How Solar Power Could Slay the Fossil Fuel Empire (2014)

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-solar-power-could-slay-the-fossil-fuel-empire-by-2030

by kafkaesq • 11 years ago

65 72 11 years ago

motherboard.vice.com

CodingGuy• 11 years ago

This will be the only chance for our climate/planet as I don't count on our leaders to agree on a strict climate protocol.

Shivetya• 11 years ago

Solar doesn't replace base line generation unless you can get the power where its needed and as you are not generating power from panels over the majority of a day it means you must get it from someone who is generating it

grhino• 11 years ago

Or generate and store excess energy during the day. I think the current challenge is that current energy storage solutions do not scale to the size of power plants?

jsudhams• 11 years ago

Even the day storing may not be option, my home town chennai got a record rain in last one month with almost no sun for most of the days. Also the only thing that helped people are fossil fuel which is Candle and LPG stoves. The regular coal based thermal power was not there due to shutdown of plant as well as tranmission lines. LPG stove made people stay on first and second floor for two weeks with no need to come down.

Paul132• 11 years ago

I know I sound sarcastic but Tony Seba might find a solution by the year 2030: how to store energy to cover the needs of a city like New York(a city that never sleeps). He has been right on the spot regarding his previous predictions, right?

Paul132• 11 years ago

Really? Everyone knows with a little bit of research that The Climate Summits are a bunch of ridiculous hoaxes.

Climate has been changing for 4.5 billion years: http://www.itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/1181/, so enough with this scaremongering.

And everyone who has studied electrical engineering for real, knows that you are always going to need base stations running on fossil fuel or nuclear energy because solar/wind power is unpredictable.

The ones who benefit out of this is the companies you do the huge installations and then increase the prices on utility bills because "practically+scientifically" alternative powers sources are not cost efficient.

Especially the wind power is useless, if you don't have base stations running on coal/nuclear energy to cover for energy variations.

But in the end, the serfs buy it thinking the climate will be saved while the corporations just get richer.

Get some reality checks here: http://www.thegwpf.com/reality-check-2500-new-coal-plants-wi...

Lastly, even Germany who had pledged to stop burning coal, votes not to do it: http://www.thegwpf.com/reality-check-2500-new-coal-plants-wi...

and pays Denmark to disable wind turbines: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-01/german-win...

Conclusion: Solar/Wind energy exist only through subsidies:utility bills increases->your tax money getting burned.

pixl97• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event

Good luck with all your coal plants.

paulsutter3• 11 years ago

I'm an advocate for solar. I just want to see an honest analysis of the whole question, what does a clean global grid look like? Anyone seen such a thing? If we really switched over to solar power, we'd need storage to handle :

- daily load variations (example, CA ISO "duck graph"[1])

- seasonal load variations (example, Seattle has 16 hours of sunlight in summer, and 8 in winter. It's overcast for weeks at a time in winter).

- unusual events, from extended weather patterns to volcanic eruptions.

Five nines (99.999%) is 5 minutes/year of downtime. What does it cost to guarantee at least that, given the variations in sun (or wind) and the fact that the grid absolutely, positively, needs to supply current for any need that gets switched on, anytime, regardless of the weather?

Tony Seba's big handwave is that the "god parity" happens in 2020 where photovoltaic is cheaper than transmission costs, so even if fossil fuel cost zero, it would cost more than rooftop PV. Ta-da!

Ok, for what percent of the population does that give you how many nines? What's the complete story that handles conditions in Seattle, London, and really most of Europe?

Tony also likes to refer to Molten Salt Solar as "baseload". Bullshit that's just short-term load following. Useful, yes! Complete solution, no. Or can it be extended? Where can I find an honest analysis?

Yeah I've heard the other handwaves: flow batteries! existing pumped water storage! add wind to the portfolio! supeconducting transmission from deserts! LiIon manufacuturing learning curve! etc... But we need numbers, not enthusiasm.

[1] http://cleantechnica.com/2014/07/21/utilities-cry-fowl-over-...

chrisatumd• 11 years ago

I found an excellent book talking about realistic sustainable solutions. It is from 2008/2009 and so solar costs are already dramatically less, but is still a great read.

http://www.withouthotair.com/

CuriousSkeptic3• 11 years ago

"the grid absolutely, positively, needs to supply current for any need that gets switched on" Why? A small addition to that could probably take us long way: Any need worth the cost.

