Even better imo than all the chemical energy we could store when we have excess solar, think about all the water we could create. Creating fresh water from sea water is extremely energy intensive, but there's nothing easier to store than giant bodies of water. Once the energy term is the reverse osmosis opex equation is erased, large scale water plants wherever it's sunny are going to start looking awfully attractive.
As a corollary to that, a lot of deserts terminate in coastline. Generating desalinated water from solar in these areas has the side benefit of "creating useful land".
What's left to figure out is the ratio of panels to water to land, and in turn whether the long term value of the land is worth the investment. (Dubai would argue it is.)
This will destroy the near shore ecosystem, because desalination dumps brine that kills everything, while at the same time destroying the desert ecosystem because it gets converted into something local flora and fauna can no longer live in.
I don't think we need worry too much about desert habitats being removed. Deserts are large (and getting larger) and the amount of land which could realistically benefit from desalination is a tiny fraction of that.
While brine can impact local salinity, so does treated-effluent outflows (mixed together they are neutral.) Regardless elevated brine levels drop off sharply from the point of outflow.
We are really good at mis-estimating scale. So we know brine decreases sharply from the point of outflow, but do we know what 50 years of brine outflow at tens of thousands of locations around the world would do?
If it's profitable, it'll be implemented all over, and underestimating that cumulative effect is something we would plead willful ignorance on as we have done with other industries in the past.
Second point I will try to make, habitats are often unique and small, we would just want to make sure an ecosystem is truly ubiquitous before destroying a small pocket of ecosystem.
Especially now, there are animals that live in just one or few specific spots. We should be careful.
I'd expect that long term the brine would do bad things near the places it is released but would not have any noticeable long term consequences much farther away as long as we don't discharge it somewhere where it destroys something local that turns out to be a dependency of something far away.
That's because almost all the water that is taken out of the ocean will make its way back to the ocean. We just borrow it for a while.
If all the water used by humans were taken from the ocean, we'd take about 1/300000th of the ocean's water per year. Most of that will be back in the ocean within 200 years. That puts the cap on the amount of water that would be missing from the ocean of 1/1500th of its volume, which means that the steady state increase in salt concentration would be less than 0.1%, which is much less than the natural variation in ocean salt levels.
The brine levels can be greatly reduced by pumping more water to dilute the brine. RO desal projects tend to optimize for an energy efficient local optima that targets minimum energy subject to maintenance constraints. But if energy is nearly free you can instead pump a lot of extra water to solve the issue by moving more volume over more area further from shore.
1) cheaper energy means you can mix more water in to get whatever salt level you want.
2) you can mix in the output of your sewage plants
3) most water is borrowed and returned, not a huge net loss. Every toilet full returns to the ocean, every washing machine run, etc.
Solar powered desalination doesn't make the list for things to worry about over the next 100 years.
>This will destroy the near shore ecosystem, because desalination dumps brine that kills everything,
WRONG
WRONG!!!
No, we used the brines to create even more batries which store our solar charge
Now we have POWER at day and at NIGHT. 24/7. 247 we are producing the brines, but then that goes onto make more batries. Ain't no ecosystem destroyed here (though I'm sure people will try to perform a regression of muh bad event unto muh new technology because that is a timelessly vogue thing to do)
I think there might be local effects from elevated brine levels, but overall nothing substantial.
Compared to the amount of water that is naturally desalinated every day (ie via evaporation), even large scale desalination is a drop in the bucket.
Desalination is already operating on a massive scale in the middle east, and we're not seeing any medium scale effects there. Elevated salinity dissipates very quickly from the point of outflow.
>Elevated salinity dissipates very quickly from the point of outflow.
I've not seen any evidence supporting this is the case, but the opposite; large swathes of high-saline concentrated blobs sweeping accross the sealife, killing it. We've had to build specialized very long outflow pipes to give the brine even a change to level
Unfortunately, most of the cost of water desalination is capital cost. You simply can't afford to build a desal plant and run it only 25% of the time.
