Solar power to take over in US, say scientists

[jpak]

http://www.busrep.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4454229&fSectionId=552&fSetId=662

After decades on the fringe, solar power is closing in on America's mainstream energy sources as surging fossil fuel prices and mounting concern over climate change spur states, businesses and homeowners to embrace alternative energy.

Panels bolted to roofs to convert sunlight into electricity are too expensive in most regions to compete with cheaper, less environmentally friendly fuels like coal.

The high cost of solar power has kept the resource out of reach for many, but not for long, say industry analysts and scientists.

The point at which the world's cleanest, most renewable resource would become cost competitive with other sources of energy on electricity grids could happen within two to five years in parts of the US and other countries, if the price of fossil fuels continues to rise at its current pace, they add.

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[rwenos]

1. Anyone Who's Spent an Afternoon in Phoenix

in June or July knows the power of solar energy.

[diane in sf]

15. Hey solar panels work OK in San Francisco in the fog belt too.

[slutticus]

25. Between solar panels and a windturbine....i think i could be completely off the grid here in SF

:D

[truthisfreedom]

2. nanosolar.com has had a huge breakthrough this year, first year in production.

They've got technology that drops the cost to 1/10th of the silicon cells, and it can be mass-produced using printing-press type technology. It's totally amazing... they can't keep up with orders... they are 1 year out on catching up. Two facilities, one in Silicon Valley and one in Germany. Their forte is rooftop roll-out solar (flat roll-up panels, printed on sheets of thin copper foil!) They even make a product that is integrated right into rubber rooftop!

[truedelphi]

6. Wow this is exciting.

I am always upset thinking about how people were jumping on the solar band wagon way back in Carter's era - and then Reagan's people ended the tax breaks.

Glad to hear it is coming of age with cheap prices.

[izquierdista]

3. Even passive solar would help

I have spent the last two days on a drive along I-20 -- with the AC out. Which gave me even more appreciation for the amount of sunshine falling upon my route. And yet, when I look off to the side, to the many hundreds of houses, in hundreds of subdivisions, nary a single solar panel, or passive coil to heat water to be seen. Just acres and acres of asphalt shingles, featureless as the Martian surface.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

4. Researchers are developing solar paint in the lab

The dyes in the paint can generate an electric current. With it, you could paint the outsides of buildings or even cars.

http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/03/24/solar-power-without-a-solar-panel/

[Zachstar]

8. 10 years ago I was seeing ads for solar paint.

I will believe it when I see it all over the place.

[NNadir]

5. Are these the same "scientists" who were saying this 30 years ago, or different ones?

As I've said a brazillion times before on this site, in response to a brazillion other wishful thinking posts of exactly this type, now stretching back 6 years, quoth the last President from Illinois:

"Of all God's creatures, the hen is the wisest. It cackles only after it's laid an egg."

Anyone who has spent decades opposing the world's largest, by far, source of working climate change gas free primary energy, while hawking promises that have been continuously been demonstrated to have been wrong is either delusional, indifferent, dangerous, or all three.

The Walmart hack, Amory Lovins, wrote in 1976:

And, at the further end of the spectrum, projections for 2000 being considered by the "Demand Panel" of a major U.S. National Research Council study, as of mid-1976, ranged as low as about 54 quads of fuels (plus 16 of solar energy).

Lovins, Amory, Foreign Affairs Oct 1976, page 76.

I am going to use the antique "quad" unit here, with the understanding that a "quad" is 1.055 exajoules.

For the last 30 years Lovins has not once desisted from making disingenuous stupid promises - promises that create unjustifiable complacency in the face of disaster - while bashing the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free energy.

While he was blathering about the "grand solar future," 600 billion metric tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste was dumped into the atmosphere, mostly by people who pay him a lot of money to greenwash them.

Now.

Let's look at is prediction of 54 quads for the US of energy through the wonders of conservation:


http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tablee1.xls

We see instead of the 54 quads that Amory lulled the faithful into believing in, that actual figure is 101 quads, very close to the figure predicted (according to Amory) by Alvin Weinberg, inventor of the pressurized water nuclear reactor and the molten salt reactor. (Weinberg's prediction was between 101 and 126 quads.)

(The difference, of course, between Weinberg and the fossil fuel shill is that Weinberg was, in fact, a scientist - a great one - while Lovins was nothing more than a snake oil preacher.)

Now, how about the 16 quads of solar energy we were also supposed to have faith in:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/alternate/page/renew_energy_consump/table1.html

0.080!!!!!

