There Are Now Twice As Many Solar Jobs As Coal Jobs In the US (vox.com) 415
According to a new survey from the nonprofit Solar Foundation, the solar industry now employs more than 260,000 people even though solar power provides just 1.3 percent of America's electricity. Last year, the industry accounted for one of every 50 new jobs nationwide. "Solar employs slightly more workers than natural gas, over twice as many as coal, over three times that of wind energy, and almost five times the number employed in nuclear energy," the report notes. "Only oil/petroleum has more employment (by 38%) than solar." Vox reports: This chart breaks it down by job type. The majority of solar jobs are in installation, with a median wage of $25.96 per hour. The residential market, which is the most labor-intensive, accounts for 41 percent of employment, the commercial market 28 percent, and the utility-scale market the rest. Now, mind you, comparing solar and coal is a bit unfair. Solar is growing fast from a tiny base, which means there's a lot of installation work to be done right now, whereas no one is building new coal plants in the U.S. anymore. (Quite the contrary: Many older coal plants have been closing in recent years, thanks to stricter air-pollution rules and cheap natural gas.) So solar is in a particularly labor-intensive phase at the moment. Still, it's worth thinking through what these numbers mean. One argument you could make about these numbers is that all this employment is, in a way, inefficient. If the solar industry hopes to keep pushing costs down and become a major U.S. energy source, it will likely need to become less labor-intensive over time. But labor costs are only one way to think about the issue. There's also a political angle here. America's energy system is inextricable from policy and politics, and an industry that creates a lot of jobs is inevitably going to have more influence over that process.
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Well, once the panels are installed (Score:2, Insightful)
the jobs are gone. Just like everything else.
Re: Well, once the panels are installed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Well, once the panels are installed (Score:4, Interesting)
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This argument going on depends on what the jobs are.
There are 'seasonal', 'temp', and 'full time'.
Season is every year industry X needs Y+/- Q number of people. They are every few months out of a job but its mostly OK they get it back again. Think theme park worker in New York vs Florida. In NY they close the theme park in winter whereas in FL they never close.
Temp is job needs to be done one time need X people. At end of job they are out of a job. Think construction worker.
Full time is job does not en
Re: Well, once the panels are installed (Score:5, Insightful)
Coal accounts for 33% of U.S. electricity production, vs 0.6% for solar.
That is a misleading stat, since NO new coal plants are being built, while solar installations are growing rapidly.
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This same BS was posted a week ago here on /. It is a misleading stat as they use different rules for what counts as a solar job vs a job in coal. For instance, they count a truck drive who occasionally delivers a solar panel as a 'supported job', but they never included those types of 'supported jobs' in the coal numbers.
Re: Well, once the panels are installed (Score:5, Insightful)
So, it is in our best interest as a species and a nation to invest in alternative longer-term energy solutions when primary finite sources of energy are cheap and plentiful now.
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You mean the way biofuels were the way to the future ?
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/0... [nytimes.com]
Or the way we now burn fossil fuels to include ethanol in gasoline ?
At some point solar may be the best, and when that happens there will be no stopping it, or maybe it won't. Going nuts before there is an actual advantage with power plants that don't compete on their own is stupid.
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You mean the way biofuels were the way to the future ?
What is your point? That although coal is stupid and uneconomic, we should burn it anyway because biofuels are even stupider? Do you think that makes any sense at all?
There is no question that current biofuels policies, including American ethanol subsidies and European wood pellet subsidies, are not cost effective, and may even be environmentally counterproductive. But that in no way justifies burning more coal. They are different issues.
Subsidizing dirty energy (Score:5, Insightful)
"Alternative energy is always better so we should shut down everything else right now"
No, subsidizing dirty sources of energy instead of investing in clean ones is idiotic and short sighted. We're not getting rid of fossil fuels for the next several decades at minimum. But failing to invest in long term better sources of energy because they aren't cheaper today is nothing short of weapons grade stupid. Coal gets direct subsidies and worse it gets a HUGE indirect subsidy in the fact that we aren't charging the full cost of cleaning up the pollution it causes.
