12 ms·

Cheap solar panels are changing the world

117 points by dotcoma 2y ago

gglon 2y ago
Achieving the first 20% of solar in an energy mix is relatively easy. Beyond that costs increase 3-5 times per energy unit mainly due to storage.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Since intermittent solar by itself is 10% the cost of alternatives, a 3-5X increase in price for solar+storage is still a fabulous deal.
- speed_spread 2y ago
  Your argument mixes "easy" and "cheap". Storage can be "easy" and you have plenty of choice: batteries, pumped, thermal, chemical, name it. If you have a large enough east-west country (hint), you might also invest in transport infrastructure to move energy where it is required so you don't have to store as much. This is also "easy", maybe moreso than storage because we've been doing it for so long. As to whether these easy things are cost effective when compared to other solutions is a completely different issue.
  - gglon 2y ago
    none of those storage solutions are easy for grid scale. For batteries you need whole factories, pumped requires permits and tone of cement, chemical is like hydrogen with low efficiency. All of those are expensive which for government is synonymous with difficult.
    - speed_spread 2y ago
      Being expensive is the _easiest_ thing for most governments. It's often a requirement! i.e. As a contractor, bid too cheaply and you will not be taken seriously.
      - gglon 2y ago
        This doesn't apply to energy grid scale projects. Also that is why energy sector in most countries is privatized. Take Germany with total energy costs that would be like ~10% of the federal budget (about 40 billion euros). Making energy even more expensive would only lead to further deindustrialization and lower gdp making it politically non viable. Also, you can't just throw money and buy storage like with typical government contracts - it requires building entire new industries (like Germany's struggles with hydrogen infrastructure).
- cma 2y ago
  For cooling (datacenters and other) you can chill water when the sun is out. And mostly passively cool the heated water when the sun is down if water is scarce. Plumbing and insulation for cooling reservoirs probably degrades a lot slower than batteries. I'm not sure about chiller plant wear and tear vs battery degradation
  - itishappy 2y ago
    The opposite works for heating as well: heating up sand during the day for use at night.
- ramses0 2y ago
  Can you elaborate a bit here? Neglecting _detailed_ info about storage conversion costs, etc, it's tough to understand the "all-in" cost for storage over time. At home, I'm fanatical about using bog-standard AA/AAA rechargeable batteries for as many things as possible (anything with a micro-USB charger is basically "e-waste waiting to happen"), and thinking through any kind of home-supplement for solar, batteries, etc. makes me think that the "waste" of house-scale / grid-scale batteries for storage makes the math not work out. Rough googling puts ~30kWh batteries at ~$15-30k, which: even if you think of it as having a 30-year service life, still works out to ~$50-100/mo in just battery depreciation. Similarly with cars (eg: PHEV). First 5 years? Great! Next 10 years? ...a ticking time bomb of "must be replaced" with the battery representing an exorbitant percentage of the vehicle value. $500 of tires on a $5000 car is one thing, but a $5000 battery on a car seems like a net negative environmentally and financially?
  - gglon 2y ago
    Solar PV operates 10-30% of the time (depending on location). Without storage, this naturally limits direct solar contribution to about 20% of energy demand. Going beyond requires expensive storage solutions.
- cesarb 2y ago
  Depending on your energy mix, you can go much further than 20% solar before needing storage. What's actually necessary is not storage, but generation which can ramp down and ramp up fast enough to compensate for the predictable daily ramps of solar generation (on top of the daily power use ramps). AFAIK, hydroelectric is one of the fastest (so much that pumped hydroelectric power plants can be used as storage), while coal and nuclear are among the slowest.
  - gglon 2y ago
    pumped hydroelectric is storage; right now it is like 99% of world storage capacity.
jiqiren 2y ago
some politicians: "lets ruin this with some tariffs"!
- henry2023 2y ago
  - "Won't somebody please think of the oligarchy?"
QuercusMax 2y ago
Paywall-free archive link: https://archive.is/K0q90 https://archive.is/K0q90
zefr0g 2y ago
MW is power, not energy
- lysace 2y ago
  > "In South Africa, for example, the total amount of energy produced from solar systems in 2019 was thought to be about 500 megawatts" This is annoyingly common with journalists and also a very clear tell that they don't have any idea what they are writing about. Maybe in a few years the writer will understand that it's tricky to store energy in a cost-efficient way and that energy isn't the same as power. Or perhaps they won't. Either way, in late 2024, this low level of understanding is pretty tiring. The writer "has been the the recipient of a 2017 National Association of Science Writers reporting award for coverage of air pollution in Detroit, and a finalist for the 2019 Livingston Award for a series on water politics at the Texas-Mexico border. At The Atlantic, she covers climate change." The writer's CV doesn't mention any education at all.
