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Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

cleantechnica.com

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Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#131

Post by dukeofdoom »

philipkglass wrote: post #123
dukeofdoom wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I've been watching these Van build outs into full time living vans for travel. Most of them have solor panels on the roof, and 3 two hundred watt batteries. One guy said it would take him 23 days to fully charge these batteries off of solar vs just a few hours to charged them from the alternator when he is driving. It just doesn't seem very practical at this point. They all seem to have 2 or 3 thousand watt panels…

I think that your recollection is incomplete or garbled. Modern solar panels are about 20% efficient. They can generate about 200 watts per square meter in midday sun with clear skies. 2000 to 3000 watts of panels would be about 10-15 square meters (107-161 square feet). Do these vans actually have roofs that large, completely covered with panels? You might expect roof top panels with sub-optimal orientation to gener…

Yes, sorry, I think I got the numbers wrong by a factor of ten. Most seem to use two or three 100 watt panels. So 300 watts is what they are getting in total for most of these build outs. But they usually leave space for fans. So I think absolute max might be something closer to double that. So can you answer with this correction?

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#132

Post by pfdietz »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #108
pfdietz wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you all are engaging in the "nothing can be invented" argument. It's profoundly reactionary, and also hypocritical, because nuclear itself is dead without great improvement. Uranium quickly runs out if the world is powered by burner reactors and known uranium resources, so either massive seawater uranium extraction or breeding cycles would be needed. Batteries have the advantage of being explorable at a small sc…

It's not "nothing can be invented". It's "come back to me after it's invented, not before". And uranium seawater extraction already exists: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s... It's more expensive than mined uranium, but since fissile material is so energy-dense that increase in fuel cost amounts to hardly any change in overall cost.

LOL. Hydrogen storage is much more invented than seawater uranium extraction. All the components are close to off the shelf; it's just a matter of putting them together (and for the CO2 tax to be high enough to make it worthwhile).

Seawater uranium extraction is at a much lower TRL (technology readiness level).

This is an excellent example of your hypocritical double standards on this subject.

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#133

Post by pfdietz »

flavius29663 wrote: post #105
pfdietz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost of a new nuclear powerplant: $10,000/kW Cost of a simple cycle gas turbine powerplant: $400/kW (combined cycle, $1000/kW) Go ahead and back up those renewables. It's still less expensive than installing nuclear, even if the turbines burn renewable-derived hydrogen.

either way, the original point remains: solar and wind alone are not reliable enough.

Back up with turbines and an adequate hydrogen store and solar/wind are as reliable as you wish.

(EDIT: we are in violent agreement?)

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#134

Post by rangoon626 »

I already know not going to find any sympathy on this site but the truth is that something that shocks me again and again is how everyone preaches battery storage without thinking about how dirty and polluting the process is to mine the materials and turn them into a finished battery product is.

How can people ignore this end of the lifecycle of lithium ion batteries? Is it just out of sight, out of mind?

Same with the solar panels. To install them at meaningful scale, do people not think about the amount of mining, manufacturing and energy it is going to take to make that many panels?

It seems even more absurd given the limited lifetime of both solutions.

Genuinely curious how proponents of this energy system square all of this.

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#135

Post by rhodozelia »

pfdietz wrote: post #81
ch4s3 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could imagine a series of cloudy windless days in the northern latitudes during the winter. Perhaps a large enough gird solves that problem? I have no clue.

One would not use batteries for the "rare, but prolonged" storage use case. You'd want something with lower capital cost, even if it were much less efficient. For example: hydrogen burned in turbines.

Who pays for the shadow generation system that we keep perfectly maintained and ready to generate 100% of system demand on the 5 days stretch of cloudy windless days? This cost has to be added to the cost of building a 100% solar/wind system.

Nobody is arguing the solar and wind power isn’t cheap, but the cost of power on those cloudy windless weeks is going to be real high to make having all that standby generation around. It’s the cost to achieve the same reliability and 99% carbon free that is expensive.

Money is imaginary and global warming isn’t so let’s just print some bonds or move some numbers around in some database and build it all! - an electrical power engineer

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#136

Post by pfdietz »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #128
Hypx wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those gas turbines you're referring to can simply be modified natural gas gas turbines. The only limiting factor would be electrolysis, but that is already something people are planning to build a lot of. Nuclear's problem are fundamentally political in nature. If we really cared about green energy, nuclear power could easily be built out at scale.

