
Solar power grew faster than any other fuel in 2016 - adventured
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-04/dawn-of-solar-age-declared-as-pv-beats-all-other-forms-of-power
======
cletus
I really love the story of technology. Unintended consequences (eg the
telephone). Also, how applications from one field affect another (eg precision
boring for cannon and artillery was fairly important to the development of
pistons that made the steam engine possible).

Of course, many of these consequences aren't foreseen. Go look at sci-fi from
the 60s and you'll see flat screens hanging on the wall. This of course
happened but flat screens were one of the critical developments for laptops
and, more importantly, modern smartphones.

Battery tech is another interesting one. Battery improvements were initially
spurred by laptops and then cellphones. A somewhat unforeseen consequence
beyond smartphones is that battery tech (along with smartphones) are largely
responsible for the development of consumer-level drones.

Electric vehicles are another obvious offshoot.

So one of the big problems with most forms of renewable energy are that they
aren't constant. Wind isn't constant. Sunshine obviously isn't (even beyond
the day/night cycle). Hydro has ben the one big success story here and is
responsible for some of the cheapest electricity in the world where it's
suitable.

I feel like the world is one big battery technological advance from a fairly
monumental and far-reaching change. Batteries I think are the real missing
link in renewable energy (IMHO).

The nice thing about solar in particular is that in a lot of places in the
world it's a good option because it doesn't require a lot of expensive
infrastructure (ie power lines). Communities can put solar panels near them. I
foresee this as being a hugely positive change and I'm happy to see it.

~~~
sliverstorm
Piggybacking, does anyone know where we are with capacitors? Everyone focuses
on batteries, but I've always wondered about supercaps. They can't hold a
charge for years, but 12-48hrs is possible. Size is not an issue, and I had
thought even fancier caps are pretty simple and environmentally friendly.
Unlike molten salt and many other storage tech, they have no moving parts.

Obviously the energy density is not incredible, but these are land-based
installations we're talking about, not Teslas.

~~~
philipkglass
I've wondered myself why supercapacitors haven't been used more for stationary
energy storage. If you search the academic literature, it looks like there are
many supercapacitor chemistries that can match or surpass the specific energy
of lead-acid batteries (~40 Wh/kg), they all manage incredible
charge/discharge rates compared to batteries, and almost all of them have
incredible cycle life compared to batteries. They can sustain thousands or
tens of thousands of charge/discharge cycles with only modest capacity fade.

Here are my guesses why supercapcitors haven't been used for bulk energy
storage:

1) The reported specific energy numbers are fudged somehow, so that if you
wanted a supercap Powerwall equivalent it'd be much larger/heavier than the
reported numbers suggest. Maybe they're excluding e.g. mass of electrolyte?

2) It just takes a long time to industrialize laboratory discoveries. It took
30 years for quantum dots to make their way from laboratory curiosity to
consumer display devices. It took 20+ years for the high-efficiency PERC solar
cell structure to make its way from the University of New South Wales to the
commercial mainstream.

~~~
ac29
Lithium-ion is an order of magnitude better in Wh/L vs supercaps [0]. There
simply isn't room to get 100+ kWh of supercaps into a ~car-sized vehicle.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densitie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densities_of_common_energy_storage_materials)

~~~
philipkglass
That table gives a value of 9 Wh/kg for electrochemical supercapacitors. I've
seen a _lot_ of researchers claim values over 30 Wh/kg in research papers over
the past few years. That's still not adequate for mobile applications that
currently use lithium ion batteries, but what we're wondering is why
supercapacitors aren't being used for stationary applications where cycle life
is more important than density. It could just be, as I speculated before, that
these improved supercapacitor designs take a long time to move from lab to
factory.

------
Robotbeat
Using nameplate capacity versus actual delivered kWh is a little misleading.
For instance, 1GW of nuclear can out-produce 3-4 GW of solar, and it does so
at a constant rate, not correlated with all the other solar farms.

