What You Ought to Know About Solar Energy But No One Talks About

What is the real problem with solar? With such a rush of projects popping up, perhaps we should take a look.

Great technology, wrong application

Pedal power works great on bicycles, but not on cars and trucks because it doesn’t scale. Big heavy vehicles require far more power than pedals can deliver. For cars and trucks, pedal power is the wrong technology.

Solar energy has the same problem. There are many applications for solar panels on a small scale where they work very well, especially when connecting to the electric grid isn’t an option, but using sunshine to power the grid itself means delivering huge amounts of constant power with reserves available on demand. Solar can’t do that, it doesn’t scale, it’s the wrong technology.

We need reliable power, all day, every day

Our complex, high technology society requires an immense amount of electricity to function, and though demand for electricity varies throughout the day, we require a certain minimum amount of electricity no matter what, all day every day, that’s called baseload power. Our conventional fossil fuel and nuclear power plants have the ability to provide essential baseload power to keep the lights on while also having a greater amount of generating capacity in reserve to meet constantly varying needs, not only the expected daily fluctuations, but to respond to the unexpected like weather events of intense heat or prolonged cold.

Ever since Thomas Edison built the first commercial power plant on Pearl Street in New York, engineers have learned how to build much larger and more efficient power stations generating huge amounts of electricity very reliably, all day and all night regardless of the weather, so much so that everyone simply expects electricity to be there when we need it. That reliable electricity made the high tech society we live in today possible. Without that power constantly available, everything stops.

Solar can’t provide baseload power or boost power on demand

The basic requirements of a power station are to provide our baseload electricity needs and to meet variations in demand when necessary. Solar energy can’t do either. Baseload always has to be there and sunshine obviously isn’t, so it fails on that requirement. When demand unexpectedly rises, the sun might not be shining and it doesn’t respond to demands, so it fails on that requirement, too. Solar energy is there when it naturally occurs regardless of our needs and demands. We can’t depend on it.

Two important terms to evaluate and compare power sources

If you want to understand electric power, you need to understand capacity factor and power density. They sound complex, but they’re pretty straightforward.

Capacity factor

This is a simple fraction expressed as a percentage. When you measure the actual average electric output of a power generator over a period of time, usually one year, that’s the top number, the numerator of the fraction. The bottom value, the denominator is the full power output possible if it ran constantly, it’s the number cited when stating the capacity of the power station. With a solar installation, when they say it’s 80 Megawatts, that’s what it could generate under ideal conditions if it ran all of the time, but if over a year, they measure what it produces day in and day out and it averages out to 16 Megawatts, then the fraction is 16/80 for a capacity factor of 20 percent.

Solar energy is obviously going to have a problem here, after all there’s night time. Without the sun, zero energy is produced. During the daytime, dusty conditions, cloud cover and bad weather of all sorts can dramatically reduce the output of the solar panels. A conventional power plant running on fossil fuel or nuclear energy runs as long as fuel is available, day and night regardless of the weather.

Solar installation capacity factors, as you would expect, vary by location. In the desert southwest of southern Arizona and New Mexico, it is anywhere from 20 to 30 percent. In our area it is in the high teens. The average across Pennsylvania is 17.3%. What does this mean? It means, a solar installation like the proposed project near Wattsburg with a maximum potential output of 80 Megawatts, is effectively less than one fifth of that, maybe 15 Megawatts. It’s like buying an 800 HP muscle car that only puts out 150 HP. You might want your money back.

For comparison, nuclear plants have a capacity factor often over 90 percent, coal and natural gas can operate at or near that level, but are declining to around 50 to 60 percent because renewables constantly vary their input to the grid, requiring conventional plants, especially gas, to power up and down to compensate.

Power density

A less well known measure now attracting much more attention is power density, which measures the footprint of the physical power plant required to produce a given amount of electricity. A single conventional power plant can be quite large, but they generate huge amounts of electricity, all day, every day.

