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

61–70 of 632 posts

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#61

Post by tuna74 »

specialist wrote: post #21
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…

I clocked that too. Perhaps author is nodding towards replacing fossil fuels with electricity. Decarbonizing steel uses a lot more energy. Ditto cement, plastics, fertilizers, HVAC, etc. Anyone care to guess how much more energy our glorious renewable energy future perfect economy will require? 4x? 6x?

Another issue is that ocean water becomes very usable since it becomes so cheap to remove the salt from it. It won't be long before the most productive food producers will be in desert regions that have access to the sea (like Australia, Pakistan and Saudia Arabia).

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#62

Post by blululu »

henry2023 wrote: post #25
blululu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Countries that dump solar panels on the international market to kill off foreign competition are really demonstrating that... During the Obama years the US invested heavily in Solar, and developed many of the technical innovations that make cheap solar possible today. Unfortunately the people who did this work were not able to keep up with the CCP subsidizing solar panels well below cost. They folded and the US has v…

What makes you think that cheap solar panels aren’t the product of economy of scale in a country that just likes to build stuff?

That’s part of it, but America is also a country that routinely achieves economies of scale and loves to build stuff so there is clearly more going on here. Look back at what was commercially and technically available 15 years ago and it is not a viable mainstream energy supply at the scale needed to have the deployment we see today. The US developed a number of key innovations that made this feasible. A lot of this was funded under Obama era energy policy, but no efforts were made to protect the native industry from an unsustainable market force which sadly meant that the policy did not get the ROI that it might have otherwise achieved.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#63

Post by jillesvangurp »

RobinL wrote: post #52
xnx wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plug-and-play kits for installation on balconies that are popular in Germany: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/business/germany-solar-pa...

Does anyone know of examples of something like this that can be bought in the UK?

Just look on Amazon. Plenty of options for people with garden sheds, boats, etc. Plugging that into a wall socket might be something that you want to verify is allowed under your insurance or local legislation.

I know some people here Germany that have picked up some panels at their local Aldi and are using them. Yields are pretty anemic but they aren't that expensive either. Kind of cool that Germany is encouraging this.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#64

Post by specialist »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #28
specialist wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I clocked that too. Perhaps author is nodding towards replacing fossil fuels with electricity. Decarbonizing steel uses a lot more energy. Ditto cement, plastics, fertilizers, HVAC, etc. Anyone care to guess how much more energy our glorious renewable energy future perfect economy will require? 4x? 6x?

How about significantly less than 1x? Fossil fuels waste most of their energy as heat. Gasoline cars are ~30% efficient, EV's are ~90%. And heat pumps are often 200-500% efficient, unlike fossil fuel furnaces which cap out around 95%. Transportation and heating use far more fuel than industrial uses.

Ya, that's Saul Griffith's prediction too. I'll defer to you both.

Tragically, I got wonksniped by Pueyo's Henry Adams Curve shout out.

TIL He's referring the Roots of Progress thesis. The mythical "stagnation" phenomonen that some "rationalists" used to obsess over.

From the hip: the mistake is measuring national vs global per capita energy use. As many, many have noted, we delegated our energy consumption by moving our mfg overseas.

Mystery solved.

Further, notice similarity between Roots of Progress' graph and https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Spoiler: Neoliberalism happened. aka globalization, austerity, supply-side economics

--

FWIW: Omitting Pueyo's tangent about the Henry Adams Curve, I found this article to be a great overview of solar PV's current position on its cost-learning-curve.

And I agree the cost of solar PV will decrease for some time. Even faster than the most optimistic projections, which has been the norm for years.

Exciting times.

I look forward to Pueyo's article explaining why price of electricity continues to rise despite decreasing production costs. Transmission? Utility monopolies? Financing?

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#65

Post by beembeem »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #12

If labor costs keep going up, it seems like the right path for the industry is to simplify installation more so it becomes more DIY. More plug-and-play. Less skilled carpenters and electricians.

