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Can solar costs keep shrinking?

caymanjim
134 replies
22h43m

I spend four months of the year traveling in an RV. Two years ago, I budgeted over $6000 for my desired solar setup (at least 1200Ah of battery, at least 2400W of solar, plus various controllers and other components). It was expensive enough for me to hold off, and more importantly, I didn't have the space on my current RV for the solar panels.

In just the two years since then, prices on batteries and panels have dropped 25% or more, and solar power per square foot at a good price point has gone up significantly (400W monocrystalline panels can be gotten for $200, in the same form factor as the 200W panels I had been budgeting for). I've now lowered my budget to $4000 for the same setup I was planning to spend $6000 on two years ago, and with 400W panels, I no longer need to upgrade to a larger RV to begin the project.

This summer is almost over, so I'm going to wait until spring to start assembling my system in earnest. Anecdotally, this is a game-changer for me. I'm looking toward year-round full-timing starting next summer, because I can now afford the power I need and don't need a larger RV as soon as I thought I would.

I intend to buy undeveloped land far from civilization in the next few years, and I'm now confident that I can DIY a whole-house solar and battery setup so cheaply that access to mains power won't be a factor in deciding where I settle. Even with seasonal variation in power production, I'll manage just fine, and the system will pay for itself in well under five years. In fact it'll pay for itself instantly if you discount the five-figure cost I would otherwise have had to pay for running a new mains power line far into the woods. And by the time I pick some land to settle on, I'll already have enough solar on my RV that I won't even need to augment the system initially; I'll be able to power a small house in a temperate climate directly off the RV itself, while I build a larger solar array (likely ground-mounted to avoid regulations and insurance complications related to roof-mounted setups).

I know my situation is unusual, but the fact that any of this is possible for well under $10k is a huge change from even a decade ago.

kingkongjaffa
76 replies
22h35m

I intend to buy undeveloped land far from civilization

I'm always intrigued by this notion, I know plenty of Americans have this kind of plan, but it's never quite as remote as they think, because, y'know you're still in America somewhere.

Unless you're thinking of somewhere in northern Canada.

I'd love to know where is considered 'far from civilization' on the continental US.

caymanjim
22 replies
21h54m

I'd love to know where is considered 'far from civilization' on the continental US.

There are many interpretations and levels of remoteness.

In my case, I want to be away from the sights and sounds and crowds of anything that would be considered urban or suburban. My prime criteria is that I don't want to see another person unless I choose to. I don't want to see a road with cars on it, I don't want to see another house or any other man-made structure that isn't mine. Ideally I don't want to hear anyone else either, but I accept that I may hear things in the distance.

I don't want to be a complete hermit, and I'm not a survivalist looking to be 100% self-sufficient. I want a small-to-midsized town about 30-60 minutes away. Something with a grocery store, gas station, and a post office or other place to receive deliveries. I don't want to be more than an hour away from doctors' offices or a hospital or urgent care. I don't want to be trapped by snow for weeks at a time.

Saying "far from civilization" was a stretch. What I really mean is I don't want to have people all around me. And I don't want to be anywhere near cities and suburban sprawl. I don't want neighbors in any meaningful sense.

Places I'm considering are Maine, Montana, northern Wisconsin, Upper Peninsula Michigan. I would absolutely consider parts of Canada, particularly northern BC. I don't have an easy path to Canadian citizenship, though. Before my Canadian girlfriend passed away last year, we had been planning to look for a secluded lakeside cabin or undeveloped land in BC.

My requirements are dense forest (desert/plains states are right out) and water (lake or canoeable river) on the property itself. I can live with other people using the water, so long as it's not motorboats and a party scene.

lanstin
11 replies
20h20m

I find this fascinating. It really does take a variety of people to make up a culture. My ideal living situation includes being able to see someone I know every time I walk out side my home, being able to walk to a bagel shop, a grocery store, a post office, a train station, and ideally a library and bike shop and parks.

It would be boring if we were all like me and clumped together.

caymanjim
9 replies
20h4m

I've lived like that. I lived in the Mission in San Francisco with four of my closest friends (all from NJ) within walking distance. It was great being able to meet up for lunch or drinks or go out clubbing, it was always a pleasant surprise to run into them randomly on the street or in a park.

I lived in midtown Manhattan and I loved being able to go out at 3am in the middle of the winter and find a fresh produce stand on the corner outside my apartment, get falafel wraps and Ethiopian and Thai and sushi and all the other great food during my lunch break, and have museums and concerts and Broadway shows within walking distance.

I lived in the Cayman Islands and had a roommate, could walk to the beach and to my favorite bars, my house was the primary hangout spot for all my friends. I was socializing daily there, and it was a small community where I knew just about everyone everywhere I went.

I'm old now. I don't drink anymore. I have no interest in parties. Even when I live in or near a city, I don't take advantage of much of anything it has to offer. I'm sick of the noise and filth and crowds, the crime and homelessness, the lack of privacy that comes with urban living. All my friends are older, have kids, live in the suburbs and are scattered all over the country. The eight months of the year that I'm not on the road in my RV, I'm living in a cookie-cutter suburban house and have no local friends at all. I exchange pleasantries with the neighbors.

My entire social life is online now, and when I can, I'm traveling. I want maximum peace and quiet. I'll go visit friends and family every couple months if I want to socialize. If/when I do settle down at my far-from-civilization objective, I may very well start feeling lonely and seek out social clubs or social hobbies. But I'll be glad to have my seclusion to return to.

hattmall
4 replies
19h21m

Why are you looking at such cold places for the off grid living?

Lots of remote forested areas in Georgia and Alabama, but I can also understand opposition to the heat.

I would give a lot consideration to TN and NC mountains.

caymanjim
2 replies
18h36m

Politics and culture play an outsized part. If I could easily move to Canada I would. Barring that, I'm more inclined to stick to blue states than red states. Montana is a bit of an outlier in my list. Cannabis legality is a factor (Wisconsin is the oddball here), but increasingly less so as I expect that problem to go away within a few years nationwide (and certainly in Wisconsin). Climate is a big factor. I grew up in NJ, and while I've lived in tropical places and tend to spend my summer traveling to a lot of hot places, I don't want to live in a hot, humid southern state. There are parts of NC and TN that are more more mountainous and less oppressive, but it's still pretty sticky there.

I still plan to spend much of the year traveling in an RV even after I settle somewhere. I'd be happy to spend the winter holed up in a cabin with a wood stove though.

whynotminot
0 replies
14h8m

I certainly understand political and cultural considerations when moving to a place. But since you seem to be trying to stay away from anyone wherever you settle, I’m a little surprised the politics and culture of a place would matter much to your circumstances.

redandblack
0 replies
18h8m

Underscoring MY personal politics/cultural views, I just returned from a NC trip and was thinking it will take another decade of development for social change to take hold. Just insane amount of economic development is happening there, and hopefully the younger crowd will be more open for changes. I noticed that there was a lot of mobility into NC, not just the northern states that has been well documented, but also from TN, AL, GA, FL and even TX

Coming back to NJ, a neighbor mentioned that they are still fighting the civil war in the south, which the media seems to also resonate well.

Just a based view from a NJ resident

lazide
0 replies
17h16m

Not the poster, but one practical reason - bugs can really cut into the outdoor enjoyment, and in colder climates ‘bug season’ is generally relatively short (but intense). Usually spring and early summer.

Warmer humid climates, it’s common to only get (at most) a few months of ‘no bugs’.

Chiggers, ticks, noseeums, mosquitos, black flies, etc.

Also, warmer humid environment mosquitos are usually tiny, sneaky, and disease carrying.

Cold area mosquitos tend to be huge, obnoxious, and less disease carrying. Easier to kill, but will bite through thick sweatshirts, type thing. (Yes really!)

Or go southwest US and only have the occasional horsefly to worry about.

hibikir
1 replies
15h48m

There is only a small window when old is just old enough that you shouldn't be afraid of what happens when you need fast, acute medical help. I have seen many a relatively far flung retirement plan get into trouble when the first health scare makes the retiree want a hospital within half an hour.

lanstin
0 replies
1h30m

Not just age but anything unexpected. Having people nearby that you can count on for casual help makes many worse case scenarios much better.

lanstin
0 replies
1h35m

I've lived in large cities, but I found the more ideal circumstance was a small but urbanized town - after I lived there 8 years or so, I not only had the good friends but an enormous group of casual acquaintances. So I literally ran into people I said hi to every time I walked anywhere. In fact, at various times most of my good friends moved away, but the whole group was there. It was east coast, so like one time someone left a pot of soup on my stove. I don't mind noise, and the neighborhood wasn't too dirty. It did have people of various income levels, and was cheap enough to have artists, who both put up many beautiful things and had a certain tendency to clutter. Also a lot of biologist types, so they had lovely plants planted, which was nice.

I'd rather have people I trust a bit around me than privacy, in general. For sure people there help each other out when help is needed. It just feels to be a more resilient, robust to errors kind of society than me and my stuff out there.

Now I'm living in San Jose, but I've passed the 8 year mark in my current location and in fact am accumulating connections with the people on the block and nearby. I go to stores where the workers stay year after year, so I am familiar to people. I've started going to classes at a local university. It's still not the connected feel of a small East coast town (Californians do seem to like their fences around the backyard and not to appreciate comments on their personal decisions), but pleasant. If only there was a grocery store I could walk to.

_DeadFred_
0 replies
52m

Being older you need to factor in healthcare. I didn't when I moved remote, and it was a big mistake. I firmly believe my mother died of cancer because I convinced her to move to a rural local that didn't have the quality of cancer care that she would have had access to if she stayed in Santa Cruz. My advice is pick a touristy area that has enough money/population moving through to have a bit better medical system than your average remote area. Definitely buy a lifeflight.org membership every year if you go the Montana/Rocky Mountain West area.

I also recommend finding a town that caters to rich tech people who want to live this remote fantasy, there are quite a few of them. It's so much more enjoyable than the actual remote living towns that no one wants to be in so they're just an aging population of dead enders and people hooked on drugs. Or at least an area with a University nearby so that you can go somewhere with some energy/vibrance and the latest cool trendy food. The realities of dead end small town/no town america can be pretty soul crushing.

Disney style curated small town america catering to the wealthy can be a pretty great place to live and have energy/vibrancy. Plus you'll have a good revolving supply of new people cycling through thinking they want to live the lifestyle (before the realities set in) bringing in the latest trends, starting food places, etc. Just make sure they aren't the 'escaping from California' types blathering about how great it is to be in a 'free' state and be away from commie land. That toxicity can overload a small community quick. You can get away with 'individualists' in a larger community where their actual freeloading on society is subsidized by normal people, but with too big a ratio basic civilian institutions get paralyzed for years until people remember/relearn society requires a social component.

renewiltord
0 replies
17h28m

This is why I live in SOMA where my friends are next door. But I also want a roughly remote but not too remote experience because I want my children to explore freely without cars around and busybodies who don't appreciate children being free. They may climb trees when they are seven and fall off and break their noses. They may fall off their bicycles and scrape their flesh to the bone. I want them to have my childhood because I think that's what makes me so resilient compared to so many other people.

gcanyon
4 replies
17h32m

don't want to be more than an hour away from urgent care

If it's an hour away, does it really qualify as "urgent" care?

spockz
1 replies
12h18m

Also, if you need a doctor or ambulance to come to you it first needs to drive the hour up and then another hour to an hospital. But maybe that type of care works differently when distances are so large. Are helicopters used?

Large distances for planned care is probably manageable. For urgent care not so much. Living alone also means not having someone else that can signal the emergency services when something is wrong.

salad-tycoon
1 replies
16h12m

Think you can keep a finger or hand on ice for a few hours. Should be “fine.” Aneurysm, MI, stroke? Not so fine but, call of the wild.

lanstin
0 replies
1h33m

urgent care vs. emergency room.

thijson
2 replies
20h33m

The further north you go, the larger the seasonal variation in sunlight. I've watched some video's of people living off grid in BC, they need a diesel generator for the winter months to get by.

switchbak
1 replies
19h20m

This is also quite dependent on the microclimate: there's a number of places in the south of BC that get radically different levels of solar radiation. Kelowna for instance would be far better than North Vancouver for a solar setup.

By and large most of BC wasn't economic enough to justify solar as a replacement for grid power, but I haven't checked those numbers in a while. We do have relatively cheap hydro power, so there's not a hugely strong incentive either. There's other reasons that might justify an install however, especially for off-grid folks.

zhynn
0 replies
50m

My town has about 500 people, but the really active community is about 50-100 that will show up at the various things we do. I am 30 minutes from grocery stores, and 3 hours from boston or montreal. I have fiber internet because the residents got sick of the telecoms and we built our own. And the forest is more dense than Montana (where I grew up), and doesn't light on fire every summer. Please come to VT. :)

Also, I a bought a ramshackle building at auction that I am turning into a community workshop. It will be fun!

mattclarkdotnet
0 replies
9h55m

Nannup, Western Australia. Or maybe Pemberton. Sorry I know you probably want somewhere in the US, but it really does tick all your boxes

conradev
14 replies
22h13m

America can get extremely remote and so you can choose how remote you want to go. Here is a journalist from Manhattan meeting folks living off-grid in Colorado: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/28/what-going-off...

Not to mention Slab City: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slab_City,_California

Infrastructure-wise, roads come before water or electricity, and so plenty of the United States has a road but no power or water. This can even be standard for those who are near civilization.

nl
13 replies
18h10m

Slab City is 100 miles from San Diego and only 160 miles from Los Angeles! That's not remote - remote should be classified using a decreasing population density over distance function.

Remote is somewhere like Nullarbor, which is 183 miles from Ceduna (population < 6000). It's over 1000km to Adelaide (population 1.3m) or 1600km to Perth (population 1.9m).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullarbor,_South_Australia

KennyBlanken
5 replies
13h47m

Many times, it really doesn't matter if you're 30 miles from anything, or 300.

If your vehicle breaks down, how screwed are you?

Do you have cell coverage to call for help?

Will anyone be passing by to flag down, any time soon?

How far away is the nearest LEO agency, fire department, ambulance?

How far away is the nearest place for water, food, etc?

murkt
2 replies
12h46m

LEO agency

I know you didn’t mean Low Earth Orbit agency, but the thought is funny.

If you’re not more than 1000+ km from the nearest satellite, you’re not in a remote area!

medstrom
1 replies
8h44m

What does it stand for?

mbroncano
0 replies
8h14m

Law Enforcement Officer

nl
0 replies
12h55m

It really depends on the reasoning for wanting to be remote.

Some people just love not having people around, in which case you really want low average weekly population density within say 5-10km (out of easy visibility and hearing).

Some people are concerned about civilization collapse or civil war or... something (ie, the prepper type). In that case you can imagine population dispersing away from (and possibly towards) major population centers over a period of months, and you want true isolation.

jacobolus
4 replies
17h41m

That's not remote: there's a paved road that goes there! Remote should be somewhere that requires weeks of travel by sailboat or camel to get to.

nl
1 replies
12h44m

I might be wrong but there are few places that already have population and yet require a week of travel via camel to get to.

My sister lived in Wingellina[1][2], Western Australia which was a 6 hour drive on unpaved, 4WD required track from Alice Springs. That's close to one of the most difficult, isolated places to get to in Australia, but even there isn't a week on Camels. Maybe going further west into the Great Sandy Desert might get close (although you get close to small townships in WA if you go too far).

The Empty Quarter has low population density but is smaller than isolated areas in Australia.

There are probably places in Siberia and Canada that are fairly isolated too.

I agree that there are more isolated islands. The Pitcairn Islands is the most obvious case.

[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/Q2wL9KCa9aXht3YS9

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingellina,_Western_Australia

neltnerb
0 replies
12h33m

I mean, I guess camels are not especially fast swimmers.

ponector
0 replies
5h18m

That is not remote: instead of weeks on camels you can easily fly basically anywhere.

But a good example of remote is Nulato, Alaska.

MarkusQ
0 replies
4h36m

The heck with camels. All these places are still within a few meters of the Earth's surface. If you want remote, you've got to think outside the biosphere!

NikolaNovak
1 replies
15h25m

When I was a teenager, we would wake up on a summer Saturday in country A, drive through the entirety of country B, and stop by in a lovely city in country C, all in 76km. With full double border crossings, changes in climate and culture and population, several different terrain types including some proper big mountains, and everything :)

Point is, yes USA is huge (let alone Australia) and skews our sense of distance, but 100 miles is not as trivial distance as we sometimes instinctively feel :-)

Damogran6
0 replies
4h35m

Heck, there's a difference between western (interstate super-slab) US and Eastern, Virginia like (Birth of a Nation two lane highway) roads.

I can leave Denver and be DEEP into Wyoming in 2 hours, or it can take 90 minutes to go 60 miles in Rural Virginia (80mph speed limit vs 60 mph speed limit)

pjc50
8 replies
22h26m

Far from "civilization", but still surrounded by lawfulness so you don't have to deal with warlords taking your solar panels.

flir
3 replies
22h22m

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

HPsquared
0 replies
21h49m

Broken window theory, through the looking glass.

ben_w
0 replies
6h10m

The game being?

DaoVeles
2 replies
17h32m

There a few people I know who live off grid, they all say the same thing. The longer you are out there the closer to 100% you will be challenged for your stuff. Be it a semi-local crazy, warlord, gypsies or cult few have heard of - they all want resources that are closer than the alternative and they are aware that you are the only defense.

Another factor of this living is that once the honeymoon period wears off, there is a dawning on many people that their tolerance for failure has dropped significantly. A break down of a vehicle can become a very big issue very fast when the nearest town is an hour away.

caymanjim
1 replies
16h24m

This is certainly a concern. I'm early 50s now and have no medical issues or physical limitations (ok, aside from fatness). I'm pretty handy. I can fix what needs fixing. My tolerance for problems and delays is high. But it won't be long before I start falling apart and will want to be closer to medical resources for myself and service providers for my stuff.

I'm not looking for a forever home. I figure I might live in the middle of nowhere for a decade or so and then who knows. Maybe move closer to town and have a nice place to visit part of the year.

DaoVeles
0 replies
15h14m

I know a couple that lived off grid and made it work for a long while. They only had to give it up in their early 80's after several decades on location. Not a bad way to be. The thing that did them in was failing health and they needed to be closer to medical centers.

njarboe
0 replies
20h6m

I would guess he will still be paying at least property taxes.

UniverseHacker
2 replies
19h55m

But there are many places where that would be two solid days of offroad driving, without seeing another person in the process.

grecy
1 replies
11h4m

Can you give me an example?I have explored a lot of remote places and never found anything nearly that remote

UniverseHacker
0 replies
6h7m

The California Sierras, Death Valley, the Mojave desert, and of course Baja (obv not in the lower 48) have remote trails that can take days to get to- not so much because they’re actually extremely far away but because the trails are slow going and difficult. There are trails where average speeds in a vehicle are slower than walking, but you can’t really hike them either - at least without pack animals- because there are no water sources.

Look at a map and see what is furthest from a highway, but technically accessible by some sort of old road or trail. Look at a mineral rights map and find the most remote gold rush era mining claims.

You won’t see people often in these places because your standard 4x4 lacks the fuel range to get there- gasoline engines have very poor range at low speeds. You need something capable but also fuel efficient- usually something with a small diesel engine, which are not very available in the US market. More remote places also tend to have a lot of cumulative water damage to trails so are very technical- requiring a lot of patience (e.g. stacking rocks for hours) and a lot of driving skill.

refurb
2 replies
18h15m

Why is that sad? These can be logging trails you’d need to squint to actually see in the brush.

And 115 miles? That’s a huge distance.

WillAdams
1 replies
15h53m

Invasive species for one thing --- folks aren't nearly as careful about checking their vehicles as they ought to be.

Not huge enough when you're considering how the McDonald's have driven out little hole-in-the-wall places and that the presence of such a fast food restaurant requires a busy highway, or a reasonably dense population center.

refurb
0 replies
12h52m

Invasive species? Most of these trail aren't even used?

irrational
2 replies
18h58m

I once drove from Oregon to Death Valley on the east side of the Cascades/Sierras. We were driving at highway speeds for most of a day and saw almost nobody. Just nothing and nobody as far as the eye could see for hundreds and hundreds of miles. This isn’t even very unique. Vast swaths of the American west are just empty.

narrator
1 replies
17h40m

There's no water in the dryer parts of the Mojave unless you're near big rivers like the Colorado or the rivers that feed into Phoenix or get it piped in from somewhere. You can't easily live anywhere permanently without a good water source.

kragen
0 replies
14h42m

you just need to drill 60 meters down: https://ca.water.usgs.gov/mojave/mojave-morongo-hydrographs....

once you're established you can collect rainwater. https://ca.water.usgs.gov/mojave/ says:

Most areas of the basin floor receive 4 to 6 inches of precipitation per year, although annual precipitation can be greater than 40 inches in the southern and eastern San Bernardino and the San Gabriel Mountains (Lines, 1996). Recharge to the groundwater system from direct infiltration of precipitation is minimal.

in modern units "4 inches" is 100 millimeters, so that's about 3 nanometers per second

each person needs about 6 liters of water per day (burning man recommendation, including hygiene, dishwashing, etc., but not garden irrigation) or 70 microliters per second. 70 microliters divided by 3 nanometers is about 20 square meters, so even in the desert you don't need a large catchment to keep your cistern full. this isn't the atacama

if you want to be far from civilization in america, though, the atacama is pretty good for that. parts of patagonia might be better and do have rain

jimt1234
1 replies
16h43m

Alaska

caymanjim
0 replies
16h21m

Tempting. Been there and loved it. Lots of cheap land. Not the best place for solar power and those winters are rough. And it's really far from family. I don't need to see family more than a few times a year, but if I lived in Alaska it'd likely be once a year.

djtango
1 replies
15h58m

As someone who has only lived in major cities - what is the plan for food? Grow it yourself / hunt?

caymanjim
0 replies
2h47m

Aside from Alaska, there's nowhere in the entire US where you're more than an hour or so away from a grocery store.

briffle
1 replies
13h48m

Crane, OR is I think the only public high school that boards its students in dorms during the week. Its geographic area is 7700sq miles. (The size of Massachusetts) It has 50-60 students.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crane_Union_High_School

JackMorgan
0 replies
8h2m

If I remember correctly my students in Glenallen AK used to be bussed from up to 2.5 hours each way! I always have thought that was so silly to still have daily classes. Why not just once a week and the whole day is filled with socializing. Humans get an idea in their heads like "how school should be" and just can't let it go...

AuryGlenz
1 replies
2h47m

I feel like people overshoot. I live on 15 acres, mostly woods. I can only just barely see my neighbor’s houses through the woods in the winter.

I’d like more land still - I grew up on 60 acres - but I still basically have complete privacy.

beacon294
0 replies
1h42m

I think a lot of people are happy with 5 acres, you think people buy 50 and it's too much? Anyways, the frontage on 50 acres is often quite slim.

sandworm101
0 replies
22h14m

> thinking of somewhere in northern Canada.

Canada is vast and in some places very rugged. "Remote" and "northern" are not related terms. Just look at BC on google maps. Look at the bit of vancouver island that is south of the US border. That is some very remote terrain, but is no way northern. Then scan up into the BC coast. Just a few hundred miles from downtown Vancouver and not a single road to be found. Or start at Whistler and pan west. Hundred of miles of mountains with nothing more than the occasional logging road.

refurb
0 replies
18h17m

Eastern US is a bit harder, but Western? It’s just a handful of cities and towns in a wilderness.

Go to Wyoming or Montana. You get a 2 or 3 hr drive outside major cities and you might be the only person around for 10+ miles.

redandblack
0 replies
18h19m

I am moving from New Jersey to Delaware - for me that is far from civilization, but can make it up by a once a month trek for the food scene in NJ.

raffraffraff
0 replies
12h28m

I think that "an hour to the nearest convenience" is far from civilization, but I'm Irish and this is a tiny country. Also, you could argue that, by definition, having a road and an RV kitted out with food, water and batteries is civilization. Even if I lived full time like that I'd feel like I owe some civilization somewhere, a tax. Who built this nice road? What hidden or socialised costs or subsidies went into kitting me out for remote life? When all is said and done, we can't survive without having some sort of connection to other groups. Going a few hundred miles away for a while and saying "I AM SELF SUFFICIENT!" is a bit silly.

And like I say, if you want peace and quiet you don't have to put your life at risk by going out of range of water, power, roads, phone coverage etc.

Ignore me, I'm sure I just don't get it.

mdemare
0 replies
11h23m

Very funny to read this from the Netherlands, where remote is defined as "I can't hear any cars".

forgetfreeman
0 replies
12h48m

There are places in wyoming where the only proof available that you aren't on another planet is the road you're driving on, where if you run out of gas it is a distinct possibility that you die of dehydration before anyone comes along to render aid.

bawolff
0 replies
21h48m

I think most people understand "far from civilization" to just mean rural. You can easily find that in america (or canada). Nobody is talking about moving to a failed state.

astronautameya
0 replies
14h56m

Everyone with this fantasy reserves the right to uniquely define 'remote' as they see fit.

