Guest post by David Middleton
So-called renewable energy sources face many economic and thermodynamic hurdles; all of which are routinely ignored by the government officials who spend our tax dollars. One of the biggest hurdles is storage. The only way wind and solar could ever reliably provide base-load is through the deployment of economically sustainable storage systems. Battery packs are one of the favored “solutions.” Li-ion battery prices have “plunged”since 2010 from $1,000/kWh to just over $200/kWh. Bloomberg New Energy Finance is ecstatic about this.
Words fail me. Well, maybe not totally fail me. We currently pay about 10¢ per kWh for electricity. Our electric utility can afford to sell us electricity for 10¢/kWh largely due to the fact that natural gas-fired power plants generate electricity for about 6¢/kWh. The Energy Information Agency forecasts that solar PV power plants entering service in 2022 will be able to generate electricity for 8.5¢/kWh. This would make solar PV competitive with natural gas… Right? Nooooo. Natural gas combined cycle has an average capacity factor of 87%. Solar PV’s average capacity factor is 25%. So, you would have to deploy at least 3 MW of solar PV to offset 1 MW of natural gas. Then you would have to deploy a storage system to deliver electricity when “the Sun don’t shine.” At $200/kWh, solar PV with storage would run about $58/kWh to fully offset natural gas at $0.06/kWh…
Of course, the battery pack is rechargeable. However, even if the battery back survived 1,500 discharge cycles at full capacity, the lifetime storage cost would still be $0.13/kWh… A total cost of about $0.22/kWh. Since heat degrades Li-ion battery life, they aren’t likely to maintain full capacity very long in places where solar PV works best (deserts), particularly with the newly discovered Photovoltaic Heat Island (PVHI) effect.
BNEF’s celebration of $200/kWh battery packs was so ridiculous, that the editors of Real Clear Energy lampooned it.
It’s All About the Battery
By Editors
October 12, 2016
The general public (defined as those who don’t read energy news because they think electricity lives somewhere inside their apartment wall) doesn’t know it yet, and probably never will, but batteries are one hot (no pun intended, Samsung) topic.
It should be no secret by now (even to the notoriously sluggish general public) that Samsung has been forced to completely kill its entire Galaxy 7 cell phone line because the built-in lithium-ion batteries kept exploding.
[…]
The wind and solar energy industries, for example, are essentially in a kind of holding mode until a battery is developed that can store their energy to be used in the fallow periods when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Until then they kind of limp along letting natural gas fill in for them at night, during storms and when they’re just feeling to weak to get to work.
The electric car industry is also waiting for better batteries. The problem with range (the number of miles one can drive without recharging) has hinged on the fact that EV car batteries are very heavy to begin with and putting in an even bigger battery to get greater range sort of defeats the environment-saving purpose.
None of this seems to phase Bloomberg’s notoriously aggressively environmentalist New Energy Finance think tank. (BNEF generates studies and articles which then get top billing in Bloomberg’s news publications.) BNEF is in a Hosana! Hosana! mood today because they’ve noticed that lithium-ion costs are going down.
[…]
Cheap li-ion batteries will spawn more electric cars which will spawn more self-driving cars which will be paired with more Uber type softwares which will take us to….the green ideal, the self-driving taxi.
Taxis, geddit? Emphatically not individually-owned cars. The family car is just so inefficient and wasteful and space-hogging and just plain selfish.
Don’t worry: A self-driving taxi will never deposit you in a shipping container instead of at your home.
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Recently I have been seeing the word “phase” used instead of “faze”. Is this a newly approved spelling?
IIRC..”phase” has always been used when talking about anything electronic..
“Faze” = “He was not fazed by that insult”…
I’m old enough to cringe every time someone uses ‘phase’ when they mean ‘faze’.
Set your phasor to stun.
For an extremely complete and detailed discussion of energy storage please see Berrie Lawson’s article titled: “Grid Scale Energy nStorage.” There is no more detailed treatment on the subject in one convenient location than this article: http://fusion4freedom.us/grid-scale-energy-storage-systems/
Perhaps one of the most overlooked “factors” about lithium ion batteries is the simple fact that lithium is not exactly as plentiful as, say, copper. The cost of batteries may be coming down, but the quantity of affordably recovered lithium will be going down, thus the price will be going up. It is totally anal to try to base an economy on a very finite quantity of an element. I suppose if we kill off 75% of the world’s population as the green movement seems to want to do, the quantity available will be come less limiting, but failing that, it is stupid to look in this direction for a solution to energy needs.
