Well, it is just a single unit, and it is being used to smooth out the intermittency of solar and wind. A large solar farm these days has has hundreds of megawatts of capacity. Same for wind farms. A battery like this can pick up 60,000 kWh of slack. If the utilities would cooperate with the solar guys they could forecast how much power the wind + solar + battery array can put out over the next, say, 48 hours, and the utilities can accordingly burn coal at a slower rate.
Do you think the price of coal or natural gas fired electricity is going to remain stable over the next 60 years? I don’t. You admit nuclear always goes over budget but stick to your price per kWh for nuclear power, which doesn’t make sense. Meanwhile, every indication points toward a falling price for solar power as far as the eye can see.
I think you are too zealous in pooh-poohing it. Solar doesn’t have to leap to 100% base load supply tomorrow- since it is modular, people are going to continue to add it, where it makes sense, bit by bit.
Is there any data on how solar affects resale value? Not all improvements pay off - pools for instance. I live in the Bay Area and there are enough houses here with solar already so that there should be some sales record.
However I suspect many new homes will be constructed with solar from the start, since installing along with a roof should be cheaper than installing on an existing roof, and landscaping can be designed around the needs of solar. Haven’t heard ads yet, but expect to,
Ah - Sebastopol - a hippy dippy town to be sure, is requiring solar on new construction. This article notes
For a short period of time. That’s the promise anyway.
I am not familiar with the details, but I know that neither coal nor nuclear plants can quickly adjust the amount of fuel they use, due to the large scale of the systems.
I don’t think the raw price of generating it is going to rise high enough that it will make sense to spend billions of dollars on batteries just for a chance to get a few MW on cloudy or windless days (unless it was cloudy and windless the day before also). There will exceptions to this in remote areas where there is not enough demand to make the economy of scale benefits of coal and nuclear pay off.
Yes it does, because my price is not a projection but a cost of currently produced base load electricity.
This has and will continue to make solar work in more and more applications, but there is a limit.
No, they are going to keep adding it where they are convinced by salespersons that it makes sense. Solar makes sense in a lot of applications, like spaceships and many other off-grid applications, but not in continuously powering the bulk of the millions of refrigerators, washing machines, factories, hospitals, schools, ect currently powered by coal and nuclear.
That is the entire point of grid-scale batteries. While your yield from solar and wind inputs may vary moment-to-moment, with enough generating and storage capacity you can provide continuous base load capacity. For now I see solar working in tandem with existing generation methods, but it has the potential gradually crowd out fossil fuel energy generation. Maybe not everywhere though, you’re probably right about that.
Which is why grid-scale batteries are useful even in the absence of alternative generation sources. Your coal plant has to supply a surplus at all times to prevent outages. But the surplus is wasted. With sufficient grid-scale power storage capacity, the surplus can be captured and used, allowing for less fuel use.
The battery cost 200 million. That's still pretty crazy on a per kWh basis, but keep in mind this is a fairly new technology, and that this power storage design is reliable for decades.
And your calculation of the cost of coal power in Germany relies on averaging the total costs of a plant over 60 or 80 years. I don’t think people will want to commit more spaces to coal generation for another 60 or 80 years now that other options are becoming available.
Perhaps. But the price of coal will increase and it still takes a decade to build a nuclear power plant. You can have solar panels on your department store or house by next month. People like it.
I guess there is a limit, sure. If solar were providing 90% of America’s electricity needs, crowding out the last 10% might be pretty tough. But I think you are overly pessimistic about the potential of solar power.
Look around. There are already solar panels on lots of those places. Go check out your airport.
For residential solar leasing, it does not seem to be a trick. A person pays zero dollars for the solar installation, then pays the solar company less money per month than they pay the electric company for their power. Sometimes a lot less. The choice is elementary economic pragmatism.
We’ll see how the large-scale projects do once government subsidies dry up. Big companies like Apple are buying billions worth of solar installations to power things like their data centers. Outfits like Wal Mart and Costco are installing solar panels on their property with an eye towards saving money.
