I had no idea this was happening. Good news for us treehuggers:
Plunging prices and booming investments are beginning to reshape the energy market, according to a couple of reports that were released this week. A report produced on behalf of Bloomberg says that investments in renewable energy have gone up by roughly a third over the last year, to $211 billion. Led by China’s renewable push, the world is now on a trajectory that will see its investments in renewable electricity surpass those in fossil fuels within a year or two. As a result of these investments, the US is now producing more renewable energy than nuclear power. …
Part of the reason is cost. Although wind turbines are very mature technology now, their cost per MW still fell by 18 percent over the last two years; photovoltaics have dropped a staggering 60 percent in that time. “Further improvements in the levelised cost of energy for solar, wind and other technologies lie ahead, posing a bigger and bigger threat to the dominance of fossil-fuel generation sources in the next few years,” according to the report’s authors.
This is worldwide. The US is lagging a bit behind but if expenditures on expanded renewable energy capacity stays on the same trajectory, “we’ll be investing more in renewables either this year or next,” than is being spent on fossil fuel power plants. Also, too, no more justification for building new nuke facilities. Win-win. [Via the Great Orange Satan.]
Martin
Regulation helps. Almost 70% of all solar tied to the grid (in the US) is in CA. The state has pushed power providers consistently on renewable power and it’s paid off. Hasn’t cost the state a penny, either, and what would you know – most of the nations solar industry is in California.
BR
This is a bit misleading, in that most of that renewable energy comes from decades old mega-size hydro, not from wind or solar or geothermal or any of the alternatives we think of as modern. And the scale at which those are being built is still small relative to total electricity (or energy) consumption.
Judas Escargot
The Numbers always win in the end.
Always.
BO_Bill
Here we BEHOLD a central Tenent of the Progressive religion. LO, thy wind shall not pause and thy sun shall not go down. FURTHERMORE, electricity can be stored. Pass the plate, pass legislation, and donate to General Electric, Generations Investment, LLC, David Blood of Goldman Sachs in particular, Goldman Sachs as a whole in general, and Al Gore, whose house you can see from space. It is for the children, brethren. HEED me, or die in fire.
Back to Heretic reality, Europe tried the whole wind thing and determined that wind power will not be able to contribute more than 2% to the overall power grid, in an entirely inefficient manner at that. Here is the pillar of reality: (1) the wind stops; (2) the sun goes down; (3) electric demand is relatively constant; (4) electric power cannot be economically stored; and (5) because of this, for every unit of ‘renewable’ power being used, another unit of good old fashioned generation capacity is sitting there idling inefficiently waiting for the wind to stop and step in.
In short, these solar and wind machines consume more energy than they produce. It is a hoax.
Roger Moore
The key is that we’re getting close to a tipping point. As the price per MW comes down, investment goes up, and that helps to drive further price drops. Once renewables are comparable in price to fossil fuels, investment will really peak and the price will come down fast. The only big hump after that is when it gets cheaper to build a new renewable plant than to keep buying fuel for an amortized fossil fuel plant.
Libby Spencer
@BR if you actually read the link, it does say, “Excluding hydropower, renewables made up about 35 percent of the power capacity added worldwide last year…
Linda Featheringill
Whatever the relative numbers, I am glad to see increasing amounts of investment being placed into alternative energy. That’s good news. If we keep this up, we’ll have a significant amount of wind and solar power someday. And if battery technology forges ahead, we’ll reach the point where most of automobile miles are fueled by wind and solar power.
Bruce S
“Led by China’s renewable push”
Communist Plot!
JGabriel
And thanks to Republican recalcitrance and intransigence with respect to R&D and tax breaks for non-oil power alternatives, the jobs for building solar and wind technologies will all be in Europe, East Asia, and Israel.
Great job, GOP!
.
aisce
yay? yay. progress.
(wouldn’t it have made more sense to just link directly to ars technica?)
