Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aunche | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the updated figures. It's worth noting that China does 28% of the world's manufacturing, much of which is exported to developed countries.

As far as solar goes, clearly coal is cheaper than solar in Nigeria because that's what they're mostly building now. Regulations and subsidies are what make solar cheaper than coal in the US.

Edit: To be clear, I'm completely in favor of coal being replaced by renewables. I'm just pointing this out to raise awareness of the economic realities that are incentivizing coal power in developing countries.

View on HN

This is absolutely not true. Solar and wind, unsubsizded, are the cheapest forms of energy currently. I highly recommend reviewing both links below to better understand the economics.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

https://www.irena.org/newsroom/pressreleases/2020/Jun/Renewa...

Not after accounting for load balancing. Depending on the situation. Weather, load profiles, etc. Hence cheap energy storage being a big deal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_renewable_energy#Comp...

I remember my department had a few very large grants for solar and wind integration studies. There is always some x profitable level to integrate into some portion of the grid. Before you actually start to lose money. Used to be around 30% in most cases a decade ago. Imagine it is bit asymptotic without improvements to the cost of energy storage. I would guess 40% in most cases now.

Found this: https://www.iea.org/articles/will-system-integration-of-rene...

Yes, I argue even when accounting for grid integration. It's a slam dunk anywhere where it's paired with natural gas due to fast throttling on open cycle and combined cycle turbines, and a little less so where coal is used. Nigeria, for example, is primarily natural gas for fossil electrical generation (~16% of their electrical generation capacity), so any kwh's you're generating with renewables is natural gas burned only when renewables can't meet load demand.

Check out South Australia on OpenNEM [1]. Paired with natural gas and transmission, they're at an exceptionally high amount of renewables penetration [2] and have a very low cost of power in Australia [3]. They're also using a large, recently expanded, Tesla utility scale battery for ancillary/frequency response services [4] (previously profitably performed by natural gas generators), which is causing financial pain for those mentioned gas operators (who are having trouble profiting now on either the power provided or frequency response services).

[1] https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&interval=30m

[2] https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/coal-generatio...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/24/south...

[4] https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/

There are some regions for which storage requirements are relatively small, and would be perfect for 100% solar rollout targets.

Phoenix and Las Vegas come to mind - places where incident solar flux and electricity demand (due to heavy air conditioner use) almost perfectly coincide (peaks are separated by only ~50 minutes)

Nigeria also fits that description. It's right on the equator, meaning there's very little seasonal variation in solar. This is in contrast to all of Europe, especially northern Europe like the UK and Germany.

I'll admit solar and wind are more attractive than I had thought, which makes me somewhat more optimistic.

That said, I think this analysis misses two important factors when it comes to impoverished countries. Otherwise, you would see more solar there. Developing countries have much lower standards when it comes to building a new power plant, so don't need to pay for sulfur scrubbers. The other factor is that unskilled labor much cheaper there. Solar and wind require much higher-skill labor as there is much more maintenance that needs to be done.

> Solar and wind require much higher-skill labor as there is much more maintenance that needs to be done.

Are you sure that the steam turbine (high RPM, balancing, thermal stress to blades, steam conditioning) is easier to maintain than a electric generator or an array of photovoltaics with control circuits?

Coal/steam power generation is old, old tech. China will be happy to build a coal plant in Nigeria and train up the operators.

Modern steam turbine plants are not that old, and they require a lot more maintenance. Plus, Nigeria produces hardly any coal, so you'll have to either import coal (requires import terminal and rail plus reliance on foreign coal) or mine more coal (open coal mine infrastructure, rail). Solar just produces electricity and doesn't need a bunch of infrastructure.

More attractive might be understating it:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/12990532

> The owners of Australia's newest coal-fired power station have written down the value of the asset to zero, wiping out a $1.2 billion investment in the face of an onslaught of renewable energy. ... The decision was booked in Sumitomo's September accounts, in which the company acknowledged the facility was worthless despite being barely 10 years old.

That's only true if you don't count the storage cost necessary to maintain a highly reliable base load supply.

Requirements for high reliability can be lower in places where electricity itself isn't a given. In other words, if you don't have money for full range of functions, you'd be glad to have at least some.

This is not true, the figures you and others have provided account for an additional theoretical externality cost on our well being for coal. The nominal price of coal energy in the US is more than half of the cost of solar per kWh (3.2 vs 6.8 cents on average)[1].

It’s even cheaper in third-world countries (and China) due to the cost of labor.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-real-costs-of-u-s-ene...

Your source is from 2011. Coal has gotten more expensive and solar much cheaper. In fact, building new, unsubsidized solar power plants is cheaper than operating an existing (and paid for) coal power plant: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/10/23/its-cheaper-to-build-.... 2.9-3.8 cents per kWh for unsubsidized solar in the US.

Nigeria is closer to the equator and has lower labor costs for installation, so their solar costs will be even cheaper.

The Lazard study includes carbon pricing which is exactly what I said: “[All studies] provided account for an additional theoretical externality cost on our well being for coal”.

Like every industry in the last decade, coal generators have also become more efficient.

I’d be shocked (heh) if solar power becomes more efficient given the Shockley-Quessier limit of PV cells which have a maximum efficiency in the best theoretical case with an infinite stacking of panels of 30%. Large synchronous machines on the other hand, in practice, can have a 95% efficiency.

Here’s a study without the “carbon pricing”: https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/MITEI-WP-2...

Again coal is much cheaper.

I’m sympathetic to your agenda but it’s deceitful and unfair to presume agreement given the unique circumstances theses results affect conclusions. A place like Nigeria has to worry about what’s happening to their people in the next month rather than in the next 50 years, thus they’ll have different trade offs to make.

