Rooftop solar PV
You can take your pick from a few posts on solar PV lately. John Quiggin has one. He borrowed from one by Stephen Lacey at Grist, cross-posted at Climate progress. I think I’ll start with Giles Parkinson at Climate Spectator.
This is a technical subject and I’m not a technical person, but we’ll see how we go.
A total of 383MW of solar photovoltaic power was installed in Australia in 2010. That was a five-fold increase on 2009. In 2011 for the first five months the total is 350MW.
By way of comparison, I believe a large-scale power station usually comes in at 1000MW or 1GW.
Some of the current activity may have to do with terminating or reducing subsidies, but the future seems bright.
Muriel Watt, chair of the Australian PV Association, last night presented some interesting predictions at the release of the APVA annual report. If the build-out continues at around the current rate, this would mean there would be more than 4.5GW of solar PV installed in the country by 2020 – the equivalent of the Latrobe Valley brown coal generators, and producing just as much – at least when the sun shines and when the load is at, or near, its peak.
The chances are, though, that this is a conservative estimate, particularly with module costs expected to fall further, retail electricity prices expected to rise, and with separate predictions that suggest large-scale solar PV utilities could provide nearly that much capacity on their own once they become cost-competitive with wind.
A large part of the reason is the astonishing reduction in cost in recent years as shown in this graph:
The reason seems to be that the Chinese are manufacturing silicon for PV panels directly rather than using offcuts from chip manufacture. Most now believe we are heading for grid parity by about 2014 or 2015, at least for the larger units of around 10kW. That’s where the levelised cost of solar PV equals the average retail price.
From there, prices will continue to fall to around 15c/KWh, while retail energy costs are expected to rise to 45c/kWh and beyond. That difference is expected to be accentuated by the widespread introduction of peak rates.
On large-scale PV Parkinson says:
The industry is waiting, with interest, for the winners of the first stage of the Solar Flagships to be announced. One of four 150MW solar PV installations will be chosen, although the second round of the flagship program will likely have more winners, but with smaller installations, and so will test more technologies and more locations.
The PV industry is confident that large-scale solar PV will match costs with wind by around 2016, and Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicted last month that up to 4.3GW of large-scale solar could be built under the renewable energy target by 2020 if it can succeed in displacing wind as the cheapest renewable energy source.
Globally Stephen Lacey’s post has this graph showing that the equivalent of 17 nuclear power stations of PV solar were shipped in 2010, a 65% annual increase over the last five years:
Global solar PV installations
On cost at the end of the post he quotes SunPower’s Tom Dinwoodie as saying, “The cross-over has occurred.” Seems it has in some markets.
Solar is a “peaking” technology rather than a base-load technology. Lacey gives this graph showing solar output against critical power demand in California:
Solar output against critical power demand
To me this leaves a troublesome shoulder on each side of the peak that would need to be met by a flexible power source if solar became a significant provider of overall power. Quiggin says that in the future:
At some point the share of solar PV will be large enough (say 30 per cent) that it will change the balance of supply and demand, ending the present situation where the excess supply of night-time power from coal must be sold at a discount. That will entail both changes in pricing structures, most obviously a premium for power supplied in the early evening or for storage technologies.
Quiggin’s final comment makes the point that if the market is allowed to operate “winners” or combinations of successful technologies will emerge from the pack. It is not possible to pick winners in advance, but one can have confidence that they will emerge.
At this stage, it looks as if solar PV and energy efficiency are the most promising candidates, along with wind, while most of the others look less hopeful than they did a few years ago.
Also:
If the cost of solar PV continues to decline at rates similar to those we have seen in recent years, the whole debate over climate mitigation will be changed. Plausibly, a CO2 price of $50/tonne will be enough to drive a fairly rapid decarbonisation of the whole electricity sector. That means a smaller increase in prices than would otherwise have been expected, and therefore less of a role for adjustments in final demand.
In other developments, researchers at the University of Minnesota are working on using CO2 instead of water to extract geothermal energy from rocks. It moves more easily through the rocks and is less likely to react with the materials around it.
Parkinson says that the whole solar technology field is still fluid as scientists look at different ways of capturing and converting solar energy. In this post he describes efforts to use concentrated solar to heat compressed air rather than water, pointing out that the best concentrated solar sites usually feature a scarcity of water. Scientists are also looking at various storage devices.
All this will create new technologies and a new environment for power grids and for the management of electricity within the home. In yet another post Parkinson looks at some of these issues. For example:
EVs [electric vehicles] without subsidies will reach price parity by 2022 (electric network provider Better Place may argue they are already there). Accenture also predicts advance storage will reach grid parity for renewable generation by 2021, and grid scale storage will reach grid parity by 2032.
Part of the point about EVs is that they can serve as a power source when not being used, if you have a smart grid. I heard Parkinson being interviewed about how smart grids operate the other day, so hopefully a post is not far way. In this comment at Quiggin’s BilB looks to a future 20 years hence when perhaps half the electricity on the grid comes from distributed sources. Change is on the way.
Thanks to John D for making sure I didn’t miss these links.
On a personal note I’m going to disappear from the intrertubes for a short period as I have to go into hospital tomorrow for a spot of laparoscopic surgery to repair a tear in my abdominal wall – in other words a hernia. I should be home the next day but anaesthetics always make me feel subhuman for a while.
Have just turned the comments on for this post. It appears that there was a glitch in the backend somewhere with the last few posts.
Off topic, but best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Apparently home air conditioners account for 50% peak load on some networks. Now the CSIRO is working on rooftop solar for cooling.
Thanks DI (nr). I’m getting mixed messages about that side of things, but have arranged to see a good sports doctor I know.
I find the following observations problematic:
While it’s obviously good if PV supply prices decline, displacing wind is obviously not as advantageous as displacing lignite or even anthracite or oil. Wind’s limited contribution to abatement largely reflects what it replaces in the supply chain — gas. If PV displaces wind, the marginal abatement will be tiny indeed. Renewables need to take on the big guns in fossil HC rather than each other or even fairly low intensity HCs if their potential for abatement is to be maximised.
There should be a way to incentivise landlords to install solar pv on their tenanted properties and/or a way for tenants to make a solar pv investment that does not financially tie them to a dwelling. Without something like that the potential of rooftop solar pv is limited to about 70% of residential dwellings at the moment.
I think that you are reading that the wrong way, Fran. The words were
“displacing wind as the cheapest ”
Not displace wind in physical or functional reality.
Good point, Sam B.
Brian,
Nice post. Prediction is fun, but the truth is we can’t really predict technological change. Imagine extrapolating that PV cost graph back in 2006. Doesn’t look good, does it?. But is it any more valid to extrapolate it from 2010?
We need markets and institutions that don’t rely on technological predictions: ie
(1) a carbon price driven by an ETS
(2) smart meters to allow consumers to measure, control and be charged on their time-of-use electricity use
(3) smart grids that accommodate distributed and intermittent generation
(4) network pricing that charges consumers according to their peak use of the grid, not their average or off-peak use.
(5) governments to back off picking winners (except for flagship projects) and wasting everybody’s money and goodwill
(6) researchers, inventors, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to keep the good ideas coming through
With all of these in place, and the technological promise discussed in the OP, there would be reasons to be cheerful, indeed.
4.5 GW of PV generates the same energy as a little over 0.5 GW of conventional generation, dear Muriel. Except of course on a bad sunless day when it generates zilchish.
If you allow that there is about 40 GW of conventional generation on the East Coast you would need over 300 GW of PV to replace it.
The second fact is that PV inverters use current control (Thanks to those totally stupid Europeans) and already is beginning to over-voltage the network. The last place for PV is on domestic rooftops, as the voltage rise effect is worst there. Large scale PV and Solar thermal connected directly to the HV network is the best prospect.
Huggy
Huggy,
The equivalence factor for Australia is 5:1 not 9:1, and that factor takes account of weather and time of day.
would you care to elaborate on
“The second fact is that PV inverters use current control (Thanks to those totally stupid Europeans) and already is beginning to over-voltage the network. The last place for PV is on domestic rooftops, as the voltage rise effect is worst there.”
Sam Bauers said:
I don’t see that as feasible short of the kinds of subsidies that so bedevil the system. It would be better to focus on increasing the stock of high quality sustainable public (or quasi-public) housing and making low net energy usage a part of the design specifications for funding.
This is getting strange.
BilB, what do you mean by “equivalence factor” (for the benighted!)
A simple question. Are solar PV panels susceptible to severe hail storms?
In line with the LP employment thread, do they regularly need cleaning and is that currently a service offered by installers?
pablo
If you can explain this to me, we’ll both know.
Hailstone Impact: 25 mm, 7.53 g at 23 m/s per IEC 61646
From,
[deleted]
Any opinions no these folks?
Oops. Too much personal info at link @14.
Can you please fix Brian? thanks
[Hope I got that right - Brian]
Should be….
http://www.solyndra.com/technology-products/200-series/
Yep, great , thanks mate.
Brian @ 12,
Nameplate rating equivalence factor. ie a 1 gig nuclear powered power station can put out around 7,884 gigawatt hours of electricity per year running at 90% of rated capacity.
1 gigawatt of PV panels in Sydney can put out around 1566 gigawatt hours of electricity running at full capacity for all available hours of sunlight and taking account of averaged weather conditions.
Giving a namelate performance ratio of 7884 divided by 1566 which is 5.03. Or a nuclear to solar flat panel PV of 1:5 . There are those who have been distorting this perception in order to give the impression that Solar Renewables are a waste of resources and cannot solve our CO2 emission problem.
I contest that view.
And you can too by doing the calculation using this nifty tool:-
http://www.energymatters.com.au/climate-data/grid-calculate-solar.php#1
Brian @12
System Nameplate rating equivalence factor.
A 1 gigawatt nuclear power station running at 90% will produce 7884 gigawatt hours of electricity annually.
A 1 gigawatt field of Solar PV flat panels in Sydney, according to the evaluation tool below, will deliver 1566 gigawatt hours per year.
So the nuclear to solarPV equivalence ratio will be 1:5 (7884 divided by 1566), or it will take 5 gig of solar panels to yield the same output as 1 gigawatt of nuclear.
I get annoyed when people distort this ratio relying on the lack of clear information in order to create the impression that Solar Renewables cannot solve our CO2 emissions problem.
I contest that view.
And you can too using this handy evaluation tool
http://www.energymatters.com.au/climate-data/grid-calculate-solar.php#1
Brian @ 12,
I am having problems, Brian, getting this response posted. I seem to have a wordpress conflict of some sort.
System Nameplate rating equivalence factor.
A 1 gigawatt nuclear power station running at 90% will produce 7884 gigawatt hours of electricity annually.
A 1 gigawatt field of Solar PV flat panels in Sydney, according to the evaluation tool below, will deliver 1566 gigawatt hours per year.
So the nuclear to solarPV equivalence ratio will be 1:5 (7884 divided by 1566), or it will take 5 gig of solar panels to yield the same output as 1 gigawatt of nuclear.
I get annoyed when people distort this ratio relying on the lack of clear information in order to create the impression that Solar Renewables cannot solve our CO2 emissions problem.
http://www.energymatters.com.au/climate-data/grid-calculate-solar.php#1
Brian,
Nameplate equivalence factor.
That would be output nameplate equivalence factor, Brian.
Brian I seem to have some kind of wordpress lockout. Here is the full text that I have been trying to post for some time.
System Nameplate rating equivalence factor.
A 1 gigawatt nuclear power station running at 90% will produce 7884 gigawatt hours of electricity annually.
A 1 gigawatt field of Solar PV flat panels in Sydney, according to the evaluation tool below, will deliver 1566 gigawatt hours per year.
So the nuclear to solarPV equivalence ratio will be 1:5 (7884 divided by 1566), or it will take 5 gig of solar panels to yield the same output as 1 gigawatt of nuclear.
I get annoyed when people distort this ratio relying on the lack of clear information in order to create the impression that Solar Renewables cannot solve our CO2 emissions problem.
http://www.energymatters.com.au/climate-data/grid-calculate-solar.php#1
BilB
Brian,
http://www.energymatters.com.au/climate-data/grid-calculate-solar.php#1
There is something really weird about this link
“http://www.energymatters.com.au/climate-data/grid-calculate-solar.php#1″
Well I am waiting for my pv panels to be connected to the grid it is only a 2kw system but I suppose every little drop helps. This investment should pay for itself within five years or sooner if electricity prices go up as predicted by the media and shock jocks over here in the east or as has already happened in the West by the Fliberals there by stealth aided by a compliant press. No anti Barnett backlash that I have heard of but I could be wrong once again.
BlB, you mean as explained here. I thought that if you had a 1000MW plant that would be what it on average actually produced, by whatever means.
Brian @12
System Nameplate rating equivalence factor.
1 gigawatt nuclear power station running at 90% will produce 7884 gigawatt hours of electricity annually.
1 gigawatt field of Solar PV flat panels in Sydney will deliver 1566 gigawatt hours per year.
So the nuclear to solarPV equivalence ratio will be 1:5 (7884 divided by 1566), or it will take 5 gig of solar panels to yield the same output as 1 gigawatt of nuclear.
I get annoyed when people distort this ratio relying on the lack of clear information in order to create the impression that Solar Renewables cannot solve our CO2 emissions problem.
