A Solar World.

[NNadir]

"This book has been written existentially. A year elapsed between its start and finish; by the end it never could be written the same way...In this year achieved more public and political acceptance than in the twenty years that had gone before...

...A facility to test thermal power systems is being built at Albuquerque, a "power tower" with a field of flat mirrors concentrating the image of the sun onto a central receiver, something like Odeillo without the big dish. It will turn out 5 megawatts...by 1979, according to ERDA's plans the United States will have a plant rated at between thirty and thirty-five thermal megawatts and generating ten megawatts of electricity.

Photovoltaics will move ahead just as quickly. ERDA is making its main thrust through the Department of Defense which is responsible for a host of faraway places in odd corners where electricity is needed in quantities of a few kilowatts...

...Given such a market, manufacturers should be able to go into production and bring the price of solar cells down from twenty thousand to two thousand dollars per peak kilowatt, merely by using silicon of a quality lower than that demanded by the semiconductor industry. This figure, Herwig said, does not take into account savings expected to come from new ways of making solar cells...

...What excites Herwig is the amount that American industry spends on solar energy. ERDA is putting out a catalog of the hundreds of companies designing and offering products. 'Industry is at least matching expenditures by the federal government,' he said...He concludes that the sun will be able to furnish 50 percent of the energy demand of the American home...the figure runs from 25 to 75 percent depending on where the house is located. It should take five years to develop and improve the components of solar heating units...

...'by 1985, optimized solar energy systems with back-up energy can be competitive with other energy systems for homes. Without a doubt they will be competitive with electricity. According to ERDA's timetable, solar heating and cooling will be competitive in some regions of the US by 1980, then in most regions five years later...

...According to one ERDA projection, 1 percent of the buildings going up will be solar-equipped by 1980 and at least twenty-five hundred homes and two hundred commercial buildings already up will get solar heating and cooling each year...They will save 50,000 barrels of oil that year and twenty times more in 1985 when, according to ERDA's forecasts, there should be 596,000 solar homes and 55,000 commercial buildings. This is bold talk in Washington..."

The above is excerpted from a chapter entitled, like the thread itself, "The Solar World," in the book Solar Energy, The Awakening Science by Daniel Behrman, copyright 1976 by Daniel Behrman, pages 384-387 Little and Brown, Publishers.

(I apologize for any typing transcription errors; no text from this historic book is available on line for obvious reasons.)

ERDA refers to the Energy Research and Development Administration, which was the historic predecessor of the Department of Energy.

The book contains many gems, including a magnificent description of the burgeoning solar industry in the wonderful Soviet Worker's People's State, including the wonderful PV power plants expected to be built between 1980 and 1985 to provide large amounts of electricity to the anti-imperialist anti-capitalist legions in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Turkmenistan. It was said that the plants would produce as much as the Lenin hydroelectric plant on the Volga.

I picked this book up off the shelf in my public library. I selected it pretty much at random, from the large number of books on the "coming soon" solar nirvana written and published in the 1970s on the subject.

Solar power is sexy.

Solar power is cool.

Everybody wants solar power to work, including me.

The difference between me and many others, I suppose, is that I was especially enthusiastic about solar energy in the 1970's, the same period of my anti-nuclear activism, and so this stuff is a big part of my memory.

I am not mocking Mr. Behrman by the way, since at the time of his writing the solar promise was an idea waiting to be tested. Since it was untested, the question of whether it actually would work or not certainly did not constitute magical thinking. Magical thinking occurs when an idea has been tested, failed to perform as expected, but the original proponents of the idea insist that the data from the failed experiment be discarded on the grounds that the data doesn't conform with their expectations.

Again, solar power is sexy.

Solar power is cool.

Everybody wants solar power to work, including me.

Speaking only for myself though, promises are not enough in a time of global environmental catastrophe. I'll believe it when I see it.

As Democrats, we must provide realistic solutions to real problems that are not faith based. Let us remind ourselves what "faith" is. It is ignoring all conflict with deeply held cherished beliefs whether or not they conflict with reality.

[Tamyrlin79]

1. We are already a "Solar" world...

Haven't you heard that our world orbits the star, Sol???


Hahah.

