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Can solar costs keep shrinking?

• hiddencost 2y ago
  I've decided not to do home solar because it seems obvious to me that industrial scale plants will be able to do it cheaper.
  • songeater 2y ago
    Yes, the cost of GENERATING electricity will undoubtedly be cheaper at the industrial scale level than on your rooftop. But that generated electricity is likely to be a region very far from your (or someone else's) consumption - needing a lot of money to lay transmission and distribution lines to the end consumer. Co-locating with consumption makes the difference in total costs far closer. Very location dependent, but please don't dismiss offhand without considering the very real transmission costs.
  • geodel 2y ago
    Right. Pricing is out of whack. I got estimate of ~50K without batteries for 8KW solar setup. I don't know who is hosing whom but this is not workable for me.
    • songeater 2y ago
      That does sound very high. Not sure where you are, but guessing you are in the US at least. As a comp, SunRun puts out detailed cost estimates for their residential systems each quarter[1]. Their average system cost was $5/watt, but with 50% of their installs having batteries. So for an 8Kw system (if you were buying outright) you should have gotten a quote of $40k with a "half-sized" battery. After US tax incentives, your cost should be <$30k including battery. But yeah, if you're not in a region where they do a lot of installs, you won't get that price... [1] "CreationCostMemo" tab in https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/_eb9fb58f3a5f81478f053661bd80d49f/sunrun/db/419/4027/file/Sunrun-2Q2024-External-Model.xlsx https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/_eb9fb58f3a5f81478f0536...
    • energy123 2y ago
      8KW panels + battery installation costs $10k total in many countries.
  • energy123 2y ago
    If you live in an area with permitting restrictions, you could have your system fully paid off before that happens.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• rtkwe 2y ago
  I'm having a hard time getting past the assumption in the article that energy use is tied directly to GDP per capita and that by not following the 7% growth of the Henry Adams Curve we're somehow below where we should/could be as a country. That embeds so many assumptions about the economy and where GDP comes from, the decoupling seems more likely to be from the transition from manufacturing and other energy heavy sectors to more services based economic activity..
  • rconti 2y ago
    Yeah, I had to re-read it 3 times to understand why the article was saying that was a _bad_ thing. Now I understand what he's saying but I'm pretty lost because it assumes a set of priors I simply never had.
    • rtkwe 2y ago
      Even the graph that I think is supposed to support the assertion by gesturing towards a link between GDP/c and energy consumption/c shows there's a huge range of per capita energy consumption for countries in the same GDP per capita band hidden because the graph uses dual logarithmic axes. It's always a little hard to read logarithmic values other than those explicitly labelled but it looks like up to a 5-7x difference in energy consumption can have basically no effect on the GDP per capita!
      • the8472 2y ago
        I don't think the range matters so much as the floor. The huge blank in the lower-right corner. No such thing as a rich, energy-poor country.
        • rtkwe 2y ago
          The articles argument is about the US moving inside the range band we see though not about the US having a 100 fold reduction in the power generated that would be required to drop us into the lower right. I did the math on the data elsewhere in this thread [0] and in an outcome that should surprise no one there's a transition around 1970 where the ratio between power used and gdp created per capita changes drastically, in 1970 we produced .69 units of GDP per unit of energy and in 2014 we were producing 7.94 using inflation adjusted dollars and oil kg equivalent per capita. We just moved into a different type of economy and there's no data in the graph or article to back up the assertion that falling off the HA curve and consuming ~5x less power per capita our GDP is somehow 5x smaller. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41392222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41392222
• 7e 2y ago
  These charts stop right at the point where the U.S. imposed tariffs on Chinese solar panels, and the tarrif schedule is only going up, to 50%. This matters because the future of solar is utility scale, where the panel costs dominate. So for the US, at least, solar costs will not keep shrinking in the short term.
  • pjc50 2y ago
    Countries that impose tariffs on solar panels and EVs are really demonstrating that they don't actually believe in climate change being important, compared to good old bribes for corporate donors.
    • blululu 2y ago
      Countries that dump solar panels on the international market to kill off foreign competition are really demonstrating that... During the Obama years the US invested heavily in Solar, and developed many of the technical innovations that make cheap solar possible today. Unfortunately the people who did this work were not able to keep up with the CCP subsidizing solar panels well below cost. They folded and the US has very little domestic solar panel manufacturing by comparison. This is unfortunate if you believe in a sustainable economy, especially since a domestic industry might have funded further R&D efforts. The tariffs are maybe too little too late for saving the nascent US solar manufacturing industry, but the issues of trade policy and climate policy are not always straightforward.
      • henry2023 2y ago
        What makes you think that cheap solar panels aren’t the product of economy of scale in a country that just likes to build stuff?
        • blululu 2y ago
          That’s part of it, but America is also a country that routinely achieves economies of scale and loves to build stuff so there is clearly more going on here. Look back at what was commercially and technically available 15 years ago and it is not a viable mainstream energy supply at the scale needed to have the deployment we see today. The US developed a number of key innovations that made this feasible. A lot of this was funded under Obama era energy policy, but no efforts were made to protect the native industry from an unsustainable market force which sadly meant that the policy did not get the ROI that it might have otherwise achieved.
• hijinks 2y ago
  solar costs keep shrinking and then you have power companies like SDGE that want to punish solar owners based on their salary and set a $125 min cost to be connected to the grid
  • candiddevmike 2y ago
    Utility companies around me will gaslight you into not getting solar--bury you in paperwork, FUD, and last ditch efforts to buy into some kind of solar timeshare program. I'm hoping to see more decentralized/hyper-local power generation and storage.