There is a link to a snazzy solar panel calculator that I have been trying for hours to put up here but it seems to cause my post to crash.
If you go to www,energymatters,com,au and then add /climate-data/grid-calculate-solar.php#1 it will take you to the solar panel evaluation tool.
It’s great news that PV panels are getting much cheaper.
Re chinese panels, after some research on whirlpool.net, we insisted on genuine Sharp panels and inverter at additional cost, made in japan, because the chinese stuff is reportedly incredibly shoddy.
Solar PV still doesn’t make sense without a storage medium however. Sometimes the sun jsut don’t shine. I guess a suitable stopgap would be CCGT gas. That can spin up relatively quickly can’t it? But you’d have to assume that enough gas capacity was built to cover the whole economy, since sometimes it’s just really dark and cloudy.
Having built that much new gas, wouldn’t the owners of these plants want to run them a bit more often?
If only it was as simple as this article suggests.
Firstly, the panel cost is only 40% of the installation. Even a 50% reduction in cost of the panels would result in a 20% drop in system cost.
Second, the break-even price for solar PV is more like 7 cents per kWh, because this is what the NEM wholesale price averaged during the past year. Anything more than this cost and it is cheaper for EnergyAustralia or whoever to buy reliable energy from carbon-burners, than it is for them to buy unrelaible, unpredictable, 80%-not-there-when-we-need-it renewable PV and wind.
Third, the backp in the shoulder periods requires either (a) large on-site battery backup and no reliance on the Grid, or (b) pay for grid connection and gas fired backup to provide power for the 80% of the time when the PV is in the dark.
I see PV and wind as stalking-horses for the gas turbine industry, which is better than coal but nowhere near good enough to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to the levels that expert opinion suggests is needed – as much as 95% in the electricity industry (Heat, George Monbiot). The costs of either batteries or grid connection should be factored into the cost of PV, because the alternative is for households to sit and shiver in the dark in the winter mornings and evenings and so on.
I am convinced that the only way that renewable wind plus PV can energise our world is if our whole society, including industry, is prepared to do without reliable electricity and, instead of using about 7000 kWh per household per year, make do with 10 or 20 percent of this total.
What are you prepared to do without?
Of course, nuclear options are low carbon, reliable, statistically much safer than even solar (Yes! I can back this up with numbers!) Most of all, it is so cheap in comparison with PV and wind on a LCOE (Least Cost of Energy) basis that there is no contest.
PV and wind, far from approaching some kind of magical crossover, are actually responsible for adding huge costs (Germany, Italy, Spain, even Australia’s huge feed-in-Tariffs). We cannot afford to chase these dreams when the answer lies elsewhere.
wilful – this looks fairly promising (though it has for a while and doesn’t seem to have moved to retail yet):
http://www.cfcl.com.au/BlueGen/
The numers are getting close enough I’m probably going to be getting a 4kW PV system (I work from home), but what would make it really valuable would be the capability to still run when the mains drops out in summer sometimes – eg a fairly small whole of house UPS which could be fed by PV. Unfortunately it looks like that still costs around $7k extra and reliability is not worth that much
Wilful @23,
“Having built that much new gas, wouldn’t the owners of these plants want to run them a bit more often?”
That is exactly the issue. Grid providers will have to think very carefully about what systems they install or they will find themselves with half utilised infrastructure. Solar PV is not going away even if 10,000 John Bennetts write ill informed comments on blogs. The optimal grid supplier compliment for solar PV is hybride CSP with storage. Other than Hydro, this is the most flexible system capable of supplying baseload as well as operate in a highly reactive manner to match the short falls from wind of PV.
If you have had trouble getting through to CEO’s of your favourite electricity supply last week then they would most likely have been Cologne attending
http://www.powergeneurope.com/index.html
and coming up to speed on the dramatic changes taking place in other parts of the world.
Sorry, BilB and folks. All BilB’s posts went straight into the spam bucket for some reason. I literally have to go, so approved them all without sorting which should remain.
Please spell your name the same way also. I think it may have automodded you as a new commenter for that reason.
See you Wednesday.
For 6. Sam Bauers:
Owners could average out how much the panels ‘earn’ and add it to the rent. There’d be no net ‘cost of living’ increase for the renter, ‘cos their electricity bills will be lower to cover the tiny increase in rent.
BilB must live on another planet to mine.
“… John Bennetts write ill informed comments on blogs. The optimal grid supplier compliment for solar PV is hybride [sic] CSP with storage.”
I don’t take kindly to being called ill informed with no indication of why this is so. Bilb must have a reference somewhere, but if so, it must be hypothetical because that utopian balance between Concentrating Solar Power and PV does not exist on any world I know of. CSP with storage isn’t fully operational 24/7 anywhere in the world yet, for starters, and will always struggle to make it through a cold, wet day. What should we use in the mornings? Five hours’ storage seems to be about the practical limit for CSP at present, although I am happy to admit the hypothetical possibility, provided that enough heat storage salts and two big enough tanks are installed to store all that heat. I saw an estimate of the millions of tinnes of salts required somewhere. It is enormous.
In practice… and we are practical, aren’t we?… CSP is not there yet either in capacity or cost. Ask the Spanish. They have trashed their economy trying.
So, rather than an ad hominem attack, how about a reliable reference to back up that opinion? I’m listening and this subject is very important.
BilB must live on another planet to mine.
“… John Bennetts write ill informed comments on blogs. The optimal grid supplier compliment for solar PV is hybride [sic] CSP with storage.”
I don’t take kindly to being called ill informed with no indication of why this is so. Bilb must have a reference somewhere, but if so, it must be hypothetical because that utopian balance between Concentrating Solar Power and PV does not exist on any world I know of. CSP with storage isn’t fully operational 24/7 anywhere in the world yet, for starters, and will always struggle to make it through a cold, wet day. What should we use in the mornings? Five hours’ storage seems to be about the practical limit for CSP at present, although I am happy to admit the hypothetical possibility, provided that enough heat storage salts and two big enough tanks are installed to store all that heat. I saw an estimate of the millions of tonnes of salts required somewhere. It is enormous.
In practice… and we are practical, aren’t we?… CSP is not there yet either in capacity or cost. Ask the Spanish. They have trashed their economy trying.
So, rather than an ad hominem attack, how about a reliable reference to back up that opinion? I’m listening and this subject is very important.
Dear moderator. I’m a newbie, not a spammer. Sorry about the double post. There was a typo in Para 3.
jb
Of course, one day new houses might be right off the grid entirely.
Brian, my comments went ito the spam bucket because of the link to energy matters. There is something about it that the system does not like.
John B, I think that you could benefit from some more research. Have a harder look at where the Europeans are with their development of these systems, and you have to think of systems working co-operatively to get the full appreciation of how the future will develop. Another important point to keep in mind is that PV will continue to grow in popularity because people like what it does for them and how it does it. People like having the sense of independence that it gives them. So, however the grid energy sector reforms itself it must be able to cope with the energy demand handed to them by consumers, both business and private. And that is the question, will they make the right decisions?
BilB,
John B is not ill-informed. He has described precisely the problem with the “distributed PV” vision that you are describing: that nobody wants to stop using electricity when the sun stops shining. Indeed, in the winter that is precisely the time that you need electricity for heating and lighting.
You cannot have it both ways. Either you need the grid or you do not. With intermittent generation – whether distributed or remote – one will need the grid to average out the intermittency and to supply power when local generation is unavailable.
As for solar thermal, I agree with you that this is going to be an essential part of the mix, given the storage that it provides. But the OP was suggesting (as was Quiggin) that PV will be the “winning” technology and (by implication) other renewables will not be required.
It would be better to welcome new, intelligent commenters rather than write them off as uninformed just because they happen to disagree with you.
Sorry, BilB, but without citations (ie, facts) there is no reason to believe your assertions.
I have worked in the energy industry in several jurisdictions for decades, including across various technologies including construction, commissioning and operation of the large diesel, coal fired, GT and CSP . There is no need for your put-down along the lines of “you could benefit from more research”. That’s simply rude and unnecessary. Your position remains factually unsupported and untenable.
I had hoped for more than dreams.
Wake up!
I’m outta here.
John B @31,
I would be inclined to agree with your conclusions if we had to wean ourselves of fossil fuel power immediately or within the next few years. Current renewable technology is intermittent and we don’t yet have the technology or the market arrangements to deliver sufficient storage or demand shifting to cope with this intermittency. We would face a very unreliable power supply compared to what we are used to.
I don’t believe that decarbonising is that urgent. We can use gas-fired generation to fill in the gaps for the next 10 or 20 years until storage technologies (perhaps solar thermal, perhaps EV batteries, perhaps demand shifting, perhaps something else not yet envisaged) develop and mature.
Indeed, if CCGT were required to continue to supply 10% (say) of kWh during the “gaps”, we would still have the 95% reduction in carbon emissions that you say is needed.
You damage your credibility with statements like this.
BilB@40,
“Another important point to keep in mind is that PV will continue to grow in popularity because people like what it does for them and how it does it. People like having the sense of independence that it gives them. ”
I would have to say that this is an illusion. Rooftop PV is only affordable because it is heavily subsidised. And far from independent, PV owners remain reliant on the grid to get their electricity in and out.
If they want real “independence” they should try disconnecting from the grid and from the public subsidy, and see then what PV “does for them”.
@Incurious and Unread
In your dreams. The Australian PV Association chair is quote above as optimistically forecasting 4.5GW of PV by 2020. Which would generate about the same amount of electricity as 1GWe of coal (not all of the Latrobe Valley power stations as falsely claimed). The effect on emissions would be trivial. Greenwash.
And where does this decarbonizing electricity supply is not urgent come from. 450 ppm atmospheric CO2 looks completely out of reach and 550 ppm CO2 is territory inhabited by optimists.
JohnB,
Hybrid CSP has been up and running for at least 2 decades. It is not hard to find details via google.
True, most PV users are grid connected, but certainly not all. And not all recieve any subsidy for their installation or continued operation. Sam, on JQ reported that his parents installed a PV system with battery backup and it is more than meeting their needs, winter and summer.
It is very early even now in the development of the distributed energy sector. Solar technology is entirely in flux as there are development projects in most countries, and system efficiencies are steadily improving. Battery technology is also changing almost daily and ultra capacitors are promising energy storage for $300 per Kwhr. As far as subsidies are concerned the recent action by the NSW government signals that such subsidies have a very short future. All indications are that subsidies are not the principle driver of the demand for PV. They influence how much PV people install more that whether they install it at all.
There is already a trend to offer new homes with PV panels fitted as original
http://solarpowerpanels.ws/solar-panels/new-homes-constructed-with-solar-panels
This will have the effect of altering property values and property marketability for both new and old buildings. There is an extra advantage for efficiency where dwellings are designed to optomise the performance of built in solar features.
Dismissive remarks from any quarter about the future of solar energy technologies are, in my view, ill informed.
Quokka,
“In your dreams. The Australian PV Association chair is quote above as optimistically forecasting 4.5GW of PV by 2020. ”
I was talking about 2050. That is the year that the 95% reduction target commonly refers to. But I concede that John B may have been talking about 2020, which I agree would be unachievable.
“And where does this decarbonizing electricity supply is not urgent come.”
Garnaut Review 2011 update paper summary, table 4.1, 450ppm scenario, Australian 2020 target = 25% below 2000 emissions. Calculated in Garnaut review 2008.
For example.
Hi TigTog,
There seems to be a problem with posting comments with some types of links. I had a very frustrating day yesterday with this and I have just now posted another comment which went straight into the spaminator. Once this happens reposting is not possible without substantial rewording otherwise the duplicate comment scanner is invoked.
I&AU,
is only related to “independence” in the strange paranoid fantasies of liber[redacted]s. Once you get your subsidized solar, the subsidy has no relationship to how indepenent you are.
If the govt gives me a billion dollars tomorrow and I invest it, I’m independent. Doesn’t matter that the original money came from the govt. see e.g. many Victorian novels, “a man of independent means,” where in this case the means came from the parents.
Your point about the grid is fair enough. But this process of putting solar on rooftops is still a form of disaggregation, and it’s good – it’s much harder, for example, for Fukushima-style accidents to wipe 20% of the power off the grid if the power supply is itself decentralized.
(though obivously, if the sun going down wipes 100% of the power off your grid, you aren’t in an ideal world either).
And of course existing energy sources receive no subsidies at all.
sg,
feed-in tariffs require continuing support from governments, as NSW PV owners have found out. So, you are not independent, even in the narrower sense that you mean it.
I support decentralisation (see eg my comment @8 upthread), but I don’t think that is a strong argument, by itself, for putting power stations on domestic rooftops. Industrial-scale PV would still be quite small and decentralised compared to, say, nuclear power.
The key point is, I think, that whilst generation can be decentralised, transmission and distribution must remain highly centralised and all supply and demand will remain reliant on this centralised grid.
The renewables dream starting to crumble?
Infigen has today announced sale of its German wind farms for two thirds of book value, ie $156M, and suspension of dividends for a year.
