Solar will soon eclipse other forms of energy generation
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Then Germany created tax incentives for producers to scale-up production.
Then China started investing in production capacity, to the extent that now in 2024 the forecast is that more solar panel GW capacity will be produced than has been installed until now worldwide.
Sources:
* A Dutch podcast on this subject: https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/goed-nieuws-schone-ene...
* How Solar Energy Became Cheap (2019), Gregory Nemet: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/ecaf.12365
* Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition (2022), Rupert Way et al. https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/publications/no-2021-01-empiricall...
* Bloomberg: The Supply Chain to Beat Climate Change Is Already Being Built. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-09-06/solar-...
Let me introduce the case of my country, Poland:
Bottom line: solar was 5.26% of the electricity mix in 2022 despite not even registering in annual reports as recently as in 2019.
People here generally lean conservative and don't think in terms of carbon footprints and whatnot. The grid is largely coal-based and until recently this was supposed to remain the case until resources run out.
Starting this year there are already hours during which solar supplies more power to the grid than coal, even though just three years earlier(2020) at 1.1% it barely registered in annual energy production reports. It's predicted to be over 7% of the mix this year.
Many different reasons for such an explosion in popularity, but ultimately they boil down to one thing: money talks. It's no secret that Poland is a net energy importer and the solar farms help in relying less on e.g. Germany in this regard and saving money in the process.
It's gaining ground because it's simply cheap and easy to deploy.
Meanwhile the nuclear power plant(s), plans for which started in earnest in 2008, is yet to start construction. Perhaps we'll have one by 2030, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
> 1. Europe to plug into desert sunshine Solar energy harvested in the sunbleached dunes of the Sahara desert is set to power millions of homes in Britain and Europe.
It's not just nice points. It's the entire point of the article.
It's also been a major supplier to Portugal, though recently overtaken by Nigeria, whose gas also runs through both Algeria & Morocco. See https://www.iea.org/articles/spain-natural-gas-security-poli..., https://www.iea.org/articles/portugal-natural-gas-security-p... for background, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medgaz and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maghreb%E2%80%93Europe_Gas_Pip... for details of the pipelines.
There's tensions and all sorts of diplomatic complexity and that have come with that, it's certainly not perfect and there's been recent diplomatic challenges specifically, but it's worked well enough to reliably supply gas from Algeria & Nigeria to Europe for decades, and has largely protected Spain & Portugal from the recent Russian gas challenges in Europe (because of this setup, they have an 'Iberian exception' on gas in EU law).
Not to say it won't be challenging, but given the profits involved, it's totally plausible to me that they could build a setup sufficient to deliver solar energy too.
If Algeria were to stop providing gas to Europe suddenly, gas could always be sourced from somewhere else. It would clearly be a huge headache but it can be done (cf Russian gas crisis just 6 months ago).
However, If Algeria decide to just stop providing electricity to Europe, what can Europe do?
If you think Europe making themselves dependent on Russian gas was a blunder, making themselves dependent on African electricity is a geopolitical suicide.
When solar is the new oil, there might be similar efforts to keep the panels illuminated.
LOL
Solar is booming there anyway - there's currently 22GW connected to the grid, which is double that of the 2019 figure. A far cry from the days of the infamous sun tax.
The world relies on Morocco for its minerals used in fertilizers so if it were not a safe place to invest, we would have worse problems to deal with, but still, the world record in HVDC line length might be not worth it.
Not only that, but also lots of other infrastructure.
IMO renewables as a backbone for energy generation in a random locale, over nuclear, are misguided. I fear they will replace maybe 60-70% of fossil, if that, then will hit a wall and we will keep on burning stuff to patch the holes, or will build nukes anyway for this purpose, at which point the renewables will have been a waste of money and time. Or maybe we will just all burn to a crisp before any of this matters.
I hope I'm wrong, because sure enough no one making energy investments seems to agree with me.
The cable itself is expensive to make and hard to install, but I believe we will put cablemaking equipment onto a ship, and sail it at 1mph all the way from the equator to northern europe, with other ships bringing shipments of copper, steel, and polymers to keep it going.
