One study says it is:
Anybody know if this is accurate or not?
I do not know but I saw (and unfortunately cannot seem to find now) an article suggesting that if solar had the same government subsidies as coal solar would be cheaper than coal. I think coal is cheaper than nuclear so…
Also, five months ago a company claimed record breaking solar cell efficiencies of 24.2%. A few days ago another company claims their new solar cells have an efficiency of 39.2%.
I imagine that has to figure in there somewhere.
Is it still cheaper when it’s dark?
The answer (to the OP) is probably “when everything goes right, yes”. In places where it’s cold in the winter and stays overcast for days at a time? Doubtful.
First, you’re reading the article wrong.
It’s a report that says that in the future, given certain assumptions, solar power will be cheaper.
Not a word about whether it is cheaper now.
Is it true that solar is getting cheaper? Yes. That’s very encouraging. Is it true that nuclear power will be getting more expensive? Probably, although the actual report simply uses the worst case costs for nuclear against the best case costs for solar. It’s propaganda, in the loose sense, not a scientific study.
Does it matter? Not in the slightest. In the future we will need both solar and nuclear and every other type of power generation that is not fossil fuels to manage the huge increases in power consumption that every forecaster is predicting while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions.
If you’re not for both solar and nuclear, then the terrorists have won. :eek:
No one is suggesting that solar should be the sole source of power, so questions about night or overcast days really don’t factor in to it. A fair comparision should be on the the cost of kilwatt hours only. If you are going to factor in the drawbacks of solar, to be fair you will have to factor in the drawbacks of coal and nuclear.
This is a more complicated question to answer than just looking at current per kWh costs. As already mentioned, both coal and nuclear have some degree of both explicit and implicit subsidy, while users of residential and small commercial solar are provided with tax incentives, so to do a head to head comparison you’d need to factor these out. You also need to consider the cost through the entire life cycle of both solar and gas, i.e. the production and maintenance cost of solar array (which is considerable) and the fuel production and disposal cycle for nuclear fission (also considerable), and the waste byproducts produced by both.
It is also the case that while advances in solar technology (both PV and solar thermal) have been continuously implemented, developed or proposed designs for high efficiency nuclear reactors have been largely stalled by regulatory fiat. In the United States, the operation of new commercial nuclear power plants ceased in the late 'Seventies; the actual technology is stuck at about the same level as 1965, with virtually all operating US designs being Generation II pressurized water reactors (PWR) which are relatively failsafe but are not of high efficiency and require substantial enrichment of uranium fuel. A few Generation III reactors have been built in Europe and Japan, but the implementation of nuclear fission reactor technology has not kept pace with development. There are a number of Generation IV proposed designs that would substantially increase efficiency and/or reduce fuel cycle cost and wastes such as the Integral Fast Reactor, Gas Cooled Fast Reactor, Pebble Bed Moderated Reactor, and Hybrid Fission-Fusion Reactor, but are as yet unproven.
Two things that also need to be considered are availability of power and footprint or impact zone. Solar power is obviously available only during the day (and only optimum for about a six to eight our interval), requiring accumulation and storage of energy. Nuclear fission can be run 24 hours a day, and ramped up or down within a certain range to better accommodate high loads. Solar requires a large footprint, and just doesn’t scale very effectively with size, whereas the efficiency of nuclear scales pretty well with higher output. On the other hand, nuclear produces not only toxic, caustic, and radioactive waste as part of the fuel processing and use cycle, but also generates considerable waste heat that may have significant environmental impact. (The same is true with coal, oil, and gas, and indeed, anything that utilizes a steam cycle.) PV solar doesn’t have this issue, but the process and waste of maintenance and replacement may produce a considerable amount of solid waste and the footprint has an environmental impact itself when implemented on large scales. Solar doesn’t offer the potential for catastrophic failure that is possible with nuclear fission, but this danger, while not insignificant, is often overstated by opponents of nuclear fission, insofar as it can be largely mitigated by passively safe designs. The more credible danger is improper disposal of used fuel and fuel processing byproducts.
In the end, we’ll likely have to utilize both methods as fossil fuels become more expensive, scarce, and prohibitive from a carbon pollution standpoint, but solar and other solar-derived sources (wind and wave, biofuels) are really most suited to supplant the need for excess energy during overflow periods rather than as a constant. Despite the fuel cycle issue with nuclear fission, it seems unavoidable short of significantly reducing the demand for energy, which is unlikely even with a growing awareness of the need for energy efficiency; as electricity replaces petrofuels for transportation the demand for energy production will increase logistically, flattening out only when petrofuel energy is replaced by storable electrical or generated chemical potential energy sufficient to provide for industrial demand of both the first and developing world nations.
Stranger
All nuclear power is subsidized. Probably all large scale power production is also in some manner (do you get rent for those power lines over your property?). So the cost of electricity delivered to that outlet in your house is very difficult to attribute to the particular means of generation.
