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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

#171

Post by toomuchtodo »

braincat31415 wrote: post #164
toomuchtodo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe Locks In Endgame for Russian Gas And Oil - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/europe-locks-endgame-russian-... - December 9th, 2025

Thanks for the link. I think the facts are correct but the conclusions are wrong. Yamal gas will be redirected to Asian markets by 2030, and Europe will keep losing its manufacturing base to locations with cheaper energy (e.g. the US). But something tells me von der Leyen will not have trouble heating her own home.

Take a look at US manufacturing activity over the last 12 months. The industry is contracting due to federal policy. US fossil gas prices are rising due to LNG exports, so it is not a sure bet cheap energy is available in the US for manufacturing.

https://www.themanufacturer.com/articles/u-s-manufacturing-c...

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64344

CATL is building one of the largest battery manufacturing facilities in Europe in Spain. I think Europe will adapt without issue to manufacturing without the inexpensive fossil fuels it previously relied on Russia for.

https://www.catl.com/en/news/6614.html

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

#172

Post by toomuchtodo »

gpm wrote: post #82
morsch wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some numbers: January 2025, the output of solar was ~1500 GWh, it peaked in June at 10500 GWh. So the lowest output was about 15% of the maximum, this year. https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&... https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&... Looking at wind, the ratio between min and max per week is about 1:5 (~1200 vs ~6000 GWh). Just as there is always some solar…

> it peaked in June at 10500 GWh And 8280 GWh the previous June for those wondering roughly how much of this was due to more solar panels being deployed.

For reference, Germany has ~101GW of solar capacity installed as of this comment (and is deploying ~2GW/month). 59% of Germany's electricity in 2024 came from renewable sources, up from 56% in 2023. I am curious to see how 2025 turns out, and therefore predict 2026 from planned renewables and battery storage projects.

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

#173

Post by braincat31415 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #171
braincat31415 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link. I think the facts are correct but the conclusions are wrong. Yamal gas will be redirected to Asian markets by 2030, and Europe will keep losing its manufacturing base to locations with cheaper energy (e.g. the US). But something tells me von der Leyen will not have trouble heating her own home.

Take a look at US manufacturing activity over the last 12 months. The industry is contracting due to federal policy. US fossil gas prices are rising due to LNG exports, so it is not a sure bet cheap energy is available in the US for manufacturing. https://www.themanufacturer.com/articles/u-s-manufacturing-c... https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64344 CATL is building one of the largest battery manufactur…

I am not sure how US manufacturing activity contracting implies that Europe is not losing its manufacturing to the US. There are lots of news of European companies expanding in the US (one example would be Airbus in Alabama, lots of others). You are absolutely right about LNG exports, and it's unfortunate because it also pushed residential gas prices up, but just look at the benchmark prices in the US vs. Europe (TTF vs Henry), they are different by a whopping factor of 2 at the moment, and it has been worse in the previous years. Notice that the US manufacturing that tends to concentrate next the the source will get its gas even cheaper. Volkswagen CEO recently stated that manufacturing in Germany no longer makes sense. I believe Europe will adapt eventually, but the cost in terms of lost manufacturing and quality of life will be high.

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

#174

Post by ceejayoz »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #155
toss1 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and none of that amounts to even close to the damage from stripping vast areas of the earth to dig up coal, grinding and transporting it to power plants, then setting it on fire, and releasing tons of CO2, and then disposing of tons of unburnt waste full of NASTY chemicals. And having to do all that continuously, every day, for the life of the plant. In every single solution you can point out problems. Complain…

It can be viewed as stripping vast areas of the earth, to put them in the shadow of a solar farm. That utterly disrupts the ecosystem underneath, though in a different way. That's usually hand-waved away.

Turns out you can basically hand-wave it away.

https://apnews.com/article/sheep-solar-texas-climate-333e721...

https://www.nrel.gov/news/detail/features/2025/solar-panels-...

Certainly more so than, say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine.

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

#175

Post by morsch »

adwn wrote: post #169
morsch wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some numbers: January 2025, the output of solar was ~1500 GWh, it peaked in June at 10500 GWh. So the lowest output was about 15% of the maximum, this year. https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&... https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&... Looking at wind, the ratio between min and max per week is about 1:5 (~1200 vs ~6000 GWh). Just as there is always some solar…

How do you interpret these numbers? If your point is that we can simply overprovision photovoltaik arrays by a factor of 6.67, then that would make solar the most expensive power generation method by far. And it only gets worse the more households transition to heatpumps, because the consumption in winter is so lopsided. For example, I heat my home with a heatpump, and I have 10 kWp of solar arrays on my roof. In the…

My point was really only that neither is solar what I'd consider negligible in winter, nor are there really weeks with no wind. Other than that, my interpretation is pretty much the same as yours.

