The problem with this idea that we subsidized solar until it was profitable is not accurate.
Solar power doesn't pollute and I would argue that all other forms of power that do pollute aren't taxed nearly enough for it, with coal being the most obvious example.
Coal power sends an insane amount of carbon into the atmosphere. If we properly carbon-taxed coal, it would go out of business tomorrow. And that doesn't even get into the environmental destruction that comes from strip mining.
Strip mining is when coal companies buy a whole fucking mountain and then destroy it piece by piece to remove the coal. How the fuck is that not good for the environment and our society after the coal is gone?
So, solar power really is a lot of cheaper than coal when you consider all the negative externalities that it brings.
Solar didn't magically just appear on the market at a lower price point than carbon-based resources though, it had to go through several iterations which required significant investment capital. This is usually where government agencies like DOE leverage their capital investment programs because private business aren't interested in paying for the R&D to solve those kinds of big problems without a guaranteed success.
Solar is only becoming cheaper today because of the research and capital that was put into developing the technology, not because it's inherently cleaner than coal. To your point, based purely on the market forces (i.e. excluding carbon taxes) coal is still a very viable option. And if the government is motivated to migrate businesses off of dirty energy resources, it also has a motivation to help develop alternatives that the market will accept.
Solyndra[0] was one example of a company that received government support to develop solar technology and became notorious for defrauding the government in the process.
> To your point, based purely on the market forces (i.e. excluding carbon taxes) coal is still a very viable option.
Oh please. Based "purely on market forces" can't exclude carbon emissions. That's a non-negligible externality which your market needs to price correctly. Not doing so is in effect subsidising coal. There is nothing "pure" about this, quite to the contrary. And this has been known for decades.
Markets suck at pricing on negative externalities. It is literally the textbook example of market failure. That's why we need regulation (e.g. Carbon taxes) to step in and make sure those costs are accounted for.
I don't know what kind of hypothetical utopian market you're referring to, but it's not one that exists in human societies.
>Oh please. Based "purely on market forces" can't exclude carbon emissions.
Huh? A bunch of people with no altruistic tendencies, and who are incapable of coordinating through any means but pricing, will not stop overfishing or carbon emissions. I don't get this often repeated thing about how not taxing carbon is subsidizing it, or how cap-and-trade is indistinguishable from naturally occurring markets. Both of those things are clearly artificial constructs built on top of the naturally-forming market. It's like many people are trying to use a perfect society as the zero-mark which all deltas and relative measures are measured from, while the state of nature (and the absence of a policy) is the obvious zero-mark to use.
No. Carbon emissions are hurting everybody on this planet. Even if you ignore plants, funghi and animals, then there are still a few billiom humans around that are participating in your market and get damaged by emissions. A fair market needs to contain provisions for compensation of this damage. Just because you can't see it right away does not mean it does not exist.
Compare it with sewer systems in a city. Many businesses would be much more profitable if they could dump their crap straight onto the street. Municipal cleaning services would need to clean up and everybody pays them. So they'd be subsidised though this. We don't accept this, we have rules against it since it's not fair. They have to pay their share, and excessive generation of crap needs to pay accordingly.
We don't accept this with crap on the street, and we should not accept it with crap in the atmosphere either. It's the exact opposite of a free market. It's misuse of a common resource.
>It's the exact opposite of a free market. It's misuse of a common resource.
Why can't free markets result in the misuse of common resources? I feel like some are trying to square a circle here. Free markets aren't axiomatically the definition of good, and it's okay for something good to not be a result of them. There are these things known as "market failures," where unattended economic activity will lead to people's goals not being achieved. Overfishing and carbon emissions are market failures; far from being the opposite of a free market, they are well-recognized consequences.
Ok sure. That's like saying time dilation is a physics failure in newtonian physics. Technically correct, and entirely unhelpful to solve the problem.
The problem here being that writing "based purely on the market forces (i.e. excluding carbon taxes) coal is still a very viable option." suggests that since we all want free markets we'll need to accept this. No we don't.
We also don't say "well purely on human nature forces we'll have a few alpha males who keep a harem of women and try to kill all competition that's not submissive". Technically correct, but entirely unhelpful to find a way how to move forward.
A free market needs rules. "Free market" does not equate "do whatever you want". Without rules that are enforced, you don't have freedom either.
I think the source of the confusion here is a massive positive esteem laid on the two words "free market," which confuse people into thinking that anything good has to be labeled a free market. Labeling a system that requires government intervention a "free-market" mechanism is, just like in your example, just as much of a misuse of language as labeling quantum mechanics a Newtonian mechanism. Minimum wages, antitrust action, taxes, bans, sanctions, and subsidies are all examples of interventions in free markets, and they can be good or bad, just like the features of the state of nature (a free market) can be good and bad in different situations.
I'm really against this idea of redefining the baseline so that whatever policy choices we like are defined as the absence of subsidies and the presence of a free market. Subsidies are when the government intervenes to give money to those who trade in certain goods. Intervention is defined as doing anything other than letting people sort it out for themselves. Likewise, a free market is not one where everything we don't like is banned, it is a market where there are no constraints on the participants' process of trade and price determination.
You would get the societies depicted in Snowcrash and Cyberpunk 2077. People would hire private security to perform the security tasks they need, just like multinationals do in third world countries. If you don't want that to happen, one has no choice but to restrict the freedom of at least one market. (The market for mercenaries.) Some countries go further and restrict other markets, for example the markets for weapons. It does not make any sense to call gun control a free-market mechanism, that's just not the right use of the term.
