Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet
pv-magazine-usa.com
pv-magazine-usa.com
I know that folks might have been able to point to a graph years ago and said we'd be here eventually, but I had my doubts given the scale required and hacking through all the lobbying efforts we saw against solar/battery. Alas, we made it here!
But hey, our populist right tell us, that the subsidies for "green technology" are bad and that we need to get rid of them, because they are making energy so expensive in Germany (cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago).
But hey - people vote for those parties. Because they know their economics, not like the leftists, who don't.
Germany (or Europe in general) is fucked. In a few years, we will reap what we now sow. And not because of our social systems or immigration, but because our oh so great political leaders are not willing to invest in the future.
This is not the argument you want to make. Energy prices are a significant component of the basket used to measure inflation. Like yeah, you expect energy prices to sink if you discount for the rise of energy prices. Germany is suffering from high energy prices its the key factor why the country has been stagnating economically for the past 6 years.
German energy prices will decline with battery storage and more renewables pushing out the last of their coal and fossil gas generation. Should’ve kept the old nuclear generators running too, as long as possible. Alas, a lesson they’ve learned.
Germany has had fossil gas ties to Russia since the Soviet time.
https://dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-50-ye...
When the iron curtain fell pretty much all of Central Europe liberalized and democratized. The sole exceptions being Belarus and Russia.
Thinking they wouldn’t choose the same path is revisionist.
I remember growing up and gaming online thinking of Russians as nothing strange compared to anyone else. This changed with first Georgia and then very much Crimea.
> An arrangement that began as a peacetime opening to a former foe has turned into an instrument of aggression. Germany is now funding Russia’s war. In the first two months after the start of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Germany is estimated to have paid nearly €8.3bn for Russian energy – money used by Moscow to prop up the rouble and buy the artillery shells firing at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk. In that time, EU countries are estimated to have paid a total of €39bn for Russian energy, more than double the sum they have given to help Ukraine defend itself. The irony is painful. “For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism,” the historian Timothy Snyder wrote recently. “When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.”
> When Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Germany faced a particular problem. Its rejection of nuclear power and its transition away from coal meant that Germany had very few alternatives to Russian gas. Berlin has been forced to accept that it was a cataclysmic error to have made itself so dependent on Russian energy – whatever the motives behind it. The foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, says Germany failed to listen to the warnings from countries that had once suffered under Russia’s occupation, such as Poland and the Baltic states. For Norbert Röttgen, a former environment minister and member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union (CDU), the German government bowed to industry forces pressing for cheap gas “all too easily”, while “completely ignoring the geopolitical risks”.
> In February this year, German Green economic affairs and climate action minister Robert Habeck said that gas storage facilities owned by Gazprom in Germany had been “systematically emptied” over the winter, to drive up prices and exert political pressure. It was a staggering admission of Russia’s power to disrupt energy supplies.
> “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”
We win or we learn.
https://atomicinsights.com/gazprom-profiting-mightily-from-g...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...
So when are they retroactively giving back their salaries and pensions for having fucked up the livelihoods of their taxpayers?
Politicians have no incentive to ever make good decisions for the future of their country without any skin in the game from which their personal riches are derived.
>We win or we learn.
Jensen Huang said that failure is learning but sometimes failure is just failure and you should know when to cut your losses before the failure goes from learning to bankruptcy. And Germany did far more failure than actually learning.
Does anyone, ever, in any role, do this?
Do CEOs return their bonuses and pay and pensions when they close a business, let alone when they cut the workforce, let alone when they miss the growth of a competitor that is currently still not a direct threat and is instead fighting a battle of attrition with friend of the CEO and would only become a threat if they can take that friend's resources without the attrition destroying everything of value?
> Politicians have no incentive to ever make good decisions for the future of their country without any skin in the game from which their personal riches are derived.
The penalty for most errors in politics is the same as the penalty in any other job: you lose the job.
Most errors, because the really bad errors get you killed, either by an angry mob or by an invading army or by special forces (who may be from the latter while pretending to be the former).
https://www.themanufacturer.com/articles/u-s-manufacturing-c...
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64344
CATL is building one of the largest battery manufacturing facilities in Europe in Spain. I think Europe will adapt without issue to manufacturing without the inexpensive fossil fuels it previously relied on Russia for.
Societies tend to not change how things work no matter who is in charge.
Just look around yourself. No society is comparable to what it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, etc, in any country. If you think nothing changed in a society, you're just poorly informed.
Not only that, Conservatives, Socialists and the Green all managed to increase our electricity CO2 footprint by moving from nuclear to coal/lng.
Germany is investing in massive battery parks dotted around the grid. This will make a difference to supporting base load and offsetting coal, but it will take time.
If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly.
How would the political class know this obvious fact from the top of their ivory McMansions?
What happened to Blitzkrieg?
Too slowly, if I'm following local news correctly (I might well not be, my German is enough to listen to podcasts but it's still not good).
e.g. this train station upgrade is currently about 20 years behind the original schedule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Köpenick_station#Presen...
Dude, soaring energy prices are driving inflation. That's like saying the prices are lower if you just keep ignoring everything that actually makes them more expensive. Duh.
Eventually there may come a day when it’s China that is stuck in the past, looking back to the early 21st century like we look back to the middle twentieth, and someone else will be ascendant.
I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century. It was the moment we chose to exit our position of world leadership both culturally and technologically.
You must have been asleep at the wheel or living under a rock to have mised China's rise over the last decades. They didn't wait for Trump to get elected in 2024 and then flipped a switch from third world country to global superpower.
