Clean Energy Should Get Cheaper and Grow Even Faster (yahoo.com) 36
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:4, 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:2)
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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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 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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You cannot run out of sunlight
*Cries in a Scottish accent.*
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)
Solar and Wind are Additional Costs (Score:2, Insightful)
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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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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 p
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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.)
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.
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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
Re:what about the storage? (Score:4, Interesting)
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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Any reason why those installation costs are so high?
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]
10% is misleading (Score:3)
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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But residential rooftop solar? Yeah, I suspect that’s mostly for people with spare cash to burn. I find it hard to believe that someone could recoup multiple 10s of thousands in under a decade.
The real action is gonna be in the industrial-scale solar farms, industrial-scale ba
Probably wont reduce emissions (Score:2, 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:2)
Haha. My California clean energy costs have been going down so fast that they are now double what they were a few years ago.