Even solar energy's biggest fans are underestimating it
vox.com
vox.com
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/69e4cb33-3615-4424-996d-5aee9d1af... | https://archive.today/11TFI
It turns out that these calculations are for utility scale purchases. You need to be buying thousands of panels to realize them.
That being said, I have noticed in the last year or so that you can find some pretty good individual panel deals, closer to $0.5/watt.
https://www.solartradesales.co.uk/8-33-solar-430w-full-black...
It's a perfect weapon really, make energy so cheap, reliable and efficient that it destroys the petro-dollar.
As someone concerned about climate change, it's a wonderful thing but I think the hegemony should watch it and adapt.
Don't expect magic feats from autocratic organisations.
It could be as simple as China just sort of stumbled into this situation and realized what's happening and now they just have to foster and grow their solar and wind industries.
Though the other thing to note is that Texas and thus the US is now a net exporter of oil, the opposite of the 70' oil crisis.
Regardless of their intentions, energy independence is a huge thing for a country's sovereignty.
Capitalism requires no conspiracy. People will do anything to increase their wealth.
I could use only a quarter of the generated energy and still break even on the panels in 5 years.
Between 5 and 10pm yesterday, batteries supplied more than twice the power that our nuclear reactors did: https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply
The grid has become so expensive due to the cost of fire proofing infrastructure that residential installs are a no-brainer if you can find someone to do the install for a reasonable price. DIY is even cheaper.
Power in California was incredibly expensive long before any of the money was going towards fire proofing.
residential power costs are substantially lower for customers in these areas vs their immediate neighbors - out-of-pocket power bills are as little as half or a third of for-profit statewide utilities for the same sustained consumption during peak usage times.
Because California forced Nuclear suppliers to throttle down to "make room for renewables", no idea who thought this decision makes any sense.
Fun project, I ended up making a simulator app with fancy graphs and stuff.
And those are not tariffs from the previous administration, that's the current one, under the guise that it will increase American production/sales, which it won't because the US can't compete with nearly free slave labor and the manufacturing barely even exists here.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/grid-interconnection-queue-...
https://cgs.umd.edu/sites/default/files/2022-07/US%20Coal%20...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-17/generatio... | https://archive.today/HvPlb (Control -f "Solar, Wind and Battery Storage Projects Dominate Grid Queues in US and Europe"; draw attention to the graphic)
https://coal.sierraclub.org/coal-plant-map
(lets not get into the per capita argument in this thread; I'm not saying it isn't valid, I am simply focused on physical systems vs accounting)
I don't know anything myself but thought it interesting. I guess it's the sort of news neither political side sees an advantage in propagating.
Panel price was 40 cents per W, but that was only 30% od the installation cost, and only 20% of total cost (with permits, etc). EU subsidies covered ~30% of the total cost.
Expect to break even in 8 years at current prices (sure to go up because they’re currently subsidized, so ~5 years more likely).
- learning effects keep making existing battery chemistries and panels cheaper. This shouldn't come as a surprise if you know anything about manufacturing. But essentially any study, report, etc. that assumes cost to be a constant is 100% certified bullshit. And there have been some notable reports that should have anticipated that that didn't. E.g. most of what is published by the IEA.
- there is still a lot of potential coming out research into new technology. And contrary to the popular belief, a lot of that makes it to market and then starts making an impact. Energy density is improving. What's currently on the road is nowhere near the theoretical maximum. Technology is hard to predict but a very safe prediction is that stagnation is not happening any time soon. So, anything that assumes energy densities, efficiencies, etc. will freeze at their 2024 levels is going to be wrong as well.
- Dropping cost opens up new use cases and increased demand. Elon Musk going to Australia and putting some megapacks down to save the day is only seven years ago. Very few people predicted that. That's now a multi billion dollar business that is disrupting grids all over the world. E.g. gas plants are being reduced to expensive peaker plants because of this unexpected use case. Including some recently opened ones.
My bold prediction is that we are living through an energy revolution that will completely change everything over the next few decades. We've seen nothing yet. Just extrapolating current trends, an order of magnitude improvement along several dimensions seems likely. And why stop there? Solar panel cost (especially including installation), battery cost, battery energy density, battery longevity, battery charging speeds, etc. Those are just some of the more obvious ones.
True.
Yes and: Multiple nascent technologies have just started their own cost-learning-curves. Advanced geothermal, hydrolyzers, electrolyzers, post Li-ion batteries, distributed energy storage / virtual power plants, nearly lossless recycling, etc, etc.
Meaning green H2, carbon free steel & cement, amazing new power grid, a circular economy.
So audacious, I have a hard time even conceiving, must less reason about this stuff.
Exciting times.
I regret I've not chosen back than a 10kWp/24kWh to being able to go from a day to another with heating, reaching hours where eventually I can power up an ICE generator to recharge because well... It's exactly in winter that I need heating, where there is the littlest Sun and when grid-disruptive storms likely happen (NOT happened so far for more than little time, but still...). At current Chinese prices it's sensible. At current local price it's not even for self-made solutions, it's totally fool for ready-made solutions by a local pro. To give some numbers my system was 11.500€ 4 years ago. The cheapest professionally made one similar but INFERIOR to mine was ~30.000€, the most expensive ~50k.
Long story short, I do not know in the US, but a current southern/center EU prices p.v. is not an economically sound choice if not self made, there is simply way too much speculation, like on EVs, where the same Chinese imported EV in Thailand costs less than 9k€ while the same vehicle cost a bit less than 40k here (eg. https://asia.nikkei.com/content/1f9ed40b4b44745e1a39fafaf94b... to have the Thailand price in BTH and USD).
