From the Ventura County Star:
ROACH DRY LAKE, Nev. — Not a light bulb’s worth of solar electricity has been produced on the millions of acres of public desert set aside for it. Not one project to build glimmering solar farms has even broken ground.
Instead, five years after federal land managers opened up stretches of the Southwest to developers, vast tracts still sit idle.
An Associated Press examination of U.S. Bureau of Land Management records and interviews with agency officials show that the BLM operated a first-come, first-served leasing system that quickly overwhelmed its small staff and enabled companies, regardless of solar industry experience, to squat on land without any real plans to develop it.
As the nation drills ever deeper for oil off its shores and tries to diversify its energy supply, the federal government has failed to use the land it already has — some of the world’s best for solar — to produce renewable electricity.
The Obama administration says it is expediting the most promising projects, with some approvals expected as soon as this month. And yet, it will be years before the companies begin sending electricity to the Southwest’s sprawling, energy-hungry cities.
Read more: http://www.vcstar.com/news/2010/sep/01/land-leased-for-solar-power-unused/#ixzz0yMLDZjM2
– vcstar.com
Except a little thing called the A-Bomb showed that atomic energy was massively and frighteningly efficient. It was just the matter of controlling the reaction and building a structure in which to contain the reaction. The exact opposite of the solar energy problem which is obvioulsy safe, but uncontrollable, widely diffused and highly inefficient. If solar, wind, and hydro power were so great humans would never have bothered with charcoal, wood, coal, steam, oil, gas, and every other source of energy since the beginning of history.
The real key is storage capacity. If that can be solved then *maybe* green energy could be somewhat viable. (And please don’t tell me to pump water up hill)
George E. Smith says:
September 2, 2010 at 8:11 am
“”” Rhys Jaggar says:
September 2, 2010 at 3:09 am
Hey, guys, you gotta start somewhere. “””
I would recommend that you start at about 1 kW/m^2 or 100 W/ft^2 maximum peak projected area for the actual interception area, and maybe about 8 hours daily max (average) ; so long as you provide for about four times that total area, because of self shadowing of one collector by another; amd I wouldn’t bet on more than 12-15% efficiency for Solar to grid AC conversion; unless you go steam turbine conversion; which likely takes even more area but somewhat better efficiency.
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It’s actually much worse than that: that is, available solar power is much lower than your figures.
Maximum solar power only occurs at 12:00 (local noon) each day. Every other minute of the day, the maximum possible power is less. Usable power occurs from 9:00 AM (local) and 3:00 PM (local), or a total of 6 hours per day.
But those six “good” hours are only during the summer months: for the other 9 months of the year, you actually less usable hours. (Some “expert” calculations assume 7 (even 8 hours) during the summer months, and ignore the losses for spring and fall, and the even shorter winter hours. Best approximation is assume the 6 hours year long. It’s a double multiple of the sine wave of the sun’s path during the day: You need to include both the sun’s elevation AND the amount of atmosphere the sun’s light is penetrating as time varies from local noon. Net result? Power drops off significantly the longer time from local noon you try to collect it.
The further north (south) of the equator you go, the greater the difference between the number of usable summer and winter hours there is.
IF – big “IF” there – there is absolutely no other interferences or shadows during any part of the day. At my house for example, my neighbor’s trees shade my roof for all but 30 minutes from 9:00 AM (local) to 2:00 PM local. My own trees shade it further between 2:30 and 8:00 (again, local solar time). Nearby buildings are not a factor for industrial/commercial solar plants.
Your 1000 per m^2 is valid ONLY
– at the equator,
– on a perfectly clear day (no clouds),
– with no humidity,
– with no dust,
– at local noon,
– onto a perfectly clean solar receiver
– aimed directly at the sun.
Next factor: Latitude.
Even at local solar noon, maximum available solar power is reduced even more as the cosine of installed latitude (the same factor works both north and south of the equator). From your latitude, the local solar elevation (at noon, point of maximum possible power) will increase (or decrease!) as a sine function based on the nbr of days (time) from the spring and fall equinoxes. So, in the summer, the local solar noon will be above (greater than) your latitude by 23.5 degrees. In mid-winter (north or south hemisphere, same equations and values apply, just the names of the months differ) the absolute elevation of the sun will be your latitude minus 23.5 degrees. At all other times of the days, the maximum elevation will be less those numbers, and the maximum effective solar power correspondingly less.
More later. Gotta go sit on the grandkids, give them their baths, bottles, books and bed. 8<)
paulw,
I refer you to my earlier comment regarding energy density. There are a myriad of ways to harvest energy from the environment. You can make windmills, you can anchor bobbing floats in the ocean waves, you can harness the flow of the Gulf stream, you can spread PV panels across acres of desert. It doesn’t matter. These technologies, at present, are simply too inefficient. They’re inefficient because the energy they’re harvesting is low density, intermittent and diffuse. You can’t change that.
