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Can solar costs keep shrinking?

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Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#151

Post by RankingMember »

Animats wrote: post #149

We're there on solar panels. The next step is batteries. And roof systems. Cheaper ways to get solar panels on roofs. That's mostly installation cost. Does Tesla's solar roof [1] actually work? Anyone have one? [1] https://www.tesla.com/solarroof

I only know one person who successfully got one installed, and his installation was endlessly delayed, after which their paperwork got screwed up on Tesla's end so they had it for free until they sold house (not sure if they ever got charged for it honestly). It worked, but reportedly wasn't as efficient as panels would've been.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#152

Post by pseudosavant »

countvonbalzac wrote: post #92
rtkwe wrote: post #2

I'm having a hard time getting past the assumption in the article that energy use is tied directly to GDP per capita and that by not following the 7% growth of the Henry Adams Curve we're somehow below where we should/could be as a country. That embeds so many assumptions about the economy and where GDP comes from, the decoupling seems more likely to be from the transition from manufacturing and other energy heavy se…

Same - take lightbulbs for example. Thanks to LEDs, the amount of energy you need to generate X amount of light has reduced considerably, but we still have as much if not more lighting than ever. And it's not like our GDP is suffering due to a lack of sufficient lighting, at a certain point there's no gain to productivity gained from having another lightbulb. Same thing can be said about cars, CPUs etc.

It is a curious assertion for sure, but the next wave of AI will be throttled by a few factors: chip fab capacity, water supply to cool data centers, and electricity to power the chips/servers. Look at what is happening with xAI in Memphis where they are illegally running a dozen turbine generators to power their new AI data center since they can't get enough supply off the grid.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#153

Post by ghaff »

rconti wrote: post #96
mapt wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been the case for years now for pitched residential roofs - they stopped being competitive a long time ago. Thankfully, the impetus for residential roof solar was always more ideological than practical. There's plenty, PLENTY, of empty unused land within a 95% transmission efficiency (hundreds or even thousands of kilometers depending on tech) of the end user, for all non-island cases.

Yeah. When we bought our solar system, even knowing it was grid-tied, it felt like we'd somehow be generating our own power. As soon as we had it, and I looked at the tiering, time-of-use, etc, and I realized it's all an arbitrage game. I'm selling my roof space and fixed asset back to the power company, and buying power from them.

If solar could reasonably double for me as a way of weathering a several day power outage in the winter, it would be more interesting. But I'm deeply suspicious of anything that has people out in front of Home Depot hard-selling something that often has complex financing schemes. I don't have huge power bills relative to lots of other home costs. So I'll pass.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#154

Post by Xt-6 »

sitkack wrote: post #115

Yes The pallet price of solar panels in the US is below 30 cents a watt. https://a1solarstore.com/wholesale-solar-panels.html And from alibaba, it is below 15 cents a watt. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Longi-solar-Hi-MO-X6-... With full systems below $1/watt. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Moregosolar-hybrid-so...

I have used to https://www.solarpricewatcher.com/ to find panels.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#155

Post by pfdietz »

philipkglass wrote: post #138
rmason wrote: post #103

I remember as a child being on a school tour of the Enrico Fermi nuclear plant South of Detroit being told that nuclear power would soon become too cheap to monitor. This was over sixty years ago! So I am a bit skeptical. I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas.…

I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas. There was a brief period in the US from the late 1960s through the early 1970s where it looked like new nuclear power plants were going to supply electricity cheaper than coal. A few commercial reactors had just been finis…

> Most people who care about the history of nuclear power know about the ballooning costs and schedule overruns for nuclear reactors after Three Mile Island

Costs were ballooning even before TMI.

> The other part is that real coal prices fell in the 1980s instead of rising.

More importantly, 1979 saw the passage of PURPA, which began to open the power market to non-utility providers. There was enormous untapped potential for cogeneration (and, as it turned out, cogeneration-in-name-only) that produced a slug of new output, mostly gas fired, into the grids just after what had been inexorable 7%/year increase in electricity demand in the US suddenly moderated.

In this environment, it was very difficult to make the case for new nuclear power plants.

