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Can solar costs keep shrinking?

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com

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Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#261
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I clocked that too. Perhaps author is nodding towards replacing fossil fuels with electricity. Decarbonizing steel uses a lot more energy. Ditto cement, plastics, fertilizers, HVAC, etc. Anyone care to guess how much more energy our glorious renewable energy future perfect economy will require? 4x? 6x?

Another issue is that ocean water becomes very usable since it becomes so cheap to remove the salt from it. It won't be long before the most productive food producers will be in desert regions that have access to the sea (like Australia, Pakistan and Saudia Arabia).

Can’t grow much in sand, how are they going to get that much soil?

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#262

I 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…

> I've now lowered my budget to $4000 for the same setup I was planning to spend $6000 on two years ago, and with 400W panels, I no longer need to upgrade to a larger RV to begin the project.

Keep in mind - the dollar is down ~10-15% in that time frame, so in real terms, the previous cost might have been >$6600 in today's dollars vs ~$4000 or a >40% reduction.

The cost of electricity is up ~5.5% compared to last year: https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#263
post #2

I'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…

It's a confusion of cause and effect, classic cargo cult thinking.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need energy to make things. Houses, roads, cars, food, many services. Basically without energy you are poor. Having energy is not enough, but it is necessary to be rich.

But sometime in the 90’s if not sooner a lot of us started valuing items that had a lower embodied energy as a ratio of the usefulness of the product. We want things that are the same but less intense, or that are much better at a fractional increase in input. And we really need it if we want a planet worth living on fifty years from now. So to ignore this desire is dangerous.

A lot of us, maybe. But my impression is that a lot of us also choose to consume more stuff more frequently (larger vehicles and homes, less durable items replaced more frequently, etc). I would not be surprised to learn that our direct energy use - such as vehicle fuel and electricity for heating - has increased with longer commutes and larger homes.

Compared to just 50 years ago, I would say that our lifestyles are on average vastly more consumptive, despite being more environmentally aware. We seem unwilling to make the sacrifices that really matter.

I think that some time in the future, our time will be seen as one of massive entitlement. As technology makes things possible, we feel entitled to make use of it if we can afford it. How many people in the 50's were using trucks to drag boats and horse floats around in the suburbs? These are the kind of reasons people will give for their consumption. e.g. "this is the lifestyle I want, it's possible, and why am I not entitled to it if I can afford to pay for it?" (in the financial sense only of course).

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#267
Why are residential prices on electricity not falling if costs of energy production are shrinking? If anything, prices only go up and electricity companies especially raise them during hot season.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#268

I 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…

I think RVs that you can live/remote work in while traveling are interesting.

(I'm speaking about large class A RVs like an apartment with washer/dryer etc...)

But as solar becomes more prevalent, I don't see why they don't design RVs more around solar.

It has only been recently that I've seen "all electric" type RVs. Before that, most RVs were hybrid propane/electric or diesel/electric, for example gas stoves, dual propane/electric refrigerators, dual propane/diesel + electric heating and propane or diesel generators.

A future RV could have huge batteries for driving, and then use those batteries for appliances, air conditioning/heat pump and other on-board power. Then add increased solar by not only rooftop solar, but maybe fold-out solar awnings. (it could also charge via EV chargers, or 220 at a campsite)

An RV like this would be modern, comfortable and let you go anywhere.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#269

Does converting sunlight to electricity reduce the amount of heat absorbed by the earth? If so, how many solar panels would be required to reduce the temp by 1 degree?

All will be heat after X amount of time. Where the X can be a few seconds or decades or centuries.

The more interesting thing would be the light reflected by the panels (albedo factor). This could be lower or higher than the surface these panels are placed on.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I question your assumptions about grid storage. The cost of storage has been plummeting alongside the cost of solar, and battery lifespans are a non-issue when capacity is not a factor. A battery storage facility that has lost 30% of its capacity after 10 years of operation is still functional with that lower capacity. Compare this to something like a car that has much more limited function with a lowered capacity.

Ok, but why then, if storage is not a big problem of solar power, the US has 179 gigawatts of installed solar capacity with rated power of all grid storage on the US grid being 31.6 GW, of that only 4.8 GW being battery storage. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Stat... [2] https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-grid...

As you might see from comment-less downvotes it's unpopular to state the truth. Too many do not accept a simple things: WEF and co want just power, the 99% of slaves, as any kind of nazi, they are not "liberal", they are just dictatorial, with countless of voluntary slaves who "trust their system" refusing to see the reality and scale.

An LFP car battery can last 10 years if took to 80% SOC normally, once a month or so to 100% to balance it, with let's say a charge cycle per cell per week. If you use it more it will last less. Now for homes and alike at China prices having enough storage to being able to go without the grid still powered normally from one day to another, normally using the grid a bit, discharging the battery to going not beyond a full cycle per cell per week, it's economically NOT convenient but still doable as a reasonable backup and doing so means shifting loads as much as possible ending up in grid usage when the grid is not much loaded most of the time and while consuming much more electricity (because you ditch natural gas and so on) still not straining the grid because the damn truth is that we can't go all electric tomorrow morning without this model.

Grid storage means hyper-expensive batteries with one or more full cycle per cell per day, typical lifetime 1-3 years, not more. For what? Just to allow more p.v. and eolic in the grid compensating their variability avoiding large scale blackouts. With this model on scale it would be normal to have 3€/$ per kWh as a mean price and we can't even built enough storage for the first generation.

The substantial reality is that the green new deal it's possible only in NEW buildings, where the need of energy to heat/cool is 1/7-1/10 of a "classic" building, and doable only with local energy production. This means smart cities are simply impossible to power on scale, some part of the currently populated world can be powered as well.

Starting what we can, meaning building small buildings residential and commercial, so not smart 15' cities, where anyone do it's best to be semi-autonomous not "in the sharing economy" where few giants loan anything to the 99%, while keep researching on what we can, because that's the best we can do. For the WEF green new deal of smart cities we could be perhaps around 4 billion humans on earth and no more. And that's just for a first generation.

In the west most have stopped the new deal simply because there is no way to implement it in a service model, it could only exists for individuals, so with personal ownership against the Agenda 2030. EVs sales are down because only those who can charge them at home could really enjoy them, the others who try have simply given up. p.v. investments tend to go not so well because for privates it's way too expensive because of speculation and large projects could grow a bit, but not much more without much grid instability.

If you try you can see the same problem everywhere: in Pakistan p.v. have boomed than utilities have started to complaint that people are less and less dependent on them, they arrive at imposing on-site exchange making p.v. economically useless and the energy price exploded as grid stability plummeted but they do not care. In Kazakhstan after the WEF (or Royal Dutch Shell) "liberalization" lobby push there was a full scale revolt and still they can't control energy prices and so on, we see more easily in the third world because they go much faster and unregulated than in the west, but that's where we are going, with many supporting their oppressors...

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