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Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025
- mensetmanusman 3y agosolar is 10x cheaper than nuclear generation, but storage is 100x more expensive than nuclear. Need a massive change in our understanding of storage costs to go 100% renewable.
- doug_durham 3y agoCitations? I find this difficult to understand.
- MilaM 3y agoDo you happen to have a source for this comparison? I'm curious to know what the economics of grid scale electricity storage are.
- BenoitP 3y agoCost figures are very hard to come by as: * Financing and returns are spread over 60 years for nuclear, which makes it hugely dependent on the interest rate. Which we don't know in advance, and also is at risk of irrational public perception (Leading in democracies to early closure of perfectly fine plants. That affects ROI hugely). * Nuclear too profits from scale: you have to maintain an army of competent engineers. But once done, you can copy-paste plants cheaply. And raw fuel is less than 10 of the operating cost. * LCOEs (financially Levelized Costs) are all over the place and highly dependent on plugging holes in production * Chinese solar panels are state-sponsored to an unspecified amount * Chinese solar panels are produced using coal electricity, and with lots fossil heat in the process. Models for pricing it in a CO2-free (or levelized with nuclear) are inexistent. * Even calculating the EROEI (Energy Return Over Energy Invested) is difficult as you need to define an envelope. For example: do you need to account for producing gasoline from solar energy to power the mining truck necessary for your materials. How about powering it with batteries? Which you would need more mining. * Battery storage needs are of humongous size. What's marginally fine now will probably be humongously expensive at scale. If done on lithium, we need about 180 years of mining for 28 days storage. And that's without accounting for other uses of lithium. * Having cheap or expensive energy from one source may help you get more of another. TLDR: At scale, it's a system with 150 variables dependent on each other, including geopolitical game theory hidden variables; and of course the climate crisis affecting the whole thing. But maybe we can trust physics: nuclear forces >> electric forces.
- wiredfool 3y agoOther recent threads have mentioned gridscale battery storage on the order of 8-10c/KWh.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoLithium based is on the order of $100/kWhr: https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/battery-storage-costs-the-economics/#:~:text=For%20example%2C%20a%20lithium%20ion,costs%20of%20grid%2Dscale%20storage https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/battery-storage-cost....
- wiredfool 3y agoFWIW, that's a different measure -- the 8-10c/kwh is for amortized cost over the lifetime of energy storage, vs the capital cost to build it.
- Kon5ole 3y agoIt doesn't have to be batteries, hydrogen gas can be generated from solar at 80% efficiency, and storing hydrogen is way cheaper than batteries. Certainly way cheaper than nuclear.
- epistasis 3y ago> storage is 100x more expensive than nuclear. Please don't make things up out of thin air. Storage is cheaper than nuclear.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoLook at the cost of storing 12 hours of energy for a 2 GW solar install (assuming long winter nights) or cost per kWhr of non gravity storage (since mountains aren't available everywhere).
- epistasis 3y agoTake these numbers from a smaller install on HN a few days ago, $390/kWh: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38942951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38942951 And you get roughly $9B for 24GWh. Rhis is roughly half the cost of Vogtle most recently completed $18B reactor, which is only 1.2GW and does baseload, so it provides less valuable constant power rather than dispatchable power that can match supply to demand. And that's before further price reductions for the batteries from having far lower power:energy ratio (save a ton on inverters), bulk discounts, and the thigh cost of doing any construction in Hawaii versus other places. What about the solar to charge it and provide daytime power? Again, using high cost estimates of $1/W, and a capacity factor of 0.25, you'd need 8GW to supply an average of 2GW continuous power, which is $8B. And again, that's using a high installed cost, and ignoring that a major cost of install, the inverters, would be shared with the batteries and could be dual utilized. Solar panel costs are only 1/3 of the total installed cost of utility solar in the US, and batter packs are similarly only able 1/3 of the total balance of system. So using excessivelt high, conservative estimates, a solar+batter install that could sustain 2GW average, but which is also hugely flexible and can adapt to peaks and troughs in demand, is going to be less than $17B, probably closer to $12B or $10B realistically. That nuclear reactor for an inflexible 1.2GW is $18B. And then let's look at project completion risk and timelines. The nuclear reactor will take 10 years, and has a >25% of failing to complete construction, leaving billions stranded. The solar plus battery install will be completed in 2-5 years, with a >95% of project success. That's today, but every year solar and storage costs fall. Nuclear might eke out a 5% decrease in cost when 10+ reactors have been built, but it's not going to catch up to storage and solar. Gravity based storage won't be able to compete, according to any of the startups' preliminary numbers I have seen published. New hydro storage requires construction, which is super expensive for advanced economies, and is unlikely to be able to even match the costs of hydro built 75 years ago, and will likely be be far more expensive. In any case, the idea that storage is 100x more expensive than nuclear is just not close to reality.
