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Thin Film Solar Power - Cheaper than Coal ?
Posted by Big Gav on January 8, 2008 - 2:00pm in The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: cigs, nanosolar, solar power, thin film solar [list all tags]
Thin film solar company Nanosolar has now shipped its first solar panels, leading to speculation that the (direct) cost of solar power is now cheaper than coal (and falling).
The company also began an auction for the second panel produced, however this was cancelled by eBay because Nanosolar decided to donate the purchase price to charity. The third panel has been donated to the Tech Museum in San Jose, California.
While it is still too early to tell whether or not Nanosolar can meet their goal of selling solar cells at $1 per watt, the fact that the company has constructed a manufacturing plant and begun shipping the product to a paying customer (in Germany) is a good sign.
The first plant is reportedly capable of producing 430 megawatts a year of cells, which is a respectable amount compared to the total amount of photovoltaic manufacturing capacity currently in place.
Nanosolar's cells are made of Copper Indium Gallium Selenide (CIGS). They aren't the only company working in this area - competitors include Heliovolt and the struggling Miasole. Other thin film solar manufacturers are working with materials like Amorphous Silicon (a-Si) - for example Sharp, Power Film, XSunX and United Solar Ovonic - or Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) - for example First Solar. Konarka also sell "power plastic" (soon to be marketed in Australia by Skyshades) using "Graetzel cells" based on a thin coating of ruthenium and organic bipyridine molecules over a titanium substrate.
One potential issue to watch as manufacturing volumes are scaled up is the availability of the various materials that make up thin film cells.
Availability and price of Tellurium are already concern to analysts of First Solar, though there is speculation that copious amounts of Tellurium can be mined from deep sea ridges.
There appear to be similar concerns about availability of indium in particular (and to a lesser extent gallium) for CIGS cells, though as usual concrete data on total reserves for these seems to be in short supply as well.
Nanosolar's technology is reportedly capable of achieving higher efficiency rates (up to 19.5%) than are achieved with other thin-film technologies. However, these efficiency rates have only been seen under laboratory conditions so far. Mass produced CIGS solar cells usually have efficiency rates of 12%-15% – making them about half as efficient as their silicon PV counterparts.
The centerpiece of Nanosolar’s technique is a proprietary ink developed by the company, which is used to print the semiconductor of the solar cell. The ink is based on various proprietary forms of nano-particles and associated organic dispersion chemistry. Once it is deposited on a flexible substrate, the ink's nano-components align themselves via molecular self-assembly, creating a homogenous mix of nano-particles that ensure the perseverance of the correct atomic ratios of the elements involved even across large areas of deposition. This approach is extremely different from the traditional vacuum deposition processes where one effectively has to "atomically" synchronize various materials sources – a complex process, which significantly limits production efficiency.
The material on which the cells are printed is a highly conductive metal foil substrate . The metal foil is 20 times more conductive than the stainless steel often used in the industry. The company says this property enables major cost reduction on the solar cell’s thin-film bottom electrode. “A thin-film solar cell consists of an absorber semiconductor layer, sandwiched between the top and bottom electrode layers. If the thin films of a solar cell are deposited directly onto a highly conductive metal foil (as opposed to glass or stainless steel), then the bottom electrode gets much simpler because the substrate can do the job of carrying the current” – explained the scientists.
In conventional silicon solar technology, wafer cells are sorted into performance bins according to their electrical characteristics before the cells are assembled into panels. Nanosolar says that this sorting process may result in grouping poorly-matched cells, because cell transitions are created through scribing after they are already deposited on the glass substrate. In contrast, the company claims that their new approach optimizes the accuracy of cell-matching, resulting in better panel efficiency distribution and yield.
The main advantages of Nanosolar's technique are its relatively high speed and the highly precise manufacturing process. According to the company, its thin-film solar films are more than 100 times thinner than silicon-wafer cells and therefore, have correspondingly lower materials costs – between 10%-20% of the current industry standard per kilowatt. The "printing" technique is executed in a "roll-to-roll" manner, in which meters-wide and miles-long rolls of solar panels are created and cut to a desirable size, much like the way in which newspapers are printed at printing houses. As opposed to the method of processing separate wafers or glass plates, a roll-to-roll printing process can be maintained for the entire length of the roll, eliminating undesirable start-ups and other cycle overhead costs – a key advantage, according to the company.
If you want to transition to sustainable infrastructure and mitigate Peak Oil support Feed-in Tariffs. Germany's free-market system has had spectacular results.
