In 1977, what price did Ralph Nader predict for solar PV energy by 2000?

I am scanning with amusement, Ralph Nader's 1977 book, "The Menace of Atomic Energy" (W.W Norton, NY 1977) where he makes oracular predictions about the energy future, including the year 2000 which occurred 6 years ago.

Sometimes we like to pretend that the debate about energy is a brand new thing, and that everything we are hearing today is being said for the first time.

Of course, in Ralph's defense, we had much less experimental evidence than we have now about the performance of energy systems. Few of us were aware of global climate change and other environmental issues. The United States was then the richest country in the world and not the poorest.

Ralph Nader commented on the "coming" solar revolution, and made some predictions about the costs associated with solar PV energy. He predicted a figure for 1985, nine years in the future as he wrote, and for 2000.

I invite you to hazard a guess on what Ralph predicted back in the days before he became a failed Presidential candidate - when he still considered himself an energy expert.

Actual figures for solar pricing can be found as always on the solar energy promotion site, www.solarbuzz.com.

NGU.

NGU.

a fascist corporate tool. He also glows in the dark and has three heads, I believe.

(I have no idea, BTW. Nor do I really care... :))

Edit: googling "nader prediction solar 1977" (I must be bored) lead me to www.psychicpathways.com/precognition.html. Curiouser and curiouser....

I sometimes get precog moments. Unfortunately, I never seem to get the useful ones, like what real estate property will increase in value or which stock offering will take off like a successful Moon launch. Of course I suspect that my guardian angel was previously a 19th century socialist and disapproves of greed on general principles.

Also I am able to supress my glowing while tooling around in the corporate office.

I have a third leg and its prehensile.

(This has no bearing, btw, on the poll or your answer.)

Ralph Nader and Kubrick's "Jack T. Ripper" share certain opinions that are generally not thought of as being rational, but on the contrary, are regarded by most people as more than a little crazy. General Ripper, of course, is a fictional character who raison d'etre was to reify insanity.

If you look into Mr. Nader some rather interesting peculiarities are striking. But Mr. Nader's mental state is neither the interest nor the issue here. The interest in comparing widely held beliefs in 1977 with those of 2006: Much of what Mr. Nader said in 1977 - he had great unquestioning press in those days and was thought oracular and saintly - entered unquestioned into urban myth and some of it remains in the common imagination today. Indeed I frequently hear Naderisms of all sorts stated as fact and repeated without any reference to whether they are true or not. Many people are unaware of the origins of Naderisms, or even that some of things they say are Naderisms.

Nader's most famous claim, that "Bush is the same as Gore," has increased suspicion of his rationality, as well it should. That one statement is, in and of itself, compelling evidence for insanity. It is the equivalent of remarking that the Empire State Building is mostly underground. However, in the light of this hallucinatory representation of Mr. Nader's in 2000, there has been no retrospective re-examination of Mr. Nader's other, historical claims.

One can still hear, for instance, the Naderism that "plutonium is the most toxic substance known." I have seen that particular statement written in the New York Times as if it were generally accepted fact. This statement arose wholly from Mr. Nader's rich imagination.

He isn't a George Bush, and certainly isn't a Tom DeLay or Bill Frist.

On edit: His name does rhyme with Darth Vader though. :rofl:

I generally stop at Republican. Where the question of Republicans is concerned, I have no theory of relativity.

On the subject of names, I note that when I was growing up, "Ralph" was another word for "chucking cookies," "barking at the pavement," "upchucking" "barfing" "retching" "blowing kisses to the china goddess," "bowing before the porcelain throne," "leaving a pavement pizza," and "retroshitting."

In this sense, my otherwise pathetic generation demonstrated some prescience.

I hope and I'm sure your generation will do better. ;-)

where the name Ralph is pronounced something like "Rafe" (as in Ralph Vaughan Williams, that is), and doesn't have this particular association (unless I'm mistaken).

I will, from time to time, be posting other 1977 predictions from the book to see how they fared.

How many US nuclear power plants have been ordered since 1977???

...and how much money did the nuclear lobby scam from taxpayers in the Energy Bill passed last year?????