    • macspoofing 2y ago
      >I'm hoping to see more decentralized/hyper-local power generation and storage With the scale we're dealing with decentralization does not work. You need to centralize for efficiency (i.e. optimize power generation and maintenance per unit of land-area). Though in this case the point is moot, since we don't have any grid-scale storage solutions for wind/solar - making them non-viable as the primary power generation regardless of price.
      • glenstein 2y ago
        >decentralization does not work. This is not quite true, because the vast majority of solar generation is consumed on site, avoiding the transmission and distribution costs of delivering electrons that would normally be necessary. Which is just one of a whole motley of dynamics working in favor of solar at larger scales: the arc of solar generation over a 24hr period almost perfectly coincides with actual market demand over the course of the day, with the exception of the afternoon/evening "duck curve", so it's actually relieving pressure on peaking generation. The important fallacy here is assuming that counterbalancing for the cycles of solar generation requires new investments, when in fact it's relieving pressure on infrastructure that already exists and is already serving those exact counterbalancing purposes. This is in addition to the benefit of offsetting alternative forms of base load generation. To be clear you are right in an important sense about a pretty fundamental thing. There is indeed a tipping point, and when we reach that tipping point of grid penetration all of the points you have raised will indeed become not merely relevant but crucial. And I forget the exact number, but my understanding is we're nowhere near that tipping point right now. I want to say around 20% of the overall grid being generated from solar power is the tipping point but I'm not sure if that's accurate. It's kind of like the argument sometimes people want to make about taxes which is that if you overtax it is a drag on the economy, which is hypothetically true but it's true at a given tipping point and it's a tipping point that we're not anywhere near, which doesn't tend to stop the advocates from bringing it up all the time.
• NooneAtAll3 2y ago
  if author is here: your footnotes don't seem to work...
  • mlinksva 2y ago
    I suspect due to the paywall. Some portion of the article, presumably including footnotes, are behind that.
• xhkkffbf 2y ago
  If labor costs keep going up, it seems like the right path for the industry is to simplify installation more so it becomes more DIY. More plug-and-play. Less skilled carpenters and electricians.
  • xnx 2y ago
    There are plug-and-play kits for installation on balconies that are popular in Germany: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/business/germany-solar-panels-climate-change.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/business/germany-solar-pa...
    • RobinL 2y ago
      Does anyone know of examples of something like this that can be bought in the UK?
      • jillesvangurp 2y ago
        Just look on Amazon. Plenty of options for people with garden sheds, boats, etc. Plugging that into a wall socket might be something that you want to verify is allowed under your insurance or local legislation. I know some people here Germany that have picked up some panels at their local Aldi and are using them. Yields are pretty anemic but they aren't that expensive either. Kind of cool that Germany is encouraging this.
    • euroderf 2y ago
      Not allowed in Finland, at least not in the KSOY service area. Lamous.
  • andrewmcwatters 2y ago
    Labor costs for installing solar are already so ridiculous that you're better off doing the parting, delivery, and some installation if not all of it yourself and then having a licensed electrician just finish the connection to your main circuit breaker.
• kkfx 2y ago
  The issues for p.v. are mainly two: - one is speculation, because yes panels get cheaper, so inverters and batteries, but prices to the customers AUGMENT more and more, and current prices for private, domestic p.v., at least in the EU, it's so high that's a nonsense installing them. Personally, since in my country it legal, a thing NOT so common, I've build a small domestic system for 11.500€ while the cheapest offer was a bit more than 30.000€ for essentially the same setup, worst than mine; - the other is again speculation on many sides, one of the most prominent the push toward utility-run p.v. witch is UNSUSTAINABLE, because it makes the load to large classic power plant vary way too quickly and too much to keep the frequency stable because we can't make enough grid storage and for such usage batteries life span it's way too low, p.v. works very well for self-consumption, with domestic storage as a grid backup, but not more. If we do not state clearly: the service model where very few own nearly all it's incompatible with the Green New Deal, we have two options: killing large finance capitalism model or falling to implement the New Deal plunging from the first to the third world countries. I'm damn serious.
  • mjamesaustin 2y ago
    I question your assumptions about grid storage. The cost of storage has been plummeting alongside the cost of solar, and battery lifespans are a non-issue when capacity is not a factor. A battery storage facility that has lost 30% of its capacity after 10 years of operation is still functional with that lower capacity. Compare this to something like a car that has much more limited function with a lowered capacity.
    • kkfx 2y ago
      It doesn't work like that. The California failure is a good example. So far energy storage can just do a day-to-day backup for homes and some non-energy-intensive business activities, for others just few hours. No more. At grid scale storage is only a quick buffer to compensate renewables fluctuations waiting for classic power plants to regulate their output. Even at current Chinese prices a re-backed grid is just a dream and a nightmare only those who do not know electricity could think it's doable, while it's perfectly possible converge to electricity as we have converged to IP, a single tech for nearly all, not the cheapest but the most universal, that on scale means doing more with less, or implementing the new deal, with self-consumption and small scale storage, so we can shift our loads (and we have very sensible economical incentives to do so) as much as possible augmenting the usage of electricity without augmenting the grid loads. Nights will demand more from the grid, but that's not an issue because most loads except in harsh winters that are more and more rare, happen during the day. This is a logic, technically sound path toward the new deal. The California model is a logic, financial-capitalism sound way to implement the new deal which actually can't happen. Those who think the contrary simply do not understand the scale and the tech we have so far. We can't produce enough storage and using it for such grid-scale loads means breaking it very quickly, not 10 years of a classic LFP but 1-3 years maximum at a scale we can't sustain for more than few years with skyrocketing costs. The giant want this because they need this to milk people as much as they can, but it's technically impossible and anyone who think the contrary will see what happen in few years if the trend will keep going like today, with more and more rolling blackouts and large stability issues to the point the EU will look like South Africa's grid now.
