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The surprising inference from me, as an energy layman, is that solar output coincides with periods of peak demand. Obviously this is seasonally adjusted, but in

The surprising inference from me, as an energy layman, is that solar output coincides with periods of peak demand. Obviously this is seasonally adjusted, but in an era when the Saudis have solar contracts being supplied for $10USD/MWh [0], the potential profits for a solar provider at periods of peak demand seem more than sufficient to encourage investment, especially with interest rates still at a historic low for big capital projects. So, what gives? Where's the solar? [0] https://reneweconomy.com.au/saudi-solar-plant-locks-in-new-record-low-price-for-power-1-04c-kwh/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/saudi-solar-plant-locks-in-new-r...

maxerickson 4y ago
Solar capacity in Texas tripled since last summer. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/heat-energy-crisis-would-be-worse-without-solar/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/heat-ener...
- dvasdekis 4y ago
  Thanks! Makes sense if it's being built as fast as possible given the number of workers available for installation.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Solar is actually super super hard to install right now, because tariffs are in an uncertain space, so nobody knows if, should they import, if they are are going to get a bill in the next 12 months for past sales that's 1x-2x the cost of the import (I forget the exact factor). This sort of protectionism isn't even buying us a bunch of local solar panel production, unfortunately. I'm not a free-market purist, and am in favor of protectionist tariffs to build a nascent industry, but this is not a way to do to it and we are only harming our installer industry with these terrible forms of tariffs and uncertainty. Edit: here's an article from a little while ago on this https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-solar-industry-warns-slowdown-due-supply-chain-disruptions-tariff-uncertainty-2022-04-28/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-solar-industry-warns-slo...
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      There’s about 100GW of solar generation in ERCOT’s interconnect queue at the moment. If there is uncertainty, utility scale developers aren’t signaling it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071998 > As of 30 September [2021] developers had 100.3GW of solar capacity in the queue, 42.4GW of utility-scale battery storage, 22.5GW of wind, 13.5GW of natural gas and minor amounts of other technologies such as biomass. For comparison, ERCOT has a maximum capacity of 15GW of coal generation, and 65GW of fossil gas generation (per electricitymap.org, which sources zone capacity data in the US from US EIA-860 reporting).
      - epistasis 4y ago
        Well if you are a solar developer it makes sense to get in line in the interconnection queue and hope that this stupid tariff stuff gets sorted out before it's time to actually buy all the panels. But I bet we'd have a lot more installed all over the US if it weren't for this.
        toomuchtodo 4y ago
        > But I bet we'd have a lot more installed all over the US if it weren't for this. Agreed. Solar PV module tariffs are suspended for 24 months FYI, so there is some near term policy clarity for utility scale developers. The ITC tax credit is also phasing down over the next 2 years, so the incentive is there to build build build. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/biden-to-pause-solar-tariffs-24-months-southeast-asia-commerce-module-probe/624928/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/biden-to-pause-solar-tariff... https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/06/06/fact-sheet-president-biden-takes-bold-executive-action-to-spur-domestic-clean-energy-manufacturing/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
      - dcsan 4y ago
        Since batteries are always the issue... How inefficient is mechanical storage? For example using electricity to just raise a heavy mass then as that lowers it can produce power. It seems that would be cheap to build at scale with the chance for almost unlimited storage. I have to assume there would be a more than 50% loss through the process, hope someone on hn can comment. Maybe it's not worth it when you can tap into unlimited sunlight the next day.
- conradev 4y ago
  Another factor for building solar right this moment is that the price of polysilicon has jumped to the point where large projects are potentially at risk of cost overruns/delays. Growing pains. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-22/china-is-preparing-to-step-in-to-curb-soaring-solar-prices https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-22/china-is-...
- chasd00 4y ago
  What does it take to setup a decent size solar farm? There’s a lot of cheap, flat, easy to develop land in far west Texas (Brewster county).
  - epistasis 4y ago
    The hardest part tends to be the interconnection to the grid, at least in most of the country. I think that ERCOT is also experiencing geographic regions with consistent grid congestion, though I can't recall which. That data is all public, but there are some providers that make it nice and easy to view: https://www.energyacuity.com/blog/ercot-lmp-map/ https://www.energyacuity.com/blog/ercot-lmp-map/
