In one way, the cost of solar ($/kWh generated) is not important. Intermittency is the killer. The capacity factor for solar has to be under 50% even in the best desert sites, and it is more likely 25% or less in those sites. This means that every kW of solar requires a kW of conventional power. In fact, the conventional power will have to supply the great majority of the demand, and solar will be just an occasional supplement.
Because of its rapid response capability, the usual primary source coupled with supplemental solar/wind is a natural gas-fueled turbine. However, the turbine must be run at low power levels continuously even when solar/wind is online. This means that solar/wind continuously emits carbon dioxide.
At present, solar/wind is a tiny portion of our electric supply, and the required “backup” comes out of the system surplus. Obama is greatly reducing that surplus, and his actions will gradually reveal the problems with wind/solar. Chief among them is the distribution network instability cause by wind/solar intermittency. The German experience is the wind/solar creates serious stability problems when it reaches about 4% of total supply.
The ice cores at Lake Vostok and the recent global warming show that temperature increases lead carbon dioxide increases. The increased CO2 is likely due to ocean outgassing. We are in the process of wrecking out economy because of a New Age superstition.
What makes you think that a gas turbine must be run constantly, Bob Sykes?
My understanding was the opposite. I thought they could easily be switched off, because they function like a jet engine. Most of the cost of gas power is the cost of the gas itself, so the additional cost of backup turbines is not vast.
Sykes is right. Find and talk to an “operator” of an electric utility. My wife’s cousin is married to one and he will talk you ear off on the folly of solar & wind integration with the power net: politics not prudent power engineering.
Two points:
1) unlikely rosy scenario for decrease in cost and increase in efficiency of solar cells, time will tell;
2) solar may work if the arrays of solar cells are in near earth orbit.
Looks like you’ll pay about $1000/kW for your peaking turbine. I haven’t read this carefully, but believe it includes the generator and auxiliary equipment.
If you run it at full capacity for 1000 hours/year on average (remember, this is just for backup when the solar doesn’t sol or the wind doesn’t blow), and you pro-rate the costs (simplistically) over 10 years, then the capital cost is 10 cents per kWh. Add 2 or 3 cents for operations & maintenance, then you’ll need to add in the cost of the fuel.
It’s definitely a mistake to equate one kWh of solar energy with one kWh of reliable, baseline energy from coal, gas, nuclear, etc. — but it’s also a mistake to conclude that it’s therefore useless. Long before we had a grid, we used intermittent wind power to pump water, for instance. Cheap solar would be disruptive in Clayton Christensen’s original sense:
Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream.
Peak demand is not only usually during the day, but usually near noon.
If solar could be used to blunt the peak, conventional plants could be run near capacity significantly more, causing a price drop disproportionate to the direct supply increase.
To flesh out the “disruptive” scenario: if solar is unsuitable for the grid (as Dan says), yet becomes very cheap, then homes & industries start to work with two kinds of power: cheap, unreliable power to be used opportunistically as it arrives, and expensive, reliable grid power for essentials & emergencies. That doesn’t simply mean a partitioning of today’s uses into the two buckets, it potentially means new uses happening, and some old routine uses becoming luxuries. (Think of people abandoning broadcast TV or five-nines-reliable landline phones for cheap, flexible but less dependable alternatives).
There are a few “if”s there, it seems to me just as likely that either solar does get integrated with the grid, or else never becomes so cheap as to be a large proportion of supply, but in between, that window does exist.
Phileas Frogg: If a government official is emphatically calling something, “evil,” that could, if pursued, accrue more power to the government, you know it’s evil.
Jim: Yeah… maybe. But Russia invaded the Ukraine, and some shady motherfuckers were running a billion bioweapons facilities there. As far as I know, nothing was ever released—and the war continues to grind on, I assume.
Phileas Frogg: When I was a child and I had all of the time in the world to be bored getting driven around in the backseat of a car, I used to look out at large buildings with strange corporate names and wonder what they did in them. I’d concoct stories about secret government programs, or occult meetings, or weapons research, etc. Then I’d imagine sneaking into them and discovering their nefarious schemes. As an adult I’ve come to realize, my boredom induced imaginative ramblings may...
Bob Sykes: “Reported” A nice weasel word. “I didn’t say it” Very nearly every news story out of Ukraine that is published in the western media is an outright lie, and the publishers know it. Those deep strikes are being ordered, directed, and conducted by actual US/NATO officers servicemen. Ukraine itself is a proxy and has no say in what is done. They just provide local meat for the Russian grinder. US/NATO troops have been active on the ground in Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union, well...
Phileas Frogg: Jim, I agree, but as a Catholic I still want the house cleaned up over at the Lateran Palace. With regard to bioweapons, you might be right, but I always liked to think of them as the, “Poor Nations Nuke.” I could be wrong, but I don’t think we’ve actually tried invading a nation armed with them, so they’re at least sufficiently dissuasive as to prevent American military intervention.
Jim: Phileas, we don’t need to further expand the power of the Vatican to resuscitate manly honor and suppress the women and the olds. Even the Congress’s Commerce, Equal Protection, and Naturalization Powers, properly understood, could do that. As for bioweapons, they have radically different properties and a much-different activation curve. I frankly doubt that they are actually all that useful.
Phileas Frogg: Jim, Funnily enough that’s one of the reasons I’m in favor of re-establishing the Papal States as key step in the remediation of the Roman Curia, despite the fact that it’s administered by dubiously Catholic individuals at present. As for modern bioweapons, it’s inevitable and stupid, but perfectly rational. Not every nation can afford, develop, or manage to sneak a nuke into operational existence, particularly under the watchful eye of the various Great Powers, so...
