How fast will it take over, how fast are costs shrinking, why is it so cheap, what industries will it birth, how much surface will it take up, where will it appear first?
Why does this post seem like an advertisement for solar companies? Are there no downsides to soakr technology? I'd like to see a more balanced treatment of the subject .
There are actually many disadvantages to solar that are not mentioned in this article. In general, increased solar is in addition to fossil fuels, not a replacement for fossil fuels. Global fossil fuel usage keeps going up despite ever-accelerating installations of solar plants.
Cost is only one of the factors that constrain solar power, so unlike many commodities, declining prices do not automatically lead to increased adoption. Low-cost solar is necessary, but not sufficient to replace fossil fuels on a global scale.
Here are the many disadvantages of solar:
1) Geography - most highly populated regions have low solar radiance.
2) Intermittency
3) Utility-scale batteries are extremely expensive - on the order of magnitude of nuclear reactors
4) Solar power only generates electricity, which is just one of many of the uses of fossil fuels.
5) Solar power undermines the electrification of the transportation sector.
6) Solar costs are highly sensitive to interest rates on the bond issues that pay for the cost of initial construction.
7) Long-distance power cables designed to overcome geographical constraints are very expensive and time-consuming to build. Crossing international borders is intensely political outside of Europe.
8) In Temperate latitudes, solar power varies greatly by season. Capacity factors are typically triple in the summer (roughly 30%) as in the winter (roughly 10%). This makes keeping the electrical grid going for 3-6 months out of the year very challenging and expensive for solar.
9) Utility-scale solar plants are very land-intensive. Since preserving wild habitats should be a key goal for protecting the natural environment
Yes, I might write a more detailed article on these topics. But here's a quick reaction to your message:
1. But solar costs drop so much that it's just a matter of time that what works in one place works in another. At a 12% drop per year, in 5 years the cost drops enough to halve. That means that a place with 2400 irradiance will have the same cost per MWh as a place with 1200, just 5 years later.
2. Intermittency can be partially solved with wind and fully solved with batteries.
3. Batteries are very expensive but their price is going down faster than solar
4. Cheap and clean electricity pushes the rest of energy to electrify. Eg: electric cars, heat pumps, electric arcs.
5. Why?
6. How is CAPEX more sensitive to interest rates for solar than other sources? Certainly not than wind and nuclear since building times are shorter. As for the exposure to interest rates, that's much better than the exposure to Saudi Arabia's decision on how much oil they will pump out.
7. You don't need them. You generate electricity locally.
8. Solar is perfectly complementary with wind
9. Solar farming is 100x more productive than agriculture per unit of land. And we only need 0.16% of land, vs agriculture's 14%. So plenty of room to replace a bit of agricultural land with solar panels
I guess that you are too busy to read my article and add a comment, so I will respond here in order:
1) Declining price does not overcome geography. They are two completely separate domains. Just like the declining cost of ocean ships does not affect land-locked desert nations. As someone who writes so well about geography, I am not sure why you cannot see that.
2) Again, you neglect geography. Areas that are both windy and high solar radiance are very rare on planet Earth. See batteries below.
3) Yes, batteries are getting cheaper but they are still on the order of magnitude as 100X the cost of storing fossil fuels. Utility-scale batteries are on the order of magnitude of nuclear power stations in cost and they produce no electricity. That is unlikely to change for many decades.
4) Again, solar/wind are not cheap. When you factor in system costs, new wind and solar are far more expensive than existing fossil fuels (see my article for details). And the intermittency of solar/wind seriously undermines electrification.
6) Because the cost of solar/wind is far more front-loaded into construction costs than for coal and natural gas. Fuel costs do not need to be financed, but construction costs do.
7) Again, you neglect geography. The vast majority of people live in either with lower solar radiance and/or low winds. This is particularly a problem in Asia where the majority of people live. Gobi desert is the only good location for either.
8) Again, you neglect geography. Windy regions and high solar radiance regions are very far apart. Texas and scattered parts of Sahara are some of the few exceptions.
