Solar Power

Noah Smith writes,

I guess I should give a concrete prediction about when solar will actually start being cost-competitive with fossil fuels, without subsidies, in some locations for some customers. My prediction is: around 2020, or 7 years from now. 95% credible interval would be…um, let’s see…2014 to 2040. So that’s a fairly wide interval.

He mentions some promising technologies. What has to be stressed is that once solar power becomes cost-competitive, we will never go back. That is, solar power is going to continue to get cheaper at a faster rate than other technologies (barring some spectacular discovery of a new energy source or a dramatic development in nuclear energy).

Having said that, in 2005, I quoted the Department of Energy as predicting that solar power would be cost-competitive within 10 years, which at this point would be 2 years from now. So, relative to predictions made during the Bush Administration, solar power seems to have fallen short.

I strongly support funding research into solar technologies. I strongly oppose subsidizing deployment of uneconomical solar power, particularly by companies led by the President’s political cronies.

Along these lines, Timothy Taylor writes,

The fundamental problem, Everett argues, is that showing something is possible at high cost is one thing, but commercializing it at low costs is quite another….

after 40 years of watching the U.S. government try to force energy markets on to a different path, it’s time for an alternative approach. The U.S. government should stop subsidizing commercial energy firms, and instead put that money into a dramatic increase in energy research and development.

8 thoughts on “Solar Power

  1. He mentions promising technologies but also avoids a good deal of reality. Take for example his casual dismissal of cost in this scenario

    “Second, the problem of intermittency isn’t really a big one. Most electricity is used during “peak” hours, which incidentally is when the sun is shining. It’s easy to imagine a future in which solar electricity powers the world during the day, and then gas takes over at night. But that will mean solar is the main source, and gas only a sideshow. ”

    What that means is that solar would not only have to be as cheap as gas but at such a discount as to recover the additional capital costs for not only the solar electricity generation but also the costs of a gas plant idled for 30-50% of most day, with the incumbent increase in the cost of the gas due to lower purchase commitments and stochastic usage. The “sideshow” would still require the full-demand gas-generated-electricity infrastructure with only the consumables being reduced which then causes the contract price of consumables to increase. Power generation enjoys reduced costs for gas (and oil) because they can make the long term, high volume purchase commitments that make pipelines economically feasible.

    • And the annoying fact that you can’t simply start and stop the gas (or coal, or diesel, or nuclear) based plants. They can take days to shutdown and days to warm up again.

      At the very least, as you mentioned you’ll need something approaching 185% installed capacity as a baseline, then multiplied by load factor, which for gas/coal is something like 1.15; for solar I’d have to get my books out, but it is something ridiculous like 1.8. In total you’d need something like 275-300% installed capacity.

  2. The obvious hangup with solar is that it isn’t one problem, it is two problems.

    It is the solar production/conversion energy efficiency problem, and then it is an energy storage problem for all the times there is insufficient solar output.

    From a power grid perspective, you are pretty much nowhere unless you solve both problems. However, better solar panels could enable a lot of interesting small scale and “off-the-grid” developments.

  3. Sigh, not sure why you linked to that silly post. He links some graphs of solar costs falling over the years and breathlessly mentions some in-progress solar research, then asserts that solar is going to be big in seven to 27 years. That’s worth linking?

    First, I’d bet against 2020, not going to happen. Second, while we all agree that solar will be big someday, we all also have no idea when that will be. It could be 15 years, it could 50. Why the hell should we have the govt spend tax money on solar R&D, let alone Solyndra? If people want solar research or panels, they will pay for it themselves.

  4. First, observe that gas is actually solar power captured in the distant past, while “solar” in this context means direct electrical conversion in the present. So one (irrlevent) sense, we’ve been solar all along.

    Second, more to the point, solar will always have a huge problem because it gets not installation gains to scale. Electricity delivered over a grid requires very little of each consuming building – that’s the point. Solar trying to replace that requires serious changes to each served building, but isn’t 24×7, and so the grid remains in place.

  5. My dad ran alternative energy research at one the US government research labs. So I’ve followed developments in the field for decades.

    The low hanging fruit recognized decades ago was in energy conservation, gained largely via regulation, and the most promising potentially cost effective technology was wind energy, which the DOE backed with all sorts of foundational research and development. And the biggest scam, of course, has been ethanol.

    Beyond wind energy, much of the rest of it has turned out to be the endless attempt to squeeze water out of a rock. You see many of the same basic non-starters discussed decade after decade.

    It’s hard to imagine that any panacea will come out of the labs as the deliberate pre-planned research objective, it will come so many other advances come, as an accidental product of basic research blundered upon when aiming at something else.

  6. Solar is sort of stuck between a rock and hard place. On the one hand it offers freedom from the grid, but on the other hand the fact it depends on the unreliable Sun (or rather unreliable weather) means you still need to invest in a means of storing or providing power ‘out of sync’ with the bad weather. This financially wipes out any benefit.

    Combine this with the fact that nuclear is enjoying a slow resurgence and it looks like it will go back to a niche solution.

  7. Arnold, I am curious to know what makes you say solar power’s cost will decrease faster than other sources. To me, it seems there can be no solid basis for such a statement. The future is unknown, and no amount of research money can guarantee success.

    Btw, nuclear power need no breakthrough to become the cheapest, dominant powersource. It merely needs government policies that do not sub-optimize. The optimal amount of red tape, licensing and physical safety in nuclear power is way, way lower than today’s.

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