Electrical Supergrids connecting places that are sunny, windy, have geothermal heat sources, biomass or tidal barrages for renewable power; along with conventional oil, gas and nuclear power generators. Then distribute this to industrial and domestic consumers, any of which might want to export surplus power arising from microgeneration. Also, perhaps to accommodate local car and domestic battery storage for supplementing the grid at peak hours controlled by smart meters.
That is one enormous technical and political challenge.
I guess it will be more likely to happen in the US rather than anywhere else, given that the political issues are rather less onerous than in the European Tower of Babel.
A European High Voltage DC grid connecting sunny North African Solar farms to the power hungry nations of Northern Europe.
Spot any potential political problems or security issues?
It will happen one day, probably bit by bit.
The huge off shore wind turbine farms being built in the North Sea need a DC super grid, if this is connected to pumped storage systems in Norway, it will have a big battery. Something similar needs to happen with solar in the South.
Anecdotal data point for my personal solar installation:
Cost after rebates and tax credits: $15,001
4.510 kW DC / 3.891 kW AC
I have not paid for electricity since installation
In my neighborhood, they are experimenting with battery stations for the neighborhood right now (we are part of a test zone by Southern California Edison). They are testing the impact of solar on more houses, they have put in wifi connected power strips in my home to track the load of my dishwasher, washing machine, home office, fridge and wine storage. But again, they have dropped in big battery boxes as well to see how they can handle night grid loads to supplement the solar installs.
This is exactly wrong. All centralized power generation has transmission losses. Fossil fuels add in constant transport costs. The beauty of solar is that it can be collected next door to point of use, as you went on to describe in this same post!
If we look forward on a timescale comparable to the life of a coal fired power plant, ~60 years, it is quite believable that by 2075 most buildings will follow this paradigm. Of course, by 2075 we may get our power from genetically modified hamsters than run on atmospheric CO2, who knows, but without some major breakthrough it is hard to see what would stop solar from achieving wide-scale application.
I said “large scale solar”, as in huge solar farms out in the desert.
I agree that point-of-use solar will increase, and maybe substantially. Nanotechnology has the potential for several different breakthroughs that could help solar power. We could get to a point in material engineering one day where we can embed solar power generation into all kinds of materials - road beds, shingles, car bodies, clothing, you name it.
You can imagine putting your phone in your pocket and having it automatically charge whenever enough sun is hitting your jacket, for example. Even it’s just a trickle charge, every little bit helps. Solar window film on office buildings could make a substantial contribution to their energy needs. Solar shingles on houses can power attic fans to pull heat out of the house and provide power for automatic shutters and/or feed the excess into the grid. One house might not add much, but if such shingles became common, it would add up to a lot.
Solar materials in city road beds or painted-on to various public surfaces could charge batteries that would power LED streetlamps at night.
Make solar materials cheap enough and easy enough to use in other materials, and it could be a revolution.
I’m not a fan of traditional rooftop solar panels. Too much hardware on the roof, too many mounting points, too much maintenance.
Solar Shingles are a better way to go, if they are cheap and efficient enough. For solar to truly become ubiquitous, it has to be extremely easy to install, low or zero maintenance, and have its cost be amortizable within 5-10 years at most. It also has to live within zoning laws and be unobtrusive. No one wants their house festooned with hardware, and no one wants to pull leaves and twigs out of the framework on a roof.
The problem so far is cost. According to the Dow site, a solar shingle is ‘affordable’ because WITH a total of 60% worth of government rebates and tax credits an installation can be ‘as low as’ $31,000. So that means without the rebates we’re still looking at $60,000-$70,000 for a solar roof. That’s too much money.
But this is a first-gen product, and other companies are making cheaper ones. Give it 5 or 10 years, and you might see these shingles available for a small premium over regular shingles that will allow them to break even on energy costs in just a few years. That would be big.
Ah. I took it to mean the adoption of solar as a large part of the grid, which is why I thought your post self-contradictory.
Solar farms aren’t as good as integrated solar architecture, I suppose. But they look like a an improvement on present paradigms–compared to shipping coal thousands of miles to burn it at a central power plant far from a city, and then sending it over transmission lines at further loss.
We’ll see if those catch on. So far, they cost more money to produce less electricity with a shorter warranty, but as you say they are just starting out. Also, as I understand it, thin-film solar panels utilize cadmium, a carcinogen that creates a disposal problem. Still, pretty cool that you can just nail solar panels onto a roof!