  - dguest 2y ago
    It might not be complete nonsense. If you map energy -> power the paragraph actually says something sensible. It could have been worse: if they'd said something like "500 megawatts per week" it would be completely unclear what they even mean. Should you map it to megawatt-hours / week (around 3 MW), because that's a common (kind of goofy) unit to work in? Or does it mean they use (on average) 500 MW?
    - lysace 2y ago
      I admire your creativity/positivity!
  - kragen 2y ago
    500 megawatts would be 4.4 terawatt hours per year. That's in the ballpark of what they actually did produce in 02019, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_Africa. So the journalist seems to have actually been correct in this case, although it's a bit like saying "the distance covered by the runner was 12 miles per hour", when it would perhaps be more appropriate to say that that was the runner's speed rather than the runner's distance.
bruce511 2y ago
Scale is the really important thing here. It's really easy and really cheap to build a small-business, or home scale generation system. This is in contrast to nuclear, coal, gas turbine etc where you really need large plants to work efficiently. Small portable diesel generators exist, but they are expensive to run, need regular maintenance and refueling. Once you can cost effectively generate real electricity for very little effort, and very low cost, then people do it. And when you distribute generation like this very large effects happen very qickly.
- michaelteter 2y ago
  In general we need to get smart and get good at bringing critical resources (energy, food/water production) reasonably local. Climate, political, and economic disasters seem more frequent each decade, and it would be a shame to starve or melt/freeze ourselves just because our delivery systems failed us. And as a Texan, it blows my mind that so many people reject local solar options. When the grid is having rolling blackouts, wouldn’t it be nice to still have power?
  - ddulaney 2y ago
    Agreed in general, but the question is what we give up in going to a more-resilient system. In particular, lots of things are the way they are because of cost. Would you be OK with your food costs doubling or tripling because it’s local? I don’t think I would.
    - itishappy 2y ago
      That's a fair point, but let's frame that in a resiliency context, where the choice becomes: * Cheap food most of the time, no food occasionally * More expensive food most of the time, imported food occasionally That decision is not one I'm particularly equipped to comment on.
    - anticorporate 2y ago
      > Would you be OK with your food costs doubling or tripling because it’s local? Just pointing out that many people, including myself, intentionally buy groceries from farmers' markets and local food co-ops very specifically because we want our food to be local. Others will spend even more time and labor on vegetable gardens for the same reason. It is unfortunate that the way we offer food production subsidies in many countries primarily benefit large, multinational conglomerates instead of funding healthier, more resilient, and more environmentally friendly local options. It is terrible that only those with means can afford to purchase local foods in many markets, but yes, plenty of us who are able to do so choose to.
moconnor 2y ago
Why on earth would “governments need to regulate and subsidise” a solar boom that is already proceeding apace without them? The tail end of this article makes no sense…
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  Among other things it beats handing the treasury to oligarchs.
- itishappy 2y ago
  Previous paragraph has more info: > A world that mostly runs on solar power will also need something else—such as hydropower, nuclear, or geothermal—to generate energy when the sun isn’t shining in the evenings and winters. Jessika Trancik, an MIT professor who models clean-energy development, told me that governments need to steer investments toward storage and alternate forms of energy to compensate for that inherent downtime. That way, the world can have a reliable energy mix when 50 or 60 percent of electricity generation comes from solar and wind. I'd expect that the solar subsidies mentioned by the last paragraph are for solar-adjacent technologies like energy storage, not the panels themselves.
- LunaSea 2y ago
  Because the current deployment is already the result of subsidies and that it wouldn't have happened without?
azaras 2y ago
A solar punk utopia is near.
wongarsu 2y ago
So basically their point is a major driver of solar installations is that in low-wage countries with unreliable electricity grids solar is now by far the cheapest backup power. And once they have it they use it. That certainly sounds reasonable. In developed countries installation and mounting costs are a significant cost driver for solar installations, but in the third world you can do that a lot cheaper, and beating a diesel generator on cost isn't hard
