> How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get? (rameznaam.com)
> How Cheap Can Energy Storage Get? (rameznaam.com)
> How Cheap Can Solar Get? (rameznaam.com)
> Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap (rameznaam.com)
Before getting too excited, realize this is for solar in Abu Dhabi, where umm...they get tons of sunlight as it were :) Though his other graph "predicts" that solar in more temperate climes will equal natural gas in "2020?" http://rameznaam.com/2015/08/10/how-cheap-can-solar-get-very...
Another great thing about Abu Dhabi and solar is that they can use the extra solar power during the day to ramp up water desalination and store energy as clean water.
There's a lot of demand that can be shifted to high-power periods, basically anything that requires heat/cold. Modern insulation is fairly good and we do have a lot of liquids with a high thermal capacity. Generating warm water for buildings and cold coolant for aircons during peak power production would be technologically feasible, it just doesn't pay off currently since the power production curve is essentially flat (lot of base power with some peak added on top).
In the future it might also be interesting to move industries with high power demand to places with more solar power - electric arc furnaces, aluminum production, ... Some of those require a base load, but a lot of them can survive a few hours with limited power.
While I primarily agree, the problem from a more long term prospective is not intra-day balancing but between summer and winter. Every place that is not near to the equator gets less sun in the time of the year when there is more need for electricity. While there are some concepts with liquid salt etc., it becomes much harder to store such large amounts of energy for long periods.
That's not necessarily true, if you're the Sheikh and you own the power plants. You may have more money but you're still the only provider in town, and have fun cashing in energy when demand hits an external spike already.
May be a noob question, but if we can lay down cables for internet across the ocean floor connecting the entire world, why not lay down cables to connect all electricity grids. Half the earth always faces the sun. We shouldn't need batteries at all then, right? And we always have the traditional power stations (renewable and non-renewable) to augment the load. (At least in theory?)
It's a very good question. I always thought that it's because of technical difficulties when transmitting electricity over long distances, but it turns out we already do it well (HVDC). When you think about it on a continent scale: why not move all PV panels from Germany to sunnier regions of Europe like Spain or Portugal where you can generate twice more power with them (in average 200 W/m² instead of 100 W/m²). The answer is simple: we'd need to have a common grid across EU member countries, but such a thing doesn't exist and it's unlikely to happen anytime soon. It turns out the biggest issue on this planet is always politics.
The amount of copper you would need to constantly convey electricity from the sunny side of the earth to the dark side would be absolutely massive. It is not an issue of common grids, as long distance high power transmission is done at many different voltages depending on the specific route, and has nothing to do with your mains voltage and frequency.
Current long distance power transmission is most often used as a way of 'balancing' production and demand between different types of plants; it is not intended or capable of transmitting the full power needs of the recieving area.
You can use aluminium instead of copper (see HVDC Gotland).
I didn't say it's just about "connecting countries with a common grid". Switching from fossil fuels to renewable sources is much more challenging than that. However, transmitting lots of power over long distances is doable and cheaper than many people think.
I know they run large (presumably) copper lines from Utah to California to pump out electricity. That can't have been cheap, how bad can it be to pump it trans atlantic? LOL
In Spain we have ridiculous laws that make it unfeasible to a layman to have solar power installed in the houses. It would be quite ironic setting up solar panels for Germany with our current situation.
While there isn't a complete grid, the UK has connections to Ireland, the Netherlands and France, enabling a bit more balancing. You can see the UK is currently running on 60% CCGT and 25% nuclear, although the 10GW solar capacity can't be shown because there's no central real-time metering for it. That's quite an impressive amount given the total (net of solar) demand is 30GW. Two and a half "Drax" worth of power, invisibly distributed around the country!
The question was if it's possible to use someone's else electricity when the sun isn't shining in your place. While it's technically possible and in many cases economically reasonable, you probably won't see countries giving up their electricity production and importing power from overseas - the main reason is politics.
you probably won't see countries giving up their electricity production and importing power from overseas - the main reason is politics.
Importing a whole country's power consumption is probably a bit much in terms of required infrastructure (except for the microstates which already do this), but smaller links are already present and make economic sense. I don't think the politics of energy security are an obstacle if the price is right.
Because power losses will be absurd (unless you manage to find a room-temperature superconductor)
Pretty simple math, if you cable has 1 Ohm/km then the distance between the Northeastern most point in Canada to Ireland is around 3000 km (or 3x10E6m)
So suppose you have this very long extension cord, plug it on Canada (100V there to help the math) and plug a lamp on Ireland (an old incandescent 100W bulb, because it dims)
Your lamp is going to have 100 Ohms. Current is going to be 100V/(6100 ohms) = 16mA, making your lamp glow with 1.6W
Transmission costs money, but less than many believe. The cost of high voltage DC (HVDC) transmission lines is roughly 1 cents per kwh for 500 miles, or 1.5 cents per kwh for 1,000 miles transmitted. Over 1,000 miles, an HVDC line may lose 5% or so of the electricity it transmits.
