Green Energy Revolution Megathread

[Tonitrus]

It's almost like the driverless car argument.  We gladly accept the trade off of tens of thousands killed in car accidents to be able to speed to work at 60mph...but "OMG A DRIVERLESS CAR CRASHED, ROBOTS WILL KILL US ALL!!!111".

[Valmy]

Nothing gives people the heebee jeebees like unseen radiation.  Dirty coal air?  Meh, been there, done that.

I thought nukes might make a comeback there for a bit but then Fukushima happened. Nukes are dead. It is hard to imagine a scenario where people start building massive numbers of Nuclear Plants again. Maybe when we finally do that cold fusion thing.

[The Brain]

The physics establishment won't touch cold fusion with a homosexual Pole. Only retirees are working on it AFAIK.

[The Minsky Moment]

Construct costs for wind are under 2000/kW.  Solar was at about 3700 in 2013, presumably that is down now and still falling.  They also have the advantage they its usually smaller scale, simpler installations.  Solar is scalable down to the household level - that creates problems and inefficiencies of its own, but it does wonders to spread around the capital cost burden.

The issue is intermittency.  But if you're going to gamble, is it a better bet to throw a trillion on a massive mega project build or 1% of that on a Manhattan Project for better battery, storage and transmission tech?

I don't have a problem with nuclear in theory.  I'd be OK with clearing out some of the red tape, but the private sector would need to fund it.  Again a trillion dollars world wide at best gets you to about 1/4 of total generation.  Focusing on the US it would be a about 250 billion to get to 40%.  That's pretty good, but I just don't think that cost is realistic.

My own experience with power generation is on the legal end - gas and solar projects, since the US doesn't really do much nuclear anymore.  It's a distorted picture because mostly I'm involved when things go wrong.  But things do go wrong. Everything from components smashing on the highway because trucks went through bridges without enough clearance to electrical components blowing up for no apparent reason to key parts being shipped to the wrong country, to hiring a convicted felon to design a never-tested-before critical sub-system to major serial design defects affecting an entire production line.

So yeah maybe you can mass produce nuclear plants on the cheap.  But if a couple years down the line you discover a big serial defect in a critical component you've just bought your self huge losses in time and money.  On the engineering and construction side, the US in particular lost an entire generation of trained and experienced workers, we'd basically be starting with conscript quality labor.  As I see it, you'd be as likely to get stuck with costs at $10,000 a KW as $2500.

[The Brain]

Construct costs for wind are under 2000/kW.  Solar was at about 3700 in 2013, presumably that is down now and still falling.  They also have the advantage they its usually smaller scale, simpler installations.  Solar is scalable down to the household level - that creates problems and inefficiencies of its own, but it does wonders to spread around the capital cost burden.

The issue is intermittency.  But if you're going to gamble, is it a better bet to throw a trillion on a massive mega project build or 1% of that on a Manhattan Project for better battery, storage and transmission tech?

I don't have a problem with nuclear in theory.  I'd be OK with clearing out some of the red tape, but the private sector would need to fund it.  Again a trillion dollars world wide at best gets you to about 1/4 of total generation.  Focusing on the US it would be a about 250 billion to get to 40%.  That's pretty good, but I just don't think that cost is realistic.

My own experience with power generation is on the legal end - gas and solar projects, since the US doesn't really do much nuclear anymore.  It's a distorted picture because mostly I'm involved when things go wrong.  But things do go wrong. Everything from components smashing on the highway because trucks went through bridges without enough clearance to electrical components blowing up for no apparent reason to key parts being shipped to the wrong country, to hiring a convicted felon to design a critical sub-system to major serial design defects affecting an entire production line.

So yeah maybe you can mass produce nuclear plants on the cheap.  But if a couple years down the line you discover a big serial defect in a critical component you've just bought your self huge losses in time and money.  On the engineering and construction side, the US in particular lost an entire generation of trained and experienced workers, we'd basically be starting with conscript quality labor.  As I see it, you'd be as likely to get stuck with costs at $10,000 a KW as $2500.

Since nukes aren't politically possible doing details about such a project is basically masturbation, and I don't think we have significantly different views of the basic facts involved.

It does seem to me to be a fairly high-risk strategy (if we think climate change is a biggie) to wait and hope for some breakthrough in energy storage that will make it cheap enough, quick enough, and environmentally friendly enough to solve the problem of a power supply based on intermittent sources (these intermittent sources will of course also have to be built, with the power transmission necessary). It can't be taken for granted that this future technology will be cheap or quick. We're talking huge amounts of energy that will have to be stored.

[The Minsky Moment]

Nuclear power in America got the snot knocked out of it by the 1-2 punch of NIMBYing after 3 mile island and the 1980s collapse in oil prices.  At this point it's hard to recover to par, much less expand share.

Europe could be different, except they can't seem to find a new model reactor design that doesn't drown in cost overruns.