• EcommerceFlow 2y ago
  I used to be radically pro-nuclear, but after seeing some of the data of solar growth and realizing we could just scale things up (like building iphones), I'm fully on board with the Elon strategy of solar + powerbanks for storage.
  • api 2y ago
    The problem with nuclear is that it likes to be big, which means big capital-intensive projects and therefore a slow iteration time. Even if there are some things that are superior about nuclear, like land and raw resource use, it's going to get run over by a fast-iterating solution with small minimum capital investment. At this point solar+batteries is a cheaper option in almost all locations except perhaps places with low levels of sunlight combined with high demand, like maybe very high Northern latitudes.
    • EcommerceFlow 2y ago
      Yup exactly. Why go through all that headache, which has existed with Nuclear since day 1, when we could just mass produce solar and plop it down on the infinite empty desert land out west.
      • beembeem 2y ago
        1) There isn't infinite desert land that can be used. 2) You still need firm, dispatchable power. Batteries are a bridge, not the only solution.
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
        • tuna74 2y ago
          Batteries are the solution. The sun is pretty stable (not very firm unfortunately, but I don't see how that relates to electricity).
• tiffanyh 2y ago
  Has the insurance & roof warranty issue been solved with panels on your roof? A few years ago I looked at putting solar panels on my roof. Both the company who roofed my house, and my insurance company - said it voided any warranty / claims against future roof damage if a solar panel was installed
  • jillesvangurp 2y ago
    That sounds a like a local problem; or maybe your roof is really that bad. In some parts of the world double digit percentages of houses now have solar panels on them. That's only going to go up.
  • beembeem 2y ago
    I went through this for a commercial installation on a flat roof. As long as the roofer inspected the penetrations made by the installation, the roof warranty was fine. Of course, this roofer also had a business line for installing panels so they had expertise in the area. Voiding the warranty is not a universal argument.
  • tuna74 2y ago
    TFA claims that it is idiotic to put solar panels on residential roofs, but them somewhere where installation cost are low instead, like on the ground or maybe factory roofs.
    • tfourb 2y ago
      As someone with plenty of solar on my roof, it is anything but idiotic. With government incentives it pays for itself in ten years and has a realistic life span of 25. It might comparatively more efficient/cheaper per watt to build solar on the ground or on large commercial structures, but that doesn't change the economics for individual home owners, which in many parts of the world are already positive.
      • opo 2y ago
        >... With government incentives… Money is fungible and not unlimited. A dollar given to you by your neighbors in their taxes to subsidize you would have gone much, much further if the money would have been spent to build solar by your power utility.
• anonfordays 2y ago
  Soon (if not already) the largest costs associated with solar installations will be the labor. It's expensive to get people on roofs and electricians to reconfigure panels, install transfer switches, etc. The equipment could be free and it would still cost thousands for the skilled trades to install.
  • hkgjjgjfjfjfjf 2y ago
    [dead]
  • BobaFloutist 2y ago
    I wonder to what extent we can make it unskilled, at least for a building with modern wiring. Plug-and-play solar panels and batteries sound scary, but not necessarily impossible to do safely.
    • wongarsu 2y ago
      Anything involving roofs is difficult to do unskilled (at scale). You are working at height, potentially on a sloped surface, and have to worry about keeping the roof water tight. But if you put the panels basically anywhere else it becomes a lot more viable. Some houses come with a plug to connect your generator, you can do something similar to plug in your inverter. Then you can later decide to put up a solar fence or put solar panels on the balcony or whatever strikes your fancy
      • jeffbee 2y ago
        Why not just prefab a frame with the panels mounted and hang it on the point of the roof with a crane? Working on the roof can be eliminated or minimized.
        • happyopossum 2y ago
          Wind. Panels and their support need to be anchored to the roof, lest they become flying solar panels.
• pkfrank 2y ago
  Thanks for sharing
• JoeAltmaier 2y ago
  OP suggests that land costs will soon dominate the equation. So no mention of orbital solar plants? Yes, somebody years ago published a study that said, Uneconomical! because lift costs, panel cost, transmission inefficiencies. All of those are now drastically changed, by orders of magnitude. It is not a matter of IF orbital solar is economical, but WHEN.
  • sharemywin 2y ago
    doesn't orbital solar also deflect sun so wouldn't it cool the earth at scale?
    • adammarples 2y ago
      Teeny tiny scale
    • noSyncCloud 2y ago
      The sunlight that hits the reflectors would never have hit the Earth anyway.
  • smeeth 2y ago
    Related startup: Reflect Orbital plans to put mirrors in space so that light can be reflected back onto ground-based panels at night. A base assumption is often that orbital solar requires a panel in space, but even that might not be the case. https://www.reflectorbital.com/ https://www.reflectorbital.com/
  • 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    I would need to see some supporting napkin math on how that makes financial sense. Something on the ground, accessible by Joe the handyman is always going to be cheaper than anything launched into space. To balance that out is going to require some huge win. Availability, efficiency, etc. Solar input in orbit is higher than what is received at ground, but similar order of magnitude. I am not sure there are real world designs for beaming power 100km from space, but you are going to take some amount of loss in transforming the power to a transmissible form, beaming it through the atmosphere, and reassembling it on the ground. Unless you have a pin point death beam, the power is going to be transmitted to a relatively large area, requiring a large amount of land to receive it. Why not just build solar panels there? Seems far easier to overbuild panels on the ground + batteries.
