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Energy Futures
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(Page 8 of 8)
Waste: Concerns have been raised about handling the heavy metals, such as cadmium, that are used to manufacture thin-film solar cells. In a 2008 life-cycle analysis, researchers at the Brookhaven National Laboratory estimated that toxic cadmium emissions from thin-film photovoltaic cells are 90 to 300 times lower than those from coal power plants.
Advantage: Thin-film solar photovoltaic cells produce no air pollution, create little or no noise, and require no fuel.
Disadvantage: Solar cell arrays supply energy intermittently and occupy a lot of space.
Representative example: In July 2008, Southern California Edison announced a $1 billion project in which solar thin-film arrays would be installed on 150 commercial rooftops, producing 250 megawatts at their maximum capacity.
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Shannon Love|11.14.09 @ 1:16PM|#
This is a good article but it overlooks the most important cost factor. It doesn't matter how much it cost to generate a watt of electricity at the generation source, it only matters what it cost to receive a kilowatt of electricity at the point of consumption.
A good example of this would the real world cost of electricity from a portable diesel generator. You could calculate how much the generator cost and the average cost of diesel but that wouldn't tell you how much a kilowatt would cost if the generator was located in the wilds of Alaska and all the diesel had to be flown in. Likewise, the cost of hydroelectric power has to include the cost of transmission from were geology dictates the dam has to be to the point of consumption.
Since weather-dependent generation cannot produce power anything close to 24/7/365, the cost per kilowatt at the point of consumption has to include all cost of increased transmission, any energy storage systems and (far more realistically) the fossil fuel and nuclear plants that will always have to be running in the background to take up the slack with less than a half hour notice.
Electricity is not a luxury and it is not something we can do without. A modern economy is basically just a system for using electricity to turn dirt into useful things. We have to have electricity when and where we need all the time. Weather-dependent generation cannot provide that and has such it remain a toy for the foreseeable future.
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