The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months
electrek.co
electrek.co
I priced out replacing all the panels (now I can do in 10 panels what used to take 28) and the inverters with a single 5kW inverter, $7,000. My price, no subsidies. That is over 80% reduction in cost, over 13 years, of the list price of $40K.
And that is why it is a huge problem for the power companies, it makes less sense now to not have panels on your roof.
It is a problem, but not necessarily in the way you may be thinking. Peak residential power usage is in the evening when solar isn't available. Power companies therefore end up spinning down coal and natural gas during peak solar, then just spinning them back up again as the sun begins to set. [1]
So you haven't replaced the coal and natural gas plants, you're just running them less. This results in higher overall costs, because you pay $$$ to build huge plants then just let them sit most of the day, which results in higher per-watt cost of non-solar power because the infrastructure and maintenance is no longer amortized over whole-day usage.
[1] My friend, a manager of 30 years at a huge mid-west power company
That said, there will be teething pains but this is a net positive thing that is happening. Growing up I lumped solar into the perpetual 10 years away category. It looks like I am going to see solar be competitive after all.
[0] I implement trading and risk management software in the energy sector, including Crude, NGL, NG, and electic.
[0] Work for a multinational in their energy & utilities consulting practice; above comment is my own.
[1] http://www.brattle.com/system/news/pdfs/000/000/749/original...
[2] https://www.texastribune.org/2014/12/15/state-law-could-shor...
A lot of people are willing to make confident, but very wrong, statements based on out of date information. It serves to protect entrenched interests and stop competition, but I have a feeling that disruption is far closer than anybody is publicly saying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
Interestingly, it does not use a dam. There's a natural lake at the bottom of a mountain and a man-made reservoir at the top, and the entire pumping facility is completely inside the mountain; it's not at all obvious that there's anything there at all from the outside. I think about that whenever people moan about the environmental impact, or flooding valleys.
And it allows you to push some levers and dials as to whether it's cheaper this year to increase your water capacity or your power capacity. City planners love that kind of thing.
I remember parking at the lower reservoir and hiking to the upper one and being amazed at how big the water pipe is.
Demand side response is already used in industry to regulate electricity demand and smooth peaks. Smart meter penetration will allow utilities to do this more and more in the residential sector too.
Supergrids are also starting to emerge and indeed, some large grid companies are pushing hard for international interconnects. (China wants a supergrid). Countries are building out more and more HVDC interconnects, both across borders and within countries. Once you have a network of utility scale renewable sources across multiple countries, meeting peak demand becomes more a matter of coordination between grids. Europe for example, is looking like a very interesting area for this right now with planned interconnects between North Africa and Southern Europe.
Since we're all citing employment, I work for a renewable energy company :)
There are already programs for industrial users to get electricity for much cheaper, if they can tolerate power cuts during peak demand. Those programs will become more and more rewarding to join and extend and automate as supply gets spikier.
It'd be interesting to see a study comparing the two options.
Does anyone know more about this? Is this able to meet baseload demand?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_Pr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage#Molten_...
In areas with cold weather, one of the most interesting (and underrated, due to only making fossil use more adaptable) developments is the installation of huge, insulated hot water tanks, to make the power generation and the great generation of combined cycle plants individually dispatchable.
I can envision older warehouses in an industrial district being converted in to vacuum flywheel storage sites where power fed in to the grid earlier is buffered and then released back to it.
Changing our culture is another possible approach. Power is used in the evenings because that's when most people get off work/home/etc and they tend to have /that/ time to do cooking and cleaning (thermal cooling / heating are more solvable with changes in materials and building shape than culture change).
The "duck curve" that your friend is referring to will be solved in a variety of ways, from wind to storage to HVDC interconnects to the rest of the nation, to peaker plants.
In the future, coal is dead. No need to build any more of it. Nuclear is too expensive to build anymore. (Unless somebody actually does thorium innovation, but I'm not holding my breath...)
When storing a kWh costs $0.10, and there's also adaptive pricing to match supply and demand better, these problems will melt away.
It does require a huge mental shift, but the cost savings will make that happen
If the math and assumptions in this article are correct, then that's exactly the (wholesale) price point Tesla is aiming for with the Powerwall:
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/05/09/tesla-powerwall-powerblo...
There are a couple other (not yet released) energy storage solutions mentioned there that might get the cost down even lower - Eos Aurora and Imergy Flow Battery
I wonder if there's enough raw materials to make that realistic. And how to you manage recycling, repair, replacement, end-of-life concerns for all those batteries on that scale?
Not asking a sarcastic hypothetical. Genuinely curious. It's hard to wrap my head around numbers that big.
