MIT Report Says Current Tech Enables Future Terawatt-Scale Solar Power Systems 176
Lucas123 writes: Even with today's inefficient wafer-based crystalline silicon photovoltaics, terawatt-scale solar power systems are coming down the pike, according to a 356-page report from MIT on the future of solar energy. Solar electricity generation is one of "very few low-carbon energy technologies" with the potential to grow to very large scale, the study states. In fact, solar resources dwarf current and projected future electricity demand. The report, however, also called out a lack of funds for R&D on newer solar technology, such as thin-film wafers that may be able to achieve lower costs in the long run. Even more pressing than the technology are state and federal policies that squelch solar deployment. For example, government subsidies to solar are dwarfed by subsidies to other energy sources, and trade policies have restricted PV module and other commodity product imports in order to aid domestic industry. Additionally, even though PV module and inverter costs are essentially identical in the United States and Germany, total U.S.residential system costs are substantially above those in Germany.
Cost of solar (Score:4, Informative)
The cost isn't different between US and Germany, The way it's paid for is different. Germany subsidizes solar power far more than the US. Just because tax revenue is spent, doesn't mean it's cheaper. One of the biggest reasons for it being uneconomical is that there is still the huge amount of hazardous waste that needs to be disposed of from the manufacturing process. It may be less of a carbon footprint, but green energy it is not.
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Germany subsidizes solar power far more than the US.
There is a reason for this: clouds. Germany is a cloudy, northern country. So, since solar makes less sense there, it has to be subsidized more.
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Unfortunately, the figures on subsidies parting the clouds are not in yet.
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since solar makes less sense there, it has to be subsidized more.
Why not use hamsters running on wheels to generate electricity? That makes even less sense, so according to your logic it should be subsidized even more.
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Why not use hamsters running on wheels to generate electricity?
Because hamsters emit CO2. Duh.
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So, since solar makes less sense there, it has to be subsidized more.
That's a hell of a straight line there. Makes you wonder how far Germany will decline over the next few decades when they work so hard to promote useless things now.
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Off topic, but I love your current sig.
Orwell presented a situation where the populace knew they were being monitored. Snowden showed that we were being monitored, but without our knowledge or consent. There is a massive gap between the two, represented by the population's awareness (and possibly acceptance, unfortunately).
Anyway, very insightful.
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They compared the unsubsidised cost.
The reason for the difference is that in the US getting the system installed is more expensive. Labour and grid connection fees are higher.
Solar's problem is political not technological (Score:5, Interesting)
Cost reductions would eventually usher in utility-scale solar. But to get residential and distributed solar, public awareness and education is needed. But there are places in the world where the grid is very unreliable or non existent. Those places also have very rich individuals and groups. Collectively rich folks in third world without reliable grid have as much purchasing power as all of the middle class of developed countries. They will fund and underwrite the cost of R&D, and deployment and financing of residential/distributed solar. So there is some chance that technology will break the barriers and enter developed countries. There was a time when my Indian relatives all had better cell phones than my circle in USA. Because Indian land lines sucked and US mobile phones had to outdo the landlines. Same thing could happen to the grid.
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The triumphant little guy sticks it to The Man, news at 11. More like, the distributed smart grid (or whatever) turns out to somehow be more expensive and less secure than advertised, and given the noteworthy lack of philosopher kings to run it, regulations become necessary to curb the worst misuses and excesses. (Assuming the distributed smart grid (or whatever) is actually viable.) Meanwhile, back in the real world, note the progress of solar in Japan, where the utilities (that would be, the folks running
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Obviously the solution is batteries, which unfortunately isn't there yet from a cost perspective. But I think they'll be there soon. Certainly the government could push for utility scale storage and updating the grid.
People in Japan are heavily protesting the nuclear reactors because of how much corruption is involved in that industry.
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Obviously the solution is batteries, which unfortunately isn't there yet from a cost perspective. But I think they'll be there soon.
Tesla's PowerWall is on the cusp. A few years to improve the capacity at the same price point, coupled with a few years' worth of increases in electric rates, and it will be there.
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So... you're a parasite for driving a car that runs on subsidized gasoline?
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do tell, you're saying there is a large group off people who DON'T benefit in any way from fossil fuel, who pay for a small group who does?
