PV Solar - If not Florida, Where?

[tom66]

Well, it's a positive feedback loop. As prices per kWh go up, more people will install solar, which will lead to increased cost of operation for traditional, large power plants.

It'll probably lead to a rapid increase in prices followed by a complete market crash as suppliers are unable to purchase at the price their customers are paying for. I'll get the popcorn and watch.

[nctnico]

Over here the price per kWh is made up of production costs, transportation costs (30%) and taxes (40%). If I would put solar panels on my roof I and feed back to the grid  I only get the production costs paid. In other words: the people operating the grid always get paid.

[Zero999]

Connecting giant battery packs to the grid to store surplus power is currently being trialled. China already has a massive battery bank and the largest battery in Europe is here in the UK.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-01/china-builds-worlds-largest-battery-36-megawatt-hour-behemoth
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jul/29/biggest-battery-energy-technology-trial

Whether of not these projects pay off, they will make renewables more viable in the future.

[dannyf]

the people operating the grid always get paid.

Yes, as long as you don't operate the grid. My operator had two large incidents a couple years back and had wide spread outage, each a week or so, mostly due to downed trees. Total cost for the repair for that year, above and beyond its budget, is $350MM.

It is always easy to make money, as long as you are not the one making it.

[zapta]

It is always easy to make money, as long as you are not the one making it.

Well said.

[Rufus]

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jul/29/biggest-battery-energy-technology-trial

Whether of not these projects pay off, they will make renewables more viable in the future.

The £18.7m project – of which £13.2m comes from the UK taxpayer

If it had any chance of being technically and economically viable then you wouldn't need to have 70% of the funding coming from taxpayers would you.

[NiHaoMike]

Thermal storage is far cheaper and more reliable than batteries and works nicely for HVAC, hot water, and refrigeration, the main energy uses in most homes. A few common deep cycle batteries easily handle the rest.

[Zero999]

If it had any chance of being technically and economically viable then you wouldn't need to have 70% of the funding coming from taxpayers would you.

At the moment, yes but what about the future?

[zapta]

If it had any chance of being technically and economically viable then you wouldn't need to have 70% of the funding coming from taxpayers would you.

At the moment, yes but what about the future?

But they are taking our money now.

[Red Squirrel]

Thermal storage is far cheaper and more reliable than batteries and works nicely for HVAC, hot water, and refrigeration, the main energy uses in most homes. A few common deep cycle batteries easily handle the rest.

Yeah one project that would be cool to try is thermal solar panels.  Basically an insulated box painted black inside with a double pane glass over it with liquid (glycol maybe?) pipes running through it.   Use the heat for the house and perhaps run a sterling engine or something for power.   Could even have it run through some kind of large sand barrel for storage.  If you get a full day worth of sun that barrel would probably store the heat for a good part of the night.   You'd then have thermal sensors everywhere and electrically controlled valves that direct the water/heat based on temperature.  Ex: if outside panels are no longer warm you stop circulating liquid through them.

[Red Squirrel]

Japan has had 50MW batteries connected to the grid for a few years now, and is scaling up.

I wonder how those batteries look like.  We have 4 strings of -48v banks of 4800AH batteries and they are huge.  That's about 19,000 amp hours total between 4 strings.  Not sure how you convert to watt hours, just divide by nominal voltage I guess?  So ours is 400wh as a comparison.  That does not seem right though, seems low...

I imagine the grid ones are the size of swimming pools!

[Zero999]

I don't know what chemistries the batteries in Japan and China use but the one here in the UK are lithium ion, probably similar to those used for laptops because they are cheap.

I often thing the UK energy system was better when it was publicly owned. At least then it was obvious there was no free market and there didn't need to be taxes as the profits went directly to the state. It may not have been the most efficient system but it was more transparent in some respects.

[Simon]

I often thing the UK energy system was better when it was publicly owned. At least then it was obvious there was no free market and there didn't need to be taxes as the profits went directly to the state. It may not have been the most efficient system but it was more transparent in some respects.

As I keep telling you things would be much better if we owned much more of our infrastructure because then we wouldn't be paying dividends to shareholders and the profits would go to the state which would be us. The problem with privatised industries that run our national service is is that at the end of the day they just want to make money and we are the ones that pay for that. And as we now know private companies don't really care for safety records.

