6 ms·

What Happens When Solar Power Is as Cheap as Coal

44 points by rblion 16y ago

hartror 16y ago
I love good news stories about the environment, hopefully it happens sooner rather than later, certainly a lot of people are betting as much with their wallets.
- pstack 16y ago
  I'm a fan of the idea of solar panels, but I'm skeptical. First, I'd like to see numbers that show solar panels are less damaging to the environment. I suspect that they require significant energy to manufacture as well as cause pollution in the process. Let's see some numbers that show it saves far more than it costs, energy/pollution-wise. I'd also like to see this supposed day (as soon as a year and a half from now, according to the article), when solar power suddenly becomes affordable. It sure wasn't one year ago and I'm pretty sure it's not, today. In fact, if you calculate the cost of materials and installation, you will often find that you don't start saving a dime until the warranty on the product has expired (around 20-25 years). Not to mention, the efficiency degrades over time, so I'm not sure what kind of performance you can expect when the warranty expires and it starts finally saving you cash. I want it to happen. Trust me. I seriously considered it (although I don't think it's allowed in my city and I know that panels on your house are forbidden by many cities and many HOAs). When I realized that the tens of thousands of dollars I'd have to invest up front in it wouldn't start to pay off until I was almost retirement age, I decided I'd just stick with what I've already got. If things change drastically in a few years, I'll revisit the idea. Until then, I'm not going to let my bank account get caught up in the hype that only benefits the solar panel installer industry. I don't see how it's going to mature significantly in a whole two years.
  - hartror 16y ago
    Two things will bring this about, the ever growing efficiencies of the panels and the economies of scale, these companies are going to be buying a crap load of these things. The energy cost of a panel isn't a concern if the power comes from a renewable. Cannot speak to the damage to the environment mining and production does but I would be surprised if it surpassed coal's damage.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - onan_barbarian 16y ago
    Why is it that people, in the age of Google, say things like "I'd like to see numbers that show..." or "I suspect that..."? http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es071763q http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es071763q So there you go. Not sure about the credibility of the source but reading this - or the myriad of other easily found sources on this matter - might be an improvement on this snarky "huh huh, I'd like to see this stuff that probably no-one before me has ever thought about" approach to the problem. While you are honing your reading skills by actually finding out something, you could revisit TFA to see this: "But the solar industry is moving so fast that those costs will be equal--at least for utilities--by 2013." ... so they're not talking about rooftop solar, which you decide to start talking about almost immediately, because you once priced up a solar panel and are thus an expert.
    - pstack 16y ago
      Feel better about yourself, now? Do you seriously think that your local utility is going to have massive solar fields that are going to provide the kind of power demands they have or even a chunk of it? The only long-term option is for existing space to be used - power generation on the space used by the house it generates. Until that is affordable, I doubt it's going to make the impact we're hoping for. Plus, come on. We all know how utility companies behave. They'll have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the type of investment necessary to roll these out, even if they're cheaper in the longer term. Also, yeah, I wouldn't have had a clue what to google for the type of information you pulled up. Good for you. You get +1 google points for today, sport.
      - davidandgoliath 16y ago
        Whom cares what your local utility is up to. Convince your landlord, or your wife to allow you to install said units on the roof. Problem solved.
      - onan_barbarian 16y ago
        I feel fine, thanks; roughly the same as before. For the record, the Google string to find out about the environmental costs of solar panel construction was "environmental costs solar panel construction". There's a mountain of information and conflicting viewpoints to sort through, naturally. As for the business about there being no place to put solar, face it, you're just making things up. You could easily look up where solar power boosters figure they're going to put these facilities (for example, ask Google "where will utilities put solar panels" - literally). Then you could form an informed opinion pro/con but once again that's too much work. Do I get another Google point?
