- powerlines work as a grid, NYC to Texas happens to cross several other cities which heavily mutualizes cost of the infrastructure. The question is not will those lines be profitable for the 2h NYC need power. It's the overall need that matters.
- energy transport represents 6% of current electric cost. To make the grid irrelevant for economic reason would suggest that energy price will changed from an order of magnitude.
Can you elaborate where you get the 6% number from? At least for me the energy transport cost is separated out (as the energy production and energy distribution are separate companies/services) and comes out to something like 40% of pre-tax electricity cost.
6% is in the ballpark of electricity loss during transmission (and even that is on the low end - depending on how the last mile delivery is done, the lower voltage cables and transformers near the consumer can easily push it up to 10%+), but that isn't the main part of the cost, that is dominated by the cost of building and maintaining the delivery infrastructure.
I think our numbers are not incompatible. Consider the French market which I understand better than the US one and has a monopoly.
28% is the transport cost of electricity overall - the figure 40% you have probably comes from average RETAIL price of electricity in some low density zones. Let's check the average cost, gross and retail, just because I'm an engineer and care about the viability of a solution from a pure technical standpoint :).
In 2019, RTE spent 426M euros/year in long distance transportation of electricity on a 20B electricity market - we have to remember that transport also includes the real estate (80M), admin (161M), local grid (789M) according to https://www.rte-france.com/en/finance/key-figures-financial-...
Those figures are stable year over year. Year over year may seem insufficient as it doesnt consider the initial investment, but remember we already have most of the grid in place already, so that's what matters to me.
The "trick" is to make use believe that local removes transport cost, but the truth is that we still need a local grid and space to put it, which is the bulk of the cost.
Overall I consider the grid to be a low cost solution we put in place years ago when we were poorer and things cost a ton because of the manual labor - but now we already got it so why not considering it only for its cost to maintain and expand and not overall cost to "deploy" as the article did.
Also, you report from MIT is 10 years old. The past decade has shown the most transformative decade of grid-related technology development in the past century, and the MIT report from 10 years ago didn't anticipate any of it. I don't blame them, most people were caught way off guard. But there's no reason to read it today except to study the history of what people were thinking back then. We are in an entirely different age.
Yeah. If this makes economic sense and takes off, then it will come first to places that are already at the fringe or off grid. Scottish islands, Hawaii, and so on. It will come last (if ever) to cities.
IIRC, electricity transport and distribution costs can vary significantly. They can be relatively high in densely populated areas because of transmission limitations/congestion, and they're also high at the edge of existing infrastructure because running additional lines can be costly.
As an example, transmission and distribution costs were roughly equal to generation costs in CA in 2016.
A large part of the initial expense is right of way. Buying up/renting property or acquiring easements and defending the inevitable lawsuits is an ever increasing cost thats starting to rival the labor and material cost of the work. Maintenance is cheaper and will only continue to get cheaper relative to development costs unless there's a substantial change in the legislation governing that litigation.
There is a dc line from east of Portland to near LA, the pacific inter-tie. It was built as 2 wires in the 70s, carrying 1.4GW. Since then, over many changes, it was upgraded to 3.1GW. that involved equipment changes at both endpoints, but the lines and towers are still the same, 50 years later.
One alternative idea I've been thinking about is immediately convert all renewable energy into hydrogen gas. Then the hydrogen is piped to where it's need, or stored in underground caverns for later use.
Power generation becomes entirely local via fuel cells. Since hydrogen can be stored for long periods of time, the intermittency problem goes away.
Although there would be a near-term loss of efficiency, the sheer simplicity of the solution is remarkable. It even eliminates the issue of down power lines cause fires, which is a major issue in California today.
This is far more complicated than using the electricity directly, at time of generations, when possible. The most clear headed, short form, explanation of hydrogen's potential I've seen is here:
We will likely end up using hydrogen in three situations: chemical feedstocks, some industrial heat processes that may want some reduction too, and backup grid generation. Switching pipelines to hydrogen has huge, unsolved problems. The energy density is far lower, meaning that even with current demand, natural gas pipelines repurposed to hydrogen would be inadequate. Already, building new pipelines for NG is so difficult that LNG storage is deployed to relieve congestion. Hydrogen would make that far worse. And there are many small things, like making the pipelines robust to the damaging effects of hydrogen, and even coming up with some sort of odorant like the mercapten in natural gas; we don't have any chemicals that can work at the moment.
There is a lot of appeal to hydrogen, and with a decade of intense industrial development we may be able to make carbon-free electrolysis derived hydrogen economical for many use cases. But it won't be many, IMHO.
The article you cited is just a person trying to, from purely an a priori standpoint, determine what is possible based on how things currently are. At no point does he try to imagine where the technology will be or where society will be in 10-30 years time. The most damning parts are where he predicts that hydrogen will fail to hit its cost targets even decades from now. That's completely in opposition to nearly every other green energy program tried recently, and I think reveals his lack of foresight.
