Cheap solar panels are changing the world
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This is in contrast to nuclear, coal, gas turbine etc where you really need large plants to work efficiently. Small portable diesel generators exist, but they are expensive to run, need regular maintenance and refueling.
Once you can cost effectively generate real electricity for very little effort, and very low cost, then people do it. And when you distribute generation like this very large effects happen very qickly.
Climate, political, and economic disasters seem more frequent each decade, and it would be a shame to starve or melt/freeze ourselves just because our delivery systems failed us.
And as a Texan, it blows my mind that so many people reject local solar options. When the grid is having rolling blackouts, wouldn’t it be nice to still have power?
* Cheap food most of the time, no food occasionally
* More expensive food most of the time, imported food occasionally
That decision is not one I'm particularly equipped to comment on.
Just pointing out that many people, including myself, intentionally buy groceries from farmers' markets and local food co-ops very specifically because we want our food to be local. Others will spend even more time and labor on vegetable gardens for the same reason.
It is unfortunate that the way we offer food production subsidies in many countries primarily benefit large, multinational conglomerates instead of funding healthier, more resilient, and more environmentally friendly local options. It is terrible that only those with means can afford to purchase local foods in many markets, but yes, plenty of us who are able to do so choose to.
There are a lot of factors limiting local farms' ability to deliver at a cheaper price point, like corporate consolidation, land being converted into suburban sprawl, a lack of local value add and processing infrastructure, huge subsidies (and water resources) being wasted on commodity growers, an aging farmer population, etc.
Do you really think that if a head of cabbage was fetching $150 a pop at my grocery store that Earl who owns the farm across the street from me is going to stubbornly continue to grow commodity tobacco at a profit of $2000 an ACRE? (About 35 cents a plant.)
We’ve created a system where investments and massive subsidy made to turn the desert into a garden destroyed agriculture nationally. It’s a predictable black swan scenario that has impactful and broad implications.
Most humans think in "next paycheck" terms not "risk-adjusted" terms, but at the same time, the Covid supply chain issues whacked people in the head with "this is a black swan" and "fragility" sticks.
Texas has a dominant ruling structure dominated by religious fanatics and resource extraction for now. Alot of the extremist nonsense is driven by the sense that demographics will drive power shifts, so cashing in is key. At some point, the “freedom” argument will flip — what is more in alignment with the cowboy myth than self-reliance where your rooftop or land provides?
It's perfectly reasonable to think local in terms of redundancy, but the primary way of delivering power should be concern of as many people as possible. It's like having an insurance plan with a lot of members. Distributing the costs and risks across as many people as possible helps keep things cheaper and mitigates risk. No one is going to care if only your power is out, but when there are a lot more stakeholders, when the grid extends across city, county, state, even country lines, if there are issues, there's more pressure to get them fixed.
In the case of PV, a large proportion of the primary products are traded via commodity exchanges. In the case of wind power, 12 manufacturers now offer systems larger than 16 MW.
This is so funny to see, and great to see said, because for decades I ran into nuclear proponents (not engineers or workers, just people into the politics) that said that nuclear was the "only" way to combat climate change (Edit: forgot a crucial clause: because "only" nuclear could scale). I would counter that nuclear does not scale in that it can't get small, and it takes forever to build or expand.
Whereas solar can go small, go big, go medium, and the same with storage these days.
Many in the nuclear world are currently hoping to scale to "modular" size, because it's become clear that with 1GW scale, in advanced economies, construction is too expensive (IMHO due to the high cost of labor compared to less advanced economies). So shifting to a more "factory" model like airplanes is the investment pitch: scale smaller and make each reactor like factory parts so that it gets cheap to build. We will see! It's got enough hype that even non-small non-modular designs are calling themselves SMRs in order to try to garner interest. And there is some interest in new nuclear these days, despite the extremely high cost, and its going towards the more expensive SMRs rather than 1GW scale reactors, because the risk of failure is on a smaller overall quantity of money.
You’re seeing the same nonsense with armchair solar + battery advocates today. The mistake is in assuming marginal advantages persist across scale, i.e. in ignoring the law of diminishing returns.
If we could have deployed nuclear immediately and infinitely when those folks were talking, they would have been right. We could t. If we could solar and batteries immediately and infinitely (without increasing prices), going all in on it would be right. We can’t. Most markets optimise heterogenously because that’s what makes sense.
