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Governments spurred the rise of solar power

133 points by jakozaur 6y ago

Darmody 6y ago
I didn't read the whole thing because it asks for an account. But I want to point something. While I think solar power is great and we should keep working on expanding it, we shouldn't approach renewable energy as our only source. Right now in Spain we had the worst snowstorm in decades and temperatures have decreased in the whole country. Around 80-85% of the solar panels are useless. Nuclear is at 100% and we're burning coal like crazy. And electricity price went up 27%.
- newsclues 6y ago
  We have solar in Ontario Canada, and while snow has a negative impact on energy production, it doesn’t go to zero.
  - Darmody 6y ago
    No, of course not. But as I said, around 80-85% of the solar energy production was stopped. Wind and hydro are not enough so we're burning coal when we could. France is also making a transition to renewable energy but they are not giving up on nuclear because they understand the risks are very, very low and they can produce enough energy to fulfill their needs and to sell to their neighbours.
    - mrpopo 6y ago
      > France is also making a transition to renewable energy but they are not giving up on nuclear Unfortunately there is very strong support on dropping nuclear power in France in favor of renewable energy, across almost all the political spectrum. Nuclear share of electricity production is already planned to be lowered from 70% to 50%.
    - olau 6y ago
      Nuclear is being phased out due to cost. As more things are discovered that could go wrong, it gets more and more expensive to fix all of them. Nuclear is also bad at this kind of thing. You really want either storage (storing heat is easy, by the way), or cheap plants. It doesn't really matter if they are expensive to run as long as they only run a few days a year.
  - nahname 6y ago
    It is worth pointing out that Ontario solar generation is only 1% of the power supply mix. https://ieso.ca/en/Learn/Ontario-Supply-Mix/Ontario-Energy-Capacity https://ieso.ca/en/Learn/Ontario-Supply-Mix/Ontario-Energy-C...
- pydry 6y ago
  Wind energy should be producing a lot more these days. Spain can also import power.
  - Darmody 6y ago
    Wind energy is around 19% which is not enough. I think the price increase means we're not ready to rely only on solar as our biggest energy source because it can fail when we need it the most.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      I mean, you don’t build the majority of your infrastructure for black swan events. You can still overbuild renewables, which are effective most of the time, and keep some fossil generators like gas peakers, biomas, and biogas for backup power.
      - simiones 6y ago
        Black swan events are completely unpredictable events. Cloud cover or solar flares are NOT black swan events, they are just the opposite: they are events that we know for sure will happen (just like global pandemics) even if we don't know when they will happen.
        pydry 6y ago
        It's most intense storm in the last 50 years. Admittedly we should be expecting these with more regularity but it's still a bit of a black Swan. Nonetheless in a system with wind and solar, wind over producing in storms should mitigate the effect of losing solar coverage.
        toomuchtodo 6y ago
        It also appears Spain has an enormous amount of geothermal potential. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032115013374 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
- Faaak 6y ago
  your generalizing a whole year to some days, which seems a bit dishonest to me.. Yet, even with what you say, spain is actually (right now) quite green: https://www.electricitymap.org/map https://www.electricitymap.org/map
  - Darmody 6y ago
    I'm not generalizing a whole year. But we need to be ready for moments like this. Looking at the data in that website you can see that solar went down to almost 0% yesterday.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Rare backup power can be supplied with hydrogen burned in turbines. The capital cost per MW(e) of a simple cycle turbine power plant is just 5% of that of current technology LWR nuclear power plants.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Yeah, achieving 100% is very hard. The interim solution is having gas or even coal plants on standby to run for the few percent of the year which the renewables can't cover.
  - mrpopo 6y ago
    > to run for the few percent of the year which the renewables can't cover. Citation needed. Honestly. A graph with power factor -> expected average number of days per year would add to the discussion.
    - fy20 6y ago
      Where I am in Europe, solar panels produce around 15% in December of what they do in June. I'm not even that far north. We don't have that much wind (even on the coast), and the country is very flat so hydro isn't an option. To use 100% green power we would need a combination of long term energy storage, and HVDC transmission across Europe.
      - stdbrouw 6y ago
        Nobody expects wind to cover the majority of our electricity needs, but don't discount it either. There are some positive signs re: winter production, too: https://www.belgianoffshoreplatform.be/en/news/winter-2019-2020-offshore-wind-energy-in-the-belgian-north-sea-breaks-record/ https://www.belgianoffshoreplatform.be/en/news/winter-2019-2...
      - sveme 6y ago
        Which is being built (e.g. the one between Germany and Norway is currently being finalized. Obviously, we need to connect vastly larger areas.
    - jakewins 6y ago
      Hour-by-hour multi-year simulations show the US grid can be ran with 90% clean power with current technology. "Clean" being the current nuke and hydro fleet plus a massive expansion of wind, solar and storage. The latest such simulation I've seen is the 2035 Report from Berkeley, I wrote a summary of it here: https://climate.davis-hansson.com/p/90percent-grid/ https://climate.davis-hansson.com/p/90percent-grid/ You can read the full report here: https://www.2035report.com/ https://www.2035report.com/
- ffhhj 6y ago
  https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Ftechnology-quarterly%2F2021%2F01%2F07%2Fhow-governments-spurred-the-rise-of-solar-power https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%...
- lukeschlather 6y ago
  "We shouldn't" is a very strong statement. If solar and wind are 15% of the cost of a nuclear plant then what's the worry? We just build 5x as much as we need (with the obvious benefit that most of the time we have virtually limitless energy.) The problems with solar and wind can be solved with scale and storage. Nuclear has a number of problems which require technology that doesn't exist at an economical price.
  - ohgodplsno 6y ago
