‘Solar’ is cheaper and cheaper
Via Uncommon wisdom daily comes this chart from Bloomberg:
Current estimates suggest that solar might be as cheap as coal by the end of the decade, and half the cost of coal by the end of the next decade. When applied to electricity prices this predicts that solar generated electricity in the US will descend to a level of 12 cents (7 pence) per kilowatt hour by 2020, possibly even 2015 for the sunniest parts of America.
actually cheaper than coal in some cases…
First Solar May Sell Cheapest Solar Power, Less Than Coal: First Solar Inc. (FSLR), the world’s largest maker of thin-film solar panels, may sell electricity at a lower rate than new coal plants earn, according to a regulatory filing from a project it purchased in New Mexico.
El Paso Electric Co. (EE) agreed to buy power from First Solar’s the 50-megawatt Macho Springs project for 5.79 cents a kilowatt- hour, according to a Jan. 22 procedural order from the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission. That’s less than half the 12.8 cents a kilowatt-hour for power from typical new coal plants, according to models compiled by Bloomberg.
of course, there are subsidies, but even so, this surprised me, as ive long been a skeptic…
Great. But how does it scale? There’s enough coal in the ground to cook this planet.
There is enough coal to cook it ONCE. There is enough solar energy to cook it FOREVER.
Is there enough open land in the Arizona/New Mexico desert to devote to large arrays of solar panels to power the US?
A typical coal fired plant takes up, what, and acre? You need more than one acre to have a viable solar array, and then there is thermal power that has the same problem, but been around longer than cheap photo-voltaic panels.
So when I go through and see that “solar panels are cheap” I find that to be a poor argument not assessing the total costs of such facilities.
Mike an acre is a large suburban house lot, not an edequate site for even a small coal plant. And coal plants typically get their fuel by rail, or occasionally barge, and the former at least has a substantial footprint of its own, even if you are just counting a spur line.
An acre is 43560 sf or 206 feet on a side or just about 2/3rds of a football field, not including end zones and sidelines. That probably isn’t enough to serve as a parking lot for a largish coal plant.
I for one would be interested in a rigorous comparison of actual total footprints, including external ones, for a desert based solar array and a water dependent coal plant.
But “what an acre?” doesn’t begin to make the cut.
And as interesting to me is the possibility of extruded thin film solar allowing widespread point supply for end users.
A huge problem with either coal fired plants or massive solar arrays located far from major users are the actual transmission line losses and once again the huge footprints required by a high power distribution grid. If you go anywhere in the west you will see 300 foot wide clear cut corridors marching right through remote forests. As things are we will probably never realistically reduce the existing footprint but any shift to point source supply works to mitigate further degradation of what is either quasi wilderness or at worst working forest.
To take a historical example the New Deal Rural Electrification program would have looked a lot different if you could have just trucked a multi-family solar generator into those Appalachian Hollows rather than committing to run distribution lines to every house.
Externalities. You HAVE to compute them in.
Bruce
you missed the point with Mike Smith
who is an idiot.
The full cost of coal is a ruined planet. I don’t know what that is in dollars.
You get these people who can only think in terms of “the bottom line” as if money was life.
coberly, you cant dismiss the front-loaded carbon footprint of solar electricity either…before one KW of solar power is generated, a lot of CO2 enters the atmosphere
bruce mentioned a few points, such as the long transmission lines and the footprint of building them, but even before that we need to figure the footprint of the diesel fuel used in mining the materials, the energy cost of transporting the raw materials & ores to your smelters & the energy needed for that, the manufacture of the solar panels (which is most cases is from coal powered electricity) and then the energy cost of transporting the finished components to the site where they will be assembled into a grid connected solar array…
i’ve spent a lot of time looking for that “rigorous evaluation” of the carbon footprint of any solar power installation that bruce mentioned he’d like to see, and have yet to see anything that comes close to covering all the bases…
rjs
They use a lot of diesel digging coal, transporting the resulting product often hundreds of miles away, and building the machines that do that digging.
That is before computing carbon footprints of getting a solar array up and running you might have to examine the wear and tear on both the mining machinery and the power plant boilers/generators. In general big things that spin and heat tend to wear out faster than more solid state equipment.
