Tag: solar energy

Solar panels can power the world says MIT study

An MIT report has found that regular solar panels like the ones used today could supply much of the world with power. They believe terawatts of energy could be produced by 2050 and say that investment, not technology, could be the biggest hurdle.

The world’s population currently consumes 15 terawatts of power from various energy sources, according to the Economist. Despite making up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, Americans use 26 percent of the world’s power.

The publication, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shows that no revolution in solar energy needs to take place, as scientists already have everything they need to harness the energy of the sun and turn it into electricity, though minor tweaks may help to improve efficiency.

The US, for example, generates less than 1 percent of its energy from solar power. This is something the researchers are looking to change.

“Our objective has been to assess solar energy’s current and potential competitive position and to identify changes in US government policies that could more efficiently and effectively support its massive deployment over the long-term, which we view as necessary,” Robert Armstrong, the director of MIT Energy Initiative, said in a statement.

The Topaz solar farm in California went online at the end of 2014. It generates 500 megawatts of energy, which is enough energy to power at least 160,000 homes. A terawatt is 1 million megawatts of energy.

The company behind the project, First Solar, uses 9 million solar panels to generate electricity. Crucially, it also eliminates over 350,000 tons of CO2 every year, Techspot reports.

“Solar electricity generation is one of very few low-carbon energy technologies with the potential to grow to very large scale. As a consequence, massive expansion of global solar generating capacity to multi-terawatt scale is very likely an essential component of a work-able strategy to mitigate climate change risk,” the MIT report said.

The study has emphasized the need for more research at a federal level, as well as more development support to help to advance low cost and large scale electricity storage technologies.

Battery technology is expected to be a crucial part of the future development of solar power energy, as the batteries can be used to store electricity during peak production and then dispense it at times when there is no sunshine.

The CEO of Tesla industries, Elon Musk, has been a big advocate of trying to develop better batteries that could help to store electricity.

“Our goal here is to fundamentally change the way the world uses energy,” Musk said on April 30, Bloomberg reported. “We’re talking at the terawatt scale. The goal is the complete transformation of the entire energy infrastructure of the world.”

The ability to get funding is out there. For example, the International Monetary Fund has calculated that the fossil fuel industries are receiving $5.3 trillion a year in subsidies, which is the equivalent to $10 million every minute. This is a figure that those looking to promote solar power can only dream of.

The authors of the MIT publication believe that the production of solar power will only increase if carbon dioxide emissions become costly. They admit this is unlikely to happen without a drastic rethink in US government policy.

“The main goal of US solar policy should be to build the foundation for a massive scale-up of solar generation over the next few decades,” the report said.

The researchers point to the example of Germany as a standout in pursuing green energy. In 1991, Berlin adopted a Feed-in Tariff scheme which was a rebate scheme to encourage the production of low carbon source energy.

The scheme was so successful that by 2013 Germany was producing 45 percent of solar energy in the EU, and 27 percent of solar energy around the globe, despite the fact that the country is not renowned for having a year-round sunny climate.

Fracking, climate change, solar in the security mix

The global oil market is going through an upheaval, with non-OPEC production led by North American producers surging while OPEC’s traditional price-setting role changes. First, US oil production and proven oil reserve growth over the past several years is astonishing. Despite the current oil price decline, US oil production growth in 2015 is expected to grow around 1 million barrels per day. However, those growth rates probably won’t be sustained over the long term.

Second, if you look at the world’s largest oil reserve holders and countries that have reserve-to-production ratios in excess of 100 years, they are almost exclusively OPEC members. The cartel’s market influence has diminished in the face of robust non-OPEC production, but the group’s power is likely to endure over the long term purely due to the sheer volume of oil its members collectively control.

The Saudis will remain the de facto leaders of OPEC until another country can build comparable spare production capacity, which in the Saudis case is currently around 2 mmb/d. Saudi Arabia has 266 billion barrels of proven high-quality, cheap-to-produce oil reserves. The US, in contrast, boasts only 44.2 billion barrels of mostly expensive-to-produce oil reserves. Technology is a wild card that has the potential to unlock additional petroleum resources and reduce production costs, but it would be a mistake to discount Saudi Arabia’s power as an oil country, particularly over the long term.

