The next graph shows that California in state electricity generation was essentially flat from 2000 to 2017 despite population  and GDP growth. The means of generation have changed mostly from around 2012 when a nuclear plant shut down, solar generation has grown rapidly and wind generation has been constant.  Hydro generation has varied due to droughts. The emissions graph above that shows California in state emissions from generation have been mostly flat and most variability was from hydro variability from droughts. The bottom line is that California in state electricity generation has not contributed to CO2 reductions from 2000 to 2018. Overall emissions gains have come from efficient use of electricity and fuels, not cleaner electricity generation.
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California recently announced a goal of 100% in state renewable electricity generation by 2040. This sounds very positive at first, but from the discussion above, in state generation only accounts for 10% of California CO2 emissions, so meeting this goal will not reduce CO2 emissions much. 

Digging deeper, California’s definition of renewable energy is wind, solar, geothermal and biofuels. It excludes nuclear and large hydro which are politically unacceptable to the California clean energy coalition. This illustrates that CO2 emissions reduction is a lower priority than other environmental concerns. 

Already the reduction of nuclear has meant that solar growth has only compensated for the loss of the nuclear CO2 emissions free source. The remaining nuclear is scheduled to close in 2025. Solar and wind will have to compensate for this loss before CO2 emissions will fall. Already the current level of solar causes solar curtailment in spring, and as solar capacity grows this curtailment will grow. California understands this and is putting great emphasis on electricity storage to allow for more solar. The storage story is complicated by the fact that California has legacy pumped storage of nearly 4GW generation capacity but it is part of large hydro which is politically unacceptable to the political status quo in California. Batteries are the great white hope for storage, but the politically incorrect pumped storage is the only current proven bulk electricity storage technology. It is not being used or updated to serve as a solar companion and enable more solar capacity to be deployed without significant curtailment.

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The next graph shows that California in state generation capacity has grown from around 50GW to around 80 GW from 2000 to 2017 while generation has stayed roughly constant. Most of the new capacity is wind and solar. The growing capital cost of capacity has to be paid from the constant electricity generation which is the simple explanation for California’s high electricity cost. Storage capacity to bolster solar intermittency will only increase overall capacity and cost of generation while maintaining electricity generation at current levels. California is rich and so far the high costs have proven politically acceptable.

The most direct path to reducing California’s CO2 emissions  is electrification of transportation and domestic and commercial energy consumption, where the bulk of emissions are. Electric cars and heat pumps are available technologies to accomplish these goals. A side effect of this would be a need to increase electricity generation. 100% renewable electricity is generally perceived as 100% clean energy and 0% CO2 emissions. As the discussion above shows, this is far from the truth. It really means a 10% reduction in CO2, leaving the remaining 90%. As such slogans like this encourage complacency among people concerned with global warming and take the focus off of efforts that are more important.

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This is a complicated article to illustrate a complicated problem. Electricity generation gets most of the attention in reducing CO2 emissions but California (and Germany) show that most of the limited success so far has come from efficiency improvements. Electricity generation has suffered from losses from infighting offsetting gains and costs growing to levels that constrain growth despite strong political support. The world is very far from California’s over two decade investment in CO2 emissions reduction. California’s limited success don’t bode well for the rest of the world.

The added cost of storage and backup mean that costs will only rise, keeping the rate of clean energy growth far below what is necessary to limit CO2 emissions in a timely manner. To the clean energy coalition there is only one path forward and no apparent awareness that this path is failing. There seems to be confidence in the 100% renewables push but little awareness of its impracticality.
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The just released IPCC report on climate change is increasing the severity of alarm and the rapidity of action needed to avert damage. Within the political and economic constraints, what is needed is a solar energy solution that is a complete replacement for fossil fuel generation at a lower cost. Current solar falls far short on cost, availability and storage. Stratosolar fixes all these problems and more. It could meet the ICCC goals for rapid deployment without global political wrangling that has never succeeded so far.

​By Edmund Kelly

In this blog post in February I discussed BNEF’s forecast for 2018 clean energy investment. This forecast projected clean energy investment in 2018 would match that of 2017. A central theme was the unpredictability of what China would do made the forecast unreliable. This came to pass in June when China announced significant solar cutbacks of around 20 GW for the 2nd half of 2018.