Take the Carlsbad plant in San Diego. It cost $1 billion to build, and it produces about 200k tons of fresh water per day. Let's say you build a similar plant and to finance the build you use municipal bonds that have a yield of 3.6% (the current level for 30 year muni bonds). That's 0.30% per month, or 0.01% per day. So only the interest on these bonds is $100k per day, which is 50 cents per ton of fresh water. According to wikipedia, it takes about 0.3 kWh to desalinate 1 ton of water [2]. In my state (NY) the average cost of electricity for industry consumers was about 7 cents for 2023 [3], so that would mean 21 cents per ton of water. If that cost goes to zero, you save 21 cents for each ton of water. But if you reduce the plant utilization from 100% to 25%, you increase the interest cost by 150 cents.
In order for desalination to be a useful target for peak electricity consumption, we need to find ways to massively reduce the capital cost of building desal plants. By "massively", I mean a factor of 10 or more. Is it possible? Yes. Is it guaranteed? No.
> Creating fresh water from sea water is extremely energy intensive, but there's nothing easier to store than giant bodies of water.
You also generate brine, you know, and that is its own environmental disaster that must be disposed of. In addition, maintenance of facilities in contact with salt water is murderously labor intensive.
Desalinization is economically useful up until you provide everybody with drinking water. Once you pass that point, desalinization is way, way, way less useful.
Mix the brine with the treated sewage you are discharging. You're probably discharging a little less than you take out, but that gets you closer to the original salinity.
Well if electricity is so cheap/free. Then brine left behind is not a problem as you can get a lot of chemicals out of it by processing it. Doing that though needs a lot of energy so it's not viable currently but would be with cheap/free electricity
yes you can https://www.nature.com/articles/s41929-018-0218-y
the brine left behind is just not salt but many other minerals like lithium which require a lot of energy to separate out. But when you have free energy/electricity a lot of other things become viable.
Most people so far don't comprehend the kind of huge change free/extremely cheap electricity would bring to the world. We have the tech to do a lot of stuff but it is not cost effective cheap electricity will change that.
Well, money is, in essence, an exchange for energy, so if energy is free we'll see a significant change in our economy system and my guess it's gonna be a wild ride
Yes, and that free energy will be seeking an equilibrium (where excess energy converts back into liquid capital) through clever uses and previously non-economical activities like separating lithium from brine. The great news is that each niche is a business opportunity. We, the clever ones, can spot those opportunities, build the tech to make them possible and build the companies that live in those new energy niches.
I'm not a chemist nor have access to the paper. Can you summarize what happens to the seawater salt if that's applied? Surely it will still need to be deposited somewhere.
Apparently seawater has 3.5% salinity. So desalinating enough to water crops/supply cities leaves you with a lot of salt.
A lot of this is possible already but not economical as most of the process to extract minerals from sea water require a lot of energy/electricity where as it is extremely cheap comparable to mine them directly. But free energy electricity would change that.
Metals that can be extracted from seawater include:
Sodium (Na): One of the most common metals found in seawater, sodium can be extracted through solar evaporation or electrolysis.
Magnesium (Mg): A metal that can be extracted from seawater.
Calcium (Ca): A metal that can be extracted from seawater.
Potassium (K): A metal that can be extracted from seawater.
Lithium: A metal that may become more important in the future as demand for lithium batteries and fusion energy increases.
Copper: A high-value metal that is often present in seawater.
Nickel: A high-value metal that is often present in seawater.
Cobalt: A high-value metal that is often present in seawater.
I wonder if the salt extracted during desalination could be dumped on top of underwater salt domes? Salt domes are one of the sources of the salt in the ocean [1].
The idea is that our salt would cover part of the salt dome, preventing that part of the salt dome from providing salt to the water. Instead, the salt that would have come from that part of the dome comes from our salt.