No, hydrogen rapidly corrodes any metals that it comes into contact with. If they are interchangeable, expect drastically smaller service intervals.

> No, hydrogen rapidly corrodes any metals that it comes into contact with.

The industries that manipulate tens of millions of tons of hydrogen each year would be astounded to hear this statement of yours. What are those facilities made of, unobtainium?

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#137

Post by Manfredo_1 »

pfdietz wrote: post #132
Manfredo_1 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "nothing can be invented". It's "come back to me after it's invented, not before". And uranium seawater extraction already exists: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s... It's more expensive than mined uranium, but since fissile material is so energy-dense that increase in fuel cost amounts to hardly any change in overall cost.

LOL. Hydrogen storage is much more invented than seawater uranium extraction. All the components are close to off the shelf; it's just a matter of putting them together (and for the CO2 tax to be high enough to make it worthwhile). Seawater uranium extraction is at a much lower TRL (technology readiness level). This is an excellent example of your hypocritical double standards on this subject.

Name one hydrogen electric grid storage facility. Not prototypes, but actual commercial facilities connected to the grid.

You insist that hydrogen is so technically ready, yet nobody is using it.

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#138

Post by pfdietz »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #112
pfdietz wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50 GWh of hydrogen would fit in one salt cavern of the kind already made for natural gas. Any numbers of companies can solution mine those caverns for you; that technology is many decades old. I'd need more information about the rest of what you want, as that scales by power not by energy capacity.

And are we currently using any of these caverns for electrolysis and grid storage? All you said is that we have a big cavern that we could fill with hydrogen. I'm asking if anybody is actually building hydrogen grid storage at any significant scale. Are there any facilities that take in excess energy from renewables, turn it into hydrogen, and then turn that hydrogen back into electricity? We both know the answer: th…

Dude. You are falling back to the "if it isn't already being done, it can't be done" argument. Please stop this foolishness.

Hydrogen is being stored in a few places. That the storage isn't larger isn't because of any technical obstacles, it's because there's no reason to store it now. In particular, when we can burn natural gas without CO2 charges, using the hydrogen for energy storage is pointless.

This doesn't mean hydrogen CAN'T be stored, it just means the market conditions for widespread adoption of an off-the-self technology aren't there yet.

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#139

Post by Hypx »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #128
Hypx wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those gas turbines you're referring to can simply be modified natural gas gas turbines. The only limiting factor would be electrolysis, but that is already something people are planning to build a lot of. Nuclear's problem are fundamentally political in nature. If we really cared about green energy, nuclear power could easily be built out at scale.

No, hydrogen rapidly corrodes any metals that it comes into contact with. If they are interchangeable, expect drastically smaller service intervals.

A claim which simply isn't true. Only certain alloys have a problem with hydrogen. We've been using hydrogen in industry for decades and most of this problem has been solved.

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#140

Post by elihu »

zizee wrote: post #41

I think the future will be robust national/international grids, with a mixture of storage options (batteries/pumped hydro) to smooth out the intermittent nature of wind and solar. Cynics always talk about the amount of energy storage required for solar as if you need to store 24 hours of energy for solar/wind to be viable. I'd like to see numbers on having 1 hour of storage for peak demand, a robust national grid, an…

I wonder what the limits are on transmitting power around the world? Like, if we wanted to connect Northern Africa to the North American power grid, how feasible would it be, and what would the losses and power capacity be?

It seems that with all the interest in using ReBCO tape in tokomaks due to its ability to transmit more power at higher temperatures than the materials that preceded it (used, for example in ITER) that it could be used to transmit power over long distances. Has anyone actually done it yet, or is it just too expensive? (Apparently the current capacity of superconducting cable is finite; if you run too much current through it, it'll transition to becoming non-superconducting. So maybe the amount of ReBCO tape needed per unit of power or the amount of active cooling needed makes it impractical.)

Eventually, to be able to usefully transmit power from daytime sun to nighttime will require crossing oceans. Which I imagine would be tough to do with a cable has to be actively cooled and work for many years without maintenance. Maybe for my hypothetical North America to North Africa route, you'd run a superconducting cable down through Central and South America over to Brazil, then have a normal high-voltage DC line across the Atlantic, with another superconducting cable that crosses the Sahara.

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