8 ms·

I hope this is a solid study and not just wishful thinking. I've been looking at pricing, and right now, fracked gas plants are running around $40/mwh, with win

by beat 7y ago

I hope this is a solid study and not just wishful thinking. I've been looking at pricing, and right now, fracked gas plants are running around $40/mwh, with wind at under $50/mwh and PV solar (no battery storage) at around $60/mwh. Coal and traditional nuclear are running around $100/mwh (these are all rounded numbers from memory, don't get unhelpfully pedantic!). These numbers are obliterating both coal and nuclear. Coal plants are shutting down as fast as replacements can be built, and nuclear plants are shutting down a decade or more before official end-of-life, because they're losing major customers to cheaper alternatives that are available right now. The cost of PV solar has dropped over 80% in the past decade, and wind like 50%, due to engineering improvements in operation and economies of scale in manufacturing. But it's a reasonable question how much farther their prices will drop. It seems unlikely to me that we'll see another decade of such radical price drops. Gas, on the other hand, is vulnerable to markets and availability. How long will it stay so cheap? And what happens if a politically progressive government gets serious about carbon taxing? On the other hand, it's a lot cheaper up-front to build a gas plant, and a lot less painful if it closes early.

GuB-42 7y ago
> and nuclear plants are shutting down a decade or more before official end-of-life, because they're losing major customers to cheaper alternatives that are available right now How? My understanding is that most of the cost of nuclear power comes from building the plant and decommissioning it. Running existing power plants for as long as they can seems like the most economical choice.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  Indeed. See page 2 (or 3, counting from the pdf) of this analysis by Lazard. In particular, the tan diamond symbol by nuclear (with a footnote). https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-120-vfinal.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o... Nuclear that's already built is very cheap AND has a very high capacity factor (i.e. doesn't need storage--although its value can be extended with storage).
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  In a word, price. As a consumer, do you want a bill for 2 cents a kWh? Or one for 15 cents a kWh? This example explainsa lot of what's happening: [1]. By way of a brief explanation, wind is expanding so fast in a lot of places that the combination of wind+LNG is just too cheap to compete with. Iowa is particularly bad, because wind is not "unreliable" in Iowa. There's a lot of wind and it's almost always blowing. So they aren't even using those LNG plants that much. Which only lowers the price to consumers even further. In some states the government has stepped in to protect the nuclear industry. Sometimes with things like carbon credits, that are given for generating power without generating carbon. Then the nuclear plants sell those credits on the free market to raise funds. But in some places government has had to be a good deal more draconian. In Georgia, they've basically made it illegal for anyone in Vogtie's service area to switch away. That's the only way they could get the math to work. (And it still doesn't work. The federal government is still pumping billions in cash into that project.) [1] - https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/iowas-only-nuclear-power-plant-to-close-the-latest-blow-to-a-fading-industry https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/iowas-only-...
  - beat 7y ago
    An interesting factoid I ran across when researching this stuff a while back is that no one has ever built a new reactor in a deregulated electricity market. Period. The time frame of nuclear reactors is very long - like 50 years. So they're very sensitive to capital costs, and capital is sensitive to risk. Now, if you were doing the risk analysis on financing for a multibillion-dollar nuclear project, and you just saw the cost of a major competitor (solar) drop 80% in a decade... well, how would that factor into your risk analysis? How much would your interest rates increase? The only safe way to finance a reactor is government-based guarantees for price regulation - the nation will consume X megawatts for Y dollars, no matter what the market thinks the price should be. And do it in such a way that some government two generations down the road can't just throw it all out and screw you.
    - Recurecur 7y ago
      And that's one of the major arguments for mass produced small modular reactors. No one-off construction, flexible siting due to no water cooling, underground for security, and meltdown proof. Just walkaway safe electricity at five cents a KWH or less. :-) terrapower.com thorcon.com x-energy.com
- Retric 7y ago
  Nuclear also has high operating costs, just not fuel costs. Solar can generally just be left alone for weeks or months at a time. Nuclear however needs security guards, regular maintenance, a highly trained workforce, large insurance premiums etc. On top of that it also needs some fuel. What’s happening with Nuclear is these older power plants occasionally need a significant overhaul and it’s at that point where they are considered too expensive.
