Solar Energy May Soon Get Much Cheaper

OilPrice.com ^ | 06/12/2010 | Brian Westenhaus

[PA Engineer]

Atwater’s micrwire arrays can simply be peeled off and stuck pretty much wherever you want.

There is another interesting benefit of this technology for roof applications. It would seem that with the reflective internal coatings, they have a flexible design to overcome the slope restrictions for optimum light absorption. There may also be design options for less than ideal southeast and southwest orientations.

There are still the costs of inverter conversion, storage, regulation, and wiring. Water-Air fuel cells combinations with electrolysis are also inefficient and costly. For over 35 years I have followed each and every promise. I never held my breath or swallowed the kool aid of Gaia. I would love to be more standalone and resilient, but there still is no there there. This technology is promising and I expect more developments to follow.

[Spaulding]

I'm about 90% certain that I've seen this headline every single year since 1975.

You have. Most who read this sort of claim are not engineers or physicists. This is the rational-sounding attack on free markets at which John Holdren was the arrogant master, while his associate, Amory Lovins, played the indefatigable Deepak Chopra - never ever at a loss for words.

These articles are usually written for publications targeting a business sector for the purpose of justifying grant purposals. Don't forget Van Jones. His blather about energy was nonsense, but music to the ears of his ignorant audience of the far left. His objective has always been, and honestly admitted, to destroy capitalism, and "green energy" has always been a prime tool.

Efficiency is a small part of the issue. Solar flux density discribes how much energy is there to collect. Under ideal circumstances about 600 watts of heat energy is available for each square meter. That 600 watts is peak flux density and is only available for about 6 hours each day. Being generous, we need four square meters to intercept 500 watts over twenty four hours assuming perfectly efficient storage and retrieval of the energy captured while the sun is high.

We are talking about low quality energy - solar heat. What does it cost to convert low-quality heat into electricity? Good conversion efficiencies are around 10%. Multiply the 4 square meter by 10, 40 square meters. This is very genererous because we have significant storage losses with most storage methods.

To make the numbers easier to understand we'll double the 500 watts from 40 square meters to 80 for 1 kilowatt. A midsized nuclear or coal plant generates a million kilowatts continuously, an energy flow which would require at least 80 million square meters of solar collector, and that presumes no rainy days, southern climes, low humidity, and is probably optimistic by at least a factor of 4 because of storage efficiency issues.

The area of the collector field allowing no space between collectors suggests a square 5 miles on a side. But these must be tracking collectors for efficiency. We'll assume a configuration with a meter between 5x5 collectors, adding about 5% to the area of the array - 85 million square meters.

The most efficient storage is pumped water, which would require a dam with an enormous lake into which water is pumped, over half the size of Hoover dam. This pumped storage facility is in addition to the 36 square mile solar farm.

To add a bit of realism, this facility must be accompanied by backup power capable of replacing the full thousand megawatts for rainy or cloudy days. Of course, the plant is least efficient when the sun is low in the sky, winter, when most people use more power. Because of the seasons - climate change - my estimates are unrealistic, by at least a factor of two. If more energy must be stored for the short days of winter, the dimensions of the array must increase, as well as the storage capciity. Solar energy is best used for heating water, swimming pools, and some homes. The enormous size of installations by itself makes it a much more dangerous technology than nuclear or coal for generating electricity. (We have reliable industrial accident data for injuries from working at heights.)

Solar electric is Utopian idealism aimed at weakening capitalism. This was always John Holdren and Amory Lovin’s goal. This writer doesn't know John Chiu, but he appears, in spite of a Nobel prize, to be a go along to get along sort of manager, a show prop for the core politburo around chairman Obama.