7 ms·

Who's afraid of Solar PV?

52 points by jdwhit2 14y ago

sohn37 14y ago
Americans.
spenrose 14y ago
Related: http://reneweconomy.com.au/2012/why-generators-are-terrified-of-solar-44279 http://reneweconomy.com.au/2012/why-generators-are-terrified... http://grist.org/article/2011-11-23-the-problem-with-the-renewables-are-reaching-cost-parity-meme/ http://grist.org/article/2011-11-23-the-problem-with-the-ren... http://www.recycled-energy.com/newsroom/publication/the-battle-over-centralization/ http://www.recycled-energy.com/newsroom/publication/the-batt... http://www.ilsr.org/solar-grid-parity-101/ http://www.ilsr.org/solar-grid-parity-101/ http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-will-the-california-system-operator-cope-with-33-renewables/ http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-will-the-cal...
slapshot 14y ago
An interesting problem is highlighted on that graph: solar seems to be peaking around mid-day, but energy demand peaks at 5 - 7 pm when solar is pretty weak. The curves showing pre- and post-solar have almost identical peaks; solar hasn't yet successfully reduced peak load. (The California energy system posts a similar graph, with a similar shape: http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx , made worse by the fact that the California wind farms apparently perform best in the morning and worst in the afternoon.) The difficulty is that, unless storage gets dramatically better, we'll still need a huge conventional electricity base. And it will still burn a huge amount of fuel: most generators are not "instant-on" -- it can take weeks to spin up a nuclear plant, days to spin up a coal plant, and hours [1] to spin up a natural gas plant. Of course, there are some savings, but there is huge waste if you have to keep the whole conventional energy infrastructure spinning during the day just to fuel that 6 pm peak load. Advice to entrepreneurs: finding a cost-effective way to store solar energy for 4 hours will be worth more than another 2% increase in efficiency. And inventing instant-on conventional-fuel plants will also make a huge difference in GHG emissions. [1] - Page 8 of http://www.euec.com/getattachment/euecjournal/Paper_3.pdf.aspx http://www.euec.com/getattachment/euecjournal/Paper_3.pdf.as... gives times between 1.2 hours for a warm start to 6 hours for a cold start.
- reitzensteinm 14y ago
  We don't need any breakthroughs. Electric cars could handle the entire peak load with today's technology, the right incentives, and capital flowing in the right place. The peak load for South Australia was 1.8 gigawatts. There are 1,275,041 motor vehicles registered in SA. If you could get all of them turned into electric cars plugged into the grid, it would be a 1.4 kW power drain per vehicle, which is less than the power drain of an ordinary kettle here (240V, 10A, ~2.4 kW). The cheapest Tesla Model S has a 40kW hour battery meaning it could sustain that power drain for over 28 hours (a total of 51 GWh). It's got a 10kW charger standard, which is more than enough. So if everyone had the cheapest Model S, kept it plugged in with the ability to send power back into the grid, and didn't mind that their car was sometimes down to 20% charge, you could power the entire grid on solar alone. That's obviously a set of unrealistic assumptions, but it does indicate that it is feasible to solve the problem like this. A more realistic set of assumptions: * 1/10 cars are turned into a Model S base model equivalent * Through financial incentives, the owners are willing to keep them plugged in during the day and using up to 20% of the battery to push back into the grid. * Cars need to shave 0.2 gigawatts off of peak load for four hours to bring it in line with the rest of the day That's 800 MWh of power to satisfy peak demand, at 200 MW. We have 127,504 vehicles, can can use up to 8kWh and 20kW each, giving: 1 GWh of capacity and 2.5 GW maximum power draw. So it's just enough. Alternatively, 5% allowing 40% usage works, etc. The power draw is insignificant. Owners can be heavily compensated for pushing energy back into the grid. I won't run the numbers here for length and time reasons, but knocking out peak power usage is incredibly profitable. You're literally decomissioning a large percentage of power plants. It would be feasible to make all the energy your car uses free; likely the lithium ion battery packs, too. The question is; would 5% of the driving population buy a $50k car if they no longer had to pay for fuel or battery packs? Financially that would probably put it closer to a BMW. I think it's feasible. What about in 10 years when the cars are $20-30k? Undeniably. In 20 years when you only need 2% of the population to be in the scheme due to battery increases and the cars cost $20k? No brainer. The system would require a smarter grid (so you can plug your car in at work and have it all taken care of), 10 years of Moore's Law for batteries, etc. But I think the numbers check out, and it means we could go crazy with solar (the explosion in solar must continue to charge these vehicles during the day). What's needed is the will to make it happen.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
TL:DR; version: Utilities make most of their profit during 'peak' times (noon to 5pm) and SolarPV systems are reducing the requirement during those times, putting price pressure on electricity. Here in California we had a similar challenge but with Watar. We periodically go through drought cycles and during the last big incentives were put in place to get people to use less water, rebates for toilets, reduced cost if you were 20% below your non-drought average, no watering during the day, drip irrigation, etc etc. Then the utility needs a rate increase because they aren't getting as much water usage. It is a hard sell though to tell people "You have to use 20% less but we're going to charge you the same amount" So electricity, like water, is a blended cost where the scarcity unit is priced to cover the physical plant costs of delivering the unit. We wholesale adoption of Solar PV it will require power utilities to come up with a different formula to recover their costs. The end result is that it will shift the cost from business (who pay the biggest power bills during the day) to non-businesses. [1] http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/04/19/east-bay-customers-could-face-water-rate-hike/ http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/04/19/east-bay-custome...
politician 14y ago
A shift in energy production is good news, so now we can use our coal generation capacity to desalinate water. We get new sunlight every day, but the fresh water that we have is all we have.
- danmaz74 14y ago
