isn't that how the open market is supposed to work?!

Coming to understand "markets" is tricky. I quote from a recent article about FITs by Paul Gipe:

The prevailing conception of the “market” for electricity in the US is a relatively recent construct....

This wasn’t always the case and in North America is seldom the case even today. Much of the electricity we rely on is from heritage resources or bilateral contracts. Only a small portion of the electricity we use is traded on the “market”.

Solar’s proponents have always dreamed that if they could just get the value right they would be paid enough to make solar profitable. Thus, proponents go through elaborate contortions to find the value that will justify what they need to be paid to make solar work...

Especially in North America an interesting option is to view the situation altogether differently ...

One group accepts unquestioningly the dominant paradigm in which they find themselves. The other chooses to change the paradigm and questions the assumptions on which the conventional wisdom is based. Alas, we don’t even use the same language because the meaning of key words in the discussion have been debased and co-opted by the prevailing philosophy.

Yet feed-in tariff advocates in North America must fight on to recapture the language, the debate, and in the end the ideas themselves... revolutionary change in the supply, ownership, and sustainability of our electricity system....

If the debate degenerates to only economics and "markets," thermodynamics will send the economists into a tailspin, wondering what hit them!

Actually, I believe it's "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win." But, a very apt quote.

Though teabaggers would never concede this, the reality is we do NOT live in anything close to an ideal "free market" economy or "meritocracy" when it comes to competition. All the big players --Big Oil & Gas, Big Banks, Big Agriculture, Big Military, Big Insurance, etc. absolutely HATE competition and will do anything in their power to crush it. The 'baggers endlessly fantasize about how if government just "got out of the way", everything would just naturally evolve into an Ayn Rand paradise where only the John Galts would run everything as efficiently as possible, leading to a paradise of perpetual abundance on earth. Never mind that actual states with weak central governments and/or complete regulatory capture (where Somalia is now and where the U.S. is heading) are Mafia states where everything is a monopoly, no competition is allowed, and anyone who tries to mess with the power structure gets 'disappeared' in a hurry.

It should be noted that we live under a certain economic system called capitalism, which operates according to, as the name suggests, capital accumulation. While in the past it has had the upside of being very good for value-maximization, it has a specific downside as the world has become very much exploited; it needs capital accumulation in order to survive. While a transition from fossils to renewables is obviously a good thing, it's not The Next Big Thing for capitalism because, obviously, solar and wind capital accumulates at the expense of fossil fuel capital.

Just a reminder so no one forgets about the curious creature we have to deal with.

It's the intermittency (unreliability). When the solar/wind is available, in the case of wind this is largely random, you HAVE to take the power, and cycle down your fossil fuel plants, ruining efficiency, increasing maintenance and wrecking the economics of the baseload plants.

Central fossil fuel plants ARE dinosaurs, they will be replaced by nuclear plants.

3D will maybe never come to mass production scale. you can compare it to the moor's law at CPUs, do not believe everything they try to tell you. you cann't fight the limitation of physics. maybe sometimes there will be a 40% efficency panel, but when it comes to solar it is only the space you need to produce the amount of power! So for small scale usage space is not so important. So go ahead and buy a system for about 1 EUR per Watt and install it today. Panels are currently sold under their production costs. And oil will rise and maybe peak tomorrow and you will need pv to make a smoth energy fall-back.

If there's any phrase that sets off a warning note in my ear, it is, 'Maybe I should just wait til it gets a little better..'

It's tricky, because there are very good reasons to be careful and deliberate in your actions.. but we are now seeing many consequences start to play out.. and we have PV at simply ludicrously low prices compared to any time in the past.

At the very least, see if you can't hedge your bets and take advantage of just the current Panel prices to the tune of a couple/few hundred watts perhaps. In lean times even that much power can be enormously useful.. (and the Future Labor prices in harder times might be much more appealing, too, while we might be trading in eggs or carrots by then..)

2) with current PV-technology i would be able to generate around 1/3 my own usage. Because you install PV only once in your life, I am waiting (i don't want to use subsidies) for the next generation of PV expected to deliver 3x as much (3D or triple layer), ...

Ummm, you mean: "triple junction"?

Each additional junction in a multi-junction photovoltaic cell contributes a declining increase in power.
For example: the Shockley-Queisser limit (max theoretical) for a 1-sun, 1-junction cell is 33.7% efficient,
a 1-sun, 2 junction cell is 42% efficiency, an additional 25%.
A 1-sun, 3 junction cell S-Q limit is 49% efficiency, an additional 12% over 2 junctions.

(for purists, yes - there are various other calcs, just using the set on the wiki page to illustrate the point that each additional junction doesn't double the 1st's power).

The best 1-sun triple junction on the NREL chart is a 37.7% efficient device (77% of the above relevant limit), only 43% better than the best 1-sun single junction.
The best 1-sun single junction is a 26.4% GaAs (63% of the limit)
or a 25.0% crystalline silicon (74% of the limit).