I know you know this but your formulation left the unwary reader thinking all costs for existing coal powered plants were sunk already. While solar was totally exposed to startup. But if large numbers of coal plants were already reaching the end of their service lives, or had no practical way to meet say mercury emissions requirements then you are looking new coal plant vs new solar array. Which shifts your cost calculations dramatically.
Which advocates like to amusing call ‘clean coal’. As if there were any way to burn carbon without producing at least carbon dioxide. Chemically the ‘cleanest’ burn you can achieve.
Spencer has an array on his roof that he leases and provides electricity. Lets ask him.
certainly, bruce; my few lines of comment wasnt meant to consider all the tradeoffs…
just to make myself clear, im NOT in any way advocationg staying with coal generation…just pointing that there aint no free energy lunch…
I love the romantic thought of free energy from the sun,but I have been a roofing contractor for 35 years most solar systems dont work,or make the roof leak.most of the time the homeowner does not know its not working,but it gives them a warm fuzzy feeling to have solar.so I take the liberals money and install the piece of useless shit on there house and every one is happy.on my land I plant redwoods that helps with green house gases,but that takes time cash and hard work.thats not something liberals like,but they can go to home depot and hire some of the illegal aliens they love so much to do it for them,so they dont have to get there hands dirty.especially you berkley collage professors like Richard lehman,and Bred Delong.
I’m not sure I’ve done all the calculations right, but right now it looks like I pay $0.16 kWh to NSTAR and $0.12 kWh to the solar company.
It is not easy to get the data but
I am guaranteed that I will pay the solar company less than I pay NSTAR.
I did not pay anything up front to have the panels installed.
I’ve had the solar system up and running for four months and so far my total electric bill –both NSTAR & the solar company — has been 27% less than in the same months a year ago.
David there is a hell of a lot of difference between technologies like thin film direct conversion and older style passive heater systems.
Those older technologies were heavy and critically dependent on plumbing which as you point out always puts you at some exposure to leaks and moreover the structual load of the water being pumped up and flowing down.
To coin a phrase the tech we are talking about is not your father’s Oldsmobile and your experience from before even a decade ago means exactly squat in context.
And frankly anyone who hires a regular roofing contractor to do a solar installation is fooling themselves. Not every contractor’s license is created equal and some guy who is perfectly adequate to do a three layer tear-off or pour a new tar roof is rather unlikely to have the skills needed.
I have or had a lot of friends in the trades and there is a wide range of abilities hidden under such categories as ‘roofer’, ‘carpenter’ and ‘plumber’. And frankly I am at a loss to understand how a modern solar installation could lead to roof leaks unless you are just drilling through the sheathing and fastening things with mollies or whatever. You just don’t have the plumbing openings you might in an older system.
David Michel
I do a little construction work myself. And like Bruce says, not all contractors are created equal. You give yourself away.
rjs
there ain’t no free lunch. but sitting in our own wastes because the steps out are not free or easy doesn’t exactly say much for homo sapiens.
just a few postscripts…
another problem with solar, or wind for that matter, is that the sun dont shine & the wind dont blow 24/7…so you need either a baseload plant that can go 24/7, or a way of storing your renewable power so that it’s available during peak periods when your sun or wind isnt…to the best of my knowledge, battery technology isnt capable, but pumped hydrostorage is one alternate; belgium is now building an island to store water for that right now…using pumped hydro with the tides in maine would work in the northeast…and if we could get cooperation with canada, great lakes wind power could be stored by pumping water uphill from lake ontario thru the lake simcoe canal system to lake huron, then reversing the flow through generators when peak power is needed…
& something else, from national geographic: the IEA projects that amount of fresh water consumed for world energy production will double within the next 25 years…they say most of that will be for coal plants and biofuels…
PS: good graphics dan, you might want to post them…
rjs
our ancestors managed with just sun and wind power for about two million years.
i can’t see that our “standard of living” is all that much nicer than theirs.
of course they didn’t have to commute to work..
