Energy Balance of the Global Photovoltaic (PV) Industry - Is the PV...

[NNadir]

...Industry a Net Electricity Producer?

Our analysis found that the PV industry was a net electricity consumer as recently as 2010, and in 2008 the PV industry consumed 75% more electricity than it produced.

This comes from the scientific journal Environmental Science and Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society.

Here's the link.

Envir.Sci.Tech.Vol.47.Iss.9.pp 3482-3489


You may need to subscribe or go to a real science library to access the full paper.

There seems to be no word on whether the net loss for solar PV was involved with the 100 billion or so servers around the world that carry information on the internet on how great the solar PV industry is, and how it can do everything and anything by the year 2090, when you, conveniently, will be dead.

It's a lucky thing we didn't bet the entire planetary atmosphere on this toxic scheme.

What's that you say? We did?

Oh, well, so much the worse for us.

Please feel free to curse and shoot at the messenger: That would be me.

Or you could submit your own paper to the journal which proves that God said that any criticism of the solar industry is obviously a lie, because, you, um, said so.

Have fun discussing amongst yourselves and do get back to me. I'd love to hear your comments, um, maybe.

[wtmusic]

1. Economic/Environmental Assessment of Grid-Tied Photovoltaics: Arizona Lessons for the U.S.

"The suitability of Solar PV as a grid-tied energy source can be analyzed in a straightforward manner. In Tucson, Arizona, a 1 kW residential or commercial grid-tied PV system costs approximately $5,000 installed[1] and may offset up to $66/year[2] of fossil fuel use. This 76 year simple payback is well beyond the life of the equipment and does not include maintenance cost.

Adding PV to the grid offers no other significant savings in utility generation and transmission requirements and only adds to administrative and engineering burden for the utility. Despite idealistic claims of infrastructure savings from distributed grid-tied PV, these do not exist in the real world because PV is not reliable power, so no significant reduction in generation or transmission infrastructure is possible.

PV system costs must fall by at least a factor of five[3] to offer real value in reducing fossil fuel use. Additional evidence of this is the fact that current federal, state, and utility subsidies cover 65-75%[4] of the up-front cost of these systems and net metering laws provide a rich subsidy for energy produced and yet the systems are still only marginally viable."

http://www.masterresource.org/2010/06/econenviron-pvs/

[PuffedMica]

2. Your article is three years old. n/t

[wtmusic]

3. OK, PV is too expensive by a factor of 3 instead of 5. nt

[cprise]

8. Now you're using AZ as an example?

Mr. 'Solar has its place' as a lead in to dissing its use in northern elevations?

I'm filing this one away!

[kristopher]

4. Poor, poor Nnads; I really feel for you...

It's awfully hard to keep track of all those pesky numbers over time, isn't it.

Luckily, Mr. Scorpio has a small cheat sheet for one that might help put things in perspective for you.



Originally posted by Mr. Scorpio
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022644762

[NNadir]

5. If you could read, and you can't, these toxic solar pieces of junk...

...consumed more electricity than they produced.

At least, that's what this scientific paper says. But it's not like there's even one electronic junk consumer who is familiar with the contents of science books.

Unsurprisingly, you're cheering for this, which is the equivalent of cheering for climate change.

This is probably one contributing cause to the fact - that no anti-nuke gives a shit about - that 2013 is coming in as the worst year ever for the accumulation of dangerous fossil fuel waste.

Like I've said many times, and as the famous climate scientist Jim Hansen says in the same environmental scientific journal that you don't read - not knowing how to read - Nuclear energy saves lives, and it follows that he implies, and I openly state, that anti-nukes are nothing short of murderers, and apparently - this after almost 60 years of cheering for this useless form of energy - solar energy has been costing lives.

Don't worry, not that you ever did, climate change is now irreversible, but feel free to advance it further.

Congratulations on your wonderful work to destroy the planetary atmosphere by pushing consumption for your fantasies.

