US installs record solar capacity as prices keep falling

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/us-installs-record-solar-capacity-as-prices-keep-falling/

by jseliger • 4 years ago

101 96 4 years ago

akira2501• 4 years ago

Yea.. it's a pretty long way to go to seamlessly pick up summer and some winter loads, though. Look at the CAISO supply trend on Sep 07 2022:

https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

Similarly, examine it on Feb 07 2022.

ZeroGravitas10• 4 years ago

Its not clear what you intend us to conclude from that data.

I'd conclude that until solar has excesses on the peak demand days that it probably makes financial sense to keep rolling out more solar.

And that increase in excess on non-peak days then makes rolling out batteries make financial sense.

And then the presence of those batteries makes rolling out even more solar make sense.

And indeed that is what is happening.

ncmncm23• 4 years ago

Right, you only roll out storage as fast as you have overcapacity to charge it from.

The amount of storage build-out that justifies, thus far, is easy to accommodate with batteries. Later, as renewables shoulder more of the load, the storage needs to get bigger and you start looking for economies of scale.

Ultimately, instead of paying to build out long-term storage, most places will rely on imports of synthesized liquid fuel to burn in peaker plants, from places that produce excess reliably, e.g. tropics, for solar, and reliably windy places. It is always windy somewhere. That synthetic liquid fuel is most likely ammonia.

And, while waiting for those to come online and undercut NG, you just continue peaking with NG.

Today people are breaking ground for factories to build ammonia synthesis equipment, which will take remarkably long to finish and start producing. Then those need to build enough synthesis equipment to absorb hundreds and thousands of excess GW. And we will have ships to transport it in, tanks to keep it in.

All that is a huge job, but it will be done. The stuff that handles an equal amount of petroleum and NG was built and is used, and will wind down and be scrapped.

jokoon5• 4 years ago

Not to mention that a big fraction of those panels are made in china, and panels generally generate much less power after 20 or 30 years.

They're also vulnerable to hail, and require a lot of copper wiring.

I would buy any stock related to mini nuclear reactors. It seems like a promising solution, since it's faster and simpler to deploy, they can probably be sold to less rich countries, they're probably even safer.

I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I wish there was more news about it.

gwicks56• 4 years ago

People have been hyping up small modular reactors for as long as I have been alive. They make total sense. And yet, there is not a single one is operation? I don't really care what tech gets us to cheap, abundant power, but given the cost curves of solar and batteries, it's hard to see anything competing.

Both are here, right now, and getting cheaper every year. Nuclear seems to be something climate skeptics points to as a way of doing nothing.

pjc502• 4 years ago

since it's faster and simpler to deploy

No it isn't, as demonstrated by all the solar being installed alongside the zero mini nuclear reactors.

require a lot of copper wiring

Intuitively I'd expect the quantity of wiring to be roughly proportional to output power, regardless of method; how much do you need for the coils of reactor turbines, for example?

panels generally generate much less power after 20 or 30 years.

Maybe? That's the expected lifetime, but the actual outcome will vary depending on how weather-beaten they are. Being entirely solid state with no moving parts larger than an electron-hole pair is quite an advantage.

can probably be sold to less rich countries

We're just going to stop worrying about proliferation?

greenthrow• 4 years ago

Nuclear plants take too long to get up and running to help us with the climate crisis that is here now. We can meet all our needs with renewables and storage.

Who cares that the panels are mostly made in China? Most of the electronics that would control your hypothetical nuclear plant would be made in China too.

pfdietz9• 4 years ago

Why does the wiring of PV panels have to be copper? The wiring (aside from the contact wires actually on the cells themselves) is not volume constrained, so I'd expect aluminum to be used, not copper.

_0w8t• 4 years ago

I used to be pro-nuclear. But the war in Ukraine stopped that. One does not need to be a president of Russia to bomb a nuclear reactor. A crazy guy at top of even small country can clearly manage to destroy reactors with modern conventional weapons releasing a lot of radioactivity. Smaller reactors increase that risk exponentially simply by having more targets closer to densely populated areas.

Fusion reactors in theory can be much safer in that regard, but until they are realized and shown to work I do not see any sensible alternative for building solar or wind while keeping coal and gas power stations running.

fasthands9• 4 years ago

If I'm reading this chart correctly on 2-07-22 solar production reached a peak of ~11MW and stayed their for about 6 hours.

On 9-7-22 solar production reached a peak just under ~13MW and was at that level for about 7/8 hours.

