Huge Solar Power Farms

Last week's news in the New York Times about massive new solar installations in California is both good and bad news. The good: Solar power plants are at last beginning to rival conventional plants in terms of peak power production. Two new installations will combine to produce 800 megawatts of power when the sun is overhead, the amount a small to midsize nuclear power plant produces at its peak. About two years ago, Technology Review reported on plans for solar farms of unprecedented size, but those would produce only 100 megawatts or less. The new installations increase this output by almost an order of magnitude. Clearly, solar power is on its way to becoming a significant source of electricity.

The bad news: It's still not that much electricity. The very fact that 800 megawatts of solar power is big news indicates just how far we've still got to go. For one thing, 800 megawatts of solar is not equal to 800 megawatts of nuclear or coal. That's because solar works only during the day--and even then it doesn't generate peak levels in the morning and evening. Nuclear can keep cranking at near peak output day and night. The new solar installations will produce far less electricity than a comparably sized nuclear plant.

What's more, we're still talking about megawatts of electricity. To supply anticipated energy needs, we need to be thinking not just in thousands of megawatts--that is, gigawatts--but in thousands of gigawatts, or terawatts, of power. According to one report, all of the solar panels produced so far can only generate about 12 gigawatts.

This is all just to say we've got a problem of enormous scale on our hands. There are also concerns about cost--solar is still more expensive than electricity generated from fossil fuels.

But enough of the negative. The new installations are yet another sign of a rapidly expanding solar industry. This expansion will fuel itself by bringing down the cost of making solar panels. Meanwhile, technology continues to improve. That includes the development of cheaper ways to store solar power, so it can be used at night.

Al Gore's Inconvenient Plan

Yesterday, Al Gore said that the United States should produce all of its electricity from carbon-free, renewable energy within 10 years. Although he didn't lay out specifics, he seems to want to do it with wind, solar, and geothermal, although it's not clear from his speech whether nuclear would be acceptable. Can it be done? It isn't likely.

To get a sense of the scale of the problem, consider: last year, wind, solar, and geothermal power accounted for an impressive-sounding 48 million megawatt-hours of electricity. (I rounded up. If I had rounded down, it would have obliterated the contribution from solar, since it is such a small part of the total.)

But in 2006, the most recent year with complete figures, four billion megawatt-hours of electricity were produced in the United States. Eventually, wind, solar, and geothermal power could cover this. But right now, they account for a little more than 1 percent of the total. Going from 1 to 100 percent will require not only building the wind turbines and solar panels and steam turbines for harvesting geothermal energy: it will also require massive new transmission infrastructure for distributing this power, from the deserts or windy plains, where much of this energy can be found, to the coasts, where people actually live. And it will require massive amounts of energy storage, since solar power doesn't work well at night, and wind power is erratic.

In light of this scale, even some truly ambitious schemes seem like a drop in the bucket. Over the past couple of weeks, T. Boone Pickens, an oil tycoon, has been using some of his billions to run television ads supporting his personal energy plan for the United States. Part of that plan is his project to build what seems to be the biggest wind farm in the country. It would nearly double the amount of wind produced in the state of Texas, the state with by far the most wind power. But that project will only produce 4,000 megawatts of power. (Total electricity generating capacity in the United States is about 1 million megawatts.) And it won't be cheap. To cover transmission-line costs alone for that and other proposed wind projects, the state of Texas plans to spend about $5 billion.

Al Gore is right, of course, that the country needs to turn to renewable energy. And it's frustrating how slowly the change is coming. But as we've recently seen with biofuels and food prices, scaling up a new source of energy can bring unanticipated consequences. Careful planning is required. We need some realistic plans for making the switch to renewable electricity, not empty rhetoric with unachievable goals.

