I’ve always wondered about something, yet have never found anyone discussing it online. So maybe some smart people can help me out:
a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise.
But here’s my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on your roof, wouldn’t it be greatly more financially advantageous (given the main cost for solar installation is the labor) for energy companies to install solar at scale? And if that’s the case, wouldn’t the energy companies eventually do this, which, given macro market laws of supply and demand, would eventually cause the price of electricity to go dramatically down for their end consumer, thus eliminating the financial benefit of privately installed roof top solar for homeowners?
I live in the southwest, and based on online calculators it “makes sense” from a 10 year outlook to pay the money now and install solar on my home, but that’s only if the energy prices don’t fall. But nobody seems to even think that’s a possibility.
A reasonable short-term goal: get 100% of US peak air conditioning load south of 37° N on solar. That's the line from the Virginia/North Carolina border west to central California.
Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage. Storage is more of an issue for wind, which varies about 4:1 over a day over large areas and doesn't match load at all.
There should be also more focus on proper thermal insulation of houses in warm climate, which is something that is not often mentioned. Lots of energy gets lost on AC simply because heat easily enters the houses.
> Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage.
In general, yes, but if you look for a term called the duck curve which characterizes that frequently the load comes up after peak output, or even after sunset. For coastal CA wind often helps fill that offset as winds frequently come up near sunset, but it's not always a guaranteed thing.
So there does need to be some sort of offsetting storage - even if it's fairly short term. But, that gives us a nice set of market niches for renewable storage to grow up though with early smaller uses growing to larger uses. ie. peak offsetting for daily variation at small capacity, to larger uses of multi-day/weekly variation compensation, maybe extended weather variation offset, to massive uses for scales like seasonal offset.
PS: and oddly enough, some of the old recommendations for efficiency are backwards for a newer renewable grid: e.g. getting a thermostat that schedules lower temperatures into the evening can push power use to later, vs pre-cooling during the day when you might consume the electric coming off panels w/o the need to store it in a battery.
I have been wonder why can't we convert outside heat into indoor cooling naturally, i.e. in Texas can we convert summer heat to AC power in real time for at least each residence house?
> the cost to decarbonize the U.S. grid alone would be $4.5 trillion
They make this sound like a lot but that strikes me as actually pretty cheap. I don't think that number can be right.
Edit: I mean seriously think. The F-35 has cost us 1.45 trillion dollars so far.
That's roughly 1/3 of the price they're asserting here. Localizing our entire energy dependence has got to have some serious national security benefits. I mean way beyond the simple evolutionary next step of one piece of military equipment.
It seems like every dollar we spend on energy sovereignity is doing like 10 or even 100 times the work 1 dollar of weapons development is doing to secure our country.
> Localizing our entire energy dependence has got to have some serious national security benefits.
It's estimated that we spent $6.8T between 1976 and 2007 on the US policy of always maintaining an Aircraft Carrier on station all day every day in the Persian Gulf, to insure the free flow of oil.
Your 1.45 trillion figure for the cost of the F-35 is the lifetime cost of the platform, including procurement and operations costs extending through the year 2070... the cost to date is nowhere near that figure.
>Localizing our entire energy dependence has got to have some serious national security benefits
It would also cause extreme instability by shooting up unemployment, destroying large corporations that offered valuable careers with good benefits, and exacerbate polarization between those who believe in man made climate change and those who don't.
Don't get me wrong - I think energy independence is the way to go - but paying $4.5 trillion to effectively ruin the lives of millions of people is not a popular position, especially given that we have terrible safety nets to allow these people to find other jobs.
I think the much more likely, less rough path is to continue renewable research until it becomes cheaper than fossil fuels in almost all cases. At which point the market will do the rest. The vast majority of fossil fuel users do not actually care that they use fossil fuel - they just care about energy generation. If you can give them a cheaper means to achieve that, they will go for it.
I know someone who has gone fully off the grid via sailboat and is currently on his way around the world. He converted his sailboat to a hybrid setup (electric engines powered by the same batteries that power his stovetop, refrigerator, etc.). His power sources keeping those batteries charged are solar (1200W) and sail regeneration [0]. He has an 18kw diesel generator as a safety measure.
His story is particularly interesting to me because he doesn't give a shit about climate change. His views are best described by George Carlin [1]. And yet, he has the lowest carbon lifestyle of anybody I know. In the 15,000 nautical miles he's sailed, he has burned a grand total of 5 gallons of diesel. And that was only because he stayed for a few weeks in Palau without sailing around, and there was a stint of a few days where there was little solar energy due to storms. He now thinks his decision to buy a diesel backup generator was just a waste of money. If you ask him why he did it, these are his answers: It's cheaper, it's quieter, it's less smelly, and it's more reliable. Not a single mention of carbon emissions or resource depletion or pollution.
