Your statements about Solar and wind remind me of others from the past. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." Darryl Zanuck, executive at 20th Century Fox, 1946 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet's continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse." Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, 1995 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Of all the people that I talk to about solar, they almost always share one common trait. They don't realize how far solar has come during the past five years and how quickly it is dropping in price. A couple years ago my family's company was sitting on a large inventory of panels after buying out a competitor. What came next was astonishing. During 2009 we would watch as the efficiency increases in solar panels caused a massive price drop. Retail prices dropped by 50% in a single year as my family scrambled to sell off the newly acquired inventory that they had luckily bought for a fraction of its market value. 2010 saw a similar drop. 175W panels were the norm, but now 260W panels are the most cost effective. Next year it will likely be 300W. At 300W we are still only about 21% efficient.
"Düsseldorf, Germany â E.ON Kraftwerke has received the permission for its new coal fired power plant project at its Studinger location in GroÃkrotzenburg, Germany. The permission covers the construction of a 1100 MW power plant that will also produce 300 MW of district heating." http://www.bulk-solids-handling.com/management/projects_contracts/articles/299746/ If renewables alone can do the job, then why are new coal plants being built in Germany? These things will have a service life of at very least 30 years so this is not some stop gap measure. And this in the nation that is being repeatedly held up as THE example of how to clean up electricity generation using just renewables.
Here is the projected cost of electricity generation from new nuclear power plants in a number of countries compiled by the IEA in their 2010 report: It depends on country and on discount rate and varies from $29.05 per MWh (Sth Korea) to $136.50per MWh (Switzerland) , but the nations with the lowest cost are the ones building the largest number of new nuclear power plants. And here is what the report says about solar PV: "For solar photovoltaic plants, the load factors reported vary from 10% to 25%. At the higher load factor, the levelised costs of solar-generated electricity are reaching around 215 USD/MWh at a 5% discount rate and 333 USD/MWh at a 10% discount rate. With the lower load factors, the levelised costs of solar-generated electricity are around 600 USD/MWh." http://www.iea.org/Textbase/npsum/ElecCost2010SUM.pdf There is simply no comparison in cost and while the cost of solar PV is dropping it still has a long way to go to become competitive. But LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) is not the whole story. The variability problem with renewables forces extra costs on the grid as a whole - either by extra capital expenditure for backup generation or overbuild of renewables and expanded transmission network. Up to a certain point (maybe 20%?) existing grids can hack it, but after that these extra costs will really start to bite. As for Bill Gates and his 64 k of memory, you can find any number of counter cases of ridiculous technological optimism, but none of them actually mean a damn thing because it is only by carefully looking at the engineering and economic realities that you can draw any informed conclusion.
You need another kind of nuke: Thorium http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/...nd-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html Looks like India is also very active in this area: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Thorium_as_a_nuclear_fuel
The French company Areva is building a new EPR reactor in Finland with the help of cheap Polish workers. The project has encountered a ton of problems. It's four years over schedule and the costs have DOUBLED and it's still years before they can start it. If nuclear is such a money making machine why is it so hard to get financing for new plants in the US. Government is generous in giving full grants for loans but investors (Wall Street) don't get too excited. They know it's too risky. Also not a single nuclear company has a full insurance for a plant to cover ALL damage in case of a catastrophe. Insurance companies know it's like playing russian roulette. 260km from Chernobyl there are areas that are uninhabitable for who knows how long, maybe for centuries or even longer. Tokyo is some 200km from Fukushima and it's still possible, if not probable, that we see some major radiation reach there if one or more cores melt and the wind plows from the northeast. If Tokyo would become a place where you could only stay for a few hours, what do you think would be the cost?
Cache, you seem serious enough in your convictions to warrant a response. Sorry to be blunt, but forget solar ever being a top 3 or 4 contributor to the generation stack. I hear and understand all your points about economies of scale, etc etc. the only impact solar will make is on the bills of customers in regulated utility (i.e. non-consumer choice) areas, where un-economic, politically driven PUC actors with ulterior motives force solar down the throats of ratepayers. They're trying to build a 10MW solar field down the road from me, for nearly $50MM. What an incredibly ridiculous "investment," but I digress... The reason large scale solar is unworkable is that while you can transmit power a long way, you cannot support voltage over long distances, and you cannot support frequency well without large amounts of spinning mass (mechanical generators) locked together in the grid. Wind has many of the same problems. Load following is impossible with Solar, and just the whole idea of large amounts of non-controllable resources participating in the grid isn't feasible. Here in TX we have massive problems with the overbuilding of Wind Generation. literally 6,000MW can vanish in like 20 minutes (average load is ~33,000 MW). You need to keep a lot of dirty old fossil fuel online (and make their owners whole by charging ratepayers to run them) to be able to actively manage against voltage collapse and frequency degradation caused by the material presence of Wind power on the grid. The last thing we need is another several thousand solar MW's that can suddenly come on or disappear because of cloudcover or whatnot. Anyway, not trying to be a grouchy naysayer, but Solar isn't going to work at the wholesale level. I agree that having distributed residential/ small businesses with panels on the roof can help the early mover consumers with their net bill, but once too many start with that there will have to be some sort of regulation or charge to owners of those to compensate for the stresses they create for the grid itself and its management. I'm not a peanut gallery armchair expert, btw, I generate & sell tens of millions of MWh's in TX, and am fairly well embedded in the regulatory affairs here. I'm 100% for environmentally sound energy policy, and solar will likely play a small (heavily subsidized) role, but it'll never become a huge player % wise. (unless of course we stop caring about voltage, frequency, phase angle, etc...) Sorry if my commentary is uncomfortable, but you seem to have invested enough thought and effort into formulating your position on the subject, so I thought I would share my take on it.
texrex2002 thanks for that post. You answered a lot of questions that I had about possible problems with solar and wind power.
One can actually buy thin film solar panels for ~$1.1 per watt or less now in bulk quantities. Given that actual US electricity production was ~1.1 Twatt in 2007, the panels would cost ~$1.21T. The balance of systems cost for a solar plant on the ground( not inefficient rooftop installs) is ~approaching 1.5X the panel cost so total cost for 1.1TW is ~ $1T(land) + ~$1.2T(panels) + ~$1,8T(balance) = ~ $4T. And this would not be overnight. It could be spread out over 20 to 30 years as other forms of electricity lose their plant licences or fail inspection. Of course, you would still need a form of power to run at night, so there would always be a need for geothermal or small scale fossil power at night.
Please see what a "Nagasaki survivor" has to say about the nuclear fallout in Japan as below: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_japan_family
Your understanding of solar economics is on the level of the average shmoe. A key note, it's all dependent state by state and varies significantly. Your understanding of electricity pricing is in the same boat. States have either regulated or deregulated utilities, with retail pricing going significantly above $0.10/kwh in deregulated states. Regardless, when talking about a large scale utility project, you're selling to the grid, so retail pricing has no bearing. Whatever your point is in regards to these topics, does not even matter when you lack the basic knowledge.