Yeah, bad joke.
:silly:

[SnoopDog]

2. If you put an array of solar cells on every rooftop....

Instead of centralize energy (power plants) you use distributive energy. If every roof top was tied into the electric grid, our requirements for polluting coal plants would diminish. And, nuclear energy plants can be finally removed from our country and our world.

Roof top energy would/could provide all your home energy needs.

[bridgit]

4. correct...

[NNadir]

7. You mean if rich people put solar cells on their roof tops...

Solar power is still toys for rich boys. The "prediction" that solar power would fall to $2,000/kilo"watt" has not been realized. The price to light one small 100 watt lightbulb at the peak of daylight with a solar electricity is $500 and rising.

www.solarbuzz.com

This is not for real people. It is a Repuke notion that if a solution is available to rich people only, that is enough.

I also note that where it has been measured, in Germany, where a marginal solar industry has been created by a huge faith based subsidy, solar energy proves to be dirtier and more dangerous than nuclear energy by a factor of three. (Biomass, another form of solar energy proves to be more dangerous by a factor of 15.)

http://www.externe.info/results.html

Again there are faith based approaches to reality - again a Repuke conception - and then there's realism. The predictions that proved to be tripe made in this excerpt from 1976 are completely and totally unchanged from the stuff being said today. The difference between the hopes of 1976 and the reality of today, is that today there is data, that data being the historical failure of the solar industry to provide a meaningful fraction of the world's energy supply in spite of great enthusiasm for it.

I propose that the Democratic Party become the party of reality which is why I point glaringly at the solar fraud. Policy should not be determined by ideology, but it should be the other way around: ideology should be developed from reality. This is the only way to defeat the American Taliban of the Repuke Party.

[SnoopDog]

10. If everybody put solar cells on their rooftop...

If our government put $200 BILLION dollars in for solar energy instead of the illegal war - we could put up alot of solar cells.

If year after year we install roof top solar energy, eventually our country could be using only clean energy.

With more demand for solar cells, the price would come down.

No it isn't for the rich only - it is for the people who know it is the only right thing to do. We need to push for this like 'there is no tomorrow' - because someday there will not be a tomorrow for humans if we continue down the same path. (And nuclear energy is obviously not the answer).

[NNadir]

13. If, if, if. Like I said, "faith based."

You are forgetting that there isn't $200 billion dollars for the Iraq war, nor is their $200 billion dollars for solar cells.

The cost of a solar facility providing as much energy as one nuclear power plant is $20 billion dollars. (Reference the solar promotion site, www.solarbuzz.com linked above.) Moreover, this energy will only be available for peak sunlight periods. The environmental cost of attempting to store this energy, besides requiring more solar plants to charge them up, will be enormous.

The fraudulent solar industry benefits from the fact that it is so weeny that no one can see it's environmental cost. There wasn't much sense of the environmental cost of coal when James Watt invented the steam engine, or of the environmental cost of gasoline when Ford built his first production line.

I note that the $200 billion dollars of our children's money that you are throwing around like Bush on a bender would theoretically (in magical solar peak watts, as opposed to physicist watts) provide as much energy as only ten nuclear plants. They would provide zero energy at night, and in the absence of nuclear power, this would require the burning of fossil fuels which are clearly (to thinking people) the most dangerous form of energy known.

The United States has 103 operating nuclear power plants, most of which produce clean electricity at 1/10th the cost of solar energy. The cost of a faith based initiative to replace them with magical solar plants would thus be two trillion dollars.

As for the balderdash supposition that solar power prices would come down with increase production, I reference the original post above, predicting competitive solar energy by 1985. If was so easy, it would have been done. Today, solar prices are rising at the same time installed (highly subsidized) capacity is rising. They have in fact risen by 5% in the last year. You can chant all you wish, but you cannot actually produce what you say you can produce.

I am sick of faith flying in the face of reality. The global climate change crisis is not waiting for the solar religion to perform magic. It is happening NOW. If solar energy worked, it would be here and no one would be talking about nuclear energy. People are complete dopes and can't understand nuclear energy - they think it is dangerous because they heard it on TV. Still in spite of this vast pool of public stupidity on nuclear subjects, despite all 40 years of hype and big time promises with small time delivery, the nuclear industry will be growing by 100 gigawatts based only on those plants planned, ordered and already under construction now. There is not one gigawatt of similar solar capacity planned anywhere on earth. Why is that? Because solar energy is merely a pleasant fantasy, closer to saying the rosary than to producing something.

