US solar production soars by 25 percent in just one year | Hacker News Reader

US solar production soars by 25 percent in just one year

arstechnica.com

68 pointstoomuchtodo71 comments

The cost of panels themselves is really incredible now. I just recently parted a 10kW system down to $0.31/watt, but now the microinverters cost more than the solar panels.

Ultimately, I think labor costs will prevent more solar installations more than the cost of the hardware itself short-term.

The challenge wrt deployment rate at utility scale is grid interconnection queues. Reform is taking time to speed deployments. “Where plug?”

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

https://www.klgates.com/FERC-Interconnection-Reform-Is-Full-...

https://emp.lbl.gov/news/grid-connection-backlog-grows-30-20...

https://decarbonization.visualcapitalist.com/gridlock-visual...

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/grid-interconnection-queue-...

https://energypost.eu/1500gw-or-renewables-deployment-delaye...

Did you diy a roof install? I’m really looking into this as I live in the southeast, but I’m getting ridiculous quotes (60k for a 10kw system with two power walls).

I've been really frustrated with price gauging in the installation quotes (also in the southeast). I'm no professional installer but I have done a few systems, one was a concerted cargo van with an off-grid 1kW system an 7.2kWh of lithium. The other system I'm in the progress of now, 9.1kW solar and around 70kWh of slightly used automotive cells.

For the system I'm working on now I have around $10k into the hardware if I'm not mistaken. There's plenty of skill and time that goes into designing the system, custom wiring, etc. I also had wuotes around $50k-60k. There's no way in hell I can justify 80% of the price in labor, very happy I happen to live in an area where I can install this myself without running into regulatory issues.

Where did you get the automotive cells?

I got them from Battry Hookup[1] late last year. I wasn't ready to do the full build yet, I've since built a "shed" that is way overbuilt and more of an kff-grid tiny house to store all of our solar equipment.

That site is pretty hit or miss with stock since it is all repurposed equipment, but if you happen to catch the right equipment going by you can get a really good deal for anything DIY.

[1] https://batteryhookup.com/

You were not kidding. On the front page of this moment is "14,000 3v Lithium CR2032 Coin Batteries" held in two barrels with a weight of 200 pounds. A tremendous bargain, if you can snatch it at the current bid of $20.

Hah, yeah just be careful with those tiny batteries if that's the way you choose to go. Different chemestries have very different outcomes and I've never been comfortable with scaling tiny batteries up to a whole-home use.

I was about to order a pallet of new lithium cells from one of the US resellers when the batch of repurposed automotive cells popped up. When I was pricing them out I could get the cells and a DIY BMS for around half the price as rack batteries often used by DIYers today. There's more work involved in putting the cells together yourself, but it is nice knowing how it works and how to fix it should a cell fail.

Yeah, self-installation. You can part a 10kW for under $10,000.

You’re getting terrible quotes because the construction industry has been doing phenomenally the last several years.

I built a contractor search product to compete with HomeAdvisor because the quotes were such a joke. I don’t use it as much as I did when I first built it though. I now know more about residential construction than some contractors I’ve worked with.

I’ve saved literally tens of thousands of dollars.

Very cool! What is it called

McWatters Home

We’ve been operating privately in Arizona by invitation. It’s ready for general availability, but not terribly useful to people outside of AZ right now.

We’re ready to start rolling out to other states and include their registrar of contractors’ directories.

Are you looking for contributors?

I would normally, but unfortunately this product is proprietary.

Ditch microinverters, get a large MPPT. Sure you spend more in cabling but microinverters are poorly-made and fail a LOT.

For those of us just tuning in, what is a MPPT? Doing a web search turns up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_power_point_tracking but that's not a device like I'd assumed, it's... are you just saying to use something that can sink a lot of DC current straight from the panels? Or to just use a smaller number of bigger inverters?

The one you link is the one he's talking about. They basically electronically optimize the panels to put out max power. It's a physical embodiment of the theoretical calculation.

Instead of having a mini-inventer on each panel, you have one MPPT and inverter for ~20 panels in a string. This has cheaper costs but the downside that e.g. shading on one panel can cause the entire string to reduce output, depending on how your MPPT and panels are wired.

