aerius wrote:Other than hydropower, I'm not sold on renewables yet. If we look at a more mature field such as wind, the rate of increase in installed capacity and energy production isn't nearly as high as it is with solar. Going by the numbers for the last 5 years for Germany, installed capacity went from around 20GW to 27GW, production from 30.7TWh to 36.5TWh, with a peak of 40.5TWh in 2007. So growth is 35% in capacity and I'll give you 40TWh for a 30% growth in energy generation.
The last few years were exceptionally poor wind years, so those numbers can be seen as pretty much a worst case scenario. This year has been an average year, so preliminary numbers expect wind energy to provide roughly 7.2& of electricity (up from 6% last year) - so roughly 45 TWh.
When solar gets up to a similar energy generation level as wind, I suspect its growth rate will slow down to a similar percentage. Which by my rough math happens at around 52GW worth of installed capacity.
How do you get 52 GW?
Anyway, wind and solar are in quite different positions, as wind is a lot more site dependent than solar. Germany has exhausted a lot of the good sites for wind on land, so more and more the capacity is being increased through replacing older wind power plants. Thats also the reason that offshore parks are being pushed, as there is still a lot of space left there. Solar is not that site dependent (outside the obvious fact that the closer to the equator you get, the better the situation), so it is in no danger of running out of good spots to build. In addition, the size of investment required to utilize wind power is a lot higher than for solar power. This means that you need larger groups or companies in order to expand it. Solar power can be easily adopted through the investment of a single household, making it a lot easier to expand rapidly once its costs are in a region where it is cost competitive to normal electricity.
Here's the fun part. You currently have 27GW and change of wind turbines installed. Combined, they produce less electricity than one of our nuke plants. How much did all those turbines cost and how long did they take to build? I also note that you've been adding to installed capacity at a rate of 2GW per year over the past 10 years, which would imply that just under 14 years would be required to double the capacity. The last time we built a nuke plant in Ontario it took 12 years.
Was that 12 years construction time, or 12 years from the start of looking into building a nuclear power plant to turning on the switch. I have no idea what it cost to construct all those wind turbines. However, when comparing the costs, you would also have to factor in costs of decommissioning that nuclear power plant.
And looking at the numbers of solar the last few years, completely blows the rate of expansion out of the water. An increase of 8 GW from 2009-2010 (5.5 TWh in output), and an increase in output of roughly 7 TWh expected from 2010-2011.
But that's not important. The reason I favour nuclear power is that it's always on and has the highest capacity factor, we're not going to get left in the cold if the wind dies or the sun goes behind the clouds. Newer reactor designs such as the Darlington plant can also load follow to accomodate changes in power demand. But most importantly, we get a ton of high paying research, science, design, engineering, and manufacturing jobs out of it and we can use this to springboard our technology advances.
Yes, there is still a lot of research, etc to be done with regards to wind & solar. And the amount of jobs - in engineering, science, manufacturing, etc - created through wind, solar and other renewables completely dwarfs nuclear power.
