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New Record Bid Set for World's Cheapest Solar, Undercutting Coal
- peteretep 11y agoThe potential desalinisation this could lead to is also pretty exciting
- hyperbovine 11y agoDesal is not the panacea many believe it to be. There are serious environmental consequences associated with all the brine discharge.
- raverbashing 11y agoOr, you know, you sell it as salt (though you might need more sun and space for that)
- vinceguidry 11y agoIt's not just salt, it's also the rest of the contaminants that came out of the seawater. The processing costs are greater than all the other ways to get salt.
- raverbashing 11y agoRegular table salt do come from saltwater, you know that, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt#Production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt#Production "All the other ways" is salt mines
- vinceguidry 11y agoSince you don't want to just Google the answer for why they're not already doing this, I'll do it for you. http://www.sidem-desalination.com/Process/FAQ/ http://www.sidem-desalination.com/Process/FAQ/ Second question down.
- raverbashing 11y agoAnd? "Whereas they concentrate seawater 1.5 times, recovery of salt would require seawater to be concentrated ten times. Under such conditions the first crystals would appear in the brine" You'll just start with something more concentrated instead of seawater Yes, you might have a reason to not want to do that, it might be easier/cheaper to just throw it back into the sea
- Dylan16807 11y agoIs that because it's actually hard to avoid the consequences, or because a lot of plants are lazy about diluting brine to save pennies? Let's think big, willing to bump the cost by 50% to make brine disposal safe. How hard is it then?
- maxerickson 11y agoI haven't read more than the summary, but this California study seems to say that mitigation can be effective: http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/ocean/desalination/docs/dpr.pdf http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/ocean/de...
- MichaelBurge 11y agoCan't you just dump it back in the ocean where it came from? The sea critters are already happy to swim around in it, and you're not going to meaningfully change the concentration of the ocean. You could mix it with sea water near the exit point to avoid temporarily raising the concentration there.
- hyperbovine 11y agoNope, not if it's not carefully dispersed. Brine is denser than saltwater. It tends to sink to the bottom, where there is little wave action or tidal flow, and remain there. It's believed that many marine organisms are negatively affected by the increased salinity, although the overall impacts are not well understood.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Gravityloss 11y agoWhy not just put water pools in plastic domes, collect the dew at night? Creating electricity with a lot of effort and using it for heating water doesn't make sense.
- Retric 11y agoCost. Large scale desalination is really cheap as in gallons per cent.
- thinkcontext 11y agoState of the art desalination, reverse osmosis, doesn't heat the water it pushes it through semi-permeable membranes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_osmosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_osmosis
- Gravityloss 11y agoAh, I now realize what stupid assumptions my question had!
- johnchristopher 11y agoWait, these are still projected costs, right ? How can they guarantee they'll be able to recoup their costs and honour their prices?
- ljf 11y agoFrom the discussion of this yesterday, I understand that most other companies could also meet these costs, if they had the same access to very cheap loans. These bids are supported by near minimal cost loans, that are being offered to help kickstart the industry in these areas, and to acquire skills and knowledge. Plus in the hope that the continued improvement in solar panels, rather than relying on the tech they can get their hands on today.
- beefield 11y agoVast majority of solar power costs are upfront capital costs. So if you know how much the panels/installation costs, what are your financing costs for ~30 year amortizing loan and how much the sun is expected to shine in the installation place, calculating the cost of electricity price per kWh is not too advanced Excel trickery.
- coldcode 11y agoIt's not cheap because the costs of building it is cheap, the companies are willing to undercut each other for the benefit of getting the contracts. The question is whether they will ever be profitable at this level.
- akhatri_aus 11y agoWhy would someone bid at a price like this before the project is set up if it was not the least bit feasible?
- beambot 11y agoPR? Hidden subsidies? Lucrative maintenance contracts? Desperation for revenue in a competitive market? Overly aggressive sales staff? Contract loopholes for cost overruns?
- knieveltech 11y ago^ this bot knows what's up.
