‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
A bit of a tangent, but it’s always strange to me when people describe Chinese or Indian cities with millions of residents as "small". Wuxi had >1 million people in 2000, and today has like 3.5 million (6.5 million in the prefecture). This article makes it sound like a minor town in a remote province, but Jiangsu has about the same population as Germany, twice as populous as California, and is an industrial powerhouse ~with~ [edit: adjacent to] the busiest port in the world (Shanghai).
Nobody ever writes about "the small city of Dallas" or "the small city of San Diego" or "the small city of Birmingham" or "the small city of Munich".
Also I think many people would say Birmingham, England is small. Why? It isn't London.
If Birmingham – the 20th biggest urban agglomeration in Europe – is small, what should the many hundreds of smaller cities be termed?
(London is a megacity.)
You can also interpret it as meaning "insignificant". A poor city with the same population as London has a much lower profile.
Wuxi has been a city for 2200 years, since London was a scattered group of Celtic-speaking villages. Even earlier, in the Spring and Autumn Period, the capital of the State of Wu, Meili, was probably in what is now Wuxi, though it may have been a few kilometers to the southeast in Suzhou. This is where the famous war of Wu against Chu began, a century after Romulus was said to have founded Rome, where the Etruscan kings still ruled. At that time, when Meili was half a millennium old —a century before Plato would found the Academy from which academia takes its name— Sun Tzu led the Wu army of King Helü to victory against Chu, making Wu one of the most important kingdoms of the Spring and Autumn Period, and making himself one of the best-selling and most influential writers in the 20th century, 2500 years later. Temples dating from the Wu period are still popular tourist attractions in Wuxi. It has been a major commercial center since before Charlemagne was born. In 1830, before two thirds of the population died in the Taiping Rebellion, Wuxi was half a million people, 4% of the population of the United States at the time.
Today, five million people live in Wuxi. It's one of the 100 biggest cities in the world, and 25% of China's microelectronics industry is in Wuxi; probably every electronic device in your house contains chips made in Wuxi.
Perhaps people think of Wuxi as "small" because it is part of the Shanghai metropolitan area. Shanghai proper has 24.5 million people, and has been one of the biggest seaports in the world for thousands of years — when Stonehenge was built, Shanghai was already at least a thousand years old. Wuxi is only half as old and five times smaller than Shanghai, and there are many ancient and enormous cities in the region, so by comparison Wuxi might seem small.
But most countries in the world do not even have one city as big as Wuxi. Wuxi is bigger than Berlin, Madrid, or Rome, or indeed any city in Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, or New Zealand. It's bigger than Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, or Philadelphia. In Turkey, only Istanbul and possibly Ankara are bigger than Wuxi; in Australia, only (greater) Sydney and (greater) Melbourne are Wuxi-sized. It's three times the size of Dallas, San Diego, Birmingham (England), or Munich. More people live in Wuxi than in Oregon, Uruguay, the country of Mongolia, Puerto Rico, Lithuania, Kentucky, Botswana, Iowa, Kazakhstan, Utah, or Qatar. Wuxi's population is triple Estonia's.
If you look at the first photo in https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/31029, the big black area in the middle is Lake Tai. As the label tells you, Suzhou is the cluster of light on its right (east) shore; Wuxi is the cluster of light on its north (top) shore.
Another significant aspect of the situation is that China has just been through 200 years of absolute hell — including the worst civil war in history, multiple foreign invasions and occupations (including 14 years of World War II), by far the worst famine in history (one with the dubious distinction of being self-inflicted, unlike the famines in India and Ireland), the Cultural Revolution, and the end of the Qing dynasty. China is now recovering. Chinese electrical production has doubled during the last decade. Wuxi 10 or 20 years ago is not the same as Wuxi today.
— ⁂ —
Finally, I think the Guardian has an anti-Chinese agenda, which leads them to trivialize anything they can about China. Consider the subtitle: "Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might made solar power the cheapest power humanity has seen, and no one saw it coming." But in fact, although people many countries contributed smarts to the problem, Chinese smarts are by far the most relevant here.
Also, some people did see it coming; https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html are my notes on the subject from 13 years ago, where I wasn't entirely sure what form cheap solar energy would take, but concluded that there were so many promising alternatives that one would surely be successful. I looked hard to find a cost factor that kept the prices of PV cells so high, and couldn't find one, and noted that the internal economics of the situation seemed to mandate rapid cost decreases. Though I didn't know it, Swanson had been presenting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson's_law at conferences sponsored by NREL and the like since at least 02004, so it wasn't just some eccentric in Buenos Aires taking notes on SEC reports and doing calculations—it was a credible calculation being presented at conferences.
And at any rate... it's pretty obvious he was referring to Wuxi today. I don't think anybody's about to have an issue referring to the Sparta of today as insignificant, its historical significance being whatever it might be.
I do think I made reasonable arguments that Wuxi today is far from insignificant, didn't I?
My main issue was just citing Wuxi's historical importance and background to defend its significance, in comparison to pre-Anglo Saxon Britain. I see Chinese people do this a lot in regards to China, often to shut down criticism of the country from "lesser" countries, ie ones that were tribalistic or uncentralized during Imperial China's heyday. "We were the center of civilization while you were backwards tribals", that sort of rhetoric.
Not saying that's what you meant, mind you.
I started with Wuxi's history mostly because I find it fascinating but partly because, without that paragraph, I thought someone might respond, "Well, sure, Wuxi is a big city now, but it doesn't have the depth of culture and tradition of a place like London—it's just a soulless consumerist metropolis!" or argue, "Sure, London's population is only twice Wuxi's, but it's a very high profile city because for centuries it ruled an Empire on which the Sun Never Set!", maybe mixed with some deniably racist remarks about "imitation" or "IP theft" or "sweatshops" (of which I think the Guardian's "Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might" is a mild version).
I didn't want to leave an opening for that kind of silly nonsense. It misinforms people.
A correction: Kazakhstan has 18.9 million people, which is a lot more than Wuxi, though less than Shanghai. Not sure how I made that error. However, Mongolia, the country, really does have only 3.4 million people.
A quasi-correction: though Dallas is only about 1.1 million people, the Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington metropolitan area is 7.5 million people, which is bigger than the Wuxi prefecture (though not the Wuxi–Suzhou metropolis, which adds 10.5 million to the 6.5 million in the Wuxi prefecture, even without adding in Shanghai too). Similarly, the Chicago–Naperville–Elgin area is 9.5 million people, and the Houston metro is 7 million. These, plus LA and NYC, are the only metros in the US more populous than Wuxi prefecture.
