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Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

Energy? I feel like it's been talked about a lot but maybe not?

Solar panels are dropping in cost at an exponential rate [0]. As of this writing, consumer "new" panels are $0.75/W and used are at around $0.30/W right now (I won't give a link as a Google search will do).

Battery technology is also dropping at an exponential rate. I believe, with a little effort, one can purchase batteries at about $0.08/Wh.

Taken together, one can purchase a 30KWh (daily) solar panel and battery storage system for about $4,200 (not including labor and extra hardware/electronics), which puts the return on investment (ROI) at about 3.5 years if we consider the average house spends around $1200 (in the USA).

Dropping costs will quickly put that in the 2 year ROI range which, in my opinion, is the inflection point where it effectively becomes too good to pass up for the average consumer.

The dropping price of energy comes with all sorts of side effects, like a potentially decentralized energy grid, use cases for excess energy (eg bitcoin mining, carbon capture, hydrogen production, etc.), novel power storage systems etc., which is maybe the "novel" part that I haven't heard too much talk about.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law

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This is actually talked about on every HN energy thread and it’s now incorrect, particularly about batteries.

Solar has supply bottlenecks at the moment that are stopping further price declines- hopefully they will get solved.

But there’s a lithium shortage that is already showing up in the price of lithium going up 5x. Analysts predict that by around 2025 lithium will limit the battery market that is trying to grow 40x to meet electrification demands [1]. Note that opening a new lithium mine takes a minimum of 7 years. sodium based batteries are coming to help this situation, but they are a new technology that will take time to productionize and ramp up.

[1] https://youtu.be/5v-DTS-ibow

Over the course of 10-15 years, I don't think you're correct. Solar is (in my opinion conservatively) expected to drop by 34% by 2030 [0] and, though I'm having trouble finding anything that spells it outright, demand and production of batteries is projected to increase dramatically that will, in my opinion, most likely allow for production efficiencies to reduce cost.

Even the video you link claims to be 'bullish' on production. I didn't see any claims about price in the future, just production, though I might have missed it.

In my opinion, we're seeing a lot of 'whiplash' effects from the supply chain issues but, as the pandemic recedes, these should resolve in the next couple of years.

[0] https://www.thesolarnerd.com/blog/will-solar-get-cheaper/

I am quite bullish on long-term battery production as well. But I recognize that we are heading for some pain in the near-term where supply will not keep up with demand.

I like that solar analysis, but I also think it is possible that the high demand for solar and high commodity (energy, etc) costs could continue to stop solar prices from dropping for much of this decade just as we have seen recently.

The temporary whiplash concept for inflation hasn't panned out yet. I follow Lyn Alden's economic analysis closely and she has been predicting this decade to be inflationary. These predictions started over a year ago when the Fed kept saying that inflation was temporary.

Tangentially related, there are a bunch of calculators out there for ROI on installing solar, but there doesn't seem to be one that will take into account the opportunity cost of installing solar now instead of waiting until it's cheaper. I would love to see one for that.

I've been thinking about this a lot with the current congressional action. I need a new roof ~now. But I have a lingering fear that huge product improvement will happen in the next 18 months due to added government money. I don't know enough about the industry to weight in that possibility.

I'd absolutely do it now. The price of solar has been beneath that of racks, mounts, wiring and installation for a while now. Even assuming a major breakthrough your costs probably wont change that much because panel cost isnt a big % of what your costs will be anyway.

There's also a risk that supply chain bottlenecks/cold war with china will drive up the cost & your electric bill is only gonna go up.

Agreed, do it now. The cost of panels in Australia is already going up due to supply issues thanks to covid, and I don't think you'll see prices come down again for a few years even with that investment.

Keep in mind, with the new law you are talking about, more money will be dumped into the market with no increase in supply.

That is what is called inflation. If people have an extra 7500 to buy solar, then solar becomes up to 7500 more expensive.

This assumes supply is perfectly inelastic. Even assuming, it also ignores the fact that the money is only dumped in one nation.

Hopefully the other pieces get cheap enough to enable some revolution in the wiring side of it. Falling costs enable some acceptable loss of efficiency, so you can blow 100W on unnecessary power conversion and another 100W or whatever on losses due to smaller cabling.

It badly needs to be standardized in a consumer-friendly way...like power-over-ethernet in reverse. Field-installable, hot-pluggable, fool proof connectors. You can get 90W over some variations of network cabling...bump that up a couple sizes so you can handle 400W.

