Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap | Hacker News Reader

Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

rameznaam.com

152 pointsepistasis213 comments

Power markets are more complicated than most people realize. One thing to note is that solar power can be cheaper than gas, but still not be economic. The fact of the matter is that an intermittent kWh is not as valuable as an on-demand reliable kWh to a utility who's number 1 priority is reliability. Even as solar is acquired at lower and lower prices, if evening power is generated by expensive and inefficient gas turbines, the customer might not see costs go down (and emissions might not go down either!). Solar is clearly economic in many markets, but we'll never get grid emissions in a place like California down much more without storage.

Solar all day, NG all night would be a major improvement over our current system. Especially as batteries get better.

Depending on where you are, that's pretty close to what's happened. Right now (4pm), the California ISO is generating 73% from renewables+hydro, 7% nuclear, and the balance gas. Naturally, the night replaces solar with gas. This is largely how California has reduced electricity emissions to their current levels.

And that nuclear power is just from a single plant!

Always gets me that the above is a no brainer. But people married to the argument that we can't have renewables until we solve the storage problem just refuse to even consider it.

Disconcerting.

NG is still extraordinarily high carbon. "A little better than coal (if you ignore the pipeline and wellhead losses)" is not something we can settle for given the seriousness of climate change. We need 24/7 low-carbon power. Fracked natural gas for entire nights (recall in winter nights are quite long) is not an option.

Or just smarter appliances. Plenty of opportunities for thermal banking/battery banking.

Most of my loads, on average, don't need to run that exact second.

I don't mind if my hot water tank super-heats water in the middle of the day for the rest of the day. If electricity is really cheap, my freezer can jump into overdrive.

I don't need my clothes to dry in the next hour, just over the next 8.

I don't care if my fridge/freezer takes a break while I run the microwave or pre-heat the oven.

I don't care if my car charges ASAP as soon as I park, as long as it's charged by 8AM. And let it run as a grid-power bank for a fee.

Then you could have A/C systems that make ice or compress refrigerant in a tank.

I think the point is that in any case, price isn't a finish line for solar to replace everything. This process will be much longer and require lots of infrastructure changes in multiple places.

>I don't mind if my hot water tank super-heats water in the middle of the day for the rest of the day.

Water does not have the capability to store much energy.

>If electricity is really cheap, my freezer can jump into overdrive.

Your freezer can't if it's not a ammonia refrigerant. You will actually be wasting energy.

>I don't care if my fridge/freezer takes a break

Your fridge actually does not use electricity constantly. It detects the temperature and run the motor, stops it when it reaches the desired temp. It's already having a break.

It's common here to have 150L+ water tanks. Can take it from 50C to 75C and then let the anti-scald valve temper the output when drawing.

OK on the freezer. Could still take the fridge down to 2C.

The concept of the fridge taking a break while running other loads is to reduce peak draw current. If everyone did that, it would make the grid more stable.

The general point made here is really interesting though - a large number of our appliances (domestic and small business) can easily be time-agnostic if built for it. It may take a decade or two to replace the fleet but boy, just think of the opportunities replacing every appliance globally presents - this is on the order of a new Tesla (the disruptive company) for each appliance.

Scheduling exchanges, where your local grid sub-station can get your bids for usage and put it into a grid wide exchange, scheduling your car to charge itself at 3:34 am using 24Wh or whatever.

We become ever more interconnected - this is the real rental economy - renting not a lawn mower for an hour but renting power. You think privacy is bad on your phone - wait till your washing machine sends "soiled underpants on at 3pm - any bids" to half the planets solar providers

- Washing machines (Replace the concrete with water balloon, choose latest time to complete)

- Lights (mostly I think these will be LEDs drawing off a panel on our roof. We don't need that much light.

- too tired to do this but a study on this must exist somewhere?

Actually lights consumes more than fridges in terms of residential electricity.

Modern lights barely consume anything. Are you thinking of old-fashioned incandescent lighting?

Improved efficiency is one of the things that allows us to have continued economic production despite reducing usage.

Nope, it’s from the statistics.

Let’s talk real. Compared to fluorescent lamp, LED comsumes half of energy. It’s not like they comsume nothing. Over 68% of sockets in American households already use LED in 2018 and 13% of energy was used in residential lighting in 2018. If 32% changes to LED it will lower the percentage to 11% which is still more than what we use to refrigerate.

LEDs mostly aren’t replacing fluorescent; CFLs never caught on all that well for domestic use. They’re replacing incandescent or halogen, so more like 10x.

LED lighting has taken the world by storm and we never hear a peep about it.

Your stats are just totally made up aren't they?

In 2017, 1% of households had all sockets using LED and 71% had not a single socket using LED. 11% still had all sockets using incandescent. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=31112

No it won't. Actually, the grid doesn't give a f about your fridge. Residential electricity usage is only 37% and fridges use about 9% of that.

> Water does not have the capability to store much energy.

Systems that make ice at night and use it for A/C during the day date back to the 1950s.

The general class of these facilities is phase-change materials. Water is pretty amazing, both for ice and for steam.

You may want to look into phase change materials for home heat and ac.

The block of ice or refrigerant liquified in a tank serve as PCMs unless we want to get really fancy :)

> I don't need my clothes to dry in the next hour, just over the next 8.

Then why not just hang them up for drying? Zero power consumption and they will dry in eight hours, maybe not under all conditions but under many.

I'm usually with you on that.

I'd even go a step ahead: dryers ruin clothes.

A bit diff in a humid area, or where the A/C would need to condense the added humidity (if dried indoors), or the furnace would have to counter-act the cooling from evaporation, but HVAC is usually more efficient than the dryer.

Intermittency and the unsuitability of grid storage batteries to compensate is heavily played up by the carbon industry.

The future of low emissions energy production will be largely driven by overproduction and demand shifting, not banks of grid level batteries.

This likely won't happen as soon in America, however, the economy is too tied in to fossil fuels and the appetite to upgrade the electric grid by utility companies heavily invested in gas isnt really there.

then by your own logic it would happen other places, it doesent.

It would be nice if you can have your appliances charging per day, and using a built in battery suited to run at night.

It is "played up" because that is how the physics/science works right now. Grid-scale storage is required to smooth out grid-scale intermittent generation.

But the solution isn't batteries, it stored hydroelectric. Only works where you have mountains though.

How is that a solution when it's difficult to build more of it?

Its only the only economical solution currently. Orders of magnitude cheaper than other solutions.

Batteries are a bit uneconomical now but may well fall in price like solar has. See for example:

>A startup run by a Tesla veteran and backed by Bill Gates is promising to build a long-duration battery that's 50 to 100 times cheaper than lithium-ion https://www.businessinsider.com/form-energy-battery-startup-...

Europe is already using something like 90% of our hydro electricity potential. So far, countries either: - added renewable energies on top of existing fossil fuel based power generation (gas, coal) - added renewable energies and replaced coal with gas (US for instance)

All they need to do is build mechanical/hydraulic systems for storing solar power during the day and unleashing it at night.

For example, use solar power during the day to pump fluid from a lower reservoir into a higher reservoir, and then harness the energy of the water flowing from the higher reservoir into the lower reservoir through turbines.

As long as your output energy is always coming from the turbines, and as long as your solar powered pumps running during the day can keep up with double the rate of drainage flow, then you should have a constant loop with a steady supply of power.

This type of system could be retrofitted onto virtually any dam, giving you a way to create a closed loop with constant power and without the water loss typical from a dam (other than evaporation).

For areas where water is scarce and a dam isn't feasible, there are also other ideas, such as gravitational potential energy systems that use solar powered energy to lift weights on pulleys, which then power a generator as the weights are lowered by gravity.

Other ideas: Thermal storage including molten salts which can efficiently store and release very large quantities of heat energy, compressed air energy storage, flywheels, cryogenic systems, etc...

Which all costs a lot of money.

There's nothing more handwavy than electricity storage

You're wildly underestimating how complicated pumped hydro is.

For one thing, existing dams absolutely cannot be converted to pumped hydro. Dams do not store water below them. Water flows downstream because a dam is in a river. There is no water to pump uphill. Unless, of course, you also build a second dam very close downstream to create another lower reservoir. This is usually a bad idea, and better to just find better geography that will support a new pumped hydro dam.

Some dams, such as Lake Oroville in California, do use an afterbay to allow for off-peak water pumping back into the lake (https://norcalwater.org/efficient-water-management/efficient...).

