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Solar Forecasting: The Next Big Thing For Solar Power?
Well that's just common sense. Duh.
From Utility Products:
People who know about renewable energy are probably also aware of wind forecasting—workers who set up meteorological equipment to measure when, where and how strongly the wind will blow at the site of a proposed wind farm. Knowing this information can make wind turbines and the power they produce more economical and reliable.
The same can be said of knowing when and where the sun will shine, if you are the developer of a solar energy facility. The people you sell your energy to need to know they can rely on the resource you are responsible for—something you might not be certain of yourself if you don’t have the kind of information that solar forecasting can put at your fingertips.
Solar forecasting as a technology is still in its infancy, and one place where it is being developed is at the University of California’s San Diego campus, where the Department of Energy is taking an interest (to the tune of a $1.93 million grant in 2010 with $500,000 cost share from the California Energy Commission) in developing ways to make solar energy more reliable through the use of forecasting techniques.
“We’re not lowering the cost of installed photovoltaics. We’re increasing the value that they will give to the market by increasing the predictability of the output. Large solar systems in the future will be bidding into an economic system, so if you’re wrong, it costs you money. This is why an annual average approach isn’t good enough,” Washom said.
Measuring the solar resource is done with equipment that is neither new nor that expensive. The clouds and sky over the entire campus at San Diego can be measured using a single sky imager, which costs about $12,000 and can be installed in about 48 hours.
“The sky imager is a hemispherical mirrored bowl on the highest building on campus. It holds the reflection of every cloud in a 360-degree radius. An arm comes out over this bowl and takes a picture of it. It’s a fisheye mirror that is looking at every cloud in the sky at once. By doing this series of photos every few seconds you can determine the speed, direction, type and opacity of the clouds moving toward your solar field. What is more cutting edge than the camera itself, however, is the ability to process the massive amount of data generated by climate sensors and cameras.
“The cost of measurement is dropping dramatically. We’re also seeing the costs of wireless communications dropping dramatically. Independent of what we’re doing, the price of computing power and terabytes of storage is dropping and will get lower. So we’re taking advantage of a globally developing market movement in this field,” Washom said.
Using the data coming into the system from this hardware, a computerized model is created. This model can tell the grid operators how much sun can be expected to make it through the clouds and hit the installed PV panels.
“We know where the panels are because they’re fixed,” Washom said. “We know where the sun is down to the nanosecond. So the only thing between our panels and the sun would be a cloud. Other factors do come into play, but cloud cover is the biggest factor.”
The lead researcher and individual processing this data is Jan Kleissl, who, in addition to working on this project, is also a professor of environmental engineering at UC-San Diego.
“There is a lot more involved in solar forecasting than just taking pictures of clouds,” Kleissl said. “People have been taking pictures of the sky for as long as we’ve had electronics. But, what we’ve been working on is computers that can tell us about these clouds. We have to train the computers to do that. Where are the clouds, and, more importantly, where are they moving? Then comes the earth-sun geometry.
“Knowing how clouds are going to behave is key to forecasting how much energy can be extracted from the sun in a given minute, hour or even day. And how do clouds behave?
“They behave badly,” Kleissl said with a laugh. “In San Diego, the clouds are better behaved than in areas that might have a little more meteorological intensity to them.
“In places like Arizona, where utilities are also investing in solar energy, clouds are rare, but when they exist they will dissipate, thicken, roll over and change shape more unpredictably than they do in the relatively boring weather of sunny San Diego.
“To meet the challenge of stubbornly inconsistent weather patterns, a variety of technologies have to work in tandem. Satellite imagery and computerized forecasting models are also part of the system and developed under a $548k grant from the California Public Utilities Commission through the California Solar Initiative,” Kleissel said. “There is no one tool that can do everything. Think of it as a hand-off.”
The sky imager, for example, can be relied on to measure the sunlight that will be available for the next 5-20 minutes. After that, satellite imagery can predict the level of sun from 30 minutes to a few hours into the future. Beyond that, a computerized forecasting model that measures physical weather patterns can be called upon to look into the future by a 24-hour period.
“When these measurement methods work together on a single system, a clearer picture of how much power can be generated and transmitted emerges,” Byron Washom said. “We anticipate the ability to forecast intra-hour what your system will produce with up to a 90 percent degree of certainty. So this will be firm power instead of non-firm power, and firm power is of a higher value because you minimize the penalties of not meeting what you bid into the market that you were going to deliver.”
This is music to the ears of power utilities, who in California are being asked to add an increasingly large amount of renewable energy into their generation portfolios—yet might still not be convinced that they can rely on renewable power to meet demand.
“With solar forecasting, grid operators can smooth out solar energy by ramping spinning reserves up or ramping it down as the grid demands it,” Washom said.
