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Clinton’s Solar Panel Plan Leaves America in the Dark
On Hillary Clinton’s campaign website, she calls for the creation of 500 million new solar panels to “power every home in America.” Voicing a strong preference for solar may win over the hearts of some environmentally conscious voters, but it should not win over their minds. A proposal to comprehensively retool the nation’s energy systems to solar power ignores a couple of very basic, yet critically important, complications.
First, every home in America is already powered. The country does not need to undergo a massive, redundant, and expensive overhaul to duplicate what has already been accomplished. Second and more importantly, this plan, if you can call it that, hinges on a physical impossibility. Solar panels cannot power homes. At least not in any way people in the industrialized world would consider acceptable. Solar power is unreliable, intermittent, and inflexible. This means solar panels are intrinsically incapable of handling the country’s home energy needs.
Energy is consumed on demand, without advance warning or notice. When anyone flicks on a light switch in their home, the unthinking expectation is that their lights will automatically turn on. That taken-for-granted miracle of convenience and standard of living is made possible through a steady and uninterrupted access to electrical energy. To ensure people always have electricity when they want to use it, power plants must use fuel sources that can continually power electrical generators. In practice, these fuel sources are limited to coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear, and hydro, and according to the Energy Information Agency those sources combine to generate 92 percent of America’s electricity in 2015.
On the other hand, renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, cannot produce power on demand. Windmills and solar panels produce energy literally as the wind blows and sun shines. Because of this intermittency, renewable energy, as it is widely known, is unreliable energy. Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, coined the term “unreliables” to replace “renewables,” as it is a much more accurate description of what they offer to energy consumers. This is not to say that solar panels serve no purpose, but we all use electricity throughout each and every day, not just when the sun is being cooperative. Imagine depending solely on solar panels for your home electricity – your access to this critical resource could be cut off by something as simple and commonplace as cloudy skies. In your homes, you cannot afford to have all your lights and appliances shut off just because it’s overcast outside.
If you think this is an oversimplified review of solar energy, it actually gets worse as you consider more details.
Daily kilowatt consumption follows a predictable pattern of highs and lows over a full day, but the amount consumed at any given moment in any given region is in constant flux. Solar, unlike traditional fuel sources for electrical energy, cannot be adjusted to meet the moment-by-moment changes in energy consumption. Even when the sun does come out and solar panels start creating electricity, there is no assurance that whatever energy produced will match whatever energy is being consumed. Solar energy cannot be ramped up or dialed down to match demand. We are stuck with whatever the weather gives us.
Worse than this inflexibility, the very nature of the rotation of the Earth guarantees that solar panels will not generate electricity when it is needed most. People need energy 24 hours a day, but in their homes specifically, they need it most when the sun isn’t shining. Home electricity consumption peaks in the early morning before people leave for work and school and again in the evening when they return home. The bulk of home energy consumption happens when the sun is not shining and peak solar production occurs when it is needed least. The graph below, created by an Australian solar energy broker, illustrates this inversion between home energy demand and solar production.
Source: http://www.solarchoice.net.au/blog/home-energy-consumption-versus-solar-pv-generation/
If you consider your own daily routines, you will likely see why this is. The average working American wakes up and starts using electricity before the sun is up. In the dark or dimly lit morning hours, people turn on lights, pull food out of the refrigerator (which has been using energy throughout the darkness of the night), use their stoves or microwaves to make breakfast, and groom themselves with any number of bathroom appliances. During the daylight hours, when solar has the greatest potential to generate power, home electricity consumption drops off because most people have gone to work or school for the day. When they return home, as the sun is setting and solar production falls off, they turn on all the lights again, use their stoves or ovens to make dinner, turn on their TVs, and use their computers to read the latest on Ricochet.
Building 500 million new solar panels could, in theory, expand solar capacity enough to handle all the daytime home electrical demand, but the true capacity for unreliable energy sources is always zero. Clinton could subsidize the solar panel portfolio to be 100 times more than what is needed, but on a sufficiently overcast day, let alone at night, they would all be for naught. A solar panel sitting in the dark cannot turn your lights on. No matter how heavily the government invests in solar, reliable and controllable sources (fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro) will always be needed to maintain steady and affordable access to energy.
Published in Science & Technology, Technology
“If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”
The basic point about where the money comes from is still valid!
Wow Mark you really thought about this. I thought I would share this picture of a battery bank at a power plant I built years ago. I guess this was to power a UPS but I can’t remember. This appears to have 60 batteries so you can get some idea of the space that 628 would take up. So in addition to the massive cost of batteries, this would be the largest room in the house.