Sadly, dams tend to destroy healthy fishery ecosystems —- a side effect of not “wasting” the water.

>...For example, use solar power during the day to pump fluid from a lower reservoir into a higher reservoir, and then harness the energy of the water flowing from the higher reservoir into the lower reservoir through turbines.

Trying to rely only on intermittent power sources has huge storage requirements due to weather along with daily/seasonal variation. If grid energy storage was a simple problem it would have been done decades ago.

For example, one estimate is that for Germany to rely on solar and wind would require about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is literally 183 times their current capacity:

>...Based on German hourly feed-in and consumption data for electric power, this paper studies the storage and buffering needs resulting from the volatility of wind and solar energy. It shows that joint buffers for wind and solar energy require less storage capacity than would be necessary to buffer wind or solar energy alone. The storage requirement of over 6,000 pumped storage plants, which is 183 times Germany’s current capacity, would nevertheless be huge.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/144985/1/cesifo1_wp5...

> If grid energy storage was a simple problem it would have been done decades ago.

Except storage is much less useful in the old paradigm, so the motivation wasn't there. Going forward, prices will swing wildly, so storage will be more valuable.

>Except storage is much less useful in the old paradigm,

Plentiful storage would obviously have been very useful over the last several decades. There is a large variation in daily electrical usage (particularly in summer months):

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915

There is also the need for extra capacity in the system because of planned and unplanned maintenance.

>...Going forward, prices will swing wildly, so storage will be more valuable.

Well yes, our economy is based on having reliable power and it would be impossible to have anywhere near the reliable power relying on intermittent power sources without a huge amount of storage. The problem is that contrary to what advocates claim, people have been looking at grid energy storage for decades and it isn't as simple as they claim.

As Bill Gates said in an interview: "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need...

Gates is investing in 4th gen nuclear and energy storage companies so he is putting his money where his mouth is.

If you want to make renewable storage seem ridiculous, you just model storage as if every electron generated is precious and can't be wasted and you get an answer like the above.

Overprovisioning is so simple and widely accepted a concept that anyone ignoring it is likely trying to intentionally mislead.

Good ideas but not currently feasible at grid-scale and so can't be really considered today as viable components of a power grid.

Yup, stacked concrete: https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris...

As mentioned in the article, solar power is insanely cheap. So while you are right that a kWh of solar is not, on average, as valuable as a kWh of semidispatchable coal, the insane cheapness means that at some point, it is economical to massively overbuild renewable and decommission fossil fuel plants. You provide no evidence for the implausible claim that solar causes emissions to go up: your argument is only that the emissions reducing effect is muted, which may be true.

Also, while storage would be helpful, it is not the only way to enable a renewable transition. Additional transmission is enormously helpful: as the sun goes down on California, the wind is picking up in the Midwest. And don’t forget demand response: if smart thermostats received price signals (maybe we should precool this house...) that would alleviate the evening ramp-up issue.

So I claim we’ll need less storage than “a whole day’s usage”. But the learning curve applies to batteries as well! This storage won’t cost as much anyway.

The whole issue of intermittency is overrated. While a single solar panel might generate intermittently, the solar fleet across a whole state generates more predictably.

I am predicting that grid emissions will come down a lot over the coming decades. Partially I’m predicting the past: they’ve already come down, a lot!

It doesn't matter that if solar/wind is cheap (or even zero) because you still have to have an alternate power source for when your intermittent power has gone AWOL. You need cheap grid-scale storage, which doesn't exist at the moment.

Or some other dispatchable low-carbon energy source, which also doesn't really exist at the moment. Load-following nuclear reactors (hooked to thermal storage) could do this physically but a lot has to happen to get the cost down. Meanwhile, various CCS options could play a role if there's a solution for safely storing vast quantities of carbon out of the atmosphere.

I don't know about its efficacy, but my favorite means of mass energy storage is a gravity battery: literally stacking heavy blocks in a huge tower, which are raised and lowered based on energy demands by automated cranes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Vault

There are many nifty schemes like this, such as compressed air, cryogenics, hydrogen, thermal, different battery chemistries, etc. Efficacy in the form economic scalability is the crucial characteristic.

Seems like a novel take on the same principal behind pumped storage hydro systems. But, at a max of 80MWh of storage, you'd need hundreds of them to match a single pumped hydro facility, which often have 10,000+ MWh of storage.

Hmm I'm not so sure about that: gravity is weak.

In some news article they say Energy Vault uses 35-ton blocks hoisted up to ~150 m - while it sounds impressive, that's only 14.3kWh (assuming 100% conversion efficiency), or about 1/7 of a single Tesla Model S (100kWh).

When I briefly looked into this, my takeaway was that the energy density (and thus price) is much, much lower than needed to compete with other storage mechanisms.

As another poster said, gravity is relatively weak compared to the other forces.

Yes, when a magnet holds up a nail, what you're seeing is that the force of the tiny magnet on the nail is much much higher than the gravitational force of the entire earth on the nail.

At best a 'gravity battery' is as efficient as hydroelectric, since pumped-storage is a gravity battery. Towers, trains, spinning flywheels are high-maintenance by comparison. The technology for pumped-storage requires a supply of water and a high place to pump it to. Used around the world (Europe & US, at least) since 1890s.

Bath County, VA: capacity 24GWh, since 1985

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

Dinorwig Power Station, Wales: capacity 9.1GWh

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/16/geeks_guide_electri...

Worldwide, today

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...

Storage would be some combination of diurnal storage (batteries, say) and long term storage (hydrogen). The former benefits from high efficiency; the latter from lower capital cost. There is also thermal storage (an order of magnitude cheaper than batteries) for any application involving heating or cooling, including industrial users of heat.

Hydrogen... which can then be put back through a fuel cell to produce electrickery. The germans are looking at this. I believe.

Exactly, the only thing limiting solar at this point is the rate of investment. Wind and hydro etc have a huge role, but for some back of the envelope estimates.

On the storage issue, at ~100$/kWh batteries that do a conservative 1,000 cycles are ~10c/kWh stored + generation costs + conversion inefficiency. Take current unsubsidized grid solar prices of 2c/kWh solar and double that for 4c/kWh as a conservative redundant safety margin. Tracking solar for example has much better morning and evening generation though at slightly higher prices.

If 2/3 of your electricity is at 4c/kWh and 1/3 is at 15c/kWh that’s 7.7c/kWh for pure solar 24/7 including peaking power needs. Obviously a specific mix of generation determines storage needs, but those are also really pessimistic estimates.

PS: Hydro power is 6.1% of the total U.S. electricity generation. If 80% of that is released at night that’s a huge reduction in storage needed. Similarly transmitting power east or west makes a large difference in storage needs.

Hydro isn't quite so fungible, I think a couple areas account for most the hydro generation.

> if smart thermostats received price signals (maybe we should precool this house...) that would alleviate the evening ramp-up issue.

Is there an existing model for retail intraday rates? Would intraday rates be desirable for all market participants?

"Add area for curtailment data?" https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib/issues/236...

> "Solar is clearly economic in many markets, but we'll never get grid emissions in a place like California down much more without storage."

even before reliable utility-scale storage, there is a lot of low hanging fruit from covering the southwest US in solar and wind. but yes, the costs of intermittent power like wind and solar doesn't by itself end with installation.

I wish more places had hourly pricing of power, with good integrations. Would be really cool to be able to set up your appliances/AC/electric car to consume more power when it is cheap. And then you could get battery banks for your house to store power when it is cheap and use it when it is expensive, absorbing the peaks in a decentralized way.

It's impressive how systemic predictability matters. When nothing happens at the right time, you basically die.

> The fact of the matter is that an intermittent kWh is not as valuable as an on-demand reliable kWh

Don't worry -- every single time renewables are mentioned on HN, this aspect is at the top of the posting.

And as long as it's true, may it long keep getting mentioned.

Every HN post has something negative at the top.

also, solar might not be solar.

"Utility scale solar" is ambiguous and can mean solar thermal or pv solar.

I think solar thermal might be a completely different animal that is not long-lived and not clean.

It might be a similar situation to where "renewable power" turns out to me mostly burning garbage or burning trees.

This documentary might be a little biased but also have some interesting insights: https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE

Concentrated solar thermal is basically dead. PV just slaughtered it.

These days most contracts are being bid solar+battery at a ratio of about 5:1, if memory serves.