“If you have too much PV, the ramp rates up and down can wreak havoc on the line voltage and power electronics used to stabilize the voltage. If on the other hand you know in advance about a lot of ramp ups or a lot of ramp downs, you can have some mitigating measures,” Washom said. “In doing real-time measurements of the actual ramp rates that are being incurred (both up and down), you can then begin to reexamine the standards and rules that limit the amount of PV on a distribution circuit before the host utility requires another engineering study.
“What this also means is that greater amounts of solar energy than previously thought possible can be safely and reliably included on a grid,” Washom said.
Kevin Meagher, chief technology officer at Power Analytics, the company whose software analyzes the incoming data on solar energy availability, agrees that solar forecasting could change the way people view solar energy.
“One of the things that had been poorly understood about PV is how to accurately understand how it’s going to perform. Until this year, the rule of thumb has been more than 15 percent penetration of PV on a distribution circuit triggers expensive engineering studies to determine if additional PV will disrupt your grid,” Meagher said. “What we’re finding is that the level of generation can be even greater than 15 percent on most circuits.”
“If grid operators know the energy potential of grid-tied solar assets with granularity down to one minute, the operator knows what to expect the grid impact will be. This makes solar energy a resource people can take more seriously,” Meagher said. “With more accurate data, the long-term potential of this technology is to treat solar energy as a more tangible resource. Like you would with a pile of coal, you’ll know how much energy there will be to draw upon.”
“It’s desirable to include even more solar energy onto the grid, but there are still changes that need to be made, and further advances in forecasting technology are still around the corner,” Kleissl said. “So far, some solar projects have energy storage and some have forecasting, but integrating the two is what you want.”
With energy storage as part of the system, an operator could store up and later dispatch solar energy during a predicted period of heavy cloud cover.
Over the next few years, researchers and engineers will work to continue to improve this technology—but Kleissel doesn’t expect any huge breakthroughs.
“The next step is to better merge and integrate these different models. This is all going to be incremental improvements,” Kleissel said. “Each step forward will bring about a lot more work.”
From Utility Products:
People who know about renewable energy are probably also aware of wind forecasting—workers who set up meteorological equipment to measure when, where and how strongly the wind will blow at the site of a proposed wind farm. Knowing this information can make wind turbines and the power they produce more economical and reliable.
The same can be said of knowing when and where the sun will shine, if you are the developer of a solar energy facility. The people you sell your energy to need to know they can rely on the resource you are responsible for—something you might not be certain of yourself if you don’t have the kind of information that solar forecasting can put at your fingertips.
Solar forecasting as a technology is still in its infancy, and one place where it is being developed is at the University of California’s San Diego campus, where the Department of Energy is taking an interest (to the tune of a $1.93 million grant in 2010 with $500,000 cost share from the California Energy Commission) in developing ways to make solar energy more reliable through the use of forecasting techniques.
 |
| photo courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy ARM Climate Research Facility. |
“We’re not lowering the cost of installed photovoltaics. We’re increasing the value that they will give to the market by increasing the predictability of the output. Large solar systems in the future will be bidding into an economic system, so if you’re wrong, it costs you money. This is why an annual average approach isn’t good enough,” Washom said.
Measuring the solar resource is done with equipment that is neither new nor that expensive. The clouds and sky over the entire campus at San Diego can be measured using a single sky imager, which costs about $12,000 and can be installed in about 48 hours.
“The sky imager is a hemispherical mirrored bowl on the highest building on campus. It holds the reflection of every cloud in a 360-degree radius. An arm comes out over this bowl and takes a picture of it. It’s a fisheye mirror that is looking at every cloud in the sky at once. By doing this series of photos every few seconds you can determine the speed, direction, type and opacity of the clouds moving toward your solar field. What is more cutting edge than the camera itself, however, is the ability to process the massive amount of data generated by climate sensors and cameras.
“The cost of measurement is dropping dramatically. We’re also seeing the costs of wireless communications dropping dramatically. Independent of what we’re doing, the price of computing power and terabytes of storage is dropping and will get lower. So we’re taking advantage of a globally developing market movement in this field,” Washom said.
Using the data coming into the system from this hardware, a computerized model is created. This model can tell the grid operators how much sun can be expected to make it through the clouds and hit the installed PV panels.
“We know where the panels are because they’re fixed,” Washom said. “We know where the sun is down to the nanosecond. So the only thing between our panels and the sun would be a cloud. Other factors do come into play, but cloud cover is the biggest factor.”
The lead researcher and individual processing this data is Jan Kleissl, who, in addition to working on this project, is also a professor of environmental engineering at UC-San Diego.