"Damn, this hot cup of coffee burned my tongue. Why would Trump do this?"
-HN comments
And then it was all killed. And we are killing off our other competitive edges over China, the way we attract all the world's best science and tech talent to build here in the US rather than in their own countries. We have sat back scientific research 2-5 years by drastically cutting grants in nonsensical ways and stopping and decimating a class of grad students.
We were the most admired country in the world, and in a short amount of time we have destroyed decades of hard work building a good reputation.
We won't get that back in a year or two, it's going to be decades of work.
Which industry? How 'huuuuuge' was the investment?
>We were the most admired country in the world
According to who?
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/the-ira-...
https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/inflation-reduction-a...
Back then when I would inform the politically cloistered about this massive boom in factory construction and the hope for US manufacturing in strategically important energy tech, the most pointed critique was "yeah there's lots of spending but that doesn't mean that the factories are going to make anything." Turns out the skeptics were right. It was a huge mistake that all this stuff went into areas where it is politically incorrect to acknowledge that clean energy is changing the world. Management was not able to trumpet the new investment and the workers dont want to acknowledge what's driving the new higher wages.
As for the US being the most admired country, I work in science and a bit in entrepreneurship. The US was so far and away the leader in these that there's no comparison at all to any other country. Any visitor is completely blown away when they see what's going on, even when they heard ahead of time how much better science and startups are in the US. It's a bit shocking that you think the US was not one of the most admired countries out there, unless you're posting from China or Russia.
It's bewildering why anyone would do such a thing but here we are.
Chinese CCP are willing to scarifies whatever traditional industrial era infrastructure in order for things to move forward and gain a global advantage. Especially when they are not the one paying for the scarifies.
Just because a country has previously invested in fossil fuels, it doesn't follow that they can't get the benefit of solar with future investment. However, there's a lot of powerful money/people/corporations that depend on fossil fuels for making billions - that's the real problem as that skews the market and politics of energy production/distribution.
Basically success creates the preconditions for this failure mode in the future.
It might be thought of as a form of overfitting. Success results in overfitting to a local maximum.
That was a dangerous mistake, and we may be left with nothing.
Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”?
Seems like a win for everyone else, no? What happened to “competition”, or is that something that’s only supposed to be beneficial within the US?
He’s saying it as a realist.
China is building the equivalent to America’s sanctions power in their battery dominance. In an electrified economy, shutting off battery and rare earths access isn’t as acutely calamitous as an oil embargo, but it’s similarly shocking as sanctions and tariffs.
Trump just leveraged Magnitsky sanctions against brazilian authorities to obtain access to brazilian rare earths until 2030.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-rare-earth...
Output in 2024 was 20 tons.
The change in Chinese output between 2023 and 2024 was an additional 15,000 tons, going from 255,000 to 270,000 tons. The USA's own increased by 3400, from 41,600 to 45,000 tons.
I'm happy to assume Brazilian output will grow, especially if the USA invests a lot in it, but is it going to even be close to enough to make up for where China's already at? China was about 70% of the global output.
I hope it was worth it. I have to believe it was. Because otherwise he delegitimized the Magnitsky Act and fucked us in exchange for nothing.
Oil hits hardest. I’m comparing financial sanctions to a battery embargo. Both are slow. Both are powerful.
I'm sick and tired of whataboutism from people who are somehow motivated to carry water for aggressive dictatorships that threaten the rest of us. I've already lost my birth country to zombies like that (they call them z-patriots, or turbopatriots, the supporters of Russia's invasion of Ukraine). In case you missed it, my original comment was intended as a criticism of the current government of the United States.
China being powerful is not something new, it was the world's largest economy for 18 of the past 20 centuries (with exceptions being parts of the 19th and 20th centuries, when Western Europe and then the US surged ahead after the industrial revolution).
> is politically stable only as long as it continues to suppress free speech and free trade.
Your analysis is through the lens of Western culture. The definition and understanding of freedom and harmony are entirely different in China. I was in China and experienced this myself, so this is firsthand experience, not something I picked up from blogs or news.
In the Chinese context, freedom is defined collectively so freedom from chaos, poverty, foreign domination etc, whereas here in the West it's individual liberty. Harmony and social stability are seen as more valuable than political pluralism, so authoritarian governance is culturally framed as legitimate. You know that 100 million Chinese travel abroad every year and all of them come back to China? Chinese leaders and citizens still remember periods of fragmentation and civil war.
There is a widespread belief that adopting a Western adversarial political model could reintroduce instability and weaken national unity so something China cannot risk given its size and diversity (you know how many ethnicities there are in China?)
This is their natural state. China has a long history of centralized, bureaucratic governance (over 2k years since the Qin Dynasty), where stability and order are prioritized.
The silent majority is silent, yes. Those who try to do something get pushed out, or worse. It's the double-edged sword of immigration. But the Chinese people love freedom like the rest of us - you don't need to go far to disprove your entire narrative, Taiwan and Singapore are right there.
Hong Kong isn't representative of China. I've been there and honestly, it felt like a post colonial UK dump. Going directly from Shenzhen to Hong Kong felt like going from a first world country to a third world one, but I digress.
I also talked with Hong Kongers (this year), and they told me a different story, one that isn't so black and white as the worldview you're projecting onto others.
> or getting a tour of Beijing from a friend who worked as a photojournalist and found himself followed by the security services and had to leave and seek asylum with his family.
That's another interesting anecdote. I actually know a photo blogger and a local journalist from China, neither of them is being followed by the security services, and neither has sought asylum anywhere. What was so unique about your friend?
> But the Chinese people love freedom like the rest of us - you don't need to go far to disprove your entire narrative, Taiwan and Singapore are right there.