Dramatically increasing the saltiness of salt water can have some negative effects. If you’ve ever kept an aquarium you’ll know that sudden changes in water composition kill your pets pretty quickly.
A solvable problem, but a problem that requires a bit of careful consideration.
Capital cost of these plants is significant, which is why most of them run 24 hours per day. If you only run them 8 hours per day, you triple the capital cost.
How do you power such plants? Good thing if you're an oil-rich country that can just readily burn what flows from the wells anyway (say, UAE). A bit harder if you don't have anything like that (say, Namibia or West Sahara).
You also have to consider the material cost. RO membranes require continuous maintenance , are expensive, and generate a massive amount of brine waste water. So while having cheap energy definitely helps, there are many expensive problems with RO filtering at scale.
I have run a dehumidifier off of excess solar before to collect water and use on plants. It was mostly for fun, and not ideal bc of possible contaminating chemicals from the dehumidifier involved, mold, and lack of minerals for the plants, but hey, it worked.
Are you doing hydroponics or something? Because the soil has more minerals that you could ever possibly get from water. I mean the ground is where those minerals in regular water come from in the first place.
I just don’t trust my random chinese amazon brand dehumidifier’s internals to be totally food-safe. At the very least the water is condensing onto some unknown (to me) metal, touching some mystery plastics.
It was a peak ~700W device, and quite efficient for its price. It’d produce a few gallons overnight in summer in southern california when attached to a rather large battery.
Fresh water is already naturally generated by surface evaporation of the oceans under the sun's rays, i.e. it's already a solar process done on a global scale.
Deserts are coming to you, at least seasonally. With less snowpack, many cities even in temperate climates are seeing their summer water supply dry up.
There is third option with excess solar energy production - send it elsewhere.
This is partly what China is doing with solar - concurrent with massive solar installation there is also extensive ultra-high-voltage electricity transmission lines being laid out, to load balance excess production in the sunny but sparsely populated N and W, with the excess consumption in the heavily populated S and E.
Australia, Morocco, Spain I think are also getting into this game, though in these cases for energy export
In countries that span time zones (aka lines of longitude) the grid likely already provides for "lengthening" the solar day.
For example in the US solar power from the west coast could easily supplement east coast evening demand. Ditto east coast supplementing west coast mornings.
Yes, this means investment in Trans-continental grids, but that makes sense in countries that are hot and wide.
The word "easily" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Major expansions to the US grid won't be cheap, done quickly or easy to protect against terrorism.
Getting agreement from all the stakeholders seems to sometimes be an issue - even the relatively small proposed Tres Amigas SuperStation has dragged on for many years and now looks like it won't happen.
agreed - any continental scale country (USA, Canada, Brazil, Russia, India, China, Australia - will have the a diversity of natural resources to become energy self sufficient. US especially for solar, but needs infrastructure build out - can't rely on private sector for energy
Hydroelectric plants along the La Grande river in northern Quebec run a substantial part of New York and Boston. The power is transferred across about a thousand miles. Transmission loss is about 10%. Ten percent would be intolerable for fossil fuel generation but a quite acceptable cost in that context, given the generation is so cheap.
No, just a very high voltage grid since P=I^2*R and with very high voltages I (current) decreases proportionately and therefore exponentially in resistive power loss.
The problem with the current crop of REBCO superconductors is not the cryogenics but the actual ceramic material being brittle. You can't make a wire or a cable, you can only operate with stiff, thin, fragile bars. On top of that. it's not cheap, $100-200 per meter of typical 200kA power band. I suppose copper is like an order of magnitude cheaper just for the cable, ignoring the whole liquid nitrogen piping.
Probably not in China, since the math with respect to losses works out. The distance from, say, a sunny place like Lanzhou to Shanghai, or even to Guangzhou, is relatively close.
