How Cheap Can Solar Get?
rameznaam.com
rameznaam.com
Upcoming posts will look at the future of wind power, the future of energy storage, and what the missing pieces are.
If you don't want to wait, you can read my thoughts on energy storage here: http://rameznaam.com/2015/04/14/energy-storage-about-to-get-...
I.e. I'm trying to figure out if going solar now is better (in California) or just waiting a few more years. I'm in no particular hurry since my electric bill vs. sq/ft is already pretty good.
Rooftop solar will probably also take 2-3 years to make up for the cost lost to the subsidy reduction. It may even be 4. So after 2016, I'd expect rooftop prices to rise before slowly dropping, and getting back to 2016 levels around 2019 or 2020.
But solar thermal has the advantage of integrated storage. When solar overall is at some reasonably high penetration (say, 10-15%) storage will become important. At that point, it depends on the cost curve of storage technologies.
If batteries or other energy storage technologies have gotten cheap enough, PV + storage will be cheaper than solar thermal. If batteries haven't dropped in price enough, solar thermal may see a resurgence.
My bet is on PV + storage, though there is no certainty here.
I know they're different technologies, but I wonder on the cross-over effects of the two. If people see a solar thermal plant going up near their town, will it encourage or discourage them from installing PVCs? Are nation states that encourage / subsidise large-scale solar thermal deployments more likely to encourage end-user scale (PVC-based) systems?
Entirely agree managing storage is increasingly the pain point - in both scales of systems (thermal just rides out cloudy / dark periods more smoothly, I believe).
Is it still true that the most $-effective large-scale power-storage mechanism is to pump water up a hill?
I don't think this will make much difference - individual PV installation is an investment decision (just like other big home improvements) based on cost of energy and subsidies. It makes some difference to how "green" people feel, but the cost matters more. It may have an effect in planning battles. Here in the UK (esp Scotland) it's all about the wind farms. European solar thermal is currently struggling against low natural gas prices: http://www.estif.org/statistics/st_markets_in_europe_2014/
Pumped storage requires naturally occuring suitable locations (not too many available) and incurs environmental damage of damming a river.
(Calling it "PVC" is really confusing me with the flexible polymer)
As to influence - I think HN types are more informed than the GP, so in our bubble it may be hard to speculate accurately on any such influence. By which I mean, if you're not informed about the technology or the trends, then any intrusion of these technologies into your life will be more significant. Perhaps I am wrong.
For Scotland I would think we're some way off a sufficiently efficient cell, given hours and angles of incidence of sunlight.
Disclaimer - I'm in Australia, about 35 degrees south, and to be candid don't really understand how even places like Germany have so much love for PVCs ;)
How do you think the fact that natural gas is guaranteed to decrease in availability / increase in cost (over the long term) compared to the guarantee solar will decrease in cost, will influence users? And how do you think the idea of users being able, or being primed, to think of themselves as producers as well as consumers will influence their decisions on power?
I don't think individuals are very good at adapting to the long term market. If I know gas will be more expensive in 5 years, I can't do very much with that today. There's also the old "the market can stay irrational longer than you stay solvent": if I invest too early I can just as easily lose money.
In the UK, I think the general public are ahead of the media and politicians on the issue. There's a noisy anti-environmentalist and anti-windfarm contingent, but most people recognise the tradeoffs. I don't think people want to be their own producer en masse, any more than grow their own food or be their own bank, but if they can make a capital investment that saves money and produces income then you're speaking the right language to the middle class.
People might start to get vocal when gas prices go up in the UK; complaints about fuel poverty and demands for more fracking. It'll require a long period of gas being more expensive than electricity for fuel and heating for people to switch their homes over.
Of course, thermal generators required direct incidence (don't work well on diffuse light), but the long and short of it is that with thermal we (may) need about half the total area we would need for PV. (On the other hand, PV can practically uses space - rooftops - which is inaccessible for thermal.)
