Guest essay by Philip Dowd
Whenever the subject of renewable energy comes up, the conversation usually turns to solar. You hear statements like: “The world receives more energy from the sun in one hour than the global economy uses in one year.”[a] You then ask yourself; “Why can’t we just capture the energy from the sun and solve our energy problem that way?” Why not, indeed?
Let’s suppose that we convert the entire American economy to “all-electric”, and we produce all of the electricity to power it from a solar facility. In other words, we stop burning carbon and capture the sun. What would this solar plant look like? How much would it cost? We can get a ballpark answer to both of these questions with a few assumptions and some simple calculations.
First we need to know how much electricity our solar power plant must generate. An analysis from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory[b] divides the US economy into four sectors – Residential, Commercial, Industrial and Transportation.
Total demand for energy from these sectors (in the box) is about 70 quadrillion BTU’s (or “quads”) per year. So, our solar power plant must reliably deliver the electric energy equivalent of 70 quads to run the US economy for one year, or 56*1012 Wh (56 Terawatt hours) of electricity per day[c].
Our solar facility would consist of a photovoltaic (PV) panel and a battery. (There are other forms of solar power, but PV is good for this purpose.) The PV panel would generate enough electricity during the day to power the economy and charge the battery, and the battery would power the economy at night. Our task is to calculate:
1. The size of the PV panel
2. The size of the battery
3. The cost of the whole thing.
The Photovoltaic Panel
Let’s assume the following:
1. The PV panel would be spread out in the Southwestern states, because that is the sunniest place in America[d].
2. We build in a 50% safety factor to handle any contingency
If we start with demand of 56 Terawatt hours of electricity per day and add a 50% safety factor, we find that we will then need a system that can produce about 83 TWh/day[e].
The easiest way to estimate the footprint of a solar facility of this size is to look at the operating experience of existing solar power plants. Here are several examples [f].
Facility Location Electricity Output/sq meter
Nellis Nevada 150 Wh/day
Beneixama Spain 160
Serpa Portugal 90
Solarpark Mühlhausen Bavaria 68
Kagoshima Nanatsujima Japan 170
The sample shows that actual output is in the 70-170 Wh/day per square meter range. If we assume 150 Wh/day-sq m for our power plant, then its foot print would be about 210,000 sq mi[g].
The Battery
For the battery we will use technology known as “Pumped Storage”[h].
This method stores energy in the form of potential energy of water, pumped from a lower elevation reservoir to a higher elevation reservoir. In our example, electric power from our solar facility produced during the day would be used to run the pumps and fill the upper reservoir. Then, at night, the stored water would be released through turbines to produce the electricity that would run the night time economy.
This is proven technology. “Pumped storage hydro (PSH) is the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available. As of March 2012, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) reports that PSH accounts for more than 99% of bulk electric energy storage capacity worldwide, representing around 127,000 MW”h. There are about 50 pumped storage plants with more than 1,000 MW of capacity in operation around the world[i] .
In 2009 the United States had 21,500 MW of pumped storage generating capacity[j]. Many of these plants were built during the 1970’s and have therefore been operating for more than 30 years.
Two good examples of pumped hydro electric energy storage in the U.S. are:
1. The facility at Ludington, Michigan[k] is built on a bluff overlooking the east shore of
Lake Michigan. It was constructed in 1969-73.
2. The Bath County facility[l] is located in the northern corner of Bath County, Virginia, on the southeast side of the Eastern Continental Divide, which forms this section of the border between Virginia and West Virginia. It was constructed in 1977-85 and is currently the largest pumped storage facility in the world.
Here are the relevant specifications (from this spreadsheet[m] ):
Capacity Capital Cost Stored Energy Footprint
(MW) ($2014/W)[n] (GWh)[o] (Acres)
Ludington, MI 1,872 0.98 25.5 1,000
Bath County, VA 3,000 1.40 43.0 820
For the purposes of this anlysis, we assumed that the night time energy demand would be about half of the daily demand, or 41 TWh. If we fulfilled this requirement with pumped storage, we would need about 1,000 facilities like Bath County , VA, or about 1,640 like Ludington, MI[p] .
If we assume the average footprint of these facilities to be 1,000 acres, the total footprint would be about 2,600 sq mi[q] for the Ludington option and 1,300 sq mi[r] for the Bath County option.
Note that for the sake of simplicity this analysis does not include a factor for energy losses during the charge/discharge cycle. Overall, the pumping/generating cycle efficiency has increased pump-turbine generator efficiency by as much as 5% in the last 25 years, resulting in energy conversion or cycle efficiencies greater than 80% (MWH, 2009)[s]. Including this factor does not materially change the result.
What Would It Cost?
Assuming today’s technology and today’s costs, this power system would cost about $65 trillion to build.
The PV Panel
Utility-sector PV systems larger than 2,000 kW in size averaged $3.40/W of capacity in 2011[t]. The capacity of a solar power plant that could generate the required 83 TWh/day of electricity would be about 17 TW[u]. The installed cost of our facility would therefore be $3.40/W times 17 TW or about $60 trillion.
The Battery
If we use the actual construction costs of the two PSH projects above, the Bath County option would cost a total of about $5 trillion and the Ludington option would cost about $3.5 trillion[v].
A few comments
1) Putting the PV power facility in the Southwest makes sense from a solar energy point of view because this is the sunniest part of America. But, this strategy has two problems:
a. The Southwest, defined as southern CA + the southern tip of NV around Las Vegas + NM + the panhandles of TX and OK, constitutes about 400,000 sq mi[w]. Our facility would therefore cover about 50% of it!
b. If a major storm covered most (or worse, all) of this, electrical output would drop dramatically and the whole country would suffer.
