Solar Power to Grow Sixfold as Sun Becoming Cheapest Resource

[flacaltenn]

The "never!" and "impossible!" crowd will be flashing their slide rules again. Improved storage? Smarter grids? Progress? Duh...
It will work, it will take time. Integrating wind and solar and biomass and yes fossil fuels for a while will have to work. After all eventually somewhere in humanity's future the non-renewables will run out (by definition). What then?

The naysayers are ridiculous. Solar power is improving daily; it's only a matter of time until we can store enough energy from the sun to use through the night. We're currently using dinosaur sludge to get energy that originally came from the sun, and they think it's impossible that it will eventually be more efficient to get it directly from the source. History will remember them as fools that hindered human progress.

The commercial versions of PV panels have not seen dramatic improvement in about a decade now. Prices have plunged making it a MATURE technology. And YES --- in lab -- if money is no object -- you can build more efficient panels. Ones that NEVER be used for commercial use -- but might be on a Mars Rover or a military vehicle.

But to do that -- you go mine a LOT of Arsenic or platinum or other rare materials. Because Gallium Arsenide has been known to boost PV panel performance since the 60s. There's no free lunch in actual design of this stuff.. And speaking of fools -- these "clean, green" ideas start getting REALLY dirty when you watermelons start advocating a MEGA ton waste stream of batteries or covering up the bird of prey deaths from wind farms, or wanting to mine Arsenic to make better solar panels.

First - bird deaths. An Environment Canada study listed the top ten causes of avian mortality. #1 - cats. While we think our sweet pet is just out wandering the alley ways catcams show that it may be out killing 10 - 12 birds a night. Responsible for +/- 200 million deaths per year. Next - powerlines, collisions and electrocutions. 25 mil. #3 collisions with houses or buildings, 25 mil. #4 Collisions with vehicles, 14 mil.
The list goes through pesticides, agricultural mowing, forestry, game bird hunting - 5 mil. and communication towers - 220,000. Windfarms didn't make the list of the top 9. They say 16,700 birds died in their fans but caution turbines are expected to grow 10 fold over the next decade. U.S. stats could be expected to mirror ours I expect when adjusted for numbers. I'm not sure how the special case of Birds of Prey would fit in, no doubt wind farms would be more deadly proportionately for them because of their size and habits.

Okay, I've heard you describe solar as a "mature" technology before. I still can't see solar fitting into that definition. Every year there has been improvements in it's efficiency and research and development is accelerating not decreasing or remaining stagnant.

The top purple (at 46% efficiency) I believe are solar cells with Gallium arsenide chemistry. You can see the steady increase in efficiency over the last decade or so. The short orange line at the bottom is the newest technology in the spotlight. Gizmag says "Researchers at the University of Toronto have manufactured and tested a new type of colloidal quantum dots (CQD), that, unlike previous attempts, doesn't lose performance as they keep in contact with oxygen. The development could lead to much cheaper or even spray-on solar cells, as well as better LEDs, lasers and weather satellites." It's a nano technology where "A quantum dot is a nanocrystal made out of a semicondutor material which is small enough to take advantage of the laws of quantum mechanics" And "In the case of solar cells, quantum dots are used as the absorbing photovoltaic material. The dots have the advantage of having a band gap that can be tuned simply by changing the size of the nanoparticles, and so they can be easily made to absorb different parts of the solar spectrum." At this early stage Quantum Dot efficiency is very low but "Although eight percent efficiency is much less than commercially-available panels, quantum dot solar cells ultimately have the potential to become more efficient than their silicon counterparts because a single photon can be made to excite multiple electrons inside the cell.
With colloidal quantum dots, in which the nanoparticles are evenly distributed, we may eventually have high-efficiency spray-on solar cells that we could apply on our roofs to generate our very own power supply". So with these new break-throughs and the intensive R and D going on I just can't agree with your description of Solar being a "mature" technology.

These panels are much more efficient (dramatically so I would say) than the +/-15% panels produced for the last decade.

No good reason for that, I just liked the graphic.

Domestic use of battery storage is starting to, and will revolutionize the home power production scene.

Elon Musk making the pitch for his line of Solar Energy storage system.

The missing link
Energy storage has been described as the missing link of solar energy adoption. A report from Deutsche Bank this year said solar energy storage would be cheap enough to be deployed on a large scale within five years as a result of a yearly cost reduction of 20% to 30% in the price of lithium-ion batteries.

