17 ms·

Solar

315 points by kmax12 3y ago

brigleb 3y ago
“in Fall 2023” my goodness this post is from the future!!!
- lolinder 3y ago
  I've always found it weird that people take the calendar at its word for when the seasons start and end. Does December 19th ever really feel like winter hasn't started yet? I prefer the meteorological seasons: https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/why-meteorological-fall-starts-before-astronomical-fall/344058 https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/why-meteorologic...
- CTDOCodebases 3y ago
  Calm down. The world consists of two hemispheres with opposite seasons. Let's cancel out that possibility first.
- beachy 3y ago
  Or the southern hemisphere
V__ 3y ago
> Solar deployment is now running at about $500 billion per year, which means that about 0.5% of global GDP is being spent on solar deployment. This figure is up an improbable 43% Y/Y What a mind boggling relative and absolute increase.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  This is caused by the cost of solar declining 89% in the last decade [1]. Batteries are next [2]. Which leads us to solar and batteries powering the world [3]. Extrapolate exponential growth of generation and storage, not linear. There is >1TW of generation and hundreds of GWs of renewables and storage (respectively) in aggregate across all US grid operator queues, for example [4]. Similar story in China [5]. (obvs we have a long way to go, just need to push the pedal to the floor; enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 2 minutes to power humanity for a year [6], and space is not a concern [7] [8]) [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices [2] https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37435387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37435387 ("Solar and batteries are going to win, and our thinking needs to adjust") [4] https://www.pv-tech.org/nearly-1tw-of-renewables-in-us-interconnection-queues-as-wait-times-continue-to-grow/ https://www.pv-tech.org/nearly-1tw-of-renewables-in-us-inter... ("Nearly 1TW of renewables in US interconnection queues as wait times continue to grow) [5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/29/china-wind-solar-power-global-renewable-energy-leader https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/29/china-wind-sol... ("China is set to double its capacity and produce 1,200 gigawatts of energy through wind and solar power by 2025, reaching its 2030 goal five years ahead of time; ...as of the first quarter of the year, China’s utility-scale solar capacity has reached 228GW, more than that of the rest of the world combined.") [6] https://www.ku.ac.ae/two-minutes-of-sun-enough-to-power-a-year-s-usage-of-humanity-gulf-news https://www.ku.ac.ae/two-minutes-of-sun-enough-to-power-a-ye... [7] https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/77565 https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/77565 ("Land and Ocean Areas to Support a 100% Renewable Energy, Zero-Emissions, Regenerative Global Economy") [8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37492062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37492062 ("Declining populations free up ag land for solar in densely populated countries")
  - javajosh 3y ago
    Holy cow that lithium price graph is astounding! It's a log plot that looks like a linear decline in price. It's like Moore's law for lithium..
    - hamburga 3y ago
      Moore’s Law is a special case of the more general “Law of Accelerating Returns.” > In my view, it is one manifestation (among many) of the exponential growth of the evolutionary process that is technology. https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/the-law-of-accelerating-returns https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/the-law-of-accelerating-r...
  - xnx 3y ago
    Great charts. I hope they update them for current years soon. I'm not sure if: the trend continued (because of technologic progress and the learning curve), the trend reversed (because of supply chain issues), or stayed the same because of the combined effects of those 2.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Very informative. Note from your 4th link I wasn't previously aware what "interconnection queues" were. This is a good overview: https://emp.lbl.gov/queues https://emp.lbl.gov/queues. Importantly, though, only a small percentage of that capacity "in queue" will actually get built. From your link: > Much of this proposed capacity will ultimately not be built, however, with only 23% of projects seeking connection from 2000 to 2016 having subsequently been built based on a LBNL analysis of a subset of queues. Only ISO-NE and ERCOT exceeded 30% completion rates, with CAISO performing the worst at 13%.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Good callout wrt queue completion ratios. Unfortunately, there aren't many comparable leading indicators of future generation to rely on (maybe EIA's 860M survey? [1] [2], but it only gives you a short look into the future). Plans are plans until steel is in the ground and glass is getting racked. Open to other suggestions if it improves modeling and forecasting. Regardless, the amount of renewables and batteries coming online (at least in the US) can't be overstated [3]. [1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860m/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860m/ [2] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/ [3] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/images/figure_6_01_c.png https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/images/figure_6_01_c...
- tuatoru 3y ago
  No, not mind-boggling at all. It's about a tenth of what is required to meet governments' signed-up-for targets for limiting global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial. For reference about 2% of global GDP is spent on new fossil fuel mining and drilling investment, and another 2-4% on the fuels (including refining).
  - somsak2 3y ago
    I would have expected the ratio of $ spent on new fossil fuels vs. new solar to be a lot higher than 4. My mind is quite boggled.
  - itishappy 3y ago
    A 10x increase is about 6 years at the current growth rate. That's mind-boggling. It can also be not enough. They're not mutually exclusive.
  - oezi 3y ago
    The figure I like to quote is that we need 2 to 5% of GDP spend per year to get to net zero by 2050. We already pretty much passed 1.5C anyway, right?
    - tuatoru 3y ago
      Yes. If we were spending 5% of global GDP on Solar and Wind now, there'd be a slim chance. Scaling up to that in six years, as a sibling comment claims, is way too late.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Jevon's paradox is one hell of a thing. When you suddenly make something very cheap, a lot of people suddenly start wanting a lot of it. What you are seeing is basically the consequence of solar changing from not the cheapest power source available into the cheapest power source available. Immediately, everybody that would invest into something else changed into solar.
tyoma 3y ago
If Solar provides up to 90% of CA’s peak capacity, why is electricity here so monstrously expensive? Shouldn’t it be nearly the lowest cost because there is no need to pay for fuel?
- ttymck 3y ago
  1. How much "area under the curve" comes from _up to_ 90% of _peak capacity_. If it read "50% of annual consumption", I might be more inclined to ask your same question. 2. It doesn't necessarily follow that free fuel == cheaper power. I'm not at all familiar, but I imagine building, operating, and maintaining a solar plant could be expensive, perhaps even more expensive than a coal plant, for all I know.
