Solar Just Hit a Record Low Price in the U.S

https://earther.com/solar-just-hit-a-record-low-price-in-the-u-s-1826830592

by toomuchtodo • 8 years ago

456 339 8 years ago

Relevant bits:

“On their face, they’re less than a third the price of building a new coal or natural gas power plant,” Ramez Naam, an energy expert and lecturer at Singularity University, told Earther in an email. “In fact, building these plants is cheaper than just operating an existing coal or natural gas plant.”
There’s a 30 percent federal investment tax credit for solar projects that helps drive down the cost of this and other solar projects. But Naam said even if you take away that credit, “these bids, un-subsidized, are still cheaper than any new coal or gas plants, and possibly cheaper than operating existing plants.”

(emphasis mine)

westurner• 8 years ago

> Relevant bits:
> “On their face, they’re less than a third the price of building a new coal or natural gas power plant,” Ramez Naam, an energy expert and lecturer at Singularity University, told Earther in an email. “In fact, building these plants is cheaper than just operating an existing coal or natural gas plant.”
> There’s a 30 percent federal investment tax credit for solar projects that helps drive down the cost of this and other solar projects. But Naam said even if you take away that credit, “these bids, un-subsidized, are still cheaper than any new coal or gas plants, and possibly cheaper than operating existing plants.”

I'm assuming that's without factoring in the health cost externalities.

toomuchtodo8• 8 years ago

Yes, this is solely for cost of power. The healthcare savings and quality of life improvements are an additional bonus on top of very cheap power.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/air-pollution-triggering... (Air pollution is triggering diabetes in 3.2 million people each year)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-... (The Other Reason to Shift away from Coal: Air Pollution That Kills Thousands Every Year)

CompelTechnic2• 8 years ago

It will operate at a flat rate of $23.76 per megawatt-hour over the course of a 25-year power purchasing agreement

Does anyone have data on typical wholesale power costs?

crazypyro• 8 years ago

Various data here: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/wholesale/

From my brief browsing, $23.76 is <70% of the average $/MWh price across the available data.

sremani• 8 years ago

that is about $2 cents on kwh! Sounds about right for wholesale price.

scblock2• 8 years ago

You can look up Locational Marginal Pricing (LMP) data. Some Independent System Operators publish the information online. It varies pretty widely by region, and by time of day, time of year, condition of the grid, etc.

ERCOT: http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/contours/rtmLmpHg.html CAISO: http://www.caiso.com/PriceMap/Pages/default.aspx MISO: https://api.misoenergy.org/MISORTWD/lmpcontourmap.html

kyoob• 8 years ago

This is truly good news, but is it really worth calling out that a record was broken when it's been trending down regularly over time?

toomuchtodo8• 8 years ago

Key milestone awareness is important. The more people who know the raw economics, the better choices that can be made.

munk-a• 8 years ago

This isn't a key milestone though, pretty much every week it breaks this record. That said the more headlines we can get about renewable energy the better, the recent moves to prop up coal are super disappointing.

IMTDb• 8 years ago

The record being broken is just the headline of the article. The body is about the trend. The first sentence makes that perfectly clear.

taf2• 8 years ago

It’s one of those rare feel good things that hasn’t been yet flooded by negative view points that often follow a wave of positive news... there is probably a name for this?

zitterbewegung• 8 years ago

Measurable technological advancement?

See also Moore's law.

3minus1• 8 years ago

pre-backlash

neolefty2• 8 years ago

The article mentions that too.

It broke a record that was set [checks calendar] last week.

But I think the headline is being a little click-baity—the article's real strength is analysis. It discusses broader trends—for example that location is important here (Ohio isn't going to get these low bids because it just isn't sunny enough)—and is fun to read.

toss1• 8 years ago

Yes. Especially since it's a continuous trend of records.

It is still news when a wining team adds another victory to their streak and progresses towards the championship,

Also, as pointed out elsewhere, TFA was mostly about this good trend.

What point were you trying to make?

jillesvangurp• 8 years ago

True, but calling out the milestone of beating operational cost of state of the art coal/gas plants is worth doing.

If you extrapolate the downward trend, it's very obvious that anything you build right now that burns fossil fuel is going to be a problem in terms of being able to compete throughout its projected life span. Prices are trending to the point where it will become economical to shut down existing and operational plants in favor of replacing them with solar or wind.

The next milestone will be when existing coal/gas plants will start getting decommissioned. This will start with the older ones but very soon after may be followed by the new and shiny ones Trump is trying to build right now. That is if he manages to get investors to back that at all. It would be kind of a dumb investment given the above.

And to preempt the battery comment, batteries were included with this bid, as is common these days.

rb8082• 8 years ago

There is an interesting part about solar generating electricity when its sunny - it will help population move to warmer climes. If you live in Ohio heating in winter is a problem, solar isn't going to keep you warm on a cold night (ok batteries can help but they're expensive). If you live in the South West though its perfect as Winter nights dont require much heat and the biggest loads are AC at the times when there is lots of sun.

Perhaps this will mean living in Southern California, Arizona etc will be increasingly popular as energy costs will be much more affordable. Of course water is the next problem, but cheap electricity can help that too.

stcredzero3• 8 years ago

If you live in Ohio that is a problem, solar isn't going to keep you warm on a cold night

Houses built to the German Passivhaus standard would do just fine in Ohio. I used to live in Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, so I should know. There was one Minnesota church built with polystyrene panels that had to start running air conditioning in the middle of winter, the insulation was so good.

If you live in the South West though its perfect as Winter nights dont require much heat and the biggest loads are AC at the times when there is lots of sun.

It can get pretty darn cold at night in the desert southwest. Again, insulation is the key.

Of course water is the next problem, but cheap electricity can help that too.

It's 10X as expensive to use techniques like desalinization. It's so much more expensive, that lots of desal plants get built, then get mothballed because it's that much cheaper to get water by other means.

sharkmerry• 8 years ago

is the expense of desalinization the electricity? Which would go down with adoption of solar?

ryanmercer2• 8 years ago

Houses built to the German Passivhaus standard would do just fine in Ohio. I used to live in Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, so I should know. There was one Minnesota church built with polystyrene panels that had to start running air conditioning in the middle of winter, the insulation was so good.

You'd have to level most structures and rebuild from scratch to manage that in large parts of North America to make a difference.

Never mind the fact heaters aren't the only thing that use electricity at night.

oconnore• 8 years ago

It's a shame that there isn't the regulatory flexibility to subsidize desalination plants, because desalination plants are sort of like insurance policies in that you usually don't need them that much until a drought hits and then you really wish you had them.

That sort of long term risk averse thinking is exactly where the market economy needs to be supplemented.

sf_rob2• 8 years ago

You could probably invest in a thermal mass hybrid HVAC system e.g. use solar during the day to heat or cool a large thermal mass (thick interior concrete wall/floor to whatever temperature you need it to be at night.

misterhtmlcss• 8 years ago

Aren't they using molten salt for this? I think I heard about molten salt being used in a few cases for energy storage. Too bad I can't recall the details. Have you heard about this?

gm-conspiracy• 8 years ago

Yes, this is a good idea, just expensive.