“There is a lot more involved in solar forecasting than just taking pictures of clouds,” Kleissl said. “People have been taking pictures of the sky for as long as we’ve had electronics. But, what we’ve been working on is computers that can tell us about these clouds. We have to train the computers to do that. Where are the clouds, and, more importantly, where are they moving? Then comes the earth-sun geometry.
“Knowing how clouds are going to behave is key to forecasting how much energy can be extracted from the sun in a given minute, hour or even day. And how do clouds behave?
“They behave badly,” Kleissl said with a laugh. “In San Diego, the clouds are better behaved than in areas that might have a little more meteorological intensity to them.
“In places like Arizona, where utilities are also investing in solar energy, clouds are rare, but when they exist they will dissipate, thicken, roll over and change shape more unpredictably than they do in the relatively boring weather of sunny San Diego.
“To meet the challenge of stubbornly inconsistent weather patterns, a variety of technologies have to work in tandem. Satellite imagery and computerized forecasting models are also part of the system and developed under a $548k grant from the California Public Utilities Commission through the California Solar Initiative,” Kleissel said. “There is no one tool that can do everything. Think of it as a hand-off.”
The sky imager, for example, can be relied on to measure the sunlight that will be available for the next 5-20 minutes. After that, satellite imagery can predict the level of sun from 30 minutes to a few hours into the future. Beyond that, a computerized forecasting model that measures physical weather patterns can be called upon to look into the future by a 24-hour period.
“When these measurement methods work together on a single system, a clearer picture of how much power can be generated and transmitted emerges,” Byron Washom said. “We anticipate the ability to forecast intra-hour what your system will produce with up to a 90 percent degree of certainty. So this will be firm power instead of non-firm power, and firm power is of a higher value because you minimize the penalties of not meeting what you bid into the market that you were going to deliver.”
This is music to the ears of power utilities, who in California are being asked to add an increasingly large amount of renewable energy into their generation portfolios—yet might still not be convinced that they can rely on renewable power to meet demand.
“With solar forecasting, grid operators can smooth out solar energy by ramping spinning reserves up or ramping it down as the grid demands it,” Washom said.
“If you have too much PV, the ramp rates up and down can wreak havoc on the line voltage and power electronics used to stabilize the voltage. If on the other hand you know in advance about a lot of ramp ups or a lot of ramp downs, you can have some mitigating measures,” Washom said. “In doing real-time measurements of the actual ramp rates that are being incurred (both up and down), you can then begin to reexamine the standards and rules that limit the amount of PV on a distribution circuit before the host utility requires another engineering study.
“What this also means is that greater amounts of solar energy than previously thought possible can be safely and reliably included on a grid,” Washom said.
Kevin Meagher, chief technology officer at Power Analytics, the company whose software analyzes the incoming data on solar energy availability, agrees that solar forecasting could change the way people view solar energy.
“One of the things that had been poorly understood about PV is how to accurately understand how it’s going to perform. Until this year, the rule of thumb has been more than 15 percent penetration of PV on a distribution circuit triggers expensive engineering studies to determine if additional PV will disrupt your grid,” Meagher said. “What we’re finding is that the level of generation can be even greater than 15 percent on most circuits.”
“If grid operators know the energy potential of grid-tied solar assets with granularity down to one minute, the operator knows what to expect the grid impact will be. This makes solar energy a resource people can take more seriously,” Meagher said. “With more accurate data, the long-term potential of this technology is to treat solar energy as a more tangible resource. Like you would with a pile of coal, you’ll know how much energy there will be to draw upon.”
“It’s desirable to include even more solar energy onto the grid, but there are still changes that need to be made, and further advances in forecasting technology are still around the corner,” Kleissl said. “So far, some solar projects have energy storage and some have forecasting, but integrating the two is what you want.”
With energy storage as part of the system, an operator could store up and later dispatch solar energy during a predicted period of heavy cloud cover.
Over the next few years, researchers and engineers will work to continue to improve this technology—but Kleissel doesn’t expect any huge breakthroughs.
“The next step is to better merge and integrate these different models. This is all going to be incremental improvements,” Kleissel said. “Each step forward will bring about a lot more work.”
Solar Panels Compete With Cheap Natural Gas
Unfortunately, the true "cost" of cheap natural gas is not known. Poisoned or ruined wells, as well as the health problems from burning gas (not as bad as coal, but not negligible either), will result in costs borne by future generations or those who aren't enjoying the benefits of "cheap" gas today.
From NPR:
Renewable energy is growing rapidly in the U.S., with wind and solar industries enjoying double-digit growth each year. Part of that growth comes from more homeowners choosing to install solar panels.
With government subsidies, some people can even make a financial argument for installing the panels. But in recent years, the price of one fossil fuel — natural gas — has declined so much that solar panels are having difficulty competing.
