Solar-plus-storage technology is improving quickly
volts.wtf
volts.wtf
Yesterday evening's peak demand was between 7-8pm at 30.7 gigawatts. Supply breakdown around 8pm:
Batteries: 8.4 GW
Natural gas: 6.0 GW
Renewables: 5.4 GW
Large hydro: 4.4 GW
Imports: 4.1 GW
Nuclear: 2.3 GW
Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance
It's the same kind of thing we see with self driving cars. They can navigate sunny California streets so "self driving" must be so close! But put them anywhere with snow, rain, fog, or even just grey skies and they struggle heavily
California represents the easy 80% side of the Pareto curve for a lot of this stuff
One could argue that batteries will have a bigger impact than solar. Batteries obviously let you decouple power generation and consumption, shifting anytime production to peak-time demand.
Less obvious is that local demand can fluctuate 2x. It usually dips mid-day and peaks 5-9pm (see the charts at www.caiso.com) when people come home and turn on their lights, oven, appliances, etc. This pattern happens throughout the year.
So forget solar for a moment; the ability to shift energy that was produced mid-day (even by a natural gas plant) to the evening would allow you to build fewer power plants. Nuclear + batteries might also be a good combination. Batteries get you closer to being able to solve for "average demand" rather than "peak demand."
This has nothing to do w/ California. California is just on the leading edge of battery installation. Solar just exacerbates the issue of the peak-to-trough ratio (evening vs. mid-day demand) due to mid-day solar "overproduction" causing it to be uneconomical to run gas plants mid-day. But solving for "peak demand" is still a problem in the absence of solar.
Still: most of the complaints about solar are answered when paired with large battery systems.
It works really well: The vertical mounting means the panels stay cooler and are thus more efficient. The east-west mounting also does that, but additionally shifts the peaks of production to close to sundown and sunrise. The only real downside is that you are using (somewhat) more panel surface. And of course you're still not generating more electricity after sundown or on cloudy days, so it is not a panacea.
Sources:
- https://undecidedmf.com/298-vertical-bifacial-solar-panels/
Looks terrible.
I think the best are only about 500Wh/kg, so a shipping container* full of them would be 28870kg * 500Wh/kg = 14.44 MWh, so if it takes an hour to the destination it's about the capacity of one not particularly thick cable.
Cables are great for electricity. If the (aluminium) cable had a cross section of one square meter, you could get all the way around the planet and back to where you started with just 1Ω of DC electrical resistance.
Was my understanding incorrect? Or perhaps have new technologies emerged that work around this limitation?
https://www.catl.com/en/news/6401.html
That's mainly for EVs though.
Not being ideal for solar just means you need to install more area, and there's plenty available space. Solar is already the cheapest (if not it's competitive with the cheapest wind power) power source. Also having to, say, double the panel area in lower solar irradiance requires less than double the non-panel costs (you don't need double the inverters or power transmission).
California is leading because the politics/economy/irradiance are the best combination, you would expect a place like that to lead first. It does not follow that other places are unsuitable for solar, it will just cost marginally more.
It's a strange but persistent pattern where success in ideal conditions will draw out a litany of reasons why that success is actually a sign of failure when instead the early success is just a sign of ideal conditions. Why wouldn't something promising succeed first in the place with the best conditions for success?
Looks like it's about 12 cents (in USD) more expensive on average per kwh in Germany than Cali
So maybe Germany isn't exactly a great example of energy production if it's that much more expensive
What is? Consumer energy prices?
Apples-to-apples consumer energy prices are difficult between the US and EU, Germany has historically had particularly high energy prices for various reasons, taxation is significantly different. Also they were a heavy importer of Russian gas and foolishly dismantled their entire nuclear generation capacity, so there are other reasons why their energy prices are high. The peaking energy costs caused by the Ukraine/Russia war have gone down.
There's no "moving goalposts" possible. Without any morality, preventing future costs, or any such way of adjusting the "real" costs... solar is just cheaper, and by a large margin which is only expected to grow. Yes you need storage and methods to move power east and west, solar is still cheaper. The greediest, most short sighted, heartless monster would still invest in solar before anything else because it makes them the most money.
https://www.dbresearch.de/PROD/RPS_DE-PROD/PROD0000000000528...
So yeah sure, it can pretend to be ahead on green tech, as long as France invests in nuclear and sell it cheap electricity in the winter when it is most needed and most expensive.
I am so tired of the bullshit about Germany "success", I think they should be disconnected from the EU grid so they can walk the walk before talking the talk.
We can also build power lines! Between different places! Such as the places with lots of sun, and the places without lots of sun!!!
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
It’s easy to put extra solar panels into a system to make up for reduced average sunlight. It’s standard practice to have a ratio of PV capacity to inverter capacity of something like 1.2:1. In a low sun location you could bump that up to 1.5:1 or higher.
Traditional power generation was always centralized big plants. Most people wouldn't want to live next to them and from a health perspective you probably shouldn't.
So "close" has always been within air quotes.
They are fire/explosion hazards, heavy metals, etc.
What power output in megawatt are we talking about here? I'm struggling to think of a fossil power source efficient at small scale
My point is that a nuclear power station near a city is probably better than a wind farm offshore 1000km away even if the wind farm and the nuclear generate the same
Nuclear has significant downsides besides the waste and proliferation risks.
You wouldn't want to build a grid on just nuclear.
Let's assume that city takes 1.2MWh at its peak every day. That would mean you need to be able to supply that. So you build a nuclear plant producing 1.2MWh of energy.
Now you have the argument against renewables (the sun doesn't always shine) in reverse. The city doesn't always need that peak power. And nuclear is the slowest of all power sources to tune up and down in terms of output.
Nuclear for base load makes a lot of sense as it'll always be fully utilized. But nuclear to power a grid 100% doesn't exist anywhere for a reason either.
The EIA has it at $81 for advanced nuclear, which is competitive with offshore wind ($88) but not hydro ($58), PV+battery ($53), PV ($31), or onshore wind ($29). Now, both of those could see big improvements with scale but I think the uncertainty of the markets and our political climate are going to complicate that a lot. A big nuclear push needs a lot of upfront funding and while Trump has boosted it a bit and hates wind, I’m not sure how much that counts on a loan that big since right now that plant is guaranteed to lose money most of the time unless it’s near a big industrial user with high baseline demand.
