The Energy Thread

Surprisingly quiet here about fracking. Been big protests in Balcombe about this (see here, for example), two boys in America are banned for life to even speak about (this), but ths new fracking frenzy seems unstoppable. Injecting chemicals into the earth to get gas, yeah, great idea...

Solar’s Insane Cost Drop

A lot of the price drop reflects China's intensely competitive solar panel manufacturers pricing below total costs (incl. plant & equipment), and a few have or will go into receivership once their bonds come do. Suntech Power, LDK Solar, Shanghai Chaori were the first to default. With the inevitable consolidation, and as the capital costs of solar manufacturing are incorporated into panel prices (demanded by future investors), I suspect we'll see some rebound.

The price collapse has been terrible for the U.S. solar panel industry.

but good for the US installer industry, correct? I mean, I see your point and have read a lot about it, but it's not as if US solar mfg was ever going to be competitive on a global scale.

FTC literally just approved much more restrictive tariffs against an expanded definition of the supply chain, here's a good overview:

http://pv.energytrend.com/research/20140607-6854.html

How many years do you have to have solar before it pays for itself?

depends on which state you're in and the incentives they have in place, look up your state here to get an idea of payback time on 5 KW:

http://www.solarpowerrocks.com/

(lowest payback time in the US right now is around 6 years, I think)

The US solar installer industry is coining it right now. It has some of the most expensive costs of install in the world. Australia and Germany, both nominally higher wage countries can install panels a lot cheaper than the US. It's a bit difficult to pin down why this should be but the sales model (a lot done by leasing) doesn't seem to incentivise competition on total system price.

a lot of it is soft costs, the permitting is s total mess, each city is different. It needs to have standardized national procedures, which will never happen bcuz America.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/509196/why-solar-installations-cost-more-in-the-us-than-in-germany/

the lasing companies don;t seem to care about cost, just how much power they can cram on a roof. I looked at a leasing quote today that had half of the system at a 318 degree azimuth, which would be insanity if you were paying for it yourself.

Ed I'm finally starting to see some installers in higher volume areas get down below $1 per watt, FYI

CLUI looks at the big solar farms being built in the SW: http://blog.art21.org/2014/06/10/solar-boom-a-possible-energy-future/#.U5h3ZPRdXbA

It's interesting because the Australian market competes based on how cheap it can make a nominal 'system'. Maximum inverter size is capped depending on who your distribution network provider is and that cap can be quite small, as low as 3kW i n some areas. The advertising sticker price is some number below $3000, you might see reference to a number of panels in the advert but rarely will you see any mention of the capacity of the system. I suspect the sales process is very much like buying a car and it's almost impossible to get the sticker price.

for any policy geeks out there, the Hawaii grid situation is fascinating/horrifying right now:

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/hawaii-crosses-the-energy-rubicon

(speaking of system caps)

Hawaii thing is crazy. we've done some work there (and tried to get more) but omg it is such a nightmare dealing with them

I mean this is just insane:

MECO had been curtailing 28 percent of the output from three wind farms in deference to its own, more expensive, oil-fired generation. This was wasting almost 16 gigawatt-hours of power a year -- a number expected to rise to more than 54 gigawatt-hours.

fucking utilities

Without knowing more I can't be exact but it is not always possible to curtail the output of a thermal plant below a certain value and stopping and starting a thermal plant can be expensive and time consuming. This is the nature of base load power. Without large scale energy storage we are going to see more and more of these anomalous situations where power at essentially zero marginal cost is being dumped in favour of power with significant marginal costs because of the need to provide a reliable network.

Islanded grids like Hawaii are the canary in the coal mine, the current grid model does not suit renewables and highly distributed generation. Now we have renewables that are at parity, if not cheaper, than traditional fossil options we have to rethink the grid. The grid was designed as a hierarchical centralised system to maximise the efficiency of a few large generators. It needs to transition to a peer-network of smaller distributed generators, storage and loads. Theres obviously the massive issue of incumbent monopolies holding on sunk capital that they expect or have been promised a return on. The model that drove those investments is no longer fit for purpose.

