Solar Farms Without Subsidy Sprout From Gloomy Britain to Italy - Bloomberg

[Peace Piper]

Neuhardenberg Solar Power Plant, Germany

Solar Farms Without Subsidy Sprout From Gloomy Britain to Italy

At least 15 projects in Europe are planned on the basis that government support won’t be needed to profit

Bloomberg.com | Anna Hirtenstein | September 9, 2018

Next to a wheat field north of London, banks of solar panels in 35 neat rows are generating electricity without any support from the government.

Despite Britain’s reputation for grey skies, the closely-held developer Anesco Ltd. is building the hybrid solar and battery facility in Milton Keynes with its own capital. It’s just one of about 15 photovoltaic projects underway from Italy to the U.K. that aren’t relying on subsidies to make a profit, according to Bloomberg NEF, which anticipates many more to come.

European nations are leading the way because they were among the first to back solar farms with above-market power prices and tax breaks in the early 2000s. That triggered a global manufacturing boom and 80 percent plunge in the cost of installing photovoltaics. Now, governments are cutting incentives as prices drop, and renewables are competitive with fossil fuels in more places.

“The change has come about because many governments believe that support is no longer necessary for the mature technologies which have seen significant cost reductions,” said Michelle Davies, head of clean energy and sustainability at the law firm Eversheds Sutherland LLP. “They take the view that the sector is sufficiently advanced to enable the market to find its own solutions.”

In Germany and Spain, incentives in the form of feed-in tariffs for solar electricity made it easy to anticipate how much each project would earn. That gave investors and bankers comfort enough to write loans to the industry.

Now, developers are starting to build plants that don’t rely on those mechanisms. Their costs are low enough that they can profit from selling power at the market price or by arranging a long-term power-purchase agreements, or PPAs, with big industrial consumers. Seeking a greener energy footprint, companies from AT&T Inc. to Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc. have been prominent buyers of PPAs. Those arrangements are used as security for banks lending money for construction costs.

“Corporate PPAs will be a key tool,” said Matt Setchell, head of energy at Octopus Investments Ltd., a renewables investor in London. “Clearly subsidies aren’t going to be around forever.”

In Italy, Octopus has five solar projects totaling 64 megawatts that don’t rely on support. The country’s MPS Capital Services Banca per le Imprese SpA partly funded those plants with 23 million euros ($27 million) of project finance. The developer will build more solar farms across 12 sites in Italy a total capacity of 110 megawatts...snip

...As more subsidies are abandoned, developers will tune into the wholesale power market, where prices have been rising in recent months. European benchmark rates for power have more than doubled since a trough in early 2016, reflecting higher costs for natural gas, coal and the carbon-emissions permits utilities must buy to burn fossil fuels...more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-subsidy-solar

Related: Chinese Solar Giant to Make All Its Panels With Just Solar Power

Bloomberg.com | Chris Martin | September 26, 2018

In a first for the solar industry, China’s Longi Green Energy Technology Co. plans to produce all of its panels using solar power in as little as three years.

President Li Zhenguo moved factories to areas of China and Malaysia that have access to hydropower in recent years -- and away from China’s coal-heavy manufacturing zones -- to make Longi’s production process more sustainable.

“For the future, we will build solar for solar,” Li said in an interview at the Solar Power International Conference in California. “We can do this in three to five years.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...st-solar-power

A Hydrogen Drone inspects a huge solar farm in China

[Zippyjuan]

Now, developers are starting to build plants that don’t rely on those mechanisms. Their costs are low enough that they can profit from selling power at the market price or by arranging a long-term power-purchase agreements, or PPAs, with big industrial consumers. Seeking a greener energy footprint, companies from AT&T Inc. to Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc. have been prominent buyers of PPAs. Those arrangements are used as security for banks lending money for construction costs.

“Corporate PPAs will be a key tool,” said Matt Setchell, head of energy at Octopus Investments Ltd., a renewables investor in London. “Clearly subsidies aren’t going to be around forever.”

