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Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA

205 points by yk 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
acidburnNSA 6y ago
Amazing progress over 15 years really. It must be stated that these numbers imply 'when the sun is shining'. The cost of the systems producing nighttime power is not accounted for in these.
- rossdavidh 6y ago
  In large parts of the world (e.g. where I live, in Texas, USA) this is by far when the largest electricity usage is (because it's when the air conditioners are working hardest). So, yes we will have to have some non-solar energy, we could get to much larger than we already are (and it's growing fast) because that is when the peak usage is.
  - 8note 6y ago
    When it's hottest, you run into dollar's other challenge - they get less efficient as they heat up
- gwright 6y ago
  This is a common oversight in much of the public discussion about renewables that is inexcusable. Public policy is being devised from a very deep misunderstanding of the physics of a power grid.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  The numbers take into account the lower capacity factor of solar. So yes, they do take into account that the sun is not always shining. Judged just on a peak kW basis, solar's advantage would be even larger.
  - acidburnNSA 6y ago
    Well yes if we put grossly misleading numbers it would be even worse of a sin. What I mean is that it is not a system cost. This assumes the existence of dispatchable low carbon energy at large scale without acknowledging this cost. You can't meaningfully talk about $/kWh with solar in the context of deep decarbonization without talking about the cost of dispatchable duplicate backup capacity. Costs and success today are riding on the back of a huge and high carbon dispatchable grid.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      Estimates of what it would cost to cover for variability of renewables puts the extra cost low enough that nuclear still is out of the running. This is especially the case if one considers that any nuclear plant whose construction started today would be competing against renewable and storage technologies of a decade or more in the future. For nuclear to survive, not only do its costs have to come down a lot, but the ongoing crash in costs of renewables and storage have to come to a sudden halt. Nuclear proponents are basically betting that all the many storage technologies fail to get cheaper. This is quite the bet.
dotBen 6y ago
If it's not off-topic, I'm curious to learn how other HN'ers have approached the planning/viability study of getting solar installed at their home. I want to see a spreadsheet to help me plan out energy use, peak need, whether batteries are worth buying, amount I could sell back, number of panels needed, amortized cost against savings etc. Extra points for thinking tax benefits and estimating the depreciating cost of panels vs the increasing cost of electricity and where the intersection is (or was, if passed) to pull the trigger on a capital expenditure, etc My initial foray so far has been vendors see this as a qualitative decision rather than a quantitative decision with little support for this approach. For me it's purely a numbers game. Anyway, I'm sure HN'ers are most likely to be thinking similarly - any pointers or resources to help others? The more I think about it, there's probably a startup here...
- xwdv 6y ago
  From a quantitative perspective it will likely not be worth it.
- joshocar 6y ago
  A lot of it comes down to the individual State incentives. My co-worker put in a system on his house and at the time the incentive was that you sold all of your power back to the grid at a fixed rate that was higher than what you would normally pay. He gets a check every month for what he sells to the grid. That rate was locked in for 15 years. It meant that he knew that with average usage he would break even in 6-7 years. Downside is that he is taxed on that income. The other side of it is how big your roof and if it faces south without much occlusion. If your roof doesn't face south or is occluded but trees then it makes it much less attractive.
- fghorow 6y ago
  AFAICT, things are already "financialized" so that things like community solar appear to be "cheaper" to a customer. (Nothing wrong with that, BTW.) I just got my first utility bill with a community solar monetary credit. I wrote the following piece attempting to figure out the energy flows -- as opposed to the dollar flows. -- cut here -- OK. I have a(n energetic) head scratcher with my latest unbundled electricity bill. It's the first one that includes a community solar subscription. For geeks, this is almost a thermodynamics question about systems and surroundings -- but it's camouflaged as a monetary problem in disguise... 1) My utility company (NYSEG) charges me a per kW-hr fee for "transmitting" electricity and servicing their infrastructure. Fine and dandy. I understand that perfectly. 2) There is a separate per kW-hr fee from a different supplier of electricity with whom I have contracted for power. Again, I understand that perfectly. 3) Now the head scratcher. My "community solar" account just started contributing PV energy to the grid from a recently completed solar farm. My fraction of energy generated from their deployment just showed up as a monetary credit to my total bill. They will invoice me of 90% of that credit, and claim that I "saved 10%" on my electricity cost. There is no statement whatsoever of the amount of electrical energy corresponding to that monetary credit. That's the monetary accounting. Now let's examine the energy accounting. Let's call the amount of energy from 2) above "N" for my "normal" source of electrical power. Similarly, let us call the (unknown) amount of energy from 3) above "S" for my solar PV power. (In principle, once I knew the fee per kW-hr I was being charged for the PV energy, I could convert the monetary charge to the numerical value for S. Let's leave that as an exercise to be dealt with later after I receive an invoice from the community solar provider -- which hopefully will tell me their cost-per-unit of energy.) Clearly, I paid my normal provider for producing N units of energy. However, I actually consumed (N-S) units of their energy, because I (notionally) also received S units of solar energy. I understand perfectly that electricity on a transmission line is fungible, hence I don't actually receive "electrons" (so to speak) from either of them. The community solar project will also get paid (at their claimed "discounted" rate) for producing S units of energy and delivering it to me via NYSEG. My conundrum: It seems to me that (N+S) units of electrical energy have been produced and paid for, but only N units have been consumed. Hence there are (N+S) - N = S units of electrical energy "somewhere" that are generated but not consumed via this accounting system. Where are those S units? Who owns them? Are they simply going towards heating up the transmission lines, or is somebody benefiting from them? Is it simply the case that NYSEG no longer has to pay for the energy consumed in heating up their transmission lines, but are still charging me the same transmission fees??? I don't know the answer to this problem. Discuss.
travisoneill1 6y ago
> The rise of variable renewable sources means that there is an increasing need for electricity grid flexibility, the IEA notes. “Robust electricity networks, dispatchable power plants, storage technologies and demand response measures all play vital roles in meeting this,” it says. Which is why it's not really the cheapest. Fossil fuel and nuclear power don't have these associated costs.