Logic fails you, also an understanding of whence most the tech that has created western civilization comes
Re:Solar's problem is political not technological (Score:5, Interesting)
My friend who returned to Bangalore and built a half a million dollar home (at exchange rate, not the PPP rate) has eight, count them, eight truck batteries in his garage, saying that stupid lead-acid crap is more reliable and maintainable than installing a Honda gasoline generator or Cummins diesel generator. In India you would find air conditioners that could run off "inverter".
The quality of AC out of the inverter is so poor most motors would burn. They are designing A/C to take that shit. There is this huge market out there. The free market will serve them.
Installing enough batteries to go off the grid is not cost effective ... in the USA. In some parts of the world, there isn't a reliable enough grid to compare the costs. They are the ones who will pay through their noses for the R&D needed to develop the batteries, the financial vehicles to pay for them and the infrastructure to manufacture them. Once the fixed costs start being paid off, they will come with a vengence into the developed established good quality grid market.
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Correct, in many parts of the world residential solar makes economic sense.
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established utilities meet demand 24x7, while residential solar can't do that for most the country.
hydro power doesn't do that either, but it's not a reason to dump hydro power. The beauty of electicity is that you don't HAVE to choose a single generation method, you can pick and choose depending on what will work out best in the long or short run.
The likely answer is to never have residential solar at all for 70% or more the country, but rather have large collection grids in wasteland.
except that electricity does not travel well over thousands of miles, if it did we would have done that with the coal plants a long time ago, the simple fact is that we have to build power plants close to where the electricity is used
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DC can go 3,000 miles. that's more than the US would need for desert solar collection
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You are confused, it's all a matter of voltage to overcome distance with less loss, and AC spends much time not being at max voltage. Coast to coast HVDC systems have already been designed, look it up
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In the Winter (Score:2)
What do you do about solar power in the winter though? Especially in northern latitudes where the "day" lasts all of 8 hours with very weak sunshine, it can't substitute for anything. Wind has the issue of randomly stopping for up to a week. If a utility wants to build a week's worth of energy storage then batteries need to be less than 10% of their current cost.
Jesus! (Score:2)
Re:Of course, there's this (Score:5, Informative)
News flash: slashdotter reads article about article, finds something to complain about, stops to post complaint, and never reads actual paper.
Re:Of course, there's this (Score:5, Informative)
News flash: slashdotter reads article about article, finds something to complain about, stops to post complaint, and never reads actual paper.
The article about the article is an accurate summary of the actual article. Current solar tech does not make much economic sense, so we are spending billions to subsidize it, rather than spending enough on research and development of new tech that does make sense. Furthermore, subsidizes designed to encourage solar adoption, have instead been co-opted by the solar industry, and used to prop up inefficient domestic producers at the expense of better and cheaper imports. So the end result is that solar is more expensive to consumers, while the worst panels are being installed. No matter how dumb you think our solar policies are, they are actually even dumber than that.
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Re:Of course, there's this (Score:5, Insightful)
Well we spent 2 trillion dollars (and 4000 lives) to subsidize oil from 2000-2008 alone.
If we gave 2 trillion dollars to the solar industry, we'd have flying cars.
Military costs to protect oil field are ongoing and extremely expensive.
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Well we spent 2 trillion dollars (and 4000 lives) to subsidize oil from 2000-2008 alone.
You cannot justify something stupid merely by pointing out that we do other things that are even stupider. Oil subsidies, and solar subsides are each stupid in their own way, and both should be ended, but they are two different issues. One does not justify the other.
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Well we spent 2 trillion dollars (and 4000 lives) to subsidize oil from 2000-2008 alone.
You cannot justify something stupid merely by pointing out that we do other things that are even stupider. Oil subsidies, and solar subsides are each stupid in their own way, and both should be ended, but they are two different issues. One does not justify the other.
I think the point is that if you have Policy A which costs $100 and Policy B which costs $1,000,000 then you should be more concerned with sorting out the latter.
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You can indeed justify something as being less stupid than the thing it replaces.
Except that subsidies for solar do not "replace" subsidies for oil in any way whatsoever. Currently, we subsidize both. We could choose to subsidize either one or the other, or neither.
I think, that you have illogically conflated subsidies for the thing being subsidized, and mean that solar is a replacement for oil. But that really isn't true either. Solar is mostly used for electricity generation, and oil is mostly used for transportation. Those are two different markets.