But of course, exporting from Australia to the rest of the world will be problematic. Not sure how that will work? My impression, however, was that they were only trying to get the energy to Singapore? Which should work. It is 3 times longer than what the Chinese are trying to do, and underwater. But again, theoretically, it should work.
Australia could make their land more productive with desalinization. Expensive energy is the main reason it isn’t done (what to do with the waste brine is the other bit).
"Fun" fact: the mentioned combination of solar and battery is something many South Africans already have - but more out of necessity to mitigate the frequent brownouts. The more radical ones even use this to go off the grid, and avoid paying anything to their failing power utility.
There are two key points of excess that comes from Solar now being the cheapest source of KWH.
1) The duck curve gets flattened to zero during the sunny days and there is excess power at that moment that no one can use. This can go into a variety of uses like hydrolysis or maybe a CO2 capture of the future. At the moment the only thing being deployed for this is storage for later release that day.
2) Solar exceeds what the grid can actually distribute. This can't be utilised as well by big centralised installations and will push towards somewhere to dump the excess power through the summer locally. Some companies are trying to turn the CO2 in the air and power into fuel for home installations and this might make homes quite a lot more independent with their own generators and fuel creation. Not a lot of solutions yet on how to utilise this power.
Other than storage of power for later use that day/week there isn't a whole lot of competition to try and use these periods of excess better. Its an area rife with business opportunities especially ones that can store the energy long term for a home once we hit scenario 2.
Ironically, it almost sounds as if total energy consumption may increase due to cheap solar…
Definitely good to not be using fossil fuels but there must also be a later point at which marginal increases in energy consumption have negative effects.
What would the risk be other than changing the distribution of heat around the planet? The solar power would have heated up the area locally had it not been captured by the panel. This makes the local temp lower while raising the temp at the point the power is used.
Solar panels have a pretty low albedo compared to most surfaces: they will contribute to warming of the planet to some degree because less light gets reflected back into space. It's just much, much less than the warming from fossil fuels for the same amount of energy.
The roughly 4x efficiency gains in using electricity for heating and replacing engines means energy is likely to go down over the next decades even while electricity use might double.
Australia consumes 5882 PJ of electricity per year [1] = 1.63 PWh/y = 4.46 TWh/day.
A Nickel-Iron battery stores 30 Wh/L [2]. They would need ~150 GL (giga liters) of NiFe batteries to store all the power consumed in a day (they would need much less just for the night) = 150 million m3 (cubic meters). A stack of cells 3m high (+ frames) would occupy 50 million m2 (sq. meters) or a square with ~7 km long sides (without service roads), so let's say battery storage industrial zone 10 km by 20 km in total, split around major cities.
Cost: ~ 1T$ ( tera-dollars :) without the land and the roof )
On the east coast of Australia, you are taxed for feeding in solar power between 10am and 3pm. They're trying to get more people to install batteries. But the ROI is 5-7 years (at current rates).
Everyone seems to be saying this but whenever I get quotes they are always the same, for every dollar the hardware goes down the labor seems to go up the exact same amount… strange how that works.
Solar energy comes up often on HN, but it is misleading to talk about solar without differentiating between utility grid solar and consumer rooftop solar. Simply put, utility grid solar provides low cost power and consumer rooftop solar does not and will not. The rooftop solar price is usually hidden because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof - sort of a reverse Robinhood scheme.
The thing with rooftop/local solar is that it doesn't need to compete with wholesale electricity prices, it only need to compete with retail prices. It's already competitive there, to the point that most places are removing subsidies and retargeting them at storage (batteries), transmission, or EV charging infrastructure.
It isn't very clear what you mean. If utilities are required to do net metering (i.e. buy all power whenever it is produced at the retail rate rather than buy what they need at the wholesale rate) it is a huge unsustainable subsidy to wealthier homeowners paid for by the less wealthy. It's free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting large costs on the less well off. As these costs grew, that also provided an incentive for consumer solar installations to increase. Eventually the issue was impossible to ignore and states are starting to remove the subsidies. It is strange that anyone thought net metering ever made any sense.