Germany de-monopolized power generation. Hermann Scheer deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for that action.
Even if solar is a 100 times more expensive than coal. That is a minor difference. Solar is sustainable. People worry about payback. What is the payback of not having a lifeboat and needing one?
Distributed solar power generation provides economic communities with lifeboats.
what the heck, it's only money.
The odds of brownouts and blackouts from the monolithic grid is 100%.
California had them, NY had them, Oklahoma had them, etc....
What is the payback of having a lifeboat when you need one? At what price is it too expensive to stay alive?
DId I miss something in the paper today? we desperately need a lifeboat today so we'll pay whatever price, even if we don't have the money?
California power outages was manipulation.
NY has power today.
Are the lights back on in Oklahoma?
I did not quite understand the question?
If today is all that matters, thing are pretty OK.
The lights are back on in Oklahoma. Fortunately, after the ice storm, repair crews from surrounding states helped. I doubt that will happen after Peak Oil really sets in.
There was a really good summary of grid risks by Gail the Actuary.
can I have the date of when peak oil really sets in? tell me who wins the World Series that year too...or I suppose we won't have baseball then because they usually play at night. can we play baseball during the day?
the market is pricing in Peak oil right about now with high prices and people are starting to become interested in alternatives. global warming is also a concern. every time oil goes up I always hear how solar stocks go up. why is that? GM went down the other day when they announced the Volt would be put off for a little bit.
Solar power not only generates electricity during peak generation demand, it generates electricity on site during peak transmission demand. All blackouts due to high demand have occured during summer air conditioning peak, to date.
Avoiding the cost of the blackouts would have paid for the solar generation grids in places like Michigan, Ohio, New York, etc. Not just in California. It gets hot in the summer in the northeast, too.
We could have had solar power for free just by avoiding the costs of the blackouts.
On the issue of blackouts and solar; Grid-tie Solar will go down with the grid as the technical standards are currently written in the US. Grid-tie solar will help with the additional load on the grid during peak summer daytime demand. But will not function with the loss of the grid.
If you go solar grid-tie, at least go with a grid-tie w/battery back-up, then in-house solar can still function during the daylight even if the grid fails.
Some folks, out west, that install a pure grid-tie play will be disappointed that their AC will go down with the grid even if the sun is overhead.
FYI.
Grid-tied-solar if large remote solar arrays has the same failure mechanism as the grid.
That is not the result of the Feed-in Tariff. These are true economic lifeboats. They can easily operate decoupled from the grid to provide power at the point of need.
It is true that grid tie systems have to shut down in the case of an outage. This is to protect people working on the lines. But, it is not hard to include a switch that physically disconnects from the grid and allows stand-alone operation. You want to be sure you don't have loads that produce transients larger that the capacity of the array or that equipment could be damaged.
Chris
Amazingly, yes. In fact, an older friend of mine tells me she used to run over to Forbes Field after school to watch baseball. They would let people in free after the fifth inning. She was at Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, and saw Maz hit his walkoff homer.
Yup, believe it or not, the World Series was played during the day. And they let people in free after the halfway point.
The Yankees used to ride the train for three days when they played at St. Louis. Many of those players think that helped the team bond. They say planes have ruined baseball.
Leanan, Mazeroski's home run wasn't 'walk-off'. The Pirates finished batting in the bottom of the eighth and the Yankees went down in order in the top of the ninth. However, Joe Carter's home run in the bottom of the ninth in the 1993 World Series was 'walk-off' because it ended the game.
Bill Mazeroski's World Series Walk-off Home Run
Hello Leanan,
The best part of the story was how the 13 year old traded the ball back for two cases of beer--I bet his parents didn't find out about this deal until the brewskis were long gone! :0
Yes John we understand:
Capital is God, and The Free Market is the chosen path.
I read Ayn Rand when I was 16 also. Boy is Ayn Rand cool then!
You are a hero for being a complete azzhole!
Is that cool or what?
Ha! - I had a friend fairly recently read Rand for first time (he's in his 30's) - and he was all excited about her and her ideas, wanted to talk all about her, he wasn't very happy when I had the same response "yeah, read her when I was in 10th grade, thought she was a big deal with cool ideas, since I've figured out she was pretty much a nasty combo of libertarian and fascist"
it really amazes me that the "free market" has become as much of a religion as it has - despite the working model of hybrid socialist countries like those of Europe (esp. the Scandinavian countries)
besides, most of the calls for a "free market" seem to me just demands for no taxes on various corporations (or subsidies for them) - hardly a free market (as if such a beast could exist)
I've figured out she was pretty much a nasty combo of libertarian and fascist"
Libertarian National Socialist Green Party
http://www.nazi.org/
How can anyone be a Libertarian Socialist (let alone a Libertarian National Socialist) - isn't that a contradiction in terms ?