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The fact is that the federal balance sheets have a big fat (+) next to oil companies, and and big fat (-) next to solar companies. One industry is putting hundreds of billions net per year into the federal budget, while another is taking billions net per year out.
Biased much?
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Well we spent 2 trillion dollars (and 4000 lives) to subsidize oil from 2000-2008 alone.
A subsidy is money spent to encourage a particular behavior or industry. At best, you can say the money spent was a subsidy for the defense and health care industries, but there is no serious linkage between that money and oil production except for oil businesses that also happen to be defense contractors (such as Halliburton).
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We subsidized security for the oil companies.
Which oil companies were those? And security from what danger? And what does most of that two trillion cost, like VA hospitals and plush DOD contracts have to do with security? Just because a vast sum of money was spent and a certain highly visible group, oil companies slightly benefited, doesn't mean that the whole expenditure is a subsidy for that group.
If I pay you a million dollars to incentivize you to pull weeds from your lawn, then that is a subsidy to pull weeds from your lawn. If I spend a milli
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You do remember the oil fields burning right?
That's not a subsidy. It was in the Kuwait's government interest to stop that ASAP.
You do remember the U.S. shooting dozens of million dollar a shot missiles per day for weeks to defend oil interests right?
Why shoot missiles for a million a shot when they could have done the job for 10k a shot? You do apparently remember how expensive those missiles were, so why can't you connect the dots?
Alternative energy will greatly reduce terrorism incentives and more importantly, funding.
Terrorism is very cheap and oil isn't going away for a very long time. And we also have to consider the economic harm of overbuilding alternative energy. That too can create the sort of poverty and corruption that is fueling much of the curren
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Makes economic sense... in some markets (Score:2)
The article about the article is an accurate summary of the actual article. Current solar tech does not make much economic sense,
True... and false. Economic viability is not a dichotomy. The truth is, it makes sense right now, in some markets, and doesn't make sense in other markets. As the technology gets cheaper, it makes sense in more and more markets.
so we are spending billions to subsidize it, rather than spending enough on research and development of new tech that does make sense.
I agree that it makes sense to spend on research and development of new tech. A nice side effect of this is that subsidizing new tech almost always has spin-off applications that weren't previously forseen.
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Unsubsidised solar is already cheaper than coal, especially if you count externalities. Installing it on a wide scale is R&D. The grid needs to adapt, we need to learn how to do it in the real world.
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Rubbish. Solar is already competitive (WITHOUT subsidies) in many markets, and that will only continue to grow. People who say otherwise have outdated information, or an agenda.
Check out this article [computerworld.com], linked from the sidebar of the original article:
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The marginal cost of oil extraction in the long run is pretty close to infinite. As a society that is the true marginal cost of current oil production. However, capitalism is woefully inefficient in this regard.
In terms of long term planning, whichever scalable renewable is/will be the cheapest is the winner.
Hint: That's solar. It may also be supplemented with tidal/wind/etc, but at the end of the day, solar will have to do the heavy lifting. That or fusion, but fusion has been 30 years away from viability
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Solar has also been "just around the corner" the last 30 years. It still needs to drop the price by almost 10x before it's economical as a partial alternative - and that's not even getting into storage. "Nest" and smart use needs to be here first, then partial micro solar deployment, then electric cars - that trifecta of electrical production, management, and storage is where the economics will finally start working.
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Large scale residential solar deployment though can end the price imbalance. As you need solar at the exact time the sun is out. If your solar unit generates 80-120% of your air conditoning power needs.
That will help with demand and load balance spikes. At least until we get Mr fusion that runs on fecal matter.
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What year are you from, 2005??? Recent solar plant in Dubai, electricity price 6 cents/kWh, no subsidies. Austin Energy has closed agreement with Recurrent Energy, price is 5 cents/kWh. Texas project probably uses federal tax reduction, but even without reduction it would be on par with natural gas plants. And natural gas producers use their own tax breaks and certainly do not pay all related costs that taxpayers pick up after them.