I think the only valid point he made is that electricity is more efficient in a lot of circumstances. But we already knew that, and in fact it's arguably not worth pursuing in a world that will be soon awashed in green energy. Plus, all of the other problems unrelated to efficiency look devastatingly hard if our goal is to have a pure zero emissions world.
Ultimately, it's exactly what Arthur Clarke warned us about regarding old people making predictions. So no, this not a "clear headed" analysis but arguably a document of luddite thinking.
> Switching pipelines to hydrogen has huge, unsolved problems. The energy density is far lower, meaning that even with current demand, natural gas pipelines repurposed to hydrogen would be inadequate. Already, building new pipelines for NG is so difficult that LNG storage is deployed to relieve congestion. Hydrogen would make that far worse. And there are many small things, like making the pipelines robust to the damaging effects of hydrogen, and even coming up with some sort of odorant like the mercapten in natural gas; we don't have any chemicals that can work at the moment.
Hydrogen will only mean larger tanks and bigger pipes compared to natural gas. This is a vast improvement over batteries or other physically based energy storage, which are dozens to hundreds of times less energy dense. You can easily figure out that the latter cases would be truly enormous in comparison, not to mention needing something much more complicated than just underground caverns.
Furthermore, there's no practical way of moving electricity across oceans. I mean yes, you can build HVDC underwater and that works to some extent, but it quickly becomes ridiculously expensive if you try to connect distant landmasses in a giant web of connected grids. With hydrogen, you are looking at shipping hydrogen like LNG.
At a basic level, you're looking at a grid that works just like the existing one, only much cleaner and slightly more expensive. Only difference this time you can put the fuel cells very close to the end-customer since there are no CO2 or NOx emissions. This nearly eliminates the need for giant overhead powerlines, itself a major benefit. Compared to the vast complexity of what we're seeing with the "macrogrid" this looks very doable.
Metal hydrides have been proposed as a possible solution. We talked to a small R&D firm years ago that had proposed putting power stations in remote areas where energy is immediately converted into a metal hydride; in their case, magnesium hydride. I remember the process of reforming magnesium hydroxide back was fairly energy intensive, perhaps too much to be considered efficient.
The benefit of storing magnesium hydride is it's much easier to store safely in large volumes than hydrogen gas. Hydrogen gas leaks through everything, it's just so small. On the other hand, you have to collect spent material (presumably at "gas stations") and return it to the energy farm, which is more complex than the one-way delivery system you'd have with hydrogen. Still seemed like an interesting idea.
Solar can't get indefinitely cheaper. Already, install cost is more than panel cost. The floor is probably around what roofs cost.
I wonder if BYD's new higher-density lithium iron batteries will take over stationary storage. Supposedly, the energy density per unit volume is comparable to lithium-ion, but they're heavier. The big advantage is that they're safer - the chemistry will not go into thermal runaway. You can buy them now in AU and NZ.[1]
It doesn't really need to get a lot cheaper. It's already cheaper than coal.
I don't think retrofitting residential rooftop solar is necessarily such a great idea given the high installation cost. It'll make much more sense on large flat roofs like on strip malls. Residential electricity users will probably get more bang for their buck by being able to take advantage of fluctuating spot prices - e.g. with intelligent storage heaters.
It'll make sense on newbuilds though. If you're already building a roof, why not make it generate a bit of electricity? The installation cost will already be built in.
And then with solar, 40%-70% of consumption will be direct without storage, at $29-$42/MWh, which pulls the all-in cost of solar way below coal.
And that's for projects deployed in 2020. Wait 5 years, the typical timeline for bidding and installation for utilities, and any utility that isnt planning for massive renewables and storage is simply bilking their customers.
Germany was built a decade ago. Using it as a point of reference is deceptive.
You're double counting the without storage benefit, it's already factored in to the $81-140 price.
The plant they list has 100 MW of solar, 50 MW/200 MWh of storage.
Assuming a CF of 0.3 that makes it 720 MWh per day, 73% of it not touching the battery.
If you built a plant that only supplies power at night it would be way more expensive.
It's not yet cheaper than coal if you wanted to run the whole grid on PV + batteries, not close. You need a lot more than 2 hours of nameplate capacity storage per plant.
But as you say, the costs are rapidly falling. The coming EV transition will provide significant economies of scale.
And this is also valuing carbon at $0, which is a horrendous distortion.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you're not correct. You seem to be saying that the "cost of storage" numbers already include averaging the storage cost between storage and not storage, but I can't get anything like that to work our to reasonably plausible numbers. Check page 8 of the PDF of their very slightly fuller explanation: https://www.lazard.com/media/451418/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
The project is cheaper than wholesale arbitrage because they don't have to pay wholesale prices to charge the battery, inverters are used for multiple purposes, and most PV solar designs already throw away some electricity, so that's free.