- alex_g 6y ago
  My propane tank doesn’t magically fill itself every other month.
- antr 6y ago
  I was just going to say this. This is what many people do not understand, it's "the cheapest" technology but the cost of the necessary ancillary services, balancing mechanism, FFR, inertia, etc., to make this happen is not baked into the LCOE models. That's how shortsighted this sort of messages are.
  - Jweb_Guru 6y ago
    While that's true, it's also true that the total cost of solar (taking storage into account) is far lower now than it was even 10-15 years ago. The logical thing we should be doing now is building massive amounts of storage, rather than complaining about how solar costs don't take it into account. As an added bonus, large pumped storage or fuel cell batteries can be reused for any renewable source (unlike solutions like concentrated solar), so any improvements in one can be mostly decoupled from improvements in the other, which is why I find the insistence that people add the cost of the batteries to the cost of solar to be pretty wearying. And I don't find arguments that pumped storage takes a long time and has high maintenance costs to build very convincing when the alternative, nuclear, has exactly the same requirement.
    - cbmuser 6y ago
      We have lots of solar in Germany (50% renewables in our electricity mix) and we’re paying the highest price per kWh in the whole world. Let alone that we’re emitting 400 grams of CO2 per kWh on average while it’s just 50 grams on average in France.
cbmuser 6y ago
Why does this non-sense get constantly rehashed all the time? You cannot compare the cost of an electricity generation system solely based on the cost of the plant technology itself, you always have to take the whole system costs into account. Solar panels might be cheap, but they are unable to provide a reliable electricity source without backup or storage systems which is what drives the actual costs. France has 70% nuclear and their kWh costs around 17 Euro cents and causes greenhouse gas emissions of 50 grams of CO2 on average. Germany has 50% renewables with the kWh at over 31 Euro cents and 400 grams of CO2 on average. The French energy sector is responsible for 50 million tons of CO2 each year while Germany’s energy sector causes over 350 million tons of CO2 each year. So, no, large scale solar power is neither cheap nor clean.
- steeve 6y ago
  This. As cool as PV is, there is a big difference between always-on, modular power source and one that has a variable and intermittent production. It would be like saying one doesn't need heating in the winter since heat is cheap in the summer.
- Faaak 6y ago
  You're comparing end-user energy cost with production costs. These are not the same ! The cost you're comparing (0.17€/kWh) includes transmission costs (Enedis + EDF), taxes (CSPE, ...) AND the energy cost (~0.06€/kwh, market rate). You cannot compare costs between countries like that, because taxes are different and transmission costs too. You must compare market rate costs (from eex for example).
  - belorn 6y ago
    A fair comparison would take a per population approach and compare similar environmental regions, and calculate the cost of supplying that region and population with the energy demand over the span of years. It is however not that hard to do since the energy market basically operate already on this principle. Energy companies bid on supplying a specific demand in the future, and the bid that is lowest win. That bid also include if I understand it right the cost of transmission. The practical end result is that different companies win the bid depending on all the variations that makes energy production commercial viable. A solar plant that is not producing enough energy because of weather conditions is not going to put in a bid, and thus the fossil fueled power plant wins the bid and the outcome is pollution. The more times fossil fueled power plants win, the more economical incentives there are to build more fossil fueled power plants, and the more pollution we get in the air. The only way to have a non-polluting power grid is to either outlaw fossil fueled plants from bidding, or make sure that there is always an pollution free alternative that has an economical reason to make a lower bid. Nuclear, renewables, batteries, solar, wind, carbon taxes or what have you, as long as fossil fueled power plants can manage to make the lowest bid we have a problem.
olivermarks 6y ago
The WEF 'weforum' website is often laughably weak. McKinsey & the WEF are endlessly trying to portray what their ideal future will look like and will cherry pick statements that back up their goals. Here is the IEA web page for their 120 euro 'World Energy Outlook 2020' publication. https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2020 https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2020 Solar https://www.iea.org/fuels-and-technologies/solar https://www.iea.org/fuels-and-technologies/solar I couldn't find the assertion about 'cheapest electricity in history' has anyone else seen the actual report? The International Energy Agency is a Paris-based autonomous intergovernmental organisation established in the framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1974 in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. ~ Wikipedia
worik 6y ago
Invest in batteries
- timbit42 6y ago
  I wish someone would figure out a better flywheel.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Limited by strength of materials.
    - worik 6y ago
      Interesting. Have you a reference? I had a friend working on industrial UPS systems that used large flywheels. Was years ago so I do not know the details. I think they could supply a lot of energy quickly (no start up time) but maybe not for long?
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel#High-energy_materials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel#High-energy_materials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virial_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virial_theorem
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Or other storage technologies. In particular, thermal storage with heat pumps appears very promising, allowing energy to be stored in extremely cheap material (rocks), and turned back around to electrical energy with a round trip efficiency ~60%. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2020.00160/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2020.0016...
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
If only nuclear energy had seen such promotion and investment as solar energy, instead of endless hysterical fear-mongering.
- literallycancer 6y ago
  It had this kind support in the Soviet Union, didn't it?
  - nexuist 6y ago
    Well, it did, up until one day...
- minikites 6y ago
  I wonder what the world would look like if the Chernobyl disaster and the Challenger disaster didn't happen. I think both of those events, combined with years of rhetoric, were a turning point in 1986 which really damaged the idea that governments were capable of solving problems and pushing society forward. We didn't give up after the Apollo 1 fire. We did give up after the Challenger disaster and Chernobyl.
- redisman 6y ago
  There was insane hype for all things atomic for decades. A few catastrophes like Chernobyl made it very unsexy
  - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