Freedom and rules are two sides of the same coin. Just doing whatever you want in a market does not make it a "free market". If somebody can go and hold a gun to your head and thereby persuade you to give them your goods for free, that's not a free market. A free market needs enforcement of rules of trade. And those rules include that you don't damage other market participants without compensation. Be it a potential bullet to the head, the mentioned "crap on the streets", or carbon emissions in the atmosphere.
>If somebody can go and hold a gun to your head and thereby persuade you to give them your goods for free, that's not a free market.
It's a free market if you can hire private security to stop them. The ban on the violent trade (often called the "monopoly on violence") is an example of an area in which modern liberal democracies do not permit complete freedom in the markets they host. I guess the slogan could be, "not every policy liberal democracies like is a free-market policy."
In a fully free market, slavery, selling of body parts, hard drugs, murders, torture for hire, kid porn, kid workers, nukes owned by private citizens etc. would be fully allowed. Very few people actually want that.
The "state of nature" does not include property rights. Markets rely on those property rights (a form of regulation), and are therefore a fundamentally artificial construct.
no markets--free, 'naturally-forming', or otherwise--are devoid of rules, whether they be implicit (e.g., dollars as trading medium, refrain from taking by force, etc.) or explicit (e.g, trading hours are 9-5). there is no 'good old days' where markets were free and the traders were good, upstanding people by happenstance.
it's just as 'natural' to prohibit the ability to unknowingly harm others without pricing that into the transaction.
>no markets--free, 'naturally-forming', or otherwise--are devoid of rules, whether they be implicit (e.g., dollars as trading medium, refrain from taking by force, etc.) or explicit (e.g, trading hours are 9-5).
9-5 trading hours are not a rule of US markets. If there was demand for trading at 8, people would organize to do that - and in fact they have, it's called after-hours trading.
Dollars as a trading medium is also an example of a non-rule. In a free market, all currencies would be lawful for transactions. In fact, in the US companies are free to sign contracts that numerate quantities of money in any currency. The only legal privilege of the dollar is its role in taxation - hardly an aspect of the free market.
Finally, the rule against taking by force is enforced by the executive branch of a democratically elected government. It is not possible to call that a free-market mechanism. A free-market mechanism for security exists, it's where you hire rent-a-cops, or in third world countries, where you hire mercenaries.
so is your argument that those off-the-cuff examples are not really rules because they're arbitrary or fuzzy (like every other rule, convention, or custom)?
the point is that there is no real world 'free market' that meets your idealized (and arbitrary) conditions.
> Solar didn't magically just appear on the market at a lower price point than carbon-based resources though
You are ignoring the entire point of the post you are replying to.
Extracting coal and burning it has massive external costs. Massive health costs to the workers and even people just living near coal extraction. Massive devaluation of land near the coal mines. Huge issues with non-carbon solution. That's all before the concerns about climate change. Few people were compensated for the massive destruction of wealth/ health & quality of life in the region. In many places the companies extracted every ounce of coal then when the lawsuits started pouring in, the company went belly up.
Once you take into account all the costs outside the costs of acquiring the land and extracting the coal, coal is vastly more expensive.
> and became notorious for defrauding the government in the process
Where's the evidence for that? The major point was that Solyndra bet on the wrong horse with CIGS; they were unknowingly doomed to fail from the start.
What happened with CIGS? There was a privately funded CIGS company here in Austin TX that also didn't make it (even though the founders and investors were solid) and I've not gotten a straight answer as to why - esp. confusing because the first quals looked very good.
Well, nothing. That's basically the point. Or, at best very little happened with it. "It wasn't getting cheaper faster than silicon was" is the most concise answer I can come up with.
I'm not sure your point in bringing up Solyndra; with that notable exception, the fed's investments in renewables turned a decent profit. It's actually a problem, in hindsight: the program was supposed to take risks on innovative ideas and companies that would be difficult to find via traditional channels, but Solyndra had such a chilling effect that the DOE stopped taking those risks.
Yeah, I meant to add the caveat that it was one of the most publicly notable government energy investments for the simple fact that it ended up in scandal, since many aren't even aware that the government invests in companies like this. I wasn't trying to criticize the initiative.
> Solyndra had such a chilling effect that the DOE stopped taking those risks.
It's frustrating to see that a private company's bad behavior wound up being a stain for the government like this.
Was it even bad behavior? I recall that there were allegations at the time that Chinese business were dumping solar panels onto the market and that meant Solyndra couldn’t compete. Though I’ve also found some news sources saying that the high prices for polysilicon caused a bunch of players to enter the market to produce it, causing prices of poly silicon to crash and Solyndra couldn’t compete. Either way it seems to be bad luck unless the CEO and board knew those were huge risks and intentionally downplayed them.
Edit: It just seems unclear to be what the supposed fraud was.
> It's frustrating to see that a private company's bad behavior wound up being a stain for the government like this.
Do not be confused into thinking there was no government collusion. Not only was solyndra a cesspool of revolving door players, it definitely knew how to play the government contracting game. I used to deliver food for ill low income housing clients and on one complex I visited saw old solyndra tube on top of the building. Someone had to look at this project and see it as a cost plus opportunity for an unrelated and unnecessary product; and now that housing block is saddled with unsupported infrastructure. Who is going to pay to remove those solyndra panels and put some other solar system up there?
> It's frustrating to see that a private company's bad behavior wound up being a stain for the government like this.
Definitely! Sorry if I came across as defensive, I'm just used to people using Solyndra to criticize the whole program. On the whole, the DOE made a big impact. It's just disappointing that one bad actor reduced that impact by turning into a political hot potato.