  - beat 7y ago
    And a nuclear plant costs about the same to run whether it's running at 100%, or 20%. Fuel costs are negligible relative to capital and operational costs. So when lower-cost competition appears and eats into the demand for nuclear power, it actually increases the per-unit cost of nuclear power, which makes alternatives more compelling, which eats into demand, which turns into a cost death spiral.
    - zaarn 7y ago
      Nuclear plants are great for base demand for these reasons (ie, the power that is always needed 24 hours round the clock, 365 days a year). Alternative energies can provide some of that, meaning that plants need to shut down because outside of providing base demand, they're incredibly expensive to make power from.
- beat 7y ago
  They're shutting down because it's cheaper to shutter them (even including the loss of interest on money set aside for decommissioning) than to continue operating them. Whatever seems "obvious" to us, the hardnosed managers responsible for the actual financial decisions are pulling the plug on dozens of reactors. If it seems irrational to us, it's because there are other cost factors we don't understand. That's why I like to look at the end, rather than make assumptions on what I think I know about the means.
  - cma 7y ago
    > If it seems irrational to us, it's because there are other cost factors we don't understand. Since they are shielded from almost all liability by law (something like $150 million liability cap + $12.5 billion industry fund; plausible disasters could reach $1 trillion+ depending on winds), it seems like there would probably be even more shutdowns if they had to pay for real insurance.
- batmansmk 7y ago
  You are totally correct. US, France, Japan and UK all decided to extend the filetime of their nuclear power plants. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower/u-s-to-extend-nuclear-reactor-lifespans-in-bid-to-revive-industry-idUSKCN1U61YH https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower/u-s-to-e... Wind is cheap because when the wind blows, everybody is trying to sell their wind produced energy at the same time and the country often overproduces. In Germany, we even see negative prices when the wind blows; The price is low not because it does not cost a lot, but because it is heavily subsidized (wind is 60% of subsidies in Germany, for only 18% of the production) and needs to sell fast otherwise the fines and costs for overloading the network are massive.
  - beat 7y ago
    Negative prices? You'll pay me to take electricity off your hands that I can sell later? That's the best argument for the battery storage market I've seen yet... (And really, it makes sense. Generate surplus when the sun is shining or wind is especially strong, run from storage when demand exceeds supply, build both until there's enough. As long as the costs are less than current baseline systems, which seems possible, then it wins.)
    - fingerlocks 7y ago
      Negative prices are not uncommon. Happens nearly every spring in the Pacific Northwest when the mountain snowpack melts, flooding the rivers and surging the output of many hydroelectric dams. The negative prices are factored into the annual revenue, and consumer prices are sort-of averaged over the year which is why you never see it on your electric bill.
      - glennpratt 7y ago
        I live in Portland. Last time I toured Bonneville, no turbines were operating on the East side. The ranger told us there was sufficient solar and wind at the time and they shutdown to protect aquatic life. Assuming that's true, I assume they'd also shutdown to protect thier pocket book.
ph0rque 7y ago
There's still a margin of soft costs that can be reduced (more in the residential than commercial/utility sectors, admittedly): https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72399.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72399.pdf
Robotbeat 7y ago
Numbers for wind and solar are now about $40/MWh unsubsidized according to current LCOE analysis: https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-120-vfinal.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o... ...as you say, this is not the whole story as you still need storage (etc). But the floor for (unsubsidized) solar may be a lot lower than that. About $14/MWh: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-floor-for-ultra-low-solar-bids-14-per-megawatt-hour https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-floor-for-u... And we're already seeing bids nearly that low: https://www.pv-tech.org/news/brazil-auction-sets-record-low-solar-price-of-us17.5-mwh https://www.pv-tech.org/news/brazil-auction-sets-record-low-... Wind is also super cheap.
- omarhaneef 7y ago
  Yes, we are seeing very low bids. $26-$30/MWh for solar doesn't even turn heads anymore. And battery costs are coming down too, and I think that curve looks more linear, but its coming down. One of the issues is that these costs are so capital intensive that the financing costs drive a lot of the price drop. With near zero or negative rates in so much of the world, I think its hard to tell what the real rates would be.
  - beat 7y ago