Granted, the same situation is present in using carbon fuels, but at least the window is wider and the opportunity to create effective alternatives is longer. What I have yet to figure out is why we waste so much time and energy on researching “stopgap solutions” instead of actually looking creatively for sustainable solutions to the future energy crisis. Killing off people just doesn’t strike me as the best policy to prolong the period of civilization as we know it. I know that, most likely, if this last – killing off people as a solution – is the way we will be going, I most likely will be in the fired at line, not the firing line, as I am getting older and may want to enter into retirement, thus being seen as a burden by those that are still working.
Yes, look at the known lithium supply, where it’s located, and what lithium extraction looks like.
Lithium extraction is not clean or green. Online photos of lithium extraction are available.
Looks has very little to do with the environmental harm. Lithium Salts are pumped out of the ground and stored in above ground pools for several weeks to concentrate through evaporation. There are only a handful of these sites worldwide and they are reasonably safe. (For instance, they are much safer than the hundreds of lead acid battery production plants — most of which are Superfund sites in the United States.)
And how much lithium supply does the U.S. have? Will lithium use make the U.S. more energy independent or more dependent on foreign lithium supplies?
I am amazed that anyone calling themselves green can defend the solar and wind plants that are destroying natural habitats all across this country. They pave paradise and put up a parking lot and howl how nature has been saved. What a crock.
“Big Yellow Taxi” is a song written, composed, and originally recorded by Joni Mitchell in 1970
“They paved paradise to put up a parking lot” and “Hey farmer, farmer, put away that DDT now” – and sentimental sound. The line “They took all the trees, and put ’em in a tree museum / And charged the people a dollar and a half just to see ’em” refers to Foster Botanical Garden in downtown Honolulu, which is a living museum of tropical plants, some rare and endangered.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Yellow_Taxi
Just out of interest, how many batteries would you need to store enough electricity through the rest of the year, to last a household through the winter. (In the UK, solar produces two fifths of bugger all then)
Let’s assume the average household uses 2000 KWh during winter.
I am not surprised that solar does not work too well in the UK given the relative absence of sunshine
The sunniest town in the UK is Bognor Regis on the south west coast which receives about 1800 hours of sunshine pa but the further north you go that number drops away
Compare that with Australian capital cities ( mostly on the coast where it is cloudier than inland)
Melbourne 2200 Adelaide & Sydney 2500 Perth and Brisbane 3000 sunshine hours pa
I don’t know whether the angle of the sun as determined by latitude as well as sunshine hours affects the quantum of solar energy hitting the panels, but if it does then the higher latitudes in the UK around 52 degrees +north vs 37 to 30 degrees or so south for those Australian cities would also act against the relative effectiveness of solar energy in the UK
BTW – David makes the point:
Our electric utility can afford to sell us electricity for 10¢/kWh largely due to the fact that natural gas-fired power plants generate electricity for about 6¢/kWh
The difference of course is various grid, admin costs, taxes etc. In the UK it would also included subsidies for wind mills, solar etc etc
You could only avoid these costs if you were prepared to cut yourself off from the grid completely. Even then, the costs would still be there, and would simply have to be borne by other consumers. (In particular, poorer ones who might not be able to afford solar panels, or own homes big enough to fit them on. )
This would hardly be progressive!
Do the estimates for costs of solar and wind include the cost of associated transmission lines and associated transmission losses?
Texas spent $7 billion on power lines to bring power from the wind sites to the cities. Other types of power can be located much closer to the cities.
The LCOE includes some of the transmission line costs. I don’t think transmission losses are included.
Texas was smart… and had lots of money at the time, thanks to oil & gas production.
Is it too much to ask all the progressive/green/liberal/whatevertheyarethisweek who want us to basically go back to the caves put all their OWN money into this stuff AND use ONLY this technology?
Here in Toronto, Canada, an Alpha Green (Bob Hunter, formerly of Greenpeace) absolutely chortled that he was going to get in on the ground floor of our nifty wind turbine, before, you know, all those greedy capitalists did.
If these guys were a tenth as smart as they think they are, they wouldn’t have to hire students to go door to door or take up space on the sidewalk outside of malls to raise money. They’d all be billionaires many times over.