    Solar is not controllable. A nuclear power plants scales up or down in less than an hour and works whether it's sunny, rainy, snowing, windy or dry. If you build five times more solar panels, you have five time more panels not running when it's not sunny. We can't store it either, because we would then need to build such large battery farms that it would be both dangerous and impractical. Not to mention that our current batteries have absolutely dreadful efficiencies and lifetimes. Additionally, the current CO2 emissions over the lifetime of a solar panel are absolutely horrendous if you do not live in a place that is sunny most of the time.
    - PietdeVries 6y ago
      I think you over-estimate the CO2 emissions for solar panels and under-estimate the complexity of nuclear installations. A quick google search [1] learns that the CO2 emissions of the solar panel are marginally higher than for a nuclear power plant, but more then 10-fold lower than coal plants. Vattenfall did a study, but it's from 1999, so relies on 20-year old solar technology. In addition, building a nuclear power plant is amazingly complex. In Europe there are hardly any companies that have the technology and risk-appetite to build one without a solid (financial) support from the government. I recall that in the UK they are building one that is over time and way over budget [2] (spoiler: they started in 2008 and as of now still aren't producing any electricity, and the government-promised price of ~100 pounds/MWh was in 2016 already beaten by solar, implying that over the lifetime the nuclear power plant will cost the consumer 50 billion pounds on subsidies and 20 billion on construction) And sure, you can't control the sun or the clouds. But with a bit of effort you can create a grid that evens out the impact of the weather. High-voltage power grids in Europe are increasingly interconnected and help fill the gaps in electrical power cross border. Excess solar energy from Germany can simply be transferred to the UK via the Netherlands. [1]: https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=co2+emissions+solar+panels&cat=web&pl=ext-ff&language=english&extVersion=1.3.0 https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=co2+emissions+sol... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
- rozab 6y ago
  What's the heating situation like in Spain? All electric? I was about to say something to the effect of: does it really matter if electricity prices spike greatly in response to the supply of renewables? Why shouldn't we discourage people from using electricity at these times? I suppose this doesn't apply to vital things like heating though.
  - aksss 6y ago
    > does it really matter if electricity prices spike? One of the reasons the electricity costs spike is because you’re maintaining two generation facilities in Germany and Spain. Solar takes massive investment but the coal plants still need to be maintained and fed for when the Sun is obscured. And I think I recall that in a place like Germany, electric demand actually goes up, not down, when the sun is obscured - more people indoors. I would also like to add that it matters significantly on an individual/family basis to productive capacity and well-being when electricity costs go up, whether manifested as blackouts or much steeper bills. Not everyone is wealthy enough to absorb that without noticeable pain. There’s a bit of a “let them eat cake” aspect to comments like this.
- wasdfff 6y ago
  I would’t be surprised to hear most of the worlds population lives in an area ideal for solar power. I’m thinking SE Asia and Africa. But also, 18 million people live in greater Los Angeles alone, so a good portion of the US population and certainly a large portion of central and south America would be good candidates as well for solar.
  - aksss 6y ago
    Especially as those areas become more wealthy and new demands come online. The model of using coal and LNG to power air conditioning units is not one to replicate.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  There isn't even enough time to construct nuclear plants within the timeframes needed to mitigate climate change. Nuclear power is also just too expensive. I know the tech crowd is still angry about the safety debate, and that may even be justified. But it just doesn't matter any more. Solar + battery is now cheaper than coal, of all things, for new construction, in fairly typical situations. Solar panels are also fairly productive in winter, more than people realise. That's because we tend to believe their output is proportional to temperatures, which it is not. Solar irradiation varies far less throughout the year than temperatures. Length of daylight in higher latitudes is an issue, but correlates surprisingly well with stronger winds, at least in Europe.
pjc50 6y ago
Paywalled, archive link is https://archive.is/nXJOd https://archive.is/nXJOd The Economist is not a perfect newspaper, but they're possibly the only non-specialist press that would dive deeply into "what is a PN junction and how does it make electricity"! > the oil shocks of the 1970s saw governments get interested Solar thermal (not PV) was put on the roof of the White House by Carter, taken down by Reagan, and eventually ended up in a museum in China (!) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-house-solar-panel-array/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous... The same issue of fuel imports drove France to build a huge number of nuclear plants, which certainly worked but are now ageing out into a maintenance headache. As the Economist points out, economy of scale and accumulation of experience in manufacturing has worked brilliantly to drive down costs in solar (and also wind). I myself got solar panels on my roof about 5 years ago, locking in a subsidy rate for 20 years. The government incentives to the renewables market have really worked brilliantly. It's just odd how few politicians want to take credit for it.
lanevorockz 6y ago
Not True ... The reason solar power is a usable today is due to natural evolutions of markets that made storing energy more viable. The search of long lasting batteries for mobile phones and electric cars. Governments had no intention of accelerating the obsolescence of fossil fuels but once you have better alternatives it's really hard to suppress. Just think that in 2015 Tesla was struggling, war in the middle east over oil and the scandal of Germany / fake CO2 calculations on german diesel cars.
- pydry 6y ago
  >Governments had no intention of accelerating the obsolescence of fossil fuels China did. They were acutely aware of how militarily exposed reliance on oil was for them and how polluting coal fired power stations were and were keen on pushing all possible alternatives.
  - EB-Barrington 6y ago
    Yes. China also relies heavily upon imported coal, hence the further push for alternatives (nuclear, solar, wind, etc). When China recently banned all coal imports from Australia, the country suffered widespread electricity blackouts.
- pjc50 6y ago
  France did, due to lack of domestic fossil fuel production; but they went nuclear instead. Germany has struggled internally - they have a strong green faction and a strong domestic coal industry.
