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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

#381
Pretty trivial remark, but when the prices are so low, leading to most prices have two trailing zeros, couldn't we maybe switch for another unit than $/kWh ? Maybe $/MWh ? So we are currently at 29.9$/MWh.

For information, the average household in the world uses 3 MWh per year and a typical US one does a bit more than 10 MWh. Advanced and ecologically minded countries like Germany go down to 3 MWh.

Keep in mind that the location is important. Dubai has a lot of sun, you would not get this price with the same tech in, say, Canada.

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

#382
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for the noob question, but isn't there always sun somewhere on the planet? Are electricity grids not globally connected, or would it be lost in transmission?

They are not globally connected. And losses become significant after a thousand kms or so. You're not going to get to the electricity to the other side of the world where the sun is shining. You need local storage. As much as is said about batteries, the only real solution here is hydro. Expect to see every viable valley start to get dammed over the next decade or so.

>Expect to see every viable valley start to get dammed over the next decade or so.

Except that dams are instead being removed for a variety of environmental and associated reasons. Free lunches are rare.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2014/0803/Setting-river...

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

#383
post #275
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price electricity differently through the day according to its scarcity and people might eventually adjust their routines to reduce evening usage.

That seems backwards. The aggregate preferences and habits of humans should be seen as an incentivizing force for the creations of new technologies, not the other way around.

Variable pricing would create those exact incentives.

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

#384

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…

There is another way - minute by minute pricing. Much of the electric power usage is not required to be right now, and can be deferred - running the refrigerator, A/C, hotwater heater, dishwasher, charging the car, etc. With real time spot pricing information available, the deferrable usages can be deferred until the spot price is cheap.

I bet this could even out demand quite a bit.

With the current flat rate pricing structure, there is no incentive whatsoever to shift demand to blunt spikes.

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

#385

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…

Other than the fact that $7k still isn't that cheap (for many people)--how long does the "average" home of 4 take to recoup that cost?

I think the barrier is not only cost, but also know-how. Few people are likely to tackle a challenging project like this with a $7k out-lay.

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

#386
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can validate. The problem with electricity is that there is no large scale storage like there is for other forms of energy like NG and Crude. Until someone comes along and figures out how to store electricity, this will continue to cause grief to power companies. Power plants are really just options, if the price per kWh is at a certain point then it makes sense to spin up or take down a plant and generate power. Add…

I recall reading a while ago about using molten salt storage at large solar concentrators. Did this ever take off? The theory was you generate excess power during the day and you can use this excess to heat the salt solution which then release thermal energy during the night. Does anyone know more about this? Is this able to meet baseload demand?

This one in Nevada came online not too long ago and is quite large -- apparently has 10 hours of storage and according to Wikipedia it generated 9.1GWh in February 2016 alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_Pr...

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

#387

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…

The huge power companies still control the grid in many countries though. I hope improvements in batteries/storage will remedy this and we'll shift towards community grids of sorts. You'll still need the traditional grid for peaks but the power is shifting (pun non intended). It's a great development, I haven't looked into the net power needed to produce solar/photovoltaics panels but it was dropping quite a bit as well.

I'm a bit surprised there are no mini wind turbines. I read about some promising developments (with close to 0 noise output) but it seems to have fizzled.

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

#388
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead (or rather in addition) to storing power, we can also get better at coordinating demand. There are already programs for industrial users to get electricity for much cheaper, if they can tolerate power cuts during peak demand. Those programs will become more and more rewarding to join and extend and automate as supply gets spikier.

Is there a way to coordinate demand without asking thousands of people to give Alice the ability to shut off their appliances?

Sell electricity at spot prices, give consumers access to that spot price, and you'll see a lot of demand flatten simply through natural market forces.

Where I live, I pay five times more for electricity between peak hours of 2pm and 8pm than I do between off-peak hours of 10pm-8am. (The remaining hours are priced at a medium level.) This has changed my behaviour, in that I now tend to wait until bedtime before switching on the clothes dryer and dishwasher.

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

#389

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…

That's a good thing. Peak power usage is midday, so providing additional supply at that time avoids the need to site new plants, which costs millions or billions of dollars. It also makes coal less economical and makes gas plants, which are cleaner and safer to operate more economical.

Peak load is actually around 6pm.

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

#390
post #363
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of cars sit in carparks during the day.

I guess the implication being there'd be a massive number of charge spots and you could swipe your card to pull off the grid what your home is putting on. But this would mean turning a car-park with just 40 plugs into needing 1,600 amps at 240v. With those grid connected homes having modest 2kWh solar installations you're talking 80kw/h. If you only spent 3kWh getting to work on average (double that for the round-tri…

Thanks for working through some numbers.

My modest intended implication was that if we only care about total sums, where the car is doesn't matter too much, as long as it has access to the grid.

The economics could work out, if the car park charges you more for electricity than they pay the grid; and the grid your home less that it charges the car park.

The car park and the grid both take a cut. For the home- and car owner, this works out to a slightly less efficient battery cycle. (If you convert the money charged back into the equivalent amount of energy.)

Of course, if you are going to use your electric vehicle like as a battery like this, it's going to affect the battery's useful life. The same would happen with the single purpose battery you have sitting in your home.

Now, the performance characteristics one looks for in a car battery and a grid storage battery are different. So I don't know whether using the car battery as a home battery even makes sense. (Ie home batteries can be bulky, but better be cheap. Car batteries have to be light and charge fast.)

On a more refined note, one can play the same game, but only do it during spikes. Ie the car can stop charging during a spike in demand, and even uncharge if the spike gets big enough or the battery is already full.

This won't do much for the diurnal cycle (that we discussed above), but a contribution during the spikiest peaks might already be worthwhile.

My gut feeling is that we will see the demand shaping for charging, but I am more doubtful about whether we'll see cars actively feeding back into the grid.

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