Tell me who in the West doesn't trivialise anything China related? Those people prefer to violently lash out over admitting things unpleasant to them.
The West needs to admit that "$name_of_western_country smarts and Chinese industrial might," usually means both Chinese smarts and Chinese industrial might, with a Western partner just appropriating the credit.
The crowd dominating intellectual discourse in the West make their countries a giant disservice by closing peoples eyes on this.
The loss of intellectual potential in Western economies came dangerously fast following the deindustrialisation.
With how thins go, the West will soon have nothing to show for its inability to make things, but also no brains to design it, and soon no money to buy it.
The famous "Designed in California, made in China" is not a statement of proves, but insecurity.
Look at, for example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640... and in particular the recent works cited in the bibliography. Lots of Chinese research groups, a Korean one, some Arabic, some Indian, an Iranian/UK team, a team from Brazil, a few teams from the US (made up of foreign graduate students, of course).
Look at the citations to one of the Brazilian team's influential review papers: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9038016761746238692... — what do the surnames of the authors tell you? On the first page, I see Indian, Spanish, Chinese, Hungarian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi, and English research teams, and from the US, Sajjad Ahmad's team at UNLV — first author, assistant professor Saria Bukhary of Pakistan.
It's far from an all-Chinese-research field.
But it certainly isn't just "Australian smarts" either.
Agreed about "Designed in California, made in China." That's an absurdity.
People have no idea how little their electronics industries mean on the world stage.
I believe it would be no big stretch to say that PV cells research in the West is nearly inconsequential to the industry, when all what matters happens within 100m of the silicon furnace without much pomp, and published papers.
I believe it's similar to how semi industry turned to be. Process engineering is a giant research discipline, but everything below the "tip of the iceberg," which is academic research, happens on the fab floor, and stays a factory secret. That's why importing Taiwanese engineers is a prerequisite to setting up any serious high volume fab on 300mm.
Oh, yeah, even the CKS32 chip on my Blue Pill only has a Chinese datasheet. It's common. (Worse is when you can get the Chinese datasheet at all only if you know the right people, who invariably live in Shenzhen. Or Wuxi, or maaybe Taipei.) It's not a totally new problem. My aunt had to learn German for her chemistry degree back in the 01960s, and here in Argentina pretty much everybody who learns to program has to learn English. Gauss wrote his dissertation in Latin; Euler wrote most of his papers in Latin. As Naomi Wu says, Chinese is the 21st-century command line.
But where was RISC-V designed? At Berkeley. By professors and grad students from China, Korea, Vietnam, Poland, the US, Greece, and Germany, I think. (Asanović is naturalized American.)
I agree that there's a lot of unpublished knowledge (PV is part of the semi industry), and a lot of that knowledge is being created in places like Wuxi. But I don't think it's true that the tip of the iceberg we can see is so inconsequential. That tip is what prevents things like the circa-2000 capacitor plague, and many new developments originate in basic research long before they make it to mass production, PERC being perhaps the latest.
Also, you can bet that the rulers of Pakistan, Saudia Arabia, Jordan, Iran, Brazil, and Egypt are not enthusiastic about their countries' access to their own abundant solar energy being dependent on their foreign relations with China, or on China's internal industrial policy; nor do they want their solar power stations to ship with Chinese remote kill switches—not currently a thing, but certainly feasible if China's bargaining position improves sufficiently.
We've seen how that kind of thing plays out many times: the US backdoor in Crypto AG hardware, the US blockade of oil to Japan in WWII, the assassinations of the Iranian nuclear scientists, the constant struggles with US export controls in every country that isn't the US (Tianhe-2 being a recent salient example), China's rare-earth exportation clampdown 10 years ago, the US oil blockade that led Germany to spin up Fischer–Tropsch coal liquefaction, the CIA-backed overthrow of Mossadegh, and so on. So quite reasonably they're investing in the possibility of developing autonomous national solar industries, a 21st-century Saudi Aramco and YPF, just without the oil.
Will they be successful? Maybe. Or maybe they'd have to do what China did for process engineering: get Chinese PV companies to open factories in Egypt and Jordan in order to transfer the necessary knowhow.
> As Naomi Wu says, Chinese is the 21st-century command line.
Care to explain it further?
(By the way, I searched for the quote to try to read it in the context in which it was first made but couldn't find it. So I guess it's a paraphrase.)
If you use your computer only through Nautilus, Firefox, and Instagram, you will commonly encounter software problems that you cannot solve, or solve only through a lot of manual drudgery. But, with a deeper understanding of the layers behind the simplified interface—layers which, for historical reasons, commonly work through "command lines", such as the JS console in the browser, the GRUB command line for booting Linux, or of course the Linux bash prompt—you often need only minutes to solve problems that would have taken hours or days to solve by hand.
Similarly, today, if you want to solve hardware problems, you will often find yourself confronted with datasheets or forum threads that are written in Chinese. If you don't speak Chinese, you will either be unable to solve the problem, or you will have to reconstruct the information needed through experimentation, or by help from someone who does speak Chinese.
However, Wuxi's central Liangxi Qu (72 km²) had a density of 13000/km² in 02010, when Wuxi had a population of only 3.5 million. This was 944k people, 83% of the population of Birmingham proper in 02019. If that had increased proportionally, which seems unlikely, it would be almost 19000/km² today. Birmingham proper averages 4300/km².
I conclude that there is no plausible sense in which Wuxi is less "necessarily a big population center" than Birmingham.
See my longer comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26930408
I have no idea what your point is, because I got stuck every time at "why write years like that?".
It even looks like a postcode, in a sentence about city populations and areas.
On the other hand, 64k of RAM ought to be enough for everyone :-D
(16-bit years, hmm...)
Look, if you and I are talking about the population of Birmingham, but instead of speaking normally you are signing your comments to the tune of "Never gonna give you up", I'm not going to reply to anything about Birmingham. I'm going to go "Uh, what's with the singing, are you OK?"
I think you got what you wanted, which was to show to everybody how cool you are with your long now dates, and the conversation is exactly where you wanted it. You're welcome, happy to serve!
I couldn't resist the bait, I'm just a man.
What, you mean like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26892923? Or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ25-U3jNWM, about the other Birmingham? Or https://youtu.be/WQ0y-vO9QLE?t=60?
Come round by my side and I'll sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
On Birmingham Sunday the blood ran like wine,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
Do you really think "What's with the singing?" would be a positive contribution as a response to any of those? More generally, is mindless conformism ever a positive contribution anywhere? Where could it be more unworthy than on a site named "Hacker News", founded to celebrate the achievements of nonconformists? Who appointed you to the Committee to Suppress Playfulness? Have you never heard that "hacking" is "the playful application of ingenuity"?
