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Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

cleantechnica.com

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Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#91

Post by manfredo »

mgolawala wrote: post #80
manfredo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even achieving just one hour of storage globally amounts to 2.5 TWh of storage. By comparison the entire world produces ~300 GWh worth of lithium ion battery annually. That leaves geographically limited options like pumped hydroelectricity, and solutions not yet deployed at any significant scale like hydrogen fuel cells, synthetic methane, thermal batteries, flywheels, etc. Realistically we should saturate daytime en…

Why would we use lithium ion batteries? I would imagine the approach to store the energy would be to use the energy from solar panels to do work that can be used to produce electricity later. For example, you could use solar energy to pump water back uphill to flow down through a hydro electric dam later. Even if it isn't the most efficient, in the long run it would likely provide the best scalability and least long…

Hydroelectric storage is geographically dependent. You need the right topography and access to water. Likewise, hydroelectric storage takes a long time to build.

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#92

Post by kragen »

flgb wrote: post #63
coderintherye wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of solar comes from Utility scale about 60/40 vs. rooftop solar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Stat...

Not in Australia, where we have much more roof-top solar (and which is less than half-the-price installed of roof-top in the US)

Interesting! Do you have any idea why it's so much cheaper?

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#93

Post by dukeofdoom »

zizee wrote: post #41

I think the future will be robust national/international grids, with a mixture of storage options (batteries/pumped hydro) to smooth out the intermittent nature of wind and solar. Cynics always talk about the amount of energy storage required for solar as if you need to store 24 hours of energy for solar/wind to be viable. I'd like to see numbers on having 1 hour of storage for peak demand, a robust national grid, an…

So I've been watching these Van build outs into full time living vans for travel. Most of them have solor panels on the roof, and 3 two hundred watt batteries. One guy said it would take him 23 days to fully charge these batteries off of solar vs just a few hours to charged them from the alternator when he is driving. It just doesn't seem very practical at this point. They all seem to have 2 or 3 thousand watt panels on the roof. Is he correct? How does the math work here? How long should it take for a 1000 Watt panel to charge a two hundred watt battery?

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#94

Post by scoopertrooper »

gruez wrote: post #74
zizee wrote: post #41

I think the future will be robust national/international grids, with a mixture of storage options (batteries/pumped hydro) to smooth out the intermittent nature of wind and solar. Cynics always talk about the amount of energy storage required for solar as if you need to store 24 hours of energy for solar/wind to be viable. I'd like to see numbers on having 1 hour of storage for peak demand, a robust national grid, an…

>international grids Europe didn't want to act when russia invaded crimea, because russia supplied all the gas. Being dependent on your neighbors for your electricity supply and having no backup would only make this problem worse.

But solar would effectively level the playing field. Countries would become interdependent upon one another for energy rather than being dependent.

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#95

Post by dragonwriter »

kragen wrote: post #92
flgb wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in Australia, where we have much more roof-top solar (and which is less than half-the-price installed of roof-top in the US)

Interesting! Do you have any idea why it's so much cheaper?

Shipping costs from China, who is the source of key materials?

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#96

Post by Qwertious »

manfredo wrote: post #53
zizee wrote: post #41

I think the future will be robust national/international grids, with a mixture of storage options (batteries/pumped hydro) to smooth out the intermittent nature of wind and solar. Cynics always talk about the amount of energy storage required for solar as if you need to store 24 hours of energy for solar/wind to be viable. I'd like to see numbers on having 1 hour of storage for peak demand, a robust national grid, an…

Even achieving just one hour of storage globally amounts to 2.5 TWh of storage. By comparison the entire world produces ~300 GWh worth of lithium ion battery annually. That leaves geographically limited options like pumped hydroelectricity, and solutions not yet deployed at any significant scale like hydrogen fuel cells, synthetic methane, thermal batteries, flywheels, etc. Realistically we should saturate daytime en…

>By comparison the entire world produces ~300 GWh worth of lithium ion battery annually.

And this will increase a hundredfold to make EV production possible.

That means that if 10% of production goes to stationary storage then within 10 years, we'll have 10 full global hours of storage.

If there's serious demand then the supply will scale up to create it.

Also, old EV batteries will provide plenty of extra stationary storage. Not to mention batteries still in EVs, in a pinch.

