Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In2011solarpanelsmadeupabout10percentofnewadditionsintheelectricity mar-
ket. So if we maintain that rate over the next decade, we'll install at least another 200
gigawatts—enough to cover 40 million homes. As we discussed at the beginning of the
topic, some people believe this is a conservative estimate. GE chief Jeff Immelt thinks
IndiaandChinaalonewillinstall200gigawattsofsolarpower.Thesenumbersarebuoy-
inginvestorconfidenceinthefutureofsolarlikeneverbefore.Asnoted,solarwilllikely
grow even faster for one basic reason: economics are better for solar panels than for any
other electricity generator because the massive scale of their manufacture makes them
more affordable each year and because of new techniques that make them more power-
ful.
To give you a sense of the scaling effect of how rapidly solar power is growing, con-
sider these numbers: In 1971, when I was born, less than 1 megawatt of solar panels
was being produced each year globally. It wasn't until I was seven years old that we
crossed the 1-megawatt-per-annum production threshold. It took another five years, into
my tweens, to get to 10 megawatts-per-annum production. In 1997, the year I got mar-
ried, the world passed the 100-megawatts-per-annum marker in the production of solar
panels. In 2004 we had the capacity to produce 1 gigawatt (1,000 megawatts) per year,
and just six years later we got to 10 gigawatts of production per annum. By 2014 the in-
dustry expects to produce 25 gigawatts of manufacturing capacity of solar panels each
year. This is the equivalent of what two dozen of the largest-scale gas-, nuclear-, or coal-
fired power plants can produce, but these power plants would cost more, take years to
build, and require dirty fuel, whereas solar requires no fuel at all. Meanwhile, in January
2012Sungevityinstalled1megawattofsolarpanels—waymorefromasinglenewcom-
panyinasinglewinter'smonththanwasproducedeachyearbytheentireindustrywhen
I was born!
The rising cost of fuel is the Achilles' heel for Dirty Energy in the United States, and
costs will continue to rise. Coal—the worst of the bunch—is becoming more expensive
even though it's the most abundant. There are a number of reasons for this: In the United
States, the productivity of coal mines peaked in 2000 and has decreased rapidly since.
Most ofourcoal nowcomes from the Powder River Basin, in Wyoming, and parts ofthe
Appalachians. The eastern coalfields are largely tapped out, so we're going to have to
keep finding other sites to mine. Wyoming has a big transport bottleneck problem, and
the cost to transport coal out of the Powder River Basin is three times that of mining it.
This is due to the rising costs of the oil that the diesel locomotives need to haul the coal
trains. The net result is that the price of coal delivery to American power plants grew
three times faster than the rate of inflation between 2006 and 2011; therefore the states
most dependent on coal had the highest electricity price increases.
