19 ms·

Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

131 points by mg 6y ago

briga 6y ago
This is good to hear. I assume location must play a large part in this? Solar must be more cost-effective in, say, the Mojave desert, than it is in Alaska. I sometimes wonder if the widespread adoption of solar is going to have an environmental impact that isn't immediately apparent. Every solar panel you put on the ground is going to take up solar energy that could otherwise be absorbed by a plant, which in turn means that plant can't absorb carbon from the atmosphere. So unless we just limit ourselves to rooftop solar panels there's sure to be some sort of environmental impact if we just switch all our energy to solar.
- xnx 6y ago
  Possibly, though I don't think solar panels will ever catch up to the amount of pavement there is.
- m463 6y ago
  I've wondered about that too (competing with nature for the sun) but I think just putting panels on the roof or over the parking lot would probably address 95% of the problem. Along similar lines, I've wondered if solar panels will start to look like pine trees at some point.
  - briga 6y ago
    >I've wondered if solar panels will start to look like pine trees at some point. Interesting thought, but I'm not sure there same factors that led to plant evolution will play out with solar panels. Plants reaching up into the air was a direct response to competition with other types of plants. Presumably the same sort of competition won't be necessary with solar panels. I'm sure nature still has a lot of inspiration we can draw from for creating new types of solar panels, but my guess is that the most efficient surface for collecting solar energy is the flat square design we see today.
    - m463 6y ago
      You're probably right. Aim fixed panels for the brightest part of the day and use batteries and that will probably solve most problems. What I think is interesting abouts trees is that they can take in energy even when the sun is low on the horizon, they have good ventilation so they don't overheat, and they work no matter what angle the sun is facing. The giant sequoias get a lot of their moisture directly from the air. Maybe we could add functions to our "tree-shaped solar panels" like fresh water gathering and climate control heat exchange.
- kragen 6y ago
  > I assume location must play a large part in this? Solar must be more cost-effective in, say, the Mojave desert, than it is in Alaska. Yes, each peak kilowatt of utility-scale solar produces about 240 watts average in Arizona, 140 in Maine, and 100 in Germany ("capacity factors" of 24%, 14%, and 10%). I assume the number for Alaska would be even lower. > Every solar panel you put on the ground is going to take up solar energy that could otherwise be absorbed by a plant, which in turn means that plant can't absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Yes, and also it will reflect less heat back into space than the plant or bare dirt would, locally raising the temperature. These will start to be important problems when the quantity of power produced by solar panels is about 100 times larger than current world marketed energy consumption. I expect that this will happen in about 30 years. However, merely switching all our energy to solar will have an effect that's about 100 times too small to matter.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    > it will reflect less heat back into space than the plant or bare dirt would, locally raising the temperature I'm not sure this checks out... the light gets absorbed, but the energy doesn't get turned into heat, it gets turned into electricity. If anything, where it's covering up concrete or asphalt it should reduce the conversion of sunlight to local heat.
    - Nullabillity 6y ago
      Some of it turns into electricity, some of it is wasted (turned into heat). And the whole point is that the electricity gets used at some point, turning into heat, computation (heat), light (heat), or motion (heat). And of course, you also have transmission losses (heat) along the way!
    - kragen 6y ago
      A 21% efficient solar panel reflects about 9% of the light, turns about 60% of it into heat immediately, and turns the other 21% into heat shortly afterwards, perhaps somewhere else, when the power the solar cell generates is dissipated by, for example, an electric motor or lightbulb.
    - 6y ago
- Someone 6y ago
  https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026 https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026: “A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use“ That article is from 2011, but I think it’s a very safe bet that factor is still more than 1,000 today. Also, I would think about every solar panel you put on the ground reflects less energy into space than the ground did.
- griffinkelly 6y ago
  I've read a few articles that these solar farms are creating their own microclimates, and particularly in already warm areas can have significant impacts to wildlife with the local temperature increasing in the range of 3-4 degrees C: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070
- jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 6y ago
  One possibility is to use farmland or grazing land. You can pick crops that do better in part shade and then place solar panels over them. If done right it could have a beneficial effect on crop growth while at the same time earning extra money.
  - fabatka 6y ago
    But then harvesting would be significantly harder, no? At least in the way I imagine this.
    - jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 6y ago
      I'm not sure but certainly it would depend on the crop as different harvesting methods are used for different crops. For example, panels could be built so cows can graze under them or for handpicked crops so that people can walk under them.
      - imtringued 6y ago
        You're right. Just build a "solar roof". Basically a solar panel on four legs.
  - Danieru 6y ago
    This is a allowed but semi-rare technique in Japan. Rare because of the capital costs to built the panels. Certain high end plants, such as tea, prefer the shade.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      It would be interesting in northern Africa. Install soil erosion blankets and then put solar panels on top to reduce evaporation. Trim the plant growth to increase the biomass available to the soil.
- zizee 6y ago
  > Solar must be more cost-effective in, say, the Mojave desert, than it is in Alaska. I don't think this was your intention, but this reminded me of something I see in so many of these conversations. In discussions about solar (and electric cars) there are always people who say "well this won't work in situation X", with an unsaid implication of "this is not the solution". It is unlikely that we will find a single solution that will be a good fit for all situations. Instead we will have many tools in our belt and apply accordingly. I know that you used alaska as an extreme, perhaps they will never get off fossil fuels. But alaska is a tiny population overall. Its the main population centers that we need to worry about, not the extremes that are hand picked to be difficult.
  - someperson 6y ago
    You may be interested in the video The LED Traffic Light and the Danger of "But Sometimes!" by Technology Connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Look at the solution you get for Alaska in https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ It's a combination of solar, wind, and hydrogen (with a little battery storage).
rich_sasha 6y ago
If solar were free, but we still needed to pay for battery storage, how would it then compare in cost to fuel-based alternatives (fossil fuel, nuclear etc)?
- kragen 6y ago
  It's a little hard to predict how the price of battery storage will change as demand for it increases by orders of magnitude, and also how energy usage patterns will change as the relative cost of nighttime energy usage goes up. I've explored these themes in the past in a number of notes. https://dercuano.github.io/topics/solar.html https://dercuano.github.io/topics/solar.html and in particular https://dercuano.github.io/notes/energy-storage-efficiency.html https://dercuano.github.io/notes/energy-storage-efficiency.h..., https://dercuano.github.io/notes/heliogen.html https://dercuano.github.io/notes/heliogen.html, and https://dercuano.github.io/notes/lithium-supplies.html https://dercuano.github.io/notes/lithium-supplies.html. https://dercuano.github.io/notes/balcony-battery.html https://dercuano.github.io/notes/balcony-battery.html and https://dercuano.github.io/notes/the-suburbean.html https://dercuano.github.io/notes/the-suburbean.html explore the question at the household scale. More recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26219344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26219344 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26229595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26229595 explore this question in more detail, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26308189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26308189 explores specifically what it would cost for California to switch to an all-solar grid with only battery storage over the next decade. David MacKay wrote a wonderful and highly accessible overview of the topic in 02009 as part of his excellent book, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, which is specifically about sustainable energy in Britain. Unfortunately it needs to be updated—in particular, it doesn't consider utility-scale battery facilities at all—and he is sadly no longer in a position to update it. The license does permit third parties to provide an updated version, but he did not publish the source code. Still, here it is: https://www.withouthotair.com/c26/page_186.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c26/page_186.shtml
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    ...how energy usage patterns will change as the relative cost of nighttime energy usage goes up. My fondest dream is that they'll stop dotting the countryside with those ridiculous pole-mounted "security" lights, and we'll be able to experience nighttime again.
VBprogrammer 6y ago
I make that $20 per MWh. That's somewhere around half the wholesale price of electricity in the UK. That's pretty incredible.
cbmuser 6y ago
