America now has more workers in solar than coal.

[D.Turtle]

While there may indeed be wind always blowing somewhere, it might not be anywhere close to where you need it. Unless the windmills are evenly spread throughout the globe, theres no guarantee that they will be where you need them.

Even simply interconnecting wind turbines close to each other already massively reduces the variability in the power output of those (connected) turbines (shown by this study).

This study tries to find the cheapest combination of offshore wind, inland wind, solar + electrochemical storage (they deliberately do not use hydro or biofuels) providing all power as often as possible (30%, 90%, 99.9% of the time), using costs in 2008 and estimating costs in 2030. They do this by using actual weather and power demand data from 1999-2002. They find that using the 2030 estimates for costs makes it possible to provide electricity at similar costs in comparison to today.

It is quite an interesting read.

[energiewende]

I would call the primary source of extra daytime power over and above base loading to be "a major grid component." And I rather suspect solar will occupy that role unless we come up with something exotic and clever.

Between nuclear being inherently rather more expensive than current fossilpower, increased need for electricity to make the liquid fuels we'll be using in vehicles in the 2050-2100 timeframe, and even modest decreases in cost of solar...

Personally I'm imagining things like nuclear, hydroelectric, and geothermal being used for base load, with a rather large solar component that helps handle the peak demand period during daylight hours. Making that solar component cost-effective will therefore matter.

Not modest, but rather order of magnitude decreases in the cost of solar. That actually isn't impossible, maybe it's even likely, but not until the next generation of powerplants. Cheap solar is in the same sort of box as nuclear fusion. If you want to stop emissions in this generation, it's a waste of money and a distraction from solutions that can work.

It seems you're right about the cost of electricity in Hawaii, which in itself may not be surprising since they burn oil unlike pretty much the entire rest of the world. It's hard to understand why, though. Hawaii doesn't produce oil and I don't think that shipping costs would sextuple the price of coal generation. I suspect some NIMBY/governmental issue is at play here.

Does "having a world-famous climate with beautiful clear air that attracts tourists from all around the world" count as NIMBYism? They have very strong incentives not to do anything that makes smog/smoke problems worse.

Explaining choice of oil rather than coal or nuclear? A single large plant could be built alongside the water (it seems the largest plant there is already) with its own facilities for unloading.

I actually expect wind to take up a large part of that. In contrast to solar power, there is always wind blowing somewhere, so that if your grid is large and good enough, wind is quite capable of always providing a certain amount of power.

The intermittency problem for wind is certainly much greater than for solar, somewhat compensated for by much lower cost prior to intermittency mitigation. The cost minimising study arrives at high grid penetration for renewables after assuming estimated 2030s prices for renewables and storage techniques.

[TimothyC]

Explaining choice of oil rather than coal or nuclear? A single large plant could be built alongside the water (it seems the largest plant there is already) with its own facilities for unloading.

Land, and especially coast line, is not cheap on the islands. You are also talking about the construction of a large, deep water port for the express purpose of delivering coal. As for nuclear, you can't build a nuclear plant on the island of Hawai'i or the Island of Maui. While those islands are only a quarter or so of the total population, they represent over two thirds of the total land area on the chain.

This leaves O'ahu as the next least bad place to build either a port or a nuclear plant. While I never circumnavigated the entire island of O'ahu, I did make it out to Lualualei Beach Park, Waianae, HI on the west side of the island, and up to Laie Point on the northern part of the island, and everywhere that wasn't a park of some form already had waterfront development. There is no where to put a facility of the size that you are talking about on O'ahu.

The final main island is Kaua'i, and the people there, from my conversations, are perfectly content to pay the higher costs, although they are adding solar power to cut costs. It's not even really NIMBYism at all because the population seems to be willing to accept the higher costs of living in exchange for continuing to not have coal or nuclear facilities on the islands. Solar however cuts the costs, and doesn't have the footprint of a large power plant.

