Solar Fail

So, this article has my silky-soft boxers all knotted up and pinching.

Let's get something straight:  I'm a fan of solar power.  A big fan.  Solar power is the energy of the future.  It's going to work, and we are going to depend on it.  Unlike wind power, which is a mature technology, and based on mechanical generators that are heavy, expensive, noisy, and dangerous, solar power is great.  To start with, let's note that right now solar power has three problems:  generation, storage, and transmission.

More after the leap of faith...

Germany Gives Up on Solar...

I have several times mentioned how crazy it is for Germany, a country with very little sunshine, ever, to go solar. When I was first there, I was struck by how much they had wasted on solar panels. Astonishing.

It was never an attempt to save resources. It was a costly signal of how much the German left loves Gaia, the Earth Mother. On the BEST, sunniest day, Germany gets 0.3 percent of its power from solar energy. And it pays the highest costs for electricity in all of Europe, save for Denmark, which (I'm trying not to laugh) decided to "compete" by specializing in wind power.

But at some point even the German left has to admit that solar power is inefficient, expensive, impractical, and (this is my favorite part) actually quite dangerous to the environment because of the enormous amount of dangerous chemical waste that results from making, and later decommissioning, solar panels.

(A nice piece, with a lot more details, from Mary Theroux...)

Grand Game: Jeannie Needs A Solar

Excellent Grand Game topic, from Anonyman.

Toronto schools go solar! They suck down solar subsidies for new roofs.

There's a bunch of dumb stuff here, but the one that made me gasp was their stating all the electricity generation in terms of "capacity." Friends, the "capacity" of solar power is calculated under the assumption that the sun is directly over head 24 hours per day, there are no clouds, and the sun does not move.

This is TORONTO.

The sun moves everywhere. But for 5 months of the year in Toronto the sun is nearly invisible, or at such a low angle that it will generate next to nothing.

And there are two other problems:
Even in Toronto, the sun moves.
Even in Toronto, even in the summer, they have the phenomenon known as "night." It's between evening and dawn (sun moving thing, again), both of which are bad for solar power. But not as bad as "night."

The actual performance of the solar roof? Likely to be 7% of the "capacity" numbers. We are talking about generating power at a cost of 20 cents / kwh, or more, and even then most of the time there won't be any power. If you include the cost of the panels when they are not generating power (Night. Winter. Clouds. That sort of thing.), the cost is probably nearly 50 cents per kwh. (Canada generates power at about 10 cents per kwh, on average, btw, from coal and nuclear plants).

I find it amazing that these schmoes in far northern countries where IS NO FREAKING SUN are the ones who think that anything they do to worship Gaia the Earth Mother is better than having actual schools.

Anyway, your turn. And, enjoy. (I have to go back this, because it is fantastic. First two paragraphs amazing. The reason sunny countries don't use solar is NOT that oil is too cheap. It's that...solar is too expensive! The only reason idiots in Germany and Canada do it is the artificial subsidies, and the belief that no cost is too high if it involves worship of Gaia.)

Some Visionaries Fail, But Not All Failures are Visionaries

Had a conversation in Germany once, with a quite sensible man. We discussed the large number of solar panels on nearby homes. Germany, as I have written, has a climate where the sun is visible for about 90 minutes, some time in late July. That's it for the year.

I said it was not rational to force people to invest in solar panels.

He crowed, triumphantly, that it WAS rational, because of the enormous subsidies from the EU and the German government.

I stared at him, and tried (gently) to point out that he was ASSUMING it was rational. The fact that an activity is subsidized just means that the state takes your money at gunpoint, and agrees to give part of it back if you agree to do something you otherwise would not do.

In this case, only an idiot would put solar panels on houses in dark, snowy, cold Germany. Unless "the government" pays you to do it. But the government is bribing you with your own money, to do something that no sensible person would do. Yes, subsidies change the incentives. So does slavery.