The Green part I can understand, even if Green generally tends to mean the "lower left" corner of the political quadrant nowadays - ecofascism seems to have a long tradition in Europe. But they definitely need to quit calling themselves Libertarians.
As for combining free market rhetoric with fascist ideas, I think thats called "neoconservatism" nowadays - its not really about free markets, its about power and control...
If you eat big macs everyday for lunch and dinner, and your doctor tells you you need to stop or you will have a heart attack, are you going to insist he provide you with the date you will actually have the heart attack before you stop eating them?
Brilliant, and quoted!
You have missed the point John15. Coal is massively subsized across the world through its ability to impose its externalities on the rest of the world. Remove this subsidy and renewables become viable.
what the heck, it's only money.
That is rather snarky from a man who can't identify a free market.
'even if solar is a 100 times more expensive than coal. That is a minor difference'
You don't have to be mad. but it helps!
I don't know what your electric bill is, but you must be seriously wealthy if you can contemplate paying 100 times that!
And BTW, making that a government subsidy instead of a direct payment makes no difference at all to the total cost.
Sorry about the 100 times. I was trying to make the point that payback is meaningless if the cost is complete social collapse cause by a collapse of the power grid.
In our use of solar collectors, is typically less than 7 years. We plan on a 30 year commercial system life. When solar harvesting really ramps to scale, I think that payback will become even better.
You assume that the people in power are looking (and seriously) at the long-term picture and not the near-term profits.
I'll give you a hint. They're not. If they were, climate change would scare the shit out of them. The US, and even nations who accept AGW as gospel truth, aren't that psyched up about it to cut all growth right now and pump everything into sustainable living.
And therein lies the flaw in your plan. Human nature. Don't worry, it sank communism and living peacefully too.
I do expect but am appalled at the lack of governmental leadership.
I expect a lot of people will build their own lifeboat.
"I expect a lot of people will build their own lifeboat"
Bill that takes time and money - we've been living on 18 acres for over a year and we don't feed ourselves yet! Tertiary Industry to Peasant is a big step, and there probably are more skills involved in the latter than the former.
If you are thinking of a lifeboat do it now!
I agree. The paradox about lifeboats is the more we make the more likely we will never need them.
The skills issue, "don't feed ourselves yet" is a critical one. But you have started the process of self-reliance. I think it would be good for TOD to promote a set of policies to deal with Peak Oil. My choices would be policies of self-reliance and community economic lifeboats:
Bill James- what you described is something akin to our invovlement in WWII. victory gardens are estimated to have supplied 40% of our vegetables.
What works is not necessarily new.
Militias are also not new. Generally not affective against armies, but armies require gas, horses or bicycles. They are not currently equipped for the last two choices.
What we have found in our experience is that it is easy not to use energy...
We have done away with all household appliances save the washing machine and use manual appliances instead. We only use one or two lights at a time, and we don't have TV reception out here.
Recent visits to my children over Christmas re-infoced that there is nothing worth watching on TV and that we are all overinformed with the views our corporate would be masters wish us to hear.
Our health and fitness has improved along with mental clarity and a feeling of wellbeing. I wholeheartedly support Sharon Astik and others call for millions of new farmers - although we don't feed ourselves completely we have produced many tonnes of spuds!!!
It is pretty amazing how many potatoes can be grown ;)
You know you don't just print the money and the solar panels fall out of the sky. If something costs a lot it means a lot of people have to spend time building things, digging in the ground, going to college to get advanced degrees and telling other people to do stuff all over the world to get what you want done.
Hmmm, this is how I thought that cartoon was going to end.
Heh, heh :-)
Bill,
as a German I'd like to add that unfortunately now we have an oligopoly with 4 big companies (RWE, E.on, EnBW and Vattenfall Europe) over here.
They keep raising prices all the time and there are rumors of ENRON-style manipulation of electricity prices at the energy market. Which prompts even secretaries of state to comment:
http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,525807,00.html (in German, you can babelfish it, "river and gas" is actually electricity and gas, and "current" is electricity ;-) )
The market here isn't as liberalized as it should be.