If the price matches the supply I'm sure people will get quite creative in reducing the demand enough to make the problem go away.

LeifCarrotson• 11 years ago

It needs to because otherwise supply voltage drops and you get brownouts.

There is no provision in light switches, outlets, thermostats, industrial machinery, or anything else to first check "is there enough current in the grid right now to run this?". They just draw current when connected, and changing that policy would be a huge endeavor.

bdamm• 11 years ago

This is called "demand response" in utility circles, and to varying degrees, has been operational for decades. Lately it is becoming much more reliable and accessible thanks to smart grid networks.

cdnsteve• 11 years ago

Perhaps the notion of the grid is outdated. Self reliance is the future, solar combined with self storage like Tesla Powerwall. https://www.teslamotors.com/en_CA/POWERWALL

jazzyk• 11 years ago

This.

The nature of solar calls for a decentralized model, with each house having solar panels and a battery - just like most houses in the US have their own heating systems.

Big, entrenched utility companies don't like it because this would take much of their profits away. That said, the grid would not completely go away - it could still serve as a means to sell/buy extra energy if need be.

zekevermillion• 11 years ago

The use of solar PV to detach from the grid seems potentially quite disruptive if the cost is even close to centrally produced and distributed power. I'm more interested in, and optimistic about, this feature than I am in the macro cost or ecological benefits of PV.

danmaz743• 11 years ago

And what happens when there are 2 consecutive weeks of bad weather during winter?

slfnflctd2• 11 years ago

My money's on this-- the explosion of people in Africa and poorer Asian countries who have both the means and the need for cheap solar (plus batteries to go with it) will quickly far outstrip any entity's ability to keep pace by building out the grid. Large parts of western countries will soon follow.

I know I'd rather pay a reasonable up front cost to own my electrical generation capacity - which, as a bonus, can be set up almost anywhere in the world - and not have to pay a monthly fee for something I have no control over that's prone to outages at times when it's needed most.

Retric5• 11 years ago

99% of all grid storage is Hydro Power because it's cheap, efficient, and relativity high density. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

Running the numbers we could build several days worth of 100% electric storage for fairly minimal costs. (10TWh = 1 day's storage.) The problem is having a back to your backup costs money and someone needs to cover the costs for a facility that effectively never gets used.

Another approach is to simply over build, renewables are rapidly becoming the cheapest option so simply over building say 10% can drastically reduce the need for grid storage.

Mvandenbergh5• 11 years ago

I'd be interested to see those numbers. Most of the "easy" hydro locations in the world are already taken so we can't just extrapolate the as-built costs of existing capacity.

ChuckMcM3• 11 years ago

I don't disagree but it is a bit more complex. But first, allow me to dispell the myth that solar cells don't generate power when it is overcast, they do. My panels typically run at 52 - 58% of rated power when the sky is wall to wall clouds. Granted that is a big drop in production it isn't 0 and can be planned around.

The "discussion inside the discussion" here is money. As inverter and management technology has gotten better, it becomes possible for a single family home, in the lower 48 states, to locally generate perhaps 95% of its annual power requirements, and to supplement that last 5% with onsite generated power using propane or methane.

In such a configuration, the consumer's on going payments are either lease payments or a maintenance contract on the gear to keep it running. Not some utility company. And that means that you cannot distribute the cost of "big" energy projects across a wide base of payers (as a utility, you can still do that with taxes). And that leads us too ... Commercial power.

While you and I might be able to live off grid, your typical multi-story office building or apartment can not. They don't have the square footage available for panels, and they generally don't have the space for back up power equipment. So they still need generators and transmission lines and a "grid." And because the cost of that grid is distributed across fewer people, their costs are significantly (I've seen estimates of 10x) higher. That raises rents, and the cost of goods, and generally puts a real crimp in any economy. Not to mention the power utility is now just another botique supplier to these guys and so loses a lot of scale it had before.

The shifting balance of power (pun intended) is going to cause a lot of disruptions and cost shifting. At the end of the day it could be the thing that puts a lot of brick and mortar stores out of business.

paulsutter3• 11 years ago

Yes of course solar cells generate (less) power on overcast days.

