Can solar costs keep shrinking?
unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com
Can solar costs keep shrinking?
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Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#2I'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 sectors to more services based economic activity..
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#3These 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.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#4I'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…
Yeah, I had to re-read it 3 times to understand why the article was saying that was a _bad_ thing. Now I understand what he's saying but I'm pretty lost because it assumes a set of priors I simply never had.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#5solar 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
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#6I'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…
>> That embeds so many assumptions about the economy and where GDP comes from
YUP. Of course there is a strong correlation between energy use and GDP growth; it takes more energy to produce more stuff.
But ultimately, what produces more stuff is harder to measure. To light the factories, more energy used to correlate with more light, until we swap out the incandescent/halogen lighting sources for LEDs. Then, we get more light for something like 16% of the energy usage. Or, getting to the stage of "lights-out" automation, and the same production for zero lighting energy. Same for more efficient motors, swapping ovens for inductive heating, more efficient processes, etc.
Seems that measuring GPD growth by energy consumption is like Bill Gates' famous example of saying that "measuring software progress by lines of code is like measuring progress in aircraft by the weight of the planes". Obviously, in specific cases, all things being equal, more is more, but in reality, fewer LOC and lighter airplanes generally produce more results.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#7solar 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
Utility companies around me will gaslight you into not getting solar--bury you in paperwork, FUD, and last ditch efforts to buy into some kind of solar timeshare program.
I'm hoping to see more decentralized/hyper-local power generation and storage.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#8I'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…
Yeah, I had to re-read it 3 times to understand why the article was saying that was a _bad_ thing. Now I understand what he's saying but I'm pretty lost because it assumes a set of priors I simply never had.
Even the graph that I think is supposed to support the assertion by gesturing towards a link between GDP/c and energy consumption/c shows there's a huge range of per capita energy consumption for countries in the same GDP per capita band hidden because the graph uses dual logarithmic axes.
It's always a little hard to read logarithmic values other than those explicitly labelled but it looks like up to a 5-7x difference in energy consumption can have basically no effect on the GDP per capita!
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#9solar 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's still the costs associated with storing that power overnight we can't get around.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#10if author is here: your footnotes don't seem to work...