Just how tiny? For an up and coming thin film, CdTe, we use about 12 gm of CdTe to make a square meter module.  In a year in an average US location, we harvest about 11% x 1750 kWh/m2-yr, or 154 kWh/yr (after accounting for another 20% in losses, but not for an additional, but small annual loss). Thus in one year, we need 0.08 g/kWh. But wait! We don’t burn PV modules, and they don’t die after one year – warranties are about 30 years, so this is really one thirtieth of that, or 2.6 milligrams per kWh. Let’s make a table:

Amounts of CdTe Used with Different Recycling and Lifetime Assumptions

In comparison, we burn:

So the ratio of the use of CdTe to these fuels is as follows:

So even without fancy assumptions about lifetime and recycling, today’s PV systems will use CdTe more conservatively than nuclear will use uranium by a factor of 10. But with reasonable recycling assumptions, made more realistic when one understands that CdTe manufacturers already recycle their modules, CdTe will use 20 and 50 times less material than nuclear per kWh of output. Compared to coal, of course, the numbers are out of this world. These differences in resource needs bear on the ultimate sustainability of the PV in comparison to other more resource-intense energy technologies.

Ken Zweibel

Perhaps Mints’ most convincing tabular evidence of the failure of thin films to revolutionize PV is her Figure 1, thin film share of total shipments. She shows that thin films’ share peaked in 1988 at 32% and plunged from there to 5% in 2004. Then it only picked up slightly to 17% by 2009. She didn’t have numbers from 2010, but given the growth of Chinese silicon, thin film share may even fall in 2010. Is this the characteristic of a revolution?

Having been part of the development of thin films, I’ll give Paula her due and say we once thought it would be a revolution. But the surprise wasn’t just about thin films – it was how good crystalline silicon could be. That’s a message I would agree with. This has to be said – crystalline silicon was better than we (the thin film community) realized; and it still seems to have plenty of potential for continued progress. There hasn’t been and there will not be any overall revolution of PV by thin films.

However, that is not “ ’nough said.”  That falls far short of ‘nough said. Because Paula’s own data shows one thing in favor of thin films and in favor of CdTe specifically – it has grown explosively, an d even more rapidly than any other technology, including crystalline silicon. And it has made a difference, along with Chinese silicon, in adding zest to PV competition, with the very desirable effect of reducing typical prices and keeping the pressure on for continuing to do so.  This is shown in Mints’ Figure 2, adapted here to show comparative CAGRs graphically:

The growth of CdTe is more than triple the growth of PV modules in general.

The lesson is thin films are not monolithic. Pick out the growth rate of amorphous and thin film silicon (purple Xs). Despite the opening made by expensive silicon, thin film silicon grew only marginally since 2004 – 38%. By comparison, CdTe (blue *) grew at 181% since 2004, three and a half times higher than the growth rate of all module shipments. This is what success looks like. To ignore the success of CdTe is to fall short in terms of understanding a crucial factor in the future of PV and to diminish unnecessarily the success of thin films to-date.

Thin films are not created equal. A bit simplistically, it’s like the old story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. For amorphous and thin film silicon, the porridge is not hot enough. The efficiency is too low. For CIS alloys, the porridge is too hot – although CIS cells can be very efficient (20% cells!), CIS is hard to manufacture. For CdTe, the porridge is just right – efficient enough and easy to manufacture. There may be a dozen documented ways to make 10% CdTe cells.

The concept of thin films makes sense – less material, less handling through large area substrates – but it has to be executed. So far, CdTe is the only technology that has executed. But when the concept of thin films is executed, it can stand up to any competition in PV, including Chinese silicon.  Can anything else in PV say the same?

Beyond the status quo, only CIS looks like it might, someday, be a serious competitor of CdTe. And this would be good, because we need more competitors to keep the progress in PV robust and the competition lively.

There is something else to be learned about the failed thin film revolution, and this is very important, especially here in DC. A good new idea may take 30 years to pan out, and by the time it does, the status quo will have changed radically. There will very likely be no revolution, and there may not even be progress.

The technologies now in place have tremendous up-side. They will get much better and deserve the Federal support needed to keep them moving (and keep the US leading technologically). Tens of new PV ideas have been examined and dropped in comparison to them, but newcomers to PV (and I include almost everyone who comes to DC with every new Administration) make the mistake that they (1) can have a revolution in PV and (2) that we need one. We can’t, and we don’t.

