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Can solar costs keep shrinking?

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com

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Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#451

Post by GardenLetter27 »

hinkley wrote: post #239
empiricus wrote: post #230

Earlier 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.

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.

> And we really need it if we want a planet worth living on fifty years from now. So to ignore this desire is dangerous.

We just need to use nuclear power.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#452

Post by locallost »

jenadine wrote: post #274

One thing that is often forgotten is the difference between the cost of electricity at the power plant, and the price of electricity in the power plug in the household. The difference is that the grid provides constant electricity at 60Hz 24/7. Solar is much cheaper to produce, but there are many challenges to get a reliable grid. Big centralized power plant that have huge turbines with kinetic energy are much easier…

There are a huge number of myths. Grid is not really my expertise, not at all, but I hear this a lot, it's challenging to get a reliable grid. At the same time I read an interview with the CEO of 50Hertz [1], one of Germany's grid operators who says, we can do 70-80% renewables easy and managed the solar eclipse a lot easier than even we thought. And data backs it up, Germany has one of the more reliable grids in the world. It makes sense even on a layman level - why would it be less of a challenge to have a grid with a few large plants? One of those goes offline unexpectedly and you lose a significant percentage of your capacity. This never happens with renewables and their intermittency is easily handled with a weather forecast.

[1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/interview/german-ele...

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#453

Post by nine_k »

csomar wrote: post #395
credit_guy wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You make the ultimate point. In a "sane?" world, once nuclear has been discovered, every country should have gone the way of France or the Soviet Union. Build nuclear everywhere with over-capacity built-in. The problem is, once Chernobyl happened (which might have bankrupted a struggling USSR), every country became wary of nuclear as some hidden costs are now more apparent. The Fukushima disaster didn't help either:…

For Chernobyl to happen, the team on the NPP had to do a number of crazy things, and disable a number of security systems which otherwise would stop the crazy things from being done.

Certainly RBMK reactors are old and have some shortcomings, but a number of them is still running without incidents. Newer designs are significantly more safe by construction.

But the public, sadly, is beholden to legends and emotions, as it has been for millennia. Having an educated opinion is work, it takes time and effort, and a human only has a limited amount of both.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#454

Post by mattclarkdotnet »

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…

Nannup, Western Australia. Or maybe Pemberton. Sorry I know you probably want somewhere in the US, but it really does tick all your boxes

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#455

Post by willvarfar »

aegis4244 wrote: post #345
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…

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…

Do you know realistic property prices and acreages in Cochise county?

A quick google image search shows a very hot Arizona.

As someone who enjoys following a lot of youtube self-builders around the world I get the impression that most channels I follow have to thread their way through some pretty convoluted and not-self-build nor budget-friendly rules :(

Do you know of any other places in the US that have similar easy-to-self-build but are more wooded and temperate?

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#456

Post by anovikov »

Spike in LCOE is merely because of interest rates. Which hits solar the hardest as it doesn't consume fuel and it's maintenance costs are very low, so almost all of the LCOE is cost of initial capital investment stretched out to 20 years by applying the interest rates, which are high.

No need to look for doom scenarios here. Interest rates fluctuate. They will be back to some lower point than today but certainly higher than in 2020. LCOE will drop off.

There's no need for solar costs to go down at all anymore. Transition will happen even if they get stuck forever, solar is cheap enough, now it's just about speed at which factories can be deployed, installers trained, etc.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#457

Post by agurk »

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…

I'm somewhat confused with the analysis of his predictions of the price of PV panels.

Is it saying Smil said (is that meant to be countered with?) PV would cost 0.05 USD/W in 2020? Or was that meant to be Al Gore claiming that price? It seems it can't be his predicted reduction as he said 25% less, so did he want to say that is would be 3.38 USD/W in 2020 (75% of the 2009 price)?

And the current cost - 0.2W/USD is 5 USD a Watt - are the units reversed there? A quick google shows a variety of prices, with nothing being 20 cents a Watt [0] - $0.5-1.50 for the less efficient thin film types quoted here. All seem quite a bit cheaper than $4.5 a watt though.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/solar/cost-of-solar-...

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#458

Post by HenryBemis »

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…

> dropped 25% or more

I don't mean to straw-man your argument, I was merely thinking that the 'actual' drop must be bigger, considering the inflation in most countries (in some EU countries it approached or hit 10%), so under normal circumstances and/or in the future the drop would/will be at 30%-35% if the same rate continues (prices getting lower - inflation getting lower)

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#459

Post by goodpoint »

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…

> Bill Gates' famous example of saying that "measuring software progress

Oh the irony.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#460

Post by medstrom »

murkt wrote: post #412
KennyBlanken wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many times, it really doesn't matter if you're 30 miles from anything, or 300. If your vehicle breaks down, how screwed are you? Do you have cell coverage to call for help? Will anyone be passing by to flag down, any time soon? How far away is the nearest LEO agency, fire department, ambulance? How far away is the nearest place for water, food, etc?

> LEO agency I know you didn’t mean Low Earth Orbit agency, but the thought is funny. If you’re not more than 1000+ km from the nearest satellite, you’re not in a remote area!

What does it stand for?
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