> Electricity during the daytime will be free
> Panels will be cheap as dirt
If you don’t consider the capital of a panel then sure free / cheap as dirt.
Then the sun goes down and the wind doesn’t happen to blow, so you fire up your gas turbine.
> Panels will be cheap as dirt
If you don’t consider the capital of a panel then sure free / cheap as dirt.
Then the sun goes down and the wind doesn’t happen to blow, so you fire up your gas turbine.
That's what I meant, the capital cost is already so low that you could use them as fence panels. They will only get lower with the looming supply glut.
Look at this monocrystaline (higher eff) panel in china: 15 cents per watt. There are cheaper ones too: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Haitai-Solar-Panel-Pr...
A 400W panel will cost 60 dollars and has a size of 1.8mx1.8m. Per square meter that is $18.52
A generic plastic fence panel from lowe's 6ft by 8ft costs $120 https://www.lowes.com/pd/Freedom-Actual-6-ft-x-7-82-ft-Ready...
price per square meter: $26.87
You're glossing over the inherent danger of solar panels in that they are relatively high voltage devices that can't be turned off easily. This means they get saddled with expensive safety regulations. The glorious utopia where you buy a pallet of the things from Wal*Mart with your pocket change and stick them everywhere the sun shines runs into some logistical hurdles.
> they are relatively high voltage devices
On the contrary, they are low voltage (12V), which makes them more dangerous (because you need higher amps to carry the same amount of energy). To make them safe, you can install inverters closer to the panel, to raise the voltage to 110 or 220, making them much much safer.
> The glorious utopia where you buy a pallet of the things from Wal*Mart with your pocket change and stick them everywhere the sun shines runs into some logistical hurdles.
That can work if you install them as fences, or just on the ground in general. If you install them on rooftops then yeah, you need some serious consideration. The installations are still grossly overpriced, if both EU and Australia can do it under 1USD per Watt, so can the US.
Lets check a random common panel.
https://www.solar-electric.com/rec-solar-rec400aa-pure-alpha...
Voc: 48.8 Volts
And the original post was talking about cheap installs, so you would string several together to put it on an inverter. You hit high voltages very quickly. Even just 4 panels and you're up to almost 200V at full sun. It's more typical to put 8-12 panels on a string. The voltages hit dangerous levels very quickly.
You want to tie them in series first, to increase the voltage and keep the amps as low as possible. 110V or 220V are not dangerous voltages, that's why houses are wired at these higher volts. People all over the world handle cables carrying 220V with very few issues. If you wired the house at 12V-48V, some wire in the wall would catch on fire every-time you wanted to toast a slice of bread, lol.
They are typically first wired in series to increase the voltage as early as possible, to make them safer. If you were to wire them in parallel you would keep a low voltage and increase the amperage, which would make their wires glow like Christmas lights.
That's the whole reason why they started selling micro-inverters that go on each panel: to increase the voltage and decrease amps before even leaving the panel area, to make them safer.
Look at a typical micro-inverter: input is up to 50 volts, 10 amps. Output is 240 volts, 1 amp. https://solartown.com/solar-products/enphase-iq8-microinvert...
For panels, the voltage is not dangerous part, the intensity is.
If they were actually 12v they would be safer. You could handle them with dry skin. It's the same reason people aren't electrocuted while working on cars. The danger would be starting fires as you noted.
Anyway, in the real world when you have panels wired in series you typically need to shield the connection wires in conduit because both the voltage and amperage reach dangerous levels and you can start fires or kill people if they try to handle the wire, and you can't easily turn them off. This is part of the expense of installing solar panels that you can't really avoid. You will always need someone who knows what they are doing to handle the electrical part or you will kill people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38304405
Add in the large number of storage options that are coming to market besides lithium ion, from sodium to iron to straight up thermal storage, and we may still have gas turbines on the grid in 20 years but it's unlikely they will generate more than a few percent of a year's electricity.
We are seeing the first disruption of the electricity industry in a loooong time and it's going to upset all other energy processes too, as electrical sources of process heat become cheaper than burning gas or anything else.
Looking at where prices are today misses the picture, look at where they will be in five years or ten years in order to understand our future.