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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

#181

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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…

This is just a slighty more sophisticated version of the "solar doesn't work at night" trope.

The implications of bringing it up is that these silly hippies haven't even thought of this basic fact so how can we trust them with our energy system.

Meanwhile, actual energy experts have been aware of the concept of winter for at least a few years now.

If you want to critique their plans for dealing with it, you'd need to do more than point out the existence of winter as a gotcha.

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

#182

Post by ohdeardear »

ak217 wrote: post #35
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…

Alas is right, China is poised to dominate battery, solar, and EV technology and to translate it to military technology as well. Meanwhile the Republicans are blowing up US alliances and sabotaging the battery/EV industrial development policy that was actually making progress in giving the US hope in catching up.

[dead]

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

#183

Post by pfdietz »

gpm wrote: post #137
pfdietz wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point being made is that if smoothing over time becomes sufficiently cheap then smoothing over space is supplanted. It would be nice if this happened before the next Carrington Event (or the next nuclear war with orbital EMP weapons.)

I get that, I'm just disagreeing that we should be looking forwards to storage becoming that cheap. Particularly when our cheap energy sources (solar, wind) have a lot of location specific variability over time. With some exceptions for sufficiently remote (or sufficiently always-sunny and not too dense) places that local grids themselves are no longer worth it

I do look forward to local storage getting that cheap. If Standard Thermal (here I am hawking them again) succeeds, we could see local PV-generated seasonally stored 600 C heat at as little as $3/GJ -- competitive with Henry Hub natural gas.

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

#184

Post by ben_w »

nutjob2 wrote: post #132
apexalpha wrote: post #105

It’s somewhat humbling that this is essentially entirely done by one country. For all their faults, I am in awe of the scale and success of their industrial policy.

It's amazing what you can achieve when you control everything in a nation and can execute anyone who disagrees.

Of "control everything" and "execute anyone who disagrees", only the former is useful; the latter is kinda why Russia (and the USSR before it) are failing despite also having a government that could control everything.

You only achieve greatness when your control gets you to do the correct thing. Strong governments make decisions faster, not better. Freedom to debate, to speak out against bad governance, to speak truth to power, democracy, all that's a system to keep a government pointing in the right direction, it slows down decision making but (generally) also increases the accuracy of that decision making.

Same deal with free markets in capitalism: its a feedback mechanism, Tim Cook can announce the Vision Pro and Zuckerberg the Metaverse, direct their teams to spend whatever number of billions was necessary to develop them, market says no.

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

#185

Post by ben_w »

jmward01 wrote: post #71

Batteries are probably going to kill long-range transmission lines and open up remote generation at a scale never thought possible. Desert solar, remote hydro, etc etc. As the price continues to fall and the density continues to rise the economics of transmission completely change and will decouple the location of power generation from the use of that power dramatically. This decoupling of location and use will drast…

> Batteries are probably going to kill long-range transmission lines and open up remote generation at a scale never thought possible.

Not at current power densities.

The bandwidth of a station wagon filled with hard drives is quite high; the power delivery of station wagon filled with batteries is on the low side compared to a wire made from the same material as that station wagon and buried under the road the wagon would have been driving along.

Even for liquid and gas fuels, people make dedicated pipelines rather than doing it all by truck and train.

Now, if someone figures out how to get something like metastable pumped hafnium isomers working… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium_controversy

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

#186

Post by ceejayoz »

aoeusnth1 wrote: post #161
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #3

$33 per MWh for solar. What is it for coal or natural gas? Maybe half that?

Curious, where do you get your news? What gives you the impression that coal or gas would possibly be cheaper than solar?

Doesn't matter; they'll keep up with the same talking points.

They're still flogging the "vast areas of the earth" one nearly two years after someone debunked it and they said "very encouraging!" to that info.

Now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259179

Early 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39415988

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

#187

Post by adwn »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #181
adwn wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is just a slighty more sophisticated version of the "solar doesn't work at night" trope. The implications of bringing it up is that these silly hippies haven't even thought of this basic fact so how can we trust them with our energy system. Meanwhile, actual energy experts have been aware of the concept of winter for at least a few years now. If you want to critique their plans for dealing with it, you'd need to…

I don't see you countering my argument, only attempting to ridicule it ("slighty more sophisticated", "trope", "these silly hippies", "been aware of the concept of winter", "existence of winter as a gotcha"). That sucks, man :-(

> If you want to critique their plans for dealing with it […]

There are many ideas for seasonal storage of PV-generated electricity, but so far there is no concrete plan that's both scalable to TWh levels and economically feasible. Here on HN, there's always someone who'll post the knee-jerk response of "just build more panels", without doing the simple and very obvious calculation that 5x to 10x overprovisioning would turn solar from one of the cheaper into the by far most expensive power generation method out there [1].

[1] Except for paying people to crank a generator by hand, although that might at least help with obesity rates.

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

#188

Post by adwn »

morsch wrote: post #175
adwn wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comb…

Thank you for actually running the numbers. I think the data is quite convincing that overprovisioning won't be the solution to the seasonal storage problem, or at least not the major factor in it.

Personally, I have high hopes for flow batteries. Increasing storage capacity is so easy with them, liquids can easily be stored for a long time, and it would even make long-distance transport by ship feasible. If only we can find a cheap, suitable electrolyte.

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

#189

Post by tim333 »

nutjob2 wrote: post #128
jack_tripper wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century. You must have been asleep at the wheel or living under a rock to have mised China's rise over the last decades. They didn't wait for Trump to get elected in 2024 and then flipped a switch from third world country to global superpower. "Damn, this hot cup of coffee burned my tongue. Why would Trump do this?" -HN comments

It was that Trump and the MAGA crowd conceded to the Chinese by destroying US goodwill and credibility built up over decades. The US will probably never recover those advantages, just as China is ratcheting up its program of dominance. Trump et al have destroyed many things that made the US great. It's bewildering why anyone would do such a thing but here we are.

I don't think it's unfixable but the behavior is still kind of odd.

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

#190

Post by matheusmoreira »

ben_w wrote: post #178
matheusmoreira wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Honestly, I don't know. I just know this rare earths business, among other things, was somehow enough for Trump to drop the very deserved Magnitsky sanctions against a brazilian judge.

I hope it was worth it. I have to believe it was. Because otherwise he delegitimized the Magnitsky Act and fucked us in exchange for nothing.

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