If we are talking about the US, the reason we couldn't deploy nuclear was that we vastly over-ordered the amount of reactors we needed, going into the 1980s, causing a glut then a drought. And then too many of them were financially disastrous construction projects. Some people say that we had too many different reactor designs, but I would point to France where they used the same reactor design but also did not see falling prices, and did not build nearly as many reactors as they had planned.
Certainly France has been much better off in terms of carbon emissions from electricity since the 1980s than most places in the world, but they were also going nuclear due to lack of cheap fossil fuels.
> If we could solar and batteries immediately and infinitely (without increasing prices), going all in on it would be right. We can’t.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying we aren't going all in on solar and storage, but I would argue that we are. Nearly all new generation capacity getting installed is solar, storage, and wind. THere's a few legacy projects for other technologies, but those natural gas plants will see little use, unless solar/storage/batteries are blocked from being deployed in the same area. EIA: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62864
This is happening in China too. They build coal plants, but they barely use them as they are just backups. Last I heard they are on track for 160GW of solar deployed this year alone, and it goes up every year.
So maybe put me into the bucket of people spouting nonsense about solar + batteries today, I could be wrong, but I really think it's the only tech stack that can and will make a big change in energy over the next 10 years.
That's the point: 2024's solar is better than 1980's nuclear, but in the meantime we've pumped a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere we didn't have to.
The same statement will be true in twenty years. We’re not building gas generators because they’re pretty.
We have power demand growth well ahead of our solar and wind deployment potential, even assuming the rosiest production growth forecasts for the next ten years. That gap is being filled with natural gas, based on infrastructure with 20 to 40-year financing timelines. Not building a nuclear plant today means more gas generators burning through the 2060s. (I’m assuming we build and deploy solar and wind as quickly as possible, too.)
Justify that statement, please. What is preventing us from installing that much wind and solar?
If anything, nuclear's deployment potential is much more limited.
No, that would be a large comprehension error. I'm making the point because people seem to use what solar and wind can finally do now to justify us not having built nuclear 40 years ago.
But America didn't want to do the hard work of spending a hundred billion dollars on infrastructure and investment to our country. We wanted the cocaine fueled orgy of capitalism that Reagan promised us. So we ripped the solar panels off of the whitehouse and shared a bed with Saudi Arabia. Now gas is cheap as chips so we can just burn as much as we want!
And this for a capital spend on equipment with no moving parts, no lubricants, no maintenance schedule (apart from a window-washer a couple times a year.)
It's a no brainer if you live anywhere the sun shines well - and LOTS of people have figured this out, so the amounts being installed are moving the needle.
I considered some small-medium batteries and panels but the calculation came out massively in favor of putting the same bundle of cash into a financial investment portfolio instead.
But solar doesn't have to be local. Upgrading the grid to move large volumes of electricity from mid to high latitudes changes your equation somewhat.
Sure. Now look at the baseline. We’d need to 10x the growth rate for the numbers to rival the expected growth in power demand. The folks at the tech majors aren’t idiots. If they could buy this cheapest power at scale, they would. Everybody would. One can’t. The panels are easy, but the batteries are back ordered and getting the land and permitting takes years.
I’m in Wyoming. I have seen people spend more time and paperwork getting a wind farm and HVDC line up than an experimental (totally non-economic) nuclear reactor. That doesn’t apply if you’re putting up one windmill to power your off-grid house. But the economics present at that scale diminish when you’re building a fleet of data centre.
The US is installing solar at a rate of about 40GW per year so we need to 2X it, not 10X it.
China is installing it at a rate of about 10GW per month, so capacity is certainly not the constraint.
2x means no carbon reduction. 3x means we can close coal by 2040 and decarbonise by 2082 [1]. And “panels are easy.” (We’re not 2 or even 3x’ing deployment inside a decade [2].)
Now look at batteries. Assume we ban EVs and send 100% of production to utilities. 10x.
Solar + wind with batteries only means we burn natural gas. It’s based on the same faulty logic as the failed nuclear-only strategies of yesteryear. It’s what we’re doing right now, which is why we’re installing about 10 GWh a year of natural gas over the 40% it already commands and why trillions are being invested in new natural gas infrastructure [3].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Un...
[2] https://seia.org/research-resources/us-solar-market-insight/
[3] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
For a while. And much less gas than without the renewables.
A lot of that load increase you are observing is about the change from fossil-fuel cars into electric ones. That one will stop eventually, and you don't want to delay it anyway.
Yes? The point is that we are currently committing ourselves to a fossil fuel energy system through at least the 2080s by not building all the non-emmitting power we can. Those investments not only put down emitting capital equipment, they capitalize a bloc of producers who will do what they must to protect their investment.
