solar power economics

I'll say ! I am really ready to fly south for the winter.

boB

OK, I had to read that again... But the energy used in making the product is included in the price when it is sold.

I don't understand how it could have had any hope of being low cost when its doller per watt was around two times that of conventional PV modules ?

Enlighten me. I'm all ears. (which looks pretty funny)

boB K7IQ

I accept Don Lancasters assertions that current solar PV is a "carbon burning net energy sink" - or whatever his prasing is.

Surprised he has not made an appearance yet.

But to me the value of all the subsidies - if there is one - is to provide a market environment that allows investment in the technology. And it does seem to be paying off.

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For large-scale installations, prices below $1.00/watt are now common. In some locations, PV has reached grid parity, the cost at which it is competitive with coal or gas-fired generation. More generally, it is now evident that, given a carbon price of $50/ton, which would raise the price of coal-fired power by 5c/kWh, solar PV will be cost-competitive in most locations. The declining price of PV has been reflected in rapidly growing installations, totalling about 23 GW in

2011. Although some consolidation is likely in 2012, as firms try to restore profitability, strong growth seems likely to continue for the rest of the decade. Already, by one estimate, total investment in renewables for 2011 exceeded investment in carbon-based electricity generation.

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John Devereux

This rather misses the point. In the UK for example, the feed-in tariff is such that a householder would expect to break even at around ten years and then start making money. That's a good deal, and many people have taken this up. The FIT will soon be reduced but won't affect those already running.

What this means is that we have a large, distributed, publicly funded research experiment, much cheaper than a state run research establishment could do it. This is not about short term economics. It may well prove that PV can't be economic, it may not, but that's the point of research.

In my view, PV stands a better chance of working than the impressively expensive fusion (any decade now since the fifties) experiments. I think MTBF will always beat fusion, but maybe it's worth spending the money to find out.

Oh, guess where the best PV panels are made? Yes, Germany.

Cheers

--
Syd

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They spent a lot - roughly enough to halve the price of solar power by encouraging production on a much larger scale than before.

This hasn't got them a lot of solar power generation - there's still room for a more than enough scaling up of production in more than halve the price of solar power generation again (which is still pretty much the interest on the capital invested in the generator).

Their long term plan is to build huge generating installation in the Sahara, and string super-conducting high-voltage links from their to Germany

sertec

It's a capital intensive scheme and is presumably progressing rather more slowly now than was originally intended.

Bjorn Lomborg does tend to be selective in his observations, and has concentrated on the immediate and tangible results of the investment, while ignoring what it was actually intended to achieve.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Installing expensive PV arrays at high latitudes was always pretty stupid tokenism. Even optimally placed at sunny low latitudes their lifetime energy payback is at most about 7x that of manufacture. A wind turbine in a decent spot is more than an order of magnitude better investment. Lomborg cannot really be trusted to be even handed. David MacKay at least deals with the numbers for renewables in a fair manner.

Germany's crazy subsidy system and that of the UK FIT served only to have "approved" cowboys installing PV arrays in totally unsuitable locations to harvest the grants. Similar scams afflict wind too :(

The most unsuitable installation so far made it onto uk.d-i-y (it was professionally installed - a DIYer noticed it!)

There is a similar, though not quite as bad, one on a West facing roof of a Village Hall surrounded by trees not far from me.

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Regards,
Martin Brown

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I think that this is an out-of date figure. Various thin-film (and potentially nanowire) photovoltaic generators use a lot less material per watt, and this pays off in a much shorter pay-back period.

Bulk solar power generation looks as if it is going to be thermal solar, for which the payback time seems to be a good deal lower.

There's a lot going on in the technology. The trouble is that the Chinese market is big enough that you have to produce your solar panels in very high volume to be able to hope to compete, which makes the start-up capital investment large.

ions

Bjorn Lomborg does tend to discount the environmental cost of CO2 emissions - he doesn't actively deny them, just seems to pay little attention to them.

ng.

Until you start figuring in the long term costs of injecting even more CO2 into the atmosphere.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Complete conversion to solar power might double the cost to the consumer, though installing that much generating capacity would probably create enough economies of scale to reduce that quite a bit -

30% won't have anything like that effect.

California already has the world's largest thermal solar plant at

354MW, and most of the proposed new plant is also thermal solar, which makes PV solar something of a red herring.