This article discusses the reasons for China’s chaotic solar policy. Basically Investors in Solar manufacturing (like much of Chinese investment) don’t behave like western investors. Investors follow a “if you build it , they will come” approach. They think supply will create the demand. Unfortunately, solar developers can’t develop projects at a rate to match the increased solar manufacturing capacity due to constraints on transmission and distribution. As a result of the reduced demand, PV panels have fallen from around $0.35/W to $0.25/W. This may cause a shakeout in the PV business, but China may prop up companies and not let that happen.

Anyway with China’s reduction, clean energy investment will now decline in 2018. Overall investment will stay in the range it has been since 2011. The graphs above show the regional investment trends from 2005 to 2018. Yellow is solar, blue is wind. AMER is america (mostly US), EMEA is Europe and APAC is Asia, which is mostly China.

As can be seen America has been in a narrow investment range since 2011. European investment has been declining since 2011 and Chinese investment rose from 2011 to 2015, but has declined slightly since then. With Trump in the White house imposing stiff tariffs on PV panels and US subsidies being eliminated over the next few years, American investment is unlikely to grow for the foreseeable future. It is likely that investment in Europe will continue its downward trend since 2011. China’s reduction in PV deployment probably means that Chinese investment will continue its downward trend since 2015.

Germany has long been the driver of clean energy investment in Europe which makes the graph below all the more telling. Investment by Germany over the last three quarters is very low relative to past investment levels. This emphasizes the scale of European decline and is all the more disturbing given Europe's overall enthusiasm for clean energy and meeting the goals of the Paris agreement. The US and China are not uniformly enthusiastic about clean energy and the German reduction to such low level makes a lie of their clean energy aspirations. There is now no one credibly leading the charge for atmospheric CO2 reduction.

The overall declining world clean energy investment does not match the optimism about clean energy. This investment level will not reduce atmospheric CO2 levels The only reason for clean energy is to reduce CO2, otherwise why bother? There is lots of hype about 100% renewables and solar and wind cheaper than fossil fuels, but in the real world progress has stalled. The money tells the true story.

The problems with intermittent renewables are well understood and are becoming increasingly difficult for clean energy enthusiasts to ignore. Potential solutions are in development but are risky and many years from economic viability.

Stratosolar solves all the problems of current intermittent renewables and could be deployed rapidly to provide cheaper energy than fossil fuels in a timeframe that can meet the 450 ppm CO2 goal.

​By Edmund Kelly

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Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) tracks new energy investment trends. BNEF  just released their 2018 new energy outlook report which discusses current trends and also projects demand out to 2050. They bring a financial investment perspective to forecasting the future of the energy electricity generation business. This contrasts with academic or climate change advocate forecasts which tend to either ignore or have unrealistic expectations of the financial aspects of forging a clean energy future. It also contrasts with forecasts from government agencies like the IEA and the  EIA or industry forecasts like those from Shell or BP who largely downplay renewable energy.

My persistent theme is that we are not on a path to reduce CO2 emissions sufficiently to limit the damage to a 2 degree celsius rise in global temperature. StratoSolar and other speculative technologies will not get serious attention until it is clear and accepted that we won’t achieve this goal on our path with current wind, solar and storage technologies.

BNEF forecasts very large increases in wind, solar and other clean energy deployment (14 times current installed capacity) along with dramatic increases in improved energy storage technologies. They also forecast continuing price reductions in wind, solar and batteries. They estimate the overall investment in electricity generation will exceed $11.5T by 2050, or an average of $360B/y. They estimate that this will change generation from 66% fossil fuel today to 66% clean energy in 2050. This is a bullish assessment from a large professional team that understands the energy business.

However over this period energy demand rises significantly due to economic growth, so despite this reduction CO2 emissions don’t fall all that much from todays level. Their opinion at the end of their presentation is that significant new technologies are needed to either directly remove CO2 from the atmosphere or provide an economical means to replace the natural gas consumption still needed to provide for long duration intermittency and seasonality.