For someone it could be defined as minimal human interaction, for others it could be a function of distance from the nearest urban/ suburban center. For most, it would be some combination of these two.

I've backpacked to some very remote places around the world, but it's hard to beat the USA (western half), Canada, Russia (east of Moscow) and Australia (anywhere not on the coast).

MrLeap
0 replies
17h6m

My picks were devils elbow MO, or climax springs MO or tightwad MO

aegis4244
18 replies
18h3m

If you're looking for some inexpensive land that can be fairly remote you might do worse than Cochise county AZ. The county has an opt out permit program as long as you have at least 4 rural acres. You can build whatever you want, no permits, no inspections. There are some restrictions. No bank will give you a mortgage, can't sell or rent it out within 2 years. You can live in your RV while you build, for 2 years I think, with a 3 year extension possible. Lots of sun for solar. Rooftop water collection for water. There are some septic options, composting, or traditional. All legal. A few dozen people on youtube building all kinds of off grid natural buildings. They get together once in a while, let you tour their build, ask questions. A little snow in the winter, not many days above 100F. 4000+ feet elevation. Fiber laid in some surprisingly rural areas. No paved roads type areas. Weird, but cool.

I did the full time RV bit in a class A. Hated it. Too small to live in, too big to travel in. Hate that black tank. Had to leave great camping spots once a week to dump and get more water, or hook up to some sort of developed campgrounds. Sucked. Regret not going for a small schoolie to travel in, large house on 5 acres to live in. That's the new plan, anyway. Best of luck.

gcanyon
8 replies
17h38m

Average rainfall 11 to 41 inches per year -- more than I expected in AZ. Still, to have reasonable water year-round for 2 people you'd need to collect across maybe 10,000 square feet? That's not a small installation.

asah
4 replies
12h2m

obviously, you need substantial storage...

what about harvesting water from the air ? I've heard that modern techniques can work in 15% humidity ?

also, trucking in water once a year can augment the supply ? at 10c per gallon, it doesn't seem crazy... https://www.reddit.com/r/TinyHouses/comments/10qj5ey/no_well...

gcanyon
1 replies
6h34m

I was going off 100 gallons per day per person, which is typical, but can obviously be improved upon. But that said, I don’t want to pay $7000 per year just for water. Plus living remotely like that is just terribly inefficient in general: food, trash, heating/cooling, transportation, water, and just everything all take much more effort/resources to produce in a solo venture like that. I’m not saying I don’t see the appeal, but the Earth could not (even remotely) support everyone living that way.

jonstewart
0 replies
6h14m

Net zero living looks a lot more like the Upper West Side than a cabin in the woods.

eek2121
1 replies
6h28m

No idea of the situation there, but rural areas in our part of the world tap underground sources for water. It gets pumped and filtered on premise. Septic is a big tank with a field up front for dispersing fluids/liquids. Commenter below mentioned trash, but if you are applying some basic sustainable living techniques, the amount of trash produced should be minimal to none.

fshbbdssbbgdd
0 replies
2h1m

I don’t know this specific area, but some deserts you have to drill impractically deep to get to any ground water.

lazide
0 replies
5h24m

If you’re buying land in AZ without a reliable well or utility hookup, you’re buying a nightmare.

There is plenty of land with reliable water there.

Rainwater for irrigation, maybe. But the reality is, most of AZ gets monsoons a couple months a year, and then essentially zero precipitation. So unless you have land favorable for setting up a dam or something, you’re going to have a hard time living off that kind of setup.

Flagstaff and Phoenix/far south being a bit different.

idiotsecant
0 replies
3h51m

Or drill a well like most rural people already do...

ElSucioDan
0 replies
14h48m

Probably more than that since the rain is all concentrated around the months of July and August. Would need to store for the rest of the year too.

willvarfar
3 replies
9h21m

Do you know realistic property prices and acreages in Cochise county?

A quick google image search shows a very hot Arizona.

As someone who enjoys following a lot of youtube self-builders around the world I get the impression that most channels I follow have to thread their way through some pretty convoluted and not-self-build nor budget-friendly rules :(

Do you know of any other places in the US that have similar easy-to-self-build but are more wooded and temperate?

davidw
1 replies
3h3m

Places with water (and therefore trees) tend to be already spoken for in most of the US. Alaska, maybe? But that's not temperate at all, and is not great for the solar aspect.

vkou
0 replies
1h26m

Alaska is pretty great if you'd like to live in a place where mosquitos make up ~90% of the animal biomass.

smolder
0 replies
4h40m

When I think remote wooded area my mind goes to western NY around Allegheny. I know (and helped) someone who self-built a house in that area but am not sure about what approvals they needed/sought for it.

MuffinFlavored
1 replies
16h19m

I did the full time RV bit in a class A. Hated it.

What were you a fan of instead?

KennyBlanken
1 replies
14h37m

If you're looking for some inexpensive land that can be fairly remote you might do worse than Cochise county AZ

It's pretty hard to do worse than "the very small amount of water is being sucked dry because there are no regulations around water use." Once the water table compacts, it never comes back...

Rooftop water collection for water.

It's one of the dries parts of the country. Good fucking luck.

A growing number of people in AZ and NV have to have water trucked in, and that is insanely expensive.

droopyEyelids
0 replies
13h42m

I'm not endorsing it as a sane idea, but for people who think the idea of living on Mars is cool, living in areas like this could push forward development of compatible technologies- like retaining and recycling all water.

Like right now my mind is trying to imagine a solar powered desiccator and water recollection device that could dehydrate all compost and bodily excretions.

zubietaroberto
0 replies
33m

Without access to a water supply, living in the middle of Arizona is just DUNE cosplay.

I do know that there are water condensation machines that could be fed with solar power, but at that point will likely be too expensive for a single family.

m463
15 replies
21h15m

I think RVs that you can live/remote work in while traveling are interesting.

(I'm speaking about large class A RVs like an apartment with washer/dryer etc...)

But as solar becomes more prevalent, I don't see why they don't design RVs more around solar.

It has only been recently that I've seen "all electric" type RVs. Before that, most RVs were hybrid propane/electric or diesel/electric, for example gas stoves, dual propane/electric refrigerators, dual propane/diesel + electric heating and propane or diesel generators.

A future RV could have huge batteries for driving, and then use those batteries for appliances, air conditioning/heat pump and other on-board power. Then add increased solar by not only rooftop solar, but maybe fold-out solar awnings. (it could also charge via EV chargers, or 220 at a campsite)

An RV like this would be modern, comfortable and let you go anywhere.

caymanjim
14 replies
21h1m

I do well in my tiny (20') RV for four months a year. It was a little cramped when I had a girlfriend with me, but still cozy. This is my third summer doing this. The first two summers, I wasn't working. This summer I'm working full-time remote (dev). It has its challenges. I plan to upgrade to a much larger 5th wheel trailer, likely in two years, with all the creature comforts you mention.

Part of the reason solar is still a fringe thing for RVs is due to the costs up till now. Another big reason has been solar panel energy density; there simply wasn't enough room on the roof for the thousands of watts you need to generate for true full-time off-grid living with all the creature comforts (most notably air conditioning). Affordable, compact DC-powered refrigerators are still new (but are becoming standard items). Battery cost used to be prohibitive, and battery weight is still a problem. The 1200Ah I'm targeting (at minimum) is going to weigh a few hundred pounds.

If you want a residential-sized fridge, washer/dryer, and air conditioning that you can use 24/7, you need more like 3200W of solar and 2400Ah of battery. The larger the RV, the more expensive it is to cool. RVs have crap insulation, and most RVs are used in hotter southern areas. True self-sufficient electric and solar with no behavioral/comfort sacrifice still requires a lot of space and costs a lot.

The market is headed toward more solar, but the kind of setup you're talking about (and that I'm building for myself) is still quite expensive. And it's a huge cost for people that don't typically need it; the vast majority of people full-timing in RVs are content to do so at a sardine-packed RV park with full hookups. The market isn't going to bear the cost of massive solar installations as standard equipment.

ericd
7 replies
19h0m

I'm curious, why do people use Ah for batteries, given that there's 3 different common server rack battery voltages (12, 24, 48)? Is 12 just assumed for RVing?

caymanjim
4 replies
18h52m

You make a good point. They really ought to be sold with Wh prominently displayed. I'm talking about 1200Ah@12V, although in reality there's a good chance that I'll do 600Ah@24V or 300Ah@48V. It's all the same 14.4kWh and will provide the exact same amount of usable power (ignoring some conversion efficiencies).

I'm using Ah because I'm used to talking to people about 12V battery systems, and Ah is the most prominent number when talking about battery capacity (when the voltage is already implied or agreed upon).

You're absolutely right though, and I should have been more clear about it.

ericd
3 replies
18h17m

Ah makes sense (that 12V is just implied for RVs). I'm used to dealing with 48V, since I'm doing this for a house, and it seems like they specify batteries both ways in that world. I wonder who uses 24V.

Anyway, thanks for explaining it.

caymanjim
2 replies
17h14m

I'm also not really sure why one would pick 24V for most applications. 12V makes sense for RVs, boats, etc. because a lot of devices are designed to operate directly off 12V. 48V makes sense for houses and solar installations, if for no other reason than smaller-gauge wires (and is a big reason I'm considering it; 00 gauge wires are enormous and unwieldy). But 24V? You're likely not running much natively off 24V, so you're already going to be doing DC-DC conversion down to 12V. And there's not much cost difference between 24V and 48V inverter systems (and in fact many of them can already handle both voltages).

My first phase DC system, currently in my RV, is a single 12V lead-acid battery, single 100W solar panel, 12VDC->120VAC inverter, a few buck converters for 5V electronics and USB ports, and a bunch of stuff running off 12V (my cell modem/router and my Beelink mini-PC are 12V direct). 12V adapter for Starlink PoE. I'm waffling on getting one or two 280Ah 12V batteries to wire in parallel, or just sticking with my crappy 12V lead-acid battery for the rest of this year and getting multiple 48V LiFePO4 when I do the full solar build-out next year.

You're not supposed to mix-and-match battery brands, manufacturing dates, time in use, etc. because if there's too much of a mismatch, they'll all degrade faster (so I've read). This is what's preventing me from incrementally building up a 12V battery bank by adding another 280Ah every few months. Instead I'm planning to milk what I have as long as possible, pick a voltage, and buy a whole bank of batteries and solar panels all at once.

sbierwagen
0 replies
16h51m

Heavy vehicles often run on 24V. (Trucks over 26k GVWR, earthmovers, military equipment)

ericd
0 replies
4h3m

Yeah, even with 48V, we're still rocking parallel 4/0 copper, it's still a lot of amperage to try to supply 15 kw at 48V. They are heavy. The ones we got from WindyNation were surprisingly flexible, though, which has made them a lot easier to work with.

stephen_g
1 replies
18h56m

Amp hours are what the batteries are specified in, right down to cells that are 1.5V, 2V, 3.9V etc.. Yes, once they're in system you want to know kWh capacity of the system as a whole, but it makes sense that people think of what's written on the batteries first.

kragen
0 replies
14h35m

caymanjim knows his units, but the general public is so ignorant that it's common to hear people confusing a 1200-amp-hour battery with a 1200-(cold-cranking-)amp battery. even people who built a multi-voltage electrical system for their rv. the struggle is real

m463
4 replies
19h22m

you need more like 3200W

The market isn't going to bear the cost of massive solar installations as standard equipment.

so doing some math...

Larger class A RVs seem to cost $300k and up, and retirees seem to happily pay for all conveniences. For "normal" people, who haven't cashed in their retirement, the good thing is that they depreciate like a car instead of appreciating like a house.

if you used all of a 40ft RV roof (40'x8') you could get ~ 5000 watts

If you had fold-out solar awnings, I don't know what you could get... 10k? 15k?

With a large tesla battery pack, you could get 100kwh of batteries.

I remember when tesla first came out with their cars. The batteries seemed unnecessarily large and expensive compared to 24 kwh batteries in other cars. But they survived the test of time/longevity being both practical and not charged and discharged 100% every day.

I think it will happen, I just wonder when.

caymanjim
3 replies
18h47m

Alas, houses appreciate, cars depreciate, and RVs are just worthless. I exaggerate, but RV depreciation is absolutely nothing like auto depreciation. They lose 25% driving off the lot and another 25% per year (numbers out my ass, but correct order of magnitude).

The cost certainly would the most make sense on gigantic $300k class As, which also conveniently have space for lots of panels and lots of batteries. And indeed you see the most elaborate factory-installed solar setups on those beasts. That's a tiny market, though.

I think you're right about the future. It won't be long before thousands of watts of solar come standard on most RVs. In fact I don't think it will be all that long (decade or two maybe?) before the RV is clad in some kind of solar material. Like every square inch of the surface is generating solar.

nothercastle
2 replies
16h7m

They are built so terribly most are worthless after 20 years and start to have major issues at 10. Also add that the first 2 years they are constantly in the shop for repairs while the warranty is still available

foobarian
1 replies
3h51m

I know some people that like to buy used trailers and then spend tons of their time fixing and complaining about leaks, rotted vinyl, etc.

nothercastle
0 replies
3h38m

Yeah I don’t get it you can’t build quality into a shitty design. Only trailers worth repairing are airstreams and fiberglass ones, and even then the time to value proposition is dubious

kragen
0 replies
14h39m

i very much appreciate you sharing your knowledge!

kragen
7 replies
20h23m

this is awesome!

i do have one quibble, though, and it's a big one. in the last two years, prices on mainstream solar panels (monocrystalline with warranty) have fallen from €0.25 per peak watt to €0.12 per peak watt; low-cost panels have fallen from €0.17 per peak watt to €0.07 per peak watt.† technically that is 'fallen by 25% or more' because it's fallen by almost 60%. 2400 watts of solar should cost you 290 us dollars plus retail markup, not 1200 dollars. if you're paying 1200 dollars, you're being swindled! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41394506 goes into details on how the swindle works

______

https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...

caymanjim
6 replies
20h15m

400W solar panels cost $200-250. So 2400W will cost me roughly $1800. There are discounts if you can buy in bulk, but I don't have room for more than 6-8 panels at most.

Like all things, the raw material cost is trivial. There are the tariffs you mention (I just skimmed your link, and don't speak German), but there's also economy of scale, packaging, logistics, etc. I'm sure I could get 400W panels for as little as $100/ea if I went to the factory myself and bought hundreds of them. Maybe even cheaper. It's not really fair to compare consumer one-off costs to industrial/commercial-scale installation costs.

technofiend
1 replies
13h30m

Before you purchase anything try A1 solar. They often have deep discounts on single panels as well as container lots. For instance they have a 440 Watt panel priced at $140, six of which would get you 2,640 watts @ $840. https://a1solarstore.com/solar-panels/440-watt-solar-panels....

kragen
0 replies
10h25m

or you could maybe drive the rv down to mexico

kragen
0 replies
18h59m

that's great, only 2½× the wholesale prices on solarserver!

is that available in the usa? because the swindle that caymanjim is being subjected to is kind of a usa-only thing

kragen
0 replies
20h6m

while it's true that there's a retail markup, that markup is not close to a factor of 4. it's about 30%. the €0.12 per peak watt cost i mentioned for mainstream solar panels is not at the factory; that's a wholesale price in european markets, which are halfway around the world from the factory. if you went to the factory, you could probably get them for €0.10 per peak watt, about 45 dollars each for your 400-watt panels. (unless you don't look chinese, in which case trying to go to the factory might get you arrested, and you'd definitely have to buy more than 6–8)

the longer comment of mine i linked explains in more detail how you're getting swindled. in english!

foobarian
0 replies
3h48m

Just wanted to clarify, are all these panels equal in size? Is there a "standard" solar panel format? It would be easy to otherwise get a much cheaper panel providing the same output if it was just a bit larger. It might be fine for ground installations but in your case space is at a premium

vondur
1 replies
2h1m

Wow, that's a heck of a lot of solar in an RV. Do you have a video tour of it, I'd love to see that!

caymanjim
0 replies
1h32m

It's all just a plan right now. I started buying components this summer, but I only have the RV's stock 100W panel so far, and an extra lead-acid battery to supplement the one it came with.

I had planned to start by putting 4x200W panels on the roof, until I get a large 5th wheel. Now I'm going to put 4-6x 400W on the current trailer for next summer. The price and size of 400W panels dropped enough to make that viable.

I'm generally too lazy to do a writeup/photos of my projects, but I might when I get it installed. There are a lot of writeups out there already though. People are squeezing lots of solar onto vams and small RVs these days.

JonChesterfield
1 replies
21h45m

Burning wood is a completely viable (if very annoying and environmentally dubious) answer to off grid hot water. Your plan sounds pretty good to me.

caymanjim
0 replies
21h24m

It's not too expensive to get a large, refillable propane tank installed, and propane is cheap. I've got family members who do that and they live five miles away from the nearest Walmart. They have municipal power and well water, but don't have municipal gas service. They only have to fill the tank four times per year. I would likely do the same, for cooking, hot water, and heat (supplemented by a wood stove, which I'd have plenty of wood for as I cleared land for a house, garage, and solar panel field).

Damogran6
1 replies
5h25m

Three years ago I performed the phase one update on our trailer (38foot 5th wheeler) I put in a Victron converter/inverter, shunt, Cerbo (HMI) and 4 100ah LiFePO4 batteries. The trailer has a 5500 generator and 3 ACs.

I wanted 2.5 days of power, not including AC, as I'd run the Jenny when needing AC

Solar is (was) coming at a future date with something in the 1200 watt range.

What I found was that we were boondocking roughly 8 nights a year, needing about 2 hours of generator each day to top off the batteries. (FWIW, there's a LOT of power to a gallon of gas) I can charge at home before we leave, exercising the generator is good, because I can rely on it when I need it (where if we right or over-size the solar, you might go a very long time before really needing the generator.

So, I'd like solar (it's quiet), but the $2500 or so to install it probably doesn't have a reasonable ROI. And I really like having AC the few days it's needed away from shorepower.

caymanjim
0 replies
1h26m

I've got a generator now, which can recharge my tiny battery in about an hour. The generator can run the AC, microwave, whatever I need. It's loud, and I often camp in primitive-but-not-remote sites which either have limited generator hours or where it would be rude to run one. That's a big reason I want maximum solar and battery. Even if I'm boondocking far from people, I don't want to listen to a generator all day. You're right about the energy density. I can run my 3000W generator for about eight hours on one 2.5 gallon tank of gas, depending on how much power I use. I've run the AC for a few hours that way.

zhynn
0 replies
55m

Please come to Vermont, there is a lot of undeveloped land, ample water, and we need people.

turtlebits
0 replies
1h49m

Seasonal variation can mean 0 production in the winter for days/weeks. Unless you have some fuel burning backup, or are spending $$$ on batteries, this isn't feasible.

onlyrealcuzzo
0 replies
21h21m

I've now lowered my budget to $4000 for the same setup I was planning to spend $6000 on two years ago, and with 400W panels, I no longer need to upgrade to a larger RV to begin the project.

Keep in mind - the dollar is down ~10-15% in that time frame, so in real terms, the previous cost might have been >$6600 in today's dollars vs ~$4000 or a >40% reduction.

The cost of electricity is up ~5.5% compared to last year: https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...

neltnerb
0 replies
17h18m

The latest modest scale battery technology is also a game changer from my consumer perspective. I use Jackeries (which do what you're talking about for lots of money XD), and mine from last year uses a chemistry that gives a maximum of perhaps 1.5A even though the capacity is quite high. The one from this year that uses lithium iron phosphate is happy to output 10A.

It's wild, I was able to power an AC brushless motor as well as a corded (technically?) drill. I could have run the drill for an hour at full power.

All around it just improves so fast I'm starting to feel like I do about computers -- the longer I continue to be satisfied with my current setup, the better the next one will be!

dghughes
0 replies
7h22m

There is now a Winnebago eRV2 EV RV (say that fast lol). I wonder if that is an advantage more for an RV sitting gas going old and brakes stick. Sounds like a good idea for those wanting to live off-grid. Range is a dismal 173km (108mi) though.

analognoise
0 replies
16h14m

Where are you sourcing parts and do you have a suggested parts list?

HenryBemis
0 replies
9h0m

dropped 25% or more

I don't mean to straw-man your argument, I was merely thinking that the 'actual' drop must be bigger, considering the inflation in most countries (in some EU countries it approached or hit 10%), so under normal circumstances and/or in the future the drop would/will be at 30%-35% if the same rate continues (prices getting lower - inflation getting lower)

GauntletWizard
0 replies
10h59m

I would love to see your setup and price sheet - I'm planning on doing the same very soon. Doing a full digital nomad lifestyle for a year or two, traveling the country, while still working remotely.

rtkwe
106 replies
1d3h

I'm having a hard time getting past the assumption in the article that energy use is tied directly to GDP per capita and that by not following the 7% growth of the Henry Adams Curve we're somehow below where we should/could be as a country. That embeds so many assumptions about the economy and where GDP comes from, the decoupling seems more likely to be from the transition from manufacturing and other energy heavy sectors to more services based economic activity..

countvonbalzac
27 replies
1d

Same - take lightbulbs for example. Thanks to LEDs, the amount of energy you need to generate X amount of light has reduced considerably, but we still have as much if not more lighting than ever. And it's not like our GDP is suffering due to a lack of sufficient lighting, at a certain point there's no gain to productivity gained from having another lightbulb. Same thing can be said about cars, CPUs etc.

kragen
11 replies
23h13m

for some economic activities, energy is not a limiting input; you are implicitly referring to economic production enabled by electric lighting, such as office work, and indeed energy has not been a limiting input for that for at least a century. reducing the cost of energy will not result in more gdp in those sectors

for other economic activities, such as solar panel production, aluminum production, and neural network training, energy is a limiting input. reducing the cost of energy will result in more gdp in those sectors

Retric
10 replies
23h8m

Dropping energy costs lowers costs in every sector but rarely by that much.

aluminum production

Dropping energy costs an by 75% only drops smelting prices by about 30% and finished goods by even less.

kragen
9 replies
21h27m

there's usually a long lag between a drop in the price of an input and the eventual impact on the price of the outputs, because part of the effect is mediated by the adoption of innovations that use more of the newly-cheaper inputs and less of the still-expensive inputs

to take one example, the last time we got access to a major new source of energy was something like watt's steam-engine in 01776. one of the effects of this was the widespread replacement of steel cans (which hadn't been invented in 01776) and glass bottles with aluminum cans in the 01970s, 200 years later. another was the replacement of travel by ship with travel by air, also about 200 years later. the delay is because many intermediating innovations were required, for example, in the aluminum-can case:

- the discovery of electrolysis;

- the discovery of aluminum;

- the discovery of canning;

- the hall–héroult process;

- improved aluminum alloys that permitted the use of 100μm-thick cans;

- the invention of deep drawing;

- epoxy liners that made aluminum cans chemically stable to acidic contents such as coca-cola;

- long-distance trucking which increased the cost imposed by heavier glass bottles.

njarboe
8 replies
20h1m

We started to access nuclear power as a new source, but then stopped for quite a while. It looks like things are starting up again. We'll see.

kragen
7 replies
19h49m

the issue with nuclear power is that the humans don't yet have the technology to exploit it economically; at their current primitive level it's uncompetitive with other sources of energy. like printing 1000 years ago or heron's aeolipile

chickenbig
6 replies
12h7m

humans don't yet have the technology to exploit it economically

$2,500/kW of capacity isn't too expensive, given the alternatives.

https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/catalyst-the-cost-of-nucl...