> that load increase you are observing is about the change from fossil-fuel cars into electric ones. That one will stop eventually, and you don't want to delay it anyway
No, it's AI. EVs are rolling out much more slowly.
If so, I don't think you have the right numbers. We are on track to completely replace all current energy (not electricity, but final usable energy) uses with renewable electricity within 15 years at current growth rates.
Even the most rabid estimates of energy use growth rate are not more than a doubling of total energy services in that time period. And with the growth rate of renewables, we'd be able to adapt to that.
It is true that there is less paperwork for a new natural gas turbine than for most renewable energy, but you also have to get that pipeline of gas built too (which, again, has less paperwork than electric transmission, but you actually still have to do it). Other non-renewable energy isn't going to deploy any faster than renewable energy.
If I have a "Residential scale" nuclear plant in the basement, there are lots of people who would like to re-purpose my nuclear fuel in other ways. (And that's before we talk about how I purchase, and renew, that fuel to begin with.)
Ultimately even "small scale" nuclear comes with massive bureaucratic and security overheads that can't simply be wished away.
In closing I'll point out that my solar system _is_ nuclear. It uses fusion nuclear energy as it's fuel. But I've cunningly hidden the radioactive elements far far away....
More seriously, solar is the closest we'll ever get to fusion power. Assuming we ever get the tech right, it'll simply be too expensive to roll out significant amounts of fusion production. It would require capital that will always give a better return elsewhere.
To put it another way, would you rather invest $100 billion in a fusion plant, that'll take 5 years to get permitted and 5 years to build, and require staffing by well trained expensive staff, or spend $10 billion on a solar farm in Africa selling electricity to the US at night which can be up and running in 2 years?
Would you be happy to commit your 100 billion today betting that when it comes online 10 to 15 years from now it'll make energy at prices comparable to the solar and storage tech available then?
Fusion may indeed be the future. But who's gonna spend the capital to find out?
But if you fund the research, people come up with better lasers and magnets and things. Then you a) have better lasers and magnets and things, which are useful for more than just fusion in the same way that NASA inventions are useful for more than just space exploration; and b) allow the reactors to get smaller:
https://www.iflscience.com/baby-fusion-reactor-less-than-a-m...
What I'm saying though is that the economics of fusion don't work. The temperature range, magnetic fields etc won't ever be 'cheap'.
Look, going to the moon wasn't economic, but it got us GPS and satellite TV which definitely are. Fusion may give us other unexpected benefits. But it'll never be the 'energy too cheap to meter' that was envisaged in the 1950s.
This feels like arguing that computers will never be cheap, because look how much it costs to build a 1970s mainframe. How could anybody ever afford to have that in their house?
Meanwhile it turns out that EUV lithography requires some fancy equipment but when you mass produce it, the result is that everybody has one in their pocket.
- It still requires mining, so is it any cleaner than solar + storage?
- Waste is significantly less recyclable than other green energy waste.
- High cost and long timelines to build.
- Major risks when damaged by weather, accidents, or damaged intentionally.
- The biggest proponents of nuclear seem to be the oil/gas industry, and politicians aligned with oil/gas. Hmm...What is another problem of nuclear. It's more dependent on storage or alternative generation than solar.
Nuclear can't get small because of social and political reasons, not technical or economics reasons.
If you could put a small nuclear reactor in your backyard and it was assured to be safe, would you?
It's actually both economic and technical: the technical side makes smaller reactors less economic in terms of efficiency. Thermal generation benefits massively from being really really big.
In a big commercial power reactor, fuel costs are tiny relative to the total system costs. If you used a tiny reactor like the Kilopower [1] to power a single home, the cost of the highly enriched fuel alone (upward of $50,000 per kilogram, 28 kg in a unit) would be orders of magnitude more expensive than grid-supplied electricity.
Those advantages go down when you include construction and permitting time (billions of dollars) and transmission costs (billions more over the plant’s lifetime).
On SMRs: we don’t know their economics because they don’t practically exist yet. Certainly not in a mass-manufactured flavour.
The argument that the grid should be 100% nuclear was never really viable. To make it work you would need nuclear to be cheap, so it could be overbuilt to cover hourly and seasonal variation in load.
That's theoretically possible, a nuclear reactor is basically a box of hot rocks used to make steam. Large reactors use turbines because they're more efficient, but you can also use steam to run a piston engine and then your cost is approximately the same as a diesel generator only you don't have to buy diesel, just exchange the box of hot rocks for a new one every decade or two. The regulatory environment is not such that this is a thing, however, and then overbuilding nuclear is too expensive.