>Solar power doesn't pollute
Nope. The heavy metals used in solar powers are pretty awful. Perhaps they don't have the same impact as CO2, but we don't have a decent solution for what to do with the trash from old solar panels.
Solar panels use cadmium and lead in trace quantities that makes recycling certain parts of solar panels unprofitable. I can easily see this being like plastics all over again.
Cadmium is not used by Si cells, which comprise 95% of the market. Lead has been used in back contact sheets but is being phased out. Heavy metals are not necessary for solar.
I tend to agree with your point about coal, but fail to see what you're trying to say.
Maybe the non-taxation of fossil fuels' externalities is akin to subsidies. Then that becomes the reason why solar power needed subsidies, but it doesn't change the fact of their existence.
I also doubt raising prices for fossil fuels would have had the same effect on research into alternatives. Solar power is now cheaper than coal, even at the low costs of coal you decry. Given enough time, solar power research will yield tremendous returns, and would have done so under any imaginable tax/subsidy regime for coal and/or solar power.
But markets aren't always capable of reaping such rewards. Not because they are evil, but there was a lot of uncertainty and extremely long timelines involved that those institutions just aren't set up for.
Politics, however, are. And it worked. Score one for that dirty concept.
> Making solar cells requires a lot of energy. Fortunately, because these cells generate electricity, they pay back the original investment of energy; most do so after just two years of operation, and some companies report payback times as short as six months.
While the above article is from 2014, it likely still applies today. I would be interested to know how much manufacturing processes have changed since then.
The other big thing the article points out is the toxic chemicals and toxic process used to produce solar panels.
Energy requirements of various technologies is commonly measured with a simple ratio called ERoEI -- Energy Returned on Energy Invested.
Basically, any energy source can be thought of as an "energy multiplier" -- it takes some amount of energy to free the resource (manufacture it, mine it, etc.), then it produces some amount of energy output over its lifetime. So by looking at energy-out / energy-in, you get a sense of your bang for your buck.
- Conventional oil wells are 18-43:1 (I've heard saudi oil wells -- the easiest to drill -- are in the range of 60:1)
- Shale is 1.5:1 (say you what you will about the shale revolution, but from an energy output point of view, it's literally scraping the bottom of the barrel)
- Oil sands are 5:1
- Wind is 20-30:1
- Solar is 9-34:1
As with any lifetime/embedded cost analysis, there's lots of variability dependent on your assumptions, manufacturing conditions, and operating conditions. There's nuances in energy types, like wind turbines produce electricity but require tons of diesel trucks and concrete to assemble.
But we can roughly say that in terms of energy requirements, solar is more efficient than shale or oil sands, but it tops out at the lower to mid range of conventional oil.
>- Shale is 1.5:1 (say you what you will about the shale revolution, but from an energy output point of view, it's literally scraping the bottom of the barrel)
>- Oil sands are 5:1
wtf? I thought oil sands were the least efficient but shale is even lower? Is there a source for this?
So a model based on pollution taxes would have worked better - We could tax the manufacturing plants, and the coal plants, and have a bake-off to see which is cleaner - Burning coal for power, or burning coal to run factories for PV panels.
But it would have been less popular, because at least in the USA we don't have a good welfare system to balance out the indirect tax on poor people, who have to spend more of their income on electricity, gasoline, other pollutants.
The negative externalities of coal aren't adequately captured by taxes, sure...but what does that have to do with government subsidizing solar? Clearly they have.
The government subsidy is a point of criticism for "free-market" proponents. It's fair to point out that fossil fuels, and especially coal, have long benefitted from being able to externalize pollution costs. This is not consistent with an efficient market, since the extra costs of coal are borne by everyone regardless of whether they benefit.
Society has subsidized coal by both paying for negative externalities and through direct government investment, which is true for all waste producing energy sources.
This is orthogonal to OPs claim that "we subsidized solar until it was profitable is not accurate"
Take revenue from carbon tax and distribute it as UBI. This gives everyone the money to pay the average carbon use, and encourages carbon use to reduce on both the supply and demand side.
Have you just arrived here as a time-traveller from Victorian London?
I have fabulous news! Forsooth, in this, the Year of Our Lord, Two Thousand and Score, Plus One, it has come to pass that mankind hath, by workings most subtle, made manifest many wondrous heating apparatuses that requireth neither coal nor coke, nor indeed train oil.
I can't read the article, but I think evidence like this is important when it comes to the whole idea of government subsidises impacting on free markets. The free market has become a bit of a religion for some (you can see in the comments here), and there's this staunch divide between those that believe the free market will always come up with a humanitarian solution, to those that believe the government need to push things for it to happen.
My FIL was head of a large coal plant in the UK, and is very critical of renewable energies, their cost, the impact on the fossil fuel industry etc... It simply isn't possible to have a conversation with him about global warming - he will simultaneously argue it isn't happening and it's natural and not caused by us. He might be an extreme example, but there is general scepticism of government subsidies here.
I'd love to see a study where researchers take things that are seen as good/important/essential to modern life and measure the amount of public/government sponsorship that helped bring it about.
I always find the free market vs government arguments a false dichotomy. Even the free-est markets require a whole host of government services: regulation, standards setting, contracts enforcement, antifraud measures provision and infrastructure to name but a few. People only cry free market when they don't like a particular government activity.
That coal plant relies on infrastructure to get its coal. It needs fair utility prices to deliver its power to customers. It needs reliable (abuse free) markets to sell the power on. It needs voltage and frequency/time standards to access the network. It needs contract enforcement to actually get paid by its customers. It needs insurance and educated workers and a CEO who won't embezzle.
