[HN Gopher] Can solar costs keep shrinking?
___________________________________________________________________
Can solar costs keep shrinking?
Author : GoRudy
Score : 191 points
Date : 2024-08-29 13:57 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com)
| rtkwe wrote:
| I'm having a hard time getting past the assumption in the article
| that energy use is tied directly to GDP per capita and that by
| not following the 7% growth of the Henry Adams Curve we're
| somehow below where we should/could be as a country. That embeds
| so many assumptions about the economy and where GDP comes from,
| the decoupling seems more likely to be from the transition from
| manufacturing and other energy heavy sectors to more services
| based economic activity..
| rconti wrote:
| Yeah, I had to re-read it 3 times to understand why the article
| was saying that was a _bad_ thing. Now I understand what he's
| saying but I'm pretty lost because it assumes a set of priors I
| simply never had.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Even the graph that I think is supposed to support the
| assertion by gesturing towards a link between GDP/c and
| energy consumption/c shows there's a huge range of per capita
| energy consumption for countries in the same GDP per capita
| band hidden because the graph uses dual logarithmic axes.
|
| It's always a little hard to read logarithmic values other
| than those explicitly labelled but it looks like up to a 5-7x
| difference in energy consumption can have basically no effect
| on the GDP per capita!
| the8472 wrote:
| I don't think the range matters so much as the floor. The
| huge blank in the lower-right corner. No such thing as a
| rich, energy-poor country.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The articles argument is about the US moving inside the
| range band we see though not about the US having a 100
| fold reduction in the power generated that would be
| required to drop us into the lower right.
|
| I did the math on the data elsewhere in this thread [0]
| and in an outcome that should surprise no one there's a
| transition around 1970 where the ratio between power used
| and gdp created per capita changes drastically, in 1970
| we produced .69 units of GDP per unit of energy and in
| 2014 we were producing 7.94 using inflation adjusted
| dollars and oil kg equivalent per capita. We just moved
| into a different type of economy and there's no data in
| the graph or article to back up the assertion that
| falling off the HA curve and consuming ~5x less power per
| capita our GDP is somehow 5x smaller.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41392222
| toss1 wrote:
| >> That embeds so many assumptions about the economy and where
| GDP comes from
|
| YUP. Of course there is a strong correlation between energy use
| and GDP growth; it takes more energy to produce more stuff.
|
| But ultimately, what produces more stuff is harder to measure.
| To light the factories, more energy used to correlate with more
| light, until we swap out the incandescent/halogen lighting
| sources for LEDs. Then, we get more light for something like
| 16% of the energy usage. Or, getting to the stage of "lights-
| out" automation, and the same production for zero lighting
| energy. Same for more efficient motors, swapping ovens for
| inductive heating, more efficient processes, etc.
|
| Seems that measuring GPD growth by energy consumption is like
| Bill Gates' famous example of saying that "measuring software
| progress by lines of code is like measuring progress in
| aircraft by the weight of the planes". Obviously, in specific
| cases, all things being equal, more is more, but in reality,
| fewer LOC and lighter airplanes generally produce _more_
| results.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| > It takes more energy to produce more stuff
|
| Energy consumption is also about _using_ that stuff. And in
| rich countries like the USA, a _lot_ of energy goes to using
| things or just moving people. So it 's possible to build more
| and use less energy, even if you don't reduce the energy cost
| of building things. They can simply become more efficient to
| _use_ and _move_.
|
| In USA, 30% is just homes and commercial sector. 40% is
| transportation. 30% is "industry". By a sort-of inverse-
| amdahl's law, it's possible to get lower energy use with more
| throughput even if we don't make "industry" more efficient.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >So it's possible to build more and use less energy, even
| if you don't reduce the energy cost of building things.
|
| In principle I can imagine that being true - but that's not
| represented in our world, so it is an open question if you
| can 'build more and use less energy' in the real world.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| It's represented everywhere that efficiency counts. I
| haven't fact-checked it, but one source[0] claims that
| refinements in the design of soda cans (thinner walls,
| different shapes) since 1960 saves "at least 90 million
| kilograms of aluminum annually."
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUhisi2FBuw
| toss1 wrote:
| Exactly!! There a uncountable millions of examples, and
| you're right, anywhere efficiency counts, which is pretty
| much everywhere.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| It's also irrelevant as anything other than a limiting
| case. The issue is with the statement that energy use
| must go up to produce more GDP or that not increasing
| energy use means we cannot raise GDP or even that GDP is
| limited by a flat energy use.
|
| USA GDP is still on basically the same exponential curve,
| yet energy is flat. That's the counter example. The rest
| is exposition.
| rtkwe wrote:
| It's really really not, you can see it in the data. I
| took GDP per capita and kg oil equivalent energy
| consumption per capita and in 1970 the very year the
| article highlights as us falling off the HA curve and
| representing 'lost' GDP the exact opposite happens. We
| begin producing way more GDP per capita using the same
| unit of energy.
|
| It's basically a piece wise function if you graph it.
| 1960 to 1970 the GPD/energy unit ratio is largely stable
| then after that it begins increasing monotonically going
| from .69 to 7.94.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41392222
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > Jevons Paradox, named for the 19th- century English
| economist William Stanley Jevons, who noticed that as steam
| engines became ever more efficient, Britain's appetite for
| coal increased rather than decreased.
|
| > Yet the amount of electricity we consume for light globally
| is roughly the same today as it was in 2010. That's partly
| because of population and economic growth in the developing
| world. But another big reason is there on the Las Vegas
| Strip: Instead of merely replacing our existing bulbs with
| LED alternatives, we have come up with ever more extravagant
| uses for these ever-cheaper lights
|
| NYT: The Paradox Holding Back the Clean Energy Revolution
|
| https://archive.is/rb2DX
| kragen wrote:
| > _To light the factories, more energy used to correlate with
| more light, until we swap out the incandescent /halogen
| lighting sources for LEDs_
|
| this is nonsense. lighting hasn't been a significant fraction
| of the energy usage of factories since they switched from
| being lighted by fireplaces to gaslighting. not in 02024, not
| in 01974, not in 01924, not in 01874
|
| > _Seems that measuring [gdp] growth by energy consumption is
| like Bill Gates ' famous example_
|
| it's true that higher efficiency is better, of course, but
| your comment embeds the false assumption that higher energy
| efficiency reduces energy use. in fact, higher energy
| efficiency usually _increases_ energy use, because it
| increases the scope of things to which marketed energy can be
| economically applied more than it reduces the use of marketed
| energy for things it was already being used for. (this is the
| well-known jevons paradox mentioned in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41392248). so, even
| today, it turns out that the countries with the lowest gdp
| and lowest energy use also have the lowest energy efficiency
|
| similarly, using high-level languages reduces the number of
| lines of code to implement some given functionality; but you
| would be completely mistaken if you used that fact to predict
| that the vast majority of programmers spend their time
| writing assembly language instead of python because python
| requires one twentieth of the code to do whatever. many
| things are done with python not just because companies
| writing python outcompete companies writing assembly, but
| also because programs that would be unprofitable to write in
| assembly language become profitable to write when you can
| write them in high-level languages!
| macspoofing wrote:
| >I'm having a hard time getting past the assumption in the
| article that energy use is tied directly to GDP per capita
|
| Why? They are correlated and so are reasonable metric to gauge
| progress when starting from a subsistence economy (as all
| economies in the world began). At some point, this may be less
| true when you hit a energy generation ceiling and you start
| 'optimizing' and trying to do more with the same amount .. but
| again, we're not there yet so it's a good metric today, and
| especially for developing economies.
|
| Put another way, you show me GDP per capita or per capita
| Energy use and I can get a reasonable ballpark for the other as
| well as a measure for the wealth of that nation.
| sobellian wrote:
| We are there today: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-
| decoupling
| Mistletoe wrote:
| This always makes me uncomfortable though. How would we
| tell the difference between rampant scamming and fudging
| numbers and an economy where we all pass around Monopoly
| money to do services for one another? I pay you to mow my
| lawn and you pay me to mow your lawn. Are we creating GDP?
| sobellian wrote:
| I'm not sure goods are quite immune from this objection.
| Industry turns out plenty of useless widgets. The Humane
| AI pin creates GDP!
| rtkwe wrote:
| Very true and you quickly get into a very command economy
| style argument about what should be produced. Ultimately
| we have the system we have and wasted or scammy products
| generally eventually die. Look at things like NFTs they
| were an extremely brief blip it turns out because people
| quickly saturated the ability of crypto early adopters to
| inflate values with their funny money. Some scams last
| longer like Thomas Kincade 'paintings' but trying to sort
| through the economic data to throw those out is just not
| possible.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > How would we tell the difference between rampant
| scamming and fudging numbers and an economy where we all
| pass around Monopoly money to do services for one
| another?
|
| It will show up as decrease in exports because other
| countries (or societies or tribes or whatever you want to
| call them) will want less of what your country is
| selling.
|
| Which then shows up as decreasing purchasing power for
| things that you do want from other countries (i.e. you
| getting poorer).
|
| Luckily for the US, that does not seem to be the case
| given the resilience of the purchasing power of the USD.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The range is so wide though. Look at a particular narrow band
| of the GDP per capita and see how wide the energy consumption
| per capita is for even a very narrow slice of GDP per capita.
| The dispersion gets even wider as you get up towards the high
| end of the GDP axis.
|
| The author asserts that we should see 5x GDP/c if we had 5x
| power usage per person and their own graph shows that that's
| not the case because it's a flawed assumption that ignores
| increases in efficiency and transitions away from energy
| intensive manufacturing to service based.
|
| The best evidence for that is that the GDP/c didn't fall off
| when we fell off the HA curve. In fact I took the GDP per
| capita and Energy consumption per capita data from world data
| bank and the ratio between the per capita GDP vs the per
| capita energy consumption has been going up steadily since we
| stopped following the HA curve.
|
| Between 1960 and 1970 the ratio between GDP and Energy
| Consumption per capita was essentially static at .74 then
| after 1970 the ratio begins to increase showing we're
| producing more per unit of consumed energy at a nearly linear
| rate. By 2014 which is the last year they had the Electric
| power per capita data the ratio was all the way up to 4.2.
| Eyeballing it the relationship is almost perfectly linear
| each year we get a little better at producing GDP for each
| kWh we consume.
|
| I even redid the calculation based on raw energy use in kg
| oil equivalents and it gets even more drastic. 1960 to 1970
| it goes from .53 to .69 GDP/kg oil equivalent [0]. Then after
| 1970 the rate increases quite distinctly going from .69 to
| 1.58 in 1980, 3.11 in 1990, 4.5 in 2000, and 6.79 in 2010.
|
| It's pretty clear from the data that we're getting better at
| producing things with the same amount of energy. It's an
| assumption that simply making more power would increase the
| amount of things made.
|
| Electricity use per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indica
| tor/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...
|
| Energy use per capita in Kg oil equivalents: https://data.wor
| ldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE?locat...
|
| GDP per capita in current USD: https://data.worldbank.org/ind
| icator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
|
| [0] nice.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Yes this confuses me too. In developed countries a huge amount
| of energy goes to _using_ things, not just _making them_. Let
| alone efficiency gains from production.
|
| This is possibly why energy use has flattened while GDP clips
| along at its normal exponential curve - we're also more
| efficient.
| hadlock wrote:
| Lighting going from 1% efficient (99% of the energy used by a
| traditional tungsten lightbulb is waste heat) to over 95%
| efficient (in many cases 99% efficient). Computers went from
| 200-400w continuous down to about 15w continuous. Lighting
| alone is responsible for a huge amount of energy drop-off.
| obscurette wrote:
| Sorry, but these numbers are not accurate. Luminous
| efficiency of tungsten lightbulbs is typically around 1-3%
| (depends on voltage and power), and luminous efficiency of
| LED bulbs is around 10-30%.
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficacy)
| Iulioh wrote:
| You forgot the part when we used 100W bulbs and now we
| use 10W led lights.
|
| Efficency in the use of energy ti generate the same
| amount of lumens, because it would be REALLY fun to have
| a 100W led lamp in my bathroom mirror (my parents still
| have 2 of these traditional lights ).
|
| I mean...energy conversion to lumen is fine but i think
| it's a little pedantic
| specialist wrote:
| I clocked that too.
|
| Perhaps author is nodding towards replacing fossil fuels with
| electricity.
|
| Decarbonizing steel uses a lot more energy. Ditto cement,
| plastics, fertilizers, HVAC, etc.
|
| Anyone care to guess how much more energy our glorious
| renewable energy future perfect economy will require? 4x? 6x?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| How about significantly less than 1x?
|
| Fossil fuels waste most of their energy as heat. Gasoline
| cars are ~30% efficient, EV's are ~90%.
|
| And heat pumps are often 200-500% efficient, unlike fossil
| fuel furnaces which cap out around 95%.
|
| Transportation and heating use far more fuel than industrial
| uses.
| specialist wrote:
| Ya, that's Saul Griffith's prediction too. I'll defer to
| you both.
|
| Tragically, I got wonksniped by Pueyo's Henry Adams Curve
| shout out.
|
| TIL He's referring the Roots of Progress thesis. The
| mythical "stagnation" phenomonen that some "rationalists"
| used to obsess over.
|
| From the hip: the mistake is measuring national vs global
| per capita energy use. As many, many have noted, we
| delegated our energy consumption by moving our mfg
| overseas.
|
| Mystery solved.
|
| Further, notice similarity between Roots of Progress' graph
| and https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
|
| Spoiler: Neoliberalism happened. aka globalization,
| austerity, supply-side economics
|
| --
|
| FWIW: Omitting Pueyo's tangent about the Henry Adams Curve,
| I found this article to be a great overview of solar PV's
| current position on its cost-learning-curve.
|
| And I agree the cost of solar PV will decrease for some
| time. Even faster than the most optimistic projections,
| which has been the norm for years.
|
| Exciting times.
|
| I look forward to Pueyo's article explaining why price of
| electricity continues to rise despite decreasing production
| costs. Transmission? Utility monopolies? Financing?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > why price of electricity continues to rise despite
| decreasing production costs.
|
| That's economics 201. The price of a commodity is the
| cost of the marginal producer. So it doesn't matter how
| cheap some producers are, the price of a commodity is set
| by the most expensive producer that is meeting demand. So
| price of electricity won't drop until cheap producers can
| meet 100% of demand.
|
| Until that happens, cheap producers enjoy outsized
| profits, encouraging more cheap producers to join the
| market.
| NortySpock wrote:
| Makes sense, and then you can split consumption (or
| production - arbitraging with a battery) into time-of-use
| buckets (a kWh of electricity already has different costs
| if you're buying during peak hours vs off-peak vs super-
| off-peak), or spot prices vs reserve prices. In
| commodities terms, I feel like it would be similar to
| futures and spot-price.
|
| Those who can buy their energy in bulk and store it
| efficiently, or only consume when the price is lower than
| X, will pay a lower rate than those who cannot store
| energy, or who pay to have someone else store it (again,
| arbitrage)
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The classic mistake with calculations around this topic is
| assuming you need an equal amount of electric energy to
| displace the equivalent in fossil fuel. It's a broken
| assumption that you see popping up in a lot of places.
