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For full disclosure, Khosla Ventures has invested in certain solar thermal technologies that we believe are far more cost-effective than the generally used numbers for CSP costs. At 1GW scale plants we believe these will start to be competitive with coal power plants in the U.S. in the next few years, even without carbon sequestration.
One argument made by Dr. Scheer against solar thermal technologies is the role of the grid--the idea that the grid was a big part of the cost in centralized solar power. Studies on the subject tend to show otherwise. (See the German DLR "Trans-CSP" study, or the Western Governors' Association 2006 Clean Energy Transmission Report.) They find that transmission is about 10 percent the cost of delivered electric power in North America and Europe today. The grid serves everyone, and keeps the lights on, rain or shine, night and day. Realistically speaking, how many people will accept power outages when the sun is not shining, or pay $100,000 or more per house for battery storage for the week of rains when they need power? It is easy for a politician (especially one whose own capital isn't at stake) to propose utilities paying for the grid and the electric plants, yet only have them generate revenue when homeowners are not generating their own subsidized power.
Similarly, it seems nonsensical to force the utility to buy electricity from rooftop solar whenever the homeowner does not need it, independent of the utility's own needs. This works politically at a small scale but is untenable at any large scale. I am not suggesting we should not have these programs; they are very helpful in getting this new industry launched and get to scale. But they should be short-term (five to seven year) programs that can work when solar rooftop electricity is a few percent of our electricity generation, but not if they become 30 percent to 50 percent of our electricity.
As stated before, capital investment in electrical generation capacity is many times higher because the consumer (even without batteries) spends four times as much per kilowatt, and the utility is also forced to duplicate that capacity as "standby capacity" when the consumer needs it. Replacing the grid with electric storage in batteries will cause the consumer to spend more than 10 times as much as today's requirement of capital. Capital inefficient technologies will never gain enough investment to matter. We need too large an investment in these new technologies for them to not make economic sense.
A second, slightly more ludicrous argument Dr. Scheer used is the idea that a large solar thermal grid in Africa is a likely nuclear target, putting energy supplies at risk. In practice, no one would build one electric plant to supply all of Europe, much as all of the American generation capacity would never be confined to one ZIP code. Nonetheless, the Morocco example I've cited (3 percent of Morrocco is enough to power all of Europe) is meant to illustrate that we have more than sufficient land to generate solar thermal power and to store the electricity cost effectively. Rest assured, my preference is for more distributed, 1GW to 2GW plants built across the U.S.
Any argument can be twisted with unlikely scenarios if one wants to critique it. One often sees this in extrapolations of corn ethanol. It would be like my twisting the wind power technology and saying if we produced all our electricity with wind, 75 percent of the planet would be without electricity 75 percent of the time--or worse!. Wind is a great resource that we should harness, but it will probably not scale beyond 10 percent of our needs globally or solve the global carbon emission problem without huge breakthroughs in storage technologies that are possible but not visible on the horizon yet. I am a fan of more research in Compressed Air Energy Storage or CAES technologies.
Thermal energy storage is one of the key advantages of solar thermal power. Storing heat--as hot water, hot oil, hot rocks--is very cheap. Storing electric power today is hundreds to thousands of times more expensive. Costs of both thermal and electric storage are declining, which is good. But using today's thermal storage systems, we can build plants that compete with gas and coal power now--not 20 years from now. Meanwhile, the reality is that battery storage per kilowatt-hour is 100 to 1,000 times more expensive today than would be cost effective--and battery technology costs are not declining very rapidly. Battery technology is not showing a path to even a five times improvement anytime soon, let alone the 100 to 1,000 times that is necessary.
From my own perspective, we have been looking for breakthrough battery investments for years without seeing a five-times technology. (We are invested in a very risky but significant technology change; if the technology works, it will make for a very good investment, but nothing on the horizon will make electric storage in batteries at home cost effective. I hope to keep looking at new approaches and prove myself wrong.)
Solar cell costs are clearly declining very rapidly, and I can see how they decline with technology improvements. Unfortunately, they have become a minority part of the cost of a solar system, so solar cell cost declines don't help the solar "system cost" as much as we would like. Again, the tendency (of Dr. Scheer and others) is be nonspecific and say technology will solve our problem and imply all technologies will decline in cost--the money being spent is that of the taxpayers and does not require objectivity. Only investors have to be truly objective if they don't want to lose their money.
Biography
Vinod Khosla co-founded Daisy Systems and was the founding chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems. He currently is a general partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
See more CNET content tagged:
plant, wind power, debate, goal, China
nuclear energy research and development was short-circuited by
misguided environmentalists. Have you looked at the work that was
done between 1984 and 1994 in the Integral Fast Reactor project at
Argonne National Laboratory (and the fuel recycling process that
continues now)? If so, I'd like to know what you think of it.
An MIT innovation.
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2007/jan/tech/kb_nuclear.html?sa_campaign=rss/cen_mag/estnews/2007-01-03/kb_nuclear
China is looking to add 100GW by 2030 and 300GW by 2050 of nuclear power.
India is also building a lot of nuclear and planning to add more.
Vinod indicates that he thinks nuclear is good but is just concerned about getting it implemented fast enough. Unless Vinod is indicating that his CSP and other solutions will eliminate all coal energy usage within 20 years, then it seems that we should hedge and continue to push ahead as fast as possible with nuclear power as well.
