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The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

electrek.co

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Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#111

Post by krschultz »

warmwaffles wrote: post #107
ChuckMcM wrote: post #103

The aggressiveness of the price drops on solar is pretty amazing. I just lost one of the inverters on my grid-tie system after it had run trouble free for 13 years. So we're looking at the first "major" repair to the system I installed in 2003. And in 2003 my 5.2kW of panels on my roof cost $38,000 before subsidies and $19,000 after. 28 panels, two 2.5kW inverters, net about 4.2kW of generation. I priced out replacin…

How long until you start seeing a return on investment? Right now my electricity bill for my home is ~100 a month in Texas. I would need to keep the same panels without maintenance fees for 33.33 years by your price point of 40k

Payback of 6 years with the new cost, even for your low electric bill.

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#112

Post by IkmoIkmo »

vonmoltke wrote: post #3

This article is making a really big deal out of bids . While the trend is encouraging, let's wait and see if the winning bidders can actually deliver at the prices they bid before getting too excited.

Agreed.

Now, I actually DO think they can deliver at the prices. But that doesn't mean solar prices dropped by 50%.

Imagine this: you've got a business opportunity for a 20 year contract. Currently it costs you $10 to run per year, but that will drop to $6 after a few years, and drop further to $1 per year in the last 10 years.

Where will it be priced? Well if I said say $5, then most would agree that makes sense. After all, your average cost will probably be something like $3 a year, so locking in the rate at $5 means you're making a profit. In fact, you'd expect others to outbid you until the price approaches the average cost of $3. But let's say it ended up priced at $5... well a journalist might say 'prices dropped by 50% this year'. When in reality, prices will drop over the next TWENTY years, and 20-year contracts reflect that expectation. Solar prices today are still $10 today, not $5.

Of course these are just made up numbers. Point is, even if companies can deliver at this pricing, it's mostly a reflection of expectations of future prices, not today's prices.

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#113

Post by tlrobinson »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #66
d_theorist wrote: post #45

This might seem like a weird thing to complain about, but am I the only person who is sick to death of headlines of the form "X just did Y"? It's the "just" I object to. It seems to be some sort of trend over the last couple of years. I think it's to make it seem more dramatic or something. It just happened! My god! In this case it is especially ridiculous, since the article describes something that happened over the…

I came in here to complain about this same thing. Just implies a timeline much shorter than 16 mos.

That depends on the timeline you're comparing it to. If previously prices dropped 50% over 10 years*, then 16 months seems pretty damn fast.

(I have no idea what historical prices of solar panels were)

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#114

Post by michaelbuckbee »

warmwaffles wrote: post #107
ChuckMcM wrote: post #103

The aggressiveness of the price drops on solar is pretty amazing. I just lost one of the inverters on my grid-tie system after it had run trouble free for 13 years. So we're looking at the first "major" repair to the system I installed in 2003. And in 2003 my 5.2kW of panels on my roof cost $38,000 before subsidies and $19,000 after. 28 panels, two 2.5kW inverters, net about 4.2kW of generation. I priced out replacin…

How long until you start seeing a return on investment? Right now my electricity bill for my home is ~100 a month in Texas. I would need to keep the same panels without maintenance fees for 33.33 years by your price point of 40k

I've been trying to do this calculation myself. One factor I hadn't initially put in was the fact that I didn't need to think about a backup generator for our (east coast) storms.

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#115

Post by DamnYuppie »

Detect wrote: post #54
mrfusion wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or do both! Grow mushrooms under the panels.

Raise panels up a bit and can graze animals underneath them too.

Cows would tear them up pretty quickly by rubbing up against them. Not saying they couldn't be re-enforced but I just wouldn't stick em out in a field with livestock.

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#116

Post by saalweachter »

dpierce9 wrote: post #18
tim333 wrote: post #4

Pretty impressive. They need to work on cheaper batteries now.

Batteries would be great but they are not necessary unless you want to replace all generation with solar which would be a gargantuan undertaking. As part of the current generation stack, even at expanded scale, solar works very well without storage.