The cable will be fed by lower voltage feeders, and voltage conversion done by stacked MOSFETS (600V MOSFETS, 5000 of them stacked, and all encased in polymer - at these voltages, air isn't a good enough insulator unless you have absolutely huge buildings.) Each stack can add or remove 300 megawatts of power from the cable - so you need a couple per powerstation or city
Even if the first part is even feasible, that second part is another world of hurt. Oh, and the part before the first part, where we fill Africa with solar to provide the world with electricity for 12-ish hours a day. The geopolitics of this all are going to be pretty much impossible to figure out and that's before any actual engineering can even begin to be done.
You can't just connect 20 cable's from Africa to the European grid and expect it to work, that's not how the grid works. And I'm truly surprised that many people on HN seem to think it would.
Source: I work in utilities and one of my current focus area's is creating software to help expand the net to cope with the addition of new renewable sources and EV charging stations. And even that is posing a massive challenge on a relatively small and local scale. I couldn't imagine the impact of this fantasy of just plugging in some cables from Africa somewhere.
Edit: This incident is an example of how sensitive all this stuff is:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-27/green-shi...
But if you want a carbon-free grid, then you can't ship the light or the wind. You either massively overbuild generation and throw most of the power away, build huge amounts of very expensive storage, or you ship the power.
Currently the world is headed towards overbuilding, but thats only because typically private companies build power generation, whereas power transport is mostly in the realm of governments, and governments are slower to act on market forces (and often aren't great at capital efficiency).
The end result will clearly be a mixture of all 3, but we're going to see a lot more power movement in the next 50 years than we saw in the last 50 years.
The Morocco-UK cable mentioned in the article would be 2,400; "transmission losses for such a long cable will be relatively high at 13%". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco-UK_Power_Projec...
The underlying actual issue was the cable path .. not so much the length but the trip across a lively and still active earthquake | volcano | fault ridden region ( that spawned the Krakatoa eruption and others ).
The engineering, repeater stations, need for a "backup" cable (that was just as likely to break) etc just didn't add up.
The Singapore | Australia cable project may rise again - but for now exporting Australian sunlight is going forward via ammonia shipments.
Also, 500km was a good economic number, because typically if you need to move power more than 500km, then it is better to build generation at the other end and ship the coal/oil there.
So only the 4 winter months here should be abridged or have excess solar power (4 times as much) as normal. This is with a insulated house etc.
December through March is when I buy electricity. I now have documented how KWhs or BTUs I need to eliminate the massive heating load. Last August the Governor made a new deal for better pricing of the electricity I deliver to the grid. This year I will see a much higher income for my excess summer production. I will re-invest this into more production.
The real problem with solar is only a few months of the year. Isolating the problem of energy production and storage to only those months demonstrates how close we are to a new energy future. My next step will be solar thermal install. I want a more passive method for heating as a backup.
My location 42.73226° N, 73.19623° W. I can provide five years of production data if people are curious.
Solar is just awful for our climate, since we produce most when we use the least, which you can see in the quite extreme negative prices for electricity we've already seen this year... And it's not even summer yet.
In 2021 the array delivered KWh in roughly these groups 8 days over 300 KWh. 96 day over 200 KWh. 84 days over 100 KWh. 110 days over 30 KWh. 20 days over 10 kWh. 15 days at 0 and the rest between 1 an 9 KWh.
If I had the install to do over I would have prioritized a steep incline. The location I choose was easy to install but the panels angle is less the 15 degrees which collects snow.
Aside from engineering feasibility, this is literally what bit Europe (Northern Europe in particular - go figure) in the backside: having a single energy supplier. Projects like this sound like nice marginal improvements, but you wouldn't want to bet your whole economy on good relations with Morocco.
It is on fact worse since oil and gas can be transported with some difficulty, Germany muddled through in the end. But you won't be able to magic out new cables at this scale. And anyway where would they lead?
I think the bulk of energy must at least be produced in the EU, with all the limitations it entails. Or else be fungible with many third parties.
