> "[in 2000] Shi agreed and ended up settling in the small city of Wuxi"
A bit of a tangent, but it’s always strange to me when people describe Chinese or Indian cities with millions of residents as "small". Wuxi had >1 million people in 2000, and today has like 3.5 million (6.5 million in the prefecture). This article makes it sound like a minor town in a remote province, but Jiangsu has about the same population as Germany, twice as populous as California, and is an industrial powerhouse ~with~ [edit: adjacent to] the busiest port in the world (Shanghai).
Nobody ever writes about "the small city of Dallas" or "the small city of San Diego" or "the small city of Birmingham" or "the small city of Munich".
I used to have a Chinese colleague who when asked where he came from would answer that he was from "A small town, you wouldn't know it. Only 3M people". He was right; I had never heard of it.
I guess in China, which has multiple mega cities, that is indeed a bit unremarkable. It's all relative.
I am laughing because something very similar happened to me. I visited a friend in one of those "smaller" cities in China (3M; not even in the top 30). He told me that his parents had moved to a nearby "village" after retirement. The village: >200k.
My wife is from a city of 7 million in China. Not only would you not have heard of it, most Chinese I've met also need some explanation of where it is.
I've traveled in China, and sometimes we just stop at some convenient roadside "village" for lunch, the kind of place that would have a Denny's and a gas station in the US. Except in China, the restaurant has five stories and it's bumper to bumper traffic outside. The population difference is really hard to get used to.
Something similar kind of happened to me ... the university I am at (normally) comprises 50k people. No idea where they are ... especially because Bielefeld University is just one building.
There's also the confounding matter of physical size - a prefecture level "city" like Wuxi is going to be nearly 20x the physical area of Birmingham (10x the size including the surrounding area) so holding a million people at the time doesn't mean it's necessarily a big population center even before comparing to what's "normal" in the country.
Wuxi, at 5.03 million people (6.6 million in the prefecture it governs) has about three times the population of Birmingham, England (1.1 million inhabitants, 3.7 million in the metropolitan era). The Wuxi prefecture covers 4600 km², the Birmingham area 600 km², a ratio of about 8:1; the cities proper are 1640 km² (the five districts of Wuxi with the 5 million population, excluding Jiangyin and Yixin) and 268 km² (Birmingham), a ratio of about 6:1. Your 20:1 is kind of in the ballpark.
However, Wuxi's central Liangxi Qu (72 km²) had a density of 13000/km² in 02010, when Wuxi had a population of only 3.5 million. This was 944k people, 83% of the population of Birmingham proper in 02019. If that had increased proportionally, which seems unlikely, it would be almost 19000/km² today. Birmingham proper averages 4300/km².
I conclude that there is no plausible sense in which Wuxi is less "necessarily a big population center" than Birmingham.
Which contributes more to the conversation: using a silly date format and calculating how many times bigger Wuxi is than Birmingham and how its growth and historical development relates to the overall boom in renewable energy, or derailing a thread about renewable energy by posting "I have no idea what your point is" and "Pedantry of the nth level"? Which one produces a conversation you'd rather be involved in?
Look, if you and I are talking about the population of Birmingham, but instead of speaking normally you are signing your comments to the tune of "Never gonna give you up", I'm not going to reply to anything about Birmingham. I'm going to go "Uh, what's with the singing, are you OK?"
I think you got what you wanted, which was to show to everybody how cool you are with your long now dates, and the conversation is exactly where you wanted it. You're welcome, happy to serve!
> you are signing[sic] your comments to the tune of "Never gonna give you up", I'm not going to reply to anything about Birmingham. I'm going to go "Uh, what's with the singing, are you OK?"
Do you really think "What's with the singing?" would be a positive contribution as a response to any of those? More generally, is mindless conformism ever a positive contribution anywhere? Where could it be more unworthy than on a site named "Hacker News", founded to celebrate the achievements of nonconformists? Who appointed you to the Committee to Suppress Playfulness? Have you never heard that "hacking" is "the playful application of ingenuity"?
> show to everybody how cool you are
Using silly date formats is not a good measure of being "cool". Helping people understand things they didn't understand before—for example, by making substantive contributions to a discussion—is a good measure of being "cool".
> the conversation is exactly where you wanted it
Obviously enough, your comments are motivated by your internal motivations, not mine.
I think you're missing the guy moved there in 2000 not 2010 or 2019. Birmingham, probably a smaller city in it's own right anyways (England doesn't really have "big city" outside London), has probably not grown any significant amount in 20 years. I wouldn't be surprised if Wuxi more than doubled.
20:1 would be "Wuxi City" (i.e. prefecture where the 6.5 million comes from) as a whole to Birmingham the traditional "city proper" westerners would think. Looking at the actual data on that... 4628/268=17.2x - not bad for a swag :).
Again my point isn't "Birmingham is big stronk western city put puny Asian city shame" it's probably 3 fold at this point:
1) If you put Birmingham the city proper in urban China people would be saying it's a small city.
2) What people call a "city" in the west is usually vastly smaller than some of the places with "city" in the name in China, as such googling "population of <x> city" and comparing it to familiar "population of <y> city" is just going to confuse people more than help them understand how big these places are.
3) Wuxi is going to be a lot smaller in 2000 when the story was taking place than today, western cities don't have that kind of powerhouse growth anymore where you have to think when the event happened not just where.
.
Maybe you still disagree with my conclusion, and that's fine, mostly I wanted to get these 3 concepts out there regardless where the reader ends up on the matter.
Those are good points. Surely #1 and #3 are correct.
I think we agree on the central point: that rags like the Grauniad systematically understate the sizes of urbanizations in China, in a variety of ways. We might disagree on why, and what the effect is.
As for #2, the question of what to call a "city" is sort of more about the cultural practices of translators than about patterns of urban growth. People in China mostly don't call Wuxi a "city"; I think they call it a 市 (the administrative unit), a 地级市 (the larger administrative unit Wuxi Prefecture), a 城市 (the social phenomenon), a 都市, or a 城. How the Guardian chooses to describe Wuxi for their English-speaking readers, mostly outside China, is really the question here.
You seem to be suggesting that writers draw the English-language line between "town" and "city" at a larger population level when they're talking about Chinese cities than when they're talking about cities in, say, England. I think you're correct. I picked three smaller "cities" in Jiangsu from Wikipedia to see how the English-speaking press describes them: Pizhou (population 163k; nytimes: "a village in Jiangsu Province in eastern China"), Yangzhong (pop. 344k; Grauniad: "a county-level city in Jiangsu province", "Yangzhong city"), and Jintan (564k; BBC: "the town of Jintan").
Wuxi has probably more than doubled since 02000, as you say, and Birmingham surely hasn't. However, even in 02000 I don't know if it was a "small city" in any absolute sense (rather than compared to Suzhou and Shanghai). Its population was surely already larger and denser than Birmingham's.
Some Western cities do have that kind of powerhouse growth; a bit of searching turns up Toluca, The Woodlands (arguably still too small to be a "city"), Brasilia, and Las Vegas. Their growth rates are in the same neighborhood as Wuxi's over the last 20 years. Brasilia, for example, has grown from 2.0 million in 02000 to 3.0 million today, 4.3 million in the metro area.
However, I'm not sure I understand your concern about how making these comparisons is "just going to confuse people." What kind of information do you think would be more useful for understanding how big Wuxi is than knowing that its population exceeds that of, for example, Mongolia, Puerto Rico, or any metropolitan area in Germany, and that the population density in its center is half that of Manhattan but three times that of Birmingham? If someone is led by the "small city" terminology to think that Wuxi is similar in size to Johnstown, PA (pop. 25000), or Wiesbaden (pop. 291000, metro area over half a million), they're already confused; wouldn't "googling population of Wuxi and comparing it to familiar population of <y> city" clear that right up?
At least after you cut through the terminological ambiguity of whether "Wuxi" means Liangxi Qu, the five districts of Wuxi City, or the whole Wuxi prefecture, and the analogous ambiguity of where to draw the limits of "London" (the Square Mile?) or "Sydney" or whatever familiar city you're comparing to, it seems like you'd be less confused after making those comparisons, rather than more confused.
You need to see the context. Wuxi is between Shuzhou (10m) and Nanjing (8.8m), next to Shanghai (26m) and Hangzhou (21m). All much much bigger than Wuxi. Wuxi was once pretty important, but it lost its importance when the tin production ran out. It literally means "No tin anymore". People see it is neat small garden city. Wuxi itself is very small, but has two bigger satellite cities outside, Yixing (>1mil) and Jiangyin (>1mil).
Compared to Shuzhou and its other neighbors it's tiny. Small city is ok.
Wuxi has been a city for 2200 years, since London was a scattered group of Celtic-speaking villages. Even earlier, in the Spring and Autumn Period, the capital of the State of Wu, Meili, was probably in what is now Wuxi, though it may have been a few kilometers to the southeast in Suzhou. This is where the famous war of Wu against Chu began, a century after Romulus was said to have founded Rome, where the Etruscan kings still ruled. At that time, when Meili was half a millennium old —a century before Plato would found the Academy from which academia takes its name— Sun Tzu led the Wu army of King Helü to victory against Chu, making Wu one of the most important kingdoms of the Spring and Autumn Period, and making himself one of the best-selling and most influential writers in the 20th century, 2500 years later. Temples dating from the Wu period are still popular tourist attractions in Wuxi. It has been a major commercial center since before Charlemagne was born. In 1830, before two thirds of the population died in the Taiping Rebellion, Wuxi was half a million people, 4% of the population of the United States at the time.
Today, five million people live in Wuxi. It's one of the 100 biggest cities in the world, and 25% of China's microelectronics industry is in Wuxi; probably every electronic device in your house contains chips made in Wuxi.
Perhaps people think of Wuxi as "small" because it is part of the Shanghai metropolitan area. Shanghai proper has 24.5 million people, and has been one of the biggest seaports in the world for thousands of years — when Stonehenge was built, Shanghai was already at least a thousand years old. Wuxi is only half as old and five times smaller than Shanghai, and there are many ancient and enormous cities in the region, so by comparison Wuxi might seem small.