Jim: A law without a court, without an army, is hardly a law at all.
Bob Sykes: The Russians have already set up a separate combat arm for drones.
Isegoria: I’m getting strong Terminator-future vibes from drones hunting survivors in the rubble.
Bruce: At Monte Cassino, we bombed the stone building to rubble, and the Germans put machine gun nests in the randomly scattered rubble. Pricy getting them out. I expect drones to routinely arrive just after a bomb strike and nest in the rubble. Maybe in Ukraine they already are. Next, they look at the field manuals on fortifications and start sneaking construction drones into inconvenient places. Maybe in Ukraine they already are.
Jim: That is an astute observation, Phileas. Indeed, to abuse Bill Gates, “People overestimate how much decline can occur in one year, and underestimate how much decline can occur in ten.”
Phileas Frogg: When degradation happens universally, at a roughly uniform rate, it’s much harder to detect, and much more likely to be accepted as, “normal,” than genuinely isolated incidents. Isolated asymmetric catastrophes are more jarring for the public and more like to cause a response than universal and uniform ones. “Family of 3 is carjacked and killed,” in a small town is more likely to elicit a response than, “Over the course of 10 years, your small...
Phileas Frogg: The fact that they both arrived at a general method is interesting, and naturally begs the age old philosophical question: “Is reality a mathematical structure? Or, is reality necessarily instantiated with mathematical properties? Or, is reality simply able to be modeled via mathematics?” I lean towards the 2nd, but I can’t wholly dismiss the 1st and 3rd, though this tidbit does seem to argue against the 3rd indirectly.
Phileas Frogg: Unless and until they release an actual sticker price, it’s only prudent to reserve judgement given the inflationary predilections of our bureaucracy.
Jim: Don’t worry, guys, not only would they not have participated, if Our Greatest Ally had somehow received advance notice, they would have helped to stop it.
Bob Sykes: Next thing you know, people will be claiming Mossad did 9/11.
In one way, the cost of solar ($/kWh generated) is not important. Intermittency is the killer. The capacity factor for solar has to be under 50% even in the best desert sites, and it is more likely 25% or less in those sites. This means that every kW of solar requires a kW of conventional power. In fact, the conventional power will have to supply the great majority of the demand, and solar will be just an occasional supplement.
Because of its rapid response capability, the usual primary source coupled with supplemental solar/wind is a natural gas-fueled turbine. However, the turbine must be run at low power levels continuously even when solar/wind is online. This means that solar/wind continuously emits carbon dioxide.
At present, solar/wind is a tiny portion of our electric supply, and the required “backup” comes out of the system surplus. Obama is greatly reducing that surplus, and his actions will gradually reveal the problems with wind/solar. Chief among them is the distribution network instability cause by wind/solar intermittency. The German experience is the wind/solar creates serious stability problems when it reaches about 4% of total supply.
The ice cores at Lake Vostok and the recent global warming show that temperature increases lead carbon dioxide increases. The increased CO2 is likely due to ocean outgassing. We are in the process of wrecking out economy because of a New Age superstition.
What makes you think that a gas turbine must be run constantly, Bob Sykes?
My understanding was the opposite. I thought they could easily be switched off, because they function like a jet engine. Most of the cost of gas power is the cost of the gas itself, so the additional cost of backup turbines is not vast.
Sykes is right. Find and talk to an “operator” of an electric utility. My wife’s cousin is married to one and he will talk you ear off on the folly of solar & wind integration with the power net: politics not prudent power engineering.
Two points:
1) unlikely rosy scenario for decrease in cost and increase in efficiency of solar cells, time will tell;
2) solar may work if the arrays of solar cells are in near earth orbit.
Looks like you’ll pay about $1000/kW for your peaking turbine. I haven’t read this carefully, but believe it includes the generator and auxiliary equipment.
If you run it at full capacity for 1000 hours/year on average (remember, this is just for backup when the solar doesn’t sol or the wind doesn’t blow), and you pro-rate the costs (simplistically) over 10 years, then the capital cost is 10 cents per kWh. Add 2 or 3 cents for operations & maintenance, then you’ll need to add in the cost of the fuel.
It’s definitely a mistake to equate one kWh of solar energy with one kWh of reliable, baseline energy from coal, gas, nuclear, etc. — but it’s also a mistake to conclude that it’s therefore useless. Long before we had a grid, we used intermittent wind power to pump water, for instance. Cheap solar would be disruptive in Clayton Christensen’s original sense:
Peak demand is not only usually during the day, but usually near noon.
If solar could be used to blunt the peak, conventional plants could be run near capacity significantly more, causing a price drop disproportionate to the direct supply increase.
To flesh out the “disruptive” scenario: if solar is unsuitable for the grid (as Dan says), yet becomes very cheap, then homes & industries start to work with two kinds of power: cheap, unreliable power to be used opportunistically as it arrives, and expensive, reliable grid power for essentials & emergencies. That doesn’t simply mean a partitioning of today’s uses into the two buckets, it potentially means new uses happening, and some old routine uses becoming luxuries. (Think of people abandoning broadcast TV or five-nines-reliable landline phones for cheap, flexible but less dependable alternatives).
There are a few “if”s there, it seems to me just as likely that either solar does get integrated with the grid, or else never becomes so cheap as to be a large proportion of supply, but in between, that window does exist.