[SnoopDog]

14. There are many points you do not consider...

Our government does everything in its power to NOT promote solar energy. (And I only mean PV because it is the cleanest not biomass). It is all about money. With coal and nuclear energy (I cannot believe people still think nuclear energy is cost effective and safe - to say nothing that a nuke plant has not been built in decades and what exactly do we do with the waste?) there are 'consumables' - a reliance on coal and uranium and a money making machine. This promotes their business but does nothing to help our planet or its people.

The reason you and others poo-poo solar is that there are no recurring revenues. Once you put them in - you don't make anymore money. That, unfortunately, is the bottom line with the 'energy' people. They can't continue to make a buck with solar.

I guess your types prefer to collect money but trash the planet. Little do you all know that you live here too and will suffer the same fate - a toxic dump with people dying horrible deaths.

[suziedemocrat]

17. You've hit the nail on the head - "no recurring revenues."

It's the same reason the music industry is starting to hate iTunes and would rather have a subscription model. RECURRING REVENUES. That seems to be the business model of choice. They don't want us all installing solar panels and they don't hear from us until we update them 10 or 20 years later.

But - I think we are hitting critical mass - and things ARE changing. Not fast enough for me, but things are happening.

For example, I heard about a "video toaster" in 1992. This made it possible to edit videos on a specialized computer. I wanted one so badly it was incredible. But they were rare and expensive. In 1997, I looked into buying a computer capable of doing video editing. I went to a company in Denver that built computers especially for video editing. They started at $12,000 - without all the extras you would need. More like 20-30,000 by the time you are finished. They were clunky and complicated. About a year later I called Gateway to order a computer to do video editing. When I said I wanted to upgrade to a 12 GB hard Drive, the salesman got made at me and said that was a ridiculous request.

In 1999, when Apple came out with Firewire and FinalCutPro, I bought a Mac G3 for $2500 - plus $500 for a monitor, and another $1700 for extra hard drives to give me 36 GB. In 2000, I went to an Apple seminar about iMovie, much cheaper software which would have been almost enough for what I was doing. The Apple guy giving the Seminar said that making your own DVDs was next to impossible and Apple would never have that functionality. Well... guess what .... they did... A year or two later they came out with iDVD.

My point is - the evolution of a technology accelerates as time goes on. Advances start very slowly. Then they become more and more frequent. Just because Solar was advancing very slowly in the 1970's doesn't mean much to me in late 2005.

[jpak]

19. Where to begin...

Global PV module production is growing at 20-40% per year and will exceed 1250 MW shipped in 2005.

The current *modest* rise in PV module prices is due to extreme demand pressures that have outstripped the growth in PV manufacturing capacity.

When PV manufacturing capacity regains demand, PV module prices will continue their historic decline.

PV for Rich People????

A few back issues of Home Power magazine will dispel that myth. The vast majority of homeowners that purchased PV systems over the last 20 years were of very modest means.

Those external cost estimates are a joke. The only thing that can be said from that link is that the external cost of renewables and nuclear are low realtive to fossil fuel-generating technologies and very similar to each other.

Period.

Finally, nuclear power is the sole bailiwick of the Republican Party - just look at what the nuclear industry got in the GOP's so-called Energy Bill.

($6.8 billion)

What a sick joke...

[struggle4progress]

22. You should do consistent calculations. Watts Bar (for example) ..

.. with a capacity around 1.1 gigawatts, seems to have had a construction cost around $6.8 billion, which works out at over $6/watt.

You just linked to a site that gives a $5/watt cost for retail residential photovoltaic capacity and multiplied by 100 to get the cost of lighting a 100 watt bulb, which you summarize as $500.

But using this same methodology, the most recent nuclear plant to go online in the US (Watts Bar), the corresponding nuclear cost per 100 watt bulb is over $600.

[jpak]

23. Or you could operate nine 11W DC compact fluorescent light bulbs,

each providing the lighting equivalent of a 60W incandescent bulb, for $500 using PV.

That's enough lighting for a one bedroom apartment...(again using the same methodology).

