Moore's law for Solar Energy?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/opinion/krugman-here-comes-solar-energy.html?ref=global-home

by fharper1961 • 15 years ago

58 46 15 years ago

DennisP5• 15 years ago

That's good news, but no matter how cheap it is, solar only works when the sun shines. The real impediment to a solar/wind economy is energy storage, which is still very expensive and hard to scale.

A good post that runs the numbers and conveys the scale of the problem is here: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-bat...

And another that takes a close look at wind is here: http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/10/29/gws-sg-es/

We can definitely use solar for about 20% of our energy, with fossil or nuclear plants backing it up. But until we fix the storage problem, the only route to a post-carbon economy is nuclear.

divtxt• 15 years ago

Existing storage technologies are insufficient to replace fossil fuels by multiple orders of magnitude.

Here's a nice summary: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8405

The bottom line: storage will need some serious R&D to find a secret sauce using fuel cells or nanotech or something.

barranger• 15 years ago

excuse my ignorance with these questions, but this is something I've been wondering every time I see an article like this (specifically the batteries needed for solar).

1) shouldn't we be concentrating our efforts on reducing the requirements from the grid to near zero for new housing builds?

Newer builds will (hopefully) also incorporate the latest in conservation technologies (better performing insulation, etc) resulting in a lower energy requirement regardless of the source. One would also imagine that new home builders implementing solar solutions would see cost benefits from scale.

2) wouldn't the efforts of concentrating on new home builds have a two pronged benefit on everyone else?

Not only would technology advances become available for retrofit projects, but the reduced strain on the grid could potentially reduce the costs grid wide?

3) what would be the benefit of having a centralized solar installation?

Any solution that centers around having a mile square cube (from the linked article) seems a bit silly to me, wouldn't houses having their own battery solution make much more sense? Having individual batteries would allow for a market for these solutions and, one would hope, from the competition within this market, new and better solutions would emerge.

DennisP5• 15 years ago

Pretty sure he's not advocating actually making a mile square cube of battery. He's just illustrating the scale of the problem. It's the same amount of battery no matter how you divide it up.

Efficiency is definitely some low-hanging fruit. It only gets us so far, though. Rooftops are probably the most effective place to deploy solar, but housing is only one piece of the puzzle.

onemoreact3• 15 years ago

That post was written by someone with a vary superficial understanding of these issues. For example Hydro power already provides a lot of 'grid storage' and is totally missing from his analysis. Also, photovoltaics are far less impacted by clouds than you might assume with partially cloudy days offering similar power levels to sunny days. And even on days where it rains constantly you get some power and often see an increase in wind power output.

Smart grids enable many applications like large scale cooling to shift of demand without building new storage infrastructure on the supply side. Not to mention simply shifting maintenance cycles can shift a lot of 'supply' to different parts of the year without building any infrastructure at all.

Add it all up and Wind + Solar meet total energy demands and have near ideal capacity factors with ~2-4 new hours of total grid energy storage. VS. the 6 days which he assumes.

PS: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/it-looks-like-ti...

DennisP5• 15 years ago

There's a limit to how far you can expand hydro. There aren't that many more places to build dams. You can expand a little more by putting reservoirs at higher elevations specifically for storage, but that's expensive.

Even at 4 hours of storage, the scale we need is a bit mind-boggling.

Your link is really interesting though. That's the kind of analysis we need. I see too many articles that just talk about rated capacity with no consideration of actual output or reliability.

My second link does similar analysis for Australia, and there it doesn't work out so well. The wind drops low over wide areas for days at a time.

In any case I have nothing against renewables, as long as they don't use up too much land...offshore wind is perfect. But I think we should be building GenIII and better nuclear reactors, too.

Game_Ender• 15 years ago

2-4 hours of the worlds entire energy consumption is staggering large amount of energy. You also need the currently non-existent capability to move massive amount of power around the globe.

DennisP5• 15 years ago

I just came across some free software for designing energy systems incorporating renewables: http://homerenergy.com/

"The HOMER energy modeling software is a powerful tool for designing and analyzing hybrid power systems, which contain a mix of conventional generators, cogeneration, wind turbines, solar photovoltaics, hydropower, batteries, fuel cells, hydropower, biomass and other inputs."

Edit: looks like it's for small-scale installations.