Every solar panel that goes up equals less power that needs to be delivered via coal or nuclear. It is benign and, under good (and ever less-rigorous) conditions, profitable.
You are making the huge assumption that something like grid scale power storage is feasible. It is most likely much simpler and more efficient to produce a little more all the time even if it is.
Exactly. Nothing that greatly increases the cost of energy is a real solution.
No it is not, batteries have been around as long as power plants.
In theory. We will see what happens in practice.
Yes, the actual cost to build, maintain and operate it, not an optimistic projection.
They will build coal or nuke plants if they want to keep the lights on, which of course they will. There are more and more coal plants being built all the time, look around you.
That doesn’t sound very forward thinking. In 2005 people loved borrowing tons of money on their houses, since real estate prices can not go down. The ten years it takes to build a nuke plant is not very long in contrast to the amount of energy it produces, it is the best long term solution for the bulk of our electricity, since the only other one is fossil fuel.
You are naively optimistic to think that we will provide anywhere close to 90% of Americas electricity needs with solar anytime in the next century,
They are public relations novelties, for the most part.
Of course it is different in every location, but the programs I am familiar with just barely pay for themselves on paper when all kinds of stars line up: the heavy subsidies on the panels themselves, the tax credit on their purchase and installation, the cheap loans, and the mandate that the utility companies buy the excess energy at above market rates or credit it year round, whether they need the surplus or not. And the maintenance, what happens if the lease companies go out of business? From what I understand the customer is on the hook for the lease, regardless of how much the maintenance ends up costing or whether the systems are even still putting out electricity.
And then there is the fact that the solar users are still relying just as heavily on the grid to provide them continuous power while paying less for its upkeep. We can’t all slash our electricity bills by huge amounts through these mandates to utilities and expect there to be a first world grid left for long.
Not overall, because it raises the cost of electricity generation. And if you want to reduce fossil fuels without doing more nuke projects you can get far more bang for your buck with efficiency programs than with solar or wind.
Wal Mart and Apple are huge global corporations that use huge amounts of electricity, very little of which is provided by solar. Also, like the rest of us, they rely on continuous base load power, none of which is provided by wind or solar. They are conspicuously throwing up a few panels here and there because it is currently a good token public relations gesture.
Any trend can be made profitable with the right combination of public misinformation and mandates. At this time, and in the foreseeable future, using solar will increase the cost of electricity. Like food, energy makes up more and more of a persons required expenditures the poorer they are. Increased energy costs are far from benign. Reducing carbon output is worth some increase in cost, but photo voltaic solar and wind rank way down the list of ways to do this, and are not on the list of feasible methods to provide continuous base load power on the scale we require today.
We can trickle a bit from solar panels and wind here and there, especially in certain climates that specifically favor them, and we can still gain a bunch of savings from efficiency. We get a good amount from hydro, but most good places to build hydro plants already have them, so that leaves coal and nuclear to do the heavy lifting.
Solar is reaching grid parity, but for the last 30 years it has been the panels that were the bottleneck in getting them to grid parity (just a few years ago panels were $5/watt). Now the panels themselves are not the bottleneck, it is the soft costs of installation that are doing this (at least in the US). The panels are $0.50-$1 a watt now. Even if they go down in price even more, the installation costs will still far and away be the biggest costs.
Why yes it can and yes there is. Check out the Notree Energy Storage Project in Texas. 153 MW of wind generating capacity stabilized by 32MW of storage. No, you’re not going to power Houston with that, but it is already up and running and proves the concept.
Japan isn’t the only place installing these things.
It isn’t a huge assumption, it is headline news. Storage + renewables = less fossil fuel burn.
What, cite that Edison ever worked with vanadium redox batteries, or lithium ion batteries. These things are new enough that we can be confident prices will come down. Wholly new battery chemistries are in the pipeline right now.
Anyway, with redox technology a battery really does have the potential to last as long as a power plant- the cycle life on these things is amazing.
New coal plants will be increasingly expensive and resisted. Fuel costs will go up.
Solar projects are being funded on the same basis i.e. total power output over the lifetime of the project, which is decades if you don’t go with the cheapest Chinese panels you can find. Banks or big institutions finance projects like this, it pays off in the long run, but you seem to accept it only for coal and nuclear and not solar.
