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Can solar costs keep shrinking?

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Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#171

Post by pfdietz »

philipkglass wrote: post #162
pfdietz wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah, I have to question OP's memory there. No way that could have been said in good faith.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#172

Post by obscurette »

hadlock wrote: post #125
jvanderbot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this confuses me too. In developed countries a huge amount of energy goes to using things, not just making them . Let alone efficiency gains from production. This is possibly why energy use has flattened while GDP clips along at its normal exponential curve - we're also more efficient.

Lighting going from 1% efficient (99% of the energy used by a traditional tungsten lightbulb is waste heat) to over 95% efficient (in many cases 99% efficient). Computers went from 200-400w continuous down to about 15w continuous. Lighting alone is responsible for a huge amount of energy drop-off.

Sorry, but these numbers are not accurate. Luminous efficiency of tungsten lightbulbs is typically around 1-3% (depends on voltage and power), and luminous efficiency of LED bulbs is around 10-30%. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficacy)

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#173

Post by mercutio2 »

pfdietz wrote: post #160
nostrademons wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I think it's reasonable to subsidize adoption of early-stage technology that's promising but doesn't pencil out yet, to kick-start the learning curve. Thanks largely to Germany for doing the lion's share of the early subsidies with solar!

But you're of course correct that this is a giant subsidy, and unfortunately it was funded by other rate payers rather than a central government, which was a nutty system from the beginning.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#174

Post by kragen »

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.

for some economic activities, energy is not a limiting input; you are implicitly referring to economic production enabled by electric lighting, such as office work, and indeed energy has not been a limiting input for that for at least a century. reducing the cost of energy will not result in more gdp in those sectors

for other economic activities, such as solar panel production, aluminum production, and neural network training, energy is a limiting input. reducing the cost of energy will result in more gdp in those sectors

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#175

Post by ziga »

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…

We need all the renewables we can get, and I think you can have both -- utility-scale and rooftop. Rooftop solar (and battery storage) just needs to be cost efficient to offset the rising cost of electricity and make it a good return on investment.

The "attacks on net metering" are merely acknowledging that the proportion of renewables on the grid is high enough that balancing grid supply and demand is becoming an issue. I'm a big proponent of rooftop solar, but the reality is that 1:1 net metering just doesn't make sense once there's a critical mass of solar installed (the duck curve problem). This is not a problem unique to California or the US. If you look at other places with high solar adoption (Australia, EU), you'll find even stricter policies like negative feed-in tariffs: the utility will charge you for exporting solar to the grid.

Battery storage is a solution to that problem, but that's where prices are still too high. I'm actually surprised that battery storage is not mentioned in the article, because that's a critical component of allowing solar/wind to grow further.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#176

Post by mercutio2 »

marssaxman wrote: post #107
datacruncher01 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think eventually the hardware will be so cheap it'll make more sense to use them as solar fences. Reduce the cost to install and maintain by 3-4x easily. Or DIY for practically nothing.

There's an apartment building here in Seattle which has solar panels mounted flat on its west-facing wall (602 12th Ave). The panels were apparently cheap enough that they did not care about maximizing daylight exposure and simply installed them in the easiest place. Quite a change this is from what I remember when I had solar panels installed on my roof eleven years ago!

West-facing is pretty close to revenue maximizing, with current consumption peaks in the early evening.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#177

Post by pstuart »

api wrote: post #55
pstuart wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) were supposed to address this concern. Unfortunately even with this strategy it doesn't seem to be able to compete cost-wise in the market. I hope that can be worked out, as I think we'd be well-served by having as many eggs in our energy basket as possible.

SMRs are still huge compared to putting $10k worth of solar panels on a house. They also require a lot of big expensive infrastructure like reprocessing facilities, expensive safety-escorted transportation, secure facilities, etc.

Yes those things are true; albeit the apple to oranges comparison of a home setup vs community baseload provider.

One of the compelling deployment cases is to revamp existing coal fired plants with SMRs, which would be a huge win in addressing climate change.

None of this is meant to disparage or dismiss solar and other renewables; it's meant to be complementary.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#178

Post by kragen »

HideousKojima wrote: post #137
Havoc wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think it’s meant more as a broad generalization than something that is always true. Many physical things take pretty fixed amounts of energy. Eg heating a liter of water.

Or refining aluminum, which uses something like 1.5% of all US electricity generation.

it would be much more, but the us imports 130% of the aluminum it consumes from places with lower energy costs: https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-aluminum.p...

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#179

Post by jauntywundrkind »

cycomanic wrote: post #156
laweijfmvo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) .

France went all in, but they saturated the energy market by when? They've built a couple since, but after an intense build out during the 70's they haven't had to keep building.

Part of the idea to me is that, if you want to be a nuclear civilization, you need government scale investment in not just building plants but in improving the designs.

You need to stay in for decades, stay evolving, where-as France simply isn't big enough, doesn't have enough demand to keep at building again and again (to the scale that they would iterate on new significantly improved fuel cycles).

America's efforts like the Integral Fast Reactor, a fast reactor with on site pyro processing, seemed so promising. A safe & proliferation-safe way to not just reprocess but to keep burning tons of the transuranics (something France doesn't really do, afaik). But we gave up. The related PRISM designs have been kicking around for decades now, and I think one might even maybe get built, but generally the atmosphere around nuclear feels like it's building old/boring designs & not trying at all to advance. Then externalizing the massive incredibly long lived waste problems.

I haven't done any research in a bit, but India for a while was talking a big game about building out Thorium reactors, at scale, and I distantly recall that seemed to have some potential to be an improved fuel cycle over the basic designs/fuel-cycles we've had for so long.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#180

Post by efields »

philipkglass wrote: post #148
efields wrote: post #132

How do we get around labor being the primary cost eater when that has (is) the most expensive factor, depending on where you live? I want labor to be paid, and I also want cheap clean energy. Help me square the circle.

Build small numbers of large ground mounted solar arrays instead of large numbers of small rooftop mounted solar arrays. Then soft costs (permitting, certification) are much lower, the overall cost per unit of electricity is much lower, and labor gets paid much better. This National Renewable Energy Laboratory page has a cost comparison of utility scale solar farms with rooftop systems: https://www.nrel.gov/solar/mar…

Thanks! I like this answer.
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