Realistically we won't throw insane amounts of storage at the problem. We'll make demand more flexible so it does work when electricity is cheap and eases off when it becomes more expensive.

For instance, something like heating: why store the electricity for heating? Wouldn't it make more sense for a house to have some form of heavily-insulated thermal mass that it can massively heat when electricity is dirt cheap, then tap into at midnight without drawing power? Storing heat is cheap, you just need a giant block of concrete with solid insulation. You don't need fancy nanoscale tech like with lithium-ion.

Even something like a kettle: the hot water taps you see at companies that are pre-heated. Have a home-version. Insulate the shit out of that and do 90% of the boiling with peak electricity.

And that's not even touching industrial power usage.

Trying to ape past systems that were based on flat electricity prices just seems like a failure of imagination. Of course it would be expensive, but why the heck would you even want to?

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#97

Post by pfdietz »

mlyle wrote: post #85
jeremysalwen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming there aren't economies of scale. Demand for solar had gone way up in recent decades (e.g. in germany, before it was cheap), and the price subsequently went down.

It's not clear batteries will do the same. While there's been effort to make batteries less reliant on scarce natural resources and mining, there's no guarantee we really get there. If we don't, price can be expected to go up, not down, with scale. I would bet on price going down slightly with scale, but one can't really tell now what will happen: it might go up a lot, it might go down a lot, or it might stay flat.

There are thousands of different chemistries for batteries. The nuclear stans are betting that all of them fail.

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#98

Post by kragen »

dragonwriter wrote: post #95
kragen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! Do you have any idea why it's so much cheaper?

Shipping costs from China, who is the source of key materials?

You might think so, but no. It's the wrong order of magnitude.

That could add maybe US$2000 per TEU, which is 21 tonnes of cargo such as solar panels. You can ship a TEU anywhere in the world for US$3000 or less. A 1m² solar panel might weigh 20 kg, so that's roughly 1000 solar pannels, or US$2 per solar panel. That solar panel is about 200 Wp, so this works out to US$0.01 of shipping cost per peak watt. Or less.

The solar module itself costs some US$0.18/Wp wholesale (the article cites higher prices, but see http://pvinsights.com/ https://www.solarserver.de/pv-modulpreise/ https://www.energytrend.com/solar-price.html for more detailed and reliable pricing info), and the whole installation including the panels maybe US$0.50/Wp. So there's no way that an extra US$0.01/Wp could double the cost of the installation. Bump it by 2% maybe.

China isn't the source of key materials. There aren't any key materials; the ingredients in PV cells, except for silver, are abundant everywhere. It's the source of the fully manufactured photovoltaic modules, a finished product that you can prop up in the sun and connect to a battery through a diode. If shipping costs were so high relative to the value of the finished product, every country would have its own solar-cell manufacturing plants, the way every country has its own liquid-oxygen plants, and there wouldn't be such a thing as a worldwide concentration of PV manufacturing in China.

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#99

Post by Qwertious »

marvin wrote: post #47
chrisco255 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have to dam a river to store energy in this way? Can they just build water towers that pull water from underground up into a tank and release it via gravity to generate power when needed?

Not enough energy. Hydropower reservoirs are typically many square kilometers of water surface, depth > 10 meters on average and a height differential on the order of 100 meters or more. Vary parameters according to geography, but it's not something that can be built without using geology for support.

Obvious solution that I'm sure has already been considered: dig down 1000 meters and build the "below" reservoir there. Even if the "above" reservoir is at ground level, you'll still get 10x the storage.

Re: Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

#100

Post by Manfredo_1 »

pfdietz wrote: post #81
ch4s3 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could imagine a series of cloudy windless days in the northern latitudes during the winter. Perhaps a large enough gird solves that problem? I have no clue.

One would not use batteries for the "rare, but prolonged" storage use case. You'd want something with lower capital cost, even if it were much less efficient. For example: hydrogen burned in turbines.

Hydrogen storage remains in the prototyping phase. We have no significant amount of hydrogen grid storage. Like thermal batteries or synthetic methane, hydrogen represents a potential storage solution but not one that we know will scale and be effectively deployed at the scope required.

If we actually deploy 50 GWh of hydrogen storage, and demonstrate that it can cheaply and reliability be built at scale then your point would be valid. But until then, hydrogen represents a theoretical solution not an actual solution.

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