Nuclear energy may have had a modest start but from the outset showed amazing potential simply because it relied on a very high density energy source. This is basic engineering. Sandia national labs has developed a sterling engine design that is said to be almost 35% efficient and it doesn’t have a huge footprint. In theory a thousand of these devices could power the entire southwest…during peak daylight hours on cloudless days. Until we can efficiently store huge amounts of electric energy solar is a bust.
As others have stated, for specific applications solar power is the cat’s meow. It is not for commercial production of electricity.
Nonegatives says:
September 2, 2010 at 11:05 am
With a $4/watt subsidy and a good buddy with an electrician’s license, you could actually come out ahead at the time of installation.
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Yeah. YOU could come out ahead (after subsidies) with solar power.
“I” end up paying for your electricity. Your house – when it burns down from badly wired, no permitted, inadequately grounded solar panels and chargers, incorrect and non-fused inverter-converter installations, and incorrectly vented and connected lead-acid battery stations.
Who is going to clean up your environmental waste, and replace your batteries every two years? Who is going to safely recharge your batteries? Your acid spill kit? Your face mask, goggles, and gloves? Your 200.00 dollar 200 amp fuse panel and 000 dc wires? (Those only cost about 2.00 per foot for the copper alone. My battery connections cost $4.00 each. Batteries are a little under $200.00 each. Battery quick connects are 20.00 etc)
Rhys Jaggar says:
September 2, 2010 at 10:44 am
From Wikipedia:
Moore’s law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware. The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every 18 months.
Moore’s law will do nothing for solar panels. You can’t make them smaller – they rely on area for power collection.
What you are referring to is the economy of scale. This is far less productive than Moore’s law and for solar panels will never produce the kind of price/performance development seen over the last 50 years in integrated circuits.
Solar panels will never achieve the kind of ROI needed for substantial power generation.
“”” Wade says:
September 2, 2010 at 5:10 am
The main problem with solar right now is how inefficient the current panels are. I’ve been reading about breakthroughs in solar panel designs for a long time now; I have yet to see one come to market. Why? If I remember correctly, the best solar panel ever made was around 25% efficient. I believe production solar panels are under 15% efficient. It is the classic catch-22 really: solar adoption doesn’t take off because it is too expensive and too inexpensive but the only way make it more efficiency and less expensive is by mass production. “””””
Actually, I believe solar cells have been built with a conversion efficiency of about 38%; but that is for air mass zero extra-terrestrial solar. Tehy are triple bandgap solar cells, that use a three junction sandwich to covert a larger portion of the solar spectrum energy. Only NASA can afford the high cost of these cells, but in their game where every gram cost a fortune to put up in space; nothing matters other than conversion efficiency; and of course weight.
Other solar cell schemes rely on focussing Optics to concentrate sunlight on cells that can run at irradiance levels of over 100 suns. So you don’t need much of the expensive and exotic semiconductor materials; but you need fancy optics instead.
Charles S. Opalek, PE said, “Solar power is NOT renewable. It is unsustainable. I has an EROIE of 0.48.”
Not that I doubt you, but do you have a source for this number? I’d be interested in reading it or seeing the energy balance that gets you to this number. The economics of solar power would suggest you are right, but I would like to see that the technical details line up with the economics.
Pull My Finger says:
September 2, 2010 at 12:21 pm
You forgot that computing has taken climatology backwards, farther in 50 years than the previous 5000 years.
“”” paulw says:
September 2, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Dr. Dave: Today about 99% of the country is served by electric providers. So why do we still have subsidies? We should have NO subsidies…NONE. This is artificial market manipulation.
Think about the first nuclear reactor to produce electricity. The research started in the early 20th century. The first test reactor produced 100KW in 1951. In 1954, the USSR plugged the first nuclear reactor to the national grid (5MW). At the end of 1960 there was less than 1GW globally.
We could say the same thing in 1950. We get all our electricity from coal, why do we need to invest taxpayer money for the unproven, inefficient and dangerous nuclear energy?
What we need to understand is that it is important to diversify our sources of electricity. Solar energy is very promising, safe, requires minimal maintenance. We need to make it better and cheaper.
If we are to slag off solar energy just because we want to prove the world that CO2 is not bad, then we would deserve what is coming to us. “””
So what part of 100 Watts per square foot did you not understand.
The Jan 2008 Issue of Scientific American Journal had a front cover article about serious Solar energy plants; and the paper proposed two such plants to be placed in the waste desert regions of the American South-West; Four Corners type territory.