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That's some pretty outdated FUD. Solar is already competitive (WITHOUT subsidies) in many markets, and that will continue to grow. From an article on the same site:
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Re:Of course, there's this (Score:5, Insightful)
What really needs to happen is to remove all gov't subsidies across the board. Indeed this is what alt-energy maven Avory Lovins [rmi.org] has been preaching for years, because he knows that without subsidies the fossil fuels can't compete with renewables. We are already near the tipping point where even the massive fossil fuel subsidies won't be enough to prop them up. The switch to renewables is just a matter of time. The only unknowns are how long it will take and how painful it will be.
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Considering that solar alone [eia.gov] gets more subsidies than coal, gas, and nuclear all combined, I think it would be solar that crumbles without them. And the only resource getting more subsidies than solar is wind, so that's two renewables down the drain without subsidies. It was true a few years ago that solar wasn't getting as much subsidy love, but the world's changed. Maybe Avory Lovins and people like him should try to keep a little more up to date before passing judgement.
Re:Of course, there's this (Score:4, Interesting)
Depends on how you slice it. [bloomberg.com]
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In the long run it doesn't really matter. Renewables will win because... PHYSICS. Forget the fact that fossil fuels are finite, they are simply doomed by the plummeting price of solar and the ever-increasing price of petroleum. A glance at the long-term curve [economist.com] will be enough to settle the matter.
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I've been saying that for years. As with moth things in life, we're better if the government stays out of it. Given time - and not that much time, really - solar wins because it's better. Last I heard current PV panels still need rare elements and so won't scale to TW production, but technology marches on. Solar can't be base load because we don't have good enough batteries yet at scale, but technology marches on. These problems seem likely to be gone in 20 years.
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I mean, incandescent light bulbs and wasteful flushing is not only affecting your wallet but eventually the well-being of all on this planet.
And that not to consider the loss to the economy when your neighbour falls on hard times.
There are good reasons quality of life is highest in the countries and places with the highest taxes and thus greatest 'common interest'.
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Aha, so you would rather live in a place where the strong get it all...
So what part of providing policing, building infrastructure, enforcing contracts, and preventing fraud means the strong get it all? I mean, more than they do now? Or are you trying to say that no one should be more successful than another, regardless of effort or ability? (I'm setting national defense off to the side, as that's a whole different argument that would just be a distraction here.)
Seriously, I don't get it - could you make your position clear?
I mean, incandescent light bulbs and wasteful flushing is not only affecting your wallet but eventually the well-being of all on this planet.
Everything any of us ever do affect the community.
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I believe I know where your arguments are coming from but very few humans can survive on their own.
By design we are achieving best when working and living in concert with others and many cultures have shown that involves more than a simple 10-commandments style government.
What you now mention about this mini-government that builds infrastructure and enforces contracts is pretty much what we have and it is still ballooning because some
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A big flaw in modern thinking is the idea that "government" is the best way for people to work together to achieve a common goal. Government ends up dominated by those with lust for power over those with skill at governing. Companies competing with one another does better for longer, as you get some weeding out of leaders who lack skill at governing, but it seems the lust for power still wins in the end, by eliminating that "competing" part. Better, but not great: we need a new path. Sadly, people want
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Oh? I thought the PV panels efficient enough to be economically worthwhile were the gallium arsenide panels - it that wrong now? Getting more gallium isn't a matter of scaling up, as there no such thing as a gallium mine - it's a "waste product" of mining zinc and aluminum (bauxite ore), and is only economically viable because we need those metals for other things. Is there a new high-efficiency panel tech now that's not gallium constrained?
If we don't care too much about efficiency then solar thermal wil
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On one hand, oil is HEAVILY TAXED from the consumer ...
Which is ostensibly a use tax on roads and transportation infrastructure.
Would you prefer a more Socialist approach to funding transportation and have people who walk, or bicycle, or drive less, or use a more fuel efficient vehicle subsidize people who get the most direct benefit from the roads and bridges? Or would you prefer to let our transportation infrastructure crumble?
In addition, since exhaust from motor vehicles is a large contributor to air pollution, a tax on gasoline can be seen as comp
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I've never given him a dime, though I did meet him once, briefly, back in the 80s.
Re:Of course, there's this (Score:5, Insightful)
So what you're saying is, you're terrified of his ideas. You can't stand the thought of simply eliminating subsidies and letting the chips fall where they may.
What's the matter? If you're right, then fossil fuels remain more profitable than renewables and nothing changes.