The recent batch of 11 reactors authorised by China are perhaps 2.8B USD each for 1.1GW plant (plus a high temperature gas reactor).

kragen
5 replies
10h29m

but 1.1 gigawatts of mainstream solar panels is 0.14 billion usd. $130 per kilowatt of capacity. even at the dismal 10% solar capacity factor achieved in very northerly countries like germany, the reactor is twice the price per average watt, and it needs to be installed far from the point of use—you can't buy a 440-watt nuclear reactor, so you need transmission, distribution, and transformers, all of which incur energy losses, capital investment, and safety hazards you can avoid with photovoltaic

that large grid also needs regulation, billing, and political stability. (a reactor is an appealing target for both russian glide bombs and enron-style scams.) and the reactor is not dispatchable over timescales of less than a day, while you can short out a solar panel in microseconds

fundamentally the reactor can't compete economically because it's shackled to a pricey steam engine. the reactor itself is a triviality, just a pile of fuel larger than the critical mass. some of them formed naturally at oklo billions of years ago. what's hard is integrating that energy release mechanism into a machine, and that's because the humans are still terrible at making machines

chickenbig
2 replies
6h23m

but 1.1 gigawatts of mainstream solar panels is 0.14 billion usd

A solar farm is more than just solar panels. This 3.5GW solar farm cost 2.13B USD, so by your estimates the panels make up just 1/5 of the cost of the farm. I'd expect the load factor of the nuclear power station to offset the solar farm's nameplate capacity advantage, and lead to steadier prices/fewer storage requirements etc etc.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/06/06/worlds-largest-solar-...

and it needs to be installed far from the point of use

Note that this is a problem for solar farms in China; they are installed where land is not valuable. Hence all the HVDC transmission records being broken in China. Plus nuclear power stations can be close to populations. For instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daya_Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant is 50km from Hong Kong.

the reactor is not dispatchable over timescales of less than a day

Modern reactors have load following capabilities, e.g. the AP1000 can ramp up 5% a minute within the 15%-100% band.

Retric
1 replies
5h14m

Pure PV farms have minimal operational costs, nuclear has huge ongoing costs. For a more realistic comparison the operating costs of nuclear offset the cost of batteries for solar.

So capital costs vs capital costs on a per Wh basis isn’t in favor of Solar it favors nuclear which has less flexibility. IE: 24 GWh per day of battery backed solar can dump half that power over 2 hours @ 6GW. 24GWh of nuclear IE a 1GWh reactor caps out at 1GW. If you want to ramp to 6GW of output nuclear needs several nuclear reactors and all of their associated costs.

Modern reactors have load following capabilities

Load following isn’t free for nuclear, any time you’re not operating at 100% you’re losing money. Batteries are inherently way more flexible.

It also costs more to build a load following reactor and they have more experience maintenance issue due to thermal stress. Nuclear inherently favors steady state operations due to the Xe pit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_pit) but it also requires being taken offline for long periods for maintaining, refurbishing, and or refueling.

chickenbig
0 replies
35m

Pure PV farms have minimal operational costs, nuclear has huge ongoing costs.

https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el... page 59 table 3.13a puts O&M for nuclear in the USA at about 12 USD/MWh plus just over 9 USD/MWh for fuel, and table 3.14 puts O&M for utility scale solar at around 6 USD/MWh or so.

As for batteries, I think a few hundred USD/kWh is a reasonable guesstimate of cost (raw LiFePO4 cells are now sub-100 USD/kWh). Backing up each hour of production of a 1GW power station would cost a few hundred million USD, plus the cost of the solar farm to charge the battery up.

24 GWh per day of battery backed solar can dump half that power over 2 hours @ 6GW

At which point the transmission becomes the limitation; the grid operator probably wants a fairly stable flow of electricity through the wires to maximise utilisation so the 6GW is not realistic, nor would moving the electricity during the day to load-adjacent storage be efficient.

Load following isn’t free for nuclear, any time you’re not operating at 100% you’re losing money.

I was responding to the point that solar panels are inherently more flexible because you can turn them off (because ...????). The same reasoning you've made about nuclear load following being uneconomical can be made about pure solar too.

Nuclear inherently favors steady state operations due to the Xe pit

Operators change the boron concentration to offset the negative change in reactivity due to Xe-135 levels. For PWRs this is not a big problem, you just have to know it is there and do the calculation for I/Xe concentrations given the power levels.

chgs
1 replies
7h52m

One larger cost you might think of with solar is land - but even in the U.K. where land isn’t exactly cheap leasing prices are about £1k an acre per year, and an acre will generate about 350MWh a year, so that’s well under 1 cent per kWh, so it’s lost in the noise.

https://www.fwi.co.uk/business/alternative-land-uses-leasing...

Retric
0 replies
4h49m

Yea and that 0.3c/kWh land cost is in the UK which is a terrible fit for nuclear.

Havoc
10 replies
1d

Think it’s meant more as a broad generalization than something that is always true.

Many physical things take pretty fixed amounts of energy. Eg heating a liter of water.

HideousKojima
6 replies
1d

Or refining aluminum, which uses something like 1.5% of all US electricity generation.

bobthepanda
3 replies
22h59m

Bahrain and UAE being big aluminum smelters is a bit surprising.

cameldrv
1 replies
21h35m

Exporting aluminum is basically exporting electricity, except aluminum is easy to ship, costs very little to store, and has an indefinite shelf life. For places with a lot of natural gas and no pipelines to export it, it’s often easier to export aluminum than liquified gas.

kragen
0 replies
21h3m

if you're burning it in aluminum-air fuel cells, it can be literally exporting electricity. right now that isn't a commercial-scale activity, but possibly it will become profitable in the coming years for places with a lot of solar power and no hvdc lines to export it

HPsquared
0 replies
22h22m

Iceland too. It takes a few workers and a lot of energy. Very sensitive to market conditions though. Peaky.

abraae
0 replies
22h57m

The Tiwai Point aluminum smelter uses 13% of New Zealand's electricity [0]

It's overseas owners are constantly playing hardball with the country over the price they pay. Feels like every year they threaten to shut the smelter down unless they get better electricity rates.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiwai_Point_Aluminium_Smelte...

nicoburns
0 replies
22h29m

Think it’s meant more as a broad generalization than something that is always true.

I think you're right, but also that the majority of the problems with the worlds economies (in the richer nations) are because of similar generalizations, and as such I think it important to rebuke them.

Having more cheap energy available is good (all else being equal), but optimising for higher energy usage is absurd.

morepork
0 replies
20h54m

Even with water heating moving to a heat pump lets you do it using less input energy because you are taking heat from the environment

bee_rider
0 replies
23h6m

The economy stopped getting better because I started taking shorter, colder showers.

pseudosavant
3 replies
23h38m

It is a curious assertion for sure, but the next wave of AI will be throttled by a few factors: chip fab capacity, water supply to cool data centers, and electricity to power the chips/servers. Look at what is happening with xAI in Memphis where they are illegally running a dozen turbine generators to power their new AI data center since they can't get enough supply off the grid.

svnt
1 replies
20h57m

It may be throttled by energy supply and water supply at a desirable site, but not by country-level energy costs and water costs, which is all this blog post is looking at.

bobthepanda
0 replies
1h33m

Depending on where you are this is a national level problem; Ireland and the Netherlands are not approving new data centers

skybrian
0 replies
18h49m

Costs are going down a lot due to algorithmic improvements. But maybe that just results in increased usage (Jevons paradox)? When there are conflicting trends, the future is pretty hard to predict.

Are any AI companies making money now? Losses can’t go on forever.

toss1
10 replies
1d3h

> That embeds so many assumptions about the economy and where GDP comes from

YUP. Of course there is a strong correlation between energy use and GDP growth; it takes more energy to produce more stuff.

But ultimately, what produces more stuff is harder to measure. To light the factories, more energy used to correlate with more light, until we swap out the incandescent/halogen lighting sources for LEDs. Then, we get more light for something like 16% of the energy usage. Or, getting to the stage of "lights-out" automation, and the same production for zero lighting energy. Same for more efficient motors, swapping ovens for inductive heating, more efficient processes, etc.

Seems that measuring GPD growth by energy consumption is like Bill Gates' famous example of saying that "measuring software progress by lines of code is like measuring progress in aircraft by the weight of the planes". Obviously, in specific cases, all things being equal, more is more, but in reality, fewer LOC and lighter airplanes generally produce more results.

jvanderbot
6 replies
1d2h

It takes more energy to produce more stuff

Energy consumption is also about using that stuff. And in rich countries like the USA, a lot of energy goes to using things or just moving people. So it's possible to build more and use less energy, even if you don't reduce the energy cost of building things. They can simply become more efficient to use and move.

In USA, 30% is just homes and commercial sector. 40% is transportation. 30% is "industry". By a sort-of inverse-amdahl's law, it's possible to get lower energy use with more throughput even if we don't make "industry" more efficient.

macspoofing
4 replies
1d2h

So it's possible to build more and use less energy, even if you don't reduce the energy cost of building things.

In principle I can imagine that being true - but that's not represented in our world, so it is an open question if you can 'build more and use less energy' in the real world.

ForHackernews
1 replies
1d2h

It's represented everywhere that efficiency counts. I haven't fact-checked it, but one source[0] claims that refinements in the design of soda cans (thinner walls, different shapes) since 1960 saves "at least 90 million kilograms of aluminum annually."

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUhisi2FBuw

toss1
0 replies
23h40m

Exactly!! There a uncountable millions of examples, and you're right, anywhere efficiency counts, which is pretty much everywhere.

rtkwe
0 replies
22h30m

It's really really not, you can see it in the data. I took GDP per capita and kg oil equivalent energy consumption per capita and in 1970 the very year the article highlights as us falling off the HA curve and representing 'lost' GDP the exact opposite happens. We begin producing way more GDP per capita using the same unit of energy.

It's basically a piece wise function if you graph it. 1960 to 1970 the GPD/energy unit ratio is largely stable then after that it begins increasing monotonically going from .69 to 7.94.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41392222

jvanderbot
0 replies
1d2h

It's also irrelevant as anything other than a limiting case. The issue is with the statement that energy use must go up to produce more GDP or that not increasing energy use means we cannot raise GDP or even that GDP is limited by a flat energy use.

USA GDP is still on basically the same exponential curve, yet energy is flat. That's the counter example. The rest is exposition.

pfdietz
0 replies
7h23m

I will note that the minimum energy needed to move people, as dictated by the laws of physics, is zero. There is no net change in average gravitational potential energy per capita, and any energy that goes into kinetic energy can in principle be recovered with arbitrarily high efficiency.

There are losses in practice, of course, to friction, air resistance, etc. but the laws of physics don't impose any lower bound on these.

kragen
0 replies
20h12m

To light the factories, more energy used to correlate with more light, until we swap out the incandescent/halogen lighting sources for LEDs

this is nonsense. lighting hasn't been a significant fraction of the energy usage of factories since they switched from being lighted by fireplaces to gaslighting. not in 02024, not in 01974, not in 01924, not in 01874

Seems that measuring [gdp] growth by energy consumption is like Bill Gates' famous example

it's true that higher efficiency is better, of course, but your comment embeds the false assumption that higher energy efficiency reduces energy use. in fact, higher energy efficiency usually increases energy use, because it increases the scope of things to which marketed energy can be economically applied more than it reduces the use of marketed energy for things it was already being used for. (this is the well-known jevons paradox mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41392248). so, even today, it turns out that the countries with the lowest gdp and lowest energy use also have the lowest energy efficiency

similarly, using high-level languages reduces the number of lines of code to implement some given functionality; but you would be completely mistaken if you used that fact to predict that the vast majority of programmers spend their time writing assembly language instead of python because python requires one twentieth of the code to do whatever. many things are done with python not just because companies writing python outcompete companies writing assembly, but also because programs that would be unprofitable to write in assembly language become profitable to write when you can write them in high-level languages!

goodpoint
0 replies
8h53m

Bill Gates' famous example of saying that "measuring software progress

Oh the irony.

Scoundreller
0 replies
1d2h

Jevons Paradox, named for the 19th- century English economist William Stanley Jevons, who noticed that as steam engines became ever more efficient, Britain’s appetite for coal increased rather than decreased.

Yet the amount of electricity we consume for light globally is roughly the same today as it was in 2010. That’s partly because of population and economic growth in the developing world. But another big reason is there on the Las Vegas Strip: Instead of merely replacing our existing bulbs with LED alternatives, we have come up with ever more extravagant uses for these ever-cheaper lights

NYT: The Paradox Holding Back the Clean Energy Revolution

https://archive.is/rb2DX

sharpshadow
10 replies
1d2h

Look at Germany the next years. We gave up coal, nuclear and now gas. Have the highest prices for energy in the world and our industry is leaving.

If we would have more energy we would get much richer and not more poor like right now.

bryanlarsen
9 replies
1d2h

The price of a commodity is equal to the highest of the lowest cost producers that can satisfy demand. Germany cannot satisfy demand with cheap renewables, so the marginal producer is expensive gas & nuclear.

German electricity is expensive because gas is expensive in Germany. Electricity will be expensive in Germany until Germany completely stops using gas shipped in via container ship.

sharpshadow
8 replies
1d1h

You got it right there Germany can’t satisfy demand with renewables and decided to cut itself of from coal and nuclear, brilliant right!?

Cherry on top some powerful player blew up Nordstream forcing Germany to buy exorbitantly expensive LNG.

Your argument to stop using LNG doesn’t work if you have many parts of industry build with gas infrastructure which can’t be replaced just like that.

derriz
3 replies
22h34m

Germany has been the biggest exporter of electricity in the world for 8 of the last 10 years[0]. It consistently generates more than it consumes. It's been this way since around 2004.

German wholesale electricity prices are relatively low by European standards - so far this year about 8th cheapest - about 13% cheaper than of France, for example[1]. This reflects the blended cost of production. Household prices are higher than average - because domestic consumption of electricity is taxed more heavily in Germany than the average in Europe.

[0] https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/electrical-energy [1] https://ember-climate.org/data-catalogue/european-wholesale-...

pyrale
0 replies
21h40m

The link you're using is from 2022, which is an outlier in terms of energy production.

The issue is that Germany exports "waste" electricity. It almost always exports cheap power, and imports at high rates. In negative price events, you will almost always see Germany in the exporter list.

For instance, today, France imported from Germany between 10:30 and 15:45, when market prices reached bottom, and exported to Germany when prices soared, including between 18h and 21h [1].

Another issue is that Germany's inability to control its power production is big enough that it can't be compensated by cross-border trades. That's what can be seen today between 18h and 21h [2], where the price spread between France and Germany became very large.

This kind of pattern has been happening all week.

[1]: https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/cross-border-electrici... [2]: https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/market-data

chickenbig
0 replies
11h44m

The ember-climate link has the qualifier

    Note that these are the prices generators receive for selling electricity on the spot market. They are not the same as the prices paid by electricity consumers, which can also include taxes, levies, network charges, subsidies, and supplier profits. They also do not account for hedging.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... shows that Germany has higher absolute prices for the consumers, which is what matters. The use of wholesale prices as a proxy for consumer prices is at best inaccurate.

Household prices are higher than average - because domestic consumption of electricity is taxed more heavily in Germany than the average in Europe.

https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/EN/Artikel/Energy/electircity-... shows 19% VAT, which is definitely a choice by the government. However even before taxes and levies Eurostat showed the price in Germany is about 0.28 EUR/MWh versus 0.22 EUR/MWh in France.

One reason Germany has been able to shift so much electricity to France is the EU Renewable Energy Directive (which excludes nuclear power but includes biomass and biofuels). Intermittent power from Germany counts against any power generated by France's nuclear power stations, helping to meet percentage consumption targets.

https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/renewable-energy/renewabl...

Nimitz14
0 replies
14h50m

I clicked on [1] and it's showing Germany's prices to be significantly higher than that of France.

kitkat_new
0 replies
22h22m

Cherry on top some powerful player blew up Nordstream forcing Germany to buy exorbitantly expensive LNG.

Germany was forced already before that, since Russia used the Gas to blackmail Germany

bryanlarsen
0 replies
1d

Only if Germany could replace all of their expensive natural gas usage with coal & nuclear would coal & nuclear be relevant.

They can't, so it isn't.

_ph_
0 replies
11h56m

The long-term plans are of course to get rid of coal and gas, as it will be the case world wide, if humanity wants to have a future.

Part of that is, that EU-wide there are increasing costs to producing CO2. Which makes power from coal and gas more expensive. This caused a strong drop in coal energy in germany in 23, as there were cheaper alternatives. This trend is expected to continue.

Gas costs saw a spike due to the war Russia started and their attempt at blackmailing Germany and consequently cutting gas delivery to Germany. Gas usage has been reduced and gas prices are roughly back to pre-war levels. But indeed, the LNG part of it is more expensive than the russian gas. On the other side, switching heating to heat pumps will reduce the overal gas consumption drastically.

Gas never bore a main load of the grid, it is mostly for supporting short time demands. This role will be important with renewables, but the overall amount of gas energy will drop

At the same time, buildup of renewables has been greatly sped up by the current government, the electricity is already generated buy almost 60% renewables.

Qwertious
0 replies
7h48m

Germany might better satisfy demand with renewables if it stopped shooting itself in the foot by blocking wind turbine locations due to NIMBYism.

specialist
9 replies
1d2h

I clocked that too.

Perhaps author is nodding towards replacing fossil fuels with electricity.

Decarbonizing steel uses a lot more energy. Ditto cement, plastics, fertilizers, HVAC, etc.

Anyone care to guess how much more energy our glorious renewable energy future perfect economy will require? 4x? 6x?

bryanlarsen
3 replies
1d2h

How about significantly less than 1x?

Fossil fuels waste most of their energy as heat. Gasoline cars are ~30% efficient, EV's are ~90%.

And heat pumps are often 200-500% efficient, unlike fossil fuel furnaces which cap out around 95%.

Transportation and heating use far more fuel than industrial uses.

specialist
2 replies
1d1h

Ya, that's Saul Griffith's prediction too. I'll defer to you both.

Tragically, I got wonksniped by Pueyo's Henry Adams Curve shout out.

TIL He's referring the Roots of Progress thesis. The mythical "stagnation" phenomonen that some "rationalists" used to obsess over.

From the hip: the mistake is measuring national vs global per capita energy use. As many, many have noted, we delegated our energy consumption by moving our mfg overseas.

Mystery solved.

Further, notice similarity between Roots of Progress' graph and https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Spoiler: Neoliberalism happened. aka globalization, austerity, supply-side economics

--

FWIW: Omitting Pueyo's tangent about the Henry Adams Curve, I found this article to be a great overview of solar PV's current position on its cost-learning-curve.

And I agree the cost of solar PV will decrease for some time. Even faster than the most optimistic projections, which has been the norm for years.

Exciting times.

I look forward to Pueyo's article explaining why price of electricity continues to rise despite decreasing production costs. Transmission? Utility monopolies? Financing?

bryanlarsen
1 replies
1d1h

why price of electricity continues to rise despite decreasing production costs.

That's economics 201. The price of a commodity is the cost of the marginal producer. So it doesn't matter how cheap some producers are, the price of a commodity is set by the most expensive producer that is meeting demand. So price of electricity won't drop until cheap producers can meet 100% of demand.

Until that happens, cheap producers enjoy outsized profits, encouraging more cheap producers to join the market.

NortySpock
0 replies
1d

Makes sense, and then you can split consumption (or production - arbitraging with a battery) into time-of-use buckets (a kWh of electricity already has different costs if you're buying during peak hours vs off-peak vs super-off-peak), or spot prices vs reserve prices. In commodities terms, I feel like it would be similar to futures and spot-price.

Those who can buy their energy in bulk and store it efficiently, or only consume when the price is lower than X, will pay a lower rate than those who cannot store energy, or who pay to have someone else store it (again, arbitrage)

tuna74
1 replies
1d1h

Another issue is that ocean water becomes very usable since it becomes so cheap to remove the salt from it. It won't be long before the most productive food producers will be in desert regions that have access to the sea (like Australia, Pakistan and Saudia Arabia).

yababa_y
0 replies
21h21m

Can’t grow much in sand, how are they going to get that much soil?

jillesvangurp
1 replies
1d2h

The classic mistake with calculations around this topic is assuming you need an equal amount of electric energy to displace the equivalent in fossil fuel. It's a broken assumption that you see popping up in a lot of places. Including reports by institutions that should know better like the IEA.

A classic example here is cars. A typical Tesla would have about 65kwh of usable battery. A gallon of fuel represents about 31 kwh. So, a 1 to 1 replacement would mean that Tesla would have about 8x less range than it actually has compared to a car with e.g. a 15 gallon tank and. pretty decent mileage of 16 miles to the gallon. Reason: a Tesla manages about 4-5 miles per kwh which amounts to about 250-300 miles range. Let's low ball that to 250. Meaning, you can drive about 8 cars more per kwh of electricity than per kwh of ICE car. Switching all road traffic to electric would mean we actually save a lot of energy. Maybe not 8x but it's going to be substantially less than what we currently consume in fuel for road traffic.

People underestimate how quickly this is going. Most commercial fleets are switching sooner rather than later. They have to, the cost savings are to large to ignore. That's most of the traffic on roads and it's not going to take decades.

Heating and cooling with heat pumps is the similar. A good heat pump that is installed properly should deliver a COP of about 4. Meaning you get 4 units of heat (or cooling) for every kwh you put in. A gas heater has a COP of slightly below 1. 1 is it's theoretical maximum. So switching industrial and domestic heating/cooling over to heat pumps is going to deliver some pretty significant savings as well. Mostly industries have barely scratched the surface on this topic. Industrial heating is mostly still based on burning gas or other fossil fuels. That's because gas used to be cheap and electricity used to be expensive.

Now that that cost has flipped around, companies are slow to adapt. But eventually some companies will start figuring this out and once they do it might save them a lot of money and make them a lot more competitive. And all that is before you consider using cheap off peak electricity when wholesale energy prices occasionally go negative!

4x-5x overall more electricity usage sounds about right. I expect it to be more because as energy keeps on getting cheaper we'll keep on finding new uses for it as energy prices keep on dropping. Assuming everything stays the same is not a great way to make predictions about the future. Things rarely do. But it's not that unreasonable to assume a 5x increase to happen over the next few decades. But it will cost us a lot less than our current energy spending. If we keep on going at the pace we are currently going we'll get there easily. And there are good reasons to expect things to speed up actually.

Solar cost will keep on shrinking. Especially in the US there is a lot of potential for improvements. That's because cost is currently inflated due to a combination of import tariffs and asinine regulations that mean installation cost is insanely high compared to other countries. Some of that regulation is courtesy of fossil fuel companies lobbying for this. But both are fixable problems. And more importantly, both are non technical problems. Meaning that international competition between countries (and domestically between states) will force the issue ultimately.

pfdietz
0 replies
23h32m

Heat pumps save gas even if the electricity is being produced in gas-fired power plants.

kragen
0 replies
19h39m

well, given that the solar luminosity is 3.8 × 10²⁶ watts, the milky way galaxy contains about 2 × 10¹¹ stars, of which ¾ are red dwarfs and so about 5 × 10¹⁰ are sunlike stars, probably our glorious renewable energy future perfect economy will use about 2 × 10³⁵ watts. current world marketed energy consumption is about 19 terawatts (1.9 × 10¹³ watts) so that's about 10²²× more than at present, not 4× or 6×

unless the humans die out as yet another sad single-planet species

empiricus
9 replies
22h16m

You need energy to make things. Houses, roads, cars, food, many services. Basically without energy you are poor. Having energy is not enough, but it is necessary to be rich.

hinkley
3 replies
21h55m

But sometime in the 90’s if not sooner a lot of us started valuing items that had a lower embodied energy as a ratio of the usefulness of the product.

We want things that are the same but less intense, or that are much better at a fractional increase in input.

And we really need it if we want a planet worth living on fifty years from now. So to ignore this desire is dangerous.

tmnvix
1 replies
21h17m

A lot of us, maybe. But my impression is that a lot of us also choose to consume more stuff more frequently (larger vehicles and homes, less durable items replaced more frequently, etc). I would not be surprised to learn that our direct energy use - such as vehicle fuel and electricity for heating - has increased with longer commutes and larger homes.

Compared to just 50 years ago, I would say that our lifestyles are on average vastly more consumptive, despite being more environmentally aware. We seem unwilling to make the sacrifices that really matter.

I think that some time in the future, our time will be seen as one of massive entitlement. As technology makes things possible, we feel entitled to make use of it if we can afford it. How many people in the 50's were using trucks to drag boats and horse floats around in the suburbs? These are the kind of reasons people will give for their consumption. e.g. "this is the lifestyle I want, it's possible, and why am I not entitled to it if I can afford to pay for it?" (in the financial sense only of course).

GardenLetter27
0 replies
10h25m

Higher consumption = higher standard of living.

We have nuclear power (and soon nuclear fusion) - we can completely decouple energy production from environmental damage.

And trying to force degrowth on populations just makes matters worse, as their economy collapses (Europe), or they resort to even worse forms of energy production like deforestation and wood burning (Sub-Saharan Africa and remote South America).

GardenLetter27
0 replies
10h25m

And we really need it if we want a planet worth living on fifty years from now. So to ignore this desire is dangerous.

We just need to use nuclear power.

morepork
2 replies
20h49m

Having more things certainly is good for GDP. But I don't know about you, but I'm pretty saturated on things already, with a bunch of stuff that I've purchased and barely use.

Perhaps this comes down to a quality of life vs GDP per capita not being identical. While I could use more energy to consume more, I don't have a very strong desire to go much above my current level of consumption.

