By: Tom D. Tamarkin & Barrie Lawson
Over the next 50 years, utility companies in the United States must replace approximately 440 Gigawatts (GW) of baseload generation capacity to provide electricity nationwide. Significant electrification of the transportation segment through electric cars and trucks can potentially quadruple the amount of needed power.
This paper explores the system requirements to replace this generation capacity with a photovoltaic only generation scheme. Topics include the definition of peak power demand, time of use issues, reserve power requirements, storage to provide power when there is no sunlight, and the various engineering challenges associated with managing a large area synchronous AC power grid.
This analysis considers the factors involved in dimensioning solar power generating plants. To illustrate the issues involved the example considers the case for supplying the entire electric power needs of the USA from solar energy without the use of fossil fuel, nuclear or other back up. To simplify the calculations, the example considers a single very large hypothetical solar power installation providing all the country’s power although in practice, generation would be dispersed in a network of smaller installations throughout the country each one closer to the point of need. Depending on the location of the solar arrays, some modifications or additions to the electricity grid distribution network may be required but these have been ignored for the purposes of this study.
In reality, such a future solar only electricity supply would most likely be generated by a mix of energy sources including several large T&D grid connected solar power installations as well as many domestic installations.
The example used for this study is a conventional solar power plant consisting of a large bank of solar panels, each made up from an array of individual photovoltaic (PV) cells, feeding the electricity grid network during the day and charging a bank of batteries which will provide the power during the hours of darkness.
The example shown below is a grid connected PV system (batteries not included) which is inactive at night when power is provided by traditional “spinning reserve” of steam driven turbines which make up part of the grid system. An off-grid system like the one considered here also requires a large battery bank to store energy during the day in order to maintain the supply during the night.
Demand Assumptions
Capacity
Sources including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), The Department of Energy (DOE), The US Energy Information Agency (EIA) and IndexMundi give estimates of the annual electrical energy demand or consumption in the USA in 2013 ranging from 3,633 to 4,886 TeraWattHours (TWh) or 12.4 to 16.7 Quads. A quad is 1.055 X 1018 Joules or 1.016 BTU (1 quadrillion BTU.)
The calculations are based on current demand only and do not include future growth. The drive towards the greater use of electric vehicles will increase this demand significantly over and above normal growth and, since most people recharge their batteries at night when the Sun is not shining, this will require a major restructuring of both the generation and storage capacities of the national grid to cope with the increased demand and its changed profile.
Power
For convenience it is often useful to convert this energy demand into the equivalent average rate of power generation or consumption. This measure assumes constant power generation 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. The power delivered is given by the energy consumed divided by the time, in this case, 1 year or 8760 hours. Thus the estimates given for average power consumed range from 415 to 535 GigaWatts (gW).
For the purposes of this example an annual energy demand of 3854 TWh corresponding to a power usage of 440 gW average generation is assumed.
Demand profile
But life is not so simple. The demand is not constant, but varies during the day and also suffers seasonal variations as well as regional variations. There are many published demand profiles reflecting these variations. The profile shown below, compiled by U.C. Berkley, is reasonably representative and offers the possibility of simpler assumptions than some other profiles. It shows that the demand during 12 daylight hours is approximately double the demand during the 12 hours of darkness. This means that 2/3 of the energy is consumed during the day and 1/3 at night.
Assuming that the demand is to be exclusively satisfied by solar power alone, the night time demand would have to be generated by the solar panels during the day.
So with an average (continuous) power demand of 440 gW, the daily energy demand is 24 X 440 = 10,560 gWh. But all of this energy will have to be captured during the 12 hours of sunlight, that is, in half the time, so that the solar power generation capacity must be 880 gW.
Of the 10,560 gWh of energy produced during the day, two thirds (7,040 gWh) will be used directly by consumers and one third (3,520 gWh) will be used to charge the battery for subsequent discharge to satisfy the consumers during the night.
The corresponding power demand will be 586.7 gW during the day and 293.3 gW during the night.
It is assumed that the daily demand profile matches the timing of the hours of sunlight, but this is not necessarily the case. However it does not significantly affect the conclusions of this study.
In practice, the solar energy captured would be more in the summer and less in the winter so that more solar panels and larger batteries would be needed in the winter and fewer in the summer. An allowance can be made for this but for the purposes of this example, these variations have been ignored.
System Requirements
From the above we can conclude that solar generating power capability of 880 gW and a battery energy capacity of 3,520 gWh will be required to satisfy the demand.
But public utilities always need a plant margin to cover, maintenance, breakdowns, unplanned peak demands and other emergencies and this is typically 20%.
Also there will be a 10% efficiency loss in the inverters necessary to convert the DC solar energy generated by the PV arrays to the AC supply connected to the distribution grid. In addition there will be a further charge-discharge round trip Coulombic efficiency loss in the batteries of about 5%. To be generous, let’s say an extra 25% of energy must be generated to cover these two efficiency losses as well as the plant margin.
