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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Solar and batteries are still more expensive than gas (as the article admits) but prices are continuing to decrease.

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.

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> Solar and batteries are still more expensive than gas (as the article admits)

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.

also waaaaaaay cheaper than nuclear power.

In a thread decrying policy choices that are artificially making one particular kind of power generation more expensive than they have to be, this seems like a weird comment to make.

Is nuclear power only expensive because of policy choices? I know it's cheaper in, say, China where the policy is different, but it still isn't anywhere as cheap as solar.

Yes on both halves of that.

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".

I’m going to push back on this and point out that the major difference between expensive and inexpensive power isn’t really safety choices, it’s the ability to mass-produce power generation components. Solar PV is at the far end of the spectrum, since panels are essentially printed in a factory. Late 20th century French nuclear is in the middle, because many nuclear power plants were constructed at the same time using nearly identical specs. Today’s nuclear power is at the opposite end, where virtually every plant is bespoke. Even China hasn’t fully standardized on a single plant that they’re building in huge numbers without customization.

More expensive than gas, if you power 98% of the grid with it. But if you power 60% of the grid, it's cheaper than gas. Useful distinction imo.

The linked white paper says that the cutover point is at 97% for sunny locations in the US, and more surprisingly, 90% for cloudy mainland US locations.

The great part is... we already have more than enough Nuclear, Hydro, Wind, and Geothermal power for that other 10% - so going 100% solar would be asinine.

It's not quite that simple. You need to be able to supply 100% of demand 10% of the time, and we don't have enough nuclear, hydro and wind to do that. 100% of demand 10% of the time is an oversimplification, but a reasonable one.

> Solar and batteries are still more expensive than gas (as the article admits) but prices are continuing to decrease.

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.

> 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.

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.

What counts as "soon" is pretty subjective of course, but $10/kWh is only 3 halving's from $80/kWh. So it wouldn't be too surprising if $80/kWh in 2026 corresponded to $10/kWh in 2030.

2030 only five years. And the original was not a typo. But it is a best case prediction. Whether that's 2028 or 2038 is a bit immaterial. What matters here is the basic principle that sodium ion batteries don't contain any hard to get or expensive materials. So the materials are cheap to source and the manufacturing process is well understood and should benefit from economies of scale, learning effects, etc. The point is that prices are coming down and the further these come down the worse it gets for gas.

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.

I don't think the USA is costing in the political risk of not converting to green energy. You do not want to be the only country emitting significant CO2 in a decades time when everyone else has transitioned. Partly it will be more expensive to keep burning fuel especially when the economy of scale decreases but also the political risk of sanctions will be very high.

It'll be a long tail. The less people rely on fossil fuels, the cheaper it will get (until it gets so underused you start lose economies of scale). But even without any proper political leadership, America will follow the money and pick the most profitable choice.

It's the long term economics that the US should be worried about. Just because the US is sticking its head in the sand doesn't mean the rest of the world is slowing down investments along with it. Other countries are investing heavily in becoming energy independent which means they'll be building the infrastructure to generate lots of cheap energy to power their economies rather than depending on expensive fossil fuel imports. Part of which currently come from the US. The recent tariff madness is actually speeding all this up.

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.

> 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.

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.

> subsidized by a communist state, to stifle worldwide competition

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.

> subsidized by a communist state, to stifle worldwide competition

China primarily wants to cut oil and gas imports. Exports are a bonus.

China was a big solar exporter before it was a big solar installer. China had a small solar manufacturing capacity in 2003. By 2008 it was number one in the world for solar manufacturing and it has remained there since:

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...

"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"

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 other group has been trying to tax solar for years: https://solarrights.org/blog/2025/05/06/solartax2024/

Sorry, what other group. Power companies?

HEH

"They unsuccessfully tried again in 2024, working with Governor Newsom to try and slip a Solar Tax in his proposed budget."

Remind me again who is in charge of the California state legislature, and who voted against this 'tax'.

So you aren't going to blame the governor, but some how will blame the Republicans for all of these issues and more? If you were at least a little more honest, I might be able to have a discussion with you.

As someone who greatly supports solar power and the rights of homeowners to install solar, I think your link is total bullshit and calling it a "solar tax" is disingenuous by people that want something for free

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.

"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. "

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?

If you don't want to pay the power company, drop their service and go it alone. If you want them as a backup for when your solar rig isn't producing what you need, then you should expect to pay the higher costs that more reliable power production demands.

