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“Suddenly”? This has been an obvious trend for many years. Anyone paying even cursory attention to the cost curve of renewable energy could see this was coming.
by mbgerring 5y ago
“Suddenly”? This has been an obvious trend for many years. Anyone paying even cursory attention to the cost curve of renewable energy could see this was coming.
- kragen 5y agoLots of people were pretty insistent on not seeing it, though. Here are my notes from 02008: https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html Basically my conclusion (in amidst a lot of embarrassingly arrogant stuff) was that maybe silicon PV was going to get a lot cheaper, because I looked long and hard for any fundamental cost floor within an order of magnitude or so of where we were, and I couldn't find one. But even if silicon PV didn't, there were several plausible alternative technologies that could move in to fill the gap. As it turned out, silicon PV is now about 20 times cheaper than it was then.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Centigonal 5y agoSorry, this is off-topic, but: it looks like you wrote on average a page or more of personal notes every day for 10 years, and then... put it all up on github? This is extremely fascinating to me. Why? Was it worth the effort?
- kragen 5y agoGithub is just a secondary or tertiary home for Dercuano; it's also on, for example, Zenodo: http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano
- chrismorgan 5y agoMeta (since it’s your site): 26px is waaaaay too large a font size for body text; I zoomed out to ⅔ before it was comfortable. Even with a comparatively small font like you’re using, I’d say never go past 20px, and I’d suggest 18px as a better upper limit (only to be applied on larger-than-mobile devices, too). Also since I’m writing, I strongly recommend against adjusting letter-spacing except for in all-caps text. (You’ve spaced headings out.) It just makes text uglier and harder to read; the designer did it the way they did for a good reason in almost all cases. But the content I am enjoying!
- lukasb 5y agoDisagree, I loved the larger text.
- kragen 5y agoIf you dislike the CSS, you'll hate the PDF formatting I hacked together in a few days before my deadline: http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano You're welcome to reskin Dercuano with a different stylesheet that you like better! You might have better taste than I do. I hope I get a chance to see it! I'm glad you're enjoying the content!
- newyankee 5y agoSomething tells me that if solar continues this decline (which is obviously much more difficult now) and achieves another 80% drop in price, it is possibly the biggest solution to most of the world's major problems impacting most of the world population (which lives in tropics). The oligopoly of energy industry by OPEC, Russia and few other countries has possibly impacted geopolitics more than anything else. The fights of today and future might all be about intellectual property on everything new and shiny that is discovered.
- kragen 5y agoI think you're being unrealistically optimistic, despite your extremely dystopian last sentence. People will continue to create suffering through ignorance, delusion, greed, and hatred even in the face of abundant energy—OPEC was founded in 01960, at which point the previous 50 years included the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward and the greatest famine in history, the Rape of Nanking, the worldwide rise of Fascism, two World Wars, the Bengal Famine of 01943, de-kulakization, the establishment of GULAG, the Great Depression, the first nuclear war, the destruction of Königsberg, the 01918 flu pandemic, the First Indochina War, the Chinese civil war, the Armenian genocide, the last 18 years of the American Indian boarding schools, the death marches of the Palestinians, the Partition of India, and some other incidents. Energy became immensely cheaper after Watt, and all of the above events happened in the world thus created. Making energy cheaper still won't solve most of the world's major problems impacting most of the world population.
- frosted-flakes 5y agoWhy are you writing years with five digits and a leading zero when the global convention is four digits, or informally, two digits?
- vages 5y agoIt’s a Long Now Foundation thing: in order for us to have a longer perspective on time, we should prefix years with 0
- 5y ago
- sp332 5y agoYes but trending toward something doesn't mean it has happened yet.
- bob29 5y agoThe IEA didn't see it coming https://maartensteinbuch.com/2017/06/12/photovoltaic-growth-reality-versus-projections-of-the-international-energy-agency/ https://maartensteinbuch.com/2017/06/12/photovoltaic-growth-...
- wumpus 5y agoIt's worth clicking on that link -- they've totally screwed up predicting the future 10 years in a row. By a huge margin.
- Animats 5y agoBy 2020, they finally came around to recognizing that solar and wind are really happening. But they still think coal consumption will increase in China.
- ashtonkem 5y ago“We’ve always done it this way” is a hell of a drug.
- perl4ever 5y agoI couldn't read the article, it said I'd reached my free limit. But the reason I remember people saying the trend would plateau is because while the solar cells themselves can get cheaper, they questioned if the installation could. Kind of reminiscent of Amdahl's law. So I'm wondering if that proved not to be the barrier people thought.
- wcarss 5y agoWhat I've heard from some friends in the installation industry is that their work is dominated by large installation projects that will become huge money-makers for the owners in a reasonably short time frame, so it's worth the big up-front cost. The panels are quite expensive and the labour is not cheap, but when you're installing 50-100+ panels on a big box store roof, it seems the economics far more than works out, at current energy price and subsidy levels.
- N1H1L 5y agoNaah. Even HN still thinks nuclear will be here anyday, and it is misguided environmentalists keeping it chained.
- labster 5y agoThat’s not quite true, HN thinks fusion is still 20 years away.
- htrp 5y ago1980 called, said fusion was 20 years away too
- jjoonathan 5y agoNuclear provides 20% of our power today and would have provided 100% of our power today if we hadn't stopped building in the 80s and had merely kept up the pace. Congrats to solar on reaching 3% of our energy mix. I'm genuinely glad that science and industry finally figured out clean energy that met the approval of environmentalists. I don't think the billion or so tons of extra CO2 spent waiting for cheap solar were worth it, but what's done is done and we just have to live with the consequences.
- Jedd 5y ago> Nuclear provides 20% of our power today .. It does? I'm not finding any citations that support that. The largest figure I'm seeing is ~ 10% > ... and would have provided 100% of our power today if we hadn't stopped building in the 80s and had merely kept up the pace. Well if we'd embraced solar + wind + storage systems in the 80's or earlier, we'd be 100% solar / wind by now. Academic counter-factuals are often equal parts fascinating and depressing.
- jsnell 5y agoYou might be defining "our" differently. You're correct worldwide. The GP is probably correct if they're talking of their home country. Only 30 countries in the world have any nuclear powerplants, with a median of about 20%. e.g. US and Russia are at that level.
- addicted 5y agoIt’s yet another example of people really sucking at understanding exponential changes.