An excellent example.
True, however your cost estimate at $100 per panel is really low balling it. Solar panels used for commercial energy production could cost well over 10x that number.
Affordable, plentiful energy is at the root of human progress. Environmentalists, in many cases, hold moral standards that place a concept of an unchanged Earth over the health and well being of human beings. Humans use energy to change their environments to make them more habitable. Environmentalists know this and, with a moral system based on never disturbing nature, want to cut off from that supply of energy. Humans need to modify their environments to survive – all animals do. Without a mind or ability to do that, Mother Earth will kill you quickly. To be against energy (or to promote policies that take us to unaffordable and unreliable energy) is to be anti human. To me, that’s what the Environmentalist movement is. It’s anti human. Many openly favor Malthusian population control. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/science/earth/bringing-up-the-issue-of-population-growth.html?_r=0
Matt,
Yours is the really important point. At the root, they have gone off the right path. Being concerned about long-term public health, a better description of what legitimate environmentalism should be called is not what the environmentalists are doing. They have latched onto a false ideology and they themselves are the threat to the human race.
Regards,
Jim
Wow! And don’t batteries generate heat as they are charged and discharged? How would that heat be managed?
And acid leaks from the batteries?
I don’t think heat was a particular issue here because there was a massive amount of ventilation required to dissipate the heat of the engines/generators. As far as leaks go, I suspect those yellow bags were somehow for that.
Do lithium-ion batteries even use acid? I know they use toxic chemicals, but I didn’t think acid was involved.
Larry,
Lithium-ion is both environmentally hazardous to manufacture into batteries but even more importantly very expensive. They can take much more charge per unit weight and this is their selling point (very very useful for LEVs light electric vehicles). However, as they are expensive to begin with and like all batteries they wear out and must be replaced, the total cost for using them for a major storage system is very high.
Regards,
Jim
Jim, I wasn’t making any claims about practicality. I was just responding to the specific question about acid leaks.
It can absolutely cost the utility more. If it can buy clean, baseload power for 8 cents per kW/h, and therefore is forced to buy intermittent solar power at the same price, it’s definitely a worse deal. They now have to absorb all the costs of the extra power management, they still need to maintain the baseload capacity so they can’t claw back savings there, etc.
Modern industrial efficiency requires predictable processes, predictable inputs and predictable outputs. When you can define all three, you can then work for marginal pareto improvements in your process and drive down costs in tiny increments over time. Traditional power sources allow for this level of fine-grained control. Solar power is almost random. A process that can handle random inputs like that is never going to be as efficient as one in which all this is completely under operational control.
Elon Musk’s case for his home battery pack is that it would allow utilities to draw power as they needed it, and not just have it forced on them by the capricious nature of the sun and clouds. This would make solar power much more like other forms of baseload power from the utility’s perspective. Unfortunately, the solution is just way too expensive. And any time there is a battery in the mix, the efficiency of the process goes down by 10-20%.
Well, sure it would. End to end leases are extremely common. For example, most large businesses do not buy their computers – they pay for a lease which includes delivery, installation, ongoing technical support, and disposal at end of life. This costs more, but has a major advantage of known costs and risks that the company can then plan for. The same goes for auto leases: many people choose to simply lease a car for two or three years rather than buy one. The lease is almost always more expensive, but the car company takes away the hassle of selling the car at the end, incurs the risk that resale values will plummet, etc.
ENMAX is simply doing the same for the homeowner’s solar power. They’re absorbing the risks, eliminating the unknown costs, and giving you a single price for everything. Of course they charge a premium for that, because it costs them more to take on that risk.
It’s only fraud if they are claiming to provide something they don’t. And ENMAX isn’t doing that. They admit that you’ll take a loss – they are aiming this at people who want to do it to save the planet, not to save money. Yes, the people who buy the product are suckers, but that’s true for most ‘early adopters’. I just bought a graphics card for $500, and I’m sure it will cost half of that in about 18 months from now.
I like using the ENMAX pricing as a proxy for solar costs because it covers everything – installation, the necessary wiring, inverters, modifications to the electrical service, maintenance, and eventual disposal. These are costs that are often overlooked when people buy solar panels for home use.
I’m sure you could build all this out at a lower price if you’re willing to take on the general contracting, hiring your own installers, buying parts piecemeal, and worrying about disposal later. That assumes your time has no value. But given the state of solar power today, you’re never going to be able to get power from that system cheaper than grid power, absent government subsidies and mandates that force people to buy your excess power at fixed prices.