But that's assuming you want to replace the whole grid with nuclear. Any proposal to replace the whole grid with a single generation technology is naive, because the premise would have to be that it's better than all other forms of generation in all contexts. Which isn't true for anything.
The big advantage of solar is that it's cheap, if you don't care about consistency -- and sometimes you don't. Solar is great for charging electric cars because they have built-in batteries and then the intermittency doesn't matter. It's pretty good for air conditioning load because that tracks solar output pretty closely. Nuclear is not going to be competitive for those things.
But the reverse is true as well. You want to use solar to drive heat pumps at night in winter in regions far from the equator? That's a bad fit, and so is anything else with intermittent power output because if the power goes out people freeze to death.
The answer is to build nuclear reactors to power heat pumps and provide cogeneration and build solar to charge electric cars and run air conditioners, instead of trying to do everything with one technology.
What we have now that we didn't have 50 years ago is super cheap storage. That's a complete revolution in how to manage grids, and I don't think that the current grid planners and ops know what to do with it yet. You can use storage to avoid transmission congestion, you can use it to time shift, you can use it to avoid distribution node upgrades when you deploy it behind the meter.
There are soooooo many ways that storage can reduce grid costs and make it more economically efficient. The challenge is that nearly all grid decisions are made by people that have incentive to keep grid costs as high as possible. We need a new economic and regulatory framework in order to see the benefits of this new technology.
Now granted most of the monthly articles we see on new battery technology don't come to anything, but there have been steady gains and its an area that is far from optimal yet. Sodium ion batteries for example could change the landscape a lot.
On the one hand we have nuclear, and that's technically possible today, but comes with significant political challenges.
I suspect that a game-changer in the storage game has more chance than nuclear actually being built.
I also think a more global grid is doable. That also has political implications, and its a large project, but the internet (ie a globally connected network) shows what can be done in relatively short order.
Now consider the alternatives if we want to decarbonize heating. Nuclear -- really anything -- takes a while to build, so if we don't start building it now and then the storage technology doesn't materialize, we're screwed.
And what happens if we build new nuclear and then the storage technology does materialize? Well, it's not going to come at the expense of solar, because we'll have to build tons and tons of solar just in order to electrify transportation and apply it in the other contexts where it's the most advantageous. The nuclear plants would be in addition to that, and be replacing coal and natural gas to provide baseload and energy for heating. So the medium-term effect would just be to replace coal and gas faster.
Then if the storage technology does materialize, it would still take decades after it does to manufacture enough of it to replace the rest of the grid. So the new nuclear plants then operate for 30-50 years while that happens, instead of running for 50-100 years if it doesn't, and instead of coal and natural gas plants continuing to operate during that time if we don't build the nuclear plants. Which would be a big problem if that's 100 years and still no advantage even if it's 30.
Your argument makes sense if things happen on decade long timeliness. But solar rollout I'd happening at insane speeds already, and accelerating. The current storage using today's tech is growing on a steep curve. If sodium-ion becomes a thing it'll explode in production and demand. (The speed with which China and others can build factories will make your eyes water.)
So it all comes down to your personal fortune. Are you willing to take the economic bet, and spend your billions on nuclear? Or would you rather someone else go down that road, and you make the safer financial choice?
economically from a capital point of view, the goal is to get a return. Not generate 24x7 power. And the economics of nuclear are terrible.
It's kind of not. Solar still represents <4% of generation in the US:
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427
The growth rate is high, but that's because the base is low. Moreover, it's barely replacing anything because demand is growing, and will grow even more as transportation and heating have to be electrified. So all the new solar is going to transportation, that's a good fit, but you still need something else to grow to satisfy heating demand, much less satisfy the existing load in the power grid currently being supplied by fossil fuels.
> If sodium-ion becomes a thing it'll explode in production and demand.
The if is the unknown. What if it doesn't, and then we're that many more years behind on building the known alternative that works?
> The speed with which China and others can build factories will make your eyes water.
If it's so fast then why hasn't it already happened? Why is only 4% of production from solar, instead of e.g. 40%? How far do we get on accelerating growth before it flattens out because the low-hanging fruit is picked and the remaining demand is a bad match for solar's generation profile?
> Are you willing to take the economic bet, and spend your billions on nuclear? Or would you rather someone else go down that road, and you make the safer financial choice?
