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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

#161

Post by pfdietz »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #160
pfdietz wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's inferior on a CO2 avoided per $ spent basis compared to utility scale solar installs. This is not difficult to understand. What's your roadblock here?

It’s superior $ for utilities though? Didn’t the public pay $0 for it?

I mean, if you want to waste your money, fine. The question is whether encouraging residential PV is good policy. I don't think it is in most cases (maybe if it allows homes to be totally disconnected from the grid, saving the cost of running lines out to them?)

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

#162

Post by ftth_finland »

pydry wrote: post #141
ftth_finland wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not really. Oh, really? What's your solution to producing non-polluting power when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow? > Electricity usage is not actually constant and nuclear power doesn't do load following unless you double the cost again Can you explain how you've come to this conclusion? We recently turned up a new nuclear power plant in Finland and they did nothing but turn up and down the generat…

>Oh, really? What's your solution to producing non-polluting power when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow? Gosh you really didnt read anything I wrote did you?

I did.

You didn't read anything I wrote, nor did you raise any of the points I raised.

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

#163

Post by constantcrying »

pfdietz wrote: post #121
constantcrying wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think environmental impact by producing billions of pannels of landfill is actually an argument against solar. I am not against solar, by the way, but it is obviously an important consideration.

You are selective in your concern. Is industrial society as a whole ok? It will produce much more waste that needs recycling that solar/wind will. If it is ok, then why would solar/wind not be? This smells of bad faith argumentation.

>You are selective in your concern.

No.

> It will produce much more waste that needs recycling that solar/wind will.

And that is bad.

> it is ok, then why would solar/wind not be?

Not at all the question. Two things can be bad at the same time.

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

#164

Post by Gud »

thelastgallon wrote: post #100
grej wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think solar makes sense in all of the places that otherwise are unused. Roofs and the shades of car parks, for example. But I am not a fan of giant fields of solar panels. Or worse, taking arable land and covering it with solar panels. Nuclear (smallest geographic footprint and smallest overall environmental impact) + solar & wind is the way forward.

40 million acres in US are used to produce ethanol, thats 10 - 15% of gasoline. The same 40 million acres as solar fields, would cover 100% of electricity needs as well as work for some crops. Agricultural subsidies for ethanol and biodiesel are worldwide, and could be 100 million acres wasted! Everyone's complaining about food prices these days, these 100 million acres could be growing food instead. https://pv-magaz…

In my opinion it would be better to let those vast acres be returned to the wild and build nuclear instead, which has a much smaller environmental footprint.

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

#165

Post by rstuart4133 »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #8

Careful of the municipal utility bait and switch! Here in Idaho they recently adjusted the net metering credit to greatly decrease the value of solar energy. They waited until there was a lot of solar adoption in the state, and then pulled the rug on solar owners under the guise of “making sure everyone pays their fair share”

> Careful of the municipal utility bait and switch! Here in Idaho they recently adjusted the net metering credit to greatly decrease the value of solar energy.

As other have said, people taking the bait changed the economics, and that forced the switch. To be fair, it was foreseeable.

Here in Australia we have the worlds highest rooftop solar take up. Feed-in rates are plummeting like a stone. It's not hard to see why - most days when the sun is shining brightly, the wholesale price of electricity is negative. Look at SA here at midday (the picture will change tomorrow): https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-elec...

We do have plans here that expose you to that wholesale price. If you export electricity when the price is negative, you pay the grid.

Ironically, at the same time this over supply is happening all states that mainly use coal have been hit by a price rise this month. I got mine today. In 22 days, the price of my electricity is going up 45%. That mainly caused by renewables (and particularly solar) making the old coal plants uneconomical. They used to be able to sell power 24 hours a day. Now since they can't ramp down quickly they have to pay the grid to export their excess power during the day. I don't know whether that's the cause, but right now we have gigawatt coal plants shutting down years earlier than they said they would five years ago. Which is how we get a 45% price rise.

So we are in this situation where feed-in tariffs are worth nothing, electricity prices are going through the roof, we are throwing away a ton of electricity we can't use during the day and solar installs are slowing down.

The solution is storage, of course. Batteries were hard to justify price wise a few days ago. But after this 45% price rise changed that. Again it's a double whammy, but in reverse this time. Remember during the day the price goes negative. That means the grid pays you to charge your battery. I would not be surprised if for a while, the return on a battery will be higher than installing solar panels.

Which means the next phase of the renewable change over has hit us with a vengeance in Australia. It's the invisible hand of the market finally directing investment where it's needed most I guess. It arrived a little late, and it's not so much a hand as a fist. We would have been better off building storage a few years ago. And again, that was foreseeable. Indeed it was foreseen by numerous published articles. But who reads learned engineering articles on future electricity tariffs? Not your average noob looking purchase roof-top solar apparent and if the people hawking solar panel installs read them, they didn't mention it.

So here we are. We wanted an energy transition. Now we've got one, ready or not.

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

#166

Post by ftth_finland »

pydry wrote: post #140
ftth_finland wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, it's a solved problem? There are prototype/experimental 100% hydrogen combustion turbines?

Yes https://www.ge.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydrogen-fuele... I would humbly suggest that in future you try to avoid using rhetorical questions to make a point when the rhetorical question can be answered by google. The fact that these rhetorical questions carry what appears to be a distinctly anti environmental agenda doesnt exactly make this incuriosity better.

> I would humbly suggest that in future you try to avoid using rhetorical questions to make a point when the rhetorical question can be answered by google.

It was not a rhetorical question.