At this point, I feel like the only reason fossil fuels are used anymore in new projects is inertia. The costs and performance of renewables+batteries has come so far in the last 5-10 years, and I think we're finally at the point where the intrinsic costs will guarantee adoption.
>At this point, I feel like the only reason fossil fuels are used anymore in new projects is inertia
Solar might work for boats and trains, but can it work for a plane? What about drones?
No renewable energy source can beat gasoline, sans nuclear power (which I think we should be transitioning to, along with the rest of the renewables). MIT built a gas powered drone that lasts 5 days (not minutes!) in the air[1] - that's simply impossible with today's battery tech. I know there are electric planes in development, maybe in production - but none of them match the passenger capacity or cargo volume of a Boeing 747. Until they do, there will always be a place for gas guzzling airliners.
Solar can work for households, skyscrapers, and apartments, and like you said, I think the advantages do outweigh the advantages of traditional coal plants so I'm excited to see that become more mainstream.
That's really cool. I like seeing other off grid solutions.
I live in a bus with 1800W of solar. I still burn a lot of diesel driving around but very rarely have to run a generator or plug in for electric, even when I run my AC.
I love being off the electric grid. There's something so satisfying about using electric power and knowing it incurs no additional negative environmental cost. I never think twice about using power, assuming I have enough available.
When I finally buy some real estate I'd love to be off grid but still have fiber internet. I don't think that'll happen but I can dream.
In some sense any technology is adopted or ignored based on its intrinsic merits or lack thereof. If we're about encouraging people to move to less-harmful technologies, making them genuinely better and irresistible seems like the avenue most likely to actually work. Making a quasi-moral issue out of it, unfortunately doesn't seem to work because we're not necessarily moral creatures, and what you get instead is a lot of sanctimony, insincere virtue signaling, hypocrisy, not to mention outright resistance. (Edit: Also see: "religions" LOL) Meanwhile an argument about the urgency of future self-preservation doesn't work either, because of that word "future" - we suck at looking ahead. Making & using tools, that's what we're good at. Evaluating tools based on what benefits they give me right now, that's what we're good at. Although we are good at disseminating, absorbing and believing in ideas too, so that's the bright spot in terms of some kind of widespread voluntary change. But on my more pessimistic days when I don't believe an abstract concept can change consciousness that much, I figure the transition to better technologies is going to have to be based on their own advantages - like your friend's electric powerplant on the boat.
> In March, an analysis of more than 7000 global storage projects by Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that the cost of utility-scale lithium-ion batteries had fallen by 76% since 2012, and by 35% in just the past 18 months, to $187 per MWh.
I hate it when they list battery prices this way, it's very misleading. That's the amortized cost of $187 per MWh cycle, not the battery's upfront cost. Assuming 2000 cycles that's $374,000 per MWh of storage.
They are comparing it with building a new power plant costs for which are calculated similarly for 20-30 year life cycle. Same is for Solar and wind power plants. Many people assume that prices of grid scale solar and wind power are coming down because of technology improvements that is partly true but another reason for the price decreases is that the investors are finding out the calculated life of these is actually 50-100% more than their previous assumptions.
I hate it when they list battery prices this way, it's very misleading.
Misleading to some, flat-out useless to others. The replacement cost of the 24KWh battery in our Nissan Leaf is about $5K. So I'll take two of those $187 MWh batteries, please.
Oh, of course they're not speaking the same language as I am with that kind of price difference. But then I guess I don't know what in the hell they're talking about if not XWh of energy storage.
Does it at least use a TVM calculation? If so it's indeed quite misleading, considering that at max 1 cycle per day (e.g. solar) that's 6 years to spread the cost across.
Good news: non-carbon energy sources will, faster than most of the world currently thinks, force carbon energy sources off the market. This has already started to happen with coal.
Bad news: Well the Left may lament the fact that it will not be due to any change of heart or international cooperation, it will just be due to mercenary calculations of cost, and technology. But all of us have to consider what will (not may, will) happen to places with very oil-dependent economies, when oil goes the way of coal. Imagine Saudi Arabia in the state that Venezuela is in right now.
I've done a bit of research on batteries and I haven't seen too many people mention vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFB) for grid storage. While lithium ion batteries have great energy density (necessary when you need to carry your energy) they deteriorate over time leading to continual capital expenditures. From what I've read, it seems like the VRFBs can basically run forever with minimal maintenance. If I were betting on large scale grid battery storage technologies I think this is where I would be interested in putting my money. While they are less energy dense, it doesn't really matter since most houses are stationary.