For reference I used this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici..., divided it by days, then the Powerwall's 6.4kwh capacity and then halved that number.
4,686,400,000,000 / 365 / 6.4 / 2 == 1,003,082,191.8 Powerwalls.
He is definitely biased against solar, but is acutely aware of the costs it presents to traditional power generation and definitely well qualified to comment on them.
They don't understand these things, they see less than half of the equation because they don't want things to change, and they only see the problems and have no interest in solving them.
IT wasn't that long ago that they were saying that solar was impossible, or that wind would never be affordable.
They were wrong about that and they will be wrong about how difficult it is going to be to adapt to lots of intermittant renewable energy powering the grid. They will complain vociferously, and they may be able to talk about some of the difficulties, but we can't trust their perspective on the big picture.
What about coking coal, for the production of steel from iron ore?
Fission plants are held to a much higher standards of safety in terms of eg decrease in quality adjusted life-years per Gigawatthour than any other form of producing electricity. Even solar.
(Though most deaths and injuries from solar come from people slipping off their roof when installing residential capacity. If memory serves right.)
The problem with nuclear is waste disposal (still not figured out, and a will be a problem for decades/centuries after the plant is closed) and amortization of billions of capital costs.
With the price disruption potential of other technology, it's a bad bet, and has been so for many years.
https://www.caiso.com/Documents/CaliforniaISOPeakLoadHistory...
I used to work at a power company as well.
(It's true that the daily peak is in the evening and that won't be helped by solar. But capacity is built to handle the annual peak, not the daily peak, and because the annual peak tends to be hot afternoons, solar actually will replace other generation in the long run.)
I bet this could even out demand quite a bit.
With the current flat rate pricing structure, there is no incentive whatsoever to shift demand to blunt spikes.
$$$ per kWh stored (and the lifetime/cycle life + operating costs of that storage) is a key benchmark.
It's already happening, but I predict we'll see more of that in the future.
Eg lots of industrial applications like smelting aluminium can do with short-ish power cuts. In return, they get a steep rebate on their electricity bill.
Would it be possible (in an utopian world) to actually have a global power network and route electricity produced during the day in one area across multiple timezones to an area where the demand is greater and no available solar? e.g. Electricity produced in West Africa at noon to be delivered to .. Tokyo, where it would be 9PM.
I understand that politically this is almost impossible, but I am curious whether there are any technological impediments for this to be feasible.
Assuming it's not a battery backed system, prices on those are dropping (or more correctly remaining stable while capacity slowly climbs).
It also makes coal less economical and makes gas plants, which are cleaner and safer to operate more economical.
Some countries need AC, others need heating.
Plus there is the problems of cities with not enough sunshine and otherwise problematic weather (snow on the panels).
You need local storage. As much as is said about batteries, the only real solution here is hydro. Expect to see every viable valley start to get dammed over the next decade or so.
Except that dams are instead being removed for a variety of environmental and associated reasons. Free lunches are rare.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2014/0803/Setting-river...
First, I work from a baseline cost of $19K, even though the list price was closer to $40K I didn't pay that for the system so I use the actual cost in my calculations.
Second there is the point where the money you've saved is equal to the money you paid, we hit that point about 10 years in. And then, depending on the life of your system (which has "positive cashflow" at that point) determines your overall rate of return. The replacment inverter (which is actually going to replace both inverters) is $2K ("upgrade" pricing from the manufacturer) And as the inverter was failing our system was under performing (so not generating as much power). The question will be how much longer am I willing to run the panels. The warranty is 25 years, so in theory another 10 years but the manufacturer (Sharp) no longer makes them and cannot replace them under warranty (they can only offer to repay you to buy a panel from some other vendor with equivalent specs and size).
So from a money perspective, had I used the $19K and put it into an S&P 500 ETF in 2003, it would have doubled by now (SPX was 1,008 in 2003, its over 2,016 today). So "bad investment" comparatively. If the panels continue for an additional 8 years and PG&E's costs stay about the same then I'll have generated about $20K in value from them so that would pencil out to a ARR of about 3.5%. Initially I funded the panels with a refinance of the house loan and that was at 6% but that has since been refinanced even lower. However had it not been, at my original purchase I'd still be running a deficit trying to both pay back the house and generate cash from the solar.
Interestingly for me, with the $7K it would cost to re-implement that system today, and 4% mortgage rates, it would have a rate of return of closer to 14% (10% if you subtract 4% as the cost of capital for a mortgage refi) and pay for itself in a bit more than 3 years and have doubled the return in 6. The challenge is additional regulatory changes which get incorporated into new installations versus the regulation regime I operate under based on my 2003 install date. I wonder sometimes what the trigger is for resetting the project's origin date.