9) For my point, it does not matter whether solar is more productive that agriculture. What matters is that solar and wind are far more land-intensive than nuclear and fossil fuels. Solar replacing agriculture destroys wild habitat by forcing agriculture to expand elsewhere.
I know that you mean well by your writing, but I think that you take Green energy corporations and Green financial analysts like Lazards too much at their word. They have a huge profit incentive to make solar and wind look far better than it is. They need to keep government subsidies coming, so they use unrealistic assumptions in their reports.
The original commenter just asked for disadvantages. I don't see how you can claim that my list are not disadvantages, even if we have differing views on how well those disadvantages can be overcome.
How about this?
I am publishing an article on the limitations of solar power on November 12th. It is not really a response to your article, as it was already in the publishing queue, but it is about the same topic.
Feel free to add comments to the bottom of my article when it is published then we can have a discussion.
A topic not to forget with PV is need for copper. A solar module 'needs' about 1 kilogram of copper (within, the cabling, the transformer etc.).
Copper mining is not the cleanest process, per 1kg copper there are about 200 kg of mining sludge. These tailings consist of finely ground ore dissolved in strong acids, bases, or other solvents. This mixture contains a lot of arsenic, cadmium, mercury, lead, and other heavy metals.
Globally, PV causes around 100 million tons of copper tailings per year. As they do not decay, they remain unchanged and toxic until the end of time.
And they are usually stored in huge open ponds, and sometimes directly "disposed of" in rivers – mostly in distant countries. About 1 million square kilometers are now occupied by mining waste (I think not from copper mining only).
PV is good for the climate, but not that nice for the environment. At least people in richer countries tend to forget this, mount PV for monetary reasons and have no clue that the 'clean' energy from the roof is causing some serious harm somewhere else on the planet.
Hate to be the ackchyually guy, but there are a few things worth to be pointed out about the area calculation:
Most of the high consumption regions coastal China, India, Europe, east coast US etc, has significantly lower irradiance. If distance doesn’t matter why not go with the best location, if it matters the irradiance is more like about 1300kwh/m2, which is around 35% more land.
Since we are covering country sized areas in PV most of it will be ground mounted. Which is tilted for optimal angle and thus less dense due to shadowing. The optimal angle depends on latitude and season, but going with 30 degree (see next point) would result in around 30-40% more land.
By far the biggest issue is storage. We can either store summer sun for winter with enormous storage, months worth of electricity or optimise the PV capacity for a winter day and only store the energy for the night. On a winter day on these locations around 20% of electricity of a summer day is produced which would result 400% more land.
So roughly around 8-9x more land would be needed in this slightly more accurate back of the envelope calculation. Which is the size of Greenland for current energy usage.
It seems that this article glossed right over the fact that this all works only if the cost of batteries come waaayyyy down. We have partial solar in our home. Batteries are the current deal breaker.
Thanks, Tomas. I live in a Texas. I knew that we had a lot of solar capacity, but your article opened my eyes to just how much! BTW, like many, I discovered your writing in early 2020…the article describing the metrics, how to make a decision about when to close due to covid. I lead a nonprofit in Houston—I had a spreadsheet modeling your recommendations. You were such a big help! We’re in ancillary healthcare, so we never shut down completely, but I will always be grateful for your non-politicized in depth articles.
I live in the Netherlands mostly off the grid with solar, wood and some natural gas. I have nice big batteries as well. The winter is difficult and I need to add some grid-power or diesel to help me through some dark weeks. My system works mainly because I have enough land to grow wood for heating.
I'm far from optimistic about large-scale solar grid-based energy: we need to mine much more copper and we have already mined the easy resources; we are now happy with low-grades and those take (exponentially) more energy and effort to mine. The more copper we have mined, the lower the grades, and the higher the costs become, and rapidly. The same with battery materials.
Despite lots of advancements I see no feasible way to solve this conundrum. This is a problem of physics, not of human creativity. So I do not (yet) share you techno-optimism. Neither do I belief in a just in time miracle solution.