- beat 11y agoHigh risk, high reward investment by individual actors who don't have to answer to boards and regulators.
- akhatri_aus 11y agoI think they mentioned there isn't any support from the government involved.
- barney54 11y agoThey will is they get subsidies to do so.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
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- ljf 11y agoDiscussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11617988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11617988
- sharemywin 11y agoBig giant government projects never have cost over runs.
- hacknat 11y agoActually they do, but they also result in dramatic changes (Railroads, Highways, Apollo, TCP/IP, etc).
- briandear 11y agoHowever for every Apollo, there's a dozen Solyndras.
- dragontamer 11y agoHmmm, looks like the US Government made the money back from that one. As a whole, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is MAKING money from the loans. Even Solyndras is just one tiny failure in a massive pool of wealth-creation with regards to the entire program. US Government makes money from the loans. US citizens created jobs for each other. Solar energy development got accelerated. The only answer to Solyndras is... damn, that was a single battle lost (0.5 Billion loan default), but the US definitely "won the war" on the $800 Billion program.
- djrogers 11y agoSometimes, yes - more often they result in cronyism and officials and bureaucrats amassing power to trade for $$. Since you brought up trains, look at the giant mess that is the California 'bullet' train. Not a single section of track has been completed, and it's already doubled in budget, reduced dramatically in speed (current projections put the trip time at ~4hrs due to a number of issues including track sharing), with ticket prices 70% higher than promised, and the legal requirements for private investment have been ignored because no private company is willing to touch it with a ten foot pole. Dramatic changes indeed...
- sharemywin 11y agoJust pointing out it was an estimate and the end cost might be very much higher.
- barney54 11y agoOne very important thing missing is that solar is not dispatchable. It does not serve the same purpose as coal and it is an apples to oranges comparison between solar and coal. Coal provides baseless power--coal plants are designed to run at a relatively steady level for more than 90% of the time. Reliable power is critical for things like server farms which draw power all the time. Solar cannot serve the same purpose without battery or other backup. At this time of year in places like California, solar doesn't help meet peak demand either. http://content.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/20160503_DailyRenewablesWatch.pdf http://content.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/20160503_DailyRenewa... Solar has a role, but comparing it to coal is misleading.
- jenno 11y agoA lot of people use the battery argument when it comes to solar, but isn't Musk's home battery pack designed specifically for this purpose?
- barney54 11y agoNo. They discontinued the larger battery and it isn't designed to operate at grid scale. http://gizmodo.com/tesla-is-discontinuing-its-10-kilowatt-powerwall-1767250649 http://gizmodo.com/tesla-is-discontinuing-its-10-kilowatt-po...
- Brakenshire 11y agoFWIW, your article says that the remaining Powerwall is designed exactly for this purpose. > The larger Powerwall was positioned as a longer-term back up power supply, which GTM noted was looking like a hard sell, with other market alternatives that were priced far below the $3500 price tag. > The remaining 6.4 kwh device has less capacity, and is designed more to shift the load of available power, such as from a solar panel, to times when the production of such energy is lower.
- nxzero 11y agoYes and no. Tesla has decided that it won’t be making the 10kWh stationary storage batteries it unveiled in April 2015, instead focusing exclusively on the 7kWh version. There's nothing stopping anyone from getting more than one battery to make up for the capacity that was offered by the larger model.