    This reaction to the Chernobyl is akin to throwing out the baby with the bath water.
    - Jweb_Guru 6y ago
      Fukushima was not long ago, either. I don't think it's a strong enough reason not to use nuclear at all given the alternatives, but all nuclear plants have fairly catastrophic failure modes in the event of an unforeseen problem and require constant maintenance and supervision in order to keep running. In areas of the world with little political stability or public funding, this makes other solutions much more attractive than they would be in an ideal world. Acting like people are being completely irrational in worrying about nuclear accidents is pretty disrespectful.
afrojack123 6y ago
Hacker News used to be a good website. Why do they allow things like this on the front site.
isolli 6y ago
I cannot help but think of this tweet [0]. https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/866313289306963969 https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/866313289306963969 In short, solar production had increased steeply between 2000 and 2015, but each and every year, the IEA predicted that production would plateau. Each and every year, they were wrong. And yet they did it again the following year.
- bob29 6y ago
  Recently the author of "Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon" Jenny Chase was on the Energy Transition Show podcast [0] discussing the growth of solar. The discussion got into some of the technical reasons solar was able to grow as it did; while the analysts were assuming solar was barely affordable with the subsidies, the industry was actually using the subsidies to develop low cost manufacturing processses, springboarding off technology from modern semiconductor manufacturing. A comical moment in that interview, on the same topic as this tweet, was that not only did IEA and other agencies and analyists under-estimate solar, the best estimate (which was still short by half) was from Greenpeace just using a simple compound growth model. [0]https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-132-the-future-of-solar/ https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-132-the-future-of...
- username90 6y ago
  We know for certain is that every exponential progress humans achieves will stop at some point. We saw exponential energy progress in the first half of 20'th century, many assumed that would just continue and everyone would have flying cars today but it stopped dead in its tracks and the energy quantities we have available today is mostly the same that we had 50 years ago.
polote 6y ago
Why people talking about climate changes always seem like a religious debate? Yeah nuclear has advantages and disadvantage, same apply for solar, wind, geothermal. But all these technologies have a role to play to solve climate change. Can we stop having these stupid religious debates? Does anyone has a link explaining one realistic way to solve climate change without going into ideological debates?
- TT3351 6y ago
  Going to guess it starts something like this: Step 1: Have lots of healthy debates
enchiridion 6y ago
On a large time scale solar seems like the right call, even over fusion. I keep hearing about storage issues, but that seems trivial given the complexity of our current energy landscape. Humanity is hopefully progressing toward a Dyson sphere... which is just maxed out solar.
burnthrow 6y ago
Having reliable electricity during a dangerous heat wave and heavy wildfire smoke that forces you indoors: Priceless.
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
SOLAR POWER IS LIBERAL POWER. ONLY FOSSIL FUELS ARE AMERICAN. or something.
74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago
I think about buying stocks of solar tech company soon. they all made huge jumps this year - at least jinko, first, canadian. like more than tripling prices. so, I'm worried about the market being a bit too hyped up. anybody with an opinion on that matter?
- u678u 6y ago
  I dont think panel manufacturers will make much money, there is too much competition from the big Chinese corps. Maybe the rewiring of the grid helps electrical component companies like Schneider but that isn't cheap either. It might end up the big power users get most of the benefit.
  - 74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago
    jinko is chinese.
08-15 6y ago
Misleading headline. The text actually says "solar PV with revenue support" is now the cheapest electricity. In other words, solar PV is cheap, because somebody else is forced to pay for it.
andy_threos_io 6y ago
As you may already know, we have a HUGE fusion reactor ( fuses 500 million metric tons of hydrogen each second. [1] ) approximately 149.5 million km away, and it's ready and free* in that sense that we don't have to build it, maintain etc., it's there, it's working 24/7 and will be working for at least 5 billion years without any maintenance. (you need surface to get it) All we have to do is to harness the sun energy in the most efficiency and harmless way. Almost all the energy used on earth comes from the sun. The nuclear*, geothermal and tidal power are more or less exceptions. * (I'm not against nuclear power and research, as we need that technology to be able to travel in space in smaller spaceships rather than this large one (some may call it earth) we use now. Right now we travel where our sun goes, not where we like to explore.) In every energy usage the key is the efficiency of the conversion. Fossil fuel's efficiency is less then 1-2% from the sun due to the efficiency of the photosynthesis [2]. All of the fossil fuels are nothing but stored solar energy with less then 1-2% efficiency. And we don't calculate with waste from the mining refining transportation etc. energy cost. And for useful energy (work) you have to burn it in a power plant or a car or whatever with maximum 10-50% efficiency [3]. So the overall efficiency is less than 1%. On the other hand solar cells with 20%+ efficiency are commercial available, wind farms are better and hydro power can be even better. (wind and hydro power are also comes indirect from the sun) (BTW the low efficiency of the photosynthesis is why the corn based fuels are waste of the solar energy, and land. You could generate the same amount of energy with solar power on less than 1/20th of the land with corn. If you need fossil fuel, algae is a much better alternative, as it's photosynthesis efficiency is higher than corn [4], also does not require valuable land, which can be used for other agriculture purpose (food) ) But, far the largest pro for the solar energy is that it will not run out in the near future (at least 5 billion years, even earth will be destroyed way before the sun run out of fuel), fossil fuels will run out, it does not matter if it's 50, 100 or 1000 years from now, but it will run out. Period. (that's the same problem with current nuclear power technology beside other factors) So you have an energy that practically will not run out, have better total efficiency about 20-100+ times than fossil fuel (and side effect it's cleaner), * and someone still surprised that this is the future... ** yes, we need to work on energy storage [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_conversion_efficiency [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel
blastonico 6y ago
I don't think it's true worldwide. I'm not poor but I don't have the money to buy solar panels and all the equipment necessary to make that work. It's sad because my place (in Brazil) is blessed by the sun 12 months a year and I feel sorry fot not being able to use that energy.