See http://www.climatespectator.com.au/commentary/green-deals-more-solar-concessions?utm_source=Climate%2BSpectator%2Bdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Climate%2BSpectator%2Bdaily
When I said that the high cost of renewable energy is a concern, I meant it. Remember, wind power is much cheaper than domestic PV, which as being discussed here is a high cost niche product being asked to fill a base load role. Its proponents tend to dismiss the related transmission (grid), battery and/or gas turbine backup costs which come with it.
Those feed-in tariffs are supposedly temporary though, so solar users won’t be dependent forever.
An additional point about solar is that if it’s to be scaled up, storage will also need to be developed and my guess is that storage will also be highly centralized, whether it’s in old-fashioned hydro schemes or something more modern. Solar also won’t necessarily free us from dependence on water for energy generation if it needs to be stored in pumped hydro (though my guess is some system of underground storage could be used that requires only a fixed quantity of water, since there won’t be much evaporation or leakage).
BilB, we use the third party spam filter service Akismet, so I have no direct control over it. For understandable reasons it thinks the super-SEO-keyword-stuffed links you are posting look like spam. So long as we keep despaminating you the feedback-algorithm will eventually put things right for that particular domain, but it may take a week or two.
If you can just drop a laconic “spaminated again” comment whenever it happens, whichever moderator is on deck soonest will clear your posts from the spambucket.
sg,
I don’t think storage will be highly centralised, simply because it is very difficult to build (beyond existing hydro catchments) very large scale storage.
Quite the opposite; storage will be highly decentralised. Which is why we need the market institutions to ensure that local storage is properly valued and compensated. I can see storage coming from (a) thermal storage at solar thermal power stations (b) electric vehicle batteries (c) local thermal storage in heating and cooling appliances (eg larger hot water tanks) (d) conversion of some existing hydro catchments to pumped storage, (e) hydrogen via electrolysers and fuel cells. There are likely to be others.
If that happens, and happens really well, then surely your system becomes as “decentralized” as, for example, the modern transport system of somewhere like Australia, that is – roads, with largely privatized transport and some public facilities?
If so, that’s a revolutionary shift from what we have now. And theoretically would make the system very robust, I would have thought.
sg,
A closer analogy would be road transport in a metropolitan area. Private vehicles are controlled (to some extent) by centrally-managed traffic lights.
Similarly, with decentralised generation, there still needs to be a centrally-managed grid, with the grid operator managing congestion and preventing overloading.
Which is what we have now.
“Rooftop PV is only affordable because it is heavily subsidised. ”
Again, fossil fuels receive $11billion in subsidies in this country. We dont have any energy markets that arent heavily subsidised by the taxpayer.
Lefty E,
Apart from by the absence of a carbon price, how is fossil-fuelled electricity subsidised? What part of that $11b is paid to this sector?
BilB, @47.
Batteries it is, then. Independence from the grid. Include a couple of days’ worth of batteries in your installed prices for PV and tell me when parity has been reached.
The home depicted in the link is getting close to reasonable, but safe maintenance is still impossible. A close friend of mine fell off his roof this year while admiring his new PV’s. What price safety? What price a week in hospital? At least a walkway along the lower edge, please.
I have never said that enthusiasts should not construct PV’s. My objection is being forced, through FiT’s, to pay for others’ hobbies while the world continues to heat up.
I read on another site this morning that the world’s PV installations last year were just under 40GW (Nameplate), ie about 8GW equivalent when compared to conventional power stations. China alone constructs this much new black coal generating capacity each month or two. Climate change analysts indicate that this is only a drop in the bucket and that the world needs tens or hundreds of times that effort. PV might be nice to have, perhaps, but from a global perspective, PV is not a meaningful part of the solution to humanity’s biggest challenge ever. We need to do very much better, for our kids’ sakes.
For perspective, India has commenced construction of 60GW of nuclear by 2032. That’s equivalent energy output (ignoring storage issues) to 300GW of PV. An equivalent solar field would be at least four or five hundred square kilometres in area, involving huge material cost and social dislocation. Perhaps some prefer that Indians and Africans and Asians stay for ever without reliable power: they will not. There are billions who want to enjoy that which we take for granted. These folks don’t have spare multiples of $10k for components and they certainly don’t have $200k homes on which to mount them.
60GW new nuclear power in India by 2032
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_India
From the SMH:
“TAXPAYERS spend about 11 times more encouraging the use of fossil fuels than on climate change programs – and the sum is growing.
Fossil fuel incentives and subsidies will cost about $12.2 billion this financial year, compared with $1.1 billion spent on programs designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions and boost clean energy research.”
@60, subsidies need not be direct. Here is a list of fossil fuel subsidies.
http://www.greenlivingpedia.org/Government_subsidies_for_fossil_fuel_use_in_Australia
Meanwhile, over in Italy:
“Italy’s nuclear revival is officially dead and the “no” vote seems likely to accelerate the meltdown of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s career.
After two days of voting, four binding referendum questions passed and each went overwhelmingly against Mr. Berlusconi wishes. In one referendum, voters blocked the centre-right government’s plan to construct nuclear power plants. Two others blocked the privatization of municipal water utilities.”
Adrian and Salient Green,
Thanks for the links. The subsidies relate primarily to transport rather than electricity generation. Transport subsidies may indirectly cause generation to be subsidised, by reducing the price of coal. However, I would expect this effect to be modest (although I am open to being persuaded otherwise) as the coal price is typically set by export markets.
So, whilst they are certainly undesirable, I don’t think the $11bn of subsidies are relevant to the merits of subsidising rooftop PV.
What on earth is a “super-SEO-keyword-stuffed link”, TigTog.
The one in your last comment used the words “solar panels” three times in the URL, on a post about solar panels. I’m not at all surprised that Akismet flagged it as a spam link.
PV not going away
http://www.gizmag.com/solar-rail-tunnel-completed/18881/?utm_source=Gizmag+Subscribers&utm_campaign=996121afce-UA-2235360-4&utm_medium=email
JohnB,
You have a problem with the idea of the scale of solar PV. The aspect that you are missing is that PV is a distributed network funded, and this is the most significant point, with distributed investment. This requires no major corporation obtaining multi billion dollar funding, and land, and a workforce in some remote area, and new transmission lines, this is an attachment that fits to existing buildings every where to provide the primary power that they need. Your 500 square kilometre scale scare image suggests your difficulty with perceiving the immense scale of everything else around you. For instance the Hunter Valley open cut mine covers an area of 600 square kilometres. I don’t know what the area of Sydney’s rooves is but it would be a massive number of which a just a 15% covering of PV panels will power Sydney completely. The total energy collected by China’s solar water heaters is the equivalent of the full output of 40 nuclear power plants.
Scale. Scale and time.
As you noticed the PV system in the link boasts 24% efficiency not the 15% commonly installed in Australia. The technology is marching on at an energetic pace and this is the reality that you appear to me to yet need to absorb.
Bilb
If you use tinyurl.com to alias your links, they won’t end up in the spaminator, and they’ll also be a lot shorter and easier for you to archive. You can even use your own character strings most of the time.
We’ve had this argument before, I&U. Only some of the subsidies are transport subisidies. Even then, its hard to see how transport costs would be absorbed without spiking the price.
Example: Subsidised cheap coal in NSW, worth some 1-3 billion to coal-fired generators
http://www.climatespectator.com.au/commentary/cobbora-coal-mine-subsidy-utilities-power-electricity-price-carbon-price
We’re already so far ahead of renewable subsidies now that I neednt go on, but I can if you like…
@ BilB, #69:
The land holdings of the coal mines in the Hunter may well be 600 square kilometres, but the actual workings would be closer to 10% of that. The combination of mines and rehab sites is bad enough. Who wants equivalent areas of PV collectors? I must admit, though, that the mines are a huge inconvenience and are not pretty (I live in Singleton).
Thanks for the link to the Belgian roof. There are any number of demonstration feel-good projects around the globe. What I cannot get into my head is anything like a reliable Indian solar system based on hundreds of square miles of collectors, whatever their spatial arrangement and despite possible efficiencies of 23% in lieu of 17%. The collectors my mate was looking at when he slipped off his roof are top of the line – 24% he stated – but he still ended up in hospital.
The signal to noise content of this discussion is diminishing, as one of us tries to avoid the big picture while pointing to trials and demos. The other is well aware of (for example) developments in low cost, organic collectors which unfortunately have very poor efficiencies and only a 5 year lifetime but might soon cost almost nix. Add another 1000 sq.km or two, but they might be much better than nothing for those who have nothing.
The need is not for demo projects at the high end, it is for solutions, within a decade or four, for the world’s masses. I cannot envision that the answer involves 60GW of PV with an LCOE of at least 15 to 25 US cents per kWh, no matter how elegant the concept. Here’s an example calculation for a range of commercial scale PV installations. If you insist on domestic scale or micro, then increase accordingly. Skip to Page 34 if in a hurry.
See:
http://www.energy.ca.gov/reti/steering/2010-06-28_meeting/documents/09_Price-LTPP_Solar%20PV%20by%20E3.pdf
These examples and notions can be tossed around for ages. In fact, they have been. In the meantime, I have seen nothing at all to convince me that India’s 60GW plan is anything other than excellent. I expect that its LCOE will be half of that for the PV.
Lefty E,
We are on the same side on this. Cobbora is an absolute shocker. FBT is a shocker. Diesel excise rebate is not ideal, but I can sort of understand it (in the sense that the fuel excise is intended to fund roads and relieve road congestion). There should still be a carbon price on it, though.
But take away every cent of those fossil fuel subsidies and the fact remains: rooftop PV is still a complete waste of public money.
I would have to take lessons, Fran. Actually the best thing for the likes of me is a worked example to follow. And thanks for the kind advice.
JohnB,
The average Indian family has 1.5 light bulbs for their family dwellings. Their needs are very different to ours. Solar panels are very popular in Africa where they can be seen mounted on a stick above mud homes and are largely used to charge cell phones. This saves the women from having to walk many hours to the nearest town and the wait as their phones are charged before the walk home. Not to mention the cost. So the more basic a family’s living standard the greater the value a single solar panel can be. When you contemplate the cost of electricity distribution to low consumption families and communities solar panels make good economic sense. So the probability of usage expansion is likely to be far more rapid in these countries that in affluent countries such as Australia.
Well, actually , Fran, that looks pretty easy. Got any other tricks?
But I&U, presumably at some point as the price per KWh of solar plummets (and thats precisely what its doing over time) your statemtn will no longer be true.
Im assuming R&D money hastens that moment.
That said, as Ive argued before, Im all for larger scale, municipal solar http://bitemylatte.blogspot.com/2009/10/municipal-solar.html
Sam B @6: Urban roof top solar started with idealistic home owners installing some panels on their roof. The problems you raised come back to this idea that “the panels will be owned by the home owner.” The implications of this are:
1. Most roof top installations only cover a fraction of the available roof area. Economies of scale are not achieved.
2. The poor can’t afford to instal panels even when the investment is quite attractive.
3. Panels are unlikely to be installed on rental properties because of a perception that it has to be landlord who pays and the tenant who benefits.
An alternate model would separate ownership of the panels from ownership of the house. Under this scheme the panel owner might be a business that leases roof space from house owners and installs and maintains the panels. Aprt from reducing the problems noted above, this type of approach may:
1. Provide lease income to lower income house owners.
2. Allow DC power from a number of houses to be converted to AC using a common unit. Suspect that this would reduce costs and/or allow more sophisticated/grid friendly systems to be used.
3. Make it more practical to use competitive tendering to set the feed in tariff and/or subsidy level.
Another approach, JohnD, would be to follow the European model to some degree where rental accommodation does not include kitchens. People move their kitchen with them. This was the genesis of the 600mm modular cabinetry. The same thinking could easily be applied to solar panels. Rental accommodation could include a rack or bracket system to allow the attachment of removeable solar PV panels. We designers can make this process totally safe and fool proof, really. I design and machine most of the electrical connections for my products and see no problem in this.
In an earlier google scan I came across several articles about people taking their solar panels with them as they moved houses (buying and selling). John Bennetts earlier annecdote about a friend who was injured as he admired his solar array has a solution too. An earlier product concept for which I took out a provisional was dubbed the “gutter guard safety fence”. This is a device that lays in roofing gutters and acts as a gutter leaf guard. When you want to service your roof or hose the mud out of the gutters there is a pull cord at the end of the gutter which pulls the gutter guard segments into the vertical position hinging around their base end to form a safety fence while clearing free access to the gutter for cleaning. This is suitable for gutter heights above 3 metres. I thought this out for my house where the highside gutter is 8 metres above the ground and very scary. So such hard ware could be part of a “safe service” relocatable solar panel system for rental accomodation. Of course you are going to say what about the meter and the connection contract. Well..I can’t solve every thing.
John D @ 67 – with a gross feed in tarriff you can clearly separate usage from generation and so remove the owner/renter barrier. The renter pays for electricity as usual and the owner benefits from the capital investment directly without having to worry about the benefit going to the renter instead of them.
Also, it depends on your definition of “poor”, but there are companies now going to retirement villages who front up the capital to install a series of solar cells in the complex. There is no upfront capital cost for the individual owners, and instead they pay a yearly fee which covers capital recovery/profit/maintenance. In return they receive the power generated from the solar cells and any FiT from the surplus. Its a pretty low risk option for those who don’t have the upfront capital.