There are plenty of people willing to invest in nuclear. The main problem is that other people (not least of which Russia, who has been caught doing this) keep trying to stop them through anti-nuclear propaganda, lobbying and litigation.
> economically from a capital point of view, the goal is to get a return.
The goal is to stop burning coal.
Basically because economic growth is exponential, and exponential growth starts slow. If a certain alga doubles its population every day and takes 30 days to cover a certain lake, how long does it take to cover half the lake?
29 days. On what day does it cover 4% of the lake?
Day 25.
Until about 8 years ago, solar was too expensive in most countries to compete with fossil fuels without subsidies, and then there was a period of four years when the Chinese cartel announced in https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-solar-gcl-i... fixed prices to keep them artificially high, as you can see on https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis.... Since that cartel evidently collapsed in late 02022, the cost of "mainstream" solar panels in the Preisindex has gone from €0.34/Wp to €0.11/Wp, and the cost of "low cost" panels has dropped from €0.22/Wp to €0.065/Wp. This month, for the first time, the Preisindex is no longer rounding prices to the nearest €0.01/Wp.
A crucial question, then, is what the exponential growth rate is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics says that from 02016 to 02022 the growth rate was 26%. At that rate, growing from 4% to 100% would take 14 years; if 4% were now, that would mean producing more energy from solar than from all sources today in 02038.
That doesn't mean people will stop burning coal, of course. It just means it'll be a marginal activity.
> How far do we get on accelerating growth before it flattens out because the low-hanging fruit is picked and the remaining demand is a bad match for solar's generation profile?
That's another crucial question, and one that is very hard to predict, but most likely at a few orders of magnitude larger than current world marketed energy consumption.
Solar energy is cheap enough to be applied to many applications for which previous energy sources were too expensive. €0.065/Wp at a capacity factor of 20% is €0.33/W; financed forever at an interest rate of 5%/year that would be €0.016/W year. A watt year is 8.77 kilowatt hours, so that works out to be €0.0018 per kilowatt hour, or €0.51/GJ. This is 200× lower than what people in California are paying today. This is a rough estimate. You can figure in the panels' nominal 20-year lifetime to get a more precise figure, though the "low cost" category generally comes with no such warranty. Also, utility companies can usually get a better interest rate than 5%. But it's in the ballpark.
For many purposes, this works out to basically unlimited energy as long as you only need it when the sun is shining. Atmospheric carbon capture is a crucial one.
> What if [sodium-ion battery technology] doesn't [become a thing],
People will make do with lithium-ion and other forms of energy storage such as sensible heat energy storage, phase-change material energy storage, and TCES.
Nuclear reactors are steam engines. Steam engines used to be piston engines, but they switched to turbines because, as I understand it, turbines are cheaper. I'm not sure why piston engines are still used for internal combustion, but I suspect it may be a question of faster ramp rates — more important for peeling out of a stop light than for your power grid. But ships are commonly propelled by large two-stroke diesel engines, and ramp rates are not much of a concern there. Such engines made by Wärtsilä are reportedly comparable to turbines in their efficiency and priced competitively with turbine generators for small electric power plants.
However, neither turbine-powered generators nor piston-engine-powered generators are priced low enough to compete with solar or wind.
Based on that, my back-of-the-napkin math says the cost of charging and discharging the pack every day for 7+ years would be about $0.10/kWh.
That’s at today’s prices, but prices are still falling an average of 12-15% per year.
And I’m not convinced that even small-scale nuclear will be cost-competitive in the future, but time will tell.
Take the UAE for example, who are experts at large scale energy projects, they have constructed and commissioned 4 nuclear reactors, on time, on budget. To say that it’s not possible, is not true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant
Full disclosure, I work in the energy sector, world wide, including the UAE.
I am also a proponent of solar. Cheap energy replaces the need for manpower.
Your own link says that the first reactor was originally scheduled to start supplying electricity in 2017 but actually entered operation in 2020. It also says "As of 22 March 2018, the project's total cost was refined to $24.4 billion to complete. However, by April 9, 2020, Power Technology reported that the project cost was $32 billion."
3 years late and 30% over budget is OK by nuclear project standards, considering much greater delays and budget blowouts in recent US/EU projects. But it's not on time and on budget.
It did take 12 years of construction, and 32 billion in funding. And they project would have been in development long before construction started.
All in a regulatory environment which priorities "getting stuff done" and where there's plenty of capital to invest. (And investors who play a very long game.)
There might be conditions somewhere that are more favorable, but its not the US.
could it be done? Obviously yes. Will it be done in the US? Not a chance.