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    The best way to measure this is from the CO2 emissions estimates. These fell by about 23% from 2018 to 2023[1], implying that renewables have displaced about one quarter of fossil fuel inputs. However, it should be noted that nobody really knows the true denominator of energy demand, because distributed small-scale solar production adds up to an unknown quantity. In the spring and summer seasons California routinely hits over 100% of demand generated from renewables at some point in a given month. CAISO, which does not cover the entire state, says that in June about 47% came from renewables. Last June it was only 37%. 1: http://www.caiso.com/Documents/GreenhouseGasEmissions-TrackingReport-July2023.pdf http://www.caiso.com/Documents/GreenhouseGasEmissions-Tracki...
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Operating a solar plant is very cheap.
- aiallthewaydown 3y ago
  the other 10% …
- gvkhna 3y ago
  Yea if you look at your bill a lot of the cost is not in generation, it’s in transmission. We’re paying for the grid mostly, upkeep and PGE/SCE profits.
shove 3y ago
The data is whatever the data is, but measuring in nominal dollars sure seems like the wrong way to approach this. Did 40% more gigawatts get deployed or did the cost of installation labor account for some/most/all of that increase?
- philipkglass 3y ago
  Hourly wages for solar farm construction labor have gone up, but more efficient installation processes and lower cost hardware have compensated for that increase. The International Renewable Energy Agency says that 191 GW of solar capacity were installed in 2022: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/03/22/new-global-solar-capacity-additions-hit-191-gw-in-2022-says-irena/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/03/22/new-global-solar-capa... Wood Mackenzie estimates that 270 GW of solar will be installed this year: https://electrek.co/2023/08/03/a-record-270-gw-of-solar-is-predicted-worldwide-for-2023/ https://electrek.co/2023/08/03/a-record-270-gw-of-solar-is-p... 270/191 = 1.41, or a 41% increase in installed capacity this year.
  - shove 3y ago
    A nice surprise. Thanks for the links!
  - dukeyukey 3y ago
    I wish it were ear when an article talks about GW of solar. Like is that averaged across the whole year? Days only or night too? Maybe it's peak output? Who knows.
    - philipkglass 3y ago
      These numbers refer to peak solar panel output under standardized test conditions. The annual output of an installed solar panel depends on how sunny a region is, whether or not the panel tracks the sun, ambient temperature, how much soiling is present on the front glass, and other factors. Utility scale PV solar farms in the US had an average capacity factor of 24.8% last year: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_6_07_b https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... These solar farms totaled 64.219 gigawatts of peak capacity and generated 139,670 gigawatt-hours of energy, equivalent to running at peak output for 24.8% of the year. The International Renewable Energy Agency also collates statistics about global electricity generation from renewable energy sources. These numbers take longer to publish than the capacity numbers, since they're more complicated to gather, but you can see the latest update here with numbers for 2021: "Renewable energy highlights, 3 July 2023" https://mc-cd8320d4-36a1-40ac-83cc-3389-cdn-endpoint.azureedge.net/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2023/Jul/Renewable_energy_highlights_July_2023.pdf?rev=61160fc74ada4f0daa670f5003820602&hash=2AAF8D76203C02D849633E37F6F06243 https://mc-cd8320d4-36a1-40ac-83cc-3389-cdn-endpoint.azureed... In 2021, global solar electricity output increased by almost 23%, growing by 191 terawatt hours. The full 440 page IRENA report with stats on both peak capacity and actual production through 2021 is available here: https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Jul/Renewable-energy-statistics-2023 https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Jul/Renewable-energy...
kmax12 3y ago
> At peak, renewables provide up to ~90% of California's electricity In fact, renewable generation regularly hit more than 100% of load in California during April and June of this year. The peak was 132% of load [0]! How can generation be more than 100% of load? California was exporting power to other regions. We track all this data and more across the United States at Grid Status: https://www.gridstatus.io/home https://www.gridstatus.io/home [0] https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso?record=Maximum%20Renewables%20To%20Load%20Ratio https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso?record=Maximum%20Ren...
- jandrese 3y ago
  This seems like a good thing. Export sun power from sunny parts of the US to less sunny parts.
  - jamiek88 3y ago
    Yep. It’s why the Texas situation is so silly.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      It's possible to still net lose money by exporting power. So much so that it might even still make sense to not do it even after a catastrophic failure every decade or two. The actual calculation will need to be done by those who have the figures and exact costs handy.
      - jamiek88 3y ago
        Who the hell was talking about the marginal profits when the clear alternative is ‘occasional catastrophe’. What a ghoulish, inhumane, MBA (but i repeat myself) perspective.
        MichaelZuo 3y ago
        > Who the hell was talking about the marginal profits when the clear alternative is ‘occasional catastrophe’. You are the first to bring up 'marginal profits', so it seems like arguing against your own idea, or at best a self-imagined strawman. Did you intend to reply to the post instead? Though the closest in what Patrick wrote is still not this concept.
justicz 3y ago
Hope it's cool for me to plug this here -- I'm one of the cofounders of a YC-backed startup working on robots that build large-scale solar farms! We basically stick a bunch of industrial robot arms in a shipping container and use them to build solar fields out in the middle of the desert. https://chargerobotics.com/ https://chargerobotics.com/ (we have an open software engineer role for the factory, email in my profile if you want to chat! team is currently 7 people)
- simonw 3y ago
  Since you work professionally with robot arms... I've always thought that it would be cool to run a robot arm museum, showcasing industrial robot arms from different periods - 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, etc. As far as I can tell the first one was Unimate in 1961: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unimate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unimate But... I don't have a feel for how many of these things actually exist out there. Do collections already exist? What happens to a robot arm once it becomes obsolete?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - zellyn 3y ago
    This sounds like something lcamtuf might be interested in…
  - rtkwe 3y ago
    Older and prototype arms are sadly often scrapped past a certain point, there's just limited use for an ancient arm with it's associated ancient control systems (often a bigger issue to keep running than the actual arms as you're dealing with real time operating systems that are tricky to run outside of their original equipment.
- leesec 3y ago
  Cool idea!
- philipkglass 3y ago
