China wind power

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"China's wind power capacity will increase more than five-fold over the next decade from 2009, a report forecast on Wednesday, as the country steps up its drive to develop clean energy.

Total installed wind power capacity will reach at least 150 gigawatts by

2020 compared with 25.8 gigawatts at the end of 2009, according to the China Wind Power Outlook 2010 report.

A more ambitious forecast by the publishers of the report -- Greenpeace, the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association (CREIA) and the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) -- is 230 gigawatts over the next 10 years.

That would be equal to 13 times the capacity of the Three Gorges Dam and could cut 410 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, or 150 million tonnes of coal consumption, said Yang Ailun of Greenpeace China.

In a more optimistic forecast, GWEC itself predicts China's wind power capacity could reach 253 gigawatts by 2020." ...

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Dirk

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Dirk Bruere at NeoPax
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Doncha just love all the great things that will happen by 2020?

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"Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego."

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Yes, China needs more wind and solar power.

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"The air pollution and smog in Beijing and Shanghai are sometimes so bad that the airports are shut down because of poor visibility. The air quality of Beijing is 16 times worse than New York City. Sometimes you can't even see building a few blocks away and blue sky is a rare sight. In Shanghai sometimes you can't see the street from the 5th floor window. Fresh air tours to the countryside are very popular."

"One survey found that a third of mainland China is regularly soaked in acid rain and half of the cities and counties surveyed receive at least some acid rain. In some places every rainy day is an acid rain day and limestone buildings are dissolving in the acid air"

-Bill

Reply to
Bill Bowden

Some great things have already happened, ahead of schedule.

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'...it has shut many of its smaller and inefficient coal-burning plants nearly two years ahead of schedule.'

'The closures put China 18 months ahead in its schedule to shut 50GW of coal-fuelled generating capacity by the end of 2010, he noted.'

'The closures, equal to about seven per cent of China's current power-generating capacity, resulted in a drop in coal use of about 160 million tonnes since January 2006. Annual carbon dioxide emissions are down by 124 million tonnes, while sulphur dioxide output has been reduced by one million tonnes per year.'

The headline grabbing claim about the rate of new plant coming online that you repeat doesn't acknowledge the rate of closure of old inefficient plant.

-- Regards Malcolm Remove sharp objects to get a valid e-mail address

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Malcolm Moore

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If wind and solar energy are such a scam, as many here believe, it makes one wonder why the Chinese are such suckers doesn't it? Hardly the tree hugging political correctness of Chinese "libruls" is it? Maybe it has more to do with the politburo being composed almost entirely of engineers and scientists.

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Dirk

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Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

hugging political

politburo being composed

There are probably big areas in China where it makes sense to get the most out of wind and solar energy.

With the politburo being mostly engineers and scientists I'm sure they'll have their base load covered with power generation they can actually rely on!

Nial.

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Nial Stewart

An interesting article pertinent to this discussion....

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"So the effect of the Kyoto Protocol is that it is OK for the West to burn fossil fuels, as long as the West is also subsidizing hydroelectric dam construction in China ?

Does anyone but me find that truly and bizarrely hilarious? I?m sure the Chinese are busting up laughing, and saying ?Give us 20 Kyoto protocols, this is great, we?ll let you well-meaning Western fools build all the hydroelectric plants China can hold? ? "

Madness.

Nial.

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Nial Stewart

fossil

Agree. If there are going to be carbon taxes and credits, they should not be exported.

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Dirk

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Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

What China really needs is stack scrubbers.

John

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John Larkin

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And propagandists.

John

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John Larkin

Wind's economic, if you've got wind. It's PV solar that isn't, yet.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

There is a huge uptake of solar water heaters in Chian. Just about everyone has one. Very efficient (vacuum) and very cheap (until you pay the middleman importer).

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Dirk

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Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

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At what cost? I went looking on Google but couldn't find any numbers. Saw a few sites claiming stack scrubbers generate other pollution "scrubber sludge" ,water pollution, and the like. If stack scrubbers are the solution, why doesn't China use them now?

-Bill

Reply to
Bill Bowden

Bill Bowden schrieb:

Hello,

the acid rain is not only a problem for limestone buildings, it is a problem for armored concrete too, especially if there is only a thin layer of concrete over the steel.