As the statista.com report says
>...Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If not for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 117 and 282 U.S. dollars per megawatt hour.
Looks like that report is a year old, but I doubt the installation costs have really gone down much since then. (Panel prices come down, but labor costs, etc don't.)
I don’t know where you live, but I can speak to how it works in Australia.
Your energy bill has a fixed daily rate to be connected to the grid. That pays for poles and wires, maintenance etc. To oversimplify a bit there’s also your cost per kWh to buy energy and to sell it. Someone using their own PV system during the day and buying from the grid at night isn’t “free riding” like you think. The connection is paid for by the fixed connection fee.
I guess it all depends on the prices the utilities have to pay to buy the power and whether they are forced to buy the power if they don't need it. If the price is higher than the rate the utility would pay for utility scale solar, than I think you have to admit the owner of the solar panels is getting at least a small subsidy - likely paid for by other rate payers who are unable to put up solar. If the price paid is basically the same, then there should be no complaints from the other rate payers.
Sure, but they are not in most places. IMO subsidies made sense to kickstart the industry given the external costs imposed by climate change, but I agree that they don't anymore.
> >...Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States.
I don't think levelized cost for generation is the correct metric here. That ignores the costs imposed by grid transmission (and utility profit margins). It's also worth noting that installation costs in the US can be much higher than those in other countries (even other wealthy countries).
>...IMO subsidies made sense to kickstart the industry given the external costs imposed by climate change, but I agree that they don't anymore.
In general, if a dollar of subsidy spent on utility based solar will go much further than a dollar of subsidy spent on consumer rooftop solar, then it makes sense to spend that dollar on where it will go the furthest. That is true now, and was true 10 years ago.
>...That ignores the costs imposed by grid transmission (and utility profit margins).
But aren't those installations also attached to the grid? If not, the costs go very very high if you have enough battery that you don't need to attach to the grid.
>...It's also worth noting that installation costs in the US can be much higher than those in other countries (even other wealthy countries).
I wouldn't be surprised if some or all the OECD countries also subsidize rooftop solar, so it might be hard to compare actual costs.
Providing the infrastructure and reliability of the grid is very expensive, so there is a huge difference between the wholesale costs and retail rates for delivered electricity. From the latest Lazard report on levelized costs, they estimate utility solar has a cost range of about $29 - $92 per megawatt. Rooftop residential has a cost estimate of about $122 to $284. Both are subsidized, but money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much further than a dollar spent subsidizing rooftop residential solar.
An earlier comment said "The thing with rooftop/local solar is that it doesn't need to compete with wholesale electricity prices, it only need to compete with retail prices."
You seemed to disagree with that? I'm pointing out that, at least where I live, it appears this commenter was correct.
Generally people who install solar also want to have power at night and when it is cloudy or raining. I think the earlier comment was maybe implying that there would be no grid connection - but that only works if you have enough backup battery to cover all the times the sun isn't shining. Battery costs have not fallen like solar panels have fallen and buying power from the grid would be noticeably cheaper. Even with the subsidies, few people who install solar panels also install enough battery backup that they don't need to use the grid.
The price of batteries has been falling pretty quickly. They're not quite affordable yet, but I'll eat my hat if they home batteries don't hit affordability in the next 5-10 years.
If rooftop solar costs me $300/MWh, that's a third cheaper than the $450/MWh charged by my local utility provider. So, even without any subsidy or feed-in tariff, it would be rational for me to install solar, use it when available, and fall back to the grid when it's not.
Again, the only point I'm making is that this this statement appears to be true:
The thing with rooftop/local solar is that it doesn't need to compete with wholesale electricity prices, it only need to compete with retail prices. It's already competitive there [without any need for subsidies]
>If rooftop solar costs me $300/MWh, that's a third cheaper than the $450/MWh charged by my local utility provider. So, even without any subsidy or feed-in tariff, it would be rational for me to install solar, use it when available, and fall back to the grid when it's not.