Your solution works because of the biofuel and supplemental fossil fuels. Overbuilding solar can solve the overnight issue, but not the issue across seasons. For that, the only solutions are likely to be wind or fuel burning. Nuclear could do but it’s so expensive that it wouldn’t work just for that. Must be baseload.
... but overbuilding solar and its infra-structure requires way more copper (and other materials) than economically minable. I just heard new copper mines will not be economically feasible until the copper price triples. And it takes 20-30 years to start one (they need to be huge to be feasible in the first place). Does not look good.
You might like (or hate :-) ) studying resource availability and mining. I found it a fascinating, but neglected, field of study.
One issue you have not addressed here is the resistance of utility companies to integrating solar into the grid. A great deal of storage and transmission is needed for solar to overcome the time and space constraints of when and where solar is available, which is quickly overwhelming the cost of installations.
Still you are focused on the costs of the solar infrastructure, not integrating it into the grid. Here in the northeast, we are faced with extreme delays on all renewable connections to the PJM grid, causing us to almost lose our offshore wind project and many community solar and battery projects did collapse. PJM (who run the grid for 14 states from Virginia to Ohio and Pennsylvania) just doesn't understand how to integrate renewables and storage projects onto the grid. Distributed energy with smart systems can greatly improve grid resiliency, but the rules have to change to reflect those new systems. Here are some resources discussing these issues: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/virtual-power-plants/hundreds-of-new-yorkers-got-free-batteries-to-clean-up-the-grid
I am not sure what nation you are referring to, but American utilities love solar projects. American utilities are typically government-regulated monopolies.
Under this model, utility profits are regulated and tied directly to new construction. They typically are mandated a 7-9% profit margin, so the easiest way to increase profits is to build new solar and wind projects. It does not matter to them whether the projects actually generate useful electricity as it does not affect their profit margin.
But, yes, you are correct that they are not so interested in building the transmission lines as this does not affect their profit margins.
At the moment, batteries aren’t close to storing enough juice. So for every solar installation where you need power after dark or when it’s cloudy, you need backup natural gas power
Yes, once the magic batteries appear, all will be well! Meanwhile in the real world EV sales are collapsing because of the batteries’ cost and weight and lack of energy density. Didn’t you do enough damage with your lockdown fanaticism?
I have been a solar enthusiast for over 10 years. My cars, my home, my pool, are powered by solar. My monthly costs are about $25 per month. It would be zero,but the monopoly that runs our grid requires that we be tied to the grid. I would be more than happy to sell back my energy to the electrical grid, but the monopoly that is the grid only provides a small percentage of the value that is provided from my overproduction. Although this is a residential application,the primary point is that until we have regulation that provides individual solar installations to go off grid and/or resell excess power back to the grid for a reasonable amount that takes the price of power generation into account, the system in place is not conducive to bringing more power to the grid to keep power costs as low as possible. There is no win-win here.
Commercial applications may not have the same considerations, but my guess (currently, without data to back this up) that this likely also applies to large installations, making it adventatious to the power grid monopoly that profits without any value add.
Hi Tomas, enjoyed your research. Few suggestions that I know from work at Delft University
1. In Europe, prices for PV are already down. Lowest prices in the market I have heard now is 0.08 euros /Wp. I do think the biggest difference yet is the import tariffs on PV, else prices would also drop further at the USA. The steady decline is prices is called Swansons law btw.
2. Basically, PV panels are made of silicon. The performance of those panels is steadily increasing. Some people expect that commercial versions of more than 30% efficiency will be reached before 2030. There are also development in tandem-cells, where you basically add another layer, like perovskite. That would make even higher efficiencies possible, resulting in even less land use needed. Production of perovskite panels has just started, so also those I expect to see significant marketshare before 2030.
3. Solar is already the cheapest source of electricity. That means in Europe and probably in the USA as well that powerplants have less hours per year when they will run. A PV-installation comes with CAPEX, but afterwards operation costs are close to zero. A fossil based powerplant has always significant costs because of the inputs.