And at the state level, I have not seen a single example of a large-scale solar build-out that didn’t result in massive increases in energy costs. The so-called ‘green economy’ is the real fraud.
Dan,
The extra costs for power management are a rather bizarre comment. When you aren’t home the house is using very little power. You come home turn on the home entertainment system, turn up the air conditioning, run the washer dryer dishwasher then you are sucking power out of the grid like crazy. That’s a power management problem. If a few panels are producing a steady predictable amount of power back onto the grid at the same time it is much less of a power management problem.
I find Musk less than brilliant. The price of his cars even with the massive subsidy is huge. They are always quoting some battery replacement cost that sounds completely bogus. Like Obama describing the ACA.
You can get investment dollars on hype but can’t make a system work on hype. If a simple reliable pricing system for the utility to buy customer produced power were offered people would buy collectors and do it. Wasting another 30 years waiting for some storage technology fantasy is not what should be done. Wasting the last 30 years didn’t need to be done either.
Regards,
Jim
Do you know how the IPCC calculates future carbon emissions? Their ‘simulation’ is a simple formula that assumes that carbon emissions will be proportional to GDP. That’s it. So their ‘low carbon’ scenario assumes lower GDP growth, and the high carbon output scenario assumes high GDP growth.
And yet, the same people who are telling us to listen to the science and who hold up the IPCC reports as authoritative are also trying to convince us that we can transition to a ‘green economy’ and dramatically lower CO2 output while growing the economy through all the jobs required to build, install, and maintain all the renewable energy projects.
This is pure snake oil. They’re using a bastardized version of Keynesianism which says that solar power is ‘infrastructure’, and therefore ‘solar jobs’ will stimulate the economy and cause it to grow because we are investing in infrastructure. But jobs are a COST of energy, not a source of wealth. Assuming reasonably full employment, all those people you are hiring to build solar installations are people who are not doing other, more productive work.
If the actual efficiency of your energy generation didn’t matter, you could double the growth in the economy by mandating that solar panels be only half as efficient. Then you’d have to make twice as many, and that would create twice as many jobs! But the bottom line is that historically energy consumption has trended linearly with GDP growth because the story of economic growth in the industrial age is largely the story of harnessing and using increasingly large and concentrated amounts of energy per capita. Energy is at the core of the economy, and anything that makes it more expensive will negatively impact growth. I don’t care how many jobs you ‘create’ – At the end of the day if your energy costs more per Joule, your economy will suffer for it.
If you think of infrastructure as the underlying stuff needed for the economy, building out millions of solar panels to replace more efficient energy sources is actually destroying our infrastructure, not building it.
There’s an old, possibly apocryphal story told about Milton Friedman, who was flown into Chile to advise the government. On the ride from the airport, he noticed some workers digging with shovels. He asked his guide, ‘Why are they using shovels, when power machinery would be more efficient?” The guide responded, “We use shovels because it creates more jobs that way.” Friedman thought for a second and then replied, “So why aren’t you having them dig with teaspoons instead?”
Creating jobs by building solar panels on roofs is like digging with teaspoons. It certainly creates jobs for solar installers, but you’d still be far better off with something more efficient.
To all,
I’m not pushing anything. I don’t want any of the subsidies. If the power companies set a fair price for customer produced power I’m sure that people would buy solar panels and do it. That the Power companies can’t do this is absurd. If people want to do solar then all that is required is a way to get their power to market. If the panels in question aren’t efficient enough to make the customer any money the customer isn’t going to buy them. If the local neighborhood zoning won’t allow panel x to be installed because of aesthetics then panel x won’t get installed.
You know just like in real life.
Regards,
Jim
I’m not talking about the homeowner’s power management problem. I’m talking about the utility, which has to buy power that is unpredictable for the same price as predictable power.
Supporting feed-in tariffs requires ‘smart grid’ technology, which costs a lot of money to build out. In addition, grid power is historically ‘one way’ to consumers – power is generated centrally through managed, efficient processes, and delivered to consumers. In a feed in system, the power system is bidirectional – power flows in both directions. This requires additional infrastructure, increases risk, complicates planning, and forces you to have excess power reserves. A turbine that is most efficient running at a 99% duty cycle may have to be run at a lower cycle when lots of solar is available. A turbine running at 80% because 20% of your power is coming from solar is not 80% as expensive.
A grid that can generate baseload power and also re-distribute consumer-generated power is much more expensive and complicated than one that just takes baseload power and distributes it where needed.
