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Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

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Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#151

Post by Retric »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #135
Retric wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US produced ~4% of its electricity from solar in 2023 and it’s predicted to hit 5.6% in 2024 and 7.0% in 2025. So ~4 years to break 10% of total generation which still doesn’t offset higher daytime demand. Thus for the next few years we’ll see higher daytime rates than nighttime outside of specific regions and specific times of the year. Beyond that you need to consider increasing EV adoption, energy storage etc. Che…

Looking to the US to be on the cutting edge of the energy transition is like looking to the US to be on the cutting edge of steam engine development during the early Industrial Revolution. In a global sense, prices are going to change rapidly and huge amounts of industry will adapt to intermittent sources. The US will catch up a decade later, adopting whatever ideas worked overseas.

The US close to average in terms of solar with most countries are on a similar curve +/- a few years. However, I used the US because our electricity demand is fairly static. The US is only up 13% since 2000 unlike Africa’s electricity demand which doubled, or China’s 600% increase over that period.

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#152

Post by BenoitP »

MilaM wrote: post #123
mensetmanusman wrote: post #114

solar is 10x cheaper than nuclear generation, but storage is 100x more expensive than nuclear. Need a massive change in our understanding of storage costs to go 100% renewable.

Do you happen to have a source for this comparison? I'm curious to know what the economics of grid scale electricity storage are.

Cost figures are very hard to come by as:

* Financing and returns are spread over 60 years for nuclear, which makes it hugely dependent on the interest rate. Which we don't know in advance, and also is at risk of irrational public perception (Leading in democracies to early closure of perfectly fine plants. That affects ROI hugely).

* Nuclear too profits from scale: you have to maintain an army of competent engineers. But once done, you can copy-paste plants cheaply. And raw fuel is less than 10 of the operating cost.

* LCOEs (financially Levelized Costs) are all over the place and highly dependent on plugging holes in production

* Chinese solar panels are state-sponsored to an unspecified amount

* Chinese solar panels are produced using coal electricity, and with lots fossil heat in the process. Models for pricing it in a CO2-free (or levelized with nuclear) are inexistent.

* Even calculating the EROEI (Energy Return Over Energy Invested) is difficult as you need to define an envelope. For example: do you need to account for producing gasoline from solar energy to power the mining truck necessary for your materials. How about powering it with batteries? Which you would need more mining.

* Battery storage needs are of humongous size. What's marginally fine now will probably be humongously expensive at scale. If done on lithium, we need about 180 years of mining for 28 days storage. And that's without accounting for other uses of lithium.

* Having cheap or expensive energy from one source may help you get more of another.

TLDR: At scale, it's a system with 150 variables dependent on each other, including geopolitical game theory hidden variables; and of course the climate crisis affecting the whole thing. But maybe we can trust physics: nuclear forces >> electric forces.

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#153

Post by Scoundreller »

soco wrote: post #68
JohnFen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're already incentivized to do things like running the dishwasher in the evening do to costs, no? Not where I live. Electricity costs the same here no matter what day or time of day it is.

My (Swiss, small) provider just got rid of differentiated pricing "for simplicity sake". On the other hand they continuously increase the solar installations, so I really don't get their point. But I'm not an economist so...

My jurisdiction went all-in on residential smart meters for all to do time of use billing.

Even apartments where hvac, hot water and laundry are central, and the builder/owner chooses the big appliances.

But it turns out people don’t care and didn’t bother with enough load shifting to cover the cost.

“Smart Metering Costs to Date Exceed Projected Costs and Benefits” says it all.

They did get/build a $249m centre to monitor all the data though.

https://www.auditor.on.ca/en/content/annualreports/arreports...

Even after ~15 years, most equipment still doesn’t care about time of use.

Most savings have been due to better regulations/promotions around efficiency. Subsidized LED light bulbs accomplish more than telling people to turn off the incandescent.

But you know, giving useful stuff to people for free is WeLFarE but forcing untested policies on them and making them pay for it is okay.

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#154

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dylan604 wrote: post #141
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing to consider is that if that's profitable to do at house scale, then it's probably even more profitable to do at grid scale and you'll likely be out-competed by utility companies. Utility companies have to pay for distribution networks, and generally pass that cost on in the price per kWh. Which you avoid the less you use the grid -- and which then become a higher proportion of the prices the utility has t…

In a lot of urban locations, it is not legal to have a residence that is not connected to the grid. If you have home generation capabilities and storage that means you take the least amount from the grid provider, you can be technically still connected to the grid without using any power. If this continues, I would not put it past the grid provider to come up with a minimum monthly bill so it is impossible to have a…

Large minimum monthly fee + required to buy service seems like the kind of thing that would piss off voters.