mirchiseth 3y ago
It's almost as if everything on this earth is a reflection of Sun. We finally figured out how to harvest it at scale without depending on nature in the middle.
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  Heck, the next big revolution will probably be solar + agriculture dual land use, since you don't need all the sun's energy for plant growth during the day. It might even lead to higher yields because the solar panels might integrate led lighting for growing in the night.
  - eternityforest 3y ago
    So the plants get "saturated" and don't want more than a certain amount of light per hour? Growing at night outdoors seems like the kind of light pollution that would harm something and anger someone, but not unlikely anyway... Do we really need more yields? I thought we made enough food for everyone already and it's just distribution at this point?
    - invalidname 3y ago
      Some specific crops grow better in the shade and the bonus is that they cool the air around them. That improves the efficiency of the solar panel. It's a win-win all around. The one challenge is getting the mechanized equipment of industrial farming around the panels without damaging them. There are companies working on improving that too.
    - suoduandao3 3y ago
      Some plants can indeed get saturated (they tend to tuck their leaves in past that point), but I could imagine more serious savings from the practice if the partial shading from solar installations reduces evaporation. In most places (particularly those where solar is most profitable) agriculture is limited by availability of water, so anything preventing evaporation is a potential boon.
    - 3y ago
llimos 3y ago
I hope we can also make the cultural shift towards the goal being clean, plentiful supply as opposed to constrained demand.
- ricardo81 3y ago
  Load shifting would certainly help achieve the goal
- mrshadowgoose 3y ago
  Couldn't agree more. We have so much untapped clean power radiating down onto our planet in the form of solar energy. Enough to provide every single human being with an energy budget far far in excess of a typical American. Yet so many people only fixate on the "solution" of "you must use less and have a shittier, less-comfortable life, there is no other way!". We are a civilization that fundamentally requires energy for all our wants and needs. People need to get over that and focus on gathering energy cleanly.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- suoduandao3 3y ago
  If energy is like money, then this is the old 'increase your income or decrease your expenses' dilemma. Increasing income is naturally the more desirable option, decreasing expenses can still be a reasonable temporary measure until you can get that promotion/career change/side hustle off the ground.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    If energy is like money, demand will always increase to be just slightly over supply.
    - suoduandao2 3y ago
      Or decrease to be just slightly over supply. We don’t like to think about it but the current energy mix plus geopolitical factors make that a distinct possibility.
jwitchel 3y ago
Despite these very exciting data points you can watch California systematically push against these trends: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/new-california-rules-would-crush-rooftop-solar-for-renters https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/new-california-ru...
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
  Yeah, I also find the NEM changes pretty hard to understand: if the goal is to shift as many people to solar as possible, why cut the incentives right when they’re starting to produce meaningful results.
  - tonyarkles 3y ago
    > why cut the incentives right when they’re starting to produce meaningful results Because it's unsustainable and every rooftop solar installation that has net metering causes electricity to be more expensive for everyone. The same time your rooftop system is producing its peak capacity is likely to be the same time the nearby grid-scale solar plants are producing at peak capacity, but the utility is forced to pay you retail price for the power you're producing when they'd rather get it at wholesale price from the larger facilities.
    - beembeem 3y ago
      A few comments: Your comment assumes that the utility needs to be using up lots of land to power customers. Rooftop solar is far more efficient and there is no extra transmission required. Utilities don't need to consume vast tracts of land just to provide power to customers. > retail price Utilities in California (by law) already deduct fees out of this, so it's not reimbursed at full retail rate anyway under old NEM rules. There's also an absolutely massive gap between retail and wholesale rates that could be explored.
      - tonyarkles 3y ago
        If what you're proposing about rooftop solar being more efficient was true, why wouldn't the utilities just pay to roll that out to residential customers? E.g. the utility pays to install the panels on your roof and then you get a discount on your electricity to pay for the "roof lease"?
photochemsyn 3y ago
Youtube's premier economist/deadpan comedian, Patrick Boyle had an interesting video on 'Electrify Everything' a few weeks ago. It could be seen as pessimistic but I think its a fairly realistic view of the costs involved in moving away from gas and oil for transportation and household & industrial energy demand. In particular, grid capacity is going to have to at least double, if not triple. Perhaps he underestimates a push towards more efficiency (i.e. a one-to-one replacement of relatively inefficient fossil fuel-powered devices in terms of energy usage is an overestimate of demand, I think), but there's little doubt that the price of grid improvements and battery storage is going to at least match the costs of the primary wind/solar energy generation systems: https://youtu.be/w4WfbqE5elk https://youtu.be/w4WfbqE5elk Technologically a complete transition to renewables is entirely plausible, but it's a mistake to try to play down the scale of effort needed - but this doesn't mean it's not possible. Look at the > $10 trillion in global oil infrastructure for comparison - offshore oil rigs, continent-spanning pipelines, gargantuan refinery complexes, a huge fleet of ocean-travelling oil & LNG tankers, etc. Of course replacing all that is going to be a major effort, requiring a significant diversion of civilizational resources to the task.
- rtpg 3y ago
  for transportation, there is one kind of out: synthetic fuel. It's 3x the cost of normal fuel at the moment, but in exchange you get a very dense form of energy storage that can be used with a lot of existing infrastructure.
thomascgalvin 3y ago
I wish home solar was more ... trustworthy? I've looked into having rooftop solar installed a number of times, and every time I've walked away with the feeling that I don't know enough to know what to watch out for, and that there was a high probability that any company I dealt with would be trying to take advantage of my ignorance.
- onethought 3y ago
  100% true. And you are right. They have the same vibe as car mechanics. Also Panels, inverters and batteries are all quite different and have varied pros and cons and installers are typically getting kick backs from specific suppliers so their advice is not impartial
- cbhl 3y ago