icefox 16y ago
If you live in MA or NJ check out the SREC's. They cause panels on your roof to pay back in only a few years (~4-6) and earn a small income until 2020 in MA (not sure about NJ) Looking at solar on my roof as an investment (never thought I would say that about solar) for an ~10K investment (after tax credits) over the next eight years it gives a positive return with the potential for a very positive return (And this is ignoring the house value increase which is ~20K for every $1k you save in electricity costs). A nice extremely stable investment that adds diversification to my portfolio. This is way better than a say a 5 year 10K CD if you are looking for something super stable to round out your portfolio. (Not to mention you are not taxed on the energy you produce via solar unlike the CD's interest.)
pkulak 16y ago
Of course, coal probably isn't cheaper, but no one cares about it's massive externalized costs.
- roel_v 16y ago
  By that logic, solar panels aren't cheaper either, because their production is so polluting and resource-consuming. At a conference a few weeks ago I was listening to a professor arguing that insulation and PV are the wrong way to go; the least resource consuming system is one with regular brick houses, warmed with geothermal energy, and with much heavier mixing of functions in our urban landscapes (actually, landscapes all together, and make the urban/rural distinction obsolete). So basically growing food on the roofs of houses etc. He had numbers to back it all up, too. I'm not saying they're correct, but at least he's trying :)
  - loganfrederick 16y ago
    Do you remember who this was? Sounds like someone I'd want to look up.
    - roel_v 16y ago
      Looked it up for you - Ronald Roovers. Slides of the specific presentation here: http://www.energie2011.nl/upload/rets%20rorovers-280311-bw.pdf http://www.energie2011.nl/upload/rets%20rorovers-280311-bw.p..., some of his websites * http://www.sustainablebuilding.info/districtoftomorrow/ * http://www.ribuilt.eu/ * http://www.sustainablebuilding.info/
  - neworbit 16y ago
    Brick houses are for locales without earthquakes :)
    - roel_v 16y ago
      Yeah OK wood/sheetrock houses then - I meant, traditional, not well insulated.
ck2 16y ago
They need to pour oil-sized investments into electricity storage research. There are only two technologies I've heard of (sodium and redox flow) being developed and they are not enough (and not portable). added: here's a complete list of ALL we have and most of them are not viable for home/large vehicle power http://electricitystorage.org/tech/technologies_technologies.htm http://electricitystorage.org/tech/technologies_technologies...
- nickff 16y ago
  I just completed a project analysing the construction of a concentrated solar power plant, using sodium as a working fluid and thermal energy storage mechanism; we found that it is a very practical solution, and believe that such a system would allow for solar power plants to provide power on a more continuous basis, at a reasonable cost. Sodium will allow for energy storage on a much larger scale than is possible with any other current technology, due to its favourable characteristics. It seems that thermal energy storage is one of the most practical methods of storing large quantities of energy, but I am unsure as to when such a system will be deployed at scale, though some (fast breeder) nuclear plants use a sodium coolant system.
jshort 16y ago
Economics is about scarce resources, solar energy is most likely the least scarce resource available to us, it is only a matter of the technology needed to optimize our retrieval of it. And as we all know technology is constantly improving at an astounding rate, which is a good thing if we want to still call earth home.
- berntb 16y ago
  >>solar energy is most likely the least scarce resource available to us Let me guess -- you're not Scandinavian? :-) :-(
bruce511 16y ago
Unfortunately it's no as simple as just plugging a solar plant into the grid and standing back. The biggest difference between a solar plant, and a coal plant, is the ability to balance supply and demand through the day (or more specifically, through the night). So, in effect, energy has to be stored during the day, and used during "unsunny" times. Where I live we already have a pump-storage scheme in place. During the night, when demand for electricity is low, water is pumped uphill from one dam to another. During periods of high demand (typically early morning, and evening) water is released generating hydro-power to supplement the grid. It generates about 400MW of power - suitable for supplementing a city, but not for taking it "off the grid". It also doesn't scale particularly well - a 4GW plant would take a lot of water. However, all is not lost. With "free" electricity it's fairly easy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen isn't the easiest, or least damaging substance to work with, but it is certainly clean, storable, transportable and so on. A power plant burning hydrogen as the fuel can run day and night. And a "hydrogen reservoir" would act as a natural capacitor - able to smooth the supply of energy to the plant. Of course there are lots of uses for electricity which are not time-of-day sensitive. Desalination for example allows dry coastal regions (which usually get a lot of sun, and hence why they're dry in the first place) to become irrigated. Solar power is a lot more useful than just domestic use, and I for one look forward to the day when it's cheap.