Furthermore the first hit on Google is:

"GE, DOE Accelerating the Path towards 100% Hydrogen"

The rest of the results are various reports of testing, research and trials.

None of these refute the original quote from the 2023 Lazard report:

"Combustion turbines for 100% hydrogen are not commercially available today."

Neither does the link you provided, which is full of weasel words.

As such 100% hydrogen combustion turbines very much do not seem to be a solved problem. I will concede that there appear to be some prototype/experimental 100% hydrogen combustion turbines, which is great. Still no commercial availability, tho.

Siemens (from the first page of Google results) probably has a more realistic take on the matter:

" H₂ capabilities of our medium-sized gas turbines

As of today, the gas turbines we're testing in our new Zero Emission Hydrogen Turbine Center are ready to burn up to 75% of hydrogen in the fuel mix. And step by step we aim to reach 100% by 2030."

So, perhaps we can agree that 100% hydrogen combustion turbines are an aspirational technology. Something that might come about in the next decade or so.

> The fact that these rhetorical questions carry what appears to be a distinctly anti environmental agenda doesnt exactly make this incuriosity better.

LOL.

I will begin by reminding you of the Hacker News guidelines:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

I will continue with noting the we, in Finland, produce about 90% (IIRC) of our electricity without fossile fuel emissions. How are you guys doing?

So you can take your "anti environmental agenda" and do something interesting with it in dark, enclosed spaces.

Sidestepping the incorrect use of "rhetorical", I do wonder what it is about facts and relevant questions that get under the skin of some people?

Is it just the embarrassment of realizing that one's arguments are without merit or the facing one's inability to coherently explain metters?

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

#167

Post by rich_sasha »

standardUser wrote: post #7

I get a little frustrated that all of the people who crapped all over solar power can now simply sit there quietly as it becomes a major component of electricity generation and pay no price for spreading anti-solar propaganda at such a historically critical juncture. I always found it particularly grotesque coming from the HN crowd, where an audience of mostly engineers and entrepreneurs seemed to have no problem fin…

Are we any closer to solving seasonal storage at high latitudes? I guess solar is taking the slack out of marginal power production, but relies on fossil fuels or nuclear to fill the gaps.

My personal gripe with renewables is that, except for some geographies, it is unlikely we can run the whole economy on renewables due to storage issues, at which point you can't make any more progress with renewables. You would then need nuclear to decarbonize further, by which point you may just as well have built nuclear in the first place.

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

#168

Post by ftth_finland »

mikeyouse wrote: post #135
ftth_finland wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with nuclear is and has always been the opportunity cost. What opportunity cost? What else are you going to spend the money on that gives you non-polluting 24/7 power output rain or shine? > If you have $15 billion today -- you could tie it up for a decade and you might get a working 1GW reactor in 10 years (though probably more like 15). The best time to build a nuclear power plant was 20 years ago. Th…

> What opportunity cost? What else are you going to spend the money on that gives you non-polluting 24/7 power output rain or shine? The opportunity cost of dollars - nobody is going to spend $15 billion on nuclear when much better investments exist. > We need days at a minimum, weeks for preference. 4 hours is nowhere enough. Why in the world would you need that much storage? Obviously Finland + solar aren't 100% co…

> The opportunity cost of dollars - nobody is going to spend $15 billion on nuclear when much better investments exist.

What better investment opportunity? Again, what else are you going to spend the money on that gives you non-polluting 24/7 power output rain or shine?

> Why in the world would you need that much storage?

You ask and answer yourself in the very next sentence:

> Obviously Finland + solar aren't 100% compatible given the latitude

> fairly extensive modeling shows a route to 99% renewable Australia with only 5 hours storage:

There are always geographies that have advantageous positions for electrical generation. Iceland has geothermal, Norway hydro, etc. This does not mean you can generalize.

> Change the mix to favor wind resources and you could likely achieve the same in Finland with some modest investments in transmission infrastructure.

Nah. Just like solar wind is highly variable. Just this week wind production varied between 55 MW and 3,8 GW.

Peak deman is about 15 GW. Subtracing 4 GW of nuclear and 2 GW of hydro, what are you going to do, overbuild current wind capacity 160x?

> We would be in a better and cheaper world if we had built a nuclear-first grid 30 years ago -- but we didn't -- and it just doesn't make sense to try to do so now when much cheaper options exist.

I'm still at a loss off what those better options are.

What better thing can I buy for $15B that gives me access to 1,6GW of generation capability 24/7?

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

#169

Post by ftth_finland »

_hypx wrote: post #143
ftth_finland wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plants aren't free.

Same issue with wind and solar. Sure, you have to build them first, but afterwards it's a continuous stream of virtually free energy.

How much is virtually free?

How much will each kWh generated from synthetic fuels cost?

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

#170

Post by ftth_finland »

pfdietz wrote: post #145
ftth_finland wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how the costs pencil out? Today, in Finland, renewables produced between 0,2 GW and 1,5 GW. Does that mean I would need $450M (1,5 GW * $300/kW) in electrolysers to soak up all that power? For simplicity's sake, let's say output averages 1GW over 24 hours? What do I get for the day with my $450M electrolysis plant?

There's a tradeoff between the cost of excess solar/wind and the capacity factor of the electrolysers. You can get a handle on where the tradeoffs lie by looking at optimizations using historical weather data. https://model.energy/ For Finland, the 2030 assumptions number (for "synthetic baseload" from renewables + storage) is just under their "EPR" number (which may be a bit optimistic, given your experience with an…

That's a very interesting site.

I got Average system cost [EUR/MWh]: 101.9 which is more than nuclear, when solving for renewables + storage + hydrogen.

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