Here's the issue: If solar is already on track to replace fossil fuels by 2030, everyone can stop working on energy. Bill Gates can apologize and shutdown his new fund. Sam Altman can stop meeting with energy companies.

But I'm skeptical. I expect there remain needed technologies. Storage? Transmission? Baseload? Such an analysis would tell us.

I'm asking, where can I find an analysis of this? All these articles are lite advocacy pieces that border on marketing.

ensignavenger2• 11 years ago

Small nuclear reactors look very promising for high density energy usage- so long as we put some effort into R&D for the technology.

hannob• 11 years ago

You're asking legitimate questions, but I'm not sure if it's reasonable to expect a good answer. You seem to want a perfect plan to go solar.

If you look at predictions for renewables from a few years ago you will find out that they are all - no matter who you asked - largely wrong. I remember that not that long ago nobody would have expected that prices for onshore wind and solar would go down so rapidly. On the other hand offshore wind was often praised as the tech that would make renewables cheap. The opposite has happened. Onshore wind and solar got cheaper in a speed that even the most outspoken renewable advocates hadn't predicted, offshore wind is one of the most expensive ways to get renewable energy.

Basically today there is not a single country that largely relies on "new" renewables (wind + solar). Denmark comes close, but they are small and interconnected with neighbors that have a lot of water power capacity and pumped storage.

I think it is pretty much impossible to predict which techs will work out in a future grid that will need a lot more storage tech. Some things we think today are promising will spectacularly fail and maybe some things we don't have on the radar yet will provide solutions.

paulsutter3• 11 years ago

I'm not asking for predictions, I'm looking for a statistical analysis that takes into account historical weather, seasonal, and load across geographies weighted by use.

This is all measured and recorded. Has anyone analyzed it? Should I pay someone to do that myself? Is anyone interested to try?

That's what I'm asking.

Gravityloss• 11 years ago

Going 100% solar makes little sense.

Something like power generation capacity, of peak load, for 30% solar, 30% wind, 30% natural gas, 30% hydro, 30% nuclear and 30% compressed air storage. Note it goes over 100% so that parts of it can be offline and peak demand can be still supplied.

The only fossil fuel, natural gas, would only be fired when electricity price was very high, like it is operated in many places already today. It is suitable for this use as the investment cost is low and the reaction time is short.

bavcyc2• 11 years ago

How is the load going to change over time? The passive house movement shows how efficient houses can be built. Also the change from CRT to LED tv's, also change loads. Refrigerators are more efficient than 20 years ago, but can they be made more efficient? Lots of small changes can change the amount of load (for lots of customers (summed)).

The other big issue is how fast can you repair 'own generation?' Utilities typically do a good job in restoring power and assist each other to restore power. Today everyone wants power all the time, 50 years ago power outages were not as much of an issue.

pbreit• 11 years ago

Wait, but why do we/you need a "clean global grid"? Doesn't need to be 100%. Just need/want to move in that direction and get as close as practicable. No reason to answer your question since it's not something we need.

pjc50• 11 years ago

I don't think anyone can give you that level of analysis. To do it 'properly' would require a set of interlinked models on the scale of the IPCC models. Certainly not in a free analysis; Gartner probably have some papers on this.

But as usual the truth lies somewhere between the delusional hype and the denialists, in the form of a gradual rollout. Realistically the newly-commissioned gas power plants are not going anywhere for 30 years, especially when shale gas is so cheap in the US. The short term in Europe is dominated by the Combustion Plant Directive closing down coal plants that reach the end of their working lives. Southern US will see more and more solar. The grid is not going anywhere and will probably require ongoing point upgrades. And so on.

marze• 11 years ago

What a ton of nitpicks, missing the big picture.

Embarrassing for HN community this comment is top voted.

kragen• 11 years ago

You have an overly rosy view of the current situation, and so you are dramatically overestimating how far photovoltaic has to go to improve it, perhaps in part because you have forgotten the existence of 85% of the world's population.