4. Batteries seems to follow the same path as PV-panels, at least when you look at the annual decrease in price per kWh. In comparison to last year, prices dropped with 40% (!!!) and the expectations are that this will continue, especially when sodium batteries will hit the market. Market grow of batteries is 60% annually over the last 10 years.
Until now, 90% of the batteries goes to cars, but this development will have an impact on electricity prices to. Or in other words; the business case for power plants in the summer will become even worse. Same goes for nuclear powerplants. For Europe, there are now scenario's where only the last 5-10% of the annual energy consumption needs to be covered with other energy carriers like hydrogen.
1. Glad to see that European costs reflect Chinese prices. And it looks like these prices will keep going down! It looks like Swanson's Law (thanks!) is just a solar zoom in of Wright's Law :)
2. Glad to see you are witnessing this on the field!
3. Yes but not firmed. All the problem lies there from now on!
4. I just started tackling the batteries article. So excited to see the parallel! Will pay attention to sodium
5. Agreed that interseasonal storage will be the final challenge, and that chemical or heat storage are big candidates there
I am very interested in and pro nuclear. The only thing that puts a (?) mark over the nuclear thesis, except for niche (but important) applications, is solar power and its cost decrease.
A first principle comparison of solar and nuclear would be great. Currently, nuclear is hard to access, because regulation, politics, lack of scale and bad industry structure have distorted the space so much.
Btw. there is a nuclear brother to Terraform Industries, called Valar Atomics.
The expensiveness and a first principles estimation of its potential compared to solar would be interesting. But even if solar is cheaper on an LCOE basis, nuclear's weather independency and power density can lead to lower overall system cost due to savings in backup/firming and transmission infrastructure.
Once again, you have impressed me with your writing. And your readers have brought up many good points below and you are able to point out where you have considered these facets. Well done! I think expanding solar is a good idea but we are a long way from elimination of petroleum products. Until storage limitations are overcome, solar will be one more way to diversify our power sources.
I loved the photo of the sheep sheltering in the shade of a solar array. Every time I see a parking lot [I live in LA so I see lots of lots, or paved paradise...] with solar panels shading the cars and providing energy I wonder why these aren't mandatory. One example that should be easy would be schools, which, as public buildings, wouldn't have landlords resisting government mandates. Just saying...
Why does this post seem like an advertisement for solar companies? Are there no downsides to soakr technology? I'd like to see a more balanced treatment of the subject .
I am trying, honestly.
I thought they would take too much land, but apparently it’s not a problem.
For the downsides, look at this article at the bottom: the gist is you can’t do solar well without batteries, and batteries are expensive.
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/can-solar-costs-keep-shrinking?r=36xnz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
There are actually many disadvantages to solar that are not mentioned in this article. In general, increased solar is in addition to fossil fuels, not a replacement for fossil fuels. Global fossil fuel usage keeps going up despite ever-accelerating installations of solar plants.
Cost is only one of the factors that constrain solar power, so unlike many commodities, declining prices do not automatically lead to increased adoption. Low-cost solar is necessary, but not sufficient to replace fossil fuels on a global scale.
Here are the many disadvantages of solar:
1) Geography - most highly populated regions have low solar radiance.
2) Intermittency
3) Utility-scale batteries are extremely expensive - on the order of magnitude of nuclear reactors
4) Solar power only generates electricity, which is just one of many of the uses of fossil fuels.
5) Solar power undermines the electrification of the transportation sector.
6) Solar costs are highly sensitive to interest rates on the bond issues that pay for the cost of initial construction.
7) Long-distance power cables designed to overcome geographical constraints are very expensive and time-consuming to build. Crossing international borders is intensely political outside of Europe.
8) In Temperate latitudes, solar power varies greatly by season. Capacity factors are typically triple in the summer (roughly 30%) as in the winter (roughly 10%). This makes keeping the electrical grid going for 3-6 months out of the year very challenging and expensive for solar.