- diafygi 11y agoI work in solar, and here's some quick facts: 1. 1 out of 78 jobs created in the U.S. last year were solar jobs[1]. 2. There are more solar employees in California than utility employees[2]. 3. Soft costs (non-hardware) were recently 64% of the installed cost of solar[3]. 4. Solar is expected to reach a load defection point (i.e. cheaper to leave the grid) in most places in the next 10-15 years[4]. 5. Energy over the next 25 years is a potential $200 trillion opportunity[5]. Like OP's article states, this industry's hardware has gotten really cheap, but the software in the industry hasn't kept up in places. So much so, in fact, that an entire startup accelerator program in the bay area, Powerhouse[6], has been created to try and attract tech entrepreneurs into the solar industry to make the next generation of solar software. My startup recently went through the program, and being a part of this industry is one of the most empowering and rewarding things I've ever done. It's one of those extremely rare instances where you can have a solid business model and a positive impact on the world. And we need all the help it can get. Solar expected to grow 100-200x over the next 25 years[7], but it won't happen if smart people don't join in. Smart grid, machine learning, energy storage, demand response, customer acquisition, logistics, energy efficiency, inventory tracking, IoT, security, and many more software areas are currently in the dark ages in energy. Solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, storage, and other clean energy sources have to replace 87% of the worlds energy in the next 32 years[8]. PLEASE HELP US! If you're a tech entrepreneur, and want to do something that matters, please please please consider doing a startup in solar or other clean energy industry. To start, if you're in the bay area, there's a hackathon next weekend around solar software[9]. I encourage you to come and learn more about solar and software in the clean energy sector. [1]: http://energy.gov/eere/articles/1-78-new-jobs-america-solar-job http://energy.gov/eere/articles/1-78-new-jobs-america-solar-... [2]: http://www.calseia.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=231 http://www.calseia.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=art... [3]: http://energy.gov/eere/sunshot/reducing-non-hardware-costs http://energy.gov/eere/sunshot/reducing-non-hardware-costs [4]: http://blog.rmi.org/blog_2015_04_07_report_release_the_economics_of_load_defection http://blog.rmi.org/blog_2015_04_07_report_release_the_econo... [5]: https://www.citivelocity.com/citigps/ReportSeries.action?recordId=41 https://www.citivelocity.com/citigps/ReportSeries.action?rec... [6]: https://powerhouse.solar/ https://powerhouse.solar/ [7]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-23/the-way-humans-get-electricity-is-about-to-change-forever http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-23/the-way-hu... [8]: http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/ http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/ [9]: https://suncode.splashthat.com/ https://suncode.splashthat.com/
- mdpopescu 11y agoAre these articles on how solar is poised to make it big Real Soon Now (tm) an instance of pg's submarine? [1] [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- maxerickson 11y agoThis is the far more common someone-wrote-a-press-release-that-makes-for-a-headline. https://www.dewa.gov.ae/news/details.aspx?nid=1689 https://www.dewa.gov.ae/news/details.aspx?nid=1689
- acomjean 11y agoAnd yet trying to work out the finances in my condo building, its not adding up... We can get solar and do the right thing, but it will still cost us.
- JshWright 11y agoIs your condo located in an extremely sunny desert?
- acomjean 11y agoNo the northeast. (massachusetts). Brick building. Flat roof that gets good sun.
- JshWright 11y agoThat additional 20°s of latitude makes a big impact on the amount of sun you'll see, regardless of how suitable the site is.
- acomjean 11y agoFor us its that the common part of the building doesn't use a lot of power. Individual units do use more than we can generate. So we have to plug the solar into individual units, which can be problematic and kind of a pain.
- marze 11y agoIt's nuclear power from a remote reactor, and it isn't too cheap to meter but is heading that way.
- JumpCrisscross 11y ago> the Dubai Electricity & Water Authority, the utility for the Persian Gulf emirate Curious that Bloomberg opted for the Persian, over Arabian, Gulf when referring to the United Arab Emirates.
- mintplant 11y ago> The body of water is historically and internationally known as the "Persian Gulf". Some Arab governments refer to it as the "Arabian Gulf" or "The Gulf", but neither term is recognized internationally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Gulf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Gulf
- mac01021 11y agoIsn't "Persian Gulf" the globally recognized name of that body of water (at least in the anglophone world)?
- kumarski 11y agoThis is great news in terms of econometrics, but I think the major looming questions still exist. 1/ Can solar impact CO2 emissions beyond single digit percentages? 2/ On what order of magnitude would battery storage capabilities have to improve to match performance characteristics of natural gas peaker plants or dare we say Oil/Natural gas? 3/ Don't the fluctuations in peak demand make solar less attractive because they require rapid natural gas peaking plants when there's increases in usage? (Outside of summer is a great example) 4/ What would be the desired performance characteristics of batteries that would make Solar a no-brainer for the environmental impact and actual viability? Cost, capability, and reusability.