The article is addresses the question of the practicality of solar power as an alternative to nuclear power. Even though nuclear has unpleasant downsides, we do know what it costs to produce over many years, and we can increase the number of nuclear power plants to match demand. The long term cost for solar electricity in volume can be guessed with some certainty, but the ability to provide solar energy at the same level as nuclear is still uncertain. Solar power requires a lot of land area, new infrastructure to match, and the ability to store power for times when the sun isn’t available. A real test would be the ability to deliver equivalent wattage generated from solar to a proposed nuclear plant, and the predicted relative cost.
We have Justin Bieber running around loose, and you’re suggesting the terrorists haven’t already won?
Best wishes,
hh
This website has some good information about the levels of government subsidies of different energy types. Regular Coal and Nuclear power receive far less government money per megawatt-hour of energy produced - $0.44 for coal and $1.59 for nuclear, versus the ~$24 for wind or solar. Now, the refined coal gets even more subsidies that anything else.
Anyways, if I were running the US energy policy, I would start building lots of reactors now, and set a up system to reprocess the waste when that makes fiscal sense. I would also encourage though tax credits or rebates roof-top solar, starting heavily in the southern states, and then moving northward, to help handle the peak demand for air conditioning, since for obvious reasons solar power potential and the amount of air conditioning needed correlate almost perfectly. Maybe even make roof top solar mandatory on new builds below a certain latitude line, and move that line north every couple of years.
It only beats wind power in a dead calm.
The paper is a ridiculous exercise in proofiness that was produced by a anti nuclear group. Here is a detailed analysis by Rod Adams.
http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2010/07/gullible-reporting-by-new-york-times-on.html
You just need to use black-lights at night.
Actually, that was a semi-serious question. See this article about using ruthenium to store solar energy. Ruthenium is, of course, hugely expensive and vanishingly rare, but it is a by-product of nuclear reactors, and now it actually has a possible mass-market use, people might start looking for it and find commercial quantities.
That’s pretty cool. If this substance was soluble in a liquid, it could be used to transport energy from a remote location to local distribution over wires. You could make a solar collector by filling a large shallow pool with the solution. But there wasn’t much info on the efficiency of the process in the article. And its hard to find practical application for something dependent on one of the rarest elements on earth. But maybe someone will find another compound that does the same trick with energy storage.
A friend of mine lives on the Big Island in Hawaii. He is miles from the nearest electric pole, so he has a solar unit to power his rather large home.
He showed me the set up the last time I was there. What his solar panels actually do is charge a very expensive group of batteries. When he turns a light on in the house, power comes from these batteries.
It is very important to keep these batteries charged up near capacity, he told me. If the batteries charge falls below about 80%, they start to degrade pretty quickly and like I said, they are expensive to replace.
The problem is that even in Hawaii, the sun doesn’t shine every day. If at the end of the day the panels haven’t fully charged the batteries, he has to go out and turn on a propane powered generator to finish the charging. He has to check the batteries every evening. I asked him about getting more panels, but he said if the sun doesn’t shine, it won’t matter how many you have.
Maybe most people already know all about this and maybe I was expecting too much from solar power, but I came away a little disappointed with the state of solar power from this first hand look at how it actually operates in real life.
Fortunately my property in Hawaii has a stream running through it so I’ll be able to have a local company install one of their mini hydro-electric systems to power the home.
The problem there is energy storage; we just don’t have a good way to temporarily store energy in small quantities. In large quantities, this can be done by using compressed air, or raising water in a reservoir, or other methods like flywheel energy storage, but it is difficult to store energy for an extended period of time (days) without significant losses, so in major power installations these are used for load balancing and temporary storage. However, as your friend’s situation indicates, in the right environment solar is nearly ideal for a small offgrid installation provided you can afford the capital installation. It can provide a useful level of energy for only a moderate degree of maintenance.
Stranger
If memory serves, plutonium is very similar, with two very different densities.
This hardly seems necessary or practical. Molten salt heat storage systems are cheap and practical and don’t require exotic materials.
http://www.sandia.gov/Renewable_Energy/solarthermal/NSTTF/salt.htm
I would say that the fact that this technology isn’t prolific might indicate that it is either not cheap, not practical, or both.
Non-dispatchable technologies by themselves may be cheaper or better than some of the fossil fuel or nuclear technologies. But the big problem has always been the issue of storage.
And that’s why off-grid applications can’t compete with the grid. The utility always has some load that can use non-dispatchable power and as long as they have other dispatchable generation sources that can compensate and follow the ebb and flow of non-dispatchable sources they can get by without storage techniques. In some cases they can employ storage techniques on a large scale (pumped hydro, compressed air etc) but those technologies usually require geological restrictions.
The average homeowner has to use more expensive alternatives like batteries which require more capital and maintenance costs.