- nicoburns 2y ago
  > solar is now by far the cheapest backup power If you're prepared to deal with it's unreliability (when the sun is not shining), then it's by far the cheapest power full stop. In countries with unreliable grids that looks a lot more attractive. Especially as in many of those countries it is reliably sunny.
  - epistasis 2y ago
    Even the cost of battery storage is getting ridiculously cheap, too. Small off-grid installations, even in the US, can be had for $200/kWh capacity, with lifetimes > 3000 cycles. So lets say <$0.07/kWh for storing it. That's about the average cost of transmission & distribution for a kWh across the US.
  - chgs 2y ago
    The sun comes up every day. If it doesn’t we’ve got bigger problems.
    - silvestrov 2y ago
      Britain and Svalbard would like a word with you.
      - chgs 2y ago
        Sure above/below 66 degrees. That’s are edge cases. I can assure you the sun comes up every day in Britain.
FactKnower69 2y ago
But is Janet Yellen still throwing a tantrum and telling anyone who will listen that China is building solar panels too efficiently? https://apnews.com/article/china-yellen-manufacturing-treasury-economics-69fa4b2bf1dca8ca408381189383717a https://apnews.com/article/china-yellen-manufacturing-treasu...
- cjbgkagh 2y ago
  In my view western economies are a ponzi scheme predicated on ever increasing cost of housing. Even a small erosion of the real economy has massive effects on the highly leveraged financial economy. This technology for cheaper goods already exists and I don’t think there is a way to stop it so my presumption is that eventually the real economy in the west will be undermined and the financialized economy will implode.
boshomi 2y ago
Wind power has also become really cheap in China. Tenders are around 1100-1800 CNY/kW onshore and around 3000 CNY/kW offshore. At the China Windpower 2024 trade fair held in October, 12 manufacturers presented wind turbines larger than 16MW, and 5 manufacturers are pushing into the 25MW range. After wind and PV became cheaper than coal in China, subsidies for onshore wind and PV were largely canceled. Subsidies in the offshore sector serve to build up an export industry. As a result, 2/3 of new PV and wind farms built worldwide are subsidy-free, most of them in China.
- space_oddity 2y ago
  How rapidly the economics of renewable energy are shifting
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    The very high experience rate of renewables is just as important as current low cost. It means anything trying to compete with them is facing a rapidly moving target, and has to aim at where renewables will be, not just where they are.
    - space_oddity 2y ago
      I think renewables also continuously lowering costs as they scale
- elric 2y ago
  Meanwhile in Belgium, we have to spend (literal) billions on power cable projects so we can connect offshire windfarms to our grid.
  - jayd16 2y ago
    I assume this is a typo but I did imagine a Belgian shire.
  - boshomi 2y ago
space_oddity 2y ago
Solar is transforming energy landscapes worldwide
OptionOfT 2y ago
Solar where I live is very scammy. Salespeople who sell you the world and then your panels don't deliver, and the company is impossible to contact (or gone) [0] Then there is the issue that there is no battery mandate, which to me is insane. In sunny, warmer states we have an oversupply of energy during the day, and then when the sun sets we have a shortage as everybody comes home, and their AC needs to work harder, and people start cooking with electricity. So basically when you put on panels without a battery you're making it harder for everybody. You're using the grid as a battery. [0] https://www.npr.org/2024/08/14/1244330369/solar-rooftop-panels-environment-fraud-deception https://www.npr.org/2024/08/14/1244330369/solar-rooftop-pane...
- bityard 2y ago
  I thought utilities were starting to install battery farms these days? If the technology is there, I'd much rather the utility own, operate, maintain them. In most residences, I see a big battery strapped to a house as something of a liability.
- mjamesaustin 2y ago
  The more solar surplus we create, the more incentive there is to build battery storage. You can see it happening in California, where storage has grown massively year over year, to the point where it's now displacing natural gas peaker plants as a primary source of meeting after-sunset evening energy demand.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- stronglikedan 2y ago
  The grid is a battery. That's one of the benefits of going solar. It's not making anything harder for anyone.
  - kspacewalk2 2y ago
    Can you elaborate what you mean by that? The grid is a battery on a scale of one household connecting to this infinite supply or infinite sink of electricity, but on a wider scale (and physical world as opposed to accounting) , you generate energy during the day and someone else needs to generate it at night, so it's in no way a battery.
jandrese 2y ago
