Photovoltaics: From Waste to Energy-maker
Posted by Engineer-Poet on October 8, 2007 - 10:00am
One recurring theme in nature is that anything which creates a waste product tends to also create an ecological niche for something which uses that product. This has also occurred in technology. It is relatively common for waste products which contain energy to find uses, but we may be about to see something a little different and more radical. For the past century, millions of tons of a particular waste product have been piling up all over the earth. This waste product contains no useful energy or rare elements, so its potential has taken longer to be widely recognized. It might just become something far more important to the future: a cheap and abundant energy-maker.
Languishing in labs and landfills
One of the most consistent elements of technological advancement is the gap between discovery and widespread commercialization. The first oil well in the USA was Drake's, in 1859; it took 54 years before the Model T reached mass production, and even longer before the internal combustion engine reached half of US households. The mechanism of nuclear fission was pieced together between 1934 and 1939, the first human-engineered fission chain reaction was in 1942, and Oyster Creek, the first nuclear plant to be ordered commercially, went on-line in 1960 (26 years); today, nuclear still accounts for only about 20% of US electric generation. Nuclear fusion was first initiated by humans in 1952 (the Ivy Mike test), but has yet to be demonstrated as a self-sustaining reaction under laboratory conditions (55 years and counting).
Some important energy sources were originally waste products. Naptha (gasoline) was originally an almost unmarketable byproduct of the production of kerosene lamp oil from petroleum. It found some uses such as cleaning fluid, but no application could use all that was being produced until the invention of the carburetor for the internal combustion engine. Now demand for gasoline and diesel fuel is the main driver for oil production. What was once discarded has become the industry's raison d'etre.
Previous responses to oil price spikes depended on technology already on the market. The US generated a substantial amount of its electricity from oil through the 1960's. When the oil price shocks of the 1970's hit, the response was to accelerate the on-going construction of nuclear electric plants; no new "Manhattan Project" was required, because the old one did just fine. Today, only about 3% of US electric generation comes from oil and oil byproducts (including petroleum coke).
We are ten to twenty years late in beginning our response to peak oil. Given the delay between invention and widespread commercialization, our productive responses from now until about 2025-2030 will come from inventions and resources already known but not yet widely used, languishing as they wait for us to take notice. Photovoltaics are one of these small but growing sources of energy.
Today's state of the art in PV
There are 4 major flavors of photovoltaic cell on the consumer market today:
- Single-crystal silicon.
- Polycrystalline silicon.
- Amorphous silicon.
- Thin film (silicon, CdTe, and CIGS are most widely used).
Some elements, like gallium, are in limited supply and cannot supply a great deal of power via photovoltaics. Others have few constraints; silicon is the 2nd most abundant element in Earth's crust (27.7% by weight). By all rights we should be able to make as many silicon PV cells as we want; we should be able to cover the planet with them.
The reality is different and more strange. Silicon PV production began as an offshoot of the semiconductor industry. The chip industry started with circular wafers made into single crystals by dipping a slowly turning crystal into a molten bath of silicon and drawing it out incrementally; the continuous turning created a rough cylinder consisting of a single crystal, which was sliced into wafers. Single crystals create the most efficient cells, but this is a slow and expensive process. Far from covering a planet, it remains far outside the typical household budget to completely cover even the house's roof.
New processes are changing this. Polycrystalline and amorphous silicon films are much cheaper than large single crystals, in both money and energy. But until recently the PV industry has been too small to be worth its own supply of silicon, so it has survived on the surplus from the semiconductor industry. This surplus had a way of disappearing when electronics were hot, squeezing out the PV industry. But this may be about to change in a very big way, and the consequences may be earth-shaking.
The chemistry of a revolution
This story starts about as far away from PV as you could think of, back in mines producing phosphate rock. Phosphates have long been in high demand as fertilizer (phosphorus is an essential element of life) and phosphate rock (fluoroapatite, Ca3(PO4)3CaF2) is today's major mineral source of the P in the KNP of fertilizers. This rock is dissolved in sulfuric acid (H2SO4) to release phosphoric acid, gypsum (CaSO4) and hydrogen fluoride (HF).
Hydrogen fluoride is nasty stuff. Today's method of disposal is to combine it with silicon dioxide (quartz sand) to make fluorosilicic acid, and then neutralize it with sodium hydroxide (lye) to make sodium fluorosilicate, Na2SiF6. This has some minor uses as a source of fluoride for drinking water, but far more is produced than can be used. It's been piling up for a long time. If Fluoride Alert's figures can be trusted, roughly a million tons of this stuff (containing about 600,000 tons of fluorine) is made every year.
That million tons of silicate also contains about 147,000 tons of silicon. It's been sitting there ever since.
That resource got noticed some time ago, during the alt-energy boom which followed the 1970's energy crisis. SRI International engineered a process which mixes sodium fluorosilicate with metallic sodium (Na). The fluorine has a greater affinity for sodium than silicon, so the result is sodium fluoride and elemental silicon. SRI claims that this process is simple and cheap (under $15/kg in volume), and easily scaled up to 1000 tons/year. The process got shelved after energy got cheap during the mid-80's, but the world has changed again and SRI has dusted it off. Per their presentation at last May's Clean Tech conference, the silicon can be turned into solid pellets, or cast directly into round crystals or ribbons.
Enter Evergreen Solar. Evergreen's "string ribbon" process produces 100-micron (0.1 mm) thick polycrystalline silicon ribbons directly from a molten silicon bath. Here's the new prospect for PV silicon: semi-toxic fertilizer waste and metallic sodium in, production-ready rectangular polysilicon wafers out.
Quantity matters
Making silicon is one thing. Making enough cheap enough to seriously change our energy situation is another thing entirely; you can burn Chanel No. 5 perfume, but you're not going to run even one heavy truck on it all year and the pricetag will make anyone less well-heeled than Bill Gates have second thoughts. So the important questions are,
- How much silicon is really available,
- How much (area) of wafers can it make,
- How much power (peak) could they produce, and
- How much will it all cost?
How much silicon: The million tons may not all be available. Some of it may be contaminated, or unsuitable for whatever reason. But since SRI claims to have tested this process, let's assume that enough raw material is produced to make 112,000 metric tons of silicon per year. That allows a bit over 20% of wastage. The specific gravity of silicon is about 2.8, so 112,000 metric tons would be about 40,000 cubic meters of solid elemental silicon.
How much area can it make: cast into ribbons 0.1 mm (10-4 meters) thick, it would make a staggering 400 million square meters of wafers. This is enough to cover a square 20 kilometers (roughly 12.5 miles) on a side.
How much peak power could they produce: Evergreen Solar is reputed to produce cells which are about 12% efficient. At the standard 1000 W/m² irradiance, the 400 million square meters of panels would produce a peak 48 billion watts of power. That's 48 gigawatts, more than 10% of US average electric consumption. We could probably add that much power every year, just from the waste produced in Florida from current mining. There are other phosphate mines, and probably a lot of raw material piled up over the years.
How much will it all cost: This is where things get into serious guesswork. SRI claims a cost (after sale of byproducts) of $14-something per kilogram of raw silicon. Let's round up to $15/kg and then multiply by ten to account for the cost of casting into ribbons, doping, printing electrodes, laminating onto glass and attaching connections (production of 400 square km per year will have some serious automation applied to it, so it shouldn't be all that expensive). A square meter of 100-micron cells has only a tenth of a liter of silicon, or 280 grams. Multiply by $150/kg and we get a price of $42/m² or about 35 cents per peak watt. The annual pricetag for all of this (112 million kg/year at $15/kg, times ten) would be just $16.8 billion. That's downright cheap; at less than $4.00 per square foot, it would be highly competitive with conventional roofing. We might see a situation where non-PV surfaces become the exception.
The consequences
It took a lot of money and smarts to create this development, but it may be very cheap to crank it out like popcorn. For the rough price of 1 year of the war in Iraq, we could make peak PV generation equal to about half of the nameplate capacity of every generator on the US grid. Further improvements in either the thickness (100 microns may not be the limit) or the efficiency (12% is just where things are today) of the cells would make watts even cheaper and more attractive.
Would we be able to absorb that much solar power? I'd like to say "probably". Today's just-in-time generation would make it difficult, but two developments would make it almost trivial: ice-storage cooling and battery-powered vehicles. Ice-storage is already starting to take off, driven by the difference between peak and overnight electric rates. The PHEV revolution is nascent, but leads inexorably to the pure EV at the limit. These developments are a grid manager's wet dream, allowing generation to be averaged over hours instead of seconds. They'll help a lot with wind, but cheap daytime PV power will drive both of these trends.
One question on everyone's mind is how this would fare in a monetary crisis. I think it depends whether it gets started soon enough. If it takes too long, there won't be either capital or barter to get it established in such an uncertain environment. But if it is already in motion, the picture looks very different to me. A cheap energy producer made in a country with a fickle currency (and a base of technology and labor which will be looking very hard for options) becomes a very attractive item for international trade. Everybody wants to make a profit, so part of the return trade would be the raw materials (sodium) and machine parts to make more. It would make little sense to outsource the labor to countries with strong currencies, so the work would stay where the raw material now sits piled in dunes. Some of the product would stay at home, too. What would a rapidly-growing source of cheap energy do to an economy and currency sunk by expensive energy? It's hard to see how the declining trend would fail to reverse itself.
Conclusion
To summarize the points above,
- We've been ignoring a major supply of silicon-containing material.
- This material can be made into elemental silicon very cheaply.
- The silicon product is ready for direct fabrication into raw wafers for PV cells.
- These PV cells may be extremely cheap: about 3 peak watts per dollar.
- If we used all the annual supply of this silicon source, we could create peak capacity of about 10% of US average electric consumption every year.
- If we used the stockpiles accumulated over the last several decades, we could go a lot faster than that.
- Cheap renewable energy producers would be an economic engine and could even help rescue a moribund economy and currency.
I know this is a rhetorical question, but what are we waiting for?
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Great Article. Thanks. What are your feelings on First Solar as compared to Evergreen Solar. Thank again.
I haven't followed them.
Yup. Super article and particularly the "state of the art in PV" Its been pretty dry for those guys due to the silicon component for a long time. Evergreen products are mostly consumer oriented and First Solar is pointed to large commercial installations. It looks like Evergreen is much more innovative in processing silicon which is likely why EP has them linked. The ribbon process for forming raw photovoltaic cells is working. http://newenergyandfuel.com/
Very interesting. I have to admit, living in the UK, I am slightly unsure how solar can make a significant difference here. The weather is often overcast. Would solar work in these conditions?
Your wind resource is much easier to exploit right now. Take a look at George Monbiot's book "Heat." Very cheap solar may still do better than wind in the UK eventually, but we are a still some time away from that.
Chris
Step 1.
As PV solar power becomes economic, large installations are put into place in Spain, where the sun is reliable and hot, and where there are huge summer peak daytime air conditioning loads.
Step 2.
The Spaniards discover they have excess, effectively free, electricity from their PV plants in the winter when a/c loads are negligible.
Step 3.
The Spaniards notice that the British are paying through their noses for peak winter electricity.
Step 4.
The Spaniards sell electricity into the French grid, the French sell their electricity into the UK grid via the existing interconnecter under the channel.
Step 5.
PV in Spain expands to provide cheap winter solar energy to the whole of Northern Europe.
EP is making a good point about the way systems (in this case the waste side of things) can produce surprising results. That is why it might just be a mistake looking at the viability of solar in the UK alone.
Solar, whether a waste product or not, will hardly be a silver bullet and will have its issues too.
Looking at the big picture, the situation looks more like this:
Source = Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation
Integrating all possibilities - including the renewable resources available to the Brits - will be a more complete answer.
http://science.reddit.com/info/2xswo/comments
http://digg.com/business_finance/Photovoltaics_From_Waste_to_Energy_maker
if you are so inclined...help us spread our contributors' work around the web, whether at reddit, digg, put it in other sites' comment boxes, or email it to others. Your help is appreciated.
Done. Here: http://newenergyandfuel.com/ plus the review covers some of the issues EP chose to leave out that will impact end users.
High penetrations levels of intermittent renewable power sources are a challenge with most current grid systems. There are several non-exclusive ways to 'absorb' solar power generation: real-time pricing, demand side management, hydro/pneumatic storage, for starters.
Retail real-time pricing will lower the cost of power when the sun is shining (or wind blowing), and raise it when this is not the case. Reducing the risk to industrial customers from unscrupulous operators gaming the system would be necessary, of course.
Demand Side Management provides a means to reduce consumption when supplies are tight. For example, a customer signed up in a Demand Side Management agreement may have their electric hot water heater or air conditioner go on a reduced duty cycle (e.g., turned 10 minutes out of every 40) , having additional control elements installed that receive 'conserve mode' signals from the grid operator when peak generation conditions are close to being reached. In 2005, U.S. electricity providers reported total peak-load reductions of 25,710 megawatts resulting from demand-side management (DSM) programs, a 9.3 percent increase from the amount reported in 2004. See a DoE initiative at http://gridwise.pnl.gov/
Energy Storage can be accomplished in a number of ways, from hydro storage (e.g., even Virginia has 3 such facilities), compressed air storage in caverns, flywheels , , and thermal storage, and others
As energy prices rise and become less reliable, any business that depends heavily on energy will invest in security of supply, kinda like a large scale UPS system. In the UK about 2/3 of the cost of our energy comes from grid maintenance rather than the generation cost. We have started to see intensive energy users install CHP or wind turbines on their sites to help meet their energy needs, this is a very good way of reducing loads on the grid and also reducing operating costs, as the energy should cost less and reliability isnt so much of an issue as the grid is hopefully there if things go wrong.
Energy storage is the easiest way to reduce fossil fuel dependency, electric transport and grid scale storage are desperatly needed :)
No nothing like 2/3rds of electricity cost is grid.
Transmission and Distribution are c. 35% of final retail electric power prices, from memory.
For wholesale customers, T&D charges would be much less. Commercial and industrial customers are 60% of UK power demand.
Remember too a lot of UK generating capacity has been written off, this was done at privatisation. So the reported cost is just the O&M and Fuel cost, without a capital cost. The UK has very old generating plant: in fact last winter, they even fired up one of the old oil fired units.
The actual generating cost in the UK will be much higher, as we replace the old coal-fired and nuclear stations with something else.
Demand-side management (DSM) is going to be key. Ice-storage A/C is going to be a huge part of this; today's summer peaks are almost entirely due to A/C load, but ice storage can shift this to any time of day and (with a little more water, which is cheap) spread demand over a large part of a week. And when PV creates noontime peaks on sunny days, ice storage will be there to buffer it.
The other big part is the EV/PHEV segment. If every light-duty vehicle in the USA (roughly 200 million) had a 16 kWh traction battery that averaged 50% charged when plugged in, there would be 1.6 terawatt-hours of tappable demand. This could absorb almost 4 hours of average US electric generation... or possibly defer it until a more favorable time a few hours in the future. This is where we could be 20 years from now.
I think that fleet replacement could go a little faster than 20 years. Also, the batteries in vehicles are not likely to be worn out when replaced, they'll just be degraded below transportation grade. So, I would guess that much storage will be in these used batteries. PG&E is already making contracts to purchase these.
Chris
A fleet replacement of established technology (ICE) with a non-commercial idea-stage technology for 20 years?
People, get some life. It took 20 years for ordinary hybrids to go from development to what? 2% of the market? How long will it take for plug-ins? For V2G? If I need to make a bet - no earlier than 2050.
"A total of 187,000 hybrid vehicles were sold in the United States in the first six months of 2007, according to J.D. Power. Sales of hybrid vehicles are expected to decline slightly in the second half of the year but, nevertheless, J.D. Power expects a total of 345,000 to be sold over the whole year. That would compare to 256,000 sold in 2006."
CNN Money
PO will dramatically change the purchasing trends of automobiles. Toss old assumptions out the door.
Interesting that I saw a television add for the Volt already.
Chris
Did they mention the price? Which channel?
It was PR. The commercial showed a bunch of kids hugging the hood. It was a commercial channel but I don't know which. But, it is interesting that GM would spend on a commercial for a product they won't produce yet for a while. Maybe they want to boost their credit rating by generating a wait list the way that the Prius had a wait list.
Chris
Plug-ins are an excellent idea because they fit in our current infrastructure. I expect them to become quite common within a decade or two. Maybe predominant - but just maybe - it is still to be seen what will be their cost and if they are able to scale fast enough.
V2G is another thing, because it will require additional infrastructure plus fitting the current one in it. Hell we don't even know if it will work - so far it's just a nicely sounding idea, demonstrated by noone.
Personally I think V2G won't work very well - and here is why: when I park my car at work in the morning I want to be able to start it any time I want to, and drive home or to my errands. Unfortunately after I park my car at work in the morning, this will be the most likely time millions of others will be doing the same and crank up those factories, A/Cs, computers etc. Hence we've got a certain negative correlation between parking and electricity demand. If this is the case when I leave work I will most likely find my car LESS charged than when I left it in the morning. If I use the ICE to recharge it on my way back, then effectively I am using my on-board ICE as a 15% efficient electrical generator that feeds the grid - burning (very expensive at that time) gasoline as a fuel. No good deal for me, thanks.
The bottom line is that V2G maybe sound like a good idea and may help a little but don't count on it yet. Let's see how plug-ins perform before we count those chickens.
LevinK, how about if we exclude you from V2G, because you seem to phrase criticisms as if you represent the world's style of life. Things will change and you won't have whatever power you want whenever you want it. Go with the flow.
But, lets not let go of, say, electric school buses. Known and regular hours on the road. But critically, an underused asset through most of the summer.
Just sitting there, 50kWh+ storage, providing ancillary services, up and down regulation, adding to spinning reserves.
Centrally located at a charging park. Oh, BTW, in emergencies, when locals seek shelter from the storm at a school, buses may provide local backup power.
And for some new EV performance results: click me
I don't see the point of your snippy comment.
Whether an idea will work or not has to be investigated prior to spending billions in implementing it. Or you don't agree? You guys are counting the chickens before they hatch and I bet none of you is even an electrical engineer. I am also not an engineer but at least I don't tell engineers what works or not.
EP's essay may be a good idea of what may possibly work. But it has to be proven in practice and this is the tough part. We can fantasize all we want.
I agree that this may possibly work. However, the potential payoff is enormous. Seeing if it does work should therefore be one of our highest priorities.
Edit: My degree says "BSEE" on it.
Unlike you, I have read (and more importantly, understood) the V2G papers at AC Propulsion's site. V2G is not a major method of storing energy for return to the grid. Its major uses are:
I just saw your edit. Thank you very much for the clarification. And of course my non electrical engineering remark was not against you - you did not participate in this conversation at this point, so I still hold on my bet.
Now in the light of your clarification, would you go back to your original post and revise it? I'm sorry for this request, but the most critical point of your clarification is that V2G is NOT a significant source for grid energy storage. While in the original post you explicitly rely on it to store non-dispatchable solar energy. Considering the amounts of energy we're talking about you have to admit this is not a viable suggestion at all.
Of course I am at fault for not doing the research before posting, but to my credit the V2G faults I pointed out were leading to exactly the same conclusion - that V2G can not be a major source for grid storage. But it could be used to stabilize the grid - something which I did not think about and I thank you again for the fair clarification. I would be curious about the cost/benefit analysis for this, but for this one I promise I'll do my own research.
Now that we are back to lacking a viable way to store huge amounts of electric energy we are again in front of the classical problems what will provide the baseload power and what will be used as peaking power.
