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Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

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Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#81

Post by pfdietz »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #43
jackmott42 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have at times tried to explain realistic visions of what it takes for renewables to become, say, 75% of the grid and people have taken it as crapping on solar, because I describe how it will require trillion dollar scale storage solutions. But fossil fuels also require trillion dollar scale extraction solutions, so I don't see it as crapping on solar, it won't be easy but we will do it, I hope!

$1T is really not that much money for the US. Energy is 4.8% of US GDP, about ~$1T. So we already have $1T to spend on energy... It's just a matter of how we spend it. This is just what things cost when you've got 335M people and most of them are relatively rich from a global perspective.

The world will spend upwards of $1Q on energy in the next century.

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#82

Post by mikeyouse »

constantcrying wrote: post #68
jackmott42 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully fossil fuel subsidy ends before green ones do, they are much more expensive.

Absolutely, use them for nuclear.

Nuclear already sees a massive amount of subsidies, it's not clear that more would move the needle in any useful way.

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#83

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jacquesm wrote: post #64
gregschlom wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"still offsets" - yes "just as valuable" - no Reducing the price that the utility pays for solar KWs makes economic sense.

That's not how energy markets work. This is by design and whether or not you think it's fair isn't really all that important. Energy prices are determined by the most expensive source of the moment, not by the least expensive one.

> Energy prices are determined by the most expensive source of the moment

Most expensive marginal source. More cheap solar shifts over that margin.

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#84

Post by not_a_shill »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #47
not_a_shill wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please respond to this? I just want to make sure misinformation isn't being spread. >Just curious because this question is always posed when HN disagrees with something. Are the recent climate events actually statistically significant?

Can you clarify what you are asking? If you mean: can we prove that man-made climate change is a factor in making some recent weather events (hurricanes, floods, wildfires, droughts etc.) worse, then yes: https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-climate-change-affect...

The context is I was responding to this post you made

>(2021) And I'm not sure if it's posted by someone who still agrees with that conclusion or someone who think things have moved fast enough in the last couple of years to make it seem silly in retrospect.

So I guess what I really want to know is:

1) what changed within the last two years that would cause an accelerating amount of climate change

2) how confident are we in that answer

3) does that answer provide any predictive power going forward. Ie, should we expect the rate of change to keep increasing or hold steady?

I don't need a link to any studies, I'll take your word for it.

Edit: thanks for the response

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#85

Post by pfdietz »

xyzzyz wrote: post #78
megaman821 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you accurately project costs of grid-scale store 1 or 2 decades into the future? It is an industry that is just starting out and projected to grow quite large. Profits and manufacturing labor account for greater than 50% of the battery costs now, so there is a good bit of room for prices to fall as manufacturing ramps up and the market becomes more competitive.

You don’t need to be very accurate, because the cost of storage is enormous even if you’re off by factor of 5. Try it yourself: start from here https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ and calculate how much it would cost to store one day of energy use in US.

Well, the salt formation in Delta, UT can store enough hydrogen for something like 30 hours of the average US electrical power consumption. IIRC, creating those ~100 storage caverns would cost in neighborhood of $10 B.

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#86

Post by thx-2718 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #80
irrational wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand the Star Trek reference. Can you elaborate?

> I don’t understand the Star Trek reference. Can you elaborate Not OP, but Star Trek posits a post-scarcity economy and progressive values. (It also presents a militarized society.)

What would you say it's militarized?

I mean, the command structure of Star Fleet mirrors the military, but as far I know the the mirror universe is the 'militarized' society.

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#87

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

pfdietz wrote: post #73
pydry wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This model thinks that 5 hours gets us to 97%: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g... 5 hours is pretty doable with batteries and pumped storage. It's a lot and very expensive but not an impossible amount and there aren't any cheaper/quicker alternatives that I'm aware of. I think Australia will be almost half way to 5 hours already once Snowy 2 is finished. That's just one pumped storage pla…

Glad to hear someone else beating the hydrogen (or some e-fuel) drum for that last few percent.

I do not understand why there is not more focus on fuel synthesis. If electricity becomes “free” for hours a day, even crummy roundtrip efficiency seems like a great option to soak up extra capacity and get long term (seasonal?) storage.

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#88

Post by pfdietz »

timerol wrote: post #55
oittaa wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole "paying the fair share" is just propaganda from oil companies. I saw a great video about that recently which sums up the situation nicely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPfpa2KqYk0

> Why is this important? Because the potential impact of net-metered solar on electricity prices doesn’t even become relevant until you reach higher levels of penetration, or roughly 10% and beyond. I think what I said was in line with that video's conclusions, which seemed to be arguing for continued net metering in the eastern half of the country, and used CA as an example of when the current policy hits its limits…

Real time variable rates are needed. These would also incentivize all sorts of load shifting strategies, which are very economically advantageous, if the damned pricing system can allow them.

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#89

Post by constantcrying »

mikeyouse wrote: post #82
constantcrying wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, use them for nuclear.

Nuclear already sees a massive amount of subsidies, it's not clear that more would move the needle in any useful way.

Where I live there are no subsidies for nuclear, as the country is far too developed for that technology and now relies on coal, together with some seasonal sun and wind.

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#90

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

UberFly wrote: post #56
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I always found it particularly grotesque coming from the HN crowd, where an audience of mostly engineers and entrepreneurs seemed to have no problem finding impossible problems that could never be solved and would therefore render solar useless on a large scale. I guess your lesson here is that most people who call themselves engineers aren't by any meaningful definition. Don't expect individual creativity from a b…

Your crapping on engineers blast-radius is too broad here.

After several decades of personal cross-industries experience across many fields and in many places, by percentage I bet it's extremely not.
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