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Can solar costs keep shrinking?

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Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#501

Post by Damogran6 »

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…

Three years ago I performed the phase one update on our trailer (38foot 5th wheeler) I put in a Victron converter/inverter, shunt, Cerbo (HMI) and 4 100ah LiFePO4 batteries. The trailer has a 5500 generator and 3 ACs.

I wanted 2.5 days of power, not including AC, as I'd run the Jenny when needing AC

Solar is (was) coming at a future date with something in the 1200 watt range.

What I found was that we were boondocking roughly 8 nights a year, needing about 2 hours of generator each day to top off the batteries. (FWIW, there's a LOT of power to a gallon of gas) I can charge at home before we leave, exercising the generator is good, because I can rely on it when I need it (where if we right or over-size the solar, you might go a very long time before really needing the generator.

So, I'd like solar (it's quiet), but the $2500 or so to install it probably doesn't have a reasonable ROI. And I really like having AC the few days it's needed away from shorepower.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#502

Post by lazide »

gcanyon wrote: post #350
aegis4244 wrote: post #345

Earlier 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.

If you’re buying land in AZ without a reliable well or utility hookup, you’re buying a nightmare.

There is plenty of land with reliable water there.

Rainwater for irrigation, maybe. But the reality is, most of AZ gets monsoons a couple months a year, and then essentially zero precipitation. So unless you have land favorable for setting up a dam or something, you’re going to have a hard time living off that kind of setup.

Flagstaff and Phoenix/far south being a bit different.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#503

Post by [deleted] »

ibeff wrote: post #463
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I just bought a field and laid them on the ground, over some plastic or something? Sure, I might be giving up some efficiency gains by not swiveling towards the sunlight or something, but I have to imagine there's a "plug and play" option possible here.

I wish JUST ONE PERSON in the comments would read the gosh darn article.

[deleted]

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#504

Post by ponector »

jacobolus wrote: post #348
nl wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slab City is 100 miles from San Diego and only 160 miles from Los Angeles! That's not remote - remote should be classified using a decreasing population density over distance function. Remote is somewhere like Nullarbor, which is 183 miles from Ceduna (population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullarbor,_South_Australia

That's not remote: there's a paved road that goes there! Remote should be somewhere that requires weeks of travel by sailboat or camel to get to.

That is not remote: instead of weeks on camels you can easily fly basically anywhere.

But a good example of remote is Nulato, Alaska.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#505

Post by eigenspace »

93po wrote: post #305
sitkack wrote: post #115

Yes The pallet price of solar panels in the US is below 30 cents a watt. https://a1solarstore.com/wholesale-solar-panels.html And from alibaba, it is below 15 cents a watt. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Longi-solar-Hi-MO-X6-... With full systems below $1/watt. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Moregosolar-hybrid-so...

It's super annoying to me to be paying $250 a month for a 1 bedroom apartment in Texas for electricity when $2200 of panels, which would be 8000 watts, would be more than enough for my needs during the day (as long as I didn't run the dryer at the same time as the AC, and also accounting for a 400W panel not usually making full power). Obviously other expensive hardware is needed too, but still.

Do you have a balcony facing south? You might be able to just buy some solar panels, a battery, and a microinverter and set it up on your balcony. You won't be able to sell your electricity back to the grid, but you can perhaps greatly reduce the amount of grid electricity you use.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#506

Post by Retric »

chickenbig wrote: post #485
kragen wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-maga…

Pure PV farms have minimal operational costs, nuclear has huge ongoing costs. For a more realistic comparison the operating costs of nuclear offset the cost of batteries for solar.

So capital costs vs capital costs on a per Wh basis isn’t in favor of Solar it favors nuclear which has less flexibility. IE: 24 GWh per day of battery backed solar can dump half that power over 2 hours @ 6GW. 24GWh of nuclear IE a 1GWh reactor caps out at 1GW. If you want to ramp to 6GW of output nuclear needs several nuclear reactors and all of their associated costs.

> Modern reactors have load following capabilities

Load following isn’t free for nuclear, any time you’re not operating at 100% you’re losing money. Batteries are inherently way more flexible.

It also costs more to build a load following reactor and they have more experience maintenance issue due to thermal stress. Nuclear inherently favors steady state operations due to the Xe pit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_pit) but it also requires being taken offline for long periods for maintaining, refurbishing, and or refueling.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#507

Post by eldaisfish »

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:…

>Even if you run your plant just fine, a strong earthquake can turn it into a nuclear bomb.

This is entirely false. No civilian nuclear power plant anywhere on earth has the level of fuel enrichment necessary to become a bomb.

If you have credible sources, please do share.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#508

Post by ben_w »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #393
ben_w wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One is in the UK, the other is in Germany.

Did that net you a dishwasher?

In the German one, yes. The UK kitchen didn't have one, and while I'm not 100% sure why — was handled by my rental agency, with me deferring to them entirely for whoever they suggested for the work and whatever design they suggested for the layout — I suspect it may have been too small.

But the cost of a dishwasher is a small fraction of the rounding error, and I was rounding up quite a bit in both cases — even the (more expensive) German one is EUR 8903 with dishwasher, hob, sink, delivery, installation, and all taxes.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#509

Post by pfdietz »

floatrock wrote: post #496
bee_rider wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if this cost was actually all broken out; the grid operator should charge for connectivity, the various energy providers should charge for the energy itself. Net metering could still make sense; your residential solar installation might make enough to cover the gap.

This is exactly what happened in California recently with Net Metering 3.0 -- the utilities cut the value of the electrons you export back onto the grid, and they even broke that value out into a supply chunk and a transmission & distribution (which effectively cuts the total export value even more because they argued that the marginal electron is worth a tiny amount as far as the t&d line items go). What's happening…

What is needed is charging not just for a connection, but for connection of a certain maximum dependable capacity. This would be best be coupled with some ability to force limitation on the instantaneous consumption, a kind of demand dispatch.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#510

Post by kaliqt »

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:…

Fukushima was extremely minor though. Chernobyl is the worst and even that was not that bad, yeah we dramatize it a lot in media, but at a societal scale measuring physically (what actually happened vs how you felt about what happened) it was a blip on the radar.
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