The Swanson Effect

Generali

We've presumably all heard of Moore's Law. This is the idea coined by a founder of Intel that stated that the number of transistors on a microchip would double every 18 months. This has basically held true since Gordon Moore said it in 1965 and the result is that we can carry access to the sum of all the world's knowledge in our pockets for the price of a couple of days work (if we're rich, pampered Westerners).

I came across another idea today, The Swanson effect. This states that every time the quantity of solar panels doubles, the price falls by 20%. Twaddle? This is the price of solar panels since 1977:



Despite all that inflation, the price per watt generated has fallen from $76.67 to $0.74 in 36 years. California now generates 6% of its electricity from solar!

purch

Also the quality and effectiveness of the panels has improved immensely over that time as well.

P.S. Awaiting antrobus to find a link to either prove or disprove the above.

kabayiri

One of the issues still to be resolved concerns efficient energy transmission.

It is somewhat annoying that the regions which receive the most sunshine are often the most sparsely populated.

I am fascinated by storage developments like Liquified Air Energy Storage.

We know that upgrading energy transmission grids is expensive. Should the focus move to energy storage development so that we can move power about efficiently?

michaels

Interesting piece on the bbc yesterday saying the national grid was building a large interconnector to a norwegian hydro plant because the economics worked really well in conjunction with variable renewables.

antrobus

purch wrote: »

Also the quality and effectiveness of the panels has improved immensely over that time as well.

P.S. Awaiting antrobus to find a link to either prove or disprove the above.

Do I have to do all the work around here?:)

I do know that Bloomberg New Energy Finance appear to release a version of that Swanson Effect chart every year. The slightly more recent version of the chart has the 2014 price per watt of $0.36, which is less than half the 2013 price.

princeofpounds

Good; oil is too valuable as a chemical feedstock to just burn, anyway.

Loughton_Monkey

I don't care how cheap it all becomes, there will be no solar panels uglifying the LM residence. Even if I have to use my heating allowance for heating!

danothy

Loughton_Monkey wrote: »

I don't care how cheap it all becomes, there will be no solar panels uglifying the LM residence. Even if I have to use my heating allowance for heating!

I've never really understood what people find so ugly about them ...

.string.

A word of caution on Solar Panels - their performance decays over time.

In Space Engineering, the area in which I worked, although not specifically in this field, knowledge of Solar Cells were a bit of a black art; it was always a fight between the output from Solar Panels (/cells) over time, their reliability their weight and their robustness. It's some time since I've been involved in that so things will have changed, but a life of 5 years at nominal efficiency was the sort of timescale which governed the time before the original Hubble Solar Arrays (made in Europe by the way with BAe as Prime Contractor) had to be replaced. In other satellites, some have lasted for over 10 years (the recent Huygens programme (10 + years) is an example) so you can trade off degradation with power margins and so forth. Mind you, Space Projects don't like it when performance starts to drop below, say, 95% due to the launch mass penalty of the extra cells. (note the above is all rough rule of thumb stuff).

Here down below we have to be careful about the source of the Solar Cells; have a look at this article, Solar Panel Degradation which castigates the lack of quality in some Chinese-provided cells, and asserts that a lifetime of 2 to 3 years can apply with some so-called cheap cells.

So the cost not only of procurement but salsa maintenance has to be factored into the total cost, so one should be wary of basing too much on the procurement cost alone, impressiveness though the progress has been.

A little more is here The Real Lifespan of Solar Panels but keep in mind the warnings of the earlier article I linked to.

What I conclude from that is that if you are getting Solar Panels on your roof you had better do your homework regarding exactly where the cells come from and what is their real performance profile and lifetime; don't rely on the glossy brochure. The same holds true for Solar Power enthusiasts, whether they be individuals, political parties, or Governments.

However such is the progress in knowledge, notably from Space-driven spinoff that I do believe things will improve; for example a fairly recent development has brought to light the degradation process in some cell types: Solar cell degradation observed directly for the first time; such things will have an impact.

So there is light on the horizon, if you will pardon the puns.

onlyroz

My parents' solar panels come with a 25-year guarantee - so presumably this would cover performance degradation?

.string.

kabayiri wrote: »

One of the issues still to be resolved concerns efficient energy transmission.

It is somewhat annoying that the regions which receive the most sunshine are often the most sparsely populated.

I am fascinated by storage developments like Liquified Air Energy Storage.

We know that upgrading energy transmission grids is expensive. Should the focus move to energy storage development so that we can move power about efficiently?

One good thing, however, is that many houses would be amenable to their installation, providing personal power stations with very little transmission costs.