I’m pretty interested in theluminous solar panels that are being developed. These panels can be designed to absorb only the wavelengths that plants don’t use. I guess they are luminescent on the other side and sort of pass the rest of the light along while generating a charge. They discuss greenhouse applications, including the notion of using these panels to grow algae for biofuel. I imagine they could be used on ordinary windows, though I have no info on the cost or efficiency of these things.
Solar panels are not much use in northern latitudes. Less energy from the sun, less daylight in winter. You need a grid. Without a grid you need a battery and that technology has a long way to go.
Retrofitting all of this onto existing buildings is very inefficient. Sometimes the roof sloping in the wrong direction for panels to work well. There are a lot of issues like that.
Germany does indeed invest very heavily in Solar energy. Government subsidies pay people for simply for generating electricity through solar power. Whether it is generated in the right place, at the right time or with much efficiency, is another matter.
The highly variable rate of generation and the poor yield in at northern latitudes means that they have to burn brown coal when there is no solar.
What they are doing is subsiding a local industry that will make returns in the longer term. They will export the technology to places where it does make sense. They do not like China dumping below-cost panels onto the market.
There is also a lot of politics involved in this. Germany has a very significant Green lobby and a program to run down nuclear power stations and boost renewables like solar and a lot of wind turbines. They want the world to buy the engineering from them and hopefully this will offset some of the disadvantages associated with running a grid with a solar and wind component.
Soon it will be winter, daylight for six hours and the sun low on the horizon. Sometimes there is no wind for those enormous Siemens turbines on the North Sea wind farms. When the nuclear is switched off it will brown coal and gas bought from Russia burning in the power stations.
Each country has to come up with an energy strategy and how to feed the demands of the electricity grid we take for granted is an important issue. Microgeneration by solar is just one element of that.
I am sure cheap solar panels from China on your roof looks like a great deal ,if you live in a sunny place in the South. But on a national and international level there is quite a complex poker game going on.
Germany is a perfect example of how not to do solar energy. The government there has tried to force an industry into existence with selected subsidies and feed-in tariffs, pushing people into using solar when it is not cost-competitive with alternatives. The result was a bubble in solar manufacturing and installations, followed by a collapse of the industry. Siemens lost a billion dollars in the last two years on solar, and is now abandoning the market. Germany’s two largest downstream solar providers have filed for bankruptcy. Bosch is abandoning its solar division after posting big losses.
And all those solar panels installed with heavy subsidies will degrade and need repair and replacement, and there is no plan in place for doing that. If the government doesn’t subsidize the next round of installations and replacements as well, many of those solar installations are going to be dismantled and moved to landfills or recycled into something else at tremendous cost.
Even worse, Germany is suffering from the fundamental problem of solar power: Its reliance on the sun. On sunny days Germany produces more solar power than it can use, and has to export it to the European grid at a loss. Then when it’s cloudy it doesn’t have enough power and has to use coal. Germany’s CO2 emissions increased last year because of that.
The net result has been a gross distortion of German energy markets, with rent-seeking companies close to the government making out like bandits while average Germans pay high energy taxes to subsidize a non-competitive form of energy.
And in the end, it’s possible that the solar industry would have been healthier had it been allowed to grow without all the distortions caused by government action. Look at what happened in Spain: The government heavily subsidized solar panel production, leading to a glut of solar panels. Then the subsidies ended when Spain hit the financial wall and the market for the solar panels vanished. That drove down the price of existing inventory, which killed demand for new production and devastated the solar industry - not just in Spain, but across Europe.
Sad to say, the incentives the UK government gave for solar panel installations is not much better than Germany. It has been an appalling catalogue of mismanagement. At one point large companies were buying up the leases for the roof space of buildings across the country in anticipation of large profits to me made out of the Feed in Tariffs paid by the government to encourage solar panel installation. It also encouraged large numbers of companies to enter the market and race to install solar to beat deadlines when feed in tariff was due to be reduced. Some of the installations were completely unsuitable. As the price of panels came down as the Chinese flooded the market, the subsidy was reduced progressively. This stop - start - stop - start has effectively killed off the industry.
The countries of North West Europe are faring rather better erecting huge Wind Farms off shore in the North Sea. Some of these things are absolutely enormous. 150m high and generating 6MW each. There are aggressive targets for each EU country to contribute towards 20% renewable power generation by 2020. I believe the US has the same sort of target.
I think governments and the electricity generation industry prefer these big, high capacity projects rather than micro-generation incentive schemes using solar panels and small wind turbines on top of houses.
Solar technology has also another disincentive: the technology still has a long way to go in terms of the efficiency of the panels and inverters. It is still improving - so better to wait a few years until the technology has matured?