Clean Energy Should Get Cheaper and Grow Even Faster (yahoo.com) 100
J. Doyne Farmer is the director of the complexity economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in Oxford's research and policy unit. And he reminds us that solar and wind energy "are very likely to get even less expensive and grow quickly," pointing out that "the rate at which a given kind of technology improves is remarkably predictable."
The best-known example is Moore's Law... Like computer chips, many other technologies also get exponentially more affordable, though at different rates. Some of the best examples are renewable energy technologies such as solar panels, lithium batteries and wind turbines. The cost of solar panels has dropped an average of 10% a year, making them about 10,000 times cheaper than they were in 1958, the year of their pioneering use to power the Vanguard 1 satellite. Lithium batteries have cheapened at a comparable pace, and the cost of wind turbines has dropped steadily too, albeit at a slower rate.
Not all technologies follow this course, however. Fossil fuels cost roughly what they did a century ago, adjusted for inflation, and nuclear power is no cheaper than it was in 1958. (In fact, partly due to heightened safety concerns, it's somewhat more expensive.)
The global deployment of technologies follows another pattern, called an S curve, increasing exponentially at first and then leveling out. Careful analysis of the spread of many technologies, from canals to the internet, makes it possible to predict the pace of technological adoption. When a technology is new, predictions are difficult, but as it develops, they get easier. Applying these ideas to the energy transition indicates that key technologies such as solar, wind, batteries and green-hydrogen-based fuels are likely to grow rapidly, dominating the energy system within the next two decades. And they will continue to get cheaper and cheaper, making energy far more affordable than it has ever been. This will happen in electricity generation first and then in sectors that are harder to decarbonize, including aviation and long-range shipping.
And in addition, "The future savings more than offset present investments to the extent that the transition would make sense from a purely economic standpoint even if we weren't worried about climate change.
"The sooner we make investments and adopt policies that enable the transition, the sooner we will realize the long-term savings."
Not all technologies follow this course, however. Fossil fuels cost roughly what they did a century ago, adjusted for inflation, and nuclear power is no cheaper than it was in 1958. (In fact, partly due to heightened safety concerns, it's somewhat more expensive.)
The global deployment of technologies follows another pattern, called an S curve, increasing exponentially at first and then leveling out. Careful analysis of the spread of many technologies, from canals to the internet, makes it possible to predict the pace of technological adoption. When a technology is new, predictions are difficult, but as it develops, they get easier. Applying these ideas to the energy transition indicates that key technologies such as solar, wind, batteries and green-hydrogen-based fuels are likely to grow rapidly, dominating the energy system within the next two decades. And they will continue to get cheaper and cheaper, making energy far more affordable than it has ever been. This will happen in electricity generation first and then in sectors that are harder to decarbonize, including aviation and long-range shipping.
And in addition, "The future savings more than offset present investments to the extent that the transition would make sense from a purely economic standpoint even if we weren't worried about climate change.
"The sooner we make investments and adopt policies that enable the transition, the sooner we will realize the long-term savings."
Fuels are a commodity, not a technology. (Score:5, Insightful)
The equilibrium price of a finite resource (like fossil fuels or fissile materials) is determined purely by supply and demand, but technology is not finite: You cannot "run out" of knowing about the wheel, or "corner the market" on the equations that describe how electronics work. At most you can manipulate inputs into specific applications of the technology, but you take the risk that buyers will find substitutes for what you sell or, pushed far enough, evolve a different application that cuts you out altogether.
Solar is a technology. Although you have to input a number of things to create the physical hardware, that's fixed cost - it's non-recurring over the lifetime of the product, unlike a fuel. And unlike a technology designed to use fuels, the options to get around resource bottlenecks are numerous. So the price of solar power can decline asymptotically over the long-term (and sometimes even short-term), with only the laws of thermodynamics as a hard stop.
You cannot run out of sunlight, will not run out of silicon, hopefully won't forget how to use semiconductors, and most of the rarer things aren't actually rare...and even amid short-term bottlenecks, they can be balanced against each other as prices fluctuate. Not really possible with FFs or nuclear inputs: They are each their own very brittle ecosystems.