That's really only true if you have perfectly elastic demand.

As soon as you need to store energy wind and solar become much more expensive.

Not really. A few hours of storage are now included in a lot of new solar projects, and it adds very little to the cost. Solar+4hours of storage has a LCOE of just 3.3 cents per kWh. https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-09-10/ladwp-v...

"Coal is cheaper than solar in Nigeria because that's what they're mostly building now"

Firtly, thats a circular argument:"clearly bloodletting works because everyone is using it"

Secondary, the argument is meanongless without a timespan - for example a hydroelectric dam is the chepest source of electricity ever, but is very expensive upfront: no private investor wants to fund that because their returns will take decades. Channel tonnel is profitable now, but initial investort got wrecked, etc.

A hypothetical asset that lasts forever has infinite ROI but if it takes you 200 years to make your money back noone will invest.

Nigeria may not have the funds to bank roll renewables even if they are cheaper in the long run. Cash flow often matters a lot more than people realise.

Coal is worse in that regard because of potential for delays and the binary nature of operating a coal power plant. You either have built the whole thing and it's making some money or you haven't and it's a money pit.

Solar also doesn't have to be centralized like a Coal plant. Not only can solar start delivering power on day 1, it can be incrementally added closer to the point of use, also saving on distribution costs.

If someone said a coal plant is being built in Nigeria, my first thought that this is being forced on them by creditors that probably already own a bunch of coal.

> As far as solar goes, clearly coal is cheaper than solar in Nigeria because that's what they're mostly building now.

If we want to find out what's cheaper in order to decide what it is more reasonable to build, we can't rely on the fact that something is actually being built as an argument. It's the other way around - first we decide what's better, then do it, otherwise whatever we do would be right since we're doing that.

Or - in this case - if you assume that those calculations were made and it was found that the coal is cheaper - and that's why they're building coal plants - then there is a question of discrepancy (coal is more expensive lately than solar according to <sources>), which needs to be addressed, otherwise it might be assumed that a mistake was made.

> Regulations and subsidies are what make solar cheaper than coal in the US.

Doesn't coal industry also receive subsidies, and aren't those subsides comparable or bigger than subsidies for solar? I'm not sure; are you?

> otherwise whatever we do would be right since we're doing that.

I didn’t follow the logic there. Are you saying everything everyone does is right?

I dig that, but it’s a strange thing to see in an argument.

That's what I'm questioning.

We can't assume a proposition is correct if we're trying to figure out if it's correct or not.

The post I'm replying to was in effect "coal is cheaper since they're building coal plants". I disagree, and show why the logic is "illogical".

> It's worth noting that China does 28% of the world's manufacturing, much of which is exported to developed countries.

You don't have to go to bat for china, you know. Does the fact that they have so much manufacturing make their emissions ok? If those manufacturing emissions we're instead from the US, would you make the same note?

the point being that an importing country should be held at least partially responsible for the emissions of the manufacturing country. if the importing country made the widgets themselves, their emissions would increase. if the importing country didn't buy the widgets at all then the manufacturing country wouldn't produce them and not emit as much CO2

> the point being that an importing country should be held at least partially responsible for the emissions of the manufacturing country.

Ok, so Saudi Arabia is responsible for America's emissions. Russia is responsible for Europe's emissions. America is responsible for China's emissions.

But let's just keep playing word games to deflect responsibility from China and make sure it's all America's fault.

> Regulations and subsidies are what make solar cheaper than coal in the US.

Please stop parroting this. Coal is cheaper than solar in the same way that a house with no down payment is free. The environmental debt from coal's CO2 emissions will far exceed costs of solar.

This is on point - pollution is the loanshark in everyone's blindspot. To 'save' a dollar on renewables is to codemn your kids to pay a thousand

The point is that even without pollution costs - and without subsidies either way - it might be more expensive to build coal plant than an equivalent solar plant. Operation costs are clearly higher in case of coal. Pollution is the cherry on top, or possibly the proverbial elephant in the room.

> Coal is cheaper than solar in the same way that a house with no down payment is free.

Except that rich europeans got the "house with no down payment" for centuries, but now expect poor africans to put down a down payment? That's going to be a hard sell to poor africans desperate to get out of poverty.

> The environmental debt from coal's CO2 emissions will far exceed costs of solar.

Expecting poor africans to give a shit is going to be a real hard sell. Especially when the climate problem is almost exclusively a rich european creation and poor africans had nothing to do with it.

Caring about climate is an enterprise of the privileged few. Unless we are willing to subsidize billions of poor africans and others around the world to the tune of trillions of dollars, I think africans and everyone else are going to go with the lowest hanging fruit. It's 2021 and hundreds of millions of africans live with electricity today. Think about that. It's insane. Considering the centuries of suffering they endured, if they have to burn down the planet to get some semblance of good life, then so be it. Let europe live in mud huts for a few centuries.

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/600-million-africans-go-with...

Unfortunately in 2021, lifting people out of poverty still always implies increased carbon emissions (historically that's how rich countries got to where they are). After the death of colonialism, poor countries also naturally want to have the same luxuries rich countries already enjoy. But now we realize that with our current scientific advancements these luxurious lifestyles are not sustainable for such a large global population.

What you said is 100% right, just the tone was a bit harsh. Since this site mostly has people from rich countries who refuse to learn history and accept any blame, you will be downvoted.

> Let europe live in mud huts for a few centuries.

This kind of vindictive rhetoric is probably something we should try to avoid in times like these. Even if you’re just “trying to make a point”.

Really our only chance of solving the climate is doubling down on high tech. Turning Europe back centuries would be clearly counterproductive.

>Let europe live in mud huts for a few centuries.

I can just buy an AC and pay for electric heating. I'm not so sure that every African can do that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com