The multi-junction devices are inordinately more expensive (made of more expensive materials, with more expensive processes, have more yield loss), and so are only worthwhile if one is sending them into space (e.g. mars rovers) or doing concentrating PV (and the later is not clearly economic).

In short, you are most likely waiting in vain for (consumer) "3D" solar.
Are you in a non-sunny area, having shading/orientation problems, small roof, and/or use a lot of electricity?

and to Luis,
thanks for this article.

I calculated the equation differently, looking at my return on investment. Here in the USA I can get about 9% ROI on a small home system using current grid energy costs. If my finance expense is 8% including repayment of principal over the first ten years, then I still have a better return than investing in the US treasury. And I will own the system after ten years.

7% interest? That's horrible. Not just from a moral standpoint, but from a financial point of view as well. There are much riskier projects that get lower interest rates. Mortgages come to mind.

There is almost guaranteed cash flow that is very easy to forecast. This makes a loan for a PV system a secured investment, not by the physical installation, but by the cash flow it generates. If someone defaults on a loan, the cash flow is still there.

Of course, banks would need to work with municipalities and electricity providers to create the necessary regulation. Make the PV system a lease in the event of a default, for example. This can't be that difficult.

in Austria the Situation is even worse!
there are only several small large scale PV projects under construction and small scale is only possible if you get subvention, because the consumer gets only about 8Cent/kwh for the surplus of power if he cann't use immediately.(austrian's can not think longer than 5 years into the future)
also there is no priority law for green power like in italy or germany, so you have to beg your grid operator to build your pv!
And when you have a larger PV project for a company you do not get a loan, because banks strongly believes the PR of the state owned grid operators.
In austria it is also more profitable for banks to lend money to italy and not to give loans to PV projects.
we saw this big positive leverage with pv loans in germany, they have had the kfw bank and then the private banks had to do the same.
It is very important to give people also loans to build PV! Or to realise, that the EROIE for other technologies are getting worse every day and they have to realise that these techs are big investment sinkholes and that fossile energy will kill us sooner or later.

More: Progress for Germany’s Power-to-Gas Drive

November 1, 2012 - Germany’s E.ON this August began construction of a new pilot plant in Falkenhagen in northeast Germany that will convert excess wind energy into synthetic natural gas that can then be fed into the regional gas grid, where it can be used to produce heat and power.

The technology is not new. In 2010, German researchers at the Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg, in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy System Technology IWES, announced they had developed what they called a “power-to-gas” process, which essentially employs hydrogen-electrolysis with methanization. ...

The technology seems to have made major strides since the first pilot. SolarFuel is currently working on a project that will see the construction of an industrial pilot facility in Werlte near Oldenburg for the production of renewable gas (or e-gas) for use in Audi vehicles. If all goes as planned and the facility begins operating in the third quarter of 2013, power from four 3.6-MW offshore wind turbines will be sourced to produce around 4,000 cubic meters of renewable methane for a connected load of 6.3 MW, fueling 1,500 turbo-compressed natural gas (TCNG) Audi A3 vehicles for a year. Audi plans to begin serial production of this vehicle type next year....

The article provides a simple diagram of the process.

Seams to me that steps making CH4 ar somewhat premature. Just skip the CH4 process and make H2 directly, store it in a large cavern, pump it to some Combined Cycle Power plants as needed.

H2 gas burns hotter and more efficiently, thus increasing overall output of CCPP, while reducing GHG emissions.

Adding a second pipeline network to carry H2 gas directly to major power plant locations will be wayy cheaper than wasting the extra energy to capture CO2 and convert it back into CH4.

CH4 is a fungible commodity, and until a surplus of H2 gas is produced, (more than can be consumed by CCPP's) it makes little sense to make more CH4, just to burn it.

When the day comes(sometime in the future), when we have a vast surplus of renewable energy(and the FF plants have been shut down). Then it makes sense to make CH4, so we can put it back into the ground and help nature sequester all the carbon mankind dumped into the atmosphere. (Natural CO2 sequestration processes are way to slow and require toxic conditions(anoxic/dead oceans) to speed up.)

If we need to tap some of those man-made reservoirs of CH4 to overcome an occasional shortage of RE energy, it becomes a non-issue.

Hey, Wes! It seems to me that one of the products of either turning water into H2 or adding CO2 to get methane is always going to be excess Oxygen. Or am I wrong about that?

If not, isn't free Oxygen a very volitile and corrosive thing? IIRCC, the large quantity of oxygen in the atmosphere long ago allowed insects to become rather large. And, at the same time, that oxygen would be trying to combine with carbon based organisms - read "burn all the plants."

Just asking about what I sense may be a problem. I could be wrong, I suppose. Educate me!

Craig

Yep. The problem with the hydrogen economy is that LH2 is so volatile and hard to store and transport. We should consider stabilizing it by locking the hydrogen down onto a chain of carbons. If you use a "backbone" of, say, 5-10 carbon atoms, you get a substance which is liquid at room temperature, storable, and pumpable, and can easily be burned in existing automobile engines.