So you buy a bunch of solar panels and some patch cables, and plug those in to a one or more "power switches" on the roof top. Then run a QSFP+ equivalent "power backhaul" down into utility room where you have your "power aggregation switch" which has a bunch of (power)QSFP+ ports and plug batteries in to a few of those. And of course a couple big QSFP28 ports to an inverter to power legacy 120V loads, which maybe someday you don't need any more as household things move to using PoLE (power over large ethernet).

This is basically the idea behind microinverters

I saw an article recently (here maybe?) that the world could switch to 100% green energy and make the investment back in 6 years. I haven't looked at the math behind it, and actually getting that many solar panels up is going to take some time too, but it really seems to me like this is the main thing we should all be focusing on right now. Because of high fossil energy prices, getting rid of Russian gas, and of course because of climate change. Three very big reasons to go all out on clean energy.

The switch to green will take longer without petroleum.

That just another "study" of Jacobson, the Stanford professor that sue other scientists when they criticise one of its study and make Stanford pay for the lost lawsuit. Anyway his work is just not very good, unrealistic assumption everywhere, there a better energy modeler out there, look at the work of Jessie Jenkins, Tom Brown, NREL, Clack....

Apologies for responding to my own message but I wanted to add that we can also put a timeline on it.

The dropping price puts the rollout/adoption within the next 10-15 years.

So it's not just a matter of 'if' but we have a guess as to when as well.

Something about this cannot be right, surely? You are saying one can invest in a solar setup and have 7+ years of free electricity, and all that starting after 3.5 years?

Why is this hard to believe?

Not for nothing but there are solar bitcoin farms that are popping up for precisely this reason.

In the region where I live (upstate New York, USA), there are solar panel fields where just five years ago there was nothing.

One reason is that this will make it a matter of survival for energy companies and governments to mandate connection to the grid and buying of electricity, for fear of having these critical companies fail.

Because this is not going to make all energy cheaper. It's going to massively increase the cost of "legacy" energy while making some types of energy free.

Perhaps they will use a "social" cost-sharing, or ... well I don't know, but essentially the time will come when living in the countryside will come with "free" energy (not unlimited though), and cities will come with punitively expensive energy.

What if energy companies also invest in "free" energy?

Of course they will, but energy companies have a larger minimum capital expenditure than a household looking to invest in generation. And the energy company will likely still carry the full cost of transporting energy, which becomes more expensive with more energy sources connecting to the grid.

It would be a change in the dynamics of economies of scale vs small and nimble, greater lobbying power is one thing economies of scale still have a big advantage in so GP's comment seems plausible.

Exactly. There will be no need for "legacy" energy. Companies that are too invested in fossil energy can die and be replaced with companies that invested in solar.

This.

Taxation of energy is a big revenue stream for the governments. What happens when people start putting independent energy sources to power themselves and it causes significant revenue drop ? Would the government tax them for putting up solar on their property ? Couple this with electrification of transportation and you have another taxation source (fossil fuels) losing revenue. This would lead to a disruption in the social power dynamics in a country.

Yes, energy companies can invest in these too, but why would I buy from them if I have my own generation ?

Fuel tax will definitely be replaced with some other form of car tax, at least in most of Europe. I don't see any way around that.

But I don't quite see how free countryside electricity would mean expensive electricity in cities? Large scale wind and solar will decrease grid prices too, and most people live in cities anyway so the people dropping off grid doesn't seem like an issue for electricity transfer costs. Plus off-grid won't happen anywhere with a real winter, so most of Europe is excluded already.

California is already debating a tax on residential solar generation, even if it never hits the grid.

PV can scale down pretty far, yeah, but it can also scale up. Having guys crawl around on rooftops trying not to damage your shingles is a lot more expensive than just setting up some panels in a field. The majority of PV getting installed is utility-scale, not household-scale, so you can buy cheap PV energy and live half a block from a supermarket and half a block from a chichi cafe.

As for costs, there's been concern for more than a decade about the "utility death spiral" scenario: some users disconnecting from a grid would spread the fixed costs of things like transmission and black start over a smaller number of remaining users, leading more of them to disconnect, and so on. So far it hasn't materialized anywhere, but as far as I know it could. I don't think the same scenario is likely with "legacy energy" like gasoline and natural gas, because the fixed costs are so low.

It's not wildly far off but I think his battery costs are a stretch. In fact double that would be a challenge to have a quality and reliable system. But it is definitely lass than 3x. Right now the best value for batteries I'm getting is 0.18 per w/h. To get 0.08 you would have to doing something like recycling small cell or ev batteries which isn't necessarily scalable and comes with some risks.

Panel costs are accurate and the additional electronic expense is not super high. $1000 should be enough for most setups.

