Solar — it's not just a clean power source producing zero emissions and almost no local water impact, it's also now one of the best choices on the basis of how much energy you get back for your investment. And with climate change impacts rising, solar's further potential to take some of the edge off the harm that's coming down the pipe makes speeding its adoption a clear no-brainer.
In 2016, according a trends analysis based on this report by the Royal Society of London, the energy return on energy investment (EROEI) for oil appears to have fallen below a ratio of 15 to 1 globally. In places like the United States, where extraction efforts increasingly rely on unconventional techniques like fracking, that EROEI has fallen to 10 or 11 to 1 or lower.
Meanwhile, according to a new study by the Imperial College of London, solar energy's return on investment ratio as of 2015 was 14 to 1 and rising. What this means is that a global energy return on investment inflection point between oil and solar was likely reached at some time during the present year.
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A transformation is happening in global energy markets that's worth noting as 2016 comes to an end: Solar power, for the first time, is becoming the cheapest form of new electricity.
This has happened in isolated projects in the past: an especially competitive auction in the Middle East, for example, resulting in record-cheap solar costs. But now unsubsidized solar is beginning to outcompete coal and natural gas on a larger scale, and notably, new solar projects in emerging markets are costing less to build than wind projects, according to fresh data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
The chart below shows the average cost of new wind and solar from 58 emerging-market economies, including China, India, and Brazil. While solar was bound to fall below wind eventually, given its steeper price declines, few predicted it would happen this soon.
...
"Renewables are robustly entering the era of undercutting" fossil fuel prices, BNEF chairman Michael Liebreich said in a note to clients this week.
Will we see a sharp pivot in energy production, or a gradual tailing off of fossil fuels as renewables take hold?
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @03:02PM
Those numbers must be based on subsidies. Wake me up when storage is included.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @03:16PM
> Those numbers must be based on subsidies. Wake me up when storage is included.
Incorrect.
Even without subsidizes utility-scale solar is cheaper than even the cheapest form of natural gas.
Here is a chart that compares unsubsidized lower and upper bounds of recent projects [vox-cdn.com] using a metric of “levelized cost of energy” (LCOE). The LCOE of a particular source is calculated by dividing the total lifetime costs of building and operating the source by the total lifetime energy output of the source. Total costs divided by total energy = LCOE.
Here is a chart indicating how US federal tax subsidizes shift those numbers. [vox-cdn.com]
The charts come from a report by the Lazard investment bank. [lazard.com]
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @04:39PM
Thanks for the link. But if we have more solar or wind plants, we'll also need more gas peaker plants for when renewables are idle. Those peakers look pricey. I'll agree that there is social good associated with using renewables, but there is also a cost that seems to be ignored.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @08:33AM
Some morons modded that as "troll"??? WTF? That dude(ette) actually posted real stuff. Where is solar at night? Where is wind during calm days??
The problem is our energy usage is based on DEMAND requirements, not on SUPPLY availability. And that's how it will continue no matter how many "smart meters" you put in. Maybe you'll have able to charge your future electric car when it's day, but you want your food cooked for you every day, when you are hungry, not when the wind is blowing! And you certainly can't have steel mill or bakeries work at the whims of clouds.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:58PM
Each one of those cars is a battery ready to run your microwave when you need it.
Furthermore the GP claimed that gas plants were 'expensive' when in fact they are just a bit more expensive than solar. So build a few of those for smoothing out the peaks and valleys from solar and wind you are good to go.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @03:48PM
These numbers are based on wishful thinking about solar panels durability and omitting some of the energy used during production and probably completely omitting energy used during transporting them. Real EROEI is probably somewhere between 3 and 6. Better than in 70s when it was below 1 or food and nature preserves to fuel plants that have around 1.2 but still far from oil. Also note that coal has EROEI around 50 and uranium probably several hundred.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday December 23 2016, @05:08PM
And does that "Real EROI" for oil factor in all the externalized costs of oil? The total cost of all the wars fought in the Middle East since WWI? And the value of the subsidies and tax breaks given to oil companies? Not to mention the total cost of oil spill cleanups paid by the government? And the total lost income and and oil-related health expenses of all the people impacted by various oil spills?