> show to everybody how cool you are
Using silly date formats is not a good measure of being "cool". Helping people understand things they didn't understand before—for example, by making substantive contributions to a discussion—is a good measure of being "cool".
> the conversation is exactly where you wanted it
Obviously enough, your comments are motivated by your internal motivations, not mine.
1. interpreted as octal in various contexts
2. leading zero stripped off when dealing with it as a number and not a string.
handling dates is already hard as it is, I'll leave the solution to y10k to much more able hands in ~7-8 thousand years :)
20:1 would be "Wuxi City" (i.e. prefecture where the 6.5 million comes from) as a whole to Birmingham the traditional "city proper" westerners would think. Looking at the actual data on that... 4628/268=17.2x - not bad for a swag :).
Again my point isn't "Birmingham is big stronk western city put puny Asian city shame" it's probably 3 fold at this point:
1) If you put Birmingham the city proper in urban China people would be saying it's a small city.
2) What people call a "city" in the west is usually vastly smaller than some of the places with "city" in the name in China, as such googling "population of <x> city" and comparing it to familiar "population of <y> city" is just going to confuse people more than help them understand how big these places are.
3) Wuxi is going to be a lot smaller in 2000 when the story was taking place than today, western cities don't have that kind of powerhouse growth anymore where you have to think when the event happened not just where.
.
Maybe you still disagree with my conclusion, and that's fine, mostly I wanted to get these 3 concepts out there regardless where the reader ends up on the matter.
I think we agree on the central point: that rags like the Grauniad systematically understate the sizes of urbanizations in China, in a variety of ways. We might disagree on why, and what the effect is.
As for #2, the question of what to call a "city" is sort of more about the cultural practices of translators than about patterns of urban growth. People in China mostly don't call Wuxi a "city"; I think they call it a 市 (the administrative unit), a 地级市 (the larger administrative unit Wuxi Prefecture), a 城市 (the social phenomenon), a 都市, or a 城. How the Guardian chooses to describe Wuxi for their English-speaking readers, mostly outside China, is really the question here.
You seem to be suggesting that writers draw the English-language line between "town" and "city" at a larger population level when they're talking about Chinese cities than when they're talking about cities in, say, England. I think you're correct. I picked three smaller "cities" in Jiangsu from Wikipedia to see how the English-speaking press describes them: Pizhou (population 163k; nytimes: "a village in Jiangsu Province in eastern China"), Yangzhong (pop. 344k; Grauniad: "a county-level city in Jiangsu province", "Yangzhong city"), and Jintan (564k; BBC: "the town of Jintan").
Wuxi has probably more than doubled since 02000, as you say, and Birmingham surely hasn't. However, even in 02000 I don't know if it was a "small city" in any absolute sense (rather than compared to Suzhou and Shanghai). Its population was surely already larger and denser than Birmingham's.
Some Western cities do have that kind of powerhouse growth; a bit of searching turns up Toluca, The Woodlands (arguably still too small to be a "city"), Brasilia, and Las Vegas. Their growth rates are in the same neighborhood as Wuxi's over the last 20 years. Brasilia, for example, has grown from 2.0 million in 02000 to 3.0 million today, 4.3 million in the metro area.
However, I'm not sure I understand your concern about how making these comparisons is "just going to confuse people." What kind of information do you think would be more useful for understanding how big Wuxi is than knowing that its population exceeds that of, for example, Mongolia, Puerto Rico, or any metropolitan area in Germany, and that the population density in its center is half that of Manhattan but three times that of Birmingham? If someone is led by the "small city" terminology to think that Wuxi is similar in size to Johnstown, PA (pop. 25000), or Wiesbaden (pop. 291000, metro area over half a million), they're already confused; wouldn't "googling population of Wuxi and comparing it to familiar population of <y> city" clear that right up?
At least after you cut through the terminological ambiguity of whether "Wuxi" means Liangxi Qu, the five districts of Wuxi City, or the whole Wuxi prefecture, and the analogous ambiguity of where to draw the limits of "London" (the Square Mile?) or "Sydney" or whatever familiar city you're comparing to, it seems like you'd be less confused after making those comparisons, rather than more confused.
I guess in China, which has multiple mega cities, that is indeed a bit unremarkable. It's all relative.
I've traveled in China, and sometimes we just stop at some convenient roadside "village" for lunch, the kind of place that would have a Denny's and a gas station in the US. Except in China, the restaurant has five stories and it's bumper to bumper traffic outside. The population difference is really hard to get used to.
The Los Angeles metro area is also one of the largest in the world. It is very obviously a city by the same standards that define sprawling Asian cities, and it's larger than Chicago.
Compared to Shuzhou and its other neighbors it's tiny. Small city is ok.
Current worldwide PV manufacturing capacity is roughly 165 GW [1] [2], with a utility scale price close to $0.01/kWh [3]. Manufacturing capacity is doubling every ~4 years. Global PV capacity in service is ~600 GW.
IEA Average global annual capacity additions in main and accelerated cases, 2023-2025: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/average-globa... [4]
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/668764/annual-solar-modu...
[2] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/solar-pv-modu...
[3] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/04/12/saudi-arabias-second-...
[4] https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2020/solar-pv
EDIT: Thanks to /u/gok for the correction on energy units.
“Nevertheless, by the end of 2015, regulators in at least 10 states had conducted studies to develop methodologies to value distributed generation and net metering, while other states conducted less formal inquiries, ranging from direct rate design or net-metering policy changes to general education of decisionmakers and the public. And there is a degree of consensus. What do the commission-sponsored analyses show? A growing number show that net metering benefits all utility customers.”
https://www.brookings.edu/research/rooftop-solar-net-meterin...
edit: actually I think it did :) ignore me
They are selling back to the grid, with a smart meter that counts power in both direction. Theres many types of policies in net metering like details about what rate you buy and sell power to the utility. In some less favorable places, the grid sells you power at retail prices but buys it back from you at wholesale. In these places, to achieve a $0 utility bill you would be generating more during the day than you consume at night. If your net metering deal paid back at retail rates you may get a credit, but as far as i understand each utility can offer totally different net metering deals, if they offer it at all.
* Solar doesn't yet have enough market penetration for the duck curve to be a problem. We're still in the early days where cutting peak usage benefits everyone.
