Yes, and more. Except without all the social dislocation, environmental poisons, climate disruption, and oh,…. profits for Big Oil.
Will solar power transform electricity markets as significantly as shale transformed oil and gas?
That is the question posed in a new study by Wood MacKenzie, an international energy research and consulting company.
“Just as shale extraction reconfigured oil and gas, no other technology is closer to transforming power markets than distributed and utility scale solar,” writes Prajit Ghosh, an energy analyst at Wood MacKenzie and the study’s primary author.
Based on the study’s persuasive analysis, it seems difficult to dispute that solar technology will transform – and in some states already is transforming – wholesale power markets.
The reach of solar in the market is now well beyond California alone and is expected to grow across multiple markets. Wood Mackenzie’s outlook emphasizes that the levelized costs of solar energy are already at grid parity* in many states and will continue to fall while combined cycle costs, in contrast, remain on the rise. By 2020, solar energy in 19 states is expected to reach grid parity with twice as many states reaching grid parity by 2030. Wood Mackenzie has identified many evolutionary parallels to shale and believes that solar has the potential to make a similar scale of transformation across markets. Wood Mackenzie’s forecast for the US assumes 26 gigawatts (GW) of distributed solar and about 45 GW of large scale solar by 2035, which totals over 71 GW of solar. Ghosh adds: “While the potential for solar energy penetration could be much larger in North America, reliability concerns, legal statutes, and other factors could limit growth prospects. There is little material linkage between lower oil prices and solar energy penetration. However, the indirect impact of lower oil prices on drilling activity and consequent gas prices could potentially hurt solar economics.”
Current wholesale market structures are not designed to accommodate large amounts of solar energy. Should solar energy penetration rapidly increase, other forms of capacity will still be necessary to meet needs during low-solar hours such as night time and periods of heavy cloud cover, Wood Mackenzie asserts. Keeping backup capacity on the grid becomes increasingly difficult as solar energy lowers power prices and worsens the economics of other technologies. Thus, Wood Mackenzie emphasizes that today’s energy and capacity market design and compensation mechanisms will need to evolve to maintain reliability. “Similarly, rate design on the retail side will need to change. Solar rooftops reduce the need for grid-connected power but do not eliminate it. Thus, issues around assigning fixed cost charges to maintain the grid have and will continue to arise” Ghosh concludes.
“Wood-Mackenzie’s forecast” – is so very wrong.
Un-sunny Germany went from 70 MegaWatts in 1999 to 40 GIGAwatts in 2014 and Ghosh thinks the US will have only 71 GW by 2035 when there’s already 16 GW in operation?
Are they assuming no breakthroughs at all in storage tech or cell manufacturing?
Even with those assumptions, they’re well short of the mark.
India plans to have 100GW solar installed in the next 7 – 10 yrs; Japan will double to 28GW by 2020 and nearly double again by 2030.
Does Wood-Mackenzie have a forecast for how far behind will America be by 2050?
Ah, the power of positive thinking and “projecting” wishes onto reality. As long as the world economy keeps growing, energy needs will continue to do so also (high projections say by as much as 500% by 2050).
Increased efficiency and a greater proportion of renewables in the mix will not make up for the fact that coal, oil, and natural gas will still be the base of the energy pyramid in 2050 and far beyond. Learn to love your CO2-enriched atmosphere, because it’s only going to get more so.
500% by 2050? Yeah, whoever came up with that was “high” indeed.
Our challenges are daunting but not (yet) insurmountable and by this point would have been just an minor annoyance if we listened to Jimmy Carter or Jim Hansen 30-something years ago.
As the great philosopher Yogi Berra reputedly said, “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future” but humanity has consistently surprised itself.
From your posts, I’m guessing you were probably a teenager in the ’50s so back then you would have had nothing more in your pockets than a set of keys, a wallet, some loose change, maybe a folding knife, right?