Is your demonizing of Arsenic compounds a scare tactic? Because you know that it has been extensively used in industry for various processes for a long long time. Even in medicine.
"In 1910, German biologist Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) invented the first drug that would cure syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease. This drug, called salvarsan, is a compound of arsenic. Its chemical name is arsphenamine".

Of course nobody likes the idea of a deadly poison being mined and used in this "the cleaner the better" solution. Hopefully the new technologies will make that unnecessary for solar panels. Anyway, to conclude, I'll just say I think your critique of the industry is up the creek without a paddle, currents of progress taking you where they will, not where you imagine.

Those increases in PV efficiencies have virtually flatlined for 30 years now. What you call "great increases" are increases IN THE LAB of about 4 or 5%. And they are for GA-AS OR multi-junction designs that add cost, real estate and complexity-cost to the manufacturing. Getting 5% more for 15% in cost is just not gonna make a great difference. It's a MATURE technology..

 

[flacaltenn]

Hey Searcher !!!

You wanna buy a solar ETF ??? THink it's just right around the corner??

Markets are hardly ever fooled with mature technologies.. Solar PV is now a bloodthirsty commodity item. That comes with MASSIVE govt handouts and subsidies to survive.

 

[Searcher44]

Those increases in PV efficiencies have virtually flatlined for 30 years now. What you call "great increases" are increases IN THE LAB of about 4 or 5%. And they are for GA-AS OR multi-junction designs that add cost, real estate and complexity-cost to the manufacturing. Getting 5% more for 15% in cost is just not gonna make a great difference. It's a MATURE technology..

Those increases in PV efficiencies have virtually flatlined for 30 years now.

The efficiency of mass produced crystalline silicon solar panels was flatlined at around 15% for a long time from my readings but this chart I referenced shows that panels now being shipped have efficiencies of over 22%.

First Solar, a U.S. company, claims they have overtaken this leading Chinese company's polysilicon panels in cost and efficiency. This article says

"After investing $775 million in technology, First Solar is producing panels for as little as 40 cents a watt, or about 15 percent less than China’s Trina Solar Ltd. In 2019, First Solar’s module cost could be as low as 25 cents a watt, according to analysts’ models.
First Solar’s investments over the past five years have increased efficiency by almost 50 percent and wrung costs from the manufacturing process. It has two new products coming next year and in 2019, applying lessons learned from the flat-screen television industry: use bigger manufacturing equipment to make larger units at lower cost..."

First Solar is not standing still, they plan to keep improving their panels.

"First Solar uses a different technology, a thin film of cadmium-telluride, which has more room to improve, said Raffi Garabedian, the Tempe, Arizona-based company’s chief technology officer. He pegs its theoretical peak at 30 percent, and his team this year reached a record 22.1 percent in a laboratory cell, using improvements that will eventually be applied at its factories."

What you call "great increases" are increases IN THE LAB of about 4 or 5%.

To repeat myself, these panels that show what I called "dramatic" improvements in efficiencies are not lab babies, they are being manufactured and shipped as we speak. The improvement in efficiency from the "flatlined" 15% to 22+% is an increase of +/-50%. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I call that dramatic.

And they are for GA-AS OR multi-junction designs that add cost, real estate and complexity-cost to the manufacturing.

No they are not GA-AS as the first chart shows and your cost objections are obviously not applicable to panels that have been judged by the market as economically feasible and are being purchased in the millions.

Getting 5% more for 15% in cost is just not gonna make a great difference. It's a MATURE technology..

The first part of your statement doesn't have any real-world applicability either, it's a theoretically true statement that has no connection to the production and sale of real-world Solar Panels.

I don't know if continuing this argument over whether Solar is a "Mature" technology or not is of any value. I'm prepared to accept that under your definition it is. I'm just wondering if your definition is confined to crystalline silicon tech or includes different approaches like CdTe, the whole thin film tech, Quantum dot, etc.

 

[flacaltenn]

Those increases in PV efficiencies have virtually flatlined for 30 years now. What you call "great increases" are increases IN THE LAB of about 4 or 5%. And they are for GA-AS OR multi-junction designs that add cost, real estate and complexity-cost to the manufacturing. Getting 5% more for 15% in cost is just not gonna make a great difference. It's a MATURE technology..

Those increases in PV efficiencies have virtually flatlined for 30 years now.

