Yes. For a detailed (verbal) analysis, see Patio11's podcast (also featuring Casey Handmer quoted in this article): https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/solar-economi...
Can solar costs keep shrinking?
161–170 of 632 posts
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#162Earlier 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. 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 poten…
In what sense were they over-optimistic?
The OP said "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."
That would mean PV cost parity with coal-generated electricity in the early 1980s. Actual PV cost declines have been remarkable but they didn't go that quickly.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#163I used to be radically pro-nuclear, but after seeing some of the data of solar growth and realizing we could just scale things up (like building iphones), I'm fully on board with the Elon strategy of solar + powerbanks for storage.
The problem with nuclear is that it likes to be big, which means big capital-intensive projects and therefore a slow iteration time. Even if there are some things that are superior about nuclear, like land and raw resource use, it's going to get run over by a fast-iterating solution with small minimum capital investment. At this point solar+batteries is a cheaper option in almost all locations except perhaps places w…
And "land and raw resource use" is just a backhanded way to imply cost, used because the actual cost doesn't favor nuclear at all.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup exactly. Why go through all that headache, which has existed with Nuclear since day 1, when we could just mass produce solar and plop it down on the infinite empty desert land out west.
1) There isn't infinite desert land that can be used. 2) You still need firm, dispatchable power. Batteries are a bridge, not the only solution.
> 1) There isn't infinite desert land that can be used.
There is far more desert land than we would need. It doesn't have to be infinite for it not to be a significant constraint.
> Dispatchable power
Batteries + burning e-fuels in turbines or fuel cells
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#165I'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…
presumably what's going to happen is that, as energy becomes dramatically cheaper, production will shift from less-energy-intensive processes toward more-energy-intensive processes. this is likely to happen at many levels: between different routes for producing the same good (for example, pidgeon vs. dow process), between alternative goods (for example, aluminum vs. steel), between subsectors (for example, heavy industry vs. high-precision manufacturing), and across sectors (for example, manufacturing vs. services)
so, with the advent of innovations that dramatically drop the cost of energy, we should expect to see energy use grow faster than gdp. that's decoupling but in the opposite direction from the decoupling you're talking about, which has been driven by the 01973–02023 energy crisis
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#166Yes. For a detailed (verbal) analysis, see Patio11's podcast (also featuring Casey Handmer quoted in this article): https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/solar-economi...
wouldn’t you say that the article itself also contains a detailed (verbal) analysis? betteridge's law aside, it agrees with you
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Is it a free market though? Or are solar, wind, etc being funded by the government? Or is gas being taxed in a way that solar is not (yet)?
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#168I 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.…
'too cheap to meter' was always nonsense and is nonsense now. the only time you're getting unmetered energy is if you have so much distributed generation and storage that transmission is unprofitable to build except for unusual cases. for example, most people with a household solar system with storage have unmetered energy during the day
the numbers you saw for solar in 01975 were wrong, based on at most five years of commercial solar panel production. now we have 50 years of commercial solar panel production to estimate the learning rate from, and consequently for the last five years or so solar is cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas in most of the world. you should have stopped waiting five years ago
in northern climates your plan b is probably a combination of wind, batteries, thermal energy storage, and emergency generators burning emergency-priced liquid fuels — initially fossil fuels, later electrolysis-sourced
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#169Yes 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...
wholesale it's €0.07/watt (peak) https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Batteries are the solution. The sun is pretty stable (not very firm unfortunately, but I don't see how that relates to electricity).
Firm refers to the generation profile of the power source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation Batteries are not cost or resource efficient for winter where I live. Less than 8 hours of sunlight is not enough to heat a house during the day let alone night. There simply isn't enough solar generation even when overprovisioned to last.
But nuclear is not dispatchable either so what's your point? It's funny how everyone brings up the intermittance of solar and wind as a point how they can never work because they don't provide baseload and nuclear is the solution.
If you read opinions from operators and incident reports you'll find that large power plants like nuclear are actually a much bigger problem for network management, because if you have to take down a nuclear plant for some reason, you suddenly have a huge issue providing that electricity with fast dispatchable generation.