But outside of the wealthy there is still huge latent demand for energy and what comes with it.

empiricus
1 replies
12h13m

But does your city have beautiful things? Do people try to create new amazing places? Does your city have working underground transportation? High speed trains? Japanese gardens everywhere? You need an excess of energy for these to be possible.

chgs
0 replies
7h45m

You need an excess of energy to build a car centric city as it uses far more energy to shift a million people by car than by underground transport or high speed train

Not sure how much energy a garden can use, could you elaborate?

rtkwe
0 replies
3h8m

Sure but that amount is not monotonically increasing.. We figure out new ways to make the same thing with less energy or new things that require less energy to make relative to their value.

I did the rough math [0] and we get 10x as much GDP out of each kg oil equivalent used as we did in the 1970s when the article bemoans us falling off the HA curve. That was one of my core problems with their point, the amount of energy used is not directly tied to the economic value of the output.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rtkwe#41391812

emporas
0 replies
6h24m

Energy is necessary, but the better the intelligence applied to any problem, the less energy is required.

I was wondering if there was any way to bring 10.000 Einsteins online. Einsteins who know all about physics, programming, math and so on, cranking up ideas days and night. If the Einsteins never sleep, that would be ideal.

macspoofing
6 replies
1d3h

I'm having a hard time getting past the assumption in the article that energy use is tied directly to GDP per capita

Why? They are correlated and so are reasonable metric to gauge progress when starting from a subsistence economy (as all economies in the world began). At some point, this may be less true when you hit a energy generation ceiling and you start 'optimizing' and trying to do more with the same amount .. but again, we're not there yet so it's a good metric today, and especially for developing economies.

Put another way, you show me GDP per capita or per capita Energy use and I can get a reasonable ballpark for the other as well as a measure for the wealth of that nation.

Mistletoe
3 replies
1d2h

This always makes me uncomfortable though. How would we tell the difference between rampant scamming and fudging numbers and an economy where we all pass around Monopoly money to do services for one another? I pay you to mow my lawn and you pay me to mow your lawn. Are we creating GDP?

sobellian
1 replies
1d1h

I'm not sure goods are quite immune from this objection. Industry turns out plenty of useless widgets. The Humane AI pin creates GDP!

rtkwe
0 replies
1d

Very true and you quickly get into a very command economy style argument about what should be produced. Ultimately we have the system we have and wasted or scammy products generally eventually die. Look at things like NFTs they were an extremely brief blip it turns out because people quickly saturated the ability of crypto early adopters to inflate values with their funny money. Some scams last longer like Thomas Kincade 'paintings' but trying to sort through the economic data to throw those out is just not possible.

lotsofpulp
0 replies
1d1h

How would we tell the difference between rampant scamming and fudging numbers and an economy where we all pass around Monopoly money to do services for one another?

It will show up as decrease in exports because other countries (or societies or tribes or whatever you want to call them) will want less of what your country is selling.

Which then shows up as decreasing purchasing power for things that you do want from other countries (i.e. you getting poorer).

Luckily for the US, that does not seem to be the case given the resilience of the purchasing power of the USD.

rtkwe
0 replies
1d2h

The range is so wide though. Look at a particular narrow band of the GDP per capita and see how wide the energy consumption per capita is for even a very narrow slice of GDP per capita. The dispersion gets even wider as you get up towards the high end of the GDP axis.

The author asserts that we should see 5x GDP/c if we had 5x power usage per person and their own graph shows that that's not the case because it's a flawed assumption that ignores increases in efficiency and transitions away from energy intensive manufacturing to service based.

The best evidence for that is that the GDP/c didn't fall off when we fell off the HA curve. In fact I took the GDP per capita and Energy consumption per capita data from world data bank and the ratio between the per capita GDP vs the per capita energy consumption has been going up steadily since we stopped following the HA curve.

Between 1960 and 1970 the ratio between GDP and Energy Consumption per capita was essentially static at .74 then after 1970 the ratio begins to increase showing we're producing more per unit of consumed energy at a nearly linear rate. By 2014 which is the last year they had the Electric power per capita data the ratio was all the way up to 4.2. Eyeballing it the relationship is almost perfectly linear each year we get a little better at producing GDP for each kWh we consume.

I even redid the calculation based on raw energy use in kg oil equivalents and it gets even more drastic. 1960 to 1970 it goes from .53 to .69 GDP/kg oil equivalent [0]. Then after 1970 the rate increases quite distinctly going from .69 to 1.58 in 1980, 3.11 in 1990, 4.5 in 2000, and 6.79 in 2010.

It's pretty clear from the data that we're getting better at producing things with the same amount of energy. It's an assumption that simply making more power would increase the amount of things made.

Electricity use per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...

Energy use per capita in Kg oil equivalents: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE?locat...

GDP per capita in current USD: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

[0] nice.

llsf
5 replies
18h35m

Energy is the fuel for machines. And machines build more and faster than humans. To increase productivity, we need more machines, and so more energy.

If energy was 10 times cheaper than currently and still available (no shortage) then we would automate more tasks and increase the global productivity. We could mine more, build more, to train/run more LLMs.

GDP is tied to energy price and availability. It is likely the main reason why US enjoyed a growing economy thanks to its free oil reserves (and the reason why Texas alone is the 8th economy in the world). Now one could argue that after pumping oil for a century now, it might not be as cheap or plentiful to extract in the future, and we better be prepared for it.

It is all about energy. No energy, and we will reduce to human/manual or animal (bring back the horses!) labor. Productivity will decrease significantly.

One issue I have with the paper, is that it equates energy and electricity. My favorite chart about US energy: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...

shows that in 2022, electricity was just 13.3 Quads of the 76.07 Quads of the energy consumed in US by residential, commercial, industrial and transportation. So unless US "electrify" the whole economy having more electricity would only help a small part of the economy.

zamadatix
2 replies
17h36m

Energy is the fuel for machines. And machines build more and faster than humans

Sure.

To increase productivity, we need more machines,

That is just one way to increase productivity. You can also make more efficient machines, come up with more efficient production processes, find alternatives to existing products that are more useful for a given task per quantity, and similar kinds of concepts. This is the point GP was making (there are more ways production changes than increasing energy used), not that energy is completely unrelated to production as a whole.

MostlyStable
1 replies
3h31m

At any given efficiency, more energy means more productivity (in the same way: at any given amount of energy production, more efficiency means more productivity). Yes, we should be increasing efficiency where reasonable, but we should also be increasing energy production.

There is a reason that the Kardashev scale is about energy utilization.

llsf
0 replies
27m

Correct, we can innovate and make the "transformer" (i.e. machines) more efficient (i.e. use less energy for same output). But the thing is, if energy was cheaper and more available we would just produce more.

The reason why now we most enjoy some time off (weekend, vacation, retirement) is thank to the machines that can produce more with less humans. Now humans mostly drive the machines.

I guess the ultimate extreme evolution would be machine driving machines, so humans could be out of the loop, except for the initial input goal. And machine would extract/mine/recycle, transform, transport, deliver everything we ever need. It would be one big machine (with lots of energy) extracting (and hopefully recycling) earth elements to satisfy humans.

ZeroGravitas
1 replies
10h52m

Given that electrification would help the 67.3 Quads of energy wasted, primarily by fossil fuel systems, that your diagram shows, not electrifying would be incredibly dumb.

A graph of major economies percentage of electricity in final energy:

https://preview.redd.it/china-is-electrifying-far-faster-tha...

llsf
0 replies
7m

I agree that huge benefits would come from electrification of residential and commercial (e.g. heat pump, induction stove, etc.), industrial (starting with the dozen of blast furnaces in US), and transportation (e.g. trains, trucks... more technologically difficult for ships and planes).

Electric "transformers" (aka machines) are more efficient in general than their fossil fuel counterparts (less heat).

Electrification (with matching electricity production) is a matter of national security. If/when fossil fuel would become either more scarce or more expensive (or both), all hell will break loose. There would be conflicts and chaos.

China is planning for long term, and putting resources in to it.

Unfortunately, the US democracy is not suitable for long term planning (while politicians can have very long terms, they are always busy planning for their re-election, not planning long term for the country). Who would have the fortitude to plan for a 10, 20, 50 years time horizon ?

US should plan for electrification (production + grid) and give a strong signal to the industry so the industry can plan ahead (e.g. GE,etc. can prepare production from gas stove to electric stoves, car manufacturers and dealers to electric vehicles, logistic companies to be ready to use electric trucks and trains, etc.), and no flip-flopping signals like we get now. The industry needs to feel confident that their investments would hold decades from now.

All this would takes years, and cost a lot. And the benefits would only be visible decades from now (no incentive for politicians). But at the time, any nation still dependent on fossil fuel, would be crushed.

jvanderbot
5 replies
1d2h

Yes this confuses me too. In developed countries a huge amount of energy goes to using things, not just making them. Let alone efficiency gains from production.

This is possibly why energy use has flattened while GDP clips along at its normal exponential curve - we're also more efficient.

hadlock
4 replies
1d

Lighting going from 1% efficient (99% of the energy used by a traditional tungsten lightbulb is waste heat) to over 95% efficient (in many cases 99% efficient). Computers went from 200-400w continuous down to about 15w continuous. Lighting alone is responsible for a huge amount of energy drop-off.

obscurette
3 replies
23h15m

Sorry, but these numbers are not accurate. Luminous efficiency of tungsten lightbulbs is typically around 1-3% (depends on voltage and power), and luminous efficiency of LED bulbs is around 10-30%. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficacy)

Iulioh
2 replies
20h42m

You forgot the part when we used 100W bulbs and now we use 10W led lights.

Efficency in the use of energy ti generate the same amount of lumens, because it would be REALLY fun to have a 100W led lamp in my bathroom mirror (my parents still have 2 of these traditional lights ).

I mean...energy conversion to lumen is fine but i think it's a little pedantic

MarkusQ
1 replies
2h51m

GP didn't "forget" it; that 10x improvement in efficiency is the reason we can use 10W bulbs to do the job that used to require a 100W bulb. Looking at energy conversion to lumens isn't "pedantic," it's "correct".

Iulioh
0 replies
1h11m

You can be correct and pedantic at the same time, like in this case.

rconti
4 replies
1d3h

Yeah, I had to re-read it 3 times to understand why the article was saying that was a _bad_ thing. Now I understand what he's saying but I'm pretty lost because it assumes a set of priors I simply never had.

rtkwe
3 replies
1d3h

Even the graph that I think is supposed to support the assertion by gesturing towards a link between GDP/c and energy consumption/c shows there's a huge range of per capita energy consumption for countries in the same GDP per capita band hidden because the graph uses dual logarithmic axes.

It's always a little hard to read logarithmic values other than those explicitly labelled but it looks like up to a 5-7x difference in energy consumption can have basically no effect on the GDP per capita!

the8472
2 replies
23h9m

I don't think the range matters so much as the floor. The huge blank in the lower-right corner. No such thing as a rich, energy-poor country.

rtkwe
1 replies
22h35m

The articles argument is about the US moving inside the range band we see though not about the US having a 100 fold reduction in the power generated that would be required to drop us into the lower right.

I did the math on the data elsewhere in this thread [0] and in an outcome that should surprise no one there's a transition around 1970 where the ratio between power used and gdp created per capita changes drastically, in 1970 we produced .69 units of GDP per unit of energy and in 2014 we were producing 7.94 using inflation adjusted dollars and oil kg equivalent per capita. We just moved into a different type of economy and there's no data in the graph or article to back up the assertion that falling off the HA curve and consuming ~5x less power per capita our GDP is somehow 5x smaller.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41392222

the8472
0 replies
1h4m

There's some wiggle room, but if you want another OOM of advancement then it appears that you also need to move an OOM up, unless you started out at the upper end of the band. And even then the next one would definitely need more.

Of course this only tells us about the current state of things, but there are lots of things that would seem ludicrous today that would be feasible if we had a lot more cheap energy. Mass desalation, carbon drawdown, synthetic fuels, electric arc furnaces etc. will all needs loads of energy.

The signum is wrong. In the long term you want it to be one, not zero.

pfdietz
2 replies
19h2m

Smil was wildly wrong about the trajectory of PV improvement. In his defense, so was almost everyone else.

I found the following comment about Smil:

"There is a way how to evaluate the quality of prophets, seers and visionaries. Find their 5,10,15 years old predictions. I own the Smil’s book: Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate (2010). So have a look how good prophet he was 10 years in advance and focus on photovoltaics (I own Czech translation of the book, so I need to re-translate his text back to English, I hope I will not skew his ideas too much):

* To get 1 PWh/year of electricity you need to install about 450 GW worth of solar panels. You need dozens of years to acomplish such task. Reality check: 3 years in current speed, in the future probably faster.

* The cost of PV panels fell from 5 USD/W in 2000 to 4.5 USD/W in 2009. He don’t see much perspective of price plummeting as predicted f.e. by Al Gore (who cited the learning curve, Smil counted with 0.05 USD/W in 2020) or by PV industry (1.5 USD/W in 2020). Smil predicted that PV panels would be 25% cheaper in 2020 and 50% in 2030. Reality check: Current price of PV panels is ~0.2 W/USD. While Smil wrote the book manufacturers finally scaled their production of polysilicone and PV cells to cover the demand. Competition among them set the cost of PV panel on the freefall trajectory. PV panels cost less than he predicted for 2030 in 2011.

How credible are such visionaries?"

I will add that in 2023, 447 GW of PV was installed globally. So, we're at the point where Smil's "dozens of years" is being done each and every year.

agurk
0 replies
9h4m

I'm somewhat confused with the analysis of his predictions of the price of PV panels.

Is it saying Smil said (is that meant to be countered with?) PV would cost 0.05 USD/W in 2020? Or was that meant to be Al Gore claiming that price? It seems it can't be his predicted reduction as he said 25% less, so did he want to say that is would be 3.38 USD/W in 2020 (75% of the 2009 price)?

And the current cost - 0.2W/USD is 5 USD a Watt - are the units reversed there? A quick google shows a variety of prices, with nothing being 20 cents a Watt [0] - $0.5-1.50 for the less efficient thin film types quoted here. All seem quite a bit cheaper than $4.5 a watt though.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/solar/cost-of-solar-...

ZeroGravitas
0 replies
10h31m

It's hard to tell if Smil is a grumpy old academic who's been catapulted to fame because his cranky opinions happened to line up with some political faction (like Jordan Peterson) or if he's been fundamentally warped by the money and attention available to those who take certain positions (like a slightly later Jordan Peterson).

His doomerism and degrowth perspective points to the early JP, writing articles mocking Obama for lack of progress with EVs points to the latter.

Either way he managed to convince Bill Gates to massively misinvest in climate solutions and while doing so loudly bad mouth all the actual solutions so that alone is a massive net negative for humanity (and, more parochially, for the USA, which is super ironic given his anti-communist stance--another weird JP parallel--as he's been super helpful to the Chinese by letting them solve all the problems he claimed were inpossible and dissuaded US companies from investing in).

kragen
0 replies
20h20m

thank you! this looks highly relevant to my interests

ZeroGravitas
1 replies
1d2h

It also neatly corresponds with the mass rollout of nuclear power so it's possible it's just the classic measurement issue of "primary energy" vs "useful energy", sometimes called the primary energy fallacy, which makes fossil fuel based systems appear 4x (or probably more going back in time) better than they actually are.

ZeroGravitas
0 replies
1d2h

I tried to track this down, found some blogs by the originator, but it only gets more confusing:

https://wimflyc.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-henry-adams-curve-c...

Henry Adams points out that over 60 years you got 3-4x more power from a ton of coal. That combined with the extra coal dug up, he claims, doubled usable energy every ten years.

But then the modern graph simply shows the coal energy, with (as far as I can tell) no attempt to account for the extra efficiency, even though the modern author of the graph makes explicit reference to the increasing efficiency of steam engines.

pfdietz
0 replies
21h20m

It's a confusion of cause and effect, classic cargo cult thinking.

neolefty
0 replies
3h15m

Exactly I'm having a hard time getting past the assumption in the article that energy use is tied directly to GDP per capita and that by not following the 7% growth of the Henry Adams Curve

Yes, this was a central simplifying fallacy in the article for me too.

Plenty of phenomena follow a logistic curve [1] — which starts out exponential but then flattens out when it reaches constraints or fills a niche or fully satisfies a need or something.

The initial exponential growth may have been a period where economic productivity was constrained in a major by energy availability. We still have some energy constraints, but they seem to be secondary — and in many areas energy requirements have fallen, as others have pointed out in this discussion. It's too complicated to simply flatten, but modern energy use does seem to broadly resemble a logistic curve.

---

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

kragen
0 replies
23h24m

presumably what's going to happen is that, as energy becomes dramatically cheaper, production will shift from less-energy-intensive processes toward more-energy-intensive processes. this is likely to happen at many levels: between different routes for producing the same good (for example, pidgeon vs. dow process), between alternative goods (for example, aluminum vs. steel), between subsectors (for example, heavy industry vs. high-precision manufacturing), and across sectors (for example, manufacturing vs. services)

so, with the advent of innovations that dramatically drop the cost of energy, we should expect to see energy use grow faster than gdp. that's decoupling but in the opposite direction from the decoupling you're talking about, which has been driven by the 01973–02023 energy crisis

acchow
0 replies
21h29m

the decoupling seems more likely to be from the transition from manufacturing and other energy heavy sectors to more services based economic activity

Put another way, instead of producing the products we consume, we offshore production (and the associated energy consumption)

anonfordays
55 replies
1d1h

Soon (if not already) the largest costs associated with solar installations will be the labor. It's expensive to get people on roofs and electricians to reconfigure panels, install transfer switches, etc. The equipment could be free and it would still cost thousands for the skilled trades to install.

nostrademons
15 replies
1d

This is one of the forces driving the shift from rooftop solar to utility-scale installations. A residential installation needs guys up on a roof to install the panels, and then custom wiring for each house. A solar farm can use robots to install tens of thousands of panels cheaply.

There are unfortunate side effects to this, even besides the attacks on net metering that have cut financial returns for existing solar customers. Distributed generation is more resilient. With a battery, you can keep your electricity during a power outage. Outages themselves are more isolated - with a VPP individual neighborhoods could keep power, while if a transmission line to a major solar farm goes down, a whole city could lose power. Large solar farms would be huge targets for warfare or sabotage, and wouldn't last very long at all. Transmission lines to them are vulnerable to natural disasters. Economically, large utilities have more market power and can capture their regulators, leading to higher prices and poor service for consumers.

But the economic benefits of scale make it harder to justify putting panels on each individual home, when the same generation capacity can be built much cheaper at a solar farm.

pfdietz
10 replies
23h30m

The attack on net metering isn't unfortunate; what's unfortunate is that people thought net metering ever made any sense. It's free riding on services provided by the grid, forcing others (who don't have PV) to pay for cost of providing those services. As PV rolled out, the craziness of net metering became impossible to ignore. Of course, those feeding at this trough objected loudly, and some naively fell for those objections.

bee_rider
8 replies
22h56m

It would be nice if this cost was actually all broken out; the grid operator should charge for connectivity, the various energy providers should charge for the energy itself.

Net metering could still make sense; your residential solar installation might make enough to cover the gap.

floatrock
4 replies
5h50m

This is exactly what happened in California recently with Net Metering 3.0 -- the utilities cut the value of the electrons you export back onto the grid, and they even broke that value out into a supply chunk and a transmission & distribution (which effectively cuts the total export value even more because they argued that the marginal electron is worth a tiny amount as far as the t&d line items go).

What's happening in California is new rooftop solar doesn't pencil out unless you pair it with batteries (ie you self-consume all your excess), and even then it gets iffy.

There's also the trend where operators charge fixed costs for connectivity. So even if you self-consume everything, you still pay $15-$50/mo just for the connection. That gets trickier because it punishes low-usage users like apartment dwellers and small households because that looks the same as a solar house that self-consumes most of their electricity.

pfdietz
2 replies
5h10m

What is needed is charging not just for a connection, but for connection of a certain maximum dependable capacity. This would be best be coupled with some ability to force limitation on the instantaneous consumption, a kind of demand dispatch.

floatrock
0 replies
3h29m

oh, don't worry, there are tons of incentive structures like this already out there. It's sophisticated energy management, though, so it's only in the Commercial & Industrial world (for now)

In C&I land, you have things like demand charges (billing by your max kW, not just kWh), demand-eligibility tiers (your electric arc-furnace plant is going to have very different charges than your warehouse), and even fun things like many flavors of demand ratchets (you have a fixed charge based on your maximum kW in last 3, 6, 12 months, or your maximum kW during the most grid-strained periods last year, or a million other variations).

C&I billing gets very creative.

Some utilities are even today experimenting with demand charges in the Resi space (don't run your dryer while charging your EV!)

bee_rider
0 replies
3h35m

That’s an interesting idea, because it matches the physics of the situation pretty well; on-demand capacity costs the grid something just to have it (batteries, or whatever), so it would be good to make that price visible to users and let them decide if they need it.

It might also push people more toward smart-grid tech, which is a desirable outcome. You might pick a dishwasher that can actually help shave the peak, if it saves you money.

spockz
0 replies
1h39m

This is how it has been before net metering in NL. You are charged by size of the connection: How many A you can consume. Then there is a separate tariff for the transport costs (fixed per day) and then the costs per kWh. With net metering the transport/connection costs stayed. Currently kWh is about €0.28.

DavidPeiffer
1 replies
21h49m

I'm sure it varies by locality, but if I look at my electric bill, I see charges for energy, transmission, and maintaining a connection to the grid. Transmission and generation are variable, connection is fixed.

I doubt the $8.50/month is the "right" charge for maintaining a grid connection, but it's what MidAmerican Energy has gotten approved in Iowa. Presumably their charges for transmission and energy cover everything adequately.

pfdietz
0 replies
5h49m

It's not just maintaining a connection to the grid, it's maintaining the generating assets on the grid that you sometimes use.

MichaelNolan
0 replies
19h1m

That’s how it is in Texas. The company that owns the power lines to your house is unrelated from the company you buy the electricity from. (The latter of which you have dozens of options to pick from)

mercutio2
0 replies
23h14m

I think it's reasonable to subsidize adoption of early-stage technology that's promising but doesn't pencil out yet, to kick-start the learning curve. Thanks largely to Germany for doing the lion's share of the early subsidies with solar!

But you're of course correct that this is a giant subsidy, and unfortunately it was funded by other rate payers rather than a central government, which was a nutty system from the beginning.

ziga
0 replies
23h13m

We need all the renewables we can get, and I think you can have both -- utility-scale and rooftop. Rooftop solar (and battery storage) just needs to be cost efficient to offset the rising cost of electricity and make it a good return on investment.

The "attacks on net metering" are merely acknowledging that the proportion of renewables on the grid is high enough that balancing grid supply and demand is becoming an issue. I'm a big proponent of rooftop solar, but the reality is that 1:1 net metering just doesn't make sense once there's a critical mass of solar installed (the duck curve problem). This is not a problem unique to California or the US. If you look at other places with high solar adoption (Australia, EU), you'll find even stricter policies like negative feed-in tariffs: the utility will charge you for exporting solar to the grid.

Battery storage is a solution to that problem, but that's where prices are still too high. I'm actually surprised that battery storage is not mentioned in the article, because that's a critical component of allowing solar/wind to grow further.

martinald
0 replies
6h12m

I think it's worse than that, for rooftop solar you have an enormous amount of sales and marketing expense baked in, plus you have homeowners which don't have enough experience to know what a good price/good install looks like. Much less of that with bigger systems.

The other major problem is the grid is not setup at all for consumers to also be generators. At least in the UK it is rare/not possible for the DNO to send power back from a neighbourhood to the grid (at least not without a total remodel of the local grid infrastructure).

So we are now hitting problems where solar is not allowed to be connected to the DNO if you have streets with a lot of solar on, because at some point the generation from the houses on the areas local transmission outstrips the demand in summer, and in that case you have too much power and nowhere for it to go (the excess cannot be sent back to the high voltage grid). The DNO cannot turn off individual solar generators easily (and even if they could, do they trust a load of chinese inverters to work reliably remotely?)

I think the key problem with solar/renewables is not undersupply in winter in northern climates (though that is a big one for true net zero) it is oversupply in the summer. It's already causing massive issues in Europe with long spells of negative pricing. Interconnectors don't really help with this because when it is sunny (and potentially windy) in one place in Europe it tends to be similar elsewhere, so everyone has too much power.

This is before the UK adds another huge amount of solar and wind in pipeline by 2030.

Note this comment only applies to northern climates. It's far less of an issue further south because AC load tends to follow solar production much more, but that is far less common in the UK.

m463
0 replies
14h10m

A solar farm can use robots to install tens of thousands of panels cheaply.

Doesn't matter if it doesn't bring down the cost of electricity. For example in california PG&E will still charge a substantial "delivery fee".