But the feed-in tariffs for alternative energy are a big breakthrough, I have to admit that. Scheer is a hero for making that possible.
Best regards,
J. Daehn, Hannover, Germany
I believe Scheer's Feed-in Tariff's and the German peoples rallying to it should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The proof is in the results. Germany added 4,000 MW of renewable generation in 2006. California's liberal subsidy approach added 242 MW of renewable generation in the last 5 years.
There will be issues with large scale manipulation of the grid and utilities. The transition from a regulated monopoly towards a distributed free market is likely to be long and sorted.
Thanks for the comment about Scheer as a hero. I do not think many people realize the scope and importance of the Feed-in Tariff accomplishment.
Well for me he is. I was just about to write "he saved all our (German) butts" (Er hat uns allen den Arsch gerettet). But time will tell if it suffices. Actually he and our Chancellor are featured in "50 people who could save the planet", available at the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jan/05/activists.ethicalliving
(was already mentioned in another thread).
Angie gets the longest coverage. But actually Scheer and the Greens should have gotten it.
Solar panels have sprung up all over the country side. Farmers seem to get the message. I haven't seen many in towns.
What a pity that you cannot get the fabulous Enercon wind turbines in the US. Their story is actually one of abuse of patents and the NSA spying out trade secrets (with German help):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enercon
http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg09891.htm
http://www.zeit.de/1999/40/199940.nsa_2_.xml
http://www.unibw.de/wow5_4/forschung/publikationen/ausgewahltearbeitenun...
The last link is from the University of the "Bundeswehr". Unfortunately only in German.
I have some concerns about Nanosolars product. I believe that the panels are only available to utilities and they are being very secretive about the product details. What is the life of these panels? Most manufacturers warrant their products for 20 years. A company that yields few details should be regarded with a measure of skepticism.
The NanoSolar "news" is pure PT Barnum. They can't make this stuff by the method they claim in any commercially viable quantities at this time. That is not to say that the approach will never work, but that the press release upon which all the reports were based is highly misleading creating the impression that they are much further along than they really are. This kind of hype ultimately does a disservice to a promising technological pathway. It will be many years before this promise if fullfilled. And believe me, 19.5% is not in the cards for this deposition technique.
My congenitally present shit-detector tells me that what you say is true. I would like some references -- it isn't enough to just assert that they are overstating their case.
Enough for what? References? Mine or theirs? These guys don't publish. Mine would be in "Applied Physics Letters" or "Progress in Photovoltaics". That is where my High efficiency CI(G)S results have been published. High efficiency CI(G)S devices are all fabricated via vacuum evaporation techniques. The very highest by a three stage process on Soda lime glass. The glass is important because it is a source of Na which has been found to be essential.
We have a team that is working on an ink jet "nano powder" technique that is nearly identical to the one used by NanoSolar. It is a very challenging approach. The advantage is that it could eventually be very cheap, but the trade-off is that the performance is very poor.
If you parse the language of the original press releases offered by NanoSolar, not the articles written by the Times or the Guardian, you will see that they didn't actually lie. They were careful about that. But, the fact is that they only managed to make a handful of modules. This is consistent with the fundamental problems associated with the approach which is a very poor degree of reproducibility. Read their web site. They try to make a virtue of the fact that they can "electrically match their cells". Well, this is actually a function of the fact that the performance is all over the map. They had to crank out many to get a few good ones.
Carefully read the self congratulatory press release. "the first commercial module to contain a cell that was deposited on an inexpensive foil substrate"... Notice that they used the singular. Leaving open the possibility that there was only one such cell in the entire module. I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of the cells in the module were fabricated with the much more mature vacuum evaporation processes.
This whole episode reads to me like the shipment of modules was a condition of this phase of their funding. A "deliverable". The press release is a rather standard procedure for meeting such a milestone, but to my way of thinking it was written in a manner that was highly misleading. Then, the Times picked it up and leapt to the conclusion that this was more than PR.
Normally, I wouldn't get involved in this sort of thing. But I believe that making these sorts of claims prematurely does harm to the technology. If it becomes firmly entrenched in the public's mind that this goal of <$1.00 watt has been achieved, any intermediate result, no matter how impressive is going to be met with yawns. The fact is that this approach will be very cheap if it can be made to work. But it is by no means clear that it can. And if it can, it is going to take a considerable amount of development work to make it real.
Thanks for this. Very informative. The kind of thing only an "insider" would know.