  "We get new sunlight every day, but the fresh water that we have is all we have." Actually, we get new fresh water every other day - it's called rain.
  - grecy 14y ago
    I can tell you've never been to Australia. EDIT: http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap10/continents.html http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap10/continents.... (Sorry for the horrible background, the data is there)
    - danmaz74 14y ago
      The data is very interesting, but as I read it it confirms that even in Australia there is a lot of fresh water coming down each year, and the problem is how to convert it into usable fresh water. Just like with solar irradiation: There is a lot of it coming, but it's very difficult to turn it into usable energy. PS I've never been to Australia, but I'd like to come someday :)
  - politician 14y ago
    If we actually got new water every day it'd be arriving on meteorites. Of the water present on the planet, 97% is salt water which is unusable for drinking or agriculture. Of the 3% freshwater, 68.7% is locked in glaciers. So, 1% of the water on the planet is liquid and most of that is underground. We don't really have a lot and things like fertilizers damage what we have. It turns out that the amount of fresh water is relatively constant. If we want more in places that have less then we have to manufacture it from seawater, steal it from our neighbors by cloud-seeding, or rely on the weather cycle convert seawater into fresh water and then distribute it. If you live in Dubai, you aren't waiting for it to rain. You're building desalination plants and processing seawater.
evolve2k 14y ago
Sounds like technology driven disruption to me.
jorgem 14y ago
>> The unspoken fear of all utility managers is the “Death Spiral Scenario”. >> In this nightmare, a utility commits to build new equipment. >> However, when electric rates are raised to pay for the new plant, the rate shock moves customers to cut their kWh use. We have a "death spiral" in water prices in my local (southern California) water district. There was a drought. People were asked to conserve. People conserved too much. Drought ended. Water use did not return. Water companies then need to raise prices to meet their distribution costs. Which lowers demand further. It can only end ugly.
- kiba 14y ago
  It only end ugly for the water companies. On the contrary, it ends beautifully for the customer.
  - jorgem 14y ago
    Not really. The water company is raising prices on everyone because we're not using as much, but they still have same overhead. If the whole community hadn't conserved, we'd have gotten more water for the same or lower cost.
    - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
      >The water company is raising prices on everyone because we're not using as much // If they're like the UK water companies then they'll be moaning they're suffering but still be making vast profits. It's like "we can't fix the pipe network without increasing water bills and we already put them up 10% this year; oh and we made 20% more profit this year so we must be serving our customers well ....".
- maxerickson 14y ago
  I doubt it gets that ugly. The per gallon charge for municipal water in the East Bay is ~$0.005. People like flushing their toilets and taking showers, so conservation only eliminates so much.
  - 14y ago
nl 14y ago
(I live in South Australia, and I've previously worked on electricity energy trading systems here) This is a pretty good article, but misses a little context that maybe helpful to non-Australian readers. 1) Power bills in Australia have been rising rapidly over the last couple of years. The reactionary response has been to blame the new Carbon Tax, but the real causes are much more complex[1]. 2) In South Australia at least it gets really, really hot. For example in February 2009 we had 6 Consecutive days over 40 °C (104 °F) and a maximum of 45.7 °C (114.3 °F)[2], and then in November 2009 we had 6 Consecutive days over 38 °C (~100 °F)[3] These peak temperatures occur earlier in the day than the typical power spike (12pm-4pm instead of 5pm-7pm), and caused huge power spikes (from air conditioner usage), and this often causes power companies to have to shut off power (they have a policy of doing rolling blackouts when they don't have enough capacity). This peak demand is much, much higher than the average peak demand shown on the linked article, and these are the peaks the power companies invest to meet. If these peaks are reduced by solar panel usage (which they should be, since the come during the best time for solar production) then it should reduce the requirements for larger power stations. [1] http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/power-play-between-federal-and-state-govenments-is-just-a-costly-farce/story-e6frfhqf-1226454453982 http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/power-play-between-feder... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_2009_southeastern_Australia_heat_wave#Adelaide.2C_South_Australia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_2009_southeastern_Austral... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_2009_southeastern_Australia_heat_wave#Adelaide.2C_South_Australia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_2009_southeastern_Australi...
- greendestiny 14y ago
  As another South Australian I have to say this article makes me a little concerned about further price rises of mains power to make up for the shortfall. Although the long term benefits of Solar are amazing the short term situation for power infrastructure here could be a problem. *Edit: I can see a flatter usage profile should probably mean cheaper power, but still I think there is some justifiable paranoia in worrying about power prices increasing in South Australia again.
  - shirro 14y ago
yessql 14y ago
The article doesn't focus much on spot pricing, which is really important in what is going to happen in the future. They showed a big drop in utility revenue during peak hours. This revenue used to be caused by high usage multiplied by really high prices. Now its high demand multiplied by moderate prices. If solar adoption continues along the path described (which is inevitable at this point, considering steadily dropping solar PV equipment prices) then the midday spot price will continue to drop as well. We'll find out some answers to the question, what do you do when the spot price of electricity approaches 0? Water desalination. Pump water uphill. Charge electric car batteries. Electrolysis to convert water to hydrogen, for later use in fuel cells or combustion engines. We will certainly see some innovation in short term energy storage, since the price of electricity just before the late afternoon peak will be much lower.

