Grid tied inverters here at retail for under $1 a Watt. Around 95% efficiency
too.
http://www.grid-tie.com/Xantrex-GT-Inverters.html
Those systems are kilowatt level or less. Imagine a local grid
supported by 3,300 MW of conventional power plants. Add a 1 kW solar
panel to it. The person designing the solar panel and attaching it to
the power grid, doesn't really have much to consider
Now, lets assume this is a place like Pennsylvania where due to
weather you can't get more than about 4% of your energy from sunlight
if its tied to the grid. That means that about 40% of your power will
be coming from sunlight on the sunniest days. (we're not assuming
storage, just direct intertie which is highly efficient) The intertie
designer has a lot more to consider in maintaining grid stability -
especially if his peaking plants take minutes or more to respond, and
only account for less than 40% of your power. And this is only one
diseconomy of scale. There are others.
I'd expect larger capacity units to be less expensive and it seems pretty clear
to me that as a very large customer you would be paying no more perhaps than
30-40c a watt
Sure, if all you were doing is installing the same intertie a million
times to 1 kW generators, but at some point you start actually
producing enough to affect more than your power meter. At some point
you start actually changing the load of the entire grid to such an
extent that you have to account for changing lighting conditions
throughout the day due to weather and time of day. Since these
conditions can change in seconds and affect huge amounts of power
generation, they have to be accounted for in the intertie system - and
paid for as intertie costs.
My approach is to focus on cost and make hydrogen the ultimate
intertie, and as long as I sell heating value at less cost than it
costs to buy it from carbon sources, I've beat the carbon sources at
their own game, I'm making a profit, and I'm well situated to dominate
the market, not merely make tiny inroads to it.
It seems YOU are the one with prejudices here actually.
That might hold water if I hadn't spent something like $400,000
studying direct intertie and had a team spend months looking at it and
pulling their hari out. Efficiency was only ONE of MANY criterion - a
more important one being profitability, and market dominance. When
you start looking at doing everything with solar, you quickly come
upon some diseconomies of scale that you need to address. Then once
you've addressed them, you then choose, what's the quickest, least
risky, path to dominance. And the answer is, hydrogen.
There are other paths - in fact there is a path I call Genesis
planet. You put an array of solar collectors in the sunnieset areas,
and you build HVDC lines to connect them all to load centers - cities,
towns and so forth. Each person has a demand curve for energy that
they go through each day, and that is modulated throughout the year
with season. This is a function of time, longitude and latitude.
So, you can take population distribution and plug in this demand
function with time for that population and get demand for the planet
consuming power as an average US citizen say. Then, you take all the
insolation data, combine that with your panel costs, land costs (which
goes down the further you get from population centers! haha), and
transmission costs - and you can calculate an optimal array of
networked panels and intertie that exactly meets the needs of the
planet. Excepting to meet the needs without any brownouts, you need
to have oversupply at certain times. What do you do with the
oversupply? Short it out, or shut it down. You can make fertilizer
with it. You can make hydrogen with it.
Then the question becomes, what do you do with the hydrogen? Remember
this is Genesis planet, everything is solar - tied to panels. Even
the cars tied to the solar grid - like slot cars, or electric trains,
or trams or magnetic coupling.
So, even Genesis planet isn't as efficient as the physics suggest,
because when you install the panels and grid and switches onto the
real Earth with the real population here - you end up shorting out
about 30% of your produciton. Which doesn't effect cost that much,but
is sure as hell is a lot of waste! Then, if you look at actual losses
in long distance HVDC lines - the idea of using hydrogen as the medium
(the famous (in our offices) solar proton and solar electron debate!
haha)
So, yeah, we looked at a lot of things - very seriously - and hired
the best and brightest to do it. The detailed results are
proprietary. But our game plan is clear.
Especially when you go beyond just the distribution of people and
sunlight and start to factor in the availability of other energy
systems, the possiblity of growth, and so forth - and you find that
there is a least risky, least costly path - which unfortunately
relegates home panels to second or third teir status in the developed
economies, and first or second tier status in developing countries,
depending on where they are. But in terms of market dominance,
developing countries isn't where the money is, or where the energy is
used. Its needed, but not used.
So, the game plan is clear. Dominate the hydrocarbon fuel production
with solar assisted hydrogenation of low rank low value fuels. With
those profits create an integrated oil company from a collection of
remarketers and appropriately located coal mines. Then use the
hydrogen distribution system that supports this operation to fuel
stationary power plants, taking stranded fuel in trade. Then, use the
hydrogen distirubtion system along with your retailing operation to
sell hydrogen directly to mobile users.
Meanwhile, with 60 GW a year production,rising to 1,400 GW per year in
a few decades, 2 GW per year rising to 160 GW per year of solar panels
will be sold for remote applications, mostly in developing regions.
Also, an increasing number of panels at central locations will be
shipping electrons instead of protons into a national and then
international HVDC power grid - supplying up to 20% of all our energy
needs in the best case - in the most developed nations.and another 4%
of our energy in these same places will be in homes offices and
factories that are off grid altogether.