Somebody should come up with a name for this stuff.

Don't get cocky. Most PV systems are grid-tied and will not work without a functioning grid. You can't expect the grid to keep functioning unless the power companies have a profitable business model. If the power companies go bankrupt and walk away then all the little PV systems no longer function either.

So careful what you wish for . . .

Following on to what speculawyer said, what it is the basic concept for grid replacement in the new paradigm? If the old players are dinosaurs and about to get hit by an asteroid, can the grid be done away with completely? What will the new business model be if the grid turns out to actually still be useful? I don't understand how the wind power from the north is to reach the industrial heartland of the south (talking Germany here) without those massive power lines.

Is the idea that all power will ultimately be generated locally? How many panels does it take to run a datacenter? A hospital? Traffic and street lights? Water and sewage systems? A metal forge?

Also, how is all of this affecting the average consumer in Germany as rate payer? Have all these price cuts during peak flowed out to them? Are they now paying substantially less than they were before the energy transformation began?

I'm not asking these questions because I'm hostile to solar or wind, nor am I in any way defending current producers. I'm just curious what the idea is here.

Pointing some of the photovoltaic panels eastward and westward (or southeastward and southwestward) would allow the producer to take advantage of the higher prices in early morning and late afternoon. Adapt or go bankrupt.

I don't get your argument. Consumers certainly do not pay spot prices for electricity - the utilities do, and then sell it to the consumers (who do not have solar power) for a standard, non-zero rate. Let me run a sunny day in Germany by you and you can point out my errors:

1. People start waking up and using electricity before the sun is really shining, causing spot prices to go up. People are paying the standard rate for this electricity.
2. The sun starts really shining and solar production goes up, causing spot prices to drop very low. The people who have solar panels do not use any electricity from the utility at this point, but the people who do not have panels continue paying the standard rate. The utility can buy electricity for a very low cost, and sell it to consumers at the usual, higher-than-spot price.
3a. If the price gets too low, utilities will turn off the peaker plants and rely on base plants.
3b. If the price doesn't get too low, they continue to run the peaker plants, and selling their own generated electricity as well as purchased spot electricity.
4. The sun starts going down, spot prices return to normal, and everything runs as usual.

In my opinion, yes, it is very hard to accept the fact that flooding the market with solar power will make it uneconomic for the consumer. I think your argument may work a little better for utilities, but definitely not for consumers.

I work for one of the biggest oil companies in the world, so it's not hard for me to see the point of arguments against clean, renewable energy (although I do not usually agree with those arguments). Your argument, however, is a bit tougher to interpret, and has a conspiracy feel to it.

Scheer also said he considered the bankruptcy of traditional (resource based) energy companies a logical result of the technology revolution, a necessary result to allow the energy market to become democratic at last. The man was a true visionary. This great article from Luis resonates a lot with Scheer's book Energy Autonomy.

PV has cost until 2012 around 80 billion EUR in Germany and will cost around 200-250 billion until 2035. These mainly come from old contracts, after 2013 additional PV is dirt cheap, so it is quite irrational to use "sunk" costs to limit the amount of PV now. :-)

Our area electric co-op has been experiencing lower revenue, largely due to a real estate crash, growth lower than projected, and people conserving. I doubt increased renewables has had nearly the effect of these other factors. That said, it's survival of the fittest. Decades of maximising profits and lack of foresight are as much to blame as the necessary adoption of renewables. High energy prices aren't the only downside to overshoot, especially for those who don't fall under your definition of rich.

Think these things are problematic now, just wait until the triage really begins. In the meantime, I'm sure we'll continue to burn everything we can.

It is not an all-or-nothing thing. When there are a few people doing PV, it is beneficial for the utility since the PV folks are generating valuable peak power and delivering it without needing new transmission lines. However, when you get past a certain point, it starts becoming difficult. So basically, the utility should start charging grid-tied PV people like $15 or $20 per month for a 'connection fee'. If you don't want to pay . . . fine, disconnect and set up your own battery system for night-time usage. But most people will pay the fee since it is cheaper & easier than doing their own batteries. The utility then uses that money for maintaining the transmission network.

gregvp,

Consider the social implications of this. Warning: you won't like them... the end result is that poor people are completely deprived of electricity.

For folks in Pakistan and Nigeria, the situation is just the reverse of what you portray as Germany's plight. In such places with no grid in sight, the prohibitive costs of fossil fuels and/or installing copper wire from the next town are the issues that lock people into energy poverty. Solar on the other hand is distributed equitably to everyone. A small solar appliance (e.g., a solar lantern) is feasible while a kerosene lamp over time is very unhealthy and prohibitively expensive to operate.

If I were in poverty, I would opt for a little solar gadget long before I would get myself stuck with fossil fuels.

Written by gregvp:
People who cannot, and who cannot get credit to install such a system, or are living in rented housing and are prevented from installing PV, must buy their energy from the grid.

PV should have a pigovian tax applied, to counteract this cost-shifting.