All provided by government, all welcomed by industry. But suddenly government has no place in free markets when it comes to CO2.
>But suddenly government has no place in free markets when it comes to CO2.
Oil/utility/nuclear are the main groups that pushed for this idealistic notion of "free markets" in the first place via think tanks like CATO and AEI and groups like ALEC.
At the time when they pushed it the hardest there were few alternatives so the "free" market naturally selected them.
While the concept gained a lot of mindshare in the American public they've since stopped pushing it quite so hard and are obviously not quite so keen on it.
It's especially ironic that they criticize renewables mainly on the basis of variability, which is probably best solved by market based solutions.
That depends on whether you want power to be cheaper or more expensive. Cheaper is nice but you'll pay for it taxes etc. Expensive is painful at the point of consumption but encourages efficiency. It's a strategic and political decision and depends on a nations needs and objectives...
The US government heavily subsidizes oil and has heavily subsidized nuclear as well. Both were choices for strategic reasons, to be independent in sources of energy (and to have nukes).
Preventing climate change and becoming independent from non-renewables seems like a worthwhile strategic goal to me, too.
And these are only the active subsidies. We're not even talking about the externalities.
Startups need early adopters who value potential and future vision. Innovators and early adopter look beyond your current offering.
The challange is finding equivalent of early adopters for commodity markets such as electrical energy. That where the government policies could step in. There are some things that initially are too expensive, but at scale could be game changing.
Instead of grants, I would allocate $100mln - $1Bln / year to auctions. to buy at lowest price, the cheaper price available should unlock bigger pool. Good examples for government subsidies:
1. Negative carbon emission.
2. Carbon-free steel.
3. Carbon-free concrete.
4. Synthetical fuels such as natural gas or gasoline.
I have thought something similar regarding developing countries. Instead of giving money/help to a developing country, you should foster local industry by committing yourself to buy ten thousand gadgets produced locally. The local cleptrocat would have difficulties siphoning off the money as the products would need to be demonstrably produced. Then, once the gadgets are produced and people employed, you do not need to even export those gadgets, but just auction them off locally, so the gadgets end up as increase in local welfare. In the best case you may even make a small profit...
Of course, it is difficult to judge what the locals produce best, but somehow I still think that induced demand would be helpful, and better than just dumping the money there.
The problem is that often enough part of the motivation in foreign aid is not making the developing nation independent, but more dependent, i.e. using the nation as either a source of cheap resources/labour or as a future market. So what foreign aid does is actually establish market dominance of the "first world" companies.
> I'd love to see a study where researchers take things that are seen as good/important/essential to modern life and measure the amount of public/government sponsorship that helped bring it about.
Essential technology investment of US tax dollars?
Because there are two different topics. Whether global warming occurs or not, and whether it is man-made or not. First one is easy to prove, just look at the temperature charts over the years and analyze. Second one is harder to quantify.
I think, in broad strokes, human origin for the temperature change is pretty simple to estimate and test?
We know how infrared scatters on CO_2 from quantum/EM physics, so from that it should be possible to take the difference in global concentration due to humanity and incident solar radiation, and derive as a result an expected temperature rise. This can then be matched against historical average temperature records.
I'm being a classic physicist and assuming everything is a first-order approximation, so someone do correct me if I'm wrong.
>>"I'd love to see a study where researchers take things that are seen as good/important/essential to modern life and measure the amount of public/government sponsorship that helped bring it about. "
Solar follow exponential cheaper trajectory with no signs of slowing down. Virtually all forecast underestimated the trend.
In less than a decade solar will be way cheaper than operating cost of gas or coal plants. It make sense to overprovision capacity and shut down pretty much anything that could be shut down during the day.
Plus cheap spurious electricity opens a lot of new frontiers.
“A naive observer, reading the reports of falling prices for photovoltaic cells and wind turbines, might conclude that the rising shares of solar and wind power will bring a new era of falling electricity prices. Just the opposite has been true.”
“Before the year 2000, when Germany embarked on its large-scale and expensive Energiewende (energy transition), that country’s residential electricity prices were low and declining, bottoming at less than €0.14/kWh ($.13/kWh, using the prevailing exchange rate) in 2000.”
“By 2015, Germany’s combined solar and wind capacity of nearly 84 gigawatts had surpassed the total installed in fossil-fueled plants, and by March 2019 more than 20 percent of all electricity came from the new renewables. However, over an 18-year period (2000 to 2018) electricity prices more than doubled, to €0.31/ kWh. The E.U.’s largest economy thus has the continent’s highest electricity prices, followed by heavily wind-dependent Denmark, at €0.3/kWh.”
and finally,
“A similar contrast can be seen in the United States. In California, where the new renewables have taken an increasing share, electricity prices have been rising five times as fast as the national mean and are now nearly 60 percent higher than the countrywide average.”
I had a really fascinating conversation with a leader at a local energy company. He discussed some challenges with pricing in producing electricity that might help here.
The BIGGEST expense for a power company is infrastructure. They have all of these electrical lines running everywhere. When they run the lines, they are designed for growth YEARS from now AND for the HIGHEST demand time frame.
This is to say: the company spends LOADS of money to run wires that are 99% unused. The cost of running the wires is a fixed expense that gets passed on to the consumers. As people move to solar power, they stop paying the power company. They stop paying for the electrical lines that were already run and already expensed. This cost is then shifted to the other consumers. Thus raising the cost of electricity for everyone else (in the short term).