But most countries in the world do not even have one city as big as Wuxi. Wuxi is bigger than Berlin, Madrid, or Rome, or indeed any city in Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, or New Zealand. It's bigger than Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, or Philadelphia. In Turkey, only Istanbul and possibly Ankara are bigger than Wuxi; in Australia, only (greater) Sydney and (greater) Melbourne are Wuxi-sized. It's three times the size of Dallas, San Diego, Birmingham (England), or Munich. More people live in Wuxi than in Oregon, Uruguay, the country of Mongolia, Puerto Rico, Lithuania, Kentucky, Botswana, Iowa, Kazakhstan, Utah, or Qatar. Wuxi's population is triple Estonia's.
If you look at the first photo in https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/31029, the big black area in the middle is Lake Tai. As the label tells you, Suzhou is the cluster of light on its right (east) shore; Wuxi is the cluster of light on its north (top) shore.
Another significant aspect of the situation is that China has just been through 200 years of absolute hell — including the worst civil war in history, multiple foreign invasions and occupations (including 14 years of World War II), by far the worst famine in history (one with the dubious distinction of being self-inflicted, unlike the famines in India and Ireland), the Cultural Revolution, and the end of the Qing dynasty. China is now recovering. Chinese electrical production has doubled during the last decade. Wuxi 10 or 20 years ago is not the same as Wuxi today.
— ⁂ —
Finally, I think the Guardian has an anti-Chinese agenda, which leads them to trivialize anything they can about China. Consider the subtitle: "Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might made solar power the cheapest power humanity has seen, and no one saw it coming." But in fact, although people many countries contributed smarts to the problem, Chinese smarts are by far the most relevant here.
Also, some people did see it coming; https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html are my notes on the subject from 13 years ago, where I wasn't entirely sure what form cheap solar energy would take, but concluded that there were so many promising alternatives that one would surely be successful. I looked hard to find a cost factor that kept the prices of PV cells so high, and couldn't find one, and noted that the internal economics of the situation seemed to mandate rapid cost decreases. Though I didn't know it, Swanson had been presenting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson's_law at conferences sponsored by NREL and the like since at least 02004, so it wasn't just some eccentric in Buenos Aires taking notes on SEC reports and doing calculations—it was a credible calculation being presented at conferences.
Oh, and I missed the editing window on this, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_prefecture-lev... claims that in 02017 Wuxi had a per-capita GDP of US$23802 per year, making it the sixth richest city in China; I guess that would be US$70k per year per family of three. This seems to have been computed on a population of 6.5 million, thus including the whole prefecture (basically the suburbs). So I don't think it's that Wuxi is poor, either, though maybe it was when the guy moved there—certainly poorer than London, though.
A correction: Kazakhstan has 18.9 million people, which is a lot more than Wuxi, though less than Shanghai. Not sure how I made that error. However, Mongolia, the country, really does have only 3.4 million people.
A quasi-correction: though Dallas is only about 1.1 million people, the Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington metropolitan area is 7.5 million people, which is bigger than the Wuxi prefecture (though not the Wuxi–Suzhou metropolis, which adds 10.5 million to the 6.5 million in the Wuxi prefecture, even without adding in Shanghai too). Similarly, the Chicago–Naperville–Elgin area is 9.5 million people, and the Houston metro is 7 million. These, plus LA and NYC, are the only metros in the US more populous than Wuxi prefecture.
London was never Gaelic. The populations living in Southern England would have spoken Brythonic languages, not Goidelic.
And at any rate... it's pretty obvious he was referring to Wuxi today. I don't think anybody's about to have an issue referring to the Sparta of today as insignificant, its historical significance being whatever it might be.
Sure. I probably wouldn't call Wuxi insignificant myself.
My main issue was just citing Wuxi's historical importance and background to defend its significance, in comparison to pre-Anglo Saxon Britain. I see Chinese people do this a lot in regards to China, often to shut down criticism of the country from "lesser" countries, ie ones that were tribalistic or uncentralized during Imperial China's heyday. "We were the center of civilization while you were backwards tribals", that sort of rhetoric.
Sure, some Greek people do that too. FWIW I'm neither Chinese, nor a fan of centralization, and I know too well that neither virtue nor wisdom follows bloodlines. It's kind of despicable to see people attempt to defend their tribalism by claiming blood descent from non-tribalist people...
I started with Wuxi's history mostly because I find it fascinating but partly because, without that paragraph, I thought someone might respond, "Well, sure, Wuxi is a big city now, but it doesn't have the depth of culture and tradition of a place like London—it's just a soulless consumerist metropolis!" or argue, "Sure, London's population is only twice Wuxi's, but it's a very high profile city because for centuries it ruled an Empire on which the Sun Never Set!", maybe mixed with some deniably racist remarks about "imitation" or "IP theft" or "sweatshops" (of which I think the Guardian's "Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might" is a mild version).
I didn't want to leave an opening for that kind of silly nonsense. It misinforms people.
> Finally, I think the Guardian has an anti-Chinese agenda, which leads them to trivialise anything they can about China.
Tell me who in the West doesn't trivialise anything China related? Those people prefer to violently lash out over admitting things unpleasant to them.
The West needs to admit that "$name_of_western_country smarts and Chinese industrial might," usually means both Chinese smarts and Chinese industrial might, with a Western partner just appropriating the credit.
The crowd dominating intellectual discourse in the West make their countries a giant disservice by closing peoples eyes on this.
The loss of intellectual potential in Western economies came dangerously fast following the deindustrialisation.
With how thins go, the West will soon have nothing to show for its inability to make things, but also no brains to design it, and soon no money to buy it.
The famous "Designed in California, made in China" is not a statement of proves, but insecurity.
I don't think Western partners are just appropriating the credit here, though. Lots of people in lots of countries have been working hard for decades to develop and improve photovoltaic cells and their manufacturing processes. A huge number of those people are Chinese, but by no means all of them.
Look at, for example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640... and in particular the recent works cited in the bibliography. Lots of Chinese research groups, a Korean one, some Arabic, some Indian, an Iranian/UK team, a team from Brazil, a few teams from the US (made up of foreign graduate students, of course).
Look at the citations to one of the Brazilian team's influential review papers: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9038016761746238692... — what do the surnames of the authors tell you? On the first page, I see Indian, Spanish, Chinese, Hungarian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi, and English research teams, and from the US, Sajjad Ahmad's team at UNLV — first author, assistant professor Saria Bukhary of Pakistan.
It's far from an all-Chinese-research field.
But it certainly isn't just "Australian smarts" either.
Agreed about "Designed in California, made in China." That's an absurdity.
I work in electronics. Nowadays there are chips which simply don't get documentation in English because chipmakers simply don't have a single client needing it, because all design, and engineering has moved to China.
People have no idea how little their electronics industries mean on the world stage.
I believe it would be no big stretch to say that PV cells research in the West is nearly inconsequential to the industry, when all what matters happens within 100m of the silicon furnace without much pomp, and published papers.
I believe it's similar to how semi industry turned to be. Process engineering is a giant research discipline, but everything below the "tip of the iceberg," which is academic research, happens on the fab floor, and stays a factory secret. That's why importing Taiwanese engineers is a prerequisite to setting up any serious high volume fab on 300mm.
> Nowadays there are chips which simply don't get documentation in English because chipmakers simply don't have a single client needing it
Oh, yeah, even the CKS32 chip on my Blue Pill only has a Chinese datasheet. It's common. (Worse is when you can get the Chinese datasheet at all only if you know the right people, who invariably live in Shenzhen. Or Wuxi, or maaybe Taipei.) It's not a totally new problem. My aunt had to learn German for her chemistry degree back in the 01960s, and here in Argentina pretty much everybody who learns to program has to learn English. Gauss wrote his dissertation in Latin; Euler wrote most of his papers in Latin. As Naomi Wu says, Chinese is the 21st-century command line.
But where was RISC-V designed? At Berkeley. By professors and grad students from China, Korea, Vietnam, Poland, the US, Greece, and Germany, I think. (Asanović is naturalized American.)
I agree that there's a lot of unpublished knowledge (PV is part of the semi industry), and a lot of that knowledge is being created in places like Wuxi. But I don't think it's true that the tip of the iceberg we can see is so inconsequential. That tip is what prevents things like the circa-2000 capacitor plague, and many new developments originate in basic research long before they make it to mass production, PERC being perhaps the latest.
Also, you can bet that the rulers of Pakistan, Saudia Arabia, Jordan, Iran, Brazil, and Egypt are not enthusiastic about their countries' access to their own abundant solar energy being dependent on their foreign relations with China, or on China's internal industrial policy; nor do they want their solar power stations to ship with Chinese remote kill switches—not currently a thing, but certainly feasible if China's bargaining position improves sufficiently.
We've seen how that kind of thing plays out many times: the US backdoor in Crypto AG hardware, the US blockade of oil to Japan in WWII, the assassinations of the Iranian nuclear scientists, the constant struggles with US export controls in every country that isn't the US (Tianhe-2 being a recent salient example), China's rare-earth exportation clampdown 10 years ago, the US oil blockade that led Germany to spin up Fischer–Tropsch coal liquefaction, the CIA-backed overthrow of Mossadegh, and so on. So quite reasonably they're investing in the possibility of developing autonomous national solar industries, a 21st-century Saudi Aramco and YPF, just without the oil.
Will they be successful? Maybe. Or maybe they'd have to do what China did for process engineering: get Chinese PV companies to open factories in Egypt and Jordan in order to transfer the necessary knowhow.
I might be misremembering it (I think she said it on Twitter), but the way I understand it is as follows.
If you use your computer only through Nautilus, Firefox, and Instagram, you will commonly encounter software problems that you cannot solve, or solve only through a lot of manual drudgery. But, with a deeper understanding of the layers behind the simplified interface—layers which, for historical reasons, commonly work through "command lines", such as the JS console in the browser, the GRUB command line for booting Linux, or of course the Linux bash prompt—you often need only minutes to solve problems that would have taken hours or days to solve by hand.
