{"id":11573,"date":"2014-11-30T11:38:25","date_gmt":"2014-11-30T16:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/?p=11573"},"modified":"2014-11-30T12:00:14","modified_gmt":"2014-11-30T17:00:14","slug":"bloomberg-notices-solar-now-cheaper-than-all-other-forms-of-energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/bloomberg-notices-solar-now-cheaper-than-all-other-forms-of-energy.html","title":{"rendered":"Bloomberg notices solar now cheaper than all other forms of energy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\r\nWhat Jon Wellinghoff predicted a year ago is starting to filter\r\n\r\n\"300x199<\/a>\r\ninto the news media: solar is going to win, and very quickly.\r\nWelcome to a sunny world!\r\n

\r\nTom Randall, Bloomberg, 29 October 2014,\r\n\r\nWhile You Were Getting Worked Up Over Oil Prices, This Just Happened to Solar<\/a>,\r\n\r\n

\r\n

\r\n\r\nAfter years of struggling against cheap natural gas prices and\r\nvariable subsidies, solar electricity is on track\r\n to be as cheap or\r\ncheaper than average electricity-bill prices in 47 U.S. states\r\n— in 2016, according to a Deutsche Bank report published this\r\nweek. That’s assuming the U.S. maintains its 30 percent tax credit\r\non system costs, which is set to expire that same year.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n<\/a>\r\nEven if the tax credit drops to 10 percent, solar will soon reach\r\nprice parity with conventional electricity in well over half the\r\nnation: 36 states. Gone are the days when solar panels were an\r\nexotic plaything of Earth-loving rich people. Solar is becoming\r\nmainstream, and prices will continue to drop as the technology\r\nimproves and financing becomes more affordable, according to the\r\nreport.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nThe graph shows blue bars for net solar savings per kilowatt hour of electricity\r\nin each state.\r\n

\r\nIn the detail below you can see that Georgia, Alabama, and Florida show positive 1 to two cents per KwH by 2016, which means they’re all probably already net positive right now at the end of 2014.\r\nAnd that’s with a federal tax credit of 10%, rather than the current 30%.\r\n

\r\n\r\n\"600x518<\/a>\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\nHere’s the best graph from that article:\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\n
\r\nSource: EIA, CIA, World Bank, Bernstein analysis\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nThe rapid plunge of solar prices is rightly terrifying to electric utilities\r\nand fossil fuel companies, as their cozy century-long baseload-capacity business models<\/a> are already being disrupted by distributed solar power and their nuclear and fracking glut LNG export boondoggles are being exposed to sunlight.\r\n

\r\nThe rest of us see a sunny day, with lower electric bills, true energy independence, and jobs right here where we need them<\/a>. Let the fossilized grip of the utilities melt from our political system as the sun rises!\r\n

\r\nThe Bloomberg writer tries to project solar growth forward:\r\n

\r\n

\r\nSolar will be the world’s biggest single source of electricity by\r\n2050, according to a recent estimate by the International Energy\r\nAgency.\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\n2050 is way too pessimistic.\r\nSolar deployment\r\n\r\ncontinues on track<\/a> to meet former FERC Chair Jon Wellinghoff’s\r\nprediction last year that\r\n\r\nsolar will overtake everything within a decade<\/a>,\r\nto produce more power than any other U.S. energy source.\r\nThat would be by 2024.\r\n

\r\nAnd it’s not just the U.S. Less developed countries are likely\r\nto ramp up solar even faster, from\r\n\r\nBangladesh for connecting places with no electricity at all<\/a>\r\nto\r\n\r\nChina with the biggest renewable energy investment in the world\r\nand a new climate change deal with the U.S. to back it up<\/a>.\r\n

\r\nThen the Bloomberg writer misinterprets the evidence before his very eyes:\r\n

\r\n

\r\nCurrently, it’s responsible for just a fraction of one\r\npercent.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nBecause of solar’s small market share today, no matter how quickly\r\ncapacity expands, it won’t have much immediate impact on the price\r\nof other forms of energy.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nLet’s use Wellinghoff’s analogy:\r\n

\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\n“If a single drop of water on the pitcher’s mound at Dodger Stadium\r\nis doubled every minute”, Wellinghoff said, “a person chained to the\r\nhighest seat would be in danger of drowning in an hour.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nIt’s not like we haven’t all seen this before, and recently:\r\ncomputers, the Internet, smartphone, tablets.\r\nMany of us now have in our pockets a supercomputer faster\r\nthan could fit in a room a decade ago.\r\n\r\nSolar power will win like the Internet did<\/a>,\r\nand\r\n\r\nfor many of the same reasons<\/a>.\r\n

\r\n\r\nRemember four years ago when\r\n\r\nArizona State University said\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\n Georgia ranked #3 among states\r\nthat could benefit most from solar power<\/a>?\r\nWell, that’s still true: for local use to lower bills and shut down coal plants\r\nwithout any need for new nukes or fracked methane “natural” gas,\r\nand for solar electricity export to other states, generating local jobs<\/a> both ways.\r\n

\r\nThe sun is rising on Georgia, the southeast, the U.S., and the world.\r\n

\r\n -jsq\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What Jon Wellinghoff predicted a year ago is starting to filter into the news media: solar is going to win, and very quickly. Welcome to a sunny world! Tom Randall, Bloomberg, 29 October 2014, While You Were Getting Worked Up Over Oil Prices, This Just Happened to Solar, After years of struggling against cheap natural […]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14,19,6124,104,559,6687,24],"tags":[1061,3906,398,8704,785,8701,8709,2498,8702,12,7,562,8737,8782,6076,29,8714,6],"class_list":["post-11573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-history","category-natural-gas-2","category-nuclear","category-oil","category-pipeline-2","category-solar","tag-bangladesh","tag-bloomberg","tag-china","tag-economy","tag-ferc","tag-georgia","tag-history","tag-jon-wellinghoff","tag-lake","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-natural-gas","tag-nuclear","tag-oil","tag-pipeline","tag-price","tag-solar","tag-valdosta"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-30F","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11573"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11585,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11573\/revisions\/11585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}