52 points by jdwhit2 14y ago

Americans.

Related: http://reneweconomy.com.au/2012/why-generators-are-terrified-of-solar-44279 http://reneweconomy.com.au/2012/why-generators-are-terrified... http://grist.org/article/2011-11-23-the-problem-with-the-renewables-are-reaching-cost-parity-meme/ http://grist.org/article/2011-11-23-the-problem-with-the-ren... http://www.recycled-energy.com/newsroom/publication/the-battle-over-centralization/ http://www.recycled-energy.com/newsroom/publication/the-batt... http://www.ilsr.org/solar-grid-parity-101/ http://www.ilsr.org/solar-grid-parity-101/ http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-will-the-california-system-operator-cope-with-33-renewables/ http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-will-the-cal...

slapshot 14y ago

An interesting problem is highlighted on that graph: solar seems to be peaking around mid-day, but energy demand peaks at 5 - 7 pm when solar is pretty weak. The curves showing pre- and post-solar have almost identical peaks; solar hasn't yet successfully reduced peak load. (The California energy system posts a similar graph, with a similar shape: http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx , made worse by the fact that the California wind farms apparently perform best in the morning and worst in the afternoon.) The difficulty is that, unless storage gets dramatically better, we'll still need a huge conventional electricity base. And it will still burn a huge amount of fuel: most generators are not "instant-on" -- it can take weeks to spin up a nuclear plant, days to spin up a coal plant, and hours [1] to spin up a natural gas plant. Of course, there are some savings, but there is huge waste if you have to keep the whole conventional energy infrastructure spinning during the day just to fuel that 6 pm peak load. Advice to entrepreneurs: finding a cost-effective way to store solar energy for 4 hours will be worth more than another 2% increase in efficiency. And inventing instant-on conventional-fuel plants will also make a huge difference in GHG emissions. [1] - Page 8 of http://www.euec.com/getattachment/euecjournal/Paper_3.pdf.aspx http://www.euec.com/getattachment/euecjournal/Paper_3.pdf.as... gives times between 1.2 hours for a warm start to 6 hours for a cold start.