Similarly, today, if you want to solve hardware problems, you will often find yourself confronted with datasheets or forum threads that are written in Chinese. If you don't speak Chinese, you will either be unable to solve the problem, or you will have to reconstruct the information needed through experimentation, or by help from someone who does speak Chinese.
https://www.zhihu.com/question/22769200 first answer to "what is Wuxi like?" starts with "Is Wuxi really a small city?". And the answer is... it was but isn't really now. So it sounds like this is a common preconception in Chinese too as you say.
Small and big are relative descriptions, not absolute. Jiangsu province is small compared to the major Chinese metropolitan areas. Comparing cities to world regions is rarely done.
Also I think many people would say Birmingham, England is small. Why? It isn't London.
Pretty much all European cities are small bar Paris and London so no need to qualify them. Same in the US. NYC and Chicago are the only big cities by Asian standards (LA isn’t really a city IMO but population wise would also qualify).
Moscow is larger than Paris or London. Madrid is 5-6 million. Saint Petersburg, Barcelona and Berlin are over five million. None of those are small by Asian standards. (to claim Paris is a large city by Asian standards, you must be going by the metropolitan area population)
The Los Angeles metro area is also one of the largest in the world. It is very obviously a city by the same standards that define sprawling Asian cities, and it's larger than Chicago.
Russia is Russia. I don’t count it as European though people do. I live in Berlin and it is small (also it’s only 3.6m people metro area). LA is all metro area with no city which is why I don’t think of it as a city. It doesn’t have the density. Measuring Paris’ population by city proper makes no sense at all. Having spent considerable time in all 3 continents and many of the cities mentioned I think there is a significant difference once cities hit 8m+ population. They become much more imposing and seem to suffer from a different class of infrastructure problems than small cities.
The vast majority of its population, 75%+, lives in Europe. Just because their current leader is worsening its ties with the West does not make Russia any less part of Europe.
My point was more when people say they're "going to Europe" they never mean they're going to Russia. If they're going to Russia they say they're going to Russia and not Europe. Russia is culturally and geographically unique.
Just a tiny bit of clarification, Shanghai isn’t part of Jiangsu, but just to the southeast of it. It does act as a major port for much of Jiangsu though, together with Suzhou in Jiangsu, right next to Shanghai.
Relevant quote: "Every time you double producing capacity, you reduce the cost of PV solar by 28%."
Current worldwide PV manufacturing capacity is roughly 165 GW [1] [2], with a utility scale price close to $0.01/kWh [3]. Manufacturing capacity is doubling every ~4 years. Global PV capacity in service is ~600 GW.
I think researchers underestimated how much solar simply “makes sense” to the average person. Once the price is reasonable enough, people are very easily able to latch onto the idea of using what they already know and feel - the sun’s heat.
Whenever I mention the solar panels in my parents house, the first question is always about the price. When I tell them they will break even in a few years, their next question is always about where to get it.
There is never any skepticism about the technology, the safety, the long term impact (as you would have if someone was setting up a nuclear or gas power plant). They simply “get it”
Then why don't more companies offer to become your electricity provider and install the solar panels for free?
They could say "We promise that your energy bills will be cheaper this year than last year (as long as you don't use more energy), and within a few years you'll own the panels and can switch to a different electricity provider."
Because if you want to do it at scale it’s cheaper to install some GW on a field somewhere than bothering with roofs of privately owned residential buildings.
I totally agree, but my partner says - fields for forests, not for stock or solar. We can totally pull it off using roofs, but I agree it costs more and is not possible for some.
Lithuania has this solar share that you can buy - the only option for most people as they live in apartments, but you do get dicked by monthly maintenance fee.
Yes, it's cheaper for utility scale solar because the environmental cost of dedicating land to an industrial purpose is ignored.
In the case of solar it is still preferable to do fields of solar to replace carbon-emitting power generation though.
But I do think governments should subsidize rooftop solar to within shouting distance of "utility" solar.
Heck I think they should be subsidizing solar and storage regardless of location. Once tech curves make existing utility installations obsolete in a few decades, then maybe move them back to rooftop.
At first, I don't think the business model was there yet. I haven't read a recent report so I know it is out of date, but on the order of half the costs were installation. If the company maintaining a contract on your roof goes out of business? Who owns the panels? Who funds a company where if it goes bankrupt they have contacts that give away their remaining assets?
Now that property owners understand it better I think there's less hesitation and I have seen it more. We're even getting some on our building before long.
But there's also the issue of trust, which is coupled with ownership. If your friend convinces you to borrow $5k as a homeowner line of credit, install panels (and own them) and that you will make it back in lower bills in a few years that's a lot easier to swallow than someone that makes money from you saying yes.
I wouldn't want strangers owning stuff that might get passed along to different strangers as a major structural component in my house, cost to maintain, and especially if I don't even own the power produced. I can't fix my roof, I can't replace the panels, it seems like a very tough sell without a track record. I don't think anyplace had that track record five years ago.
This would be more palatable than "We're going to install these panels after you buy then and provide x warranty". I've had 3 solar companies come give us prices on our house. If the company folds/disappears then the warranty doesn't mean squat and if there is any breakage after that happens, we're likely to end up in the red.
In the Netherlands at least there are several suppliers that will lease your roof to put solar panels on it and then either give you a monthly fee or you use them as supplier and you get discount on the bill.
One reason is issues with property ownership. In the U.K. a company could do this but if the original customers were to see the house, they’d have no legal means of compelling the new owners to take up the arrangement. At least that’s what I understand.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but I can provide some figures. There is currently a push in London to get households install solar panels, and I expressed interest in getting a set installed to our house. Sadly, the finances don't add up.
Our house is not exactly small, and optimistically you could fit 10 PV panels on the roof. At least according to the quote I received, but having scouted installations in the nearby places, 8 might be more realistic. (Shape of the roof is a factor.)
Assuming energy prices overall grow as they have over the past decade, it would take 12-15 years to break even on the installation cost. That's with 10 panels. With 8, add a couple of years. And assume there will be no additional maintenance or replacement costs to consider.
So, at least in the UK: unless you are wealthy enough to have a large house with a sufficiently large roof, PV installations are not yet financially viable. It should be better in the rural regions where houses tend to be larger. With more installation surface area available, the marginal cost of each PV panel goes down and the marginal benefit of its energy production goes up.
Hence, in the UK, for a single-family dwelling, a roof with space for 14 panels should be enough to make the installation viable. A house with that much roof surface, at least near us, starts from approximately £700k.
I too looked into this a few years ago and was quoted 11 years to get my money back... Which didn't make financial sense at the time. Perhaps if it was more like 4 years I might consider it.
The UK has a lot of cloud cover so I do wonder if we should stick with wind power which is doing really well with the off shore installations.
Plus nuclear... For the rare times the wind doesn't blow.
I suspect it's not just the cloud cover. Looking at the map, it's quite depressing to note just how high up north even London really is. Berlin, Warsaw and Amsterdam are all similarly positioned. If we pan west along the 50° north parallel, the first reasonably large city in the American continent is ... Winnipeg.
We just don't get that much sunlight throughout the year to start with.
Also applied for local authority buy together scheme, have a south facing roof but math came out the same, around 10y payback. Was a shame as I recall number being similar years ago. Would love to get solar but need to see it down in the 5y range to pull trigger I think.
I had mine installed seven years ago and have nearly broken even just on the feed-in-tariff subsidies alone. There have been no additional maintenance or repair costs.
The unaffordability of UK property is a separate question.
It's possible to attach all sorts of third-party obligations onto property ownership; this is called "burdens" in Scottish property law, I forget the equivalent English term, possibly "lien" in American?
My favorite part of PV is that you can scale it to fit any power generating capacity, from a residential roof all the way up to a 50MW farm. It’s fairly linear, too, in terms of land usage and cost, which makes it easy to understand.
Yes, this is really the crucial thing about solar. It scales, in all directions, from small to large.
Production capacity is scaling too, though just barely at the edge of what we need. I really wish that governments would commit hard to decarbonization of the hydrogen market (including ammonia for fertilizer), through solar/wind + elctrolyzers. The only thing stopping further scaling of production capacity is the demand side of things. Having an extra 50-100 GW of solar production to decarbonize industry would really speed the climate transition. But until there's the guaranteed market for it, the market is going to develop very slowly until green hydrogen is cheaper than natural gas as an input.
Germany pushed solar along when it wasn't cheap, greatly accelerating the fall off solar prices. All governments should push industrial chemical process decarbonization together.
The other thing to is the massive redundancy with solar. Friend mine worked on installing a giant GE Gas Turbine for a power plant. They fired it up and it threw its blades. And it was down for 9 months. Doesn't really happen with solar.
This means PV can be installed with some level of sloppiness and inattention to detail that would be ruinous on a large integrated power plant, like a nuclear power plant. I bet this also reduces labor costs by reducing the level of training and expertise required.
50MW is a small scale solar generator these days. Bhadla Solar Park is 2.2GW, and there are plans being tossed around to go even larger. For example 10GW in northern Australia (Sun Cable).
When people can make or save money easily, then it will sell, if they can't it won't.
So the 'tipping point' was always going to be when it became practical to industry, then business, then consumers etc..
We're still not quite there yet as it will 'really happen' when homeowners can go to Home Depot, pick up what they need and have it up and working same day. When that happens, it will Solar Armageddon, the good kind.
Unless you live in the sunbelt, it will take more than a few years to recoup. Factor in replacing the inventor every 7 years, it becomes questionable, it also depends on your storage solution or local buy back program. Add an electric car to the mix and it becomes feasible.
But I think it still needs to become cheaper.
It depends greatly on your setup but, unless you are running some crazy, completely off-grid, system with cheap batteries and cheap inverter, you can expect an inverter to last you longer than this. Most are rated for 10-15 years, with some rated for 25 year lifecycle.
As with many things, quality costs, but not all costly inverters are quality, so do your research before you buy.
The warranty for most residential solar inverters is around 10 years, though often prorated towards the end of that timeframe. 7 years does not sound crazy, though with good cooling and and decent quality it's probably a tad low.
In Australia, after a $2500 .gov subsidy, mine will pay for themselves in 4.5 years. LG Panels with 25 Year output guarantee. 6.6kw System. Financially speaking it's a complete no brainer.