  If you have a backyard (or a balcony) I'd start with a single solar panel and "portable solar generator" off of Amazon. For about $500 (admittedly terrible $/kWh) I felt like I got a much better intuition about things like "solar panels generate ~no power in partial shade" and "power output from a solar panel changes from month to month" which can help you in your decision-making. It's not obvious to me that rooftop solar panels will still pay for themselves (in the past there were subsidized rates that made the math work better) but being able to run off batteries+solar "microgrid" in a power outage for a few hours is a quality-of-life improvement that I'd consider for the right price. (There's some of this in corporate offices, luxury apartments, etc.)
  - itsrobforreal 3y ago
    During the pandemic I built a number of simple indoor solar systems, setting panels in the lower part of my windows (I keep the shades open at the top) and hooking up to either a homegrown controller/battery/inverter system or a jackery. The jackery is roughly 30% more expensive but feels a lot less fragile than my homemade stuff, and I've moved all my device charging (tablet/phone/power tool battery) charging over to these systems. It was a fun project! Cabling is always the part that sneaks up on you so make sure to plan out the cabling / what plug types you want / crimp or buy / etc. ahead of time.
csours 3y ago
It seems like the neighborhood is the sweet spot for battery deployments - Easier to spread capital allocation, Lower stress on transmission lines. Are any organizations working on neighborhood storage in a big way?
- somethoughts 3y ago
  There was one retirement community in Florida that was talking about this: https://babcockranch.com/our-vision/core-initiatives/ https://babcockranch.com/our-vision/core-initiatives/ "In partnership with Florida Power & Light, Babcock Ranch houses the FPL Babcock Ranch Solar Energy Center and FPL Babcock Preserve Solar Energy Center on 870 acres of land. Each one is capable of generating 75 MW of clean energy, for a combined total of 150 MW capacity and 680,000 solar panels. The FPL Babcock Ranch Solar Energy Center ensures that the net production of clean, renewable energy at Babcock Ranch exceeds the total amount the town consumes. Another exciting part Babcock Ranch’s clean energy program? We house the largest solar-plus-storage system operating in the U.S. today. Created by FPL, these ten large gray steel battery storage units can store 1 megawatt of power and discharge for 4 hours. The new battery storage system ensures a steady supply of power on partly cloudy days and at night." Small Florida community aims for energy independence by harnessing the power of the sun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7TrBu_uEhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7TrBu_uEhI
gumby 3y ago
> If one takes at face value the estimate that the world will deploy 300–400 GW of solar in 2023 (IEA), and that 1 MW of solar =~ 5 acres, we're deploying roughly 3–4 acres of solar per minute. The thing about solar is location, location, and location. The annual average GHI in the Mojave is over 6 kWh/m2/day while in Alaska it's under 3. Interestingly, Germany, who funded a big push into Solar, has the solar resource of Alaska. So you can't derive the area or cost from a unidimensional installation chart.
throwaway892238 3y ago
Lots of people on HN only talking about solar recently. Solar will not solve all our energy needs. - Batteries are not cheap, nor renewable. Just because there may be advances in the future does not mean batteries are going to always be cheap and freely available. They are also currently quite dangerous to deal with. - A society based on only solar would have to reduce its power needs in winter, or increase its solar generation capacity to account for winter losses. (Winter losses is largely the shorter daylight hours, but also snow in northern climates) - Solar only works under ideal conditions, which is to say, in daylight, without clouds, smoke, ash, snow, etc. Even if you have batteries to account for occasional environmental losses, those batteries probably won't last for weeks on end in the event of the more bizarre weather that climate change is bringing. - At some point, people run out of land to put panels on. Geography and legal/political boundaries around the world vary. Sometimes there just won't be enough land. - A lot of the cheap manufacturing is centered in one or two countries, which creates a political and economic disadvantage to the rest, if they become over-dependent on this energy generation method. Look at what's happened recently from a loss of access to cheap natural gas. - Transmission/distribution/management is still a significant challenge which is not solved; you can have all the solar generation you'll ever need and still have power shortages.
- gumby 3y ago
  Who is advocating a solar-only future? Whom are you arguing with?
  - its_ethan 3y ago
    No one is proposing a solar-only future, and this guy's comment isn't arguing against that... His comment points out valid concerns for a future that appears to be trending in the direction of relying more and more on solar power - these are real concerns even if solar accounts for ~20% of all power generation, not some 100% solar-only future. It's a reminder that solar power is not some silver bullet solution to energy generation.
    - reducesuffering 3y ago
advy 3y ago
> In Spain, electricity provided by solar increased 8 percentage points Y/Y, from 16% to 24%. This increase is only for the month of July, not Y/Y.
thelastgallon 3y ago
Module prices are now $0.130/W - $0.151/W: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/09/08/china-solar-module-prices-dive-to-record-low/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/09/08/china-solar-module-pr... This is less than the 2030 projections of $0.17/W for modules: https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/2030-solar-cost-targets https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/2030-solar-cost-t... Related, China adds enough new solar and wind every year to cover the total electricity use of many major economies such as Australia and the UK: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-renewables-2023 https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-renewables-2...
rj45jackattack 3y ago
Can an American explain to me why there are so many solar scams in the USA? I'm about to bring my 20,000W rooftop array online. In my country I simply got quotes from local professionals and it was painless. I picked the best system that met my needs and they installed within weeks.
- standardUser 3y ago
  You know how haggling is accepted in some countries as part of doing business? In the US, small businesses scamming consumers if simply part of doing business. It's up to the consumer if they want to spend their time getting competing quotes or finding trusted referrals. But for a lot of people, a lot of the time, it's just easier to pay the premium even though you know you're getting ripped off. You'll find this in auto repair, landscaping, construction, plumbers and electricians, even web developers!
- _ea1k 3y ago
  In the US, it is really hard to sell solar in a lot of places. This can be true even for houses where it would obviously be useful and even when incentives make it so obvious that anyone _should_ do it. Companies minimize their sales cost by using the lowest cost, most effective salesmen that they can find and don't monitor them very much. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ones that you hear from the most are the ones that you almost certainly shouldn't do business with. I feel like there should be some term for this kind of market, where the worst of the worst natural rise to the top for periods of time.

