China wind power

Netherlands,

competitive in my country.

Euro,

Obviously depends where you live, but in the Mediterranean nations payback is well within the lifetime of the panels, especially if the electricity being generated is priced at domestic grid rates.

Netherlands,

competitive in my country.

Euro,

Of course you can harness rain and mud by growing vegetables. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(From Vancouver, which is as rainy as Holland but not nearly as flat.)

cells:

Netherlands,

using

competitive in my country.

Sign up for all those free trade mags, and catalogs, and burn them.

John

At least the big ones (over 1 MW) are usually solar thermal (heliostats, parabolic reflectors) not PV modules for some "strange" reason.

PVs are economical, if you can sell all your PV production at a generously subsidized feed in tariff to the net and buy back your consumption at the grid rates (often 1/4 of the feed in tariff).

Of course, you have to be careful not to sell PV solar power at night to the net :-).

In order to be truly economical, the PV price per Watt must drop by one order of magnitude to survive without subsidies.

One should not assume that current subsidized prices will last forever, with current economical crisis, there are talks in some countries to cut back the number of new projects that are allowed into the generous subsidizes system.

By the time PV is economical, China will own the entire industry.

They are already economical for domestic users in places like S Italy, Cyprus, Malta etc without subsidy.

The breakeven has always been stated at $1/W ie prices must halve

Isolated islands like Cyprus and Malta have to produce their electricity in small low efficiency coal and especially oil powered power stations that have to rely of foreign import of fuels. With increasing use of air conditioning, the production capacity must be capable of handling these peaks.

In a small grid, you have to build quite a lot of reserve capacity in order to survive a failure in the largest production unit.

It is no wonder, that the electricity price in those islands is high and hence PV is economical, if the real production costs are charged during the peak hours.

I do not understand how this would apply to Sicily, which is connected to the Continental Europe grid and hence would also get electricity produced by cheaper nuclear and hydroelectric power plants. The peak demand can partially be handled with hydroelectric plants.

Be careful when reading such claims.

Those $1/W prices are usually stated for the peak power production. Unfortunately solar or wind does not produce the nominal power for

A tracking PV panel might slightly increase the annual production, but when a tracking unit is used, the cost for peak watt will be increased.

Local PV can currently make sense in hot areas with few clouds to drive local air conditioners, since the electricity production and demand will match quite well. But why generate electricity with low efficiency and then drive compressors rather than using vacuum solar thermal collectors and drive absorbtion chillers (with medium efficiency) to cool the house ?

re

es

When it's economic depends on your local price of electricity, the amount of sun you get, whether you use batteries (expensive), or just use the grid at night (much cheaper), etc.

I posted a QuickBASIC program that figures it out

At $2 / watt for panels, no batteries, sunbelt USA location, and vanilla assumptions, I get break-even in about 16 years, and a 25-year

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Depends where such a power station is sited (the 1$/W has been for power stations, not domestic)

European domestic power prices

The most economical use is to displace a proportion (

Last year I wondered that too. Short answer: the high efficiency of compressor-type a/c units more than compensates for the low efficiency of PV. So it was when I added it up, anyway.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Are you talking about big tracking (DESERTEC style) solar thermal power plants in Sahara or something else ?

No doubt a solar thermal power station in Arizona or Saudi-Arabia might be quite useful.

But outside these places, does the deployment make any sense ?

Domestic PV is sunny climates makes the most sense of all.

Already partially up and running....

...Jim Thompson

Actually, the efficiency of PV increases with falling temperatures. Meaning snowy hills are much better than the mediteranean.

The single cell output voltage drop is something like -2 mV/K from some nominal 600 mV output voltage, so if going from hot desert to cold mountains, the system efficiency might increase from 10 % to 12 % or 13 %, no big deal.

Instead use the heat directly in applications, in which electricity is not absolutely needed.