Are the companies buying the energy getting government subsidies to do so? If so, the solar companies are getting an indirect subsidy.


https://www.vox.com/2018/5/30/174086...subsidy-europe

Now this doesn’t mean the training wheels are off, nor that renewables are now on the “level playing field” that every energy company claims to want but can never agree on.

For starters, “subsidy free” is a squishy term that doesn’t have a standard definition. What these projects in Europe have in common is that they aren’t getting governments to pick up a chunk of the retail cost of the power they produce. However, countries are still providing some of these projects support in the form of research and development, renewable energy mandates, manufacturing tax breaks, and so on.

So the recent project announcements don’t quite refute the claim that renewables can’t survive without subsidies. (It should be noted that fossil fuels have long received and continue to benefit from subsidies around the world.)

[Swordsmyth]

How much of a regulatory burden are the conventional/nuclear power plants under?

[Schifference]

How long before the conclusion is that solar panels are harming the world and adversely affecting climate? All that warmth from the sun that would be warming the earths thermal mass is now being diverted to solar panels.

[Zippyjuan]

How long before the conclusion is that solar panels are harming the world and adversely affecting climate? All that warmth from the sun that would be warming the earths thermal mass is now being diverted to solar panels.

What about all those houses and highways and buildings preventing the sun from reaching the ground?

[Schifference]

Everything has an affect. We just don't know how solar will affect the planet. Hydro changes water and causes issues. I am sure harvesting the wind also has an impact. It won't be until we are dependent on solar and wind that we will find out how it is negatively affecting our planet.

[pcosmar]

Everything has an affect. We just don't know how solar will affect the planet. Hydro changes water and causes issues. I am sure harvesting the wind also has an impact. It won't be until we are dependent on solar and wind that we will find out how it is negatively affecting our planet.

We were dependent on them. until other Cheap and available fuels were exploited,,, rather than developing and improving existing technologies..

I have long thought the Industrial Revolution was a mistake,, (or at least poorly handled)

Technology at present can bring those power sources back.. it is simply harvesting..

[Zippyjuan]

Everything has an affect. We just don't know how solar will affect the planet. Hydro changes water and causes issues. I am sure harvesting the wind also has an impact. It won't be until we are dependent on solar and wind that we will find out how it is negatively affecting our planet.

They occupy a totally insignificant percent of the planet's surface. And wind turbines don't resist the wind like trees do.

[Schifference]

My point is that once people are utilizing "Green Energy" scientists will report how the use of such green energy has an adverse effect on us. Everything people need/use must be controlled by the government. If we need or use something it must have an adverse affect on our planet.

According to Newton, the two forces are called action and reaction forces and are the subject of Newton's third law of motion. Formally stated, Newton's third law is: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The statement means that in every interaction, there is a pair of forces acting on the two interacting objects.

The government will find a way to tell the masses that Solar Panels are harming the earth worms or the stroxlymphosis of the lmyschiotic reaction.

[pcosmar]

My point is that once people are utilizing "Green Energy" scientists will report how the use of such green energy has an adverse effect on us. Everything people need/use must be controlled by the government. If we need or use something it must have an adverse affect on our planet.

According to Newton, the two forces are called action and reaction forces and are the subject of Newton's third law of motion. Formally stated, Newton's third law is: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The statement means that in every interaction, there is a pair of forces acting on the two interacting objects.

The government will find a way to tell the masses that Solar Panels are harming the earth worms or the stroxlymphosis of the lmyschiotic reaction.

Science and Pseudoscience.. there is a difference..

[Zippyjuan]

Despite Britain’s reputation for grey skies, the closely-held developer Anesco Ltd. is building the hybrid solar and battery facility in Milton Keynes with its own capital.

Average sunshine there:

January 2 hours a day
February 3
March 4
April 5
May 6
June 6
July 7
August 6
September 5
October 4
November 2
December 2 hours of sunshine a day

[Swordsmyth]

Everything has an affect. We just don't know how solar will affect the planet. Hydro changes water and causes issues. I am sure harvesting the wind also has an impact. It won't be until we are dependent on solar and wind that we will find out how it is negatively affecting our planet.