Clearly solar can be a part of both, but what exactly part remains to be seen. I see it doing relatively well combined with nuclear as a secure baseload and for the nights plus NG plus some DSM to handle the peaks. Like you pointed out V2G can be used both as DSM and to handle short-term shartfalls. 50% nuclear, 30% solar and 20% NG look pretty viable to me. With apologies to Alan, but if/when solar picks up I don't think wind will be referred to at all.
Yet again, Levin, You are wrong. See you don't bother to look up any references or educate yourself, so here is slide 15 of V2G Basics from a recent conference on plug-in vehicles sponsored by the IEEE:
Average car driven 1 hour/day --> time
parked is 23 hours/day
Daily average travel: 32 miles
Practical power draw from car: 10 - 20 kW
US power generation=811 GW; load=417 GW
US 191 million cars x 15 kW = 2,865 GW
Vehicle batteries in a converted nationwide fleet has some 7x the capacity of US load. That's non-negligible.
Let's go further. If each vehicle stores 10 kWh/day, that's 20% of US daily consumption of 10^10 kWh/day. With all-electric vehicles at 35 kWh, storage capacity is 70% of electricity consumed per day. So, for example, an electric fleet enables significantly more wind power to be productively used than without a storage method.
You know in Texas they have installed so much wind power that now at night they can't use it all. Storage would significantly grow their use of wind. But then, you have a history here of arguing against significant amounts of wind.
Don't you think there's a reason people get so snippy with you?
Is nobody building pumped storage? At (IIRC) ~$100/MWh capacity, I would've expected selling dirt-cheap nighttime wind power at daytime peak rates would be economic. I could certainly be missing something, though.
Pitt, the comment was made last month in a public forum in front of audience of engineers, policy makers, business people, and utility people, and was made by Mark Kapner, PE, Senior Strategy Planner for Austin Energy.
My guess is the resources for pumped storage are just not there regionally.
They are, apparently, adding load balancing by putting windmills on the coast (where the winds blow at different times of day, even if the Load Factors are much lower than on the Texas Plains).
Warren Buffett is investing up to $4bn in Texas windmills.
If I am wrong, this mean EP is also wrong, and this paper here (PDF) is also wrong. Note this is a detailed technical paper not a power point presentation. I think you confuse grid regulation with energy storage. Grid regulation is the service of having a stand-by power to meet short-lived variations in demand. Utilities use hydro power, battery packs and capacitor banks to do it.
But it can not be used to smooth longer-term variation like the day/night cycle of solar. For these you need to have a significant storage in terms of GWh - like pumped hydro for example.
V2G does not have a huge capacity in terms of GWh. Your presentation and your calculation is bogus. The utility can not rely on all of the 10kwh stored in the car battery! Figure more like 2-3% of it. Why? Because if you jump in your car you need to know it is as fully recharged as possible - otherwise you are effectively feeding the grid with your ICE. Or the same thing I've been trying to point out all the time.
Overall I agree that V2G will be very useful. It will definitely enable more wind, because currently the V2G service is mostly performed by fossil plants operating in a spinning reserve mode. With V2G these can safely be retired.
BTW I'm expecting EP's response, at least he seems to know what he is talking about.
"...Because if you jump in your car you need to know it is as fully recharged as possible - otherwise you are effectively feeding the grid with your ICE."
There you go again with that ICE thing, and expecting whatever you want whenever you want it. You just don't get it. There are multiple services v2g enables. Check my first post on this thread.
By the way, it's not my presentation. It's from a guy who's been working on this for 10 years, and is currently riding around in a 35 kWh pure EV, and is working with a major utility and grid operator in a pilot program. The concept has been worked out. The concept has been demonstrated, and continues to be studied in order to get real-life experience with successively larger fleets.
But as I have said, don't sign up.
As for your bet, I don't want your money.
I think it is obvious that V2G will provide some storage functions too. That may work nicely in the case with school buses which you pointed out.
This does not change that the 191mln.vehicles x 10kwh calculation was mildly said misleading. There will be real-world constraints on this number, with discharging limits depending on a number of factors. Even if we accept that the the on-demand user culture will have to change, I think the personal car will be the least useful part of V2G. Hopefully financial incentatives could address that somewhat.
I am not an expert in this, but the presentation quotes 10-20kw per vehicle. Is this viable? It seems to me typical households and neighborhood clusters are not calculated for charges like that... wouldn't it require some rewiring?
I am perfectly fine with all you've said, but I wasn't misleading, I simply pointed out order of magnitude values of certain quantities. Real-world constraints will of course limit what can be accomplished, but that is a discovery process that is underway.
The eBox in Willett's talk provides 120 kW. The U Delaware car gets taken out on 100+ mile trips around the Delaware valley with typically 30-40% of battery power left over before any recharging. Has cruised on I95 between Washington and Wilmington at 70+ mph without a problem.
As you know even better in local and stop and go traffic. EVs are amazing efficient due to additional regenerative braking for recharging the battery.
I just had a DOH! moment with all those things around V2G.
Tesla Roadster has a 53kWh battery pack. They claim it will last for 100,000 miles. They also assume energy efficiency of 110Wh/km or 177Wh/mile. So throughout the battery life they expect:
100,000 x 177Wh/mile = 17,700 kWh could be recycled though the battery.
Their battery pack consists of 6,800 18650 Li-Ion cells, currently selling for about $2.50/piece, wholesale. This is $17,000 just for the Li-Ion cells, and I'm assuming everything else could be reused after the cell is degraded (which is a very weak assumption).
So to cover only the degradation of my car battery, the utility will have to pay me:
17,000 / 17,700 = $0.96 / kWh!
Why in the world would they want to do it if the wholesale price of peaking power is more like $0.05 c/kWh? This is 19 times as expensive! And $0.96/kwth is just the beginning - we did not count the infrastructure and the original generation costs inside yet.
So, in order V2G to work we would need:
1) Batteries that don't degrade (ultracapacitors?) - the jury is still out on whether we'll see those
2) Either breakthrough on chemical battery life or on battery cost or a combination thereof. But what is the chance we could see breakthroughs that lower the cost 20 times!
The only thing I saw in the V2G papers about battery degradation is it will be a subject of later research. Isn't this way to convenient?
Please correct me if I'm missing something. If I don't then I'll consider this discussion to be over.
$0.96 cents / kWh!
I wouldn't settle for less than a $1/kWh!
See my links and comments to Robert below, but in summary:
You're making money by just being plugged into the grid, providing spinning reserves. For regulation services, you can make $2500/yr.
On the battery lifetime, altairnano's specs claims a 15,000 deep-cycle lifetime, 41 years at one cycle per day. V2G will mostly be a small fraction of full cycle charge/discharge, so you might cut that lifetime by half.
Any reduced battery life is balanced against any revenue stream for providing services to the grid.
You're making money by just being plugged into the grid, providing spinning reserves.
"Spinning reserve" is the ability to produce energy on demand - and the bottom line is that you have to be able to produce it when requested at the market price.
Actually the way it works is at the time power is requested the loads are bid up with the lowest cost marginally produced power engaged first. In such environment V2G will never be used! The highest marginal cost peaking electricity is Natural Gas - at some $0.10/kwth it is 10 times less than batteries.
The only way what you suggest to work is to mandate utilities to NOT maintain enough lower cost spinning reserve thus creating artificial shortage in the market! Aren't you stretching this a little bit? How do you expect consumers will react to a $1/kwth price on their bills? Utilities will not pay for standby they will NEVER EVER use. They will build up the lower cost peaking generation until there is a glut of it - which is the case everywhere in the developed world. They will simply choose to ignore anybody who tries to sell them 20 times more expensive electricity. Or do you suggest the government mandates them to accept the bitter pill?
I agree that if it delivers, Altairnano's battery may address the cost issue to some extent. Assuming it reaches the same cost as Li-Ion and it has 10x times the battery life, the cost of the power (from degradation only) would be $0.10/kwth. Add infrastructure and premium costs and it would go to $0.15/kwth - closer to competitiveness but still remains to be seen. Just like with Eestor the question remains open.
Even then the utilities will prefer buying Altarirnano/Eestor batteries themselves. Why all the trouble of building V2G infrastructure and paying premiums if they can be in a full control and take all the benefits for themselves? Are you going to force them not to do it? Moreover the goal of accommodating renewables will be more easily reached this way.
I think you should abandon the idea at this point of time, it's getting way too funky.
Tesla uses conventional li-ion batteries. At about $400/kwh, and perhaps 500 cycles, the cost per discharge is about $.80, far too high for utility storage. This is generally understood - no one would suggest using conventional li-ion batteries for utility storage.
First, you have to realize that V2G isn't the most important use of vehicle batteries for utility load leveling. Instead, the the most important use of vehicle batteries for utility load leveling is dynamically scheduled charging, which will make a dramatic difference.
V2G won't be needed for large-scale utility load-leveling until wind & solar reach more than 20% each of market share - that won't be for at least 10 years, and that would be under a crisis mode installation program.
2nd, 500 cycles is conservative for conventional li-ion in a vehicle with sophisticated charge & temp management.
3rd newer li-ion batteries, such as A123systems, or Altair, have much more than 10x the cycle life of conventional li-ion.
4th, li-ion costs will continue to drop by 7-10% per year - it's pure economy of scale & manufacturing experience.
By the time V2G is needed, it will be cost-effective.
Guys, this is getting surrealistic. V2G will NEVER be competitive, because there is an inherent much better deal - do it yourself battery to grid. The utilities have a century long experience in doing it and so far I don't see them complaining.
No matter how battery technology evolves, it will always be more profitable for the utility to buy it's own batteries and do it itself instead of building and enormous infrastructure for effectively renting mobile batteries.
In addition utility scale batteries will always have different requirements than vehicle batteries. Utility scale batteries would also benefit from economies of scale. BTW why is nobody suggesting renting our cell phone batteries? If you add them up they will form enormous unutilized capacity.
If the utility pays you for your battery it will have to cover the following:
- battery degradation
- V2G infrastructure, maintenance and profit margin
- premium to the car owners to cover his cost of frequently buying new batteries and making him interested in the whole schema
If the utility byus its own batteries it will have to pay for:
- battery degradation (depreciation)
- nothing else
The first option will ALWAYS be much more expensive. Something plus something is always more than something plus zero. I would expect V2G to put at least a $0.10/kwth charge over the battery degradation cost. It is ridiculous to think they would ever consider such a deal.
There is a caveat: if ultra capacitors come to life and degradation costs get close to zero then the game becomes different. In this case the V2G infrastructure + car owner premium will have to compete with the cost of capital for buying the ultracapacitor over its lifetime. I would not hold my breath though - complex schemas like V2G are never cheap. It will be many years of investing billions upfront before the costs are brought down to competitive level... in a competitive market nobody would do it if they have an easy, quickly deployable and scalable alternative at hand.
Have a good evening and sorry for spoiling this party.
I think E-P has answered most of your concerns, but I'm not sure you really absorbed what I or he was saying, so I'll try again:
1) Tesla's batteries are far more expensive than other chemistries, because Tesla wanted the maximum energy density, which the older, conventional li-ion's provide. Firefly or A123systems batteries would be far, far cheaper than the $1/KWH that you're using, more on the order of 10 cents per KWH.
2) The most important thing is not V2G, which is energy flowing from the car. The most important thing is utility managed charging, which will buffer wind & solar. That will suffice for at least 10 years. By that point the infrastructure for utility managed charging will have been in place for years - the utilities (PG&E, etc), car companies (Tesla, GM) and software companies are already planning for this to be in place when the cars are sold. That infrastructure will seamlessly handle V2G.
3) A123systems batteries, which appear likely to win the Volt contract, have sufficiently long cycle life that effectively there is no degradation cost to the car owner to reselling energy back to the utility.
4) vehicle owners will pay for batteries for their transportation utility, and utilities won't have to pay the full cost of the battery.
By the time V2G is needed, if it ever is, the batteries & infrastructure will be ready.
OTOH, V2G may not be needed. Geographical diversity, long distance transmission, PHEV dynamic charging, pumped storage, flow batteries, Firefly lead-acid in utility scale installations....all of these may do the job. I suspect it will have an important role at least for the small-scale services that have been discussed, but we'll see.
"Spinning reserve" is the ability to produce energy on demand - and the bottom line is that you have to be able to produce it when requested at the market price.
Actually the way it works is at the time power is requested the loads are bid up with the lowest cost marginally produced power engaged first. In such environment V2G will never be used! The highest marginal cost peaking electricity is Natural Gas - at some $0.10/kwth it is 10 times less than batteries.
Actually you are wrong. We're not addressing peak demand. Spinning reserves is a reserve when power is required quickly, within minutes, from 'spinning' generators and ready to go at a moments notice. It is paid for by (1)the amount of time it's reserve is ready to go and available, and (2) the $/kWh of actual energy delivered. Ignore (2) as insignificant for now, let's focus on (1) revenue for being 'available'. A 100 kW battery plugged in for an hour provides 0.1 MW-hour of reserve. Agregated in a fleet of ten cars provides 1 MW - hour. No power need be exchanged in this service unless the ISO requests it. PJM (the ISO or grid operator in the mid-atlantic region) pays for this reserve $14 per MW - hr. Stay plugged in 10 hrs, that's $14/car per day. Multiply by days available per year for annual revenue. How often is spinning reserves called on? In the PJM service area, all of 21 hours for all of 2005 (pg 36 from Ref).
And then there are regulation services, the revenue of which was discussed by me elsewhere in this thread and comes from this work.
I think you should abandon the idea at this point of time, it's getting way too funky.
Not for me.
You insist on looking at it from the POV of V2G vehicle owner. You imagine getting a fixed stream of income basically for having a battery.
Guess what? It won't happen. Anyone with cache on hand can buy a battery and in the case of utilities they have to be crazy to pay all those premiums to you, not keep them for themselves.
Like I explained - you can not make them accept V2G if its cost per kwth is higher than what they already can get from existing spinning reserve. Since installed spinning reserve is more than enough, you are basically suggesting that they will be paying for an insurance for event that will never happen. It's like buying a life insurance for dead person.
The utility can't justify the capital cost just to have spinning reserve. But if you're paying for the battery via the difference between the cost of energy from electricity and the cost of energy from gasoline, the extra revenue from services such as regulation and spinning reserve is worth the expense in control systems and the minor impact on durability.
(If that impact exists at all; recall that AC Propulsion's regulation test caused the measured capacity of the Panasonic lead-acid battery pack to increase.)
I don't think you even bother to read my posts.
Go for it man, I'm with you.
It's probably because you don't seem to get the whole spinning reserves, regulation, peak load thing.
If you do, you're not conveying it in a way that this argument/debate can move forward.
If you think it's not economic for utilities to invest in V2G, great. Repetition on your part doesn't improve your message.
And don't worry 'bout your tax dollars going for v2g. They're being well-spent wasting American and Iraqi lives as we quibble.
When you fill your posts with multiple egregious errors of fact, you are not going to get the kind of answer you want. You are going to have to straighten both your facts and your reasoning out first, THEN you will get the kind of response that you desire.
After some digging into it I admit you two are right and I don't/didn't quite understand the nature of the peak load, spinning reserve and regulation services. I'm sorry.
Now I'm back to square one: what would be the cost/benefit analysis of V2G? It looks the primary service V2G could provide is regulation, it should be less competitive as spinning reserve or peak load. For these two I'd also think discharge limitations will limit the actual resource base - I am at loss what happens after the storage is drained if peak load/spinning reserve mode is engaged - aren't those contracts supposed to be for continuous power? I need to do some more digging but I would suspect that the V2G contracts would be depending both on MWs and the GWh-s available.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5050/is_200504/ai_n18342790
$360mln. or even $500mln. yearly is too thin of a market IMO. I think it will all depend on the cost of implementing the V2G system itself vs the expected revenue. Solar and especially wind may increase this market, but this would increase their overall costs too.
I don't really think more wind and solar plus V2G will be enough to retire significant number of existing units. Obviously spinning reserve is avoided for coal power plants as much as possible, so I don't think many of those are or will be kept running just because of that. If I understand correctly ancillary services don't reduce the need for base load power.
P.S. Somehow you forget that the $0.03-0.05/kwth electricity spinning reserve generators provide ALREADY includes its capital costs inside. And a generator may work 60 years. How long on-grid battery would last? 2 years?
Not quite. It's the ability to make up the difference between immediate supply and immediate demand on command (response time of a few seconds). This has historically been done with generators on-line but idling, but it can be done just as easily and far more efficiently by varying a large controllable load. In the case of (PH)EVs, the available spinning reserve is equal to the full charging load (and that's without making demands on the batteries to feed back to the grid).
Spinning reserve has its own market price, quite different from e.g. a MW of base load generation. If you have 200 million vehicles connected to the grid at a minimum of 6.6 kW peak charging load apiece (220 V 30 A connection; some will have more), that's 1.32 TW of load available to manage the grid. If it's averaging 1 kW per vehicle, you've got 200 GW (roughly 45% of today's average generation in the US) to play with as spinning reserve.
You can do considerably more than that, of course. Spinning reserve is there to make up for a large generator going off-line. V2G would allow back-feeding the grid for a few critical minutes while slower-reacting plants were brought up to take up the slack (or other demand was taken off-line). It has to be there, but it gets used very infrequently. In this way, V2G would supply "spinning reserve" at zero cost in fuel, minimal cost in equipment and a very low cost in battery life.
Historically the generators you find obsolate now were providing spinning reserve at the cost of $0.02-0.05/kwth.
Your genial innovation is going to provide them with spinning reserve for $1/kwth. OK lets allow innovations etc. to bring this down to say $0.20/kwth. Just perfect!
Just to mix in the conversation a little is the Flow battery. I dont think I've seen anyone mention it in this long thread. http://www.vrbpower.com/
We are putting one of these in for UPS of a Telco site I am in the middle of engineering. It will be 100Kw.
I think these may be more what we will end up seeing at the power utility level as more wind and solar projects come on-line. They are already using them with ff electric plants now at the end of long transmission line runs. Charging at night and using them for peaking during the day.
I dont have the numbers in front of me, but I recall it being 2x cheaper than lead-acid for mass storage and battery life. High up-front costs but last longer than Lead acid that we use in DC plants of telcos.
Thoughts on NaS batteries? AEP recently prchased some MWs, and IIRC, price was $4-4.5 per Watt.
Snipped press release from AEP below. Sounds like they're also interested in flow.
What's most interesting is they want to get 1 GW of storage.
“We’re first movers on advanced storage among U.S. utilities, a position we’ve held on a wide number of technologies in our century of existence,” Morris said. “Our near-term goal is to have at least 25 megawatts of NAS battery capacity in place by the end of this decade. But this is just a start. Our longer-term goal is to add another 1,000 megawatts of advanced storage technology to our system in the next decade. We will look at the full spectrum of technologies – flow batteries, pumped hydro, plug-in hybrid vehicles and various other technologies in early stages of development today – to determine their feasibility and potential for commercial application.”
" This has historically been done with generators on-line but idling, but it can be done just as easily and far more efficiently by varying a large controllable load. "
You might want to clarify that "varying a large controllable load" is really not V2G, but demand management. This might be a source of confusion...
You do realize that the Tesla Roadster is a luxury toy (albeit a very "green" one), and that its battery chemistry is on the way out due to better technologies already on the market?
As you know this has nothing to do with the Tesla Roadster, it has everything to the with the properties of Li-Ion batteries.
Whether Li-Ion batteries are on their way out remains to be seen. With $1/kwth drawn it would have to be a total 100 fold improvement over battery life and cost to reach utility acceptable cost levels.