Thus the generating power will need to be at least 1,100 gW or 1.1 TW and the battery capacity will need to be 4,400 gWh to allow for the efficiency losses and the plant margin.
What does this mean in practice?
The Available Solar Energy
The actual amount of solar energy impinging on the solar panel depends on several factors.
The solar energy reaching the Earth’s atmosphere, known as the irradiance, is 1,367 W/m2 normal to the Sun’s rays. By the time it reaches the ground after absorption by the atmosphere it is reduced to 1,000 W/m2 normal to the Sun’s rays. This corresponds to the energy impinging on a flat plate on the ground when the Sun is directly overhead.
But outside of the tropics, the Sun is never directly overhead and, apart from mid-day, it is never even at its highest point as it appears to move from East to West due to the rotation of the Earth. If the Sun is not directly over the plate, the energy intercepted by the plate will diminish with the actual amount intercepted being proportional to cosΘ times the “normal” incident energy, where Θ is the angle of deviation of the Sun’s rays from the normal 90° incidence. (See Solar Power – Geometry)
Then there is no Sun at all during the night.
Finally the angle to the Sun, as well as the number of daylight hours, decreases (In the northern hemisphere) during the winter months as the Earth orbits the Sun.
Taking all of these factors into account, the average of the time varying solar energy received on the ground is called the insolation and figures have been published for the actual insolation at various geographic locations by several sources.
NREL is one such source which publishes a range of charts showing the daily average solar power received during each month of the year, plus yearly averages, for different solar array types and configurations at various locations in the USA. The chart below is typical and has been used, with others in the series, in the calculations which follow.
For the purposes of this study, the location chosen for the solar plant is somewhere in the South West, the sunniest part of the country, since this will require the smallest solar array. For a tilted flat plate array, as specified below, the chart shows that the average solar energy intercepted throughout the year by the array is around 6 kWh/m2/day in the South West. If the plant were to be located in the colder northern states, the energy intercepted would drop by a third to around 4 kWh/m2/day so that the solar array would have to be about 50% larger to capture the same amount of energy. Other charts in this series show how the insolation decreases during winter months and increases during the summer.
The Solar Array Configuration
Several configurations of solar panels are available.
Fixed Array
The simplest and least expensive solar array is constructed from a series of fixed flat plate collectors all facing south and tilted towards the Sun at an angle corresponding to the latitude of the site.
Tracking Array
The efficiency can be improved by 30% or more by means of tracking systems which ensure that the solar panel is always pointing directly at the Sun. Two axis systems track the apparent changing azimuth and elevation of the Sun as the Earth rotates during the day and continues its year long journey around the Sun. This option is quite complicated and very expensive. See more about Solar Tracking.
The Electrical Energy Captured
From the NREL charts, the annual average insolation (solar energy received) in the South West of the USA is between 5 and 6 kWh/m2/day for a fixed array tilted towards the Sun and 7 to 8 kWh/m2/day for steerable two axis solar panels able to track the Sun across the sky, maintaining the Sun’s rays as close to normal as possible to the surface of the array. Let us assume 6 kWh/m2/day for a fixed array and 8 kWh/m2/day for a two axis tracking array.
Conversion Efficiency
The current generation of mass produced commercial PV cells for converting solar energy into electrical energy have a conversion efficiency of around 15%.
This means that the above fixed array can generate the equivalent of a 24 hour average continuous power output of (6÷24) X 0.15 kW/m2 during each hour or 37.5 Watts/m2.
Similarly a two axis tracking array can generate an average of 50 Watts/m2 during every hour.
During hot sunny days the PV cell output will increase due to the increased solar radiation, but at the same time the cell temperature will also rise causing the cell output power to fall due to the decrease in the conversion efficiency. See (Solar Cell Operating Characteristics).The PV cell output power typically reduces by about 0.5% for every degree Celsius increase in PV cell temperature. The precise output power achieved from the cells depends on the conditions, but to optimize the power output, water cooling is often employed to keep the cell temperature as low as possible.
The calculations in this example assume STC (Standard Test Conditions) PV cell ratings, that is a cell temperature of 25 °C without external cooling. Local conditions may necessitate cooling to get the best out of the solar arrays and this would increase the cost and complexity of the installation.
Energy Lost During Charging
Because of the mismatch during charging between the voltage generated by the PV array and the voltage of the battery being used to store the charge there is a potential energy loss which can be as high as 10% of the captured energy. This loss can normally be reduced to about 1% by using Maximum Power Point Tracking, an electronic technique designed for this purpose.
The Solar Array Dimensions
To generate the system requirements of 1,100 gW, a fixed solar array would have to have an area of 1,100,000,000,000/37.5 sq meters, made up from 29.333 billion, 1 meter square panels, covering an area of 29,333 km2 or a square with sides of 171.3 km long. This is about the size of Belgium and 50% bigger than Israel, just for the silicon PV cells.