While wind power undoubtedly beats fossil fuel-powered energy in environmental measures, large-scale wind power deployment could cause rising temperatures, a new study by Harvard researchers suggests.
While wind power reduces emissions, its climate impacts—if wind plants were to generate 100 percent of U.S. electricity demand—are not negligible, according to Harvard postdoctoral fellow and first author Lee Miller, and to David Keith, the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and senior author of the paper.
The researchers modeled a scenario in which wind power were to provide all the present U.S. electricity demand and covered one-third of the continental U.S. with enough wind turbines to meet that demand. Using a standard weather-forecasting model, the researchers found that this scenario would warm the surface temperature of the continental U.S. by 0.24 degrees Celsius, with the largest changes occurring at night when surface temperatures would increase by up to 1.5 degrees. Wind turbines actively mix the atmosphere near the ground, which causes the warming.

More at: https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-N...-Suggests.html

[pcosmar]

I wish we could harvest Lightning..

There are enough natural lightning strikes every year to entirely power the nation..

I have trouble imagining a storage facility that could absorb a single strike.

[Swordsmyth]

I wish we could harvest Lightning..

There are enough natural lightning strikes every year to entirely power the nation..

I have trouble imagining a storage facility that could absorb a single strike.

[pcosmar]

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/e...ers/lightning/

Cloud-to-ground lightning bolts are a common phenomenon—about 100 strike Earth’s surface every single second—yet their power is extraordinary. Each bolt can contain up to one billion volts of electricity.

If it could be harvested and stored.. But it is clear that the Energy is there. in abundance.

[Schifference]

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/e...ers/lightning/


If it could be harvested and stored.. But it is clear that the Energy is there. in abundance.

It would be discovered that the earth actually needs the lightning bolts and attracts the lightening. Taking the energy for consumption would disrupt the normal earths electrical polarity deep within its core. This would then cause the Earth to alter its orbit. Or something to that effect. Lightening has a purpose and you cannot mess with it.

[VIDEODROME]

Couldn't elevated solar panels just have a mirror system to reflect some light under them to compensate for any effect that results from them blocking the sun in a certain area? Or just space them out to let the sun pass between panels? There problem solved and we have clean energy.

We could also be putting panels on building roofs that block the sun already.

As for Windmills, it sounds like that is a Night Time effect so if they're disabled at night, problem solved. Maybe if we're efficient enough, some energy harvested during daytime hours could be stored.

[AZJoe]

Instead of the centralized power generation with massive miles of fields of solar panels and and upon thousands of kilometers of power cabling for the transmission and distribution network,
I like the small consumer end point solar or wind generators which can be placed on rooftops or affixed ot houses. But that of course allows people to be off grid and free from dependence on centralized utility companies.

[Schifference]

Instead of the centralized power generation with massive miles of fields of solar panels and and upon thousands of kilometers of power cabling for the transmission and distribution network,
I like the small consumer end point solar or wind generators which can be placed on rooftops or affixed ot houses. But that of course allows people to be off grid and free from dependence on centralized utility companies.

The problem with the homeowner model is storage of the electricity. It might be more efficient to use the solar to produce hydrogen and use that as needed. All I know is batteries are very expensive and need replacing.

[AZJoe]

The problem with the homeowner model is storage of the electricity. It might be more efficient to use the solar to produce hydrogen and use that as needed. All I know is batteries are very expensive and need replacing.

The storage problem applies to giant centralized solar and wind farms as well, but on a scale massively larger and requires a massive distribution network. Storage is an issue but easier to accomplish on small scale consumer end point, and eliminated the necessity of gargantuan distribution and transmission networks.

[angelatc]

European nations are leading the way because they were among the first to back solar farms with above-market power prices and tax breaks in the early 2000s.

if there was actual value, the market would have done it with no subsidies. Socializing the losses and now privatizing the profits is something that you should be embarrassed to brag about here.

The left is bat$#@! crazy.