That is what everyone on grid had to do before alternative energy feed-in tariffs. With PV the number of electrical power producers is increasing degrading the monopoly of the centralized producers. Take advantage of your opportunities before they pass you by. Consumers pay for the product they purchase. Producers usually get paid for selling their product, but some feed-in tariffs limit the price and using a market system for electricity is making the price go negative sometimes. Spain decided to revoke the feed-in tariff. Those are risks born by the producers. Consumers should pay the producers a fair rate for their product, not the other way around.

I ride a bike to work. Please give me some of the money you save because of the reduced cost of gas due to the lower demand. On the other hand I must pay extra to keep public transport viable because I don't contribute as much directly as others do.

I am rich so I bought a lot of energy efficient household machines/lamps to keep my electricity usage low, getting even richer doing so. Now I must pay extra because the reduced income of the utility is spread unevenly over the less fortunate. On the other hand I want some money from people who buy efficient household machines now because as an early adopter I payed more in the past to allow the price to drop.

Don't shop in a supermarktet without compensating the grocery, bakery, butcher for their reduced sales.

Those poor bastards that cannot afford their own home or PV system should pay me dearly for their stimulus of dirty energy and accompanying air pollution from centralized fossil fuel plants that I try very hard to shutdown with my PV plant.

See, cost shifting is everywhere, this ain't going to work.

To join the pigpile.. nothing personal Greg..

One of the things about PV and the old argument that 'but, but it Doesn't Scale!' .. is that it does, and particularly it scales DOWN, and you get to start discovering just how useful very small quantities of Electric Supply and storage can be.

As others said, a little Solar LED lantern can now be had for $5, and as combinations of LED's develop, very cheap reading and household lighting options, as well as simple battery charging can be aggregated bit by bit in this way, making it available not just to the very poor, who have often and still are frequently obligated to buy Kerosene for lighting, or carry a Car Battery to the next town for charging just to keep the family Cell phone and radio going.. etc, but it makes power available even to migrants, since Small PV is entirely portable and requires nothing but sunlight to operate. (Batteries sold separately..)

Finally.. I also believe Culture matters, and Germany is one of the least-likely societies out there to be so short-sighted as to abandon the poorer segments of the society the way you've painted it.

EDIT, ... AND, those Pigovian Taxes could be targeting competing energy products that we are trying to disincentivise, to the benefit of clean and durable energy tools, eh?

ps,
Storage and Peak/OffPeak pricing options are becoming available for residential accountholders.. the storage could be in Heat or Refrigeration in a number of forms.. Some ceramic Storage Electric Heaters are already commercially available.

That cycle graph is slightly deceptive.

Going from 500cycles at 100%DOD to 2,050 @ 30%DOD looks like a whopper...but the delivered energy isn't as amazingly different.

If that's a 100 amp-hour battery..
500 * (100 * 1.0) = 50,000 amp-hours
2,050 * (100 * 0.3) = 61,500 amp-hours
50,000/61,500 = .81

Edit: As you mention there also - it seems Peukert's Law/effect is most important in sizing a PbA system.

For those in a cloudy place like Germany the PV array needs to be overbuilt a bit more.

Hold it right there. It's not what you think!

Solar Won't Work in America Because It's Not Sunny Like Germany. You can hear these facts on Fox News!

@BlueTwilight - thanks for posting that. I was about to chime in and write an identical post to yours, but you've saved me the trouble.

I really enjoyed the article until I got to the battery bit. Instantly warning bells started to chime - mythical, there's no better word.

There's no way the maths works for the battery in the article. As you say, if we want 3000 charge cycles from a battery as described, we need to only discharge it about 10% of its capacity, and gently at that. I think we'd find the real-world round-trip efficiency is about 70% if you're lucky. So a WAY bigger battery is indeed needed. (Don't even think about the supply of lead relative to the demand if everyone did this.)

And so how much of the rest of the article can we trust? Any number of other basic assumptions that are equally bogus (but we haven't spotted) would throw all the analysis way off.

Ben (20 yrs off-grid and grid-tie PV both in UK and Spain)

Yes, Jamaica will get there first, wherever 'there' turns out to be. The island will either have some useful electricity in its economy in the medium term or not, as the 'oil export noose' tightens. Local investment (available or cost-effective?) will either make renewables work, or not. Ideas about cost-effectiveness look as though they are under test now in a real-time laboratory!

The islands of Hawaii are also a good example, especially since they're within the U.S. economy and regulatory system. The island I grew up on (Kauai) runs on an oil power plant plus a bit of hydro. Electricity costs are typically above $0.40/kwh. State and local governments pull in lots of tax revenue, and are reliably liberal. The island has lots of windy hillsides to put turbines on, and the south side is arid, sunny, tropical, and has miles and miles of unused former sugar plantation land to build on.

Kauai is a renewable energy paradise. The fact that renewables have not yet taken off there should make us a little nervous.

Sorry to be late guys but, I've been quite busy these past couple of weeks with my existing business.