StratoSolar does not suffer from the long duration intermittency problem because it is above all weather effects. This means there is no need for natural gas generation and its CO2 emissions. Stratosolar's higher utilization makes the same cheap PV panels three or more times more effective. Cheap storage from gravity energy storage or the cheap batteries BNEF forecasts make Stratosolar a complete replacement for fossil fuels before 2050 for far less than the $11.5T BNEF forecasts.

The direct inherent ability of simply not having a long duration intermittency problem is Stratosolar’s key qualitative advantage over ground based wind and solar. Quantitative advantages in cost can be argued as unrealistic and ignored but qualitative advantages that make a solution move from impossible to possible are fundamental. The world has yet to accept the long duration intermittency achilles heel of wind and solar. This BNEF forecast states the problem clearly without much fanfare. It's not their main theme. Their general forecast is bullish for current clean energy investment. The fact that it is not solving the CO2 emissions problem is not an energy investor issue. Investors just want to make money.

By Edmund Kelly

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A few years ago I wrote a couple of blog articles on economic growth and inequality. Back then I mentioned a paper by Ray Dalio that discussed a simple model of the economy. Ray observed that the US economy goes through long term cycles where total US debt gradually builds up to unsustainable levels and then declines suddenly causing depressions. This happened in 1929 when total US debt reached 250% of GDP and then in 2008 when debt reached over 350% of GDP.

However, as the graph above shows, after a brief decline  in 2009 and 2010, US total debt has increased from $54T to over $70T and the debt/gdp ratio has stabilized at around 350%. It seems this level was manageable over the last decade because the fed kept interest rates very low and propped up asset prices with quantitative easing (QE). Dalio describes debt reduction as de-leveraging. It would appear that de-leveraging from the 2008 crisis has not occured. This disaster has yet to unfold.

It seems hard to believe that after all the pain of the last decade that the debt problem still remains. The chart below shows the share of debt categories over time.

After 2008, US government debt had to rise from 20% to 35% of total debt to deal with the great recession. Mortgage and consumer debt did decline from about 30% of total debt to 25% of total debt with massive foreclosures and layoffs. Financial system debt declined from about 40% to about 30% of total debt. Non-financial corporate debt has risen a few%.

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Debt at 350% of gdp is unstable and dangerous. So where in the current total US debt does the danger lie? There does not seem to be a housing bubble, and the federal government is still solvent. That leaves the non financial and financial sectors.

While the financial sector debt seems to have shrunk somewhat, it is an opaque sector with lots of debt in shadow banking and opaque financial instruments. QE has inflated all US asset classes, especially stocks and bonds. The corporate world has issued lots of junk bonds and borrowed a lot. Bond rating agencies have been raising red flags. Many corporations have been borrowing to remain alive.

Pressure on debt is building from many directions. The fed stopped QE purchases and has been slowly raising interest rates. Oil prices are rising toward $100/barrel again. The probability of US economic slowdown seems more and more likely every day.
Emerging markets are in trouble due to a stronger dollar. Financial troubles in Turkey, Venezuela and Argentina are in the headlines. Italy in the hands of right wing populists poses potentially severe systemic risks to European and US banking.

Some combination of events will likely trigger a sudden US stock market decline which in turn could expose over leveraged investors and begin the positive feedbacks that exposes more bad debt and leads to major corporate defaults. This was the path followed in the great depression in 1929. Once the real economy is in decline, deleveraging is inevitable and the Fed has fewer tools to deal with a harder problem than 2008.
On top of that throw in Trump and his dysfunctional administration and there is ample reason to be concerned.
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By Edmund Kelly

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This article by Michael Schellenberger in Forbes is another example of a committed environmentalist that is concerned with the problems of intermittent wind and solar power as solutions to reducing CO2 emissions. He points out that in the few markets like California and Germany where wind and solar have become a significant part of electricity generation, the price of electricity has risen in lock step with renewables penetration. This is not the long term cost problems of adding storage or transmission. This is the early stage deployment phase where wind and solar are added to existing grids and the existing generation adapts to the intermittent generation and acts as backup.