For usually, when newcomers have new ideas, they are old ones – old and discarded ones that are very boring to the PV community. Plastic solar cells? Dye cells? Cells made on flexible foils? Give me a break. They exist and can be barely sold. These technologies are not terawatt-worthy. Yet often, it is just these kind of cell technologies that people new to PV fund and research when they talk of the next revolution. Someday we will have a mature PV program, when we have the patience to learn about the one we have.

So, Paula, pardon me for using your excellent story as a springboard. Your data tells a deep and important story, even beyond the necessary recognition that thin films did not revolutionize PV.

Ken Zweibel

The answer is “prices.” There is no real price, because there are many prices. Price varies by the amount of local sunlight and by the system size and type.

And there are two kinds of prices – dollars per watt, which is price per instantaneous power. And cents per kWh, which is price per unit of delivered energy. Dollars per watt is hard; cents per kWh is harder.

So with this in mind, let’s do some prices!

Big systems are cheaper than small systems; tiny systems, like those on your house, are more expensive again. If we assume the biggest systems can be installed (sans delays and all sorts of undefinable costs) at $3/W; then large rooftop systems on WalMart might go in for $4/W; and residential systems for $5/W. These would be “perfect” systems, with no delays and other setbacks. For more typical ones, you can add a dollar or even $2/W. These are all fixed arrays; if you want tracking, add another 50 ¢/W to a dollar to the large system price (but you get 25% more output).

Then there’s location. In comparison to the desert southwest US, putting up systems in average US locations are about 20% more expensive because you get 25% fewer photons; the East Coast is about 35% worse. (These are slightly corrected for reduced temperature losses versus the Southwest.) So if a large fixed array is three units of cost, what are the others?

Table 1. Relative Costs for Different Sizes and Locations (ratios to $3/W in Southwest)

Let’s put this into something we can understand, cents per kWh (¢/kWh). There is no easy way to do this, but all we are looking for is a sense of these prices. Even these prices are estimates, and real prices vary all over the place. So let’s assume $3/W is 16 ¢/kWh, and take ratios to get the others.

Approximate Prices by Location and Size in ¢/kWh (no incentives)

Thus you can see where someone can correctly quote nearly 40 ¢/kWh about PV costs, for example in a less sunny place like Germany; and I can quote 16 ¢/kWh in the US Southwest for large systems. We have not yet come to the point where different locations, applications, and sizes are distinguished in PV.

With 30% investment tax credit, these would calculate about 30% cheaper, and many have made the argument that this is only compensation for solar’s environmental, economic, and security values, which are otherwise unmonetized. Just to validate this somewhat, Jens Meyerhoff, head of First Solar’s utility systems business, stated in sworn testimony before Congress September 23: “First Solar is capable of providing solar electricity at a cost between $0.12 and $0.16 per kilowatt-hour” (presumably after application of the investment tax credit). This is consistent with the numbers in the above tables.

Ken Zweibel

Solar is so cute and cuddly we can bear-ly stand it. But does this teddy have any teeth?

Is there a more lovable energy source than solar power?

Its fuel is light from the sun, which is free and available almost anywhere. It’s entirely clean to run. It’s easy to install and maintain. The big utilities can use it to generate green grid power, but you can also put it on your own roof to become your own utility or to go off-grid.

And did I mention that it’s powered by THE SUN?

(Full disclosure: I do some work for a solar power company in Virginia called Secure Futures).

It’s no wonder that public support for solar power is high, with 92% of Americans in a 2009 poll saying that it’s important to develop solar energy resources. In particular, environmentalists love solar power best of all energy sources. It’s as clean as wind power, but solar is much less controversial.

Wind turbines make noise and spoil hillside “viewsheds” that bother the neighbors and the turbines’ huge spinning turbine blades can kill birds and bats. But aside from a need for land and some use of toxics in manufacturing, solar has few environmental impacts. And so far, there has been very little NIMBY opposition to solar installations.

Itsy bitsy teeny weeny

But many experts in energy beg to demur. They admit that yes, solar power sure is cool. But they say that solar is not a practical source of electricity today. And they predict that it will probably never become practical in the future.

