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‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

theguardian.com

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Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#211

Post by kragen »

Fomorian wrote: post #206
kragen wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the correction! It was totally unfair of me to conflate all the insular Celtic tongues like that. I do think I made reasonable arguments that Wuxi today is far from insignificant, didn't I?

Sure. I probably wouldn't call Wuxi insignificant myself. My main issue was just citing Wuxi's historical importance and background to defend its significance, in comparison to pre-Anglo Saxon Britain. I see Chinese people do this a lot in regards to China, often to shut down criticism of the country from "lesser" countries, ie ones that were tribalistic or uncentralized during Imperial China's heyday. "We were the c…

Sure, some Greek people do that too. FWIW I'm neither Chinese, nor a fan of centralization, and I know too well that neither virtue nor wisdom follows bloodlines. It's kind of despicable to see people attempt to defend their tribalism by claiming blood descent from non-tribalist people...

I started with Wuxi's history mostly because I find it fascinating but partly because, without that paragraph, I thought someone might respond, "Well, sure, Wuxi is a big city now, but it doesn't have the depth of culture and tradition of a place like London—it's just a soulless consumerist metropolis!" or argue, "Sure, London's population is only twice Wuxi's, but it's a very high profile city because for centuries it ruled an Empire on which the Sun Never Set!", maybe mixed with some deniably racist remarks about "imitation" or "IP theft" or "sweatshops" (of which I think the Guardian's "Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might" is a mild version).

I didn't want to leave an opening for that kind of silly nonsense. It misinforms people.

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#212

Post by neltnerb »

tzs wrote: post #153
makomk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would hope at such small levels of production, the proximity to the user would reduce power losses and be automatically corrected for by the timing generators so as to shift production closer to the user.

It does seem like close to retail rates aren't outrageous to believe are fair for small quantities. I think you'd need to get to the point where generation was a significant fraction of local usage before transmission was costly or inefficient... but by then you'd likely find batteries cheap enough to also just load shift by physically storing the electricity in small buildings around a city.

Maybe the retail rate should go down, but it does make some sense for a tiny generator right next to or even in the same building as a user should get closer to retail rates than generator rates. If enough people did it they could eliminate transmission lines entirely and just use batteries.

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#213

Post by kragen »

zamadatix wrote: post #115
jacobolus wrote: post #70

> "[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…

There's also the confounding matter of physical size - a prefecture level "city" like Wuxi is going to be nearly 20x the physical area of Birmingham (10x the size including the surrounding area) so holding a million people at the time doesn't mean it's necessarily a big population center even before comparing to what's "normal" in the country.

Wuxi, at 5.03 million people (6.6 million in the prefecture it governs) has about three times the population of Birmingham, England (1.1 million inhabitants, 3.7 million in the metropolitan era). The Wuxi prefecture covers 4600 km², the Birmingham area 600 km², a ratio of about 8:1; the cities proper are 1640 km² (the five districts of Wuxi with the 5 million population, excluding Jiangyin and Yixin) and 268 km² (Birmingham), a ratio of about 6:1. Your 20:1 is kind of in the ballpark.

However, Wuxi's central Liangxi Qu (72 km²) had a density of 13000/km² in 02010, when Wuxi had a population of only 3.5 million. This was 944k people, 83% of the population of Birmingham proper in 02019. If that had increased proportionally, which seems unlikely, it would be almost 19000/km² today. Birmingham proper averages 4300/km².

I conclude that there is no plausible sense in which Wuxi is less "necessarily a big population center" than Birmingham.

See my longer comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26930408

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#214

Post by 88840-8855 »

potatoman22 wrote: post #202
ShakataGaNai wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but in NorCal (BayArea) is about $3/what. My 9.4kw system is generating about 55kwh a day right now. Because of the mild weather we've had, the last day we used more net power from the grid (than we produced) was March 18.

$3 per what?

It should be "$3 per whom", obviously.

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#215

Post by [deleted] »

kragen wrote: post #174
BurningFrog wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think Wuxi is insignificant. Wuxi has been a city for 2200 years, since London was a scattered group of Celtic-speaking villages. Even earlier, in the Spring and Autumn Period, the capital of the State of Wu, Meili, was probably in what is now Wuxi, though it may have been a few kilometers to the southeast in Suzhou. This is where the famous war of Wu against Chu began, a century after Romulus was said to hav…

[deleted]

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#216

Post by _Microft »

edhelas wrote: post #28
ggm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is only a few decades of lithium left to be extracted by the way. Julian Simon's bet with Paul Ehrlich. You're not apparently aware of the amount of lithium worldwide, it's availability or its price trajectory. All minerals are significantly more abundant than people think, supply chain dynamics in mining do no equate to scarcity on earth, they relate to the economics of exploration and extraction and shippin…

Sure, we have plenty of minerals left ! But where and how much energy you need to extract them. In France we have lithium in Alsace, we could dig-it-up, but it's really not worth it energy wise and environmentally wise.

As far as I know lithium extraction from brine is both in development and an area of active research which would allow to tap a lot more lithium resources than previously expected. I remember reading something about a test plant in Cornwall and some similar stuff from Germany as well. Maybe that would help you in France as well?

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#217

Post by morsch »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #186
jjoonathan wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your source doesn't support your assertion, but I suppose you're free to ignore that little problem if you want to. In the meantime, we should be talking about how best to make storage happen, because anyone who isn't busy playing semantics games can see that storage (critically: paying for storage) is going to dominate the back half of this transition.

IMO, the solution isn't storage. It's ways to use cheap energy. As solar energy becomes an increasingly large part of the grid, there are huge incentives to re-structure electricity demand around when solar is producing heavily. One possible way this plays out is that we start doing things like water desalinization to produce fresh water, and electrolysis to produce hydrogen during the day when electricity is free, a…

Two sides of the same coin, I'd say.

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#218

Post by Haga »

jacobolus wrote: post #70

> "[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…

It's small by Chinese standards.

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#219

Post by Haga »

kragen wrote: post #211
Fomorian wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I probably wouldn't call Wuxi insignificant myself. My main issue was just citing Wuxi's historical importance and background to defend its significance, in comparison to pre-Anglo Saxon Britain. I see Chinese people do this a lot in regards to China, often to shut down criticism of the country from "lesser" countries, ie ones that were tribalistic or uncentralized during Imperial China's heyday. "We were the c…

Sure, some Greek people do that too. FWIW I'm neither Chinese, nor a fan of centralization, and I know too well that neither virtue nor wisdom follows bloodlines. It's kind of despicable to see people attempt to defend their tribalism by claiming blood descent from non-tribalist people... I started with Wuxi's history mostly because I find it fascinating but partly because, without that paragraph, I thought someone m…

Well the ccp gutted Chinese history and culture, so wuxi might as well be 70 years old.

Re: ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

#220

Post by laurencerowe »

krapht wrote: post #104
jacobolus wrote: post #70

> "[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…

Small and big are relative descriptions, not absolute. Jiangsu province is small compared to the major Chinese metropolitan areas. Comparing cities to world regions is rarely done. Also I think many people would say Birmingham, England is small. Why? It isn't London.

> Also I think many people would say Birmingham, England is small. Why? It isn't London.

If Birmingham – the 20th biggest urban agglomeration in Europe – is small, what should the many hundreds of smaller cities be termed?

(London is a megacity.)

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