- Lio 6y ago
  > the scandal of Germany / fake CO2 calculations on german diesel cars. The scandal was not about fake CO2 calculations. It was about Volkswagen having its engine management systems detect if a car was being tested and alter how it ran so that it generated less NOx emissions at the expense of power output[1]. When the car was used outside the lab it would produce a higher power output at the expense of illegally high NOx emissions. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
bsenftner 6y ago
Considering how oil industry executives became élite wealth and moved into senior government positions globally, it is no wonder they did not make solar energy research illegal.
jakozaur 6y ago
Another good read: https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020/ https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c... Solar follow exponential cheaper trajectory with no signs of slowing down. Virtually all forecast underestimated the trend. In less than a decade solar will be way cheaper than operating cost of gas or coal plants. It make sense to overprovision capacity and shut down pretty much anything that could be shut down during the day. Plus cheap spurious electricity opens a lot of new frontiers.
- polote 6y ago
  And previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23185166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23185166
- igravious 6y ago
  “A naive observer, reading the reports of falling prices for photovoltaic cells and wind turbines, might conclude that the rising shares of solar and wind power will bring a new era of falling electricity prices. Just the opposite has been true.” https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/electricity-its-wonderfully-affordable-but-its-no-longer-getting-any-cheaper https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/electricity-its-wond... this is the reality “Before the year 2000, when Germany embarked on its large-scale and expensive Energiewende (energy transition), that country’s residential electricity prices were low and declining, bottoming at less than €0.14/kWh ($.13/kWh, using the prevailing exchange rate) in 2000.” “By 2015, Germany’s combined solar and wind capacity of nearly 84 gigawatts had surpassed the total installed in fossil-fueled plants, and by March 2019 more than 20 percent of all electricity came from the new renewables. However, over an 18-year period (2000 to 2018) electricity prices more than doubled, to €0.31/ kWh. The E.U.’s largest economy thus has the continent’s highest electricity prices, followed by heavily wind-dependent Denmark, at €0.3/kWh.” and finally, “A similar contrast can be seen in the United States. In California, where the new renewables have taken an increasing share, electricity prices have been rising five times as fast as the national mean and are now nearly 60 percent higher than the countrywide average.”
  - jakozaur 6y ago
dm319 6y ago
I can't read the article, but I think evidence like this is important when it comes to the whole idea of government subsidises impacting on free markets. The free market has become a bit of a religion for some (you can see in the comments here), and there's this staunch divide between those that believe the free market will always come up with a humanitarian solution, to those that believe the government need to push things for it to happen. My FIL was head of a large coal plant in the UK, and is very critical of renewable energies, their cost, the impact on the fossil fuel industry etc... It simply isn't possible to have a conversation with him about global warming - he will simultaneously argue it isn't happening and it's natural and not caused by us. He might be an extreme example, but there is general scepticism of government subsidies here. I'd love to see a study where researchers take things that are seen as good/important/essential to modern life and measure the amount of public/government sponsorship that helped bring it about.
- est31 6y ago
  The US government heavily subsidizes oil and has heavily subsidized nuclear as well. Both were choices for strategic reasons, to be independent in sources of energy (and to have nukes). Preventing climate change and becoming independent from non-renewables seems like a worthwhile strategic goal to me, too. And these are only the active subsidies. We're not even talking about the externalities.
- jakozaur 6y ago
  Startups need early adopters who value potential and future vision. Innovators and early adopter look beyond your current offering. The challange is finding equivalent of early adopters for commodity markets such as electrical energy. That where the government policies could step in. There are some things that initially are too expensive, but at scale could be game changing. Instead of grants, I would allocate $100mln - $1Bln / year to auctions. to buy at lowest price, the cheaper price available should unlock bigger pool. Good examples for government subsidies: 1. Negative carbon emission. 2. Carbon-free steel. 3. Carbon-free concrete. 4. Synthetical fuels such as natural gas or gasoline.
  - 6y ago
nabla9 6y ago
Solar power, Tesla, SpaceX it's amazing what big government taxing individuals in mixed market society can achieve.
jrochkind1 6y ago
Nothing unusual about this, although it can be done wisely or foolishly. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/ethanol-has-forsaken-us/602191/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/ethanol-ha... If we are to survive and thrive on this planet, it would be good to do it more wisely. In general, the "free market" can be easily overstated, it has ever been this way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism Not to mention colonialism as a driver of early capitalist economy.
socrates1998 6y ago
The problem with this idea that we subsidized solar until it was profitable is not accurate. Solar power doesn't pollute and I would argue that all other forms of power that do pollute aren't taxed nearly enough for it, with coal being the most obvious example. Coal power sends an insane amount of carbon into the atmosphere. If we properly carbon-taxed coal, it would go out of business tomorrow. And that doesn't even get into the environmental destruction that comes from strip mining. Strip mining is when coal companies buy a whole fucking mountain and then destroy it piece by piece to remove the coal. How the fuck is that not good for the environment and our society after the coal is gone? So, solar power really is a lot of cheaper than coal when you consider all the negative externalities that it brings.
- kyrra 6y ago
