Solar now ‘cheaper than grid electricity’ in every Chinese city

Yes. There are times in the German power grid when you can get paid for consuming (green) electricity!

Solar, when combined with energy storage, can serve as a dispatchable resource. Even with battery storage, solar is already cheaper that existing dispatchable coal generation.

http://ieefa.org/ieefa-u-s-solar-plus-storage-is-undermining...

It's also quite the investment while (at least in some countries) there are plans to lower or remove the payments for delivering power back to the net.

I live in a flat, as most europeans do. I'm not even the owner, so how I am supposed to push for that. Even if the owner did I don't think the surface of the roof is enough, not to mention that it has shadows from other buildings, antennas and so on.

It's still not a clear choice, at least not in Portugal. A solar panel + battery setup pays itself back in 10-12 years, without selling electricity back to the grid. This exceeds the warranty/lifetime on batteries and exceeds the warranty on panels (although not the lifetime). It's a risky proposition.

Selling back to the grid is priced at the wholesale price: 4¢/kWh (slated for 5¢ early next year). It's sold at a loss, since consumer prices are about 10¢/kWh by night and 20¢/kWh by day. The ability to sell back does not move the needle on the payback period.

And note that Portugal is a sunny country. A panel works, on yearly average, 5h/day at full power. In central/northern Europe the numbers are probably worse.

People do buy houses, cars, even electronics like laptops through a lease. It is the banks and financial institutes that need a bit of nudge (or appropriate market signals) to start offering competitive lease options and people will be buying solar panels in no time.

On the other hand, the recent California law about new houses needing solar panels is a step in the right direction.

Installing solar panels has become more and more uninteresting, at least in Germany.

In former times there were generous subsidies for installing solar panels: You got, I think, a fixed amount per kWh that you installed on your roof and you also got a better price for the electricity that you put back into the grid. In Germany it's called "Einspeisevergütung" if I remember correctly.

This program was limited though, and now you have to pay for the panels all yourself (or you get only a little bonus from the state) and the prices for "selling" into the grid have fallen drastically because there's just too much electricity on sunny days and its sold for negative values on the international electricity markets.

Installing new solar panels on your roof is now only interesting when you can use the electricity for yourself. That means charging EVs, filling battery-powered storage (also expensive and not subsidized, I think) or using the electricity around and in your house.

If you've got an older installation you might benefit from the old tariffs and get a little bit more money, but building new systems is rather uninteresting for private households.

With rising prices for electricity there will be new "motivation" for installing new solar systems on your house. But as already said, only for using the electricity for yourself.

Also a law was changed recently, so that renters can now install their own "balcony solar systems" (one panel for example) and feed that electricity right back into their grid through the wall outlet. This is only allowed with small systems though, so that you may produce enough energy for your household base load, but not make your meter turn backwards.

In the bigger picture all of this shows how Germany has, so far, failed to do a real switch to renewable energies or really take a step into that direction.

We got lots of solar systems and lots of wind turbines, but we are not able to store the produced electricity for later use. So lots of wind turbines are turned out of the wind, because there's an overproduction of electricity on windy days. And prices for solar generated electricity have dropped, as already mentioned.

Meanwhile the four large energy companies in Germany are doing what they want and are holding the government as hostage.

Chopping down woods without any need, because some coal-fired power stations needs to be run because we could otherwise lose 20.000 jobs all over Germany.

Nobody thinks about how many jobs we could create with a heavy switch and investment in renewable energies and storage solutions for energy.

After all, taking a step backwards it's kind of a sad situation.

Or alternatively, that the market has a better grasp of the situation than the head of solar analysis at BloombergNEF. Just because she has 'head' and 'solar' in her title doesn't mean she is all-knowing about the solar market.

If solar actually represented a better deal companies would be falling over themselves to install solar panels everywhere. It is likely that there are important realities or risks that the analysts have missed.

Either that, or someone is going to make a killing installing solar panels on a lease-to-buy basis.

