Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

And that's how the situation in SF came to be. Lots of money wanting to be "saved" by tech.

1) Diversify their economy

2) Build up enough sovereign wealth to maintain their citizens standard of living after the oil has run out.

The first is very hard, because huge percentages of their population are completely disengaged from the economy. It's estimated that 30-40% of working age adults neither have a job, nor are looking for one. An unusually high percentage of those who have jobs work for the government, and somewhere close to 90% of non-oil jobs are held by foreigners. There is immense social and economic pressure against citizens of KSA getting private sector jobs. The biggest "employer" in the country is the yearly hajj pilgrimage, which isn't a lot.

The latter is incredibly hard because of the former. That 30-40% of the population that don't have jobs need to be fed, or they'll eventually revolt. And all of those government jobs cost a huge amount of money. And the fact that the citizens of KSA neither want jobs (apparently) and aren't properly trained for a lot of those jobs makes reducing the social services bill very, very hard.

If they can outrun the de-carbonization of the world, KSA will do okay. Maybe not as good as it was during the peak (if you were one of the few getting the benefits), but not terrible. If they don't outrun de-carbonization .... well, then I would recommend not being there when whatever happens, happens.

I mean if you own a skyscraper in NY you're basically set for life. Multiple lives.

Unless batteries get a lot lighter, ships are more likely to be powered by liquid hydrogen or ammonia, which are relatively straightforward to produce from renewable energy.

Over the last couple years / decades, ships went slower and slower on average as to save fuel (fuel became more expensive as well as environmental regulation on how much a ship may emit, which correlates to fuel intake).

So some people in the naval industry propose going back to using wind power, either via traditional sailing or more elaborate schemes (via electricity generation as an intermediary).

Where and how it shown that?

Yeah, because we've done a great job of stewarding middle-east so far.

Even with the best intentions, it's not clear this " statebuilding" is even remotely realistic

An interesting fact here is that the UAE will never become poor.

The UAE has saved up over 1.3 million USD dollars per citizen[a]. And this is just the government’s savings. Obviously, there’s immense private wealth on top of that as well. Even if with investment returns as low as 4% per year drawn out, that would translate to $52,000 per citizen.

This is 52k of money that you could almost call free money. We’re not counting for the fact that at least half these citizens are not going to simply sit at home. They’re going to work, earn, start companies, etc. And the citizenry is very highly educated. And a lot of them actually have STEM degrees too (which correlates with higher earnings). So realistically, the per capita annual income could be in the over $100k per citizen range, even after the oil has run out.

[a] The UAE has about 1 million citizens (most of the ~9 million who live in the UAE are not citizens), and the UAE’s sovereign wealth funds have total assets exceeding USD $1.3 trillion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_soverei...

I wonder if in the future, camels will be owned and/or ridden only by very wealthy individuals.

(like many horses nowadays)

However, I think there also are reasons to believe things will be better:

1) the EIA forecasts linear growth of renewables, while its been behaving exponentially over the last 5-10 years. That gives me hope they’ve underestimated the long term growth rate. (It would be interesting to compare their older predictions vs actual)

2) nearly all of the energy consumption growth is non-OECD and will require newly built generation. If cost of renewables continues to drop, it might just be economic sense that pushes renewables over coal

3) at least on the EU side, fossil fuels are increasingly getting a negative connotation. On top of the financial comparison, I expect this could dampen new fossil growth as well.

World coal consumption peaked in 2013, not sure why you believe it is coming back in 2050?!

Most of the new global energy production brought online is renewables, and has been for the last 4 years...The renewable fraction is also increasing. Not sure why you believe fossil fuel use will increase for the next 3 decades?!

Why not? Equipment at that scale is complicated, and requires a lot of skill and experience to operate.

Not to mention responsibility. When you screw up, people die. Very likely including you.

Do they? Has doubling the work-force helped Western economies? I think that Elizabeth Warren & others have questioned that idea - i.e. that the wages were reduced to compensate for the increased labour supply - although even if not beneficial for individual families it could still be beneficial for the economy as a whole (and especially for the capitalist class).