It really depends where you live. Looking around me, no, they are not building new coal plants. See here, coal installation in the US has been dropping for decades and there is practically no new coal generation planned. China is a different story, sure, but in the US anyway, coal is in retreat.
Nuke plants? We’ll see if any get built here in the US. I’m not really against them, but sober governments like Japan’s and Germany’s want to ditch their nuke plants and switch to solar. Good luck talking those guys out of it.
I don’t think you’re keeping current with the numbers coming out of the solar industry. I’m not sure exactly what you’re arguing with me here though. Can solar increase it’s share of US power production ten-fold? Yes, absolutely. Will it take over 100%? I doubt it. In-between, yes something will have to pick up the slack. I don’t expect coal to become extinct anytime soon.
Not as ambitious as Apple’s efforts, but still not trivial. There are tons more examples, the Army being an especially informative one. When the military adopts a technology, it tends to end up in widespread civilian use.
I don’t think solar panels themselves are subsidized at all. Only a portion of solar companies rely on government loans.
But why not have government support? Democratically elected governments put these incentives in place to favor solar over fossil fuels because that is what the populations want. The market doesn’t really price in the true costs of fossil fuels, people realize this and take action.
I don’t know what happens if these companies go out of business. The two biggest solar leasing companies I know of have substantial financial backing- Solar City is backed up by Elon Musk’s empire, and SunPower is backed by Total oil. They probably won’t go under. If they do, their leases are an asset that I bet will be taken over by some bigger fish. As for utilities paying for the extra power, well that is something that is going to have to be worked out I guess, it is contentious all the way around.
Our grid is 100 years old. It needs to be updated anyway. If you ask me, the transition to a large share of renewables will be a pain in the keester for a lot of people, but nevertheless we’re moving in that direction.
Meh, the end user pays less for their solar power, so the solar companies make a profit. Maybe wholesale coal fired power is 2.5 cents in Germany, but residential consumers pay wayyy more than that in the US. You’re taking a case where solar provides lower cost to the consumer and painting it as higher cost. I don’t get it :dubious:
How many megawatts do you need to see before it quits being a public relations gesture? Because commercial installations produce a significant amount of power now, and are only getting started.
I need a cite. Grid parity has been achieved in 10 states, and the price of solar power is still falling. If you’re worried about poor people, you ought to support solar power.
I guess it comes down to short-term vs. long-term thinking. Right now, yes, coal and nuclear do “the heavy lifting”, as you put it. Absolutely true. But long term, well we’ll see what happens to nuclear, but coal and gas are going to be increasingly priced out and polluted out.
Commercial installations can make quite a bit of sense.
I don’t remember the exact numbers, but my employer has a large solar array installed on our refrigerated warehouse. It cost several million dollars, they received several million dollars in tax breaks, and they financed the net cost at 4%. Annually the cost of financing and maintenance compared to the return in offset electricity costs adds up to a >20% ROI.
Our other warehouse is a little smaller with a much larger array connected to a more expensive electric utility and it provides over half of their annual electricity needs. Again, it was offset by in incentives and tax breaks and financed and it nets nearly 100% annual ROI.
At that scale with such a high demand for electricity (maintaining delta-t >70°f in July) it’s just free money.
Not even close, that battery provides 32 MW forFORTY MINUTES. It gets dark and windless for longer than forty minutes, even in West Texas.
Except that as a non-solution to providing the bulk of our grid power, solar and wind are just in the end providing cover for more coal plants. People generally oppose nuke plants when they think we don’t need them because of the promises of solar and wind. But in the end people are not going to let the lights go off, and we will end up burning more coal if that is what we have to do to keep them on, which we will without nuclear power.
I love the new batteries. I am going to get a high end electric bike in a year or two as soon as the prices come down one more step. I just don’t think they are up to the task of providing continuous base load power at anywhere near the scale industrial society requires. IMO they are mostly useful for taking grid power to where there is none, or secondarily for storing energy generated and used off grid, like an off grid solar cabin.