There are both passive and active options.

You need to drill pretty deep and have multiple wells, or have alot of land surface area and excavate (not too deep though).

Other option is using water from a well or spring and dumping that water back into another well or stream (with an increase in water temp.).

jpao79• 8 years ago

Actually maybe a well insulated house could be considered a "thermal battery". If you look at the CAISO reports, a significant chunk of the duck curve is related to heating/cooling. If you had a super well insulated house, you could do the heating/cooling during the day.

Instead today, people fire up the AC on overdrive when they get home in the evening to cool/heat the place down/up. What happens if your Nest could just fired it up at 3pm while the sun was still shining.

In fact the opposite is done today to take advantage of early morning peak pricing, commercial buildings cool/heat at 3am to get optimal energy pricing.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/retired-cpuc-co...

overcast2• 8 years ago

Why does it have to be electric heat? Natural Gas is doing a good job right now. Let's work on supplying electricity, for things that require electricity first. When we've moved away non renewable energy sources for electricity generation, then move onto the heating issues in colder climates.

rb8082• 8 years ago

Yes Gas is great, but in 100 years it wont be cheap. I wasn't really talking about the next decade.

wtetzner• 8 years ago

But even with natural gas, don't you end up needing electricity to move the heat through the house?

ChuckMcM3• 8 years ago

In my experience, the perception that "solar isn't for everybody", especially when using housing examples, is fooled by hidden assumptions that were made during the time.

Consider the situation in 1950 when you are building a house, you can double or triple the cost of home construction by insulating it so that the net energy needed to heat or cool it is minimal, or you throw a oil burner in the basement which is burning fuel oil that costs a few cents per gallon and keep everything nice and toasty. The "obvious" choice there was not to spend the money on insulation but instead to just use really cheap energy to manage the temperature range. Makes everything much easier to engineer.

If, on the other hand, you design with the assumption that energy is extremely expensive and so you minimize the need to use it to regulate temperatures within a house, you can design a house that is temperature stable with the minimal amount of energy input for air circulation.

That gets you houses in the New Mexico desert that need no air conditioning (air cooling) and churches and office buildings in the northeast that need no additional heating.

Things that I have read about include extended depth insulated exterior walls. "Smart" glass windows that reject 97% of the infrared and ultraviolet spectrum (I've got film on my house windows that are not that good but they do a tremendous job of minimizing heat load in the summer). Passive heat exchanger systems that keep the temperature balanced between upstairs and downstairs, and solar roof tiles that provide both insulation and energy for running the house.

Does that help you if you're living in a 'mid century wood frame house', probably not. But it isn't that solar couldn't meet the heating and cooling needs, it is that combined with good house engineering this is already a solved problem.

driverdan3• 8 years ago

That gets you houses in the New Mexico desert that need no air conditioning (air cooling) and churches and office buildings in the northeast that need no additional heating.

Do you have a source for your NM desert example? I'm doubtful you can keep a desert home cool with just airflow.

swebs3• 8 years ago

We've built oil pipelines, why not "electricity pipelines" made of refrigerated, super conducting cable?

epistasis3• 8 years ago

The technology that's being deployed right now for this is high-voltage DC:

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/07/09/eia-examines-hvdc-for...

It's an infrastructure investment that would pay dividends, but requires getting through a quagmire of politics.

jankeymeulen• 8 years ago

At 3% loss per 1000 km (625 miles) HVDC is already good enough I'd say.

philipkglass7• 8 years ago

High voltage direct current lines can already cover vast distances. Siemens has started supplying equipment for a Chinese HVDC project that will transmit 12 gigawatts over 3300 kilometers:

https://www.siemens.com/press/pool/de/pressemitteilungen/201...

That's a long enough line to stretch between California and East Coast states.

Getting rights-of-way for big interstate transmission projects is harder than actually building the projects after those rights are secured. Superconducting cables can carry more power per cross section than HVDC lines, but they're a lot more expensive and immature. Nobody has yet found a project that would justify full-scale superconducting lines over more conventional high voltage lines built with ordinary resistive conductors.

rsynnott13• 8 years ago

If you live in Ohio heating in winter is a problem, solar isn't going to keep you warm on a cold night.

(a) In any realistic scenarios where a grid goes mostly-solar, you'd expect that it would have adequate storage.

(b) Storage heaters are a thing (and far more economical than batteries).

(c) Modern "passive houses" and similar standards require surprisingly small energy input to heat, even when it's very cold outside. For whatever reason these mostly haven't been adopted in the US, but are becoming common in parts of Europe.

coryfklein5• 8 years ago

We have a loooong way to go before cost of living in southern California is offsetting energy prices in Ohio.

nivertech• 8 years ago

Q: Where one can check solar energy prices?

neolefty2• 8 years ago

This article's data is a winning bid to build a plant. Is there a systematic source for those numbers?

philipkglass7• 8 years ago

You have to read a bunch of news articles and keep an eye out for articles that actually include numbers. I don't know of any public databases aggregating that sort of information. There are commercial services that sell data and reports.

Keep in mind that solar electricity, like any form of electricity generation, has location-specific and project-specific cost factors. Building any form of power plant is cheaper in China than in Germany. Solar power prices in Nevada are almost always going to be cheaper than in Michigan, because even if the construction costs are the same, the arrays will get more sun per year in Nevada.

robto• 8 years ago

As far as I know, the industry standard is the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's annual 'Tracking The Sun' report[0]. I recommend it as a great primary source - the measurements are well explained and accompanied by helpful charts and analysis of the year-to-year changes. LBNL also publishes other useful resources on energy production/consumption, so it's worth browsing around to see what they have if you're interested.

[0]https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/tracking-sun-10-installed-p...

s3r3nity• 8 years ago

Depends upon what type of data you want.

If you want to check solar energy prices for your _home_, then I'd recommend EnergySage (https://www.energysage.com/). I think they have a tool for commercial buildings as well, but don't quote me.

If you want more generic public data, I think other commenters have better sources, though their blog might have some articles wit that information.

sol_remmy• 8 years ago

I would not trust a source called "earther.com" to tell me good news about solar because they're clearly going to be biased.

When power industry magazines talk about solar being cheap then i'll believe it

maxerickson4• 8 years ago

I live north of 45° and the city manager said in an article about the new solar farm that it's cheaper electricity than they can otherwise buy.

throwaway57522• 8 years ago

Did you do anything but read the url of the article? What power industry magazines should we follow so we know when you're satisfied?

Do you have anything substantial to say about the points made in the article? For the record, it took me seconds to ascertain it was a part of Gizmodo's umbrella group, and the article made some very clear dollar/cent claims on utility scale projects.

philipkglass7• 8 years ago

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nv-energy-23-cent-solar-con...

scblock2• 8 years ago

1) Power industry magazines, regulated utilities, mainstream newspapers, and others have 2) This source, regardless of bias, is reporting published public price information for long-term contracts, and comparing said published price information to other published price information. So what's your objection beyond the focus of the site?

opo4• 8 years ago

PG&E has an option where you can choose to have 50% or 100% of your power come from solar:

...When you enroll, PG&E will purchase additional, new solar resources to meet your electricity needs as well as those of other participating customers.