First off, the nuke is a research reactor located at the Mona campus of the University of The west Indies that, is used by the faculty of natural sciences for research and the teaching of nuclear physics. It is an academic facility of no commercial value.

The government sold 80% of it's shares in the national electricity company (JPS) in 2001. Since then those shares have changed hands resulting in Korea East West Power (EWP) and Marubeni Corporation having joint ownership of the 80% privately held shares. During the same period of privatization referred to in the lead post, some amount of private (non JPS) generating capacity was added mostly through slow and medium speed diesel plants but, 68% of the generating capacity and all the of the transmission and distribution network is owned by the JPS. The most concise and complete and current description of the electricity sector in Jamaica is probably Section 2.2 of the RFP for Supply of up to 115 MW of Electricity Generation Capacity from Renewable Energy Based Power Generation Facilities on a Build, Own and Operate (BOO) Basis, available as a PDF file. Sections 2.3 through 2.10 also include some interesting information including this from Section 2.6, "RENEWABLE PARTICIPATION"

In the Jamaican electricity system, renewable energy generation is supplied mainly by wind and hydroelectric technologies.

In 2011, annual generation from renewable energy sources accounted for approximately 6 % of total system generation. With contributions of 2.5% and 3.5% from hydro and wind respectively.

It is remarkable that according to an article at the Worldwatch Institute blog site titled Wigton Wind Farm: Jamaica’s Commitment to Renewable Energy Starts Paying Off

Wigton Wind Farm is actually composed of two separate projects, one built in 2004 and the other in 2010. The first phase – or Wigton I as it is referred to – comprises 23 NEG-Micon 900/52 turbines, each with an installed capacity of 900 kilowatts (kW). The second phase, Wigton II, consists of 9 Vestas V80 turbines, each with an installed capacity of 2 megawatts (MW). Their respective capacity factors are 35 percent and 33 percent, which means together they generate around 115 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity per year. In total the wind farm is expected to offset 60,000 barrels of oil per year and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 85,000 tons.

So, two wind farm projects, built in a relatively short time frame have increased the contribution made by wind from essentially zero to 3.5% or more than the entire fleet of hydroelectric plants that have been around for longer than I can remember!

There is certainly room for expansion of wind power and according to this newspaper article: Power in the water - Government looks to hydroelectricity as search intensifies for cheaper light bills, there is also some potential for additional hydro. The article is somewhat sloppily written as it makes the assertion that two separate plants were the "first hydroelectricity plant in Jamaica" while completely overlooking this from the JPS history page

In 1897, another company, the West India Electric Company, established an office in Kingston at 151 Orange Street. They built the hydroelectric plant on the Rio Cobre River at Bog Walk, which consisted of three machines, each with the capacity to deliver over 300 kilowatts of energy. West India Electric not only extended electricity service to other areas, but also introduced a new element to the city scene – electric tramcars. Tramcars later replaced the horse drawn cabs, which had been providing public transport, and remained in service until 1948.

The dam built for this plant still stands but only the ruins of the turbine house remain and some of the supports for the eight foot diameter pipe that ran from the dam to the turbine house, can still be seen along the side of the road that follows the route of the pipe. I thought that the plant had been closed because of an accident that killed 33 men who were cleaning the inside of the pipe but, this page from a newspaper web site, reveals that the accident took place on June 24, 1904 and the plant remained in operation for decades. I could not find the date of closure online but, it is interesting to note that, back at the beginning of the 20th century, Kingston Jamaica had an urban transit system consisting of electric trams, powered entirely by a hydro-electric plant!

Getting back to the subject at hand, the situation here is almost exactly the same as described in Europe that, the interests of the owners of fossil fuel burning generators are protected to the point where, the only incentives for renewable electricity providers are absence of import duties and sometimes an absence of sales tax. Even then, these are often criticised as tax breaks for the rich since, low income earners are not seen as having a chance to participate. Following initiatives to privatise the electricity sector, the government now finds itself obliged to protect the interests of the investors in the fossil fuel powered generating business, to the detriment of the nation. The government appears loathe to do anything that could possibly adversely affect the profitability of the businesses they quite recently invited to rescue the ailing electricity sector, by investing in fossil fuel burning power plants.

A cursory look at the RFP for electricity from renewable sources shows that there is not a great deal (if anything) that is being done to provide incentives for renewable electricity generating plants of any kind, as this will conflict with the interests of the existing players. There is no inkling of any concern for or thought of, the prospects for any increases in the price of fossil fuels going forward, the assumption appearing to be that, there will be no significant fuel cost increases for fossil fuels! I wonder where they got that idea?

In the mean time, I am anticipating delivery of a shipment of solar PV modules, purchased at of 69 cents per watt, from the same source as Ghung's recent purchases. I am also looking forward to testing one brand of grid tied micro-inverter, with improving prospects for the availability of string inverters that can be connected, without using additional transformers, to Jamaica's bastardised grid (US class voltages with European frequency). Once I can figure out my own costs per installed watt of grid tied PV I can get a better idea of the economics. Just as an indication of the challenges faced in working out the economics, the best commercial interest rates available for financing such projects I have seen, are in the region of 9%!