And as I argued above if this miracle battery appears, an utility would have to be crazy to consider YOU as a car owner as its battery provider. It will buy them and use them itself. Which will BTW be much better for the renewables integration than the overcomplexity and unreliability of V2G.
I can repeat this all I want but you guys seem to have an affection for this idea. Sleep it over.
You overgeneralize "lithium-ion batteries". For every salient property you could specify to support your case, someone here would likely supply a counterexample.
You have degenerated to fact-free ideological rants. Time to sit down, have a drink and relax.
You are indirectly implying that Tesla's engineers did not pick the lowest cost, longer lasting batteries. Which would translate to lowest cost / mile for their batteries.
I'm not at all expert in the various flavors of Li-Ion, but if I may rely on their authority - they picked the best which is available at the moment for a BEV. I would be happy to prove me wrong and to show me there are suitable BEV batteries, which will cost you much less than $1/kwth. I would not consider anything more than $0.10/kwth though.
Your phrase "lowest cost, longer lasting" says it all. It's an oxymoron. The longer-lasting cells are always going to cost more than those which sacrifice lifespan for cheapness.
TM is using laptop cells (cobalt oxide), which is why they need all the careful thermal management stuff. They could have purchased A123Systems LiFePO4 cells for vastly superior life and total immunity to thermal runaway, but they would have paid a penalty both in cost and in bulk (they would have required more cells). TM decided not to re-engineer the vehicle a second time (they already changed their selection of cells to achieve greater durability but sacrificed energy capacity).
This is about right. The value of a transportation grade battery is having its full capacity for as many charges as possible. Tesla expects 500 charges rather than 334, but you're close. So, when do you swap the battery pack? Let's say at 15% degradation. Now, say you are PG&E and you flog a power backup to a commercial building and you buy these batteries. You are OK with using them down to 80% degradation because you are not paying rent for the spot in the building where you park the batteries. Let's assume degradation is linear with cycling because of the management built into the battery packs. You buy at 20% of the original cost of the battery because hey, it ain't transporation grade anymore. You get about 2.6 times more battery use than in transportation mode. So now your cost is $0.07/kWh for using the battery pack less whatever fee you charge for providing the backup service. So, your price for arbitrage is about $0.104/kWh assuming $0.03/kWh cost of electricity to charge and 86% charging efficiency, not counting the fee you are getting for parking the storage on someone else's property. I assume this is why PG&E is signing contracts to buy used Tesla battery packs.
Since there is more storage available in used batteries than during their transportation life time, this will dominate the storage associates with batteries built for transportation. With fleet conversion, this amounts to about half a day of storage. At this level of storage, an entirely renewable grid delivering at $0.08/kWh seems quite feasable.
Chris
The paper is absolutely correct, given its assumptions.
You're reading it wrong. If there were 20 million Chevy Volts or equivalent in California, and they all arrived at work with their 16 kWh batteries 50% depleted as they plugged in, the utility can absolutely rely on a very large fraction of 160 GWh of demand that day (some will disconnect early). Average that over 10 hours, that's 16 GW of controllable load available as spinning reserve.
The AC Propulsion V2G study you cite shows that California's load peaked (past tense) at under 30 GW. If you postulate 50 GW of PV added in California, producing an average of 300 GWH/day, the PHEVs could make up for the other loads and generators on the grid by absorbing none of it (up to 50 GW surplus from the PV), all of it plus another 82 GW (assuming 220 V 30 A connections to the grid times 20 million vehicles), or anything in between. The vehicular load could be varied by that full 132 GW in seconds, without tapping into the back-feeding capability.
160 GWh is a very significant amount of storage, even if you can only get a small fraction of it back to the grid again. It gives you enormous flexibility in generation (and perhaps the difference between minimum requirements and full charge to play with). The major problem with RE is when the power is generated. The vehicle doesn't care if you charge it at home at night or at work during the day. If you can tailor-make your load curve to suit your generation, the problem is solved.
Perhaps I was being too nuanced, but the two points are not contradictory. Vehicles using V2G will store vast amounts of energy (that's what their batteries are for, after all), but they will not return large amounts of this to the grid. Further, the shift away from fossil-fired generation to PV (at least in the Sunbelt) will completely change the dynamics of the system:
The AC Propulsion study you cite is about regulation as a service, not spinning reserve.
Historic studies of the time-shifting effects of EVs on the grid are only valid given today's generation regime. Any large shift to PV will completely change that game and invalidate the assumptions regarding the daily load curve. You'll have to assume that the vehicles will charge when the power is available, which won't always be in the wee hours of the night any more.
Wind is available in places and at times that PV is not. There won't be any PV operating during a 3-day spell of horizontally blowing snow in western Minnesota, but a wind farm will be cranking. Even evenings in sun-rich areas are good for wind; your PHEV is going to be more useful if you can snag a fast charge while shopping or dining out after work, no?
I surrender. You guys rock. Go ahead and do it.
Sing me out though and forget about using my taxpayers money. Just give me your address so I can also send you my $1/kwth bill - I don't agree to pay this one either.
Whether an idea will work or not has to be investigated prior to spending billions in implementing it.
No no, they're spending bajillions on it. Hyperbole works for me too. Pass on a reference on the billions. Then I'll pass on mine for the bajillions figure.
Or you don't agree?
Do some homework. This has been extensively published on for over ten years. Start here: http://www.udel.edu/v2g
You guys are counting the chickens before they hatch
I give up on that one.
and I bet none of you is even an electrical engineer.
Hey now you're getting personal. Let's see, most of the effort on V2G is underway in collaboration with ... people who work at an electric utility! But who knows what kind of educational background they might have.
But let's argue as Rome burns.
I am an electrical engineer and nobody is going to do V2G except in an emergency. Vehicle fuel is more precious than electricity. If it were otherwise, we would all have an internal combustion engine in our basements generating our electricity.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
v2g is not about internal combustion engines....
It's about turning expensive fuel into cheap electricity at a profit.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
V2G is about using a charge taken at one time off the grid and sending it back to the grid when there is need. I think you are worried that the plug in hybrids will be charging off their engines and that will go to the grid. I expect that if V2G takes off, it will be used with EVs since they will have larger capacities. But, I doubt that cycling a transportation grade battery for grid storage will make much sense. Much better to use the degraded transportation batteries after they no longer give adequate range for transportation. They will still be good 99% efficient batteries and they can be treated more gently in their semi-retirement.
Chris
There is no such thing as 99% efficient batteries. Try 75-80% roundtrip efficiency (maybe ultracapacitors could get close to 99% efficiency but these are yet to be demonstrated).
You reminded me that full-scale V2G will degrade car batteries... just forget that idea people. On the other hand PHEVs and BEVs are good candidates for DSM.
I was surprised to read 99% efficiency for the Tesla batteries and now I agree that must have been an error. Their claimed charge efficiency is 86%. Thanks for making me recheck that. Nissan has included a super capacitor in a hybrid truck.
Chris
No it isn't. You don't know what you're talking about.
V2G is about storage of electricity via batteries. Batteries that also function for a second use: Transportation.
So by charging these batteries overnight when demand is low, then providing some of that stored energy back to the grid for times when demand is high, V2G can provide several benefits to the security of electricity supply and grid stability by providing ancillary services.
V2G provides a significant benefit for storing energy from intermittent solar and wind resoures. V2G helps to support plug-in vehicles, which have well-to-wheel CO2 emissions 33%-65% lower than conventional vehicles. And when chearged from primarily renewable or nuclear power, have no well-to-wheel emissions.
No, it isn't. V2G is about spinning reserve, regulation, and reactive power. These are all services that grid-connected battery vehicles can provide more cheaply than most of the generation plants now doing the job, so using V2G will make the total cost of running the grid go down.
Actually he is right.
If V2G was used only to recharge the battery when there is surplus electricity (from wind etc.) then it would make sense. But similar proposal is already in place - aka "smart grid" or DSM, in which certain schedulable loads (like A/C with thermal storage, refrigerators etc.) engage only when they are given a signal by the grid operator.
If V2G is used in its "full version" - that is to give off electricity and help meet peak demand, then the electricity that was given off will have to be recharged from the on-board ICE. Which is extremely inefficient idea - figure a 15% efficient electricity generator, that runs on fuel much more expensive than what utilities use.
Maybe it will turn out that DSM would work; V2G - I'm not so sure.
... you would only be burning motor fuel to make electricity if the net flow was to the grid, not the immediate flow.
I can produce several horsepower measured over a period of perhaps 0.5 seconds. Averages matter.
In a mostly stochastic environment you would end up with part of the fleet on negative and part on positive. Depending on the total installed capacity, on the peak demand, on the available surplus, on the non-dispatchable part of the generation, and on a bunch of other factors I'm not qualified enough to estimate.
In order V2G to be compatible with the primary goal of plug-ins (highly efficient electric transportation) you would have to limit the amount of "negatives" and the amount of not fully charged vehicles to minimum. Actually it is safe to assert that you would have to have NO "negatives" at all, for obvious reasons. Vehicles should give off only from the charge which has been accumulated after they were plugged in, no more than that.
These problems should pose a significant limit to the V2G potential as an utility storage. You can also forget V2G to work to solve the evening/night problem solar has - people will want their vehicles charged when they wake up. Add to this battery degradation (Li-Ion batteries are not good for grid storage for the same reason) and maybe it will not be that useful idea after all.
I know I'm doing a little hand-waving here and I better read some serious research on the subject first (which I don't have time right now), but these seem to be valid issues with the V2G concept.
Yes and no.
PHEVs can't solve a solar energy problem when there's no solar energy, but they can solve the other problem: how to generate the sunset-to-sunrise demand most efficiently. The PHEV fleet allows a large part of that demand to be scheduled to suit the grid, and the load curve could be set to suit the point (both in total GWh generated and immediate load) where the grid ops want things to be in the morning. This lets them do it with the cheapest, most efficient generators they have.
If V2G is used in its "full version" - that is to give off electricity and help meet peak demand, then the electricity that was given off will have to be recharged from the on-board ICE.
Where are you getting this from? Who defined "full version"? You. You created a strawman to then point to it as a stupid concept. No one is proposing running a FF-engine to charge their battery to feed the grid. Where do you get your information?
You won't get an answer from me unless you change your tone. I don't feed trolls.
Certainly. Let me offer you my apologies for my tone.
I'll be back in the morning. If you have the time, cite a reference to some work that proposes your "full version", as I know of none.
I am an electrical engineer
BFD
and nobody is going to do V2G except in an emergency
I'd call you an idiot but you don't know what you're talking about.
Think pure plug-in vehicles. Think storage. Think what are the challenges to grid stability, congestion relief, and peak load management.
It's not about distributed FF-fired generators. It's about distributed storage. Jeez.
Think car owner. With a PHEV. I can have a car all charged up ready to go at all times. Or I can get a nickel from the utility in exchange for allowing them to play games with my expensive battery with a finite lifetime. And have to burn gasoline if I want to drive off in my car. The utility has cheaper and more reliable methods of solving THEIR congestion relief, and peak load management problems. Batteries won't help stablize the grid. They can't react fast enough. What the utilities want to do that is an SMES. Not to mention the whole thing is a legal and billing nightmare.
Run some numbers. How much do batteries cost and how long do they last? And if it is worth it, why wouldn't the utilities buy their own batteries instead of paying to ruin mine. Why wouldn't the utilities buy cheap and durable lead acid batteries instead of ruining the expensive light weight batteries I have to have in my car.
If the utility want to have peak load management, they can charge time of day pricing. Then I'll charge up my car with cheap watts. No way in heck are they going to charge and discharge MY battery at THEIR convenience. My pain is more than their gain.
I used fossil fuel car as an example because ruining electric cars is worse.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
I would agree with this.
It would not matter to me what promises and safe guards that they put in place to assure me that no major draw down of the battery would or could ever occur.
Even if a system is designed to only make less then a second draw down, I would still put in a diode in the circuit to prevent the battery from being used.
If they require the battery to be online, I would just provide a cheep lead acid battery for such use.
DocScience
The utilities have about the same attitude about people dicking with their grid. Their legal department would go catatonic.
If we had supercapacitor cars, v2g might have something. Or flywheel cars or SMES cars or anything with a factor of a hundred better specific power than batteries, can be charged and discharged in five minutes, and has an effectively infinite cycles lifetime. We are invoking both the technology tooth fairy and the litigation tooth fairy. But not with batteries.
We are also assuming free WIFI to exchange billing information. There's an inverter and a electric meter in every car stall. A thousand bucks worth of equipment? A standardized electricity interface that all car makers follow. The utility has a database listing with 200 million cars in it of which 20 million are replaced every year and lord knows how many are bought and sold. How many data entry people and phone answerring people at $15 bucks an hour do they have to hire? Do they outsource this to India? What will vandalism cost? People hacking the WiFi network and only pretending to download electricty while getting credits? When somebody hits the stall while parking and talking on their cellphone at the same time, who sues who for a couple thousand dollars in damages? Or does everyone fix their equipment and life goes on. What happens when terrorists or teenagers attach the charger to their tesla coil? I hope nobody was planning on using the grid this afternoon.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
No Robert, let's just sink another couple a hundred billion into oil this year. And next. And next. That's a hecka investment in the future.
BTW, no one utility will have a database of 200 M cars. Think regions and ISOs.
Hitting the stall while parking and talking on the cell phones at the same time? Gosh, seems exactly the same thing could happen right now with a pump at the gas station. Generally people don't whip up to the pump at 60mph.
What happens when terrorists or teenagers attach the charger to their tesla coil? Gosh, putting terrorists and teenagers in the same sentence seems, I don't know, maybe not well thought out?
But I'll be happy to keep a list of your concerns for those working on v2g but not reading TOD.
I wonder what should be the number of recharging stations.
In US there must have at least 1 billion parking places... well let's say 80% of those are at shopping malls and other short term places and will be excluded. Of course this will reduce the number of "storage" reserve, but let's forget this for now.
This leaves us with 200 million of which let's say half are with a stall - 100 mln. Plus 100 million in each house garage. 200 mln. stalls multiplied by how much? Including all additional cabling (plus repavement?) I'd say no less than $1000 per piece. A neat $200 billion only for that!
How many nukes, CPPs, capacitors, batteries, pumped storages etc. would we build for $200 billion? At $2000/kW current prices we'd double our nuke capacity for this money! It starts to smell like scam.
Run some numbers.
Fortunately, that's been done, here for example, to adress your concerns on costs, revenues, and battery life.
No way in heck are they going to charge and discharge MY battery at THEIR convenience. My pain is more than their gain.
Not a problem. Don't sign up. Make economic decisions. Heck, have your A/C controlled by a utility. That can be your part to addressing carbon mgmt.
I used fossil fuel car as an example because ruining electric cars is worse
No one suggested using FF in a hybrid to feed power into the grid. Your example was a misrepresentation of what v2g is about. That's a disservice to those who read here, and also don't know about v2g. That's why I'm bothering to respond.
Is it just me or does your link not work.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Sorry. Its http://www.udel.edu/V2G/KempTom-V2G-Fundamentals05.PDF
The term “peak power” does not refer to a specific power
market. Rather, it is used to refer to the highest cost hours
of the year, when most or all generators are on-line and
additional power is costly. A full analysis of the value
of peak power requires stepping through hourly market
values, assuming sales of V2G whenever the market value
is above the cost of V2G and the vehicle is available, and
summing the annual revenue (see [14]). To provide a simpler
calculation here as an example, we use an industry rule of
thumb from central California [14], that there are 200 h in an
average year when additional generation costs $ 0.50/kWh.
Based on this and the data in Table 5, we give in Table 6
parameters for calculating the revenue and cost of a fuel cell
vehicle providing peak power.
Thus the net revenue, based on Table 6, is $ 1500–1210,
or $ 290, a positive annual net, but perhaps too small to justify
transaction costs. This calculation is given only as an
illustration. This result is highly dependent upon the cost of
hydrogen (a mid-range projection was used here), the actual
market prices for a representative year rather than the rule
of thumb used here, and the match of peak time to vehicle
availability. More complete analyses of V2G for peak power
have been performed by Nagata and Kubo [15] and Lipman
et al. [32].
The problem with using $.50 for peak electricity costs is that I can install PV panels for $.20. Solar thermal for maybe half that. Energy can be stored by making ice or compressing air in a salt dome but that isn't my field. Even if batteries were the best option, they would use a room full of stationary lead acid battery. Not an expensive EV lithium battery.
The transaction costs are huge. The article doesn't even want to go there. They are better off buying their own lithium battery then renting and ruining mine.
The fundamental assumption to V2G is that there will be spare automobile battery capacity out there. There really won't. I want all my charge/discharge cycles. And all the energy to run my car. The only reason the future is electric (and the present is not) is because gasoline is running out. And the alternative is stocking up on ammo and living off the land. I'd like to see electrified RoW, batteries suck so much. If I was in the psychic business, that's my prediction for the future.
Utilities have better solutions to their problems then V2G. They rather spend nothing and not solve them, but that doesn't make the alternative solutions go away.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Thanks but your cut-and-paste from the article was for Fuel Cells, not batteries. And since the thread is so deep, a reader can't tell you are quoting an article.
For batteries revenue is calculated for 15 kW battery to be $2554/yr for regulation services. The cost estimate includes capital expenses on infrastructure and lifecycle costs.
On the battery lifetime, altairnano's specs claims a 15,000 deep-cycle lifetime, 41 years. V2G will mostly be a small fraction of full cycle charge/discharge, so you might cut that lifetime by half. As I linked in my first post on this topic yesterday, here's some recent demonstrations on their battery in EVs.
Any reduced battery life is balanced against any revenue stream for providing services to the grid.
http://www.beiterbatteries.com/12v_700ah.htm
12 volt 70 amp hour battery. $150 for 840 watt hours. $6000 for 35 kilowatt hours. The utilities aren't going to pay you $2500 per year. They are going to buy their own batteries for $6000, run them for five years and then throw them out. And notice the lead acid solution sucks. They have better ways to generate or store peak power.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
The only reason the future is electric (and the present is not) is because gasoline is running out.
The past was electric circa 1910. Gas and ICE provided a very unique opportunity to screw ourselves royally.
The present isn't electric because even at $3/gal here and an installed base of 600 M vehicles worldwide, change won't come without force. One might think AGW might be that force, but it'll be peak oil. The mindset of 'I can have whatever I want whenever I want' will fondly be rememebered as our wild and crazy days, except for the lives wasted supporting our need to go shopping, and the lives to be wasted by the unintended consequences of our oil addiction.
http://www.acpropulsion.com/reports/V2G-Cal-ExecSum.pdf
The cost of electricity generated by each EDV type is estimated. Battery vehicles
can provide electricity to the grid at a cost of $0.23/kWh for current lead-acid batteries,
$0.45/kWh for the Honda EV Plus with nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries, and
$0.32/kWh for the Th!nk City car with nickel cadmium (NiCd) battery. The fuel cell
vehicle can generate electricity at a cost ranging between $0.09 – $0.38 kWh, the wide
range depending on the assumed cost of H2, with the lower figure based on the longerterm
assumption of a mature hydrogen market. A fuel cell vehicle with hydrogen
recharge through a garage reformer could generate electricity at $0.19/kWh from natural
gas (at $0.84/therm). The hybrid vehicles in motor-generator mode can generate
electricity at a cost of $0.21/kWh if fueled with gasoline (at $1.50 per gallon) and at
$0.19/kWh if fueled with natural gas. Based only on these simple costs per kWh, it
appears that in the near term the most attractive EDV types are the lead-acid battery
vehicle, a fuel cell vehicle recharged from a natural gas reformer, and the hybrid vehicle.