To me the average seasonal difference actually seems insignificant in the big picture. If its feasible for solar to power most energy on the summer days then it would be doable to get there for winter days especially since demand on 2-7-22 peaked at about 60% of the peak on 9-7-22.

The larger issues seem to be unpredictable off days due to off-season weather (cloud cover or wilfire ash or whatever) and of course storing power at night. But it seems like batteries will improve and running off solar on the day reduces need for natural gas until night.

pjc502• 4 years ago

That page shows me "-17MW" for solar, so I'm not sure what to make of that?

ZeroGravitas10• 4 years ago

If you visit the link it loads todays info. The poster was intending us to select a specific date on the calendar to get the full days info not just the early morning.

Not totally sure why solar would ever be negative, but that's the wider explanation I think.

One possibility is that batteries are often colocated with solar, so possibly a solar/battery combination has been misfiled under solar.

buro9• 4 years ago

At what point does the accumulation of solar deployed start to threaten the economics of power plant creation?

That is... power plants are such significant investments that they are only viable with a government guarantee on future price and demand. But with renewables being deployed at large scale, those guarantees would start being something a gov would pick up the tab on rather than long-term by consumers.

Which is to hypothesis that the gov won't want to pick up the tab, prices of grid energy will rise fast, and there's a long-term incentive to getting off-grid that will accelerate whenever this tipping point occurs.

ben_w7• 4 years ago

At what point does the accumulation of solar deployed start to threaten the economics of power plant creation?

From what I've read… a few years ago, even for existing plants and just counting fuel costs. Although the cause is because it is cheap, not because of how much is installed.

tuatoru6• 4 years ago

What guarantee? Are you thinking of nuclear plants?

Gas turbine power plants are cheap to build. (They have to be, because they're used as "peakers", only operating 10% - 20% of the time.) The threat to them is battery storage, not renewable generation.

Combined-cycle gas turbines (combined with steam powered generation using the turbine exhaust for heat) are slightly less cheap, but nowhere near the same league as nuclear costs.

Even so, in some places it's now (2022) cheaper to build new PV than to pay for the gas to run a fully paid-for gas plant. Or so we are told.

Long distance high voltage transmission lines sometimes need government involvement, because 1) they affect many land-owners, at least some of whom won't be happy; and 2) the margins are low in the power transmission game.

The need for long-distance transmission and gas peakers could be reduced quite a bit in a year or so, if PV, wind, and battery storage prices continue on trend (downwards). Not off-grid, but local grid.

belorn3• 4 years ago

Guarantees on future price is what Germany did/does as subsidies to the renewable sector. If prices fall significantly then it would be the German government that has to pay the difference between what investors expected and what the market is willing to pay.

With prices going the other, governments in EU (including Germany) is now considering subsidies again by creating a price roof. Any difference between the roof price and the market price will be paid by the government.

Nuclear plants can have similar subsidies. Price guarantees and price roofs are market tools rather than technology dependent tools, but they are more likely to trigger if the market price is fluctuating a lot. The more weather dependent the energy grid is, for now (and in general), the larger and more frequent the difference between max and min price are, the more likely the government will have to pay out in order to offer such subsidies.

Of course the government are not required to offer either subsidies.

willis936• 4 years ago

US energy price hike of 50-100% in the past week. Whatever impact solar has on energy price: it is very much not the dominant effect.

ncmncm23• 4 years ago

Solar, despite its fast accelerating installation rate, is still a very, very small fraction of the mix, most places.

jillesvangurp3• 4 years ago

Right now. Seriously, companies that are building gas/coal/nuclear plants under the assumption that electricity prices are going to stay at the current levels are making a very fatal mistake. A lot of investments in this space are drying up for this reason or effectively under water. Investors know this and are moving their money elsewhere.

Cost per mwh from off-shore wind is below 50$ now in a market where the prices peaking north of 500$ recently. Very profitable business. Solar energy is cheaper than that and even more profitable. Basically as panel prices drop, the life time cost of their energy drops as well. And since that is measured in decades, it's very low to begin with.

A 100 watt panel operational for 3 decades producing maybe 0.5kwh per day on average would produce around 5 mwh of power during it's operational life (a bit over 10k days, easy number to work with). More in sunny places, less in cloudy places. You can get solar panels like that at around 50$. Those are consumer prices, power plants would be able get better deals. The higher efficiency ones that people actually put on their roofs are more expensive of course but also produce more energy. The cost of the energy they produce is probably around 30-40$ per mwh That's domestic solar and right now. Prices for commercial solar plants are around 1-2 cents per kwh in some sunny countries (unsubsidized). So 10-20$ per mwh In other places it's a bit higher. We'll see that drop below 10$ very soon. Offshore wind is more expensive typically but still very lucrative.