Solar

315 points by kmax12 3y ago

brigleb 3y ago

“in Fall 2023” my goodness this post is from the future!!!

lolinder 3y ago
I've always found it weird that people take the calendar at its word for when the seasons start and end. Does December 19th ever really feel like winter hasn't started yet? I prefer the meteorological seasons: https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/why-meteorological-fall-starts-before-astronomical-fall/344058 https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/why-meteorologic...
CTDOCodebases 3y ago
Calm down. The world consists of two hemispheres with opposite seasons. Let's cancel out that possibility first.
beachy 3y ago
Or the southern hemisphere

V__ 3y ago

> Solar deployment is now running at about $500 billion per year, which means that about 0.5% of global GDP is being spent on solar deployment. This figure is up an improbable 43% Y/Y What a mind boggling relative and absolute increase.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
This is caused by the cost of solar declining 89% in the last decade [1]. Batteries are next [2]. Which leads us to solar and batteries powering the world [3]. Extrapolate exponential growth of generation and storage, not linear. There is >1TW of generation and hundreds of GWs of renewables and storage (respectively) in aggregate across all US grid operator queues, for example [4]. Similar story in China [5]. (obvs we have a long way to go, just need to push the pedal to the floor; enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 2 minutes to power humanity for a year [6], and space is not a concern [7] [8]) [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices [2] https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37435387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37435387 ("Solar and batteries are going to win, and our thinking needs to adjust") [4] https://www.pv-tech.org/nearly-1tw-of-renewables-in-us-interconnection-queues-as-wait-times-continue-to-grow/ https://www.pv-tech.org/nearly-1tw-of-renewables-in-us-inter... ("Nearly 1TW of renewables in US interconnection queues as wait times continue to grow) [5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/29/china-wind-solar-power-global-renewable-energy-leader https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/29/china-wind-sol... ("China is set to double its capacity and produce 1,200 gigawatts of energy through wind and solar power by 2025, reaching its 2030 goal five years ahead of time; ...as of the first quarter of the year, China’s utility-scale solar capacity has reached 228GW, more than that of the rest of the world combined.") [6] https://www.ku.ac.ae/two-minutes-of-sun-enough-to-power-a-year-s-usage-of-humanity-gulf-news https://www.ku.ac.ae/two-minutes-of-sun-enough-to-power-a-ye... [7] https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/77565 https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/77565 ("Land and Ocean Areas to Support a 100% Renewable Energy, Zero-Emissions, Regenerative Global Economy") [8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37492062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37492062 ("Declining populations free up ag land for solar in densely populated countries")
- javajosh 3y ago
  Holy cow that lithium price graph is astounding! It's a log plot that looks like a linear decline in price. It's like Moore's law for lithium..
  - hamburga 3y ago
    Moore’s Law is a special case of the more general “Law of Accelerating Returns.” > In my view, it is one manifestation (among many) of the exponential growth of the evolutionary process that is technology. https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/the-law-of-accelerating-returns https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/the-law-of-accelerating-r...
- xnx 3y ago
  Great charts. I hope they update them for current years soon. I'm not sure if: the trend continued (because of technologic progress and the learning curve), the trend reversed (because of supply chain issues), or stayed the same because of the combined effects of those 2.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Very informative. Note from your 4th link I wasn't previously aware what "interconnection queues" were. This is a good overview: https://emp.lbl.gov/queues https://emp.lbl.gov/queues. Importantly, though, only a small percentage of that capacity "in queue" will actually get built. From your link: > Much of this proposed capacity will ultimately not be built, however, with only 23% of projects seeking connection from 2000 to 2016 having subsequently been built based on a LBNL analysis of a subset of queues. Only ISO-NE and ERCOT exceeded 30% completion rates, with CAISO performing the worst at 13%.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Good callout wrt queue completion ratios. Unfortunately, there aren't many comparable leading indicators of future generation to rely on (maybe EIA's 860M survey? [1] [2], but it only gives you a short look into the future). Plans are plans until steel is in the ground and glass is getting racked. Open to other suggestions if it improves modeling and forecasting. Regardless, the amount of renewables and batteries coming online (at least in the US) can't be overstated [3]. [1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860m/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia860m/ [2] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/ [3] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/images/figure_6_01_c.png https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/images/figure_6_01_c...
tuatoru 3y ago
No, not mind-boggling at all. It's about a tenth of what is required to meet governments' signed-up-for targets for limiting global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial. For reference about 2% of global GDP is spent on new fossil fuel mining and drilling investment, and another 2-4% on the fuels (including refining).
- somsak2 3y ago
  I would have expected the ratio of $ spent on new fossil fuels vs. new solar to be a lot higher than 4. My mind is quite boggled.
- itishappy 3y ago
  A 10x increase is about 6 years at the current growth rate. That's mind-boggling. It can also be not enough. They're not mutually exclusive.
- oezi 3y ago
  The figure I like to quote is that we need 2 to 5% of GDP spend per year to get to net zero by 2050. We already pretty much passed 1.5C anyway, right?
  - tuatoru 3y ago
    Yes. If we were spending 5% of global GDP on Solar and Wind now, there'd be a slim chance. Scaling up to that in six years, as a sibling comment claims, is way too late.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Jevon's paradox is one hell of a thing. When you suddenly make something very cheap, a lot of people suddenly start wanting a lot of it. What you are seeing is basically the consequence of solar changing from not the cheapest power source available into the cheapest power source available. Immediately, everybody that would invest into something else changed into solar.

tyoma 3y ago

If Solar provides up to 90% of CA’s peak capacity, why is electricity here so monstrously expensive? Shouldn’t it be nearly the lowest cost because there is no need to pay for fuel?

