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199 comments on The Energy Return of (Industrial) Solar - Passive Solar, PV, Wind and Hydro (#5 of 6)
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199 comments on The Energy Return of (Industrial) Solar - Passive Solar, PV, Wind and Hydro (#5 of 6)
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Prof,
Excellent series of posts.
I think that you have decisively debunked one of the main tenets of the dieoff religion.
That is: every other alternative to oil is negative or too low EROEI.
It seems that we have plenty of options as long as we actually build them.
Please correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that our best approach should be to build proportionately in this order based on EROEI:
Hydro
Wind
Nuclear
Solar Thermal
Photovoltaic
In any event, great work.
Applause.
A very good overview for renewables/alternatives and their related challenges. I would like to add a few bits that appear to have been overlooked. Certainly not the fault of the researcher as it is a very broad subject area:
1. Solar generation here is primarily broken down into passive solar (solar architecture) and photovoltaic. When taken in total, it's actually a small picture of all of solar energy. On the one hand, solar architecture could be considered an added efficiency as it generates no net energy in itself but reduces or eliminates the need for outside heating and cooling inputs.
a. Solar photovoltaic itself can be broken down into numerous segments.
1a. Traditional photovoltaic energy using silicon.
2a. Thin film photovoltaic energy using silicon.
3a. Thin film photovoltaic using other common materials.
4a. Thin film photovoltaic using nanotechnology materials.
GALLIUM NOT USED IN SILICON CELLS
It's important to note that gallium is NOT USED in silicon solar generation. Gallium is only used as part of second generation thin film photovoltaic technology. So far, only silicon production has proven to be a limiting factor in photovoltaic production. As there has now been a massive overbuild in silicon production to support the solar industry, this is not likely to be a problem for at least the next few years.
DIVERSE MATERIALS BASE
Cadmium, telluride, and carbon nanotubes are all substances that have been used for solar energy generation. In the realm of photovoltaics alone, the materials base is quite diverse and options are continuing to expand.
2. CONCENTRATED SOLAR POWER (CSP) is not addressed in the above article. CSP is a form of electricity generation that uses mirrors and lenses to reflect and concentrate solar radiation onto boilers, towers, or specially designed heat engines that collect the energy and, through mechanical process, turn it into electricity. Though not as large a production base as photovoltaics and primarily useful only in very sunny parts of the world, very large CSP power plants have been build and are under construction in areas like Arizona, California, and Spain.
MATERIALS FOR CONCENTRATED SOLAR POWER are common and do not require exotic inputs.
3. STORAGE FOR SOLAR POWER ALSO INCLUDES MOLTEN SALT and non-lead acid battery storage. An ongoing revolution in battery technology is providing a number of high capacity, high cycle, batteries for energy storage and for the automobile industry. Ferrus Iron batteries made by BYD systems for cell phones can cycle more than 3,000 times and offer a much higher charge density than lead acid batteries. Lithium Ion batteries with carbon nanotube storage are also being designed for the Chevy Volt and are now in use in Prius after market plug in electric upgrades. These batteries, designed by A123 systems, can cycle over 8,000 times and have an even higher charge density than BYD's offering.
RAPIDLY GROWING, BUT SMALL, PRODUCTION CAPACITY FOR SOLAR ENERGY.
The current 'nameplate' production capacity for the world's solar industry is about 13 Gigawatts -- including CSP but not including efficiency designs like solar architecture. If the entire 2008 market were to be utilized on a year on year basis, it would take 1000 years to build enough generation capacity to power the entire planet. That said, 2009 production capacity is expected to reach 18 Gigawatts, and 2010 capacity is expected to hit 24 Gigawatts. This approximate doubling every few years will have a massive effect come around 2015-2020 where new solar energy builds could represent 2-3 percent of world capacity EACH YEAR if the current rate of expansion is maintained.
CURRENT SOLAR ENERGY GENERATION CAPACITY IN THE UNITED STATES IS 3.8 GW. This represents enough energy to power 2.4 million households or about 2% total electricity demand. Figures on solar energy production have lagged while the industry has surged. Average growth rate in the US alone is 48% year on year since 2002. At the current rate of growth, solar energy will represent 10%+ of total US energy use within ten years.
