The Breakthrough Energy Coalition

Umbran said:

I don't have lots of time to dig up sources, as I'm at work. However, the International Energy Agency says:

"The median cost of producing so-called baseload power that is available all the time from natural gas, coal and atomic plants was about $100 a megawatt-hour for 2015 compared with about $200 for solar, which dropped from $500 in 2010. Those costs take into account investment, fuel, maintenance and dismantling of the installations over their lifetimes and vary widely between countries and plants."

The key to note is that solar has halved its price in the past five years. The price is expected to continue to drop. Fossil fuel energy has remained fairly constant, and is only likely to rise. And this is apples to apples - just as building new renewable energy has a cost, so does maintaining old fossil fuel infrastructure - those turbines need to be replaced too, you know.

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Yes, it did. Mostly between 2010 and the end of 2012. Since then the drop in price has drastically slowed. This is the expected curve of any fringe technology that gets pushed forward -- it rapidly declines in price as it gets ramped up and then goes into a much shallower cost curve as efficiencies in manufacturing and scale are achieved. Solar's already had it's big price drop. Absent an unforseen breakthough (which is possible in any field, even oil), solar will only maginally reduce in cost in the future.

Yep. But the results aren't radioactive! And the turbines in a farm can be taken out and replaced individually, and upgraded as technology gets better, without shutting down the entire farm, or needing a whole new installation. You can maintain a windfarm pretty much forever, rather than having to have major toxic and radioactive waste cleanups and abandon sites. This is similar for solar power, with the note that it is even better suited for distributed power generation. The renewables are, in a word, sustainable, where a nuclear plant very much isn't.

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The actual waste produced by modern designs is 1) very small and 2) not as radioactively dangerous. The really bad waste comes from older designs no one would use anymore (HWRs) and breeder reactors who's point was to create large amounts of refined fissiles which results in a lot of waste. The Hanford site and the Savannah site, both used to create bomb material, are great examples of this.

Modern thorium salt models have much longer lifespans, dramatically improved safety profiles, and produce much less and much less dangerous waste. Plus it's easier to get thorium than uranium.

In short, you can't put wind farms against the dinosaurs of the reactors we have to today as a solid point against pursuing a comprehensive nuclear strategy.

Also, as a side point, the production of wind turbines involves rare earth processing, which is an environmental nightmare. There are lakes so toxic in China right now to provide the magnets in wind turbines that it makes Chernobyl look clean.

Two techs that have shown massive reduction in cost in the past decade - and the breakthroughs in storage required are not terribly massive. Heck, the Tesla Powerwall has technology sufficient for home use already, though they need in increase scale of production to bring the cost down.

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Again, the reduction is price is expected engineering economics. That reduction is at an end. And they're still to expensive to compete without direct and massive subsidies.

The Tesla powerwall, like much of Tesla's offerings, isn't quite as pretty as the press releases would have you believe. There's no new technology in there, and you can't build them at the scale necessary. Like, cannot build them. There's not enough resources to do so.

"World science groups"? Can't even name them? Cite, please.

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The IPCC, maybe, which indicated that there is no discernible increase in severe weather or drought in the world? Multiple other studies that do not find such connections? The study most cited used an uncertain model to diagnose that the drought was only more likely, but still could be naturally caused?

Severe weather has not increased worldwide. It hasn't gotten worse. These are facts. It's impossible to separate out attribution for weather right now.

Don't be condescending. It was a simple editing error - replace "your mitigation" with "your adaptation". Basically, failing to eliminate the problem means that regional weather and climate disasters will continue to destabilize the lesser-developed areas of the world, one after another. Have fun adapting to brush wars. Have even more fun when one of then is a nuclear power.

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Ha! Okay, Pot, I can see that it as a mistaken usage.

But there's no evidence of increased climate disasters, so....

Changes due to climate change are predicted to be on the span of decades to one century. As in, sea level rise of another foot above the current level by 2050 is in the middle of the expected range. This doesn't sound like much - probably no nee dto build a wall for that, even, right! Except that the effect of storm surges becomes magnified.

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None of the predicted outcomes from 20 years ago hold today. Severe weather and drought are flat. None from 10 years ago hold. The arctic still has ice (more than it did 10 years ago, even). There are no skillful projections of changes. Sea level rise has been constant for more than 100 years, with no evidence of acceleration. All of those things might happen, sure, but they also might not. There's zero evidence of catastrophic impacts as of now.

Wow. Sweeping, unsupported statements. Great.

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Wow. Sarcastic dismissal without rebuttal. Great.

Yes, or something more dense and even less biodegradeable. The problem is that in order to take atmospheric CO2 and make a plastic out of it, you are basically reversing the burning process - you have to put in *at least* as much energy as you'd get out of totally burning that plastic, which is about the same as burning the same mass of oil (give or take a bit). This can probably make this an industrial-scale process, but on the scale required the energy issue is a problem.