* Social good rationalizes the cost shifting
"It hasn't happened yet" and "it's for the best" are VERY different arguments from "it won't happen." Why the deception? Shifting the grid's role from generation to storage is not impossible. Barring that, distributed storage is not impossible. Making PV panels cheap was a huge but tractable step that is now behind us. Figuring out storage is the second huge but tractable step and it's well on the way to being solved. In the meantime, it absolutely makes sense to deploy PV at least until it starts cutting into base load, and from that point the economic case for storage becomes clear and obvious. The facts are on our side, so why lie?
My intent in no way is to deceive or put forth bad data.
In the meantime, we should be talking about how best to make storage happen, because anyone who isn't busy playing semantics games can see that storage (critically: paying for storage) is going to dominate the back half of this transition.
If you combine net metering with time based pricing, it seems like there is plenty of incentive for smart people like you to build energy storage and make money off of arbitrage.
Peak electricity demand is driven by AC, primarily when it’s hot... in the summer.
I don't know about you, but the indoor temperature above which I start wanting AC is around 72-75F, or ~23C. Lots of the PNW gets over that for much of the summer. It didn't used to be this way, but I've wanted AC in Seattle for at least a few weeks a year, sometimes as much as 6 - 8 weeks, since 2013 or 2014. Particularly because the insulation in a lot of apartment buildings meant to make them more efficient in winter causes them to heat up like a furnace in a hot summer.
AC sure is a quality of life if not a necessity of life... Though if our homes were built for this climate rather than by Californian companies using shoddily adapted designs it might be another story.
As solar keeps getting cheaper the question shifts further from how do I get maximum power to how do I maximize my investment. Which is a slightly different and far more complex optimization problem.
Residential installations are usually setup to maximise the total output, and often the positioning is constrained by the geometry of the roof. Residential solar installers are really in a race to the bottom.
One up and coming trend which might have a significant impact on this is for residential retail tariffs to be directly linked, at 30min resolution, to the wholesale energy market prices.
From what happened in Texas recently that sounds like a nightmare for consumers. https://www.npr.org/2021/03/06/974417969/texas-wont-reduce-1...
They avoid the Texas problem by limiting the maximum rate to be no more than the government regulated "default power offer" over the entire year.
Planning on getting both solar power and a battery system in the next 12 months, changing my electric hot water to a heat pump and moving to hydronic heating and split system airconditioning.
I'm also going to install a second circuit back to my smart meter that will connect to my apartment garage space so that an EV charger can be installed in the future.
In our case I definitely recall most of those outages happening midday as it screwed up lunch. There were other factors as well (I think transmission efficiency diminishes as you approach capacity, so localized issues are a thing)
10 million watt-hours of electricity
Your system would produce 10 million watts if it did 10 million watt-hours per hour.
It does seem like close to retail rates aren't outrageous to believe are fair for small quantities. I think you'd need to get to the point where generation was a significant fraction of local usage before transmission was costly or inefficient... but by then you'd likely find batteries cheap enough to also just load shift by physically storing the electricity in small buildings around a city.
Maybe the retail rate should go down, but it does make some sense for a tiny generator right next to or even in the same building as a user should get closer to retail rates than generator rates. If enough people did it they could eliminate transmission lines entirely and just use batteries.
At the time we had them installed, both the federal government and Oregon had very generous subsidies.
We do have a loan to pay off the balance not covered by those subsidies, but the monthly payment on the loan is about $40 cheaper per month than our electric bill was prior to having them installed. So, even with the interest on the loan, we are paying significantly less for our monthly electric usage. Once the panels are paid off, our bill will just be $12/month.
We do have a loan to pay off the balance not covered by those subsidies, but the monthly payment on the loan is about $40 cheaper per month than our electric bill was prior to having them installed. So, even with the interest on the loan, we are paying significantly less for our monthly electric usage. Once the panels are paid off, our bill will just be $12/month.
I have a hard time making sense of this. I log into HN and see comment after comment about how solar is taking over, then I read articles like this[0], that state that countries heavily invested in renewables, like wind a solar, are going backwards. They are now trying to label natural gas as "green investment" in Germany, otherwise they won't have energy capacity. They have to build more fossil fuel plants.
Do you really think "power companies" are "screwed"?
[0]https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/eu-indecision-over-gas-...
- If retail electricity prices are moderate/high and excess solar power generation gets a net metering credit. I don't think that this will remain common as solar penetration increases, but some early adopters in different regions will be able to take advantage.
- If the electrical companies invested too much in transmission and distribution infrastructure and are now making up for it with high prices per kilowatt hour. This describes the Australian rooftop solar boom and at least parts of California. Note that this can be a financial winner even without retail-priced net metering; you're just thrifting on how much overpriced electricity you buy from the power company.
- If the location is far from the existing grid and you're expected to pay to build the intervening connection yourself. Solar plus batteries, even with today's relatively high battery prices, can beat the cost of building that connection.
Mostly I expect power companies to survive the rise of solar power just fine. Most solar generation will come from large facilities owned by large companies, not household rooftop units. The over-representation of small rooftop solar units in Germany has contributed to the high cost of their energy transition. I see the German policy decisions favoring small solar units as a carrot used to ensure broad population support for solar power. Maybe it was politically necessary. But the generating costs would be lower had they favored fewer, larger installations.
There are different kinds of power companies.
Utilities with a regulated asset base that get to socialize all of their costs across rate payers aren’t screwed.
Asset-light energy suppliers/retailers in competitive deregulated markets aren’t screwed.
Asset-heavy power generators in competitive deregulated markets might be screwed .. if they have a large portfolio of legacy assets.
Solar PV creates two problems for them.
Firstly, distributed solar reduces the load available to them to serve.
Secondly, centralized and distributed solar depress wholesale energy prices in the middle of the day (and causes increasing frequency of negative-price events).
Together these reduce the volume of sales, reduce profitability, and can increase running costs, because many legacy generators weren’t originally designed to be flexible with the ability to ramp up and down every day.
While solar PV isn’t good for some power companies, it’s generally good for consumers.
Considering there are so many people whose solar is grid connected you would think that they would often ask themselves how difficult it is to maintain repair and operate the grid they rely on every time it snows or rains or at night.
Whenever I mention the solar panels in my parents house, the first question is always about the price. When I tell them they will break even in a few years, their next question is always about where to get it.
There is never any skepticism about the technology, the safety, the long term impact (as you would have if someone was setting up a nuclear or gas power plant). They simply “get it”
Electricity costs are ~ $0.2 per kwh, AUD
So to me the US prices seem even more ridiculous
That includes panels, inverter, mounting system, and installation.
https://www.ikea.com/au/en/customer-service/product-support/...
At this price point, it's becoming a no-brainer.
- SoCal Edison is $0.23 / kWh. https://www.sce.com/residential/rates/Standard-Residential-R...
