Earlier quoted context omitted.
One is in the UK, the other is in Germany.
Did that net you a dishwasher?
Dishwashers cost 300-500 EUR in Europe.
Can solar costs keep shrinking?
421–430 of 632 posts
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
The price to get solar installed in the US is insanely high compared to the cost of the materials. I've seen my extended family get quotes north of 40k for modest installs. I got a modest system with batter for around 9k in the EU, and id say I'd install the same for under 5k at today's prices.
A kitchen remodel in a high income city in the US is 75k-100k for something basic. The lopsidedness of US prices for light construction projects is a huge problem.
Ikea will sell you kitchens for 4k including appliances and set everything up for 2k. In Europe. (without electricity and plumbing)
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
>don't want to be more than an hour away from urgent care If it's an hour away, does it really qualify as "urgent" care?
Also, if you need a doctor or ambulance to come to you it first needs to drive the hour up and then another hour to an hospital. But maybe that type of care works differently when distances are so large. Are helicopters used?
Large distances for planned care is probably manageable. For urgent care not so much. Living alone also means not having someone else that can signal the emergency services when something is wrong.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#424Earlier 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.
Having more things certainly is good for GDP. But I don't know about you, but I'm pretty saturated on things already, with a bunch of stuff that I've purchased and barely use. Perhaps this comes down to a quality of life vs GDP per capita not being identical. While I could use more energy to consume more, I don't have a very strong desire to go much above my current level of consumption. But outside of the wealthy th…
But does your city have beautiful things? Do people try to create new amazing places? Does your city have working underground transportation? High speed trains? Japanese gardens everywhere? You need an excess of energy for these to be possible.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
We started to access nuclear power as a new source, but then stopped for quite a while. It looks like things are starting up again. We'll see.
the issue with nuclear power is that the humans don't yet have the technology to exploit it economically; at their current primitive level it's uncompetitive with other sources of energy. like printing 1000 years ago or heron's aeolipile
> humans don't yet have the technology to exploit it economically
$2,500/kW of capacity isn't too expensive, given the alternatives.
https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/catalyst-the-cost-of-nucl...
The recent batch of 11 reactors authorised by China are perhaps 2.8B USD each for 1.1GW plant (plus a high temperature gas reactor).
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're looking for some inexpensive land that can be fairly remote you might do worse than Cochise county AZ. The county has an opt out permit program as long as you have at least 4 rural acres. You can build whatever you want, no permits, no inspections. There are some restrictions. No bank will give you a mortgage, can't sell or rent it out within 2 years. You can live in your RV while you build, for 2 years I t…
Average rainfall 11 to 41 inches per year -- more than I expected in AZ. Still, to have reasonable water year-round for 2 people you'd need to collect across maybe 10,000 square feet? That's not a small installation.
obviously, you need substantial storage...
what about harvesting water from the air ? I've heard that modern techniques can work in 15% humidity ?
also, trucking in water once a year can augment the supply ? at 10c per gallon, it doesn't seem crazy... https://www.reddit.com/r/TinyHouses/comments/10qj5ey/no_well...
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a fair point that nuclear (and all power plants) need maintenance windows where they come offline (and occasionally unplanned outages). But this is not the same as saying nuclear is not dispatchable, that's just incorrect.
nuclear isn't dispatch-able for a different reason: you don't turn it off. Nuclear is relatively expensive, and those expenses are roughly 100% capex cost, so if you consider a reactor with a 10 billion construction cost and a 50 year lifespan, every hour you turn off the reactor costs at least ~$25k (or more if you assume the reactor was intending to do better than break-even.
If by dispatch-able you mean something that can cheaply fill the gaps when wind/solar is not producing, then nuclear is not dispatch-able. For that purpose, we really only have fossil plants (and hydro in a few areas)
But if you compare the predictability of nuclear to that of wind/solar, nuclear is a lot easier to plan, and also requires way less (if any) contribution from other sources.
Also, I would argue that the current prices for building nuclear plants is at least 2-4x higher than they should be (depending on location).
If the regulations for nuclear were to be scaled back to a point where the net average harm caused per GWh was just slightly less than for the alternatives, and if we allowed a free, competitive market for the construction, nuclear would become a lot cheaper than today.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
The price of a commodity is equal to the highest of the lowest cost producers that can satisfy demand. Germany cannot satisfy demand with cheap renewables, so the marginal producer is expensive gas & nuclear. German electricity is expensive because gas is expensive in Germany. Electricity will be expensive in Germany until Germany completely stops using gas shipped in via container ship.