The efficiency of mass produced crystalline silicon solar panels was flatlined at around 15% for a long time from my readings but this chart I referenced shows that panels now being shipped have efficiencies of over 22%.

First Solar, a U.S. company, claims they have overtaken this leading Chinese company's polysilicon panels in cost and efficiency. This article says

"After investing $775 million in technology, First Solar is producing panels for as little as 40 cents a watt, or about 15 percent less than China’s Trina Solar Ltd. In 2019, First Solar’s module cost could be as low as 25 cents a watt, according to analysts’ models.
First Solar’s investments over the past five years have increased efficiency by almost 50 percent and wrung costs from the manufacturing process. It has two new products coming next year and in 2019, applying lessons learned from the flat-screen television industry: use bigger manufacturing equipment to make larger units at lower cost..."

First Solar is not standing still, they plan to keep improving their panels.

"First Solar uses a different technology, a thin film of cadmium-telluride, which has more room to improve, said Raffi Garabedian, the Tempe, Arizona-based company’s chief technology officer. He pegs its theoretical peak at 30 percent, and his team this year reached a record 22.1 percent in a laboratory cell, using improvements that will eventually be applied at its factories."

What you call "great increases" are increases IN THE LAB of about 4 or 5%.

To repeat myself, these panels that show what I called "dramatic" improvements in efficiencies are not lab babies, they are being manufactured and shipped as we speak. The improvement in efficiency from the "flatlined" 15% to 22+% is an increase of +/-50%. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I call that dramatic.

And they are for GA-AS OR multi-junction designs that add cost, real estate and complexity-cost to the manufacturing.

No they are not GA-AS as the first chart shows and your cost objections are obviously not applicable to panels that have been judged by the market as economically feasible and are being purchased in the millions.

Getting 5% more for 15% in cost is just not gonna make a great difference. It's a MATURE technology..

The first part of your statement doesn't have any real-world applicability either, it's a theoretically true statement that has no connection to the production and sale of real-world Solar Panels.

I don't know if continuing this argument over whether Solar is a "Mature" technology or not is of any value. I'm prepared to accept that under your definition it is. I'm just wondering if your definition is confined to crystalline silicon tech or includes different approaches like CdTe, the whole thin film tech, Quantum dot, etc.

That's all good analysis but it misses the point about TECHNOLOGY advances. The efficiencies of the PANEL ITSELF in converting sun Watts to electrical watts are NOT the same as First Solar (or the Chinese) being able to produce panels at a lower cost per watt. Companies with the SAME TECHNOLOGY specs will end up producing and selling those for DIFFERENT cost/watt.

Once the technology stalls and flattens out, ALL market gains come thru manufacturing engineering, volume, and corporate efficiency.

On your other point. Thin-film and wafer based are not really interchangeable in all applications. They have DIFFERENT market niches. And there ARE markets for super high performance panels where cost is less of an object. But most of those technologies/recipes are expensive for fundamental reasons. Like the materials that are required or extra optics for focusing light, multi-junction, multi-frequency, etc.

 

[SixFoot]

This Conservative will most definitely (and happily) be filling his 5,000 sq feet of rooftops with solar panels and installing a few wind turbines just as soon as the technology becomes feasible for normal people.

Lots of rooftops out there doing nothing but soaking up heat, adding to the cooling bill.

Speaking of power storage; those Aluminum-ion batteries sure do look promising. We have plenty of the metal to spare, too.

Aluminium-ion battery - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Old Rocks]

Aluminium-ion battery - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lithium-ion comparison[edit]
Aluminium-ion batteries are conceptually similar to lithium-ion batteries, but possess an aluminium anode instead of a lithium anode. While the theoretical voltage for aluminium-ion batteries is lower than lithium-ion batteries, 2.65V and 4V respectively, the theoretical energy density potential for aluminium-ion batteries is 1060 Wh/kg in comparison to lithium-ion's 406 Wh/kg limit.[2] The large difference in energy density potential is due to the fact that aluminium ions have three valence electrons while lithium ions only have one. Aluminium is also more abundant than lithium, lowering material costs.[3]

Thank you. We are on the verge of a battery revolution like that we have seen in the PV market. A grid scale battery will be the swiss army knife of the distributed grid. And a battery cheap enough for standard autos is cheap enough for home storage.

 

[Skull Pilot]

An endless free source of energy. How could anyone have a problem with that.

well solar panels aren't free so technically solar power isn't free