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Well, it could power the U.S. if transportation weren't an issue. I worked with the Wind Energy Project Group several years back at the TU Delft and when I aske

by drostie 11y ago

Well, it could power the U.S. if transportation weren't an issue. I worked with the Wind Energy Project Group several years back at the TU Delft and when I asked why the US didn't just exploit its huge reserves of wind and solar energy available, say in the Midwest, an engineer who worked there with me thumbed through some books and came up with some ballpark statistic, which I think was something like "1% power loss per hundred km" or so -- basically it meant that this was potentially feasible for powering Chicago with a wind farm in Iowa, or possibly even getting energy from Canada to New York City, the rest of the possibilities were far more limited. Maybe someone on HN is an actual engineer for one of these power companies and can give a more reliable figure? Solar grid parity would definitely be pretty awesome. Do you know whether the gains come from better efficiencies, or from cheaper manufacture? In any case, I'd caution HN on that: don't expect an immediate turn-over. It's sort of like how poor people are constrained by their food budgets to eat an obesity-inducing diet: solar power works well if you can buffer the more-up-front costs (investment, maintenance, the volatility in the electric bill induced by weather) with your budget in exchange for the long-term payoff, but that's just a really hard sell to people who are in the middle and lower-middle class.

nostrademons 11y ago
I'm going off a handful (~3-4) conversations with people in the industry, but my impression is that a large portion of the cost reductions come from economies of scale, particularly being driven by early-adopter industrial customers. The big problem with solar is that you need a large up-front R&D and tooling/manufacturing investment before you can produce any working installations at all. Amortized over a small production run, this isn't cost effective enough to get any companies off the ground. But the tax subsidies that the government poured into the industry were enough to make it cost effective enough to bring on some early industrial companies like Google profitably. The profits from industrial customers can then be used to subsidize early-adopter consumer R&D, which at sufficient scale operates profitably on a unit-installation basis, which can then be used to fund mass-market adoption. Positive feedback cycle, where eventually a tipping point is reached and solar takes over. As for getting it out to consumers: that's what financial arrangements are for. A friend of mine (in cloudy Massachusetts) has an interesting deal where he rents the solar panels from a company that basically charges him a flat fee < his electric bill, and guarantees a certain power output regardless of weather conditions (so they'll pay his electric bill if the panels don't generate what they say they'll generate). The company owns the panels, books any tax subsidies, pays for installation, and has the freedom to upgrade & reinstall as newer models come on the market. As a result, it's zero risk for him, and the company presumably has the industry knowledge and economies of scale to manage their risk appropriately. They could, for example, swap out his 1st gen panels as newer models come on the market and then send them to a sunnier location where they'd perform fine.
CyberDildonics 11y ago
It is almost all from cost of manufacturing. The one statistic that explains the solar boom and articles like this is that by 2017 solar panels should drop 40% in price per kw/hr. If they are at grid parity now, what will 40% do? That is just in the next 2 years. In fact depending on where people live, at a certain point solar will make more sense than investing in the stock market (although of course this will even out at some point as electricity cost becomes essentially the cost of solar in the area around you).

by drostie 11y ago

nostrademons 11y ago

I'm going off a handful (~3-4) conversations with people in the industry, but my impression is that a large portion of the cost reductions come from economies of scale, particularly being driven by early-adopter industrial customers. The big problem with solar is that you need a large up-front R&D and tooling/manufacturing investment before you can produce any working installations at all. Amortized over a small production run, this isn't cost effective enough to get any companies off the ground. But the tax subsidies that the government poured into the industry were enough to make it cost effective enough to bring on some early industrial companies like Google profitably. The profits from industrial customers can then be used to subsidize early-adopter consumer R&D, which at sufficient scale operates profitably on a unit-installation basis, which can then be used to fund mass-market adoption. Positive feedback cycle, where eventually a tipping point is reached and solar takes over. As for getting it out to consumers: that's what financial arrangements are for. A friend of mine (in cloudy Massachusetts) has an interesting deal where he rents the solar panels from a company that basically charges him a flat fee < his electric bill, and guarantees a certain power output regardless of weather conditions (so they'll pay his electric bill if the panels don't generate what they say they'll generate). The company owns the panels, books any tax subsidies, pays for installation, and has the freedom to upgrade & reinstall as newer models come on the market. As a result, it's zero risk for him, and the company presumably has the industry knowledge and economies of scale to manage their risk appropriately. They could, for example, swap out his 1st gen panels as newer models come on the market and then send them to a sunnier location where they'd perform fine.

CyberDildonics 11y ago

It is almost all from cost of manufacturing. The one statistic that explains the solar boom and articles like this is that by 2017 solar panels should drop 40% in price per kw/hr. If they are at grid parity now, what will 40% do? That is just in the next 2 years. In fact depending on where people live, at a certain point solar will make more sense than investing in the stock market (although of course this will even out at some point as electricity cost becomes essentially the cost of solar in the area around you).