We have hundreds of years of coal. People only resist coal plants where they already have stable electricity supplies, always provided by some combo of hydro, nuke, and fossil. The long trend, and the current trend all over the developing world, is for more and more base load demand being provided by more and more coal plants, except where mitigated by nuclear.
But they rely on legislative mandates and tax credits that give them huge artificial advantages. In other words it is “made up” solvency, kind of like cooked data.
Banks like this because they are not on the hook if the lease company goes out of business if all of their panels degrade to the point of uselessness and become a liability, the customer is. The banks are just selling cheap loans because there is money to lend, it’s not like the actual solar system is securing the loans, the customers credit score is (and of course whatever insurance or other backup the bank has, we know how that goes).
I am all in favor of using incentives to nudge development in the right directions when it is clear what those right directions are, I just do not agree with the assumption that trying to replace our grid with solar and wind is even feasible, let alone worthwhile.
Only because we had a large build up of them and enjoy a stable electricity supply as a result. We have managed to make quite a bit of gains via efficiency and there are more to make, this, and our existing infrastructure have made new plants unnecessary for a short period of time.
For the most part, it is either going to be coal, nuclear, or some form of primitism or neo-primitism. Japan and Germany are not going to let their factories lose juice any more than we are. Those sentiments will outlast the current popularity of solar. Solar will still play an ever increasing role, but that does not mean they can provide the bulk of our base load power, there is no reason to think they can.
But at what cost? When you give a large artificial advantage to a less efficient method of generating power it has a cost.
What we are arguing here are issues of scale and orders of magnitude. Of course coal won’t be completely replaced by solar. My contention is that there is no reason, other than blind hopefulness anyway, no* technical* reason to think that solar will, anytime in the foreseeable future, be able to provide continuous base load power on or anywhere near the scale that coal OR nuclear do today. I am talking in the large scheme of things, not token individual projects.
So 137 acres of solar farm for a data center that employs 35 people. It looks like the entire project might cost something like $30 million per job. This is not something that is an example that very many industries can follow. It is a novelty and a marketing ploy, one who’s cost is at least partially offset by tax credits and mandates upon the utilities that provide the grid that the data center will still rely on.
There are millions of tons of carbon and vast quantities of heavy metals and other poisons spewed by the coal plants that Apple and Wal Mart’s factories in China are connected to, in the big picture the few solar installations you are talking about are trivial in comparison.
The entire boondoggle is based on the misperception on the part of the public that it is technically feasible to provide the amounts of continuous base load power we need without coal or nuclear, or that the technology to do so is right around the corner.
I am also moving in the direction of Mexico when I go to the Taco Bell a few blocks south of me but that doesn’t mean I a making a true run for the border.
Solar does not provide lower costs to consumers overall, it causes a higher price. It not only shifts the extra cost of solar onto all of the non solar customers through mandates and and other preferential treatment, it currently goes a little farther in many areas so that solar customers pay less.
For one thing you keep using peak MW capacity of batteries, which only produce that amount for short periods of time. How about a system that can independently produce even a few MW of base load power continuously and as reliably as our current grid. In my decades of life I have only lost the food in my freezer to a power outage once, that’s the kind of reliability people expect.
This is artificial “grid parity” based on a combination of factors. You could make Flintstones cars on par with gasoline autos in terms of cost benefit with enough creative taxation and regulation, that wouldn’t make them a real part of our transportation solution (although they might be in their own right).
In the short term the best use of our resources is in efficiency, grid powered geothermal, and solar water heating, all in different proportions depending on location. In the long term the only thing that will stop the expansion of coal is nuclear. Nuclear is risky, but all of the other methods we have to generate continuous power are worse.
Hank, you put a lot of emphasis on base load power generation, as if our refrigerators will be shut down by a lack of power production. Nothing could be further from reality, as this opinion piece about the Kewaunee nuke plant smartly explains:
“as if our refrigerators will be shut down by a lack of power production.”…What do you think they run on? Of course they will be shut down without power production. Without hydro, fossil, and nuke none of us would have refrigeration.
