Can solar costs keep shrinking?

Around here, cost of solar have risen recently. Even though there still is the stimulus rule that any surplus put into the net can be extracted later (ie., the net functions like a storage facility for any residential installation), recently, power companies have started charging for returning energy. Quite massively too - the difference with their sale price is 2-4 cents/KWhr.

While there are good (as well as bad) reasons for this, the upshot is that the RoI for residential installations changed abruptly and became significantly worse - more or less overnight.

Due to that, and the low cost of the panels themselves, whether they become cheaper isn't very relevant for the market here (since other costs dominate).

The Tiwai Point aluminum smelter uses 13% of New Zealand's electricity [0]

It's overseas owners are constantly playing hardball with the country over the price they pay. Feels like every year they threaten to shut the smelter down unless they get better electricity rates.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiwai_Point_Aluminium_Smelte...

this article is unfortunately fairly usa-centric, but it doesn't really mention the main cost driver for solar installations in the usa, which is the predatory tariffs that have been imposed by a series of administrations, based on the most ridiculous rationales. it does mention that solar panels in the us cost more than twice what they cost elsewhere, but doesn't really explain why. the number now is more like 4× because international panel prices have fallen by half since the year-old figures mostly used in the article. it says, 'overseas, it can go as low as $0.10-$0.12/watt', but actually the current benchmark figure for low-cost solar panels in https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... is €0.07/watt peak, which is 8¢/watt peak in the us dollar

the latest ridiculous news item in this pathetic story of regulatory capture is a petition from the american alliance for solar manufacturing trade committee to impose retroactive import tariffs on solar panel imports from vietnam and thailand https://www.pv-tech.org/us-manufacturers-seek-retroactive-ta...

the supposed justification for thus kneecapping us heavy industry by cutting it off from the cheapest energy in history? 'dumping': supposedly chinese solar panels (the majority of the panels sold in the world, but under 0.1% of the us market https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight... More) are being sold 'under cost'. but when you dig into the justifications for the supposed 'dumping', it turns out that they amount to things like 'provision of solar-grade polysilicon for ltar (less than adequate remuneration)' and 'funding on infrastructure'. i.e., the us department of commerce is trying to charge chinese solar module manufacturers for the government building power plants and cutting good deals on raw materials with other chinese companies. see barcode:4426784-02 c-570-011 for example (there's apparently no url i can use to link these documents directly). useful starting points may include https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14... https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2014-12-23/pdf/2014-3...

to give you an idea of how ridiculous these justifications are, one of the other documents i got was arguing about whether the fair market price for chinese solar-panel-assembling labor should be determined by comparing it to malaysian electronics-assembly labor or romanian electronics-assembly labor. they ended up settling on turkish labor, so to the extent that wages in the area of china where trina solar assembles their panels are lower than wages in turkey, the us department of commerce is imposing the difference as countervailing tariffs for 'dumping'. the evidentiary standard in these proceedings is 'guilty until proven innocent' ('adverse inference in selecting from the facts otherwise available')

the us keeps imposing new import tariffs against renewable energy; https://finance.yahoo.com/news/analysis-bidens-china-tariff-... documents how they're trying to keep out not just solar panels but also electric cars, but failing, because chinese investment is creating new productive capacity for the relevant goods throughout the world — the opposite of what would happen if dumping was actually happening, since the objective of dumping is to drive competition out of business

the result is that solar energy in the usa is several times more expensive than in the rest of the world, so it's getting installed only very slowly. the contrast between the rather pathetic https://www.seia.org/news/solar-installations-skyrocket-2023... (32.4 gigawatts installed in the usa in 02023, only 8% of the worldwide 430 new gigawatts installed worldwide) and the 216 gigawatts added at the same time in the prc (https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...) and the astounding 660 gigawatts expected in the prc this year: https://www.pv-tech.org/bnef-global-solar-additions-655gwdc-...

this by itself should make it clear how ridiculous the 'dumping' accusations are. if you're dumping a product, selling it below its production cost in order to eliminate overseas competition, you don't sell it to yourself. that's losing money on every sale and trying to make it up on volume!

so what's happening is that the world is going through the renewable energy transition, solving the problem of global warming, despite the usa fighting tooth and nail to prevent it with its foreign and trade policy. the prc is leading, developing new manufacturing techniques that lower the prices of energy so low that us companies insist they're dumping their solar panels below cost, but mostly investing in securing access for their own domestic industry

the last time a major new source of energy became available was the steam engine, which is still what powers most of the world's electric grid, in the form of steam turbines in nuclear and coal power plants. that enabled new forms of industry and new economic structures. for the last 50 years we've been stuck in an energy crisis as we've run into fossil-fuel resource constraints and dropping eroei. that crisis has finally ended; the future is already here, but it's not widely distributed. usa policy seems focused on ensuring that the future arrives domestically as slowly as possible, enabling china to obtain as large a lead as possible in the new energy-intensive industries enabled by unbelievably cheap solar energy

if you want the us to be the place where builders go to build things, you need to fix this

> Around here

Where?

> a house with high, quality, modern insulation?

How much is society willing to spend collectively to upgrade our housing stock for this? Not to mention triple-paned windows are not standard by any sufficiently large builder on new construction. Double-paned? Certainly.

Geothermal is great. But in an already built city, it's not feasible to install quickly. There is also a lack of legal framework or precedent in place to heat multiple properties from a single source. I tried very hard to obtain a quote for this and it was well over 50k for a single family home, and nobody would actually do it because of the big city I live in. Want a heat pump too? That's another 25k. Throwing down 100k up-front is not a reasonable request to a typical homeowner.