- Entergy Arkansas is $0.074 / kWh. https://cdn.entergy-arkansas.com/userfiles/content/price/tar...
- Subsidies. - Cost of labour. How much do you need to pay to install the panels? - Your energy usage patterns. If you use a lot of energy when the sun is shining, your panels will pay themselves off faster. - Cost of transmission of energy. How much does it cost to get the energy from the generator to you. - Cost of energy. How much it costs to generate energy where you are. - Location. Proximity to the equator, annual sunshine hours, shading, panel angle.
Alternatively, pending a change in the law, there are solar fields where you can purchase panels (also eligible for subsidy) and pay an annual maintenance fee. In this case it is around 6-7 yrs.
We've got a quote for €6k - €2.5k subsidy for 8KW system. We use a ton of power - which is a main factor how quickly you get your money back.
We were planning to get 18kW system installed on roof, but to get sign off from power grid we would need to upgrade our power lines at great expense (we are end of line rural), so I am wondering about using solar farm for additional capacity (when it’s available).
Interested in your thoughts.
Plus they reserve right to set it whatever they want it and you have no practical way to sell your investment...
2.3k euro for 5kwh [0] which sounds more than Tesla Powerwall. You probably want more, but you do your math. Probably you'll want to return more to network in summer and use that in winter. Store peak winter excess
0: https://shop.saulesgraza.lt/parduotuve/saules-elektrines/sau...
"The price of a typical solar panel system is about £4,800. It can take anywhere between 15 and 26 years to recoup this costs, for a typical home – depending on where you live"
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/utilities/free-solar-panel...
Production capacity is scaling too, though just barely at the edge of what we need. I really wish that governments would commit hard to decarbonization of the hydrogen market (including ammonia for fertilizer), through solar/wind + elctrolyzers. The only thing stopping further scaling of production capacity is the demand side of things. Having an extra 50-100 GW of solar production to decarbonize industry would really speed the climate transition. But until there's the guaranteed market for it, the market is going to develop very slowly until green hydrogen is cheaper than natural gas as an input.
Germany pushed solar along when it wasn't cheap, greatly accelerating the fall off solar prices. All governments should push industrial chemical process decarbonization together.
Then why don't more companies offer to become your electricity provider and install the solar panels for free?
They could say "We promise that your energy bills will be cheaper this year than last year (as long as you don't use more energy), and within a few years you'll own the panels and can switch to a different electricity provider."
Our house is not exactly small, and optimistically you could fit 10 PV panels on the roof. At least according to the quote I received, but having scouted installations in the nearby places, 8 might be more realistic. (Shape of the roof is a factor.)
Assuming energy prices overall grow as they have over the past decade, it would take 12-15 years to break even on the installation cost. That's with 10 panels. With 8, add a couple of years. And assume there will be no additional maintenance or replacement costs to consider.
So, at least in the UK: unless you are wealthy enough to have a large house with a sufficiently large roof, PV installations are not yet financially viable. It should be better in the rural regions where houses tend to be larger. With more installation surface area available, the marginal cost of each PV panel goes down and the marginal benefit of its energy production goes up.
Hence, in the UK, for a single-family dwelling, a roof with space for 14 panels should be enough to make the installation viable. A house with that much roof surface, at least near us, starts from approximately £700k.
The unaffordability of UK property is a separate question.
The UK has a lot of cloud cover so I do wonder if we should stick with wind power which is doing really well with the off shore installations.
Plus nuclear... For the rare times the wind doesn't blow.
We just don't get that much sunlight throughout the year to start with.
I’m facing almost directly south without any shade from trees.
A special historical example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancel_repair_liability
That does more or less what you're asking for I think?
Now that property owners understand it better I think there's less hesitation and I have seen it more. We're even getting some on our building before long.
But there's also the issue of trust, which is coupled with ownership. If your friend convinces you to borrow $5k as a homeowner line of credit, install panels (and own them) and that you will make it back in lower bills in a few years that's a lot easier to swallow than someone that makes money from you saying yes.
I wouldn't want strangers owning stuff that might get passed along to different strangers as a major structural component in my house, cost to maintain, and especially if I don't even own the power produced. I can't fix my roof, I can't replace the panels, it seems like a very tough sell without a track record. I don't think anyplace had that track record five years ago.
Lithuania has this solar share that you can buy - the only option for most people as they live in apartments, but you do get dicked by monthly maintenance fee.
In the case of solar it is still preferable to do fields of solar to replace carbon-emitting power generation though.
But I do think governments should subsidize rooftop solar to within shouting distance of "utility" solar.
Heck I think they should be subsidizing solar and storage regardless of location. Once tech curves make existing utility installations obsolete in a few decades, then maybe move them back to rooftop.
When people can make or save money easily, then it will sell, if they can't it won't.
So the 'tipping point' was always going to be when it became practical to industry, then business, then consumers etc..
We're still not quite there yet as it will 'really happen' when homeowners can go to Home Depot, pick up what they need and have it up and working same day. When that happens, it will Solar Armageddon, the good kind.
As with many things, quality costs, but not all costly inverters are quality, so do your research before you buy.
This is also a bad thing, because there are some real issues with PV panels too: leaking toxic materials, recycling problems, environmental side-effects because you need to mine for rare earths and critical metals, etc. It's far from being as simple and as clean as many people imagine, and not taking into consideration all this might cost us all a lot of damage to nature and wildlife in future. I don't want to get into nuclear vs. solar energy flame wars here, primarily because I don't feel that I have enough information and knowledge to be able to perceive all the possible side-effects of each type of energy - but the fact that world is so deeply biased one way for solar, the other way fro nuclear energy definitely will not help the best judgment on this very important topic.
The most expensive and rare element in them is silver - used for the reflective layer underneath.
What toxic materials?
For example, the truth may look like this:
The majority of new solar panels use zero toxic materials.
Old solar panels installed decades ago had toxic materials until the introduction of a ban that banned these toxic materials.
A small minority of solar panels are thin film panels and they use cadmium.
However, since we have started with the "solar panels are bad" bias we are trying to look for evidence.
Selection bias results in a search for "solar panels toxic materials":
The problem? People are mostly getting rid of problematic solar panels in the first place. Regular solar panels can be easily recycled, you extract the glass, the aluminum, the silver, the lead free solder and sometimes even the wafers and then you are left with some residual problem materials, things like leaded solder or unrecycleable thin film cells.
Those things make the news, grab the clicks and give the appearance that all solar panels are like that, because those articles aren't there to present reality, they are there to lie by omission and misrepresent so that their readership has one more story that fits in with an overall narrative, no matter how misguided that narrative is.