CHALLENGES
Materials supply chains need to be built and expanded to support solar infrastructure. New materials will be needed to increase grid capacity as loading increases from new solar systems. New energy regimes will have to be established as states begin to share or build capacity across borders. For example, Virginia is currently building wind generation capacity out of state for in state use. They are paying to have the electricity transported via grid but this is still less expensive and politically troubling than building a massive number of new coal plants. I think, in the future, power sharing arrangements will also be made with sunny states and states that lack solar generation resources. Solar energy generated in Spain, for example, could help keep the lights on in other parts of Europe. As transportation moves increasingly to grid support, you will have to have a considerable overbuild in multiple generating areas -- solar, wind, nuclear + other. Storage will add some costs but result in net energy costs much lower than those for current transportation systems. In the end we could have a much better and more democratic energy system than the one we started with. But getting to that point is going to take a lot of ingenuity, resolve, and creativity. Greed will not get us there and we may well have to allocate FF resources to build the new infrastructure while rationing its use by consumers. In an orderly society this is certainly possible. But in the absence of salient leadership, things can break down very fast.
My additions on solar are not meant to divert from wind, nuclear or other energy sources. It just seems I had more to add in this area.
http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news12.28d.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/csp.html
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=solar-power-lightens-up-with-thin-fi...
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2005/11/69528
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/04/14/solar_electric_thermal/
http://solar-in-china.blogspot.com/2007/12/qiangsheng-to-invest-400-mill...
thank you - CSP definitely has to be added to the mix.
CSP - Look at http://www.redrok.com Dwayne Johnson.
Good comment.
I'm surprised CSP / solar thermal power isn't covered, given that is likely the single largest form of power generation we will have 100 years from now.
And like you say, it doesn't require any exotic materials.
http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/3791
I don't think that the installed solar generation capacity for the US (3.8 GW) is correct and I can't find a reference in the links. For PV alone, I think that we may be approaching a GW installed about now: http://www.seia.org/Year_in_Review_2007.pdf
There are about 4 GWe of CSP in the pipeline for the US, but I don't think that we've quite broken half a GW of capacity so far. I would guess that we have 1.2-1.4 GW nameplate capacity today and we'll likely get to 3.8 GW nameplate late in 2010.
Chris
SWING and a miss.
Hydro. It's great. Honestly, it's the cleanest highest return cheapest power we use. But basically it's not possible to significantly expand it, all the good sites are already in use. That means that the sites that are still available for development are the poorer sites with the lower EROEIs. Look for no help there.
Wind. It is also good, it is however the definitive way to crash your grid. Over installation beyond 10-15% of total usage in wind and you have to keep spinning reserve which must be factored into the cost and eats into that pretty EROEI. Spinning reserve BTW, is a power plant that is *currently burning fuel* and producing no power. Still develop it for all it's worth, just remember that its worth is limited.
Nuclear. All for it, build it, love it, use it.
Solar thermal. Great where it works. Don't expect it to take a major portion of energy anytime in your lifetime. It involves major realignments of physical infrastructure, and that just isn't going to happen in a shrinking economy. It's *really* hard to turn a building 90 degrees to face the sun :P.
PV. The EROEI stated above fails to account for the grid synchronous inverter. That is both the most expensive and least reliable portion of a PV system, and it drops the EROEI down to around 2:1. Look for no help here at this scale until CIGS PV hits the market.
Lot of broad strokes there, Ford. Sounds like they call for some links to back them up.
Solar Thermal.. You don't have to aim the house, you can aim Evac Tubes lying flush to the roof of the house, or any of a few dozen other ways to grab that heat. Tracking mirrors, etc. Great where it works, being what? Where the sun is shining? There's a laundromat a block from here on the Maine Coast that heats its water with Solar Evac Tubes. The Strip from here to the equator surely has an abundance of potential sites.
Need some stats on your Grid-sync Inverter claim, too. Which brands/models are falling apart? How do they kill the EROEI? Calcs, please.
Wind argument. 'Grid Crasher?' When, from that one German event two yrs ago? Didn't a boat hit some transmission lines, after all was said and done?
A lot of blanks to fill in.
Bob
There was a period recently where more than 40% of Spanish generation was coming from wind.
The idea that you need to limit it to 15% is laughable.
The main issue is making sure you have good enough data to be able to monitor shifts in wind intensity so that you can dispatch alternate forms of generation when the wind power jumps or falls - and if you build enough storage you don't even need to do this...
You'll need a cite on that. Note that the 15-20% as stated was intended as a total of generated electricity, not nameplate capacity. so *if* you got lucky and on a specified day produced 40% of your energy with wind, it would still not necessarily have met the conditions for 15% penetration. Wind installations have a typical capacity factor of 25% so to get 15% total energy, you'd have to install 60% of your nameplate capacity.