Similarly, using the more expensive tracking array could reduce this area to 22,000 km2 or a square with sides of 148.3 km.
Solar Array Manufacturing
Note that If 1 square metre PV panels were manufactured at the rate of 1 per second, it would take 930 years to manufacture 29.3 billion panels.
It takes energy to make PV panels, especially the highly efficient, old-school crystalline silicon kind. Even just creating the silicon crystals requires heating rock or sand to around 1650 °C (3,000 °F), and that’s not counting the creation of the electronics that connect the silicon wafers to the grid, and the mounting hardware that holds the whole thing together. And then there’s the energy used to ship the panels and install them.
A study by researchers from the Netherlands and the USA (Fthenakis, Kim and Alsema, 2008), which analyses PV module production processes based on data from 2004-2006 finds that it takes 250kWh of electricity to produce 1m2 of crystalline silicon PV panel. The solar panels considered above typically produce around 300kWh electricity per year, so it will take almost a year to “pay back” the energy cost of the panel.
Service Area
The total area covered by the solar array will significantly larger than the area of the panels to allow for installation, maintenance access and periodic cleaning. The space required for the batteries is in addition to this.
Site Location
The example above assumes that the entire solar generating capacity is located in a region with the most advantageous solar conditions. What if the plant were to be located in the cloudier and chillier North East?
From the NREL solar maps, we can see that the average daily solar radiation would be reduced from 6 kWh/m2/day to 4 kWh/m2/day. Thus the average electrical power produced by the PV cells with the same efficiency of 15% will reduce from 37.5 W/m2 to 25 W/m2 and the number of one square meter solar panels required to produce the same electric power would consequently increase by 50% to 44 billion covering an area of 44,000 square kilometers or a square with sides of 210 km. Bigger than Denmark, the Netherlands or Switzerland.
On the other hand, because of the higher PV cell temperatures experienced in the South West, installations would probably require local cooling systems to optimize the power output, whereas installations in the North East would benefit since they could get by without PV cell cooling. Cooling requires additional power to pump and chill water.
The required battery capacity would be largely unaffected by the location, but the cooling requirements could change. In the warmer southern regions forced cooling will most likely be required, but in the milder northern conditions we could expect this requirement to be reduced though probably not eliminated.
The Battery
Storage Requirements and AC Power Grid Engineering Challenges
The battery is no less complicated.
Thomas Edison is reputed to have said “When people get into the battery business they automatically become liars”. That was before he got into the battery business himself. It may not be true today but there’s plenty of room for misunderstanding the battery specifications, particularly with modern Lithium batteries.
Let’s just look at the capacity here. The battery’s capacity is the amount of energy it can hold. Unfortunately this is not all usable energy since it is not advisable to keep the battery at its fully charged level with a 100% state of charge, nor should a Lithium battery be discharged to below 2 Volts.
The most stressful operating state of a battery is when it is fully charged. Lithium batteries in particular are at risk of damage from even slight overcharging and Battery Management Systems (BMS) must provide precise control of the charging process to avoid this.
Lithium batteries also suffer damage at low states of charge (SOC) because the active chemicals in the battery undergo irreversible changes at low voltage affecting both the battery’s life and its safety. See Lithium Battery Failures and SOC.
Thus a Lithium battery should operate between about 20% and 95% state of charge so that its useful capacity will be around 75% of its theoretical or installed “nameplate” capacity. In the example that follows, the capacity is considered to be the usable capacity. Battery manufacturers however usually specify the nameplate battery capacity as its total energy content or theoretical capacity rather than its useful energy content. You need to know this.
Currently, Lithium ion batteries suitable for grid storage are available from several suppliers in 40 foot containers with various energy storage capacities of around 1 mWh and costing $750,000 or more each. They usually include cooling and an electronic converter unit delivering AC power at 480 Volts 60 Hertz or similar. To store 1 mWh during a charging period of 12 hours, the average charging power must be 1mWh ÷ 12 = 83.33 kW. Similarly the battery must be capable of delivering a power of 83.33 kW during 12 hours of discharge.
These charge – discharge rates assume the full plant margin of 25% is being generated and used.
Under normal circumstances the actual base load charge – discharge power without the plant margin requirement will be 66.67 kW. However these are the average power deliveries and the peak power availability and demand could vary considerably from the averages.
To store 4,400 gWh would need 4.4 million of these 40 foot containers costing $3,300,000,000,000 or $3.3 trillion. As a quick error check on the numbers calculated above, the total power handling capability of 4.4 million containers each supplying a power requirement 66.67 kW will be 4,400,000 X 66.67 kW = 293.3 gW, matching the requirement outlined in the Demand Profile above.