I wonder what the wider economic effect will be if the price of solar continues to improve and the fossil fuel industry can't find a way to remain competitive. Since some places are far more suitable for solar power generation than others, will those areas end up with a significant advantage in the cost of living? Could that in turn lead to a major migration of people and economic activity to those areas?
If you are talking about countries, cost of energy stopped being an important differential ages ago (except for some very specific niches, like aluminum refining).
If you are talking about cities, people will just build transmission lines.
I don't think the differences are that extreme. I used this site: https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/ to get annual energy output for a 4KW system.
Houston 5,737 kWh/Year
Boston 5,214 kWh/Year
Seattle 4,389 kWh/Year
Houston might end up with a significant advantage in the cost of living in the low carbon future, because our economy is based on oil and there won't be nearly as many jobs here anymore.
The Saudis can still make money at 20$/ barrel oil. Oil is just a commodity, so the decline in oil consumption will be a gradual process, not a step function.
W.r.t. power production in good solar areas, modern transmission tech can send power 1k miles w/less than 1% loss. Those regions will likely export power, not import people.
How is the battery storage only $0.013 per kWh? Is that a misprint and they meant $0.13 per kWh? Or is there some fancy accounting where they're storing only a small percentage of the total energy output and giving a diluted price with the partial storage cost spread over the total output? Or is it truly possible with massive scale to achieve battery costs this low? I can't see how this adds up without some sleight of hand, as the gigafactory production cost isn't even nearly this low yet?
Later in the article they clarify that the batteries cost $0.187/kWh. However, the owner of said battery will be able to sell energy storage to the grid operator. I also assume that there is a synergy, in that the solar side of the installation is more valuable.
I'm guessing if they don't count depreciation and charge the batteries when the price is negative, it might make sense. But otherwise that is an astounding claim backed by zero evidence.
(Los Angeles deal) would provide 7% of the city's electricity beginning in 2023 at a cost of 1.997 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) for the solar power and 1.3 cents per kWh for the battery.
So 3.297 cents per kwh. That's on par with large hydro like Tacoma Power Park. I'm getting 11 cents per kwh for my solar currently in the midwest.
Maybe we don't need the batteries if the synthetic fuel tech becomes good enough (there are companies working on this such as Prometheus and Carbon Engineering). Could it be possible for California to become a major oil producer state with extremely cheap solar? Cover the Mojave desert with solar and convert the excess power into oil? It seems definitely possible if there was a carbon tax (which should exclude such synthetic fuel from the tax since it's carbon neutral when it's burned). Without such a tax, maybe it's possible but much more difficult to compete with fossil oil.
>should exclude such synthetic fuel from the tax since it's carbon neutral when it's burned
I hope not. Let the plants remove the CO2 from the air instead. That would be much better than burning it again. How can your process be called neutral if nature has a "more neutral" solution than yours? Let the biomass do its job and just stop burning oil.
Much better than batteries or gravity storage mechanisms is liquid air storage. It is not for small scale sites, but the bigger, the more economical, it becomes. As an OTS (off the shelf) solution i do not know why it is not used more...
Liquid air storage offers cheapest route to 24 hour wind and solar
Seriously! I'm an old time R/C enthusiast who romps frequently and still buys a toy here and there. I got out of R/C for a little bit so the last pack I bought was a 4,200mah 7.4 volt LiPo from a tiny mom+pop manufacturer. The pack is well taken care of and probably 7 or 8 years old. It's time for a new one.
I just looked up a replacement battery by the same manufacturer and their 7.4v LiPo's are up to 22,000 mah! That's almost 525% bigger than my last pack! That kind of capacity was only a dream back then, and 20 years ago when NiMH was the only game in town we were racing 30mph with 3,300!
I thought it was a typo. But other manufacturers are offering similar products.
> It would provide 7% of the city's electricity beginning in 2023.
This seems a bit slow to me. 5 years in California time usually ends up being at least 10 years if you are lucky. By then the 7% will probably be closer to 3-5%. I think California is going to have to be a lot more aggressive with Solar and battery if they are going to reach their climate goals...
I wonder why we're not seeing such precipitous drops in the cost of personal solar installations? It still takes a couple of decades for a home panel installation to pay for itself, and that's if you're in a good area for sunlight.
Regardless, it's excellent news. Coal is godawful stuff and we'll be much better off leaving it in the ground where it belongs.
[+] [-] rmuesi|6 years ago|reply
a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise.
