delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/10/hoisted-from-comments-nicholas-weaver-on-solar-vs-nuclear-myhrvold-dubner-and-levitt.html
J Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles The Semi-Daily Journal of an Economist: A Fair, Balanced, Reality-Based, andMulti-Appendaged Look at the World Department of Economics, UC Berkeley #3880, Berkeley, CA 94720-3880;
com/2009/10/20/are-solar-pane ls-really-black-and-what-does-that-have-to-do-with-the-climate-debat e/ Now there are many MANY problems with solar replacing coal, from the energy storage issue to potential use of rare-metal components. Solar is not a panacea, and the real conclusion that one reaches is nuclear power, and lots of it. I can easily construct a solid argument that solar is not viable for most of our electricity needs: 1 It doesn't work at night/cloudy conditions without additional energy storage. It is unclear what a real ramp-up of solar production would do to that market. Or if you use an alternate approach ("White roof is 1T C02 per 10 m^2 annual savings equivelent" Akbari's estimate), you are still talking the CO2 load of just 500 kWh/yr of a coal plant. If your 10 m^2 roof generates 15 kW for 6 hours/day, that is $5/W to <$2/W. Since so much of the cost of the cells for the study is the refining of silicon, there is probably a similar drop in kWh of construction per watt of power. He misses one of the huge reasons why the efficiency crowd want buildings to have a high albeido: simply to lower the AC bill for free, and thus why you should put solar cells on the roof of your garage rather than the house itself... He compares the cost of running a coal plant with the cost of building a solar plant, neglecting that we need to construct vastly more power plants to both meet growing demand and to deal with end-of-life on old, inefficient plants. Even then, the breakeven point is less than 3 years, by his inflate-the-cost of solar figure! It would be easy enough to go "Whoops, the 'because they are black' quote was taken a bit out of context as a joke, thats really minor all things considered. The conclusion thus stands, but the argument becomes sound. Instead, what is happening is I have to conclude that anything Myhrvold says has to be assumed to be false until proven otherwise, and by unquestioningly accepting his assumptions, anything Drubner and Levitt say may need to be taken the same way.
com/2009/10/20/are-solar-pane ls-really-black-and-what-does-that-have-to-do-with-the-climate-debat e/ Now there are many MANY problems with solar replacing coal, from the energy storage issue to potential use of rare-metal components. Solar is not a panacea, and the real conclusion that one reaches is nuclear power, and lots of it. I can easily construct a solid argument that solar is not viable for most of our electricity needs: 1 It doesn't work at night/cloudy conditions without additional energy storage. It is unclear what a real ramp-up of solar production would do to that market. Or if you use an alternate approach ("White roof is 1T C02 per 10 m^2 annual savings equivelent" Akbari's estimate), you are still talking the CO2 load of just 500 kWh/yr of a coal plant. If your 10 m^2 roof generates 15 kW for 6 hours/day, that is $5/W to <$2/W. Since so much of the cost of the cells for the study is the refining of silicon, there is probably a similar drop in kWh of construction per watt of power. He misses one of the huge reasons why the efficiency crowd want buildings to have a high albeido: simply to lower the AC bill for free, and thus why you should put solar cells on the roof of your garage rather than the house itself... He compares the cost of running a coal plant with the cost of building a solar plant, neglecting that we need to construct vastly more power plants to both meet growing demand and to deal with end-of-life on old, inefficient plants. Even then, the breakeven point is less than 3 years, by his inflate-the-cost of solar figure! It would be easy enough to go "Whoops, the 'because they are black' quote was taken a bit out of context as a joke, thats really minor all things considered. The conclusion thus stands, but the argument becomes sound. Instead, what is happening is I have to conclude that anything Myhrvold says has to be assumed to be false until proven otherwise, and by unquestioningly accepting his assumptions, anything Drubner and Levitt say may need to be taken the same way.
follow me on Twitter From Brad DeLong * J Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, a Research Associate of the NBER, a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and Chair of Berkeley's Political Economy major.
|
http://csua.com/feed/