ekt_bear: I thought that we established already on previous threads that solar isn't competitive as a source of energy (aside from very niche cases)?

So why on earth do you keep bringing it up?

ekt_bear: I thought that we established already on previous threads that solar isn't competitive as a source of energy (aside from very niche cases)?

So why on earth do you keep bringing it up?

ekt_bear: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source


After reading that article and consulting the tables therein, nobody should ever suggest solar again as a viable fuel source...

It is all largely down to economies of scale, says Jenny Chase, head of solar analysis at BNEF. In 2011, enough solar panels were produced worldwide to generate 27 gigawatts, compared with 7.7 GW in 2009. Chase says solar power is now cheaper than diesel "anywhere as sunny as Spain". That means vast areas of Latin America, Africa and Asia could start adopting solar power. "We have been selling to Asia and the Middle East," says Björn Emde, European spokesman for Suntech, the world's largest producer of silicon panels. Over the next few years he expects to add South Africa and [b]Nigeria [/b]to that list.

(Reuters) - Britain will delay a planned cut to subsidies for solar power projects until August 1, a month later than initially planned, after low demand for panels in March and April, Energy Minister Greg Barker said on Thursday.

"Following detailed consultation with industry and consumers, the government is introducing a range of changes to the FITs (feed-in tariff) scheme with effect from 1 August to provide better value for money and allow businesses and householders to plan with confidence," Barker said.

The government last year announced an emergency review of the country's subsidy scheme for large-scale solar installations after higher-than-expected demand threatened to deplete the government's renewable energy budget early.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20120524-714664.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)--California regulators approved a plan Thursday to expand a subsidy for rooftop solar power generated by homeowners and businesses, handing a victory to the solar industry.

The plan, adopted by the California Public Utilities Commission, allows more homeowners and businesses that install their own solar-power systems to sell the power they don't use to their utility at high prices. The program requires utilities to buy the power.

The program, called "net energy ...

The review resulted in a subsidy cut of up to 50 percent for solar projects from April 1 this year and further cuts were planned from July 1 if demand rates remained high.

Wind energy has become the favourite whipping boy in the renewable energy world. However, solar energy has its critics as well. Wind energy opponents are usually current or prospective neighbours of turbine installations. Solar energy naysayers are typically actual or would-be economists.

“Why should we invest in solar photovoltaic systems? They aren’t cost effective.” This is akin to asking, “What use are seeds? You can’t eat them.” No, solar PV is not cost-effective. Yet.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. Solar PV is already a highly competitive option in cases where the solar resource is plentiful, or alternative power sources are expensive, or both. However, there are still relatively few situations where solar PV can compete against coal, natural gas, nuclear, or hydroelectricity without subsidies.

Why should we care? Subsidies cost the taxpayer (or, in the case of feed-in tariffs, the ratepayer). The cost cannot be justified unless it brings some benefit. So what benefit do solar subsidies provide?

First, it’s worthwhile examining what will happen in the absence of subsidy. Fossil fuel energy sources are limited to however much is stashed away in the earth’s crust. As time goes on, these sources are being depleted. That is why the price of oil and coal has been climbing inexorably. Occasionally a new technology such as hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) comes along which offers up a large amount of new supply, but such events only postpone the inevitable.

As traditional energy sources climb in price, there appear more and more marginal cases in which solar becomes a cheaper option, and the market for solar PV grows. As the market for solar increases, industry capacity increases to meet the demand. As production volumes increase, companies work their way up the learning curve and drive costs out of the process, bringing the price down. Since competing technologies are rising in price, it is an inevitable consequence that the price of solar will drop, and the market for solar will grow.

China's allegation that renewable-energy subsidies in five U.S. states, including Massachusetts, violate free-trade rules is ratcheting up a potentially costly trade war between the world's two largest economies.

China filed a complaint Friday at the World Trade Organization over U.S. procedures for calculating anti-subsidy duties on imports.

Programs supporting renewable power, including wind and solar, in Washington state, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio and California, violate WTO policies and trade treaties, according to a preliminary finding of an investigation posted Thursday on the website of China's Ministry of Commerce.

The U.S. Commerce Department decided last week to impose tariffs of as much as 250 percent on imports of Chinese solar cells. The agency said the imported units were being sold for less than the cost of production in an attempt to drive out U.S. competition.

Both countries have identified renewable energy as a strategically important industry that could provide both jobs and clean power. At least four U.S. solar manufacturers filed for bankruptcy in the past year even as federal subsidies helped build a $8.4 billion U.S. solar market.