> Power delivered by the ‘GREGY Interconnection’ cable will serve grids in Greece, Italy and Bulgaria.
The comment:
> what is going to power Northern Europe in winter?
You literally didn't read the first sentence of the comment, did you?
Extending those to Northern Europe doesn't take that much imagination.
You cannot lay a 2000 mile subsea cable from Greece to the Nordics.
The Nordic grid is separate from the Central European grid and interconnection capacity is limited.
Time to let your imagination fly. What’s your solution?
Sure, that makes it easier, not harder. Interconnection capacity can be expanded. The Nordic grid is already connected (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Northern_E... ; 11 interconnections are listed), just not synchronized; they can and do exchange power just fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid details all sorts of proposals in this regard, some of them currently being implemented. Like I said, not much imagination necessary; others have already gotten it well past that point.
Tell that to the folks actually building these transmission networks.
Sure. Finland is adding an additional 1000 MW of capacity to Estonia. It's expected to be ready for service in 2035.
In case you didn't notice, that's less than a nuclear power plants worth of interconnection capacity in a decade.
That page is little much than fancy hand waving. What's more amusing is that you can also find the summary of a study from Finnish engineering firm Pöyry on the very same page that concludes the following:
> some of them currently being implemented.
Which ones? Specifically which ones will add the required tens of GWs of interconnection capacity?
That's putting it charitably. You need a rather large leap of faith from those hallucinations to a real solution.I suspect they'll agree that overland transmission lines are far easier to build than undersea lines. (As long as you're not trying to do it in, say, Afghanistan.)
> While it found that spreading renewables across Europe produced a smoothing effect, large scale weather patterns would impact many European countries at similar times.
Yes, that's why building and interconnecting with solar farms in Northern Africa is being discussed.
> In case you didn't notice, that's less than a nuclear power plants worth of interconnection capacity in a decade.
One would presume they build according to actual need. It's pretty clear future capacity expansion of proven technology will be needed as use of renewables expands.
Wind, onshore and offshore. The North Sea is currently filled up with offshore wind parks. North Sea countries
Hydropower is popular in the Nordics, I believe. With pumped storage that could flatten the seasonal variation.
Overproduction of both wind and solar is also feasible. Winter production of solar is not nothing, it's just less. Scaling up the number of collectors will still get you more production.
Seasonal price fluctuations. Having summer electricity be nearly free can create business opportunities, whereas high winter prices will reduce demand from industrial consumers.
How about when the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow?
> Hydropower is popular in the Nordics, I believe.
Popular, but insufficient. Only Norway could ostensibly be run on hydro.
> Overproduction of both wind and solar is also feasible.
But is it economically viable?
> Winter production of solar is not nothing
Yeah, it pretty much is in the Nordics.
> Scaling up the number of collectors will still get you more production.
Nope. Zero times a large number is still zero.
> Having summer electricity be nearly free can create business opportunities, whereas high winter prices will reduce demand from industrial consumers.
Sure, business opportunities for end users. But is it sustainable?
With too much supply renewables make no money and other producers have to make all their money in the winter months.
A rarity. Happens for a few hours a year, which can easily be passed with short-term storage.
> With too much supply renewables make no money and other producers have to make all their money in the winter months.
Renewables will have to recoup their investments in the winter, yes. Since it's predictable, it's not a big deal to have seasonality. Make a lot of money in winter to tide you over for the summer. Many industries work like that.
It's rather more than a rarity and for periods much longer than a few hours.
Case in point:
"European Wind Turbines at a Standstill Amid an Ongoing “Wind Drought” ... But as of recently, barely even a breeze has made its way through the through the winter air. ... "Britain is in the middle of a wind drought — and the timing couldn't have been worse. For several days now, the U.K. and western Europe have been calm, with barely a breeze," Thomas Moore writes for Sky News. ... Wind speeds in the U.K. have been rather slow recently, and this is impacting the country's ability to utilize wind energy.