• pkfrank 2y ago
  Thanks for sharing.
• rmason 2y ago
  I remember as a child being on a school tour of the Enrico Fermi nuclear plant South of Detroit being told that nuclear power would soon become too cheap to monitor. This was over sixty years ago! So I am a bit skeptical. I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas. Close to fifty years later I am still waiting. I bet if you're in San Diego, Dallas or Tampa its already there. We have tons of solar getting built in the state of Michigan area but if you inquire its all either government subsidized or wealthy folks who can afford to not care about the economics. I am not against solar in the least. But it needs to be pointed out that those of us in the Northern climates need a Plan B whether it be nuclear, geo-thermal or something else.
  • takinola 2y ago
    > I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas My understanding is commercial solar (as opposed to household solar) is cheaper than natural gas so that prediction is at least partly true
    • epoxia 2y ago
      Not really, the over-cited LCOE of solar/wind does not account for the cost of (its increased need of) battery storage. As time of use does not align with the time of generation. Also, battery storage has its own ongoing costs with battery degradation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxlnBNVCfBQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxlnBNVCfBQ
      • Veedrac 2y ago
        2019 was half a decade ago. You can tell solar+storage is cheaper than anything else except conditionally wind at least in the US because people have stopped building new generation capacity for anything else.
• GaggiX 2y ago
  >What will the world be like when panels cost $0.05/watt? $0.01/watt? "Good morning, I would like a 400W solar panel" "Sir, that will be $4"
  • perlgeek 2y ago
    At some point, the glass, frame and wiring will dominate the cost of solar panels, and when we hit that point, the price will likely stop falling. I don't know if we'll ever get as low as $4 with our current approach.
    • kragen 2y ago
      that is already the case; solar panels have been cheaper than window glass per square meter for years now. that's why the article says: > Is there a floor for these costs? > > Solar manufacturers are investing hundreds of billions in expanded capacity in an all out war for market share against a background of panel price drops of 15-25% per year. There is an extreme economic forcing function towards rapid improvement and ultimately convergence with the Platonically ideal solar panel - some 20 um thick layer of silicon supported by a 100 um thick layer of plastic rolled off a spool - or some other tech that's thinner and cheaper than paper.—Casey Handmer > Thinner and cheaper than paper. Think about that! i suspect that at some point people are going to be mounting bare (passivated) silicon dies on string and putting up chicken wire over them to keep the hailstones off, or something like that. think about how plants support their leaves
      • tuatoru 2y ago
        Perovskite films on microgrooved plastic film, offset printed roll to roll and rolled out mounted vertically like windbreak netting in orchards. For example: https://eyouagro.com/blog/citrus-fruits-wind-protection-netting/ https://eyouagro.com/blog/citrus-fruits-wind-protection-nett... Reduces land costs because the land is already being used for crops of one sort or another. Agrivoltaics ftw.
        • kragen 2y ago
• happyopossum 2y ago
  I have seen a ton of articles about the plummeting 'costs' of solar over the past decade, so I was shocked when I recently got a bunch of quotes for a 10-12KW residential install: they were almost the same as the cost of the 10KW system I had installed back in 2014. So at least here in California, inflation and rising labor costs have eaten up all of those savings.
  • teachrdan 2y ago
    Well, according to at least one online calculator, $1 in 2014 in the US would be worth $1.33 today. So perhaps the real price has gone down by over 33%?
  • mkaic 2y ago
    The article addresses this and notes that most of the cost reductions we've seen in the past decade are only really applicable to utility-scale installations, as it's only then that the one-time costs can be amortized sufficiently. Small consumer installations are dominated by costs other than the panels themselves to a much greater degree than utility-scale installations.
  • oezi 2y ago
    This seems extremely sus. Maybe the 10kw include battery today?
• sitkack 2y ago
  Yes The pallet price of solar panels in the US is below 30 cents a watt. https://a1solarstore.com/wholesale-solar-panels.html https://a1solarstore.com/wholesale-solar-panels.html And from alibaba, it is below 15 cents a watt. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Longi-solar-Hi-MO-X6-MAX_1601223804552.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Longi-solar-Hi-MO-X6-... With full systems below $1/watt. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Moregosolar-hybrid-solar-system-6KW-5KW_1600676066294.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Moregosolar-hybrid-so...
  • jtbayly 2y ago
    Misses the point of the article, which is to explore far beyond that cost.
    • sitkack 2y ago
      It doesn't, this is a snapshot of the costs now, you know what they were 5 years ago you can extrapolate a curve. The costs are still falling and will continue to fall. I should be able to supply a data point of the cost of panels today without getting admonished as being off-topic, rtfm.
      • eigenspace 2y ago
        Yes it does miss the point. Panels are no longer the expensive part of solar. The expensive part is now things like labour, installation, and land acquisition, and bringing those costs down is going to be hard.
        • sitkack 2y ago
          My links showed that panels are demonstrably not the primary cost.
          • deleted 2y ago
            [deleted]
  • 2y ago
• efields 2y ago
  How do we get around labor being the primary cost eater when that has (is) the most expensive factor, depending on where you live? I want labor to be paid, and I also want cheap clean energy. Help me square the circle.