One of the things that I'm optimistic about is the way solar and wind have become so cheap that they're being installed on their own merits. You will find no shortage of people online bemoaning the woke energy that is going to ruin the economy, but their complaints can't stop people from installing more and more renewable energy every year. Even in places like Texas where the oil and gas industry is practically a religion. Ironically the only place that has seen effective pushback is California, where the legislature structured the system such that solar installs are basically just a gift to their corrupt energy companies.
- purplethinking 2y ago
  I've never once seen solar being called "woke energy", is that a thing? Either way, everyone's realigning now that Elon is MAGA, solar and EVs are out, they're MAGA now. Now it's all about degrowth and going back to our roots, there is no energy that is clean now.
  - lantry 2y ago
    degrowth is trendy and fashionable online in certain communities, but from what I've seen the vast majority of democrats don't agree with it, if they've even heard of it. Most of the democrats I know are big fans of solar, and would be derided online as "neoliberal" or "centrist".
    - jandrese 2y ago
      I've never met a degrowth advocate in real life. I think it's one of those communities that only exists online because the proponents are too geographically scattered to form local communities.
      - purplethinking 2y ago
        It has taken root in Germany and EU as a whole. Why do you think they shut down their nuclear power plants while in an energy crisis?
ThinkBeat 2y ago
It is too bad that Biden is not letting Americans benefit from cheap solar panels and electric cars¹ ¹ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/05/14/fact-sheet-president-biden-takes-action-to-protect-american-workers-and-businesses-from-chinas-unfair-trade-practices/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
- henry2023 2y ago
  It's harder to believe in free markets when you're not the one selling.
skybrian 2y ago
If we’re talking “world,” global coal usage is predicted to increase, much of it in China and India, before declining later. Apparently with electricity usage going up, there’s more of every kind of power generation? https://tildes.net/~enviro/1jqy/coal_is_powering_the_energy_transition https://tildes.net/~enviro/1jqy/coal_is_powering_the_energy_... Also, cheap solar seems to be running into something like Amdahl’s law, where the solar panel cost is a small part of total cost. Hard to say what the trend will be for non-panel costs. How cheaply can they be installed and maintained?
- henry2023 2y ago
  Panel cost? The floor is the limit. [1] Installation cost? Depends on local labor wages but the skill is easy to learn. I'd recommend to DIY a couple 500 Wh panels just as an experiment. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
  - bmicraft 2y ago
    That site is kinda bad. They show the same number for '21/'22 and don't have any data for '23/'24
    - henry2023 2y ago
      Yeah i'd be nice to have the other two datapoints. Production cost per PV watt was around 15 cents at the end of 2023 [1]. Some claim that by the end of 2024 this figure will reach 10 cents per watt. [2] [1]. https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-solar-panel-costs-plunge-in-2023-60-cheaper-than-us https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-solar-panel-costs-plunge.... [2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/11/23/solar-module-prices-may-reach-0-10-w-by-end-2024/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/11/23/solar-module-prices-m....
nnf 2y ago
I have solar panels and battery storage and have been very happy with them, but there are two aspects (in the area of the U.S. where I live) that made obtaining panels a lot more difficult than it needed to be. Around here, it's extremely common for homeowner associations to ban solar panels outright ("they're ugly", "nobody wants to look at that", etc.). Additionally, the local power utility has been granted the ability to limit how much solar capacity an individual homeowner can have. I would be more understanding of this second point but for the fact that very nearby, across a state line, solar capacity is not limited even though it's the same utility and the same power grid. When looking for a home several years ago, we only had a couple of options because solar was a requirement for us, but we wouldn't be allowed to add solar at most of the properties that were on the market at the time. We ended up finding a place and adding solar, the largest array we were allowed by the utility. It's very beneficial and I'm still glad we did it, but with an electric car and all electric appliances, it's often not enough to supply our needs. By allowing utilities to place such low capacity limits on solar generation, solar installation becomes less attractive, which I presume is what the utilities want and is the reason they lobby for such restrictions. Getting rid of these outdated HOA rules and utility-imposed capacity limits (when there's no technical reason for them) are two things we'll need to overcome in order to make solar adoption more attractive and hopefully more affordable for everyone.
kkfx 2y ago
Unfortunately due to tariffs, p.v. systems for private people are still not cheap at all compared to other countries... Tariffs to protect... Nothing, because we produce essentially nothing, just some inverters.