You got it right there Germany can’t satisfy demand with renewables and decided to cut itself of from coal and nuclear, brilliant right!? Cherry on top some powerful player blew up Nordstream forcing Germany to buy exorbitantly expensive LNG. Your argument to stop using LNG doesn’t work if you have many parts of industry build with gas infrastructure which can’t be replaced just like that.
The long-term plans are of course to get rid of coal and gas, as it will be the case world wide, if humanity wants to have a future.
Part of that is, that EU-wide there are increasing costs to producing CO2. Which makes power from coal and gas more expensive. This caused a strong drop in coal energy in germany in 23, as there were cheaper alternatives. This trend is expected to continue.
Gas costs saw a spike due to the war Russia started and their attempt at blackmailing Germany and consequently cutting gas delivery to Germany. Gas usage has been reduced and gas prices are roughly back to pre-war levels. But indeed, the LNG part of it is more expensive than the russian gas. On the other side, switching heating to heat pumps will reduce the overal gas consumption drastically.
Gas never bore a main load of the grid, it is mostly for supporting short time demands. This role will be important with renewables, but the overall amount of gas energy will drop
At the same time, buildup of renewables has been greatly sped up by the current government, the electricity is already generated buy almost 60% renewables.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't work like that. The California failure is a good example. So far energy storage can just do a day-to-day backup for homes and some non-energy-intensive business activities, for others just few hours. No more. At grid scale storage is only a quick buffer to compensate renewables fluctuations waiting for classic power plants to regulate their output. Even at current Chinese prices a re-backed grid is just a…
> The California failure is a good example What California failure? Take a look at record battery discharging for CAISO https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso?record=Maximum%20Bat... Do you notice anything? The records keep falling ever summer. The battery discharge per day went up by 100% in the last year. I do not see any bending of the curve. California is the perfect example of building enough batteries can solv…
I notice the wrong focus: how much such storage cost vs how much it will been able to run? My slowly discharged home battery have a declared loos of 5% in ~3 years and I discharge only 10%/day normally. My car SOH (NMC though), if true from ODB state 10% loss over ~2 years. Compared to some friends I can esteem 2.3 years of useful life for NMC, 8 years for LFP if MODERATELY used (80-20% 3 time a week), for grid storage the useful life might be 1-3 year.
Secondary consider the battery production capacity: actually we do not recycle batteries except few experiments, too expensive to be done on scale, that still recycle only a part of lithium, most efficient recover let's say 80% from a new battery.
What do you expect in 10 years?
VS
what you expect if we re-build on scale modern small buildings where p.v. at a significant slice of latitude it's roughly 50% of total consumption in pure self-consumption? What if a modern home who consume in hot summer ~30kWh/day consume from the grid ~5kWh/day like a home with no A/C and in cold winter consume ~40kWh/day, ~30 from the grid instead of 90-100kWh of a classic one (data ranged from homes in Sweden to Spain)? Because you know the most we get so far was from consuming much less to do much more, where we are far better than generating more from renewables in improvements rate terms. You can't "improve" classic buildings, you can only rebuild them and we haven't enough natural resources to rebuild cities not counting it's practically impossible for mere impact of such megaproject on existing human life.
The reality is that only a spread society of small stuff can evolve, and in a changing world we need to been able to evolve. That's the resilience WEF talk, denying it at the same time.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#430Soon (if not already) the largest costs associated with solar installations will be the labor. It's expensive to get people on roofs and electricians to reconfigure panels, install transfer switches, etc. The equipment could be free and it would still cost thousands for the skilled trades to install.
This is one of the forces driving the shift from rooftop solar to utility-scale installations. A residential installation needs guys up on a roof to install the panels, and then custom wiring for each house. A solar farm can use robots to install tens of thousands of panels cheaply. There are unfortunate side effects to this, even besides the attacks on net metering that have cut financial returns for existing solar…
Yes, roof-top installation is expensive, but if you combine it with other maintenance of the roof, it gets very cheap. And any new roof should have it planned in with the setup.
Also, here the northern latitude helps, in Germany people start putting solar panels on walls and fences. There is plenty of cheap space and the efficiency isn't too bad considering the cheap panel costs.