[Simon_Jester]

Personally I'm imagining things like nuclear, hydroelectric, and geothermal being used for base load, with a rather large solar component that helps handle the peak demand period during daylight hours. Making that solar component cost-effective will therefore matter.

I actually expect wind to take up a large part of that. In contrast to solar power, there is always wind blowing somewhere, so that if your grid is large and good enough, wind is quite capable of always providing a certain amount of power.

I don't disagree.

For the US, solar has the advantage that North America's biggest potential solar power sources (big, flat, sunny areas west of the Mississippi) are getting plenty of sunlight during the period of peak electrical demand in the US (the afternoon). So even without the ability to store terajoules or petajoules of electrical energy, the US grid could still make plenty of good use of solar power, if that power were available at an acceptable cost.

Other, less time-dependent sources of power (including wind, but also things like nuclear and hydroelectric) would have to be used to provide the base load at all hours of the day and night, of course.

Not modest, but rather order of magnitude decreases in the cost of solar. That actually isn't impossible, maybe it's even likely, but not until the next generation of powerplants. Cheap solar is in the same sort of box as nuclear fusion. If you want to stop emissions in this generation, it's a waste of money and a distraction from solutions that can work.

Some level of funding on this generation of plants is probably necessary to get any actual progress on the next generation- why are you so averse to the idea that large scale engineering experience is one of those fields in which progress can occur and people learn by doing?

Meanwhile, the real problem is getting nuclear and wind up and running. Nuclear suffers more from public perception than anything else; government funding won't help. Wind power is actively being pursued already. What in heaven's name would you have the state spending the money on?

Explaining choice of oil rather than coal or nuclear? A single large plant could be built alongside the water (it seems the largest plant there is already) with its own facilities for unloading.

Which runs into the logistics problems mentioned above. If you have to pay the cost of building a harbor facility capable of offloading thousands of tons of coal off a ship, suddenly that 'cheap, cost-effective' coal-burning electricity becomes a lot more expensive. That is not a normal part of the cost of doing business when building coal fired power plants.

As always, the hidden costs of building the infrastructure can make a "profitable" economic undertaking very, very unprofitable.

[Sea Skimmer]

What about eventually having space solar plants? While it may not be plausible in the immediate future, advances in current solar power might make it possible a few decades down the line.

If money were no issue they'd be great, but then if money was no issue we could just build plenty of solar on the earth's surface and all kinds of energy storage systems. Its really nothing to do with solar panel technology proper though, existing solar panels work pretty awesome in space. Its the stupid high cost of throwing the satellites in geosynchronous orbit and then trying to maintain them for a economical lifespan that kills the idea, when compounded with the endless problem of any laser or microwave downlink system powerful and accurate enough to be useful is also by nature powerful enough to be a space based weapon. We'd need a ten fold reduction in space launch costs before we could even think about doing this, that on its own might be possible in twenty or thirty years, but I wouldn't hold out hope on any of the other problems.

[energiewende]

Not modest, but rather order of magnitude decreases in the cost of solar. That actually isn't impossible, maybe it's even likely, but not until the next generation of powerplants. Cheap solar is in the same sort of box as nuclear fusion. If you want to stop emissions in this generation, it's a waste of money and a distraction from solutions that can work.

Some level of funding on this generation of plants is probably necessary to get any actual progress on the next generation- why are you so averse to the idea that large scale engineering experience is one of those fields in which progress can occur and people learn by doing?

Meanwhile, the real problem is getting nuclear and wind up and running. Nuclear suffers more from public perception than anything else; government funding won't help. Wind power is actively being pursued already. What in heaven's name would you have the state spending the money on?

Solar doesn't involve any extraordinary engineering challenge. The real problems are at the level of basic research, which continued quite happily when there was no subsidy for mass roll-out of commercial solar panels. The state should spend money on 1. nuclear 2. carbon capture and storage 3. flood defences - in that order. It is of course up to them whether the public would find building a tidal barrier around New York to be more or less preferable than building nuclear plants but solar will not allow you to substantially cut CO2 emissions in anything less than 50 years.