00joe• 15 years ago

20%? Over 60% of our electricity is consumed when the sun shines. Currently we get less then 1% of our power from solar. Storage will not matter for a very long time.

grayrest• 15 years ago

Just heard about this the other week, but if the SMU study [1] from a week or so ago is true, I don't see why geothermal couldn't provide the base load. I've seen related articles claim that no new tech is required and there's an enhanced geothermal facility that just opened in Australia. Strikes me as...simple.

[1] http://blog.smu.edu/research/2011/10/25/vast-coast-to-coast-...

ww520• 15 years ago

I remember seeing some research into using nanotech to create multi-surface structures that can capture lots of hydrogen. Hopefully we'll get some break through in that area.

btilly• 15 years ago

Moore's Law is actually quite ubiquitous. In The Innovator's Dilemma a large number of examples are given of similar trends that lasted for decades, including such things as the volume that a hydraulic scoop could scoop, to the distance that a steam ship could travel without refueling, to the capacity of batteries.

It is therefore no surprise that solar power would show a similar trend.

gwern• 15 years ago

> Moore's Law is actually quite ubiquitous.

Well, s-curves (sigmoid curves) certainly are common, but Moore's law - so far - is not a sigmoid AFAIK.

nickpinkston• 15 years ago

This SciAm article has actual numbers / charts - worth looking at: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/sm...

maeon3• 15 years ago

When solar becomes cheaper than the alternatives, the propaganda machine can only slow the adoption, not stop it. The entities that consume large quantities of electricity are mostly unaffected by IQ lowering media transmissions.

jerf• 15 years ago

You don't really need to reach for "propaganda" as an explanation as to why people have not been in a big rush to buy more expensive (both up front and ongoing) and less reliable electricity, and when and if that ever changes it won't be "despite the mighty power of progaganda", it'll be because it's cheaper and better.

geogra4• 15 years ago

Solar is going to be a disruptive technology in the future. Something I'm pretty excited about.

barney54• 15 years ago

"At what cost?" That's the first question anyone should ask about solar (or any other type of energy). Even though prices have fallen, solar is still, by far, the most expensive source of on-grid electricity generation--5 time more expensive than natural gas for example. http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2009/05/12/leveliz...

spenrose2• 15 years ago

You provide a link from 2009 (!) which states that the "levelized" capital cost of nuclear is higher than that of solar PV. Fail and fail. Current solar PV prices are much lower than they were expected to be in 2009 -- that's part of why Solyndra went bust. And if nuclear is cheaper, why does no one build it? Answer: it's not, as soon as you include the costs of waste disposal and disaster insurance, both of which are effectively infinite because no one has a solution. See http://www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/NCW-SolarRe... among many others.

spenrose2• 15 years ago

More details: http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/11/07/362705/krugman-sola...

wavephorm• 15 years ago

  Moore’s Law — in which the price of computing power
  falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months

I stopped reading right there.

Symmetry• 15 years ago

We know that it produces toxic (and radioactive) wastewater that contaminates drinking water

Yes, some of the runoff is almost five times as radioactive as a banana. I don't mean to say that we shouldn't be concerned about the chemical sin fraking fluids, clearly those are things we should worry about. But raising the specter of radiation here just seems like fear mongering.

JoeAltmaier• 15 years ago

Water evaporates, concentrating contaminates. Its much more important to have water safe to begin with.

wbracken• 15 years ago

I was not concerned with fraking until I read:

"the heavy trucking required for fracking inflicts major damage on roads"

tryitnow• 15 years ago

Krugman's article is not very interesting (at least not by HN standards). It's clear he has his biases.

But the HN comments here contain some pretty cool links, which is why I upvoted it.

I worked in the renewables space for a little bit and my conclusion was that far too many companies were making political bets, not technological or business bets. Specifically, a lot of business models depended on an extension of Kyoto to the US, which did not happen and is unlikely to happen any time soon. Without that the business models were interesting,but not compelling.

Personally, I do believe renewables can replace a significant fraction of fossil fuels, but they have to do it based on cost, not political correctness. I'm not saying that as a normative statement, but as an observation of American politics. There was a brief window of time when carbon could be priced the way environmentalists wanted it to, but that's not going to happen again any time soon.

patio11• 15 years ago

Clayton Christensen had a much more interesting take on solar power at the Business of Software conference: it won't compete with fossil fuels in the US anytime soon (except as a recipient of huge amounts of government largess), because for the most part our energy infrastructure works really, really well. It's ubiquitous, cheap, and mostly doesn't kill you. In much of the world, energy is 0 for 3! This makes e.g. small solar cells just good enough to run a cell phone charging station into revolutionary, disruptive devices in parts of Africa, because they're not competing against a well-developed multi-billion dollar infrastructure, they're competing against "no electricity at all." If they're expensive and fail to work in poor weather and available only spottily and... who cares, some electricity still beats no electricity.