The point is solar and wind are wasteful and misinvestments and likely to be so for a long time yet to come.
That's not how investing in new technologies works. Nothing new is cheaper until it can get to sufficient scale. Cars were not cheaper than horses for quite a number of years after the car was invented. Email wasn't cheaper than postal mail at first. Furthermore when you take the full cost of coal (including pollution mitigation), solar and wind are cheaper TODAY - without subsidies even. They only seem more expensive because coal doesn't have to clean up after itself. When we stop allowing fossil fuels to dump endless amounts of pollutants and CO2 into the atmosphere without direct economic cost, then you can come and tell me how expensive wind and solar are.
Re: Well, once the panels are installed (Score:4, Insightful)
Strawman argument so it has no bearing. Also you might note A. Corn is the worst possible biofuel. B. All biofuels are in fact solar. C. We have pipeline and liquid fuel storage and transfer infrastructure. D. Liquid Hydrocarbons are energy dense. E. We have fuel burning devices already in use.
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Re: Well, once the panels are installed (Score:5, Informative)
it's our cheapest and most abundant energy source.
Nope. Coal is currently about $42 per ton, which is about $2 per million BTU. Gas is not only cheaper, but gas plants are also simpler and cheaper to run. Gas plants are faster to adapt to fluctuations in demand, and can even serve as "peakers". They work well in a grid with intermittent wind and solar. Coal plants can't do that. They overproduce in the troughs when they dump excess power on the grid at low prices, and they can't ramp up for the peaks to take advantage of price surges. This is why, in America, not a single coal plant is under construction or even being planned. Coal no longer makes economic sense.
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Correct I should have stably priced over the long term.
Re: Well, once the panels are installed (Score:4, Interesting)
To be a little glib, the future of energy economics is just two things: gas and pork.
Gas for getting stuff working, and pork for all the people who are making money off of useless "renewables".
At the end of the day, every renewable is backed up by a gas plant. If the future is really without oil and coal and nuclear, as greens want, then everything will be gas.
(This post intentionally simple and glib to make a point.)
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At the end of the day, every renewable is backed up by a gas plant
At the end of the day, gas will run out/get expensive, and renewables will be backed by storage.
Re: Well, once the panels are installed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Well, once the panels are installed (Score:5, Interesting)
it's our cheapest and most abundant energy source
Sorry [eia.gov]. Not even if you ignore coal's hundreds of billions [chgeharvard.org] annually in externalised costs.
It's not even the most abundant. There are roughly 2.4x10^19 BTUs of known coal reserves. We get that much energy from the sun every 8.25 days - just on the land surface alone, not even counting oceans.
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Isn't that if we had 100% efficiency capturing at 100% flat surface area?
With that kind of abundance of energy, does it really matter? If we can consistently bring down the price of each kilo watt hour of solar energy below that of coal, coal will be dead. With the carbon footprint it creates, the pollution it generates and the damage that comes with it, coal is a liability
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Can one even find solar panels that shitty as I thought most were in the 12-18% efficiency range and the really cheap printed solar shingles being like 8% efficient. So using realistic numbers like that we would be down to 0.1% of earths surface area needing to be covered by solar panels. This does ignore the storage problem but there are a number [wikipedia.org] of batter [wikipedia.org]
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Re: Coal is a poor option (Score:3)
Guess they dont have batteries over in shill land.
Re: Well, once the panels are installed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Okay, let's.
A 3KW solar system will run in the $5K+ range
$5K of coal is in the timezone of 725MW-hr.
New Orleans gets about 2650 hours of sunlight per year, so 20 years is 53K hours of sunlight. 3KW for 53K hours is about 160MW-hr over 20 years. 240MW-hr over 30 years.
So, $5K of solar will give you about 2/9 the energy that the same amount of coal will give you over 20 years, or 1/3 of the coal over 30 years.