Let’s take a typical Western teen back to June 6th, 1954, have him find a certain British polymath, one of humanity’s greatest-ever minds and ask him to describe the size & weight of a computing device capable of a billion instructions per second, can store thousands of complete books, take full color photographs with automatic adjustment for ambient lighting, store & play every song you can think of, record and play back full motion video, place & receive phone calls wirelessly. all with a built-in battery that will power it for hours to days.
And then place an iPhone in front of Alan Turing and tell him that in 50 years, for about 2 weeks to 2 months salary, 1.5 billion people will have a similar device for everyday use.
In the face of that revelation, do you think he would have gone ahead with his suicide?
What are the reliability questions he is talking about?
“500% by 2050? Yeah, whoever came up with that was “high” indeed”.
Yes, and I used that to “stir the pot”. The lows are not all that low, however, and all of them largely fail to look at that bugaboo that so few on Crock want to address—-I speak of human population dynamics (there—I’ve said it again—-another “fart in church” comment). The very best of them from your perspective see peaks around 2040 and an improving situation by 2050—-2040 is 25 years and 50+ppm more CO2 away.
“Our challenges are daunting but not (yet) insurmountable”, you say? Let’s hope you’re right. and would you care to make a prediction about EXACTLY when they will become insurmountable?
“….by this point would have been just a minor annoyance if we listened to Jimmy Carter or Jim Hansen 30-something years ago” just proves my point—-we didn’t listen then, we’re hardly listening now, why do you think we will ever get our shit together in time? Oh, I forgot—-bright-sideness, wishful thinking, the power of positive thinking, and the renewables fairy will save us.
“As the great philosopher Yogi Berra reputedly said, “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future” but humanity has consistently surprised itself”. Uh-huh. Yogi also said “It’s deja vu all over again”—-see “bright-sideness, wishful thinking, the power of positive thinking, and the renewables fairy”. The big surprise this time looks to be near self-extinction for the human race.
Yes, I was born in 1940 and do remember the breakthroughs of the 50’s like “portable” radios and transistor radios you could (just) fit in a pocket. Your navel-gazing and look into my future/present is fun but it’s just an exercise.
I think he would have gone ahead with his suicide because he was smart enough to add it all up—-mainly the numbers about coal-oil-natural gas-economic growth-human population dynamics-AGW impacts—-and seeing how bleak that is would have put him into an even deeper depression.
If everyone were thinking like “we” North Americans, I would agree that we’re doomed.
But we are not the whole world, we don’t have the only children and it’s not solely up to us to make a brighter day for those not yet living. China has made some terrible missteps in chasing Western dollars but they are starting to right the ship.
I don’t know what the date for “too late” will be but we have passed some of the predicted dates without things getting quite to the forecast catastrophes.
But I worry that too much of humanity is concentrated into too little area, ie, China, India and Southeast Asia, and crop failures, water shortages or some other calamity will cause a serious setback with huge losses of life.
Ah, but don’t you see that everyone IS “thinking” like “we” North Americans and Europeans. The global model is free-market capitalism and “growth”, and the China-India-Southeast Asia area that worries you because of population “concentration” holds ~half the Earth’s people. They are now industrializing and urbanizing and consuming just as “we” did, and have told “us” that they don’t intend to stop just because we got ours first and don’t want them to crap up the planet the way we did.
China has made some terrible missteps, yes, and IS “starting to right the ship”, but they have destroyed the land, poisoned the air, and used up the water to the point that they may have waited far too long. India follows the same path and, in spite of good intentions, will likely not do it right either.
You say “….we have passed some of the predicted dates without things getting quite to the forecast catastrophes…”. Which ones are those that we didn’t get to? What have we really “passed”? It’s more like we have “postponed” and just kicked the can down the road.
Yes, it’s only a matter of time until “some calamity will cause a serious setback with huge losses of life”. Not if, but when.
Batteries are the next shale:
http://youtu.be/Wr3LFVoubzM
http://youtu.be/Tei3TZdf9yQ