First off, I know this article is more targeted at utility-scale installations, but much of the comment section is discussing or interested in residential so it's worth bringing this piece up.

One of the problems for residential roof-mounted systems is the wind load that large flat panels introduce. This load needs to be offset with very strong roof penetrations. You need to drive large bolts directly into the trusses of the roof which requires a bit of expertise, and has risks if you knick the edge of a piece of structural timber.

Contrast this with the round tubes used by solar thermal that don't introduce large wind loads, and nearly any DIYer can drill holes in their roof to support them.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#66

Post by tuna74 »

beembeem wrote: post #58
EcommerceFlow wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup exactly. Why go through all that headache, which has existed with Nuclear since day 1, when we could just mass produce solar and plop it down on the infinite empty desert land out west.

1) There isn't infinite desert land that can be used. 2) You still need firm, dispatchable power. Batteries are a bridge, not the only solution.

Batteries are the solution. The sun is pretty stable (not very firm unfortunately, but I don't see how that relates to electricity).

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#67

Post by tuna74 »

tiffanyh wrote: post #46

Has the insurance & roof warranty issue been solved with panels on your roof? A few years ago I looked at putting solar panels on my roof. Both the company who roofed my house, and my insurance company - said it voided any warranty / claims against future roof damage if a solar panel was installed

TFA claims that it is idiotic to put solar panels on residential roofs, but them somewhere where installation cost are low instead, like on the ground or maybe factory roofs.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#68

Post by beembeem »

rtkwe wrote: post #9
hijinks wrote: post #5

solar costs keep shrinking and then you have power companies like SDGE that want to punish solar owners based on their salary and set a $125 min cost to be connected to the grid

I don't think utility companies are entirely wrong to charge some flat rate for being connected to the grid, there are fixed costs with each customer and solar homes are not actually independent from the grid even if they're net neutral their night time power has to come from somewhere. Even if we get to enough residential solar to completely power the grid from solar and charge enough storage to last overnight there…

1) Those fixed costs go down with more distributed generation. No need for large solar farms in a different zip code if many customers have it on their roof.

2) Many/most utilities don't pay retail rates for excess power, so there's already profit built into the arrangement with solar customers.

3) You didn't address a utility charging monthly fixed fees based on income.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#69

Post by bryanlarsen »

specialist wrote: post #64
bryanlarsen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about significantly less than 1x? Fossil fuels waste most of their energy as heat. Gasoline cars are ~30% efficient, EV's are ~90%. And heat pumps are often 200-500% efficient, unlike fossil fuel furnaces which cap out around 95%. Transportation and heating use far more fuel than industrial uses.

Ya, that's Saul Griffith's prediction too. I'll defer to you both. Tragically, I got wonksniped by Pueyo's Henry Adams Curve shout out. TIL He's referring the Roots of Progress thesis. The mythical "stagnation" phenomonen that some "rationalists" used to obsess over. From the hip: the mistake is measuring national vs global per capita energy use. As many, many have noted, we delegated our energy consumption by moving…

> why price of electricity continues to rise despite decreasing production costs.

That's economics 201. The price of a commodity is the cost of the marginal producer. So it doesn't matter how cheap some producers are, the price of a commodity is set by the most expensive producer that is meeting demand. So price of electricity won't drop until cheap producers can meet 100% of demand.

Until that happens, cheap producers enjoy outsized profits, encouraging more cheap producers to join the market.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#70

Post by beembeem »

tuna74 wrote: post #66
beembeem wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) There isn't infinite desert land that can be used. 2) You still need firm, dispatchable power. Batteries are a bridge, not the only solution.

Batteries are the solution. The sun is pretty stable (not very firm unfortunately, but I don't see how that relates to electricity).

Firm refers to the generation profile of the power source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation

Batteries are not cost or resource efficient for winter where I live. Less than 8 hours of sunlight is not enough to heat a house during the day let alone night. There simply isn't enough solar generation even when overprovisioned to last.

Post reply on HN