231–240 of 262 posts
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You are very defintly confused here,;) or there, in Pakistan where some of the rulling class will brag about never getting utility bills, but the reality is that every built thing, down to the roads is there for them, but at root the main concepts of fuedal societies are intact, and going solar, fits in quite well, as it can be set up as distributed systems that will literaly conect into a larger grid, based on allie…
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Battery modules (not home scale, but utility scale) are around $50/kWh in China. If we assume a 20 year lifespan and 50% charge/discharge once a day, that adds (ignoring interest) $0.013/kWh to the energy cycled through the batteries (plus a small add from efficiency being not quite 100%). This is quite cheap compared to (say) the fully loaded cost of energy from a nuclear power plant. Smaller units will be more expe…
Installed costs for residential battery storage typically range from $800-1,200/kWh in the US market as of 2024-2025. ROI for 24/7 solar+battery is negative in almost all residential cases using current technology and prices.
I can confirm that prismatic 1kWh LFP cells cost ~$60 in single digit numbers.
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> Seasonal energy storage is uninteresting, you just overbuild the energy production instead. This is already done for every existing type of energy production to account for seasonal variation in demand. It’s the only thing that is interesting, considering you just hand-wove that last 3% of reliability away with vague “backup generators” and “transmission lines to other places”. Both immensely expensive items if the…
You understand that fossil fuel and nuclear plants are typically less reliable (have a lower availability factor) than that right? Every form of power generation has downtime, and needs balancing with other types or accepting that downtime. Solar tradeoffs low mechanical complexity for higher environmental dependence, but ends up with similar (in fact less) downtime here under unfavorable assumptions (100% of energy…
You keep on citing dubious numbers from the Big Green lobby, but the reality is. There's not a single place on this planet where after a certain threshold of penetration solar and wind haven't made supply less reliable, haven't caused economic sustainability issues to generators and haven't made power absurdly more expensive to customers.
Not to mention the frequently forgotten issues of toxic waste in production and decommissioning, the toxic fire hazard of giant battery banks and the pathetic short useful life of intermittent power infrastructure. Not to mention the environment impact of such big land gobblers, cynically overlooked by the same folks that decided to destroy nuclear with mountains of bureaucratic red tape deliberately created to suffocate it by ignorant green politicians.
Solar may have a bigger place, in countries with plenty of sun like Brasil, the Middle East or North Africa where residential and commercial consumption peaks with air conditioning usage during peak solar production, and with long days, but even then, absent some magical storage technology that doesn't exist yet, with limits.
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It shouldn't be, I agree. And eventually it won't be. But SEIA's report https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight... said that, in Q1 of 02024, utility-scale fixed-tilt installations in the USA averaged 98¢ per peak watt, of which 40¢ was the PV modules; and residential installations averaged 325¢ per peak watt, of which 20¢ was the PV modules, which is an atypically low share, historically speakin…
I'm surprised at the 40¢ figure for utility scale. Are you sure that didn't include the mounting hardware? Utility-scale PV is typically with 1-axis trackers. Another possibility would be that utility scale solar optimizes to a much large disparity between DC rating and AC rating than does domestic rooftop PV.
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Balcony solar is installed on a unit-by-unit basis. It isn't 800W per building; it's potentially up to 800W for each unit in an apartment.
That's still not a lot. Less than a hairdryer uses.
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That isn't the efficiency, which is a number somewhere under 23%, dividing the number of joules of light into the panel by the number of joules of electrical power out of it. Maybe you mean that at peak he gets 91% of the advertised 6kW, i.e., 5500W? Anyway, you said they paid €7000 and get back €500 per year, which is enough to calculate the ROI at 7.1% per year. Powerwalls are indeed extremely overpriced. But batte…
yes 7% ROI if no depreciation, but neither panels nor inverter are expected to last much beyond ten years. I was actually chatting with him just now since I got into this discussion, and he said he also needs a maintenance/emergency callout and cleaning contract, thats about €250 a year. In spite of this, he was still happy with doing this, good for the planet, even if not for this wallet. He also put up a large scre…
Inverters are a different problem, and they do in fact die after a few years. But you don't need the inverter to use the energy.
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Mexico could start producing synfuels with abundant solar energy and exporting them to the US, but that is far from the course plotted by President Sheinbaum, even though (or perhaps because) her doctorate is in the use of energy. Instead she's doubling down on oil drilling.