> A naive observer, reading the reports of falling prices for photovoltaic cells and wind turbines, might conclude that the rising shares of solar and wind power will bring a new era of falling electricity prices. Just the opposite has been true.
This is utter nonsense. The first sentence is about the future cost of power, and the argument is specifically about how the price is changing such that the future cost will be lower. The second sentence then argues that the past deployments have led to higher prices.
Even the most uninformed observer of global energy markets can pull up 2020 PPA auctions and see the staggering void that has emerged between bids from gas, coal and nuclear vendors vs bids from solar+storage and wind+storage.
As a random example, here is the draft plan Siemens is drawing up for my hometown, it includes PPA estimates for gas turbines, wind and solar+storage, current as of a few weeks ago. The recommendation from Siemens is to immediately stop all construction of anything other than solar+storage, a complete reversal from prior plans for my utility in bright-red Missouri.
1. Early adopters pays premium. Especially true for technology that gets exponential cheaper. Rich countries such as Germany, Denmark and California pay R&D for rest of us.
2. If not renewables or other form of non-fossil fuel, the price of energy would be increasing anyway. We are reaching peak of fossil fuel production. Fracking make it cheap temporarily, but overall we are depleting cheap fields and would be forced to use ones which are harder to access.
Versus France, Germany is only twice as dirty for only twice the price which seems like a pretty good deal if you ask me.
IMO the policy has been a natitonal disaster for German, not only have prices increased without materially offsetting carbon, it has also made them much more dependent on Russian gas which increases the economic cost of standing up to Russian aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere. The promises of jobs from domestic production of panels also never quite panned out due to competition from Europe and installation/maintenance related jobs are likely offset by reduced competitiveness from electrical costs not to mention increased strategic dependence on China for components.
Wind has been quite a bit better but locals are starting to push back from what I've been reading.
Which has nothing to do with the cost of wind and solar.
You can tell this because there are multiple European countries which have a higher proportion of renewables than Germany, yet (as you point out yourself) they have lower electricity costs.
I didn't read the whole thing because it asks for an account.
But I want to point something. While I think solar power is great and we should keep working on expanding it, we shouldn't approach renewable energy as our only source.
Right now in Spain we had the worst snowstorm in decades and temperatures have decreased in the whole country. Around 80-85% of the solar panels are useless. Nuclear is at 100% and we're burning coal like crazy. And electricity price went up 27%.
"We shouldn't" is a very strong statement. If solar and wind are 15% of the cost of a nuclear plant then what's the worry? We just build 5x as much as we need (with the obvious benefit that most of the time we have virtually limitless energy.)
The problems with solar and wind can be solved with scale and storage. Nuclear has a number of problems which require technology that doesn't exist at an economical price.
Solar is not controllable. A nuclear power plants scales up or down in less than an hour and works whether it's sunny, rainy, snowing, windy or dry. If you build five times more solar panels, you have five time more panels not running when it's not sunny. We can't store it either, because we would then need to build such large battery farms that it would be both dangerous and impractical. Not to mention that our current batteries have absolutely dreadful efficiencies and lifetimes.
Additionally, the current CO2 emissions over the lifetime of a solar panel are absolutely horrendous if you do not live in a place that is sunny most of the time.
I think you over-estimate the CO2 emissions for solar panels and under-estimate the complexity of nuclear installations.
A quick google search [1] learns that the CO2 emissions of the solar panel are marginally higher than for a nuclear power plant, but more then 10-fold lower than coal plants. Vattenfall did a study, but it's from 1999, so relies on 20-year old solar technology.
In addition, building a nuclear power plant is amazingly complex. In Europe there are hardly any companies that have the technology and risk-appetite to build one without a solid (financial) support from the government. I recall that in the UK they are building one that is over time and way over budget [2] (spoiler: they started in 2008 and as of now still aren't producing any electricity, and the government-promised price of ~100 pounds/MWh was in 2016 already beaten by solar, implying that over the lifetime the nuclear power plant will cost the consumer 50 billion pounds on subsidies and 20 billion on construction)
And sure, you can't control the sun or the clouds. But with a bit of effort you can create a grid that evens out the impact of the weather. High-voltage power grids in Europe are increasingly interconnected and help fill the gaps in electrical power cross border. Excess solar energy from Germany can simply be transferred to the UK via the Netherlands.
> I recall that in the UK they are building one that is over time and way over budget [2] (spoiler: they started in 2008 and as of now still aren't producing any electricity, and the government-promised price of ~100 pounds/MWh was in 2016 already beaten by solar, implying that over the lifetime the nuclear power plant will cost the consumer 50 billion pounds on subsidies and 20 billion on construction)
Oh I know. I'm french, the Flamanville EPR is a running joke. But this is merely a consequence of dubious political choices having lead to putting a hold on building nuclear power plants for a long time, which means the people who knew how to do that are either in other companies or retired. There has been a horrible loss of skill in this subject in most of western Europe and the US. We've built dozens of nuclear power plants are are one of the cleanest countries in the world when it comes to CO2 per kWh. I dare say that at one point we definitely understood how to do it.
Korea has demonstrated they have the ability to build multiple third generation reactors in 5 to 6 years. So does China.
> And sure, you can't control the sun or the clouds. But with a bit of effort you can create a grid that evens out the impact of the weather. High-voltage power grids in Europe are increasingly interconnected and help fill the gaps in electrical power cross border. Excess solar energy from Germany can simply be transferred to the UK via the Netherlands.