So, in a market where that is true right now, planning to operate new plants where the energy cost is at least 10x that, you are not going to be able to compete long term. Basically operating at 10x the cost of your competitors is a lousy business plan. And when 10x has a chance of becoming 100x or even a 1000x it's basically madness to even consider that.

Prices will eventually actually drop below a 10 cents per mwh. It's a bold prediction but you can just look at the cost curves and trends and make some predictions. It will happen in the next 2-3 decades. That's a 10x improvement relative to now.

What makes solar panels expensive is all the exotic materials, glass, and energy needed to produce them. Energy cost is trending down. So, that helps. And there are companies producing solar with organic materials that are essentially printing them on rolls. This is a new and emerging business but you'd find those on some EV car roofs for example. That sounds like something that could drop prices a lot and would also be really scalable. Lower material cost, lower energy cost, economies of scale. A 10x cost drop is a conservative estimate. It might turn int 50x or even 100x eventually. So, relative to the 10x difference we have today that adds up to a very depressing outlook for anything else.

So, coal/nuclear/gas power plant creation is not a great investment currently. These plants need to operate for decades to generate meaningful return on investment.

Short term there's plenty of demand for expensive energy, long term energy is going to be so cheap and plentiful that that business will dry up rapidly. More so than is already happening.

Many power plants are of course already unsustainable economically and only survive because of government support and protectionist measures. There are a lot of coal companies that went bankrupt in recent years. And gas plants aren't doing much better. Nuclear plants have similar issues. Yes they are clean but way too expensive. People are building new ones not because they are cheap but because securing access to energy is strategically important to countries. But unless somebody figures out how to make them 100x cheaper than they are now, they are not going to ever be competitive. And there's no guarantee that 100x would be enough even.

neilwilson• 4 years ago

Trouble is the cost of solar panels doesn't factor in the dust to dust costs. It's essentially still relying upon the subsidy from cheap Chinese manufacturing. That isn't a sustainable method of creating, or renewing them - particularly when battery storage starts to compete with cars for the raw materials used to produce the batteries. There isn't enough raw materials available on a global scale to do both, and that tightness will likely reverse the cost decline and probably rapidly.

The cheap installed renewable plant that is going in today needs to start self replicating itself on a dust-to-dust basis. Otherwise it is going to end up being a one off benefit that we squandered - like easily accessible gas fields.

Which is why nuclear needs to be there as the strategic option. Markets aren't always the best way to make long term decisions.

pfdietz9• 4 years ago

What makes solar panels expensive is all the exotic materials,

What exotic material is needed for crystalline silicon PV (95% of the market)? Silicon itself is extremely mundane; it's the second most common element in the Earth's crust.

ZeroGravitas10• 4 years ago

This happened a while ago. Before renewables actually.

Peaker plants only run some of the time. They charge more for their power because they need to cover their fixed costs.

That's partly why people use gas plants, theyre relatively cheap to build, which matters when you are effectively acting as a backup.

We could in theory let these businesses gamble on how often they will be needed but grids/governments already found it better to pay capacity fees to these generators to ensure they are available if needed.

Notably, that money goes to the people who build the plant, not the fossil fuel suppliers, unless the capacity is actually needed.

But even those people are having their business model challenged because batteries that are installed to shift daily solar peaks can bid for the same peaks.

And as the gas gets burnt less, the price goes up, in a vicious circle that leads to more and more battery deployment.

pfdietz9• 4 years ago

The peakers are still needed for the last few percent that batteries can't economically cover. The price of power at those times will rise to the point that the peakers can still cover their costs, but it will be cheaper than having enough batteries to handle it. What's needed is to expose those prices to the end users so demand dispatch can handle some of it.

Very low capacity factor peakers could be run with hydrogen (or other e-fuels) without greatly affecting their costs, since they'd use so little of it.

ajsnigrutin2• 4 years ago

As long as the earth turns, we'll need power at night too (and on cloudy days), and current energy storage devices are not good enough to cover all of that usage.

ben_w7• 4 years ago

A true fact about what we built yesterday isn't a necessary limit to what we can build tomorrow.

The storage tech works (as would a global power grid), we "only" need to scale it up, and at current prices a global grid would cost about the same as current annual spending on fossil fuels, while the cost of batteries depends on your estimate for storage requirements, which depends on the diversity (location and energy sources) of the grid, but could be in a similar range.