Brian: You say in the post:
However, while there is an element of truth in the overall power generation system is too complex for it to be wise to allow crude market mechanisms to drive the mix in investment. This is particularly true if variable power sources such as solar and wind are to make up a significant part of the power mix.
Firstly there are geographic distribution issues for solar and wind. The power output from these sources will be less variable if the installations a spread over as wide an area as practical even though crude market forces would tend to drive investment in wind to concentrate at a few wind hotspots.
Secondly there a geographic distribution issues associated with grid capacity/costs. Grid costs will be minimized by having generators close to point of use even though inappropriate market pressures may drive the location of generators to less than optimum balances between generation and grid costs.
Secondly, there are technical mix issues. These issues are complicated by different needs at different stages in the clean-up process. For example, one logical plan might be divided into 3 stages:
Stage 1: Coal fired is replaced with a mix CCGT and clean power. There must be enough CCGT is in place at the end of this process to ensure supply reliability during stage 2.
Stage 2: Clean power investment continues until a point is reached where emission targets can only be met with the % of power ex CCGT drops below the % required for reliable power supply without power storage.
Stage 3: CCGT is replaced by clean power with storage.
Two comments here: Firstly it will be difficult to get the necessary CCGT investment without offering some long term price and sales certainty.
Secondly, during stages 1 and 2 the choice of clean power tech will be driven by the price without storage. During stage 3, storage needs and prices will become more important.
Good system engineering is more important than market forces for driving investment in power generation.
Food for thought, JohnD.
“Good system engineering is more important than market forces for driving investment in power generation”
Lefty E @76,
I support R&D subsidies and grants. FiTs are not R&D. Just think how much R&D might have been supported with the money wasted on FiTs.
When rooftop PV becomes competitive with low carbon alternatives, public subsidies will not be required to make it attractive to install. So my statement (that rooftop PV is a waste of public money) would still stand.
John D @80:
You cannot have it both ways.
Either you seek to benefit from geographic spread of unreliable solar and wind, thus needing a very much enlarged grid, or you have no grid and instead need local storage.
Remember, the grid cost in Australia already greatly exceeds the capital tied up in generating plant. What you have argued is that we should throw money at the problem of intermittency, in the hope that magic will smooth out the peaks and troughs.
Sad to say, even a big fat grid the size of Australia or Europe or USA has been shown to be susceptible to weather events, thus still needing storage.
You have ended up advocating the worst of all worlds:
More grid,
More storage,
Less reliability,
More cost,
Needs still not met: Customers still not happy.
Please, don’t refer me to the BZE2020 exercise in greenwash. That is only for superoptimists who cannot count, who want to have zero air travel within Australia (air is only for overseas flights), 50% reduction in energy consumption and all of this while goods and passengers travel by non-existent high capacity rail driven by electricity which won’t be available.
I know, I’m a pessimist or a realist, depending on your point of view. I’m an engineer, so I guess that realistic pessimism is included in the package.
I’m also a reluctant convert to nuclear options, simply because there is no practical alternative to fossil fuels which doesn’t involve driving us back into the Dark Ages, is scaleable to provide power for the 75% of the world’s population who would like to enjoy what we of the West already enjoy – not just 1.5 light globes and an hour per day of water, at best.
The more I study nuclear options, the more my fears have been put to rest on all fronts – safety, non-proliferation, cost, resource allocation…
There is a short book putting both sides of the story (two Australian authors, writing from opposite ends of the book). I recommend it. Why Vs Why – Nuclear Power, Prof. Ian Lowe and Prof. Barry Brook, Pantera Press, 2010. It’s the closest thing to balance that I have found.
John Bennetts
I’m as sympathetic to inclusion of nuclear power in world/Australian energy options as anyone posting persistently on this site, and I certainly have the most profound reservations about the feasibility of the current BZE2020 proposal.
Nevertheless, your response above lacks the detail you need to provoke a serious and considered exchange of views in this forum. It’s far better to identify something specific in the BZE2020 proposal to which you object, or to point to an aspect of intermittency that you say cannot be reconciled with current or future energy usages than to simply start tossing about terms such as “greenwash”. Used as you have used it here, this is merely offensive. Whatever one may say of the BZE proposal, it’s not “greenwash” and the people who post here are not, IMO, naive or uninformed. The questions you raise have been the subject of persistent argument here over a very long time. Saying that you are an engineer and avowing “realism and pessimism” as an occupational condition will be regarded by many as either arrogant or condescending and perhaps both. We do have engineers posting here, including AIUI, your interlocutor, JohnD.
I don’t have standing to speak for the moderators here, or the LP community more broadly but I strongly suspect that if you wish thoughtful responses, that you will need to adopt a rather less hectoring tone.
I hope that helps.
This slurry based battery just might make EV’s and solar PV more practical by providing a much better battery that could be used as a more energy intensive flow through battery as well as a non flow battery.
Potentially a game changer.
“you will need to adopt a rather less hectoring tone”
Good advice, Fran.
John B@83,
“That [BZE2020] is only for superoptimists who cannot count.”
No, BZE is from superoptimists who can count. And its work is very useful and insightful for precisely that reason.
It is about what is possible, not what is probable.
John Bennetts,
a). take Fran’s advice.
b). re-examine your own conclusion from a retail consumer’s point of view and in the light of increased electricity prices soon to hit 28 cents per unit and not including any carbon tax, and peak oil which will drive petrol to $2 per litre in the next few years. Should Australia commit to Nuclear power consumers would be locked into buying their electricity at whatever the grid price was. The combination of energy prices will be carving a huge price through family budgets just as cell phone charges have. This will not work for Australians. The distributed grid is a guaranteed development which when you examine the consequences would decimate the viability of the Nuclear option.
It is not a case of what you believe is better from an engineering point of view, it is about what real people will do in the face of costs and alternatives. This is Barry Brookes problem. He has conjured up a solution and is trying to drive it forward, but he has lost the perspective of what consumers actually want.
John B @63: If you really are an engineer I shouldn’t have to explain to you that simplistic statements like:
can act as barriers to the finding the optimum solutions that engineers are supposed to be seeking.
For example, if you look at the solar PV/grid/storage issue you would find that many farmers have chosen to use solar PV with storage because connecting to the grid is so expensive. You would also find that most urban solar PV users are connected to the grid without storage because they were connected to the grid anyway. However, in the urban context there may be a case for being connected to the grid AND have some storage.
This hybrid approach has the advantage of allowing surplus power to be sold while still having the storage that I understand is necessary if solar PV is top be used in the home during a blackout. Storage also has the attraction of allowing cheap off- peak to be stored and sold later or used to reduce power costs during high price times of the day.
I shouldn’t have to tell you either that challenging questions can be a spur to innovation that often are of more use outside of the context in which the question is asked. For this reason I think BZE2020 is a useful exercise even though I don’t think it was ever going to happen. It highlights the areas where advances can easily be made how as well as areas where better answers would be desirable.
Go back and have a look at what you said @63 and ask yourself what you would do if solar PV became very cheap and you wanted a reliable power system.
Good thinking, JohnD
“[allowing cheap off- peak to be stored and sold later] or used to reduce power costs during high price times of the day”
That [thought] had not occured to me at all. I think that you have found a loophole in the FiT.
John D @ 85, your link was broken. By a remarkable feat of ESP I’ve put in the link to the slurry based battery I think you were after
As I indicated upthread, I’ve had a little stay in hospital. So far so good.
John Bennetts, you are very welcome here, but established commenters have indicated what the form is on this forum.
I want to go back to your comment @ 53. Firstly, you’ve got the figures wrong. The sale was for 156 million euros ($210 million) against an estimated value of $230 million. I make that a discount of about 13%, not a third.
Secondly, did you notice this at the end of the segment?
It makes clear that Infigen is divesting wind assets in Germany but is not exiting the sector.
John D @ 77, I understand that in Germany people are renting other people’s rooves to install PV solar and take advantage of the feed-in tariffs, but I don’t know any details on how it operates.
John B @83: You accuse me of:
The key point I was making was that
I would have thought that it was obvious that what I was talking about was the need consider the balances between things like reliability, expenditure on the grid, storage and cost with the objective of balancing these things in a way that keeps the customer happy. That is what good system design is all about.
I would also add the smart power alternatives that Bilb talks about. The system design is further complicated by the quite different problems that have to be faced as we move to cleaner and cleaner power generation. It is certainly not an area where simple market measures that depend on artificial price increases are a substitute for good engineering.
John D @ 80 I was reporting Quiggin’s comment on market solutions but didn’t say I entirely agreed with him. In fact my vision of how things should go is similar to your three-phase outline. The phase-out of coal and the two-phase role of gas has to be a designed outcome rather than left to the market.
There was something Ian Lowe wrote in 2009:
It doesn’t mean, of course, that markets cannot be used within a framework of systems design.
I just found the same brilliant battery, JohnD..and Brian. Well it looks like we have a real solution as long as there are no technical hitches. The original flow batteries developed by Dr Maria Skylas Kazakis (spelling) at the UNSW were 20 watt hours per kilogram of vanadium soup. So if this new system paste has 10 times the energy content of the original formula then that will hold 200 watt hours per kilogram, or 200 kilogram per 40 Kwhrs. So that means that the VW Bulli will have a fuel weight of 225 kg. I think that we have a winner. This will also mean that storage batteries for distributed PV systems will have a base energy conversion module, and extra capacity will be able to be added over time by adding extra tanks of slurry. This also solves the problem of the day time car problem. Not to mention the possibility of bringing home a tank of electricity on those extended low solar periods if the system should run a little low. Brilliant.
I love modern technology!
Hi Fran and others.
Thanks for trying to stick with me.
My primary concern was with two conflicting statements.
First, it is true that broad geographic spread will result in less fluctuations in the total generated output. However, this has been exaggerated by some commenters. The real question regards how much this geographic smoothing effect is in practice, and at what energy flows east-west and north-south.
Even with grids spanning whole continents the smoothing limits are quite small, as various studies have demonstrated. I have no refs to cite right now and don’t feel the need to look too hard. The proponent has to flesh out his/her proposal. Grids with the necessary capacity do not exist in North America, Europe or Australia, so any proposal which relies on such connectedness needs to consider and to cost the transmission systems which are envisaged to address even part of the reliability problem.
No such grid will solve the problem, either because winter happens right across the continent or (for wind) because a single large weather pattern deprives wide swathes of the continent of wind power at the same time.
I then read further, in the same first paragraph, and see that grid costs are stated to reduce due to the distributed nature of the power generators (SPV and wind). This cannot be true, because the grid will have to be mightily enlarged in order to transmit power across the continent to combat the reliability problem.
Large scale grids in Australia and, presumably, elsewhere cost several times more than the generation plant, so it is important that we get the grid properly in focus and build sufficient capacity into it to achieve objective 1 (maximise reliability) while achieving a competing priority (minimise cost).
As I said in my earlier post, it cannot go both ways. Unless generation is truly distributed, all the time, then the grid will have to work harder and will necessarily cost more.
So, folks, I am nowhere near being convinced that PV can be considered rationally unless at least two other factors are considered at the same time.
Factor 1: Grid capacity Vs Grid cost.
Factor 2: EITHER backup power (GT’s?) OR Storage (Batteries?) OR a combination of these two.
I have intentionally left hydro out because there are too many environmental issues associated with new hydro and existing hydro is already spoken for.
Likewise, I have left pumped storage out because no PV proponent on this thread has shown willingness to include in the costs for PV an allowance for pumped storage, even salt water storage.
Discussing PV without including consideration of transmission grid, storage and GT’s is akin to getting dressed for a night out where the required standard is “coat and tie”. Even if not stated to be so, trousers, shoes and shirt are necessarily part of an acceptable system.
Brian @95,
Are you suggesting that Quiggin’s stance on markets is “ethically indefensible”? If not, what is the relevance of that quote.
For another perspective
3,287,263 km2 – total area of India
500 km2 – PV area equivalent to 60GW nuclear, apparently
0.015% – % of total area of India required for that PV array
A 22.4 km x 22.4 km square, or circle of ~25.2 km radius
Or distributed over five 100 km2 arrays around the country, or however.
Hardly seems an impost. Especially considering what else could be found to force people from such a large area of land against their wishes or desires in these times.
The kind of failure recently seen at Fukushima, with a 30km exclusion zone has created a far greater zone (>700 km2) of inconvenience and loss of access and amenity, potentially for decades, than what you suggest is required to generate 60GW nuclear equivalent of PV solar power. Using current technology, which is only certain to improve it seems.
The 80km exclusion zone some prefer for the Fukushima nuclear accident is a tenfold greater area of some 5000 km2.
How much social dislocation is that?
In context, in countries as rich in large tracts of dry open land and significant sunshine such as both India and Australia, it seems that in fact the area required to produce the equivalent PV power is remarkably small compared to the entire land area of the countries. Even by current PV tech, let alone after further development.
Got an off the grid 3.5 kW system and batteries where I am, has been working for over ten years, batteries recently replaced with higher storage but far cheaper than the originals as well. Had just a few dropouts and problems over the years, including once from a lightning strike destroying the regulator inside it’s shed and almost starting a fire.
I’d guess we live here without every power guzzling accessory available to and often found in the modern home, but who needs most of them? Some rural areas have over 10% of properties with PV already.