No, it doesn't. This is plain wrong. Power loss for a 1000 km HVDC line is 3.5% [0], which is the same order of magnitude as battery losses.
If you had of said it cost a lot of money to transmit over long distances, then fine.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#:~...
We certainly can. However it is expensive. In my country (Australia) is is estimated to be cira $20 Billion
The US recently spent more than that on a single nuclear power plant.
The point is the upfront costs aren’t actually that significant.
Average solar panels last 20-30 at most right now just fyi
50 years is practically right out of the question
Considering they work by basically taking electrons from the material, they are guaranteed to get much less efficient and I doubt it's a linear effect. I think once you have destroyed the first layers, it becomes much more complicated to get meaningful power depending on variables.
Solar panel talk always focuses on the ideal conditions like California, but you have to account that plenty the energy transition is necessary in place where solar panels are not that efficient to begin with.
The actual panels themselves are a different kind of infrastructure.
There's a few big metros the rest of it is sparse, where sparse is a stretch? Isn't Perth like the most isolated city in the world?
I remember the uni day discussions about Africa supplying the rest of the world with solar energy and that the material requirements for such an infrastructure should become a thing around 2025 - 2035 ... then someone explained climate change and hinted at the exponential function ...
back to topic: you'd have to maintain an "inert" backup, which isn't portfolio-communist-economically "viable". or you share the load "as much as necessary", which would still become an issue if any of the suppliers have a fallout ...
and AFAIK it still is a real plan but, officially, we are not where we wanted to be material science-wise ... heat, distances and batteries are still somewhat an issue, meaning, not efficient and cheap enough to be a no-brainer (despite already being a no-brainer but, you know, wolfs of the wall street bangers are super cool and smart and who wouldn't be partisan with leBuffets et al???)
> Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply and Muscat in Oman – 99%, using 6 GW solar panels and 17 GWh battery. Even cloudier cities like Birmingham [UK] can get 62% of the way to a constant supply every hour of every day across the year.
[0] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
I'm all for not letting perfect being the enemy of good, and I used to work in solar. I'm very in favor of it. I just really think people need to be realistic about this stuff
The Birmingham case is a perfect example where solar might not be the source, wind is
I do think that the batteries side of the equation is handwaved away too much though
Batteries at this scale are going to be awful for the environment once we start to have to decommission and dispose of them
There are no perfect solutions unfortunately
I have never gotten a clear explanation of this from someone who expresses concern for batteries causing environmental damage. They aren't harmful like car batteries, for example. And the people expressing concern about batteries never seem to express concern for the far greater use of other minerals in their daily life.
Could be wrong though
There are many place that get a lot of sun. As solar panels come down in price, it becomes even easier to compensate for deficits with additional panels.
It’s common practice to install more solar panel capacity than inverter capacity because panels are rarely operating at peak output anyway. If you’re installing 100kW of inverters, you might install 120kW of panels. The panel array wouldn’t exceed 100kW most of the time anyway.
In a location with suboptimal sun, you might install an even higher ratio of panels to inverter and battery capacity.
Some people get bothered by this because they feel like some of the solar power is wasted at peak capacity, but you have to consider that the inverter and battery capacity is also wasted when you’re not sending enough from the panel array. It’s a balancing act.
You also have to consider that the same sunlight that makes California good for solar also creates additional demand for air conditioning. A location with less sun would have less solar heat gain, which is easier to serve for many reasons.
It also represents 12% of the country's population, which makes it a better benchmark than just being 1 of 50 states.
Florida and Colorado are not much farther below California in total solar radiation per year per sq meter, either.
Ditto for even Idaho and Oklahoma.
California is representative of more than 25% of the United States in terms of solar intensity.
People really need to get away from the idea that if a solution doesn't work for 100% of use cases then it's nonviable.
What I am saying is "it works in California, it must be ready to roll out globally immediately" is silly
It works in California means "it is ready to roll out in areas with very optimal conditions but long-term it still likely has a lot of speedbumps so temper your timelines accordingly"
That's all. I'm just tired of people thinking timelines are short when stuff performs under super ideal conditions
If it works in California then it will probably work elsewhere. AND more importantly, if it doesn't work in California then it's probably not going to work anywhere else.
This feels like a strawman. We just started doing this in one place with ideal conditions. The next step could be other places with even more ideal conditions New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada (all have more sunshine than "ideal" California). [0]
We need to start investing immediately to begin overcoming the speed-bumps you mention. California has gotten to this point in about 5 years. Spend the next 5 years on the states I mentioned above. Then move on to Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Utah, South Carolina, and Kansas.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/sunniest-st...
So San Francisco?
As a result, solar is rarely cost effective even with subsidies, and basically never without them.
Doesn't mean people don't install it for various other reasons, but it serves as a good contrast to California despite similar political landscapes.
The one big upside that I haven't seen mentioned is that rooftop solar is local. So what I overproduce doesn't go on the big grid, it's probably consumed by my neighbor or someone in my street.
All those big power plants, and big consumers of electricity (because they're switching from their current source), will lead to net congestion where you need to decide if you want to increase net capacity... Which is slow and $$$
I'll be using a local / non-grid-tied system with Ecoflow batteries and a smart panel or transfer switch of some sort. IMO this is the best way to go when solar is non-competitive in terms of selling electricity back - also significantly more robust against disasters, since grid-tied systems do not work when the grid is down (something consumers tend to gloss over or be ignorant of) due to safety regulations.
:/
Because solar isn't energy dense, you will probably be told that you picked an area with low land cost to make it look better.
For England you can replace the word solar with wind and the same would probably apply
Houses don't tend to have consistent electricity usage. Think of the electricity usage for a suburb. Chances are it's almost 0 most days. People get home and turn on the stove, the washer, the TV, etc. Big demand spikes at certain times of day, low demand for the rest
Commercial usage goes the opposite direction. Higher during the day when stores and offices are open, lower overnight
Industrial usages tend to be more consistent, but constant. Factories don't shut down overnight, but they have high constant requirements
But as a power company you are supplying all of this. You have to supply a consistent load that satisfies all of these usecases. It's all one grid after all, outside of some very unusual cases
And if you oversupply too much you break the grid. If you undersupply then stuff that relies on you shuts down and breaks
It's very much a goldilocks problem, which is non-trivial to optimize or automate
It's the renewables during the day while the sun is shining.