[bridgit]

3. i'm ready, i say the sooner the better, i say it is long over due...

http://www.nrel.gov

[SnoopDog]

6. I am putting in a $10,000 5 kw system - a small system. I cannot afford

the $35,500 35 kw system I want to put in.

But I will do put it in the 5 kw system. I want to be able one day to post that I HAVE a solar system installed - doing my part for our earth.

And, besides, it will be so much fun to look on my roof and know that I am an Electric Producer.

[bridgit]

8. down here on the flats, SMUD has a tax rebate for such investment...

we don't own a house but hubby has a line on renewable systems so when we do that's the way it will be set-up from the git-go. congrats for your efforts every little bit does & will help B-)

[Throckmorton]

20. Where are you getting a 5KW system for $10,000?

The best I've been able to do is around 20K for one.

[SnoopDog]

21. From a company in Northern California...

My site has alot of trees and he said a 30kw system would be $30 to $35k - cannot afford that. So I asked him for a beginners system and the cost was $10k.

Here is what is estimate said:

"This system would produce
approx 3.8-5.2 KWhrs/day on a
sunny equinox day"

I see you are in CT so this may not help you... But his company name is Feather River Solar Electric.

I found him in "Home Power" magazine. It is a good magazine and inspires me to get something going.

This small system can be expanded so once I get some extra cash (ya, right) I will add to it.

[Throckmorton]

28. Ok, a 5.0 Kw-hr system,

which in Connecticut is a 1200 watt system, as we average 4.2 hours of peak solar flux per day here. I thought you were getting a 5000 watt peak system, which would yield 21 KWhr/day here, on average.

Incidentally, my weather station tracks solar flux in watts per meter, and over the past two years I have averaged very close to the DOE numbers for solar flux.

[pstans]

5. Every new building should be built with solar panels on it

It should be a requirement. It would increase the demand, making solar panels more readily available and other homes would add them to their existing structures.

[NNadir]

9. Who is going to pay for it?

Please tell us how you afforded the solar system on your home and who paid for it.

[SnoopDog]

11. If our government and our citizens demand solar energy -

it would be affordable to all.

We need more and more people to promote the obvious soundness of solar energy instead of the naysayers picking on every point to discourage it.

Very similar to how we 'put a man on the moon' - we as a nation 'goes for it' and make it a national priority.

[bridgit]

15. most people will have no clue unless & until they see their meters...

turning backward distributing elect back into the grid is my thought :shrug: it's that "who's gonna pay for all this hippie shit bullshit!?!?" point of view that has kept renewables on the shelf imo

[pstans]

12. Good question

1. There are already tax breaks from the federal government.
2. An increase in demand would lower the cost.
3. I don't understand why electric and gas companies aren't getting into renewable energy. Why aren't they putting up wind farms and purchasing companies that manufacture solar panels. Push for them to get involved. They have the money to invest. Instead they are invest in the same oil refineries, exploration, and power plants. They have to know that the fossil fuels are running out and are bad for the environment.

[skids]

16. And...

1) The tax breaks are deserved. All other forms of energy are subsidized already by the government -- gee look what just passed in the congress today... a fossil fuel industry subsidy. Gee I wonder who pays for all the supporting infrastructure for nuclear reactors... again the public. This is just giving certain sectors of the renewables market a peice of the same pie all the energy companies get.

2) Increased demand already has lowered the cost. There's been a small bump in the road due to wafer supply which has caused a price increase on legacy-style panels. That won't hold the market back for long, and a move away from monocrystal cells was already anticipated. Manufacture of CIGS cells which don't require any silicon is scaling up right now, and concentrated PV systems are due to hit the market soon which use 1/25th to 1/100th the amount of silicon for the same power output.

3) Electric and gas companies do in fact participate. They do run solar, wind and geothermal -- though since they have the ability to get right of way to do so, they've been mostly working on large hydroelectric.

Though it really is a pity that everyone's attention stays riveted on electricity generation when we waste most of our electricity heating and cooling. Solutions for that have been around for decades and can self-finance on credit -- that heating and cooling needs are being ignored is the real blunder here. And that's everyone's fault, since just about anyone from big business owners to home owners can take out a loan and save enough with the resulting system to pay down the interest. They just don't do so.