If you want the capability of using your own rooftop solar, you need to install a much more costly battery backup system. With a typical solar system, the electrical output is sent to the grid. (So, if there is an outage on the grid, it will also shut down your panels since they don't want you to possibly electrocute the electrical workers.)
Yea, it is pretty hard to understand the point you are trying to make and simply repeating yourself doesn't actually help. But to go through in more detail:
>If rooftop solar costs me $300/MWh, that's a third cheaper than the $450/MWh charged by my local utility provider.
The $300 is an estimated LCOE for the intermittent power produce by rooftop solar, not some charge you get in the mail. Utilities can buy or produce that power for much less than that cost.
>So, even without any subsidy or feed-in tariff, it would be rational for me to install solar, use it when available, and fall back to the grid when it's not.
Except as I pointed out, you can't "use it when available" unless you have a battery backup system which the LCOE will be much higher than what you will pay your utility over the life of the system. That might change in the future, but that is the reality today.
>Again, the only point I'm making is that this this statement appears to be true:
>> The thing with rooftop/local solar is that it doesn't need to compete with wholesale electricity prices, it only need to compete with retail prices. It's already competitive there [without any need for subsidies]
I guess you should ask yourself why you think that statement was true? The person who made that comment adjusted their comment to add that actual battery systems weren't competitive at this point:
>>"They're not quite affordable yet, but I'll eat my hat if they home batteries don't hit affordability in the next 5-10 years."
- Retaining the existing grid connection but not connecting the solar to it (or not connecting it in such a way that power is sent back to the grid).
- Running household electrical loads off of the solar when available, falling back to the grid connection when it isn't.
You don't necessarily get full utilisation of the solar energy this way, but you can often still save a whole bunch of money compared to not having the solar. Especially if you are willing/able to load shift energy intensive things like washing/drying to times where the sun is shining.
You can also potentially gain additional savings by having a smallish battery that gains you some additional utilisation without it necessarily having to cover your entire daily usage.
Except as I pointed out, you can't "use it when available" unless you have a battery backup system
Maybe I've misunderstood, but aren't people already using these systems when available, without battery backups? And just reverting to paying PG&E when the sun isn't out?
ok, I think I misunderstood what you meant. Yes, when the sun is shining and the power grid is alive, you can use your power. People are usually shocked to find that when there is a power outage, they generally can't use their solar panels to have power (unless they have a battery backup system which can isolate them from the grid). But the costs for installing consumer solar are high enough that these systems only had a reasonable payback period when people could sell the power back to the utility at a very high rate. I see that in CA when they finally had to lower that subsidy, demand for consumer solar is estimated to have dropped by 80%:
While solar panel costs have dropped very low, the soft costs for installing rooftop solar (labor, permitting, etc.) have only gone up, so one off rooftop solar will always be more expensive than utility solar.
I feel that this is true for my area as well. I think for now the installers are taking the savings from cheaper panels and increasing their profit. I think the only way to reap those savings would be to do a self installation but that is becoming harder with permits and such and this is okay because we need safe electricity. I am in Canada and we don't get the most optimal sun for solar. It is still worth it but takes I believe about 15 years to finally break even. So not a huge amount of people are installing it so there is not a huge competitive market. If panel prices fall enough other companies will start offering it at a cheaper price and that is when we will start to see benefits.
When the reporters asked him about the quotation and the viability of "commercial power from atomic piles," Strauss replied that he expected his children and grandchildren would have power "too cheap to be metered, just as we have water today that's too cheap to be metered."
> Most of the world's solar power was installed in the past 30 months
The wikipedia article continues: "Prior to 1985, water meters were not required in New York City; water and sewage fees were assessed based on building size and number of water fixtures; water metering was introduced as a conservation measure."
Most places I've lived in the US have been metered.