By comparison, the risk that your solar panels will stop producing electricity, or that someone will invent Mr. Fusion and drop the price of electricity through the floor in the next decade, is quite low.
So every time I find myself having this discussion in a group, there are folks who want to argue the financial model to "show" something (generally negative) about solar power. Either it's not a good investment, or it's just coal power used to make the stuff that now is generating not even as much power was was used to manufacture it, or it's causing more pollution by forcing utilities to turn plants on and off, etc etc.
I was fortunate that I could finance it without risking things like my kid's college fund, I live in an area where there is a lot of sun and mild weather so my house's "demand" is quite manageable, and as an engineer I get to live my belief that we can engineer solutions to the worlds problems like energy interdependence and climate change.
I am grateful that today, the systems costs have gotten so low that it's possible for more people to make that choice.
However here I assumed that there was no drop in optimism, or pessimism over the one year period. For if you were to bought in when expectations were high, your actual return would be lower.
Sometime the relation between growth and return is completely paradoxical. You would expect that in the past 100 years a portofolio invested in UK stocks to be dominated by one of US stocks. After all the first country went from being The Global Superpower to dubious second rate global player, meanwhile the US had done the same in reverse. Yet an investor in UK stocks would have been marginally better of.
Likewise you would expect China with its spectacular growth, to have brought impressive returns compared to the US. Yet that had not happened.
In many cases solar is really close to a no brainier. Which is why Florida Utility's have tried so hard to block residential adoption.
This is actually turning into a hollow victory for Florida utilities. To bring people up to speed, Florida outlawed homeowner PPAs [1] (which locks out firms like Solar City, who install the panels and sell you power; no out of pocket cost for you, and you get solar immediately).
With the rapid decrease in panel costs, and the uptick in firms who are providing extremely cheap (or even zero percent loans in some programs!) financing for solar, Solar City (and other installers) are moving towards a financing model, which kills Florida's efforts to stop the spread of distributed rooftop solar.
Disclaimer: I did some volunteer work for the non-profit who attempted to fight utility legislation in this space [2].
[1] http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2015/jan/16/flo...
Of course, the correct solution isn't to compound one perverse incentive (out-of-sync fixed vs variable pricing) with another (ban on solar or refusal to buy); it's to change to a system of decoupled maintenance and power pricing.
"yeah, but how long before you see a return on investment?"
how about instantly?
this is what we did:
1) calculated our monthly electricity payment: $160 or so a month.
2) priced out solar to push our payment to net-zero-ish: the savings really start multiplying once you get down into the regulated tiers.
3) replaced our electricity bill with a solar installation loan.
what did we get in return?
instant insulation from rate hikes: http://business.time.com/2011/12/16/plugged-in-then-pay-up-e...
instant equity on our house.
oh, and look! i can now have a solar-powered car!
but yeah, if i happen to still live in this house in 15 years, sure, no electricity bill. and, i'm sure somewhere along the line i'll end up "making all my money back".
Solar leases bring down the resale value of a home. If the equipment is owned it raises the resale value of a home.
I've sold 2 homes this year with solar leases. Both of them were great deals for the buyers netting basically the value of the lease off the full retail value of the home.
http://www.azcentral.com/story/money/real-estate/2015/07/17/...
In the past 25 years, electricity rates in CA have seen a 3-4x increase. If this continues, then even as some of the advantages drop away, the comparison function (monthly electric bill) will also increase, likely offsetting a lot of lost value.
Depends. Solar doesnt necessarily add value. Depends on the appraisal. I only know because I tried to buy a home with solar panels. The homeowner had raised the price of the home to include his investment in the panels but the appraiser wouldnt include the panels in the appraisal.
But it stands to reason that the prices of energy will rise faster than the rates of inflation, so it would still be a good investment.
And during the day, when you have peak-solar energy, you'll be at work and won't be taking advantage of it. You'll recoup some of the costs through net-metering, but you usually buy back at wholesale prices and not at retail prices.
Finally, I'd expect utility companies to change their pricing scheme in the near future to account for solar. They service your electrical wires for example, and you'll likely have to pay a certain amount of money for that. So while you're not buying "power" (or at least, as much power) as before, you'll still have the service cost of being hooked up to the grid.
This means if utilities attempt to squeeze people with solar on their roof, they will simply move to batteries eventually. This already makes sense, today, in Hawaii (where the local utility was stalling on additional grid tie capacity, and with their per kwh rates so high, is was cheaper to go off grid). The more people who move off grid, the less people the utility can spread its costs across, increasing the rates for those remaining (which then rapidly incentives those people to move off grid).
This is called "the utility death spiral". Its a very real possible outcome, and utilities are aware of it. [+]
[+] http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/this-is-what-the...