But here’s my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on your roof, wouldn’t it be greatly more financially advantageous (given the main cost for solar installation is the labor) for energy companies to install solar at scale? And if that’s the case, wouldn’t the energy companies eventually do this, which, given macro market laws of supply and demand, would eventually cause the price of electricity to go dramatically down for their end consumer, thus eliminating the financial benefit of privately installed roof top solar for homeowners?
I live in the southwest, and based on online calculators it “makes sense” from a 10 year outlook to pay the money now and install solar on my home, but that’s only if the energy prices don’t fall. But nobody seems to even think that’s a possibility.
[+] [-] Animats|6 years ago|reply
A reasonable short-term goal: get 100% of US peak air conditioning load south of 37° N on solar. That's the line from the Virginia/North Carolina border west to central California.
Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage. Storage is more of an issue for wind, which varies about 4:1 over a day over large areas and doesn't match load at all.
[+] [-] ivanhoe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dv_dt|6 years ago|reply
In general, yes, but if you look for a term called the duck curve which characterizes that frequently the load comes up after peak output, or even after sunset. For coastal CA wind often helps fill that offset as winds frequently come up near sunset, but it's not always a guaranteed thing.
So there does need to be some sort of offsetting storage - even if it's fairly short term. But, that gives us a nice set of market niches for renewable storage to grow up though with early smaller uses growing to larger uses. ie. peak offsetting for daily variation at small capacity, to larger uses of multi-day/weekly variation compensation, maybe extended weather variation offset, to massive uses for scales like seasonal offset.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
PS: and oddly enough, some of the old recommendations for efficiency are backwards for a newer renewable grid: e.g. getting a thermostat that schedules lower temperatures into the evening can push power use to later, vs pre-cooling during the day when you might consume the electric coming off panels w/o the need to store it in a battery.
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
What's terrible is that PG&E charges the end customers $0.28-$0.42/kwh even though it purchases even the most expensive wholesale power below 5c/kwh
[+] [-] CydeWeys|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ausjke|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DubiousPusher|6 years ago|reply
They make this sound like a lot but that strikes me as actually pretty cheap. I don't think that number can be right.
Edit: I mean seriously think. The F-35 has cost us 1.45 trillion dollars so far.
That's roughly 1/3 of the price they're asserting here. Localizing our entire energy dependence has got to have some serious national security benefits. I mean way beyond the simple evolutionary next step of one piece of military equipment.
It seems like every dollar we spend on energy sovereignity is doing like 10 or even 100 times the work 1 dollar of weapons development is doing to secure our country.
[+] [-] haroldp|6 years ago|reply
It's estimated that we spent $6.8T between 1976 and 2007 on the US policy of always maintaining an Aircraft Carrier on station all day every day in the Persian Gulf, to insure the free flow of oil.
https://offiziere.ch/wp-content/uploads/US-miiltary-cost-of-...
[+] [-] marcusverus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geophertz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StreamBright|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nexuist|6 years ago|reply
It would also cause extreme instability by shooting up unemployment, destroying large corporations that offered valuable careers with good benefits, and exacerbate polarization between those who believe in man made climate change and those who don't.
Don't get me wrong - I think energy independence is the way to go - but paying $4.5 trillion to effectively ruin the lives of millions of people is not a popular position, especially given that we have terrible safety nets to allow these people to find other jobs.
I think the much more likely, less rough path is to continue renewable research until it becomes cheaper than fossil fuels in almost all cases. At which point the market will do the rest. The vast majority of fossil fuel users do not actually care that they use fossil fuel - they just care about energy generation. If you can give them a cheaper means to achieve that, they will go for it.
[+] [-] ourmandave|6 years ago|reply
Their final phase of the project started in 2018 with a $922M investment.
Iowa Public Radio toured one of the windmills back in January.
https://www.iowapublicradio.org/post/skyscrapers-fields-wind...
[+] [-] darksaints|6 years ago|reply
His story is particularly interesting to me because he doesn't give a shit about climate change. His views are best described by George Carlin [1]. And yet, he has the lowest carbon lifestyle of anybody I know. In the 15,000 nautical miles he's sailed, he has burned a grand total of 5 gallons of diesel. And that was only because he stayed for a few weeks in Palau without sailing around, and there was a stint of a few days where there was little solar energy due to storms. He now thinks his decision to buy a diesel backup generator was just a waste of money. If you ask him why he did it, these are his answers: It's cheaper, it's quieter, it's less smelly, and it's more reliable. Not a single mention of carbon emissions or resource depletion or pollution.