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>You cannot run out of sunlight
Nitpick: You can run out of area to collect sunlight. Rooftops are great, but the taller the building the more volume you're trying to supply with the same area. If you want that sunlight for farmland, you can't cover the fields with solar panels.
You also tend to run out of solar power nightly (which can be mitigated with power storage, for which there are many constantly growing and improving options), and away from the equator you run low (or out, if you're far enough)
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Re: Fuels are a commodity, not a technology. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not cover the roads, parking lots, and roofs of big box stores instead? Slap a per square foot tax on buildings 5000 square feet and larger if they donâ(TM)t have at least 75% solar coverage.
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In Ontario, I'd love to see the major highways near urban areas roofed with solar. I imagine there would be some issues keeping them clean and clear, but there would also be reduced winter road care required, and less worry about wet surfaces as the majority of rain would be diverted before it hit the road surface. Less sun directly in a driver's eyes in the morning and evening.
On the other hand, the roads aren't exactly designed to have large volumes of snow and water all dumped on the shoulders. There
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You need to look into VERTICAL solar! You do not need to keep them clean at all, they work better with double sided PV in the winter than normal PV. They also work on farms too; and they may be cheaper to mount than normal PV as well. Downside is they produce nothing at midday.
If they could help with highway sound, they could be used in those highway barrier walls (which are mostly to help property values next to the road.)
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This is already a problem at a local high school where the brats throw stuff on the roof to damage the panels. Or just throw shit on the roof for other reasons -- which was literally ROCK and metal equipment (and you can often see dents in the metal) The occasional sports ball accidentally goes up there too; I expect an American football to do damage. Hardened solar panels are required...
Security Cameras are required. Windows have been around forever and get broken... but you're likely to get caught. Having
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With agricultural land we have a massive NIMBY problem in the UK. They hate wind turbines and solar farms, and are mostly wealthy enough not to care about the cost of electricity because otherwise they wouldn't be able to afford to live in rural areas with a nice view.
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So, when we were in the UK last month after Worldcon, and took the train to Edinburgh, then London, you're saying we didn't see a ton of rooftop solar, nor 4? 5? 6? solar fields? And we didn't see the wind turbines there, or in Wales?
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Google the on shore wind turbine ban. It's only just been lifted.
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At this point solar tends to get installed where it is cheapest, and there are still massive amounts of untapped and cheap places to put it. For big commercial buildings their issue tends to be that they don't own the building and there isn't much incentive for the owner to install panels if they can't negotiate a rent increase that matches the electricity cost savings so they get their payback time.
All things that could be solved, but at the moment we seem to be struggling just to pick all the low hanging
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Some parking lots are starting to be covered over with solar.
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If you want that sunlight for farmland, you can't cover the fields with solar panels.
What you CAN do is cover areas and effectively turn them into grasslands/farmland, and there is an entire field now for using solar panels, spaced out, so that you only partially shade, increasing yields. It also helps because it reduces evaporation, leading to more effective water usage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics/ [wikipedia.org]
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The area requirement isn't a hard problem unless we need to generate way more electricity than we currently do. Human development, even if we only count urban areas, covers much more of the world than would need to be "covered with solar panels" to power it all. I think this is like a factor of 10 right now. It'll take some effort the standardize everything so "installing solar panels" is just what we used to call roofing, but.. we already have building codes.
The tricky part will be transmitting energy wher
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There's also proposals to build transmission lines from north Africa into Europe via Spain & Italy. Of course, China's investing heavily in similar projects too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Those are the two areas with the most intensive use & construction of HVDC transmission projects.
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Yes, the tricky part I'm referring to is politics, money and time rather than technology. Connecting Egypt to Greece and Morocco to Spain are baby steps toward a system that would involve cooperation between dozens of nations and require much more capacity. For example, those two connectors are roughly equivalent to a single power plant each.