I suspect the pandemic might have provided a cause for the delay. I was myself involved in a large energy project in the UAE and remember the challenges caused by the lockdowns happening.
But probably with a 30% over budget bill, that is only partially an explanation.
Additionally, the UAE is big users of solar, also having been early adopters of the technology.
And like solar, you can build nuclear in small and large scale plants.
But my favourite contender for future, base energy source is fusion power,
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/31/1106384/inside-a...
It's fun to view these large solar plants on satellite view. Absolutely massive. https://www.google.com/maps/place/36%C2%B010'54.0%22N+100%C2... and with the nearby pumped hydro that is itself in the gigawatt range and growing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longyangxia_Dam ) removes the concerns of "how do you store the power!".
I'm not convinced small scale solar is the future when large integrated hydro+solar like this has such huge advantages.
We apparently have that for some EVSEs, but still not for my stupid dishwasher. (It uses electric heat to boost the water temperature, no matter how much I prime the hot water plumbing, and it's quite a pig energy-wise.)
Real energy has curves, and the sooner we embrace that, the better off we'll be.
Worse, my energy provider put me on a time-of-day rate that's _most_ expensive during peak sun hours, which seems backwards if they're supposed to be introducing more PV to the mix. I guess it's time to negotiate with the landlord and get some panels on the roof so I can start offsetting my own consumption at their so-called "peak" times.
10 years ago, in 2014, utility scale PV generation was 57%. Over those 10 years, utility scale PV generation increased by ~10x, where as small scale PV generation only increased by ~6.5x. In spite of absolutely massive incentives, small scale PV generation has grown slower in absolute and percentage terms in nearly every single year of the last decade.
Scale is the really important thing here. It is really easy and really cheap to use economies of scale to purchase square kilometers of panels and plop them down in bulk over vast swathes of regular land in a assembly line fashion.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_03_01_b.html
At least where I live, solar is still roughly break even cost-wise with not installing solar over 20 years -- but it increases your home's complexity and makes updating your roof more complicated and expensive.
Personally I get 17.5% return on capital spent (and ways to improve that further) so the math works out well. Ymmv.
That both explains why it was adopted relatively early for private use cases as well as why it doesn't grow as much as commercial installations as equipment gets cheaper.
At the China Windpower 2024 trade fair held in October, 12 manufacturers presented wind turbines larger than 16MW, and 5 manufacturers are pushing into the 25MW range.
After wind and PV became cheaper than coal in China, subsidies for onshore wind and PV were largely canceled. Subsidies in the offshore sector serve to build up an export industry.
As a result, 2/3 of new PV and wind farms built worldwide are subsidy-free, most of them in China.
The price-driving monopoly/oligopoly problem also affects the US electricity market.
That certainly sounds reasonable. In developed countries installation and mounting costs are a significant cost driver for solar installations, but in the third world you can do that a lot cheaper, and beating a diesel generator on cost isn't hard
If you're prepared to deal with it's unreliability (when the sun is not shining), then it's by far the cheapest power full stop. In countries with unreliable grids that looks a lot more attractive. Especially as in many of those countries it is reliably sunny.
I can assure you the sun comes up every day in Britain.
The $3/W is a choice that we made in our political system, by 1) keeping highly fractured and inconsistent local permitting processes rather than a more efficient higher-level rule making, 2) letting utilities exercise control over the process such that they can minimize installations (why isn't your electricity bill going down even though electricity generation is getting cheaper with the new technology? Same reason: regulatory capture of your Public Utilities Commission).
When looking for a home several years ago, we only had a couple of options because solar was a requirement for us, but we wouldn't be allowed to add solar at most of the properties that were on the market at the time. We ended up finding a place and adding solar, the largest array we were allowed by the utility. It's very beneficial and I'm still glad we did it, but with an electric car and all electric appliances, it's often not enough to supply our needs.
By allowing utilities to place such low capacity limits on solar generation, solar installation becomes less attractive, which I presume is what the utilities want and is the reason they lobby for such restrictions.
Getting rid of these outdated HOA rules and utility-imposed capacity limits (when there's no technical reason for them) are two things we'll need to overcome in order to make solar adoption more attractive and hopefully more affordable for everyone.
> A world that mostly runs on solar power will also need something else—such as hydropower, nuclear, or geothermal—to generate energy when the sun isn’t shining in the evenings and winters. Jessika Trancik, an MIT professor who models clean-energy development, told me that governments need to steer investments toward storage and alternate forms of energy to compensate for that inherent downtime. That way, the world can have a reliable energy mix when 50 or 60 percent of electricity generation comes from solar and wind.