- tallowen 3y agoI found this podcast with Jesse Jenkins to be a really helpful start to understand non fixed energy resources. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-the-sun-isnt-always-shining/id1548554104?i=1000633373832 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-the-sun-isnt-alwa... I thought that the most cost effective way to supply energy would require a certain amount of base load. It seems like this is a misunderstanding because of how much cheaper and more available these non fixed resources are than fixed resources. Energy this cheap gives us a huge incentive to change our energy use patterns to match power abundance rather than to take energy demand as a constant.
- specialist 3y agoYes and: I appreciated Jenkins' explanation of the different variability time scales. "Base load" is folk understanding and not especially helpful for planning our future green energy grid. IIRC, seconds, minutes, hours-days (diurnal), and months-years (seasonal). Meaning there's huge opportunity for all sorts of novel energy storage (and demand shifting) systems. Dynamic load balancing might use modestly sized of Li-ion batteries scattered around the grid. And thermal batteries could be used for long-term storage. The opportunities are insurmountable. -- Yogi Bera
- 7thaccount 3y agoYes, but please keep things in context. We're transitioning away from baseload, but it's a major endeavor and not going to happen over night. I think the HN crowd is a little overzealous in this area. NERC is reporting the potential for energy shortages in many regions in the United States. This was once virtually unheard of. Solar alone isn't going to fix this in the next few years and many regions still have only tiny amounts of demand that is responsive to price.
- Retric 3y agoThe ramp up is inherently slow, we’re still generally seeing cheaper nighttime rates than daytime rates even after years of ‘heavy’ investment in solar. Solar’s impact on prices is going to remain fairly trivial for the next few years. But start looking 20 years out and a great deal of nighttime load will shift, which dramatically reduces the need for storage even as decades of X0 GW per year adds up. Aka it’s not just one trend you need to follow but several.
- epistasis 3y agoThe EIA (and the IEA) have historically underpredicted solar deploys, to a comical level. They need 2-4 years of spot on predictions before they can regain credibility on their projections, IMHO. So I would put these projections as a bare minimum floor on how much solar will get installed. The true number is likely quite a bit higher.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> would put these projections as a bare minimum floor on how much solar will get installed Is there evidence they haven't fixed this bias? The EIA and IEA are in general credible forecasters. Assuming past errors will persist doesn't sound like a good strategy unless you have methodological clues that they haven't made adjustments.
- apsec112 3y agoThis isn't like trying to beat the stock market. There's no intrinsic reason why their predictions should be any good, and in fact they've been comically bad, coming in too low every year for 21 consecutive years: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/10/09/iea-low-balls-solar-growth-again/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/10/09/iea-low-balls-solar-g... (this is from 2018, but the same trend has continued up through 2023)
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> no intrinsic reason why their predictions should be any good This is where the "generaly credible" bit comes in. They're good forecasters in other domains. Part of being a good forecaster is adjusting as you make errors. So we'd need a hypothesis for why they wouldn't be making those adjustments. As a trivial example, Hoekstra's chart shows the WEO serially predicting false plateaus between 2006 and 2018. Those plateaus are no longer the case for the IEA's solar predictions [1]. Again, not rejecting that this may be undershooting reality. But if your only evidence is past performance, that's likely oversimplistic. [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-june-2023/executive-summary https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-j...