The phone device in question is the Galaxy Note 7, not the Galaxy 7. I’m typing this now on a Galaxy S7 smartphone, which does not have battery issues.
David,
I am sorry, but you are misusing the $/kWh for storage. It is a volumetric cost based on the size of the battery, not a variable cost of production; If one wants to store 1 kWh, the battery costs $200. Similarly, if one wants to store 10 kWh, the battery costs $2,000. Where your analysis fails is that once the battery is sized and purchased, you only need to pay for the energy to recharge the battery. You apply the full output of the 3x solar PV system to the $200/kWh, this is significantly in error.
In theory, you would optimize the size of both the solar array from an energy produced perspective and the storage for a volumetric perspective so as to maximize the delivered kWh per day. You would oversize the solar array so that when the sun is shining not only are you servicing the demand at the time, you are also charging the battery. Once the sun goes down, the battery kicks in.
Make no mistake, an optimized system is exorbitantly expensive as I have run these numbers for multiple clients, a factor of 10 is a good rule of thumb over retail rates under the best insolation conditions (if cloudy days are involved, forget it). The factor or approximately 1,000 is embarrassingly overstating the case.
Regards
Maybe I’m misreading what you wrote… But I think your explanation doesn’t seem to jive with this graph…
?w=720
Enter stage left
The NUCLEAR BATTERY
(Small modular disposable / recyclable reactor)
Conventional oil, gas and coal have had 100 years ++ of practical exploitation to refine generation efficiency – there is little more to come.
Despite massive spend over the last 10 years, solar, wind etc are in their infancy, as is battery technology. If efficiency improvements in battery cost per kwh follow the performance of the last five years, costs will fall by 80%.
This may be wildly optimistic – but we should not count on the current status quo indefinitely – in 5 – 10 years storage technologies may have refined to the point they are contenders, not wholly uncompetitive.
You really need to learn a little history.
Wind is several hundred years old and even solar is some 50 years old.
They have been making practical batteries for over 100 years. Well before the first practical gas powered car was built.
80%???
The need to fall by at least 2 orders of magnitude.
Regarding oil & gas exploration & exploitation, we have barely scratched the surface of discovery and recovery efficiency. Improvements in seismic data acquisition and processing continuously enable us to “see” things we couldn’t see before. The typical oil well only recovers about 10% of the oil in place. Current enhanced recovery methods enable 20-60% recoveries. Technology acts as a cost-deflater in our business, just as much as it does in solar & wind.
The fact that solar and wind generation may become less expensive in the future, is irrelevant to the current build-out of uneconomic infrastructure. Our government isn’t funding the development of new technology when they mandate and subsidize solar power plants. They are funding the uneconomic build out of utility scale infrastructure because they think they see a future need for solar power.
Imagine if the government had mandated and subsidized the manufacturing of a home version of the UNIVAC I in 1957 because some prescient bureaucrats foresaw a future market for home computers. The misallocation of capital would have been horrendous.
With energy, it’s even worse. Electricity is a cost. When bureaucrats mandate that “x” percentage of electricity be generated by so-called renewable sources, they are mandating higher energy costs – they are destroying wealth. When government subsidizes the build out of utility scale solar power plants, they are subsidizing more expensive and less available electricity – they are destroying wealth.
When the free market is allowed to work, people like Thomas Edison, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs create wealth.
The problem isn’t teething problems with a new technology. The problem is a mentally deficient government crowbarring the economic equivalent of a 1957 home version of the UNIVAC I into an economy with no real market for a prohibitively expensive home version of the UNIVAC I.
Some day in the future coal, gasoline, natural gas, nuclear fission and just about every other power generation source will be replaced by something that delivers more value to the economy… Real value… Measured in $$$. Not phony value like “social cost of carbon,” EROEI or fill-in-the-blank averted. That day is not here yet.
Man did not leave the Stone Age because of a stone shortage. Man did not advance from the Chalcolithic to the Bronze Age because brilliant government bureaucrats forced coppersmiths to purchase bronze credits.
Terry,
First oil is rarely used to generate electricity in the US. Catalyst developments are the new technology that improves use of fossil fuels, these are exciting and provided by the free market without government subsidies. There seems to be no end to the chemistry side of newer and better catalysts. Just look at the application of plastics in every product we buy including auto’s. All these come from fossil fuels. It is not mature and the opportunities in new catalysis is endless.
