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posted by martyb on Wednesday September 11 2019, @07:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the things-prior-to-2038 dept.

Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035, Study Says

By 2035, it will be more expensive to run 90% of gas plants being proposed in the U.S. than it will be to build new wind and solar farms equipped with storage systems, according to the report Monday from the Rocky Mountain Institute. It will happen so quickly that gas plants now on the drawing boards will become uneconomical before their owners finish paying for them, the study said.

The authors of the study say they analyzed the costs of construction, fuel and anticipated operations for 68 gigawatts of gas plants proposed across the U.S. They compared those costs to building a combination of solar farms, wind plants and battery systems that, together with conservation efforts, could supply the same amount of electricity and keep the grid stable.

As gas plants lose their edge in power markets, the economics of pipelines will suffer, too, RMI said in a separate study Monday. Even lines now in the planning stages could soon be out of the money, the report found.

Hopefully our electrical distribution grid will still work.


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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday September 11 2019, @08:39PM (3 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 11 2019, @08:39PM (#892892) Journal

    You are overly optimistic.

    I would agree that solar panels *CAN* be recycled, but this doesn't mean that they ever are, or that there's any organization to do so. (If so I'd like to hear of it.)

    There are many different varieties of solar panel, including one in a lab that's made entirely (hah!) from graphene. (That's what the new blurb said. Believe it if you want to.) Some of them are quite polluting to manufacture, others less so. Some require lots of "rare earths", others less. They also vary a lot in efficiency and required working conditions. So I don't think you can trust many generic claims.

    OTOH, the US may be installing a lot of solar cells (or doing so prior to the Trump trade war), but it's not building many. So this doesn't speak to your point.

    The availability of space, however, at current use of electricity isn't a problem. OTOH, don't assume that most people live in a place where they own their own roof.

    As for batteries...well, I'm dubious, but we'll see. However there's also the PG&E molten salt solar plant in the Mojave desert, and that uses heat stored in the molten salt to continue generating power after dark. (Molten salt has it's own problems, of course, but they're almost certainly soluble.)

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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday September 12 2019, @12:58AM (2 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 12 2019, @12:58AM (#893003) Journal

    I would agree that solar panels *CAN* be recycled, but this doesn't mean that they ever are

    Like it didn't mean that cadmium/mercury/other-nasty-stuff batteries were ever recycled [batteryrecycling.org.au]?
    Yeah, there never was a precedent. /s

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    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday September 12 2019, @03:45AM (1 child)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 12 2019, @03:45AM (#893043) Journal

      Sorry, that link won't open in my browser. Probably requires javascript.
      The other link, the one that linked to a site saying solar panels would be valuable to recycle, didn't say that anyone was doing so.

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      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday September 12 2019, @04:29AM

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 12 2019, @04:29AM (#893054) Journal

        Sorry, that link won't open in my browser. Probably requires javascript.

        PDF - the link is http://www.batteryrecycling.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Battery-regulations-final.pdf [batteryrecycling.org.au]
        Can be downloaded with wget, just confirmed that the response code is 200, no redirects.

        ---request begin---
        GET /wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Battery-regulations-final.pdf HTTP/1.1
        User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; MSIE 9.0; WIndows NT 9.0; en-US))
        Accept: */*
        Accept-Encoding: identity
        Host: www.batteryrecycling.org.au
        Connection: Keep-Alive

        ---request end---
        HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
        ---response begin---
        HTTP/1.1 200 OK
        Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2019 03:57:44 GMT
        Server: Apache/2.4.41 (cPanel) OpenSSL/1.0.2s mod_bwlimited/1.4
        Last-Modified: Wed, 17 Apr 2019 04:31:42 GMT
        ETag: "1102d7a-4ca69-586b25cc1873a"
        Accept-Ranges: bytes
        Content-Length: 313961
        Connection: close
        Content-Type: application/pdf

        ---response end---
        200 OK
        Length: 313961 (307K) [application/pdf]
        Saving to: ‘Battery-regulations-final.pdf’

        Battery-regulations-fina 100%[====================================>] 306.60K  --.-KB/s   in 0.1s

        The other link, the one that linked to a site saying solar panels would be valuable to recycle, didn't say that anyone was doing so.

        Because there's no economic sense to do so yet, the vast majority of PV-s have an productive lifespan (80% of initial capacity or better) of at least 25 years (many of them with showing a lower degradation) and are still producing.
        As a note, a 20% drop in efficiency will make a PV that was 17% efficient when new into one that is 13.6% efficient - not something that one would consider "broken".

        Here [nrel.gov]

        Question: What is the productive life of solar PV panels, and do they produce the same amount of electricity year-over-year?

        Answer: The productive life of solar panels and the electricity production from these panels over time depend on factors such as climate, module type, and racking system, among others. The reduction in solar panel output over time is called degradation. NREL research [nrel.gov] has shown that solar panels have a median degradation rate of about 0.5% per year but the rate could be higher in hotter climates and for rooftop systems.[1] A degradation rate of 0.5% implies that production from a solar panel will decrease at a rate of 0.5% per year. This means that in year 20, the module is producing approximately 90% of the electricity it produced in year 1.

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