Solar ENERGY production in the United States in March 2018.
Often in this space we hear how "falling solar prices" are driving the coal industry out of business.
Because I find this rhetoric annoying and delusional to the point of toxicity I decided to look up how much solar energy was produced in the United States in recent times. The data is reported at the EIA website and can be found here:
EIA US Electricity Browser (Accessed 06/09/18).
It shows the entire output of the entire United States for solar energy, with the latest data figure being March of 2018.
In March of 2018 US solar, residential and utility scale combined produced 7513 thousand MWe, which translates to 0.027 exajoules of energy. World energy demand was, as of 2016 for the entire year, 576 exajoules, and will surely be higher this year.
In terms of average continuous power, the entire solar industry produced in the entire United States 10,483 MW of power.
The Navajo coal plant in Arizona has been killing Native Americans, with their active acquiesce and, indeed, enthusiasm, since 1974. It's power rating is 2,250 MW. The capacity utilization of coal plants is on the order of 80%, second only to cleaner and far more sustainable nuclear plants, which typically run at capacity utilization of greater than 90%. For generations native american miners have been laboring in the Kayenta coal mines to feed that plant. They're worried they're going to lose their jobs.
It follows from the above numbers, - people buying into the so called "renewable energy" scam are very, very, very, very, very poor at numbers - that if the Navajo coal plant operated at 80% capacity utilization, producing average continuous power of 1800 MW, all the solar plants combined in the entire United States produced less energy than six coal or gas plants the size of the Navajo coal plant.
The United States has 844 plants capable of running on coal.
Actually, since solar energy requires the operation of redundant systems it could be free and still not be "cheap" depending on the external and internal cost of back up systems which are always required, since it is widely reported that an event called "night" happens once in every 24 hour period almost everywhere on the planet, with the possible exception of areas inside the arctic circles. (Our habit is to ignore external costs - the costs paid by human and other species flesh, and the cost to the destruction of environment. This is precisely why solar energy is often described as "green." )
Boilers at coal plants cannot be thermally isolated, since boiling water by definition implies heat exchange. Thus if one shuts a coal or gas plant of the increasingly prevalent combined cycle type because the sun is shining, it follows that one must waste energy to bring cooled water back up to its boiling point under pressure.
By the way, as I noted elsewhere, a great hullabaloo has been raised about the fates of uranium Dine (aka "Navajo" ) miners. Many books have been written about them. By contrast nobody gives a shit about black lung disease or other health effects related to the jobs of native American miners at the Kayenta mines that supply the Navajo coal plant.
In the link immediately above, I analyzed the entire death toll of all Dine (Navajo) uranium miners from radiogenic cancers:
Now.
I am an American. One of my side interests is a deep, if non-professional, reading of American History. Often we Americans present our history in triumphalist terms, but any serious and honest examination of our history reveals two imperishable stains on our history that we cannot and should not deny. One, of course, is our long and violent history of officially endorsed racism, including 250 years of institutionalized human slavery. The related other stain is the stain of the open and official policy of genocide against Native Americans: There is no softer word than “genocide.” Both episodes, each of which took place of a period on a scale centuries, were policies with open and “legal” sanctioning of the citizens of the United States and their “democratic” government, and were often justified by some of our most educated and influential leaders. I cannot reflect on my country without reflecting on these dire facts. I am not here to deny the role that genocide played in our history, and I note with some regret that the last people born within the borders of the United States to achieve full citizenship rights – this took place only in 1924 – were the descendants of the first human beings to walk here, our Native American brothers and sisters.
Still, one wonders, was hiring Dine/Navajo uranium miners yet another case of official deliberate racism as the pile of books in the Firestone library strongly implied?
Really?
A publication[51] in 2009 evaluated the cause of deaths among uranium miners on the Colorado Plateau and represented a follow up of a study of the health of these miners, 4,137 of them, of whom 3,358 were “white” (Caucasian) and 779 of whom were “non-white.” Of the 779 “non-white” we are told that 99% of them were “American Indians,” i.e. Native Americans. We may also read that the median year of birth for these miners, white and Native American, was 1922, meaning that a miner born in the median year would have been 83 years old in 2005, the year to which the follow up was conducted. (The oldest miner in the data set was born in 1913; the youngest was born in 1931.) Of the miners who were evaluated, 2,428 of them had died at the time the study was conducted, 826 of whom died after 1990, when the median subject would have been 68 years old.
Let’s ignore the “white” people; they are irrelevant in these accounts.