Interesting post - and why I am not looking at the future with rose colored glasses
it seems that nearly all technologies which show promise to help mitigate peak oil suffer from this:
"The fact is that this approach will be very cheap if it can be made to work. But it is by no means clear that it can. And if it can, it is going to take a considerable amount of development work to make it real."
this seems to apply to plug in hybrids (lack of good, inexpensive batteries with a long life and enough charge for a reasonable distance between charges) - to wind (storage and only-part-time issues, and of course nimby), to cleaner more efficient nukes (if pebble beds and breeders are so great, why isn't anybody building them?) - and of course to that great (future) savior, fusion (so far it doesn't work, we can't solve the engineering problems, horribly expensive to even build working models let alone producing plants)
add to this a (near) future world with shrinking resources (including money to pay for it all), and our ever working all these problems out BEFORE it all goes into the toilet, seems less and less likely...
SW;
Thanks for the particulars.
As far as 'Yawns' go, I am also continually amazed at how much of a YAWN even I seem to find for the enormous potential to actually offset Heating Oil, Natural Gas and Electricity Demand with the astonishingly simple outlay of a few million bucks per state to start getting Solar Heating up onto our rooftops. It's simple, can use a range of different materials, and a 4th grader could do the math that says this would save us a terrific amount of our energy demand.
What do you think of the prediction that even if one of the newer PV techs did bring the $/watt way down, that demand levels would pretty much guarantee that the delivered price is unlikely to shave by much, and will probably shoot UP if we hit any serious AboveGround bumps or FF downslides.
Any time someone tells me they're waiting for the price to fall, I tell them they might want to get a few Watts worth at US$5, in case that turns out to have been the 'cheap' price.
Bob
I automatically discount anything Nanosolar announces. I don't believe it. The company started out on the Toronto Stock Exchange listed as a gold miner with no output, morphed into a Vancouver Stock Exchange listed company as a gold miner with no output, morphed once more into a Las Vegas based gold miner with no output, then changed its name, bought a paint company, and began touting itself as a leading researcher in solar technology [yeah right]. So far, they have provided nothing but spin.
While I am not questioning their honesty, I don't believe them.
ImSceptical - What is your source for this information? Not a single element of it backed up by anything I can find online.
First off NanoSolar is a privately held company backed by venture capitalists, includign Benchmark Capital, Davidow Ventures, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, Jeff Skoll and OnPoint:
http://www.news.com/With-hefty-funding,-solar-start-up-takes-on-big-guns/2100-11398_3-6086151.html
http://www.benchmark.com/news/sv/2004/04_26_2004.php
http://www.nanosolar.com/investors.htm
I'm sure the gold/paint company has simply pulled the wool over the eyes of all these poor investors.
Beyond that they have received multiple grants and contracts from California and US Government agencies:
http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=47697
http://www.konarka.com/news_and_events/konarka_articles/2004/8_august/electronic_news/nanosolar_wins_darpa_award.php
http://www.nanosolar.com/AwardsReviews.htm
I'm sure DARPA and the US DoE just send millions over to paint companies.
If they were publicly listed, I would wonder if you were carrying a short position.
Would you be interested in helping get solar powered mobility networks deployed?
I haven't heard of that term before. Checking Google I found a reference to your project JPods.
Great concept! There was a similar proposal called SkyTran a few years ago which had a lot of similarities, but required a number of technological innovations to realize. Your design seems to be based around current technology.
What sort of help are you looking for?
I promote SkyTran and everyone making these efforts. Building a Physical-Internet is vital to mitigating Peak Oil. The cost is low enough, service and capacity high enough to attract drivers from cars.
Our technology is very simple. Integrate roller coaster mechanics with distributed collaborative computer networks.
Here are a couple of clips to show how simple the technology is: a Fox News Story and my niece pushing an occupied JPod. You can see rail upgraded between the two and how low the power requirements.
As for what we need help with, everything. We are building a distributed power grid, mobility mechanics, very large solar arrays, etc.... The great thing is there is a 65% cost saving to pay for the transition.
email me: bill.james@jpods.com
Mikeo, I may very well be wrong. Perhaps I'm confusing them with another company named Nano* which claimed to be building better batteries and solar PV. I believe their battery technology was slated [by them, anyway] for use in the Tesla.
For some reason I associated Nanosolar with this other company.
Do you have any references/further information on why you say they cannot make this work? I'm not saying there haven't been quite a few hokum stories but is there anything that physically stops it achieving the scale and performance claimed?