reitzensteinm 14y ago
We don't need any breakthroughs. Electric cars could handle the entire peak load with today's technology, the right incentives, and capital flowing in the right place. The peak load for South Australia was 1.8 gigawatts. There are 1,275,041 motor vehicles registered in SA. If you could get all of them turned into electric cars plugged into the grid, it would be a 1.4 kW power drain per vehicle, which is less than the power drain of an ordinary kettle here (240V, 10A, ~2.4 kW). The cheapest Tesla Model S has a 40kW hour battery meaning it could sustain that power drain for over 28 hours (a total of 51 GWh). It's got a 10kW charger standard, which is more than enough. So if everyone had the cheapest Model S, kept it plugged in with the ability to send power back into the grid, and didn't mind that their car was sometimes down to 20% charge, you could power the entire grid on solar alone. That's obviously a set of unrealistic assumptions, but it does indicate that it is feasible to solve the problem like this. A more realistic set of assumptions: * 1/10 cars are turned into a Model S base model equivalent * Through financial incentives, the owners are willing to keep them plugged in during the day and using up to 20% of the battery to push back into the grid. * Cars need to shave 0.2 gigawatts off of peak load for four hours to bring it in line with the rest of the day That's 800 MWh of power to satisfy peak demand, at 200 MW. We have 127,504 vehicles, can can use up to 8kWh and 20kW each, giving: 1 GWh of capacity and 2.5 GW maximum power draw. So it's just enough. Alternatively, 5% allowing 40% usage works, etc. The power draw is insignificant. Owners can be heavily compensated for pushing energy back into the grid. I won't run the numbers here for length and time reasons, but knocking out peak power usage is incredibly profitable. You're literally decomissioning a large percentage of power plants. It would be feasible to make all the energy your car uses free; likely the lithium ion battery packs, too. The question is; would 5% of the driving population buy a $50k car if they no longer had to pay for fuel or battery packs? Financially that would probably put it closer to a BMW. I think it's feasible. What about in 10 years when the cars are $20-30k? Undeniably. In 20 years when you only need 2% of the population to be in the scheme due to battery increases and the cars cost $20k? No brainer. The system would require a smarter grid (so you can plug your car in at work and have it all taken care of), 10 years of Moore's Law for batteries, etc. But I think the numbers check out, and it means we could go crazy with solar (the explosion in solar must continue to charge these vehicles during the day). What's needed is the will to make it happen.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

TL:DR; version: Utilities make most of their profit during 'peak' times (noon to 5pm) and SolarPV systems are reducing the requirement during those times, putting price pressure on electricity. Here in California we had a similar challenge but with Watar. We periodically go through drought cycles and during the last big incentives were put in place to get people to use less water, rebates for toilets, reduced cost if you were 20% below your non-drought average, no watering during the day, drip irrigation, etc etc. Then the utility needs a rate increase because they aren't getting as much water usage. It is a hard sell though to tell people "You have to use 20% less but we're going to charge you the same amount" So electricity, like water, is a blended cost where the scarcity unit is priced to cover the physical plant costs of delivering the unit. We wholesale adoption of Solar PV it will require power utilities to come up with a different formula to recover their costs. The end result is that it will shift the cost from business (who pay the biggest power bills during the day) to non-businesses. [1] http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/04/19/east-bay-customers-could-face-water-rate-hike/ http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/04/19/east-bay-custome...

politician 14y ago

A shift in energy production is good news, so now we can use our coal generation capacity to desalinate water. We get new sunlight every day, but the fresh water that we have is all we have.

danmaz74 14y ago
"We get new sunlight every day, but the fresh water that we have is all we have." Actually, we get new fresh water every other day - it's called rain.
- grecy 14y ago
  I can tell you've never been to Australia. EDIT: http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap10/continents.html http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap10/continents.... (Sorry for the horrible background, the data is there)
  - danmaz74 14y ago
    The data is very interesting, but as I read it it confirms that even in Australia there is a lot of fresh water coming down each year, and the problem is how to convert it into usable fresh water. Just like with solar irradiation: There is a lot of it coming, but it's very difficult to turn it into usable energy. PS I've never been to Australia, but I'd like to come someday :)
- politician 14y ago
  If we actually got new water every day it'd be arriving on meteorites. Of the water present on the planet, 97% is salt water which is unusable for drinking or agriculture. Of the 3% freshwater, 68.7% is locked in glaciers. So, 1% of the water on the planet is liquid and most of that is underground. We don't really have a lot and things like fertilizers damage what we have. It turns out that the amount of fresh water is relatively constant. If we want more in places that have less then we have to manufacture it from seawater, steal it from our neighbors by cloud-seeding, or rely on the weather cycle convert seawater into fresh water and then distribute it. If you live in Dubai, you aren't waiting for it to rain. You're building desalination plants and processing seawater.