- reitzensteinm 16y ago
  Another tactic that I quite like is using battery powered cars in combination with a smart grid to generate power during peak usage. If a car is plugged in and is fully charged, it will use a percentage of that to feed back into the grid. Presumably, you'd give quite high incentives to doing this. If someone only charges their car when the grid has excess power, and allows up to 50% of that power to go back into the grid at peak usage, that electricity could even be free. There'd likely be a setting on your charging station to handle this. You don't need many cars generating 5kW before you're talking about quite a serious amount of power. Of course, there are problems with this approach - most people park their cars somewhere else during the day, the accounting is an issue, and it seems to be more suited to wind than solar, but I really like the idea of repurposing the massive batteries that we're going to have laying around anyway. For reference, a Tesla battery pack holds 53kWh [1], which will supply an average home with power for two days [2]. So the numbers really do add up for using it to help during spikes. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster#Battery_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster#Battery_system [2]: http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/esr/table5.html http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/esr/table5.html
geuis 16y ago
Can any folks reading this with investment experience perhaps point to some information on how to start investing in solar companies? Seems like the time to move some investments in that direction.
ericd 16y ago
I really, sincerely doubt that solar is going to be cheaper than coal in two years, barring a massive carbon tax or a huge breakthrough in solar. The energy density of sunlight is still extremely low, and coal is expected to be abundant long into the future. Does this article point out some breakthrough that I missed, or some other reasoning? All I saw was some fluff about grid parity, apparently derived from a quote in the almost as fluffy Bloomberg source article by the CEO of a solar cell manufacturer saying that they were nearing parity, without mentioning any numbers. Given that the only hard numbers given in the source article claim a ~3x difference in the article, and the CEO of Solar City claiming that prices of installations have been dropping 5-8% a year, this doesn't add up to the 66% cost reduction in two years necessary to reach parity. This is even without considering all the auxiliary problems with solar, including energy storage. Flagged for being inaccurate.
- scythe 16y ago
  If you read the Bloomberg article more carefully, you'll notice that the 5-8% figure refers to rooftop solar installations, not the sort of large-scale solar panel fields produced by a utility company. That all is not terribly relevant -- the article isn't claiming that solar power will be cheaper than coal by 2013, rather it is simply fielding speculation about the implications of solar becoming cheaper than coal. There's a much longer article linked, and it deals with the practical issues of solar power: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/131/solar-goes-supernova.html?page=0%2C0 http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/131/solar-goes-supernova...
  - ericd 16y ago
    Yeah, I realized that he was talking about rooftop installs, but the bulk of that cost is in the panels, and the unit cost decrease of manufacturing those should fall roughly in step with industrial panels. My main point was that it was a long way to fall, 5-8% at a time, or even double that, if you make some very favorable assumptions. The article did make a point of saying that they would reach cost parity by 2013, and I'm fairly sure that they were intentionally glossing over facts to make their article more linkbait-worthy. That solar/wind continue to be championed by the media is keeping the public from taking seriously the fact that we don't have that many realistic options when it comes to getting off fossil fuels besides nuclear.
heresy 16y ago
JAXA's pie in the sky SSPS project avoids the problem of variability of supply. Emplaced at a Lagrange point, one could imagine a potential 24/7 source of energy. Also, one of the proposed ways to transmit the energy back to earth is via lasers. Could be fun if there are issues with the targeting subsystems :)