My question is how do the batteries go , if there is 1 - N days of cloudy weather? Can the batteries supply the peak for more than one day? Is there ( or where would they go ) transmission lines to bring in the needed peak supply from other storage (battery / pumped hydro ) areas?
Another step would be to include days of peak electricity demand, which in my country occurs in cold weather ( heaters) and very hot weather ( air conditioner's ) OR is there demand limits like in Spain demand limit for some houses is around 3KW (YUKS)
Supply itself is an inadequate metric. Yet convenient to obstruct the view upon CA that beacon of the future, suddenly being littered with third world brown and blackouts.
Sadly, the US is hitting a hiccup as the current administration is going out of their way to make solar installs harder and more expensive. Putting tariffs on solar equipment imports is an insane self-defeat. We should be importing as much cheap solar and battery gear as we can get our hands on.
Give it a couple years of price progress and political turnover and I think we’re going to be in a great position.
On the contrary
> The sunniest US city, Las Vegas [...] It could get to 60% solar+storage at $65/MWh — cheaper than gas.
The article asserts that until you are generating the majority of your power from Solar+Storage, at least in favorable places, solar is cheaper than gas...
And it reached that conclusion under the incredibly unfavourable assumption that all the solar is in the same place, not being distributed around by a grid averaging out the amount of cloud cover over space.
Expensive in that the policy choice is "we want the worst-case to be affordable", and that this includes not only explosive meltdowns but also international treaties to make sure nobody steals radioisotopes.
More than it needs to be, because anecdotes I've heard about radiation spills include "some liquid was spilled on the tarmac so we had to dig up a long deep trench; the replacement had some granite in and was more radioactive than the stuff it replaced".
Exactly, gas is heavily subsidized and government supported in the US. And even with that support it only barely scrapes ahead. Courtesy of current and future tax payers coughing up the interest payments on the trillions of dollars in debt. That's not going to last indefinitely. The key point here is that the difference is a bit artificial.
In the rest of the world where installing solar is something like a third of the cost (no tariffs, less installation bureaucracy, less crippling rules and legislation, etc.) and where batteries can be imported closer to cost price from China, the picture is very different. If it's importing LNG vs. cheap solar panels + batteries, the latter is already very attractive in many places. Even at higher latitudes than the 49th parallel below which most of the US is.
And it's on track to get a lot better. Production for sodium ion batteries is starting to come online in China. It will be a while before those make it to the US due to the politics. But some are now projecting cost as low as 10$/kwh for those mid term. 1 mwh battery would cost about 10K$ at those prices. And they have quite long lives (thousands of charge cycles). You can run a house on one of those for well over a month in the US. Much longer in places where houses are better insulated and more efficient. It will be a few years before we can get these obviously. But it's a nice mental model for what a reasonably affordable battery will be able to do soon.
Is that a typo? Just a year ago ago batteries were expected to drop to $80/kWh around 2026-2027... $10/kWh in the near future is absolutely insane.
It's also worth noting that we've been on a bit of a journey with solar panels. Prices for those have also fallen quite a bit in the last decade and might fall further.
That puts any investments to do with gas plants solidly under water within just a few years. Which is why there is a reluctance in the market to invest in that sort of thing despite considerable political pressure in parts of the US to do so.
The US as an manufacturing and export country already doesn't make much sense. And that will only get worse. Industry depends on energy and if that energy is locally more expensive than abroad, that puts any energy intensive business at a disadvantage when other countries start running on really cheap renewables and battery.
If you look at this globally, there are a lot of emerging markets that never imported that much oil, coal, and gas to begin with that probably never will. They'll be growing fueled by cheap locally generated renewables. And then there are countries all over Asia and Europe that are mostly importing their fossil fuels that are going to decimate what they import over the next decades. All of that will shift the economic balance in their favor. Any one exporting fossil fuels (including the US) is going to have a rather big problem with shrinking exports.
Places like China are far ahead of everyone else here. And an increasingly large part of their economy is actually selling their tech to other countries to get to a similar level.
The tariffs are going to impact me heavily because I had planned on buying a shitload of solar in the next 3-5 years. If the price on solar triples in that timeframe (as the price on other things has in the last few years), I will not be "going solar" after all except for a few small hobby projects.
That being said, we should not lose sight of the fact that the REASON solar is cheap right now is because it manufactured almost exclusively in the far east, at cost, subsidized by a communist state, to stifle worldwide competition. I don't think that is good for the world either. There is likely (hopefully) a middle ground here somewhere.
China primarily wants to cut oil and gas imports. Exports are a bonus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China#/media/Fi...
But it didn't start installing large quantities of solar power domestically until 2013:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China#Solar_PV_...
Before that, solar power was too expensive for large scale use inside China. Chinese renewable energy growth was mostly hydropower and wind before 2013. Now of course China is by far #1 in yearly solar power installations as well as solar manufacturing, and that in combination with electric vehicle adoption is helping to curb oil demand:
"China’s electric car revolution hammers demand for oil"
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-electric-car-revolution...
I don't think "to stifle competition" is right. I suspect China would love it if other countries were investing in solar as much as they are. They just want the tech ASAP.
The other group has been trying to tax solar for years: https://solarrights.org/blog/2025/05/06/solartax2024/
Why no outcry on HN?
The fundamental problem with net metering is that it is obviously unsustainable and unfair. People who are hooked up to the grid benefit from more than just the energy they consume, but the hookup costs and maintenance of the grid is a real cost that power companies need to pay for. Perhaps even more obviously, any company that is in a retail business can only survive if they buy a product at a (cheaper) wholesale rate and sell it at a (more expensive) retail rate. Net metering is exactly the same as forcing power companies to buy energy at a retail rate. Again, this is obviously not sustainable.