For 4.4 million containers, the containers would cover an area of 130.8 million m2 = 130.8 km2 or a square with sides 11.44 km long; but adequate access space must also be provided, adding substantially to the total.The standard container exterior dimensions are 12.193 m X 2.438 m giving an area of 29.727 m2
There could be some cost and space savings if the batteries were installed in a purpose built building, but this could hamper the planned long term battery replacement program. (See Battery Ageing next)
Note: If the manufacturer’s specified 1 mWh battery capacity is the installed capacity rather than the usable capacity considered here, one third more, or a total of 5.7 million containerized batteries would be required to store the required 4,400 gWh of energy.
In warm climates, extra battery capacity (and consequent solar generating capacity needed to provide it) will be required to power forced cooling of the battery to slow its ageing process and thus avoid its premature failure.
Battery Aging
All batteries suffer deterioration with age and their end of life is generally specified as being when the capacity has reduced to 80% of what it was when it was new. For lithium batteries the lifetime is typically between eight and ten years but depends on the usage conditions. Higher temperatures accelerate battery ageing and thus reduce battery life.
For high power applications, the required battery capacity is usually specified as sufficient to cover the end of life performance. This means that the capacity when new must be 25% higher in order to meet the end of life requirements. Since the calculation above already includes a plant margin factor, there is some leeway here, but in any case it would be prudent to adopt another 10% margin to avoid end of life failures. See more about Battery Life (and Death)
The biggest problem however comes from the finite life of the battery, since the entire installation will have to be replaced every 8 to 10 years.
Battery Recycling
Unlike the situation with lead acid batteries, there are currently very few recycling plants able to recycle Lithium batteries to extract the useful chemicals. In any case, taking a Lithium Cobalt cell as an example, the Lithium content in the LiCoO2 cathode material is only 7% by weight. Lithium is between 20 and 100 times more abundant in the Earth’s crust in terms of the number of atoms than Lead and Nickel, so that the demand for recycling is less. See Battery Chemistries.
Note that if these 44 million containerized batteries were manufactured in China, it would take 587 round trips of twenty days each way on the largest container ships to deliver them to the USA.
See more about Solar Power
Among the simplifying assumptions in the post is the unstated one that a two-axis flexible array will receive vertical sunlight from dawn to dusk.. Obviously, in a close-packed array, only the east-most column of panels would receive full sunlight at dawn, those to the west lying in its shadow. The opposite occurs at sunset, with full sunlight only at around noon, depending on spacing. Anyone want to design a large three-axis array stretching from Canada to the Rio Grande?
Don’t put it too close to the Rockies, you’ll lose at least half an hour of afternoon sunlight if you do.
As with other wind and solar energy projects, the energy required to build, maintain, and back up this project would overwhelm whatever energy it produced. Unless there are order of magnitude increases in wind and solar power efficiency and reliability, they will remain energy parasites that can only survive with political mandates and subsidies.
But if we don’t build them to replace what works then there will more severe storms which will spin the wind things more (no solar during a storm) so that they might produce the energy to replace what worked and so eliminate the storms that might make the wind things work ….uh….bear with me here….I have a point…..I just need someone to tell me what it was.)
/sarc
You’re a good man…
Since “they want to ban fossil fuels, I think all those solar panels from China should arrive by solar and/or wind power including the tugs that dock the vessels. What is the economics for the longer passage?
“Over the next 50 years, utility companies in the United States must replace approximately 440 gigawatts (GW) of baseload generation capacity to provide electricity nationwide.”
…unless we can get the warmunists outa office.
What allowance have you made for winter? (Sorry if I have missed it!)
In the UK solar runs at less than 5% capacity, probably a lot less in January. This is of course at a time when demand is highest.
This would necessitate at least double the back up/battery capacity, when based on annual figures.
The article is US-centric where for the nation as a whole, the demand in summer is higher than the demand in winter – especially with the population moving to the sunbelt states. The purpose of the article was to show that an all-solar generation model doesn’t make sense in the US. As you have correctly pointed out, it makes even less sense in the UK.
The article is not US centric. It is California centric. The climate in California is far milder than the climate east of the Rockies.
The first chart specifies that they are comparing spring and fall.
Having engineering training I enjoy the application of quantifiable common sense to the prevention of bird killing power generation supply.
The problem may have at last been solved: a US patent was granted last month for a low energy producing device.. See http://ecat.com/news/e-cat-patent-granted-by-uspto
I know about the scepticism surrounding this line of research but $10,million has been paid over for the technology rights. If this proves to match its claims we can expect to have low cost domestic <10Kw units in our homes in future.
Did your engineering training involve being skeptical of those convicted of fraud? There are many con artist who make too good to be true. If you have taken chemistry and thermodynamics your BS meter should have pegged high.
I’ll believe it when i see it but the US Patent Office in the last two weeks has granted a patent for a low energy nuclear device.
