Unlike gasoline prices, solar PV prices have only risen by 10% this year.

[NNadir]

Over at www.solarbuzz.com, they keep abreast of solar prices. With the price of gasoline rising, there certainly will be a point at which solar electricity will compete with diesel power in terms of fuel costs.

The cost of solar power is now given as 5.64 per "watt" where "watts" are the "peak" watts in which solar panels are traditionally sold, noon, cloudless, sunny day. The corresponding price in June of 2004 was 4.99 per "watt." (To find these prices over time, click on the graph of solar prices.)

Thus solar PV prices have risen about 10% in the last year, not too bad compared to crude oil, which was selling for around $41/barrel a year ago and is now around $70/barrel, a 75% increase.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/15/eveningnews/main617664.shtml

Solar buzz is good enough to give us the cost of solar energy as opposed to solar power.

According to them, in the United States today, solar electricity costs $0.2166/kw-hr. A kw-hr is 3.6 million joules, meaning that the cost per joule for solar energy produced by PV is 6.02 one hundred millionths of a dollar.

That sounds like a bargain.

However, a gallon of gasoline has 132 million joules of gasoline. Therefore, to produce as much energy as a gallon of gasoline, the solar cell costs $7.94.

And there you have it folks: Replacing a diesel with a solar cell implies a willingness to pay almost $8.00/gallon.

Of course the external cost of diesel is much higher than the external cost of solar PV. According the European Union, as of 2001, the external cost of solar PV electricity was 0.33 Eurocents/kw-hr or (taking the exchange rate of 1.2 USD/Euro) or 1 billionth of a dollar per joule. Carrying this through we see that the fully loaded cost of solar electricity including external costs, is $8.04/gallon, gasoline equivalent. (The figure is for German production, as described in this link.)

http://www.itas.fzk.de/deu/tadn/tadn013/frbi01a.htm

In this report, http://www.externe.info/expoltec.pdf, relying on the graphic on page 35, we see that the external cost for a diesel engine (standard thermal, not combined cycle) is about 5 eurocents/kw-hr. Thus the external cost of diesel fuel is $7.98/gallon! Note that this does not include the internal cost, the cost you actually pay at the pump. Thus if you are paying $3.00/gallon, your total cost to the human race + the people who sell you the gasoline is about $11.00/gallon

http://www.externe.info/expoltec.pdf

Thus the fully loaded cost of a solar cell is lower than the cost of diesel. However people don't actually directly pay the external cost. They are perfectly willing to ignore such costs, to the detriment of their own health and future (and the health and future of their children).

I just thought I'd inject a little of something called reality.

[Redstone]

1. Why the hell aren't they going down?

I can outfit the house with PVs at a dollar a watt. They were supposed to have hit that price a couple of years ago.

What happened?

Redstone

[jpak]

2. Global demand for PV cells and modules outstripped supply

and there is also a global supply bottleneck for polysilicon feedstock.

Once new module and polySi production capacity comes on-line (in 2007) PV prices will come down.

[Redstone]

3. Back in the late Eighties, TI and one of the California electric companies

were supposed to have had an astonishing breakthough with panels essentially made (if I remember right) from aluminum foil and silicon spheres.

It was all over the electronics trade magazines, but just kind of went away.

Wonder what happened?

Redstone

[skids]

9. That sounds like these guys here:

http://www.spheralsolar.com/2_spheral-technology/

Like most of the tens of other technologies that show great promise in drastically cutting PV costs, the companies that use the technology exist in a hand-to-mouth world where they are perpetually trying to find enough investment capital (and manufacturing acumen) to pull volume production up from it's bootstraps.

Fortunately a couple are making it -- EverGreen is perhaps the best example, though they seem to be intent on funneling the reduced production cost back into expansion rather than out to the consumer.

Eventually, I suppose. It is really annoying, considering how utterly "duh" obvious some of the cost saving inventions are:









http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/3/7/114711/9242

[Dead_Parrot]

10. I don't get why they don't license out the tech...

OK, so Bob's Solar may not have the ability to storm the world with their photomatic, but why not get BP, GE or Suntech to run with it and just collect the cash? :shrug:

[skids]

11. BP, GE, etc all have their own plans...

They choose the technologies they think will be most competitive. In the case of the larger corporations, such choices tend to be made by people who are decidedly constipated.

Part of the problem is the percieved volatility -- price wars between radically different technologies tend to end up lopsided in the long run, and nobody wants to be on the lop side. The plethora of competing designs actually hurts the prospect for securing investment.

