From a discouraging piece by David Rotman in Technology Review:
as Robert C. Armstrong, director of the MIT Energy Initiative and one of the authors of the report, puts it: “Even if you give away the [photovoltaic] materials for free, you still couldn’t produce electricity as cheaply as with coal or natural gas.”
Read the whole thing.
Not as cheaply when you ignore environmental costs that is.
A pox on both your houses!
I could throw up free solar panels right now and be ecstatic. But I’d never do it for the still speculative and mythological global warming damage (mercury in China? That is another story).
Coal and natural gas aren’t sustainable either but we will ignore that.
Arnold’s use of “sustainable” is odd. But it is probably chosen to point out that “sustainable” under the use of most other people is a fraud.
One irony of ‘renewables’ is that in fact it takes a lot of coal to smelt quartz into semiconductor-quality silicon via the Czochralski process, same goes for lithium for those rechargeable batteries behind (clean) tech, and even more coal to smelt the limestone into the cement needed for a windmill anchor. When you take it all into account – as was done with the Prius a while back – one finds that there aren’t even any significant carbon savings, despite the higher cost – which is a worst of all worlds scenario.
Often times when you hear that the price of some renewable infrastructure is going down, it is only because the price of these fossil inputs has temporarily declined.
And of course the ‘carbon savings’ of these installations typically entirely ignores the huge amount of carbon dioxide emitted during their production and transportation to market, especially if it’s all on the books of some entity overseas (which is the case for most cement and bulk shipping nowadays).
If you try to build a ‘closed-loop’ of renewables made with energy derived solar and wind, the already high cost goes up another order of magnitude.
There are a lot of assumptions involved. Solar installation costs of 85% are reasonable post construction but not with new construction. Comparing average rather than marginal cost can tilt the scale, just as comparing existing rather than new can. Distribution costs exceed generation costs so how these costs are divided is critical.
Residential solar is in part a PSST/tipping point story. When we have the batteries for our hybrids we can use the extra energy, and vice versa.
Rechargeable batteries are extremely expensive – even without subsidies – for a reason. Think of the enormous opportunity cost of those resources, and what kind of trade-offs it would really take to justify that enormous expenditure.
If if really made economic sense to put solar on roofs and batteries in homes and cars, companies would be willing to do it and customers willing to buy it without any subsidy.
As it is, the subsides embedded in a dozen points in the process basically make it as much of a ‘third-party-payer’ industry as health care.
True. However internal combustion engines and gasoline aren’t getting much cheaper while batteries and solar cells aren’t to the point of diminishing returns yet. At some point they will intersect at parity. So while we shouldn’t subsidize current solar tech in ways that retards future solar tech, basic research seems warrantef.
Solar power isn’t *currently* on the efficient frontier. But the room for improvement is more than 10 orders of magnitude (treating a Dyson sphere as the theoretical limit). Contrast that with wind, where the theoretical limit only seems to be ~2 orders of magnitude above humanity’s current power consumption (see e.g. http://www.pnas.org/content/109/39/15679 ).
Thanks to this physical fact, I expect that future generations will appreciate our basic solar energy research more than most other types of research we are currently engaging in. I believe we should work on building better institutional framework(s) for supporting it (more stuff like the X-Prize, less direct subsidies?), rather than concluding from Solyndra and other prominent failures/non-spectacular-successes that this line of research does not deserve public support at all.
And we also shouldn’t subsidize current state of art.
Increasing quantity is different than increasing quality. We can scale up solar right now, but it isn’t economical to do so.
Solar power generation has been around since the 1870’s (Mouchot), and ran into stagnation a long time ago. Improvements in cost-per-watt are mostly due to economies of scale in manufacturing and installation (and cheap coal in China), not because research and technological innovation has dramatically improved the efficiency / cost trade-off.
If you look at a solar cell today, it’s based on the same tech that was around 35 years ago. So our descendants probably will thank our ancestors more than us, which is sad (for us) but true. Indeed, if I’m being honest, I should probably thank the 1880-1930 generation more for key developments that improve my life than anything done by folks in the last fifty years.
There are times when investment/subsidy in a technology helps that technology. I don’t think Solar is at that point. The sun will remain the same, but “solar” today is not what solar power is going to be in just a few years. Dumping money into it right now is not like putting money into electric cars. Pouring money into today’s solar probably retards the future, “sustainable” solar.
And maybe arbitrarily [and extra-legally] banning coal because natural gas is cheap doesn’t help either. Maybe it just wastes natural gas and causes a lot of natural gas sunk cost investment to be built that pushes a transition to solar off even further.
Here in California roof top Solar is popping everywhere. So rooftop solar costs around ~$.20 which is not economical compared to other sources. Not if you are paying for utility power company day rates of $.32 which means you save $.12 for usage. So solar is not collapsing anytime soon because we know the power company will never lower there rates.
Secondly, the article makes a near straw man argument: Solar can not cover all times of the day (No Duh!) Solar costs more than natural gas. (It saves a lot transmission costs) And nobody expects solar to the main power source until 2050.
Solar hot water looks to be all over China. Neither of these examples mean anything for anyone else, necessarily.
Solar panels in California are there for much the same reason as my home has a recycling container. I don’t use it much, and have been known to go months without doing anything with it, but it’s very helpful optically.
That is, both things are a very visible way to show you care. It’s the Green version of having a cross on the wall.
It is so hard to tell, I think we need a CO2 tax with a payout for those who remove CO2 from the air. We need prices.
I have long maintained that the long-run reason to make fusion nuclear power work is that it is the ONLY source of energy that is NOT dependent on a sun. Fission nuclear power is dependent on some star that blew up billions of years ago before our solar system formed. Fossil fuels are from our sun millions of years ago. Solar, hydro and wind are from our sun now.
I guess hydrothermal power is not technically from our sun, but it’s not renewable either. An accident of gravity, not unlike the sun itself.
Fusion nuclear power is DRIVEN, we don’t just catch power as it goes by. Even a Dyson sphere cannot compete. We put deuterium and tritium, or (someday) hydrogen and boron, together at high temperature and pressure and we get more power per gram of fuel than we do from Uranium. We make our own stars anywhere we want.
All life on earth is just a fancy way of intercepting sunlight as it goes by, or eating stuff that does. Even your fancy Tesla is a parasite on the accident of gravity we call the sun.
I have mixed feelings about who PAYS for fusion research, but I have no doubt whatsoever in my mind that any intelligent race in the universe must master fusion nuclear power before it calls itself sentient. Only then are they masters of their own destiny.
So in other words, Corey, we should get in the business of making our own suns?