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| Solar Power isn't Feasible | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Dec 30 2013, 12:31 AM (2,237 Views) | |
| Deleted User | Dec 31 2013, 10:56 AM Post #61 |
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love my system |
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| Berton | Dec 31 2013, 10:56 AM Post #62 |
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The link is in this thread. All you have to do is read. "German residential solar panel installations today cost about $2.25/watt capacity, [10] versus a hair over $5/watt in the US. [11] (Numbers vary over a considerable range. Most of this is labor/permitting costs.) But German panels generate less than half as much actual power over time. So when you normalize the panel install cost by capacity factor, US and German solar power generation are already at cost parity. The payback periods for solar investments are about the same in California and Germany. This is surprising to most solar advocates, who tend to blame higher costs for the low uptake rates in the US. But system economics alone do not explain disparities in installation rates. So why does Germany have 16 times as much nameplate panel capacity per capita as the US? [12] Yes, permitting is much easier there, but that’s mostly captured by the $/watt costs since installation companies usually pull the permits. And I don’t think the German people are that much more pro-environment than the rest of the world. There’s no good reason for the disparity that I can find — it ought to swing the opposite way. Solar just isn’t a good power source for a cold, dark country that has minimal daytime air conditioning load. Solar in Phoenix, Arizona makes sense, but not in Frankfurt. The only conclusion I can come to is that Germany’s solar power boom is being driven entirely by political distortions. The growth of solar is not economically justified, nor can it continue without massive political interference in power markets. Many people are surprised to hear that Germany only gets a tiny 2.0% of its total energy / 4.6% of its electricity from solar power (in 2012). [5,13] All the headlines about new records on peak summer days make it seem more like 50%. Despite all the cost and pain and distortions, PV solar has turned out to be a very ineffective way of generating large amounts of energy. They could have generated at least four times as much carbon-free power via new nuclear plants for the same cost. [14] (Nuclear would have been a better option for a lot of reasons. I’ll get to that later.)" |
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| colo_crawdad | Dec 31 2013, 11:07 AM Post #63 |
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Fire & Ice Senior Diplomat
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Wow! What a new game by Berton. Post quoted material and then challenge others to find the link for it somewhere in the thread. After all, there are only 63 posts on 7 pages. I wonder thy Berton doesn't do as is required in any writing, WHENEVER quoting a source,that source must be noted on that page. |
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| Berton | Dec 31 2013, 11:17 AM Post #64 |
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Oh yes it is so difficult to find the one post I made which had a link about Germany and solar power. "With subsidies for new solar systems phasing out over the next 5 years, solar growth has already started to decline. The installation rate peaked and is now dropping. [13, 15] Despite falling panel and installation costs, the majority of new German solar projects are expected to stop when subsidies end. They’re already on the downward side of the technology uptake bell curve: (Data after 2008 from [14], prior to 2008 from Wikipedia) If you pay close attention, all the pro-solar advocates are still using charts with data that stops after 2011. That’s because 2011 was the last year solar was growing exponentially. Using data through July 2013 and official predictions for the rest of this year, it’s now clear that solar is not on an exponential growth curve. It’s actually on an S-curve like pretty much every other technology, ever. Limitless exponential growth doesn’t exist in the physical world. [13] Also note the huge gap on that graph between the actual generation and the nameplate capacity. That’s where the miserable capacity factor comes in. (I think this is the source of a lot of misplaced optimism about solar’s growth rate.) Green media outlets only report solar power either in peak capacity or as percent of consumption on sunny summer days. Both of these measurements must be divided by about 10 to get the true output throughout the year." |
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| Brewster | Dec 31 2013, 12:10 PM Post #65 |
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C'mon, now, Colo You can't ask Bertie to do that - every time he posts a link, someone shows it's just more Right Wing BS with no solid expertise behind it. Your request amounts to cruel and unusual punishment! |
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| colo_crawdad | Dec 31 2013, 12:26 PM Post #66 |
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Yes, it would probably be asking too much in terms of effort and time to expect Bertn to take the time and effort to either preface a new quotation with""from my prior link" or finish the post with a similar statement. |
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| Berton | Jan 1 2014, 12:14 AM Post #67 |
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I see the children were up late last night. Non the less the lesson will continue. Hopefully they will read and learn something. "In reality, solar is scaling up much slower than conventional energy sources scaled up in the past, despite solar receiving more government support. This graph shows the growth rate of recent energy transitions in the first 10 years after each source reached grid scale (1% of total supply): [13] I think this chart is the best way to make an apples-to-apples comparison of uptake rates. Only about a quarter of the “renewables” line is due to solar (the majority is biomass, wind, and trash incineration). So the true solar growth rate from 2001-2011 is only 1/4th as fast as nuclear from 1974-1984, and 1/6th as fast as natural gas from 1965-1975. [13] When a new energy source is genuinely better than the old energy sources, it grows fast. Solar is failing to do so. Yet it’s had every advantage the government could provide. What this all implies is that without government intervention, PV solar can’t be a significant source of grid power. The economics of German solar have only made sense up til now because they tax the hell out of all types of energy (even other renewables), and then use the proceeds to subsidize solar panels. Utilities are forced to buy distributed solar power at rates several times the electricity’s market value, causing massive losses. The German Renewable Energy Act directly caused utility losses of EUR 540 million in August 2013 alone. [16] It’s a shocking amount of money changing hands. When you strip away the well-intentioned facade of environmentalism, this is little more than a forced cash transfer scheme. It’s taking from utilities (who are losing money hand over fist on grid management and pre-existing conventional generation capacity) and from everyone who doesn’t have rooftop panels, and shoveling it into the pockets of everyone who owns or installs panels. Which means it’s both a massive market distortion and a regressive tax on the poor. This explains why per-capita solar uptake is so high in Germany. The government has engineered a well-intentioned but harmful redistribution system where everyone without solar panels is giving money to people who have them. This is a tax on anyone who doesn’t have a south-facing roof, or who can’t afford the up-front cost, or rents their residence, etc. People on fixed incomes (eg welfare recipients and the elderly) have been hardest hit because the government has made a negligible effort to increase payments to compensate for skyrocketing energy prices. The poor are literally living in the dark to try to keep their energy bills low. Energiewende is clearly bad for social equality. But Germany’s politicians seem to have a gentleman’s agreement to avoid criticizing it in public, particularly since Merkel did an about-face on nuclear power in 2011. [17]" |
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| campingken | Jan 1 2014, 12:28 AM Post #68 |
Fire & Ice Senior Diplomat
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Solar makes sense in some places and not in others. |
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| Berton | Jan 1 2014, 12:29 AM Post #69 |
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It has limits every where. Keep reading and you will learn. |
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| Neutral | Jan 1 2014, 12:37 AM Post #70 |
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Fire & Ice Senior Diplomat
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Some think just because the sun shines often it is feasible, they refuse to read the facts. |
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