As a homeowner, of course I would love net metering, because I'd be getting a sweet deal. But it's not hard for me to see how this can't continue as solar power installations increase. Austin, TX, was one of the first locales to use "value of solar" pricing, and yeah, while it sucks for the homeowner, it is also fairer and more sustainable. I'm also not saying this is the only way to do things (e.g. you could have a monthly connection fee and a separate monthly power charge), but this "solar rights" group is just spinning bullshit because their sweet deal is about to come to an end.
Yes, that is exactly my point. And yes, I'd love it if I got paid more as a homeowner. But Austin is basically paying me wholesale rates for my power I send to the grid, which fundamentally makes sense from an economics perspective. Again, net metering is inherently infeasible for the power company without a vast reconfiguring of how grid electricity is charged.
Solar should be saving the homeowner money and not risking increased taxes in the future, especially if the homeowner has to foot the bill for thousands of dollars it takes to install the panels/system.
"Net metering is exactly the same as forcing power companies to buy energy at a retail rate. Again, this is obviously not sustainable."
Why prop up power companies if the business model is unsustainable? Especially if you want to convert to something like solar? Why should I, as a homeowner, be forced to pay the power companies just because they can't change with the times?
The problem lies when you need the power company 'some of the time'.
The costs of the power company are in 2 parts. Generation and Distribution. Traditionally those costs were bundled together, those who used more paid more (for both generation and Distribution. )
If I generate my own solar, say 65% of the time, then I'm paying 65% less for generation (which is fair, I'm using 65% less) but I'm also paying 65% less for distribution (which is unfair because the cost of distribution is fixed, not variable. )
The power company can solve this by billing the two parts separately. Indeed in some places in the world utilities are formally splitting the two parts into different companies. Generation has variable cost depending on consumption- Distribution has fixed cost if you are connected at all.
Of course people without solar want this split (it fairly distributes Distribution), folks with solar want the old way to continue (less for me to pay, cost to everyone else goes up.)
Power companies are trying to change with the times, by separately billing. Some homeowners are the ones trying to straddle the best of both words, and effectively get "100% availability" for no cost.
It makes perfect sense and I don't see why/how it should be different. Asking to pay just for electricity generation is crazy because it is the "easier" step, creating, maintaining and equilibrating the network is by far the more complicated endeavor.
That's not a fair argument.
> The costs of the power company are in 2 parts. Generation and Distribution
That's the real issue. How, in most places in the us that I know of, these 2 are combined. Which leads to this problem becoming a thing.
We all pay taxes for roads. Whether we use them or not. Being connected to the grid should make everyone pay an equal share based on their connection size. Who delivers power over that connection? Pick your provider, make it a free market where power is a true commodity. Generation prices will drop significantly, distribution prices will probably go up.
You can apply the above reasoning to the ISPs of the world too. Like roads, and electric connections, I think we can all consider an internet connection as vital to our daily lives as roads are
> That's not a fair argument.
Why not? Plenty of people do it.
It's like saying we should all use helicopters if we don't like traffic.
Smaller grids are harder to get right and more expensive to run because you need more surplus capacity to be able to deal with peak demand.
But then the reverse is true - if you are enjoying the benefits that the grid bestows then you need to pay for that. Yes, in the past the "variable benefits" and the "fixed benefits" were all rolled into a single payment, which was based on variable use. It was "simple" and "mostly fair".
Now that a single payment is no longer fair, it makes sense that the benefit-cost needs to be split into a variable, and fixed, component. That's not some sort of new tax, or penalty for solar users. It's simply costing benefits correctly.
So we return to the point - if you want the benefits, then these are the costs of that. If you don't need the benefits then you can disconnect. (Personally I like the benefits, and hence pay my share of the fixed costs.)
The interesting bit is that the distribution charge is a mix of fixed-fees and per-kWh fees. Obviously the fixed fees will remain if I added solar, but I'm not certain what would happen to the per-kWh fees if I started exporting power to the grid.
Proposals have included fees as high as $700 per year for the average solar consumer. These efforts, backed by Governor Newsom’s Public Utilities Commission, were defeated in 2021, 2022, and 2024 due to public outcry but remain under consideration."
Just admit that the the Democrats in charge of California don't care about the environmental benefits of solar.
You keep making this disingenuous argument all over this thread.
If you have solar and use their grid to distribute it you pay to use their grid. If you want solar off the grid and want no distribution you pay nothing to them.
It's really that simple. There is production and distribution. If you are using their distribution you pay them for it. Not to mention for the stability of still getting power when your solar is insufficient...
My city recently enacted a tax on solar called a generation fee or something like that. That is, if you put up solar panels, generate all your own power, and export ZERO back to the grid you need to pay them "fee" for every kWh generated because they are making less back in distribution costs to their subscribers since you stopped buying their power.
Sounds to me like their broken business model is their problem. After doing the math in some places it make sense to disconnect completely, avoid the interconnect fees, and run a standby generator for the edge cases where solar doesn't work. I've heard this is becoming popular in places like Australia and California more recently (Of course, then the government tries to make living off grid illegal to protect electric company profits)
Sorry, what other group. Power companies?
"They unsuccessfully tried again in 2024, working with Governor Newsom to try and slip a Solar Tax in his proposed budget."
NM-just perused your HN comments and they are littered with dog whistles and talking points. Gymnastics seems too generous.
We are specifically talking about the increase costs in solar. Taxing is definitely one of them.
"dog whistles and talking point"
You have 3 comments. You also keep using that phrase 'gymnastics'. Do you even know what it means? It doesn't appear so.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-...
I would worry more about the inverters, including microinverters.
Also consider that if someone is doing industrial sabotage on that scale it would be much easier to attack the fossil fuel and nuclear power plants and their enormous computer controlled generators. Even hydroelectric would be susceptible. Or maybe attack the substations. There is nothing unique or special about solar panels that makes them a good target, and their highly distributed and diverse nature actually makes them more difficult.
> and their highly distributed and diverse nature actually makes them more difficult
Distributed doesn't make it harder, if/when there's a common failure mode. See e.g. this with the power grid which is obviously as distributed as any PV connected to it: https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/01/could-hackers-use-n...