And that's best case (right now), since the 5K cost for the solar is a minimum, not an average
Re: Well, once the panels are installed (Score:5, Informative)
Since you haven't provided any links to back your data, I have to ask: is that energy value just a conversion of the raw BTUs, or into electricity delivered to end users. It's a really important difference, since most coal plants are only 25-35% efficient in creating electricity from raw heat. If you are quoting the raw energy content as heat, then I'd argue you need to discount it by a factor of 3-4x, since most coal is burned to make electricity, and PV creates electricity directly.
Here's another approach: the wholesale price for electricity is, depending on the region, something like $25-50/MWh [source [eia.gov]]. Unfortunately, the breakdown doesn't tell us the cost for each source (coal, nuke, gas, etc.), but let's argue that it's on the low end: $25/MWh. That captures the cost not only of the fuel, but also the operating costs of the plant, profit, paying off the loans to build the plant, etc. On the other hand, a large pile of coal is pretty useless for generating electricity without all the rest of those costs, so I'd say it's fair to include them.
At $25/MWh, a $5k purchase would get you 200 MWh of electricity, which makes PV look much more favorable.
And it's still nonsense (Score:2)
Given that approximately zero people are required to actually generate that 0.6% of solar power, I'd say coal is the one looking inefficient - look at all the manpower required simply to keep a coal power plant maintained and running, let alone constantly fed with coal that's been surveyed, mined, processed, and transported to the plant.
Maybe try comparing manpower needed by each to actually add a MW of capacity, instead of to generate a MWh - then you might have a comparison that doesn't look so appalling
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Tge jobs are about installing new power plants.
So your analysis makes no sense.
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Coal accounts for 33% of U.S. electricity production, vs 0.6% for solar.
Just as an FYI; about five years ago, Coal accounted for over 40%.
=Smidge=
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Once the panels are installed, there will be jobs installing the storage facilities, and after that, there will be no electricity bill other than equipment maintenance costs, so less reason to work as many hours.
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Once you start drilling MTI estimates that you can provide 100% of US energy needs from geothermal anyway. There are also ice batteries, kinetic energy storage, vanadium batteries, liquid sulfur, and even just pumping water into pressure vessels or uphill.
Re:Well, once the panels are installed (Score:5, Interesting)
the jobs are gone. Just like everything else.
Insightful enough.
But that's just how these things work. Once upon a time, coal was king. But now it's falling. When the NatGas Frackers came through my area, they employed a lot of people for a few years. Then the wells were built, and they moved to another state.
Even if by some Executive fiat, we moved back to coal, we'd have to deal with the combined effects of automation and that the rest of the world is dropping it. So we won't get exports.
In other words, like you said, the jobs are gone.
But people tend not to think much beyond next month. When the Frackers came to the area, all you heard about was jerbs, Jerbs, JERBS! As if Fracking was the majic pill that was going to give these folks jobs for the rest of their days.
But the wells were drilled, new pipelines were laid, collctors and compressors, and the system doesn't need many people to keep it up and running - at least compared to the initial jobs.
So yeah, solar industry jobs wil probably follow a similar pattern. A huge boom, then trailing off. The days of thinking that a person is going to do one job, the same job, live in the same town in the same houhse your entire life, and not have to learn to do anything else is no longer a rational idea. Things change too quickly.
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You're absolutely right, it's just rather unfortunate that the (vocational) education system doesn't prepare people to be this flexible. Apart from hard skills which can be trained,
Re:Well, once the panels are installed (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really. Solar panels are becoming as tied to a construction project as roofing materials, and other basic building supplies. Even after buildings are retofitted, there are always new things coming up, new technologies that are iffish now, but are maturing (tinted windows which may run at 1/20 the wattage a normal panel, but with the sheer square footage on a south side of a building, it might be worth doing, when the price for the tint becomes that cheap.)
Solar plants will continue to expand. With HVDC transmission methods, there is a lot of desert that can be used for solar, and with roughly 3.5% transmission loss per 1000 km, this can be a viable way to provide a few GW to a city. If the transmission loss is too great, it isn't too difficult to pull CO2 from the air and make ethanol, propane, synthetic diesel (Audi has pioneered this), or something similar as a way to fuel non-electric vehicles and stay carbon negative. Heck, with enough power and a source of water, thermal depolymerization becomes possible, which is an extremely good way to dispose of plastic and have a usable resource for fuel or manufacturing.