Oops, that should be circle of 25.2 km diameter above for 500 km2
@Quoll,
The “land use” attributable to the Fukushima accident is attributable to well …. an accident. And one that almost certainly would not have occurred if the NPPs were EPRs that India will be building at Jaitapur. Land use for solar is by design and inescapable.
Especially in densely populated countries, land use is a big issue and simplistic calculations about total land verses land for technology X don’t even start to address the real issues. For example in the UK, the theoretical on-shore wind resource is 4,000 TWh/year, but according to the UK Climate Change Committee, the practical resource is somewhere in the range 17-83 TWh/year, before economic constraints. They conclude that on-shore wind is good for no more than about 15% of UK electricity by 2030. This is a dramatic down scaling of purported resource.
And this is another reason I like nuclear – small footprint and even smaller with advanced closed fuel cycle nuclear. Humans have already stomped all over enough of the planet.
@Quokka
Accidents happen, the risk outcomes vary
The Chernobyl permanent exclusion area is some 30km as well I believe
The point I was making related to supposed costs and social dislocation of land use by PV bought up by someone else. Others started the idea of land use area as some sort of nominal measure for costs and social amenity.
I just did a few simple calculations to provide another perspective on a point raised by someone else.
Argue with them if you think that consideration of land use area for various technologies is not a valid point to raise.
To be fair if you think that, then even if they’re using it as a justification for nuclear or they try and characterise people who apparently support PV as being malevolently disinterested in the rights of poorer people.
People can live under PV, or it can be incorporated onto other structures or infrastructure and does necessarily preclude use of the space below for very many things. So long as the sun is not blocked it is nonexclusive to other applications anyway.
Brian the “nameplate rating” of PV modules is total bullshit.
Firstly the output of a PV module declines at 0.6% for every degree K the cell reaches above its NOCT (Normal operating cell temperature) this is given as 45C. Thus on a typical Australian day where the cell temperature gets to at least 75C the output degenerates by 18% for most of the day.
The actual Annual Capacity Factor for PV averaged over the East Coast is about 12% thus PV requires 8 times the nominal power rating to produce the same energy as a base load plant.
On the question of voltage rise due to PV.
The issue is that PV inverters are designed to output a current in phase with the voltage wave, this makes them unity power factor and insensitive to the network voltage.
At midday when the load is low the LV open wire network voltage tends to rise. The PV inverters drive the effective load even lower and the voltage rises more until under AS4777 rules the inverter must shut down. The power utilities are well aware of this problem and in some cases are refusing access to their network. The on/off again operation of the inverters and the fact that some people cannot get their PV on the network are causing much angst.
The problem is current control; voltage controlled inverters do not cause these issues but they cost more and you cannot buy them any-way because the lower cost Current control have driven them from the market.
Huggy
Huggy: It would be better if nameplate capacities were expressed in something like gW equivalent of CCGT or something along those lines.
Many of the problems you talk about seem solvable to a dumb process engineer. This includes the temp/performance issue and the control problems. I might be wrong but I think one of the advantages of larger and linked rooftop systems is that it is easier to afford inverters with more sophisticated and grid friendly features.
Quokka: The area required for solar PV is a furphy while there is plenty of rooftop area available for. While the actual footprint of a nuclear reactor may be small I suspect you would need a very large buffer zone to have any politically feasible chance of getting a nuclear reactor in Aus.
I&U @ 98:
“Indefensible” is a strong word. I’d suggest it might lack an ethical dimension, as stated.
I suspect that if Prof Q and Ian Lowe came together they might accommodate each other’s position. But there is a problem in that I’m not sure how urgent Quiggin sees the issue of mitigation and what targets he considers appropriate.
My problem is that I think we need to go to zero net emissions by 2030, and net negative from 2030 to 2050. That means we need to consider now how power should and shouldn’t be generated after 2030. There is no point in allowing new gas plants to be developed on the basis that their investment and operational horizon goes beyond 2030. So even for grid smoothing you’d have to use something like gas after 2030 only if you could offset it by carbon sequestration, bearing in mind that you need the bottom line to be net negative overall and there will be other unavoidable emissions.
My worry has been and is that just putting a price on carbon, even cap and trade, is not going to get us there or is going to lead to waste in having to decommission and compensate plants before their lifespan is up.
None of the serious planning by states is adequate, because none takes into account that 450ppm and 2C are just too dangerous.
John B: This link gives the variation in output for both single wind farms and the current combined wind power. It also shows just how much our wind power is concentrated in SA and thus highly dependent on weather in the bight. The case for spreading wind farms is pretty obvious even if it means having some wind farms in places like Qld to both smooth output and requiring less grid capacity to get wind power to Qld.
A look at daily cloud cover via satellite pictures would support distribution of solar PV. There is also a case for nth/south spread so that impact of length of the high variation in the southern parts of Aus is reduced.
In theory there is a case for East/west spread to take advantage of the different time zones. However you would need a very long power line to make that work and the gain is not all that significant..
I&U, from a recent press release from alexincancun from the Bonn talks on what Africa wants:
Again, folks, what are the live options for removing CO2 from the atmosphere? We’re clearly heading there, on top of major reductions.
John D:
I have seen your link before. It contains much useful information yet still only hints at the detailed truth, which is that wind varies just as much on a fine scale, measured in minutes, asd it does at a scale measured in hours.
Don’t get me wrong – I am happy for wind to be part of the energy mix, also solar PV and solar thermal. However, claims that solar or wind can be increased as a percentage of the generating capacity of the nation have to be tempered by an understanding that, as shown by the graph JD linked to, varies between 0 and 70% of the aggregate nameplate rating when on the scale of the NEM.
Any suggestion that SA’s demand can be supplied from wind in, say, Qld, at any particular instant, needs to be measured against the need for either new massive DC transmission lines between the top and the bottom of the NEM. Perhaps the existing transmission system could be upgraded, but that involves two existing DC links between these two extremes and consideration of capacity constraints, which already limit supply options to SA from the east and north.
There is no easy answer. Stochastically perverse and unreliable supplies such as wind and PV rely on interlinking on a grand scale, storage and close to 100% GT backup, all of which cost bundles of money.
Whichever way the system is planned, either as interlinked local systems or as one huge whole, storage, backup and grid capacity, combined, cost much more money for unreliable wind and PV than for reliable coal and nuclear. That fact gives me no satisfaction, it is just saying it the way that it is.
Discussion of energy options which do not include these factors in appropriate proportions is deeply flawed.
In the final washup, I remain convinced that in western communitiesthe cost of these three factors severely limits the value of wind and PV generation options, except as minor components of a system which relies primarily on reliable generation sources to do the heavy lifting.
I am also convinced that societies which do not have access to reliable electricity supplies would like to have them, and that these communities will use whatever means as are available to gain them.
As someone said above, it is unreasonable to expect that this not be so. It may well be reasonable for western societies to assist less well off communities, eg by constructing nuclear power plants and transmission systems which have potential to reduce demand for (for example) coal fired generation in places like Asia, Africa and India. That is beyond the scope of this thread’s lead article.
John Quiggins’ article contains a few other statements which I disagree with.
“Solar is a “peaking” technology rather than a base-load technology.”
It is neither. PV is unable to be called upon to meet peaks, and is clearly not base-load. Peaks, which are characterised by the need to add energy to meet a peak, are met by OCGT (which is much less efficient and hence more carbon-intensive than CCGT) or hydro (which is strictly limited in practice) in any PV dominated system. There is an exception, batteries, which are prohibitively expensive for grid-supplied energy. Peaks are not really a consideration in islanded PV systems, because the household which uses more than it generates will simply brown out.
“…[T]he equivalent of 17 nuclear power stations of PV solar were shipped in 2010.”
No, they were not.
The solar nameplate rating must first be divided by at least a factor of 5 to 10, depending on location, to determine equivalence.
The fairer and more meaningful statement would be that solar PV modules the energy equivalent of two or three nuclear or coal powered generators were shipped in 2010.
This is the equivalent of about 1 month’s increase in the coal fired capacity of the Chinese generation fleet.
Sad to say, the gap is not closing, as some would hope – it is widening. CO2 emissions in that same year, 2010, have recently been reported to be 10% higher than for the previous year.
It is very much a false hope that PV will be able to turn this situation around. The world needs us all to use every tool at our disposal to meet the carbon challenge. By all means, let PV achieve what it can and where it can, but do not stand in the way of other carbon free technologies because to do so is a path which leads to climate failure.
@ Lefty E:
By far the best way to deal with atmospheric CO2 is to not put it there in the first place.
Removing CO2 from the atmosphere directly is somewhat akin to needles and haystacks… very large haystacks.
Huggy @103,
That sounds like a lot of twoddle to me.
Midday is peak demand time and the load is consistent. I have voltage meters on a number of my machines, I see no voltage change. Every anti PV commentator here is doing handstands to say that PV contributes nothing significant to the grid, and now here you are saying that PV is influencing the grid at peak load. Give me a break.
Using the Energy Matters calculator it takes 5 of PV to equal 1 of conventional. However there are a lot of older panels with lower efficiencies. The better of the panels being installed are now up to 24% efficient way up from the earlier 15% panels. However the calculator used 16.5% efficient panels (6 to the kilowatt) for its calculation. I believe the calculator. Further as the percentage of the 24% panels increases the ratio will only steadily improve in PV’s favour. You claim is incorrect.
JohnB,
You haven’t really taken anything that is presented here in from what I can see from your “summary” @ 109. You are convinced that energy delivery system that varies is bad and therefore irrelevent. Clearly you are not able to see that the energy world is changing to renewables and that people are happy about it. While we have been talking here news of a fantastic new high density energy storage technology capable of storing weeks of electricity for households has been revealed, and still you maintain your Nuclear conviction. We will just have to let technology take its course.
With all due respect Brian, the issue you have is nothing to do with the ethics of markets. For example, if the target under a cap and trade was zero net emissions by 2030, then carbon price under that regime would be so high that investment in the types of generation capacity you are concerned about would not occur. It is as simple as that. What markets can do (in conjunction with other carefully targeted measures) is deliver a given reduction in emissions at the lowest cost to the economy. The target drives the market, not the other way around.
@ Lefty: CO2 sequestration is still a tricky business.
In terms of geological sequestration (i.e. sticking it back in the ground), I think they have yet to get a working example of this that gives any benefit in terms of net flow of CO2 from the atmosphere. That said I know that Geoscience Australia is changing the emphasis of their petroleum division to consider CCS in existing basins, so clearly things will be moving towards looking at this more seriously.
However it seems that by far the easiest way to reduce CO2 emissions is to stop emitting the stuff in the first place. With a bit of luck natural processes such as dissolution in the oceans will provide a net negative flux of CO2, so if we could get to Brian’s target of zero emissions of CO2 by 2030, then nature might take care of the rest.
However this really depends on what we mean by ‘zero emissions’. And if we wait too long then the natural reservoirs (i.e. oceans and plant life etc) will adjust to the increased amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. If that happens (i.e. we lose the buffering effect of these reservoirs) then we are well and truly fucked in terms of trying to remove it again at any reasonable cost. Adaptation will be the only route left.
@ LO: I suspect that Brian’s comments about market ethics have less to do with the behaviour of a pure market-driven approach, and more to do with the rent-seeking of people/organisations who have a lot to lose under a carbon price. That said, I agree that a high price on CO2 is what’s required to drive a change in the market, and I don’t think that’s what we are going to get. Instead all we’ll get is higher prices but no alternatives.
John Bennetts,
If there is a serious intention to decarbonise our energy sector in order to eliminate our rampant CO2 emissions and regardless of the methodology used, then by far the most significant progress will be made by eliminating the political road block that the likes of Abbott , Joyce, and the faceless bureaucrats in halls of government have put up to derail all forms of Climate Action. This is where we must all agree as failure to do so will lead to the eventual destruction of everything that we all seek to achieve. This is where Barry Brooke and his minions should be putting their effort.
LO @ 112, I see the need for a framework similar to what John D outlined @ 80. To put it another way, no more new coal and gas as an interim baseload and backup technology to take us through to 2030. All additional power should be renewable. What is built would depend on what the market throws up. But from the above discussion, I’m inclined to think that intermittent sources are still problematic and are perhaps unlikely to provide more than half of total needs.
I see baseload or non-intermittent power coming from at least three possible sources – nuclear, geothermal and waves. Australia could probably give nukes a miss. If the market throws up other technologies, then so much the better. I would see some money going into developing these technologies.
I would set up a framework similar to the above through regulation, with the market working within that. I would have a price on carbon to penalise bad behaviour and provide funds to support and encourage promising new technologies. But the price wouldn’t be what’s driving the whole system. Its prime purpose would be as a source of revenue.
In terms of ethics, I don’t care what terms you use, but the object is to provide a safe climate for those who come several generations after us. Their needs are the whole point.
Brian,
If we are unwilling to
“provide a safe climate for those who come several generations after us”
then humans as a species are every thing that lemmings are in reality not. We really are the species casually marching steadily to the precepice.
LeftyE, there is no point us taking co2 out of the atmosphere. Given that there is space underground for only a fraction of a percent of the co2 we are emitting, there is definitely going to be no room for taking it out of the atmosphere.