    Capital costs are a legit concern. If something happens in international markets that causes interest rates to spike globally, it will set back the pace of conversion tremendously.
    - Analemma_ 7y ago
      “Fortunately” we appear to be heading into a recession, so I doubt high interest rates are on the way any time soon.
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      Any way to leverage negative interest rates from developed countries into renewables? Very interested if someone knows how to facilitate such a bond issue.
surfmike 7y ago
Do those prices for solar and wind factor in storage?
- beat 7y ago
  Depends. But wind doesn't really need storage... a broad-based wind grid delivers a pretty consistent base load, as we've learned from early adopters like Iowa and Texas that have over a decade of wind data at scale. edit: There's enough variation in wind farm output to maybe make some storage financially beneficial - production costs could actually go negative when there's enough wind.
  - bob1029 7y ago
    As a Texas resident who lives in the ERCOT region, I am going to have to vehemently disagree regarding the "consistent base load" that should allegedly be supplied by our wind farms. We had a day no fewer than 4 weeks ago that broke every record in terms of energy cost - for over 90 minutes our electricity cost 9 entire American dollars per KWh. We were <500MW of capacity away from rolling blackouts. The cause is the fact that we had bet a certain % of the base load would have been supplied by all the new wind farms, but in reality we had to fire up every peaker plant in the state, and even request assistance from other grids in order to meet demand. The wind simply wasn't blowing. If more of our mix had been natural gas, even just 5-8%, that event would have been completely mitigated.
    - powerbroker 7y ago
      Adding just 10%, to Nat Gas plants, would be 5,000 MW on the Texas grid. Given that wind farms were operating at 1/5th of capacity during this Texas grid events, you would need something like double the current installed wind farm base to be able to deliver 5,000 MW at that 1/5th capacity utilization. It has taken decades to get to the current, rough, 24,000 MW nameplate capacity for Texas to get to where it is.
    - matthewdgreen 7y ago
      So help me with the costs here. Adding 25,000 MWh (5,000MW * 5 hours emergency supply) of lithium battery storage would cost... what? As compared to constructing and operating new natural gas plants? I can't get clear numbers that I trust.
batmansmk 7y ago
Don't get fooled by simple price comparison. It's comparing apples and oranges. Gas, nuclear, coal, reversible dams, geothermy... are all controllable energy sources: they produce when we need it. Wind and solar are intermittent. Equip fully the world with solar and wind and the trains will have to leave their stations when the wind blows and not at any other moment. What's happening is that countries migrating towards wind turbines like Germany also adds coal plant to the same capacity in order to compensate for when the wind doesn't blow. For each GW of wind one can find a GW of coal or gas being installed. Then, if we are talking about adding batteries into the mix to make it work, solar and wind become far from carbon neutral, and endangers us way more than nuclear.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  I suspect that if variable electricity pricing for consumers, a great deal of the need for "batteries" will evaporate. Heavy consumer electric uses (charging the car, HVAC, hot water) can easily be time shifted. It isn't time shifted today because consumer electricity rates are constant 24/7.
  - mruts 7y ago
    The price for electricity already varies hour by hour. Maybe not as much as solar would, but most people (including me) are not paying a pegged price for electricity 24/7.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      Not in the Pacific Northwest (Puget Power). Also, to make this work best, appliances need to be connected to the internet and the power companies need to have an internet ABI where the current power price can be extracted by those appliances. At last, an actual use for internet connected appliances!
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      Pacific Power (Oregon) also has fixed rates.
bobcostas55 7y ago
The $/mwh for renewables is only part of the story. The intermittency costs they impose on the system as a whole is higher than the direct cost of producing the energy, and the only way to solve this is through improving battery technology by orders of magnitude. Additionally, the intermittency costs per mwh will increase as the share of renewable energy increases. In general, renewable energy investments right now are completely irrational in terms of the environmental impact, as they cost up to 10x more than the total social cost of the carbon emissions they are displacing. (And also much more than _current_ carbon sequestration tech!) [0] [0] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFIEPIC_WP_201962_v3.pdf https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFIEPIC_WP_20196...
MarkMc 7y ago
So cost of PV solar has dropped 80% over past decade - it it reasonable to expect another 40% drop over the coming decade? A quick Google search suggests that Solar PV efficiency is 11-22%. Could it be 20-35% in 2029?