As you might have guessed, you pay a premium for his option:

...Your monthly electric energy statement will include a charge for the solar power you are purchasing and related program charges, as well as a credit for the standard generation you are no longer purchasing. Today, the net of these charges and credits is a premium.

https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/solar-and-vehicles/opt...

contextfree• 8 years ago

It looks like the premium has dropped rather dramatically just over the past couple of years (over 40% for average residential, and to almost zero for medium and large commercial.)

glitcher• 8 years ago

Is there anything specific about that source besides the name that increases your skepticism? By that logic, one could say that anyone posting under a pseudonym containing "sol" shouldn't be trusted when they comment on a solar topic either.

swebs3• 8 years ago

Is there anything specific about that source besides the name that increases your skepticism?

1. It's from the Gawker network, which is known for clickbait, yellow journalism, and half-truths.

2. They don't cite their sources. All links (except 1) in the article just lead to past articles they've written. The only external link is about a report unrelated to the main article.

Here is a better article published a day before this one which gives more details and actually lists their sources.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nv-energy-23-cent-solar-con...

Symmetry• 8 years ago

I'm mostly gratified by what a "Dog bites man" story this is. Solar prices have been decreasing steadily for a long time so we should expect to see a story like this every few months until the adoption curve flattens out - which hopefully won't be for a while.

throwaway57522• 8 years ago

The bit about storage becoming a routine part of bids was an interesting piece of information.

blobbers• 8 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. The gigafactory isn't mention in this, but could there be synergies with Tesla's (somewhat shady... pun intended) acquisition of SolarCity?

These sorts of installs aren't exactly the same thing, but maybe SolarCity needs to pivot to from distributed consumer to large scale utility.

ryanmercer2• 8 years ago

You'd think but photovlotaics have already been targeted as far as importing into the U.S., counterveiling and anti-dumping duties and what not.

They dodged this recent tariff change that took effect this week as 8541.40.60 tariffs currently aren't included in this tariff war with China but they could see more aggressive action.

dalbasal• 8 years ago

Stock market hits all time high!!

Mountain_Skies• 8 years ago

Wonder if there is a bit of an Osbourne Effect limiting demand as potential buyers keep waiting to see if the next generation of panels are even better.

CyberDildonics4• 8 years ago

It doesn't seem to have slowed down TV sales.

xahrepap4• 8 years ago

Slightly off topic... Interesting thing about solar in Utah (maybe everywhere? Not sure about the specifics): Utah gives every land owner pollution credits. They're allowed to pollute X units worth per year or something like that. Depending on certain criteria you're allotted a certain amount of credits. The problem is, these credits are transferable. So if I, for example, don't pollute, I can sell my credits off to someone who wants to pollute more than average.

Something (I think is shady) some companies are doing is selling solar for really cheap in dollars, but they subsidize the cost by selling it for credits. Average Joe is going to think he's polluting less, however since he sold off his pollution credits, his solar purchase has authorized someone else to pollute for him. Netting us nothing in the end.

(not an expert, so I may have misunderstandings and be oversimplifying things, but the point should be easy to understand)

thelastidiot2• 8 years ago

It sounds like a fantastic loophole that allows companies to break regulations. I love capitalism.

icelancer• 8 years ago

Then you haven't done enough research on cap and trade, which the vast majority of environmental studies show is an extremely effective way to manage the problem.

adventured2• 8 years ago

I'd suspect that if the actual net is anywhere close to even, then that scheme having the side-effect of further building up the solar industry, is a massive long-term win for renewable energy and the environment.

xahrepap4• 8 years ago

That's a good point. I didn't really think of that. It still feels a bit off, but that does help return some of the feel-goods back into buying solar :)

jackcarter• 8 years ago

I'm not familiar with Utah's program, but it sounds like an emissions trading / "cap and trade" program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading

There are two ways that this is netting something:

1. Utah gets to set the total allowable emissions/year. If this is set lower than what emissions would be, absent the program, then emissions will be reduced.

2. Companies have to pay for those credits. If the credit price ends up being high enough, then companies will invest in ways to reduce emissions, e.g. by purchasing carbon scrubbers.

eigenvector• 8 years ago

It's not net zero impact to pollution, because polluters are forced to buy credits, which increases the costs of their pollution and incentivizes them to reduce it, while non-polluting technologies are subsidized by the income they can get from selling unused credits.

The key is how many total credits you allocate to begin with - they should be sufficiently scarce that large emitters need to buy credits - and continually ratcheting down the number of credits allocated annually.

craftyguy• 8 years ago

which increases the costs of their pollution and incentivizes them to reduce it

Or, they pass the cost to the very consumers that sold them the credits.

bazooka_penguin• 8 years ago

Effectively the same as moving manufacturing to 3rd world countries. Out of sight out of mind

hathawsh3• 8 years ago

I've never heard of this. What is the name of Utah's "pollution credit" program and where can I find out more? Google isn't helping me.

ac29• 8 years ago

Perhaps its this?

https://deq.utah.gov/air-quality/emission-credits-offset-reg...

Alex3917• 8 years ago

since he sold off his pollution credits, his solar purchase has authorized someone else to pollute for him. Netting us nothing in the end.

You're forgetting the 'cap' part of cap-and-trade. The point is minimize the cost of reducing the total amount of greenhouse gas (or whatever) pollution across society. The reason for allowing people to sell their credits is that it reduces the economic cost of reducing pollution. It doesn't matter whether any given individual is polluting more or less, what matters is that total pollution is continually decreasing until we reach safe levels.

xahrepap4• 8 years ago

Thanks for the explanation. You're right. I wasn't aware of the full system. The parts I did know seemed like a shady loophole for bigger polluters to take advantage of.

Thanks!

CuriousSkeptic• 8 years ago

Seems a bit unfair to single out land owners. One would think even non-landowers should have claim to the air.

landryraccoon• 8 years ago

The status quo in most places is : pretty much people pollute however they want at zero marginal cost to themselves, without needing any credits, and passing on the costs to the environment as a whole.

The credits are an improvement, because polluters at least have to pay for pollution credits, which means they have an incentive to pollute less.

seangrogg• 8 years ago

Chances are the solar companies themselves are selling for cheap and taking credits as an "alternative currency", which makes sense for Average Joe as they no longer need them (in theory) as (I assume) excess credits have no value.

From there, the solar company probably covers their own pollution level and then sells the remainder of the credits at auction and capitalizes on the spread.

Company pollution rates will likely not be affected until it eats into their profits; rather, they will likely just buy credits up to the point where there's a breakeven between the cost of a credit and the savings for a credit. Whatever money is saved won't be used to increase pollution but rather just be reinvested into other parts of the company or released to shareholders.

