Solar ... In the news

EricMears

zeupater wrote: »

Hi

There's a little issue here. The conversion factor is 1000, not 10 - the cost is therefore 9.3p/kWh, not £9.30 … I believe that this is referred to as being the 'strike price'.

HTH
Z

Afraid 8am was a bit early for me

Martyn1981

zeupater wrote: »

Hi

There's a little issue here. The conversion factor is 1000, not 10 - the cost is therefore 9.3p/kWh, not £9.30 … I believe that this is referred to as being the 'strike price'.

HTH
Z

Hi Z. Yep the £93/MWh for nuclear is the strike price. In fact that paragraph that threw Eric is a pretty poorly written 'thought exercise', as my mind went into dump mode at the end of the day.

I shouldn't have really called it 'the nuclear subsidy' as the strike price takes account of the price that the leccy is sold at. So at night it might be sold for £10/MWh and the CfD (contract for difference) will make up the £93 with a £83 subsidy. On average, assuming a market price of about £50, the subsidy will be £43, and at peak times when the market price might be more than £93, the extra has to be handed back, eg if sold at £103, then £10 of subsidy has to be returned.

I chose the whole £93/MWh as that is effectively the cost of that leccy to the leccy supply companies, in the same way that my 'fictional' 7p FiT plus 4.77p/2 export = 9.385p/kWh or £93.85/MWh.

In 2023, and without a crystal ball, perhaps a more realistic future figure that crucially, still allows domestic PV to be viable, would be a FiT of 6p with an export element of 3.3p (6.6p/2), giving a match to the nuclear cost.

When I said that there are a lot of holes in this mental exercise, I wasn't kidding. The leccy supply companies would see less of the leccy, households receive additional income via reduced expenditure (IYSWIM) so the economics of demand side generation kick in making the crucial difference, and the avoidance of waste is also important.

Plus, the fact that nuclear generation is predictable, which should allow it some financial margin, in the interests of fair play.

But purely as an exercise to show how small scale 4kW (micro scale?) PV can compete with monster scale 1.6GW nuclear today* it's still an interesting situation, which may surprise many.

[But mustn't belittle large scale on-shore wind, which is almost there already, with individual turbines in the 0.5 to 2MW range also being far smaller than a nuclear reactor.]

*Currently, only those systems ideally located, and able to generate about 1,000kWh/kWp pa, and at the lowest end of the pricing scale.

Mart.

mac2008

1.1GW new capacity in Q1 2014!

http://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/guest_blog/uk_solar_industry_installs_massive_1.1_gw_in_first_quarter_of_2014_2356

In other words, the UK has installed circa 25% of its total solar capacity in the last 3 months.

I don't expect this will be sustained (everyone rushing to beat the ROC drop), but, as the article says: "With the future of onshore wind looking increasingly at risk, a new Solar Strategy released from DECC, a likely reduction in Chinese module pricing in Europe, and a whopping project pipeline growing under 1.4 ROCs, it begs the question: can it get any better for the UK solar PV industry?"

Martyn1981

Hiya Mac. Short article puts the UK utility-scale PV into context with the rest of the world.

Ed Davey hails UK solar market’s growth

Wiki-Solar.org notes that it took six years for both Germany and the USA to reach the 1GW of utility-scale solar installed milestone, whereas the UK reached it in just four years.

Commenting on the figures, Wiki-Solar’s Philip Wolfe said: “Even these figures may be understated. The energy regulator Ofgem has a backlog of several months in the registration process – when final figures are published we may find a lot more capacity was actually installed in the first quarter. I wouldn’t be surprised if the UK has even overtaken Spain and broken into the top five.”

Given the government's shift in emphasis from utility scale to roof mounted mid and small scale, I wonder if we'll see a revision to the incoming CfD rates?

Could be embarrassing as the 2018/19 rate for large scale PV is £100/MWh, and the STA (Solar Trade Association) were quite vocal when the rates were announced as they'd suggested a LOWER rate, which the govt ignored!!!

The suspicion at the time, was that the government didn't want to publish a PV rate (after 8/9 years of support (in 2019)) that was equal to or lower than the incoming nuclear CfD of £93/MWh (after 60 years of support (in 2023)).

Mind you, the on-shore wind rate will match that nuclear figure this year, and undercuts it in 2017 ........ so the greenest govt ever is doing its best to [STRIKE]support[/STRIKE] restrict it!

Still, for all my criticisms of the govt policies, the UK has still managed to roll out a reasonably well balanced amount of renewables, scaling up nicely towards the 2020 targets. :T

Funny ole world in it!

Mart.

Martyn1981

Not sure how independent this study is, nor if it fully takes account of the greater predictability of nuclear (though it does include back-up costs), but interesting, especially as wind and solar costs are still falling:-

Solar cheaper option than nuclear, new study finds

Report commissioned by Germany's Agora Energiewende reveals that new solar and wind plants are able to generate cheaper low-carbon power than the most modern nuclear reactors.

Solar and wind power should lead the global push for a cleaner energy future, says a recent study that found both renewable energy technologies are able to deliver cheaper low-carbon electricity than even the most modern nuclear reactors.

