Sun Machines Essay from the Economist

Deployed S U N M A C H I N E S 

Solar, an energy source that gets cheaper and cheaper, is going to be huge

The Economist, Jun 20th 2024, https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2024/06/20/solarpower-is-going-to-be-huge?utm_campaign=r.data-newsletter&utm_medium=email.internalnewsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=12/24/2024&utm_id=2024096

A photovoltaic cell is a very simple thing: a square piece of silicon typically 182 millimeters on each side and about a fifth of a millimeter thick, with thin wires on the front and an electrical contact on the back. Shine light on it, and an electric potential— a voltage—will build up across the silicon: hence “photovoltaic”, or PV. Run a circuit between the front and the back, and in direct sunlight that potential can provide about seven watts of electric power.  This year the world will make something like 70bn of these solar cells, the vast majority of them in China, and sandwich them between sheets of glass to make what the industry calls modules but most other people call panels: 60 to 72 cells at a time, typically, for most of the modules which end up on residential roofs, more for those destined for commercial plant. Those panels will provide power to family homes (microgrids), to local electricity collectives (Virtual Power Plants), to specific industrial installations and to large electric grids; they will sit unnoticed on roofs, charmingly outside rural schools, controversially across pristine deserts, prosaically on the balconies of blocks of flats and in almost every other setting imaginable. Once in place they will sit there for decades, making no noise, emitting no fumes, using no resources, costing almost nothing and generating power. It is the least obtrusive revolution imaginable. But it is a revolution, nonetheless.

(Ed:

• Value of electricity in people’s lives is critical to survival, communications, transportation, health and comfort
• Financial Benefits (both grid supply expansion and demand reduction)
  • WIN: All customers and taxpayers receive reduction in electricity rate escalations as deferred future upgrades of distant new generation plants (nuclear, gas turbines, hydro).
  • WIN: Utility can defer future upgrades of delivery infrastructure (towers, poles, transformers, and wire gauge) as demand growth is reduced.
  • WIN: Microgrid owners may reduce utility payments to connection only ($36/month) and incentive participation of $2/kWh (about $600/year with complex rules).   US study “VPPs could help reduce annual power sector upgrade expenditures by $35 billion in 2030.  US study “deploying 80-160 GW of VPPs by 2030 could avert as much as $10 billion in annual new grid generator costs”
• Electric Vehicle and Vehicle to Grid (V2G) deployment is projected to grow annually by 30% in 2025
• This surge is driven by delivery of substantial financial benefits, grid reliability, efficiency, decentralization, aging grid infrastructure updates, sustainability, mitigation of and adaptation to climate change)