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Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

pv-magazine-usa.com

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Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#111

Post by epistasis »

solarengineer wrote: post #92
epistasis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are certainly not alone in your beliefs, but it always amazes me which technologies get the benefit of doubt and which are severely penalized by unfounded doubt. Solar and especially batteries are completely penalized and doubted in a way that defies any honest assessment of reality. The EIA and IEA forecasts are as terrible as they are because the reflect this unrealistic doubt (random blog spam link, but this o…

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat... 10 new plants at USD 2.7 Billion each. They take six years to build. USD 2/Watt. They have standardised designs, have invested in grownig their manpower and know-how.

If you believe China's internal pricing numbers, sure....

But their actual investments in billions of dollars and in GW show that nuclear is not competing with solar, and is sticking around for hedging bets. They the are deploying far far far more solar and storage than nuclear. And if those nuclear costs were accurate, then nuclear would be far preferable. $2/W is incredible, as in perhaps not credible, but it would also be far cheaper than solar.

And even if China figured out how to build that cheaply, it doesn't mean that highly developed countries will be able to replicate that. Nuclear requires a huge amount of high skill, specialized labor, and doing that cheaply is only possible at certain levels of economic development. As economies develop to ever higher productivity, the cost of labor goes up, and it's likely that nuclear only ever makes sense at a very narrow band of economic development.

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#112

Post by JumpCrisscross »

antonvs wrote: post #106
ak217 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas is right, China is poised to dominate battery, solar, and EV technology and to translate it to military technology as well. Meanwhile the Republicans are blowing up US alliances and sabotaging the battery/EV industrial development policy that was actually making progress in giving the US hope in catching up.

> Alas is right, China is poised to dominate … Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”? Seems like a win for everyone else, no? What happened to “competition”, or is that something that’s only supposed to be beneficial within the US?

> Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”?

He’s saying it as a realist.

China is building the equivalent to America’s sanctions power in their battery dominance. In an electrified economy, shutting off battery and rare earths access isn’t as acutely calamitous as an oil embargo, but it’s similarly shocking as sanctions and tariffs.

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#113

Post by matheusmoreira »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #112
antonvs wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alas is right, China is poised to dominate … Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”? Seems like a win for everyone else, no? What happened to “competition”, or is that something that’s only supposed to be beneficial within the US?

> Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”? He’s saying it as a realist. China is building the equivalent to America’s sanctions power in their battery dominance. In an electrified economy, shutting off battery and rare earths access isn’t as acutely calamitous as an oil embargo, but it’s similarly shocking as sanctions and tariffs.

> shutting off battery and rare earths access

Trump just leveraged Magnitsky sanctions against brazilian authorities to obtain access to brazilian rare earths until 2030.

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#114

Post by DamonHD »

wrsh07 wrote: post #34
codersfocus wrote: post #21

Does anyone know whether it makes sense to setup solar arrays closer to users or to concentrate them in sunny places and send them throughout the country? e.g. an analysis of whether we should setup all the solar farms in Nevada for the whole country... set them up in the general south and transmit north... or will each state have their own farms?

Casey Handmer is a huge solar bull and his estimate is that solar becomes cheaper than any other form of electricity even when generated from northern states by 2030 (likely sooner) Iirc solar is meaningfully more efficient (30-50%) in southern states, so it will likely make sense to place energy intensive workloads in locations with more direct sun. However, the cost of transmitting additional power is interesting a…

IMHO "efficient" isn't really the right term in your second para. The PV generation per W incoming is actually a little lower at higher ambient temperatures, but is otherwise fairly constant.

I assume that you mean higher kWh/y/kWp, ie you get more generation out of a given solar panel in the south each year.

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#115

Post by jfengel »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #102
ak217 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas is right, China is poised to dominate battery, solar, and EV technology and to translate it to military technology as well. Meanwhile the Republicans are blowing up US alliances and sabotaging the battery/EV industrial development policy that was actually making progress in giving the US hope in catching up.

good. maybe we can copy some shit for cheap and leap frog a few generations instead of leading the world!

Unlikely, since our labor costs are still considerably higher than elsewhere. For a very long time our economy has rested on developing high margin products and letting others do the low-marginal-overhead of making it. We assumed that they were not going to catch up to us as innovators.

That was a dangerous mistake, and we may be left with nothing.

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#116

Post by rgmerk »

empiricus wrote: post #48

All nice and beautiful, but I don't understand how will this work in the winter in the temperate areas. You maintain parallel natural gas installations and ramp them up in the winter? Does this doubles the cost?

From a global perspective, people living in temperate areas are actually the exception, not the rule (if a disproportionately economically successful exception).

The likely implication of this is that, long term, unless wind power starts going back down the cost curve, or you're fortunate enough to have lots of hydro power, Northern Europe, Canada, northern China and so on are going to have much more expensive energy than more equatorial places.

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#117

Post by jack_tripper »

epistasis wrote: post #107
api wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I saw it. I just felt like that was the moment it tipped.

This is exactly right, IMHO. We were in a course to counter China's momentum, we had handled COVID so much better, our industry had a huuuuuuge investment in it and was poised to take tiff. And then it was all killed. And we are killing off our other competitive edges over China, the way we attract all the world's best science and tech talent to build here in the US rather than in their own countries. We have sat bac…

>our industry had a huuuuuuge investment in it

Which industry? How 'huuuuuge' was the investment?

>We were the most admired country in the world

According to who?

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#118

Post by mcswell »

api wrote: post #77
ak217 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas is right, China is poised to dominate battery, solar, and EV technology and to translate it to military technology as well. Meanwhile the Republicans are blowing up US alliances and sabotaging the battery/EV industrial development policy that was actually making progress in giving the US hope in catching up.

It’s the innovators dilemma. We have so much not just technical but cultural and political sunk cost in fossil fuels and traditional industrial era infrastructure. The Chinese are just developing now and don’t have so much of that sunk cost. So they can think like it’s the future. We are stuck in the past. Eventually there may come a day when it’s China that is stuck in the past, looking back to the early 21st centur…

"Make America Little Again" --Donald J. Trump

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#119

Post by rssoconnor »

ramshanker wrote: post #2

Has any production battery become cheaper than LEAC ACID for computer UPS ? I have not seen new cheaper UPS getting launched.

Do not try this at home, but I replaced the lead acid battery in my UPS with a LFP battery. From what I read online, the charging curves for lead acid batteries and LFP batteries are very similar. The LFP batteries have a slightly higher charging voltage, so I expect my LFP battery to only charge upto about 80% capacity or so due to the charging voltage being slightly too low. I'm hoping the battery will last 10 years instead of 2 or 3 years.

Do not try this at home, as changing battery chemistry is quite ill advised.

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#120

Post by ak217 »

antonvs wrote: post #106
ak217 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas is right, China is poised to dominate battery, solar, and EV technology and to translate it to military technology as well. Meanwhile the Republicans are blowing up US alliances and sabotaging the battery/EV industrial development policy that was actually making progress in giving the US hope in catching up.

> Alas is right, China is poised to dominate … Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”? Seems like a win for everyone else, no? What happened to “competition”, or is that something that’s only supposed to be beneficial within the US?

China is governed by the CCP, which holds the world record for the number of people murdered by the state, feeds its citizens militaristic propaganda at scale, is currently controlled by a guy who fancies himself a dictator, and is politically stable only as long as it continues to suppress free speech and free trade. It takes a dangerous kind of willful naivete to just ignore that fact.
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