Which demonstrates the need for intelligent regulation. We may need to have a grid system owned and paid for the same way we have a road system. Somebody is free to live out in the boonies at the end of a long dirt road he/she cut with a bulldozer. What they can’t do is not pay their share of the rest of the national road system that creates and delivers all the goods of civilization to them.
The electrical grid, and the internet, and a lot of other infrastructure systems may end up going the same way. You’re free to go off-grid, cord-cut, or whatever. But you’re not going to be free of paying for a *pro rata *share of the wider infrastructure you benefit from.
This may, *a la *the Rural Electrification Act, the Rural Utilities Service, or the USPS, require legislation and cost-sharing to deliver these network benefits to the low-density = high-cost-per-user areas.
Ref Stranger’s density graph, I thought it *very *interesting that current tech photovoltaics and current tech cities are at about the same density.
IOW, if we can increase PV power density 2 or 4x, then the collective rooftops of a city can power (most of) the whole city. Less a few power hogs like steel mills that would need a large solar “farm” outside their current (heh :)) land area.
To the degree that self-driving or aerial “cars” replace the current kind, cities will use less land area for parking and for roads which frees that area up for either PVs or buildings topped with PVs.
The case certainly doesn’t close today. But it’s not 4 orders of magnitude from closing. It might be 1+ orders. And that’s for a pure PV solution before we consider other energy sources.
Back to the OP’s Q:
If you’re asking whether a single production PV cell is a mature tech, IMO the answer is it’s fairly mature.
If you’re asking whether PV deployment as a planetary scale aspect of our total industrial infrastructure is mature tech, IMO the answer is that it’s not really even out of the prototype stage yet, much less the midscale demonstration stage.
There have been major changes in the underlying costs, industry structure and market prices of solar photovoltaics technology, over the years, and gaining a coherent picture of the shifts occurring across the industry value chain globally is a challenge. This is due to: “the rapidity of cost and price changes, the complexity of the PV supply chain, which involves a large number of manufacturing processes, the balance of system (BOS) and installation costs associated with complete PV systems, the choice of different distribution channels, and differences between regional markets within which PV is being deployed”
IMO “smarter usage” is a factor that can (and should) be applied to all forms of energy generation, so it isn’t specific to solar. That is to say, more efficient appliances that reduce energy demand are a benefit no matter whether the energy comes from solar, nuclear, oil, coal, or anything else.
Storage as well, but is a particular issue with solar for the reasons you mention - the sun doesn’t shine all the time, or in all places. A nuclear power plant generates energy all the time, a solar installation less than half the time at best.
As far as the OP, solar energy now is like practical fusion - we are fifty years away from implementation on a broad scale, just like we were fifty years ago.
It’s more accurate to say that the limiting factor on solar is no longer the cost of the inverters or modules. At 25 cents a watt (and inverters are down to 30 cents a watt), since $1 a watt solar is way better than coal, if you wanted to deliver $1 a watt solar, the equipment is only costing you 55 cents. You need a streamlined method of permitting, you need a roof attachment system that doesn’t require any real labor, or you need the panels to be packaged as some kind of modular rack where any low paid unskilled worker can just drop the module off a truck and plug it in. You need cheaper trackers so the unskilled laborer need not even get it aligned right. Concentrated solar power “flowers” (some set of cheap lenses or mirrors to concentrate all the light onto a tiny 40% efficient, cooled solar panel) are also a great idea because you get twice the power per unit of area taken up and need not worry about what direction the “flower” is facing - just drop it somewhere where the sun is overhead a decent amount of time, and the servomotors inside will align the lens with the sun.
I’m not sure what Stranger is smoking up above. The man makes persuasive sounding arguments that sound good, but I’ve unfortunately found that he’s spouting bullshit in about half the posts he makes.
The bullshit he’s spouting this time is that we have done the calculations for how much solar we’d need to meet all energy demands - including steel mills and the like. And it’s somewhere between 2500 and 10,000 square miles of solar panels, or a chunk out of Nevada or Arizona. His “energy density” arguments are hot air - sure, solar may not be dense, but you don’t need a whole lot of panel mass to collect some. The actual problem with running solar powered steel mills is the batteries.
Say what? Have you tried actually doing the math on this? Google or look up how many square miles covered with panels you would need to meet, on average, 100% of USA energy demand.
Now, yeah, you have a statistical problem. If you had enough panels to reach 100%, and battery banks with enough buffering for nighttime average load, you would run into a problem where some percent of nights (depending on how you size the battery) you will run out of juice. So you need backup power. Not enough backup capacity for 100% of load, because there is never going to be a day without any sun at all across the entire USA, but some calculated fraction of that to meet utility reliability requirements. And that backup power is probably natural gas burning generators. And in practice it means something like 10% of the power would still be coming from natural gas in this nearly 100% renewable future society.
I didn’t say anything about efficiency. Smarter usage may include efficiency but is not the only part.
Solar has a different generation profile than coal, etc. As such, it demands a different usage profile. Currently, nighttime generation is cheap, and so some industries timeshift their usage. As a simple example, air conditioners can be augmented with a chilled water reservoir that’s cooled at night and used during the day. These are no longer needed for solar.
Industries like aluminum smelting will also want to shift their use. Not just night vs day, but geographically. Again, this is already done–except that currently aluminum production tends to cluster around hydroelectric plants. In the future, they’ll be in deserts near big solar farms.