  - rtpg 4y ago
    One thing I wonder about is how far can you be from population centers in practice? I remember hearing that you want to be close or else you lose a lot to transmission but that might not be at all true
    - fragmede 4y ago
      You make the X vs Y call. Assuming it is material, at some distance the cost of land (X) vs the transmission loss (Y), it becomes economical to choose X instead of Y
    - Aloha 4y ago
      Long distance synchronous AC transmission or HVDC transmission is pretty efficient - enough to overcome the inherent land pricing differential.
  - Mvandenbergh 4y ago
    Grid connection, land use permissions (i.e. local planning). The latter is very easy in rural Texas so just the former really.
    - voxadam 4y ago
      Don't forget about environmental studies and approval.
- oldjavacoder 4y ago
  - blitzar 4y ago
    > ego so big he made his rocket look like a sex toy not sure if you have noticed but rockets, misiles, bullets, skyscrapers are all phallic symbols. Sick burn against a person saying their phallus looks like a phallus though
    - oldjavacoder 4y ago
      Rockets ... looks like rockets, except in the case I correctly referred to. Thank you.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ajross 4y ago
> So, what gives? Where's the solar? Being installed as fast as the fabs can churn it out? Production capacity isn't infinitely elastic, factories take time to build. Solar is growing very rapidly, for reasons exactly like this, but it's not magic.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  Also huge tariffs on Asian solar panels cuts demand.
  - rossdavidh 4y ago
    Tariffs are a thing, but there is absolutely no shortage of demand right now, and hasn't been for a while.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      It's a bit more insidious than that, because uncertainty on the part of the importer means that they don't know how much to charge. A tariff action in the future can be assessed on past sales, and when you don't know how much can be assessed, you can't even really hedge or buy and then give rebates later. It's a really fucked up situation.
      - ajross 4y ago
        That may be so, but it remains the case that every wafer that comes out of a solar panel fab gets sold, with a large backlog of demand in every market. And the supply side is responding to that by building out capacity rapidly. Tariffs may or may not be "fucked up" as a matter of principle, but in practice they aren't a barrier.
        TaylorAlexander 4y ago
        Is every wafer that comes out of Asia being purchased in the USA or have tariffs shifted demand to other countries? How have tariffs affected future purchase orders and new factory build outs? I’m just having a hard time believing they have a negligible effect when the worlds second largest economy adds added cost to solar panel imports.
Chilko 4y ago
I found this really interesting as well as here in New Zealand that relationship is inverted - we don't typically have residential air conditioning yet use a lot of electric heating so our peak demand is in the mornings and evenings, and most intense in the winter. This makes the business case for solar a lot trickier here as the periods of max generation (daytime during the summer) coincides with low demand and subsequently low wholesale energy prices.
- Thorentis 4y ago
  People need to realise that not all forms of renewable generation are good solutions in all parts of the world, just because they're renewable. I hate the "green energy" cults that shout you down for suggesting solar might be bad idea for these sorts of reasons.
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    Well, bad idea for now. If we can start storing up solar energy for the winter, then it might start making a lot of sense. The sand battery that can store thermal energy for months seems pretty interesting in this aspect. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520
    - Retric 4y ago
      Getting one discharge per year and being less than 30% efficient is a major limitation for any kind of construed thermal battery. A more viable though still impractical approach is to store energy in rocks underground. Essentially trading the need for a multi km deep borehole for geothermal with the need to provide your own heat.
- blamazon 4y ago
  Doesn't New Zealand have tons of hydro? Is it possible summer solar could be used to pump up a mountain reservoir somewhere with that energy sold 6 months later at a premium?
blitzar 4y ago
The first thing I did was move the mouse over the demand curve and noticed that it was 1:1 with something in the wind / solar box. It is almost too obvious that there should be 20-30GW of solar installed. So much for "sometimes the wind doesnt blow" as well. Looks like they are doing just fine with their wind power in texas.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
This is why some places have net metering arrangements for PV. Energy provided at your yearly and daily peak and located at your demand centers and so reducing peak transmission load? Worth far more than the 1 for 1 offer adopted purely for convenience due to how old meters worked. Yet Texas doesn't have such a policy statewide. Because a simple money saving idea got politicised and lots of people got convinced they were subsidizing liberal elites, rather than paying their neighbours for providing a useful service.

