gr,

Your question: "Sorry, what land area are we talking about with second gen biofuels?"

My answer: About 1.5 mile square miles of arable or semi-arable land for US gasoline needs:

Math: Each acre of cellulosic switchgrass can produce 136 gallons of gas equivalent (GGE) per acre. The US annually consumes about 140 billion gallons of gas. which would require a billion acres or 1.5 million square miles of land area.

Reference: March 22, 2008 article, "Researchers Conclude Average Farm Cost of Switchgrass for Ethanol Is About $0.49/Gallon"
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/03/researchers-con.html#more

Here is another analysis of biofuels vs electricity for transport. It's by the former CEO of Tesla, obviously an EV fan, but the results are similar. The graphic on slide #26 pretty well sums it up.

Now algae is a lot more efficient use of surface area and as such it holds more promise than switchgrass.

The conclusions grow ever clearer. The world (not merely the United States) needs all the nuclear, wind, and Solar power it can build ASAP. Vehicle fuels will be manufactured from air and water using non-fossil energy sources and will retail at about $5 per gallon before taxes. Fossil fuels and biofuels are too problematic.

I do not think we need 1 million square miles of switchgrass. We do not need to provide all the liquid fuels with biomass. Some will go a long way to reduce imports of oil. The all or nothing at all view misses the point.

Sorry, here's the link to the Tesla presentation alluded to in my previous post

http://www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/zevprog/symposium/presentations/eberhard.pdf

Who cares?

Solar EV miles are already cheaper than gasoline miles, and that's the only thing the consumer cares about.

Nanosolar are constructing their cells for $0.99 per watt, so a 2 kW array could cost as little as $3,000 at $1.50 per watt installed. Somewhere sunny like California that would produce 4,400 kWh per year.

That's enough electricity for 17,500 electric miles per year. For your average Californian it would cost:

Gasoline (at 40 mpg, $3/gallon): 7.5 cents per mile
Solar (traditional PV @ $8 per watt): 8.8 cents per mile
Solar cents per mile (nanosolar PV @ $1.50 per watt): 1.7 cents per mile

@ Clett,

I'd like this math to work, but BEV have to get cheaper before it will.

My assumption is that PV panels installed in California will cost at least 3 cents per mile installed. That's optimistic. Saving a net of 4.5 cents per mile over 120,000 miles in the first 8 years is only $5400 in savings before interest and gas price fluctuations. I don't think the prospect will help enough consumers over the higher up front costs of BEVs.

Another hitch is that 5 out of 7 sunny days, your car is probably not parked at your house, but at your place of work.

I think Solar Thermal will work, but that it will not often be in combined cycle with coal and algae. Places where you have good insolation, you don't have much water.

Making panels for $1 per watt and selling them at that price are not the same thing. Unless they are a non-profit and the management takes zero salary, the retail price will be higher. Unisolar had thin film panels more than a decade ago that cost less to make. They sold them at market rates to get funds for expansion. Nanosolar's investors probably interested in a return on risk investment.

gr:
Yes, but solar thermal is going up at a pretty rapid rate. Although orders seem to have slowed down, there was for a couple of months a new one being proposed every week of >100 MW, plus the one company that was previously discussed with a factory that can produce 700 MW/year (just one company).

Neil: They don't have to, but PHEVs/BEVs WOULD be powered using baseload because it's cheaper, and otherwise you'd need over a hundred new power plants, mostly using natural gas, and all these in themselves would spike the demand for nat gas, compounding the rise in prices. Plus, most people would be charging them at night by habit, even if we don't make it a law or use a smart grid.

@sjc,

Nanosolar say they can make a profit selling them at $1 per watt, so I costed them at $1.50 per watt to the customer to allow some markup for the distributor.

@Healthy Breeze,
I totally agree that the big shift will finally come as soon as the batteries are cheap enough, and that is the ONLY thing in my view that is currently holding things back. Fortunately BYD are one the case with their sub $300 per kWh LiFePO4 batteries....

But Greyfalcon, you still don't get it.

You smolder biomass (a technique known as pyrolysis). The products you obtain are: 1. electricity. 2. bio-oil. 3. biochar.