As for who is poor, I would suggest, not that any of the people pushing these solar toys give a rat's ass, that it is humanity that has been impoverished by these toxic fantasies.

Heckuva job, slow one You must be very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very proud.

[jpak]

28. Hello

This type of post is unacceptable.

jpak

[GliderGuider]

9. I love pictures! Here's one for you.

Last edited Fri Apr 12, 2013, 09:45 AM - Edit history (1)

Data from BP.

From 2010 to 2011, solar power added 2.15 mtoe, while the world's primary energy consumption went up by 296 mtoe, and fossil fuel consumption went up by 282 mtoe. In that one year the world added 130 times as much fossil fuel energy as solar energy.

Solar generates 0.04% of the world's primary energy.
Wind generates 0.3% of the world's primary energy.
Fossil fuel generates 87% of the world's primary energy.

Solar power still appears to be the AA battery of the global energy picture.

[truedelphi]

26. Then there is the pesky factoid that in Germany

there is a large switch to PV and wind units to power up homes and offices.

[caraher]

6. This is an important analysis but doesn't say solar is a dead end

It just says we need to be smart about how we deploy it. From the abstract:

However, there is a >50% (chance) that in 2012 the PV industry is a net electricity provider and will “pay back” the electrical energy required for its early growth before 2020. Further reducing energetic costs of PV deployment will enable more rapid growth of the PV industry. There is also great potential to increase the capacity factor of PV deployment. These conclusions have a number of implications for R&D and deployment, including the following: monitoring of the energy embodied within PV systems; designing more efficient and durable systems; and deploying PV systems in locations that will achieve high capacity factors.

One could have done a similar analysis of the nuclear industry at the time the first reactors were coming online and made misleading negative claims concerning net energy production from fission.

The main message is something I'm very sympathetic to - we should not engage in "feel-good" deployment of renewable technologies. It is makes little sense, from a greenhouse gas perspective, to start by covering nations at high latitude with lots of clouds, like Germany, with solar PV panels. But they have a "successful" feed-in tariff program because the metrics are economic and political rather than physics-based. It would have been more rational, from a global emissions perspective, to deploy those same panels someplace sunny.

[NNadir]

7. Actually, it has been a dead end for more than 50 years.

The solar industry on the entire planet, after sucking hundreds of billions of dollars, euros, yuan and yen, still doesn't produce 1 exajoule of the 520 exajoules of energy that humanity consumes each year.

It has been useless in the fight against climate change - not that anti-nukes are interested in climate change at all - as is evidenced by the data from Mauna Loa.

It turns out that for the last 50 years it hasn't even produced net energy at all, despite tons of semi-literate and completely illiterate cheering for it.

There is a 50%, not a one hundred percent probability that the systems will finally produce a positive energy flow this year, but I note that this year is now on course to be a record year for the collapse of the atmosphere.

Finally your analysis of nuclear energy is highly dubious. The energy density of uranium is enormous, and the capacity utilization is the highest in the world, higher even than the next closest competitor, the filthy fuel coal, for which neither solar and wind, with their miserably low capacity factors are an alternative. Nuclear energy is not some crap that's available for 10% of the time.

The paper makes - if you read the text - important statements about the relationship between reliability (capacity utilization) and net energy output.

To wit:

The other major factor in how well the PV industry performs going forward is the capacity factor that new installations can achieve. Doubling the capacity factor, ceteris paribus, halves the EePBT. Deployment of PV in regions with high insolation and
capacity factors provides greater overall benefits for the energy system. As such, policies aimed solely at rapid deployment in
areas with low insolation, without increasing net electricity yield (by either decreasing CEeD or improving PV performance), might not be beneficial for the energy sector as a whole.