2) Putting our PV power plant in the “Southern states”, defined as southern CA + southern tip of NV around Las Vegas + all of NM + all states east to the Atlantic Ocean, alleviates the storm risk scenario but puts much of the panel in states that are not as “sunny” as the Southwest, and so our PV power facility would have to be larger to account for that. Even without this expansion it would occupy about 22% of it[x].
3) Some people would say that much of the land in these states is “empty”; but others would say that it is wilderness or grazing land or farm land. It’s safe to say that either the Southwest or the Southern States strategy would provoke some real push-back.
4) PV Panels on houses. There are about 89 million houses in the US[y]. If the owners of every one of them installed 1,000 sq ft (e.g 20 ft by 50 ft) of PV panel on their roof, the total area would be about 3,200 sq mi., a small percentage of the needed area.
Additional Construction Costs
Building the solar power plant is not the only cost of capturing the sun.
1) Electrifying the economy. We simply assumed at the beginning that the entire economy has been “electrified”, so that all energy is now supplied in the form of electricity, but this in itself would be an enormous project. By far the largest part of this would involve the electrification of the transport sector. The chart above shows that transportation is the largest user of energy (38%) and that almost all of it comes in the form of petroleum. Electrifying this sector would mean abandoning the internal combustion engine and converting to electricity all cars, buses, trucks (especially tractor-trailers), ships, and the entire railroad network.
2) Re-building and expanding the entire national electrical grid. Today power plants are located close to the user. Major cities, e.g. Chicago, are surrounded by a network of power plants[z]. Our new solar system, however, would locate the power plants where the sun shines the most. So, in theory, much of it would be located in the Southwest, which is the sunniest part of America. This means that the solar-based grid would be much larger than present because it must transport electricity much larger distances, for example, from Arizona to New Jersey.
3) Developing a computer network to control the whole system, the so-called “smart grid”. The solar grid must be able to react to changes in the weather. Suppose we adopt the Southern States strategy. Further suppose that on Monday the Southwest is clear and the Southeast is cloudy. On that day huge amounts of electricity must move generally west to east. Then suppose that on Tuesday the Southwest is cloudy and the Southeast is clear. On that day huge amounts of the electricity must move generally east to west. This will be happening every day as weather systems move across America. The grid and control systems to handle this do not, today, exist.
Compare the “Solarization” of America With Other “Mega-Projects”
America is certainly capable of successfully sustaining large projects over long periods of time that require solutions to major engineering problems. Three examples are:
1. The Manhattan Project. The project to build the first atomic bomb spanned 1942-1946 and cost about $26 billion in 2014 dollars[aa].
2. Project Apollo. The project to put the first man on the moon spanned 1961-1972 and cost about $130 billion in 2014 dollars[bb].
3. The Interstate Highway System. This project was authorized in 1956 and was completed in 1991, 35 years later, at a cost of about $500 billion in 2014 dollars[cc].
These are three very successful projects. What were the keys to their success?[dd]
1. A perceived threat or reward that leads to public acceptance. The Manhattan project and Apollo project were both responses to perceived threats, which compelled policymaker support for these initiatives. The interstate highway system was perceived as an enormous jobs program that would also produce a big jump in economic productivity.
2. A clear goal. Each project had a clear goal – build the bomb, put a man on the moon by end of 1969, build the interstate highway system.
3. Government money that ensures success. All three projects were funded by government. For example, the Manhattan Project consumed about 1% of the federal budget during its life, and Project Apollo consumed about 2% during its life.
How does our solar project score on these three success factors?
1. Perceived threat or reward. Climate change and/or exhaustion of fossil fuels. But, does the American public buy in to this? Recent polls suggest that it does not.
2. A clear goal. Electrify the US economy and generate the electricity with a solar-based system. But, whereas the interstate highway system (for example) generated huge benefits to Americans, it is not clear if there are any near-term benefits from, for example, converting transportation from carbon to solar-produced electricity.
3. Government money to ensure success. The government’s role in all three projects was to provide the funding. But, given the public’s lack of support, the huge amounts of money required, and the fiscal shape in which governments at all levels find themselves, governments today are in no position to fund this entire project.
What To Do?
In order to adopt solar power on a large scale today we must confront four problems associated with the technology.
1. The sun is a relatively low density energy source. Even in a sunny place like Arizona, it delivers only about 200 W/sq m over an average day[ee].
2. Today’s PV panels are inefficient at converting this energy to electricity. A typical low-cost PV panel will convert only 15-20% of the sun’s energy to electricity.
3. Intermittency. The sun shines for only about half of the 24 hour day, and is often obscured by clouds.
4. Cost. The construction cost of a solar PV facility is about $3.50/W vs about $1.00/W for a gas-fired power plant[ff]. Furthermore, whereas a gas-fired plant produces electricity 24/7 rain or shine, a solar plant produces electricity only during the daylight hours.
The efficiency of PV panels continues to improve, and panels with 20% efficiency are coming onto the market[gg], but the theoretical limit of the PV technology in use today is 31%[hh], and getting there has been agonizingly slow. More research is required to improve the efficiency of PV panels and any other technology that converts the sun’s energy to electricity.