Indeed, this is why micro inverters are spec’d for residential rooftops, and MPPT for utility scale solar. Rarely is shading a concern with utility scale, where as it’s much more common in small scale installs.

I've had great luck with Enphase IQ8 series micro inverters fwiw from a cost and reliability perspective on smaller scale systems.

They're still so expensive that it's hard to justify in my mind. I'd rather just install an extra string or two of cheap panels and eat the shading losses, since I have the space available

Oh, this is the "string inverter" approach that came up in my search. I assumed it wasn't that because running in series seemed like it should result in less cabling [cost], not more. Is it less cabling but thicker to handle the current?

Yeah it's a straight DC high voltage (~150-500v) to the inverter, which means running two 10-gauge cables the entire length of the array. With mini-inverters you have ~6 inches of 10-gauge cable into a mini inverter and the rest of the connection is via standard 14gauge 3 strand romex or something.

Thanks for explaining:)

No worries at all, I just learned from youtube mostly, I think this guy has the best content https://www.youtube.com/@WillProwse

If panel costs become a smaller and smaller fraction of installation cost over time, I wonder what sort of innovations we see where we install them "sub optimally" because it's easier to put them there. E.g. hanging them vertically on the side of a fence or on a wall might be easier (and thus cheaper) than placing them on the roof.

I'm already planning to have a robust inverter and battery stack offgrid and do all the actual solar panel wiring myself. They're going to be thrown in the field face up, and if they have problems, I'll just add more or replace dead ones. $0.31/w is actually kind of expensive, you can get crappy clearance used panels for more like $0.15/w or even less if you shop around (shipping is the largest expense at that point!)

Does it even make sense to set up racking for panels that are ~1/4 the price of a rack, even if you are using ballasted cheapo racking?

One company is trying the approach of placing the panels flat on the ground[0]. So long as you put a fence around it to stop local wildlife from crushing them, seems easy enough. Maybe give it a monthly sweep if it is more prone to collecting debris.

[0] https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/texas-solar-farm-flat-on-the-...

Wow, that’s incredible pricing.

I had the idea to have them floating, sort of, where you angle them by pumping up a sort of canal or something. And potentially the water could be used to create condensation based irrigation for crops planted with in the panels.

That or installations that mimic trees with preserves ground space being maximized.

Yeah that's actually very close to what I am thinking, if I get some expensive high value panels, I'm at a fairly high latitude (46N) so the winter-summer angle difference is extreme - winter 69.77 degrees, summer 17.27 degrees. I plan to do it with something like angle iron and fasteners but it's a big angle adjustment. I may actually hang them on the side of the barn with standoffs at the bottom in the winter, and in the summer lay them flat on the ground.

There are also panels available as surplus, rotated out old stock from large solar farms (at least in Australia)- when they start to dip and an engineer determines it's cost effective to replace with brand new and more efficient (than the older panel ever was).

I've seen a lot of panels on cars | vans to charge batteries for fridges etc.

Also more professional offerings such as mobile charging for field work.

https://www.solarbatterywarehouse.com.au/solar-battery-shop/...

and farmers with workshops just buying the batteries, inverters, panels and fitting those to existing trailers | tractores | trucks, etc.

Interestingly there's a job add on HN for Mech Engineers to help build robots for this:

Charge Robotics is a Series A startup building robots that build solar farms

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/charge-robotics/jobs/m...

Grid solar is the future, not placing an expensive system on your roof (though homeowners will do that for other reasons, like disaster preparedness).

At the moment, you can part out a system that immediately has a greater savings on your power bill than keeping the same amount of money in a 4% high yield savings account. So we've passed a threshold where the ROI makes sense if you're doing your own installation.

The biggest hurdle is almost no one is installing their own solar systems.

To clarify, this is production of solar energy, not of the panels themselves.

All the panels are made in China, right?

https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-manufacturing

https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-manufacturing-map

> According to the U.S. Solar Market Insight Q2 2024 report released today by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie, total U.S. solar module manufacturing capacity now exceeds 26 GW annually.

https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/2024-press-releases/u...

Not all, but more than 3/4.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/668749/regional-distribu...