Battery prices are also dropping, although as not as fast as solar, but its at the point where in some regions solar + battery is cheaper than coal

Modern Gas turbines can also act as a good backup for solar in times where there is unusual demand because they can start up on under a minute

Does cheaper prices open up some less efficient ways of storage?

I'm still hoping for this one, just because it's so epic: the giant rock-piston gravity storage: https://www.heindl-energy.com/

Another aspect of this is the cost of the physical solar cells have dropped low enough that other costs have become significant. This is pushing companies to increase efficiency which opens the door for other applications.

A hypothetical cheap ~30% efficient solar panel could add something like 40 miles of range per day to a car in ideal conditions. That starts to look actually useful vs a simple gimmick.

>A hypothetical cheap ~30% efficient solar panel could add something like 40 miles of range per day to a car in ideal conditions.

Does this take into consideration the increased weight of the solar panel and any additional equipment?

Could it not be built into the roof directly! This is a great idea as presumably people who don’t use their car a lot need not leave it charging permanently and if you run out of battery you can just wait (if it’s sunny enough).

I am not positive but I am guessing that solar panels as the roof would weight more than the regular car material?

I am not really an expert on electricity but there could also be additional equipment involved as well (inverters, transformers, etc).

The light collecting portion of solar panels is extremely light weight. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082FCZ4MD/ref=emc_b_5_t?th=1

59.2 by 26.5 inches or ~1 square meter Weight: 6.2 lbs.

If you looking at 12 square meters of space that’s 75 pounds though an integrated system would have plenty of options to save weight.

Solar panels are DC as are batteries so you don’t need an inverter.

Why is that better than just putting the solar panel on the roof of your house and plugging the car in?

Your car is presumably not always at home. So, a solar panels on the roof of your house don’t increase the range of your car. At highway speeds assuming regular charges that’s mostly irrelevant. But if you’re camping or run out of charge it could become so.

Even relatively small solar arrays could keep a car from discharging at an airport parking lot etc. That could extend to running the climate controls when your shopping without concern for draining the battery.

PS: That said, the roof also has many advantages such as allowing you to park in a garage without issue.

I wonder how that would change the safety profile of the car (for driver and outsiders) and insurance costs. Panels are fairly cheap but you'd be adding a bit of value there.

Correct me if I'm wrong, and I quite possible could be, but from a quick Google search, I'm seeing numbers of anywhere 200Wh/mile to 350Wh/mile for a Tesla. If we're generous and assume only 200Wh/mile, then 40 miles of range translates to an energy consumption of 8,000Wh.

A 100 watt solar panel, producing the full 100 watts, would take 80 hours of perfect sunlight to produce enough power for an extra 40 miles of range.

Assuming best case (unrealistic) conditions, if you get 8 hours of perfect sunlight in day, and your solar panels produce 100% of their rating for all 8 hours, it would take 1000 Watts worth of solar panels to produce that extra 40 miles of distance over 8 hours. It seems kind of unrealistic to fit 1000 Watts of solar on top of a car. And that's an absolute minimum, under best case conditions.

If you had, say, maybe a more realistic 300 watts worth of panels on top, and they got 4 hours of full sunglight, you'd be producing an extra ((300W * 4h) / 200Wh/mile) = 6 miles. And that's still assuming best case condition for power consumption per mile.

[Edit] - And like the other commenter stated, those few extra miles get cut down when you consider the weight of hundreds of watts of solar panels added onto the vehicle.

Here's a recent analysis: https://teslatap.com/articles/solar-vehicle-roof-analysis/

To me it looks like it will never be a meaningful solution, due simply to physics.

That has several really bad assumptions by assuming all solar roofs need to fit on an existing Tesla‘a roof.

> The usable clear area of a Model S glass roof is 42” x 45”

A Model S is actually 195.9” by 77.3 (ex. mirrors). Assuming a reasonable shaped solar car using 75% of that surface is covered in panels that’s 12x the area. But you also gain from panels covering the sides of the vehicle.

Further “Because the vehicle roof is flat, it collects less light than if it was positioned at the optimum angle to the sun.“ as I said your not limited by the roof. “Lastly, we lose at least 10% more due to the safety glass,” we don’t need glass and that’s already part of panel efficiency numbers. “and the inverter/charging is only 81% efficient.” Solar panels and batteries are both DC so you don’t need an inverter, the charge discharge efficiency of lithium ion can be over 90%.

San Francisco 5.34kWh/m * .3 efficiency * 7.33 square meters = 11.7kW/day /.3kW per mile = 35 to 39.14 miles in San Francisco depending on how much your charging the battery with plenty of areas getting more sunlight. Using the highest efficiency panels currently produced that goes up significantly, but cheap 30% efficient panels seems like a more reasonable mid term prediction.

PS: Example of a flexible 1m panel zero glass required at under 300$/m: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082FCZ4MD/ref=emc_b_5_t?th=1

> Solar panels and batteries are both DC so you don’t need an inverter, the charge discharge efficiency of lithium ion can be over 90%.

You'll still need a DC-DC converter, which is just an inverter with a rectification step. The 81% number is low, but there is a loss here.

But you could have a few 100w (or 200w) solar panels installed on the roof of your house which either charge your home battery or offload that to the grid. And just charge your car when you want.

It is true that you lose some energy every time you store or transfer it, but if we install solar panels on every roof (so we get excess energy from solar) and also find a way to store energy cheaply for a long time, that should be enough to completely switch from fossil fuels, (well, mostly)

Yeah I think I did some back of the napkin calculations that this would be feasible if we put solar panels on every roof. One challenge is that installation is still pretty expensive from a labor point of view because roofs are all unique to one degree or another (age, orientation, composition) and the parts and knowledge to DiY aren't yet commonly available at the local big box hardware store. Plus you have to interact and interconnect with the power company so its another layer of complexity and specialization. Adoption could be greatly accelerated if we had something that made installation of panels on houses a priority especially for lower income households in both the developed and developing world as they would in theory benefit the most from really cheap electricity or at least lower electrical bills. As it stands now it can pay for itself over time but typically on the scale of decades and there are a lot of middle men who will install them and then own the panels and try to profit off of the price differential.

Doing some calculations from another direction:

The maximum daily energy density of sunlight in sunny Los Angeles is about 6.4 kWh / m2 [1] (assuming perfect, moving angle of panels to sun).

If we can turn the entire footprint of a Model X into solar panels, that gives us about 10 m2 (big car!).

The US DoE reports the Model X gets 100 mi / 31 kWh [2]. Or 12.4 kWh for 40 mi.

So those panels would need to get 1.2 kWh / m2 of solar power. Which is about 18% efficiency and pretty reasonable for good consumer panels [3].

But it assumes the car is in sunlight all day at the perfect angle, there is no loss (eg due to weight), in a locale as sunny as LA (eg Seattle gets half of the sunlight as LA), and can be completely coated in efficient panels (the model S solar roof is <1 m2 in comparison). Bumping efficiency to 30% gives some headroom but it still seems pretty impractical.

[1] https://globalsolaratlas.info/detail?c=34.270738,-116.929301...

[2] https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=41196

[3] https://news.energysage.com/what-are-the-most-efficient-sola...

I'd like to see this for large vehicles. Buses, semi, etc.

just use off-car solar panels.

https://sunelec.com

routinely sells panels for 30 cents/watt.

If you could skip the inverter step, charging your electric car could be very low cost.

5,000 watts of (raw) solar panels for $1500 and would give even the most power-hungry 350wh/mi tesla ~ 70 miles of charge in 5 hours of sun.

(a 200wh/mi car would need ~ $500 of panels for 40 miles)

nice application of the learning curve, a model taught in strategy and operations courses in business school.

basically every model from around 2010 badly miscalculated the learning coefficient of the solar industry. apparently some forecasts are still badly calculating it.

The part that boggles the mind is that the forecasts are still terribly wrong, in the same direction, 10 years later.

The forecasts from the IEA are my favourites, predicting a decline in PV expansion every year. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/11/20/iea-versus-solar-pv-r...

The IEA forecast has been so wrong it suggests malice.

I dont understand how you could continue apply learning curve , do we expect solar panel price to fall forever? And labour as well as land cost to fall ?

Some of those are fixed. Even if Labour and Solar are free, you will still have to paid for land. In a way I think this is quit optimistic projection of solar.

This tells me that until fossil plants are mostly shut down (and perhaps afterward), we will continue to have negative electricity prices at times. It might be a profitable idea to buy extra energy storage capacity to get paid for storing energy at certain times, then sell it when it is high demand.