It's still worth examining the panels in minute detail. I just think it would be a ton more difficult to hide much functionality within a panel.
The technology keeps improving, clean energy is increasingly shaping up to be a new arms race with China, and politics these days tend to swing back and forth wildly. By 2028+, it’s very plausible we’ll see things 180 and there'll be plenty of government attention given to clean energy. Even the current administration could change their tune if it's positioned as "beating China" (or even for no reason at all, because who knows with them).
Spending a couple years to prop it up and become a well-established player by then could be a huge advantage.
I'm looking into a DIY install, and it's looking like the microinverters are going to basically be just as expensive as the panels themselves. A quick Google seems to imply this is similar for utility-scale installs: the BoS costs are less than, but still comparable to the costs of the actual panels.
On one hand I get it; panels are very simple, robust devices, while inverters need to interface with the grid and usually have network connectivity and so on. On the other hand, there's a lot less material in an inverter, and they're still relatively simple electronics? Which we're pretty good at mass producing cheaply. You'd think there's a lot of room there to get the cost down.
Perkskovites to name one tech, will probably be a generational shift in solar panel technologies, the US would be stupid to miss it if they want to be a future world energy player outside the slow inevitable decline of fossil fuels.
For who has the stomach to fund it, there is available maybe another order of magnitude in cost performance in solar, and say two or three orders of magnitude of cost performance available in batteries?
It's not a one-off datapoint: none of the other upcoming massive AI datacenters, that I've read about, are built for solar power. Amazon's in rural Illinois (2.2 gigawatts), was also on HN, also going with natural gas.
I'll believe in this when the ruthlessly optimizing FAANG's believe in it, with their own money. Clearly they do not.
E.g. the Al Dhafra Solar PV project in the UAE has a capacity of 2 GW and covers over 20 square kilometers, using ~4 million panels.
I mean, sure, Musk clearly doesn't like CA these days, but the point is there's a lot of cheap land out there.
Much of Tennessee is deeply forested. 8000 acres is a square 3.5 miles or 5.7 km on a side.
Knocking down that much forest hits different than planting poles in dry grassland or desert that prevails in much of the western US.
According to the article, 2 GW would require 8-10 Solar GW and 35-40 GWh of batteries to achieve high 90's availability. I would guess finding enough land close by might be a challenge.
Just imagine if we install 300GW of solar panels in a dark warehouse and connect it to 3000 GWh of battery capacity, then we can magically dance around with fairies in our CO2 free Utopia?
Don't believe it? What are you a nazi bigot?
I keep getting downvoted for much less sarcastic comments that are actually providing actual information on reality.
In this case, I find it baffling that they see nothing wrong in needing 22km2 just for a solar panel installation, before even talking about the cost of batteries.
Like there is no way that this has no environmental impact and plenty of unsuspected side effects. And that's before talking about the fact that it would be an installation for just one usage, in very good conditions.
Solar is getting installed because it makes a lot of money for already rich people, there is not really any other good explanation but they'll ask the public to fund the "bad" CO2 producing installation necessary to make the whole thing viable...
And no, they are wrong, gas is still currently cheaper ($40 is less than $70)
For solar in Germany, it is 37 Euro/MWh to 80 Euros/MWh not including storage.
According to [1] (figure 5, 6) its at the maximum, around 80€ MWh. Am I looking at the wrong stats?
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Base load is a myth; as long as you can orchestrate low carbon energy (nuclear + renewables + hydro), storage (hydro and batteries), transmission, and load shifting and shedding, the grid will continue to operate at expected service levels. Europe demonstrates this today with high renewables penetration in Portugal, Spain, the UK, and Germany, and nuclear in France (with robust exports to adjacent grids). "Excess" renewables that are curtailed during low demand seasons solve for near term storage as the storage manufacturing/deployment ramp curves upward and the price decline curves downward.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/01/solar-cost-of-electri...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/european-unio...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-is-eus-bigges...
As long as you keep the gas peaker plants operating for those few months every couple of years with overcast, low wind weather (e.g. in 2021: https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w... ) which severely limits a lot of the renewable output.
Or you don't have an unpredicted peak/drop and the whole grid fails over (cf. Iberia a few months back).
Handwaving very complex problems as "it's a myth" won't make it go away.
Having evidence that the problem is tractable, while observing the continued rate of deployment of generation and storage, as well as their cost decline rates, is arguably not handwaving anything away. Simply follow along observing China as they continue to prove out the thesis ahead of developed countries.
Enough sunlight falls on Earth in ~30 minutes to power humanity for a year. Everything else is capture, transmission, and storage.
China launches world’s first grid-forming sodium-ion battery storage plant - https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/03/china-launches-worlds-fi... - June 3rd, 2025 ("With a total investment of over CNY 460 million ($63.8 million) and occupying 34,000 square metres, the Baochi plant is designed for an installed capacity of 200MW/400MWh. Based on a dual daily charge-discharge cycle, it can regulate up to 580 GWh annually — enough to power 270,000 households, with 98 per cent of its energy sourced from renewables. The facility supports more than 30 local wind and solar power stations, alleviating the impact of intermittent supply and facilitating the integration of high shares of renewables into the grid.")
How we made it: will China be the first electrostate? - https://www.ft.com/content/e1a232c7-52a0-44dd-a13b-c4af54e74... | https://archive.today/OSFYo - May 20th, 2025
If not, there must be other costs not included, in the above statement?https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/20/why-the-uks...
https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-j...
https://ember-energy.org/data/european-electricity-prices-an...
https://gmk.center/en/infographic/electricity-prices-in-euro...
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/electricity-prices-acros...
However, it's true that places with low heat pump adoption tend to have few ACs. For example, ACs are rarer in Germany than in Norway, despite Germany being warmer.
If you want numbers, search Google and find your preferred sources. It'll take all of 10 seconds, I promise.
No, that isn't what the article says. I'll quote it for you:
I think it was around $70 for new gas. It was a weighted US average — from memory, but I might be wrong on that.
Marginal costs of $108 for gas peaking and $31 for combined cycle. $48-$107 actual LCOE ($77.5 average).
