Thermal solar with storage could find a role if it can produce cheaper power in between the time the Sun goes down and the wind comes up in places like SoCal. But PV and cheap storage could beat it out.

A more likely competitor will be wind imported from Wyoming. IIRC the evening wind starts picking up about the same time Pacific Coast sunshine starts to fade. We’ve got most of the transmission line in place, actually two of them. There’s the “coal line”, the Intermountain Intertie that comes down from Utah and the “hydro line”, the Pacific Intertie that carriers PNW power to SoCal. Plans are underway to connect the upper end of the two, creating a loop and then running a spur up to Wyoming’s excellent wind.

Then there’s offshore wind. Floaters off the Pacific coast could disrupt bunches of plans.

Thermal solar might have a more important role in parts of the world that doesn’t have the evening/nighttime wind resource, making thermal storage more valuable.

Your wording also suggests some confusion. There is “solar thermal electricity generation.” Concurrently there can be “solar thermal storage” which can make power plants more efficient with a higher ROI and with a substantially higher capacity factor but storage is not generation.

There is a lot of talk about matching generation to demand, most of which is overly-optimistic and missing the point. I’m all for load-matching when it will result in lower carbon emissions, but it will not be possible to get to negative carbon with load-matching alone. Right now we are at around 14% renewable electric production and we’re already having trouble with brownouts and stability. We need buffering capacity and we need it now! To my mind, thermal storage is one of the least expensive ways to provide it with the fewest drawbacks and the most additional advantages.

… but there are so many moving parts to all this, it’s hard to tell the optimum way to plan it. How large should you size your facilities, for example? Moving electricity around is extraordinarily efficient; moving waste and raw materials around far less so, which suggests facilities should be more distributed. If we make storage too small, on the other hand, at what point is the heat loss so great that you have to build more specialised containers which increases your carbon footprint?… or what if some superior permanent carbon sequestration technology comes along which is so simple, it’s more worthwhile to build out PV and batteries, or even simply to burn coal!? (if you could scrub it enough to get the toxic waste out, of course).

To answer these questions it would be far better to levy a global, slowly increasing carbon tax (and rebate for sequestration) which will allow people to put their money where their mouths are and bet on different technologies until the system is optimally efficient.

Which means solar should be a large part of our energy solution. Another thing I think should be big that isn’t yet: Natural gas generation in landfills. We have alot of landfill and garbage that could be consumed for energy production, but is not.

My point is that you could use some of that lost heat energy to sequester carbon and manufacture things, which we’ll need to do anyway. Why not get the most bang for your buck?

PV is totally the same as a computer chip. It’s all just silicon, and it’s fairly delicate. I think they protect it the best they can, but there’s no reason to expect it to last forever with the wind, rain and sun eating away at it. Windmills are tough and last much longer.

I realise in an age when denialists seem to have a science-free stranglehold on the public discourse, one might want to do something personally, and I see PV as a much better course of action than doing nothing (The new water-cooled PV looks especially promising), but if we as a nation really wanted to maximise our sustainability efforts, wind is the way to go. I don’t like arbitrary credits being given out for different technologies. There should be a simple, gradually-increasing carbon tax, not micro-managing different industries.

Storage is absolutely key to shutting down coal plants. I didn’t quite understand how power generation works when I first started researching it, but you can’t just shut down coal plants when you don’t need them and fire them up again when you do. They provide baseload power, which means they just run and everything else is auxiliary to them. If you set up thermal storage tanks in these plants, however, you could concentrate energy from windmills (or solar panels, or any other type of intermittent generation source), and provide a constant renewable supply of electrical generation… but what’s really nice about thermal storage is you can also use heat to do things like cast steel and melt silicon as well as stripping energetic hydrogen off sewage, garbage and ag waste, capturing that chemical energy for later use and producing carbon in a much more stable state that won’t be turned into methane by bugs and fungi… so you can actually go carbon-negative with it.

I would never suggest there is anything reasonable, moral or acceptable about the mining, transportation or burning of coal. It’s a horrendous toxic nightmare from start to finish.

And the preamble of the document basically states that their numbers are comparing apples and oranges, as well as different suppliers will sit outside the range.

Lastly, like in this comment, you don’t seem to care about any externalized costs – such as the huge health impact of coal mining, distribution, burning, and dealing with its waste. And you’re constantly on about storage – storage is also a problem for any system that creates power intermittently, such as wind.