205 points by yk 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Amazing progress over 15 years really. It must be stated that these numbers imply 'when the sun is shining'. The cost of the systems producing nighttime power is not accounted for in these.

rossdavidh 6y ago
In large parts of the world (e.g. where I live, in Texas, USA) this is by far when the largest electricity usage is (because it's when the air conditioners are working hardest). So, yes we will have to have some non-solar energy, we could get to much larger than we already are (and it's growing fast) because that is when the peak usage is.
- 8note 6y ago
  When it's hottest, you run into dollar's other challenge - they get less efficient as they heat up
gwright 6y ago
This is a common oversight in much of the public discussion about renewables that is inexcusable. Public policy is being devised from a very deep misunderstanding of the physics of a power grid.
pfdietz 6y ago
The numbers take into account the lower capacity factor of solar. So yes, they do take into account that the sun is not always shining. Judged just on a peak kW basis, solar's advantage would be even larger.
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  Well yes if we put grossly misleading numbers it would be even worse of a sin. What I mean is that it is not a system cost. This assumes the existence of dispatchable low carbon energy at large scale without acknowledging this cost. You can't meaningfully talk about $/kWh with solar in the context of deep decarbonization without talking about the cost of dispatchable duplicate backup capacity. Costs and success today are riding on the back of a huge and high carbon dispatchable grid.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Estimates of what it would cost to cover for variability of renewables puts the extra cost low enough that nuclear still is out of the running. This is especially the case if one considers that any nuclear plant whose construction started today would be competing against renewable and storage technologies of a decade or more in the future. For nuclear to survive, not only do its costs have to come down a lot, but the ongoing crash in costs of renewables and storage have to come to a sudden halt. Nuclear proponents are basically betting that all the many storage technologies fail to get cheaper. This is quite the bet.

