Renewable Energy Is Suddenly Startlingly Cheap
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Basically my conclusion (in amidst a lot of embarrassingly arrogant stuff) was that maybe silicon PV was going to get a lot cheaper, because I looked long and hard for any fundamental cost floor within an order of magnitude or so of where we were, and I couldn't find one. But even if silicon PV didn't, there were several plausible alternative technologies that could move in to fill the gap.
As it turned out, silicon PV is now about 20 times cheaper than it was then.
This is extremely fascinating to me. Why? Was it worth the effort?
But the content I am enjoying!
You're welcome to reskin Dercuano with a different stylesheet that you like better! You might have better taste than I do. I hope I get a chance to see it!
I'm glad you're enjoying the content!
The oligopoly of energy industry by OPEC, Russia and few other countries has possibly impacted geopolitics more than anything else. The fights of today and future might all be about intellectual property on everything new and shiny that is discovered.
Energy became immensely cheaper after Watt, and all of the above events happened in the world thus created. Making energy cheaper still won't solve most of the world's major problems impacting most of the world population.
But the reason I remember people saying the trend would plateau is because while the solar cells themselves can get cheaper, they questioned if the installation could.
Kind of reminiscent of Amdahl's law.
So I'm wondering if that proved not to be the barrier people thought.
The panels are quite expensive and the labour is not cheap, but when you're installing 50-100+ panels on a big box store roof, it seems the economics far more than works out, at current energy price and subsidy levels.
Congrats to solar on reaching 3% of our energy mix. I'm genuinely glad that science and industry finally figured out clean energy that met the approval of environmentalists. I don't think the billion or so tons of extra CO2 spent waiting for cheap solar were worth it, but what's done is done and we just have to live with the consequences.
It does? I'm not finding any citations that support that. The largest figure I'm seeing is ~ 10%
> ... and would have provided 100% of our power today if we hadn't stopped building in the 80s and had merely kept up the pace.
Well if we'd embraced solar + wind + storage systems in the 80's or earlier, we'd be 100% solar / wind by now. Academic counter-factuals are often equal parts fascinating and depressing.
I am very hopeful that our grids will be powered by a mix of renewables that cover most hours in a 24 hour cycle with some mix of energy storage.
Also, as individuals, we are buying more of our own generation and storage needs, which I feel is great for reaching to places that the grid has not be able to.
Australia has the highest penetration of household solar (20%) and that is unlikely to slow.
Coal generators are already almost a stranded asset and gas plants for FCAS are obsolete.
Amber provides consumption (and feed-in) at the wholesale rates, with a fixed $15/month fee.
The price is mostly at the AUD 0.10 - 0.20 / kWh during the day currently (its winter here) and as of right now (16:00 AEST), it's showing that 40% of the source is renewables (on a cloudy day)
The price has peaks at 07:00-09:00 and 17:00-19:00 and the renewables drop when the sun goes down, but on average wind days, it drops to ~20% from 40%.
Household solar is booming in Australia, to the point where governments are now rebating battery storage instead of solar panels, because the grid can't handle the inflow during solar peak. It's almost at the point where it would be worthwhile to have a household battery that uses grid energy during the day to charge.
In the meantime, our federal government wants to spend AUD660m on an unneeded gas peaker plant that is estimated to only be needed 2% of the time.
Renewables got a long way to go. Storage is barely feasible right now and is the largest reason why it just can't work. This isn't a "Debbie downer" speaking here, these are facts. Green energy cannot support the infrastructure we've created right now. We could revert society to adapt to needing less power, but you're more likely capable of overthrowing the US government than have people be okay with using 30% if their max power usage nowadays.
There is no real need to reduce energy consumption. We have plenty of space to build solar panels and wind turbines. But primary energy consumption will naturally go down a bit when you replace ICEs (30% efficient or so?) with EVs (80% efficient or so?) and oil and gas heaters with heat pumps (2 4 times as efficient). Of course electricity consumption will be way larger.
I was under the impression that storage is the crucial missing piece?
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiewende#Phasen_der_Energi...