Profitable for the first guy. Not profitable for anyone after enough people try to get a piece of that action. And maybe not profitable for anyone ever if the power company themselves installs enough storage capacity.

I just wish the negative electricity prices reached the non-industrial consumer.

If it reached me, I'll have an Arduino controlled hot water heater, furnace and fridge/freezer dynamically turning on/off to take the most advantage of prices pronto.

In some areas you can buy electricity this way, but the other end of the deal bites you, so beware of that.

When it seems like you might die from the heat but the price charged is $8.50 per kWh how much longer do you want to wait before switching on the AC? (If you live somewhere it never gets hot, figure on the same but for a midwinter freeze and deciding when to pay for your resistive circuit heat pump boost)

I figure it all averages out. But when I pay an average price, I have no incentive to lower demand when prices are high or raise demand when prices are low, contributing to even higher average prices.

There’s an Australian startup that sells electricity at wholesale prices to consumers

https://www.amberelectric.com.au/

It's all up to the charging algorithm. If your grid access is priced according to energy transferred, you pay a positive retail price no matter how negative the wholesale price is. If your grid access is a fixed charge, you could directly take advantage of the negative wholesale price.

In some places, industrial users have the second algorithm.

Reality is that grid access (transport/distro) should be more variable too.

Line sag is worst when demand is highest or it’s hot outside. Same with running out of transformer capacity.

When an upgrade is triggered, it’s to build more peak capacity.

The only reason renewables would cause negative prices is the subsidy they get on generated output, that would cause them to continue generating because for THEM they are still making money at that instant. Otherwise, the renewable source itself could capture the negative price by just not feeding power to the grid.

Although I guess they "burn" their excess on-site, doesn't it make sense for solar panels to send power to a load at all times?

If they didn't, wouldn't that unspent energy make the panels even hotter and shorten lifespan/reduce efficiency?

It doesn't make sense for them to be sending power to the grid if they earn negative dollars doing it.

No, there's no cost to just not drawing power from the modules. They would become slightly hotter, but that's not a big deal.

I mean, if they're 20% efficient, then shunting the energy would mean they have 4/5ths the energy getting turned into heat, no?

In the US southwest, where it's the hottest here, most new utility-scale PV is using single axis trackers. So curtailment there could mean turning away from the Sun.

Dumping power is not free - you need properly cooled resistor banks etc. to do it safely. For many forms of generation it's worth putting power on the grid at negative prices under some circumstances.

Yup, storage just like that has been built in Switzerland: https://www.alpiq.com/power-generation/hydropower-plants/pro... California is mountainous enough to follow suit.

California has a lot of storage just like that already. The problem is that it can't be scaled up.

California is beginning to dip its ties into battery storage, however. There's a couple projects that total about 200 MWh currently, IIRC. And at Moss Landing they are installing more than a GWh soon.

It's already cheaper to use batteries than natural gas peaker plants (the most expensive form of energy). The next phase of storage is to defer or replace transmission like upgrades (which are also super expensive). After that we get into daily cycle operations like giving small amounts of dispatchability to solar or wind projects.

And just like solar, batteries are getting cheaper far far faster than anybody ever predicted. What people used to consider the absolute floor in terms of raw material cost For lithium ion batteries is dropping all the time too.

However, the challenge for scaling up renewables and storage is not technical, it's going to be political. Utilities are not typical businesses that will just switch to the cheapest way of doing things. They are excessively political, and lobby a ton in order to influence how they are regulated (and thus how they profit off a captive audience), and they have been close bedfellows of fossil fuel interests for a loooong time because their combined lobbying power is so much stronger.

Oddly enough, just as hydro won't be able to scale even where it makes sense because of popular political opposition, we won't be able to scale renewables and storage because of entrenched interests lobbying Against popular opinion (renewables are popular across all of the political spectrum).

Energy is cheap, power is expensive - you can already get energy for free sometimes on the intraday market, but you still pay if you need delivery at a certain time and the grid fees for peak power consumption stay expensive. I am looking forward to Tesla's million-mile battery!

With launch costs set to drop aggressively I wonder if space based solar becomes viable sooner than expected. Iirc the NASA estimate was something like $200-500/kg launch costs. I wonder if concentrated solar in the form of thin mirrors can change that.

Musk's most recent estimate of the eventual cost per kg on starship was 10 usd/kg. He may be considered an unreliable source at this point, however.

It's now reached the point that "energy producer" lobbyists are lobbying Trump to keep banks from refusing to finance fossil fuel projects.[1][2] They're now a bad long-term investment.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/05/08/us/08reuters-heal...

[2] http://archive.is/QSPle

I'm actually quite shocked at how much energy is produced by solar, especially when compared to residential wind turbines. Panels are efficient, and when it's sunny, you're juicing.

The real challenge is of course bringing down cost of storage, which is the key to make solar systems efficient (not just cheap).

> residential wind turbines

Wind has a scalability problem. Residentially, it's only a good sell as a backup supply for when solar isn't cutting it to hopefully prevent generator use. And even that's a tough economic argument.

Towers have huge economies of scale, both in total size and height. So the turbines just keep getting bigger and bigger because it's more and more cost effective.

If my understanding is correct there is curious difference in perceived scale with kinetic vs thermal energy. Based on a a rowing machine's advertised metrics, I calculated you could row across the English channel on half a packet of chocolate biscuits.

Put another way: I’ll have to spend an hour on the treadmill to work off the calories in this burger.

This sounds interesting but I don't really understand, could you elaborate?

1 biscuit = 85 cal

1000m rowing = 60 cal [1]

English Channel = 35km (narrowest point)

35 * 60 / 85 = 24.7 biscuits!

[1] https://darkhorserowing.com/how-to-translate-calories-to-met...

Ah, got it. That's cool, thanks for sharing!

I'm not sure if this impacts your scenario, but the "calorie" commonly used in nutrition is actually a "kcal", or a thousand calories as used by physicists. Most confusing term for units ever.

> residential wind turbines

Wind power in the USA generated 7.3% of the electricity in 2019. Solar did 1.8%.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

I thought the old lie with statistics trick of starting the Y axis above zero was debunked in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s etc. The blog name above the X axis and gray shading make it look like the costs are approaching zero.

I recently watched the documentary "Planet of the Humans". For context, the writer of the documentary is an environmentalist.

One of the stated points was that solar and wind cannot be relied upon 24/7 -- to account for the lack of reliability, you need to have a backup power generator (e.g. coal power plant) running. The thing about coal plants (does it apply to natural gas plants too?) is that if you "idle" them, then have to ramp them up to feed demand, then later ramp them down -- it's a very inefficient way of running them. Now based on my understanding, it might be more efficient to just run the coal plant (or natural gas planet?) 24x7, in which case you've just added waste with the use of solar/wind. How much truth is there to this?

0? You can have utility scale storage and Nuclear as backup

Damn shame we haven't been investing in nuclear over the past few decades. Now when we need it most, it's too late.

Nuclear is one of the few technologies that has a negative learning curve. As we improve designs, it seems to get more expensive rather than less.

There was a brief window in the 1970s where US nuclear construction projects were finishing on time. But the utility industry had planned for waaaaay too much new capacity. So when all the construction projects with poor execution, that struggled to complete and therefore came in way over budget, finally came online in the early 80s, they were financial disasters in a scale that nearly bankrupted several utilities.

Since then, utilities lost their appetite. And there's basically no way for us to replace the 400 or so reactors in the world that eMate nearing end of life.

However, I'm not sure we will need nuclear. With how cheap wind and solar are getting, far faster than anybody anticipated, we have finally found the technologies that may some day provide energy "too cheap to meter." However, like nuclear they are not dispatchable (except for some designs in France), so if we want to power a grid we either need to overbuild capacity by quite a bit, or use energy storage. There's a cost trade off for the two that depends on how cheap storage gets, and how cheap extra capacity is, and how cheap transmission is from an area with different weather that day. (For example, one can imagine building 2x of panel capacity over the amount of inverter capacity on a solar install, so that even on cloudy days you can chug along at near full energy output... it all depends on the cost trade offs.)

And as fast an solar is getting cheap, far beyond expectations, so is lithium ion storage. And there are many chemistries with high specific energies (and thus unsuitable for vehicles), that we are just now dipping our toes into.