Despite the challenges, recent price movements in the PV sector will probably make it attractive to quite a few commercial consumers. The complicated economics that arise as a result of the lack of net meetering and the net billing arrangements being used instead, mean that PV is not the slam dunk you would expect it to be in this high priced electricity environment.

Edit: Clarify situation in local market described in paragraph starting "Getting back to the subject at hand".

Alan from the islands

Thanks Dave W for that - I live in Britain at latitude 55.6N.
A few points though:
when we it comes to matching UK demand, wind power supply is pretty much opposite of solar in UK especially further north and at sea.
The National Grid can (does ) modify intermittency problems, except in the case of wind-power when there is a widespread stationary anti-cyclone.
HVDC's acceptable transmission losses potentially allow for connection with remote bulk sources, and importantly for bulk transfer between separate large AC grids, further mitigating intermittency problems on the national grid.
Existing gas-fired power has very rapid response to demand fluctuation, and can equally ramp up from non-spinning reserve to cope with a supply fluctuation. (Existing reserve must be already large enough to cope with sudden loss of power from GWs nuclear - does happen! - or from loss of AC at a nodal point.)
EDIT Weather forecasts for wind are usful at the moment, as are the existing forecast methods used for managing steep changes in demand.

Does not mean that there are not severe problems and challenges. A lot of wind really could make nuclear economics unviable, for instance! (I do not reject 'nuclear' out of hand, but it does present serious challenges in its own way.)

Either way, it looks as though we are stuck with large scale grids in the UK. Who knows what happens further down the line; local mini-grids with local power for light and controls and communication might be what we end up with if we go downhill fast enough. And roof-top solar hot-water is a useful economy even now and even where I live and something of a standby. I am more concerned however with the UK NG (gas) grid and the cost of heating our 20M homes. Insulation and negawatts has a critical future in UK and extending the life of houses and their need for maintenance will be one issue for the grandchildren living in our legacy.

I think I'm going to write a detailed look at the unicorn harvesting in the case of the UK, just to see how far it will be uncritically echoed on the internetsss. Prior art shows I have a good chance for wide circulation. Mind you, not that I know anything about unicorns but that shouldn't stop me from writing it, or orthers from uncritically echoeing it, right?

Written by DaveW:
Here are the solar insolation figures for London:
http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/london.html

So insolation varies from a high of 4.86Kwh/m2/dy to a low of 0.49Kwh/m2/dy, or around ten fold.

Your insolation data is for a horizontal surface located in London according to Gaisma's Help Page which is not the optimal direction to point a PV panel.

Insolation

The monthly average amount of the total solar radiation incident on a horizontal surface at the surface of the earth for a given month, averaged for that month over the 22-year period (Jul 1983 - Jun 2005). Each monthly averaged value is evaluated as the numerical average of 3-hourly values for the given month. Source: NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Science Data Center.

With London located at 51.5 degrees north latitude and assuming clear skies, the optimal direction to point a PV panel is 38.5 degrees from the vertical for altitude and due south for azimuth. The EU Solar Calculator shows the following power output for a 1 kW_p PV system with latitude: 51.509 degrees, longitude: -0.264 degrees (London), estimated system loss = 0%, a slope of 38 degrees from vertical and azimuth of 0 degrees (due south). The variation from the minimum power in December to the maximum in June is 3.8 times, not around 10 fold.

month kWh/month
Jan    42.8
Feb    56.9
Mar    98.2
Apr   130
May   140
Jun   140
Jul   139
Aug   124
Sep   108
Oct    79.3
Nov    51.0
Dec    36.7
Year: 1145.9 kWh

If the PV is pointed with a slope of 45 degrees and the other parameters the same, it does not make much difference (1.3%):

month kWh/month
Jan    45.0
Feb    58.7
Mar    99.2
Apr   129
May   136
Jun   135
Jul   134
Aug   122
Sep   108
Oct    81.4
Nov    53.5
Dec    38.9
year: 1131.7 kWh

When the slope is 0 degrees (pointing strait up), then the minimum in December is 15.6 kWh/month and the maximum in June is 146 kWh/month which gives a variation of 9.4 times.

With a slope of 45 degrees and azimuth -90 degrees (east) and another azimuth 90 degrees (west):

               East
Month	Ed 	Em 	Hd	Hm
Jan 	0.65	20.2	0.75	23.3     
Feb 	1.18	33.2	1.31	36.8
Mar 	2.19	67.8	2.38	73.7
Apr 	3.44	103	3.79	114
May 	4.01	124	4.54	141
Jun 	4.25	127	4.84	145
Jul 	4.00	124	4.59	142
Aug 	3.32	103	3.82	118
Sep 	2.58	77.4	2.91	87.4
Oct 	1.55	48.0	1.74	54.0
Nov 	0.83	25.0	0.95	28.5
Dec 	0.51	15.8	0.60	18.6
Total for year	869  		982