by beat 7y ago

GuB-42 7y ago

> and nuclear plants are shutting down a decade or more before official end-of-life, because they're losing major customers to cheaper alternatives that are available right now How? My understanding is that most of the cost of nuclear power comes from building the plant and decommissioning it. Running existing power plants for as long as they can seems like the most economical choice.

Robotbeat 7y ago
Indeed. See page 2 (or 3, counting from the pdf) of this analysis by Lazard. In particular, the tan diamond symbol by nuclear (with a footnote). https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-120-vfinal.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o... Nuclear that's already built is very cheap AND has a very high capacity factor (i.e. doesn't need storage--although its value can be extended with storage).
bilbo0s 7y ago
In a word, price. As a consumer, do you want a bill for 2 cents a kWh? Or one for 15 cents a kWh? This example explainsa lot of what's happening: [1]. By way of a brief explanation, wind is expanding so fast in a lot of places that the combination of wind+LNG is just too cheap to compete with. Iowa is particularly bad, because wind is not "unreliable" in Iowa. There's a lot of wind and it's almost always blowing. So they aren't even using those LNG plants that much. Which only lowers the price to consumers even further. In some states the government has stepped in to protect the nuclear industry. Sometimes with things like carbon credits, that are given for generating power without generating carbon. Then the nuclear plants sell those credits on the free market to raise funds. But in some places government has had to be a good deal more draconian. In Georgia, they've basically made it illegal for anyone in Vogtie's service area to switch away. That's the only way they could get the math to work. (And it still doesn't work. The federal government is still pumping billions in cash into that project.) [1] - https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/iowas-only-nuclear-power-plant-to-close-the-latest-blow-to-a-fading-industry https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/iowas-only-...
- beat 7y ago
  An interesting factoid I ran across when researching this stuff a while back is that no one has ever built a new reactor in a deregulated electricity market. Period. The time frame of nuclear reactors is very long - like 50 years. So they're very sensitive to capital costs, and capital is sensitive to risk. Now, if you were doing the risk analysis on financing for a multibillion-dollar nuclear project, and you just saw the cost of a major competitor (solar) drop 80% in a decade... well, how would that factor into your risk analysis? How much would your interest rates increase? The only safe way to finance a reactor is government-based guarantees for price regulation - the nation will consume X megawatts for Y dollars, no matter what the market thinks the price should be. And do it in such a way that some government two generations down the road can't just throw it all out and screw you.
  - Recurecur 7y ago
    And that's one of the major arguments for mass produced small modular reactors. No one-off construction, flexible siting due to no water cooling, underground for security, and meltdown proof. Just walkaway safe electricity at five cents a KWH or less. :-) terrapower.com thorcon.com x-energy.com
Retric 7y ago
Nuclear also has high operating costs, just not fuel costs. Solar can generally just be left alone for weeks or months at a time. Nuclear however needs security guards, regular maintenance, a highly trained workforce, large insurance premiums etc. On top of that it also needs some fuel. What’s happening with Nuclear is these older power plants occasionally need a significant overhaul and it’s at that point where they are considered too expensive.
- beat 7y ago
  And a nuclear plant costs about the same to run whether it's running at 100%, or 20%. Fuel costs are negligible relative to capital and operational costs. So when lower-cost competition appears and eats into the demand for nuclear power, it actually increases the per-unit cost of nuclear power, which makes alternatives more compelling, which eats into demand, which turns into a cost death spiral.
  - zaarn 7y ago
    Nuclear plants are great for base demand for these reasons (ie, the power that is always needed 24 hours round the clock, 365 days a year). Alternative energies can provide some of that, meaning that plants need to shut down because outside of providing base demand, they're incredibly expensive to make power from.
beat 7y ago
They're shutting down because it's cheaper to shutter them (even including the loss of interest on money set aside for decommissioning) than to continue operating them. Whatever seems "obvious" to us, the hardnosed managers responsible for the actual financial decisions are pulling the plug on dozens of reactors. If it seems irrational to us, it's because there are other cost factors we don't understand. That's why I like to look at the end, rather than make assumptions on what I think I know about the means.
- cma 7y ago
  > If it seems irrational to us, it's because there are other cost factors we don't understand. Since they are shielded from almost all liability by law (something like $150 million liability cap + $12.5 billion industry fund; plausible disasters could reach $1 trillion+ depending on winds), it seems like there would probably be even more shutdowns if they had to pay for real insurance.
batmansmk 7y ago
You are totally correct. US, France, Japan and UK all decided to extend the filetime of their nuclear power plants. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower/u-s-to-extend-nuclear-reactor-lifespans-in-bid-to-revive-industry-idUSKCN1U61YH https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower/u-s-to-e... Wind is cheap because when the wind blows, everybody is trying to sell their wind produced energy at the same time and the country often overproduces. In Germany, we even see negative prices when the wind blows; The price is low not because it does not cost a lot, but because it is heavily subsidized (wind is 60% of subsidies in Germany, for only 18% of the production) and needs to sell fast otherwise the fines and costs for overloading the network are massive.
- beat 7y ago
  Negative prices? You'll pay me to take electricity off your hands that I can sell later? That's the best argument for the battery storage market I've seen yet... (And really, it makes sense. Generate surplus when the sun is shining or wind is especially strong, run from storage when demand exceeds supply, build both until there's enough. As long as the costs are less than current baseline systems, which seems possible, then it wins.)
  - fingerlocks 7y ago
    Negative prices are not uncommon. Happens nearly every spring in the Pacific Northwest when the mountain snowpack melts, flooding the rivers and surging the output of many hydroelectric dams. The negative prices are factored into the annual revenue, and consumer prices are sort-of averaged over the year which is why you never see it on your electric bill.
    - glennpratt 7y ago
      I live in Portland. Last time I toured Bonneville, no turbines were operating on the East side. The ranger told us there was sufficient solar and wind at the time and they shutdown to protect aquatic life. Assuming that's true, I assume they'd also shutdown to protect thier pocket book.