Second, Natural gas has only more recently been used for electricity generation because of the impressive technology developments mostly fracking that has dramatically increased an abundance of and lowered the cost of natural gas. The fossil fuel folks have found and developed many times additional more BTU’s than solar and wind combined and dramatically lowered the cost of both oil and natural gas.
Third, wind and solar are not in their infancy , wind was used before fossil fuels. No thoughtful investor would assume that there will be a dramatic increase in efficiency, because both depend on a fossil energy source for application. A big part of the cost especially for wind turbines is the concrete, steel, land use, etc. Except for free land use all these should be expected to increase. Do they pay taxes like private Companies on the land and capital investment The government is not honest when they project higher efficiency improvement and dramatic reduction in cost. Unfortunately the government has not learned that there are various laws of thermodynamics that they cannot violate. Mankind has been looking for a better battery for a century, and a break through has been elusive.
If one thinks a breakthrough is near, why invest in defective technology today, wait until later when a better option is developed. Spend the money on research rather than commercialization. Let the free market decide when to commercialize.
The problem with wind is there is no economy of scale. Each turbine is an individual unit requiring its own individual base structure and individual coupling to the grid.
Every component used in wind is very old technology, rotors, gearbox, shaft, generator. There can be no great improvement in the design of these components, and one knows when a technology has reached its zenith and that is when minaturisation is no longer happening.
If one wants more output from a windturbine, one does not get a more efficient product in the same or smaller package. Instead one ends up with a bigger turbine.
Because of wind shadow, these large turbines take up ever increasing areas of land.
We are not dealing with something akin to radios which went from valves to transistors to IC chip
There is no revolution coming. Wind will never get significantly cheaper.
OK – you buy a 1-KW-HR battery for $200. You charge it at night with .$.04 KW/HR power but assume that various inefficiencies of conversion from grid AC to battery DC back to grid AC and battery efficiency means you require 1.2 KW-HR to produce the returned power of 1 KW-HR. Therefore costs about $.048 to charge the battery to produce the 1 KW-HR. Now you sell the power at peak time for $.12 KW/HR for a net gross profit of $.072 per charge cycle. You do this for 250 days a year (Monday thru Friday) and the net gross is $18 per year. $200/$18= 11.1 years to pay back cost of the 1-KW-HR battery. Lots of other costs not considered but I think one can see that if the downward cost trend continues to $100 per KW-HR that these things may very well make economic sense. In CA peak power is sometimes well above $.20 KW/HR and off peak often less than 4 cents.
The problem is you get 2,000 (if you are lucky) charge/discharge cycles and the battery is kaput, headed for the recycling center. So @ur momisugly 250 per year the battery only lasts 8 years. You will never pay back the cost of the battery because the battery won’t last 11.1 years.
You are also ignoring the cost of the DC/AC AC/DC converters (which turn out to be almost as expensive as the batteries), the labor required to install all this, uninstall old batteries, etc etc. etc.
I will just build a gas plant and I’ll not only be profitable if peak hours are $0.08 per kilowatt, I’ll make far more profit than your battery storage concern at any price above that as well.
The only place this technology makes sense is on islands like Hawaii where it’s expensive to import fossil fuels and there’s no native source. At that point it’s cheaper to do solar, wind, and batteries.
Peter
Peter,
I don’t argue that the gas fired combined cycle plant would be more profitable.
I did mention that other costs were not considered and specifically mentioned the converter/inverter.
My point is that at $100 per KW-HR the batteries may be profitable. Possibly the $100 level will never be met, but also possible is $50. Whether gas, coal, nuclear, solar wind etc. there will always be a large KW/HR price difference between peak and off peak (and I mean 10PM to 6AM for off peak) and there is a reasonable possibility that battery storage may be practical.
Jim Berry
1) You neglect the cost of the electronics needed to charge and discharge the battery.
2) You neglect the cost to install the battery and electronics.
3) You neglect the carrying cost of the money used to buy and install the battery and associated hardware.
4) You neglect the fact that the capacity of your battery decreases by a small bit each time it is cycled.
PS: From what I have read, the best way to destroy your battery quickly is to charge it fully, then discharge it fully over and over again.
