Solar is going to overtake everything.. - admin - 08-23-2013
One of the country’s top regulators explains why he is so bullish on solar.
Herman K. Trabish: August 21, 2013
If anybody doubts that federal energy regulators are aware of rapidly changing electricity landscape, they should talk to Jon Wellinghoff, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
“Solar is growing so fast it is going to overtake everything,” Wellinghoff told GTM last week in a sideline conversation at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas.
If a single drop of water on the pitcher’s mound at Dodger Stadium is doubled every minute, Wellinghoff said, a person chained to the highest seat would be in danger of drowning in an hour.
“That’s what is happening in solar. It could double every two years," he said.
Indeed, as GTM Research's MJ Shiao recently pointed out, in the next 2 1/2 years the U.S. will double its entire cumulative capacity of distributed solar -- repeating in the span of a few short years what it originally took four decades to deploy.
Chart: GTM Research/SEIA U.S. Solar Market Insight
Geothermal, wind, and other resources will supplement solar, Wellinghoff said. “But at its present growth rate, solar will overtake wind in about ten years. It is going to be the dominant player. Everybody’s roof is out there.”
And those other resources have not seen declining prices like solar has. “Solar PV is $0.70 or $0.80 per watt to manufacture. Residential rooftop is $4 to $5 per watt. But they are going to drive that down to $2 and then to $1 per watt.”
Advanced storage technologies also promise lower costs, he said. “Once it is more cost-effective to build solar with storage than to build a combustion turbine or wind for power at night, that is 'game over.' At that point, it will be all about consumer-driven markets.”
Wellinghoff was a consumer advocate early in his career and has not changed sides. “Even though the FERC oversees wholesale markets, utilities, and other jurisdictional entities at the wholesale level, the consumer needs to be our major concern," he said.
If FERC does not ensure the grid is ready to integrate the growing marketplace demand for distributed solar and other distributed resources, Wellinghoff said, “We are going to have problems with grid reliability and overall grid costs.”
Transmission infrastructure will be able to keep up with solar growth. The big changes will be at the distribution level where FERC has less influence, he explained. But the commission has been examining the costs and benefits of distributed generation (DG) in wholesale markets.
“Rate structures need to be formulated in ways that fully recognize the costs and benefits of distributed resources,” Wellinghoff said. “In many utility retail rates, a disproportionate amount of the fixed costs are recovered through a variable rate. That is problematic when a lot of people go to distributed generation.”
The net metering controversy this has caused at utilities like Xcel and Arizona Public Service, he said, can only be resolved by “the fully allocated, fully analyzed cost and benefit study of distributed resources.”
There is value in distributed solar, Wellinghoff said, “that can be captured and realized by the distribution utility that is not being paid to PV system owners because they have not been analyzed, quantified, and monetized.”
The Crossborder Energy study in California concluded the benefits of DG are near retail rates, he noted. “If utilities say that study is wrong, let’s get their studies and the studies from the solar side, and let’s have a hearing, let’s have full discovery, and let’s have a fully litigated process. That’s what regulatory commissions at the federal and state levels are for, to put all that data on the table and see what the accurate answers are.”
FERC isn’t involved in that process because it is a retail rate issue, Wellinghoff explained. “But DG and distributed solar can be wholesale grid resources if a wholesale grid operator can access those resources and have some control over them. What FERC has to do is ensure these distributed systems get recognized and compensated and integrated into the wholesale grid.”
If he was put in charge of updating the retail utility business model and pushing it to incorporate DG, Wellinghoff said, he would introduce more competition.
“I would unbundle utility services,” he said. “I would do a full analysis of anything not now competitive, like the distribution system, and then try to ensure I could recover costs in a way that adequately reflected all costs and benefits for all users.”
The sales of retail energy, capacity, and ancillary services should all be competitive and coupled with the wholesale grid, he said.
“Consumers should have access to and be able to respond to five-minute wholesale prices. They should have the opportunity -- not the requirement, but the opportunity -- to respond to those prices and modify their loads and usages to lower their energy costs. The result would be an optimized use of the grid.”
Watch Wellinghoff answer a caller's question about distributed solar:
RE: Solar is going to overtake everything.. - admin - 08-25-2013
Here's another cracker from Pritchard, although I have argued much of this stuff for years, so I can hardly disagree 
US marines go to war in Afghanistan with solar cells embedded in their rucksacks, efficient enough to recharge lithium-ion batteries for radios and greatly lighten loads.
Field patrols will soon have almost weightless solar blankets as well. These will be able to capture a once unthinkable 35pc of the sun's light as energy with thin membranes, a spin-off from technology used in satellites.
