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

As the year winds down, various reports on CO2 growth and climate change have appeared. One of the more interesting is a report from a multi agency effort of the US government. Given Trump’s climate change denial I expect many of the authors have exited or plan to exit government. This just adds to the evidence that C02 levels continue to rise and the consensus view is we are already in trouble, but nothing like what is to come.

As I repeatedly point out there is no evidence yet for any CO2 reduction at a global level from current deployment of wind and solar. Running the numbers shows that current levels of investment ($250B/y) are insufficient to have a discernible impact. Despite great improvements current wind and solar still need considerable subsidy support (euphemistically called policy support) and need to address the full costs of integrating intermittent sources of electricity into a supply on-demand grid.

There has been very little public acceptance of the need to address intermittency. Nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news. I recently came across a report from the climate policy initiative group (CPI) that actually took a realistic view of a path forward that addresses intermittency.

Rather than demanding the perfection of a pure solution they settled on scenario that used CCNG as the long-term backup and Lithium Ion batteries for shorter daily cycling. In this approach the CCNG plants have a very low utilization factor which in an open market would produce a very high cost of their electricity. However, it only produces 10% to 20% the CO2 of a pure CCNG all gas solution.

As they point out the system would not be economically competitive with today’s Lithium Ion technology and the burden of CCNG capital costs and would need government policy support. They project that with current Lithium ion cost and reliability trends the system might be competitive by 2030.

That doesn’t sound so bad unless you take the climate change science seriously.  12 more years of increasing CO2 is hard to recover from. Its also based on governments coming up with substantially more money between now and 2030. Current politics are not favorable.
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It was refreshing however to read a report that addressed the real problems that need to be solved and are hopefully influencing governments of the reality of issues with current wind and solar deployment.
As always energy is driven by economics. The solutions have to be economically viable
 
By
Edmund Kelly

In this blog post on 10/2/2017 I discussed the EIA’s latest 2017 world energy projection out to 2050. The EIA is America’s congressional energy information body, equivalent to the Congressional budget office (CBO) for budgetary information. The IEA (international energy agency) is a similar energy information agency with 29 country members (including the US). The IEA has a more global developed world perspective. The IEA just released their 2017 world energy outlook. It is much the same as the EIA’s outlook, but presents more future “sustainable development scenarios” that address CO2 emissions and climate change, which the EIA avoids due to contentious American politics.  As is common with such scenarios they project what could be successful without saying how to achieve that success, or what the economic impact would be. The mechanism always depends on government policy to force change. So far, governments show no appetite for change on the scale indicted by the sustainable development scenarios.

CO2 emissions grew in 2017 after several years of steadying out mostly due to burning less coal and more natural gas. So, EIA and IEA projections are for CO2 emissions to reduce, but not to a level that keeps CO2 below 450 ppm by 2050 unless there is drastic change from current trends. Meanwhile yearly CO2 emissions continue to rise, not fall.

In 2017 solar PV is set to exceed 100 GW of new installs and wind about 60GW. This represents major growth in the last few years and sounds like a lot but unfortunately is a tiny fraction of what is needed. Getting a sense of the scale of what is needed to be relevant to CO2 reduction is daunting and demoralizing for advocates of current wind and solar.

In 2012 I made a video for solve for x that showed the scale of the necessary solution. Things have not changed much except that there are five fewer years to 2050. It will take about 0.8TW to 1TW of average new clean energy electricity generation every year for thirty years. This average generation translates into 4TW to 5TW of current new wind and solar nameplate capacity. Today's 100 GW PV manufacturing capacity would need to scale by 40X to 50X. Current utility scale solar is around $1/W, rooftop is over $2/W. If utility cost halves to $0.50/W that is $2T/y to $2.5T/y. This is about 10X current clean energy yearly investment. This is also not counting storage, backup or transmission costs. Allowing for more cost reduction brings cost into the $1.5T/y current total spent on energy.

As my last blog post discusses, clean energy investment has been stalled at about $250B for the last seven years. About half of this is government subsidies. Government policies are determining the current investment level. To get to sustainable clean energy growth it must become market driven growth. Energy is a commodity. Price determines demand. Instead of 4TW to 5TW Stratosolar only needs 1.2TW to 1.5TW each year, or $0.6T to $0.8T each year. The key point is that this is at a fraction of the cost of electricity from fossil fuels without needing any government subsidy. Electricity at $0.01/kWh to $0.02/kWh without any strings or hidden costs will simply replace fossil fuels at a rapid pace driven by market forces and high profits driving investment.

As is common with energy discussions, it is easy to get lost in the weeds. The only reason for clean energy is to reduce CO2 emissions. Wind and solar are not an end in themselves. They are a means to the end of reducing CO2 emissions. If they are not on a path to reducing CO2 they are failing their purpose, no matter how successful they are as businesses.  Stratosolar is a logical progression that takes today's solar PV from failing to reduce global CO2 to succeeding in reducing global CO2. That is a big deal and worthy of some attention.