maxerickson 4y ago

Solar capacity in Texas tripled since last summer. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/heat-energy-crisis-would-be-worse-without-solar/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/heat-ener...

dvasdekis 4y ago
Thanks! Makes sense if it's being built as fast as possible given the number of workers available for installation.
- epistasis 4y ago
  Solar is actually super super hard to install right now, because tariffs are in an uncertain space, so nobody knows if, should they import, if they are are going to get a bill in the next 12 months for past sales that's 1x-2x the cost of the import (I forget the exact factor). This sort of protectionism isn't even buying us a bunch of local solar panel production, unfortunately. I'm not a free-market purist, and am in favor of protectionist tariffs to build a nascent industry, but this is not a way to do to it and we are only harming our installer industry with these terrible forms of tariffs and uncertainty. Edit: here's an article from a little while ago on this https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-solar-industry-warns-slowdown-due-supply-chain-disruptions-tariff-uncertainty-2022-04-28/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-solar-industry-warns-slo...
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    There’s about 100GW of solar generation in ERCOT’s interconnect queue at the moment. If there is uncertainty, utility scale developers aren’t signaling it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071998 > As of 30 September [2021] developers had 100.3GW of solar capacity in the queue, 42.4GW of utility-scale battery storage, 22.5GW of wind, 13.5GW of natural gas and minor amounts of other technologies such as biomass. For comparison, ERCOT has a maximum capacity of 15GW of coal generation, and 65GW of fossil gas generation (per electricitymap.org, which sources zone capacity data in the US from US EIA-860 reporting).
    - epistasis 4y ago
      Well if you are a solar developer it makes sense to get in line in the interconnection queue and hope that this stupid tariff stuff gets sorted out before it's time to actually buy all the panels. But I bet we'd have a lot more installed all over the US if it weren't for this.
      - toomuchtodo 4y ago
        > But I bet we'd have a lot more installed all over the US if it weren't for this. Agreed. Solar PV module tariffs are suspended for 24 months FYI, so there is some near term policy clarity for utility scale developers. The ITC tax credit is also phasing down over the next 2 years, so the incentive is there to build build build. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/biden-to-pause-solar-tariffs-24-months-southeast-asia-commerce-module-probe/624928/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/biden-to-pause-solar-tariff... https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/06/06/fact-sheet-president-biden-takes-bold-executive-action-to-spur-domestic-clean-energy-manufacturing/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
    - dcsan 4y ago
      Since batteries are always the issue... How inefficient is mechanical storage? For example using electricity to just raise a heavy mass then as that lowers it can produce power. It seems that would be cheap to build at scale with the chance for almost unlimited storage. I have to assume there would be a more than 50% loss through the process, hope someone on hn can comment. Maybe it's not worth it when you can tap into unlimited sunlight the next day.
conradev 4y ago
Another factor for building solar right this moment is that the price of polysilicon has jumped to the point where large projects are potentially at risk of cost overruns/delays. Growing pains. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-22/china-is-preparing-to-step-in-to-curb-soaring-solar-prices https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-22/china-is-...
chasd00 4y ago
What does it take to setup a decent size solar farm? There’s a lot of cheap, flat, easy to develop land in far west Texas (Brewster county).
- epistasis 4y ago
  The hardest part tends to be the interconnection to the grid, at least in most of the country. I think that ERCOT is also experiencing geographic regions with consistent grid congestion, though I can't recall which. That data is all public, but there are some providers that make it nice and easy to view: https://www.energyacuity.com/blog/ercot-lmp-map/ https://www.energyacuity.com/blog/ercot-lmp-map/
- rtpg 4y ago
  One thing I wonder about is how far can you be from population centers in practice? I remember hearing that you want to be close or else you lose a lot to transmission but that might not be at all true
  - fragmede 4y ago
    You make the X vs Y call. Assuming it is material, at some distance the cost of land (X) vs the transmission loss (Y), it becomes economical to choose X instead of Y
  - Aloha 4y ago
    Long distance synchronous AC transmission or HVDC transmission is pretty efficient - enough to overcome the inherent land pricing differential.
- Mvandenbergh 4y ago
  Grid connection, land use permissions (i.e. local planning). The latter is very easy in rural Texas so just the former really.
  - voxadam 4y ago
    Don't forget about environmental studies and approval.
oldjavacoder 4y ago
- blitzar 4y ago
  > ego so big he made his rocket look like a sex toy not sure if you have noticed but rockets, misiles, bullets, skyscrapers are all phallic symbols. Sick burn against a person saying their phallus looks like a phallus though
  - oldjavacoder 4y ago
    Rockets ... looks like rockets, except in the case I correctly referred to. Thank you.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ajross 4y ago