dotBen 6y ago

If it's not off-topic, I'm curious to learn how other HN'ers have approached the planning/viability study of getting solar installed at their home. I want to see a spreadsheet to help me plan out energy use, peak need, whether batteries are worth buying, amount I could sell back, number of panels needed, amortized cost against savings etc. Extra points for thinking tax benefits and estimating the depreciating cost of panels vs the increasing cost of electricity and where the intersection is (or was, if passed) to pull the trigger on a capital expenditure, etc My initial foray so far has been vendors see this as a qualitative decision rather than a quantitative decision with little support for this approach. For me it's purely a numbers game. Anyway, I'm sure HN'ers are most likely to be thinking similarly - any pointers or resources to help others? The more I think about it, there's probably a startup here...

xwdv 6y ago
From a quantitative perspective it will likely not be worth it.
joshocar 6y ago
A lot of it comes down to the individual State incentives. My co-worker put in a system on his house and at the time the incentive was that you sold all of your power back to the grid at a fixed rate that was higher than what you would normally pay. He gets a check every month for what he sells to the grid. That rate was locked in for 15 years. It meant that he knew that with average usage he would break even in 6-7 years. Downside is that he is taxed on that income. The other side of it is how big your roof and if it faces south without much occlusion. If your roof doesn't face south or is occluded but trees then it makes it much less attractive.
fghorow 6y ago
AFAICT, things are already "financialized" so that things like community solar appear to be "cheaper" to a customer. (Nothing wrong with that, BTW.) I just got my first utility bill with a community solar monetary credit. I wrote the following piece attempting to figure out the energy flows -- as opposed to the dollar flows. -- cut here -- OK. I have a(n energetic) head scratcher with my latest unbundled electricity bill. It's the first one that includes a community solar subscription. For geeks, this is almost a thermodynamics question about systems and surroundings -- but it's camouflaged as a monetary problem in disguise... 1) My utility company (NYSEG) charges me a per kW-hr fee for "transmitting" electricity and servicing their infrastructure. Fine and dandy. I understand that perfectly. 2) There is a separate per kW-hr fee from a different supplier of electricity with whom I have contracted for power. Again, I understand that perfectly. 3) Now the head scratcher. My "community solar" account just started contributing PV energy to the grid from a recently completed solar farm. My fraction of energy generated from their deployment just showed up as a monetary credit to my total bill. They will invoice me of 90% of that credit, and claim that I "saved 10%" on my electricity cost. There is no statement whatsoever of the amount of electrical energy corresponding to that monetary credit. That's the monetary accounting. Now let's examine the energy accounting. Let's call the amount of energy from 2) above "N" for my "normal" source of electrical power. Similarly, let us call the (unknown) amount of energy from 3) above "S" for my solar PV power. (In principle, once I knew the fee per kW-hr I was being charged for the PV energy, I could convert the monetary charge to the numerical value for S. Let's leave that as an exercise to be dealt with later after I receive an invoice from the community solar provider -- which hopefully will tell me their cost-per-unit of energy.) Clearly, I paid my normal provider for producing N units of energy. However, I actually consumed (N-S) units of their energy, because I (notionally) also received S units of solar energy. I understand perfectly that electricity on a transmission line is fungible, hence I don't actually receive "electrons" (so to speak) from either of them. The community solar project will also get paid (at their claimed "discounted" rate) for producing S units of energy and delivering it to me via NYSEG. My conundrum: It seems to me that (N+S) units of electrical energy have been produced and paid for, but only N units have been consumed. Hence there are (N+S) - N = S units of electrical energy "somewhere" that are generated but not consumed via this accounting system. Where are those S units? Who owns them? Are they simply going towards heating up the transmission lines, or is somebody benefiting from them? Is it simply the case that NYSEG no longer has to pay for the energy consumed in heating up their transmission lines, but are still charging me the same transmission fees??? I don't know the answer to this problem. Discuss.