For MECO to move beyond the above situation they would have to write off/down significant assets which is finically untenable and make massive new capital investments in storage so they can dispense with the oil plant. In the mean time more and more customers will discover that they can meet their own needs partially or wholly from solar, storage and other technologies, diminishing revenues for the utilities. The utilities are in a bind of their own making but most people will still need a network to provide reliability, I'm not sure the utilities are agile enough to move to the new model, but they currently own the infrastructure needed to support that model

topping and starting a thermal plant can be expensive and time consuming

this is a big part of the problem in Hawaii as I understand it

"stopping", obv

more on Hawaii today:

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/A-Solar-Permit-Slowdown-is-Chilling-Oahus-Installer-Market

I was referring to their building wind farms before dealing with the tie-in issues, if that wasnt clear. My company was doing some pv feasibility studies for some prospectively huge installations and the big issue we came up against was tying them into the grid, regulatory issues, etc. Their regulatory framework is totally fucked up and outdated. HECO is going to have to eat some capital losses, there's no way around it.

paging Ed...

somewhere on ILX (I don't think it's in this thread), you discussed the process by which you/your employer were "writing down" oil assets? Can you maybe find that for me?

If anybody else can dig it up, thanks in advance

kind of bump, because actually i'd be quite interested in that as well, but also to record a chance encounter flying back from Glasgow earlier in the year, that had a slightly Ballardian flavour to it.

Had taken my seat by the window, and a well-groomed late thirties early forties man in a relaxed but expensive suit sat down beside me, having had a short discussion in Spanish with the person in front, and then turned to me said hello, and asked me what I'd been up to in Glasgow, in the accents of 'international English', (slightly soft 'classless' tones and deracinated vowels) which, being expressive of a non-English-speaking background is quite exotic and appealing to me. I explained briefly, wary of a bore, but felt it was polite to ask him also what he'd been doing.

Turned out he'd been setting up an offshore windfarm. He was an an engineer who specialised in renewable energy. This was certainly interesting enough to want to continue, and he told me a bit about the engineering challenge about fixing large windmills in often turbulent seas, and the heavy duty sub-marine structures required.

I said I felt that as an industry outsider it was often difficult to get a sense about the effectiveness of renewable energy from the press and media generally.

He gave me a bit of energy 101 (stuff i could have probably worked out, but which it was useful to be told clearly and by an expert) - that the big problem was not generating energy, it was storing it, and that for anything bigger than a mid-sized house, batteries were unfeasible. He also pointed out that the only large-scale battery or way to store energy available on earth had used the same technology for thousands of years, which was that of damming reservoirs.

The well-known consequent problem for energy sources like windfarms and solar power being that their main power sources are variable and intermittent in force.

The UK energy sector is required to use any resources of renewable energy *before* using non-renewable energy power generation. I need to be careful about my terminology here because, as this person pointed out, renewable energy is not the same as 'clean' energy necessarily, and 'clean' or 'green' energy is not the same as renewable energy. Renewable energy sources include wind and solar power, but also chip-wood burning generators (a quickly growing industrial use a friend of mine who started out as a woodcutter and woodland manager is currently making a sizable amount of cash from). 'Clean' energy can, I believe, also include nuclear energy, which is not renewable. Some of this categorisation is ignored or confused in much media coverage I think.

I asked if we'd reach a stage where we could rely totally on renewable energy (let's stick with that phrase for the moment). He said that in fact there have been numerous days in recent years where 100% of the UK's energy requirements had been sourced using renewable energy. However, at times of high levels of usage, the amount generated wasn't sufficient for national requirements.

