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Comment by travisb | Hacker News Reader

A big part of it is the industry standard for using the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCoE) as the benchmark metric. By that metric, solar IS the lowest cost power source.

But that definition doesn't take into account availability. This wasn't a problem when all electricity sources were highly available by default. You can burn coal or run the hydro turbines any minute of the year. With the rise of often-unavailable renewable sources like solar and wind that definition is now insufficient and under counts the true like-for-like cost of solar.

By any metric which takes into account minor availability requirements (eg. supplies electricity at night) solar badly loses its cost advantage. It gets even worse if the metric is the still important "deepest winter night" scenario.

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> By any metric which takes into account minor availability requirements (eg. supplies electricity at night) solar badly loses its cost advantage. It gets even worse if the metric is the still important "deepest winter night" scenario.

This is wildly incorrect. Batteries have gotten cheaper, solar has gotten cheaper, and even accounting for storage solar now wins by a wide margin even in "wintery" climates.[0]

Ten years ago you were right, but the cost has been falling by a huge percentage every year for about 15 years straight now. There will never be another time when it makes sense to dig up fossil fuels, ship them all over the world, process them, and then set them on fire when we can just slap up a solar panel and store the power for something approximating free on a 20+ year timeline.

Even if we discount the tax breaks (which we should since Trump is a doofus) both the LCOE and LCOS (levelized cost of storage) of PV + battery are lower than for natural gas, coal, nuclear, etc. Wind beats it by a small amount but less of our land is suitable for wind.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/pdf/...

That presentation doesn't support your claim. The closest it gets is that solar attached to 4 hours of batteries is, ignoring tax credits, about (it's hard to read accurately from the graph) ~8% more expensive than combined-cycle plants.

But 4 hours isn't near a full night. At least 12 hours of battery storage would be necessary for that, possibly more depending on light angles and the relative supply-versus-demand loading at different times of day.

Roughly from the graph on page 8, that 4 hours of battery costs $22/MWh over solar alone. Presuming no further solar panels were needed, extending that 4 hours to 12 to cover the night would cost around $44/MWh more, bringing the total cost of 24h-reliable solar+battery to around $97/MWh -- WITH tax credits. Without tax credits it would be $20-$30 higher, but the graph is too low resolution to be precise. That compares poorly to the $65/MWh for combined-cycle for one single night -- which gets no tax credits accounted for in that graph.

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