_ph_
0 replies
11h51m

Yes, roof-top installation is expensive, but if you combine it with other maintenance of the roof, it gets very cheap. And any new roof should have it planned in with the setup.

Also, here the northern latitude helps, in Germany people start putting solar panels on walls and fences. There is plenty of cheap space and the efficiency isn't too bad considering the cheap panel costs.

BobaFloutist
9 replies
1d1h

I wonder to what extent we can make it unskilled, at least for a building with modern wiring. Plug-and-play solar panels and batteries sound scary, but not necessarily impossible to do safely.

wongarsu
3 replies
1d

Anything involving roofs is difficult to do unskilled (at scale). You are working at height, potentially on a sloped surface, and have to worry about keeping the roof water tight.

But if you put the panels basically anywhere else it becomes a lot more viable. Some houses come with a plug to connect your generator, you can do something similar to plug in your inverter. Then you can later decide to put up a solar fence or put solar panels on the balcony or whatever strikes your fancy

jeffbee
2 replies
1d

Why not just prefab a frame with the panels mounted and hang it on the point of the roof with a crane? Working on the roof can be eliminated or minimized.

ssl-3
0 replies
1d

Even if it works, that just trades some of the working-on-a-roof trade skills for (much more expensive) crane operator and rigging skills, while also adding the expense of the crane itself.

happyopossum
0 replies
1d

Wind. Panels and their support need to be anchored to the roof, lest they become flying solar panels.

red_trumpet
3 replies
1d

Plug-and-play solar panels [...] sound scary

But they already exist and are pretty popular in Germany to put on your balcony.

Diederich
2 replies
1d

Neat, do you have a quick reference handy? Thanks!

Diederich
0 replies
22h30m

This is outstanding, thank you.

dzhiurgis
0 replies
13h22m

It's pretty high voltage (500V DC) - you start to get arcing at this voltage.

mapt
7 replies
1d

This has been the case for years now for pitched residential roofs - they stopped being competitive a long time ago.

Thankfully, the impetus for residential roof solar was always more ideological than practical. There's plenty, PLENTY, of empty unused land within a 95% transmission efficiency (hundreds or even thousands of kilometers depending on tech) of the end user, for all non-island cases.

rconti
2 replies
1d

Yeah. When we bought our solar system, even knowing it was grid-tied, it felt like we'd somehow be generating our own power.

As soon as we had it, and I looked at the tiering, time-of-use, etc, and I realized it's all an arbitrage game. I'm selling my roof space and fixed asset back to the power company, and buying power from them.

ghaff
1 replies
23h38m

If solar could reasonably double for me as a way of weathering a several day power outage in the winter, it would be more interesting. But I'm deeply suspicious of anything that has people out in front of Home Depot hard-selling something that often has complex financing schemes. I don't have huge power bills relative to lots of other home costs. So I'll pass.

mapt
0 replies
3h27m

DIY doesn't come with those asterisks, and DIY with only-thermal power use & energy storage is on the simple side of things. "Help me heat in the winter" is basically the simplest use-case, because you can accomplish it with a south-facing solar fence and some resistors [or an inverter + space heater, or whatever].

Personally I like the idea of a three-season thermal mass store, a big tank of water or pile of sand that you dump heat into when it's sunny, and extract it at will the rest of the day/week.

matharmin
1 replies
1d

That depends on where you live. In my area, labor is cheap and the costs of panels, batteries and inverters came down significantly over the last 5 years. You can now break even on electricity costs for a residential pitched-roof installation in under 5 years. This is without any subsidies, without selling anything back to the grid.

Utility-scale solar installations also make a lot of sense, but around here transmission capacity for that is still a massive issue. You can install more transmission capacity, but it's not cheap.

mapt
0 replies
3h34m

You can now break even on electricity costs for a residential pitched-roof installation in under 5 years. This is without any subsidies, without selling anything back to the grid.

This is arguably a false economy.

~75% of costs for the power grid are not in volume electricity generation, but in maintenance. They haven't priced it that way in most places to encourage power-saving and reduce the need for new infrastructure construction, but they'll be forced to if every roof sprouts solar cells.

If volume electricity generation is the concern, doing it in a field is dramatically cheaper than doing it on a roof.

Teever
1 replies
19h27m

I'd like to see the roofs of big box stores and their parking lots covered in solar panels. It would keep cars a lot cooler and would enable very efficient charging stations to be located in the parking lot.

mapt
0 replies
3h31m

A good number of the roofs already are. While more expensive than working in a field, it's way cheaper/safer than working on a tiny residential roof.

Parking lots are tougher, but I saw the first one this year.

datacruncher01
7 replies
1d1h

I think eventually the hardware will be so cheap it'll make more sense to use them as solar fences. Reduce the cost to install and maintain by 3-4x easily. Or DIY for practically nothing.

marssaxman
2 replies
1d

There's an apartment building here in Seattle which has solar panels mounted flat on its west-facing wall (602 12th Ave). The panels were apparently cheap enough that they did not care about maximizing daylight exposure and simply installed them in the easiest place. Quite a change this is from what I remember when I had solar panels installed on my roof eleven years ago!

mercutio2
1 replies
23h12m

West-facing is pretty close to revenue maximizing, with current consumption peaks in the early evening.

m463
0 replies
14h8m

I remember asking a friend who understood solar what angle was best to capture the most energy. He told me "you don't aim for the sun, you aim for PG&E"

gniv
0 replies
13h58m

This is fantastic! Somehow I hadn't heard about vertically mounted solar panels until now but it sounds great. There are so many advantages to vertical mounts I would expect them to become the norm.

pests
0 replies
1d

There is research coming out that vertical solar panels are more efficient. I think part of it comes from lower temps allowing for more efficient operating. No tracking or pointing required. Less cleaning as its not a flat surface for dust or fall impacts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AVO1IyfA9M

edit: I see others have linked similar videos, all good sources on this topic.

throwup238
2 replies
1d

That's already the case, even with commercial solar. There's a startup called Erthos [1] that has figured out that it's cheaper to just throw the panels on the ground, saving the labor and material cost for the supports. There was an HN thread on it a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33926683

[1] https://erthos.com/

jtbayly
1 replies
1d

This and the parent comment are all addressed in the article.

throwup238
0 replies
14h48m

To be fair, no one’s ever accused me of reading the articles before commenting :-)

hiAndrewQuinn
2 replies
1d

What if I just bought a field and laid them on the ground, over some plastic or something? Sure, I might be giving up some efficiency gains by not swiveling towards the sunlight or something, but I have to imagine there's a "plug and play" option possible here.

ibeff
0 replies
8h4m

I wish JUST ONE PERSON in the comments would read the gosh darn article.

jeffbee
1 replies
1d

Residential solar costs in the USA are already 50% sales and marketing, and most of the other half is labor.

jandrese
0 replies
21h25m

That and banking enough to cover the warranty for the next 30 years. Lots of early solar systems had reliability issues, especially the inverters, that make them expensive to maintain.

m463
0 replies
14h12m

I think it's more important to lower roadblocks as opposed to costs for solar.

It seems australia removed a lot of roadblocks and solar is very popular.

kragen
0 replies
23h8m

this is the main topic of the article; it describes where those costs come from and how they are being reduced

flakeoil
0 replies
8h30m

Correct. And also the non-solar panel material. For example the aluminium support they use between the roof and the solar panels costs the same or more than the actual solar panels. When I asked for an offer two years ago the price of the solar panels was about 25% of the total cost.

The aluminium frame was 25%, labor 30% and putting up the scaffold 20%.

I hope thin film solar panels integrated in the actual roof material will become more common going forward as it removes the need for an aluminium frame, you get a new fresh roof, it's lighter, no holes are drilled in the roof etc.

DaoVeles
0 replies
17h17m

Pretty much. There will be a bottom limit on the price of the panels, simply due to the logistics of moving materials, I mean there is a price of salt per ton that is almost entirely this.

But everything else around solar such as inverters, cables, framing, labor, battery storage is where a large part of the cost now. Innovations in those areas will probably yield better cost reductions than the panels will nowadays. That is just wild to see!

tails4e
32 replies
23h0m

The price to get solar installed in the US is insanely high compared to the cost of the materials. I've seen my extended family get quotes north of 40k for modest installs. I got a modest system with batter for around 9k in the EU, and id say I'd install the same for under 5k at today's prices.

spywaregorilla
14 replies
22h47m

11k for my house in MA net of a few thousand in subsidies last year.

I don't think I really believe your quote of 40k. Does that even break even on energy bill savings?

lacksconfidence
4 replies
19h18m

It's very real. I was recently quoted 30k-43k for 7kw of panels, 13.5kwh of battery, along with reworking some electrical panels. The one coming in at the top of the range were baking in a ton of profit and willing to negotiate down once shown the other quotes. In the end i completely passed, it just doesn't make sense to pay 30k to avoid 3k a year in electric bills.

spywaregorilla
3 replies
19h12m

Well, a battery is going to boost it substantially

tails4e
1 replies
11h18m

5kwh battery module for 1.2k in the EU. 13.5kw should be under 5k. Any system north of 15k is price gouging, unless the system is huge.

spockz
0 replies
2h4m

Where do you get batteries that cheap? I’ve been following the market here in the Netherlands and it is about €1000/kWh, going down a bit for batteries approaching 10kWh. Although, I haven’t checked for the last 6 months.

lacksconfidence
0 replies
18h59m

with how pricing works here battery is basicaly a necessity. They will pay 3-8c /kwh during the day for extra production, and charge 50-65c/kwh when you don't have enough production. Well, maybe necessity is a bit strong. That's only a $5-$8/day swing on a 13kwh battery. But it adds up.

kevinob11
3 replies
22h37m

I'm in the Seattle metro area and 25K to 40K is very common. They tell you all kinds of subsidies and payback periods but the out of pocket or loan is always in that range. And payback periods are terrible here given the weather.

kitten_mittens_
2 replies
22h30m

My parents spent $18K on rooftop solar in the Boise metro area. One Tesla powerwall battery and install on top of that will be another $15K.

tails4e
1 replies
11h16m

And the Powerwall is also a ripoff vs many other options. 5kw battery module can be for for 1.2k, so 3 modules give 15kwh for under 5k

lacksconfidence
0 replies
1h56m

depends on the market. The 5kw options i was quoted were Enphase 5p batteries, average price from multiple installers was $5k per battery installed.

tails4e
0 replies
4h8m

That's obscene. Less than 10k of materials (and they can probably source it cheaper than a regular joe like me), 5k labour. 35k profit is a bit much....

tails4e
0 replies
22h39m

Exactly, it makes no financial sense, you'd never get payback on it at that price. The company offering it had payment plans and all, with 0% interest, to make it more attractive, but that's just part of the grift.

lsllc
0 replies
45m

Do you mind saying what company and which end of MA?

albrewer
0 replies
2h47m

I paid $50k for 24kWh nameplate capacity with no battery, fully installed and integrated, a year ago at 2% interest (the only reason it made sense to even do the deal). My electric bill went from an average of $350/mo to $16/mo (the minimum to stay connected), while the loan payment is ~$300. My cost for the materials alone would have been ~$30-35k (I needed higher power individual panels to get the capacity I needed, and went with a micro inverter setup for higher reliability). Equipment rental would have been another $3k because I had to dig a trench out to my detached garage to fit the entire system, and I don't own a 30 ft ladder to reach my roof. Electrical work has to be signed off on by a licensed electrician. Engineering schematics of the electrical system have to be created. Permits with the city have to be filed. Another $1-2k. For another $10k: I got to keep the week of vacation I would have needed to burn, someone else is responsible for fixing defects in the system, and I didn't have to spend the mental bandwidth on all the ins and outs of the whole shebang. The installers finished the system in a day, and had it turned on generating power after all the bureaucracy hurdles were cleared a few weeks in.

When I can afford it, the next project is add enough battery capacity to effectively go off grid.

sitkack
11 replies
22h54m

A kitchen remodel in a high income city in the US is 75k-100k for something basic. The lopsidedness of US prices for light construction projects is a huge problem.

ben_w
7 replies
22h11m

And there I was, thinking spending ~£€10k each for two kitchens recently was extravagant.

pcurve
6 replies
21h22m

What country are you based?

ben_w
5 replies
20h12m

One is in the UK, the other is in Germany.

dzhiurgis
4 replies
14h33m

Did that net you a dishwasher?

ben_w
2 replies
5h10m

In the German one, yes. The UK kitchen didn't have one, and while I'm not 100% sure why — was handled by my rental agency, with me deferring to them entirely for whoever they suggested for the work and whatever design they suggested for the layout — I suspect it may have been too small.

But the cost of a dishwasher is a small fraction of the rounding error, and I was rounding up quite a bit in both cases — even the (more expensive) German one is EUR 8903 with dishwasher, hob, sink, delivery, installation, and all taxes.

jessekv
1 replies
4h12m

Germany has commoditised kitchen installation. Perhaps because kitchens are often not included with the apartment?

ben_w
0 replies
4h3m

That causes kitchens here to be often modular and removable — I've literally seen someone take their kitchen sink with them on a tram here.

The kitchen I got here, is a permanent installation, because my partner didn't want the normal German style.

oezi
0 replies
12h23m

Dishwashers cost 300-500 EUR in Europe.

oezi
1 replies
12h21m

Ikea will sell you kitchens for 4k including appliances and set everything up for 2k. In Europe. (without electricity and plumbing)

ponector
0 replies
2h59m

You forgot that in US kitchens are huge. Could be bigger than typical studio apartment in a crowded EU city.

narrator
0 replies
17h33m

You got to get multiple bids. I had a small remodel job. I got three bids. One was for 3x the lowest bid, one was about double the lowest bid. After evaluating, I contracted with the company that did the middle bid and they did a great job. Not getting multiple bids on something that pricey is really financially irresponsible, IMHO.

caymanjim
2 replies
21h40m

Your $40k price is the high end and only in some markets, and has a whole lot more to do with regional labor costs than anything else. The same system would probably be $15k installed in another market. And that's before the enormous subsidies that are on offer in many states.

Or if you're at all handy and willing to educate yourself, you can DIY it for a fraction of the cost. That's obviously not for everyone, but you don't need any professional skills. You could hire an electrician if you want to be grid-tied.

Spivak
1 replies
17h6m

Yeah, holy balls. My neighbor got theirs installed for $11k all-inclusive $9k after the Biden subsidy. And that included a complete replacement and expansion of their electrical panel to to accommodate it. $40k sounds unreal they better be gold plated.

mattmaroon
0 replies
4h11m

Probably just in California. Everything there is gold-plated pricing.

throwup238
0 replies
1h39m

> I've seen my extended family get quotes north of 40k for modest installs.

They got the "fuck off" price because there's far more demand that supply at the moment. When businesses have more work than they can handle, they'll give customers quotes with absurd markups like that. It's enough money that it's worth the disruption if the customer actually wants it that bad, but they also don't really want the customer.

MostlyStable
0 replies
3h26m

My FIL has basically decided to just install his own solar from now on after getting quoted 10's of thousands of dollars in install labor cost for a job that he ended up doing himself in less than a day. And yes, it was done to code and spec (he's an engineer who runs a small manufacturing company, so the job was well within his skill set).

jtbayly
3 replies
1d

Misses the point of the article, which is to explore far beyond that cost.

sitkack
2 replies
22h58m

It doesn't, this is a snapshot of the costs now, you know what they were 5 years ago you can extrapolate a curve. The costs are still falling and will continue to fall.

I should be able to supply a data point of the cost of panels today without getting admonished as being off-topic, rtfm.

eigenspace
1 replies
22h16m

Yes it does miss the point. Panels are no longer the expensive part of solar. The expensive part is now things like labour, installation, and land acquisition, and bringing those costs down is going to be hard.

sitkack
0 replies
21h51m

My links showed that panels are demonstrably not the primary cost.

93po
1 replies
20h4m

It's super annoying to me to be paying $250 a month for a 1 bedroom apartment in Texas for electricity when $2200 of panels, which would be 8000 watts, would be more than enough for my needs during the day (as long as I didn't run the dryer at the same time as the AC, and also accounting for a 400W panel not usually making full power). Obviously other expensive hardware is needed too, but still.

eigenspace
0 replies
5h17m

Do you have a balcony facing south? You might be able to just buy some solar panels, a battery, and a microinverter and set it up on your balcony. You won't be able to sell your electricity back to the grid, but you can perhaps greatly reduce the amount of grid electricity you use.

EcommerceFlow
41 replies
1d2h

I used to be radically pro-nuclear, but after seeing some of the data of solar growth and realizing we could just scale things up (like building iphones), I'm fully on board with the Elon strategy of solar + powerbanks for storage.

api
27 replies
1d2h

The problem with nuclear is that it likes to be big, which means big capital-intensive projects and therefore a slow iteration time. Even if there are some things that are superior about nuclear, like land and raw resource use, it's going to get run over by a fast-iterating solution with small minimum capital investment.

At this point solar+batteries is a cheaper option in almost all locations except perhaps places with low levels of sunlight combined with high demand, like maybe very high Northern latitudes.

EcommerceFlow
21 replies
1d2h

Yup exactly. Why go through all that headache, which has existed with Nuclear since day 1, when we could just mass produce solar and plop it down on the infinite empty desert land out west.

beembeem
19 replies
1d1h

1) There isn't infinite desert land that can be used.

2) You still need firm, dispatchable power. Batteries are a bridge, not the only solution.

tuna74
16 replies
1d1h

Batteries are the solution. The sun is pretty stable (not very firm unfortunately, but I don't see how that relates to electricity).

beembeem
14 replies
1d1h

Firm refers to the generation profile of the power source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation

Batteries are not cost or resource efficient for winter where I live. Less than 8 hours of sunlight is not enough to heat a house during the day let alone night. There simply isn't enough solar generation even when overprovisioned to last.

cycomanic
4 replies
23h15m

But nuclear is not dispatchable either so what's your point? It's funny how everyone brings up the intermittance of solar and wind as a point how they can never work because they don't provide baseload and nuclear is the solution.

If you read opinions from operators and incident reports you'll find that large power plants like nuclear are actually a much bigger problem for network management, because if you have to take down a nuclear plant for some reason, you suddenly have a huge issue providing that electricity with fast dispatchable generation.

beembeem
3 replies
22h46m

It's a fair point that nuclear (and all power plants) need maintenance windows where they come offline (and occasionally unplanned outages). But this is not the same as saying nuclear is not dispatchable, that's just incorrect.

adgjlsfhk1
2 replies
20h42m

nuclear isn't dispatch-able for a different reason: you don't turn it off. Nuclear is relatively expensive, and those expenses are roughly 100% capex cost, so if you consider a reactor with a 10 billion construction cost and a 50 year lifespan, every hour you turn off the reactor costs at least ~$25k (or more if you assume the reactor was intending to do better than break-even.

trashtester
1 replies
11h59m

If by dispatch-able you mean something that can cheaply fill the gaps when wind/solar is not producing, then nuclear is not dispatch-able. For that purpose, we really only have fossil plants (and hydro in a few areas)

But if you compare the predictability of nuclear to that of wind/solar, nuclear is a lot easier to plan, and also requires way less (if any) contribution from other sources.

Also, I would argue that the current prices for building nuclear plants is at least 2-4x higher than they should be (depending on location).

If the regulations for nuclear were to be scaled back to a point where the net average harm caused per GWh was just slightly less than for the alternatives, and if we allowed a free, competitive market for the construction, nuclear would become a lot cheaper than today.

adgjlsfhk1
0 replies
1h15m

and also requires way less (if any) contribution from other sources.

This part is wrong. Electricity demand is varies about 50% over the course of the day and about 50% over the course of a year, so a 100% nuclear grid would only be operating at ~50% capacity which would double the costs.

On a local scale, renewables aren't predictable, but over large areas (e.g. US/EU), almost all of the variability cancels out (especially since wind and solar are anti-correlated with each other). Both nuclear and solar/wind grids (or a combination of both) will require some amount of over-capacity/hydro storage/battery storage/gas-peaker plants to economically provide consistent power. My guess is that we'll settle on some combination of over-provisioned solar/wind for seasonal variation combined with hydro/gas for daily and battery for hourly and faster variation. (and possibly using demand side shaping like desalination/water heating to use excess energy).

I find it somewhat hard to believe that nuclear plants could easily be made dramatically cheaper and easier to build if regulation wasn't a problem because if that were the case, we would expect to see China and India building lots of nuclear reactors cheaply. There's obviously further room for reactor design optimization, but I don't think it's as simple as just blaming regulation.

BobaFloutist
3 replies
1d

How often/much do you realistically need to heat a house with high, quality, modern insulation? Does your house have triple-paned windows, a vestibule for each entryway, well insulated walls, attic, and roof, etc?

Also if we're talking about heating, there's also the possibility of geothermal heat pumps, which seem to work everywhere, and while they have a high one-time capital cost but I'm pretty sure can more or less keep trucking along providing unbelievably cheap heat pretty much forever - even if you have to replace components, you probably won't ever have to redig the shaft again, which is a huge factor in the cost.

beembeem
2 replies
22h51m

a house with high, quality, modern insulation?

How much is society willing to spend collectively to upgrade our housing stock for this? Not to mention triple-paned windows are not standard by any sufficiently large builder on new construction. Double-paned? Certainly.

Geothermal is great. But in an already built city, it's not feasible to install quickly. There is also a lack of legal framework or precedent in place to heat multiple properties from a single source. I tried very hard to obtain a quote for this and it was well over 50k for a single family home, and nobody would actually do it because of the big city I live in. Want a heat pump too? That's another 25k. Throwing down 100k up-front is not a reasonable request to a typical homeowner.

epistasis
0 replies
15h20m

It's less "spend" as it is "invest". The problem with investment is the cost of capital. But if we're thinking of spending massive amounts of money for nuclear, capital must be very cheap indeed, and we absolutely must consider instead investing that in reducing our need for as much energy.

Geothermal is also a great shift for natural gas utilities. Delivery of weak heat sources to heat pumps is being explored in many areas.

Nuclear is the equivalent of throwing down 100k on a house for a massive custom-drilled ground-source heat pump solution. So in these difficult areas, we need to consider the alternatives.

BobaFloutist
0 replies
21h47m

It's not a reasonable request to a typical homeowner, but if we're looking at a path to a society-wide greener tomorrow, it's worth looking at.

I wonder how much upgraded insulation and geothermal heat pump(/district heating) could be paid for by the cost to build a new nuclear power plant - or even by the difference in cost to build that power plant versus to get sufficient solar and batteries to, in combination with the insulation, generate comparable temperature control.

tuna74
2 replies
1d

Yes, solar power won't work in Svalbard winters. This is known.

beembeem
0 replies
22h57m

I'm not talking about the arctic circle. This applies to Northern US, Sourthern Canada. And for that matter, a good chunk of the EU.

adgjlsfhk1
0 replies
20h41m

well I'm sure those 2530 people can find another power source.

jahnu
0 replies
1d

HVDC can go a couple of thousand km no problem with relativity low losses.

coryrc
0 replies
1d

Drake Landing shows how you can shift heating from summer to winter. For twenty years it's been heating homes in Alberta, Canada. Though I see now, because it's a one-off, they are having trouble getting replacement parts :(.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/okotoks-drake-landing...

chickenbig
0 replies
11h26m

Batteries are the solution.

Batteries aren't the solution to seasonal variation, are they? Discharging once a year means the batteries either need to be ultra-cheap or the electricity they provide would be very expensive. Batteries provide easy access and relatively efficient round trips, but at a high capital cost.

For me it is somewhat mysterious that wind/solar proponents view hydrogen (and methane/ammonia) as an unnecessary competing technology.

pfdietz
0 replies
23h25m

1) There isn't infinite desert land that can be used.

There is far more desert land than we would need. It doesn't have to be infinite for it not to be a significant constraint.

Dispatchable power

Batteries + burning e-fuels in turbines or fuel cells

Qwertious
0 replies
5h52m

1) yes there is

2) nuclear also needs dispatchable power, it doesn't work well if it needs to constantly ramp up and down. Batteries are vital to full nuclear for this exact reason.

jahnu
0 replies
1d

The best argument for new nukes I heard was to drop in replace coal furnaces in existing thermal coal power plants in china.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/nuclear-perhaps

pstuart
3 replies
1d2h

Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) were supposed to address this concern. Unfortunately even with this strategy it doesn't seem to be able to compete cost-wise in the market.

I hope that can be worked out, as I think we'd be well-served by having as many eggs in our energy basket as possible.

api
2 replies
1d2h

SMRs are still huge compared to putting $10k worth of solar panels on a house.

They also require a lot of big expensive infrastructure like reprocessing facilities, expensive safety-escorted transportation, secure facilities, etc.

pstuart
1 replies
23h12m

Yes those things are true; albeit the apple to oranges comparison of a home setup vs community baseload provider.