The reason natural gas prices have fallen is because production is way up, thanks to hydraulic fracturing. Fracking, as it's called, is a controversial drilling technology that some say harms the environment. But the process has also made it possible to extract oil and gas once thought to be trapped in rock too deep underground for drillers to reach.
Due in large part to a combination of fracking and horizontal drilling, there's been a nearly 30 percent increase in the amount of natural gas produced in the U.S. since 2005.
"We've got a classic situation of supply and demand," says Kathryn Klaber, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group based outside Pittsburgh.
Natural gas demand has not gone up as quickly as supply, and Klaber says the price has dropped.
"A handful of years ago, natural gas could have been in the order of 12, 13, 14 dollars per million BTU," she says. "We're now down to three to four [dollars]."
This has allowed utilities that burn natural gas to produce electricity to hold the line on rates. For most of us, that's a good thing, but for those who've installed solar panels, it makes that investment less of a bargain.
Barbara Scott had 21 solar panels installed last March on her house in Media, Pa. Scott's family was the first in the community, and she was prepared to evangelize, "We can have open houses and write newsletter articles and promote the idea of solar," she said. But that was before the economics changed.
With government rebates and tax incentives, Scott says, her family spent $21,000 to install the system. She figured it would take eight years to recoup that investment.
A lot of other people had the same idea at the same time, which sent the price of solar energy credits down sharply in Pennsylvania. Scott says that added another seven years to the payback period.
On top of that, Scott says, electricity rates aren't going up as quickly as she thought they would, thanks in part to low natural gas prices.
"So that, again, adds another two years to our payback period," she says. "We're up to 17 years, which is, essentially, the life of the system. And we haven't even considered what happens if the system breaks or what it's going to cost to take the system off the roof and dispose of it. "
Despite this, Scott says she's still happy to have the panels on her house.
"But now, knowing it's — at best — a break-even proposition, we're not so comfortable telling other people to do it," she says.
Her experience raises questions about the viability of much larger, utility-scale solar projects built in recent years. But for them, the balance sheet looks different.
"They get a fixed price contract with a utility or somebody else who will buy that power from them," says Richard Caperton, director of clean energy investment at the Center for American Progress. Or with utilities, "they get to roll that into a rate base and recover that cost from electric power consumers."
Caperton says what's more interesting is to think about the wind, solar and even nuclear plants that are not being built now because producing with cheaper natural gas is more attractive to investors.
But natural gas prices could rise again quickly. If that happens, solar panels may seem like a good investment once again.
From NPR:
Renewable energy is growing rapidly in the U.S., with wind and solar industries enjoying double-digit growth each year. Part of that growth comes from more homeowners choosing to install solar panels.
With government subsidies, some people can even make a financial argument for installing the panels. But in recent years, the price of one fossil fuel — natural gas — has declined so much that solar panels are having difficulty competing.
The reason natural gas prices have fallen is because production is way up, thanks to hydraulic fracturing. Fracking, as it's called, is a controversial drilling technology that some say harms the environment. But the process has also made it possible to extract oil and gas once thought to be trapped in rock too deep underground for drillers to reach.
Due in large part to a combination of fracking and horizontal drilling, there's been a nearly 30 percent increase in the amount of natural gas produced in the U.S. since 2005.
"We've got a classic situation of supply and demand," says Kathryn Klaber, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group based outside Pittsburgh.
Natural gas demand has not gone up as quickly as supply, and Klaber says the price has dropped.
"A handful of years ago, natural gas could have been in the order of 12, 13, 14 dollars per million BTU," she says. "We're now down to three to four [dollars]."
This has allowed utilities that burn natural gas to produce electricity to hold the line on rates. For most of us, that's a good thing, but for those who've installed solar panels, it makes that investment less of a bargain.
Barbara Scott had 21 solar panels installed last March on her house in Media, Pa. Scott's family was the first in the community, and she was prepared to evangelize, "We can have open houses and write newsletter articles and promote the idea of solar," she said. But that was before the economics changed.
With government rebates and tax incentives, Scott says, her family spent $21,000 to install the system. She figured it would take eight years to recoup that investment.
Enlarge Jeff Brady/NPR Barbara Scott and Mac Given in Media, Pa., had 21 solar panels installed last March. With government rebates and tax incentives, Scott says, her family spent $21,000 to install the system.
On top of that, Scott says, electricity rates aren't going up as quickly as she thought they would, thanks in part to low natural gas prices.
"So that, again, adds another two years to our payback period," she says. "We're up to 17 years, which is, essentially, the life of the system. And we haven't even considered what happens if the system breaks or what it's going to cost to take the system off the roof and dispose of it. "
Despite this, Scott says she's still happy to have the panels on her house.