However, the simple cost per kWh comparison does not provide an adequate evaluative
framework.
The cost of electricity from the EDVs noted above is too high to be competitive
with baseload power, which typically has a range from $0.03–0.05/kWh. EDV power is
competitive in three other markets: "peak power" (during peak demand periods), spinning
reserves, and regulation services.
Since your link doesn't work, I found my own. This is the first hit when googling v2g. I'd like to know where to find $1.50 gasoline in California, I'd like to fill up there. Gas costs twice that. Anyways V2G is more expensive they grid power. Useless for replacing spinning reserve (too slow). And not competitive with PV solar power's current $.20/kWh for peak power. PV's are going to get cheaper a lot quicker than batteries will, and solar thermal is even cheaper.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
PV's are going to get cheaper a lot quicker than batteries will, and solar thermal is even cheaper.
Amen to that coming true ASAP. Note my graphs somewhere on this page for cost of electricity from solar PV. Without any subsidies, it's more like 35-45 cents per kWh, at least based on NJ data. I can't wait to see that drop 2-3 fold, and note DOE's SAI program targets 2015 for that to happen.
Thanks to Engineer-Poet for updating here and discussing the SRI method as a potential viable means to this end.
But the bulk of charging EVs must occur overnight, with wind ideally, until we've got a TW or so of solar power capacity.
You can make that price drop 2-3 fold today. Just move your panels to Arizona.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Absolutely.
So here's one trick up here in the mid-atlantic. 2-3x concentrators. A magnification low enough for course tracking of sun, and with little loss of diffuse non-direct light for those cloudy/overcast days. But sufficient to run the panels for sunny times at intensities like they were in Tucson AZ in Summer.
No special panels required (although FirstSolar have favorable temperature properties), as appropriate mirrors can be added on to existing products.
And until sea level rises to 3 meters, we've got something like 20-40 GWpeak of capacity between NJ, DE, MD, and PA. IT's maybe not obvious, but there a lot of land where solar make great sense.
When sea level rises 3 m, look for company in Tucson, where the hordes will then fight over water.
Between Arizona and the Mid-Atlantic the change in panel value owing to the solar resource is a factor of about 1.3, not 2--3. Concentrators also add to costs but in the current silicon price environment they can lead to savings. This system, which can be roof mounted, should give a factor of two reduction in cost. Some silicon applications will require concentrators. DARPA is pushing hard on high (greater than 40%) efficiency panels that use 20 times concentration. These will need some tracking to work I think. It is tough to figure how much this reduces costs at this point. But, if the $/W figure comes in at the same level as regular panels, it should make utility scale PV more competitive with home installation since $/W land cost will go down.
Chris
I'm sure it makes a huge difference to you if the utility charges you at full power from 3 AM to 7 AM, or half power from 11 PM to 7 AM.
So much better to burn gasoline all the time, eh? </sarcasm>
Selling spinning reserve just means being ready to add power to the grid (which includes cutting load; everything between your current load and zero represents reserve but costs nothing). Besides, the utility will pay handsomely for actual fast-response reserve generation. If you get paid $1.00/kWh for that power and your engine, alternator and battery system is 20% efficient, my calculations say they'd be paying you the equivalent of $6.73/gallon. I'd happily buy fuel at $4.50/gallon and sell at $6.73 on the one day of the year they needed it, and buy energy at 75¢/gallon equivalent the other 364 days.
Batteries can respond as fast as flicking a switch. I have been investigating some 165 A MOSFET switches which would allow me to put about 4 kW @ 24VDC onto a load in under 100 microseconds. A half-cycle of 60 Hz AC takes 8.3 milliseconds. In short, you are spouting ideological nonsense.
You can draw 165 amps from a lead acid battery. You can't draw 165 amps from a lithium battery. It will explode.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Try 120 A pulse discharge from a single 26650 cell (10 seconds). A battery with a significant amount of storage (say, cells paralleled to give 230 AH instead of 2.3 AH) would be able to supply 12,000 amps pulse. Put 4 strings in series to get a nominal 13.2 volts, and you've got about 150 kW peak out of cells massing only 28 kg.
What's the voltage drop of a 120A pulse discharge across the one ohm internal resistance of a lithium battery. I won't get a nominal 13.2 volts. I get -106.8V. Why does your link cite batteries that don't exist and aren't on the market? Is it because your thought experiment doesn't work with real batteries?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_ion_battery
The specific power for batteries you can actually buy is 1.8 kW/kg.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
"Why does your link cite batteries that don't exist and aren't on the market?"
A123systems batteries are indeed on the market. Take a look at DeWalt 36V tools.
It says right on the page I cited: "Internal impedance: (1kHz AC) 8 mΩ".
Your ability to read for content appears seriously impaired. Have you tried cognitive therapy?
Common saying among us sailors...
"There's no more efficient pump than a scared man with a bucket."
If we need to change out our cars in a hurry in order to keep driving, we will.
Hi Chris,
Your article just has a statement without attritubution that PG&E INTENDS to buy used lithium batteries. Most of the article is about a Norwegian who wants to lease them to PG&E (what do they need him for?).
The V2G people (Univ. of Delaware) assumes lithium phosphate batteries that don't actually exist yet. Current batteries are lithium cobalt or lithium plastic. So we are on the horns of a dilemma. If batteries don't get better ther won't be any EV market. But if they do, there won't be any used batteries the utilities can buy cheap.
Used batteries are just fine for what PG&E is said to want them for. Storing intermittent power from wind and solar. Used lithium has to be cheaper than shiny new lead acid or PG&E won't bother.
Used lithium is even worse for stabilizing the grid where a large amount of power is needed in a short period of time. The factor that limits power draw from a battery is its internal resistance, and lithium's internal resistance starts off bad and gets worse. The same reason they become unsuitable for transportation use.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
From my reading, PG&E is buying. The lease is for transportation use.
Chris
One item that I didn't see addressed (or maybe I missed it) was the amount of initial energy required to create the PV cells. This is not insignificant and you can place all the raw materials out in the sunshine for 3-8 years (the time for energy return to be balanced) but you don't have the spontaneous formation of a PV cell.
It takes much energy up front to create even the most inefficient of cells. If you don't expend it up front in a "concentrated" way, it does not matter whether you have the raw materials or not, the energy availability becomes the issue that cannot be overlooked.
This is the reason why, if you wait for the economics to work out, you may never get too far down this road and why (if we want to make this transition) we should just plunge in and do it.
What are your sources for the 3-8 year EROEI estimate? I've seen several estimates, and agree with Jeff Vail on his 1 to 5 years averaging of estimates.
Remember this IS NOT EROEI as we typically think of it.
This is the amount of time that it takes for the cell's output (W-hr/sq meter, since the area is "fixed" after production, it's a matter of totalizing the watt-hr output over each day of use).
I'll have to dig it out from my mass of archives, but it came from an EPA document a couple of years ago that summarized the energy use (W-hr equivalent/square meter of PV cell area) for making several different types of PV cells (multi-layer, high-efficiency frameless to medium efficiency, framed models). If I can find the weblink, I'll provide it. As I recall, it compared the total energy required at the processing facilities but did not include any of the energy requirements for obtaining and transporting either the raw materials or the final products. The variance in the energy recovery time is both a function of the efficiency of the cell design and it's placement (e.g., latitude and angle of placement)
If I recall correctly it also compared the old 1% efficiency models that characterized designs of 40 years ago (many are "just" now passing through the energy breakeven point. New cells, as implied from my post, will reach that energy breakeven point much sooner even though they require much greater initial energy input to achieve the high efficiency designs.
The message from this is two-fold: somewhere between 1000 and 2500 days of operation these newer cells will finally have paid for their energy debt in electrical output (every day after that point is a net positive in energy production) AND if you don't have the inital energy budget to create these cells, it won't matter what the "economics say."
I look forward to seeing your references so that we may examine their accuracy and applicability.
NREL's done the calculation. Go to their site.
NREL states:
"Energy payback estimates for rooftop PV systems are 4, 3, 2, and 1 years:
- 4 years for systems using current multicrystalline-silicon PV modules,
- 3 years for current thin-film modules,
- 2 years for anticipated multicrystalline modules, and
- 1 year for anticipated thin-film modules"
There is no available EROEI analysis for this process, as it is just a hypothetical suggestion from EP – AND the idea of 12% efficiency is very positive-flexible upwards , and “obviously a finger in the air”– IMHO.
So asking for/playing with EROEI here is absurd, as they hardly do this for mainstream solutions -period-
The super clean silicon of today gives some 15-17% efficiency … those are real products, but I distrust the EROEIs I have read for those so far..
I'm having a hard time understanding you today, Paal.
EROEI is always a bit of a stretch, since you have to place common values on different energy sources to come up with your comparison.. but still, it's not that hard to get a number for how much was 'invested' in making PV, if you wanted a number in watts, joules, calories.. and it's easier still to see what comes out the other end. What's so 'finger in the air' about this?
Bob
Easy – you are tricky today Jokuhl :-)
THE Engineer-Poet’s method “is just a proposal for a fictive and not a real product” Where do you start the EROEI-analysis for a "mental" product ?
.. and more important – What efficiency does these hypothetical wafers yield?? Who’s to tell – do we just buy into the 12% efficiency suggested by EP ?
When I read the WP essay, I read dirty silicone and more processing to be done .. How much ?– don’t ask me ..
Conclusion: EROEI for this is “a finger in the air” not more but not less either..
I was being deliberately pessimistic about the efficiency of the String Ribbon cells; they are now approaching 18% efficiency. Even if they were much worse rather than better, doubling the energy-payback time from 2 weeks to 4 weeks would have little effect.
WS, Starship Trooper has a very valid point here, so I'd ask you WS : where are your numbers for the same ?
I will salute Engineer-Poet for bringing these suggestions to the marketplace – and those should be looked into. I will not speculate in the numbers that EP is playing around with, as they are speculative and very vague- that said “all stones have to be turned”..
Now the more I perceive our common energy future (without fossils and ultimately uranium…) the more EROEI centered I’m becoming. I believe that EROEI will be the pinnacle in all energy planning within a few years – because that’s what its all about … “what will the net energy be … from this or that process?” …
I keep thinking, have the Windturbine- and PV-manufacturers make their own “products” using their OWN-produced energy (for the most part, where possible)– and then lets see where that is taking us …
Here is the NREL source that I have usually referred to, which gives numbers considerably better than those above.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf
"Energy payback estimates for rooftop PV systems are 4, 3, 2, and 1 years: 4 years for systems using current multicrystalline- silicon PV modules, 3 years for current thin-film modules, 2 years for anticipated multicrystalline modules, and 1 year for anticipated thin-film modules (see Figure 1).
With energy paybacks of 1 to 4 years and assumed life
expectancies of 30 years, 87% to 97% of the energy that
PV systems generate won’t be plagued by pollution, greenhouse gases, and depletion of resources.
Based on models and real data, the idea that PV cannot pay back its energy investment is simply a myth. Indeed, researchers Dones and Frischknecht found that PV-systems fabrication and fossilfuel energy production have similar energy payback periods (including costs for mining, transportation, refining, and construction). "
Bob
What a glossy 4 ½ years old summary for PV’s (OE/GO-102004-1847 January 2004)
I’d update myself if I were you Jokul. Look at fig 2 and see how “glossy” they represent the net gain.DO not swallow all you read , for starters this report...
IF it all was true -
What are they waiting for it’s a win –win –win situation, nothing can fail here – nothing at all…
In a few years they can “make ALL their internally needed energy for the implemented processes ” – as for production and mining – all electrical. You know there are el. Lorries today. Use them for the mining operations – make el. Drilling equipments – and so forth. Cost of transports and installations are sure included in this PDF.
NO – we need better than this , that’s for sure.
BTW here is a dayfresh Receding Horizon article on Chinese PV solar (todays drumbeats)
"The raw material's price has gone from around $30 a kilogram to over $250 on the spot market ...." These scenarioes are not (probably) going away in the years to come - or?
"I’d update myself if I were you Jokul. "
Paal, you've disparaged everyone's submission, so please show us the approach and technical data to convince us that we should disregard our sources and believe you. And please support your position with solid data (i.e., no simple hand-waving dismissals) so that we are not forced to simply dismiss what you have to say.
Certainly you have a point Will S – what can I add?
My core point is actually that I have not seen any deeply conducted report concerning EROEI for PV’s (or many other renewable systems for that matter) – apart for some extended analysis for bio-fuels, but those are not particularly positive, as we might hope for.
If you understood the gist to my post (the one you replied to) you get my concerns – (after fossils/nuke) How do we make large electrical driven dumper trucks on a necessary scale – with PV solar, to run the overall PV activities? Is it doable? These exercises should be carried out today, now that we still have the conventional backups like oil, coal and nuke – cus’ in 50-100 years it’s too late to trail and error …
You don't. You make electrically-powered bucket wheels and conveyor belts instead. You can run your salt-electrolysis system flat out during daylight hours on PV and just barely enough (on wind or electricity from DCFC's) to keep it warm at night.
That's if you postulate a brick-wall end or want to be totally pure. In the real world, fossil fuels will still be around to power the necessary conversion stuff even if we have to sequester the carbon. If you can cut the cost of PV cells from $3/watt to $0.33/watt, you cut the cost of the power to roughly 5¢/kWh. You can do a lot with power that cheap, even if you have to pay a little extra for e.g. ice systems to make full use of it.
Many people seem unaware that underground mining today is almost 100% electric. The only reason we do it differently on the surface (strip mining) is the extra boost we get from fossil fuels. We can still surface mine with electricity, but as E-P notes, we'll just do it differently.
I have few quibbles with E-P's overall thesis but I do not believe his adoption rates are practical without a crisis mindset throughout society. We barely turn around the existing vehicle fleet in 20 years and as Stuart has demonstrated, housing has an even longer turnaround time. The key unknown variable remains decline rate of petroleum production versus adoption rate. Additionally, as Westexas has noted, the decline of production coupled with the increase of consumption by the petroleum exporting nations can turn exporters into importers in short order.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
I agree. Without a crisis mindset throughout society, we are never going to make the necessary investments in solar and the only other thermodynamically viable and environmentally bearable - albeit smaller scale - alternatives, wind,wave and geothermal.
The time window for crisis aversion is rapidly closing. All the more imperative is it that everyone at TOD and similar groups works unceasingly to get the message through to the ignorant blockheads who control the media and government.
The business-as-usual market-driven response is essentially reactive. What we urgently need is proactive investment, and I don't see this happening without massive financial incentives of some kind.
And if we can't figure out how to do surface mining with electric powered equipment we can run that equipment on biofuels. And raise the fuel crops with electric tractors.
(Why do so many people wish the worst?)
What do you mean, "figure out"? I understand that bucket wheel excavators are the preferred method for strip mining of coal, and they are already electric.
The issue of surface mining came up a few days ago and someone posted a picture of one of the monster trucks used to move coal. They dismissed the idea of moving away from oil as we couldn't run those behemoths with batteries.
Just trying to plug a leak.
I think you're missing a few possibilities here:
Of course, we could easily have several of these trends feeding on each other at once.
E-P, The Oil Drum has analyzed prior adoption rates of new technologies. It simply does not occur under normal circumstances in less than 50 years or so. The present impact of solar is so small that, compared to other energy shifts, we cannot expect solar to make a massive impact without a public change of policy. E-P you cannot show me any other historical change that has occurred as fast as you are postulating here. We need a shift in public policy to a crisis mindset and then to drive full speed towards these exact solutions. But if you falsely believe that the market will make this change in sufficient time, then you are making a very dangerous bet that is not backed by history at all. These solutions can do what we need done! But we cannot get there in time with a business as usual mindset.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Counterexamples:
All of these trends achieved huge penetration in far less than 50 years, some in less than 10. And PV is now about where cell phones were in 1990, ready for takeoff.
"We barely turn around the existing vehicle fleet in 20 years "
Replacement of the entire fleet is the wrong goal. Newer vehicles are used more, and some older vehicles hang around a long time, but vehicles less than 6 years old account for 50% of miles travelled.
Six years for 50%. That's the figure to keep in mind, and that's without a crisis mindset, although I agree that a crisis mindset would be a good idea.
Its being done. Some large construction and farm and even home equipment is hybrid now - both electric and more commonly hydrostatic. I was surprised at the familiarity of so many people that are unaware of the hybrids they're using now. Some rather burly folks wouldn't like their hybrids taken away! See: http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2007/10/03/have-y...
Paal;
Accounting Shenanigans and insider allegations of an over-ambitious Chinese Solar Chop Shop don't go very far to refute the NREL document, even if my link doesn't have the fresh scent of a newborn press release. I was kind of expecting your link to say something about a more recent analysis of the broader world of current PV technologies and their effectiveness, since there certainly have been changes in 4 years, but I haven't heard anything about PV industries producing LESS efficient panels than they had before.
As EP mentioned, there is hardly a shortage of the Silicon itself, which is not to say someone out there isn't still going to try to 'cut the diamond with the mother-of-pearl' and loose it on the world to see if it sells as well as the real McCoy.
I guess I didn't actually get your point. I don't know of any reason to doubt the NREL numbers, even if you want to impugn them with the tag of being too 'glossy'.. just tell me how they are wrong- but that doesn't mean I think that a Solar Buildout will be a breeze, either. It's still just one BB, and probably more appropriately seen as the source for running our Radios than our Ovens, Smelters and Mining Tools. I do hold some hope for Wind, Tide and Wave power to take on more of the Brunt of the Work, where PV is ideal for its portability, somewhat as an alternate and dual-purpose roofing material, and a very low-maintenance, low-profile power source..
Bob
Jokul – see my response to WS just above.
My trouble is that I read “10 bad vs. 1 good”- article on PV’s , just as the Chinese receding horizons article I linked to you. I’v not till date seen any “trustworthy” report on this matter, and I’m not counting your report either –
Silicone is abundant yes, but - I know Norway has a silicone-mine regarded the purest in the world. And this matters very much – concerning “after work/sales price” - all “not so pure” mines will render more expensive final products – due to … you know, more after works and more energy intensive …these things are going the very same way ..
Stuffs are getting more difficult and rarer… aka crude, diamonds, gold, uranium … the list goes on… food)
I’m not against PV’s – but I don’t know whether its viable or not -yet
REC, a Norwegian PV maker has gotten some spankings in the Norwegian media lately…. Due to excessive claims … “as in the sky is the PV-limit – but with no technical backings – just glossy words….
The problem with PVs is you need a huge fossil-fuel based economy to invent and then produce them.
I'd say this is also the problem with nuclear - I think the whole nuclear industry has been run at a loss so far, strictly riding in the shoulders of good old oil and coal.
You don't need fossil fuels to produce them, at least not after a point.
One other thing,
Right next to that fig2 is the references, which suggests their data is as much as 10 years old! But does that work against solar or to its favor?
"R. Dones; R. Frischknecht, “Life Cycle Assessment
of Photovoltaic Systems: Results of Swiss Studies on Energy Chains.” Appendix B-9. Environmental Aspects of PV Power Systems. Utrecht, The Netherlands: Utrecht University,
Report Number 97072, 1997.
K. Kato; A. Murata; K. Sakuta, “Energy Payback Time and Life-Cycle CO2 Emission of Residential PV Power System with Silicon PV Module.” Appendix B-8. Environmental Aspects of PV Power Systems. Utrecht, The Netherlands: Utrecht University, Report Number 97072, 1997.