Most solar quotes take this into consideration, and quote you for enough solar to get into the minimum bill for your region (most utilities have a few hundred Kwh you can use per month at an obscenely low rate, and then it ramps up from there--solar is quoted so that you'll always stay within that cheapest range.)
For my current house in Austin, I'm still interested in solar, but it was both more cost-effective and had a shorter payback time to re-insulate to R36 in the attic and redo our horrible system (which had no ducts at all--agh, stupid 1956 house) than it was to do solar at the time.
Spending $40,000 of that on "clean energy" so that they can "feel better" is well outside of the typical person's price range. Even $7000 would be cost-prohibitive, especially if they're paying or saving up for their kids.
A cold can of beer also makes you feel better. Its a hell of a lot cheaper too. The answer for the typical American is to wait for utility-scale to build Solar out for them.
When the city as a whole notices that solar is cheaper than running peaker plants or whatever, then the city / municipality can purchase an entire field of solar (AND the energy storage needed to make it useful) and give it out for the whole town.
And in the mean time, you can drink your beer on the porch while you wait for progress to be made.
If you want to "save up for your kids", the way to do it is to invest your money in the investments that have the highest ROI, as long as you have enough liquidity to weather emergencies. Pay off your 23% credit card before your 17% credit card, pay off your 17% credit card before you start putting up solar panels that will have a 16% internal rate of return, and put up the solar panels before you buy the cold can of beer with its 0% ROI.
Twenty years from now, you'll be drinking your beer on the porch and sending your kids to college, while your typical American loser neighbors are whining about their credit card and electric bills.
The relevant number is "Amercian median house-owning household income"
But a side benefit of putting in the system was we did a lot of electrical panel work, and as as result put 8 circuits on to a transfer switch (the incremental cost was the transfer switch and the electrictian's time wasn't materially affected.) So when the power does go out we can fire up a generator and switch over to gen power easily.
Cons: - Retail cost of electricity is already v low in most of TX (Houston, Dallas) - so it's hard to compete. - not much competition in the solar rooftop installation space (due to first point above) - No net metering policies in Houston, Dallas.
Pros - High solar yield
Why can't the utility companies do the financing (upfront investment), place them on our roofs, and get a little bit of the profit? Seems like a win-win situation.
And otherwise government, or specialized banks?
And for the do-it-yourselfers, how much of the cost is installation now? Is it practical to do most of the grunt work yourself and then get an electrician in to do the final part?
I can recommend that as a plan of action, find a local group offering job training as a solar installer and take it. Then using that knowledge you can design an installation that meets your local code.
I'm a bit surprised there are no mini wind turbines. I read about some promising developments (with close to 0 noise output) but it seems to have fizzled.
I would not expect a company to quote a new install for that price since they will have to add the mounting system and pay their installers for a day's labor getting everything set up.
Well that's the utilities opportunity to survive. Utilities should actually lobby against ICE cars and pro-EVs. They will be the ones charging EVs everywhere. Not everyone will afford to charge their own EV at home where they have solar panels.
I think the barrier is not only cost, but also know-how. Few people are likely to tackle a challenging project like this with a $7k out-lay.
I am already "in the black" as it were since the system has already provided more value than it cost to install and maintain. So no worries there. But 325W panels are physically larger than 185W panels (not twice as large but still) so replacing the 28 panels on the roof with them would get my raw input up to 9.1kW but I'd need roughly 33% more surface area. That would add another strut on the mounting system and the top row of panels would extend beyond the peak of the roof (now disallowed by the building code). However, it would be "easy" get get 16 in there, which would be an equivalent raw foot print (5,200 watts)
I think it's to make it seem more dramatic or something. It just happened! My god!
In this case it is especially ridiculous, since the article describes something that happened over the course of 16 months.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=quietly&sort=byPopularity&pref...
Really gives you the impression that Facebook deprecated their API's official Python bindings in order to be evil. Otherwise, they would have formally alerted the press.
"X just quietly did Y" is a thing, even:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=just%20quietly&sort=byPopulari...
Next it will be "See what crazy change to solar made energy purchasers sit up pay attention!"
"See what crazy change to solar just made energy purchasers sit up and pay attention!"
"10 Crazy ways to validate your product for free that startup gurus won't tell you about!"
PS: I don't know what the 10 ways are, I just write headlines.
That is _much_ worse, and I refuse to click on any link with that sort of headline because it's guaranteed to be more ads than content.
At least with the original headline I have an idea the topic is solar, and the news is the price falling significantly. Honestly I don't see the problem with the original headline.
Here's an A/B test I recently ran on some notification messages. There were two messages, only difference is the word "new" in there.