Well, yes. It's a panel that only generates power when sunlight is shining on it. When the sun goes down, solar stops producing power.
Switching all power generation to PV solar is going to require massive overprovisioning. This has been obvious, and widely known, for decades. Cost-per-KWh is going to be widely variable during the day. This has also been known. Running an aluminum smelter at midnight is going to stop being economical.
We can either do this, or pay to raise every building and road in Miami by 6 feet. One or the other.
Edit: to be fair, the US is still investing in nuclear just not at the “expansion” scale for the most part. Only one new reactor in construction rn.
Or will we be smart enough to chose to what use we put our energy?
Boom, analysis complete.
You point out other ways to improve our energy consumption to avoid touching to your beloved crypto mining. While it could be both.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/ammonia-renewable-fu...
The emissions add up: Ammonia production consumes about 2% of the world's energy and generates 1% of its CO2.
2% not 20%
Source: https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...
The mechanism we use is markets: the energy is put for sale, and bought by those who have some use for it.
High-carbon energy comes with an externality, CO2 emission, which doesn't depend on the use to which this energy is put.
There is an obvious solution to this: make high-carbon energy expensive, and use the Pigovian tax to subsidize installation of more renewable energy. The coal plants can pay for their own obsolescence, win-win.
Bitcoin is a complete distraction from this goal. If the price of energy doubled everywhere, overnight, and the market price of Bitcoin stayed perfectly level, Bitcoin's energy use would halve also.
So if you make high-carbon energy expensive, and renewable energy cheap, Bitcoin miners will use the renewable stuff instead. Indeed, to a significant degree this is already what happens.
Now it's still 0.5% of the world's electricity production. What would prevent it for jumping to 30% in a few years?
In your assumption, the bitcoin market price stays level. But it can double or triple quickly, and peak for short intervals of time, or stay high. All because of the belief of bitcoiners. That's all just a huge socio-psychological problem.
Only, it's the complete opposite of the story told to us, in the internet media, about a bitcoin that will always eventually climb yet another order of magnitude...
This is just the 'lump of labor' fallacy applied to energy. Any demand induces more supply, and since Renewable Energy Is Suddenly Startlingly Cheap this new supply will mostly be renewable energy.
Again, this isn't about Bitcoin, it applies to any economic growth which consumes energy. Right now it's good, because, quite aside from the fact that useful and valuable things are done with that energy, it induces the market to supply more renewable energy, which further drives down the price of solar panels and windmills, in a virtuous cycle.
We're in no danger of running out of economically valuable wind and solar sites, any time soon. The only limiting factor is customers with money in their pocket and the desire to buy electricity with it.
There are only two things we can do to make this process faster: buy more electricity, and tax polluting power plants. Bitcoin can only do one of these things.
As an aside: if Bitcoin was 60 times as valuable (the implication of your jump from 0.5% to 30%), it would have a market cap of 44 trillion dollars. That's simply not possible as an act of religious faith; that would conclusively prove Bitcoin's value as sound money.
If I create a religion saying that the only worth purpose in life is to own one of my drawings, and then I make 10 of them, and then I get the whole Earth population to believe this religion, my drawings will have an unbounded market cap too.
That does not make them "proving value as sound money", only it shows that they are very desirable, but what it does not reveal is that the reasons behind it are irrational.
About the bitcoin as an "incentive for more renewable", wouldn't all the catastrophes present and future provoked by the global warming be a sufficient incentive? Why would adding random usages of energy change anything?
A lot of people seem to think that market prices are determined by production costs but that isn’t the case.
Market prices are determined by supply and demand and that’s where renewables (except for hydro power) are very bad at.
This is why Germany has the highest electricity prices worldwide. Because it has a large share of wind and solar meaning that a large portion of the electricity is not supplied on demand:
> https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
So stating that producing renewable electricity is cheap is rather irrelevant as long as the electricity cannot be produced on demand.
I love Germany for many reasons and have lived there but pricing is not one of these reasons. Cellular, home Broadband, 4G LTE, Bank fees, that weird radio tax, and just about everything that is run by corporations is expensive compared to many other nations.