There are numerous studies that predict that intermittent renewables become less effective as their penetration increases. This is mainly due to reduced capacity factors as intermittent generation is curtailed when its generation is not needed. An equally significant factor is that fossil generation capacity is also curtailed when intermittent sources are generating. The system as a whole has an increasingly reduced capacity factor as intermittent generation becomes a larger percentage. Capital cost and fixed O&M costs are the biggest costs of generation. Lower capacity factor increases the cost of generation proportionally. As Michael points out, there is now evidence that this actually occurs.

As we have discussed endlessly, a solar based solution needs to 1) be much cheaper, 2) not have random intermittency and 3) have a cost effective storage solution for night time generation. Current solutions do not satisfy ANY of these criteria and cannot succeed. It seems that current wind and solar must fail before there is acceptance that these requirements apply.

Stratosolar does meet these criteria.  

By Edmund Kelly

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This article in the MIT Technology review discusses this paper in the journal Energy and Environmental Science.  The topic is the viability (or lack thereof) of 100% renewable electricity generation. The authors are all renowned scientists from several prestigious institutions. Recently, Mark Jacobson and his colleagues doubled down on their earlier study on the feasibility of 100% renewables with an updated study. This is part of a continuing increasingly public debate over the current economic viability of a 100% renewables energy policy. The following is the abstract of the Energy and Environmental Science paper.

Abstract
We analyze 36 years of global, hourly weather data (1980–2015) to quantify the covariability of solar and wind resources as a function of time and location, over multi-decadal time scales and up to continental length scales. Assuming minimal excess generation, lossless transmission, and no other generation sources, the analysis indicates that wind-heavy or solar-heavy U.S.-scale power generation portfolios could in principle provide ∼80% of recent total annual U.S. electricity demand. However, to reliably meet 100% of total annual electricity demand, seasonal cycles and unpredictable weather events require several weeks’ worth of energy storage and/or the installation of much more capacity of solar and wind power than is routinely necessary to meet peak demand. To obtain ∼80% reliability, solar-heavy wind/solar generation mixes require sufficient energy storage to overcome the daily solar cycle, whereas wind-heavy wind/solar generation mixes require continental-scale transmission to exploit the geographic diversity of wind. Policy and planning aimed at providing a reliable electricity supply must therefore rigorously consider constraints associated with the geophysical variability of the solar and wind resource—even over continental scales.
End Abstract
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The history of top down academic solutions to global energy system problems has not been positive. This does not bode well for the Jacobson solution. Global or even regional behaviour is too hard to coordinate. The one constant of energy and other commodity markets is that the low cost provider always wins. Payment for externalities can rarely be imposed on commodity producers.

StratoSolar reduces the cost of electricity to a fraction of electricity from fossil fuels. This makes it the lowest cost energy provider by a considerable margin, a margin sufficient to motivate rapid adoption. Being above the weather it does not suffer from the long duration intermittency that is the problem at the heart of the 100% renewables debate. It also includes a cheap energy storage option for nightime generation. It can be situated anywhere geographically. Were it proven, its significant cost advantage would rapidly make it the only energy source.

Renewables are still not cheaper than fossil fuel so they require carrots and sticks to promote adoption. The intermittency problems are still not exposed because their penetration levels are too small for the bad effects to show.

In a rational world, potential 100% renewable energy solutions would be explored. Unfortunately a political majority does not see an energy problem worth solving and the minority who do see a problem cannot agree on a path to viable solutions because they are focused on political solutions, not economically viable solutions.

By Edmund Kelly

Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) has ten predictions for 2018. One prediction is that PV installs in 2018 will be about the same as 2017’s 98GW. PV panel prices are predicted to decline slightly to $0.3/W to $0.33/W. Overall clean energy investment is expected to be about the same as 2017. This continues the level investment trend of about $250B/Y since 2011 that I discussed in this October 2017 post. Lower PV prices are not increasing PV manufacturer’s dollar sales. PV manufacturers have dramatically increased GW output within a constant revenue stream.

Both PV manufacturing and PV deployment are now dominated by China which significantly increased manufacturing capacity and almost doubled PV deployment in 2017. Bloomberg and others cannot predict China’s PV markets. Here is a Quote from the Bloomberg article.