"In California, a "Solar Tax" has been proposed in recent years, which would impose fees or charges on households with rooftop solar panels based on the energy they produce.

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.

I don't live in California and don't pay attention to what the Democrats there do. My response was about "net metering." Having to sell your solar power to the utility at the wholesale rate, not the retail rate, would seem fair to me, since you're only selling them power and not any of the other stuff that is necessary to deliver that power to anywhere else. If you don't like the price, don't sell the power, find something else to do with it or some other way to store it.

Repeating the same bullshit propaganda from this group does not make it true. If you have another source for what was actually proposed, I'm all ears. Searching for things like "proposed solar tax California" only brought up articles about the sunsetting of the solar tax credit in CA, which is a far, far cry from being a solar tax.

You don't. Disconnect from the grid completely. If you don't need the power company then disconnect from them.

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.

My electric bill already shows a fixed "facility" charge and a variable "energy" charge. If I didn't use any electricity one month, I would still owe the facility charge. I thought they all did it that way.

> You don't. Disconnect from the grid completely. If you don't need the power company then disconnect from them.

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

>> You don't. Disconnect from the grid completely. If you don't need the power company then disconnect from them.

> That's not a fair argument.

Why not? Plenty of people do it.

Because disconnecting is so draconian, it comes with many more downsides than upsides.

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.

Ok, your point is valid. You can't disconnect from the grid if you want all the benefits that the grid bestows.

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.)

My bill is currently split between generation and distribution, and the two halves are roughly equal. (I don't have any solar at the moment.)

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.

Yep, in France we have a separate "subscription" fee that you have to pay no matter what, even if consumption is zero. It even has power levels and flexibility options that change the subscription prices, but also the electricity prices depending on the time of the day.

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.

Most of the cost of power is not the cost of the electrons. You have to account for the transmission and distribution infrastructure, the operation of the grid, the safety programs, customer service, etc. Retail rates bake that all in. When you run local solar, they are still providing all of that for you when you need it, plus the distribution of the power you sell back to them. What would be "fair" would be to net meter at the value of the power, minus the cost of the grid and backup generation. The cold truth is that this would still be a negative number, i.e. what would truly be fair is for the homeowner to pay a fee to the power company even when they are running off of their own solar 24/7.

> Why should I, as a homeowner, be forced to pay the power companies...?

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...

Austin's "value of solar" is the opposite of net metering. 100% of the solar you produce goes back into the grid, which is bought at some cheap rate, and then you buy back your own electricity at retail rates. You litterally lose more money at tier 3 rates than you get paid.

> Austin's "value of solar" is the opposite of net metering.

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.

The electric company isn't "entitled" to their subscribers either.

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)

Someone needs to pay to maintain the connection to your house, even if you don't draw any electricity from it.

Like you point out, it's totally viable for you to disconnect from the grid if you so desire, and then you don't pay the power company anything. So what's your beef?

Ah more mental gymnastics in chat. Trying to tax solar and flinging around tariffs backed by extreme climate change denial are not exactly the same thing.

NM-just perused your HN comments and they are littered with dog whistles and talking points. Gymnastics seems too generous.

"Trying to tax solar"

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.

I use it only for folks like you and other proxy red hats. I know what it means. Sorry I haven’t dedicated my days to pumping internet points on hn. I mostly lurk. I also know what that means. You and your ilk turn yourselves inside out to prove to ONLY YOU that you are righteous in your dogma. Always with the most vague and suspect “sources”. Your fear driven ethos and enlarged frontal lobe will hopefully be the end of you and yours eventually in public discourse. Until then, good luck.

I haven't heard anyone say it out loud, but I'd wager it's in large part related to things like Chinese solar panels containing remotely triggerable kill-switches and/or having the ability to function as unauthorized mesh relays

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-...

I could see subterfuge in the inverters, but aren't panels themselves electrically very simple? I would think a rogue device within the panel itself would be apparent.

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.

Reds under beds, again?

You can trace out the circuits on a traditional solar panel. They aren't complex devices. If someone managed to hide some kind of control chip in there and also some sort of connectivity to trigger it then my hat is off to them.

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.

Other targets may be more appropriate, but:

> 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...

Depends if you can exploit the system directly from the Internet or if you need to break into hundreds of thousands of individual networks before you can trigger the attack.

The S in IoT stands for security

This isn’t a thing. As in - try sitting in on a power purchase negotiation where the minutiae of every conceivable risk is debated for hours on end and this never even comes up.

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