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Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

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Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#121

Post by fredophile »

Scoundreller wrote: post #56
sephamorr wrote: post #28

Power markets are more complicated than most people realize. One thing to note is that solar power can be cheaper than gas, but still not be economic. The fact of the matter is that an intermittent kWh is not as valuable as an on-demand reliable kWh to a utility who's number 1 priority is reliability. Even as solar is acquired at lower and lower prices, if evening power is generated by expensive and inefficient gas t…

Or just smarter appliances. Plenty of opportunities for thermal banking/battery banking. Most of my loads, on average, don't need to run that exact second . I don't mind if my hot water tank super-heats water in the middle of the day for the rest of the day. If electricity is really cheap, my freezer can jump into overdrive. I don't need my clothes to dry in the next hour, just over the next 8. I don't care if my fri…

You may want to look into phase change materials for home heat and ac.

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#122

Post by pfdietz »

Scoundreller wrote: post #112
pfdietz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't make sense for them to be sending power to the grid if they earn negative dollars doing it. No, there's no cost to just not drawing power from the modules. They would become slightly hotter, but that's not a big deal.

I mean, if they're 20% efficient, then shunting the energy would mean they have 4/5ths the energy getting turned into heat, no?

In the US southwest, where it's the hottest here, most new utility-scale PV is using single axis trackers. So curtailment there could mean turning away from the Sun.

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#123

Post by m463 »

TheGrim-888 wrote: post #47
Retric wrote: post #6

Another 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.

Correct me if I'm wrong, and I quite possible could be, but from a quick Google search, I'm seeing numbers of anywhere 200Wh/mile to 350Wh/mile for a Tesla. If we're generous and assume only 200Wh/mile, then 40 miles of range translates to an energy consumption of 8,000Wh. A 100 watt solar panel, producing the full 100 watts, would take 80 hours of perfect sunlight to produce enough power for an extra 40 miles of ran…

just use off-car solar panels.

https://sunelec.com

routinely sells panels for 30 cents/watt.

If you could skip the inverter step, charging your electric car could be very low cost.

5,000 watts of (raw) solar panels for $1500 and would give even the most power-hungry 350wh/mi tesla ~ 70 miles of charge in 5 hours of sun.

(a 200wh/mi car would need ~ $500 of panels for 40 miles)

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#124

Post by blendo »

bananabreakfast wrote: post #95
remmargorp64 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All they need to do is build mechanical/hydraulic systems for storing solar power during the day and unleashing it at night. For example, use solar power during the day to pump fluid from a lower reservoir into a higher reservoir, and then harness the energy of the water flowing from the higher reservoir into the lower reservoir through turbines. As long as your output energy is always coming from the turbines, and a…

You're wildly underestimating how complicated pumped hydro is. For one thing, existing dams absolutely cannot be converted to pumped hydro. Dams do not store water below them. Water flows downstream because a dam is in a river. There is no water to pump uphill. Unless, of course, you also build a second dam very close downstream to create another lower reservoir. This is usually a bad idea, and better to just find be…

Some dams, such as Lake Oroville in California, do use an afterbay to allow for off-peak water pumping back into the lake (https://norcalwater.org/efficient-water-management/efficient...).

Sadly, dams tend to destroy healthy fishery ecosystems —- a side effect of not “wasting” the water.

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#125

Post by epistasis »

Barrin92 wrote: post #106
woodandsteel wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you saying that we should abandon renewables, and stick with fossil fuels until a truly green energy technology is invented, sometime in the future? And if that is not what you are saying, then what exactly do you think we should be doing today?

Cut down on the energy we expend, minimize the amounts of materials we use, focus on technology that consumes less energy rather than just attempting to make more of it in marginally less dirty fashion and so on. Instead of promoting electrical cars which consume vast amounts of materials and still run on a dirty energy mix cut down on the car reliance altogether, for a trivial example.

As somebody who advocates a lot for my local government to finally, please please allow people to build housing in ways to merely allow people to choose to drive less, I think you are looking at this all wrong.

Even if we went back to early days of energy use, we are burning wood (or worse) and that is going to make for a truly ugly air quality.

Nobody wants to use X amount of energy, they actually want to accomplish Y amount of energy services. Current tech has X about four to five times as Y. As we electrify, it enables tech to get X very close to Y. But we also get to use cleaner energy as we electrify.

