Live data from Hacker News

Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

pv-magazine-usa.com

211–220 of 226 posts

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

#211
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electrolysis hydrogen is only a little bit more expensive than hydrogen derived from methane and electrolyzers with dozens of megawatt are available. That seems pretty solid to me at this point in the energy transition.

Hydrogen generation isn't the problem, storing it over several months is. Economical, safe, and reliable storage of hydrogen is very much an unsolved engineering challenge. If it weren't, hydrogen storage plants would shoot out of the ground left and right: Even here in Germany, we have such an abundance of solar electricity during the summer months that wind generators have to be turned off and the spot price of ele…

Why stop at hydrogen for storage and transport;

there's ammonia, methanol, and other derivatives that are easier to store and transport.

eg: * https://www.methanex.com/our-products/about-methanol/marine-...

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

#212
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydrogen generation isn't the problem, storing it over several months is. Economical, safe, and reliable storage of hydrogen is very much an unsolved engineering challenge. If it weren't, hydrogen storage plants would shoot out of the ground left and right: Even here in Germany, we have such an abundance of solar electricity during the summer months that wind generators have to be turned off and the spot price of ele…

You can store it in salt caverns

If that's so easy, cheap, and safe, why aren't there companies doing it on a large scale already? We're talking about billions of Euros of market volume.

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

#213
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydrogen generation isn't the problem, storing it over several months is. Economical, safe, and reliable storage of hydrogen is very much an unsolved engineering challenge. If it weren't, hydrogen storage plants would shoot out of the ground left and right: Even here in Germany, we have such an abundance of solar electricity during the summer months that wind generators have to be turned off and the spot price of ele…

Why stop at hydrogen for storage and transport; there's ammonia, methanol, and other derivatives that are easier to store and transport. eg: * https://www.methanex.com/our-products/about-methanol/marine-...

Yes, those are easier to store, but more expensive and less efficient to generate.

The question is the same as for hydrogen: If it's easy, cheap, and safe to generate, store, and convert back into electricity, why isn't it already being done on a large, commercial scale? The answer is invariably that it's either not easy to scale, too expensive (in terms of upfront costs, maintainance costs, or inefficiencies), or too unsafe, at least today.

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

#214
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why stop at hydrogen for storage and transport; there's ammonia, methanol, and other derivatives that are easier to store and transport. eg: * https://www.methanex.com/our-products/about-methanol/marine-...

Yes, those are easier to store , but more expensive and less efficient to generate . The question is the same as for hydrogen: If it's easy, cheap, and safe to generate, store, and convert back into electricity, why isn't it already being done on a large, commercial scale? The answer is invariably that it's either not easy to scale, too expensive (in terms of upfront costs, maintainance costs, or inefficiencies), or…

With rapidly dropping PV prices it just gets cheaper - this is only a relatively recent thing; the projects that exist to exand production are barely complete yet .. capital plant takes time to build.

Fortescue only piloted athe the world's first ammonia dual-fuel vessel late last year, give them time to bed that in and advance.

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

#215
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can store it in salt caverns

If that's so easy, cheap, and safe, why aren't there companies doing it on a large scale already? We're talking about billions of Euros of market volume.

Right now it’s cheaper to make hydrogen from methane and methane is easier to store and process so no large scale storage of hydrogen is in demand. Nevertheless storage in salt caverns is a proven process that is in use right now eg. Linde does it.

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

#216
post #200
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…

> Complaining that "X isn't perfect" is the easiest and laziest thing in the world to do. Assessing the ACTUAL costs and damages IN PROPORTION is more difficult, but actually yields good results. no one here typed that photovoltaics shouldn't be on play. but the way it's being paraphrase, feels like a panacea. the OP telling other skeptical opinions against mass substitution to photovoltaics is 'a shame on a tech ori…

Nice, a lovely screed using exactly the same Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt techniques used by tobacco companies to promote cigarettes for decades after they were proven to be the source of mass fatal diseases costing people and society, and again reused by the fossil energy companies.

Every single claim above is at best massively outdated and/or outright wrong and disproved (and no, I won't go do your research for you and find cites for everything).