There is a slogan, he said, being used in the industry and in government, which is 20 by 20 - that is to say, 20% of yearly energy use being provided using renewable energy by the year 2020, and I believe that a 25% level was being set for 2025.

What were the biggest challenges? He asked me how long I expected a power plant to be in use for. I suggested a couple of generations. He said it was about 25 years. He then asked what sort of time frames banks looked at when investing. 7 years? He said it was actually more like 14, but with a 7 year break/assessment point. Then he asked how long governments tended to plan for, and I laughed and said 'an electoral cycle?' and he said 'right.'

He explained the challenge they had was securing the large amount of funding required to set up a windfarm, and his job, which was in part salesman (unsurprisingly, given his smooth but not unpleasing conversation), was to secure funding from lots of different places.

There are some more details, which were probably interesting, but which I've forgotten, but we moved on to talk a bit about my work and some of the challenges there, and also about his family, and it was here that I felt something almost sinister sitting to one side of him, something in the way he talked about his wife and children. It was very proprietorial, there was a strange sense of anger and need to control that seemed to come from frustrations with his father. They 'won't do' this, of course 'they don't understand the details'.

We disembarked at City airport, but happened to meet again on the tube from City, and he struck up conversation in a more jocular tone, about what men could expect from women - something along the lines of 'you've got to know how to get what you want, right?' followed by a wink. I found all this allied with his general bland approachability and appearance, and clear intelligence, unpleasant and irritating, especially as I've always been terrible at knowing how to get what I want, or even what I want in the first place, and perhaps slightly naively dislike generic assumptions about men and women, or me for that matter. The sinister configurations or disjunctions of his personality, which had been only latent or possibly even projected earlier in the journey, had now become more clearly visible - these configurations being unreformed personal beliefs as hidden components of his futuristic manner and job. It was this that reminded me of Ballard.

He gave me his card and said I should get in touch as it had been pleasant talking to me. I think I may have thrown it away, though it may be buried in with the heap of other business cards lying around in drawers at home. I felt both repulsed and intrigued - I have no desire to see him at all again, and am at the same time curious to know more.

What in the world is Lockheed Martin smoking

The annoucement seems premature, as all Skunk Works® has announced to date is a plasma chamber where the plasma provides most of the magnetic field confinement, structured so the field increases as particles depart the high pressure/fusing zone. LM is speculating the small size and short development cycles of its design will permit ramping up pressures and energy payback in a way that's not possible for massive tokamaks of the traditional magnetic confinement approach.

A talk from Charles Chase on LM's design from last December.
http://www.youtube.com/JAsRFVbcyUY?t=4m37s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsRFVbcyUY

There's no discussion from LM on how they'll deal with the 14.1 MeV neutrons flying out at 0.173 c from the deuterium-tritium fusion cycle. These cause all sorts of problems like transmution, embrittlement and cracking in reactor materials. Nor how they'll source their tritium, a rather expensive material. They're probably planning on breeding it by irradiating a lithium blanket within the reactor with all those neutrons, but even ITER isn't sure how that will pan out.

Most of this stuff is well beyond my expertise, but I've been casually following fusion research since I first learned the word "tokamak" in a 1980 Omni magazine article.

Man this sounds promising.

most of the reaction I've seen is people acting like this is totally bunk, but would Lockheed fucking Martin just come out with something silly like that?

I know there's other things in the news but this seems like a big deal.

I like the part where every revision doesn't require a bunch of different governments to pony up billions of dollars.

The more I look into it, the more I think tritium supplies will be the obstacle to D-T fusion. The ITER project (alone) will use most of the world supply, and I'm not convinced breeding tritium in a lithium blanket (basically, use molten lithium as the plasma chamber coolant, and pull ditritium gas from it) will work. And of course, if it does work, everyone with one of these can turn any fission triggers in their arsenal into much higher yield H-bombs. So much for powering volatile Africa or South Asia.