MikeJ
Of course since China is more forward looking than the US when it comes to renewables, the wingnuts have a new complaint. A few weeks ago they had a guy talking about solar on SciFri and the very first caller complained about sending money to China to buy renewables.
Liberals like have electricity that doesn’t pollute, so republicans have to hate it.
cleek
sadly, BO_Bill is partially right. there’s just no way wind, solar or hydro can ever be enough to satisfy all our energy needs. it can work in select locations, for part of the demand. but we need something truly revolutionary, to get us off fossil fuels completely.
toujoursdan
One still needs fossil fuels to create renewable energy. So we may reduce it, possibly, temporarily*, but we won’t kick it.
*though with an economic model based on a doctrine of unlimited growth = success, it’s doubtful.
JGabriel
@BO_Bill:
… like a teabagger preaching to progressives.
.
Tonal Crow
Ah, another Republican hoaxster crying “hoax!” The facts are that (1) Europe has concluded that wind can supply approximately 20% of average usage without significant changes to the grid; (2) the wind almost never stops everywhere on a large grid as we have in the U.S.; (3) electricity demand is not “relatively constant”, and systems that modulate demand according to supply (e.g., smart meters controlling large-scale refrigeration) are becoming much more common; (4) electricity can in many cases be economically stored to significant degrees (e.g., via reducing flow through dams, pumping water uphill, molten salt storage) and storage tech is improving; (5) drops in renewable supply are now almost always sufficiently predictable so that spinning reserve need be only a small proportion of renewable capacity; and (6) You’re a hoax.
toujoursdan
#12 – Finding something revolutionary is becoming less and less likely if we continue to cut R&D the way we are.
(But I’m sceptical of relying on the Technology Fairy to save us anyway.)
maya
BO_bill,
Our home is one of those “off the grid” establishments in NorCal. We use no outside grid power,(PG&E). When the sun goes down our house is lit by solar power stored during the day in, ready for this, batteries! That’s how the system works. I have a feeling the same may be true of wind.
Gripes: I’ve got some. Batteries could be far better, as in lasting power. Trogen and pricier batteries are expensive and last about 7 years. Cheaper batteries, less. One really big gripe is just when you get and install an inverter to change DC into AC household power, the manufacturer sells out to a bigger entity who shitcans the better unit and replaces it with a cheaper ,(to them), look-a-like unit that sucks. Then that company in turn sells out to still another gobble and vomit operation and the quality degrades down even further. The problem lies not with the concept and abilities of solar power but with the nuances of the free market capitalist system that almost always results in a free for all downgrade. You know, like how you can’t find an actual quart or half-gallon of ice cream anymore.
Fortunately, we are still using our 13 year old inverter that runs like a champ. Our total electric costs,(battery replacement costs and initial solar power system costs), runs less than $500 per year. Beat that with a stick if you can.
Capt. Fogg
Hoax is a strong word. True, it may not be economically self sustaining, and may not be for years, but it’s too easy to confuse “is not now” and “can’t ever be.”
So much new technology took a long time to become profitable – far more than most people realize – and of course what’s not making money right now is a function of how much things cost right now and oil will never cost less than it does now, now much how much baby drills.
Not now currently producing cash flow or making a profit is not exactly the same thing as saying we can’t ever do it that way, or that there are not important advantages, even if it costs more. Nuclear power is enormously more expensive than anyone dreamed it could possibly be and that argument works the other way too.
Doesn’t the argument really deconstruct to “I don’t like the changes this will require?” and after all, are we not going to get to the $500, $1000, $5000 barrel of oil – and higher? Reality has a habit of making the impractical and even impossible necessary.
That energy is currently difficult to store does not argue that it will always be so. In fact that argument smells more hoaxy than what it’s trying to dispute. I can think of a number of energy storage systems one of which converts current to hydrogen, for instance, which can be stored. There’s a great deal of extrapolation in your argument and we know how that works: nothing will replace the horse, the railroads, the newspaper, etc.