> I wonder if those over-optimistic solar cost predictions you saw in 1975

In what sense were they over-optimistic? PV has experienced a remarkably relentless cost decline along an experience curve of about 20% decline in cost with each doubling of cumulative production.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#156

Post by cycomanic »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #146
rmason wrote: post #103

I remember as a child being on a school tour of the Enrico Fermi nuclear plant South of Detroit being told that nuclear power would soon become too cheap to monitor. This was over sixty years ago! So I am a bit skeptical. I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas.…

If we had gone all-in on nuclear, starting in the 70s, how cheap and plentiful would electricity really be today, 50 years later?

Not much cheaper as can be clearly seen in France who did go all in and is only able to keep costs reasonable (not low) by skimping on maintance.

Nuclear has received significantly more subsidies than solar or wind (in both the US and EU) and is still not viable (mind you fossils have received by far the most subsidies) .

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#157

Post by pfdietz »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #54
specialist wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I clocked that too. Perhaps author is nodding towards replacing fossil fuels with electricity. Decarbonizing steel uses a lot more energy. Ditto cement, plastics, fertilizers, HVAC, etc. Anyone care to guess how much more energy our glorious renewable energy future perfect economy will require? 4x? 6x?

The classic mistake with calculations around this topic is assuming you need an equal amount of electric energy to displace the equivalent in fossil fuel. It's a broken assumption that you see popping up in a lot of places. Including reports by institutions that should know better like the IEA. A classic example here is cars. A typical Tesla would have about 65kwh of usable battery. A gallon of fuel represents about…

Heat pumps save gas even if the electricity is being produced in gas-fired power plants.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#158

Post by Veserv »

epoxia wrote: post #140
takinola wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas My understanding is commercial solar (as opposed to household solar) is cheaper than natural gas so that prediction is at least partly true

Not really, the over-cited LCOE of solar/wind does not account for the cost of (its increased need of) battery storage. As time of use does not align with the time of generation. Also, battery storage has its own ongoing costs with battery degradation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxlnBNVCfBQ

What is the point of citing theoretical values like LCOE when we have direct practical information on predicted profitability?

Energy producers in Texas are are adding 8x as much solar capacity (24 GW) as natural gas capacity (3 GW) [1] over 2024-2025. Do you believe that the entire Texas power plant industry is deliberately choosing less profitable and capital inefficient generation?

That could be the case, they may optimistically forecasted or undercounted potential future problems, but at this point in time their calculations seem to show that solar is tremendously more cost efficient to deploy over its expected lifetime.

It could also be the case that there are just subsidies for renewable energy in Texas that tip the balance. But at the scales we are now discussing, 10-20% of total energy generating capacity, the total value of those subsidies would need to be quite tremendous (in the G$ to 10 G$ per year range).

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61783#:~:tex....

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#159

Post by PaulKeeble »

rmason wrote: post #103

I remember as a child being on a school tour of the Enrico Fermi nuclear plant South of Detroit being told that nuclear power would soon become too cheap to monitor. This was over sixty years ago! So I am a bit skeptical. I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas.…

We are very much there already, Solar and Wind are both cheaper than Natural gas which is itself is cheaper than Coal. Solar is around 5 cents a KWH whereas Nuclear is more like 15 cents a KWH. The prices of Wind and Solar are being set by Gas at the moment as well and at some point that pricing will detach once more batteries are in place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#160

Post by pfdietz »

nostrademons wrote: post #135
anonfordays wrote: post #72

Soon (if not already) the largest costs associated with solar installations will be the labor. It's expensive to get people on roofs and electricians to reconfigure panels, install transfer switches, etc. The equipment could be free and it would still cost thousands for the skilled trades to install.

This is one of the forces driving the shift from rooftop solar to utility-scale installations. A residential installation needs guys up on a roof to install the panels, and then custom wiring for each house. A solar farm can use robots to install tens of thousands of panels cheaply. There are unfortunate side effects to this, even besides the attacks on net metering that have cut financial returns for existing solar…

The attack on net metering isn't unfortunate; what's unfortunate is that people thought net metering ever made any sense. It's free riding on services provided by the grid, forcing others (who don't have PV) to pay for cost of providing those services. As PV rolled out, the craziness of net metering became impossible to ignore. Of course, those feeding at this trough objected loudly, and some naively fell for those objections.
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