[jimmy olsen]

Brain, you're underestimating solar and wind greatly.

https://www.wpr.org/new-research-shows-solar-energy-may-have-been-undervalued

Has the future reach of solar energy been underestimated? New research shows it may be so.

Previous studies have estimated the share of solar energy by the year 2050 would be between 5 and 17 percent, according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison news release. However, a recent study from the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change showed the percentage of solar energy worldwide will be three times higher than originally projected. More specifically, the share by 2050 will likely be between 30 and 50 percent.

While conducting the study, a team of researchers, including associate professor Greg Nemet of the La Follette School at UW-Madison, realized long-term energy planning simulations tended not to include solar energy.

"We started thinking that seems strange because if you look around the world, if you look on the ground, there's a lot of solar energy going in, so we went back to the forecast, we looked back over 15 years and looked at what people predicted, what happened to solar energy five years out, and it was consistently under-counting how much solar there actually was," Nemet said.

As for why solar's potential was underestimated, there are a number of reasons, but Nemet said the biggest driver is that solar is getting cheaper and faster than originally expected.

While technology is making solar increasingly more efficient and cost-effective, there are still challenges associated with the power source.

Solar energy is different in two ways from the way power plants have operated for the last 100 or so years, Nemet said. One is that it's distributed — made up of several small power plants — and second, it's not dispatchable. Essentially, people can't just turn on solar electricity at the drop of a hat because energy is produced when the sun shines, and that is based on things like seasonality and daily variation.

The energy grid, Nemet said, will need to change to accommodate that. One way to do so is to increase storage in the grid. Another way is to have a more price-responsive grid, meaning energy consumers have control over their energy expenditures by altering electricity use in response to wholesale electricity prices. Nemet said these two changes could make a huge difference.

"There's ways ... technology themselves are evolving and improving that will help us accommodate some of the challenges of a pretty different type of power source," Nemet noted.

On top of that, regulations would need to change too.

"For the most part, we are, have a regulation of electricity in the U.S. that was designed in the 1930s, usually updated in the 1990s in some places, but that needs to be modernized as well, as do utility business models," Nemet said. "Cheap solar keeps forcing us to reassess our assumptions."

Both of those points — the grid and regulations — were also addressed by lead author Felix Creutizig of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, who said that policymakers in industrial countries will need to "modernize electricity market regulations and promote technologies for new storage methods," according to a university statement.

Nemet said his main takeaway for policymakers is that cheap solar exists, and that presents a huge opportunity.

"It's a gift, you might say," Nemet said. " ... It's a gift that we shouldn't squander, and I think it's really up to us how we use this technology of cheap, clean energy that we can make reliable with a flexible grid and use it for lots of different activities that will improve people's lives; so how we use it is going to make a big difference and how we deal with financing of it, new utility business models, regulation of it and building infrastructure to accommodate it, that's all things that we need to do to take advantage of this opportunity."

Even in Wisconsin — which is not necessarily the sunniest place compared to other locales — solar shouldn't be ruled out. Yes, more electricity is produced off a solar panel in a sunny place, and the cheapest solar is happening in places such as the southwestern United States, Mexico, Chile and the Middle East, Nemet said. However, he added, the place where the most solar materials were being installed, until recently, was Germany.

"That's no sunnier than Wisconsin," Nemet said. "The biggest market for solar now, not the biggest producer of solar panels, the biggest consumer of solar panels is now China. That's also a place that doesn't have anything on us in terms of the amount of sunlight. We're getting to the point where solar is cheap enough where even in a place like this, we can have cost-effective solar."

In Wisconsin, you can see solar energy installations in Madison and Point Beach, among other locations.

[mongers]

In some ways this is just window dressing, I don't believe you can magic modern energy intensive lifestyles into zero carbon outcomes; save people money on their electricity bills and they'll just go and blow the money on a second or third vacation to sunnier climes via a kerosene powered tube in the upper atmosphere.

Time for us to collectively move to active climate management, where those technical means come from I've no idea.

[Admiral Yi]

Tim, your article is saying what Teh Brain has been saying.

[Valmy]

In some ways this is just window dressing, I don't believe you can magic modern energy intensive lifestyles into zero carbon outcomes; save people money on their electricity bills and they'll just go and blow the money on a second or third vacation to sunnier climes via a kerosene powered tube in the upper atmosphere.

Time for us to collectively move to active climate management, where those technical means come from I've no idea.

Technology is not magic. It is just a matter of what you are designing your system for. The old tech gave off CO2 the new tech won't but it will have other short comings. It is all iterative.  Nothing magic about it. I don't understand 'window dressing'.

I do think we will be active in the future in managing climate as well.