| Including reports by institutions that should know better
| like the IEA.
|
| A classic example here is cars. A typical Tesla would have
| about 65kwh of usable battery. A gallon of fuel represents
| about 31 kwh. So, a 1 to 1 replacement would mean that Tesla
| would have about 8x less range than it actually has compared
| to a car with e.g. a 15 gallon tank and. pretty decent
| mileage of 16 miles to the gallon. Reason: a Tesla manages
| about 4-5 miles per kwh which amounts to about 250-300 miles
| range. Let's low ball that to 250. Meaning, you can drive
| about 8 cars more per kwh of electricity than per kwh of ICE
| car. Switching all road traffic to electric would mean we
| actually save a lot of energy. Maybe not 8x but it's going to
| be substantially less than what we currently consume in fuel
| for road traffic.
|
| People underestimate how quickly this is going. Most
| commercial fleets are switching sooner rather than later.
| They have to, the cost savings are to large to ignore. That's
| most of the traffic on roads and it's not going to take
| decades.
|
| Heating and cooling with heat pumps is the similar. A good
| heat pump that is installed properly should deliver a COP of
| about 4. Meaning you get 4 units of heat (or cooling) for
| every kwh you put in. A gas heater has a COP of slightly
| below 1. 1 is it's theoretical maximum. So switching
| industrial and domestic heating/cooling over to heat pumps is
| going to deliver some pretty significant savings as well.
| Mostly industries have barely scratched the surface on this
| topic. Industrial heating is mostly still based on burning
| gas or other fossil fuels. That's because gas used to be
| cheap and electricity used to be expensive.
|
| Now that that cost has flipped around, companies are slow to
| adapt. But eventually some companies will start figuring this
| out and once they do it might save them a lot of money and
| make them a lot more competitive. And all that is before you
| consider using cheap off peak electricity when wholesale
| energy prices occasionally go negative!
|
| 4x-5x overall more electricity usage sounds about right. I
| expect it to be more because as energy keeps on getting
| cheaper we'll keep on finding new uses for it as energy
| prices keep on dropping. Assuming everything stays the same
| is not a great way to make predictions about the future.
| Things rarely do. But it's not that unreasonable to assume a
| 5x increase to happen over the next few decades. But it will
| cost us a lot less than our current energy spending. If we
| keep on going at the pace we are currently going we'll get
| there easily. And there are good reasons to expect things to
| speed up actually.
|
| Solar cost will keep on shrinking. Especially in the US there
| is a lot of potential for improvements. That's because cost
| is currently inflated due to a combination of import tariffs
| and asinine regulations that mean installation cost is
| insanely high compared to other countries. Some of that
| regulation is courtesy of fossil fuel companies lobbying for
| this. But both are fixable problems. And more importantly,
| both are non technical problems. Meaning that international
| competition between countries (and domestically between
| states) will force the issue ultimately.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Heat pumps save gas even if the electricity is being
| produced in gas-fired power plants.
| tuna74 wrote:
| Another issue is that ocean water becomes very usable since
| it becomes so cheap to remove the salt from it. It won't be
| long before the most productive food producers will be in
| desert regions that have access to the sea (like Australia,
| Pakistan and Saudia Arabia).
| yababa_y wrote:
| Can't grow much in sand, how are they going to get that
| much soil?
| kragen wrote:
| well, given that the solar luminosity is 3.8 x 1026 watts,
| the milky way galaxy contains about 2 x 1011 stars, of which
| 3/4 are red dwarfs and so about 5 x 1010 are sunlike stars,
| probably our glorious renewable energy future perfect economy
| will use about 2 x 1035 watts. current world marketed energy
| consumption is about 19 terawatts (1.9 x 1013 watts) so
| that's about 1022x more than at present
|
| unless the humans die out as yet another sad single-planet
| species
| sharpshadow wrote:
| Look at Germany the next years. We gave up coal, nuclear and
| now gas. Have the highest prices for energy in the world and
| our industry is leaving.
|
| If we would have more energy we would get much richer and not
| more poor like right now.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The price of a commodity is equal to the highest of the
| lowest cost producers that can satisfy demand. Germany cannot
| satisfy demand with cheap renewables, so the marginal
| producer is expensive gas & nuclear.
|
| German electricity is expensive because gas is expensive in
| Germany. Electricity will be expensive in Germany until
| Germany completely stops using gas shipped in via container
| ship.
| sharpshadow wrote:
| You got it right there Germany can't satisfy demand with
| renewables and decided to cut itself of from coal and
| nuclear, brilliant right!?
|
| Cherry on top some powerful player blew up Nordstream
| forcing Germany to buy exorbitantly expensive LNG.
|
| Your argument to stop using LNG doesn't work if you have
| many parts of industry build with gas infrastructure which
| can't be replaced just like that.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Only if Germany could replace all of their expensive
| natural gas usage with coal & nuclear would coal &
| nuclear be relevant.
|
| They can't, so it isn't.
| derriz wrote:
| Germany has been the biggest exporter of electricity in
| the world for 8 of the last 10 years[0]. It consistently
| generates more than it consumes. It's been this way since
| around 2004.
|
| German wholesale electricity prices are relatively low by
| European standards - so far this year about 8th cheapest
| - about 13% cheaper than of France, for example[1]. This
| reflects the blended cost of production. Household prices
| are higher than average - because domestic consumption of
| electricity is taxed more heavily in Germany than the
| average in Europe.
|
| [0] https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/electrical-energy [1]
| https://ember-climate.org/data-catalogue/european-
| wholesale-...
| pyrale wrote:
| The link you're using is from 2022, which is an outlier
| in terms of energy production.
|
| The issue is that Germany exports "waste" electricity. It
| almost always exports cheap power, and imports at high
| rates. In negative price events, you will almost always
| see Germany in the exporter list.
|
| For instance, today, France imported from Germany between
| 10:30 and 15:45, when market prices reached bottom, and
| exported to Germany when prices soared, including between
| 18h and 21h [1].
|
| Another issue is that Germany's inability to control its
| power production is big enough that it can't be
| compensated by cross-border trades. That's what can be
| seen today between 18h and 21h [2], where the price
| spread between France and Germany became very large.
|
| This kind of pattern has been happening all week.
|
| [1]: https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/cross-border-
| electrici... [2]: https://www.rte-
| france.com/en/eco2mix/market-data
| kitkat_new wrote:
| > Cherry on top some powerful player blew up Nordstream
| forcing Germany to buy exorbitantly expensive LNG.
|
| Germany was forced already before that, since Russia used
| the Gas to blackmail Germany
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| It also neatly corresponds with the mass rollout of nuclear
| power so it's possible it's just the classic measurement issue
| of "primary energy" vs "useful energy", sometimes called the
| primary energy fallacy, which makes fossil fuel based systems
| appear 4x (or probably more going back in time) better than
| they actually are.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I tried to track this down, found some blogs by the
| originator, but it only gets more confusing:
|
| https://wimflyc.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-henry-adams-
| curve-c...
|
| Henry Adams points out that over 60 years you got 3-4x more
| power from a ton of coal. That combined with the extra coal
| dug up, he claims, doubled usable energy every ten years.
|
| But then the modern graph simply shows the coal energy, with
| (as far as I can tell) no attempt to account for the extra
| efficiency, even though the modern author of the graph makes
| explicit reference to the increasing efficiency of steam
| engines.
| javiramos wrote:
| A fantastic deep dive into this topic is Vaclav Smil's book
| Energy and Civilization:
| https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262536165/energy-and-civilizati...
| kragen wrote:
| thank you! this looks highly relevant to my interests
| countvonbalzac wrote:
| Same - take lightbulbs for example. Thanks to LEDs, the amount
| of energy you need to generate X amount of light has reduced
| considerably, but we still have as much if not more lighting
| than ever. And it's not like our GDP is suffering due to a lack
| of sufficient lighting, at a certain point there's no gain to
| productivity gained from having another lightbulb. Same thing
| can be said about cars, CPUs etc.
| Havoc wrote:
| Think it's meant more as a broad generalization than
| something that is always true.
|
| Many physical things take pretty fixed amounts of energy. Eg
| heating a liter of water.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Or refining aluminum, which uses something like 1.5% of all
| US electricity generation.
| kragen wrote:
| it would be much more, but the us imports 130% of the
| aluminum it consumes from places with lower energy costs:
| https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-aluminu
| m.p...
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Bahrain and UAE being big aluminum smelters is a bit
| surprising.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Iceland too. It takes a few workers and a lot of energy.
| Very sensitive to market conditions though. Peaky.
| cameldrv wrote:
| Exporting aluminum is basically exporting electricity,
| except aluminum is easy to ship, costs very little to
| store, and has an indefinite shelf life. For places with
| a lot of natural gas and no pipelines to export it, it's
| often easier to export aluminum than liquified gas.
| kragen wrote:
| if you're burning it in aluminum-air fuel cells, it can
| be _literally_ exporting electricity. right now that isn
| 't a commercial-scale activity, but possibly it will
| become profitable in the coming years for places with a
| lot of solar power and no hvdc lines to export it
| abraae wrote:
| The Tiwai Point aluminum smelter uses 13% of New
| Zealand's electricity [0]
|
| It's overseas owners are constantly playing hardball with
| the country over the price they pay. Feels like every
| year they threaten to shut the smelter down unless they
| get better electricity rates.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiwai_Point_Aluminium
| _Smelte...
| bee_rider wrote:
| The economy stopped getting better because I started taking
| shorter, colder showers.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Think it's meant more as a broad generalization than
| something that is always true.
|
| I think you're right, but also that the majority of the
| problems with the worlds economies (in the richer nations)
| are because of similar generalizations, and as such I think
| it important to rebuke them.
|
| Having more cheap energy available _is_ good (all else
| being equal), but optimising for higher energy usage is
| absurd.
| morepork wrote:
| Even with water heating moving to a heat pump lets you do
| it using less input energy because you are taking heat from
| the environment
| pseudosavant wrote:
| It is a curious assertion for sure, but the next wave of AI
| will be throttled by a few factors: chip fab capacity, water
| supply to cool data centers, and electricity to power the
| chips/servers. Look at what is happening with xAI in Memphis
| where they are illegally running a dozen turbine generators
| to power their new AI data center since they can't get enough
| supply off the grid.
| svnt wrote:
| It may be throttled by energy supply and water supply at a
| desirable site, but not by country-level energy costs and
| water costs, which is all this blog post is looking at.
| kragen wrote:
| for some economic activities, energy is not a limiting input;
| you are implicitly referring to economic production enabled
| by electric lighting, such as office work, and indeed energy
| has not been a limiting input for that for at least a
| century. reducing the cost of energy will not result in more
| gdp in those sectors
|
| for other economic activities, such as solar panel
| production, aluminum production, and neural network training,
| energy _is_ a limiting input. reducing the cost of energy
| _will_ result in more gdp in those sectors
| Retric wrote:
| Dropping energy costs lowers costs in every sector but
| rarely by that much.
|
| > aluminum production
|
| Dropping energy costs an by 75% only drops smelting prices
| by about 30% and finished goods by even less.
| kragen wrote:
| there's usually a long lag between a drop in the price of
| an input and the eventual impact on the price of the
| outputs, because part of the effect is mediated by the
| adoption of innovations that use more of the newly-
| cheaper inputs and less of the still-expensive inputs
|
| to take one example, the last time we got access to a
| major new source of energy was something like watt's
| steam-engine in 01776. one of the effects of this was the
| widespread replacement of steel cans (which hadn't been
| invented in 01776) and glass bottles with aluminum cans
| in the 01970s, 200 years later. another was the
| replacement of travel by ship with travel by air, also
| about 200 years later. the delay is because many
| intermediating innovations were required, for example, in
| the aluminum-can case:
|
| - the discovery of electrolysis;
|
| - the discovery of aluminum;
|
| - the discovery of canning;
|
| - the hall-heroult process;
|
| - improved aluminum alloys that permitted the use of
| 100mm-thick cans;
|
| - the invention of deep drawing;
|
| - epoxy liners that made aluminum cans chemically stable
| to acidic contents such as coca-cola;
|
| - long-distance trucking which increased the cost imposed
| by heavier glass bottles.
| njarboe wrote:
| We started to access nuclear power as a new source, but
| then stopped for quite a while. It looks like things are
| starting up again. We'll see.
| kragen wrote:
| the issue with nuclear power is that the humans don't yet
| have the technology to exploit it economically; at their
| current primitive level it's uncompetitive with other
| sources of energy. like printing 1000 years ago or
| heron's aeolipile
| kragen wrote:
| presumably what's going to happen is that, as energy becomes
| dramatically cheaper, production will shift from less-energy-
| intensive processes toward more-energy-intensive processes.
| this is likely to happen at many levels: between different
| routes for producing the same good (for example, pidgeon vs.
| dow process), between alternative goods (for example, aluminum
| vs. steel), between subsectors (for example, heavy industry vs.
| high-precision manufacturing), and across sectors (for example,
| manufacturing vs. services)
|
| so, with the advent of innovations that dramatically drop the
| cost of energy, we should expect to see energy use grow
| _faster_ than gdp. that 's decoupling but in the opposite
| direction from the decoupling you're talking about, which has
| been driven by the 01973-02023 energy crisis
| empiricus wrote:
| You need energy to make things. Houses, roads, cars, food, many
| services. Basically without energy you are poor. Having energy
| is not enough, but it is necessary to be rich.
| hinkley wrote:
| But sometime in the 90's if not sooner a lot of us started
| valuing items that had a lower embodied energy as a ratio of
| the usefulness of the product.
|
| We want things that are the same but less intense, or that
| are much better at a fractional increase in input.
|
| And we really need it if we want a planet worth living on
| fifty years from now. So to ignore this desire is dangerous.
| tmnvix wrote:
| A lot of us, maybe. But my impression is that a lot of us
| also choose to consume more stuff more frequently (larger
| vehicles and homes, less durable items replaced more
| frequently, etc). I would not be surprised to learn that
| our direct energy use - such as vehicle fuel and
| electricity for heating - has increased with longer
| commutes and larger homes.
|
| Compared to just 50 years ago, I would say that our
| lifestyles are on average vastly more consumptive, despite
| being more environmentally aware. We seem unwilling to make
| the sacrifices that really matter.
|
| I think that some time in the future, our time will be seen
| as one of massive entitlement. As technology makes things
| possible, we feel entitled to make use of it if we can
| afford it. How many people in the 50's were using trucks to
| drag boats and horse floats around in the suburbs? These
| are the kind of reasons people will give for their
| consumption. e.g. "this is the lifestyle I want, it's
| possible, and why am I not entitled to it if I can afford
| to pay for it?" (in the financial sense only of course).
| morepork wrote:
| Having more things certainly is good for GDP. But I don't
| know about you, but I'm pretty saturated on things already,
| with a bunch of stuff that I've purchased and barely use.