9) Utility-scale solar plants are very land-intensive. Since preserving wild habitats should be a key goal for protecting the natural environment
And there are others.
Yes, I might write a more detailed article on these topics. But here's a quick reaction to your message:
1. But solar costs drop so much that it's just a matter of time that what works in one place works in another. At a 12% drop per year, in 5 years the cost drops enough to halve. That means that a place with 2400 irradiance will have the same cost per MWh as a place with 1200, just 5 years later.
2. Intermittency can be partially solved with wind and fully solved with batteries.
Wind complementarity tackled in this article
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/wind-and-solar-a-perfect-match
3. Batteries are very expensive but their price is going down faster than solar
4. Cheap and clean electricity pushes the rest of energy to electrify. Eg: electric cars, heat pumps, electric arcs.
5. Why?
6. How is CAPEX more sensitive to interest rates for solar than other sources? Certainly not than wind and nuclear since building times are shorter. As for the exposure to interest rates, that's much better than the exposure to Saudi Arabia's decision on how much oil they will pump out.
7. You don't need them. You generate electricity locally.
8. Solar is perfectly complementary with wind
9. Solar farming is 100x more productive than agriculture per unit of land. And we only need 0.16% of land, vs agriculture's 14%. So plenty of room to replace a bit of agricultural land with solar panels
I guess that you are too busy to read my article and add a comment, so I will respond here in order:
1) Declining price does not overcome geography. They are two completely separate domains. Just like the declining cost of ocean ships does not affect land-locked desert nations. As someone who writes so well about geography, I am not sure why you cannot see that.
2) Again, you neglect geography. Areas that are both windy and high solar radiance are very rare on planet Earth. See batteries below.
3) Yes, batteries are getting cheaper but they are still on the order of magnitude as 100X the cost of storing fossil fuels. Utility-scale batteries are on the order of magnitude of nuclear power stations in cost and they produce no electricity. That is unlikely to change for many decades.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/more-evidence-that-solar-wind-cannot
4) Again, solar/wind are not cheap. When you factor in system costs, new wind and solar are far more expensive than existing fossil fuels (see my article for details). And the intermittency of solar/wind seriously undermines electrification.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-solar-wind-undermines-evs
5) I explain fully in linked article above.
6) Because the cost of solar/wind is far more front-loaded into construction costs than for coal and natural gas. Fuel costs do not need to be financed, but construction costs do.
7) Again, you neglect geography. The vast majority of people live in either with lower solar radiance and/or low winds. This is particularly a problem in Asia where the majority of people live. Gobi desert is the only good location for either.
8) Again, you neglect geography. Windy regions and high solar radiance regions are very far apart. Texas and scattered parts of Sahara are some of the few exceptions.
9) For my point, it does not matter whether solar is more productive that agriculture. What matters is that solar and wind are far more land-intensive than nuclear and fossil fuels. Solar replacing agriculture destroys wild habitat by forcing agriculture to expand elsewhere.
I know that you mean well by your writing, but I think that you take Green energy corporations and Green financial analysts like Lazards too much at their word. They have a huge profit incentive to make solar and wind look far better than it is. They need to keep government subsidies coming, so they use unrealistic assumptions in their reports.
The original commenter just asked for disadvantages. I don't see how you can claim that my list are not disadvantages, even if we have differing views on how well those disadvantages can be overcome.
How about this?
I am publishing an article on the limitations of solar power on November 12th. It is not really a response to your article, as it was already in the publishing queue, but it is about the same topic.
Feel free to add comments to the bottom of my article when it is published then we can have a discussion.
Appreciate the response! Any observations regarding environmental concerns, either with mining of materials, or leakage/disposal issues?
Not really. They're sand!
And the mining is not especially bad AFAIK. But I haven't looked into that specifically.
In any case the mining is better than pumping out oil or mining coal.
A topic not to forget with PV is need for copper. A solar module 'needs' about 1 kilogram of copper (within, the cabling, the transformer etc.).