So, start from the bottom:

>> thrash burried .. multi kilo tons wind turbines

not sure if you mean buried or burned, but wind turbines are already being recycled and reused in bulk, and that is ramping up (and also offtopic from solar)

>> visual pollution coming from wind turbines

Again offtopic, and also purely a matter of taste; it doesn't affect anything

>> transporting these batteries to be recycled in specific areas is just a matter of building cargo-drones powered by solar energy and AI vision

Nice strawman argument from something I never said, and no, there are plenty of other perfectly good transport methods. And yes, recycling batteries is already becoming good business and a great feedstock for 'mining' the materials, and no it does not need to be a big deal, and siting the 'mining' facilities for recycling/recovery is vastly more flexible than siting mining for coal which is obviously necessary wherever the coal happened to form 100 million years ago.

>> they even were ironic agaisnt nuclear technology

Again, a strawman argument, as I never said I was against nuclear tech, and I am in fact for the new forms of nuclear tech, particularly the smaller even portable reactors ('tho the promise of Thorium reactors seems to have faded, but I'm not sure why).

>> if you think it's economically viable to dismantle coal stations and substitute them for solar

Again, only citing multiple studies showing that, and again, you entirely miss the point, which is not that you'd necessarily do it in every case, but that the point of coal being even the economical option has long passed, nevermind the environmental catastrophe it creates.

>> cute little article of people producing tomatoes under laboratory settings

tomatoes aren't the only thing being produced in conjunction with solar panels, and there are so many projects and studies showing its effectiveness in both improving results for farmers and improving their financial stability that it has a name: "agrivoltaics". Instead of spending your energy scoffing at things you obviously know nothing about, perhaps go read up on it and learn something.

>> security/reliability of the grid agaisnt (cyber)terrorism and war

If you want security and reliability, the best thing is widely dispersed power generation as close as possible to the use location. I have advocated for decades that a DOD project like the US Interstate Highway System should be done to ensure every household had a minimum amount of solar self-generation capacity, and stockpile transformers which have a manufacturing lead time of years. A nationwide grid outage without this is a potentially civilization-collapsing event, whereas if every household had some baseline capacity, they can still refrigerate food and communicate. Obviously just a cutout example, but the principle of diversity of power sources and locations makes a more robust system. Only bad grid planning makes solar or wind anything other than an improvement in grid reliability.

Moreover, battery tech is now sufficiently cheap that even the net cost of installing solar+batteries is lower than fossil plants, and that combination has better stability and millisecond-response rates that massively stabilize the grid (vs. ramp-up times measured in minutes-hours for gas plants and days for coal/nuclear).

>>a shame on a tech oriented forum

It is not the discussion of other options, but the disproportionate dismissal and spurious arguments that is a shame here. I'm sure there might be some exceptional situation where a new coal plant might actually be better all things considered, and if you have an actual example to discuss then bring some fats, but overall, that ship has sailed.

with agrivoataiagain, there are hundreds of article

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

#217
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 5x to 10x overprovisioning would turn solar from one of the cheaper into the by far most expensive power generation method out there. This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x. Additionally that implies the overprovisioned power is worthless in the summer, which does not have to be the case. It might make certain processes viable due to very low cost of…

> This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x. That's a huge "if". The cost of PV panels has come down by a factor of 10 in the last 13 years or so, that's true. I doubt another 10x decrease is possible, because at some point you run into material costs. But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total install…

> But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total installation cost of utility-scale PV. This means that even if the panels were free, it would only reduce the cost by a factor of 1.5.

1. Do the other costs scale with the number of panels? Because if the sites are 5 times the scale of the current ones I would imagine there are considerable scale based cost efficiencies, both within projects and across projects (through standardization and commoditization).

2. Vertically mounted bifacial PV already greatly smoothes the power production curve throughout the day, improving profitability. Lower cost panels make the downside of requiring more panels in such a setup almost non-existent. Additionally, they reduce maintenance/cleaning costs by being mounted vertically.

3. Battery/energy storage (which further improve profitability) costs are dropping and can drop further.

Also, please address the matter of using the overprovisioned power in summer. Possible projects are underground thermal storage ("Pit Thermal Energy Storage", only works in places where heating is required in winter), desalination, producing ammonia for fertilizer, and producing jet fuel.