It's simply a matter of political will.

Musk looked at the regulatory tape around nuclear and said "I guess it has to be solar then" and I think that was a mistake. If we'd applied his economics of scale, and first principles thinking to nuclear we'd be far, far more along than we are right now and we'd probably have more medical isotopes to boot.

I'm not sure if this changes your point but many people lived to their 70s and 80s in the 18th century as they have for recorded history.

There's nothing renewable about using wood if you're not replanting the forest.

Energy sources do get replaced. Just not every time.

As to abandoning energy sources, total amount of wood burned is actually down significantly as agriculture has dominated land usage age. In the Middle Ages for example large tracts of land where devoted to having little forests as a replenishing source of wood, various useful plant species, and wild game.

Less well known energy sources like whale oil and animal dung are also down in absolute terms.

To complete the picture, here is how you can drill the well in the first place:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn7twImE2ug

When it's bought back from you, they only pay for the generation part which makes sense in my opinion. Now where that price point is, I don't know! (25%? 50%? no idea)

It seems the smart meter issue is almost unrelated though. Where I am (UK, potentially where you are too as it looks like a similar issue), the old feed-in tariff subsidised the energy _generated_ by a system, regardless of if you used the energy yourself or exported the energy. That's great to kick-start an economy but doesn't scale at a national level.

I understand they are trying to push to pay for what is exported by houses only. I'm a bit sad to see the old subvention gone as it made solar panel uneconomical in lots of situations, and there's a lot to say about timing, but in principle I think it's sound reasoning.

Hot water will stay at the top of the tank, so that means you can use most of the hot water without a significant drop in temperature.

There's a company making tanks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1Z4JCoPAGc

I think this correlates with EV sales. In the places that have lots of EVs you will find employers that have chargers.

Elon Musk said it in one of his presentations, something like "we sell cars whereever we put in superchargers".

1: not all if the costs are energy related. In fact, the cost to build and maintain the transmission and distribution systems is quite substantial. But that cost is for an average amount of energy over a number of years so it’s hard to turn that into a floating market value

2: There are socioeconomic factors that need to be resolved. Someone who works nights can’t avoid using power during high price times as it may be the only time to do chores. Or someone who works two jobs who can’t afford any fancy equipment to time shift use.

[0] https://octopus.energy/agile/

This has been a thing in Australia too, under the decades-old assumption that midnight coal is the cheapest period of power. There have been projects to change the boiler systems to 1) heat at midday instead of midnight, to reflect the changed cost-curve caused by solar, and 2) randomise the exact period of heating, to spread the demand over a range rather than causing a huge spike at 12:00 exactly.

India without any Li ion manufacturer is trying very hard to get at least 1 or 2 off the ground with production linked incentives and a few business houses have entered.

Huge amount of money to get off the grid - how many years of bills is that?

I have a 4kW system up here at 56 degrees north, and there's no way I could go off grid with it because the seasonality is huge; I can't store power all the way through the winter. I get it from the big offshore windfarms instead.

Now if you had variable loads or a battery you could schedule them to buy and sell power based on the market rate. Since very few people have the ability to do this, you can constantly beat the market on an almost daily basis. Tesla in fact already does this. Not only do they profit from this buying and selling, the grid becomes stabilized because the high and low demand periods become smoothed.

[1] https://www.ndsu.edu/climate/North%20Dakota%20Data/Yearly%20...

[2] http://www.bismarck.climatemps.com/sunlight.php

That said, Germany's investments are clearly a failure, IF you go by the desired carbon reduction goals for 2020-2030.

I also don't know anyone who genuinely believes any of those carbon goals are feasible, or that we have high odds of hitting them... but that might just be that I tend to have cynical friends.

Here's what Germany did: They invested a vast amount in local renewables, at above market prices, that had the effect of dramatically driving down the global price of wind and solar. Because they radically expanded production capacity. Effectively, Germany gave the world a 'gift'!