Copper mining is not the cleanest process, per 1kg copper there are about 200 kg of mining sludge. These tailings consist of finely ground ore dissolved in strong acids, bases, or other solvents. This mixture contains a lot of arsenic, cadmium, mercury, lead, and other heavy metals.
Globally, PV causes around 100 million tons of copper tailings per year. As they do not decay, they remain unchanged and toxic until the end of time.
And they are usually stored in huge open ponds, and sometimes directly "disposed of" in rivers – mostly in distant countries. About 1 million square kilometers are now occupied by mining waste (I think not from copper mining only).
PV is good for the climate, but not that nice for the environment. At least people in richer countries tend to forget this, mount PV for monetary reasons and have no clue that the 'clean' energy from the roof is causing some serious harm somewhere else on the planet.
Here is the article that I referred to in my earlier comment.
Feel free to reply in the comments.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-solar-cannot-displace-fossil
Yes, there are many downsides to solar technology, which I explain in my recent article. Feel free to leave a comment.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-solar-cannot-displace-fossil
Hate to be the ackchyually guy, but there are a few things worth to be pointed out about the area calculation:
Most of the high consumption regions coastal China, India, Europe, east coast US etc, has significantly lower irradiance. If distance doesn’t matter why not go with the best location, if it matters the irradiance is more like about 1300kwh/m2, which is around 35% more land.
Since we are covering country sized areas in PV most of it will be ground mounted. Which is tilted for optimal angle and thus less dense due to shadowing. The optimal angle depends on latitude and season, but going with 30 degree (see next point) would result in around 30-40% more land.
By far the biggest issue is storage. We can either store summer sun for winter with enormous storage, months worth of electricity or optimise the PV capacity for a winter day and only store the energy for the night. On a winter day on these locations around 20% of electricity of a summer day is produced which would result 400% more land.
So roughly around 8-9x more land would be needed in this slightly more accurate back of the envelope calculation. Which is the size of Greenland for current energy usage.
Anyway good points and great article!
It seems that this article glossed right over the fact that this all works only if the cost of batteries come waaayyyy down. We have partial solar in our home. Batteries are the current deal breaker.
Well the goal of the article was not an in-depth of pros-and-cons. That said, I address this issue partially in today's article:
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/wind-and-solar-a-perfect-match
But I'll write batteries soon too, so we can see then what I think!
Agreed that right now they are a deal breaker, but their cost is dropping precipitously!
Thanks, Tomas. I live in a Texas. I knew that we had a lot of solar capacity, but your article opened my eyes to just how much! BTW, like many, I discovered your writing in early 2020…the article describing the metrics, how to make a decision about when to close due to covid. I lead a nonprofit in Houston—I had a spreadsheet modeling your recommendations. You were such a big help! We’re in ancillary healthcare, so we never shut down completely, but I will always be grateful for your non-politicized in depth articles.
I live in the Netherlands mostly off the grid with solar, wood and some natural gas. I have nice big batteries as well. The winter is difficult and I need to add some grid-power or diesel to help me through some dark weeks. My system works mainly because I have enough land to grow wood for heating.
I'm far from optimistic about large-scale solar grid-based energy: we need to mine much more copper and we have already mined the easy resources; we are now happy with low-grades and those take (exponentially) more energy and effort to mine. The more copper we have mined, the lower the grades, and the higher the costs become, and rapidly. The same with battery materials.
Despite lots of advancements I see no feasible way to solve this conundrum. This is a problem of physics, not of human creativity. So I do not (yet) share you techno-optimism. Neither do I belief in a just in time miracle solution.
Thx!
Your solution works because of the biofuel and supplemental fossil fuels. Overbuilding solar can solve the overnight issue, but not the issue across seasons. For that, the only solutions are likely to be wind or fuel burning. Nuclear could do but it’s so expensive that it wouldn’t work just for that. Must be baseload.
... but overbuilding solar and its infra-structure requires way more copper (and other materials) than economically minable. I just heard new copper mines will not be economically feasible until the copper price triples. And it takes 20-30 years to start one (they need to be huge to be feasible in the first place). Does not look good.
