Solar happenings

[nwdiver]

How well would that work in an unheated basement? Mine was below 40F on some cold days this winter. (Yes I need to do some insulating).

The Geospring is a "hybrid" hot water heater meaning it's a heat pump but it also has traditional resistance elements for back-up. I've got mine in my garage and it often gets <40F in the winter.... The resistance elements kick on ~35F-40F.

 

[JRP3]

Interesting. Thanks.

 

[tigerade]

The Netherlands installed a very impressive 100,000 PV systems in 2013 and aims to install another 100,000 in 2014.

100,000 More Solar Roofs In Netherlands In 2013, Another 100,000 Targeted For 2014 | CleanTechnica

The Dutch solar market saw good growth, approximately doubling from about 100,000 solar roofs to about 200,000 solar roofs. In 2014, the aim is to reach about 300,000.
To be exact, 101,326 new installations were registered in 2013, mostly on private homes. That compares well to 140,000 installations in the US in 2013. The US, of course, has a much larger population — approximately 19 times larger.

 

[drinkerofkoolaid]

Apple is currently building a gigantic sapphire production plant. Is it possible that Apple is planning to make some sort of sapphire solar panel system that would be integrated into all forms of devices and buildings (windows?) Would there be a significant benefit to this process? What kind of effect would it have on the efficiency/ cost of Solar Panels?

"Now that sapphire (an insulator) can now be used, the only conductive pathway remaining is the spiderweb of zinc nanowires. This state-of-the-art fabrication technique should allow access to all manner of new devices, including high efficiency solar panels"

Solar Panels Made from Sapphire - Yahoo Voices - voices.yahoo.com

 

[swaltner]

Apple is currently building a gigantic sapphire production plant. Is it possible that Apple is planning...

I don't know if it's a new product. Apple currently uses sapphire in the iPhone 5s for the "home button" that has the fingerprint sensor mounted underneath it. Apple - iPhone 5s - Design says the sensor is "Made from laser-cut sapphire crystal, the surface of the button directs the image of your finger to a capacitive touch sensor, which reads beneath the outer layers of your skin to get a detailed print."

 

[tigerade]

An article discussing the impact of falling solar prices:
Log In - The New York Times

 

[FlasherZ]

Unfortunately, it's Krugman. The byline said all it needed to say.

"By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."

 

[PeterW]

Opinion: As nuclear power dies, solar rises - CNN.com

Wasn't sure where to post this, thought it was a good read.

 

[Skotty]

Opinion: As nuclear power dies, solar rises - CNN.com

Wasn't sure where to post this, thought it was a good read.

Nuclear should not be considered an enemy. http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/energy-and-climate/liberals-and-progressives-for-nuclear/

That said, I look forward to seeing what solar can do.

 

[nwdiver]

Nuclear should not be considered an enemy. http://thebreakthrough.org/index.ph...limate/liberals-and-progressives-for-nuclear/

That said, I look forward to seeing what solar can do.

Most nuclear opponents would like nothing more than to see it succeed... but we're also realists and accept the fact that it is just far to expensive to be a viable solution. There is no path to economic viability for nuclear power. Solar Power will very likely be <$1 by 2020. We're already very close... pricing out a ~70kW system for work a budget system is Panels $0.54/w ; Inverter $0.13/w ; Mounting $0.26/w... only the cost of labour would bump it just over $1/w. This equates to ~$0.03/kWh... there is no way nuclear can compete with that. The cost just to OPERATE a nuclear plant is ~0.02/kWh... never mind the cost to BUILD it.

5 years ago I was looking forward to watching the nuclear renaissance kill coal... but the reality is that since 1977 the cost of nuclear power has risen ~400% while the cost of solar has fallen ~99%. "Too cheap to meter"? I bet solar can meet that challenge ... at least between ~9am and 5pm :biggrin:.

 

[JRP3]

You can't realistically price solar without including the price of massive energy storage.

 

[nwdiver]

You can't realistically price solar without including the price of massive energy storage.

OK... so ignoring the fact that we can get to ~20% solar with ZERO storage. And probably ~50% with demand response.

The COST of a Model S battery is probably ~$20k. If we assume only ~1000 cycles that comes out to ~$0.17/kWh

http://insideevs.com/tesla-battery-...less-than-a-quarter-of-the-car-in-most-cases/

A 5000 cycle life is probably more likely especially of it's being cycled daily for $0.034/kWh

Then there's lab tests that indicate a 20000 cycle life is more than possible for $0.0085/kWh

http://info.a123systems.com/blog/bid/151833/Cycle-Life-Testing-The-Lithium-Ion-Battery-Ultramarathon

THEN there's the "Giga Factory" which should lower battery costs another ~30% by 2020 for $0.0056/kWh

The best hope for nuclear is currently either Nuscale or the AP1000... they think that if they play their cards right they MIGHT be able to get to $0.07/kWh.... AND that depends on a 90% capacity factor; something that cheap solar will make IMPOSSIBLE.