Bob
If that's the link I'm thinking of (I'm bandwidth-impaired at the moment or I'd check), it dates from the late 1990's and is seriously out of date already. Things today are considerably further along.
3 - 8 years?
This has been discussed in here too many times for you to make this mistake by ignorance. I'm starting to believe there is a rethorical purpose on FUDding the PV's.
It's possible he hasn't read those discussions, though, so it's best to give him the benefit of the doubt and simply provide the correct information.
3-8 years is substantially longer than the energy payback time for new PV technologies, which ranges from 1 year (thin-film, southern Europe) to 3.5 years (crystalline, northern Europe) according to this report. Given that southern Europe is at roughly the same latitude as the middle of the US (Rome = NYC), the payback times should be shorter for installations in the deserts of the US southwest.
Moreover, the proposed approach sounds like it will use substantially less energy, since it doesn't sound like it needs to use the molten silicon bath that is the current approach. Accordingly, the energy payback time for this particular technique sounds like it will be substantially lower than one year.
Actually, I haven't read it here before. After all, I do have a life.
For the moment, I can't find the EPA reference (it's not in my "solar folder" but I did find "this" Googling).
http://www.nrel.gov/pv/thin_film/docs/fact_sheet_external_cost_pv_2005.pdf
Now this reference claims, midway down the page, an actual measured energy payback period of 0.21 years (a mere 77 days in Tuscon). From the info presented that computes (if I did my math correctly) to 680 kWhr/m^2.
So, by that measure, anyone claiming 1 year (or more) is off by a factor of 5. However, the other EPTs in the same document range up to 2.5 years. For the Tuscon example, however, that takes about half the electrical energy that I consume in an average month. For the first "rooftop example" the energy input computes out to 4250 kWhr/m^2.
But the point I was raising is this: you have to have that energy up front to create these panels (and the storage unless you are going to power the system only when the sun is up high enough to meet demand) in a highly entropic form, no matter what system you have.
I can place a 100 m^2 thin layer of sand on my roof along with whatever other "raw materials" for doping and layering needed to make up the balance of the PV cell and allow the sun to shine upon it for between 77 and 150 days (using the numbers from the above reference) and 100 m^2 of PV cells don't suddenly and spontaneously appear on my roof as fully operational.
I'm not taking the position that they (PV celss) don't pay themselves and it's quite possible that the life cycle costs I'm using are both older and more inclusive in energy requirements than the above reference. I am taking the position that if "we" are waiting for them to become "economical," we may wait to the point where we have no "spare capacity" in the energy usage to create these as alternatives. Since we speak of peak energy in different forms here, we may come to the point where we really have to decide what (or whom) we will be willing to do without because we waited too long.
It's a bit analogous to climbing high mountains (with supplemental oxygen), because eventually most people run out of capacity to supply enough oxygen to keep their body going in the thin air and they collapse and die.
As I pointed out to someone who thinks the technological energy fix is just around the corner (and even if it isn't we are resourceful enough to find other uses for existing materials): in theory I can fabricate all the parts and fuel I need to replicate a Saturn V rocket to go to the moon using wood as an energy source. But if that was the energy source I was reduced to using would I really be worried about building a Saturn V rocket?
Engineer Poet:
Thank you for a very interesting and though-provoking key post. Congratulations for the clarity of your thought, and your generosity in sharing your research with us.
The solution for energy shortages post-peak, climate change and the scourge of having 1.6 billion people without any electricity, living on less than $2 per capita per day is all the same. We need to help the half of the planet thats very poor leapfrog over fossil fuel use to sustainable, renewable energy and this process looks like it will work in almost any temperate, sub-tropical and tropical climate on the globe.
The coal advocates, the bitumen sand advocates and the doomers all are intellectually dishonest in their use of Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROEI) and Return On Investment (ROI). It results in suspiciousness of all of us because we refuse to adopt a standard definition and endless discussions of what the standards should compare and wasting precious time when we need action. The reason I say its the same flaw is that its cherry picking. The strip miners (coal and most bitumen) never account for environmental consequences, while the doomers/radical environmentalists account for exagerated costs.
The result is the same, Garbage in/ Garbage out and its because of intellectual dishonesty. Its not even comparing apples and oranges, its comparing apples and a root vegetable.
The real comparison of the time component of the solar process is the time and costs spent to set up a bitumen strip mine in Alberta. Solar and tar sands are both "non-conventional" and practicially inexhuastable. Thats right, a three hundred year supply will probably kill us through climate change long before we use it all up. So if we consider the fantasticly high ewnvironmental costs, solar is better than free because it will be cheaper in 10 years than any energy with any production cost-and that means any fossil fuel. With any luck i'll be bankrupt and permanently out of the oil and gas business.
Same way with costs. Bitumen strip mines cost $100,000 per barrel per day of production, and that doesn't include increased royalties, refinining costs, transportation costs or the cost of cleaning up 6 barrels a day of sludge and sand per barrel of syncrude, or the CO2 costs. Tar and coal are fantasticially expensive, too expensive to use let alone subsidize.
Bob Ebersole
Climate is more important than latitude when considering solar energy potential. Every place on earth over the course of a year recieves exactly the same number of hours of sunlight if measured at the cloud tops, 4380 hours. Some places average a greater percentage of this potential due to cloud cover.
Actually, it is. You have two radical changes here:
But let's check that number anyway.
If the sodium for the process is made from electrolysis of sodium chloride, it will require energy input of NaCl's heat of formation (-411.12 kJ/mol) plus some for losses. Call it 500 kJ/mol (and you have the chlorine for other purposes too). Production of one mole of silicon (28 grams) requires 4 moles of sodium, so the energy requirement for the silicon becomes 2 MJ/mol. Finally, a square meter of 100-micron wafers requires 280 g (10 moles), so the total energy to produce the silicon for a square meter of cells is 20 MJ.
If the cells are 12% efficient, they will produce 120 W/m² under standard conditions. They will need 20,000,000J/120W = ~167,000 seconds = ~46 hours to pay back this energy. That's 11.5 days at 4 hours peak-equivalent per day. Your major energy concerns become the glass, polymer sealants and framing; the cells are barely significant.
The technological and societal changes are more important at that point than the energy requirements, but we have other problems to solve even if fossil energy isn't scarce (because fossil energy causes problems by itself).
Thank you, this is very helpful in thinking about this.
It points out the change in technology and what is and is not included. It also points out the difficulty in dealing with peak electrical generation and storage issues since the available hours of sunlight are a limiting factor for many of us.
But it seems that the answer that you and others are giving is that the energy payback is measured in hours and the amount of energy required is small if not insignifcant.
If this is the case, then right now the "spare" (off-peak)energy availabilty could easily replicate the total amount of electrical generation grid capacity in a matter of months. In fact, given the numbers being tossed around, a single dedicated coal-fired power plant (1200 MW) could supply enough power to produce more than 41,000 m^2/day (700 kWh/m^2) of PV cells or more than 15 million square meters of PV cells/year. And if I remember how to convert square meters to square kM, that's 15 square kilometers/year. (I believe that some of the energy requirment numbers are not primary energy numbers. For example, the amount of energy referenced does not include the primary energy for the thermodynamic cycle, just the net.)
And that's just from one power plant. How many square kM do we need to turn off all the existing power plants in the US?
So, if energy isn't the issue and raw materials isn't the issue (plentiful and "dirt cheap") something must be terribly amiss. Someone posted a reply that coal is cheaper, but if we are paying for coal and the power plant through rate charges and the raw materials are abundant then the cost of the PV cell includes all of that and the PV cell should only be marginally more expensive than the equivalent energy content of the coal.... The only conclusion is that the cost of PV cells are artificially inflated.
Their cost should be about the same as the energy cost to make the PV cell in the first place.
As pointed out in another post, this apparently has been widely dicussed here. If someone here has calculated the amount of energy and time required for a group of large power plants to create the amount of PV surface area required to turn off all the other power plants, this would be helpful.
After all, this is really what we are talking about when we are speaking about "solar energy," not just nibbling at the margins.
That is half-true.
However, slashing the energy and materials requirements for the active portion affects the whole, and may cut energy requirements for the rest; if energy payback only takes 3 months, a 40:1 EROEI only requires a lifespan of 10 years. Or cheaper, high-iron glass and less-transparent sealants could be used. The figure of merit is W/$, not W/m².
Engineer-Poet,
I suppose you've mentioned this idea to the folks at Evergreen Solar. As I recall, they have recently signed a long term contract with a supplier of silicone. They are also building additional capacity.
Disclaimer: I own some Evergreen Solar stock. I hope it goes ballistic so I can afford to buy a solar PV system...
E. Swanson
Of it's early history: "Evergreen Solar was founded in 1994 by three veterans of Mobil Solar Corp., who left that company when its parent, Mobil Oil, divested the alternative-energy subsidiary."
This past year, First Solar has been the ballistic ride. But Evergreen is expanding capacity and when Cd and Te start getting scarce, Si will continue chugging up the hill.
Disclaimer: I own stock in neither company :(
Great article, Engineer-Poet, thanks for putting it together.
I recently bought 12 Evergreen Cedar series 120 watt pv panels to add to my solar system. Awaiting on the active tracker (they are backordered!) to install.
As a US (Massachusetts based, where I live) solar manufacturer I am happy to support them. Some stock may be my next purchase.
Best hopes for US made solar companies!
Engineer-Poet
silicone is a polymer with an alternating silicon, oxygen backbone.
Give the dog a break on his nomenclature, dogs can't take chem lab with those clumsy paws anyway.
I think your cost estimates are a little high for solar grade silicon. The big issue is purity rather than supply of metalurgical grade silicon. Achieving high purity is energy intensive and curently costs about $25/kg to produce. A new process aiming at 6 nines of purity comes in at about $8/kg.
I think you have put your finger on the main issue right now in the solar industry though. Purified silicon is in short supply and so the industry production is constrained. This is providing an opening though for thin film to experience rapid growth.
I think also that there is potential for a continuous process which goes from metalurgical silicon to purified waffers (such as ribbons) that could have some advantages in heat management. $0.30-0.40/Watt at the gate panel production costs are not out of the question.
I also agree that the falling dollar has pretty good timing if we are willing to go in for industrial growth in PV. People's attitudes to solar are a little funny. They seem to think that it will be used only where panels are produced while they don't think coal or uranium will be used where they are mined. Yet, solar puts less stress on shipping infrastructure than either of these. So, your picture of a big export boom has many things going for it, not least, well developed hyrdo power in the US. The similarities between aluminum and silicon should not be overlooked.
"I want aluminum. I don't care if I get it from Alcoa or Al Capone." --Harry Truman
Chris
Here is a link to a paper abstract estimating costs for the SRI process.
Chris
There is another process coming on line as well. It uses silane gas in a fluidized bed reactor. It also appears to beat the standard Siemens process on energy and looks like it gets to 8 nines in purity. The process is closed loop so that dealing with Cl and such is minimized.
Chris
Great article! Thanks!
If advances in solar pan out like the one describe here, the short and medium term problem may be (among other things) a total lack of qualified personnel for installing these things and tying them into the grid.
My wife is a PV installer and teacher for Solar Energy International, and it is typical at the end of a week-long class for several local installers to come offer jobs on the spot to any of her students. Oddly, almost none of the students take them up on it, as they have dreams of starting their own solar companies, in which case they will be even harder pressed to find qualified personnel.
The solar business is booming right now already and work is being turned down all over the country because of the huge backlog. Electrical work is rough, and not many Americans are up to the task these days (up on roofs, temps up to 150F in summer, high voltage tie-ins, potential for electrical fires if errors are made, thus high insurance costs, typical four year apprenticeship to become electrician, etc)
If you're looking to have work once peak oil really sets in, you're pretty much guaranteed a job in the solar industry!
I did a google for Solar Energy International and it seems the site was down. Must be all those people signing up for the courses overwhelmed their servers or something.
BTW why the heck is a four year apprenticeship necessary to become an electrician? This isn't brain surgery after all. I would assume anyone with good math skills, a solid grasp of college level physics and the ability to think critically, be able to follow written instructions and be able to read schematics should be able to get certified in a year. If you can pass the certification exams you shouldn't need to be an indentured servant (apprentice) for four years. That's my $1/50.
You aren't really serious are you?
I wrote some sarcasm below but I took it back so don't read it.
Same for a Jumbo pilot, I reckon they should be allowed out after a year. Straight out of school pass the exam and into it, how hard can it be?
Carpenters too, nothin' hard about whackin' in a nail.
After a year then, the passed out electrician can start a business and wire your house maybe even a high-rise.
Safety and experience is not really necessary.
We are much smarter now, we humans have grown another brain in the last 100 years so we don't need apprenticeships anymore.
A common misconception is that we are smarter now, we are not. We are overall better educated, that does not equate to being smarter.
Ask these few for their opinion.
Newton
Einstein
Edison
Marconi
Watt
Darwin
Curie
Bell
Franklin
Pasteur
Copernicus
It is best to dig the well before you are thirsty.
I have designed and built electronic circuits for different uses and also consider house wiring considerably simple.
My annoyance is that some areas do not want to let home owners do any of their own wiring, such as putting in an extra plug.
They want you to pay some electrician $50 to a $100 to wire in a simple light fixture.
DocScience
Solar installation is rather simple. I've done two systems for my own use.
One simply needs to be able to read instructions and apply them with a modicum of common sense.
No reason why someone with an average IQ couldn't learn to be a (residential) installer in a few months. One needs some basic electrical skills, some roofing skills, a bit of concrete knowledge. The sort of stuff that most handymen already know.
Back the installers up with well trained inspectors who check things out before the switches are flipped.
Somewhat ironic since it is the theme of your article. Gallium is bycatch from the aluminum smelting industry and not particularly rare. Nobody wants it.
Say the silicon is free. The panels would cost what $3 a watt? I think silicon costs $1.50 a watt today and you are suggesting we can shave a buck off the cost of a watt (if it works).
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Thanks for the article and the chemistry lesson. I have been a long time lurker on this site, but your writing spurred me to respond (and the ELM of westexas) and finally post.
Disclosure; I am in the solar energy industry and located in Florida (and own stock in Evergreen). For some time I have been trying to figure an angle to locate PV manufacturing here. There is state grant money available for the development of such an endeavor but I could never figure on an advantage of locating a PV plant here…until the connection in your paper. This idea is worth investigating, I’m sure the governor would like the PR of home grown solar. Note Florida nixed 3 coal power plants in as many months.
Although I have no direct manufacture experience (EE by training), several back of the napkin calculations seem to prove out a cause to investigate it further using Evergreen’s method even before looking at your source for silicon.
Based on what I learned from my recent trip to the Solar Power 2007 Conference, the manufacture of silicon and PV panels will not be enough to satisfy demand for several years. What I saw and what I was told in plans to build new plants for PV, this would not even satisfy incremental demand for electricity during some of the planetary sessions at the conference. But you have shown a possibility to scale things to drive up supply and (maybe) drive down installed price.
Thus this has possibilities to make inroads for solar PV better than the now < 1% targets. Thanks for the read.
Some people like gallium and others have suggested a supply problem.
Chris
There aren't a whole lot of people who manufacture neutrino detectors. At $300 a kilogram you can get all the gallium you want. But nobody wants it.
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/gallium/460302.pdf
My sources are the USGS (the what peak oil people) and Nippon Mining, an aluminum company. There's a lot of people out there who are trying to convince you to buy precious and not-so-precious metals.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
The neutrino detector was an attempt at humor.
I agree that speculation is metals is often rumor driven. But, Engineer Poet is not without some justification to point to a possible supply issue. On the other hand, if gallium is stored in panels, we'll know where to get it if we need it for something else. Recycling is being built in from the start for a lot of the solar industry.
Chris
So what is the best price per watt on solar panels ??
Link ??
http://www.ecobusinesslinks.com/solar_panels.htm
All you patriotic Americans can go down with the ship but I'm diversifying my assets out of dollars. I'm buying Sharp and Kyocera. They make good HDTVs too. I'm buying REC solar in kroners. They have a deal with evergreen to jointly own a foundary in Germany. I expect REC Solar to someday gobble up evergreen. Likely at a premium for evergreen shareholders.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
This is the link I use to follow retail pricing as well. Wholesale pricing to commercial installers is lower. First Solar is selling below $3/Watt including recovery costs. Nanosolar plans to sell at about $1/Watt. Both of these are thin film and limited to commercial use so far. Safety testing for the First Solar product is continuing and it apparently does not release much cadmium in the case of a fire but their production is sold out for some time so it seems unlikely that they'll be moving into the residential market soon.
Chris
Solar installations in California today run $9 a watt before rebate. Half parts and half labor. If the wholesale price for panels is even lower, that underscores how labor intensive this industry is. Even if the silicon were free, we can't reach the holy grail of grid parity.
I am not in the industry, but my thoughts on reducing labor costs are to design a standard system and put it on every house. California law requires every builder after 2012 to offer solar power. If somebody can get the contract to do an entire subdision, they do one set of engineering for every house with the same floorplan. One salesperson calling all builders instead of thousands calling all the homeowners. The installation labor go to the same place each morning instead of driving all over creation every day for the next gig. One 18 wheeler brings all the supplies. Scheduling labor is easier. I would imagine having roof spikers and electricians on the payroll with nowhere to go is real expensive.
Inverter prices will benefit from mass production. But they have to come with a ten year warranty and are handling an order of magnitude more power than computer power supplies. Reliability comes at a price. It might be cheaper to have someone take the inverter off the wall every ten years and refurbish it (only the switching transisters and the electrolytic capacitors go bad) than to design in longer lifetime. They figure they'll sell you a new computer every other year.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Robert, I wish the installs and engineering were cookie-cutter like that. Outside costs of county permits, Structural Engineering fees (Florida wind load) and State system design certification (Florida) all add about $1K on top of the price to the owner before work can begin. Some of the NEC requirements cause most solar installations to be treated like commercial projects due to the metal conduit requirements; thus higher labor costs.
Not doubt though, if all the houses are the same design then that initial red tape costs can be spread out except for the permit for each same house. Unless, as here in Florida, the wind load zone and exposure is different for each same house, then you end back up with additional wind load engineering fees.
I wish installs were cookie cutter like that too. I'm listing some goals to work on for the future, not stating the existing state of the art.
I don't live in a hurricane zone and we don't pay as much attention to wind loads here. The wind in my city is strong enough to attract the attention of windmill people. Whether they beat the nimbyites remained to be seen.
Isn't there some wind level the roofs have to be able to withstand? Just set the same standard for solar panels. No point the panels surviving when the roof is now in South Carolina.
If Florida wants to encourage solar panels, they should look it which red tape hoops are really necessary. This may have more impact on the future of solar then what the nerds do in the lab.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
I agree that cookie cutter is not going to happen, but you can get some aspects of this by having a large library of tweakable designs and using a flexible modular system. Another oportunity is to use more labor saving equipment such as hoists as is done with commercial installations. Our first installation was done in under a day even with pauses for retakes with the film crew.
Chris
Taking something apart to refurbish or repair it costs money. The future may be in silicon carbide semiconductors; they can operate at much higher temperatures than silicon (I read of a recent test at red heat), so the cooling requirements are much simpler and the lifespan should be very much improved (if the electronics don't fail from ion mobility when cooking at 900°F, they'll be stable as a table at 250°F).
IIRC, mdsolar recently posted that First Solar was selling panels @ 2.50 a watt (wholesale?).
Something to keep an eye on is panel lifetime. c-Si has 30+ years, thin-film pv may be quite a bit shorter.
As always, it's the levelized cost of electricity that should be used when making a decision.