“China has been engaged in a trade war against the U.S. interests for a number of years and only now are we calling them to the carpet for their illegal and predatory trade practices,” said Mike Wessel, a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission that reports to Congress.

Chinese solar companies criticized Commerce's preliminary decision May 18 that they improperly benefit from government subsidies and sell solar cells below cost.

China initiated the investigation into U.S. subsidies in November, a month after seven U.S. solar manufacturers filed their complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission and Commerce. In announcing the preliminary findings yesterday, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said some U.S. actions “constitute prohibited subsidies.”

During the U.S. investigation into whether Chinese companies received illegal government aid, the U.S. acted “inconsistently with WTO rules and rulings in many aspects,” China's mission to the WTO in Geneva said Friday in an email. The U.S. “repeated its wrongful practice” during its recent anti-subsidy investigation on Chinese solar cells.

The Commerce Department is scheduled to announce on May 30 how much in tariffs Chinese companies should pay over allegations their wind-tower exports receive unfair government subsidies.

The department is scheduled to make its final determination on the solar tariffs in early October.

Beaf:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328505.000-indias-panel-price-crash-could-spark-solar-revolution.html

This will help some people think. A little more thought will show them how to do it even cheaper and avoid an air ticket to madness in the West.
As usual, foreigners see it before the lazy fools that are quick to groan and grimmace.

I really pity the state of Nigerian minds. It is disgraceful.

SOLAR power has always had a reputation for being expensive, but not for much longer. In India, electricity from solar is now cheaper than that from diesel generators. The news - which will boost India's "Solar Mission" to install 20,000 megawatts of solar power by 2022 - could have implications for other developing nations too.

Recent figures from market analysts Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) show that the price of solar panels fell by almost 50 per cent in 2011. They are now just one-quarter of what they were in 2008. That makes them a cost-effective option for many people in developing countries.

A quarter of people in India do not have access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency's 2011 World Energy Outlook report. Those who are connected to the national grid experience frequent blackouts. To cope, many homes and factories install diesel generators. But this comes at a cost. Not only does burning diesel produce carbon dioxide, contributing to climate change, the fumes produced have been linked to health problems from respiratory and heart disease to cancer.

Now the generators could be on their way out. In India, electricity from solar supplied to the grid has fallen to just 8.78 rupees per kilowatt-hour compared with 17 rupees for diesel. The drop has little to do with improvements in the notoriously poor efficiency of solar panels: industrial panels still only convert 15 to 18 per cent of the energy they receive into electricity. But they are now much cheaper to produce, so inefficiency is no longer a major sticking point.

It is all largely down to economies of scale, says Jenny Chase, head of solar analysis at BNEF. In 2011, enough solar panels were produced worldwide to generate 27 gigawatts[/color], compared with 7.7 GW in 2009. Chase says solar power is now cheaper than diesel "anywhere as sunny as Spain". That means vast areas of Latin America, Africa and Asia could start adopting solar power. "We have been selling to Asia and the Middle East," says Björn Emde, European spokesman for Suntech, the world's largest producer of silicon panels. Over the next few years he expects to add South Africa and Nigeria to that list.

The one thing stopping households buying a solar panel is the initial cost, says Amit Kumar, director of energy-environment technology development at The Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, India.[color=#990000] Buying a solar panel is more expensive than buying a diesel generator, but according to Chase's calculations solar becomes cheaper than diesel after seven years. The panels last 25 years.

Even in India, solar electricity remains twice as expensive as electricity from coal, but that may soon change. While the price drop in 2011 was exceptional, analysts agree that solar will keep getting cheaper. Suntech's in-house analysts predict that, by 2015, solar electricity will be as cheap as grid electricity in half of all countries. When that happens, expect to see solar panels wherever you go.

THE rush to subsidise solar power over the past decade has been massively wasteful and squalidly political. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the sorry saga of Solyndra, a Californian maker of novel tubular solar panels down the maw of which the Obama administration shovelled $535m in the hope of “green jobs” and photo ops. It got instead mismanagement, bankruptcy and scandal. The money wasted on Solyndra, though, is as nothing compared to the tens of billions of euros squandered on solar panels in Germany. So little electricity do these panels produce under its cloudy northern skies that the emissions from a single large coal-fired power station are enough to nullify all the benefits that their carbon-free contribution might bring. The green jobs they, too, were meant to bring are largely, though not entirely, in China.

Solar boosters will argue that all this money has nevertheless brought down the price of solar power. It is undeniable that massively subsidised demand has been largely responsible for recent sharp drops in the price of panels. But to see that as a justification is to ignore the vast, albeit to some degree unknowable, opportunity costs of programmes so expensive.


