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Solar power is anything but cheap. Solar panels are very expensive, short-lived and manufacturing them produces plenty of CO2 and other pollutants. Nuclear ene

Solar power is anything but cheap. Solar panels are very expensive, short-lived and manufacturing them produces plenty of CO2 and other pollutants. Nuclear energy is the closest we have to "clean and cheap".

epistasis 6y ago
This is precisely reversed. Even the IEA has finally agreed that solar photovoltaic is the cheapest energy in history: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a34372005/solar-cheapest-energy-ever/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a34372005/solar-che... And this is from an agency that is notoriously pessimistic and wrong about solar, vastly overestimating costs of solar and underestimating future deployments. So when the IEA has declared solar cheap, one can be sure that there is zero data to support otherwise. Similarly, the IEA has been unreasonably bullish about the cost of nuclear, but still places it as one of the most expensive sources of energy. The data is not on your side, and I have to wonder why you came to believe the things that you are saying.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  Perhaps even more importantly, the price of solar has been steadily declining at a faster rate than all other types, and it's been doing it for decades. One could argue that it will suddenly stop declining in price, but that seems as silly as betting against Moore's law in the 80's. Solar has reached price cutover, and installations are exploding so the manufacturing learning curve should really start to bite.
  - zbrozek 6y ago
    Where will that continued cost reduction come from? I think there's still a bit of room left, but not a whole lot. The panels themselves are commodities now where many of them are close to materials cost. There's probably a bit of room to cut in racking and in figuring out ways to make installation easier. Not that any of that is really a problem. Solar is plenty cheap enough, but I don't see a mechanism for it to keep up its precipitous decline in price going forward for many years to come.
    - epistasis 6y ago
      Same place all the previous cost reductions came from: a few percent heee, a few percent there. We are not close to really any sort of physical limitations. We can continue to use less and less material, and come up with designs that require less and less labor per watt. And there are entire directions we haven't really explored yet to reduce costs even further. For example, panel lifetime. If we can extend panel lifetime by 5 years, that's a 20%-25% reduction in costs. Yet lifetime has stayed fairly constant and unoptimized up until now. 10 years from now we will have a ton of new lifetime data from existing panels that can help us guide the next generation of panels.
      - zbrozek 6y ago
        I'd argue against that. I was in the solar industry (as an intern) 2008-2009. The amazing decline of the cost of crystalline silicon shortly thereafter was overwhelmingly the driver of panel cost reductions. The basic recipe of tempered glass, encapsulant, cells, soldered stringing, encapsulant, backsheet for the panels has been mildly optimized but has not seen major revolution in quite some time. The cells themselves also very much are up against physical limits. Last I checked, the theoretical maximum efficiency of a silicon cell in sunlight at the surface of the Earth was something like 29%. The best cells made aren't far from that, and the cells you can actually buy and put into panels en masse are 20-24%. We can talk about multijunction III-V cells, but those are exotic and are unlikely to ever become cheap. Given the upper bound of efficiency with commodity materials and construction, the only "squishy" places for further cost reductions are improvements in manufacturing efficiency, installation efficiency, and regulatory overhead. On my own home - where I'm installing a 14 kilowatt array - the regulatory overhead is close to 30% of the total cost. That's large, yes, but even if we snapped our fingers and zeroed it, we're still not talking anything close to the gains we've had in the past. I completely agree that further improvements are going to be "a couple percent here and there" but I don't think that there's a whole lot of total room to cut. We're just not going to see another 10x reduction like we've seen a couple of times since PV became a thing.

epistasis 6y ago

This is precisely reversed. Even the IEA has finally agreed that solar photovoltaic is the cheapest energy in history: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a34372005/solar-cheapest-energy-ever/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a34372005/solar-che... And this is from an agency that is notoriously pessimistic and wrong about solar, vastly overestimating costs of solar and underestimating future deployments. So when the IEA has declared solar cheap, one can be sure that there is zero data to support otherwise. Similarly, the IEA has been unreasonably bullish about the cost of nuclear, but still places it as one of the most expensive sources of energy. The data is not on your side, and I have to wonder why you came to believe the things that you are saying.

bryanlarsen 6y ago
Perhaps even more importantly, the price of solar has been steadily declining at a faster rate than all other types, and it's been doing it for decades. One could argue that it will suddenly stop declining in price, but that seems as silly as betting against Moore's law in the 80's. Solar has reached price cutover, and installations are exploding so the manufacturing learning curve should really start to bite.
- zbrozek 6y ago
  Where will that continued cost reduction come from? I think there's still a bit of room left, but not a whole lot. The panels themselves are commodities now where many of them are close to materials cost. There's probably a bit of room to cut in racking and in figuring out ways to make installation easier. Not that any of that is really a problem. Solar is plenty cheap enough, but I don't see a mechanism for it to keep up its precipitous decline in price going forward for many years to come.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    Same place all the previous cost reductions came from: a few percent heee, a few percent there. We are not close to really any sort of physical limitations. We can continue to use less and less material, and come up with designs that require less and less labor per watt. And there are entire directions we haven't really explored yet to reduce costs even further. For example, panel lifetime. If we can extend panel lifetime by 5 years, that's a 20%-25% reduction in costs. Yet lifetime has stayed fairly constant and unoptimized up until now. 10 years from now we will have a ton of new lifetime data from existing panels that can help us guide the next generation of panels.
    - zbrozek 6y ago
      I'd argue against that. I was in the solar industry (as an intern) 2008-2009. The amazing decline of the cost of crystalline silicon shortly thereafter was overwhelmingly the driver of panel cost reductions. The basic recipe of tempered glass, encapsulant, cells, soldered stringing, encapsulant, backsheet for the panels has been mildly optimized but has not seen major revolution in quite some time. The cells themselves also very much are up against physical limits. Last I checked, the theoretical maximum efficiency of a silicon cell in sunlight at the surface of the Earth was something like 29%. The best cells made aren't far from that, and the cells you can actually buy and put into panels en masse are 20-24%. We can talk about multijunction III-V cells, but those are exotic and are unlikely to ever become cheap. Given the upper bound of efficiency with commodity materials and construction, the only "squishy" places for further cost reductions are improvements in manufacturing efficiency, installation efficiency, and regulatory overhead. On my own home - where I'm installing a 14 kilowatt array - the regulatory overhead is close to 30% of the total cost. That's large, yes, but even if we snapped our fingers and zeroed it, we're still not talking anything close to the gains we've had in the past. I completely agree that further improvements are going to be "a couple percent here and there" but I don't think that there's a whole lot of total room to cut. We're just not going to see another 10x reduction like we've seen a couple of times since PV became a thing.