By all accounts, it looks like he had written out a reasonable explanation as to why he predicted solar would not become cost effective. At the end of the day, if something doesn't make financial sense, it won't last long without subsidies from the government.
The assumptions behind his predictions changed and therefore so did the conclusion. Seems pretty reasonable.
Like he says, solar power's intermittency is still an issue in non-sunny places, but in areas with lots of sunlight, the landscape of power generation is changing for the better.
Which, to people not familiar with the scientific method, is shocking.
Everyone seems to be projecting their own egos onto this guy. Their minds say, "If I were proved wrong and had to admit it, I'd be mortified." These people aren't scientists. They're being emotional.
Again, props to this guy.
This is a fantastic example of how government subsidies can help. Had there been no subsidies, the demand for solar power would have been smaller, the industry would not have been compelled to compete that much on improving solar power, and this Harvard researcher's prediction (solar not cheap enough in the near future) might have turned true.
He said these subsidies make no sense because solar is far from being competitive, yet they are the very reason solar became competitive.
My belief is that it wouldn't have happened nearly this fast without both subsidies, and a widespread awareness under investors that there are going to be government incentives for a huge renewable market. But figuring out the amount is impossible.
Imagine if the founders of Solar City also thought like this guy. Suffice to say they probably wouldn't be owning one of the largest US solar companies in the US right now.
Solar City did think like that guy. Solar City is heavily dependent on subsidies and the ability to sell power to utilities at retail, not wholesale, rates. Solar City pulled out of Nevada when Nevada took away some of those benefits.[1] Their business model requires subsidies.
The big utility-scale plants are now profitable at wholesale rates. Even in Nevada.[2] That's what matters.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2016/01/sol... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_Mountain_Solar_Facility
The scale of land use and other environmental impacts necessary to power the world on biofuels or many other renewables are such that we doubt they provide a sound pathway to a zero-carbon low-footprint future.
High-efficiency solar cells produced from earth-abundant materials are an exception and have the potential to provide many tens of terawatts on a few percent of the Earth’s surface. Present-day solar technologies will require substantial innovation to meet this standard and the development of cheap energy storage technologies that are capable of dealing with highly variable energy generation at large scales.
Nuclear fission today represents the only present-day zero-carbon technology with the demonstrated ability to meet most, if not all, of the energy demands of a modern economy. However, a variety of social, economic, and institutional challenges make deployment of present-day nuclear technologies at scales necessary to achieve significant climate mitigation unlikely. A new generation of nuclear technologies that are safer and cheaper will likely be necessary for nuclear energy to meet its full potential as a critical climate mitigation technology.
> rooftop solar seem systems which are (arguably) little more than green bling for the wealthy
My rooftop solar system (installed in late 2013) is 2.5 years in to what is looking to be a 5.9 year break-even point. After 6 years I will be earning $4-5k/year from it. Even if I had financed this (not a solar lease, those are usually structured so the leasing company gets all the benefits) at a high interest rate, it would turn out to be one of my best investments on a $/return basis.
The fact that basically don't have a monthly power bill (which is substantial in hot parts of PG&E land) is my #1 benefit here, as reducing my monthly budget by that amount makes the rest of my life that much nicer. The fact that I have reduced my 'carbon footprint' is barely on my radar compared to the financial benefits here....
I did find it crazy that the installer/designer wanted to know if I wanted more visible colors, or a portion of the panels facing the from top the house so they were more noticeable. I suppose some people just have to green-signal...
Can you point us in the direction of a good write-up on net-metering? I'm sure different jurisdictions have different rules. I was under the impression that net metering was only good up until your yearly production was equal to your demand. Or are you saying that the $4-5k/year is at wholesale rates?
The Sahara has some of the Sunniest sky's in the world. Maybe its time to spend a few hundred billion and build those solar plants in North Africa.
Someone forgot to tell my neighbors - in New England. Rooftop solar everywhere.
It is also a dumb line. Solar power production varies considerably and a lot of power consumption is flexible but we don't have any intelligence built into the power distribution network to be able to tell devices when to use power and when not to.
Imagine if smart cables went into our laptops so they could charge when power was abundant/cheap and use battery when it wasn't. Electric cars could automatically start charging when power was cheap and stop when it got expensive. Washing machines could have timer function which would start them as soon as power prices were low.
Yeah, PG&E is practically begging their customers to install solar. The biggest savings come on the days/times with the best solar potential, and dropping out of that highest tiers can be a real win.
Solar Energy is unlimited, cheap and clean. My guess would be that energy will eventually end up being near free.
Human beings don't directly photosynthesize for clear reasons. Solar power isn't available constantly and is too diffuse to power us in real-time. Instead, we eat plants (or animals, which is just another layer of indirection) that have photosynthesized over time and stored up that energy - we then convert that energy so we can metabolize it as needed.
