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Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’
- itsoktocry 6y ago>the best locations and with access to the most favourable policy support and finance So in a world of rock bottom interest rates, incentives, subsidies and "revenue support mechanisms" geared toward green projects, solar is the cheapest alternative? That's not surprising; it's the goal.
- kstenerud 6y agoThe point is that we're finally there. That the market has been manipulated through government incentives is not as important as the fact that developers will now see renewables as more favourable in future projects. This is about momentum more than anything else, and momentum is hugely important when your horizon crosses decades. The money ecosystem in play now favours renewables more than non-renewables, and that's reason to celebrate.
- jimbob45 6y agoDoesn’t the issue of cloudy days remain though? I’m genuinely asking - the last I checked, solar efficiency took a backseat to battery storage as the step preventing us from moving forward.
- rrmm 6y agoI would guess that capacity is designed wrt average insolation and not peak; spot market generation takes care of the peaks.
- jimbob45 6y agoRight but the spot market generation wasn’t enough to subsidize upkeep and development of the local grid I thought. Grids needed to be nationalized (or city...alized) to allow citizens to pay taxes to upkeep the grids, which cut into the price-efficiency of solar. Again, I’m asking out of curiosity. My expertise is a few Reddit threads and some cursory Wikipedia research.
- rrmm 6y agoYeah, I don't know the area well at all. It seems like at some point you'll have to pay for the grid directly (ie, the power will be free-ish, you'll pay for the size of the wire to your house).
- Ekaros 6y agoStandard in Finland. Our power and transmission pricing is separate. So you buy transmission from local monopoly and then can freely choose who you buy the power from. Which means that I and others who don't use electrical heating pay more for transmission than power itself. Priced on amperage for base cost and then some for per unit of power.
- kstenerud 6y agoThere's plenty of R&D into cloudy-day solar collection, and there's also wind, tidal, hydro, as well as many clean battery technologies ranging from chemical to heat to gravitational. Not to mention traditional backup systems and smart grids. We're not so fragile that cloudy days will shut down our energy grid.
- pjc50 6y agoWhat is "forward"? While 100% isn't feasible today, currently deployment is low, so it's still easy to achieve real CO2 and cost reduction by increased deployment. (Away from the equator, seasons are more significant than cloud or day/night cycle..)
- Ekaros 6y agoOr during winter above Artic Circle... As only meaningful pricing metric is average price for whole year in location of consumption. Anything else is just cheating.
- pfdietz 6y agoWind becomes a very attractive option at high latitudes. The site I point at for simple energy modeling: https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ uses real historical weather data, and surprisingly the cheapest energy systems it models for synthesized baseload from renewables + storage is in... Greenland?! I'm not sure I really believe that, but it made me sit up and take notice.
- pfdietz 6y agoThe cost of various storage technologies is declining, and should be quite affordable by the time they are needed. This retro shadow being cast back from the expected future is among the reasons nuclear cannot get investment now.
- xvilka 6y agoGood. Time to build solar power gathering satellites and a laser to deliver the power to the surface.
- ben_w 6y agoGoing to space is still so expensive that it makes more sense to build a global HVDC power grid even though antopodal 800 kV connections of current designs would have 60% losses over that distance. (And that’s assuming you get less than 60% losses going from electricity to light, through the atmosphere, back to electricity; and the ground station is free or negligible cost; and nobody worries about orbital death rays either malicious or accidental).
- pjc50 6y agoWhy? This is worse on every possible level; cost, energy efficiency, safety. Just put panels on your roof.
- rrmm 6y agoHey, what if we just covered the roads with solar panels?! There are lots of roads! Or maybe we put solar panels on the bottom of the ocean, no one is using that space! /s
- ben_w 6y agoRoads may well be a good thing to cover, depending on the costs of the structure. And I don’t mean “solar roadways” — a roof keeping the rain and the snow off isn’t worthless, and the extra lighting cost is small compared to the solar energy because neither streetlights nor car headlights are as bright as sunlight. And (/s notwithstanding) people have considered floating PV on reservoirs to avoid evaporative losses.