Solar technology will only improve as well. Panels may be near maximums of energy output, but better MPPT controllers and energy storage will be the focal point eventually as the bottleneck moves from panels.
The nice thing about solar is that it is stupidly easy to set up compared to any other energy source [1], and it is relatively maintenance free, because everything is solid state on the grid, and off the grid, the only component that wears out are batteries.
[1]: A cast off car battery, a surplus panel, a $8 PWM charger from eBay, and some 12 volt light bulbs can power the lights on a detached building indefinitely. I don't know any other energy source that can sit there and do that. The Aussies go a step further and stick refrigerators with solar panels on them in the middle of nowhere so they can get a cold one even if on the back 40. I don't know any other energy source that can do that... nuclear perhaps, but with all the fear about nuclear, you will never see a basketball-sized reactor just for powering a small building.
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It's really too bad nuclear is so demonized. It's the best solution for energy needs right now. Reactors can now be scaled down quite a lot, and a self-contained virtually maintenance-free reactor could produce many megawatts of power for 30 - 50 years before requiring replacement. Not to mention some of the excess heat could be used to heat homes and hot water tanks which would make it even more practical.
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It's really too bad nuclear is so demonized. It's the best solution for energy needs right now. Reactors can now be scaled down quite a lot, and a self-contained virtually maintenance-free reactor could produce many megawatts of power for 30 - 50 years before requiring replacement. Not to mention some of the excess heat could be used to heat homes and hot water tanks which would make it even more practical.
The problem with nuclear is always going to be the same. It is a technology that can fail catastrophically and render large tracts of land uninhabitable when it does. One can argue that if a nuclear plant is properly run and safety standards are enforced then nuclear is a viable option and that is true. The flaw in that argument is that it only takes one ambitious corporate weasel trying to suck up to his bosses by cutting costs through nixing safety procedures, buying sub standard parts or cutting personne
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Can Not fail? I've heard that before, usually right before a catastrophe. Safe as hell I'll buy. Can not fail? No.
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the jobs are gone. Just like everything else.
And once the coal is gone those jobs are gone ... and the mountain tops, hill sides trees and wildlife are gone from surface/strip mining and the water has been polluted from runoff and the air is sooty and hazy from burning the coal. Actually, I guess the out-of-work coal miners can go on to restore the environment and clean the water - assuming (a) they (and we) haven't all died off and (b) the EPA is still around to make someone clean it all up -- and the taxpayers will pay for it.
Problem solved.
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Right. We should support coal because of the ongoing jobs of destroying mountains in order to burn them. And solar panels never ever need to be replaced or serviced.
This might be the dumbest argument I've ever seen.
Re: Well, once the panels are installed (Score:2, Interesting)
More accurately, we shouldn't compare apples and oranges. The whole coal process is mature and optimized for efficiency. Solar is, comparatively, in its infancy.
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True, but you stopped too soon. Lots of that rain water ends up in rivers, running down to the sea. Humans have been using that water to turn turbines for many centuries (there are pictures of water-wheel powered metal presses dating back to the middle ages - it was a major tool in the production of early chain mail, and water-wheel mills are even older), and for almost a century now we've been using it to produce electricity.
So the Hoover damn's hydro-power... counts as solar !
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Re:Well, once the panels are installed (Score:4, Informative)
then you'll have to stop supporting fossil fuels too because they'll run out eventually.
. . . so will the Sun. (grin)
Rarely mentioned, is that solar cells degrade over time, although nowhere near as much, or as quickly, as in the past. . . Eventually, they will have to be replaced as well. . .
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Re:Well, once the panels are installed (Score:4, Informative)
Solar panels last about 20 years, then need to be replaced.
No, they are warrantied for 20 years. That means that the manufacturer thinks that most of them will last at least that long. The warranty is usually for 80% power production. Even if they fall below 80% production, they are still producing power, and don't "need" to be replaced.