damn, coberly, you stepped right into the same problem i struggled with in a paper i wrote in the 80s…allow me to indulge myself by excerpting:
what seems apparent is that biological life is the only active counter-entropic (i.e., generating organization rather than defaulting to randomness) force in our universe, and photosynthesis, using solar energy input, is the essential organizer on our planet…the human element of life has incorporated a more-or-less sophisticated technology into its adjustment and interaction with the planets cycles and its other life systems…but every cycle or system that came to require modification by human technology (and hence by energy not “naturally” occurring on the planet) became an energy sink in the thermodynamics of the planet’s life systems (ie., it continues to need artificially supplied or manipulated energy to maintain the same level of order) …many cycles and systems are being tampered with already in order to support more life and organization; hence the amount of artificially (ie., technologically driven and/or manipulated) energy input into the biosphere has been increasing… meanwhile, its basic life supporting organization had been decreasing (due to pollution, radiation, etc.)…this artificiality has allowed for quantum leaps in the planet’s organizational stasis and human population, but it has adversely impacted the natural balances & in so doing brought the entropic threshold closer…thus to maintain bio-stability now requires a continually input of energy…any attempt to return to a non-manipulative energy input (ie., just natural solar energy) would precipitate a backlash of cascading chaos & thus would result in a reduction of humanity’s numbers & organization (due to lowered living standards, medical services, transportation, agriculture production, etc.) and considering the unlikelihood of voluntary mass suicides, would probably precipitate wars with the remaining accumulated weapons, which could possibly turn nuclear when the going got tough – and as free radiation from atomic weaponry is known to be one of the most potent disorganizers of life, such would further lower the ecological potential of the planet…so it our opinion that our commitment to technology is past the point of no return; that, given the present state of our planet, the can be no significant curtailing of energy & technology without plunging the planet & its population into a severe dark ages or finis…
i guess what i am saying there is that our species is already locked in to our complex energy interaction with the planet, and i could not see any way we as a species could get back to the simple interactions with just the sun & wind that were adequate for our ancestors for those 2 million years that you cite…
coberly,
I resent the fact that you result to name calling and bashing, rather than for an actual argument. Bruce, I am an industry professional in the financial services industry, and additionally from Texas, so I am a bit warped in the footprint of a coal fired plant. All I can see is the power plant on the west side of Brooklyn that seems to be rather small in comparison to the natural gas plant off I-10 close to Columbus Texas (and even smaller from the South Texas Project “STP” Nuclear Reactor in Brazoria County, TX), to which both I will say do not require 40 acres (excluding STP because that is a behemoth in the wilderness) to produce the necessary megawatts to feed into the grid, all things being equal (not including parking lots,rail lines, etc.).
But if we get into the back and forth of “your an idiot” you miss my point exactly.
My point is for all of you simpletons is that you cannot have an argument based solely “on panels are cheap!” nor can you maintain an argument based solely on “we pump huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere”. For the first fact, its relative to quality of the panel and the size of the installation. Furthermore, the largest greenhouse gas is actually water vapor. Carbon, methane, your granny’s old hairspray only exacerbate the problem of warming the earth and creating more atmospheric water vapor.
I digress, but the point is, we have to have a comprehensive comparison of cost, benefits, environmental impact, maintenance, and so on.
And you ABSOLUTELY must look at the bottom line. Your utility company certainly does, and if the utility company does not see that the market can tolerate rate hikes to build out a $35mm solar project in the desert and string 450 miles of transmission cable to a remote location, then they are not going to do it. It isn’t profitable. I would enter a few supporting examples (which mostly are common sense based to anyone who lives in a capitalistic society), but what’s the point, I obviously am just some “idiot” trolling the board.
rjs
i think if you put numbers to it you will find the situation not so dire.
surely we can live without commuting to work in 2,000 dollar phallic symbols.
Mike Smith
I am old and ugly and not very smart person. See how easy that was?
As for your being an idiot… I am not name calling. I am making a diagnosis. The “largest greenhouse gas is actually water” is diagnostic.
Just to help you out a little, I have no doubt your Business School Aptitude Test scores are higher than mine.
You still don’t know a damn thing about greenhouse gas driven global warming.
And your reliance on “bottom line” is evidence of a complete inability to learn from the world around you.