Bye

Reply to
Uwe Hercksen

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FREMONT, Calif. ? A few years ago, Silicon Valley start-ups like Solyndra, Nanosolar and MiaSolé dreamed of transforming the economics of solar power by reinventing the technology used to make solar panels and deeply cutting the cost of production. Founded by veterans of the Valley?s chip and hard-drive industries, these companies attracted billions of dollars in venture capital investment on the hope that their advanced ?thin film? technology would make them the Intels and Apples of the global solar industry.

But as the companies finally begin mass production ? Solyndra just flipped the switch on a $733 million factory here last month ? they are finding that the economics of the industry have already been transformed, by the Chinese. Chinese manufacturers, heavily subsidized by their own government and relying on vast economies of scale, have helped send the price of conventional solar panels plunging and grabbed market share far more quickly than anyone anticipated.

As a result, the California companies, once so confident that they could outmaneuver the competition, are scrambling to retool their strategies and find niches in which they can thrive.

?The solar market has changed so much it?s almost enough to make you want to cry,? said Joseph Laia, chief executive of MiaSolé. ?We have spent a lot more time and energy focusing on costs a year or two before we thought we had to.?

The challenges come despite extensive public and private support for the Silicon Valley companies. Solyndra, one of the biggest firms, has raised more than $1 billion from investors. The federal government provided a $535 million loan guarantee for the company?s new robot-run,

300,000-square-foot solar panel factory, known as Fab 2.

?The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra,? President Obama said in May during an appearance at the then-unfinished factory. But during the year that Solyndra?s plant was under construction, competition from the Chinese helped drive the price of solar modules down 40 percent. Solyndra rushed to start cranking out panels on Sept. 13, two months ahead of schedule, and it has increased marketing efforts to make the case to customers that Solyndra?s more expensive panels are cost-effective when installation charges are factored in.

?It definitely puts more pressure on us to bring our costs down as quickly as possible by ramping up volume,? said Ben Bierman, Solyndra?s executive vice president for operations and engineering.

Silicon Valley companies like Solyndra, Nanosolar and MiaSolé continue to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in customer orders and some plan to expand local manufacturing. But the rapid rise of low-cost Chinese manufacturers has made investors ? who once envisioned the region?s future as Solar Valley ? skittish about backing new capital-intensive start-ups.

?I don?t see another Solyndra being done,? said Anup Jacob, whose private equity firm, Virgin Green Fund, has invested significantly in Solyndra.

In the third quarter of 2010, venture capital investment in solar companies plummeted to $144 million from $451 million in the year-ago quarter, according to the Cleantech Group, a San Francisco research firm.

The paucity of capital and the sheer size of Chinese solar panel makers have proved particularly problematic for companies like Solyndra and MiaSolé, which make photovoltaic cells using a material called copper indium gallium selenide, or CIGS.

Unlike conventional solar cells, made from silicon wafers, CIGS cells can be deposited on glass or flexible materials, much as ink is printed on rolls of newspaper. Though the technology is less efficient at converting sunlight into electricity, the promise of ?thin film? solar cells was that they could be made cheaply. But producing CIGS cells on a mass scale has turned out to be a formidable technological challenge, requiring the invention of specialized manufacturing equipment.

While Silicon Valley companies were working on the problem, silicon prices fell and Chinese companies like JA Solar, Suntech and Yingli Green Energy rapidly expanded production of conventional solar panels, supported by tens of billions of dollars in inexpensive credit from the Chinese government as well as other subsidies like cheap land.

Arno Harris, chief executive of Recurrent Energy, a San Francisco solar developer acquired by Sharp last month, said he chose to sign a supply deal with Yingli because the Chinese company offered low prices, quality products and financing.

?We realized that would enable us to bid competitive power prices from projects that could also be efficiently financed,? Mr. Harris said in an e-mail.

Chinese solar panel makers now supply about 40 percent of the California market, the largest in the United States, and the bulk of the European market, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research and consulting firm.

?We grow every year with double revenue and almost double capacity,? said Fang Peng, the chief executive of JA Solar, in a telephone interview from the company?s Shanghai headquarters. ?At end of the year, we will have 1.8 gigawatts of capacity and will have grown from 4,000 employees at the beginning of this year to more than 11,000.?