Tesla Powerwall is back-ordered through the summer of 2016 already:

http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/6/8561931/tesla-38000-powerwall-preorders-announced

Forbes is not impressed:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2015/05/01/why-teslas-powerwall-is-just-another-toy-for-rich-green-people/

paging Ed...

somewhere on ILX (I don't think it's in this thread), you discussed the process by which you/your employer were "writing down" oil assets? Can you maybe find that for me?

If anybody else can dig it up, thanks in advance

― sleeve, Wednesday, October 1, 2014 8:41 AM (7 months ago)

Its basic accounting - the assets in question are judged unlikely to be worth the value they're carried on the books, so some or all of the "book value" is removed from the assets column on the balance sheet, and becomes a loss on the income / P & L sheet. Its a paper loss, not representing a current unrecovered cash outflow, but because it reduces income a write down can be used to reduce tax liabilities.

There's a fight going on in Nevada that contains, in microcosm, all the struggles and challenges that face utilities in the 21st century.

It centers on a Las Vegas–based company called Switch, which runs power-hungry data centers in southern Nevada. Like many firms these days, Switch wants electricity that is cheaper and cleaner than what it can get through its local utility, NV Energy. In fact, Switch wants to go 100 percent renewable.

So it asked the Nevada public utility commission (henceforth PUCN) for permission to defect from the utility and procure its own power on the open market. Four big casino companies — Wynn Las Vegas, MGM Resorts International, Caesars, and the Las Vegas Sands Corp. — got in line behind it, requesting to jump ship as well.

Yesterday, the PUCN rejected the application, saying that Switch would have to stay in the fold a bit longer.

What's going on? How can a company defect from a utility at all? And why wasn't Switch allowed to do so? And what does it all mean? Good questions!

http://www.vox.com/2015/6/12/8767927/switch-nevada-utility

tone of that article is really grating

Consumers are quickly coming to view energy not as a utility commodity like tap water but as a differentiated collection of products and services, a bazaar at which they should be allowed to shop.

consumers are fucking stupid then

This is exciting: http://electrek.co/2016/05/02/price-solar-power-fell-50-16-months-dubai-0299kwh/

those are big utility projects, so the cost metric is a bit skewed towards razor-thin margins, but yes it is impressive and encouraging.

ok i watched one of the kirk sorenson thorium videos and i've totally drunk the kool-ade. let's do this

yeah i've been curious about it for a while now, and the cynic in me says (w/o data) that we're not using it because a) there's some fatal flaw that isn't being reported or b) Big Energy interests are actively suppressing it

when they realise all you need to do to acquire it is send out a truck to drive over fields of it they'll love it

admittedly the video i watched is redolent of the sort of conspiracy theory magnum opuses the internet excels in but sorensen says several times that he thought the same thing - "there's some fatal flaw that isn't being reported" - and went to grad school in Knoxville to find out, and everybody was like nope, you're right

the bit of the video that i actually found most interesting i still don't quite understand - about producing jet fuel out of seawater (related vid here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_3495016107 ). the guy makes a good point about aviation: electric planes don't exist and won't exist. you still need some kind of energy-dense hydrocarbon to make these things fly. but how any of that relates to nuclear i don't quite get

ah i guess the idea is that the electricity required for electrolysis has to come from somewhere? and that's where thorium (or what have you) comes in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9TR9G5bd7w
I don't know if there has been any talk about DAPL around here, it's something I've been following closely.

kinda wish there was a thread for #NODAPL, we'll see where it goes after today. heavy shit going down.

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/10/27/developing_100_militarized_police_demolishing_nodapl

from yesterday:

https://cldc.org/2016/10/26/update-militarized-police-presence-at-standing-rock/

https://www.tesla.com/solar

this seems Actually Good

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/8/31/17799094/california-100-percent-clean-energy-target-brown-de-leon

Energy industry is fucking bonkers right now, so much is happening in CA

see also: new cash rebates for battery storage being offered in CA and HI