Nice blog, by the way :-)
How serious are grid stability issues presented by solar PV (without storage) at high penetration rates (say > ~ 20%)? Important? Not? Thanks.
So since the cost drivers changing - why does it make sense to model future price on old cost drivers ?
I initially set out to model soft costs on their own, separate from module costs. However, that effort revealed other factors. Solar capacity factor is rising and operational costs (which are not included in soft costs are dropping. There are more variables at play. For some of those variables, there isn't robust data available over lon times.
All of those variables ultimately feed into electricity prices, in the end, which is why I chose that modeling approach.
In the case of Moore's Law, a transistor can be any size. By contrast, solar cells absorbs too little energy if they are too thin.
TL;DR: There are real physical limitations to solar cells.
1. The grams of rare earths required per watt of solar have been dropping steadily. And Solar PV panels with no rare earths at all have been developed, though they are not yet common.
2. "Rare earths" are not so rare. Their prices have tumbled substantially as new mines have opened up and substitutes have been found.
Yes, but mining them is an environmental disaster.
Yeah, but the super-efficient solar cells are not the cheap ones that everybody is putting on their roof. They're the ones going on the international space station.
>Once a particular solar technology reaches grid parity
It already did in about half of the continental US, about two years ago.
I mean that seriously. Right now, pretty much all that matters is cost per watt. For normal terrestrial uses, a 20% efficient cell loses out to a 5% efficient cell that's 10x cheaper. (Numbers made up on the fly with no particular basis.) We're not currently hurting for space for these things, and sunlight is free.
Even if these two use the same basic technology, I think they are essentially two completely separate "markets."
The inverters used in the residential market versus the solar plant market are usually quiet different and, IMHO, form two distinct markets. Reductions in the inverter cost for solar plant deployments would result in a reduction in the home market, but the relationship is not as direct as the relationship between the panels since you would rarely be able to use the same inverter in both markets.
They are not trivial. Germany claims one trillion EUR direct costs on network upgrades to cope with renewable energy. They do not take into account energy storage costs. Even now (at least in my country) 75% of energy costs are distribution costs.
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-Trillion-Euro_cost_of_G...
Energy storage is indeed going to be vital once solar exceeds 10-20% of capacity. Energy storage, fortunately, is also dropping fast in cost:http://rameznaam.com/2015/04/14/energy-storage-about-to-get-...
I have future posts coming with closer looks at the future of storage prices, wind prices, and possibly one on nuclear.
I do agree that Moore's Law generally holds true. However a better model is an approximation of multiple S-curves, where each S curve represents the beginning, growth, and maturation of each step in technology.
The smearing of S curves and integration of new lines of tech allow for what appears an exponential growth.
Also, I'd like your opinion on http://www.bioinspired.net/ -- Commercially available memristors, albeit high priced.
Its likely it'll never be cheaper to build traditional sealed glass panels cheaper than house windows, although per sq meter it might get cheaper than televisions.
Some of the more optimistic claims outside the article seem to have very unusual assumptions about the cost of glass.
I doubt others see it that way, so I guess I'll pay the cleanup cost later like everyone else regardless. Such is the human condition.
That's really generous, however I think it would be the government's duty to compensate for these externalities so you don't have to pay more for solar (or not much more) than for the grid. Otherwise the environment will just stay a huge "tragedy of the commons".
The real test should be if it ensures that people pay a "fair price" for a product. Paying a little more for clean energy is perfectly reasonable.
You could argue the other way and say that paying a little more for dirty energy is perfectly reasonable because someone has to come after them to clean things up. There is a cost to that.
Outside of very short term smoothing effects from strategic reserves, "fair price" raises some troubling price-fixing flags, for me.
[1] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=42940.0
The comparable number for fossil fuels (in this case, oil) is 'well to tank efficiency', which amounts to about 25% for oil, if i recall correctly. So 1/4th of energy contained in oil is already spent to bring it to market.