I mean just because none of those costs are included in the market price of oil doesn't mean they aren't directly attributable to its use. And heck, we haven't even discussed the expected cost of adapting to global warming yet - that's liable to start getting extremely expensive by the end of the century.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Friday December 23 2016, @08:23PM
But, how would doing that result in oil industry execs getting raises?
(Score: 1) by garrulus on Friday December 23 2016, @04:16PM
Yep batteries are the critical thing. And cheap good converters. But I assume its full chain else comparisons make no sense.
Btw this royal society, are they the same guys that couldn't even calculate the "smart meter" yield?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @07:50PM
Those numbers must be based on subsidies.
The oil industry's annual subsidies of tens of billions of dollars from the US government are a fact of life and should be included in these calculations. That's what you meant, right?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:52AM
EROEI is about energy, as the two E point, not money (at least, not directly... sooner or later some are unable to understand things if not translated to money terms). It means that 1 unit of energy used for something will give you X energy back, X:1. Unless the thing you get is used for other things, not energy, you want X to be >1 and the higher the better. Oil falling to 15 means oil extraction is becoming more energy intensive than before, "drill and get oil fountain" is becoming rare, while "drill, drill more... and more, then pump... pump harder, and clean what you extract to get acceptable oil" is becoming more and more common. At some point oil extraction only makes sense as feedstock for other processes (plastics, solvents, etc), not for energy purposes. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513003856 [sciencedirect.com] has some numbers of past years like 1970 and also more recent.
Modern society, the one that develops new things, is said to become unsustainable if EROEI goes below 10:1, because you use too much of what you get to get the next batch, instead of use it to get other things. If you use 1 and get 2, you get only 1 to really use as the other 1 is needed for the next cycle, so 50% vs 50%. EROEI 10? You get 9 and 1 for the next cycle, 90% vs 10%. EROEI 100? You get 99 and have to use 1, 99% vs 1%. http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/2/1/25/pdf [mdpi.com] says EROEI 3 is barely enough to get along, having to cut in medicine or education (bye bye R&D). https://books.google.com/books?id=SRocBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA27&lpg=PA27&source=bl&ots=bedj9G2VD_&sig=Z-pLySOgClHzHDu_KTwzvDqqzRg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZ5sHk7YvRAhXCqxoKHerYBLwQ6AEIOTAH [google.com] talks about 5:1 or 10:1 as minimum to keep a half modern civilization, instead of just a dying one as with 3:1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eroi-charles-hall-will-fossil-fuels-maintain-economic-growth/ [scientificamerican.com] mentions again 5:1 for a spartan one, going up as you add things we take for granted as "civilized" and with options to keep adapting to future challenges (by means of education, healthy population, R&D).
To see the energy of a project check http://www.theenergycollective.com/barrybrook/471651/catch-22-energy-storage [theenergycollective.com] and scroll down to the graph with triangles and bars. Last graph, a pyramid, has EROEIs for things like art or grow food, again matching what more or less said before, 5:1 is barely enought to keep rolling, support anyone beyond involved workers is 7:1, education needs 9:1. It even talks about the EROEI of pumped hydro, "amazing" 35:1 (49:1 for plain hydro), and later says we can not use storage for a transition away from fossil fuels. That's a facepalm moment. Thinking nuclear plants can idle without wasting energy and start and stop at will, or that we solved the residue handling (if tech or politics problem doesn't matter, we have not yet and don't seem to want to, we just pass the hot potato around) is also a WTF. What is more, I know of handful places in which there is pumped hydro to save the nuclear output at valley moments and be able to supply at peak ones.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Saturday December 24 2016, @07:53AM
Steam bypass (feature of most modern reactors) and use that for process heat (in siberia it is used for central heating, in some parts of the world it is used for desalination).
Having processes that can stand being unpowered for a while (days, weeks) makes this even more aftractive.
Nuclear is interesting in that regard, unless you have hydro (save water) or pumped storage (fill upper reservoir) or fastacting plants at neighbour grids (export) it often is cheaper to just co-place it with industrial processes that needs heat.