Just stop and think a moment about what they (we) are trying to do. For a photovoltaic device to work, you need to be able to create a high quality semi-conductor with a long minority carrier lifetime, few defects in the crystal lattice, and a long diffusion length. They are essentially trying to do this by grinding up the constituent elements into a very fine powder (That's where the "nano" comes from) mixing it with a solvent and and then spraying it onto a foil and heating it up. If you consider the phase diagrams of the elements involved, you need to try to fool mother nature somehow unless you want to end up with a film that is essentially crap. Under certain circumstances, if everything works just right, you can get this to work over small areas. But that doesn't make for a commercial product. Nothing that I have seen out of these people indicates that they have done anything more than made a whole shit load of relatively shitty films, cherry picking a few good ones and integrating them into a few modules to meet their contractual obligations for deliverables. I could of course be wrong, but that is my professional opinion and unless I saw some evidence, which they clearly have not demonstrated, I see no reason to believe anything other than the literal words they have released, not the NY Times gullible interpretation of them.
Thanks for explaining all this SW - its nice to have some feedback from someone working in the field.
Even IF Nanosolar could make solar PV panels at $1 per watt, I would recommend that they not sell much below the $5 per watt panel market price. Not only could they retain the profits for future expansion, but they would preserve the wafer based industry that is badly needed. What we need now are more panels, not a monopoly by one company.
Selling panels at say $3 per watt might sound good, but if you eliminate a whole wafer based industry, you might do more harm than you would think. Germany has provided incentives for PV and the market took off like a rocket. Now we need to sustain that momentum, not destroy it.
Demand relationship to price may not be what people think. If you can cut the panel price per watt at the retail level in half, you may not see twice as many watts sold year over year.
I know this is not what some people want to hear, but the consequences of actions should be fully considered before making hasty moves.
"Thin Film Solar Power - Cheaper than Coal ?", asks the title of the keypost.
That such a question can even be asked is evidence of the massive strides made by solar engineers over the last decade.
And the cartoon is pure genuis! :-)
RC
Yes, it's a danger. Suppose someone comes up with a solar cell with a 7-year halflife which sells for a lot less than silicon PV. The short-term nature of human thought and business cycles could give those a huge advantage since the threshold for putting them in place would be lower, but they might be a worse choice than more expensive cells that last longer.
When you throw in the reliance of this process on indium and tellurium, etc, it gets a bit dodgy. That wouldn't be a problem in a niche product, but it could be if it attracted a preponderance of investment.
Almost any startup is forced to make extravagant claims simply to survive in business. That's not a criticism of these guys, but unless they're saints they will be subject to this reality.
Still, good luck to 'em. There must be a lot of ways to get energy from the sun. Whatever happened to quantum dots? Rhetorical question, I can google it if I want to.
I love the low-tech of CSP with steam storage for baseload. You could nearly maintain that on 19th-century technology. The problem with needing large supplies of trace metals like this, is that you wind up requiring a manganese-nodule mining infrastructure in place as an integral part of the process. High-threshold stuff like that will not be around in the future.
Here is an article about storing heat in sodium for use at night.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22527591/
This with pumped hydro could make 24/7 renewable possible.
The cartoon is out of date. Big oil don't own the oil any more, they own about 10% of it. The rest is in the hands of national oil companies, most of whom don't have a clue what they are doing. Hence the shortages.
Also why all this fuss about price. all fossil generated electricity is going to soon be very expensive indeed, as well as very polluting.
"The rest is in the hands of national oil companies, most of whom don't have a clue what they are doing. Hence the shortages."
riiiiiiiiiiight - it's all those damn foreigner's fault! it's OUR oil, and they just can't pump it fast enough!
couldn't have anything to do with geology could it?
btw, I have heard nothing but "well-managed" about Saudi Aramco - so the largest producer is doing a fine job, there just isn't enough oil to go around for rising world demand AND SA, Russia etc. all have increasing internal demand to deal with - hence the shortages
so much more fun to blame somebody else for the problem though isn't it?
I think from a layman's point of view "big oil" could mean the NOCs as well as the 7, ooops - make that 4, sisters.
Anyway - its not meant to be literally true - "big oil" doesn't own the coal or uranium mines either. Maybe "big business" should be the title.
The dream of solar panels (be they PV or thin film) is that you buy the things and become "energy independent" - no more reliance on the coal / oil companies for your power / fuel (once you have an EV as well) and some utility company.