In addition to that, europe has an overarching grid, in which the fraction that is wind is *far* below the 15% threshold. to point at germany or spain is comparable to stating that nebraska generates X% and neglecting the cross-border flux.
You're wrong about "the main thing" too, the data is important, yes, however you need to *have* the backup generation capacity and the grid capacity to carry the overage/underage from production to load. To fail to factor for that is to lie about the realities. It's true that below certain thresholds, you have no need to factor for those, but that's where the 15% comes in (which is still more than 10 times current world installed base, so there's obviously no need to put the brakes on anytime soon).
Well, here The Age mentions a 27% period for a week, though,
And here we see that on April 18th this year they managed 32%.
You speak of getting "lucky" and having days where the generation fraction is high, but it's not luck. It's about putting the turbines in the right place and having accurate weather forecasts. It's like saying that being a good commercial fisherman is "luck" - it's not, it's knowledge and experience and judgment combined with some forecasting.
Once again, overall penetration is 9 percent, which means that spain is still far below the 15-20% threshold. It also means that on the "jackpot" hours, wind should provide something in the neighborhood of 36% of spot energy. That is in fact *exactly* my point.
If you were to install 20% then on a jackpot day you'd be generating 80% and would need to either shed load or idle some older baseload plants that are unlikely to respond well to being power cycled. In addition, the German windfarms have effectively proven that you would still need to have schedulable plants and fuel reserves capable of meeting the full demand assuming that you are getting exactly 0 from your windmills. Those days will happen too, statistically, for every second that ALL your windmills are generating at full, you will have a second where none of your windmills are doing anything. Taking the jackpot moments as cases of the strength of wind power is to neglect the bust moments, and those are just as critical.
Your insistence that it's all information is simply wrong, it's information and infrastructure, and as total wind penetration grows, the infrastructure needs grow with it. Now, an HVDC line running from northern Norway to southern Spain via Germany *might* allow penetration all along that corridor in excess of the 15-20%, due to the geographic diversity, but simply taking spain in isolation and neglecting the subsidy from french nuclear is seriously biased math.
It's also worth noting that the equivalency is 1000, 4 mw wind turbines for each 1 gwe nuclear plant. Since I have never seen a windfarm containing more than 10, 4 MW turbines, that means that you will need 100 mountaintop style sites (or an offshore rectangle 8 miles on a side at 1/4 mile separation) to replace the energy produced by the Nplant.
Great where it works being obviously southward facing homes that require heating *but have good sun* a significant fraction of the year. So basically it's useless in for example upstate NY where I live due to poor sunlight in the winter. As for the evac tubes, panels, etcetera, (not addressed in the original post) I ran the math on it, and discovered that in order to provide heat for a modest sized house (looking for 30,000 btus/hr) would require (30,000 btu = 8.8 kw = 8.8m^2 * 2 (winter sun is weaker than full summer) * 2 (inefficiency)*4 (8 hour day)) 140M^2 of collection paneling. That's larger than the typical modest house. In addition to that, it says nothing at all about the storage of that heat for the overnight.
I never said that the inverters were "falling apart" I said that they were the most maintenance intensive portion of the system, which they are. As for how they kill the eroei, well, off the cuff, they lose 5% of the energy that hits them, after that, the energy involved in manufacturing them and delivering them MUST be taken into account when calculating the eroei of the system. To fail to do so and just account for the energy in the panels themselves is simply to lie.
Look, when I am looking at eroei, I find it simplest to simply look at the finances. Anything with a 25 year amortization does *not* have a 10:1 eroei, to claim that it does means that the accounting of the energy inputs has been done incorrectly. Taking the meter turnings at the factory that produces the panels will always produce high eroei numbers. Mining the copper to make the inverter takes energy, as does the labor of the chinese guy who winds the inverter. frankly, there is no sink of money that isn't energy based, so the simplest and most accurate way to calculate eroei for anything wil be to look at the economics.
(30,000 btu = 8.8 kw = 8.8m^2 * 2 (winter sun is weaker than full summer) * 2 (inefficiency)*4 (8 hour day)) 140M^2 of collection paneling.
These numbers appear to be pulled out of a hat. You need to provide engineering substance to your above claim. Bald assertion does not do so.
Note most passive solar homes are very energy efficient, so comparisons to ordinary non-efficient homes is a case of apples and oranges, unless you are limiting your discussion to passive solar retrofitting of an existing home, where increased energy efficiency (insulation, airtightness) is normally implemented anyway.