The authors report that the capacity factor of solar is 11.5% - which suggests that in the best case, one needs to use dangerous fossil fuels 88.5% of the time to back it up, averaged over the world. The authors note that the capacity utilization is weighted by the fact that the Germans have the largest solar capacity - in precisely the place that it is least useful, but still, we've been sinking money into the this rabbit hole for 50 years, and given the fact that science is undergoing a tremendous devaluation in our culture, there is a low probability that any of the next 2,000 "solar breakthroughs" we always hear about will be any more useful than the last 10,000 such "breakthroughs" we heard about in the past.

The authors assert that

They offer a lot of "if" and "could" statements in the paper, which has been the routine approach to the so called "renewable" energy "miracle" for more than 5 decades of atmospheric collapse.

Finally, I note that there is an assumption with reference to the lifetime of the solar junk.

We assume a system lifetime of 25 years and zero operation and maintenance and decommissioning electricity costs.

That's a dubious assumption, especially given that an inverter is lucky to work for 5 years. The word "inverter" appears nowhere in the paper. I note that PSEG installed solar junk on lots of the telephone poles here in New Jersey in the last three years and after Hurricane Sandy, some were laying in the streets all around here. I shutter to think about the toxicology of cadmium selenide and teluride - these were First Solar jobs - given that all of our landfills here sit directly over our water table on which New Jerseyans depend. Finally there is no reference to performance degradation, such as observed in the well known Stabler Wronski effect in silicon based systems, and related effects in even more toxic varieties of solar cells.

The fact is, that after almost 6 decades of mindless cheering, the solar industry has managed to know effectively <em>nothing</em> to address the issues of clean energy, but regrettably, at a great loss to humanity, there were far too many people to engage in faith based betting of the planetary atmosphere on them.

The results of that bad bet are now clear

Have a nice evening.

[GliderGuider]

10. According to Charlie Hall, an energy source needs an EROI of better than 5:1

In order to be a candidate for powering an industrial society, an energy source has to have a EROI of at least 5:1 and possibly as much as 8:1. If solar power is really only around 1:1 now (which is easy to believe), it's not going to be viable as a "society-scale solution" until we somehow cut its life-cycle energy cost by 80% to 90%.

[wtmusic]

11. Interesting, sounds about right.

This source puts PV solar significantly higher at 6.8:1.



Seems to be a statistic of limited value, as it can be manipulated to show pretty much whatever you want.

"Measuring the EROEI of a single physical process is unambiguous, but there is no agreed-upon standard on which activities should be included in measuring the EROEI of an economic process. In addition, the form of energy of the input can be completely different from the output. For example, energy in the form of coal could be used in the production of ethanol. This might have an EROEI of less than one, but could still be desirable due to the benefits of liquid fuels."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested

Do you have a link?

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. But is that "energy to manufacture new demand in a year" to "energy obtained from previous...

..installations, in that year"? Because that's what they're measuring here.

Because PV has grown at such a fast rate (up to 70% per year by 2010), it's been harder for the previously installed capacity to produce the energy needed for the new manufacture. Using the rough figures from the graph at the beginning of the abstract, I think they may be saying it's been taking something like 2 years to get back the energy put into manufacture of a typical cell. So they'd need a lifetime of perhaps 10 years to get EROI of 5:1.

[FBaggins]

13. It's even more than that.

The energy to produce the new panel is one thing, but there's also the energy to build the factories and mines and infrastructure that will later build the new panel. If you wanted to to calculate EROEI (a false measure IMO, but that's another conversation), you would only assign to that panel the portion of the infrastructure investment that represents the proportion of lifetime manufactured volume that the plant will build. This number is, of course, entirely unknown looking forward... but the false measure of "total energy into the industry compared to total out so far" assigns the entire infrastructure expense of the industry to essentially 2-3 years worth of production.

It's an interesting data point... but not very relevant when assessing the value of the solar industry as an energy alternative.

[GliderGuider]

14. EROI analysis is complicated by the fact that PV and wind are non-fuel sources.

This is why we more often hear about energy payback periods rather than EROI. EROI is a straightforward idea for fuel-using energy sources, less so for non-fuel sources.