It doesn't matter that solar itself is cheap, it still needs backup plants which are the reason Germany has the highest electricity prices - world-wide. > https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/ https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/ It's really strange that users on HN keep rehashing the myth that solar and wind energy will result in lower electricity prices for consumers - they won't, never. Even if solar and wind energy was free, consumers would still have to pay the costs for running backup and/or storage plants which lets consumers prices soar. The problem with solar and wind is that they simply can't produce electricity on-demand which means the kWh has an actual market value and can therefore be sold with a profit. If a solar or wind park produces huge amounts of electricity when demand is low, the result are dumping or even negative prices. Affordable and clean electricity in populous industrial countries like Germany or the US can be provided through nuclear energy only. Proof: > https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?time=latest&country=~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t... > https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?time=latest&country=~FRA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t... Germany: 350 million tons p.a. CO2 in the energy sector France: 50 million tons p.a. CO2 in the energy sector Germany: 38 cents per kWh France: 22 cents per kWh Germany: 50% renewables in its electricity mix France: 70% nuclear in its electricity mix
- yazaddaruvala 6y ago
  Here is a commercial installation of solar + storage at $0.04/kWh[1]. And it’s not unique, that article links to the cheapest solar + storage in the US at $0.025/kWh. Additionally, these are today’s prices, as per this article the price for renewables is dropping exponentially every year. And if Elon Musk is to be believed (which I do) the price for storage is also dropping exponentially. [1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/09/10/los-angeles-commissio https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/09/10/los-angeles-commissio...
  - flavius29663 6y ago
    storage alone will almost never be enough. The electricity is just too important for the modern societies to leave it to chance. You will have events where there will be no wind or sun for weeks. In order to have that many batteries it would require monumental investments. And those batteries would sit unused for years. You need a diverse and distributed generation network, backed by gas burning plants.
imwillofficial 6y ago
Headlines that take the facts completely out of context for $400, Alex
luxuryballs 6y ago
I like to believe that millions of years ago the people of Saturn made giant solar collection tree-like space elevator power facilities to catch all those passing rays. That is where Saturn’s rings came from.
zizee 6y ago
I think the future will be robust national/international grids, with a mixture of storage options (batteries/pumped hydro) to smooth out the intermittent nature of wind and solar. Cynics always talk about the amount of energy storage required for solar as if you need to store 24 hours of energy for solar/wind to be viable. I'd like to see numbers on having 1 hour of storage for peak demand, a robust national grid, and appropriately provisioned and placed solar and wind, taking the duck curve into consideration.
- manfredo 6y ago
  Even achieving just one hour of storage globally amounts to 2.5 TWh of storage. By comparison the entire world produces ~300 GWh worth of lithium ion battery annually. That leaves geographically limited options like pumped hydroelectricity, and solutions not yet deployed at any significant scale like hydrogen fuel cells, synthetic methane, thermal batteries, flywheels, etc. Realistically we should saturate daytime energy demand with solar, and if there aren't any scalable storage options by then switch gears and proceed with hydroelectric where it's viable and nuclear where it's not.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    > Even achieving just one hour of storage globally amounts to 2.5 TWh of storage. By comparison the entire world produces ~300 GWh worth of lithium ion battery annually ... so if we could increase battery production by just 10x, then we could create an hours worth of storage every year. That seems... very doable.
    - thiht 6y ago
      That sounds extremely expensive and not very green.
    - manfredo 6y ago
      And then we'd have to continue that production for two and a half decades to get to 1 day of storage. And we'd also have to drastically increase our battery recycling capacity to match (remember most lithium ion batteries last 1000-2000 cycles).
E-Reverance 6y ago
An additional benefit of solar is that it is the most politically stable energy source since it can be deployed off-grid. This is important because the more unstable regions of the world can sometimes be seen as hopeless because investments require high upfront costs and can't be trusted with being properly maintained. Therefore solar can enable growth and be deployed during periods of unrest/conflict.
polyomino 6y ago
What if instead of pulling carbon above ground, we inject oxygen underground, produce electricity and CO2 below ground and then leave the CO2 down there. Has anyone tried this?
- kragen 6y ago
  This is more or less what post-combustion capture carbon-capture-and-storage plants do, with the minor detail that they do the actual combustion above ground instead of below ground. But the inputs and outputs are as you describe: oxygen from the air, fossil fuels from underground, CO₂ outputs injected back underground, heat outputs sent to somewhere unspecified, typically the air. CCS power stations are substantially more expensive than the usual kind of fossil-fuel power station, and they are generally considered to be economically uncompetitive. It's probably better to do the actual combustion aboveground in many cases—although it makes your power plants easier to blow up with bombs, it also makes them enormously easier to build and maintain, and much less dangerous to work in when nobody is trying to blow them up.