44 points by rblion 16y ago

I love good news stories about the environment, hopefully it happens sooner rather than later, certainly a lot of people are betting as much with their wallets.

pstack 16y ago
I'm a fan of the idea of solar panels, but I'm skeptical. First, I'd like to see numbers that show solar panels are less damaging to the environment. I suspect that they require significant energy to manufacture as well as cause pollution in the process. Let's see some numbers that show it saves far more than it costs, energy/pollution-wise. I'd also like to see this supposed day (as soon as a year and a half from now, according to the article), when solar power suddenly becomes affordable. It sure wasn't one year ago and I'm pretty sure it's not, today. In fact, if you calculate the cost of materials and installation, you will often find that you don't start saving a dime until the warranty on the product has expired (around 20-25 years). Not to mention, the efficiency degrades over time, so I'm not sure what kind of performance you can expect when the warranty expires and it starts finally saving you cash. I want it to happen. Trust me. I seriously considered it (although I don't think it's allowed in my city and I know that panels on your house are forbidden by many cities and many HOAs). When I realized that the tens of thousands of dollars I'd have to invest up front in it wouldn't start to pay off until I was almost retirement age, I decided I'd just stick with what I've already got. If things change drastically in a few years, I'll revisit the idea. Until then, I'm not going to let my bank account get caught up in the hype that only benefits the solar panel installer industry. I don't see how it's going to mature significantly in a whole two years.
- hartror 16y ago
  Two things will bring this about, the ever growing efficiencies of the panels and the economies of scale, these companies are going to be buying a crap load of these things. The energy cost of a panel isn't a concern if the power comes from a renewable. Cannot speak to the damage to the environment mining and production does but I would be surprised if it surpassed coal's damage.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- onan_barbarian 16y ago
  Why is it that people, in the age of Google, say things like "I'd like to see numbers that show..." or "I suspect that..."? http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es071763q http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es071763q So there you go. Not sure about the credibility of the source but reading this - or the myriad of other easily found sources on this matter - might be an improvement on this snarky "huh huh, I'd like to see this stuff that probably no-one before me has ever thought about" approach to the problem. While you are honing your reading skills by actually finding out something, you could revisit TFA to see this: "But the solar industry is moving so fast that those costs will be equal--at least for utilities--by 2013." ... so they're not talking about rooftop solar, which you decide to start talking about almost immediately, because you once priced up a solar panel and are thus an expert.
  - pstack 16y ago
    Feel better about yourself, now? Do you seriously think that your local utility is going to have massive solar fields that are going to provide the kind of power demands they have or even a chunk of it? The only long-term option is for existing space to be used - power generation on the space used by the house it generates. Until that is affordable, I doubt it's going to make the impact we're hoping for. Plus, come on. We all know how utility companies behave. They'll have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the type of investment necessary to roll these out, even if they're cheaper in the longer term. Also, yeah, I wouldn't have had a clue what to google for the type of information you pulled up. Good for you. You get +1 google points for today, sport.
    - davidandgoliath 16y ago
      Whom cares what your local utility is up to. Convince your landlord, or your wife to allow you to install said units on the roof. Problem solved.
    - onan_barbarian 16y ago
      I feel fine, thanks; roughly the same as before. For the record, the Google string to find out about the environmental costs of solar panel construction was "environmental costs solar panel construction". There's a mountain of information and conflicting viewpoints to sort through, naturally. As for the business about there being no place to put solar, face it, you're just making things up. You could easily look up where solar power boosters figure they're going to put these facilities (for example, ask Google "where will utilities put solar panels" - literally). Then you could form an informed opinion pro/con but once again that's too much work. Do I get another Google point?

