Here’s an addendum to last month’s post about China’s heavy investment in renewable energy. The Longyangxia Dam Solar Park in Eastern China presently contains four million solar panels spread over ten square miles of desert. It has a capacity of 850 megawatts, which is enough to power 140,000 U. S. homes. Here’s what is looks like from space.
As previously noted, China plans to spend $361 billion on renewables between 2016 and 2020. They are likely to meet their 2020 renewable goals under the Paris Agreement sometime in 2018. This is possible in part because the cost of solar panels in China has dropped by 40% since 2010.
The Solar Foundation has published its 2016 National Solar Jobs Census, which they claim is “the most credible, annual review of the solar energy workforce in the United States.” (The report may be downloaded from this web page. For some reason, they require you to identify yourself before reading the report.) The data are based on a combined telephone and email survey of 3,888 businesses engaged in solar activity. A solar job is defined as one in which workers spend 50% of more of their time doing solar-related work; however, 89% of the jobs reported are full-time solar workers.
The headline is that the solar workforce increased by 24.5% in 2016, to an estimated total of slightly over 260,000 jobs. Solar employment has grown 178% since 2010. This is the fourth year in a row in which it has grown by over 20%. In spite of all the fuss here in Pennsylvania over jobs in the natural gas industry, solar employs more people than natural gas; in fact, more than any other energy source except the petroleum.
The Solar Foundations has supplied this handy graphic with the highlights of their survey.
And this relentlessly cheerful video.
The solar job surge is driven primary by demand for residential installations. Installers accounted for 34% of the new jobs. Forty-one percent of solar jobs are in the residential market, compared to 28% in the commercial sector and 31% in utility-scale project development.
One discouraging finding in the report is that the survey respondents predicted a slowdown to only a 10% increase in solar jobs in 2017. The Solar Foundation attributes this in part to the conservatism of employers, who have underestimated solar job growth in previous years. They also make the mathematical point that, as the size of the solar work force grows, any number of new jobs that are added will be a smaller percentage of the total.
The report claims that the overall prospects for solar power remain strong. The cite the rapidly falling cost of solar components, and the extersion of federal Investment Tax Credits until 2021. However, there are some concerns. The declining cost of fossil fuels, especially natural gas, could be a problem. They also mention recent organized attempts (by the fossil fuel industry) to change state net metering laws in order to discourage distributed generation.
Today’s New York Times has an article about how educators and government agents located in rural states are trying to encourage climate-friendly activities without alienating climate deniers. They are learning to discuss climate change without using the words “climate change.” For example, they might instruct farmers on practical ways to cope with drought without ever mentioning the most important cause of recent increases in drought.
One way to encourage renewable energy is to emphasize cost savings. Pocketbook voting may explain why 45% of Republicans favor giving priority to renewable energy over fossil fuels, even though only 12% of them say climate change is a major threat to the well-being of the country.
PowerScout, a San Francisco-based solar company did a study comparing the solar installation rates of donors to the Democratic and Republican parties. Using a database of the names and addresses of campaign contributors from the top 20 solar states, they first narrowed the sample down to 1.5 million contributors living in single family homes. Then they checked these addresses using satellite images and artificial intelligence software. By feeding images of homes with and without solar panels into the computer, the model, called a convolutional neural network, learned to distinguish between them with 90% accuracy.
Here are the results by state.
Overall, 3.06% of Democratic donors had solar installations, compared to 2.24% of Republican donors. However, in California, where solar power is well-established, it was a virtual tie, and in the state with the highest penetration of solar, Hawaii, Republicans had a slight edge.
In 2016, for the first time, the U. S. added more electricity-generating capacity from solar power plants than from natural gas, wind, or any other source of energy. The total of 9.5 gigawatts (GW) of solar generating capacity is triple the amount added in 2015 and is enough to provide electricity for 1.8 million homes. Here are the data as reported to the U. S. Energy Information Administration. (The apparent surge in new generating capacity in December is due to respondents’ habit of waiting until the end of the year to report new installations.)
The top five states adding new solar are California (3.9 GW), North Carolina (1.1 GW) Nevada (.9 GW), Texas (.7 GW) and Georgia (.7 GW). These data are for utility-scale photovoltaic solar installations and do not include distributed generation (rooftop solar). In addition to solar, 8 GW of natural gas and 6.8 GW of wind power were added. No new coal-fired plants were built last year.
What accounts for this rapid solar growth? It’s not federal investment tax credits, which remained at 30%, the same as in previous years. The explanation is the rapid decline in the cost of photovoltaic cells, which has dropped from $77/watt in 1977 to $.26/watt in 2016.
It’s difficult to get a handle on the cost of various sources of power, since it varies from one country to another and depends on whether government subsidies are included. The world’s average cost of solar is now the same or less than any other energy source except wind. (See the chart below.)
Levelized cost of energy refers to the net cost to install an energy system divided by its expected lifetime output. Levelized cost data typically include subsidies. The average levelized cost of solar had dropped to $600 per megawatt-hour (MWh) a decade ago and is now at or below $100/MWh, about the same as coal and natural gas. In other words, solar has reached grid parity with fossil fuels. The cost of land-based wind power is about $50/MWh.
The above figures are for the average of all countries. However, a recent Bloomberg report claims that for 58 emerging economies, including China, India and Brazil, the cost of new solar has dropped below that of wind. The difference may be due to the location of these emerging countries, which are nearer to the equator than wealthier countries, and their need to add new capacity quickly, which creates economies of scale. It had been anticipated for some time that solar would eventually be cheaper than wind power, but few analysts expected it to happen this fast.
The problem is subsidies. According to the International Energy Agency, fossil fuels received $493 billion in subsidies worldwide in 2014, the most recent year for which figures are available. This is more than four times the subsidies received by renewables. On a level playing field, there would be little reason to add anything but solar or wind power.
Here’s a bit of holiday cheer–a video about a community solar network that is bringing electricity and WiFi to an off-grid rural village in Bangladesh.
The question raised by this bottom-up approach is whether enough people can be helped to make a difference. The video says the sponsor, ME SOLshare, Ltd., plans to bring installations like this one to 1 million people by 2021. (The current population of Bangladesh is 170 million.)
If human life is to survive on this planet, we must switch to 100% renewable energy very soon—yesterday, if possible. There is now a demonstration project that can help us to visualize this possibility.
Ta’u is the largest island in American Samoa, a U. S. territory in the Southern Pacific Ocean. It’s about 17 square miles and has 790 inhabitants. It previously generated electricity by shipping in 109,500 gallons of diesel fuel every year. Not only was this expensive, but there were occasional interruptions of the supply due to rough seas.
Ta’u now runs on nearly 100% solar energy due to the installation of a 1.4 megawatt microgrid consisting of 5328 Solar City solar panels and 60 Tesla Powerpacks, which are batteries for energy storage. This not only gives them enough energy to supply the island’s needs 24/7, it provides enough storage capacity to last for three days without sunlight—a rare occurrence—and recharges in seven hours. Here’s a promotional video from Tesla advertising the project.
The $8 million project was funded by the American Samoa Economic Development Authority, the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency. Solar power is almost free once the system is installed. (Three full-time workers are required for plant maintenance.) Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an estimate of the current yearly cost of their diesel fuel, so I can’t tell how long it will take to recover its cost.
Obviously, transforming this small demonstration project to a larger power grid poses all kinds of infrastructure problems, but they are problems that are soluble in principle, and at a much lower cost than the fossil fuel companies would lead us to believe. We have no choice but to do it.
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