Most people don't spend enough on energy to make cost savings a big priority. With solar, there are tangible benefits right now if you know what you are doing but delaying your investments a few years may mean you get more benefits. Increasingly it is not the panel cost but everything around it (inverters, batteries, installation cost, etc.). All those things are subject to economies of scale. Basically, you get a delayed effect. In a few years it will go from cheaper to way cheaper to magnitudes cheaper. At that point things get more urgent.

Another thing to consider is that supply and demand are not that well matched currently. Basically, there's no such thing as over production for batteries or solar panels currently and even installation is bottle-necked on availability of people to do that. That reflects in the pricing as well.

IMHO, the biggest change with solar is that energy cost goes from a variable cost to basically a fixed cost (one time investment in batteries + panels) + variable revenue (from selling excess energy) + variable cost for when your panels don't deliver enough juice. The market is still adapting to this and e.g. the ease of selling excess energy varies between markets.

Some companies are going to get more benefit than others. E.g. any companies operating vehicles will probably want to switch to EV. At that point charging them with their own solar panels becomes attractive; especially when combined with vehicle to grid revenue.

The government nudge should target the energy storage issue by creating cost incentives for energy companies to build out this technology. I don't see how consumers can reasonably cooperate on consuming during daytime, when production is peak. (Automating home consumption via connected devices might result in net loss of energy as the devices' production/use gobbles rare materials and data.)

Or, perhaps, this article is naive and the market realizes that there are some unseen costs associated with solar investment. Not to mention the opportunity cost of the capital needed to convert to another type of energy infrastructure.

I live in a large apartment building in the Netherlands, during the last home owners association meeting we discussed installing solar panels. The problem is the huge uncertainty the government creates. At the moment it is allowed to just deduct the amount of power you create from the amount you use and pay for the remainder. This way the government does not collect energy tax on the energy you create from your solar, thus they treat this as a subsidy. They announced that this subsidy will end by 2023, it is not clear how things will be after that time. Most of the home owners agreed that the risk they will change it into a regulation that will be (financially) bad for us is too large so we are not installing them until there is more clear.

But even then, the government changes at least every 4 years, how am I supposed to make a long term investment - (solar takes about 10 years for return on investment around here, with current regulation) - if I don't know if I will be screwed by the next administration? Especially now that the support for the "climate change denial party" is growing.

> a little nudge from the government

Like the subsidies they've had for years?

Regardless, what are they going to do, come forcibly put solar panels on your roof? Keep them maintained? Repair them if a branch falls?

It’s the government that often prevents market forces from taking advantage of such opportunities.

Most regions limit how many competing providers may operate in the same area, requiring that they possess a license - of which legislation allows only a few or even just one to exist.

Vested interests, of course, won’t want to make serious investments in new infrastructure until they absolutely have to. Especially if they’re still making payments on their debt for building the current architecture.

what does "balance the random load" mean in an engineering context? i would have thought electricity would balance itself?

This isn't only sunk cost, it's attributed to different budgets. You would struggle to get many people to accept the subsidy exists. Likewise in car manufacture, or aircraft, or almost any established industry with a large cost/price distinction and externalities unmet.

All gas and oil has fugitive C02 issues. Look what happened with that gas storage well in California which had months long leaks. Were the owners required to offset the extra CO2? Or the gulf oil leaks which have been continuously flowing since the sixties? Or tar sands?

Nobody budgets the remediation cost into the unit cost of the energy.

Even if we become energy independent from ME oil, which we’re net independent I think, (and about 90% on the crude side?) then we still have Japan, Europe and many parts in Asia which need uninterrupted oil supplies from the ME.

This quip is a common trope that has several problems with it and is years out of date. Please stop using it.

First, oil-based energy doesn't compete with solar to a large extent. That will change as EVs get more popular, but outside of islands like Hawaii, oil isn't used much for electricity generation (where solar competes).

Second, solar is already attractive for most new generation scenarios in many locations, including dispactchable situations where you also need storage. It's getting so cheap that it's starting to compete with existing generation.

http://ieefa.org/ieefa-u-s-solar-plus-storage-is-undermining...

Nothing in China is real and all the citizens are brainwashed about every topic with no accuracy whatsoever.

Remember when it was leaders from communist countries believing the US supermarkets were fake?

I think it would be more productive to dissect the particular nuances of this issue, as other comments have