So trivial as to be meaningless.

Now, fundies on this site like "percent talk," so let's do percent talk. How far off was Lovins' 1976 sixteen quads prediction off? 20,000%. Let's write it out. Twenty THOUSAND percent.

Now the same people want to come back here in the face of the world's greatest disaster and announce the same shit they were talking 30 years ago, 0.6 trillion tons of carbon dioxide later.

In fact, having failed to produce even the roughly 25% they promised for 2000 in 1976, the same crowd is now here announcing they will now produce 100%.

Have they NO sense of decency at long last?

Selling homeopathic remedies to cancer patients is, in my view, one of the most reprehensible things that a person can do.

The planet's atmosphere has cancer, a cancer that is already proving fatal in many places around the world.

And what do we offer?

Patent medicines that have failed a brazillion times before.

How many people, exactly, have to die while waiting for these promises, fairy tales really, to come true, before we see the people offering them for what they are?

[truedelphi]

7. I hope my asking you this doesn';t annoy the heck out of you

But what are you referring to when you say: working climate change gas free primary energy

In one or two words - what does that string of words refer to?.

And BTW if solar was a dead horse, Germany and Japan wouldn't be buying up any and all solar cells that they can get their hands on.

[Zachstar]

9. Fission Power

[bananas]

13. Hydro generates more energy than fission

NNadir is wrong - as usual.

Fission is only used to generate electricity, and ranks second behind hydro:

"Hydro, nuclear, and other (geothermal, solar, wind, and wood and waste) electric power generation ranked fourth, fifth, and sixth, respectively, as primary energy sources in 2005, accounting for 6.3, 6.0, and 0.9 percent, respectively, of world primary energy production (Table 2.9)."

http://www.eia.doe.gov/iea/overview.html

[NNadir]

10. Buying up "all the solar cells they can get their hands on" is NOT the same as producing significant

energy.

If in fact, "all the cells they can get their hands on" is insignificant, that is demonstrative of a big, big, big, big, big, big, big problem, isn't it?

In my opinion, the reason they are buying all of this stuff at a huge premium is because people want to hear what they want to hear, and not what they need to hear.

Solar energy has a huge subsidy - politically induced - wherein it is allowed to charge double the retail price of electricity for feed ins.

And it still is a failure.

Solar energy is a failure. It cannot do what is advertised. If it could - with all the cheering - it would have done so decades ago.

In fact, the only reason that the external cost of solar energy - which is non-trivial - is missed is because the form of energy is trivial.

The entire planet, Germany, Japan and all of the "solar will save us" countries have yet to produce one, even one, of the 500 exajoules of energy that humanity now needs.

The world's largest form of climate change gas free primary energy is now nuclear energy, which produces between 28 and 29 exajoules of primary energy, depending on thermodyanmic efficiency.

This amount of energy exceeds all other sources of climate change gas free primary energy combined.

[jpak]

12. I got news for you - the multi-billion dollar multi-GW "solar failure" is growing exponentially

and installing far more new generating capacity which generates far more more new "solar-failure" GW-hrs than new nuclear capacity right now...

:rofl:

[truedelphi]

17. Thanks for some sanity

Solar has been lying in wait until the technology was refined enough to produce the type of cells that will do it all for us. Had it not been to the oil companies' advantage to keep it
out of the mainstream, I'm sure that it would have come to fruition much sooner.

Some thirty years ago, I had a friend who owned a 12 volt solar cell array that he kept inside a backgammon case. He threw it up on the dashboard of the UPS truck that he traveled around in, and the backgammon case gave him the energy to produce his morning coffee or run his stereo. The other thing about it - the cells he used were guaranteed for 150 years - his great grand kids can run their coffee pots off it.

[PSPS]

14. The longest journey begins with one step, Grasshopper!

Nuclear energy isn't the panacea you make it out to be. There are too many toxic byproducts that last thousands of years.

You're stuck in the centralized-power-generating mindset. Who says we have to build enormous power plants and string wires everywhere? It was economically feasible in the past because the sources of the energy (gas, oil, gravity, etc.) were cheap and plentiful. That's not the case anymore.

I think the future will involve an enormous number of smaller generating stations, including solar in many areas, serving much smaller areas. Perhaps as small as a single residence. Sure, it may be hard to fathom so many installations, but we've got a lot of people in the world too. And as prices for, say, these solar products go down, it will be far cheaper to generate electricity that way than build a new power plant of any kind. Plus conservation like flourescent bulbs is no small thing either, and a megawatt of power saved costs a small fraction of what it costs to generate a megawatt.

