Solar is free.
The energy is free guys.
Its that simple.
Its the conversion that has you guys confused.
Solars useful properties is where you start.Unlike coal or oil which you have to find,and deliver, solar is already in its useful stage when it reaches you and it doesn’t cost anything to get there.
He needn’t be. Of course, being connected to the grid and not drawing power from it represents no marginal cost. There is, naturally, the initial investment that must be made to provide the connection – and a connection that can turned off and on at will is more expensive than one that cannot, albeit not all that much more expensive. However, you are surely not under the delusion that there is a predictable time when he isn’t using power?
Let us take a refrigerator an example. As you will know, the compressor motor will cycle and off according the needs of the system as determined by the setting of the thermostat, the amount of insulation, and the ambient temperature. When will this be? It’s somewhere between very difficult and impossible to predict.
Now, as alternatives, we might envision:[ul]
[li]Staying up part of the night, watching a thermometer showing the internal temperature, and switching the compressor motor on and off by hand – in effect, acting as the thermostat oneself. Of course, this is no different from actually using a thermostat. It is less efficient, in that:[list][/li][li]If you need to switch the motor on at 0-dark-thirty, and that free solar energy is shining down on the other half of the planet, and we never built that very expensive power storage because, hey, solar is free, you’re SOL; your milk turns to cottage cheese[/li][li]If you fall asleep, ditto.[/li][/ul]
[li]Having the compressor motor run, say, five minutes out of the hour, whether it needs to or not. This has the virtue of predictability; however:[ul][/li][li]It may be very wasteful of energy, if we run the motor when we don’t need to[/li][li]It may be very wasteful of food, if we don’t (or can’t) run the motor when we need[/li][/ul][/list]
Sure. But it’s also possible to have large power requirements at predetermined times, and indeterminate power requirements at undetermined times. It’s also possible to not have power production at undetermined times (a cloud passes in front of the Sun, and, oops, your solar converters output drops by 30%. Bummer).
And, as I’ve said, not worth having at that price.
I expect it to work reliably.
A world in which people are regimented by and at the mercy of the vagaries of nature seems attractive to many of the…ahem…less rational advocates of renewable energy resources. Perhaps they possess some divine rescript exempting them from those vagaries. Or, perhaps, being good progresive agnostic New Agers, they never bothered to read the gospels, where it notes that “the rain falls on the just and on the unjust”.
See the Perfect Master on battery sizes.
Akassukami
Turn off the power to your house and at the end of the month see if you get a bill from the power company.
You can bet your a** you will.
Call your power company and tell them to shut off your power and then the next day call them again and turn it back on again and see if you get charged for the reconnect fee even if no one was there.
You can bet your a** you will.
What does this have to do with solar?
Nothing.
Just like most of you guys posts.
Solar energy is FREE.
If you want to take the trouble to use it OK.
If you want to remain in the brightly lit power wasting world we have built around here the rest of the world will hate you.And you will ask yourself Why? I’m a nice guy?
If you want to again lead the world then take another look and see if you can figure a better low power alternative to a source that is free and abundant.
Try to find low power alternatives to high power tasks.
I’m tired of talking to you.
It has become more important to you to seemingly win this debate by twisting the subject to your point of view than it is to solve or explain anything.
Have a nice day
And not worth having at that price
**
Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
(BTW, it’s good to see that you’re giving up your use of that energy-intensive invention of the Devil, the PC.)
*justwannano * – the captioned book explains the situation very well. It’s a matter of land area. To get substantial solar energy, we would need to cover truly significant portions of the earth’s surface with energy-receiving screens. This approach would reduce the land available for forests and parks.
The actual approach used in the US – concentrated power plants that produce large amounts of energy – is much more efficient in terms of land usage. As a result of this practice (and of more efficient agriculture), we have been able to significantly increase the amount of forested land in the US. These forests improve the quality of life, and also reduce atmospheric CO2.
december, there is more than that. Solar energy is very low grade heat and expensive and difficult to transform into electricity or mechanical energy. You can obtain electric and mechanical energy much cheaper from other sources. Solar is best used for heat. The problem with that is that where solar is plentiful, heat is not in great demand and where heat is in demand, solar is not plentiful. In other words, in Florida there is not much demand for heating homes because the entire state is heated for free by the Sun. Maybe that is what justwannano means by “free”. In the same sense that you save a lot of air conditioning if you live in Toronto.
I just wonder if justwanno knows how to get free energy how come he’s not a multimillionaire hobnobbing with Bill Gates.
I just want to say that when a poster uses the [****list] code in a format analogous to an outline that one should seriously reconsider one’s stance against him/her.
ie-don’t fuck with them in a topic which one doesn’t know about.
Frankly, nitpicking that everyone’s problem with solar is in the distribution is incredibly dodgy. Why else would we recognize a power source if we can’t distribute it???
Thank you power wasting fans.
Especially your kind words acatsukami
Now I think I’ll turn off my solar charged radio and go see why my solar powered
electric fenced in cows are making such a fuss.
Then I’ll go out to my truck with the solar powered battery charger and go to town where
I will buy gas which is piped through lines with solar powered sensors. Next we’ll go out
to dinner.
I’ll be sure to be careful when passing the solar powered highway warning device.
I’m anxiously waiting for some one with vision,certainly none of you guys ,to begin
selling a solar powered lap top.
wow! We are making great strides! I had never heard of solar powered cows before!
If you can build that solar powered computer you’d become very rich. Everybody would buy it so they could tell their boss the only way to get any work done is to be sent to a tropical beach.
BTW, I am not going to do it again but I remember doing some calculations in another thread which showed that even if the electric energy was free (meaning the pv solar panels etc were free), just the cost of storing and recovering the energy in batteries made the energy way more expensive than buying it from the power company.
We are all part of the big conspiracy, aren’t we? (When do I get my check?)
Well, I just want everyone to know that I’ve been converted. I’m going to advocate banning the use of all fossil fuels. I mean, who cares if people in cities can’t grow their own food? It’s not like we really need to distribute it to them. All those New Yorkers and such will just flee to the country on horseback and we’ll all live happily down on the farm, chasing butterflies in that free sunlight.
And of course we don’t need those silly big tractors to harvest our crops, because I’m sure well get plenty of help from all our children with the women barefoot and pregnant…
We’ll step boldly into the 19th Century!
as for nuclear power…
if we could just build a viable ‘space elevator’ perhaps we could just jettsion all the nuclear waste into space…
Okay, veering a bit off track here (big surprise…), but there is one more thing I’d like to ask. How can the same people who decry nuclear waste (NIMBY and all) not be concerned about the amount of air pollution created by traditional coal- or oil-powered plants? I’d think that the effects of air pollution would be far more pervasive than a tighly-restricted nuclear waste storage.
Oh yeah, Akatsutami…to my understanding (I know, I know, my understanding isn’t worth a hill of beans in GD…just bear with me), setting up a wind or solar farm is expensive, but it’s a one-time cost. So it’s only a matter of time before the costs become favorable to a more conventional plant. Of course they need to be maintained, but that’s true for any power plant. So how are wind and solar plants economically unfavorable? (There are a number of active wind farms in California, which would indicate that this isn’t a completely hopeless idea.)
BTW, too bad about Anthracite…she was as militant as anyone, but she did seem to have her facts straight.
DKW, I do not think anyone is saying there is no hope for alternative forms of energy generation, rather than they are not competitive today.
>> setting up a wind or solar farm is expensive, but it’s a one-time cost. So it’s only a matter of time before the costs become favorable to a more conventional plant. Of course they need to be maintained, but that’s true for any power plant. So how are wind and solar plants economically unfavorable?
Again, that is a big fallacy. Fuel is just part of the cost of generating power and you have to look at the entire picture. The fact that fuel is cheaper in one case does not mean the end cost will be cheaper. And, as has already been mentioned, coal is also free. You take it from where it is sitting. “Free” is a very relative term. One big-ass generator powered by big-ass turbines is just more economical than 2,000 dinky generators with wind turbines. It is cheaper to build and maintain. It can work 24/7. It is in one place.
This is like proposing going back to sailships. Yes, the wind is free but a ship burning fuel at a rate of thousands of $ /hr is much cheaper to operate. It goes faster (and time is money), it goes all the time (not just when the wind blows).
Once you take all costs into account you would find out conventional energy costs less.
Setting something up isn’t a ‘one-time cost’, it’s just one variable that goes into the economic formula for power production cost.
For example, if it costs $100 million to set up a solar or wind plant, and it’s useful life is estimated to be 20 years, then the cost to set it up is $5 million per year. Divide that by how many kWh are produced in that year, and you get a cost per kWh for initial construction.
It gets more complicated, because you have to account for the time/value of money (you’re paying up front for construction, even though some of the value won’t be seen for 20 years).
Then you have to figure out the cost of maintenance per year, and add that to your kWh cost.
Now, if you’re a traditional coal or nuclear plant, you also have to add in the cost of the fuel required to generate each kWh. It’s true that in a solar or wind plant, that one particular cost goes away. But increases in the costs of the other line items can easily swamp that savings. In some plants, the cost of fuel is already a tiny percentage of the overall operating cost. It’s quite possible that an improvement in design or materials that stretches out the life of the plant or reduces maintenance could save more than you’d save by eliminating the fuel entirely.
And that’s the real problem with wind and solar. They cost a ton to set up, they are extremely maintenance-intensive, and they don’t last very long. As a result, power produced by them is much more expensive than traditional sources. And it’s likely to stay that way for a long time, because if fuel is, say, 20% of the cost of a kWh of electricity, then that fuel cost would have to increase by a factor of five before the cost of the electricity doubles.
Not just air pollution, but all forms of pollution.
OTOH, people have been killed by emphysema, silicosis, etc., for…well, undoubtedly since there have been people. Moreover, we don’t see air pollution (except in extreme cases). Radiation, however, is relatively new as a hazard. Reactor waste is concrete and discrete; you can pick up a chunk and hold it (if you don’t mind dying horribly).
