Interesting Links for 25-09-2014
- Please be careful with your iPhone 6 - looks like it bends if you apply too much pressure
(tags: iphone apple ) - Cats aren't actually domesticated. (And they think of you as a large, not terribly effective, cat)
(tags: cats ) - India now has a spaceship orbiting Mars
(tags: mars India space ) - The Surprising Path to a Faster NYTimes.com (How do you ( Read more... )
Does Swanson’s Law hold in the future? (One might want to look at the cost of steam engines for this.)
What’s driving it? If it is a learning curve effect what’s driving that? What are people getting better at? Or is it economies of scale? If so, when do they stop?
What happens to the price of coal when solar gets underneath it? What I’d expect to happen is firstly a cutting of margins, secondly for marginal production to be shut down and then for an investment in capital and technology to reduce the cost of extraction.
There is clearly a virtuous circle as solar drops in price as a result. The premium needing to be paid over coal falls reducing the solar cost until it becomes negative. At this point one would expect a long period of significant year on year roll out.
There’s an interesting question about what happens when large numbers of installed solar panels repay their financing and (if) they still have many years of operation ahead of them. That might cause a significant drop in retail energy prices or a significant return to owners of solar panels. Proving out a 30+ year life for these things would also allow cheaper financing over a longer period. Either way that implies a significant growth spurt.
Although more likely is that the first wave of solar panels hit 25 years of live and condition monitoring indicates they will last longer and solar panel owners refinance before their own panels hit 20 years.
And what does this do to other renewable energy technology? Looks like wind has about 15 years to find some significant cost savings before it gets left behind by solar.
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I can't remember precise figures from "Renewable energy without the hot air", but we just don't get enough light in the UK to make it feasible to generate all of our power that way. China is different, of course.
I wonder if coal people are investing in cheaper extraction _now_ - because waiting for solar to catch up will then leave them trying to improve faster than solar can, which might be a race it can't win.
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Solar pv even in the UK would still contribute a significant amount of energy and knock a number of our less good power stations off the grid.
In some ways the fact that we are not an ideal location for solar power might mean we end up getting the panels much cheaper but later. Cheaper because by the time everyone else has done theirs there is so much more Swanson effect and also because by the time we get round to it there will be huge numbers of solar panel factories, set up to supply a growing market, now trying to supply a steady state market. Therefore some over capacity.
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