Solar’s big advantage is that its peak production is similar to peak demand when other types of production are more expensive – even coal is more expensive to run during the summer than the winter. (Turbines require a differential between internal and environmental temperature, the greater the differential the greater the theoretical power output, and hence, can produce less power during warmer times than cooler ones).

Lifetime CO2 footprint per WHAT is most important? Pound? Are we trying to produce pounds here or kilowatt-hours? This paper:

http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn268.pdf

says PV produces from 5 to 10 times more carbon per kilowatt-hour than wind over the lifetime of each system. If you disagree with the analysis, please let me know why. Saying the numbers are made up does not necessarily make it so.

I like pump-up storage. It’s efficient and has a low carbon footprint, but it also doesn’t solve the problem of industrial production of carbon, whereas thermal storage does.

Your cost valuation is based on a short-term analysis. The system you would have us build is more sustainable than that which we currently have, but still unsustainable in the long run.

In order to make it sustainable, you’d have to create additional infrastructure. You’d have to create every bit of the heat in a thermal-buffered system for industrial production, plus 5 to 10 times the heat for carbon sequestration, but instead of capturing 40% of it for electricity generation, you’d just be flushing the rest down the toilet… so you’d have 60% greater costs for generation (9 cents per kWh wind vs. 15 cents per kWh PV), more than 7 times the cost for storage (7.6 x 10^9 cubic feet of battery storage vs 1.0 x 10^9 cubic feet of molten salt in a 240 gWh system), the cost of an entirely separate infrastructure for the production of steel, cement, silicon and other industrial products, and the cost of an entirely separate infrastructure for carbon sequestration which will be at minimum 5 times more expensive than colocated carbon sequestration thermal storage facilities…

How in the world is all of that supposed to be less than twice as expensive as a wind-thermal system?

If you disagree with any of my numbers, please let me know. I’ll be happy to admit if any of them are off-base.

What don’t you understand about the use of heat in the production of steel, concrete and silicon and its use in the sequestration of carbon in garbage, sewage and agricultural waste through anaerobic thermal processing? I know this stuff is difficult to understand, but I don’t mind explaining it if you need me to.

Lifetime CO2 footprint is what is most important when comparing generation methods. Think about it.

The paper I linked found that there were approximately 6GW of additional generation available from existing federal lands. Consider the fact that only a small percentage of our 80,000 existing dams are on federal land.

Additionally, and you failed to do this, dive deeper into the data and you’ll see that there are many additional existing dams which are not usable for generation – they don’t have adequate inflow. But they are find for pump-up.

Thermal – it’s too damned inefficient. You cannot double your supply cost and compete unless your technology is incredibly cheap, and turbines don’t get given away.

As for your heat issues, you’ve moved off into the land of bullshit.

Now, you make the final post to this conversation. I’ve got more important ways to spend my time.

Please tell the people of New Orleans there is no cost associated with a carbon footprint.

Maybe there is more available power we could extract from pump-up systems. The paper you gave me cited 6GW of additional power capacity possible to build out. That is not enough to supply the nation with the 800GW of power it’s capable of demanding… so unless you’ve got another source that contradicts your first one, let’s table discussion of pump-up systems for now. I know you love them and I do too, but I don’t think they’ll be able to solve this dilemma.

Let’s do a thought experiment: What if we built out enough PV and enough batteries to supply the entire nation with baseload power. You’re still left with a system that’s producing carbon and continuing to make our planet uninhabitable. If you wanted to make such a system sustainable, you’d have to take a portion of that energy you produced and create heat with it to create the solar panels and batteries needed to run your system plus pyrolise your waste stream in order to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

If you used windmills and buffered your energy with heat, on the other hand, you’d start off with a fifth to a tenth of the carbon debt and you’d already have a readily available source of heat for carbon sequestration and industrial processes that make our way of life possible.

The 60% “waste” heat isn’t actually waste at all, it’s replacing the heat from fossil fuel now used for cement, steel and silicon production AND once you ran out of demand for that, you can use it to pyrolise your waste stream, create fossil-free fertiliser, fossil-free chemical energy for mobile applications and actually reduce atmospheric carbon concentrations.

Now do you understand why this is the least expensive option? You have to think of the long term…

Cost is a separate issue from CO2 footprint.

Time of production is important. Solar produces during peak demand hours.

You seem to be unable to understand the role of efficiency in storage. It doesn’t matter if one system is somewhat cheaper if it costs multiple times more to operate over its lifetime.