As usual, John Larkin doesn't know what he is talking about.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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As usual Bjorn Lomborg was low-balling what had gone on. The biggest single effect of the German investment in solar power was in halving the price, just by driving the industry to scale up it's output by a factor of ten or whatever. Lomborg didn't see any necessity to figure that into the benefits, which has probably slowed global warming by about five years, although this will only be realised when we start using solar power to supply a substantial part of our energy needs (which Lomborg doesn't expect to happen).

But gullible nitwits always fall for sexy sound-bites.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

. .

Der Spiegel is taking a least one denialist a lot too seriously

Fritz Vahrenholt's book, "The Cold Sun", presents long-exploded scientific nonsense as if it is inarguable fact and Der Spiegel's reporter hasn't entirely appreciated what she was told by the scientific expect that she consulted.

"Science" journalists are prone to make this kind of mistake - they much prefer to print a story as if it is about a revolutionary change in our world view, even when the reality is that the author is deluded and the book nonsense.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Translation. Right-wing nitwit thinks he's got a vote-winning issue. Unfortunately, Germany's investment in solar energy has paid off big in China, who appreciated what Germany had done, and did exactly the same, but with a larger domestic market. It's Solyndra, German style. Germany is going to have to re-think it's solar energy program, and certain right-wing politicians are setting themselves up to exploit the situation.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Using out of date numbers for the net CO2 effects of solar panels is definitely the kind of things that denialist propagandists do.

Unlike you, I enjoy thinking. Unfortunately, Bjorn Lomborg doesn't repay concentrated attention. He's a denialist - slightly less blatantly misleading than most of the species, in that he doesn't actually deny that anthropogenic global warming is going on, or endorse fatuous fallacies like claiming that it's all being caused by the sun, but he's still endorsing inaction and letting Exxon-Mobil make loads of money by digging up even more fossil carbon.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

He probably knows enough about the advances in technology to know that it is no longer true.

He seems to have made the claim back in 2002

and he did repeat it in 2008.

but was more optimistic about new technology, even back in 2008, when addressing the issue in detail

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Yes, he even said that here fairly recently; that he does see it becoming economic in the near-term.

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John Devereux

You shouldn't. That hasn't been true since thin film PV came on stream.

Best estimates for current production units is something like a 7x return on the energy to produce them over a 25 year lifetime if you install them somewhere sensible that is sunny (and about 4x in the UK).

By comparison a 2MW wind turbine has a figure of merit around 80x.

See for example David MacKays summary and references therein see:

Or if you want to go to original source Richards & Watt 2007

Perhaps he has finally conceded that he is incorrect/out of date.

The main problem I have with it is that it is really only worthwhile for off grid use at low latitudes. It is beyond stupid to subsidise people to install PV Arrays at latitudes higher than 50 degrees.

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Regards,
Martin Brown

Cool, I guess the big oil / tobacco companies propaganda got to me.

He did do that here recently, sort of (for some near-term thin film types).

Yes, the EU should be subsidizing them in Portugal, Italy, Spain, then they could export the power to the rest of us in the Frozen North.

Hmmm..... think I have just solved the Eurozone crisis.

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John Devereux

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I didn't plow through the estimates this time, but, superficially, thin-film seems to have overcome that problem.

Tubes are stupid. They're fragile, expensive, and less efficient. It makes no sense to stagger tubes at 50% duty cycle to collect a fraction of the roof-bounce, when a smaller, stronger, cheaper, flat panel can collect *all* the sun directly.

ng.

A nuclear engineer pal of mine, IIUC, says only a few percent of the fissionable material of a fuel rod is used, then it's trashed. Reprocessing would take advantage of more of the fuel, and reduce the waste volume by two orders of magnitude.

The Canadians have a passive design that works on low-enriched fuel.

Yes. All energy extraction takes a toll on the planet. That's okay, but less is better. And conservation by voluntarily changing habits is a zero-risk, minimal cost method.

Most people could cut enormously without inconvenience. I'm personally a radical conservationist, dress like a polar bear, and leave the heat off all winter(*). I harvest about 5kWhr of solar passive heat a day in winter, when it's there. I won't use the a/c this summer either, not beyond a token for humidity (to control mildew).

(*) It kicked in automatically a few times to save the pipes. Can't help that.

That's all by choice and philosophy though. I wouldn't force it on anyone, the point being that you can really cut a lot if you want, without taking it nearly as far.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Building rivers is hard.

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e ;

What are they using all that PV for in the typical residence there?