Wait until oil hits $500 a barrel (and this old man expects to see that in his lifetime) and then tell me there are too many barriers to harnessing energy that make it worthless to develop it.
Or you can invest in my cold fusion project – I still have room for more ground floor investors ;-)
Roger Moore
@cleek:
That’s simply not true. There’s a lot of work going into efficient ways of storing renewable power. There’s also quite a bit that could be done with time sensitive pricing that would encourage some power hungry but time insensitive industries to run when power production is peaking. Those aren’t necessarily things that we can complete as quickly as we could replace all our power plants, and they’ll result in a system that doesn’t look much like our current power grid, but they are possible.
gene108
I agree with the last sentence. It costs more to build a new plant of any kind, than keep an existing one operation.
I think the big hump will be when old plants are ready to be shut down or overhauled, would it be cheaper to scrap it and build a renewable energy producing plant?
Anyway, this will have A HUGE impact on the coal producing places in this country. Most of our fossil fuel consumption, with regards to producing electricity comes from coal fired power plants.
Places like West Virginia, which are already struggling economically, will really get hit, if we don’t have a coherent energy policy to put some sort of transition in place, if we ever get close to the “hump(s)” you describe and we start replacing coal fired plants with renewable sources.
Anyway, to ween us off our dependence on foreign oil, we’ll need electric cars.
I’ve given up hope that the U.S. will ever adopt off-the-shelf solutions, to reduce our consumption of foreign oil – which is almost totally locked up in transportation usage – by doing such things as investing in mass transit and making it effective for people to opt to take the bus, rather than drive to work or to get groceries, etc.
Link for 2009 data on electricity production in the USA.
http://www.eia.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epa_sum.html
In 2009 the U.S. generated 1,025,000 megawatts of electricity in total (assuming I’m reading things correctly). About 48,000 megawatts was produced by renewable energy sources.
If we want to supplant king coal, as the major source of our electric power, we really have a long, long, long way to go.
RossInDetroit
Uh, no. Former municipal power company employee here. Power consumption varies tremendously no matter the production source. Fossil fuel generators have one most efficient operating point. This means that most of the time they’re much more wasteful than their design goal.
See, it’s complicated.
Linda Featheringill
I’ll bet that Old Bob doesn’t believe in peak oil, either.
Well, that’s okay. As we all know, believing is what makes things happen and so he’ll probably do all right.
Roger Moore
@gene108:
That will happen gradually. But you also have to consider what happens if there are big spikes in fossil fuel prices. Coal doesn’t have the same kind of short- to mid-term problems with shortages, but a fair amount of our generating capacity comes from natural gas that does.
The other wild card is some kind of carbon pricing, either cap and trade or a straight carbon tax. That could push fossil fuel prices up a lot, and it would hit coal hardest. The interesting point there is that as the renewable energy sector gets bigger, it may get powerful enough to make carbon pricing politically possible.
RossInDetroit
That’s been going on for decades to spread out the load. Buildings were built as far back as the ’70s with air conditioning units that froze water using cheaper off-peak power at night, then used the ice to absorb the HVAC heat load during the day, using far less power during peak load.
They do it because it’s cheaper. As usual, cost is the driver. When oil gets expensive enough and renewable gets more units in the field the economies of scale will drive down the install costs of solar and wind.
Martin
Plug-in electric vehicles. They’re rolling batteries. When conditions are favorable for solar/wind/hydro/etc. then put the excess power in your car, and when conditions are unfavorable, have the house draw off the car.
The typical house uses 30kWh of power per day. The Nissan Leaf has a 24kWh battery. The Tesla has a 53kWh battery.
And I know this will come as a shock, but BOB is full of shit on this: “electric demand is relatively constant”. During summer, daytime demand is almost 10x evening demand. So while solar would create supply when demand is highest, wind tends to pick up in the evening and could be used to charge up vehicles on the surplus capacity. With a smart meter, if you knew that you weren’t planning on going out on a given day (we rarely have both cars out on weekends, for example) you could tell your power system to draw off of one car during the day rather than off the grid. One car would be able to power most CA homes (we use about half the national average of residential power) even during the day in summer.