For a Si panel, when installed cost gets below $3/Watt, levelized cost of pv electricity will be economic and compete with utility prices.
Hi John,
Yes, figuring out wholesale is a tea leaves kind of thing. First Solar charges what the market will accept and their pricing likely depends on what utilities charge commercial businesses to a large extent. Their production cost is not much above $1/Watt at last report and they include recovering the panels in their price. So, around $2.50/Watt wholesale is my best guess based on what they have said. They could likely go lower if they faced competition. The installers (e.g. SunEdison) tend to work out fairly complex financing deals that sometimes leave the ownership with other entities. These deals take into consideration the tax benefits fo accelerated depreciation and may be bundled to take best advantage of that.
Because of all this, making comparisions with retail are difficult and even comparing costs with, say, a new coal or nuclear plant is a little difficult. The trend seems to be that commercial solar is going just as fast as it possibly can based on production because commercial businesses both save some money and get predictability in their energy costs.
Chris
Chris, thanks for confirming what may be First Solar's wholesale price lately.
I think that going through all the costs (first cost, time value of money, tax and credits and incentives, lifetime of components) is tedious and will not be done by the average homeowner; a sharp business would certainly do this.
Either way, a potential customer of PV should have some idea of the their cost/kWh of PV electricity. I'm working to make this info publicly available for all installations in NJ from 2001 - 2007, with help from the State's BPU Office of Clean Energy.
A more informed customer will ideally make better choices, and may help lower the cost as a consequence.
That is a great service. I see an oportunity in NJ to offer basically free solar to people who have land. The question that needs to be answered though is how long the current net metering regulations will stay in place. Any ideas?
Chris
At least out to 2035, based on how the BPU is working to incent the market.
Also, plans are underway for community solar, where individuals, towns, or organizations can form a single site and put up PV, and sell back to the local utility. Whether this will raise the net-metering above 2 MW or not remain to be seen, but the point is that the generated electricity sent back to the grid need not be less than the amount used by the site.
As you're probably aware, beginning next June, in 2008 one will earn RECs worth maybe 61cents/kWh for pv electricity generated, no matter whether one uses it or it's sent back to the grid. The cap for energy year 2009 (start june '08) is $711/MWh, decreasing 3% per year.
Re project data, I have the spreadsheets and have graphed up much of the data. Since installer names are listed with each project, one can certainly compare costs across installers. Not completely sure how to handle that.
Will post some graphs late pm.
I'll look forward to it. I think you see what I'm getting at. You really only need to produce about 4 times your use to have things pay off in a resonable time. The trick is to manage it with enough installations so that it works as a business.
Chris
Chris - I'm not sure what you're getting at. Under old rules, pv size (in annual kWh projected) per site was limited to not more than the annual kWh consumed by the site from conventional utility electricity in the prior year. Maybe under new rules this may change.
NJ project data below. For costs over time, remember NJ has had a capacity-based incentive, which is changing to a performance-based incentive, and the 2004-07 Si shortage jacking up panel prices, but which is coming to an end. I keep my eye on the outliers on the low cost side. What are they doing to deliver lower cost. More to be mined here and published in near future.
Note (if you can read it) levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is without State or Federal rebates, credits, or deductions, and without RECs.
Hi John,
This is nice work. Did you have tilt data? That is a pretty big spread in annual production. Also, I'm wondering it you know the number of bids projects received? Interesting that the lowest cost systems are residential. Sweat equity? Ground mounts?
I had read that the treatment of net excess generation in New Jersey was to compenste at the retail rate, but now going back to DSIRE I see an avoided cost rate treatment. In this case, my idea won't work quite yet. For solar power, an avoided cost treatment could come out higher than retail if one looked at time of generation, but I doubt you could get this right away. The SREC conversion sounds interesting but it seems like it is going to require dual meters and so net metering will be out the window. This is fine of course since the solar industry is headed for price competition with delivered power without subsidies, but changing the rules requires ensuring that early adopters don't lose. 61cents/kWh SRECs that last only a few years could seem like a bait-and-switch kind of thing as well.
Chris
Did you have tilt data?
Yes, and that was incorporated in the graphs, most obviously as in Fig 7 Top for LCOE vs. annual production. While most of the data refers to residential projects, two points: generally the extra cost of slightly tilting panels southward on flat-roof commercial buildings rather than flat orientation leads to a lower LCOE (i.e. it's a better thing to do, even at higher first cost), and putting panels on residential roofs with natural tilt and azimuth facing South is the no-brainer way to lower LCOE, even though a large fraction of installations are not, with a non-negligible number of systems facing due East or West. Alas, these were capacity-based incentivized, which is changing to production (of electricity) incentivized.
Also, I'm wondering it you know the number of bids projects received?
No. But would like to do a retrospective survey of customers to find out, and also get measures of quality vs. system cost across installers.
Interesting that the lowest cost systems are residential. Sweat equity? Ground mounts?
I think projects greater than (GT) 40 kW on commercial buildings have the lowest install cost, ~ $7/Watt. But definitely self-installed residential systems are the cheapest - less than $6/Watt.
The SREC conversion sounds interesting but it seems like it is going to require dual meters and so net metering will be out the window
Not at all. The output of the PV system will be metered independent of how the electricity is used. This is the basis for earning SRECs, 1 per MWh generated. After that meter, the PV electricity is grid-tied in normal way, so your electric meter runs forward (nighttime) or backward (sunny mid-day) with net being a charge or credit on your monthly utility bill.
61cents/kWh SRECs that last only a few years could seem like a bait-and-switch kind of thing as well
The SREC values are tied to the solar alternative compliance payment (SACP), which is what the BPU has set, for 2008-2016, at $711/MWh in first year, dropping 3% each subsequent year.
And yes, the SRECs are traded in the NJ SREC market, so their value can be anywhere from $711/MWh to $0/MWh in a given time period depending on supply and demand, all driven by satisfying the State's solar-RPS. The BPU is working right now on how to secure a fixed value for the SRECs, to reduce investor risk. Stay tuned.
Sound confusing? Some including myself argued unsuccessfully for a straight-up 15-year contract-based feed-in tariff. Oh well.
I thought you must have had tilt. I don't think microclimates could do quite that much. It is reassuring that SRECs will rely on self-reporting. I do think that for residential, you want a clear indication of how much the homeowner will pay. If the SREC repaid "loan" is only a risk for the lender then that is one thing, but if there is a chance that the market falls through and homeowners are asked to pay out of pocket for the failure of the market to performed as predicted after they have already committed then this will be a very bad thing. The way we do things, we can remove systems if things head south and we have an identified aftermarket, but individual owners are going to feel stuck and cheated.
Thanks for the answers,
Chris
Right. So this so-called 'securitization' of SREC values is a critical issue to resolve for the BPU within the next few months, and is under way.
Is this whole program customer-friendly? Not right now. Could this all have been done more simply? Definitely, but the path has been chosen.
And yet, since Aug 1, 40+ MW of projects have registered in the SREC-only pilot. Almost all large scale projects, many PPA or lease agreements. So the party's on.
Sorta like dripping blood in shark-infested waters.
Hi John,
I'm not surprised. We should be in for at least a MW next summer assuming the Willmington and NYC operations service all of NJ. Willmington covers Baltimore for now so I'd guess it'll cover southern NJ as well. My bet is that the SRECs trade at about $0.20/kWh because everyone is going to jump.
Chris
I am not sure if the following statement is correct - "How much peak power could they produce: Evergreen Solar is reputed to produce cells which are about 12% efficient. At the standard 1000 W/m² irradiance, the 400 million square meters of panels would produce a peak 48 billion watts of power. .... " Why? - Because to my knowledge 1000W/m2 is not even close to real value. It rather 200-300W/m2 at best locations and at peak time. So 48 billion watts would go down to 10 billion watts or even less.
Also 20km2 is only a "net" active area. There needs to be add some area for maintenance, servicing, grid infrastructure and grid equipments. The real used area would be at least 50% higher.
Unfortunately solar energy will remain as a marginal source for long time.
Martin
As usual ... it's 'coming soon'!
Lets hope it does come soon, it's urgently required ... but don't hold your breath ... electricity isn't a good alternative to oil for many applications ... for instance not much oil is used for generating electrity.
We heed a viable, cost effective, alternative for transport that everybody can afford ... none suitable yet!
Houses in sunny climes may use solar at reasonable cost per peak watt, but check how much power is required, and when it's required ... clue? ... typically, it's way more than the area of one side of your roof.
Xeroid.
IMO, any way we look at it, we need Electrification Of Transportation (EOT), regardless of whether it's high tech electric cars, or electric light rail (or more likely some combination of both).
IMO, the safe assumption is that we can do what we did before, i.e., electric light rail and electric streetcars.
No, but most industrial petroleum use is for heating, and that's easy enough to replace by electricity.
They already exist and are in commercial production, such as the REVA which can travel at 45mph, with a 50 mile range, and is available for uner $14,000. If you can charge at work - and it'll fully recharge in an 8-hour workday - that car can handle about 90% of the world's commutes and errands, at full normal city-driving speeds.
The reason you don't see these around is that gas is still so cheap there's no reason for most people to accept the lower speed and limited range, even if they rarely exceed either. If oil becomes scarce enough that gas becomes prohibitively expensive, though, the inconveniences of electric vehicles (mostly range) will no longer be sufficient to prevent people from using them.
The technology to functionally replace gas-powered cars already exists.
High-voltage DC lines can transfer electricity thousands of kilometres without less than 10% loss, so the sensible thing to do is generate the power in sunny climes and then move it to where it's needed. Storage (pumped or otherwise) can be efficiently done either centrally or locally.
I agree the technology exists but at the moment it just isn't viable, except for extreme locations like city centres.
Have you ever seen a real life Reva? ... I have, there are plenty in London's West End ... they are not a viable alternative for most of the world let alone a family of Americans ... and that's a comment from somebody who has driven Smart cars for years.
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2005/08/reva_electric_c.html
There are ~600 million cars in the world, it will take quite a while for the Reva (also known as G-Wiz) to replace that lot. Therefore, IMO, sadly the Reva is not a viable option for most of the world's population.
Also, until I see solar PV or windmill factories powered by solar or wind sustainably churning out alternate energy sources and with excess power to power all the needs of their workforce indefinitely, it is impossible for me to tell whether any of these alternatives are actually viable. At the moment it looks to me like they all rely on fossil fuels and optimistic calculations to some extent.
Xeroid.
>>The technology to functionally replace gas-powered cars already exists.
>I agree the technology exists but at the moment it just isn't viable, except for extreme locations like city centres.
Are you talking about the technology or existing high production lines of vehicles? There's a major difference.
The technology does indeed exist today to have electric cars with ranges over 200 miles, which should suffice for city dwellers and suburbanites, which should cover over 90% of the population.
http://www.technologyreview.com/BizTech/wtr_16624,295,p1.html?a=f
That's by no means an extreme - 30% of Americans live in city centres, and 2/3 live in urbanized areas, even with cheap gasoline.
Why do you say that? What necessary functions of a personal automobile is it unable to carry out? It's pretty clearly adequate (if less convenient than a normal car) for the majority of commutes, few of which require much in the way of passenger or cargo capacity. It's adequate for grocery shopping. It's adequate for most errands.
It's too small for larger families, but there's no reason why a slightly larger and slightly more expensive version couldn't be made for that niche market.
It's largely incapable of long trips, but the vast majority of those are done by choice. If we're positing a post-peak world, 500-mile road trips to see grandma aren't key determiners of the survival of civilization.
At current rates, it never will. If the need to replace oil consumption becomes a matter of life-and-death, though - as some people here are suggesting it will - then the Reva is a vehicle that is already in commercial production that is less resource-intensive than most cars currently being made, suggesting in excess of 100m Reva-like all-electric cars could be produced yearly with the resources already being spent on producing oil-burning cars. At any significant fraction of that rate, production of electric cars would displace enough oil-burning cars to significantly lower year-on-year oil demand.
The point isn't that it will; the point is that it could if, as doomers expect, it becomes necessary.
Factories get their electricity from the grid. The grid gets its electricity from all kinds of places. Insisting that a factory be off-grid makes no economic sense - it's like insisting they fuel their furnaces with dollar bills.
Electricity is electricity, regardless of where it comes from. If a solar cell produces 20x more energy than went into making it, does it really matter if the energy that created it was coal or solar? No - and, in fact, the factory can't even tell.
You'd have more luck complaining about the fossil fuels involved in the plastics used in solar cell construction, but even that's largely irrelevant - the amount of oil used to make plastic is so small (under 15%, last I cited sources for that here) and the alternatives so well-known (gasification of coal or biomass, among others) that it's not really going to be a critical issue for decades, if ever.
Shoot.
That accounts for about 90% of my car travel.
What will I tell the kiddies?
I disagree with your "Electricity is electricity" statement though.
If a plant making solar or wind gathering devices operated exclusively with the energy gathered by its own devices, that couldn't help but put the nail in the coffin for BAU fossil fuel/go nuclear arguments.
How?
Given a stream of 60Hz AC coming into the factory, there's to my knowledge no way of telling what generated that stream. How does solar-sourced electricity (w/pumped storgage) differ from coal-sourced electricity - at all - from the point of view of the factory?
It makes a difference in sales. If you can say that your product is green, you gain advantage in the current market. This is why companies advertize their use of green power. Safeway buys a percentage of wind power where I live. The allocate it, for the purpose of advertizing, by saying their gas stations are 100% renewables powered.
Chris
Hi Martin,
That is an incorrect. Insolation varies throughout the day, and is often at or even above 1000 w/m² around noon all over the country, and I have a pyranometer to prove it.
And I think on some level you are confusing peak power with net energy output as well (instantaneous watts vs. watt hours).
It is easy to find "peak sun hours," which means hours of the day equivalent to 1000w/m²
for anywhere in the USA from NREL's PV watt calculator at
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/codes_algs/PVWATTS/
This is historic weather data! Most places on the usa get between 4 and 6 hours of 1000w/m² a day on average year round (less in the winter, more in the summer). Which is a lot better than the 200-300 you claim
You are confusing peak with average I think. The typical annual resource in the US is about 5 kWh/m^2/day for a tilted but stationary panel accounting for clouds. This comes to about 200 W/m^2 average. Another way to look at this is that you get about 5 peak equivilent hours of sunlight per day on average during a year.
Chris
Roads already take up about 80,000km^2 in the US, so adding a few hundred km^2 on top of that for solar power really makes no difference.
Agree, but roads are less high tech and it took over 100 years to build all of them.
Martin,
Very odd comparison.. we still haven't built ALL the roads, and then again, others have been built and rebuilt. There IS a comparison there, however, as Roadways and PV are both installations that are ongoing and ever-building/rebuilding/expanding. As they say about Oil Supply.. 'It's all about flow.' And with PV as with traffic, if you want more capacity, you just build some more. (Who says greens are against growth?)
Bob
Because to my knowledge 1000W/m2 is not even close to real value. It rather 200-300W/m2 at best locations and at peak time.
Where have you seen this claim? The image below shows it to be incorrect.
5kWh/m2/day (very good value, NE is much lower and more clouds) = 208W/m2 (average) = 624W/m2 (8 hours average of sunshine) .. so 1000W/m2 is maybe the top peak time.
The other thing you want to look at is residential electricity rates. In Connecticut (about 4.5 kWh/m^2/day) they are $0.13/kWh while in Oklahoma (about 5.5 kWh/m^2/day) they are about $0.09/kWh so that solar works out to be a better deal in Connecticut. Right now, incentives wipe out that comparison though since you can get a $5/Watt rebate in Connecticut.
Chris
(click to enlarge)
It's a little disingenuous to give the solar radiation for December. Christmas comes but once a year. IF you live offgrid AND you don't have air condition, THEN you may be interested in the minimum amount of electricity.
In a discussion of producing grid electricity, the IPOs may well be more interested in meeting air conditioning loads on hot summer days then replacing baseline power in the winter.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Disingenuous?
It seems that he's showing that even in the worst case (December) for Northern Hemisphere, the daily KWH/M2 average is well enough above the 200/300w numbers that were claimed above.
"It rather 200-300W/m2 at best locations and at peak time".
This is quite simply, factually wrong. We have good measured data for most of the country. SW
When I consider a post-carbon world, two technologies really stand out today - solar and fission. Everything else, as the original article mentions, needs far more time (and often far more research) before it becomes practical. This means that they key to solving the planet's energy crisis over roughly the next century will most likely be some combination of fission reactors and solar energy. Now solar energy is broader than just solar PV but PV is going to be a huge part of that if we can pull it off.
The key remains adoption rate of fission and solar versus decline rate in fossil fuels. This is why transparency in the petroleum industry is so badly needed. Without transparency we cannot hope to accurately predict the decline rate, and therefore the minimum adoption rate of the replacement technologies necessary. And that is a very dangerous gamble for our species to be making.
If we are going to solve this energy crisis, this is precisely how we are going to do it. The great unknown, since we have blown away the "fat" years in which we could have been getting ready, is whether we will convert in time or not.
To answer Engineer-Poet's rhetorical question - societies do not exist to adapt to facts. Societies exist as problem solving machines, and once built, like a hammer, they view every problem as a nail. What we are waiting for is a change in our society. Unfortunately, that change may come too late if we wait too long.
To paraphrase Alan Drake - here's hoping we have the sense to begin mass adaptation of these kinds of technologies sooner rather than later.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
solar and fission. Everything else, as the original article mentions, needs far more time (and often far more research) before it becomes practical.
Why do you believe wind is not currently viable? Far more installed capacity exists for wind than for solar by at least one order of magnitude.
My oversight, Will. I am rather under the weather this week, not feeling terribly well and so not thinking as clearly as I otherwise might.
Wind is certainly part of that overall solution. Some people here may not recall some of my earlier remarks here at The Oil Drum but I have always believed that we already possess the necessary technology to solve the energy crisis that is now upon us. For me, the problem never has been about technology. It has always been about possessing the psychological willpower and the political willpower to make the necessary and far-reaching changes that are needed to transition from a fossil fuel based energy regime to a sustainable energy regime. All of this discussion about new technology is not aimed at solving the problem, but rather it is aimed at continuing business as usual, something that I do not believe is viable.
Please note that while I have said I think we can solve the energy crisis with existing technology, that this still does not solve the other problems facing us, including massive loss of biodiversity, continued population growth, climate change and a host of other issues. Our civilization is rushing headlong into a host of crisis points seemingly without much regard for the dangers involved. If we can collectively "wake up" and give these multiple crises the attention needed, we may manage to avert a catastrophe. What concerns me most though is the general lack of response thus far.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Sorry to hear that you aren't feeling well. One hopes you will recover soon.
I agree with most of what you wrote in both posts of the subthread. Solar PV and other renewables can provide lots of energy, certainly enough for the present U.S. population to live comfortably. However, continuing to live as we do is the problem and adding excess energy to our lives will only make things worse, even as we may find ways to reduce our CO2 emissions. I feel that the clash between our high energy, high technology lifestyles with the rest of the natural world will ultimately lead to a near total ruin of the natural world. In a direct "confrontation" between man and nature, the other non-human residents of Earth will all end up as road kill. We already know how to live at the bottom of the ocean and floating in the ISS in orbit, given enough material and energy to do so. The entire planet might be re-engineered to fit mankind's notion of an ideal place to live, but for how long? Would we (or can we) realistically think of everyone living in large cities without the rest of the Earth's life forms? I doubt it and I wouldn't want to live that way in any event.