The sun’s intermittency issue requires development of grid scale electricity storage systems that are sufficient (in this example) to power the entire economy during the night. Many new technologies are currently under development. As with PV panel efficiency, more research is required to develop these new technologies for electricity storage.
The capital cost of PV power plants is falling as the cost of PV panels drops. Today, PV panels cost about $.74/W, one one-hundredth of the cost in 1977[ii]! But the PV panel is only one component of the total cost of a complete solar power plant. The so-called “non-module” costs, e.g. inverters, mounting hardware, labor, permitting and fees, overhead, taxes, installer profit, etc, now make up at least two thirds of the total installed cost[jj]. Further reductions in total cost will require significant reductions in non-module costs. The total cost of a PV power plant today is still about four times the cost of a gas-fired equivalent, and it generates electricity for only half the day.
Finally, as with any energy plan, we must continue to work on energy efficiency. The chart above shows that of the 70 quads of energy supplied to the economy, about 47%[kk] of them are “rejected”, i.e. lost. Improving energy efficiency (BTU/$ GDP) is a must, regardless of the way forward.
A Final Comment
The intent of this exercise is to arrive at a ballpark estimate of what it would take to stop burning carbon and “Capture the Sun”. There is obviously a large margin of error, plus or minus, in all of it. One thing is certain. Eventually we homo sapiens will consume all of the planet’s supply of carbon. Long before that time we must develop an alternative to burning that carbon.
It’s a good bet that solar will eventually be a major part of our energy equation. The good news about the sun is that it is:
1. For all practical purposes an inexhaustible source of energy.
2. Free.
3. Available to everyone. No country can seize control of the sun and deny it to others.
But, it is also true that solar power today supplies only about two tenths of one percent of the energy to run the U.S. economyb. It is easy to see why when we compare the economics of solar with other options. In the exercise above I estimate the cost of building a system to power today’s economy with energy from the sun at about $65 trillion. Doing the same thing with gas-fired technology would cost about $4 trillion[ll], about 6% of the cost of solar.
Remember that this whole exercise has used today’s technology and today’s costs. Both of these should improve over time, but until they do the business case for a major push into solar does not look good.
REFERENCES:
[a] ”Solar Energy, A New Day Dawning?”, Nature 443, 19-22 (7 September 2006) doi:10.1038/443019a; Published online 6 September 2006
[b] Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – https://missions.llnl.gov/energy/analysis/energy-informatics
[c] 70 x 1015 BTU/yr = 1.9 x 1014 BTU/day = 56 x 1012 Wh/day = 56 TWh/day
[d] http://www.currentresults.com/Weather/US/average-annual-state-sunshine.php
[e] PV Panel Capacity
Desired output = 56 TWh/day
50% safety factor raises this to 83 TWh/day
[f] Power Plant Footprint
Nellis Powerplant (Nevada) = 30 GWh/yr on 140 acres = 150 Wh/day per sq meter, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellis_Solar_Power_Plant
Beneixama (Spain) = 30 GWh/yr on 500,000 sq m = 160 Wh/day per sq meter, http://www.solarserver.com/solarmagazin/solar-report_0109_e.html
Serpa (Portugal) = 20 GWh/yr on 600,000 sq m = 90 Wh/day per sq meter, http://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_48.shtml p48
Solarpark Mühlhausen (Bavaria) = 17,000 kWh/day on 25 hectacre = 68 Wh/day per sq meter, http://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_48.shtml p41
Kagoshima Nanatsujima (Japan) = 22,000 households @ 3,600 kWh/household on 1.3 million sq m = 170 Wh/day-sq m http://global.kyocera.com/news/2013/1101_nnms.html
[g] Required output = 83 TWh/day so this divided by 150 Wh/day-sq m = 210,000 sq mi
[h] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations
[j] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_power_in_the_United_States#Pumped_storage
[k] http://www.consumersenergy.com/content.aspx?id=6985
Ludington Pumped Storage Plant, Ludington, MI
[l] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station
[m] Some examples of pumped storage facilities. All can be found in Wikipedia:
[n] The equation here is Capital Cost at time of construction x adjustment for inflation ÷ Capacity
For Bath = $1,600 mil x 2.6 ÷ 3,000 MW = $1.38 /W (inflation adjustment is for the period 1981 – 2014)
For Ludington = $315 mil x 5.8 ÷ 1,872 MW = $0.98 /W (inflation adjustment is for the period 1971 – 2014)
For inflation adjustment use this site: http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
[o] The equation here is Capacity x Time to Empty Upper Reservoir
For Bath = 3,000 MW x 14.3 hours = 43.0 GWh
For Ludington = 1,872 MW x 13.6 hours = 25.5 GWh
[p] The equation here is Demand ÷ Stored Energy
For Bath = 41 TWh ÷ 43.0 GWh = 953 or about 1,000 “Bath-like” facilities
[q] 1,640 x 1,000 acres x 0.0016 sq mi/acre = 2,600 sq mi
[r] 1,000 x 820 acres x 0.0016 sq mi/acre = 1,300 sq mi
[s] http://www.hydro.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/NHA_PumpedStorage_071212b1.pdf
[t] http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2012/11/27/the-installed-price-of-solar-photovoltaic-systems-in-the-u-s-continues-to-decline-at-a-rapid-pace/
Original Source is: Tracking the Sun, an annual PV cost-tracking report produced by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
[u] http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech_cap_factor.html
According to this chart, the capacity factor for solar power plants installed so far in the U.S. is about 20%. Therefore, the Capacity of a solar plant to power America would be = electricity demand/day ÷ 24 hrs/day ÷ 20% capacity factor
= 83 TWh/day ÷ 24 h/day ÷ 0.2 = 17 TW
[v] Capacity of pumped storage = night time demand ÷ 12 hrs = 41 TWh ÷ 12 h = 3.4 TW
Capital cost for Bath = $1.40/W, so Bath option CapEx = 3.4 TW x $1.40 ≈ $4.8 trillion
Capital cost for Ludington = $0.98/W, so Ludington option CapEx = 3.4 TW x $0.98 ≈ $3.3 trillion
