Solar is not green. Doped high-purity silicon wafers do not just magically grow on trees, they are manufactured by chemical industry that leaves a, toxic as all hell, waste stream per megawatt produced that makes nuclear power look like "magical kittens and faries power, INC", a waste stream that has no half life, that just piles up for all eternity. And as if this was not bad enough, even if the producers clean up their act, all forms of solar power inevitably pave over ecosystems with industrial plant. If you put up windmills in a forest, field, or hell, a nature preserve, then the wheel tracks from the construction crew, and the digging for the power line heal over quickly enough, and life goes on, with very little impact on what was there before, apart from the couple of square meters that are the base of the mill. Build a nuke plant, and the number of square meters used for mining, plant ect - is very low per kwh produced. Solar, on a scale that would actually produce significant power, inherently kills landscapes by the dozens and hundreds of square kilometers stone cold dead Nothing grows without light, and solar power takes all of it where it is built.
Zum Beispiel, Weser Stadion (Werder Bremen) (construction nearly finished in photo, one year ago) "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
thomas was likely using silicon technology when he posted his comment, and he had no problem with that, ubiquitous as such technology is. Given the scales of digital and PV technology, recycling and proper disposal can be assumed to be developing. Life cycle energy costs together with disposal costs should make mass-produced PV very bearable.
also, notice the decent angle for winter sun on the stadium. double benefit, as just to the right of the photo is one of Bremen's giant swimming baths, with 4 diving and giant pools, kid's zones, slides and games, etc., you an get tan from both directions. :-)) "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
And cost is not something which can be, or should be, ignored. The projected cost of the solar feed in tariff in germany is high enough that if the same money were allocated to nuclear build, the result would be a fully carbon free grid, which would be rather better outcome than the projected build of solar the cost projections assume (single digit percentage of power from solar..)
And just to demonstrate that my objection to solar is not just nuclear advocacy, - there is also the very simple point that the same amount of money spent on "more wind and pumped storage" would also result in vastly more CO2 displacement per Euro spent. As would wave power. or geothermal. Or ocean thermal inclines. Anything and everything is, and will remain, cheaper than rooftop solar, so all subsidies for it are bad policy. Because the cost of paying people to do rooftop work will never come down. It is possible that sufficiently cheap solar cells will someday make economic sense if you put them up during initial construction, or when a roof needs replacing in any case, but this would make for a really slow build of capacity..
the cost of paying people to do rooftop work will never come down.
It's "economic lunacy" to pay people to do work? Perhaps we should go along with current models of "economic sanity" that are all about treating labour as a cost to be reduced?
Even if the panels were free, and they are not, the labor inherent in redoing the roofing of most buildings, with the inherent disruption to traffic, ect, make them more expensive than any other form of power
[Citation needed]
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
http://egpreston.com/costofcentralsolar.pdf
cites a cost of installation of 4 dollars/watt, at a capacity factor of 15 %, which is shit compared to.. anything. (the author also makes a fairly compelling case for the economics of rooftop solar with cheap panels in new build. Logic does not hold water for retrofits, as the author costed the labor of a normal roof refit at 0. Which only makes sense if you are looking solely for the diffrence between a solar roof and a regular roof you are putting up in any case)
Most of Canada's population lives to the South of Frankfurt... maybe even Munich. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
So essentially, your figures support the argument that retrofit rooftop PV should be installed as a counter-cyclical policy during a construction slump.
I suppose you could make a case for doing counter-cyclical nuclear buildouts instead, but I am not convinced that the lead times on nuclear plants make that viable for the initial phases of a recession.
We should build a europe wide HSR net for people and rededicate the regular lines for freight.
And local passengers. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
There is slowness from lower priority related stops, but the latter are not due to the number of passenger trains, but the speed differential -- and that more vs. expresses than stopping trains. In that sense, replacing expresses with high-speed trains on dedicated lines would indeed be the way to go. I note though that due to noise issues, currently ever more countries return to the (IMO bad) idea to put freight trains on the high-speed lines (because those are avoiding lines), and hope that advanced signalling will improve capacity.
Meanwhile, European railfreight is also slow due to a low top speed of trains, inefficient switching when trains are re-arranged, and (considering the distances at which rail is most competitive) above all borders (which are often technological borders). There are improvements in each field, though. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
This makes the average trip shorter, which disadvantages rail over truck given the current underpricing of truck fuel.
