Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030
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Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030
#2This is good to hear. I assume location must play a large part in this? Solar must be more cost-effective in, say, the Mojave desert, than it is in Alaska.
I sometimes wonder if the widespread adoption of solar is going to have an environmental impact that isn't immediately apparent. Every solar panel you put on the ground is going to take up solar energy that could otherwise be absorbed by a plant, which in turn means that plant can't absorb carbon from the atmosphere. So unless we just limit ourselves to rooftop solar panels there's sure to be some sort of environmental impact if we just switch all our energy to solar.
Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030
#3This is good to hear. I assume location must play a large part in this? Solar must be more cost-effective in, say, the Mojave desert, than it is in Alaska. I sometimes wonder if the widespread adoption of solar is going to have an environmental impact that isn't immediately apparent. Every solar panel you put on the ground is going to take up solar energy that could otherwise be absorbed by a plant, which in turn mea…
Possibly, though I don't think solar panels will ever catch up to the amount of pavement there is.
Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030
#4This is good to hear. I assume location must play a large part in this? Solar must be more cost-effective in, say, the Mojave desert, than it is in Alaska. I sometimes wonder if the widespread adoption of solar is going to have an environmental impact that isn't immediately apparent. Every solar panel you put on the ground is going to take up solar energy that could otherwise be absorbed by a plant, which in turn mea…
I've wondered about that too (competing with nature for the sun) but I think just putting panels on the roof or over the parking lot would probably address 95% of the problem.
Along similar lines, I've wondered if solar panels will start to look like pine trees at some point.
Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030
#5If solar were free, but we still needed to pay for battery storage, how would it then compare in cost to fuel-based alternatives (fossil fuel, nuclear etc)?
Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030
#6This is good to hear. I assume location must play a large part in this? Solar must be more cost-effective in, say, the Mojave desert, than it is in Alaska. I sometimes wonder if the widespread adoption of solar is going to have an environmental impact that isn't immediately apparent. Every solar panel you put on the ground is going to take up solar energy that could otherwise be absorbed by a plant, which in turn mea…
> I assume location must play a large part in this? Solar must be more cost-effective in, say, the Mojave desert, than it is in Alaska.
Yes, each peak kilowatt of utility-scale solar produces about 240 watts average in Arizona, 140 in Maine, and 100 in Germany ("capacity factors" of 24%, 14%, and 10%). I assume the number for Alaska would be even lower.
> Every solar panel you put on the ground is going to take up solar energy that could otherwise be absorbed by a plant, which in turn means that plant can't absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
Yes, and also it will reflect less heat back into space than the plant or bare dirt would, locally raising the temperature. These will start to be important problems when the quantity of power produced by solar panels is about 100 times larger than current world marketed energy consumption. I expect that this will happen in about 30 years. However, merely switching all our energy to solar will have an effect that's about 100 times too small to matter.
Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030
#7If solar were free, but we still needed to pay for battery storage, how would it then compare in cost to fuel-based alternatives (fossil fuel, nuclear etc)?
It's a little hard to predict how the price of battery storage will change as demand for it increases by orders of magnitude, and also how energy usage patterns will change as the relative cost of nighttime energy usage goes up. I've explored these themes in the past in a number of notes.
https://dercuano.github.io/topics/solar.html and in particular https://dercuano.github.io/notes/energy-storage-efficiency.h..., https://dercuano.github.io/notes/heliogen.html, and https://dercuano.github.io/notes/lithium-supplies.html. https://dercuano.github.io/notes/balcony-battery.html and https://dercuano.github.io/notes/the-suburbean.html explore the question at the household scale.
More recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26219344 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26229595 explore this question in more detail, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26308189 explores specifically what it would cost for California to switch to an all-solar grid with only battery storage over the next decade.
David MacKay wrote a wonderful and highly accessible overview of the topic in 02009 as part of his excellent book, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, which is specifically about sustainable energy in Britain. Unfortunately it needs to be updated—in particular, it doesn't consider utility-scale battery facilities at all—and he is sadly no longer in a position to update it. The license does permit third parties to provide an updated version, but he did not publish the source code. Still, here it is: https://www.withouthotair.com/c26/page_186.shtml
Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030
#8I make that $20 per MWh. That's somewhere around half the wholesale price of electricity in the UK. That's pretty incredible.
Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030
#9If solar were free, but we still needed to pay for battery storage, how would it then compare in cost to fuel-based alternatives (fossil fuel, nuclear etc)?
Would need $20/KWh battery storage to be competitive with nuclear for baseload according to https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9
At the moment, we're at about $800/KWh.
Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030
#10This is good to hear. I assume location must play a large part in this? Solar must be more cost-effective in, say, the Mojave desert, than it is in Alaska. I sometimes wonder if the widespread adoption of solar is going to have an environmental impact that isn't immediately apparent. Every solar panel you put on the ground is going to take up solar energy that could otherwise be absorbed by a plant, which in turn mea…
> I assume location must play a large part in this? Solar must be more cost-effective in, say, the Mojave desert, than it is in Alaska. Yes, each peak kilowatt of utility-scale solar produces about 240 watts average in Arizona, 140 in Maine, and 100 in Germany ("capacity factors" of 24%, 14%, and 10%). I assume the number for Alaska would be even lower. > Every solar panel you put on the ground is going to take up so…
> it will reflect less heat back into space than the plant or bare dirt would, locally raising the temperature
I'm not sure this checks out... the light gets absorbed, but the energy doesn't get turned into heat, it gets turned into electricity. If anything, where it's covering up concrete or asphalt it should reduce the conversion of sunlight to local heat.