That means, of course, that the Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet will remain a key asset. Add the Iranian nuclear talks, the predations of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and the simmering tensions between Israel and its neighbors to the oil that flow through the Strait of Hormuz and there seems little doubt we will keep substantial naval, air and expeditionary forces in the area for the foreseeable future.

Oil-sea-routes-map

But these shifting energy markets raises larger strategic questions.

Colin spoke with one of the wisest analysts about the energy sector and its national security implications, Tony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. A former senior Pentagon and NATO official, Cordesman also served as director of policy and planning for resource applications at the Department of Energy. He doesn’t foresee any immediate major strategic shifts created by the energy market changes. At the same time, he acknowledges that major technological and market shifts have usually gone unnoticed until they hit us in the face.

Cordesman points to the solar and nuclear markets, where we have all been expecting or hoping for major technological breakthroughs “since the Nixon administration.” Then he notes that, in the oil market, “no one predicted that the most critical technological breakthrough would prove to be fracking.” Can we expect a breakthrough in the solar, nuclear or biofuel arenas? “It may take 25 to 50 years or it will happen almost without warning,” he predicts.

The current situation in the alternative energy world: We’re seeing the strong growth of renewable energy, albeit from a low base. The growth rate of installed US solar power capacity has been impressive, but that growth rate has slipped in the past few years as the technology has gained market share. “U.S. solar power capacity would need to grow at an annual rate of 22 percent in order for solar to provide 10 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2030, from less than 1 percent now,” Breaking Energy recently reported.

Wind and solar are used to generate electricity but coal will remain a significant source of US power generation for decades, although its market share looks likely to decline — for environmental reasons. The renewable energy story is important, and while it is changing the way utilities do business, wind and solar are only beginning to compete with fossil fuels on price. In most cases, their competitiveness is a result of tax incentives often referred to as subsidies. Also, the intermittent nature of these resources is a technical challenge that must be overcome in order to efficiently integrate large volumes of wind and solar energy into the power grid during times of peak demand. Creative financing and technological advances – particularly in energy storage – will help renewable electricity sources compete over time, but coal and natural gas will remain significant components of the US power generation mix for the foreseeable future.

At the international level, the issue of burning coal to generate power is far more complex. It is cheap and represents a comparatively cost-effective way to electrify large portions of the global population that currently have no access to power. Indeed, nine countries are collectively about to build roughly 550 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity over the next two and a half decades.

And Then, Climate Change

In many ways, reducing emissions from coal-fired power generation is the key to dealing with climate change. China has been acting to address coal plant emissions due to its dangerous air pollution levels, which is an important piece of the climate change puzzle.

This poses a great conundrum for China. The Communist Party’s leaders are trying to forge a China united between rural and urban areas and that requires huge and fast economic development — much of it dependent on the use of cheap and readily available coal. Weaning themselves off of coal may be promising in terms of reducing emissions, but Cordesman says they are unlikely to be able to accept the economic tradeoffs.

For the same reasons, many other developing countries including India, Bangladesh and Pakistan are increasing their coal-fired power generation fleets.

Some think the ship has already sailed on preventing the impacts of climate change and now focus on adapting to extreme weather and other consequences as opposed to mitigating emissions such that they limit global temperatures from increasing more than 2 degrees Celsius.

Optimists remain however, and international agreements are not the only thing to focus on when thinking about what the world is doing to address the issue. “At every level—individuals, families, cities, states, provinces, even multinational corporations—efforts to cut CO2 are underway,” David Biello, associate editor for environment and energy at Scientific American, wrote in a recent post. He goes on to point out, “these are first steps and they are coming at a quickening pace, which suggest a possible future free of catastrophic climate change. More and faster should be the new slogan for action to address global warming. How much more and how much faster should be the only issue for negotiation.”