By Edmund Kelly

About this time last year I wrote a post based on Bloomberg's (bnef) reporting on global clean energy financing. The theme was the lack of growth in clean energy investment. This time last year the Chinese market was in turmoil after the government lowered its FIT subsidies and a bust seemed imminent. As I discussed in a recent post, China proved resilient and installed way more PV than was predicted taking the 2017 total to possibly over 100GW vs. the 85 GW predicted. Bloomberg’s Q3 2017 investment survey illustrated in the chart above shows that 2017 overall world investment is set to about match 2016 and China’s overall clean energy investment is about the same for 2017 as 2016. So lower PV panel prices have increased the GW of PV installed but within the constraint of a similar overall level of money investment.

This demonstrates that the clean energy market is constrained by the amount of investment which is set by a government subsidy constraint. If PV was market competitive without subsidy, investment should be growing.

Examining the quarterly investment chart above shows overall global clean energy investment has been within a narrow range for the last seven years (2011-2017) after ramping up during the previous seven years (2004-2010). Over the last seven years US investment has fluctuated within a narrow range. European investment has fallen significantly, and Chinese investment has grown to offset the European decline. This means that the  growth in GW installed of wind and solar has been due to reducing $/W capital costs, not increasing investment. The looming prospect of US tariffs on PV panels is likely to reduce US investment in PV, and the ITC subsidy is phasing out. The prospects are not good for PV investment growth in the US. From the chart, China’s clean energy investment peaked in Q3 2015 and has been steadily declining since. Europe seems set to continue its decline. Overall there does not seem to be much prospect of global growth in clean energy investment.

This gets me back to my familiar theme. This latest Bloomberg survey is continuing evidence that the world is not on a track for clean energy to grow at a rate to replace fossil fuels before the end of the 21st century. As I also discuss regularly, there are many impediments beyond just lowering generation costs (like backup, storage and transmission) that will become more significant and must also be overcome. The issue is fundamentally about money as these Bloomberg surveys illustrate.

What is needed is a clean energy system solution that beats the current fossil fuel system in cost of energy to the customer. The problem is not just about electricity generation but a complete fossil fuel free energy solution. Stratosolar is such a solution and the web site covers many of the details of why Stratosolar is such a solution in detail. Energy is a complex multi faceted problem that is hard to understand. Deep throat’s advice to “follow the money” gets to the heart of difficult problems when lots of noise gets in the way of understanding as is the case with clean energy.

By Edmund Kelly

Five years ago, I produced this chart based on 2011 EIA world energy use projections out to 2050. It showed the scale of fossil fuel energy to other energy and the projected growth of fossil fuels and green energy. The central message this chart illustrated then was we were not on a path to reduce fossil fuel consumption.
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The EIA recently came out with their 2017 projections. Its interesting to compare what has changed over six years. Since 2011 solar PV has reduced dramatically in price and grown significantly, so we would expect this to show up. Significantly, growth in solar and wind barely changes the EIA projections to 2050.

This chart shows the new 2017 projection out to 2050. The 2017 projected overall energy use falls to 27 TWy from the 2011 33 TWy projection. This stems mostly from a reduction in coal consumption with a small contribution from a reduction in nuclear. Significantly, despite significantly lower costs since 2011, renewables are about the same for the 2017 projection as for 2011. The overall situation is little changed with fossil fuel still dominating.

The EIA projections are generally disparaged by clean energy advocates as being inaccurate about clean energy. This criticism is correct, but because clean wind and solar are small overall contributors, the overall EIA world projections are accurate. The reductions in coal and nuclear are the most significant changes since 2011 and going forward. The EIA projected growth in renewables is still significant if probably underestimated. Hydro is still larger than wind and solar in 2107 but most of the growth in renewables is wind and solar so their EIA projected growth rates are significant, though from a low base.

While solar and wind have reduced significantly in cost, the unfortunate reality is they have yet to become competitive without subsidies in any market. There is no magic threshold where they suddenly become competitive without subsidies. It will start slowly in the markets with the best resources and expand to less endowed markets as costs reduce. As growth occurs new impediments like backup, storage and transmission/distribution will rear their ugly heads and act as a brake on growth, as is being illustrated by early adopters like California and Germany. Nothing in this scenario allows for sudden and exponential growth to occur as happened with computers, cell phones and other mass market products.

The EIA projections are in line with other world energy projections from IEA, BP, Shell etc. Even boosters like Bloomberg and Lazard don’t project renewables as the dominant provider of energy, only electricity. The trends point to renewables perhaps replacing fossil fuels by the turn of the century, fifty years too late for CO2 stabilization at below 450ppm. 