ph0rque 7y ago

There's still a margin of soft costs that can be reduced (more in the residential than commercial/utility sectors, admittedly): https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72399.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72399.pdf

Robotbeat 7y ago

Numbers for wind and solar are now about $40/MWh unsubsidized according to current LCOE analysis: https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-120-vfinal.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o... ...as you say, this is not the whole story as you still need storage (etc). But the floor for (unsubsidized) solar may be a lot lower than that. About $14/MWh: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-floor-for-ultra-low-solar-bids-14-per-megawatt-hour https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-floor-for-u... And we're already seeing bids nearly that low: https://www.pv-tech.org/news/brazil-auction-sets-record-low-solar-price-of-us17.5-mwh https://www.pv-tech.org/news/brazil-auction-sets-record-low-... Wind is also super cheap.

omarhaneef 7y ago
Yes, we are seeing very low bids. $26-$30/MWh for solar doesn't even turn heads anymore. And battery costs are coming down too, and I think that curve looks more linear, but its coming down. One of the issues is that these costs are so capital intensive that the financing costs drive a lot of the price drop. With near zero or negative rates in so much of the world, I think its hard to tell what the real rates would be.
- beat 7y ago
  Capital costs are a legit concern. If something happens in international markets that causes interest rates to spike globally, it will set back the pace of conversion tremendously.
  - Analemma_ 7y ago
    “Fortunately” we appear to be heading into a recession, so I doubt high interest rates are on the way any time soon.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Any way to leverage negative interest rates from developed countries into renewables? Very interested if someone knows how to facilitate such a bond issue.