One thing I did notice when I was living in the USA though, was how expensive it was over there compared to Australia. Installation costs are 3x the price, I have no idea why. My system before the subsidy was $11k, and that was for top of the line panels and inverter. Cheap panels would have been around $7k
Most of the difference is in business practices, in customer acquisition. Basically all the advertising and salespeople to push solar. Lack of uniform building codes, and highly disparate permitting processes also raise costs in the US. Utilities are also hugely inconsistent throughout the US, not varying city-to-city like permitting processes, but there are thousands of different utilities in the US each with different policies. And perhaps the biggest problem is utility policies that either eliminate or make feasible solar for homes. After a utility makes solar possible by allowing favorable interconnection policies, companies rush in attempting to take advantage of the new market. But when utility executives get enough lobbying power to make solar economically infeasible through unreasonable fees, it kills existing solar installers. So the only solar companies that survive are those with large reach across lots of geographies that also have massive marketing arms that can do big customer acquisition when there's a sudden window of favorable solar interconnection policy.
I paid €3900 for 22 panels, 7.2kw system here in the Netherlands. I did install it myself (but the whole package was delivered and the electric connections done by the supplier), and the panels and inverter are cheap Chinese brands. As I didn't situate them ideally and they lose efficiency as the heat up quite drastically I expect to generate between 4500 and 5000kwh. That should save me about €800 a year so this is a pretty solid business case.
In the U.S. it varies by region, but mid-quality panels are usually quoted at $2.50 to $3.00 per watt installed (before subsidies). Tesla Solar is advertising $2.00/watt nationwide but there are some questions about their responsiveness in actually getting anything installed in a timely manner. Outside of CA most people are only paying $0.10-$0.13/KWh making payback rough unless you have a large state or local subsidy on top of the federal 26% tax credit.
Hugely. A few of the main factors that will determine your payoff time:
- Subsidies.
- Cost of labour. How much do you need to pay to install the panels?
- Your energy usage patterns. If you use a lot of energy when the sun is shining, your panels will pay themselves off faster.
- Cost of transmission of energy. How much does it cost to get the energy from the generator to you.
- Cost of energy. How much it costs to generate energy where you are.
- Location. Proximity to the equator, annual sunshine hours, shading, panel angle.
My area has a payoff roughly in line with the lifetime of the panels themselves, or half that if you believe the local companies absurd projections of future energy prices.
"The price of a typical solar panel system is about £4,800. It can take anywhere between 15 and 26 years to recoup this costs, for a typical home – depending on where you live"
The key is do you use lots of electricity during summer days when the panel are producing? If so a 5-10% return even with loss of capital is possible. If you don't consume the electricity yourself then it's not really economic. Obviously closer to the equator and higher your electricity prices the better it gets.
To install on your roof - 7-8 years in lithuania. There is a ~20% subsidy for up to 10kW systems.
Alternatively, pending a change in the law, there are solar fields where you can purchase panels (also eligible for subsidy) and pay an annual maintenance fee. In this case it is around 6-7 yrs.
We were planning to get 18kW system installed on roof, but to get sign off from power grid we would need to upgrade our power lines at great expense (we are end of line rural), so I am wondering about using solar farm for additional capacity (when it’s available).
18-25 €/kw = €200 per year times 25 years = 5k€ of 8k€ install is
62.5% of your system cost... This actually buys you some off the shelve batteries (5kwh so far IIRC) which might alleviate your line capacity issue (not sure tho).
Plus they reserve right to set it whatever they want it and you have no practical way to sell your investment...
Yeah, batteries won’t cut it really - need to store thousands of kWh for winter. I’ll have to look into the terms some more - afaik nothing is finalised yet, awaiting change in law. Thanks for input!
Batteries are to get you thru the night, forget winter.
2.3k euro for 5kwh [0] which sounds more than Tesla Powerwall. You probably want more, but you do your math. Probably you'll want to return more to network in summer and use that in winter. Store peak winter excess
I'm getting 8kw installed on my roof next month and the pay off is somewhere between 10-12 years. That's with NC's electricity costs being cheap at ~11c per kWh - in other areas this will drastically change.
Depends on where you live. Sure, if you an apartment heavy area like Singapore, then no - but based on some very quick googling, it looks like globally around 60% to 80% of the population live in detached or semi-detached houses, where they own the roof, so there's your free space.
Even when people rent, I can see having solar panels simply becoming factored into the rent equation. If the renter can expect to save $100 off their monthly power bill, then the landlord can easily ask for an additional $80 in rent, which means they make more profit over the owned lifetime of the property.
> There is never any skepticism about the technology, the safety, the long term impact (as you would have if someone was setting up a nuclear or gas power plant). They simply “get it”
This is also a bad thing, because there are some real issues with PV panels too: leaking toxic materials, recycling problems, environmental side-effects because you need to mine for rare earths and critical metals, etc. It's far from being as simple and as clean as many people imagine, and not taking into consideration all this might cost us all a lot of damage to nature and wildlife in future. I don't want to get into nuclear vs. solar energy flame wars here, primarily because I don't feel that I have enough information and knowledge to be able to perceive all the possible side-effects of each type of energy - but the fact that world is so deeply biased one way for solar, the other way fro nuclear energy definitely will not help the best judgment on this very important topic.
yes, if you don't count in the inverter and charger controller units and the batteries used as part of a common setup... I've got a degree in electrical engineering, but as I've said, I really don't feel competent enough to go into any discussion on a degree of actual threat, if any, as looking into all the side-effects of some tech is really complex task far above my pay grade and it's super easy to overlook something and jump to wrong conclusions. I just wanted to point out that this popular black & white bias between solar and nuclear is not as simple as people think of it.
Batteries are very rare as part of most residential solar installs. Inverters and charge controllers are pretty basic devices, they contain a bunch of high current semiconductors and heat sinks and fans, nothing that I’m aware of that’s particularly hazardous or unusual.
The majority of new solar panels use zero toxic materials.
Old solar panels installed decades ago had toxic materials until the introduction of a ban that banned these toxic materials.
A small minority of solar panels are thin film panels and they use cadmium.
However, since we have started with the "solar panels are bad" bias we are trying to look for evidence.
Selection bias results in a search for "solar panels toxic materials":
The problem? People are mostly getting rid of problematic solar panels in the first place.
Regular solar panels can be easily recycled, you extract the glass, the aluminum, the silver, the lead free solder and sometimes even the wafers and then you are left with some residual problem materials, things like leaded solder or unrecycleable thin film cells.
Those things make the news, grab the clicks and give the appearance that all solar panels are like that, because those articles aren't there to present reality, they are there to lie by omission and misrepresent so that their readership has one more story that fits in with an overall narrative, no matter how misguided that narrative is.
Mostly the impurities coming from contacts and support materials, according to [1] primarily As, Cd, Hg, Se,Pb, Zn, Co, Ni, Mo, Cu, Cr, Sb.
"In the course of the work, it was found that the toxicity
indices of the EVA and Tedlar® components increase
with prolonged exposure to materials in aqueous
solution, approaching values characterizing an unsafe
degree of toxicity to the environment and human health."
From Wikipedia, "Swanson's law is the observation that the price of solar photovoltaic modules tends to drop 20 percent for every doubling of cumulative shipped volume." (Swanson's law is a special case of Wright's law for more general manufacturing costs, and is a misnomer.)
Fusion power you can install on your roof. Throw in a little storage and a decent climate and the power companies are on track to be thoroughly screwed.
>power companies are on track to be thoroughly screwed.
I have a hard time making sense of this. I log into HN and see comment after comment about how solar is taking over, then I read articles like this[0], that state that countries heavily invested in renewables, like wind a solar, are going backwards. They are now trying to label natural gas as "green investment" in Germany, otherwise they won't have energy capacity. They have to build more fossil fuel plants.
Do you really think "power companies" are "screwed"?
Concerns about Germany’s energy system transition and the question of whether power companies are “screwed” are kind of orthogonal.
There are different kinds of power companies.
Utilities with a regulated asset base that get to socialize all of their costs across rate payers aren’t screwed.
Asset-light energy suppliers/retailers in competitive deregulated markets aren’t screwed.
Asset-heavy power generators in competitive deregulated markets might be screwed .. if they have a large portfolio of legacy assets.
Solar PV creates two problems for them.
Firstly, distributed solar reduces the load available to them to serve.
Secondly, centralized and distributed solar depress wholesale energy prices in the middle of the day (and causes increasing frequency of negative-price events).
Together these reduce the volume of sales, reduce profitability, and can increase running costs, because many legacy generators weren’t originally designed to be flexible with the ability to ramp up and down every day.
While solar PV isn’t good for some power companies, it’s generally good for consumers.
And this is why the utility companies are trying to shut it down or make it uneconomical. NEM 3.0 in CA, for example, has a rent-seeking provision where the power company gets to bill the rate-payer for assets the rate-payer owns, even if no power crosses the meter. I predict a rash of off-gridding.
The power-companies-are-screwed story is a bit oversold. The cheapest solar power comes from large solar farms, exactly the sort of thing power companies themselves build and operate. Smaller distributed solar units are a big financial winner in the following circumstances:
- If retail electricity prices are moderate/high and excess solar power generation gets a net metering credit. I don't think that this will remain common as solar penetration increases, but some early adopters in different regions will be able to take advantage.
- If the electrical companies invested too much in transmission and distribution infrastructure and are now making up for it with high prices per kilowatt hour. This describes the Australian rooftop solar boom and at least parts of California. Note that this can be a financial winner even without retail-priced net metering; you're just thrifting on how much overpriced electricity you buy from the power company.
- If the location is far from the existing grid and you're expected to pay to build the intervening connection yourself. Solar plus batteries, even with today's relatively high battery prices, can beat the cost of building that connection.
Mostly I expect power companies to survive the rise of solar power just fine. Most solar generation will come from large facilities owned by large companies, not household rooftop units. The over-representation of small rooftop solar units in Germany has contributed to the high cost of their energy transition. I see the German policy decisions favoring small solar units as a carrot used to ensure broad population support for solar power. Maybe it was politically necessary. But the generating costs would be lower had they favored fewer, larger installations.