...and in what year did Ronald Reagan and his GOP cronies eliminate all federal tax credits for domestic solar energy????

No technology that is truly useful is wholly dependent on the research of a single nation or for that matter, dependent on public funding of any single nation.

Although there have been some claims to the contrary recently from the right, neither the laws of physics or the laws of economics are determined by fiat and proclamation from the President of the United States.

I note that many nations have been able to develop industrial scale energy technologies without any outside help. Germany in the 1940's developed and constructed for instance, a Fischer-Tropsch infrastructure for the production of liquid motor fuels from coal, as did South Africa, more or less independently in the Apartheid era. The construction of these industries was unimpeded by the actions or inactions of Ronald Reagan or any other President of the United States. In fact, in the former case, a President of the United States was authorizing the bombing of the industrial facilities connected with this new energy industry.

I note that the 2003 research budget for PV power in Japan is 24,000 MJY, about $230,000,000 at the exchange rates that prevail as of this writing.

http://www.oja-services.nl/iea-pvps/nsr03/jpn.htm

In many countries, 52 years after the invention of the solar cell and 52 years along in its failure as a significant energy industry, the inclusion of solar PV research in a national energy budget is always a political winner. However we must recognize that solar PV production in the United States remains, as of 2003 at a wholly unimportant 0.061 exajoules.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/rea_data/table2.html

Such poor production should be a clarion call to all who care about global climate change.

That the solar PV industry, with all this good will and positive press, with more than 50 years of private and public funding, is still unable to provide a single exajoule of energy is a telling signpost on whether anyone should trust its ability as a tool in the ongoing crisis of global climate change.

Personally, if the solar industry can reverse its 5 decades of economic failure, I will have no problem with that. I will be pleasantly surprised and of course relieved. I merely assert that in the light, or if you will, the light of day, of the current emergency any attempt to rely on solar PV power is unjustifiable complacency. Such complacency may well be fatal to most or all of humanity.

An exajoule remains an exajoule and right now the world needs roughly 430 of them.

As always, when fossil fuel use has been eliminated, I will be happy to discuss the relative merits of the technologies that have replaced it. That day, however, remains as far off as it did in 1954 and as it did in 1977.

For now I merely assert the truth:

There is no such thing as risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy. That energy is nuclear energy.

It used consistent R&D funding and programmed subsidies to create a strong and growing market for PV that will supply 50% of Japan's residential electric demand by 2030.

note: the cost of residential PV in Japan is now $0.11-0.15 per kWh compared to $0.21 per kWh for power from the nuclear/fossil grid.

The US, on the other hand, done it the wrong way....

We listened to morans like Ronald Reagan (and the GOP RW) who concluded that solar was "liberal" and therefore could not work. Only poorly educated filthy hippie-type dreamers wanted solar - real men didn't.

So they cut federal PV R&D to the bone and eliminated federal solar tax credits to homeowners..and then proclaim "where is solar after all these years"...blah blah blah...

We will rue the day we ever elected them....certain.

With five votes, we can get this thread to the DU Greatest page and watch it really go :nuke:

To be truly irrational you'd have to say it would be free but I doubt anyone would be that dumb. There is after all costs associating with manufacturing solar cells.

By the way NNadir, I forgot to thank you for your complement on my phosphorus post last week. Not too many people think that I'm on to anything there.

I would like the cost in 1977 dollars. There are severalconverters on the internet that will give the cost in 2005 dollars (no 2006 yet).

Historical retail electrical prices, for interest, from 1960 to the present are available here: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0810.html

He'd have to expect the price of solar to be 1/6 to 1/10 the real price of electricity in 1977 terms. That simply isn't going to happen as anyone with half a brain could tell. Even if you mass produce the solar cells and put them on every spare surface in America you couldn't get that kind of price reduction. Just pure fantasy.