Nor is there going to be enough energy available to waste on such a process, given that we are heading into an energy constrained world.
We need to stop cutting down forests and start replanting them or allowing them to regenerate.
Soon it will dawn on even the most self involved that we are in deep do-do. Our highly consuming, high energy use way of life is going to crash even before the developing world gets to any sort of affluence.
‘LeftyE, there is no point us taking co2 out of the atmosphere. Given that there is space underground …’
Everyone above has been missing the point of my question Im afraid. Im not talking about the dead end of underground sequestration. Im talking about this: http://www.wallstreetdaily.com/2011/04/27/saving-the-world-with-synthetic-trees/
BilB @ 116, I continually look for whether people suggesting strategies really understand the dimensions of the problem and the urgency of action required. If they don’t measure up on that score, I lose interest to some extent.
Ultimately I don’t care how we reach a safe climate, as long as we do. If it’s going to be a high price on carbon that is politically acceptable rather than a more planned approach, then so be it.
Salient Green, there is a real problem with the coal-fired power station building programs of China and India in particular. They are extremely unlikely to agree to junk all their new and recently built stations by 2030, for example.
Flannery in his Quarterly Essay, now published as a monograph by Black Inc, takes this problem seriously. It’s one of the most depressing parts of the problem that faces us.
BTW his considered opinion is that despite our best efforts the earth’s climate system will pass a point of no return during the next few decades.
I agree with your general point though Salient. Synthetic trees may buy some time, thougn there’s still stoorag issues.
Incidentally, when unprecedented and dramatic climate change events do start occurring, my money is on the denialists to be the ones who outright panic, start joining millenarian movements with the other idiots, or just go postal with guns.
We’ll be the ones who have to keep a proper civilisation going.
Brian, we can stop exporting coal. That will help.
Lefty E @ 121 – do you know of any quantitative research that has been done in to the effect of Australia stopping coal exports? Presumably that cause an increase in coal prices world wide which may decrease the amount of CO2 produced if electricity producers end using non coal methods. But I wonder if CO2 output would also be offset by less efficient coal being used (say brown coal, but physically closer to China) being used.
Eg what real difference, other than being a very big symbolic and financial gesture would it actually make?
There is an interesting piece on the ABC’s The Drum advocating the formation of a government owned corporation – “Energy Supply Portfolio Company” or ESP Co to “take charge of the governing of our energy supply assets to develop and implement the plan to transform our generation portfolio for 2020 and beyond”. Somewhat analogous to NBN Co. It would take change of NEM and SWIS, perform regulatory functions and facilitate funding within the constraints of specific objectives. It would provide a degree of certainty for investors that a carbon price does not.
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2759240.html
Some of the comments are quite enthusiastic. This does not surprise me. The major political problem with a carbon tax is that all it does is promise emissions reductions based on economic modelling with a underpinning faith in the “free market”. Politically, it is much better to have far more tangible national objectives and appropriate structure in place to drive them forward. Much of the population has far less faith in the nominally free market than does a vocal portion of the chattering classes.
If a sense of national purpose can be engendered (as was partly achieved with NBN) then you are on the way to a political winner.
@ Lefty: I think this is a great idea if it really works. I’d like to know how much effort (carbon-wise) might it take to make the synthetic tree in the first place though. And then how much carbon will you emit trying to place it all in storage? And how stable is the resin? Will it be ok to store in an abandoned underground mine or will it break down and release stuff into the water? And if it is going to break down then why not just grow actual trees and store those?
I’m just asking because removing 12% of the carbon from the atmosphere isn’t really that good if you have to produce an extra 10% making/installing/storing the things in the first place, not even taking into account the cost of all of this. Seems a bit like the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.
Ok, thinking about my previous comment: I suppose given the synthetic tree can do it up to 1000x faster than a normal tree, we could have synthetic forests sucking up carbon much faster.
However I assume this rate drops over time as the resin at the surface gets saturated (which I assume is why they have needles as this would maximise the surface area to volume ratio). And does 1000x times faster really make much difference in the long run? Assuming that these trees take some time to build, when you compare the efforts of a lot of young fast-growing trees to the time it takes to get an equivalent forest out of a factory, I think some of these advantages disappear. I think there might be a number of better uses for the resin (in terms of placing needles inside smoke stacks or near large carbon emitters etc) which might minimise some of this deficiency though.
Still, it’s a cool idea – and we need all the help we can get.
@Lefty E
Forestation and reforestation are by far the most realistic methods at the moment. I saw James Hansen say in an interview that by his estimate the upper limit of a maximal worldwide effort would be to remove 50 ppm CO2 from the atmosphere.
More “techno” methods would very likely be staggeringly expensive.
Lefty E @ 121, we are told that cattle producers should have a responsibility that extends right down the chain to the consumer. Why shouldn’t the producers of coal have a similar responsibility?
Indeed Brian – and in fact this principle has never been doubted in the case of uranium and nuclear power. What’s the difference?
Quokka @ 123,
I agree with that thrust. And the carbon price is the ideal funding method to make that work and remain independent of government. But note that GenIIPV does not need that in any way, other than perhaps for some custom grid interfacing infrastructure, to thrive as Gen2′s funding is entirely private.
Personally I think that the electricity levy funded infrastructure rebuilding fund model is far superior and more in the interests of the consumer as it provides fully paid up utilities which do not need to include mortgage payments in their electricity output price. These consumer funded facilities would then be a partnership between the consumer and the infrastructure development business that built and operated the utilities, again completely independent from government.
But at this stage of the disaster the best path forward is whatever one can get past the bumbling politicians and into action.
May be that zinc/polymer batteries may be the future for both transport and the household?
Quokka @123: Couldn’t agree more about the need for an electricity supply corporation responsible for the planned transition to clean electricity. The transition is simply too complex to be driven by something as crude as a carbon price.
Such an organization would be a logical entity to drive investment in clean electricity by using competitive tendering to set up long term contracts for the supply of clean electricity Many of the other roles suggested make sense too.
Bilb @129: Couldn’t disagree more when you say:
It is simply too clumsy an approach for driving an optimum solution and the price increases it requires to work simply provides ammunition for those who really believe we should do nothing.
Brian: This topic deserves a post of its own.
@John D
And at the risk of repeating myself, I think at some sort of level a significant part of the general population sense this as well. This poses more problems for a carbon tax than do the activities of climate deniers. The latter of course jump on any perceived weak point but overall I’m pretty sure that there is majority support for significant action on climate but that action needs to be clearly seen to be effective.
OK, JohnD,
as I said I prefer an electricity levy approach as it is very logically user pays, but that is not going to happen. So you have to decide how your Corporation is going to achieve its funding. If that is left in the hands of politicians then you are grid locked again.
At the end of the day the funding of the total bill for the rebuilding of infrastructure falls on the end user.
So do they bite the bullet and pay progressively as they consume by way of a levy, ( and I have to say here that I would have no trouble slugging a smelter with a 3 cent per unit levy on top of the 3.5 cents per unit that they pay [a guess on my part] for their electricity)
or does a Corporation say to energy tenderers “you have to find your own funds” in which case the end user foots the bill eventually for the principle plus interest (based on the tenderer’s rating) plus profit plus costs plus distributors margin on those items,
or do you use proceeds from a carbon price charge as accumulated in a fund plus some borrowing at government bond rates to expand the build rate (this borrowing would be paid back at the end of the build programme from the extended carbon pricing but still at the fixed carbon price rate).
It is a no brainer to my way of thinking if the objective is to provide renewable energy at the lowest possible cost.
Brian said:
Much as would any rational person, I desperately hope he is wrong — that we are not too late in practice, and that we humans as a species find the resources we need to foreclose at least the worst of what we have authored in a way that does not radically insult equity.
Buried deep under that is the idea that if we really are going to do too little too late, that I live long enough to curse to their faces those who dug in their heels and ensured that we failed to act with the rigour and ubiquity needed.
BiLb @ 111.
The voltage rise is not twaddle. If it was the power utilities on the East Coast would not be holding conferences on the subject.
Try googling “voltage rise due to PV”
A good sample:
http://www.bepress.com/ijeeps/vol10/iss4/art3/
I delivered a paper on the subject to an IEA conference in 2001
Try to get up to speed before you denigrate people who really know what they are talking about.
Huggy
Fran@134
There is one strategy that would save the world:
The ubiquitous adoption of local energy storage at the consumer premises. Allowing that there are 8 million residences in Oz this would mean 80 GWh of energy storage. Enough to store the entire output capability of the generation mix for over 2 hours. The consequence of this would be that intermittent renewable sources would be absorbed by the network and that peaking generation would not be needed. also the network would run at an ADMD of <1kVA thus avoiding network refurbishment costs (this saving would pay for the storage systems BTW).
But we are too fucking stupid to do this.
huggy
Brian,
Quiggin wrote the book (literally) on the failings of market orthodoxy and neoliberal economics. He is also a vehement critic of privatisation. He is the last person who would be unthinkingly cheering on market-based economic policies.
And yet, on carbon mitigation, he supports a free market response to a carbon price and cogently sets out his rationale for this in a blog post which you link to.
Your response: Quiggin is “unethical” and “doesn’t understand the dimension of the problem.”
I’m disappointed.
One source of financing clean energy that deserves thinking about is superannuation/pension funds. There is a vast amount of money there and there are surely many routes to accessing some of it. I don’t see why there could not be some legal obligation on super funds to invest a certain amount in clean energy. There are various obligations that come with the tax benefits of savings in such vehicles, and adding another relatively small one would not be terribly onerous.
Or it might be something as simple as government loan guarantees under the condition that super funds buy the debt. Everybody wins – the super funds get a higher return than govt bonds with lower risk than corporate debt. The clean energy companies get access to potentially cheaper capital.
I think the existence of something along the lines of an “Energy Supply Portfolio Company” as per the drum article would be a plus for this.
Well, Huggybunny, if there is a voltage rise then is a regulatory issue. I’m pretty sure that the high efficiency inverter that we are developing for GenIIPV regulates its output voltage very accurately regardless of its throughput current. I would have thought that if the grid voltage is being forced to rise then someone is over producing.
I&U @ 137, I’m an admirer of John Quiggin’s and am in awe of his intelligence and knowledge. I’ve appreciated his writing and insights on many topics. I would never call him unethical and if I have given that impression I apologise completely. I think you are taking my words in a way I didn’t intend them.
If you want to review what I wrote see @ 95, @ 105 and @ 115.
At 105 I said Quiggin’s statement, as stated, might lack an ethical dimension. Then again it might not.
I think James Hansen is right in saying that we are already into dangerous climate change and need to get emissions down to 350ppm. I’d really love to know what John Quiggin thinks about that, and if he accepts, what it means for 2020 targets and the strategies we should adopt.
The mainstream discourse, one that we hear from many scientists, is of 80% reductions by 2050 and of 450ppm giving us a 50% chance or so of staying within the guardrail of 2C (Stern’s midpoint). I think that adopting Hansen’s view is a game-changer which would show very clearly in what people write about climate mitigation strategies. But I can’t and wouldn’t say that people holding the mainstream view are unethical. Nevertheless in my own concept of what constitutes a safe climate, in view of the inherent risks, such a position does not take adequate account of the needs of future generations.
I’ve had another look at John Quiggin’s last paragraph. If I may be so bold the substantive argument comes down to this:
I can’t argue with that, but much depends on what is meant by "substantial" and in what time-frame. I look for a note of urgency that isn’t there.
That’s all.
PV is still marginal in term of energy and price, even here in Oz. Got to wonder why the Germans wasted all that money.
But solar thermal is really coming of age in sun blessed countries like here. With mass manufacturing of mirrors (and some clever designs) then the energy/economics are looking real good, like really good.
Better designs require less water (as they generate steam, duh, important here), plus the molten salt mix looks good for … some… overnight power (don’t believe the hype there is still a long way to go on this, but some good practical designs exist that can even out fluctuations and deliver some,some, late power).
Plus it is economic with capital. Easier to slot in a ST into (replacing) a current generator in the right locations.
But in the end you still need some base generator capacity. Even with Australia’s natural advantages, you are going to need some nuclear power. We are lucky, current technology means roughly 30%, if you live in Finland you need 100%. Well unless you love coal of course or love to waste gas (70% wasted if you burn it to generate electricity).
And if you want to move to a total resource recycled economy then you need even more electricity, or if you want to go to electric vehicles .. even more.
Qokka: More on the need for reforms to the power industry
BilB@139
The voltage rise problem is not a regulatory issue it is simply that the networks in Australian capital cities are open wire, thus they have a large reactive component in their impedance. Current controlled inverters simply push in phase current into this impedance thus the voltage tends to rise. The degree of rise will depend upon the other loads that are present and the magnitude of the inverter/s input to the network. Midday is bad because many people are at work and the PV is at maximum.
The problem for the PV installers is that only current controlled inverters are truly sanctioned by AS4777, and that the global production lines contain many hundreds of thousands of these; all with an non-fixable problem, the capacitor on the dc bus is too small to support VARS, no matter what they try to do with the firmware. The only way to fix this is by either altering the power factor if the inverter (AS4777 calls up unity pf-oops and it not physically possible because there is no-where for the circulating current to circulate) or to shut the inverter down if the voltage gets outside the limits set by AS4777; this they all do except for the ones that have been doctored at the risk of setting afire or killing some-one -but hey who cares – solar is totally benign right?