|
| Perhaps this comes down to a quality of life vs GDP per
| capita not being identical. While I could use more energy to
| consume more, I don't have a very strong desire to go much
| above my current level of consumption.
|
| But outside of the wealthy there is still huge latent demand
| for energy and what comes with it.
| acchow wrote:
| > the decoupling seems more likely to be from the transition
| from manufacturing and other energy heavy sectors to more
| services based economic activity
|
| Put another way, instead of producing the products we consume,
| we offshore production (and the associated energy consumption)
| pfdietz wrote:
| It's a confusion of cause and effect, classic cargo cult
| thinking.
| 7e wrote:
| These charts stop right at the point where the U.S. imposed
| tariffs on Chinese solar panels, and the tarrif schedule is only
| going up, to 50%. This matters because the future of solar is
| utility scale, where the panel costs dominate. So for the US, at
| least, solar costs will not keep shrinking in the short term.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Countries that impose tariffs on solar panels and EVs are
| really demonstrating that they don't actually believe in
| climate change being important, compared to good old bribes for
| corporate donors.
| blululu wrote:
| Countries that dump solar panels on the international market
| to kill off foreign competition are really demonstrating
| that... During the Obama years the US invested heavily in
| Solar, and developed many of the technical innovations that
| make cheap solar possible today. Unfortunately the people who
| did this work were not able to keep up with the CCP
| subsidizing solar panels well below cost. They folded and the
| US has very little domestic solar panel manufacturing by
| comparison. This is unfortunate if you believe in a
| sustainable economy, especially since a domestic industry
| might have funded further R&D efforts. The tariffs are maybe
| too little too late for saving the nascent US solar
| manufacturing industry, but the issues of trade policy and
| climate policy are not always straightforward.
| henry2023 wrote:
| What makes you think that cheap solar panels aren't the
| product of economy of scale in a country that just likes to
| build stuff?
| blululu wrote:
| That's part of it, but America is also a country that
| routinely achieves economies of scale and loves to build
| stuff so there is clearly more going on here. Look back
| at what was commercially and technically available 15
| years ago and it is not a viable mainstream energy supply
| at the scale needed to have the deployment we see today.
| The US developed a number of key innovations that made
| this feasible. A lot of this was funded under Obama era
| energy policy, but no efforts were made to protect the
| native industry from an unsustainable market force which
| sadly meant that the policy did not get the ROI that it
| might have otherwise achieved.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > CCP subsidizing solar panels well below cost
|
| So we should allow them to subsidize the Western energy
| transition? And cost the CCP money at the same time?
| Literally have the Chinese taxpayer pay for cheap Western
| energy?
|
| I see the same dynamic playing out with EVs:
|
| "EVs are too expensive we have to subsidize them!"
|
| <China produces EVs that are cheaper than Western cars>
|
| "EVs are too cheap, we have to tariff them!"
|
| This is just handing taxpayer cash to Tesla shareholders
| with extra steps.
|
| > many of the technical innovations that make cheap solar
| possible today
|
| Name some? Because it looks to me like a straightforward
| learning and scaling curve in Chinese factories. If they
| were actually infringing US patents they'd be blocked on
| that basis, which tells me they aren't.
| specialist wrote:
| Yes but (as you already know):
|
| Realpolitick, the political economy, remains important. The
| sausage factory. Tariffs are the hush money to secure the
| ongoing support for Bidenomics.
|
| It's super important that every player has its own domestic
| production. Even if USA's (or EU's) total global market share
| < 5%, it's worthwhile. De-risk supply chains, national
| security, upkeep of domestic competency, etc.
|
| Quid pro quo. China could liberalize their economy too. Allow
| foreign direct investment. Drop their own tarriffs. But
| they're not (yet?) willing to forfeit autonomy in exchange
| for "free trade".
|
| --
|
| I get what you're saying. I too agree that fighting climate
| crisis is our top priority. These slap fights are
| infuriating. But, for better or worse, you and I aren't in
| charge.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Countries that impose tariffs on solar panels and EVs are
| really demonstrating that they don 't actually believe in
| climate change being important, compared to good old bribes
| for corporate donors_
|
| Or countries could be heterogenous and care about climate
| change, energy independence and jobs.
| ldbooth wrote:
| Also The post-Covid interest rate hikes. Which is why prices
| went up from 2021-2023. The author attributes this only to
| supply chain: developers had PPAs signed in 2019-2021 that
| assumed lower borrowing & construction costs, then interest
| rates went up sharply, and all those PPAs had to be either
| renegotiated or the underlying project was never built.
| joeyh wrote:
| Those tariffs have were entirely worked around on the Chinese
| side before the ink was dry. One easy dodge: Manufacture in eg
| India for a little bit more, sell those to the US, transport
| Chinese solar panels for installation in India.
|
| I bought a pallet just after the tariffs were announced and the
| price today is cheaper.
| slavik81 wrote:
| For comparison, Canadian tariffs on Chinese solar panels are
| >150%.
| hijinks wrote:
| solar costs keep shrinking and then you have power companies like
| SDGE that want to punish solar owners based on their salary and
| set a $125 min cost to be connected to the grid
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Utility companies around me will gaslight you into not getting
| solar--bury you in paperwork, FUD, and last ditch efforts to
| buy into some kind of solar timeshare program.
|
| I'm hoping to see more decentralized/hyper-local power
| generation and storage.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >I'm hoping to see more decentralized/hyper-local power
| generation and storage
|
| With the scale we're dealing with decentralization does not
| work. You need to centralize for efficiency (i.e. optimize
| power generation and maintenance per unit of land-area).
| Though in this case the point is moot, since we don't have
| any grid-scale storage solutions for wind/solar - making them
| non-viable as the primary power generation regardless of
| price.
| glenstein wrote:
| >decentralization does not work.
|
| This is not quite true, because the vast majority of solar
| generation is consumed on site, avoiding the transmission
| and distribution costs of delivering electrons that would
| normally be necessary. Which is just one of a whole motley
| of dynamics working in favor of solar at larger scales: the
| arc of solar generation over a 24hr period almost perfectly
| coincides with actual market demand over the course of the
| day, with the exception of the afternoon/evening "duck
| curve", so it's actually relieving pressure on peaking
| generation.
|
| The important fallacy here is assuming that
| counterbalancing for the cycles of solar generation
| requires _new_ investments, when in fact it 's _relieving_
| pressure on infrastructure that already exists and is
| already serving those exact counterbalancing purposes. This
| is in addition to the benefit of offsetting alternative
| forms of base load generation.
|
| To be clear you are right in an important sense about a
| pretty fundamental thing. There is indeed a tipping point,
| and when we reach that tipping point of grid penetration
| all of the points you have raised will indeed become not
| merely relevant but crucial. And I forget the exact number,
| but my understanding is we're nowhere near that tipping
| point right now. I want to say around 20% of the overall
| grid being generated from solar power is the tipping point
| but I'm not sure if that's accurate.
|
| It's kind of like the argument sometimes people want to
| make about taxes which is that if you overtax it is a drag
| on the economy, which is hypothetically true but it's true
| at a given tipping point and it's a tipping point that
| we're not anywhere near, which doesn't tend to stop the
| advocates from bringing it up all the time.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > the vast majority of solar generation is consumed on
| site
|
| I don't believe this is true for a vast swath of
| residential solar. In spite of HN's love of remote work,
| a lot of homes are mostly or completely empty during the
| day, with energy use ramping up in the evenings as people
| return home.
|
| This results in homes 'selling' electricity to the grid
| during the day, and buying it back in the evening and
| overnight.
| nicoburns wrote:
| That's true in many (but by no means all) cases now, but
| it's a short term problem. Home batteries with capacity
| for a day or more's usage are on track to hit
| affordability in the next 5 years, which will remove this
| problem.
|
| There is also a lot of scope for demand shifting. For
| example, timing washer and dryer runs during the day when
| people are out. Or running AC during the day (even if
| nobody is home!) so that it doesn't have to work so hard
| in the evening.
| rtkwe wrote:
| I don't think utility companies are entirely wrong to charge
| some flat rate for being connected to the grid, there are fixed
| costs with each customer and solar homes are not actually
| independent from the grid even if they're net neutral their
| night time power has to come from somewhere. Even if we get to
| enough residential solar to completely power the grid from
| solar and charge enough storage to last overnight there's still
| the costs associated with storing that power overnight we can't
| get around.
| glenstein wrote:
| The trouble with this logic is that public utility
| commissions across the country have measured the impact that
| solar has on the grid, and found that not only does it not
| impose a cost, but it confers a benefit, in some studies up
| to 33 cents per kilowatt hour.
|
| I completely agree with your core point, which is that there
| need to be costs associated with impact on the grid, to make
| sure that there's no incentivization of freeloading in either
| direction. Whether utilities owe solar owners a one time
| payment, an ongoing payment, or should be contributing to the
| financing of new construction of solar panels is an open
| question imo.
| rtkwe wrote:
| I think the utilities are moving very early with their flat
| rate charges but I don't think they're wrong in the long
| term that a flat rate will be required to fund the grid in
| the future. I'm thinking about the point where a large
| majority of customers have sufficient solar generation to
| cover their entire energy usage for the day on average,
| those people still need generation or storage of power
| during the night when solar doesn't work so somewhere
| they'll need to continue paying for power generation or
| storage during the night. This is probably doable with time
| based rates instead but we'll have to see and even then
| we'll probably need some flat rate to account for people
| with local storage because they also exist as a cost to
| service.
| glenstein wrote:
| So as I mentioned in my previous comment, public
| utilities commissions across the country have all run
| their own independent studies of the value of bringing
| solar on the grid measured against its costs and
| generally found it to be a net positive rather than a
| negative. Those studies encompass things that you're
| talking about such time base rates, cost of mobilizing
| peaking and base load production, efficiencies from
| consuming power on site instead of having to send it
| through the transmission and distribution system, etc
| sephamorr wrote:
| Source please? I'm aware of the large costs in the opposite
| direction due to the freeloading you mention:
|
| https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2024/04/22/californias-
| ex...
| glenstein wrote:
| This is from the Maine PUC, other PUCs across the country
| do their own studies. Maine is on the high side, but all
| but one PUC that I'm aware of have calculated positive
| values.
|
| https://www.utilitydive.com/news/maine-puc-study-values-
| sola...
| beembeem wrote:
| 1) Those fixed costs go down with more distributed
| generation. No need for large solar farms in a different zip
| code if many customers have it on their roof.
|
| 2) Many/most utilities don't pay retail rates for excess
| power, so there's already profit built into the arrangement
| with solar customers.
|
| 3) You didn't address a utility charging monthly fixed fees
| based on income.
| rtkwe wrote:
| 1) They go down but not to zero. Consider a hypothetical
| person with excess solar and a large power bank, they still
| cost money to serve and build reserve capacity for when
| events require them to pull from the grid.
|
| 2) They don't and there was a LOT of complaining about not
| getting paid full rates by early solar adopters.
|
| 3) I'm fine with it. The power grid is one of the natural
| monopolies where state operation makes more sense than the
| weird quasi private marketless mess we have now and
| progressive tax structures are normal there so I don't see
| as much problem with income related grid fees. Also higher
| income people will generally have larger grid demands
| meaning they need more excess capacity built in so they
| probably do cost more to serve.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| No one wants to hear it, but this is the case. We need to
| revamp how we charge for electricity.
|
| A flat fee that accounts for all the fixed costs that the
| grid requires, then an additional fee based on usage. There
| is no magical bullet that removes that. Maintaining lines and
| transformers and keeping it all monitored and balanced and so
| on takes money.
|
| That will make it so solar is still viable without making
| utilities complete money holes.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| if author is here: your footnotes don't seem to work...
| mlinksva wrote:
| I suspect due to the paywall. Some portion of the article,
| presumably including footnotes, are behind that.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| If labor costs keep going up, it seems like the right path for
| the industry is to simplify installation more so it becomes more
| DIY. More plug-and-play. Less skilled carpenters and
| electricians.
| xnx wrote:
| There are plug-and-play kits for installation on balconies that
| are popular in Germany:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/business/germany-solar-pa...
| RobinL wrote:
| Does anyone know of examples of something like this that can
| be bought in the UK?
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Just look on Amazon. Plenty of options for people with
| garden sheds, boats, etc. Plugging that into a wall socket
| might be something that you want to verify is allowed under
| your insurance or local legislation.
|
| I know some people here Germany that have picked up some
| panels at their local Aldi and are using them. Yields are
| pretty anemic but they aren't that expensive either. Kind
| of cool that Germany is encouraging this.
| euroderf wrote:
| Not allowed in Finland, at least not in the KSOY service
| area. Lamous.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Labor costs for installing solar are already so ridiculous that
| you're better off doing the parting, delivery, and some
| installation if not all of it yourself and then having a
| licensed electrician just finish the connection to your main
| circuit breaker.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I regularly bring this up: modern fridges are generally
| continuous drive (which means they run off DC at some level
| anyway). And they run all the time(ish).
|
| Waiting for a (mass-)manufacturer to build one with a 48VDC
| input that anyone can self-install a solar panel and plug-in
| but switches to a mains-fed 48VDC source as required.
|
| Doesn't need a battery (the fridge/freezer is one!), gets you
| some operation during outages, no license required to wire
| up. Takes advantage of whatever solar is available during the
| daytime without really wasting any.
|
| Would also love a non-permanently installed doohickey that
| doesn't require an electrician to legally install that will
| gladly push solar into a power strip and handle all the
| intertie stuff itself.
|
| It shouldn't be a "whole house or nothing" and a "completely
| islanded circuit or nothing" dilemma when wanting to partly
| solarize something. Which I guess Germany has allowed but
| regulations a big impediment in most places.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > modern fridges <snip> run all the time(ish).
|
| Genuinely curious - when did this become a thing? I have a
| couple of relatively recent fridges (less than 10 yrs old,
| and same model still sold today) that constantly cycle
| on/off, and spend more time off than they do on.
|
| I'd imagine a variable speed system (like are available in
| inverter-based heat pumps today) could be designed to run
| nearly constantly, but the variability of things like room
| temp, fridge loading (empty fridges are less efficient than
| full ones), open/closing doors, and the addition of
| warm/hot things in the fridge would make it so there's
| always a need for cycling at some level...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| From what I've seen, they're usually marketed as
| "inverter fridges".
|
| And yeah, at least the fan turns off when you open the
| door, and I'd imagine if you put a bunch of ice into the
| fridge, it wouldn't need to run at all for a while.
|
| Meanwhile my local electric code (Ontario Canada) still
| requires a dedicated circuit for the fridge, which will
| now basically hum along at 1-2amps and never
| brownout/trip a circuit. What a waste.
| beembeem wrote:
| First off, I know this article is more targeted at utility-
| scale installations, but much of the comment section is
| discussing or interested in residential so it's worth bringing
| this piece up.
|
| One of the problems for residential roof-mounted systems is the
| wind load that large flat panels introduce. This load needs to
| be offset with very strong roof penetrations. You need to drive
| large bolts directly into the trusses of the roof which
| requires a bit of expertise, and has risks if you knick the
| edge of a piece of structural timber.
|
| Contrast this with the round tubes used by solar thermal that
| don't introduce large wind loads, and nearly any DIYer can
| drill holes in their roof to support them.
| tfourb wrote:
| This is news to my solar installation, which is not fixed to
| my roof structure at all. My roof is not that steep, so the
| panels are simply put of frames which are weighed down with
| concrete pavers. And this is not DIY job, but professionally
| installed with warranty and everything.
|
| Similarly, most solar installations on steeper roofs here in
| Germany are either made without penetrations at all (by
| hooking special frames into the roof structure under the roof
| tiles), or they use very basic screws that tie into the
| existing roof structure. Our neighbor did his solar
| installation himself on a pretty steep roof, something you
| would absolutely not do if there were any risk of structural
| damage.
| kkfx wrote:
| The issues for p.v. are mainly two:
|
| - one is speculation, because yes panels get cheaper, so
| inverters and batteries, but prices to the customers AUGMENT more
| and more, and current prices for private, domestic p.v., at least
| in the EU, it's so high that's a nonsense installing them.
| Personally, since in my country it legal, a thing NOT so common,
| I've build a small domestic system for 11.500EUR while the
| cheapest offer was a bit more than 30.000EUR for essentially the
| same setup, worst than mine;
|
| - the other is again speculation on many sides, one of the most
| prominent the push toward utility-run p.v. witch is
| UNSUSTAINABLE, because it makes the load to large classic power
| plant vary way too quickly and too much to keep the frequency
| stable because we can't make enough grid storage and for such
| usage batteries life span it's way too low, p.v. works very well
| for self-consumption, with domestic storage as a grid backup, but
| not more.
|
| If we do not state clearly: the service model where very few own
| nearly all it's incompatible with the Green New Deal, we have two
| options: killing large finance capitalism model or falling to
| implement the New Deal plunging from the first to the third world
| countries. I'm damn serious.
