There is every reason to think all three of these phenomena will continue to be true in coming years. (The report contains a short but fascinating discussion of all the many technological developments on PV’s horizon — still tons of room to improve.)

The researchers see two key challenges ahead, if PV is to continue its rapid expansion. The first is the cost of financing, especially in the developing world. The second is integrating high levels of wind and solar into the grid. (Because wind and solar are variable, they require sophisticated balancing from other sources and grid technologies; I wrote about that challenge in some detail here.)

Say PV can address those challenges and maintain its current rate of learning, improvement, and expansion. What would a more realistic model projection look like?

To find out, the researchers plugged better cost information and more aggressive cost-curve assumptions into REMIND, a “global inter-temporally optimizing energy–economy model that has been extensively used for analyses of climate policies.”

Long story short, here are the results:

The gray shaded areas show the potential growth of PV, bounded by the lowest and highest historical growth rates. As you can see, this updated model run shows PV wildly outperforming most other model runs (the areas in other colors), eventually providing 30 to 50 percent of global electricity.

Now, there’s no guarantee that PV will continue growing at historical rates. In fact, there are reasons to think wind and solar will run into serious problems as they expand (see this post from Jesse Jenkins and Alex Trembath).

But even the bottom end of this new forecast (30 percent of global electricity) is a hell of a lot higher than the high end (e.g., 17 percent) on the forecasts the IPCC and the IEA are using. If PV can maintain anything even close to its recent explosive growth, it is going to outperform what analysts expect. Again.

The second bit of happy news comes from researchers at Atmosphere to Electrons, an R&D program for wind power at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Their new paper is primarily about the scientific and technical challenges their team is researching — high-tech ways to further improve wind turbines and farms. But as part of the exercise, they project just how much wind costs could fall if all those high-tech solutions are implemented. It’s pretty mind-blowing.

The researchers are pursuing what they call “System Management of Atmospheric Resource through Technology” (SMART) strategies — a cluster of technologies and practices that will allow next-generation wind farms to produce more energy, more reliably, for more hours of the day. Here are the four areas of innovation they are going after, translated into English:

Better predicting performance through high-fidelity physics modeling (HFM) of local conditions.

Better design and control at the plant level by using sensors and real-time monitoring of wind flows as they move through the turbines.

Better design and control at the turbine level through “innovative rotor and drivetrain technology” and scale (i.e., taller towers and bigger blades).

Smarter grid integration by giving each turbine the ability to communicate directly with the grid, play a role in its “stability and operational planning,” and offer it various extra services like voltage regulation (don’t ask).

Just how much of a difference would these changes make? To find out, the researchers ran a simulation of a 2030 wind-power plant using all the SMART innovations, operating at a site with roughly average wind resources.

The result: unsubsidized energy costs ranging from $19 to $32 per megawatt-hour, with an average of around $23/MWh. That is roughly 50 percent lower than today’s wind power costs.

So after dropping 65 percent between 2009 and today, wind-power costs could drop another 50 percent by 2030. That’s pretty amazing. Energy costs of $23/MWh would make wind competitive with natural gas almost everywhere in America, without subsidies.

. . .as John Hensley of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) writes, plenty of other analysts are similarly bullish. A survey of wind energy experts last year by Lawrence Berkeley Lab found that they too expected substantial cost drops (though 40 percent by 2030 was their high end). Like solar, wind still has tons of room to improve.

Funny how not one country has any capacity to operate of purely solar / wind and doesn't like doing so any time soon.

RE is surging as the cost of RE plunge.

I have not ever argued for a pure RE network, always include nuclear as the uninterruptible electricity source. Did you even note, BigOle, that I mentioned the Houston nuclear generator was still operating despite 50" of rainfall?

So what will be do for base load power in this decades while we are waiting for renewables to get their sh1t together?

BigOl64 wrote on Sep 1^st, 2017 at 10:23am:



gee, I don't know ... how about stand in the way or renewables and cry  ... do you think that will work?

BigOl64 wrote on Sep 1^st, 2017 at 10:19am:

It will not be easy, I agree. Everybody turns into an old woman if you even mention nuclear. A diverse system is a reliable system and no nuclear plant has caused problems just by itself, the two big failures were due to old tech, bad siting and whatever caused the Chernobyl operators to stuff up their plant. Maybe thorium will make nuclear more acceptable—it isn’t significantly different to uranium reactors, bit less waste maybe. Still fission tho.

Maybe the Libs could come up with a scheme to get solar panels on rented houses? That would boost solar power, saving more baseload for industry.