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Comment by credit_guy | Hacker News Reader

> Utility scale solar PV [...] is now the cheapest form of new energy to deploy.

I've been hearing this claim for a few years now, and I took it at face value, until a few days ago. I was having a discussion with a friend and told him that PV's share of electricity generation must by quite high, and then I checked the EIA website [1], and it turns out only 2.3% of the electricity comes from PV, while about 40% come from gas and 20% from coal.

Something does not add up. If PV is so cheap, why don't we see more electricity being produced by PV?

[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

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Only recently did PV becomes the least-cost source of new electric generation.[0] And new utility-scale projects take 2-7 years to develop. For example, TX is anticipated to add 10 GW of new solar generation in 2022.[1] As I write this (while the sun is up, noon in TX), the current demand in TX is 38 GW.[2]

Source: Have been developing solar power plants since 2008.

[0] The tipping point for solar is different in different regions based on many factors, but primarily the amount of annual sunlight and the cost of fuel on the margin, and regulatory policy.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/texas-track-add...

[2] http://www.ercot.com/

Hijacking your comment to say that the fine print in the EIA chart cited by the person you're replying to says they're only accounting for new and utility scale generation. Utility installs dwarf residential, but if you add all non-utility generation it's quite a bit more substantial, and it was 'only' until early to mid 2010's that utility installations outpaced other installs.

According to an industry group, 20GW of solar was installed last year (3.1GW residential), representing 43% of new generation capacity: https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight...

According to EIA, new wind generation in 2020 was a bit over 14GW.

Walking back from 20GW being 43%, that means in 2020 we had 46GW installed overall, so wind was 30%.

By any measure, 73% of new generation being renewable is pretty impressive. Worldwide the number of solar installs looks almost logarithmic.

Utility installs dwarf residential in most places, but a notable exception is Australia. This probably reflects dysfunctional regulation and regulatory capture by fossil fuel interests there.

It takes many decades for old generation to phase out, so even with a significant fraction of new capacity being solar, the total proportion will remain low.

https://cleantechnica.com/files/2020/09/Cumulative-Total-US-...

Solar capacity is increasing dramatically, but it does have limits.

Namely, solar + storage bids are only competitive in some markets. PV generation is often the cheapest source, but without storage it is not practical for many applications.

Wind was cheaper. The levellized cost of electricity from solar has only recently dropped below that of wind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

Yep, wind was the cheapest form of energy starting around mid 2010's.

I think wind's problem is that wind installations get massive pushback in a lot of communities. I wish I were joking when I said a turbine near me was permanently shut down after a federal judge declared the plaintiff's objections for health reasons to be valid.

The court fight triggered a poison pill town bylaw that a turbine inactive for X amount of time has to be removed. All the idiots had to do was get an injunction and then tie the whole thing up in court for long enough.

There are several reasons:

1) lifetimes of utility assets are measured in decades, not years

2) the utility industry is not used to needing to pay attention to new technology and new information, and has a huge bias against renewables that goes back to the hard energy /soft energy split of the 1970s and 1980s

3) Utility planning models (IRPs, often for five years out) often use outdated info that is 3-5 years old when planning deployments for the next five years. So even if utilities used up to date info, it would take 5 years for them to shift strategy.

4) many utilities are not incentivized to install least cost generation, and their incentives and profit rates are different for things like installing transmission, distribution, etc

5) regulators of utilities are often even further behind the times than utility executives or completely captured (see for example Arizona)

> 1) lifetimes of utility assets are measured in decades, not years

Fair enough, but here's [1] how the picture looked just 4 years ago. Coal was at 33%, natgas at 33% an solar at 0.6%, wind at 4.7%. So a lot of coal was replaced by natgas, and a bit of wind. For some reason solar went up only by 1.7%

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20170322133856/https://www.eia.go...

The reasons further down explain why utilities are very slow to react and why even after a better choice is available.

But even with your further comparison, you are falling prey to the same bad logic: solar can't be cheaper because we aren't already using it. You are looking at the decisions from 2010 to 2015 to evaluate the situation from 2021.

For changing technology, that's a really bad assumption. If nearly all the market for CPUs is Intel, then AMD comes out with a far better deal than Intel, do you evaluate how much better AMD is by the installed base across all computer? Of course not.

Check out what is being planned for the future. Some of the decisions are not great, because utilities don't yet know that storage is super cheap. But you'll find that in price responsive markets, nearly all new planned generation is wind, solar, and storage. Along with a few new gas plants proposed by people hedging against the dominant tech, or just through inertia.

Because it has only recently become cheaper to invest in solar rather than "ride out" existing coal investments.

I believe that the natural gas generators are still not at the "ditch as soon as you can" moment that hit coal hit a few years ago, and even then there's only so much solar being made right now.

The other factor is that solar manufacturing isn't being full-bore developed because as soon as you get a plant up, you're at risk of a paradigm shift beating you out. The promise of perovskites might be holding back silicon panel investment.

The Chinese, for as much as US media has been portraying them as a big bad, did a massive solid for the world in pushing solar panel manufacturing and battery manufacturing from the top down.

Granted they wanted to push everyone out/monopolize manufacturing, but who cares WHY, the net effect is to change our possible future for decarbonization. The US would never do that with the dominance of petroleum lobbying.

South Korea should also get a fair amount of credit for supporting Samsung in this direction.

Most of a terawatt of green energy projects are stuck in a regulatory backlog.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-renewabl...

Have a look at what new capacity was installed last year:

https://ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/over-80-of-2020-glob...

> Something does not add up. If PV is so cheap, why don't we see more electricity being produced by PV?

> Utility scale solar PV [...] is now the cheapest form of new energy to deploy

For China... The West has very few semiconductor grade silicon smelters, and no industrial scale ones for PV ingots.

I think all of PV cell makers in the West just dice Chinese boules

Correct, EXCEPT for thin film cells by First Solar (who make the whole module). Although hopefully this is changing.

Cheapest to deploy, meaning adding new energy sources.

For instance, even since the year or two that EIA has last updated their numbers to the numbers that just came out that include August 2021... the amount of total solar (far right column) generated (154TWh) vs total electricity generated (4087TWh) gives about 3.8% solar electricity for the last 12 months rolling. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

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