Notably, wind energy has a far more favorable EROI than solar does (currently), but wind power is a relatively limited resource.
I don't mean to say that this is the primary reason for nuclear's demise - it isn't - but it is a real hurdle against increasing deployments.
Of course, there are very exciting new developments in nuclear technology that solve this - breeding, reprocessing, etc - but they are all (still) at an experimental stage. That's the catch-22 of nuclear: there's an existing, mature industry, which uses it's fuel unsustainably, and there are developments to sustainably use nuclear power, which is quite far from being an industry.
> Solar panels, according to Weißbach, generate four times as much energy over their lifetimes as it takes to manufacture them. Unfortunately, Weißbach also claims that an EROI of 7 is required to support a society like Europe. [...] For solar, which I know better, this paper is an outlier.
> If we used only the estimates from 2010 on, we’d find an EROI for poly-Si solar of around 15. If we used only the 2013 estimate, we’d find an EROI of around 25.
> In summary: The Weißbach paper is, with respect to solar, an outlier. A more realistic estimate of poly-Si solar EROI, today, is somewhere above 10, and probably above 15. And it’s rising. Solar panels generate many times more energy over their lifetimes than is used to construct them and their associated hardware.
Again, this should be compared with the breathtaking environmental devastation of the non-green technologies. Most of us don't live in Appalachia (coal), Canada (tar sands) or Dakota (fracking) either. Or one of the two failed reactor exclusion zones in the world.
We are literally pumping hundreds to thousands tons per day of CO2 in the atmosphere with coal, not to mention mercury and radium, and people are worried about batteries?
Perhaps you just need to check with your building owner.
If you're a tenant looking for an apartment you can keep asking it from landlords. Hopefully they start seeing that it's something that can be a distinct factor.
If you're a company doing real estate software, you can incorporate info about solar panels (and things like energy efficiency metrics) to the software.
Personally, it would take something like a decade to recapture the capital costs associated with a solar installation. I don't have a 10-year commitment to my home, and don't have a capital gain tax liability to offset. So with solar I save a few bucks a month, and pick up alot of risk that my electric utility bears right now.
Makes sense if you own the property and have the spare cash to take the free money (8% yield tax free) - though the UK government is reducing the subsidy
If only it was. Neither solar panels nor wind turbines last for a very long time, and the recycling processes don't exist on an efficient or clean scale for either yet.
But my grandfather worked at a coal fired plant. I've been to the strip mine. I've seen the trains that run continuously to truck it in.
From a layman's perspective it seems like an incredibly efficient process. Is there any chemical refinement going on at all? All that I saw looked mechanical (but I was very young).
I would guess that it would take many years of Solar before it broke even, in an environmental impact sense, with "cleaner" coal.
I think ultimately solar probably wins. But the initial cost seems like it must be orders of magnitude higher.
That said, I'd get solar if I could. Just not my highest home-improvement priority and I'd have to do something about the trees shading the south side of my roof. I like my trees. :-(
OTOH it would be nice if there were a high power (~2KV), affordable (<$2,000?), silent wind turbine solution to supplement our grid power.
Since the GP was talking about "trees shading the south side of my roof" I'm guessing that he's in the northern hemisphere. Or maybe he's just really bad at siting solar panels, but I was giving him the benefit of the doubt. :)
There are various estimates of the breakeven time, but even the most conservative ones put it under ten years.
You don't have to get your own solar if it's not convenient, that's what the grid is for.
1: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...
You're right, we will have to bite the bullet to have enough renewable capacity in the future. All I'm arguing is that we know both the risks of action and inaction. It's hard to get a sense of environmental damage from inside a comfortable air-conditioned building.
Also, lots of other things that aren't good for the environment use rare earths. Kind of weird and illogical that people only care about it when you're trying to do good.
In 2003, China had 4,143 coal related accidents that killed 6,434 people. But, installing rooftop solar also kills some people so it must be the great evil.