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| I question your assumptions about grid storage. The cost of
| storage has been plummeting alongside the cost of solar, and
| battery lifespans are a non-issue when capacity is not a
| factor.
|
| A battery storage facility that has lost 30% of its capacity
| after 10 years of operation is still functional with that lower
| capacity. Compare this to something like a car that has much
| more limited function with a lowered capacity.
| kkfx wrote:
| It doesn't work like that. The California failure is a good
| example. So far energy storage can just do a day-to-day
| backup for homes and some non-energy-intensive business
| activities, for others just few hours. No more. At grid scale
| storage is only a quick buffer to compensate renewables
| fluctuations waiting for classic power plants to regulate
| their output.
|
| Even at current Chinese prices a re-backed grid is just a
| dream and a nightmare only those who do not know electricity
| could think it's doable, while it's perfectly possible
| converge to electricity as we have converged to IP, a single
| tech for nearly all, not the cheapest but the most universal,
| that on scale means doing more with less, or implementing the
| new deal, with self-consumption and small scale storage, so
| we can shift our loads (and we have very sensible economical
| incentives to do so) as much as possible augmenting the usage
| of electricity without augmenting the grid loads. Nights will
| demand more from the grid, but that's not an issue because
| most loads except in harsh winters that are more and more
| rare, happen during the day.
|
| This is a logic, technically sound path toward the new deal.
| The California model is a logic, financial-capitalism sound
| way to implement the new deal which actually can't happen.
| Those who think the contrary simply do not understand the
| scale and the tech we have so far. We can't produce enough
| storage and using it for such grid-scale loads means breaking
| it very quickly, not 10 years of a classic LFP but 1-3 years
| maximum at a scale we can't sustain for more than few years
| with skyrocketing costs.
|
| The giant want this because they need this to milk people as
| much as they can, but it's technically impossible and anyone
| who think the contrary will see what happen in few years if
| the trend will keep going like today, with more and more
| rolling blackouts and large stability issues to the point the
| EU will look like South Africa's grid now.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| Ok, but why then, if storage is not a big problem of solar
| power, the US has 179 gigawatts of installed solar capacity
| with rated power of all grid storage on the US grid being
| 31.6 GW, of that only 4.8 GW being battery storage. [2]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_S
| tat... [2]
| https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-
| grid...
| kkfx wrote:
| As you might see from comment-less downvotes it's unpopular
| to state the truth. Too many do not accept a simple things:
| WEF and co want just power, the 99% of slaves, as any kind
| of nazi, they are not "liberal", they are just dictatorial,
| with countless of voluntary slaves who "trust their system"
| refusing to see the reality and scale.
|
| An LFP car battery can last 10 years if took to 80% SOC
| normally, once a month or so to 100% to balance it, with
| let's say a charge cycle per cell per week. If you use it
| more it will last less. Now for homes and alike at China
| prices having enough storage to being able to go without
| the grid still powered normally from one day to another,
| normally using the grid a bit, discharging the battery to
| going not beyond a full cycle per cell per week, it's
| economically NOT convenient but still doable as a
| reasonable backup and doing so means shifting loads as much
| as possible ending up in grid usage when the grid is not
| much loaded most of the time and while consuming much more
| electricity (because you ditch natural gas and so on) still
| not straining the grid because the damn truth is that we
| can't go all electric tomorrow morning without this model.
|
| Grid storage means hyper-expensive batteries with one or
| more full cycle per cell per day, typical lifetime 1-3
| years, not more. For what? Just to allow more p.v. and
| eolic in the grid compensating their variability avoiding
| large scale blackouts. With this model on scale it would be
| normal to have 3EUR/$ per kWh as a mean price and we can't
| even built enough storage for the first generation.
|
| The substantial reality is that the green new deal it's
| possible only in NEW buildings, where the need of energy to
| heat/cool is 1/7-1/10 of a "classic" building, and doable
| only with local energy production. This means smart cities
| are simply impossible to power on scale, some part of the
| currently populated world can be powered as well.
|
| Starting what we can, meaning building small buildings
| residential and commercial, so not smart 15' cities, where
| anyone do it's best to be semi-autonomous not "in the
| sharing economy" where few giants loan anything to the 99%,
| while keep researching on what we can, because that's the
| best we can do. For the WEF green new deal of smart cities
| we could be perhaps around 4 billion humans on earth and no
| more. And that's just for a first generation.
|
| In the west most have stopped the new deal simply because
| there is no way to implement it in a service model, it
| could only exists for individuals, so with personal
| ownership against the Agenda 2030. EVs sales are down
| because only those who can charge them at home could really
| enjoy them, the others who try have simply given up. p.v.
| investments tend to go not so well because for privates
| it's way too expensive because of speculation and large
| projects could grow a bit, but not much more without much
| grid instability.
|
| If you try you can see the same problem everywhere: in
| Pakistan p.v. have boomed than utilities have started to
| complaint that people are less and less dependent on them,
| they arrive at imposing on-site exchange making p.v.
| economically useless and the energy price exploded as grid
| stability plummeted but they do not care. In Kazakhstan
| after the WEF (or Royal Dutch Shell) "liberalization" lobby
| push there was a full scale revolt and still they can't
| control energy prices and so on, we see more easily in the
| third world because they go much faster and unregulated
| than in the west, but that's where we are going, with many
| supporting their oppressors...
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| I used to be radically pro-nuclear, but after seeing some of the
| data of solar growth and realizing we could just scale things up
| (like building iphones), I'm fully on board with the Elon
| strategy of solar + powerbanks for storage.
| api wrote:
| The problem with nuclear is that it likes to be big, which
| means big capital-intensive projects and therefore a slow
| iteration time. Even if there are some things that are superior
| about nuclear, like land and raw resource use, it's going to
| get run over by a fast-iterating solution with small minimum
| capital investment.
|
| At this point solar+batteries is a cheaper option in almost all
| locations except perhaps places with low levels of sunlight
| combined with high demand, like maybe very high Northern
| latitudes.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| Yup exactly. Why go through all that headache, which has
| existed with Nuclear since day 1, when we could just mass
| produce solar and plop it down on the infinite empty desert
| land out west.
| beembeem wrote:
| 1) There isn't infinite desert land that can be used.
|
| 2) You still need firm, dispatchable power. Batteries are a
| bridge, not the only solution.
| tuna74 wrote:
| Batteries are the solution. The sun is pretty stable (not
| very firm unfortunately, but I don't see how that relates
| to electricity).
| beembeem wrote:
| Firm refers to the generation profile of the power
| source:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation
|
| Batteries are not cost or resource efficient for winter
| where I live. Less than 8 hours of sunlight is not enough
| to heat a house during the day let alone night. There
| simply isn't enough solar generation even when
| overprovisioned to last.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| How often/much do you realistically need to heat a house
| with high, quality, modern insulation? Does your house
| have triple-paned windows, a vestibule for each entryway,
| well insulated walls, attic, and roof, etc?
|
| Also if we're talking about heating, there's also the
| possibility of geothermal heat pumps, which seem to work
| everywhere, and while they have a high one-time capital
| cost but I'm pretty sure can more or less keep trucking
| along providing unbelievably cheap heat pretty much
| forever - even if you have to replace components, you
| probably won't ever have to redig the shaft again, which
| is a huge factor in the cost.
| beembeem wrote:
| > a house with high, quality, modern insulation?
|
| How much is society willing to spend collectively to
| upgrade our housing stock for this? Not to mention
| triple-paned windows are not standard by any sufficiently
| large builder on new construction. Double-paned?
| Certainly.
|
| Geothermal is great. But in an already built city, it's
| not feasible to install quickly. There is also a lack of
| legal framework or precedent in place to heat multiple
| properties from a single source. I tried very hard to
| obtain a quote for this and it was well over 50k for a
| single family home, and nobody would actually do it
| because of the big city I live in. Want a heat pump too?
| That's another 25k. Throwing down 100k up-front is not a
| reasonable request to a typical homeowner.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| It's not a reasonable request to a typical homeowner, but
| if we're looking at a path to a society-wide greener
| tomorrow, it's worth looking at.
|
| I wonder how much upgraded insulation and geothermal heat
| pump(/district heating) could be paid for by the cost to
| build a new nuclear power plant - or even by the
| difference in cost to build that power plant versus to
| get sufficient solar and batteries to, in combination
| with the insulation, generate comparable temperature
| control.
| jahnu wrote:
| HVDC can go a couple of thousand km no problem with
| relativity low losses.
| coryrc wrote:
| Drake Landing shows how you can shift heating from summer
| to winter. For twenty years it's been heating homes in
| Alberta, Canada. Though I see now, because it's a one-
| off, they are having trouble getting replacement parts
| :(.
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/okotoks-drake-
| landing...
| tuna74 wrote:
| Yes, solar power won't work in Svalbard winters. This is
| known.
| beembeem wrote:
| I'm not talking about the arctic circle. This applies to
| Northern US, Sourthern Canada. And for that matter, a
| good chunk of the EU.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| well I'm sure those 2530 people can find another power
| source.
| cycomanic wrote:
| But nuclear is not dispatchable either so what's your
| point? It's funny how everyone brings up the
| intermittance of solar and wind as a point how they can
| never work because they don't provide baseload and
| nuclear is the solution.
|
| If you read opinions from operators and incident reports
| you'll find that large power plants like nuclear are
| actually a much bigger problem for network management,
| because if you have to take down a nuclear plant for some
| reason, you suddenly have a huge issue providing that
| electricity with fast dispatchable generation.
| beembeem wrote:
| It's a fair point that nuclear (and all power plants)
| need maintenance windows where they come offline (and
| occasionally unplanned outages). But this is not the same
| as saying nuclear is not dispatchable, that's just
| incorrect.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| nuclear isn't dispatch-able for a different reason: you
| don't turn it off. Nuclear is relatively expensive, and
| those expenses are roughly 100% capex cost, so if you
| consider a reactor with a 10 billion construction cost
| and a 50 year lifespan, every hour you turn off the
| reactor costs at least ~$25k (or more if you assume the
| reactor was intending to do better than break-even.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > 1) There isn't infinite desert land that can be used.
|
| There is far more desert land than we would need. It
| doesn't have to be infinite for it not to be a
| significant constraint.
|
| > Dispatchable power
|
| Batteries + burning e-fuels in turbines or fuel cells
| jahnu wrote:
| The best argument for new nukes I heard was to drop in
| replace coal furnaces in existing thermal coal power plants
| in china.
|
| https://www.volts.wtf/p/nuclear-perhaps
| pstuart wrote:
| Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) were supposed to address this
| concern. Unfortunately even with this strategy it doesn't
| seem to be able to compete cost-wise in the market.
|
| I hope that can be worked out, as I think we'd be well-served
| by having as many eggs in our energy basket as possible.
| api wrote:
| SMRs are still huge compared to putting $10k worth of solar
| panels on a house.
|
| They also require a lot of big expensive infrastructure
| like reprocessing facilities, expensive safety-escorted
| transportation, secure facilities, etc.
| pstuart wrote:
| Yes those things are true; albeit the apple to oranges
| comparison of a home setup vs community baseload
| provider.
|
| One of the compelling deployment cases is to revamp
| existing coal fired plants with SMRs, which would be a
| huge win in addressing climate change.
|
| None of this is meant to disparage or dismiss solar and
| other renewables; it's meant to be complementary.
| pfdietz wrote:
| And "land and raw resource use" is just a backhanded way to
| imply cost, used because the actual cost doesn't favor
| nuclear at all.
| oezi wrote:
| Elon has dropped out of this game pretty much. Its Chinese
| manufacturing for pretty much all components. But as the
| article says: the hardware is now less than half of the cost
| and shrinking further.
| jandrese wrote:
| Elon gave up on panels, but Tesla batteries are still a big
| player in home and grid scale storage.
| energy123 wrote:
| Also 50% tariffs are going to hit Chinese battery
| manufacturers soon. The Biden admin considers it a national
| security priority to have energy done onshore.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Has the insurance & roof warranty issue been solved with panels
| on your roof?
|
| A few years ago I looked at putting solar panels on my roof.
|
| Both the company who roofed my house, and my insurance company -
| said it voided any warranty / claims against future roof damage
| if a solar panel was installed
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| That sounds a like a local problem; or maybe your roof is
| really that bad. In some parts of the world double digit
| percentages of houses now have solar panels on them. That's
| only going to go up.
| beembeem wrote:
| I went through this for a commercial installation on a flat
| roof. As long as the roofer inspected the penetrations made by
| the installation, the roof warranty was fine. Of course, this
| roofer also had a business line for installing panels so they
| had expertise in the area. Voiding the warranty is not a
| universal argument.
| tuna74 wrote:
| TFA claims that it is idiotic to put solar panels on
| residential roofs, but them somewhere where installation cost
| are low instead, like on the ground or maybe factory roofs.
| tfourb wrote:
| As someone with plenty of solar on my roof, it is anything
| but idiotic. With government incentives it pays for itself in
| ten years and has a realistic life span of 25.
|
| It might comparatively more efficient/cheaper per watt to
| build solar on the ground or on large commercial structures,
| but that doesn't change the economics for individual home
| owners, which in many parts of the world are already
| positive.