The study by consultant Prognos AG – commissioned by Agora Energiewende, which is a think-tank owned by the Mercator Foundation and European Climate Foundation – has concluded that newly built solar and wind plants with natural gas as a backup can deliver power that is one-fifth cheaper than nuclear backed by gas.

Mart.

Martyn1981

UK to install 16 GW by 2018

Nevertheless, IHS has raised its near-term forecasts for the U.K., as the strategy document along with signs of high developer activity indicate continued growth. By 2018, IHS forecasts the U.K. to have 16 GW of installed PV capacity, 13 GW of that new capacity installed over the next five years. This would put the U.K. on track to overshoot the government's target of 20 GW by 2020, which may result in a revised support environment. This year, IHS expects 2.4 GW of new PV installations in the country.

Mart.

Martyn1981

Smart Wind and Solar Power
Big data and artificial intelligence are producing ultra-accurate forecasts that will make it feasible to integrate much more renewable energy into the grid.

Some extracts:

Every few seconds, almost every one of the hundreds of turbines records the wind speed and its own power output. Every five minutes they dispatch data to high-performance computers 100 miles away at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder. There artificial-intelligence-based software crunches the numbers, along with data from weather satellites, weather stations, and other wind farms in the state. The result: wind power forecasts of unprecedented accuracy that are making it possible for Colorado to use far more renewable energy, at lower cost, than utilities ever thought possible.

Before the forecasts were developed, Xcel Energy, which supplies much of Colorado’s power, ran ads opposing a proposal that it use renewable sources for a modest 10 percent of its power. It mailed flyers to its customers claiming that such a mandate would increase electricity costs by as much as $1.5 billion over 20 years.

But thanks in large part to the improved forecasts, Xcel, one of the country’s largest utilities, has made an about-face.

It has installed more wind power than any other U.S. utility and supports a mandate for utilities to get 30 percent of their energy from renewable sources, saying it can easily handle much more than that.

Forecasting solar power is next for NCAR and Xcel, but that can be even trickier than wind. For one thing, Xcel doesn’t get information about how much power private rooftop solar panels are generating, so it doesn’t know how much of that power it could lose when clouds roll in. NCAR’s new solar forecasts will use data from satellites, sky imagers, pollution monitors, and publicly owned solar panels to infer how much solar power is being generated and then predict how that amount will change.

Take the example of electric cars. A car stores enough electricity to power a house for anywhere from half a day to several days, depending on the size of the battery pack. And it has sophisticated power electronics that can control the timing and vary the rate of charging, which could offer a way to match fluctuating wind power to electricity demand. With small modifications, the cars’ batteries can deliver stored power to a home and to the power grid. There aren’t many electric cars now, but that could easily change in the decades it will take before renewable energy makes up more than 30 or 40 percent of the electricity supply (wind supplies 4 percent now, and solar less than 1 percent).

At NREL, researchers can plug 30 electric cars into docks that let them interface with power-grid simulations on a supercomputer, to project what would happen if thousands of cars were connected to the grid. The idea is that electric cars might store power from solar panels and use it to power neighborhoods when electricity demand peaks in the evening, and then recharge their batteries using wind power in the early morning hours.

Last year, on a windy weekend when power demand was low, Xcel set a record: during one hour, 60 percent of its electricity for Colorado was coming from the wind. “That kind of wind penetration would have given dispatchers a heart attack a few years ago,” says Drake Bartlett, who heads renewable-energy integration for Xcel. Back then, he notes, they wouldn’t have known whether they might suddenly lose all that power. “Now we’re taking it in stride,” he says. “And that record is going to fall.”

Mart.

groovyf

A subtle tangent to current posts of solar... a Space-Based Solar article:
http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2014/05/what-it-will-take-to-farm-sunlight-from-space/

Martyn1981

Interesting shake up of large scale solar has just been announced.

Hard to explain, so you'll need to read and watch the comments, but basically ....... large scale solar has become too successful too fast. So despite the RO subsidy cut in April, it might still suck up too much money, so the government is looking to rein it back. Not unreasonable so far (perhaps).

But .... the claims are that the budget can't cope. However, PV is already substantially cheaper than off-shore wind, and looks like it'll keep it's promise and match on-shore wind by the end of the decade, with both technologies being cheaper than nuclear.

Some time back I read comments that the government seemed to be doing everything to prevent publishing future large-scale PV subsidies that were lower than the 2023 nuclear subsidies. It seemed like conspiracy theory nonsense to me at the time, but now I'm not so sure.

So, cut support for on-shore wind, then cut support for large scale PV. But continue to support nuclear and off-shore wind. Watch out off-shore wind, if you manage to meet your targets and match nuclear by 2030, you know what'll happen - when a man carrying a shovel tries to take you round behind the barn, don't go! :eek:

RO support for solar over 5MW to be scrapped in 2015

Industry reaction to solar RO closure for >5MW in 2015

Mart.

Cardew

Martyn1981 wrote: »

large scale solar has become too successful too fast.

Well I never! - I suppose large scale solar farms are still not as efficient as sub 4kWp systems on the roofs of domestic houses though;)