I'm on the grid, and I had a three-week power outage two years ago. Getting to 99.999% would require no power outages for the next 5700 years. Even getting to 99% would require no power outages for the next 3 years, which isn't going to happen; I had an overnight power outage a few months ago. That's because I live in Argentina. Not out in the boondocks — in the capital, with flatscreen TVs, world-class medical care, and subways crammed full of people glued to their Samsung Galaxy Whatevers. A friend of mine in Pakistan isn't even getting one nine; he has a rolling blackout of an hour every few hours. He's at maybe 70% or 80% grid uptime.

I don't understand this myopic focus on "Seattle, London, and really most of Europe". What percentage of the population lives in the US and Europe? 14%. 86% of the population lives elsewhere. How about Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Delhi, Mexico City, Beijing, Lagos, São Paulo, and Mumbai? Those are the world's ten biggest cities, and by themselves they total nearly the population of the US. As it happens, none of them are in the US or Europe.

Also, as it happens, most of them are at much more equatorial latitudes than most of Europe and even much of the US.

Speaking of rolling blackouts, I lived in California in 2000. At the time, political corruption in the energy markets led to rolling blackouts there, with a total of several hundred hours of blackout at each location (except hospitals, national security installations, and things like that). So California isn't going to reach 99.999% on-grid reliability within the next couple of millennia either, even without any further outages. Reliable electricity is very important to some industries, like semiconductor fabrication. Maxim has a fab there in San José, or at least they did last year. Maybe they'd would be better off depending on solar panels on the fab roof instead of the fickle governance of the California transmission grid.

The upshot of all of this is that transmission-line parity for most of us is going to occur pretty soon actually. It doesn't need to hit 99.999% or 99.99% or 99.9% or even 99% reliability to be an improvement from where we are now. In fact, in Pakistan and in much of the world, even if it's 50% reliable, it's a big help, as long as the times when it's out aren't the same times the regular power grid is out.

Molten-salt solar is certainly capable of some load following, although not as fast as a gas turbine, but it can also handle baseload, because it can run at whatever time of day or night you need. Can it be extended? Well, the materials you need are super common and well understood (we were recently treated to an explanation the other day of how Lavoisier made significant improvements to the handling and production of the salts in question in the 18th century), and the heat engine is typically a closed-cycle Parsons steam turbine, same as in a coal or combined-cycle plant. There's no reason I know of to expect it to be any harder to scale than other types of steam turbines. The only issue is that it will have a hard time producing energy as cheaply as photovoltaic unless we can bring the cost of the machinery way down and its lifetime up.

You mention deserts, I suppose because enormous land area is cheap and the skies are not cloudy all day. But how much area do you really need to generate the electricity we use? Argentine electricity use, for example, is only about 3000 kWh/year/人, or 340 W/人. With a typical panel efficiency of 15% (not 22% like some advanced unijunction panels), a typical capacity factor of 18%, a solar constant of, say, 1000 W/m², and a latitude of 34°36’ (thus a cosine of 82%), this works out to 15m²/人, or 65 000 人/km². The actual population density here in Buenos Aires — the densest and most populous city in the entire country — is 14 000 人/km². Rooftop photovoltaic is plenty to replace the existing rickety power distribution infrastructure.

Pumped water storage might be useful, wind is useful, deserts are certainly going to be immense resources, and cheaper batteries could eliminate the intermittency problem (if they work), but none of those are actually necessary.

ZeroGravitas3• 11 years ago

I believe the duck graph would be entirely eliminated if people had well insulated homes and air-con that could take advantage of abundant solar to pre-cool their home before they got home. Not that it's easy to get from here to there, but it's hardly the jetsons either.

The kind of person who frequents this site might like the Rocky Mountain Institute's take on this:

http://www.rmi.org/our_goals

Loads of boring wonkery about more efficient buildings, and better ways of regulating utilities to align incentives properly, or ideas for financing the deployment of new technologies for efficent shipping and so on.

crimsonalucard• 11 years ago

Business guys look at line graphs and think that trends continue forever. The reality is, everything has a limit. No technology can improve indefinitely as technology is bounded by the limits of the physical world (see Moore's law). Only an industry scientist has the perspective to make an accurate prediction. Will solar technology improve to a point where it can beat the energy density of fossil fueles? Or is it physically impossible? Any qualified people willing to supply an opinion?

Personally my intuition says that we will go to solar, but at great cost. We will be forced to switch due to rising oil costs and even after the switch the energy supply will be so diminished that we will no longer be treating energy as frivolously as we do today.