"In the course of the work, it was found that the toxicity indices of the EVA and Tedlar® components increase with prolonged exposure to materials in aqueous solution, approaching values characterizing an unsafe degree of toxicity to the environment and human health."
[1] https://www.e3s-conferences.org/articles/e3sconf/pdf/2020/21...
That's NOT MOST PEOPLE. And not that many "average people".
Even when people rent, I can see having solar panels simply becoming factored into the rent equation. If the renter can expect to save $100 off their monthly power bill, then the landlord can easily ask for an additional $80 in rent, which means they make more profit over the owned lifetime of the property.
- Every 4 years our production doubles
- Meaning every year our production capacity increases by .5 (or 5 times every decade).
- The first year (2020) starts at 165GWh capacity production
- The total energy use of the world (in 2013) was 157,000 TWh.
- Annual growth in energy demand was 40% between 1990 and 2008.
- 20% for the US
- 150% for China
2020: 165GWh
2030: 825GWh
2040: 4.1TWh
2050: 20.6TWh
2060: 103,1TWh (estimated global demand of 400TWh by this point)
----
2061: 154,1TWh
- Production capacity and panel efficiency does not increase (which it likely will)
- Solar will be the only source of energy (it's more likely to be one of a few technologies used)
- We don't factor infrastructure changes, space or installation time.
- We don't factor the consumers being ready for energy in the form of electricity (electrifying industry, cars, homes)
- We don't factor in the environmental impact of producing panels.
- We assume grid scale batteries that can handle buffering exist already and are installed
We can expect to see our 2013 energy usage met with solar alone by 2060. Might be reasonable to use solar exclusively by the turn of the century (2100)
If the growth in energy demand continues to rise at its current levels, by 2060 we might see an energy demand of 400TWh. This indicates that with the currently predicted solar production scaling, solar can cover half of our energy requirements.
There are enormous challenges with things like rapidly electrifying the automotive industry, mining the materials required to meet our grid scale demand, fabrication of the components, integrating a technology that isn't plug-and-play compatible with our grid infrastructure and supporting an IO model from every node.
Source (I know it's just wikipedia but come on, this is just a comment on HN):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Trend...
That is, unavoidable unless chemical energy is turned into electrical energy directly like in fuel cells (these have smaller but still surprisingly large losses), or the rejected thermal energy is used for heating.
https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv
And the total electricity consumption is over 20 000 TWh/a, which, given current trends, means that 100% of current electricity consumption would be covered by solar already next decade. (You were discussing energy, not electricity, but electricity should be the smaller one)
Change is geometric (i.e. fixed percentage), not linear (i.e. fixed number).
This gives 18.92% yearly increase (instead of .5), but 5.6568x increase in decade (instead of 5x).
By 2060 this gives 169 TWh (instead of 103), and 200 in 2061.
We would also expect energy growth to level of at US/EU level once it reaches them, there's no reason to expect Asia to sustain it's energy growth indefinitely.
Don't get me wrong: solar is still not enough, storage is big elephant in the room, and we should build nuclear yesterday. It's just not as bleak as your comment made it out to be.
LNG, nuclear, and coal are each way too expensive long term. With solar prices continuing to drop, this is only going to get worse. Coal is already being decommissioned in many countries. China is an exception but only because they are growing so rapidly that they can't keep up with clean energy deployments (despite having the largest deployment of that world wide). That's an effect that is short term. They actually announced their grid will be 100% renewables by 2060.
New gas plants (the least expensive of those 3) at this point don't make a lot of sense either. The investment pitch is horrible: we'll be producing energy at about 3-4x of the current price of renewables for the next 50 years. By the time those 50 years are over it might be as bad as 30x. It goes from bad to worse. Nuclear needs to get a lot cheaper to be interesting for investors.
Grid infrastructure is indeed a short term challenge. Having more solar and wind on the grid is causing grid operators to evolve what they are doing to fix that. A few decades is a long time to address issues though. Batteries and cables seem to be what is needed here. European and North American grids seem to have issues getting permits for new cables. E.g. Germany needs more north south cables so people in the south can actually use the wind power generated in the north. But putting a few hundred km of cables in place seems to be a hard problem from a bureaucratic point of view. It's not a technical problem though. We've known how to make electrical cables for a long time. Though there is of course some innovation in that space as well to enable more efficient long distance connections.
Cars are electrifying at the pace we can ramp up battery production. Even so, there are a lot of cars in the world and most of the new ones are still not electric. That will flip around towards the end of this decade. From then, decline of ICE could be pretty rapid. The cost advantages for owners will drive this.
EVs are a growth business in a covid year and are very profitable. So, car manufacturers are already going as fast as they can here. Interestingly, you see the same kind of learning effect with battery as you see with solar panels. And with wind power too. All of this combined means things could go a lot quicker than some companies hope/expect.
The total energy use in 2013 was 157 000 TWh (and it's probably <<much, much>> higher in 2021, due to China and India continuing to develop).
The additional solar power being added in 2061, by your own math, is 154 TWh.
So, adding up the whole line, that would mean that solar would still only offer about 154 x 40 = ~6 000 TWh (best case scenario) of electricity in 2061. Faaar from the 157 000 TWh used in 2013 and probably super far from what's going to be required in 2061.
Did you mess up your math?
If the doubling keeps up, then solar would hit the current total world energy consumption only 3 years later (ie, before 2040). Exponential scaling is crazy. I've tried incorporating the growth rate of current demand, but it only adds a couple years to each of these dates.
Assuming that you have some leeway to pay your mortgage off quicker (depending on your exact terms).
Atleast where I live a standard 25 year mortgage can be paid off in ~10 if you were to double up your payments, because all of the additional money you're paying comes off the principal. Thus, the non-interest portion of the payment has _more than_ doubled.
What about on-site battery?
In any case, $15k is still a bit too steep for me, not because I can't afford it but because I want something that'll pay for itself in less than 5 years. My electricity bill is about $150/mo. so a solar roof doesn't make sense financially, even if I'm able to sell the excess to the grid.
Typical systems don’t have a battery, nor do they need one.
The grid is used as the battery.
An off-grid solar installation is significantly more expensive.
At least as of last fall, it was roughly $3/watt for solar installs - before incentives. Right now TSLA advertises about $2.2/watt, which is by far cheaper than anyone else.
If so, at 9.4 kW / 55 kWh per day, I would bloody hope you are exporting to the grid. That is an extreme amount of energy for a single family.