“China’s boom, which saw an extraordinary 53GW installed in 2017, is still fundamentally irrational – the mechanism to collect the subsidies to be paid out has not been determined, and many of these projects are being built before they have secured ‘quota’ from the government to have access to the subsidy pool. However, it looks as if Chinese state-owned developers and investors will build them anyway, on the assumption that the government will find a way and, if not, compensation for the power itself will prevent a total loss.

A mandatory Renewable Energy Credit may be introduced in 2018 in China, and might answer part of the ‘where does the subsidy come from’ question. About half the new build in China will be distribution-grid-connected, ie smaller projects with the ability to sell to local power consumers. These are not subject to quota, but are limited by the ability of large developers to put together volumes of small deals.”

The PV market in China and worldwide is subject to the whims of government policy. The aggregate behaviour of China, the US and Europe has maintained a stable PV revenue stream since 2011. This has not been coordinated, other than China probably reacting to the drop in European demand by increasing Chinese demand to prop up Chinese manufacturers.  As Bloomberg has stated, China’s future behavior is not predictable. If China maintains its current level of dollar commitment to PV deployment, PV panel prices will probably continue to fall as Bloomberg predicts but it is hard to see dramatic price reductions of the magnitude we have seen already happening again. 

PV deployment is increasingly constrained by other costs which have not dropped at the rate of PV panels. Transmission, backup and storage costs loom as PV penetration increases. PV on its current path will not reduce CO2 emissions for a long time. Stratosolar can alter this dynamic.
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By Edmund Kelly

When we first evolved the PV version of StratoSolar, it was a surprise that we could find no prior mention of anything like it, despite trying hard. This has been reinforced over the years by the surprise and confusion that the concept always generates. It is constantly thought of as novel and is usually regarded more as science fiction than science fact.

Recently a colleague met Dr. Richard Swanson at a social occasion at Stanford and mentioned the StratoSolar concept to him. Dr. Swanson told him it was an old idea that had been described in a paper written by William R. Cherry in 1970. Dr. Swanson kindly forwarded a copy of the paper. Lo and behold the paper describes a concept remarkably like StratoSolar that discusses the major engineering challenges in detail. A pdf file of the paper is attached to this post.

I think that Dr. Swanson is probably the only person on the planet who remembers this paper which stems from the very early years of PV. William R. Cherry was a distinguished pioneer of PV and the prestigious Cherry award is named after him. Dr. Swanson himself is a world-renowned figure in the PV arena and the source of the famous “Swanson’s Law”.

To me, this nearly fifty-year-old paper is a validation of the StratoSolar concept from a well-respected source. I only wish we had found it sooner, though I have still not found the paper online, only the copy sent to me by Dr. Swanson. Human nature is naturally distrustful of ideas with no apparent historical precedent which goes some way to explaining the unwillingness to evaluate StratoSolar.

In 1970 PV was only used in space applications. It cost hundreds of dollars per watt compared to today’s cost of about $0.35/W. William Cherry was a visionary who contemplated the future of PV and examined space based, stratosphere, and terrestrial concepts as this later 1971 paper shows.

The Cherry paper from the 1970 Proceedings of the 8th IEEE Photovoltaics Specialists Conference describes a “floating mattress” system that is 1 mile by 1 mile and 100 ft deep floating at 50,000ft and higher in the stratosphere. Its cross braced rigid cubic structure is remarkably like StratoSolar. Its gas bags are polyethylene which was and still is the standard gas bag material, though better materials are now available. The tethers described use steel and taper from 3/8in diameter at the bottom to 3/4in. at the top. This would still be practical, but Kevlar and UHMWPE are better choices today. There are references to Goodyear for the tether and buoyancy calculations. The overall system plus tethers weighed around 10,000 tons, which is not far from what a similar sized StratoSolar system weighs. PV efficiencies have improved from the 7% in 1970 to over 20% today, so a same sized StratoSolar array would now generate three times the power.

The system could have been constructed in 1970 but the PV technology was then hundreds of times too expensive. The concept was too far ahead of its time and was forgotten. William Cherry died in 1980.

Today’s improved technologies make the concept viable and its inherent advantages of no long duration intermittency from weather and dramatically increased energy over PV on the ground make it potentially the cheapest source of energy on the planet, far cheaper than fossil fuels and available to all regardless of geographic location.
 
By Edmund Kelly