Are energy prices higher in every country that has more renewable sources than not?
https://euanmearns.com/the-causes-of-the-differences-between...
Particular policy isn't going to be a global discussion, it's going to be jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction, and will likely follow similar lines to all recycling discussion. PV cells aren't made of especially rare minerals, so it's not likely to be a high-priority issue. That's perhaps disappointing, but given that's our default for pretty much all recycling, it's no great reason to worry about one particular technology.
[1] https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/2017/10/the-opportunities-...
- we can’t rely on intermittent power source without grid scale batteries (which we don’t cheaply have)
- fossil fuel land use is exaggerated since it is double counted (e.g. you might drill for oil on a farmed field) and since it can be cheap, remote land. Solar land use is usually single purpose and near the users (so typically more expensive/useful land).
Grazing animals probably wouldn't work very well.
Some grasses grow with partial light. With the right inter-panel spacing, could it be that a grazing animal might require more space, but not to an unreasonable degree? (I assume there are other considerations for the pasture...ease of finding the animals, moving them around, etc)
Or rather, too much sun for available water. Installing solar panels high enough that goats don't bump into them, and planting shade-tolerant arid plants, can absolutely support grazing.
There are also studies that show that solar panel above fields can help boost production of both: solar panel get cooled by the plant perspiration and the plant get cooled by the shade of the panel.
Goats climb anything.
Singapore to Darwin is about 2000 miles. For reference, that's comparable to Chicago to LA. That's at least an order of magnitude larger than what I'm used to thinking about for transmission.
It turns out that if you want to drive your transmission loss down, you need to run at (substantially) higher voltage. This is predominantly driven by resistive loss because your transmission wires aren't perfect conductors, as well as corona loss which scales with voltage.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110604181007/https://www.aep.c...
has some stats on stats on line losses. At 765 kV (this is 50x what you'd see on a local transmission line), with the best cited figure (circa 2007) of 0.5% loss per 100 miles, you'd see about 10% loss over 2k miles. That's not great, but it doesn't actually seem horrible -- if you're producing 2x the power you need anyways, then you're still delivering a huge surplus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects#Asia -- and sort by length.
(Of course, this doesn't account for last-mile delivery, or AC/DC conversion losses. But the limiting factor isn't the technology, at this point.)
https://www.google.com/maps/@28.4198071,-98.8400976,792a,35y...
Your first point seems to be an actual but manageable problem though.
And in the case of:
> - we can’t rely on intermittent power source without grid scale batteries (which we don’t cheaply have)
.. for domestic users, behind the meter storage is fast becoming compelling.
I had (with local subsidies) AUD $7,000 worth of panels installed earlier this year, and generate an average of 2.5 more power than I consume. A $10,000 battery system probably cover my domestic usage for all but the most rare run of cloudy days. That second figure's on a downward trend, too, especially as flow storage and other battery technologies start to benefit from the scale-up.
Depending on panel capacity and storage size, then yeah, you may find they align - but it's all a tradeoff. My point with those numbers is that for a reasonably small cost (compared to say the capex of a house build, which is the time these things should be installed) you can get very close to self-reliance in terms of electricity, at least at a residential scale, so we're not all held up by grid-scale storage systems. Commercial consumers of electricity tend to have predictable cycles, and therefore their baseload is much easier to manage.
I currently rent an apartment and a car and neither are clean energy, as much as I'd like them to be. No amount of protest will get my landlord to install solar panels on the roof, considering they won't even fix a smoke detector for 3 weeks; asking property management for an EV charging solution results in no response; EVs also haven't come out with a subscription or cost-effective long term rental model yet.
California has a law requiring your landlord to allow you to install an EV charging station if you want it.
It's out of your pocket, and doesn't really seem attractive to me as a renter to "invest" in a space I'm only renting. But if you're a long term renter and really want to make the EV switch, you are allowed to do so.
https://www.kts-law.com/electric-vehicle-charging-stations-f...
I always assumed if I improved my apartment my landlord has an incentive (in theory) to evict me and rent it to someone else for more.
So that incentive does not exist.
I imagine gross prices are slightly higher in California due to permitting.