- rrmm 6y agoYeah the whole comment was /s just because the grand parent was a worst-of-all-ways thing. Floating PV is pretty interesting, has anyone done it on a large enough scale for the economics/efficiency of it to be evaluated?
- qz2 6y agoI await our idiotic governments taxing it heavily to support dying petroleum industries next.
- konjin 6y agoPeople don't want to hear it but saying 'solar is cheap when the sun shines' is like saying 'coal is cheap at the mine'. You need to send it to where it is needed and when it is needed. Storage methods need tens of trillions of investment to reach that capacity and power prices would have to increase 10 to 100 fold to cover those investments. Solar is not a solution for an industrial civilization.
- pjc50 6y agoYou should look at what prices solar and storage are actually being deployed at. Your comment is very much saying things can't be done while people are actually doing it.
- konjin 6y agoI work as a quant for a power company. I have very much looked at what the prices are doing and the answer is "making my employer filthy rich and making the grid unsustainable over the next decade". Solar and batteries are eating the profit from base load and peak generators. Yet are unable to provide the sustained power requirements to keep the grid going on a day that gets over 35C. If you like having power in hospitals at all hours you can't let solar and battery storage invade the grid without regulating it such that the grid survives. Nationalization of the grid assets and a massive nuclear building spree is the only solution if we want children to grow up in a world where brownouts are the exception.
- socialdemocrat 6y agoSeems like an American problem. You got more renewable usage in Europe and more stable grids than the US. Problem is more likely due to poor management and low investment and maintenance of grids in the US. When I travel around the US I notice infrastructure in general is in very poor condition . While people drive big cars and live in McMansions. Public poverty and private opulence.
- barrenko 6y agoCheap just means someone else (or even you indirectly) is paying.
- VyperCard 6y agoNo it doesn’t.
- maallooc 6y agoYes it does.
- cbmuser 6y agoYes, it does. Come to Germany, we have lots of solar power and the highest electricity prices worldwide.
- socialdemocrat 6y agoDue to high consumer taxes on electricity. Look at France. They did not pay for their nuclear power through consumer taxes but through general taxes hence the price looks low. Somebody else paid in other words. French taxes are higher than German taxes. Germany is a poor example as it shut down perfectly fine nuclear power, thus incurring a cost on replacing it. UK has cut emissions more than Germany but had lower prices.
- orwin 6y ago> Due to high consumer taxes on electricity. Look at France. They did not pay for their nuclear power through consumer taxes but through general taxes hence the price looks low. Somebody else paid in other words. French taxes are higher than German taxes. No. Where did you even read that? EDF gave France government 20 Billions in dividends over 10 years, not the opposite. While selling electricity on average 42 euros/MWh. No subsidies, and EDF pay for the whole French network AND the international cables (those going to UK are a net loss). And like USPS have to put money aside to take care of their employees retirement, EDF had to put money aside to take care of retired nuclear plant and waste storage over 300 years. Also EDF had to absorb the cost of linking solar "farms" to their network themselves (in their report in 2012 they estimated this cost to be close to 1 billion by 2017). On this point this is likely that it did not cost that much, because they managed to be able to refuse individuals trying to connect to their grid. The EPR was a mistake and made EDF valuation down by 80%, but despite that and no financial help from the French government (except with sales contracts), the dividends are still comming through. EDF is run by engineers (or at least was) and it shows.
- maallooc 6y agoOkay, and that must include the expensive price and environmental concerns of maintaining ESS to ensure energy continuity, the price to run fossil fuel plants to prepare for cloudy days, expanding the power grid to remote solar locations, disposing used solar panels and inverters, chemicals and water to clean the panels, and many other hidden fees to make solar viable, right?
- crispyporkbites 6y agoBy that logic you should factor in the environmental costs of fossil fuels when calculating the costs of that. But oops nope we don’t pay that now, we’ll just let future generations handle it.
- maallooc 6y agoUmm yes we do? We factor in these costs to every energy source, at least in our country, and solar is not even remotely cheap.