I said that they were the most maintenance intensive portion of the system, which they are.
How much maintenance are you claiming they need? Mine has needed zero in the last 8 years. Of course, since PV panels really require no maintenance (mine have needed none in the last 8 years), your statement doesn't amount to much anyway. Please supply current data to support whatever claim you make.
In contrast to the vast supporting documentation you have posted? Seriously, I just browsed your last 50 posts and failed to find anything of substance in any of them. Even your own experiences with your PV system are biased anecdotal unscientific worthless tripe.
As for the numbers I was using in the 30kbtu example, they were highly optimistic numbers from one end to the other. look it up yourself.
As for the solar design necessitating the more energy efficient home design, I call BS on that, you are comparing apples to grapes if you compare the heating requirements on a brand new high efficiency home to that of the average US or European home. Simply put, that's cheating.
Just as an example of exactly HOW generous I was being with my numbers in my 30kbtu example, in upstate NY, december insolation is only *2* kwh/m^2/day.
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/redbook/atlas/serve.cgi
In my example, I gave it 4. you will also find that no passive solar collection panels or evac tubes on the market can come even close to the 50% efficiency that I allowed. If you're going to demand specific math, it's going to get *very* bad for your case very fast.
This all pertains to existing houses, new houses can easily enough improve in many ways. However, that's what I meant by "not in your lifetime" the average age of a residence in the US is something in the neighborhood of 25 years so if we were to start now mandatig that *every* new home were to be high efficiency, it would take 25 years to replace half the homes currently in use with the newer designs. That is entirely too slow to constitute a noticeable impact.
I also looked up MTBF for grid tied inverters, and I found that most manufacturers have 10 year design life as a "goal". this means that you can expect to be replacing the single most expensive single component of your "low maintenance" system every 10 years on average (I am making the assumption here that the panels themselves are modular and can be swapped out individually.)
The importance of energy efficiency is reflected in the amounts of energy that are available. For example, in Germany, with even less solar energy than your upstate New York location, PassiveHaus designs are able to utilize solar energy for
Indeed, PassivHaus homes cannot use more than 4746 btu/ft² per year in non-renewable heating energy.
From http://www.cepheus.de/eng/index.html;
"Cost-optimized solar thermal systems can meet about 40–60% of the entire low-temperature heat demand of a Passive House. The low remaining energy demand moreover makes something possible which would otherwise be unaffordable, and for which available supply would not suffice:
Over the annual balance, the remaining energy consumption (for space heating, domestic hot water and household electricity) is offset completely by renewable sources, making the Passive House fully primary-energy and climate neutral. This is being achieved in the CEPHEUS housing development in Hannover-Kronsberg"
Homes meeting the PassiveHouse requirements have been built in the US, such as this one near Chicago;
http://www.e-colab.org/ecolab/SmithHouse.html
So solar energy can be used for home heating needs when attention is paid to energy efficiency.
Once again, if it involves changing out the actual home, then you can look for no help here in your lifetime. I never said that you couldn't build a home capable of being heated by passive solar, I said that if you wait for passive solar to make significant inroads into the energy picture, you're going to be waiting a LONG time. It's great for individuals building single new homes on large lots, basically useless for anything else, and will have no impact on fossil fuel demand for decades at a minimum.
It's great for individuals building single new homes on large lots, basically useless for anything else
Wrong yet again;
and will have no impact on fossil fuel demand for decades at a minimum.
Unsupported assertion.
Nice developments. Makes no difference to the point though. I have explained time and again that the average age of a dwelling in the industrialized world is 25 years, and that therefore if ALL new homes were built to this standard, then half the homes would have been replaced in 25 years, Since residential heating represents 10% roughly of fossil fuel consumption that would give us an overall improvement of 0.2% per year IF we instituted a crash project to institute Passive solar construction. This is assuming that there is exactly zero growth in population AND that each home uses zero fossil fuels. neither of which is the case.
So like I said, totally useless. Being pigheaded about it serves you poorly.
There's no one following this but us now, so you can drop the posturing and derogatory language, which only weakens your argument anyway.
You made some overly narrow assumptions in your math.
First, don't assume that solar technology will be implemented in a vacuum; other aspects of home energy use is also dropping, like high efficiency refrigerators, CFL, lower energy computers, etc., etc, as shown in the PassivHaus examples above. So the 0.2% becomes at least 0.3%
Secondly, as building energy consumes 1/3 of US energy consumption, commercial and industrial building also can take advantage of passive and active solar. And they tend to renovate much more often than every 25 years. So instead of 10%, we are looking at 33% and the the 0.3% becomes 1%.
http://www.eere.energy.gov/buildings/database/mtxview.cfm?CFID=22259466&...