Utility scale solar farms are also very large, the Wattsburg project, for example, will take up over 1100 acres, but it produces only a tiny fraction of what could be generated on that amount of land compared to any conventional power generator and it only does so when weather conditions are perfect.

The power density number is measured in Watts per square meter of land surface. For example, the Wattsburg project: 1100 acres is 4,451,542 square meters. If it generates 80 Megawatts, the power density is 17.97 Watts per square meter, but that’s the best possible number. If you consider the capacity factor for solar where the 80 Megawatts is really 15 Megawatts, the power density is 3.37 Watts per square meter.

Power density numbers are staggeringly different for conventional energy and renewable energy. The numbers cited here are from the book Power Density, by Vaclav Smil, an excellent and thorough book on the topic.

Solar installation power density varies by location, size and equipment specifics, but is anywhere from about 3 to 15 watts per square meter.

Vaclav Smil made detailed calculations for a variety of power plants and the specifics vary greatly within each type.

Coal plant power densities range from 700 to 2500 Watts per square meter. (pages 135-140)

Nuclear calculations come in at 2400 to 7600 Watts per square meter. (pages 145-147)

Natural gas is the real eye opener. When used to fire boilers, the power densities can range from roughly 3000 to as much as 6000 Watts per square meter, however, when a gas turbine is used to spin a generator and the hot exhaust gas is used to produce heat for a steam turbine, you have what is called combined cycle generation yielding up to 10,500 Watts per square meter! Remember, solar power density is 3 to 15 Watts, so combined cycle gas can in many cases have 1000 to 2000 times the power density or more!

What these power density numbers mean is you would need anywhere from hundreds to thousands of times the land area used by conventional power plants to replace them with renewables. But it gets even worse.

Replacing fossil fuel plants with solar panels is a fantasy

Since “net zero” is the goal often cited by renewable advocates which is based on powering our grid with all renewable energy, we need to replace the continuous power we take offline, but for every unit of power we remove from the grid when shutting down fossil fuel or nuclear plants, it isn’t a one to one replacement, we have to replace it with a multiple of that capacity since renewables are often partially or totally unavailable.

From PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences):

Based on the current CFs, an energy transition toward renewables will require a massive infrastructure and nominal capacity to be built and installed. To replace the current fossil capacity that generates 4 TWe with solar PV and wind at a 1:1 ratio, we must install 12 TWe from these renewables. This estimate applies to a replacement-only scenario with no growth, also assuming that the 0.5 CF for fossil plants is all waste and not needed to provide peak load. For an expansion scenario, each 1 TWe of fossil fuel electricity displaced by 1:1 solar PV and wind would require 6.5 TWe from these renewables.

Get that? To replace fossil fuel with renewables assuming no growth in capacity, it requires 3 times the capacity removed. If we allow for growth, it takes 6.5 times in renewable capacity to replace the fossil fuel power taken offline and the capacity must grow in order to have sufficient power available to charge all of the electric vehicles the government is demanding we use. There isn’t enough land area, money or time to do this. What politicians and activists are promoting is an impossible fantasy and simple math makes that clear.

Solar is carbon intensive, too?

As noted by Michael Shellenberger, solar isn’t quite the green technology it claims to be. China, where most all solar panels are manufactured, is building coal fired power plants at a breakneck pace and the resulting cheap electricity powers the factories producing those panels for installation in the USA where we continue to shut coal plants down, where our politicians think we’re lowering carbon emissions. China is cheering us on in our rush to solar because they’re making a lot of money from us. While we take coal plants offline, US taxpayers are helping China build more. Our grid gets more unstable due to lack of reserve power, our electricity cost skyrockets, as a certain ex-president boasted it would and our economy is crippled. So, what are the benefits of solar again?

I think Thomas Sowell said it best:

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

If a few clear heads prevail, perhaps we’ll stop this train before it crashes, but I’m not holding my breath.

See also:
Your Electric Power Problems May Just Be Getting Started
If You Use Electricity This is Not Good News, PJM Interconnection Issues Grid Warning