There is a solution to all this, another type of inverter called a voltage source inverter , but it is intrinsically more expensive – or was seen to be such by the European academic wankers who dreamed up the current controlled stuff about 30 years ago – “Oh lets build this giant airship and fill it with hydrogen gas” -sort of stuff.
Huggy
Huggy & Bilb: Climate progress had this article on to manage grids with renewables Any comments? Looks good to me and includes things that Bilb talks about from time to time.
JohnD.
1. Solar inverters – without exception – all use a MPPT algorithms to control PV output, either in dc/dc converters or in the inverter itself.
2. One major manufacturer of micro-inverters recently withdrew the product from the market, however I believe the micro-inverter has a future; mainly because you can buy a panel with one, put it on your apartment balcony, plug it into a power point and wind your meter backwards. Og course I would not advocate such an action.
The rest of your article is simply smart grid flannel I am afraid.
Huggy
Bilb @133: There are lots of ways of organizing contracts and funding industry corporations. I have no particular obsession with any of these ways of financing a corporation. I also have no particular obsession re public or private ownership. My attitude is horses for courses with different check and balances to reflect the specific problems related to each approach.
In terms of my oft repeated proposal for the use of contracts for the supply of clean electricity my mining contract background suggests that the tenderer would build, own and operate (BOO) the generating plant. Something like the proposed corporation would then bill the power distributors and pay the contractors according to the various contract price formula.
If we are talking about a corporation with the capacity to prepare tender documents, review tenders, set up contracts and do some of the other things Quokka’s link talks about costs could be paid by the government or a levy on some point in the industry. A levy of one cent/kWh would raise $2.2 billion/yr so we should be talking something much less than one cent/kWh. The carbon price seems a very complicated way of financing the corporation and gives the government too much power over the corporation.
JohnD@144,
That article has covered most of the bases, and there will be more as problems need resolution. The reason why this is not talked about in Australia is because we have such a small renewables sector so far. But that will change.
Huggybunny,
I have not had the need to think about it but now that I do, I think that there are only 3 ways for an inverter to push electricity into the grid.
It can have a higher voltage, it can distort the waveform, or it can use either or both of the other two to feed power into the weakest phase (to do this the system would have to be connected to more than one phase. If an area develops too high a voltage due to PV injection then the surplus energy will either need to be accommodated by the power generator reducing power, or a load needs to be found to absorb the extra and generate income from it. JohnD’s link above on grid management pretty well covers most of solutions.
John D,
The AEMC is undertaking a review (mentioned in the article you link to) of the treatment of the demand side in the National Electricity Market.
If you have some ideas on that, you should make a submission to the review. Might be more constructive than just throwing mud.
John D,
To be clear, I am referring to your comment @142 upthread.
I@U,
JohnD @142 is not throwing, he is informing. And it is appreciated.
BilB @147,
“If an area develops too high a voltage due to PV injection then the surplus energy will either need to be accommodated by the power generator reducing power, or a load needs to be found to absorb the extra and generate income from it.”
It is clear from this comment that you do not understand AC power flow (hint: to reduce AC voltage you need to absorb kVAr, not kW). It is probably a good idea for you to listen to Huggybunny, who obviously does understand AC.
I&U: I am only a dumb mineral processing engineer, not a power system engineer so I make no claims to have expertize in power supply and control systems. However, I have picked up a bit about power and control systems from designing, operating and commissioning mineral processing plants. Enough to appreciate that AC power has the added complication of phase change. Enough to appreciate that a power distribution system with multiple power sources combined with multiple end users (who may switch things on and off without notice) is going to be difficult to control.
On the other hand Huggy is coming across as someone who wants solar PV to go away rather an interesting power distribution problem. When pressed he has admitted that the voltage build-up problem can be solved by using a different type of inverter control. So I share Bilb’s optimism that power systems can be converted to something that will be able to handle a high percentage of solar PV in the future.
What are you on about I&U? I mention neither kva or kw. What I said was you control fluctuations with managed loads, exactly as the grid management technology referred to in John D’s link at 144 does using a knowledge based approach. See, you didn’t follow the link did you. Well you should because it is extremely interesting.
I am Avery strong supporter of PV Injection into the grid. The injection has to be done correctly or we are in deep doo doo.
The present crop of smaller single phase inverters are basically rubbish.
They are rubbish because they cannot control the network voltage and if enough of them are installed in one cluster they will make the network unusable.
On the other hand a voltage source inverter will control it’s power by adjusting it’s phase angle and can source or sink VARS at the same time thus controlling both voltage and power. It also works 24/7 as either a power factor corrector or as voltage controller. Add some batteries and the domestic system can become stand alone.
If the present trajectory continues it will all end in tears.
Huggy.
Bilb @ 153,
You are just demonstrating your ignorance again. A “load” means kW. I talked about kVAr. I didn’t mention kVA.
Read Huggy @154 and look up “AC power” on wikipedia, or something. Then come back to the debate when you understand it.
Sorry to be brutal, but your modus operandi of rubbishing people who disagree with you or whom you don’t understand is starting to p*ss me off.
John D @152,
That’s basically correct (your 1st para). And for once we can agree that the market is not going to solve this one. We need regulation: in both senses of the word.
” is starting to p*ss me off”
Well get used to it I&U. “Load” the collective term is kilowatts, “a load”, the specific term, is kva.
Thanks Huggy. sounds like you, Bilb and I all agree that much larger percentages of power ex solar PV can be handled provided that appropriate changes are made. We also appear to agree that urban PV would be better if we moved away from very small householder owned installations.
By the way, I would have thought that one of the attractions of solar PV from a grid management point of view is that it can be switched on and off very quickly – or am I missing something?
The thread has been a touch more snarky than I’d prefer, so take a chill pill everyone please.
Some electrical engineering basics:
kW refers to real power where the curent is in phase with the voltage it produces work
KVA refers to the apparent power where the current may not be in phase with the voltage
KVAr is the reactive power that simply circulates in the circuit and does no work at all
Power factor is basically the ratio of real to reactive power in given circuit. It is expresses as the cosine of the angle between the voltage and the current thus it is always less than unity or unity.
The difficulty with the present single phase PV to grid inverters is that they are controlled so that they always output a current in phase – thus at unity power factor. This strategy is fine for really robust networks where much of the network is underground and the input from the PV is a small fraction of the total load.
In Australia most of the consumer network is overhead and open wire and thus has a high reactive component . As the proportion of PV grows the in phase current tends to force the voltage up especially during periods of low load. The present crop of inverters can be jigger alittlento alter their power factor small percentage. However their dc bus capacitors are too small to support significant circulating current so this is not an adequate fix, also the control cannot be dynamic as they do not have adequate sensing capabilities.
The real problem is that the PV installers and the Business Council people have no real technical insight into this and are simply installing the same old crap. In their defense it must be said that the Standards people are just as ignorant; as are the Europeans who got us into this mess in the first place.
The utilities are now vetting the point of attachment characteristics and are not permitting installations where the network cannot cope.
The utilities have two options – one is to put the network underground, but the $40 billion to do this is a problem. The other is to change the inverter topology but as there are hundreds of thousands of the old topology in the supply line it will take time.
Huggy.
For anyone who is confused by all of this here is another way of viewing what power factor is all about
http://www.powerstudies.com/content/resources/Diane%20Power%20Factor.pdf
Huggy: Is it good enough to leave existing inverters unchanged and only change new ones if the system is working OK now?
Do you save much money on more sophisticated inverters if each one processes the output of more panels?
BilB @ 161 yep that is the guts of it.
To control power flow in an AC system you either control the voltage phase shift between the inverter or alternator or you lock the two voltage waves together and control the current.
The first method requires a coupling inductor the second does not. That is why the current control method was chosen in the first place. It seemed elegant at the time. Not so.
Huggy
JohnD@162
You can add solid state voltage regulator/s at appropriate nodes in the network. These can be shunt or series, the shunt type sources or sinks VARS to control the voltage at the point of attachment.
The present stock of inverters can be absorbed in places where the PV penetration is low.
Huggy
Huggy, thanks for the explanation @ 160, and BilB too @ 161, so that the non-technical of us can have some glimmerings.
Announced today:
I understand the one in Chinchilla will have coal seam gas back-up.
Also:
It uses air rather than water in the process.
Here is a study extract that backs up Huggybunnys case to some degree. The interesting thing is though that this suggests that voltage controlled inverters are capable of stand alone operation whereas current controlled inverters are not, which means that rural PV systems are most likely to be voltage controlled inverters unless there is a hybrid version to the current controlled system. It also implies that when the grid goes down current controlled systems can only deliver dc power not ac, again unless there is a hybrid. And this would put these systems in the same basket as most instantaneous gas water heaters which require 240 connection to operate. However it does not say that the use of current controlled inverters is that bad, particularly as these can be spread across the three phases in an area. There is also a significant amount of installation checking which should define which inverters are suitable in any one area.
http://www.ceem.unsw.edu.au/content/userDocs/Appendix6.7to6.10.pdf
BilB
I think I pointed out that voltage source (or controlled) inverters can be used stand alone. They are widely used in RAPS systems. You must have a voltage source and energy storage to be able to do real work in a stand alone system. In the case of a diesel generator the energy storage is in the fuel and in the inertia of the rotating machine.
The people who think that comes the apocalypse they can run on that dinky “sunny boy ” are in for a rude shock. You can, BTW buy grid connectable VS systems but they cost a heap more.
Hugg
Brian: You wonder how the economics of the Mooree solar PV plant would compare with large scale rooftop after taking grid etc costs into account.
You also wonder what checks the government made before the announcement?
John D,
Moree has long been the intended site for a large scale solar array system of some sort. The reason being that it has good solar insolation and the grid is already there. Professor David Mills was keen to get a CSP project up and running there before he gave up and headed overseas. Many years have passed.
Watch this youtube video of a presentation dinner for Solar Impulse and listen to the things that the various high profile European politicians are saying. Then compare that to the crap that comes out of nost of our politicians mouths.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tHy4pLpNJk&feature=player_embedded
Well that is the thinking going on in Europe, that small 400 million strong zone.
According to the Australian, the Moree plant is PV.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/industry-sectors/solar-power-future-set-for-nsw-queensland/story-e6frg97o-1226077596870
It doesn’t mention anything about storage and details are sketchy. At $900 million for 150 MW nameplate capacity that is very expensive. If capacity factor is 30%, that is about the equivalent of coal at $18 billion per GW. Ouch.
Pending further details, one might observe that even if the PV panels were free this still may not be price competitive. I hope to be impressed when more info is available, but I fear that this about the size of it.
Quokka: Even more interesting, @ $900m for 150mW nameplate, the cost is equivalent to $9000 for a 1.5 kW rooftop unit! OK, the Moree plant is in a place with good insolation (but so are lots of rooftops) and the panels may track the sun, but even so…
Unless there is something special (like a strong R&D component) about this installation it should only be a goer if the expected LREC credits are high enough to justify the investment. Subsidies merely discourage investment in more competitive renewables.
Rooftop comes with a lot of advantages compared with stand alone PV. The land is free, most of the support structure is free, no extra power lines are required and the power is used locally so there are no grid losses.
It all has the smell of political panic by people who can’t handle basic arithmetic.
It is not that bad, JohnD. Tracking solar PV will have up to double the effectiveness of average rooftop PV so that figure is more like $4500 per 1.5 kv. We as a nation are in the need of getting something significant built. Nothing can be learnt from no experience. I personally don’t give a damn what price it is (as long as it is not a ripoff scam). Without taking this early initiative the notion of decarbonising our energy industry is dead in the water and talking about it endlessly is a pathetic joke.
Bilb: It is not clear whether tracking (or anything else?) has been taken into account when calculating the nameplate capacity.
I can see nothing special about this plant that might justify an investment that is not cost competitive with other renewable options.
My personal view is that the solar PV future is more likely to be rooftop for the reasons advanced @172. In addition, rooftop offers the prospect of ongoing jobs supported by a steady
Climate action is getting a bad reputation as a result of a string of actions that have higher than necessary costs per tonne CO2 abatement.
I support the idea of flagship projects and heliostatic PV and solar thermal-gas hybrid seem like sensible options to explore. But I agree with Quokka, that they seem inordinately expensive, especially considering the context of this thread (ie that PV is coming of age).
Is this just down to the extra costs associated with prototyping, or is it symptomatic of the problem that (as in my experience) centralised tendering for generation capacity rarely achieves value for money?
I would have to interpret John D’s comment @172 as that he prefers, in this case, to see decentralised investment under a market structure to centralised procurement by government. That is good to see.
This is what the IEA says about PV plants costs in 2010 Projected Costs of Generating Electricity
Well, if this is it then it is not to be a tracking system
http://www.infigenenergy.com/media/417314/moree%201.pdf
Needs more information.
Yup, that is the one, but not quite as reported
http://www.infigenenergy.com/solar-flagships-program.aspx
I fear that the Moree project will not be tracking, in which case it might get 20% Annual Capacity Factor .
The best PV site in Australia is in the Longreach area in QLD about 24% ACF.