Nuclear would be a nice tool to have, if it was competitive with other technologies, but it's going to be decades before it can prove itself and establish a positive track record for deployment. Utilities have been burned too many times by financial dumpster fires.

Nuclear back up? Nuclear is good for base loads, not for peak loads.

Nuclear would be ridiculously uneconomical as a backup. You either run nuclear as baseload or you don't bother.

Today's nuclear reactors run constantly because the fuel is so cheap compared to the rest of the operations. They want to be selling kWh as much as possible because kWh is money. To convince nuclear operators to do backup, there would have to be some kind of market for their on-demand carbon-free characteristics. This would require market changes.

Of course, it's very possible for nuclear reactors to load follow from a physical point of view. Naval reactors load follow into battle mode quite impressively, and power stations could do the same, again if there were a market for it.

Even traditional reactors can couple to some kind of thermal energy storage system to allow them to stay mostly at 100% while the whole system load follows very nicely.

There are many exciting possibilities in on-demand, low-footprint, low-carbon energy with nuclear technology.

This is a relatively good point. In the California electricity market, the increase in renewables results in a very large power-ramp rate in the late afternoon (nothing unique to California). In general, more-efficient power plants either cannot, or lose efficiency, when changing operating power levels. A ~60% efficient combined-cycle gas plant cannot ramp power very much, which results in the grid building and running more ~40% efficient gas turbines, which can ramp their power output in order to meet the early-evening power ramp. Interestingly, at this point, adding more Solar to the California grid results in very little emissions reduction, since the additional solar displaces efficient baseload generation with inefficient ramp-able load. The solution, of course, is storage.

a natural gas plant doesn't really suffer from this "idle" problem you're describing with coal power plants. it's also much cleaner.

Why is that? I was under the impression that gas versus coal just changes the fuel that is burnt.

Natural gas produces about half the CO2 emissions per unit energy as coal. (And presumably less other harmful stuff like radioactive fly ash.)

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11

A gas plant can be ramped up and down quite fast, so they can be used as a so-called "peaker" plant, only producing when there's a shortage of solar/wind power. Coal takes a while to get hot and to cool down, so it's only worth using it if you need a constant stream of energy.

Have you ever had a camp fire/bonfire? It takes a LONG time to get the wood hot enough to burn well.

In contrast your gas stove goes on and off in a moment.

Coal vs gas is the same way.

None - the documentary is full of half truths, out of date information, pseudoscience and outright lies. It's been absolutely torn apart both by the research community and the environmental movement.

Some examples:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/28/climate-...

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/05/05/real-problem-m...

https://medium.com/@btincq/10-reasons-planet-of-the-humans-g...

Renewables are just a technology totally dependent on fossil fuels from birth to burial. The book by Charles Hall , Energy Return on Investment, opened my eyes to the true nature of renewables . Once fossil fuels are gone, renewables will soon follow.

The EROEI of renewables is good and getting better. There is nothing in their manufacture that would be impossible without fossil fuels.

Think hard about that; huge trucks for mining, huge trucks for transport, huge amount of energy to separate component minerals, the actual energy for manufacture of these renewables, up to this point I don't see renewables at any stage of this process. Diesel fueled trucks to deliver said renewable technologies to their place of use. Oh, their is one worker who drives a tesla ...... Oh at end of their life requires fossil fuels for dismantlement , fossil fuels to transport device to some recycling plant, fossil fuels for the energy to process this dead technology, oh there is one guy there that drives a tesla. I use to believe that renewables would help; but alas when you really look at this technology with a total suspension of bias you reach the same conclusion.

Nothing you listed there requires fossil fuels.

If you think those activities require fossil fuels, you are basically saying industrial society is impossible after fossil fuels run out.

That problem with that guy is he hasn't done any math to back any of that up.

When you run the numbers for say tractors, trains and mining trucks it pencils out just fine.

Confirmation bias is not good; one must look at other sources to firm up you belief and if you find other info contradicts your bias you must update your beliefs. For me ,Charles Hall's book Energy Return on Investment totally changed my mindset by reminding me thermodynamics from undergrad 46 years ago(oh shit!!1)

You need to dust off your pencil then. I took three semesters of thermo as part of my mechanical engineering program. I ran the numbers for heavy vehicles and it all works.

Simply put, there is not a battery big enough for these trucks, the trucks are too massive ,the battery would be massive,it unfortunately will not work, just the laws of the universe.

Except that's totally wrong. Mines are already electrifying!

Tell me, why do you think this vehicle cannot be made even larger? Are you thinking that batteries for such vehicles have to consist of larger cells?

Thats right.

Those huge truck use electric motors, because electric motors have better torque. The diesel is just there to provide an energy source. There are already several haul trucks that use batteries instead of diesel. And some of them generate more electricity than they use, because they haul large loads downhill and regenerative breaking means that for the truck, its duty cycle is energy positive!

It's important to ask: why do you think thinks like large trucks can not be electrified? What assumptions do you hold that say they could never be powered by carbon free electricity?

To be fair it did challenge an extraordinarily popular mainstream narrative that renewable energy is marching in to save the day from climate change without hardly any meaningful negative externalities. Of course the mainstream is going to tear it apart. They knew this in advance.

That said, knowing which statements are outright wrong is indeed valuable.

Still worth watching IMHO.

Do we really need a “2020” by the title?

It's in the title of the original post, to distinguish from similar posts in 2011 and 2015

Solar's future may be cheap but capitalism's future is always going to be pricey.

Making solar panels require massive amount of energy. If built in China, these panels are made with electricity from coal. They don't have a great C02 budget.

Today's solar panels are efficient enough that even if they are produced using electricity from coal, by the end of their life, they've reduced CO2 emissions by more than what the coal produced to manufacture them.

Is solar just a stopgap tech? Like, do they still require fossil fuel energy to create, not to mention maintain and rebuild? And I know we’re now strip mining the ocean for battery metals. I don’t yet sense the sustainability in this amid all this economic hand-waving of “it’s getting cheaper”. (forgive my tone, i have a hard time of making sense of the big picture of renewables, hoping to eventually see how it actually fits into a utopic idea of a “closed-loop economy”)

I’m reminded here a bit of Ted Chiang’s short story, Exhalation, where the people devise clever ways to try to put air back in the ground without using more than they’re sequestering. I hope our situation is better than that.

I'm not sure about the resource costs of solar in particular but the question is a very salient one. Vaclav Smil has a great piece on this. "What I see when I see a wind turbine"

"the quest for renewable electricity generation. And yet, although they exploit the wind, which is as free and as green as energy can be, the machines themselves are pure embodiments of fossil fuels. • Large trucks bring steel and other raw materials to the site, earth-moving equipment beats a path to otherwise inaccessible high ground, large cranes erect the structures, and all these machines burn diesel fuel. So do the freight trains and cargo ships that convey the materials needed for the production of cement, steel, and plastics. For a 5-megawatt turbine, the steel alone averages 150 metric tons for the reinforced concrete foundations, 250 metric tons for the rotor hubs and nacelles (which house the gearbox and generator), and 500 metric tons for the towers.[...] For a long time to come—until all energies used to produce wind turbines and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources—modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels."

http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/15.WINDTURBINE.pdf

Sounds like a bullshit purity test.

It's not a bullshit purity test at all. It highlights the extremely neglected costs in raw material and non-electrifiable infrastructure that is required to produce materials that are nominally 'green'. In some cases it's questionable if some green technologies actually are a net positive at all.

There is a strong 'abundance' bias implicit in articles by people like Ramez Naam, who push so strongly for green energy production because they don't want to consider the very obvious alternative, dematerialisation and reduction of energy consumption. People like Naam still categorically hang onto a growth narrative so they tend to neglect the downsides of the solutions they provide.

> It highlights the extremely neglected costs in raw material and non-electrifiable infrastructure that is required to produce materials that are nominally 'green'.

Ignored by whom? You?

In fact, embedded energy is a huge consideration in the evaluation of green technologies.

It’s a depressingly common reality that “nobody has considered” is effectively equivalent to “I haven’t considered” on the internet.

The idea that solar panels might not be more efficient than burning coal is not an opinion held by someone who has done any level of research on the subject at all.

> In some cases it's questionable if some green technologies actually are a net positive at all.

This is just FUD, unless you actually have numbers that show CO2 emissions are higher over the lifetime of a solar panel compared to a coal power plant.

> don't want to consider the very obvious alternative, dematerialisation and reduction of energy consumption.

Forcing everybody into poverty is not a viable alternative.