Compact fluorescents can do more to get billion dollar generating plants out of the rate base than can PVs. Same with appliance and building efficiency standards. good morning

That's why my house has mostly the new compact fluorescent bulbs and I really turn on the heat (truth be told I don't need heating or AC in San Diego). We need to improve build code standards if we want to save costs over the long term however no matter how much we conserve we will still need some energy and solar has proven itself to not be economically cost effective even after 50 years of trying and massive subsidies. It is time to give up the ghost on the solar utopia and search for real economically doable alternatives to fossil fuels in order to blunt the effects of global warming. That's going to mean hydro and geothermal where geographically possible (which is a minority of places in the US) with nuclear every where else. Certain areas are suitable for wind or solar and they can make up a valuable but small slice of total energy production. They can't economically carry the burden of most of the nation's energy needs though.

That's just the facts. Some people will opt to bury their head in the sand but in the end that is what we'll do or will just suffer the full effects of global warming.

I hate the typical solutions that always lead to generating plants, transmission lines (or pipelines), and an energy company at the center of it all, raping us for profits.

before we fix the source of the problem.
:eyes:

He might have predicted something like "too cheap to meter."

The reference is, again, "The Menace of Atomic Energy" by Ralph Nader and John Abbotts, Norton, NY, (copyright 1977) pg 245-246.



The italics and bold are mine, not Ralph's. Reference 48 is a 1974 statement from Dr. Paul Rappaport of RCA corporation in a hearing at the House Committee on Science and Aeronautics, US Congress, 1974, pp.41-42.

As noted elsewhere in this thread, it is important to compare inflation adjusted sums.

I will use this convenient calculator for comparing 1977 prices with 2005 prices, noting that calculator does not yet allow for the entry of 2006, which is sure to be a banner year for energy prices:

http://minneapolisfed.org/Research/data/us/calc/index.cfm

To avoid rounding errors, I will also multiply all prices by 1000 to get the price for megawatt-hour instead of the more familiar kilowatt-hour.

The price Ralph gave us was $10/MWhr in 1977 dollars for solar PV by 2000. In 2005 dollars this price is $32.11/MWhr or 0.0311 per KWhr. From www.solarbuzz.com we see that the actual 2005 cost of solar power is $214.40/MWhr ($0.2144/kw-hr), but we must note that the solar cell cost is actually retail because the generator - the owner of the solar system - will be paying delivered retail prices, not busbar (at the generating source) prices. According to the Energy Information Agency, the delivered residential retail average cost for electric power in 2005 was $94.10/MW-hr.


http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/epm_sum.html#three

(This means that given the high end costs reported by Ralph of $90.00/MW-hr, 9 cents/KWhr, the price of electric power in real terms has fallen since 1977 at least in some places.) Thus in 1977 Ralph Nader predicted that solar power PV would cost roughly 1/3 of retail power prices today.

The cost, in mills (tenths of a cent) for various power generation strategies per year are given, by the Energy Information Agency here:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epaxlfile8_2.xls

Converting to dollars per megawatt/hour we see that the 2004 production cost (as always ignoring the external or environmental cost) for fossil steam power was $23.85/MWhr, for hydroelectric $8.69/MWhr, for gas turbines $50.10/MWhr, and for nuclear $18.26/MWhr.

Converting the 2004 dollars to 1977 dollars for the last form of energy, we see that the production cost for nuclear energy today is $5.86/MWhr, 0.586 cents/KWhr, or roughly half of what Ralph Nader predicted for solar energy in 2000 in 1977 dollars.

It is interesting to reflect on the cost of the research, as Dr. Rappaport estimated in 1974, that would reduce the cost of solar energy to 5 cents/kw-hr, $250 million dollars (1974 dollars). In 2005 dollars this would be about $982 million dollars. I note that over 1.2 billion dollars was spent on solar research in the just the 1990's by the United States government alone, and considerably more was spent in private industry and by public and private interests abroad. (Nor was this the first money spent on solar energy research. In the last year of the Carter administration, some $120 million - almost 300 million 2005 dollars - was spent on solar research.) The inflation adjusted cost of solar power is only now approaching the 1974 estimate for 1985 and the price is rising not falling. (Five cents in 1977 dollars is 19.74 cents in 2005 dollars.) Thus estimates for the return on investment for research in the solar technology have been overly optimistic.