You might like (or hate :-) ) studying resource availability and mining. I found it a fascinating, but neglected, field of study.
One issue you have not addressed here is the resistance of utility companies to integrating solar into the grid. A great deal of storage and transmission is needed for solar to overcome the time and space constraints of when and where solar is available, which is quickly overwhelming the cost of installations.
That’s true! It’s because I address it here:
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/can-solar-costs-keep-shrinking?r=36xnz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Still you are focused on the costs of the solar infrastructure, not integrating it into the grid. Here in the northeast, we are faced with extreme delays on all renewable connections to the PJM grid, causing us to almost lose our offshore wind project and many community solar and battery projects did collapse. PJM (who run the grid for 14 states from Virginia to Ohio and Pennsylvania) just doesn't understand how to integrate renewables and storage projects onto the grid. Distributed energy with smart systems can greatly improve grid resiliency, but the rules have to change to reflect those new systems. Here are some resources discussing these issues: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/virtual-power-plants/hundreds-of-new-yorkers-got-free-batteries-to-clean-up-the-grid
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/governors-pjm-capacity-market-auction-opsi-p3-ls-power/731186/
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/utility-resilience-extreme-weather-planning-aps-duke-epri/725820/
https://www.bayjournal.com/news/energy/with-electricity-prices-rising-groups-blame-slow-rollout-of-renewables/article_cb7290b2-91a1-11ef-aa11-3738a0d6d187.html
https://evergreenaction.com/blog/four-ways-states-can-meet-ai-energy-demand-with-clean-energy-1
I am not sure what nation you are referring to, but American utilities love solar projects. American utilities are typically government-regulated monopolies.
Under this model, utility profits are regulated and tied directly to new construction. They typically are mandated a 7-9% profit margin, so the easiest way to increase profits is to build new solar and wind projects. It does not matter to them whether the projects actually generate useful electricity as it does not affect their profit margin.
But, yes, you are correct that they are not so interested in building the transmission lines as this does not affect their profit margins.
Very interesting article, and solar is here to stay in Australia - thought this article on printable solar technology might be of interest: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-03/csiro-opens-new-facility-to-print-flexible-solar-panels/104549170
Crazy, very cool!
Also, if you do have a model where you can resell power to the utility. It can’t be at retail prices. Or the utility goes bust
Indeed
In the Switzerland Zurich area as a private customer, you
pay 0.32 CHF for the kWh
receive 0,1625 CHF for the resell kWh (in theory it should equal the production cost of the utility provider)
Just to get an impression.
At the moment, batteries aren’t close to storing enough juice. So for every solar installation where you need power after dark or when it’s cloudy, you need backup natural gas power
Correct. This will likely end soon.
Yes, once the magic batteries appear, all will be well! Meanwhile in the real world EV sales are collapsing because of the batteries’ cost and weight and lack of energy density. Didn’t you do enough damage with your lockdown fanaticism?
I have been a solar enthusiast for over 10 years. My cars, my home, my pool, are powered by solar. My monthly costs are about $25 per month. It would be zero,but the monopoly that runs our grid requires that we be tied to the grid. I would be more than happy to sell back my energy to the electrical grid, but the monopoly that is the grid only provides a small percentage of the value that is provided from my overproduction. Although this is a residential application,the primary point is that until we have regulation that provides individual solar installations to go off grid and/or resell excess power back to the grid for a reasonable amount that takes the price of power generation into account, the system in place is not conducive to bringing more power to the grid to keep power costs as low as possible. There is no win-win here.
Commercial applications may not have the same considerations, but my guess (currently, without data to back this up) that this likely also applies to large installations, making it adventatious to the power grid monopoly that profits without any value add.
That’s awesome!
Do you resell the power at night? Could you? Or in the evening. With batteries. Maybe that would increase your margins?
I think forcing people to connect to the grid is dumb.
But I do understand that they would pay you little: they have to pay for the grid, and you’re probably producing when everybody else is.