The larger of the two facilities needed only 30,000 squ miles to put in silicon solar cell panels. Teh much smaller 16,000 squ mile plant used mirrors and a central boiler running a steam turbine. Steam turbine technology is very well developed, and understood.
Well 30,000 squ miles is also 19.2 million acres; which it so happens is the exact size of the entire Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Much more energy can be recovered in ANWR simply by drilling on about 2400 acres; about the size of a good sized shopping mall. Well you need a road to get in there; I suppose you need one to get in there to admire that arctic desert wasteland too.
I guess you just have to pick which desert wasteland you want to exploit, and how much of it.
That’s why 100 W/ squ ft times conversion efficiency matters.
Most conventional energy is not meaningfully subsidized by the government. By meaningful, I mean that removing the subsidy would move the price of power to the point that it would change purchasing behavior.
Further, the devil is usually in the details with all of these so called “reports” on energy subsidies. Usually, if you dig into the details you find that the direct subsidies for fossil/conventional fuels are much less than the direct subsidies of renewables. In the US, the majority of the subsidies on non-renewables come from tax breaks and energy assistance programs for the poor. And the majority of those tax breaks don’t apply to fossil fuels or energy companies only. Often, they are “breaks” that buffer or elimante double taxation on foreign subsidiary profits.
The analysis of such programs are rarely done well by renewable advocacy groups. They either don’t have the skills and knowledge to do them correctly. Or, as is often the case, they don’t have incentive to tell the whole story. Establishing meaningful subsidy metrics is usually bad for their cause. (BTW… I find this univerally true for all advocacy groups, regardless of cause. Because in order to be an effective advocate, sometimes you have to turn a blind eye to facts that don’t quite fit your world view. I’m not saying I agree with it. Just that I understand it.)
paulw says:
September 2, 2010 at 1:17 pm
If you’d read a little further in the Wikipedia article you paraphrased in your post you would have read that the reason nuclear power was developed in the 1950’s was because it was thought (at the time) it would provide electricity ‘too cheap to meter’.
Ah, all those wonderful Popular Science articles I read in the 1980’s, showing all those wonderful new ways to harvest solar energy, how solar was this close to being cheap enough for everybody. And the solar cells were getting better all the time, just one more advance would give such great efficiency we might not need any other form of energy…
A thought occurred to me while I was bouncing between the different energy articles.
Currently we are primarily using fossil fuels, which are basically stored solar energy accumulated by plants, over hundreds of thousands of years, that was converted into a more dense form of stored solar energy over a timeframe of a million years or so.
A. Why are people worrying about us running through hundreds of thousands of years of accumulation in only a few hundred years?
B. If we really are burning through so-many thousands of years of stored solar energy every year, how can people think we can harvest enough energy for just one year from only one year of solar radiation? And that’s figuring we only have solar projects on land (30% of global area) where practical (a very small percentage) while the fossil fuels may include solar energy stored by former ocean-dwelling lifeforms as well as land-based.
As far as alternative energy goes, I wonder what the numbers are for the “Big Wheel.” Construct large lightweight wheel (carbon fiber?), place in horizontal orientation (parallel to ground), suspend in very-low friction manner (just a ring, magnetically levitated perhaps?), and let Coriolis force set it to rotating. Keeping it low friction to maximize energy output, permanent (super)magnets could be embedded in the rim, then use stationary coils for electricity generation (no brushes needed). Placing the ring in vacuum would remove air drag losses, but the needed assembly and maintenance might be more than the savings would yield.
Once up and running it’s free energy, as long as the planet keeps turning. It’ll work good up here in the temperate zones where solar can be marginal, and it’ll generate power 24/7 as opposed to solar and wind. Thus the major things to wonder about are development costs and paying for the installations.
Anyone know how to apply for government research grants and/or lobby Congress for subsides? Hey, we gotta start saving the planet, so you know it’ll be worth it.
Paulw: “We need to make it better and cheaper.”
Then put the government money into basic research and don’t waste it setting up uneconomic solar farms.
Paul you seem to be very dishonest. You say half a trillion subsidies and then the latter claim is $3 billion.
497 billion dollar difference.
It is possible you dont’ know what subbsidies are.
Look at this: game changer-:
http://www.fastcompany.com/1594671/bill-gates-goes-nuclear-with-toshiba-tie-up
Game Changer here too:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303491304575187880596301668.html
hopefully we won’t have to cover the planet with solar panels and bird choppers
Toshiba’s expertise has it’s roots at Oregon State- but Oregon would rather contemplate it’s navel…
then tax it..
paulw says:
September 2, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Dr. Dave: Today about 99% of the country is served by electric providers. So why do we still have subsidies? We should have NO subsidies…NONE. This is artificial market manipulation.