This had the long-term affect of dramatically increasing global solar + wind deployments (b/c prices fell) and transferring a huge economic boom to China, who actually made the solar panels and who's government subsidized production.

Unfortunately, for domestics political reasons, Germany also shut down their nuclear plants and kept burning coal. So their total CO2 emissions have been roughly constant and about 10x higher, per person, than France or Sweden.

The article is correct in that vastly more electrical transmission is needed to effectively integrate renewables. The article is misleading in describing price spikes. Yes, there are 2-45 days a year of price spikes for a few hours, but on average price is lower b/c of renewables outside of Germany. (Again, Germany did everyone the favor of buying renewables before they were economic.) Texas average prices are some of the lowest in the world. CA wholesale power prices are very low globally, while retail prices are sky high b/c PG&E is a monopoly combined with an inadvertent domestic terrorist organization.

Something the article only eludes to, the energy transition covers many more areas than just power production. Germany has done a bad job in both transportation and building emissions. They're overly reliant on Russian natural gas for heating and have been slow to embrace electric cars (VW is doing 'ok' but not great). Both issues are separate to renewables but major failings of German policy to either reduce emissions or increase energy security.

Overall, the German investment in renewables electricity production is a massive success and global gift. Completely underrecognized. Everything else sits in the category between "failure" and "didn't even try."

I agree that currently nuclear makes sense as if there is political will it could be scaled up quickly and at the very least provide base power.

> The Germans paid for it creating the market/industry. Vast amounts. [...] If the Germans keep voting green [...]

Your reply:

> That’s rather inaccurate. [...] German electricity prices are so high because [...] German law mandates that these plants are not allowed to operate unless wind and solar are unable to provide sufficient electricity

So what you're saying is, German lawmakers mandated the Germans pay for it...

Your comment seems to be making some odd argument about the expense, as if it should be cheap? The original commenter was pointing out exactly that: it costs. "The Germans paid..."

> .

Most people prefer the European panels because the overall price isn't that much different, and they know if they ever need to make a warranty claim it'll be a lot easier from a European manufacturer.

These are retail prices for home installation - of course for utility scale it's a different story.

Considering a similar system like that in southern Europe where installation is pretty cheap, and the prices are higher, I see A$12000 for a 10KW system of panels and a 10KW Fronius three-phase inverter.

But when I factor in power outage which happens a lot, the solar is much better deal.

I've had 24/7 power sine we moved to solar.

Living in a two bedroom unit in Sydney my last quarterly electricity bill was over $500.00 which comes to over $2000.00 a year.

Basically here in Sydney we have high electricity prices and my washer, drier and air conditioner love to chew up electricity.

Assuming a 16% capacity factor that system will generate $328 worth of electricity a year at $0.03 per kWh. It would break even after 22 years. That's incredibly far away from the 208 years you have quoted.

The flaw in your thinking is that this setup wasn't chosen for you. It wasn't build in your country nor was it built by you so why would you compare it to your own needs? If you had to build your own solar system you would get a smaller one (which would decrease the breakeven duration according to your weird criteria despite not meaningfully changing the system) and you would probably install it yourself.

The reality is that wherever that solar system was built electricity costs more than $0.03 and the person needs more energy or feeds the the energy into the grid.

It's like complaining about a family of five getting a Volkswagen Sharan when you are just fine in your Citroen Ami. It's not about you.

Building house here also starts around $50K (not counting land price). BTW land prices rose from 500$ to $500K on nice terrain when asphalt roads where build (in like 15 years span). I am happy that solar panels + storage are getting cheaper as building house anywhere will become possibile. Probably will contribute to faster development of poorer countries/regions with bad infrastructure.

That is like saying, "one of the downsides of using a cooked noodle as a fork is that it doesn't hold its shape". It's disqualifying until that issue is sorted.

