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

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

#311

Post by epistasis »

coryfklein wrote: post #265
epistasis wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a manager at a large power company for 30 years is both an advantage and a disadvantage. For the past 30 years, the energy industry has changed incredibly slowly, so ones expectations of what is possible in the way of innovation is far far lower than it should be. The "duck curve" that your friend is referring to will be solved in a variety of ways, from wind to storage to HVDC interconnects to the rest of the…

> Being a manager at a large power company for 30 years is both an advantage and a disadvantage. He is definitely biased against solar, but is acutely aware of the costs it presents to traditional power generation and definitely well qualified to comment on them.

Right, and my point is kind of that the entrenched energy interests have been wrong time and again about solar, wind, and now storage. As well as HVDC.

They don't understand these things, they see less than half of the equation because they don't want things to change, and they only see the problems and have no interest in solving them.

IT wasn't that long ago that they were saying that solar was impossible, or that wind would never be affordable.

They were wrong about that and they will be wrong about how difficult it is going to be to adapt to lots of intermittant renewable energy powering the grid. They will complain vociferously, and they may be able to talk about some of the difficulties, but we can't trust their perspective on the big picture.

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

#312

Post by adventured »

kragen wrote: post #194
gonzoflip wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask where you got your 3% because that number is very low compared to any number I have ever read? This Wikipedia chart shows annualized returns to be 10.47%. That is >3x your 3%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500_Index#Annual_returns

3% is an estimate of the rate of economic growth: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth As I said above, we should expect the market's long-run returns to be close to the rate of economic growth. It's true that stocks in the US in the 20th century dramatically outperformed that 3%. This is for three reasons: first, up to about 1975, the world's economic growth rate was higher than 3%, due to the Se…

GDP growth has no strict correlation to stock market returns. Why not? Because corporate profits (eg the S&P 500) can grow far faster than GDP, as they did from 2002-2014.

You should not expect stock market returns to mirror GDP growth. The S&P 500 is not strictly representative of US economic performance, which is precisely why the huge corporations did so well with the cheap dollar and significant global economic expansion while domestic locked companies didn't fair nearly so well.

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

#313

Post by gpm »

ssmoot wrote: post #294
jobu wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When storing a kWh costs $0.10, and there's also adaptive pricing to match supply and demand better, these problems will melt away. If the math and assumptions in this article are correct, then that's exactly the (wholesale) price point Tesla is aiming for with the Powerwall: http://cleantechnica.com/2015/05/09/tesla-powerwall-powerblo... There are a couple other (not yet released) energy storage solutions mentione…

It'd take over 1 BILLION Powerwalls to store half the daily usage in the US (using old usage numbers off Wikipedia). I wonder if there's enough raw materials to make that realistic. And how to you manage recycling, repair, replacement, end-of-life concerns for all those batteries on that scale? Not asking a sarcastic hypothetical. Genuinely curious. It's hard to wrap my head around numbers that big. For reference I u…

The number actually needed is a bit lower than that (I estimate half a billion), but the general question still stands.

Variable electricity needs already mean we use less electricity at night time [0]. Shift electricity expensive processes preferentially run at night to the day and using 80%/120% seems like a reasonable rough approximation. So we need 4,686,400,000,000 / 365 / 2 * 0.8 ~= 513,5780,822 kwh in the '12 dark hours'

Between current supplies nuclear hydro and wind we account for approximately 30% of electricity generation [1], on the assumption that electricity generation from these is constant, but can't be ramped up during the night, we get about 4,686,400,000,000 / 365 / 2 * 0.3 = 1,925,917,808 kwh. Leaving 3,209,863,014 kwh needed from storage, or 501,541,095 powerwalls.