This new kit is a military imperative. Taliban ambushes of supply convoys are a major killer. The Pentagon says the cost of refueling forward bases is $400 a gallon.
The US Naval Air Weapons Station already relies on a 14 megawatt array of solar panels in California's Mojave desert for a thrid of its power. Pearl Harbour will soon follow as the Pentagon goes off-grid, better shielded from enemies.
The US Navy will derive half its energy supply from renewables by the end of this decade, according to a report entitled Enlisting the Sun: Powering the U.S. Military with Solar Energy, by the US solar industry (SEIA). It may be a stretch to say that the US Naval Research Laboratory is the vanguard of the world's green revolution, but not a big stretch.
"The US Defence Department is racing ahead. This could be like the semiconductor industry in 1980s where the military changed the game," said Jeremy Leggett, chairman of Solarcentury.
Nor is the Pentagon alone. Grant lists from the "SunShot Initiative" of the US Energy Department show that America's top research institutes are grappling with each of the key issues that have bedevilled solar energy for so long.
Los Alamos - home of the Manhattan Project - is working on smart grids and better ways to capture excess electricity produced in peak sunlight hours. The Argonne labs are working on thermal energy storage to overcome "intermittency", the curse of solar and wind.
Oak Ridge is testing coatings that increase durability of solar panels eightfold. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is working on a CO2 power cycle that could achieve 90pc thermal efficiciency and does not require water, transforming the propects of desert solar.
The quest for renewables has quietly become a national endeavour of the world's paramount superpower, still home to 18 of the world's top 20 universities. The Japanese are no slouches either. They are spending $200m on a thermal storage project in Hokkaido using vanadium in electrolyte tanks. All this ferment will surely have consequences, though what and when is hard to predict.
The US Energy Department expects the cost of solar power to fall by 75pc between 2010 and 2020. By then average costs will have dropped to the $1 per watt for big solar farms, $1.25 for offices and $1.50 for homes, achieving the Holy Grail of grid parity with new coal and gas plants without further need for subsidies.
The current average in the US ranges from $5.30 for homes to as low as $2.50 for some utilities, though the figures are hotly disputed. Germany is further ahead, down to $2.25 to $2.50 even for homes. Broadly speaking, costs are down by a quarter over the past year due to the flood of cheap Chinese panels.
The Department expects a "nonlinear" surge in solar expansion once the key threshold is reached, "paving the way for rapid, large-scale adoption of solar electricity across the US", with solar providing 27pc of the country's power by the middle of the century. If so, solar may prove to be the bigger story than shale in the end.
"This could take off very fast and catch a lot of people by surprise. The oil and gas industry is starting to smell that renewables are really dangerous for them," said Mr Leggett.
Like all solar survivors, he has emotion invested in his dream, and the prospect of vindication is sweet. What is new is that big global banks are starting to agree. Earlier this year UBS published a report on the “unsubsidised solar revolution”, arguing that every rooftop in Italy, Spain and even Germany should have a solar cover based purely on hard economics.
"We believe the solar sector is at an inflection point," says Vishal Shah from Deutsche Bank. "It has passed the tipping point for grid parity in 10 major markets worldwide."
Deutsche Bank said the dramatic fall in the price of solar panels to between $0.60 and $0.70 per watt - lower than thought possible five years ago - has already rendered solar power competitive "without subsidies" in Japan, South Korea, Australia, Italy, Greece, Spain, Israel, South Africa, Chile, Southern California, Hawai and Chile - in some cases because electricity prices are ruinous. (Italy's solar is not efficient but electricity retails at $0.38 per kilowatt hour, compared with $0.15 in Germany and the UK).
These regions could be joined within three years by Thailand, Mexico, Argentina, Turkey and India, among others. Mr Shah said emerging markets are likely to embrace solar over the next decade for hard-headed commercial reasons, without the need for government subsidies. "Solar is now cheaper compared with diesel-based electricity generation in many markets such as India and Africa," he said.
This does not mean necessarily that Germany has benefited much from its head-long rush into solar, a decade too early for its own good. Households have been bled to subsidise the green dream. Around €100bn or more has been frittered away on costly feed-in tariffs. German investors have lost their shirts on a string of solar ventures that have gone bankrupt. The gains leaked out to copycat companies in China, able to undercut German rivals in their own market with cheap labour and giveaway credit.
Such are the perils of being a "first mover", a fate that Britain knows well. It is a reminder too that advances in solar technology do not easily translate into profits for solar companies. They are tearing each apart in cut-throat competition. Yet Germany surely did the rest us a favour by cracking photovoltaics at a crucial moment, and for that we have a debt of gratitude.