The fairest analysis would be a full life cycle energy analysis, taking in the energy from mining, fabrication, distribution, installation, operations and maintenance, and disposal on one side, and comparing that to lifetime energy output on the other. I would guess that's the direction this paper is trying to go.

One interesting aspect of the renewable build-out is the source of the required capital. People have made the point that sources like wind and solar currently require fast-response backup capability (i.e. gas turbines), thus tying them for the moment to the fossil fuel infrastructure. Something similar can be said about the capital requirements. The capital (and by extension the energy) required to build renewable sources comes from an economy that is 87% fossil fueled. That means that $870,000 of every million dollars used to build renewable energy has already caused CO2 emissions before the renewable source generates a single watt-hour.

This means that, for example, the financing for the London Array will have caused, directly and indirectly, the release of about 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 (at the global GDP intensity of 0.5 kgCO2 per USD). Now, that's just a year and a half of the amount they claim the array will avoid, but in the end the question is whether that amount will actually be avoided, or whether the electricity from the array will actually displace existing energy supplies rather than simply add to them.

The other problem that society-scaled renewables face is that while the energy they produce may be relatively clean in itself, all energy use expands the general economy. Any expansion of the economy implies an increase in CO2 production outside the boundaries of the renewable energy system itself so long as a relatively constant proportion of the economy is driven by fossil fuels. Most of those secondary CO2 emissions are not attributed to the energy system itself (they are outside the boundaries of the analysis). In a sense this is the same issue as the funding-source argument above, but it happens on an ongoing basis rather than stopping when the energy project is complete.

[muriel_volestrangler]

15. It would be a mistake to assume that all expenditure causes the same rate of co2 emission (nt)

[GliderGuider]

17. True. That's why I didn't assume it.

The UK's carbon intensity of GDP is much (2.5x) better than the world average. However, there's a real issue with deciding where to draw the system boundaries in a globalized manufacturing environment. The UK is spending 3 billion dollars on the London Array, but it's being spent all over the world - some locally, in the EU, some in the US, some in China, some in Japan, some in other south-east Asian nations...

I fall back on the global CO2 emissions and GWP as my first approximation when I talk in general terms about carbon emissions and economies. Both are so globalized now that it seems like a sensible starting point.

[OKIsItJustMe]

16. Your analysis of the situation is off

It reminds me of how for years, financial analysts would point out that Amazon.com was experiencing phenomenal growth, but it still hadn’t turned a profit.

The reason for the apparent EROI of 1:1 is simply due to the exponential growth of manufacturing. The idea here is that the existing panels are now offsetting the power needed to manufacture the new panels (which have a faster payback times than the panels currently in place!)

If we stopped manufacturing solar panels today, the EROI for the existing panels would be much greater than 1:1.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/argument-over-the-value-of-solar-focuses-on-spain


In fact, it wouldn’t be much worse than that of oil and gas:

[GliderGuider]

18. Yes, the curve will change as the manufacturing infrastructure gets built out.

But PV isn't a net energy winner yet. Nor is it a policy winner, nor a capacity winner.

AA batteries...

So far. How much time do we have left?

[OKIsItJustMe]

19. How much time do we have left?

Let’s see… do we have time to wait for some ideal solution which isn’t imagined yet?