And of the modules, I would guess an even bigger fraction of the cells (the actual silicon dies) are made in China.

So the only practical near-term effect the tariffs have is increasing the cost solar adoption.

Incentives would have been better than tariffs to boost U.S. solar manufacturing.

To put it in perspective, in 2023 the world produced 5.5% of it's electricity from solar - if in the U.S., there was 25.3% growth year over year to 7% today, and given that overall worldwide electricity consumption grows annually by a couple percent, there is nothing in particular to be proud about here: U.S. is in the middle of a pack, producing as much solar as a share of total electricity consumption as everyone else does. Why should it be harder than anywhere else to install same Chinese solar panels? And it isn't. If this is seen as an achievement, things are bad indeed.

I think the important part is that the price has reached a level that incentivizes large scale installations.

Usage is going up and maybe that's attributable to more people shifting to electric cars.

We can certainly do better but claiming there is nothing to be proud of seems unnecessarily gloomy.

This is good news sure, but everyone else in the world, on average, is at more or less the same spot with about same growth rates, too. So there is no longer even an expectation that America is supposed to be the leader, and just not falling behind others is seen as a major achievement?

I completely understand you.

We accomplish this growth despite a lot of people not believing in global warming, despite having large corporations lobbying against renewables.

I am not sure why you are expecting the US to be a leader here. We are trailing other countries in many areas (healthcare, child mortality...) due to our political environment that makes positive change so difficult.

> Why should it be harder than anywhere else to install same Chinese solar panels?

Democracy. Permitting. Federalism. Regulatory decentralization. Lots of things that make construction relatively difficult in the USA.

All of these are in place in the EU too and we don't have a problem at all. We produced 10.2% of all electricity from solar in the same period. Having a lot less land and a lot less sun.

Half of the US voting population is still cheering cries of, "Drill baby drill". There are significant entrenched interests who are fighting renewable development wherever possible. It is only because the economics of solar panels have gotten too good to ignore that things are proceeding.

Solar panels are great at a consumer level due to utility metering agreements. At a grid level they are another story. Decentralized, fault tolerant, power grid with fall back generation just in case, is a tough challenge. This is why Europe pays the highest electricity prices in the world.

You also pay to send your kids to university, have the worlds best particle accelerator, and pay to take care of sick people.

Huh? Higher education is free for citizens in most EU countries and super cheap in the rest of them ($500-$5000 a year).

Pay to take care of sick people? Healthcare is socialised almost everywhere and is either free to use, or very cheap (and even commercial is cheap because it competes against free or very cheap state-provided one, even if it's patchy in quality and has long waiting times).

Thinking of "what's really wrong in EU" i can come up with only one thing really: our airlines are a pathetic piece of shit especially pertaining to the "premium" service, and no one really understands why.

I think they mean "pay to send your kids to university" and "pay to take care of sick people" as in the state absorbs the cost.

But the wording is ambiguous.

That is what I meant. The plural or collective you.

I don't have a comment on pride, but I do think the growth is remarkable: the US and similar countries already have mature power grids, meaning that solar adoption is fighting against the "sunk cost" of hundreds of billions of dollars and decades of investment. Understood in that context, solar's growth in the US is remarkable to me.

25% growth in anything at scale is interesting.

It's true that some other places are ahead. For example solar in Australia has been growing at at average of 29% per year for 10 years[1], and wind at 15% per year for 10 years.

But every energy market is unique. The US has a huge supply of new, cheap oil and gas from fracking, and that means it has taken longer for solar to be cheap enough to undercut the politics of the fossil fuel lobby.

[1] https://www.energy.gov.au/energy-data/australian-energy-stat...

From another perspective, just because others are having success, does not mean one should not recognize one's own. It is not a zero sum game here, it's win-win.

Also, the article indicates it is more likely over 40% growth for 2024, it is 25% year over year for the first 5 months of the year, not for an entire year.

Next stop: Energy too cheap to meter.

Disaster! What if the energy prices go negative!!!

That means you're unwilling to shut off your generator, so you pay other people to stop instead.

Be right back, going to melt down some scrap in the old arc furnace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJYzAd0YHA

Batteries are the new cool kid on the block.