- socialdemocrat 6y agoNo you don’t because if you did, fossil fuels would not have been competitive at all. And if solar isn’t cheaper is you are getting ripped off or you live in a cloudy place or far north.
- crispyporkbites 6y agoIf we burn fossil fuels at scale for 1000 years, will the planet remain habitatable? Will the human race survive? Did your country factor that into the costs of fossil fuels?
- fareesh 6y agoDon't know why you are downvoted. As a layperson I have no idea what the correct answer is to this - i.e. once you factor in the manufacturing, replacement, maintenance, backup plant, batteries, etc. what is the net gain?
- cbmuser 6y agoThese comparisions solely account for the production costs and not for the system costs of solar energy and are therefore completely useless. Solar panels will always require a backup power plant as the Sun isn’t shining 24/7 and storing large amounts of electric energy isn’t trivial. I‘m really disappointed that this kind of non-sense gets posted on HN over and over again. I‘m from Germany, we have 50% renewables in our electricity mix and our electricity prices are the highest worldwide. France has 70% nuclear and their consumer electricity prices are half of the German ones. Additionally, France emits only 50 grams of CO2 per kWh while Germany emits 400 grams on average per kWh. I know lots of comments will counter-argue „Yes, but the high taxes in Germany.“ but those aren’t the main price drivers. The main price drivers are the costs for subsidizing solar and wind (the so-called EEG-Umlage) and the costs for keeping backup power plants available which are allowed to produce only when solar and/or wind won’t deliver as both solar and wind have precedence over other electricity providers in the electricity net (the so-called Netzentgelt). Solar might be cheapest when you consider the pure production costs per kWh but it’s not the cheapest when you consider the costs for a conplete system to provide electricity for a population. Even single houses aren’t able to live off just solar while every house can live solely on power from a nuclear power plant which provides electricity 24/7.
- kstenerud 6y agoActually, prices excluding taxes and levies look pretty similar: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-household-electricity-prices-second-highest-eu https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-household-electr... And in Germany and Denmark, taxes and levies ARE the main price drivers. The maintenance costs are amortized in the per-kwh cost to consumers, same as with nuclear or gas or coal. Single houses can't live off just solar energy because they aren't diversified like a nation can be (in terms of storage, routing, diversity of technologies, etc). Nuclear is nice in theory, but unfortunately they are managed by humans, and humans do stupid things like run them past their decommission date or fail to locate backup generators above flooding level or skimp on maintenance and inspections. And nuclear accidents create no-go zones that last millenia. Only truly "meltdown-proof" reactors would avoid this problem, but R&D into this is terribly slow and seems to be obstructed at every turn by incumbents.
- rogerthat_au 6y agoI run a startup (www.de.energy) that opens up solar as an asset class and funds solar commercial and industrial projects in India and Africa. The last project we funded was for 31,500 INR per kW ($425) and we are currently about to fund a few projects at $364/kW for Tier 1 equipment. This is more expensive than utility scale projects. The estimates in the article are what we are seeing on the ground. Yes, it is accurate that solar can't supply more than 30-40% of the energy mix. But we are still far from reaching that level of supply in the developing world and faster the cost reduces, the better it'll be for continued deployment en masse. Battery innovation as well as other tech will continue to improve the amount of solar in the energy mix. Edit: You may also find this helpful - https://de.energy/blog/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020-2/ https://de.energy/blog/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020-...
- Tipewryter 6y agosolar can't supply more than 30-40% of the energy mix With enough batteries, why not?
- rogerthat_au 6y agoI meant solar on its own. Solar + battery is where the future of solar is, but the economics of batteries don't work yet relative to grid electricity price in the developing world. So far we've deployed solar+battery in petrol pumps and a few off-grid locations. In the markets where we operate, on grid, it is economically not an option yet.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoThis is demonstrably false. Batteries and solar are already cost competitive. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-17/solar-with-batteries-cheaper-than-gas-in-parts-of-u-s-southwest https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-17/solar-wit... https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-mexico-approves-100-renewable-replacement-for-san-juan-coal-capacity/582557/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-mexico-approves-100-ren...