I don't consider 5% per 1000 miles an "absurd" amount.
You don't need a room temperature superconductor. High temperature superconductors can be economically refrigerated today. The problem overland is encapsulation - under the sea this goes away since the environment is much more stable (and colder).
Yes, but adding refrigeration to a cable will make it firstly about thousand times more likely to need a repair, and when repairing, rather a lot less bendable and more fragile, thus making it also more difficult to repair.
There are also -- of course -- a lot of political problems with the idea of a a global electric grid. Like, what happens to your electrical system in case of an international crisis. Russia has used its gas supplies for political pressure in Europe, and other nations may do the same with electricity.
Power transmission on large distances is a very difficult subject. To put it simply, wires have a non-zero resistance to current, increasing with its length.
For instance, Morocco plans to put solar panels in the Sahara. The solution that is considered in order to transmit power was that the solar station would charge batteries and the batteries would be carried by trucks.
Chemical energy storage looks interesting and it's not limited to batteries. Can be fuel as well. And it can be transferred via automated rail line (or even wire transport).
Slightly off-topic, but I stumbled across this fascinating documentary about the massive challenges of laying the first submarine transatlantic cable (1858) a few days ago:
Great idea. Another factor an engineer told me about high voltage power lines is that they could send way more power through them but the limiting factor is heat. The lines start sagging.
But on the ocean floor the cold water could keep the lines cool.
This whole machination thing will collapse as soon as the solar panel prices, along with the inverter and battery costs drop low enough to be part of every house.
Once everyone generates and stores their own electricity, the residential market will go away. This might be another 20 to 30 years off, but it is inevitable. And once factories start building Stirling engines and solar facilities into their designs, the industrial power market will collapse as well. It's a good thing.
More and more people live in dense cities where they only rent a small place in a large building. Such places make solar irrelevant. For metropolitan spaces you need power plants anyway.
Only for people that own their house; renters won't be able to take advantage of this because it's a lot of capital outlay that the home owner gets no benefit from. Same for anyone in an apartment.
So the residential market for purchased electricity will never go away, but a significant reduction would still be a huge win.
Indeed, the landlord can probably get away with mandating that his tenants buy a certain minimum amount of power at a certain cost giving him a fixed income to finance the capital outlay against.
This is an interesting thought. Some apartment complexes already do some form of resold Internet or Cable access. I could see them doing a mass solar install similarly.
I'm not seeing a collapse of the market, but I'd expect summertime A/C costs to be less than they would otherwise. Here in California, that's a solid win.
Renters can buy solar from those producing it via virtual net metering or community solar garden projects. Doesn't have to be on your own roof to opt in.
I dont know where you live but in 3 different countries where i have lived till now the electricity bill was never high enough for me to take it in account for the choice of a place.
Almost anywhere! The only exceptions are the more touristic centres, like the Algarve coast or Lisbon itself, but even there you can find those prices right across the river.
There's no way that's true, the benefits of the grid will ensure it always exists in cities. It guarantees 24/7 power for all citizens, smooths out regional hiccups (i.e. if it's cloudy in one region), and allows better allocation of excess resources (i.e. to smelt aluminium).
It might, however, go away for cottages/cabins, or other rural buildings. Many people I know have generators at their cottages because the power is unreliable enough, and given the unreliability, the grid must be pretty expensive to maintain.
Even when everybody has own storage and power - networking it makes it cheaper and more reliable. It can be done bottom-up, by building small grids between neighbors and connecting them.
With a good automated system for calculating the net flows between people (maybe using bitcoin?) - it could develop into energy-network equivalent of internet. Only international and intercontinental links need support from big organizations and countries.
If the price is dropping so rapidly, this makes a bad deal out of the 30-year loans solar installers are pitching in the US. Furthermore, if fossil-fuel-sourced kilowatt-hours compete by pricing downward, and thus pay solar owners less per kWh, it could make solar seem like a bad deal.
They can get a bit higher I believe (40%) in small sizes, so a trick that is also applied is focussing all the sunlight in that small area, to improve conversion rate. There is still a thing called heat, making it a bit more complicated.
You can get to much higher efficiency, but it involves very expensive manufacturing techniques which make the final cost much higher per unit of electricity. IIRC price-competitive silicon panels are now somewhere about 18-23% efficient, CdTe panels somewhat less.
This will create massive pressure on the price of oil. Why would anyone in their right mind not try to sell it off as fast as possible as it won't be worth much in a few years.