If my government won't even let me reduce Y for those people that want to, then the idea of forcing everybody to drastically reduce Y, and leaving the X factor the same, will be truly disastrously ineffective.

I think that in the 1970s, this idea was far more reasonable. But as we have failed to make any progress on reducing the amount of energy services that people want, but we have made tons of progress in reducing the X factor, and in cleaning up energy generation, I no longer see it as a feasible or fruitful path.

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#126

Post by epistasis »

cobookman wrote: post #29
undershirt wrote: post #4

Is 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…

Almost 50% of residential energy usage is HVAC and Hot Water heaters. I see no reason we couldn't use excess solar during the daytime to heat our hot water heaters, or cool/heat the house. Modern Construction and Water Heaters have great insulation, and its possible to use the `cheap` electricity during peak solar to store as heating/cooling.

Heat pump technology has come an amazing way, as well!

Switching to an electric heat pump water heater from my natural gas water heater saves nearly as many emissions per year as stopping 12,000 vehicle miles. And it saves money, though it front loads the cost a tiny bit.

We could have a massive economic boom just by retrofitting existing buildings with more efficient and modern technologies.

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#127

Post by dub4u »

Scoundreller wrote: post #56
sephamorr wrote: post #28

Power markets are more complicated than most people realize. One thing to note is that solar power can be cheaper than gas, but still not be economic. The fact of the matter is that an intermittent kWh is not as valuable as an on-demand reliable kWh to a utility who's number 1 priority is reliability. Even as solar is acquired at lower and lower prices, if evening power is generated by expensive and inefficient gas t…

Or just smarter appliances. Plenty of opportunities for thermal banking/battery banking. Most of my loads, on average, don't need to run that exact second . I don't mind if my hot water tank super-heats water in the middle of the day for the rest of the day. If electricity is really cheap, my freezer can jump into overdrive. I don't need my clothes to dry in the next hour, just over the next 8. I don't care if my fri…

> I don't need my clothes to dry in the next hour, just over the next 8.

Then why not just hang them up for drying? Zero power consumption and they will dry in eight hours, maybe not under all conditions but under many.

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#128

Post by GhostVII »

sephamorr wrote: post #28

Power markets are more complicated than most people realize. One thing to note is that solar power can be cheaper than gas, but still not be economic. The fact of the matter is that an intermittent kWh is not as valuable as an on-demand reliable kWh to a utility who's number 1 priority is reliability. Even as solar is acquired at lower and lower prices, if evening power is generated by expensive and inefficient gas t…

I wish more places had hourly pricing of power, with good integrations. Would be really cool to be able to set up your appliances/AC/electric car to consume more power when it is cheap. And then you could get battery banks for your house to store power when it is cheap and use it when it is expensive, absorbing the peaks in a decentralized way.

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#129

Post by asdff »

pydry wrote: post #71
sephamorr wrote: post #28

Power markets are more complicated than most people realize. One thing to note is that solar power can be cheaper than gas, but still not be economic. The fact of the matter is that an intermittent kWh is not as valuable as an on-demand reliable kWh to a utility who's number 1 priority is reliability. Even as solar is acquired at lower and lower prices, if evening power is generated by expensive and inefficient gas t…

Intermittency and the unsuitability of grid storage batteries to compensate is heavily played up by the carbon industry. The future of low emissions energy production will be largely driven by overproduction and demand shifting, not banks of grid level batteries. This likely won't happen as soon in America, however, the economy is too tied in to fossil fuels and the appetite to upgrade the electric grid by utility co…

It would be nice if you can have your appliances charging per day, and using a built in battery suited to run at night.

Re: Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

#130

Post by Gibbon1 »

pfdietz wrote: post #120
anesmike wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think hard about that; huge trucks for mining, huge trucks for transport, huge amount of energy to separate component minerals, the actual energy for manufacture of these renewables, up to this point I don't see renewables at any stage of this process. Diesel fueled trucks to deliver said renewable technologies to their place of use. Oh, their is one worker who drives a tesla ...... Oh at end of their life requires f…

Nothing you listed there requires fossil fuels. If you think those activities require fossil fuels, you are basically saying industrial society is impossible after fossil fuels run out.

That problem with that guy is he hasn't done any math to back any of that up.

When you run the numbers for say tractors, trains and mining trucks it pencils out just fine.

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