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Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

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Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#101

Post by Manfredo_1 »

pfdietz wrote: post #97
mlyle wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear batteries will do the same. While there's been effort to make batteries less reliant on scarce natural resources and mining, there's no guarantee we really get there. If we don't, price can be expected to go up, not down, with scale. I would bet on price going down slightly with scale, but one can't really tell now what will happen: it might go up a lot, it might go down a lot, or it might stay flat.

There are thousands of different chemistries for batteries. The nuclear stans are betting that all of them fail.

None of those other battery chemistries are seeing the massive growth that lithium ion batteries have experienced. The nuclear "stans" are just pointing out that these are potential solutions, not actual solutions. If iron oxide batteries, or some other chemistry, suddenly becomes cheap and easily deployed at the TWh scale, great. But until then they're not a solution.

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#102

Post by pfdietz »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #101
pfdietz wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are thousands of different chemistries for batteries. The nuclear stans are betting that all of them fail.

None of those other battery chemistries are seeing the massive growth that lithium ion batteries have experienced. The nuclear "stans" are just pointing out that these are potential solutions, not actual solutions. If iron oxide batteries, or some other chemistry, suddenly becomes cheap and easily deployed at the TWh scale, great. But until then they're not a solution.

Yes, you all are engaging in the "nothing can be invented" argument. It's profoundly reactionary, and also hypocritical, because nuclear itself is dead without great improvement. Uranium quickly runs out if the world is powered by burner reactors and known uranium resources, so either massive seawater uranium extraction or breeding cycles would be needed.

Batteries have the advantage of being explorable at a small scale. Now that the potential market has become so clear this is happening, in many companies.

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#103

Post by pfdietz »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #100
pfdietz wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would not use batteries for the "rare, but prolonged" storage use case. You'd want something with lower capital cost, even if it were much less efficient. For example: hydrogen burned in turbines.

Hydrogen storage remains in the prototyping phase. We have no significant amount of hydrogen grid storage. Like thermal batteries or synthetic methane, hydrogen represents a potential storage solution but not one that we know will scale and be effectively deployed at the scope required. If we actually deploy 50 GWh of hydrogen storage, and demonstrate that it can cheaply and reliability be built at scale then your po…

All the components of hydrogen, with the possible exception of low cost electrolyzers, don't need to be prototyped. It's existing technology. It's not like (say) molten salt reactors, in which fundamental development remains to be done.

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#104

Post by flavius29663 »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #39
cbmuser wrote: post #19

It doesn't matter that solar itself is cheap, it still needs backup plants which are the reason Germany has the highest electricity prices - world-wide. > https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/ It's really strange that users on HN keep rehashing the myth that solar and wind energy will result in lower electricity prices for consumers - they won't, never. Even if solar and wind energy was free, consume…

Here is a commercial installation of solar + storage at $0.04/kWh[1]. And it’s not unique, that article links to the cheapest solar + storage in the US at $0.025/kWh. Additionally, these are today’s prices, as per this article the price for renewables is dropping exponentially every year. And if Elon Musk is to be believed (which I do) the price for storage is also dropping exponentially. [1] https://pv-magazine-usa.…

storage alone will almost never be enough. The electricity is just too important for the modern societies to leave it to chance. You will have events where there will be no wind or sun for weeks. In order to have that many batteries it would require monumental investments. And those batteries would sit unused for years.

You need a diverse and distributed generation network, backed by gas burning plants.

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#105

Post by flavius29663 »

pfdietz wrote: post #88
cbmuser wrote: post #19

It doesn't matter that solar itself is cheap, it still needs backup plants which are the reason Germany has the highest electricity prices - world-wide. > https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/ It's really strange that users on HN keep rehashing the myth that solar and wind energy will result in lower electricity prices for consumers - they won't, never. Even if solar and wind energy was free, consume…

Cost of a new nuclear powerplant: $10,000/kW Cost of a simple cycle gas turbine powerplant: $400/kW (combined cycle, $1000/kW) Go ahead and back up those renewables. It's still less expensive than installing nuclear, even if the turbines burn renewable-derived hydrogen.

either way, the original point remains: solar and wind alone are not reliable enough.