As for the cost of solar in general, it is still much more expensive than other forms of renewable energy in most areas, as can be seen if you look at the difference in feed-in-tariffs required to support the technology. For example, in Ontario the feed-in-tariff for solar is between 27.5 – 38.4 cents per kWh. On the other hand, other renewable sources have FIT values as low as 7.7c per kWh.
The good news for the greens – Ontario’s flirtation with a ‘green economy’ has caused their electricity costs to skyrocket to about 24 cents per kwh, with another big increase coming next year. That allows the greens to claim that solar power has achieved ‘grid parity’. (-:
In comparison, here in Alberta our electricity from good old coal and natural gas costs between 6 cents and 9 cents per kWh. So of course our new NDP government is going to kill our current electrical generation in favor of ‘green energy’. This, we’re told, will grow the economy. Because paying four times as much for power is sure to enhance our GDP and make our manufacturing more competitive…
Here in Alberta, I can buy power for 6-9 cents per kWh. Do you think I can generate solar power for anywhere near that cost? And if that’s my price, the cost of producing the power is going to be much less. So without feed-in-tariffs, no power company is going to buy my solar power at a price anywhere near what it costs me to generate it. If they give me 4 cents per kwh, which is probably closer to their own cost, I will be selling power to them at a huge loss.
Now, if I can’t use that power anyway, then any money I can recoup is better than not recouping it at all. But no combination of sales to the grid and personal usage will result in a power bill even remotely close to what I pay now. If I decided to generate 50% of my power needs from solar, I’m guessing my power cost would go from somewhere between 6-9 cents per kWh to something closer to 20 cents.
The feed-in-tariffs are a reasonable guide to the cost of the energy, because they are supposed to be set by the government to be roughly the cost of generation plus a tiny bit more. So if Ontario’s FIT for solar average 25 cents per kWh, that’s telling me that this is their best guess for what it cost me to generate that power. I certainly won’t be able to generate solar power for anything less than that, or else my solar panels could generate profit for me by just selling it all to the grid, and people would already be setting up profitable solar panel systems for that purpose, rather than using any of the power at home.
If I can buy grid power for 17 cents, sell my solar power for 25 cents because of a FIT, why on earth would I ever consume any of my own solar? Selling it to the utility gets me a subsidy, while consuming it myself does not.
Dan,
Premise number one is false. The utility doesn’t need to pay the same price for the homeowner produced power as its own power. However, I think the argument that the homeowner power comes at a cost higher than no homeowner power at all is ridiculous. The utility is paying nothing for the creation of this power. The equipment to feed power onto the grid, calculating its time and quantity, is paid for by the homeowner.
The utility will know how many panels are up and running at any given time. They will know about how much power will be produced and when and where. I would believe that the homeowner generated power wouldn’t have the same price as utility generated power but I’d guess that it wouldn’t be priced at less than 50% of the utility power.
Yes, that’s a pure guess. However, I don’t think it would require an engineer to determine accurately. I’d recommend a forensic accountant.
Regards,
Jim
The utility does have to build out the grid capability to monitor, accept, and distribute the power. The utility has to manage this fluctuating source of power inline with its other power generation sources. The utility may have to pay more for its baseload power if it can’t provide a guarantee of how much it will buy and under what circumstances. None of this is free.
So then the question becomes whether the value of the customer’s energy will exceed the cost of building out the infrastructure required to use it, plus the added cost of the lost efficiency in going to a bidirectional energy transport mechanism. I’m not a power engineer, so I don’t know the specific details. But I do read engineering journals from time to time and talk to other engineers, and these types of issues are always held out as examples of the kind of costs utilities face for which the general public (and politicians) may have no understanding.
I suspect there is a scaling issue here. The additional costs might be paid back if there is enough power coming from consumers to overcome the additional costs of accessing it, but if homeowner solar only amounts to a couple of percentage points of overall electricity distribution, whatever savings per kWh the utility gains may not make up for the additional costs.
If it was that easy to profit from buying back solar power, why are feed-in-tariffs even necessary? Why wouldn’t utility companies be working hard to get homeowners to install as much solar as they can, regardless of government policy?
In any event, if it costs a homeowner $.25 per kWh to generate solar power, and the utility will buy back the excess at $.04 per kWh, that isn’t a very great deal for the homeowner. And I believe those are reasonable approximations of what solar costs, judging by the feed-in-tariffs required to promote solar in most countries. So unless you live in a place which already has sky-high energy rates (Ontario or Germany for example), any solar installation is going to cost you more money in the end than simply buying grid power.