> It highlights the extremely neglected costs in raw material and non-electrifiable infrastructure that is required to produce materials that are nominally 'green'.

Hey just because you haven't thought of them doesn't mean other people with much more knowledge and experience on the subject haven't.

Yeah :) . They can't see those machines using electricity instead of diesels, they can't see steel making without atmospheric pollution, and same goes for cement.

I guess some people have hard times adjusting to some novelties. Their arguments don't stand, and they don't see that.

There was a commercial for the Nissan Leaf about gas-powered everything: https://youtu.be/Nn__9hLJKAk

I was tremendously surprised recently by some of the clever work on making cement without CO2 emissions, starting exactly 60 minutes into this talk:

https://youtu.be/E76q-9q7ZDg

Standard hydrolysis for making (green) hydrogen from water using electricity also creates excellent chemistry for the cement process.

We must anticipate an era where there are periods of zero-marginal-cost energy so plentiful we can't use it all, followed by periods of undersupply. Storing electrical energy in hydrogen may seem completelt uneconomical right now, but combining that process with cement production could result in fantastic efficiency of process. We are going to need carbon-neutral cement somehow, and if we get hydrogen with it, and CO2 feedstock for other purposes, we may be in a really good position for all sorts of processes.

Industrial processes have been under examined as we try to become carbon neutral. That means that there's tremendous opportunity, not that it's impossible. Humans are clever when we are allowed to be, we just haven't put much innovative thought into our industrial processes in a long time, much less resigned then from the ground up!

No, the author is just saying we're still a long ways away from the true final goal of using no fossil fuels.

This seems a little silly - of course to develop future technologies we need to use existing technologies.

Imagine debating using an abacus to develop a computer - "ah but we must remain pure to the hopes, dreams and philosophies of what the computer aspires to be." Yeah, ok. I'll be over here funding wind turbine companies, you can debate the merits of the methodology and strategies of funding green tech with petroleum-based products yourself. Sounds a little boring to me.

I don't understand your comparison at all. Given that the primary problem that a wind turbine seeks to solve is environmental, the environmental costs in making the turbine have to be considered.

There's no relationship to computers here, it's not a question of philosophical purity, but of correct evaluation of the costs and benefits of a technology.

> the environmental costs in making the turbine have to be considered.

Of course it is considered, and few short decades ago that was a valid counterargument. Not anymore - and not later, given the pace of development in efficiencies and breadth of applications.

The raw material costs of producing and manufacturing windturbines has not been significantly reduced. You still need mostly as much stuff now to make one as you needed years ago, and the same goes for the transport of everything that goes into the turbine, because the energy density of electrical sources isn't high enough to say, power a containership.

You can't just wave away legitimate criticism by talking about "rapid innovation" that does not exist, mostly because it runs into physical limits.

> The raw material costs of producing and manufacturing windturbines has not been significantly reduced.

Perhaps, but we're talking about environmental concerns, not directly economical or material.

> You still need mostly as much stuff now to make one as you needed years ago

Suppose.

> and the same goes for the transport of everything that goes into the turbine, because the energy density of electrical sources isn't high enough to say, power a containership.

No, you're wrong here. Majority of pollutions from transport come from cars, and those demonstrated significant improvement over decades. More, there is no physical law forbidding transport ships using green energy sources - be that electrical (yes, batteries), wind (sails) or something else (hydrogen? nuclear?). And in fact we do see more and more examples of transport which runs on green sources - even planes.

Yes, batteries have lower energy density than gas. But batteries have enough energy density to be usable, and their characteristics improve lately; that's good enough for practical purposes. Not to mention, of course, theoretical possibility.

> Of course it is considered...

One would certainly hope so, but lots of weird things happen on this planet.

Where could someone who is interested to learn about the degree to which this is true go to read about what is really happening on the ground? Where did you learn about it?

First, Fermi estimate. You can estimate how much something weights, costs, takes to construct etc.

Then you become particularly good in it when you read texts from this area, so you gradually replace your estimates with data. And correct your errors when they disrespect reality too much. It's harder to estimate CO2 emissions from cement production from first principles; but you may have actual numbers from typical plants, which include inefficiencies.

All of that favors data and usually requires calculations, and also often requires understanding of natural sciences - conservation laws, energy conversions, speed of processes - and some economical modeling too.

A collection of links with data and models is on Azimuth Project - https://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/HomePage .

Sorry, I'm not doubting that it can be done, I'm wondering about how you know it is done. Huge difference.

Ok, let's brainstorm - how do we build wind turbines without the 150 year history of industrialization, accumulated knowledge of how to build real, physical things that accomplish the goals of 100% renewable energy? I'm all ears. Maybe I'm missing something - always happy to hear solutions to real, extant problems.

How does it compare the environmental costs of all the materials, equipment, research and degradation related to fracking and ocean drilling?

> Given that the primary problem that a wind turbine seeks to solve is environmental

That's ridiculous. The problem 'building a wind turbine' seeks to solve is "How do I turn this money into more money".

In market societies (eg most of the west) functionally speaking, the % of 'green power' delivered by environmental projects is a rounding error; it's essentially all delivered by people with capital attempting to obtain more capital.

That’s just asking for a chicken and egg problem.

You can’t get fully renewable energy production until you can use EV trucks to deliver the windmills, and you can’t get clean EVs until you have windmills to power them. Sure, we currently burn some diesel to setup these windmills, but the alternative is to burn coal. Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

Also, who’s the ominous “they” above? Energy companies don’t setup power production out of spite; they setup energy production so we can have AC and TVs. We’re the consumers of all of that electricity, directly or indirectly.

Well we should ask this for every energy technology and fortunately people have done this. The term for this is energy return on investment (EROI) where solar has between 8.7 and 34 and wind between 10 and 20 (although other literature says 20 to 50). A value 1 means you get as much energy as you invested. So for solar that means you get your energy used for production back in 1 to 4 years.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment

And the EROEI has been increasing, since one aspect of driving these technologies down their experience curves is reduction in inputs, including energy, needed to make them.

So are you saying that we should abandon renewables, and stick with fossil fuels until a truly green energy technology is invented, sometime in the future?

And if that is not what you are saying, then what exactly do you think we should be doing today?

Cut down on the energy we expend, minimize the amounts of materials we use, focus on technology that consumes less energy rather than just attempting to make more of it in marginally less dirty fashion and so on.

Instead of promoting electrical cars which consume vast amounts of materials and still run on a dirty energy mix cut down on the car reliance altogether, for a trivial example.

As somebody who advocates a lot for my local government to finally, please please allow people to build housing in ways to merely allow people to choose to drive less, I think you are looking at this all wrong.

Even if we went back to early days of energy use, we are burning wood (or worse) and that is going to make for a truly ugly air quality.

Nobody wants to use X amount of energy, they actually want to accomplish Y amount of energy services. Current tech has X about four to five times as Y. As we electrify, it enables tech to get X very close to Y. But we also get to use cleaner energy as we electrify.

If my government won't even let me reduce Y for those people that want to, then the idea of forcing everybody to drastically reduce Y, and leaving the X factor the same, will be truly disastrously ineffective.

I think that in the 1970s, this idea was far more reasonable. But as we have failed to make any progress on reducing the amount of energy services that people want, but we have made tons of progress in reducing the X factor, and in cleaning up energy generation, I no longer see it as a feasible or fruitful path.

>Instead of promoting electrical cars which consume vast amounts of materials and still run on a dirty energy mix >cut down on the car reliance altogether, for a trivial example.

I see, so you think people should abandon autos and instead use buses that run on fossil fuels, or trains that run on electricity made from fossil fuels. Forever. And of course let's not forget the fossil fuel that will be used in constructing all those new buses and trains. So it seem like you want us to stay on fossil fuels.

And if that is not your plan, then what is?

> the machines themselves are pure embodiments of fossil fuels. • Large trucks bring steel and other raw materials to the site, earth-moving equipment beats a path to otherwise inaccessible high ground, large cranes erect the structures, and all these machines burn diesel fuel. So do the freight trains and cargo ships that convey the materials needed for the production of cement, steel, and plastics. For a 5-megawatt turbine, the steel alone averages 150 metric tons for the reinforced concrete foundations, 250 metric tons for the rotor hubs and nacelles (which house the gearbox and generator), and 500 metric tons for the towers.

This is FUD. The mass of construction materials pads the quote but is not a useful measure of environmental impact.