I am sorry I don’t have time to be diplomatic. I have tried teaching… kindly… and I find it doesn’t work.
coberly, now I have no expertise in this so I can’t get in the middle but I was waiting in the doctor’s waiting room for my husband yesterday and read this article in Smithsonian Magazine about the work of a researcher Jim Anderson on Ozone. Here is a quote:
“
While water in the stratosphere might seem innocuous, the finding made Anderson “profoundly worried,” he recalls. From the decades he had spent studying the depletion of the earth’s ozone layer—the thin gauze of molecules in the stratosphere that blocks most incoming ultraviolet radiation—Anderson knew that water could, through a series of chemical reactions, destroy ozone.”
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Ozone-Problem-is-Back–And-Worse-Than-Ever-180011891.html#ixzz2K8TFTIwG
coberly, I came back just to say that I am not saying water is the largest causal factor of anything. In fact I get the idea from the article that it’s role is more current and is the result of the primary causal factors that created the current situtation. The bigger storms that push this phenomenon are also a part of the cycle. People can read Dr. Anderson’s ideas and results for themselves.
bruce web,my comments only prove that you and your over educated,paupas jack ass friends have a romance with solar ,no matter the cost.the dipshits,and elitists like obama don’t care that the production of solar panels in china creates more toxic waste than you care to admit .even ed Dolan said his solar was not cost effective ,the average person cant afford the cost of solar,yet the libtards and 1%ers will ram it down our throats because they know whats good for us.I never said I installed the solar systems,the homeowner would hire there own conman solar cont.most solar cont. were once used car salesmen,or berkley college professor.oh and I am glad you have “friends in the trade” I am sure they are your friend,not just there for the money.cause every contractor wants to hang around some libtard that worships the sun!
coberly,better I sit in my own waste then masturbate in a circle with my libtard college friends worshiping the sun.
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ah, David,
maybe Mike Smith can see now why I have run out of patience with greenhouse deniers.
Anna Lee
I am not familiar with the research you cite.
The problem with the “water is a bigger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide” is that it ignores the science and the history.
We are a “water planet” and water vapor is what keeps the daytime temperature within a hundred degrees of the nighttime temperature. It is in fact “a greenhouse gas.”
But it has been around a long time and we are not making any more of it. The physics of water vapor in the atmosphere makes it self limiting (up to a point: we may find a way to upset that balance too).
Meanwhile rather tiny amounts of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere in excess of the planet’s ability to remove it, have increased the heat retained by the planet.. a tiny amount. Just enough to upset the ecological balance that made human life possible.
I don’t think there is any way to convince people who don’t want to believe this. Even those who actually know something, and are not paid liars, can limit their mental space to include, and exaggerate, only those aspects of the problem that confirm what they want to believe.
I’ll look at your link. But if you have any doubts about the role of carbon dioxide, i suggest a visit to your local library: I am by no means an expert, and a few years ago I recognized that I did not know enough to deserve to have an opinion. So I went to my local library. You can’t rely on “one book.” But if you read enough of them… and, though I hate to say it… have a reasonable background in science in general.. you will soon enough come to see who is lying and who is not.
coberly, That was the reason for my second post. No, I have no illusions about carbon dioxide and my original post was not meant as an endorsement of the Smith posts. I just thought you might have a look at the article about Anderson whose early work had more to do with CFCs than CO2.
Anna Lee
I read the article. Thank you.
I need to point out that the article does not question the reality of global warming or the role of carbon dioxide.
What it is saying is that global warming may be creating storms big enough to inject water into the stratosphere where it acts as a catalyst to destroy ozone… another problem altogether.
In other words, he is NOT agreeing that water “is a greenhouse gas more powerful than carbon dioxide (it is, but that has nothing to do with global warming)… he is saying that global warming may be leading to an exacerbation of the ozone problem.
it is important to think slowly about these things before getting off on the wrong idea.
Anna Lee
I read the article. Thanks for calling it to my attention.
It is important to realize that the article is NOT calling into question the reality of global warming or the role of carbon dioxide in driving that warming.