You know Singapore isn't exactly a "free" country either, right? And Singaporeans are generally fine with that and accept the trade off. So who's disproving whose narrative here?
Different cultures have different systems and trade offs, different value systems and philosophies of life. But some people seem not to understand that and view everything through the lens of their own values, convincing themselves there's only one "right" way to live and that everything else is evil. The Holy Crusades had similar vibes.
So just to clarify, I'm from the EU, and I'm not paid for anything I write here. Maybe your world model is influenced by propaganda? The world isn't black and white.
I also encourage people to read more about the history and culture of other countries, especially the ones they have strong opinions about, which they often haven't formed themselves (In my experience, this is often lacking in US education, people learn a lot about US history, but not as much about the rest of the world).
Reading more philosophy can also broaden your perspective. In particular, I recommend learning about Singapore, its history, Lee Kuan Yew, and why many highly educated people there willingly accept restrictions on individual freedom. If you understand that, you can then start reading about China, its culture, and its history.
You can't compete fairly with China because the government applies massive subsidies and is coercive with both imports and exports.
Right behind Russia, China is the biggest threat to global order and peace. It's no accident they are in cahoots.
I’m getting a strong sense of denial in this thread.
Chinese totalitarianism just doesn't seem like such a huge contrast as it once did. At least they get an increase in quality of life for the tradeoff. Also a lot of this reeks of Sinophobia tbh
> Also a lot of this reeks of Sinophobia tbh
I'm in Berlin, I have more to fear from Trump's administration than from Xi Jinping's.
If I was in the Philippines, I think it would be the other way around. Initially I also had Japan and Taiwan in that comparison, but thinking a bit harder, there's also a risk that Trump is isolationist, that means the risk from each is more like a multiplier than a simple comparison.
Which is why it makes me especially angry that the current US government is throwing away this gift in order to appease a bunch of aging leaders of petro-states. Literally poisoning the world for a 10-15 year giveaway to the richest of the rich.
I take some solace knowing that fossil fuels are now a dead end. And even though certain people are trying to keep the industry going, that end is sooner than ever.
This is truly important, allowing the plummeting cost of the batteries to be amortized over so many cycles.
(Also, "alas" is a lament, expressing sadness, which is clearly not your intent.)
https://optimisticstorm.com/iea-forecasts-wrong-again/
Similarly, nuclear power gets way too much benefit of the doubt, which should simply vanish after a small amount of due diligence on construction costs over its history. It's very complex, expensive, high labor, and has none of the traits that let it get cheaper as it scales.
10 new plants at USD 2.7 Billion each. They take six years to build. USD 2/Watt. They have standardised designs, have invested in grownig their manpower and know-how.
But their actual investments in billions of dollars and in GW show that nuclear is not competing with solar, and is sticking around for hedging bets. They the are deploying far far far more solar and storage than nuclear. And if those nuclear costs were accurate, then nuclear would be far preferable. $2/W is incredible, as in perhaps not credible, but it would also be far cheaper than solar.
And even if China figured out how to build that cheaply, it doesn't mean that highly developed countries will be able to replicate that. Nuclear requires a huge amount of high skill, specialized labor, and doing that cheaply is only possible at certain levels of economic development. As economies develop to ever higher productivity, the cost of labor goes up, and it's likely that nuclear only ever makes sense at a very narrow band of economic development.
It is a little surprising to me that some markets don't see the benefit. I was pretty delighted ~8 years ago to get some 4500mah 6s batteries RC (under 100Wh) for ~$65 but the price doesn't feel like it's changed much since, based on some light shopping around. Just wanted to note what I perceived as an unevenness. https://rcbattery.com/liperior-4500mah-6s-40c-22-2v-lipo-bat...
For all their faults, I am in awe of the scale and success of their industrial policy.
You only achieve greatness when your control gets you to do the correct thing. Strong governments make decisions faster, not better. Freedom to debate, to speak out against bad governance, to speak truth to power, democracy, all that's a system to keep a government pointing in the right direction, it slows down decision making but (generally) also increases the accuracy of that decision making.
Same deal with free markets in capitalism: its a feedback mechanism, Tim Cook can announce the Vision Pro and Zuckerberg the Metaverse, direct their teams to spend whatever number of billions was necessary to develop them, market says no.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/china-has-invented-a-whole-new...
(partially behind paywall, sorry)
Too put the facts crudely, the world would be fucked climate change wise without China. The oft heard "why do anything while China is the problem" would be hilarious, if people repeating bald-faced bullshit didn't grate so much.
Load-balancing the area having a cloudy few days and the area having a sunny days and the area having a windy few days and so on will remain extremely valuable. It lets you install a lot less batteries and isn't that much infrastructure given that the last mile problems are dealt with already.
It would be nice if this happened before the next Carrington Event (or the next nuclear war with orbital EMP weapons.)
With some exceptions for sufficiently remote (or sufficiently always-sunny and not too dense) places that local grids themselves are no longer worth it
They assume each battery cycles entirely EVERY day - even in winter. They also assume PV is never curtailed - not even in summer. They of course ignore multi-day weather anomalies. Like wise for weekend/holiday demand variations. etc.
The best part of the report are real world bids of 2025 ESS projects.
[1] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...
That seems physically unlikely to me. Sure, burying and maintaining cables costs money, but other than that transferring energy in a very fundamental and solid state way is going to be much easier than packaging it up and transporting it with heavy machinery.
This is definitely a case where your argument only works if it is supported by the actual calculation.