I'm hugely bullish on PV long-term, but it's important for us to keep this
sort of thing in mind. And the discussion of the /peak/ output of solar or
wind as a percentage of total electrical output is also not terribly helpful.

By the time solar accounts for 10-15% of total energy production on the grid,
there will regularly be times when solar is providing almost all the grid's
power. But overall, it's still just 10-15%.

In order for solar to displace most of the energy produced on the grid, it's
necessary for solar to actually produce 2-3x the actual end-use electricity
demand at times, with the output stored in batteries or sometimes just wasted.

And according to my calculations, in order for solar to provide for 100% of
the power produced even during winter (without requiring weeks of storage),
you're going to need a nameplate capacity approximately 20-30 times the
average grid consumption (on an energy basis, oversizing the array by a factor
of 3 to 5), and most of the energy will need to be thrown away. This is
obviously going to be more expensive per kWh, but this is why a mix of power
sources is essential for economic power production, and at high latitudes
(like the UK and Germany), this is even more important.

(Note: it is possible to improve that oversizing factor if you have extensive
HVDC power lines and hydrogen production, but those things are expensive and
PV is cheap, so often it might still make sense to just over-size the array.)

~~~
KirinDave
> and most of the energy will need to be thrown away.

I won't speak to the veracity of your numbers. I have no idea your methodology
or even if you're qualified to do an analysis here or the quality of your
data, so...

But I will point out that the current plan to address this is to repurpose and
recycle existing lithium ion battery packs at sclae, while continuing to
develop very large electrical energy storage methods.

A real-life example of this is Tesla's Australian contract
([https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-power-
tesla/tes...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-power-tesla/tesla-
wins-giant-battery-contract-in-australia-has-100-day-deadline-idUSKBN19S0EV))
which uh... literally started on twitter as a dare between rich people
([https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/840032197637685249?lang=...](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/840032197637685249?lang=en)).

Very large power storage stations like this actually offer a lot of utility in
a variety of scenarios. Not only do they make distributed grids much more
reliable offer a facility to ground out excess energy on the grid (helping
reduce the impact of solar phenomenon over large-scale transport networks),
but they also have a lot of value in disaster recovery scenarios.

~~~
Robotbeat
Sure, my calculations assumed about 48 hours of storage. But there's a pretty
big difference between 48 hours and seasonal storage where you need weeks (400
hours).

What Tesla is currently doing is installing about 4 hours of battery for the
typical site, so about two orders of magnitude away from being able to
scavenge all that wasted power on a fully PV grid, but fairly optimal to
ensure full use of stored power.

It is key to understand the seasonal variation of sunlight. This is a much
worse problem at high latitudes. But at lower latitudes (say, anything less
than 45-50 degrees, i.e. >80% of the world's population), PV is now cheap
enough it's cheaper to just over-size the PV array to provide power even when
it's cloudy and/or winter than to provide weeks or months of storage.