We can point to a thousand cases in which people get all hot and bothered about a relatively infrequent, but novel and poorly understood, hazard, and merrily accept the much greater chances of dying from a traditional one.
**
sailor and Sam Stone have already done a pretty good job of answering this question. I would merely add that maintenance isn’t a straight-line cost over the expected lifetime of any piece of equipment (nor does that “lifetime” figure express a point at which the equipment will suddenly dissolve into a cloud of dust, like the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay).
The maintenance costs will be relatively high at first, as we find defective components and replace them (a phenomenon often called “burn-in”, “shake-down”, or, when referring to the components, “infant mortality”). Then there will be a minimum of maintenance. Gradually, the cost will rise as the lifetime of the equipment is approached, until the point is reached where the maintenance costs are greater than the amortized cost of buying a new piece. Maintenance costs vs. time usually form a “J”-shaped curve.
An automobile is an example of this situation. Buy a new car, and at first there can be a small flurry of work done on it, taking Coke® bottles out of door panels and tightening hose clamps. Then (assuming it’s not a lemon), we achieve a minimum of costs, just changing the oil and replacing the filters every few thousand miles. Gradually, more and more things need servicing, until at a certain point the owner will say, “Screw this!” and buy a new car. Sure, he could have the engine pulled and rebuilt, but when the estimated costs of keeping that junker running exceed the payments on a new car, he’ll probably give up.
(The analogy isn’t pefect, because there are reasons for buying a new car that don’t apply to buying a new power plant. “Hey, babe, I just got a new fire-engine-red wind turbine the other day; wanna hook up your toaster to my utility?” makes a spectacularly bad pick-up line in a singles’ bar.)
As I’ve said before, it’s certainly possible to site an, e.g., wind turbine so that it produces power at competitive prices. I’d be a liar if I tried to deny it, and a fool to expect to get away with it. Equally, however, the world as a whole is not Tehachapi Pass.
Take $5M and build a generator with a steam turbine. Now you start pumping steam and you have a generator working 24/7 at close to full capacity for several years, rain or shine, republican or democrat, that thing is pumping the Kw out.
Now, say instead you decide to build some wind generators. You cannot control the wind as you control the steam so… to begin with you have to design it to withstand winds way in excess of the productive speed. The thing has to be massively overbuilt. The optimum range for a turbine is relatively narrow so most of the time the turbine is not working very well. When the wind is too strong, you have to shut it down. When there is not enough wind you have to shut it down. During those times you would wish you could pay for wind (fuel) because you have $5M sitting idle and that is very expensive.
When the winds does blow, you can still not control it. The generator will spin at whatever speed it pleases and now it is up to you to convert the energy to something useful. This costs money.
Now, you produce steam when you want it or need it, but the wind is not so accommodating. If you need power and it does not blow, you need traditional backup generation capacity… So you might as well start with that and forget about the wind.
If the wind blows and you have nowhere to store the energy, it is worse as if it had not been produced as now you have to find a way to “burn” it off…
Wind generators are not located inside buildings where they can easily be serviced. They are located in places where you would not want to be when the storm is blowing, which is when you need to be there. Look at the wind generators offshore Denmark. Servicing those has to be a nightmare.
Check out http://www.windpower.dk/tour/index.htm
Anyway, as I said, we have gone around this track several times before. justwanno believes in the evil conspiracy and no amount of reasoning is going to change that.
Quote sailor
And, as has already been mentioned, coal is also free. You take it from where it is sitting.
“Free” is a very relative term.
It used to be free.
There must be a huge hollow space between your ears.
Great huge machines are required to mine coal.
These use fuel.
The waste is called pollution.
The land where these mines are found need to be reclaimed.And the use of these places
are forever suspect to environmental safety.
The fact that fuel is cheaper in one case does not mean the end cost will be cheaper.
Well at least you got that part right.
Quote Sam Stone
For example, if it costs $100 million to set up a solar or wind plant, and it’s useful life is
estimated to be 20 years, then the cost to set it up is $5 million per year. Divide that by
how many kWh are produced in that year, and you get a cost per kWh for initial
construction.
Where did you find the 100 million figure.
How can you compare the cost of a solar plant to a coal plant. Please take into account
the existing infrastructure.
Please take into account the cost to everyone in taxes because of the subsidies given by
government.
There have been over 150 billion dollars in government subsidies paid to energy
companies. Thats right Billion. These are dollars not mentioned by anyone except myself
in these discussions. Thats a significant amount and it is a cost that needs to be examined
when looking at cost perKWH… Sure its paid by the government but it is still a cost.
Still quoting Sam
It gets more complicated, because you have to account for the time/value of money
(you’re paying up front for construction, even though some of the value won’t be seen for
20 years).
Now figure it again.
My sincere appologies for the degrading remark.
You have conducted yourself as a gentleman in these discussions and I have not.
justwannano, would you mind too terribly using the [ quote ] and [ /quote ] commands? Thanks.
A couple of sites
Subsidies
check this out
http://www.ecouncil.ac.cr/rio/focus/report/english/subsidies/chap3.htm
another site