The way the electrical grid is made in Europe is fully made with centralisation in mind. A few core production points distributing to everything else. For this to apply to solar, that would require absolutely gigantic solar parks.
> Excess solar energy from Germany can simply be transferred to the UK via the Netherlands.
Except Germany doesn't sell their solar energy. Germany is running on coal and natural gas, producing over 40% of their energy through these means. The absolute insanity of phasing out a solution as effective and safe as nuclear has lead to horribly worse.
> But with a bit of effort you can create a grid that evens out the impact of the weather.
How ? solar panels produce a _pitiful_ amount of energy. We would need dozens of millions of them. A small nuclear power plant produces about 10 TWh per year. A well running solar panel produces, if you're lucky, 300kWh per year. Thirty million solar panels, thirty million square meters plus the needed infrastructure, maintenance... for one measly small nuclear power plant.
Wind is not better. Hydraulic is okay, but most countries have run out of space to make dams. Geothermal is very limited.
The environmental cost to do solar at scale is often overlooked, perhaps as great a sin as obscuring the “true cost” of fossil fuels. The cost of production (strip mining, heavy manufacturing), emplacement (concrete, steel, shipping, land clearing), and short lifespan are easily overlooked when the ideal vision seems so juicy. It’s great to augment a house (assuming you own one) with panels, though without substantial subsidies or disposable income in more northern climes the math still doesn’t pencil out as a good return when compared to natural gas. If your only alternative is imported diesel/heating oil, maybe different story, but of course in such places the carbon cost of TCO goes up in tandem with the benefits.
It's not that we couldn't use the excess energy to generate green fuel or green natural gas as storage that we need anyway for the foreseeable future for aviation, remaining ic engines.
Do we wiggle our magic fingers and generate gas out of nowhere ? Renewable gas accounts for about, at best, 10% of gas consumed in a year. As in, that's about as much renewable gas we could make. And it's not exactly an instantaneous process, so we would still be wasting energy. The best existing solution is storing that energy as water that we would pump up a basin, to be released later and used in a dam. That would work, if we did not need to flood areas where major cities are to make it work.
>Do we wiggle our magic fingers and generate gas out of nowhere ? Renewable gas accounts for about, at best, 10% of gas consumed in a year.
If we have excess (more or less free) electricity, i don't think we need magic fingers for this.
Hydro storage is quite expensive and difficult to build, for natural gas there is already a storage and distribution network in place. And it's quite easy tonstore for a long time.
Solar is not 15% the price of nuclear. This falsehood comes up pretty often because the extreme cases of "late by half a decade" have been parroted incessantly by antinuclear folks. When one actually looks at the numbers, on average the time to build a nuclear plant is 5 years and nowhere near the cost of the late colleagues.
Nuclear plants also operate *efficiently* for decades whereas solar panels only for a few years to a decade. That means replacement has to come more often for panels. They also require more land to generate the same amount of energy (I don't know if that's taken into account in the calculations).
And of course energy has to be retrieved from other sources when solar won't operate which might be more expensive than solar.
While the price of solar is dropping of course, so is the price of nuclear as new reactors are being developed and prototyped: can't remember the name right now but one was funded by Bill Gates and is built in arrays from multiple mass producible units. That allows building smaller, localized reactors at a lower price.
Yeah, achieving 100% is very hard. The interim solution is having gas or even coal plants on standby to run for the few percent of the year which the renewables can't cover.
Isn’t this the story of Energiewende? The theoretical generation capacity is very high but their solar power capacity factor in reality is 10%, add wind and (debatably green) biomass and its still only 20% of installed renewable capacity. So that’s a significant gap that coal ends up covering (more than a few percent). Expanding the program by a factor of 5x to account for inefficient power factor is probably not in the cards considering electricity is already the highest price in Europe. Doing a u-turn on nuclear or a new initiative to replace coal with LNG is more likely in next two decades.
Hour-by-hour multi-year simulations show the US grid can be ran with 90% clean power with current technology. "Clean" being the current nuke and hydro fleet plus a massive expansion of wind, solar and storage.
That's an advocacy report, reaching 90% by 2035 requires an awful lot of policy changes. Without any change the US will hit 55% by 2035.
Also, I think advocacy groups tend to underestimate the obvious and not so obvious impacts an increasingly larger share of so-called clean power. I suggest we do not yet know the true cost of grid-scale battery, e-mobility battery, solar pv and wind because we have not yet reached the end-of-life for a statistically significant percentage of installed projects.
“Solar photovoltaic (PV) deployment has grown at unprecedented rates since the early 2000s. As the global PV market increases, so will the volume of decommissioned PV panels, and large amounts of annual waste are anticipated by the early 2030s. Growing PV panel waste presents a new environmental challenge, but also unprecedented opportunities to create value and pursue new economic avenues.”
“This report, prepared jointly by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the International Energy Agency Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), is the first-ever projection of PV panel waste volumes to 2050. It highlights that recycling or repurposing solar PV panels at the end of their roughly 30-year lifetime can unlock an estimated stock of 78 million tonnes of raw materials and other valuable components globally by 2050. If fully injected back into the economy, the value of the recovered material could exceed USD 15 billion by 2050.”
edit: here's a 2017 in depth EU sponsored study
EU Commission: JRC Science for Policy Report – Materials Impact on the EU’s Competitiveness of the Renewable Energy, Storage and E-mobility Sectors – wind power, solar photovoltaic and battery technologies
See section 6.1 "Recycling of materials from wind turbines, solar panels and batteries"
Agree, lots of unknowns ahead. My response was simply to the comment above asking for citations whether it is even technically possible to run the grid at such high penetration.
