
What Happens When Solar Power Is as Cheap as Coal - rblion
http://www.fastcompany.com/1745113/what-happens-when-solar-power-is-as-cheap-as-coal
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bruce511
Unfortunately it's no as simple as just plugging a solar plant into the grid
and standing back. The biggest difference between a solar plant, and a coal
plant, is the ability to balance supply and demand through the day (or more
specifically, through the night).

So, in effect, energy has to be stored during the day, and used during
"unsunny" times.

Where I live we already have a pump-storage scheme in place. During the night,
when demand for electricity is low, water is pumped uphill from one dam to
another. During periods of high demand (typically early morning, and evening)
water is released generating hydro-power to supplement the grid. It generates
about 400MW of power - suitable for supplementing a city, but not for taking
it "off the grid". It also doesn't scale particularly well - a 4GW plant would
take a lot of water.

However, all is not lost. With "free" electricity it's fairly easy to split
water into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen isn't the easiest, or least damaging
substance to work with, but it is certainly clean, storable, transportable and
so on.

A power plant burning hydrogen as the fuel can run day and night. And a
"hydrogen reservoir" would act as a natural capacitor - able to smooth the
supply of energy to the plant.

Of course there are lots of uses for electricity which are not time-of-day
sensitive. Desalination for example allows dry coastal regions (which usually
get a lot of sun, and hence why they're dry in the first place) to become
irrigated.

Solar power is a lot more useful than just domestic use, and I for one look
forward to the day when it's cheap.

~~~
aerique
What about of world-wide energy grid, so that the side of the earth with
sunshine routes their left-over energy to the side without sun?

I realize this is currently a fantasy but would it ever be feasible or are
there technical limitations preventing this from ever occurring?

~~~
bruce511
Define "technical limitation"?

The most obvious issue that springs to mind is the difference in voltage
supplied from country to country. In the US it's 110V, elsewhere it's usually
220V or 240V. So I suppose replacing every electrical appliance inside, or
outside, the US isn't a "technical" limitation, but it's certainly a
limitation of some kind.

That aside there are losses when electricity is "moved" - they further you
move it the more you lose. (that's a simplification, but it'll do.)

Politically of course, there are limitations as well. Assuming the grid was
mostly on land, each country becomes vulnerable to another country cutting it
off. I'm not sure that the US for example would want to be dependent on
Canada, or Russia, and I suspect the rest of South America may not like being
vulnerable to Panama, and so on.

Most of the generation would probably occur in desert regions, and I'm
thinking that's already a problem with an oil based economy.

~~~
joahua
That limitation is a little bit arbitrary - 110/240 are stepped down, post-
transmssion voltages. In terms of interconnection/transmission between states
there are ways around this. 50/60Hz poses a little bit more of a difficulty,
perhaps... I'm no electrical engineer but there are apparently (inefficient?)
ways to do this.

~~~
Leynos
Japan seems to overcome the frequency issue somehow:

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:Power_Gr...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:Power_Grid_of_Japan.PNG)

Half of the country operates at 50Hz and the other half at 60Hz:

"In Japan, the western part of the country (Kyoto and west) uses 60 Hz and the
eastern part (Tokyo and east) uses 50 Hz. This originates in the first
purchases of generators from AEG in 1895, installed for Tokyo, and General
Electric in 1896, installed in Osaka. The boundary between the two regions
contains four back-to-back HVDC substations which convert the frequency; these
are Shin Shinano, Sakuma Dam, Minami-Fukumitsu, and the Higashi-Shimizu
Frequency Converter."

~~~
fr0sty
This has actually been a major issue in light of the recent damage from the
earthquake/tsunami. Poser generation on the 50hz half of the country has been
greatly diminished and the frequency matching stations have insufficient
capacity to meet demand.

[http://www.npr.org/2011/03/24/134828205/a-country-divided-
ja...](http://www.npr.org/2011/03/24/134828205/a-country-divided-japans-
electric-bottleneck)

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pkulak
Of course, coal probably isn't cheaper, but no one cares about it's massive
externalized costs.

~~~
roel_v
By that logic, solar panels aren't cheaper either, because their production is
so polluting and resource-consuming.

At a conference a few weeks ago I was listening to a professor arguing that
insulation and PV are the wrong way to go; the least resource consuming system
is one with regular brick houses, warmed with geothermal energy, and with much
heavier mixing of functions in our urban landscapes (actually, landscapes all
together, and make the urban/rural distinction obsolete). So basically growing
food on the roofs of houses etc.