(On edit: You'll notice that one of the linked designs is in fact teamed up with a fairly large company, that being Xerox.)

[Dead_Parrot]

12. I guess you're right...

It would be nice they had the noodle to, for instance, slap a SunCube on top of what they've got while still developing the megawafer2000 (and proceed to mop the floor with the opposition when they've got both).

Ho hum. Pass the Ex-Lax...

[NNadir]

13. Of course if marketing brochures and diagrams were technology...

...fewer people would be burning natural gas, and every new solar installation would not require a breathless set of a hundred internet links.

People have been at solar research for over 50 years now. For 50 years it has been evaluated from every angle, including from a business standpoint.

It remains a marginal business with trivial participation in the world's energy demand, still less than an exajoule of energy production.

I think solar energy has made advances, but it is hardly enough for humanity to rely upon. I certainly hope that solar energy will increase its share of peak load power generation. This would be a good thing. But it is time to stop blaming a secret cabal of stupid, big, bad, guys for its failure to get further. Steve Jobs and those sort of guys started more or less in garages. They built companies because they had something that was needed and was affordable. It's what the solar companies need to produce.

[Dead_Parrot]

14. 50 years?

Remind me what 1905 paper Einstien won the Nobel prize for...
:evilgrin:
(OK, so not a working PV panel. I'm only half serious)

[NNadir]

17. OK, then, since the invention of the

solid state solar cell.

You are right. The understanding of how to create an electric current by employing solar energy dates to the 19th century, and a critical theoretical advance on the matter was made by big Al in 1905.

[skids]

15. Well, I would point out...

...that all those products have at least working prototypes, and two of them are being sold, albiet in small volume.

Personally though I acknowlege that there may be a "cabal of bad guys" causing mischief I don't consider it to be the primary obstacle. That obstacle is twofold: lack of willingless to take business risk on the part of the people with the coin to make it happen, and the fact that being a brilliant scientist or research engineer does not translate into being a brilliant industrial process engineer or manufacturing project director. Especially the latter -- because it doesn't involve complicated math and chemistry, the people that do the legwork to optimize material supply lines, organize labor and shipping, and sign contracts probably don't get the esteem they deserve -- a sucessful product demands a top notch person or five in those fields.

I think the design that energy innovations was originally going to market probably tells the typical story the best:

LEARNINGS:

The SunPod proved to be an extremely promising design. Oddly, one of the lowest-tech components - the plastic Fesnel lens - proved to be too costly for mass deployment at this time. We will continue to work with suppliers in the hopes of bringing down the overall system costs to the point that it makes economic sense to potential customers.

http://www.energyinnovations.com/sunpod.html

...which means basically they didn't have anyone with the know-how or clout to make happen production of a cheap (UV hardened, granted) piece of transparent plastic, and that killed the product.

[NNadir]

16. I don't really believe in a "cabal of bad guys," but I credit some of what

you say.

The solar business has been around for 50 years, and I note that the inventors of the technology, Bell Labs, commercialized many products invented by their scientists and engineers.

Moreover, they did know a lot about scaling up and process engineering. Bell Laboratories was for many years the premier industrial laboratory in the world, and it spoke for a time when the American economy was not dominated by useless MBAs but by dynamic thinkers, largely engineers and scientists.

The technology for solar PV energy production didn't go anywhere (and mostly it's still more promise than reality) for several reasons, which I will put in their approximate order of importance in my opinion:

1) The world's population was much smaller, and therefore it was easier to conceal the egregious environmental consequences of industrial practice, including the industrial practice of energy production.

2) Energy was enormously cheap. Even now, when energy is more appropriately priced, solar electricity is not really competitive. It remains the province of rich people, as my calculation shows, if external costs are ignored.

3) The technical hurdles were large. The advances in chemistry and physics in the last decades has been enormous. A 1950's chemist walking into a laboratory today would simply be largely incompetent to do basic procedures. This is not a reflection on the poor quality of 1950's chemists (and physicists) but is rather a measure of their success. They invented all of this stuff. However they did not have in the 1950's and 1960's. I note that the common availability of basic computing power did not really exist until the 1970's at the earliest, and broadly until the 1990's.

4) An environmental movement with political, economic, and broad social acceptability functionally did not exist. Although there were people who made environmental noise, including a famous President of the United States (Theodore Roosevelt), these people were mostly concerned with the preservation of wilderness. The atmosphere was not a broadly discussed issue. Smog, for instance, was mostly of interest because it obstructed the views of the mountains around Los Angeles. The health implications were not broadly recognized.