In this case, the pollutant is paying money to pay less in taxation, the solar company is providing access to renewable energy, and Average Joe is going to be polluting less at home. I could get behind that.

EDIT: Also, this means that Utah could theoretically wean the state's pollution credits lower and lower each year until the cost of polluting is so high that pollutants either convert or leave.

Latteland• 8 years ago

It netted us more solar power installed so that the next person will have it at a lower price through volume, encouraging cheaper s.p. for everyone else.

cjhanks• 8 years ago

This solution won't work if the sun ceases to emit light, therefore it's not fool proof.

I kid, but - why so much pessimistic "all or nothing" attitude on this?

preparedzebra3• 8 years ago

The internal combustion engine seems to have been milked for all the efficiency our current materials can get out of it, while new materials and economies of scale in solar tech keep pushing prices lower. However, material science could also revolutionize the efficiency of engines and make them cost competitive with solar again. Solar-ification seems to be the trend, but it is not guaranteed.

BigChiefSmokem• 8 years ago

That is not true. My new 2019 Mustang EcoBoost has 310hp and 350ft/lb of torque (key for acceleration) and is considered an entry-level mid-range vehicle. As recently as the early 2000s anything past 300hp was considered a race car.

Advanced software (in modern automatic transmissions for example) and material advancements have made all the difference in the advancement of combustion engines in the past 15 years and I firmly believe that technology can be pushed even further. I want to see 4 cylinder engines pushing 500hp, sounds like a pipedream now but so did 300hp when I was a kid.

If you want to see what happens when you perfect the marriage between a combustion engine and an electric motor w/ batteries, do some research on the McLaren P1.

selectodude• 8 years ago

The Mercedes-Benz M133 engine already pushes almost 400hp out of a 2-liter 4 cylinder. I imagine they'll all grenade themselves before they hit 50,000 miles but I guess we'll see.

preparedzebra3• 8 years ago

horsepower is not fuel efficiency

swebs3• 8 years ago

However, material science could also revolutionize the efficiency of engines and make them cost competitive with solar again

I doubt it. We've passed peak oil and have resorted to expensive techniques like fracking to collect the scraps. Meanwhile, even if no advances in solar panels occur in the future, the price of power produced by solar will only go down as more panels are added to the grid.

The biggest hurdle now is getting cars with combustion engines off the road and replacing them with electric. I haven't seen much progress made on that front in the past few years.

willismichael2• 8 years ago

I keep imagining that somebody will invent a way to transform cheap renewable energy into some kind of fuel that can be used by existing combustion engines. If there some way to use atmospheric CO2 in the process, then it could be a zero sum game.

preparedzebra3• 8 years ago

I think a lot of people lack imagination here. What kinds of efficiencies could we create with room temp. super conductors? This is a good read for anyone interested in this trend https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...

jonknee• 8 years ago

We've passed peak oil

That is not true

rsynnott13• 8 years ago

Internal combustion engines are generally not used in power plants. Modern thermal plants use either gas or steam turbines. The best thermal plants currently have efficiencies approaching 65%, and there are theoretical limits; there's not too much more blood to be squeezed from that stone.

tombert2• 8 years ago

I'm of course a supporter of solar, and I don't want to be "that guy", but is there a strategy for handling solar power at night? In these areas that are mostly solar, how do they store the energy, or do they resort to natural gas or coal or something?

deepnotderp• 8 years ago

Molten salt batteries?

tombert2• 8 years ago

I remember hearing from Bill Nye about an idea to pump water to lift up pillars during the day to store potential energy, then release those pillars overnight. I wonder if that's being implemented anywhere.

raldi2• 8 years ago

Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_Pr...

paulddraper• 8 years ago

(1) Ideal: Big batteries

(2) Pragmatic: Use on-demand power sources at night: fossil, nuclear, etc.

Just as big as the storage issue, though, is distribution.

Available solar power in the American Northwest is laughable compared to the American Southwest.

stusmall2• 8 years ago

Here is a great podcast about an old method from the nuclear age that is being used today for solar: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

legitster• 8 years ago

Hydroelectric. I believe there is a project in California looking into a big reservoir they can use to fill with water when they have extra power.

Aside from that, price incentives should come into play. Everyone charges their cars and electronics during the day when power is cheapest. If you want to run your equipment at night you have to pay more.

opportune• 8 years ago

I'm not a fan of consumer-facing dynamic pricing in a lot of contexts, but power by far makes the most sense.

An interesting side effect may be that it could encourage us to return to more natural sleeping schedules, based on the actual time when the sun is in the air. Of course that does pose problems in areas that are very close to one of the two poles

epistasis3• 8 years ago

There are oh-so-many ways to address this and it's not clear what the market will pick.

First off, 100% solar is not likely to win out unless it's a small grid on an island. Any realistic grid will have wind and solar and hydro. New nuclear is already far more expensive than lithium ion batteries + solar, so that's out of contention for new builds unless a government is trying to subsidize the industries that are companions to fission power (nuclear submarines, etc.)

Among the ways to time shift electrical demand:

- lithium ion batteries. These will likely be only 5-6 cents/kWh within five years.

- thermal storage: cooling (making ice) or heat can be stored for these energy applications

- demand response: EVs and many other large demand sources can respond to price signals or aggregated demand response to shift their consumption to the best times. Currently this is mostly used to shave the peaks off of demand but with critical mass of EV there will be huge amounts of valley filling too.

- vehicle to grid: I'm somewhat skeptical this will win a cost battle, but it's being investigated: high penetrations of EVs mean that there will be a day or more of storage on wheels. This can be used in all sorts of ways, potentially.

- flow batteries: I'm also skeptical that these will win on price, but they might.

- concentrating solar power: this is solar power from heat, therma storage can be used in conjunction to deliver 24 hour power. Early pilots were super expensive but recent project have dropped drastically in price to the point where it has a chance of being competitive with other storage tech.

- lots of others that I'm forgetting.

Basically solar is will probably get so cheap that we'll overbuild a ton of it and have more power than the inverters can handle, and size the installs for the winter lows, most likely. This means that there will likely be tons of extra unused DC power at solar sites for large chunks of the year. Could be an opportunity...

BioMeditate• 8 years ago

There was a company trying to do compressed air with good efficiency but they aren't doing so well right now

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/lightsail-energ...

agumonkey2• 8 years ago

any curated list of place to follow to stay up to date ?

rsynnott13• 8 years ago

Currently, typically, you ramp up gas production. This is obviously still better than using the gas throughout the day and night. In the future, improvements in storage technology may make that more viable; there are already experiments in this direction, with 1GWh-scale flow battery storage facilities to be completed in Germany and China in the next year.

Power usage is typically lower at night, of course. And wind generation tends to be a bit higher at night in most places.

jartelt2• 8 years ago

You still get wind power at night in most areas. You can also ramp up natural gas plants at night to pick up demand. You can store energy as well using pumped hydro or batteries. We are not yet in a situation where large-scale storage is totally necessary though. The grid managers are able to make everything work using the flexible resources already on the grid today.