1. You store the biochar in soils and make them more productive, while halting deforestation if applied in the tropics.

2. You provide decentralised carbon-negative electricity to rural communities.

3. You provide bio-oil that can be upgraded to biofuels.

All this results in the use of almost all the carbon, and by storing the char in soils (where it remains inert for millennia), you go carbon-negative.

So you take CO2 out of the atmosphere, while generating electricity and biofuels.

It's the most efficient technology of all. No other technology goes carbon-negative and no other technology halts deforestation because of it.

Do you get it now?

@NorthernPiker:
Switchgrass? (Waste) Wood!
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,547312,00.html
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iHLzbIPNPyjjvbMH6dSzcR_QpaaQ

They may say that, but until I see them for sale at $1-$1.50 per watt then it has not happened.

I have driven past that Kramer Junction Mojave solar thermal installation. The land that it uses is just a speck in the desert compared to what is there.

The solar cell might reach 1.5 per BUT the installed cost is still gona be 6.5 per so all you gain is going from 10 per to 6.5 a simple 35% drop in cost.

2 guys can errect a 50 kw wind turbine in an hour or so it takes hours and hours to slap up even a 4kw solar array and it takes ou more room.


As doe h2 vs bev vs erev...

No matter how bad things get we will have swiychgrass and SOME way of making h2 and if we dont have electricity then we wont need to go anywhere anyway... we just dont know how MUCH of these sorts of things we will have abd wicg things we will need to do and WANT to do will favor wich of these things... so we do em all.

Because when failure is not an option too much isnt too much and too many options is just peachy.

As doe wich one will win... who gives a f as long as we are there to go neener neener neener and gloat does it EVER matter?

The two reasons that solar hasn't gone down in price in the last couple of years is that (1) polysilicon prices have gone through the roof in recent years, mostly due to demand from solar producers and (2) they've been able to sell as many as they can produce at these prices.

It's expected that ~2010 PV solar prices are going to drop like a rock when a whole sh*tload of new panel and polysilicon supply is going online. It's expected that's when the high-cost producers are going to start being weeded out.

If that is true, then a panel that now sells for $600 would sell for much less. We can map the price to demand curve from that. If the price drop to half, will the number of panels sold double? We will see.

I read a comment by a venture capitalist that they were looking for a "Moore's Law" for PV. My first thought was, "The sun isn't going to keep doubling the energy hitting the earth every 18 months," but maybe it will be a price per kilowatt that gets cut in half every 18 months. There's also a lot of room for reduction in the packaging and coupling electronics. Conversion efficiency will play a subordinate role until the market matures, and it becomes a differentiator after cost/kilowatt levels some. Or..maybe quantum dots (hopefully made without heavy metals) will get very efficient and very cheap pretty quickly. Dunno.

Asking for Moore's law for PV suggests a total lack of knowledge of semiconductors.
Moore's law works because you have been able to reduce the size of features (to 45 nm at present) and so keep doubling the number of transistors per unit area.
The number of transistors is what we are counting in Moore's law.

However, PV depends on the active area itself, not the number of logical elements on it. Thus Moore's law cannot apply.

Solar PV has been getting about 8% cheaper every year, which is not quite a doubling in performance every 18 months, but it's certainly a trend.

Dan A is right that supply is soon to catch up with demand for silicon (dozens of factories are being built around the world) and that prices of traditional PV will plummet.

However, I think before this we will see the impact of a disruptive technology or two in the industry. Number one is nanosolar, but number two is solar-organic-rankine-cycle which has the huge benefit of 24 hour electricity production at very low cost.

Price and demand are interesting to watch. Let's say I have a technology that will reduce the cost of a panel 50%. The cost per watt is 1/2 of what it was. Will I sell it at half the price or sell at or just below market price and keep the profits. The investors will want you to keep the profits, because they want to expand and capture more market share or sell out as an exit strategy.

It depends on the market. Is the market is massively constrained by lack of supply, or is supply almost keeping up with demand and a price reduction would not allow you to sell many times more panels in the same time period? Up until the Green Party in Germany changed the laws, it was hard to make a living selling solar panels.

Every time I hear the faithful talk about prices coming down as volume goes up, I wonder if this is some eternal truth under all circumstances or just wishful hoping. There are many more factors to consider, the investors own the stock and their management makes the decisions. No amount of hoping will change that.