Someone made the point that it's a rather daunting materials design challenge to make PV panels: They must withstand 30 years of water, heat, salt and UV light with no degradation, and then trivially separate into their constituent components at recycling time. We are definitely gearing up to create an enormous recycling headache 30 years from now.
The unknowns of ageing wind power are becoming visible here in Germany. There are stacks of wind turbine blades in some regions, waiting on a field for years to maybe be properly disposed of some day.
Replacing old wind turbines is also a financial problem, without the higher-than-now subsidies of the past many aren't viable. So wind turbine parks are actually shrinking.
One may see this as a positive, because it weeds out subsidy-driven inefficiency.
What does proper disposal look like for a fiberglass, epoxy, and plastic construct like a turbine blade? I don’t get the impression that renewable tech is all that recyclable.
It seems like we have the brains to be doing studies on the long term environmental impact of turbines and panels. I confess I haven’t looked too hard for this but I don’t see others posting them and imagine it’s not a very popular topic.
Where I am in Europe, solar panels produce around 15% in December of what they do in June. I'm not even that far north. We don't have that much wind (even on the coast), and the country is very flat so hydro isn't an option.
To use 100% green power we would need a combination of long term energy storage, and HVDC transmission across Europe.
You could look for you own graphs? I don't think it's in dispute that the power output of wind and solar varies, and that its output is somewhat stochastic. And that there's a market for extremely intermittent capacity.
Yes, as you overbuild renewable capacity the number of such occasions goes down. This is why is said that it's hard to reach 100%, but it's not impossible.
Germany’s renewables power factor is ~20%. There’s a significant gap in supply made up by coal. In shutting down a sizable portion of their nuclear capacity, I believe 2020 hit record levels of fossil fuel consumption.
Germany had existing nuclear capacity they shut down as an imprudent reaction the Fukushima disaster. Now they’re making up the supply gap with coal. But for new nuclear plants, you are right, that is not a role for new nuclear investment. I think nuclear has to be a fixed capacity supplier with renewables augmenting, vs the other way around.
I mean, you don’t build the majority of your infrastructure for black swan events. You can still overbuild renewables, which are effective most of the time, and keep some fossil generators like gas peakers, biomas, and biogas for backup power.
Black swan events are completely unpredictable events.
Cloud cover or solar flares are NOT black swan events, they are just the opposite: they are events that we know for sure will happen (just like global pandemics) even if we don't know when they will happen.
That is your fault for not building more wind. Some areas in the US are > 50% wind. Other areas are not allowing it, mostly for political reasons (but you cannot draw a "side" - in different areas it is different political sides opposing wind)
To be fair, some of those “political” opponents are considering ecological impacts of wind, including local habitat impacts and long term sustainability. The amount of fossil fuel resources to in place one turbine (steel, concrete, ongoing lubricants) for devices that may have a 20% power factor and a 25 year lifespan (ignoring the shorter blade lifespan), doesn’t always look the most attractive, especially when you drive by abandoned turbines.
There isn't even enough time to construct nuclear plants within the timeframes needed to mitigate climate change.
Nuclear power is also just too expensive. I know the tech crowd is still angry about the safety debate, and that may even be justified. But it just doesn't matter any more.
Solar + battery is now cheaper than coal, of all things, for new construction, in fairly typical situations.
Solar panels are also fairly productive in winter, more than people realise. That's because we tend to believe their output is proportional to temperatures, which it is not. Solar irradiation varies far less throughout the year than temperatures. Length of daylight in higher latitudes is an issue, but correlates surprisingly well with stronger winds, at least in Europe.
I would’t be surprised to hear most of the worlds population lives in an area ideal for solar power. I’m thinking SE Asia and Africa. But also, 18 million people live in greater Los Angeles alone, so a good portion of the US population and certainly a large portion of central and south America would be good candidates as well for solar.
Especially as those areas become more wealthy and new demands come online. The model of using coal and LNG to power air conditioning units is not one to replicate.
No, of course not. But as I said, around 80-85% of the solar energy production was stopped. Wind and hydro are not enough so we're burning coal when we could.
France is also making a transition to renewable energy but they are not giving up on nuclear because they understand the risks are very, very low and they can produce enough energy to fulfill their needs and to sell to their neighbours.
> France is also making a transition to renewable energy but they are not giving up on nuclear
Unfortunately there is very strong support on dropping nuclear power in France in favor of renewable energy, across almost all the political spectrum. Nuclear share of electricity production is already planned to be lowered from 70% to 50%.
Nuclear is being phased out due to cost. As more things are discovered that could go wrong, it gets more and more expensive to fix all of them.
Nuclear is also bad at this kind of thing. You really want either storage (storing heat is easy, by the way), or cheap plants. It doesn't really matter if they are expensive to run as long as they only run a few days a year.
I'm not generalizing a whole year. But we need to be ready for moments like this. Looking at the data in that website you can see that solar went down to almost 0% yesterday.
Rare backup power can be supplied with hydrogen burned in turbines. The capital cost per MW(e) of a simple cycle turbine power plant is just 5% of that of current technology LWR nuclear power plants.
What's the heating situation like in Spain? All electric?
I was about to say something to the effect of: does it really matter if electricity prices spike greatly in response to the supply of renewables? Why shouldn't we discourage people from using electricity at these times? I suppose this doesn't apply to vital things like heating though.
> does it really matter if electricity prices spike?