The major difficulty with the distributed rooftop model is that the average ACF is about 12% thus you are funding model that is about half as efficient as selected sites. It is just plain dumb.
Huggy
I fear that the Moree project will not be tracking, in which case it might get 20% Annual Capacity Factor .
The best PV site in Australia is in the Longreach area in QLD about 24% ACF.
The major difficulty with the distributed rooftop model is that the average ACF is about 12% thus you are funding model that is about half as efficient as selected sites. It is just plain dumb.
Huggy
I&U: You are right to say that I prefer “decentralized investment under a market structure to centralized procurement by government” for SOLAR PV. This is largely because of the advantages I listed @172 plus the fact that solar PV is highly modularized so the benefits of scale will be relatively low and may be offset by the savings listed.
Up to date the use of feed in tariffs and government subsidies have meant that there are no market forces driving a reduction in the price of solar PV power despite the rapid drop in the cost of solar PV. What is needed is a mechanism that provides some form of competitive tendering for the supply of solar PV power.
On the other hand, centralization makes more sense for solar thermal because the potential module size is much much higher than it is for solar PV. Even there there may be cases where decentralization is attractive if low grade waste heat can be used.
My view on flagship projects is that this can be useful for large scale demonstration. However, this is not required for solar PV and it looks to me as though all that is going on is that a smart operator has found a lurk to exploit.
The big attraction of some forms of solar thermal is the prospect of low cost heat storage. While the use of hot air turbines is interesting it is not clear how this would be linked to storage.
I am particularly attracted to the use of solar thermal augmentation of CCGT plants. In this case solar heat is used to create some of the steam used in the CCGT steam turbine. This coul;d mean using a larger steam turbine so that the CCGT produces more power during the day or simply reducing emissions per kWh while the sun shines.
Having looked at Infigin Energy’s proposed and now funded solar plan, it is not that good a deal. Basically it is a large array of fixed panels with a 14.5% efficiency. This is pretty hohum in solar PV terms. They coul have gone to a little bit of trouble and made the banks of panels at least tilt in one axis to either follow the sun’s sweep each day or follow the inclination for seasons.
You’ve got to hope that this is some defacto funding for UNSW or for building a new solar panel factory somewhere in Australia that will lead to huge savings. My guess is that this project got up because it was the only one on the table.
GenIIPV for instance for the same nameplate hardware supplied but not fitted would be $525 million, but would deliver 4 times the Kwhr electrical output, and would have been fully funded by the end users. Difference is that it was not on the table.
Whereas both JohnD and myself prefer a distributed PV system, it is important to realise the full solution is a broad mix of solutions, so Infigin get the nod because they are actually ready to get started, and it is the beginning of a journey towards our entirely renewable future.
John D @181,
I’m not clear what you are proposing for solar PV. You say that you prefer decentralised investment, but then you say that “what is needed is a mechanism that provides some form of competitive tendering” for PV.
There are some interesting comments, from you and BilB, about the flagship tender:
John D @173: “It all has the smell of political panic by people who can’t handle basic arithmetic.”
John D @181: “it looks to me as though all that is going on is that a smart operator has found a lurk to exploit.
Bilb @182: “My guess is that this project got up because it was the only one on the table.”
These are problems that bedevil government tenders, particularly where projects are high profile using novel technology. This is what underlies my opposition to central procurement (except for flagship projects) and my support for market mechanisms.
@BilB
That is what they are going to do. It is single axis tracking.
http://www.moreesolarfarm.com.au/Project.htm
Please supply some reference for this claim. I do not believe a factor of four or anything like it. We can assume the engineers building this thing are not complete idiots.
What we have here is real (estimated) costs for a real PV project and it is time to face facts. Real project costs are worth far more than posts on Joe Romm’s blog.
I&U: Bilb’s link says: “The Solar Flagships program is intended to provide the foundations for large scale, grid-connected, solar power to play a significant role in Australia’s electricity supply.
BP Solar together with its consortium partners Fotowatio Renewable Ventures (FRV) and Pacific Hydro applied for funding under the Solar Photovoltaic (PV) technology category in round one of the program and was successfully shortlisted in May 2010. On June 18th 2011 the Government announced that our consortium has been successful and was chosen to develop Australia’s first utility-scale solar PV project………
The installation will provide a demonstration of the viability of utility scale solar projects in Australia. It will also address a number of key research issues, including enhancing the understanding of the interaction of utility scale solar with the Australian grid. ”
I have two problems here. Firstly the government appears to have specified that large scale solar PV had to be part of the program. Would have been smarter to have had more flexibility and a requirement that there was something special that really did need help with a large scale demonstration.
Secondly, it is doubtful that the project was able to do anything that couldn’t be done with modelling or something much smaller in scale. It is a coincidence of course that the government has received a lot of flak recently re not spending the flagship money.
There is nothing to stop the government using a simple tendering system for the supply of solar PV. Would need to be set up so that it could deal with a large number of small tenders for rooftop.
Using the NREL Simplified Levelized Cost of Electricity Calculator we can derive an estimate of the cost of electricity from the Moree project.
Assumptions
——————-
25 year service life
8% discount rate
$6,130/kW capital cost
$20/kW annual operations and maintenance cost
LCOE
——–
At 20% capacity factor: $0.34/kWh
At 25% capacity factor: $0.27/kWh
http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech_lcoe.html
What’s the average cost of electricity on the NEM? $0.05 /kWh ?
Interestingly, the capital cost is about the same as the 2006 NREL estimate for PV.
Well Quokka if
“What’s the average cost of electricity on the NEM? $0.05 /kWh ”
is true, then someone had better come up with a damned good reason why electicity retail is 22 cents per unit, about to go up to 28 cents per unit, there still is no carbon price component , and these people are holding out their hand for compensation crying “poor mouth”.
So it is not the Infigenergy project also supposedly for Moree. Thank goodness, that one looked a little too low tech.
Quokka, I can only expound up GenIIPV claims beyond what I have done so far under a confidentiality agreeement, which I was prepared to do at one stage with a suitable adjudicator. But the window for that is closing rapidly as we get close to hard development. However, if you were familiar with the state of the art technology you would be able to verify what I have said yourself.
BilB @187,
Quokka is roughly correct on the NEM (ie wholesale) prices. They go up and down, and have been higher and lower than this.
Much of the retail cost of electricity (at least half for domestic customers, I would guess) is from distributor charges. There is some cost from MRET and (I think) other renewable schemes. Then there is transmission and, finally, a retailer margin.
If you are interested, it should be straightforward to find out the details. Innumerable reports have been written on this breakdown.
See if you can dig one up, I&U. That has got to be good reading.
There are two AP1000 nuclear reactors being built in South Carolina in the US. Here is a presentation to analysts on the project:
http://www.scana.com/NR/rdonlyres/94A681F0-6304-46A9-932E-8F7224FC052E/0/SCANA2011AnalystDayPresentation.pdf
Page 28 shows an assessment of cost of electricity for new plant by various technologies per kWh. (2010 estimates).
Nuclear: $0.076
CCGT: $0.081
Coal: $0.117
Offshore Wind: $0.292
PV: $0.437
Brain
I had a look through the bits of the thread i missed and if iv’e overlooked a link, i apologise.
The APVA response to the PC carbon emission policies
report.
Seems their not impressed.
(PDF)
http://www.apva.org.au/sites/default/files/documents/Releases/APVA%20-%20Response%20to%20Productivity%20Commission%20Carbon%20Emission%20Policies%20Report%20June%202011.pdf
BilB @190,
the recently controversial AEMC report on future electricity price increases is here
A summary of the make up of the retail electricity price (figure 3.1 of the report) for 2010/11 (in c/kWh) is as follows:
Wholesale 7.64
Distribution 7.80
Transmission 1.56
Retail Margin 3.42
Energy Efficiency Schemes 0.57
MRET schemes 0.40
Feed in Tariffs 0.38
Other state schemes 0.12
Total 21.89
Wholesale is rather higher than I (or Quokka) had recognised, but it still makes up a minor part (35%) of the retail price. Distribution is lower than I thought, but there are substantial increases in the pipeline.
Thaks very much for that I&U. It certainly puts paid to the argument that the MRET is forcing electricity prices up.
I am interested in the distribution and transmission costs section, particularly the local cabling end as this will be the key cost for local distribution of electricity by independent brokers of electricity exported by GenIIPV. I have not researched this yet, but this gives some indication of the cost boundaries.
It would have been interesting to see how this compared with a similar report of 4 years ago to see where the retail price increases have been aSo the public bsorbed. As I have maintained for some years now, the problem with a market blunt instumen to drive change is that it is inefficient. An electricity levy providing the funds for infrastructure rebuild has the advantage of not affecting the sales margins of an existing industry. If the power generators have to raise the funds for rebuilding through prices then this is passed on through the retail price times 2 as the distributors abtain a windfall in their margins, just as the government did on fuel excise as the petrol price rose some years ago. So the consumer public end up paying more than double for the benefit of a decarbonised electricity sector.
How this plays out in manufacturing is where there is a process to be performed on material, if the process performer is required to source the material, do the process and then pass on the combination of material and process cost, that will usually be a minimum of double the material cost as the processor must take the risk on the material and the financing of it. So if the process is only 10% of the cost of the material then this places a very large premium on the end product. The way that we get around this is for the buyer to supply the material to the processor and the buyer takes the risk on material losses and finances the material, so the processor has only to cover his own costs and profit based on that.
The same methodoligy should have been applied to the rebuilding of our electricity infrastructure with the funding for the rebuilding being provided by consumers via a levy with the consumers covering the risks associated with new technology directly. So, whereas there is some valid concern for industry “slush fund”, I do not think that the cost of that is anything like the cost of market driven indirect incentives.
I thought that I had posted this…
More on the “Cambridge Crude” flow battery
http://blog.cafefoundation.org/?p=3526
the schematic may take a little while to load so be patient.
BilB@195.
Thanks for that link, very interesting. Flow batteries that are available at the moment are rather pathetic. They have very poor energy density and have a serious disadvantage in that due to the pumped nature of the reactants there is a parasitic current developed that restricts the voltage to less than 60Vdc.
Electric motors for vehicles must be at least 300 Vdc or there will be serious losses invoked.
lithium ion, Lead acid and Sodium Nickel Chloride all do well at high voltages.
BilB @194,
The distributors do not operate on a % margin basis: distribution prices are set independently of wholesale prices. Retail margins are set by competition. So the doubling-up effect that you refer to does not exist.
Distribution pricing for consumers will not give you much indication of what you might be charged (or receive) for distributed generation. This is a complex and immature issue. A lot more work will have to be done on it by distributors, regulators and generators if there is going to be substantial new generation connected to distribution networks.
All evidence to the contrary on the cost distribution issue, I&U. But how this current round of price increases is split will prove the point one way or the other.
On the other, this is indeed new territory. I have to find out who owns the cables to the household and how their maintenance is managed.
Huggybunny,
As I said upthread the original Vanadium Redox battery has a 25 watthour per kilogram (Fn1). The voltage issue was resolved, I believe, by connecting cells in series,they are routinely used and grid voltages. The press release for this new flow battery boasts 10 times that capacity which would make it 250 watt hours per kilogram.
(Fn1) Current production vanadium redox batteries achieve an energy density of about 25 Wh/kg of electrolyte. More recent research at UNSW indicates that the use of precipitation inhibitors can increase the density to about 35 Wh/kg, with even higher densities made possible by controlling the electrolyte temperature. (Wikipaedia)
(Fn2)
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110317141418.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100607142225.htm
(Fn3)
“Other useful properties of vanadium flow batteries are their very fast response to changing loads and their extremely large overload capacities. Studies by the University of New South Wales have shown that they can achieve a response time of under half a millisecond for a 100% load change, and allowed overloads of as much as 400% for 10 seconds. The response time is mostly limited by the electrical equipment. Round trip efficiency in practical applications is around 65-75%”
Here is a report on a Green Investment Forum reported at The Oil Drum.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8042#more
There are some really interesting links in there.
But there is also a graph of Germany’s total electricity consumption showing the origin breakdown which splits the log of lies and misperceptions about Germany’s renewable energy sector. In simple terms it shows for 2009 that 14% of Germany’s electricity came from wind, biomass and solar, with a further 2.5% coming from hydro (older renewables). The message is that for the short history that renewables have had they have achieved 14% against nuclear’s 21%, and the gap is closing. Renewables work and can be consistently built upon. Direct Solar’s 1% is a bit disappointing but with the Desertec underway this will change significantly in due course.
@Bilb,
The chart shows deployment of renewables over nearly twenty years to achieve 14% of electricity supply. France managed to decarbonize it’s whole electricity supply in just a little longer with nuclear power. The contrast could not be more stark.
And something further to consider. In 2010 Germany produced 7.7% of it’s electricity from solar/wind/geothermal etc (ie non-biomass, non-hydro renewables). The is the sector that has to expand to replace fossil fuels and in particular coal.
The achievements so far are rather modest, and we could leave the cheer leading for while until there is really something to cheer about.
France certainly did go nuclear, that was there choice. Now when one their reactors goes “pop” the howl of protest against nuclear will make Abbott seem a quiet and modest monk by comparison. Give it time and some competition and the French nuclear industry will crack just as the others eventually do.