[SgtRock]

Greeting EEVBees:

--See below link to a Canadian pro solar blog, which says that Canadian PV Solar paybacks times can run to many more years than the 5 touted in this thread.

http://ecoliving.scotiabank.com/articles/should-you-go-solar

"Depending on your province, it will take anywhere from seven to 80 years to recoup your costs, explains Marc Melanson. That’s because electricity is relatively cheap in Canada, from 5.3 cents per kWh in Ontario to 11.8 cents in P.E.I. Ontarians recover costs fastest because of the microFIT program."

--If Simon is correct, and that UK ownership of the means of power production would allow the government to keep the monies otherwise kept as profits by the energy providers. Then indeed it would make sense, would it not, to just have the government own all companies?

"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
François, Marie Arouet - Voltaire
1694  -  1778
 
Best Regards
Clear Ether

[G7PSK]

A very large chunk of the UK power industry is now owned by EDF a French company that is still largely supported by the French government, the laugh being that the UK power network was sold off due to EU regulations about state ownership so ours is now privatized to the French state. Our politicians need a large chunk of plutonium tied to them and then be thrown into a tank of heavy water.

[zapta]

Only because the energy companies are ripping them off. For the sake of their liberty and freedom they should make sure that the grid works for them, and that the monopolies that are allowed to profit from supplying them (e.g. with right of way for infrastructure) do so responsibly.

Unfortunately, that's un-American.

I had a chance to witness the difference between the greed driven West Berlin and the common good driven East Berlin before the wall failed. The difference mind boggling. Same people, same language, same history, same culture and yet the greed driven side was flourishing and the common good driven side looked like a depressing desert of building.

Greed is good motivator. We wouldn't have most of the good things we have now without grid, probably no not youtube and eevblog.

Edit: fixed 'grid' to 'greed'.

[SgtRock]

Greeting EEVBees:

--And here is another interesting article about the huge German PV Solar fail which is part and parcel of their energy revolution, which it turns out will be powered by ever increasing usage of lignite, or brown coal, the very dirtiest.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/10/04/should-other-nations-follow-germanys-lead-on-promoting-solar-power/

"If you pay close attention, all the pro-solar advocates are still using charts with data that stops after 2011. That’s because 2011 was the last year solar was growing exponentially. Using data through July 2013 and official predictions for the rest of this year, it’s now clear that solar is not on an exponential growth curve. It’s actually on an S-curve like pretty much every other technology, ever. Limitless exponential growth doesn’t exist in the physical world." [See chart below]

"This explains why per-capita solar uptake is so high in Germany. The government has engineered a well-intentioned but harmful redistribution system where everyone without solar panels is giving money to people who have them. This is a tax on anyone who doesn’t have a south-facing roof, or who can’t afford the up-front cost, or rents their residence, etc. People on fixed incomes (eg welfare recipients and the elderly) have been hardest hit because the government has made a negligible effort to increase payments to compensate for skyrocketing energy prices. The poor are literally living in the dark to try to keep their energy bills low. Energiewende is clearly bad for social equality. But Germany’s politicians seem to have a gentleman’s agreement to avoid criticizing it in public, particularly since Merkel did an about-face on nuclear power in 2011."

"Get ready Little Lady Hell is coming to breakfast"
Chief Dan George  1899  -  1981
 
Best Regards
Clear Ether

[Zero999]

Only because the energy companies are ripping them off. For the sake of their liberty and freedom they should make sure that the grid works for them, and that the monopolies that are allowed to profit from supplying them (e.g. with right of way for infrastructure) do so responsibly.

Unfortunately, that's un-American.

I had a chance to witness the difference between the grid driven West Berlin and the common good driven East Berlin before the wall failed. The difference mind boggling. Same people, same language, same history, same culture and yet the grid driven side was flourishing and the common good driven side looked like a depressing desert of building.

Grid is good motivator. We wouldn't have most of the good things we have now without grid, probably no not youtube and eevblog.

There is a huge difference between a command economy, like the old eastern bloc and a mixed economy, like modern day China or most of western Europe back in the 70s.

A command economy will always fail to deliver growth because one central governing body can't possibly meet everyone's needs and there's a total lack of any competition, in every sector.

