Joe - How much and how soon do you expect the price of PV to drop? Do you think it will be on the order of 50% drop in 5-10 years? More or less? Sooner or later?

My utility offers the equivalent of a 45% rebate on a solar installation (in addition to the $2k federal tax credit). In other locations, this would make solar PV very competitive with utility rates, but my utility has such a low rate to begin with, the financial break-even point is 20+ years. I still plan to get a PV system, for the energy price security.

I’m trying to decide if I should get a full system, sized to provide 100% of my electricity, now with the 45% rebate, or if I should get a smaller system now (say 50%) and add on a lower-cost, newer-tech system later.

I realize you can only make best estimates, but from your oil insights, I know your best estimates are the most informed. Any insights on expected changes in solar PV pricing are appreciated. Thanks!

But what the hell is Nocera thinking — he knows better. Could it be the lure of PR and funding?

I agree that CSP is a good match for AC load and wind is a good match for PHEV charging since neither application requires 24/7 power if it is demand managed. What I’m confused about is the “base load” claim for CSP.

To make CSP base load one needs lots of thermal storage. I’m not aware of any thermal storage in CSP plants. Is any one doing this? Is there a paper design somewhere?

Charles — I use the term “solar baseload” for simplicity’s sake. I think most solar baseload companies are looking at six hours of storage, which means technically it is more “load following” than baseload. And indeed load following is better than baseload in industrialized countries. And of course there is little reason to spend a lot of money to be able to deliver power at four in the morning when most power plants are giving it away — and you would only end up competing with wind. That said, some companies are looking at longer-term storage, And I think that might be more common in developing countries.

http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid467.php

which shows nuclear far above the per-kwh cost of other alternatives, and coal and gas also well above wind, without even any carbon taxes. It doesn’t show solar, unfortunately, so I’m not sure exactly how it compares.

Oh, one thing that’s a bit confusing on the chart is the light blue color — basically, it’s the cost of fuel, but in the cogen colums, it’s the cost of fuel minus the “heat credit” from doing cogen. For nuke, gas, and coal, of course, that credit is zero.

I did not see any mention of increases in efficiency which is probably the key drawback of hydrogen energy storage.

I did not say wind has yet to match the costs of nuclear, nat. gas, and coal. I said solar PV and baseload have not.

I care about this because you are one of the primary critics of the Hydrogen Economy idea and I want your message to get out there.

[JR: It is always possible you are right, but 1) I included the link to my recent critique of hydrogen and 2) this post is mostly not about “the hydrogen economy.” I have just added more links, though!]

We have lot’s of historical data for coal, gas, nuclear and wind (Europe).

What about CSP? Where is the best data for real world CSP performance?

“charlesH — Try IEA (fairly good) and EIA (ask Joe).”

David, thx for the links. I still can’t find the info I want.

Can anyone point me to info on the most modern CSP plant in operation or under construction.

Capital cost
operating cost
maintenance cost
average power output (e.g. MWyrs)

It has been done, but because daytime power fetches a higher price than nighttime power, there is little incentive for companies to do more than prototype thermal storage. That will change when CSP becomes a much larger portion of the grid. The challenge will then to make the nighttime generation from thermal energy storage cost competitive. Ausra claims the storage of heat deep underground, where the Earth provides containment for the pressures required, will solve that problem, but as far as I know, it has not yet been prototyped. It would certainly be helpful if the DOE contracted with Ausra to prototype it.

“Generating electricity around the clock with solar thermal technology relies on storage systems that run turbines long after the sun sets. “Ausra has a very active energy storage R & D group and we will be prototyping a couple of systems this year here in the US,” said John O’Donnell.

Solar Energy Storage
This is not a new technology, having been used for plastic manufacturing and petroleum production for a long time. Solar thermal plants have a cost advantage compared to photovoltaic technology because energy can be stored as heat without being converted to another form or relying on batteries.

“My favorite example in comparing energy storage options is on your desktop,” said John O’Donnell. “If you have a laptop computer and a thermos of coffee on your desk, the battery in your laptop and the thermos store about the same amount of energy. One of them costs about $150 and the other one costs maybe $3 to $5. On the wholesale level, storing electric power is at least 100 times more expensive than storing heat.””

http://cleantechnica.com/ 2008/ 03/ 27/ solar-thermal-electricity-can-it-replace-coal-gas-and-oil/

The only thing that isn’t proven is to do it underground. It’s pretty conventional mining tech though, but even if it doesn’t work they could still build the facility on the surface for a relatively small increase in land requirements.

Thermal oil is also proven and is cost-effective. But boiler storage is even cheaper, more efficient, and more environmentally benign (it’s water).

Some people worry about safety. It is true that one of the most proven systems caught fire a long time ago. And pressurized steam vessels might rupture. But this is not a bigger threat than in conventional thermal plants like coal and nuclear. Plus the area will not be public space, it’s off limits fenced area. If the boilers are underground then the pressure of the rock will contain the steam ie it will be inherently safe (the pressures used are not that big for a couple hundred meters of rock and sediment. And rock is a good insulator.

http://pfdietz.blogspot.com/ 2005/ 11/ direct-carbon-fuel-cells.html

Also not the interesting stuff about direct carbon fuel cells (which would actually deserve the term fuel cell as carbon really is a fuel, not a synthetic energy carrier).

This website handles the problems and lost energy of using Hydrogen as a fuel, I go back to this article:

http://www.physorg.com/news85074285.html

Somebody should quick write an article on using Hydrogen in a regular Internal Combustion Engine, which it can do. If you have a headline, ‘Remarkable Hydrogen Fuel Cell Breakthrough: By using an ICE.’ Then have a smart looking Engineer talking about the tremedous cost saving just found since ICE’s cost something like 50 times less than Fuel Cells.

That’s a very odd definition of “baseload”. Six hours is just enough to cover the afternoon-evening *peak* load.

We can also burn lithium batteries in a steam engine. That doesn’t mean it’s an efficient proposal, or that this is the best way to ‘use’ lithium batteries.

If you’re going to use ICE, then you might as well make synthetic fuels. Could be hydrogen, methanized. We have excellent natural gas infrastructure and methane is easy to handle plus the ICE is easier to use with methane. Hydrogen embrittles the engine so you need expensive materials. And since there’s no infrastructure for hydrogen you have to build it. Which will be expensive and take lots of time. Plus it is wasteful to pump hydrogen around as it doesn’t have a lot of energy, you have to pump loads of it around to get reasonable amounts of energy. The pumping losses are severe.

I think I managed to avoid most of the hype (the Monitor’s editorial process has a patented, built-in desensationalizer), but I wish that I had been able to find out how much MIT’s process would actually cost and compare it to current technologies.

But I think what saved me was that I linked to an article in the Onion that for me captures the MIT researchers’ tone: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30990