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Can solar costs keep shrinking?

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Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#481

Post by jenadine »

locallost wrote: post #452
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…

It is certainly possible, just more expensive. And I'm just saying that one shouldn't mix cost of production and price for the consumer.

It is easier to size the network when the current flows basically in one single direction from power plant to users. When the production is decentralised, you need more transmission lines. You also get more losses in the transmission if you go through more substations. Big turbines helps to keep a stable frequency on the network despite unpredictable consumption changes. With renewables one need to adjust the frequency. One also need to keep the power factor in track. All of this means extra costly hardware on the grid and extra loss.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#482

Post by gcanyon »

asah wrote: post #426
gcanyon wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I was going off 100 gallons per day per person, which is typical, but can obviously be improved upon. But that said, I don’t want to pay $7000 per year just for water. Plus living remotely like that is just terribly inefficient in general: food, trash, heating/cooling, transportation, water, and just everything all take much more effort/resources to produce in a solo venture like that. I’m not saying I don’t see the appeal, but the Earth could not (even remotely) support everyone living that way.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#483

Post by eek2121 »

asah wrote: post #426
gcanyon wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

No idea of the situation there, but rural areas in our part of the world tap underground sources for water. It gets pumped and filtered on premise. Septic is a big tank with a field up front for dispersing fluids/liquids. Commenter below mentioned trash, but if you are applying some basic sustainable living techniques, the amount of trash produced should be minimal to none.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#484

Post by emporas »

empiricus wrote: post #230
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…

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.

Energy is necessary, but the better the intelligence applied to any problem, the less energy is required.

I was wondering if there was any way to bring 10.000 Einsteins online. Einsteins who know all about physics, programming, math and so on, cranking up ideas days and night. If the Einsteins never sleep, that would be ideal.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#485

Post by chickenbig »

kragen wrote: post #448
chickenbig wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ener…

> but 1.1 gigawatts of mainstream solar panels is 0.14 billion usd

A solar farm is more than just solar panels. This 3.5GW solar farm cost 2.13B USD, so by your estimates the panels make up just 1/5 of the cost of the farm. I'd expect the load factor of the nuclear power station to offset the solar farm's nameplate capacity advantage, and lead to steadier prices/fewer storage requirements etc etc.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/06/06/worlds-largest-solar-...

> and it needs to be installed far from the point of use

Note that this is a problem for solar farms in China; they are installed where land is not valuable. Hence all the HVDC transmission records being broken in China. Plus nuclear power stations can be close to populations. For instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daya_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant is 50km from Hong Kong.

> the reactor is not dispatchable over timescales of less than a day

Modern reactors have load following capabilities, e.g. the AP1000 can ramp up 5% a minute within the 15%-100% band.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#486

Post by kkfx »

energy123 wrote: post #419
SirHumphrey wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but why then, if storage is not a big problem of solar power, the US has 179 gigawatts of installed solar capacity with rated power of all grid storage on the US grid being 31.6 GW, of that only 4.8 GW being battery storage. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Stat... [2] https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-grid...

The answer to this is obvious. Until very recently, solar was less than 100% of midday electricity. What would have been the point of installing batteries? To charge them with natural gas?

Start with

- https://doi.org/10.1109/PowerAfrica.2017.7991192

- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijepes.2022.108701

And you'll learn why we can't keep up grids with massive p.v./eolic and why storage is needed.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#487

Post by api »

pstuart wrote: post #177
api wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMRs are still huge compared to putting $10k worth of solar panels on a house. They also require a lot of big expensive infrastructure like reprocessing facilities, expensive safety-escorted transportation, secure facilities, etc.

Yes those things are true; albeit the apple to oranges comparison of a home setup vs community baseload provider. One of the compelling deployment cases is to revamp existing coal fired plants with SMRs, which would be a huge win in addressing climate change. None of this is meant to disparage or dismiss solar and other renewables; it's meant to be complementary.

What I was really getting at was the effect that low incremental cost has on the evolution of the technology. A technology with low incremental unit cost can evolve very rapidly, while high unit cost capital-intensive technologies are slow to evolve. Which will win?

Some technologies are inherently high unit cost and capital-intensive. Aerospace is a classic example, and it's why we're still flying on 1970s-tech airplanes and why rockets are just now becoming reusable. Aerospace advances at a crawl because each unit is so expensive.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#488

Post by aziaziazi »

shusaku wrote: post #346
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.

As the article mentions, labor is now the dominate cost for solar. In poor countries where labor costs are cheap (panel costs still need to go down for this case), we’re going to lift an insane number of people out of poverty using cheap solar. That was never an option with nuclear (who wants an unstable regime managing a power plant?)

> we’re going to lift an insane number of people out of poverty

Please elaborate how? In my understanding electricity access is a problem in many poor countries but what makes the people poor is the lack of any ressources (food, tool, book, pills, land, shelter, money for proxy those…). Electricity may be on the list but it’s far from the first.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#489

Post by jonstewart »

gcanyon wrote: post #482
asah wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I was going off 100 gallons per day per person, which is typical, but can obviously be improved upon. But that said, I don’t want to pay $7000 per year just for water. Plus living remotely like that is just terribly inefficient in general: food, trash, heating/cooling, transportation, water, and just everything all take much more effort/resources to produce in a solo venture like that. I’m not saying I don’t see the…

Net zero living looks a lot more like the Upper West Side than a cabin in the woods.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#490

Post by martinald »

nostrademons wrote: post #135
anonfordays wrote: post #72

Soon (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…

I think it's worse than that, for rooftop solar you have an enormous amount of sales and marketing expense baked in, plus you have homeowners which don't have enough experience to know what a good price/good install looks like. Much less of that with bigger systems.

The other major problem is the grid is not setup at all for consumers to also be generators. At least in the UK it is rare/not possible for the DNO to send power back from a neighbourhood to the grid (at least not without a total remodel of the local grid infrastructure).

So we are now hitting problems where solar is not allowed to be connected to the DNO if you have streets with a lot of solar on, because at some point the generation from the houses on the areas local transmission outstrips the demand in summer, and in that case you have too much power and nowhere for it to go (the excess cannot be sent back to the high voltage grid). The DNO cannot turn off individual solar generators easily (and even if they could, do they trust a load of chinese inverters to work reliably remotely?)

I think the key problem with solar/renewables is not undersupply in winter in northern climates (though that is a big one for true net zero) it is oversupply in the summer. It's already causing massive issues in Europe with long spells of negative pricing. Interconnectors don't really help with this because when it is sunny (and potentially windy) in one place in Europe it tends to be similar elsewhere, so everyone has too much power.

This is before the UK adds another huge amount of solar and wind in pipeline by 2030.

Note this comment only applies to northern climates. It's far less of an issue further south because AC load tends to follow solar production much more, but that is far less common in the UK.

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