A patent does not validate that a claim is operational or a statement is correct. It is simply awarded to an applicant based on novelty and lack of prior disclosure. Andrea Rossi’s claims in Italy of “cold fusion” (he calls it E-CAT) have no basis in science except in the LENR field of very low energy, hence of no practical value as an energy producing scheme. It is noteworthy that Rossi spent time in Italian prison for fraud and there is no independent verification with numbers that his E-CAT system preforms. It appears that Rossi may be using his U.S. patent to attract investors who are not knowledgeable in physics and who do not conduct adequate due diligence. Some people might use the word scam. See: http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/RossiECat/Andrea-Rossi-Energy-Catalyzer-Investigation-Index.shtml
A patent does not validate that a claim is operational or a statement is correct. It is simply awarded to an applicant based on novelty and lack of prior disclosure. Andrea Rossi’s claims in Italy of “cold fusion” (he calls it E-CAT) have no basis in science except in the LENR field of very low energy, hence of no practical value as an energy producing scheme. It is noteworthy that Rossi spent time in Italian prison for fraud and there is no independent verification with numbers that his E-CAT system preforms. It appears that Rossi may be using his U.S. patent to attract investors who are not knowledgeable in physics and who do not conduct adequate due diligence. Some people might use the word scam. See: http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/RossiECat/Andrea-Rossi-Energy-Catalyzer-Investigation-Index.shtml
There is a significant units error here. mW is milliwatt; megawatt is MW. Only a factor of a billion difference. Also, gW is wrong, it should be GW. But in that case, there is no ambiguity.
Capital letters.
the real errors are in the words written in Capitol Hill by capitalized idiotic zealots determined to destroy the world’s most effective energy distribution system.
Correct. The error relates to the convention stated above. The on-line version of the article is correct. Thanks for letting us know about the typo errors in this version. See: http://fusion4freedom.us/going-solar/
It appears the actual power is less than the projected power in the NREL map. I am in central Colorado, rated 5-6, but the installers of my panels claim an average of 4.2 KW/day. That is a 19-43% exaggeration, or 31% if the average of 5.5 KW is used.
What do your panels actually produce compared to what is claimed? Why does the solar industry report ‘expected’ performance when it is never achieved?
For the same reason auto makers tout the “EPA mileage” even though real cars on real roads never make those numbers?
“Over the next 50 years, utility companies in the United States must replace approximately 440 Gigawatts (GW) of baseload generation capacity to provide electricity nationwide. ”
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Makes me wonder how I might legislate my own corner of the tax base.
Even better………..just print money, I’ll be dead by time the bills come due.
What about the children ?,… they’ll only know what they have been told.
Until they begin to question.
Then you better hide.
Some points:
(1) don’t use the crustal abundance of Li vs Pb and Ni. Li is a ‘lithophile element ‘ like Si, Al, B, C, Ge, Ga, Na, K, Rb, Cs, Be, Mg, Ca, Sr, Ba, RE elements and a host of others that generally don’t occur as sulphides and is therefore are much dispersed in the crust which is ‘lithic’ in composition (alkali alumino-silicates mainly). Ni and Pb are ‘chalcophile’ elements which means they do not dissolve to a significant extent in alumino-silicate crustal rocks, but selectively combine with sulphur.
This results in their tendency to concentrate in veins or as stratified “cumulates” in very large liquid basic magmas in which various minerals (having different solubilities) crystallize in the melt and settle out forming stratified layers (see Bushveld Complex for the most famous type locality for this process). As the the early-forming minerals (magnesium silicates) settle out, the remaining liquid composition changes and remaining elements in the shrinking liquid phase become more concentrated until they, too, settle out (chromite, platinum group metals, for example – these are ‘siderophile elements – they like associating with a group of elements in the middle columns of the periodic table – iron the ‘type’ element). Finally, the chalcophile elements crystallize out later as a layer, or, as is common with the final residual liquids, these may be subjected to tectonic pressures and squeezed out into fractures formed in the enclosing crustal (alumino-silicate) rocks.
There are complications in these events but basically that is how it works. I have a 40yr old paper on the process – an hypothesis that quantifies the concentration of elements into mineral deposits in the crust which includes an estimate of how much (tons) of each element WAS concentrated into “resources” based on crustal abundance, USGS estimates of resources as a “statistical sample” of what is actually there, and its electro-chemical potential as a proxy for chemical activity. I’ve been thinking of putting this out here in WUWT to see if it can withstand total annihilation here!
It would be useful to me to have cost estimates here. I can’t really extract anything like a per-kW hour out of this analysis.
Currently I pay something in the range of 8 cents per kW hour. Plus a lot of complicated gobble-goo about fees and debt service and extra special stuff. But my usage cost go up by about that.
If the per kW hour cost is drastically higher than that then I really don’t care how much land it would take. It’s a non starter. I know that solar in Ontario is drastically more expensive than any other form of electricity currently on the grid. I don’t care about the land when I have already rejected it because of the foolishly high costs.