- Osiris30 11y agoComprehensive annual report on the state of various deployable grid storage technologies - and answer to your questions here: http://blog.rmi.org/blog_2016_01_21_how_much_does_storage_really_cost_lazard_weighs_in http://blog.rmi.org/blog_2016_01_21_how_much_does_storage_re...
- gaius 11y agoIs it this cheap because it is subsidized by oil revenue tho'?
- boona 11y ago"Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada grabbed international headlines recently with a simple explanation of a cutting-edge technology called quantum computing." While dodging a question about his understanding of economics. Forgive me, I'm just a bitter Canadian upset that we're now running a huge deficit and passing the buck on to our children.
- Trisell 11y agoI can tell you as an American, that after a while you get used to the feeling of a huge national deficit and multi-trillion dollar debt. It becomes something like a warm blanket of guilt that helps you sleep at night.
- xenadu02 11y agoIssuing debt is just an accounting trick to maintain credibility of the currency (i.e. That we aren't just printing dollars willy-nilly to fund the government) The huge chunk of debt is owed from one part of the government to the other. No one ever cut their way to growth. The key is almost always to grow the GDP faster than you grow the debt on average. The nominal debt number will never go down - ever - but it should stay fixed or shrink relative to GDP if possible.
- tokenadult 11y agoBloomberg News reports[1] that David Keith, a Harvard professor of applied physics and public policy, used to be a solar power skeptic but has reexamined the economics of current solar power and now expects solar power to be important because the economics have changed. Professor Keith's recent essay on solar power, "Cheap Solar Power,"[2] shows the facts and calculations to explain why solar power now beats several other sources of primary electricity for many applications. It is very likely that many industries will move to places where solar power is especially abundant and inexpensive. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-04/harvard-scientist-a-former-solar-skeptic-now-sees-the-light http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-04/harvard-sc... [2] http://www.keith.seas.harvard.edu/blog-1/cheapsolarpower http://www.keith.seas.harvard.edu/blog-1/cheapsolarpower
- epistasis 11y agoThanks for this pointer, it's very interesting! It's hard to argue with numbers that are already there in front of you. A lot of the cost changes have been driven precisely because there was investment and the industry grew, his prognostications about it never being affordable were an attempt at a self-fulfilling prophecy in that by increasing skepticism about the tech curve, it never gets explored. I'd be skeptical of his views of the future, though. For example, he mentions gas peaking plants, but grid-scale lithium ion batteries are already cheaper than natural gas peakers for many situations; lithium ion is getting cheaper but natural gas is not. The only advantage of natural gas is lower capex, but in this financial environment that's not a huge advantage. By the time that solar is displacing lots of other energy, lithium ion will be displacing all those natural gas peaker plants. Once he sees those numbers, he'll probably change his mind again.
- Brakenshire 11y agoLithium ion can't store electricity across seasons, though, which is important anywhere outside equatorial areas. Gas can be left idle during the Summer, and used during the Winter. If the cost of solar power went below the marginal cost for burning gas (i.e. lower than the per unit fuel costs for gas generation), the most cost-effective solution might actually be to use solar during the Summer, and maintain a fleet of gas stations solely for the Winter months.
- mactitan 11y agoIn the USA heating, HVAC, etc.. account for half of the energy used in residential buildings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy Direct solar water heating (passive) has been used for quite a while and has a maximum efficiency of solar thermal systems are between .46 & .74. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_water_heating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_water_heating That compares to a solar panel efficiency of .15; and I guess a lot less when applied to water heating due to conversion. And implementing in dense urban areas, passive is not as viable as active. If we were serious we would first implement passive systems. But we don't. I guess there’s something I don’t understand.
