Solar ... In the news

Martyn1981

Hiya cells, still posting nonsense I see.

cells wrote: »

your figures are too generous for the EV and too negative for the diesel car and you are using accounting tricks in the form of looking at diesel that is heavily taxed vs electricity that is nowhere near as heavily taxed. you are not comparing technology you are comparing taxes

Nope! Just comparing costs to the consumer.

cells wrote: »

Bulk storage makes no sense for stationary applications for a long long time. Why do you think building 100kg objects to bolt onto your wall and scrap and landfill and replace every x years is a good idea when the already existing copper wire into your home does a fine job and will last hundreds of years not clogging up landfills?

Battery storage does not even get rid of the need for a copper wire into the home it might do for x months a year but you will still be dependent on it some of the time which means you will bear the full cost of the system

If the price comes down, it makes complete sense, it's called economics.

No need to get rid of the copper wire, even though it does cost about twice as much per day as you tried to convince people, as you simply didn't know that DNO's and local distribution grids existed.

However, in sunny places like Australia, there have now been two detailed reports showing that economic storage with PV, could lead to 1/3 of households disconnecting from the grid. Plus of course there's the existing houses being disconnected by the leccy suppliers, as it's cheaper for them to install PV and storage, than maintain the poles and wires. And on top, the new town that may be built off-grid as they found that the cost of PV and storage, (with gas generation for 40% of demand) costs less to build, than just the cost of connection to the grid.

cells wrote: »

There is not the manufacturing capacity to ramp that fast.

The world needs to build 4 billion homes to house its 10 billion population. If you feel 60% of them will/should have a 4KWp system on the roofs by year x its not a difficult calculation

2.8 billion x 4KWp = 11.2 TWp
Say you want that over the next 30 years that would be 373GWp installed per year and the world is at only about 1/10th of that.

"its not a difficult calculation" - perhaps it was for you!

Surely 60% of 4bn is 2.4bn, which if you wanted to put 4kWp on the roof of each, would give a total of 9.6TWp, which over 30 years would be 320GWp. That's roughly 4 times (not ten) current capacity. And BNEF has predicted demand/production rising to 200GWp pa.

cells wrote: »

So if you believed in this 11.2TWp [9.6TWp] you would have to point to a lot of additional PV factories being built.

Are you saying that factories won't be built to meet demand? Does world production of a commodity usually follow demand, or ignore it?

cells wrote: »

The difference is that PV crashes its own price for most of its generation output, so if you offer PV a CFD at £70 your probably going to have to pay out the best part of £70 a unit. IF you offer nuclear £100 your probably going to have to only hand over £50 a unit.

You seem a little confused. So PV will crash the price when it's generating, according to you, and presumably wind will do the same too. Yet prices will be higher (minimising the subsidy element) when nuclear is generating.

But nuclear will be generating when PV is, and when wind is, so would reflect the very same spot prices. Given that nuclear is already £20/MWh more than PV and on-shore wind, that means the subsidy element for nuclear will be £20/MWh more than them, all the time they are both generating ..... would it not?

You also seem to be directly contracting the National Audit Office, who have just revised the 2013 subsidy element for Hinkley (not nuclear, just Hinkley) from £6bn to £30bn (fig 20).

cells wrote: »

Also it is not one v the other. The best option for the UK is probably to simply keep what exists and if needed replace some of the older plants with new CCGTs and wait 5 years by which time the potential of both Solar and nuclear will be far more clear.

What isn't clear? Current auction rates in Germany have PV at €72 (£60/MWh), whilst Hinkley is now at £102/MWh.

Following NAO advice the government are already aware that nuclear (in general) will cost considerable more than PV (and wind), no need to wait 5 more years.

Solar and wind 'cheaper than new nuclear' by the time Hinkley is built

An unpublished report by the energy department shows that it expects onshore wind power and large-scale solar to cost around £50-75 per megawatt hour of power generated in 2025. New nuclear is anticipated to be around £85-125/MWh, in line with the guaranteed price of £92.50/MWh that the government has offered Hinkley’s developer, EDF.

cells wrote: »

Hinkey should not be built,

Hopefully it won't.

cells wrote: »

nor should there be a mass early build out of PV

Too late, that ship's already sailed. Last year PV supplied more electricity than hydro, and will probably produce 50% more again this year. During the summer months PV has been supplying about 5% to 6% of demand.