[jimmy olsen]

Once again, solar power prices plunge year after year. And somehow people are still in denail that it's the future.

https://solarindustrymag.com/utility-scale-solar-costs-plummet-2020-sunshot-goal-achieved

The installed cost of U.S. solar power fell to record lows in the first quarter of 2017, thanks to the continuing decline in PV module and inverter prices, higher module efficiency, and lower labor costs, according to a new analysis by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Though utility-scale solar costs have declined nearly 30%, residential- and commercial-scale solar system prices have lagged behind at 6% and 15% reductions, respectively, according to the report, "The U.S. Solar Photovoltaic System Cost Benchmark: Q1 2017," authored by NREL's Ran Fu, David Feldman, Robert Margolis, Michael Woodhouse and Kristen Ardani.

In terms of kilowatt per hour, the report shows that the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) benchmarks without subsidies fell to between 12.9 and 16.7 cents for residential systems, 9.2 and 12.0 cents for commercial systems, 5.0 and 6.6 cents for utility-scale fixed-tilt systems, and 4.4 and 6.1 cents for utility-scale one-axis tracking systems.

The report estimates that the total installed system cost – one of the primary inputs used to compute LCOE – has declined to $2.80 per direct current watts (Wdc) for residential systems, $1.85 Wdc for commercial systems, $1.03 Wdc for fixed-tilt utility-scale systems, and $1.11 Wdc for one-axis tracking utility-scale systems.

Compared with the first quarter of last year, the benchmarks fell by 6% for residential, 15% for commercial and 29% for utility-scale systems, the report says.

"The rapid system capital cost decline of solar PV systems, driven by lower module prices and higher market competition this year, demonstrates the continuing economic competitiveness of solar PV in today's energy investment portfolio," states Fu, lead author of the report.

According to NREL, these results suggest that the DOE's SunShot Initiative, which was launched in 2011, has met its 2020 cost target for utility-scale solar systems three years early. Furthermore, the industry is more than 85% of the way toward achieving the 2020 commercial-scale and residential-scale solar cost targets, NREL adds.

Given the success of SunShot, the DOE says it is looking beyond the initiative's 2020 goals with an expanded 2030 vision for the Solar Energy Technologies Office. Specifically, while the DOE will continue research to drive down costs, new funding programs will focus on a broader scope of administration priorities, including early-stage research to address challenges such as grid reliability, resilience and storage.

"With the impressive decline in solar prices, it is time to address additional emerging challenges," says Daniel Simmons, acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy at the DOE.

Simmons has announced up to $82 million in early-stage research in two areas:
•Concentrating Solar Power (CSP): Up to $62 million will support advances in CSP technologies to enable on-demand solar energy.
•Power Electronics: Up to $20 million will be dedicated to early-stage projects to advance power electronics technologies. Such innovations are fundamental to solar PV as the critical link between PV arrays and the electric grid, says the DOE.

Awardees will be required to contribute 20% of the funds to their overall project budget – yielding total public and private spending of nearly $100 million. The funds provided are cooperative agreements – not grants – involving substantial federal oversight; they consist of go/no-go technical milestones that "ensure attentive stewardship" of projects, the agency notes.

The NREL report also highlights the importance of reducing the non-hardware – i.e., soft – costs of solar. As the PV module price has reached a new low level, the proportion from soft costs – such as labor and overhead costs – has grown. In the first quarter, soft costs accounted for 68% of residential system costs, 59% of commercial systems and 41% of utility-scale systems.

Approximately 13.7 GW of new PV systems were installed in the U.S. last year, and the largest share came from 10.2 GW in the utility-scale sector. Nearly 45 GW of solar is installed in the U.S., accounting for about 1% of the nation's electricity supply, the report adds.

NREL's full technical report can be downloaded here. To learn more about SunShot's new milestone, past achievements and future plans, check out an exclusive cover story in Solar Industry's September issue. The issue is available online here, as well as at this week's Solar Power International show at booth #469.

doe Utility-Scale Solar Costs Plummet; 2020 SunShot Goal Achieved

[Eddie Teach]

Tim, how do you end up reading stories from Wisconsin public radio? 

[jimmy olsen]

Tim, how do you end up reading stories from Wisconsin public radio? 

Google news search

[The Brain]

Brain, you're underestimating solar and wind greatly.

I don't see it. Even the fanbois handwave about some future storage technology. And I like the guy who said that customers should get used to unstable weather-dependent power supply (prices through the roof when there's no wind and sun, problem solved!). "Another way is to have a more price-responsive grid, meaning energy consumers have control over their energy expenditures by altering electricity use in response to wholesale electricity prices." Nicely put.

[Gups]

Brain, you're underestimating solar and wind greatly.

I don't see it. Even the fanbois handwave about some future storage technology. And I like the guy who said that customers should get used to unstable weather-dependent power supply (prices through the roof when there's no wind and sun, problem solved!). "Another way is to have a more price-responsive grid, meaning energy consumers have control over their energy expenditures by altering electricity use in response to wholesale electricity prices." Nicely put.

Interconnectors can help a fair bit but that's fundamentally correct.