I often note that solar energy is well suited to replace that natural gas capacity which is peak load capacity, available exactly at moments of highest demand: hot, sunny days. Since global climate change is now taking place, it would be helpful to have such peak load capacity available for immediate use. However, in the immediate future, history does not justify the expectation that the costs of solar power will be affordable by anyone but the wealthy in time to meet the ongoing catastrophe of global climate change.

The cost of residential PV in Japan is currently $0.11- 0.15 per kWh and declining.

Gee, how did they manage to do that??????

Thank you Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr and Jr and all the asshole Republican's in Congress for lacking the vision of President of James Earle Carter and abandoning renewable energy R&D.

Maybe we can bash Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome while we're at it too...(hey Rush et al. do it all the time).

If nuclear electricity is so cheap - why does the nuclear industry need $6 billion for a 1.8 cent per kWh production credit to build 6 new nuclear plants????

(clue: cuz they cost too much to build and operate otherwise).

:rofl:

If you are correct in your analysis, of course, the question will answer itself.

The best way for the solar industry to compete with nuclear is simply to produce energy measurable in exajoules.

If everyone in Japan finds solar power cheaper than its alternatives, there will be absolutely no problem getting 50 million solar roofs.

According to this link from a solar promotional site, the number of households in Japan having solar roofs in smaller than 50 million by a factor of almost 1000:

http://www.solarbuzz.com/FastFactsJapan.htm

Hopefully your prediction will be of better quality than that of Ralph Nader in 1977 repeating that of Dr. Rappaport in 1974.

n/t

another thread currently running, giving a measure of the scale of renewable energy in Japan.

I have also taken the liberty of including the total energy budgets for Japan as well as Denmark. Further I have given the figures for the total carbon dioxide releases for both countries.

Nuclear is therefore the clear "looser" and should be abandoned in favor of coal...

What nonsense.

LOL!!!!

Therefore it is of extreme political importance to stop the expansion of coal energy, given that global climate change must be stopped or we may all die.

Once again, there now, for the first time, is an organization that measures the external cost of energy: www.externe.info

Nuclear energy is the only form of energy that is scalable on a level with coal. What will be need to be done is to include the external costs of energy along with the internal cost, perhaps as a carbon, nitrogen oxide, heavy metal, etc tax. Many people have already recognized this worldwide and many exajoules of nuclear capacity are now under construction. Nuclear's advantages are so great that nuclear capacity will easily displace coal under these circumstances.

The third alternative is to "manage" the situation by tragedy. I suspect that many people in the first world, by the application of wishful thinking about renewables, are leading humanity to this point.

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The amount of coal used as part as a primary energy source in percentage terms has declined slightly since 1973, from 24.8% of primary energy in 1973 to 24.4% of primary energy in 2003.

In OECD countries, the share of coal has declined by a greater amount, in 1973 was 22.4% of primary energy and is now 20.5% of primary energy.

This data is freely available on the internet and can be found on pages 6 and 7 in convenient easy-to-understand pie charts in the document "Key Energy Statistics" which is provided by the International Energy Agency: http://www.iea.org/dbtw-wpd/Textbase/nppdf/free/2005/key2005.pdf

In absolute energy terms, where significant capacity is measured in exajoules, the use of coal has increased since 1980 by 32.4 exajoules. Seventy two percent of this increase or 23.4 exajoules can be attributed to just two nations, India and China. Another 7.7 exajoules of the increase was accounted for by the United States, a country that is inhabited by many anti-nuclear mystics.

Combined these three nations account for 96.3% of the increase in the use of coal.

Both China and India now have very active nuclear energy programs: India has 8 nuclear reactors under construction and has proposed another 24 of them. China has 2 new nuclear reactors under construction, 9 on order, and has proposed another 19 reactors beyond that.

In Western Europe, the use of coal declined by 3.0 exajoules. 29% of this decrease is represented by France which went nuclear in the 1980's. France now consumes less than half of an exajoule of coal. Almost all of the non-nuclear nations in Europe have seen their coal use either increase or more or less remain the same.

This information is also freely available on the internet and can be found here:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tablee4.xls

Because of my preference for SI units, I have converted Quads to exajoules by multiplying by 1.055.

