A tipping point means that it’s more effective and less expensive than the alternatives, says Ray Kurzweil – inventor, writer, futurist, CEO of Kurzweil Technologies. He said he believes the tipping point for solar energy will come soon.
Solar power currently provides less than 1% of the world’s energy, but a panel of experts announced in early 2008 that solar energy is part of a sustainable future.
According to Kurzweil, solar energy is going to be economically attractive. ‘Even if particular organizations don’t care about the environment, they’re going to go with the least expensive solution. Solar energy has the added benefits that it’s renewable, it’s friendly to the environment, and we have plenty of solar energy. ‘We have 10,000 times more sunlight that we need to meet all of our energy needs,’ Kurzweil told EarthSky.
In energy, the tipping point is well defined – that is the cost per watt. Right now, using these old traditional solar panels, the energy per watt is 3 or 4 times more expensive than fossil fuels. But, solar energy cost is coming down, whereas fossil fuels are doing the opposite. And based on those trajectories, a crossing point where solar energy will be cheaper than fossil fuels is definitely within 5 years, maybe sooner, Kurzweil predicts.
Our thanks to Ray Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil is a world-renowned inventor and futurist, and the founder of many companies, including Kurzweil Technologies. He has been a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism.
I’d like to know if there is ongoing research and development in using bodies of water for the purpose in collecting solar energy.
I think it will be longer than 5 years before solar becomes the major player that it, ultimately, is destined to be. Although I am aware that it is starting to gain more consideration at the commercial/industrial level, it is still not a resource that is available “on-demand”, i.e., the power available at a given moment can vary widely from day-to-day and even minute-to-minute, so there will still need to be some other type to generation to provide reliable baseload power, as well as mechanisms that can adjust that baseload output in a timely fashion to compensate for short term fluctuations in solar generation.
This means that as long as solar is a minor component of the grid, say 5% or less, total energy from photovoltaics could fluctuate a fair amount, and the necessary adjustments to other generating resources could still be made, but if solar were, say 20-25% of electrical generation, it would make grid management much more of a challenge due to sudden drops in availability, e.g., due to fast moving cloud cover from an incoming storm system.
That is to say, the issue for development of solar beyond the status of “bit player” is not simply the raw cost of generation and/or transmission, but the costs of integrating it into a grid that requires stable generation over at least short time intervals, and a certain amount of redundancy in generation capacity so that when solar is not available (e.g., due to cloudy days) adequate capacity is available from other sources. Better controls cost money, and redundant capacity costs money, so barring extraordinary technological developments the “solar revolution” is likely to go slow until these issues are worked out.
J. Winker
Solar energy is not likely to become a major part of our energy future unless someone can rewrite the laws of physics. The sun provides a finite amount of energy to earth and only a small part can be captured as heat or electricity. In Arizona, there is work on a solar generating station being done. The unit will produce power for about 6 hours per day as the units cannot be reliably controlled for aiming. They must be stationary to be reliable. Another real problem is wind and sand. The parabolic mirrors used to focus the light on the heat collection apparatus must be as nearly perfect as possible. A little sand blown accross them and they are scratched and ruined. If dust or mud settles on them, they must be cleaned before being useful.
As of now, solar energy is a great idea for someone to reduce reliance on the grid or to cut an electric bill as long as one remembers that the payback period is several years and that the equipment requires maintenance and replacement. Large scale collectors have not proven economically viable as yet.
One development I read about, recently, which I think could have a huge impact here, is that the electric industry is just beginning to experiment with connecting power grids via Superconductors. What does this have to do with Solar Power?
J. Winker said, “. . .it is still not a resource that is available “on-demand”, i.e., the power available at a given moment can vary widely from day-to-day and even minute-to-minute. . .”
The Sun is always shining brightly *somewhere*. I see the potential that a worldwide “Superconductive Supergrid” will someday allow excess power from Sunny parts of the world to transport power to other parts of the world which need it.
That’s not to say I really think that Solar will ever (or at least in our lifetime) provide 100% of our energy needs, but a SuperGrid could go a long way towards making Solar be a much larger part of the mix.
I think that is still a ways off into the future, however, simply because research is still very much ongoing into high-temperature-superconductors. The SC Grid which I recently read about, is relatively small (it’s supposed to connect the grids in several South-Western USA states together), and it’s using a SC which needs to be, I believe, cooled with liquid nitrogen.
No power company would want to invest lots of money in expensive cooled conductors, I suppose, if someone is going to just come out with HTSCs in a few years which reduce the cost of building the SuperGrid by an order of magnitude because they don’t have to be cooled as much (or at all, perhaps). But, I think it’ll happen eventually.
While there’s no way to know at what rate progress will be made in making solar power a viable alternative, over the past few years I’ve gotten the impression that in the field of alternative energy generally — especially solar — there may be something akin to Moore’s Law at work. (If you’re not familiar with that “law,” Wikipedia has a surprisingly good but accessible entry at this URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law).
If my impression is anywhere near correct, then improvements will — and are — coming at ever faster rates, at least for awhile.
It’s also worth noting that in the variant of solar power that uses mirrors instead of panels there are some instances in which the quality control doesn’t have to be as precise as in others. Let me give two examples.
A student team at, let’s see, MIT built a parabolic reflector “disk,” but it wasn’t really a disk. It was curved lengths of mirrors — spaced apart, lowering the mirror’s cost. They used something cheap like PVC to make a frame. Then they held a news conference that was filmed (it’s on YouTube somewhere, or was) in which they provided a simple, but impressive, demonstration. They positioned the contraption just so, and a student stuck a length of wood up into the focal point. The board literally exploded in flame in a heartbeat. I’m not 100% sure I remember the temperature at the focal point precisely, but it seems to me their lab tests of the device showed it was in the 3,000-degree F range.
Next is a cooker various charities are handing out in the Third World. In its simplest, cheapest incarnation, it can be made with a box, some black paint, aluminum foil, and a sheet of glass. (More “upscale” versions uses metal boxes.) It’s not fast, but a person *can* prepare a cooked meal, if he starts early enough to have enough sunlight. Nor can he cook, say, a roast, as the temperatures are low — it’s really best for something like heating a thin piece of meat or thinly sliced vegetables.
Heck, I like to make tea by putting water and tea in a clear glass jug with a lid, then sitting it out in the sun an hour or so — works great.
Again, I may way off-base about this, but this impression has grown stronger over time, as I read more and more. I’m not a scientist/technologist/engineer, so I have to educate myself the best I can. I certainly *hope* I’m right.
We just installed an array of solar panels at our home in AZ. So far the conversion to solar energy has been effortless.