> So, what gives? Where's the solar? Being installed as fast as the fabs can churn it out? Production capacity isn't infinitely elastic, factories take time to build. Solar is growing very rapidly, for reasons exactly like this, but it's not magic.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago
Also huge tariffs on Asian solar panels cuts demand.
- rossdavidh 4y ago
  Tariffs are a thing, but there is absolutely no shortage of demand right now, and hasn't been for a while.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    It's a bit more insidious than that, because uncertainty on the part of the importer means that they don't know how much to charge. A tariff action in the future can be assessed on past sales, and when you don't know how much can be assessed, you can't even really hedge or buy and then give rebates later. It's a really fucked up situation.
    - ajross 4y ago
      That may be so, but it remains the case that every wafer that comes out of a solar panel fab gets sold, with a large backlog of demand in every market. And the supply side is responding to that by building out capacity rapidly. Tariffs may or may not be "fucked up" as a matter of principle, but in practice they aren't a barrier.
      - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
        Is every wafer that comes out of Asia being purchased in the USA or have tariffs shifted demand to other countries? How have tariffs affected future purchase orders and new factory build outs? I’m just having a hard time believing they have a negligible effect when the worlds second largest economy adds added cost to solar panel imports.

Chilko 4y ago

I found this really interesting as well as here in New Zealand that relationship is inverted - we don't typically have residential air conditioning yet use a lot of electric heating so our peak demand is in the mornings and evenings, and most intense in the winter. This makes the business case for solar a lot trickier here as the periods of max generation (daytime during the summer) coincides with low demand and subsequently low wholesale energy prices.

Thorentis 4y ago
People need to realise that not all forms of renewable generation are good solutions in all parts of the world, just because they're renewable. I hate the "green energy" cults that shout you down for suggesting solar might be bad idea for these sorts of reasons.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  Well, bad idea for now. If we can start storing up solar energy for the winter, then it might start making a lot of sense. The sand battery that can store thermal energy for months seems pretty interesting in this aspect. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520
  - Retric 4y ago
    Getting one discharge per year and being less than 30% efficient is a major limitation for any kind of construed thermal battery. A more viable though still impractical approach is to store energy in rocks underground. Essentially trading the need for a multi km deep borehole for geothermal with the need to provide your own heat.
blamazon 4y ago
Doesn't New Zealand have tons of hydro? Is it possible summer solar could be used to pump up a mountain reservoir somewhere with that energy sold 6 months later at a premium?

blitzar 4y ago

The first thing I did was move the mouse over the demand curve and noticed that it was 1:1 with something in the wind / solar box. It is almost too obvious that there should be 20-30GW of solar installed. So much for "sometimes the wind doesnt blow" as well. Looks like they are doing just fine with their wind power in texas.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

This is why some places have net metering arrangements for PV. Energy provided at your yearly and daily peak and located at your demand centers and so reducing peak transmission load? Worth far more than the 1 for 1 offer adopted purely for convenience due to how old meters worked. Yet Texas doesn't have such a policy statewide. Because a simple money saving idea got politicised and lots of people got convinced they were subsidizing liberal elites, rather than paying their neighbours for providing a useful service.