Last summer NorCal had some nasty heatwaves come through, with lots of "red flag" warnings. High winds, high heats. We had multiple days of 110F+. On those days we used more than 55kwh/day.
That being said, the game with solar is that of averages. Right now we're making a lot and exporting a lot. When the summer heats up, we'll be making even more power, but not exporting as much. In winter time we generally need more from the grid than we make.
Hopefully at the end of the year, we'll be near zero net.
A single panel in part shade tends to produce a lot less than the fraction still exposed to sunlight, but I believe recent advancements in panel tech has made this less of an issue.
Ultimately, situating the panels in areas where, barring cloud cover, they will receive full direct sunlight is always the optimum approach.
You are miles ahead of the curve. However, where the pacific northwest, midwest, and east are concerned about energy, Arizona is concerned about water.
As my friend used to say, "nobody gets it all."
I wonder how much would it cost now?
So that means I could, theoretically move to a remote or desert location, somehow install a solar panel myself, set a Starlink Internet, and live happily ever after? Assuming I could somehow grow potatoes in a small green house.
Edit: Missing Drinking Water and Sewage treatment.
My existing house isn’t particularly suitable from a cost perspective to install solar on (clay tile roof, a good 20 years left at least). I also don’t really want to manage an installation project, nor own the maintenance and risk. But I would pay to directly offset my consumption.
Something like a solar mutual fund where you buy in, they expand capacity using your purchase price by funding commercial solar installations.
That way, no matter where you get your power from, all your money goes to green sources.
One example of this is Norway vs Europe : Norway is interconnected with the rest of the Europe for « green electricity » market but doesn’t share the electric grid of the rest of Europe.
The consequences is that any European can buy « green contracts » that pays Norway renewable industry. Sounds ok as an European.
But now, by this market rules, a Norwegian citizen that doesn’t pay the « green premium » is considered consuming non renewable electricity even if he have no physical way to consume non renewable. And as a Norwegian citizen, it can be difficult to understand the incentive to pay more while knowing your electricity is physically constrained to be only from renewable sources.
As a French I have a similar problem : why should I pay a premium to get CO2-free energy while knowing my country spent billions of public money (which I’m really glad) to be self sufficient with nuclear power plants ? And since nuclear is not a renewable energy, I have no way if I wanted to pay a « premium » that would help fund nuclear energy even if I politically support it as en important ally against global warming.
And, selling this onwards as a premium to the end user without actually changing their behaviour.
Since you get the same service (your power ultimately comes from the same grid), it's a pure price discrimination strategy.
[This is maybe a general restatement of pjerem's sibling comment]
I do pay this premium, but I mostly feel cheated by it.
The main thing I was looking for was something where I felt my money would genuinely provide additional capacity (i.e. they weren't just going to build it anyway). I also think it's a benefit they're built on schools, so hopefully get the kids thinking about renewables.
Their cost per kWh generated is comparable to a home installation with none of the hassle.
I've been very pleased.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-03-16/california...
http://www.caiso.com/todaysoutlook/pages/supply.aspx
Power is being exported in the afternoons, but even at that time natural gas plants continue to run.
Yes solar is insanely cheap today, but it will be much cheaper in a few years. And capacity factors are 30%+ for single-axis trackers in sunny places: https://emp.lbl.gov/pv-capacity-factors
Not to mention the delivery cost is another major part of the bill which is not changed regardless of the source of the electricity.
My mother and stepfather installed solar ten years ago and basically paid zero utility bills from then with utility connected solar (they said they paid $50/year to PGE). I think the equation is the same now except the cost of such a system is less.
Most places, you use more of a resource and you get a volume discount. In california it goes up from .25 to .31 to .39 cents per kwh.
meanwhile the wholesale price of power is no different from anywhere else, maybe .03c/kwh.
One "bright side" is that it makes it practical for people to install solar and at some point their cost drops to zero. So there's a viable market for solar.
Look how Hermann Scheer, ridiculed as "the pope of solar energy" by his opponents here in germany, described his intentions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GokiQDQHp0
He was the originator of the german renewable energy act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source... that forced power utilities to pay for solar energy produced by people owning solar panels at a specific and slowly decreasing price. His efforts led to the the creation of a market for solar energy systems in Germany.
I don't mean solar panels that can be put on roofs. I mean roofs that are made of solar panels.
I can not imagine so. I don't know any other industry where this type of "combine two products" is the better approach. In theory, a single system should always give a better ROI than combining two systems that are not made to be combined in the first place.
https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/tesla-solar-roof-do-the-so...
There simply aren't any rational free market actors funding large unprofitable initiatives for 40 years with the expectation that the technology will be a bananza after all the principals have retired or are dead.
For example, failure to price in externalities in a 'free' market is one of the biggest flaws, and exactly why we find ourselves in a situation of having way too much CO2 in the atmosphere.
A free market generally means one where one's control over their person and private property is not restricted as long as that control is not being exercised to violate other's equal right to their person and private property, and to the commons.
But other than definitions, I agree with you.
But the major advantage that the free market has is that it is much better than the government at assessing the relative size of positive and negative externalities.
The government consistently underestimates the positive externalities of free market activity. Much like in this case - the people advocating that the government subsidise solar power and commit early have all been shown to have badly misjudged the situation. The free market is much better at getting clean power to people than they thought.
Actually, you got it exactly backwards, having a free market in the first place is a political choice the government makes. All of this is merely a fiction in our head, without that fiction we are back to the "Law of the jungle". Everything you can take and protect is yours, which is completely at odds with the idea of a free market.
>But the major advantage that the free market has is that it is much better than the government at assessing the relative size of positive and negative externalities.
The free market is the ultimate henchman of the government, it will optimize for the legislated outcome down to every single letter and squeeze every ounce of efficiency available. If the political context allows it, it will happen. If negative externalities are not balanced out via fees, this is equivalent to the government telling every entity in the economy to abuse the externality.
>The government consistently underestimates the positive externalities of free market activity.
No, it underestimates how reliable its henchman is and for some reason it doesn't know how to talk to the henchman even though it's the most natural thing in the world.
>Much like in this case - the people advocating that the government subsidise solar power and commit early have all been shown to have badly misjudged the situation.
Subsidizing solar power is wrong, for obvious reasons. The goal isn't solar power, the goal is the reduction of CO2 emissions and if possible, the reduction of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. This requires a stronger cap and trade system or a CO2 price, in theory these are equivalent, in practice the former is prone to too much meddling.
>The free market is much better at getting clean power to people than they thought.
What we need is less government "intervention" and more government activity in the market as the ultimate investor, let the henchman do the actual work.