A: "You received a message from the admins about your Facebook page."
B: "You received a new message from the admins about your Facebook page."
About 1000 samples per group. Not sure if noise.
Sample Size: 1000
Observed Proportion: 15.64%
Confidence Level: 95%
Confidence Interval: ±2.25
Range for the true population proportion: 13.39% to 17.89%
When I enter 250000 in sample size I get ranges that don't overlap. Does that mean I would need that many samples to answer this?
(I have no idea what historical prices of solar panels were)
I don't read Buzzfeed, the pioneer (I think?) of this trend, but I read the similar Polygon gaming news site, and two of its five lead stories at the moment sport conversational style headlines: "The Hearthstone legendary cards you must craft ASAP" and "The film Apocalypse could have looked like this".
Most articles in a normal newspaper don't do this because they don't have to. Only the headline needs to be sensationalist to sell the paper. On a website, every article needs to drag people in. The current headline is click-bait. That would be forgivable if the entire article wasn't terrible as well. There is very little content or analysis, everything is cribbed from other sources, including the charts. I will give the author credit for linking all of their sources, but that is where my praise ends.
I didn't intend it to become the top comment. I just finally snapped and had to express my annoyance.
I guess I tapped into a lot of pent-up demand for the same thing.
'Just' and '16 months' are pretty far apart in my mind, I found the headline quite awkward to read because of it.
Now, I actually DO think they can deliver at the prices. But that doesn't mean solar prices dropped by 50%.
Imagine this: you've got a business opportunity for a 20 year contract. Currently it costs you $10 to run per year, but that will drop to $6 after a few years, and drop further to $1 per year in the last 10 years.
Where will it be priced? Well if I said say $5, then most would agree that makes sense. After all, your average cost will probably be something like $3 a year, so locking in the rate at $5 means you're making a profit. In fact, you'd expect others to outbid you until the price approaches the average cost of $3. But let's say it ended up priced at $5... well a journalist might say 'prices dropped by 50% this year'. When in reality, prices will drop over the next TWENTY years, and 20-year contracts reflect that expectation. Solar prices today are still $10 today, not $5.
Of course these are just made up numbers. Point is, even if companies can deliver at this pricing, it's mostly a reflection of expectations of future prices, not today's prices.
>DEWA invited developers to submit bids for configurations made up of three sub-phases: a mandatory 200MW to be commissioned in April 2018, and another two optional 300MW tranches in 2019 and 2020, respectively,” the firm said in an analysis of the results.
so it's not being built for 2 or 3 years and they are probably hoping costs will continue dropping during that period.
The details of the situation are quite complicated, more details here http://www.apricum-group.com/dubai-shatters-records-cost-sol...
In large part because it's night half of the time, solar has a pretty low capacity factor, like in the 20% range (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor for details) so it matters whether this is 800MW peak or 800MW average. I think it's peak, which means that we're talking about something in the range of US$400M to US$500M worth of solar panels at current prices — which are the same prices as in 2014, when bids were twice as high! With a 35% capacity factor (Dubai is equatorial and sunny, although even Arizona only gets 19%), this project will have only 800 MW * 35% * $ 0.0299/kWh = US$73.4M/year of revenue, which is only a 16% return on investment — or ⅓ that, at 5⅓%, if we assume that the non-module costs of the project amount to ⅔ of the total cost, as shown in the bargraph on the article.
So, is the winning bidder (strangely, not named in the article!) really willing to accept a 5⅓% IRR for this investment, because PV solar park competition is really that cutthroat? Or are they betting that by the time they have to buy the modules, the prices will have fallen (returning to their former exponential decline?), and/or that the notorious "soft costs" that eat up half the project cost are becoming cheaper?
There's no real floor on the cost of silicon photovoltaic modules, since almost all of the cost of producing them from raw materials is energy, not the materials themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrystalline_silicon#Capaci...
The price graph a little lower is interesting.
i get mad even thinking about it.
Same with internet, Cable, TV. The lawmakers will always try and mitigate the disruption, but all they are doing is delaying the inevitable.
Just asked her about this, and she said that: 1) the electrical grid wasn't designed for transferring power this way, and it can damage the grid 2) because solar power isn't a constant power source (say, a cloud blocks the sun for a minute), power companies need to keep power available for someone who's using solar. The amount of this is dictated by their peak power usage. May not seem like a big thing, but as more and more people switch to solar, they suddenly need to hold massive amounts of power, as disruptions can affect people in entire regions.
Then she started getting heavy into the physics of reactive power and my brain stopped working T_T
Anyways, there's a reason that they're charging fees for solar usage. You're using their electrical grid, and it costs money to maintain it and improve it to handle some of the new challenges of solar power.