I'd expect that the solar subsidies mentioned by the last paragraph are for solar-adjacent technologies like energy storage, not the panels themselves.
This is annoyingly common with journalists and also a very clear tell that they don't have any idea what they are writing about.
Maybe in a few years the writer will understand that it's tricky to store energy in a cost-efficient way and that energy isn't the same as power.
Or perhaps they won't.
Either way, in late 2024, this low level of understanding is pretty tiring.
The writer "has been the the recipient of a 2017 National Association of Science Writers reporting award for coverage of air pollution in Detroit, and a finalist for the 2019 Livingston Award for a series on water politics at the Texas-Mexico border. At The Atlantic, she covers climate change."
The writer's CV doesn't mention any education at all.
If you map energy -> power the paragraph actually says something sensible.
It could have been worse: if they'd said something like "500 megawatts per week" it would be completely unclear what they even mean. Should you map it to megawatt-hours / week (around 3 MW), because that's a common (kind of goofy) unit to work in? Or does it mean they use (on average) 500 MW?
You think it's clear tell that she knew what she was talking about when she wrote "the total amount of energy produced from solar systems in 2019 was thought to be about 500 megawatts".
Similarly you think it's a clear tell that I don't know what I'm talking about when I say that this is an incorrect statement, and that this is a clear tell.
So there's nothing actually wrong with the reporter's statement, even though it would be more precise to say that the average power generated was thought to be around 500 megawatts.
The arithmetic number wasn't made up out of thin air. The unit (and arithmetic number) were wrong in the given context (energy).
I claim that the latter is a common tell of a lack of understanding.
You claim that I don't know what I'm talking about since the number wasn't made up.
They said “500MW”
Is that peak output? Nameplate capacity? 500MWh?
Who knows.
It's true that someone who didn't understand the area might say "500 megawatts" when they meant "500 megawatt-hours", but the reporter in this case didn't make that error, and anyway 500 megawatt-hours in a year would be 57 kilowatts, which is an implausibly small amount of solar power to be produced by an entire medium-income country. That's more like a single large commercial building.
This is like the seventeenth century situation where cloth was sold by the "ell", but each kind of cloth was measured by a different ell. The Flemish ell was a different length from the English ell or the Scottish ell. This nonsense survives today in the custom current in the less advanced countries of weighing gold and silver in "troy ounces" and other commodities such as pepper in a different "ounce" that is about 10% smaller.
But the situation with energy is much worse, because transmuting electrical energy into gasoline, or vice versa, is enormously less inefficient than transmuting pepper into gold. Different forms of energy are far more often equivalent than different forms of mass.
The insight underlying the SI system of units is that calculations become much easier if you use a consistent set of units derived in a simple way from a minimal set of base units such as the kilogram and meter. How much kinetic energy is going to kill a 100-kg man falling from a building at 10 meters per second? Trivially, 50 kilojoules. How much energy does a 10-watt lightbulb consume in 5000 seconds? 50 kilojoules. If you are paying US$0.02 per megajoule for gasoline, US$0.01 per megajoule for natural gas, and US$0.04 per megajoule for electrical energy, what's the cheapest way to heat your house? Gas, unless your electric heat pump has a coefficient of performance over 4.
By contrast, if the different prices are expressed in different units, it adds difficulty to every kind of reasoning, to the point that there seems to be a popular misconception that megawatts are not even the right unit for measuring the solar energy production of a country.
Kilowatt hours are an especially silly unit. A watt is by definition a joule per second, so measuring energy in kilowatt hours is similar to measuring distance in mph-minutes. An mph-minute works out to be exactly 88 feet, and a kilowatt hour is exactly 3.6 megajoules. Just use megajoules! Stop making everything more difficult.
"500 meters per second" is not just (total production per year) / (seconds in a year) but also (total production in a day) / (seconds in a day) and (total production in a month) / (seconds in a month).
Meters per second, like watts, has the advantage of being an SI unit and therefore facilitating calculations with other SI units without requiring a bunch of numerical conversion factors.
But in this case yeah, there seems to be a mix-up.
Separately, it's true that peak power is often a very important criterion for energy storage systems.
Except that isn't what the article says:
"In South Africa, for example, the total amount of energy produced from solar systems in 2019 was thought to be about 500 megawatts"
But hey, you reached your goal, killing the velocity of my comment way up there.
You planted the seed of "doubt".