However, taxes are collected by the government that our population has voted in (in democratic nations). This is also why we prefer government monopolies over private monopolies, because we have a degree of control, we get to choose.
The only dilemma is that the choice of government is on a societal level, individuals may not get what they voted for. However, there is no good solution to this problem and the search for a solution will only stop after the end of humanity.
The incredible thing is that these free-market-respecting taxes are found by economists to have zero negative effects on economic efficiency:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
They are also very easy to administer and impossible to evade - thus extremely fair - and do not require creating a surveillance state to monitor private economic interactions, as a sales or income tax do.
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Glo...
How do you suggest any other source of energy compete in this kind of market?
Can't be stored (don't tell me about lithium, please do the math…), and it's not there at night.
One would expect a similar cost decline curve for batteries [1] once every automaker is required to buy batteries when they can only sell EVs.
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2021/lithium-ion-battery-costs-0323
Just an idea, you have ~500kg of lithium-battery in an average EV for a few hundred km of autonomy.
95% of stored electricity today is water pumped behind dam. You want to store electricity, build dam.
There is only a few decades of lithium left to be extracted by the way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26928343
Storage is a component, but renewables will get so cheap we'll overbuild and throw away (curtail) the excess versus optimizing for storage.
The world has sufficient lithium reserves for storage and EV demands.
Check the result https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE, Germany is ~300g of CO²/kwh, France is 50g.
Why ? Because when there is no wind, no sun, you need power. And then you're burning gaz or coal. So you "erase" all those 0CO² days.
Also solar panel efficiency fades over time, you loose 50% of efficiency after a few decades. Wind-turbines have 25y life expectancy.
Solar panels retain 90% of their production rating after 25 years, and can be recycled at end of life, as can wind turbine blades (with the turbines repowered, typically generating more power than the previous equipment).
What’s with the FUD? Definitely feels like there’s an agenda when the data is objectively clear.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/germany-rejected-nuclear-power-a...
It's one thing to say "we don't think it's worth the money" and another to spend the money but not achieve much, it's even worse IMO!
Yes, it sometimes makes me wonder what the real agenda is.
Perhaps it's more relevant that the solar panels that were installed decades ago were 50% less efficient; that's technological progress.
https://sites.lafayette.edu/egrs352-sp14-pv/technology/histo...
Progress that was enabled substantially by there being a market that would buy the early inefficient solar panels, providing capital for further research.
It sure would be nice if we had a transnational energy infrastructure, as the sun is always shining somewhere. Think DESERTEC and Gobitec but for the whole planet.
Crossing west-to-east Europe with electricity is already loosing 30% of it. Let's transport electricity from Australia to India !
And for wind, it's the same issue, when there is wind in Finland, there is wind in Spain. So you can't "balance thing" between countries.
From the DESERTEC website:
> For long transmission distances direct current transmission is superior to alternating current. Alternating current has high losses due to capacitive and inductive resistance, which do not occur in direct current transmission. With that technology, a 3000 km line (for example Cairo to Munich) has losses lower than 10%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...
https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-re...
It's expensive now to recycle, and according to the article, the costs don't drop to recycle because if it's cheaper to dig up ore vs. recycle, well, the business doesn't exist.
Julian Simon's bet with Paul Ehrlich. You're not apparently aware of the amount of lithium worldwide, it's availability or its price trajectory. All minerals are significantly more abundant than people think, supply chain dynamics in mining do no equate to scarcity on earth, they relate to the economics of exploration and extraction and shipping.
I'll make an exception for pink diamonds. Lithium is not in 10 year decline. Lithium is also not the only battery mineral of interest and battery tech is not stand and die on lithium for either cost, or energy density, or recharge speed.
In France we have lithium in Alsace, we could dig-it-up, but it's really not worth it energy wise and environmentally wise.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/09/16/how-long-will-the-lit...
> The scenario which assumes 73 Mt of lithium supply left, best policies (recycling, V2G, second-life) implemented and around 3 billion EVs on the road sees lithium fully depleted a few years beyond 2100. If the same policies and number of cars were matched with just 26 Mt of lithium, but recycling efforts would only grow slowly, battery manufacturers will close shops even before 2040.
Please, don't do this. You said 10 years. It's not exhausted in 10 years and a mining report from 2010 doesn't tell you anything in 2021. Mines are developed when economics justify it. Available lithium is huge.
Oil was supposed to run out in 1865, 1880, 1900, 1920, 1940, 1985, 2005, ...
If there's a demand for a specific resource, prices go up and people find a way to extract more of it, if it's present on this planet. And lithium is the 25th most abundant element, so there's a ton more of it than there's oil in the crust.
Luckily I just read an article about how much energy solar is generating!
You can charge the electric cars when there's an excess, so in particular all the extra load from electric car charging that some people were so worried about is no longer a concern.
If it gets cheap enough, you can overbuild capacity so that you have just enough power if it's a bit overcast, and way too much when there's sun (since solar cells can be safely "turned off" as far as I know, unlike conventional plants).
If we now get some process for capturing carbon from the air where electricity is the main cost (i.e. overbuilding capacity and using it only 20% of the time is affordable), we now have a place to put all the excess electricity during peak.
Yes heating water, or cooling places are nice. But your trains ain't gonna work "only when there is sun".
If you need backup at one moment, you need 0C0² backup and basically: Or you build dam, or you build nuclear plants.
If you build nuclear plants, it's basically dumb to have plenty of renewable next to it…
There are very large amounts of "free" space, on rooftops, for example.
So put solar panels on roofs in Paris then. Europe has plenty of space if you actually look for it.
Except my apartment was on top, and there were four more just like it below me...
Maybe with a carbon tax, this could work... otherwise natural gas peakers will take all the money off the table.
Now, this wasn’t cheap (thankfully incentives made it more affordable and Eversource provides the most expensive electricity in the United States), after incentives it was about $22000. That’s a lot, but it’s not hard to imagine this becoming scalable in the near future for climates with better solar potential than Connecticut.
As far as Powerwalls go, I'd definitely want something like that in an outbuilding and not in my house. Last thing I want to do is wake up at 3:00am with a raging battery fire in my basement.
Here is the USGS mineral commodity summary for lithium in 2010: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium...
Here is the same report for 2021: https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-lithium.pd...
World lithium reserves went up from 9.9 million tons in 2010 to 21 million tons in 2021 even as extraction accelerated. Companies have been putting more effort into discovery which has increased known reserves much faster than increasing extraction is drawing them down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium
I'm too lazy to do the math, but that's probably enough lithium to plate the entire planet with it if we want to :-)
Aluminum battery stations could replace gas stations.