  Manufacturing isn't free. https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-always-as-green-as-you-think https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt... > Making solar cells requires a lot of energy. Fortunately, because these cells generate electricity, they pay back the original investment of energy; most do so after just two years of operation, and some companies report payback times as short as six months. While the above article is from 2014, it likely still applies today. I would be interested to know how much manufacturing processes have changed since then. The other big thing the article points out is the toxic chemicals and toxic process used to produce solar panels.
  - ReactiveJelly 6y ago
    So a model based on pollution taxes would have worked better - We could tax the manufacturing plants, and the coal plants, and have a bake-off to see which is cleaner - Burning coal for power, or burning coal to run factories for PV panels. But it would have been less popular, because at least in the USA we don't have a good welfare system to balance out the indirect tax on poor people, who have to spend more of their income on electricity, gasoline, other pollutants.
  - floatrock 6y ago
    Energy requirements of various technologies is commonly measured with a simple ratio called ERoEI -- Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Basically, any energy source can be thought of as an "energy multiplier" -- it takes some amount of energy to free the resource (manufacture it, mine it, etc.), then it produces some amount of energy output over its lifetime. So by looking at energy-out / energy-in, you get a sense of your bang for your buck. Looking at the latest figures on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#Application_to_various_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#Ap... : - Conventional oil wells are 18-43:1 (I've heard saudi oil wells -- the easiest to drill -- are in the range of 60:1) - Shale is 1.5:1 (say you what you will about the shale revolution, but from an energy output point of view, it's literally scraping the bottom of the barrel) - Oil sands are 5:1 - Wind is 20-30:1 - Solar is 9-34:1 As with any lifetime/embedded cost analysis, there's lots of variability dependent on your assumptions, manufacturing conditions, and operating conditions. There's nuances in energy types, like wind turbines produce electricity but require tons of diesel trucks and concrete to assemble. But we can roughly say that in terms of energy requirements, solar is more efficient than shale or oil sands, but it tops out at the lower to mid range of conventional oil.
jpgvm 6y ago
Oil and gas were/are massively subsidized. Solar is winning because it turns out that at scale it's just cheaper. Nothing beats cheaper.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  In what way does the government pay you to use oil?
  - totalZero 6y ago
    It's pretty easy to google that....not trying to be cheeky but here's the first hit I got for "Gas Subsidies": https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subsidies-a-closer-look-at-tax-breaks-and-societal-costs https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...
    - missedthecue 6y ago
      I know what the first hit of google says. It's the only thing anyone can give me when they assert that the O&G industry is the recipient of subsidization. And it's a total joke. It mentions stuff like asset depreciation and LIFO inventory accounting. Basic accounting principles are not subsidies, and are not specific to the oil industry. The author was clearly stretching to try to prove a political point; it is not an accurate representation of the facts. The point is that the government does not pay you incentives to consume oil like it does for electric cars or solar panels.
      - pestatije 6y ago
        It is already explained in previous threads: the government does not tax for CO2 emissions. That's oil, gas, and coal's subsidy.
      - jpgvm 6y ago
        Better and more balanced source is the Wiki article that covers the entire energy sector and various subsidies that have been awarded to each: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidy
Proven 6y ago
More economic nonsense from The Economist. Governments have no money, they steal it from taxpayers. It was the taxpayer who unwillingly spurred the rise of renewables and got next to nothing in return (because they would have gotten electric energy at market prices, the entire difference to a lower market price (used to subsidize renewables) was wasted)
jMyles 6y ago
One odd thing I'm not seeing discussed frequently in threads about solar: Where are the cheap panels and storage solutions? I have lived in my bus for most of the past five years. I have a solar array on the roof (with lots of python glue[0]). And panel (and for that matter, battery) prices that I'm seeing today are no cheaper - and in some cases, a bit more expensive - than when I architected the system five years ago. Is all the reporting about cheap solar somehow specific to grid-tied solutions? 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRp84BlFF94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRp84BlFF94
- kevstev 6y ago
  Where are you located? In the northeast US, I keep seeing panel prices come down each year, to the point where they are a fairly small portion of the system cost these days- labor now dominates the price.
  - jMyles 6y ago
    I have flexible panels on the bus. Three years ago, I paid $110 for 100 watt flexible mono panels. I can't even find that deal now, let alone cheaper.
ganafagol 6y ago
There ought to be a similar article about nuclear. Public funding for nuclear exceeds solar by orders of magnitude. Not just in the U.S.
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
> Governments spurred the rise of solar power Govs are in the business of broadly benefiting the public now? - And at the expense of fossil fuel shareholders who have handsomely paid for their legislative privileges?!?. Where's the honor in that?
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  Don't worry, the solar companies have shareholders too.
  - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    That's some seriously American optimism
- maerF0x0 6y ago
  > Govs are in the business of broadly benefiting the public now? I would argue that they are not. Rather I'd like to see Governments close the broken incentives that lead companies to not broadly benefit the public. The key is that, IMO, government should not in any way be in business or making business decisions (eg solar over another technology), but rather making societal standards (0.x grams of CO2 per GW Hr, or whatever a reasonable metric would be) Then let people exercise their freedom to choose which upstanding business they support.
LockAndLol 6y ago
Too late and nowhere nearly as much as they should've. Sure, they get credit for doing *something* but the free market proponents continuously operated against solar. Praising them is like praising a reckless driver with a fat, greedy business dude in the passenger seat and people in the back staring at their phones, who decides to act normally seconds before an accident.
seddin 6y ago
Here in Spain you can get fined if you own too many solar panels or do not have a contract with an electricity company.