A yearly 1% reduction in energy use provides positive impacts right from the start. Add in energy efficiency improvements to the other domains, such as transportation and industrial processes, and quite a bit of progress can be made.
Well, you're still here, and the conversation has finally come around to a 2 sided discussion of math, so we're finally at the point when you deserve better treatment than insults (you have to admit that your "long on opinion and short on substance and accuracy" is a statement deserving of the contempt I gave it, particularly since I was right in every aspect of the post). So okay, lets go from there.
The other efficiency improvements you mentioned fall outside of this discussion really, CFLs are quite unrelated to passive solar construction. In fact, these things go to prove my point, CFLs and efficient windows are being installed as fast as sylvania anderson can make them, despite which, residential energy demand is still increasing.
As for passive solar and efficiency tweaks on commercial/industrial structures, I think you can look for very minimal improvements there, industry is usually pretty well on top of the efficiency curve, for example, it's a long time since I have seen an incandescent bulb in a commercial or industrial building, they've pretty much been fluorescent for the last 30 years. Also, industrial applications are far less able to be successfully met with passive solar. Sure, you may be able to heat the building with passive solar, but you won't be able to provide process steam or run machinery on it, so at best you're looking at maybe 1/4 of the energy that enters an industrial/commercial site being able to be met with passive solar (yes, I did just pull that 1/4 out of my butt, feel free to find a citation if you dislike that number).
Now, as regards the total fraction of energy that we're working with,
https://eed.llnl.gov/flow/pdf/USEnFlow02-quads.pdf
Shows that only very small amounts of oil go to either residential or commercial applications. In the residential applications we are therefore primarily looking at savings of natural gas and coal electric. That makes this really not about peak oil at all, but more about climate change and carbon reduction. Just wanted to have that said.
Now, is passive solar useful for cooling? No, not really, about the best it can do in most climates is a reduction in A/C energy. In most climates that require heating can it totally replace heating energy? Not really, they can significantly reduce it, yes, but never eliminate. Can you cook with passive solar? no, not really, you still need natural gas or grid electric for that. Can they eliminate the need for lighting? no, not really, at best they reduce the need to nights and cloudy days. so once again, I was being very generous in my 0.2% assessment. Really, if we were to figure that a good passive house uses half the outside energy compared to a traditional house, we'd be pretty close, hyperbole notwithstanding.
passive solar isn't junk, it's great where it works, and I see no reason not to encourage deployment of it to all degrees possible, but it isn't going to make a difference to peak oil or climate change on anything except the very long term, it's just another too little too late type measure.
As for "active solar" (PV) the emergy doesn't work, it's still a loser. This is reflected in the financial math. There's just no real point in installing them yet. An honest and full accounting of all the energy that is involved in gettin gthem in operation on your house will show that they are an energy sink, not a source.
TBH, it's fair to compare passive solar to hybrid cars, yes, they are a good technology, and there's no reason not to pursue them, but the problem is several orders of magnitude too large for them to have enough of an impact. You're trying to put out a housefire with an eyedropper.
SWING and a miss
High on opinion and devoid of substance and accuracy.
So, after an abundance of comments swapped and bantered, your claim that my original comment lacked accuracy was the most inaccurate thing said to date. I was correct about the possibilties of passive solar (worthless as a retrofit and entirely too slow to have an effect using new construction), correct about wind (15-20% total energy production without starting to lose EROEI), correct about hydro (tapped), and correct about PV (inverter makes it a loser at this time). I'll accept your apology anytime you care deliver it.
I was correct about the possibilties of passive solar (worthless as a retrofit and entirely too slow to have an effect using new construction)
Still an unsupported assertion, see above.
correct about wind (15-20% total energy production without starting to lose EROEI)
Still an unsupported assertion. What you said, btw, was "Over installation beyond 10-15% of total usage in wind and you have to keep spinning reserve which must be factored into the cost and eats into that pretty EROEI."
You completely ignored existing (or future) hydro (or CAES) that can be used as storage, and you changed your percentages.
correct about hydro (tapped)
The US alone has 300 GW of additional hydro potential.
http://hydropower.id.doe.gov/resourceassessment/
correct about PV (inverter makes it a loser at this time).
You have yet to substantiate anything on this subject.
I'll accept your apology anytime you care deliver it.
I'm sorry you're having so much difficulty on this subject.