[0] http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=13131

[1] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3

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

#314

Post by epistasis »

paulhart wrote: post #287
S_A_P wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can validate. The problem with electricity is that there is no large scale storage like there is for other forms of energy like NG and Crude. Until someone comes along and figures out how to store electricity, this will continue to cause grief to power companies. Power plants are really just options, if the price per kWh is at a certain point then it makes sense to spin up or take down a plant and generate power. Add…

Oncor solicited a study that showed that a mass install of Tesla Powerwall devices would be an economic solution to this problem [1], at which point all the generators lost their minds and lobbied the PUCT to prevent Oncor from destroying their market [2] (because of their position as a Transmission & Distribution Service Provider in the market, it would require a change in law for Oncor to be able to implement the p…

It's interesting to see the stark contrast between the naysayers that don't have information to back their claims (such as comments sibling to yours), and the people who have looked at current tech and made realistic assessments like Oncor and Brattle.

A lot of people are willing to make confident, but very wrong, statements based on out of date information. It serves to protect entrenched interests and stop competition, but I have a feeling that disruption is far closer than anybody is publicly saying.

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

#315

Post by jimmcslim »

epistasis wrote: post #225
coryfklein wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that is why it is a huge problem for the power companies It is a problem, but not necessarily in the way you may be thinking. Peak residential power usage is in the evening when solar isn't available. Power companies therefore end up spinning down coal and natural gas during peak solar, then just spinning them back up again as the sun begins to set. [1] So you haven't replaced the coal and natural gas plants, y…

Being a manager at a large power company for 30 years is both an advantage and a disadvantage. For the past 30 years, the energy industry has changed incredibly slowly, so ones expectations of what is possible in the way of innovation is far far lower than it should be. The "duck curve" that your friend is referring to will be solved in a variety of ways, from wind to storage to HVDC interconnects to the rest of the…

> In the future, coal is dead.

What about coking coal, for the production of steel from iron ore?

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

#316

Post by ryanmarsh »

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

$100 a month in the summer in Texas? You living in a shoe box in the panhandle or what? I spend $700 a month in August. Tell us your secret for real.

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

#317

Post by epistasis »

derefr wrote: post #275
pc2g4d wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price electricity differently through the day according to its scarcity and people might eventually adjust their routines to reduce evening usage.

That seems backwards. The aggregate preferences and habits of humans should be seen as an incentivizing force for the creations of new technologies, not the other way around.

That's like saying market economies are backwards. We need to match resources to people somehow, and markets are a very popular way to do that fairly and efficiently.

I'm not saying that markets should be unchecked but it's very strange to see such naked Marxism on this site.

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

#318

Post by kragen »

adventured wrote: post #312
kragen wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3% is an estimate of the rate of economic growth: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth As I said above, we should expect the market's long-run returns to be close to the rate of economic growth. It's true that stocks in the US in the 20th century dramatically outperformed that 3%. This is for three reasons: first, up to about 1975, the world's economic growth rate was higher than 3%, due to the Se…

GDP growth has no strict correlation to stock market returns. Why not? Because corporate profits (eg the S&P 500) can grow far faster than GDP, as they did from 2002-2014. You should not expect stock market returns to mirror GDP growth. The S&P 500 is not strictly representative of US economic performance, which is precisely why the huge corporations did so well with the cheap dollar and significant global economic e…

Your point that the S&P 500 represents large US companies, rather than all US companies, is well taken. Still, the process of centralization you describe (where most gains go to past winners) can't continue indefinitely; the S&P 500 companies (at least the ones in the US) can't account for more than 100% of US production.

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

#319

Post by richdougherty »

jhallenworld wrote: post #295
Analemma_ wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very efficient and it's a great solution overall; the only problem is there are only so many dams we can build, since each one requires drowning a valley.

Solution: swimming pool on the roof. http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672202/you-deserve-a-house-with...

The more sun, the more water in the pool. Win-win!

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

#320

Post by g8oz »

teraflop wrote: post #305
flo-g wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the grid connects (residential and commercial) across time zones, one generating for the next with no need of storage devices?

Maybe if we had room-temperature superconductors. For now, transporting huge amounts of electric power across many thousands of miles is very, very inefficient.

HVDC lines work very well even if they are quite expensive.
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