  - rhodozelia 6y ago
    Economically uncompetitive compared to solar/wind 500% overbuilt? How many hours storage have to be added to the solar / wind to make a ccs gas plant competitive?
    - kragen 6y ago
      Probably, yeah. As I said in my other comment, the whole question of utility-scale storage cost modeling is difficult to get a good handle on.
rangoon626 6y ago
I already know not going to find any sympathy on this site but the truth is that something that shocks me again and again is how everyone preaches battery storage without thinking about how dirty and polluting the process is to mine the materials and turn them into a finished battery product is. How can people ignore this end of the lifecycle of lithium ion batteries? Is it just out of sight, out of mind? Same with the solar panels. To install them at meaningful scale, do people not think about the amount of mining, manufacturing and energy it is going to take to make that many panels? It seems even more absurd given the limited lifetime of both solutions. Genuinely curious how proponents of this energy system square all of this.
Manfredo_1 6y ago
That "manipulation of hydrogen" mostly involves use in the the chemical industry. We don't use hydrogen to power gas turbines. I'm not sure why you're trying to deny the existence of chemical facts: https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/faqs/what-is-hydrogen-embrittlement#:~:text=Corrosion%20in%20environments%20containing%20hydrogen%20sulphide%20can%20cause%20hydrogen%20absorption%20and%20cracking.&text=On%20this%20basis%2C%20ferritic%20steel,nickel%20alloys%20and%20aluminium%20alloys https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/faqs/what-is-....
- pfdietz 6y ago
  > That "manipulation of hydrogen" mostly involves use in the the chemical industry. We don't use hydrogen to power gas turbines. So, when you said hydrogen rapidly corrodes any metal it comes into contact with, that didn't include the metal that the chemical industry makes their equipment from? So, let's just put a "this is chemical industry" signs on our hydrogen storage plants, and presto! Magically protected! Note that one of the things the chemical industry does with hydrogen-rich gases is burn them in combustion turbines, just like in a proposed hydrogen energy storage facility. Turbines for burning hydrogen have been available for decades. See, for example, what General Electric says: https://www.ge.com/power/gas/fuel-capability/hydrogen-fueled-gas-turbines https://www.ge.com/power/gas/fuel-capability/hydrogen-fueled... "Our turbines have nearly 30 years of experience operating on a variety of fuels that contain hydrogen, totaling over 6 million operating hours as hydrogen-fueled turbines using concentrations ranging from 5% to 95% (by volume)." Off. The. Shelf. > I'm not sure why you're trying to deny the existence of chemical facts: https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/faqs/what-is- https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/faqs/what-is-.... I'm not sure why you're presenting a link that doesn't back up the claim you made.
  - Manfredo_1 6y ago
    > So, when you said hydrogen rapidly corrodes any metal it comes into contact with, that didn't include the metal that the chemical industry makes their equipment from? So, let's just put a "this is chemical industry" signs on our hydrogen storage plants, and presto! Magically protected! I'd say you're being deliberately ignorant here, but I'm really not so sure. A gas turbine spins rapidly, putting huge stresses on the blades. They also operate at extremely high temperatures. And from your link: > The use of hydrogen as a gas turbine fuel has been demonstrated commercially, but there are differences between natural gas and hydrogen that must be taken into account to properly and safely use hydrogen in a gas turbine. In addition to differences in the combustion properties of these fuels, the impact to all gas turbine systems as well as the overall balance of plant, must be considered. In a power plant with one or more hydrogen-fueled turbines, changes may be needed to the fuel accessories, bottoming cycle components, and plant safety systems. GE’s broad field experience enables our engineers to understand the impact of using hydrogen as a gas turbine fuel. Hmm, maybe not so simple. And when we look at what's actually being deployed, it's not 100% hydrogen it's a mixture that's mostly natural gas with only a small portion of hydrogen: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/gas-turbines-hydrogen-us/ https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/gas-turbines-hydro... > The new gas turbines will be commercially guaranteed capable of using a mix of 30% hydrogen and 70% natural gas fuel. Between 2025 and 2045, the hydrogen capability will be systematically increased to 100% renewable hydrogen. These turbines still mostly burn natural gas. GE says it'll get there eventually, possibly over the course of 3 decades.
Proven 6y ago
Still not cheap enough to not subsidize it, apparently!
mtalhaashraf 6y ago
The intermittent problem is the one that worries me the most. As an engineer, if I think really long term, I would like to couple water storage with energy storage. I think water will itself need to be stored in a better manner. And I would store it in tunnels at different heights. And optimize that height difference for maximum potential energy. The tunneling tech would advance faster when it serves both of these functions and things like Hyperloop.