Defenders of solar subsidies point out that, unlike those on biofuels, they do not actually take food from the plates of the hungry. That is true; but it is a pretty low bar. Fixating on solar power, which is still a more expensive way to generate electricity than most, has delivered little by way of emissions reductions for the subsidy buck, and left governments paying through the nose for whatever the industry can ship, rather than encouraging true innovation.

Europe’s solar subsidies have proved not just expensive, but also unreliable. As so often happens with such regimes, their excessive generosity has led to a glut of output, and their cost has risen, leading governments to cut rates. Capacity will probably shrink as a result, discouraging innovation. A high price on carbon, set in such a way that investors could count on it lasting for decades, would have created a more stable business environment and thus, over the long run, brought about more innovation in clean energy.

Still, by pushing the price of panels down, subsidies have created possibilities that were not there before. In some sunny parts of America, and elsewhere, people who can afford the upfront costs of solar panels on their roofs can now get electricity from them more cheaply than they can get it down the wires from a power station. Solar panels with battery back-up can now compete with diesel generators for many off-grid applications in developing countries—such as powering mobile-phone masts, which are spreading like unsubsidised wildfire through much of the world.

The right way to do it

There is much that governments can do to encourage such progress in the future without repeating the mistakes of the past. They should limit the grounds on which people can object to neighbours’ solar installations through the planning process. They should remove subsidies for technologies that compete with solar. In India, which has lots of sun and lots of back-up generators burning subsidised diesel, that could be a game changer in itself. Above all they must fix a price of carbon that gives innovators the confidence that competing with fossil fuels for the long term will be a rewarding, and perhaps hugely profitable, undertaking. If politics prevent them from setting a substantial carbon price, they might consider requiring utilities to have a carbon-free component to their generating portfolios, as happens in many American states. But that needs to be open to all carbon-free technologies, not just the ones that the politicians like, so that the most efficient can prosper.

In the long run, there is little reason to doubt that a great deal of the world’s energy will come from solar systems. The sun is hugely powerful—it delivers more energy in an hour than humankind uses in a year—and unlike fossil fuels it will never run out. The application of new materials science and nanotechnology offers the possibility of cost reductions much larger than can be imagined in windpower or hydropower, in biomass or in nuclear power. But massive subsidies are not the way to build the business

Imagine ekt bear posted stuff that mostly had to do with Europe and the US, yet he was talking about solar energy. Oyb has stup!dly posted extracts to show that solar energy is not cheap in the UK. Why would it be when snow falls there?
Some people are abysmally unimaginative and low self-esteemed. Why else would anyone compare solar energy in a temprate climate with that in a tropical one. Isn't that daft and mentally lazy?

[size=14pt]Indian villagers' lives transformed by new energy delivery system[/size]

A social enterprise is providing low-cost mobile-charging and light services through micro grids in Uttar Pradesh, enabling the poorest to cease relying on kerosene – and to stay connected

...

But it is here in Uttar Pradesh, one of India's largest and poorest states, far away from the country's straining power grid, that US-born entrepreneurs Nikhil Jaisinghani and Brian Shaad have started to pioneer a wholly different energy system, designed to meet some of the most basic needs of the poorest.

Their company, Mera Gao Power (MGP), provides ultra-low cost lighting and mobile phone charging services to individual houses by building and operating solar-powered micro grids at a village level.

Each household that signs up to their service receives two LED lights and one mobile-charging point in their home at a cost of 25 rupees (£0.301) per week. The setup cost is an additional one-off payment of 40 rupees (£0.48). "This is the kind of price point that the majority of them can afford," Sandeep Pandey, MGP's operations manager, explained.

The benefits of these simple services for a village household are multiple. The lights not only allow individuals to work after dark, providing additional time for activities that generate income, but they permit extra time for children to study.

Beaf: Poor daft oyb, always giving excuses to remain a mentally lazy, screaming awuf luv'n leach.
I've never seen a more bedragled cockroache. Imagine giving reasons to remain wretched even when spoonfed with ideas.

This is exactly why the country remains underdeveloped.

It might also sound strange to the oyb's that they can also run solar powered boats, solar airconditioning etc. People just want to remain awuf luv'n phucks.

Beaf: The best oyb can do is give excuses for his stup!dity and lack of imagination by name dropping when enough proof has been provided of his mental laziness. I didn't even know the clown was an engineer until ekt bear mentioned it. What a pity!
If some engineers act the fool and are blind to creativity, what hope is there for the country?