You can also just change the definition of off-peak electricity.

The coal grid already provides cheaper electricity at different times of day, because it's not efficient to turn coal plants on and off. Right now that cheaper electricity is at night, because most electricity consumers consume during the daylight hours. So if you need a boatload of electricity and aren't too sensitive about the time, you can shift you consumption to the off-peak hours and save some money.

But if you're not time-sensitive in your consumption, you can shift to the sunny daylight hours, when solar power is available. And if you're really not time-sensitive in your consumption, you can even shift consumption from cloudy days to sunny days.

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#117

Post by SwellJoe »

nashashmi wrote: post #34
SwellJoe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of farmland and ranch land in the US that shouldn't be farmland or ranch land. They're too dry, too hot, and competing for water resources with people and natural (sometimes endangered) ecosystems. So, maybe it's something that should be encouraged; the food those farms and ranches produce would need to be replaced by food grown in more appropriate climates, and we'd need to rethink our recent "local fo…

Hah! Only if dictatorship could ordain things to be done so correctly. Unfortunately we live in a capitalistic democracy.

Are you sincere in your belief that only a dictatorship could lead to more environmentally responsible agriculture and land use in the US? It seems like trolling, but if you're sincere, I could point you to some references on how our current laws reward irresponsible water and land use in many cases. There are many things a "capitalistic democracy" (if that's really what we are living in, which I also think is debatable) can do, and many things that are already being done, to guide how land owners utilize their land. The unintended consequences of current agricultural and water-use law in places like some parts of California, which have experienced more years of drought than years of normal rainfall for more than a decade, have been pretty significant. Government at local, state, and federal levels, have helped create the problems I'm talking about, so why shouldn't they be able to help alleviate them?

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#118

Post by stale2002 »

jmcgough wrote: post #80
alex20 wrote: post #48

And here in the USA some states are punishing solar customers who sell their energy, by taxing them on infrastructure costs, to protect the big energy companies. Their reasoning for taxing them is to "maintain the lines and equipment". The counter-argument to that is, "customers who consume pay taxes and fee's to maintain the lines, and on top of that, the government is giving them tax breaks to help "maintain the li…

My gf is an electromechanical engineer at a solar power startup (and obviously supportive of solar power initiatives). Just asked her about this, and she said that: 1) the electrical grid wasn't designed for transferring power this way, and it can damage the grid 2) because solar power isn't a constant power source (say, a cloud blocks the sun for a minute), power companies need to keep power available for someone wh…

Solar power REDUCES peak grid usage; it does NOT increase it.

When do you think solar power is producing the most electricity? In the afternoon on a hot summer day.

When do you think peak grid electricity usage peaks? In the afternoon on a hot summer day!

Solar power helps get rid of the peak electricity usage problem. If anything, power companies should be paying solar users even more, because they are reducing costs for the power company, not increasing them.

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#119

Post by rayiner »

alex20 wrote: post #48

And here in the USA some states are punishing solar customers who sell their energy, by taxing them on infrastructure costs, to protect the big energy companies. Their reasoning for taxing them is to "maintain the lines and equipment". The counter-argument to that is, "customers who consume pay taxes and fee's to maintain the lines, and on top of that, the government is giving them tax breaks to help "maintain the li…

In most places, power companies pay to build and maintain the grid, not the government with taxes.

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#120

Post by SwellJoe »

retbull wrote: post #76
hooloovoo_zoo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar panels might get in the way of them using their farm equipment if they're close together.

If you completely ignore repairing and paying for the automation you hypothetically could build a farm where the solar panels were on arms that would pull them out of the way of the tractors/combines or whatever.

I wonder if the weight of solar panels would prevent them being mounted on a wheeled device like the rolling irrigation systems used on many farms? Those are pretty robust and don't break frequently or require much maintenance; in the case of solar panels, they wouldn't even need to move frequently (so no need for permanent motors on them; you could just hook them to tractors or trucks and tow them out of the way). Though, there would need to be a lot more of them, and moving a bunch of them for harvest time or other stuff that required them out of the way would take a lot of time.
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