I would say it does. According to [1] 5% of electricity is generated from oil. Also I would guess that this capacity is mostly located in places where other generation types are not available (islands, remote locations etc) and will be overtaken by solar before coal.
Then also there is EV+solar combo (solar owners are more inclined to get ev and vice versa).
It not so much that it isn't possible, just that it's significantly more efficient, by a large margin, to use solar to displace more dirty energy sources (and of those, coal is by far the highest priority).
Last time I saw a electricity to fuel system with a price attached, it was the US Navy's one which could produce gasoline at $6/USgal. Not competitive unless you're in the middle of the sea, which is their intended use case.
If you want to create fuel from sun and CO2 it's cheaper to farm some oil-heavy plants and produce biofuel from them. They grow solar cells from sun and air by itself :) It's magic-level nanotech :)
This comes up often, but not really. There is no good replacement as cheap as oil from plant sources. Plants require a LOT more labor, processing, and producing it requires huge amounts of space. That's why we use oil and nothing else. If it was competitive, oil would have been replaced by plants long ago for chemical use.
Because right now, batteries last only about one year and need to be replaced after that (I have lots of bad experience there), and because right now, my calculations show that for a 35,000 investement, the panels have to last 13 years before one breaks even, unless one lives in a sunny area. The problem is that the current solar technology isn't very good yet: the panels constantly lose capacity as they generate electricity. And integrated Stirling engine designs are only available for industrial applications, or made by enthusiasts: one still cannnot go to local Lowe's or Home Depot and buy a residential, integrated Stirling engine power plant. That's why oil is going to stay with us for a few more decades. Hopefully not too many, but it's not going to disappear overnight.
Not on an industrial scale. Currently, solar and battery is roughly similar too diesel generated electricity in cost (i.e. very expensive) but for load displacement solar is very hard to beat. In this case the Abu Dhabi grid is basically running on gas plants that would be peakers in other markets.
i.e. Abu Dhabi could consume much more solar especially as a large demand for power is for cooling (storing cold water, freezing some food further is a much cheaper way of storing power than batteries as it is load shifting.)
Basically oil is out of mind for generating electrical power on an industrial scale as its way to expensive so it is not competing with that. See every small island powergrid investment over the last 5 years.
Comparing stirling engines to panels -> Panels are so much simpler they will perform better for any domestic and even industrial use. Maintenance is a driving cost in getting these prices down, mechanicals tend to have much higher maintenance requirements.
20% worst case degradation over 20 years is an minor issue. Easily planed for in the financials of such a plant.
Comparing stirling engines to panels -> Panels are so much simpler they will perform better for any domestic and even industrial use. Maintenance is a driving cost in getting these prices down, mechanicals tend to have much higher maintenance requirements.
What exactly needs maintenance in a Stirling engine? Please be concrete.
One of these is currently commercially widely available, installed on roofs, and halving in cost seemingly every 18-24 months. The other one isn't.
I don't doubt that Stirling systems could be cheaper, but I'm not seeing them yet. I also flatly refuse to believe that a moving-parts system can last 25 years without maintenance, even if just regular oiling, while solar panels should still have 70-80% of their output after 25 years with no maintenance. It's the inverters and batteries that require maintenance or replacement.
(There are claims that solar thermal storage + Stirling is cheaper than PV+batteries, which are much more plausible, but where are the installations, big or small?)
That video makes my point nicely in two ways. Firstly, the link under it to the commercial supplier is dead. It's not a product you can just buy.
Secondly, it's a concentrator system with a two-axis tracker. That's going to require maintenance, however trivial. You can clearly see a chain-and-sprocket arrangement at about 1:20 in the video. If you have a chain technology which is maintenance-free for 25 years, I know a lot of cyclists who'd be interested.
I never oiled the chain on any of my bicycles, and it's been more than 25 years. They still run. Even so, I prefer putting on a little grease on such a sprocket compared to hoping that my solar panels will generate enough power after 13 years.
And in my initial post, I unequivocally stated that one of the biggest problems with the integrated Stirling engine is that no residential kits are available at the local hardware store.
Mordern batteries last a lot more than one year. Tesla is providing ten year warranties on their batteries for their daily cycle batteries. https://www.tesla.com/powerwall
They do? I guess that explains why my UPS's, running on the same type of batteries, would be regularly shot after a year and I'd have a power outage. And I have industrial uninterruptible power supplies, with the current going through them, just like how they would be used in a solar panel scenario.
Don't believe the hype. Modern batteries are junk.
> That's why oil is going to stay with us for a few more decades.
In a couple of decades we might also have fusion power, and this time it's probably going to work because we have much better superconductor magnets. We can make the whole reactor much smaller.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12537649
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11627965