Also on that page, doing some napkin math on the project lifetime MWh of 1,260,000, and the purchase price of $600-$1000/kWh is higher than most grid batteries deployed these days. These are very conservative numbers!
Lazard's numbers are difficult to compare to most actual storage payment contracts, because every one I've seen is structured around paying for capacity, in kW-months, rather than straight payments for every MWh of energy dumped on the grid. But the capacity payments end up working out to numbers that are on the low end of Lazard's cost estimates when translated.
I'm sorry, it was a mistake. You're not counting it twice, it is indeed a figure just for storage, with the assumption of daily cycling.
If we use the ratio of the plant (i.e. 200 MWh storage for 720 MWh generation at a 30% capacity factor), that would leave us with (81-140 * 0.27) + 29-38 for the generation, for a total cost of $51-76/MWh.
But that's still based around the idea of cycling the storage daily. Solar performs poorly on cloudy days, so you can either overbuild it significantly, build days of storage instead of hours, or keep the old power plants around as backup. Either of the three is going to bump up that cost significantly.
It blows coal out of the water if you don't have to worry about days you're not producing power, but you can't build a grid around that. And coal is mostly being eaten by natural gas for price reasons anyway.
Did you factor in a discount rate with your back of the napkin math? It might explain why the purchase price looks so high.
Yes, we haven't even been looking for lithium until recently, and the availability of it has more than doubled in just a few years. (Note that a lot of lithium comes from "resources" and not from "reserves," as the latter term usually refers to mining rather than brining.)
For current chemistries, cobalt is more of a concern, but that's mostly a concern for car batteries, and the concern is more about the terrible conditions of extraction (some child labor from small scale mining) than the total amount.
For stationary storage, sodium behaves a lot like lithium, but is far heavier. And there are all sorts of flow chemistries that have barely been examined.
However I think the lithium train has left the station, unless there's some sort of serious market interference to cause huge unexpected shortages, there's little chance for lithium competitors to catch up within the next 15 years.
What chart shows battery backup on that page? What is the sample solar field + batteries that puts out at a cheaper rate than an equivalent coal plant? Or is this just theoretical not based on any real deployment?
Lazard has not revealed the full details of their methodology, but there are deployments with storage all the time, they tend just not to get any press unless Tesla is involved. And until FERC's recent order 841, it was pretty much impossible to even connect storage on most grids.
Here's a summary of hybrid projects (generation plus storage) as of last year (page 6):
Nobody ever factors in damages from CO2. The German government for examples estimates those to be around 195€/ton. That adds about 18 Eurocents/kWh for coal. Its real cost is thus more than double the estimates given in the other comment.
Germany's electricity prices are high because theyve front loaded capex and are decommissioning old power plants early.
It gets even more ridiculous when the nuclear lobby roll it out because if they were going to go on a nuke plant building binge like France did in the 80s their electricity prices would be even higher.
You will need to deal with the gaps and it's not trivial, but if you are already putting huge panels, would it not be easier to route rain/snow/ice from the gaps, than to build a separate rain/snow proof layer with a bunch of mounting holes?
It shouldn't be hard to add some overlapping flaps to the panel (during manufature), and roofs with tiles like these [1][2], only use around 5cm of overlap, so 10-15cm might be sufficient and simple for a big solar panel.
That's a gimmick with thousands of panels and connectors.
Very pretty, but seems like a fire waiting to happen, or at least a regular failure. Also seems expensive financially and materially with all those individual connectors and cables.
I was thinking of something a bit more brutalist-fashion, with the roof designed for standard 1-2 m² panels, and a small dose of non-solar same-color panels for any chimneys, corners or other unavoided irregularities. Not small shingles to fit any roof.
Comparable, but that's not the right comparison. It's between a roof and buying your power from the power company and roof+solar. The first is way cheaper.
If we want to be green than still, a roof + 1,000 sq feet of solar out in the country connected to your house by wires is way cheaper.
That's not really much different than having a terrace or a green roof to deal with when roof problems occur. Sure you can make a plain roof but it is a ridiculous waste of outdoor space, which leads you to need to reserve other space.
I would like to see terrace materials with mediocre efficiency solar collection, similar to the solar streets idea, but dealing with a realistic amount of wear and tear.
If you are talking about a single family home then build a solar A-frame, or better yet don't build it. But most larger buildings need to have a significant amount of flat roof.
its not cheaper than coal, in fact it cant function without fossil fuel. You need to account for the backup energy needed to if you want to talk about the price
10 years ago, the story was that solar could never produce energy at an affordable rate, and if we ever got past 5% renewables we'd see rolling blackouts. Then the panic point was 10%, then 30%, then 50%.