You don’t comprehend how much pump-up we could build if that was the smartest way to store power.

We already have somewhere around 22GWs. We could build hundreds of GWs more if desired.

I’ll give you a very good reason why we should expect this to be so: In terms of sheer energy density, wind is many times higher than solar. This means the amount of machinery required to capture it is many times less. Given fossil fuels are currently being used to create this machinery, it is no surprise that the carbon footprint of wind is smaller than the carbon footprint of PV.

I’m going to have to take issue with the concept that any carbon footprint is acceptable. For the earth to remain habitable, we need to be taking carbon out of the atmosphere, not simply reducing the amount we put in.

Photovoltaics are thin sheets of rock. Correct. What do you think silicon chips are? o_O

Reducing buffering requirements by balancing nighttime production with daytime production is a good idea, but does not eliminate the need for energy buffering.

I just gave you a real world comparison of storage space required in a sodium-sulphur storage system set up by Xcel Energy vs. the storage space required in the Andasol salt storage tanks which showed the former would need 7 times the physical space to achieve the same energy storage. If you are suggesting a cubic foot of salt costs same as a battery of the same size, that’s a 7-fold cost advantage for molten salt storage straight out the gate, not to mention the other benefits of sequestered atmospheric carbon, free usable biogas and biofuels, carbon-free manufacturing of cement, steel and other industrial processes, leveraging of existing centralised infrastructure and technical expertise, and the fact that batteries are going to continue be far more expensive and far less durable than salt!

I’m not comparing the costs of pump-up storage. At 6 gW maximum capacity, it’s not going to be able to provide the amount of peak power the country is capable of demanding.

Wind may or may not cause more CO2 to be produced. We don’t have evidence of wind turbines lasting more than 30 years to date.

With either the CO2 footprint is low enough to be totally acceptable.

What are the costs of thermal storage? And what are you using for the price of pump-up and battery storage? Where does your “7x” come from?

Your comparison of PV panels to computers is bull. I suspect you’ve never seen a solar panel. Silicon solar panels are basically thin sheets of rock placed behind glass covers. To say that PV panels are “extraordinarily delicate” is a crock.

Will PV become less expensive than onshore wind? It doesn’t matter. It’s likely to become cheap enough to be the ‘daylight’ producer while wind will be the major ‘nighttime’ producer.

http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn268.pdf

PV produces up to 5 to 10 times more carbon per kilowatt-hour than wind. If you consider the cost of continuing to produce atmospheric carbon goes to infinity (which it does), wind comes out on top, even if it costs at minimum 5 times more than PV (and it looks like offshore wind is getting more expensive, given the latest EIA report):

http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf

Thermal storage has to compete with systems that are twice as efficient and at bare minimum 7 times as expensive… plus they wear out more quickly… plus they are distributed over a wide area… plus they don’t have waste heat you can use to sequester carbon in our waste stream, make cement sustainably or even process the silicon needed to make PV panels or the parts required for windmills!

I’m not sure why you wouldn’t be suspicious of a company’s claims about their own product… not saying Kyocera is wrong, but it’s not an impartial source…

I’m also not sure where you’re confused about solar panels being similar to computer chips. Both computer chips and PV panels are electronic components precision-crafted from silicon in clean rooms. They are both extraordinarily delicate, but one is housed in plastic boxes indoors and one is thrown out into the elements. It looks to me like the EIA report has taken the delicacy of PV into account, and without carbon accounting, it looks like PV would still be more cost-competitive than offshore wind, but not onshore wind.

I’m pointing out that if thermal storage is only 40% efficient (his estimate) then you have to generate/store 2.5kWh in order to get 1kWh out.

With pump-up hydro and battery storage efficiency is a bit over 80%. That means that you have to generate/store only 1.25kWh in order to end up with 1kWh of usable electricity.

That puts a huge burden on the cost of building thermal storage. It would have to be so incredibly cheap to build and operate that it could offset a 2x input cost on a daily basis.

I’m pointing out that if thermal storage is only 40% efficient (his estimate) then you have to generate/store 2.5kWh in order to get 1kWh out.

With pump-up hydro and battery storage efficiency is a bit over 80%. That means that you have to generate/store only 1.25kWh in order to end up with 1kWh of usable electricity.

That puts a huge burden on the cost of building thermal storage. It would have to be so incredibly cheap to build and operate that it could offset a 2x input cost on a daily basis.