icefox 16y ago

If you live in MA or NJ check out the SREC's. They cause panels on your roof to pay back in only a few years (~4-6) and earn a small income until 2020 in MA (not sure about NJ) Looking at solar on my roof as an investment (never thought I would say that about solar) for an ~10K investment (after tax credits) over the next eight years it gives a positive return with the potential for a very positive return (And this is ignoring the house value increase which is ~20K for every $1k you save in electricity costs). A nice extremely stable investment that adds diversification to my portfolio. This is way better than a say a 5 year 10K CD if you are looking for something super stable to round out your portfolio. (Not to mention you are not taxed on the energy you produce via solar unlike the CD's interest.)

pkulak 16y ago

Of course, coal probably isn't cheaper, but no one cares about it's massive externalized costs.

roel_v 16y ago
By that logic, solar panels aren't cheaper either, because their production is so polluting and resource-consuming. At a conference a few weeks ago I was listening to a professor arguing that insulation and PV are the wrong way to go; the least resource consuming system is one with regular brick houses, warmed with geothermal energy, and with much heavier mixing of functions in our urban landscapes (actually, landscapes all together, and make the urban/rural distinction obsolete). So basically growing food on the roofs of houses etc. He had numbers to back it all up, too. I'm not saying they're correct, but at least he's trying :)
- loganfrederick 16y ago
  Do you remember who this was? Sounds like someone I'd want to look up.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    Looked it up for you - Ronald Roovers. Slides of the specific presentation here: http://www.energie2011.nl/upload/rets%20rorovers-280311-bw.pdf http://www.energie2011.nl/upload/rets%20rorovers-280311-bw.p..., some of his websites * http://www.sustainablebuilding.info/districtoftomorrow/ * http://www.ribuilt.eu/ * http://www.sustainablebuilding.info/
- neworbit 16y ago
  Brick houses are for locales without earthquakes :)
  - roel_v 16y ago
    Yeah OK wood/sheetrock houses then - I meant, traditional, not well insulated.

ck2 16y ago

They need to pour oil-sized investments into electricity storage research. There are only two technologies I've heard of (sodium and redox flow) being developed and they are not enough (and not portable). added: here's a complete list of ALL we have and most of them are not viable for home/large vehicle power http://electricitystorage.org/tech/technologies_technologies.htm http://electricitystorage.org/tech/technologies_technologies...

nickff 16y ago
I just completed a project analysing the construction of a concentrated solar power plant, using sodium as a working fluid and thermal energy storage mechanism; we found that it is a very practical solution, and believe that such a system would allow for solar power plants to provide power on a more continuous basis, at a reasonable cost. Sodium will allow for energy storage on a much larger scale than is possible with any other current technology, due to its favourable characteristics. It seems that thermal energy storage is one of the most practical methods of storing large quantities of energy, but I am unsure as to when such a system will be deployed at scale, though some (fast breeder) nuclear plants use a sodium coolant system.

jshort 16y ago

Economics is about scarce resources, solar energy is most likely the least scarce resource available to us, it is only a matter of the technology needed to optimize our retrieval of it. And as we all know technology is constantly improving at an astounding rate, which is a good thing if we want to still call earth home.

berntb 16y ago
>>solar energy is most likely the least scarce resource available to us Let me guess -- you're not Scandinavian? :-) :-(

bruce511 16y ago

Unfortunately it's no as simple as just plugging a solar plant into the grid and standing back. The biggest difference between a solar plant, and a coal plant, is the ability to balance supply and demand through the day (or more specifically, through the night). So, in effect, energy has to be stored during the day, and used during "unsunny" times. Where I live we already have a pump-storage scheme in place. During the night, when demand for electricity is low, water is pumped uphill from one dam to another. During periods of high demand (typically early morning, and evening) water is released generating hydro-power to supplement the grid. It generates about 400MW of power - suitable for supplementing a city, but not for taking it "off the grid". It also doesn't scale particularly well - a 4GW plant would take a lot of water. However, all is not lost. With "free" electricity it's fairly easy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen isn't the easiest, or least damaging substance to work with, but it is certainly clean, storable, transportable and so on. A power plant burning hydrogen as the fuel can run day and night. And a "hydrogen reservoir" would act as a natural capacitor - able to smooth the supply of energy to the plant. Of course there are lots of uses for electricity which are not time-of-day sensitive. Desalination for example allows dry coastal regions (which usually get a lot of sun, and hence why they're dry in the first place) to become irrigated. Solar power is a lot more useful than just domestic use, and I for one look forward to the day when it's cheap.