[w] An estimate from Google Maps
[x] NV+AZ+NM+TX+OK+LA+MS+AL+GA+SC+FL ≈ 1 million sq mi according to Wikipedia
[y] US Census Bureau http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr11-20.pdf
[z] http://www.eia.gov/state/maps.cfm
[aa] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
[bb] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Apollo#Program_cost
[cc] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
[dd] Analysis in this section is based on this article by Deborah D. Stine, PhD, now at Carnegie Mellon University: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34645.pdf
[ee] MacKay, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, p46
[ff] U.S. Energy Information Administration, Updated Capital Cost Estimates for Utility Scale Electricity Generating Plants”, April 12, 2013, http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/capitalcost/, Table 1
[gg] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/20/idUS110444863620110620
[hh] Shockley-Queisser limit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limit
[ii] http://www.economist.com/news/21566414-alternative-energy-will-no-longer-be-alternative-sunny-uplands
[jj] http://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/LBNL-5919e.pdf, graph on p14
[kk] From the chart on page 1:
Total energy to drive the U.S. economy (in the box) = 69.5 quads
Total energy input = total energy output
Total energy output = rejected energy + energy services = 32.5 quads + 37.0 quads
Therefore rejected energy = 32.5 / 69.5 = 46.8%
[ll] 83 TWh/day required to run the economy
Assume the capacity factor for these gas-fired plants = 90%
Then capacity = 83 ÷ 24 ÷ 0.9 = 3.8 TW
Cost to build = 3.8 TW x $1/W ≈ $ 4 trillion
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rgbatduke says:
July 31, 2014 at 5:46 am
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I am not sure I understand the limitations. BC Hydro produces most of its power (Bennet Dam and others on the Peace and Columbia Rivers) over 1200 km from the major users in the lower mainland and exports power to the US (and sometimes imports) through grid ties. Alberta is in the process of building a 300 km DC transmission line from west of Edmonton to Calgary (Berkshire Hathaway has applied to buy Alta-Link, the current transmission line builder).
Most of the US is within 1200 km of the southern sunny areas with the exception of the north east states such as Maine. New England, New York, and other northern states import (for now) large amounts of hydro and nuclear from Canada. (See quote at the end.)
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/where-canada-s-surplus-energy-goes-1.1109321
http://transmission.bchydro.com/NR/rdonlyres/83A5FDF4-F326-4AEC-ABCE-A13D2D00542B/0/BCH_Transmission_J1_2013.pdf
As for solar, I have done the analysis both myself and had professional help – the problem with current technology is that the panels and the batteries require replacing before the costs have been recovered so solar requires constant re-investing, and no cost recovery, at least in my location. If it were feasible at my latitude, 52 40, I would have been off the grid long ago. I personally think I will be long deceased before solar is economic at household scale without a grid tie. But even with a grid tie, it does’t pay at this time.
In Canada, we are energy hogs, because we live in a cold climate.
“Although Canada is one of the biggest power users in the world — due in large part to home heating demands — it is also an energy exporter.
The country generated a whopping 585,000 gigawatt hours of electricity in 2008, which is more than enough for domestic consumption (and, incidentally, more than the total annual electricity use in India).
For many years, Canada’s surplus power has been sold to the U.S. It’s a profitable business for Canadian utilities — worth about $3.8 billion in 2008 — but it’s limited by bottlenecks in Canada’s aging transmission infrastructure.
North-south axis
More than three quarters of the electricity generated in this country comes from hydro or nuclear power, neither of which produce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The U.S., on the other hand, gets close to 50 per cent of its energy from coal-fired generating stations.
The electricity business: Federal or provincial?
In Canada, the Constitution Act stipulates that electricity generation, transmission and distribution fall within provincial jurisdiction.
The federal government therefore has little to do with it, except with regard to export.
Each province’s energy export licences and quotas are issued by Canada’s National Energy Board. This independent agency, established in 1959, governs international and interprovincial trade in oil, gas and electricity.
Canada’s extensive power grid offer a stable source of clean electricity for many northern states. By purchasing this energy, as opposed to building more coal plants, the U.S. is working towards its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Most of the states along the border are connected to Canadian provinces through an extensive high-voltage system.
Canada’s main customers are New England, New York, the Midwestern states and the Pacific Northwest. The provinces that export the most are Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia.
Most of the trade is north-south, between provinces and states, because the distances between power plants and markets in the U.S. are shorter than the east-west distances between those plants and other Canadian cities. The value of the American dollar is also an attractive factor in north-south trade.”
This post, almost all of it including the commentary is myopic in the extreme in that it has failed totally to take into account the desires and aims of the rest of the world’s peoples and nations re energy availability and use.
The American population at around 360 millions comprises about 5% of the world’s current population of 7.2 billions .
The rest of the World intends by every means possible to one day match the American standards of living and therefore by implication, as energy use per capita is a good proxy for the standard of living, America’s energy use per capita.