For most people the issue is space. This is going to be another thing where the poor are taxed. A significant amount of single family residences dropping off the grid will cause prices to go up for the people that don't have the luxury of 4000 sq ft to fill with solar panels.

The $0.08wh is something that you have to hunt around for.

Just a cursory look on Aliexpress gives $0.12wh for LiFePo4 batteries [0] [1].

Looking on Alibaba, I see some potential sellers that might get below that $0.12 but it takes looking around and potentially talking with sellers. I do think it's possible but it requires some hunting, especially in the 'consumer' quantities we're talking about (sub qty 100).

[0] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3256803821576908.html?spm=a2...

[1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3256803518663847.html?spm=a2...

I have been living fully off solar (and some wind here and there) for 10 years. Its amazing. Never do I stress powerlines going down, brownouts, etc.

You can run a fridge, lights and a laptop 24.7 on about $300 of solar. You can add panels as your needs and budget increases. The biggest cost is the battery.

Do you have a writeup of your setup? Do you use lead acid for your batteries?

Besides the money issue, the biggest concern I have are balancing the batteries, getting the right inverters, keeping the panels clear and figuring out what inefficiencies are during the non-summer seasons.

I'd check out Lithium Solar on youtube - he's got a fairly comprehensive set of videos on almost every topic regarding batteries, inverters and general setup.

I'd be curious what your wind setup looks like. I have some land off grid which gets good wind, and I'm trying to decide whether that could be a reasonable alternative to solar. I don't see nearly as much information about residential wind turbines as I do solar.

I'd love to learn more about your setup. I'm very interested in investing in a solar + battery self-sufficient setup for myself, but without electrical engineering experience it's quite intimidating.

300 dollar was like 10 years ago, now it's more like 3000.

Sorry, but no. If anything solar gear has got cheaper in recent times. Secondhand Solar Panels are almost free at present. And the price of batteries is dropping fast.

Likewise, I have been living off-grid with solar for well over 20 years.

My batteries have always been lead-acid, simply because L.A. is still much cheaper than Lithium and alternatives.

I've recently taken my first set of Lead-Acid batteries out of service. They powered a small fridge, etc, via 200W of solar panels for over 20 years with essentially zero maintenance, except for occasional top-up of distilled water.

Inverters were a problem at first. I had a series of Inverters die over the years, until I started buying Victron products. Have had zero problems since. Rule one, is "don't buy cheap inverters".

The best part is that secondhand solar panels are now very cheap. The reason is that Gov regulations for grid-tie prohibits the use of second-hand panels, so people doing upgrades will basically throw away their old panels.

My setup runs a conventional fridge/freezer, and a large computer which is on-line for most of the day, as well as my workshop full of electrical tools. I do have a large generator, but the only time it gets run is when I have some welding to do. I don't even gave a battery charger hooked to it.

There are so many myths about solar: Lead-Acid batteries don't last as they are destroyed by deep-cycles. Yes, but when you size the system, you should aim for a deep discharge maybe once a month. This still should result in twenty years life or so. I live in a wet and cloudy part of Australia, and this winter my batteries have never been as low as 80% capacity, and it is rare if the batteries haven't returned to 100% charge by 10:00am each day.

Probably the main problem with solar is that people are stupid. One of my neighbours installed a modest solar system, only to have it regularly fail due to low battery voltage. Long story short: The supplier fitted a Watt meter which tracked the consumption at each outlet. It showed that that the problem was in his daughter's bedroom. A quick search revealed a huge radiator under her bed that she was running each night. Problem solved.

I would be very suspicious around claims from people trying to sell you solar panels. There are a lot of incentives in the US such as tax credits. This is good but a lot of people in green energy industry include that into calculations, which is fine except its under the assumption that the incentive will persist. Even Tesla shows you "net effective" price of their car by calculating the gas savings (e.g. Model 3 purchase price is 47k but they "potential savings" price is 38k which include potential incentives and gas savings of $8,600)

There are other gotchas like PACE loans being senior to your mortgage. So if you get a PACE loan, the loan is transferred to the person buying the home and is senior to your mortgage.

I'm also suspicious around the maintenance and longevity claims. For instance, from my experience, the energy efficient light bulbs do not live up to to their claims. I changed about half of my lightbulbs within three years and they supposedly have a 20+ year lifespan. It's fine that they don't have a crazy lifespan, but it just shows the industry is okay with outright false claims.

Overall I think the industry is so juiced by incentives and manipulated by regulations that it attracts shady players.

