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New Record Low Solar Price in Abu Dhabi – Costs Plunging Faster Than Expected

105 points by slyall 10y ago

blazespin 10y ago
This will create massive pressure on the price of oil. Why would anyone in their right mind not try to sell it off as fast as possible as it won't be worth much in a few years.
- Annatar 10y ago
  Because right now, batteries last only about one year and need to be replaced after that (I have lots of bad experience there), and because right now, my calculations show that for a 35,000 investement, the panels have to last 13 years before one breaks even, unless one lives in a sunny area. The problem is that the current solar technology isn't very good yet: the panels constantly lose capacity as they generate electricity. And integrated Stirling engine designs are only available for industrial applications, or made by enthusiasts: one still cannnot go to local Lowe's or Home Depot and buy a residential, integrated Stirling engine power plant. That's why oil is going to stay with us for a few more decades. Hopefully not too many, but it's not going to disappear overnight.
  - parimm 10y ago
    Mordern batteries last a lot more than one year. Tesla is providing ten year warranties on their batteries for their daily cycle batteries. https://www.tesla.com/powerwall https://www.tesla.com/powerwall
    - Annatar 10y ago
      They do? I guess that explains why my UPS's, running on the same type of batteries, would be regularly shot after a year and I'd have a power outage. And I have industrial uninterruptible power supplies, with the current going through them, just like how they would be used in a solar panel scenario. Don't believe the hype. Modern batteries are junk.
  - jerven 10y ago
    Not on an industrial scale. Currently, solar and battery is roughly similar too diesel generated electricity in cost (i.e. very expensive) but for load displacement solar is very hard to beat. In this case the Abu Dhabi grid is basically running on gas plants that would be peakers in other markets. i.e. Abu Dhabi could consume much more solar especially as a large demand for power is for cooling (storing cold water, freezing some food further is a much cheaper way of storing power than batteries as it is load shifting.) Basically oil is out of mind for generating electrical power on an industrial scale as its way to expensive so it is not competing with that. See every small island powergrid investment over the last 5 years. Comparing stirling engines to panels -> Panels are so much simpler they will perform better for any domestic and even industrial use. Maintenance is a driving cost in getting these prices down, mechanicals tend to have much higher maintenance requirements. 20% worst case degradation over 20 years is an minor issue. Easily planed for in the financials of such a plant.
    - Annatar 10y ago
      Comparing stirling engines to panels -> Panels are so much simpler they will perform better for any domestic and even industrial use. Maintenance is a driving cost in getting these prices down, mechanicals tend to have much higher maintenance requirements. What exactly needs maintenance in a Stirling engine? Please be concrete.
      - jerven 10y ago
        Any of the moving parts e.g. mechanical to electrical converter, the 2 axis point solar tracker.
        Annatar 10y ago
        And you believe that a solar panel would last longer and be cheaper than a Stirling solar power plant? Based on which data?
        pjc50 10y ago
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Panels have a 25 year warranty, and only degrade about 0.8%/year. They'll produce usable power for at least half a century.
  - visarga 10y ago
    > That's why oil is going to stay with us for a few more decades. In a couple of decades we might also have fusion power, and this time it's probably going to work because we have much better superconductor magnets. We can make the whole reactor much smaller.
- CptJamesCook 10y ago
  Solar doesn't really compete with oil. It competes with coal, natural gas, and nuclear power to power homes.
  - frgewut 10y ago
    I would say it does. According to [1] 5% of electricity is generated from oil. Also I would guess that this capacity is mostly located in places where other generation types are not available (islands, remote locations etc) and will be overtaken by solar before coal. Then also there is EV+solar combo (solar owners are more inclined to get ev and vice versa). [1] http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Breakdown-of-Electricity-Generation-by-Energy-Source#tspQvChart http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Breakdown-of-Electricity-Gene...
  - ghshephard 10y ago
    What happens when transportation starts to shift over to electricity?
  - visarga 10y ago
    Why can't solar be used to capture CO2 and produce fuel?
    - mseebach 10y ago
      It not so much that it isn't possible, just that it's significantly more efficient, by a large margin, to use solar to displace more dirty energy sources (and of those, coal is by far the highest priority).
    - ajuc 10y ago
      If you want to create fuel from sun and CO2 it's cheaper to farm some oil-heavy plants and produce biofuel from them. They grow solar cells from sun and air by itself :) It's magic-level nanotech :) http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/prices.html http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/prices.html
    - pjc50 10y ago
      https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/01/uic-solar-co2-fuel/ https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/01/uic-solar-co2-fuel/ Last time I saw a electricity to fuel system with a price attached, it was the US Navy's one which could produce gasoline at $6/USgal. Not competitive unless you're in the middle of the sea, which is their intended use case.
- ekianjo 10y ago
  You can easily store oil. Electricity, not so much. And oil is a necessary element for numerous chemical compounds, you cant really compare both.
  - XorNot 10y ago
    Industrial use of oil for chemicals doesn't burn it and is tiny compared to transportation. Also highly substitutable with plant sources.
    - ekianjo 10y ago
      > Also highly substitutable with plant sources. This comes up often, but not really. There is no good replacement as cheap as oil from plant sources. Plants require a LOT more labor, processing, and producing it requires huge amounts of space. That's why we use oil and nothing else. If it was competitive, oil would have been replaced by plants long ago for chemical use.
Annatar 10y ago
This whole machination thing will collapse as soon as the solar panel prices, along with the inverter and battery costs drop low enough to be part of every house. Once everyone generates and stores their own electricity, the residential market will go away. This might be another 20 to 30 years off, but it is inevitable. And once factories start building Stirling engines and solar facilities into their designs, the industrial power market will collapse as well. It's a good thing.