Now the FUD has switched to "you're not taking into account the cost of backup fossil fuels." Well turns out that coal is being shut down everywhere, because it can't even compete. We don't need them. There's a chance that we might need natural gas a few weeks a year in 2040. The statement should be "how are natural gas plants going to shift payment schemes so they can survive in this world," not "you're not taking into account the cost."
We have storage alternatives that will make natural gas obsolete at the next spike in fuel prices. Storage deploys quick. The fossil fuel guys had better get their lobbying straight if they want a piece of the pie in 15 years, or they will be engineered around.
> Well turns out that coal is being shut down everywhere, because it can't even compete. We don't need them.
Because of natural gas. The growth of natural gas almost entirely offsets the coal shutdown.
We have barely doubled the electricity generated by renewables in the US since the 90s: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
And hydro makes up a 1/3 of it, wind makes slightly more than hydro, and solar is nearly a drop in the bucket.
PJM and ERCOT interconnection queues are seeing big drops in natural gas, replaced with renewables (and storage).
Counting hydro as renewables, when it has been a large and unchanging source of energy for decades upon decades, is just a tactic to obscure the exponential growth in renewables. A clever way to try to snow investors or shareholders that don't want to admit to bad investments, but not a good way to understand where the market is actually going.
The cost to generate electricity when asked to. ERCOT operates an auction to match the supply of electricity to demand at any given moment. In PJM, they have an energy market, but there's also capacity markets, where people can get paid by being ready to generate on demand. The idea being that the capacity market will reduce some of the price volatility that happens in ERCOT, where sometimes energy goes for thousands of dollars per MHw.
The PJM and ERCOT markets, where any independent operator can interconnect and start trying to make money, are in stark contrast to a lot regulated utilities in the US. Under the regulated utility model, the utility tries to maximize profits under the constraints of what the regulator will let them get away with, and what the regulator will let the utility bill to the customer. Often, the regulator's rules tend to make the utility want to build lots of transmission, because that's a guaranteed 20% profit. Whereas if the utility adds lots of cheaper new generation, they are at risk of putting old assets out of business, which means lost capital investments.
So when we want to find out what the true costs of electricity are, we should look to where investors are putting their money in PJM and ERCOT, and ignore anybody who works for a regulated utility. The motives are completely different.
The cost of generating electricity is not really a useful way to think about it if it doesn't look at the cost of generating reliable electricity.
Solar and wind are unreliables and can't actually be used consistently which means that you need to not just factor in the cost of the backup energy but also to take into account that solar and wind are parasitic forms of energy and thus drives up the cost of other forms because they are politically preferred through among other things wind tax credits.
So I don't believe that you are actually describing anything close to the true cost until you start doing something like the above.
In order to proceed to your pre-determined talking point, reliability, you ignored my entire comment and its contens. This is because you are following a playbook from inside an echo chamber that hasn't looked to the reality of new tech that's developing.
I said, the cost to generate electricity when asked to, i.e. whatever is needed to make the grid function. I talked about capacity markets, the guarantees against "parasitism."
Therefore, the cost is actually reflected in the functioning of the grid.
The idea of "parasitic" energy sources is preposterous. If they can't be relied upon, then during those unreliable moments the fuel-based generators can make all their profits.
If it were actually somehow cheaper to keep these fossil-based plants in force, point out the market failure to us. We have two entirely different market structures, energy-only in ERCOT, and energy+capacity in PJM, and they are both coalescing away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and storage.
Your arguments are years out of date. Everybody knows that fossil fuels have limited lifespan on the grid, the only question is how much they can manipulate market regulations to keep them going for a few more years. Exxon is already paying heavily for their foolishness in overinvesting in assets that were clearly stranded at the time of purchase. How many more years of taking out loans to pay dividends can these companies endure?
No the cost is not reflected in the functioning of the grid, quite the contrary.
Wind and solar makes the system more complex AND because it's politically preferred and incentivized through ex. wind tax credits it ends up making the other forms more expensive because they have to give room for wind and solar WHEN they have capacity which obviously makes fossil fuel more expensive.
Wind and solar is the affirmative action of the energy system and they deliver a small fraction of the actual energy needed to run a modern society.
Never understood why with a B2B average volume weighted battery cost of 137$/kwh per BNEF do LFP batteries for retail always start at 500$/kwh or so including Tesla powerwall. I understand part of it is inverter and may be BMS but still the difference is excessive.
Stationary storage should not cost > 200 $/kwh and hopefully as demand accelerates we see these prices soon.
The retail price of LFP batteries outside of China is a grand ripoff given that automotive sector, allegedly, already gets automotive grade cells (which are superior to storage grade) for $50-$60 kWh.
But even this way, I don't see battery storage becoming a thing economics wise, except in places where electricity supply itself is unreliable.
Grid scale storage can be made incomparably cheaper with things other than batteries, especially if storage periods are just few hours.