133 points by jakozaur 6y ago

I didn't read the whole thing because it asks for an account. But I want to point something. While I think solar power is great and we should keep working on expanding it, we shouldn't approach renewable energy as our only source. Right now in Spain we had the worst snowstorm in decades and temperatures have decreased in the whole country. Around 80-85% of the solar panels are useless. Nuclear is at 100% and we're burning coal like crazy. And electricity price went up 27%.

newsclues 6y ago
We have solar in Ontario Canada, and while snow has a negative impact on energy production, it doesn’t go to zero.
- Darmody 6y ago
  No, of course not. But as I said, around 80-85% of the solar energy production was stopped. Wind and hydro are not enough so we're burning coal when we could. France is also making a transition to renewable energy but they are not giving up on nuclear because they understand the risks are very, very low and they can produce enough energy to fulfill their needs and to sell to their neighbours.
  - mrpopo 6y ago
    > France is also making a transition to renewable energy but they are not giving up on nuclear Unfortunately there is very strong support on dropping nuclear power in France in favor of renewable energy, across almost all the political spectrum. Nuclear share of electricity production is already planned to be lowered from 70% to 50%.
  - olau 6y ago
    Nuclear is being phased out due to cost. As more things are discovered that could go wrong, it gets more and more expensive to fix all of them. Nuclear is also bad at this kind of thing. You really want either storage (storing heat is easy, by the way), or cheap plants. It doesn't really matter if they are expensive to run as long as they only run a few days a year.
- nahname 6y ago
  It is worth pointing out that Ontario solar generation is only 1% of the power supply mix. https://ieso.ca/en/Learn/Ontario-Supply-Mix/Ontario-Energy-Capacity https://ieso.ca/en/Learn/Ontario-Supply-Mix/Ontario-Energy-C...
pydry 6y ago
Wind energy should be producing a lot more these days. Spain can also import power.
- Darmody 6y ago
  Wind energy is around 19% which is not enough. I think the price increase means we're not ready to rely only on solar as our biggest energy source because it can fail when we need it the most.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    I mean, you don’t build the majority of your infrastructure for black swan events. You can still overbuild renewables, which are effective most of the time, and keep some fossil generators like gas peakers, biomas, and biogas for backup power.
    - simiones 6y ago
      Black swan events are completely unpredictable events. Cloud cover or solar flares are NOT black swan events, they are just the opposite: they are events that we know for sure will happen (just like global pandemics) even if we don't know when they will happen.
      - pydry 6y ago
        It's most intense storm in the last 50 years. Admittedly we should be expecting these with more regularity but it's still a bit of a black Swan. Nonetheless in a system with wind and solar, wind over producing in storms should mitigate the effect of losing solar coverage.
        toomuchtodo 6y ago
        It also appears Spain has an enormous amount of geothermal potential. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032115013374 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
Faaak 6y ago
your generalizing a whole year to some days, which seems a bit dishonest to me.. Yet, even with what you say, spain is actually (right now) quite green: https://www.electricitymap.org/map https://www.electricitymap.org/map
- Darmody 6y ago
  I'm not generalizing a whole year. But we need to be ready for moments like this. Looking at the data in that website you can see that solar went down to almost 0% yesterday.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Rare backup power can be supplied with hydrogen burned in turbines. The capital cost per MW(e) of a simple cycle turbine power plant is just 5% of that of current technology LWR nuclear power plants.
pjc50 6y ago
Yeah, achieving 100% is very hard. The interim solution is having gas or even coal plants on standby to run for the few percent of the year which the renewables can't cover.
- mrpopo 6y ago
  > to run for the few percent of the year which the renewables can't cover. Citation needed. Honestly. A graph with power factor -> expected average number of days per year would add to the discussion.
  - fy20 6y ago
    Where I am in Europe, solar panels produce around 15% in December of what they do in June. I'm not even that far north. We don't have that much wind (even on the coast), and the country is very flat so hydro isn't an option. To use 100% green power we would need a combination of long term energy storage, and HVDC transmission across Europe.
    - stdbrouw 6y ago
      Nobody expects wind to cover the majority of our electricity needs, but don't discount it either. There are some positive signs re: winter production, too: https://www.belgianoffshoreplatform.be/en/news/winter-2019-2020-offshore-wind-energy-in-the-belgian-north-sea-breaks-record/ https://www.belgianoffshoreplatform.be/en/news/winter-2019-2...
    - sveme 6y ago
      Which is being built (e.g. the one between Germany and Norway is currently being finalized. Obviously, we need to connect vastly larger areas.
  - jakewins 6y ago
    Hour-by-hour multi-year simulations show the US grid can be ran with 90% clean power with current technology. "Clean" being the current nuke and hydro fleet plus a massive expansion of wind, solar and storage. The latest such simulation I've seen is the 2035 Report from Berkeley, I wrote a summary of it here: https://climate.davis-hansson.com/p/90percent-grid/ https://climate.davis-hansson.com/p/90percent-grid/ You can read the full report here: https://www.2035report.com/ https://www.2035report.com/
ffhhj 6y ago
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Ftechnology-quarterly%2F2021%2F01%2F07%2Fhow-governments-spurred-the-rise-of-solar-power https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%...
lukeschlather 6y ago
"We shouldn't" is a very strong statement. If solar and wind are 15% of the cost of a nuclear plant then what's the worry? We just build 5x as much as we need (with the obvious benefit that most of the time we have virtually limitless energy.) The problems with solar and wind can be solved with scale and storage. Nuclear has a number of problems which require technology that doesn't exist at an economical price.
- ohgodplsno 6y ago
  Solar is not controllable. A nuclear power plants scales up or down in less than an hour and works whether it's sunny, rainy, snowing, windy or dry. If you build five times more solar panels, you have five time more panels not running when it's not sunny. We can't store it either, because we would then need to build such large battery farms that it would be both dangerous and impractical. Not to mention that our current batteries have absolutely dreadful efficiencies and lifetimes. Additionally, the current CO2 emissions over the lifetime of a solar panel are absolutely horrendous if you do not live in a place that is sunny most of the time.
  - PietdeVries 6y ago
    I think you over-estimate the CO2 emissions for solar panels and under-estimate the complexity of nuclear installations. A quick google search [1] learns that the CO2 emissions of the solar panel are marginally higher than for a nuclear power plant, but more then 10-fold lower than coal plants. Vattenfall did a study, but it's from 1999, so relies on 20-year old solar technology. In addition, building a nuclear power plant is amazingly complex. In Europe there are hardly any companies that have the technology and risk-appetite to build one without a solid (financial) support from the government. I recall that in the UK they are building one that is over time and way over budget [2] (spoiler: they started in 2008 and as of now still aren't producing any electricity, and the government-promised price of ~100 pounds/MWh was in 2016 already beaten by solar, implying that over the lifetime the nuclear power plant will cost the consumer 50 billion pounds on subsidies and 20 billion on construction) And sure, you can't control the sun or the clouds. But with a bit of effort you can create a grid that evens out the impact of the weather. High-voltage power grids in Europe are increasingly interconnected and help fill the gaps in electrical power cross border. Excess solar energy from Germany can simply be transferred to the UK via the Netherlands. [1]: https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=co2+emissions+solar+panels&cat=web&pl=ext-ff&language=english&extVersion=1.3.0 https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=co2+emissions+sol... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
rozab 6y ago
What's the heating situation like in Spain? All electric? I was about to say something to the effect of: does it really matter if electricity prices spike greatly in response to the supply of renewables? Why shouldn't we discourage people from using electricity at these times? I suppose this doesn't apply to vital things like heating though.
- aksss 6y ago
  > does it really matter if electricity prices spike? One of the reasons the electricity costs spike is because you’re maintaining two generation facilities in Germany and Spain. Solar takes massive investment but the coal plants still need to be maintained and fed for when the Sun is obscured. And I think I recall that in a place like Germany, electric demand actually goes up, not down, when the sun is obscured - more people indoors. I would also like to add that it matters significantly on an individual/family basis to productive capacity and well-being when electricity costs go up, whether manifested as blackouts or much steeper bills. Not everyone is wealthy enough to absorb that without noticeable pain. There’s a bit of a “let them eat cake” aspect to comments like this.
wasdfff 6y ago
I would’t be surprised to hear most of the worlds population lives in an area ideal for solar power. I’m thinking SE Asia and Africa. But also, 18 million people live in greater Los Angeles alone, so a good portion of the US population and certainly a large portion of central and south America would be good candidates as well for solar.
- aksss 6y ago
  Especially as those areas become more wealthy and new demands come online. The model of using coal and LNG to power air conditioning units is not one to replicate.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
There isn't even enough time to construct nuclear plants within the timeframes needed to mitigate climate change. Nuclear power is also just too expensive. I know the tech crowd is still angry about the safety debate, and that may even be justified. But it just doesn't matter any more. Solar + battery is now cheaper than coal, of all things, for new construction, in fairly typical situations. Solar panels are also fairly productive in winter, more than people realise. That's because we tend to believe their output is proportional to temperatures, which it is not. Solar irradiation varies far less throughout the year than temperatures. Length of daylight in higher latitudes is an issue, but correlates surprisingly well with stronger winds, at least in Europe.