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The equilibrium price of a finite resource (like fossil fuels or fissile materials) is determined purely by supply and demand
Supply and demand certainly matter, but the price cannot drop below the cost to extract and process the fuel over the long term. And that is determined by among other things technology.
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> but the price cannot drop below the cost to extract and process the fuel over the long term
Sure can! In fact has happened several times in just the past few years, for supply to outstrip demand so much that prices go negative as producers get desperate to keep their storage from overflowing.
Turns out that you can't just turn the supply on and off on a whim, so supply is not totally elastic. If demand shrinks too fast, producers end up in a situation where they will pay others to take product off their
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Over the long term. Short term it can, long term, the suppliers go bust.
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Most countries, except Iceland, are still at the nascent stages of developing their renewable energy infrastructure so we've yet to see what it'll all look like once it's a more mature system, like the fossil fuels-b
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> long term, the suppliers go bust.
And why should the suppliers go bust in "the long term"? Oh right, because the market price dropped below the cost to produce it, thus obliterating profit.
So, again, the price absolutely can and has dropped below the cost of production. Time scale is irrelevant to that fact.
=Smidge=
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Time scale is irrelevant to that fact.
It is not because companies have finite resources to eat losses.
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Whether or not a company can endure losses for any amount of time is entirely separate from whether or nor the cost of doing business exceeds profits.
"The price cannot drop below the cost to extract and process the fuel over the long term" is an objectively false statement, on any timescale, because it is 100% possible for a resource to be in such low demand that there is nobody willing to pay even the cost of extraction for it.
=Smidge=
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It's not unrealistic to imagine a future where domestic electricity is close to free for a lot of people. A combination of their own solar and storage, and low grid energy prices at night. Profit will be from commercial use of electricity, especially new uses like hydrogen production, and from a standing charge or taxation (like France does it).
Averaged over a year it's already possible to get to zero, or even get paid, by having a large enough solar array. If I didn't work from home I'd make a decent littl
Re:Fuels are a commodity, not a technology. (Score:4, Funny)
You cannot run out of sunlight
*Cries in a Scottish accent.*
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Scotland could be the Saudi Arabia of wind power. They have incredible resources, especially off-shore. They are pretty consistent too. They just need the investment and the will to build it.
Brittle (Score:2)
Not really possible with FFs or nuclear inputs: They are each their own very brittle ecosystems.
I would agree with nuclear as the regulations around supply chains mean that, essentially, there are two or three companies allowed to mine and process fuel. However, the oil and natural gas markets are fairly robust, to the point when OPEC lowered production around 15 years ago, it took about two years before other production methods cranked up and prices fell again (to the point in nearly bankrupted a few economies)
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The issue there is that even with all that, it doesn't even come close to internalizing the actual costs of the nuclear supply chain. It's not even economically viable if you had to reflect 100s to 1000s of years of waste storage in the energy prices. It's completely political that it exists at all.
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The equilibrium price of a finite resource (like fossil fuels or fissile materials) is determined purely by supply and demand...
You forgot the rate of interest. The price of a finite resource changes over time as supply is used up. The percentage change in the price will change at an amount just equal to rate of interest. The owner of a barrel of oil can sell it today for P1 or wait until tomorrow and sell it for P2. If the percentage change from P1 to P2 is greater than the interest rate, it is in the owner's interest to hold. If less than the rate of interest, he is better off selling today and earning the interest. The result is
Solar and Wind are Additional Costs (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Solar and Wind are Additional Costs (Score:4, Informative)
That problem is already solved, because an electric car's battery can power [wikipedia.org] a home for days. [environmentamerica.org]
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Re:Solar and Wind are Additional Costs (Score:5, Informative)
Their advocates usually overlook this.
No they don't. In fact most pricing for green energy these days include the provisional cost of backup added to it in the estimates and in the cost decision, quite often these days accepting the cost/return of including storage, and sometimes even storage alone passes cost/benefit and gets sanctioned as a project.