So everything that the original poster’s simplistic scenario suggested plus all the rights, wrongs and alternative scenarios provided by the commenters has to multiplied by roughly 20 fold to give some indication of the true global scale of every one of those numerous alternative scenarios being proposed by commenters.
Do the sums again for a global situation and see how impractical and just how irrational and far from practical reality the idea of using solar panels technology exclusively for the future global energy requirements really is.
The same applies to the proponents of global energy supplied via wind turbines.
Somewhere, somehow, some way, someone will crack fusion power technology one day probably not very far into the future. It could even be by 2017 or soon after if the Lockheed Martin Skunkworks transportable Fusion reactor actually works out as they and we all hope for.
The rewards for the successful team or inventor of a theoretically unlimited in output power source coupled with an infinite supply of fuel into the never ending future is an incentive of such magnitude that mankind will persevere in this quest until he finally achieves that ultimate in the power generation goal.
Fusion energy is the only such source of energy within our present knowledge range available to mankind and that is the course that every nation of earth should be directing their energy research, their hopes and their economic research power towards.
Cheap, always on, dead reliable energy was the key to the beginnings if the great British Industrial Revolution in the late 1600’s, an energy revolution which continues on to this day.
The three thousand year old wind power and water wheels were dispensed with by british industrialists as fast as they could get rid of them when the first steam powered, coal fired engines, deadly dangerous as they were, showed a semblance of reliability and proved they were capable of driving the pumps of the coal mines and the looms and spinners of the nascent textile industry that already in those times required dead steady power to run smoothly and efficiently.
We in the industrialized countries are so use to always having this steady ultra reliable power at the flick of a switch or at our finger tips that we have completely lost sight of what it would mean for our civilization, for our standards of living, for our personal demands and comforts if our power resources became intermittent, unreliable, variable and unpredictable and for this situation to continue for years on end.
Solar and wind everywhere, in every location and every situation they have been established have amply proven over and over again in the last two and half decades that they meet every deficient point by being intermittent, unreliable, unpredictable and highly variable in their power generating abilities and consequently have amply demonstrated their complete inability and complete unsuitability for a totally power dependent, heavily industrialised 24 hours a day civilisation which suposedly can be run using just 6 to 8 hours a day of intermittent, unpredictable, highly variable solar and wind power.
Why bother even thinking of expanding any power generation source with that sort of record to try and provide power for an entire heavily industrialised nation of 360 millions let alone for humanity’s entire numbers of 7.2 billions.
If we start with demand of 56 Terawatt hours of electricity per day and add a 50% safety factor, we find that we will then need a system that can produce about 83 TWh/day
Too ambitious. I think a fairer thought experiment would be to envision replacement of the 4,000 tWh of electricity generated in the United States each year. That’s 11 TWh per day. A 50% safety factor — no opinion on the necessity of this — would entail 16.5 TWh a day. That’s a far cry from 84 TWh.
A good deal of the energy use is “non-electrifiable” in this century. The light passenger vehicle fleet will be convertible if battery costs are radically slashed and energy density radically improved. This would entail a 20% increase in demand, from 11 TWh/day to 13 TWh, and from 16.5 TWh/day to 20 TWh/day with a safety factor. But a lot of other energy use isn’t so readily convertible.
Therefore, I’d use a lower bogey. And, given that the true gating factor — economical storage — would equally enable solar and wind, I think an analysis that posits only solar is non-tenable even as a thought experiment.
Ric: Please let us know if you hear any positive news about the Papp engine. That has an even crazier underlying theory, and its promise is twice as great as the E-Cat. (E.g., it could be used in transportation and it would not require a boiler to obtain electrical energy from.)
Let’s print off another $65Tn in treasuries and begin construction tomorrow. The kids can pay for it later.
I mentioned the cost of getting to orbit above, and a possible solution: MagLev launchers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarTram
/Mr Lynn
rgbatduke says:
July 31, 2014 at 5:46 am
———————————————-
… A lot of stuff that makes sense …
.. and then spoils it with the passage that starts with …
Solar does make a good deal of sense on individual rooftops, where in many parts of the country or world it is already a break-even to win-a-bit proposition compared to buying power from the existing heat-generation grid, a household at a time. When the surplus is sold back into the grid, it ekes out fossil fuel supplies and over time could drop the cost of electricity in general.
I have no problem with people generating their own power using rooftop solar or other non-invasive means and using it themselves. What I do have a problem with is people selling badly phased power into a grid that has a very high quality of evenly phased and uniform electricity thereby screwing things up for the rest of us. It is like someone with a dirty roof and gutters selling their rainwater run-off directly into the water pipes of their neighbours without any filtering or purification done. You cannot get a home rooftop system to provide properly and uniformly phased power with any kind of solution that is remotely economic.
Power companies do a lot of things besides just generating the electricity we use.
richardscourtney says: July 31, 2014 at 1:30 pm
But I suppose it was inevitable that a ‘peak oiler’ would use this thread as an excuse to promote their error.
Richard
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More nonsense from Richard. Any finite resourse is capable of being exhausted.
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george e. smith says: July 31, 2014 at 3:08 pm
Cost is not the problem; that can be cured with the stroke of the pen.
_________________________________
You confuse money with true wealth. Anyone can print fiat money, but if it is not backed up by real resourses, or real efficient labour, it is not worth a damn. You simply end up with a loaf of bread costing ten million dollars.
Building a solar array of this magnitude takes real resources and real labour, not fiat money, and it can and will bankrupt an entire nation.