Mart.

cells

while you say all this, 50 million homes and business are connected to the grid annually and fossil fuel use keeps going up

Also your quote was 'The examples seem to show that after a slow burn, when the technologies take off, they are quickly 'adopted' by around 60% of households in what looks (to me) like 15 years or so.'

So 9.6TWp is your guess within 15 years = 640GW of production every single year from now to year 15. How much has been / will be installed this year for comparison?

Solar PV will become a significant primary energy source with a lot of subsidy and a lot of time. It wont get to the exponential crayon drawn install rates and reach 80% of primary energy within your lifetime let alone 15 years

cells

Martyn1981 wrote: »

If the price comes down, it makes complete sense, it's called economics.

How do you expect the price of a 100-200kg battery, delivered, installed, used, uninstalled and sent to landfill once every x years and a replacement purchased to repeat all over again, to come down to the point where its more economic than a 1kg inert copper wire that lasts multiple lifetimes?

maybe you can figure out how much the grid and DNOs costs per day in the UK, and how much they can drop their prices before going out of business, and tell everyone what it is your trying to save them from with stationary batteries?

Martyn1981

cells wrote: »

while you say all this, 50 million homes and business are connected to the grid annually and fossil fuel use keeps going up

You're always stating 50m homes added to the grid each year, but you never reference it.

You say FF use keeps going up, but it looks like your beloved coal has stagnated in the world and is in terminal decline in the UK and US. With the top four miners in the US losing 99.9% of their value in the last 5 years.

BTW, do you still claim that coal burning isn't harmful to our health because you don't think a lump of raw coal smells bad?

cells wrote: »

So 9.6TWp is your guess within 15 years = 640GW of production every single year from now to year 15.

[What happened to your 11.2GWp "it's not a difficult calculation" claim?]

Not my guess, your interpretation. I simply posted an article discussing disruptive technology rollouts. Before you edited down my comments and applied them solely to PV, you'll see I actually said:-

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Hopefully this will apply to RE and EV's.

This was deliberate so that nobody could try (ok, you've tried), so nobody could successfully try to misrepresent my opinion.

I didn't say PV specifically, because what I realised, but you've failed to take account of, is the fact that PV is just one component of RE, and for domestic use, you have to consider the number of properties for whom PV is suitable.

In the UK (and very similar estimates in the US) the number of PV suitable domestic properties is roughly 20%, though, as prices tumble, I see no reason why more properties wouldn't adopt some sort of micro system, perhaps 500Wp window shade, door canopy etc.

So, using your un-referenced figure for population and homes, and 65% of 20% we get 128GWp pa.

cells wrote: »

How much has been / will be installed this year for comparison?

Google is your friend!

But estimates are around 70GWp, rising to 100GWp+ by 2021. As I previously mentioned, BNEF expects 200GWp by 2040.

cells wrote: »

Solar PV will become a significant primary energy source with a lot of subsidy and a lot of time.

Actually it's already a significant primary energy source, greater than hydro in the UK already, or didn't you read that bit?

Subsidies have been minimal, especially when you consider that coal pollution (not cost or CO2 impact, just pollution) costs the UK approx £60/MWh, and PV is now down to £80/MWh or less.

Time wise, we've been supporting PV for 6 years, and are already at this stage, so no, not a lot of time at all.

cells wrote: »

It wont get to the exponential crayon drawn install rates and reach 80% of primary energy within your lifetime let alone 15 years

80% of primary energy? Who said that? You need to stop making stuff up.

Mart.

Martyn1981

cells wrote: »

How do you expect the price of a 100-200kg battery, delivered, installed, used, uninstalled and sent to landfill once every x years and a replacement purchased to repeat all over again, to come down to the point where its more economic than a 1kg inert copper wire that lasts multiple lifetimes?

I think you've gone off on a bit of a crazy rant there.

As always in a discussion about domestic battery storage, you try to spin things. All you need is for the cost/kWh to fall below the cost of import. Then with metered export, the cost of import minus export.

Tesla (and there are many, many more battery manufacturers) is aiming for $100/kWh battery price, so at 5,000 cycles that would be 2c/kWh, or approx 1.4p/kWh.

I wouldn't bet against battery cost reductions at this point in time. Many people explained (like you with batts) that PV wasn't economical 10yrs ago, but panel prices have fallen about 90% since then.

As previously mentioned, for sunny Australia, two detailed reports (links previously provided when you were denying the country's ability to diversify domestic energy generation) have suggested upto 1/3 of households leaving the grid for cheaper PV and storage. The reports suggest the number could have been higher, but on-grid costs will also be pulled down by RE and storage.

cells wrote: »

maybe you can figure out how much the grid and DNOs costs per day in the UK, and how much they can drop their prices before going out of business, and tell everyone what it is your trying to save them from with stationary batteries?