One of the compelling deployment cases is to revamp existing coal fired plants with SMRs, which would be a huge win in addressing climate change.

None of this is meant to disparage or dismiss solar and other renewables; it's meant to be complementary.

api
0 replies
6h20m

What I was really getting at was the effect that low incremental cost has on the evolution of the technology. A technology with low incremental unit cost can evolve very rapidly, while high unit cost capital-intensive technologies are slow to evolve. Which will win?

Some technologies are inherently high unit cost and capital-intensive. Aerospace is a classic example, and it's why we're still flying on 1970s-tech airplanes and why rockets are just now becoming reusable. Aerospace advances at a crawl because each unit is so expensive.

pfdietz
0 replies
23h27m

And "land and raw resource use" is just a backhanded way to imply cost, used because the actual cost doesn't favor nuclear at all.

credit_guy
6 replies
16h36m

I continue to be radically pro-nuclear (but I'm also pro-solar and pro-wind). Especially given Elon's example with SpaceX, how you can drop the cost of some technology by a factor of 10 or 100. Elon's idea was that the floor on the price of something is the cost of the raw materials. Everything else can be optimized. The cost of a nuclear power plant is most likely one thousand times the cost of the raw materials. Can we drive it down by a factor of 10 or 100? If not, why not? And if we can, can we increase the world's energy production by a factor of 10, or 100?

csomar
4 replies
14h29m

You make the ultimate point. In a "sane?" world, once nuclear has been discovered, every country should have gone the way of France or the Soviet Union. Build nuclear everywhere with over-capacity built-in.

The problem is, once Chernobyl happened (which might have bankrupted a struggling USSR), every country became wary of nuclear as some hidden costs are now more apparent. The Fukushima disaster didn't help either: Even if you run your plant just fine, a strong earthquake can turn it into a nuclear bomb.

So we are back to basics, collecting photons from far away. Using quantity instead of sci-fi stuff. It's quite safe too, at least the panels themselves.

nine_k
0 replies
10h21m

For Chernobyl to happen, the team on the NPP had to do a number of crazy things, and disable a number of security systems which otherwise would stop the crazy things from being done.

Certainly RBMK reactors are old and have some shortcomings, but a number of them is still running without incidents. Newer designs are significantly more safe by construction.

But the public, sadly, is beholden to legends and emotions, as it has been for millennia. Having an educated opinion is work, it takes time and effort, and a human only has a limited amount of both.

kaliqt
0 replies
5h1m

Fukushima was extremely minor though. Chernobyl is the worst and even that was not that bad, yeah we dramatize it a lot in media, but at a societal scale measuring physically (what actually happened vs how you felt about what happened) it was a blip on the radar.

eldaisfish
0 replies
5h12m

Even if you run your plant just fine, a strong earthquake can turn it into a nuclear bomb.

This is entirely false. No civilian nuclear power plant anywhere on earth has the level of fuel enrichment necessary to become a bomb.

If you have credible sources, please do share.

Galaxeblaffer
0 replies
11h16m

Please tell me how an earthquake can turn a relatively modern nuclear pp into a nuclear bomb ?

qnleigh
0 replies
10h54m

There was an excellent article here a few months ago about what drives the cost of nuclear power up so much, at least in the US. The US Navy has managed to develop relatively cheap nuclear reactors for submarines, so the technology exists. Commercial reactor costs are constantly driven up by regulations that become stricter during the process of building power plants, to the point where they often have to dismantle things to comply with new regulations that came into effect during construction. Nuclear plants go way over budget consistently, and it sounds like the economic case is actually getting harder for them.

Ultimately these regulations are driven by the large fraction of the public that is terrified of nuclear disaster. Unless that changes, costs may not go down significantly.

oezi
2 replies
1d2h

Elon has dropped out of this game pretty much. Its Chinese manufacturing for pretty much all components. But as the article says: the hardware is now less than half of the cost and shrinking further.

jandrese
1 replies
21h25m

Elon gave up on panels, but Tesla batteries are still a big player in home and grid scale storage.

energy123
0 replies
19h45m

Also 50% tariffs are going to hit Chinese battery manufacturers soon. The Biden admin considers it a national security priority to have energy done onshore.

shusaku
1 replies
17h48m

As the article mentions, labor is now the dominate cost for solar. In poor countries where labor costs are cheap (panel costs still need to go down for this case), we’re going to lift an insane number of people out of poverty using cheap solar. That was never an option with nuclear (who wants an unstable regime managing a power plant?)

aziaziazi
0 replies
6h19m

we’re going to lift an insane number of people out of poverty

Please elaborate how? In my understanding electricity access is a problem in many poor countries but what makes the people poor is the lack of any ressources (food, tool, book, pills, land, shelter, money for proxy those…). Electricity may be on the list but it’s far from the first.

rr808
0 replies
16h10m

solar + powerbanks for storage

Works great for California, not so much for the Northern long dark cold winters.

rmason
34 replies
1d

I remember as a child being on a school tour of the Enrico Fermi nuclear plant South of Detroit being told that nuclear power would soon become too cheap to monitor. This was over sixty years ago!

So I am a bit skeptical. I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas. Close to fifty years later I am still waiting.

I bet if you're in San Diego, Dallas or Tampa its already there. We have tons of solar getting built in the state of Michigan area but if you inquire its all either government subsidized or wealthy folks who can afford to not care about the economics.

I am not against solar in the least. But it needs to be pointed out that those of us in the Northern climates need a Plan B whether it be nuclear, geo-thermal or something else.

takinola
13 replies
1d

I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas

My understanding is commercial solar (as opposed to household solar) is cheaper than natural gas so that prediction is at least partly true

epoxia
12 replies
23h58m

Not really, the over-cited LCOE of solar/wind does not account for the cost of (its increased need of) battery storage. As time of use does not align with the time of generation. Also, battery storage has its own ongoing costs with battery degradation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxlnBNVCfBQ

Veserv
8 replies
23h32m

What is the point of citing theoretical values like LCOE when we have direct practical information on predicted profitability?

Energy producers in Texas are are adding 8x as much solar capacity (24 GW) as natural gas capacity (3 GW) [1] over 2024-2025. Do you believe that the entire Texas power plant industry is deliberately choosing less profitable and capital inefficient generation?

That could be the case, they may optimistically forecasted or undercounted potential future problems, but at this point in time their calculations seem to show that solar is tremendously more cost efficient to deploy over its expected lifetime.

It could also be the case that there are just subsidies for renewable energy in Texas that tip the balance. But at the scales we are now discussing, 10-20% of total energy generating capacity, the total value of those subsidies would need to be quite tremendous (in the G$ to 10 G$ per year range).

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61783#:~:tex....

verisimi
7 replies
23h24m

Is it a free market though? Or are solar, wind, etc being funded by the government? Or is gas being taxed in a way that solar is not (yet)?

bee_rider
3 replies
23h10m

There isn’t a free market for energy really, it is a global marketplace and the government of every major player puts their thumb on the scale.

Governments are investing in solar because they want to be ahead in the renewable economy, where energy literally just falls from the sky. Is that a subsidy? I guess. It is also a good strategic move.

Are petrochemicals taxed or subsidized? I have no idea, it is a big tangled web. What are the costs of staying plausibly friendly with Saudi Arabia and other OPEC members, who pays that bill?

I’m not going to try and defend either way, but I don’t believe anybody who says they have an answer. If they did manage to analyze the entire global economy somehow (where to even start) I don’t think they’d post the answer here.

verisimi
2 replies
14h30m

Wouldn't the answer be to provide a simple number for the cost of a thing (oil, solar, wind, etc), that removes the government subsidies/taxes from the equation.

Otherwise, you can tax what you don't like to oblivion or subsidise what you do like until it appears viable, but in neither case are you getting a true picture of the cost. The subsidies/tax moves a simple cost question, into the murky world of politics and society and opinion.

We are only pretending to discuss costs if the social infrastructure is determining taxes/subsidies.

bee_rider
1 replies
13h41m

Who’s going to provide that number and how do they calculate it?

verisimi
0 replies
6h51m

Right. This is to say there nothing real or authentic about the numbers we are given. Solar numbers will shrink or inflate as a function of subsidies or taxes. The whole thing is operating within the confines of government largesse. It's nothing to do with the actual cost of energy, those numbers are a mystery.

spywaregorilla
0 replies
22h44m

Gas is being subsidized

pfdietz
0 replies
20h49m

Since fossil fuels are not being charged the full cost of their negative externalities, no it's not a free market.

goodpoint
0 replies
22h27m

renewables have never been subsidized nearly as much as oil and nuclear.

Veedrac
2 replies
23h47m

2019 was half a decade ago.

You can tell solar+storage is cheaper than anything else except conditionally wind at least in the US because people have stopped building new generation capacity for anything else.

spywaregorilla
0 replies
22h37m

Well, that claim isn't true.

Solar + Storage is cheaper than a gas peaker plant, but it is not cost competitive with a base load gas plant.

laweijfmvo
5 replies
23h48m

If we had gone all-in on nuclear, starting in the 70s, how cheap and plentiful would electricity really be today, 50 years later?

cycomanic
4 replies
23h33m

Not much cheaper as can be clearly seen in France who did go all in and is only able to keep costs reasonable (not low) by skimping on maintance.

Nuclear has received significantly more subsidies than solar or wind (in both the US and EU) and is still not viable (mind you fossils have received by far the most subsidies) .

jauntywundrkind
3 replies
23h11m

France went all in, but they saturated the energy market by when? They've built a couple since, but after an intense build out during the 70's they haven't had to keep building.

Part of the idea to me is that, if you want to be a nuclear civilization, you need government scale investment in not just building plants but in improving the designs.

You need to stay in for decades, stay evolving, where-as France simply isn't big enough, doesn't have enough demand to keep at building again and again (to the scale that they would iterate on new significantly improved fuel cycles).

America's efforts like the Integral Fast Reactor, a fast reactor with on site pyro processing, seemed so promising. A safe & proliferation-safe way to not just reprocess but to keep burning tons of the transuranics (something France doesn't really do, afaik). But we gave up. The related PRISM designs have been kicking around for decades now, and I think one might even maybe get built, but generally the atmosphere around nuclear feels like it's building old/boring designs & not trying at all to advance. Then externalizing the massive incredibly long lived waste problems.

I haven't done any research in a bit, but India for a while was talking a big game about building out Thorium reactors, at scale, and I distantly recall that seemed to have some potential to be an improved fuel cycle over the basic designs/fuel-cycles we've had for so long.

otherme123
2 replies
22h33m

They've built a couple since, but after an intense build out during the 70's they haven't had to keep building.

I don't get this. France had 71% of their grid nuclear in 2018. From 1980 until 2000, the only new power installed in France was nuclear. What do you mean "keep building"? Reach 100% nuclear, banning/removing all other forms of energy? Even more than that and export energy?

_ph_
1 replies
11h39m

The main body of Franc nuclear are old reactors which require increasing maintenance and extension of operations license to keep producing. If France planned to keep their nuclear power, a lot more reactors would have to be build quickly. Reality is, there is one reactor in construction and it is long delayed and way over budget. It is supposed to get online this year or next. But with the costs of that one reactor, it is not thinkable to replace the aging reactors. As a consequence, France needs urgently to develop and implement a plan B.

On the other side, even France sees the increased competition of renewables. This summer they even had to take three nuclear reactors temporarily off grid, because demand for nuclear was just too low.

otherme123
0 replies
4h27m

I like to read the pro-nuclear articles, and the more I read the more I'm convinced they are trying to scam the governments/citizens. In the last 5 years or so they are asking for:

- We want a minimal payment around 80€/MWh because we provide base load. (Average price in Europe this year is 65€).

- We want our obsolete centrals to have their lifespan extended to (depending on the source) 50, 75 or even 100 years. At 80€/MWh guaranteed.

- We want the government to deal with the residues. Maybe we pay half the cost.

- We want the regulators to ease safety requirements, so our building and manteinance costs are competitive.

And now:

- Do you remember we wanted our centrals lifespans extended? Now we want them demolished and replaced, because after 40 years they are old. Government should pay/finance it, even when budgets blow up 5x.

- Do you remember that we wanted to be paid extra for being the baseload? Now we want to be the whole grid, 70% is not enough. At 80€ guaranteed, no competition guaranteed, financed by the state, and if anything goes wrong we won't pay shit.

philipkglass
4 replies
1d

I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas.

There was a brief period in the US from the late 1960s through the early 1970s where it looked like new nuclear power plants were going to supply electricity cheaper than coal. A few commercial reactors had just been finished on a reasonable schedule and budget. Government cost projections showed that just-completed reactors were competitive with coal and that by the mid 1980s, with rising coal production costs, nuclear would have a clear edge.

Most people who care about the history of nuclear power know about the ballooning costs and schedule overruns for nuclear reactors after Three Mile Island, so that explains part of why this projection didn't pan out.

The other part is that real coal prices fell in the 1980s instead of rising. Increased surface mining of coal reversed the upward price trend for coal as a fuel. At the same time, the thermal efficiency of coal fired power plants kept improving beyond what was considered practical circa 1968. So new coal fired power plants were spending less per gigajoule of fuel and turning more of the fuel into electricity. New coal plants in America became so cost-effective in the 1980s that nuclear would have been hard pressed to compete even without the actual delays and cost overruns that nuclear foundered on. France dodged this environmentally dreadful rise of coal because they didn't have abundant domestic coal like the US, so they were committed to developing non-fossil electricity regardless of improvements in coal technology.

I wonder if those over-optimistic solar cost predictions you saw in 1975 also assumed ever-rising fuel costs. If solar companies expected coal power to keep getting more expensive, that would indirectly accelerate the adoption of solar power (lowering its costs) as well as directly easing the cost benchmark that solar power needed to meet.

Or maybe, like in many other cases, the people working on solar back then were just over-optimistic about improvements and had blind spots about the obstacles ahead.

pfdietz
3 replies
23h37m

Most people who care about the history of nuclear power know about the ballooning costs and schedule overruns for nuclear reactors after Three Mile Island

Costs were ballooning even before TMI.

The other part is that real coal prices fell in the 1980s instead of rising.

More importantly, 1979 saw the passage of PURPA, which began to open the power market to non-utility providers. There was enormous untapped potential for cogeneration (and, as it turned out, cogeneration-in-name-only) that produced a slug of new output, mostly gas fired, into the grids just after what had been inexorable 7%/year increase in electricity demand in the US suddenly moderated.

In this environment, it was very difficult to make the case for new nuclear power plants.

I wonder if those over-optimistic solar cost predictions you saw in 1975

In what sense were they over-optimistic? PV has experienced a remarkably relentless cost decline along an experience curve of about 20% decline in cost with each doubling of cumulative production.

philipkglass
2 replies
23h30m

In what sense were they over-optimistic?

The OP said "I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas."

That would mean PV cost parity with coal-generated electricity in the early 1980s. Actual PV cost declines have been remarkable but they didn't go that quickly.

pfdietz
1 replies
23h15m

Yeah, I have to question OP's memory there. No way that could have been said in good faith.

ben_w
0 replies
21h58m

Their memory may well have been perfect, as public speakers and newspapers do get things wrong every so often.

One show I watched as a kid, Blue Peter, introduced Thrust SSC as a car that would go faster than the speed of light. (Or perhaps my memory of that is wrong, too…)

kragen
4 replies
23h20m

'too cheap to meter' was always nonsense and is nonsense now. the only time you're getting unmetered energy is if you have so much distributed generation and storage that transmission is unprofitable to build except for unusual cases. for example, most people with a household solar system with storage have unmetered energy during the day

the numbers you saw for solar in 01975 were wrong, based on at most five years of commercial solar panel production. now we have 50 years of commercial solar panel production to estimate the learning rate from, and consequently for the last five years or so solar is cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas in most of the world. you should have stopped waiting five years ago

in northern climates your plan b is probably a combination of wind, batteries, thermal energy storage, and emergency generators burning emergency-priced liquid fuels — initially fossil fuels, later electrolysis-sourced

aftbit
2 replies
23h2m

Hi Kragen, small world! At an individual scale, I think plan B is pretty much always a small tri-fuel generator. At a society scale, it's probably a natural gas turbine. If batteries continue to follow their own price curve down, storage may well be a viable answer to 95%+ dunkelflautes at some point in our lifetimes.

I'm curious about the land use analysis and the embodied energy. Given the capacity factor inherent in my climate, will solar panels ever pay off the energy used to make, ship, and install them? Similar question for batteries. And how much land do we need to cover to handle the P95 dark/calm weeks?

Anyway, interesting stuff. Solar continues to eat the world, slowly but surely. :)

pfdietz
0 replies
20h47m

The societal solution for Dunkelflauten remains using turbines, but the gas burned switches from fossil natural gas to green hydrogen.

kragen
0 replies
21h5m

hey, nice to be in touch! i haven't done much lately with sip

not just in our lifetimes; within a decade

as for embodied energy, the energy payback time on solar panels has been on the order of a few months to a year or two for decades now; see https://iea-pvps.org/snapshot-reports/snapshot-2024/ for a comprehensive overview, http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/9/8/622/htm for a detailed analysis from 02016, or https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy05osti/37322.pdf for an easily digestible but outdated explanation from 02004. you're right that it depends on capacity factor! according to https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights... the capacity factor across the border from you in kentucky is better than 25%, which is about as good as you can expect anywhere, but in much of your area only 10–15%, so you might need to multiply those payback times by as much as 2. https://atb.nrel.gov/img/electricity/2021/p19/v1/solar-annua... provides more detailed ghi (global horizontal irradiance) data for the usa which makes it look like it ought to be more like 20%. i'd be very interested in actual numbers by us state

batteries use an insignificant amount of land, but probably overprovisioning of solar production is cheaper than batteries until you get into those 95th percentiles you're talking about. so probably we're talking about something like 10× the land use for solar panels that would be needed to meet demand on average? it depends a lot on how much demand flexibility there is; will dunkelflaute electrical grid demand be 20% of average grid demand, 2%, or 0.2%? that's a question that depends on things like what new designs people come up with for aluminum smelters and haber-bosch fertilizer plants, which is impossible to anticipate ahead of time

r00fus
0 replies
3h4m

Totally - my energy costs in CA with solar = generation is super-cheap during daytime but transmission costs from PG&E are insanely high.

PaulKeeble
3 replies
23h31m

We are very much there already, Solar and Wind are both cheaper than Natural gas which is itself is cheaper than Coal. Solar is around 5 cents a KWH whereas Nuclear is more like 15 cents a KWH. The prices of Wind and Solar are being set by Gas at the moment as well and at some point that pricing will detach once more batteries are in place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

SubjectToChange
2 replies
12h37m

The intermittency is a huge problem. Grid scale batteries and/or pumped hydro are laughably inadequate for bridging the gap. Wind and solar energy is only cheap when they aren’t responsible for maintaining baseload capacity on the grid.

Simply consider the case of China. They install and export more solar PV than anyone else in the world, and they are aggressively building out wind as well. It is literally impossible to get a better price than China when it comes to renewable energy, yet for some reason the Chinese have decided to dump tens of billions of dollars into nuclear energy.

zo1
0 replies
7h36m

At some point we need to "tell" people to adjust. The "effectively infinite, at any time" tap of electricity that's subsidized and enabled by an all-encompassing government needs to stop.

We've been effectively spoiled with this capability, and we need to be weaned off quite abruptly. Just because we've been spoiled and expect the grid to give us on-demand energy in the middle of the night, doesn't mean we have to continue doing so.

jahnu
0 replies
4h1m

Those plans are to some degree a consequence of a conservative outlook when they were initially approved mixed with local politicians fearing a backlash in a cold winter if there is even a short period with a power shortage. This happened a couple of winters ago in some regions of China and is part of the reason for the coal power plant build spree they went on. Have a search for news on the coal power plant news in 2023. However, these plants turn out to not be really needed and are idle a lot and approvals are plummeting for new coal plants in 2024 already and I would expect to see the same for nuclear soon as renewables continue to prove their reliability and as battery storage continues to grow massively.

That said the growth in renewables will still take some years to make a big dent in coal in China so the nuclear power is welcome!

hijinks
17 replies
1d3h

solar costs keep shrinking and then you have power companies like SDGE that want to punish solar owners based on their salary and set a $125 min cost to be connected to the grid

rtkwe
11 replies
1d3h

I don't think utility companies are entirely wrong to charge some flat rate for being connected to the grid, there are fixed costs with each customer and solar homes are not actually independent from the grid even if they're net neutral their night time power has to come from somewhere. Even if we get to enough residential solar to completely power the grid from solar and charge enough storage to last overnight there's still the costs associated with storing that power overnight we can't get around.

glenstein
7 replies
1d2h

The trouble with this logic is that public utility commissions across the country have measured the impact that solar has on the grid, and found that not only does it not impose a cost, but it confers a benefit, in some studies up to 33 cents per kilowatt hour.

I completely agree with your core point, which is that there need to be costs associated with impact on the grid, to make sure that there's no incentivization of freeloading in either direction. Whether utilities owe solar owners a one time payment, an ongoing payment, or should be contributing to the financing of new construction of solar panels is an open question imo.

pfdietz
1 replies
6h56m

That link is from 2015, so I suspect it's talking about benefits at very low penetration.

Clearly things become very different at very high penetration. I mean, if everyone is net metering, who is consuming the excess power? Who is paying for the power plants that these people use when not providing their own power? The economics would go all to hell.

rtkwe
0 replies
4h59m

I think we'll have to go to floating rates for bought power to solve that. If there really is no where for the power to go the price of power from solar should fall to zero or below. The economics of your night load plants/storage gets tricky then though because you're losing time when you would currently be making money to solar but they still need to exist to provide power during the night or when there's bad weather all day and you don't get much solar power.

rtkwe
2 replies
1d2h

I think the utilities are moving very early with their flat rate charges but I don't think they're wrong in the long term that a flat rate will be required to fund the grid in the future. I'm thinking about the point where a large majority of customers have sufficient solar generation to cover their entire energy usage for the day on average, those people still need generation or storage of power during the night when solar doesn't work so somewhere they'll need to continue paying for power generation or storage during the night. This is probably doable with time based rates instead but we'll have to see and even then we'll probably need some flat rate to account for people with local storage because they also exist as a cost to service.

glenstein
1 replies
20h28m

So as I mentioned in my previous comment, public utilities commissions across the country have all run their own independent studies of the value of bringing solar on the grid measured against its costs and generally found it to be a net positive rather than a negative. Those studies encompass things that you're talking about such time base rates, cost of mobilizing peaking and base load production, efficiencies from consuming power on site instead of having to send it through the transmission and distribution system, etc

rtkwe
0 replies
5h38m

I'm not talking about now. I thought I made that clear enough but I'm talking about in the future with extremely high levels of solar self sufficient customers. All of those need power during the night so absent huge grid storage you'll need nuclear or hydro to provide reliable night time power all of which costs money.

I'm all for massive solar investments it's a great path forward but there are issues we'll have to address.

beembeem
1 replies
1d1h

1) Those fixed costs go down with more distributed generation. No need for large solar farms in a different zip code if many customers have it on their roof.

2) Many/most utilities don't pay retail rates for excess power, so there's already profit built into the arrangement with solar customers.

3) You didn't address a utility charging monthly fixed fees based on income.

rtkwe
0 replies
1d1h

1) They go down but not to zero. Consider a hypothetical person with excess solar and a large power bank, they still cost money to serve and build reserve capacity for when events require them to pull from the grid.

2) They don't and there was a LOT of complaining about not getting paid full rates by early solar adopters.

3) I'm fine with it. The power grid is one of the natural monopolies where state operation makes more sense than the weird quasi private marketless mess we have now and progressive tax structures are normal there so I don't see as much problem with income related grid fees. Also higher income people will generally have larger grid demands meaning they need more excess capacity built in so they probably do cost more to serve.

Night_Thastus
0 replies
1d

No one wants to hear it, but this is the case. We need to revamp how we charge for electricity.

A flat fee that accounts for all the fixed costs that the grid requires, then an additional fee based on usage. There is no magical bullet that removes that. Maintaining lines and transformers and keeping it all monitored and balanced and so on takes money.

That will make it so solar is still viable without making utilities complete money holes.

candiddevmike
4 replies
1d3h

Utility companies around me will gaslight you into not getting solar--bury you in paperwork, FUD, and last ditch efforts to buy into some kind of solar timeshare program.

I'm hoping to see more decentralized/hyper-local power generation and storage.

macspoofing
3 replies
1d2h

I'm hoping to see more decentralized/hyper-local power generation and storage

With the scale we're dealing with decentralization does not work. You need to centralize for efficiency (i.e. optimize power generation and maintenance per unit of land-area). Though in this case the point is moot, since we don't have any grid-scale storage solutions for wind/solar - making them non-viable as the primary power generation regardless of price.

glenstein
2 replies
1d2h

decentralization does not work.

This is not quite true, because the vast majority of solar generation is consumed on site, avoiding the transmission and distribution costs of delivering electrons that would normally be necessary. Which is just one of a whole motley of dynamics working in favor of solar at larger scales: the arc of solar generation over a 24hr period almost perfectly coincides with actual market demand over the course of the day, with the exception of the afternoon/evening "duck curve", so it's actually relieving pressure on peaking generation.

The important fallacy here is assuming that counterbalancing for the cycles of solar generation requires new investments, when in fact it's relieving pressure on infrastructure that already exists and is already serving those exact counterbalancing purposes. This is in addition to the benefit of offsetting alternative forms of base load generation.

To be clear you are right in an important sense about a pretty fundamental thing. There is indeed a tipping point, and when we reach that tipping point of grid penetration all of the points you have raised will indeed become not merely relevant but crucial. And I forget the exact number, but my understanding is we're nowhere near that tipping point right now. I want to say around 20% of the overall grid being generated from solar power is the tipping point but I'm not sure if that's accurate.

It's kind of like the argument sometimes people want to make about taxes which is that if you overtax it is a drag on the economy, which is hypothetically true but it's true at a given tipping point and it's a tipping point that we're not anywhere near, which doesn't tend to stop the advocates from bringing it up all the time.

happyopossum
1 replies
1d

the vast majority of solar generation is consumed on site

I don't believe this is true for a vast swath of residential solar. In spite of HN's love of remote work, a lot of homes are mostly or completely empty during the day, with energy use ramping up in the evenings as people return home.

This results in homes 'selling' electricity to the grid during the day, and buying it back in the evening and overnight.

nicoburns
0 replies
22h8m

That's true in many (but by no means all) cases now, but it's a short term problem. Home batteries with capacity for a day or more's usage are on track to hit affordability in the next 5 years, which will remove this problem.

There is also a lot of scope for demand shifting. For example, timing washer and dryer runs during the day when people are out. Or running AC during the day (even if nobody is home!) so that it doesn't have to work so hard in the evening.

tiffanyh
14 replies
1d2h

Has the insurance & roof warranty issue been solved with panels on your roof?

A few years ago I looked at putting solar panels on my roof.

Both the company who roofed my house, and my insurance company - said it voided any warranty / claims against future roof damage if a solar panel was installed

tuna74
9 replies
1d1h

TFA claims that it is idiotic to put solar panels on residential roofs, but them somewhere where installation cost are low instead, like on the ground or maybe factory roofs.

tfourb
7 replies
23h57m

As someone with plenty of solar on my roof, it is anything but idiotic. With government incentives it pays for itself in ten years and has a realistic life span of 25.

It might comparatively more efficient/cheaper per watt to build solar on the ground or on large commercial structures, but that doesn't change the economics for individual home owners, which in many parts of the world are already positive.

opo
5 replies
22h45m

... With government incentives…

Money is fungible and not unlimited. A dollar given to you by your neighbors in their taxes to subsidize you would have gone much, much further if the money would have been spent to build solar by your power utility.

tfourb
3 replies
21h44m

That might be the case but the fact is that these incentives exist and eligible home owners that don’t use them are in effect throwing money away.

Also, it can be politically and technically expedient to provide incentives, even if it is not the theoretically most efficient use of that money. For example if it increases acceptance for renewables in the broader population or jump starts an industry (as it has in Germany).

opo
2 replies
14h41m

You don't need to use tentative phrases like "That might be the case", or "even if it is not theoretically most efficient use of that money". As the page on statista.com states:

Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If not for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 117 and 282 U.S. dollars per megawatt hour. …

https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...

It is understandable that anyone getting free money thinks it is good. But if the less well off people (renters, etc.) learn that they are paying more for power to subsidize wealthier residents (when that money could have gone a lot further if spent on other solar projects) - don't you think that might lower enthusiasm for government subsidizing the move away from fossil fuels? This sort of reverse Robin Hood policy hurts everyone in the long run.

tfourb
1 replies
13h38m

Places outside the U.S. exist, you know? PV would be cost effective here in Germany for residential buildings even without incentives, though most owners would probably build smaller installations. And there are plenty of countries without government incentives where people still build PV.

As for the renters: many of them currently have decided to buy small plug in PV sets, since their installation has been allowed under German law recently. No incentives for those, either.

And I’ll repeat myself: incentives can have valuable political goals that have nothing to do with cost effective buildout of solar. In Germany, these incentives have contributed massively to improving popular sentiment towards PV and acceptance of government subsidies for renewables generally.

opo
0 replies
2h18m

...PV would be cost effective here in Germany for residential buildings even without incentives, though most owners would probably build smaller installations.

I suspect the cost differences between ground based solar installed by a utility and consumer rooftop solar aren't really that different in Germany. Most of the cost of rooftop solar are the soft costs, with the bulk often being the labor costs for the work on the roof. The costs for the actual panels is very low these days.

...In Germany, these incentives have contributed massively to improving popular sentiment towards PV and acceptance of government subsidies for renewables generally.

To repeat myself, I do understand that people like getting free money. In terms of public opinion, I see this survey that was done on the energy transition: https://andel.dk/wp-content/uploads/Andel-Holding-European-s...

...The share of positive citizens varies across countries from 45% to 80%. Croatia and Denmark are the most positive, while the Czech Republic, Germany and Estonia are the most negative.
oezi
0 replies
11h20m

Money spent is money earned. Many countries realized solar is creating a lot of local wealth generation rather than losing money for the local economy by buying fossils from abroad. Subsidies for such make sense because they just come back in additional taxes.

sitkack
0 replies
22h39m

The thing I like about rooftop residential solar is that the substations and the feeder lines don't need to get upgraded. During the hot sunny part of the day, the locally produced energy can go right into AC.

When grid scale batteries drop in price, the substations can also store energy. Then the feeder lines only ever need to support the base load power draw.

Solar is so cheap, that even in off grid installations, the battery bank can be a fraction of what it previously would have been sized for. Modern batteries can be charged much faster and workloads can be shifted to the sunny part of the day.

UniverseHacker
0 replies
19h28m

That makes no sense to me. Roof space is unused (essentially free), and the panels shade the house making it more livable and efficient. Land you can use that is near your house is your yard- extremely valuable and expensive. Putting it elsewhere requires buying the electricity from someone else, all of the costs and losses of a power grid, and unreliability of a power grid.

Installing a solar panel on a roof is not exactly expensive, complex, or difficult. Virtually every house in my neighborhood has them.

tfourb
0 replies
23h59m

Writing from Germany, we have non-penetrative fasteners for basically all roof types common here. Maybe talk to some solar experts in your area, they might have an off the shelf solution that won't void warranties.

jillesvangurp
0 replies
1d1h

That sounds a like a local problem; or maybe your roof is really that bad. In some parts of the world double digit percentages of houses now have solar panels on them. That's only going to go up.

beembeem
0 replies
1d1h

I went through this for a commercial installation on a flat roof. As long as the roofer inspected the penetrations made by the installation, the roof warranty was fine. Of course, this roofer also had a business line for installing panels so they had expertise in the area. Voiding the warranty is not a universal argument.

UniverseHacker
0 replies
19h33m

I don't see how that could hod up in court unless the insurer could demonstrate that the panels were installed in a way that caused the damage... and in that case the installer would be liable

xhkkffbf
12 replies
1d3h

If labor costs keep going up, it seems like the right path for the industry is to simplify installation more so it becomes more DIY. More plug-and-play. Less skilled carpenters and electricians.

andrewmcwatters
5 replies
1d2h

Labor costs for installing solar are already so ridiculous that you're better off doing the parting, delivery, and some installation if not all of it yourself and then having a licensed electrician just finish the connection to your main circuit breaker.

Scoundreller
4 replies
1d2h

I regularly bring this up: modern fridges are generally continuous drive (which means they run off DC at some level anyway). And they run all the time(ish).

Waiting for a (mass-)manufacturer to build one with a 48VDC input that anyone can self-install a solar panel and plug-in but switches to a mains-fed 48VDC source as required.

Doesn’t need a battery (the fridge/freezer is one!), gets you some operation during outages, no license required to wire up. Takes advantage of whatever solar is available during the daytime without really wasting any.

Would also love a non-permanently installed doohickey that doesn’t require an electrician to legally install that will gladly push solar into a power strip and handle all the intertie stuff itself.

It shouldn’t be a “whole house or nothing” and a “completely islanded circuit or nothing” dilemma when wanting to partly solarize something. Which I guess Germany has allowed but regulations a big impediment in most places.

happyopossum
3 replies
1d

modern fridges <snip> run all the time(ish).

Genuinely curious - when did this become a thing? I have a couple of relatively recent fridges (less than 10 yrs old, and same model still sold today) that constantly cycle on/off, and spend more time off than they do on.

I'd imagine a variable speed system (like are available in inverter-based heat pumps today) could be designed to run nearly constantly, but the variability of things like room temp, fridge loading (empty fridges are less efficient than full ones), open/closing doors, and the addition of warm/hot things in the fridge would make it so there's always a need for cycling at some level...

Scoundreller
2 replies
22h0m

From what I’ve seen, they’re usually marketed as “inverter fridges”.

And yeah, at least the fan turns off when you open the door, and I’d imagine if you put a bunch of ice into the fridge, it wouldn’t need to run at all for a while.

Meanwhile my local electric code (Ontario Canada) still requires a dedicated circuit for the fridge, which will now basically hum along at 1-2amps and never brownout/trip a circuit. What a waste.

fomine3
1 replies
11h15m

So we should just buy efficient inverter refrigerator, rather than add 48VDC.

Scoundreller
0 replies
7h9m

At the end of the day, they’re going to (possibly transform the voltage), rectify and AC input into DC and chop it up to get variable-frequency drive.

I kinda wonder how low or high voltage it could run on out-of-the-box but there might be other stuff that runs off straight 120V (e.g. defrost cycle).

RobinL
1 replies
1d2h

Does anyone know of examples of something like this that can be bought in the UK?

jillesvangurp
0 replies
1d1h

Just look on Amazon. Plenty of options for people with garden sheds, boats, etc. Plugging that into a wall socket might be something that you want to verify is allowed under your insurance or local legislation.

I know some people here Germany that have picked up some panels at their local Aldi and are using them. Yields are pretty anemic but they aren't that expensive either. Kind of cool that Germany is encouraging this.

euroderf
0 replies
22h29m

Not allowed in Finland, at least not in the KSOY service area. Lamous.

beembeem
1 replies
1d1h

First off, I know this article is more targeted at utility-scale installations, but much of the comment section is discussing or interested in residential so it's worth bringing this piece up.

One of the problems for residential roof-mounted systems is the wind load that large flat panels introduce. This load needs to be offset with very strong roof penetrations. You need to drive large bolts directly into the trusses of the roof which requires a bit of expertise, and has risks if you knick the edge of a piece of structural timber.

Contrast this with the round tubes used by solar thermal that don't introduce large wind loads, and nearly any DIYer can drill holes in their roof to support them.

tfourb
0 replies
23h51m

This is news to my solar installation, which is not fixed to my roof structure at all. My roof is not that steep, so the panels are simply put of frames which are weighed down with concrete pavers. And this is not DIY job, but professionally installed with warranty and everything.

Similarly, most solar installations on steeper roofs here in Germany are either made without penetrations at all (by hooking special frames into the roof structure under the roof tiles), or they use very basic screws that tie into the existing roof structure. Our neighbor did his solar installation himself on a pretty steep roof, something you would absolutely not do if there were any risk of structural damage.

kkfx
11 replies
1d2h

The issues for p.v. are mainly two:

- one is speculation, because yes panels get cheaper, so inverters and batteries, but prices to the customers AUGMENT more and more, and current prices for private, domestic p.v., at least in the EU, it's so high that's a nonsense installing them. Personally, since in my country it legal, a thing NOT so common, I've build a small domestic system for 11.500€ while the cheapest offer was a bit more than 30.000€ for essentially the same setup, worst than mine;

- the other is again speculation on many sides, one of the most prominent the push toward utility-run p.v. witch is UNSUSTAINABLE, because it makes the load to large classic power plant vary way too quickly and too much to keep the frequency stable because we can't make enough grid storage and for such usage batteries life span it's way too low, p.v. works very well for self-consumption, with domestic storage as a grid backup, but not more.

If we do not state clearly: the service model where very few own nearly all it's incompatible with the Green New Deal, we have two options: killing large finance capitalism model or falling to implement the New Deal plunging from the first to the third world countries. I'm damn serious.

mjamesaustin
10 replies
1d2h

I question your assumptions about grid storage. The cost of storage has been plummeting alongside the cost of solar, and battery lifespans are a non-issue when capacity is not a factor.

A battery storage facility that has lost 30% of its capacity after 10 years of operation is still functional with that lower capacity. Compare this to something like a car that has much more limited function with a lowered capacity.

energy123
3 replies
12h29m

The answer to this is obvious. Until very recently, solar was less than 100% of midday electricity. What would have been the point of installing batteries? To charge them with natural gas?

energy123
1 replies
1h43m

I know that storage is necessary I was explaining why storage hasn't been built at scale yet

kkfx
0 replies
7m

Well, you miss the point: we do not have much storage because it last way too little at certain daily load. It's simply way to costly so far to have a nation-wide grid full of renewables, while we can make p.v. grow at small scale, for self-consumption reducing the daily load on the grid, when the grid is most charged.

mallets
0 replies
18h17m

Costs are falling and installs are rapidly increasing? It didn't make sense to build them so far due to limited renewables on grid, you need to regularly produce (a lot) more than load. Like in CA.

And Pumped hydro is great wherever it's possible, don't see why it needs to be pitted against BESS.

kkfx
0 replies
21h7m

As you might see from comment-less downvotes it's unpopular to state the truth. Too many do not accept a simple things: WEF and co want just power, the 99% of slaves, as any kind of nazi, they are not "liberal", they are just dictatorial, with countless of voluntary slaves who "trust their system" refusing to see the reality and scale.

An LFP car battery can last 10 years if took to 80% SOC normally, once a month or so to 100% to balance it, with let's say a charge cycle per cell per week. If you use it more it will last less. Now for homes and alike at China prices having enough storage to being able to go without the grid still powered normally from one day to another, normally using the grid a bit, discharging the battery to going not beyond a full cycle per cell per week, it's economically NOT convenient but still doable as a reasonable backup and doing so means shifting loads as much as possible ending up in grid usage when the grid is not much loaded most of the time and while consuming much more electricity (because you ditch natural gas and so on) still not straining the grid because the damn truth is that we can't go all electric tomorrow morning without this model.

Grid storage means hyper-expensive batteries with one or more full cycle per cell per day, typical lifetime 1-3 years, not more. For what? Just to allow more p.v. and eolic in the grid compensating their variability avoiding large scale blackouts. With this model on scale it would be normal to have 3€/$ per kWh as a mean price and we can't even built enough storage for the first generation.

The substantial reality is that the green new deal it's possible only in NEW buildings, where the need of energy to heat/cool is 1/7-1/10 of a "classic" building, and doable only with local energy production. This means smart cities are simply impossible to power on scale, some part of the currently populated world can be powered as well.

Starting what we can, meaning building small buildings residential and commercial, so not smart 15' cities, where anyone do it's best to be semi-autonomous not "in the sharing economy" where few giants loan anything to the 99%, while keep researching on what we can, because that's the best we can do. For the WEF green new deal of smart cities we could be perhaps around 4 billion humans on earth and no more. And that's just for a first generation.

In the west most have stopped the new deal simply because there is no way to implement it in a service model, it could only exists for individuals, so with personal ownership against the Agenda 2030. EVs sales are down because only those who can charge them at home could really enjoy them, the others who try have simply given up. p.v. investments tend to go not so well because for privates it's way too expensive because of speculation and large projects could grow a bit, but not much more without much grid instability.

If you try you can see the same problem everywhere: in Pakistan p.v. have boomed than utilities have started to complaint that people are less and less dependent on them, they arrive at imposing on-site exchange making p.v. economically useless and the energy price exploded as grid stability plummeted but they do not care. In Kazakhstan after the WEF (or Royal Dutch Shell) "liberalization" lobby push there was a full scale revolt and still they can't control energy prices and so on, we see more easily in the third world because they go much faster and unregulated than in the west, but that's where we are going, with many supporting their oppressors...

kkfx
2 replies
1d1h

It doesn't work like that. The California failure is a good example. So far energy storage can just do a day-to-day backup for homes and some non-energy-intensive business activities, for others just few hours. No more. At grid scale storage is only a quick buffer to compensate renewables fluctuations waiting for classic power plants to regulate their output.

Even at current Chinese prices a re-backed grid is just a dream and a nightmare only those who do not know electricity could think it's doable, while it's perfectly possible converge to electricity as we have converged to IP, a single tech for nearly all, not the cheapest but the most universal, that on scale means doing more with less, or implementing the new deal, with self-consumption and small scale storage, so we can shift our loads (and we have very sensible economical incentives to do so) as much as possible augmenting the usage of electricity without augmenting the grid loads. Nights will demand more from the grid, but that's not an issue because most loads except in harsh winters that are more and more rare, happen during the day.

This is a logic, technically sound path toward the new deal. The California model is a logic, financial-capitalism sound way to implement the new deal which actually can't happen. Those who think the contrary simply do not understand the scale and the tech we have so far. We can't produce enough storage and using it for such grid-scale loads means breaking it very quickly, not 10 years of a classic LFP but 1-3 years maximum at a scale we can't sustain for more than few years with skyrocketing costs.

The giant want this because they need this to milk people as much as they can, but it's technically impossible and anyone who think the contrary will see what happen in few years if the trend will keep going like today, with more and more rolling blackouts and large stability issues to the point the EU will look like South Africa's grid now.

lakis
1 replies
14h56m

The California failure is a good example What California failure? Take a look at record battery discharging for CAISO https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso?record=Maximum%20Bat...

Do you notice anything? The records keep falling ever summer. The battery discharge per day went up by 100% in the last year.

I do not see any bending of the curve. California is the perfect example of building enough batteries can solve the duck curve problem. Even in Texas, with the government actively against renewables and batteries, you see record been set for battery storage all the time https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Pow... Texas quadruple the battery storage in the last year. Difference between California and Texas. California is about 3 years ahead of Texas. When the economics are so much cheaper, battery power is build .

kkfx
0 replies
11h55m

I notice the wrong focus: how much such storage cost vs how much it will been able to run? My slowly discharged home battery have a declared loos of 5% in ~3 years and I discharge only 10%/day normally. My car SOH (NMC though), if true from ODB state 10% loss over ~2 years. Compared to some friends I can esteem 2.3 years of useful life for NMC, 8 years for LFP if MODERATELY used (80-20% 3 time a week), for grid storage the useful life might be 1-3 year.

Secondary consider the battery production capacity: actually we do not recycle batteries except few experiments, too expensive to be done on scale, that still recycle only a part of lithium, most efficient recover let's say 80% from a new battery.

What do you expect in 10 years?

VS

what you expect if we re-build on scale modern small buildings where p.v. at a significant slice of latitude it's roughly 50% of total consumption in pure self-consumption? What if a modern home who consume in hot summer ~30kWh/day consume from the grid ~5kWh/day like a home with no A/C and in cold winter consume ~40kWh/day, ~30 from the grid instead of 90-100kWh of a classic one (data ranged from homes in Sweden to Spain)? Because you know the most we get so far was from consuming much less to do much more, where we are far better than generating more from renewables in improvements rate terms. You can't "improve" classic buildings, you can only rebuild them and we haven't enough natural resources to rebuild cities not counting it's practically impossible for mere impact of such megaproject on existing human life.

The reality is that only a spread society of small stuff can evolve, and in a changing world we need to been able to evolve. That's the resilience WEF talk, denying it at the same time.

JoeAltmaier
10 replies
1d

OP suggests that land costs will soon dominate the equation. So no mention of orbital solar plants?

Yes, somebody years ago published a study that said, Uneconomical! because lift costs, panel cost, transmission inefficiencies.

All of those are now drastically changed, by orders of magnitude. It is not a matter of IF orbital solar is economical, but WHEN.

sharemywin
2 replies
1d

doesn't orbital solar also deflect sun so wouldn't it cool the earth at scale?

noSyncCloud
0 replies
1d

The sunlight that hits the reflectors would never have hit the Earth anyway.

adammarples
0 replies
1d

Teeny tiny scale

0cf8612b2e1e
2 replies
1d

I would need to see some supporting napkin math on how that makes financial sense. Something on the ground, accessible by Joe the handyman is always going to be cheaper than anything launched into space. To balance that out is going to require some huge win. Availability, efficiency, etc.

Solar input in orbit is higher than what is received at ground, but similar order of magnitude. I am not sure there are real world designs for beaming power 100km from space, but you are going to take some amount of loss in transforming the power to a transmissible form, beaming it through the atmosphere, and reassembling it on the ground. Unless you have a pin point death beam, the power is going to be transmitted to a relatively large area, requiring a large amount of land to receive it. Why not just build solar panels there?

Seems far easier to overbuild panels on the ground + batteries.

thfuran
1 replies
18h32m

Solar input in orbit is higher than what is received at ground, but similar order of magnitude.

On a sunny day, it's only something like 30% brighter above the atmosphere IIRC. I guess you beat cloud cover (assuming you can deliver it to ground through the clouds efficienly), but I agree it doesn't seem worth it.

pfdietz
0 replies
7h5m

The big advantage is the PV in space doesn't experience night (aside from very rare eclipses by Earth in geostationary orbit, which happens for a short period twice a year).

If we had laser power beaming it might make sense to put large PV installations around the Earth-Sun L2 point, so the power could be beamed to collectors on Earth's night side. Each beam would serve a series of collectors as the Earth rotated. The market in the Pacific would quickly be saturated, I imagine.

smeeth
0 replies
1d

Related startup: Reflect Orbital plans to put mirrors in space so that light can be reflected back onto ground-based panels at night.

A base assumption is often that orbital solar requires a panel in space, but even that might not be the case.

https://www.reflectorbital.com/

pulvinar
0 replies
1d

The middle of a large desert is effectively free land, and perfect for solar. I don't see how space could ever be more economical in any respect. If beaming energy gets cheaper than transmission lines, we can beam it point-to-point on the earth too.

ianburrell
0 replies
23h49m

Cheap solar panels mean that orbital solar will never be economical. Orbital solar made sense back when solar panels were super expensive so made sense to use them continuously. Solar panels are so cheap now that people are setting them on the ground.

400W solar panel costs $200 and weighs 40 lbs. If Starship gets down to $100/lb, that is $4000 to put a panel in space. There are thin film panel that weight way less but cost more that would improve the launch cost but still be expensive. That means that will be cheaperp to have many panels on Earth and have enough left for storage.

ZeroGravitas
0 replies
22h20m

You're suggesting land costs are the key here, but orbital solar beaming energy down as microwaves to earth need giant antenneas similar in land area to a solar farm as recievers. So there is no land advantage to offset the other costs.

BatFastard
10 replies
21h20m

Does converting sunlight to electricity reduce the amount of heat absorbed by the earth? If so, how many solar panels would be required to reduce the temp by 1 degree?

mallets
5 replies
21h12m

All will be heat after X amount of time. Where the X can be a few seconds or decades or centuries.

The more interesting thing would be the light reflected by the panels (albedo factor). This could be lower or higher than the surface these panels are placed on.

pfdietz
4 replies
20h44m

Also, the emittance of the panels at thermal wavelengths is important. What you want is a panel that converts wavelengths shorter than the bandgap cutoff at high efficiency, reflects near and mid IR at longer wavelengths, but has high emissivity in the far IR at wavelengths where the atmosphere isn't too opaque.

BatFastard
2 replies
20h20m

Could you convert electricity into a infrared laser and beam the energy into space?

pfdietz
0 replies
20h4m

A laser beam carries no entropy, so I don't see the point of this.

Using a laser beam to dissipate heat is one of those classic hard science fiction bloopers. David Brin is one guilty party (in "Sundiver").

Qwertious
0 replies
4h1m

You can skip the solar panel entirely and just lay out mirrors, or just spray the ground with white paint.

mallets
0 replies
20h21m

Not like optimising for this make much sense when we haven't even covered 1% of land yet.

Maybe our great-great-great-great grandkids can think on it, will be so disappointed if they haven't mastered terraforming yet.

lcvw
2 replies
21h16m

No because when the electricity is used it creates heat.

BatFastard
1 replies
20h33m

Heat is just a frequency in the spectrum right? What percent of emissions in an LED comes out as infrared?

mallets
0 replies
20h14m

Uhh, IR isn't heat. Heat isn't part of the EM spectrum. Hot stuff just emits more IR.

For IR in LED bulbs. Don't know, other than inconsequential.

morepork
0 replies
20h24m

Depending on the surface being covered it may actually increase the heat. Any electricity produced will eventually become heat. Solar panels will absorb more heat than surfaces with a high albedo where a lot is reflected back into space.

7e
10 replies
1d3h

These charts stop right at the point where the U.S. imposed tariffs on Chinese solar panels, and the tarrif schedule is only going up, to 50%. This matters because the future of solar is utility scale, where the panel costs dominate. So for the US, at least, solar costs will not keep shrinking in the short term.

pjc50
6 replies
1d3h

Countries that impose tariffs on solar panels and EVs are really demonstrating that they don't actually believe in climate change being important, compared to good old bribes for corporate donors.

blululu
3 replies
1d2h

Countries that dump solar panels on the international market to kill off foreign competition are really demonstrating that... During the Obama years the US invested heavily in Solar, and developed many of the technical innovations that make cheap solar possible today. Unfortunately the people who did this work were not able to keep up with the CCP subsidizing solar panels well below cost. They folded and the US has very little domestic solar panel manufacturing by comparison. This is unfortunate if you believe in a sustainable economy, especially since a domestic industry might have funded further R&D efforts. The tariffs are maybe too little too late for saving the nascent US solar manufacturing industry, but the issues of trade policy and climate policy are not always straightforward.

henry2023
1 replies
1d2h

What makes you think that cheap solar panels aren’t the product of economy of scale in a country that just likes to build stuff?

blululu
0 replies
1d1h

That’s part of it, but America is also a country that routinely achieves economies of scale and loves to build stuff so there is clearly more going on here. Look back at what was commercially and technically available 15 years ago and it is not a viable mainstream energy supply at the scale needed to have the deployment we see today. The US developed a number of key innovations that made this feasible. A lot of this was funded under Obama era energy policy, but no efforts were made to protect the native industry from an unsustainable market force which sadly meant that the policy did not get the ROI that it might have otherwise achieved.

pjc50
0 replies
22h29m

CCP subsidizing solar panels well below cost

So we should allow them to subsidize the Western energy transition? And cost the CCP money at the same time? Literally have the Chinese taxpayer pay for cheap Western energy?

I see the same dynamic playing out with EVs:

"EVs are too expensive we have to subsidize them!"

<China produces EVs that are cheaper than Western cars>

"EVs are too cheap, we have to tariff them!"

This is just handing taxpayer cash to Tesla shareholders with extra steps.

many of the technical innovations that make cheap solar possible today

Name some? Because it looks to me like a straightforward learning and scaling curve in Chinese factories. If they were actually infringing US patents they'd be blocked on that basis, which tells me they aren't.

specialist
0 replies
1d2h

Yes but (as you already know):

Realpolitick, the political economy, remains important. The sausage factory. Tariffs are the hush money to secure the ongoing support for Bidenomics.

It's super important that every player has its own domestic production. Even if USA's (or EU's) total global market share < 5%, it's worthwhile. De-risk supply chains, national security, upkeep of domestic competency, etc.

Quid pro quo. China could liberalize their economy too. Allow foreign direct investment. Drop their own tarriffs. But they're not (yet?) willing to forfeit autonomy in exchange for "free trade".

--

I get what you're saying. I too agree that fighting climate crisis is our top priority. These slap fights are infuriating. But, for better or worse, you and I aren't in charge.

JumpCrisscross
0 replies
1d

Countries that impose tariffs on solar panels and EVs are really demonstrating that they don't actually believe in climate change being important, compared to good old bribes for corporate donors

Or countries could be heterogenous and care about climate change, energy independence and jobs.

slavik81
0 replies
1d

For comparison, Canadian tariffs on Chinese solar panels are >150%.

ldbooth
0 replies
1d2h

Also The post-Covid interest rate hikes. Which is why prices went up from 2021-2023. The author attributes this only to supply chain: developers had PPAs signed in 2019-2021 that assumed lower borrowing & construction costs, then interest rates went up sharply, and all those PPAs had to be either renegotiated or the underlying project was never built.

joeyh
0 replies
1d2h

Those tariffs have were entirely worked around on the Chinese side before the ink was dry. One easy dodge: Manufacture in eg India for a little bit more, sell those to the US, transport Chinese solar panels for installation in India.

I bought a pallet just after the tariffs were announced and the price today is cheaper.

hiddencost
5 replies
1d1h

I've decided not to do home solar because it seems obvious to me that industrial scale plants will be able to do it cheaper.

geodel
2 replies
1d

Right. Pricing is out of whack. I got estimate of ~50K without batteries for 8KW solar setup. I don't know who is hosing whom but this is not workable for me.

songeater
0 replies
23h57m

That does sound very high. Not sure where you are, but guessing you are in the US at least.

As a comp, SunRun puts out detailed cost estimates for their residential systems each quarter[1]. Their average system cost was $5/watt, but with 50% of their installs having batteries. So for an 8Kw system (if you were buying outright) you should have gotten a quote of $40k with a "half-sized" battery. After US tax incentives, your cost should be <$30k including battery.

But yeah, if you're not in a region where they do a lot of installs, you won't get that price...

[1] "CreationCostMemo" tab in https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/_eb9fb58f3a5f81478f0536...

energy123
0 replies
12h33m

8KW panels + battery installation costs $10k total in many countries.

songeater
0 replies
1d

Yes, the cost of GENERATING electricity will undoubtedly be cheaper at the industrial scale level than on your rooftop.

But that generated electricity is likely to be a region very far from your (or someone else's) consumption - needing a lot of money to lay transmission and distribution lines to the end consumer.

Co-locating with consumption makes the difference in total costs far closer.

Very location dependent, but please don't dismiss offhand without considering the very real transmission costs.

energy123
0 replies
12h34m

If you live in an area with permitting restrictions, you could have your system fully paid off before that happens.

GaggiX
4 replies
1d

What will the world be like when panels cost $0.05/watt? $0.01/watt?

"Good morning, I would like a 400W solar panel"

"Sir, that will be $4"

perlgeek
3 replies
1d

At some point, the glass, frame and wiring will dominate the cost of solar panels, and when we hit that point, the price will likely stop falling. I don't know if we'll ever get as low as $4 with our current approach.

kragen
2 replies
23h4m

that is already the case; solar panels have been cheaper than window glass per square meter for years now. that's why the article says:

Is there a floor for these costs?

> Solar manufacturers are investing hundreds of billions in expanded capacity in an all out war for market share against a background of panel price drops of 15-25% per year. There is an extreme economic forcing function towards rapid improvement and ultimately convergence with the Platonically ideal solar panel - some 20 um thick layer of silicon supported by a 100 um thick layer of plastic rolled off a spool - or some other tech that's thinner and cheaper than paper.—Casey Handmer

Thinner and cheaper than paper. Think about that!

i suspect that at some point people are going to be mounting bare (passivated) silicon dies on string and putting up chicken wire over them to keep the hailstones off, or something like that. think about how plants support their leaves

tuatoru
1 replies
20h37m

Perovskite films on microgrooved plastic film, offset printed roll to roll and rolled out mounted vertically like windbreak netting in orchards.

For example: https://eyouagro.com/blog/citrus-fruits-wind-protection-nett...

Reduces land costs because the land is already being used for crops of one sort or another. Agrivoltaics ftw.

kragen
0 replies
20h4m

that's fantastic! yeah, you don't want to shade your wheat and corn with solar panels, but oranges and lettuce will benefit from it

it's going to be pretty hard to dethrone silicon after the amount of supply-chain and process optimization that's gone into lowering its costs, but in some sense things like what you're describing seem to make it inevitable at some point

happyopossum
3 replies
1d

I have seen a ton of articles about the plummeting 'costs' of solar over the past decade, so I was shocked when I recently got a bunch of quotes for a 10-12KW residential install: they were almost the same as the cost of the 10KW system I had installed back in 2014.

So at least here in California, inflation and rising labor costs have eaten up all of those savings.

teachrdan
0 replies
1d

Well, according to at least one online calculator, $1 in 2014 in the US would be worth $1.33 today. So perhaps the real price has gone down by over 33%?

oezi
0 replies
11h16m

This seems extremely sus. Maybe the 10kw include battery today?

mkaic
0 replies
23h57m

The article addresses this and notes that most of the cost reductions we've seen in the past decade are only really applicable to utility-scale installations, as it's only then that the one-time costs can be amortized sufficiently. Small consumer installations are dominated by costs other than the panels themselves to a much greater degree than utility-scale installations.

jenadine
2 replies
20h58m

One thing that is often forgotten is the difference between the cost of electricity at the power plant, and the price of electricity in the power plug in the household. The difference is that the grid provides constant electricity at 60Hz 24/7.

Solar is much cheaper to produce, but there are many challenges to get a reliable grid. Big centralized power plant that have huge turbines with kinetic energy are much easier and cheaper to handle on the grid than a distributed intermittent production where you somehow need to convert to 60Hz and add storage that has quite some loss.

locallost
1 replies
10h24m

There are a huge number of myths. Grid is not really my expertise, not at all, but I hear this a lot, it's challenging to get a reliable grid. At the same time I read an interview with the CEO of 50Hertz [1], one of Germany's grid operators who says, we can do 70-80% renewables easy and managed the solar eclipse a lot easier than even we thought. And data backs it up, Germany has one of the more reliable grids in the world. It makes sense even on a layman level - why would it be less of a challenge to have a grid with a few large plants? One of those goes offline unexpectedly and you lose a significant percentage of your capacity. This never happens with renewables and their intermittency is easily handled with a weather forecast.

[1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/interview/german-ele...

jenadine
0 replies
6h44m

It is certainly possible, just more expensive. And I'm just saying that one shouldn't mix cost of production and price for the consumer.

It is easier to size the network when the current flows basically in one single direction from power plant to users. When the production is decentralised, you need more transmission lines. You also get more losses in the transmission if you go through more substations. Big turbines helps to keep a stable frequency on the network despite unpredictable consumption changes. With renewables one need to adjust the frequency. One also need to keep the power factor in track. All of this means extra costly hardware on the grid and extra loss.

efields
2 replies
1d

How do we get around labor being the primary cost eater when that has (is) the most expensive factor, depending on where you live?

I want labor to be paid, and I also want cheap clean energy. Help me square the circle.

philipkglass
1 replies
23h46m

Build small numbers of large ground mounted solar arrays instead of large numbers of small rooftop mounted solar arrays. Then soft costs (permitting, certification) are much lower, the overall cost per unit of electricity is much lower, and labor gets paid much better.

This National Renewable Energy Laboratory page has a cost comparison of utility scale solar farms with rooftop systems:

https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in...

If you look at the orange portion of the bar for each year (installation labor), you'll see that labor gets paid about 50% more for utility scale farms than for rooftop systems. As of 2023 it's about $0.24 per watt on utility scale systems, $0.18 per watt on rooftops. But the complete rooftop system is much more expensive ($2.70 per watt vs. $1.20 for a large solar farm). The solar farm with one axis tracking will also produce more energy per installed watt over the course of a year. As a result, the cost per kilowatt hour generated from a rooftop solar array is multiples higher than from a utility scale solar farm in the same climate.

efields
0 replies
23h10m

Thanks! I like this answer.

kragen
1 replies
23h24m

wouldn’t you say that the article itself also contains a detailed (verbal) analysis? betteridge's law aside, it agrees with you

calmbonsai
0 replies
17h44m

True. I didn't realize that Patio11's podcast links had built-in transcripts so my additional description was superfluous.

Animats
2 replies
23h42m

We're there on solar panels. The next step is batteries.

And roof systems. Cheaper ways to get solar panels on roofs. That's mostly installation cost. Does Tesla's solar roof [1] actually work? Anyone have one?

[1] https://www.tesla.com/solarroof

RankingMember
0 replies
23h39m

I only know one person who successfully got one installed, and his installation was endlessly delayed, after which their paperwork got screwed up on Tesla's end so they had it for free until they sold house (not sure if they ever got charged for it honestly). It worked, but reportedly wasn't as efficient as panels would've been.

tanewishly
1 replies
22h59m

Around here, cost of solar have risen recently. Even though there still is the stimulus rule that any surplus put into the net can be extracted later (ie., the net functions like a storage facility for any residential installation), recently, power companies have started charging for returning energy. Quite massively too - the difference with their sale price is 2-4 cents/KWhr.

While there are good (as well as bad) reasons for this, the upshot is that the RoI for residential installations changed abruptly and became significantly worse - more or less overnight.

Due to that, and the low cost of the panels themselves, whether they become cheaper isn't very relevant for the market here (since other costs dominate).

josefresco
0 replies
22h55m

Around here

Where?

locallost
1 replies
20h10m

The premise of the article, that we would be richer if we used more energy is preposterously wrong. A light bulb used to be typically 100w, it's now a 1/10 of that. We get a lot more out of the energy now, which means we are in fact richer because we have more things. I just bought a TV which uses a quarter of the electricity of a Tv from a decade ago, and this with 4x as many pixels.

The big idea most people fail to grok is that we don't need energy at all, we need certain things energy provides us (light, heating, cooking, entertainment etc). But if I could super insulate my house and use 0 energy to keep it warm, this would not make me poorer. On the contrary.

Amory Lovins came up with the idea of "negawatts" a long time ago.

pfdietz
0 replies
6h52m

The crash in price of solar is upending the negawatt story. If power does become very cheap, efficiency becomes less important.

kumarski
1 replies
21h29m

I think it's irrelevant if the cost of solar panels goes to zero, the reality is that the farm to fork cost/kwh is still quite high because dispatch and transmission are never cheap.

Furthermore, for every 1 pound of polysilicon produced...you get 4 pounds of silicon tetrachloride output.

I gambled on $UAN and $AMR guesstimating that the spread of renewables would lead to more nat gas and coal/steel consumption per a kilowatt hour produced globally. I got lucky and it worked out. I'm not bullish on solar costs going below the embodied energy cost of desal per 1000 gallons. (10-14kwh/1000 gallons)

pfdietz
0 replies
21h23m

Furthermore, for every 1 pound of polysilicon produced...you get 4 pounds of silicon tetrachloride output.

SiCl4 can (and should) be completely recycled in the process that makes silicon, to make more SiHCl3. There is no reason to treat it as waste in a cost optimized system.

hacker_88
1 replies
7h59m

Solar + LFP batteries, Energy Combo for the future

Qwertious
0 replies
5h30m

LFP might lose out to sodium batteries, long-term. Sodium is dirt cheap - salt mines make lithium-salt extraction look like a joke, and the middle east has an abundance of desalination plants that end up dumping their ultra-concentrated brine back into the water because they have way more than they can do anything with.

fny
1 replies
4h18m

The core realization of the article is that energy costs have increased 30-100%. This is inline broadly with inflation experienced post-COVID presumably due to all the helicopter money dumped on the economy.

I suspect if these figures were revised for inflation, the same trends we've seen over the past ten years would persist.

jmyeet
0 replies
4h6m

There's a huge factor in the increase in energy costs during the pandemic that doesn't get talked about much, weirdly. It gets attributed to greedflation but it's actually far simpler.

In 2020, the Trump administration pressured OPEC to cut production by about 9.7 million barrels a day [1], roughly 10% of the world's production. This was a 2 year deal. Look at the 5 year chart [2] and you can see exactly where this deal starts and ends. This is further confirmed by looking at OPEC oil production [3].

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/special-report-trump...

[2]: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil

[3]: https://ycharts.com/indicators/opec_crude_oil_production

cbmuser
1 replies
11h30m

Customers are paying prices, not costs. A cheap kWh of solar electricity isn't useful when it's not available when needed. Prices are mandated by supply and demand.

Also, while the costs of the solar modules may fall further, the costs for the whole setup does not. A solar power plant requires a lot of mechanical and electrical parts to get the solar modules installed and connected to the electricity grid plus labor costs.

energy123
0 replies
11h5m

You didn't read the article.

NooneAtAll3
1 replies
1d3h

if author is here: your footnotes don't seem to work...

mlinksva
0 replies
1d2h

I suspect due to the paywall. Some portion of the article, presumably including footnotes, are behind that.

zackmorris
0 replies
4h10m

Solar panels cost less than windows:

89x44" for $221.40: https://www.portable-sun.com/products/canadian-solar-540w-bi...

96x48" for $544.00: https://1stwindows.com/retro/milgard2/trinsic/picture-window...

Those were the first that came up in search. I'm seeing other 500 W panels for $100-150 and windows for $1000-2000. But we can safely say that panels are less than half the cost of windows.

The increase in solar panel cost was from Trump's 30% solar tariff in 2018:

https://www.seia.org/research-resources/section-201-solar-ta...

The saddest thing about all of this for me is that we had the tech to manufacture inexpensive solar panels at scale in the 1980s. Just like any of us could design better computer vision sorters for recycling. We're stopped for protectionist geopolitical reasons so that people in entrenched industries don't lose their jobs.

I wish we could be honest about this, because it's what the next US presidential election is about. We can pretend that we live in a free market economy of winners and losers, or we can work together at a meta level above the zero-sum game Nash equilibrium that's leading us inexorably towards species extinction and global climate change:

https://medium.com/nori-carbon-removal/how-to-break-the-clim...

szundi
0 replies
22h2m

Surely can, but you have to pay the installer guys and the structure that holds the panels even if they cost zero.

shmerl
0 replies
21h15m

Why are residential prices on electricity not falling if costs of energy production are shrinking? If anything, prices only go up and electricity companies especially raise them during hot season.

pkfrank
0 replies
1d

Thanks for sharing.

pkfrank
0 replies
1d

Thanks for sharing

magicfractal
0 replies
18h22m

Just to point out that the reason why solar panel costs have been decreasing is because china as part of their 5-year plans set solar energy as a national priority and the world is now benefiting from their upfront investments and economies of scale. This is a clear datapoint towards economic planning for the green transition and rational management of natural resources.

kragen
0 replies
22h57m

this article is unfortunately fairly usa-centric, but it doesn't really mention the main cost driver for solar installations in the usa, which is the predatory tariffs that have been imposed by a series of administrations, based on the most ridiculous rationales. it does mention that solar panels in the us cost more than twice what they cost elsewhere, but doesn't really explain why. the number now is more like 4× because international panel prices have fallen by half since the year-old figures mostly used in the article. it says, 'overseas, it can go as low as $0.10-$0.12/watt', but actually the current benchmark figure for low-cost solar panels in https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... is €0.07/watt peak, which is 8¢/watt peak in the us dollar

the latest ridiculous news item in this pathetic story of regulatory capture is a petition from the american alliance for solar manufacturing trade committee to impose retroactive import tariffs on solar panel imports from vietnam and thailand https://www.pv-tech.org/us-manufacturers-seek-retroactive-ta...

the supposed justification for thus kneecapping us heavy industry by cutting it off from the cheapest energy in history? 'dumping': supposedly chinese solar panels (the majority of the panels sold in the world, but under 0.1% of the us market https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight... More) are being sold 'under cost'. but when you dig into the justifications for the supposed 'dumping', it turns out that they amount to things like 'provision of solar-grade polysilicon for ltar (less than adequate remuneration)' and 'funding on infrastructure'. i.e., the us department of commerce is trying to charge chinese solar module manufacturers for the government building power plants and cutting good deals on raw materials with other chinese companies. see barcode:4426784-02 c-570-011 for example (there's apparently no url i can use to link these documents directly). useful starting points may include https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14... https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2014-12-23/pdf/2014-3...

to give you an idea of how ridiculous these justifications are, one of the other documents i got was arguing about whether the fair market price for chinese solar-panel-assembling labor should be determined by comparing it to malaysian electronics-assembly labor or romanian electronics-assembly labor. they ended up settling on turkish labor, so to the extent that wages in the area of china where trina solar assembles their panels are lower than wages in turkey, the us department of commerce is imposing the difference as countervailing tariffs for 'dumping'. the evidentiary standard in these proceedings is 'guilty until proven innocent' ('adverse inference in selecting from the facts otherwise available')

the us keeps imposing new import tariffs against renewable energy; https://finance.yahoo.com/news/analysis-bidens-china-tariff-... documents how they're trying to keep out not just solar panels but also electric cars, but failing, because chinese investment is creating new productive capacity for the relevant goods throughout the world — the opposite of what would happen if dumping was actually happening, since the objective of dumping is to drive competition out of business

the result is that solar energy in the usa is several times more expensive than in the rest of the world, so it's getting installed only very slowly. the contrast between the rather pathetic https://www.seia.org/news/solar-installations-skyrocket-2023... (32.4 gigawatts installed in the usa in 02023, only 8% of the worldwide 430 new gigawatts installed worldwide) and the 216 gigawatts added at the same time in the prc (https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...) and the astounding 660 gigawatts expected in the prc this year: https://www.pv-tech.org/bnef-global-solar-additions-655gwdc-...

this by itself should make it clear how ridiculous the 'dumping' accusations are. if you're dumping a product, selling it below its production cost in order to eliminate overseas competition, you don't sell it to yourself. that's losing money on every sale and trying to make it up on volume!

so what's happening is that the world is going through the renewable energy transition, solving the problem of global warming, despite the usa fighting tooth and nail to prevent it with its foreign and trade policy. the prc is leading, developing new manufacturing techniques that lower the prices of energy so low that us companies insist they're dumping their solar panels below cost, but mostly investing in securing access for their own domestic industry

the last time a major new source of energy became available was the steam engine, which is still what powers most of the world's electric grid, in the form of steam turbines in nuclear and coal power plants. that enabled new forms of industry and new economic structures. for the last 50 years we've been stuck in an energy crisis as we've run into fossil-fuel resource constraints and dropping eroei. that crisis has finally ended; the future is already here, but it's not widely distributed. usa policy seems focused on ensuring that the future arrives domestically as slowly as possible, enabling china to obtain as large a lead as possible in the new energy-intensive industries enabled by unbelievably cheap solar energy

if you want the us to be the place where builders go to build things, you need to fix this

jmyeet
0 replies
22h11m

Solar power is the future. The drop in price in the last 20 years is absolutely wild. The charts in this article show this. What's encouraging is that it's pretty steady progress. It's hard to predict when or where that ends.

Batteries continue to get cheaper (also covered). This matters too because storing energy solves the base load "problem". Batteries aren't the only way to store energy either. There continue to be advances in the so-called "power-to-gas" technology, where you essentially use excess power to make fuel, usually from CO2 in the air. This isn't currently economic but it continues to get cheaper. It also provides an upper ceiling on how expensive gas can get.

The LCOE of nuclear in particular is damning [1]. Every single commercial nuclear power reactor has been built with government subsidies too so it doesn't seem like government support is the issue. There are still too many unsolved problems.

Solar is the only method of direct power generation. I think every other method inovles turning a steam turbine. There are no moving parts. They can be installed on everything from wristwatches to power stations to satellites.

[1]: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....

jmacd
0 replies
2h36m

Are the costs of roof/home installs falling anywhere? Here in eastern Canada the pricing has gone up per kWh in the last 10 years fairly significantly.

forgetfreeman
0 replies
12h52m

I hate the chunk of rhetoric around GDP. What an uncritical readthrough thinks: oh man, everyone should be making a bunch more money. What they actually said: a couple hundred people in the US missed out on capturing all these lost gains.

energy123
0 replies
14h56m

The article concludes that solar costs will drop another 8x then plateau.

d_burfoot
0 replies
21h36m

Does anyone see signs of data center usage being affected by electricity costs? I imagine a relatively near future where your AWS bill changes depending on the time of day, and so companies shift their computational work from region to region, following the sun.

bkandel
0 replies
6h9m

If we had stayed on the Adams curve, we would be consuming 2-5x more energy than we do today. For the US, that means that GDP per capita today would not be the current amount of $65k, but $100k-$200k. It is a catastrophe that we don’t have more energy: We should be much richer.

I'm sorry, what??? Correlation != causation. We have become more energy efficient, and it does not follow at all that cheaper energy will increase our GDP by 2-3x.

anovikov
0 replies
9h4m

Spike in LCOE is merely because of interest rates. Which hits solar the hardest as it doesn't consume fuel and it's maintenance costs are very low, so almost all of the LCOE is cost of initial capital investment stretched out to 20 years by applying the interest rates, which are high.

No need to look for doom scenarios here. Interest rates fluctuate. They will be back to some lower point than today but certainly higher than in 2020. LCOE will drop off.

There's no need for solar costs to go down at all anymore. Transition will happen even if they get stuck forever, solar is cheap enough, now it's just about speed at which factories can be deployed, installers trained, etc.

__MatrixMan__
0 replies
20h45m

As long we keep using logarithmic axes: yes, indefinitely!

Havoc
0 replies
22h21m

Think these days we should really be talking more about storage than panels.

And I don’t mean lithium batteries. More things like molten salt and sand batteries - things that require a bit of planning and infra that is reliant on rare metals etc