At this rates there is no new deal.
About underestimating... Well... We have no seasonal storage. So we can't run a grid with p.v. apart of anything else. We can't even run a home with p.v. only, simply because OR we use something else to heat and recharge EVs or we need the size of the home itself of panels and storage, witch could last theoretically 10 years. So personally in a new home with an EV I produce around 50% of my energy needs and I'm in the southern Alps at 1030 so a very good place for p.v.
We should do much more, of course, but the dream of a renewable only grid is still a dream, possible in some areas of the world, like Norway with mountain hydro, nearly possible in some others, like Swiss but definitively not possible on scale. Beside that remember a thing: a modern home consume 1/7-1/10 of a "classic" one, thanks to mere design and insulation. We could converge to electricity with new homes ONLY on scale, we cannot with classic ones. We could converge to electricity on scale for cars if we mandate WFH for all eligible jobs, not without that.
That's to say is a MUST understanding what we need to implement the new deal, because what we need it the opposite of what big corps want.
Now on to batteries. Again, let us assume this is a manufacturing floor, and battery manufacturing continues to scale up globally.
> BNEF is tracking 7.9 TWh of annual battery manufacturing capacity announced for the end of 2025. That’s compared to demand projections of 1.6 TWh, and even that assumes steady EV demand growth and very rapid growth in batteries for storage applications. Even half that total announced capacity would be enough to equip almost every car sold in the world next year with a 50 kWh battery pack. [My note: Global light vehicle auto sales are ~90M units per year]
We are, trying to be as rational and with as little hyperbole as possible, at the hockey stick inflection point looking almost straight up.
Edit: It also appears the US is throwing another $3B into battery projects.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41603409 ("HN: US announces $3B in funding for new battery projects")
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.today/DklaA ("Bloomberg: China’s Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts")
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... | https://archive.is/8Dy4D ("Bloomberg: China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants")
(i track and provide reporting on global energy electrification velocity and clean energy policy on a volunteer basis for a cleantech startup)
https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-...
An online UPS will also have a AC-DC converter (rectifier) in addition to the DC-AC converter (inverter). It usually also has fans to cool those since they are running continuously, even when AC power is available.
An offline UPS is basically an online UPS with a relay, so that if the AC power is working, all of the UPS circuitry is bypassed. This reduces the usage of the DC electronics and increases the efficiency when power-loss is rare (since the AC->DC->AC path will always dissipate some power).
A line-interactive transformer is like an offline UPS, but with voltage conditioning (e.g. via an autotransformer) to handle voltages that are a bit low or a bit high.
Consumer UPSs are (almost all?) either offline or line-interactive.
https://www.amazon.com/GOLDENMATE-600W-Battery-Protector-Lif...
It's only 500VA, but it is under $1k.
We haven’t really even ramped up production of battery chemistries that are tailor made for grid storage yet. Batteries like sodium-ion, molten metal or various flow batteries have basically no limits to how much we can scale them, and a really low potential price floor.
Is it really that much? That's incredible!
You have to realize that battery manufacturing capacity has been growing at an exponential rate. 15 minutes of global power capacity will quickly turn into 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, etc. 8 hours of global storage is enough to survive the night with just solar alone.
15 minutes is already a huge win. The more lead time we have for production ramping, the cheaper and more efficient we can make the plants that provide backup power.
Batteries have become dirt cheap to make and we are very quickly getting to the point where the power electronics are actually the more expensive part of a battery deployment rather than the battery capacity itself.
The real defining fact about solar and battery storage is that it is very amenable to mass production and scaling. Small modular components that can be produced in a factory and require minimal maintenance.
I'm in no crusade to make people think like me. I am on a path of leveraging my knowledge.
Batteries are being produced at TWH/year scale now. Probably crossing into 1.5-2 TWH/year this year. That's new batteries added every year. This is projected to grow over the next few years. Most of those batteries have thousands of cycles of lifetime. Tens of thousands for some of the newer chemistries (e.g. sodium ion).
Overall electricity production is 25-30 TWH per year; for the entire planet. So 25000 TWH. That's going to go up of course but it's a nice number to work with.
Those batteries can cycle multiple times per day. Lets assume once a day (they'd be able to do multiple of course). So you get about 365 TWH of power cycled per day out of 1 TWH of batteries (discharged and charged again). You'd charge them with cheap solar, wind, geothermal, and whatever else you have available; whenever you have that available.
About 70 TWH of battery would be enough to get to 25000 TWH per year. We'll have that probably in the early 2040s. Once we hit tens of TWH of battery produced per year that won't take long. Of course electricity production and demand will increase as well.
Of course, we'll have plenty of other power sources. So, most of those batteries will just be sitting there fully charged most of the time and we won't actually be cycling most of them all that much. That's a lot of potential energy. Combine that with cables, dynamic pricing, demand shaping, and a few other things and the implied need for long term storage melts away.
Or is it saying that you would get 173,000 terrawatt-hours of electrical energy? It refers to energy then gives a number in units of power.
But Dyson had this great spherical concept, so maybe there is a way to get a lot of that energy while still, like, living on the planet.
So what you are basically saying we have to support solar with other sources, always, by principle. Still good supplementary stuff unless you are too north/south from cca equator, there it will never be a major thing.
The article was clearly written by some fanboi. I suppose when oil was first discovered, there were fanbois for oil too. But maybe it would be better if the fanbois started to get ahead of the criticism.
You are correct. If the world were perfect in every way, some people will come up with ways to find faults the scheme of things. This is because various causes give meaning to people's lives. Without a cause they would feel life is meaningless.
Note: I am not saying that most causes do not have legitimacy, what I'm claiming is they have tones of religion.