By comparison, Solyndra expects to have a total production capacity of

300 megawatts by the end of 2011.

The competition from the Chinese prompted some Silicon Valley companies, like AQT Solar, to pursue new strategies to survive. AQT has modified off-the-shelf machines used to make computer hard drives to create CIGS cells using a proprietary process. The Sunnyvale company, which has raised $15 million from investors, further cut its capital costs by manufacturing only solar cells, which it sells to other companies to package into solar panels.

Rather than build a factory from the ground up, the company recycled a

1970s-era rental building. ?We moved in here in eight weeks, put our first 20-megawatt line up and did it for under a million dollars. That?s on Chinese time,? said Michael Bartholomeusz, AQT?s chief executive.

A mile away, another start-up, Innovalight, has abandoned solar module manufacturing altogether. The company had developed what it calls a silicon ink, which increases a solar cell?s efficiency when it is printed on a standard silicon wafer.

After installing a 10-megawatt production line, in late 2008, Innovalight executives decided that, rather than compete with the Chinese, they would license the patented ink technology to them and avoid having to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to build factories of their own.

?How do you fight against enormous subsidies, low-interest loans, cheap labor and scale and a government strategy to make you No. 1 in solar?? said Conrad Burke, Innovalight?s chief. ?Innovation will be the heart of the U.S. strategy, and although it might not create the same scale, we?re exporting well-protected technology to China and creating well-paying jobs here.?

As part of its corporate sustainability policy, Wal-Mart Stores last month acted to bolster American CIGS companies by signing a deal with a Silicon Valley solar installer, SolarCity, to put 15 megawatts of photovoltaic panels on its big-box stores and requiring that a significant percentage of them come from thin-film companies like MiaSolé.

Even so, SolarCity?s chief executive, Lyndon Rive, acknowledged that his company would also be installing a large number of conventional solar panels for the retail giant ? nearly all of them made in China.

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Dirk

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On a sunny day (Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:18:32 +0100) it happened Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote in :

Actually I did read that earlier, and it made me look up those Chinese companies ,and get the specs for their solar cells, and prices, google stp185s_24ad_en.pdf Yingli-YL185.pdf Say about 430 Euro each for a 185 W or so panel. I then did a design with some online solar power calculator with these cells:

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and I cannot break even in > 30 years with those cells here in the Netherlands, even if placed in a perfect position facing the sun. No solar for me, also the initial investment for the sort of power I am using was much more then 50000 $. I was hoping, as I just did the yearly power sums here, but no way is solar competitive in my country. Not even with subsidies.

Maybe in the south, near the equator, in the Sahara desert..

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Jan Panteltje

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competitive in my country.

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"As of September 2010, there are now 546 solar module prices below $4.00 per watt (?2.92 per watt) or 42.6% of the total survey. This compares with 527 price points below $4.00 per watt (?3.12 per watt) in September.

The lowest retail price for a multicrystalline silicon solar module is $1.97 per watt (?1.44 per watt) from a US retailer. The lowest retail price for a monocrystalline silicon module is also $2.21 per watt (?1.61 per watt), from a German retailer. "

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Dirk

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Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

On a sunny day (Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:53:26 +0100) it happened Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote in :

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Netherlands,

competitive in my country.

Yes that is right, the panels mentioned above are monocrystalline 185 W at 435 Euro, so that makes 2.35 Euro, subtract 20% VAT makes 1.95 Euro, makes about 2.7 $ I guess I can get them for 2.2 if I contact those companies directly, but it all makes no difference as it is totally useless for where I live. In my view people get ripped of here, as they invest into something that never will pay itself back .

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

Euro,

text -

you will know when solar panels have become economically viable when......

when you see solar panals on the roof of the company that makes them.

Mark

Reply to
Mark

By what factor? If it's only by 2 or 3, events can make it quickly become economic when things go pear shaped. Look at the 1970's oil price increases. Having an installed base that suddenly looks like it was a good idea is better than melting when your air conditioner quits.

(One admission: I originally had "freezing in the dark". A bad phrase to use when discussing solar electricity).

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

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Mark Zenier

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