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Whelp, there isn't any less energy intensive method of polymerization, so unless you have a matter converter hidden away somewhere....

It sequesters the plastic, yes, but does virtually nothing to hasten the demise of dependence on oil.

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Sure it does -- I buy more plastic bottles to replace the ones I've thrown away, thereby buying more oil. Think globally, act locally, right?

Ovinomancer said:

< snip massive amounts of verbiage > . . .
The Tesla powerwall, like much of Tesla's offerings, isn't quite as pretty as the press releases would have you believe. There's no new technology in there, and you can't build them at the scale necessary. Like, cannot build them. There's not enough resources to do so.
< snip more massive amounts of verbiage > . . .

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Right about the Powerwall, wrong in principle: Yes, Lithium is in short supply -- but lead isn't.
The main users of backup storage may end up being Electric Utility companies, who can spare the space to house large amounts of deep-cycle lead-based batteries to store power during the day, to be released during peak usage hours. The typical homeowner doesn't have the room for that, but power companies can buy whole building lots, or even sizable acreage, to house their solar-powered energy storage. The space wouldn't be a problem for them, and the shortage of lithium wouldn't apply.
It's simply a matter of will and pocketbook: is it economically feasible to use solar as an energy source, given that it will need battery backup? Further, what's the replacement cost as the lead-based batteries wear out? This depends partly upon the design, of course. Technological improvements are making batteries better, too.

Article: Houston is planning to buy solar energy from Hecate Energy at 4.8 cents per kilowatt hour, from a project near Alpine, Texas.

Article: Cheaper than Natural Gas:
This one lists a project where NV Energy plans to buy solar energy at 4.6 cents per kilowatt hour from SunPower Corp., as well as a project where NV Energy plans to buy solar energy at 3.87 cents per kilowatt hour from First Solar.

With SunEdison now producing silicon wafers at 99.9999% purity, we're not going to get further leaps of technological improvements in that direction; but we may see efficiencies arising from the difference between N-doping and P-doping of the silicon, and from economies of scale.

tuxgeo said:

Right about the Powerwall, wrong in principle: Yes, Lithium is in short supply -- but lead isn't.
The main users of backup storage may end up being Electric Utility companies, who can spare the space to house large amounts of deep-cycle lead-based batteries to store power during the day, to be released during peak usage hours. The typical homeowner doesn't have the room for that, but power companies can buy whole building lots, or even sizable acreage, to house their solar-powered energy storage. The space wouldn't be a problem for them, and the shortage of lithium wouldn't apply.
It's simply a matter of will and pocketbook: is it economically feasible to use solar as an energy source, given that it will need battery backup? Further, what's the replacement cost as the lead-based batteries wear out? This depends partly upon the design, of course. Technological improvements are making batteries better, too.

Article: Houston is planning to buy solar energy from Hecate Energy at 4.8 cents per kilowatt hour, from a project near Alpine, Texas.

Article: Cheaper than Natural Gas:
This one lists a project where NV Energy plans to buy solar energy at 4.6 cents per kilowatt hour from SunPower Corp., as well as a project where NV Energy plans to buy solar energy at 3.87 cents per kilowatt hour from First Solar.

With SunEdison now producing silicon wafers at 99.9999% purity, we're not going to get further leaps of technological improvements in that direction; but we may see efficiencies arising from the difference between N-doping and P-doping of the silicon, and from economies of scale.

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Lead batteries are a very poor choice due to their rotten volume/energy ratios. It takes a lot of lead to make a battery of sufficient size, and the few projects that are using lead batteries are transitioning away to other types due to the cost and maintenance (lead batteries are high maintenance as well). Also, the only grid level battery installations are for power load balancing, not storage. The Powerwall might help you in your home, if you have the money and space for one, but it's not a grid level solution at all. It's still a novelty.

You should read your links -- the costs for solar below gas are due to the massive Federal subsidies. The first one you link says there is concern because the solar installation has to be up and running by the end of 2016 (it hasn't broken ground yet) in order to qualify for the Federal subsidies and be able to deliver that price. In general, if anything says it's cheaper than nat-gas right now, it's because they're hiding part of the cost. In this case, their hiding it behind the subsidies.

Finally, while doping has an impact, we're at the limit for what can be done with common elements for the doping. There's a fine line in doping where adding more dopant just degrades the crystal matrix, which is what actually allows the semiconductor to work -- ie more doping is harmful past a specific point. That point different depending on the dopant, and there's been years of study on this. The high efficiency cells that are in labs right now all have pretty wild chemistries, and none of them are remotely cost effective (when they can actually stand a non-lab environment, which is also uncommon). We may find something that works better(and I hope so, I keep waiting to read about a cost-effective breakthrough on solar), but it's highly unlikely to be with silicon.

But props for mentioning doping!