Transmission: $41.50 per MWh per 1,000 miles. https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81662.pdf
Rail freight: $160 / ton per 1,000 miles. At 220 Wh/kg a ton of batteries is 200kWh. So rail costs $800 per MWh per 1,000 miles without considering the cost of the batteries themselves.
Not at current power densities.
The bandwidth of a station wagon filled with hard drives is quite high; the power delivery of station wagon filled with batteries is on the low side compared to a wire made from the same material as that station wagon and buried under the road the wagon would have been driving along.
Even for liquid and gas fuels, people make dedicated pipelines rather than doing it all by truck and train.
Now, if someone figures out how to get something like metastable pumped hafnium isomers working… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium_controversy
Extreme case sometimes used to argue against PV is the Arctic circle. Anywhere in the Artctic circle has to choose between enough batteries to cope with entire days when the sun's below the horizon *or* a transmission line further south where the sun's still up.
Or a different renewable, or nuclear, my point here isn't any particular answer just that there's cases where you might go for something other than PV+battery, and my point before is just about yeeting batteries around.
That said, re-reading the comment I was originally responding too, I may have inferred too much from:
> Right now is likely the time to buy sunny land in the middle of nowhere but near train tracks.
And the previously quoted words "remote generation".
I can imagine that they might go several months without usable sunlight, so yes, they'll likely need some form of energy distribution unless they plan on burning blubber for their energy needs.
https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...
That so mundane and should be easy to fix, right? That's why I bring up scale. Nobody has experience running projects that big. Some things are just too big to manage.
On top of this you have very high costs for an increasingly complex grid, which needs to be built and then maintained. Prices will never again be as low as in the fossil/nuclear era.
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...
Looking at wind, the ratio between min and max per week is about 1:5 (~1200 vs ~6000 GWh). Just as there is always some solar power generation, there is never no wind, though looking at those charts there were 4 weeks in the late summer of 2023 when production was low consecutively, between 700 and 1000 GWh.
And 8280 GWh the previous June for those wondering roughly how much of this was due to more solar panels being deployed.
This doesn't have have to be by switching consumption; using less is possible: Passivhaus is from Germany, after all. However, you can't do that and keep all your historical protections on buildings and layers-upon-layers of red tape on renovations.
And it only gets worse the more households transition to heatpumps, because the consumption in winter is so lopsided. For example, I heat my home with a heatpump, and I have 10 kWp of solar arrays on my roof. In the last week of July, we consumed 84 kWh and generated 230 kWh (273 %). In the last week of November, we consumed 341 khW and generated 40 kWh (11 %). This means we'd need roughly 10 times as much PV area to match demand (10 roofs?), and huge batteries because most of that consumption is in the evening, at night, and in the morning.
Of course, utility-scale and residential solar behave a bit differently, and it becomes more complicated if wind is factored in. But it shows that you can't just overprovision PV a little to fix the main problem of solar power: that it is most abundant in summer, and most in demand in winter.
Above, I looked at the weekly min/max ratio. Of course the daily ratios are much higher, 1:60 for solar, and about 1:30 for wind. But wind and solar do have a useful anti-correlation: the ratio is "only" about 1:15 for combined solar+wind. Still high, but a huge improvement on both wind and solar individually.
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...
In reality, the ratio is even higher since we routinely have to drop solar and turn off wind turbines when there is more production than demand (and I don't think that generation is reflected in the graph).
Ie. the max is already a representation more of grid and demand than of production, and it'd make more sense to use the ratio of min:mean, so comparing what we expect PV+wind to produce on average with what they give on the worst day. That gets us a different, more favorable ratio: 195 TWh produced in 2025 so far, let's call it 550 GWh/day, giving a ratio of about 1:6.
Personally, I have high hopes for flow batteries. Increasing storage capacity is so easy with them, liquids can easily be stored for a long time, and it would even make long-distance transport by ship feasible. If only we can find a cheap, suitable electrolyte.
The implications of bringing it up is that these silly hippies haven't even thought of this basic fact so how can we trust them with our energy system.
Meanwhile, actual energy experts have been aware of the concept of winter for at least a few years now.
If you want to critique their plans for dealing with it, you'd need to do more than point out the existence of winter as a gotcha.
> If you want to critique their plans for dealing with it […]
There are many ideas for seasonal storage of PV-generated electricity, but so far there is no concrete plan that's both scalable to TWh levels and economically feasible. Here on HN, there's always someone who'll post the knee-jerk response of "just build more panels", without doing the simple and very obvious calculation that 5x to 10x overprovisioning would turn solar from one of the cheaper into the by far most expensive power generation method out there [1].
[1] Except for paying people to crank a generator by hand, although that might at least help with obesity rates.
This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x.
Additionally that implies the overprovisioned power is worthless in the summer, which does not have to be the case. It might make certain processes viable due to very low cost of energy during those months. Not trivial as those industries would have to leave the equipment using the power unused during winter months, but the economics could still work for certain cases.
Some of the cases might even specifically be those that store energy for use in winter (although then we're not looking at the 'pure' overprovisioning solution anymore).
That's a huge "if". The cost of PV panels has come down by a factor of 10 in the last 13 years or so, that's true. I doubt another 10x decrease is possible, because at some point you run into material costs.
But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total installation cost of utility-scale PV. This means that even if the panels were free, it would only reduce the cost by a factor of 1.5.
1. Do the other costs scale with the number of panels? Because if the sites are 5 times the scale of the current ones I would imagine there are considerable scale based cost efficiencies, both within projects and across projects (through standardization and commoditization).
