By 2016 Or Latest 2017 Solar Power Will Be Equal Or Less Than The Cost Of Coal Power
The cost of solar power production keeps on coming down and the cost of coal power has been rising.
For China that cross over point may be reached in the very near future.
With air quality out of control and the government wanting to do something about it, there might be an unforseen solar revolution about to happen in China.
The International Energy Agency had assumed that China would soon be burning more than half the world’s coal each year, dooming any chance of capping greenhouse gases at safe levels. “Like it or not, coal is here to stay for a long time to come. Coal is abundant and geopolitically secure, and coal-fired plants are easily integrated into existing power systems. But it is equally important to emphasise that coal in its current form is simply unsustainable,” it said in its December report.
Yet technology may have played another of its great tricks. The cost of extraction for fossils is ratcheting upwards (punctuated by cyclical bursts of supply, of course) as the easy reserves are exhausted.Solar cost are coming down and down as the technology keeps getting better, right now helped by the US military and energy department. The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory says scientists can already capture 31.1pc of the sun’s energy with a 111-V Solar Cell, though records keep being beaten.
Cheap energy storage from flow-batteries (a Harvard research project funded by the US Advanced Research Projects Agency) will soon overcome the curse of intermittency, letting us absorb the sun’s rays by day and release them again as heating and light overnight.
As I reported recently, Sanford Bernstein’s Michael Parker and Flora Chang say we have achieved a virtuous circle of “global energy deflation” that will erode the viability of oil, gas and the fossil fuel nexus over time. But even they would probably not have imagined that solar could match Chinese coal within two years.
When you combine this news with China’s ability to get cheap gas from Russia, it’s looking like the air quality may start improving in years to come.
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