- DrStalker 10y ago
  Only for people that own their house; renters won't be able to take advantage of this because it's a lot of capital outlay that the home owner gets no benefit from. Same for anyone in an apartment. So the residential market for purchased electricity will never go away, but a significant reduction would still be a huge win.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Renters can buy solar from those producing it via virtual net metering or community solar garden projects. Doesn't have to be on your own roof to opt in.
    - euyyn 10y ago
      Plus if you offer me a place where I don't have to pay an electricity bill, I'm able to contribute that money towards a higher rent than otherwise.
      - ekianjo 10y ago
        I dont know where you live but in 3 different countries where i have lived till now the electricity bill was never high enough for me to take it in account for the choice of a place.
        icebraining 10y ago
rogerdpack 10y ago
Before getting too excited, realize this is for solar in Abu Dhabi, where umm...they get tons of sunlight as it were :) Though his other graph "predicts" that solar in more temperate climes will equal natural gas in "2020?" http://rameznaam.com/2015/08/10/how-cheap-can-solar-get-very-cheap-indeed/ http://rameznaam.com/2015/08/10/how-cheap-can-solar-get-very...
- narrator 10y ago
  Another great thing about Abu Dhabi and solar is that they can use the extra solar power during the day to ramp up water desalination and store energy as clean water.
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    It is not exactly storage, just a vital use.
    - _ph_ 10y ago
      But it is an use of electricity which can follow the availability as the produced water can be easily stored which for the practical use comes close.
  - Xylakant 10y ago
    There's a lot of demand that can be shifted to high-power periods, basically anything that requires heat/cold. Modern insulation is fairly good and we do have a lot of liquids with a high thermal capacity. Generating warm water for buildings and cold coolant for aircons during peak power production would be technologically feasible, it just doesn't pay off currently since the power production curve is essentially flat (lot of base power with some peak added on top). In the future it might also be interesting to move industries with high power demand to places with more solar power - electric arc furnaces, aluminum production, ... Some of those require a base load, but a lot of them can survive a few hours with limited power.
    - 10y ago
pavanred 10y ago
May be a noob question, but if we can lay down cables for internet across the ocean floor connecting the entire world, why not lay down cables to connect all electricity grids. Half the earth always faces the sun. We shouldn't need batteries at all then, right? And we always have the traditional power stations (renewable and non-renewable) to augment the load. (At least in theory?)
- ptaipale 10y ago
  There are technical and economic challenges. To get started, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_power_cable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_power_cable
  - kristofferR 10y ago
    Slightly off-topic, but I stumbled across this fascinating documentary about the massive challenges of laying the first submarine transatlantic cable (1858) a few days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_ErFUv8HYs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_ErFUv8HYs
- qoobaa 10y ago
  It's a very good question. I always thought that it's because of technical difficulties when transmitting electricity over long distances, but it turns out we already do it well (HVDC). When you think about it on a continent scale: why not move all PV panels from Germany to sunnier regions of Europe like Spain or Portugal where you can generate twice more power with them (in average 200 W/m² instead of 100 W/m²). The answer is simple: we'd need to have a common grid across EU member countries, but such a thing doesn't exist and it's unlikely to happen anytime soon. It turns out the biggest issue on this planet is always politics.
  - nickff 10y ago
    The amount of copper you would need to constantly convey electricity from the sunny side of the earth to the dark side would be absolutely massive. It is not an issue of common grids, as long distance high power transmission is done at many different voltages depending on the specific route, and has nothing to do with your mains voltage and frequency. Current long distance power transmission is most often used as a way of 'balancing' production and demand between different types of plants; it is not intended or capable of transmitting the full power needs of the recieving area.
rodionos 10y ago
For reference, 2.42 cents per KWh is 10x lower than commercial/residential prices in sunny Hawaii https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/9e548f6b https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/9e548f6b per data.gov https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/hi-electricity-prices-815fa https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/hi-electricity-prices-815fa
known 10y ago
I heard that with latest solar panels we can convert 30% light to electricity;
- nomercy400 10y ago
  They can get a bit higher I believe (40%) in small sizes, so a trick that is also applied is focussing all the sunlight in that small area, to improve conversion rate. There is still a thing called heat, making it a bit more complicated.
- Brakenshire 10y ago
  You can get to much higher efficiency, but it involves very expensive manufacturing techniques which make the final cost much higher per unit of electricity. IIRC price-competitive silicon panels are now somewhere about 18-23% efficient, CdTe panels somewhat less.
merraksh 10y ago
Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12537649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12537649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11627965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11627965
- ahazred8ta 10y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=rameznaam.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=rameznaam.com > How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get? (rameznaam.com) > How Cheap Can Energy Storage Get? (rameznaam.com) > How Cheap Can Solar Get? (rameznaam.com) > Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap (rameznaam.com) Is anybody seeing a pattern? :-(
magoon 10y ago
If the price is dropping so rapidly, this makes a bad deal out of the 30-year loans solar installers are pitching in the US. Furthermore, if fossil-fuel-sourced kilowatt-hours compete by pricing downward, and thus pay solar owners less per kWh, it could make solar seem like a bad deal.