              West
Month	Ed 	Em 	Hd	Hm
Jan 	0.65	20.2	0.75	23.3
Feb 	1.18	33.0	1.31	36.8
Mar 	2.17	67.4	2.38	73.7
Apr 	3.42	103	3.79	114
May 	3.98	123	4.54	141
Jun 	4.22	127	4.84	145
Jul 	3.97	123	4.59	142
Aug 	3.30	102	3.82	118
Sep 	2.57	77.0	2.91	87.4
Oct 	1.54	47.7	1.74	54.0
Nov 	0.83	24.9	0.95	28.5
Dec 	0.51	15.8	0.60	18.6
Total for year	864 	 	982

Ed: Average daily electricity production from the given system (kWh)
Em: Average monthly electricity production from the given system (kWh)
Hd: Average daily sum of global irradiation per square meter received by the modules of the given system (kWh/m2)
Hm: Average sum of global irradiation per square meter received by the modules of the given system (kWh/m2)

The annual power output for pointing them this way is 75% of the optimum, but one gets to use all of the roof area allowing for the installation of double the number of PV panels and a more uniform power output through out the day instead of a sharp peak around noon. Power out put in Fall and Winter is bad.

Solar works when the panels are pointed in an optimal direction and arrays are overbuilt to deal with the clouds.

"So if, for instance, Germans who have solar arrays on their roofs were paying the true marginal costs they impose on the grid by reducing their overall power needs, but needing power when it is toughest to the grid to supply it, then they might be paying instead of the usual ~$0.30kwh something like $1.00kwh."

We had this a few weeks ago, the solution is simple: Bill power and energy seperately as it is done in case of cummunity heating, problem solved.

However your main problem is, you do not propose an alternative, only to claim that nuclear is possible and ignoring the problems in France like very high price for a kW nuclear, huge demand of pump storage, high export quota is not enough.

I bet one could create a cheaper renewable system with the money, storage and export quota found in France. :-)

So any silver used in the panel is essentially sequestered indefinitely (50 - 100 years) and not available for recycling?

Do you think we may be seeing a shortage of the metal shortly ~:) due to irresponsible trading, increasing industrial demand (?) and declining quality of ore?

" the germans, spanish, and italians were paying friggin *crazy* prices to incentivize PV. It's how they got so much done so quickly."

Well, being a citizen of one of the three countries you have mentioned I would not take it as a positive thing... paying 6,7 billion Euros (~10 billion $) per year for the next 20 years just to have China develop the industrial base for PV manufacturing could hardly be called a success in any economics college class, don't you think?

But this is one of those crazy-like-fox deals. Because if you want to get solar PV cheap, you need to scale it rapidly.
Lower subsidies would have had to go on for much longer, ending up in equal or greater societal costs.

But that's just it. The gold-plated subsidy strategy only works if you cut it off at some point -- otherwise, you lose money forever. And that cutoff is exactly what Spain and Luxembourg have done, and what the original article is complaining about.

Is now the right time to end the subsidy? Should it be a ramp-down instead? I don't know. But you gotta stop sometime.

IIRC, Sun Common grew out of a sort of environmental buying club, gathering groups of likeminded folks to build out these systems. Beats going it alone, as I can atest to. Seems like a good model, especially for grid tie projects within communities; spreads the risk a bit.

It sounds like some leasing companies are actually leasing roof space. I expect at some point they'll make folks an offer to let them buy out the system. Anyway, welcome to the club!

BTW: I noticed today that Vermont has the second lowest mortgage debt in the US; reported to only have only 29 mortgages seriously under water. Here's to community pragmatism.

Over here a discussion about how much Silver is in a tomahawk missile. The US Navy has a 3,500 stockpile and 124 were used in Lybia.

I'll leave it to you oil-reaseachers to crunch the numbers to see of the Silver "invested" covers the energy from the oil extracted.

And added Silver link:
www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/02/07/3682707.htm?site=science&topi...

Aluminum can substitute for silver where it is used as a reflector behind a PV cell. It is harder to replace silver as the conductors etched onto the face of a PV cell because its high electrical conductivity is desirable. The production of silver can be increased because it is not at its peak. The efficiency of PV panels will probably increase decreasing the amount of silver used per watt produced.

It looks like the problem there was the support structure. I could not tell from the pictures, but standard panels can support that load level (5400Pascals ( 112 lb/ft2 )).

"A gas turbine can be dispatched to ramp generation up or down to match load. Solar plants can not be controlled as such."

But your qualification is for a "normal" power grid where all solar panels are injecting at their maximum capacity. A gas turbine operating at maximum capacity can also not be ramped up.

Drop the output to 80% of maximum and you can do load following in either case. Tracking PV panels can use tilt adjustment, tracking converters can shift toward or away from the maximum power point. A diversionary load might even be able to use the excess power in some cost-effective manner. Much faster than ramping a turbine or boiler, without the damage of mechanical stress.

Abound Solar manufactured cadmium telluride thin-film photovoltaic panels which are too expensive to compete with silicon PV panels. As far as I know, cadmium is not used in silicon PV panels. It is a problem with a dead end PV technology.

