1. Those "technologies" exist and are simple, but the same solutions are not applicable in all locations.

2. It's not a significant problem now and does not stand in the way of continued development of renewables in probably 99% of current developments.

3. Yes it will affect price and the same thing happens in the fossil fuel market. Baseload natural gas or coal power plants are considerably more efficient than peaking load power plant and because of that many places currently use energy storage. More will be needed as market share of renewables increases, though in some areas it will be quite a while because renewables produce more during peak loads anyway.

1. Technologies to store massive amount of energy do exists but they are not practical in large scale. Storing lets say 1 day capacity need of energy for one million city is not realistic.

2. Of course it doesn't stand in the way of continued development.

3. This actually the opposite in almost any cold climates which is a huge problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...orage_projects

The largest pumped storage hydro project in the world was built in 1967. It stores 126,352 MWH. Average home in the US uses 30kwh/day. It's enough energy for 4.2 million people for a day.

That specific project would not be able to provide enough power, as opposed to energy, but it wasn't designed for that purpose.

There are many problems and there are many solutions. But, this brings to mind the fact that energy efficiency is just a massive opportunity to cut back on fossil fuel use.

The solution already happened, we should be looking to use and extract more fossil fuels not reduce them. But your way to caught up in your own dogma to realize this.

I would not worry about energy storage. Worst case you use lithium batteries and that is cheaper than what the City of Los Angeles charges for power. You can also use hydroelectric at night instead of the day. Ever go to Laughlin. At night the river is real low. As the day progresses the flow increases. Instead the river will flow at night, and during the day river will trickle. Then you have all the old natural gas and coal plants that can be fired up for peak demand. Then there is nuclear, can it ramp up during the night? Geothermal could ramp up during the night. Then we could also get solar from south america or china. Especially Australia or Atacama Desert. Use aussie solar power to heat homes in Canadian winter. Worldwide it is sunny somewhere.

As for efficiency. Efficient heat pumps, led bulbs 100 lumen per watt are all coming or are here.

The future will be to disconnect from the grid. The cities want too much they say they are helping you but like Broadwalk Empire they are all corrupt, they have figured out the moonshine is too much work and bloody. They just tax the hell out of you to near poverty, and claim they are helping you.

This thread reminds me of my favorite Bertrand Russell quote.

Use Australian solar to power Canada? Storage is not an issue because hydro plants exist in some locations? Using overly simplistic stats about cost/kwh that have not been normalized? Truly a sad display for 2+2.

If the "renewables are here and ready" advocates truly to care to educate yourselves, I'd recommend learning about electricity markets and what an ISO is. Page 35 of the link below is not a bad place to start.

http://www.ferc.gov/market-oversight...rgy-primer.pdf

Interesting five-year retrospective on Fukushima. Bottom line is that, despite being hit by one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded plus a major tsunami, there's no particular reason to believe that anyone at all was killed by the meltdown. Going back to the hydro vs nuclear conversation we had a while back, the very same earthquake knocked down a dam, killing eight people. Just your periodic reminder that safe, on-demand zero-carbon power has existed for decades, but there's no political will to use it.

Interesting Fukushima article. I expect one of two things to happen in the next decade. Either we'll have a breakthrough in batteries that makes them a common part of electricity systems (unlikely), or we'll see a slow shift towards greater acceptance of nuclear as a fuel source with the prevailing view being that a) it's at least better than coal on the environment front and b) debt being generally more accepted by the average person. The prevailing view on nuclear vs gas will be interesting.

Nuclear is expensive is the problem with it.

Nuclear has a high initial capital cost, but is (generally) not expensive on a levelized cost basis. Any reliable, dispatchable, long-life baseload power has positive effects on the rest of the system as well. Depending on how it's financed it can be quite economic.

Jurisdictions that want to put it in place generally have to deal with a) negative public perception and b) financing it in some form, which doesn't sell well on a 4-year platform.

Don't really want to go on a giant derail of this, but as with fossil fuels, there are hidden costs and externalities. If nuclear power plants were forced to insure themselves for the cost of what might happen in a disaster scenario, the power cost would be much higher. Costs of repairing and decommissioning reactors often blow out. Spent fuel is not being stored properly right now and nobody wants to take it (although my state, South Australia, is considering building a repository here and I hope we do). etc etc. Nuclear should certainly be part of the solution imo but it's not a panacea.