Just need some system to construct solid fuel blocks with that excess energy. Could bypass the panels and create wood, but maybe there are other better strategies. Maybe some places can fit a hydrogen storage cavern in their backyard.
You produce Hydrogen or Methane during summer and feed fuel cells or combined cycle gas plants during winter. It's not terribly hard, it's just a bit expensive right now. Most countries already have infrastructure to store large amounts of natural gas, which can be reused for this.
This is why I made a graph: https://flatline.org.uk/daystats.html (click top graph for intraday detail). It's both, really, but then I am fairly far north. There's a three month period of daily production being <20% of summer peak.
Uh, you must be living quite far up north! There are people living there, wow! (Snobbery of a man who used to live in tropics.) Just joking.
Though, 26 vs 0.15 kwh variance is still nothing in comparison to the worst daily production on record, and nil you get at night.
Well, can only say that there is nothing even imaginable on the horizon to being practical for seasonal scale energy storage. Even for a small country as UK, you will need a small ocean to store enough energy for one season worth of consumption.
Yup. There's also a lot of room at the utility scale for improved designs of the old Edison batteries. Nickel-Iron chemistries are heavy and initially expensive, but:
1. They can last effectively forever with periodic electrolyte topoff, proper charge control, decent thermal management, and good contaminant prevention policies.
2. They (and their electrolyte effluvia) aren't terribly toxic.
Most other utility scale chemistries have limited lifespans and degrees of toxicity and disposal/recycling difficulties.
Hell, this could even be a Long Now project: design and operate a 10,000 year utility-scale NiFe battery. There's no theoretical reason why not.
They could get a bit more imaginative and standardized. Intelligent panels with integrated micro invertors that you just had to feed a cable into the fuse box and you're done would be nice. Standards so my water heater could talk to the panels and know when to turn on would be nice too.
micro-inverters won't cut it for grid-tied. Realistically, things are not far from that now - I just installed a 6.6kW ground mount system here, and conceptually what you describe is more or less all I had to (ignoring the underground cable runs and inverter->service panel interconnect).
the "standards" part I agree with - it irks me that despite the fact that my solar edge inverter could theoretically constantly be babbling to the network about the state of things, the protocol is entirely proprietary (and I refuse to connect it to the internet anyway).
My understanding of the term "micro-inverter" is that it describes a small, unsophisticated, lower power inverter. Such a device could not match grid phase and could not handle high voltages. They are useful for other reasons, but by themselves don't connect to the grid.
My Solar Edge system uses micro-inverters on each panel, but still has "an inverter" before the grid interconnect.
The current microinvertors are a bit expensive and custom, though often worth it. So I was suggesting there is still plenty of headroom for panel manufacturers to improve their product by integrating micro inverters and inteligence and such. Incidentally I think you technically have Solar edge optimizers, slightly different from micro inverters, hence why you still need an inverter, a blurry distinction admittedly.
You're absolutely right - I was forgetting what I installed! The SolarEdge thingies on my panels don't invert at all, they just modulate the voltage/connectivity for the panels so that malfunction/shade doesn't pull the whole array down.
What I'm personally waiting for is a grid-tied inverter that can also be used to directly charge batteries as well. Nobody seems to make one that doesn't involve some important compromises. For now it seems that if you want grid-tied and a battery system, you charge the batteries through a double DC->AC->DC conversion (i.e. charge the batteries from your regular house AC system), and somehow solve the instant-cutover problem separately.
No, but I don't think anyone thinks they are practically capped out in terms of economies of scale and engineering refinement. Certainly not with the promise of perovskites.
I'd guess 8% MINIMUM for another five years. Really is quite the blocker for any new nuclear / hydrogen / biofuel / natural gas planning aside from load levelling.
BYD is the name of the manufacturer - a big e-car maker in China.[1] Their battery technology is lithium iron phosphate.
To gp's objection, multilayer cells (possibly silicon-perovskite, possibly others) reduce installation cost and real estate cost. Double the power per unit area, halve the installation and land requirement.
Other overhead costs like design and regulatory approval can be reduced with standardization.
Costs can't continue going down indefinitely, but I agree that we are not near a floor. I'd expect another 20 years of gradually tapering reductions. As you say, not good for any kind of thermal generation, with its attendant high operation and maintenance costs. It also makes fusion power generation research pointless.
I was a huge LFTR stan a couple years ago. Solar/Wind has shut me up about that.
I still think we should research it long-term...
But (HOT TAKE) redirecting any large scale funding to hydrogen, nuclear, geothermal, or hydro in the next ten years is just slowing down progress on global warming when we are, by all accounts, in a VERY critical time for mitigating the worst case.
I think the cheapest iteration of solar will be when it's essentially in paint - decades or more away. There'll be some portion of the cost that remains fixed over longer term - say cost of inverters or other factors - and the marginal cost of the solar paint.