But if it were, say, 7 cents, then I could be convinced to take a look. A square of land about 200 km on a side isn’t that big a deal. Lots of human activities use up chunks of land that big.
So, help me out with some cost estimates?
Steam plants do not take much land. The generating capacity to supply a city if a million people would fit inside a Walmart. The last ship I was on in the navy had two reactors and two steam plants. Electricity produced by steam plants is very affordable at around 5 cents/kwh. If you buy coffee on the way to work, you spend more of coffee than electric power.
There are some places where electricity is more expensive but that is because government likes to tax energy and then blame energy companies. That works well for them. There are many examples where local governments disliked power plants and taxed them out of business. Gone were the property taxes and the income from workers. When a small city loses $10-20 million in tax revenue it hurts.
If make the investment in a PV systems, your property taxes will go up even if the PV systems does not save you any money.
>>If make the investment in a PV systems, your property taxes will go up even if the PV systems does not save you any money.
While all hidden costs must factor into an actual budget analysis for PV systems, this is currently not true in California. Property tax exemption on PV systems was extended in 2014 until 2025. Its nice to be subsidized. The state income tax credit has expired and was not renewed and the federal tax credit on PV solar systems expires this year.
I see 2 possible ways to do a solar dominated grid without massive storage, neither without problems:
– A massive global generation and distribution grid, just waiting for a politically motivated disruption.
– Solar power satellites, not nearly economically competitive, at least not at current launch costs.
As for storage, lithium batteries have major advantages where the storage must be compact and low mass. Utility storage does not need to be low mass. Still, even the least expensive storage will have costs, and likely an objection from the radical greenies.
The other problem with global distribution is that you can’t transmit power more than a few hundred miles without big losses. Perhaps we can look into this again when they perfect room temperature super conductors.
Chart contrivance comes to mind in place of creative modeling or data mining.
It seems a ridiculously simplistic analysis.
eg “solar energy captured would be more in the summer and less in the winter … An allowance can be made for this but for the purposes of this example …” How about cleaning dust and dirt? How long does snow stay on the ground around US? How about weeks of no sun? etc
I was intending to make this very point.
Solar panels are ideally placed in dry (ie., cloudless) sunny (ie., cloudless) sites. These tend by their nature to be dusty.
I have a holiday home in Southern Spain. During the summer, there is a build up of fine dust (sands blowing from the Sahara) which covers the garden furniture. The other day it rained (it has only rained a few times this year), the car looked like a leopard covered in brown spots (1 to 1.5 cm in diameter). Essentially it was raining a light film of mud. It is referred to as ‘red rain’ because of the reddish tint from the sand that is left behind when the rains dries out
In Spring, the swimming pool is covered with a fine layer of pollen. The pollen season goes on for about 2 weeks, and may be it takes about 3 weeks for the pool to clear. The pool looks almost mustard yellow during the height of the pollen season, gradually getting a greeny colour and then an opaque white as the pump and filter gradually removes the pollen.
All of this would have a dramatic impact upon efficiency of these panels. They would require regular cleaning to maintain efficiency, and that is unlikely to happen in view of the expense.
I suspect that the snakesoil salesmen under estimate the loss of efficiency caused by ordinary environmental factors (including bird poop) and the expense involved in regular maintenance required to keep the panels working efficiently.
I have seen many pictures of panels in farmers fields where the fields have become overgrown between the panels and thereby obscuring the sun. .
Even though the analysis is sketchy, it raises some good points of discussion. Direct energy payback for solar modules (assumed crystalline silicon) is said to be > 1 year. That’s not too bad for renewable solutions. Up to maybe 8 or 10 years for CdTe “thin film” modules. Current utility scale solar uses single axis tracking – splitting the difference between the two mentioned above. Required land area is about 0.03% of the earth’s land area. Again, not impossible. Especially since these systems will have to be distributed across the planet.
The battery issue seems to have been given equal treatment. in overview – not impossible, just requiring an order of magnitude or two more effort than we currently give it. Not cost-efficient by today’s standards.
Needs a lot more detailed wringing out to be an actual plan.
I’m no mathematician, I knew all this intuitively.
I guess I must be a genius.
I simply find photos like this obscene – http://www.juwi.de/uploads/tx_dfmediacenter/Solarpark_Lieberose.jpg
When they are done strip mining coal they are required by law to restore the land back to forest http://www.groundtruthtrekking.org/static/uploads/photos/regraded-tilled-replanted_1.700×700.jpg
Solar farms are as big as coal strip mines and, as opposed to how strip mined areas are restored back to nature, solar “farms” will NEVER be restored, there will only be more and more of them scaring the land permanently.
Look at the loped off mountain tops in Vermont for Wind Turbines. Reminds me of West Virginia.