Skeptics have three main problems with solar. First, because it’s intermittent (the sun doesn’t always shine), solar power can’t provide the always-on power that we’re used to. So, every time you put up a solar power installation you also need to build or pull in a dirty fossil fuel or nuclear plant to back it up. That’s not so clean, is it? And it’s wasteful too, since you basically have to keep those backup plants running on standby 24/7.

Second, solar power is also expensive, not only because you need all those other plants just sitting around as back up, but also because making solar panels requires fancy-dancy materials like rare-earth minerals and costs money for many other reasons. Even with government subsidies, solar power still can’t compete today with coal or nuclear power rates.

Finally, even if you could store solar power at night or ship it over from sunny areas like Arizona to places that need the juice like New York City, the battery and grid technology is so far in the future that solar power won’t be able to scale up in any meaningful time frame to replace coal or nukes.

Solar panels look cool. But are they practical?

So, critics say, no matter how neat solar panels and reflector mirrors look gleaming in the noonday sun, solar power always seems to be the energy source of tomorrow. Put together, after decades of development photovoltaics and solar thermal power still can’t produce even one percent of America’s juice. Doesn’t that prove that solar will always be rinky-dink?

In support of this view, Tad Padzek of the University of Texas at Austin told the ASPO-USA conference in October that if you measure all electricity sources by the number of days worth of usage per year that each provides, solar is microscopic. If coal covers 176 days, nuclear power covers 72 days and wind power covers 5 days, solar power would account for only one puny hour of America’s electricity usage.

Another skeptic, Robert Hirsch, who also spoke at the ASPO event, referred to solar power in his book The Impending World Energy Mess as the “emperor’s underwear,” an energy source that is not a total fraud and does have some value, but whose power comes only at a very high price.

Growing, but without much love

“You have to start somewhere,” says Ken Zweibel, director of the GW Solar Institute at George Washington University.

Zweibel told the ASPO-USA conference that, although the US doesn’t have much more solar power today than we did ten years ago, we have yet to see a nationwide emergency program to ramp it up. Quite the opposite, in fact. Most of solar’s growth has taken place in a start-again-stop-again policy atmosphere where incentives were intermittent and investors had difficulty planning the true costs of a project. “We’ve seen a 3000-fold increase in solar capacity without really trying.”

“Recently, the numbers have started to grow, doubling over the year before,” Zweibel told me. “It doesn’t take many doublings for things to get pretty astounding.”

(Click image to enlarge.) Chart showing similar adoption curves for solar power and other sources of electricity. Image: Terry Peterson.

In support, Zweibel cites the work of researcher Terry Peterson, who did a study of the rate at which wind power ramped up to its current nameplate capacity of about 100 gigawatts worldwide. “Solar is now on the same increase curve as wind and also as both natural gas and nuclear power were in their big periods of growth.”

Zweibel cites another report, this time a forthcoming study by Robert Margolis for the Department of Energy, that in twenty years solar power could supply 20% of US electricity demand, an amount equivalent to the energy now used by America’s entire fleet of cars and light trucks.

And if wind power can ramp up to provide yet another 20% of US electricity in the same period, as many experts have also projected, then in 2030 nearly half of America’s power will come from these two clean, renewable sources, the sun and the wind. That’s definitely not chickenfeed.

GW Solar Institute's Ken Zweibel

Today, bigger and bigger solar projects are in the works. For example, in October California approved the world’s largest solar installation, a thermal plant capable of generating 1,000 megawatts of power using mirrors to heat water that would turn turbines to generate electricity.

Zweibel says that such projects could overcome the challenge of providing always-on power by pairing solar installations not with fossil fuel or nuclear plants, but instead with wind farms of appropriate capacity. Working together, solar and wind often balance out each others’ intermittency, since the wind often blows harder at night while the sun isn’t shining.

But to supply power from the sun that’s more consistently available, storage will have to greatly improve. Along with better batteries and other ways to store electricity such as compressed air and pumped water, Zweibel says that we can use the growing fleet of hybrid electric and all-electric vehicles as batteries-on-wheels, one of those neato ideas that seems to solve two problems at the same time.

“Electric vehicles can be brought online without adding much capacity,” Zweibel says. “EVs are storage which allow you to add more solar power without adding more cost.”