Tharkun• 8 years ago

1) Reducing demand would be a great place to start. Good insulation, something to help keep the sun out in warm climtaes, efficient appliances of any kind etc.

2) Timing demand to peak solar moments. When the sun is brightest, why not start heating your well-insulated home & start your washer and stuff?

3) A bit of local battery storage could help the grid immensely, especially wrt appliances like electric cookers (induction or whatnot), toasters & kettles etc. These usually draw a lot of power for a pretty short amount of time -- and to make matters worse, everyone uses them around roughly the same moment around sunset. I think this is where the value in things like the PowerWall truly lies.

I guess when those three things are in place, it should be a lot easier to provide power outside of peak solar moments.

inputcoffee4• 8 years ago

The true price of solar is the price to produce reliable, continuous energy. That requires something to smooth out the signal and store the energy, most probably a battery.

The solar + battery price is also going down, though not as fast as the solar only piece. But that's the metric we should be following. When that hits $30 per MWh, it'll be game over.

immad• 8 years ago

Why can't existing energy infrastructure handle the gaps? Does it take too long to boot up a natural gas plant just for the night?

Would still make a huge dent to energy needs and the existing infrastructure already in place.

rock_hard• 8 years ago

Without a buffer (like a battery) solar energy fluctuates highly because of clouds and other things that get in the way for split seconds during the day.

inputcoffee4• 8 years ago

That is true, and existing infrastructure does (mostly) handle the gaps.

How much does "existing infrastructure" charge to handle the gaps? This calculation differs wildly from as low as $6 to as high as $15, but I think $12 is the right answer.

So add $12 to solar only as a rough rule of thumb. Note that this $12 still comes with transmission issues, and environmental impact.

rsynnott13• 8 years ago

That's what's generally happening. It's a bit of a limiting factor, though. As you have more and more renewable, you need more and more gas plants which mostly sit around doing nothing, which isn't free.

There's also the opposite problem, particularly in the case of wind turbines; if you have enough, then your base-load (ie coal, nuclear, hydro) plus renewable may sometimes exceed demand. This happens from time to time in Ireland, for instance, due to a large installed base of wind. At that point you have to turn off renewable, and that's not always trivial or instant. Storage would help there, too, by absorbing the excess.

coryfklein5• 8 years ago

Because total load on the power grid peaks at 8 PM when solar is providing nearly 0% of the power [1].

This means that no matter how many additional solar panels you add to the system, you are not displacing a single fossil fuel plant. Sure it's good that those plants are running nominally fewer hours per day per additional solar panel, but the cost to own, operate, and maintain the panels is roughly constant.

This results in the effect of increased prices for fossil power in a way that can't be offset by solar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

babaganoosh89• 8 years ago

Also the cost of installation. At least for home solar, installation makes up the majority of the cost.

inputcoffee4• 8 years ago

Yes, and any estimate of solar only costs is composed largely of financing charges which is another way of saying capital costs. These include the installation.

mrfusion3• 8 years ago

I have an idea for a product to solve this if anyone is interested in chatting. I just don’t have the capital or hardware knowledge to get it going.

rsynnott13• 8 years ago

I wouldn't bet on batteries, or at least conventional batteries, being the long term solution. There's interesting work being done with air pressure storage, flow batteries (the largest batteries currently under construction are mostly flow batteries in the 500MWh-1GWh range, though the technology is still in its infancy), and big scary vacuum flywheels.

All of these are far less developed than lithium ion cells, but have the potential to do a lot better on cost and longevity grounds.

CompelTechnic2• 8 years ago

One weird thought I had the other day: high voltage DC transmission lines are getting more popular. I wonder if it would be economical for a high voltage DC line to form a loop around the entire planet, so that the load can follow the sun through a complete cycle.

digikata3• 8 years ago

I think the key is that we can start to develop infrastructure just fine on lithium cells, and it might even accelerate the development of more efficient alternatives develop because it proves the market to investors.

jbrownpa2• 8 years ago

Planet Money covered this recently: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

Here's an entry on the storage facility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...

"The biggest battery in the world is a giant lake tucked away in the Appalachian Mountains on the border between Virginia and West Virginia"

One of the more promising things is actually water-based storage using back-to-back reservoirs. Water has a lot of mass per volume and is really low tech. And it's a proven strategy that has been operational for many decades.

chx• 8 years ago

I think what ARES is doing has the biggest potential: running heavy trains on a closed loop uphill to store energy and downhill to generate. They claim 80% charge/discharge efficiency which is quite good. The technology is very well understood and mature and the environmental effects are lower than building a reservoir.

state_less• 8 years ago

Batteries are pretty convenient though. They don't have any moving parts and can supply electricity on demand.

Not all lithium batteries are created equal in terms of longevity. A traditional lithium manganese battery might have 500 cycles in it before hitting 80% capacity. A lithium titanate [1] battery might be closer to 5000 cycles. A battery could be designed for long term usage and thus lower the long term cost, if not the upfront cost.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93titanate_batte...

raldi2• 8 years ago

How do you track it? What is it now?

ghouse5• 8 years ago

False equivalence. A similar argument could be made of nuclear power (which needs to run at/near 100% output), or supercritical coal (similar operating constraint to nuclear). Do we need to add batteries to those as well to make an apples-apples comparison? (Incidentally, much of the pumped hydro in the US was built to integrate nuclear power).

Unless you're trying to power the grid with a single power plant (like on a small island), argument made above doesn't hold. The grid is a network of generators (and loads) with different operating characteristics.

reaperducer• 8 years ago

Plus, just because the sun goes down doesn't mean all solar generating stations stop making electricity.

I'm not even remotely an expert in this field, but the towers at the solar furnaces I've seen continue to glow well into the night, meaning they're hot enough to still generate steam, and thus electricity, long after it's dark.

I don't expect they generate electricity all night, but maybe not as much energy needs to be stored as people assume.

jartelt2• 8 years ago

This comment gets made in every single solar article put on HN. The true price of solar is what the market is willing to pay for it. If the solar was ruining the grid or was way more expensive than what it seems, we would not keep seeing solar installed at this pace and at these costs.

We need to get out of the mindset that all power generators need to produce a steady amount of power 24/7. A flexible grid made of many power sources that can be ramped up and down can just as easily meet demand and may even be best since it is resilient when any one power source goes down for an extended period of time.

You can't just say that solar should be more expensive because it only works half the day. You could just as easily turn that argument around and say that nuclear and coal plants should be more expensive since they are only economical if run at a constant load and require long shutdowns every year for maintenance. There needs to be extra capacity on the grid to meet demand during nuclear/coal shutdowns, but no one states that nuclear and coal should be more expensive as a result.

inputcoffee4• 8 years ago

You misunderstand the sense of "true" here.

The point is not that the "true" price in the sense of what it ought to be. It is the "true" price in the sense of what the market is actually paying for the service.

When people put out the number $23, they compare it with the cost of power and wonder why, if it is so much lower, it doesn't already swamp the current solution.