Sure, fine (except for the insurance bit, which I'm becoming increasingly convinced is not true today). But if you have to choose between paying more for power and having to store nuclear waste on the one hand, and having the world's climate self-destruct because of coal, it seems like the costs of nuclear are pretty trivial. And sure, the hypothesized solar economy of 2030 might be even better, but it's not actually 2030 yet, so that's not on the table.

The high cost of nuclear is mostly due to the obscene regulations they have to follow thanks to enovirmental groups like Sierra club who protested in the 70's when nuclear was on track to being a leading energy source.

If you could instantly replace all coal with nuclear I would do it, outside of China, a nuclear plant that started planning now would not be operating until after 2030.

Any energy source has externalities. But like Shifty86 has said, the net effect of energy is positive to the human existence, even if the perception of today isnt so.

The general public views renewables as mostly (if not fully) positive, which just isnt true. Wildlife impacts, rare earth issues, and a whole host of NIMBY concerns come along with each of hydro, wind, and solar. Until fairly recently it actually cost more energy to make a solar panel than that solar panel produced.

At this moment, intermittent energy sources in anything other than small doses typically need to be backed up with dispatchable sources, so the choice is often not wind vs x but wind + x.

On a separate note...while pushing for cleaner sources of energy is certainly worthwhile, we focus way too little on the demand side of the equation in my opinion. Which leads to hypocritical clowns like Dicaprio consuming 100-1000x the energy of the average human, while at the same time complaining about the dirty sources of that energy.

Popular myth that shows your confirmation bias.

When I started installing in 2007 I specifically used Evergreen modules because they had the shortest energy payback period, which was 1.5 years as I recall. (obviously given some estimate of typical conditions)

In 1977 a study was done with Solarex modules and found 6.4 year energy payback.

In 2004 NREL estimated the energy payback for rooftop solar systems at about 2.7 years.

2012 JRC European Commission did a more detailed map showing energy payback time in different areas - some being down around 1 year.



You may or may not know that the standard industry warranty is 80% of power production after 25 years.

You have made so many off-base assertions in this debate that I don't plan to engage you beyond this message. I expect you might believe what you believe because you (and many others) take stats based on one small segment of the overall picture and apply them to far broader conclusions.

The first study you link asserting that in 1977 solar had a 6.4 year payback is so dumb I really struggle with where to even start. It clearly says the MANUFACTURE of the cells. (i.e. not the whole picture), among other issues. Ask anyone remotely knowledgeable and they will tell you we were nowhere close to being net positive that long ago.

If you want one of many examples of a thoughtful analysis from an unbiased source, check the link below.

http://www.popsci.com/science/articl...icity-they-use

By the way, saying that I "may or may not know that the standard industry warranty is..." is a really poor way to argue your point here. How a product is commercialized can in many instances have little to do with the true cost, because they aren't necessarily connected concepts. Using that as support in a debate about solar power demonstrates a lack of basic understanding of economics, development, and power markets/systems generally.

What an astounding link to Popular Science. Woah.

The point of noting the warranty is that the solar panels produce energy for a long time. If you want more than just the warranty, well, it's probably because you are so poorly informed, but it can be provided.

On the wild chance that you'd actually educate yourself:

https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/dow...er-sprache.pdf

On page 32 you'll find the energy pay-back time of about 1.2 years (in Italy - a little over 2 years in Germany) for a PV system, including tracker, inverter, mounting and cabling, frame, laminate, cell, ingot, and si feedstock for a system with a standard multicrystaline panel. And that was from 5 years ago.

Storage makes classic "base load" plants like nuclear and coal even more attractive. With adequate storage we are looking at storage replacing peak power plants like natural gas.

Now who would have saw this coming!Quite the shocker.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/cou..._share_twitter

That's that non-pv stuff, that never made sense, but was built anyway.

Yeah. I don't want to say I'm against solar thermal (large projects), but it's not my thing. And to put that $2.2B in perspective - I doubt they'll shut down because of a short fall, why would they? And it's still small compared to say the $10.4B it's costing to shut down the broken San Onofre power plant.

Solar thermal does have the advantage of being able to run 24/7 on stored heat.

And https://cleantechnica.com/2016/03/18...npah-contract/

The shortfalls were relatively modest. Over 80% of targets for the first two years of operation and 97% of the target for 2015.

I think it at the time it started development a lot of people couldn't foresee how dramatically the prices in PV would drop.

I talked to a guy who was building a big solar thermal project and while under construction they would have areas on the ground that would I guess unavoidably be the target of large groups of mirrors. They were marked off as death zones and if you walked into them you'd just burst in flames. At one point some machinery got hit and the steel melted.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexepst.../#6d4514bb18dc