At this point, I feel like the only reason fossil fuels are used anymore in new projects is inertia. The costs and performance of renewables+batteries has come so far in the last 5-10 years, and I think we're finally at the point where the intrinsic costs will guarantee adoption.
[0] https://oceanvolt.com/solutions/hydro-generator/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4
[+] [-] nexuist|6 years ago|reply
Solar might work for boats and trains, but can it work for a plane? What about drones?
No renewable energy source can beat gasoline, sans nuclear power (which I think we should be transitioning to, along with the rest of the renewables). MIT built a gas powered drone that lasts 5 days (not minutes!) in the air[1] - that's simply impossible with today's battery tech. I know there are electric planes in development, maybe in production - but none of them match the passenger capacity or cargo volume of a Boeing 747. Until they do, there will always be a place for gas guzzling airliners.
Solar can work for households, skyscrapers, and apartments, and like you said, I think the advantages do outweigh the advantages of traditional coal plants so I'm excited to see that become more mainstream.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/mits-gas-powered-drone-is-...
[+] [-] driverdan|6 years ago|reply
I live in a bus with 1800W of solar. I still burn a lot of diesel driving around but very rarely have to run a generator or plug in for electric, even when I run my AC.
I love being off the electric grid. There's something so satisfying about using electric power and knowing it incurs no additional negative environmental cost. I never think twice about using power, assuming I have enough available.
When I finally buy some real estate I'd love to be off grid but still have fiber internet. I don't think that'll happen but I can dream.
[+] [-] JetezLeLogin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaredcwhite|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StreamBright|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|6 years ago|reply
I hate it when they list battery prices this way, it's very misleading. That's the amortized cost of $187 per MWh cycle, not the battery's upfront cost. Assuming 2000 cycles that's $374,000 per MWh of storage.
[+] [-] xbmcuser|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikestew|6 years ago|reply
Misleading to some, flat-out useless to others. The replacement cost of the 24KWh battery in our Nissan Leaf is about $5K. So I'll take two of those $187 MWh batteries, please.
Oh, of course they're not speaking the same language as I am with that kind of price difference. But then I guess I don't know what in the hell they're talking about if not XWh of energy storage.
[+] [-] aidenn0|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imtringued|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rossdavidh|6 years ago|reply
Bad news: Well the Left may lament the fact that it will not be due to any change of heart or international cooperation, it will just be due to mercenary calculations of cost, and technology. But all of us have to consider what will (not may, will) happen to places with very oil-dependent economies, when oil goes the way of coal. Imagine Saudi Arabia in the state that Venezuela is in right now.
[+] [-] pg_bot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stupidcar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcosdumay|6 years ago|reply
If you are talking about cities, people will just build transmission lines.
[+] [-] francisofascii|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdfman123|6 years ago|reply
Hopefully we get diversifying...
[+] [-] anonuser123456|6 years ago|reply
W.r.t. power production in good solar areas, modern transmission tech can send power 1k miles w/less than 1% loss. Those regions will likely export power, not import people.
[+] [-] laser|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] F_r_k|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blake1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] merpnderp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alvern|6 years ago|reply
So 3.297 cents per kwh. That's on par with large hydro like Tacoma Power Park. I'm getting 11 cents per kwh for my solar currently in the midwest.
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bit_logic|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcMgD2BwE72F|6 years ago|reply
I hope not. Let the plants remove the CO2 from the air instead. That would be much better than burning it again. How can your process be called neutral if nature has a "more neutral" solution than yours? Let the biomass do its job and just stop burning oil.
[+] [-] emanuensis|6 years ago|reply
Liquid air storage offers cheapest route to 24 hour wind and solar
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20424313
[+] [-] tim333|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ailideex|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zelon88|6 years ago|reply
I just looked up a replacement battery by the same manufacturer and their 7.4v LiPo's are up to 22,000 mah! That's almost 525% bigger than my last pack! That kind of capacity was only a dream back then, and 20 years ago when NiMH was the only game in town we were racing 30mph with 3,300!
I thought it was a typo. But other manufacturers are offering similar products.
[+] [-] mfgs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattferderer|6 years ago|reply
Is getting rid of coal & natural gas possible without nuclear?
I don't see how solar & wind can do it by themselves, even if you take the battery part out of the equation.
[+] [-] foxyv|6 years ago|reply
This seems a bit slow to me. 5 years in California time usually ends up being at least 10 years if you are lucky. By then the 7% will probably be closer to 3-5%. I think California is going to have to be a lot more aggressive with Solar and battery if they are going to reach their climate goals...
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
Regardless, it's excellent news. Coal is godawful stuff and we'll be much better off leaving it in the ground where it belongs.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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