Solar Just Hit a Record Low Price in the U.S

We need to get out of the mindset that all power generators need to produce a steady amount of power 24/7. A flexible grid made of many power sources that can be ramped up and down can just as easily meet demand and may even be best since it is resilient when any one power source goes down for an extended period of time.

You can't just say that solar should be more expensive because it only works half the day. You could just as easily turn that argument around and say that nuclear and coal plants should be more expensive since they are only economical if run at a constant load and require long shutdowns every year for maintenance. There needs to be extra capacity on the grid to meet demand during nuclear/coal shutdowns, but no one states that nuclear and coal should be more expensive as a result.

Unless you're trying to power the grid with a single power plant (like on a small island), argument made above doesn't hold. The grid is a network of generators (and loads) with different operating characteristics.

“Three years ago you almost never saw batteries as part of a new solar or wind project,” Naam said. “In 2018, we’ve seen battery storage frequently show up as part of these bids. Energy storage is becoming the new normal with solar bids.”

So they are already working on it with some of the projects at least, and there's no reason to think they won't scale up and start becoming competitive before too long.

All of these are far less developed than lithium ion cells, but have the potential to do a lot better on cost and longevity grounds.

There's "baseload power" (coal, nuclear, wind, solar is really good for this), and there's "Peaker power" (natural gas and hydro are really good for this).

Hydro is super-simple. Just block the water if you don't need energy, and unblock it when you need energy. Ditto with Natural Gas, which can spin up / spin down arbitrarily.

Solar, Nuclear, and Wind generate power on their own schedule and can't really be bothered. But you use OTHER forms of energy when the sun stops shining.

Natural gas is expensive to run 100% of the time. But if you can run Natural gas only 20% of the time, then you're still saving money.

Once the heavily regulated energy market has time to adjust to market conditions you are going to see this energy surplus during the day being adjusted for. Where solar panels make economic sense today they may not tomorrow when energy prices for mid-day use plummet due to oversupply.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

Would still make a huge dent to energy needs and the existing infrastructure already in place.

[1] http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx

> The Nevada auction also included a number of projects that link up utility-scale solar with batteries. Mastering solar plus storage will be critical for renewables to truly overtake fossil fuels, since they only generate power when it’s sunny or when the wind blows.

> “Three years ago you almost never saw batteries as part of a new solar or wind project,” Naam said. “In 2018, we’ve seen battery storage frequently show up as part of these bids. Energy storage is becoming the new normal with solar bids.”

That's the job of the inverter, right? It uses free solar energy first and maintains reliability by supplementing it with costly grid power.

It is true that a wide electrical grid needs a base load.

It is also true that solar isn't great at continuous power because of, you know, the Sun sometimes being behind the Earth.

But that doesn't mean you need necessarily need batteries. There are at least two scenarios where you don't:

1. You have an alternative to batteries for storage. This could mean using excess solar power to create some fuel that may well also be portable. This isn't an economic way of creating gasoline (yet) but in remote places this might not matter. It also might not matter if this power is essentially "free" (eg you need to build a certain capacity anyway which leaves times where excess power is being generated).

2. Power usage on electrical grids is also not smooth. It also peaks during the day when, as it happens, the Sun is also out. So your solar capacity is actually reducing your peak grid power requirements, which is incredibly useful.

They dodged this recent tariff change that took effect this week as 8541.40.60 tariffs currently aren't included in this tariff war with China but they could see more aggressive action.

There are two ways that this is netting something:

1. Utah gets to set the total allowable emissions/year. If this is set lower than what emissions would be, absent the program, then emissions will be reduced.

2. Companies have to pay for those credits. If the credit price ends up being high enough, then companies will invest in ways to reduce emissions, e.g. by purchasing carbon scrubbers.

The key is how many total credits you allocate to begin with - they should be sufficiently scarce that large emitters need to buy credits - and continually ratcheting down the number of credits allocated annually.

You're forgetting the 'cap' part of cap-and-trade. The point is minimize the cost of reducing the total amount of greenhouse gas (or whatever) pollution across society. The reason for allowing people to sell their credits is that it reduces the economic cost of reducing pollution. It doesn't matter whether any given individual is polluting more or less, what matters is that total pollution is continually decreasing until we reach safe levels.