And in any case it is irrelevant. This article is about things getting cheaper. Battery tech is one of those techs that is also getting cheaper which is why there are so many grid battery storage projects currently being executed.
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Some places in the world are charging a feed-in tariff, so it's faster to pay back solar+battery than must solar by itself since if you over generate during the day (which people typically do) you end up paying for it if you can't store that juice somewhere.
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Some of the current grid batteries are in the multi-gigawatt-hour range. That’s getting to be real amounts of energy, and some of the facilities actually make money. They’re not just tech demo toys anymore. Info on the ten largest grid batteries as of 2024.
https://www.quan [quantistry.com]
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>but industrial-scale battery storage costs are dropping exponentially
They'll be free in no time.
(Yes I'm being snarky, but "exponentially" is being thrown around a lot, especially by the author who wildly abuses the notion of Moore's law.)
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Have ouy ever come out of your basement, and found hours, or days, with no wind? Esp. in areas that are always windy?
Solar is getting cheaper (Score:2)
It is not that this is news, we know that for quite some time now.
The solar bet was succesful. Hermann Scheer would have loved that.
My colleagues are now heating their pool to 95 Fahrenheit with their solar cells because of surplus energy.
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My colleagues are now heating their pool to 95 Fahrenheit with their solar cells because of surplus energy.
A friend in California invited me to his home with his enjoyable pool. It is a simple rectangular shape so it is easy to cover in a large plastic bubble wrap layer that is easy to roll up when not in use.
That plastic cover is all he uses and his pool is quite warm and relaxing, like a giant warm bathtub.
quick 'n dirty google [amazon.com]:
Re:Solar is getting cheaper (Score:4, Interesting)
I tried that, but sunlight degrades the plastic and bits of it clog your filter pretty quickly. And you have to replace it every couple of years.
I'd rather have the pool a bit cooler and use liquid cover to reduce evaporative heat losses.
what about the storage? (Score:1)
Sustainable generation is only half the story. To have parity with fossil fuel or nuclear fuel generated energy, there will also have to be cost-effective high capacity quickly recoverable energy storage, because that's what the fuels in fossil/nuclear fuel energy also provide. Stored energy, on tap / provided at will, and not just by accident like wind (if it blows) or solar (if it's not cloudy). Adding storage of energy into any equation drastically changes what makes the most sense.
Re:what about the storage? (Score:4, Interesting)
When I learned that you can buy batteries that store more than 1000kWh over their lifetime and cost less than $200, it calmed me the fuck down. That was "cheap enough" to not worry about the feasibility of electric everything. And still, it's getting cheaper at a breathtaking rate, both by increasing longevity and lower unit price. It is getting ridiculously obvious that electricity is taking over from fossil fuels, and that most of that electricity is going to be from renewable source, not nuclear. At this point, all that fearmongering from people who can't fathom a world without burning fuels is just an annoyance.
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A 1000 kWh battery that costs $200 is $0.20/kWh. Right now, only ten states [usatoday.com] have residential rates higher than that -- in 40 states, you pay less to get energy from the grid than that battery's cost, and that's before you charge the battery or pay to hook it into your house's power lines.
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Eh? How does that math work? You're not paying the battery $.20/kWh to feed you power. It's an upfront cost you add to the total cost of the generation system you're using (presumably solar). At the same time, I doubt that 1 MWh of storage - fully installed/wired-up and ready to go - costs $200.
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Yes that was my point -- the OP seemed to think that a $0.20/kWh battery meant that batteries were a good solution. My point was that the battery alone, before you have anything to plug it into and before you charge it, is still more expensive than residential electricity in most of the country. The OP should not have been reassured by that.
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Well I was more talking numbers, and trying to parse what everyone was saying. Nobody was being clear about whether they were discussing output or capacity, and the prices seemed off.
I see 10 kWh capacity Powerwall batteries going for $1400 or so. Installation is probably the main expense with these things if you can't DIY it. In no way is that $0.20 per kWh of capacity. It's $140!
