It is inevitable that most of everything will become solar powered. It makes economic sense despite the fossil fuel apologist. A breakthrough came today with a momentous event.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/26/solar-impulse-plane-...
Despite retardation of development by conservatives coal and oil interest, solar power is moving forward and should.
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Myk, I looked and am unable to find any studies that demonstrate that solar power is economically superior (costs less), as you’ve said, to other forms of power generation. Can you point me in the direction of some? Thx!
Well, you won't find any CyberLN and there is a reason.
1) All major oil and coal manufacturers are subsidized.
2) The real savings cannot be realized until a viable infrastructure is in place.
BUT...
If you implement solar power on your own and make enough to exceed your need and send the excess to the grid you will get paid for that power.
There is a person in Lewisville Texas doing just that. He has solar panels and a wind machine. He made them himself.
Note if you removed the subsidies and tax abatements that oil and coal enjoy and applied them to solar and wind, the cost would be cheaper.
Image result for Oil and coal subsidies
The study found that oil, natural gas, and coal received $369 billion, $121 billion, and $104 billion (2010 dollars), respectively, or 70% of total energy subsidies over that period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies
As you can see from the study the customer only pays 30% of what fossil fuel energy really cost.
China is moving to solar and wind energy, not because they care about the environment but because in the long run, it's cheaper and sustainable.
Both solar and wind offer advantages other than just reduced pollution. They are sustainable require less maintenance and labor and don't need to be refined or processed. As the grid becomes more dependent on solar and wind, the cost will go down.
@mykcob4:
Here in Australia at least, rooftop solar is heavily subsidized.
If you implement solar power on your own and make enough to exceed your need and send the excess to the grid you will get paid for that power.
Millions are doing just that in Australia. We have 24 panels on our roof, which produce far more power than we can use in the daytime. We sell the surplus back to the power company for about 3 cents a kilowatt, and they sell it back to us at night for about five times as much. Batteries are still too expensive to make going off-grid viable. Maybe in a few years.
One problem is that the power companies are selling less power due to rooftop solar, but they still need to maintain a large base capacity to meet nighttime demand. Even with solar, you still need power stations and transmission lines, but reduced revenues mean that power companies are less willing to build or update their facilities.
I've heard that solar roof tiles and bricks are now being manufactured. So you can turn entire houses into generators. Couple that with cheap, efficient batteries, and maybe grid power will become obsolete. I think that will take another 10 years or so, though.
Wind power is more problematic. Maintenance costs are high, and the turbines are noisy. They also kill birds. A lot of people complain about the effect on the landscape. The vertical axis type may be better, but the jury is still out.
I installed Solar power just last year reducing our power bills (we are home all day being pensioners) by 3/4. The largest component of our bill now is the supply charge which, as pensioners is subsidised(woot!) We only have a small system sufficient for our daily needs, selling the surplus back to grid at 7c Kw/H and being charged 42c Kw/H in the evening!
Algebe is dead right, batteries are our next step and we will be self sufficient except for the gas I prefer for cooking. When batteries fall sufficiently in price I shall certainly invest in one which should reduce our bills to approx $AU2.00 per month supply charge only.
Energy companies are already ramping up supply charges to try and compensate for their profit shortfall predicted to reduce their turnover by over 50% by 2030 on domestic usage and with commercial premises filling vast roof spaces with solar panels their industrial base will dwindle as well.
South Australia has Elon Musks biggest battery array in the world causing much angst and dismay amongst the coal loving dinosaurs in the conservative side of politics.
The world is changing, becoming a cleaner, nicer place, hardly anyone smokes in Australia now, all we have to do is get rid of coal and there's another step for our grandchildren's' survival.
I have to dock you a point: its kilowatts*hours, not kilowatts/hours.
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Have you considered one of those large tanks of gas for cooking/heating water?
We have street supply of gas which we use (as it is cheaper) on winter evenings for cooking and heating.
And ok, Correction understood!
@Old man... all we have to do is get rid of coal
Here in Queensland, they're trying to do that by sending it all to China [LOL]. I hope Australia loses the dig-it-up-and-ship-it-out culture soon. There's a sense of impending doom as China starts to restructure its economy and fix its environment.
Maybe I'm an idealist; but perhaps dollars/kWh isn't the best metric. How about carbon/kWh instead?
@Nyarlathotep: How about carbon/kWh instead?
Very true. But the real deciding factor is votes per kWh.
Nyar: “carbon/kWh”
There’s the linchpin!
Solar power is only economical when somebody else is paying for it.
...
You could heat your house economically burning cash - as long as somebody else supplies the " fuel".