What about cities that only get enough sun from about April to late September? If your battery is doing almost nothing during the other half of the year, it becomes way less cost effective. Still good, but takes twice as long to be really profitable.
Beyond a certain point, it makes more sense to use transmission lines connecting you to somewhere sunnier.
The western American grid connects bits of Canada to bits of Mexico.
"The Real Risk to the Electric Grid" https://archive.ph/avp9N
Ooga-Booga!!!
Besides that, I was going to note: Yes, solar isn't necessarily great in northern Germany and further north. But us and the Scots and the Brits have one super-power up our sleeve: Shitty weather made of rain, wind and misery. Meaning, we put up wind turbines up here. We got like 33% of our power from these turbines over 2024 and apparently, expansion of wind capacity in 2025 is happening very quickly.
It's somewhat amusing, because the amount of wind power and planned offshore wind capacities are currently forcing rather large infrastructure projects to move all of this power south. My parents are living right next to where Nordtrasse A-Nord is going past. That is a _huge_ construction site.
I see a scrollbar in Firefox on Windows but it's quite small due to the article length + comments at the bottom. Maybe 5% of the height of the whole scroll bar.
The idea is to store the power until these events. A lot of money is made from these.
Yet I keep seeing people argue against solar by simply stacking those two costs on top of each other.
It's still a long, long way from where it needs to be to live fully off solar, though. Want solar powered AC and a fridge? One or the other. You can't have both. It still needs help from the consumption end and energy production end. For example, mini-split AC systems these past few years have at least made solar-powered ACs in RVs possible.
15kWh of storage, which is plenty to run AC, a fridge, and plenty else overnight, would be €3000. Call it €1200 for 7kw of panels and mounting gear, which you could just about cram on your roof assuming a full sized RV, and you’re looking at €5000 all in.
I live totally off grid, and admittedly have 30kW of panels and 75kWh of storage, but we also charge the car, cook, heat, cool, and all the rest off of it. Battery prices have dropped precipitously over the last five years - our original OPzS lead bank is a joke compared to the lithiums I can now just chuck in on pretty much a whim.
7kw of panels? Nothing under a full-sized RV (45') can touch that. Those are the tour-bus style RVs.
The problem is that at that length, they're impractical for boondocking because that often involves some pretty rough terrain. You'll be limited to RV parts and those have power hookup anyways.
Boondocking is far easier/less dangerous with your Class B/Cs which are well under 30' in length. You have far less room for panels at that length.
This sort of thing:
Even V2G isn't so appealing anymore - actual bidirectional chargers cost 5-10k for some bizarre reason. You can commission equivalent of your cars battery for that, without too much of electrical work.
"Henry Hub Natural Gas Spot Price is at a current level of 3.21, down from 3.22 the previous market day and up from 2.17 one year ago." That's in $/MMBTU, divide by 1.038 to get $/MCF.
The problem is that energy is a concerted industry that requires all of the parts to work together. That requires institutions that are ready and willing to play ball. Otherwise you look like Brazil, which until this year had a really impressive trend of solar adoption which just... suddenly... stopped:
https://www.absolar.org.br/mercado/infografico/
You can see it clearly in the graph: solar adoption grows rapidly every year until 2024, going from under 5% to over 20% of Brazil's electricity matrix in a decade, and then we get to 2025. Solar farm expansions drop almost to zero, and rooftop adoption significantly slows. Why did this happen? Well, the grid wasn't ready:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/brazils-grid-caps-po...
It's not like nobody could have seen this coming. The trend is smoothly exponential every year until 2025. They just didn't care. There simply was not enough pressure or attention from the government or the public to prevent a grid crunch.
These problems are not unavoidable. They are mostly political failures. In general, electricity markets do not exist without state support. China does not have this problem. In the West, our politicians seem to be too fond of the legacy energy industry and too timid about building infrastructure to address the issue, not to mention the popular tendency to think that the government should — or even can — just "get out of the way", or the ever-present NIMBY lawsuits.
It's not only Brazil, either; the UK has the same problem with wind:
https://archy.deberker.com/the-uk-is-wasting-a-lot-of-wind-p...
...which has been outstanding since 2023. There is not even enough grid capacity planned to address the problem, to say nothing of how little they've actually built. I believe there is currently a political controversy about the appearance of pylons.
You are being sold a pup. The grid was fine. Places like South Australia (a state) have 70% renewables without big changes to the grid.
I don't know what the real reason was, but it's more likely to do renewables undercutting the price the existing coal plants could sell electricity during the day, to the point the were no longer profitable. So to keep them profitable they curtailed the much cheaper solar and wind, rather than the coal fired generation. Maybe those plants are state owned, or perhaps they have good political connections, or perhaps they own the generation, distribution and retail networks making them very difficult for a politician to take on.
The approach taken in other countries is to let the market sort it out, with a guiding hand. If coal plants can only generate at night because they are out-competed during the day by solar, then let them raise their prices at night and when the sun don't shine. That will cause price spikes. Don't like the political problems price spikes cause? Force the retailers to sell at a base price fixed for must they advertise in advance. The retailers won't do that because they are owned by the generators - it's time to split the two functions and create an electricity market. Intermittent renewables and slow ramping coal companies are causing spikes? Create a market for storage, and ensure the retails have no choice but to purchase enough storage guarantee the continuous supply they promised to the customers.
Or you can just sit on your hands, let the existing coal generators continue doing what they have always done, and justify it by saying "the grid" can't handle change. Reuters will happily repeat that excuse for you, without asking too many questions. Politically, that works too. But only in the short term. In the longer term, particularly as those coal fired plants reach end of life, you are up for a really painful time because the gradual change you could have had had now has to happen all at once.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_lithium_p...
Here's a USGS report on global lithium from 1996:
https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/...
And the same report from 2025:
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-lithium.pd...
Over those 29 years world production shot up from 6,300 tons in 1995 to 240,000 tons in 2024. At the same time reserves grew from 2.2 million tons to 30 million tons.
