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

cleantechnica.com

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

#141

Post by dylan604 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #117
Ajedi32 wrote: post #60

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. Edit: Unless you're taking advantage of tax incentives to do it at house scale. Its hard to beat the economics of just being handed free money.

> 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 $0 payment. Otherwise, who's going to pay for the administrative costs of having you as a customer?

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

#142

Post by tialaramex »

DennisP wrote: post #124
bilsbie wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always said this! Make daytime energy 100x cheaper and the market will respond. Appliances will start building in batteries, behaviors will change , and who knows what else the market will come up with.

That's just externalizing costs though. Instead of building a large battery at the power station, you're building lots of little batteries everywhere else. Even demand management can be an externalized cost. If a factory shuts down half the time, then you need twice as many factories to produce the same stuff.

> If a factory shuts down half the time, then you need twice as many factories to produce the same stuff.

No. It means you might need twice as much of whatever the bottleneck is, assuming that's a real time manufacturing resource which it might well not be. You definitely don't need twice as many whole factories. And if that bottlebeck isn't energy intensive that's not the problem at all, you can just re-arrange the energy intensive parts and you won't even need more factory.

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

#144

Post by danans »

outside1234 wrote: post #130
tallowen wrote: post #2

I found this podcast with Jesse Jenkins to be a really helpful start to understand non fixed energy resources. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-the-sun-isnt-alwa... I thought that the most cost effective way to supply energy would require a certain amount of base load. It seems like this is a misunderstanding because of how much cheaper and more available these non fixed resources are than fixed resources.…

AND how we manage our personal energy - for example, adding batteries to arbitrage the cheap daytime energy during the night

I do this today with residential batteries on a time-of-use rate plan that is highest between 3PM and midnight (with an average $0.30/kWh price difference between peak and low rates).

I end up arbitraging about 5kWh/day (1825kWh/yr ) of usage between those rates, which works out to about ~$500/year in utility bill savings. Compared to the cost of the battery system, that's not much and the payback period is well beyond the life of the battery.

In some locations (alas not mine), you can sell your battery's charge back to the grid during, providing grid ancillary services, for an even better ROI.

There is still, however, some resistance against opening the gates to leaf-node distributed energy resources from traditional utilities and generators.

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

#145

Post by hgomersall »

zackmorris wrote: post #85

Just so we have some numbers: $0.41 per watt utility-scale solar panel cost in 2020 ($0.17-$0.30 by 2030): https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/2030-solar-cost-t... Cost projections (note the 2019 upswing where market forces and installation costs exceeded solar panel cost): https://www.solar.com/learn/solar-panel-cost/ $480/kWh utility-scale battery cost (falling by 32% to $326/kwH by 2030): https://www.energy…

I'm suspicious of those numbers. I personally can build a home scale battery storage system for around 280£/kWh. As in, I can go and buy the parts to do that and put it together. I can't believe they can't already do it cheaper at grid scale. That said, it might well be it's as easy to buy at small scale as at grid scale currently.

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

#146

Post by winter_blue »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #125
bilsbie wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always said this! Make daytime energy 100x cheaper and the market will respond. Appliances will start building in batteries, behaviors will change , and who knows what else the market will come up with.

How is daytime energy supposed to get 100x cheaper and still allow solar, which only generates during the daytime, to recover its costs? Unless you mean for the nighttime price to increase by a huge factor, but then how would that out-compete existing technologies for generation at night?

I think he means solar panels becoming so cheap that the total cost of solar is 1/100 of nighttime energy sources.

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

#147

Post by Kon5ole »

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.

It doesn't have to be batteries, hydrogen gas can be generated from solar at 80% efficiency, and storing hydrogen is way cheaper than batteries. Certainly way cheaper than nuclear.

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

#148

Post by AnthonyMouse »

danans wrote: post #133
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can replace a significant proportion of the grid with intermittent generation without any trouble. Using solar for the air conditioning load in the summer is perfect. Use whatever you want to charge electric car batteries because they're batteries and most cars are parked >90% of the time. You can can't shift 100% of the load based on time of day through pricing, but you can do a non-trivial amount. Then you pick…

> Then you pick the low-hanging fruit and start trying to find a solution to power heat pumps in the winter at night and it's... not as easy. But it's also not impossible, especially as heat pump efficiency keeps marching up in colder conditions and stationary battery prices keep going down with new chemistries that trade off energy density for cost. Heck, if batteries are still too expensive, we could even use resid…

Storage isn't just a bad fit for that because it's expensive, though. What do you do when it runs down, because it's unusually cold or you have an extended period of low generation, or both? Now it's 20 degrees below freezing and you have no heat.

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

#149

Post by Scoundreller »

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…

What’s your “smart” thermostat?

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

#150

Post by AnthonyMouse »

winter_blue wrote: post #146
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is daytime energy supposed to get 100x cheaper and still allow solar, which only generates during the daytime, to recover its costs? Unless you mean for the nighttime price to increase by a huge factor, but then how would that out-compete existing technologies for generation at night?

I think he means solar panels becoming so cheap that the total cost of solar is 1/100 of nighttime energy sources.

Even if the panels were free, you couldn't cover the labor to install them for that.
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