131 points by mg 6y ago

This is good to hear. I assume location must play a large part in this? Solar must be more cost-effective in, say, the Mojave desert, than it is in Alaska. I sometimes wonder if the widespread adoption of solar is going to have an environmental impact that isn't immediately apparent. Every solar panel you put on the ground is going to take up solar energy that could otherwise be absorbed by a plant, which in turn means that plant can't absorb carbon from the atmosphere. So unless we just limit ourselves to rooftop solar panels there's sure to be some sort of environmental impact if we just switch all our energy to solar.

xnx 6y ago
Possibly, though I don't think solar panels will ever catch up to the amount of pavement there is.
m463 6y ago
I've wondered about that too (competing with nature for the sun) but I think just putting panels on the roof or over the parking lot would probably address 95% of the problem. Along similar lines, I've wondered if solar panels will start to look like pine trees at some point.
- briga 6y ago
  >I've wondered if solar panels will start to look like pine trees at some point. Interesting thought, but I'm not sure there same factors that led to plant evolution will play out with solar panels. Plants reaching up into the air was a direct response to competition with other types of plants. Presumably the same sort of competition won't be necessary with solar panels. I'm sure nature still has a lot of inspiration we can draw from for creating new types of solar panels, but my guess is that the most efficient surface for collecting solar energy is the flat square design we see today.
  - m463 6y ago
    You're probably right. Aim fixed panels for the brightest part of the day and use batteries and that will probably solve most problems. What I think is interesting abouts trees is that they can take in energy even when the sun is low on the horizon, they have good ventilation so they don't overheat, and they work no matter what angle the sun is facing. The giant sequoias get a lot of their moisture directly from the air. Maybe we could add functions to our "tree-shaped solar panels" like fresh water gathering and climate control heat exchange.
kragen 6y ago
> I assume location must play a large part in this? Solar must be more cost-effective in, say, the Mojave desert, than it is in Alaska. Yes, each peak kilowatt of utility-scale solar produces about 240 watts average in Arizona, 140 in Maine, and 100 in Germany ("capacity factors" of 24%, 14%, and 10%). I assume the number for Alaska would be even lower. > Every solar panel you put on the ground is going to take up solar energy that could otherwise be absorbed by a plant, which in turn means that plant can't absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Yes, and also it will reflect less heat back into space than the plant or bare dirt would, locally raising the temperature. These will start to be important problems when the quantity of power produced by solar panels is about 100 times larger than current world marketed energy consumption. I expect that this will happen in about 30 years. However, merely switching all our energy to solar will have an effect that's about 100 times too small to matter.
- brundolf 6y ago
  > it will reflect less heat back into space than the plant or bare dirt would, locally raising the temperature I'm not sure this checks out... the light gets absorbed, but the energy doesn't get turned into heat, it gets turned into electricity. If anything, where it's covering up concrete or asphalt it should reduce the conversion of sunlight to local heat.
  - Nullabillity 6y ago
    Some of it turns into electricity, some of it is wasted (turned into heat). And the whole point is that the electricity gets used at some point, turning into heat, computation (heat), light (heat), or motion (heat). And of course, you also have transmission losses (heat) along the way!
  - kragen 6y ago
    A 21% efficient solar panel reflects about 9% of the light, turns about 60% of it into heat immediately, and turns the other 21% into heat shortly afterwards, perhaps somewhere else, when the power the solar cell generates is dissipated by, for example, an electric motor or lightbulb.
  - 6y ago
Someone 6y ago
https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026 https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026: “A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use“ That article is from 2011, but I think it’s a very safe bet that factor is still more than 1,000 today. Also, I would think about every solar panel you put on the ground reflects less energy into space than the ground did.
griffinkelly 6y ago
I've read a few articles that these solar farms are creating their own microclimates, and particularly in already warm areas can have significant impacts to wildlife with the local temperature increasing in the range of 3-4 degrees C: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35070
jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 6y ago
One possibility is to use farmland or grazing land. You can pick crops that do better in part shade and then place solar panels over them. If done right it could have a beneficial effect on crop growth while at the same time earning extra money.
- fabatka 6y ago
  But then harvesting would be significantly harder, no? At least in the way I imagine this.
  - jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 6y ago
    I'm not sure but certainly it would depend on the crop as different harvesting methods are used for different crops. For example, panels could be built so cows can graze under them or for handpicked crops so that people can walk under them.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      You're right. Just build a "solar roof". Basically a solar panel on four legs.
- Danieru 6y ago
  This is a allowed but semi-rare technique in Japan. Rare because of the capital costs to built the panels. Certain high end plants, such as tea, prefer the shade.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    It would be interesting in northern Africa. Install soil erosion blankets and then put solar panels on top to reduce evaporation. Trim the plant growth to increase the biomass available to the soil.
zizee 6y ago
> Solar must be more cost-effective in, say, the Mojave desert, than it is in Alaska. I don't think this was your intention, but this reminded me of something I see in so many of these conversations. In discussions about solar (and electric cars) there are always people who say "well this won't work in situation X", with an unsaid implication of "this is not the solution". It is unlikely that we will find a single solution that will be a good fit for all situations. Instead we will have many tools in our belt and apply accordingly. I know that you used alaska as an extreme, perhaps they will never get off fossil fuels. But alaska is a tiny population overall. Its the main population centers that we need to worry about, not the extremes that are hand picked to be difficult.
- someperson 6y ago
  You may be interested in the video The LED Traffic Light and the Danger of "But Sometimes!" by Technology Connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8
pfdietz 6y ago
Look at the solution you get for Alaska in https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ It's a combination of solar, wind, and hydrogen (with a little battery storage).