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The OP seemed to be saying $200 for a battery that, across all cycles, could store and discharge 1000 kWh, so the equivalent of 100 full cycles for that 10 kWh-capacity Powerwall. (I bet the Powerwall provides a lot more than 100 cycles, but you do pay more for it.)
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Thank you, someone can read. I wrote "1000kWh over their lifetime", as that's an easy way to convert the one-time investment cost into a per kWh cost, which is how people are used to paying for electricity. Batteries crossed the feasibility threshold a long time ago, and ever since then the path was brightly lit and inevitable. A 10 kWh capacity Powerwall is a good example for the falling prices. That Powerwall uses LFP cells and is rated for 6000 equivalent full charge cycles, so over its lifetime it can s
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That's a short lifetime. You're also listing battery metrics that are basically useless for pricing out a storage system.
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Batteries don't just die after 6,000 cycles. Efficiency drops, but they're still useful. And companies are starting to ship LFPs that, for cars, are guaranteed for 600,000 miles. Sodium Ion is also starting to ship, and those are even cheaper than LFP.
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Yes I know. I was referring to Entrope's remark about 100 cycles. Obviously even existing batteries are going to last a lot longer than that.
You can't really say it's going to cost you X per kWh for the life of the battery, since you have no idea how many actual cycles you'll get from it and because that data is only really relevant juxtaposed with grid power costs which are variable.
The real consideration is, how expensive is grid power right now and how much am I paying per month to stay on grid? If I go
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> is still more expensive than residential electricity in most of the country.
Your math still doesn't work because you're comparing a one-time cost of a battery to the ongoing consumable cost of energy. Do you believe that you buy a battery for your house, fully charged, use the energy in it and then throw it away? Like a cheap disposable alkaline cell?
Whether or not buying a battery for your house makes sense will depend on what you want to accomplish. If you want a day or two worth of backup power to k
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Still doesn't work because it's still a one-time cost. You can make up any numbers you want; Why stop at 1000 cycles? LFP batteries on the market right now are good for 4000+ cycles. Using that logic the cost is now 5 cents per kwh. You cannot compare costs by simply amortizing the battery pack cost over an arbitrary length of time and declare it doesn't stack up against grid power.
And it doesn't even make sense to approach it that way, is my point. The use case for batteries is either backup power or cost
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> If you are likely to dip into battery power (or grid power) then it is valid to directly compare the two as it is a cost you will incur.
If you are "likely to dip into battery power" then either grid power is more expensive (and costs are in your favor), or it's not available at all and cost comparison is irrelevant.
Otherwise there is no purpose to using a battery at all, not only for cost but there's just no utility in having one.
That's why it's stupid to try and compare costs in this way.
=Smidge=
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And it's been pointed out several times that your math depends on assigning an arbitrary end date to the battery system when in fact battery systems go through a gradual degradation and don't just stop working at a given point in time. Are you factoring in the power that's now "free" after you've amortized it?
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Investment cost divided by capacity and equivalent full charge cycles gives an easy estimate for the cost that storing electricity adds on top of the cost to generate it. You may be deciding between using the grid at night or increasing your solar capacity and storing the excess during the daytime so that you need less or no grid electricity at night. If you know what it costs to make a kWh and what it costs to store it, that's an easy decision, and in many places the next question is "do I have enough roof
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I am aware of that. That's why I put "cheap enough" in quotes. That price made it feasible. The states where people pay more than that show that that price is not an absolute deal-breaker. It's gotten a lot cheaper since and is still getting cheaper at a rapid rate, and we're not even talking about utility scale batteries. Those have been crossing these thresholds even longer ago.
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Any reason why those installation costs are so high?
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there will also have to be cost-effective high capacity quickly recoverable energy storage
Batteries are already getting cheaper. But the solar farm people are still waiting for the battery fairy to swoop in and sprinkle her magic battery dust on the grid.
To be fair, traditional utility companies are better about building out generation and storage to match. Because they understand reliability. It's the investors in solar farms that cry for someone to come in and build them storage and better grids. So they can make their money without doing the hard work (investments or rates to pay for them).
