I remember when solar power was ridiculously expensive. I'm amazed that in sunny regions it is transitioning so quickly from "more expensive than the most expensive fossils" to "cheaper than the cheapest fossils." Not long ago I thought that natural gas was going to have significantly more time to savor its victory over coal before being dethroned in turn.
The article says "A bit over 10% of all power produced in the US came from solar..." but given the table doesn't include oil, they clearly mean only 10% of all electrical power. It's only 6-7% if you include oil.
(And don't get me started on the stupidity of measuring power as GWh per 4 months)
Technically, if you want total power defined by physics that equates to aka power as defined by physics, then the US is 99% solar just like every other country. Look at the solar numbers for all that farm land which is converted to chemical enegery at low efficiency. Then add in passive solar heating etc.
Interestingly 80% of farmland is used to feed animals which give us 20% of our calories. So the total solar energy required for the average diet ends is significantly boosted. More so if you include fish that are high on the food chain.
PS: Might seem pedantic, but it's more often relevant that you might think.
This is counting all output by wind and solar regardless if it is needed and usable when the power is being produced. This is quite important because wind and solar are not on-demand sources of power.
> This is counting all output by wind and solar regardless if it is needed and usable when the power is being produced. This is quite important because wind and solar are not on-demand sources of power.
I think you have that backwards: in the US, we lack the ability to scale down coal and nuclear plants. Solar and Wind are generally the first to get pulled offline when generated capacity exceeds demand and storage.
TIL this is called "curtailment" and it's an argument that utilities have used to justify not spending on renewables that are saving the environment from global warming (which is going to require more electricity for air conditioning).
Solar energy production peaks around noon. Demand for electricity peaks in the evening. We need storage (batteries with supercapacitors out front) in order to store the difference between peak generation and peak use. Because they're unable to store this extra energy, they temporarily shut down solar and wind and leave the polluting plants online.
Consumers aren't exposed to daily price fluctuations: they get a flat rate that makes it easy to check their bill; so there's no price incentive to e.g. charge an EV at midday when energy is cheapest.
Developing energy storage capabilities (through infrastructure and open access basic research that can be capitalized by all) is likely the best solution. According to a fairly recent report, we could go 100% renewable with the energy storage tech that exists today.
But there's no money for it. There's money for subsidizing oil production (regardless of harms (!)), but not so much for wind and solar. There's money for responding to natural disasters caused by global warming, but not so much for non-carbon-based energy sources that don't cause global warming. A film called "The Burden: Fossil Fuel, the Military, and National Security" quotes the actual unsubsidized price of a gallon of gasoline.
Wouldn't it be great if there was some kind of computer workload that could be run whenever energy is cheapest ( 'energy spot instances') so that we can accelerate our migration to renewable energy sources that are saving the environment for future generations? If there were people who had strong incentives to create demand for power-efficient chips and inexpensive clean energy.
Where would be if we had continued with Jimmy Carter's solar panels on the roof of the White House (instead of constant war and meddling with competing oil production regions of the world)?
It's good to see wind and solar growing this fast this year. A chart with cost per kWhr or MWhr would be enlightening.
See what we can do? In a relatively short amount of time, a revolution happened. As prices get lower, unless the state taxes them to the wazoo, DIY-ers can get close to free electricity as after a few years the panels will pay for themselves.
Consider what happens when people are mostly energy independant, efficient, and have open source software to turn this into quite a lot of different things.
Everything, or virtually anything, is closely priced to energy cost. Virtually everything we use, uses energy to be transformed and then transported to us. If we take care of AC (correlates with hot and sunny days), cooking, charging our cars (why nor charge them when the sun is out?) and other household stuff (we can program to do the laundry at 1pm when the sun is at max) a lot of energy is freed for other stuff. Price drops...
I'm jumping even further.. beside the price of renewable energy transformer (solar, wind, hydro..), the tools (heating, cutting, radio, etc) and the metatools (computer, network) what else is there to buy ?