From there, the solar company probably covers their own pollution level and then sells the remainder of the credits at auction and capitalizes on the spread.

Company pollution rates will likely not be affected until it eats into their profits; rather, they will likely just buy credits up to the point where there's a breakeven between the cost of a credit and the savings for a credit. Whatever money is saved won't be used to increase pollution but rather just be reinvested into other parts of the company or released to shareholders.

In this case, the pollutant is paying money to pay less in taxation, the solar company is providing access to renewable energy, and Average Joe is going to be polluting less at home. I could get behind that.

EDIT: Also, this means that Utah could theoretically wean the state's pollution credits lower and lower each year until the cost of polluting is so high that pollutants either convert or leave.

The credits are an improvement, because polluters at least have to pay for pollution credits, which means they have an incentive to pollute less.

>> “On their face, they’re less than a third the price of building a new coal or natural gas power plant,” Ramez Naam, an energy expert and lecturer at Singularity University, told Earther in an email. “In fact, building these plants is cheaper than just operating an existing coal or natural gas plant.”

>> There’s a 30 percent federal investment tax credit for solar projects that helps drive down the cost of this and other solar projects. But Naam said even if you take away that credit, “these bids, un-subsidized, are still cheaper than any new coal or gas plants, and possibly cheaper than operating existing plants.”

I'm assuming that's without factoring in the health cost externalities.

Does anyone have data on typical wholesale power costs?

Consider the situation in 1950 when you are building a house, you can double or triple the cost of home construction by insulating it so that the net energy needed to heat or cool it is minimal, or you throw a oil burner in the basement which is burning fuel oil that costs a few cents per gallon and keep everything nice and toasty. The "obvious" choice there was not to spend the money on insulation but instead to just use really cheap energy to manage the temperature range. Makes everything much easier to engineer.

If, on the other hand, you design with the assumption that energy is extremely expensive and so you minimize the need to use it to regulate temperatures within a house, you can design a house that is temperature stable with the minimal amount of energy input for air circulation.

That gets you houses in the New Mexico desert that need no air conditioning (air cooling) and churches and office buildings in the northeast that need no additional heating.

Things that I have read about include extended depth insulated exterior walls. "Smart" glass windows that reject 97% of the infrared and ultraviolet spectrum (I've got film on my house windows that are not that good but they do a tremendous job of minimizing heat load in the summer). Passive heat exchanger systems that keep the temperature balanced between upstairs and downstairs, and solar roof tiles that provide both insulation and energy for running the house.

Does that help you if you're living in a 'mid century wood frame house', probably not. But it isn't that solar couldn't meet the heating and cooling needs, it is that combined with good house engineering this is already a solved problem.

Houses built to the German Passivhaus standard would do just fine in Ohio. I used to live in Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, so I should know. There was one Minnesota church built with polystyrene panels that had to start running air conditioning in the middle of winter, the insulation was so good.

If you live in the South West though its perfect as Winter nights dont require much heat and the biggest loads are AC at the times when there is lots of sun.

It can get pretty darn cold at night in the desert southwest. Again, insulation is the key.

Of course water is the next problem, but cheap electricity can help that too.

It's 10X as expensive to use techniques like desalinization. It's so much more expensive, that lots of desal plants get built, then get mothballed because it's that much cheaper to get water by other means.

(a) In any realistic scenarios where a grid goes mostly-solar, you'd expect that it would have adequate storage.

(b) Storage heaters are a thing (and far more economical than batteries).

(c) Modern "passive houses" and similar standards require surprisingly small energy input to heat, even when it's very cold outside. For whatever reason these mostly haven't been adopted in the US, but are becoming common in parts of Europe.

Duluth gets about half of the annual Global Horizontal Irradiance that Tuscon does, and that's before accounting for the fact that snow will sometimes cover the panels. In addition, Minnesota has significantly lower electricity prices than the big coastal states (partially due to the great wind resource in the SW corner of the state, partially due to political reasons).