LED bulbs can last 20 years if they're designed to. Most of what is sold is generally very low quality, with poor heat management, low quality power circuitry and excessive load on the LEDs, which all result in shortened life. It's a shame. Some of the first bulbs I got were good quality and I still have them in frequent use 10+ years later. Many others have been quickly failing junk.

I'm not sure about the US as installation costs there are very expensive, but in my part of Europe I had 10kW of roof mount solar installed for €10,800 at the end of last year.

The calculations I did for it in 2020 were that the payback period would be 7 years, or 6 with government incentives. That was when electricity was 15c/kWh though... if energy prices stay at the current level I will break even in less than 4 years. I generate around 8000kWh a year, which at current prices is €3200.

The panels should last forever (assuming no physical damage from hail storms etc), they just decrease in efficiency. The inverter should last at least 10 years, but that's easy to replace as it's not on the roof.

That seems like a decent price. If you talk to the places in Homedepot they are floating $30-$40k for an install

Surely this doesn’t include installation or something? I have been quoted $1.50-$1.80/w installed.

I did qualify that this was not including labor and the other hardware and electronics needed for such a system.

The (relatively) high cost is most likely because of labor and (in my opinion) inflated hardware costs of battery and solar panels.

Labor is a massive expense and can't be discounted but one could imagine a solar panel "kit" that just includes the hardware that you can install yourself.

One could also imagine that the costs of labor being subsumed by a larger entity that can take advantage of economies of scale and provide solar energy like a "classic" energy company. I believe something like that is already happening in the region where I live (upstate New York, USA).

For places where labor might be cheaper, then total costs would also come closer to raw hardware costs.

> Labor is a massive expense and can't be discounted but one could imagine a solar panel "kit" that just includes the hardware that you can install yourself.

Installing high-wattage DC lines without any training at all is a great way to get house fires.

Also, I haven't got whole lot of un-shaded roof space.

I don't understand why commercial solar isn't even bigger than it is - are they waiting for prices to come down, or what?

Was in a mega rental house and my wife burned her hand on the wall. Someone prior had done some diy electric work. The diy gas lines is what got us in the end.

Land is expensive. I am actually surprised why the companies don't lease home solar panel kits, e.g. you sign up and they install at minimal cost, and you pay for the electricity generated by the solar panels, but at a reduced rate compared to the grid. The ownership of the panels stay with the company leases them.

This is actually a very common model (along with the similar "power purchase agreement" (PPA) model).

Those structures do exist, but they're not normally popular. Look for "power purchase agreement" solar plans. Normally those involve some pretty long contracts that are hard to get out of, contracts transfer to the new owner of the house so it can make your house less desirable, often require you to buy all the power they generate even if you don't need it all, need to call their contractors to remove the panels whenever you need roofing work done, you've got a lot of equipment in your house that isn't yours.

I wouldn't do it. I don't need yet another interested party when trying to sell my house eventually, and I don't want to scare off would-be buyers with potentially complicated contract terms.

People do all sorts of home renovation with lighting, fuse boxes, outlets and the like. I don't want to dismiss safety concerns but at the same time this is well within scope of many home owners.

> I don't understand why commercial solar isn't even bigger than it is - are they waiting for prices to come down, or what?

I think this is a really good question and I don't know the answer to it.

My not-very-well-informed opinion is that there are a confluence of factors involved:

* Infrastructure buildout, especially in the USA where the infrastructure projects take massive amounts of effort and the population is spread out over a large area of land, takes a lot of time, effort and money.

* The prices involved aren't as lucrative yet as they could be. When the price per MWh is 1/10 that of coal, then we'll see huge rollout (in my opinion).

* Adoption/rollout is happening but, in some places at least, there's government capture preventing widespread rollout/adoption (Pennsylvania?)

* Aging infrastructure prevents large scale energy injection at random points.

To the last point, here in New York state, I've heard one has to pay to first do a survey if the site where you want to build a solar array can actually inject that much more energy into the grid (at a cost of $10k+ or more) and even then, you're limited by what the aging energy infrastructure can support, capping the amount of energy available.

As someone who does lots of home renovation solar is not even close to in the same league as other types of work. Speaking as someone who has put in new circuits into a live panel.

First off you need roofing skills, which 99% of homeowners have no idea how to do safely, often needs specialized equipment, and you run the risk of falling off and basically paralyzing yourself for life. Then you have the issue of having run conduit correctly, grounding everything to code, having disconnects installed in the right places, which is going to vary from state to state and even city to city based on what the laws are.

If you don't electrocute yourself, and manage to not fall off the roof and die, and somehow connect everything correctly, there is approximately 0% chance the local utility agrees to connect your system without a licensed electrician who is willing to vouch for the work you did.