pjc50 6y ago

Paywalled, archive link is https://archive.is/nXJOd https://archive.is/nXJOd The Economist is not a perfect newspaper, but they're possibly the only non-specialist press that would dive deeply into "what is a PN junction and how does it make electricity"! > the oil shocks of the 1970s saw governments get interested Solar thermal (not PV) was put on the roof of the White House by Carter, taken down by Reagan, and eventually ended up in a museum in China (!) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-house-solar-panel-array/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous... The same issue of fuel imports drove France to build a huge number of nuclear plants, which certainly worked but are now ageing out into a maintenance headache. As the Economist points out, economy of scale and accumulation of experience in manufacturing has worked brilliantly to drive down costs in solar (and also wind). I myself got solar panels on my roof about 5 years ago, locking in a subsidy rate for 20 years. The government incentives to the renewables market have really worked brilliantly. It's just odd how few politicians want to take credit for it.

lanevorockz 6y ago

Not True ... The reason solar power is a usable today is due to natural evolutions of markets that made storing energy more viable. The search of long lasting batteries for mobile phones and electric cars. Governments had no intention of accelerating the obsolescence of fossil fuels but once you have better alternatives it's really hard to suppress. Just think that in 2015 Tesla was struggling, war in the middle east over oil and the scandal of Germany / fake CO2 calculations on german diesel cars.