If you still want to try to defend subsidies, all it means is that you're admitting that fossil fuels can no longer compete.
Re:Of course, there's this (Score:5, Informative)
None of those taxes begins to account for the lack of disposal fees for fossil fuels.
If all fossil fuel users were required to collect and safely sequester the CO2 that they're allowed to spew into the air free of charge, fossil fuels would not be even close to competitive with solar energy. As it stands, the rampant use of fossil fuels is saddling future generations with hundreds of $Trillions of remediation costs. It only looks cheaper because you're kicking the can down the road.
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If all fossil fuel users were required to collect and safely sequester the CO2 that they're allowed to spew into the air free of charge, fossil fuels would not be even close to competitive with solar energy.
No need for that, even. Just build the CO2-fixing cost into the sales of the fuel, like when you sell electronics in California or when you sell pretty much anything in the EU, and you're responsible for the waste. Consequently way more stuff over there is stamped for recycling. I have to throw away a ton of plastic just because nobody bothered to stamp a number on it when they molded it.
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I have to throw away a ton of plastic just because nobody bothered to stamp a number on it when they molded it.
Not much difference between you throwing it away or recycling it these days. China became much more strict about importing recyclables two years ago, plus the price of oil dropped. Unless it is stamped #1 or #2 it's probably headed from the blue bin to a landfill.
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And what do you think ALL THE PLANTS ON EARTH photosynthesise with?
They use the carbon given off by decaying plants and animals. They do not consume all the carbon dug up from geological deposits, and even if they did, they would give it back up as they decay. Redepositing that carbon into geological strata is an exceedingly slow process that has been totally overwhelmed by the rate of our mining it.
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Plants also aerobically respirate O2 and emit CO2 at night. They are not pure CO2 sucking machines.
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Lovins is a hack that gets money to tell the less knowledgeable greenies exactly what they want to hear, and they certainly worship at his feet and send him their money. He's a slick operator.
I don't care if you think Lovins is a hack/slick operator. Your name calling aside, Lovins' IDEA of removing all energy subsidies seems to have merit...at least to me. What is your objection to removing subsidies? Or do you actually agree with Lovins on that point?
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Re:Of course, there's this (Score:5, Interesting)
Bingo.
If we ignored costs we could all eat caviar on the moon.
The main issue with solar is the depreciation. Assuming they last forever... they'd be absurdly inexpensive. Of course they don't. They tend to wear out after 10-20 years depending on what various manufactuers say.
But the really silly thing is that they are not built to be maintained. They can only be built at the factory and when they wear out you have to throw them out.
How green is that especially when the vast majority of the solar panel is going to be roughly identical to how it was when it rolled off the manufactoring line.
What we should be looking at AMONGST OTHER things is figuring out specifically what is not working with an old worn out cell and either how you prevent that situation through maintenance, redesign the cells so they can be maintained, or we need some sort of micro manufacturing system for solar cells.
If you could buy a machine that made solar panels... ideally not with silicon wafers... choose a cheaper material even if it is less space efficient. And then rather than sell the panels you sell the machine that makes the panels.
The guy with the panels on his roof doesn't even need to own the machine but someone in the area probably should have enough manufacturing capacity to maintain the existing solar infrastructure.
Look, all costs are just supply and demand. In the case of solar panels the issue is supply. There is lots of demand for them. The costs get pushed up by a lack of supply. So we need more production and that production has to assume lower prices because it will be a higher supply environment.
Democratizing the manufacturing of the panels solve the problem because the big industrial producers make more money with the cost of panels higher. It isn't in their interests to push the prices lower.
If you move those companies away from selling toast and instead selling toasters... we might get a dramatically lower price.
Someone is going to be upset that I'm advocating the less space efficient panels. The more efficient ones have unreasonably high quality control requirements to be practical in the applications I'm discussing. We need something simple and robust and cheap. Something that when it breaks or wears out can be patched or repaired without going to any great expense.
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Explain the difference if you can. I briefly looked into it and there seems to be a lot of solar panels that use glass still. They use different kinds but glass is quite common.
Re:Of course, there's this (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, I meant silicon vs. thin film. Here's a thing [nrel.gov] (caution, pdf). The panels, even the newest ones, last a very long time.
