5 ms·

It’s only cheap if the land is free, transmission costs are free, and your power needs are intermittent. None of those are true in reality. The “solar is the c

It’s only cheap if the land is free, transmission costs are free, and your power needs are intermittent. None of those are true in reality. The “solar is the cheapest form of energy” is a marketing gimmick. If it were true free market forces would already gone 100% solar because the purpose of energy companies is to make money.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
You seem to have misread my comment, or just didn't read the whole thing, because I mostly agree (except for the part about "land is free" - most of the solar costs I've seen take into consideration full installation and financing costs). I said it was cheapest on a pure per kW basis. But exactly for these reasons e.g. the intermittent nature of it we can not currently go 100% solar without storage solutions, infrastructure improvements, etc. Point being it is those areas that will need to be solved (i.e. come down in price) and that marginal improvements in panel efficiency aren't the limiting factor in going to 100% renewables.
mcbishop 2y ago
> If it were true free market forces would already gone 100% solar EVs might be cheaper than ICE cars now (including energy expense over their expected lifetimes)... But that doesn't mean the free market should be 100% EVs (all of a sudden).
bruce511 2y ago
While land isn't free, solar doesn't need land, it needs sun. By which I mean there's an awful lot of free rooftop space available, and a lot of space which would benefit from a roof (like car parks at the mall). So it's not competing for land against say buildings or agriculture. Now sure, the owner of the roof may want some rent etc, but that really doesn't alter the cost of the energy, it just spreads the benefit.
- cocoa19 2y ago
  Why are we choosing rooftops instead of a central location for solar, like we do for all other types of electricity generation? At first sight, it seems economies of scale would make it easier to have one company handle a solar power station, rather than now having to pay expensive home solar panel loans and maintain them.
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    We are choosing central locations. Google utility-scale solar.
  - tekno45 2y ago
    transmission of electricity has losses. And 2 solar panels only make 2x as much energy if exposure is the same. So go where the sun is already done if the sun is above your head.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    >> Why are we choosing rooftops instead of a central location for solar, like we do for all other types of electricity generation? solar is different to say coal, because the economics of home-generation, and grid generation are not miles apart. In other words it's not like I can have a coal-fired power station at home, but I can have solar panels. Up to now electricity generation has been constrained to large-scale (hydro, coal, nuclear etc). The advent of solar, and to a lesser extend small-scale wind and hydro, makes local generation more accessible. >> rather than now having to pay expensive home solar panel loans and maintain them. Solar maintenance is minimal. (Again, not like a turbine generator.) Loans are a function of capital. It takes capital to populate a home roof, and capital to build a power plant. If you have no capital then the point is moot. As an individual I have enough capital to fund my solar system without loans. (I get about a 14% return on that capital.) I don't have enough capital to fund a power station. Other benefits of home generation include more resilience should the grid fail. So for example, after a storm, power lines may be down, but I get electricity during the day. That's a bonus though, not the main driver. So to answer your question - it's not either or, it's both. There's a lot of roof-top solar in my city (measured in gigawatts), there's also solar farms generating power. Lastly' I'll point out that distribution _from_ my house is cheaper than from a plant, because I generate a few spare kw, and the wire already coming into my hose is sufficient for that. So no new (grid) hardware is required.
- robocat 2y ago
  Solar farms (on land) are far cheaper to install and maintain than rooftop. Utility scale farm might be ~$1/Watt for installation. https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-installed-system-cost.html https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in... Residential is ~$3/Watt. Commercial rooftop is somewhere between but still more expensive than a solar farm. Rooftop has the advantages that it delivers where the load is, and there are often subsidies available, plus some marketing kudos. But if just considering land cost by installing rooftop instead of solar farms is usually not an economic tradeoff. And note that agrivoltaics (dual use solar+agriculture) is more expensive than pure solar farming: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/03/26/cost-comparison-between-agrivoltaics-and-ground-mounted-pv/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/03/26/cost-comparison-betwe...