117 points by dotcoma 2y ago

Achieving the first 20% of solar in an energy mix is relatively easy. Beyond that costs increase 3-5 times per energy unit mainly due to storage.

bryanlarsen 2y ago
Since intermittent solar by itself is 10% the cost of alternatives, a 3-5X increase in price for solar+storage is still a fabulous deal.
speed_spread 2y ago
Your argument mixes "easy" and "cheap". Storage can be "easy" and you have plenty of choice: batteries, pumped, thermal, chemical, name it. If you have a large enough east-west country (hint), you might also invest in transport infrastructure to move energy where it is required so you don't have to store as much. This is also "easy", maybe moreso than storage because we've been doing it for so long. As to whether these easy things are cost effective when compared to other solutions is a completely different issue.
- gglon 2y ago
  none of those storage solutions are easy for grid scale. For batteries you need whole factories, pumped requires permits and tone of cement, chemical is like hydrogen with low efficiency. All of those are expensive which for government is synonymous with difficult.
  - speed_spread 2y ago
    Being expensive is the _easiest_ thing for most governments. It's often a requirement! i.e. As a contractor, bid too cheaply and you will not be taken seriously.
    - gglon 2y ago
      This doesn't apply to energy grid scale projects. Also that is why energy sector in most countries is privatized. Take Germany with total energy costs that would be like ~10% of the federal budget (about 40 billion euros). Making energy even more expensive would only lead to further deindustrialization and lower gdp making it politically non viable. Also, you can't just throw money and buy storage like with typical government contracts - it requires building entire new industries (like Germany's struggles with hydrogen infrastructure).
cma 2y ago
For cooling (datacenters and other) you can chill water when the sun is out. And mostly passively cool the heated water when the sun is down if water is scarce. Plumbing and insulation for cooling reservoirs probably degrades a lot slower than batteries. I'm not sure about chiller plant wear and tear vs battery degradation
- itishappy 2y ago
  The opposite works for heating as well: heating up sand during the day for use at night.
ramses0 2y ago
Can you elaborate a bit here? Neglecting _detailed_ info about storage conversion costs, etc, it's tough to understand the "all-in" cost for storage over time. At home, I'm fanatical about using bog-standard AA/AAA rechargeable batteries for as many things as possible (anything with a micro-USB charger is basically "e-waste waiting to happen"), and thinking through any kind of home-supplement for solar, batteries, etc. makes me think that the "waste" of house-scale / grid-scale batteries for storage makes the math not work out. Rough googling puts ~30kWh batteries at ~$15-30k, which: even if you think of it as having a 30-year service life, still works out to ~$50-100/mo in just battery depreciation. Similarly with cars (eg: PHEV). First 5 years? Great! Next 10 years? ...a ticking time bomb of "must be replaced" with the battery representing an exorbitant percentage of the vehicle value. $500 of tires on a $5000 car is one thing, but a $5000 battery on a car seems like a net negative environmentally and financially?
- gglon 2y ago
  Solar PV operates 10-30% of the time (depending on location). Without storage, this naturally limits direct solar contribution to about 20% of energy demand. Going beyond requires expensive storage solutions.
cesarb 2y ago
Depending on your energy mix, you can go much further than 20% solar before needing storage. What's actually necessary is not storage, but generation which can ramp down and ramp up fast enough to compensate for the predictable daily ramps of solar generation (on top of the daily power use ramps). AFAIK, hydroelectric is one of the fastest (so much that pumped hydroelectric power plants can be used as storage), while coal and nuclear are among the slowest.
- gglon 2y ago
  pumped hydroelectric is storage; right now it is like 99% of world storage capacity.

jiqiren 2y ago

some politicians: "lets ruin this with some tariffs"!

henry2023 2y ago
- "Won't somebody please think of the oligarchy?"