travisoneill1 6y ago

> The rise of variable renewable sources means that there is an increasing need for electricity grid flexibility, the IEA notes. “Robust electricity networks, dispatchable power plants, storage technologies and demand response measures all play vital roles in meeting this,” it says. Which is why it's not really the cheapest. Fossil fuel and nuclear power don't have these associated costs.

alex_g 6y ago
My propane tank doesn’t magically fill itself every other month.
antr 6y ago
I was just going to say this. This is what many people do not understand, it's "the cheapest" technology but the cost of the necessary ancillary services, balancing mechanism, FFR, inertia, etc., to make this happen is not baked into the LCOE models. That's how shortsighted this sort of messages are.
- Jweb_Guru 6y ago
  While that's true, it's also true that the total cost of solar (taking storage into account) is far lower now than it was even 10-15 years ago. The logical thing we should be doing now is building massive amounts of storage, rather than complaining about how solar costs don't take it into account. As an added bonus, large pumped storage or fuel cell batteries can be reused for any renewable source (unlike solutions like concentrated solar), so any improvements in one can be mostly decoupled from improvements in the other, which is why I find the insistence that people add the cost of the batteries to the cost of solar to be pretty wearying. And I don't find arguments that pumped storage takes a long time and has high maintenance costs to build very convincing when the alternative, nuclear, has exactly the same requirement.
  - cbmuser 6y ago
    We have lots of solar in Germany (50% renewables in our electricity mix) and we’re paying the highest price per kWh in the whole world. Let alone that we’re emitting 400 grams of CO2 per kWh on average while it’s just 50 grams on average in France.

cbmuser 6y ago

Why does this non-sense get constantly rehashed all the time? You cannot compare the cost of an electricity generation system solely based on the cost of the plant technology itself, you always have to take the whole system costs into account. Solar panels might be cheap, but they are unable to provide a reliable electricity source without backup or storage systems which is what drives the actual costs. France has 70% nuclear and their kWh costs around 17 Euro cents and causes greenhouse gas emissions of 50 grams of CO2 on average. Germany has 50% renewables with the kWh at over 31 Euro cents and 400 grams of CO2 on average. The French energy sector is responsible for 50 million tons of CO2 each year while Germany’s energy sector causes over 350 million tons of CO2 each year. So, no, large scale solar power is neither cheap nor clean.

