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Can solar costs keep shrinking?

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Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#181

Post by bee_rider »

verisimi wrote: post #167
Veserv wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

There isn’t a free market for energy really, it is a global marketplace and the government of every major player puts their thumb on the scale.

Governments are investing in solar because they want to be ahead in the renewable economy, where energy literally just falls from the sky. Is that a subsidy? I guess. It is also a good strategic move.

Are petrochemicals taxed or subsidized? I have no idea, it is a big tangled web. What are the costs of staying plausibly friendly with Saudi Arabia and other OPEC members, who pays that bill?

I’m not going to try and defend either way, but I don’t believe anybody who says they have an answer. If they did manage to analyze the entire global economy somehow (where to even start) I don’t think they’d post the answer here.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#182

Post by the8472 »

rtkwe wrote: post #8
rconti wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I had to re-read it 3 times to understand why the article was saying that was a _bad_ thing. Now I understand what he's saying but I'm pretty lost because it assumes a set of priors I simply never had.

Even the graph that I think is supposed to support the assertion by gesturing towards a link between GDP/c and energy consumption/c shows there's a huge range of per capita energy consumption for countries in the same GDP per capita band hidden because the graph uses dual logarithmic axes. It's always a little hard to read logarithmic values other than those explicitly labelled but it looks like up to a 5-7x differen…

I don't think the range matters so much as the floor. The huge blank in the lower-right corner. No such thing as a rich, energy-poor country.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#183

Post by kragen »

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 the main topic of the article; it describes where those costs come from and how they are being reduced

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#184

Post by Retric »

kragen wrote: post #174
countvonbalzac wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 networ…

Dropping energy costs lowers costs in every sector but rarely by that much.

> aluminum production

Dropping energy costs an by 75% only drops smelting prices by about 30% and finished goods by even less.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#185

Post by bee_rider »

Havoc wrote: post #120
countvonbalzac wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

The economy stopped getting better because I started taking shorter, colder showers.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#186

Post by kragen »

perlgeek wrote: post #136
GaggiX wrote: post #105

>What will the world be like when panels cost $0.05/watt? $0.01/watt? "Good morning, I would like a 400W solar panel" "Sir, that will be $4"

At some point, the glass, frame and wiring will dominate the cost of solar panels, and when we hit that point, the price will likely stop falling. I don't know if we'll ever get as low as $4 with our current approach.

that is already the case; solar panels have been cheaper than window glass per square meter for years now. that's why the article says:

> Is there a floor for these costs?

> > Solar manufacturers are investing hundreds of billions in expanded capacity in an all out war for market share against a background of panel price drops of 15-25% per year. There is an extreme economic forcing function towards rapid improvement and ultimately convergence with the Platonically ideal solar panel - some 20 um thick layer of silicon supported by a 100 um thick layer of plastic rolled off a spool - or some other tech that's thinner and cheaper than paper.—Casey Handmer

> Thinner and cheaper than paper. Think about that!

i suspect that at some point people are going to be mounting bare (passivated) silicon dies on string and putting up chicken wire over them to keep the hailstones off, or something like that. think about how plants support their leaves

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#187

Post by aftbit »

kragen wrote: post #168
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.…

'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 o…

Hi Kragen, small world! At an individual scale, I think plan B is pretty much always a small tri-fuel generator. At a society scale, it's probably a natural gas turbine. If batteries continue to follow their own price curve down, storage may well be a viable answer to 95%+ dunkelflautes at some point in our lifetimes.

I'm curious about the land use analysis and the embodied energy. Given the capacity factor inherent in my climate, will solar panels ever pay off the energy used to make, ship, and install them? Similar question for batteries. And how much land do we need to cover to handle the P95 dark/calm weeks?

Anyway, interesting stuff. Solar continues to eat the world, slowly but surely. :)

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#188

Post by tails4e »

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...

The price to get solar installed in the US is insanely high compared to the cost of the materials. I've seen my extended family get quotes north of 40k for modest installs. I got a modest system with batter for around 9k in the EU, and id say I'd install the same for under 5k at today's prices.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#189

Post by bobthepanda »

kragen wrote: post #178
HideousKojima wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Bahrain and UAE being big aluminum smelters is a bit surprising.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#190

Post by SirHumphrey »

mjamesaustin wrote: post #41
kkfx wrote: post #22

The issues for p.v. are mainly two: - one is speculation, because yes panels get cheaper, so inverters and batteries, but prices to the customers AUGMENT more and more, and current prices for private, domestic p.v., at least in the EU, it's so high that's a nonsense installing them. Personally, since in my country it legal, a thing NOT so common, I've build a small domestic system for 11.500€ while the cheapest offer…

I question your assumptions about grid storage. The cost of storage has been plummeting alongside the cost of solar, and battery lifespans are a non-issue when capacity is not a factor. A battery storage facility that has lost 30% of its capacity after 10 years of operation is still functional with that lower capacity. Compare this to something like a car that has much more limited function with a lowered capacity.

Ok, but why then, if storage is not a big problem of solar power, the US has 179 gigawatts of installed solar capacity with rated power of all grid storage on the US grid being 31.6 GW, of that only 4.8 GW being battery storage. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Stat... [2] https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-grid...

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