| opo wrote:
| >... With government incentives...
|
| Money is fungible and not unlimited. A dollar given to you
| by your neighbors in their taxes to subsidize you would
| have gone much, much further if the money would have been
| spent to build solar by your power utility.
| tfourb wrote:
| That might be the case but the fact is that these
| incentives exist and eligible home owners that don't use
| them are in effect throwing money away.
|
| Also, it can be politically and technically expedient to
| provide incentives, even if it is not the theoretically
| most efficient use of that money. For example if it
| increases acceptance for renewables in the broader
| population or jump starts an industry (as it has in
| Germany).
| sitkack wrote:
| The thing I like about rooftop residential solar is that
| the substations and the feeder lines don't need to get
| upgraded. During the hot sunny part of the day, the locally
| produced energy can go right into AC.
|
| When grid scale batteries drop in price, the substations
| can also store energy. Then the feeder lines only ever need
| to support the base load power draw.
|
| Solar is so cheap, that even in off grid installations, the
| battery bank can be a fraction of what it previously would
| have been sized for. Modern batteries can be charged much
| faster and workloads can be shifted to the sunny part of
| the day.
| tfourb wrote:
| Writing from Germany, we have non-penetrative fasteners for
| basically all roof types common here. Maybe talk to some solar
| experts in your area, they might have an off the shelf solution
| that won't void warranties.
| anonfordays wrote:
| Soon (if not already) the largest costs associated with solar
| installations will be the labor. It's expensive to get people on
| roofs and electricians to reconfigure panels, install transfer
| switches, etc. The equipment could be free and it would still
| cost thousands for the skilled trades to install.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| I wonder to what extent we can make it unskilled, at least for
| a building with modern wiring. Plug-and-play solar panels and
| batteries sound scary, but not necessarily impossible to do
| safely.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Anything involving roofs is difficult to do unskilled (at
| scale). You are working at height, potentially on a sloped
| surface, and have to worry about keeping the roof water
| tight.
|
| But if you put the panels basically anywhere else it becomes
| a lot more viable. Some houses come with a plug to connect
| your generator, you can do something similar to plug in your
| inverter. Then you can later decide to put up a solar fence
| or put solar panels on the balcony or whatever strikes your
| fancy
| jeffbee wrote:
| Why not just prefab a frame with the panels mounted and
| hang it on the point of the roof with a crane? Working on
| the roof can be eliminated or minimized.
| happyopossum wrote:
| Wind. Panels and their support need to be anchored to the
| roof, lest they become flying solar panels.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Even if it works, that just trades some of the working-
| on-a-roof trade skills for (much more expensive) crane
| operator and rigging skills, while also adding the
| expense of the crane itself.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| > Plug-and-play solar panels [...] sound scary
|
| But they already exist and are pretty popular in Germany to
| put on your balcony.
| Diederich wrote:
| Neat, do you have a quick reference handy? Thanks!
| notatoad wrote:
| here's an example:
| https://www.theverge.com/24150901/ecoflow-powerstream-
| review...
| Diederich wrote:
| This is outstanding, thank you.
| datacruncher01 wrote:
| I think eventually the hardware will be so cheap it'll make
| more sense to use them as solar fences. Reduce the cost to
| install and maintain by 3-4x easily. Or DIY for practically
| nothing.
| marssaxman wrote:
| There's an apartment building here in Seattle which has solar
| panels mounted flat on its west-facing wall (602 12th Ave).
| The panels were apparently cheap enough that they did not
| care about maximizing daylight exposure and simply installed
| them in the easiest place. Quite a change this is from what I
| remember when I had solar panels installed on my roof eleven
| years ago!
| mercutio2 wrote:
| West-facing is pretty close to revenue maximizing, with
| current consumption peaks in the early evening.
| oakesm9 wrote:
| There's an Undecided video on this exact topic
| https://youtu.be/LqizLQDi9BM?si=nnWVU-Espt7a6VDv
| xnx wrote:
| "already, across Europe, homeowners are building garden
| fences with solar panels simply because it's not much more
| expensive than doing so using traditional materials --
| namely, wood."
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/opinion/solar-power-
| free-...
| pests wrote:
| There is research coming out that vertical solar panels are
| more efficient. I think part of it comes from lower temps
| allowing for more efficient operating. No tracking or
| pointing required. Less cleaning as its not a flat surface
| for dust or fall impacts.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AVO1IyfA9M
|
| edit: I see others have linked similar videos, all good
| sources on this topic.
| mapt wrote:
| This has been the case for years now for pitched residential
| roofs - they stopped being competitive a long time ago.
|
| Thankfully, the impetus for residential roof solar was always
| more ideological than practical. There's plenty, PLENTY, of
| empty unused land within a 95% transmission efficiency
| (hundreds or even thousands of kilometers depending on tech) of
| the end user, for all non-island cases.
| rconti wrote:
| Yeah. When we bought our solar system, even knowing it was
| grid-tied, it felt like we'd somehow be generating our own
| power.
|
| As soon as we had it, and I looked at the tiering, time-of-
| use, etc, and I realized it's all an arbitrage game. I'm
| selling my roof space and fixed asset back to the power
| company, and buying power from them.
| ghaff wrote:
| If solar could reasonably double for me as a way of
| weathering a several day power outage in the winter, it
| would be more interesting. But I'm deeply suspicious of
| anything that has people out in front of Home Depot hard-
| selling something that often has complex financing schemes.
| I don't have huge power bills relative to lots of other
| home costs. So I'll pass.
| matharmin wrote:
| That depends on where you live. In my area, labor is cheap
| and the costs of panels, batteries and inverters came down
| significantly over the last 5 years. You can now break even
| on electricity costs for a residential pitched-roof
| installation in under 5 years. This is without any subsidies,
| without selling anything back to the grid.
|
| Utility-scale solar installations also make a lot of sense,
| but around here transmission capacity for that is still a
| massive issue. You can install more transmission capacity,
| but it's not cheap.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Residential solar costs in the USA are already 50% sales and
| marketing, and most of the other half is labor.
| jandrese wrote:
| That and banking enough to cover the warranty for the next 30
| years. Lots of early solar systems had reliability issues,
| especially the inverters, that make them expensive to
| maintain.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| What if I just bought a field and laid them on the ground, over
| some plastic or something? Sure, I might be giving up some
| efficiency gains by not swiveling towards the sunlight or
| something, but I have to imagine there's a "plug and play"
| option possible here.
| Tade0 wrote:
| There's precedent:
|
| https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/texas-solar-farm-flat-on-
| the-...
|
| I think the efficiency figures are exaggerated, but the fact
| remains that such an installation requires less labour.
| throwup238 wrote:
| That's already the case, even with commercial solar. There's a
| startup called Erthos [1] that has figured out that it's
| cheaper to just throw the panels on the ground, saving the
| labor and material cost for the supports. There was an HN
| thread on it a few years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33926683
|
| [1] https://erthos.com/
| jtbayly wrote:
| This and the parent comment are all addressed in the article.
| nostrademons wrote:
| This is one of the forces driving the shift from rooftop solar
| to utility-scale installations. A residential installation
| needs guys up on a roof to install the panels, and then custom
| wiring for each house. A solar farm can use robots to install
| tens of thousands of panels cheaply.
|
| There are unfortunate side effects to this, even besides the
| attacks on net metering that have cut financial returns for
| existing solar customers. Distributed generation is more
| resilient. With a battery, you can keep your electricity during
| a power outage. Outages themselves are more isolated - with a
| VPP individual neighborhoods could keep power, while if a
| transmission line to a major solar farm goes down, a whole city
| could lose power. Large solar farms would be huge targets for
| warfare or sabotage, and wouldn't last very long at all.
| Transmission lines to them are vulnerable to natural disasters.
| Economically, large utilities have more market power and can
| capture their regulators, leading to higher prices and poor
| service for consumers.
|
| But the economic benefits of scale make it harder to justify
| putting panels on each individual home, when the same
| generation capacity can be built much cheaper at a solar farm.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The attack on net metering isn't unfortunate; what's
| unfortunate is that people thought net metering ever made any
| sense. It's free riding on services provided by the grid,
| forcing others (who don't have PV) to pay for cost of
| providing those services. As PV rolled out, the craziness of
| net metering became impossible to ignore. Of course, those
| feeding at this trough objected loudly, and some naively fell
| for those objections.
| mercutio2 wrote:
| I think it's reasonable to subsidize adoption of early-
| stage technology that's promising but doesn't pencil out
| yet, to kick-start the learning curve. Thanks largely to
| Germany for doing the lion's share of the early subsidies
| with solar!
|
| But you're of course correct that this is a giant subsidy,
| and unfortunately it was funded by other rate payers rather
| than a central government, which was a nutty system from
| the beginning.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It would be nice if this cost was actually all broken out;
| the grid operator should charge for connectivity, the
| various energy providers should charge for the energy
| itself.
|
| Net metering could still make sense; your residential solar
| installation might make enough to cover the gap.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| I'm sure it varies by locality, but if I look at my
| electric bill, I see charges for energy, transmission,
| and maintaining a connection to the grid. Transmission
| and generation are variable, connection is fixed.
|
| I doubt the $8.50/month is the "right" charge for
| maintaining a grid connection, but it's what MidAmerican
| Energy has gotten approved in Iowa. Presumably their
| charges for transmission and energy cover everything
| adequately.
| ziga wrote:
| We need all the renewables we can get, and I think you can
| have both -- utility-scale and rooftop. Rooftop solar (and
| battery storage) just needs to be cost efficient to offset
| the rising cost of electricity and make it a good return on
| investment.
|
| The "attacks on net metering" are merely acknowledging that
| the proportion of renewables on the grid is high enough that
| balancing grid supply and demand is becoming an issue. I'm a
| big proponent of rooftop solar, but the reality is that 1:1
| net metering just doesn't make sense once there's a critical
| mass of solar installed (the duck curve problem). This is not
| a problem unique to California or the US. If you look at
| other places with high solar adoption (Australia, EU), you'll
| find even stricter policies like negative feed-in tariffs:
| the utility will charge you for exporting solar to the grid.
|
| Battery storage is a solution to that problem, but that's
| where prices are still too high. I'm actually surprised that
| battery storage is not mentioned in the article, because
| that's a critical component of allowing solar/wind to grow
| further.
| kragen wrote:
| this is the main topic of the article; it describes where those
| costs come from and how they are being reduced
| energy123 wrote:
| One of the YC companies is doing robotics for solar panels
| installation
| hiddencost wrote:
| I've decided not to do home solar because it seems obvious to me
| that industrial scale plants will be able to do it cheaper.
| songeater wrote:
| Yes, the cost of GENERATING electricity will undoubtedly be
| cheaper at the industrial scale level than on your rooftop.
|
| But that generated electricity is likely to be a region very
| far from your (or someone else's) consumption - needing a lot
| of money to lay transmission and distribution lines to the end
| consumer.
|
| Co-locating with consumption makes the difference in total
| costs far closer.
|
| Very location dependent, but please don't dismiss offhand
| without considering the very real transmission costs.
| geodel wrote:
| Right. Pricing is out of whack. I got estimate of ~50K without
| batteries for 8KW solar setup. I don't know who is hosing whom
| but this is not workable for me.
| songeater wrote:
| That does sound very high. Not sure where you are, but
| guessing you are in the US at least.
|
| As a comp, SunRun puts out detailed cost estimates for their
| residential systems each quarter[1]. Their average system
| cost was $5/watt, but with 50% of their installs having
| batteries. So for an 8Kw system (if you were buying outright)
| you should have gotten a quote of $40k with a "half-sized"
| battery. After US tax incentives, your cost should be <$30k
| including battery.
|
| But yeah, if you're not in a region where they do a lot of
| installs, you won't get that price...
|
| [1] "CreationCostMemo" tab in https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfron
| t.net/_eb9fb58f3a5f81478f0536...
| pkfrank wrote:
| Thanks for sharing
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| OP suggests that land costs will soon dominate the equation. So
| no mention of orbital solar plants?
|
| Yes, somebody years ago published a study that said,
| Uneconomical! because lift costs, panel cost, transmission
| inefficiencies.
|
| All of those are now drastically changed, by orders of magnitude.
| It is not a matter of IF orbital solar is economical, but WHEN.
| smeeth wrote:
| Related startup: Reflect Orbital plans to put mirrors in space
| so that light can be reflected back onto ground-based panels at
| night.
|
| A base assumption is often that orbital solar requires a panel
| in space, but even that might not be the case.
|
| https://www.reflectorbital.com/
| sharemywin wrote:
| doesn't orbital solar also deflect sun so wouldn't it cool the
| earth at scale?
| adammarples wrote:
| Teeny tiny scale
| noSyncCloud wrote:
| The sunlight that hits the reflectors would never have hit
| the Earth anyway.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I would need to see some supporting napkin math on how that
| makes financial sense. Something on the ground, accessible by
| Joe the handyman is always going to be cheaper than anything
| launched into space. To balance that out is going to require
| some huge win. Availability, efficiency, etc.
|
| Solar input in orbit is higher than what is received at ground,
| but similar order of magnitude. I am not sure there are real
| world designs for beaming power 100km from space, but you are
| going to take some amount of loss in transforming the power to
| a transmissible form, beaming it through the atmosphere, and
| reassembling it on the ground. Unless you have a pin point
| death beam, the power is going to be transmitted to a
| relatively large area, requiring a large amount of land to
| receive it. Why not just build solar panels there?
|
| Seems far easier to overbuild panels on the ground + batteries.
| pulvinar wrote:
| The middle of a large desert is effectively free land, and
| perfect for solar. I don't see how space could ever be more
| economical in any respect. If beaming energy gets cheaper than
| transmission lines, we can beam it point-to-point on the earth
| too.
| ianburrell wrote:
| Cheap solar panels mean that orbital solar will never be
| economical. Orbital solar made sense back when solar panels
| were super expensive so made sense to use them continuously.
| Solar panels are so cheap now that people are setting them on
| the ground.
|
| 400W solar panel costs $200 and weighs 40 lbs. If Starship gets
| down to $100/lb, that is $4000 to put a panel in space. There
| are thin film panel that weight way less but cost more that
| would improve the launch cost but still be expensive. That
| means that will be cheaperp to have many panels on Earth and
| have enough left for storage.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| You're suggesting land costs are the key here, but orbital
| solar beaming energy down as microwaves to earth need giant
| antenneas similar in land area to a solar farm as recievers. So
| there is no land advantage to offset the other costs.
| pkfrank wrote:
| Thanks for sharing.
| rmason wrote:
| I remember as a child being on a school tour of the Enrico Fermi
| nuclear plant South of Detroit being told that nuclear power
| would soon become too cheap to monitor. This was over sixty years
| ago!
|
| So I am a bit skeptical. I also remember around 1975 getting all
| excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so
| fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power
| produced from coal or natural gas. Close to fifty years later I
| am still waiting.
|
| I bet if you're in San Diego, Dallas or Tampa its already there.