The post you are responding to definitely wasn't very nuanced.
Considering there are so many people whose solar is grid connected you would think that they would often ask themselves how difficult it is to maintain repair and operate the grid they rely on every time it snows or rains or at night.
You don't even need a decent climate. I live in Portland Oregon where it is cloudy for 9 months out of the year. In Portland, anything we generate beyond what we can use is fed back into the grid and given to us as a credit. We generate enough solar power credits that we don't pay anything for electricity year round other than a $12 monthly fee to be tied into the grid.
If they're crediting you for that energy at anything close to the retail electricity rate you're effectively getting a really generous subsidy. Because solar is so cheap but only produces electricity sometimes and at pretty much the same time everywhere in the region, the actual cost of electricity when your solar panels are producing heavily and feeding back into the grid is much, much lower than when they're not producing and you're a net consumer of grid power. Not only that, but it's a subsidy that's likely paid to wealthy people who can afford to install solar by poorer people who can't.
These fallacies against net metering have been disproven. See the linked citation for details.
“Nevertheless, by the end of 2015, regulators in at least 10 states had conducted studies to develop methodologies to value distributed generation and net metering, while other states conducted less formal inquiries, ranging from direct rate design or net-metering policy changes to general education of decisionmakers and the public. And there is a degree of consensus. What do the commission-sponsored analyses show? A growing number show that net metering benefits all utility customers.”
That link of yours states again and again and again that net metering doesn't cost shift as if this were a general principle, but if you look at its sub resources you see support for very different conclusions, namely:
* Solar doesn't yet have enough market penetration for the duck curve to be a problem. We're still in the early days where cutting peak usage benefits everyone.
* Social good rationalizes the cost shifting
"It hasn't happened yet" and "it's for the best" are VERY different arguments from "it won't happen." Why the deception? Shifting the grid's role from generation to storage is not impossible. Barring that, distributed storage is not impossible. Making PV panels cheap was a huge but tractable step that is now behind us. Figuring out storage is the second huge but tractable step and it's well on the way to being solved. In the meantime, it absolutely makes sense to deploy PV at least until it starts cutting into base load, and from that point the economic case for storage becomes clear and obvious. The facts are on our side, so why lie?
I’m satisfied with the data and contents of the post to substantiate my assertion. You are free to cite your own sources if you disagree. I believe the Brookings Institute to be a reportable source.
My intent in no way is to deceive or put forth bad data.
Your source doesn't support your assertion, but I suppose you're free to ignore that little problem if you want to.
In the meantime, we should be talking about how best to make storage happen, because anyone who isn't busy playing semantics games can see that storage (critically: paying for storage) is going to dominate the back half of this transition.
IMO, the solution isn't storage. It's ways to use cheap energy. As solar energy becomes an increasingly large part of the grid, there are huge incentives to re-structure electricity demand around when solar is producing heavily. One possible way this plays out is that we start doing things like water desalinization to produce fresh water, and electrolysis to produce hydrogen during the day when electricity is free, and getting heavy energy industry like aluminum smelting to shut off in periods where demand is higher. Some amount of grid storage will be necessary, but I'm guessing a lot of the solution will be shifting demand rather than supply, since it's a lot easier to turn off machines than to store enough electricity to keep them on.
The claims were being made that net metering currently has a set of issues that makes the referenced policy a generous policy. The link provides seems plenty to refute that claim to me. You seem to be moving the goals posts here.
If you combine net metering with time based pricing, it seems like there is plenty of incentive for smart people like you to build energy storage and make money off of arbitrage.
There is, but storage isn't cheap enough yet. Tesla powerwalls are still pretty expensive, at around $8k each, from what I hear. If they can get the cost down by another factor of 5-10, I think you'll see a huge acceleration in adoption and possible arbitrage.
Why isn't it net metering? It seems to be net metering whether you count in kilowatt hours or dollars.
They are selling back to the grid, with a smart meter that counts power in both direction. Theres many types of policies in net metering like details about what rate you buy and sell power to the utility. In some less favorable places, the grid sells you power at retail prices but buys it back from you at wholesale. In these places, to achieve a $0 utility bill you would be generating more during the day than you consume at night. If your net metering deal paid back at retail rates you may get a credit, but as far as i understand each utility can offer totally different net metering deals, if they offer it at all.
Our system generates about 10 MWh per year (10 million watts of electricity). Our house isn't that big (1800 sq feet) and we have all LED lights and the highest energy saving appliances. We don't use anywhere near that many watts in a year. Our surplus credits easily cover our energy costs during Winter.
Yeah, I don’t know the right way to write it. When I look at the app the reports our solar panel output and say I just want the output for all of 2020, it reports a figure just shy of 10 MWh. The previous years were close to the same figure. How do you say what the total output from a system was over an entire year?
10 megawatt hours is fine. 10 megawatts is incorrect. It's a mistake of units. A MWh is an energy measure while a MW is a power measure. That's what the parent was correcting.
Natural gas furnace. I probably would have gone electric if we had installed the furnace after the solar panels went in. But, our natural gas bill is so small that I don’t really worry about it.
If that furnace is "smart" enough, you could add electric heater as additional external heat source. My wood pellet furnace has such options, but I think that if I simply added some electric heater into main loop, it would just work less (it can change it's output power from 24kW down to 7kW or just turn off burner if main loop is hot enough).
Oregon's electricity is only 0.75% from solar, which should mean that variations in solar output have almost no effect on the price or production levels.
I would hope at such small levels of production, the proximity to the user would reduce power losses and be automatically corrected for by the timing generators so as to shift production closer to the user.
It does seem like close to retail rates aren't outrageous to believe are fair for small quantities. I think you'd need to get to the point where generation was a significant fraction of local usage before transmission was costly or inefficient... but by then you'd likely find batteries cheap enough to also just load shift by physically storing the electricity in small buildings around a city.
Maybe the retail rate should go down, but it does make some sense for a tiny generator right next to or even in the same building as a user should get closer to retail rates than generator rates. If enough people did it they could eliminate transmission lines entirely and just use batteries.
Peak solar production during the middlish periods of the day in summer.
Peak demand (if your grid is summer peaking - some peak in winter) is likely in the afternoon when people get home, right as solar output starts to taper off.
It all varies a bit by culture and climate, but I think this is largely true.
This pattern may have changed or be different in different states, but I did participate in a project (about 15 years ago) where we essentially agreed to offline a very significant facility including a datacenter at short notice in exchange for a rebate and capital funds.
In our case I definitely recall most of those outages happening midday as it screwed up lunch. There were other factors as well (I think transmission efficiency diminishes as you approach capacity, so localized issues are a thing)
You can easily offset that changing the angle the panels are installed at. People think in terms of maximum total output but tracking solar show significant power is available late in the day.
As solar keeps getting cheaper the question shifts further from how do I get maximum power to how do I maximize my investment. Which is a slightly different and far more complex optimization problem.
Yeah you're right. But, tracking solar (and solar with fixed positioning that maximises energy output later in the day) largely applies for more sophisticated sites such as commercial and industrial. I've seen such setups that forego around 20% of solar energy production to maximise production during more expensive time of use windows (including offsetting time of use demand charges).
Residential installations are usually setup to maximise the total output, and often the positioning is constrained by the geometry of the roof. Residential solar installers are really in a race to the bottom.
One up and coming trend which might have a significant impact on this is for residential retail tariffs to be directly linked, at 30min resolution, to the wholesale energy market prices.
> One up and coming trend which might have a significant impact on this is for residential retail tariffs to be directly linked, at 30min resolution, to the wholesale energy market prices.
I just signed up for amberelectric.com.au. They offer the wholesale power rate (set every 30m by the electricity market authority) and the wholesale solar power feed rate, for a $15/month flat fee.
They avoid the Texas problem by limiting the maximum rate to be no more than the government regulated "default power offer" over the entire year.
Planning on getting both solar power and a battery system in the next 12 months, changing my electric hot water to a heat pump and moving to hydronic heating and split system airconditioning.
I'm also going to install a second circuit back to my smart meter that will connect to my apartment garage space so that an EV charger can be installed in the future.
yeah - you shift the risk from the retailer onto the consumer.
Usually these deals will have some kind of faux-insurance arrangement baked in where the consumer will never have to pay more than something like $300/MWh
35 Celsius = 95 Fahrenheit for my fellow yanks. That seems like a pretty extreme line to draw for "when do I need AC".
I don't know about you, but the indoor temperature above which I start wanting AC is around 72-75F, or ~23C. Lots of the PNW gets over that for much of the summer. It didn't used to be this way, but I've wanted AC in Seattle for at least a few weeks a year, sometimes as much as 6 - 8 weeks, since 2013 or 2014. Particularly because the insulation in a lot of apartment buildings meant to make them more efficient in winter causes them to heat up like a furnace in a hot summer.
It can really depend on how much air circulation you can get. In a high rise, you will need AC, but if you’re in a house you can easily manage with open windows and ideally a fan in your roof that can pull air up and in. There are very few days even in Portland where the temps don’t fall into comfortable as soon as the sun sets.
At least by the sounds and oceans it's a rather humid heat.
AC sure is a quality of life if not a necessity of life... Though if our homes were built for this climate rather than by Californian companies using shoddily adapted designs it might be another story.
I still can't make the numbers work for me, when I try, it seems like I'm always better off keeping my money in stocks and paying PGE to build more renewable generation.
I responded to someone else, but my response also fits here:
At the time we had them installed, both the federal government and Oregon had very generous subsidies.
We do have a loan to pay off the balance not covered by those subsidies, but the monthly payment on the loan is about $40 cheaper per month than our electric bill was prior to having them installed. So, even with the interest on the loan, we are paying significantly less for our monthly electric usage. Once the panels are paid off, our bill will just be $12/month.
What is your expected payback time on the investment of solar? It seems like in Oregon it will take a long time with the amount of sunlight and the relatively cheap energy costs.
At the time we had them installed, both the federal government and Oregon had very generous subsidies.