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

#218
post #216
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Complaining that "X isn't perfect" is the easiest and laziest thing in the world to do. Assessing the ACTUAL costs and damages IN PROPORTION is more difficult, but actually yields good results. no one here typed that photovoltaics shouldn't be on play. but the way it's being paraphrase, feels like a panacea. the OP telling other skeptical opinions against mass substitution to photovoltaics is 'a shame on a tech ori…

Nice, a lovely screed using exactly the same Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt techniques used by tobacco companies to promote cigarettes for decades after they were proven to be the source of mass fatal diseases costing people and society, and again reused by the fossil energy companies. Every single claim above is at best massively outdated and/or outright wrong and disproved (and no, I won't go do your research for you…

> not sure if you mean buried or burned, but wind turbines are already being recycled and reused in bulk, and that is ramping up (and also offtopic from solar)

it seems i'm an outdated dreamer here or do you think "two million metric tons of wind turbine blades will reach the end of their operational lifetime in the United States by 2050" is a low-number? something being recyclable doesn't mean it will be, not that's economical feasible to do it. that's like saying we should produce PET plastic mindlessly just because we can recycle it 100%. ¶ https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssusresmgt.4c00256

> Again offtopic, and also purely a matter of taste; it doesn't affect anything

so clearly you don't have idea about authorizations to build them nor what's actually going on ¶ https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/01/the...https://www.nature.com/articles/s44358-025-00078-1

> Nice strawman argument from something I never said, and no, there are plenty of other perfectly good transport methods. And yes, recycling batteries is already becoming good business and a great feedstock for 'mining' the materials, and no it does not need to be a big deal, and siting the 'mining' facilities for recycling/recovery is vastly more flexible than siting mining for coal which is obviously necessary wherever the coal happened to form 100 million years ago.

... please, just do a quick research on the amount of batteries that actually are recycled, not if they can be recycled. do you think building biometallurgical or pyrometallurgy/hydrometallurgy facilities is cheap and easy to build a bunch of them so we compass the decentralized nature of wind and solar generation? there's a high cost of transporting dead batteries, which requires fossil fuel and if done through roads, will contribute much more to their actual state of the worst offender of micro-plastic producers/polluters worldwide. i will just point some papers on the problem of recycling vehicle batteries (which is so small on scale compared to what we are discussing); https://www.mdpi.com/2313-0105/11/3/94https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134492...https://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/21_ma...

> Again, only citing multiple studies showing that, and again, you entirely miss the point, which is not that you'd necessarily do it in every case, but that the point of coal being even the economical option has long passed, nevermind the environmental catastrophe it creates.

seriously. am i arguing with ChatGPT? one thing is to re-purpose unused coal facilities, the other is to claim is economically feasible to substitute them with solar. we aren't living in a happy place where we just substitute stuff arbitrarily based on emergent tech ¶ https://www.sunhub.com/blog/repurposing-coal-mines-solar-ene...https://www.renewableinstitute.org/abandoned-coal-mines-coul...https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/PNNL-SA-...

> Instead of spending your energy scoffing at things you obviously know nothing about, perhaps go read up on it and learn something.

i remember once doing volunteer for a farm based on the system of a Swiss guy who came to Brazil to execute his hypothesis. really neat. a pioneer on "regenerative agriculture". but if i actually had to became his proletariat for the rest of my life and know i would retire with a low salary and the consequences of intensive physical labor those organic places required, i wouldn't think it's revolutionary. people on GMO farms have a greater prognosis. rural exodus is an ongoing social phenomena because a thing... with that said i was quite happy to know someone i worked with invested millions USD on solar technology on their farm. really neat move. but would much better a local generator for the whole region... but our global situation doesn't seem to care much about long-term solutions, that are expensive and slower to build. every average enthusiast seems more worried about short term gains and trusting "green technology news headlines" than actually evaluating everything with skepticism

i'm all for development and implementation of greener solutions. that's why i don't even have a driver license. i don't like coal (my country doesn't even use it) but i'm not a blind upper class north American that thinks buying high-tech photovoltaics or wind turbines is the panacea nor these don't leak lead on China or India

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

#219
post #218
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, a lovely screed using exactly the same Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt techniques used by tobacco companies to promote cigarettes for decades after they were proven to be the source of mass fatal diseases costing people and society, and again reused by the fossil energy companies. Every single claim above is at best massively outdated and/or outright wrong and disproved (and no, I won't go do your research for you…

> not sure if you mean buried or burned, but wind turbines are already being recycled and reused in bulk, and that is ramping up (and also offtopic from solar) it seems i'm an outdated dreamer here or do you think "two million metric tons of wind turbine blades will reach the end of their operational lifetime in the United States by 2050" is a low-number? something being recyclable doesn't mean it will be, not that's…

late edit: oh by the way, you also don't see to understand what are the key topics of cyber-security on energy... this is a great start: https://www.csis.org/podcasts/power-map

although de-centralization is always good!

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those people already use almost no energy compared to everybody else.

Great we should be done relatively quickly then. ;)

Done with what, they don't matter here.
Post reply on HN