

Moore's law for Solar Energy? - fharper1961
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/opinion/krugman-here-comes-solar-energy.html?ref=global-home

======
patio11
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).

~~~
pkulak
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
> 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.

------
DennisP
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...](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/)

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.

~~~
onemoreact
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...](http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/it-looks-like-time-to-
build-an-atlantic-seaboard-wind-grid.ars)

~~~
DennisP
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.

~~~
onemoreact
Hydro is already used for peaking power, at most we would retrofit things it
increase peak power output where it's reasonable to do so.

Building 4 hours of storage is a rather extreme step that's also extremely
unlikely. California already has a 40c/kwh cost differential between peak
summer demand and the middle of winter, but nobody is building massive grid
energy storage to smooth that out. Even over the course of a single day you
could make 10c/kwh just from grid storage but nobody is building it. Rather we
add peaking power plants because base load power + storage costs more than
peaking power plants and that's likely to continue to be the case even in a
world dominated by solar + wind power plants.

~~~
PaulHoule
If you use hydro for peaking, you increase the impact of hydro on the
environment.

A hydro plant running at baseload has a river downstream that is like... a
river. Water levels vary with something close to the natural rhythm.

A hydro plant used for peaking will have no water flow for hours, and then
heavy water flow. That puts extreme stress on organisms living downstream.

~~~
onemoreact
Rivers don't have constant flows so it's more natural to have variable output
than constant output. And dam's never have zero output, it's more a question
of 30-80% and back down.

[http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700006602/USGS-Gains-
from...](http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700006602/USGS-Gains-from-Grand-
Canyon-flooding-short-lived.html)

------
tryitnow
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.

------
yummyfajitas
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?

------
btilly
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
> 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
This SciAm article has actual numbers / charts - worth looking at:
[http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-
blog/2011/03/16/sm...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-
blog/2011/03/16/smaller-cheaper-faster-does-moores-law-apply-to-solar-cells/)

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

------
barney54
"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...](http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2009/05/12/levelized-
cost-of-new-generating-technologies/)

~~~
spenrose
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...](http://www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/NCW-
SolarReport_final1.pdf) among many others.

~~~
spenrose
More details: [http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/11/07/362705/krugman-
sola...](http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/11/07/362705/krugman-solar-power/)

------
geogra4
Solar is going to be a disruptive technology in the future. Something I'm
pretty excited about.

------
flipbrad
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.

------
PaulHoule
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.

~~~
nobody3141592
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.

------
wbracken
I was not concerned with fraking until I read:

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

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orijing
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?

------
maeon3
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
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.

------
wavephorm

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

I stopped reading right there.