He wrote:
The second part of the cost is everything else other than the solar panels. This cost is currently $4/watt in the $7/watt estimates I have been stating in this and other papers in this series.
That's not just installation, but inventers and cables and transport (and possibly Canadian dollars); still, it appears too high. In this comment thread from 2004, you see prices that are a fraction of 1€/Watt-peak. More current figures put the panels at still well over 50% and installation at 15%, which translates to around 0.5€/Wp. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
I think there are two separate issues here: The financial and environmental coast benefit of solar on new build rooftops vs. other forms of generation, and the social/environmental benefits of retrofits vs. other forms of stimulus spending. Since the latter target a specific subgroup of building workers - roofing specialist and electricians - there is no reason why a stimulus plan targeted at a range of sectors in recession might not include such subsidised spending as one element in the mix. notes from no w here
Employing these currently unemployed construction workers is, economically speaking, free, inasmuch as it does not displace any other economic activity they might engage in.
Anything and everything is, and will remain, cheaper than rooftop solar, so all subsidies for it are bad policy. Because the cost of paying people to do rooftop work will never come down. It is possible that sufficiently cheap solar cells will someday make economic sense if you put them up during initial construction, or when a roof needs replacing in any case, but this would make for a really slow build of capacity..
and slow is what we have, but it would speed up with incentives, and no costly clean up afterwards. has it occurred to you that panels actually protect the roof? considering the 25+ years life of panels, the work needed to install them is derisory, besides we need to get a lot more creative with roof space anyway, be it for rooftop gardens, shading for leisure, water storage ect, why not suck some sun too?
retrofitting is always more costly than starting from scratch, but the faster and firmer the incentives, the more architecture will take energy on board, and the less we depend on 'big daddy' power plants, and spread the load, the better, no?
the real front line for solar development is on the 3rd world village scale anyway, not europe's cloudy north, but it started with the germans, so there you go.
where europe really needs it is the impoverished south, greece and the southern half of italy are screaming for it.
it's a no-brainer really, everyone likes them, whereas nuclear's biggest (usually not costed) externality may be the degree of brutal social control needed to convince locals that their own people will run these behemoths to the standards of the french!
italians can't even incinerate rubbish, you really want them managing nuclear waste? way to kill the tourist business, with the mob dumping it offshore in the med! ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Disruption to traffic? And roofs don't have to be maintained when no PV is installed, no satellite dishes and antennae are put up, nor new roof windows?... Come on, this is hyperbole too much.
The projected cost of the solar feed in tariff in germany
...is something established producers (who stand to lose market share) like to play around with. In particular, they like to forget about subtracting market prices.
if the same money were allocated to nuclear build, the result would be a fully carbon free grid
Because nuclear can replace intermediate power and peaker plants... not.
the same amount of money spent on "more wind and pumped storage" would also result in vastly more CO2 displacement per Euro spent
The economic point of a feed-in law is not to subsidize the cheapest and most CO2-friendly generation. It is to create a large enough separate market for competing producers of new, still expensive technologies to bring prices down by reailising economies of scale and doing research with a significant budget. Which is exactly what's happening.
Anything and everything is, and will remain, cheaper than rooftop solar
I wouldn't be so sure. Prices are coming down -- and so are feed-in tariffs due to degression. (Even if the current government leaves the current degression rate alone, the rate for 2015 installments will be half of the 2008 rate.) The industry even claims that the open market price level could be reached by 2013, which I doubt strongly, but still inmature technologies like HDR geothermal or wave power should be overtaken by then. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Checking, I find the trick was to compare with retail (end-user) price, not the production price of other generators. Not entirely honest, as this comparison is applicable only for off-grid users who have some application that would use all the generated electricity, and the PV price they indicate seems to be the upper bound formed by the feed-in rate rather than the (possibly much lower) production price per kWh.
At any rate, prices are going down.
*Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Depends where. In China, certainly. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
But siting is less of an issue, as noted above, as there are large areas that can be converted (roofs, parking lots, etc). I agree that greenfield large scale PV plants can easily become a blight on the landscape and will not go that far in Europe.
As for wind, most installation is in fields where the impact is minimal. Hilltop assembly does require some road construction, but it can usually be done to minimize impact. I don't think that's a very strong negative for wind. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