The emergence of the Indian and Chinese economies has been an area of concern for all who care about global climate change. This has been a difficult ethical crisis because of the poor living standards of the majority of people in these countries, and of course, their huge populations. The Chinese and Indian commitments to nuclear energy show that they take these issues seriously internally, even though, unfortunately, they have bootstrapped their economic growth through the dangerous avenue of using coal. As their living standards rise, we can only hope that they will continue to move from the dangerous fuel, coal, to the safer one, nuclear energy.

World nuclear energy figures are reported in billion-kilowatt hours of electricity, a billion kilowatt-hours being a unit of energy. To convert this electricity to primary energy we assume that nuclear power plants have 33% efficiency. (This is what the IEA does, see page 59 of the Key Energy Data Report listed above.) When one does this, one sees using this table: http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table27.xls one can estimate that the primary energy capacity for nuclear energy has increased by about 20 exajoules. I note that nuclear energy managed this increase in production during a time when many people were actively agitating against nuclear energy as some people, albeit fewer in percentage terms, continue to do in spite of the extremely exigent emergency represented by global climate change.

Nuclear opponents still are hard pressed to produce a single exajoule from their loudly promoted alternatives. My perception is that mostly at some point they fall back on apologizing for and minimizing the risks of fossil fuels.

If indeed, nuclear energy is a "looser" (sic) than it seems to me, it is humanity that is losing. However I believe that the evidence shows that nuclear energy is a winner. It has thrived in spite of its critics.

Coal consumption by US electric utilities rose from 964 million tons in 2001 to 1115 million tons in 2004.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/page/special/feature.html

There are more than 100 new coal-fired power plants in various stages of development in the US - and only 13 measly little itty bitty nuclear plants.

King Coal clearly supplies more Mighty Exojoules to the US economy than Stupid Nuclear.

There is enough coal in the US to supply its needs for 250 years - or more!!!

But only enough stupid uranium in the US for 25 years at current demand.

Based on the stupidity of Moran Logic, King Coal is the clear winner and nuclear is the clear LOOSER!!!!

Down with Nuclear Power

And Long live the King - Coal!!!!!!

:rofl:

I have never seriously doubted this and have indicated as much in many posts noting that the renewable energy is unable to produce on its promises, the point of this thread.

I was merely pointing out the stupid logic of pro-nuclear anti-solar advocates...

"PV is currently not a significant source of energy and therefore can never be a significant source of energy."

"The energy technology that provides the "mostest exajoules" is the winner and must be advanced. All other energy technologies must be ignored"

This is just as stupid as claiming that advocating for renewable energy is advocating for "coal".

I have seen many posts where nuclear advocates are also advocates of wind power.

Wind power is renewable.

Therefore anyone who advocates for wind is a "coal apologist"...

blah blah blah....

change has been addressed.

Anyone who advocates something other than nuclear energy for this purpose is of course, free to participate in the demonstration of their energy on an exajoule scale.

So far, no such form of renewable energy - hydroelectric power excepted - has done so.

It's not like these supposed alternatives lack good will. People have been praising them for 50 years, but so far, 50 years of promises have not proved sufficient to even scratch the surface of the international disaster known as global climate change.

I very much wish the situation would change, as I favor all forms of energy that reduce global climate change risk, but I feel we all must be realistic. It's not a time for fantasy.

Impossible....and delusional.

:rofl:

"Reality" is that nuclear power plants require substantial fossil fuel inputs throughout their life and fuel cycles.

As a result, nuclear power plants release as much - or more - CO2 into the atmosphere as gas-fired power plants.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,15822495%255E1702,00.html

This is not a solution, this is a charade.

There is only one energy technology that can fight global warming: and that technology is solar based.

harrumph!

The global warming impact of nuclear energy has been measured.

As many times as the canard about the global climate change impact of nuclear energy is repeated, I can repeat this link:

http://www.itas.fzk.de/deu/tadn/tadn013/frbi01a.htm

The global warming impact of nuclear energy is less than 10% that of solar PV.

The more important difference between nuclear energy and solar energy remains that nuclear energy has produced energy on an exajoule scale.