I absolutely appreciate all these risks. I have seen ads tho for diy solar where companies give you a kit and help you work through the permitting process. Also a couple YouTubers documenting the process.

You can install it yourself, its not rocket science. Plenty of online tutorials.

What about my fear of heights? :lol: . There is a reason I chose a desk job!

There are 'ground mount systems' for solar panels that are popular if you have the space.

A cursory look on YouTube gives many results [0] [1] [2].

There are fields of ground mounted solar panels in the country side where I live.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t4hGBWLtxM

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzar3xqCb6k

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc-wgpGfbtA

> Taken together, one can purchase a 30KWh (daily) solar panel and battery storage system for about $4,200

I haven’t researched it but I feel like I’d have pay 20-40K for such a system. What gives?

Is it all just labor and regulations? Why can’t we solve that?

> Why can’t we solve that?

Maybe this is the next big thing.

$4,200 is _very_ optimistic for the panel/battery cost for a 30kWh system. The GP comment also conveniently excluded "labor and extra hardware/electronics". There's a lot more that goes into a solar power system (especially one that has to manage batteries) than just slapping the panels on the roof and dropping the batteries off in the garage. Inverters, chargers, grid integration equipment, etc.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "just" labor. You're talking about a critical system, that has the possibility of seriously injuring someone (including folks outside your house) or causing extensive property damage if not installed correctly. That seems like a thing where skilled (and fairly compensated) installers and some degree of regulation is very appropriate.

I wouldn’t get too excited for decentralized energy.

More energy sources means more power lines all over the place.

Few things get NIMBYs worked up like power lines.

The social aspect will be harder to solve than the engineering.

Or less. People are using solar to go off the grid.

This is something that I think has basically flown under the radar of mainstream understanding: you can now live "off the grid" and have many of the perks that used to be the domain of grid-connected living.

Not all of them... but "off grid" no longer means living like Ted Kaczynski. The popular understanding has yet to catch up.

You can have artificial lighting all night long (thanks to LEDs and batteries), computers (ideally you want to avoid the DC -> AC -> DC conversion), Internet access (although most satellite systems aren't really optimized for low power yet), running water (solar-powered pumps, cheap large-capacity plastic storage totes), etc.

The items that are still hard to get, because of their inherently energy-intensive nature, are hot water out of the tap on demand, and interior climate control (space heating especially). You need a pretty big solar array and battery system to run even a fairly efficient (AC or heat pump) climate control system. Lots of people get around this by siting their off-grid cabins in places that don't require AC, and making the interior volume small enough to heat with a small biofuel furnace (like a modern, efficient wood stove) that can burn locally-obtained fuel.

I would like to see a more in depth treatment than what I've seen (or what I've thought about).

Certainly cross country electric lines aren't going to needed as much because the energy can be produced by a relatively clean factory. With coal, we want it very far away enough away from consumers so as not to cause health concerns. Decentralized energy, at the very least, means we can create solar power plants next to larger cities and towns.

In terms of the wires in urban centers, I don't have a good sense. I can see where you might be right but at the same time, that infrastructure is already there and there are efficiencies to be gained by not transporting electricity over many miles of copper.

I also agree that the social aspect but there's a large pressure to find solutions because energy costs are going to be dropping by an order of magnitude or more.

> Certainly cross country electric lines aren't going to needed as much because the energy can be produced by a relatively clean factory. With coal, we want it very far away enough away from consumers so as not to cause health concerns. Decentralized energy, at the very least, means we can create solar power plants next to larger cities and towns.

Your going to need very long electric lines, to send clean energy from places where its sunny to places where it cloudy, or from places where its windy, to places where its currently calm.

Sorry, I'm not quite sure I understand your point.

There are places that have so much cloud cover year round that it makes solar adoption there effectively impossible? The frequency of these places is such that their energy needs requires the infrastructure remain in place?

Decentralization has never worked in the history of mankind. I don't know why people continue to get hyped up about decentralization topics.

The internet?

It was created as a decentralized network, but is it now? It may be in some technical sense, but for all practical purposes, it's collectively centralized.

One interesting documentary on this topic is Adam Curtis' All Watched Over by Machines of Every Loving Grace.

> which puts the return on investment (ROI) at about 3.5

Fyi, that's time to break even. ROI is measured in % (annualized, usually).

Panels are dropping but installation costs have not. Now more than have of the cost is installation. The real impact will be with the utility size installations. We need a way to reduce cost for all the other costs outside the panels.

yeah, sure, sounds great... but how to afford a house on which I could put those panels on?

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