Ralph
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
This is only part of why solar will never be significant. It has it’s place, and as rgb points out, it may become fairly common as an add-in, if, if, and if… Still, solar just CANNOT be a substantive share of our energy needs. We must burn the fuels. It is burn or die. Really.
I’m sure someone else has pointed it out above, but how much less sunshine does the SW get during the winter? Given the fact that last winter every State in the Union had some level of snow coverage at the same time, what would happen should similar happen in regards to the astronomical demands for light and warmth during an event such as a Polar Vortex? What would happen if at the time of greatest need, the SW is socked in by cloud or even snow covering a percentage of those panels?
Then how much will it cost to maintain per year? Just because sunshine is free, it doesn’t mean everything else is. What is the lifespan of all those millions of solar PV panels? How much to replace them all seeing as they lose efficiency every year?
It’s all well and good using SPV or a small wind turbine on your property to potentially reduce your household energy bills, but the idea of using such a singular method based on having exactly the right conditions to be effective, on a national basis, is nothing short of suicidal on multiple levels.
Why do people always ignore, the cost of land and the cost of money, Interest payments alone would exceed any fuel cost
“””””……george e. smith says: July 31, 2014 at 3:08 pm
Cost is not the problem; that can be cured with the stroke of the pen.
_________________________________
You confuse money with true wealth. Anyone can print fiat money, but if it is not backed up by real resourses, or real efficient labour, it is not worth a damn. You simply end up with a loaf of bread costing ten million dollars……””””””
Well Ralph, I don’t confuse anything.
And my point went right over your head.
For starters, you even got your very own point fouled up.
I said NOTHING about printing fiat money. What I did suggest was in fact stealing REAL WEALTH from those who created it; those nasty oil and gas, and coal companies. That is the piggy bank I raided. Those people are actually doing something of real economic value; their work output runs the whole planet; well most of it anyway.
And I simply pointed out that ALL of that wealth of those energy companies is still not enough to fund that rat hole that is PV solar energy. It takes too much energy from existing viable energy sources (fossils) to produce even the most efficient solar cells.
The problem is the sun; it is a pitiful excuse for a power source. At maybe 200 W/m^2 best case, you can get energy more densely by pedaling a bicycle (driving an alternator.)
There are people working on “solar cells”, that are so “cheap”, you can just about spray it out of a garden hose onto your existing roof (whatever that is made of) a a penny a square foot).
They think that is great; cheap enough for anyone to afford. They might have even achieved 0.3% conversion efficiencies. Did I mention this stuff is cheap.
And the sun is still crawling along at 1,000 W/m^2 absolute max on the surface.
I’ll give you all the cheap solar cells you want.
To power up your house, you couldn’t afford the property taxes on how much land you would need.
It’s a technological (power density) problem; not an economic problem.
And as long as people think it is an economic problem, they will put economists to work on the solution (like my oil tax).
If solar PV was a net energy availability system, like oil and gas and coal are; it would automatically be economical.
The existing totality of planet earth energy sources, is self supporting; there is NOTHING ELSE to tap to subsidize it. We got here from fig trees by our own shoe laces; without subsidies.
Free clean green renewable energy (figs) failed to get us down from the trees, and grow to our current populations. It took fire and stored chemical energy to do that . And free clean green renewable energy could never sustain the present; or any future projected world population; not to mention all the animals.
Another energy-saving tip: If you take a bath in cold weather, don’t pull the plug until two hours after you’ve left it. That way its heat goes into the house, not down the drain.
From Ric Werme on July 31, 2014 at 6:22 pm:
Nowadays, any company that deliberately chooses a name that is too bland for a quick web search is de facto guilty of deliberate obfuscation.
Thankfully Google can be pretty smart.
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Industrial_Heat,_LLC
From the “Pure Energy Systems Wiki” it is found the founding investor of Industrial Heat LLC is Tom Darden, CEO of Cherokee Investment Partners thus someone with an image problem ducking charges of racial and cultural insensitivity if that company is not in fact predominantly owned by Cherokees.
In the Profile section, which obviously was supplied by the company due to the use of “we”, it says:
So their specialty is acquiring potential Superfund cleanup sites, which likely would be cheap. Except it doesn’t say here they do remediation and cleanup, which can be expensive and long-term. They manage.
And their current big thing is building PV solar farms on contaminated land, thus justifying not cleaning it up as it’s in use, using private money while government subsidies are drying up, when a smart company would know solar is not competitive without subsidies like feed-in tariffs thus they’re gambling on elected politicians being willing to increase electricity rates to consumers by mandating more and ongoing preferential treatment.
“Industrial Heat” was founded in 2012. The Wiki notes their website, http://industrialheat.co/, as of 2014 Jan 24 would default to a press release of the Rossi acquisition. It still does, to a PR Newswire page, not their own server.
It does not look like “Industrial Heat” is actively seeking investors. Perhaps it would help if they partnered with “Industrial Light and Magic”. Then they could produce a spectacular demo video of the Amazing Efficacious eCat.
“Household heating is included in the electrification for your workings. If a new build house is well designed, then the combination of south facing windows and high levels of insulation can provide most of the heating that a property requires. This can be done without all the drawbacks that you report and should be cost neutral.”
Rebuilding the housing stock to have south facing windows in the US would be a rather expensive undertaking–so the cost of rebuilding them would have to be added to the article’s computation of expenses if you treat the computation as if it did not have to produce heating energy for those houses. OTOH, if you don’t rebuild all the existing housing, their energy requirements are properly included in the calculations.
