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It‘s most fascinating when you realize that wind & solar will, very soon after being competitive with new coal and gas, become cheaper even than existing fossil

It‘s most fascinating when you realize that wind & solar will, very soon after being competitive with new coal and gas, become cheaper even than existing fossil fuel plants. That’s because renewables are almost entirely front-loaded: upkeeps is somewhat neglible in comparison to construction. For fossile fuels, the fuel itself is a dominating cost. Meaning: in some countries, we are on the brisk of an inflection point, after which growth of clean tech will be limited only by our ability to increase production. I saw a graph, which I can unfortunately not find now, predicting 2021 for some European countries and some regions in the US. There isn’t much speculation in a time frame of only two years.

_Microft 8y ago
An article arguing that this has already happened came through the frontpage during the last few days. -> I can't find it. Can anyone help?
- spatten 8y ago
  I think it was this one: http://rameznaam.com/2019/04/02/the-third-phase-of-clean-energy-will-be-the-most-disruptive-yet/ http://rameznaam.com/2019/04/02/the-third-phase-of-clean-ene...
  - _Microft 8y ago
    Yes, it is, thank you!
beefield 8y ago
As solar is growing globally something like 30% p.a., one could argue that we have already been limited by the ability to increase production. Just for comparison, Apple has never had a 100% y.o.y increase of iPhone over two full production years, and that was a consumer device with explosive growth. I would not expect that it could be feasible to have similar growth numbers in energy infrastructure than iPhone.
- dependsontheq 8y ago
  The limit is mostly investment, PV has no resource limitations currently.
7952 8y ago
The capital costs still need to be paid off. But the industry has a strong interest in scaling up and reducing costs. And optimisation is probably easier when you are building and installing thousands of individual units rather than a few complex monoliths.
gridlockd 8y ago
> ...growth of clean tech will be limited only by our ability to increase production. Production is not the problem. Growth of green tech has been (and will be) limited by the ability to store and use output on-demand. Germany is already causing problems in the European electricity grid through overproduction of wind energy. Meanwhile, their base load is covered by coal and imports of nuclear energy. It would require a massive amount of battery storage to even out: https://www.oulu.fi/blogs/how-much-storage-does-the-energiewende-need https://www.oulu.fi/blogs/how-much-storage-does-the-energiew...

_Microft 8y ago

An article arguing that this has already happened came through the frontpage during the last few days. -> I can't find it. Can anyone help?

spatten 8y ago
I think it was this one: http://rameznaam.com/2019/04/02/the-third-phase-of-clean-energy-will-be-the-most-disruptive-yet/ http://rameznaam.com/2019/04/02/the-third-phase-of-clean-ene...
- _Microft 8y ago
  Yes, it is, thank you!

beefield 8y ago

As solar is growing globally something like 30% p.a., one could argue that we have already been limited by the ability to increase production. Just for comparison, Apple has never had a 100% y.o.y increase of iPhone over two full production years, and that was a consumer device with explosive growth. I would not expect that it could be feasible to have similar growth numbers in energy infrastructure than iPhone.

dependsontheq 8y ago
The limit is mostly investment, PV has no resource limitations currently.

7952 8y ago

The capital costs still need to be paid off. But the industry has a strong interest in scaling up and reducing costs. And optimisation is probably easier when you are building and installing thousands of individual units rather than a few complex monoliths.

gridlockd 8y ago

> ...growth of clean tech will be limited only by our ability to increase production. Production is not the problem. Growth of green tech has been (and will be) limited by the ability to store and use output on-demand. Germany is already causing problems in the European electricity grid through overproduction of wind energy. Meanwhile, their base load is covered by coal and imports of nuclear energy. It would require a massive amount of battery storage to even out: https://www.oulu.fi/blogs/how-much-storage-does-the-energiewende-need https://www.oulu.fi/blogs/how-much-storage-does-the-energiew...