(Batteries are also the most expensive of the seriously considered solutions, other storage methods exist and work just fine but aren't so good for cars and we need the batteries for cars anyway).

I'm not sure how long either approach would last before needing servicing/replacement, but I'd be surprised if it was less than a year.

Anyone here know how long underwater HVDC cables last?

ZeroGravitas10• 4 years ago

I'm glad you say "cover all" because I think people underestimate by quite a lot how far PV and Lithium batteries can get you if you're not near the poles.

So today's tech, just with more deployment mostly solves this.

Yes there's room for Wind and heat batteries and all those other things, but even the brutally stupid approach of Solar PV and lithium batteries that we have today, without any new breakthroughs, is good enough to cover most of it.

People use more energy during the day, when the sun is up. Solar PV is the cheapest energy in history and broadly matches this daily profile.

Retric• 4 years ago

In the daytime grid solar is already the cheapest option in terms of cost per kWh, but demand is on a second by second basis not simply a question of producing enough total power each month. That means there isn’t a single tipping point, just increased adoption as costs drop. Cheaper grid storage increase the amount of PV grid operators will want etc.

As to going fully off grid, [Rooftop solar + inverters etc + batteries + installation] vs [paying for the same things + an electric grid] seems to favor home installation before you consider economies of scale. When panels where expensive rooftop solar was more competitive because the primary costs where the panels themselves, but as they drop other costs become more relevant and solar farms are pulling ahead. Though specific tax breaks for rooftop solar muddles the issue.

djtango• 4 years ago

Not sure why you were downvoted, seems like a very valid concern. If we turned off oil and coal tomorrow the world would fall apart.

The OddLots podcast has been covering this issue on various episodes but the world of energy is a super complex system of competing interests. Ultimately we need energy to power our transition away to clean energy but the old energy industries have suffered from chronic underinvestment. There was some stat where a university course for oil (or coal?) had dropped to 1 student.

But as we're seeing, without supply prices start to shoot up so unless the world is prepared to undergo huge reduction of consumption, the transition will need to be gradual.

ncmncm23• 4 years ago

There is no danger or possibility of turning off oil or coal tomorrow, so it is a wholly idle concern. Concern trolling, really.

Demand will fall continuously, and supply will track it. The less of it utilities use, the less sensitive they will become to price, i.e. willing to pay more for it, when they need any at all. But as demand falls off, it will be harder to place what you have, if you have extra. So expect investment in sourcing to fall. These factors will make price volatile.

Industries still using mined hydrocarbons will look to get off them well before alternatives cost matches it, just because prices for alternatives will be more stable, falling on a predictable downward trend.

geoduck14• 4 years ago

I had a fascinating talk with an executive at a power dustrobution company a couple of years ago.

He looked forward to Solar. He said the #1 biggest cost of electricity was 2 fold: 1) running cable everywhere and 2) anticipating demand 10 years away and running cable for that demand

So, putting solar on your roof really helps them with demand "far" from the plant

bdcravens2• 4 years ago

Virtually every one of the solar salespeople (probably a dozen in less than 3 months) I have had come to my door use shady tactics. ("We are here from your energy utility to give you a free energy analysis....", "free solar" (based on net costs only, but ignoring the $30k in payments you sign up to cover installation etc), etc. I'm hip to the tactics, but everyone may not be. I have at least one friend that tells me they regret the decision.

I'm actually pro-solar, and plan to get it eventually, but I think the scaminess surrounding it will put a nasty taste in people's mouths for years to come.

ncmncm23• 4 years ago

Rooftop solar costs quite a lot more to field than utility solar.

If you can buy from a community solar project, instead, that is likely a better deal.

bdcravens2• 4 years ago

Unfortunately I'm in the Houston area, where there isn't much support for renewables or sustainability on a level larger than the individual. The best I was able to do was find a grid provider that claims to be 100% renewable.

pdx_flyer• 4 years ago

The biggest unknown right now is how FERC 2222 is going to play out. It essentially allows consumer solar to be aggregated and sold on the wholesale markets. As aggregators come online and prices fluctuate there are going to be even more regulations as federal and state officials find flaws and gaps in how the system works.

I tend to lean toward battery storage as being the piece that will tip the scale. As more efficient and longer lasting batteries come online, grid ops will become a bit easier and some of the DER capacity that would typically be shed could be stored for later needs.

US installs record solar capacity as prices keep falling

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