And if you think batteries are bad, look at Pumped Storage. Dams and reservoirs that would change in height by more than 50% daily, and cover about ten times the areas of all existing dams and reservoirs presently providing the existing Hydro power. The Environmentalists would never allow that to happen. The reservoirs would also be useless for sport or recreation due to the constantly changing height/level. And the would waste about 10 % of the power they provide. Same for pumped air, CO2, whatever stored in unused salt mines, oil wells or whatever.
For the nearby future the solution should come from the fusion project, or is that wasted money.?
Please see our on-line presentation titled “Why Fusion is the Only Realistic Solution” at: http://fusion4freedom.us/category/issues/fusion-solution/ This is on our website and is an extensive section covering all the issues surrounding the future of energy and the need to stop wasting money on renewables as defined by today’s politicians which only serve to incorrectly raise people’s expectations and drain federal tax dollars in the green energy scheme of big green corporate largesse
Fusion is the power of the future, and has been for the last 50 years.
Fusion indeed is the power of the future. The joke about always has been for the last 30 years and always will be is unfortunate. The reason fusion has not been developed relates to the fact that on the civilian energy side (as opposed to the NNSA managed weapons side) fusion science has been poorly managed and chronically underfunded. We still have a fair amount of high energy experimental and plasma physics to do, to fully understand all the instabilities leading to stagnation, etc. Whereas the government and the popular science media wants people to believe we have spent billions and billions of dollars on dedicated and focused fusion science and research, this is not the case. In 1980 President Carter signed the magnetic fusion energy engineering act after a universally unanimous vote of approval in both the house and senate. Two years later the funding was reduced by 75% at the direction of President Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman. Then in 1985 Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev convinced President Reagan to discontinue the American unilateral development of fusion and set forth the proposition of an international consortium to do fusion; initially the U.S., Russia, and China. Our DOD would have no part of this so the efforts languished for many years. Ultimately ITER was formed and the U.S. now is only a 9% partner in ITER which is sited in Southern France. Unfortunately the current administration has directed the DOE that all nonmilitary weapons fusion R&D money be directed on U.S. ITER related projects as a matter of our ITER obligations. ITER is a magnetic tokomak approach which is now $10 billion dollars over budget and close to 20 years beyond schedule. It is effectively run by the IAEA under the UN. Imagine putting the UN in charge of developing energy (remember he who controls energy controls the world.) I have assembled the absolute best web site on fusion energy science, history, project news, politics and the like. We have an excellent treatment of Innovative Confinement fusion approaches being conducted in the private sector and the news section is updated daily. We have close to 50 videos on fusion. My article “Who Killed Fusion” is the most complete and credible history of fusion and its incompetent management and there is a detailed article about Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev and the downfall of fusion science in the U.S. See: http://fusion4freedom.us/ and/or the sister site at: http://fuelrfuture.com/ and indeed as my on-line presentation is titled, “Fusion is the Only Realistic Solution” at: http://fuelrfuture.com/category/issues/fusion-solution/
Lot’s of interesting back-and-forth on this one. If I had the time, I’d calculate the number of square km coal pits are opened each year, and use that for the area of coal generation. Any one done that calculation yet? Please share.
There is a coal mine and large coal plant that the interstate runs across in Gillette, Wyoming. If you are not looking for it, you will pass by it without noticing it. If you are worried about eyesores, think about NYC.
Ah… as Willis says…. Wind and the Sun are FREE! Everything else costs money…… reality bites…. hard!\
No one charges you for coal or uranium. They are free too.
What costs is making use of them, same as for wind and solar.
Your calculation needs some improvement. First…you can’t have all the panels in the southwest….in fact a small percentage will be located there. You can’t ship all this power to where it’s needed….you only get to ship it a few hundred miles before energy transmission losses become to great…..therefore…at best you’d only get 4 watt/m2/day.
You’d would need considerable storage and panels for the days the sun doesn’t shine. This can be extended periods of time too….I lived in syracuse…sun didn’t shine between Nov.To May.
The land area would be much higher perhaps by a factor of 10. Not very much land is flat….and it’s usually already used by farming. There needs to be space in between panels. Due to the angle of the panel array. Also need access ways for maintenance. Figure a 50 percent loss there.
Figuring all of this you’d probably need 3 times as many panels. I bet you could not find enough usable land for this
Come on. Continental crust contains 15 ppm of fissile material (Thorium &. Uranium) on average and one ton of it is enough to feed a 1GW power plant for a year, if it is used in an efficient manner. That’s 70 thousand tons of granite to be mined, size of a football field to a depth of 12 feet. For the same purpose one needs 4 million tons of coal. To get to that amount, you have to remove a lot more rock from above coal layers. Therefore volume of annual mining can be decreased more than a hundredfold and you do not need special sites, you can dig down almost anywhere. That’s for a time when all concentrated reserves are gone, but we have much better ores for millennia.
If nuclear fuel is used efficiently (not like the 0.5% fuel efficiency of current nuclear plants), you’ll have much less nuclear waste with next to no long half life transuranic contamination in it, so its radiation is back to background level in several centuries. Therefore it is sustainable, so we do not have an energy crisis, not even in the long run.