The value of solar right now is that it provides energy at the hottest, most energy use part of the day. But there is a tipping point where marginal solar is not really valuable for a grid anymore. California and Germany are at that point.

Hopefully we get cost-effective day-scale energy storage, it's not going to happen in the next few years unfortunately.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020

But batteries get cheaper every year, so check back in 2021 for even cheaper prices. Most observers expect lithium ion storage to be cheaper than natural gas within a decade. And when you amortize the nighttime storage costs with the cheap daytime solar, natural gas is barely holding on in some markets. If we had a carbon tax that came close to internalizing the externalities, I don't think NG would be running for much longer.

Maybe Carbon sequestration?

Yes, provided you ignore the cost of balancing an increasingly volatile grid, a volatility that is created by renewables. Also provided you ignore the cost to provide energy when said renewables aren't generating any.

Claims to back up your statment, such as from Lazard, are horribly flawed because they use the metric of LCOE - levelised cost of energy - to claim that renewable energy is cheaper. It is, provided you ignore the slew of costs that are not borne by renewable generators but which ARE borne by consumers.

Yes, batteries are getting cheaper but not at the scale required for the grid. Before you quote the Australian Tesla battery, remember that it can only provide energy for minutes - yes, minutes.

What is needed today for a low-carbon future is nuclear and hydro. Renewables will get there one day but that day is not tomorrow or next year.

Another effect is it makes these plants sit idle for periods of time.

It costs a lot of money to build a power plant. Every hour it sits idle is an hour you're not getting any benefit out of the investment you made. So it takes longer to break even on your investment. (Possibly, as a consolation, the plant lasts longer or has lower yearly maintenance costs.)

The only piece missing here is an internet-connected thermostat for the tank that inquires about the spot price for electricity and turns on when it's cheap.

The same thing applies to your HVAC system.

Cure yourself of this tendency to jump to extremes. Your relationships and your career will benefit from pausing and moderating what you say.

To the content of your comment: -

There is a sizable menu of options to make wind and solar more reliable. Two technologies with nearly a century of history behind them are pumped hydro and CAES (compressed air energy storage).

Batteries have been technologically feasible for decades, and are on the cusp of economic feasibility (that is: being cheaper than the alternatives), thanks to the manufacturing learning curve that the OP makes so much of.

Better grid interconnections also help a lot and probably have an even more illustrious history than pumped hydro and CAES. Demand management (asking large users, e.g. pulp and paper mills to pause for a while), is also a venerable technique.

It is possible to use surplus power to make fuels to burn when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. This is still in its infancy only because we have never before had periods when electricity had a negative price.

These are just the things that sprang to my mind without thinking about it. There are others.

Seemingly complicated problems don't necessarily require complicated solutions.

You can do three easy things. Create bigger electricity grids with more decentralized generation (the whole earth receives a roughly constant amount of energy from the sun), overproduce energy or build some storage.

The 'carriage' fee, ie the fee used to transport the electricity will grow quite a lot as the entity in charge of that finds reason to charge that much more and gov. will find reasons to tax.

There's the cost of electricity - but also distributors and government in that equation.

If the cost of making parts for the Google Phone were $1, and there were only 1 type of phone in the US and everyone had to have one ... would Google drop the price of the phone? Probably not. They would capture more surpluses.

This will be the same everywhere.

If electricity were purchased at 'independent stations' etc it would be another story entirely. As energy got cheaper, power usage would increase, and efficiency of households would go down.

It's the uptime that adds costs.

Granted, these are mass produced homes built in the 50s-80s for the most part before home construction got more strict about insulation and energy used to be a lot cheaper.

>Lazard’s latest annual Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis (LCOE 14.0) shows that as the cost of renewable energy continues to decline, certain technologies (e.g., onshore wind and utility-scale solar), which became cost-competitive with conventional generation several years ago on a new-build basis, continue to maintain competitiveness with the marginal cost of selected existing conventional generation technologies.

I assume new-build is building a wind for or nat gas plant.