E. Swanson
Fully agree with your comments, GZ, though I'd want to fight nukes in favor of wind. It's the old proliferation issue on nukes. (You know - once the standard drops such that nuclear weapons can be flown under the wing of a B52 from Minot to Barksdale without anyone knowing - well, you know that slippery slope).
But to paraphrase you we're creatures of habit. Wind, solar and electric transportation don't require any wishful new technology - it's all about rate of implementation vs. decline in oil production. But as creatures with very bad habits, the painful route is likely the one we'll have to take. Here's hoping it won't be as bloody as the French Revolution.
All this is very good, but I am missing what I had hoped to hear- alternative ways to get solar power.
Engineer-Poet is excellent at getting to the basic numbers and doing sensible calculations therefrom. So I ask him or anyone so inclined, to do a little arithmetic on the following (what I think are) facts today, and get a proper comparison with PV of any stripe
1) There is way more solar thermal energy hitting this planet than we need.
2) Existing solar thermal power plants get around 20% energy conversion, right now, and can be improved by known methods. Their delivered watts cost less than those from PV.
3) We can put all the solar thermal electricity generation we could want in deserts, and transport it long distances efficiently by proven high voltage DC lines. (the Germans proposed just this to power Europe from Sahara at least 20 years ago)
4) We can store electricity efficiently in very well proven pumped hydro plants, located anywhere they make sense- no hills required, since we can dig holes cheaply.
So, why aren't we doing it? -- As well as EP's proposed PV path,--- as well as others,--- all getting from solar to where we want to be.
Summary. Solar is IT. Do it. Do it fast. Do it as many ways that make sense. May best ways win.
And in between, don't make babies- or at least, more than 2. And to get the wherewithall, it would be nice to quit making cars for as many years as is needed to do the solar conversion-- we did it before when we were in the strenuous business of killing our now-friends in Europe and Asia.
Because coal is cheaper.
Also because coal and natural gas plants are well understood and mature, meaning they're likely to cause fewer heebie-jeebies to potential financiers (IIRC, Jerome a Paris wrote an article about funding for wind power that touched on this issue). Solar, by contrast, is changing so fast that it's hard to know what technology to back, which business cases make sense, and so on.
Plus, they all cost more than coal.
At this point, replacing our fossil fuel infrastructure is no longer a problem of "how" - the technology is already available. It's a question of "why", and right now not many people seem to think the answers to that question are particularly compelling. That's changing in some places (e.g., Germany), and that change in attitudes is likely to continue, or even speed up if peak oil and/or climate change start to cause problems. Until then, though, economics will largely preserve the old system.
The purely short term economic viewpoint is a massive part of the problem and it pushes us further down the road without having made a successful transition. This puts us even more at the mercy of the problem of decline rate versus adoption rate of replacement technologies.
Further, the current economic models ignore or severely discount costs that they have been allowed to ignore by society, whether rightly or wrongly. Pollution, environmental damage, and climate change are three huge costs that, if fully factored into fossil fuels, would likely lead to significant changes in how these are considered. The fact that these costs are not factored in is one of the primary reasons that coal is leading this current wave of energy source changes.
As Alan Drake might say, here's hoping for full cost accounting of the real costs of coal.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Absolutely.
The narrower the price gap between renewable and non-renewable sources, though, the easier it will be to convince society to take into account externalities and long-term consequences. At $1/W (above) x 5kWh/m^2 average insolation, that's capital costs of around $0.70 per kWh per year. Assuming an 8% return on investment takes care of maintenance and financing, for a 30-year lifespan that's $0.23 per kWh, which is about what many residential customers in Europe pay for daytime electricity. Transmission, billing, and other infrastructure costs'll increase that a little, of course, but it'd still be well within the realm of what people have already proven they can pay for.
So if/when fuel prices and/or externalities pricing cause fossil fuel generation of electricity to become less attractive, solar generation will be able to take up some of the burden at costs that won't be prohibitively disruptive to economic stability. (Of course, there's always the question of how quickly capacity can be added, but that's another issue.)
"At $1/W (above) x 5kWh/m^2 average insolation,"
Assuming $1/W, 21% capacity factor (1.825 KWH's per year per peak watt, or $.55 capital cost per KWH), 8% interest, and 25 year life: that would give you 5.1 cents per kwh. In other words, annual cost is about 9% of capital cost, IOW capital multiple of 11.
More than competitive.
Pitt, I am sure you know that " cheaper" means "not counting all the real costs, like ruining the planet"
And, "economics" will preserve the old system as long as it is that same old Primitive Economics, economics that counts only small costs, like the small cost of blowing a hill top into a trout stream and hauling off the coal , leaving us hillbillies even more destitute than we were, and the bears buried and the trout dead.
Talk about "start to cause problems" Around here, problems have not only started, they have run a hell of a long way down the road, leaving some awful big muddy footprints behind.
Can't hardly anything cost more than coal. Unless-- you don't count the cost of coal.
Renewable energy technology, wind and solar especially are getting cheaper, whilst conventional fuels can only get more expensive. We should be looking at todays investments from 10 years in the future.
Finally you acknowledge a stumbling block to your vision of solar powering the world.
If it is not cost effective to the general consumer, solar will be mostly overlooked until the lights begin going out and there is no alternative but to "go solar".
When the lights begin to go out it is too late.
Where will the available power be diverted from to mass produce and install solar where it's required?
If solar is so good and pays for itself in no time flat, why aren't power companies running around the country installing solar panels on every roof? They could charge for the electricity they produced and make a handsome profit.
Imagine if twenty years ago that every new home constructed, was required to have enough solar power installed for future needs, paid for by the power company. If like all the solar evangelists claim, they would have paid for themselves in no time and they would be making billions in profit.
Power companies pay for coal and uranium for what reason?
They are even finite resources....could it be capitalism at work?
Corporations are just like an individual, they will fight to hold on to what they have until it's too late.....(FYJ).
Really we all know it's already too late for alternative energy to prevent a major collapse. It won't even stave it off for a day.
It will enable prepared individuals to hang on a bit longer though.
Solar evangelists forget that money makes the world go round.
It is best to dig the well before you are thirsty.
In addition to this above post,
wind and solar are getting a bit cheaper but not on the scale needed to compete with the direct wastage of ff.
As energy prices rise, so do the cost of these alternate energy projects, so that expenses never justify the out of pocket cost, to most people.
The cost of copper has increased to about 4 times what it was a few years ago.
Once several percent of the population finally decides to start putting in alternative heating systems using copper pipe for plumbing and water heating solar panels , only the richer people will be able to afford the copper, and even then, copper pipping will be constantly out of stock, for years, meanwhile energy prices keep rising.
If governments do not push the projects in spite of people, they will not be built.
Ask why energy poor Cuba and other energy poor countries do not have large amounts of wind and solar, and you will hear the response that it just cost too much.
Is there any reason we, most of us, are not going to be in exactly the same situation in the near future ??
DocScience
http://www.angelfire.com/in/Gilbert1/grid.html
.
http://www.energybulletin.net/19420.html
Published on 21 Aug 2006 by GraphOilogy / Energy Bulletin. Archived on 21 Aug 2006.
Net Oil Exports Revisited
by Jeffrey J. Brown
http://www.tinyhouses.net/
I expect that as copper prices rise, more homes will be "plumbed" with plastic.
Who uses copper for plumbing any longer?
(Hint: Only those places where the plumbers' union is really stong. ;o)
Plastic tubing, such as Pex, is the happening thing. It's even what gets used around here for in floor radiant heating.
Don't know about using plastic in solar collectors, but there's always stainless steel....
(Deleted - double post.)
You appear to have mistaken me for someone else, as I can hardly be said to have been a strong proponent of such a vision.
Nuclear has never been cost effective to the general consumer - in the sense of owning your own generating capacity - and that hasn't stopped it from being a major power source in the US, and the major power source in France.
Unless you mean not cost effective to the general consumer in the sense of costing too much, but many consumers in Europe pay 2-3x what Americans pay for electricity, and are hardly suffering. Consumers could handily pay rates for electricity that would make solar economically viable now.
You misunderstand - it pays for its energy rapidly. Despite the misguided estimates of some people, though, energy represents only a small fraction of the cost of most products.
Again, you woefully misunderstand, compounding the issue by conflating present and past technology.
Solar power technology 20 years ago was expensive, and it's pretty simple to see that installing cheaper generating capacity + transmission infrastructure and investing the remaining funds would yield a higher rate of return than the solar investment you suggest. Accordingly, it made no economic sense to do as you said, so unsurprisingly nobody did.
And nobody's claiming anyone should have, either.
What people are saying is that current solar technology is a viable replacement for substantial amounts of generating capacity now, and may even be an economically preferable power source in the near future. Very different claim.
Don't imagine that what you believe bears any relation to what other people know.
I liked this part best.......
"What people are saying is that current solar technology is a viable replacement for substantial amounts of generating capacity now, and may even be an economically preferable power source in the near future. Very different claim".
"People are saying"..........
"May even be"........
"Substantial amounts".........
I call that pissing into the wind.
Now that you assert solar is "viable" when can I expect to see factories turned over to the mass production of solar panels? I guess its the "near future".
What do other people know Pitt, are you one of them or just believe them? This I gotta hear.
For my home I need 30 panels for a viable grid connect, no batteries just grid connected.
I have to consider........
Will I have to move
Will the grid remain up
Will I need extra security
Would I have been better off investing the 40k
Now if I had plenty of money I wouldn't worry but I don't and I worry.
So what is your expert advise Pitt.
You must be an expert because you "know".
Again, you misunderstand the difference between "viable" and "economically viable".
Factories manufacturing buggy whips are viable - as in, entirely possible - but are not economically viable, so they don't exist. Similarly, factories manufacturing solar cells en masse are viable-as-in-possible right now, but are not economic, and so they don't exist yet.
If the economics changes - as one would expect in the face of severe fossil fuel shortages - then we can expect to see more solar cells manufactured. Once that first hypothetical - fossil fuel shortages in rich nations - arrives, then we can expect to see that second hypothetical arrive.
Why would you want a grid-connect system on your home? If you think the grid'll go down, it won't be all that useful; if you don't think it'll go down, you can keep buying electricity from the grid while pushing for the utilities to generate more from renewables. Large-scale solar installations are much more economic than personal rooftop installations, so it's probably more worthwhile to buy energy from the greenest power company you can find, paying their "renewable sources" surcharge if they have one, or pushing them to start one if they don't.
Any building heating and domestic hot water can be run from your PV or wind or anything else, and your extra electricity can be used to heat the reserve hot water tank without the need for batteries, or putting the extra energy into the grid.
It would not be difficult to put in a switch to run your fridge either off the grid, or on your separate system using a cheaper inverter, as there would be no need to synchronize with the grid.
The same situation can be used to run your lights.
The rest of your grid tied equipment uses very little energy, that you may as well use the grid for it.
Why do people seem so desperate to tie into the grid, as that seems to be one of the larger expenses ??
DocScience
We need the grid for when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing.
The alternative is stored energy by some means.
An inverter is a given for an grid connected system, you run your home from solar during the day and excess is put back into the grid for which the power company pays you, maybe in twenty years then you can get your money back.
In my opinion the people advocating solar as a means to save the world are evil, have vested interests or both.
Just say you could, right now put a decent PV array on every home.
So what do we have.
We have the vested interests very rich if paid by the government.
We have households with enough electricity and extra money.
What will they do with the extra money but consume more and use more energy. They could have more kids to help consume more in the future.
The vested interests will have heaps of money to invest, they have just consumed copious amounts of energy producing millions of PV,s. So they can build office buildings etc and venture into new energy consuming capitalism. All of which does nothing to stop the depletion of our oil and food supply.
Solar and wind advocates always claim that energy is only "a small fraction" of manufacturing cost.
People who keep claiming that should be kicked of the site.
Just a few things for example......
Wine bottle, book, box of paper clips, PV panel, box of corn flakes, plasma TV.
I count all the energy required to make each of those objects come into being.
Exploration
Research and development
Mining
Refining
Smelting
Legislation
Farming
Fertilizer production
Transport
Advertising
Patents submissions (all the paper involved)
Computers
Electricity
Human labour
I'm not even counting food production and its consumption.
Maybe you can think of some more.
They add up to the true energy cost of manufacturing.
When you purchase any of those objects you are paying for a hell of a lot of energy.
What is worth more, the ingredients taken to make a wine bottle or the energy required to get it to become a wine bottle and get it into your home?
Solar advocates can come and see me when solar power alone is used to manufacture a PV, beginning with the base ores. Or just power a blast furnace, or substitute for an oxy acetylene welder.
I'll say it again, all the solar you ever need will not help us stave off the affects of peak oil. Only more oil can do that.
It will help those remaining after the collapse but there will be millions of unused PV arrays around then.
Anyone here can tell me where I'm mistaken, I look forward to it, I actually prefer a brighter future.
You're centuries behind the times. Charcoal (processed biomass, derived from solar energy) powered metallurgy for thousands of years. I could make acetylene from limestone and charcoal just fine, too. But you are probably thinking more of arc welding and arc furnaces. PV would be able to run those just fine (when the sun was shining, of course).
I don't know if you can hear anything over the raging of your resentments, but you asked, and I'll try.
Just a couple observations, anyway..
"Solar advocates can come and see me when solar power alone is used to manufacture a PV, beginning with the base ores. Or just power a blast furnace, or substitute for an oxy acetylene welder."
WHY? We can assemble enough panels in an array to produce Megawatts of power to handle any of these various jobs you've insisted on.. but we'll also have wind and water power, we'll have wood and corn husks etc.. to burn, gasify, .. and will we really be out of Acetylene? Of course there will be CSP power, and I have to believe we'll have gotten some TidePower solutions running before long..
But unless you simply don't believe the numbers that say that a panel WITH its support eq around it can replace all it's embodied energy in 3-4 years, and yet it will be producing for 30 or more, then what is to keep that panel from giving some of it's lifetime watts into a grid that is feeding the PV industry and making new panels, and yet have watts left over for lighting, communications, whatever?
~~
"I'll say it again, all the solar you ever need will not help us stave off the affects of peak oil. Only more oil can do that."
Sorry, there is plenty of energy out there, not that we have enough time left to make a smooth transition any more. Solar advocates (and wind, etc.. they are not usually exclusive) mostly probably agree with you that we will be feeling those effects, no matter how hard we push at this point. The point is, we see energy sources that work, that endure, that are pretty clean. Why would we not move towards them? Who's claiming it'll be easy? (OK, AntiDoomer sounds that way sometimes, and you see the reactions he/she elicits, and Infinite Possibilities was truly glowing in his ability to say 'It's all solved! It's just a matter of building it now! I don't see a problem!')
But PV is working now. It's been proving itself for decades now. So it's expensive. So is College, does that mean it's not worth it, and will only be a good idea when it is as cheap as Sodapop?
or as cheap as bottled H2O :)
Or to put it another way:
"How many kilowatts ya gettin' from them-thar composite shingles, Henry?"
I think the utilities' lackluster support for solar is because it doesn't bring them the "economies of scale" they like to get in a giant multimegawatt plant. In fact, it's eventually going to cut into their revenue -- so you don't have much of a lobby for disruptive DIY energy production.
| The problem will solve itself.
| But not in a nice way.
The issue I see with large-scale solar thermal and HVDC is the capital cost of the transmission system. This can be equal to the cost of conventional generation equipment! Producing power at the point of use with PV allows a great deal of capital to go into more generation instead of distribution. We can use the remote solar-thermal plants for overnight loads, which are small (and will get smaller with e.g. ice storage A/C systems run mostly off PV).
OK, That's fine, except we now have the usual quibble about what the actual as opposed to hoped-for costs will be. Either way it goes, desert solar thermal and HVDC, or cheap local PV, solar energy is the way to go, and that's all I am really arguing for.
The important point is that we have a whole huge amount of solar energy we know how to turn into electriciity by a lot of different ways. No need for stuff like nuclear.
BTW, I am just fine with no AC except a black panel on my roof that radiates to night sky, stores cool water which keeps me cool during the day, at which time that same black blanket is heating my hot water. Pretty near no electricity involved. Comfortable on a 35C day. No ice.
OK, That's fine, except we now have the usual quibble about what the actual as opposed to hoped-for costs will be. Either way it goes, desert solar thermal and HVDC, or cheap local PV, solar energy is the way to go, and that's all I am really arguing for.
The important point is that we have a whole huge amount of solar energy we know how to turn into electriciity by a lot of different ways. No need for stuff like nuclear.
BTW, I am just fine with no AC except a black panel on my roof that radiates to night sky, stores cool water which keeps me cool during the day, at which time that same black blanket is heating my hot water. Pretty near no electricity involved. Comfortable on a 35C day. No ice.
OOPS. sorry 'bout that doubledip. My computer keyboard stuck.
At this moment, 0400, my black blanket out on the roof is reading 16C. Nice and cool. Gonna be another hot day, tho.
Solar energy is the way to go. No energy is even better.
There is a competitor to PV solar power and that is the solar Stirling generator. The claimed efficiency of 24% is impressive as well as the ability to produce grid ready power without costly conversion.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9596_22-6129168.html
..."Some elements, like gallium, are in limited supply and cannot supply a great deal of power via photovoltaics. Others have few constraints; silicon is the 2nd most abundant element in Earth's crust (27.7% by weight). By all rights we should be able to make as many silicon PV cells as we want; we should be able to cover the planet with them."...
It is not so easy how it sounds .... Abundance of Si does not mean too much. Here we are
• Silicon production capacity forecast
(Based on ~11g/W Si consumption (in 2007) with 0.5% annual reduction) = 2007 ~ 2GW, 2009 ~7GW, 2011 ~7.6 GW
• Si Solar cell production capacity forecast
2007 ~ 4.5GW, 2009 ~7.5GW, 2011 min 9.5 GW
So we can expect 2005-2008 significant shortage, 2009-2010 market almost in equilibrium with silicon supply/demand however, as new silicon plants are finished
silicon demand will continue strong growth 2011-2012 second situation of shortage with necessity to build new silicon plants.
And ... a few GW adds very small fraction to power we are using and to power we need to replace.
Solar energy is only a cosmetic adjustment. We need to adjust our live styles....
M
Where Water is Oxidized to Dioxygen: Structure of the Photosynthetic Mn4Ca Cluster, cornerstone of photosynthesis.
This seemed very promising nothing new on it, Did someone cut the funding ?
Martin;
Whose predictions are those? Predictions come from all sides, and their source is just as significant as their content.
I'm in full agreement that our lifestyles will change, whether we do it by choice or not.. but saying so in this thread sounds like you think that there are proponents of Solar Electric who don't already understand and accept that we have to learn to live with far less energy at our disposal. Solar PV electricity is as precious as Maple Syrup, and as hard-won. If you've ever boiled 40 gallons of sap down to one gallon of Syrup, you're unlikely to ever waste a drop of it.
Bob
Except that big maple syrup operations use reverse osmosis to get the water out. That can be done using solar power so there are some synergies.
Chris
Now if we can just hang onto a few of our Sugar Maples!
No kidding. Having grown up in Maine, I always felt guilty buying canadian syrup, until I read the 2000 report to congress on climate change. Then I understood why I could not find syrup from Maine. You can still get potatoes from Maine but now blueberries may be shifting North as well. Maine grown cotton anyone?
Chris
Here is the source ...http://www.photovoltaics-reports.com/products/yd51879-pv-team.html
My point is that the fluoride disposal from phosphate mining in Florida alone is sufficient to increase today's production of PV by roughly an order of magnitude.
A couple questions have crossed my mind about the chemistry of this process.
