301–310 of 842 posts
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250 miles is a totally normal distance for high voltage AC electrical transmission lines.
Running normal high voltage lines 250 miles isn’t free, and that cost should be part of the comparison used. Also, the cheapest land I found was 4k/acre, still well above pfdietz’s estimate.
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Without Hot Air and this blog are polar opposites. Without Hot Air uses costs from 2008 and assumes that they won't improve. The costs of solar have reduced by 90% since 2008 so McKay's conclusions are horribly wrong. OTOH Casey Handler is betting his company that the costs will improve from current values.
While the cost of the hardware has, many factors still apply such as efficiency and thusly the total area of solar required. You're right though that the book is not up to date, and getting long in the tooth in some aspects.
The other factor that is missed is that solar panels are proving to be surprisingly non exclusive in their land usage.
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California's oversupply problem is caused by, allow me to guess, fixed 24/7 electricity rates. These fixed rates remove all incentive for load shifting. Make electricity cheap when the sun shines, and expensive at night, and the market will shift demand. There are lots of cheap and easy ways to shift demand, I've outlined several on HN.
In most of California (served by PG&E) it's really expensive during the day, blisteringly expensive in the evening, and really expensive at night.
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The same author has a really good blog article with the math showing that it's cheaper to build solar locally in places with poor insolation than it is to build high voltge DC lines to bring it in from sunnier places. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
The author is making the classic mistake of assuming exponential trends continue indefinitely. Solar installs are becoming dominated by non solar panel costs. Some of those can continue to get cheaper, but land costs for example aren’t dropping. As to long distance power transmission and solar, it’s less about local vs long distance transmission of power but redundancy of generation. Batteries you discharge nightly v…
While it's true that land costs aren't dropping, rural land is still very cheap and due to the nature of solar power it could be almost free.
For example, here in Chile most solar plants are in the middle of the desert. Even if that land had to be paid for, my guess is it's VERY cheap.
The trouble with our current system is that the answer to environmental catastrophe is to make more stuff. And the entities that make the stuff have an incentive to pursue models that see them continue to make that stuff and sell it. Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming mo…
It looks like the solution they have come up with for this is subscriptions - you never buy your car or your solar panel, you just subscribe to them.
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You can get land in upstate NY for $1000/acre. There's a lot of cheap rural land even on the east cost. Arguing that Manhattan is expensive therefore PV doesn't work is like arguing Manhattan is expensive therefore agriculture doesn't work.
Edit2: Closest found was 9k per acre a little over 250 miles away.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/0-Ward-Loomis-Rd-Oxford-N...
(~214 miles from Oxford NY to Manhattan by road)
(search in Zillow by county)
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> Some of those can continue to get cheaper, but land costs for example aren’t dropping. The great thing about solar is that you can put a lot of it directly on rooftops in most places. Obviously not on top of skyscrapers in NYC, but there are plenty of homes and businesses with ample room for panels.
Rooftop solar is now far more expensive than utility scale solar. As a renter who subsidies this through my electricity bills I don’t understand why I should be subsidising more artisanal scale generation for homeowners at 3x the price of utility scale solar.
“Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas” Tell me if this sounds familiar. How about we store that natural gas underground in the same areas we’ve been taking it out? Sounds kinda like a natural for energy storage and a little carbon sequestration. (Can’t be sure with myself whether I’m s…
If you're doing carbon sequestration you skip the part where you convert it to methane and just sequester the captured CO2. Given the scale of the problem, something like that will (should?) be done. If we take it seriously and figure out a political solution, eventually every current natural gas well will be converted to CCS and run in "reverse", as it were. However, the energetics are such that most carbon capture,…
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The author is making the classic mistake of assuming exponential trends continue indefinitely. Solar installs are becoming dominated by non solar panel costs. Some of those can continue to get cheaper, but land costs for example aren’t dropping. As to long distance power transmission and solar, it’s less about local vs long distance transmission of power but redundancy of generation. Batteries you discharge nightly v…
He didn't say that the trend would go forever. He said that he didn't see a reason for them to slow down in the near term, we could still be at the beginning of a sigmoid curve. While it's true that land costs aren't dropping, rural land is still very cheap and due to the nature of solar power it could be almost free. For example, here in Chile most solar plants are in the middle of the desert. Even if that land had…
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> Some of those can continue to get cheaper, but land costs for example aren’t dropping. The great thing about solar is that you can put a lot of it directly on rooftops in most places. Obviously not on top of skyscrapers in NYC, but there are plenty of homes and businesses with ample room for panels.
Rooftop solar is now far more expensive than utility scale solar. As a renter who subsidies this through my electricity bills I don’t understand why I should be subsidising more artisanal scale generation for homeowners at 3x the price of utility scale solar.
I’m vaguely attached to a utility scale deal trying to happen. The land owners are interested, the utility is interested, and there isn’t much around the site. Still the details might kill the deal- they can’t agree where the HV lines will run, the utility wants a bit more land than the owners want to lease, access details and liability concerns are coming up, etc…
Utility scale solar is the future but rooftop solar gets installed NOW because each deal is simpler.
Now why my utility isn’t building out solar fields in the massive amounts of land they own around their coal and oil fired plants…