ERD50
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
It's an opportunity!
I do think we will find alternatives that provide base power (new nukes, something else?). If wind and solar get cheap enough (relative to other sources), and we develop alternative base power that can ramp up/down fast, we might just 'waste' the excess wind/solar. It could be cheaper to just use 60% of it, rather than try to use 100% by storing it (which will probably waste 20% of what we stored in the process!).
Another hypothetical big-picture view to see just how BIG an issue we are facing to try to make solar fit. Very round numbers for convenience, but they actually work pretty well:
Recall the saying "It takes money to make money"? Well, it takes energy to save energy! A solar panel requires a lot of energy to produce, and it takes about two years for it to produce enough power to make up what it used. And...
since we saw that the US only gets ~ 0.4% of its electrical power from solar PV, let's imaging we want to really scale up, to where solar is really making a difference, and get to 40% in ten years. That means 100x the amount of panel production as we have today, so let's put in 10X per year.
It gets interesting - for year 1-10, we need to dedicate 8% of our electrical power to produce the panels, which are adding 4% points of overall generation each year. So we are negative for two years, and go step-wise from 4% solar net in year 3, 8% in year 4, finally up to 32% overall solar power in year 10. We get the full 40% for years 11 through 25, and then we start all over!
So 40% maybe is not such a crazy high target number, as it takes 11 years to get there even at a very aggressive rate. So our average solar savings is still somewhat small overall (edit/add: ~ 14% for years 1-10, and 29.6% average over the 25 years). And as we get to these overall numbers (remember, that 24/7/365 average!), that sounds we will have an excess at the daytime peaks (that 40% is compressed into daylight hours), which means storage/waste, so 40% installed capacity won't get you to 40% overall offset.
Hmmm, do we dare run $'s?
Let's see, if the 20GW current installed capacity figure is correct and in-line with the 0.4% production number (if that is correct - this source says closer to 0.22% from solar 29 ∕ 13010 ≈ 0.0022290546) ....
Our 10x installed capacity increase for 10 consecutive years means we install 200GW, at a conservative $1/watt (I imagine this kind of demand would cause shortages which would drive up prices, but let's be kind), is $200 Billion per year (plus up front energy costs the first two years), times 10 years $2 Trillion (did I get my decimals and money/SI units correct?).
Perspective? Oh boy... In 2013 the total US consumption of electric energy was 4113 Terawatt hours (TWh) (or million mWh or billion kWh)
so at a rough average of $0.10/kWh, we currently spend ~ 4113 x 10^9 kWh = $411.3 Billion per year? So even with my conservative $1/W installed (likely 2x that), we are looking at increasing our energy spending by at least 50% for ten years, probably more like double or more. It would start to get offset in year three, but could we really muster up that kind of up-front expenditure? What effect would it have on the economy?
And is doing far less really doing much at all (environmentally)?
OK, my brain officially hurts, off to something else.
-ERD50
Last edited:
