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Comment by codecamper | Hacker News Reader

Solar panels now sell for about 45c a watt out of China. Cost to create is around 36c / watt.

This allows deployments such as in Chile & Dubai where the cost/kwh is 3 cents & below.

This now cheaper than coal, without subsidy.

Remove the subsidies that oil, gas & coal receive, and you will witness a new day.

Only problem for solar right now is over supply caused by a sudden drop in demand. China reduced its subsidy a bit. Also the US extended subsidy for 5 years, which is great, but it has removed the urgency to complete utility scale solar plants before subsidy cutoff, causing the utilities to sit it out & wait.

Better act soon! (250 years to clear CO2 from atmosphere, feedback loops only now being discovered.)

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"Remove the subsidies that oil, gas & coal receive, and you will witness a new day."

Yes. But you will also need to remove the anti-dumping import duties on Chinese-made PV cells.

Those are some pretty big special interest groups (particular the first one) receiving government protection from foreign competition. So good luck with getting those protections removed.

You think these duties will stop the Chinese? Ha ha ha.

Already the major chinese manufacturers are opening fabs in Malaysia. First Solar and Sunpower (US PV companies) also manufacture in Malaysia.

I'm not saying they are actually doing this, but how hard will it be to ship modules from China to Malaysia and then onto final destinations?

Also the power grid cannot accommodate in it's current form. Older substations struggle to do with the load fluctuations that are caused by solar panels, which is why they are discouraging them in Hawaii. A huge investment would be required to upgrade these substations. But yes, soon solar will be cheaper than coal.

well the grid needs to be upgraded. Totally ridiculous that HI discourages residential PV.

Absolutely. I was just pointing out that in the current state of a lot of developed countries, coal is still cheaper than solar because of the infrastructure. But we're bloody close!

Those upgrades cost money. And the main reason people install PV is so they don't have to pay the power company.

I wonder if they're going to go in the direction of requiring those big home battery systems with every personal PV install? It would drive the install price up a fair bit, but could theoretically smooth out the demand on the power grid to avoid these problems. In fact it could be a better situation than we have today for a place like Hawaii. The battery backed solar homes would start needing grid power in the middle of the night, roughly the time demand is otherwise at its lowest.

Is the necessary volume achievable, both in land required and producing the actual panels? I'm under the impression that efficiency drops when you move towards the poles, where many of the developed countries are. Also, do solar panels still require rare minerals to manufacture?

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