Small scale fusion on the other hand would have a viable niche application at the poles, in the sea or underground or any other environment that is without sun or space.
Production is not subsidized: factories pay full price for their power.
>Cost of current production is an upper bound.
Under the current state of the energy economy, maybe. If we had to replace all manufacturing power sources with renewables - absolutely not.
That's not very interesting though - what is interesting, which has been my topic of conversation this entire time, is what the energy economy would look like if it were not still fundamentally rooted in fossil fuels.
Given that coal and other fossil fuels are basically free energy - it does not take much at all to get energy from it (ie, set it on fire), it is not physically possible for PV generation to beat that. Therefore, it follows that renewable power will be more expensive than fossil fuel power. I don't see why this is so hard to acknowledge - we are living in a time of unreasonably cheap power, fuelled by several million years worth of stored solar energy. It can't last.
Solar and wind, un-subsidized, are the cheapest power the world has ever seen, and their cost is still falling at exponential rate.
And? Most of our power usage is not supplied through electricity. Solar panels are never going to heat my house.
Plus storage is a thing. Using a heat pump to dry NaOH or melt Sodium Acetate, or heat a large pond can store low grade heat economically for months. Ammonia, or methanol can do so indefinitely.
Then there's transmission. HVDC can transport energy 10GW pernline for thousands of km at costs comparable to local generation.
I'd be very surprised if you could avoid using a solar panel to heat your home in 40 years even if you go out of your way to do so.
https://globalsolaratlas.info/detail?c=-5.462873,137.384064,...
Bifacial isn't in this model, but it boosts the snowy region by about 20% and the tropical one by about 5%
And what will the stuff available to burn be made from when there are plants producing ethylene or methanol or ammonia in chile or saudi arabia or mongolia for less than what gas costs to dig up?
These mental gymnastics routines are olympic level.
>driving operating coal plants out of business
Any specific ones? The only coal plants I've seen get shut down are because of environmental reasons (or age). Some countries, like Germany and China, are re-opening or building new coal plants.
Talking of mental gymnastics - fundamentally, the energy economy boils down to EROI (energy returned on energy invested). It's just wishful thinking that we can replace energy sources that are basically free (coal, oil, gas), with those that have energy payback periods in the mid-double digits of their expected lifespan (solar).
If you're really worried about it, buy a panel from europe, the polysilicon (90% of the energy) comes from hydro, wind, and nuclear powered countries.
Even if all the money for a solar module went to coal generation at chinese or indian prices and nothing else it would pay back that power in under two years.
If the only activity involved in making PV was to spend the entire system cost on lignite and burn it directly at the mine front, it would *still* produce more energy in its lifetime than putting the coal in a coal plant.
It's absolutely laughable that you think you can keep spouting this ridiculous lie.
Where do you get your numbers from?
>it would pay back that power in under two years.
That's exactly the problem. This is a significant portion of the lifetime output of the panels.
>it would still produce more energy in its lifetime than putting the coal in a coal plant.
I'm not arguing that solar panels are a net negative, as you seem to be implying. I'm arguing that the energy economics of a world fuelled entirely by solar (and other renewable technologies - solar is about the worst for EROI) would look very different to what we have now.
You're the one making the insane claims. You back them up.
I certainly haven't made any claims as specific as this without any backup!
Prove new solar in a median location is lower EROI than the median for new gas using up to date info on the whole process and solar cells you would buy for a project started now such as 155 micron wafer mono PERC.
Nope, I said that it's lower than other sources of power, and thus an energy economy based on solar will look very different than what we currently have.
Given that electricity represents a relatively small percentage of our power usage, in the majority of cases (materials manufacture, industry, heating, etc), the EROI of renewables will be worse than fossil fuels.
Then add heat pumps and PV+Heliostat or PV+CSP derived hydrogen compounds to your equation and realise that adding heat and chemical stocks shipped from distant places to the equation makes it favour renewables even more as you can turn 120MJ of electricity and 40MJ of direct sunlight at Chile's 35% capacity factor into 120MJ of hydrogen or 100MJ of Ammonia you don't have to refine. With the heat pump you'd get more low grade heat even if you burnt the fossil fuel for electricity.
Wind + PV is a pure upgrade from an EROI perspective, and electrolysers and CSP are following very close behind.
And they have to use traditional energy sources, or buy energy from neighbors.
For example, such a transmission line is currently being built to send solar energy from Northern Australia to Singapore across about 3000km of ocean. Another project is generating wind energy near Iceland and sending it to the UK a distance of 800km.
Unfortunately, most of territories I mention, also have low population density, about 1/10 of western Europe, and have low middle income, so it is not right to directly compare them with western Europe or Singapore, in possibilities to achieve same infrastructure power.
If 1% of the world needs to get 30% of their energy from gas while we figure out the hydrogen thing, it's not really a problem.