Tag: Solar power

Featured Posts, Technology / Software

What do we do in a world where energy is in abundance?

Swanson Effect

The cost of solar power is falling in direct relation to the amount of solar power modules being produced. With no end in sight to this price reduction, we should soon be in a world where energy is in abundance.

Solar PV Installed globally

Moore’s Law, the law that says the number of transistors in computers doubles every two years approximately, has an equivalent in solar power called Swanson’s Law. Swanson’s Law states that the price of solar panels tends to drop 20% for every doubling of cumulative shipped volume. This leads to a positive feedback loop of lower prices meaning more solar pv installed, leading to lower prices, and so on. And consequently, as the price of solar panels drops (see top graph), the amount of installed solar globally has increased exponentially (see chart on right).

This law has held true since 1977, and according to the Economist

technological developments that have been proved in the laboratory but have not yet moved into the factory mean Swanson’s law still has many years to run

This positive feedback loop is manifesting itself in China, where in May of this year the National Development and Reform Commission announced that China would target a more than tripling of its installed solar capacity to 70 gigawatts (GW) by 2017.

While in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his cabinet recently approved increasing the country’s solar target fivefold to a goal of reaching 100GW by 2022.

To put those numbers in perspective, according to the International Energy Agency’s Snapshot of Global PV Markets 2014 report, the total amount of solar PV installed globally reached 177GW at the end of 2014.

And it is not just South East Asia, Brazil and the US this week reached a historic climate agreement that will require.

the US to triple its production of wind and solar power and other renewable energies. Brazil will need to double its production of clean energy. The figures do not include hydro power.

And according to GTM Research, by 2020 Europe will install 42GW and account for 31% of the global solar market.

Is this having a significant effect on pricing?

Absolutely it is. The price for installed solar hit another new low at the end of last year when Dubai utility DEWA awarded a contract to Riyadh-based consortium Acwa Power to build and operate a 200MW solar park for a guaranteed purchase price of 5.84US cents per kWh for 25 years.

To fully appreciate the significance of this price, it is necessary to understand that the price of natural gas – which generates 99% of the UAE’s electricity – stands at 9 cents. So, in the United Arab Emirates at least, solar power is currently 65% of the cost of the next cheapest form of electricity production. And its price will continue to decline for the foreseeable future.

So, solar power is cheap (in some cases 65% of the cost of the next nearest competitor), its price is continually dropping, and with 100’s of gigawatts of orders coming into the pipeline, the price reductions may even accelerate.

In this scenario we are headed into a world where solar power rates, for all intents and purposes, approach zero. In that situation, the question becomes, what do we do in a world where energy is in abundance?

Trends & Concepts

Friday Green Numbers round-up 07/09/2010

Green Numbers
Photo credit trindade.joao

And here is this week’s Green numbers:

Trends & Concepts

SunSpec Alliance setting standards for the solar industry
BP Oil Spill
Photo credit Tom Raftery (Me!)

Sunspec.org is an alliance of renewable industry companies whose aim is to define communication standards data monitoring for the solar power industry.

Up until now there haven’t been any standards agreed around data communication in the solar power industry which added huge cost and complexity to the monitoring and management of solar farms – especially when there were multiple vendors involved. These lack of interoperability and increased cost issues have greatly hobbled solar power’s growth.

To address this the SunSpec Alliance was formed last year with the express purpose of defining standards which, if widely adopted, should significantly speed up the deployment of solar energy systems and be a big help in their management, reporting and maintenance.

On this coming May 11th, the Alliance will publish their initial set of proposed communication standards for the industry and open them up for public review and comment. The first specifications cover the inverter, the meter and the environmental sensors.

The release of these documents will be followed up by implementations of the specifications by Alliance member companies, testing, certification and a branding project to bring those products to market. Once these standards start to become widely adopted, they can be proposed to the IEC or the IEEE to become official international standards.

Standards are hugely important for the growth of any emerging industry. In the case of solar power, the standards will be all the more important, coinciding as they are with the with the arrival of smart grids and the development of smart grid interoperability standards.

by-sa

Featured Posts, Trends & Concepts

US Smart Grid Future Looking Bright?

Barack Obama in shades
Photo credit Barack Obama

President Barack Obama was in Florida on Tuesday this week for the official opening of Florida Power and Light’s new solar energy power plant. The 90,000+ solar panel plant, which has been installed across 180 acres of the 5,000 acre FPL property, is expected to generate 25MW of clean electricity (enough to power 3,000 homes) making it the largest operating solar power plant in the US.

President Obama took the opportunity to announce (slightly sooner than was expected) the awarding of $3.4 billion in investment grants to help spur the transition to smart grids in the US.

According to theReuters report:

The grants, which range from $400,000 to $200 million, will go to 100 companies, utilities, manufacturers, cities and other partners in 49 states — every state except Alaska….

The winning companies have secured an additional $4.7 billion in private money to match their government grants, creating $8.1 billion in total investment in the smart grid.

Full listings of the grant awards by category and state are available here and here.  A map of the awards is available here.

The announcement includes:

  • $1 billion for smart meters and in-home display technologies
  • $400 million for grid modernization projects to make electricity distribution and transmission more efficient with digital monitoring and increased grid automation
  • $2 billion, the bulk of the monies, is going to projects which help integrate all the various components of smart grids so they can interoperate seamlessly and
  • $25 million to help expand the manufacturing base of companies that can produce the smart meters, smart appliances, synchrophasors, smart transformers, and other components for smart grid systems

And some of the outcomes of the awards will be:

  • Will put the US on pace to deploy more than 40 million smart meters in American homes and businesses over the next few years
  • Install more than 1 million in-home displays, 170,000 smart thermostats, and 175,000 other load control devices to enable consumers to reduce their energy use. Funding will also help expand the market for smart washers, dryers, and dishwashers, so that American consumers can further control their energy use and lower their electricity bills.
  • Install more than 200,000 smart transformers that will make it possible for power companies to replace units before they fail thus saving money and reducing power outages
  • Install more than 850 sensors – called ‘Phasor Measurement Units’ – that will cover 100 percent of the U.S. electric grid and make it possible for grid operators to better monitor grid conditions and prevent minor disturbances in the electrical system from cascading into local or regional power outages or blackouts. This monitoring ability will also help the grid to incorporate large blocks of intermittent renewable energy, like wind and solar power, to take advantage of clean energy resources when they are available and make adjustments when they’re not.
  • Install almost 700 automated substations, representing about 5 percent of the nation’s total that will make it possible for power companies to respond faster and more effectively to restore service when bad weather knocks down power lines or causes electricity disruptions.
  • Reduce peak electricity demand by more than 1400 MW, which is the equivalent of several larger power plants and can save ratepayers more than $1.5 billion in capital costs and help lower utility bills. Since peak electricity is the most expensive energy – and requires the use of standby power generation plants – the economic and environmental savings for even a small reduction are significant. In fact, some of the power plants for meeting peak demand operate for only a few hundred hours a year, which means the power they generate can be 5-10 times more expensive than the average price per kilowatt hour paid by most consumers
  • Put the US on a path to get 20% or more of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

Those are some pretty impressive numbers and they should go a long way towards helping the US modernise its ageing electricity distribution system, facilitating the greater penetration of renewable power suppliers onto the grid and thereby reducing America’s enormous carbon footprint!

by-sa

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