If Solar provides up to 90% of CA’s peak capacity, why is electricity here so monstrously expensive? Shouldn’t it be nearly the lowest cost because there is no need to pay for fuel?
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/chart-whos-the-le...
As toomuchtodo mentioned in another comment [1], the cost of solar declined 89% in the past decade. California's installed base is weighted toward older, more expensive solar power installations because it started installing solar power sooner and more rapidly than other states. That's compounded by California's slowdown in utility scale solar farms added in recent years. Texas is about to surpass California on installed solar farm capacity and Texas's solar generation will be cheaper because those farms have been built more recently with lower cost solar hardware.
https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in...
In 2010, the cost-per-watt was a little more than 2 dollars higher for residential solar than for utility scale solar ($8.70 vs $6.54). In 2022, residential was still a little more than 2 dollars higher ($3.16 vs $1.06), but since system costs have plummeted, that means the ratio now favors utility scale installations much more dramatically.
You can see in the charts that "Soft Costs - Other" remains persistently high for residential solar. That includes things like permitting and inspection. A 100 megawatt solar farm requires permitting and inspection too, but it's much less cost than the 10,000 permits and inspections required for equivalent capacity distributed across residential rooftops. The other big difference evident from 2010 to 2022 is that residential solar inverter costs are still significant whereas the inverter costs have become practically invisible in 2022 for large solar farms. More aggressive price competition and increasing unit capacity have proportionally lowered the inverter costs much more for large solar farms.
The cost per megawatt hour generated is actually even more imbalanced in favor of large solar farms than these cost-per-watt charts show. You can't use solar tracking on rooftops. Solar farms with single axis tracking to follow the sun's position generate more energy per year than equivalent wattage installed in fixed positions on rooftops. Average rooftop systems are also less frequently cleaned than ground level solar farms. Not only does rooftop solar cost 3 times as much per installed watt, it also generates maybe 30% less energy per installed watt per year.
Two issues I see missing from NREL's analysis: land use and distribution.
I don't see a cost attributed to land in there. It's free for residential because it's already put to use, but not so for utility-scale and probably hard to estimate broadly. Environmental impacts of that land use should also be accounted for in addition to direct land acquisition cost and/or leasing. Solar generation does not have land impacts when placed on a roof. That land is already "disrupted" and therefore allocated for human use.
Either way, labor is now the dominant piece of the cost for residential, and it's obvious that one-off small jobs in high-price metros are more expensive than a crew operating in rural areas. An accounting looking strictly and materials + labor is going to heavily favor utilities, but it doesn't capture the full picture.
I hope you are spending your time attacking farming, which uses orders of magnitude more land than PV (and will even in a PV-powered world) and delivers orders of magnitude less economic value per unit of land.
2. It doesn't necessarily follow that free fuel == cheaper power. I'm not at all familiar, but I imagine building, operating, and maintaining a solar plant could be expensive, perhaps even more expensive than a coal plant, for all I know.
In the spring and summer seasons California routinely hits over 100% of demand generated from renewables at some point in a given month. CAISO, which does not cover the entire state, says that in June about 47% came from renewables. Last June it was only 37%.
1: http://www.caiso.com/Documents/GreenhouseGasEmissions-Tracki...
In WA we pay more for "fish mitigation" than all other hydro-related costs. I expect CA has similar money pits.
Now, nuclear is not fossil fuel, but Lazard measures LCOE of nuclear as 6x more expensive than solar and wind. So that might be part of it.
I use solar at home and the battery is actually the most expensive and least durable component of the system.
Also the battery disposal story is not great (at least at the moment).
This is in line with why are we replacing fossil fuels with solar.
It was never a quality of life play, it's some sort of altruistic effort / dumbness deciding to be the suckers kind of thing.
California for sure cares about them Californians who'd be alive 150 years from now more than those who are alive right now. Actually not even that, given that the atmosphere is one for everybody, they care more about Indians and Chinese who'd be alive 150 years from now than Californians who struggle and are 'alive' right now.
Given that the atmosphere is one for everybody, comparing by country does not make sense because some countries have more people than other countries.
It makes sense to identify who are the fools and who are the wiseguys.
Like the solar panel industry which was jumpstarted with immense subsidies by Germany, EU and the US and now is 99% a Chinese industry manufacturing product. Amazing.
And EVs will be too, once the smoke clears we'll be lucky if we are left with just the brand and the cult of personality of Tesla, while everything else will be manufactured in China.