‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by oblio » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:41 AM UTC

apatheticonion wrote: post #182

toomuchtodo wrote: post #2

Relevant quote: "Every time you double producing capacity, you reduce the cost of PV solar by 28%." Current worldwide PV manufacturing capacity is roughly 165 GW [1] [2], with a utility scale price close to $0.01/kWh [3]. Manufacturing capacity is doubling every ~4 years. Global PV capacity in service is ~600 GW. IEA Average global annual capacity additions in main and accelerated cases, 2023-2025: https://www.iea.or…

Let's run the numbers! - Every 4 years our production doubles - Meaning every year our production capacity increases by .5 (or 5 times every decade). - The first year (2020) starts at 165GWh capacity production - The total energy use of the world (in 2013) was 157,000 TWh. - Annual growth in energy demand was 40% between 1990 and 2008. - 20% for the US - 150% for China Let's calculate solar energy generation capacity…

Maybe I'm misreading your numbers, but:

The total energy use in 2013 was 157 000 TWh (and it's probably > higher in 2021, due to China and India continuing to develop).

The additional solar power being added in 2061, by your own math, is 154 TWh.

So, adding up the whole line, that would mean that solar would still only offer about 154 x 40 = ~6 000 TWh (best case scenario) of electricity in 2061. Faaar from the 157 000 TWh used in 2013 and probably super far from what's going to be required in 2061.

Did you mess up your math?

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

#262

Post by kragen » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:41 AM UTC

oblio wrote: post #258

Rerarom wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-dig...

Sorry, but: pfffft! Pedantry of the nth level. On the other hand, 64k of RAM ought to be enough for everyone :-D

Which contributes more to the conversation: using a silly date format and calculating how many times bigger Wuxi is than Birmingham and how its growth and historical development relates to the overall boom in renewable energy, or derailing a thread about renewable energy by posting "I have no idea what your point is" and "Pedantry of the nth level"? Which one produces a conversation you'd rather be involved in?

(16-bit years, hmm...)

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

#263

Post by teachingassist » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:45 AM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #113

anonuser123456 wrote: post #77

Is there a way to invest directly in solar to offset your personal use, without installing it directly on your house/land? My existing house isn’t particularly suitable from a cost perspective to install solar on (clay tile roof, a good 20 years left at least). I also don’t really want to manage an installation project, nor own the maintenance and risk. But I would pay to directly offset my consumption. Something lik…

My power provider has a scheme (I forget the name) where basically your entire electricity bill goes to "green" electricity producers. The logic is that you can't control where your electricity comes from , but you can easily control where your money goes . That way, no matter where you get your power from, all your money goes to green sources.

I understood a problem that energy providers are investing some minimum (perhaps only the legal minimum) into green provision, an amount that they would have anyway.

And, selling this onwards as a premium to the end user without actually changing their behaviour.

Since you get the same service (your power ultimately comes from the same grid), it's a pure price discrimination strategy.

[This is maybe a general restatement of pjerem's sibling comment]

I do pay this premium, but I mostly feel cheated by it.

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

#264

Post by minusf » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:47 AM UTC

Rerarom wrote: post #247

MrPatan wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 02010 > 02019 I have no idea what your point is, because I got stuck every time at "why write years like that?". It even looks like a postcode, in a sentence about city populations and areas.

https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-dig...

i applaud the optimism for humankind's longevity. what could go wrong with these dates?

1. interpreted as octal in various contexts

2. leading zero stripped off when dealing with it as a number and not a string.

handling dates is already hard as it is, I'll leave the solution to y10k to much more able hands in ~7-8 thousand years :)

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

#265

Post by speedgoose » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:47 AM UTC

edhelas wrote: post #12

toomuchtodo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the solar is almost free, you can shift investment to storage, transmission, demand response, and other (more expensive) low carbon generation. One would expect a similar cost decline curve for batteries [1] once every automaker is required to buy batteries when they can only sell EVs. [1] https://news.mit.edu/2021/lithium-ion-battery-costs-0323

Please do the math, check how much you'll need to cover the consumption of a small city for a night. Just an idea, you have ~500kg of lithium-battery in an average EV for a few hundred km of autonomy. 95% of stored electricity today is water pumped behind dam. You want to store electricity, build dam. There is only a few decades of lithium left to be extracted by the way.