Compare it to the insane land use requirements of solar power, together with millions of tons of batteries.
Just a quick note. Thorium is a fertile element not a fissile one like uranium or man made plutonium. Thorium can be used in fission reactors with a properly designed fuel cycle supplying the needed fast neutrons. See: http://www.whatisnuclear.com/articles/thorium.html However fission is indeed a solid energy solution for energy production and certainly the bridge to future fusion solutions.
You are right, Thorium is not fissile, just as most of Uranium (99.27% of it, isotope 238U). However, it can be turned into 233U in an appropriate reactor design, and that’s fissile, so it can be used for energy production. And you don’t even need fast neutrons to do that.
I do not know if fission energy is a bridge to future fusion solutions or not, but it does not really matter. We have ample reserves of fission precursors in Earth’s crust for the rest of the solar system’s lifetime, so it is sufficient in itself.
Fusion energy has its own problems. Unlike fission, it is very difficult to initiate it in a controlled manner, what is more, all simple pathways produce much more neutrons than fission reactors for the same energy output. And neutron radiation is really nasty, it is very difficult to contain it and does tremendous structural damage to all construction materials around.
Aneutronic fusion, on the other hand, is hardly more than a pipe dream.
Fission is the bridge to fusion. The comments regarding radiation and radioactive waste from fusion need explanation. Fusion produces no direct radiation, per se. However certain fusion reactions such as the deuterium tritium (DT) produce substantial amounts of high energy neutrons which can alter containment structure integrity and create radioactive byproducts. That is now typically addressed by a lithium bath which is also proposed to produce the needed tritium in a breeding process. Aneutronic reactions such as 3He D or P 11Boron are indeed more difficult and we must first develop experience with DT reactions, but they will ultimately be developed over time. Fusion indeed is the power of the future. The joke about always has been for the last 30 years and always will be is unfortunate. The reason fusion has not been developed relates to the fact that on the civilian energy side (as opposed to the NNSA managed weapons side) fusion science has been poorly managed and chronically underfunded. We still have a fair amount of high energy experimental and plasma physics to do to fully understand all the instabilities leading to stagnation, etc. Whereas the government and the popular science media wants people to believe we have spent billions and billions of dollars on dedicated and focused fusion science and research, this is not the case. In 1980 President Carter signed the magnetic fusion energy engineering act after a universally unanimous vote of approval in both the house and senate. Two years later the funding was reduced by 75% at the direction of President Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman. Then in 1985 Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev convinced President Reagan to discontinue the American unilateral development of fusion and set forth the proposition of an international consortium to do fusion; initially the U.S., Russia, and China. Our DOD would have no part of this so the efforts languished for many years. Ultimately ITER was formed and the U.S. now is only a 9% partner in ITER. Unfortunately the current administration has directed the DOE that all nonmilitary weapons fusion R&D money be directed on U.S. ITER related projects as a matter of our ITER obligations. ITER is a magnetic tokomak approach which is now $10 billion dollars over budget and close to 20 years beyond schedule. It is effectively run by the IAEA under the UN. Imagine putting the UN in charge of developing energy (remember he who controls energy controls the world.)I have assembled the absolute best web site on fusion energy science, history, project news, politics and the like. We have an excellent treatment of Innovative Confinement fusion approaches being conducted in the private sector and the news section is updated daily. We have close to 50 videos on fusion. My article “Who Killed Fusion” is the most complete and credible history of fusion and its incompetent management and there is a detailed article about Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev and the downfall of fusion science in the U.S. See: http://fusion4freedom.us/ and/or the sister site at: http://fuelrfuture.com/ and indeed as my on-line presentation is titled, “Fusion is the Only Realistic Solution” at: http://fuelrfuture.com/category/issues/fusion-solution/
What I take from this is that N Korea is 60 years ahead of curve and the rest of the “civilized” world seems hell bent to catch up.
I wish I could post a picture here of Asia and that section of the world at night. North Korea is virtually dark at night while the rest of the developed world glows brightly. Great analogy.
The future most environmentalists envision for the rest of us.
The leaders of course will always get power and other luxuries, much like Pyongang is an isolated spot of light in the N. Korean countryside.
You think it is easy for the leaders of North Korea?
You have no idea what it is like:
They are so ronery.
Ignore the section on the analysis of the battery issues. It will not be relevant because, since we will be able to use technology to control the climate, that means all we have to do is put suitably sized solar panel farms all around the equator. ‘As The World Turns’ [catchy title, yes?] the sun will always shine on half the panels. That vaunted technology previously mentioned will easily be able to transmit the power generated to where it is needed. Therefore ‘batteries not included’. That same technology will of course be able to prevent the wars which would otherwise inevitably break the wires used to move the energy. Problem Solved!