I did calculate it last year, don't you remember? You'd been telling everyone it was 10p/day, and I explained why it was more like 30p. I supplied references such as OFGEM and cost breakdowns, but you denied all the information, preferring instead to divide the National Grid's costs, come out at 10p, and claim that was all we pay.

If you further recall, I tried for weeks to explain that as well as NG's transmission costs, we also have the larger distribution costs (of the DNO's) to include, but you dismissed this information too, saying that no other companies were involved in leccy delivery to our door.

Finally you stated a cost similar to mine, deleted about 200 posts, then claimed that you'd never argued with me, that I hadn't given you the numbers, and that you'd found them yourself. But you dropped that claim (and ran away) when I pointed to all your posts referenced in mine and others replies to you, so deletion didn't work.

Has that helped you to remember now?

Mart.

Martyn1981

cells wrote: »

How do you expect the price of a 100-200kg battery, delivered, installed, used, uninstalled and sent to landfill once every x years

Please don't send any batteries to landfill, they should be recycled. Alternatively, do what the car manufactures are doing, and recycle EV batts for stationary storage.

Mart.

cells

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Has that helped you to remember now?
Mart.

Yes a little. Can you answer me these question since you seem to keep track of this sort of thing

(PS you don't need to answer them all if you know then go ahead if not you don't need to spend lots of time looking)

What's the current installed cost of a PV system for someone who does their homework (is not a pro or a novice just an interested amateur). 4KWp or any other size you think is more typical

How much are the daily grid costs pre profit

Is there a possibility that in the future the national grid goes (or is reduced in scope) but the DNOs stay (due to the more flexible nature of modern power stations can they be connected to ibdeoendant DNOs rather than need a connection between DNIs aka NG)

What sort of cycle life is expected in good li-ion stationary storage. What's the charge and discharge losses. What do you think a typical home size battery will be in KWh

What are the current costs per watt on the better/good utility solar PVs in EU and USA

What is worldwide PV production capacity. What is worldwide battery production capacity. What are those expected to be within 5 years.

Does it make sense environmentally (or on a physics basis) to use batteries at current PV levels in the UK. That is to say overall if a person installs a battery on their solar system is the nation going to produce more or less fossil fuel burn. At what level does this change.

Martyn1981

cells wrote: »

Yes a little. Can you answer me these question since you seem to keep track of this sort of thing

(PS you don't need to answer them all if you know then go ahead if not you don't need to spend lots of time looking)

Google is your friend, plus, having looked at the questions, if you don't know some of the answers already, then do you think you should have been making grand statements about PV rollout previously?

I'll answer off the top of my head, rather than go looking, so allow some variance from 100% accuracy.

Answers in red:-

cells wrote: »

What's the current installed cost of a PV system for someone who does their homework (is not a pro or a novice just an interested amateur). 4KWp or any other size you think is more typical

4kWp - £4k to £5k. About £1k/kWp for larger systems. However, the UK PV supply network (import, wholesale, retail) has suffered badly with the recent govt cuts to PV (at all scales). This may push up prices.

How much are the daily grid costs pre profit

I believe we've done this one to death. You were adamant that it was 10p/day per household. But in reality it's about 20% of the electricity bill, perhaps 25p-30p/household/day.

Is there a possibility that in the future the national grid goes (or is reduced in scope) but the DNOs stay (due to the more flexible nature of modern power stations can they be connected to ibdeoendant DNOs rather than need a connection between DNIs aka NG)

The grid won't go. Could reduce in percentage of leccy supplied, but total demand will be increasing, so that should counter any reduction in the volume carried. Power stations are already connected to the distribution network, rather than to the National Grid - mine is, and all generation is soaked up by local properties (so DNO not NG). You may also want to research PPA's, where larger systems are installed near or on the land of the customer, to supply power at a favourable (pre-negotiated) rate. Bristol City Council have already installed a number of these.

What sort of cycle life is expected in good li-ion stationary storage. What's the charge and discharge losses. What do you think a typical home size battery will be in KWh

10,000 cycles. Tesla - 8% losses. Size guess, perhaps 4kWh useable (5kWh total).

What are the current costs per watt on the better/good utility solar PVs in EU and USA

Germany £60/MWh (€72/MWh). US £30/MWh ($40/MWh with subsidies). Chile/Saudi Arabia about £21/MWh ($30/MWh).