Vaclav Smil is looking at this all wrong. There are three phases here

1) power is produced by plants that take fossil fuels to build and fossil fuels to run

2) power is produce by plants that take fossil fuels to build and no fossil fuels to run

3) power is produced by plants that were built using renewable energy and run off of it too.

Most of the people who focus on phase 2 basically want us to stay on fossil fuels forever, but they don't want to come out and say it.

> Most of the people who focus on phase 2 basically want us to stay on fossil fuels forever, but they don't want to come out and say it.

How do you know this? Serious question.

Because if you leave out the first and third phases, then there is no reason to develop renewables and get off of fossil fuels. And if that was not what they thought, they should say it, but they don't.

But let me ask you the question, what is your position on global climate change and renewables? Do you believe global climate change is real, caused at least considerably by human fossil fuel emissions and dangerous? Do you believe we should be replacing fossil fuels with renewables?

And what do you think of my three phase analysis?

> And if that was not what they thought...

Oh, so you do realize you are speculating about what other people think then? It wasn't clear in your prior comment.

> But let me ask you the question, what is your position on global climate change and renewables?

My position is that until we realize that the problem preventing us from moving forward is not a lack of climate science, but rather a lack of psychological/neurological science, and a lack of widespread knowledge of, and acceptance of, that which we already know...including, or maybe even especially, among the intellectually gifted, like many people right here on HN.

Because of this, I consider the rest of your comment is moot. Doesn't matter if it's right or wrong, it makes no difference. We have the same conversations here day after day, year after year, with the same self-important tones of intellectual and moral superiority. And for what? Does anything ever change? You can have a ten phase analysis and it doesn't mean shit at the end of the day if you can't get people to agree on a direction to move in.

If you cared about the environment as much as you think you do, you'd be willing to listen to what I'm saying. And if you were willing to listen to what I'm saying, you'd be the first person on HN. But I suspect, like all the others, you won't...because this is the nature of an uncontrolled Default Mode Network.

No, you are absolutely wrong that things never change. The survey data shows that the public has been steadily increasing its acceptance of the realities of global climate change and what needs to be done about it. That is true even among Republicans.

Instead of lecturing me about the psychological/neurological science (which I do know a fair amount about, though I am sure not as much as you do about the neurological side), you should be looking at how it is that conventional arguments for realities sometimes works. Also, the problem with focusing on first getting people to accept what the psychological and neurological science is that people's psychology and neurology will cause them to reject the scientific truths about the psychology and neurology.

As far as having a strong view on what other people are thinking, everyone does that all the time, including you. For instance, when someone tells you they believe something, you make a judgement as to whether or not they are telling the truth. You do it because you are not crazy.

The reason I think what I do in this case is I have been watching this debate over the years. Traditionally people who disbelieved in global climate change would present arguments it is not occuring (or not dangerous).In the last year or so, this has pretty much stopped, at least in forums like HN, and instead people have presented the argument that renewables are bad for the environment (which is in fact not true).

I assume the reason for this change is that the people who disbelieve in global climate change have realized they can't win the battle arguing directly and have switched to an indirect approach. In fact, there is an name for this, it's called "concern trolling" Furthermore I think it is clear there is an small army of trollers on this subject paid for by business or ideological interests, so I assume this switch in tactics was decided by them. Though of course some people who are not paid trollers might also follow along.

> No, you are absolutely wrong that things never change.

Actually, I'm not "absolutely wrong". I asked a question: "Does anything ever change?"

> The survey data shows that the public has been steadily increasing its acceptance of the realities of global climate change and what needs to be done about it.

Do surveys control actions and government policy, and if so, to what degree?

> ...you should be looking at how it is that conventional arguments for realities sometimes works

Oh I do, all the time. As far as I can tell, the conventional arguments being used don't work very well, especially when it comes to producing significant changes in net(!) outcome.

> Also, the problem with focusing on first getting people to accept what the psychological and neurological science is that people's psychology and neurology will(!) cause them to reject the scientific truths about the psychology and neurology.

Is that so. Upon what is this prediction of the future based? A popular meme, or actual conclusive evidence, that is directly related to psychological and neurological science, and has demonstrable predictive power?

> As far as having a strong view on what other people are thinking, everyone does that all the time, including you. For instance, when someone tells you they believe something, you make a judgement as to whether or not they are telling the truth. You do it because you are not crazy.

What you've written here is true. But the difference between myself and most other people, at least based on my observations, seems to be that I take a consciously deliberate, disciplined approach to distinguishing between "facts" and heuristic predictions - both when thinking, and when speaking/writing (broadcasting ideas into the minds of other people).

> Traditionally people who disbelieved in global climate change would present arguments it is not occurring (or not dangerous). In the last year or so, this has pretty much stopped, at least in forums like HN, and instead people have presented the argument that renewables are bad for the environment (which is in fact not true).

Yes, some people have done that ("presented the argument...") I imagine. Some people have done other things as well. Lots of things occur in the world. Why they occur, and what conclusions an individual should draw (and rebroadcast, often as "fact") from the subsets of occurrences that he is aware of is where it gets complicated.

Biomass energy (aka: wood) is renewable. Do you not consider burning wood to be bad for the environment, at the very least in the sense that it gaining a higher share in clever statistical reporting can give the general public a false sense of security?

> I assume the reason for this change is that the people who disbelieve in global climate change have realized they can't win the battle arguing directly and have switched to an indirect approach.

Is this a safe assumption? Is the assumption correct? How would you know?

Is it possible that the change in your observations of beliefs isn't directly proportional to the actual underlying existence of beliefs? For example, might censorship play a role in this? Have there been any instances where individuals who don't hold the proper beliefs are banned or rate-limited on popular forums? The answer to this is yes, because I have been the "victim" of this many times. So now the question is: to what degree is this happening? How would we even know? One can certainly form conclusions based on guessing, as you have done above, but is your guess correct?

And banning is just one possible alternate cause. What if people got tired of the increasingly ideological and authoritarian culture in mainstream forums and have voted with their feet, going somewhere else entirely where there is either less ideology, or an ideology that is more to their liking? If this is what is happening (and it is, but to an unknown degree), now people who like to opine about the behaviors and inner thoughts of others don't even have that raw material to work with anymore, because it is completely off your radar.

Furthermore, since you seem to have some expertise in psychology: do you ever consider the consequences of millions of people making (and broadcasting in the media, both social media, but also formal mainstream media) negative statements about the thoughts and behavior of groups of people? Do you ever consider how this affects the psyche of people who are denigrated on a daily basis, and how that may alter their future behavior, such as who they might vote for in an election?

Perhaps you "think" (heuristically predict) that we "shouldn't have to" worry about such things, or that this "isn't" a problem. But once again: upon what is that prediction based? And, is the prediction accurate? How would you know?

The human mind provides the holder a crystal clear, ultra high definition impression that they know what is going on in the world, but this impression is an elaborate illusion. That is a fact.

So instead of "lecturing" me that we are on the right course, no adjustments or deeper thinking required, I recommend you think a bit more deeply about what is going on here on planet Earth, because your religion's current assessment seems rather off the mark to me, and our lack of progress on climate change seems to confirm that fairly well.

If the manufacturing facility that makes the panels is itself powered by solar, then the true cost is mostly the materials and what it takes to source them.

As for batteries, not every dollar application needs metal or chemical batteries. There are other options as low tech as pumping water uphill, heating water, compressing air, etc.

Solar panels can’t use all that much energy and raw materials if the final unsubsidized price is under 2c/kWh.

I can't speak about wind (not my expertise), but for solar, the energy payback is about 1-year in operation for current installations, with a predicted 30-year lifespan. Compare this against estimates for the energy cost of bringing gasoline to market which can exceed 30%.

Until there exists 100% clean options for the entire pipeline of resource extraction, transport, assembly, distribution, etc., there will still be fossil fuel involvement in 'clean energy generation'. Can't really make clean energy cleanly unless we have clean energy to make it in the first place.

Resource extraction / recycling is a whole other issue of course.

We have that technology for decades - for example, Tu-155 flew on hydrogen in 1988 - and we gradually replace existing usage with more and more clean options. Don't worry - we won't turn off pollutions overnight, but will gradually drive them to zero. And then to net negative values, restoring some losses in the environment.

with enough infrastructure, particularly batteries and interconnected smart grids, you could average out solar power generation across the globe and fuel the whole world on solar many times over.