PS: A report by the World Bank in cooperation with the Chinese government found that about 750,000 people die prematurely in China each year from air pollution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China#Accidents_and_de...
The pollution from solar cell manufacture is mostly near the mines and chemical processors, and the effects are mitigated if you don't go near there or live downstream. Pollution from coal burning affects everyone who lives downwind of any furnace, and those are located near the users to cut down on transmission losses.
Natural sources of pollution, like volcanoes, are not much of a concern, because most of the biosphere chooses not to live near them. So an artificial zone made more inhospitable than the surface of Venus, confined somehow, and situated far from civilization, is a bit less of a concern than the air quality index of Beijing.
Would it help if the raw materials were mined from asteroids, the finished product manufactured in space, and then dropped to the surface by nontoxic ablative shields and parachutes? If the answer is yes, being able to confine the pollution to specific areas on Earth is almost as good. (But the confinement is the hard part.)
No magnets, induction motors.
It's obvious modern societies are wasteful - energy, food, water, transportation - but everybody is talking about how to increase production efficiency, no one is talking about how to decrease over-consumption.
[1] A big topic for sustainable development: https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=prosperity+without+gr...
In the UK Co-operative energy and Ecotricity are two that I'm aware of.
The other thing you can do is invest in a "community solar garden" project, which basically means you pay for the panels, and get the benefit of their generation, but they don't sit on your roof.
In places where the regulatory regime and utilities are sane with regards to metering and feed-in tariffs putting in a solar installation is already a winning proposition.
grid-tie systems are another story and a bigger investment. (need a proper electrician to wire it etc...)
feeding ignorant "city ways" in terms of people's silly habits fed by years of cluelessness (no a hairdryer will never ever be possible, as that's 2kw right there...) that's where the biggest expenses come in... if you don't try to keep up with the usual clueless electrical consumption, a well organized person can begin cutting their footprint down...
for example my alleged 85w macbook pro power supply consumes less than 20w typically... my inverter says so...
See:
http://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-build-a-windmill
It weighs about 100 Kg and it's currently in storage near the town of Beverwijk in NL. It cost a small fortune to make it and I'd rather see it being used than slowly rust away in storage.
I've been using a pedal-powered generator to power my computer, phone, tablet, and LED lights for the last 5 years and have tested several laptops and other devices using it. I've found that most laptops draw from 12 W (11" Chromebook) to 25 W (older 15" Dell) when their battery is charged, but 40-60 W when charging. The power supplies of most devices seem to have about a 50% safety factor, so a device that has a normal max power consumption of 50 W will use a 75 W power supply.
Is that about right (ballpark), or have I missed something? It would probably power my laptop for the day, anyway... It's something to think about (since I love cycling, even stationary ;-) )
If you're used to bicycling, dress appropriately, and work in a cool environment with a fan, you can produce 50-60 W.
Above that, it becomes difficult to maintain your concentration on your work while trying to pedal hard at the same time.
On most days, I maintain about 35-50 W, depending on the load.
So far this morning, I've ridden for 2 hrs, 5 minutes and produced 74 W-hr. The computer I'm using this morning is a Raspberry Pi2 with a 19" monitor. I'm also powering our DSL modem/router and a 12 V fan while recharging two tablets, four AA batteries, and my phone at the same time.
You don't mention the model of Xantrex inverter but the 813-3000-UL is a 3 KW model.
I'm old enough that when I was young inverters and switching DC-DC and power supplies in general cost about a buck a watt, now its ten cents and dropping. That would have been $4000+ decades ago, now its about $300 delivered.
That's not the only cost, of course, 3 KW at 12 V is a non-trivial DC current, and two hundred aH isn't going to run that hair dryer for hours, but how much hair do you have to dry anyway?
It it possible for the mathematically trained to easily immerse and innovate in the industry ?
It it possible to manufacture solar cells "in your garage" so to speak ?