One of the reasons the electricity costs spike is because you’re maintaining two generation facilities in Germany and Spain. Solar takes massive investment but the coal plants still need to be maintained and fed for when the Sun is obscured. And I think I recall that in a place like Germany, electric demand actually goes up, not down, when the sun is obscured - more people indoors.
I would also like to add that it matters significantly on an individual/family basis to productive capacity and well-being when electricity costs go up, whether manifested as blackouts or much steeper bills. Not everyone is wealthy enough to absorb that without noticeable pain. There’s a bit of a “let them eat cake” aspect to comments like this.
I know what the first hit of google says. It's the only thing anyone can give me when they assert that the O&G industry is the recipient of subsidization. And it's a total joke. It mentions stuff like asset depreciation and LIFO inventory accounting. Basic accounting principles are not subsidies, and are not specific to the oil industry. The author was clearly stretching to try to prove a political point; it is not an accurate representation of the facts.
The point is that the government does not pay you incentives to consume oil like it does for electric cars or solar panels.
Better and more balanced source is the Wiki article that covers the entire energy sector and various subsidies that have been awarded to each: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidy
One odd thing I'm not seeing discussed frequently in threads about solar:
Where are the cheap panels and storage solutions?
I have lived in my bus for most of the past five years. I have a solar array on the roof (with lots of python glue[0]). And panel (and for that matter, battery) prices that I'm seeing today are no cheaper - and in some cases, a bit more expensive - than when I architected the system five years ago.
Is all the reporting about cheap solar somehow specific to grid-tied solutions?
Where are you located? In the northeast US, I keep seeing panel prices come down each year, to the point where they are a fairly small portion of the system cost these days- labor now dominates the price.
Too late and nowhere nearly as much as they should've. Sure, they get credit for doing *something* but the free market proponents continuously operated against solar.
Praising them is like praising a reckless driver with a fat, greedy business dude in the passenger seat and people in the back staring at their phones, who decides to act normally seconds before an accident.
Govs are in the business of broadly benefiting the public now? - And at the expense of fossil fuel shareholders who have handsomely paid for their legislative privileges?!?.
> Govs are in the business of broadly benefiting the public now?
I would argue that they are not. Rather I'd like to see Governments close the broken incentives that lead companies to not broadly benefit the public. The key is that, IMO, government should not in any way be in business or making business decisions (eg solar over another technology), but rather making societal standards (0.x grams of CO2 per GW Hr, or whatever a reasonable metric would be)
Then let people exercise their freedom to choose which upstanding business they support.
The Economist is not a perfect newspaper, but they're possibly the only non-specialist press that would dive deeply into "what is a PN junction and how does it make electricity"!
> the oil shocks of the 1970s saw governments get interested
The same issue of fuel imports drove France to build a huge number of nuclear plants, which certainly worked but are now ageing out into a maintenance headache. As the Economist points out, economy of scale and accumulation of experience in manufacturing has worked brilliantly to drive down costs in solar (and also wind).
I myself got solar panels on my roof about 5 years ago, locking in a subsidy rate for 20 years. The government incentives to the renewables market have really worked brilliantly. It's just odd how few politicians want to take credit for it.
Considering how oil industry executives became élite wealth and moved into senior government positions globally, it is no wonder they did not make solar energy research illegal.
Not True ... The reason solar power is a usable today is due to natural evolutions of markets that made storing energy more viable. The search of long lasting batteries for mobile phones and electric cars. Governments had no intention of accelerating the obsolescence of fossil fuels but once you have better alternatives it's really hard to suppress. Just think that in 2015 Tesla was struggling, war in the middle east over oil and the scandal of Germany / fake CO2 calculations on german diesel cars.
> the scandal of Germany / fake CO2 calculations on german diesel cars.
The scandal was not about fake CO2 calculations.
It was about Volkswagen having its engine management systems detect if a car was being tested and alter how it ran so that it generated less NOx emissions at the expense of power output[1].
When the car was used outside the lab it would produce a higher power output at the expense of illegally high NOx emissions.
>Governments had no intention of accelerating the obsolescence of fossil fuels
China did. They were acutely aware of how militarily exposed reliance on oil was for them and how polluting coal fired power stations were and were keen on pushing all possible alternatives.
France did, due to lack of domestic fossil fuel production; but they went nuclear instead. Germany has struggled internally - they have a strong green faction and a strong domestic coal industry.
So you give the credit to Apple,Google and Tesla ? any sources on how much did this companies invested in R&D for solar panels or wind turbines? Or how you connected smartphones and cars sold in last decade with all the research that happened until now?
The biggest issue with Solar Panels and wind turbines were always about normalising output. This used to cause substantial loss which made it unviable. Things got much better when storage of energy became cheaper, and engine tech improved due to Tesla.
You can also give credit for the Energy Derivative market that used trading on Energy futures to help companies financially hedge any risk on green energy.
Any numbers that prove that Tesla actually put more money then governments ? In fact Tesla benefited from the government programs so the prove would make no sense, it must be other companies that put more more then governments in the green energy sector.
Solar power doesn't pollute and I would argue that all other forms of power that do pollute aren't taxed nearly enough for it, with coal being the most obvious example.
Coal power sends an insane amount of carbon into the atmosphere. If we properly carbon-taxed coal, it would go out of business tomorrow. And that doesn't even get into the environmental destruction that comes from strip mining.
Strip mining is when coal companies buy a whole fucking mountain and then destroy it piece by piece to remove the coal. How the fuck is that not good for the environment and our society after the coal is gone?
So, solar power really is a lot of cheaper than coal when you consider all the negative externalities that it brings.