Or do we have time to get serious about the technology we have today.

http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/re_futures/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Renewable Electricity Futures Study[/font]

[font size=3]The National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL) Renewable Electricity Futures Study (RE Futures) is an initial investigation of the extent to which renewable energy supply can meet the electricity demands of the continental United States over the next several decades. This study explores the implications and challenges of very high renewable electricity generation levels—from 30% up to 90%, focusing on 80%, of all U.S. electricity generation—in 2050. At such high levels of renewable electricity generation, the unique characteristics of some renewable resources, specifically geographical distribution and variability and uncertainty in output, pose challenges to the operability of the nation's electric system.[/font]

[font size=4]Key Findings[/font]
[font size=3]

• Renewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today, in combination with a more flexible electric system, is more than adequate to supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while meeting electricity demand on an hourly basis in every region of the country.
• Increased electric system flexibility, needed to enable electricity supply and demand balance with high levels of renewable generation, can come from a portfolio of supply- and demand-side options, including flexible conventional generation, grid storage, new transmission, more responsive loads, and changes in power system operations.
• The abundance and diversity of U.S. renewable energy resources can support multiple combinations of renewable technologies that result in deep reductions in electric sector greenhouse gas emissions and water use.
• The direct incremental cost associated with high renewable generation is comparable to published cost estimates of other clean energy scenarios. Improvement in the cost and performance of renewable technologies is the most impactful lever for reducing this incremental cost.

…[/font][/font]

[GliderGuider]

20. Oh, by all means get serious. I have nothing against renewable power.

I just don't like the mendacious, manipulative limbic/reptilian cheer-leading that goes on around our energy sources, be they renewable, fossil or nuclear.

I think that a 20-year planning horizon is about all we can count on in terms of keeping the GlobCiv lights on. another decade might All technologies would benefit from being realistically evaluated within that constraint. To me this means:

• No nukes, shut them down. Nuclear power stations operating in a fragile and disintegrating social environment are a clear and present danger.
  
• Don't plan on solar or wind saving the day. The day is not going to be "saved" for a whole host of intersecting and mutually amplifying reasons.
  
• Get off fossil fuels as much and as fast as you can. Stop doing things like driving and flying.

In fact, here's my recipe for a happy future:

Stop consuming. Let's each cut all our individual consumption by 80% or more, as soon as possible. Simplify. Quit your job and find one that pays less than half as much, to reduce the temptation to buy stuff. Stop watching television. Learn to do low-energy, low-tech stuff, like gardening and building using only hand tools. Get out of the slave economy entirely if you can. Stop trying to fix civilization - it's rotting around us, and cannot be fixed. We can't even replace it until after it dies, and that moment is approaching, so let's get ready for it. Let's come to terms with the tsunami, with our own death and the deaths of others. Because that is a skill that will always come in handy.

[OKIsItJustMe]

21. “Stop consuming. Let's each cut all our individual consumption by 80% or more, as soon as possible.”

Sounds great! However I’m more interested in solutions I think the majority will go along with.

[GliderGuider]

22. Why not start closer to home?

All too often, searching for solutions for other people to follow is a cop-out to keep from doing it yourself.

In the last dozen years I have followed my own advice, and I can vouch that the simplicity feels great. I keep my computer and internet connection because that's the lowest-cost, highest-impact way to influence others. It's the one material luxury I have kept, and the freedom is breathtaking.

[OKIsItJustMe]

23. Isn’t it a bit presumptuous of you to assume I have not started at home?

?

[GliderGuider]

24. Yes, maybe, nope.

If it's not true you'll disregard it as not applying to you. If it is true, you might get affronted.
Either way, it's just a reaction. You could simply own it, dismiss me and move on.

[NNadir]

25. We actually don't need any theoretical justification for recognizing this.

The solar industry is empirically a grand and expensive failure.

Despite 50 years of mindless cheering, and tons of money thrown in all internationally respected currencies, as well in some very weak currencies by people who could ill afford such faith based extragavance, it has still failed to become a significant form of energy, useless in addressing a single important environmental emergency.

There is good evidence that it is in itself an environmental disaster, not that anyone will pay attention to that fact. What will happen is that people will continue to lie to themselves until the end.

I would say "lie to themselves until it's too late," except "too late is already passed." I expect we'll easily hit 400 ppm in this exceptional year and in the process set a new record.

[GliderGuider]

27. Nothing to quibble about there.

Not at all, at all.