[jpak]

11. Reality trumps the sick fantasies of anti-solar religious zealots

every time

:rofl:

[Greyskye]

23. Sheesh, the nerve of those fundies!

Like Intel, IBM, etc.

http://www.thestreet.com/s/intel-plugs-into-solar-power/newsanalysis/techsemis/10421606.html?puc=googlen&cm_ven=GOOGLEN&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA

You should write to them, and show them the error of their ways. :eyes:

Because, after all - 'ignorance kills!'.

[tinrobot]

16. Can't wait to install solar.

I think next year will be the year.

[kestrel91316]

18. I see our anti-alternative energy fundie illiterate whacko troll

has put in his appearance.

Pissing all over DU again. Doesn't he have a day job?

[glitch]

26. That is his day job. nt

[Kolesar]

19. Article describes that there may be an oversupply of crystalline silcone soon

...and it is possible that thin film, non-silicone PVs may take over and "harm" those who entered the crystalline silicone production business.

--

Although solar power is easily installed, building solar panels is expensive because of tight supplies of silicon, their most expensive component. Most industry analysts expect the constraint on silicon supplies to end within two years. They are, however, divided on whether this would help or harm the industry.


Some say a drop in silicon prices would tip the scales from boom to bust by dramatically boosting the supply of photovoltaic panels, which make up 90 percent of sales.

But rival technologies are emerging, such as thin-film panels that need almost no silicon, raising the possibility of a costly battle over which type of solar power will dominate.

Ted Sullivan, a senior analyst at Lux Research, expected "a shake-out among companies that aren't prepared to thrive in this new environment - particularly crystalline silicon players that haven't invested in new thin-film technologies".

These concerns have helped to cool red-hot solar panel stocks, a volatile sector that also faces uncertainty over whether congress will renew tax incentives that expire at the end of the year.

[One_Life_To_Give]

20. if the price of fossil fuels continues to rise at its current pace

"if the price of fossil fuels continues to rise at its current pace"


If thats true $5/watt solar panels with $4/watt installations will be then cheaper source of electricity.

[Kolesar]

21. So, inflation works in favor of just buying the PV panels now

Electricity could cost 20 or 40 cents per kW*hour during the decades during which the PV panels are "paying themselves off".

[One_Life_To_Give]

22. Absolutely

Assuming a high inflation rate you would be best off to purchase now. Be sort of like buying Microsoft stock in 79.

[kgrandia]

24. Solar vs. Wind

It's funny, for whatever reason solar power seems to resonate so much better that wind power when it comes to renewable energy technology. Or is that just me??

[cascadiance]

27. I guess it depends on what part of the country you are in...

Solar collection of course happens during the day and not at night, so you have to capture the energy in some form of energy store or use energy off a grid for night time use for solar. It also is a better solution in sunnier regions like Southwest U.S., etc.

Wind of course works better in windier parts of the country, and also works in the evening if wind is still happening in the evening. If wind dies down though, which is more unpredictable than the daily solar cycles, then it might get less energy some days moreso than others. Also, wind energy generation through propellers that may hurt migrating birds is an issue to be concerned with, with more of these turbines on the landscape. Wind turbines are probably more apt to have mechanical difficulties over time and I guess might be a shorter term investment.

Either of these energy resources though would be FAR better than what we are doing now with fossil fuel crap.

[cascadiance]

28. What would really help is to provide landlords incentives to install solar in their buildings...

Typically, it is the renter that bears the brunt of energy costs, and therefore landlords aren't as concerned about helping keep their tenant's costs down. If you could do it just enough to get a number of landlords to start jumping in and doing it, perhaps that would make it competitive enough for a lot of renters to be "power shopping" if their power bills go up more.

The more you could get the renters properties fitted with solar energy, especially in a sunny place like California that with its housing costs has TONS of renters, the sooner you could make a BIG dent on fossil fuel usage in these areas.

[IowaGirl]

29. Some states offer significant rebates for solar panel

installation. We installed a couple solar panels on our houseboat and it ran the cd player, phone charger and a few other low voltage things without too much initial expenditure. Places like Harbor Freight have been offering the solar panels at pretty cheap prices. Iowa is getting big into wind turbines. Nevada, IA has had giant wind turbines for years now. Many solar panels have a life of 10 years so DH and I have been thinking of adding a few each year so that they wouldn't all die at once in 10 years. :popcorn: