[HN Gopher] Solar's Future is Insanely Cheap (2020)
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Solar's Future is Insanely Cheap (2020)
Author : epistasis
Score : 58 points
Date : 2020-05-14 20:44 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rameznaam.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rameznaam.com)
| maheart wrote:
| I recently watched the documentary "Planet of the Humans". For
| context, the writer of the documentary is an environmentalist.
|
| One of the stated points was that solar and wind cannot be relied
| upon 24/7 -- to account for the lack of reliability, you need to
| have a backup power generator (e.g. coal power plant) running.
| The thing about coal plants (does it apply to natural gas plants
| too?) is that if you "idle" them, then have to ramp them up to
| feed demand, then later ramp them down -- it's a very inefficient
| way of running them. Now based on my understanding, it might be
| more efficient to just run the coal plant (or natural gas
| planet?) 24x7, in which case you've just added waste with the use
| of solar/wind. How much truth is there to this?
| qaq wrote:
| 0? You can have utility scale storage and Nuclear as backup
| ktal wrote:
| Damn shame we haven't been investing in nuclear over the past
| few decades. Now when we need it most, it's too late.
| keithnz wrote:
| Nuclear back up? Nuclear is good for base loads, not for peak
| loads.
| sephamorr wrote:
| This is a relatively good point. In the California electricity
| market, the increase in renewables results in a very large
| power-ramp rate in the late afternoon (nothing unique to
| California). In general, more-efficient power plants either
| cannot, or lose efficiency, when changing operating power
| levels. A ~60% efficient combined-cycle gas plant cannot ramp
| power very much, which results in the grid building and running
| more ~40% efficient gas turbines, which can ramp their power
| output in order to meet the early-evening power ramp.
| Interestingly, at this point, adding more Solar to the
| California grid results in very little emissions reduction,
| since the additional solar displaces efficient baseload
| generation with inefficient ramp-able load. The solution, of
| course, is storage.
| yoavm wrote:
| a natural gas plant doesn't really suffer from this "idle"
| problem you're describing with coal power plants. it's also
| much cleaner.
| Animats wrote:
| It's now reached the point that "energy producer" lobbyists are
| lobbying Trump to keep banks from refusing to finance fossil fuel
| projects.[1][2] They're now a bad long-term investment.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/05/08/us/08reuters-
| heal...
|
| [2] http://archive.is/QSPle
| clairity wrote:
| nice application of the learning curve, a model taught in
| strategy and operations courses in business school.
|
| basically every model from around 2010 badly miscalculated the
| learning coefficient of the solar industry. apparently some
| forecasts are still badly calculating it.
| greglindahl wrote:
| The part that boggles the mind is that the forecasts are still
| terribly wrong, in the same direction, 10 years later.
| frede wrote:
| The forecasts from the IEA are my favourites, predicting a
| decline in PV expansion every year. https://www.pv-
| magazine.com/2018/11/20/iea-versus-solar-pv-r...
| sephamorr wrote:
| Power markets are more complicated than most people realize. One
| thing to note is that solar power can be cheaper than gas, but
| still not be economic. The fact of the matter is that an
| intermittent kWh is not as valuable as an on-demand reliable kWh
| to a utility who's number 1 priority is reliability. Even as
| solar is acquired at lower and lower prices, if evening power is
| generated by expensive and inefficient gas turbines, the customer
| might not see costs go down (and emissions might not go down
| either!). Solar is clearly economic in many markets, but we'll
| never get grid emissions in a place like California down much
| more without storage.
| paulsutter wrote:
| Such terrific news should be presented more honestly. The price
| of solar+storage needs to competitive with fossil operating
| costs, not of solar alone.
| undershirt wrote:
| Is solar just a stopgap tech? Like, do they still require fossil
| fuel energy to create, not to mention maintain and rebuild? And I
| know we're now strip mining the ocean for battery metals. I don't
| yet sense the sustainability in this amid all this economic hand-
| waving of "it's getting cheaper". (forgive my tone, i have a hard
| time of making sense of the big picture of renewables, hoping to
| eventually see how it actually fits into a utopic idea of a
| "closed-loop economy")
|
| I'm reminded here a bit of Ted Chiang's short story, Exhalation,
| where the people devise clever ways to try to put air back in the
| ground without using more than they're sequestering. I hope our
| situation is better than that.
| blunte wrote:
| If the manufacturing facility that makes the panels is itself
| powered by solar, then the true cost is mostly the materials
| and what it takes to source them.
|
| As for batteries, not every dollar application needs metal or
| chemical batteries. There are other options as low tech as
| pumping water uphill, heating water, compressing air, etc.
| Retric wrote:
| Solar panels can't use all that much energy and raw materials
| if the final unsubsidized price is under 2c/kWh.
| sephamorr wrote:
| I can't speak about wind (not my expertise), but for solar, the
| energy payback is about 1-year in operation for current
| installations, with a predicted 30-year lifespan. Compare this
| against estimates for the energy cost of bringing gasoline to
| market which can exceed 30%.
| ktal wrote:
| Until there exists 100% clean options for the entire pipeline
| of resource extraction, transport, assembly, distribution,
| etc., there will still be fossil fuel involvement in 'clean
| energy generation'. Can't really make clean energy cleanly
| unless we have clean energy to make it in the first place.
|
| Resource extraction / recycling is a whole other issue of
| course.
| clairity wrote:
| with enough infrastructure, particularly batteries and
| interconnected smart grids, you could average out solar power
| generation across the globe and fuel the whole world on solar
| many times over.
|
| 10% of our energy needs come from 440 nuclear power plants
| worldwide. for comparison, the sun is a nuclear plant 1.3
| million times the size of the earth. all life on earth
| basically runs on solar energy (or a derivative of it).
| cobookman wrote:
| Almost 50% of residential energy usage is HVAC and Hot Water
| heaters.
|
| I see no reason we couldn't use excess solar during the daytime
| to heat our hot water heaters, or cool/heat the house.
|
| Modern Construction and Water Heaters have great insulation,
| and its possible to use the `cheap` electricity during peak
| solar to store as heating/cooling.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I'm not sure about the resource costs of solar in particular
| but the question is a very salient one. Vaclav Smil has a great
| piece on this. "What I see when I see a wind turbine"
|
| _" the quest for renewable electricity generation. And yet,
| although they exploit the wind, which is as free and as green
| as energy can be, the machines themselves are pure embodiments
| of fossil fuels. * Large trucks bring steel and other raw
| materials to the site, earth-moving equipment beats a path to
| otherwise inaccessible high ground, large cranes erect the
| structures, and all these machines burn diesel fuel. So do the
| freight trains and cargo ships that convey the materials needed
| for the production of cement, steel, and plastics. For a
| 5-megawatt turbine, the steel alone averages 150 metric tons
| for the reinforced concrete foundations, 250 metric tons for
| the rotor hubs and nacelles (which house the gearbox and
| generator), and 500 metric tons for the towers.[...] For a long
| time to come--until all energies used to produce wind turbines
| and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources--
| modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on
| fossil fuels."_
|
| http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/15.WINDTURBINE.pdf
| lallysingh wrote:
| Sounds like a bullshit purity test.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| It's not a bullshit purity test at all. It highlights the
| extremely neglected costs in raw material and non-
| electrifiable infrastructure that is required to produce
| materials that are nominally 'green'. In some cases it's
| questionable if some green technologies actually are a net
| positive at all.
|
| There is a strong 'abundance' bias implicit in articles by
| people like Ramez Naam, who push so strongly for green
| energy production because they don't want to consider the
| very obvious alternative, dematerialisation and reduction
| of energy consumption. People like Naam still categorically
| hang onto a growth narrative so they tend to neglect the
| downsides of the solutions they provide.
| avmich wrote:
| Yeah :) . They can't see those machines using electricity
| instead of diesels, they can't see steel making without
| atmospheric pollution, and same goes for cement.
|
| I guess some people have hard times adjusting to some
| novelties. Their arguments don't stand, and they don't see
| that.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| This seems a little silly - of course to develop future
| technologies we need to use existing technologies.
|
| Imagine debating using an abacus to develop a computer - "ah
| but we must remain pure to the hopes, dreams and philosophies
| of what the computer aspires to be." Yeah, ok. I'll be over
| here funding wind turbine companies, you can debate the
| merits of the methodology and strategies of funding green
| tech with petroleum-based products yourself. Sounds a little
| boring to me.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I don't understand your comparison at all. Given that the
| primary problem that a wind turbine seeks to solve is
| environmental, the environmental costs in making the
| turbine have to be considered.
|
| There's no relationship to computers here, it's not a
| question of philosophical purity, but of correct evaluation
| of the costs and benefits of a technology.
| avmich wrote:
| > the environmental costs in making the turbine have to
| be considered.
|
| Of course it is considered, and few short decades ago
| that was a valid counterargument. Not anymore - and not
| later, given the pace of development in efficiencies and
| breadth of applications.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| That's just asking for a chicken and egg problem.
|
| You can't get fully renewable energy production until you can
| use EV trucks to deliver the windmills, and you can't get
| clean EVs until you have windmills to power them. Sure, we
| currently burn some diesel to setup these windmills, but the
| alternative is to burn _coal_. Don't let the perfect become
| the enemy of the good.
|
| Also, who's the ominous "they" above? Energy companies don't
| setup power production out of spite; they setup energy
| production so we can have AC and TVs. We're the consumers of
| all of that electricity, directly or indirectly.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Well we should ask this for every energy technology and
| fortunately people have done this. The term for this is
| energy return on investment (EROI) where solar has between
| 8.7 and 34 and wind between 10 and 20 (although other
| literature says 20 to 50). A value 1 means you get as much
| energy as you invested. So for solar that means you get your
| energy used for production back in 1 to 4 years.
|
| Source:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
| frede wrote:
| Energy is cheap, power is expensive - you can already get energy
| for free sometimes on the intraday market, but you still pay if
| you need delivery at a certain time and the grid fees for peak
| power consumption stay expensive. I am looking forward to Tesla's
| million-mile battery!
| Retric wrote:
| Another aspect of this is the cost of the physical solar cells
| have dropped low enough that other costs have become significant.
| This is pushing companies to increase efficiency which opens the
| door for other applications.
|
| A hypothetical cheap ~30% efficient solar panel could add
| something like 40 miles of range per day to a car in ideal
| conditions. That starts to look actually useful vs a simple
| gimmick.
| lettergram wrote:
| Do we really need a "2020" by the title?
| ascorbic wrote:
| It's in the title of the original post, to distinguish from
| similar posts in 2011 and 2015
| [deleted]
| 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote:
| I'm actually quite shocked at how much energy is produced by
| solar, especially when compared to residential wind turbines.
| Panels are efficient, and when it's sunny, you're juicing.
|
| The real challenge is of course bringing down cost of storage,
| which is the key to make solar systems efficient (not just
| cheap).
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