- specialist 3y agoExcellent. Witness the power of the cost learning curve (Wright's Law). Per Jenny Chase, we also need new wind power generation capacity to keep pace. If solar gets too far ahead of wind on the cost learning curve, it'll (further) spoil the financing of wind. Our glorious green energy future requires both wind and solar, in roughly equal measure. This Volts episode is quite good: Checking in on solar power - A conversation with Bloomberg NEF's Jenny Chase. [2023-11-29] "longtime solar industry analyst Jenny Chase, author of Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, catches us up on the current state of the global solar industry and looks to where it’s going." https://www.volts.wtf/p/checking-in-on-solar-power https://www.volts.wtf/p/checking-in-on-solar-power
- drycobbler 3y agoThis was fascinating! Thanks for sharing!
- KptMarchewa 3y agoSadly, wind has much better capacity factor, and works during nights and winter.
- intrasight 3y agoWhy sad?
- zardo 3y agoGetting the wrong ratio of installed green power generation means less CO2 reduction per dollar invested.
- intrasight 3y agoMarkets are imperfect - even more so when government subsidies play a major role. Wind will play a growing role.
- datameta 3y agoAccording to the charts, battery storage seems to be growing roughly in parity.
- KptMarchewa 3y agoBattery storage does not help with seasonal differences.
- datameta 3y agoThat's why it's important to have a have both solar and wind, because in this case wind generates more power in the winter.
- darknavi 3y agoThis forecast has wind up as well, just not as much as solar.
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- verisimi 3y agoI don't get why solar is so popular. In more northern regions, you get much less light in the winter. You effectively can only generate around one tenth of the energy you can in the summer - this is from experience talking to others who monitor their solar installations. But, you need more energy in the winter. People are in more, using electricity for heat cos it's colder. I'm pointing out that there is a supply/demand reversal. Sure there are sweet spots in spring and autumn, but when you really need energy, you have less. You can mitigate some minor fluctuations with batteries.... Ie you can smoothen things a bit, but you can't really take the summer's excess, to use in the winter. It just seems like a fundamental mismatch, that leaves you exposed, when you need the most amount of support.
- dralley 3y ago>But, you need more energy in the winter. People are in more, using electricity for heat cos it's colder. I'm pointing out that there is a supply/demand reversal. Sure there are sweet spots in spring and autumn, but when you really need energy, you have less. Northern areas tend to use fossil fuels for heating at higher rates, and less heat pumps.
- morsch 3y agoLet me introduce you to Scandinavia... https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/10/30/do-heat-pumps-work-in-winter-experts-explain-why-nordic-countries-have-installed-the-most- https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/10/30/do-heat-pumps-work...
- megaman821 3y agoThe answer is a bit simple. Only a small amount of Earth's population lives at north European latitudes (https://engaging-data.com/population-latitude-longitude/ https://engaging-data.com/population-latitude-longitude/). Solar is quite effective for the majority of the population, so its adoption rate will have the biggest impact on further climate change.
- switchbak 3y ago
- hammock 3y agoWelcome to the future. https://media.sciencephoto.com/c0/47/01/29/c0470129-800px-wm.jpg https://media.sciencephoto.com/c0/47/01/29/c0470129-800px-wm...
- Fauntleroy 3y ago1) That ain't even bad 2) There are better ways to integrate solar into communities
- hammock 3y ago> 1) That ain't even bad It's not exactly a step towards a 15-minute city, either
- r00fus 3y agoRight, in a 15m city this would be on rooftops or integrated in the agriculture.