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#106

Post by Manfredo_1 »

pfdietz wrote: post #103
Manfredo_1 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydrogen storage remains in the prototyping phase. We have no significant amount of hydrogen grid storage. Like thermal batteries or synthetic methane, hydrogen represents a potential storage solution but not one that we know will scale and be effectively deployed at the scope required. If we actually deploy 50 GWh of hydrogen storage, and demonstrate that it can cheaply and reliability be built at scale then your po…

All the components of hydrogen, with the possible exception of low cost electrolyzers, don't need to be prototyped. It's existing technology. It's not like (say) molten salt reactors, in which fundamental development remains to be done.

Right, and what company can I call right now to install 50GWh of hydrogen storage?

It's existing technology, but it's a novel application of that technology. We haven't used hydrogen electrolysis as a form of grid storage before. And we certainly haven't used it for grid storage at the Terawatt hour scale. And that the scale we'll need to make wind and solar viable. 1 TWh isn't even 30 minutes of global electricity consumption.

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#107

Post by belltaco »

turtlebits wrote: post #44
zizee wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The average household consumes 28.9kwh in a day Maybe in the USA. > which is way more than rooftop solar can provide. Maybe in your part of the world this is true, but it is not unrealistic in many places. Also, why are you limiting your thinking to rooftop solar?

The article is referring to the prices in the US. When land is at a premium, most people aren't going to cover their yard with solar panels. . Rooftop is already generally accepted.

I don't get it, are these built on people's yards?

https://constructionreviewonline.com/biggest-projects/top-5-...

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#108

Post by Manfredo_1 »

pfdietz wrote: post #102
Manfredo_1 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those other battery chemistries are seeing the massive growth that lithium ion batteries have experienced. The nuclear "stans" are just pointing out that these are potential solutions, not actual solutions. If iron oxide batteries, or some other chemistry, suddenly becomes cheap and easily deployed at the TWh scale, great. But until then they're not a solution.

Yes, you all are engaging in the "nothing can be invented" argument. It's profoundly reactionary, and also hypocritical, because nuclear itself is dead without great improvement. Uranium quickly runs out if the world is powered by burner reactors and known uranium resources, so either massive seawater uranium extraction or breeding cycles would be needed. Batteries have the advantage of being explorable at a small sc…

It's not "nothing can be invented". It's "come back to me after it's invented, not before".

And uranium seawater extraction already exists: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

It's more expensive than mined uranium, but since fissile material is so energy-dense that increase in fuel cost amounts to hardly any change in overall cost.

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#109

Post by c0nsumer »

Qwertious wrote: post #99
marvin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not enough energy. Hydropower reservoirs are typically many square kilometers of water surface, depth > 10 meters on average and a height differential on the order of 100 meters or more. Vary parameters according to geography, but it's not something that can be built without using geology for support.

Obvious solution that I'm sure has already been considered: dig down 1000 meters and build the "below" reservoir there. Even if the "above" reservoir is at ground level, you'll still get 10x the storage.

The water needs to go somewhere to generate power. Most water tables are much closer to the surface than 1000 meters. Meaning, the water would have no way to go without pumping it back up...

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#110

Post by pfdietz »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #106
pfdietz wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the components of hydrogen, with the possible exception of low cost electrolyzers, don't need to be prototyped. It's existing technology. It's not like (say) molten salt reactors, in which fundamental development remains to be done.

Right, and what company can I call right now to install 50GWh of hydrogen storage? It's existing technology, but it's a novel application of that technology. We haven't used hydrogen electrolysis as a form of grid storage before. And we certainly haven't used it for grid storage at the Terawatt hour scale. And that the scale we'll need to make wind and solar viable. 1 TWh isn't even 30 minutes of global electricity c…

50 GWh of hydrogen would fit in one salt cavern of the kind already made for natural gas. Any numbers of companies can solution mine those caverns for you; that technology is many decades old. I'd need more information about the rest of what you want, as that scales by power not by energy capacity.
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