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The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

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Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#221

Post by BurningFrog »

m3mnoch wrote: post #183
warmwaffles wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long until you start seeing a return on investment? Right now my electricity bill for my home is ~100 a month in Texas. I would need to keep the same panels without maintenance fees for 33.33 years by your price point of 40k

this argument kind of annoys me. "yeah, but how long before you see a return on investment?" how about instantly? this is what we did: 1) calculated our monthly electricity payment: $160 or so a month. 2) priced out solar to push our payment to net-zero-ish: the savings really start multiplying once you get down into the regulated tiers. 3) replaced our electricity bill with a solar installation loan. what did we get…

As solar prices go down, surely the added house equity goes down with it?

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#222

Post by coredog64 »

mod wrote: post #167
d_theorist wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly have a fantastically lucrative career in annoying-headline-writing ahead of you.

I'm trying to validate my product. Would you pay me $5/day for an annoying headline? "10 Crazy ways to validate your product for free that startup gurus won't tell you about!" PS: I don't know what the 10 ways are, I just write headlines.

7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#223

Post by adamweld »

coryfklein wrote: post #215
ChuckMcM wrote: post #103

The aggressiveness of the price drops on solar is pretty amazing. I just lost one of the inverters on my grid-tie system after it had run trouble free for 13 years. So we're looking at the first "major" repair to the system I installed in 2003. And in 2003 my 5.2kW of panels on my roof cost $38,000 before subsidies and $19,000 after. 28 panels, two 2.5kW inverters, net about 4.2kW of generation. I priced out replacin…

> And that is why it is a huge problem for the power companies It is a problem, but not necessarily in the way you may be thinking. Peak residential power usage is in the evening when solar isn't available. Power companies therefore end up spinning down coal and natural gas during peak solar, then just spinning them back up again as the sun begins to set. [1] So you haven't replaced the coal and natural gas plants, y…

Which is exactly why Tesla and other companies are investing in residential power banks. They have the potential for huge efficiency gains across the grid.

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#224

Post by ptaipale »

comatose_kid wrote: post #35
cubano wrote: post #29

It's interesting how no one is discussing how the governments massive subsidy of the solar and wind power industries are completely distorting the market for these "prices", so studies like these are pretty much nonsense. Of course price/KW will drop massively if the entire thing is being propped up by taxpayer dollars and not the actual need to be profitable. I guess I just need to resign myself to the idea that so…

"Oil, coal and gas received more than four times the $120 billion paid out in incentives for renewables including wind, solar and biofuels" source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-12/fossil-fue...

However, those subsidies are not paid in the same geographical and political regions at all.

Sun and wind subsidies are paid out in places like EU countries, especially Germany, where they distort the market. Gasoline on the other hand is taxed highly.

Oil, coal and gas get subsidies in places like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran or Malaysia, where they distort the market.

That Venezuela distorts its markets in some way does not really make it a good idea to distort the market in Germany (or USA) in another way.

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#225

Post by epistasis »

coryfklein wrote: post #215
ChuckMcM wrote: post #103

The aggressiveness of the price drops on solar is pretty amazing. I just lost one of the inverters on my grid-tie system after it had run trouble free for 13 years. So we're looking at the first "major" repair to the system I installed in 2003. And in 2003 my 5.2kW of panels on my roof cost $38,000 before subsidies and $19,000 after. 28 panels, two 2.5kW inverters, net about 4.2kW of generation. I priced out replacin…

> And that is why it is a huge problem for the power companies It is a problem, but not necessarily in the way you may be thinking. Peak residential power usage is in the evening when solar isn't available. Power companies therefore end up spinning down coal and natural gas during peak solar, then just spinning them back up again as the sun begins to set. [1] So you haven't replaced the coal and natural gas plants, y…

Being a manager at a large power company for 30 years is both an advantage and a disadvantage. For the past 30 years, the energy industry has changed incredibly slowly, so ones expectations of what is possible in the way of innovation is far far lower than it should be.

The "duck curve" that your friend is referring to will be solved in a variety of ways, from wind to storage to HVDC interconnects to the rest of the nation, to peaker plants.

In the future, coal is dead. No need to build any more of it. Nuclear is too expensive to build anymore. (Unless somebody actually does thorium innovation, but I'm not holding my breath...)

When storing a kWh costs $0.10, and there's also adaptive pricing to match supply and demand better, these problems will melt away.

It does require a huge mental shift, but the cost savings will make that happen

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#226

Post by up_and_up »

TheIronYuppie wrote: post #218
up_and_up wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instant equity on our house. Depends. Solar doesnt necessarily add value. Depends on the appraisal. I only know because I tried to buy a home with solar panels. The homeowner had raised the price of the home to include his investment in the panels but the appraiser wouldnt include the panels in the appraisal.