pydry 6y ago
>Governments had no intention of accelerating the obsolescence of fossil fuels China did. They were acutely aware of how militarily exposed reliance on oil was for them and how polluting coal fired power stations were and were keen on pushing all possible alternatives.
- EB-Barrington 6y ago
  Yes. China also relies heavily upon imported coal, hence the further push for alternatives (nuclear, solar, wind, etc). When China recently banned all coal imports from Australia, the country suffered widespread electricity blackouts.
pjc50 6y ago
France did, due to lack of domestic fossil fuel production; but they went nuclear instead. Germany has struggled internally - they have a strong green faction and a strong domestic coal industry.
Lio 6y ago
> the scandal of Germany / fake CO2 calculations on german diesel cars. The scandal was not about fake CO2 calculations. It was about Volkswagen having its engine management systems detect if a car was being tested and alter how it ran so that it generated less NOx emissions at the expense of power output[1]. When the car was used outside the lab it would produce a higher power output at the expense of illegally high NOx emissions. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

bsenftner 6y ago

Considering how oil industry executives became élite wealth and moved into senior government positions globally, it is no wonder they did not make solar energy research illegal.

jakozaur 6y ago

Another good read: https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020/ https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c... Solar follow exponential cheaper trajectory with no signs of slowing down. Virtually all forecast underestimated the trend. In less than a decade solar will be way cheaper than operating cost of gas or coal plants. It make sense to overprovision capacity and shut down pretty much anything that could be shut down during the day. Plus cheap spurious electricity opens a lot of new frontiers.

polote 6y ago
And previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23185166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23185166
igravious 6y ago
“A naive observer, reading the reports of falling prices for photovoltaic cells and wind turbines, might conclude that the rising shares of solar and wind power will bring a new era of falling electricity prices. Just the opposite has been true.” https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/electricity-its-wonderfully-affordable-but-its-no-longer-getting-any-cheaper https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/electricity-its-wond... this is the reality “Before the year 2000, when Germany embarked on its large-scale and expensive Energiewende (energy transition), that country’s residential electricity prices were low and declining, bottoming at less than €0.14/kWh ($.13/kWh, using the prevailing exchange rate) in 2000.” “By 2015, Germany’s combined solar and wind capacity of nearly 84 gigawatts had surpassed the total installed in fossil-fueled plants, and by March 2019 more than 20 percent of all electricity came from the new renewables. However, over an 18-year period (2000 to 2018) electricity prices more than doubled, to €0.31/ kWh. The E.U.’s largest economy thus has the continent’s highest electricity prices, followed by heavily wind-dependent Denmark, at €0.3/kWh.” and finally, “A similar contrast can be seen in the United States. In California, where the new renewables have taken an increasing share, electricity prices have been rising five times as fast as the national mean and are now nearly 60 percent higher than the countrywide average.”
- jakozaur 6y ago

dm319 6y ago

I can't read the article, but I think evidence like this is important when it comes to the whole idea of government subsidises impacting on free markets. The free market has become a bit of a religion for some (you can see in the comments here), and there's this staunch divide between those that believe the free market will always come up with a humanitarian solution, to those that believe the government need to push things for it to happen. My FIL was head of a large coal plant in the UK, and is very critical of renewable energies, their cost, the impact on the fossil fuel industry etc... It simply isn't possible to have a conversation with him about global warming - he will simultaneously argue it isn't happening and it's natural and not caused by us. He might be an extreme example, but there is general scepticism of government subsidies here. I'd love to see a study where researchers take things that are seen as good/important/essential to modern life and measure the amount of public/government sponsorship that helped bring it about.

est31 6y ago
The US government heavily subsidizes oil and has heavily subsidized nuclear as well. Both were choices for strategic reasons, to be independent in sources of energy (and to have nukes). Preventing climate change and becoming independent from non-renewables seems like a worthwhile strategic goal to me, too. And these are only the active subsidies. We're not even talking about the externalities.
jakozaur 6y ago
Startups need early adopters who value potential and future vision. Innovators and early adopter look beyond your current offering. The challange is finding equivalent of early adopters for commodity markets such as electrical energy. That where the government policies could step in. There are some things that initially are too expensive, but at scale could be game changing. Instead of grants, I would allocate $100mln - $1Bln / year to auctions. to buy at lowest price, the cheaper price available should unlock bigger pool. Good examples for government subsidies: 1. Negative carbon emission. 2. Carbon-free steel. 3. Carbon-free concrete. 4. Synthetical fuels such as natural gas or gasoline.
- 6y ago

nabla9 6y ago

Solar power, Tesla, SpaceX it's amazing what big government taxing individuals in mixed market society can achieve.

jrochkind1 6y ago

Nothing unusual about this, although it can be done wisely or foolishly. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/ethanol-has-forsaken-us/602191/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/ethanol-ha... If we are to survive and thrive on this planet, it would be good to do it more wisely. In general, the "free market" can be easily overstated, it has ever been this way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism Not to mention colonialism as a driver of early capitalist economy.

socrates1998 6y ago

The problem with this idea that we subsidized solar until it was profitable is not accurate. Solar power doesn't pollute and I would argue that all other forms of power that do pollute aren't taxed nearly enough for it, with coal being the most obvious example. Coal power sends an insane amount of carbon into the atmosphere. If we properly carbon-taxed coal, it would go out of business tomorrow. And that doesn't even get into the environmental destruction that comes from strip mining. Strip mining is when coal companies buy a whole fucking mountain and then destroy it piece by piece to remove the coal. How the fuck is that not good for the environment and our society after the coal is gone? So, solar power really is a lot of cheaper than coal when you consider all the negative externalities that it brings.