steeve 6y ago
This. As cool as PV is, there is a big difference between always-on, modular power source and one that has a variable and intermittent production. It would be like saying one doesn't need heating in the winter since heat is cheap in the summer.
Faaak 6y ago
You're comparing end-user energy cost with production costs. These are not the same ! The cost you're comparing (0.17€/kWh) includes transmission costs (Enedis + EDF), taxes (CSPE, ...) AND the energy cost (~0.06€/kwh, market rate). You cannot compare costs between countries like that, because taxes are different and transmission costs too. You must compare market rate costs (from eex for example).
- belorn 6y ago
  A fair comparison would take a per population approach and compare similar environmental regions, and calculate the cost of supplying that region and population with the energy demand over the span of years. It is however not that hard to do since the energy market basically operate already on this principle. Energy companies bid on supplying a specific demand in the future, and the bid that is lowest win. That bid also include if I understand it right the cost of transmission. The practical end result is that different companies win the bid depending on all the variations that makes energy production commercial viable. A solar plant that is not producing enough energy because of weather conditions is not going to put in a bid, and thus the fossil fueled power plant wins the bid and the outcome is pollution. The more times fossil fueled power plants win, the more economical incentives there are to build more fossil fueled power plants, and the more pollution we get in the air. The only way to have a non-polluting power grid is to either outlaw fossil fueled plants from bidding, or make sure that there is always an pollution free alternative that has an economical reason to make a lower bid. Nuclear, renewables, batteries, solar, wind, carbon taxes or what have you, as long as fossil fueled power plants can manage to make the lowest bid we have a problem.

olivermarks 6y ago

The WEF 'weforum' website is often laughably weak. McKinsey & the WEF are endlessly trying to portray what their ideal future will look like and will cherry pick statements that back up their goals. Here is the IEA web page for their 120 euro 'World Energy Outlook 2020' publication. https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2020 https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2020 Solar https://www.iea.org/fuels-and-technologies/solar https://www.iea.org/fuels-and-technologies/solar I couldn't find the assertion about 'cheapest electricity in history' has anyone else seen the actual report? The International Energy Agency is a Paris-based autonomous intergovernmental organisation established in the framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1974 in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. ~ Wikipedia

worik 6y ago

Invest in batteries

timbit42 6y ago
I wish someone would figure out a better flywheel.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Limited by strength of materials.
  - worik 6y ago
    Interesting. Have you a reference? I had a friend working on industrial UPS systems that used large flywheels. Was years ago so I do not know the details. I think they could supply a lot of energy quickly (no start up time) but maybe not for long?
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel#High-energy_materials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel#High-energy_materials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virial_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virial_theorem
pfdietz 6y ago
Or other storage technologies. In particular, thermal storage with heat pumps appears very promising, allowing energy to be stored in extremely cheap material (rocks), and turned back around to electrical energy with a round trip efficiency ~60%. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2020.00160/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2020.0016...

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago

If only nuclear energy had seen such promotion and investment as solar energy, instead of endless hysterical fear-mongering.

literallycancer 6y ago
It had this kind support in the Soviet Union, didn't it?
- nexuist 6y ago
  Well, it did, up until one day...
minikites 6y ago
I wonder what the world would look like if the Chernobyl disaster and the Challenger disaster didn't happen. I think both of those events, combined with years of rhetoric, were a turning point in 1986 which really damaged the idea that governments were capable of solving problems and pushing society forward. We didn't give up after the Apollo 1 fire. We did give up after the Challenger disaster and Chernobyl.
redisman 6y ago
There was insane hype for all things atomic for decades. A few catastrophes like Chernobyl made it very unsexy
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  This reaction to the Chernobyl is akin to throwing out the baby with the bath water.
  - Jweb_Guru 6y ago
    Fukushima was not long ago, either. I don't think it's a strong enough reason not to use nuclear at all given the alternatives, but all nuclear plants have fairly catastrophic failure modes in the event of an unforeseen problem and require constant maintenance and supervision in order to keep running. In areas of the world with little political stability or public funding, this makes other solutions much more attractive than they would be in an ideal world. Acting like people are being completely irrational in worrying about nuclear accidents is pretty disrespectful.

afrojack123 6y ago

Hacker News used to be a good website. Why do they allow things like this on the front site.

isolli 6y ago

I cannot help but think of this tweet [0]. https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/866313289306963969 https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/866313289306963969 In short, solar production had increased steeply between 2000 and 2015, but each and every year, the IEA predicted that production would plateau. Each and every year, they were wrong. And yet they did it again the following year.

bob29 6y ago
Recently the author of "Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon" Jenny Chase was on the Energy Transition Show podcast [0] discussing the growth of solar. The discussion got into some of the technical reasons solar was able to grow as it did; while the analysts were assuming solar was barely affordable with the subsidies, the industry was actually using the subsidies to develop low cost manufacturing processses, springboarding off technology from modern semiconductor manufacturing. A comical moment in that interview, on the same topic as this tweet, was that not only did IEA and other agencies and analyists under-estimate solar, the best estimate (which was still short by half) was from Greenpeace just using a simple compound growth model. [0]https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-132-the-future-of-solar/ https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-132-the-future-of...
username90 6y ago
We know for certain is that every exponential progress humans achieves will stop at some point. We saw exponential energy progress in the first half of 20'th century, many assumed that would just continue and everyone would have flying cars today but it stopped dead in its tracks and the energy quantities we have available today is mostly the same that we had 50 years ago.

polote 6y ago

Why people talking about climate changes always seem like a religious debate? Yeah nuclear has advantages and disadvantage, same apply for solar, wind, geothermal. But all these technologies have a role to play to solve climate change. Can we stop having these stupid religious debates? Does anyone has a link explaining one realistic way to solve climate change without going into ideological debates?

