> Compared to what?
My comment was based on 1kW panel on Amazon.com is $500 delivered but there's likely a lot of nuance in quality and lifetime and labor for these projects
My comment was based on 1kW panel on Amazon.com is $500 delivered but there's likely a lot of nuance in quality and lifetime and labor for these projects
Coal runs 24/7 pretty predictably. 1kw of coal means 1kw of power 24/7.
Solar output varies heavily throughout the year, with only limited times where 1kw will be produced by that panel. On average, you’d be lucky to get 2-3 hrs a day at that capacity, and 8 hrs total of any significant output.
Also, the output from that panel needs to be converted/inverted to be used, and those inverters are expensive too.
If you want to produce electricity 24/7 from those panels, you’ll also need batteries.
So figure 5-10x the cost of a single panel to somewhat reliably produce that panels equivalent in energy 24/7 - assuming you have the space.
This is where the cost calculations of solar fall apart to the point of being outright fraud. You need to add the cost of the natural gas peaker plant you build and keep around for nights and “seasonal” energy troughs before the number makes any sort of sense whatsoever.
I’ve said it before - but solar power has been the easiest ever to predict investment I’ve ever made so far in life. The investment was into natural gas.
Solar is cheap until you reach a saturation point that is already there in some areas - rapidly approaching in others. Battery deployments currently are measured in the hours of duck curve they cover at the moment, not nights or number of days they can cover in totally predictable seasonal energy shortage scenarios. It’s trivial when you can ignore and socialize the actual expensive hard problems to solve.
I love solar and wind - they should be primary generation sources for humanity. I hate the utterly rampant financial fraud going on sold to the public by professional grifters.
It is because of this. Literally. You’ll need to do your own math though, because it’s too politically embarrassing to acknowledge. After all, California now has ‘too much solar’!
It’s also why California is keeping their Nuke plant alive (doing a strong about face), and building a ton of natural gas peaker plants, and Germany imports massive amounts of electricity during certain times of day and year - and has been keeping coal around a lot longer than they were supposed to.
Because this is a way harder problem than naive back of the envelope calculations suggest. But that would be awkward to acknowledge. So, we don’t.
Or is it really ‘there is no way they could be lying to us, or doing something stupid! That would be crazy!’?. Because if so, I’ve got some math that shows it literally could be no other way.