How can reserves go up even as we're mining lithium faster? It's because reserves are defined by a combination of economics and technology. The Earth's crust contains 20 ppm of lithium now and in 1996 (or a million years ago, for that matter). The geology doesn't change but the effort put into identifying potential sources of lithium and means of extracting and purifying lithium does change. Geologically speaking, the Earth has a lot of lithium. World lithium reserves have been increasing faster than they have been depleted, because the industrial demand that causes reserve depletion also spurs additional research to identify potential lithium sources and extraction processes.
Good to hear!
Reason why I thought there was a shortage was because there was a major push to recover Li from old phones a few years back. I have 4-5 old unused phones lying around my house. (Mostly because there's old text messages in them that I'm hoarding.) I presume it's the same for others. And I was wondering whether there's enough Li for new phones.
New residential batteries are already using sodium instead.
Solid state (i.e. for planes) have higher potential when using sodium than lithium.
I thought Lithium was used because it was lighter than the others. Good to know planes can use Sodium batteries. There's plenty of Sodium!
However in terms energy security: Are these efficient panels (and future ones) produced at all outside of China?
Or for new homes, not connecting to the grid in the first place. Around here, the cost of getting a new house on the grid is $50,000 - $100,000. This is often more than the cost of the land itself. That will buy a serious amount of panels and storage, AND you won't have to send a $100 - $200 check to the utility every month. (They will need replacing in a few decades, of course, but being energy-independent can still work out.)
I live in Michigan which is one of the worst states for solar. Full sun only half the time and fairly brutal winters, depending on the year. Yet I know people who get almost all of their electricity from solar. They treat the grid as a big backup generator. Some are just getting into it now and others have been doing it for years as a hobby. Of course there's more to it than just switching power sources. You need to think about insulating your home better, alternative sources of heat, timing when you run certain appliances, running some stuff directly off DC to reduce conversion losses, etc. But it's eminently doable. Which means it's a complete no-brainer for the southwestern states with plenty of sun and very little demand for winter heat.
My main concern at this point is that solar and batteries are cheap NOW, will they be in the future? It's hard to say. But my guess is that we might be at peak "cheapness" for solar, for a bunch of reasons. The federal subsidy is going away. Right now, solar panels and batteries come from almost exclusively from China, whose government has subsidized their low cost to prevent foreign competition. Even if they decide to keep producing them cheaply (they may not, their economy is not doing any better than ours lately), the new tariffs are designed explicitly to make them NOT cheap in order to favor US manufacturers (the few such that there are, one of which is Tesla) and indirectly, oil companies.
In urban/suburban environments, solar can make sense to offset SOME electricity usage in order to lower the light bill, but that's about as far as you can get for most homes. What little land is available is shaded by trees or large buildings. Roof panels work, but are a huge pain for panel and roof maintenance, and the roof should face south, and only so many can fit on the roof, etc. A rack of lithium batteries bolted to the outside of a house looks like a liability to insurance companies and may lower resale value. I still think the best strategy for urban environments is to force utilities (via regulation) to build out more solar farms to move the risks out of the neighborhoods, let the utilities handle all the maintenance and pain points, and take advantage of the economies of scale.
I did the same noodling years ago, when battery prices were "only" dropping at 8% per year. My conclusion was in your decade or two, it's possible energy production and storage will be driven by solar and EV's in the suburbs respectively.
I don't see how that won't happen, to be honest. The costs they talk about in the article, like $70/MWH, is the wholesale price. The customer pays about 3 times that. If batteries and solar look good at $70/MWH, they look like gold raining from the sky when you are paying $240/MWH.
Right now where I live, you can buy a dedicated house batteries. They cost as little under $1000/kWh installed. Or you can buy an EV which works out at $600/kWh for the battery, and you get the rest of the car for free :D.
If the current trajectory of battery prices continues, the fate of the car industry is sealed. It's all over bar the shouting. When means everyone is going to have a positively gigantic parked in the garage regardless of what the insurance companies you are wringing your hands over think of it. And yes solar panels on the roof are a hassle, but you can justify a lot of hassles when your power costs 300% more if you don't have them on the roof.
Residential batteries are already $100/kWh. IMO if you already have a line you are better off making money off arbitrage xor utilizing TOU.
I am writing from an off-grid shack in rural CO where I have installed a fairly nice panel, storage, and inverter system (4kw panels, 15kwh batteries, 6kw inverter).
I'm about $10k into that project (though I did all the labor, and didn't count that), but the easement and company equipment would have been $25k-$35k... much more effecient from a money perspective to go with solar out here in the sticks.
I am sure that in places like space, where there are no gas stations (or much solid matter at all), solar is going to be an easier deal than petrochemicals.
By the end of the winter I had renovated a 24x24 room into my music studio, which is mostly heated with firewood that I collect as part of my wildfire mitigation or (kind of expensive) an externally vented propane all heater.
By the end of the winter it was much easier to stay warm. Hopefully I'll have a septic, cistern, and tiny house setup by the time it geet cold again.
The solar equipment was super easy to install and I think it will be cheaper than grid power in the 10-year time frame.
Sinking heat is an issue in space. The thermal radiator panels on the ISS are bigger than the solar panels.
I mean, there are countries with seasons (at least for a few more years, until we're done screwing up the climate).
Tony Seba talks a lot about this stuff if you’re interested.
Dams do that...
So to rephrase the part you quote for clarity: No one is aiming to store a full season’s energy in batteries
Less will do :)
You don't live in a place that relies on dams, do you?
I realise there is extreme weather in the US but every discussion on renewables, cars, trains, cycling, construction standards or whatever else has comments along the lines of "good for Utah (or wherever) but this couldn't possibly work in the 95% of the US that is constantly inundated by biblical plagues".
Sure the performance of whatever technology might be suboptimal but I struggle to believe vast swathes of the US experience weather so extreme as to be uninhabitable. If I'm wrong y'all really need to leave that country for your own safety.
Technical performance is an input in the efficiency that actually matters, but definitely not the sole determinant. Ultimately the cost efficiency that delivers the needed power at the some time. If you can capitalize more panels at the right cost, it overcomes an "uunworkable" technical performance efficiency.
Five years ago, solar + batts were getting dismissed as being able to offset natural gas. Now its offseting that tradoff in new energy builds for California. What we're seeing is renewables advancing on multiple efficiency fronts - both technical performance efficiencies, and subsystem costs, to deliver more competitive system cost efficiency. More and more traditional energy and more regions will be displaced because these technologies are still in the rapid cost drop phase of their manufacturing S curves.