There are other things you can do to make an impact in MN, though. An obvious one is roof and window insulation...

[1] https://www.energysage.com/

[2] https://solarpowerrocks.com/infographics/solar-infographic-s...

If you do the discounted cash flow calculation of solar, at $2.3/W, electricity costs you around 5c/kWh: http://databin.pudo.org/t/19ece6

I'm looking at DIY solutions. At least I can scale it as I have a few hundred at a time instead of trying to make $20k work in a budget.

It is still news when a wining team adds another victory to their streak and progresses towards the championship,

Also, as pointed out elsewhere, TFA was mostly about this good trend.

What point were you trying to make?

It broke a record that was set [checks calendar] last week.

But I think the headline is being a little click-baity—the article's real strength is analysis. It discusses broader trends—for example that location is important here (Ohio isn't going to get these low bids because it just isn't sunny enough)—and is fun to read.

If you extrapolate the downward trend, it's very obvious that anything you build right now that burns fossil fuel is going to be a problem in terms of being able to compete throughout its projected life span. Prices are trending to the point where it will become economical to shut down existing and operational plants in favor of replacing them with solar or wind.

The next milestone will be when existing coal/gas plants will start getting decommissioned. This will start with the older ones but very soon after may be followed by the new and shiny ones Trump is trying to build right now. That is if he manages to get investors to back that at all. It would be kind of a dumb investment given the above.

And to preempt the battery comment, batteries were included with this bid, as is common these days.

The Moapa Band of Paiutes is presumably not dedicating most of their reservation's land to solar generation. Most of the Topaz Solar Farm's land is dedicated to solar generation. That's why you see a much lower energy density if you're calculating areal production using the entire land of the reservation as the denominator.

Solar has become cheaper than coal quite recently. It takes time to build new projects. The "cheaper than coal" qualifier is also so far true just in areas with reasonably good sun resources. Much of the US population lives in areas where there's not enough sun for PV to be cheaper than coal. New York and Pennsylvania aren't there yet, for example.

Finally, the US federal government is trying to prop up the coal industry. That includes invoking "national security" to keep uncompetitive coal plants running. The present administration has also raised the prices of solar equipment with a slew of tariffs. There's a risk for project developers that they could submit a bid for a new solar project, sign a contract, and then a year later see their costs rise above profits due to another round of tariff fights. There's a risk for project buyers that they'll lock in an agreement for a new "cheaper than coal" solar project but be forced to keep buying coal power anyway due to outside forces.

For example, Arizona's excellent sun resources now make PV generation significantly cheaper than running a 1970s-era coal plant in the state, but the federal government may try to force the coal plant's old customers to keep buying its electricity:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-coal/us-interior-depa...

Advanced software (in modern automatic transmissions for example) and material advancements have made all the difference in the advancement of combustion engines in the past 15 years and I firmly believe that technology can be pushed even further. I want to see 4 cylinder engines pushing 500hp, sounds like a pipedream now but so did 300hp when I was a kid.

If you want to see what happens when you perfect the marriage between a combustion engine and an electric motor w/ batteries, do some research on the McLaren P1.

I doubt it. We've passed peak oil and have resorted to expensive techniques like fracking to collect the scraps. Meanwhile, even if no advances in solar panels occur in the future, the price of power produced by solar will only go down as more panels are added to the grid.

The biggest hurdle now is getting cars with combustion engines off the road and replacing them with electric. I haven't seen much progress made on that front in the past few years.

But we are approaching peak global emisisons, at last (a human and good tipping point)!, and cheap solar is a big chunk of that.

Atmospheric scrubbing doesn't scale so good.

[0]https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/tracking-sun-10-installed-p...

Keep in mind that solar electricity, like any form of electricity generation, has location-specific and project-specific cost factors. Building any form of power plant is cheaper in China than in Germany. Solar power prices in Nevada are almost always going to be cheaper than in Michigan, because even if the construction costs are the same, the arrays will get more sun per year in Nevada.

If you want to check solar energy prices for your _home_, then I'd recommend EnergySage (https://www.energysage.com/). I think they have a tool for commercial buildings as well, but don't quote me.