Your roof in Cleveland vs. that blinding Arizona sun

Zweibel sees a place for millions of panels on rooftops across the country. Those panels won’t be as affordable as doing solar at utility scale. But distributed solar will have the advantage of adding needed competition so far missing from most regions’ electricity markets. By requiring utilities to become more efficient, competition from home PV systems will drive down costs for retail electricity.

But Zweibel thinks that big solar will be more cost-effective in the long run. Large installations can turn the burning sun of the southwestern US into affordable juice for the rest of the country at competitive rates — 14 to 17 cents per kilowatt hour without any subsidies.

Can solar power become the grizzly bear of energy sources, ready to rip carbon emissions to shreds?

And in the future, Zweibel sees solar only getting cheaper because, viewed from every aspect of the energy business, solar enjoys the lowest risk. While coal, natural gas and uranium are sure to rise in cost as supplies deplete, solar has no fuel cost to pay. Instead, its main cost comes from manufacturing equipment, and that is likely to continue falling in the future. “Total prices today are 40% to 60% less than three years ago,” he says.

Operational and regulatory risks are both also low relative to other power sources, particularly those environmental bad-boys, coal and nuclear. Coal is sure to feel the wrath of carbon taxes along with additional costs from carbon sequestration, if the industry ever delivers on the so-far elusive promise of “clean” coal. And if nuclear begins to ramp up again as President Obama has promised, the public is likely to demand expensive measures to increase the safety of new plants and to store growing piles of radioactive waste.

Meantime, the break-even point on investment for solar PV has come down to ten years in the US southwest and 14 years in a moderately sunny East Coast state like Virginia, for example. Today’s solar panels are rated to last 30 or 40 years, and in the near future, panels could be built to last a full century, Zweibel says.  As simple to maintain as they are to assemble, the only major component of a solar system that needs to be changed out regularly is the inverter, a relatively inexpensive part of the whole setup.

So, what will it take to help the solar teddy bear grow into a thousand-pound grizzly, ready to rip to shreds high energy costs, polluting fuels and dangerous nukes?

Aside from new technology, Zweibel calls for certainty in deployment. Because they’re not predictable — one year they’re here and they next year they could be gone — tax credits have not been the most helpful form of incentive to invest in solar power. Also, tax credits favor Wall Street speculators over entrepreneurs and homeowners. “I hate these tax credit things. They bring in Goldman Sachs and firms like that while pushing out the rest of us,” says Zweibel.

He calls for outright grants over tax credits, and for public incentives that are locked in for a period of years to avoid the on-again-off-again syndrome and provide some predictability for investors to put their money into building solar installations.

Large installations of 100-year solar panels could be the Roman aqueducts of our generation. Photo: Wolfgang Staudt via Flickr.

“Simple, rugged, long-lived infrastructure like dams, harbors, aqueducts, schools and libraries differentiates great civilizations from failures,” says Zweibel.

And with peak oil coming on, if we can convert many of our cars, trains, and buses over from liquid fuels to electricity, then solar power could just help America find a cost-effective substitute for some of the oil that we’ll lose. This could help provide a much softer landing to our oil-soaked economy.

Because transportation is so key to our economy and our culture, powering transportation with solar could, by itself, make the America of the future a great civilization rather than a failure.

Now a watt of PV installed for a year can produce from about 1-2 kWh/yr. Maybe that watt cost $3 to install. One kWh produced normally in the US, by the EPA estimate, is about 0.7 kg CO₂ / kWh. So using an average value of 1.5 kWh/W-yr, we could assume about 1 kg/W-yr.

But this forgets two pretty significant things – those kWh are valuable; and there is a loan that adds cost to the PV. So for round numbers, let’s assume the loan doubles the amount of money spent on the PV; but the value of the electricity offsets the original amount. Voila, we are back where we started – $3/W of added cost. This is obviously very rough! But it is assumptions like this that make all these calculations ‘rough’.

So if you calculated the cost per MT of CO2 on the basis of one year PV output, it would be $3/1 x 10^-4 MT = $3,000/MT – not a pretty picture.

But if you assumed that PV would last 30 years, then PV would cost $3000/30 = $100/MT. This seems to be the number you hear the most often.

Still high.