You add those kinds of efforts up, and even if we can’t get 100% there, we can get pretty damn close.
Origuy
This could be a big deal:
In a hybrid car, you could capture the waste heat from the exhaust and use it to recharge the battery, for example.
Roger Moore
@RossInDetroit:
I was thinking more of heavy industry like aluminum smelting, the kind of industries that are currently located right next to power plants because it’s cheaper to pay extra transportation costs than electrical transmission charges. If intermittent renewables get cheap enough, it might wind up being cost effective to run those industries mostly intermittently to take advantage of the super-cheap power.
RossInDetroit
My brother got a patent on such a device in 2010. It’s used to run small devices in remote places where heat is available but electric power is hard to run.
All thermoelectric processes are very inefficient. I’ve fooled with charging batteries from Peltier modules and the current production is pretty dismal unless you have a huge, sustainable temperature differential.
Martin
Not really. Realize that CA has gone from average household consumption equal to the national average to now half the national average – and power production is up to 20% renewable. And that excludes folks like maya that have added individual power production.
The taxpayers haven’t really had to pay anything for this. It’s all done by regulation. If the other 49 states would get their shit together, they could take big chunks out of the problem in no time, just through conservation.
Citizen_X
Oh, that’s right. It’s far better to send American money to Saudi Arabia to buy oil, so that Saudi royals can support al Queda, so they can kill Americans.
Bill Murray
Harvesting of the vast amounts of energy we currently waste or do not currently use is a huge area of research and is just starting to get into productive applications.
Heck there are even sustainable dance clubs in Europe that generate the needed electrical power from the dancers on the dance floor
http://www.energyharvestingjournal.com/articles/energy-harvesting-dance-floors-00001613.asp
http://www.sustainabledanceclub.com/
Anya
Even the US Army is going green for practical reasons. Here’s 5-Ways the USA Military is Going Green,
nathanlindquist
“Wait until oil hits $500 a barrel (and this old man expects to see that in his lifetime)”
It won’t, but not because peak oil isn’t real. Because the economy can’t run on $500 a barrel oil. Before 200 dollar oil, we will see recession, which knocks prices back down.
Which is also why most of this renewable vs. coal discussion is pointless, because as long as our transportation system is stuck on oil it doesn’t matter how many solar panels we are making.
Chris T.
@Martin: Nonetheless, we do have “a long way to go”, since most of the country is much more backwards than California this way, and California has been plugging away at energy efficiency for about 40 years now. It could easily take the rest of the country 20 to 40 years to catch up, and I at least would call that “a long way to go”. :-)
As for “renewable” intermittency, as several have pointed out, the man with the B.O. has his numbers off by a factor of about 10 to start with. One can run up to about 20% wind power before one has to make “other changes” to the way “the grid” (I put this last in quotes as it is itself a misnomer, there is no single “the” grid) operates. We still have plenty of room for this here in the US. (Some other countries, not so much.)
The biggest change that we should make, in my opinion, is to the “grid supply and demand model”, which boils down to this: “any time anyone wants more (or less) electric power, suppliers must instantly spin up (or down) that additional power”. That is, demand—and nothing but demand—immediately and completely determines supply, at all times. This is the model used under regulated electric suppliers, and is what most consumers see. If there are signals (price or otherwise) that tell consumers about available supply, they are rigid and/or hidden: for instance, one might have a model where “summer” electric costs more, or “daytime” electric costs more, with fixed days and times of summer and/or daytime. Electricity is $.06 per kWh at 6:59:59 AM, and then wham!, 7 AM rolls around and electricity is instantaneously $.12 per kWh. Because, you know, it was twice as abundant one second ago. Or, the power company pays you $20 a year to install a shutoff device on your air conditioner compressor, which they promise to activate for no more than 20 minutes every hour at a time of their choice and not yours, or some similarly inflexible approach.
