From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2014 9:54 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 12:40 AM, Chris de Morsella <[email protected]>
wrote:
> The prices for PV keeps coming down as well; in fact it has dropped an
amazing 99% in the past quarter century.
That's very nice, but even if the price dropped to zero it wouldn't be
enough to completely take over from nuclear and fossil fuel because it would
still be too dilute and too unreliable and unpredictable for many, perhaps
most, applications.
So say you. and yet just this year alone - 2014 - it is projected that
between 40 to 50 Gigawatts of new solar PV capacity will be installed on a
place called planet earth. another way of picturing the huge amount of solar
capacity this represents is that this is well over 300 square kilometers of
solar PV collection surface. What you don't seem to get is that it is taking
over and will increasingly take over as the most important source of
electric generation. The prices will continue to fall - and though in the
world you seem to live in the cost of something means little or nothing - in
this world cost drives decisions.
You harp on dilute. well I have news for you - the food you eat, that you
need in order to survive, it is a dilute source as well, and yet - we have
managed somehow to grow food. So what if solar is dilute - as you put it.
Does the appliance in your house, sucking electrons down from the grid and
dumping them to ground care what created the current? You make much of
something that does not really matter in the long run. In the near term
there is going to be dislocation of vested industries and outmoded ways of
doing things, but after five or so decades people will wonder how the world
ever functioned without ubiquitous solar PV.
The grid will adapt, becoming adaptive, and beginning to act more like a
true network; battery (and other utility scale energy storage systems) will
- and are in fact evolving. Some of the new utility scale flow batteries
coming to market that use environmentally benign and low cost reactants are
promising. All electric cars - which were I live are becoming quite common -
are also driving [pardon the pun] the evolution of high power density
batteries, and in addition are becoming a nascent distributed power storage
network that in its aggregate could scale up to as big as the all-electric
fleet grows. Solar PV - IMO - is poised for a new wave of next generation
multi-junction, multiple band gap, layered cells that can exploit the solar
flux at many more wave-lengths, including down into the infrared range
(meaning they would still produce some power - even on hazy and light cloudy
days).
-Chris
John K Clark
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