It's going to be more expensive than the fuel the US digs up for quite some time. Synthetic fuels don't really make economic sense without the massive subsidies the US uses to keep e.g. it's agriculture going. There is a lot of discussion around aviation fuels currently. Targets for SAF boil down to mixing in a small percentage of bio fuels with regular fuel. This smooths out the 10x or so price difference of SAF to…
Your mention of aviation fuel is relevant. That's a context where batteries are not pretty good already, although they are viable for short hops; in aviation, as in shipping, heavier batteries create more energy consumption, so a carrier with a higher specific energy per kilogram is very valuable. Conventional jet fuel is 43MJ/kg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Chemical_reacti...) while lithium-ion batteries are up to about 0.8MJ/kg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Electrochemical...).
Very crudely, an airplane whose weight is mostly jet fuel can fly about 50 times as far as a rechargeable-battery-powered airplane if both are going the same speed. Rechargeable batteries are 50 times worse than jet fuel. And they're improving slowly; the last time that difference halved was with the invention of lithium-ion battery, which went mainstream about 30 years ago. The previous major improvement was the lead-acid battery 120 years earlier.
However, promising alternative synthetic fuels other than paraffin include aluminum, magnesium, and zinc, which can be burned in aluminum-air batteries, magnesium-air batteries, and zinc-air batteries, respectively. Aluminum and magnesium are 31.0 and 24.7MJ/kg, respectively, but burning them in metal-air batteries instead of in heat engines allows you to extract about twice as much useful energy from the reaction, so they are in practice higher in energy density than current jet fuel.
Current aluminum prices are US$2828/tonne (https://www.lme.com/Metals/Non-ferrous/LME-Aluminium#Overvie...) which works out to 9.1¢/MJ. A barrel of oil is 6 gigajoules (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_of_oil_equivalent) and US$58.78 (https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/energy/crude-oil/light-swee...) which is about 0.98¢/MJ. So the price of aluminum would have to drop by about a factor of 5 to make this appealing. It's plausible that this will happen, but not before 02040.
Magnesium is 17050RMB/tonne (https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/magnesium), which is US$2410/tonne, working out to 9.8¢/MJ.
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Battery modules (not home scale, but utility scale) are around $50/kWh in China. If we assume a 20 year lifespan and 50% charge/discharge once a day, that adds (ignoring interest) $0.013/kWh to the energy cycled through the batteries (plus a small add from efficiency being not quite 100%). This is quite cheap compared to (say) the fully loaded cost of energy from a nuclear power plant. Smaller units will be more expe…
Installed costs for residential battery storage typically range from $800-1,200/kWh in the US market as of 2024-2025. ROI for 24/7 solar+battery is negative in almost all residential cases using current technology and prices.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Installed costs for residential battery storage typically range from $800-1,200/kWh in the US market as of 2024-2025. ROI for 24/7 solar+battery is negative in almost all residential cases using current technology and prices.
Let's assume the lower end of that range - $800/kWh and take the example of Arizona. https://www.aps.com/en/Residential/Service-Plans/Compare-Ser... The difference between off-peak and on-peak rates there is about $0.21/kWh in the summer and $0.29/kWh in the winter, so assume an average delta of $0.25/kWh. Assuming no solar panels, if you charge the battery on the grid at off-peak rates and discharge it completely at…
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I have attempted to make sense of your comment several times, but I cannot figure out what the intended meaning is of most of it.
I’m not arguing that centralized or state-capitalist systems “never work” in the sense that nothing gets built, or that output can’t rise. Clearly roads, ports, power plants, and factories were constructed in many of the cases you listed. The narrower point I’m making is about economic rationality. Without market prices for capital goods generated through profit-and-loss entrepreneurship, there is no way to know whet…
Generally speaking, if you invest your money in a historically kleptocratic country, you can expect your investment to get confiscated if it's profitable, and possibly even if it's not, which is what happened to my retirement savings. Even if you make your investment at a time when the country is governed by non-kleptocrats, you will probably lose it after the next coup or election in which new kleptocrats come to power.
In that environment, where private investment in long-term infrastructure projects is irrational and languishing in poverty for many generations is the normal state of affairs, state capitalism frequently works.
I don't think moral arguments about atrocities are somehow orthogonal here. Power plants and electrical grids are often worthwhile investments, not because building monuments to Westinghouse is a pious sacrifice that pleases the electrical gods, but because they promote human welfare by providing material abundance. That's how we measure whether society is richer, not, as you say, by the amount of concrete poured. If human welfare is your yardstick, the possibility of economic catastrophes like the Holodomor greatly diminishing human welfare must necessarily weigh on the negative side of the balance. The inhabitants of Auschwitz and the Congo Free State were not enjoying even the material abundance they had enjoyed previously.
So we know that central planning carries risks to human welfare that decentralized systems do not. However, it also has opportunities to promote human welfare that decentralized systems do not. The variance is larger. I don't think we know enough to measure the expectation.