105 points by slyall 10y ago

This will create massive pressure on the price of oil. Why would anyone in their right mind not try to sell it off as fast as possible as it won't be worth much in a few years.

Annatar 10y ago
Because right now, batteries last only about one year and need to be replaced after that (I have lots of bad experience there), and because right now, my calculations show that for a 35,000 investement, the panels have to last 13 years before one breaks even, unless one lives in a sunny area. The problem is that the current solar technology isn't very good yet: the panels constantly lose capacity as they generate electricity. And integrated Stirling engine designs are only available for industrial applications, or made by enthusiasts: one still cannnot go to local Lowe's or Home Depot and buy a residential, integrated Stirling engine power plant. That's why oil is going to stay with us for a few more decades. Hopefully not too many, but it's not going to disappear overnight.
- parimm 10y ago
  Mordern batteries last a lot more than one year. Tesla is providing ten year warranties on their batteries for their daily cycle batteries. https://www.tesla.com/powerwall https://www.tesla.com/powerwall
  - Annatar 10y ago
    They do? I guess that explains why my UPS's, running on the same type of batteries, would be regularly shot after a year and I'd have a power outage. And I have industrial uninterruptible power supplies, with the current going through them, just like how they would be used in a solar panel scenario. Don't believe the hype. Modern batteries are junk.
- jerven 10y ago
  Not on an industrial scale. Currently, solar and battery is roughly similar too diesel generated electricity in cost (i.e. very expensive) but for load displacement solar is very hard to beat. In this case the Abu Dhabi grid is basically running on gas plants that would be peakers in other markets. i.e. Abu Dhabi could consume much more solar especially as a large demand for power is for cooling (storing cold water, freezing some food further is a much cheaper way of storing power than batteries as it is load shifting.) Basically oil is out of mind for generating electrical power on an industrial scale as its way to expensive so it is not competing with that. See every small island powergrid investment over the last 5 years. Comparing stirling engines to panels -> Panels are so much simpler they will perform better for any domestic and even industrial use. Maintenance is a driving cost in getting these prices down, mechanicals tend to have much higher maintenance requirements. 20% worst case degradation over 20 years is an minor issue. Easily planed for in the financials of such a plant.
  - Annatar 10y ago
    Comparing stirling engines to panels -> Panels are so much simpler they will perform better for any domestic and even industrial use. Maintenance is a driving cost in getting these prices down, mechanicals tend to have much higher maintenance requirements. What exactly needs maintenance in a Stirling engine? Please be concrete.
    - jerven 10y ago
      Any of the moving parts e.g. mechanical to electrical converter, the 2 axis point solar tracker.
      - Annatar 10y ago
        And you believe that a solar panel would last longer and be cheaper than a Stirling solar power plant? Based on which data?
        pjc50 10y ago
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Panels have a 25 year warranty, and only degrade about 0.8%/year. They'll produce usable power for at least half a century.
- visarga 10y ago
  > That's why oil is going to stay with us for a few more decades. In a couple of decades we might also have fusion power, and this time it's probably going to work because we have much better superconductor magnets. We can make the whole reactor much smaller.
CptJamesCook 10y ago
Solar doesn't really compete with oil. It competes with coal, natural gas, and nuclear power to power homes.
- frgewut 10y ago