When do you think solar power is producing the most electricity? In the afternoon on a hot summer day.
When do you think peak grid electricity usage peaks? In the afternoon on a hot summer day!
Solar power helps get rid of the peak electricity usage problem. If anything, power companies should be paying solar users even more, because they are reducing costs for the power company, not increasing them.
I'd be all in favor of having solar power sell at the going rate that utilities are paying. But that's not how it works. And that's not how solar advocates want it to work.
[1]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/downloads-englisch/pdf-file...
We don't know precisely what effect that will have on the grid utility business, or what effect that will have on overall grid supply price rates. One could argue that grid power should get cheaper... one could argue that there would be a net canceling effect among all the factors involved... or one could much more reasonably say that it's a chaotic system so no outcome is guaranteed.
Disruption!
I imagine hot summer afternoons are a time when factories operate below capacity (or not at all), and people heat their homes less and spend more time outside away from TV, etc.
That is a very valid reason. Solar power - like wind - is erratic in nature and has much higher requirements for the power transmission network than e.g. hydroelectric, nuclear of fossil power.
The erratic nature is even worsened by subsidies which encourage people to peak production, regardless of consumption. The way these subsidies have been implemented varies across countries, but wherever you have them, you are also inviting trouble to the power grid.
It's not consumption anymore, but usage. You are using the grid infrastructure you should be required to help maintain it. It was just never an issue before now. Everyone uses the grid, the community needs to help maintain it.
FYI - most regional utilities in the US are publicly owned, not private, so I'm not sure who "the big energy companies" are.
It would be like demanding free Internet because you run a website lots of people visit so your upload is greater than your download.
In my state, we are not allowed to tie into the grid at all.
So, maybe it's something that should be encouraged; the food those farms and ranches produce would need to be replaced by food grown in more appropriate climates, and we'd need to rethink our recent "local food" movement, in some regards, but agriculture, and particularly animal agriculture, are an ecological disaster almost everywhere they exist. Couple that with limited water resources (where a lot of agriculture takes place in California, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico) and you've got a recipe for serious problems long-term.
That said, agriculture could also shift. Less water-intensive foods, more foods that are appropriate for the area they're being consumed in.
Anyway, I think solar farms replacing agricultural farms could be a net win for the environment, even before considering the improvements that come from turning off coal-fired plants.
Ships and rail both favour crops which store well (grains) or can be shipped frozen or refrigerated. For fresh fruit and vegetables, time is critical, and you generally want to be on store shelves within at most a few days. That's where trade-offs between location, farming costs (particularly for greenhoused or hydroponic farming) vs. transport start to get factored in. There are reasons why a generation ago you simply didn't have fresh produce out of season.
http://solarbuildermag.com/news/church-farm-school-in-pennsy...
On the other hand, wind farms have a tiny footprint so that's already a major thing in some areas.
This has been a dramatic change in the US midwest landscape over the last decade. When driving through Iowa or Kansas these days, the horizon is constantly dotted with wind turbines nestled in amongst the corn fields or livestock pastures. 15 years ago this was NOT the case.
We do not have a shortage of land or places to put solar panels. Land is cheap, cheap, cheap compared to the other costs of solar panels.
There is no need to come up with fancy schemes to convert roads or windows or farms or whatever to solar panels. We aren't running out of land for them any time soon.
http://watchdog.org/191942/critics-want-sunshine-huge-mn-sol...
http://www.startribune.com/big-solar-parks-proposed-for-minn...
Including "prime" farmland:
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/02/03/opponents-want-minne...
Note that at the moment upfront costs (the panels) are so expensive it will be a long time before solar panel 'fields' would become any significant fraction of total arable land. I.E. a simple few acre farm field might be worth a couple hundred thousand euros, but totally filling it with panels might cost billions.
The questions was what it would cost a farmer, not farmer in place where it's obviously illegal?
What...
You are only allowed to setup photovoltaic panels if you have plants below them (asparagus and some flowers grow fine, apparently).
I have no idea why.
In Oregon, here's the list of allowed uses of farmland: http://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/215.213
You could probably install solar panels for the purpose of powering your house and farm equipment, but you couldn't install solar panels everywhere and sell the electricity to the public:
"Utility facilities necessary for public service, including wetland waste treatment systems but not including commercial facilities for the purpose of generating electrical power for public use by sale or transmission towers over 200 feet in height."
It's not just a local thing: Maybe there are places where it doesn't hold, but the government wants to ensure the US isn't dependent on other countries for food. So it puts restrictions on the farmland to ensure that there's always enough food available.
