Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap
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Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap
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Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap
#2nice application of the learning curve, a model taught in strategy and operations courses in business school.
basically every model from around 2010 badly miscalculated the learning coefficient of the solar industry. apparently some forecasts are still badly calculating it.
Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap
#3nice application of the learning curve, a model taught in strategy and operations courses in business school. basically every model from around 2010 badly miscalculated the learning coefficient of the solar industry. apparently some forecasts are still badly calculating it.
The part that boggles the mind is that the forecasts are still terribly wrong, in the same direction, 10 years later.
Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap
#4Is solar just a stopgap tech? Like, do they still require fossil fuel energy to create, not to mention maintain and rebuild? And I know we’re now strip mining the ocean for battery metals. I don’t yet sense the sustainability in this amid all this economic hand-waving of “it’s getting cheaper”. (forgive my tone, i have a hard time of making sense of the big picture of renewables, hoping to eventually see how it actually fits into a utopic idea of a “closed-loop economy”)
I’m reminded here a bit of Ted Chiang’s short story, Exhalation, where the people devise clever ways to try to put air back in the ground without using more than they’re sequestering. I hope our situation is better than that.
Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap
#5Energy is cheap, power is expensive - you can already get energy for free sometimes on the intraday market, but you still pay if you need delivery at a certain time and the grid fees for peak power consumption stay expensive. I am looking forward to Tesla's million-mile battery!
Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap
#6Another aspect of this is the cost of the physical solar cells have dropped low enough that other costs have become significant. This is pushing companies to increase efficiency which opens the door for other applications.
A hypothetical cheap ~30% efficient solar panel could add something like 40 miles of range per day to a car in ideal conditions. That starts to look actually useful vs a simple gimmick.
Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap
#7Do we really need a “2020” by the title?
Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap
#8I'm actually quite shocked at how much energy is produced by solar, especially when compared to residential wind turbines. Panels are efficient, and when it's sunny, you're juicing.
The real challenge is of course bringing down cost of storage, which is the key to make solar systems efficient (not just cheap).
Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap
#9Is solar just a stopgap tech? Like, do they still require fossil fuel energy to create, not to mention maintain and rebuild? And I know we’re now strip mining the ocean for battery metals. I don’t yet sense the sustainability in this amid all this economic hand-waving of “it’s getting cheaper”. (forgive my tone, i have a hard time of making sense of the big picture of renewables, hoping to eventually see how it actua…
I'm not sure about the resource costs of solar in particular but the question is a very salient one. Vaclav Smil has a
great piece on this. "What I see when I see a wind turbine"
"the quest for renewable electricity generation. And yet, although they exploit the wind, which is as free and as green as energy can be, the machines themselves are pure embodiments of fossil fuels. • Large trucks bring steel and other raw materials to the site, earth-moving equipment beats a path to otherwise inaccessible high ground, large cranes erect the structures, and all these machines burn diesel fuel. So do the freight trains and cargo ships that convey the materials needed for the production of cement, steel, and plastics. For a 5-megawatt turbine, the steel alone averages 150 metric tons for the reinforced concrete foundations, 250 metric tons for the rotor hubs and nacelles (which house the gearbox and generator), and 500 metric tons for the towers.[...] For a long time to come—until all energies used to produce wind turbines and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources—modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels."
Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap
#10nice application of the learning curve, a model taught in strategy and operations courses in business school. basically every model from around 2010 badly miscalculated the learning coefficient of the solar industry. apparently some forecasts are still badly calculating it.
The part that boggles the mind is that the forecasts are still terribly wrong, in the same direction, 10 years later.
The forecasts from the IEA are my favourites, predicting a decline in PV expansion every year.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/11/20/iea-versus-solar-pv-r...