EDIT: Maybe "wasted" is the wrong word. Is your car engine "wasted" just
because it's not red-lining 24/7? Averaged over a year, your engine only has a
"capacity factor" of about 0.2%, but the energy is there when you need it, and
it's still affordable. Likewise with solar, it's okay if not all the
electricity is utilized, as long as it produces enough on cloudier days to not
require a ton of storage (up to ~50 hours of storage is fine).

~~~
KirinDave
Forgive me, but it seems to me like you didn't read the materials that I
passed you in instead based your commentary on Tesla's powerwall product?

------
igravious
China is becoming an absolute economic monster. I mean that with no negative
connotations. And we're not talking trailing-edge tech here, but leading-edge.

FTA:

“The institution established after the first major oil crisis in 1973 said 165
gigawatts of renewables were completed last year, which was two-thirds of the
net expansion in electricity supply. Solar grew by 50 percent, with almost
half new plants built in China.”

See also:

[https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publicatio...](https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/GlobalEVOutlook2017.pdf)

“In 2016, China was by far the largest electric car market, accounting for
more than 40% of the electric cars sold in the world and more than double the
amount sold in the United States”

And:

[http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-
pro...](http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-
profiles/countries-a-f/china-nuclear-power.aspx)

“Mainland China has 37 nuclear power reactors in operation, about 20 under
construction, and more about to start construction. The reactors under
construction include some of the world's most advanced, to give a 70% increase
of nuclear capacity to 58 GWe by 2020-21. Plans are for up to 150 GWe by 2030,
and much more by 2050.”

Economies by GDP PPP:

[http://statisticstimes.com/economy/countries-by-projected-
gd...](http://statisticstimes.com/economy/countries-by-projected-gdp.php)

    
    
       China:   23,194.411
       USA:     19,417.144
       India:   9,489.302
       Japan:   5,420.228
       Germany: 4,134.668
       Rest:    meh
    

(in billions of $ of course)

I'm sure there are lots more examples.

~~~
adventured
GDP PPP is a near worthless reference for countries like China and India.
India has a billion people living in extreme poverty, with the word extreme
not doing the context justice. China still has about half a billion people
living in that type of poverty as well. Both of those are semi-masked by the
fantasy PPP figures.

PPP is a way of pretending that just because you can afford a Starbucks cup of
coffee in Beijing, you're economically equivalent to someone earning $60,000
per year in Frankfurt. Back in reality, there are vast objective economic
differences of reality that go with comparing China vs highly developed
nations on PPP. Can you afford to travel to Paris or Toronto? Can you afford a
BMW or Mercedes (cheap Chinese cars are death boxes on wheels)? Can your
savings or income get you out of cities with extreme pollution so you can live
better? Do you have access to the kind of healthcare available in Finland or
Denmark? What kind of social safety net does your nation provide?

Once you get much beyond comparing hamburger prices, the value of the PPP
premise collapses when comparing highly developed nations vs eg China.

~~~
igravious
Rubbish. Where are the numbers to prove what you're saying?

[https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/06/8-facts-about-
chinas-...](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/06/8-facts-about-chinas-
economy/)

In 2012 extreme poverty in India was 20%, bit less than 10% in China. And
shrinking each year.

“At the outset of the reforms in 1978, China was poor. It had a GDP per capita
level similar to Zambia – lower than half of the Asian average and lower than
two thirds of the African average. China experienced an average GDP growth of
close to 10% per year until 2014, raising per capita GDP almost 49-fold, from
155 current US Dollars (1978) to 7,590 US Dollars in 2014, lifting 800 million
people out of poverty – an unparalleled achievement. In urban centres in
China, poverty has been virtually eliminated.”

\---

At market rates China's economy will be the biggest in the world sometime in
the mid-20s. I have never seen anywhere that PPP† is a worthless metric. Point
me to a decent source that corroborates your opinion.

†
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity)

~~~
adventured
> In 2012 extreme poverty in India was 20%, bit less than 10% in China. And
> shrinking each year.

Saying that extreme poverty in India is 20%, is grotesquely absurd. As
recently as 2014, half of India's population (58%, or ~750 million people) was
living on about $3 per day. Pretending that $1.25 is extreme poverty, but $3
per day isn't, is the obvious absurd part. That just demonstrates again how
worthless PPP is. $3 per day is objective extreme poverty no matter how one
attempts to hide from that fact.