- pixl97 3y agoBeing that we've not taken any steps toward the 15 minute city in the US, solar or not, I don't think that's much of a measuring stick.
- dvdkon 3y agoNo, but a 15-minute city would offer no opportunities for this to happen, except on hard town borders. Any plot of land this big in a dense city would be much more lucratively used for houses.
- marssaxman 3y agoBetter yet, there are better ways of integrating solar with agriculture.
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago[dead]
- orenlindsey 3y agoWe really shouldn't have waited this long to start transitioning to clean energy. If 2050 really is the point of no return (somewhere around then, from what I've heard), we'll have to replace over a century of infrastructure in about 20 years. And scaling is the hardest part. (we've already done some scaling, but renewables only account for ~20% of US energy, so we have to 5x that) Then, there's less developed countries, which can't fund subsidies and have unstable governments making it less likely for big infrastructure projects to get started anyways. Not to mention oil-based economies. Many of them are just sticking their heads in the sand pretending oil will hold up their economy forever. This will be disastrous for them, and I'm sure many will lobby to stop clean energy (which will only make things worse for the planet). Only Saudi Arabia is really trying to diversify. As I said, we really should have started sooner so we could get the politics out of the way and we could just be focusing on deployment at scale today.
- vladms 3y agoInformation takes time to disseminate to people. I think the transition happened "as fast as it could" given that people tend to oppose change, have a hard time understand scientific results and science takes a long time anyhow. If anything I would say "we should educate more people". Because that is the only thing that might prevent the next "we shouldn't have waited..." (for any of the problems that we could solve, but people just don't think/understand them - like antibiotic microbial resistance and other topics)
- alfor 3y agoSolar and batteries are on an expodential path. The cost is going down so fast it won't make sense to have anything else. I think that by 2035 most of the transition will be done even if we don't have major new developpement, but if you look at what AI is finding in new materials I think that the next few years are going to be very weird. Look into Tony Seby, he predicted the current path 10y ago.
- londons_explore 3y agoThe real question is will growth of solar push electricity prices down enough that fossil plants get decommissioned early because they are no longer sufficiently profitable?
- collinmcnulty 3y agoAlmost certainly, assuming the growth of solar occurs as stated. The real tipping point is the fuel-only operating cost of a given plant, which is a function of the plant's efficiency and the price of its fuel.
- londons_explore 3y agoRemember that many plants have futures contracts setting the price for both fuel and electricity sometimes 10+ years in advance. Theoretically futures contracts should never affect wether an activity is financially worthwhile or not, but realistically a profitable contract can keep a plant online even though it otherwise makes no sense to do so.
- adrianN 3y agoDon't forget the CO2 price.
- huytersd 3y agoIt depends on what you mean by fossil fuels. With solar and wind you absolutely need gas peaker plants to come online quickly and provide power during downtime so that’s not going away anytime soon. Batteries may offer some replacement but we’re not there yet. Pumped hydro is probably the best bet if governments can work out the issues with it and start getting it right.
- sheepybloke 3y agoThey've already majorly affected what sort of plants get built. For example, most of the new build plants are natural gas based and designed to be started quickly to supplement the current production of power.
- ren_engineer 3y agoI love having our energy grid being reliant on a geopolitical rival. I'm sure this won't end in disaster >China makes 80% of global solar panels >controls 95% of overall supply chain for solar https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/energy/china-to-dominate-95-of-solar-panel-supply-chain-83651 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/energy/china-to-dominate...
- baron816 3y agoThis is what the a big part of the Inflation Reduction Act was meant to address. You can thank Biden and Manchin for taking action to address your concerns.
- r00fus 3y agoWe only have ourselves to blame (mostly due to being in the pockets of Big Oil/Coal).