A Grätzel or dye sensitized solar cell can be easily created in your garage. Look them up on Youtube.
Source: I work in the field.
It can include a lot of software.
To use the situation I'm most familiar with: there are hundreds of millions of people in emerging economies who live off-grid and spend tens of billions of dollars annually on expensive fuel-based energy. They'll switch to solar tomorrow if we [1] can solve the problem of upfront financing [2]. It's the same problem that SolarCity, Sunrun, et al. are tackling in the US. This problem is the kind that gets solved by, among other things, developing the same kind of enterprise-targeted mobile/web/backend/data systems familiar to any developer at a modern SaaS company (but targeting a different, unusually interesting and important market, with some unique challenges).
[1] https://careers.stackoverflow.com/company/angaza/
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/selling-ener...
https://www.edx.org/course/solar-energy-delftx-et3034x
Although most of the current innovation seems to be focused on the panel efficiency, and that area requires some understanding of Materials Science
http://www.rdmag.com/news/2014/01/understanding-perovskite-b...
If you pick the winners, investment will have huge return.
Most solar companies, however, will be casualties in the fierce competition to come.
The other area to look at is energy storage. More renewables will increase the demand for energy storage. And it's early days in that field. Again: Huge returns for the winners. But most companies will be shaken out of the field.
As Ramez said, you don't bet on an "emerging industry", you bet on the winners in that emerging industry, otherwise you may very well lose your money. When new industries are born there are usually hundreds of competitors in the beginning, but eventually only a few big ones remain, and it's usually those that started early and got big early.
In California, a minimum charge was introduced and will be $10.00 starting in 2016. I suspect that this charge will be jacked up in increments till it is a significant fraction of the monthly bill.
If this does indeed play out, then the only option will be solar with localized energy storage, and disconnect completely from the grid.
California also will be flattening the rate curve at the Utility companies request to combat solar installations in the next 1-2 years. Users in the first tier will be paying more, the other tiers will be combined into one and be at a lower rate than the current top tier. In 2019 there is a plan to move everyone to time of use pricing. Once time of use is mandated, it may be too expensive to remain connected to the grid.
Besides, centralized energy systems have certain advantages that household operations do not have. Maybe even better ones will arrive once solar becomes more accessible. SO it makes sense that they will stay at least as competitive as off-grid systems.
Businesses trying to keep their outdated business models alive do that sort of thing all the time. Just look at the music and movie industry's continued flailing as they try to keep CDs/DVDs profitable while their customer base wants files that they can play on _any_ device they own, not a physical copy or some DRM-laden crap that forces them to use it on one system.
This movement is going to put the skids under the home solar company's pitch that you'll be able to feed electricity back and sell it to the power companies.
Unless the utilities decide to become more competitive, the only way to win in the long term is NOT to feed the energy you make back into the grid.
The term "solar cell" refers to a wide variety of technologies[1]. Anything from common semiconductors, rare-earths or even fruit juice can be used to make solar cells. The impact will be highly dependent on the type of cell in question.
[1]:http://www.nrel.gov/ncpv/images/efficiency_chart.jpg
The above graph isn't all-encompassing.
I'm interested in these questions:
- What cell types are currently bought, will be bought in large quantities?
- How it affects / will affect the environment?
http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-...
The second addresses the carbon cost specifically.
http://info.cat.org.uk/questions/pv/what-energy-and-carbon-p...
[1] http://info.cat.org.uk/questions/pv/what-environmental-impac...
[2] http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalconsumer_researchrepor...
[3] http://www.solarscorecard.com/2014/2014-SVTC-Solar-Scorecard...
There is now push back by the dominant power company in my area against solar. When I got solar they gave me a small grant.
Solar is the future I think. Too much potential danger from nuclear and coal polutes too much.
Also, panels may be declared end-of-life because they are not as effective as newer ones, even though they are still generating to original specification.