I stated my reasons for why I believe PPP is worthless, numerous times over.
Let's see you refute what I said. There are blatant objective economic lines
involved in the standard of living gap between China and highly developed
nations - which PPP as a fantasy attempts to ignore - and I listed several of
them.

~~~
ben_w
Going from $1.25/person/day to $3/person/day might do nothing for you in
Manhattan, but in Nairobi it makes the difference between a shack in a shanty
town in the first instance, and indoor plumbing, locked doors, and an
electricity supply in the second.

Source: I’ve visited a home in Nairobi whose rent was in the order of $1,000
_per year including bills_ , and housing 4 people.

------
DougWebb
That's great, but "Use of New thing is growing faster than use of already-
widely-used Old things" is hardly surprising.

------
baron816
The story of solar’s growth seems like a big deal now, but it’s nothing
compared to a few years from now when costs fall so low that it becomes
cheaper to replace a coal or nuclear plant than to continue operating them.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I think that's been an economic reality in the USA for a few years now, though
also including natural gas in the tech doing the replacing. The recent EPA
document that was intended to support coal and nuclear covered this:

 _“The draft report finds that since 2002, ‘most baseload power plant
retirements have been the victims of overcapacity and relatively high
operating cost but often reflect the advanced age of the retiring plants.’

“Overcapacity is a major cause of the turmoil in electricity markets. The
report explains that because the growth in electricity demand has flattened
since 2008, it is harder for ‘less competitive plants’ to survive. …

“And it doesn’t make sense to keep an uneconomic plant running when you know
it’s going to keep losing money.

“In the case of nuclear power, the study notes that vast majority of the plant
closure announcements blame plant retirement on ‘unfavorable market
conditions.’ And the ‘most unfavorable condition is that the marginal cost of
generation for many nuclear plants is higher than the cost of most other
generators in the market.’

“Similarly, coal is also hurt by its high marginal cost: ‘[Coal] plants that
have retired are old and inefficient units that were not recovering their
operations and fuel costs, much less capital cost recovery.'”_

That may be starting with the oldest, dirtiest and least efficient powerplants
but it's only going to get worse for them as time goes on.

~~~
MrRadar
The oversupply in the generation market is why I've lately been confused why
the coal and nuclear industries haven't been promoting electric vehicles more
vigorously to drive demand for electricity. With pretty much every other
electric appliance having only gotten more efficient I don't see any other way
to drive significant increases in demand.

~~~
stult
>why the coal and nuclear industries haven't been promoting electric vehicles
more vigorously to drive demand for electricity

Well, on the coal side, they can hardly maintain that coal isn't bad for the
environment whilst simultaneously claiming that electric cars are better.

~~~
Brakenshire
Although, coal produces its pollution many miles away from population centres,
whereas internal combustion cars produce it feet away from people breathing it
in on city pavements.

Nuclear in particular should be promoting it, it matches perfectly with the
overnight charging demand. Perhaps in that case it's just that nuclear isn't
that significant an industry, they have enough effort trying to promote
themselves.

Certainly it's strange that utilities in general aren't all guns blazing for
electric cars, I suspect we'll see that start to happen soon.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Various utilities give $10K rebates on EV purchases. I've never run the
numbers to see how that works out for them economically. Though they often get
government support to roll out insulation and other efficiency improvements so
maybe it falls under that.

The ones that pay to control the timing of EV charging make more immediate
sense to me.

------
bamboozled
This is looking like the final blow for Western economical dominance unless
serious catch up begins. Investing in coal, what a joke!

It won't be easy to compete with a manufacturing powerhouse that practically
runs on free energy to provide the world with goods and services. Good luck
competing with that!

------
Pigo
I'm always glad to hear news about the advancement of solar power, but I don't
hear as much about advancement in batteries or storage. The manufacturing of
batteries is not a clean and renewable resource, or have I missed some new
methods or ways of extracting rare minerals.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
The use of the word "rare" seems to be a reliable indicator that people have
been exposed to anti-renewable propaganda.

Rare-earth elements are not rare.

"Despite their name, rare-earth elements are – with the exception of the
radioactive promethium – relatively plentiful in Earth's crust, with cerium
being the 25th most abundant element at 68 parts per million, or as abundant
as copper."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-
earth_element](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element)

And, further, many batteries and renewable power sources don't even use any
Rare-earths.