2. Vertically mounted bifacial PV already greatly smoothes the power production curve throughout the day, improving profitability. Lower cost panels make the downside of requiring more panels in such a setup almost non-existent. Additionally, they reduce maintenance/cleaning costs by being mounted vertically.
3. Battery/energy storage (which further improve profitability) costs are dropping and can drop further.
Also, please address the matter of using the overprovisioned power in summer. Possible projects are underground thermal storage ("Pit Thermal Energy Storage", only works in places where heating is required in winter), desalination, producing ammonia for fertilizer, and producing jet fuel.
Mostly yes. Once you're at utility-scale, installation and maintainance should scale 1:1 with number of panels. Inverters and balancing systems should also scale 1:1, although you might be able to save a bit here if you're willing to "waste" power during peak insolation.
But think about it this way: If it was possible to reduce non-panel costs by a factor of 5 simply by building 5x larger solar plants, the operating companies would already be doing this. With non-panel costs around 65%, this would result in 65% * (1 - 1/5) = 52% savings and give them a huge advantage over the competition.
> 2. Vertically mounted bifacial PV […] 3. Battery […] costs are dropping
I agree that intra-day fluctuations will be solved by cheaper panels and cheaper batteries, especially once sodium-ion battery costs fall significantly. But I'm specifically talking about seasonal storage here.
> Also, please address the matter of using the overprovisioned power in summer.
I'm quite pessimistic about that. Chemical plants tend to be extremely capital-intensive and quickly become non-profitable if they're effectively idle during half of the year. Underground thermal storage would require huge infrastructure investments into distribution, since most places don't already have district heating.
Sorry, very busy today so I can't go into all details, but I still wanted to give you an answer.
A factor of 5 is certainly within the realms of physics, given the numbers I've seen floating around. Note that prices are changing rapidly and any old price may not be current: around these parts, they're already so cheap they're worth it as fencing material even if you don't bother to power anything with them.
> But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total installation cost of utility-scale PV. This means that even if the panels were free, it would only reduce the cost by a factor of 1.5.
This should have changed your opinion, because it shows how the material costs are not the most important factor: we can get up to a 3x cost reduction by improving automation of construction of utility-scale PV plants.
I think I've seen some HN startups with this as their pitch, I've definitely seen some IRL with this pitch.
1) demonstrated ability in a utility-scale plant
2) already economically viable, or projected to be economically viable within 2 years by actual process engineers with experience in scaling up chemical/electrical plants to industrial size
Yes, that's hard to meet. But the thing is, we've seemingly heard of hundreds of revolutionary storage methods over the last decade, and so far nothing has come to fruition. That's because they were promised by researchers making breakthroughs in the lab, and forecasting orders of magnitude of cost reductions. They're doing great experimental work, but they lack the knowledge and experience to judge what it takes to go from lab result to utility-scale application.
there's ammonia, methanol, and other derivatives that are easier to store and transport.
eg: * https://www.methanex.com/our-products/about-methanol/marine-...
The question is the same as for hydrogen: If it's easy, cheap, and safe to generate, store, and convert back into electricity, why isn't it already being done on a large, commercial scale? The answer is invariably that it's either not easy to scale, too expensive (in terms of upfront costs, maintainance costs, or inefficiencies), or too unsafe, at least today.
Fortescue only piloted athe the world's first ammonia dual-fuel vessel late last year, give them time to bed that in and advance.
Why 2 years?
Even though I'm expecting the current approximately-exponential growths of both PV and wind to continue until they supply at least 50% of global electrical demand between them, I expect that to happen in the early 2030s, not by the end of 2027.
(I expect global battery capacity to be between a day and a week at that point, still not "seasonal" for sure).
Significantly longer than that and you go from prediction to speculation, and it is unwise to base a country's energy policy on speculation.
That is contingent on that we’re not wasting money and opportunity cost that could have larger impact decarbonizing agriculture, construction, aviation, maritime shipping etc.
Some deep geothermal projects have failed because the wells wouldn’t stay open. Maybe this generation of companies have solved this problem; let’s wait and see.
Europe, and Germany and the UK in particular, are really poorly suited to take advantage of this new cheap technology. If these countries don't figure out alternatives, the countries with better and cheaper energy resources will take over energy intensive industries.
This is not a problem for solar and storage to solve, it's a problem that countries with poor resources need to solve if they want to compete in global industry.
The likely implication of this is that, long term, unless wind power starts going back down the cost curve, or you're fortunate enough to have lots of hydro power, Northern Europe, Canada, northern China and so on are going to have much more expensive energy than more equatorial places.
e.g. an analysis of whether we should setup all the solar farms in Nevada for the whole country... set them up in the general south and transmit north... or will each state have their own farms?
That said, it doesn't make sense to have just a single place for the entire country, as there are multiple grids in the US (primarily East, West, and Texas), and with very long transmission you can get into phase issues.
But one effect of ever cheaper solar is that transmission costs start to dominate generation costs, because transmission is not getting cheaper.
Cheap solar and storage requires rethinking every aspect and all conventional wisdom about the grid. Storage in particular is a massive game changer on a scale that few in the industry understand.
Physically transporting electricity across distance is very expensive and a not-insignificant amount of power is simply lost on the way. These problems only get worse as the amount of power goes up, and the danger grows very quickly as power goes up. Plus the strategic and logistical benefits of distributed generation.
Simply put you can't centralize generation for the entire country. There's no practical way to actually transport that much power. Not with the technology we have today. If we had high-temperature superconductors then it would make more sense. But with standard metal wires, it's not happening.