  • philipkglass 2y ago
    Build small numbers of large ground mounted solar arrays instead of large numbers of small rooftop mounted solar arrays. Then soft costs (permitting, certification) are much lower, the overall cost per unit of electricity is much lower, and labor gets paid much better. This National Renewable Energy Laboratory page has a cost comparison of utility scale solar farms with rooftop systems: https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-installed-system-cost.html https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in... If you look at the orange portion of the bar for each year (installation labor), you'll see that labor gets paid about 50% more for utility scale farms than for rooftop systems. As of 2023 it's about $0.24 per watt on utility scale systems, $0.18 per watt on rooftops. But the complete rooftop system is much more expensive ($2.70 per watt vs. $1.20 for a large solar farm). The solar farm with one axis tracking will also produce more energy per installed watt over the course of a year. As a result, the cost per kilowatt hour generated from a rooftop solar array is multiples higher than from a utility scale solar farm in the same climate.
    • efields 2y ago
      Thanks! I like this answer.
• Animats 2y ago
  We're there on solar panels. The next step is batteries. And roof systems. Cheaper ways to get solar panels on roofs. That's mostly installation cost. Does Tesla's solar roof [1] actually work? Anyone have one? [1] https://www.tesla.com/solarroof https://www.tesla.com/solarroof
  • RankingMember 2y ago
    I only know one person who successfully got one installed, and his installation was endlessly delayed, after which their paperwork got screwed up on Tesla's end so they had it for free until they sold house (not sure if they ever got charged for it honestly). It worked, but reportedly wasn't as efficient as panels would've been.
  • Veserv 2y ago
    Just another faked demo and scam [1][2] followed by a bait-and-switch for generic overpriced product. [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/40422084/inside-steel-pulse-the-mysterious-project-that-became-elon-musks-solar-roof https://www.fastcompany.com/40422084/inside-steel-pulse-the-... [2] https://mansionengineer.com/2018/08/10/elon-musk-tesla-and-the-solar-roof-tile-fraud/ https://mansionengineer.com/2018/08/10/elon-musk-tesla-and-t...
• calmbonsai 2y ago
  Yes. For a detailed (verbal) analysis, see Patio11's podcast (also featuring Casey Handmer quoted in this article): https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/solar-economics/ https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/solar-economi...
  • kragen 2y ago
    wouldn’t you say that the article itself also contains a detailed (verbal) analysis? betteridge's law aside, it agrees with you
    • calmbonsai 2y ago
      True. I didn't realize that Patio11's podcast links had built-in transcripts so my additional description was superfluous.
      • kragen 2y ago
        i thought your additional description was helpful; i don't follow every link in every hn comment to see what the resulting page says
• tanewishly 2y ago
  Around here, cost of solar have risen recently. Even though there still is the stimulus rule that any surplus put into the net can be extracted later (ie., the net functions like a storage facility for any residential installation), recently, power companies have started charging for returning energy. Quite massively too - the difference with their sale price is 2-4 cents/KWhr. While there are good (as well as bad) reasons for this, the upshot is that the RoI for residential installations changed abruptly and became significantly worse - more or less overnight. Due to that, and the low cost of the panels themselves, whether they become cheaper isn't very relevant for the market here (since other costs dominate).
  • josefresco 2y ago
    > Around here Where?
• kragen 2y ago
  this article is unfortunately fairly usa-centric, but it doesn't really mention the main cost driver for solar installations in the usa, which is the predatory tariffs that have been imposed by a series of administrations, based on the most ridiculous rationales. it does mention that solar panels in the us cost more than twice what they cost elsewhere, but doesn't really explain why. the number now is more like 4× because international panel prices have fallen by half since the year-old figures mostly used in the article. it says, 'overseas, it can go as low as $0.10-$0.12/watt', but actually the current benchmark figure for low-cost solar panels in https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preisindex/ https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... is €0.07/watt peak, which is 8¢/watt peak in the us dollar the latest ridiculous news item in this pathetic story of regulatory capture is a petition from the american alliance for solar manufacturing trade committee to impose retroactive import tariffs on solar panel imports from vietnam and thailand https://www.pv-tech.org/us-manufacturers-seek-retroactive-tariffs-on-solar-import-surge/ https://www.pv-tech.org/us-manufacturers-seek-retroactive-ta... the supposed justification for thus kneecapping us heavy industry by cutting it off from the cheapest energy in history? 'dumping': supposedly chinese solar panels (the majority of the panels sold in the world, but under 0.1% of the us market https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight-report-q2-2024 https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight... More) are being sold 'under cost'. but when you dig into the justifications for the supposed 'dumping', it turns out that they amount to things like 'provision of solar-grade polysilicon for ltar (less than adequate remuneration)' and 'funding on infrastructure'. i.e., the us department of commerce is trying to charge chinese solar module manufacturers for the government building power plants and cutting good deals on raw materials with other chinese companies. see barcode:4426784-02 c-570-011 for example (there's apparently no url i can use to link these documents directly). useful starting points may include https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14563/crystalline-silicon-photovoltaic-cells-whether-or-not-assembled-into-modules-from-the-peoples https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14... https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2014-12-23/pdf/2014-30071.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2014-12-23/pdf/2014-3... to give you an idea of how ridiculous these justifications are, one of the other documents i got was arguing about whether the fair market price for chinese solar-panel-assembling labor should be determined by comparing it to malaysian electronics-assembly labor or romanian electronics-assembly labor. they ended up settling on turkish labor, so to the extent that wages in the area of china where trina solar assembles their panels are lower than wages in turkey, the us department of commerce is imposing the difference as countervailing tariffs for 'dumping'. the evidentiary standard in these proceedings is 'guilty until proven innocent' ('adverse inference in selecting from the facts otherwise available') the us keeps imposing new import tariffs against renewable energy; https://finance.yahoo.com/news/analysis-bidens-china-tariff-wall-203334559.