surfmike 7y ago

Do those prices for solar and wind factor in storage?

beat 7y ago
Depends. But wind doesn't really need storage... a broad-based wind grid delivers a pretty consistent base load, as we've learned from early adopters like Iowa and Texas that have over a decade of wind data at scale. edit: There's enough variation in wind farm output to maybe make some storage financially beneficial - production costs could actually go negative when there's enough wind.
- bob1029 7y ago
  As a Texas resident who lives in the ERCOT region, I am going to have to vehemently disagree regarding the "consistent base load" that should allegedly be supplied by our wind farms. We had a day no fewer than 4 weeks ago that broke every record in terms of energy cost - for over 90 minutes our electricity cost 9 entire American dollars per KWh. We were <500MW of capacity away from rolling blackouts. The cause is the fact that we had bet a certain % of the base load would have been supplied by all the new wind farms, but in reality we had to fire up every peaker plant in the state, and even request assistance from other grids in order to meet demand. The wind simply wasn't blowing. If more of our mix had been natural gas, even just 5-8%, that event would have been completely mitigated.
  - powerbroker 7y ago
    Adding just 10%, to Nat Gas plants, would be 5,000 MW on the Texas grid. Given that wind farms were operating at 1/5th of capacity during this Texas grid events, you would need something like double the current installed wind farm base to be able to deliver 5,000 MW at that 1/5th capacity utilization. It has taken decades to get to the current, rough, 24,000 MW nameplate capacity for Texas to get to where it is.
  - matthewdgreen 7y ago
    So help me with the costs here. Adding 25,000 MWh (5,000MW * 5 hours emergency supply) of lithium battery storage would cost... what? As compared to constructing and operating new natural gas plants? I can't get clear numbers that I trust.

batmansmk 7y ago

Don't get fooled by simple price comparison. It's comparing apples and oranges. Gas, nuclear, coal, reversible dams, geothermy... are all controllable energy sources: they produce when we need it. Wind and solar are intermittent. Equip fully the world with solar and wind and the trains will have to leave their stations when the wind blows and not at any other moment. What's happening is that countries migrating towards wind turbines like Germany also adds coal plant to the same capacity in order to compensate for when the wind doesn't blow. For each GW of wind one can find a GW of coal or gas being installed. Then, if we are talking about adding batteries into the mix to make it work, solar and wind become far from carbon neutral, and endangers us way more than nuclear.

WalterBright 7y ago
I suspect that if variable electricity pricing for consumers, a great deal of the need for "batteries" will evaporate. Heavy consumer electric uses (charging the car, HVAC, hot water) can easily be time shifted. It isn't time shifted today because consumer electricity rates are constant 24/7.
- mruts 7y ago
  The price for electricity already varies hour by hour. Maybe not as much as solar would, but most people (including me) are not paying a pegged price for electricity 24/7.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Not in the Pacific Northwest (Puget Power). Also, to make this work best, appliances need to be connected to the internet and the power companies need to have an internet ABI where the current power price can be extracted by those appliances. At last, an actual use for internet connected appliances!
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Pacific Power (Oregon) also has fixed rates.

bobcostas55 7y ago

The $/mwh for renewables is only part of the story. The intermittency costs they impose on the system as a whole is higher than the direct cost of producing the energy, and the only way to solve this is through improving battery technology by orders of magnitude. Additionally, the intermittency costs per mwh will increase as the share of renewable energy increases. In general, renewable energy investments right now are completely irrational in terms of the environmental impact, as they cost up to 10x more than the total social cost of the carbon emissions they are displacing. (And also much more than _current_ carbon sequestration tech!) [0] [0] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFIEPIC_WP_201962_v3.pdf https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFIEPIC_WP_20196...

MarkMc 7y ago

So cost of PV solar has dropped 80% over past decade - it it reasonable to expect another 40% drop over the coming decade? A quick Google search suggests that Solar PV efficiency is 11-22%. Could it be 20-35% in 2029?