My friend actually laughed, and said, "You economists. You never want to take anything on faith!" As if faith and religion were a big part of the lives of the German people. Or as if faith meant that installing solar panels at a cost per kw/hr that is triple the generation costs of other available technologies actually made sense, instead of being a boondoggle for the "Green Industry" pirates who run the EU like a whipped dog.

Anyway, a great story (shared by the Blonde) about faith-based energy policy in California. Just so many excellent little nuggets in this story. Glad to see that Californians can be just as ridiculously faithful as Germans can.

China as Solar Icon

Lots of  Yewessers have been saying we should pattern our solar industry after that of China.  Of course, we pretty much bought the farm on Solyndra, etc.  What is China doing differently?

The answer, it turns out, is NOTHING.  Their heavily subsidized companies are failing also, on an even larger scale.  The reason is not a difference in policy, but rather a similarity in physics:  Solar power is simply not a viable energy source at this point.  It takes $120 to generate $100 worth of electricity, and at some point the subsidies run out.  The story from the NYT.

The collapse of Suntech is a milestone in the precipitous decline of China’s green energy industry in the last four years. 

More than any other country, China had bet heavily on renewable energy as the answer to its related problems of severe air pollution and heavy dependence on energy imports from politically unstable countries in the Middle East and Africa. 

China is also exposed to global warming on its low-lying, densely populated coastline, which the Energy Department in Washington has estimated to have more people vulnerable to displacement from rising sea levels than anywhere else on earth. 

But China’s approach to renewable energy has proved ruinous, financially and in terms of trade relations with the United States and the European Union. State-owned banks have provided $18 billion in loans on easy terms to Chinese solar panel manufacturers, financing an increase of more than tenfold in production capacity from 2008 to 2012. This set off a 75 percent drop in panel prices during that period, which resulted in losses to Chinese companies of as much as $1 for every $3 in sales last year. 

Now, Max will likely comment and say something about how Germany's decision to end subsidies was somehow different.  It must be fun to live in your own world, Max, free from the restraints of logic and evidence!

Shine on you crazy diamond

Did you guys catch Jared Diamond in Sunday's NY Times? Ouch.

He starts out with an ode to corporate environmental responsibility:

The embrace of environmental concerns by chief executives has accelerated recently for several reasons. Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government.

But somehow ends up in Thomas Friedman crazyland:

While the United States is dithering about long-distance energy transmission from our rural areas with the highest potential for wind energy generation to our urban areas with the highest need for energy, China is far ahead of us. It is developing ultra-high-voltage transmission lines from wind and solar generation sites in rural western China to cities in eastern China. If America doesn’t act to develop innovative energy technology, we will lose the green jobs competition not only to Finland and Germany (as we are now) but also to China.

Class, repeat after me:

(1). Green jobs are NOT a zero sum game where nations are competing for a fixed number of them.

(2). If China or Germany or anyone develops "innovative energy technology", that is NOT bad for us.  It is in fact *awesome* for us, as we can then adopt it and use it.

People, ideas are public goods. That is the whole basis of new growth theory. If China is now doing cutting edge R&D, that is an unmitigated blessing for everyone on the planet.

Monday's Child

1.  Obama the Spectator.  Money quote, pretty disturbing:  "A perilous and unspoken accord in American politics has grown up while no one was looking, which unites the liberal left and the authoritarian right. They agree in their unquestioning support of a government without checks or oversight; and it is the Obama presidency that has cemented the agreement. The state apparatus which supports wars and the weapons industry for Republicans yields welfare and expanded entitlements for Democrats. "  

2. Ban cash?

3.  Conan The Taxpayer. He's 6'5".  I'd like to see a picture of him standing with frequent reader (and Westerly, RI resident) Shirley.  It would be amusing....

4.  Mormons are fans of property rights.  But this is pretty territorial.

5.  8 things that happy people do.  This may explain why Democrats are so unhappy.  As far as I can tell, Democrats are pretty much 0 for 8 here.

(moremoremore!)