So the purpose of the comment is to explain that it is not a complete solution, and not reflective of the total ("true") bill.

heisenbergs2• 8 years ago

Not only that. Solar energy production follows the sun, which incidentally is what humans also follow and when they are typically active and using most energy. Hence, solar producing energy when it is actually needed and in most demand (peak energy). This is even more so the case in hotter places that need AC.

hueving5• 8 years ago

If the solar was ruining the grid or was way more expensive than what it seems, we would not keep seeing solar installed at this pace and at these costs.

This completely ignores the fact that the people buying solar get subsidies and they aren't the ones paying for the burdened grid.

In some states, distribution companies are paying retail prices back to solar producers. That means these people get to freeride on the grid and force the power company to deal with their unstable power supply for free.

TheSpiceIsLife• 8 years ago

but no one states that nuclear and coal should be more expensive as a result.

Yes, yes we are.

The correct calculation uses the capacity factor, not the name-plate capacity.

aagha• 8 years ago

I think you're looking at this only from an economical point of view and not factoring in environmental concerns.

In CA, though solar continues to be installed, we've reached a point--due to a lack of good/cheap storage ability--that at the end of the day (where Solar has been working fine all day), in order to meat evening demand, the only way to address steep demand is to fire up coal-fired plants. They work, but they're not only expensive, they're dirty.

Florin_Andrei• 8 years ago

There's a lot of "lumpy" demand that peaks during the day, requiring no storage. E.g. all air conditioning would be perfect as a consumer of solar energy.

mikec3010• 8 years ago

reliable, continuous energy.

That's the job of the inverter, right? It uses free solar energy first and maintains reliability by supplementing it with costly grid power.

Animats• 8 years ago

Not entirely. About 10GW of solar capacity would cover the entire air conditioning load peak for California[1] That's when power prices are the highest, and it doesn't need energy storage. Pretty soon, most air conditioning load will be on solar power.

[1] http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx

rwcarlsen• 8 years ago

But you do need storage and/or backup providers because not having air-conditioning run on cloudy days is not an option.

cletus• 8 years ago

To quote Dwight... "False."

It is true that a wide electrical grid needs a base load.

It is also true that solar isn't great at continuous power because of, you know, the Sun sometimes being behind the Earth.

But that doesn't mean you need necessarily need batteries. There are at least two scenarios where you don't:

1. You have an alternative to batteries for storage. This could mean using excess solar power to create some fuel that may well also be portable. This isn't an economic way of creating gasoline (yet) but in remote places this might not matter. It also might not matter if this power is essentially "free" (eg you need to build a certain capacity anyway which leaves times where excess power is being generated).

2. Power usage on electrical grids is also not smooth. It also peaks during the day when, as it happens, the Sun is also out. So your solar capacity is actually reducing your peak grid power requirements, which is incredibly useful.

dragontamer6• 8 years ago

With regards to #2: You should study the "duck curve" and "nessie curve".

In particular, in Solar-heavy situations, the peak energy is now 5pm. When the sun begins to set but there's still a large demand of electricity.

Batteries in today's form cannot solve the duck curve. So the only reasonable situation is to use natural gas plants to supply the grid with power. Future batteries need to be built more efficiently and cheaper to deal with the many Gigawatts and Gigawatt-hours (both power AND energy capabilities need to grow) to deal with the future duck curve and/or nessie curves.

dragontamer6• 8 years ago

No more than the true-price of Nuclear is the price to spin-up and spin-down nuclear as the electric grid demands.

There's "baseload power" (coal, nuclear, wind, solar is really good for this), and there's "Peaker power" (natural gas and hydro are really good for this).

Hydro is super-simple. Just block the water if you don't need energy, and unblock it when you need energy. Ditto with Natural Gas, which can spin up / spin down arbitrarily.

Solar, Nuclear, and Wind generate power on their own schedule and can't really be bothered. But you use OTHER forms of energy when the sun stops shining.

Natural gas is expensive to run 100% of the time. But if you can run Natural gas only 20% of the time, then you're still saving money.

coryfklein5• 8 years ago

Agreed. Without some alternative form of energy in the morning and evening we may have already reached the saturation point of solar energy. See the Duck curve [1].

Once the heavily regulated energy market has time to adjust to market conditions you are going to see this energy surplus during the day being adjusted for. Where solar panels make economic sense today they may not tomorrow when energy prices for mid-day use plummet due to oversupply.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

raven105x• 8 years ago

Prices will not plummet due to oversupply, they will increase as demand decreases to increase profitability. Electricity prices reflect only one thing: how high they can be while still being "affordable". Even now, in most major cities, residential pricing is 10x-50x of business/industrial pricing ...in the same zip code. The cost of production of electricity is almost enitely irrelevant to its' pricing.

maxerickson4• 8 years ago

Thermal storage is super easy for cooling and can be used to shift the evening load.

Just offer economic incentives to put ac on a timer.

Brakenshire3• 8 years ago

Energy prices plummeting in the middle of the day creates an enormous economic incentive for energy storage or demand shifting, which in turn makes energy in the middle of the day more valuable.

woodandsteel• 8 years ago

If you had actually read the article, you would have discovered that many of the projects covered in the Nevada auction included batteries.

stale20025• 8 years ago

There is an alternative. Don't "smooth" it out. Just provide double the capacity needed. If prices go low enough, you can solve the problem by just throwing more solar panels at it.

nikdaheratik• 8 years ago

From the article:

“Three years ago you almost never saw batteries as part of a new solar or wind project,” Naam said. “In 2018, we’ve seen battery storage frequently show up as part of these bids. Energy storage is becoming the new normal with solar bids.”

So they are already working on it with some of the projects at least, and there's no reason to think they won't scale up and start becoming competitive before too long.

jrochkind1• 8 years ago

So... did you read the article, mr. top-voted comment?

The Nevada auction also included a number of projects that link up utility-scale solar with batteries. Mastering solar plus storage will be critical for renewables to truly overtake fossil fuels, since they only generate power when it’s sunny or when the wind blows.
“Three years ago you almost never saw batteries as part of a new solar or wind project,” Naam said. “In 2018, we’ve seen battery storage frequently show up as part of these bids. Energy storage is becoming the new normal with solar bids.”

mrfusion3• 8 years ago

What happened to all the solar tariffs folks were stressing about?

stusmall2• 8 years ago

It's in the article:

They also show that the efforts of the Trump administration to prop up fossil fuels at the expense of renewables aren’t enough to push solar out to sea. The tariffs that Trump levied earlier this year against cheap solar panels imported from China could eventually dampen installations. Naam said they add roughly 10 percent to the price of utility-scale projects, but “at most, they move the price of solar back by about a year.”