Appraisals are not strictly tied to price of homes. Only the value for the loan. That's not to say you're not going to associate the two together (if you're buying a house with a loan), but the $30k one way or the other isn't a huge percentage of a 30 year loan.

Depends on where you buy. A 200K home in the midwest, 30K is a big percentage. The assumption being made here is that investing in solar automatically raises the value of the home. I am saying not necessarily. The example above was an appraisal in Madison WI, which, though in the midwest, definitely has plenty of solar installs.

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#227

Post by noir_lord »

coryfklein wrote: post #215
ChuckMcM wrote: post #103

The aggressiveness of the price drops on solar is pretty amazing. I just lost one of the inverters on my grid-tie system after it had run trouble free for 13 years. So we're looking at the first "major" repair to the system I installed in 2003. And in 2003 my 5.2kW of panels on my roof cost $38,000 before subsidies and $19,000 after. 28 panels, two 2.5kW inverters, net about 4.2kW of generation. I priced out replacin…

> And that is why it is a huge problem for the power companies It is a problem, but not necessarily in the way you may be thinking. Peak residential power usage is in the evening when solar isn't available. Power companies therefore end up spinning down coal and natural gas during peak solar, then just spinning them back up again as the sun begins to set. [1] So you haven't replaced the coal and natural gas plants, y…

> Peak residential power usage is in the evening when solar isn't available.

Assuming it's not a battery backed system, prices on those are dropping (or more correctly remaining stable while capacity slowly climbs).

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#228

Post by ChuckMcM »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #114
warmwaffles wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long until you start seeing a return on investment? Right now my electricity bill for my home is ~100 a month in Texas. I would need to keep the same panels without maintenance fees for 33.33 years by your price point of 40k

I've been trying to do this calculation myself. One factor I hadn't initially put in was the fact that I didn't need to think about a backup generator for our (east coast) storms.

Well one issue with grid-tied systems is that when the grid is offline they provide no power (they explicitly don't want to back feed into the power lines and kill some lineman who things power is off). So one of the certification issues is to make sure that your inverters recognize that state and shut down.

But a side benefit of putting in the system was we did a lot of electrical panel work, and as as result put 8 circuits on to a transfer switch (the incremental cost was the transfer switch and the electrictian's time wasn't materially affected.) So when the power does go out we can fire up a generator and switch over to gen power easily.

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#229

Post by S_A_P »

coryfklein wrote: post #215
ChuckMcM wrote: post #103

The aggressiveness of the price drops on solar is pretty amazing. I just lost one of the inverters on my grid-tie system after it had run trouble free for 13 years. So we're looking at the first "major" repair to the system I installed in 2003. And in 2003 my 5.2kW of panels on my roof cost $38,000 before subsidies and $19,000 after. 28 panels, two 2.5kW inverters, net about 4.2kW of generation. I priced out replacin…

> And that is why it is a huge problem for the power companies It is a problem, but not necessarily in the way you may be thinking. Peak residential power usage is in the evening when solar isn't available. Power companies therefore end up spinning down coal and natural gas during peak solar, then just spinning them back up again as the sun begins to set. [1] So you haven't replaced the coal and natural gas plants, y…

Can validate. The problem with electricity is that there is no large scale storage like there is for other forms of energy like NG and Crude. Until someone comes along and figures out how to store electricity, this will continue to cause grief to power companies. Power plants are really just options, if the price per kWh is at a certain point then it makes sense to spin up or take down a plant and generate power. Adding a bunch of highly variant generation to the grid can make the market more volatile since there could be a lot of up and down with generation facilities.[0]

That said, there will be teething pains but this is a net positive thing that is happening. Growing up I lumped solar into the perpetual 10 years away category. It looks like I am going to see solar be competitive after all.

[0] I implement trading and risk management software in the energy sector, including Crude, NGL, NG, and electic.

Re: The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months

#230

Post by schwabacher »

kragen wrote: post #194
gonzoflip wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask where you got your 3% because that number is very low compared to any number I have ever read? This Wikipedia chart shows annualized returns to be 10.47%. That is >3x your 3%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500_Index#Annual_returns

3% is an estimate of the rate of economic growth: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth As I said above, we should expect the market's long-run returns to be close to the rate of economic growth. It's true that stocks in the US in the 20th century dramatically outperformed that 3%. This is for three reasons: first, up to about 1975, the world's economic growth rate was higher than 3%, due to the Se…

I'm not an expert here, but doesn't it make sense for stocks to return higher than growth because of earnings?

For example imagine I own stocks making up 1% of in a company w/ earnings of $X, and market cap of 10 * $X. If the companies growth over a year is 3%, at the beginning of the year my stocks should be worth 0.01 * $X and at the end of the year 1.03 * 0.01 * $X due to the growth, BUT shouldn't i also have received 0.01 * $X (my share of earnings) in dividends that I am free to reinvest, giving me a 4% return overall?

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