The article is discussing a current glut in the electricity market in one area of the country, a glut caused by fossil fuel burning plants, not solar or wind. And how with low natural gas prices gas plants can be competitive because they can more quickly adjust the amount of fuel they use according to demands. It is using “base load plant” in an industry jargon sort of way to differentiate coal and nuclear plants who have to run at high capacity continuously to be efficient, and can not adjust fuel use quickly, from gas plants, which can quickly adjust their output to meet intermittent demand. All of these systems, including gas plants, are able to produce large scale, continuous, base load power in a way that solar systems can not.
Meanwhile, the California utilities are preparing to install major power storage capacity, from here:
1.325GW- that’s really a lot of power storage. Will California generate and store so much solar power that they’ll be able to decommission everything else? No. What I am saying is that solar generation and storage systems can replace your base load generators, one at a time, just give it a chance.
Again, you are comparing peak output to continuous output. Batteries only output their rated capacity for a limited time, which is why these systems are all connected to the grid.
It doesn’t matter how much the batteries are rated at their peak when they are empty after several cloudy days. These systems have no foreseeable chance of replacing fossil/hydro/wind.
Hank, I think that you are confusing energy capacity and power. They’re not the same things. The idea of coupling a photovoltaic cell to a battery means that a steady output can be obtained, and the power levels can be adjusted relatively quickly.
You are correct in that all these PV + battery systems are too small. So far, there’s only been pilot projects, but their capacity keeps increasing.
Additionally, you are ignoring the long-term costs of continuing to use coal: at the very least, subsidies to our agricultural sector will have to dramatically increase, as the likelihood of droughts increases. These “unpriced” costs of hydrocarbons should not be ignored in any honest discussion.
A steady output can be maintained only until the battery runs out.
Every time I buy a bicycle that weighs less I make it to the top of the mountain faster, that does not mean I should expect a bike to ever be able to keep up with a motorcycle, regardless of new technology.
It is kind of hard to predict that, increased climate volatility is likely, and that will cause droughts in some places, and more rain in others.
Regardless, it is not the carbon from coal that I worry about, it is the much nastier stuff. Humans are adapted to changes in climate, we are not adapted to high levels of toxic heavy metals being dispersed into the food chain.
I’m talking about a system where the solar, wind and maybe hydro and nuclear inputs all feed continuously into a storage system, and the storage system spits out power in a close approximation to updated demand forecasts. The right kind of storage system can be 1000x more flexible than your nuke plant, while also being absolutely, perfectly stable. The real trick is scale- once the whole network becomes large enough, you won’t feel afraid anymore.
Mostly I only want to replace fossil. Coal, primarily. Not because the coal-burners are villains. 50 years ago it made all the sense in the world and there were not a lot of alternatives anyway. Today a lot of respectable people still focus on the upsides of coal, even though, to an increasing degree anyway, they aren’t seeing the big picture. Coal gas and coal synfuel, yah ok, let’s talk.
Today, we have efficient, durable (and cheap!) solar panels and fledgling grid-scale storage systems. Also, variable-output natural gas-fired power generation. A burgeoning ev fleet. Nuke plants retiring. What oh what should we do?
It’s never cloudy/windless everywhere at once. As long as there is reasonable grid connectivity, and enough reserve capacity to cover the average number of cloudy/windless days in a particular location, and just enough storage to handle nighttime and some degree of statistical fluctuation, there won’t be a problem.
Don’t say “but what if we get unlucky and it really is cloudy everywhere”. We could also get unlucky and have meteors strike several nuke plants at once. At some point you have to trust in the statistics.
Besides, hydro systems are already our best bet for energy storage. They can act as “batteries” with enormous capacity. The very modest dam near where I grew up has a capacity of 4,000,000 kW-h per foot of water level when filled. If the generator capacity were beefed up, it could serve millions for weeks to cover a lull in renewable inputs.
Specialized hydro pumped storage exists, but in many cases you don’t need pumping; just beefed up peak capacity and careful resource management.
Using pumped hydro is very inefficient and it requires handy topographical features such as mountains and lakes, which tend to be rather distant from the centres of power consumption, which tend to be cities.
