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Get those labor costs down from having to have so many presumably high-skilled workers, and it may start to be a little more competitive with coal price-wise, w

Get those labor costs down from having to have so many presumably high-skilled workers, and it may start to be a little more competitive with coal price-wise, which is what it's all about.

heygrady 10y ago
Solar might already be competitive with coal [1] [1] https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/25/cost-of-solar-power-vs-cost-of-wind-power-coal-nuclear-natural-gas/ https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/25/cost-of-solar-power-vs-...
heygrady 10y ago
According to the article, they are not highly skilled workers. > Many of the jobs are also accessible to people who might otherwise struggle to find well-paying jobs. An entry-level worker without a degree can conceivably double their salary within a year, from $10-$12 an hour for simple manual labor to $20-$23 an hour. The median wage posted for solar installer jobs in 2016 was $26 an hour.
- Gibbon1 10y ago
  > from $10-$12 an hour for simple manual labor to $20-$23 an hour. What that says to me is jobs installing solar have higher productivity than other available low skilled jobs.
padseeker 10y ago
Coal has already been losing to other sources, albeit not necessarily renewables. The cost of natural gas has plunged and getting coal out of the ground is more expensive than it used to be as we've already pulled out the easy to get coal. A lot of the cost issues is about comparing wattage - solar has become way more efficient than it used to be. Coal efficiency has not changed much. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/for-cheapest-power-on-earth-look-skyward-as-coal-falls-to-solar https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/for-cheap...
wavefunction 10y ago
Coal is already more expensive than solar, were the subsidies provided to the coal industry removed.
- wavefunction 10y ago
  Downvote me if you want but refer to page 6[0] and see that Solar beats subsidy-less Advanced Coal costs in LCOE. [0]http://www.eia.gov/outlooks/archive/aeo15/pdf/electricity_generation_2015.pdf http://www.eia.gov/outlooks/archive/aeo15/pdf/electricity_ge... I wonder if that's even taking into account the unacknowledged costs of petro-carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
  - hermitdev 10y ago
    How does subsidy-less solar match up against subsidy-less coal (honest question)?
    - ridgeguy 10y ago
      I don't have stats for subsidy-less coal, but I'll point you to [1], which gives the unsubsidized installed price of grid-level solar (defined as >500kW) power as being about $2.30/Wdc in 2015. Page 14 has a summary graph of this parameter since 1998. The report gives pre-incentive prices for residential (<10kW) and non-residential (<500kW) as well. [1] https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/tracking_the_sun_ix_report_0.pdf https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/tracking_the_sun_ix_repo...
    - epistasis 10y ago
      At utility scale unsubsidized solar is cheaper than coal kWh for kWh, albeit with the caveat that solar is not dispatchable, and the coal is not being penalized for the externalities and deaths it causes in the general population. However, except for the health damage, it's difficult to quantify the rest of the damage that coal does without lots of arguments. https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

Get those labor costs down from having to have so many presumably high-skilled workers, and it may start to be a little more competitive with coal price-wise, which is what it's all about.

heygrady 10y ago

Solar might already be competitive with coal [1] [1] https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/25/cost-of-solar-power-vs-cost-of-wind-power-coal-nuclear-natural-gas/ https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/25/cost-of-solar-power-vs-...

heygrady 10y ago

According to the article, they are not highly skilled workers. > Many of the jobs are also accessible to people who might otherwise struggle to find well-paying jobs. An entry-level worker without a degree can conceivably double their salary within a year, from $10-$12 an hour for simple manual labor to $20-$23 an hour. The median wage posted for solar installer jobs in 2016 was $26 an hour.

Gibbon1 10y ago
> from $10-$12 an hour for simple manual labor to $20-$23 an hour. What that says to me is jobs installing solar have higher productivity than other available low skilled jobs.

padseeker 10y ago

Coal has already been losing to other sources, albeit not necessarily renewables. The cost of natural gas has plunged and getting coal out of the ground is more expensive than it used to be as we've already pulled out the easy to get coal. A lot of the cost issues is about comparing wattage - solar has become way more efficient than it used to be. Coal efficiency has not changed much. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/for-cheapest-power-on-earth-look-skyward-as-coal-falls-to-solar https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/for-cheap...

wavefunction 10y ago

Coal is already more expensive than solar, were the subsidies provided to the coal industry removed.

wavefunction 10y ago
Downvote me if you want but refer to page 6[0] and see that Solar beats subsidy-less Advanced Coal costs in LCOE. [0]http://www.eia.gov/outlooks/archive/aeo15/pdf/electricity_generation_2015.pdf http://www.eia.gov/outlooks/archive/aeo15/pdf/electricity_ge... I wonder if that's even taking into account the unacknowledged costs of petro-carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
- hermitdev 10y ago
  How does subsidy-less solar match up against subsidy-less coal (honest question)?
  - ridgeguy 10y ago
    I don't have stats for subsidy-less coal, but I'll point you to [1], which gives the unsubsidized installed price of grid-level solar (defined as >500kW) power as being about $2.30/Wdc in 2015. Page 14 has a summary graph of this parameter since 1998. The report gives pre-incentive prices for residential (<10kW) and non-residential (<500kW) as well. [1] https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/tracking_the_sun_ix_report_0.pdf https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/tracking_the_sun_ix_repo...
  - epistasis 10y ago
    At utility scale unsubsidized solar is cheaper than coal kWh for kWh, albeit with the caveat that solar is not dispatchable, and the coal is not being penalized for the externalities and deaths it causes in the general population. However, except for the health damage, it's difficult to quantify the rest of the damage that coal does without lots of arguments. https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...