I could see inverters going the way of the dodo. 48VDC may pickup.
More and more electronics are rectifying the AC to DC anyway (e.g. my fridge is variable-frequency drive), but usually stepping it down since they'll have a transformer for isolation anyway.
The current losses may be less than inversion (and rectification) losses.
The big problem these days is that AC appliances are cheap and DC appliances get charged the 'off-grid' tax, so you just throw more cheap panels at the problem.
When you pay a lot more for roughly the same thing in the off-grid version. I get it that they're not mass-produced, but a DC fridge/lightbulb/whatever isn't that much different than the AC version.
Maybe one day incinerating toilets won't cost $4k.
> as the costs of local generation and storage continue to plummet, the relative inefficiency of long distance transmission will drive its use out of favor. This will mean the proliferation of rooftop solar and consumer batteries, as well as solar+batteries at utility scale
Rooftop solar and consumer batteries does require consumers to have access to capital, though.
It's easy to forget (especially if you make $$$$$ in tech) that many people just aren't in great shape financially. Even if rooftop solar pays off in the end, they may not have the cash sitting around, may not be able to qualify for a loan, or may have other more urgent needs (car loan, etc.).
Plenty of people will understand the payoff and will be able to push themselves over the hump to reach a more optimized state. But there will probably always be lots of people who can't and will buy electricity instead.
> Plenty of people will understand the payoff and will be able to push themselves over the hump to reach a more optimized state. But there will probably always be lots of people who can't and will buy electricity instead.
A consequence of this is that as people with the capital (and accountants advising them) opt out of the grid, the burden of grid maintenance will fall increasingly on people who can't get access to the capital (or are short-term in their housing).
So poor people will end up paying far more for their electricity than affluent people.
Renewables won't buy an industrial power user out of the grid, they need reliability. Also, location is more important than what the power bill is for most industry and commercial. You need a large plot of land for the power to run your average large power user.
Renewables won’t make house owners independent of the grid either.
Have a look at Calfifornia where a lot of gas plants have to provide electricity when the sun is down.
It’s sometimes really bizarre how proponents of renewables completely ignore the low capacity factor of their proposed technology or claim that large-capacity storage is a trivial problem to solve.
There is a reason why Germany has the second-highest electricity prices worldwide and why California had rolling blackouts not so long ago.
Germany's electricity prices are almost completely irrelevant for the discussion about the cost of newly installed renewables today. In Germany consumer prices are high because the consumer subsidizes twenty year old systems while large scale industrial users get to consume the cheap, subsidized electricity.
California had rolling blackouts because of criminal fraud. The governor was recalled to kill prosecution of the fraud, and to get the state to pay the fraudulent billing. Arnold came through with the $80B.
For an average household that may be spending $125/mo for electricity, even a fully paid-for solar installation is low impact. Most people would be better off investing elsewhere first.
It's already become securitized. Some solar co will pay you up-front for 25y access to your roof, because they'll find an investor happy enough for a 5% return on a project with an >10% yield.
Granted, I'm an outlier in that I did my own install, but I'm earning around 10% on the installed cost of my 6.6kW ground mount arrays, which is high impact given that I can't get that from any non-stock-market investment or savings at present.
Exactly. And even in places like South Africa where solar should play well it's still a significant investment for middle class relative to their earning power.
Worse government sitting on a pile of old coal plants has a financial incentive to not lose their well off customers. It's the only part of their customer base that _can_ pay.
The article argues that is solar keeps getting cheaper at 10% a year and batteries at possibly double that the cost of transmission becomes way too high for new transmission lines. It will be cheaper to overbuild solar and have a few hours of battery backup.
Agree to too large an extent for my comfort. Things like Facebook and Twitter, for instance, have basically made anything posted globally viewable. Everything posted on those platforms is globally viewed and, it seems, global viewership is even reinforced or even enforced (through 'outrage mobs' looking for the latest thing to be upset and 'go viral' over, etc).
edit-Here's a potential factor to make energy local - but just a supposition: A desire for power to be generated at smaller, localized scales. i.e. Power becomes near-free through the use of tiny nuclear plants - so tiny even your most stalwart against it perceives it as safe enough at that tiny scale.
If anything, the cause of the most recent real estate crash (and subsequent rise) was the overwhelming covariance of real estate trends throughout the country/developed world.
Agreed. Though, I could imagine a RE market correction breaking the correlations - if only through bankrupting the market players forcing that correlation. i.e. I'm in rural America seeing commercials for cash RE buyers from mobile applications. That's got to be indicative of factors correlating markets intimately. I'm also wondering whether this indicates new factors actually creating connections between markets that weren't previously there - or simply hubris.
I have thought for a while that small, decentralized, self sustaining homes or communities are one aspect of a future utopia that makes sense. It definitely isn't within our lifetime future, but I do believe level power generation will be a hallmark of some kind of future.