Note: For nuclear waste. Nuclear waste is mostly (95%) unburned uranium. Japan and France reprocess their waste.
For proliferation. There are already 443 nuclear power plants. US, China, India all have nuclear weapons. 40 countries already have the knowhow and the material for nuclear weapons. Iran and N Korea were proliferated with knowledge to in the 1980s from Pakistan. What is the incremental risk from more nuclear power ? Nuclear material for nuclear weapons is better made from reactors that are not designed for nuclear power.
There are better nuclear plant designs such molten salt reactors.
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com
===
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/search/label/nuclear
Integral Fast Reactor?
An MIT innovation.
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2007/jan/tech/kb_nuclear.html?sa_campaign=rss/cen_mag/estnews/2007-01-03/kb_nuclear
China is looking to add 100GW by 2030 and 300GW by 2050 of nuclear power.
India is also building a lot of nuclear and planning to add more.
Vinod indicates that he thinks nuclear is good but is just concerned about getting it implemented fast enough. Unless Vinod is indicating that his CSP and other solutions will eliminate all coal energy usage within 20 years, then it seems that we should hedge and continue to push ahead as fast as possible with nuclear power as well.
Note: For nuclear waste. Nuclear waste is mostly (95%) unburned uranium. Japan and France reprocess their waste.
For proliferation. There are already 443 nuclear power plants. US, China, India all have nuclear weapons. 40 countries already have the knowhow and the material for nuclear weapons. Iran and N Korea were proliferated with knowledge to in the 1980s from Pakistan. What is the incremental risk from more nuclear power ? Nuclear material for nuclear weapons is better made from reactors that are not designed for nuclear power.
There are better nuclear plant designs such molten salt reactors.
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com
===
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/search/label/nuclear
People are also made sick by coal. the people who are sick before they die from cancer and heart disease and those who are just made sick from asthma and other illnesses. This makes the entire medicare problem worse.
40% of all freight rail traffic in the US is to move coal. So a large part of the diesel fuel usage is also linked to coal power. Over 1 billion tons of coal per year is in used each year in the USA alone. 40% of rail subsidies and maintenance are thus coal related.
60,000 people die early deaths each year in the united states because of coal pollution. The immediate step is clean up the coal plants and there are some bills to help about 25%-50% in the USA.
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/04/support-clean-air-bills-to-save.html
But to get the rest of the way we need to replace coal completely.
Anyway two points i'd like to make here.
1) if you can't make rome at home take rome to where you can build it and make the most use of it industrialy.
2) what about heat effected nano crystals to collect up heat.
Did you know that George W. Bush uses geothermal heat pumps to heat and cool his house in Texas? I am betting we can build even bigger geothermal heat pumps to provide electricity by turning water into steam and using the steam to turn generators which crank out electricity.
It seems if you want a greener house, George W. Bush has a greener house than Al Gore has. While Al Gore continues to bash people for not being green enough, George W. Bush is leading the way by example and made his house greener in hopes that others would follow his example.
While I agree with most part of the article, I cannot agree with this point. We only need to look back to our history. If there's no nuclear meltdown accident, there will not be enough R&D goes into handling the meltdown, nor nuclear waste. It's simple economy -- no problem, no demand, and there will be no money flow into handling those issues. There WILL be money trying to get more output, or build a bigger plant w/ minimum money, however, because if there was no accident, people would find the idea the best thing discovered ever, and would like to squeeze every bit out of it.
The primary reason why nuclear plant doesn't fly is because economically there won't be enough money to make it safer until disaster hits, but when disaster does hit, it's so scary and affects us so much that people will demand we abandon the idea altogether, instead of finding ways to fix it.
Even if a nuclear plant was to blow up like a nuclear bomb (which they cannot) it would not take out one million people because they are not that close to that many people and would be blowing up on the ground.
The coal plants collectively generate 20,000 tons of uranium and thorium fallout every year. Parts per million of the 6 billion tons of coal waste that gets thrown into the air.
Why are you not more scared of the 1 million dead every year from coal ?
Air pollution is killing 3 million per year. This includes all of the fossil fuel pollution.
Even if a nuclear plant was to blow up like a nuclear bomb (which they cannot) it would not take out one million people because they are not that close to that many people and would be blowing up on the ground.
The coal plants collectively generate 20,000 tons of uranium and thorium fallout every year. Parts per million of the 6 billion tons of coal waste that gets thrown into the air.
Why are you not more scared of the 1 million dead every year from coal ?
Air pollution is killing 3 million per year. This includes all of the fossil fuel pollution.
one thing i noticed after coming to the US is that there are 100s of lights turned on (in offices, etc) where they really only need 50% of them. at least, they can replace these with the new energy efficient LED lights which also last longer. temperature in the water heaters can be lowered, motion sensors could be set up to turn on/off lights and air condidtioning. you know.. little things like these would make a big difference in the long run.
Mahurshi Akilla
I think they should understand people want to see the world preserved, species protected, the air clean and
society harmonious. Basically we need to understand that improvement will not come by increasing income but by reducing losses. I can see no difficulty in backing up solar systems and the target should absolutely be that no fossil fuel is beeing burned on a sunny day.
- Eye opening rebuttal
- by Allan338 May 12, 2007 9:31 PM PDT
- Well reasoned and well thought out.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(20 Comments)I'd never looked at green power through the lens of 3rd world perspective.... Thank you.