He had numbers to back it all up, too. I'm not saying they're correct, but at
least he's trying :)

~~~
pkulak
No, not really. Resource consumption isn't an externalized cost. The pollution
is though. But do you really think that making a solar panel creates more
pollution than that created by the coal you would otherwise need to make the
same amount of energy over the panel's 20, 50, or even 100 years of pollution
free existence? There's probably a difference of several orders of magnitude.

~~~
roel_v
Actually in most cases (currently), resource consumption _does_ include many
externalized costs (from a practical point of view). All those Chinese-made PV
panels, they have caused massive pollution by the time they are done.

(of course resource consumption per se is not an externalized cost, that's
obvious; but the price we pay today for many things do not include the full
lifecycle ('cradle to cradle') costs.

Regarding the amount of energy used; PV panels have working life of 20-25
years. The links I provided below include numbers (well, somebodies
interpretation of them) somewhere on the consumed/produced ratio; I don't know
how they relate. I'm just saying that using dollar value cost to calculate
grid parity is wrong, from an environmental point of view, and that that goes
for both sides (the coal and the PV side of the equation).

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icefox
If you live in MA or NJ check out the SREC's. They cause panels on your roof
to pay back in only a few years (~4-6) and earn a small income until 2020 in
MA (not sure about NJ)

Looking at solar on my roof as an investment (never thought I would say that
about solar) for an ~10K investment (after tax credits) over the next eight
years it gives a positive return with the potential for a very positive return
(And this is ignoring the house value increase which is ~20K for every $1k you
save in electricity costs). A nice extremely stable investment that adds
diversification to my portfolio. This is way better than a say a 5 year 10K CD
if you are looking for something super stable to round out your portfolio.

(Not to mention you are not taxed on the energy you produce via solar unlike
the CD's interest.)

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ericd
I really, sincerely doubt that solar is going to be cheaper than coal in two
years, barring a massive carbon tax or a huge breakthrough in solar. The
energy density of sunlight is still extremely low, and coal is expected to be
abundant long into the future.

Does this article point out some breakthrough that I missed, or some other
reasoning? All I saw was some fluff about grid parity, apparently derived from
a quote in the almost as fluffy Bloomberg source article by the CEO of a solar
cell manufacturer saying that they were nearing parity, without mentioning any
numbers. Given that the only hard numbers given in the source article claim a
~3x difference in the article, and the CEO of Solar City claiming that prices
of installations have been dropping 5-8% a year, this doesn't add up to the
66% cost reduction in two years necessary to reach parity. This is even
without considering all the auxiliary problems with solar, including energy
storage.

Flagged for being inaccurate.

~~~
scythe
If you read the Bloomberg article more carefully, you'll notice that the 5-8%
figure refers to _rooftop_ solar installations, not the sort of large-scale
solar panel fields produced by a utility company.

That all is not terribly relevant -- the article isn't claiming that solar
power will be cheaper than coal by 2013, rather it is simply fielding
speculation about the implications of solar becoming cheaper than coal.
There's a much longer article linked, and it deals with the practical issues
of solar power:

[http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/131/solar-goes-
supernova...](http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/131/solar-goes-
supernova.html?page=0%2C0)

~~~
ericd
Yeah, I realized that he was talking about rooftop installs, but the bulk of
that cost is in the panels, and the unit cost decrease of manufacturing those
should fall roughly in step with industrial panels. My main point was that it
was a long way to fall, 5-8% at a time, or even double that, if you make some
very favorable assumptions.

The article did make a point of saying that they would reach cost parity by
2013, and I'm fairly sure that they were intentionally glossing over facts to
make their article more linkbait-worthy.

That solar/wind continue to be championed by the media is keeping the public
from taking seriously the fact that we don't have that many realistic options
when it comes to getting off fossil fuels besides nuclear.