"But now, knowing it's — at best — a break-even proposition, we're not so comfortable telling other people to do it," she says.
Her experience raises questions about the viability of much larger, utility-scale solar projects built in recent years. But for them, the balance sheet looks different.
"They get a fixed price contract with a utility or somebody else who will buy that power from them," says Richard Caperton, director of clean energy investment at the Center for American Progress. Or with utilities, "they get to roll that into a rate base and recover that cost from electric power consumers."
Caperton says what's more interesting is to think about the wind, solar and even nuclear plants that are not being built now because producing with cheaper natural gas is more attractive to investors.
But natural gas prices could rise again quickly. If that happens, solar panels may seem like a good investment once again.
How solar power can help the billion people without electricity
We tend to think of solar power as something that industrialized nations can use to wean themselves from fossil fuels, but for those who don't have any power now, solar can transform their lives. Just like those solar-powered road signs and street lights that are far from any power lines, solar can help remote villages in developing countries around the world.
From The Guardian:
From The Guardian:
After the Durban talks last month, climate realists must face the reality that "shared sacrifice," however necessary eventually, has proven a catastrophically bad starting point for global collaboration. Nations have already spent decades debating who was going to give up how much first in exchange for what. So we need to seek opportunities — arenas where there are advantages, not penalties, for those who first take action — both to achieve first-round emission reductions and to build trust and cooperation.
One of the major opportunities lies in providing energy access for the more than 1.2 billion people who don't have electricity, most of whom, in business-as-usual scenarios, still won't have it in 2030. These are the poorest people on the planet. Ironically, the world's poorest can best afford the most sophisticated lighting — off-grid combinations of solar panels, power electronics, and LED lights. And this creates an opportunity for which the economics are compelling, the moral urgency profound, the development benefits enormous, and the potential leverage game changing.
The cost of coal and copper — the ingredients of conventional grid power — are soaring. Meanwhile, the cost of solar panels and LEDs, the ingredients of distributed renewable power, are racing down even faster.
If we want the poor to benefit from electricity we cannot wait for the grid, and we cannot rely on fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency, historically a grid-centric, establishment voice, admits that half of those without electricity today will never be wired. The government of India estimates that two-thirds of its non-electrified households need distributed power.
Fortunately, the historic barriers to getting distributed renewable power to scale in poor villages and neighborhoods are rapidly being dismantled by progress in technology, finance, and business models. Getting 1.2 billion people local solar power they can afford is within grasp — if we only think about the problem in a different way. In fact, the world can finish this job by 2020.
The poor already pay for light. They pay for kerosene and candles. And they pay a lot. The poorest fifth of the world pays one-fifth of the world's lighting bill — but receives only 0.1 percent of the lighting benefits. Over a decade, the average poor family spends $1,800 on energy expenditures. Replacing kerosene with a vastly superior 40 Wp (Watts peak) home solar system would cost only $300 and provide them not only light, but access to cell-phone charging, fans, computers, and even televisions.
Kerosene costs 25 to 30 percent of a family's income — globally that amounts to $36 billion a year. The poor do not use kerosene because it is cheap — they are kept poor in significant part because they must rely on expensive, dirty kerosene.
And the poor pay in other ways. A room lit by kerosene typically can have concentrations of pollution 10 times safe levels. About 1.5 million people, mostly women, die of this pollution every year, in addition to those who die from burns in fires.
So why do the poor use kerosene? Because they can buy a single day's worth in a bottle, if that is all they can afford. For the poor, affordability has three dimensions: total cost, up-front price, and payment flexibility. Solar power comes in a panel that will give ten, or even 20, years of light and power — but the poor cannot afford a ten-year investment up front. And many cannot handle conventional finance plans, which require fixed payments regardless of their income that month.
Nor, for the record, do the electrified middle class pay for electricity up front. When I moved into my house in San Francisco, I did not get a bill for my share of the power plants and transmission grid that give me power each month. I pay as I go, based on how many kwh's I use that month.
So lighting the lives of 1.2 billion people with off-grid renewable electricity requires three ingredients:
• Capital to pay for solar or other renewable electrical generation for 400 million households that depend on kerosene;
• Business models for those households to pay for the electricity they use, at the price it really costs, which is a lot less than kerosene;
• Financing, public policy, and partnerships to create the supply chains and distribution networks capable of getting distributed electrical systems to every household that needs them. (These needs might require $6 billion in credits and loan guarantees.)