  - bruce511 2y ago
    >> Residential is ~$3/Watt Installation costs are going to depend a lot on your location, roof type and to an extent size. My (residential) install (9600w) was around 60c per watt. Ymmv
    - robocat 2y ago
      The Lazard report is pretty reliable, some 2023 figures for LCOE from: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/04/14/average-solar-lcoe-increases-for-first-time-this-year/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/04/14/average-solar-lcoe-in... Utility-scale solar PV comes in anywhere from $24/MWh to $96/MWh Unsubsidized residential rooftop PV has an LCOE between $117/MWh and $282/MWh, the LCOE of community and commercial and industrial (C&I) solar ranges between $49/MWh and $185/MWh. When factoring in federal tax subsidies under the US Inflation Reduction Act, including domestic contest provisions, rooftop PV comes in at $74/MWh to $229/MWh, and community/C&I rooftop PV at $32/MWh to $155/MWh. It is hard to find good comparative figures with similar assumptions (e.g. incentives, location, year), but the above give a ballpark.
- idiotsecant 2y ago
  The only people pushing rooftop solar are the ones who haven't thought about it very hard. Roofs are expensive. We build them to A) hold up the most likely loads and B) keep our water. Putting a bunch of solar panels on them makes them worse at both, especially when we have a lot of unused land. I mean monumental amounts.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    I presume you mean "B) keep our water off"? I guess the viability of roofs depend on the construction techniques in your area. In my experience roof's here have plenty of extra load availability, and I'm not sure what effect the panels would have on water. In my area something like 5GW of solar has been installed on rooftops, and that has moved the needle. And of course land availability varies a lot by country. YMMV.
    - idiotsecant 2y ago
      Geez yes I meant keep out water but I'm on mobile and not very careful! Yes, if we're talking about Hong Kong or somewhere with extremely high urbanization maybe the calculus is different, but that's a political issue more than a technical one. Every city on earth has land not utilized for living or heavy ag within a very reasonable distance.
pulvinar 2y ago
If it's a marketing gimmick, they're fooling a lot large power companies: "Solar and battery storage to make up 81% of new U.S. electric-generating capacity in 2024" https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424
- SkyPuncher 2y ago
  They’re not fooling those companies. Those companies are happy to push “we’re green”. Not saying it’s a bad thing, but I don’t buy that any company is being fooled by this.
  - hansvm 2y ago
    Plus, they charge more for greener power.
  - notTooFarGone 2y ago
    Ah yeah the classic companies that forego profit to put a sticker on their logo
abetusk 2y ago
We are in the process of seeing a rapid and vast shift to solar. Infrastructure takes time to roll out so the timeframe of solar is maybe 10-15 years before we see 50% of the worlds power switch to solar. If the 10-15 year estimate is true, this would be a breakneck speed for such a fundamental infrastructure change.
austhrow743 2y ago
Do you throw out things you already own when you see that an alternative has become cheaper than what you paid?
derstander 2y ago
> If it were true free market forces would already gone 100% solar because the purpose of energy companies is to make money. I’m not going to speak on whether solar truly is the cheapest form of energy as I have no idea whether or not that is the case. But I’m going to suggest that one of your premises is wrong: we don’t have a true free market in energy — see all of the subsidies that gas, oil, and coal companies have gotten (for quite some time). Yes, solar gets subsidies, too, but comparing a relative newcomer to entrenched players makes this a lot less clear of a picture than you’re painting. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_subsidies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_subsidies
conk 2y ago
Existing power generators have deprecation schedules measured in the decades. The free market forces are going to prevent those investments from becoming a write off today.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