It’s too inefficient. You end up using way more energy supplying all those spread out spaces than you can afford. It’s why suburbs struggle so much with long term infrastructure maintenance - density is the primary way humanity reduces energy usage.
Bigger question is will point of use generation destroy the economic viability of the electrical grid.
It's already not particularly unreasonable for many residential users in California to generate all that they consume on-site with solar and a backup gasoline generator to refill the batteries during winter bad weather... the main cost in doing so is the batteries and people are continuing to predict decreases in battery costs.
Electric cars will probably save the grid nearterm, with people wanting the convenience of charging overnight at home. Eventually all carparks will be equipped with solar powered charging, which will allow people to use their cars as backup power packs.
Long term, solar/battery economics will eventually make the cost of maintaining the grid too expensive. Governments will try and mandate against it, but that will only last so long.
Since the pandemic I’ve been effectively off grid in the city. Kind of interesting Recently Verizon cut me off (despite their promise not to) and their agents don’t seem to understand the concept of my not having enough power to call them and wait on hold for a possible resolution. So I’m stuck living off grid with a carrier who I can’t explain the situation to, actually I got a temporary SIM but I still can’t access my phone number. I know it sounds like a sob story. The point of sharing is to emphasize that nobody really understands the ramifications of not having unlimited power available on tap.
No, it sounds like the intro to a lawsuit. (Although I'm surprised because I thought a cell phone could effectively run purely on solar power if you get any decent sunlight)
I don't get it. You live in the city, but somehow don't have power? Is it because of infrastructure reasons (eg. down power line), or administrative reasons (eg. failure to pay bill)? Also, smartphones have "talk times" of tens of hours[1]. I find it difficult to believe that you're being put on hold for that long. Even if for some reason you're being put on hold for days, you can still use a $20 power bank to get you through.
My iPhone 8 battery doesn't even have tens of hours of STANDBY time anymore. I can definitely see an older phone battery having trouble with a long call.
The only flaw in your story is that you are posting it on the internet and you are saying that it is still ongoing. There is probably a way to contact them via the internet or maybe with a plain old letter. I'm sure you already tried everything but it is still weird that you are posting about it here.
Isn't he assuming a steady exponential improvement in solar power costs but taking the cost of long-distance power transmission (which during the fossil fuel era has had little reason to improve) to be fixed? Like, obviously that means solar will eventually become local. But as solar displaces coal, it will be more and more profitable to transport power further distances, which will probably put significant downward pressure on long-distance transmission costs.
> in the frequency control auxiliary services (FCAS) market the provider with the fastest response can completely control the market, forcing other providers to transfer almost unlimited wealth in any desired direction
My understanding of the FCAS market is that it is quite shallow, and while there is indeed a first mover advantage that Hornsdale (Tesla battery in SA) has capitalised on, if all the other battery projects in Australia go ahead, they'll probably collapse the price.
I think the opposite. Solar and wind really want massive grids. I imagine a global superconducting grid where sunlight shining on North Africa is powering Dallas at night.
Solar and wind power, backed by batteries, would cover my usage 150%. I would really like to see more decentralized energy generation in the future.
I've watched some videos on Mongolia recently, they use solar panels in yurts in literally the middle of nowhere to charge batteries and watch satellite TV, which is amazing imo.
If they can do it, so can we. Individual power generation for every house.
(1) the panels have a lifespan of 25 years, far below the desirable value for the lifetime of any house, but we have barely begun to figure out how to recycle them
(2) the level of battery usage this would imply has tremendous, mostly negative implications. A large chunk of contemporary batteries is just packaging (i.e. does not contribute to energy storage), and this would replicated across every house. While more easily recycled (in theory) than PV, we're still talking about a gigantic increase in highly distributed tricky-to-recycle material. That doesn't even get to the resources required to store sufficient energy for contemporary western/US lifestyles when solar or wind is unavailable.
p.s. I live in a net-zero-PV-powered house, grid tied.
> (1) the panels have a lifespan of 25 years, far below the desirable value for the lifetime of any house, but we have barely begun to figure out how to recycle them
meh if they lose 20% of their production after 25 years.
Someone without a Homeowners' Association will put them on lumber Toblerones all across their yard and happily use them for another several decades. When do they hit 33% or less efficiency? That's when you shred them up, recover the metals and grind them into dust for concrete. They're mostly sand products anyway.
Well, I found this article with a nice infographic. Considering panels are mostly made out of glass it's not very difficult to recycle 95% of the materials.
That’s why I don’t recommend either, but instead decycling them.
After what percentage of deficiency does solar become unviable? I’ll gladly take panels off anyone’s hands that have lost 75% of their efficiency and hodge-podge something together. If we lose 20% after 25 years, when do we lose 75%+?