The money is on the table. It's just on the wrong plates. Purchase and finance of solar power for 1.2 billion people would cost about $10 billion a year over a decade. The 11 countries with the largest number of households without electricity spent $80 billion each year subsidizing fossil fuel — only 17 percent of which benefits the poor. In 2010, the World Bank spent $8 billion on coal-fired power plants, few of which provided meaningful energy access to the poor. The UN's Clean Development Mechanism is proposing to give $4 billion a year to anything-but-clean coal-plants. So there is already far more capital in the system than is needed.
Even five years ago the business models did not exist to enable the poor to afford solar. Solar was much more expensive. The only alternative to buying a solar system with cash was a bank or micro-credit loan for which most of the poor could not qualify.
But the combination of dirt-cheap solar, the cell-phone revolution, and mobile phone banking has changed everything. There are almost 600 million cell-phone customers without electricity — using their phones very little, still spending $10 billion to charge them in town. There are hundreds of thousands of rural, off-grid cell towers powered by diesel — at a price of about $0.70/kilowatt hour. All over the world cell-phone towers are being converted from diesel to hybrid renewable power sources. So cell phone companies have a powerful motivation to get renewable power into rural areas, to get electricity to their customers, and to charge for electricity through their mobile phone payment systems.
At least three commercial models have been launched in the last several months. India's Simpa Networks — in partnership with SELCO in India and DT-Power in Ghana, India and Kenya — are testing models in which solar distributors can allow customers to pay for electricity through mobile banking "pay as you go" plans. Zimbabwe's Econet Power has launched an even more intriguing model, in which it provides its cell-phone customers with solar power as a customer benefit, charging them only $1 week to use a home solar system provided by Econet, with the bills tied to the customer's cell phone account.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has proclaimed 2012 the Year of Universal Energy Access. His initiative is keyed not to the UN climate talks, but to the Rio +20 Earth Summit talks scheduled for June.
Imagine that at Rio, instead of embracing business-as-usual solutions to energy access, the world decided to empower the poor with the electricity they can truly afford — distributed solar?
What would the benefits be? In carbon terms alone, kerosene for lighting emits almost as much greenhouse-gas pollution as the entire British economy. 1.5 million lives a year would be saved from respiratory ailments. The available income for the world's poorest fifth would be increased by 25 to 30 percent — a pretty big development bang-for-the-buck. Numerous studies have shown that providing basic energy access increases household income by 50 percent or more by providing more time and opportunities for home-based income generation.
But the leverage is actually much greater. If one-fifth of the world is on solar, as these people prosper and can afford more electricity, they are going to expand solar systems, rather than turning to coal or nuclear. Their neighbors include the one-third of humanity with "spasmodic" electricity — wires that in rural areas work only at night, and in urban areas go down in the afternoon. These customers would find distributed solar far more reliable than the current grid. If we add those 2 billion to the 1.2 billion who are not on the grid, virtually half of humanity could be turning to renewable power as the cheapest, most reliable and most available form of energy. The fossil fuel interests would lose completely their current moral argument — that more carbon will power the poor.
That, I would argue is a phenomenal game-changer — and a powerful first step in building a trusting, low-carbon coalition of rich and poor nations. And that coalition could lay the groundwork for the more challenging global efforts that will be needed to stabilize and eventually restore the climate.
One of the major opportunities lies in providing energy access for the more than 1.2 billion people who don't have electricity, most of whom, in business-as-usual scenarios, still won't have it in 2030. These are the poorest people on the planet. Ironically, the world's poorest can best afford the most sophisticated lighting — off-grid combinations of solar panels, power electronics, and LED lights. And this creates an opportunity for which the economics are compelling, the moral urgency profound, the development benefits enormous, and the potential leverage game changing.
The cost of coal and copper — the ingredients of conventional grid power — are soaring. Meanwhile, the cost of solar panels and LEDs, the ingredients of distributed renewable power, are racing down even faster.
If we want the poor to benefit from electricity we cannot wait for the grid, and we cannot rely on fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency, historically a grid-centric, establishment voice, admits that half of those without electricity today will never be wired. The government of India estimates that two-thirds of its non-electrified households need distributed power.
Fortunately, the historic barriers to getting distributed renewable power to scale in poor villages and neighborhoods are rapidly being dismantled by progress in technology, finance, and business models. Getting 1.2 billion people local solar power they can afford is within grasp — if we only think about the problem in a different way. In fact, the world can finish this job by 2020.
The poor already pay for light. They pay for kerosene and candles. And they pay a lot. The poorest fifth of the world pays one-fifth of the world's lighting bill — but receives only 0.1 percent of the lighting benefits. Over a decade, the average poor family spends $1,800 on energy expenditures. Replacing kerosene with a vastly superior 40 Wp (Watts peak) home solar system would cost only $300 and provide them not only light, but access to cell-phone charging, fans, computers, and even televisions.