Now, there may be other reasons to install solar. If grid power becomes unreliable, solar might be a good backup option. If you live in a remote area off the grid, solar might be a good alternative. If you’re a ‘prepper’ and want to be prepared for emergencies, a solar backup system might be a good idea, and if you can sell the power back to the utility when you don’t need it, that might partly offset the cost.
I’m not against solar. I’ve even thought of installing my own system, or getting a portable system that can be set up to produce electricity if the grid goes down. But as of today, there’s no way that it will be cheaper than just buying grid power.
Dan,
I’m sure all of these factors go into it. However, I sincerely doubt these blanket numberless rejections. I meant what I said. If the utility wants to provide access to its books and a forensic accountant goes over them and verifies the numbers I’d be glad to believe it. I just don’t think this is the case. Actually, the solar power would tend to cut off the peak load hours. Peak load occurs in the middle of the day (not the middle of the night) so the extra solar power would make the build out requirements less not more. Any area (the south..etc.) where air conditioning was a big power consumer would have an especially high peak load with the sun shining at mid-day. The solar power units would also be producing peak output at mid-day. This cuts off the peak requirement and reduces the build out even more. I’m just not buying this argument until my forensic accountant went over the power companies real costs penny by penny.
Regards,
Jim
Dan,
You are missing the point of my gripe. The State encouraged us to install solar panels. They adopted a pricing regime that would enable us to recoup the initial cost over a decade or two. Then, after we had sunk the costs, they changed the price so that we lost all benefit of having the solar panels. That is fraud.
If you want to argue that solar panels add nothing because the utility must maintain the capacity to meet peak needs even when solar panels are producing no power, then you are just saying that there is no value to solar power, ever. Which is fine. I think your assumption is wrong in certain markets, such as here in Nevada where peak energy needs are very predictably correlated to hot sunny summer days. But if your alternative approach was adopted, and all solar was just eliminated entirely, that would be fine with me. Just not after the fact. Don’t make promises to induce me to install solar panels, and then announce that they are worthless and I won’t get any credit for producing my own electricity much of the time.
Oh, and one more thing. The argument that rooftop solar is useless and does not deserve compensation from the utility becomes downright silly when you consider that the utility is building and using more than a dozen of its own solar plants for power generation.
https://www.nvenergy.com/renewablesenvironment/renewables/solar.cfm
If solar is so undependable and useless, then why am I paying rates that include support for these solar plants?
Larry,
QED
Regards,
Jim
I think that this is partly possible and partly not. Certainly the utility can know (if it tries) how many panels are installed because it needs to install equipment at each residence to be able to receive the excess power. However, it is a Herculean task to keep track of solar inventory in a meaningful way over a 5 or 10 year period. A home that stops producing solar power looks very similar to a home that raises its consumption for whatever reasons (i.e. in each case the home starts importing more power from the grid). A homeowner may choose for whatever reasons to remove panels. Power inverters (DC to AC) need to be replaced periodically, and many homeowners can and will balk at throwing more money at a system if they are not happy with it. Will they be fastidious about reporting this stuff, and if they are, will the utility keep good track of what people tell them. It all seems pretty doubtful.
Ross,
Again a wild exaggeration. Computer technology is very cheap and reliable now. It can only get more so. Once fully computerized such a system would be easy to monitor. Real time information about how much power is being produced would be available. That power could then be priced according to the exact time it was created. Prices could be updated on a minute by minute basis if that would make you feel better. Panels offline would be sensed immediately.
This single monitoring application is not hard to do in the information age. It only need be done once and then mass produced. I would say the power industry has the financial gravitas to have the monitoring application done for them and then some.
Really you are making mountains out of molehills.
Regards,
Jim
I will be posting about the Desert Sunlight plant in Nevada soon. Its cost of wholesale generation is over $0.13 cents per kWh. To put that in perspective, I pay about $0.09 cents in Texas RETAIL (but don’t worry the easy fix is to raise rates in Texas). I will attempt to demonstrate in my future post that Desert Sunlight is not generating half the power it said it could and so the whole thing will go under shortly.
In any case, the utility makes its money by adding assets to its rate base. Investments by the utility in solar give them a return which is paid for by the rate-payers. So the utility loves its own plants. As a purchase power contract (solar produced by others and purchased by the utility, which is more common), the utility is not making a return on solar power, but it does get PR for it and it can manage the contract terms for power purchase. The utility does not have that ability with homeowners. The terms are dictated by politicians. And there is the rub.
That is really no different that dealing with the drop in power usage when a family goes on vacation. Honestly, if actuarial principles were that unreliable, there wouldn’t be any insurance industry.