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Can solar costs keep shrinking?

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com

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Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#291

Post by kragen »

caymanjim wrote: post #204

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…

this is awesome!

i do have one quibble, though, and it's a big one. in the last two years, prices on mainstream solar panels (monocrystalline with warranty) have fallen from €0.25 per peak watt to €0.12 per peak watt; low-cost panels have fallen from €0.17 per peak watt to €0.07 per peak watt.† technically that is 'fallen by 25% or more' because it's fallen by almost 60%. 2400 watts of solar should cost you 290 us dollars plus retail markup, not 1200 dollars. if you're paying 1200 dollars, you're being swindled! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41394506 goes into details on how the swindle works

______

† https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#292

Post by mallets »

pfdietz wrote: post #281
mallets wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, the emittance of the panels at thermal wavelengths is important. What you want is a panel that converts wavelengths shorter than the bandgap cutoff at high efficiency, reflects near and mid IR at longer wavelengths, but has high emissivity in the far IR at wavelengths where the atmosphere isn't too opaque.

Not like optimising for this make much sense when we haven't even covered 1% of land yet.

Maybe our great-great-great-great grandkids can think on it, will be so disappointed if they haven't mastered terraforming yet.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#293

Post by kragen »

javiramos wrote: post #45
rtkwe wrote: 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…

A fantastic deep dive into this topic is Vaclav Smil's book Energy and Civilization: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262536165/energy-and-civilizati...

thank you! this looks highly relevant to my interests

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#294

Post by lanstin »

caymanjim wrote: post #240
kingkongjaffa wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I intend to buy undeveloped land far from civilization I'm always intrigued by this notion, I know plenty of Americans have this kind of plan, but it's never quite as remote as they think, because, y'know you're still in America somewhere. Unless you're thinking of somewhere in northern Canada. I'd love to know where is considered 'far from civilization' on the continental US.

> I'd love to know where is considered 'far from civilization' on the continental US. There are many interpretations and levels of remoteness. In my case, I want to be away from the sights and sounds and crowds of anything that would be considered urban or suburban. My prime criteria is that I don't want to see another person unless I choose to. I don't want to see a road with cars on it, I don't want to see another…

I find this fascinating. It really does take a variety of people to make up a culture. My ideal living situation includes being able to see someone I know every time I walk out side my home, being able to walk to a bagel shop, a grocery store, a post office, a train station, and ideally a library and bike shop and parks.

It would be boring if we were all like me and clumped together.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#295

Post by BatFastard »

pfdietz wrote: post #281
mallets wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, the emittance of the panels at thermal wavelengths is important. What you want is a panel that converts wavelengths shorter than the bandgap cutoff at high efficiency, reflects near and mid IR at longer wavelengths, but has high emissivity in the far IR at wavelengths where the atmosphere isn't too opaque.

Could you convert electricity into a infrared laser and beam the energy into space?

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#296

Post by caymanjim »

kragen wrote: post #291
caymanjim wrote: post #204

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…

this is awesome! i do have one quibble, though, and it's a big one. in the last two years, prices on mainstream solar panels (monocrystalline with warranty) have fallen from €0.25 per peak watt to €0.12 per peak watt; low-cost panels have fallen from €0.17 per peak watt to €0.07 per peak watt.† technically that is 'fallen by 25% or more' because it's fallen by almost 60%. 2400 watts of solar should cost you 290 us do…

400W solar panels cost $200-250. So 2400W will cost me roughly $1800. There are discounts if you can buy in bulk, but I don't have room for more than 6-8 panels at most.

Like all things, the raw material cost is trivial. There are the tariffs you mention (I just skimmed your link, and don't speak German), but there's also economy of scale, packaging, logistics, etc. I'm sure I could get 400W panels for as little as $100/ea if I went to the factory myself and bought hundreds of them. Maybe even cheaper. It's not really fair to compare consumer one-off costs to industrial/commercial-scale installation costs.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#297

Post by mallets »

BatFastard wrote: post #287
lcvw wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No because when the electricity is used it creates heat.

Heat is just a frequency in the spectrum right? What percent of emissions in an LED comes out as infrared?

Uhh, IR isn't heat. Heat isn't part of the EM spectrum. Hot stuff just emits more IR.

For IR in LED bulbs. Don't know, other than inconsequential.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#299

Post by kragen »

toss1 wrote: post #6
rtkwe wrote: 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…

>> That embeds so many assumptions about the economy and where GDP comes from YUP. Of course there is a strong correlation between energy use and GDP growth; it takes more energy to produce more stuff. But ultimately, what produces more stuff is harder to measure. To light the factories, more energy used to correlate with more light, until we swap out the incandescent/halogen lighting sources for LEDs. Then, we get m…

> To light the factories, more energy used to correlate with more light, until we swap out the incandescent/halogen lighting sources for LEDs

this is nonsense. lighting hasn't been a significant fraction of the energy usage of factories since they switched from being lighted by fireplaces to gaslighting. not in 02024, not in 01974, not in 01924, not in 01874

> Seems that measuring [gdp] growth by energy consumption is like Bill Gates' famous example

it's true that higher efficiency is better, of course, but your comment embeds the false assumption that higher energy efficiency reduces energy use. in fact, higher energy efficiency usually increases energy use, because it increases the scope of things to which marketed energy can be economically applied more than it reduces the use of marketed energy for things it was already being used for. (this is the well-known jevons paradox mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41392248). so, even today, it turns out that the countries with the lowest gdp and lowest energy use also have the lowest energy efficiency

similarly, using high-level languages reduces the number of lines of code to implement some given functionality; but you would be completely mistaken if you used that fact to predict that the vast majority of programmers spend their time writing assembly language instead of python because python requires one twentieth of the code to do whatever. many things are done with python not just because companies writing python outcompete companies writing assembly, but also because programs that would be unprofitable to write in assembly language become profitable to write when you can write them in high-level languages!

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#300

Post by locallost »

The premise of the article, that we would be richer if we used more energy is preposterously wrong. A light bulb used to be typically 100w, it's now a 1/10 of that. We get a lot more out of the energy now, which means we are in fact richer because we have more things. I just bought a TV which uses a quarter of the electricity of a Tv from a decade ago, and this with 4x as many pixels.

The big idea most people fail to grok is that we don't need energy at all, we need certain things energy provides us (light, heating, cooking, entertainment etc). But if I could super insulate my house and use 0 energy to keep it warm, this would not make me poorer. On the contrary.

Amory Lovins came up with the idea of "negawatts" a long time ago.

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