But at a hundred years, this might settle down to about $30/MT plus some degradation and for O&M. So here’s my first ansatz at calculating the $/MT CO2 of PV:

Cost per MT of Avoided CO2 from PV (First Approximation, $/MT CO2 avoided)

If the PV were cost effective at $2/W, say, then the $3/W number would be higher; but the $1.5/W number might be almost zero (and the the details of the loan, the degradation, extra cost for variability, and O&M would need to be included).

Here’s another way to look at this, based on levelized electricity cost. We have to make some broad assumptions, so let’s assume that solar electricity is worth 10 ¢/kWh. And let’s assume that $3/W system has a levelized cost of electricity of 16 ¢/kWh with a 30-year loan (this is about right for a sunny location). That means it needs a 6 ¢/kWh for 30 years subsidy to be installed. Each kWh avoids 0.7 kg, so this is 9 ¢/kg, or 90 $/MT (rounding up). Each year, society would have to pay an additional $90, but would also get another MT of saved CO2.

This doesn’t count the fact that after 30 years, society would actually start saving money (the PV system is running for 1 ¢/kWh, so we would be getting 9 ¢/kWh savings). So that means in another 20 years, or 50 years total, our CO2 would have been avoided for free. (This connects up with the previous analysis if the savings after the loan were included.)

But no one ever counts the post-30 years part, usually saying it is “discounted” away. So much for the Hoover Dam – it’s just a phantom of our collective imagination. (Actually, the savings are real; it’s only the economists who think business-defined discounting is “real,” when in fact it is only used for business to maximize short-term profit. It is not societally defined the same way.)

Ken Zweibel

More recently, I figured out that as long as wind was less expensive than PV, wind would be stored first in CAES.

Under the circumstances that wind is cheaper than PV and wind blows more at night, we won’t be seeing much PV stored for shifting to nighttime.

It’s going to be hard for PV to get cheaper than on-shore wind. Wind today seems to have about 50% more output per installed watt than PV does. So that means PV must be 2/3 of the cost of wind per watt to be equivalent to it. If on-shore wind is about $2/W, then PV would have to reach $1.33/W – maybe $1.5/W because wind has higher O&M costs. This is tough but eventually likely about 2020. Even when it is achieved, however, it only means PV becomes about the same price as on-shore wind is now. (Of course, solar is produced during the day, when it is more valuable than wind. And PV is already about the same price as off-shore wind.)

According to recent DOE studies, up to deployments of about 20% PV or wind, we can handle the variability. But above something like 20% electricity each, there will start to be too much PV electricity during the Spring and Fall days, and too much wind on many nights.

So here we have it – a world where we push the limits of the grid with 20% PV and 20% wind, at something up to 40% of our electricity. And sometimes, on the days or nights of the lowest demand or the highest wind or PV, we have too much wind at night or too much PV during the day. Does this limit us? Is 20% each the end?

That’s the point where people start talking about storage. But storage about doubles the cost for the electricity that is stored (roughly!), and it isn’t even all that proven at scale.

What about moving electricity as an alternative to storage? Move PV electricity from midday to evening by sending it east from the west coast. Or move it from daytime to nighttime by sending it from the Sahara to New York City under the Atlantic with high voltage DC. Or move wind from nighttime to daytime. You can build more and more PV and wind as long as you can send it further and further away where conditions are different.

Surprisingly, the economics of shifting electricity are about the same as storage. 10% loss for three thousand miles is like batteries; 20% for 6000 miles is like pumped hydro; 40% loss is about 12,000 miles, half the earth away – and is like compressed air energy storage (CAES). Then you have to compare the capital costs, and interestingly, they tend to favor transmission, except for the very longest distances (and depend sensitively on whether you can use the transmission both ways, i.e., fully use their capacity to offset their cost).

It comes down to caverns and transmission on land for CAES; or transmission on land and underwater for shifting wind and sun to where it’s needed. It’s transmission either way, but shifting is more proven at cost and scale than storage. Yet it is rarely compared to storage.

Transmission isn’t as much a technical problem (it is already way further along than storage) as a societal one (i.e., NIMBY); and political, since it connects different parts of the Earth. So it doesn’t support the idea of energy independence; and it is vulnerable to culture clashes and isolated revolutionaries. But perhaps proper redundancy and keeping the fossil fuel power plants ready and storing some fossil fuels needed to overcome an emergency might be enough (I want to acknowledge that I heard something like this idea for backup fossil fuels first from Arnold Goldman; and the idea of international transmission goes back at least to Buckminster Fuller). After all, as everyone knows, it’s a lot easier to store fuel than store electricity.