His thesis was that if solar ever becomes a big thing in the US it will be because it grew like wildfire on the global periphery until the tech gets mature enough to start peeling off bits around the edges of US consumption (and then implied it might go further than that, using the same disruption mechanic).

roc4• 15 years ago

I'm not sure how solar can become cheap/effective enough for the developing world without commodification due western subsidies and demand.

tptacek3• 15 years ago

It can't be cheap/effective enough to provide power at western service levels, but it can within developing world budgets be cheap/effective enough to provide useful levels of power.

The key point here is just a restatement of Christiansen's "Innovator's Dillemma": a new product incapable of meeting the needs of most users of an incumbent product, but capable of meeting the needs of some other related market.

pkulak• 15 years ago

I think that's over thinking it. If solar panels get cheap enough, companies will find a way to make it reliable. It's not terribly difficult (or expensive, comparatively) to store energy when size and weight are not a concern. You can use huge tanks of molten salt, for example. But in the short term, you could just hook a bunch of panels up alongside a normal natural gas plant. Just spin the gas up when it's cloudy or at night. The nice thing is that in a lot of places where it's hot and sunny often, electricity use tracks sunlight due to air conditioning. Natural gas already supplements coal plants all over the country. It would be no different.

anamax• 15 years ago

> It's not terribly difficult (or expensive, comparatively) to store energy when size and weight are not a concern. You can use huge tanks of molten salt, for example.

Yet, PG&E pumps water uphill at night so it can get more hydro during the day. Maybe they made a big mistake, but I'd like to see some actual numbers.

PG&E isn't perfect, but they're not obviously incompetent either, so ....

To put it another way, if you're correct, you're ignoring gobs of money.

> The nice thing is that in a lot of places where it's hot and sunny often, electricity use tracks sunlight due to air conditioning.

Most places don't have air conditioning.

bh42222• 15 years ago

Why would the US electricity infrastructure care if the electrons come from coal heat or sun light?

And if renewable power becomes cheap enough you can synthesis gasoline from air. Renewable power does not have to become incredibly cheap for this work. If the price of oil rises high enough that alone could make synthesizing fuel using solar power profitable.... in theory.

DennisP5• 15 years ago

That's true as long as there's no price no carbon. It's hard to compete with someone who can externalize massive costs.

(Coal emissions, btw, are estimated to kill at least 13,000 Americans per year, and many more Chinese.)

flipbrad• 15 years ago

One fantastic presentation given at HomeCamp 4 last month was by Moxia. Their angle on this is retrofitting homes to use DC sockets rather than AC (via USB ports and convertible DC cables, so you don't have to carry the brick around with you). They install batteries, an AC/DC transforming battery charger (charging overnight, using off-peak, cheap electricity) and solar panels (presumably wind turbines and other generators can be used too). All with clever management and monitoring integration. The point of this (besides the convenience of having DC sources for everything, and LED lighting) is shifting your power consumption off-peak, and to an extent, offgrid.

orijing• 15 years ago

It's interesting that he started the discussion with a reminder of externalities, pointing out that the negative externalities from fracking were not properly internalized.

I'm surprised he didn't mention the FITs in Europe, and the cheap loans in China. Was he making a singular point of the United States, or did he overlook places where solar is relatively advantaged relative to fossil fuels?

PaulHoule2• 15 years ago

Moore's law is the wrong analogy.

Computer chips become better every year because they get smaller, use less materials.

We could make solar cells thinner, but we can't appreciably reduce the area that they take up. The solar cells need some backing material, brackets to hold them, infrastructure to move the electricity away, security mechanisms so that people can't steal them, and other forms of material that can't be rapidly dematerialized.

nobody31415922• 15 years ago

Moore's law is all about improvements in the fab process which drives down not only design rules but also defect rates to mean that putting more devices on a single wafer is more cost effective.

As you reduce the process costs then there is no reason that the cost of solar panels doesn't approach coated window glass.

yummyfajitas• 15 years ago

Krugman, as is his custom, criticizes his political enemies without even knowing their position.

From the article: Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives.

If they are "actively hostile" to alternatives, why did they pass a law subsidizing alternatives?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005

Also, why are we submitting inflammatory and dishonest pundits to HN, rather than a source that might skip the politics and cover some actual science?

Moore's law for Solar Energy?

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