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jshort
Economics is about scarce resources, solar energy is most likely the least
scarce resource available to us, it is only a matter of the technology needed
to optimize our retrieval of it. And as we all know technology is constantly
improving at an astounding rate, which is a good thing if we want to still
call earth home.

~~~
berntb
>>solar energy is most likely the least scarce resource available to us

Let me guess -- you're not Scandinavian? :-) :-(

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ck2
They need to pour oil-sized investments into electricity storage research.

There are only two technologies I've heard of (sodium and redox flow) being
developed and they are not enough (and not portable).

added: here's a complete list of ALL we have and most of them are not viable
for home/large vehicle power
[http://electricitystorage.org/tech/technologies_technologies...](http://electricitystorage.org/tech/technologies_technologies.htm)

~~~
nickff
I just completed a project analysing the construction of a concentrated solar
power plant, using sodium as a working fluid and thermal energy storage
mechanism; we found that it is a very practical solution, and believe that
such a system would allow for solar power plants to provide power on a more
continuous basis, at a reasonable cost. Sodium will allow for energy storage
on a much larger scale than is possible with any other current technology, due
to its favourable characteristics. It seems that thermal energy storage is one
of the most practical methods of storing large quantities of energy, but I am
unsure as to when such a system will be deployed at scale, though some (fast
breeder) nuclear plants use a sodium coolant system.

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hartror
I love good news stories about the environment, hopefully it happens sooner
rather than later, certainly a lot of people are betting as much with their
wallets.

~~~
pstack
I'm a fan of the idea of solar panels, but I'm skeptical.

First, I'd like to see numbers that show solar panels are less damaging to the
environment. I suspect that they require significant energy to manufacture as
well as cause pollution in the process. Let's see some numbers that show it
saves far more than it costs, energy/pollution-wise.

I'd also like to see this supposed day (as soon as a year and a half from now,
according to the article), when solar power suddenly becomes affordable. It
sure wasn't one year ago and I'm pretty sure it's not, today. In fact, if you
calculate the cost of materials and installation, you will often find that you
don't start saving a dime until the warranty on the product has expired
(around 20-25 years). Not to mention, the efficiency degrades over time, so
I'm not sure what kind of performance you can expect when the warranty expires
and it starts finally saving you cash.

I want it to happen. Trust me. I seriously considered it (although I don't
think it's allowed in my city and I know that panels on your house are
forbidden by many cities and many HOAs). When I realized that the tens of
thousands of dollars I'd have to invest up front in it wouldn't start to pay
off until I was almost retirement age, I decided I'd just stick with what I've
already got. If things change drastically in a few years, I'll revisit the
idea. Until then, I'm not going to let my bank account get caught up in the
hype that only benefits the solar panel installer industry. I don't see how
it's going to mature significantly in a whole two years.

~~~
onan_barbarian
Why is it that people, in the age of Google, say things like "I'd like to see
numbers that show..." or "I suspect that..."?

<http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es071763q>

So there you go. Not sure about the credibility of the source but reading this
- or the myriad of other easily found sources on this matter - might be an
improvement on this snarky "huh huh, I'd like to see this stuff that probably
no-one before me has ever thought about" approach to the problem.

While you are honing your reading skills by actually finding out something,
you could revisit TFA to see this:

"But the solar industry is moving so fast that those costs will be equal--at
least for utilities--by 2013."

... so they're not talking about rooftop solar, which you decide to start
talking about almost immediately, because you once priced up a solar panel and
are thus an expert.

~~~
pstack
Feel better about yourself, now?

Do you seriously think that your local utility is going to have massive solar
fields that are going to provide the kind of power demands they have or even a
chunk of it? The only long-term option is for existing space to be used -
power generation on the space used by the house it generates. Until _that_ is
affordable, I doubt it's going to make the impact we're hoping for.

Plus, come on. We all know how utility companies behave. They'll have to be
dragged kicking and screaming into the type of investment necessary to roll
these out, even if they're cheaper in the longer term.

Also, yeah, I wouldn't have had a clue what to google for the type of
information you pulled up. Good for you. You get +1 google points for today,
sport.

~~~
onan_barbarian
I feel fine, thanks; roughly the same as before.

For the record, the Google string to find out about the environmental costs of
solar panel construction was "environmental costs solar panel construction".
There's a mountain of information and conflicting viewpoints to sort through,
naturally.

As for the business about there being no place to put solar, face it, you're
just making things up. You could easily look up where solar power boosters
figure they're going to put these facilities (for example, ask Google "where
will utilities put solar panels" - literally). Then you could form an informed
opinion pro/con but once again that's too much work.

Do I get another Google point?

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heresy
JAXA's pie in the sky SSPS project avoids the problem of variability of
supply.

Emplaced at a Lagrange point, one could imagine a potential 24/7 source of
energy.

Also, one of the proposed ways to transmit the energy back to earth is via
lasers. Could be fun if there are issues with the targeting subsystems :)

------
geuis
Can any folks reading this with investment experience perhaps point to some
information on how to start investing in solar companies? Seems like the time
to move some investments in that direction.

