Challenge: Solar=Third of US electricity by 2000

loughery111

Banned
Actually it just might make it competitive.

(best I can do at the moment. I'm looking for a better source. I think their statement regarding coal is way off base.)

Torqumada

It's from a site that sells home solar kits, for Chrissake! Everything about modern-day solar suggests that giving it all the subsidies we can would still just be pouring money down a hole, when it could better be spent on just about every other clean(ish) energy technology we have and on research to make sure that when we do start using solar in earnest, it's the best stuff we can possibly get.

It's certainly possible that an early POD that seriously pushes solar, and solar only, could make it much more competitive and give it a subsidy regime that will prop it up as well. But 30% is pushing Apollo+Manhattan+TVA levels of investment. Additionally, any sane energy policy in the 1960's or 70's is going to push nuclear first, wind second, and solar only third. Even then, solar will likely be the centralized mirror-tower kind, as photovoltaics sucked back then.

EDIT: Also, the supposition that coal would never have beaten out watermills, wood, or steam (definitely not a power source... and largely generated by burning coal, so I don't follow that line of idiocy) without subsidies is either miserably misinformed or a bald-faced lie. Coal trounced water in portability, enabling factories to be built near populations, and wood in energy density. What subsidies they're referring to is beyond me.
 
I didn't take the US figures past 2004, mainly because the US percentage of manufacturing cratered with production moving to the far east. I suppose that if we wanted to get a sense of how fast production might be able to go up during a period we could do complete series of world production from 1976 thru 2010 and pick the best 27 years.

Here is a series for worldwide production:

1976 - 2 Megawatts
1980 - 7 M-Watts
1984 - Apparently don't have it (MIA)
1988 - 34 M-Watts
1992 - 58 M-Watts
1996 - MIA
2000 - 277 M-Watts
(splice from another source)
2006 1.74 Gigawatts
2007 2.83 G-Watts
2008 6.08 G-Watts
2009 7.59 G-Watts
2010 12.23 G-Watts

Fair warning: The two sources have somewhat different figures when they overlap, with the source for the early data about 20% higher.

With that in mind, the best period I see for solar growth that is anywhere close to the range I gave is 1980 to 2010, which is three more years than I gave for the challenge. That would an increase of just under 1750 times in the thirty years. If we applied that rate of growth to the period 1976 to 2000 (which is stacking the deck in the favor of solar growth considerably) that gives us 3.5 gigawatts in 2000.

The best ten year period for solar growth was from 2000 to 2010, which was 44.15 times. If you could somehow get that rate starting in 1980, worldwide production would have been a little over 13.6 gigawatts in 2000, still a long ways from the goal. I tried giving the solar industry the best five year growth it has had from 1976 to 1980, and then giving it the 44.15 times growth for both decades and still only got it to 27.4 gigawatts worldwide by 2000.

Of course that all assumes that the technology for the same level of growth was available in 1976 that was available in 2000. That's probably not true. More under next rock.
 
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It's from a site that sells home solar kits, for Chrissake!

You mean when the oil industry tells us they are actually helping to make the environment cleaner, they might be lying? :rolleyes: I told you it wasn't the best of sources. I had much better sources on hand at one time, but it seems to be lost to me at the moment due to shuffling from computer to computer over the years and a couple of dead links that had government backing. I have followed this stuff literally for decades. There are lots of disincentives to not using renewable energy resources and very few of them actually have anything to do with the Free Market and more do do with government regulation and incentives to old, and well connected industries. This graphic however, doesn't lie when it states that over a 6 year period, coal and oil got $72 billion in subsidies while solar got $1 billion and that was just for the years 2002 to 2008. So, it's possible they might not be lying about the rest of the facts and one can ignore their opinion on coal (which I mentioned in my post about it).

Again, you seem to be thinking that even if we had been spending money on projects since 1973, that we would still have the same level of solar power based technology today that we do. I think we would probably be two decades at least further on and who knows what that will mean for things like photo voltaic efficiency, cost, ability to use more than the visible spectrum of light etc....

Yes, I think that nuclear would have been pushed too. However, if something like TMI happens at roughly the same time, it might stop development in the same manner. With more nuclear power plants available, the chances for an accident happening do increase.

Carter was the biggest presidential proponent for solar power, calling for 20% by 2000. Maybe if he doesn't lose the election in 1980 (which would probably be a major achievement in itself) that might be possible.

As for the cost of such a project: The cost of the Manhattan project was $20 billion. The total cost of the Apollo project was $25.4 billion. I can't find figures on the TVA, but if it is equal to the cost of the Manhattan project and Apollo project combined, that's still only $100 billion in total cost. Seems a bargain to me, even adding in inflation. ;)

Torqumada
 
In 1976 First Solar's Cadmium Telluride tech wasn't mass-producible, and they are the current price leaders. Single crystal and (I think) Multicrystal silicon were available or soon would be, but the best silicon cells then were roughly two-thirds as efficient as the best ones now. The tech for growing and sawing ingots was considerably more primitive then. The semiconductor industry poured a lot of billions into improving that tech over the intervening years. Amorphous was about two-thirds as efficient then as it is now.
 
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