Here is another tale from India where some are free to be creative and not dream of Abuja oil or how to buy an air ticket to go and suffer like fools abroad with the high chance of ending up in a mental home as I posted (with proof) earlier. Many Nigerians are running mad abroad out of this foolish lack of imagination and inability to harness what is under our noses.

Imagine ekt bear posted stuff that mostly had to do with Europe and the US, yet he was talking about solar energy. Oyb has stup!dly posted extracts to show that solar energy is not cheap in the UK. Why would it be when snow falls there?
Some people are abysmally unimaginative and low self-esteemed. Why else would anyone compare solar energy in a temprate climate with that in a tropical one. Isn't that daft and mentally lazy?



http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2012/jan/16/india-solar-power-system

oyb:

oga afro pseudoscience, are you so daft, stoopid or just like your master that cannot counter anything i posted?

all across the world, solar energy is heavily subsidised because everyone is hoping it will pan out in the long run.

see beafs solar powered boat solution

this is what the joker thinks will work on an industrial scale

this is the sort of roadside consultantcy we can expect from beaf

i mean come on, the only thing the likes of beaf can be consulted on is internet smear campaigns of the crude beer parlour fishwife kind "gej good ogbeni bad!"

These are exciting times for those who dreamed of solar powered air conditioning, with two different products offering this technology recently launching in the market.

LG Electronics has released a solar-assisted air conditioner that uses the sun’s energy to power the AC via a solar panel attached to the top of the outdoor unit. The company claims their solar hybrid air conditioner is capable of reducing around 212kg of carbon over 10 years.

Beaf:

Lol! Can anybody believe this fool is an engineer? Anyway, you must have gone to the same school as becomerich and studied "electricity engineering!"
Can anybody imagine someone calling himself and engineer, yet he is afraid of solar energy. The twerp has to lie and compare Nigeria near the Sahara to England near the North Pole!!!!

I've had a serious dose of comedy this morning!

Oyb engineer, can you even make a pepper grinder?

13volts: We had a very long discussion on this issue in office today. England as a country is not known to have any mineral resources, I hardy see any manufactured product MADE IN ENGLAND despite the fact that they are our colonial master. The only major investment in Nigeria that is traced to England is BP.

My questions are;
1. Why do we have less poor people in England compared to America.
2. Without a huge manufacturing base like in America, China, Germany or Japan. How do the British manage to sustain a vibrant economy and at the same time avoid the recession ravaging Europe and America?
3. We have many blacks in England, they hardy made their presence known globally except in the EPL. Most noticeable black personalities in the world are from America, in music, movies, sport and what have you. Are the blacks in England marginalized or what? why are they not making waves as their counterparts in America?

13volts: Why do we have less poor people in England compared to America

13volts: Without a huge manufacturing base like in America, China, Germany or Japan. How do the British manage to sustain a vibrant economy and at the same time avoid the recession ravaging Europe and America?

13volts: 3. We have many blacks in England, they hardy made their presence known globally except in the EPL. Most noticeable black personalities in the world are from America, in music, movies, sport and what have you. Are the blacks in England marginalized or what? why are they not making waves as their counterparts in America?

oyb:

Each household that signs up to their service receives two LED lights and one mobile-charging point in their home at a cost of 25 rupees (£0.301) per week. The setup cost is an additional one-off payment of 40 rupees (£0.4cool. "This is the kind of price point that the majority of them can afford," Sandeep Pandey, MGP's operations manager, explained.

wow! this is fantastic - i'm off to get mine now! this solution will power my tv, fridge, pc, washing machine , freezer

is this the best sort of dosh that you can come up with

how many times were you dropped on your head, or are you naturally this stoopid?

Bandit C.:


Finally, the US is light years ahead of the UK so comparison is ridiculous.

England in particular is like a huge refuse dump compared to most western and northern european countries.

Their only saving grace is the English language.

England should be compared to Belgium and Italy in terms of advancement not US or Germany.

ekt_bear: Beaf. That electricity is 3X or 4X the price of the alternatives when generated by solar in say the US should suggest that it isn't going to be economically feasible in Africa either.

It isn't as if we get 3X or 4X the sun in Africa as they do in the US. There aren't 60 or 70-something hours in an African day, lol

ekt_bear: Long story short, it isn't cost-effective to generate electricity from solar, except for some very special cases.

So it is stvpid to be telling someone not to emigrate to the US and go harvest sun in the Sahara desert, or whatever it is that you are advocating.

That represents an unprofitable, money-losing, poverty-inducing business. Not one that is a good way for someone to make their living..