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But that is not what nuclear and fossil fuel provides. Nuclear is not highly dispatchable nor is coal. In most grids, they have depended on gas peakers. And even gas requires at least some power plants to be spinning constantly when they are not supplying energy.
We are already seeing batteries displacing gas peakers for short scale use since once you have enough capacity for daily power shifting, they can cope with minute long, it's the advert break in the football match, power surge for no extra infrastruc
Whats funny is that (Score:5, Interesting)
Because they know the ROI period for solar farms is 7-10 years while the same ROI for a gas plant is 9-15 years. Wind power isn’t as good at 7-12. But solar/bettery costs are dropping exponentially and those other numbers are pretty constant. Operating costs follow similar trends. Scream all you want about *insert-favorite-energy-source-here*, the cold icy uncaring grip of economics is probably gonna strangle everything except solar, in most parts of the world.
It’s not gonna happen fast enough to mitigate AGW. Our species completely screwed the pooch on that one. But, in a century, most of our energy will be solar simply due to economics.
Numbers for nuclear are all over the friggin’ map, delending on your assumptions. I saw payback numbers ranging from 10 (hahaha yeah sure) to 100. I love the concept of baseload nuclear power, but it’s never gonna be more than a niche tech for situations when money is not a concern.
https://www.forbes.com/home-im... [forbes.com]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
https://www.turbinehub.com/pos... [turbinehub.com].
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
ROI is likely longer than 7 - 10 years (Score:2)
Maybe, but the payback years seems too short.
https://unboundsolar.com/solar... [unboundsolar.com]
All of these are $10,000 systems for 3,000 Kilowat-hours per year
Price per kilowatt hour - years until payback with 26% federal subsidy - without federal subsidy
33 cents - 7.47 years - 10.10 years
25 cents - 9.87 years - 13.33 years
20 cents - 12.33 years - 16.67 years
15 cents - 16.44 years - 22.22 years
10 cents - 24.67 years - 33.33 years
Average electricity residential rates per states https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
California 34
Know of 2 persons with 16 cents per Kwh (Score:2)
neither one is going to pay back the solar panel system on their home in under 15 years.
large scale commercial works, residentail kind of (Score:2)
Federal depreciation for 5 years of a solar panel farm works out financially.
For homeowners not in the 5 highest electricity cost states, solar panels on the roof have a long payback period.
Get that payback period to 10 years or less for most of the sunny part of the USA and a massive boom in solar powered homes will happen.
California's seen that via raising the electricity rates by goverrnment taxes and government regulation.
10% is misleading (Score:4, Informative)
The cost of solar panels has dropped an average of 10% a year, making them about 10,000 times cheaper than they were in 1958, the year of their pioneering use to power the Vanguard 1 satellite.
While the panels themselves may have gotten cheaper, the cost to install solar panels on your roof is still very expensive (tens of thousands of dollars), to the point where it doesn't pay off for several decades, and has been so for the past 20 years or so I've been looking into it. Quotes I got 20 years ago were around $40,000. Quotes now? Pretty much the same. And yet, a 10% reduction every year over 20 years *should* have brought that $40k down to just under $5k.
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Mind you both rebate and tariff are dropping each year, however there's now a $4k rebate on residential battery installations as government priority has shifted to neighbourhood storage due to high penetration of rooftop solar generation and consequent wholesale rates going negative during peak solar times...
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Quotes I got 20 years ago were around $40,000. Quotes now? Pretty much the same. And yet, a 10% reduction every year over 20 years *should* have brought that $40k down to just under $5k.
So what you are saying is that inflation has been growing at 10% a year.
Probably wont reduce emissions (Score:1, Troll)
Clean energy technology needs oil and petrochemicals to mine and refine the raw materials plus manufacturing of the plastics, composites, and lubricants that are needed for the systems to function. Making solar panels requires coal as a raw ingredient - https://youtu.be/rekmjLrpONs?s... [youtu.be]
haha good one (Score:5, Interesting)
Haha. My California clean energy costs have been going down so fast that they are now double what they were a few years ago.