rich_sasha 6y ago

If solar were free, but we still needed to pay for battery storage, how would it then compare in cost to fuel-based alternatives (fossil fuel, nuclear etc)?

kragen 6y ago
It's a little hard to predict how the price of battery storage will change as demand for it increases by orders of magnitude, and also how energy usage patterns will change as the relative cost of nighttime energy usage goes up. I've explored these themes in the past in a number of notes. https://dercuano.github.io/topics/solar.html https://dercuano.github.io/topics/solar.html and in particular https://dercuano.github.io/notes/energy-storage-efficiency.html https://dercuano.github.io/notes/energy-storage-efficiency.h..., https://dercuano.github.io/notes/heliogen.html https://dercuano.github.io/notes/heliogen.html, and https://dercuano.github.io/notes/lithium-supplies.html https://dercuano.github.io/notes/lithium-supplies.html. https://dercuano.github.io/notes/balcony-battery.html https://dercuano.github.io/notes/balcony-battery.html and https://dercuano.github.io/notes/the-suburbean.html https://dercuano.github.io/notes/the-suburbean.html explore the question at the household scale. More recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26219344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26219344 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26229595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26229595 explore this question in more detail, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26308189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26308189 explores specifically what it would cost for California to switch to an all-solar grid with only battery storage over the next decade. David MacKay wrote a wonderful and highly accessible overview of the topic in 02009 as part of his excellent book, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, which is specifically about sustainable energy in Britain. Unfortunately it needs to be updated—in particular, it doesn't consider utility-scale battery facilities at all—and he is sadly no longer in a position to update it. The license does permit third parties to provide an updated version, but he did not publish the source code. Still, here it is: https://www.withouthotair.com/c26/page_186.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c26/page_186.shtml
- jessaustin 6y ago
  ...how energy usage patterns will change as the relative cost of nighttime energy usage goes up. My fondest dream is that they'll stop dotting the countryside with those ridiculous pole-mounted "security" lights, and we'll be able to experience nighttime again.

VBprogrammer 6y ago

I make that $20 per MWh. That's somewhere around half the wholesale price of electricity in the UK. That's pretty incredible.

cbmuser 6y ago

It doesn't matter that solar itself is cheap, it still needs backup plants which are the reason Germany has the highest electricity prices - world-wide. > https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/ https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/ It's really strange that users on HN keep rehashing the myth that solar and wind energy will result in lower electricity prices for consumers - they won't, never. Even if solar and wind energy was free, consumers would still have to pay the costs for running backup and/or storage plants which lets consumers prices soar. The problem with solar and wind is that they simply can't produce electricity on-demand which means the kWh has an actual market value and can therefore be sold with a profit. If a solar or wind park produces huge amounts of electricity when demand is low, the result are dumping or even negative prices. Affordable and clean electricity in populous industrial countries like Germany or the US can be provided through nuclear energy only. Proof: > https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?time=latest&country=~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t... > https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?time=latest&country=~FRA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t... Germany: 350 million tons p.a. CO2 in the energy sector France: 50 million tons p.a. CO2 in the energy sector Germany: 38 cents per kWh France: 22 cents per kWh Germany: 50% renewables in its electricity mix France: 70% nuclear in its electricity mix