reitzensteinm 16y ago
Another tactic that I quite like is using battery powered cars in combination with a smart grid to generate power during peak usage. If a car is plugged in and is fully charged, it will use a percentage of that to feed back into the grid. Presumably, you'd give quite high incentives to doing this. If someone only charges their car when the grid has excess power, and allows up to 50% of that power to go back into the grid at peak usage, that electricity could even be free. There'd likely be a setting on your charging station to handle this. You don't need many cars generating 5kW before you're talking about quite a serious amount of power. Of course, there are problems with this approach - most people park their cars somewhere else during the day, the accounting is an issue, and it seems to be more suited to wind than solar, but I really like the idea of repurposing the massive batteries that we're going to have laying around anyway. For reference, a Tesla battery pack holds 53kWh [1], which will supply an average home with power for two days [2]. So the numbers really do add up for using it to help during spikes. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster#Battery_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster#Battery_system [2]: http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/esr/table5.html http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/esr/table5.html

geuis 16y ago

Can any folks reading this with investment experience perhaps point to some information on how to start investing in solar companies? Seems like the time to move some investments in that direction.

ericd 16y ago

I really, sincerely doubt that solar is going to be cheaper than coal in two years, barring a massive carbon tax or a huge breakthrough in solar. The energy density of sunlight is still extremely low, and coal is expected to be abundant long into the future. Does this article point out some breakthrough that I missed, or some other reasoning? All I saw was some fluff about grid parity, apparently derived from a quote in the almost as fluffy Bloomberg source article by the CEO of a solar cell manufacturer saying that they were nearing parity, without mentioning any numbers. Given that the only hard numbers given in the source article claim a ~3x difference in the article, and the CEO of Solar City claiming that prices of installations have been dropping 5-8% a year, this doesn't add up to the 66% cost reduction in two years necessary to reach parity. This is even without considering all the auxiliary problems with solar, including energy storage. Flagged for being inaccurate.

scythe 16y ago
If you read the Bloomberg article more carefully, you'll notice that the 5-8% figure refers to rooftop solar installations, not the sort of large-scale solar panel fields produced by a utility company. That all is not terribly relevant -- the article isn't claiming that solar power will be cheaper than coal by 2013, rather it is simply fielding speculation about the implications of solar becoming cheaper than coal. There's a much longer article linked, and it deals with the practical issues of solar power: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/131/solar-goes-supernova.html?page=0%2C0 http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/131/solar-goes-supernova...
- ericd 16y ago
  Yeah, I realized that he was talking about rooftop installs, but the bulk of that cost is in the panels, and the unit cost decrease of manufacturing those should fall roughly in step with industrial panels. My main point was that it was a long way to fall, 5-8% at a time, or even double that, if you make some very favorable assumptions. The article did make a point of saying that they would reach cost parity by 2013, and I'm fairly sure that they were intentionally glossing over facts to make their article more linkbait-worthy. That solar/wind continue to be championed by the media is keeping the public from taking seriously the fact that we don't have that many realistic options when it comes to getting off fossil fuels besides nuclear.

heresy 16y ago

JAXA's pie in the sky SSPS project avoids the problem of variability of supply. Emplaced at a Lagrange point, one could imagine a potential 24/7 source of energy. Also, one of the proposed ways to transmit the energy back to earth is via lasers. Could be fun if there are issues with the targeting subsystems :)