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/analysis-bidens-china-tariff-... documents how they're trying to keep out not just solar panels but also electric cars, but failing, because chinese investment is creating new productive capacity for the relevant goods throughout the world — the opposite of what would happen if dumping was actually happening, since the objective of dumping is to drive competition out of business the result is that solar energy in the usa is several times more expensive than in the rest of the world, so it's getting installed only very slowly. the contrast between the rather pathetic https://www.seia.org/news/solar-installations-skyrocket-2023-record-setting-first-full-year-inflation-reduction-act https://www.seia.org/news/solar-installations-skyrocket-2023... (32.4 gigawatts installed in the usa in 02023, only 8% of the worldwide 430 new gigawatts installed worldwide) and the 216 gigawatts added at the same time in the prc (https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/energy-transition/020824-infographic-china-solar-capacity-coal-electricity-renewable-energy-hydro-wind https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...) and the astounding 660 gigawatts expected in the prc this year: https://www.pv-tech.org/bnef-global-solar-additions-655gwdc-in-2024/ https://www.pv-tech.org/bnef-global-solar-additions-655gwdc-... this by itself should make it clear how ridiculous the 'dumping' accusations are. if you're dumping a product, selling it below its production cost in order to eliminate overseas competition, you don't sell it to yourself. that's losing money on every sale and trying to make it up on volume! so what's happening is that the world is going through the renewable energy transition, solving the problem of global warming, despite the usa fighting tooth and nail to prevent it with its foreign and trade policy. the prc is leading, developing new manufacturing techniques that lower the prices of energy so low that us companies insist they're dumping their solar panels below cost, but mostly investing in securing access for their own domestic industry the last time a major new source of energy became available was the steam engine, which is still what powers most of the world's electric grid, in the form of steam turbines in nuclear and coal power plants. that enabled new forms of industry and new economic structures. for the last 50 years we've been stuck in an energy crisis as we've run into fossil-fuel resource constraints and dropping eroei. that crisis has finally ended; the future is already here, but it's not widely distributed. usa policy seems focused on ensuring that the future arrives domestically as slowly as possible, enabling china to obtain as large a lead as possible in the new energy-intensive industries enabled by unbelievably cheap solar energy if you want the us to be the place where builders go to build things, you need to fix this
• caymanjim 2y ago
  I spend four months of the year traveling in an RV. Two years ago, I budgeted over $6000 for my desired solar setup (at least 1200Ah of battery, at least 2400W of solar, plus various controllers and other components). It was expensive enough for me to hold off, and more importantly, I didn't have the space on my current RV for the solar panels. In just the two years since then, prices on batteries and panels have dropped 25% or more, and solar power per square foot at a good price point has gone up significantly (400W monocrystalline panels can be gotten for $200, in the same form factor as the 200W panels I had been budgeting for). I've now lowered my budget to $4000 for the same setup I was planning to spend $6000 on two years ago, and with 400W panels, I no longer need to upgrade to a larger RV to begin the project. This summer is almost over, so I'm going to wait until spring to start assembling my system in earnest. Anecdotally, this is a game-changer for me. I'm looking toward year-round full-timing starting next summer, because I can now afford the power I need and don't need a larger RV as soon as I thought I would. I intend to buy undeveloped land far from civilization in the next few years, and I'm now confident that I can DIY a whole-house solar and battery setup so cheaply that access to mains power won't be a factor in deciding where I settle. Even with seasonal variation in power production, I'll manage just fine, and the system will pay for itself in well under five years. In fact it'll pay for itself instantly if you discount the five-figure cost I would otherwise have had to pay for running a new mains power line far into the woods. And by the time I pick some land to settle on, I'll already have enough solar on my RV that I won't even need to augment the system initially; I'll be able to power a small house in a temperate climate directly off the RV itself, while I build a larger solar array (likely ground-mounted to avoid regulations and insurance complications related to roof-mounted setups). I know my situation is unusual, but the fact that any of this is possible for well under $10k is a huge change from even a decade ago.
  • kingkongjaffa 2y ago
    > I intend to buy undeveloped land far from civilization I'm always intrigued by this notion, I know plenty of Americans have this kind of plan, but it's never quite as remote as they think, because, y'know you're still in America somewhere. Unless you're thinking of somewhere in northern Canada. I'd love to know where is considered 'far from civilization' on the continental US.
• Havoc 2y ago
  Think these days we should really be talking more about storage than panels. And I don’t mean lithium batteries. More things like molten salt and sand batteries - things that require a bit of planning and infra that is reliant on rare metals etc
• jmyeet 2y ago
  Solar power is the future. The drop in price in the last 20 years is absolutely wild. The charts in this article show this. What's encouraging is that it's pretty steady progress. It's hard to predict when or where that ends. Batteries continue to get cheaper (also covered). This matters too because storing energy solves the base load "problem". Batteries aren't the only way to store energy either. There continue to be advances in the so-called "power-to-gas" technology, where you essentially use excess power to make fuel, usually from CO2 in the air. This isn't currently economic but it continues to get cheaper. It also provides an upper ceiling on how expensive gas can get. The LCOE of nuclear in particular is damning [1]. Every single commercial nuclear power reactor has been built with government subsidies too so it doesn't seem like government support is the issue. There are still too many unsolved problems. Solar is the only method of direct power generation. I think every other method inovles turning a steam turbine. There are no moving parts. They can be installed on everything from wristwatches to power stations to satellites. [1]: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
• szundi 2y ago
  Surely can, but you have to pay the installer guys and the structure that holds the panels even if they cost zero.