Above, I looked at the weekly min/max ratio. Of course the daily ratios are much higher, 1:60 for solar, and about 1:30 for wind. But wind and solar do have a useful anti-correlation: the ratio is "only" about 1:15 for combined solar+wind. Still high, but a huge improvement on both wind and solar individually.

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...

In reality, the ratio is even higher since we routinely have to drop solar and turn off wind turbines when there is more production than demand (and I don't think that generation is reflected in the graph).

Ie. the max is already a representation more of grid and demand than of production, and it'd make more sense to use the ratio of min:mean, so comparing what we expect PV+wind to produce on average with what they give on the worst day. That gets us a different, more favorable ratio: 195 TWh produced in 2025 so far, let's call it 550 GWh/day, giving a ratio of about 1:6.

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

#176

Post by ZeroGravitas »

epistasis wrote: post #84
state_less wrote: post #16

The scaling up of battery manufacturing for EVs and now solar storage has lead to prices I would have never imagined I'd see in my lifetime. It's one of the success stories that, having lived through it, has been a real joy. I know that folks might have been able to point to a graph years ago and said we'd be here eventually, but I had my doubts given the scale required and hacking through all the lobbying efforts we…

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…

Original source of that observation was Auke Hoekstra nearly a decade ago:

https://x.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1730992987021226002

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

#177

Post by ben_w »

antonvs wrote: post #133
nutjob2 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's alas for everyone but China. Who wants to be dependent on an aggressive totalitarian state? You can't compete fairly with China because the government applies massive subsidies and is coercive with both imports and exports. Right behind Russia, China is the biggest threat to global order and peace. It's no accident they are in cahoots.

Where do you place the United States under the Trump administration in that list? I’m getting a strong sense of denial in this thread.

IMO, depends where you are in the world.

I'm in Berlin, I have more to fear from Trump's administration than from Xi Jinping's.

If I was in the Philippines, I think it would be the other way around. Initially I also had Japan and Taiwan in that comparison, but thinking a bit harder, there's also a risk that Trump is isolationist, that means the risk from each is more like a multiplier than a simple comparison.

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

#178

Post by ben_w »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #113
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Brazil?

https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-rare-earth...

Output in 2024 was 20 tons.

The change in Chinese output between 2023 and 2024 was an additional 15,000 tons, going from 255,000 to 270,000 tons. The USA's own increased by 3400, from 41,600 to 45,000 tons.

I'm happy to assume Brazilian output will grow, especially if the USA invests a lot in it, but is it going to even be close to enough to make up for where China's already at? China was about 70% of the global output.

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

#179

Post by ben_w »

jack_tripper wrote: post #93
toomuchtodo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

‘We were all wrong’: how Germany got hooked on Russian energy - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/02/germany-depend... - June 2nd, 2022 > An arrangement that began as a peacetime opening to a former foe has turned into an instrument of aggression. Germany is now funding Russia’s war. In the first two months after the start of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Germany is estimated to have paid nearly €8.3bn for Ru…

>> “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.” So when are they retroactively giving back their salaries and pensions for having fucked up the livelihoods of their taxpayers? Politicians have no incentive to ever make good decisions for the future of their country without any skin in the game from which their personal riches are derived. >We win or we learn…

> So when are they retroactively giving back their salaries and pensions for having fucked up the livelihoods of their taxpayers?

Does anyone, ever, in any role, do this?

Do CEOs return their bonuses and pay and pensions when they close a business, let alone when they cut the workforce, let alone when they miss the growth of a competitor that is currently still not a direct threat and is instead fighting a battle of attrition with friend of the CEO and would only become a threat if they can take that friend's resources without the attrition destroying everything of value?

> Politicians have no incentive to ever make good decisions for the future of their country without any skin in the game from which their personal riches are derived.

The penalty for most errors in politics is the same as the penalty in any other job: you lose the job.

Most errors, because the really bad errors get you killed, either by an angry mob or by an invading army or by special forces (who may be from the latter while pretending to be the former).

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

#180

Post by ben_w »

junto wrote: post #58
tirant wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t care if German prices for electricity are below inflation. They’re just still expensive. As an EV owner is difficult to find an electricity provider with costs below 0,25€/kWh, and most of them go beyond 0,30€. While I had prices in other European countries for around 0,05€/kWh at night for example. Not only that, Conservatives, Socialists and the Green all managed to increase our electricity CO2 footprint by…

That’s mainly because German has fucked up the smart meter rollout. In their wisdom they separated the meter and the gateway when other countries just combined it. They also made it super secure (good), but then didn’t look at the fact that lots of people live in rented apartments and their meters in the cellars have really poor or no cellular connectivity. When Germany can finally do steerable dynamic loads properly…

> If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly.

Too slowly, if I'm following local news correctly (I might well not be, my German is enough to listen to podcasts but it's still not good).

e.g. this train station upgrade is currently about 20 years behind the original schedule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Köpenick_station#Presen...

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