Can solar costs keep shrinking? • Hacker News Board

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#441

Post by fomine3 » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 7:17 AM UTC

Scoundreller wrote: post #237

happyopossum wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> modern fridges run all the time(ish). Genuinely curious - when did this become a thing? I have a couple of relatively recent fridges (less than 10 yrs old, and same model still sold today) that constantly cycle on/off, and spend more time off than they do on. I'd imagine a variable speed system (like are available in inverter-based heat pumps today) could be designed to run nearly constantly, but the variability of…

From what I’ve seen, they’re usually marketed as “inverter fridges”. And yeah, at least the fan turns off when you open the door, and I’d imagine if you put a bunch of ice into the fridge, it wouldn’t need to run at all for a while. Meanwhile my local electric code (Ontario Canada) still requires a dedicated circuit for the fridge, which will now basically hum along at 1-2amps and never brownout/trip a circuit. What…

So we should just buy efficient inverter refrigerator, rather than add 48VDC.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#442

Post by energy123 » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 7:26 AM UTC

cbmuser wrote: post #433

Customers are paying prices, not costs. A cheap kWh of solar electricity isn't useful when it's not available when needed. Prices are mandated by supply and demand. Also, while the costs of the solar modules may fall further, the costs for the whole setup does not. A solar power plant requires a lot of mechanical and electrical parts to get the solar modules installed and connected to the electricity grid plus labor…

You didn't read the article.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#443

Post by grecy » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 7:28 AM UTC

_yb2s wrote: post #309

grecy wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly right. It's mathematically impossible to get more than 116 miles from a McDonalds in the lower 48 - and that's if you take a helicopter! https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mcfarthest-spot-skb

But there are many places where that would be two solid days of offroad driving, without seeing another person in the process.

Can you give me an example?I have explored a lot of remote places and never found anything nearly that remote

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#444

Post by GauntletWizard » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 7:33 AM UTC

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…

I would love to see your setup and price sheet - I'm planning on doing the same very soon. Doing a full digital nomad lifestyle for a year or two, traveling the country, while still working remotely.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#445

Post by qnleigh » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 7:38 AM UTC

credit_guy wrote: post #364

EcommerceFlow wrote: post #37

I used to be radically pro-nuclear, but after seeing some of the data of solar growth and realizing we could just scale things up (like building iphones), I'm fully on board with the Elon strategy of solar + powerbanks for storage.

I continue to be radically pro-nuclear (but I'm also pro-solar and pro-wind). Especially given Elon's example with SpaceX, how you can drop the cost of some technology by a factor of 10 or 100. Elon's idea was that the floor on the price of something is the cost of the raw materials. Everything else can be optimized. The cost of a nuclear power plant is most likely one thousand times the cost of the raw materials. Ca…

There was an excellent article here a few months ago about what drives the cost of nuclear power up so much, at least in the US. The US Navy has managed to develop relatively cheap nuclear reactors for submarines, so the technology exists. Commercial reactor costs are constantly driven up by regulations that become stricter during the process of building power plants, to the point where they often have to dismantle things to comply with new regulations that came into effect during construction. Nuclear plants go way over budget consistently, and it sounds like the economic case is actually getting harder for them.

Ultimately these regulations are driven by the large fraction of the public that is terrified of nuclear disaster. Unless that changes, costs may not go down significantly.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#446

Post by ZeroGravitas » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 7:39 AM UTC

llsf wrote: post #335

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…

Energy is the fuel for machines. And machines build more and faster than humans. To increase productivity, we need more machines, and so more energy. If energy was 10 times cheaper than currently and still available (no shortage) then we would automate more tasks and increase the global productivity. We could mine more, build more, to train/run more LLMs. GDP is tied to energy price and availability. It is likely the…

Given that electrification would help the 67.3 Quads of energy wasted, primarily by fossil fuel systems, that your diagram shows, not electrifying would be incredibly dumb.

A graph of major economies percentage of electricity in final energy:

https://preview.redd.it/china-is-electrifying-far-faster-tha...

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#447

Post by ZeroGravitas » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 8:01 AM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #324

javiramos wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Smil was wildly wrong about the trajectory of PV improvement. In his defense, so was almost everyone else. I found the following comment about Smil: "There is a way how to evaluate the quality of prophets, seers and visionaries. Find their 5,10,15 years old predictions. I own the Smil’s book: Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate (2010). So have a look how good prophet he was 10 yea…

It's hard to tell if Smil is a grumpy old academic who's been catapulted to fame because his cranky opinions happened to line up with some political faction (like Jordan Peterson) or if he's been fundamentally warped by the money and attention available to those who take certain positions (like a slightly later Jordan Peterson).

His doomerism and degrowth perspective points to the early JP, writing articles mocking Obama for lack of progress with EVs points to the latter.

Either way he managed to convince Bill Gates to massively misinvest in climate solutions and while doing so loudly bad mouth all the actual solutions so that alone is a massive net negative for humanity (and, more parochially, for the USA, which is super ironic given his anti-communist stance--another weird JP parallel--as he's been super helpful to the Chinese by letting them solve all the problems he claimed were inpossible and dissuaded US companies from investing in).

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#448

Post by kragen » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 8:03 AM UTC

chickenbig wrote: post #425

kragen wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

but 1.1 gigawatts of mainstream solar panels is 0.14 billion usd. $130 per kilowatt of capacity. even at the dismal 10% solar capacity factor achieved in very northerly countries like germany, the reactor is twice the price per average watt, and it needs to be installed far from the point of use—you can't buy a 440-watt nuclear reactor, so you need transmission, distribution, and transformers, all of which incur energy losses, capital investment, and safety hazards you can avoid with photovoltaic

that large grid also needs regulation, billing, and political stability. (a reactor is an appealing target for both russian glide bombs and enron-style scams.) and the reactor is not dispatchable over timescales of less than a day, while you can short out a solar panel in microseconds

fundamentally the reactor can't compete economically because it's shackled to a pricey steam engine. the reactor itself is a triviality, just a pile of fuel larger than the critical mass. some of them formed naturally at oklo billions of years ago. what's hard is integrating that energy release mechanism into a machine, and that's because the humans are still terrible at making machines

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#449

Post by kragen » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 8:06 AM UTC

technofiend wrote: post #406

caymanjim wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 $…

Before you purchase anything try A1 solar. They often have deep discounts on single panels as well as container lots. For instance they have a 440 Watt panel priced at $140, six of which would get you 2,640 watts @ $840. https://a1solarstore.com/solar-panels/440-watt-solar-panels....

or you could maybe drive the rv down to mexico

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#450

Post by GardenLetter27 » Fri, Aug 30, 2024, 8:07 AM UTC

tmnvix wrote: post #265

hinkley wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Higher consumption = higher standard of living.

We have nuclear power (and soon nuclear fusion) - we can completely decouple energy production from environmental damage.

And trying to force degrowth on populations just makes matters worse, as their economy collapses (Europe), or they resort to even worse forms of energy production like deforestation and wood burning (Sub-Saharan Africa and remote South America).