| We have tons of solar getting built in the state of Michigan area
| but if you inquire its all either government subsidized or
| wealthy folks who can afford to not care about the economics.
|
| I am not against solar in the least. But it needs to be pointed
| out that those of us in the Northern climates need a Plan B
| whether it be nuclear, geo-thermal or something else.
| takinola wrote:
| > I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar
| and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five
| years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or
| natural gas
|
| My understanding is commercial solar (as opposed to household
| solar) is cheaper than natural gas so that prediction is at
| least partly true
| epoxia wrote:
| Not really, the over-cited LCOE of solar/wind does not
| account for the cost of (its increased need of) battery
| storage. As time of use does not align with the time of
| generation. Also, battery storage has its own ongoing costs
| with battery degradation.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxlnBNVCfBQ
| Veedrac wrote:
| 2019 was half a decade ago.
|
| You can tell solar+storage is cheaper than anything else
| except conditionally wind at least in the US because people
| have stopped building new generation capacity for anything
| else.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Well, that claim isn't true.
|
| Solar + Storage is cheaper than a gas peaker plant, but
| it is not cost competitive with a base load gas plant.
| epoxia wrote:
| True, I didn't realize how much panel costs have declined
| since then[0]. Also tax incentives for renewables have
| doubled as well (rightfully so)[1].
|
| [0] https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/chinas-solar-
| producti...
|
| [1] https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/
| Veserv wrote:
| What is the point of citing theoretical values like LCOE
| when we have direct practical information on predicted
| profitability?
|
| Energy producers in Texas are are adding 8x as much solar
| capacity (24 GW) as natural gas capacity (3 GW) [1] over
| 2024-2025. Do you believe that the entire Texas power plant
| industry is deliberately choosing less profitable and
| capital inefficient generation?
|
| That could be the case, they may optimistically forecasted
| or undercounted potential future problems, but at this
| point in time their calculations seem to show that solar is
| tremendously more cost efficient to deploy over its
| expected lifetime.
|
| It could also be the case that there are just subsidies for
| renewable energy in Texas that tip the balance. But at the
| scales we are now discussing, 10-20% of total energy
| generating capacity, the total value of those subsidies
| would need to be quite tremendous (in the G$ to 10 G$ per
| year range).
|
| [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61783#:
| ~:tex....
| verisimi wrote:
| Is it a free market though? Or are solar, wind, etc being
| funded by the government? Or is gas being taxed in a way
| that solar is not (yet)?
| bee_rider wrote:
| There isn't a free market for energy really, it is a
| global marketplace and the government of every major
| player puts their thumb on the scale.
|
| Governments are investing in solar because they want to
| be ahead in the renewable economy, where energy literally
| just falls from the sky. Is that a subsidy? I guess. It
| is also a good strategic move.
|
| Are petrochemicals taxed or subsidized? I have no idea,
| it is a big tangled web. What are the costs of staying
| plausibly friendly with Saudi Arabia and other OPEC
| members, who pays that bill?
|
| I'm not going to try and defend either way, but I don't
| believe anybody who says they have an answer. If they did
| manage to analyze the entire global economy somehow
| (where to even start) I don't think they'd post the
| answer here.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Gas is being subsidized
| goodpoint wrote:
| renewables have never been subsidized nearly as much as
| oil and nuclear.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Since fossil fuels are not being charged the full cost of
| their negative externalities, no it's not a free market.
| philipkglass wrote:
| _I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar
| and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five
| years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or
| natural gas._
|
| There was a brief period in the US from the late 1960s through
| the early 1970s where it looked like new nuclear power plants
| were going to supply electricity cheaper than coal. A few
| commercial reactors had just been finished on a reasonable
| schedule and budget. Government cost projections showed that
| just-completed reactors were competitive with coal and that by
| the mid 1980s, with rising coal production costs, nuclear would
| have a clear edge.
|
| Most people who care about the history of nuclear power know
| about the ballooning costs and schedule overruns for nuclear
| reactors after Three Mile Island, so that explains part of why
| this projection didn't pan out.
|
| The _other_ part is that real coal prices fell in the 1980s
| instead of rising. Increased surface mining of coal reversed
| the upward price trend for coal as a fuel. At the same time,
| the thermal efficiency of coal fired power plants kept
| improving beyond what was considered practical circa 1968. So
| new coal fired power plants were spending less per gigajoule of
| fuel and turning more of the fuel into electricity. New coal
| plants in America became so cost-effective in the 1980s that
| nuclear would have been hard pressed to compete even without
| the actual delays and cost overruns that nuclear foundered on.
| France dodged this environmentally dreadful rise of coal
| because they didn 't have abundant domestic coal like the US,
| so they were committed to developing non-fossil electricity
| regardless of improvements in coal technology.
|
| I wonder if those over-optimistic solar cost predictions you
| saw in 1975 also assumed ever-rising fuel costs. If solar
| companies expected coal power to keep getting more expensive,
| that would indirectly accelerate the adoption of solar power
| (lowering its costs) as well as directly easing the cost
| benchmark that solar power needed to meet.
|
| Or maybe, like in many other cases, the people working on solar
| back then were just over-optimistic about improvements and had
| blind spots about the obstacles ahead.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > Most people who care about the history of nuclear power
| know about the ballooning costs and schedule overruns for
| nuclear reactors after Three Mile Island
|
| Costs were ballooning even before TMI.
|
| > The other part is that real coal prices fell in the 1980s
| instead of rising.
|
| More importantly, 1979 saw the passage of PURPA, which began
| to open the power market to non-utility providers. There was
| enormous untapped potential for cogeneration (and, as it
| turned out, cogeneration-in-name-only) that produced a slug
| of new output, mostly gas fired, into the grids just after
| what had been inexorable 7%/year increase in electricity
| demand in the US suddenly moderated.
|
| In this environment, it was very difficult to make the case
| for new nuclear power plants.
|
| > I wonder if those over-optimistic solar cost predictions
| you saw in 1975
|
| In what sense were they over-optimistic? PV has experienced a
| remarkably relentless cost decline along an experience curve
| of about 20% decline in cost with each doubling of cumulative
| production.
| philipkglass wrote:
| _In what sense were they over-optimistic?_
|
| The OP said "I also remember around 1975 getting all
| excited about solar and getting told that costs were
| dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper
| than power produced from coal or natural gas."
|
| That would mean PV cost parity with coal-generated
| electricity in the early 1980s. Actual PV cost declines
| have been remarkable but they didn't go _that_ quickly.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Yeah, I have to question OP's memory there. No way that
| could have been said in good faith.
| ben_w wrote:
| Their memory may well have been perfect, as public
| speakers and newspapers do get things wrong every so
| often.
|
| One show I watched as a kid, Blue Peter, introduced
| Thrust SSC as a car that would go faster than the speed
| of _light_. (Or perhaps my memory of that is wrong,
| too...)
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| If we had gone all-in on nuclear, starting in the 70s, how
| cheap and plentiful would electricity really be today, 50 years
| later?
| cycomanic wrote:
| Not much cheaper as can be clearly seen in France who did go
| all in and is only able to keep costs reasonable (not low) by
| skimping on maintance.
|
| Nuclear has received significantly more subsidies than solar
| or wind (in both the US and EU) and is still not viable (mind
| you fossils have received by far the most subsidies) .
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| France went all in, but they saturated the energy market by
| when? They've built a couple since, but after an intense
| build out during the 70's they haven't had to keep
| building.
|
| Part of the idea to me is that, if you want to be a nuclear
| civilization, you need government scale investment in not
| just building plants but in improving the designs.
|
| You need to stay in for decades, stay evolving, where-as
| France simply isn't big enough, doesn't have enough demand
| to keep at building again and again (to the scale that they
| would iterate on new significantly improved fuel cycles).
|
| America's efforts like the Integral Fast Reactor, a fast
| reactor with on site pyro processing, seemed so promising.
| A safe & proliferation-safe way to not just reprocess but
| to keep burning tons of the transuranics (something France
| doesn't really do, afaik). But we gave up. The related
| PRISM designs have been kicking around for decades now, and
| I think one might even maybe get built, but generally the
| atmosphere around nuclear feels like it's building
| old/boring designs & not trying at all to advance. Then
| externalizing the massive incredibly long lived waste
| problems.
|
| I haven't done any research in a bit, but India for a while
| was talking a big game about building out Thorium reactors,
| at scale, and I distantly recall that seemed to have some
| potential to be an improved fuel cycle over the basic
| designs/fuel-cycles we've had for so long.
| otherme123 wrote:
| > They've built a couple since, but after an intense
| build out during the 70's they haven't had to keep
| building.
|
| I don't get this. France had 71% of their grid nuclear in
| 2018. From 1980 until 2000, the only new power installed
| in France was nuclear. What do you mean "keep building"?
| Reach 100% nuclear, banning/removing all other forms of
| energy? Even more than that and export energy?
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| We are very much there already, Solar and Wind are both cheaper
| than Natural gas which is itself is cheaper than Coal. Solar is
| around 5 cents a KWH whereas Nuclear is more like 15 cents a
| KWH. The prices of Wind and Solar are being set by Gas at the
| moment as well and at some point that pricing will detach once
| more batteries are in place.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
| kragen wrote:
| 'too cheap to meter' was always nonsense and is nonsense now.
| the only time you're getting unmetered energy is if you have so
| much distributed generation and storage that transmission is
| unprofitable to build except for unusual cases. for example,
| most people with a household solar system with storage have
| unmetered energy during the day
|
| the numbers you saw for solar in 01975 were wrong, based on at
| most five years of commercial solar panel production. now we
| have 50 years of commercial solar panel production to estimate
| the learning rate from, and consequently for the last five
| years or so solar is cheaper than power produced from coal or
| natural gas in most of the world. you should have stopped
| waiting five years ago
|
| in northern climates your plan b is probably a combination of
| wind, batteries, thermal energy storage, and emergency
| generators burning emergency-priced liquid fuels -- initially
| fossil fuels, later electrolysis-sourced
| aftbit wrote:
| Hi Kragen, small world! At an individual scale, I think plan
| B is pretty much always a small tri-fuel generator. At a
| society scale, it's probably a natural gas turbine. If
| batteries continue to follow their own price curve down,
| storage may well be a viable answer to 95%+ dunkelflautes at
| some point in our lifetimes.
|
| I'm curious about the land use analysis and the embodied
| energy. Given the capacity factor inherent in my climate,
| will solar panels ever pay off the energy used to make, ship,
| and install them? Similar question for batteries. And how
| much land do we need to cover to handle the P95 dark/calm
| weeks?
|
| Anyway, interesting stuff. Solar continues to eat the world,
| slowly but surely. :)
| kragen wrote:
| hey, nice to be in touch! i haven't done much lately with
| sip
|
| not just in our lifetimes; within a decade
|
| as for embodied energy, the energy payback time on solar
| panels has been on the order of a few months to a year or
| two for decades now; see https://iea-pvps.org/snapshot-
| reports/snapshot-2024/ for a comprehensive overview,
| http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/9/8/622/htm for a detailed
| analysis from 02016, or
| https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy05osti/37322.pdf for an easily
| digestible but outdated explanation from 02004. you're
| right that it depends on capacity factor! according to
| https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-
| insights... the capacity factor across the border from you
| in kentucky is better than 25%, which is about as good as
| you can expect anywhere, but in much of your area only
| 10-15%, so you might need to multiply those payback times
| by as much as 2.
| https://atb.nrel.gov/img/electricity/2021/p19/v1/solar-
| annua... provides more detailed ghi (global horizontal
| irradiance) data for the usa which makes it look like it
| ought to be more like 20%. i'd be very interested in actual
| numbers by us state
|
| batteries use an insignificant amount of land, but probably
| overprovisioning of solar production is cheaper than
| batteries until you get into those 95th percentiles you're
| talking about. so probably we're talking about something
| like 10x the land use for solar panels that would be needed
| to meet demand on average? it depends a lot on how much
| demand flexibility there is; will dunkelflaute electrical
| grid demand be 20% of average grid demand, 2%, or 0.2%?
| that's a question that depends on things like what new
| designs people come up with for aluminum smelters and
| haber-bosch fertilizer plants, which is impossible to
| anticipate ahead of time
| pfdietz wrote:
| The societal solution for Dunkelflauten remains using
| turbines, but the gas burned switches from fossil natural
| gas to green hydrogen.
| GaggiX wrote:
| >What will the world be like when panels cost $0.05/watt?
| $0.01/watt?
|
| "Good morning, I would like a 400W solar panel"
|
| "Sir, that will be $4"
| perlgeek wrote:
| At some point, the glass, frame and wiring will dominate the
| cost of solar panels, and when we hit that point, the price
| will likely stop falling. I don't know if we'll ever get as low
| as $4 with our current approach.
| kragen wrote:
| that is already the case; solar panels have been cheaper than
| window glass per square meter for years now. that's why the
| article says:
|
| > _Is there a floor for these costs?_
|
| > > _Solar manufacturers are investing hundreds of billions
| in expanded capacity in an all out war for market share
| against a background of panel price drops of 15-25% per year.
| There is an extreme economic forcing function towards rapid
| improvement and ultimately convergence with the Platonically
| ideal solar panel - some 20 um thick layer of silicon
| supported by a 100 um thick layer of plastic rolled off a
| spool - or some other tech that 's thinner and cheaper than
| paper.--Casey Handmer_
|
| > _Thinner and cheaper than paper. Think about that!_
|
| i suspect that at some point people are going to be mounting
| bare (passivated) silicon dies on string and putting up
| chicken wire over them to keep the hailstones off, or
| something like that. think about how plants support their
| leaves
| tuatoru wrote:
| Perovskite films on microgrooved plastic film, offset
| printed roll to roll and rolled out mounted vertically like
| windbreak netting in orchards.
|
| For example: https://eyouagro.com/blog/citrus-fruits-wind-
| protection-nett...
|
| Reduces land costs because the land is already being used
| for crops of one sort or another. Agrivoltaics ftw.
| kragen wrote:
| that's fantastic! yeah, you don't want to shade your
| wheat and corn with solar panels, but oranges and lettuce
| will benefit from it
| happyopossum wrote:
| I have seen a ton of articles about the plummeting 'costs' of
| solar over the past decade, so I was shocked when I recently got
| a bunch of quotes for a 10-12KW residential install: they were
| almost the same as the cost of the 10KW system I had installed
| back in 2014.
|
| So at least here in California, inflation and rising labor costs
| have eaten up all of those savings.
| teachrdan wrote:
| Well, according to at least one online calculator, $1 in 2014
| in the US would be worth $1.33 today. So perhaps the real price
| has gone down by over 33%?
| mkaic wrote:
| The article addresses this and notes that most of the cost
| reductions we've seen in the past decade are only really
| applicable to utility-scale installations, as it's only then
| that the one-time costs can be amortized sufficiently. Small
| consumer installations are dominated by costs other than the
| panels themselves to a much greater degree than utility-scale
| installations.
| sitkack wrote:
| Yes
|
| The pallet price of solar panels in the US is below 30 cents a
| watt.