Heck, modern nuclear engineering intro courses even traina people to provise a rough estimate at how it will perform at various steam bypasses (or if they can take higher heat prior to the steam generators)
(Also - modern nuclear reactors can cycle down to between 40% and 60% in about an hour, and then ramp up to 95% at a rate of 3-5% per minute. Coupled with steam bypass this allows for very interesting options)
(Score: 2) by Ayn Anonymous on Sunday December 25 2016, @02:36AM
So all you nuclear power calculator here let the nuclear waste sit somewhere unattended, unwatched, unprotected ?
Yes ?
No ?
So let's say just one guy is looking after it.
For just minimal wage. $15
24h of course.
So, 24 x 15 = $360 per day.
$131,400 per year.
Half-time of plutonium is 10,000 years.
It will probably take 10 times half time to call it not "EXTREME dangerous and toxic".
That's: 13,140,000,000 13 billion dollar for some thousands tones of this nuclear waste shit.
Only one with a mental disorder believe that mankind can protect something for 100,000 years.
So, you are totally stupid or member of the nuclear cartel a...holes, or suffer from a mental disorder not to get what the REAL problem with nuclear power is.
Hint: it is no running them safely.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday December 25 2016, @10:30AM
Or we could just chuck the spent LWR fuel into CANDUs, set up breeders and the run a global nuclear programme long enough that we pass the time needed for storage (which - with the abice setup - reduced to less than 10k years).
Or we could chuck the spent LWR fuel unto CANDUs and breeders, and destroy the remaining stuff more active than U238 in an ADS. (From a technical point if view the waste issue was solved back in the 50s - we just need to push the price down and get politicians to allow us to build other types of reactors at a significant scale).
And since you insist there is no way to run a reactor safely then please tell me what failure modes you worry about with CANDU, AHR, HTR-PM, , IFR, ADS, ABB BWR 90+ or an ESBWR.
(Oh, and noone seriously considering nuclear in the long run considers only a single family of technologies [with the exception of ADS])
The notion that you must store nuclear waste in more strict ways than scrap metal is not really true if you're willing to fully use available technologies (it just is easier and less of a political hassle to store it - and most long term storages considered/under construction are designed to be sealed off unless you at least have the technology we got in the early 1900s (so - assuming next time round we rediscover everything at our current once there will be less than 40 years between when we could breach into a repo until we learn how we should approach it, and given the depths of the repos it will take a few decades to breach them with 1910s technology. Oh, and where long term storages are planned to be built are where the bedrock isn't expected to change for a couple of million years [excepting east asia - where the tectonic plates are expected to be melted in the even more radioactive innards if the earth])
(Btw; the halflife of Pu-239 is about 24k years, and it is the third most stable isotope of Pu - and it is easy enough to use that it is insane to send it to storage instead of fissioning it. And while at it - you are aware the toxic properties of nuclear waste has nothing to do with radioactivity?)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @06:08AM
its more like: 1 unit of energy invested will unlock x(>1) amount of energy.
if 1 unit of energy would create x(>1) units of energy, it would require a overunity device.
obviously the energy is below our feet (oil, gas, coal) already but needs some "digging"
or investment of energy to become available.
same with sunshine. it bangs on the planet everyday. if you want to collect it,
then a certain amount of energy needs to be expended to be able to collect it.
EROI is thus not about money but about energy.
if solarpanels have a EROI of 15, it means that 1 solar panel can collect
enough sunshine energy to produce 15 more solar energy collecting panels.
however a EROI of 15 for oil doesn't means that you can create 15 more oil.
Oil, gas, coal will not go away, they are too convenient; rather it will become
obsolete to convert chemical oil-gas-coal energy into electrical energy.
the conversion efficiency is only between 35-70% (small combustion engine to big gas turbines).
Converting sunshine with solid-state solar panels is not a chemical process.
if we have a unlimited energy source on one side (sun) and a finite source on the other
and then invest energy and continue to use a conversion process with crappy efficiency
(above) then it should be obvious that pretty much everyone belongs in the loony bin.
over time, tapping the sun for electrical energy will make it very cheap and extremely
abundant then we need to figure out what stuff to do with it.
as it stands now, tapping a finite source, some things are not considered doing because of
limitations of the source.
for example, re-greening the sahara desert. it would need a gigantic amount of energy to do it
(and would contribute to "climate change" but in a good way) and isn't considered because the main source
of energy is too expensive to do it.
another: RE-freezing the north pole? again, gigantic amounts of energy required.
etc.