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Can solar costs keep shrinking?

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com

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Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#91

Post by smeeth »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #88

OP suggests that land costs will soon dominate the equation. So no mention of orbital solar plants? Yes, somebody years ago published a study that said, Uneconomical! because lift costs, panel cost, transmission inefficiencies. All of those are now drastically changed, by orders of magnitude. It is not a matter of IF orbital solar is economical, but WHEN.

Related startup: Reflect Orbital plans to put mirrors in space so that light can be reflected back onto ground-based panels at night.

A base assumption is often that orbital solar requires a panel in space, but even that might not be the case.

https://www.reflectorbital.com/

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#92

Post by countvonbalzac »

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…

Same - take lightbulbs for example. Thanks to LEDs, the amount of energy you need to generate X amount of light has reduced considerably, but we still have as much if not more lighting than ever. And it's not like our GDP is suffering due to a lack of sufficient lighting, at a certain point there's no gain to productivity gained from having another lightbulb. Same thing can be said about cars, CPUs etc.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#93

Post by sharemywin »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #88

OP suggests that land costs will soon dominate the equation. So no mention of orbital solar plants? Yes, somebody years ago published a study that said, Uneconomical! because lift costs, panel cost, transmission inefficiencies. All of those are now drastically changed, by orders of magnitude. It is not a matter of IF orbital solar is economical, but WHEN.

doesn't orbital solar also deflect sun so wouldn't it cool the earth at scale?

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#94

Post by rtkwe »

sobellian wrote: post #71
Mistletoe wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This always makes me uncomfortable though. How would we tell the difference between rampant scamming and fudging numbers and an economy where we all pass around Monopoly money to do services for one another? I pay you to mow my lawn and you pay me to mow your lawn. Are we creating GDP?

I'm not sure goods are quite immune from this objection. Industry turns out plenty of useless widgets. The Humane AI pin creates GDP!

Very true and you quickly get into a very command economy style argument about what should be produced. Ultimately we have the system we have and wasted or scammy products generally eventually die. Look at things like NFTs they were an extremely brief blip it turns out because people quickly saturated the ability of crypto early adopters to inflate values with their funny money. Some scams last longer like Thomas Kincade 'paintings' but trying to sort through the economic data to throw those out is just not possible.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#95

Post by slavik81 »

7e wrote: post #3

These charts stop right at the point where the U.S. imposed tariffs on Chinese solar panels, and the tarrif schedule is only going up, to 50%. This matters because the future of solar is utility scale, where the panel costs dominate. So for the US, at least, solar costs will not keep shrinking in the short term.

For comparison, Canadian tariffs on Chinese solar panels are >150%.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#96

Post by rconti »

mapt wrote: post #90
anonfordays wrote: post #72

Soon (if not already) the largest costs associated with solar installations will be the labor. It's expensive to get people on roofs and electricians to reconfigure panels, install transfer switches, etc. The equipment could be free and it would still cost thousands for the skilled trades to install.

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.

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.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#97

Post by adammarples »

sharemywin wrote: post #93
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #88

OP suggests that land costs will soon dominate the equation. So no mention of orbital solar plants? Yes, somebody years ago published a study that said, Uneconomical! because lift costs, panel cost, transmission inefficiencies. All of those are now drastically changed, by orders of magnitude. It is not a matter of IF orbital solar is economical, but WHEN.

doesn't orbital solar also deflect sun so wouldn't it cool the earth at scale?

Teeny tiny scale

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#98

Post by jeffbee »

anonfordays wrote: post #72

Soon (if not already) the largest costs associated with solar installations will be the labor. It's expensive to get people on roofs and electricians to reconfigure panels, install transfer switches, etc. The equipment could be free and it would still cost thousands for the skilled trades to install.

Residential solar costs in the USA are already 50% sales and marketing, and most of the other half is labor.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#99

Post by jeffbee »

wongarsu wrote: post #86
BobaFloutist wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder to what extent we can make it unskilled, at least for a building with modern wiring. Plug-and-play solar panels and batteries sound scary, but not necessarily impossible to do safely.

Anything involving roofs is difficult to do unskilled (at scale). You are working at height, potentially on a sloped surface, and have to worry about keeping the roof water tight. But if you put the panels basically anywhere else it becomes a lot more viable. Some houses come with a plug to connect your generator, you can do something similar to plug in your inverter. Then you can later decide to put up a solar fence…

Why not just prefab a frame with the panels mounted and hang it on the point of the roof with a crane? Working on the roof can be eliminated or minimized.

Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?

#100

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #88

OP suggests that land costs will soon dominate the equation. So no mention of orbital solar plants? Yes, somebody years ago published a study that said, Uneconomical! because lift costs, panel cost, transmission inefficiencies. All of those are now drastically changed, by orders of magnitude. It is not a matter of IF orbital solar is economical, but WHEN.

I would need to see some supporting napkin math on how that makes financial sense. Something on the ground, accessible by Joe the handyman is always going to be cheaper than anything launched into space. To balance that out is going to require some huge win. Availability, efficiency, etc.

Solar input in orbit is higher than what is received at ground, but similar order of magnitude. I am not sure there are real world designs for beaming power 100km from space, but you are going to take some amount of loss in transforming the power to a transmissible form, beaming it through the atmosphere, and reassembling it on the ground. Unless you have a pin point death beam, the power is going to be transmitted to a relatively large area, requiring a large amount of land to receive it. Why not just build solar panels there?

Seems far easier to overbuild panels on the ground + batteries.

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