• d_burfoot 2y ago
  Does anyone see signs of data center usage being affected by electricity costs? I imagine a relatively near future where your AWS bill changes depending on the time of day, and so companies shift their computational work from region to region, following the sun.
• kumarski 2y ago
  I think it's irrelevant if the cost of solar panels goes to zero, the reality is that the farm to fork cost/kwh is still quite high because dispatch and transmission are never cheap. Furthermore, for every 1 pound of polysilicon produced...you get 4 pounds of silicon tetrachloride output. I gambled on $UAN and $AMR guesstimating that the spread of renewables would lead to more nat gas and coal/steel consumption per a kilowatt hour produced globally. I got lucky and it worked out. I'm not bullish on solar costs going below the embodied energy cost of desal per 1000 gallons. (10-14kwh/1000 gallons)
  • pfdietz 2y ago
    > Furthermore, for every 1 pound of polysilicon produced...you get 4 pounds of silicon tetrachloride output. SiCl4 can (and should) be completely recycled in the process that makes silicon, to make more SiHCl3. There is no reason to treat it as waste in a cost optimized system.
• BatFastard 2y ago
  Does converting sunlight to electricity reduce the amount of heat absorbed by the earth? If so, how many solar panels would be required to reduce the temp by 1 degree?
  • lcvw 2y ago
    No because when the electricity is used it creates heat.
    • BatFastard 2y ago
      Heat is just a frequency in the spectrum right? What percent of emissions in an LED comes out as infrared?
      • mallets 2y ago
        Uhh, IR isn't heat. Heat isn't part of the EM spectrum. Hot stuff just emits more IR. For IR in LED bulbs. Don't know, other than inconsequential.
  • mallets 2y ago
    All will be heat after X amount of time. Where the X can be a few seconds or decades or centuries. The more interesting thing would be the light reflected by the panels (albedo factor). This could be lower or higher than the surface these panels are placed on.
    • pfdietz 2y ago
      Also, the emittance of the panels at thermal wavelengths is important. What you want is a panel that converts wavelengths shorter than the bandgap cutoff at high efficiency, reflects near and mid IR at longer wavelengths, but has high emissivity in the far IR at wavelengths where the atmosphere isn't too opaque.
      • mallets 2y ago
• shmerl 2y ago
  Why are residential prices on electricity not falling if costs of energy production are shrinking? If anything, prices only go up and electricity companies especially raise them during hot season.
• jenadine 2y ago
  One thing that is often forgotten is the difference between the cost of electricity at the power plant, and the price of electricity in the power plug in the household. The difference is that the grid provides constant electricity at 60Hz 24/7. Solar is much cheaper to produce, but there are many challenges to get a reliable grid. Big centralized power plant that have huge turbines with kinetic energy are much easier and cheaper to handle on the grid than a distributed intermittent production where you somehow need to convert to 60Hz and add storage that has quite some loss.
  • locallost 2y ago
    There are a huge number of myths. Grid is not really my expertise, not at all, but I hear this a lot, it's challenging to get a reliable grid. At the same time I read an interview with the CEO of 50Hertz [1], one of Germany's grid operators who says, we can do 70-80% renewables easy and managed the solar eclipse a lot easier than even we thought. And data backs it up, Germany has one of the more reliable grids in the world. It makes sense even on a layman level - why would it be less of a challenge to have a grid with a few large plants? One of those goes offline unexpectedly and you lose a significant percentage of your capacity. This never happens with renewables and their intermittency is easily handled with a weather forecast. [1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/interview/german-electricity-transmission-ceo-80-renewables-is-no-problem/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/interview/german-ele...
    • jenadine 2y ago
      It is certainly possible, just more expensive. And I'm just saying that one shouldn't mix cost of production and price for the consumer. It is easier to size the network when the current flows basically in one single direction from power plant to users. When the production is decentralised, you need more transmission lines. You also get more losses in the transmission if you go through more substations. Big turbines helps to keep a stable frequency on the network despite unpredictable consumption changes. With renewables one need to adjust the frequency. One also need to keep the power factor in track. All of this means extra costly hardware on the grid and extra loss.
• __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  As long we keep using logarithmic axes: yes, indefinitely!
• locallost 2y ago
  The premise of the article, that we would be richer if we used more energy is preposterously wrong. A light bulb used to be typically 100w, it's now a 1/10 of that. We get a lot more out of the energy now, which means we are in fact richer because we have more things. I just bought a TV which uses a quarter of the electricity of a Tv from a decade ago, and this with 4x as many pixels. The big idea most people fail to grok is that we don't need energy at all, we need certain things energy provides us (light, heating, cooking, entertainment etc). But if I could super insulate my house and use 0 energy to keep it warm, this would not make me poorer. On the contrary. Amory Lovins came up with the idea of "negawatts" a long time ago.
  • pfdietz 2y ago
    The crash in price of solar is upending the negawatt story. If power does become very cheap, efficiency becomes less important.
• magicfractal 2y ago
  Just to point out that the reason why solar panel costs have been decreasing is because china as part of their 5-year plans set solar energy as a national priority and the world is now benefiting from their upfront investments and economies of scale. This is a clear datapoint towards economic planning for the green transition and rational management of natural resources.
• energy123 2y ago
  The article concludes that solar costs will drop another 8x then plateau.