|
| https://a1solarstore.com/wholesale-solar-panels.html
|
| And from alibaba, it is below 15 cents a watt.
|
| https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Longi-solar-Hi-MO-X6-...
|
| With full systems below $1/watt. https://www.alibaba.com/product-
| detail/Moregosolar-hybrid-so...
| jtbayly wrote:
| Misses the point of the article, which is to explore far beyond
| that cost.
| sitkack wrote:
| It doesn't, this is a snapshot of the costs now, you know
| what they were 5 years ago you can extrapolate a curve. The
| costs are still falling and will continue to fall.
|
| I should be able to supply a data point of the cost of panels
| today without getting admonished as being off-topic, rtfm.
| eigenspace wrote:
| Yes it does miss the point. Panels are no longer the
| expensive part of solar. The expensive part is now things
| like labour, installation, and land acquisition, and
| bringing those costs down is going to be hard.
| sitkack wrote:
| My links showed that panels are demonstrably not the
| primary cost.
| Xt-6 wrote:
| I have used to https://www.solarpricewatcher.com/ to find
| panels.
| kragen wrote:
| wholesale it's EUR0.07/watt (peak)
| https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...
| tails4e wrote:
| The price to get solar installed in the US is insanely high
| compared to the cost of the materials. I've seen my extended
| family get quotes north of 40k for modest installs. I got a
| modest system with batter for around 9k in the EU, and id say
| I'd install the same for under 5k at today's prices.
| sitkack wrote:
| A kitchen remodel in a high income city in the US is 75k-100k
| for something basic. The lopsidedness of US prices for light
| construction projects is a huge problem.
| ben_w wrote:
| And there I was, thinking spending ~PSEUR10k each for two
| kitchens recently was extravagant.
| pcurve wrote:
| What country are you based?
| ben_w wrote:
| One is in the UK, the other is in Germany.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| 11k for my house in MA net of a few thousand in subsidies
| last year.
|
| I don't think I really believe your quote of 40k. Does that
| even break even on energy bill savings?
| tails4e wrote:
| Exactly, it makes no financial sense, you'd never get
| payback on it at that price. The company offering it had
| payment plans and all, with 0% interest, to make it more
| attractive, but that's just part of the grift.
| kevinob11 wrote:
| I'm in the Seattle metro area and 25K to 40K is very
| common. They tell you all kinds of subsidies and payback
| periods but the out of pocket or loan is always in that
| range. And payback periods are terrible here given the
| weather.
| kitten_mittens_ wrote:
| My parents spent $18K on rooftop solar in the Boise metro
| area. One Tesla powerwall battery and install on top of
| that will be another $15K.
| caymanjim wrote:
| Your $40k price is the high end and only in some markets, and
| has a whole lot more to do with regional labor costs than
| anything else. The same system would probably be $15k
| installed in another market. And that's before the enormous
| subsidies that are on offer in many states.
|
| Or if you're at all handy and willing to educate yourself,
| you can DIY it for a fraction of the cost. That's obviously
| not for everyone, but you don't need any professional skills.
| You could hire an electrician if you want to be grid-tied.
| 93po wrote:
| It's super annoying to me to be paying $250 a month for a 1
| bedroom apartment in Texas for electricity when $2200 of
| panels, which would be 8000 watts, would be more than enough
| for my needs during the day (as long as I didn't run the dryer
| at the same time as the AC, and also accounting for a 400W
| panel not usually making full power). Obviously other expensive
| hardware is needed too, but still.
| efields wrote:
| How do we get around labor being the primary cost eater when that
| has (is) the most expensive factor, depending on where you live?
|
| I want labor to be paid, and I also want cheap clean energy. Help
| me square the circle.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Build small numbers of large ground mounted solar arrays
| instead of large numbers of small rooftop mounted solar arrays.
| Then soft costs (permitting, certification) are much lower, the
| overall cost per unit of electricity is much lower, and labor
| gets paid much better.
|
| This National Renewable Energy Laboratory page has a cost
| comparison of utility scale solar farms with rooftop systems:
|
| https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in...
|
| If you look at the orange portion of the bar for each year
| (installation labor), you'll see that labor gets paid about 50%
| more for utility scale farms than for rooftop systems. As of
| 2023 it's about $0.24 per watt on utility scale systems, $0.18
| per watt on rooftops. But the complete rooftop system is much
| more expensive ($2.70 per watt vs. $1.20 for a large solar
| farm). The solar farm with one axis tracking will also produce
| more energy per installed watt over the course of a year. As a
| result, the cost per kilowatt hour generated from a rooftop
| solar array is multiples higher than from a utility scale solar
| farm in the same climate.
| efields wrote:
| Thanks! I like this answer.
| Animats wrote:
| We're there on solar panels. The next step is batteries.
|
| And roof systems. Cheaper ways to get solar panels on roofs.
| That's mostly installation cost. Does Tesla's solar roof [1]
| actually work? Anyone have one?
|
| [1] https://www.tesla.com/solarroof
| RankingMember wrote:
| I only know one person who successfully got one installed, and
| his installation was endlessly delayed, after which their
| paperwork got screwed up on Tesla's end so they had it for free
| until they sold house (not sure if they ever got charged for it
| honestly). It worked, but reportedly wasn't as efficient as
| panels would've been.
| calmbonsai wrote:
| Yes. For a detailed (verbal) analysis, see Patio11's podcast
| (also featuring Casey Handmer quoted in this article):
| https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/solar-economi...
| kragen wrote:
| wouldn't you say that the article itself also contains a
| detailed (verbal) analysis? betteridge's law aside, it agrees
| with you
| tanewishly wrote:
| Around here, cost of solar have risen recently. Even though there
| still is the stimulus rule that any surplus put into the net can
| be extracted later (ie., the net functions like a storage
| facility for any residential installation), recently, power
| companies have started charging for returning energy. Quite
| massively too - the difference with their sale price is 2-4
| cents/KWhr.
|
| While there are good (as well as bad) reasons for this, the
| upshot is that the RoI for residential installations changed
| abruptly and became significantly worse - more or less overnight.
|
| Due to that, and the low cost of the panels themselves, whether
| they become cheaper isn't very relevant for the market here
| (since other costs dominate).
| josefresco wrote:
| > Around here
|
| Where?
| kragen wrote:
| this article is unfortunately fairly usa-centric, but it doesn't
| really mention the main cost driver for solar installations in
| the usa, which is the predatory tariffs that have been imposed by
| a series of administrations, based on the most ridiculous
| rationales. it does mention that solar panels in the us cost more
| than twice what they cost elsewhere, but doesn't really explain
| why. the number now is more like 4x because international panel
| prices have _fallen by half_ since the year-old figures mostly
| used in the article. it says, 'overseas, it can go as low as
| $0.10-$0.12/watt', but actually the current benchmark figure for
| low-cost solar panels in https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-
| preis-pv-modul-preis... is EUR0.07/watt peak, which is 8C//watt
| peak in the us dollar
|
| the latest ridiculous news item in this pathetic story of
| regulatory capture is a petition from the american alliance for
| solar manufacturing trade committee to impose _retroactive_
| import tariffs on solar panel imports from vietnam and thailand
| https://www.pv-tech.org/us-manufacturers-seek-retroactive-ta...
|
| the supposed justification for thus kneecapping us heavy industry
| by cutting it off from the cheapest energy in history? 'dumping':
| supposedly chinese solar panels (the majority of the panels sold
| in the world, but under 0.1% of the us market
| https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight...
| More) are being sold 'under cost'. but when you dig into the
| justifications for the supposed 'dumping', it turns out that they
| amount to things like 'provision of solar-grade polysilicon for
| ltar (less than adequate remuneration)' and 'funding on
| infrastructure'. _i.e._ , the us department of commerce is trying
| to charge chinese solar module manufacturers for the government
| building power plants and cutting good deals on raw materials
| with other chinese companies. see barcode:4426784-02 c-570-011
| for example (there's apparently no url i can use to link these
| documents directly). useful starting points may include
| https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14...
| https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2014-12-23/pdf/2014-3...
|
| to give you an idea of how ridiculous these justifications are,
| one of the other documents i got was arguing about whether the
| fair market price for chinese solar-panel-assembling labor should
| be determined by comparing it to malaysian electronics-assembly
| labor or romanian electronics-assembly labor. they ended up
| settling on turkish labor, so to the extent that wages in the
| area of china where trina solar assembles their panels are lower
| than wages in turkey, the us department of commerce is imposing
| the difference as countervailing tariffs for 'dumping'. the
| evidentiary standard in these proceedings is 'guilty until proven
| innocent' ('adverse inference in selecting from the facts
| otherwise available')
|
| the us keeps imposing _new_ import tariffs against renewable
| energy; https://finance.yahoo.com/news/analysis-bidens-china-
| tariff-... documents how they're trying to keep out not just
| solar panels but also electric cars, but failing, because chinese
| investment is creating new productive capacity for the relevant
| goods throughout the world -- the opposite of what would happen
| if dumping was actually happening, since the objective of dumping
| is to drive competition out of business
|
| the result is that solar energy in the usa is several times more
| expensive than in the rest of the world, so it's getting
| installed only very slowly. the contrast between the rather
| pathetic https://www.seia.org/news/solar-installations-
| skyrocket-2023... (32.4 gigawatts installed in the usa in 02023,
| only 8% of the worldwide 430 new gigawatts installed worldwide)
| and the 216 gigawatts added at the same time in the prc
| (https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...)
| and the astounding _660 gigawatts_ expected in the prc this year:
| https://www.pv-tech.org/bnef-global-solar-additions-655gwdc-...
|
| this by itself should make it clear how ridiculous the 'dumping'
| accusations are. if you're dumping a product, selling it below
| its production cost in order to eliminate overseas competition,
| you don't sell it _to yourself_. that 's losing money on every
| sale and trying to make it up on volume!
|
| so what's happening is that the world is going through the
| renewable energy transition, solving the problem of global
| warming, despite the usa fighting tooth and nail to prevent it
| with its foreign and trade policy. the prc is leading, developing
| new manufacturing techniques that lower the prices of energy so
| low that us companies insist they're dumping their solar panels
| below cost, but mostly investing in securing access for their own
| domestic industry
|
| the last time a major new source of energy became available was
| the steam engine, which is still what powers most of the world's
| electric grid, in the form of steam turbines in nuclear and coal
| power plants. that enabled new forms of industry and new economic
| structures. for the last 50 years we've been stuck in an energy
| crisis as we've run into fossil-fuel resource constraints and
| dropping eroei. that crisis has finally ended; the future is
| already here, but it's not widely distributed. usa policy seems
| focused on ensuring that the future arrives domestically as
| slowly as possible, enabling china to obtain as large a lead as
| possible in the new energy-intensive industries enabled by
| unbelievably cheap solar energy
|
| if you want the us to be the place where builders go to build
| things, you need to fix this
| caymanjim wrote:
| I spend four months of the year traveling in an RV. Two years
| ago, I budgeted over $6000 for my desired solar setup (at least
| 1200Ah of battery, at least 2400W of solar, plus various
| controllers and other components). It was expensive enough for me
| to hold off, and more importantly, I didn't have the space on my
| current RV for the solar panels.
|
| In just the two years since then, prices on batteries and panels
| have dropped 25% or more, and solar power per square foot at a
| good price point has gone up significantly (400W monocrystalline
| panels can be gotten for $200, in the same form factor as the
| 200W panels I had been budgeting for). I've now lowered my budget
| to $4000 for the same setup I was planning to spend $6000 on two
| years ago, and with 400W panels, I no longer need to upgrade to a
| larger RV to begin the project.
|
| This summer is almost over, so I'm going to wait until spring to
| start assembling my system in earnest. Anecdotally, this is a
| game-changer for me. I'm looking toward year-round full-timing
| starting next summer, because I can now afford the power I need
| and don't need a larger RV as soon as I thought I would.
|
| I intend to buy undeveloped land far from civilization in the
| next few years, and I'm now confident that I can DIY a whole-
| house solar and battery setup so cheaply that access to mains
| power won't be a factor in deciding where I settle. Even with
| seasonal variation in power production, I'll manage just fine,
| and the system will pay for itself in well under five years. In
| fact it'll pay for itself instantly if you discount the five-
| figure cost I would otherwise have had to pay for running a new
| mains power line far into the woods. And by the time I pick some
| land to settle on, I'll already have enough solar on my RV that I
| won't even need to augment the system initially; I'll be able to
| power a small house in a temperate climate directly off the RV
| itself, while I build a larger solar array (likely ground-mounted
| to avoid regulations and insurance complications related to roof-
| mounted setups).
|
| I know my situation is unusual, but the fact that any of this is
| possible for well under $10k is a huge change from even a decade
| ago.
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| > I intend to buy undeveloped land far from civilization
|
| I'm always intrigued by this notion, I know plenty of Americans
| have this kind of plan, but it's never quite as remote as they
| think, because, y'know you're still in America somewhere.
|
| Unless you're thinking of somewhere in northern Canada.
|
| I'd love to know where is considered 'far from civilization' on
| the continental US.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Far from "civilization", but still surrounded by lawfulness
| so you don't have to deal with warlords taking your solar
| panels.
| flir wrote:
| Don't hate the player, hate the game.
| ohthatsnotright wrote:
| Or change the rules of the game: https://www.businesstech
| africa.co.za/energy/2023/08/21/broke...
| HPsquared wrote:
| Broken window theory, through the looking glass.
| njarboe wrote:
| I would guess he will still be paying at least property
| taxes.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> thinking of somewhere in northern Canada.
|
| Canada is vast and in some places very rugged. "Remote" and
| "northern" are not related terms. Just look at BC on google
| maps. Look at the bit of vancouver island that is south of
| the US border. That is some very remote terrain, but is no
| way northern. Then scan up into the BC coast. Just a few
| hundred miles from downtown Vancouver and not a single road
| to be found. Or start at Whistler and pan west. Hundred of
| miles of mountains with nothing more than the occasional
| logging road.
| conradev wrote:
| America can get extremely remote and so you can choose how
| remote you want to go. Here is a journalist from Manhattan
| meeting folks living off-grid in Colorado:
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/28/what-going-
| off...
|
| Not to mention Slab City:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slab_City,_California
|
| Infrastructure-wise, roads come before water or electricity,
| and so plenty of the United States has a road but no power or
| water. This can even be standard for those who are near
| civilization.
| caymanjim wrote:
| > I'd love to know where is considered 'far from
| civilization' on the continental US.
|
| There are many interpretations and levels of remoteness.
|
| In my case, I want to be away from the sights and sounds and
| crowds of anything that would be considered urban or
| suburban. My prime criteria is that I don't want to see
| another person unless I choose to. I don't want to see a road
| with cars on it, I don't want to see another house or any
| other man-made structure that isn't mine. Ideally I don't
| want to hear anyone else either, but I accept that I may hear
| things in the distance.