A rather grandiose project and there appears to be a much simpler way of harnessing solar power. Solar heating of the earth causes evaporation of water which leads to formation of clouds. These clouds then travel inland where they release water as rain which has gained considerable gravitational energy during the process. The rain then drains into rivers and, in many areas, there are canyons that the rivers flow through that can be dammed to produce a reservoir of water having considerable potential energy if a generator is attached to the outflow of the river. Given that rainfall is often erratic in many areas, the dam that one builds would also provide a source of irrigation water. The idea seems so simple, that it surprises me that no-one has thought of it before and people are instead proposing to carpet the SW US with hundreds of thousands of square miles of solar cells which is far more environmentally destructive than the low-tech natural solar powered pumped storage system described above.
When one deals with watermelons, one has to negate everything they say in order to determine their true intentions. In BC, no further natural solar powered pumped storage systems are allowed to be constructed because they are “destructive of the environment” and “unsustainable”. Instead, massive bird blenders which produce a small amount of intermittent power and likely will never return as electricity the amount of energy involved in their construction and transportation, are placed on scenic mountains where they spoil the view and kill endangered species of birds by the hundreds. Such idiotic power sources are, in the opinions of the watermelons, “enironmentally friendly” and “sustainable”.
A hydroelectric dam is a very elegant means of harnessing a very dilute energy density source and magnifying the energy density several million fold and producing a power source that is the ultimate in “sustainability”. I’ve driven through NE Washington state and the hydroelectric dams constructed there in the 1930’s took what was essentially a desert and made it into a very productive agricultural area. I’ve never understood why a massive coral reef is considered to be “natural” given the massive alteration in the local ecology that the unchecked growth of coral has caused whereas a human accomplishement such as the Grand Coulee dam are considered to be unnatural. Corals create ecology altering reefs and humans create sustainable energy sources such as dams. The fact that watermelons seem determined to destroy every hydroelectric dam in the US is so insane that one can only make sense of it if one views “environmentalism” as an anti-life religion.
ralfellis:
At July 31, 2014 at 1:30 pm I attempted to ‘head off’ disruption of this thread by ‘peak oilers’ when I wrote
‘simple-touriste’ accepted the point and did not reply.
But – with the same inevitability that Roger Sowell turns up to spout nonsense whenever nuclear power is discussed – you decided to again make a fool of yourself at July 31, 2014 at 8:47 pm by replying to my economic point with this
True, and planet Earth will be “exhausted” when the Sun turns Red Giant, but there is no reason to concern ourselves about something far in the future.
The CAPABILITY of exhaustion of “easily accessible fossil fuel” is not the same as the ECONOMIC POSSIBILITY, and the “exhaustion” is an economic an impossibility. However, despite “exhaustion” of oil being impossible, Malthusians scare-monger about it as part of their scare-mongering about ‘overpopulation’.
I again explain why ‘peak oil’ is impossible for the benefit of those who don’t know and so there is no reason to further side-track this thread with the nonsense of ‘peak oil.
The ‘peak oil’ issue is part of the fallacy of overpopulation.
The fallacy of overpopulation derives from the disproved Malthusian idea which wrongly assumes that humans are constrained like bacteria in a Petri dish: i.e. population expands until available resources are consumed when population collapses. The assumption is wrong because humans do not suffer such constraint: humans find and/or create new and alternative resources when existing resources become scarce.
The obvious example is food.
In the 1970s the Club of Rome predicted that human population would have collapsed from starvation by now. But human population has continued to rise and there are fewer starving people now than in the 1970s; n.b. there are less starving people in total and not merely fewer in in percentage.
Now, the most common Malthusian assertion is ‘peak oil’. But humans need energy supply and oil is only one source of energy supply. Adoption of natural gas displaces some requirement for oil, fracking increases available oil supply at acceptable cost; etc..
In the real world, for all practical purposes there are no “physical” limits to natural resources so every natural resource can be considered to be infinite; i.e. the human ‘Petri dish’ can be considered as being unbounded. This a matter of basic economics which I explain as follows. bold
Humans do not run out of anything although they can suffer local and/or temporary shortages of anything. The usage of a resource may “peak” then decline, but the usage does not peak because of exhaustion of the resource (e.g. flint, antler bone and bronze each “peaked” long ago but still exist in large amounts).
A resource is cheap (in time, money and effort) to obtain when it is in abundant supply. But “low-hanging fruit are picked first”, so the cost of obtaining the resource increases with time. Nobody bothers to seek an alternative to a resource when it is cheap.
But the cost of obtaining an adequate supply of a resource increases with time and, eventually, it becomes worthwhile to look for
(a) alternative sources of the resource
and
(b) alternatives to the resource.
And alternatives to the resource often prove to have advantages.
For example, both (a) and (b) apply in the case of crude oil.
Many alternative sources have been found. These include opening of new oil fields by use of new technologies (e.g. to obtain oil from beneath sea bed) and synthesising crude oil from other substances (e.g. tar sands, natural gas and coal). Indeed, since 1994 it has been possible to provide synthetic crude oil from coal at competitive cost with natural crude oil and this constrains the maximum true cost of crude.
Alternatives to oil as a transport fuel are possible. Oil was the transport fuel of military submarines for decades but uranium is now their fuel of choice.
There is sufficient coal to provide synthetic crude oil for at least the next 300 years. Hay to feed horses was the major transport fuel 300 years ago and ‘peak hay’ was feared in the nineteenth century, but availability of hay is not significant a significant consideration for transportation today. Nobody can know what – if any – demand for crude oil will exist 300 years in the future.