Hi Tomas, enjoyed your research. Few suggestions that I know from work at Delft University
1. In Europe, prices for PV are already down. Lowest prices in the market I have heard now is 0.08 euros /Wp. I do think the biggest difference yet is the import tariffs on PV, else prices would also drop further at the USA. The steady decline is prices is called Swansons law btw.
2. Basically, PV panels are made of silicon. The performance of those panels is steadily increasing. Some people expect that commercial versions of more than 30% efficiency will be reached before 2030. There are also development in tandem-cells, where you basically add another layer, like perovskite. That would make even higher efficiencies possible, resulting in even less land use needed. Production of perovskite panels has just started, so also those I expect to see significant marketshare before 2030.
3. Solar is already the cheapest source of electricity. That means in Europe and probably in the USA as well that powerplants have less hours per year when they will run. A PV-installation comes with CAPEX, but afterwards operation costs are close to zero. A fossil based powerplant has always significant costs because of the inputs.
4. Batteries seems to follow the same path as PV-panels, at least when you look at the annual decrease in price per kWh. In comparison to last year, prices dropped with 40% (!!!) and the expectations are that this will continue, especially when sodium batteries will hit the market. Market grow of batteries is 60% annually over the last 10 years.
Until now, 90% of the batteries goes to cars, but this development will have an impact on electricity prices to. Or in other words; the business case for power plants in the summer will become even worse. Same goes for nuclear powerplants. For Europe, there are now scenario's where only the last 5-10% of the annual energy consumption needs to be covered with other energy carriers like hydrogen.
Thanks!
1. Glad to see that European costs reflect Chinese prices. And it looks like these prices will keep going down! It looks like Swanson's Law (thanks!) is just a solar zoom in of Wright's Law :)
2. Glad to see you are witnessing this on the field!
3. Yes but not firmed. All the problem lies there from now on!
4. I just started tackling the batteries article. So excited to see the parallel! Will pay attention to sodium
5. Agreed that interseasonal storage will be the final challenge, and that chemical or heat storage are big candidates there
You're welcome. Some more extensive background info: https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
& forecast: https://aukehoekstra.substack.com/p/batteries-how-cheap-can-they-get
I am very interested in and pro nuclear. The only thing that puts a (?) mark over the nuclear thesis, except for niche (but important) applications, is solar power and its cost decrease.
A first principle comparison of solar and nuclear would be great. Currently, nuclear is hard to access, because regulation, politics, lack of scale and bad industry structure have distorted the space so much.
Btw. there is a nuclear brother to Terraform Industries, called Valar Atomics.
Did you see my article on nuclear?
I’m a big fan!
More on nuclear today or tomorrow.
The big downside is cost. It’s expensive! We can make it cheaper but it’s not clear we can make it “solar cheap”
I did!
The expensiveness and a first principles estimation of its potential compared to solar would be interesting. But even if solar is cheaper on an LCOE basis, nuclear's weather independency and power density can lead to lower overall system cost due to savings in backup/firming and transmission infrastructure.
Love your information on TX vs CA. Just shows; let the market decide.
Once again, you have impressed me with your writing. And your readers have brought up many good points below and you are able to point out where you have considered these facets. Well done! I think expanding solar is a good idea but we are a long way from elimination of petroleum products. Until storage limitations are overcome, solar will be one more way to diversify our power sources.
Correct!
You mentioned that heat pump prices are expected to continue falling. Are there recent studies or reports that support this trend?
Will probably tackle in the (premium) article next week!
I loved the photo of the sheep sheltering in the shade of a solar array. Every time I see a parking lot [I live in LA so I see lots of lots, or paved paradise...] with solar panels shading the cars and providing energy I wonder why these aren't mandatory. One example that should be easy would be schools, which, as public buildings, wouldn't have landlords resisting government mandates. Just saying...
It’s now mandatory in France for parkings over 1500m2 before July 2028.
You mean for parking coverings?
I resist telling people what to do, though! The economic case should be enough!
Excellent work sir, keep it up 👍