Posted on 05/12/2016 3:41:41 PM PDT by bananaman22
The oil price rout has caused a lot of headaches in the renewable industry, especially in the heavily subsidized U.S. solar sector, which is suffering some setbacks even as solar installations are growing rapidly.
Solar power suppliers are scaling back operations as demand is growing slower than expected, and the sector is wondering where to go from here.
Investors have, of course, sensed the uncertainty. An industry that showed so much promise—particularly against the background of international efforts to curb the effects of climate change—is now in the doldrums. So what went wrong?
(Excerpt) Read more at oilprice.com ...
What went wrong?
Solar doesn’t pay for itself/turn a profit.
If a typical solar installation could be used in the event of a power outage, they’d sell more of them. As it stands you can’t have a grid-tied system if you have battery storage.
With subsidies, all I've seen is poor engineering, faulty financing and the inevitable busts (with the US Taxpayers fleeced).
My opinion as an amateur technical guy is that it doesn’t take enormous equipment or enormous amounts of money to develop a better solar cell. Any solar cell technology can be tested with a sample less than an inch square. Efficiency, life expectancy, and cost to manufacture are the key parameters.
For an example of the progress of large semiconductors, look no further than the beautiful, large video displays we have now. Done without subsidies.
A winning solar collector would bring in enormous amounts of money to its developer/patenter.
No. Crappy products for the price and the big one, the sun only is out less than half the time when weather is factored.
No.....It’s killing TAX PAYERS!!!!
The solar power industry has never shown promise except as a niche product. That's because it is not viable as a mainstream provider of electricity. If it were a promising industry it would not require government subsidies.
I find that solar works pretty well to power our weekend cabin. A 32watt panel and a 12 golf cart battery powers lights and radios etc all weekend. Still need a generator for power tools or vacuum cleaner.
Wouldn’t work so well for a house. You need a big battery room and a back up generator. And those batteries need to be replaced every few years. And.. and.. and..
My kid took down a six decade old Aermotor mill on one of the wells at the ranch he foremans and put a two panel solar pump in it’s place. I was surprised at how good it works. Produces from a couple of hundred feet.
Solar has some uses.
The dirty coal consumed to manufacture in China, and the petroleum used to ship, install, and maintain solar panels uses more total energy than the solar panels will ever generate. In other words solar isn't helping anything.
“And those batteries need to be replaced every few years.”
The success of solar as a major power producer requires better batteries than we have now. Battery development is another technology that (I think) doesn’t require massive investment.
I consider solar power to be a successful endeavor. It’s used in more and more places, mostly remote installations requiring a small amount of power. But that’s fine.
Indeed it does, always has. It’s just not base power.
There have been ENORMOUS sums of money poured into solar cell material research by private companies and by NASA (who I contract to work for).
Any big advances now will be more by happenstance.
Solar has a very bright future for low cost distributed power but it is totally worthless for industrial grade commercial power generation - ie power plants.
Obama’s solar stimulus killed the solar industry because it forced a lot of emerging tech into the market while still half baked and before it was ready and the crash of the Obama stimulus gold rush mentality destroyed a lot of promising companies that would have solid around the 2020 time frame
Obama’s green initiative was the analog to government stimulating the personal computer industry in 1978 by buying a radio shack TRS-80 for every American family and killing off demand for the IBM PC and putting Apple Computer into bankruptcy
Depends on where you live.
I live in a single party state that
has driven the price of electricity to be
the highest in the nation. Thanks to Democrats
and taxpayers I can pay for a
10 kW system in 8 years. It is worth it for me.
Other people on this post are correct,
all costs considered, the solar will never
return the costs needed to produce it.
The subsidies and the freedom from the
government are what makes it worth it.
Thanks for paying your taxes!
You left out that ALL private systems will eventually need serious maintenance, eventual replacement or scrapping out.
One by one they will fail and leave a bigger hole in the future grid the longer this charade is allowed to go on
The government proved that when you give things to people and make it really easy to “succeed” then you help ensure failure by de-motivating them from taking the steps a normal business would take....our welfare society being proved out at all levels....
“There have been ENORMOUS sums of money poured into solar cell material research”
You say big advances will be more by happenstance. Does that mean the enormous sums are being divided up among numerous independent efforts?
Is the money directed mostly toward reducing the manufacturing cost of existing cell designs, or in developing new cell designs?
How long does the typical cell last as it sits out there with the sun hitting it and ambient temperatures varying from cold to hot.
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