No shit Sherlock. That's what happens (Score:2, Interesting)
That's what happens when the last President, along with the last Democrat presidential nominee, said that he was going to bankrupt the industry.
When they count noses (Score:2)
I always ask, how many dollars per nose.
There are *probably* more people working for fast food than in coal... There isn't any money in it though.
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I always ask, how many dollars per nose.
There are *probably* more people working for fast food than in coal... There isn't any money in it though.
Why do you have to ask? That information is right there in the summary, unasked for.
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Wait, you mean we have to read the summaries now? You're one of those fact-nazis, aren't you? Always trying to supply actual information where it's not wanted.
This is just as true as it was last week (Score:5, Informative)
I remember this story from when it was posted last week. [slashdot.org]
Coal to gas conversions? (Score:2)
"Many older coal plants have been closing in recent years, thanks to stricter air-pollution rules and cheap natural gas."
How often is it economic to do power station coal to gas conversions? Clearly you need to be near a gas pipeline. Can you just replace coal fired boilers with gas fired boilers, or is it more complicated? If instead you're using gas turbines, there is much less commonality between the old and converted power station, and less reason to convert rather than start with a green field.
Re:Coal to gas conversions? (Score:4, Informative)
It isn't.
I was involved on the edge of one of those proposals in 1994. Putting gas burners in a boiler is a huge waste of fuel and in the long run just gutting the building and putting gas turbines in makes a vast amount more sense than all of the very difficult mucking about with water, steam, etc you have to do with a large thermal power station. Within a very short time running costs of a retrofitted plant would exceed the cost of getting gas turbines. With the idea of reusing the site we couldn't even use the existing stack because the exhaust temperature of the gas turbines would be a lot higher. In the end new turbines were placed elsewhere since selling the site made more sense than trying to reuse a small portion of a very large site, and we would get very little savings by having existing walls, roof and an antiquated switchyard.
Also I think the bit you quoted is simplistic and misleading with the source either not being entirely honest or not having a good grasp on a very major factor.
The plants are closing because they are old and nearly all of the ones closing have exceeded their design life but are kept going by increasingly expensive repairs. Parts of boilers don't cost a lot to fix since they can be done a few tubes at a time, turbine blades can be replaced a few at a time, but turbine rotors are a different story. A combination of heat and stress means they will be dangerous to use eventually with replacement as the only option (and a waiting list of years for a new one - though spares are often kept). Those old plants are going to have to be replaced entirely with something new, and since nobody wants to outlay the huge amount of capital for a large thermal power station they get replaced with stuff you can buy piecemeal instead of putting down the cash for gigawatts of capacity at once.
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If a nation has lots of gas, export might be a worth more than just selling it cheap for local power.
So if gas is cheap, cant be exported at a profit and a nation really wants brand new gas turbines?
Who to buy from? A brand that has a history of gas, nuclear and other turn key turbine builds that are delivered on time, wi
"Once stuff is installed the jobs are gone." (Score:5, Interesting)
Like hell!
Do you have any idea how BIG the install base for solar is going to get?
Right now, solar and solar + battery are at the worst it's ever going to be again.
There's, quite literally, enough first-time install base out there to keep every person currently doing it until they die of old age, with a HUGE backlog of jobs.
And while the panels eventually drop off in efficiency after 20-30 years, there will be enough retrofit work in a couple decades to keep the industry going strong for pretty much EVER.
Not to mention a bit of extra capacity planned into an install can keep an install self-sufficient for decades beyond the initial lifespan.
Another generation or two of improvements in panel construction, battery engineering (with accompanying drops in price) and management software, and we should start seeing fully-integrated solar power and solar power+solar water heating "kits" hit the market. And that's when solar is REALLY going to take off.
Solar jobs deliver just .6% of American energy (Score:2, Offtopic)
There would be more jobs (Score:3)
If Carter hadn't put solar panels on the White House and Reagan hadn't taken them down to show how politically different he was maybe they would be seen as the space age technology they are instead of something "green" to hate just to toe a party line.
