[HN Gopher] 'Insanely cheap energy': solar power continues to sh...
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'Insanely cheap energy': solar power continues to shock the world
Author : toomuchtodo
Score : 63 points
Date : 2021-04-24 21:31 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Meanwhile the largest California utilities are _rolling back_
| incentives for solar[1]. Why? Because they 're effectively
| _paying_ people to take electricity during the peak hours of the
| duck curve. Texas has the same issue during peak periods of wind
| power.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-03-16/california...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It's as if they're incentivizing customers to install local
| storage (which receives generous subsidies) to self consume
| generated power.
|
| This is referred to in the utility industry as the "death
| spiral", when it's cheaper to generate and store power locally
| versus receiving inadequate compensation for what power you
| export and then having to consume expensive power from the
| grid.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=utility+death+spiral
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Relevant quote: "Every time you double producing capacity, you
| reduce the cost of PV solar by 28%."
|
| Current worldwide PV manufacturing capacity is roughly 165 GW [1]
| [2], with a utility scale price close to $0.01/kWh [3].
| Manufacturing capacity is doubling every ~4 years. Global PV
| capacity in service is ~600 GW.
|
| IEA Average global annual capacity additions in main and
| accelerated cases, 2023-2025: https://www.iea.org/data-and-
| statistics/charts/average-globa... [4]
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/668764/annual-solar-
| modu...
|
| [2] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/solar-pv-
| modu...
|
| [3] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/04/12/saudi-arabias-
| second-...
|
| [4] https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2020/solar-pv
|
| EDIT: Thanks to /u/gok for the correction on energy units.
| gok wrote:
| $0.01 per kilowatt _hour_
| greeneggs wrote:
| From Wikipedia, "Swanson's law is the observation that the
| price of solar photovoltaic modules tends to drop 20 percent
| for every doubling of cumulative shipped volume." (Swanson's
| law is a special case of Wright's law for more general
| manufacturing costs, and is a misnomer.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law
| [deleted]
| zaroth wrote:
| Fusion power you can install on your roof. Throw in a little
| storage and a decent climate and the power companies are on
| track to be thoroughly screwed.
| irrational wrote:
| You don't even need a decent climate. I live in Portland
| Oregon where it is cloudy for 9 months out of the year. In
| Portland, anything we generate beyond what we can use is fed
| back into the grid and given to us as a credit. We generate
| enough solar power credits that we don't pay anything for
| electricity year round other than a $12 monthly fee to be
| tied into the grid.
| makomk wrote:
| If they're crediting you for that energy at anything close
| to the retail electricity rate you're effectively getting a
| really generous subsidy. Because solar is so cheap but only
| produces electricity sometimes and at pretty much the same
| time everywhere in the region, the actual cost of
| electricity when your solar panels are producing heavily
| and feeding back into the grid is much, much lower than
| when they're not producing and you're a net consumer of
| grid power. Not only that, but it's a subsidy that's likely
| paid to wealthy people who can afford to install solar by
| poorer people who can't.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| These fallacies against net metering have been disproven.
| See the linked citation for details.
|
| "Nevertheless, by the end of 2015, regulators in at least
| 10 states had conducted studies to develop methodologies
| to value distributed generation and net metering, while
| other states conducted less formal inquiries, ranging
| from direct rate design or net-metering policy changes to
| general education of decisionmakers and the public. And
| there is a degree of consensus. What do the commission-
| sponsored analyses show? A growing number show that net
| metering benefits all utility customers."
|
| https://www.brookings.edu/research/rooftop-solar-net-
| meterin...
| mulmboy wrote:
| The post didn't describe net metering
| [deleted]
| philips wrote:
| In oregon you can also sign up for community solar, get a
| state sponsored discount on your bill, and not put up the
| capital costs to install yourself.
|
| https://www.energytrust.org/community-solar/
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Peak solar production is in the summer.
|
| Peak electricity demand is driven by AC, primarily when
| it's hot... in the summer.
| edent wrote:
| One of the best things about this tech is how effective it is at
| domestic scale. My small roof in London generated 26kWh of
| electricity today. About 3X what we consumed.
|
| https://twitter.com/edent_solar
| burlesona wrote:
| How well does it work if you have at least partial tree cover
| on your entire property?
| sxates wrote:
| My house in California is peaking around 70kWh this time of
| year (April, 14kw system), well more than we're using. I can
| charge my tesla during the day and still be exporting to the
| grid. Most afternoons my house is probably powering every house
| on my street.
| richwater wrote:
| How much was your system?
| edhelas wrote:
| All this energy !
|
| Can't be stored (don't tell me about lithium, please do the
| math...), and it's not there at night.
| pridkett wrote:
| It's not as far off as you might think - even for individual
| homeowners. I've got a far from ideal house with a 8.4KWh solar
| array on my roof and 3x Tesla Powerwalls in my basement.