We do have a loan to pay off the balance not covered by those subsidies, but the monthly payment on the loan is about $40 cheaper per month than our electric bill was prior to having them installed. So, even with the interest on the loan, we are paying significantly less for our monthly electric usage. Once the panels are paid off, our bill will just be $12/month.
I think you underestimate how complex the powergrid is and how hard the storage problem is. Try running the numbers on how much battery you'd need to run california off solar reliably.
Global PV annual power production was at ~1800 TWhr/yr in 2019. Total global electricity generation was ~26,000 TWhr/yr.[1] If the doubling time is 4 years, it would take about 15 years (so 2034) for solar to be producing as much as the current global electricity generation. At that point, the cost will have dropped to 28% of what it is now (so let's say it's $20/MWhr now, that becomes ~$5/MWhr.
If the doubling keeps up, then solar would hit the current total world energy consumption only 3 years later (ie, before 2040). Exponential scaling is crazy. I've tried incorporating the growth rate of current demand, but it only adds a couple years to each of these dates.
- Every 4 years our production doubles
- Meaning every year our production capacity increases by .5 (or 5 times every decade).
- The first year (2020) starts at 165GWh capacity production
- The total energy use of the world (in 2013) was 157,000 TWh.
- Annual growth in energy demand was 40% between 1990 and 2008.
- 20% for the US
- 150% for China
Let's calculate solar energy generation capacity using the growth estimates provided.
2020: 165GWh
2030: 825GWh
2040: 4.1TWh
2050: 20.6TWh
2060: 103,1TWh (estimated global demand of 400TWh by this point)
----
2061: 154,1TWh
So assuming:
- Production capacity and panel efficiency does not increase (which it likely will)
- Solar will be the only source of energy (it's more likely to be one of a few technologies used)
- We don't factor infrastructure changes, space or installation time.
- We don't factor the consumers being ready for energy in the form of electricity (electrifying industry, cars, homes)
- We don't factor in the environmental impact of producing panels.
- We assume grid scale batteries that can handle buffering exist already and are installed
Seems like there is reason for cautious optimism. We have to see how governments go about rapidly normalising our energy usage to electricity (banning new purchases of gas cars?), upgrading infra and how they will generate the remaining electricity (LNG, nuclear, coal?).
We can expect to see our 2013 energy usage met with solar alone by 2060. Might be reasonable to use solar exclusively by the turn of the century (2100)
If the growth in energy demand continues to rise at its current levels, by 2060 we might see an energy demand of 400TWh.
This indicates that with the currently predicted solar production scaling, solar can cover half of our energy requirements.
There are enormous challenges with things like rapidly electrifying the automotive industry, mining the materials required to meet our grid scale demand, fabrication of the components, integrating a technology that isn't plug-and-play compatible with our grid infrastructure and supporting an IO model from every node.
Source (I know it's just wikipedia but come on, this is just a comment on HN):
And the total electricity consumption is over 20 000 TWh/a, which, given current trends, means that 100% of current electricity consumption would be covered by solar already next decade. (You were discussing energy, not electricity, but electricity should be the smaller one)
> Meaning every year our production capacity increases by .5 (or 5 times every decade).
Change is geometric (i.e. fixed percentage), not linear (i.e. fixed number).
This gives 18.92% yearly increase (instead of .5), but 5.6568x increase in decade (instead of 5x).
By 2060 this gives 169 TWh (instead of 103), and 200 in 2061.
We would also expect energy growth to level of at US/EU level once it reaches them, there's no reason to expect Asia to sustain it's energy growth indefinitely.
Don't get me wrong: solar is still not enough, storage is big elephant in the room, and we should build nuclear yesterday. It's just not as bleak as your comment made it out to be.
When I look at this chart [0], seeing that we’re wasting about 2/3 of our energy, I expect the energy demand to drop significantly if we electrify everything and have more local energy sources.
This is a good point. Seems like there is reason to be optimistic. I certainly think it's possible for the US to be carbon neutral by 2050 - but ya'll better start banning gas cars sooner rather than later (seeing as modern cars will last 20-30 years).
Note that much of the waste probably comes from thermal / fossil power generation, which is unavoidable even in theory (cf. Carnot efficiency).
That is, unavoidable unless chemical energy is turned into electrical energy directly like in fuel cells (these have smaller but still surprisingly large losses), or the rejected thermal energy is used for heating.
The total energy use in 2013 was 157 000 TWh (and it's probably <<much, much>> higher in 2021, due to China and India continuing to develop).
The additional solar power being added in 2061, by your own math, is 154 TWh.
So, adding up the whole line, that would mean that solar would still only offer about 154 x 40 = ~6 000 TWh (best case scenario) of electricity in 2061. Faaar from the 157 000 TWh used in 2013 and probably super far from what's going to be required in 2061.
Mining is indeed needed to produce some things. But then those things are not expendables and can be recycled after decades of use. And we're no longer mining stuff that we literally use once to burn it like oil, gas, coal, etc. I'd call that a net win.
LNG, nuclear, and coal are each way too expensive long term. With solar prices continuing to drop, this is only going to get worse. Coal is already being decommissioned in many countries. China is an exception but only because they are growing so rapidly that they can't keep up with clean energy deployments (despite having the largest deployment of that world wide). That's an effect that is short term. They actually announced their grid will be 100% renewables by 2060.
New gas plants (the least expensive of those 3) at this point don't make a lot of sense either. The investment pitch is horrible: we'll be producing energy at about 3-4x of the current price of renewables for the next 50 years. By the time those 50 years are over it might be as bad as 30x. It goes from bad to worse. Nuclear needs to get a lot cheaper to be interesting for investors.
Grid infrastructure is indeed a short term challenge. Having more solar and wind on the grid is causing grid operators to evolve what they are doing to fix that. A few decades is a long time to address issues though. Batteries and cables seem to be what is needed here. European and North American grids seem to have issues getting permits for new cables. E.g. Germany needs more north south cables so people in the south can actually use the wind power generated in the north. But putting a few hundred km of cables in place seems to be a hard problem from a bureaucratic point of view. It's not a technical problem though. We've known how to make electrical cables for a long time. Though there is of course some innovation in that space as well to enable more efficient long distance connections.
Cars are electrifying at the pace we can ramp up battery production. Even so, there are a lot of cars in the world and most of the new ones are still not electric. That will flip around towards the end of this decade. From then, decline of ICE could be pretty rapid. The cost advantages for owners will drive this.
EVs are a growth business in a covid year and are very profitable. So, car manufacturers are already going as fast as they can here. Interestingly, you see the same kind of learning effect with battery as you see with solar panels. And with wind power too. All of this combined means things could go a lot quicker than some companies hope/expect.
Sure, they'll get you in with the promotion prices, but as soon as fossil fuel plants get decommissioned you be sure the Sun is going to increase sunshine prices and jack up the $/kwh
One of the best things about this tech is how effective it is at domestic scale. My small roof in London generated 26kWh of electricity today. About 3X what we consumed.
My house in California is peaking around 70kWh this time of year (April, 14kw system), well more than we're using. I can charge my tesla during the day and still be exporting to the grid. Most afternoons my house is probably powering every house on my street.
Not op but we just installed 12kw system in Seattle and will have cost us $23k after federal tax credit. Approximately $2/watt. Get quotes from 3+ credible local companies. Also check energysage.
If you have a mortgage then you are effectively borrowing $23k from the bank for the period of your mortgage - so the total interest could be a significant chunk of money.
Assuming that you have some leeway to pay your mortgage off quicker (depending on your exact terms).
If you pay off your mortgage quicker you pay less interest. Not sure what you mean by "fixed".
Atleast where I live a standard 25 year mortgage can be paid off in ~10 if you were to double up your payments, because all of the additional money you're paying comes off the principal. Thus, the non-interest portion of the payment has _more than_ doubled.
>> Of that $15k, $4.3k was for the panels themselves, $2k for the inverter, $1k for mounting hardware, and $8k for installation.
What about on-site battery?
In any case, $15k is still a bit too steep for me, not because I can't afford it but because I want something that'll pay for itself in less than 5 years. My electricity bill is about $150/mo. so a solar roof doesn't make sense financially, even if I'm able to sell the excess to the grid.
If you view it as an improvement to your home, which increases your home's value, then it can make more financial sense than if you only look at the pure electricity savings.
Heat water with it during the day, if you live in colder climate you can use it for heating as well, but that would mean of course having proper radiator system installed.
Time value of money, opportunity cost, etc. An investment that merely pays for itself in a large number of years is a bad investment. An RoI of 5 years is a decent rule of thumb to use.
Not OP but in NorCal (BayArea) is about $3/what. My 9.4kw system is generating about 55kwh a day right now. Because of the mild weather we've had, the last day we used more net power from the grid (than we produced) was March 18.
Last summer NorCal had some nasty heatwaves come through, with lots of "red flag" warnings. High winds, high heats. We had multiple days of 110F+. On those days we used more than 55kwh/day.
That being said, the game with solar is that of averages. Right now we're making a lot and exporting a lot. When the summer heats up, we'll be making even more power, but not exporting as much. In winter time we generally need more from the grid than we make.
Hopefully at the end of the year, we'll be near zero net.
Mobile keyboards. Sigh. Even when you type things right, they bite you.
At least as of last fall, it was roughly $3/watt for solar installs - before incentives. Right now TSLA advertises about $2.2/watt, which is by far cheaper than anyone else.
My wife and I recently bought our first home, I've lived in Arizona my whole life, and one of the selling points was this house came with solar setup and the units already paid off. I had no idea how huge a difference it makes. During the day we run entirely off our solar panels. This time last year our bill was beginning to climb as AC use increases significantly as April progresses. Our bill has barely budged, saving us hundreds of dollars and we're not even in to summer yet. I'm tempted at this point to get one of the battery offerings out there for power storage.
The number of 100+ degree fahrenheit days last year in Arizona was more than concerning. A collective breath is being held this year in the hope it doesn't repeat itself or worse, indicate it a new normal.
You are miles ahead of the curve. However, where the pacific northwest, midwest, and east are concerned about energy, Arizona is concerned about water.