As to your question, there's lots going on in storage, it wouldn't suprise me
if 1/5th of the stories on a renewable tech blog were about progress and
breakthroughts in various types of storage.

~~~
asfdsfggtfd
The difference is that copper tends to be concentrated into minable deposits.
REE tend to be spread out. Also comparing Ce with Cu is not totally fair the
HREE are also important industrially and they are much rarer than the LREE -
and tend to be less well concentrated into minable deposits.

~~~
Brakenshire
A lot of the rare-earths are produced as a by-product of other mining
activities. Also, as soon as supply is seriously in constraint, recycling
technology for EOL products would be developed, and as the price of sourcing
from mines increased, recycling rates would tend towards 100%. Ultimately, the
mining product is not being destroyed in the production of something like a
battery, so it is fundamentally different, and fundamentally more sustainable
than burning a fossil fuel.

~~~
asfdsfggtfd
There was a crisis around 2010 and this did not happen.

Agree that recycling is probably going to be important (as it is already with
other metals).

------
hokkos
Does the Twh figures take into account the capacity factor where for nuclear
power it is 90% and photovoltaic solar from 10% to 20% ?

~~~
philipkglass
Yes, that's the meaning of reporting annualized TWh. It takes capacity factors
into account.

------
woodandsteel
The article says China was by far the biggest purchaser of new PV.

Any global change skeptics out there who want to defend Trump's claim that
climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese to undermine the US economy?

------
eighthnate
Isn't this a bit disingenuous. A bum with a penny finding a dollar would see a
faster growth in wealth than bill gates earning $1 billion in capital gains.

Solar is coming off such a low base that any growth will outpace any other
fuel.

------
lostmsu
What is that solar in percentage of total power production?

~~~
edent
In the UK, solar was able to provide 23.7% of power demands. That's more than
Nuclear provided.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/26/solar-
po...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/26/solar-power-breaks-
uk-records-thanks-sunny-weather)

Now, the caveat is that was at "solar peak" one afternoon in May.

As I type this, on a grey afternoon, solar is providing 6% of the UK's
electricity. See
[http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/](http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/)

~~~
ZeroGravitas
The early peak records are also often on holidays or weekends, as total demand
is lower and coal/gas gets shut down first as it has a higher marginal cost.

Still good to see progress, but you're going to see records broken regularly
for years to come as the instant, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly
records get broken again and again.

------
gasgiant
My infant child grew faster than any other person in my house 2016.

~~~
dagss
Well yes, but there is a backstory here of IEA refusing to believe in solar,
severely underestimating its growth for every projection over the course of
the past decade (assuming linear rather than exponential).

This has had real implications for investments in oil/gas/coal.

"Authorities finally realize infant will grow to adult."

~~~
majewsky
This reminds me of the story where the Secretaries of Education of the German
states recently found out that their projection for the number of first-
graders in 5 years was off by about 400,000 (in a country of 80 million
people).

Because, y'know, it's not like you could get any reliable data on how many
people in your country will be six years old, five years from now...

~~~
jermaustin1
Immigration, Emigration, Infant Mortality, Private Education, etc., are just a
few factors that could influence that number.

~~~
ben_w
400,000 is a 40% error on a population of 80 million with a life expectancy of
80 years. Unless 45% of recent asylum seekers were 6 years old, or unless 40%
of 6 year olds emigrated (I don’t know which way the error went), that is too
large a surprise to be so easily forgiven.

~~~
jermaustin1
I never said a single factor fell into the 400k figure.

I'm also highly skeptical of the figure itself, as the total number of
enrolled 6-year-olds is only 675k (97% of population) in 2012 (the last year
the number was available), and for the years prior, it was pretty stable (+/\-
50k). [1]

Being off by an order less than that makes some sense, but being off by 60% in
a pretty stable country seems completely improbable.

[1]:
[http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=RPOP#](http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=RPOP#)