I think it is pretty common for reasoning to require a fairly long explanation to become clear. Hopefully I've achieved that for most readers, even if you are still struggling. But if you object to this thread being "extremely verbose", why are you copying and pasting the same comment into it here and in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41998632?
> In South Africa, for example, the total amount of energy produced from solar systems in 2019 was thought to be about 500 megawatts, Nana said
This is a very explicit phrasing “the total amount of energy produced” and the units don’t work out. You can figure out what they meant by doing additional research, but that doesn’t make it a non-error.
There's nothing incorrect about any of these; it's mostly just a question of which units are the most convenient or unambiguous in a given context. And, I guess, which units your audience is accustomed to seeing; the SI unit for liters of gasoline per 100 kilometers would be square meters, but if you say your new car's gas mileage is 7.8 × 10⁻⁸ m², a lot of people will think you're using the wrong units, and they will surely have a hard time interpreting it.
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† Well, except that in this case the "500" is almost certainly made up; I don't think zelos was looking up South African rope production statistics!
But hey, you reached your goal, killing the velocity of my comment way up there.
You planted the seed of "doubt". Congrats.
Because of behavior like this: HN is not a great place for discussing anything to do with energy. Fanaticism generally rules. The loudest person wins. This is sad.
Probably someone out there will be convinced by "the loudest person", but hopefully most people will instead be convinced by sound reasoning and evidence. That's my goal: understanding what is really true, rather than believing what you copy-paste the most times.
That phrase is still nonsense. The fact that if you go, do your research, get the real numbers, and interpret them you can discover that what the journalist is trying to say is correct is meaningless. You can still cut the journalist out from the process and lose nothing.
Understanding the difference between power and energy is really the most crucial aspect you can imagine, here. Still they keep failing at this.
i think a more useful correction for people whose day to day lives don't require them to keep track of the difference is
MW is rate of energy use with respect to time, not total energy. The rate of energy in science is called "power"
because they both are measures of energy, and the energy/power distinction in science co-opted preexisting words that didn't have those precise meanings. Total energy is the integral of power over time, so it's not really wrong to say "this higher energy battery contains more power" in everyday speech.
These data accord with the article's thesis, but it doesn't inspire confidence that units were conflated. They're not the same thing as megawatts, they don't measure energy, etc.
Then there is the issue that there is no battery mandate, which to me is insane.
In sunny, warmer states we have an oversupply of energy during the day, and then when the sun sets we have a shortage as everybody comes home, and their AC needs to work harder, and people start cooking with electricity.
So basically when you put on panels without a battery you're making it harder for everybody. You're using the grid as a battery.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/08/14/1244330369/solar-rooftop-pane...
https://tildes.net/~enviro/1jqy/coal_is_powering_the_energy_...
Also, cheap solar seems to be running into something like Amdahl’s law, where the solar panel cost is a small part of total cost. Hard to say what the trend will be for non-panel costs. How cheaply can they be installed and maintained?
Production cost per PV watt was around 15 cents at the end of 2023 [1]. Some claim that by the end of 2024 this figure will reach 10 cents per watt. [2]
[1]. https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-solar-panel-costs-plunge....
[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/11/23/solar-module-prices-m....
Ironically the only place that has seen effective pushback is California, where the legislature structured the system such that solar installs are basically just a gift to their corrupt energy companies.
Either way, everyone's realigning now that Elon is MAGA, solar and EVs are out, they're MAGA now. Now it's all about degrowth and going back to our roots, there is no energy that is clean now.
https://nypost.com/2022/10/01/bidens-woke-green-energy-makes...
I admit the phrase "woke energy" isn't commonly used, but the sentiment is there. If you think backing Elon would lead to cognitive dissonance you have to remember that you can avoid the issue entirely by just not thinking about it.
¹ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
At home, I'm fanatical about using bog-standard AA/AAA rechargeable batteries for as many things as possible (anything with a micro-USB charger is basically "e-waste waiting to happen"), and thinking through any kind of home-supplement for solar, batteries, etc. makes me think that the "waste" of house-scale / grid-scale batteries for storage makes the math not work out.
Rough googling puts ~30kWh batteries at ~$15-30k, which: even if you think of it as having a 30-year service life, still works out to ~$50-100/mo in just battery depreciation.
Similarly with cars (eg: PHEV). First 5 years? Great! Next 10 years? ...a ticking time bomb of "must be replaced" with the battery representing an exorbitant percentage of the vehicle value. $500 of tires on a $5000 car is one thing, but a $5000 battery on a car seems like a net negative environmentally and financially?