Does anyone see signs of data center usage being affected by electricity costs? I imagine a relatively near future where your AWS bill changes depending on the time of day, and so companies shift their computational work from region to region, following the sun.
Can solar costs keep shrinking?
251–260 of 632 posts
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
it would be much more, but the us imports 130% of the aluminum it consumes from places with lower energy costs: https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-aluminum.p...
Bahrain and UAE being big aluminum smelters is a bit surprising.
Exporting aluminum is basically exporting electricity, except aluminum is easy to ship, costs very little to store, and has an indefinite shelf life. For places with a lot of natural gas and no pipelines to export it, it’s often easier to export aluminum than liquified gas.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#253I think it's irrelevant if the cost of solar panels goes to zero, the reality is that the farm to fork cost/kwh is still quite high because dispatch and transmission are never cheap.
Furthermore, for every 1 pound of polysilicon produced...you get 4 pounds of silicon tetrachloride output.
I gambled on $UAN and $AMR guesstimating that the spread of renewables would lead to more nat gas and coal/steel consumption per a kilowatt hour produced globally. I got lucky and it worked out. I'm not bullish on solar costs going below the embodied energy cost of desal per 1000 gallons. (10-14kwh/1000 gallons)
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#254I'm having a hard time getting past the assumption in the article that energy use is tied directly to GDP per capita and that by not following the 7% growth of the Henry Adams Curve we're somehow below where we should/could be as a country. That embeds so many assumptions about the economy and where GDP comes from, the decoupling seems more likely to be from the transition from manufacturing and other energy heavy se…
> the decoupling seems more likely to be from the transition from manufacturing and other energy heavy sectors to more services based economic activity
Put another way, instead of producing the products we consume, we offshore production (and the associated energy consumption)
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
for some economic activities, energy is not a limiting input; you are implicitly referring to economic production enabled by electric lighting, such as office work, and indeed energy has not been a limiting input for that for at least a century. reducing the cost of energy will not result in more gdp in those sectors for other economic activities, such as solar panel production, aluminum production, and neural networ…
Dropping energy costs lowers costs in every sector but rarely by that much. > aluminum production Dropping energy costs an by 75% only drops smelting prices by about 30% and finished goods by even less.
there's usually a long lag between a drop in the price of an input and the eventual impact on the price of the outputs, because part of the effect is mediated by the adoption of innovations that use more of the newly-cheaper inputs and less of the still-expensive inputs
to take one example, the last time we got access to a major new source of energy was something like watt's steam-engine in 01776. one of the effects of this was the widespread replacement of steel cans (which hadn't been invented in 01776) and glass bottles with aluminum cans in the 01970s, 200 years later. another was the replacement of travel by ship with travel by air, also about 200 years later. the delay is because many intermediating innovations were required, for example, in the aluminum-can case:
- the discovery of electrolysis;
- the discovery of aluminum;
- the discovery of canning;
- the hall–héroult process;
- improved aluminum alloys that permitted the use of 100μm-thick cans;
- the invention of deep drawing;
- epoxy liners that made aluminum cans chemically stable to acidic contents such as coca-cola;
- long-distance trucking which increased the cost imposed by heavier glass bottles.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#256Soon (if not already) the largest costs associated with solar installations will be the labor. It's expensive to get people on roofs and electricians to reconfigure panels, install transfer switches, etc. The equipment could be free and it would still cost thousands for the skilled trades to install.
Residential solar costs in the USA are already 50% sales and marketing, and most of the other half is labor.
That and banking enough to cover the warranty for the next 30 years. Lots of early solar systems had reliability issues, especially the inverters, that make them expensive to maintain.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#257I used to be radically pro-nuclear, but after seeing some of the data of solar growth and realizing we could just scale things up (like building iphones), I'm fully on board with the Elon strategy of solar + powerbanks for storage.
Elon has dropped out of this game pretty much. Its Chinese manufacturing for pretty much all components. But as the article says: the hardware is now less than half of the cost and shrinking further.
Elon gave up on panels, but Tesla batteries are still a big player in home and grid scale storage.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#258I spend four months of the year traveling in an RV. Two years ago, I budgeted over $6000 for my desired solar setup (at least 1200Ah of battery, at least 2400W of solar, plus various controllers and other components). It was expensive enough for me to hold off, and more importantly, I didn't have the space on my current RV for the solar panels. In just the two years since then, prices on batteries and panels have dro…
Burning wood is a completely viable (if very annoying and environmentally dubious) answer to off grid hot water. Your plan sounds pretty good to me.
It's not too expensive to get a large, refillable propane tank installed, and propane is cheap. I've got family members who do that and they live five miles away from the nearest Walmart. They have municipal power and well water, but don't have municipal gas service. They only have to fill the tank four times per year. I would likely do the same, for cooking, hot water, and heat (supplemented by a wood stove, which I'd have plenty of wood for as I cleared land for a house, garage, and solar panel field).
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#259I think it's irrelevant if the cost of solar panels goes to zero, the reality is that the farm to fork cost/kwh is still quite high because dispatch and transmission are never cheap. Furthermore, for every 1 pound of polysilicon produced...you get 4 pounds of silicon tetrachloride output. I gambled on $UAN and $AMR guesstimating that the spread of renewables would lead to more nat gas and coal/steel consumption per a…
> Furthermore, for every 1 pound of polysilicon produced...you get 4 pounds of silicon tetrachloride output.
SiCl4 can (and should) be completely recycled in the process that makes silicon, to make more SiHCl3. There is no reason to treat it as waste in a cost optimized system.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
A kitchen remodel in a high income city in the US is 75k-100k for something basic. The lopsidedness of US prices for light construction projects is a huge problem.
And there I was, thinking spending ~£€10k each for two kitchens recently was extravagant.
What country are you based?