In the UK it used by the National Power grid to meet peak demand because it can come up to full generation is a minute or so. Gas powered plants take 30 minutes or more. Nuclear, of course, is always on.
Solar is pretty useless when the sun goes down and in northern latititudes the sun goes down early in winter. Wind is also highly variable. Worse still, if the weather is cloudy and air still you have two sources of power generation that are idle. The statistics are a bit depressing. Worse still, they also suffer from geographical issues. Often the best places for them are far away from the centres of consumption.
However, if we had a big battery and an extensive power grid connecting these remote locations, that might work. Except, there is no big battery and a new electricity distribution grid will cost billions.
However…if electric vehicles become mass market. Those big batteries connected to the grid at night could be just the thing the power network designers are looking for.
Solar and wind can also be used to mitigate demand if they are generated near the source of consumption. But, so too can encouraging energy efficiency in building design and remedial work like adding double glazing and insulation.
Governments have to take into account all of these factors and come up with policies to steer the national infrastructure in the right direction. Sad to say, the issue is both politicised with many environmental issues and the policies introduced are often short sighted. In the UK, the incentives for renewable power generation by solar have been something of a fiasco. The market started and stopped as subsidies were introduced and then reduced or withdrawn. Then the trade issue where China was accused of dumping cheap panels on the international market and making it impossible for local manufacturers to enter the market.
While a shiny set of solar panels on the roof may satisfy someone living in a sunny place and the Germans may look fondly at the wind turbine on top of their house. But these are mere bagatelles in scheme of things. A side show that will do little to provide the reliable grid power we have all come to take for granted.
However, keep an eye on that battery technology, it could be a game changer.
Any talk of adding batteries to the system to store power has to take into account the energy losses of that system. All batteries have internal resistance and cannot be charged with 100% efficiency. Hydro pumping schemes have to factor in mechanical losses and losses due to evaporation in the reservoir. There are no free lunches, so every intermediate storage system or energy transfer system you add will reduce the overall efficiency of the system. In general, count on losing at least 30% of your energy when putting intermediate storage into the mix.
Another problem with large scale solar is transmission line losses. Solar farms are huge and need to be located in sunny places far away from population centers where real-estate is cheap. That means higher transmission line losses. There are also conversion losses when converting DC solar power into power that can be efficiently propagated over long distances.
I see solar power being used in two different ways - electric solar will be increasingly used for point power of specific devices - solar powered streetlights, traffic lights, job site power in remote areas, etc. Big solar plants, if they become efficient at all, may be used as part of a direct energy source for local manufacturing, or solar thermal plants that use the heat from the sun directly to power turbines with steam. Instead of storing energy in electric batteries, you can store heat using molten salt and use that heat to power turbines 24/7 for baseload power. However, that doesn’t get you away from conversion losses or storage losses.
I can see solar becoming a very valuable add-on power source. Thin-film solar that can be made into shingles, window film, or embedded in car batteries could supplement grid power whenever possible. If it’s cheap enough, it could be cost-effective to do so. Then you don’t need to store it - you just need to regulate it and have power switching systems that can feed it into the grid intelligently when possible for immediate use - or just use it locally, like having a solar car battery contributing 5% of the power required to charge your electric car, or having it drive accessories like the stereo and instrument panel of your car while driving, taking some of the load off the drive batteries.
Over time, solar may become ubiquitous, but that doesn’t mean it will provide more than a fraction of our power. It will just provide a percentage of it, but in many different ways.
Of course. Even today, coal does not provide a majority of our power; just a plurality. As energy production becomes more diverse, we should expect even less dominance from any one source.
Transmission line losses aren’t necessarily as bad as you think; at least not everywhere. California imports huge amounts of electrical energy, basically because coal plants are all but nonexistent and because of nuclear NIMBYism. And yet we have gigantic areas suitable for solar farms. They are remote, but they aren’t as remote as a different state, which is the current state of affairs.
California is a bit of a special case, but if more states enact pollution laws that prevent local non-renewable generation, then the transmission losses start working in favor of solar.