Kerosene costs 25 to 30 percent of a family's income — globally that amounts to $36 billion a year. The poor do not use kerosene because it is cheap — they are kept poor in significant part because they must rely on expensive, dirty kerosene.
And the poor pay in other ways. A room lit by kerosene typically can have concentrations of pollution 10 times safe levels. About 1.5 million people, mostly women, die of this pollution every year, in addition to those who die from burns in fires.
So why do the poor use kerosene? Because they can buy a single day's worth in a bottle, if that is all they can afford. For the poor, affordability has three dimensions: total cost, up-front price, and payment flexibility. Solar power comes in a panel that will give ten, or even 20, years of light and power — but the poor cannot afford a ten-year investment up front. And many cannot handle conventional finance plans, which require fixed payments regardless of their income that month.
Nor, for the record, do the electrified middle class pay for electricity up front. When I moved into my house in San Francisco, I did not get a bill for my share of the power plants and transmission grid that give me power each month. I pay as I go, based on how many kwh's I use that month.
So lighting the lives of 1.2 billion people with off-grid renewable electricity requires three ingredients:
• Capital to pay for solar or other renewable electrical generation for 400 million households that depend on kerosene;
• Business models for those households to pay for the electricity they use, at the price it really costs, which is a lot less than kerosene;
• Financing, public policy, and partnerships to create the supply chains and distribution networks capable of getting distributed electrical systems to every household that needs them. (These needs might require $6 billion in credits and loan guarantees.)
The money is on the table. It's just on the wrong plates. Purchase and finance of solar power for 1.2 billion people would cost about $10 billion a year over a decade. The 11 countries with the largest number of households without electricity spent $80 billion each year subsidizing fossil fuel — only 17 percent of which benefits the poor. In 2010, the World Bank spent $8 billion on coal-fired power plants, few of which provided meaningful energy access to the poor. The UN's Clean Development Mechanism is proposing to give $4 billion a year to anything-but-clean coal-plants. So there is already far more capital in the system than is needed.
Even five years ago the business models did not exist to enable the poor to afford solar. Solar was much more expensive. The only alternative to buying a solar system with cash was a bank or micro-credit loan for which most of the poor could not qualify.
But the combination of dirt-cheap solar, the cell-phone revolution, and mobile phone banking has changed everything. There are almost 600 million cell-phone customers without electricity — using their phones very little, still spending $10 billion to charge them in town. There are hundreds of thousands of rural, off-grid cell towers powered by diesel — at a price of about $0.70/kilowatt hour. All over the world cell-phone towers are being converted from diesel to hybrid renewable power sources. So cell phone companies have a powerful motivation to get renewable power into rural areas, to get electricity to their customers, and to charge for electricity through their mobile phone payment systems.
At least three commercial models have been launched in the last several months. India's Simpa Networks — in partnership with SELCO in India and DT-Power in Ghana, India and Kenya — are testing models in which solar distributors can allow customers to pay for electricity through mobile banking "pay as you go" plans. Zimbabwe's Econet Power has launched an even more intriguing model, in which it provides its cell-phone customers with solar power as a customer benefit, charging them only $1 week to use a home solar system provided by Econet, with the bills tied to the customer's cell phone account.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has proclaimed 2012 the Year of Universal Energy Access. His initiative is keyed not to the UN climate talks, but to the Rio +20 Earth Summit talks scheduled for June.
Imagine that at Rio, instead of embracing business-as-usual solutions to energy access, the world decided to empower the poor with the electricity they can truly afford — distributed solar?
What would the benefits be? In carbon terms alone, kerosene for lighting emits almost as much greenhouse-gas pollution as the entire British economy. 1.5 million lives a year would be saved from respiratory ailments. The available income for the world's poorest fifth would be increased by 25 to 30 percent — a pretty big development bang-for-the-buck. Numerous studies have shown that providing basic energy access increases household income by 50 percent or more by providing more time and opportunities for home-based income generation.
But the leverage is actually much greater. If one-fifth of the world is on solar, as these people prosper and can afford more electricity, they are going to expand solar systems, rather than turning to coal or nuclear. Their neighbors include the one-third of humanity with "spasmodic" electricity — wires that in rural areas work only at night, and in urban areas go down in the afternoon. These customers would find distributed solar far more reliable than the current grid. If we add those 2 billion to the 1.2 billion who are not on the grid, virtually half of humanity could be turning to renewable power as the cheapest, most reliable and most available form of energy. The fossil fuel interests would lose completely their current moral argument — that more carbon will power the poor.
That, I would argue is a phenomenal game-changer — and a powerful first step in building a trusting, low-carbon coalition of rich and poor nations. And that coalition could lay the groundwork for the more challenging global efforts that will be needed to stabilize and eventually restore the climate.
