Contribution from Viv Forbes
“Solar power – a subsidised appendage”.
Australian electricity consumers can look forward to soaring charges for electricity and blackouts if state and federal politicians continue to undermine the power grid by mandating and subsidising solar power generation.
Solar power can never produce continuous, predictable, low cost power. It must always be supported by expensive power storage systems or by reliable power sources such as coal, gas, hydro or nuclear.
No matter how many millions of taxpayer money is poured into “research”, it can never solve the two fatal flaws of solar power.
Firstly, sunlight energy arrives in very dilute form, and thus needs vast areas of collectors to harvest significant energy. This results in high capital costs and much environmental disturbance. Solar power can light one 75-watt bulb for every card table of collectors (in the middle of the day only). How many card tables do we need to run the trains, factories, fridges, homes, heaters, hospitals and tools of a big city?
Secondly, the solar energy produced during daylight hours is constantly variable and unpredictable, and zero power is generated at night. As a result, solar power farms seldom produce more than an average of 15% of their rated capacity over a year and as low as 1% for a day or so.
In Australia, the maximum electricity demand occurs at about 6.30 pm in mid-winter in the big southern cities. However, the maximum solar power is generated at noon in mid-summer in clear northern deserts. If the nightly solar curfew is to be supplied by solar power, this necessitates a vast area of collectors to provide daytime grid power as well as charging a storage backup which supplies power at night. The scattered solar collectors also need a huge new transmission network. Such a system is inefficient and very costly.
More likely, however, is that the solar farms will be backed up by gas or coal power stations on standby, wasting fuel and capital until they are needed to supply power on cloudy days or during the nightly solar blackouts.
Solar energy has useful applications, but supplying the power grid is NOT one of them. Solar power can never supply the reliable low cost electricity needed for Australian cities and industries. In that application, it can only exist as a subsidised and troublesome appendage propped up by serious power sources such as coal, gas, nuclear or hydro.
Viv Forbes Chairman
The Carbon Sense Coalition
MS 23 Rosewood Qld 4340 Australia 0754 640 533
www.carbon-sense.com info@carbon-sense.com
For a detailed look at Solar Power Realities, with actual performance figures see:
Viv, the ACT regulatory commission agrees with you.
Also see my: Canberra solar PV gross feed scheme is a foolish and expensive experiment with our electricity system
April 19th, 2009 by Warwick Hughes
> Solar power can never produce continuous, predictable, low cost power.
The only problem with solar in the terms given above is getting
to cheap long-term storage, and while that does need to be done a)
hundreds of very smart chemists around the world — including dozens
right in my own city — are working on it explicitly, and b) plants provide
a pretty good proof of concept. As for costs: over time the cost
of all technological processes fall asymptotically close to zero.
The land costs issue is real enough, but there is no reason in theory
why you can’t float PV islands out in the deep ocean. It’s just
engineering.
Claims that technological problems can ‘never’ be solved have a mixed
track record.