According to Yale Environment 360, the phrase "wind drought" is exactly what it sounds like — it refers to an extended period of time that an area lacks wind, or experiences slower-than-usual wind speeds. In 2021, wind speeds were 15 percent slower than in previous years, making for one of the least windy periods in the U.K. in nearly 60 years."
https://www.greenmatters.com/news/wind-drought
> Renewables will have to recoup their investments in the winter
How is solar going to recoup its investment when it produces no power during the winter months?
> How is solar going to recoup its investment when it produces no power during the winter months?
No one's building solar farms above the Arctic Circle.
In terms of the Northern Europe winter, wind, offshore wind, and solar from Africa will hopefully make up a lot of the shortfall.
Solar can be exported, for example, as pure hydrogen or potentially as hydrogen in ammonia, or possibly other easier to transport material (I'm not a chemist).
Places that receive high amounts of sunlight like Australia would also work for this.
As opposed to already tying energy needs to contested regions.
Now if we could somehow raise the price of coal to account for its externalities.. by stipulating minimum taxes on coal and imposing tariffs on any countries that don't implement those... then we might have a chance.
But I think wind energy (producing or importing) is probably Poland's best bet for getting off of coal.
I suspect doing it through economics alone isn't going to happen, instead some version of the Large Combustion Plant Directive will simply ban coal generation in Poland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations...
If you decide to build a nuclear plant today, it might be finished by the time renewables deployed today have reached the end of their design lives.
(People will no doubt answer that it can be done quickly, and I urge those people to get on down to Hinkley Point C with a shovel to help them finish the thing)
Had we built nukes 20 years ago, the problem wouldn't be here today.
It's not a great argument.
And even if it did, the real issue is how to supply power when the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow, i.e. windstill winter days.
During such periods Norway does not have sufficient excess in hydro power generation to satisfy neighboring countries needs.
France already has plans for more nuclear.
We Germans might have issues but let's see what this really means in the next 20 years.
We have a huge gas network and every sun hour will keep those storage tanks full for longer and it should be predictable enough to get good prices
Let's assume not every investment decision is following SoftBanks approach.
Solar, wind, hydro, fission and fusion are all different, with different strengths and weaknesses. Building capacity for one source (making it cheaper in the process!) does not go to waste. Power plants will continue to operate continuously to recoup their capital cost.
A renewable-only grid is generally not the consensus view, just something Greenpeace pushes
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...
Olkiluoto 3, Finlands newest nuclear reactor sells electricity for 40€/MWh. Even if you double that, to account for the French subsidy, you only end up at $86/MWh after currency conversion.
The same Lazard research report also states that: "Combustion turbines for 100% hydrogen are not commercially available today".
Given that you have to produce something other than hydrogen to produce clean energy this drives down efficiency further.
So, what are these completely insane things that you can do with renewable energy sources and still come out ahead?
> The same Lazard research report also states that: "Combustion turbines for 100% hydrogen are not commercially available today".
50% hydrogen already in use:
https://hydrogen-central.com/ge-new-gas-turbine-help-smooth-...
A DOE grant to get to 100% hydrogen:
https://www.ge.com/news/press-releases/ge-doe-accelerating-t...
No need to let perfect be the enemy of good. Make synthetic methane to get the hydrogen blend needed.
Then there are rules regarding smaller entrepreneurs. Those changed a bit in the past few years, but both before and after the changes there were rules making it so you don't have to pay VAT if you stay below a certain amount of revenue. Those amounts have always been well above what a typical residential solar installation earns.
So what happened was, some tax-smart type deducted the panels in their first year, and was planning to not pay VAT in later years. The tax service didn't agree with the whole "I'm an entrepreneur now" thing, and a court case was fought. The court agreed with the entrepreneur, so for years people could get their solar panels essentially VAT-free.
But it's pretty complex for ordinary people to do this. There were some specialized companies that could help with it, and installers would offer those services as part of their package. It was a mess, and they finally just said: let's just stop this "vestzak-broekzak" nonsense and set VAT to 0%.
So it's not a subsidy, it's a streamlining of an existing tax reality.