kyrra 6y ago
Manufacturing isn't free. https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-always-as-green-as-you-think https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt... > Making solar cells requires a lot of energy. Fortunately, because these cells generate electricity, they pay back the original investment of energy; most do so after just two years of operation, and some companies report payback times as short as six months. While the above article is from 2014, it likely still applies today. I would be interested to know how much manufacturing processes have changed since then. The other big thing the article points out is the toxic chemicals and toxic process used to produce solar panels.
- ReactiveJelly 6y ago
  So a model based on pollution taxes would have worked better - We could tax the manufacturing plants, and the coal plants, and have a bake-off to see which is cleaner - Burning coal for power, or burning coal to run factories for PV panels. But it would have been less popular, because at least in the USA we don't have a good welfare system to balance out the indirect tax on poor people, who have to spend more of their income on electricity, gasoline, other pollutants.
- floatrock 6y ago
  Energy requirements of various technologies is commonly measured with a simple ratio called ERoEI -- Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Basically, any energy source can be thought of as an "energy multiplier" -- it takes some amount of energy to free the resource (manufacture it, mine it, etc.), then it produces some amount of energy output over its lifetime. So by looking at energy-out / energy-in, you get a sense of your bang for your buck. Looking at the latest figures on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#Application_to_various_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#Ap... : - Conventional oil wells are 18-43:1 (I've heard saudi oil wells -- the easiest to drill -- are in the range of 60:1) - Shale is 1.5:1 (say you what you will about the shale revolution, but from an energy output point of view, it's literally scraping the bottom of the barrel) - Oil sands are 5:1 - Wind is 20-30:1 - Solar is 9-34:1 As with any lifetime/embedded cost analysis, there's lots of variability dependent on your assumptions, manufacturing conditions, and operating conditions. There's nuances in energy types, like wind turbines produce electricity but require tons of diesel trucks and concrete to assemble. But we can roughly say that in terms of energy requirements, solar is more efficient than shale or oil sands, but it tops out at the lower to mid range of conventional oil.

jpgvm 6y ago

Oil and gas were/are massively subsidized. Solar is winning because it turns out that at scale it's just cheaper. Nothing beats cheaper.

missedthecue 6y ago
In what way does the government pay you to use oil?
- totalZero 6y ago
  It's pretty easy to google that....not trying to be cheeky but here's the first hit I got for "Gas Subsidies": https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subsidies-a-closer-look-at-tax-breaks-and-societal-costs https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...
  - missedthecue 6y ago
    I know what the first hit of google says. It's the only thing anyone can give me when they assert that the O&G industry is the recipient of subsidization. And it's a total joke. It mentions stuff like asset depreciation and LIFO inventory accounting. Basic accounting principles are not subsidies, and are not specific to the oil industry. The author was clearly stretching to try to prove a political point; it is not an accurate representation of the facts. The point is that the government does not pay you incentives to consume oil like it does for electric cars or solar panels.
    - pestatije 6y ago
      It is already explained in previous threads: the government does not tax for CO2 emissions. That's oil, gas, and coal's subsidy.
    - jpgvm 6y ago
      Better and more balanced source is the Wiki article that covers the entire energy sector and various subsidies that have been awarded to each: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidy

Proven 6y ago

More economic nonsense from The Economist. Governments have no money, they steal it from taxpayers. It was the taxpayer who unwillingly spurred the rise of renewables and got next to nothing in return (because they would have gotten electric energy at market prices, the entire difference to a lower market price (used to subsidize renewables) was wasted)

jMyles 6y ago

One odd thing I'm not seeing discussed frequently in threads about solar: Where are the cheap panels and storage solutions? I have lived in my bus for most of the past five years. I have a solar array on the roof (with lots of python glue[0]). And panel (and for that matter, battery) prices that I'm seeing today are no cheaper - and in some cases, a bit more expensive - than when I architected the system five years ago. Is all the reporting about cheap solar somehow specific to grid-tied solutions? 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRp84BlFF94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRp84BlFF94

kevstev 6y ago
Where are you located? In the northeast US, I keep seeing panel prices come down each year, to the point where they are a fairly small portion of the system cost these days- labor now dominates the price.
- jMyles 6y ago
  I have flexible panels on the bus. Three years ago, I paid $110 for 100 watt flexible mono panels. I can't even find that deal now, let alone cheaper.

ganafagol 6y ago

There ought to be a similar article about nuclear. Public funding for nuclear exceeds solar by orders of magnitude. Not just in the U.S.

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago

> Governments spurred the rise of solar power Govs are in the business of broadly benefiting the public now? - And at the expense of fossil fuel shareholders who have handsomely paid for their legislative privileges?!?. Where's the honor in that?

whimsicalism 6y ago
Don't worry, the solar companies have shareholders too.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  That's some seriously American optimism
maerF0x0 6y ago
> Govs are in the business of broadly benefiting the public now? I would argue that they are not. Rather I'd like to see Governments close the broken incentives that lead companies to not broadly benefit the public. The key is that, IMO, government should not in any way be in business or making business decisions (eg solar over another technology), but rather making societal standards (0.x grams of CO2 per GW Hr, or whatever a reasonable metric would be) Then let people exercise their freedom to choose which upstanding business they support.

LockAndLol 6y ago

Too late and nowhere nearly as much as they should've. Sure, they get credit for doing *something* but the free market proponents continuously operated against solar. Praising them is like praising a reckless driver with a fat, greedy business dude in the passenger seat and people in the back staring at their phones, who decides to act normally seconds before an accident.

seddin 6y ago

Here in Spain you can get fined if you own too many solar panels or do not have a contract with an electricity company.