yazaddaruvala 6y ago
Here is a commercial installation of solar + storage at $0.04/kWh[1]. And it’s not unique, that article links to the cheapest solar + storage in the US at $0.025/kWh. Additionally, these are today’s prices, as per this article the price for renewables is dropping exponentially every year. And if Elon Musk is to be believed (which I do) the price for storage is also dropping exponentially. [1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/09/10/los-angeles-commissio https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/09/10/los-angeles-commissio...
- flavius29663 6y ago
  storage alone will almost never be enough. The electricity is just too important for the modern societies to leave it to chance. You will have events where there will be no wind or sun for weeks. In order to have that many batteries it would require monumental investments. And those batteries would sit unused for years. You need a diverse and distributed generation network, backed by gas burning plants.

imwillofficial 6y ago

Headlines that take the facts completely out of context for $400, Alex

luxuryballs 6y ago

I like to believe that millions of years ago the people of Saturn made giant solar collection tree-like space elevator power facilities to catch all those passing rays. That is where Saturn’s rings came from.

zizee 6y ago

I think the future will be robust national/international grids, with a mixture of storage options (batteries/pumped hydro) to smooth out the intermittent nature of wind and solar. Cynics always talk about the amount of energy storage required for solar as if you need to store 24 hours of energy for solar/wind to be viable. I'd like to see numbers on having 1 hour of storage for peak demand, a robust national grid, and appropriately provisioned and placed solar and wind, taking the duck curve into consideration.

manfredo 6y ago
Even achieving just one hour of storage globally amounts to 2.5 TWh of storage. By comparison the entire world produces ~300 GWh worth of lithium ion battery annually. That leaves geographically limited options like pumped hydroelectricity, and solutions not yet deployed at any significant scale like hydrogen fuel cells, synthetic methane, thermal batteries, flywheels, etc. Realistically we should saturate daytime energy demand with solar, and if there aren't any scalable storage options by then switch gears and proceed with hydroelectric where it's viable and nuclear where it's not.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  > Even achieving just one hour of storage globally amounts to 2.5 TWh of storage. By comparison the entire world produces ~300 GWh worth of lithium ion battery annually ... so if we could increase battery production by just 10x, then we could create an hours worth of storage every year. That seems... very doable.
  - thiht 6y ago
    That sounds extremely expensive and not very green.
  - manfredo 6y ago
    And then we'd have to continue that production for two and a half decades to get to 1 day of storage. And we'd also have to drastically increase our battery recycling capacity to match (remember most lithium ion batteries last 1000-2000 cycles).

E-Reverance 6y ago

An additional benefit of solar is that it is the most politically stable energy source since it can be deployed off-grid. This is important because the more unstable regions of the world can sometimes be seen as hopeless because investments require high upfront costs and can't be trusted with being properly maintained. Therefore solar can enable growth and be deployed during periods of unrest/conflict.

polyomino 6y ago

What if instead of pulling carbon above ground, we inject oxygen underground, produce electricity and CO2 below ground and then leave the CO2 down there. Has anyone tried this?

kragen 6y ago
This is more or less what post-combustion capture carbon-capture-and-storage plants do, with the minor detail that they do the actual combustion above ground instead of below ground. But the inputs and outputs are as you describe: oxygen from the air, fossil fuels from underground, CO₂ outputs injected back underground, heat outputs sent to somewhere unspecified, typically the air. CCS power stations are substantially more expensive than the usual kind of fossil-fuel power station, and they are generally considered to be economically uncompetitive. It's probably better to do the actual combustion aboveground in many cases—although it makes your power plants easier to blow up with bombs, it also makes them enormously easier to build and maintain, and much less dangerous to work in when nobody is trying to blow them up.
- rhodozelia 6y ago
  Economically uncompetitive compared to solar/wind 500% overbuilt? How many hours storage have to be added to the solar / wind to make a ccs gas plant competitive?
  - kragen 6y ago
    Probably, yeah. As I said in my other comment, the whole question of utility-scale storage cost modeling is difficult to get a good handle on.

rangoon626 6y ago

I already know not going to find any sympathy on this site but the truth is that something that shocks me again and again is how everyone preaches battery storage without thinking about how dirty and polluting the process is to mine the materials and turn them into a finished battery product is. How can people ignore this end of the lifecycle of lithium ion batteries? Is it just out of sight, out of mind? Same with the solar panels. To install them at meaningful scale, do people not think about the amount of mining, manufacturing and energy it is going to take to make that many panels? It seems even more absurd given the limited lifetime of both solutions. Genuinely curious how proponents of this energy system square all of this.