QuercusMax 2y ago

Paywall-free archive link: https://archive.is/K0q90 https://archive.is/K0q90

zefr0g 2y ago

MW is power, not energy

lysace 2y ago
> "In South Africa, for example, the total amount of energy produced from solar systems in 2019 was thought to be about 500 megawatts" This is annoyingly common with journalists and also a very clear tell that they don't have any idea what they are writing about. Maybe in a few years the writer will understand that it's tricky to store energy in a cost-efficient way and that energy isn't the same as power. Or perhaps they won't. Either way, in late 2024, this low level of understanding is pretty tiring. The writer "has been the the recipient of a 2017 National Association of Science Writers reporting award for coverage of air pollution in Detroit, and a finalist for the 2019 Livingston Award for a series on water politics at the Texas-Mexico border. At The Atlantic, she covers climate change." The writer's CV doesn't mention any education at all.
- dguest 2y ago
  It might not be complete nonsense. If you map energy -> power the paragraph actually says something sensible. It could have been worse: if they'd said something like "500 megawatts per week" it would be completely unclear what they even mean. Should you map it to megawatt-hours / week (around 3 MW), because that's a common (kind of goofy) unit to work in? Or does it mean they use (on average) 500 MW?
  - lysace 2y ago
    I admire your creativity/positivity!
- kragen 2y ago
  500 megawatts would be 4.4 terawatt hours per year. That's in the ballpark of what they actually did produce in 02019, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_Africa. So the journalist seems to have actually been correct in this case, although it's a bit like saying "the distance covered by the runner was 12 miles per hour", when it would perhaps be more appropriate to say that that was the runner's speed rather than the runner's distance.

bruce511 2y ago

Scale is the really important thing here. It's really easy and really cheap to build a small-business, or home scale generation system. This is in contrast to nuclear, coal, gas turbine etc where you really need large plants to work efficiently. Small portable diesel generators exist, but they are expensive to run, need regular maintenance and refueling. Once you can cost effectively generate real electricity for very little effort, and very low cost, then people do it. And when you distribute generation like this very large effects happen very qickly.

michaelteter 2y ago
In general we need to get smart and get good at bringing critical resources (energy, food/water production) reasonably local. Climate, political, and economic disasters seem more frequent each decade, and it would be a shame to starve or melt/freeze ourselves just because our delivery systems failed us. And as a Texan, it blows my mind that so many people reject local solar options. When the grid is having rolling blackouts, wouldn’t it be nice to still have power?
- ddulaney 2y ago
  Agreed in general, but the question is what we give up in going to a more-resilient system. In particular, lots of things are the way they are because of cost. Would you be OK with your food costs doubling or tripling because it’s local? I don’t think I would.
  - itishappy 2y ago
    That's a fair point, but let's frame that in a resiliency context, where the choice becomes: * Cheap food most of the time, no food occasionally * More expensive food most of the time, imported food occasionally That decision is not one I'm particularly equipped to comment on.
  - anticorporate 2y ago
    > Would you be OK with your food costs doubling or tripling because it’s local? Just pointing out that many people, including myself, intentionally buy groceries from farmers' markets and local food co-ops very specifically because we want our food to be local. Others will spend even more time and labor on vegetable gardens for the same reason. It is unfortunate that the way we offer food production subsidies in many countries primarily benefit large, multinational conglomerates instead of funding healthier, more resilient, and more environmentally friendly local options. It is terrible that only those with means can afford to purchase local foods in many markets, but yes, plenty of us who are able to do so choose to.

moconnor 2y ago

Why on earth would “governments need to regulate and subsidise” a solar boom that is already proceeding apace without them? The tail end of this article makes no sense…

forgetfreeman 2y ago
Among other things it beats handing the treasury to oligarchs.
itishappy 2y ago
Previous paragraph has more info: > A world that mostly runs on solar power will also need something else—such as hydropower, nuclear, or geothermal—to generate energy when the sun isn’t shining in the evenings and winters. Jessika Trancik, an MIT professor who models clean-energy development, told me that governments need to steer investments toward storage and alternate forms of energy to compensate for that inherent downtime. That way, the world can have a reliable energy mix when 50 or 60 percent of electricity generation comes from solar and wind. I'd expect that the solar subsidies mentioned by the last paragraph are for solar-adjacent technologies like energy storage, not the panels themselves.
LunaSea 2y ago
Because the current deployment is already the result of subsidies and that it wouldn't have happened without?

azaras 2y ago

A solar punk utopia is near.