Fun fact: You can now get a 99kwh ev with bidirectional charging (vehicle to home) for about $50-55K, new.
I can easily imagine buying one of these as an extra “beater” car in a few years, and making sure we’re always charging at least one car at home when it’s sunny.
All I can say is we apparently have different ideas of what a "beater" car is. I hope you're right though and that EV batteries have a 15-20 year usable life.
Yeah, that was my point. The battery capacity drops as a percentage over time. Currently, you can get a $60K MSRP, 33kwh-rated used car for ~$10-15K, with over 90% of the original capacity left.
30kwh of tesla powerwalls is at least $23K. Sadly, those used cars don’t support v2h or v2g.
Seems much more likely that in the US at least, fossil fuel interests will push for taxes on solar installations and usage to bring their costs up to the level of oil and gas.
This is a nice article and everything, but any time I see someone trying to convince me that their magic lines pointing to some point in time that is a decade or more away are definitely going to mean Free Stuff for sure and that it’s a certainty, the signal they’re trying to send gets drowned out by the noise of my bullshit detector screeching.
Re: the grid connection backlog - much of the challenge of turning on new generation is simulating the increasingly complex ways the grid can fail due to all the interconnections. It’s a huge computational challenge and there’s really not much incentive to speed it up
Where do you get your notion of “expensive” from? Expensive compared to what?
Solar panels are dropping precipitously in price. If solar installation companies had better incentives and less scammy behavior, or if you DIY’d your solar setup, it is hard to beat on price lately. As the article indicates, grid-connected solar is quickly approaching an end state, after which battery storage and opportunistic “excess” usage or transfer will be more important.
"If solar installation companies had better incentives and less scammy behavior"
If wishes were horses....
You still need the mounting hardware, the wiring, the permits and interconnect with the grid if you're doing that it, the batteries and the permits for those if you're storing excess locally, etc. and none of that stuff is getting cheaper. Not to mention the labor to install it and connect it. Not saying there isn't scammy behavior happening, there is, just like there is in any other home improvement/remodel contracting market.
But the panels are an ever-shrinking part of the price of a project, and they are the only thing that's getting cheaper.
Can someone explain to me why this is a "good" thing?
If solar is too cheap, it won't be overbuilt... or people will lose their return on investment => less solar.
Unless I am missing something major, another way to say this is "solar power during peak solar flux will become so valueless that people will stop building solar".
To the downvoters: Off-grid solar will be unlikely to be dominant energy consumption, and there are other options to build cheap, efficient and clean energy. Solar is an option and I don't "hate" solar.
This is a simple argument of negative prices or low-cheap prices will correct themselves on the market without external forces like subsidies from tax payers... which means it isn't nearly as cheap as everyone is saying.
Electrical energy is useful by definition. As indicated in the article, you have to essentially do arbitrage by using “excess” generation to do something that produces value ($), like storing the energy in a battery for later when the grid is more expensive, or to do useful work like make fertilizer, capture carbon, condense water, run your AC extra hard , etc.
Batteries have a 50% efficiency cut on storage and recall... it is unlikely that cutting the spot price in half will make this profitable.
"Although battery storage has slightly higher round-trip efficiency than pumped storage, pumped-storage facilities typically operate at utilization factors that are currently twice as high as batteries." [1]
Also very limited run times on the grid: "For example, in 2015, the weighted average battery duration was a little more than 46 minutes, but by 2019, weighted average battery durations had doubled to 1.5 hours."
Imagine the battery was your only source of power, the EIA is saying that 50% of the time you could discharge / recharge those batteries - at grid scale. Capacity factors are huge for total efficiencies because it measures the time your system is operating...
After a heavy charge / discharge cycle temperatures in batteries might be high enough that you have to allow them to cool or recharge at lower rates.
