The Math of Replacing Carbon With PV in 10-Years
The financial cost of electricity can be figured out. American homes use 24 kWhs a day on average, more in the South, less in the Northeast. Say a dime a kWh, over the 25 year warranty of PV panels is:
$0.10 x 24 x 365 x 25 = $21,900. That's the cost of doing nothing, business as usual. It also assumes no inflation or price increases for 25 years.
The cost of PV is currently price-fixed by a global cartel, and the market is rigged. Every so often somebody writes a book about it, and we have a 30 year track record of those books and magazines reports. A few examples from the past decades:
http://ScienceCop.info/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=TheSunBet...
http://sciencecop.info/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=TheCarbon...
http://sciencecop.info/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Cartel+So...
Rationally, the cost of PV is somewhat the same as the cost of beer cans and beer bottles, as they are made from the same starting raw materials and go through equally complex industrial machines and processes. Picture beer cans and bottles melted down to a puddle the thickness of a business card. How much materials is that?
Generously, with a fat profit margin built in, that solidified puddle one foot square should cost no more than 30 cents installed on the rooftop and making 12 watts of electricity each bright sunny hour.
That is of course not today's price. Chevron execs bragged that they made retail-ready PV for $1/watt several years ago. That would make that square foot of PV $12 at their manufacturing costs. The difference between $12 and $0.30 is 40 multiples of 30 cents.
There's a transitionary time between $1/watt and 30 cents a dozen. Stern intolerance of delays by corporations who have already delayed it for 30 years will shorten that transition time. The public must inform itself on how PV is made sufficiently to be able to make it if the corporations will not.
It seems terribly bold, but a PV casting furnace is the heart of PV. Seven wheelbarrows of sand processed yesterday becomes four wheelbarrows of sand then becomes 2 wheelbarrows of polycrystal PV cast ingots (12 cubic feet) in one 24 hour day in one furnace. The technology uses three expired-patent public domain processes.
http://h2-pv.us/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Bulk_Sand
http://h2-pv.us/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=4457903
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Like drug patents that expire, it is natural that the price will crash.
The incentive for businesses to enter the field are the high prices set by the price-fixer cartel. $3/watt PV would be bargains snapped up in today's market. That one day's operation of furnace consuming 7 wheelbarrows of PV can ultimately become 12 cubic feet of polycrystal silicon ingot that is sliced into 600 meters squared of PV cell wafers.
At a wholesale value of $1/watt in today's rigged price structure, one furnace makes $78,000 worth per day of wholesale product with small machinery investments and fairly low materials consumables costs.
Because this operation can happen in small compact spaces, the barriers to entry are few, and many small operations can begin in the not distant future. Even buying electric power for the furnaces at retail rates of 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, the daily power bill to crystalize 720 kilograms of silicon is only $864, to make $78,000 of product per day.
Theoretically extrapolating from these numbers it takes 4,317 furnace-days to make one square mile of PV cell surfaces. That would be twelve years for one furnace alone to make one square mile of PV.
Because the value is high and the price of materials is low the early adopters will profit fast, easily adding on more furnaces, and inspiring others to do likewise. One furnace making $78K gross per day would make $2,340,000 worth of product per month.
A minimal ten year goal would be 5,381 square miles of residential rooftops, every detached home in America.
While trees shade some and others have bad slopes facing the wrong way, just for argument purposes I am projecting the rooftop electric production of the 75,000,000 single family detached homes with average 2,000 square feet of roof surfaces. It comes out to the number above, 5,381 square miles.
If we know that it takes 12 furnace years per mile, we can compute the number of furnaces needed to complete the 5,381 square miles in different lengths of time. All this is 1st approximation and can be refined later for closer numbers.
There are 64,572 furnace years required to roof America in Blue PV. If there are multi-furnace operations, say 5 furnace per plant, then the number of businesses come to 12,915 if you want to complete the job in one year, or 2,583 if you want to complete the job in 5 years, 1,292 if the job takes ten years. That averages 26 factories per state spread over the country.
Each furnace costs like a Lexus, expensive yes, but they pay off fast.
Naturally the price must decrease as the supply increases, so that the last to enter the business do not make the fortunes of the early adopters.
78,000 watts daily production at $1/watt falling to 30 cents a watt, reduces the value per day to $23,400.
By the tail end of the gold rush when PV is a penny a watt in the cast ingot state, the value per day per furnace is $780/day. That's less than the day's electricity used to cost at a dime a kilowatt-hour, but then electricity won't cost that much to people who make PV -- for them it will be practically free. Somewhere before that moment there will be consolidation in the industry and larger operations will buy up or push out smaller players.
As long as there are millions to be made per month from operations not greatly different in scale from a Pizza Hut or dry cleaners, The independents can own the market.
So this is a rightwinger's dream of free-market enterprise, hardly something they can be against unless they are paid to badmouth it.
Here's the facts that you need to arm yourself against phoney argument that America will be in economic chaos.
Assume 2.5 cents/kWh in 2016 from universal PV.
Assume 5,381 square miles of residential rooftops = 75m x 2,000 sq.ft.
Assume each home uses 24 kWh/day, x 365 days x 75m/homes = 657,000,000 kWhs.
Assume all US homes have blue PV rooftops, which costs the same as the cheapest grade of composition asphalt shingles.
Assume 3,613,500,000,000 kilowatt hours total annual electricity production from residential rooftops alone. (75m homes x 2000 sq.ft/home. x 12 watts/sq.ft. x 5.5 peak hours average daily sun x 365/days per year).
https:/cia.gov/ciapublications/factbook/geos/us.html
Electricity - consumption: 3.717 trillion kWh (2004)
Total: 3.717 trillion kWh
Roofs: 3.6135 trillion kWh
These figures have not included the other 30 million housing units in apartment blocks and multifamily structures. Then start roofing the factories, offices, schools, stadiums, car ports over mall parking lots.
The only losers are those who bet on dirty pollution, and that is poetic justice the way it is supposed to be.
What's the cost? Everybody need a new roof anyway every 30 years or so, so 1/3rd is the cost that would have been spent. At 2.5 cents sq.ft. that saves $30,112,500,000 of the cost right off the bat. The balance of costs is $60.225 billion, a couple of month's of Bush-Exxon's Steal Iraq Oil War.
$60 billion divided by 300,000,000 Americans = $200. You pay $200 per person and never see a utility bill for the next 25 years. That's a dollar a day for seven months. Compare that to the $21,900 that the average family would otherwise pay in retail utility rates.
The production figures given, 3.6135 trillion kWh from PV roofs is not only residential. It includes EVERYTHING: all factories, all elevators, all malls, schools, streetlights, military, hospitals, weather radar, everything.
There is no financial collapses, no chaos. Just orderly making, selling, installing PV that creates thousands of brand new jobs. When the buildings are all blue rooftop PV there is ten times that amount of PV needed for the hydrogen side of H2-PV. The H2 part of H2-PV needs to start immediately as the PV part starts because energy storage makes PV more valuable. Without the storage we need carbon-power longer. Maybe put 30 factories per state, 50 factories. There's millions and millions of dollars to be made and people can start reaping the gold without delay.
Global Warming is called off. Make it happen in ten years.
Drop by http:H2-PV.us/wiki to learn more.
http:ecosyn.us PALACES for the People, H2-PV, PV-Breeders acres of PV, tons of Hydrogen