Mvandenbergh5• 11 years ago

The theoretical maximum efficiency of a single junction silicon cell (Shockley–Queisser limit) is 33.7%.

As a means of electricity production, it's already better than fossil fuels in large parts of the world but fossil fuels are storable and that makes all the difference.

selimthegrim2• 11 years ago

The Shockley-Queisser limit should not be treated as the pillars of Hercules. Multi-junction and next generation systems hold great promise.

at-fates-hands• 11 years ago

I've been following solar for around a decade now and have yet to consider it because of it's long ROI. Sure, the technology has gotten more efficient as pointed out in the article, but a consumer's up front costs have yet to come down.

I checked again last year about installing an array on my roof. My original outlay would be in the 30-40K range with an ROI of over ten years. If you want solar to take over the world and be a viable alternative to low income families, this isn't going to cut it.

Also, does the author know there's a limited amount of lithium in the world while his projections are pretty rosy for electric, the facts don't seem to align with his assumptions:

William Tahil, the founder of Meridian International Research, a technology consultancy in Martainville, France, has argued that there simply isn’t enough economically recoverable lithium on the planet to support the auto industry’s ambitious plans. Tahil estimated that only 4.4 million tons of the world’s lithium resources can be extracted without prohibitive cost, a supply he believes will be quickly exhausted if lithium-ion batteries become a staple of next-generation cars.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/1124/034.html

So why people are focusing on lithium to herald in the new electric car revolution, we should probably already be looking beyond electric cars as a viable long term solution.

yourapostasy2• 11 years ago

I share your concerns. I've been looking into DIY flow batteries as an alternative for middle-income groups, but that approach isn't promising so far; we're still talking five figure sums up front to store just 45kWh (rounded-off, high side of average daily US residential utilization). Unsurprisingly for those well-versed in thermodynamics, energy is just plain expensive to store; another way of putting that is fighting against entropy is monetarily expensive.

These technologies are currently only accessible to highly-determined and resourceful people (those willing to make fundamental changes to their electricity consumption patterns, or those with 2+ sigma annual disposable income to fund their individual solution), and are still not ready for mass, de-centralized adoption. Grid-scale deployments might be another story, but any talk of a mass wave of private individuals adopting this technology is not matching up with the numbers I've run.

A combination of energy conservation and energy production technologies and techniques, I can see gaining traction, but that is a long, long (2+ decades) ways off in the US (Germany is potentially leading the way here IMHO).

grandinj• 11 years ago

There is plenty of lithium. This is just an updated version of the Malthusian idiocy.

http://m.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/31/rare_metals_mineral_re...

ksec• 11 years ago

Where does it said there are pretty?? We know there are enough oil or petrol that could last 100s to 1000s of years. And there are known Lithium reserve that could last us 100s years even if we keep the current pace of development.

The problem with both is extraction cost. How can we effectively extract it that provide a profits at this current price. It wasn't until recently US mastered the technique of flasking oil we have more then what we need.

g8oz• 11 years ago

>My original outlay would be in the 30-40K range with an ROI of over ten years.

So you'd be getting (saving) 4K annually from a 40K investment? Try getting that kind of return elsewhere.

Seriously though, the best solar strategy for the homeowner is do-it-yourself ground mount installs. If DIY is not your thing at a minimum get separate quotes for install and supply. The markup solar installers add to equipment is outrageous.

bavcyc2• 11 years ago

Interesting article.

I can't remember who said it, but humans tend to over-estimate change in the long term, and under-estimate change in the short term.

It will be interesting to see what changes do occur in this time frame.

yourapostasy2• 11 years ago

That is Amara's Law [1]. The paraphrase given by Cringely that is commonly quoted (to my knowledge, Amara himself never gave as concise a quote as the paraphrase) is:

"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara

olivermarks• 11 years ago

it's worth noting that various large vc firms lost their shirts around this period last year betting big on solar...this article may have been part of the pr push for all that

lintiness• 11 years ago

oil's below $40/brl and ng is around $2. the solar / renewable drive "began" with prices of both at 3*+ multiples of where they are today. the problem addressed has diminished which should affect investment / development and stall future transition.

How Solar Power Could Slay the Fossil Fuel Empire (2014)

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