OTOH, if by 'farmland', you meant 'desert in Nevada', I can't imagine anyone would care if you bought it up and installed panels there.
Here's an application for "smart power" technology. When a cloud comes over and blocks the sun, air conditioner compressors should shut down temporarily. If the cloud cover remains, start up again, on a somewhat random time delay, to give generators time to respond. (This will probably be implemented with some overly complex system that involves "the cloud", rather than being done by a simple broadcast signal.)
That isn't to say that there aren't improvements in solar cost. There are improvements. I just wouldn't compare a bid in Texas to one in Dubai.
https://electrek.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/chart.jpeg?w=77...
The price curve has to start flattening out soon! (I hope it doesn't, but I can't see how you can carry on achieving 50% price drops so rapidly...)
Also, I think for a lot of buyers there's more to the purchase than cost. A lot of organisations have environmental targets to hit nowadays, solar is one way to realise these targets.
And as another commenter mentioned, some people buying might not have a choice (not having electricity isn't an option).
I was excited by this headline until I read the article. This price drop is the result of advances in financial - not technical - engineering. It means nothing for the cost of solar outside of this specific deal, as below-market interest rates are just more subsidies. This is yet another eco-clickbait headline.
Today, (and for some time in the past) solar panels can be an investment, that is paid off by the amount that is saved by not having to use the grid (for example.)
So a homeowner might calculate that by investing $20,000 in solar panelling today, they can have a 100% return within 72 months (6 years). It's free if they manage to use it for 6 years. Afterward the fact that this paneling is installed is "profit" - they get the ongoing money from their savings.
So they are motivated by self-interest to make this investment, even if they assign "$0" to how much it's worth to them to reduce their carbon footprint on the planet; they don't have to care.
But look at what happens if they consider that the investment price will drop by 50% in the next 18 months. Then they will have a 100% return in 36 months, plus the 18 months they wait means their investment is repaid in 54 instead of 72 months. Or, perhaps, they can install twice the paneling in 18 months. Either way their ROI is better.
So that means for the next 18 months they are simply continuing to use the grid, which might have a higher carbon footprint. This might, paradoxically, drop adoption of solar paneling today (depending on people's expectation of the price change in the future.)
But then you think that others will think this too, so then you should wait.
And then you remember that you should never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.
To heat a whole home in a Boston winter seems like it might cost $1000 or so. Is it reasonable to expect rooftop solar to ever generate that much electricity?
Newer ones would work fine for most of the Boston winter.
When you start with one of the worst possible use cases of solar, you can't expect great results.
Electric heating is great for individual rooms, not for whole house heating.
I've read field reports of people with measured air changes per hour that meet the PassivHaus standard, with 60+ R-value insulation (again, PassivHaus standard), isolated the foundation with insulation, consolidated all possible thermal bridges into a single, small conduit, and heat input from passive solar concentrator, enjoying NE US winters with only double-digit gas/electric bills for active heating in the worst months. With a rocket stove, most could avoid even that nominal amount and take care of burning their brush pile at the same time.
The insulation will cost you upfront, though. Corning FOAMGLAS is my favorite at the moment because it doesn't involve greenhouse gases during its manufacture, but it and its installation can easily add 15% to your overall build cost. Use EPS (looks like giant styrofoam blocks roughly the size of 3 feet thick doorways, wish all the styrofoam we throw away into landfills could somehow be recycled into these) instead, and you still are looking at around a 10% upcharge. Granted, you're hovering around 70'ish R-value with that much, and thermal changes take a much longer time compared to conventional residences.
The chief benefit however, is that this happened starting at daytime hours (when workers come into factories and tons of energy is suddenly demanded from the grid). However, because 12:00 noon is peak solar, peaker-plants will shift to later in the day to 3:00pm to 5:00pm or so (as opposed to running from 12:00 to 7:00 each day, they'll maybe run 3:00 to 7:00 each day).
Peaker Plants can be Hydro or Natural Gas. Natural Gas Peaker Plants are the most expensive, and they currently happen to run during a similar timeframe as solar.
For now, Peaker Plants can remain the solution. We need something to work on cloudy / rainy days after all. And "battery" tech is getting better.
No reason other than them being more expensive than batteries:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-22/batteries-...
>We need something to work on cloudy / rainy days after all.
Even without storage, interconnecting grids with HVDC across the US (or across a continent) solves this problem really really nicely. China is already building tons of HVDC to do this, and we need to as well. Long haul transport over HVDC is also cheaper than peaker plants.
That said, natural gas peaker plants stick around as long as the fuel costs are low, and the capital has already been sunk into the plant. But for new capacity, I think there's going to be a huge shift towards storage.