Solar PV on rooftops is great, injecting power directly at the load, eliminating transmission and distribution losses until there is excess to spill back to grid. It would be helpful if we stopped running an entirely artificial timetable in winter that demands heavy activity well outside daylight hours, so that demand better matched availability.
Depends on the country.
In Washington state, our power sources are not next to our population centers; in fact many are in the center of our state! And our state would be the 87th-biggest-country out of 197 in the world.
USA averages 6% transmission loss. New long-distance transmission lines are HVDC and have far less loss over distance. But people oppose them for dumb and good reasons; why would I in Washington state want to have good connections to California so the local producers can reduce supply and drive up prices?
Always overwhelm the enemy when possible. Even when he's planning.
Bureaucracy is the main thing holding back clean energy right now, rather than economics. You can see this in how Texas, which has lax grid regulation but isn’t biased towards clean energy has far surpassed CA, which subsidizes and got a big head start, in wind/solar generation in a few years.
Iirc solar is meaningfully more efficient (30-50%) in southern states, so it will likely make sense to place energy intensive workloads in locations with more direct sun.
However, the cost of transmitting additional power is interesting and complex. Building out the grid (which runs close to capacity by some metric^) is expensive: transmission lines, transformers or substations, and acquiring land is obvious stuff. Plus the overhead of administration which is significant.
So there's a lot of new behind-the-meter generation (ie electricity that never touches the grid)^^
With all that in mind, I expect energy intensive things will move south (if they have no other constraints. Eg cooling for data centers might be cheaper in northern climes. Some processing will make sense close to where materials are available) But a significant amount of new solar will still be used in northern states because it's going to be extremely cheap to build additional capacity. Especially capacity that is behind-the-meter.
^ but not others! Eg if you're willing to discuss tradeoffs you might find dozens of gw available most of the time https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/out-of-thin-air
^^ patio11 has a good podcast about this https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/the-ai-energy... Disclaimer: my employer apparently sponsored that episode
I assume that you mean higher kWh/y/kWp, ie you get more generation out of a given solar panel in the south each year.
I think you and I are saying the same thing though!
It's unfortunate that "efficiency" has both engineering and economic definitions.
We'll continue to see a mix though of Residential / Commercial & Industrial / Utility Scale
There are about 7,000 Utility scale sites in the US right now, so even the big boys there are fairly distributed.
So decentral is the current way to go.
That is the current state in the US
But yeah, the cheap chinese "power stations" run circles around most UPS capacity wise. UPS market is very complacent.
If you want an Lithium power supply then the keyword to look for is "LFP".
Sure, up front you're paying very little for that box that can run your PC for an hour.
But over 2-4 years you'll have to replace that UPS after it fails catastrophically in really dumb ways, and that's if you're lucky and it doesn't also burn your house down, whereas a proper storage system will last for a long, long time with more capability.
In my business I've never had a deskside UPS live longer than that.
And yes, we don't buy the ultra expensive ones. That's true.
They tend to have features that may not be necessary for a UPS (eg solar or DC input), while lacking some features that are more common on UPS (eg companion app to turn your computer off when UPS gets low, although you might be able to rig your own solution)
I guess I've just been lucky.
But what might happen when they fail - thermal runaway is no joke with lithium-ion, ask any firefighter.
They are most certainly not inert, they just have well established safety and charging protocols and are not used in very high quantities together because of their low energy density and cycle life.
LFP batteries which have iron phosphate cathodes are very stable compared to colbalt based batteries that tend to have catastrophic failures due to overcharge causing cathode failure. LFP have higher cycle life and are cheaper and typically whats used for storage and application where the loss in erergy density is not a big deal.
Do not try this at home, as changing battery chemistry is quite ill advised.
While it'll be possible for me to be more than fully self-sufficient in summer, I'd need roughly 3x more panels to come close to having a chance in winter, plus far more battery storage than is reasonable.
I suspect it might be more doable somewhere with milder winters, like Italy but especially as you go further north and the days get shorter, there's just no chance.
For it to work in places with large seasonal differences, we need something else (e.g. nuclear) and/or storage.
6.5 cents/kWh is pretty good, 65 cents though is terrible.
Actually difference is more than 10:1 too
We could start with those ~3 billion people.
Also wind has proven to be a very good supplement to pv.
Analysis finds "anytime electricity" from solar available as battery costs plummet.
Those missing quotes go a long way to making the headline make sense.
Ember’s report outlines how falling battery capital expenditures and improved performance metrics have lowered the levelized cost of storage, making dispatchable solar a competitive, anytime electricity option globally.
Or since power has no provenience, "When batteries are available, electricity prices fall"
Arguably your edit is more factual. But part of the job of the title in an editorial like this is to tell you what their perspective is.
(Analysis finds ((anytime electricity) from solar) available) (as (battery costs) plummet)
In the unsuccessful parse, “anytime“ introduces a relative clause.
(Analysis finds [that] (anytime ((electricity from solar) [is] available))) ???
Subject (((((Solar battery) costs) plummet) analysis) findings)
Verb [back]
Object (anytime (electricity availability))
Garden path sentence structure trap creation relies on initial word parse error encouragement. Brain pattern recognition system default subject-verb-object order preference exploitation causes early stop interpretation failure.
Solar battery costs plummet phrase acting as complex noun modifier group creates false sentence finish illusion. Real subject findings arrival delay forces mental backtrack restart necessity.
Noun adjunct modifier stack length excess impacts processing speed negatively. Back word function switch from direction noun to support verb finalizes reader confusion state.
We write to be understood. Short sentences and simple words make the truth easy to see.
“How cheap is battery storage?“ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...