It's still a significant cost added on and slows things down, but you can only do so much damage.

rsynnott13• 8 years ago

Those will have a lagging effect.

julienchastang2• 8 years ago

Note the picture in the article is the Ivanpah concentrated solar thermal power facility in California (near Las Vegas, NV). The article concerns photovoltaic not concentrated solar. I drove by Ivanpah not long ago and it is a site to see, the towers look about as bright as the sun, but my understanding is concentrated solar is not as attractive economically as PV.

rsynnott13• 8 years ago

Probably not now, no (though it does have the interesting property that, with certain designs, it keeps producing power some time after the sun goes down). At the time solar power towers were developed, though, PV was rather expensive and inefficient; the dramatic advances of the last couple of decades weren't really expected.

julienchastang2• 8 years ago

Also, I believe they have to be pre-heated in the morning with natural gas diminishing the carbon advantage. Too bad, they really do look impressive.

WrathOfJay• 8 years ago

Given that solar auction minimum bids have dropped 470% in the last 4 years (in Mexico, https://earther.com/mexico-just-auctioned-off-the-cheapest-s...), isn't it crazy to accept a 25 year flat rate contract?

distances• 8 years ago

I don't know if this is overly pendantic, but surely they mean prices dropped by 79%? Percentages in the hundreds would mean prices deep in the negatives.

kraig911• 8 years ago

If only we could do long transmission from one half of the earth and vice versa...

niftich• 8 years ago

The frustrating part about solar is that because the peak generation output doesn't line up with typical peak consumption ("the duck curve"), utilities need natgas peakers, which sit mostly idle, to fill in the gap. As solar installation grows, coal baseload falls behind due to cheap natgas, and nuclear languishes due to huge capex, established baseload capacity will decrease. From now on, new capacity will largely be a mix of natgas CC, natgas CT, solar, and wind. CCs (combined cycle) are most able to serve in baseload/load-following capacity, but if solar and wind are reliable for a particular interconnection, CTs (simple cycle) are cheaper to build, if less efficient to operate.

Much of the strategizing in the future will be about trying to find the right balance of CCs and CTs to complement intermittent and opportunistic (load-ignorant) renewables, while balancing an onslaught of new regulations and activists that will force battery storage as an issue. This is already happening now, well before battery storage is cost-competitive.

ghouse5• 8 years ago

The frustrating part about solar is that because the peak generation output doesn't line up with typical peak consumption ("the duck curve"), utilities need natgas peakers, which sit mostly idle, to fill in the gap.

Solar does line up with peak consumption. The duck curve is not a consumption curve, but a "Net Demand" curve -- the demand remaining after solar and generation is removed.

Peakers existed before solar. A typical load duration curve is a sideways "S" The peakers may run less than 5% of the year but are necessary to meet the hottest hours of the year.

coryfklein5• 8 years ago

Solar does line up with peak consumption.

Not true according to [1], which shows peak consumption around 19:00, just as solar production drops to 0.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

moistoreos• 8 years ago

Why is this a surprise? Solar costs have been falling for multiple decades.

NON-SURPRISING HEADLINE: "Falling Costs Are Actually Falling".

The important statistics to pay attention to are the implementations and if the components are recyclable not the cost per megawatt. Increasing renewable energy is important but not if you cannot recycle the components.

toomuchtodo8• 8 years ago

Solar panels are easily recyclable. There is an operational pilot plant in France doing so.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-solar-recycling/europes-f...

Keep in mind, solar panels have a 25 year warranty, and after that will continue to produce power (at about 80% rates output). We have decades to get recycling infrastructure in place.

Brakenshire3• 8 years ago

The important statistics to pay attention to are the implementations and if the components are recyclable not the cost per megawatt.

Why? Solar panels are mostly made of processed sand.

duxup2• 8 years ago

My house faces south westish. I have a lot of roof on the back side that I think would be good for solar but all the automated online stuff seem to indicate it was be expensive and not pay off for a LONG while. At least around here in MN there's not a lot of residential push for it. Hopefully as prices drop it becomes more viable.

toomuchtodo8• 8 years ago

I’d get three quotes from solar installers [1] and have them include your 30% federal tax credit, state incentives, and any utility or SREC incentives. Your payback period is most likely less than 10 years, and your ROI on cash invested would be higher than the S&P500 [2]. Ensure you’re not paying more than $3/watt pre-incentives if you select a quote to proceed with.

[1] https://www.energysage.com/

[2] https://solarpowerrocks.com/infographics/solar-infographic-s...

samcheng• 8 years ago

Solar is quite location (and latitude) dependent.

Duluth gets about half of the annual Global Horizontal Irradiance that Tuscon does, and that's before accounting for the fact that snow will sometimes cover the panels. In addition, Minnesota has significantly lower electricity prices than the big coastal states (partially due to the great wind resource in the SW corner of the state, partially due to political reasons).

There are other things you can do to make an impact in MN, though. An obvious one is roof and window insulation...

tshannon• 8 years ago

I've always wondered if it makes any sense (if you have the property) to setup a windmill instead of solar panels. I don't think there's much market in smaller / single home windmill installations and so the costs are probably much, much higher.

aoeusnth15• 8 years ago

Online calculators over-estimate costs for large systems. You can find newer installers who are more willing to negotiate prices, and play them off each other. I negotiated one company down from ~$3.5/W to $2.30/W (before 30% credit) on my large residential system - and these weren't budget panels either (Sunpower E20).

If you do the discounted cash flow calculation of solar, at $2.3/W, electricity costs you around 5c/kWh: http://databin.pudo.org/t/19ece6

driverdan3• 8 years ago

You have 30kW of panels? That's a large system. Most people cna't fit that many. The more panels you get the lower the price gets per kWh.

gibybo5• 8 years ago

I think your numbers are pretty optimistic. You're neglecting depreciation for one. Panels have a lifetime in the range of 20-30 years, inverters have a lifetime in the range of 10 years. 4% is also an optimistic interest rate for a loan that lasts the lifetime of the system. You may be able to get that for a ~5 year loan, but then you need to include the higher opportunity cost of the money that was used to pay that loan off which will be tied up for 20+ years.

EADGBE3• 8 years ago

Same situation as you. It does seem expensive, and my cost of energy in MO is really quite cheap.

I'm looking at DIY solutions. At least I can scale it as I have a few hundred at a time instead of trying to make $20k work in a budget.

crb002• 8 years ago

In 2019 to reap the tax credit sunset every battery will fly off the shelf and get a few solar panels in front of it to qualify.

walrus01• 8 years ago

As a person who's built PV systems: The problem of generating enough kWh in a month is solved. In pallet load and container load quantities, good quality PV panels are now very affordable. Roof and ground mounting systems, DC power wiring and interconnect systems are highly developed, modular and easy to build with relatively unskilled labor.