What someones privatised the sun? How is someone else paying for sunlight?
I don't get that first sentence, the second sentence makes perfect sense.
You do have to factor into the cost the price of the equipment. You need the solar panels, a controller and storage batteries. The batteries will need frequent replacing - every few years - and the controllers don't last forever. I have a system and have had to replace the batteries twice and the controller 3 times in 10 years. (When the controller dies it sometimes takes out the battery) Surprisingly the panels are quite robust. They survived a lightning strike that smoked the controller.
Anyone who tells you " solar power is cheap" is forgetting to mention the fact that somebody else is paying for it. The governmental subsidy doesn't come out of thin air - it comes out of somebody else's pocket.
Of course my system didn't qualify for a subsidy. Oh well. Considering it' s a low power draw system - it' s still cheaper than running commercial power 1\4 mile.
So, solar is not cheap, but still cheaper than the grid. Got it.
In remote areas under certain conditions it is cheaper.
But if you're looking to run a household or business - in almost all cases you' re still financially way better off using commercial power.
Yep solar cannot yet compete with already in place super expensive infrastructure.
It is closer than you think on: throwing a few modern panels on your south facing roof in sunny areas tied to the grid however. ROI on a few smartly placed panels and no battery backup can be as little as 3-4 years in terms of electric bill savings. Especially as many commercial grids switch to a tier system of electric costs. Where if you go over 500 kWh a month your electric bill jumps from 10 cents a kWh to 20 cents or more.
Ofcourse simply using less electricity is the best way :)
Then as I mentioned before there is all the hidden costs of grid energy powered by fossil fuels, if the cost of human life and health is factored in, at even modest rates, fossil fuel large grids are far more expensive even subtracting out all the already in place infrastructure costs.
A solid point of agreement - using less is best.
The problem isn' t a hardware problem. It' s a meatware problem.
People, that is.
The ever expanding population is the elephant in the room that refuses to be addressed.
If the human population was measured in the millions rather than billions, solar would easily take care of all power requirements. ( incidentally - " solar" includes wind and hydroelectric power - as sunlight is the driving force behind those forms).
The sun is the driving force behind all forms of power :) Except maybe geothermal, although w/o the sun there would not of been the material for the earth to form into a large solid mass with a hot core :)
I wrote a 30 page paper for college that I spent a few months on about nuclear power. (I started anti nuclear and after the research became begrudgingly pro-nuclear as lesser of evils sort of scenario.) One of the best books I found was: "without all the hot air."
And I feel it very neatly and concisely explained the overall energy picture, including a large section on solar wind etc.
And you are right, if we had a population measured in millions instead of billions, solar, wind and existing hydro/thermal would easily cover all our energy needs. Even if the entire population of millions consumed energy at the rate the average US citizen does.
A single large aluminum plant producing aluminum at 15k kWh per ton and say they produce 100 tons an hour while in production, would require 1.5 million kWh of production every hour. At roughly 4 panels needed to create a single kWh in ideal conditions, you would need 6 million panels. Each needing roughly 25 square feet of space. 25 times 6 million = 150 million square feet. Then double it so they can run at full capacity even if it's cloudy or the sun is not directly overhead. 300 million square feet.
43560 square feet in an acre, that is 6887 acres of solar panels to just run the large aluminum plant during daylight hours. It also has to be near by or quite a bit of loss will also occur in transmission. That is roughly 10 square miles that would have to be set aside near the large aluminum plant. Or put in numbers we can understand, that is roughly the size of 45 eighteen hole golf courses. Cost aside, a problem with solar is simply space. And ofcourse it all stops as soon as it is dark cutting production time in half when it is far more efficient for aluminum plants to run 24/7.
Does solar have a niche in rooftop solar? Absolutely. Could we ever even approach 50% of humanities current and growing power needs with solar? Even with enormous leaps in efficiency of the panels, conversion and transmission, (let alone cost,) not a chance! simply due to size constraints.
An admirable goal would be to put solar on every south (or flat) facing roof available, but at current global growth rates in power use, putting solar on every south/flat facing roof available would not even keep up with the growth in new demand for power.
I have been following the progress of the Solar Impulse 2 since it began it's journey. The expedition made many stopovers, and the people in charge made many speeches. One thing they constantly repeated was "if we can make it work on an airplane, we can make it work everywhere.
There are no studies that associate lower costs for solar power tied to this flight. But instead, just like Columbus, no one knows what pushing back this barrier will produce. But there will be positive results because today's adventure lays the foundation for a future generation of engineers and dreamers.