In short: Cheaper batteries plus already cheap solar means that solar is now a cheap source of “anytime electricity”.
https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-20...
PV in the US is also more expensive than globally however: $38-171 for Utility scale with storage, when including subsidies, $60-210 when not.
Coal is so much worse in every cost metric than gas combined cycle it's not worth considering, even leaving the pollution aside.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/34-%20Exh...
So solar and batteries are now cheaper than all other forms of energy/electricity the only problem is finance for poor countries as you need to spend for all the 15-20 years of electricity in one go where as for coal and gas you will spend the same amount over 10-15 years. For rich countries the problem is mostly protectionism as cheap energy would destroy a lot of wealth of people in power.
Battery storage hits $65/MWh – a tipping point for solar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46251705 - December 2025
People have it in their heads that this is some bleeding heart, don't ruin the planet thing, but it's plain economics. Non-renewable energy is simply inferior, and will only become more so.
you simply can't say this. despite the lobby against it, solar and wind energy have lifespans of around 20 years and afterwards, it's a freaking mess to deal with recycling and often times, garbage we don't know what to do. not even counting the amount of NASTY chemicals going into the production of solar panels. these are sometimes permanent and will have a great long term impact on ecology if we just start destroying plants to substitute with "green" alternatives mindlessly
one can also make a point that despite wind generators metals and batteries being almost to 100% recyclable, it's heck expensive to do and we don't have infrastructure. a comparison cosidering everything involved may show that hydroelectrics, nuclear, geo-thermal and heck even gas may have a similar or better impact depending on location
I love that this is followed by “so go nuclear!”
then you can move on and judge what't the panorama of closed/paywalled science found out there (Nature) that evaluates impacts of solar panel not even considering numbers of last batches of thrash from ~ 2010 (which still have 10-15 years till they start filling the world with chemicals like lead)... then may dive into electricity security and distribution and recycling technology to bring up a single ignorant phrase comment downsizing nuclear generation, despite it being safer and ecological on the long-term compared to photovoltaics in LOTS of places, for example
And having to do all that continuously, every day, for the life of the plant.
In every single solution you can point out problems. Complaining that "X isn't perfect" is the easiest and laziest thing in the world to do. Assessing the ACTUAL costs and damages IN PROPORTION is more difficult, but actually yields good results.
https://apnews.com/article/sheep-solar-texas-climate-333e721...
https://www.nrel.gov/news/detail/features/2025/solar-panels-...
Certainly more so than, say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine.
Similar effects can also be created in currently wild areas that does NOT disrupt the ecosystem, but augments it. For starters, in very dry areas which are ideal for solar deployment, the typical constraint on the ecosystem is lack of shade and moisture preservation, which is mitigated by solar deployment
There are also VAST areas of already populated or in-use areas that are ripe for deployment of solar panels, rooftops, parking areas, canals, reservoirs, and more, and ALL of them are a net improvement with solar panels
So, nobody is stripping anything from the earth, and there is no continuous transportation of materials to set them on fire. The fact that it is already CHEAPER to produce electricity by tearing down a coal plant and installing the same solar capacity shows how crazy it is.
Just because something was the best way we had to do something three technology generations ago does not mean it is still best, or even viable or recommended. Stunning to see such unscientific backwards attitudes on a site focused on science and technology.
no one here typed that photovoltaics shouldn't be on play. but the way it's being paraphrase, feels like a panacea. the OP telling other skeptical opinions against mass substitution to photovoltaics is 'a shame on a tech oriented forum' probably don't even know that regulations and deals of these ballparks have a bunch of regulamentations and considerations that even needs to look for the security/reliability of the grid agaisnt (cyber)terrorism and war...
they then bring a cute little article of people producing tomatoes under laboratory settings being shaded by solar panels. we are chatting about mass production and distribution of energy. if you think it's economically viable to dismantle coal stations and substitute them for solar only shows ignorancy from a multitude of fields... as if energy was easy as comparing output of CO2/$ per watt produced! they even were ironic agaisnt (underdeveloped yet more sane than photovoltaics in the long-term for a vast majority of cases) nuclear technology :D we may shall dismiss the discussion of hooking up batteries on wind/solar, as current prices don't make recycling (batteries) any sense in a large scale that will be decentralized due the geo-location of wind/solar requirements. or do you think transporting these batteries to be recycled in specific areas is just a matter of building cargo-drones powered by solar energy and AI vision? we may also dismiss ecology on the amount of area and damaged species by exchanging any power plant to wind/solar because it's cheap. even group of populations agaisnt visual pollution coming from wind turbines, for example. we also should dismiss the amount of thrash burried by thousands and thousands of multi kilo tons wind turbines after 25 years etc. /s
Every single claim above is at best massively outdated and/or outright wrong and disproved (and no, I won't go do your research for you and find cites for everything).
So, start from the bottom:
>> thrash burried .. multi kilo tons wind turbines
not sure if you mean buried or burned, but wind turbines are already being recycled and reused in bulk, and that is ramping up (and also offtopic from solar)
>> visual pollution coming from wind turbines
Again offtopic, and also purely a matter of taste; it doesn't affect anything
>> transporting these batteries to be recycled in specific areas is just a matter of building cargo-drones powered by solar energy and AI vision
Nice strawman argument from something I never said, and no, there are plenty of other perfectly good transport methods. And yes, recycling batteries is already becoming good business and a great feedstock for 'mining' the materials, and no it does not need to be a big deal, and siting the 'mining' facilities for recycling/recovery is vastly more flexible than siting mining for coal which is obviously necessary wherever the coal happened to form 100 million years ago.