So normalized to the percentage of source ... (Score:2)
So the 2015 numbers [eia.gov] are 33% coal and 0.6% solar. Or in other words, about 50 times as much coal power nationwide. Normalizing it that way, the solar industry takes 100 times as many workers to produce the same every as coal.
Now, you can argue that solar is a nascent industry and that a lot of the labor is in the build-out. But for now, this is a pretty silly (and expensive) sideshow.
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Only because of unequal comparisons (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're counting the work involved in wiring Solar panels into peoples' homes as Solar jobs,
then you should be counting the work involved in installing normal Electrical service into peoples' homes as Coal/Natgas jobs.
Re:Only because of unequal comparisons (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Only because of unequal comparisons (Score:5, Informative)
No, the equivalent job would be connecting new coal/gas power stations to the grid, and those jobs are counted.
So solar is 100x more labor intensive than coal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a proper count (Score:5, Funny)
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citation needed
Re:Not too surprising (Score:4, Informative)
"Uttered in 2008, still haunting Obama" (04/05/12)
http://www.politico.com/story/... [politico.com]
"It’s just that it will bankrupt them"
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So I'm seeing a war that never actually materialized...
Re:Not too surprising (Score:4, Informative)
Context matters. He didn't declare war on coal, he declared war on carbon emissions. If anyone figures out how to burn coal cleanly and efficiently, they'd be most welcome.
If not, those hundreds of billions in external costs they've been getting away with ignoring for so long will catch up with them in some form; as a carbon tax or cap & trade or whatever, so that particular market failure will be corrected. The public is no longer willing to pay those costs - and it's a good bet that coal plants will become (even more) uneconomical, when the full costs have to be paid.
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NPR just showed that Black Lung is dramatically underreported.
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So you're saying that government jobs programs work. Fantastic, let's bring back the WPA and get the unemployment rate down a few more percentage points. #MAGA!
Re:Not too surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
It's definitely over-stating to say the solar companies are "mostly failed". Solyndra failed. It was an investment in US semiconductor manufacturing, so having it fail is a shame, but some portion of investments will fail.
And unfortunately there isn't any clean coal. Unpleasant facts don't go away just because you choose not to believe them.
Re: Not too surprising (Score:2)
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Oh please...coal mining has become too expensive and unproductive to sustain itself in any reasonable way. Even with massive subsidies it would never make a comeback.
Solar and natural gas have eclipsed the coal industry, and nothing in the world is going to reverse that. You'd be better off starting a buggy whip manufacturing company than to bet on coal making a comeback. It's just not going to happen, and that's a fact.
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Oh please...coal mining has become too expensive and unproductive to sustain itself in any reasonable way.
Mining it isn't quite like it used to be either. Even though it dosn't employ many people to do the work, one new way of obtaining the coal that is left is you tear off the top of a mountain, and dump the tailings in the next valley over. Aside from freaking people out with the look, it pretty much completely destroys the local ecosystem that cannot be mitigated. All in all, not something most of us want in our ex-backyard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Nookyler is a much better option than this: htt [ohvec.org]
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... one new way of obtaining the coal that is left is you tear off the top of a mountain, and dump the tailings in the next valley over. Aside from freaking people out with the look, it pretty much completely destroys the local ecosystem that cannot be mitigated.
Don't forget water pollution from the runoff !!
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Only because the mining companies only pay a fraction of the costs that society as a whole incurs. Most of their costs are externalized.
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When you have an administration who effectively declared war on coal and coal producers, and shoveled billions of tax dollars in to various (mostly failed) solar companies - to launder the money - it's not a shock that there are more solar jobs.
Bullshit.
What were all of these failed companies? And what was the path of th laundered money?
I'll bet you woulld have really been pissed off when coal replaced wood. One time wood was king, and when coal came along, it killed a lot of lumbereer's jobs.By the way, this is true, not bullshit http://explorepahistory.com/st... [explorepahistory.com] Fortunately however, all of the coal barons were of impeccable character and honesty, unlike these criminals who are so unamerican that they eschew black lung disease.