- unethical_ban 3y agoI dislike when people criticize something without being inquisitive or acknowledging the elephant in the room. What is your alternative? Continue heating the planet through burning oil/NG/coal? Develop solar panels domestically and wait to flip to solar (missing out on benefits in the meantime)? Nuclear?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- VintageCool 3y agoIf China stops selling us solar panels, the ones we already have will keep producing power and we'll be just fine. I feel like you're making an analogy here to 1973 when Saudi Arabia cut off the supply of oil or 2022 when Russia cut off the supply of fossil gas, but the analogy doesn't work.
- fastaguy88 3y agoHow hard would it be to include one graph that plots the relative contributions of solar, wind, gas, coal, etc to total energy usage, rather than growth in energy usage? If the growth over the next 2 years is 10% of current total, having it mostly be renewable is nice, but not very meaningful. It is reassuring that coal growth is negative, but what is the total? Negative 2% is very different from negative 20%.
- MichaelNolan 3y agoFor the US, the eia has all of this info in a pretty accessible format. For electricity - https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/ For energy - https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/?tbl=T01.03#/?f=M https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/?tbl=T01.03#/?f...
- tomohawk 3y agoThis makes me sad, as it means the industrialization of non-urban lands that will get covered with panels. Croplands. Wild lands. If subsidies were only provided for panels that cover existing urban hardscapes, it would be much better.
- jcampbell1 3y agoWe currently have 40 million acres of corn dedicated to ethanol production. All our energy needs can be met by 15 million acres of solar panels. The same set of facts that make you sad make me happy.
- megaman821 3y agoBut can I cut a maze out of solar panels?
- alfor 3y agoParking, flat roof, unprofitable argriculture land, there is plenty of space.
- zackmorris 3y agoJust so we have some numbers: $0.41 per watt utility-scale solar panel cost in 2020 ($0.17-$0.30 by 2030): https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/2030-solar-cost-targets https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/2030-solar-cost-t... Cost projections (note the 2019 upswing where market forces and installation costs exceeded solar panel cost): https://www.solar.com/learn/solar-panel-cost/ https://www.solar.com/learn/solar-panel-cost/ $480/kWh utility-scale battery cost (falling by 32% to $326/kwH by 2030): https://www.energy-storage.news/li-ion-bess-costs-could-fall-47-by-2030-nrel-says-in-long-term-forecast-update/ https://www.energy-storage.news/li-ion-bess-costs-could-fall... Solar energy will likely be stored in low-cost sodium ion residential and high-temperature sodium sulphur utility-scale batteries. This is probably a solved problem in the lab but will take 5-10 years to roll out at scale. To put this in perspective, Bonneville Power in the northwest supplies some of the cheapest electricity in the US due to its installed hydroelectric base. But it is no longer able to compete with renewables, as solar and wind prices have fallen below its $35/MWh wholesale price: https://www.bpa.gov/energy-and-services/rate-and-tariff-proceedings/power-rates https://www.bpa.gov/energy-and-services/rate-and-tariff-proc... http://www.bluefish.org/notobase.htm http://www.bluefish.org/notobase.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity Now the cost-benefit of dams is being examined due to their environmental impact on fish runs (like salmon) and the starvation of wildlife like killer whales near estuaries. Meaning that since solar is scalable, it has made nuclear the most expensive form of electricity today in terms of levelized cost. That doesn't mean that newer thorium and pebble bed reactors aren't worth exploring for high-power use cases, but that there's no way to build, fuel and decommission a nuclear reactor more cheaply than operating an existing dam which is already more expensive than solar. The smart investment today is in energy storage and AC/DC transformers. Photovoltaics are second to that because they are a saturated market, but there could be opportunities in thinner and disposable panels, especially for electric vehicles.
- hgomersall 3y agoI'm suspicious of those numbers. I personally can build a home scale battery storage system for around 280£/kWh. As in, I can go and buy the parts to do that and put it together. I can't believe they can't already do it cheaper at grid scale. That said, it might well be it's as easy to buy at small scale as at grid scale currently.
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