wongarsu 2y ago

So basically their point is a major driver of solar installations is that in low-wage countries with unreliable electricity grids solar is now by far the cheapest backup power. And once they have it they use it. That certainly sounds reasonable. In developed countries installation and mounting costs are a significant cost driver for solar installations, but in the third world you can do that a lot cheaper, and beating a diesel generator on cost isn't hard

nicoburns 2y ago
> solar is now by far the cheapest backup power If you're prepared to deal with it's unreliability (when the sun is not shining), then it's by far the cheapest power full stop. In countries with unreliable grids that looks a lot more attractive. Especially as in many of those countries it is reliably sunny.
- epistasis 2y ago
  Even the cost of battery storage is getting ridiculously cheap, too. Small off-grid installations, even in the US, can be had for $200/kWh capacity, with lifetimes > 3000 cycles. So lets say <$0.07/kWh for storing it. That's about the average cost of transmission & distribution for a kWh across the US.
- chgs 2y ago
  The sun comes up every day. If it doesn’t we’ve got bigger problems.
  - silvestrov 2y ago
    Britain and Svalbard would like a word with you.
    - chgs 2y ago
      Sure above/below 66 degrees. That’s are edge cases. I can assure you the sun comes up every day in Britain.

FactKnower69 2y ago

But is Janet Yellen still throwing a tantrum and telling anyone who will listen that China is building solar panels too efficiently? https://apnews.com/article/china-yellen-manufacturing-treasury-economics-69fa4b2bf1dca8ca408381189383717a https://apnews.com/article/china-yellen-manufacturing-treasu...

cjbgkagh 2y ago
In my view western economies are a ponzi scheme predicated on ever increasing cost of housing. Even a small erosion of the real economy has massive effects on the highly leveraged financial economy. This technology for cheaper goods already exists and I don’t think there is a way to stop it so my presumption is that eventually the real economy in the west will be undermined and the financialized economy will implode.

boshomi 2y ago

Wind power has also become really cheap in China. Tenders are around 1100-1800 CNY/kW onshore and around 3000 CNY/kW offshore. At the China Windpower 2024 trade fair held in October, 12 manufacturers presented wind turbines larger than 16MW, and 5 manufacturers are pushing into the 25MW range. After wind and PV became cheaper than coal in China, subsidies for onshore wind and PV were largely canceled. Subsidies in the offshore sector serve to build up an export industry. As a result, 2/3 of new PV and wind farms built worldwide are subsidy-free, most of them in China.

space_oddity 2y ago
How rapidly the economics of renewable energy are shifting
- pfdietz 2y ago
  The very high experience rate of renewables is just as important as current low cost. It means anything trying to compete with them is facing a rapidly moving target, and has to aim at where renewables will be, not just where they are.
  - space_oddity 2y ago
    I think renewables also continuously lowering costs as they scale
elric 2y ago
Meanwhile in Belgium, we have to spend (literal) billions on power cable projects so we can connect offshire windfarms to our grid.
- jayd16 2y ago
  I assume this is a typo but I did imagine a Belgian shire.
- boshomi 2y ago

space_oddity 2y ago

Solar is transforming energy landscapes worldwide

OptionOfT 2y ago

Solar where I live is very scammy. Salespeople who sell you the world and then your panels don't deliver, and the company is impossible to contact (or gone) [0] Then there is the issue that there is no battery mandate, which to me is insane. In sunny, warmer states we have an oversupply of energy during the day, and then when the sun sets we have a shortage as everybody comes home, and their AC needs to work harder, and people start cooking with electricity. So basically when you put on panels without a battery you're making it harder for everybody. You're using the grid as a battery. [0] https://www.npr.org/2024/08/14/1244330369/solar-rooftop-panels-environment-fraud-deception https://www.npr.org/2024/08/14/1244330369/solar-rooftop-pane...

bityard 2y ago
I thought utilities were starting to install battery farms these days? If the technology is there, I'd much rather the utility own, operate, maintain them. In most residences, I see a big battery strapped to a house as something of a liability.
mjamesaustin 2y ago
The more solar surplus we create, the more incentive there is to build battery storage. You can see it happening in California, where storage has grown massively year over year, to the point where it's now displacing natural gas peaker plants as a primary source of meeting after-sunset evening energy demand.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
stronglikedan 2y ago
The grid is a battery. That's one of the benefits of going solar. It's not making anything harder for anyone.
- kspacewalk2 2y ago
  Can you elaborate what you mean by that? The grid is a battery on a scale of one household connecting to this infinite supply or infinite sink of electricity, but on a wider scale (and physical world as opposed to accounting) , you generate energy during the day and someone else needs to generate it at night, so it's in no way a battery.