What we could use instead is “smart appliances” and something more flexible. If suppliers could say “electric energy is now $.12 per kWh but we think it will be $.14 per kWh over the next hour starting 20 minutes from now”, your air conditioner could turn on and grab some “cool” now, at the cheaper price, and then turn off when the price goes up, saving you some money and saving the power company the need for additional generation. If they could signal “the price is now $.14 but will likely drop to $.12 in 10 minutes” your refrigerator could save you some money by letting the temperature inside climb one extra degree.
This kind of thing is, I admit, very hard to get right. Do it wrong and tomorrow’s Enron will screw you over just like yesterday’s did. It will take a whole lot of government regulation to make it work. I am not, I repeat not, calling for “deregulation”. I am saying “regulate differently”.
Joel
In some ways, the best thing that could happen to environmentalism is the depoliticization of it.
gene108
Biggest problem with plug-in electrical cars is only 30% of us (or something like it) have garages, where you can plug your car into to recharge.
If you live in a condo, like myself or apartment, you are SOL.
There has to be a huge investment in infrastructure for plug-in technology to be viable, that I don’t see happening soon.
Maude
@Martin:
Republican governors are going in the opposite direction.
It makes it hard to do anything to save energy. Also, too, the whining about light bulbs.
Suffern ACE
Oh, it has largely been depoliticized, defanged, and bought out years ago.
MikeJ
@Joel:
There is nothing political about it now. Sane people want renewable energy sources. Insane people don’t. Sadly, most of the sane people are in one party. There is nothing environmentalists can do to make insane people sane.
Tonal Crow
No, but there’s something the earth system can do. Alas, it will probably be too late for advanced civilization to survive when the events that even Republicans cannot deny arrive.
bago
RossInDetroit One place with continual thermal flux is going to be datacenters. The amount of energy you could recapture just by tapping on the convectional stream is kind of staggering.
Amir_Khalid
@gene108:
Do those electric-car batteries have to come in a car? I think I see a market for any battery manufacturer with the imagination to repackage them for sale to house and apartment dwellers.
El Cid
The answer, as it apparently is for nearly everything, is the magical wonder of graphene.
Of course, being weirdly magic (electrons traveling through it travel as fast as light would through substances, rather than the slower movements of electrons; it’s also ideal for targeting tumors and works as a substrate for growing organs which causes growth far faster than yet explicable, can be the fastest optical switcher for data traffic, i.e., internet, around, and appears to make ultra-efficient solar cells possible), it turns out that production of graphene may not only be cheap, but might reduce CO2 in the air during its manufacture.
There’s something really weird about this substance. It just does too fucking much.
http colon // news DOT asiaone DOT com/News/Latest%2BNews/Science%2B%2526%2BTech/Story/A1Story20110628-286324.html
AAA Bonds
Another possibility: enhanced geothermal systems (EGS).
http://www.google.org/egs/index.html
Gunner
@Libby (#6) – If you actually read the EIA report, it does include hydroelectric. Your quote is in regards to added capacity, which is different than total energy production. Also note that the EIA includes biomass as renewable, which accounts for 1/2 of the energy production by renewables. Wind and solar, which most people think of when talking about renewables, make up about 12 to 14 percent of the energy production by renewables. Energy production by biomass dumps CO2 into atmosphere, just as fossil fuels do. There is a long way to go, and to say that energy production by renewables has passed nuclear is a result of how energy sources are categorized and is not an accurate statement of the state of wind and solar.
Tonal Crow
Except that biomass grows by removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Thus, as long as we consume biomass at a rate no higher than the rate at which it grows, consuming it does not increase the amount of atmospheric CO2. The problem with fossil fuels is that they consist of CO2 removed from the atmosphere over much longer periods of time than it takes us to mine and burn them.