  I would say it does. According to [1] 5% of electricity is generated from oil. Also I would guess that this capacity is mostly located in places where other generation types are not available (islands, remote locations etc) and will be overtaken by solar before coal. Then also there is EV+solar combo (solar owners are more inclined to get ev and vice versa). [1] http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Breakdown-of-Electricity-Generation-by-Energy-Source#tspQvChart http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Breakdown-of-Electricity-Gene...
- ghshephard 10y ago
  What happens when transportation starts to shift over to electricity?
- visarga 10y ago
  Why can't solar be used to capture CO2 and produce fuel?
  - mseebach 10y ago
    It not so much that it isn't possible, just that it's significantly more efficient, by a large margin, to use solar to displace more dirty energy sources (and of those, coal is by far the highest priority).
  - ajuc 10y ago
    If you want to create fuel from sun and CO2 it's cheaper to farm some oil-heavy plants and produce biofuel from them. They grow solar cells from sun and air by itself :) It's magic-level nanotech :) http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/prices.html http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/prices.html
  - pjc50 10y ago
    https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/01/uic-solar-co2-fuel/ https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/01/uic-solar-co2-fuel/ Last time I saw a electricity to fuel system with a price attached, it was the US Navy's one which could produce gasoline at $6/USgal. Not competitive unless you're in the middle of the sea, which is their intended use case.
ekianjo 10y ago
You can easily store oil. Electricity, not so much. And oil is a necessary element for numerous chemical compounds, you cant really compare both.
- XorNot 10y ago
  Industrial use of oil for chemicals doesn't burn it and is tiny compared to transportation. Also highly substitutable with plant sources.
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    > Also highly substitutable with plant sources. This comes up often, but not really. There is no good replacement as cheap as oil from plant sources. Plants require a LOT more labor, processing, and producing it requires huge amounts of space. That's why we use oil and nothing else. If it was competitive, oil would have been replaced by plants long ago for chemical use.

Annatar 10y ago

This whole machination thing will collapse as soon as the solar panel prices, along with the inverter and battery costs drop low enough to be part of every house. Once everyone generates and stores their own electricity, the residential market will go away. This might be another 20 to 30 years off, but it is inevitable. And once factories start building Stirling engines and solar facilities into their designs, the industrial power market will collapse as well. It's a good thing.

DrStalker 10y ago
Only for people that own their house; renters won't be able to take advantage of this because it's a lot of capital outlay that the home owner gets no benefit from. Same for anyone in an apartment. So the residential market for purchased electricity will never go away, but a significant reduction would still be a huge win.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Renters can buy solar from those producing it via virtual net metering or community solar garden projects. Doesn't have to be on your own roof to opt in.
  - euyyn 10y ago
    Plus if you offer me a place where I don't have to pay an electricity bill, I'm able to contribute that money towards a higher rent than otherwise.
    - ekianjo 10y ago
      I dont know where you live but in 3 different countries where i have lived till now the electricity bill was never high enough for me to take it in account for the choice of a place.
      - icebraining 10y ago

rogerdpack 10y ago

Before getting too excited, realize this is for solar in Abu Dhabi, where umm...they get tons of sunlight as it were :) Though his other graph "predicts" that solar in more temperate climes will equal natural gas in "2020?" http://rameznaam.com/2015/08/10/how-cheap-can-solar-get-very-cheap-indeed/ http://rameznaam.com/2015/08/10/how-cheap-can-solar-get-very...