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#155

Post by Symbiote »

MostlyStable wrote: post #108
jakewins wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recall your entire house is a thermal battery too! In fact, all the four major energy loads in a house - Heating/Cooling, Water heating, EV Charging, House Battery - are extremely flexible. But we're still lacking good standards for reliable control. Today we do stuff like tell your HVAC to stop via vendor X's cloud API. What happens if your router dies after we send a "stop" command in the middle of the winter? For…

Tangentially related gripe: My biggest issue in making this work reliably is that my "smart" thermostat is trying to be too smart. Our power gets cheap at 10pm. I can't just set my HVAC to turn on at 10 and go full blast until power gets expensive again at 6am. I have to program a set temperature at a time. if I set that at 10pm, my thermostat tries to make sure that it _reaches_ that temp at exactly the time. So it…

Check the manual for the thermostat. Mine has a setting to disable this feature.

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#156

Post by londons_explore »

collinmcnulty wrote: post #138
londons_explore wrote: post #57

The real question is will growth of solar push electricity prices down enough that fossil plants get decommissioned early because they are no longer sufficiently profitable?

Almost certainly, assuming the growth of solar occurs as stated. The real tipping point is the fuel-only operating cost of a given plant, which is a function of the plant's efficiency and the price of its fuel.

Remember that many plants have futures contracts setting the price for both fuel and electricity sometimes 10+ years in advance.

Theoretically futures contracts should never affect wether an activity is financially worthwhile or not, but realistically a profitable contract can keep a plant online even though it otherwise makes no sense to do so.

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#157

Post by wiredfool »

MilaM wrote: post #123
mensetmanusman wrote: post #114

solar is 10x cheaper than nuclear generation, but storage is 100x more expensive than nuclear. Need a massive change in our understanding of storage costs to go 100% renewable.

Do you happen to have a source for this comparison? I'm curious to know what the economics of grid scale electricity storage are.

Other recent threads have mentioned gridscale battery storage on the order of 8-10c/KWh.

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#158

Post by mcbishop »

dylan604 wrote: post #107
s1artibartfast wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But an individual can't take action without the grid taking action to provide customers with the different pricing rates.

What? The entire premise was that it is cheaper at night. Thanks for jumping into the middle of the convo though and trying to jerk the wheel.

Settle down. A lot of the U.S. doesn't have time-differentiated rates.

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#159

Post by wiredfool »

verisimi wrote: post #15

I don't get why solar is so popular. In more northern regions, you get much less light in the winter. You effectively can only generate around one tenth of the energy you can in the summer - this is from experience talking to others who monitor their solar installations. But, you need more energy in the winter. People are in more, using electricity for heat cos it's colder. I'm pointing out that there is a supply/dem…

I've done some math on residential solar in Ireland, on east-west facing pitched roofs, and it looks like a 4-6KW system would be break even in 5-7 years, given the current prices (44c/KWh) and the current subsidies (~2k for a ~8k install cost all in).

It's a little complicated because of time of use, and it's unclear if net metering or feed-in rates will continue.

While Ireland has a good chunk of renewables, mainly wind, our electricity rates are still driven by gas import prices, so they're 2x what they were a couple years ago.

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#160

Post by guerby »

anthomtb wrote: post #131
bruce511 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a solar system installed last year. During the day, from around 8am til around 5pm we are "off grid" in the sense that we can generate more than we use. I've already switched hot water and pool pump to daytime rather than night. The dishwasher now runs in the morning, not after dinner. Washing and drying, Aircon/ heating mostly happened during the day anyway. Overall our use of grid power has dropped to 20%, an…

I moved to a house with a solar system in October. I now make a point to run the dishwasher and dryer during day time hours. And avoid using the dryer on cloudy days. It doesn't really matter when I run these appliances. Between fixed rate electricity and net metering, the cost will be the same even if they run at night. But I get weird satisfaction knowing that the sun is providing the power.

And don't forget the ultimate flexible load: electric vehicles.

In 2023 near half of my (relatively well insulated all electric home) energy use was charging my EV at home.

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