So… It’s worse than I thought it was… ???
Sorry, that was supposed to be in response to Jim above. I don’t know how it got down here.
Mark, thanks
How about the cost of land or structure, taxes, insurance, maintenance, replacement, disposal, interest and every thing else private industry is required to pay.
I completely agree it’s worse than David M. thought it was, but as far as this statement, the PowerWall cycles the batteries between 20% and 80%. I try to do the same on my iPhone (for example).
Which just subtracts from capacity of course. It’s typically 60% of the rating, but that’s how you get 2,000 cycles out of it…
Peter
‘The only way wind and solar could ever reliably provide base-load is through the deployment of economically sustainable storage systems.’
No. Periods of no sun/wind are of undefined length. Providing back up for a day might be practical. Once you get to a few days out, the cost is prohibitive. Storage becomes non productive assets.
This is antithetical to base-load.
The first part is a bit embarassing. It wrongly assumes you have to buy new batteries for every kWh you want to store.
Later on, the post account for recharging and states 22 cents per kWh. At this price you can run an economy. It hurts, but it’s feasible.
So this post might change my mind after all. But not in the way it is supposed to.
The first part sets up the second part… Neither of which should change your mind, if you can do math.
Please accept my apologies for not reading all of the comments, but the main article is just deliberately missing the point.
An electric car needs a minimum of 200Wh/Tonne Mile to overcome rolling resistance, at least until the tyre companies come up with better tyres. That means that a 1Kwh battery takes you no more than 5 miles, and hence the Nissan leaf with a 20Kwh Battery rated at 100 miles, and a Tesla with an 85Kwh battery in the 300’s of miles. So at $200/Kwh, a car battery costs $4000-$12000 depending on range requirements.
Electricity is generally cheaper than gasoline, I can fill my 85Kwh battery for no more than, say, $17, probably more like $10. In the UK, 300 miles of fuel will cost me say $50. So I save $40 every time I fill up.
Suppose my car lasts 100,000 miles. I fill up 333 times, so I save over $13,000 on fuel in the life of the vehicle. 333 charges/discharges is not a scary number even for current battery tech.
At some point, not very far away, a cheap enough battery makes an electric vehicle the most economical choice. What’s more, it has no gearbox, no clutch, minimal cooling system, and overall a fraction of the moving parts of an IC car. If theory means anything, it is therefore intrinsically more reliable. It is also more accelerative, (aka sexier) if they do it right.
$200/Kwh is probably not cheap enough to drive a switch, but $100/Kwh may well be. Musk seems to think so too. Further, also c.f. Musk and the ‘Power Wall’, an Auto-sized battery will happily buffer most households weekly power requirements. Put one in your basement and Solar panels on your roof – you would be insane to go off-grid, but your power import requirements can shrink drastically.
Batteries really are a world-changing tech, and we are getting quite close to a cut-over point.
As a smart old man used to say, the stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, and the oil age won’t end because we run out of oil. It will end because we come up with something better.
My post wasn’t about cars. The point was how the cost of storage makes solar PV even more uneconomic despite the “plunge” in battery prices.
Regarding Tesla… I am blown away by its engineering. I love to look at them. They are technological masterpieces.
If I could afford a $100,000 toy, it would be the second one I would pick.
The average price of the Tesla Model S starts out twice as high as the 5-yr true cost to own of the MB E350.
If I drove a Tesla from Houston to Dallas, I could recharge at one of two charging stations between here and there, Huntsville and Corsicana. If I drove a MB from Houston to Dallas, I could refuel at one of dozens of gas stations between here and there.
Tesla has a ways to go before I would choose it over the MB. Since I drive a Jeep Rubicon, I wouldn’t choose either, unless I could afford a G-Wagon.
My Dad had an electric car in the 1990s. The battery life was only about 3 to 4 years, at a cost of about £2,500 .to £3,500. he had the car for about 11 years and had 3 sets of batteries,.
Whenever you use any appliance in the car, it starts draining the batteries, eg., heater, rear window demister, windscreen wipers, headlamps etc.
The batteries needed charging every day. Of course, that was not a complete cycle, but the idea that you can do 100,000 on 33 cycles is nothing like real life experience.
whoops typo
Yes, this is the reason we don’t see too many electric cars in Canada in the winter. Can’t imagine how much fun it would be choosing between freezing and spinning in snow.