Manfredo_1 6y ago

That "manipulation of hydrogen" mostly involves use in the the chemical industry. We don't use hydrogen to power gas turbines. I'm not sure why you're trying to deny the existence of chemical facts: https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/faqs/what-is-hydrogen-embrittlement#:~:text=Corrosion%20in%20environments%20containing%20hydrogen%20sulphide%20can%20cause%20hydrogen%20absorption%20and%20cracking.&text=On%20this%20basis%2C%20ferritic%20steel,nickel%20alloys%20and%20aluminium%20alloys https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/faqs/what-is-....

pfdietz 6y ago
> That "manipulation of hydrogen" mostly involves use in the the chemical industry. We don't use hydrogen to power gas turbines. So, when you said hydrogen rapidly corrodes any metal it comes into contact with, that didn't include the metal that the chemical industry makes their equipment from? So, let's just put a "this is chemical industry" signs on our hydrogen storage plants, and presto! Magically protected! Note that one of the things the chemical industry does with hydrogen-rich gases is burn them in combustion turbines, just like in a proposed hydrogen energy storage facility. Turbines for burning hydrogen have been available for decades. See, for example, what General Electric says: https://www.ge.com/power/gas/fuel-capability/hydrogen-fueled-gas-turbines https://www.ge.com/power/gas/fuel-capability/hydrogen-fueled... "Our turbines have nearly 30 years of experience operating on a variety of fuels that contain hydrogen, totaling over 6 million operating hours as hydrogen-fueled turbines using concentrations ranging from 5% to 95% (by volume)." Off. The. Shelf. > I'm not sure why you're trying to deny the existence of chemical facts: https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/faqs/what-is- https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/faqs/what-is-.... I'm not sure why you're presenting a link that doesn't back up the claim you made.
- Manfredo_1 6y ago
  > So, when you said hydrogen rapidly corrodes any metal it comes into contact with, that didn't include the metal that the chemical industry makes their equipment from? So, let's just put a "this is chemical industry" signs on our hydrogen storage plants, and presto! Magically protected! I'd say you're being deliberately ignorant here, but I'm really not so sure. A gas turbine spins rapidly, putting huge stresses on the blades. They also operate at extremely high temperatures. And from your link: > The use of hydrogen as a gas turbine fuel has been demonstrated commercially, but there are differences between natural gas and hydrogen that must be taken into account to properly and safely use hydrogen in a gas turbine. In addition to differences in the combustion properties of these fuels, the impact to all gas turbine systems as well as the overall balance of plant, must be considered. In a power plant with one or more hydrogen-fueled turbines, changes may be needed to the fuel accessories, bottoming cycle components, and plant safety systems. GE’s broad field experience enables our engineers to understand the impact of using hydrogen as a gas turbine fuel. Hmm, maybe not so simple. And when we look at what's actually being deployed, it's not 100% hydrogen it's a mixture that's mostly natural gas with only a small portion of hydrogen: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/gas-turbines-hydrogen-us/ https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/gas-turbines-hydro... > The new gas turbines will be commercially guaranteed capable of using a mix of 30% hydrogen and 70% natural gas fuel. Between 2025 and 2045, the hydrogen capability will be systematically increased to 100% renewable hydrogen. These turbines still mostly burn natural gas. GE says it'll get there eventually, possibly over the course of 3 decades.

Proven 6y ago

Still not cheap enough to not subsidize it, apparently!

mtalhaashraf 6y ago

The intermittent problem is the one that worries me the most. As an engineer, if I think really long term, I would like to couple water storage with energy storage. I think water will itself need to be stored in a better manner. And I would store it in tunnels at different heights. And optimize that height difference for maximum potential energy. The tunneling tech would advance faster when it serves both of these functions and things like Hyperloop.