While the battery of an EV is heavy, there is not 500kg of lithium inside it. For example a Tesla S with 100kWh, one of the biggest battery on the market, has about 7kg of lithium.

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

#266

Post by oblio » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:47 AM UTC

vostok wrote: post #75

throwawayboise wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$22,000 would pay my electric bills for about 12 years, not even factoring in opportunity cost. What are the ongoing maintenance costs/total cost of ownership over 12 years of such a system? As far as Powerwalls go, I'd definitely want something like that in an outbuilding and not in my house. Last thing I want to do is wake up at 3:00am with a raging battery fire in my basement.

If we're talking about nerds buying this stuff, $22k is comparable to what people spend on nice homelab setups. I would pay $22k just because it's cool and not because it saves money.

Yeah, but we're talking about 0.1% of the population. For mass adoption, prices have to be much, much lower.

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

#267

Post by oblio » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:51 AM UTC

edhelas wrote: post #35

edhelas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

2010 blog article ? https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/09/16/how-long-will-the-lit... > The scenario which assumes 73 Mt of lithium supply left, best policies (recycling, V2G, second-life) implemented and around 3 billion EVs on the road sees lithium fully depleted a few years beyond 2100. If the same policies and number of cars were matched with just 26 Mt of lithium, but recycling efforts would only grow slowly, batt…

Oh, boy! You probably don't want to read about peak oil extraction :-D

Oil was supposed to run out in 1865, 1880, 1900, 1920, 1940, 1985, 2005, ...

If there's a demand for a specific resource, prices go up and people find a way to extract more of it, if it's present on this planet. And lithium is the 25th most abundant element, so there's a ton more of it than there's oil in the crust.

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

#268

Post by baybal2 » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:53 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #256

baybal2 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finally, I think the Guardian has an anti-Chinese agenda, which leads them to trivialise anything they can about China. Tell me who in the West doesn't trivialise anything China related? Those people prefer to violently lash out over admitting things unpleasant to them. The West needs to admit that "$name_of_western_country smarts and Chinese industrial might," usually means both Chinese smarts and Chinese industri…

I don't think Western partners are just appropriating the credit here, though. Lots of people in lots of countries have been working hard for decades to develop and improve photovoltaic cells and their manufacturing processes. A huge number of those people are Chinese, but by no means all of them. Look at, for example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640... and in particular the recent works…

I work in electronics. Nowadays there are chips which simply don't get documentation in English because chipmakers simply don't have a single client needing it, because all design, and engineering has moved to China.

People have no idea how little their electronics industries mean on the world stage.

I believe it would be no big stretch to say that PV cells research in the West is nearly inconsequential to the industry, when all what matters happens within 100m of the silicon furnace without much pomp, and published papers.

I believe it's similar to how semi industry turned to be. Process engineering is a giant research discipline, but everything below the "tip of the iceberg," which is academic research, happens on the fab floor, and stays a factory secret. That's why importing Taiwanese engineers is a prerequisite to setting up any serious high volume fab on 300mm.

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

#269

Post by oblio » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:54 AM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #180

philipkglass wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct. Here is the USGS mineral commodity summary for lithium in 2010: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium... Here is the same report for 2021: https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-lithium.pd... World lithium reserves went up from 9.9 million tons in 2010 to 21 million tons in 2021 even as extraction accelerated. Companies have been putting more effort into discovery wh…

And most of our lithium doesn't come from proper "reserves" but from what is categorized as "resources," which is several times the quantity of "reserves." I don't know how much lithium is out there but we've barely even begun looking and there's never been demand for much in the past.

> At 20 mg lithium per kg of Earth's crust,[45] lithium is the 25th most abundant element.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium

I'm too lazy to do the math, but that's probably enough lithium to plate the entire planet with it if we want to :-)

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

#270

Post by rorykoehler » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 10:55 AM UTC

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…

Pretty much all European cities are small bar Paris and London so no need to qualify them. Same in the US. NYC and Chicago are the only big cities by Asian standards (LA isn’t really a city IMO but population wise would also qualify).