It's really a matter of who has the focus and financial strength to continue to invest in the manufacturing and tech to keep up the improvements - a lot like the solar+batt version of Moores law in chips and the race surrounding it.
But it's cloudy. A lot. It literally does not raise to my conscious awareness if the sun does not shine in December. And I mean literally in its original sense. It takes over 30 days in the winter for me to notice that I haven't seen the sun in a while and another couple of weeks before I'm really bothered by it. We're already far enough north that winter days are noticeably shorter and less bright as it is, and then the sun doesn't even shine. In the summer 50% cloudy is a fairly normal day. Bright blue sky from horizon to horizon is uncommon enough to be worth noting.
Solar advocates may relax as I'm not going to claim that solar is "useless" in Michigan. However, it is undeniably a lot more useful in deserts that are much closer to the equator. And big government solar projects really do pencil out much worse in Michigan than they do in California or Arizona, even though I'm not constantly dodging death around here. I like the diversity in power sources on general principles but we do take an efficiency hit to get it.
For sure solar isn't as effective in the UK but we're lucky to have shallow sea nearby for offshore wind (onshore wind being opposed by the same kind of NIMBY clowns that are a true biblical plague in every country). But if solar is cheap enough you may as well deploy it even where it's not especially efficient. Then you can start to look at things like transmission lines or whatever energy source works best for your area.
Edit: it's a reasonable point that dollars spent in the 2nd cloudiest state on solar aren't particularly well spent, but that leaves you with 48(?) less cloudy states. While CA is pretty south there are 10 more states to the south of it, one of them is even called the sunshine state and is effectively an uninhabitable sinking swamp, ideal for solar!
https://electrotechrevolution.substack.com/p/renewables-allo...
The whole thing is worth reading, but this is the most interesting result:
Let's push the boundaries further and see how much solar we can get in the system without exceeding the 100% gas case’s £76/MWh. Playing with the numbers we find that installing 6.5 GW of solar and 12 GWh of battery storage alongside our 1 GW gas plant, we can get to the result plotted below...
Solar now accounts for over 70% of total generation. During the summer basically all electricity now comes from solar. This system costs the same £76/MWh as the 100% gas case. Remarkably, a combination of 1 GW of gas, 6.5 GW of solar, and 12 GWh of battery storage can achieve the same overall system cost as installing just 1 GW of gas.
The lowest-cost scenario has much less solar, but not 100% gas either:
Solar energy now accounts for over a quarter of total generation, while the total system costs £9/MWh less than just using gas.
You can modestly decarbonize a gas-driven electricity system with solar and save a modest amount of money, or keep costs constant and deeply (though not completely) decarbonize the same system with solar and batteries, even in the relatively sunlight-poor UK.
And since their google maps embed seems to be broken, a direct link to that: https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=11HL-d8V1MCxM01uEwpn...
Where I live isn't that great though.
And then if you have the bad luck to be stuck in Birmingham, in the UK.
That's a cloudy place. And you barely have, like, two very, very sunny months, like in the middle of the year in summer when it's actually, it is actually sunny. Most of the time it's various degrees of cloudy. So even there you have more than 60% of the way to 24/365"
So it's not as big as a drop-off as you might think with solar+battery. And that's not accounting for wind being a much better performer in the UK.
While the point that the benchmark favours CA is reasonable what about the other 10+ states on California's latitude? Even as far North as New York is equivalent latitude to Madrid. I just struggle to believe the desert of Nevada for instance or Texas isn't also viable for solar. Plus those states have the advantage of not having California's crumbling transmission infrastructure (though even worse for Texas from what I understand) or anti-building regulatory regime.
This strand of American pessimism seems to only ever lean one way, to ignore lessons from other countries and to oppose new tech.
What would be favourable for that cost curve is not putting tarrifs on Chinese subsidised panels and this fatalism leeches energy from that consensus. When the tech is cheap enough to slap anywhere the optimal deployment is less important and why not make the most of China's 'blunder' with these below cost panels.
OP said that in terms of weather, California is almost ideal for renewables and self-driving cars. California is very, very, very sunny and mild.
Many places in the United States are not that for a good portion of the year. That was the point. Not that it's uninhabitable, but that these results may not translate to other areas.
But from a brief Google California isn't even in the 10 most southerly states in the US. While I have broader problems with the political direction of travel of this site in general my main concern is trying to shake Americans out of this fatalism where nothing ever works, nothing is possible and the country has to be left to decay.
You guys landed on the moon for goodness sake, where's that America gone?
It basically died when we became divided into two camps, neither of which can support any proposal if the other side supports it too. People are more concerned with feeling they've won an argument than actually achieving anything.
While the UK faces some ongoing challenges:
- Transmission bottlenecks in Scotland
- Dwindling opportunities for offshore wind construction
- Natural gas for heating in an old and poorly insulated housing stock
- Electricity prices tied to gas prices
- A generation of NIMBYs who don't want wind turbines ruining their view of transmission pylons and ecologically dead sheep pastures
- Lack of zonal pricing to incentivize more on-shore renewables
And needs to go further and faster I don't think energy generation falls into the same ideological divide there (though this may change with Reform UK and their questionable funding/astroturfing). Certainly net zero and 'green crap' remains contentious but from an actual building-the-thing perspective we're just quietly getting on with it.
To describe solar+batteries as "baseload" is like calling the Martingale Strategy an infinite money machine. It works brilliantly until it doesn't.
I'm glad that some countries have built and are still betting on the half-century years-old tech: fast neutrons reactors, those outputs are equivalent to our regular light-water reactors and which generates no waste (to be precise, most of that waste have a ~30yo half-life, not a big deal)
In the meantime, here in France, we've had the lowest power supply cost for decades
I am glad politics have fixed that, so that we can be miserable like everyone else
Here you go. Fairly detailed overview of how most of the cost is not factored into the monthly bills consumers pay. It basically involves a lot of state backed debt, subsidies, etc. Also note the massive investment in a waste storage facility.