Solar panels are getting better and better all the time, but for a long time the marginal benefits of running them have been slim (once you offset the power generation by the cost to manufacture, install, and maintain them). And their output is notoriously unpredictable because it's dependent on weather. So, T&D losses alone are enough of a factor to make certain kinds of solar deployment unfeasible. Then consider how much easier maintenance would be if your panels are arranged in a conventional solar farm rather than running for miles down a highway. So, rather than snaking along highways, it's probably better to cluster all the panels close together just outside (or, as you also suggest, integrated into) a major population center.
Once base load and/or peaker plants become unprofitable, you either lose those or end up paying for them to idle.
Neither outcome is very desirable.
Energy storage is unlikely to come to the rescue in time.
There is no way solar is going to overtake everything by 2027.
I wish that was the case, it would be awesome but that is just not going to happen.
This fantasy land stuff is so counterproductive because when it doesn't happen it causes people to question the entire idea.
How the World Really Works is Smil's book to counter fantasy land stuff like this article but the problem is there is a true believer contingent that that is just not interested in the real world.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply uneducated, ignorant or a true believer themselves.
The fundamental problem is reflected in Smil's writing. The space of energy is incredibly complex and an incredibly dry read. It couldn't lend itself less to news articles and social media posts. So we end up with this ridiculous two sided argument between climate change denial morons and climate fanatics who think solar is going to overtake everything by 2027 and to think otherwise is to be one of the climate change denial morons.
It is fucking pathetic.
Considering the overall tone of your comment 2027 comes across like a favourite straw man.
Looking at the annual data is amazing too: https://opennem.org.au/energy/nem/?range=all&interval=1y
In 2022 our electricity grid was 34.9% renewables already, with wind and solar pretty close in proportion.
People underestimate how cheap natural gas used to be; as a byproduct of oil drilling it can be nearly free, and in some place is just flared because it was too cheap to bother capturing. That all changed when the Russians attacked.
Otherwise, the cost of the panels is not the biggest cost in most solar installations. Anyone investing in solar has to pay for permits, workers, electricians, inspections, mounting and distribution equipment, etc, and these costs are relatively static, roughly tracking inflation. The payback on any decent-sized solar installation is still years or decades down the road, even if the panels themselves were given away for free.
Where power companies successfully deploy solar to lower overall production costs (like mind does), I can promise you they are not at all incentivized to pass those savings back to the end users. Those profits go to shareholders, unless the regulators step in and demand otherwise.
I have the same size array and I think it was $48K USD 8 years ago before tax credits. I have now sold more SRECs than the initial cost of the array. I also rarely receive an electric bill. Finally it was installed on a standing seam roof so no roof penatrations.
I haven't noticed any decrease in production and will expect that most of the cost of the original install to be on physical installation and when it comes to replace the equipment I can tell it will be cheaper and more performant then my existing system.
Planetary concerns exist but I feel that we are world full of manufacturing crimes and there is no reason to hold solar to higher standard. I also think that the decentralization that solar provide an efficiency that isn't obvious on it's face.
I had not heard of this - it's very interesting!
Solar farms are definitely much, much simpler .. thousands or even millions of perfectly uniform panels manufactured in a factory, some wiring and power electronics and some electrical infrastructure to connect to the grid. Projects are delivered in months, and almost all within 1% of project budget.
Nuclear power plants consist of probably tens of thousands of different components: a reactor (containing a reactor core, fuel rods, control rods, moderator, and coolant), a turbine, a generator, a containment building, a cooling system, pumps, valves, and piping, a control system, a safety system, and a waste disposal system, along with all the same electrical infrastructure to connect to the grid. Projects take years to decades and invariably delivered multiples over budget.
The downside of nuclear is that more could go wrong when building, while deploying solar panels doesn't have any risks and the permission (if any) is easy to get.
Fabbing hundreds of thousands of hectares of semiconductor is going to be far from risk-free or environmentally benign.
Also, residential solar installations have killed and injured many more people than nuclear power plants ever have. It turns out that climbing on roofs is dangerous.
Not at all the same nuclear.