Think about the first nuclear reactor to produce electricity. The research started in the early 20th century. The first test reactor produced 100KW in 1951. In 1954, the USSR plugged the first nuclear reactor to the national grid (5MW). At the end of 1960 there was less than 1GW globally.
We could say the same thing in 1950. We get all our electricity from coal, why do we need to invest taxpayer money for the unproven, inefficient and dangerous nuclear energy?
What we need to understand is that it is important to diversify our sources of electricity. Solar energy is very promising, safe, requires minimal maintenance. We need to make it better and cheaper.
If we are to slag off solar energy just because we want to prove the world that CO2 is not bad, then we would deserve what is coming to us.
Your comparison backfires if you want to compare solar to nuclear. In the 1920s the first research showed that nuclear reactors might be possible. 30 years later the first reactors were build, and 30 years after that one country, France, produces more electricity from nuclear than the country consumes.
Compare that with solar. The principle was understood already in the late 19th century (comparable to nuclear in the 1920s). In the late 1950s and early 1960s a lot of further research was put in to make them viable for the space program, their main application. Now it’s 50 years later and the only progress is some cost reduction and viability as competitive energy producer is no closer than it was in the 1960s.
Solar Projects around the world. It even includes the desert tortoise project.
http://electronicdesign.com/article/power/solar_energy_goes_beyond_photovoltaics.aspx?nl=1
Every wind and solar plant in the country could be shut down right now and there would be no affect on our power supply. The air would not be measurably cleaner. If subsidies, Grants and tax credits were eliminated we would save hundreds of billions each year. Power cost to consumers would be less. The back-up units for these facilities would simply provide less expensive power.
Wind and solar are totally useless and hugely expensive.
Another problem with solar is that environmentalists will never accept the building of solar energy plants, at least not in California. An interesting ‘opinion’ from the San Diego UT today on solar energy in the deserts.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/sep/02/deserts-at-risk-in-push-for-green-energy/
A good comparison of “alternative” power and nuclear would be Denmark which provides most of its power from wind and France which supplies about 75% of its power from nuclear.
Denmark, when the wind blows well, sells much of its very expensive power at below cost to neighboring countries. When not producing Denmark buys power from the same neighboring countries at a premium. Result Denmark has the highest electric rates in Europe.
France, on the other hand, with 75% nuclear is the only country in Europe that regularly exports electricity and they have the lowest cost power in Europe.
…and if you have unfounded fears of nuclear power, or think that our country is technologically incompetent and cannot build a waste storage facility, we could use natural gas. we have trillions of cubic feet in domestic reserves. It makes far more sense to run vehicles with it than gasoline or deisel. It is economical. It burns clean and produces a fraction of the carbon dioxide.
If you could get over the other unreasonable fear that carbon dioxide is warming the earth to any great extent, then we could use clean coal, which we have hundreds of years of supply.
We have more energy than any other country on earth and we have a $700 billion dollar a year trade deficit because we import 75% of our oil. We have 2 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves in shale oil alone. Our oil supplies dwarf that of Saudi Arabia and we go begging for energy. The fact that we are dependent on foreign countries for energy is inexcusable. We can be 100% energy independent and we can have clean air. All we need to do is replace the politicians that give us pork projects and replace them with leaders that can supply real alternatives.
Ooops! Make that 2 billion barrels of oil in shale oil.
tty says:
September 2, 2010 at 5:36 am
Solar panels (and thermal solar power) are very sensitive to dust. Even a very thin dust layer will cut power production drastically. Ask the people who runs the Mars Rovers if you don’t believe me.
Just as a general semi-related question: Anyone know why they didn’t make the Mars rover wind powered?
It is getting dark and all the supporters of solar can’t respond.
Jon says:
September 2, 2010 at 3:36 pm
A good comparison of “alternative” power and nuclear would be Denmark which provides most of its power from wind and France which supplies about 75% of its power from nuclear.
Jon,
the 75% number for France for nuclear is a bit misleading and also false. It’s about 78% of its generated electrical power (Status 2007). However, in 2007 France consumed 447 billion kWh of electricity and generated 433 billion kWh with nuclear, while France is also the biggest electricity exporter in Europe. Using nuclear generation and France’s consumption, you could also argue that 97% of France’s electricity is produced by nuclear.
In regards to Denmark and wind energy you are correct. Germany is the same way. When the wind blows, a substantial amount excess, and heavily subsidized, German wind power is exported to whoever wants to take it, for whatever price they want to pay. But when it does not blow Germany imports electricity for whatever the sellers want.
Unfortunately the wind blows most consistently in spring and fall, when electricity consumption there is low, while high pressure systems in the summer and winter (peak consumption) deliver little wind.
As a result Germany is a net exporter of electricity. But they export when nobody wants it.