So that means I could, theoretically move to a remote or desert location, somehow install a solar panel myself, set a Starlink Internet, and live happily ever after? Assuming I could somehow grow potatoes in a small green house.
Edit: Missing Drinking Water and Sewage treatment.
Can I ask how power generation differs depending on weather conditions? For example, what might be typical daily power generation on a rainy day, on a cold, overcast day in winter etc.
There's some methods to work around that if it means a portion of the solar array is shaded at times (you separate them onto different 'strings' feeding power back to your controller, as I understand it).
A single panel in part shade tends to produce a lot less than the fraction still exposed to sunlight, but I believe recent advancements in panel tech has made this less of an issue.
Ultimately, situating the panels in areas where, barring cloud cover, they will receive full direct sunlight is always the optimum approach.
Is there a way to invest directly in solar to offset your personal use, without installing it directly on your house/land?
My existing house isn’t particularly suitable from a cost perspective to install solar on (clay tile roof, a good 20 years left at least). I also don’t really want to manage an installation project, nor own the maintenance and risk. But I would pay to directly offset my consumption.
Something like a solar mutual fund where you buy in, they expand capacity using your purchase price by funding commercial solar installations.
My power provider has a scheme (I forget the name) where basically your entire electricity bill goes to "green" electricity producers. The logic is that you can't control where your electricity comes from, but you can easily control where your money goes.
That way, no matter where you get your power from, all your money goes to green sources.
I don’t know where you are living but this method had issues when different networks are involved.
One example of this is Norway vs Europe : Norway is interconnected with the rest of the Europe for « green electricity » market but doesn’t share the electric grid of the rest of Europe.
The consequences is that any European can buy « green contracts » that pays Norway renewable industry. Sounds ok as an European.
But now, by this market rules, a Norwegian citizen that doesn’t pay the « green premium » is considered consuming non renewable electricity even if he have no physical way to consume non renewable. And as a Norwegian citizen, it can be difficult to understand the incentive to pay more while knowing your electricity is physically constrained to be only from renewable sources.
As a French I have a similar problem : why should I pay a premium to get CO2-free energy while knowing my country spent billions of public money (which I’m really glad) to be self sufficient with nuclear power plants ? And since nuclear is not a renewable energy, I have no way if I wanted to pay a « premium » that would help fund nuclear energy even if I politically support it as en important ally against global warming.
I understood a problem that energy providers are investing some minimum (perhaps only the legal minimum) into green provision, an amount that they would have anyway.
And, selling this onwards as a premium to the end user without actually changing their behaviour.
Since you get the same service (your power ultimately comes from the same grid), it's a pure price discrimination strategy.
[This is maybe a general restatement of pjerem's sibling comment]
I do pay this premium, but I mostly feel cheated by it.
I am doubtful: my electricity as a residential consumer ultimately comes from the same grid, so my CO2 cost is the same, whether I choose the green plan or not.
This is how it works in Massachusetts, it's pretty cool to be able to select a renewable energy power producer hooked up to the state's grid to receive your electric bill money.
At this point probably just keep paying your electric bill, as most utilities are expanding their commercial solar as a portion of their generation capacity.
Look into community solar in your local area. It's utility scale solar and you usually get an offset or pays back to shares depending on how it is structured.
I subscribe to a community solar installation in lieu of installing panels on my shaded roof. The local (to Maryland) company I use is Neighborhood Sun - https://neighborhoodsun.solar/
There are companies like https://www.peoplepowersolar.org/ were money can be invested. I'm not from the US, though. In germany, there are about 1000 companies like this.
The main thing I was looking for was something where I felt my money would genuinely provide additional capacity (i.e. they weren't just going to build it anyway). I also think it's a benefit they're built on schools, so hopefully get the kids thinking about renewables.
Their cost per kWh generated is comparable to a home installation with none of the hassle.
Something like this would be perfect for Australia. There is so much empty land getting baked by the sun all year round. People in apts may not be able to have their own installed but they could buy x kw worth in the middle of the country.
Meanwhile the largest California utilities are rolling back incentives for solar[1]. Why? Because they're effectively paying people to take electricity during the peak hours of the duck curve. Texas has the same issue during peak periods of wind power.
If you believe them, anyway. One of these utilities is even PG&E. "Cynical cashgrab" would be an alternative take. They're not making much money selling power to people with solar panels so now they want said people to pay them a flat fee.
I don't really understand this. I just looked into moving onto EV rates for PG&E and the super cheap "off peak" hours start at midnight and run through the night. If solar is causing issues with overcapacity during the day why are they charging me peak rates starting at 3pm?
The headline that “no one saw it comping” is slightly annoying in the sense that plenty of people predicted exactly this. They took the observed industrial learning curve at face value and forecast it forward 15 years. I noticed these arguments at the time, and while I found them persuasive, I had nowhere near enough expertise to evaluate.
The article cites a learning rate (depreciation per doubling of capacity) of 28%. That's true over decades, but: "the learning rate estimated with data from 2007 onward is even higher at 40%." https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(21)00100-8
Yes solar is insanely cheap today, but it will be much cheaper in a few years. And capacity factors are 30%+ for single-axis trackers in sunny places: https://emp.lbl.gov/pv-capacity-factors
My mother and stepfather installed solar ten years ago and basically paid zero utility bills from then with utility connected solar (they said they paid $50/year to PGE). I think the equation is the same now except the cost of such a system is less.
California is sort of a mess. I think it's all regulatory capture.
Most places, you use more of a resource and you get a volume discount. In california it goes up from .25 to .31 to .39 cents per kwh.
meanwhile the wholesale price of power is no different from anywhere else, maybe .03c/kwh.
One "bright side" is that it makes it practical for people to install solar and at some point their cost drops to zero. So there's a viable market for solar.
He was the originator of the german renewable energy act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source... that forced power utilities to pay for solar energy produced by people owning solar panels at a specific and slowly decreasing price. His efforts led to the the creation of a market for solar energy systems in Germany.
One thought around all this is that irregular power costs could increase the incentive for appliances that consume electricity during the day and give it off at night - refrigerator freezing huge chunks of ice, large hot water tanks, larger batteries for drills or laptops.
Solar shingles have been on the market from several companies for many years. They have never really taken off since they are a lot more expensive and have worse performance than regular solar panels.
You say "they are" as if this still is the case. Do you mean that installing Tesla shingles give a lower ROI than installing normal shingles and solar panels on top of them?
I can not imagine so. I don't know any other industry where this type of "combine two products" is the better approach. In theory, a single system should always give a better ROI than combining two systems that are not made to be combined in the first place.
Tesla's solar roof is more comparable to expensive slate tiles then the standard tar shingles. Here is an analysis that finds tesla's solar roof is significantly more expensive than a new roof + a traditional solar installation.
Hmm, difficult to agree with that as a blanket statement. Generally that kind of absolutist thinking is as flawed as the same in the other direction. The optimum is likely somewhere in the middle.
For example, failure to price in externalities in a 'free' market is one of the biggest flaws, and exactly why we find ourselves in a situation of having way too much CO2 in the atmosphere.
I don't think any serious free market advocate thinks the government doesn't have a place in restricting and producing negative and positive externalities, respectively.
A free market generally means one where one's control over their person and private property is not restricted as long as that control is not being exercised to violate other's equal right to their person and private property, and to the commons.
Distilled down to its essence a free market grants you protection from involuntary transactions and access to voluntary transactions. Externalities are involuntary transactions, from a free market perspective they aren't any different from robbery or the dreaded... taxes.
However, taxes are collected by the government that our population has voted in (in democratic nations). This is also why we prefer government monopolies over private monopolies, because we have a degree of control, we get to choose.
The only dilemma is that the choice of government is on a societal level, individuals may not get what they voted for. However, there is no good solution to this problem and the search for a solution will only stop after the end of humanity.
Yes, that is a good distillation. There are also taxes that do not violate free market principles, like a tax on usage of land, or any other natural resource.
The incredible thing is that these free-market-respecting taxes are found by economists to have zero negative effects on economic efficiency:
They are also very easy to administer and impossible to evade - thus extremely fair - and do not require creating a surveillance state to monitor private economic interactions, as a sales or income tax do.
Maybe technically, in the sense that there has to be some sort of overarching enforcement and regulation to have a market.
But the major advantage that the free market has is that it is much better than the government at assessing the relative size of positive and negative externalities.
The government consistently underestimates the positive externalities of free market activity. Much like in this case - the people advocating that the government subsidise solar power and commit early have all been shown to have badly misjudged the situation. The free market is much better at getting clean power to people than they thought.
>Maybe technically, in the sense that there has to be some sort of overarching enforcement and regulation to have a market.
Actually, you got it exactly backwards, having a free market in the first place is a political choice the government makes. All of this is merely a fiction in our head, without that fiction we are back to the "Law of the jungle". Everything you can take and protect is yours, which is completely at odds with the idea of a free market.
>But the major advantage that the free market has is that it is much better than the government at assessing the relative size of positive and negative externalities.
The free market is the ultimate henchman of the government, it will optimize for the legislated outcome down to every single letter and squeeze every ounce of efficiency available. If the political context allows it, it will happen. If negative externalities are not balanced out via fees, this is equivalent to the government telling every entity in the economy to abuse the externality.
>The government consistently underestimates the positive externalities of free market activity.
No, it underestimates how reliable its henchman is and for some reason it doesn't know how to talk to the henchman even though it's the most natural thing in the world.
>Much like in this case - the people advocating that the government subsidise solar power and commit early have all been shown to have badly misjudged the situation.
Subsidizing solar power is wrong, for obvious reasons. The goal isn't solar power, the goal is the reduction of CO2 emissions and if possible, the reduction of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. This requires a stronger cap and trade system or a CO2 price, in theory these are equivalent, in practice the former is prone to too much meddling.
>The free market is much better at getting clean power to people than they thought.
What we need is less government "intervention" and more government activity in the market as the ultimate investor, let the henchman do the actual work.
The development of solar has been heavily subsidized by governments, so there isn't really a free marker success story here. If anything it's a story of how well long term interests, tethered to Nation-state level wealth via taxation, can work hand in hand with market forces.