 

[JRP3]

You'd really need to figure enough battery capacity to power a large section of the country for a week or so for a worst case scenario, a week of heavy rain, or snow. I don't know what that would work out to be, but a single 85kWh battery per household won't cut it.

 

[RubberToe]

Lots of good points. To go completely renewable with no baseload (coal, nuclear, natural gas) would require massive storage like JRP mentioned. And unless you want to make EVERY end point power user be able to both generate and store all the power they would ever need, there will have to be at a minimum a local massive storage facility or a local/regional baseload power supplier with some kind of grid connections still in place.

The way I think things might play out, would be as follows. Obviously wind and solar are getting installed at ever increasing rates. This cuts into the baseload power suppliers revenue, and also makes it tougher for the maintaining of the grid. Someone from England suggested that the running of the grid be separated from the generation of the power. I guess that was done there. That seems to me like a good idea. The grid would be nationalized, and run for the benefit of all connected to it. Then the power companies can compete against each other concerning who can supply power when and at what cost. They would also be competing against the individual homes that supply power via their solar panels. This would be a major change, no doubt.

From strictly a "lets emit as little CO2 as possible" point of view, I think something like this might happen: solar and wind keep ramping up, lessening the need for baseload power. Especially once personal or regional energy storage come into play over time as costs for that decrease. As less baseload power is required, they could start turning off the more polluting plants first (i.e. coal). Any specific plant wouldn't be shut down until the surrounding community that uses it's power can reliably get all required power from other sources or stored power from renewables. Since baseload will still be required for a long time, the choice would be nuclear. One problem I could see doing this would be that should renewable and storage come down so fast that everyone is doing it, you could end up with a very expensive nuclear plant that runs for 10 years and then can't compete with the renewable/storage suppliers. Who then eats the cost if the plant is no longer economically feasible?

Hawaii will probably show us the way in this regard, excluding the nuclear component. Their power costs are so high, and they have the highest solar installation per capita. Maybe Hawaii could be used as a great test case for nationalizing the grid, then letting the power suppliers compete against each other? In cases where suppliers who use non-renewable sources can still undercut renewable providers, you would still have to game the system to favor the renewable suppliers whenever possible, if that is where you want to go as a society. Obviously the big non-renewable energy companies aren't going to be very happy if the national consensus is that they all need to be put out of business. But in some sense I think this is the way things are already moving. No new coal plants are coming on line, renewables are growing, and cities such as Los Angeles and others are swearing off coal as quickly as they can.

The path to 100% renewable power is I think eventually going to happen, not sure how long it will take to get there. It could be sooner than many of us think. You would want to make the best possible use of facilities already in place (the current grid, and current power plants) as you go down that path, as long as those facilities don't interfere with the eventual goal of 100% renewable power.

My $0.02.

RT

 

[lolachampcar]

RT,
The natural progression you describe seems the logical path.

Local storage is inevitable. The question is in what form? Will it be on a per house basis with a Tesla battery and a generator hooked up to the natural gas supply because the local utility went on the war path? Or, will it be the local utility doing neighborhood storage once the utility owned local solar warrants local storage. Batteries are sized for 24 hour cycle storage and grow beyond that when technology/costs allow. Fill in power is provided by the ever scaling down demand generation the utility already owns.

One of those two scenarios is less expensive, more efficient and makes the utility relevant in fifty years. The other has the utility extinct.

 

[nwdiver]

I expect natural gas to be the dominant "stand-by" energy source. The plants are cheap to build and there's no warm-up time like Nuclear or Coal... they're practically push-button. There are a lot of options but I don't see nuclear being one of them; Nuclear Power is ~$5/w to build and the cost to maintain a nuclear plant is ~80% the cost to operate one... great choice for "base-load" very poor choice for stand-by.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Half these questions have been answered in the real world over the last three years in Germany. A week of heavy rain? If there's no solar radiation hitting the panels then there's no solar radiation heating the buildings and therefore much less air conditioning boosting the mid-day electricity demand. Until you're at about 10% solar you're just chopping the peaks off the demand curve every day, so there's no storage necessary.

Let's get to 10% solar before we start worrying about storage. This is June of last year in Germany:

 

[RubberToe]

Well, we got to 6% solar in California yesterday :smile:. I'm guessing that September we may hit 10% for the first time:

 

[Skotty]

I think we could reasonably do maybe 50% renewables, on average. The problem is the other 50%.

 

[JRP3]

We are discussing beyond 10, 20, or even 50% here.

I expect natural gas to be the dominant "stand-by" energy source. The plants are cheap to build and there's no warm-up time like Nuclear or Coal... they're practically push-button.

NG plants sitting idle most of the time are not economical to build since they will never produce enough electricity to pay for their cost. As for nuclear, conventional plants may not work but smaller modular LFTRs might.