5) Issues connected with sustainability were not something about which people routinely thought. Times were good and most people attending, say, the 1964 World's Fair in New York, thought times would improve forever. I recall, as a child, attending that fair and seeing (in the GM pavilion) a display on how, in the future, the mechanized construction of highways through the Amazon basin would take place. I was amazed. I recall thinking that this was a great thing. This was because I was a product of my culture, a culture that never considered how people in New York might depend on the existence of the Amazon rain forest. One of my favorite rock songs is Donald Fagen's "IGY" which captures the flavor of those times exactly. No one needed to consider the possibility that the good times would not roll forever. In fact, many of the people who thought this, are long dead. For them, the good times did last forever. We are their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

6) The infrastructure did not exist for the integration of power sources of different types. There was no such thing as an inverter. No one saw the need to develop such a thing, or more importantly to pay for it, since the existing thermally powered infrastructure, which was AC, worked just fine and was cheap to operate. (I note that this is still a problem to a more limited extent. The fluctuations associated with wind power for instance, can indeed be problematic, although giant steps have been made. This fact accounts for the fact that wind energy, though known as a source of energy for many, many centuries, was not used to generate electricity until very recently.) In connection with this point, I note that many power companies resisted the introduction of solar technology on precisely these grounds. They had to be compelled to adjust and make the technological advances required by law.

7) Batteries were expensive and the technology was poor and inefficient. I note that if batteries were still required, i.e. if one could not use the electrical grid as a battery, solar technology would still be more esoteric than it already is, and let's face it, it is still esoteric.

All of these factors certainly weigh historically against the development of solar energy.

A last factor may be considered which has not changed. This is as follows: It is still acceptable to have a de facto subsidy of energy by ignoring the external costs of energy, cost to the environment, to human health, and to the health of the entire biosphere.

The matter of energy is one that is complex, and is not amenable to simplistic "feel good" marketing about the grand renewable future and glib marketing brochures about so and so's solar system, or wind farm, or even some nuclear power plant of the most modern type. Of considerable importance is the fact that a vast unsustainable population of human beings now exists and very few of the members of that population are willing to commit suicide in order to stabilize the environment and to create a future. Speaking only for myself, I'm not there yet, though I am very depressed by what I see. If we simply raise the price of energy to what it costs fully loaded, the people who will immediately suffer at the margins of survival are the poor. Indeed this is already the case, the poor are the ones who are dying the quickest.

I have argued that solar energy is really cheaper than diesel fuel in gasoline price equivalent terms, even though the price of solar power is like gasoline at $8.00/gallon. That's reality. The question of how we address reality is properly the province of politics and ethics. However the issues of politics and ethics as currently employed are being used not to address reality, but to obscure it.

Do I think the advancement of solar energy is a good idea? Yes. Do I think it will happen in a timely fashion? No.

[jpak]

18. This year is the 60th anniversary of US nuclear power

What is the status of US nuclear power today????

103 operating reactors - the last few cost $6-7 billion a piece (compared to their original price tag of a $0.4-0.9 billion). Some took more than 20 years to complete.

110 canceled reactors with associated stranded costs of >$112 billion
Are the utilities that ordered these plants responsible for these costs??? Nope...

Partial meltdowns at Fermi 1 and Three Mile Island 2 cost "somebody" more than a billion dollars (and just whom might that "somebody" be??? Take a guess.)

A major fire at Browns Ferry 1 will cost TVA $1.8 billion to repair. A "little corrosion problem" at Davis Besse cost the plant owners over $200 million in fines, lost revenue and repair costs.

The cost of decommissioning existing US reactors is $23 billion - hope these utilities have the cash to do this - otherwise "someone else" will have to bail them out.

Disposal of depleted UF6 accumulated at (antiquated and uneconomic) US uranium enrichment facilities will cost taxpayers more than $4 billion.

US uranium enrichment plants can't compete with foreign enrichment facilities - who is bailing them out????

The cost of the Yucca Mountain spent fuel repository is $65 billion and climbing. The Nuclear Waste Fund will cover only ~$28 billion of this - who will make up the difference?????

And who will pay for the costs of monitoring, maintaining and mitigating radioisotope releases from Yucca Mountain over the next few hundred years???? The long dead people that produced the spent fuel dumped there???? I don't think so...

Probably the same people that are footing the $4-8 billion clean-up bill at the failed commercial spent fuel reprocessing plant in West Valley NY.