In a mixed economy, the state owns the infrastructure, i.e the power grid, road, rail network etc. where competition can't exist anyway and the rest of the economy is privately owned and regulated by the government as necessary.

With the current system. If one gets pissed off with the electricity grid, they can't choose who distributes the power to them. It's not possible to change. The wires, circuit breakers and distribution transformers will always be owned by whoever operates the grid, whether it be the sate, EDF or whatever, irrespective of the energy supplier, so competition cannot exist.

The grid is better off state owned. At least then our government can control it, rather than EDF, a French company and it can be operated as a public service, not for the benefit of a foreign power. that way, if people get pissed off with the grid, they can protest and vote in a different government who'll do something about it. At the moment, with a French company controlling our grid, we're fucked.

[dannyf]

Like climate deniers, they are looking at very short term trends to try and justify their claims,

You mean, looking at solar power from 2000 to 2011 and projecting exponential growth into eternity?

Or looking at the temperature decline in the 1970s and worried about global cooling into eternity?

Or looking at the temperature rise in the 1990s and worried about global warming into eternity?

Or looking at the halt of temperature rises in the 2000 and insisted that global warming means both global warming and global cooling?

...

[zapta]

It didn't halt, the energy just ended up in places other than the atmosphere.

... which the alarmists' models didn't account for.

[tom66]

... which the alarmists' models didn't account for.

I don't think any (respectable) climate scientists have predicted global temperature rises for individual years or even decades. The best case estimates put it somewhere around 2 to 6 degC in 2050, which is a wide error bar.

[zapta]

... which the alarmists' models didn't account for.

I don't think any (respectable) climate scientists have predicted global temperature rises for individual years or even decades. The best case estimates put it somewhere around 2 to 6 degC in 2050, which is a wide error bar.

Yes, the margin is wide but the fear mongering was based on the high end and the current data is well below it.  It's just like this Florida project that raised money based on exaggerated estimations that don't match reality but the zealots still call it a 'success'. This AGW/EV things has strong aspects of a religion (which is fine as long as I am not forced to pay for it).

[SeanB]

Also note that the error bars depend on the model, and no model to date has passed the simplest verification of inputting a decade or three of historic data, running the model till last year and seeing if the result actually corresponds, without massive amounts of "correction coefficients" ( or fudge to fit the curve you want irrespective of the input info) either during or in post processing.

While you had in the 1990's "global cooling OMG we are going to be popsicles" the same data now is "Global Warming OMG we are going to cook". While the climate is forever changing ( you know, entropy, a slightly variable star providing most heat input, varying amounts of cosmic dust compressing the star's magnetic field, the cooling of the core being expressed by varying volcanic activity) there is no "perfect climate" ever, you will always have some place too hot, some place too cold, some place where it is drought, some place where there are floods, and it will never be the same from even one year to the next, let alone for decades.

I am for reducing waste, reducing energy use and recycling what we have, along with having it last for a decent period and be relatively easy to maintain and repair. Buying a new one because the colour has changed, or the new one has a feature that you never use, or because it is "new shiny flavour of this month", is not a sustainable model.

[zapta]

I find most of these claims of exaggeration are themselves exaggeration based on things like only reading the headline or some blog. Do you have a link?

Mojo Chan, I doubt that facts will convince you but since you asked here is one (there are many more):

http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html

[magetoo]

While the climate is forever changing [...] there is no "perfect climate" ever, you will always have some place too hot, some place too cold, some place where it is drought, some place where there are floods, and it will never be the same from even one year to the next, let alone for decades.

But that's not the point.  The point is not that "everything should be perfect", the point is that the climate and environment varies around the globe; so our society and our ecosystems are adapted for this variation, but only for how things are right now.

If you start changing things around at random, that is going to affect this variation and we'll end up with something different from what we currently are adapted to.  That's not just numbers on the weather map, it'll have an effect on things we depend on - like changed weather patterns messing up agriculture, rising sea levels putting land under water, and so on.  Sure, in the long run things will settle into a new equlibrium, and society and nature will adapt to the new situation, but getting there isn't going to be pretty.

Just because you don't like the snake-oil solution that some people are pushing doesn't mean the problem isn't real.