It isn’t time to get too squeamish about solar and wind beyond 40% of our electricity. As we know from other blogs, this is enough to eliminate all our imported oil, if we had electric transport. So it’s quite a good amount. But it is time to think a bit beyond the box about alternatives.

Ken Zweibel

Invest big, now; make money slowly, later.

Invest big, now; get nearly free electricity, later.

Invest now, reduce CO2 later.

Work now, sit on your laurels, later.

Even worse: subsidize now, reduce costs for later.

So many things about PV have the form: pay a large amount now (invested money, energy, CO2), get paid back slowly but in a big way, later:

Reward(t) = Slow payback(t) – One Big, Up-front Cost

Just as a reminder of some other things like this, let’s recall the beauty of:

• Bridges and tunnels
• Highways
• Roads
• Water supplies from distant sources
• Cars and trucks
• Manufacturing equipment
• Houses and buildings
• Flood control and dams
• Laws and regulations
• Standards and codes
• The Constitution
• Public health policy

Are you vague about standards, codes, laws, regulations, the Constitution being like this? Think of Haiti – think of the costs of building codes in San Francisco, and compare that to a lack of codes in Haiti. Up front cost. Think of signing and living by a contract instead of stealing.

These are the bases of civilization.

If PV is out of tune with our times, we are out of tune with civilization.

We can do better.

Ken Zweibel

My scifi dream is to have solar distributed around the world, with maybe a majority in the sunniest places. What percent? That I don’t know.

I dream of this costing under $2/W on average. Big systems and small ones, averaging under $2/W in all. So if this is say about 20,000 TWh worldwide, that’d be 13,000 GW or so, or about 26,000 billion dollars – 26 trillion dollars. You have to remember, the energy industry is the biggest in the world. It moves several trillion a year.

But how do we use this solar? Because it is all during the day, it is too much daytime electricity. We can’t have 4 times as much electricity as the peak demand, even if it does coincide with the peak. We have to move it and store it. The answer is some combination of storage and long-distance transmission. We don’t keep the electricity ‘here’ – we send it overseas when it’s night ‘there’, and we get it from there, when it’s night here. We send it south when it’s summer here; and get it from the southern hemisphere when it’s winter here (and the sun is low for us). We move it around. Then whatever is left, we store. Some of it we store and use in electric transportation.

And don’t complain to me about what happens “when the sun don’t shine.” Because the sun is shining somewhere all the time, and we’ll have the transmission lines to get it here.

This dreamy idea differs from others’ because of the emphasis on long-distance transmission rather than storage. It’s kind of cooler that way, because the idea that the sun on the other side of the Earth is like storage hasn’t really sunk in yet. The losses are similar, too; and whereas large scale storage does not yet exist even conceptually, long-distance and undersea transmission are routine.

12,000 miles of high voltage transmission might cost us 36% losses. But that only means our worst price for transmitted electricity (a fraction of what we use) is 3 1/8^th $ per watt instead of $2/W. And you never know – in the fullness of time, we might beat $2/W, too, lowering this further.

Then what would we have? We’d have a long-lived electricity exoskeleton around the Earth that eventually will cost us very little money to maintain, for generations, even centuries to come.

Now we need the world that’s politically enlightened enough to support it. But to solve that, I’d have to switch genres to fantasy.

Ken Zweibel

Most traditional market-oriented people can’t even see the reason why society should pay even temporary subsidies. They see subsidies as violating the level playing field ideal. No one should have any advantage over anyone else, they say.

They believe there is a level playing field, and they want to preserve it. Most people do. It seems utterly natural.

It is a remarkable fact that humans rapidly adapt to change. Soon they hardly even notice a change, as they naturally adapt, as if they had sea legs. Change a level playing field, and most people just change with it. Soon they think it’s level again – when it was never level in the first place. Just tilted the way they were used to, the way they liked.

Our drive for stability seems to demand that as soon as a new way of doing things is established, much to the chagrin and pain of the previous way, it becomes “level.” The King is dead; long live the King!