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First Solar appears to be making the sort of panels you're talking about. :)
They use "CdTe Thin Film" :)
Can't seem to find out who actually sells the fucking things though. They might only sell to industry or municipalities which is a shame.
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It is all a question of per year depreciation in dollars.
Say I have something that costs 10,000 dollars and depreciations at a rate of .01 percent a year and then I have something that costs 10 dollars and depreciates at a rate of 1 percent a year. Which is better if they provide the same amount of power at manufacture? Obviously the 1 dollar system because its initial cost is so low that the depreciation in dollars doesn't matter.
What we need to do is get that number as low as possible by dollar and ideall
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Hey bingo
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The old glass panels from 40 years ago do have an indefinite lifespan.
They don't have that, though. After 10 or 20 years there's noticeable reduction in output, and that's if they were made well enough not to fail due to thermal cycling. They're not going to last forever. They're still great, though.
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Sorry if I am redundant [nrel.gov]. Some people offer 25 years warranties on these things. They degrade very slowly.
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http://energyinformative.org/l... [energyinformative.org]
80% output after 25 years.
Decline is essentially linear at 10% per decade. So 70% output after 35 years.
I.e. put on 25% more panels and you are fine. Or use more efficient devices that use 30% less electricity in 35 years and you are fine.
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They're not going to last forever. They're still great, though.
80% output after 25 years.
So you agree with me? You could have said that in fewer words.
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Hey bingo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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The longer they last and the more maintainable they are the better the economy.
What is more, the panels are typically not recycled along with more electronic shit in this country. It mostly goes to a land fill somewhere. You should know that.
As to it being expensive to do things in precisely the way the factory does it... of course. The point is to do it in a way that takes logistical limitations into consideration.
As to communism, I am advocating communism no more than a person that says he'd like to be ab
Re: Of course, there's this (Score:2)
"If you ignore costs"???
That's rich, considering the immense externalities of oil, gas, and coal burning.
Ignoring costs for solar ... Do you even understand economics?
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In other words, it presently is not a compelling economic option.
You need to read about economies of scale [wikipedia.org].
It's pretty stupid to compare economic viability of 50+ year old industry (covering 90+% of market) with 10+ year old industry (striving to gain a percent or two).
I like how pragmatically Germans went after the solar: it makes sense in long term, thus it makes sense to start R&D sooner than later. And apparently it is going well enough that they are even planning to repel the subsidies [theguardian.com] (to much chagrin of some).
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Like I said, nothing we don't already know.,
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That is why they pin hope on R&D, and not scaling, to get us their.
And in your opinion, where from come the R&D money? From Santa Claus?
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R&D gets money from the sales. Subsidies help lower the entry barrier and grow the market. Larger the market - more money gets into the R&D.
Lots of things were not viable initially without gov't help. Public transportation, metallurgy, telecommunications, energy - are all the industries gov't helped to jump start by giving subsidies and tax breaks. Because there is no single party - or group of parties - large enough to finance the whole thing till it becomes, as you put it, "compelling economic o
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And in your opinion, where from come the R&D money? From Santa Claus?
Primarily Uncle Sam.
You should head up the page to the subsidies argument, where you can bicker one way or the other about how the billions per year that the government hands out to green tech is or is not a subsidy.
My guess is you will find some way to justify the idea that it isnt a subsidy... just like right here where you found a way to ignore it completely.
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My guess is you will find some way to justify the idea that it isnt a subsidy... just like right here where you found a way to ignore it completely.
I haven't ignored it.
I simply can't understand your condescending tone about it.
It is pretty normal for gov't to jump start industry by helping it one way or another. It happened (and happens) in a lot of important industries.
But you are acting here as if it was something weird and unusual.
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Lots of things once were not "presently compelling economic options". Among them, computers that could be afforded by small businesses, digital television and offshoring information-handling jobs to foreign countries via high-speed data channels.
Things change. Sometimes they get kickstarted by government subsidies. Sometimes by a private concern with deep pockets and high expectations. Sometimes just by the onward march of technology.
"presently economically compelling" is about the WORST reason for not cons
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I think solar is great, and wind is great, but I also know the challenges of ad
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Photo-Voltaic solar power.
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Photovoltaic (evil because rare earths) as opposed to thermal (evil because desert tortoises would have to live in the shade).
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