The StratoSolar message has been that economics matter and current solar PV has many economic problems that will keep it from becoming a replacement for fossil fuels for a long time to come. StratoSolar solves all these problems. Time is marching on.
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By Edmund Kelly

In an earlier post in June, only a few months ago, I discussed GTM’s 2017 projections for the global solar PV market. This was 85GW, 30GW of which was for China. GTM did mention how opaque and difficult to predict the Chinese market was. Well, GTM’s observation was far more prescient than they expected. A series of recent reports of unexpected growth in the Chinese market have been increasing the projected 2017 market size, first to 90GW and now to over 100GW.  GTM were predicting slow global growth for PV out to 2022, with the market only exceeding 100GW in 2021, not 2017. This year’s Chinese growth alone (from 30GW to 45GW) far exceeds the total 2017 individual markets in the US, India or Europe.

China has surprised everyone, including I suspect, themselves. The trigger for the growth was probably the sudden drop in module prices to $0.30/W from over $0.50W last year, combined with higher than expected FIT subsidies. China has been building significant new manufacturing capacity (exceeding 100GW) and much of this has been the latest mono/PERC technology that has improved efficiency from the 15% of multi-crystalline to around 20%. The evidence is that the low Chinese module pricing is not due to dumping below cost, but is a profitable and sustainable business for the biggest manufacturers who are consolidating control over the Chinese PV business and given their scale, the world PV business.  

For the PV business $0.30/W module costs mean that a $1.00/W system cost for utility scale systems is now common worldwide. This has long been the goal for PV to become competitive with fossil fuels. It also means that PV in many markets is competitive with wind power.  At these prices, it makes sense for China to increase their scale of PV deployment and utilize their manufacturing capacity.

For StratoSolar, $1.0/W system cost translates to $0.02/kWh electricity cost, far below fossil fuels and ground PV and low enough to make electricity from storage affordable and synthetic fuels affordable. The fundamental driver of energy markets is economics. PV becoming market competitive should substantially increase its growth rate over the current low predictions by the EIA and others. This growth should soon expose the limits to solar PV growth and the benefits StratoSolar brings to PV.

By Edmund Kelly
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https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/07/19/chinas-record-installations-could-save-solar-in-20.aspx
 
http://pv.energytrend.com/research/Strong_Chinese_Market_to_Push_Annual_Global_Photovoltaic_Demand_Above_100_GW_for_2017.html

Nuclear power and wind/solar are the two main contenders for a fossil fuel free energy future. My previous blog post focused on the problems with wind/solar. It now seems that nuclear power is also in serious trouble. Earlier this year (2017) as I covered in this post, Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy due to cost overruns on their AP1000 nuclear reactors. Now the other shoe has dropped with the cancellation of two AP1000 projects as covered by this article in climate news network and IEEE Spectrum. Other new reactor projects around the world are also in trouble. These articles make the point that the nascent nuclear revival based on improved designs is petering out. New nuclear designs for the future also seem to be in trouble as discussed in this article in climate news network.

Nuclear power has always had significant political opposition, but the engineering complexity now seems to be a more significant problem.

With the growing awareness of the limits of wind/solar and the imminent demise of nuclear power, there is a need to try new approaches like StratoSolar. As I have repeatedly stated over the years, StratoSolar viability is quick and cheap to demonstrate. Its claim to be a complete replacement for fossil fuels is based on solid and well proven technologies. Its not based on magical power, perpetual motion or unproven basic science research.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the leading contenders of wind/solar and nuclear are proving more and more problematic as their deployments increasingly expose their weaknesses. Its time to examine alternative options like StratoSolar

​By Edmund Kelly

A persistent theme on this blog has been that the practical limits of intermittent alternative energy sources like wind and solar would have to be broadly accepted before realistic alternatives (like Stratosolar) that can solve the problems will get a hearing. A series of recent publications have focused on the viability of wind and solar.

Mark Jacobsen’s 100% renewables paper as an example of the naivete of alternative energy researchers has been mentioned several times. Unfortunately, his research has been enthusiastically embraced by advocates for renewables and he has even testified as an expert before congress. However the plot has thickened. Recently, Mark Jacobson’s optimistic 100% alternative energy modelling has been challenged by a paper authored by many respected energy researchers with a more practical bent.  
The IEEE spectrum article  provides a good overview with links to the original Jacobson paper and the rebuttal paper. This rebuttal paper prompted a debate which hopefully raised awareness in a broader audience. Joe Rohm, a committed environmentalist, jumped in to back up Jacobson.  Schellenberger, a fan of nuclear power backed the rebuttal.

A recent article in New Scientist by Michael Le Page points out that renewables are not succeeding in replacing fossil fuels. Gains from wind and solar have been offset by losses from nuclear.

A paper from Jan Petter Hansen at the University of Bergen in Norway shows that at projected rates of growth for PV and Wind, resource modelling predicts they will top out in 2030 at a small fraction of what is needed to replace fossil fuels.

A key point here is these publications represent a debate among those who all agree on the threat of global warming and the need to eliminate fossil fuels. The papers represent a growing awareness of the problems with current wind and solar as a viable, complete replacement for fossil fuels. Hopefully this will create a more fertile ground for the evaluation of alternatives like Stratosolar that can realistically solve the problems of current solar energy and can be a complete, economically viable replacement for fossil fuels.
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By Edmund Kelly