There are few markets where society’s thumbprint is more marked than in the energy market. Put bluntly, past societal preferences and investments have defined today’s energy market; and future ones will redefine it, no matter how much anyone says otherwise.

Forget the level playing field. There’s no such thing. Let’s look at the facts:

1.       The nuclear industry would not exist without the Price Anderson Act, which allows nuclear power plants to operate without accident liability. Without that Act, lenders would charge double today’s interest rates to cover their risks, and nuclear would be uneconomical. Why do you think the first thing any President does to awaken the nuclear industry is promise it loan guarantees? Is it even necessary to add worries about terrorism and spent nuclear fuel to see how much society buries its anxieties about nuclear in extra, but hidden support?

2.       The coal industry kills people underground, kills them above ground with particulates, and is the biggest source of carbon dioxide. The people who work in the mines are being replaced by machines and explosives, and those machines and explosives remove mountain tops or strip mine the West. Coal ash is the spent fuel of coal power plants, buried under golf courses and erupting from rupturing ash ponds. Where in the price of coal are those costs?

3.       Natural gas is the great white hope of traditionalists, and our confidence in it depends on an overnight doubling of reserves created for a desperate audience by calling shale gas safe and clean. Even without shale gas, pipeline leaks and explosions in Michigan and California form the backdrop to drilling platform explosions in the Gulf. Natural gas is not a dependable solution, even if we wish otherwise. But it has a tremendous hidden subsidy – if its price goes up, the Public Utility Commission will automatically pass it along to you. Do you know this? Do you consider it a subsidy? Has it melted into the woodwork, along with all the other weirdness we call a level playing field?

4.       Three dollar a gallon gasoline may be something Joe six pack has gotten used to, but it’s equivalent to 36 ¢/kWh electricity in terms of energy content for moving a car. PV and wind are half that price, if only we had the cheap batteries to go with them. Persian Gulf blackmail (and the cost and political backlash from  our deployed troops) and Gulf of Mexico explosions top off the list of offenses of this essential component of today’s level playing field.  How many billions is that?

Society has made choices and continues to make choices that favor traditional energy sources. When we have a series of accidents in the Gulf, our Southern politicians call for more drilling not more safety. Long ago, they were co-opted by the tilt of that playing field, necessitating they ignore accidents and environmental degradation. The same is true of Appalachian politicians. This is the power of the tilted level playing field in action, and we hardly notice it. We think it’s “normal and rational.”

What will happen to the level playing field? As alternatives like PV, CSP, and wind become more and more convincing and familiar, the level playing field will shift again and deprive the traditional fuels of their favors. Instead, the favors will become foundations for solar, wind, and electric transport. That will become the new level playing field, and no one will call it otherwise.

Those being marginalized will complain, but their voices will fade. The rest of us will either enjoy the change or look the other way, if we even notice it. When the transition is over, we won’t even remember the process. We’ll say solar, wind and electric transport became cost effective.

It isn’t fair or right to expect PV to become cost-effective without any societal help. But, shhhhh…we don’t need to say anything about it. Soon, once society likes PV enough, it will help it in such a way that no one notices anymore, like it does now for coal, nuclear, oil, and gas.

Ken Zweibel

Here’s a different headline from RenewablesBiz Daily:

Beleaguered couple backs tougher EPA fly ash rules

Karen and Stephen Fox have had a rough year or so, by most measures. He was diagnosed in March 2009 with larynx cancer and has struggled through treatments… They couldn’t refinance or find a buyer for their home to help pay the bills because, they said, it’s involved in the $1 billion neighborhood lawsuits over toxic fly ash used to build a nearby golf course.

Now let me see – coal ash can be dumped under golf courses near people’s houses, but PV systems endanger the kangaroo rat (and wind systems look funny off Cape Cod). And the coal industry and its regulators at EPA can claim they didn’t know. And the PV system must be studied for every possible sin of the father, even though it was designed as a relief from those sins.

From CleanTechnica:

While 11 Gigawatts of clean energy languished in “environmental reviews”, between 2000 and 2008, 20 Gigawatts of dirty power plants in California were promptly approved and installed.

Why is it every new PV system has to be more rigorously checked for every fantasy, when the old ways are doing things that would put PV on death row?

Well, we already answered that question. But it’s still sad and silly.

Ken Zweibel