Wind and Solar Will Be the Cheapest Way to Generate Power by 2040

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601687/wind-and-solar-will-be-the-cheapest-way-to-generate-power-by-2040/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Wind and Solar Will Be the Cheapest Way to Generate Power by 2040[/font]

[font size=4]Unfortunately, that’s not enough to win the climate-change battle.[/font]

by Richard Martin June 13, 2016

[font size=3]Although the prices of coal and gas will continue to scrape bottom over the next couple of decades, the cheapest form of power generation will soon be renewable energy. That’s the conclusion of the New Energy Outlook 2016 from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which was released Monday.

The cost of generating electricity “for onshore wind will fall 41 percent by 2040, and solar photovoltaics by 60 percent, making these two technologies the cheapest ways of producing electricity in many countries during the 2020s and in most of the world in the 2030s,” the report concludes. The installed price of residential rooftop solar power today is about $3.00 per watt, without government subsidies. That means that under the Bloomberg scenario, the price would be $1.20 per watt. (For utility-scale solar it will fall to about 53 cents per watt.)

That is cheap, but unfortunately it’s not enough to achieve the level of solar penetration (30 percent or more) needed to really make a dent in global greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming to less than 2 °C.

That’s because of the “value deflation” effect: as more solar power gets added to the grid, the value of each additional unit of solar capacity to producers goes down. That means that the price of solar has to fall substantially below the levels outlined in the Bloomberg report for solar to become a major source of power generation—to around 25 cents a watt, according to a paper published in Nature Energy in April. “Even with rapid technological advancement, 25 cents per watt may be out of reach by midcentury,” wrote the paper’s authors, Varun Sivaram of the Council on Foreign Relations and Shayle Kann of GTM Research.

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[InAbLuEsTaTe]

1. Zero chance of that happening, which is a GOOD thing. A new alternative is about to hit the market... just wait and see.

[StevieM]

2. What is the new alternative that you are thinking of? (eom)

[Bill USA]

3. probably "cold fusion"... ROFL!

[NNadir]

4. So many people will have cooked to death waiting for these useless predictions...

Last edited Wed Jun 15, 2016, 06:18 AM - Edit history (1)

...to come through that it won't matter in 2040 that the only thing that was really cheap was talk.

In 50 years of listening to this repetitive bull, I have yet to see anyone looking back at the previous bull to understand how the current bull is, well, bull.

There is no difference, absolutely no difference at all, between this soothsaying and the soothsaying of the tiresome fool Amory Lovins made about the year 2000 in 1976, with exactly the same terms.

Well there is one difference. His prediction was in the past so it was obviously inaccurate to the point of silliness, although that fool hasn't shut up despite being wrong in all of his predictions.

This prediction, every bit as stupid and as uninformed as his was 40 years ago, is also wrong, and frankly delusional, since there aren't enough of the rare and toxic materials to make this expensive failure work.

If the decade after decade of soothsaying about how renewable energy would someday be affordable, dangerous natural gas would not be the fastest growing source of energy here or anywhere else, but it is.

This trash thinking about so called "renewable energy" is simply denialism writ large, a huge burden placed on all future generations by a current generation that is completely and totally unwilling to think, and unwilling to hear what it doesn't want to hear, even if, as is the case, what it doesn't [ii]want to hear is true.

I'll tell you what 2040 will involve. It will involve carbon dioxide concentrations well over 450 ppm, huge new deserts with the last sensible people left - if there are any - screaming curses at the generations that preceded them, that would be us.

History will not forgive this, should history survive, nor should it.

Have a nice day tomorrow.