| Yesterday I produced 43KWh of electricity and exported 27KWh to
| the grid. The only reason I've needed grid connectivity in the
| last nine days has been to export power. In essence, I'm
| largely off grid from March through October.
|
| Now, this wasn't cheap (thankfully incentives made it more
| affordable and Eversource provides the most expensive
| electricity in the United States), after incentives it was
| about $22000. That's a lot, but it's not hard to imagine this
| becoming scalable in the near future for climates with better
| solar potential than Connecticut.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| $22,000 would pay my electric bills for about 12 years, not
| even factoring in opportunity cost. What are the ongoing
| maintenance costs/total cost of ownership over 12 years of
| such a system?
|
| As far as Powerwalls go, I'd definitely want something like
| that in an outbuilding and not in my house. Last thing I want
| to do is wake up at 3:00am with a raging battery fire in my
| basement.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| If the solar is almost free, you can shift investment to
| storage, transmission, demand response, and other (more
| expensive) low carbon generation.
|
| One would expect a similar cost decline curve for batteries [1]
| once every automaker is required to buy batteries when they can
| only sell EVs.
|
| [1] https://news.mit.edu/2021/lithium-ion-battery-costs-0323
| edhelas wrote:
| Please do the math, check how much you'll need to cover the
| consumption of a small city for a night.
|
| Just an idea, you have ~500kg of lithium-battery in an
| average EV for a few hundred km of autonomy.
|
| 95% of stored electricity today is water pumped behind dam.
| You want to store electricity, build dam.
|
| There is only a few decades of lithium left to be extracted
| by the way.
| hh3k0 wrote:
| > Please do the math, check how much you'll need to cover
| the consumption of a small city for a night.
|
| It sure would be nice if we had a transnational energy
| infrastructure, as the sun is always shining somewhere.
| Think DESERTEC and Gobitec but for the whole planet.
| edhelas wrote:
| Oh yes, thousands of km of high power copper cables.
|
| Crossing west-to-east Europe with electricity is already
| loosing 30% of it. Let's transport electricity from
| Australia to India !
|
| And for wind, it's the same issue, when there is wind in
| Finland, there is wind in Spain. So you can't "balance
| thing" between countries.
| hh3k0 wrote:
| > Crossing west-to-east Europe with electricity is
| already loosing 30% of it. Let's transport electricity
| from Australia to India !
|
| From the DESERTEC website:
|
| > For long transmission distances direct current
| transmission is superior to alternating current.
| Alternating current has high losses due to capacitive and
| inductive resistance, which do not occur in direct
| current transmission. With that technology, a 3000 km
| line (for example Cairo to Munich) has losses lower than
| 10%.
| lbotos wrote:
| I was interested in what it takes to recycle a Li-ion cell
| and this was a pretty good overview for others:
|
| https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-
| re...
|
| It's expensive now to recycle, and according to the
| article, the costs don't drop to recycle because if it's
| cheaper to dig up ore vs. recycle, well, the business
| doesn't exist.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Redwood Materials, founded by JB Straubel (Tesla co-
| founder and previously CTO), is working on this problem.
|
| https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/
| ggm wrote:
| > There is only a few decades of lithium left to be
| extracted by the way.
|
| Julian Simon's bet with Paul Ehrlich. You're not apparently
| aware of the amount of lithium worldwide, it's availability
| or its price trajectory. All minerals are significantly
| more abundant than people think, supply chain dynamics in
| mining do no equate to scarcity on earth, they relate to
| the economics of exploration and extraction and shipping.
|
| I'll make an exception for pink diamonds. Lithium is not in
| 10 year decline. Lithium is also not the only battery
| mineral of interest and battery tech is not stand and die
| on lithium for either cost, or energy density, or recharge
| speed.
| edhelas wrote:
| Sure, we have plenty of minerals left ! But where and how
| much energy you need to extract them.
|
| In France we have lithium in Alsace, we could dig-it-up,
| but it's really not worth it energy wise and
| environmentally wise.
| ggm wrote:
| http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/
| edhelas wrote:
| 2010 blog article ?
|
| https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/09/16/how-long-will-the-
| lit...
|
| > The scenario which assumes 73 Mt of lithium supply
| left, best policies (recycling, V2G, second-life)
| implemented and around 3 billion EVs on the road sees
| lithium fully depleted a few years beyond 2100. If the
| same policies and number of cars were matched with just
| 26 Mt of lithium, but recycling efforts would only grow
| slowly, battery manufacturers will close shops even
| before 2040.
| ggm wrote:
| 3billion cars. Exhausted at 2010 extraction rates by 2100
| so in 80 years not 10, and for 3 billion cars, and that's
| from resource availability figures from 11 years ago.
|
| Please, don't do this. You said 10 years. It's not
| exhausted in 10 years and a mining report from 2010
| doesn't tell you anything in 2021. Mines are developed
| when economics justify it. Available lithium is huge.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > But where and how much energy you need to extract them
|
| Luckily I just read an article about how much energy
| solar is generating!