US uranium production collapsed in the 1980's. The US nuclear power industry is sustained by imported uranium - and that situation will only git "worser and worser".
And who is paying for the $450 million clean-up of a defunct uranium mine in Moab Utah ???? (clue: it ain't the people who owned and profited from the mine).

So how does one build a nuclear reactor in the US today???? Meet with Dick Cheney behind closed doors, give the GOP millions in campaign contributions and force taxpayers to pony up $9-12 billion in subsidies.

Nuclear power - such a deal...

not

[Dead_Parrot]

19. And your atlernative is what, PV?

The US uses ~ 74EJ of electricity a year, 20% from nuclear power: ~14.8EJ, or 4.11PWh. To wrangle out that out of solar, you'd need 1.877TWp of PV installed, with a pricetag (at today's solarbuzz prices) of $10,156,000,000,000.

Of course, Solar only gets some funding from the state: If we cap it at, say, $2,000/kW, the bill would only be $3.754 trillion.

Who'd pick up that check, the tooth fairy?

Edit: Sorry, Solarbuzz just nudged the price up by a cent - Please add $18.7 billion to the first figure. thanks :)

[jpak]

21. Yes, PV

and solar electric, solar thermal, offshore/onshore/small-scale wind, wave, tidal, biomass, biogas, geothermal and hydroelectric development at existing US dams that currently do not produce power.

and conservation and combined-heat-and-power for district heating.

That's what America wants and that's what they are paying for...

22 US states have enacted renewable portfolio standards - none have passed nuclear portfolio standards.

No tooth fairy required.

:)

[Dead_Parrot]

22. You're moving the goalposts

I don't have a problem with wind et al. But the mean salary in the US last year was $37,870 - most of the richest nation on Earth cannot afford PV, since it would mean blowing an entire years salary. Yet the taxes these people pay will be spent on sticking PV on some rich fuckers house, rather than something they'll get the benefit from.

If the state wants to spend tax money on a windfarm, or a wave array, or even PV for the community, that's fine. But blowing tax on rich individuals is shameful.

Go find an average Joe in NJ, keeping a mortgage, wife and two kids on $43,860, and ask him if he's happy that his taxes have paid $250,000 for Ted Blew's shiny new PV array.

You might get a shock about "what America wants".

[NNadir]

5. The cost of everything is rising, particularly energy related things.

Solar PV is still a trivial form of energy, inasmuch as it has to produce an exajoule of energy out of the 440 exajoules of energy demand for the planet as a whole.

However, as this calculation shows, this is totally a function of the arbitrary decision to allow everybody to subsidize oil with their flesh.

As a practical matter, solar PV energy is already competitive with oil if oil is unsubsidized. In fact, it's a bargain.

It does seem though that the solar industry is ill equipped to scale up. Even though the industry produces less than an exajoule of energy, materials for it's manufacture are in short supply. Hence the rising prices.

[jpak]

4. Uranium prices increased by 80% last year

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=3&ObjectID=10385088

The *temporary* 10% rise in PV module prices doesn't look that bad by comparison...

[Dead_Parrot]

7. But since fuel is only about 10% of the cost of a nuclear plant...

...an 80% "temporary peaking in uranium prices" (as your article puts it) would only put the cost of nuclear power up by 8%...

[John McDonald]

20. Why is the price of gas going up

The price of gas is high because the value of dollar trending downward in the face of massive deficit spending by Bush, Reichert, and Congressional Republicans.

The single most important thing to do to lower the cost of gas for George Bush and the Republicans is to balance the budget. If the Republicans balanced the budget, the value of the dollar would skyrocket. When the budget was balanced in 2002 under Clinton, the price of gas was $0.83 cheaper - NOT because of the supply and demand for oil was weak (remember the economy was pretty hot in 1999 and 2000) but because oil producing countries valued the integrity of the dollar and sold us more oil for fewer dollars.

The single biggest thing that can be done to lower the price of gas is NOT conservation, not finding new oil, not drilling in ANWR, not nuclear power, not solar power, not wind, not bio diesel, and not ethanol - it is balancing the budget which raises the value of the dollar!

Supply/Demand and security issues are raising the price of gas ~$0.50. We need conservation and new energy sources as well. However, the price of gas is not high because oil companies are price gouging, it is primarily poor fiscal management on the part of the Bush Adminstration.

[BeFree]

6. Unlike gasoline...

..solar produces it's wattage nearly every day for twenty years or more, while gas goes up in smoke in minutes.

No real comparison. Solar wins!

[Dead_Parrot]

8. Yeah, that's why we all have solar powered cars.

Apples and oranges.