If you want more generic public data, I think other commenters have better sources, though their blog might have some articles wit that information.

Aside from that, price incentives should come into play. Everyone charges their cars and electronics during the day when power is cheapest. If you want to run your equipment at night you have to pay more.

2) Timing demand to peak solar moments. When the sun is brightest, why not start heating your well-insulated home & start your washer and stuff?

3) A bit of local battery storage could help the grid immensely, especially wrt appliances like electric cookers (induction or whatnot), toasters & kettles etc. These usually draw a lot of power for a pretty short amount of time -- and to make matters worse, everyone uses them around roughly the same moment around sunset. I think this is where the value in things like the PowerWall truly lies.

I guess when those three things are in place, it should be a lot easier to provide power outside of peak solar moments.

First off, 100% solar is not likely to win out unless it's a small grid on an island. Any realistic grid will have wind and solar and hydro. New nuclear is already far more expensive than lithium ion batteries + solar, so that's out of contention for new builds unless a government is trying to subsidize the industries that are companions to fission power (nuclear submarines, etc.)

Among the ways to time shift electrical demand:

- lithium ion batteries. These will likely be only 5-6 cents/kWh within five years.

- thermal storage: cooling (making ice) or heat can be stored for these energy applications

- demand response: EVs and many other large demand sources can respond to price signals or aggregated demand response to shift their consumption to the best times. Currently this is mostly used to shave the peaks off of demand but with critical mass of EV there will be huge amounts of valley filling too.

- vehicle to grid: I'm somewhat skeptical this will win a cost battle, but it's being investigated: high penetrations of EVs mean that there will be a day or more of storage on wheels. This can be used in all sorts of ways, potentially.

- flow batteries: I'm also skeptical that these will win on price, but they might.

- concentrating solar power: this is solar power from heat, therma storage can be used in conjunction to deliver 24 hour power. Early pilots were super expensive but recent project have dropped drastically in price to the point where it has a chance of being competitive with other storage tech.

- lots of others that I'm forgetting.

Basically solar is will probably get so cheap that we'll overbuild a ton of it and have more power than the inverters can handle, and size the installs for the winter lows, most likely. This means that there will likely be tons of extra unused DC power at solar sites for large chunks of the year. Could be an opportunity...

(2) Pragmatic: Use on-demand power sources at night: fossil, nuclear, etc.

Just as big as the storage issue, though, is distribution.

Available solar power in the American Northwest is laughable compared to the American Southwest.

Power usage is typically lower at night, of course. And wind generation tends to be a bit higher at night in most places.

They also show that the efforts of the Trump administration to prop up fossil fuels at the expense of renewables aren’t enough to push solar out to sea. The tariffs that Trump levied earlier this year against cheap solar panels imported from China could eventually dampen installations. Naam said they add roughly 10 percent to the price of utility-scale projects, but “at most, they move the price of solar back by about a year.”

It's still a significant cost added on and slows things down, but you can only do so much damage.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-solar-recycling/europes-f...

Keep in mind, solar panels have a 25 year warranty, and after that will continue to produce power (at about 80% rates output). We have decades to get recycling infrastructure in place.

Why? Solar panels are mostly made of processed sand.

>...When you enroll, PG&E will purchase additional, new solar resources to meet your electricity needs as well as those of other participating customers.

As you might have guessed, you pay a premium for his option:

>...Your monthly electric energy statement will include a charge for the solar power you are purchasing and related program charges, as well as a credit for the standard generation you are no longer purchasing. Today, the net of these charges and credits is a premium.

https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/solar-and-vehicles/opt...

Do you have anything substantial to say about the points made in the article? For the record, it took me seconds to ascertain it was a part of Gizmodo's umbrella group, and the article made some very clear dollar/cent claims on utility scale projects.

Solar does line up with peak consumption. The duck curve is not a consumption curve, but a "Net Demand" curve -- the demand remaining after solar and generation is removed.

Peakers existed before solar. A typical load duration curve is a sideways "S" The peakers may run less than 5% of the year but are necessary to meet the hottest hours of the year.