China’s Solar Binge Is Turning Into a Hangover

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602136/chinas-solar-binge-is-turning-into-a-hangover/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]China’s Solar Binge Is Turning Into a Hangover[/font]

[font size=4]Record growth in the first half of 2016 sounds great for renewable energy, but the country has far more solar power than it can use.[/font]

by Richard Martin | August 9, 2016

[font size=3]China’s epic solar binge accelerated in the first six months of 2016, as the country added more than 20 gigawatts of new solar installations. That’s nearly three times as much as the same period last year, and is more than the total installed capacity of all but Germany, Japan, and the United States.

But signs are growing that the boom is starting to fade. Investment firm Macquarie Capital said last month that many of the solar farms built this year were hastily completed to meet the deadline of July 1, when government subsidies for new solar were cut. Further cuts are expected next year as the government tries to rein in runaway development.

China now has around 63 gigawatts of solar power capacity, more than any other country. And wind, solar, nuclear, and hydro projects continue to be built out even though energy demand in China is nearly flat. Beijing is also having trouble meeting its financial commitments to solar developers: some 21 billion yuan ($3.16 billion) in solar subsidies have yet to be paid.

…

Much of the new solar generation, particularly in the desert provinces of western China, is not even hooked up to the grid. That means much of the power is going to waste—39 percent in Gansu Province and more than half in Xinjiang, according to the Photovoltaic Industry Association. It’s part of a long-term supply glut that plagues China in the coal, steel, and concrete industries as well.

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[Loki Liesmith]

1. Sell the excess.

[Travis_0004]

3. To who?

That also assumes that the lines exist to bring it to outside customers, or the lines are profitable enough to run or upgrade.

[NNadir]

2. It's not hard to have three times the solar capacity of Germany, US and Japan.

The solar energy industry is tiny and useless in every country, no matter how many hundreds of billions of dollars are thrown at it, particularly because it's partisans have such poor educations that they can't tell the difference between a Watt and a Joule.

This means that they're so stupid, they think solar cells work at night.

[NickB79]

4. The smart move would be to shut down coal plants and sub the excess renewables into the grid

But coal burning plants, coal transportation and coal mining employ millions in China, and the Chinese government isn't about to send millions of workers to the unemployment lines at a time when their economy is slowing down. It's the same reason we still subsidize a big chunk of Appalachia's coal fields.

So far, all they've done is close the smallest, most inefficient plants to improve air quality, knowing that the loss of these small operators won't cause enough upheaval to generate widespread protests and anger. The big players are still supported by the government.

[NNadir]

5. There is a huge thermodynamic problem with this. It's easy to see by doing a simple experiment...

...in your kitchen.

Just before sun up place a pot on your stove, fill it with water, and bring the water to a boil, timing it from the time you turn the heat on until it comes to a rapid boil.

When the sun rises, turn the heat off. Wait until the sun goes down. When the sun goes down, turn the heat on again. Does the water boil instantly? If not, time it until it does come to a rapid boil. Did you use more energy or less energy to get the water to boil twice as opposed to getting it to boil once?

Now do the same experiment turning the heat off whenever a cloud comes by, etc.

Now imagine that instead of a pot, you had a huge boiler, containing hundreds of thousands of liters of water.

The solar industry, a useless and tiny industry worldwide that produces insignificant quantities of energy at vast expense is, of course, dependent on having a redundant back up system powered by a dangerous fossil fuel. Whenever we hear - as we do endlessly - that solar prices are dropping, and solar energy is cheap, the purveyors of this nonsense somehow neglect to include the cost of this redundancy into the "solar energy inexpensive" calculation. A coal plant will need to burn more coal per megajoule of electricity generated than it would if it were run continuously, which is why coal plants do and are designed to have very high capacity utilization.

The solar industry, which could disappear in its entirety tomorrow without causing even a blip of disruption to the world power supply, cannot rely on coal, just as it is nothing like a replacement for coal despite all of the continuous lies one hears to the contrary. It depends on dangerous natural gas backup.

There's nothing more absurd than these people who claim that they're against fracking because solar energy is so great. They're lying, if not deliberately to a listener, then to themselves.

Have a nice evening.