Whatever you think about that episode, it is now behind us. Solar technology is advancing on every front with the rush of history. A team at Oxford University is working on perovskite, a cheap and abundant material that may slash the costs of solar panels by 75pc to under $0.20 per watt. While normal silicon layers are 180 micrometres thick, perovskite can capture the same amount of sunlight with one micrometrr, according to MIT Technology Review.
In Australia, the University of New South Wales is probing a mix of screen-printing techniques and use of semiconductors that boost solar efficiency to 50pc. Labs in Wisconsin have found ways to undercut silicon with carbon nanotubes. That alone does not do much to lower the "soft costs" of solar installation, now the biggest barrier, but Germany's experience has shown that scale can work wonders.
The race is on: somebody, somewhere, is soon going to deliver grid parity with a clarity that silences all critics. Then we can all forget about subsidies for solar, and tax it instead, a future cash cow.
Goldman Sachs published a report last week entitled Time to renew interest in renewables?, a straw in the wind perhaps.
The message is to shun static - dare I say Luddite - assumptions about the limits of solar power. "Human ingenuity should not be underestimated," it said. Nor should the US military be underestimated.
RE: Solar is going to overtake everything.. - admin - 04-11-2014
The Solar Industry Has Been Waiting 60 Years For This To Happen — And It Finally Just Did
ROB WILE
APR. 10, 2014, 10:26 AM http://static4.businessinsider.com/assets/images/sprites.png?1397056133); padding: 1px 0px 0px 12px; position: relative; color: rgb(241, 30, 30); background-position: -300px 0px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat;" title="views">10,397
It's now a question of how and where, not if, solar becomes a dominant force in energy markets.
AllianceBernstein's Michael Parker and Flora Chang published a note last week with the following chart showing how rapidly the cost of solar on a real-dollars-per-million-BTU equivalent basis has, in many instances, come to match that of conventional fuels.
Nothing else looks like this. And the title of the chart, Welcome to the Terrordome, reflects this almost violent decline in solar pricing.
AllianceBernstein
The authors write:
Exhibit 2 is the chart the solar industry has been working towards for 60 years. Solar is now – in the right conditions – cheaper than oil and Asian LNG on an MMBTU basis. Yes, we are using utility- scale solar costs in developing markets with lots of sun. But that describes the growth markets for global energy today. For these markets solar is just cheap, clean, convenient, reliable energy. And since it is a technology, it will get even cheaper over time. Fossil fuel extraction costs will keep rising. There is a massive global market for cheap energy and that market is oblivious to policy changes at the NDRC, MITI, the EU or the CPUC.
Solar still makes up only a tiny fraction of overall energy usage on an absolute basis — about 0.17%. But it's an unstoppable trend.
For now, this minuscule starting point is great for investors, Parker and Chang say, because it will continue to be more attractive than oil and gas prices, which are set to keep climbing. Bernstein's notoriously bullish energy team forecasts an oil price of $150 by 2020. Parker also explains that if utilities try to respond, growth in the storage market will accelerate.
As solar costs fall, the price that end markets will pay for solar energy is set by oil and remains unchanged. The solar industry (upstream and downstream) collects all of the value created by improvements in the technology. The behavior from here seems clear: the solar industry will expand. Retaliatory steps from distribution utilities will increase the market for cost-effective battery storage. This becomes – initially – a secondary market for battery technologies being developed for the auto sector. A failed battery technology in the auto sector (too hot, too heavy, too rigid a form factor) might well be perfect for the home energy storage market.... with an addressable end market of 2 billion backyards.
But there's another, Terrordome-esque scenario Parker outlines, which he calls global energy deflation. It would be great news for consumers, but investors would get killed. He uses the crude forward curve as a reference point:
AllianceBernstein
He writes:
...the risk is that I am being too conservative. It may be that oil and gas producers sitting on large reserves will not wait for deflating energy prices a decade from now before changing behavior. Rather, the expectation of energy deflation may be enough. If the downward sloping forward curve is ever accepted as permanent, rational behavior from energy producers will guarantee it is so. Sitting on oil and gas reserves for the benefit of generations yet to come ceases to be a rational strategy if that reserve represents a depreciating rather than an appreciating asset. This is the hidden flaw with the "equal and opposite/ too small to matter" formulation. Ultimately what may kill the solar sector – and every other part of the energy market – for equity investors is not renewable technology and battery storage turning into behemoths, but the realization of that future as inevitable.
Actually, solar utilities seem to have been around for longer than 60 years. We dug through the Library of Congress' image archives to find a solar water heater dated 1929 (PDF):
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/solar-price-terrordome-chart-2014-4#ixzz2yV3953q4
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