There's a lower bound to how cheap electricity can be, the infrastructure to distribute it isn't free. Every country price this differently, but one way to solve this is to split the cost per kWh in use and transport, which is common in Europe.

In Norway we have a model like that, and it effectively sets a lower boundary of (depending a little on the region) around 0.50NOK/kWh, around 0.05$/kWh. The price for electricity quite often go into the negative during summer, but you still end up paying for the distribution.

I recently learned that electricity meters cost ~150USD.

At that sort of price, for low usage users it might be multiple years simply to pay back the cost of the meter.

One can buy a $3 meter from China, but obviously it is less accurate. I'd like to see a system where less accurate meters are used, but you pay a small premium to cover any inaccuracies in metering.

Are you sure you want less accurate meters? There's a lot of losses in the network itself, and without accurate meters it's hard to pinpoint where they are and if they can be fixed.

In Norway we quite recently switched to more accurate networked meters and at that time they said that as much as 30% of all electricity produced wasn't accounted for, which you end up paying for, one way or another. Some of these losses are from the network itself. But a not insignificant part was from people illegally tapping the grid or last-mile losses due to poorly maintained infrastructure that was hard to pinpoint without using expensive manpower to physically check every single connection.

Meter inaccuracies are sometimes over and sometimes under. Losses are always under.

Across enough thousands of meters, you should be able to separate the effects. I suspect the hundreds of millions saved if a country switched to cheap less accurate meters would easily pay for other methods of policing/detecting theft. For example, 'radar' down the electricity cables can see how far away every switch, device and wire is. It would be pretty straightforward to put radar devices at a few places on the public network, then effectively triangulate to some house who is stealing power because when they turn stuff on and off (which the radar can see, together with the cable length), no nearby customers meter sees the increased load.

I don't really understand the argument you're trying to make. You want us to use less accurate meters and then pay a premium to cover those inaccuracies, which is supposed to be cheaper than just buying accurate meters? And then use some technology that doesn't seem to exist to detect losses and theft? If it was this easy we'd already be doing it.

These meters are more expensive, but not that much more expensive. The majority of the cost, by a long shot, comes from installing them. These meters also offer a lot of other capabilities, which greatly improves the reliability of the network. If you spread the cost of these meters over the projected lifespan we're talking about cents per month.

This is clearly a good point in that infrastructure is a cost and needs continual upgrade and maintenance.

However it's not clear that the appropriate way to pay for that is usage based: looking at domestic supply for example it's roughly the same cost per house to connect to the grid, so it doesn't really make sense to pay more if you have more usage.

I'm not sure what alternative models look like for this and I'm not sure they are better or worse. But there probably is room for innovation on billing this part.

For the last mile you're probably right, but the electricity has to come from somewhere. So you also need to size the production capacity, distribution network, sub-stations and whatnot to match the installed capacity. Things get really bad, really quickly, when demand and availability doens't match.

Your infrastructure doesn’t have to be so beefy when you produce and cache it locally. In my climate, 500W vs 15kW wood be enough boost for winters. That’s 30x reduction in pricy infrastructure.

Energy storage via batteries is ridiculously expensive if the storage is greater than 24 hours. Hydrogen tanks (or salt caverns) might be the solution, but there is still the capital cost of the electrolyzers and fuel cells.

Everything I read seems to suggest that hydrogen is a pipe dream for energy storage, as the output efficiency is so low. And that's before accounting for all the issues of just storing and distributing it.

Solar panels and wind turbines produce electricity, the highest form of energy, directly. Instead of converting that to thermal or chemical energy for storage and then back to electricity for distribution, you're better off just storing it at as thermal energy at the destination. I think we often forget that thermal energy means everything from ~0 Kelvin. A heat exchanger can be very efficient.

I think there's going to be a lot of interesting stuff happening with dual-use PV panels and thermal heat exchangers. In some cold climates you generally want as much thermal energy as you can get your hands on.

10kWh would be enough for my house (on top of constant 500W and few kWh from solar) and costs about $2000 USD. That’s probably few centimetres worth of underground cabling or orders of magnitude less than street transformer.

Would have been more if we allowed chinese panels :(

And fossil fuel usage still did not go down.

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