Under normal circumstances batteries do _not_ heat up during charge/discharge, both the BMS and their internal electrical design (most of the cells are connected in parallel) are intended to prevent that. And you connect the batteries in parallel too. The current in individual cells
is not significant enough to cause any visible temperature changes even when the whole pack makes hundreds of amps @48v.
According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), in 2019, the U.S. utility-scale battery fleet operated with an average monthly round-trip efficiency of 82%,
First, batteries aren't only available "50% of the time", where does that come from?
Second, that isn't how 'efficiency' works, it is the percentage you get back from what you put in and your own link says 82%. Where are you getting these ideas?
efficiency is lower. This is what is meant by capacity.
Capacity or efficiency? You're getting your terms mixed up.
Math is hard. Understanding efficiencies via words is harder :)
It isn't that hard if you're talking about things that are true and make sense.
What? Round-trip efficiency already means in-to-out. Even if it meant in->stored and stored->in, that would be 0.8 * 0.8 = 64%. Your numbers make no sense.
:( Capacity factor 50% means you only have batteries at half the availability... ie the batteries need to cool or recharge at fixed rates and you can't use them as energy storage buffers in a continuous manner... as one would need for grid batteries to work effectively.
Also you're mixing up 'efficiency' which is what you said at first now with 'capacity factor' which is completely different.
ie the batteries need to cool
Where are you getting that from?
or recharge at fixed rates
Everything recharges at a 'fixed rate'. Lithium titanate batteries and some LiFe batteries like the Headway 38120 HP can charge at 10C, which means they can charge in around 6 minutes if you have the amps to put through them.
as one would need for grid batteries to work effectively.
Then how are people already using them as grid batteries?
"Also you're mixing up 'efficiency' which is what you said at first now with 'capacity factor' which is completely different.
"
Effective utilization on the grid is affected by efficiency and capacity factor. One is "when the system is operable, how well does it perform". The other is "how often is the system operable".
People generally colloquially use efficiency as effectiveness. However in real systems, that power peoples lives & livelihoods, effective systems are both efficient and available.
People generally colloquially use efficiency as effectiveness
Not if they are talking about specific technical definitions. You should ask these hypothetical people if they know anything about batteries.
However in real systems, that power peoples lives & livelihoods, effective systems are both efficient and available.
I don't know what point this vague abstract description is supposed to make, but battery systems are literally working right now and making people money.
Misunderstanding efficiencies, capacities and costs lead to lobbying for subsidies on technologies.
This article point says at some point during the day, either:
1. you need high capacity & efficiency grid storage (ie hydroelectric storage)
or
2. someone engineers a grid scale batteries that have never been deployed before that are 2x more capacity than current installs and with the same efficiencies - and they deploy them in tandem with the current solar installs.
While it is _possible_, there are a lot of other people competing for energy markets... it is not at all indicated by the article that market forces will be focusing 100% on solar.
Why is it supposed to be an investment? If it's sufficiently cheap, it becomes something that you buy because it's useful to you, not because the government is promising you subsidies for life.
Also, the other driving force here is the cost of grid-delivered energy. California is sure working hard on incentivizing solar + storage that way...
I think the person who is selling "cheap" solar will decide it isn't worth it to give you something convenient without additional cost, especially if they are losing money.
They will exit the market all together cause there are other ways to spend money than give away cheap solar.
The argument isn't that solar will be too cheap, the argument is that it will be cheap enough that lots of it will be built in situations where the grid doesn't have any spare capacity and won't be connected to the grid.
Who are you buying solar from if the cells are disconnected from the grid?
Solar itself is already 3.9% of the _total_ us grid power.
Subdivide that 3.9% into a small category: grid disconnected solar... what one would be discussing is something that will not influence the total price of energy.
If one has grid-scale storage, there are many more efficient ways to do electricity generation.
Hydroelectric, in existing geological reservoirs, are the only grid-scale "battery" that currently exists. The primary reason they are not more popular is because not many reservoirs exist right next to major power consuming locales.