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://carbontracker.org/solar-and-wind-can-meet-world-
| ener...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26928343
|
| Storage is a component, but renewables will get so cheap
| we'll overbuild and throw away (curtail) the excess versus
| optimizing for storage.
|
| The world has sufficient lithium reserves for storage and
| EV demands.
| edhelas wrote:
| Sure :) 500BEUR (yes, half a trillion !) invested in wind
| turbines in Germany over 20 years.
|
| Check the result https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE,
| Germany is ~300g of CO2/kwh, France is 50g.
|
| Why ? Because when there is no wind, no sun, you need
| power. And then you're burning gaz or coal. So you
| "erase" all those 0CO2 days.
|
| Also solar panel efficiency fades over time, you loose
| 50% of efficiency after a few decades. Wind-turbines have
| 25y life expectancy.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I thought it was because Germany shut down its nuclear
| power plants and ramped its coal generation up? [1]
| Germany poorly managing its power grid doesn't imply that
| renewables aren't economically rational; it implies
| Germany makes irrational national policy. France is
| primarily nuclear powered, as you point out with their
| low CO2 emission footprint (compare the generation mixes
| of both countries in ElectricityMap, I'm familiar having
| contributed generation data for Europe).
|
| Solar panels retain 90% of their production rating after
| 25 years, and can be recycled at end of life, as can wind
| turbine blades (with the turbines repowered, typically
| generating more power than the previous equipment).
|
| What's with the FUD? Definitely feels like there's an
| agenda when the data is objectively clear.
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/story/germany-rejected-nuclear-
| power-a...
| coryrc wrote:
| How I look at it, had they spent the same amount of money
| in a different way, they could be carbon neutral. Climate
| change is an emergency but no one is acting like it.
|
| It's one thing to say "we don't think it's worth the
| money" and another to spend the money but not achieve
| much, it's even worse IMO!
| [deleted]
| Someone wrote:
| Wind turbine blade recycling is hard. I wouldn't call it
| a proven technology. For example, all recycling options
| discussed in https://designedconscious.com/plastics-in-
| the-ocean/sustaina... are into inferior products (shorter
| glass fibers, ash, etc)
| [deleted]
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I run the utilities at night because electricity is cheaper
| then. I'd run them during the day if I had solar.
| epistasis wrote:
| How do you know how much lithium there is? Every year we
| discover more accessible lithium than the year before. Do the
| history!
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| It still means power for air conditioning is ~free during the
| day when it's most needed, and you could pre-cool or pre-heat a
| bulk block with high heat capacity, then slowly use the
| heat/cold during the day.
|
| You can charge the electric cars when there's an excess, so in
| particular all the extra load from electric car charging that
| some people were so worried about is no longer a concern.
|
| If it gets cheap enough, you can overbuild capacity so that you
| have just enough power if it's a bit overcast, and way too much
| when there's sun (since solar cells can be safely "turned off"
| as far as I know, unlike conventional plants).
|
| If we now get some process for capturing carbon from the air
| where electricity is the main cost (i.e. overbuilding capacity
| and using it only 20% of the time is affordable), we now have a
| place to put all the excess electricity during peak.
| edhelas wrote:
| I think that you don't see how much land you actually need.
| Maybe in America there is plenty of space, but in Europe it's
| way more difficult. To replace one nuclear reactor, you need
| ~ half of Paris in solar panel. And still need energy "at
| night".
|
| Yes heating water, or cooling places are nice. But your
| trains ain't gonna work "only when there is sun".
|
| If you need backup at one moment, you need 0C02 backup and
| basically: Or you build dam, or you build nuclear plants.
|
| If you build nuclear plants, it's basically dumb to have
| plenty of renewable next to it...
| stale2002 wrote:
| Fortunately space and land are cheap in the vast scheme of
| things.
|
| There are very large amounts of "free" space, on rooftops,
| for example.
| sunstone wrote:
| Heat the swimming pool during the day and then use the heat
| pump at night.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| How does that store energy for the grid?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| [deleted. made mistake of commenting about cryptocurrency.]
| doggosphere wrote:
| You dont really need to propose that by law, solar is already
| cheaper. Just remove subsidies from coal, and add carbon tax.
| greenearth1 wrote:
| This is why pushing for free markets is the most effective
| solution for combating fossil fuel dependencies.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| If you push for free markets, Big Oil isn't going to be the
| first to yield. If we can't get rid of CO2 subsidies, solar
| subsidies are necessary.
| lumost wrote:
| The free market really has no method of pricing developments
| with 30+ years to profit/free cash flow. The government first
| started subsidizing solar to be price competitive in specific
| situations in the 1970s.
|
| There simply aren't any rational free market actors funding
| large unprofitable initiatives for 40 years with the
| expectation that the technology will be a bananza after all
| the principals have retired or are dead.
| [deleted]
| torgian wrote:
| "How Droll": So-called 'shocking' titles actually pretty
| sensationalist.
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