- maxerickson 11y agoWhy would you expect physics to dominate economics? For investors, a big power station like this is a purely economic decision (will it be profitable or not). For a homeowner, a few dollars a month for hot water is not a significant motivator to make a change (replacing a thing that works to save money after several years is not exciting). It would probably be a good idea to figure out how to incentivize rental property owners to increase building efficiency. Or maybe just pay for it directly in exchange for a few years of not capturing the benefit in the rent.
- fgGAMI 11y agoBased on Dubai's recent history, I'd speculate there is some slave or slave-like labor involved to make it viable.
- beat 11y agoSlave labor doesn't help much for high-tech projects. Slaves are mostly useful for manual labor that doesn't require literacy or complex skills. Remember, before we invented tractors, if you wanted to move a thousand tons of rock a mile, it had to be done largely by hand. That is a use case for slave labor. Before we invented harvesters, cotton had to be picked by hand. That is a use case for slave labor. Domestic servants are a use case. But the invention of powered machinery made most slave jobs obsolete.
- dingo_bat 11y agoI remember a few days ago when we had a thread about an Indian minister saying the same thing, and everyone was being skeptical and negative. Well look now, seems like he was right.
- beat 11y agoThere's been some discussion of solar generation cost vs storage cost here, with the idea that any generation project is necessarily coupled to storage. But is that really the case? I can see a model where generation and storage are completely decoupled businesses. Large, somewhat unpredictable fluctuations in the cost of generation (solar and wind) should lead to large fluctuations in price of generated electricity, down to minute-by-minute. Ideally, generators want to sell every kwh they can at peak production, even at a lower cost. With modern computer controls, this makes a delightful opportunity for an arbitrage market. Storage providers - and this could be giants like lake-scale hydro, or dwarves like the batteries in electric cars - could buy electricity from generators when it's cheap, and sell it when it's expensive (the sun isn't shining, the wind isn't blowing, hot day spikes demand, etc). This can be fully automated. Just plug your car into the wall at night. It might decide to buy electricity, or sell electricity, depending on the price at the time. Aggregators could pool capacity across many small providers. Large storage systems could benefit from economies of scale and long-term contracts. Create a smart grid that can support this, and let the free market solve the pricing problems for us.
- rhino369 11y agoThere is already an large arbitrage opportunity. The difference between peak and baseload pricing is pretty high. If it was clearly economical, someone like Exelon (who owns nuke plants) would probably be doing it. Then again, at lest several utilities claims they were going to buy Telsa powerwalls to do it. So maybe the pricing is getting to the point where it's profitable.
- beat 11y agoBuilding something genuinely new, like caching electricity, is fraught with technical risks, financial risks, and regulatory hurdles. It's the kind of thing that can put a billion-dollar enterprise out of business. So expect a decade or more of research, small-scale experiments, political negotiation, and more, to bring storage online at any sort of scale. It's really, really hard, and really risky. Nuclear plants, as you probably know, are almost pure base load solutions. They can't just be scaled up or slowed down arbitrarily. A volatile, arbitrage-based market efficiency would be pretty hard on the existing nuclear base, and could render a lot of plants unprofitable. Meanwhile, the gas-fired peak load plants are tremendously expensive, because they have so much downtime and are inefficient. One or two decades ago, competing against them with storage was economically impractical. Now, it's becoming feasible. Especially once we start building gigawatts of sitting capacity anyway, in the shape of EV cars.
- niels_olson 11y agoEveryone is talking about storage, but why not route power to need? Put 4000 square miles of solar in the Mexican desert and sell the power to to the northern US and Canada all winter. Run power over Siberia and Alaska to get across time zones.
- neolefty 11y agoIdeally, yes we would do that! But see other comments about the cost and efficiency of power transmission for the physical challenges involved. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11628965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11628965
- vackosar 11y agoIs solar using rare metals that we will run out of soon? So will in the end solar fail anyway?
- prbuckley 11y agoI recently came across an interesting new approach to store renewable ebnergy by moving large masses on rail cars up a slope. Here is some more information on the approach http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/ http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/