What it is saying is that global warming may be creating thunderstorms powerful enough to inject water into the stratosphere…where it is not normally found… in amounts sufficient to increase the depletion of ozone… another problem altogether.
coberly, while i dont doubt that you or i could survive living off the sun and the wind, i question whether the other 7 billion people, most of whom are living in cities, will let us peacefully tend our organic gardens with our stone age tools when industrial agriculture & the transportation systems collapse and the food supply to those cities is cut off after everyone is reduced to living in the same manner as our prehistoric ancestors did…
btw, here’s a picture for you…
Precisely!
coberly –
Since you are intent to redirect to a debate about greenhouse gases and their overall effects:
Water Vapor 36-72% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas
More water vapor = higher temps due to radiation absorbtion:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Atmospheric_Transmission.png
However, the EPA excludes water vapor and concentrates on human activity alone: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases.html#
But as I stated earlier, emissions exacerbate the problem.
And you still have not gotten my original point. You cannot one for one:
Gemasolar thermal solar project in Spain generates 19.9 MGW of power and takes up 477.60 Acres of land
3 Mile Island Nuclear Reactor generated when initially built 1,708 MGW on 814 acres of land.
For Gemasolar to full replace an originally planned 3 Mile Island, they would need 40,992 acres of land to generate the same amount of power, or roughly 18.9% of the total land area of the state of Rhode Island. This does not account for cost.
while there’s no doubt that water vapor traps heat, it isnt one of the greenhouse gases tracked by the WMO in their annual assessment;
according to the World Meteorological Organization’s annual report on 2011 greenhouse gases atmospheric methane also hit a new high of about 1813 parts per billion (ppb) in 2011, which is 259% of the pre-industrial level, 40% of methane is emitted into the atmosphere by natural sources (e.g., wetlands) and about 60 % comes from activities like cattle breeding, rice agriculture, fossil fuel exploitation, landfills and biomass burning…it’s about 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2 in the long term, but 70 times as potent over a 20 year horizon; therefore, in the short term, it’s global net warming effect is one-third that of CO2…
nitrous oxide is 298 times more heat trapping than equal emissions of carbon dioxide over a 100 year period and also contributes to the destruction of the ozone layer, which screens harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun…
since CO2 levels were at 390.9 parts per million (ppm) in 2011, and atmospheric N2O was about 324.2 parts per billion in 2011; a back of the envelope calculation puts the contribution of N2O to global warming at about one quarter that of CO2…according to the EPA: “Agricultural soil management is the largest source of N2O emissions in the United States, accounting for about 68% of total U.S. N2O emissions in 2010″
according to a more recent study, estimates are atmospheric soot has a warming effect approximately two thirds that of carbon dioxide…
so all together they would contribute more to global warming than the closely watched CO2…
coberly,do you have a ti-died tee shirt and dredlocks ,and are you going to the next grateful dead show or will you be to busy shitting on cop cars at the 99%rally?
rjs – thanks for publishing this. My father-in-law sent me some of the same info, and included also a study published by a group of chemical engineers that assessed the life span of these chemicals. Let me see if I can find the link…
David – what kinds of chemicals are use to color lock those ti-died shirts man? And f- poly blends, I have to have hemp cloth. And yes, my bong is made from recycled bottles.
mike smith,I have a 10th grade education and don’t try to impress any one.I have to say its nice to hear a voice of reason like yours.I am a tree hugger,and have planted over 1000 redwoods.I dug the holes myself,I’am not afraid to get my hands dirty.I am tired of all the do-gooders that want to save the planet,and dont know shit about the real world.if they want to shrink there carbon foot print they should plant a tree in there own back yard .and stop telling us we cant have cheap energy,or a large soda,or are second amendment,a v-8,Christmas,or be a white,hetro ,christian male!
rjs
i am not proposing stone age tools. but i’d like to start by requiring small, slow, short range, all electric vehicles in cities.
If i remember correctly, this would solve about half the greenhouse gas problem.
please try to avoid the “all or nothing” fallacy. you are smarter than that.
Mike Smith
I don’t know that anyone is proposing “one for one”.
I thought your comment about “acres of land” was … well, severely misinformed.
And your comment about “water vapor” demonstrates a complete ignorance of the relevant science. I don’t mean to be rude, but how do you have a “reasoned debate” with someone who doesn’t know anything and refuses to learn?
David
I can see why you only got a tenth grade education.
