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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

I dug down trying to get the actual paper and it appears it's a pre-print with only the abstract available (but maybe I wasn't looking in the right spot).

That being said, the quotes from the author were more to the point of it being a milestone that in the UK that Solar+Battery systems were now less expensive than gas/coal.

To my understanding, this is a milestone vs "raw" production numbers, which you're correct in saying have had solar as the cheapest option for years.

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The claim hinges entirely on the narrow definition of "large-scale energy generation." For the UK, with its high seasonal energy demand and low winter solar output, the cost of generation is almost irrelevant next to the cost of firming that power for 24/7/365 availability. While the paper[1] shows solar PV and daily-cycle batteries are getting cheaper, it also shows seasonal storage solutions like hydrogen are still an order of magnitude too expensive and inefficient (huge capex for electrolyzers/storage + poor round-trip efficiency). So providing reliable, 24/7/365 baseload power from PV + storage in the UK is demonstrably not cheaper than gas or nuclear today.

[1] https://www.authorea.com/users/960972/articles/1329770/maste...

The per-kWh capacity cost at the link for hydrogen is very high compared to others I've seen. I wonder at the assumptions going into it. Are they assuming above-surface compressed hydrogen tanks, or liquid hydrogen?

Ultra cheap thermal storage promises cost at least an order of magnitude below that.

It's now passed peer-review, but hasn't yet been formatted into the journal's format as a PDF.

Abstract here: https://www.authorea.com/users/960972/articles/1329770-solar...

Which links to this .docx: https://www.authorea.com/users/960972/articles/1329770/maste...

Holy crap, the UK has absolutely awful solar insolation, that solar and battery is now cheaper than coal really emphasizes how much the tech has advanced, and continues to advance!

Germany also has absolutely terrible solar resources, worse than any continental US state, and is also deploying tons and tons of solar.

Solar really is one of the more amazing technologies of our time, especially when combined with batteries, which advance almost as fast.

We will have such greater reliability, cost, and air quality as coal is completely replaced by modern clean energy systems.

UK insolation is very roughly half that of (say) California, IIRC...

(BTW, this is my crowd at Surrey, and Ravi is my (IfS) director!)

Germany has deployed a lot of solar because of the Stromeinspeisungsgesetz from the 90s. It was the first feed in tariff law in the world afaik.

It made it that you were guaranteed a certain rate for x amount of years. As a result people were driving to farmers to rent their roof to install solar on it.

There’s a weird thing the contestants in the solar car challenge that Australia has been hosting since forever where they generate more power on haze or partly cloudy days than on sunny. I don’t know if they ever sorted out why. Speculation was reflected light off the clouds, but I suspect panel temperature also played a role. And road temperature affects panel temps.

What the UK cannot do is concentrating solar. The efficiency absolutely crashes in diffuse light.

Yeah. The temperature issue would have been my first guess.

Regarding concentrating solar: are people still trying to make that work for commercial generation? I thought this had generally failed to pan out for electricity generation.

Concentrated PV is pretty dead, the cost and complexity of the tracking is not at all worth it for the theoretical increase in efficiency.

The latest discoveries with double sided panels really puts the last nail in that coffin I believe.

There are still plants out there, but I don’t know how many are still operating versus being decommissioned.

There are many variations of concentrating solar. There’s the tower, there’s the curved mirror with the tube of oil, and there’s the magnifying glass with a small, exotic solar cell that can handle 10 Suns’ worth of light.

None of them work on overcast days because they rely on parallel rays of light.

It's kind of funny because you just know that in 30 years or so Texas is going to be a gloriously wealthy producer of solar power, and it'll probably be owned by the same people who own the oil fields today, but the current stranglehold of oil is preventing those very same people from getting richer.

You're not getting richer from selling cheaper energy

When the alternative is other people selling the energy for cheaper while you sell no energy, that's even worse.

Self-cannibalization is infinitely preferable to the regular sort of cannibalization.

You can definitely get richer selling cheaper energy. If the market demand price of energy is still high but you reduce your costs, you're making more money.

Being owned by the people that have oil is pretty true. I know a number of Texans that still make good money on their wells which allowed them to accumulate a lot of land. They've been receptive to adding wind and solar farms on their properties, with wind being a pretty big winner around here.

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