What is interesting is to look at the breakdown in increases of non-hydro renewables:
Non-hydro renewables 149,652 +10.8%
- of which wind 104,801 +10.5%
- of which utility-scale solar 18,510 +33.6%
This equates to:
Type 2017 2018 difference
Non-hydro renewables 135,065 149,652 +14,587
- of which wind 94,842 104,801 +9,958
- of which utility-scale solar 13,854 18,510 +4,654
In other words, utility-scale solar is increasing faster, but it is still falling behind. The increase in wind power is almost the starting point of utility scale solar.
I would love to know how the residential scale solar numbers fit into this, but that isn't reported here.
It's worth remembering that this data is for January - April. Solar is going to have a much bigger contribution in the following four months. I don't know about wind patterns in the US, but in Europe the wind also tends to blow less strongly in summer.
Don’t be so sure. Even though summer gives you more direct sunlight and longer days, it also knocks down your efficiency (and weather patterns in some areas will be more inclined to cloud over those months).
In the US the same is true with wind as in Europe. Places with good summer wind resources are uncommon, but California has a few of them.
british Columbia has been building half a dozen new hydro electric power plants per year for the last 20 years. It takes 3-6 years to do the environmental studies. Goats, insects, tadpoles, bears, eagles, fish, plants, you name it, everything is studied to see how it will be impacted. On a recent project they discovered a frog that was on the endangered list actually wasn't endangered at all as it was in every creek in the whole area.
Impacts can be mitigated by creating new habitat.
there are environmental monitors during all construction and weekly reporting to the goverment ministries of fisheries and forests during operation.
The run of river plants only cause unnatural changes in river flows if human life is at risk. Some owners would rather destroy a bearing than kill a fish.
My point is that hydro can operate without much impact on the environment. Flow releases and fish ladders might decrease the absolute amount of energy generated but that small decrease is in the big picture preferable to switching to natural gas for the entirety of the hydro plant capacity.
I don't think any struggles of the pacific salmon or humpback chub can be blamed solely on hydro.
Disclaimer: I program hydro plants for the last 15 years.
I believe salmon runs that have been impacted can be helped without having to remove dams entirely, but I'm an EE not a biologist.
I also don't defend all dams. Many dams have had terrible impacts on people and the environment.
Hydro could be mooted when there is enough battery storage in MWH as there is stored in the potential energy in the water in the reservoirs of the dams.
The economics on batteries aren't there yet. To be able to depend on having x MWH of energy in the battery in 5 years you need a battery that is 10x, or you buy a battery that is only 1.5x but then replace it every year. A project in Hawaii just chose pumped hydro storage over batteries.
I'm more hopeful geothermal will become a strong resource but all of the drilling equipment and expertise is chasing oil.
After some quick googling, skim reading, it looks like your govt has tried harder to preserve your salmon runs. Honestly, that's pretty encouraging. And the restoration work on Vancouver Island is exciting.
Since the Columbia (Basin) is also used for irrigation, agriculture, it's been hard, slow work balancing the needs of all the stakeholders. Just guessing: Maybe that's less of a factor for your govt.
Aside: I do think we'll need to be build more reservoirs, cisterns. Higher up. As you know, the snowpack, which used to hold the water, has all but disappeared with climate change. We'll need something to replace that functionality, capacity. So even as an EE, you'll still have a lot of work in the future (assuming you stay with hydro).
There's a ceiling on wind, though. Without storage, you need some other source. And no, averaging over a large area won't work. We have that now, and there's still about 4:1 variance in a day over the CAISO or PJM control areas.
With solar, peak air conditioning load and peak solar output pretty much coincide.
A 300 MW/1200 MWh project planned in California by Vistra Energy:
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vistra-energy-to-de...
Another California project, 182.5 MW/700 MWh from Tesla/PG&E:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/PG-E-Tesla-team...
Have We Reached Peak Peaker? ‘I Can’t See Why We Should Build a Gas Peaker After 2025’
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/battery-storage...
A Reckoning for Power Giants: Siemens May Sell Its Gas Turbine Business
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/siemens-may-sel...
I remember when solar power was ridiculously expensive. I'm amazed that in sunny regions it is transitioning so quickly from "more expensive than the most expensive fossils" to "cheaper than the cheapest fossils." Not long ago I thought that natural gas was going to have significantly more time to savor its victory over coal before being dethroned in turn.