TT3351 6y ago
Going to guess it starts something like this: Step 1: Have lots of healthy debates

enchiridion 6y ago

On a large time scale solar seems like the right call, even over fusion. I keep hearing about storage issues, but that seems trivial given the complexity of our current energy landscape. Humanity is hopefully progressing toward a Dyson sphere... which is just maxed out solar.

burnthrow 6y ago

Having reliable electricity during a dangerous heat wave and heavy wildfire smoke that forces you indoors: Priceless.

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago

SOLAR POWER IS LIBERAL POWER. ONLY FOSSIL FUELS ARE AMERICAN. or something.

74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago

I think about buying stocks of solar tech company soon. they all made huge jumps this year - at least jinko, first, canadian. like more than tripling prices. so, I'm worried about the market being a bit too hyped up. anybody with an opinion on that matter?

u678u 6y ago
I dont think panel manufacturers will make much money, there is too much competition from the big Chinese corps. Maybe the rewiring of the grid helps electrical component companies like Schneider but that isn't cheap either. It might end up the big power users get most of the benefit.
- 74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago
  jinko is chinese.

08-15 6y ago

Misleading headline. The text actually says "solar PV with revenue support" is now the cheapest electricity. In other words, solar PV is cheap, because somebody else is forced to pay for it.

andy_threos_io 6y ago

As you may already know, we have a HUGE fusion reactor ( fuses 500 million metric tons of hydrogen each second. [1] ) approximately 149.5 million km away, and it's ready and free* in that sense that we don't have to build it, maintain etc., it's there, it's working 24/7 and will be working for at least 5 billion years without any maintenance. (you need surface to get it) All we have to do is to harness the sun energy in the most efficiency and harmless way. Almost all the energy used on earth comes from the sun. The nuclear*, geothermal and tidal power are more or less exceptions. * (I'm not against nuclear power and research, as we need that technology to be able to travel in space in smaller spaceships rather than this large one (some may call it earth) we use now. Right now we travel where our sun goes, not where we like to explore.) In every energy usage the key is the efficiency of the conversion. Fossil fuel's efficiency is less then 1-2% from the sun due to the efficiency of the photosynthesis [2]. All of the fossil fuels are nothing but stored solar energy with less then 1-2% efficiency. And we don't calculate with waste from the mining refining transportation etc. energy cost. And for useful energy (work) you have to burn it in a power plant or a car or whatever with maximum 10-50% efficiency [3]. So the overall efficiency is less than 1%. On the other hand solar cells with 20%+ efficiency are commercial available, wind farms are better and hydro power can be even better. (wind and hydro power are also comes indirect from the sun) (BTW the low efficiency of the photosynthesis is why the corn based fuels are waste of the solar energy, and land. You could generate the same amount of energy with solar power on less than 1/20th of the land with corn. If you need fossil fuel, algae is a much better alternative, as it's photosynthesis efficiency is higher than corn [4], also does not require valuable land, which can be used for other agriculture purpose (food) ) But, far the largest pro for the solar energy is that it will not run out in the near future (at least 5 billion years, even earth will be destroyed way before the sun run out of fuel), fossil fuels will run out, it does not matter if it's 50, 100 or 1000 years from now, but it will run out. Period. (that's the same problem with current nuclear power technology beside other factors) So you have an energy that practically will not run out, have better total efficiency about 20-100+ times than fossil fuel (and side effect it's cleaner), * and someone still surprised that this is the future... ** yes, we need to work on energy storage [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_conversion_efficiency [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel

blastonico 6y ago

I don't think it's true worldwide. I'm not poor but I don't have the money to buy solar panels and all the equipment necessary to make that work. It's sad because my place (in Brazil) is blessed by the sun 12 months a year and I feel sorry fot not being able to use that energy.