The same thing is happening with petroleum. It's denser and more flexible than the sun. These are real constraints that have led us to use these sources of energy and prioritize them. They're not insurmountable - I think as prices fall we'll see more research into storage, I believe panel efficiency is going up - but the path of least resistance is a powerful force.
I've always wondered why humans did not evolve to photosynthesize, and am interested if they could be permitted to evolve to using CRISPR.
Likewise, for the past century or more, fossil fuels were the cheapest source of concentrated energy by far. That's about to stop.
At the radius from the sun that our planet is, there is an upper limit to solar energy of about 4/3 Watts/(M^2) (projected across the curve of the earth during daylight... through atmosphere...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Intensity_in_the_Sola...
The most effective way of collecting sunlight is to use curved reflective surfaces and concentrate it on to points that generate useful work either from the heat or from the photon intensity.
Interestingly, such mirrors also offer anime/bond villain/scifi style focused energy delivery 'weapons'; which is why I am most surprised that the US space programs haven't put any in to higher orbit above the majority of the garbage floating about the earth.
It might also be possible to use the delivered energy from such a system to incite deceleration of existing orbital junk and force burn-up/re-entry.
I'd like to see the time when energy will lack.
Sometimes I wonder how we could rebootstrap technology in a frugal manner. Have shelter, a bit of comfort, a predictable enough supply not to worry too much.
[1] just the other day I put a gif on imgur, 1Million views, a few TB of bandwidth.. I felt bad. So much for this. And that's not the most viewed, nor the longest. Imagine how much is used everyday.
(Ignoring that servers being busier without a good caching infrastructure tends to ramp up resource usage and pull more power)
Umm, exactly how big was that gif? One of those numbers doesn't match up with the other...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(Submitted title was "Harvard Physicist, Long-Time Solar Skeptic Admits Solar Power Now Makes Sense".)
Source is from 2012: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-01-05/five-rare-...
So, it's past 2015, apparently these shortages didn't materialize.
Currently Hydro power makes up a small (6%) but significant portion of the energy mix in the US.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3
When you look at just the clean energy sources in the US this percentage is greater obviously. Also, other countries rely more on Hydro than the US (Canada and China come to mind).
Has there been modeling done on what global warming will do to those Hydro power sources? For example, I can imagine drought is not good for reliable Hydro power. Has declining Hydro power been accounted for in possible future clean energy mixes?
Coal. Using it like this you avoid all the pollution problems (all the impurities are captured inside the process and not simply emitted).
True you still emit some extra CO2, but that vast majority of the energy content of gasoline does not come from the coal, it's added from the solar power.
So even though you do still emit CO2, as a percentage it's much more minimal.
Since each side gets sunlight somewhere, no batteries needed. Of course 1000 years from now they could solve the battery problem too where each residence has its own low cost, safe storage.
Or 1000 years from now terrorists dirty-bomb everyone. Sigh.
...Well, on a more optimistic note, a dirty-bombs, while they may destroy property values and cause cleanup issues, don't really kill any more than a conventional/kinetic bomb. I think they may be one of the best-case scenarios when it comes to a terrorist strike, since the causalities will be low, but there will be a lot of "frenzy" about the invisible radiation. (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, or if there are silent aerosolized short-half-life "bombs" in existence that are "detonated" secretly inside of buildings so that people are accumulating long term exposures unknowingly).
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if room-ish temperature superconductors appear much sooner than 1,000 years from now. And it will definitively be interesting to see how high of energy densities SMES (Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage) will get to in the next 20 years with existing cryogenic superconductors.
http://snf.ieeecsc.org/abstracts/stp443-high-field-hts-smes-...
Now imagine radioactive fine particles with half-life of decades.
Sure, the death isn't instantaneous. But the suffering and early death will be massive. After the US nuked Japan (twice) the real damage was to those left living for the short time afterwards and all the radioactivity an slow death.
Please see: https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.files.wordpress.com...
And: http://science-and-energy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/201...
And: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqhC6uI8TUY (for french speakers out there)
Please do convince me that we can run the current industrial civilization, at current rates of energy usage, with only solar & wind, on a long enough run, without oil.
Bottom-up studies suffer from a big diversity of flaws, and there are plenty of them with obvious bias both ways.
Personally I think wind parks look awesome but there is a lot of opposition.
Another is how many birds it kills a year. (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-many-birds-do-w...)
That's not to say we shouldn't build it. Just that we need to consider what it costs before we do.
We'll get there. I'd just like to make sure we remember that absolutely everything has a cost. The cost of anything is the value it has in its alternative uses.
If we're subsidizing renewable energy, we're not spending money on something else (and we're reducing people's incomes in the process).
[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-sunedison-collapse-201... [2] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-sunedison-inc-yieldco-idUS...
When businesses (wholesalers and consumers) start going to solar on a grand scale, Solar will have finally arrived as a cost effective alternative. Wake me when this happens.
I'm not holding my breath.