Texas Professor Has Bright Ideas for Solar Power
The hits just keep on coming? I fully expect an increasing cascade of technological break-throughs and other news to keep the renewable energy momentum growing.
From NPR:
By almost any measure, 2011 was a rough year for solar power in the U.S. Federal subsidies to Solyndra became the focus of a congressional investigation after the company went bankrupt. Other solar outfits are feeling pressure on two fronts: low-cost Chinese-manufactured panels are driving prices down around the world, and electricity from America’s newly unleashed natural gas reserves is making power from renewable sources seem less economical.
But at the end of the year, a scientist in Austin has brought a little sun into the forecast. Meet Xiaoyang Zhu, a chemistry professor at the University of Texas, and director of the Energy Frontier Research Center.
For the last few years Zhu and his team have been working on a way to dramatically increase the amount of energy harvested from Solar technology. Now, they think they’ve done it.
“So our recent discovery is this. If you have a light photon,” he says to me, then pauses. “I guess this concept is simple enough, yea?”
Well, maybe not for many of us. Here’s a little background. Solar panels capture energy from light photons. But when the photon is too hot, with energy too high, traditional techniques only capture part of it. Most of the light converts to heat. Zhu’s team has found away to absorb those photons into a plastic. To put them in what scientists call a “dark state.”
“In this dark state, this one electron whole pair becomes two electrons whole pair,” Zhu says. “Of course it’s very difficult to describe in common language. You hear about this thing called quantum weirdness?”
Again, I shake my head no.
It took some explaining – but here’s the upshot: In this “dark state” Zhu was actually able to harvest two electrons of energy from one hot photon.
“So, the conventional Solar panel. That efficiency theoretically is 31 percent. With our discovery the theoretical efficiency increases to 44 percent.”
That’s a more than 40 percent increase in the amount of energy that can be produced from a solar panel. But you can’t do it with traditional silicone photovoltaic cells. Remember, I said Zhu’s team has been using plastic to capture the energy.
“The advantage of course, is obvious when I say plastic,” he says. “It’s cheap.”
Engineering the new plastic semiconductor solar cells to the point that they could be commercially viable is Zhu’s next challenge. “A friend of mine at MIT, a group at MIT is actually trying to do that,” he says. “And the efficiency is not there yet.”
But he’s confident that within a few years, solar cells that can capture more energy than anything we have today will be reality outside the laboratory. And that should do a lot to spark greater interest in solar power.
From NPR:
By almost any measure, 2011 was a rough year for solar power in the U.S. Federal subsidies to Solyndra became the focus of a congressional investigation after the company went bankrupt. Other solar outfits are feeling pressure on two fronts: low-cost Chinese-manufactured panels are driving prices down around the world, and electricity from America’s newly unleashed natural gas reserves is making power from renewable sources seem less economical.
But at the end of the year, a scientist in Austin has brought a little sun into the forecast. Meet Xiaoyang Zhu, a chemistry professor at the University of Texas, and director of the Energy Frontier Research Center.
For the last few years Zhu and his team have been working on a way to dramatically increase the amount of energy harvested from Solar technology. Now, they think they’ve done it.
“So our recent discovery is this. If you have a light photon,” he says to me, then pauses. “I guess this concept is simple enough, yea?”
Well, maybe not for many of us. Here’s a little background. Solar panels capture energy from light photons. But when the photon is too hot, with energy too high, traditional techniques only capture part of it. Most of the light converts to heat. Zhu’s team has found away to absorb those photons into a plastic. To put them in what scientists call a “dark state.”
“In this dark state, this one electron whole pair becomes two electrons whole pair,” Zhu says. “Of course it’s very difficult to describe in common language. You hear about this thing called quantum weirdness?”
Again, I shake my head no.
It took some explaining – but here’s the upshot: In this “dark state” Zhu was actually able to harvest two electrons of energy from one hot photon.
“So, the conventional Solar panel. That efficiency theoretically is 31 percent. With our discovery the theoretical efficiency increases to 44 percent.”
That’s a more than 40 percent increase in the amount of energy that can be produced from a solar panel. But you can’t do it with traditional silicone photovoltaic cells. Remember, I said Zhu’s team has been using plastic to capture the energy.
Photo by Daniel Reese for KUT News.
Solar Energy Panels in Austin, Texas.
Engineering the new plastic semiconductor solar cells to the point that they could be commercially viable is Zhu’s next challenge. “A friend of mine at MIT, a group at MIT is actually trying to do that,” he says. “And the efficiency is not there yet.”
But he’s confident that within a few years, solar cells that can capture more energy than anything we have today will be reality outside the laboratory. And that should do a lot to spark greater interest in solar power.
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