Of the Native American miners, 536 died before 1990, and 280 died in the period between 1991and 2005, meaning that in 2005, only 13 survived. Of course, if none of the Native Americans had ever been in a mine of any kind, never mind uranium mines, this would have not rendered them immortal. (Let’s be clear no one writes pathos inspiring books about the Native American miners in the Kayenta or Black Mesa coal mines, both of which were operated on Native American reservations in the same general area as the uranium mines.) Thirty-two of the Native American uranium miners died in car crashes, 8 were murdered, 8 committed suicide, and 10 died from things like falling into a hole, or collision with an “object.” Fifty-four of the Native American uranium miners died from cancers that were not lung cancer. The “Standard Mortality Ratio,” or SMR for this number of cancer deaths that were not lung cancer was 0.85, with the 95% confidence level extending from 0.64 to 1.11. The “Standard Mortality Ratio” is the ratio, of course, the ratio between the number of deaths observed in the study population (in this case Native American Uranium Miners) to the number of deaths that would have been expected in a control population. At an SMR of 0.85, thus 54 deaths is (54/.085) – 54 = -10. Ten fewer Native American uranium miners died from “cancers other than lung cancer” than would have been expected in a population of that size. At the lower 95% confidence limit SMR, 0.64, the number would be 31 fewer deaths from “cancers other than lung cancer,” whereas at the higher limit SMR, 1.11, 5 additional deaths would have been recorded, compared with the general population.
Lung cancer, of course, tells a very different story. Ninety-two Native American uranium miners died of lung cancer. Sixty-three of these died before 1990; twenty-nine died after 1990. The SMR for the population that died in the former case was 3.18, for the former 3.27. This means the expected number of deaths would have been expected in the former case was 20, in the latter case, 9. Thus the excess lung cancer deaths among Native American uranium miners was 92 – (20 +9) = 63...
...On the other hand, roughly 7 million people will die this year from air pollution.[52] Of these, about 3.3 million will die from “ambient particulate air pollution” – chiefly resulting from the combustion of dangerous coal and dangerous petroleum, although some will come from the combustion of “renewable” biofuels. Every single person living on the face of this planet and, in fact, practically every organism on this planet is continuously exposed to dangerous fossil fuel waste, and every person on this planet and practically every organism on this planet contains dangerous fossil fuel waste...
...Seen in this purely clinical way, this means that all of the Native American uranium miners dying from all cancers, 93 lung cancer deaths and 54 deaths from other cancers, measured over three or four decades, represent about 23 minutes of deaths taking place continuously, without let up, from dangerous fossil fuel pollution.
The modern equivalent of coal miners are the miners for the material intensive so called "renewable energy" industry. This mining is a toxicological nightmare but we couldn't care less. Most of the miners who will suffer the health effects of this latest affectation are overseas, particularly in China. Most of the people who will die from recycling this garbage are also overseas, living in the poorest places on earth.
We couldn't care less.
I wish you a pleasant Saturday afternoon.
= new reply since forum marked as read
...of an asinine "renewable energy" advocate by confusing units of power - usually in a misleading bit of scamming among the so called "renewable energy" peak power is represented as if it were average continuous power - with units of energy.
It's a typo and you are correct, the unit should be MWh not MWe. However the calculation itself is correct (since the calculation was in fact done using the correct unit and not the typed unit), and the average continuous power of all solar facilities built in the United States after half a century of cheering is roughly 10,000 MWe.
Note that it is essential to understand that this power may or may not have been available at a period of peak demand, which on most US grids is around 4 pm in the afternoon.
Moreover any power produced by this toxicological nightmare requires a redundant system, which is never reported when the big lie that solar energy is cheap is told.
If I need two systems to do what one can do, the cost of both systems should apply, especially if the economic and thermodynamic efficiency of one is degraded by the operation of the second, which is precisely the case in the solar/gas nightmare.
In percent talk, after 50 years of hype, solar remains trivial, particularly because the most environmentally and economically sustainable practice of energy production will maximize capacity utilization.
I could say "SOLAR ENERGY GREW BY 600%" if I'm a liar and I use the percent talk of 0.67 to 2.35. Unfortunately on the planet in its entirety, the growth of solar and wind combined has been 1/10 the growth of coal in the 21st century, as I frequently report with reference to 2017 World Energy Outlook. Coal grew by 60 exajoules in the period between 2000 and 2016, where as the entire solar and wind industry combined totals less than 10 exajoules, having grown in the same period by close to 6 exajoules.
Solar and wind capacity has been hyped for half a century and remains what it has always been, trivial. I note that the solar cell was discovered in Bell labs in 1954, three years before the first commercial nuclear plant came on line. Here's an ad from that era hyping this failed technology:
This is why nuclear power is environmentally and economically superior to solar trash, particularly when one considers the lifetime of the systems. Twenty to 30 years from now, all of the solar crap on this planet will be nothing more than electronic waste, and babies born today will face the challenge of disposing of the massive amounts of material generated for no sane or safe reason.
Nuclear energy has a history of scale up that has been demonstrably faster than all the bullshit handed out about solar energy for the last 70 years, beginning in the early 1950's.
I note even in "percent talk" the nuclear industry has been providing approximately 20% of US electricity for several decades. Were it not for our cultural hatred of science and engineers, that number could have been much greater.
But we do hate scientists and engineers, right and left. We don't trust them and we don't believe them.
If the trillions of dollars squandered on solar and wind were instead devoted to nuclear energy - a cleaner and safer and readily more scalable source of energy than solar - infrastructure would be built to last 60 to 80 years.
Since we don't give a shit about future generations, we're perfectly OK with this state of affairs.
We are morally vapid. History will not forgive us, nor should it.
Thanks for your note of correction. Have a nice evening.