I like nuclear and hope it plays a part in the future, but solar will dominate. It will be cheaper than everything in the long run. It is already the cheapest in many circumstances. Solar costs continue do go down while nuclear costs go up.
Did you just wake up from a 10-year coma? Solar is already deployed on a broad scale. Over a quarter of electric capacity built in 2016 (in the US) was solar. It will take time to replace the existing infrastructure–these things don’t happen instantly–but for new construction, solar (and wind) are dominant. Wake me up when a new nuke plant gets built in the US. Or coal, for that matter.
I doubt this, at least under current technology, which is my point about fusion.
What are the many circumstances where solar power is cheaper overall than other technologies? I mean cheaper without subsidies, which are just cost-shifting.
Yep, Shodan does sound a lot like another conservative that posted before showing how clueless he was about the current costs of solar panels and related technology.
In that past case that poster was getting stuck on the costs of solar panels from 15 years ago.
Is it okay to hope/believe that Big Fusion will be the “magic bullet” that will solve all our energy needs for the next thousand years?
Or will fusion be “on the horizon” forever?
Or even somewhere in between?
Meanwhile, as to the question in the OP, when ordinary suburban homes can get a good part of their energy from a solar array on the roof, the tech seems to have hit a kind of maturity.
Well, kinda. There’s a severe problem with fusion that is not discussed many places. The problem is that producing neutrons soaks an enormous amount of energy from the fusion reaction, and converting neutrons back to electricity is inefficient. (you have to do neutrons -> heat -> steam and at best you get 40%)
Worse, the neutron formation energy is itself sucking mass-energy out of the reaction. Hence, a “net positive” fusion reaction that is evolving neutrons is apparently basically never going to be energy positive overall.
There are far more difficult fusion reactions that produce few neutrons, but they have the problem of needing even more ridiculous temperatures and pressures.
The TLDR is that even “break even” fusion reactors, like the planned ITER or a proposal from MIT that uses high temp superconductors to be smaller, only break even in an abstract physics sense. They still don’t produce electricity and are basically just another money sink with no return.
Ultimately, all these problems are maybe solvable. But the problem is you would end up with a warehouse full of the most expensive, delicate, and advanced equipment human civilization can produce, all to do the same thing as boiling water. And side neutrons mean it’s still radioactive, you still need some of the precautions that conventional fission reactors require.
Frankly, you can do solar forever. You “just” have to produce about 50% extra solar power that human civilization needs as a whole, and use the excess power to electrolyze water. Then, hydrogen + CO2 -> methane. Then, methane -> CO2 + water in a fuel cell. The methane is a storable intermediate, you can keep it in tanks for months, solving the storage problem with solar.
Most solar power you would use directly instead of doing this conversion, some you would store in batteries and use later the same day or during the night, the methane would be a long term storable form of energy to handle those troughs during certain parts of the year, etc.
So just solar with batteries + fuel storage could provide the needs for all of human civilization.
Read the post right above yours. I mention a practical, achievable with existing tech alternative to batteries. It has a large round trip energy cost, so you would still need to use batteries, but it would allow you to stockpile fuel against longer term production shortfalls.
Any optimism for solar power satellites? I started out not believing much in them, but a friend of mine who is an engineer spent a lot of time and effort persuading me, and now I think (maybe?) they could be a nifty idea.
Are SPSs a nifty idea, batshit loony, or somewhere in between?
Like anything it comes down to economics. We’re down to 55 cents a watt for the actual production of the energy. If you could develop all the rest of the pieces with nearly fully automated factories and install them with minimal labor across deserts, with sweeping robots to clean the grit off, well you have some pretty damn cheap power.
If you get 6 “sun hours” per day (desert performance), roughly each watt gets you 2.19 kilowatt-hours per year. So if you spent $1, and you have a MARR of 8%, you need to charge 8 cents for that kilowatt-hour to get an acceptable return on your investment. If you spent $0.50, and it’s an even better desert, that might be 3-4 cents. I’ll assume 3.5 cents for the next part.
If you only have a MARR of 4% (large, utility scale projects backed by government bonds may need less ROI), you can see how you could get it down to 2 cents a kWh.
So if you turn that electricity to fuel for 75% losses, you needed 133 kilowatt-hours to make an equivalent to a single gallon of gasoline. Or, $4.65. This is by combining CO2 and water, and you don’t make actual gasoline, you stop at compressed natural methane.
So that’s some pricey fuel. But not ridiculously so. And I’m using numbers taken from present or nearly immediate future prices. So this indicates to me that this idea is feasible, you wouldn’t be using this synthfuel all the time, only to make up for production shortfalls. You’d have big oceans of methane stored underground, made from excess solar power, and you’d burn the methane when you need to, when the climate is not making enough sun in a particular geographic area. Although, one nasty problem is leaked methane is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2 is.
This process doesn’t release net CO2, btw, because when you made the methane, you collected the CO2 from the atmosphere.
It sounds like a bad idea to me to get all of our electricity from solar power. Or any one source, for that matter. There’s too much risk of something disrupting it. If there’s a disaster that blocks out sunlight, such as a nuclear winter, asteroid strike, or major volcanic eruption, then we would be faced with losing electricity at the same time that we’re trying to survive the disaster itself.