ttymck 3y ago
1. How much "area under the curve" comes from _up to_ 90% of _peak capacity_. If it read "50% of annual consumption", I might be more inclined to ask your same question. 2. It doesn't necessarily follow that free fuel == cheaper power. I'm not at all familiar, but I imagine building, operating, and maintaining a solar plant could be expensive, perhaps even more expensive than a coal plant, for all I know.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  The best way to measure this is from the CO2 emissions estimates. These fell by about 23% from 2018 to 2023[1], implying that renewables have displaced about one quarter of fossil fuel inputs. However, it should be noted that nobody really knows the true denominator of energy demand, because distributed small-scale solar production adds up to an unknown quantity. In the spring and summer seasons California routinely hits over 100% of demand generated from renewables at some point in a given month. CAISO, which does not cover the entire state, says that in June about 47% came from renewables. Last June it was only 37%. 1: http://www.caiso.com/Documents/GreenhouseGasEmissions-TrackingReport-July2023.pdf http://www.caiso.com/Documents/GreenhouseGasEmissions-Tracki...
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Operating a solar plant is very cheap.
aiallthewaydown 3y ago
the other 10% …
gvkhna 3y ago
Yea if you look at your bill a lot of the cost is not in generation, it’s in transmission. We’re paying for the grid mostly, upkeep and PGE/SCE profits.

shove 3y ago

The data is whatever the data is, but measuring in nominal dollars sure seems like the wrong way to approach this. Did 40% more gigawatts get deployed or did the cost of installation labor account for some/most/all of that increase?

philipkglass 3y ago
Hourly wages for solar farm construction labor have gone up, but more efficient installation processes and lower cost hardware have compensated for that increase. The International Renewable Energy Agency says that 191 GW of solar capacity were installed in 2022: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/03/22/new-global-solar-capacity-additions-hit-191-gw-in-2022-says-irena/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/03/22/new-global-solar-capa... Wood Mackenzie estimates that 270 GW of solar will be installed this year: https://electrek.co/2023/08/03/a-record-270-gw-of-solar-is-predicted-worldwide-for-2023/ https://electrek.co/2023/08/03/a-record-270-gw-of-solar-is-p... 270/191 = 1.41, or a 41% increase in installed capacity this year.
- shove 3y ago
  A nice surprise. Thanks for the links!
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  I wish it were ear when an article talks about GW of solar. Like is that averaged across the whole year? Days only or night too? Maybe it's peak output? Who knows.
  - philipkglass 3y ago
    These numbers refer to peak solar panel output under standardized test conditions. The annual output of an installed solar panel depends on how sunny a region is, whether or not the panel tracks the sun, ambient temperature, how much soiling is present on the front glass, and other factors. Utility scale PV solar farms in the US had an average capacity factor of 24.8% last year: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_6_07_b https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... These solar farms totaled 64.219 gigawatts of peak capacity and generated 139,670 gigawatt-hours of energy, equivalent to running at peak output for 24.8% of the year. The International Renewable Energy Agency also collates statistics about global electricity generation from renewable energy sources. These numbers take longer to publish than the capacity numbers, since they're more complicated to gather, but you can see the latest update here with numbers for 2021: "Renewable energy highlights, 3 July 2023" https://mc-cd8320d4-36a1-40ac-83cc-3389-cdn-endpoint.azureedge.net/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2023/Jul/Renewable_energy_highlights_July_2023.pdf?rev=61160fc74ada4f0daa670f5003820602&hash=2AAF8D76203C02D849633E37F6F06243 https://mc-cd8320d4-36a1-40ac-83cc-3389-cdn-endpoint.azureed... In 2021, global solar electricity output increased by almost 23%, growing by 191 terawatt hours. The full 440 page IRENA report with stats on both peak capacity and actual production through 2021 is available here: https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Jul/Renewable-energy-statistics-2023 https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Jul/Renewable-energy...

kmax12 3y ago

> At peak, renewables provide up to ~90% of California's electricity In fact, renewable generation regularly hit more than 100% of load in California during April and June of this year. The peak was 132% of load [0]! How can generation be more than 100% of load? California was exporting power to other regions. We track all this data and more across the United States at Grid Status: https://www.gridstatus.io/home https://www.gridstatus.io/home [0] https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso?record=Maximum%20Renewables%20To%20Load%20Ratio https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso?record=Maximum%20Ren...

jandrese 3y ago
This seems like a good thing. Export sun power from sunny parts of the US to less sunny parts.
- jamiek88 3y ago
  Yep. It’s why the Texas situation is so silly.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    It's possible to still net lose money by exporting power. So much so that it might even still make sense to not do it even after a catastrophic failure every decade or two. The actual calculation will need to be done by those who have the figures and exact costs handy.
    - jamiek88 3y ago
      Who the hell was talking about the marginal profits when the clear alternative is ‘occasional catastrophe’. What a ghoulish, inhumane, MBA (but i repeat myself) perspective.
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        > Who the hell was talking about the marginal profits when the clear alternative is ‘occasional catastrophe’. You are the first to bring up 'marginal profits', so it seems like arguing against your own idea, or at best a self-imagined strawman. Did you intend to reply to the post instead? Though the closest in what Patrick wrote is still not this concept.

justicz 3y ago

Hope it's cool for me to plug this here -- I'm one of the cofounders of a YC-backed startup working on robots that build large-scale solar farms! We basically stick a bunch of industrial robot arms in a shipping container and use them to build solar fields out in the middle of the desert. https://chargerobotics.com/ https://chargerobotics.com/ (we have an open software engineer role for the factory, email in my profile if you want to chat! team is currently 7 people)

simonw 3y ago
Since you work professionally with robot arms... I've always thought that it would be cool to run a robot arm museum, showcasing industrial robot arms from different periods - 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, etc. As far as I can tell the first one was Unimate in 1961: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unimate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unimate But... I don't have a feel for how many of these things actually exist out there. Do collections already exist? What happens to a robot arm once it becomes obsolete?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- zellyn 3y ago
  This sounds like something lcamtuf might be interested in…
- rtkwe 3y ago
  Older and prototype arms are sadly often scrapped past a certain point, there's just limited use for an ancient arm with it's associated ancient control systems (often a bigger issue to keep running than the actual arms as you're dealing with real time operating systems that are tricky to run outside of their original equipment.
leesec 3y ago
Cool idea!
philipkglass 3y ago