Indeed, coal also demonstrates an ‘expanding Petri dish’.
Spoil heaps from old coal mines contain much coal that could not be usefully extracted from the spoil when the mines were operational. Now, modern technology enables the extraction from the spoil at a cost which is economic now and would have been economic if it had been available when the spoil was dumped.
These principles not only enable growing human population: they also increase human well-being.
The ingenuity which increases availability of resources also provides additional usefulness to the resources. For example, abundant energy supply and technologies to use it have freed people from the constraints of ‘renewable’ energy and the need for the power of muscles provided by slaves and animals. Malthusians are blind to the obvious truth that human ingenuity has freed humans from the need for slaves to operate treadmills, the oars of galleys, etc..
And these benefits also act to prevent overpopulation because population growth declines with affluence.
There are several reasons for this. Of most importance is that poor people need large families as ‘insurance’ to care for them at times of illness and old age. Affluent people can pay for that ‘insurance’ so do not need the costs of large families.
The result is that the indigenous populations of rich countries decline. But rich countries need to sustain population growth for economic growth so they need to import – and are importing – people from poor countries. Increased affluence in poor countries can be expected to reduce their population growth with resulting lack of people for import by rich countries.
Hence, the real foreseeable problem is population decrease; n.b. not population increase.
All projections and predictions indicate that human population will peak around the middle of this century and decline after that. So, we are confronted by the probability of ‘peak population’ resulting from growth of affluence around the world.
The Malthusian idea is wrong because it ignores basic economics and applies a wrong model; human population is NOT constrained by resources like the population of bacteria in a Petri dish. There is no existing or probable problem of overpopulation of the world by humans. And claims of ‘peak oil’ are nonsense.
Richard
@Ashok Patel,
lower the temperature at the ground and together with the water spilled when cleaning the panels will grow a jungle which will also have to be cut back. OTOH we may plant corn on that former sterile place for bio…
[/sarc]
Philip
150 Wh/day-m^2 looks too low. That’s about 31 W/m^2 solar insolation. The global ave. is 200 W/m^2. Check your data.
The author makes various questionable assumptions and misses a couple of the big points.
The biggest point is that we continuously rebuild our infrastructure. We will be rebuilding our power production and distribution system over the next 30 years to become sustainable. Additionally, diversity is desirable when building a system. Diversity lets you take advantage of the best local sustainable solutions, and diversity makes the overall system more robust.
Issues that the author gets wrong include:
1) We’re allowed to use wind and geothermal. Wind provides energy at night and
when a storm covers the southwest united states. We’re allowed to use tidal
energy. We’re allowed to use micro-hydro.
2) We’re allowed to build power plants in sunny northern Mexico as well as
the southwest united states. We’re allowed to put solar panels on top of
existing urban infrastructure.
3) Moving to terawatts of solar PV requires increasing the supply of PV
by a factor of 1,000. Historically, across numerous technologies, economies of
scale from mass production tend to decrease costs by about half for each doubling of production. We can thus expect prices to decrease by a factor of
eight as we roll out PV to terawatt scales.
4) Although you are describing the costs, you aren’t describing the income
produced by the electricity.
5) The author suggests that the United States cannot build multi-trillion
dollar infrastructure by stating that the national highway system is a
half-trillion dollar project. But the author neglects the existing power
distribution system.
6) The assumption that half of the energy would be used at night is
unwarranted. With the massive fleet of electric vehicles described,
the car batteries form a rather big chunk of the storage. Most of thesecars would be charged during the day while parked at work. On the existing
electrical grid, about 2/3rds of electricity is used during the day.
7) The author states that solar costs 16 times as much as natural gas. You
may want to look at the EIA levelized costs
(http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm)
which show solar PV costing about wice the cheapest natural gas technology.
The solar PV cost is an average from across the united states, not a cost
taken from just the southwest united states. Even after you attach a
large battery to solar PV, you are nowhere near sixteen times the cost of
natural gas.
8) http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html provides a detailed analysis
of renewable technologies.
Dr strangelove: See http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html for a detailed discussion of watts/square meter on a solar farm. Unfortunately, for a large scale desert farm, the densities are rather low. On the other hand, for an individual rooftop, densities are, as you point out, quite a bit higher; a point that the author of this article does miss.
Boris: Your “massive bird blenders” may “kill birds by the hundreds”, but that’s not noticeable compared to bird deaths from cats, power lines, windows, pesticides, automobiles, …
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/wind-turbine-kill-birds.htm
Rebuilding the housing stock is not an expensive undertaking. We’ve been doing it continuously for quite some time now. Over the course of the next 30 years — the timeframe for building out terawatts of solar PV — we will replace a substantial portion of our housing stock. Probably a bit over 60% of the stock.
cesium62:
At August 1, 2014 at 2:32 am you assert
No, you have completely missed the point of Dowd’s analysis, and your “big points” are trivia which do not alter his main conclusion; viz.
Richard
george e. smith says:
July 31, 2014 at 3:08 pm
Every time I do this calculation, I get to the same conclusion. It takes too much damn energy to make solar panels; doesn’t have anything to do with cost.
—
Ignoring deterioration losses for the moment, if you mad 1 million solar panels to provide the energy to manufacture another million, you can then use that 2 million panels to manufacture 4 million. The energy input hurdle you describe exponentially approximates toward zero, doesn’t it?