Not cheap enough to stop subsidizing it, of course
‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world
151–160 of 339 posts
Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world
#152As a California resident I don't see the cheaper generation cost gets reflected on my utility bill, so what's the point to the consumer? Not to mention the delivery cost is another major part of the bill which is not changed regardless of the source of the electricity.
Distributed generation lowers demand for transmission capacity, so it could reduce delivery costs.
Generally solar increases demand for transmission because it is unreliable, so more transmission is useful to smooth out spikes and dips.
Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't even need a decent climate. I live in Portland Oregon where it is cloudy for 9 months out of the year. In Portland, anything we generate beyond what we can use is fed back into the grid and given to us as a credit. We generate enough solar power credits that we don't pay anything for electricity year round other than a $12 monthly fee to be tied into the grid.
If they're crediting you for that energy at anything close to the retail electricity rate you're effectively getting a really generous subsidy. Because solar is so cheap but only produces electricity sometimes and at pretty much the same time everywhere in the region, the actual cost of electricity when your solar panels are producing heavily and feeding back into the grid is much, much lower than when they're not pr…
Oregon's electricity is only 0.75% from solar, which should mean that variations in solar output have almost no effect on the price or production levels.
Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> power companies are on track to be thoroughly screwed. I have a hard time making sense of this. I log into HN and see comment after comment about how solar is taking over, then I read articles like this[0], that state that countries heavily invested in renewables, like wind a solar, are going backwards . They are now trying to label natural gas as "green investment" in Germany, otherwise they won't have energy capa…
Concerns about Germany’s energy system transition and the question of whether power companies are “screwed” are kind of orthogonal. There are different kinds of power companies. Utilities with a regulated asset base that get to socialize all of their costs across rate payers aren’t screwed. Asset-light energy suppliers/retailers in competitive deregulated markets aren’t screwed. Asset-heavy power generators in compet…
And this is why the utility companies are trying to shut it down or make it uneconomical. NEM 3.0 in CA, for example, has a rent-seeking provision where the power company gets to bill the rate-payer for assets the rate-payer owns, even if no power crosses the meter. I predict a rash of off-gridding.
Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Of that $15k, $4.3k was for the panels themselves, $2k for the inverter, $1k for mounting hardware, and $8k for installation. What about on-site battery? In any case, $15k is still a bit too steep for me, not because I can't afford it but because I want something that'll pay for itself in less than 5 years. My electricity bill is about $150/mo. so a solar roof doesn't make sense financially, even if I'm able to se…
Why is the 5 year payback critical, as opposed to 7 or 8? You're still coming out ahead.
Time value of money, opportunity cost, etc. An investment that merely pays for itself in a large number of years is a bad investment. An RoI of 5 years is a decent rule of thumb to use.
Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think researchers underestimated how much solar simply “makes sense” to the average person. Once the price is reasonable enough, people are very easily able to latch onto the idea of using what they already know and feel - the sun’s heat. Whenever I mention the solar panels in my parents house, the first question is always about the price. When I tell them they will break even in a few years, their next question is…
> I tell them they will break even in a few years Then why don't more companies offer to become your electricity provider and install the solar panels for free? They could say "We promise that your energy bills will be cheaper this year than last year (as long as you don't use more energy), and within a few years you'll own the panels and can switch to a different electricity provider."
Pretty sure there are companies that do this. My parents received an offer like this, structured like a lease with a small buyout at the end.
Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world
#157Meanwhile the largest California utilities are rolling back incentives for solar[1]. Why? Because they're effectively paying people to take electricity during the peak hours of the duck curve. Texas has the same issue during peak periods of wind power. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-03-16/california...
If you believe them, anyway. One of these utilities is even PG&E. "Cynical cashgrab" would be an alternative take. They're not making much money selling power to people with solar panels so now they want said people to pay them a flat fee.
Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world
#158One of the best things about this tech is how effective it is at domestic scale. My small roof in London generated 26kWh of electricity today. About 3X what we consumed. https://twitter.com/edent_solar
My wife and I recently bought our first home, I've lived in Arizona my whole life, and one of the selling points was this house came with solar setup and the units already paid off. I had no idea how huge a difference it makes. During the day we run entirely off our solar panels. This time last year our bill was beginning to climb as AC use increases significantly as April progresses. Our bill has barely budged, savi…
The number of 100+ degree fahrenheit days last year in Arizona was more than concerning. A collective breath is being held this year in the hope it doesn't repeat itself or worse, indicate it a new normal.
You are miles ahead of the curve. However, where the pacific northwest, midwest, and east are concerned about energy, Arizona is concerned about water.
As my friend used to say, "nobody gets it all."
Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world
#159> "[in 2000] Shi agreed and ended up settling in the small city of Wuxi" A bit of a tangent, but it’s always strange to me when people describe Chinese or Indian cities with millions of residents as "small". Wuxi had >1 million people in 2000, and today has like 3.5 million (6.5 million in the prefecture). This article makes it sound like a minor town in a remote province, but Jiangsu has about the same population as…
That's probably how the Chinese refer to it? You can also interpret it as meaning "insignificant". A poor city with the same population as London has a much lower profile.
https://www.zhihu.com/question/22769200 first answer to "what is Wuxi like?" starts with "Is Wuxi really a small city?". And the answer is... it was but isn't really now. So it sounds like this is a common preconception in Chinese too as you say.
Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world
#160The headline that “no one saw it comping” is slightly annoying in the sense that plenty of people predicted exactly this. They took the observed industrial learning curve at face value and forecast it forward 15 years. I noticed these arguments at the time, and while I found them persuasive, I had nowhere near enough expertise to evaluate.