25% of all energy consumption is from nuclear/hydro/renewable, counting all forms of fossil fuel.
That said, natural gas is far and away the largest fossil fuel source of energy. There's no truth to the saying that electric cars are coal powered, around here.
Do you think that solar panels on the roof are as efficient as centralizing them?
Anything that bypasses them is probably more efficient than working with them.
Rooftop solar panels are less totally efficient, but more resilient than the centralized case. As everybody knows, efficiency × resilience ≤ 1, alas. For resilience and reliability, you have to have some slack.
But should everyone have solar panels on the roof?
I've been getting solicitations that say I can save money by switching my power supplier to someone with a solar farm somewhere.
- EV access laws for renters are slowly gaining traction.
- EV batteries are getting large enough that you can get by with fast charging once or so a week off-property. I know tesla drivers that do not charge at home.
- craigslist has a checkbox for "EV charging" when searching for apartments.
What are some of these laws? Does that mean I get to charge at more private chargers?
One of the big obstacles to going EV (besides the lack of cost-effective EV rental) is that all the chargers around me are private chargers whereas the gas stations are public.
So maybe an extension cord and a normal outlet gets you what you want.
i.e. not enough for an average roundtrip bay area commute.
The fixed number seems to depend on the car. It would be higher for a model 3 and lower for a model X.
And I'd guess that a large performance model X on wide tires in a cold climate might not get the same miles from a kilowatt as a standard model 3 with aero rims in a temperate climate.
Obviously a user in Kansas would get more miles per kWh than a user in the Swiss Alps but the vehicle has data on where all the user has driven and how many kWh were used at every instant since it was purchased.
Meanwhile, there are a few ways to view battery charge:
- miles of range remaining (the default)
- ideal miles of range remaining
- percentage.
Turns out, percentage is a much more rational way to view battery charge. Charge to 70% or 80% is absolute and graspable.
Charging to range is variable and not really that helpful. Maybe if you are a really consistent and conservative driver it would work for you, but I've found it to be unpredictably inaccurate and leads to confusion.
sorry, NOT important enough to scale
The mph number is overstated if you use AC/heat, and/or travel >75 mph. But it’s not more than 30% off in my experience. It should do pretty well in the Bay Area where the weather tends to be mild.
When charging it seems to be a fixed multiplier vs the instantaneous kw charging rate.
Another alternative for apartment dwellers, though I don't know if there are many options in CA, is Community Solar, where you buy a share of a utility-sized installation.
For renters, that'll largely depend on if you get an individual PG&E bill. Large apartment buildings aren't always individually metered. Instead, you pay a calculated portion of the building's single energy bill alongside your rent. (Referred to as RUBS--ratio utility billing system--in the multifamily housing space.)
But I do wonder, is anyone championing solar as a solution to environmental damage actually taking stock of the impact? With oil and gas, you drill a little hole in the ground. Once it is burned, it is in the air, mostly short lived pollutants, besides carbon dioxide, which can be sequestered and even turned into food by plants. With solar (and the batteries needed to store energy), you've got pit mines, heavy metals in local water, all sorts of toxic byproducts of production, and then the production is dependent on surface area. I do think climate change has sucked all the air out of the room with regard to the environmental movement and not enough is being done to fight all these other negative impacting behaviors, and I wonder if we aren't in at least as bad a boat with solar and batteries.
Electronics are and will be produced anyway, even if we didn't pursue solar.
Solar panels take land. But there is a lot of desert and semi-desert land which has perfect insolation, like 350 days of unrestricted sunshine per year. The energy produced there could be used to produce freshwater from nearby seas. The shadow afforded by the panels could help host some sustainable vegetation.
The dangerous chemicals can be, with the help of plentiful energy, transformed to more benign chemicals, or recycled.
As long as solar panels and wind turbines produce significantly more energy in their lifetime than it takes to construct them, they can pay off their own externalities.
With coal you have open pit mining for lignite like here in Germany, with runoff poisoning rivers, Mercury pollution from burning it, and for bituminous coal which is mined underground you have to keep the mines clear of the groundwater literally forever or risk poisoning the local water supply.