Alternative
Re:Not too surprising (Score:5, Informative)
What of it? VC companies regularly expect about 1 in 10 companies to succeed. But more importantly, the green energy fund made a profit for the USA. [bloomberg.com]
Or do you have some objection to the US government investing in the US and making a profit on the investment?
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Sorry but it's disingenuous to say that made a profit when it's subsidized.
Re: Not too surprising (Score:3)
Sorry but its ignorant to say what you just said. The gov loaned out X amount of dollars. The gov then recieved back an amount larger than X in loan repayments. Ergo, profit. Just like any other loan with an interest rate larger than zero.
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The solar system on my RV runs the 'fridge, so we cool our food "next to" solar panels. We heat it with clean natural gas, which warms every bit as much as we'd like it to warm, and doesn't smell, period.
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Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Nothing is as toasty warm as a coal fire (Score:5, Interesting)
When I lived in West Virginia, coal stoves were very common (wood stoves too).
On a cold and damp bone chilling winter day, nothing warms as well as a coal stove. Coal smoke smells good too, sweet and not as acrid as wood smoke. Seriously, can you imagine someone warming themself next to a solar panel? Ha. You can't get enough electricity out of a solar panel to warm a house in cold weather, certainly not at the favorable cost/benefit ratio which coal provides.
O RLY? We had coal heat when I was a kid, and that stuff had an acrid, acidic smell that brings back bad memories when I smell coal smoke even today. Stoking, removal of the ashes - a major pain in the ass. And the reason you got to feel the heat in the morning was that unless someone got up every three hours, the fire would burn out. Or you could bank it and get cold anyhow.
My NatGas super efficient furnace doesn't require me to warm up on damp bone chilling days because I'm already there. Seems like celebrating old hand cranked cars.
Unless you were trying to be funny - then Okay, carry on..
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No, it's in a different phase of industry life cycle, is all.
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Being in a different phase may explain why it's more expensive, but doesn't in any way contradict the assertion that it is so.
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Then helping people get every solar rebate or solar tax credit in their state or federally over the years.
Later questions about upgrades to support home battery systems.
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For a semester long design project I had in university, I created a very detailed solar simulation and concluded that at below 26 /wattp, solar beat even hydro in cost. And it was a very detailed model including every known parameter (except labor which varied too much and was a one shot expense).
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For industrial-scale plants, I'm still not convinced that they will be able to replace existing generation facilities and supply the ever increasing power demands of the US. 0 power production for half the day and a bell-like curve for generation when the sun is out (under optimal conditions) just doesn't strike me as viable for large-scale power generation. Add to this the push for electric vehicles and we could see a significant increase in electrical demand in the not-so-distant future.
That's why solar thermal with a molten salt reservoir makes sense for utility-scale solar. For example, the Crescent Dunes [wikipedia.org] project in Nevada can store 1.1 GWh of power which is 10 hours if it is running at full capacity (110 MW). This allows you to timeshift the power between when the sun is shining and when demand is greatest. Solar could conceivably power the entire grid with a mixture of these plants and PV plants. Not that I think it should, it's quite expensive and nuclear would be more efficient a
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So the PR says but nobody is putting up the money to build those either for the same reason as above.
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Facepalm.
Nobody is putting money into coal because the risk of insane regulation is too high. You don't want to have a 40 year investment killed in year 10 because some fanatic at the EPA faked data.
As for nuclear try again one we just had one go live
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
There's 60 reactors under construction worldwide
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i... [world-nuclear.org]
The reason more nuclear isn't being built at a high rate are liability issues and nimby.
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You win your special little game!
Now can you just piss off and stop following me around while we get back to why the above poster is not getting a nuke plant in their state, the one next door or even the same continent?
Look at your own link (Score:2)
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P.S. Really at least hit the wikipedia or something before you say shit like that.
I mean were you just hoping that nobody knew nuclear power plants were built ?
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https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
12 cents a kwh before transmission ?