evolve2k 14y ago

Sounds like technology driven disruption to me.

jorgem 14y ago

>> The unspoken fear of all utility managers is the “Death Spiral Scenario”. >> In this nightmare, a utility commits to build new equipment. >> However, when electric rates are raised to pay for the new plant, the rate shock moves customers to cut their kWh use. We have a "death spiral" in water prices in my local (southern California) water district. There was a drought. People were asked to conserve. People conserved too much. Drought ended. Water use did not return. Water companies then need to raise prices to meet their distribution costs. Which lowers demand further. It can only end ugly.

kiba 14y ago
It only end ugly for the water companies. On the contrary, it ends beautifully for the customer.
- jorgem 14y ago
  Not really. The water company is raising prices on everyone because we're not using as much, but they still have same overhead. If the whole community hadn't conserved, we'd have gotten more water for the same or lower cost.
  - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    >The water company is raising prices on everyone because we're not using as much // If they're like the UK water companies then they'll be moaning they're suffering but still be making vast profits. It's like "we can't fix the pipe network without increasing water bills and we already put them up 10% this year; oh and we made 20% more profit this year so we must be serving our customers well ....".
maxerickson 14y ago
I doubt it gets that ugly. The per gallon charge for municipal water in the East Bay is ~$0.005. People like flushing their toilets and taking showers, so conservation only eliminates so much.
- 14y ago

nl 14y ago

(I live in South Australia, and I've previously worked on electricity energy trading systems here) This is a pretty good article, but misses a little context that maybe helpful to non-Australian readers. 1) Power bills in Australia have been rising rapidly over the last couple of years. The reactionary response has been to blame the new Carbon Tax, but the real causes are much more complex[1]. 2) In South Australia at least it gets really, really hot. For example in February 2009 we had 6 Consecutive days over 40 °C (104 °F) and a maximum of 45.7 °C (114.3 °F)[2], and then in November 2009 we had 6 Consecutive days over 38 °C (~100 °F)[3] These peak temperatures occur earlier in the day than the typical power spike (12pm-4pm instead of 5pm-7pm), and caused huge power spikes (from air conditioner usage), and this often causes power companies to have to shut off power (they have a policy of doing rolling blackouts when they don't have enough capacity). This peak demand is much, much higher than the average peak demand shown on the linked article, and these are the peaks the power companies invest to meet. If these peaks are reduced by solar panel usage (which they should be, since the come during the best time for solar production) then it should reduce the requirements for larger power stations. [1] http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/power-play-between-federal-and-state-govenments-is-just-a-costly-farce/story-e6frfhqf-1226454453982 http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/power-play-between-feder... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_2009_southeastern_Australia_heat_wave#Adelaide.2C_South_Australia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_2009_southeastern_Austral... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_2009_southeastern_Australia_heat_wave#Adelaide.2C_South_Australia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_2009_southeastern_Australi...

greendestiny 14y ago
As another South Australian I have to say this article makes me a little concerned about further price rises of mains power to make up for the shortfall. Although the long term benefits of Solar are amazing the short term situation for power infrastructure here could be a problem. *Edit: I can see a flatter usage profile should probably mean cheaper power, but still I think there is some justifiable paranoia in worrying about power prices increasing in South Australia again.
- shirro 14y ago

yessql 14y ago

The article doesn't focus much on spot pricing, which is really important in what is going to happen in the future. They showed a big drop in utility revenue during peak hours. This revenue used to be caused by high usage multiplied by really high prices. Now its high demand multiplied by moderate prices. If solar adoption continues along the path described (which is inevitable at this point, considering steadily dropping solar PV equipment prices) then the midday spot price will continue to drop as well. We'll find out some answers to the question, what do you do when the spot price of electricity approaches 0? Water desalination. Pump water uphill. Charge electric car batteries. Electrolysis to convert water to hydrogen, for later use in fuel cells or combustion engines. We will certainly see some innovation in short term energy storage, since the price of electricity just before the late afternoon peak will be much lower.