In the UK, 300 miles of fuel costs you $50 because most of that is tax. Without tax, the fuel will cost you approximately $20, possibly a bit less.
If the tax man is denied at the gas pump, you can be sure that other tax rates will be adjusted upwards to compensate. As an individual move, you can beat the tax man with this strategy. As a societal move, it’s a fool’s game to try to change behavior to avoid paying taxes.
@ur momisugly Russell Robles-Thome October 19, 2016 at 2:57 pm
Please accept my apologies for not reading all of the comments, but the main article is just deliberately missing the point.
An electric car needs a minimum of 200Wh/Tonne Mile to overcome rolling resistance, at least until the tyre companies come up with better tyres. That means that a 1Kwh battery takes you no more than 5 miles, and hence the Nissan leaf with a 20Kwh Battery rated at 100 miles, and a Tesla with an 85Kwh battery in the 300’s of miles. So at $200/Kwh, a car battery costs $4000-$12000 depending on range requirements.
*****
Russell, you are comparing your subsidized cost of electric cars versus the cost heavily taxed cost of petroleum cars — yeah it works for you, but how about everyone else that is paying for your folly.
You ignore the fact that at least half the cost of fuel is taxes. Once you start taxing electricity to pay for roads, the cost differential disappears.
Yes, you guys are right: most of the difference is Tax, but I don’t see that going away. Can anyone imagine petrol taxes being slashed to make way for taxes on EVs? My crystal ball says that when EVs become popular, the govt will add to road-tax to make up for lost revenue from Petrol Tax. But they will leave Petrol Tax in place to keep the differential tax in place. Petrol car owners will get hit twice. Probably that will accelerate the move to EV…
In any case, the cause of the differential is irrelevant. In the UK (is our petrol *actually* the most expensive in the world?) and probably elsewhere in Europe, we are seriously close to a cut-over point. The US will be further away. Here the choice is (ball-park) $17,000 on petrol, or $4000 on electricity plus a 70Kwh battery. When a battery is $100/Kwh, that’s a very interesting equation which may well be good enough to drive adoption. The fact that EVs ought to be simpler and therefore more reliable and cheaper is also a plus.
Anyway, next time you come to buy a car, do the calculation, and see how cheap you think a battery needs to be to make an EV attractive to you.
First of all, I can put over 500 miles’ worth of diesel in my Mercedes in 2 – 3 minutes. How long is it going to take to put the same mileage into an EV? Further, being a fairly elderly old girl, she runs very happily on vegetable oil, obtainable from many outlets for as little as 50p per litre.
Second, it may have escaped your attention, but the company that supplies the EV charging points on the UK motorway network has just implemented a major price hike in the 20 minute charging cost, so the EV is no longer cheaper to “fill” than a conventional vehicle.
Thirdly, I have always carried a spare gallon of fuel in my cars, and over the past half-century that has been a life-saver on several occasions. Try that with an EV.
Also The stone age did not end because a government subsidy caused man to move on.
The technology is not there yet and may never be there.
My state just added a 23 cent per gallon tax on gasoline, where do the electric car owner pay his/her share.
Including massive taxes the cost of 300 miles of fuel in the US is currently about $ 24 dollars.
The average total tax is circa 48 cents per gallon which electric cars do not pay yet. Why?
As I recall, the motor fuel tax subsidizes other expenditures besides roads. How do government’s replace those funding sources as the revenues are eliminated? Not to mention the massive taxes fossil fuel companies pay to the US treasury and royalities paid on oil and naturl gas production to the Feds and the States.
http://www.api.org/~/media/Files/Statistics/State-Motor-Fuel-Taxes-Report-Oct-2016.pdf
Get ready for GPS calculated taxing on mileage. Similar to the road tax imposed upon interstate and cross country truckers. Search “highway Use Tax” or “Truck Mileage Tax.” State legislators are talking about it now in states with increased numbers of electric and hybrid vehicles. .
Yes, Californication has been pushing this for some time. Gasoline (Petrol) tax was initially intended to fund road works and maintenance (ie, Shovel Ready Jobs), but was too lucrative not to raid to fund the General Fund.
Now that Cash Cow is drying up with high mileage, electric\hybrid vehicles; and mandated manufacture fleet efficiencies.
The solution: find more ways to tax.