mirchiseth 3y ago

It's almost as if everything on this earth is a reflection of Sun. We finally figured out how to harvest it at scale without depending on nature in the middle.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago
Heck, the next big revolution will probably be solar + agriculture dual land use, since you don't need all the sun's energy for plant growth during the day. It might even lead to higher yields because the solar panels might integrate led lighting for growing in the night.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  So the plants get "saturated" and don't want more than a certain amount of light per hour? Growing at night outdoors seems like the kind of light pollution that would harm something and anger someone, but not unlikely anyway... Do we really need more yields? I thought we made enough food for everyone already and it's just distribution at this point?
  - invalidname 3y ago
    Some specific crops grow better in the shade and the bonus is that they cool the air around them. That improves the efficiency of the solar panel. It's a win-win all around. The one challenge is getting the mechanized equipment of industrial farming around the panels without damaging them. There are companies working on improving that too.
  - suoduandao3 3y ago
    Some plants can indeed get saturated (they tend to tuck their leaves in past that point), but I could imagine more serious savings from the practice if the partial shading from solar installations reduces evaporation. In most places (particularly those where solar is most profitable) agriculture is limited by availability of water, so anything preventing evaporation is a potential boon.
  - 3y ago

llimos 3y ago

I hope we can also make the cultural shift towards the goal being clean, plentiful supply as opposed to constrained demand.

ricardo81 3y ago
Load shifting would certainly help achieve the goal
mrshadowgoose 3y ago
Couldn't agree more. We have so much untapped clean power radiating down onto our planet in the form of solar energy. Enough to provide every single human being with an energy budget far far in excess of a typical American. Yet so many people only fixate on the "solution" of "you must use less and have a shittier, less-comfortable life, there is no other way!". We are a civilization that fundamentally requires energy for all our wants and needs. People need to get over that and focus on gathering energy cleanly.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
suoduandao3 3y ago
If energy is like money, then this is the old 'increase your income or decrease your expenses' dilemma. Increasing income is naturally the more desirable option, decreasing expenses can still be a reasonable temporary measure until you can get that promotion/career change/side hustle off the ground.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  If energy is like money, demand will always increase to be just slightly over supply.
  - suoduandao2 3y ago
    Or decrease to be just slightly over supply. We don’t like to think about it but the current energy mix plus geopolitical factors make that a distinct possibility.

jwitchel 3y ago

Despite these very exciting data points you can watch California systematically push against these trends: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/new-california-rules-would-crush-rooftop-solar-for-renters https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/new-california-ru...

fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
Yeah, I also find the NEM changes pretty hard to understand: if the goal is to shift as many people to solar as possible, why cut the incentives right when they’re starting to produce meaningful results.
- tonyarkles 3y ago
  > why cut the incentives right when they’re starting to produce meaningful results Because it's unsustainable and every rooftop solar installation that has net metering causes electricity to be more expensive for everyone. The same time your rooftop system is producing its peak capacity is likely to be the same time the nearby grid-scale solar plants are producing at peak capacity, but the utility is forced to pay you retail price for the power you're producing when they'd rather get it at wholesale price from the larger facilities.
  - beembeem 3y ago
    A few comments: Your comment assumes that the utility needs to be using up lots of land to power customers. Rooftop solar is far more efficient and there is no extra transmission required. Utilities don't need to consume vast tracts of land just to provide power to customers. > retail price Utilities in California (by law) already deduct fees out of this, so it's not reimbursed at full retail rate anyway under old NEM rules. There's also an absolutely massive gap between retail and wholesale rates that could be explored.
    - tonyarkles 3y ago
      If what you're proposing about rooftop solar being more efficient was true, why wouldn't the utilities just pay to roll that out to residential customers? E.g. the utility pays to install the panels on your roof and then you get a discount on your electricity to pay for the "roof lease"?

photochemsyn 3y ago

Youtube's premier economist/deadpan comedian, Patrick Boyle had an interesting video on 'Electrify Everything' a few weeks ago. It could be seen as pessimistic but I think its a fairly realistic view of the costs involved in moving away from gas and oil for transportation and household & industrial energy demand. In particular, grid capacity is going to have to at least double, if not triple. Perhaps he underestimates a push towards more efficiency (i.e. a one-to-one replacement of relatively inefficient fossil fuel-powered devices in terms of energy usage is an overestimate of demand, I think), but there's little doubt that the price of grid improvements and battery storage is going to at least match the costs of the primary wind/solar energy generation systems: https://youtu.be/w4WfbqE5elk https://youtu.be/w4WfbqE5elk Technologically a complete transition to renewables is entirely plausible, but it's a mistake to try to play down the scale of effort needed - but this doesn't mean it's not possible. Look at the > $10 trillion in global oil infrastructure for comparison - offshore oil rigs, continent-spanning pipelines, gargantuan refinery complexes, a huge fleet of ocean-travelling oil & LNG tankers, etc. Of course replacing all that is going to be a major effort, requiring a significant diversion of civilizational resources to the task.

rtpg 3y ago
for transportation, there is one kind of out: synthetic fuel. It's 3x the cost of normal fuel at the moment, but in exchange you get a very dense form of energy storage that can be used with a lot of existing infrastructure.

thomascgalvin 3y ago

I wish home solar was more ... trustworthy? I've looked into having rooftop solar installed a number of times, and every time I've walked away with the feeling that I don't know enough to know what to watch out for, and that there was a high probability that any company I dealt with would be trying to take advantage of my ignorance.