No Neil. Not BS

What's your plan? To halt traffic when the wind doesn't blow? To halt traffic when it's cloudy?

Or exactly how much redundancy did you plan to have? Data from EON in Germany shows that with 100% wind power a redundancy factor of 25 is needed. That is, if you want 1 GW guaranteed power you need to install 25 GW.

Average power is great. But average traffic is not great. What is needed guaranteed power. Or was the plan to build 1 GW of wind power, get an average of 200 MW AND to keep a 1 GW of rotating coal power for the less than 100% wind days?

No globi. It's not BS.

The reason why more renewable is produced than nuclear is that all the cheap hydro, geothermal, farm and forest already has been built. The question is from where do we get additional power.

Denmark, the great wind power nation, has the highest CO2 emissions/produced kWh. Germany is planning for 15 + GW coal. Why? Because wind is so effective and viable? I don't think so. Wind and solar is built exactly as much as the taxpayers can afford to pay for it. The electricity has to be produced by some other means. We have natural gas, coal and nuclear. There is nothing else. The rest is just BS paid by the taxpayers.

And btw, Just how much guaranteed power did these German 1300 MW photovoltaics produce? No coal redundancy needed ;-)

ANDRICHROSE,

Do you in northern Italy only drive on sunny days? I wish my life would be so easy. On rainy days I could stay at home...

SJC,

I think Nanosolar will be leisurely about reaching their 1$/watt goal, mostly because they need to throw off a lot of cash to build additional factories. By the time they have 4 or 5 factories producing a couple gigawatts of annual PV production capacity, even if other producers can match them on price (perhaps with better conversion efficiency), Nanosolar will be able to use volume production capacity to stear the market.

The thing is, they want to take market share by growing the market faster than anyone else. They will have lower costs to do that. Other vendors can offer higher conversion efficiency to create multiple price points in the market place.

Helen, think about what you have said - 1GW of wind requires 25GW of coal ???
The most 1 GW of wind would require would be 1GW of gas or coal, but it is mostly about 800 MW.
As you point out, you can't really replace fossil / nuke with wind, you can only supplant it.

So, you do not reduce your capital or staff costs by much, all you can do is turn down the fossil when the wind blows, so you get some fuel savings and GHG reductions.

You will also have to beef up your grid a great deal, as it ends up dancing to the wind tune. (There is no guarantee that the wind will be available near the demand centers).

If you have gas, you can spin it up/down quickly, so you can balance the wind (or solar) easily enough, but gas is expensive and won't last forever.

You can't really bring coal up and down quickly (at present).

Balancing wind (and solar) is a very interesting and important subject for the next decade or so.

I suppose it is easy enough to do with gas, the trick will be to do it in such as way as to reduce capital and staff costs as well as just saving a bit of fossil fuel.

You can go with wind - but it isn't cheap by the time you have got it to people's homes and places of work.

No Mahonj,

I didn't say that. What I meant was that if you want guaranteed 1 GW with wind you need to install 25 GW of wind (on an area the size of Germany).

Yes. With gas you can build auxiliary quick power, but it's a bit stupid to build 1 GW wind and 1 GW gas power to get an average of 200 MW wind and 800 MW gas. Why bother with the wind? The capital costs are huge.

a: To keep the greens off your case.

b: You can go to 10, maybe 20% wind without too much fuss, if you have an alternative source (gas or hydro).
You may as well put in some - the question is when to stop - you hit diminishing returns.

It also depends on how well wind correlates with maximum demand - if you get most wind (say winter) when you need most electricity for heating, it can help also.

The trick is to know when to stop.

It probably isn't as crazy as what the Germans are doing with solar. Now that is crazy.

Better to just keep the nukes going for as long as possible (and then build more nice new design ones).

Unplanned consumption/production is called disturbance.

Disturbance doesn't become too expensive to handle when it is 10, maybe 20%.

Wind doesn't correlate at all with maximum demand. It's not enough that it on average blows more in winter. When it's COLD there's no wind.

If solar wasn't so expensive it would be a great correlation with air conditioning.

Wind doesn't correlate with any consumption.