jandrese 2y ago

One of the things that I'm optimistic about is the way solar and wind have become so cheap that they're being installed on their own merits. You will find no shortage of people online bemoaning the woke energy that is going to ruin the economy, but their complaints can't stop people from installing more and more renewable energy every year. Even in places like Texas where the oil and gas industry is practically a religion. Ironically the only place that has seen effective pushback is California, where the legislature structured the system such that solar installs are basically just a gift to their corrupt energy companies.

purplethinking 2y ago
I've never once seen solar being called "woke energy", is that a thing? Either way, everyone's realigning now that Elon is MAGA, solar and EVs are out, they're MAGA now. Now it's all about degrowth and going back to our roots, there is no energy that is clean now.
- lantry 2y ago
  degrowth is trendy and fashionable online in certain communities, but from what I've seen the vast majority of democrats don't agree with it, if they've even heard of it. Most of the democrats I know are big fans of solar, and would be derided online as "neoliberal" or "centrist".
  - jandrese 2y ago
    I've never met a degrowth advocate in real life. I think it's one of those communities that only exists online because the proponents are too geographically scattered to form local communities.
    - purplethinking 2y ago
      It has taken root in Germany and EU as a whole. Why do you think they shut down their nuclear power plants while in an energy crisis?

ThinkBeat 2y ago

It is too bad that Biden is not letting Americans benefit from cheap solar panels and electric cars¹ ¹ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/05/14/fact-sheet-president-biden-takes-action-to-protect-american-workers-and-businesses-from-chinas-unfair-trade-practices/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

henry2023 2y ago
It's harder to believe in free markets when you're not the one selling.

skybrian 2y ago

If we’re talking “world,” global coal usage is predicted to increase, much of it in China and India, before declining later. Apparently with electricity usage going up, there’s more of every kind of power generation? https://tildes.net/~enviro/1jqy/coal_is_powering_the_energy_transition https://tildes.net/~enviro/1jqy/coal_is_powering_the_energy_... Also, cheap solar seems to be running into something like Amdahl’s law, where the solar panel cost is a small part of total cost. Hard to say what the trend will be for non-panel costs. How cheaply can they be installed and maintained?

henry2023 2y ago
Panel cost? The floor is the limit. [1] Installation cost? Depends on local labor wages but the skill is easy to learn. I'd recommend to DIY a couple 500 Wh panels just as an experiment. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
- bmicraft 2y ago
  That site is kinda bad. They show the same number for '21/'22 and don't have any data for '23/'24
  - henry2023 2y ago
    Yeah i'd be nice to have the other two datapoints. Production cost per PV watt was around 15 cents at the end of 2023 [1]. Some claim that by the end of 2024 this figure will reach 10 cents per watt. [2] [1]. https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-solar-panel-costs-plunge-in-2023-60-cheaper-than-us https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-solar-panel-costs-plunge.... [2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/11/23/solar-module-prices-may-reach-0-10-w-by-end-2024/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/11/23/solar-module-prices-m....

nnf 2y ago

I have solar panels and battery storage and have been very happy with them, but there are two aspects (in the area of the U.S. where I live) that made obtaining panels a lot more difficult than it needed to be. Around here, it's extremely common for homeowner associations to ban solar panels outright ("they're ugly", "nobody wants to look at that", etc.). Additionally, the local power utility has been granted the ability to limit how much solar capacity an individual homeowner can have. I would be more understanding of this second point but for the fact that very nearby, across a state line, solar capacity is not limited even though it's the same utility and the same power grid. When looking for a home several years ago, we only had a couple of options because solar was a requirement for us, but we wouldn't be allowed to add solar at most of the properties that were on the market at the time. We ended up finding a place and adding solar, the largest array we were allowed by the utility. It's very beneficial and I'm still glad we did it, but with an electric car and all electric appliances, it's often not enough to supply our needs. By allowing utilities to place such low capacity limits on solar generation, solar installation becomes less attractive, which I presume is what the utilities want and is the reason they lobby for such restrictions. Getting rid of these outdated HOA rules and utility-imposed capacity limits (when there's no technical reason for them) are two things we'll need to overcome in order to make solar adoption more attractive and hopefully more affordable for everyone.

kkfx 2y ago

Unfortunately due to tariffs, p.v. systems for private people are still not cheap at all compared to other countries... Tariffs to protect... Nothing, because we produce essentially nothing, just some inverters.