What is worldwide PV production capacity. What is worldwide battery production capacity. What are those expected to be within 5 years.

PV production is topping 70GWp pa, not sure of capacity, but it's higher. PV production is very quick to build, so can demand follow. Annual production expected to top 100GWp by 2020.

Batts - no idea, there are simply too many types, and too many manufacturers. Plus the technology and production scale is increasing at a massive rate currently. Plus, of course, batteries are only one type of storage.

Does it make sense environmentally (or on a physics basis) to use batteries at current PV levels in the UK. That is to say overall if a person installs a battery on their solar system is the nation going to produce more or less fossil fuel burn. At what level does this change.

Environmentally it makes little sense at the moment, we have no problem coping with current PV (and wind generation) levels, so any excess will be mopped up locally, displacing FF generation.

However, when batts become economical, then they will help to improve the economics of demand side PV installs. This may result in installs that wouldn't otherwise happen, so whilst the batts may not help with FF generation, the added PV will.

It's also worth noting that peak demand/supply has a higher average CO2 level than low demand, as more FF generation comes on line. So storing daytime PV for early evening use can have an environmental benefit by reducing CO2 emissions. Plus, lower demand will allow less use of coal burners (as seen this summer) - obviously anything that reduces coal generation carries a massive environmental benefit due to the vast damage/costs from burning coal.

In the US, batts at supply side generation can be used to stabilise generation, and thereby achieve a better quality/better price for the generation.

At what level will it change, domestically, as explained above. Nationally, when peak generation starts to bump up against minimum daytime demand (Summer Sunday afternoon). This may happen at around 30GWp (20-25GW), but is probably of little real consequence, so a more realistic point, would be the other 6 days a week, when demand is around 5-10GW higher, allowing perhaps 8-12GWp more PV.

In the UK we now have little coal generation, and still falling fast, but a lot of gas generation, which can demand follow, thus preventing price crashes.

Martyn1981

MIP becoming obsolete, says SolarPower Euro

The removal of another five Chinese companies from the EU’s price undertaking is further demonstration of the mechanism’s failure, according to the CEO of trade group SolarPower Europe.

As part of the undertaking, which allows Chinese firms to do business without paying punitive trade duties, a minimum import price (MIP) was set. Structural issues with the way that floating price is calculated mean it is heavily influenced by currency distortions. As a result, it has been set at €0.56/W, well above global averages.

This week, a further three firms withdrew while another two were removed by the European Commission as it felt it was not possible to sufficiently monitor their transactions.

“The MIP is clearly failing to function anymore, many Chinese companies are now voluntarily leaving it, as the price no longer bears the slightest resemblance to market prices for solar in the world or in Europe today,” said James Watson, CEO, SolarPower Europe. “European module manufacturers, like everyone else in the world, have also been successful in reducing costs and we are seeing quotes of less than €0.48/W from some players in Europe. Therefore, the maintenance of the price at €0.56/W means that it is becoming obsolete.”

So not only is the MIP preventing us from getting the best prices, but it's actually substantially higher than EU prices now, which seems 'a little naughty'.

Mart.

Martyn1981

Not sure if this is Green & Ethical or PV news, but either way it's a fun article:-

The Australian town that wants to get off the grid

The 300 residents of Tyalgum, set among the rolling hills near the Queensland-New South Wales border, are fond of saying their town is "beautiful 24-7".

Soon, if all goes to plan, this little town in a region famed for its alternative lifestyle could be the first place in Australia to get off the electricity grid and keep the lights on 24-7 using 100% renewable energy.

According to Mr Price, the 300 people of Tyalgum collectively spend A$700,000 (£406,000, $534,000) a year on electricity, with 55% of that going to maintain the poles and wires.

Building the infrastructure needed to take the entire village off the grid is expected to cost A$7m.

"In all honesty, it would be good to have a demonstration site that actually proves decentralised distribution will actually work. Can you actually take areas off the grid?"

But even if the project stops before reaching off-grid status, it won't be a total loss, Ms Clifford says.

"We don't see a risk at any point if we were to stop because people still have solar on their roof," she says.

"Our strategy is that we're going to put as much solar on roofs as we can, as many batteries that we can, have that infrastructure sitting there and then go to Australia and say we have all this stuff in play, what are you going to do about it?"

"It's guerrilla warfare in the renewable energy industry."

Go for it.

Mart.