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Can solar costs keep shrinking?

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Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#571

Post by zhynn »

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…

My town has about 500 people, but the really active community is about 50-100 that will show up at the various things we do. I am 30 minutes from grocery stores, and 3 hours from boston or montreal. I have fiber internet because the residents got sick of the telecoms and we built our own. And the forest is more dense than Montana (where I grew up), and doesn't light on fire every summer. Please come to VT. :)

Also, I a bought a ramshackle building at auction that I am turning into a community workshop. It will be fun!

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#572

Post by _DeadFred_ »

spockz wrote: post #423
gcanyon wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>don't want to be more than an hour away from urgent care If it's an hour away, does it really qualify as "urgent" care?

Also, if you need a doctor or ambulance to come to you it first needs to drive the hour up and then another hour to an hospital. But maybe that type of care works differently when distances are so large. Are helicopters used? Large distances for planned care is probably manageable. For urgent care not so much. Living alone also means not having someone else that can signal the emergency services when something is wro…

We have http://lifeflight.org in the Rocky Mountain West. $85 a year. I wish they would expand into ground service in my area so I didn't have to worry about ambulance bills.

Maybe pick up a personal anti choking device (https://www.amazon.com/anti-choking-device/s?k=anti+choking+...) as well.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#573

Post by lsllc »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #200
tails4e wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

11k for my house in MA net of a few thousand in subsidies last year. I don't think I really believe your quote of 40k. Does that even break even on energy bill savings?

Do you mind saying what company and which end of MA?

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#574

Post by zubietaroberto »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #403
KennyBlanken wrote: post #391

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 It's pretty hard to do worse than "the very small amount of water is being sucked dry because there are no regulations around water use." Once the water table compacts, it never comes back... > Rooftop water collection for water. It's one of the dries parts of the country. Good fucking luck. A growing num…

I'm not endorsing it as a sane idea, but for people who think the idea of living on Mars is cool, living in areas like this could push forward development of compatible technologies- like retaining and recycling all water. Like right now my mind is trying to imagine a solar powered desiccator and water recollection device that could dehydrate all compost and bodily excretions.

[flagged]

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#575

Post by chickenbig »

Retric wrote: post #506
chickenbig wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 re…

> Pure PV farms have minimal operational costs, nuclear has huge ongoing costs.

https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el... page 59 table 3.13a puts O&M for nuclear in the USA at about 12 USD/MWh plus just over 9 USD/MWh for fuel, and table 3.14 puts O&M for utility scale solar at around 6 USD/MWh or so.

As for batteries, I think a few hundred USD/kWh is a reasonable guesstimate of cost (raw LiFePO4 cells are now sub-100 USD/kWh). Backing up each hour of production of a 1GW power station would cost a few hundred million USD, plus the cost of the solar farm to charge the battery up.

> 24 GWh per day of battery backed solar can dump half that power over 2 hours @ 6GW

At which point the transmission becomes the limitation; the grid operator probably wants a fairly stable flow of electricity through the wires to maximise utilisation so the 6GW is not realistic, nor would moving the electricity during the day to load-adjacent storage be efficient.

> Load following isn’t free for nuclear, any time you’re not operating at 100% you’re losing money.

I was responding to the point that solar panels are inherently more flexible because you can turn them off (because ...????). The same reasoning you've made about nuclear load following being uneconomical can be made about pure solar too.

> Nuclear inherently favors steady state operations due to the Xe pit

Operators change the boron concentration to offset the negative change in reactivity due to Xe-135 levels. For PWRs this is not a big problem, you just have to know it is there and do the calculation for I/Xe concentrations given the power levels.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#576

Post by zubietaroberto »

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…

Without access to a water supply, living in the middle of Arizona is just DUNE cosplay.

I do know that there are water condensation machines that could be fed with solar power, but at that point will likely be too expensive for a single family.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#577

Post by llsf »

MostlyStable wrote: post #534
zamadatix wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Correct, we can innovate and make the "transformer" (i.e. machines) more efficient (i.e. use less energy for same output). But the thing is, if energy was cheaper and more available we would just produce more.

The reason why now we most enjoy some time off (weekend, vacation, retirement) is thank to the machines that can produce more with less humans. Now humans mostly drive the machines.

I guess the ultimate extreme evolution would be machine driving machines, so humans could be out of the loop, except for the initial input goal. And machine would extract/mine/recycle, transform, transport, deliver everything we ever need. It would be one big machine (with lots of energy) extracting (and hopefully recycling) earth elements to satisfy humans.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#578

Post by kkfx »

energy123 wrote: post #555
kkfx wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know that storage is necessary I was explaining why storage hasn't been built at scale yet

Well, you miss the point: we do not have much storage because it last way too little at certain daily load. It's simply way to costly so far to have a nation-wide grid full of renewables, while we can make p.v. grow at small scale, for self-consumption reducing the daily load on the grid, when the grid is most charged.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#579

Post by llsf »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #446
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…

Given that electrification would help the 67.3 Quads of energy wasted, primarily by fossil fuel systems, that your diagram shows, not electrifying would be incredibly dumb. A graph of major economies percentage of electricity in final energy: https://preview.redd.it/china-is-electrifying-far-faster-tha...

I agree that huge benefits would come from electrification of residential and commercial (e.g. heat pump, induction stove, etc.), industrial (starting with the dozen of blast furnaces in US), and transportation (e.g. trains, trucks... more technologically difficult for ships and planes).

Electric "transformers" (aka machines) are more efficient in general than their fossil fuel counterparts (less heat).

Electrification (with matching electricity production) is a matter of national security. If/when fossil fuel would become either more scarce or more expensive (or both), all hell will break loose. There would be conflicts and chaos.

China is planning for long term, and putting resources in to it.

Unfortunately, the US democracy is not suitable for long term planning (while politicians can have very long terms, they are always busy planning for their re-election, not planning long term for the country). Who would have the fortitude to plan for a 10, 20, 50 years time horizon ?

US should plan for electrification (production + grid) and give a strong signal to the industry so the industry can plan ahead (e.g. GE,etc. can prepare production from gas stove to electric stoves, car manufacturers and dealers to electric vehicles, logistic companies to be ready to use electric trucks and trains, etc.), and no flip-flopping signals like we get now. The industry needs to feel confident that their investments would hold decades from now.

All this would takes years, and cost a lot. And the benefits would only be visible decades from now (no incentive for politicians). But at the time, any nation still dependent on fossil fuel, would be crushed.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#580

Post by prdonahue »

lsllc wrote: post #573
spywaregorilla wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

11k for my house in MA net of a few thousand in subsidies last year. I don't think I really believe your quote of 40k. Does that even break even on energy bill savings?

Do you mind saying what company and which end of MA?

I did a system earlier this year with My Generation Energy, coincidentally while I was interviewing for the CPO role at Aurora Solar (where I am now).

Highly recommend MGE if you’re in the Cape Cod area. Not sure how far off Cape they’ll go if not.

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