Solar PV with Battery Storage Cheaper Than Conventional Power Plants | Hacker News Reader

Solar PV with Battery Storage Cheaper Than Conventional Power Plants

cleantechnica.com

25 pointstoomuchtodo24 comments

I have a solar plus battery off grid setup at one of my homes. My comment that is the top on this item (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40877337) describes what I did for my solar setup. Two years in, everything has paid for itself. I expect the system to produce for 7-13 years without meaningful maintenance costs.

At the 7 year mark my cost per kwh will be below $0.02 . Power in my area (southwest US) is $0.12 per kwh. Some factors are complex to measure. Such as how much more I run the AC because it is essentially 'free' than I would if it were still $0.12 per kwh. Another complex factor is that I can generate much more power than I consume currently. If I found a sensible use for the surplus power then costs drop even lower even faster. My consumption is about 50% of max, on an annual basis.

If you do really have that much surplus power you should think about getting an EV.

> If I found a sensible use for the surplus power then costs drop even lower even faster.

Buy a few Bitcoin miners. Since you won't be running them 24/7, might be worth buying less efficient ones from last-gen.

I am not averse to that but the cooling is an issue. I have the most excess power in the summer. From what I have read I cannot use exterior temperature air which can be 95-105 in summer. Is there any inexpensive water cooling setup for them?

Study: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/cost-o...

Seasonal battery storage is currently impossible, making PV very much not a year round thing (for those places with any significant winter and associated heating requirement). You just can't install a MWh battery in your home right now.

Why do people think on cloudy days solar is just off? You can get 10-20% of peak from solar on a cloudy day. If you are in bumfuck nowhere with current prices you can build 5x-10x peak of your minimum energy needs with a fair amount of battery storage for fairly cheap 99% availability. If you want to go to that 100% you can still get grid energy to store based on weather or have a small generator with whatever you want to burn.

Of course for the huge majority of people 90% availability is more than enough and is very cheap tendency going down.

Winter here isn't just a cloudy day.

I have PV. In 3-4 winter months I produce about 15% of the yearly output, but I consume 90+% of the heating energy.

Even 10x my PVs is not going to be enough, and for even that I don't have the roof space.

Even if I lay PV for the 95th worst percentile days, I still absolutely must have a grid connection because the kind of batteries to shift summer production to winter consumption simply don't exist.

You overbuild solar at utility scale to compensate for seasonal fluctuations.

Wind is stronger in winter. Wind charges batteries in winter, solar charges the same batteries in summer. Natural gas provides for the statistically unusual droughts until seasonal storage (e.g. hydrogen) is deployed, or significant overbuilding and/or cross-geography transmission is done.

Sure, but now you're not talking about something you install in a home.

Clearly if this was true we wouldn't need thermal plants. That makes me think this is not true.

What, you expect existing power plants to instantly get upgraded or replaced when something better comes along?

Not to mention that there are many other dimensions to optimize other than cost.

No, but we should expect new power plants to be built using the new technology.

Removing coal from the equation would be a big win

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2024/04/17/forget...

They are. Solar and wind is seeing massive investment and build-out. See, for example, the first graph at https://www.wri.org/insights/clean-energy-progress-united-st... .

In the US. Great!!!

China is building more solar/wind than the rest of the world put together.

https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/china-continues-to-le...

Europe is rapidly replacing its existing fossil fuel energy supply with solar/wind.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/chart-solar-wind-overtake-fossil-...

Are these countries/regions moving as fast as they should be. No. But they are well ahead of what people would have predicted even a decade ago and let’s not even talk about the 2000s where solar and wind were looked upon as a toy source of energy.

What’s holding further expansion back is the grid, storage, and geopolitics (and of course, massive amounts of money coming from the trillion dollar incumbents).

These are all problems that are resolving themselves.

Chinas is building more propaganda then the rest of the world combined and well meaning idiots transport it.

Trying to spur some green coldwar competition as a noble goal?

Its missguided as a project though.the green killer app is free,clean subs and trains. As in you could read the news and have a coffee while commuting. Measure not by size of the lever,but by effect of the lever and thus resistance of the car industry.

The US EIA government has a chart on coal usage since 1950 (below). Eyeballing the graph, peak US coal was in 2007 with a pretty sharp decline since then. Since 2007 that was probably taken up by natural gas, but given the continually decreasing cost of solar, coal is on the way out.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/use-of-coal.php

Climate change is a global problem. Please look at the problem globally

Solutions will be implemented locally. There’s no global agency that can decree everyone use solar.

If even one moderate sized o punter is able to transition successfully that will put tremendous amounts of pressure on every other country.

So while climate change is indeed a global problem, the solutions have to be judged locally since they will have to be local and bottom up.

But solar plus batteries is cheaper, right? People will naturally choose them?

The US continued to burn coal in powerplants just due to misaligned incentives, at a cost of tens of billions in energy costs alone (i.e. not counting pollution health effects or climate change), when gas and renewables were cheaper.

Similarly China, although building lots of solar/wind/batteries hasn't really had state of the art grid regulations for capacity planning and has local state governments sometimes working at cross purposes.

Both are in the process of shaking free of these historical mistakes, but your assumption of an instant reaction of perfectly responsive energy markets is mistaken.

Well, we aren't building new thermal plants. About 95% of new net energy coming online in the US is renewables, storage or nuclear.

This is the world changing, it's a crossover that happened only very recently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com