The development of fossil fuels has been even more heavily subsidized by governments, to the tune of USD 5.2 trillion in 2017, up from USD 4.7 trillion in 2015.
The free market really has no method of pricing developments with 30+ years to profit/free cash flow. The government first started subsidizing solar to be price competitive in specific situations in the 1970s.
There simply aren't any rational free market actors funding large unprofitable initiatives for 40 years with the expectation that the technology will be a bananza after all the principals have retired or are dead.
Actually, they wouldn't win; many renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels nowadays. Though this is a good point; we need to factor “stealing from the future” and other externalities into the price somehow, if we are to use a capitalist market. (Hence carbon taxes, rather than carbon subsidies, should be government policy.)
If you mean by "free market", a market that prices in all externalities, then yes. If you mean by "free market" a market where environmental destruction is free, then no.
Subsidizing fossil fuels and fraud from Exxon got us where we are now. Although I would recommend subsidizing renewable sources instead of going full free market - just pointing out we never really had that.
It still means power for air conditioning is ~free during the day when it's most needed, and you could pre-cool or pre-heat a bulk block with high heat capacity, then slowly use the heat/cold during the day.
You can charge the electric cars when there's an excess, so in particular all the extra load from electric car charging that some people were so worried about is no longer a concern.
If it gets cheap enough, you can overbuild capacity so that you have just enough power if it's a bit overcast, and way too much when there's sun (since solar cells can be safely "turned off" as far as I know, unlike conventional plants).
If we now get some process for capturing carbon from the air where electricity is the main cost (i.e. overbuilding capacity and using it only 20% of the time is affordable), we now have a place to put all the excess electricity during peak.
I think that you don't see how much land you actually need.
Maybe in America there is plenty of space, but in Europe it's way more difficult. To replace one nuclear reactor, you need ~ half of Paris in solar panel. And still need energy "at night".
Yes heating water, or cooling places are nice. But your trains ain't gonna work "only when there is sun".
If you need backup at one moment, you need 0C0² backup and basically: Or you build dam, or you build nuclear plants.
If you build nuclear plants, it's basically dumb to have plenty of renewable next to it…
I don't think much thought has been given to the cost structure of nuclear peak plants. A nuclear facility which only generated power part of the time should have a longer service life and generate less waste per unit time. Meaning the high capex decommissioning process may be pushed back decades or more.
One of the things limiting the life of nuclear power plants is damage from thermal cycling. So a nuclear facility which only generates power part of the time can have a shorter service life in terms of calendar time (and will almost certainly have a shorter life in terms of time spent operating or power produced).
It makes sense that a nuclear peaker plant could last longer, but it's probably a challenge to sell an investment where the payoff comes after the investors are dead. In the short to medium term, that unused capacity is lost profit.
Maybe with a carbon tax, this could work... otherwise natural gas peakers will take all the money off the table.
I actually did some calculations based on my previous apartment. We had remote heating and hot water, so only needed power for cooking, PC's etc. I found that if I covered the section of the roof above my apartment with solar panels, I could be "off grid" almost then entire year.
Except my apartment was on top, and there were four more just like it below me...
It’s not as far off as you might think - even for individual homeowners. I’ve got a far from ideal house with a 8.4KWh solar array on my roof and 3x Tesla Powerwalls in my basement. Yesterday I produced 43KWh of electricity and exported 27KWh to the grid. The only reason I’ve needed grid connectivity in the last nine days has been to export power. In essence, I’m largely off grid from March through October.
Now, this wasn’t cheap (thankfully incentives made it more affordable and Eversource provides the most expensive electricity in the United States), after incentives it was about $22000. That’s a lot, but it’s not hard to imagine this becoming scalable in the near future for climates with better solar potential than Connecticut.
$22,000 would pay my electric bills for about 12 years, not even factoring in opportunity cost. What are the ongoing maintenance costs/total cost of ownership over 12 years of such a system?
As far as Powerwalls go, I'd definitely want something like that in an outbuilding and not in my house. Last thing I want to do is wake up at 3:00am with a raging battery fire in my basement.
If we're talking about nerds buying this stuff, $22k is comparable to what people spend on nice homelab setups. I would pay $22k just because it's cool and not because it saves money.
There's some places where you can't put the Powerwalls indoors. In CT where I live it's just fine. I did add in a fire suppression system in my basement when I had them installed. This was not a requirement and was included in my overall cost figure provided. It's a big red thingy in between the rafters that goes "boom" when there's a fire. That's a technical term.
> There is only a few decades of lithium left to be extracted by the way.
Julian Simon's bet with Paul Ehrlich. You're not apparently aware of the amount of lithium worldwide, it's availability or its price trajectory. All minerals are significantly more abundant than people think, supply chain dynamics in mining do no equate to scarcity on earth, they relate to the economics of exploration and extraction and shipping.
I'll make an exception for pink diamonds. Lithium is not in 10 year decline. Lithium is also not the only battery mineral of interest and battery tech is not stand and die on lithium for either cost, or energy density, or recharge speed.
As far as I know lithium extraction from brine is both in development and an area of active research which would allow to tap a lot more lithium resources than previously expected.
I remember reading something about a test plant in Cornwall and some similar stuff from Germany as well. Maybe that would help you in France as well?
> The scenario which assumes 73 Mt of lithium supply left, best policies (recycling, V2G, second-life) implemented and around 3 billion EVs on the road sees lithium fully depleted a few years beyond 2100. If the same policies and number of cars were matched with just 26 Mt of lithium, but recycling efforts would only grow slowly, battery manufacturers will close shops even before 2040.
3billion cars. Exhausted at 2010 extraction rates by 2100 so in 80 years not 10, and for 3 billion cars, and that's from resource availability figures from 11 years ago.
Please, don't do this. You said 10 years. It's not exhausted in 10 years and a mining report from 2010 doesn't tell you anything in 2021. Mines are developed when economics justify it. Available lithium is huge.
Oh, boy! You probably don't want to read about peak oil extraction :-D
Oil was supposed to run out in 1865, 1880, 1900, 1920, 1940, 1985, 2005, ...
If there's a demand for a specific resource, prices go up and people find a way to extract more of it, if it's present on this planet. And lithium is the 25th most abundant element, so there's a ton more of it than there's oil in the crust.
I thought it was because Germany shut down its nuclear power plants and ramped its coal generation up? [1] Germany poorly managing its power grid doesn’t imply that renewables aren’t economically rational; it implies Germany makes irrational national policy. France is primarily nuclear powered, as you point out with their low CO2 emission footprint (compare the generation mixes of both countries in ElectricityMap, I’m familiar having contributed generation data for Europe).
Solar panels retain 90% of their production rating after 25 years, and can be recycled at end of life, as can wind turbine blades (with the turbines repowered, typically generating more power than the previous equipment).
What’s with the FUD? Definitely feels like there’s an agenda when the data is objectively clear.
Germany's fossil fuel use for grid generation was steady after Fukushima. Coal use declined. After 2017, coal use fell off a cliff (as CO2 allowances became more expensive in Europe.)
How I look at it, had they spent the same amount of money in a different way, they could be carbon neutral. Climate change is an emergency but no one is acting like it.
It's one thing to say "we don't think it's worth the money" and another to spend the money but not achieve much, it's even worse IMO!
Progress that was enabled substantially by there being a market that would buy the early inefficient solar panels, providing capital for further research.
> Please do the math, check how much you'll need to cover the consumption of a small city for a night.
It sure would be nice if we had a transnational energy infrastructure, as the sun is always shining somewhere. Think DESERTEC and Gobitec but for the whole planet.
> Crossing west-to-east Europe with electricity is already loosing 30% of it. Let's transport electricity from Australia to India !
From the DESERTEC website:
> For long transmission distances direct current transmission is superior to alternating current. Alternating current has high losses due to capacitive and inductive resistance, which do not occur in direct current transmission. With that technology, a 3000 km line (for example Cairo to Munich) has losses lower than 10%.
If the energy is practically free from the sun then 30% loss can be manageable if that's the cost of renewable reliable energy. Heck coal is only about 44% efficient to begin with and we currently accept that loss.
Over large distances, high-voltage direct current transmissions would be used which has losses in the low single-digit percentage per 1000km. See following link for details:
It's expensive now to recycle, and according to the article, the costs don't drop to recycle because if it's cheaper to dig up ore vs. recycle, well, the business doesn't exist.
While the battery of an EV is heavy, there is not 500kg of lithium inside it. For example a Tesla S with 100kWh, one of the biggest battery on the market, has about 7kg of lithium.
World lithium reserves went up from 9.9 million tons in 2010 to 21 million tons in 2021 even as extraction accelerated. Companies have been putting more effort into discovery which has increased known reserves much faster than increasing extraction is drawing them down.
And most of our lithium doesn't come from proper "reserves" but from what is categorized as "resources," which is several times the quantity of "reserves." I don't know how much lithium is out there but we've barely even begun looking and there's never been demand for much in the past.
Reduces grid demand by localizing the energy, storing it on site thermally. Air conditioners that make ice at night and cool during the day do the same.
Freeman Dyson devised an a/c system at Princeton that involved using snow making machines to generate a large pile of ice in an insulated shed during the winter (with the doors open) and circulated coolant through the ice pile and the buildings in the summer (with the shed doors closed).
I think aluminum batteries are coming along nicely in that area of battery tech and they have a very large capacity. The problem with aluminum has always been high energy costs to produce. So you can store the energy in the aluminum itself by using it to produce Aluminum for use in batteries.
Aluminum battery stations could replace gas stations.
A bit of a tangent, but it’s always strange to me when people describe Chinese or Indian cities with millions of residents as "small". Wuxi had >1 million people in 2000, and today has like 3.5 million (6.5 million in the prefecture). This article makes it sound like a minor town in a remote province, but Jiangsu has about the same population as Germany, twice as populous as California, and is an industrial powerhouse ~with~ [edit: adjacent to] the busiest port in the world (Shanghai).
Nobody ever writes about "the small city of Dallas" or "the small city of San Diego" or "the small city of Birmingham" or "the small city of Munich".