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Can solar costs keep shrinking?

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Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#531

Post by nothercastle »

foobarian wrote: post #529
nothercastle wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are built so terribly most are worthless after 20 years and start to have major issues at 10. Also add that the first 2 years they are constantly in the shop for repairs while the warranty is still available

I know some people that like to buy used trailers and then spend tons of their time fixing and complaining about leaks, rotted vinyl, etc.

Yeah I don’t get it you can’t build quality into a shitty design. Only trailers worth repairing are airstreams and fiberglass ones, and even then the time to value proposition is dubious

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#532

Post by bee_rider »

pfdietz wrote: post #509
floatrock wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s an interesting idea, because it matches the physics of the situation pretty well; on-demand capacity costs the grid something just to have it (batteries, or whatever), so it would be good to make that price visible to users and let them decide if they need it.

It might also push people more toward smart-grid tech, which is a desirable outcome. You might pick a dishwasher that can actually help shave the peak, if it saves you money.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#533

Post by mapt »

matharmin wrote: post #104
mapt wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been the case for years now for pitched residential roofs - they stopped being competitive a long time ago. Thankfully, the impetus for residential roof solar was always more ideological than practical. There's plenty, PLENTY, of empty unused land within a 95% transmission efficiency (hundreds or even thousands of kilometers depending on tech) of the end user, for all non-island cases.

That depends on where you live. In my area, labor is cheap and the costs of panels, batteries and inverters came down significantly over the last 5 years. You can now break even on electricity costs for a residential pitched-roof installation in under 5 years. This is without any subsidies, without selling anything back to the grid. Utility-scale solar installations also make a lot of sense, but around here transmiss…

> You can now break even on electricity costs for a residential pitched-roof installation in under 5 years. This is without any subsidies, without selling anything back to the grid.

This is arguably a false economy.

~75% of costs for the power grid are not in volume electricity generation, but in maintenance. They haven't priced it that way in most places to encourage power-saving and reduce the need for new infrastructure construction, but they'll be forced to if every roof sprouts solar cells.

If volume electricity generation is the concern, doing it in a field is dramatically cheaper than doing it on a roof.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#534

Post by MostlyStable »

zamadatix wrote: post #351
llsf wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Energy is the fuel for machines. And machines build more and faster than humans Sure. > To increase productivity, we need more machines, That is just one way to increase productivity. You can also make more efficient machines, come up with more efficient production processes, find alternatives to existing products that are more useful for a given task per quantity, and similar kinds of concepts. This is the point G…

At any given efficiency, more energy means more productivity (in the same way: at any given amount of energy production, more efficiency means more productivity). Yes, we should be increasing efficiency where reasonable, but we should also be increasing energy production.

There is a reason that the Kardashev scale is about energy utilization.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#535

Post by mapt »

Teever wrote: post #317
mapt wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been the case for years now for pitched residential roofs - they stopped being competitive a long time ago. Thankfully, the impetus for residential roof solar was always more ideological than practical. There's plenty, PLENTY, of empty unused land within a 95% transmission efficiency (hundreds or even thousands of kilometers depending on tech) of the end user, for all non-island cases.

I'd like to see the roofs of big box stores and their parking lots covered in solar panels. It would keep cars a lot cooler and would enable very efficient charging stations to be located in the parking lot.

A good number of the roofs already are. While more expensive than working in a field, it's way cheaper/safer than working on a tiny residential roof.

Parking lots are tougher, but I saw the first one this year.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#536

Post by floatrock »

pfdietz wrote: post #509
floatrock wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

oh, don't worry, there are tons of incentive structures like this already out there. It's sophisticated energy management, though, so it's only in the Commercial & Industrial world (for now)

In C&I land, you have things like demand charges (billing by your max kW, not just kWh), demand-eligibility tiers (your electric arc-furnace plant is going to have very different charges than your warehouse), and even fun things like many flavors of demand ratchets (you have a fixed charge based on your maximum kW in last 3, 6, 12 months, or your maximum kW during the most grid-strained periods last year, or a million other variations).

C&I billing gets very creative.

Some utilities are even today experimenting with demand charges in the Resi space (don't run your dryer while charging your EV!)

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#537

Post by mapt »

ghaff wrote: post #153
rconti wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. When we bought our solar system, even knowing it was grid-tied, it felt like we'd somehow be generating our own power. As soon as we had it, and I looked at the tiering, time-of-use, etc, and I realized it's all an arbitrage game. I'm selling my roof space and fixed asset back to the power company, and buying power from them.

If solar could reasonably double for me as a way of weathering a several day power outage in the winter, it would be more interesting. But I'm deeply suspicious of anything that has people out in front of Home Depot hard-selling something that often has complex financing schemes. I don't have huge power bills relative to lots of other home costs. So I'll pass.

DIY doesn't come with those asterisks, and DIY with only-thermal power use & energy storage is on the simple side of things. "Help me heat in the winter" is basically the simplest use-case, because you can accomplish it with a south-facing solar fence and some resistors [or an inverter + space heater, or whatever].

Personally I like the idea of a three-season thermal mass store, a big tank of water or pile of sand that you dump heat into when it's sunny, and extract it at will the rest of the day/week.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#538

Post by MostlyStable »

tails4e wrote: post #188
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...

The price to get solar installed in the US is insanely high compared to the cost of the materials. I've seen my extended family get quotes north of 40k for modest installs. I got a modest system with batter for around 9k in the EU, and id say I'd install the same for under 5k at today's prices.

My FIL has basically decided to just install his own solar from now on after getting quoted 10's of thousands of dollars in install labor cost for a job that he ended up doing himself in less than a day. And yes, it was done to code and spec (he's an engineer who runs a small manufacturing company, so the job was well within his skill set).

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#539

Post by neolefty »

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…

> Exactly 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

Yes, this was a central simplifying fallacy in the article for me too.

Plenty of phenomena follow a logistic curve [1] — which starts out exponential but then flattens out when it reaches constraints or fills a niche or fully satisfies a need or something.

The initial exponential growth may have been a period where economic productivity was constrained in a major by energy availability. We still have some energy constraints, but they seem to be secondary — and in many areas energy requirements have fallen, as others have pointed out in this discussion. It's too complicated to simply flatten, but modern energy use does seem to broadly resemble a logistic curve.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#540

Post by rtkwe »

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.

Sure but that amount is not monotonically increasing.. We figure out new ways to make the same thing with less energy or new things that require less energy to make relative to their value.

I did the rough math [0] and we get 10x as much GDP out of each kg oil equivalent used as we did in the 1970s when the article bemoans us falling off the HA curve. That was one of my core problems with their point, the amount of energy used is not directly tied to the economic value of the output.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rtkwe#41391812

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