It'll be an uphill fight the whole way (Score:1)
1. They have money invested in fossil fuel companies, and likewise the fossil-fuel industry has funded them being elected
2. 'Renewables' are viewed by them as 'liberal' causes, therefore the knee-jerk reaction against it, regardless of whether it's in the best interests of the country in general or their own constituents in particular
Alternate theory: hidden subsidy limit (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now, it's not necessary to worry about stability or reliability of wind or solar because the grid is backed by gas, oil, coal, nuclear, hydro, etc built to full capacity. Adding solar or wind sporadically allows the remaining plants to ramp down, and they ramp back up when the wind don't blow and the sun don't shine.
This existing build-out of the non-intermittent energy sources is a hidden subsidy for solar and wind. If wind and solar begin to run gas and hydro and coal out of business at scale, then that subsidy disappears and now the intermittent sources need to actually pay for generating capacity or energy storage to take over when the wind doesn't blow and at night or through the winter.
Newsflash: a gas plant that runs all night becomes pretty cheap compared to a battery* that can output just as much power continuously all night.
So what you're going to have is that the solar is going to build out it's own gas plant infrastructure and hope that daily savings from sunlight offsets the cost, or the investment is just going to make solar unattractive when reliability is priced in too.
*My average nighttime load is about 1.5kW (because I have oil heat, it would be 3kW if I had a heat pump). Let's say 1 million homes in a metro area need 1.5kW for 12 hours each night. That's 18 million kwh of storage plus power electronics. Building this out of Tesla Powerwall 3 lego blocks, that's about 1.5 million powerwalls at an msrp of 7k each, so about 11billion dollars. That's gonna build more than enough gas plants to do the job. Hell with that kind of money you can do it with nukes.
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Let's say you need 18h of 3kW. That's 54kWh. Enough batteries to store that cost less than $10000 and can be expected (cautious estimate) to last 3000 equivalent full charge cycles. That will be $10000/(3000*54kWh)=6ct/kWh, and that's without the economies of scale that utilities get. Battery prices have dropped by two thirds over the past 8 years, so by the time you need to replace those batteries, you can expect the cost to be a lot lower still. In essence, nobody is going to build gas power plants. They'
Re: Alternate theory: hidden subsidy limit (Score:2)
Unless and until the treehuggers start permitting strip mining for lithium, cobolt, etc, battery prices have a built-in floor defined by mining and processing the raw materials.
Before that floor is reached, the floor is defined by manufacturing plant capacity for the finished product. Investments to date have addressed the latter. As for the former, it's all still mined and processed Not Here and shipped to Here.
Can't expect the price floor to keep dropping.
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That's an absurd amount of heat for September. Electricity must be cheap as water where you live or you'd look for ways to conserve.
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That's an absurd amount of heat for September.
Tonight! James gets his hair stuck in a Hoover and @ObliviousGnat learns of the existence of the the Southern Hemisphere and cooler temperatures at altitudes and towards the poles.
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Living near the poles explains why someone would use so much heat in the spring, but that's a really weak case against renewables!
The exception ... (Score:2)
the rate at which a given kind of technology improves is remarkably predictable.
Not really surprising. (Score:2)
The insane effort that goes into making fossil fuels feasible is a relic of the steam age and in some cases from even before that. That harvesting the sunlight directly and using this newfangled thing called electricity for a direct energy efficiency of 75% on the low end will beat out the entire fossil fuel industry in the vast majority of cases isn't the surprising. We all know it's been for decades now that the fossil fuel industrial complex has actively worked on preventing innovation (Chevy Volt anyone
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all wrong because we don't have cheap energy storage. that's why 3/4 our energy is from fossil. We have night, and we have windless times.
seems a bit ignorant (Score:1)
solar panels have mass - they need a certain amount of material, there is volume & weight in the shipping, and the labour & hardware to get them mounted is significant. These costs aren't going anywhere.
Wind farms - yeah, see above.
Moore's law. Lol