10% of our energy needs come from 440 nuclear power plants worldwide. for comparison, the sun is a nuclear plant 1.3 million times the size of the earth. all life on earth basically runs on solar energy (or a derivative of it).

Yes. Nuclear energy proponents sometime seem to forget that solar energy is effectively thermonuclear energy from a big free source reactor - the question isn't in having that reactor, or running it, the question is just in catching energy it radiates. Solar guys become increasingly good at that - together with wind guys, who employ that energy after another free conversion into moving air.

Almost 50% of residential energy usage is HVAC and Hot Water heaters.

I see no reason we couldn't use excess solar during the daytime to heat our hot water heaters, or cool/heat the house.

Modern Construction and Water Heaters have great insulation, and its possible to use the `cheap` electricity during peak solar to store as heating/cooling.

Heat pump technology has come an amazing way, as well!

Switching to an electric heat pump water heater from my natural gas water heater saves nearly as many emissions per year as stopping 12,000 vehicle miles. And it saves money, though it front loads the cost a tiny bit.

We could have a massive economic boom just by retrofitting existing buildings with more efficient and modern technologies.

In the big picture, you could say that fossil fuels are a stopgap technology (with complex manufacturing and lots of parts needing maintenance) until engineers invent(ed) better/cheaper batteries. But the way I prefer to see it is that solar is helping the transition to 100% renewable energy.

Another way to see it is that we already have an electric grid, so we are just finding ways to provide electric power cheaper--then the "efficient market" will figure things out. Also, electricity is used directly in manufacturing, for example smelting aluminum, and that is often done with renewable electricity (hydro in the US Pacific Northwest, geothermal in Iceland). Trains in many parts of the world run on electric power, and of course you can charge EVs with solar power or other renewable energy. And I'm sure some ICE cars are manufactured with electric-powered tools that run on solar energy during the day.

PS: if you know your tone is off, why not ask in a different tone?

Virtually all energy on available on Earth is Solar-derived. Plants all use solar power, carbon sources are all ancient stores of solar power. There's enough solar energy for several of our civilizations (4-5 orders of magnitude more, by a napkin calculation). Roughly 1/50,000 of Earth's surface covered in solar panels would suffice.

> do they still require fossil fuel energy to create, not to mention maintain and rebuild

That's not really particularly relevant. What is crucial is that they produce more energy than they consume. This is an important figure, EROI (Energy Return on Energy invested), which should be >1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#Ph...

Photovoltaics generally have been well over 1. There are still sustainability challenges with the technology, but I think they're minor (relative to current alternatives and carbon technology).

Cheap for the economy, not so cheap for the environment.

These kind of articles rarely calculate the price to dispose old solar panels.

Our country recently found that current methods for disposing solar panels pose a grave danger to the environment and imposed strict regulations for it. As a result the price for disposal quadrupled. Because consumers of the solar panel, which are mostly individuals, can't afford those prices, the government is preparing for a law that charges manufactures up front for the price of disposal.

It is assumed that solar will be more expensive than natural gas after the changes.

"Grave danger" from what?

That just dumping old solar panels into the landfill will cause Cu, Pb, As, Cr to spread into the ground effectively contaminating it. The government is trying to ban dumping it and trying to impose a responsibility to manufacturers to properly recycle and decontaminate it, which will cost about 4~5 times more than dumping.

Oh no, copper! Chromium! Next you're going to tell me of the fiendish plot to incorporate these into pots and pans to poison us all.

There is no reason to include As in PV. There are anti-renewable propaganda screeds that pretend otherwise ("look! GaAs PV cells are a thing, therefore all PV uses As!")

That leaves lead. Lead has been used for connections, but it is being phased out, not least because of EU environmental regulations. The PV cells themselves do not need lead.

I suspect you are just repeating anti-renewable lies here.

Actually it does matter if it's not properly processed. Government research found those metals were contaminating landfills, and imposed restrictions.

If you are interested in the facts, here are one. I believe in research done by my pro-PV government and scientists, not environmental shills and anti-science PV aficionados like you and this article.

http://knrec.or.kr/file/2018%EC%8B%A0%EC%9E%AC%EC%83%9D%EC%9...

That does not display for me. Useless.

Let me repeat: we have copper and stainless (chromium) steel pots and pans (or, in the case of stainless steel, surgical implants!) The idea that PV is dangerous because of those metals is absurd on its face. Chromium toxicity is from highly oxidized (hexavalent) chromium that will not be produced from Cr in ordinary structural materials.

My priors for interpreting statements like yours is to treat them as garbage. This is because renewables have been subject to an endless stream of BS criticism for decades. The expectation upon seeing more such clearly dubious criticism, such as yours that flies in the face of elementary chemistry, is that it's just more of the same.

> I suspect you are just repeating anti-renewable lies here.

You speak with a tone of authority - do you have deep expertise and knowledge in this field? Yes or no? Please don't dodge the question.

This is the best article I could find with about 10 minutes of googling. I have excerpted a small portion, but there is more relevant information immediately following this portion.

This does not sound like a solved problem to me, at all.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338195279_An_overvi...

3. Global photovoltaic market and waste generation The market share of solar panels by technology group is shown in Fig. 4. Currently, the volume of comprehensive connected PV panels is rising sharply. Rapid growth is anticipated in the coming years with the typical useful life of a solar panel of 25 years [1,12]. However, it is expected that the total quantity of PV panels EOL will reach 9.57 million tonnes by 2050 [4]. In 2014, the market was dominated by silicon-based c-Si panels, which accounted for a 92% share of the market with those based on CdTe technology at 5%, copper indium gallium (di) selenide (CIGS) at 2%, with 1% accounted for by those manufactured from other materials (dye-sensitized, CPV, organic hybrids) [4,14,15]. The market share of c-Si PV panels is projected to decrease from 92% to 44.8% between 2014 and 2030 [13,14]. The third-generation PV panels are predicted to reach 44.1%, from a base of 1% in 2014, over the same period [4,13–15]. Solar PV panels will probably lose efficiency over time, whereby the operational life is 20–30 years at least [7,13,16]. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimated that at the end of 2016, there were around 250,000 metric tonnes of solar panel waste globally [12]. The solar panels contain lead (Pb), cadmium (Cd) and many other harmful chemicals that could not be removed if the entire panel is cracked [17–19]. In November 2016, the Environment Minister of Japan advised that Japan’s production of solar panel waste per year is expected to rise from 10,000 to 800,000 tonnes by 2040 and the country has no plans to dispose of them safely and effectively [17,20]. A recent statement found that the Toshiba Environmental Solutions will take approximately 19 years for reprocessing all solar massive waste of Japan produced by 2020 [21]. The yearly waste will be 70–80 times higher by 2034 than the year before 2020 [21]. China with a larger number of solar plants, currently operates around two times as many solar panels as USA and has no proposals for the dumping of the whole old panels. Despite the presence of environmental awareness, California, another world leader in solar panels, also has no waste disposal plan. At the end of their useful lives, only Europe requires the manufactures of solar panels to collect and dump solar waste. Although solar panels were disposed of on regular sites, it is not advisable because the modules can degrade, and harmful chemicals can leach into the ground causing drinking water contamination [22]. The lifetime of PV modules has been estimated for 25 years. Therefore, it can be assumed that the installed PV power (MW) becomes waste after that period. To identify the time shifting, the years of installation and the years of waste generation may be denoted as x and y, respectively where y ¼ xþ25 [1].

The listing of cadmium there should be a tipoff. Cd is used in CdTe, which is a small and shinking fraction of the PV market (most is Si, which does not use Cd; CdTe is also limited by the availability of tellurium). And I already explained about lead.

The projection there that c-Si market share will shrink seems very dubious. c-Si market share is growing, not shrinking (displacing multi xtal Si).

The waste from PV is largely glass, plastic, aluminum, and steel. All these will be in small quantities compared to what is produced elsewhere in the economy.

Perhaps you should become a consultant, sounds like you can save these countries a lot of money by telling them how things really are.

I'm wondering why landfills are insufficient? Are the linings not good enough?

Not processing old solar panel was deemed dangerous by the government and we are building a government facility to recycle and properly decontaminate them. The price to run the facility will be collected from the manufacturers.

Same for Wind too. 81 tons of waste needs to be processed after 20 years of service of a 5MW wind turbine but operators and manufacturers does not take the price of disposal into account.

Sure but I'm asking about the technology. It seems odd that old solar panels couldn't somehow be safely buried without leaching.

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