[NNadir]

24. Could it be that the reason energy companies don't invest is that

it doesn't work?

I note that the position stated in your #2, increase in demand and lower cost was exactly what was stated in 1976. The cost of solar energy was supposed to be equivalent to the other forms of energy by
1985!

How is the same statment made almost 30 years later supposed to be more believable? Do you have any evidence for this claim, or is it just repeating the 30 year old rosary?

The demand for solar cells are rising from next to zero to slightly farther from zero, we hear all the time from dopey solar advocates about how "solar power is gaining "exponentially." They get breathless with enthusiasm over a magical solar Mega"watt" here or a magical solar Mega"watt" there. Facing this increased demand, are prices really falling? No. They are going up, from unaffordable to more unaffordable.

Lots of people come on this website hemming and hawing over the price of natural gas, which is now over $13/MBTU, more than double it's price last year. Even at this high price it is still much, much less 1/2 the price of solar PV energy. People say they can't afford natural gas. How then will they afford solar without even the batteries. According to solarbuzz, the price of solar PV power is $0.2112/kw-hr. This is the equivalent of natural gas at $61.90/MBTU, almost 5 times the cost of natural gas when natural gas is at the highest price ever.

The solar industry can't even compete when the fossil industry is collapsing.

It requires more than ritualistic platitudes to convince me that the solution for the global climate crisis WHICH IS HAPPENING NOW is to wait for solar PV prices to come down by a factor of 5 through increased demand, so that it can just be very expensive as opposed to prohibitively expensive, rich spoiled brat trust fund kids aside.

Let's be clear, if the prices of electricity rise by a factor of 10 from what they were last year just to satisfy the mystical sensibilities of people who understand almost zero about business and less about energy, people will be hurt and hurt badly. It may not matter to some people, Repukes and the equally dogmatic Greenpeace types that all of these people will be poor people, but it matters to me.

Electric companies are not getting into solar energy (with the exception wind) because it doesn't work.. It's really that simple.

Everybody wants solar power to work. Solar Power is sexy. Solar power is cool. Solar power is dreamy. It just isn't realistic. And unless we get realistic real soon, there is going to a tragedy on a scale that small minded twits hovered over their televisions can't even imagine in their most drunken dreams.

[jpak]

26. PV manufacture IS a profitable exponentially growing multi-billion dollar

per year global business.

In Japan, electricity from PV IS competitive with electricity from the grid ($0.11-0.15 per kWh for PV vs. $0.21 per kWh from the nuclear/fossil grid).

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/8225/8225solarenergy.html

How did Japan do this?????

<snip>

Sawin singles out Japan and Germany as models for how governments should create programs to ease in PV. The U.S. federal government, she says, is a model of how not to do it.

<snip>

(Japan's 100,000 Solar Roof Program)

The rebates started at 50% of installed costs and declined each year. Japanese utilities were also required to buy surplus power generated by PV owners at retail rates. As a result, more than 168,000 residential PV systems, generating 622 MW, were installed under the program. In 2002, utilities purchased 124 GW of surplus PV power, she says.

<snip>

By the end of 2003, Japan had 887 MW of PV installed, at a growth rate of 43% annually since the early 1990s. The country aims to have 4,820 MW of PV in place by 2010, Sawin says.

The peak government investment in the program came in 2001 at $219 million; this year, it will decline to $49 million, she says. Next year, it will be phased out.

<snip>

In comparison, Ronald Reagan ended all federal tax credits for solar back in the 1980's. Subsequent Republican administrations and Congresses have been absolutely hostile to the US solar industry ever since.

Despite this, more than 250,000 American homes are today equipped with PV systems and tens of thousands more have roof-top solar hot water systems.

Whilst the US imports uranium, oil and natural gas, the US actually EXPORTS PV modules to the rapidly growing global PV market. It's one of the few US produced tech products that can make that claim.

Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2 and the Gingrich/Delay/Lott/Frist Congresses spent tens of billions of dollars on nuclear power R&D over the last 25 years.

How many new nuclear reactors were ordered during this period?????

ZERO

The only way new nuclear reactors can be built in the US is through massive government subsides - and this is exactly what Dick Cheney and Delay/Frist Congress accomplished this year.

