The Oil Drum

The Liberal Party has markedly changed its tune on solar power since it got kicked out of office, with shadow environment minister Greg Hunt calling for a national feed in tariff for solar power and declaring he "has a vision of Australia becoming a solar continent" at the Climate Action Network Australia Conference in Sydney.

Hunt went on to say ""giant dishes, large fields of mirrors, these are one of the forms of power stations of the future" and "an important part of Australia's future energy" - all of which indicates he is on board with the vision of large scale solar thermal power.

While we spend a lot of time talking about traditional energy sources based on depleting resources that are extracted from the ground, I think its important to remember that the fastest growing sources of energy are solar and wind, and that these will never run out. As M King Hubbert put it regarding solar power in particular :

The biggest source of energy on this earth, now or ever, is solar. I used to think it was so diffuse as to be impractical. But I’ve changed my mind. It’s not impractical…This technology exists right now. So if we just convert the technology and research and facilities of the oil and gas industries, the chemical industry and the electrical power industry—we could do it tomorrow. All we’ve got to do is throw our weight into it.

Both Stuart Staniford's recent "Powering Civilization to 2050" post and (to a lesser extent) Scientific American's "Solar Grand Plan" concentrated on using photovoltaic solar cells to provide the bulk of our energy needs. While both thin film and traditional silicon based PV cells seem to set new efficiency records every couple of months (a CIGS cell recently reached 19.9% efficiency in lab tests, and multi-crystalline silicon PV cells recently reached 19.5% efficiency), the most promising mechanism for large scale solar power generation seems to be solar thermal power (often referred to as concentrating solar power, or CSP).

This is a guest post from Kiashu.

From Auntie we learn that in South Australia, soon householders with photovoltaic setups will be able to sell their power to the grid at double the retail rate. I had a look at some figures and saw that as they said, it's not going to be a money-making scheme for the average household, who would have to be energy-conservers to break even, though in principle it could be an investment with a small return for community organisations, since they have buildings with a large roof area which aren't used much - we'd have to look at figures for larger (20+kW) systems to be sure.

South Australia will become the first state to pay a premium to people who install solar panels which can return power to the electricity grid. From July, electricity generated by solar panels will be worth twice that bought from power retailers. Legislation passed by State Parliament last night extends the scheme to small businesses, churches and community groups.

South Australian Greens MP Mark Parnell says his amendment was accepted by the Government to make it a 20-year scheme instead of five. "This new bill isn't going to make solar panels a money-making scheme for people; what it does is it softens some of the expense," he said. "We already have the commonwealth rebates which are a good incentive, now we've got this extra state rebate and thanks to the Greens amendment we've now got a scheme that is guaranteed to last 20 years."

The legislation has been passed just ahead of Adelaide hosting an international solar cities congress next week.

First, thanks to all who contributed ideas. You may have an entirely different opinion on the most important energy stories. Feel free to share it. Many of these stories were contributed by various readers. Comments by readers are italicized. If you want to know who wrote what, you can see the entire comment thread here.

Click "There's More" to see my Top 10 Energy Stories of 2007:

"Have the guts to consider the silent consequences when standing in front of the next snake-oil humanitarian." -Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan

I believe our generation faces a sobering choice: Take serious steps to reduce our fossil fuel usage now - and this will undoubtedly entail some amount of hardship - or leave it to our children to face a great deal of hardship. I firmly believe this is our choice, and we must look to solutions that move us in that direction. I also believe that if most people understood that we are pushing a very serious problem onto our children - instead of assuming scientists and engineers will solve the problem - then we would collectively pursue a solution with far greater urgency.

Or more precisely, the future should be electric.

I have done a lot of research lately into various alternative diesel technologies as I was working on my renewable diesel chapter. One thing that became very clear to me is that the world will not be able to displace more than a fraction of our petroleum usage with biofuels. I already knew that this was the case with ethanol, but now I think this will be a general limitation for all liquid biofuels. Consider this sneak preview (still in draft form) from the book:

First of all, let me introduce Jerry. He is a Ph.D. chemist that I met 11 years ago when we both worked on butanol research and technical support for Celanese Chemicals. While I was certainly aware of Peak Oil (I had mentioned it in my graduate thesis), Jerry was the first person who convinced me that the smooth transition to biofuels that I envisioned at that time was highly questionable, and that things might not turn out so well. Jerry is also the father of Ana Unruh Cohen, the Director of Environmental Policy at the Center for American Progress. Ana previously wrote a guest essay on Prop 87 here. Jerry makes around 300 contacts a year with government officials (congress, federal agencies, etc.) in his role as an advocate. Jerry is a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Audubon Society, Wilderness Society, American Solar Energy Society, and a supporter of Worldwatch. He is also a member of the Technical Advisory Group for Colorado Springs Utilities which is tasked with looking at renewables and demand-side management. He lives in a solar rammed earth tire house (pictures can be seen here) in the Rocky Mountains west of Colorado Springs with his wife Diana.

"We are getting some reports of customers getting aggressive with our crews because they want their power restored," Moreno said.

"Please be patient with us, we need our space to work and to work safely. We understand that you're frustrated right now. But we are trying the best we can to get the power restored quickly."

https://glfc.cfsnet.nfis.org/mapserver/pv/index_e.php

This link would not autoformat, but it does work if you past it into a browser.

Interactive maps of photovoltaic (PV) potential and insolation for Canada have been developed by the Canadian Forest Service (Great Lakes Forestry Centre) in collaboration with the CANMET Energy Technology Centre (CANMET-Varennes) Photovoltaic systems group. Insolation data was provided by the Data Analysis and Archive Division, Meteorological Service of Canada, Environment Canada. The maps give estimates of the electricity that can be generated by grid-connected photovoltaic arrays without batteries (in kWh/kW) and of the mean daily global insolation (in MJ/m2 and in kWh/m2) for any location in Canada on a 300 arc seconds ~10 km grid. They are presented for each month and for the entire year, for six different PV array orientations: a sun-tracking orientation and five fixed South-facing orientations with latitude, vertical (90°), horizontal (0°) and latitude ± 15° tilts (see figure). Data can be obtained at any grid location by "querying" the maps.