|
| I don't want to be a complete hermit, and I'm not a
| survivalist looking to be 100% self-sufficient. I want a
| small-to-midsized town about 30-60 minutes away. Something
| with a grocery store, gas station, and a post office or other
| place to receive deliveries. I don't want to be more than an
| hour away from doctors' offices or a hospital or urgent care.
| I don't want to be trapped by snow for weeks at a time.
|
| Saying "far from civilization" was a stretch. What I really
| mean is I don't want to have people all around me. And I
| don't want to be anywhere near cities and suburban sprawl. I
| don't want neighbors in any meaningful sense.
|
| Places I'm considering are Maine, Montana, northern
| Wisconsin, Upper Peninsula Michigan. I would absolutely
| consider parts of Canada, particularly northern BC. I don't
| have an easy path to Canadian citizenship, though. Before my
| Canadian girlfriend passed away last year, we had been
| planning to look for a secluded lakeside cabin or undeveloped
| land in BC.
|
| My requirements are dense forest (desert/plains states are
| right out) and water (lake or canoeable river) on the
| property itself. I can live with other people using the
| water, so long as it's not motorboats and a party scene.
| thijson wrote:
| The further north you go, the larger the seasonal variation
| in sunlight. I've watched some video's of people living off
| grid in BC, they need a diesel generator for the winter
| months to get by.
| lanstin wrote:
| I find this fascinating. It really does take a variety of
| people to make up a culture. My ideal living situation
| includes being able to see someone I know every time I walk
| out side my home, being able to walk to a bagel shop, a
| grocery store, a post office, a train station, and ideally
| a library and bike shop and parks.
|
| It would be boring if we were all like me and clumped
| together.
| caymanjim wrote:
| I've lived like that. I lived in the Mission in San
| Francisco with four of my closest friends (all from NJ)
| within walking distance. It was great being able to meet
| up for lunch or drinks or go out clubbing, it was always
| a pleasant surprise to run into them randomly on the
| street or in a park.
|
| I lived in midtown Manhattan and I loved being able to go
| out at 3am in the middle of the winter and find a fresh
| produce stand on the corner outside my apartment, get
| falafel wraps and Ethiopian and Thai and sushi and all
| the other great food during my lunch break, and have
| museums and concerts and Broadway shows within walking
| distance.
|
| I lived in the Cayman Islands and had a roommate, could
| walk to the beach and to my favorite bars, my house was
| the primary hangout spot for all my friends. I was
| socializing daily there, and it was a small community
| where I knew just about everyone everywhere I went.
|
| I'm old now. I don't drink anymore. I have no interest in
| parties. Even when I live in or near a city, I don't take
| advantage of much of anything it has to offer. I'm sick
| of the noise and filth and crowds, the crime and
| homelessness, the lack of privacy that comes with urban
| living. All my friends are older, have kids, live in the
| suburbs and are scattered all over the country. The eight
| months of the year that I'm not on the road in my RV, I'm
| living in a cookie-cutter suburban house and have no
| local friends at all. I exchange pleasantries with the
| neighbors.
|
| My entire social life is online now, and when I can, I'm
| traveling. I want maximum peace and quiet. I'll go visit
| friends and family every couple months if I want to
| socialize. If/when I do settle down at my far-from-
| civilization objective, I may very well start feeling
| lonely and seek out social clubs or social hobbies. But
| I'll be glad to have my seclusion to return to.
| bawolff wrote:
| I think most people understand "far from civilization" to
| just mean rural. You can easily find that in america (or
| canada). Nobody is talking about moving to a failed state.
| grecy wrote:
| Exactly right. It's mathematically impossible to get more
| than 116 miles from a McDonalds in the lower 48 - and that's
| if you take a helicopter!
|
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mcfarthest-spot-skb
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| But there are many places where that would be two solid
| days of offroad driving, without seeing another person in
| the process.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Yeah, it's kind of sad how pervasive roads/trails are:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42104894
|
| With more than 14,000 of them, it's not possible to be more
| than 115 or so miles from one:
|
| https://www.rd.com/article/farthest-away-from-mcdonalds/
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Burning wood is a completely viable (if very annoying and
| environmentally dubious) answer to off grid hot water. Your
| plan sounds pretty good to me.
| caymanjim wrote:
| It's not too expensive to get a large, refillable propane
| tank installed, and propane is cheap. I've got family members
| who do that and they live five miles away from the nearest
| Walmart. They have municipal power and well water, but don't
| have municipal gas service. They only have to fill the tank
| four times per year. I would likely do the same, for cooking,
| hot water, and heat (supplemented by a wood stove, which I'd
| have plenty of wood for as I cleared land for a house,
| garage, and solar panel field).
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > I've now lowered my budget to $4000 for the same setup I was
| planning to spend $6000 on two years ago, and with 400W panels,
| I no longer need to upgrade to a larger RV to begin the
| project.
|
| Keep in mind - the dollar is down ~10-15% in that time frame,
| so in real terms, the previous cost might have been >$6600 in
| today's dollars vs ~$4000 or a >40% reduction.
|
| The cost of electricity is up ~5.5% compared to last year:
| https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
| m463 wrote:
| I think RVs that you can live/remote work in while traveling
| are interesting.
|
| (I'm speaking about large class A RVs like an apartment with
| washer/dryer etc...)
|
| But as solar becomes more prevalent, I don't see why they don't
| design RVs more around solar.
|
| It has only been recently that I've seen "all electric" type
| RVs. Before that, most RVs were hybrid propane/electric or
| diesel/electric, for example gas stoves, dual propane/electric
| refrigerators, dual propane/diesel + electric heating and
| propane or diesel generators.
|
| A future RV could have huge batteries for _driving_ , and then
| use those batteries for appliances, air conditioning/heat pump
| and other on-board power. Then add increased solar by not only
| rooftop solar, but maybe fold-out solar awnings. (it could also
| charge via EV chargers, or 220 at a campsite)
|
| An RV like this would be modern, comfortable and let you go
| anywhere.
| caymanjim wrote:
| I do well in my tiny (20') RV for four months a year. It was
| a little cramped when I had a girlfriend with me, but still
| cozy. This is my third summer doing this. The first two
| summers, I wasn't working. This summer I'm working full-time
| remote (dev). It has its challenges. I plan to upgrade to a
| much larger 5th wheel trailer, likely in two years, with all
| the creature comforts you mention.
|
| Part of the reason solar is still a fringe thing for RVs is
| due to the costs up till now. Another big reason has been
| solar panel energy density; there simply wasn't enough room
| on the roof for the thousands of watts you need to generate
| for true full-time off-grid living with all the creature
| comforts (most notably air conditioning). Affordable, compact
| DC-powered refrigerators are still new (but are becoming
| standard items). Battery cost used to be prohibitive, and
| battery weight is still a problem. The 1200Ah I'm targeting
| (at minimum) is going to weigh a few hundred pounds.
|
| If you want a residential-sized fridge, washer/dryer, and air
| conditioning that you can use 24/7, you need more like 3200W
| of solar and 2400Ah of battery. The larger the RV, the more
| expensive it is to cool. RVs have crap insulation, and most
| RVs are used in hotter southern areas. True self-sufficient
| electric and solar with no behavioral/comfort sacrifice still
| requires a lot of space and costs a lot.
|
| The market is headed toward more solar, but the kind of setup
| you're talking about (and that I'm building for myself) is
| still quite expensive. And it's a huge cost for people that
| don't typically need it; the vast majority of people full-
| timing in RVs are content to do so at a sardine-packed RV
| park with full hookups. The market isn't going to bear the
| cost of massive solar installations as standard equipment.
| kragen wrote:
| this is awesome!
|
| i do have one quibble, though, and it's a big one. in the last
| two years, prices on mainstream solar panels (monocrystalline
| with warranty) have fallen from EUR0.25 per peak watt to
| EUR0.12 per peak watt; low-cost panels have fallen from EUR0.17
| per peak watt to EUR0.07 per peak watt.+ technically that _is_
| 'fallen by 25% or more' because it's fallen by almost 60%. 2400
| watts of solar should cost you 290 us dollars plus retail
| markup, not 1200 dollars. if you're paying 1200 dollars, you're
| being swindled! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41394506
| goes into details on how the swindle works
|
| ______
|
| + https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-
| preis...
| caymanjim wrote:
| 400W solar panels cost $200-250. So 2400W will cost me
| roughly $1800. There are discounts if you can buy in bulk,
| but I don't have room for more than 6-8 panels at most.
|
| Like all things, the raw material cost is trivial. There are
| the tariffs you mention (I just skimmed your link, and don't
| speak German), but there's also economy of scale, packaging,
| logistics, etc. I'm sure I could get 400W panels for as
| little as $100/ea if I went to the factory myself and bought
| hundreds of them. Maybe even cheaper. It's not really fair to
| compare consumer one-off costs to industrial/commercial-scale
| installation costs.
| kragen wrote:
| while it's true that there's a retail markup, that markup
| is not close to a factor of 4. it's about 30%. the EUR0.12
| per peak watt cost i mentioned for mainstream solar panels
| is not at the factory; that's a wholesale price in european
| markets, which are halfway around the world from the
| factory. if you went to the factory, you could probably get
| them for EUR0.10 per peak watt, about 45 dollars each for
| your 400-watt panels. (unless you don't look chinese, in
| which case trying to go to the factory might get you
| arrested, and you'd definitely have to buy more than 6-8)
|
| the longer comment of mine i linked explains in more detail
| how you're getting swindled. in english!
| Havoc wrote:
| Think these days we should really be talking more about storage
| than panels.
|
| And I don't mean lithium batteries. More things like molten salt
| and sand batteries - things that require a bit of planning and
| infra that is reliant on rare metals etc
| jmyeet wrote:
| Solar power is the future. The drop in price in the last 20 years
| is absolutely wild. The charts in this article show this. What's
| encouraging is that it's pretty steady progress. It's hard to
| predict when or where that ends.
|
| Batteries continue to get cheaper (also covered). This matters
| too because storing energy solves the base load "problem".
| Batteries aren't the only way to store energy either. There
| continue to be advances in the so-called "power-to-gas"
| technology, where you essentially use excess power to make fuel,
| usually from CO2 in the air. This isn't currently economic but it
| continues to get cheaper. It also provides an upper ceiling on
| how expensive gas can get.
|
| The LCOE of nuclear in particular is damning [1]. Every single
| commercial nuclear power reactor has been built with government
| subsidies too so it doesn't seem like government support is the
| issue. There are still too many unsolved problems.
|
| Solar is the only method of direct power generation. I think
| every other method inovles turning a steam turbine. There are no
| moving parts. They can be installed on everything from
| wristwatches to power stations to satellites.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
| szundi wrote:
| Surely can, but you have to pay the installer guys and the
| structure that holds the panels even if they cost zero.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| Does anyone see signs of data center usage being affected by
| electricity costs? I imagine a relatively near future where your
| AWS bill changes depending on the time of day, and so companies
| shift their computational work from region to region, following
| the sun.
| kumarski wrote:
| I think it's irrelevant if the cost of solar panels goes to zero,
| the reality is that the farm to fork cost/kwh is still quite high
| because dispatch and transmission are never cheap.
|
| Furthermore, for every 1 pound of polysilicon produced...you get
| 4 pounds of silicon tetrachloride output.
|
| I gambled on $UAN and $AMR guesstimating that the spread of
| renewables would lead to more nat gas and coal/steel consumption
| per a kilowatt hour produced globally. I got lucky and it worked
| out. I'm not bullish on solar costs going below the embodied
| energy cost of desal per 1000 gallons. (10-14kwh/1000 gallons)
| pfdietz wrote:
| > Furthermore, for every 1 pound of polysilicon produced...you
| get 4 pounds of silicon tetrachloride output.
|
| SiCl4 can (and should) be completely recycled in the process
| that makes silicon, to make more SiHCl3. There is no reason to
| treat it as waste in a cost optimized system.
| BatFastard wrote:
| Does converting sunlight to electricity reduce the amount of heat
| absorbed by the earth? If so, how many solar panels would be
| required to reduce the temp by 1 degree?
| lcvw wrote:
| No because when the electricity is used it creates heat.
| BatFastard wrote:
| Heat is just a frequency in the spectrum right? What percent
| of emissions in an LED comes out as infrared?
| mallets wrote:
| Uhh, IR isn't heat. Heat isn't part of the EM spectrum. Hot
| stuff just emits more IR.
|
| For IR in LED bulbs. Don't know, other than
| inconsequential.
| mallets wrote:
| All will be heat after X amount of time. Where the X can be a
| few seconds or decades or centuries.
|
| The more interesting thing would be the light reflected by the
| panels (albedo factor). This could be lower or higher than the
| surface these panels are placed on.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Also, the emittance of the panels at thermal wavelengths is
| important. What you want is a panel that converts wavelengths
| shorter than the bandgap cutoff at high efficiency, reflects
| near and mid IR at longer wavelengths, but has high
| emissivity in the far IR at wavelengths where the atmosphere
| isn't too opaque.
| mallets wrote:
| Not like optimising for this make much sense when we
| haven't even covered 1% of land yet.
|
| Maybe our great-great-great-great grandkids can think on
| it, will be so disappointed if they haven't mastered
| terraforming yet.
| BatFastard wrote:
| Could you convert electricity into a infrared laser and
| beam the energy into space?
| pfdietz wrote:
| A laser beam carries no entropy, so I don't see the point
| of this.
|
| Using a laser beam to dissipate heat is one of those
| classic hard science fiction bloopers. David Brin is one
| guilty party (in "Sundiver").
| morepork wrote:
| Depending on the surface being covered it may actually increase
| the heat. Any electricity produced will eventually become heat.
| Solar panels will absorb more heat than surfaces with a high
| albedo where a lot is reflected back into space.
| shmerl wrote:
| Why are residential prices on electricity not falling if costs of
| energy production are shrinking? If anything, prices only go up
| and electricity companies especially raise them during hot
| season.
| jenadine wrote:
| One thing that is often forgotten is the difference between the
| cost of electricity at the power plant, and the price of
| electricity in the power plug in the household. The difference is
| that the grid provides constant electricity at 60Hz 24/7.
|
| Solar is much cheaper to produce, but there are many challenges
| to get a reliable grid. Big centralized power plant that have
| huge turbines with kinetic energy are much easier and cheaper to
| handle on the grid than a distributed intermittent production
| where you somehow need to convert to 60Hz and add storage that
| has quite some loss.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| As long we keep using logarithmic axes: yes, indefinitely!
| locallost wrote:
| The premise of the article, that we would be richer if we used
| more energy is preposterously wrong. A light bulb used to be
| typically 100w, it's now a 1/10 of that. We get a lot more out of
| the energy now, which means we are in fact richer because we have
| more things. I just bought a TV which uses a quarter of the
| electricity of a Tv from a decade ago, and this with 4x as many
| pixels.
|
| The big idea most people fail to grok is that we don't need
| energy at all, we need certain things energy provides us (light,
| heating, cooking, entertainment etc). But if I could super
| insulate my house and use 0 energy to keep it warm, this would
| not make me poorer. On the contrary.
|
| Amory Lovins came up with the idea of "negawatts" a long time
| ago.
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