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Comment by deepnotderp | Hacker News Reader

This is a lot of words to say “solar + battery lcoe is $70/MWH and gas is $40/MWH, but most places outside the U.S. don’t have access to tons of cheap gas so it’s more expensive there”

And no, they are wrong, gas is still currently cheaper ($40 is less than $70)

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In other places outside US, cost of gas electricity is not 40/MWh. In Germany for example, the cost of natural gas power plants is 110 to 170 Euros/MWh.

For solar in Germany, it is 37 Euro/MWh to 80 Euros/MWh not including storage.

Where did you get the 110 - 170 figure from?

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...

Not the parent, but I believe they were talking about LCOE, or total cost including building the plant and operating it. So that will be the cost of natural gas plus the rest amortized.

Yes. It would be LCOE for both solar and gas.

Yeah ok but without storage you are comparing apples to oranges. Even with storage it is barely comparable. Since even with batteries you can't provide power 24/7.

This is factually inaccurate. At solar and storage costs today, they are cheaper than existing fossil generation in all of Europe. In the US, even at today's low fossil gas prices, they are competitive. They will become even more competitive over the next several years as the price of solar and batteries continues to decline, and the US fossil gas market is exposed to global demand via LNG exports. Renewables prices will keep going down, fossil costs will keep going up, very broadly speaking.

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...

> 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).

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.

> 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 we use power-to-gas for the gas peaker plants, gas peaker plants can be just as renewable. We can use excess Summer electricity to generate it, We've already got the powerplants and storage anyway.

RE ".....At solar and storage costs today, they are cheaper than existing fossil generation in all of Europe....." If so, are power prices decreasing in Europe?

  If not, there must be other costs not included, in the above statement?

Europe isn't optimizing for lower prices. It's trying to phase out coal, which might lead to higher prices if gas is used more often:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/20/why-the-uks...

Lots of nuance, citations below, TLDR is fossil gas and hydro volatility from Russia and climate change has caused price levels seen. Europe avoided €59B in fossil fuel import costs due to new wind and solar in the EU since 2019. The evidence shows renewables have been restraining electrical cost increases, and as more renewables and storage is deployed, costs should remain flat (if not decline).

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...

Not sure why you say this. I'm on solar + batteries 24/7 365 days a year. Use no fossil fuels. Even had utility company remove power poles from my place.

Yeah for some parts of the world that is possible. Not for most of europe.

Probably pretty doable in Europe. For one most people don't have air conditioning and that's a big suck of electricity. And if you aren't using electric for heat then realistically your electric draw is not going to be that high

Heating generally uses much more energy than cooling, and even more so if something is burned.

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.

More like comparing fresh apples to preserved dried apples, in that PV is still useful even without storage until it exceeds ~100% of daytime demand; and even then pumped hydro is like a fridge or something similar to put the fresh apples in, because you got it anyway for unrealated reasons.

Where is your $40/mwh figure from? The claim in the podcast is that average LCOE for new gas in the US is "around $76, $78" or "around $70".

Combined cycle can be as low as $37 during low price periods of natural gas; combustion cycle is around or higher than the $70 in the podcast. Dedicated peaker plants can be much more expensive depending on the design.

Where are your numbers from? "during low price periods" doesn't really make sense here, we're talking about LCOE which is the average cost over the lifetime of a plant.

LCOE is entirely fictional unless looking at a dead plant. Anyone who claims to know what natural gas prices will be over the lifetime of a plant should be avoided at all costs.

If you want numbers, search Google and find your preferred sources. It'll take all of 10 seconds, I promise.

> This is a lot of words to say “solar + battery lcoe is $70/MWH and gas is $40/MWH,

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.

I suspect your $40/MWH isn't LCOE, it's the marginal cost of producing an extra MWH from an existing plant. A second problem they don't mention for gas is the demand is so high, the wait time for a new turbine is around 4 years. Batteries on the other hand can be bought with very short lead times.

Lazard agrees with you: https://www.lazard.com/media/uounhon4/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...

Marginal costs of $108 for gas peaking and $31 for combined cycle. $48-$107 actual LCOE ($77.5 average).

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