A Zero-Emissions City in the Desert

Last week, construction began on a huge renewable-energy and urban-planning experiment, and it will be funded by $120-a-barrel oil at an anticipated cost of $22 billion over about eight years. The Masdar Initiative, launched in 2006, is an ambitious project to build a city near Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. It will house 50,000 people but will produce zero net carbon dioxide emissions and zero waste. Construction just began on the solar power plant that will power the city's construction, and later the city itself. And the first building to go up will be part of the new Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (MIST), a school put together largely with the help of MIT that will be devoted to developing technologies for environmentally sustainable cities.

One of the best things about the project--which I'll write about more in the coming days--is that it provides a much needed way to test ideas for renewable energy and efficiency at a large scale. The hope is that the technology tested here can be applied throughout the world.

But while the project will no doubt provide valuable insights, its location and the circumstances of its construction will limit its applicability. While the Abu Dhabi government won't be providing all of the $22 billion--it's calling on private investment with the hope that the project will be profitable--not every country can count on windfall profits to fund similar projects. What's more, the solutions developed for use in a hot, dry, sunny climate won't necessarily apply to places like, say, New England. Indeed, Gerard Evenden, a senior partner at Foster + Partners, the firm hired to plan the city, says it's essential that cities and buildings be custom-built with the location in mind to maximize efficiency.

Finally, what's to be done with cities that already exist? Many of the approaches to be taken at Masdar--such as controlling the orientation and length of the city streets and the height and construction materials of buildings--won't work with places like New York and Mexico City. This morning at a symposium dedicated to the collaboration between MIT and Masdar, Ernest Moniz, the director of the MIT Energy Initiative, said that a more challenging task is finding ways to retrofit existing systems.

Automakers Criticize Fuel Cells

The world's top automakers' leaders finally woke up, looked around, and realized what many experts have been saying for years: hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles don't make much sense. At the auto show in Geneva yesterday, Bob Lutz, GM's vice chairman, the global-warming skeptic who is nevertheless leading the charge at GM in promoting cleaner vehicles, seems to have come close to conceding that the company's much advertised fuel-cell program is little more than a marketing gimmick.

He said that fuel cells are still far too expensive, and that advances in lithium-ion batteries likely make fuel cells unnecessary, according to a report in today's Wall Street Journal.

As Toyota's president, Katsuaki Watanabe, voiced his skepticism about the technology, he noted that fuel cells are expensive and that infrastructure for distributing hydrogen widely doesn't exist.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to pour money into research related to fuel-cell vehicles.

Experts have argued that powering cars with electricity distributed via the grid and stored in batteries is far more efficient than making hydrogen from water and distributing it. (For more arguments against hydrogen, see "Hype about Hydrogen.") What's more, the infrastructure to do so is already in place. Better batteries are needed for long-range electric cars. But cars that use batteries for daily driving and efficient gasoline or diesel engines for extended trips could overcome that problem while leading to significantly reduced greenhouse emissions.

Hydrogen may yet play an important role in the future, however. It could serve as a way to store energy from the sun to be used at night. To this end, researchers are developing more efficient ways to split water with sunlight. (See "Cheap Hydrogen.")

Big Solar News

Thin-film solar panels that can be printed in high-throughput processes could make solar as cheap as electricity from the grid. Or at least that has long been the promise. But while the panels have shown quite a bit of promise in the lab, they've been very difficult to make reliably at a large scale. Indeed, there have been a series of delays from companies developing printed solar panels.

But now one company, San Jose, CA-based Nanosolar, has started to ship printed solar panels. (See "Large-Scale, Cheap Solar Electricity" for our earlier coverage of the company.) The first cells off the line will be used for a power plant in Germany. The company plans to deliver one megawatt's worth of solar panels for the plant.

It's still too early to tell whether the company can meet its goal of producing cells at $1 a watt, and the company isn't yet disclosing the technical specifications of the panels, except under a nondisclosure agreement. But the fact that the company is shipping a product to a paying customer is certainly a good sign.

The company is marking the occasion by auctioning off the second commercial solar panel to come off its line. You can bid on it here.