The coal grid already provides cheaper electricity at different times of day, because it's not efficient to turn coal plants on and off. Right now that cheaper electricity is at night, because most electricity consumers consume during the daylight hours. So if you need a boatload of electricity and aren't too sensitive about the time, you can shift you consumption to the off-peak hours and save some money.
But if you're not time-sensitive in your consumption, you can shift to the sunny daylight hours, when solar power is available. And if you're really not time-sensitive in your consumption, you can even shift consumption from cloudy days to sunny days.
There's a fairly decent analysis from Lazard consulting on storage:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-storage...
It used to be part of their cost of energy analysis, but has recently been broken out:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
But since these report aggregate information from previous years, they always feel out of date compared to watching the latest news.
Ramez Naam's forecasts are the most informed forecasts that I have found:
http://rameznaam.com/2015/10/14/how-cheap-can-energy-storage...
Couldn't changing the business hour according to the sun and wind be the real cost killer?
No technologies, no investments involved, it just requires one smart boss, some smart accountant and employees.
Imagine it: people would have no way to avoid raising their kids during the down season, we could fire teacher, single could do art, we could stop funding culture and it would be popular culture, maybe science, less working hours, but more people would have to work.
It would solve quite a few problem.
For information, the average household in the world uses 3 MWh per year and a typical US one does a bit more than 10 MWh. Advanced and ecologically minded countries like Germany go down to 3 MWh.
Keep in mind that the location is important. Dubai has a lot of sun, you would not get this price with the same tech in, say, Canada.
"One can suspect that Masdar had access to long-term financing through the wealthy emirate of Abu Dhabi that no commercial banks, the primary source of capital for the other bidders, could match in cost."
The cost of capital is the most important thing on these projects. If you're getting below market capital financing then no shit, prices are going to fall a lot.
If you get a bid from a solar company they almost never give you the cost per watt (at least for the 5 companies I got bids from), but you should do that calculation yourself and then compare against the average in California to see if they are ripping you off:
I suspect solar deployment will take the US by surprise, because of the compelling economics.
Hint: go long on SCTY
I love the idea, but I'll have sold my current house before a suite of solar panels pays for itself, and from my limited knowledge, the price of solar-equipped houses doesn't reflect the investment before it's paid for itself.
Disclosure: UK, we have no sunshine.
Solar panels with enough battery backup, plus an alternate generator (gas or diesel) for times when it's overcast for longer than your battery reserve are still going to have a very long payback time if utility power is an option.
There's a reason utilities exist, after all. It's always been possible to have your own electrical generator, it's just way more cost-efficient to do that at utility scale. That will likely continue to be the case with solar and batteries.
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/07/22/exponential-growth-globa...
But perhaps the inputs for manufacturing solar energy are dependent on oil price (transportation etc.).
Especially with the sort of auction pricing in energy markets. If the going rate for energy is 5 cents a KW*hour, then you can't sell it for 6 cents.
Solar survives off subsidies in the USA. Though in places like Dubai it might be a competitive energy provider.
Saying that solar is okay because it's hooked up to the grid is not an answer, because that's just another instance of a reliable energy source (fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro) bailing out an unreliable one (solar, wind).
Sure, coal and gas pickup the remaining tab, but even if they are covering half of the usage, that's better than all of it.
by the same token, price reductions in solar power cost leads to battery storage systems (or other storage systems) being even more desirable and cost-competitive, in turn leading to them being installed in preference over other types of power plants.
1) You're still using MUCH less overall fossil fuels. A 40% reduction in fossil fuel use would do wonders for the world economy and be a huge step forward in reducing emissions. 2) If other people are feeding power back into the grid, then you can be using their solar power. It's sunny somewhere, right?
You can add a battery backup system to cover night-time usage on your own home. The $10k battery system basically doubles the price. But since the solar panel's price just dropped by 50%... Cloudy days you might still be in a deficit.
What is so wrong with a mixed system that uses renewables where it makes sense and relies on other sources to fill in whatever gaps appear?
Of course price/KW will drop massively if the entire thing is being propped up by taxpayer dollars and not the actual need to be profitable.
I guess I just need to resign myself to the idea that so many misguided people now believe that government can print and spend money on everything and that will always work forever.
But it won't.
source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-12/fossil-fue...
Sun and wind subsidies are paid out in places like EU countries, especially Germany, where they distort the market. Gasoline on the other hand is taxed highly.
Oil, coal and gas get subsidies in places like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran or Malaysia, where they distort the market.
That Venezuela distorts its markets in some way does not really make it a good idea to distort the market in Germany (or USA) in another way.
If saving the world was free, the private sector would have done it already. It's not, so it needs to be subsidized.
I think you're right, but one option is politically easier than the other.