• forgetfreeman 2y ago
  I hate the chunk of rhetoric around GDP. What an uncritical readthrough thinks: oh man, everyone should be making a bunch more money. What they actually said: a couple hundred people in the US missed out on capturing all these lost gains.
• cbmuser 2y ago
  Customers are paying prices, not costs. A cheap kWh of solar electricity isn't useful when it's not available when needed. Prices are mandated by supply and demand. Also, while the costs of the solar modules may fall further, the costs for the whole setup does not. A solar power plant requires a lot of mechanical and electrical parts to get the solar modules installed and connected to the electricity grid plus labor costs.
  • energy123 2y ago
    You didn't read the article.
• anovikov 2y ago
  Spike in LCOE is merely because of interest rates. Which hits solar the hardest as it doesn't consume fuel and it's maintenance costs are very low, so almost all of the LCOE is cost of initial capital investment stretched out to 20 years by applying the interest rates, which are high. No need to look for doom scenarios here. Interest rates fluctuate. They will be back to some lower point than today but certainly higher than in 2020. LCOE will drop off. There's no need for solar costs to go down at all anymore. Transition will happen even if they get stuck forever, solar is cheap enough, now it's just about speed at which factories can be deployed, installers trained, etc.
• hacker_88 2y ago
  Solar + LFP batteries, Energy Combo for the future
  • Qwertious 2y ago
    LFP might lose out to sodium batteries, long-term. Sodium is dirt cheap - salt mines make lithium-salt extraction look like a joke, and the middle east has an abundance of desalination plants that end up dumping their ultra-concentrated brine back into the water because they have way more than they can do anything with.
• bkandel 2y ago
  > If we had stayed on the Adams curve, we would be consuming 2-5x more energy than we do today. For the US, that means that GDP per capita today would not be the current amount of $65k, but $100k-$200k. It is a catastrophe that we don’t have more energy: We should be much richer. I'm sorry, what??? Correlation != causation. We have become more energy efficient, and it does not follow at all that cheaper energy will increase our GDP by 2-3x.
• fny 2y ago
  The core realization of the article is that energy costs have increased 30-100%. This is inline broadly with inflation experienced post-COVID presumably due to all the helicopter money dumped on the economy. I suspect if these figures were revised for inflation, the same trends we've seen over the past ten years would persist.
  • jmyeet 2y ago
    There's a huge factor in the increase in energy costs during the pandemic that doesn't get talked about much, weirdly. It gets attributed to greedflation but it's actually far simpler. In 2020, the Trump administration pressured OPEC to cut production by about 9.7 million barrels a day [1], roughly 10% of the world's production. This was a 2 year deal. Look at the 5 year chart [2] and you can see exactly where this deal starts and ends. This is further confirmed by looking at OPEC oil production [3]. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/special-report-trump-told-saudi-cut-oil-supply-or-lose-us-military-support--idUSKBN22C1V3/ https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/special-report-trump... [2]: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil [3]: https://ycharts.com/indicators/opec_crude_oil_production https://ycharts.com/indicators/opec_crude_oil_production
    • fny 2y ago
      This was only to balance out a demand collapse which occurred during the two day period. The Saudi's were deliberately pumping oil during the pandemic to bankrupt US energy companies which were over-leveraged in many cases, and Trump responded in a way I think any US president would have--I say this despite my hate of the man. The coincidence in the price rebound over two years reflects pandemic induced demand which took two years to recover and some time for the related supply chain issues to resolve: it is very difficult to shut off and restart an oil well, which is part of the reason why we had an overcapacity of oil during the pandemic which led to negative oil prices. In the same vein, oil prices shot up immediately due to demand pull and slow response from producers. This persistence in the price increase reflects broader increases due to inflation caused by "helicopter money": the government printed money into the economy, which has inflationary consequences. It's not greedflation, it's governmentflation.
• zackmorris 2y ago
  Solar panels cost less than windows: 89x44" for $221.40: https://www.portable-sun.com/products/canadian-solar-540w-bifacial-solar-panel-up-to-650w-bifacial-cs6w-540mb-ag https://www.portable-sun.com/products/canadian-solar-540w-bi... 96x48" for $544.00: https://1stwindows.com/retro/milgard2/trinsic/picture-window/?w=96&h=48 https://1stwindows.com/retro/milgard2/trinsic/picture-window... Those were the first that came up in search. I'm seeing other 500 W panels for $100-150 and windows for $1000-2000. But we can safely say that panels are less than half the cost of windows. The increase in solar panel cost was from Trump's 30% solar tariff in 2018: https://www.seia.org/research-resources/section-201-solar-tariffs https://www.seia.org/research-resources/section-201-solar-ta... The saddest thing about all of this for me is that we had the tech to manufacture inexpensive solar panels at scale in the 1980s. Just like any of us could design better computer vision sorters for recycling. We're stopped for protectionist geopolitical reasons so that people in entrenched industries don't lose their jobs. I wish we could be honest about this, because it's what the next US presidential election is about. We can pretend that we live in a free market economy of winners and losers, or we can work together at a meta level above the zero-sum game Nash equilibrium that's leading us inexorably towards species extinction and global climate change: https://medium.com/nori-carbon-removal/how-to-break-the-climate-change-nash-equilibrium-f4ca3354cb8b https://medium.com/nori-carbon-removal/how-to-break-the-clim...
• jmacd 2y ago
  Are the costs of roof/home installs falling anywhere? Here in eastern Canada the pricing has gone up per kWh in the last 10 years fairly significantly.