For what it’s worth to you I planted fifty ponderosa last year and cleared nine acres of blackberries by hand.
the fruit trees are coming a little slower than i hoped, but again, they are all dug by hand.
i don’t know if someone like you can avoid “assuming” and then confusing his own hatreds with reality, but you ought to give it a try.
well, i should say
i never held anyone’s lack of education against them. i didn’t think much of what i saw in schools myself.
but there is a difference between lack of formal education and “stupid and proud of it.”
and i don’t do all that hand work out of some hippie fantasy about back to nature. i do it that way because that’s all i can afford.
i considered a solar pump because my well is relatively remote. but i finally decided that on-grid was more practical.
point being that even I try not to live in a fantasy world. but that does mean i have to take account of some real world trends like global warming.
i am sorry you are so angry. i’d like to be a nicer person myself, but i keep running into people who won’t let me.
coberly, the reference to stone age tools was a bit of snark, & an exaggeration to make a broader point…
while i agree that electric vehicles reduce the tailpipe pollution in cities, the jury is still out on their overall carbon footprint, but most seem to agree it depends on where you plug it in; if the power source is from coal, an electric vehicle’s carbon footprint aint much different than a fuel-efficient gas or diesel car…
Carbon Dioxide Emissions By Source – US EPA
rjs
depends on the electric vehicle. if you insist upon eighty miles per hour in a vehicle that will hold your living room… maybe.
but electric cars are twice as carbon efficient… including generation and delivery costs… as gas cars at the same speed and weight. more efficient at low speeds.
btw, i have owned 50 mpg gas cars so I know even a gas car with some speed can be made more fuel efficient… just not at the weight and speed “demanded” by americans.
coberly, I have a 10th grade education because my mother was a whore,and married my dads best friend,best man at their wedding. he beat me and such,so I left school and went to work.I retired at 47.I live in northern ca.the most liberal place in the usa.most of the berkley grads I meet have never left the world of academics,they hate guns god and hard working white males.they love illeglal aliens, gays and cloth shopping bags.there tolerant as long as you see things there way.my half brother is the perfect example he has a PHD in political science from berkley.many years ago we were watching CNN a F.B.I. profiler said the D.C. sniper was a white, right wing, christian. and I said to my brother how would he know that.my brother threw a temper tantrum and said “oh I suppose you think he is a black Muslim”.I told him to calm down and, reminded him my hobby was MMA and I did not want to hurt him.IN the last election I told him I did not like Obama he will never talk to me again,so I get a little hostile when talking to greenies or liberals,dont take it personal.
David
I don’t.
David
I will go a little further. I am genuinely sorry you had such bad times. I share some of your feelings about some of those people.
But it is important to try not to judge everyone by the label you first put on them. You may even be right more often than not, but you could be a lot happier person, I think, if you could find a way to let go of your anger.
You mentioned god. There are people who hate religion, and there are people who make religion hateful. But if you can keep your wits about you and avoid either I think that might be your best hope.
received via email overnight:
Renewables now cheaper than coal and gas in Australia : Renew Economy: A new analysis from research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance has concluded that electricity from unsubsidised renewable energy is already cheaper than electricity from new-build coal and gas-fired power stations in Australia.
The modeling from the BNEF team in Sydney found that new wind farms could supply electricity at a cost of $80/MWh –compared with $143/MWh for new build coal, and $116/MWh for new build gas-fired generation.
These figures include the cost of carbon emissions, but BNEF said even without a carbon price, wind energy remained 14 per cent cheaper than new coal and 18 per cent cheaper than new gas.
“The fact that wind power is now cheaper than coal and gas in a country with some of the world’s best fossil fuel resources shows that clean energy is a game changer which promises to turn the economics of power systems on its head,”
rjs
thanks for this. it was news to me.
since the thread has rolled off the front page, maybe you would care to bring the Australian numbers in as a new Post.
coberly, dont really have anything else but that article, partially copied above, hardly enough to make a post out of…& im hardly expert enough on Aussie energy to write about it…
since i brought up methane as a greenhouse gas on this thread, thought you’d all like to see what just happened in January in the arctic:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OTfGBMswYDs/UQyPQJI8UXI/AAAAAAAAJKQ/zFrPQUexXaY/s1600/8453866348957.jpg