>> they even were ironic agaisnt nuclear technology
Again, a strawman argument, as I never said I was against nuclear tech, and I am in fact for the new forms of nuclear tech, particularly the smaller even portable reactors ('tho the promise of Thorium reactors seems to have faded, but I'm not sure why).
>> if you think it's economically viable to dismantle coal stations and substitute them for solar
Again, only citing multiple studies showing that, and again, you entirely miss the point, which is not that you'd necessarily do it in every case, but that the point of coal being even the economical option has long passed, nevermind the environmental catastrophe it creates.
>> cute little article of people producing tomatoes under laboratory settings
tomatoes aren't the only thing being produced in conjunction with solar panels, and there are so many projects and studies showing its effectiveness in both improving results for farmers and improving their financial stability that it has a name: "agrivoltaics". Instead of spending your energy scoffing at things you obviously know nothing about, perhaps go read up on it and learn something.
>> security/reliability of the grid agaisnt (cyber)terrorism and war
If you want security and reliability, the best thing is widely dispersed power generation as close as possible to the use location. I have advocated for decades that a DOD project like the US Interstate Highway System should be done to ensure every household had a minimum amount of solar self-generation capacity, and stockpile transformers which have a manufacturing lead time of years. A nationwide grid outage without this is a potentially civilization-collapsing event, whereas if every household had some baseline capacity, they can still refrigerate food and communicate. Obviously just a cutout example, but the principle of diversity of power sources and locations makes a more robust system. Only bad grid planning makes solar or wind anything other than an improvement in grid reliability.
Moreover, battery tech is now sufficiently cheap that even the net cost of installing solar+batteries is lower than fossil plants, and that combination has better stability and millisecond-response rates that massively stabilize the grid (vs. ramp-up times measured in minutes-hours for gas plants and days for coal/nuclear).
>>a shame on a tech oriented forum
It is not the discussion of other options, but the disproportionate dismissal and spurious arguments that is a shame here. I'm sure there might be some exceptional situation where a new coal plant might actually be better all things considered, and if you have an actual example to discuss then bring some fats, but overall, that ship has sailed.
with agrivoataiagain, there are hundreds of article
it seems i'm an outdated dreamer here or do you think "two million metric tons of wind turbine blades will reach the end of their operational lifetime in the United States by 2050" is a low-number? something being recyclable doesn't mean it will be, not that's economical feasible to do it. that's like saying we should produce PET plastic mindlessly just because we can recycle it 100%. ¶ https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssusresmgt.4c00256
> Again offtopic, and also purely a matter of taste; it doesn't affect anything
so clearly you don't have idea about authorizations to build them nor what's actually going on ¶ https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/01/the... ¶ https://www.nature.com/articles/s44358-025-00078-1
> Nice strawman argument from something I never said, and no, there are plenty of other perfectly good transport methods. And yes, recycling batteries is already becoming good business and a great feedstock for 'mining' the materials, and no it does not need to be a big deal, and siting the 'mining' facilities for recycling/recovery is vastly more flexible than siting mining for coal which is obviously necessary wherever the coal happened to form 100 million years ago.
... please, just do a quick research on the amount of batteries that actually are recycled, not if they can be recycled. do you think building biometallurgical or pyrometallurgy/hydrometallurgy facilities is cheap and easy to build a bunch of them so we compass the decentralized nature of wind and solar generation? there's a high cost of transporting dead batteries, which requires fossil fuel and if done through roads, will contribute much more to their actual state of the worst offender of micro-plastic producers/polluters worldwide. i will just point some papers on the problem of recycling vehicle batteries (which is so small on scale compared to what we are discussing); https://www.mdpi.com/2313-0105/11/3/94 ¶ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134492... ¶ https://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/21_ma...
> Again, only citing multiple studies showing that, and again, you entirely miss the point, which is not that you'd necessarily do it in every case, but that the point of coal being even the economical option has long passed, nevermind the environmental catastrophe it creates.
seriously. am i arguing with ChatGPT? one thing is to re-purpose unused coal facilities, the other is to claim is economically feasible to substitute them with solar. we aren't living in a happy place where we just substitute stuff arbitrarily based on emergent tech ¶ https://www.sunhub.com/blog/repurposing-coal-mines-solar-ene... ¶ https://www.renewableinstitute.org/abandoned-coal-mines-coul... ¶ https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/PNNL-SA-...
> Instead of spending your energy scoffing at things you obviously know nothing about, perhaps go read up on it and learn something.
i remember once doing volunteer for a farm based on the system of a Swiss guy who came to Brazil to execute his hypothesis. really neat. a pioneer on "regenerative agriculture". but if i actually had to became his proletariat for the rest of my life and know i would retire with a low salary and the consequences of intensive physical labor those organic places required, i wouldn't think it's revolutionary. people on GMO farms have a greater prognosis. rural exodus is an ongoing social phenomena because a thing... with that said i was quite happy to know someone i worked with invested millions USD on solar technology on their farm. really neat move. but would much better a local generator for the whole region... but our global situation doesn't seem to care much about long-term solutions, that are expensive and slower to build. every average enthusiast seems more worried about short term gains and trusting "green technology news headlines" than actually evaluating everything with skepticism
i'm all for development and implementation of greener solutions. that's why i don't even have a driver license. i don't like coal (my country doesn't even use it) but i'm not a blind upper class north American that thinks buying high-tech photovoltaics or wind turbines is the panacea nor these don't leak lead on China or India
although de-centralization is always good!
They're still flogging the "vast areas of the earth" one nearly two years after someone debunked it and they said "very encouraging!" to that info.
Now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259179
Early 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39415988