People want solar because it empowers them and their families, it secures their household budgets against Enron-style fraud and larceny and it's good for the environment.

They don't want nuclear because it empowers rapacious energy companies, threatens their families and pocketbooks, and is associated with unsavory types like Lyndon LaRouche, the GOP and their cronies in Big Business.

So yeah, solar is cool and sexy - and nuclear ain't.

[Name removed]

27. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[jpak]

18. The Cheney administration is spending $6.8 billion

to build 3 new nuclear plants.

Who pays for that?????

Who will pay most of the cost of building and operating Yucca Mountain ($60+ billion)????

Who will pay for depleted UF6 disposal ($3 billion)????

Who will pay for the decommissioning of abandoned uranium mines ($1 billion and counting)????

Who pays for the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (which compensates uranium workers for morbidity and mortality due to exposure to radiation, uranium and beryllium - $600 million and counting)????

Who will pay for the decommissioning of the FAILED and abandoned commercial spent fuel reprocessing facility at West Valley NY ($2 billion already spent, $4-8 billion estimated final cost)?????

Who paid for the financial DISASTER the is the United States Uranium Enrichment Corporation (final not yet determined but already in the hundreds of millions of dollars)????

Who paid for the Three Mile Island ($1 billion dollar) "non"-accident????

Who paid for the Brown's Ferry ($7 billion) "non"accident???

Who paid the stranded costs of the dozens of nuclear power plants that were canceled in the 1970's and '80's (estimated at $112 billion) ?????

Since 1948, the US government has spent $66+ billion on nuclear power R&D and subsidies (~$600 million per operating US reactor)...

Who paid for ALL THAT????

[garybeck]

25. Solar energy works now, and it did back in the 70s.

the only thing in the way is politics.

[NNadir]

29. And now for some more amusing excerpts from this 1976 book...

Page 10: "About this time in Washington, Barry Commoner, Charmian of the Scientists Institute for Public Information was calling the Breeder Reactor a "disastrous mistake." He charged that the Atomic Energy Commission was covering up a report that solar energy could provide 21 percent of the power that the United States would need by 2000 and at a competitive price. The New York Times stepped into the argument in a Washington-datelined story that explained: 'On the principle that one cannot beat something with nothing, the antinuclear scientists are cranking up a campaign to tell the public that solar energy is more feasible than is generally understood and will pose much less environmental risk than reactors.

Disinterested analysts fear that the public will leap to the conclusion that sunshine is the solution to all energy problems in much the same way that scientists and engineers led the public 25 years ago to expect early, abundant and cheap nuclear energy - a promise that continually receded'."

NNadir note: Nuclear Energy is among the cheapest energy options now available.

And now some more:

Page 11: "...I was told that a former classmate of mine was touting a plan to convert the Indian reservations of the Great Southwest with solar cells produced by a new process making them cheaper than throwaway beer cans. I was intrigued...I phoned my former classmate. He did not remember me but took me into his confidence...Weren't solar cells too expensive?

Not at all, Dan, not at all. He named a name, that of a researcher who had achieved a breakthrough in producing solar cells. The capital cost was down to 30 cents per watt, only three-tenths of a dollar. That was quite different that the price in outer space, about $100/watt..."

(The bold print has been added by me for emphasis.)

Well there you have it folks.

It is5 years after 2000, the year that the self-serving fool Barry Commoner told us we could be more than 20% solar, some 80% less than what the paranoid freak self-serving fool Ralph Nader was predicting at the same time for the same future that has now passed, 100%.

For 30 years, solar power has been sexy. For 30 years solar power has been cool. Everybody wanted solar energy to work, including me.

Where have you heard this kind of talk before, or since it is some 30 years since the loose talk about the beer can priced solar cells, where do you hear this kind of talk still?

Let me direct you to one place.

The International Society for Solar Soothsaying

Now, of course, at the ISSS, Barry Commoner having been relegated to oblivion, they're talking about 2020, and 30,000 Mega"watts," or, even if we confuse magical solar "watts" with physicist watts, 0.2% of the world's energy demand (500 exajoules, representing an average power demand of 16 trillion watts).

Hype and marketing and delusion aside, this should not - in a time of global climate catastrophe - be comforting to anyone with a modicum of mind.

I guess they never heard of global climate change at Greenpeace.