narrator 10y ago
Another great thing about Abu Dhabi and solar is that they can use the extra solar power during the day to ramp up water desalination and store energy as clean water.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  It is not exactly storage, just a vital use.
  - _ph_ 10y ago
    But it is an use of electricity which can follow the availability as the produced water can be easily stored which for the practical use comes close.
- Xylakant 10y ago
  There's a lot of demand that can be shifted to high-power periods, basically anything that requires heat/cold. Modern insulation is fairly good and we do have a lot of liquids with a high thermal capacity. Generating warm water for buildings and cold coolant for aircons during peak power production would be technologically feasible, it just doesn't pay off currently since the power production curve is essentially flat (lot of base power with some peak added on top). In the future it might also be interesting to move industries with high power demand to places with more solar power - electric arc furnaces, aluminum production, ... Some of those require a base load, but a lot of them can survive a few hours with limited power.
  - 10y ago

pavanred 10y ago

May be a noob question, but if we can lay down cables for internet across the ocean floor connecting the entire world, why not lay down cables to connect all electricity grids. Half the earth always faces the sun. We shouldn't need batteries at all then, right? And we always have the traditional power stations (renewable and non-renewable) to augment the load. (At least in theory?)

ptaipale 10y ago
There are technical and economic challenges. To get started, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_power_cable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_power_cable
- kristofferR 10y ago
  Slightly off-topic, but I stumbled across this fascinating documentary about the massive challenges of laying the first submarine transatlantic cable (1858) a few days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_ErFUv8HYs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_ErFUv8HYs
qoobaa 10y ago
It's a very good question. I always thought that it's because of technical difficulties when transmitting electricity over long distances, but it turns out we already do it well (HVDC). When you think about it on a continent scale: why not move all PV panels from Germany to sunnier regions of Europe like Spain or Portugal where you can generate twice more power with them (in average 200 W/m² instead of 100 W/m²). The answer is simple: we'd need to have a common grid across EU member countries, but such a thing doesn't exist and it's unlikely to happen anytime soon. It turns out the biggest issue on this planet is always politics.
- nickff 10y ago
  The amount of copper you would need to constantly convey electricity from the sunny side of the earth to the dark side would be absolutely massive. It is not an issue of common grids, as long distance high power transmission is done at many different voltages depending on the specific route, and has nothing to do with your mains voltage and frequency. Current long distance power transmission is most often used as a way of 'balancing' production and demand between different types of plants; it is not intended or capable of transmitting the full power needs of the recieving area.

rodionos 10y ago

For reference, 2.42 cents per KWh is 10x lower than commercial/residential prices in sunny Hawaii https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/9e548f6b https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/9e548f6b per data.gov https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/hi-electricity-prices-815fa https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/hi-electricity-prices-815fa

known 10y ago

I heard that with latest solar panels we can convert 30% light to electricity;

nomercy400 10y ago
They can get a bit higher I believe (40%) in small sizes, so a trick that is also applied is focussing all the sunlight in that small area, to improve conversion rate. There is still a thing called heat, making it a bit more complicated.
Brakenshire 10y ago
You can get to much higher efficiency, but it involves very expensive manufacturing techniques which make the final cost much higher per unit of electricity. IIRC price-competitive silicon panels are now somewhere about 18-23% efficient, CdTe panels somewhat less.

merraksh 10y ago

Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12537649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12537649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11627965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11627965

ahazred8ta 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=rameznaam.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=rameznaam.com > How Cheap Can Electric Vehicles Get? (rameznaam.com) > How Cheap Can Energy Storage Get? (rameznaam.com) > How Cheap Can Solar Get? (rameznaam.com) > Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap (rameznaam.com) Is anybody seeing a pattern? :-(

magoon 10y ago

If the price is dropping so rapidly, this makes a bad deal out of the 30-year loans solar installers are pitching in the US. Furthermore, if fossil-fuel-sourced kilowatt-hours compete by pricing downward, and thus pay solar owners less per kWh, it could make solar seem like a bad deal.