(1) I'm not sure what you mean by 'desirable value for the lifetime of any house'. 25 years may be below the desirable lifetime for structural components of a house. But for appliances (which I'd consider solar panels closer too), 25-30 years is relatively long [0]. Even for the closely related structural-ish component of roofing material, 25-30 years is in the range [0]. Asphalt shingles (which are most common around me) are 15-30 years. There are longer lasting roofs, but they're on the same order of magnitude. Most of the residential solar payoff calculations I've seen (in the US) are in the 7-20 year range, which is less than 25-30 years.
Spanish tile roofing will last at least 80 years (possibly requiring a relay depending on the climate and how good a job is done with the first laying). With reasonable care, and luck in avoiding damage from above (e.g. trees), tile roofs could last 300 years or more.
Slate varies depending on the region it comes from - Pennsylvania slate tends to suffer badly from freeze/thaw action, but some from New England can match the 200 year lifetime associated with Welsh slate. Similarly for stone.
It is absolutely the case that these materials are not widely used in US construction. But they have lifetimes that more closely match the expected life of even a moderately well-built stud frame house.
Metal roofing is rapidly gaining ground in some parts of the USA, and has a theoretical lifetime even beyond tile or slate. Unfortunately poor initial installs in many cases shortens the real-world life to something closer to high-end asphalt shingles.
The appliance/panel comparison strikes me as apt in some ways, but not in others. While removing/replacing roof-mounted solar might be approaching ease of replacement that is in the same ballpark as a typical stove, refridgerator, washing machine, water heater or furnace, it is necessarily more laborious and more dangerous work, and involves a component that to all effects and purposes is totally passive.
I wasn't commenting on the payoff time, but on the notion that we should be installing this relatively short-lived equipment everywhere we possibly can.
> they use solar panels in yurts in literally the middle of nowhere to charge batteries and watch satellite TV, which is amazing imo.
> If they can do it, so can we.
Weather is a huge variable. In summer my solar panels may generate all the power needs for my off-grid boat. In winter, I rely on the engine alternator and turning my fridge off.
The article fails to realize the future of energy in Texas is wind power hundreds of miles away from people. This is the largest concentration of wind power in the US and is still growing.
Just to be pedantic, low-voltage transport is wasteful (expensive) compared to high-voltage transport of the same power (energy).
That is because transport (cable) loss is a function of the current squared, while the transported power (energy) is a function of both current and voltage.
Of course most appliances that want DC usually do so at a lower voltage (typically 5-24V), hence why they often go hand in hand.
Even from the battery attached to your house? I'm not saying power every appliance, just have both DC and AC circuits in the home. DC circuit would power "DC native" things like LED lighting and computing devices, while AC would power "AC native" things like motors. By using AC everywhere we have to bundle AC/DC converters for every lightbulb in the house, and in my experience those converters are prone to failure way before the LEDs themselves.
I don't think you'll see much increase beyond the current size of DC networks. DC from the solar panels to battery backup, but AC to everything else. Single room lighting on a single DC power supply, etc.
There's just too much momentum behind AC circuits, and with modern electronics you can do AC->DC and vice versa quite efficiently. Additionally, AC has some nice benefits, like having safer/simpler plugs and switches due to minimized arcing.
I'm not saying completely replace AC. I'm saying homes could, should have both. The lighting circuits could be exclusively DC LED powered by solar/home battery which would be zero maintenance compared to current LED lights which have a bundled AC/DC converter in the bulb that fails way before the actual LED fails.
With starship costs possibly being ~ $20/kg, some quick math says you could pull existing solar panels up from earth at ~ $100/kilowatt [1]. For comparison, it looks like installation on a house costs about $2500/kw [3].
It's no short-term thing, but it's the kind of thing that I might get to see in my lifetime. And it's certainly something that should get engineers excited, even if it's just considering what's theoretically possible.
Also, as the 2nd video notes, though it does send more heat through to earth, it's trivial in comparison to greenhouse effects, which are the kind of things this could mitigate, not just by cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions, but by providing enough cheap energy to make carbon capture feasible.
Space based solar is obviously several decades away. It's so obvious it doesn't have to be said.
While I don't think using the energy on earth is a good idea I'm sure it would work out for space based manufacturing. If you can send the silicon modules to space and manufacture the rest onsite you could probably make it economical.
"Significantly" is a pretty bold claim. Earth gets insane amounts of solar power, a few hundred extra square kilometers of panels in space won't make much of a difference.
- powerlines work as a grid, NYC to Texas happens to cross several other cities which heavily mutualizes cost of the infrastructure. The question is not will those lines be profitable for the 2h NYC need power. It's the overall need that matters.
- energy transport represents 6% of current electric cost. To make the grid irrelevant for economic reason would suggest that energy price will changed from an order of magnitude.
- energy transport also innovates and improves.
If you are interested, this report from the MIT has a section about the future of the grid: http://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/MITEI-The-F...