First, isn't NaF a less-desirable byproduct than sodium fluorosilicate? It seems the fertilizer industry makes the Na2SiF6 as a not-so-noxious byproduct. I'd think CaF2 might be even less noxious, but NaF can be pretty corrosive stuff, you know.
Second, is there any thought to closing the cycle a little further? That is, to separate HF and NaX (X=OH|CO3|Cl), then use the HF to make more fluorosilicate (a simple process, just dissolve cullet or silicate rocks in it). The NaX could go back to the reduction cells to get Na for silicon production.
| The problem will solve itself.
| But not in a nice way.
Or make batteries out of it?
-----
Just remember the Golden Years, all you at the top!
Uhhhh, batteries?
| The problem will solve itself.
| But not in a nice way.
Oh, and I wanted to say, great article!
I agree that this technology needs to be encouraged. With PV, wind, and sodium-sulfur batteries, I could imagine a future where we'd still have a reliable power grid.
For polycrystalline systems I suggest a 'rule of 6'. That is max kwh per day is 6 X peak kw. Example if your system maxes at 2 kw you will get 12 kwh that day.
One aspect of the process described was not clear to me: does the process directly produce silicon of sufficient purity for the manufacture of PV cells, or does the silicon need to be purified in a subsequent processing step?
If no further processing is required, then great. But if further processing is required, then I'm not sure I see much advantage to going this route. As understanding it, the most difficulty (and hence the greatest expense) in producing PV-grade silicon is in the purification step rather than in the actual production of the silicon.
Silicon is generally produced by the reduction of silica with carbon in an electric arc furnace, in much the same way tha metallic iron is produced by the reduction of iron oxide with carbon in a blast furnace. Being that the raw material in this case is high-grade sand, it probably represents only a tiny fraction of the cost of producing the silicon. So the fact that in this process you are essentially using a free waste sodium fluorosilicate waste material does not to change the economics very much.
Furthermore, metallic sodium is hardly cheap and is also relatively energy intensive to produce. Therefore, it is also not obvious that the reduction of sodium fluorosilicate to silicon using sodium has either any cost or energy advantages over the 'smelting' of silica in an electric arc furnace.
Maybe there's something I've misunderstood or am not seeing, but unless it direcly produces purified silicon, then I really don't see how this process represents an advantage over the current method of producing silicon.
I was wondering the same thing - where does this metallic Sodium come from in large quantities. Yeah, there is a lot of sodium in seawater, but the trick is to get it out.
As I understand it, most metallic sodium is produced electrolytically from sodium cloride. While sodium chloride is, for all intents and purposes,
virtutally infinitely abundant, the energy to produce metallic sodium from it is hardly so. Here we have the same problem with both aluminum and titanium, two of the most common elements in the earth's crust, yet two of the most energy-intensive substances to reduce to their metallic state.
Basically, it's the energy that's the problem, not the availability of the raw material.
OK, and if we start to extract massive quantities of sodium from seawater, wouldn't we be left with massive quantities of chlorine gas?
Sodium Flouride isn't a huge concern of mine. It is a relatively stable crystal, somewhat toxic, and somewhat hygroscopic, so you would want to store it in a safe and dry place. But chlorine gas in these quantities would be more difficult to store, so there would probably be a need to find a way to bind up the chlorine into a stable solid of some sort. In massive quantities, of course.
I find it annoying that you're asking this question three hours after it was answered in this thread.
You do realize that the question that I asked several posts above was asked was within minutes of your answer. That was the post that your response would have answered. It happens here. Learn to deal with it.
What I find annoying is that you don't bother reading the question that I posted about what you would do with thousands of tons of Chlorine (I presume to be in a gasseous form). That was the question I raised 3 hours after the thread that you cited (which doesn't address the question).
The question was about what to do with a large quantity of Chlorine gas.
You will notice below, that the partial pressure of Chlorine gas is much lower then Carbon dioxide , at room temperature.
So if they consider carbon capture, storing carbon dioxide in an old deep gas or oil well, as a workable solution, then it would be much easier to store Chlorine gas in a similar deep well, because it has a lower partial pressure.
The only corrosive effects to be of concern would be at the well head.
They would have to check for any remote possibility of underground seepage to another drilled well.
Does anyone know if this would be a viable solution ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine
Boiling point 239.11 K (-34.04 C, -29.27 F)
http://encyclopedia.airliquide.com/Encyclopedia.asp?GasID=13
Vapor pressure (at 21 °C or 70 °F) : 6.95 bar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide
Boiling point -78 C (195 K), (sublimes)
http://encyclopedia.airliquide.com/Encyclopedia.asp?GasID=26
Vapor pressure (at 20 °C or 68 °F) : 58.5 bar
DocScience
I have heard people who talk about carbon capture and sequestration basically admit that the containment isn't guaranteed to be 100% effective. You might have leaks. But if you have 10000 different wells all filled with compressed CO2, and one of them springs a leak and vents everything to the atmosphere, it isn't *that* big a deal - conceptually the vast majority of the CO2 is still sequestered.
With Chlorine I don't think that is good enough. The stuff is just too toxic.
And to top it off, if there is water in the gas wells, I believe that when combined with chlorine gas it would make hydrochloric acid, which could cause rocks to be dissolved, increasing the risk of leaks.
My gut says that the stuff needs to be bound up in other molecules that are far less toxic, and ideally solid at room temperatures. And that may require massive quantities of other compounds and/or energy.
Either that, or a different source of sodium metal would need to be found.
From the sounds of it, chlorine is a valuable industrial chemical (think PVC) which is already produced in exactly the manner you're fretting about. The EU alone produces about 10 million tons of chlorine each year, suggesting that using a million tons of it for producing silicon would represent a trivial overall change in the amounts of chlorine generated worldwide.
In other words, it's a non-issue.
Actually, you wouldn't be using it - it would be a byproduct of the process, and you need to figure out what to do with it. If the amount produced overwhelms any markets, then you have a problem of figuring out what to do with it. If the amount produced is far less, then it is a minor perturbation.
I guess an alternate way of looking at it is to assume that this type of production would just try and purchase NaOH from existing suppliers and make the sodium metal directly.
My calculations show that to make 147,000 tons of Silicon, you would need 840,000 tons of NaOH. According to Wikipedia, in 1998 worldwide annual production was 45 million tons, so this process would use about 2% of the worldwide production. If it were 20%, or 50%, there could be a concern that the markets would be seriously perturbed. 2% would be a fairly minor perturbation.
Not to mention the investment required for large scale process trains involving metallic sodium. Probably one actual cost estimate will kill this idea for quite a while.
As I understand it, most metallic sodium is produced electrolytically from sodium cloride. While sodium chloride is, for all intents and purposes,
virtutally infinitely abundant, the energy to produce metallic sodium from it is hardly so. Here we have the same problem with both aluminum and titanium, two of the most common elements in the earth's crust, yet two of the most energy-intensive substances to reduce to their metallic state.
Basically, it's the energy that's the problem, not the availability of the raw material.
The sodium would come from a chloralkali plant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloralkali_process
Inputs are brine and electricity. Outputs, like many in industrial chemistry, can be adjusted somewhat. They may include Na, Na2O, NaOH, NaOCl, Cl2, HCl, and H2. Obviously you'll have an equal number of sodium and chlorine atoms in the final products. Sodium is easier and cheaper to reduce than aluminum, but it does require electric power to do so.
Disposal of the byproducts is not a problem, at least not on the same scale as a coal fired generating plant. Most all of the above listed products have industrial uses, and the quantity is probably 3 or 4 orders of magnitude less than CO2 from the power plant.
That is what SRI appears to be claiming, and I'm taking their word for it.
The chemistry looks good to me. Making sodium is simpler and less energy intensive than making silanes. The rest of it's all exothermic, give or take some melting of the silicon. And the only environmentally touchy part is the fluoride byproduct, but then we're starting with a fluoride byproduct anyway... (my degree was in chemistry)
If SRI can get solar grade silicon out of it without a lot of extra processing steps, it looks good. Thanks for posting this excellent analysis, EP.
A well researched post. I hate to be a downer, but the system we have now will never allow us to do anything for the common good. The maggots who own this country care only about one thing: money. The old guard will do things the way they see fit, based on how much them and their buddies get. I could come up with a free power system and they wouldn't use it. They would kill and destroy the idea. Abandon all hope. It isn't hopeless because it is hopeless, it is hopeless because the stupid greed monkeys have their hands on all the controls.
Where does one buy solar panels for $3 -$4 / watt or less as some have professed ??
Latest price survey
http://www.solarbuzz.com/Moduleprices.htm
If the technology is too expensive to buy what is the point.
This was linked above. You are reading an index in your link, not a spread.
Chris
I might be wrong, but a couple of issues weren't clear (there is only so much info one can put in one article, after all!)
1) What about the PV panel support cicuitry? (inverters, etc) silicon doesn't scale up well with power control (at least not the power control for sine-wave inverters) and the same purity is still required as is now for semi-conductors. Nor does it like high-voltage, which means really expensive HV FETs or lots more copper and LV cabling.
2) Assuming the capacity is distributed and low-scale, who regulates the grid frequency?
Too many anti-islanding inverters all pushing the frequency up against themselves and then tripping?
Seems to me that there would still need to be thumping great pieces of rotating machinery to regulate the whole thing (solar thermal with salt or geothermal storage?)
Also, wrt support circuiry, won't we need a heap of aluminium for all the capacitors (big & small) and support frames?
(It may even be possible to create a process to produce both silicon and aluminum by reduction of aluminum silicates.)
Getting metals from silicates requires ultracheap energy, high prices or a command economy. See the flowchart in http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9608/Smirnov-9608.html
of how the Russians reluctantly make aluminium ore from nepheline since they lack good bauxite.
I think you missed the point. This system already recovers materials from silicates. There's a possibility of recovering metals; since the energy of formation of NaF is not terribly higher than NaCl (and the fluorine may be a more valuable byproduct), it may be better to produce the sodium from recovered (recycled) NaF.
What qualifies as "ultracheap"? There are ecological impacts to consider, also. If we sustain less total damage by adding more PV to reduce silicates to make both aluminum and silicon instead of digging bauxite in sensitive areas, there's some point at which internalized ecological costs and cheaper PV will tilt things in that direction.
Here's a different line of thinking altogether inspired by a TV show I just saw on Moroccan style cooking; silicon could be produced as an adjunct of a 'charcoal' economy. Even when silica is reduced with charcoal http://www.chemlink.com.au/silicon.htm
substantial electrical input is required. Maybe we could get both the charcoal and some electricity from biomass. We could do home heating and cooking with charcoal and save PV for low power applications. Not sure if the numbers work out though.
Charcoal reduction would get you metallurgical grade silicon, and the purification steps are expensive.
| The problem will solve itself.
| But not in a nice way.
The infrastructure for avoiding independent anti-islanding inverters syncing to each other is already beginning to be deployed as Demand Response Infrastructure. Currently this is an essentially one way data link that communicates a need for reduction in demand, but it can be expanded to cover phase information when distributed generation becomes the dominate source of power. You will only need the systems that bring the distributed generation up to this level to have phase reading capability so that the current generation of interconnects can continue to function without replacement.
Chris
1) PV solar doesn't scale. So you pay the same price per watt no matter the size of your installation. You can always put two inverters in parallel for the same $.60 a watt.
2) To quote Alexander the Great, "to the strongest". The inverters are trying to sync to the grid frequency, not set it. If all the electricity on-grid is PV, what do we need AC for? What do we need a grid for? Everyone runs a DC house with either individual or shared energy storage. Batteries or other.
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
The main opportunity for scale in PV is at the fabrication plant. There is also an opportunity for volume savings where scheduling jobs and the use of labor saving equipment can be justified. There are some opportunities too for division of labor, having the qualified installer supervising a number of installations where the labor is more specialized to attaching the panels to the roof leaving the electrical work and quality assuarance to the supervisor. It is not easy to reduce costs but it is possible.
Chris
One application of thin-film PV is in the form of adhesive-backed encapsulated rolls of cells (on a stainless-steel substrate) applied to raised-seam metal roofing. The cells are applied before installation of the roof panels. Given that sufficiently thin silicon is flexible, it is conceivable that roofing panels could be integrated with PV at a factory and be delivered to a job site cut to size and already partly assembled. Lift into place with a crane, bolt down, wire up, flip the switch.
You can get some wiring simplification by having the inverters smaller and on the roof. Then you are just ganging AC. This also helps for yard mounts since you can have these at a greater distance from the interconnect box.
There are PV roofing products available but I think that they still have low enough efficiency that you end up with a smaller output than typical use. Still, there is some appeal to this. 20% efficeint silicon panels tend to work in most cases to meet a homes electricity use (under net metering) so this can be preferable.
Commercial installations often go for 30% of use with 9% efficient CdTe because the price point works out better that way.
Chris
I like having my inverter in a temperature controlled environment in my garage. 150 F ambient on the roof plus the additional heat from being only 90%-95% efficient times 4kWs. Inverters already have a limitted 10 year lifetime. When the time comes to refurbish my inverter, I don't want to climb down a ladder with a fifty pound, $5000 piece of electronics. I want to unhook it from my garage wall.
What's wrong with ganging DC?
RobertInTucson
I haven't escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
With our systems you don't do that work. All maintenance is included. Having them accessible is a plus since they can be maintained without the homeowner needing to be present. We won't be using ladders much. The problem with ganging DC is that you need to balance things pretty carefully, account for non-uniform shading and such. We may be eating a little on the heat issue. With 20% efficient panels we expect a 17% average system efficiency. The expected mean time to failure for our inverters is above 15 years so that with our business model, we will be moving systems sooner than this for a substantial fraction of our systems. If you sell your house, you can pass on your contract, but you can also take your contract and system with you to your new house at no charge. The advantage to doing that is that you retain the rate pegged to the time you signed up in the new service territory (currently 2005 utility rates). The system that is removed from your old house will usually be sold in an international aftermarket at a depreciated price and a fresh system will be installed on the new (to you) home. Given that people move fairly often, frequently our systems will be sold before any inverters fail meaning no need for inverter maintenance during a contract.
Chris
"2) To quote Alexander the Great, "to the strongest". The inverters are trying to sync to the grid frequency, not set it. If all the electricity on-grid is PV, what do we need AC for? What do we need a grid for? Everyone runs a DC house with either individual or shared energy storage. Batteries or other."
It's not that we "need" AC, but changing over is just too large a job to consider at this point in time. We're going to undergo enough disruption with the oil/coal -> solar switch.
The grid? We'll need it. Expecting individuals to maintain their own set of batteries is not realistic. Shared local storage makes a lot of sense as it would reduce long distance grid loads. Most likely power companies would create dispersed storage sites as the technology matures.
And some people will continue to live in places where neither wind or solar will provide what they need 24/365. They will require power shipped to them. Just like grapes in December....
Perhaps some policy changes could boost wind and solar's prospects. For example, a carbon tax on coal and petroleum based on the amount of CO2 which would be released per BTU gained might make solar more competitive, decrease demand for coal and petrol. Some of the revenues could go to basic research for alternative energies and strategies to address climate change.
For details on economics and EROEI for PV google on "Alsema". A link caN BE FOUND HEREhttp://www.chem.uu.nl/nws/www/publica/Publicaties2004/e2004-103.pdf or here http://www.chem.uu.nl/nws/www/publica/Annualreports/pub_annual2004.htm.
For late 2004 info on other solar go here http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=864
For other comments on needing fossil to make solar, note that we only need fossil to build the first solar plant, including battery nack-up for 24/7 operation, in the SW USA with >2200/yr equivalent peak insolation. We can then cascade new plants off the first one. Over 3 or 4 plant generations the fossil eroei reaches a ridiculously large number.
PV is still supply constrained this year, but looks to move to demand constrained in the next few months. For those who say that no one is mass producing PV, 250 MWp was installed in 2001, 600 MWp in 2003, 1800 MWp was installed WW in 2006 and 6500 MWp is projected for 2010. Scale that growth rate up for 20 years. Single crystal Si PV cells are now in production at 22% efficiency (standard lab test), and full system efficiency (sunlight in, a/c out) of >15% is now practical. Concentrators are a very effective way both energetically and economically to increase the output per sq. m. of Si. regardless of the skeptics, it is happening. Murray
I just want to put a perspective on solar installation progress.
This seems like a good start.
Does anyone wish to check if I calculated this correctly ?
The installed solar capacity in 2006 is about 1/20 of 1% of total world electricity generation capacity.
World Electricity - production: 17.4 trillion kWh (2004 est.)
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/xx.html
.
.
"World Electricity Installed Capacity”
http://www.eia.doe.gov/iea/elec.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iea2005/table64.xls
World Electricity Installed Capacity by Type, January 1, 2005
World Total 3,871.952 (Million Kilowatts)
Conventional Thermal 2,652.269
Hydroelectric 761.863
Nuclear 374.195
Geothermal, Solar, Wind, Wood and Waste 83.624
1800 MWp = 1.8 MKw installed WW in 2006
1.8 MKw / 3,871 MKw = .046 % = about 1/20 of 1%
DocScience
Haven't checked your math, but think you failed in your perspective. PV never really took off until about 2001, when a slowdown in the microelectronics business provided a major surplus of polysilicon feedstock that drove down the cost of silicon. There were some incentive programs in the "90s but they were trivial. To the extent that there might be "PV era" it started in 2001. 2010 projected production is 65x 2001. Pretty good growth. 6500 MWp at 1800 hours/yr equivalent peak insolation is about the equivalent of one 1200 MW coal fired plant. If the growth rate continues we would expect about 65 coal fired plant equivalents in 2020 and >3600 in 2030. That's not cumulative, it's per year. While Si output is not likely to grow that fast, silicon surface likely will. Thin film is a very small fraction of the total today and "sliver cell" is essentially zero, both are likely to grow. By 2030 we should have 6 to 10x the surface per Kg of Si.
Now for some real perspective. At present prices PV is only competitive for peak power or remote (off grid) installations. That is less than 15% of total electricity. So the ONE YEAR supply in 2010 will be about 0.3% of total w0rld target market , and 15 to 20% by 2020. WOW!
If memory serves, Edison started the electricity supply for NYC about 1890. Electricity installation in the USA got a big boost by the TVA in the 1930s. Rural areas were still being electrified in the early 1950s. PV is progressing pretty rapidly by that perspective.
Also note, PV is unlikely ever to be a large share of total world electricity. For many decades we will use coal, nuclear, hydro, wind and other, so comparing current one year PV supply with total world inStalled base developed over >10 decades is pretty meaningless.
Thankyou for the reply.
The comparison is just to show how much PV is currently being installed, compared to the total usage
I do not consider it useful to compare the future guess amounts, as that can vary either way by a considerable amount.
I am trying to show that considerable solar production increases need to be done soon.
DocScience
.
( So the ONE YEAR supply in 2010 will be about 0.3% of total w0rld target market )
You calculation works out well.
Another way of looking at this is what fraction of generating capacity currently being added is solar.
Based on the EIA data you linked, about 120,000MW is being added yearly. Assuming a capacity factor of 25% for solar and 75% for other sources, solar was effectively 450MW of 90,000MW, or about 0.5% of new capacity.
It wasn't clear to me in this article, but the SRI process is not expected to be in production (3 chinese mfrs) until 2009 at the earliest, according to the press release (which implies a very low probability for this prediction...)
Also, what little documentation Evergreen has about their company doesn't include any references to alternative sources for their silicon (which makes sense, given the above).
So, although this is a plausible future scenario, it shouldn't be considered _likely_ by any means!
CW
Nice job Engineer-poet.