What is marginal cost? Is that adding capacity to a wind farm or nat gas plant, or just having an existing nat gas plant generate more power per day.

Are they basically saying that renewables are competitive when capital costs are included and also when capital costs are excluded?

The much trickier problem is storage that's only needed once a week, once a month, or once a year. That's where we don't have batteries, yet.

I never asked for benefit to every single person perfectly equally.

For society, having the quite significant proportion of people who are renters and apartment dwellers getting more than an insignificant benefit from our own government should be a thing.

I am not asking for handouts. But for the handouts to those people wealthy enough (not rich per se but wealthy enough) to own their own standalone home to stop. And for that money to benefit all via society wide infrastructure such as a powerstation/energy storage/grid costs and upgrades.

It'd benefit the standalone homeowners still. But everyone else too.

It's hard to market "you'll spend less on power so that's why the rent is higher".

Most of it is in the mining, refining, and transport of the massive quantities of metals needed to manufacture and install the combination of generation, transport, transformation, and storage equipment + the second/third order equipment to manufacture the electrical equipment.

Our supply chains are dependent on fossil fuels for all of this, and we're a long long way off from replicating even a fraction of it with a purely electrical version.

If we do choose to pursue that goal (which I think is worthwhile), the renewables still lack the energy ROI to make it feasible. We can do it, but it pretty much requires wide scale adoption of nuclear for the thermodynamics to work out.

Getting the price down for nuclear construction and maintenance is important. Keep in mind that these plants were built in the 80s or earlier.

> Nuclear in 2020 doesn't make any sense. It's far cheaper to over-provision and use storage.

What storage? That's the point. You can listen to what Bill Gates said about this last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xe3BWPsBTU

Barring the legal/political hurdles, I could theoretically drive from my home in Texas to Alaska, then cross to Russia, and on to Paris in around 250~ driving hours. Throw in another day or two for a private boat across the Bering Strait/North Pacific.

9 days to basically drive around the entire world. 15000 miles. Just for giggles, my 2012 Honda CRV will get around 350-400 miles per tank of gas. We'll drive conservatively at 60 mph to hit the full range. Depending on the cost of gasoline, I could drive around the entire world for about $1200. Maybe $1500 once I get into Europe. Insane!

Before cars, that same journey would take months moving non stop. A solo trip can now be done in about 2 weeks with an experienced driver.

Absolutely insane the cool stuff we can do with modern technology :)

Not accounting for all types of risks makes for a very skewed comparison.

It's instructive several ways.

Any number of fairly simple methods would have hugely alleviated the impact of the disaster. Much as with major nuclear disasters, it was a cascade of failures, starting with poor management and a dysfunctional culture, amplified through poor design, adverse conditions, poor communications, delayed or absent warnings, and little or no disaster response (many of the deaths were attributed to starvation and disease, not drowning or other physical impacts).

A useful thing to keep in mind, though, is that after a dam break is done being a a massive disaster area, which typically resolves in a few hours to a few weeks, the land is no longer a glowing radioactive mess. It can be re-settled and populated as structures and infrasctructure are rebuilt. Zhumadian City, the region surrounding Banqiao, has a present population of over 7 million.

Hydro disasters have been large, but are tangible/sensible, immediate, and resolve relatively quickly.

There are literally tens of thousand of dams, if not > 100k, worldwide (over 22k in China alone), with well over a century of major utilisation. Granted 100 or fewer major (2+GWe) installations.

There are fewer than 400 nuclear power stations worldwide, with at least three highly notable failures.

The immediate innundation from Banqiao was responsible for ~25k deaths. The additional 100k or so came from starvation and disease due to widespread disruption of the region, and a grossly inadequate disaster response plan and capability. Adequate engineering, operation, management, forecasting, disaster planning, preparation, and response, could have reduced the loss still further.

Organisational / institutional failures at Chernobyl, Fukushima, and for that matter, Hanford and Sellafield, were and are massive contributing factors. These cannot be engineered around.