The problem to be solved now is economical, reliable, long-lasting (in number of cycles) battery storage. Or some other form of storage to draw those kWh back from when the sun is down.

mulmen2• 8 years ago

It is my understanding that we are already past or very near a point of no return w.r.t greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. Talk of peak power and renewable excess leads to discussion about the need to store that excess. Could we also expend that energy to do something like scrub CO2? Is this even feasible at a scale that could make a difference?

pjc50• 8 years ago

Maaaaybe, but the cheapest and most effective step is not to put it in the atmosphere in the first place. Besides, it's the politics that's infeasible.

maliker• 8 years ago

Direct air capture of CO2 is getting pretty good. Carbon Engineering [1] was in the news recently for demonstrating an efficient scheme at commercial scale. When I looked at the math, their technique would add about 8 cents/kWh to the price of fossil power assuming it was used to capture all the CO2. So if solar is coming in around 2 cents/kWh, you could have 10 cent electricity (competitive in many markets) that also captures as much CO2 as the average fossil unit currently creates. The progress is pretty heartening.

mulmen2• 8 years ago

Yeah I think about this in the context of energy density in batteries. Liquid fuel like gasoline has huge benefits for personal transportation just because of the energy density. I wonder what amount of clean energy it would take to make some kind of synthetic/green(?) fuel similar to E85 (E100?). The cost of the fuel could include the carbon capture based on how the fuel is burned.

e: looks like you missed a link but I looked up Carbon Engineering and if what they say is true that is really exciting. Especially for airlines and shipping.

andygates• 8 years ago

Tipping points are contentious - some seem to have happened already, and they're only clear in hindsight.

But we are approaching peak global emisisons, at last (a human and good tipping point)!, and cheap solar is a big chunk of that.

Atmospheric scrubbing doesn't scale so good.

Pica_soO• 8 years ago

I sometimes wonder- if you have a superconducting "pipeline" along the earths rotation direction could those countrys where the sun is still "up" power those where the sun already has set?

Tade0• 8 years ago

China is doing something similar with its HVDC power lines.

fallingfrog• 8 years ago

This gives me hope. We really do have both the technology, and the money, to cut our fossil fuel usage to almost zero, right now- and morally, there is no other choice.

the84722• 8 years ago

That's just a part of electricity. We also need to tackle other major contributors like transportation, heating, concrete manufacturing and agriculture. And soon, for all of those.

coryfklein5• 8 years ago

Interesting headlines from the "Presentation PDF" found at [1].

Installed prices are higher for systems at tax-exempt customer sites than at for-profit commercial sites
Residential new construction offers significant installed price advantages compared to retrofits
No clear relationship between installer-level pricing and installer volume
Prices vary considerably across installers
Installed prices in the United States are higher than in other national PV markets
Installed price declines have been partially offset by falling state and utility incentives
Installed prices continued to fall in 2016, albeit at the slowest rate since 2009 [emphasis mine]
Module-level power electronics have a seemingly small effect on installed prices
Ground-mounted non-residential systems are generally higher priced than rooftop systems

[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/tracking-sun-10-installed-p...

cloudkj• 8 years ago

Every time I see a headline like this it makes me think that I should work on some personal DIY projects related to solar to really appreciate the advances. Does anyone have experience or suggestions for cool projects to try?

king_nothing• 8 years ago

Is Warren Buffett’s Nevada holdings still thwarting progress of rooftop solar in the name of profits?

8bitsrule• 8 years ago

No mining, no drilling, no transportation, no wastes. Huh, I bet that's why solar and wind are cheap.

As a decades-long solar and wind advocate (the term 'renewable' has been spun too much to be useful) I'm sad to say... too bad they made it take so long. And there still isn't nearly enough of it.

As for storage, there are literally dozens of solutions. Yeah, they can be expensive. So's the alternative ... to everybody. (How'd that nuclear thing work out for the Japanese? ... who had centuries of quakes and tsunamis to learn from? ...who have a nearly limitless supply of offshore winds. Ooops.)

As for selling to the power company (they're resistant for multiple reasons ... can see the writing on the wall, and will find ways to cheat you ... sell to your neighbors at cost instead.

This HAS to be the future, kids. The sooner, and the cheaper, the bettter. Time to sell the buggy whips.

ksec2• 8 years ago

Correct me if any of the maths below are wrong.

Eagle Solar Mountain Solar Farm ( 300 MW ) will have an annual production capacity of over 900 million kilowatt hours (kWh) once completed. The Moapa Band of Paiutes has become a national clean energy leader and will host in excess of 600 MW of solar on the 72,000-acre reservation. [1]

For example, the Topaz Solar Farm [3] has an annual production capacity of 1200 million kWh on 25km2. Around ~6200 acre.

This seems an awful a lot of space for low capacity generation? I know it is reserved, but that is like 10x the size difference, why aren't they building more?

US annual electricity consumption is 4,015 billion kilowatt hours in 2017, 60% coming from fossil fuel [2].

For solar energy to replace that 60% energy consumption; 2409 billion kWh, it would require 2000 Topaz Solar Farm, or 50,000 km2, or slightly less the fifth of Nevada area.

The cost of the 300MW Eagle Solar Mountain Solar Farm is roughly $2B, assuming it would cost $3.6B to build the size of Topaz Solar Farm which is 550MW, it would take $7.2 trillion to build a 60% US needed solar farm, ignoring the benefits of Economy of scale, and any improved efficacy of solar panel.

Given all the benefits of Solar, being cheaper then Coal, I am surprise it is still only 1.6% of US electricity generation. Why is that?

[1]https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180531006155/en/8mi...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm

philipkglass7• 8 years ago

The $2 billion in the article you linked seems to refer to NV Energy's "latest tranche of renewable projects totaling over 1 gigawatt." The cost of the Eagle Solar Mountain Solar Farm does not appear to be broken out specifically in that article.

The Moapa Band of Paiutes is presumably not dedicating most of their reservation's land to solar generation. Most of the Topaz Solar Farm's land is dedicated to solar generation. That's why you see a much lower energy density if you're calculating areal production using the entire land of the reservation as the denominator.

Solar has become cheaper than coal quite recently. It takes time to build new projects. The "cheaper than coal" qualifier is also so far true just in areas with reasonably good sun resources. Much of the US population lives in areas where there's not enough sun for PV to be cheaper than coal. New York and Pennsylvania aren't there yet, for example.

Finally, the US federal government is trying to prop up the coal industry. That includes invoking "national security" to keep uncompetitive coal plants running. The present administration has also raised the prices of solar equipment with a slew of tariffs. There's a risk for project developers that they could submit a bid for a new solar project, sign a contract, and then a year later see their costs rise above profits due to another round of tariff fights. There's a risk for project buyers that they'll lock in an agreement for a new "cheaper than coal" solar project but be forced to keep buying coal power anyway due to outside forces.

For example, Arizona's excellent sun resources now make PV generation significantly cheaper than running a 1970s-era coal plant in the state, but the federal government may try to force the coal plant's old customers to keep buying its electricity:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-coal/us-interior-depa...

ksec2• 8 years ago

I see. Sorry I don't follow much US politics.

I know Nevada are basically a desert, which is perfect for Solar Panel and electricity, does the Federation nature, forbid a super scale Solar Farm in Nevada to power the rest of US? And who owns the grid in US? Government?

imtringued• 8 years ago

Every country should invest more into railway and subway infrastructure. Trains are vastly easier to automate, highly energy efficient and have run on electricity for at least a century.

Why even bother with electric self driving cars or trucks when the solution to this problem already exists?

Solar Just Hit a Record Low Price in the U.S

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