onethought 3y ago
100% true. And you are right. They have the same vibe as car mechanics. Also Panels, inverters and batteries are all quite different and have varied pros and cons and installers are typically getting kick backs from specific suppliers so their advice is not impartial
cbhl 3y ago
If you have a backyard (or a balcony) I'd start with a single solar panel and "portable solar generator" off of Amazon. For about $500 (admittedly terrible $/kWh) I felt like I got a much better intuition about things like "solar panels generate ~no power in partial shade" and "power output from a solar panel changes from month to month" which can help you in your decision-making. It's not obvious to me that rooftop solar panels will still pay for themselves (in the past there were subsidized rates that made the math work better) but being able to run off batteries+solar "microgrid" in a power outage for a few hours is a quality-of-life improvement that I'd consider for the right price. (There's some of this in corporate offices, luxury apartments, etc.)
- itsrobforreal 3y ago
  During the pandemic I built a number of simple indoor solar systems, setting panels in the lower part of my windows (I keep the shades open at the top) and hooking up to either a homegrown controller/battery/inverter system or a jackery. The jackery is roughly 30% more expensive but feels a lot less fragile than my homemade stuff, and I've moved all my device charging (tablet/phone/power tool battery) charging over to these systems. It was a fun project! Cabling is always the part that sneaks up on you so make sure to plan out the cabling / what plug types you want / crimp or buy / etc. ahead of time.

csours 3y ago

It seems like the neighborhood is the sweet spot for battery deployments - Easier to spread capital allocation, Lower stress on transmission lines. Are any organizations working on neighborhood storage in a big way?

somethoughts 3y ago
There was one retirement community in Florida that was talking about this: https://babcockranch.com/our-vision/core-initiatives/ https://babcockranch.com/our-vision/core-initiatives/ "In partnership with Florida Power & Light, Babcock Ranch houses the FPL Babcock Ranch Solar Energy Center and FPL Babcock Preserve Solar Energy Center on 870 acres of land. Each one is capable of generating 75 MW of clean energy, for a combined total of 150 MW capacity and 680,000 solar panels. The FPL Babcock Ranch Solar Energy Center ensures that the net production of clean, renewable energy at Babcock Ranch exceeds the total amount the town consumes. Another exciting part Babcock Ranch’s clean energy program? We house the largest solar-plus-storage system operating in the U.S. today. Created by FPL, these ten large gray steel battery storage units can store 1 megawatt of power and discharge for 4 hours. The new battery storage system ensures a steady supply of power on partly cloudy days and at night." Small Florida community aims for energy independence by harnessing the power of the sun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7TrBu_uEhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7TrBu_uEhI

gumby 3y ago

> If one takes at face value the estimate that the world will deploy 300–400 GW of solar in 2023 (IEA), and that 1 MW of solar =~ 5 acres, we're deploying roughly 3–4 acres of solar per minute. The thing about solar is location, location, and location. The annual average GHI in the Mojave is over 6 kWh/m2/day while in Alaska it's under 3. Interestingly, Germany, who funded a big push into Solar, has the solar resource of Alaska. So you can't derive the area or cost from a unidimensional installation chart.

throwaway892238 3y ago

Lots of people on HN only talking about solar recently. Solar will not solve all our energy needs. - Batteries are not cheap, nor renewable. Just because there may be advances in the future does not mean batteries are going to always be cheap and freely available. They are also currently quite dangerous to deal with. - A society based on only solar would have to reduce its power needs in winter, or increase its solar generation capacity to account for winter losses. (Winter losses is largely the shorter daylight hours, but also snow in northern climates) - Solar only works under ideal conditions, which is to say, in daylight, without clouds, smoke, ash, snow, etc. Even if you have batteries to account for occasional environmental losses, those batteries probably won't last for weeks on end in the event of the more bizarre weather that climate change is bringing. - At some point, people run out of land to put panels on. Geography and legal/political boundaries around the world vary. Sometimes there just won't be enough land. - A lot of the cheap manufacturing is centered in one or two countries, which creates a political and economic disadvantage to the rest, if they become over-dependent on this energy generation method. Look at what's happened recently from a loss of access to cheap natural gas. - Transmission/distribution/management is still a significant challenge which is not solved; you can have all the solar generation you'll ever need and still have power shortages.

gumby 3y ago
Who is advocating a solar-only future? Whom are you arguing with?
- its_ethan 3y ago
  No one is proposing a solar-only future, and this guy's comment isn't arguing against that... His comment points out valid concerns for a future that appears to be trending in the direction of relying more and more on solar power - these are real concerns even if solar accounts for ~20% of all power generation, not some 100% solar-only future. It's a reminder that solar power is not some silver bullet solution to energy generation.
  - reducesuffering 3y ago

advy 3y ago

> In Spain, electricity provided by solar increased 8 percentage points Y/Y, from 16% to 24%. This increase is only for the month of July, not Y/Y.

thelastgallon 3y ago

Module prices are now $0.130/W - $0.151/W: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/09/08/china-solar-module-prices-dive-to-record-low/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/09/08/china-solar-module-pr... This is less than the 2030 projections of $0.17/W for modules: https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/2030-solar-cost-targets https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/2030-solar-cost-t... Related, China adds enough new solar and wind every year to cover the total electricity use of many major economies such as Australia and the UK: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-renewables-2023 https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-renewables-2...

rj45jackattack 3y ago

Can an American explain to me why there are so many solar scams in the USA? I'm about to bring my 20,000W rooftop array online. In my country I simply got quotes from local professionals and it was painless. I picked the best system that met my needs and they installed within weeks.

standardUser 3y ago
You know how haggling is accepted in some countries as part of doing business? In the US, small businesses scamming consumers if simply part of doing business. It's up to the consumer if they want to spend their time getting competing quotes or finding trusted referrals. But for a lot of people, a lot of the time, it's just easier to pay the premium even though you know you're getting ripped off. You'll find this in auto repair, landscaping, construction, plumbers and electricians, even web developers!
_ea1k 3y ago
In the US, it is really hard to sell solar in a lot of places. This can be true even for houses where it would obviously be useful and even when incentives make it so obvious that anyone _should_ do it. Companies minimize their sales cost by using the lowest cost, most effective salesmen that they can find and don't monitor them very much. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ones that you hear from the most are the ones that you almost certainly shouldn't do business with. I feel like there should be some term for this kind of market, where the worst of the worst natural rise to the top for periods of time.