PDV do not lose any sleep about the cadmium in PV panels. You should however be mad as hell about heavy metals released from coal combustion, either to the atmosphere which you breath, or in ash heaps that pollute surface and ground waters.
from Wikipedia:
"The TVA Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill occurred just before 1 a.m. on Monday December 22, 2008, when an ash dike ruptured at an 84-acre (0.34 km2) solid waste containment area at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, Tennessee, USA. 1.1 billion US gallons (4,200,000 m3) of coal fly ash slurry was released. The coal-fired power plant, located across the Clinch River from the city of Kingston, uses ponds to dewater the fly ash, a byproduct of coal combustion, which is then stored in wet form in dredge cells. The slurry (a mixture of fly ash and water) traveled across the Emory River and its Swan Pond embayment, on to the opposite shore, covering up to 300 acres (1.2 km2) of the surrounding land, damaging homes and flowing up and down stream in nearby waterways such as the Emory River and Clinch River (tributaries of the Tennessee River). It was the largest fly ash release in United States history."
also from Wikipedia:
"Fly ash, also known as flue-ash, is one of the residues generated in combustion, and comprises the fine particles that rise with the flue gases. Ash which does not rise is termed bottom ash. In an industrial context, fly ash usually refers to ash produced during combustion of coal. Fly ash is generally captured by electrostatic precipitators or other particle filtration equipment before the flue gases reach the chimneys of coal-fired power plants, and together with bottom ash removed from the bottom of the furnace is in this case jointly known as coal ash...
Toxic constituents depend upon the specific coal bed makeup, but may include one or more of the following elements or substances in quantities from trace amounts to several percent: arsenic, beryllium, boron, cadmium, chromium, hexavalent chromium, cobalt, lead, manganese, mercury, molybdenum, selenium, strontium, thallium, and vanadium, along with dioxins and PAH compounds."

Yep. That gets back to the concept of "energy quality" and "embodied energy". In a way Luis is right, the electron is just a carrier of charge, however, the electromotive force (voltage - and current) is whats important , ie the capacity for work:

A source of emf (electromotive force) can be thought of as a kind of charge pump that acts to move positive charge from a point of low potential through its interior to a point of high potential. … By chemical, mechanical or other means, the source of emf performs work dW on that charge to move it to the high potential terminal. The emf ℰ of the source is defined as the work dW done per charge dq: ℰ = dW/dq.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro-motive_force

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro-motive_force#Solar_cell

We can discuss this at length and it should be.

People seem to be having a very hard time with this article.

The value of an electron generated from something that does not consume fuel resources is very high. Flexibility (or controllability) in newer and evolving energy markets (as de Sousa seems to be describing) is less a product of what happens in individual power plants, and more a product of adequate resource planning, market design, and operability of the grid (system management).

The value of an electron from a thermal plant is very low in such a market because it is taken last. As de Sousa describes: "With proper feed-in tariffs in place governments can then focus on the monolithic base load electricity suppliers; they won't disappear, but their role will fundamentally change. They must shift their focus from production to storage and load-balancing."

There may need to be additional price supports for lower value sources of electrons (moved to the sidelines by bulk energy services from intermittent resources), and I can see something like a "capacity market" being of assistance to keep these resources in the mix and viable on a commercial and competitive basis.

Saying each electron is equal is just another way of saying the performance of the whole is what we are looking at (and how reliability and price are tied together in the operation of the entire system). We can take individual sources and look at them alone if we wish, but that would be looking the wrong way through the binoculars. Instead of the forest, we'd be looking at a lot of individual trees.

there is a 30% federal tax credit and a 10% state tax credit. These large subsidies greatly reduce the installation cost.

The installation costs are not "greatly reduced" they are merely defrayed in this scheme. Despite the fancy graphics, if anything, "costs" are going up over time due to increases in labor, fuel and raw materials costs and availability (aluminum railing, nuts, bolts, copper cabling etc); a kind of "Red Queen" effect in a "cost-efficiency" race hidden to most people because of lack of consideration to raw-material, manufacturing and transportation "costs" (ie, Easily Stored, Extremely Dense, High Quality soure of Energy). I think maybe a very small percentage of the population is able to capitalise on these "subsidies" just based upon the number of solar PV arrays I see in the neighborhoods around this very sunny city ~;) The rest of the non-PV, petroleum-based population bear the burden of the subsidies for the few in the form of taxation/rent-seeking/ghost-inflation of some flavour. Just an observation....

I'm going long condoms and silver

ahhhh, come to think of it long condoms probably wont work ~;)

Here's another thought:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_generation

From this American's perspective, that is a really unusual power demand curve for May. In the U.S., power demand is much more flat from 6am to 8pm in cold seasons, and has a large late-afternoon air conditioning spike in warm weather.

Anyone care to comment on how Germany has managed to put peak demand at the same time of day that the solar panels are most active? I'm guessing there's some heavy demand-side load leveling going on.