You seem to have misread my comment, or just didn't read the whole thing, because I mostly agree (except for the part about "land is free" - most of the solar costs I've seen take into consideration full installation and financing costs). I said it was cheapest on a pure per kW basis. But exactly for these reasons e.g. the intermittent nature of it we can not currently go 100% solar without storage solutions, infrastructure improvements, etc. Point being it is those areas that will need to be solved (i.e. come down in price) and that marginal improvements in panel efficiency aren't the limiting factor in going to 100% renewables.

mcbishop 2y ago

> If it were true free market forces would already gone 100% solar EVs might be cheaper than ICE cars now (including energy expense over their expected lifetimes)... But that doesn't mean the free market should be 100% EVs (all of a sudden).

bruce511 2y ago

While land isn't free, solar doesn't need land, it needs sun. By which I mean there's an awful lot of free rooftop space available, and a lot of space which would benefit from a roof (like car parks at the mall). So it's not competing for land against say buildings or agriculture. Now sure, the owner of the roof may want some rent etc, but that really doesn't alter the cost of the energy, it just spreads the benefit.

cocoa19 2y ago
Why are we choosing rooftops instead of a central location for solar, like we do for all other types of electricity generation? At first sight, it seems economies of scale would make it easier to have one company handle a solar power station, rather than now having to pay expensive home solar panel loans and maintain them.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  We are choosing central locations. Google utility-scale solar.
- tekno45 2y ago
  transmission of electricity has losses. And 2 solar panels only make 2x as much energy if exposure is the same. So go where the sun is already done if the sun is above your head.
- bruce511 2y ago
  >> Why are we choosing rooftops instead of a central location for solar, like we do for all other types of electricity generation? solar is different to say coal, because the economics of home-generation, and grid generation are not miles apart. In other words it's not like I can have a coal-fired power station at home, but I can have solar panels. Up to now electricity generation has been constrained to large-scale (hydro, coal, nuclear etc). The advent of solar, and to a lesser extend small-scale wind and hydro, makes local generation more accessible. >> rather than now having to pay expensive home solar panel loans and maintain them. Solar maintenance is minimal. (Again, not like a turbine generator.) Loans are a function of capital. It takes capital to populate a home roof, and capital to build a power plant. If you have no capital then the point is moot. As an individual I have enough capital to fund my solar system without loans. (I get about a 14% return on that capital.) I don't have enough capital to fund a power station. Other benefits of home generation include more resilience should the grid fail. So for example, after a storm, power lines may be down, but I get electricity during the day. That's a bonus though, not the main driver. So to answer your question - it's not either or, it's both. There's a lot of roof-top solar in my city (measured in gigawatts), there's also solar farms generating power. Lastly' I'll point out that distribution _from_ my house is cheaper than from a plant, because I generate a few spare kw, and the wire already coming into my hose is sufficient for that. So no new (grid) hardware is required.
robocat 2y ago
Solar farms (on land) are far cheaper to install and maintain than rooftop. Utility scale farm might be ~$1/Watt for installation. https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-installed-system-cost.html https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in... Residential is ~$3/Watt. Commercial rooftop is somewhere between but still more expensive than a solar farm. Rooftop has the advantages that it delivers where the load is, and there are often subsidies available, plus some marketing kudos. But if just considering land cost by installing rooftop instead of solar farms is usually not an economic tradeoff. And note that agrivoltaics (dual use solar+agriculture) is more expensive than pure solar farming: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/03/26/cost-comparison-between-agrivoltaics-and-ground-mounted-pv/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/03/26/cost-comparison-betwe...
- bruce511 2y ago
  >> Residential is ~$3/Watt Installation costs are going to depend a lot on your location, roof type and to an extent size. My (residential) install (9600w) was around 60c per watt. Ymmv
  - robocat 2y ago
    The Lazard report is pretty reliable, some 2023 figures for LCOE from: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/04/14/average-solar-lcoe-increases-for-first-time-this-year/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/04/14/average-solar-lcoe-in... Utility-scale solar PV comes in anywhere from $24/MWh to $96/MWh Unsubsidized residential rooftop PV has an LCOE between $117/MWh and $282/MWh, the LCOE of community and commercial and industrial (C&I) solar ranges between $49/MWh and $185/MWh. When factoring in federal tax subsidies under the US Inflation Reduction Act, including domestic contest provisions, rooftop PV comes in at $74/MWh to $229/MWh, and community/C&I rooftop PV at $32/MWh to $155/MWh. It is hard to find good comparative figures with similar assumptions (e.g. incentives, location, year), but the above give a ballpark.
idiotsecant 2y ago
The only people pushing rooftop solar are the ones who haven't thought about it very hard. Roofs are expensive. We build them to A) hold up the most likely loads and B) keep our water. Putting a bunch of solar panels on them makes them worse at both, especially when we have a lot of unused land. I mean monumental amounts.
- bruce511 2y ago
  I presume you mean "B) keep our water off"? I guess the viability of roofs depend on the construction techniques in your area. In my experience roof's here have plenty of extra load availability, and I'm not sure what effect the panels would have on water. In my area something like 5GW of solar has been installed on rooftops, and that has moved the needle. And of course land availability varies a lot by country. YMMV.
  - idiotsecant 2y ago
    Geez yes I meant keep out water but I'm on mobile and not very careful! Yes, if we're talking about Hong Kong or somewhere with extremely high urbanization maybe the calculus is different, but that's a political issue more than a technical one. Every city on earth has land not utilized for living or heavy ag within a very reasonable distance.

pulvinar 2y ago

If it's a marketing gimmick, they're fooling a lot large power companies: "Solar and battery storage to make up 81% of new U.S. electric-generating capacity in 2024" https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424

SkyPuncher 2y ago
They’re not fooling those companies. Those companies are happy to push “we’re green”. Not saying it’s a bad thing, but I don’t buy that any company is being fooled by this.
- hansvm 2y ago
  Plus, they charge more for greener power.
- notTooFarGone 2y ago
  Ah yeah the classic companies that forego profit to put a sticker on their logo

abetusk 2y ago

We are in the process of seeing a rapid and vast shift to solar. Infrastructure takes time to roll out so the timeframe of solar is maybe 10-15 years before we see 50% of the worlds power switch to solar. If the 10-15 year estimate is true, this would be a breakneck speed for such a fundamental infrastructure change.

austhrow743 2y ago

Do you throw out things you already own when you see that an alternative has become cheaper than what you paid?

derstander 2y ago

> If it were true free market forces would already gone 100% solar because the purpose of energy companies is to make money. I’m not going to speak on whether solar truly is the cheapest form of energy as I have no idea whether or not that is the case. But I’m going to suggest that one of your premises is wrong: we don’t have a true free market in energy — see all of the subsidies that gas, oil, and coal companies have gotten (for quite some time). Yes, solar gets subsidies, too, but comparing a relative newcomer to entrenched players makes this a lot less clear of a picture than you’re painting. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_subsidies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_subsidies

conk 2y ago

Existing power generators have deprecation schedules measured in the decades. The free market forces are going to prevent those investments from becoming a write off today.