The article is sound but as so many articles about energy it doesn’t take into account that prices of almost everything depends of the available energy, so doing price analysis can only work at a given instance and never to do projections. Why does a battery costs 1000$ or 200$ and not 1$ per Kw? Simple, cost of energy which defines the price off all commodities and human labor needed to produce them.
If solar develops and since there’s no lack of space to put units it could at some point lower the cost of energy due of increasing availability, so panels and batteries should fall in price to a point where the only cost would be the cost of human labor.
The difference of solar to all other forms of producing energy, wind included, is that almost anyone can own a producing unit so drop in costs will only accelerate the implementation of new units instead of stopping it as is the case for the other sources since only big producers could afford or sources are limited, plus shareholders usually don’t like diminishing returns. Another aspect is that solar is also scalable, as long as you have space to put more that is, so as prices drop it’s easy to add more power and the cycle goes on.
Now the only thing that can limit solar development is the eroi. As we stand I have little doubt that solar has positive returns, at a rate much lower than other sources no doubt about it either but again, with that particular factor that number of units can be virtually unlimited so the only question is if there’s anything in the producing chain (metal, rare earth, etc) that can became so rare as even with more energy available exploitation of a particular resource would make it unsustainable.
First, there’s lack of space. Is there free land out there somewhere? What about the power lines that have to go there to where the power is used?
second, a majority of the cost of installation is already labor and maintenance. There’s now diminishing returns on the material cost of solar panels. There’s less than one halving left in solar costs and then it’s a hard plateau on labor costs.
The whole point of energy production is to substitute for labor costs. Else we’d all be pushing wheelbarrows around. Every extra dollar spend on solar and wind is dollars not spent on humans achieving better things in their lives (or eating for that matter)
Peter
What matters is not your doubts, but the facts.
At present, the eroi on solar is strongly negative.
$200.00 / kWh????!!!!!!
And what do most of us pay the power company? $000.15 / kWh more or less.
Need to do a lot more plunging.
[One is the price of storage and has multiple cycles, the other is the price of energy used . . . mod]
The English language is one of the most beautiful human constructs. It includes words like ‘gaga’.
So before we get all ‘gaga’ about declining ‘per unit’ price curves for solar cells and lithium batteries, let’s seriously look at the cost inputs to this production.
First, understand the the vast percentage of primary production (material processing, fabrication, overland transport, etc.) occurs in China.
Secondly, and please read this slowly. China completed and brought into commercial operation 1,000, yes, 1,000 coal burning power plants in 3,000 days between 2004 and 2013. That’s one additional unit every three days. Total capacity: 550,000 MWe. Power engineers will appreciate this number but for most others, eyes glaze over.
This single feat is beyond comprehension in the industrial history of humans. And yet there is little note of this in the West. We just focus on carbon (dioxide) emissions.
Third, the Chinese government through the government owned and controlled banking system is in the habit of funding mega industries with low interest rate loans in order to dominate world markets.
So the pricing so gloriously celebrated is largely a product of cheap energy (carbon based), cheap capital (looming financial crisis?), and cheap Chinese labor (which is aging and fading away).
Before we project the cost curves above down to zero, we should understand the EROI (Energy Return on (energy) Invested)’ for electricity provided by ‘solar cells supported lithium storage’. Then compare the EROI when panel and battery production is based on (Chinese) coal versus the bootstrap operation (panels and batteries produced from energy supplied by panels and batteries).
When this calculation is complete with peer review by qualified engineers and economists, get back and let’s talk turkey (Thanksgiving Day is November 24 this year!). 😉
Reading ranks right up there with “ritin n ‘rithmatic”… The Three R’s… ,)
They are called the three R’s, because spelling wasn’t in the list.
The battery of that same electric powered forklifter I had to extinguish fire held capacity for 24 hours working time = 3 shifts of 8 hours.
2.5 ys after first starting that same battery barely held for 8 hours = 1 shift.
So after 2.5 ys that same battery has lost 66.67% capacity while work amount remained the same: you load when there’s time window for loading; not when the battery’s already down.
That’s the 2000 cycles.
Going to work and the battery stench hangs in the hall your lungs collapse and you’re outsourced immediately.
Believe it or not.
I’m surprised no one has commented on the truncated Bloomberg graph, which makes it look like the price has already dropped to near-zero…until you read the values on the Y-axis.