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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

#261

Post by stale2002 »

ptaipale wrote: post #210
lambertsimnel wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does grid electricity usage peak on hot summer afternoons? If it's because of air conditioning, it's probably not universal. I imagine hot summer afternoons are a time when factories operate below capacity (or not at all), and people heat their homes less and spend more time outside away from TV, etc.

Certainly not universal. Could be true in California or Texas, possibly. For sure it's not here. Where I live, the peak is a winter morning which is windless and therefore particularly cold, at 8:00 (before sunrise). Solar output is zero, wind power output is zero. Everyone turns extra heaters on, puts the kettle on to make a hot cup before taking a warm shower.

The point isn't that it is 100% universal for all places. The point is that it is true for most places.

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

#262

Post by jobu »

epistasis wrote: post #225
coryfklein wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

If the math and assumptions in this article are correct, then that's exactly the (wholesale) price point Tesla is aiming for with the Powerwall:

http://cleantechnica.com/2015/05/09/tesla-powerwall-powerblo...

There are a couple other (not yet released) energy storage solutions mentioned there that might get the cost down even lower - Eos Aurora and Imergy Flow Battery

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

#263

Post by kragen »

zsombor wrote: post #235
kragen wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're being a little unfair with the S&P comparison: you should be comparing the returns on your actual investment with the expected returns on the S&P, not its actual returns. The stock market got a 5.4% return over that time, yes, but that's above average; we should expect its long-run returns to be close to the rate of economic growth, or more like 3%. And it could easily have been zero or even negative o…

The rate of economic growth has little relation to the stock market yield. For one you have forgotten about the dividends, currently around 2%. Now lets assume the company grows by 3%, so your shares will now be worth 3% more. But the total return will actually be 5%. However here I assumed that there was no drop in optimism, or pessimism over the one year period. For if you were to bought in when expectations were h…

You aren't the only one to make those mistakes; I've explained where you went wrong in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11623817 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11623377.

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

#264

Post by jackmoore »

ams6110 wrote: post #186
peppaz wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing Tesla is making huge battery packs for our homes so we can ditch the grid entirely.

I think it will never be the case that you can run a household solar/battery plant for less than a utility can do it on massive scale and just run a wire to your house (remember to factor in depreciation on all your household kit, batteries and inverters don't last forever).

I think this is true too, but it depends on how efficiently the utility company runs their business, and how much profit margin they are allowed to extract.

Utility companies aren't competing directly with each other for the lowest price, so in practice there could be a lot of places where, while less efficient, it's cheaper for home owners to have their own means of power production.

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

#265

Post by coryfklein »

epistasis wrote: post #225
coryfklein wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Being a manager at a large power company for 30 years is both an advantage and a disadvantage.

He is definitely biased against solar, but is acutely aware of the costs it presents to traditional power generation and definitely well qualified to comment on them.

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

#266

Post by encoderer »

up_and_up wrote: post #204
m3mnoch wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

This is true, because the job of the appraiser is to estimate market value. If buyers will not pay a premium, they have no resale value. But in my experience buying a home in SFBA with solar, and getting it appraised for refi, it counted both times. (In the cost approach it was valued at $20k in 2013 and $10k this year)

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

#267

Post by encoderer »

up_and_up wrote: post #204
m3mnoch wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

This is true, because the job of the appraiser is to estimate market value. If buyers will not pay a premium, they have no resale value. But in my experience buying a home in SFBA with solar, and getting it appraised for refi, it counted both times. (In the cost approach it was valued at $20k in 2013 and $10k this year)

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

#268

Post by manishsharan »

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…

I am clearly out of my depth here but what if we take the newly daytime unused/idle coal power or natural gas power for other endeavors like sea water desalination or just pumping up water into a watertower when daytime energy cost is low and adding increased hydro capacity in the evening when the energy cost is higher?

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

#270

Post by ZeroGravitas »

dragontamer wrote: post #243
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fair" in the context of a heavily regulated utility should have some relation to social benefit. It's not fair for utilities to force costs onto consumers just because of a differential of political influence. It's not fair that solar reduces grid load at their peaks and saves them money on building out grid capacity and expensive and inefficient CO2 producing gas peaker plants and that benefit is not returned to th…

Consumers should pay a fair price for the service. If consumers are using the utility's batteries and the utility's network, then the consumer should pay for the use of those services. Peaker-plants can have a very simple solution: carbon taxes. Simple enough, and I support this measure to handle the externality. Rooftop solar currently is probably a net benefit as long as the storage issue isn't a problem. (IE: the…

I'm glad you support a carbon price, because that's another great example of where "fair" becomes a political discussion.

I could say that if a coal producer wants to dump sulphur, radiation, C02 etc. into the air then it's "fair" that they recompense the people who live in the countries they pollute and the people they help to kill. Why should those who don't do this (people who generate their own electricity or pay to have non-coal energy) have to shoulder these costs?

Simple argument right? But no, it's a decades long political fight with no end in sight, because some groups have dispersed interests, while other groups have very direct incentives.

The same is true here, lots more rooftop solar would be of small benefit to most people. But it directly threatens some concentrated interests. And they will happily tell you that solar will destroy the grid, or net-metering isn't fair etc. etc. Not because it's true, but because it's in their narrow and short term interests to lie.

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