Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Can solar costs keep shrinking?

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 632 posts

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#471

Post by chgs »

empiricus wrote: post #424
morepork wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You need an excess of energy to build a car centric city as it uses far more energy to shift a million people by car than by underground transport or high speed train

Not sure how much energy a garden can use, could you elaborate?

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#472

Post by zo1 »

SubjectToChange wrote: post #414
PaulKeeble wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are very much there already, Solar and Wind are both cheaper than Natural gas which is itself is cheaper than Coal. Solar is around 5 cents a KWH whereas Nuclear is more like 15 cents a KWH. The prices of Wind and Solar are being set by Gas at the moment as well and at some point that pricing will detach once more batteries are in place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

The intermittency is a huge problem. Grid scale batteries and/or pumped hydro are laughably inadequate for bridging the gap. Wind and solar energy is only cheap when they aren’t responsible for maintaining baseload capacity on the grid. Simply consider the case of China. They install and export more solar PV than anyone else in the world, and they are aggressively building out wind as well. It is literally impossible…

At some point we need to "tell" people to adjust. The "effectively infinite, at any time" tap of electricity that's subsidized and enabled by an all-encompassing government needs to stop.

We've been effectively spoiled with this capability, and we need to be weaned off quite abruptly. Just because we've been spoiled and expect the grid to give us on-demand energy in the middle of the night, doesn't mean we have to continue doing so.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#473

Post by [deleted] »

kragen wrote: post #310
njarboe wrote: post #308

Earlier 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

[deleted]

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#474

Post by pfdietz »

jvanderbot wrote: post #15
toss1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

> It takes more energy to produce more stuff Energy consumption is also about using that stuff. And in rich countries like the USA, a lot of energy goes to using things or just moving people. So it's possible to build more and use less energy, even if you don't reduce the energy cost of building things. They can simply become more efficient to use and move . In USA, 30% is just homes and commercial sector. 40% is tra…

I will note that the minimum energy needed to move people, as dictated by the laws of physics, is zero. There is no net change in average gravitational potential energy per capita, and any energy that goes into kinetic energy can in principle be recovered with arbitrarily high efficiency.

There are losses in practice, of course, to friction, air resistance, etc. but the laws of physics don't impose any lower bound on these.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#475

Post by dghughes »

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…

There is now a Winnebago eRV2 EV RV (say that fast lol). I wonder if that is an advantage more for an RV sitting gas going old and brakes stick. Sounds like a good idea for those wanting to live off-grid. Range is a dismal 173km (108mi) though.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#476

Post by Scoundreller »

fomine3 wrote: post #441
Scoundreller wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At the end of the day, they’re going to (possibly transform the voltage), rectify and AC input into DC and chop it up to get variable-frequency drive.

I kinda wonder how low or high voltage it could run on out-of-the-box but there might be other stuff that runs off straight 120V (e.g. defrost cycle).

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#477

Post by pfdietz »

thfuran wrote: post #336
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would need to see some supporting napkin math on how that makes financial sense. Something on the ground, accessible by Joe the handyman is always going to be cheaper than anything launched into space. To balance that out is going to require some huge win. Availability, efficiency, etc. Solar input in orbit is higher than what is received at ground, but similar order of magnitude. I am not sure there are real world…

>Solar input in orbit is higher than what is received at ground, but similar order of magnitude. On a sunny day, it's only something like 30% brighter above the atmosphere IIRC. I guess you beat cloud cover (assuming you can deliver it to ground through the clouds efficienly), but I agree it doesn't seem worth it.

The big advantage is the PV in space doesn't experience night (aside from very rare eclipses by Earth in geostationary orbit, which happens for a short period twice a year).

If we had laser power beaming it might make sense to put large PV installations around the Earth-Sun L2 point, so the power could be beamed to collectors on Earth's night side. Each beam would serve a series of collectors as the Earth rotated. The market in the Pacific would quickly be saturated, I imagine.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#478

Post by pfdietz »

glenstein wrote: post #288
sephamorr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source please? I'm aware of the large costs in the opposite direction due to the freeloading you mention: https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2024/04/22/californias-ex...

This is from the Maine PUC, other PUCs across the country do their own studies. Maine is on the high side, but all but one PUC that I'm aware of have calculated positive values. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/maine-puc-study-values-sola...

That link is from 2015, so I suspect it's talking about benefits at very low penetration.

Clearly things become very different at very high penetration. I mean, if everyone is net metering, who is consuming the excess power? Who is paying for the power plants that these people use when not providing their own power? The economics would go all to hell.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#479

Post by pfdietz »

locallost wrote: post #300

The premise of the article, that we would be richer if we used more energy is preposterously wrong. A light bulb used to be typically 100w, it's now a 1/10 of that. We get a lot more out of the energy now, which means we are in fact richer because we have more things. I just bought a TV which uses a quarter of the electricity of a Tv from a decade ago, and this with 4x as many pixels. The big idea most people fail to…

The crash in price of solar is upending the negawatt story. If power does become very cheap, efficiency becomes less important.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#480

Post by verisimi »

bee_rider wrote: post #404
verisimi wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the answer be to provide a simple number for the cost of a thing (oil, solar, wind, etc), that removes the government subsidies/taxes from the equation. Otherwise, you can tax what you don't like to oblivion or subsidise what you do like until it appears viable, but in neither case are you getting a true picture of the cost. The subsidies/tax moves a simple cost question, into the murky world of politics and…

Who’s going to provide that number and how do they calculate it?

Right. This is to say there nothing real or authentic about the numbers we are given. Solar numbers will shrink or inflate as a function of subsidies or taxes. The whole thing is operating within the confines of government largesse. It's nothing to do with the actual cost of energy, those numbers are a mystery.
Post reply on HN