In short, solar production had increased steeply between 2000 and 2015, but each and every year, the IEA predicted that production would plateau. Each and every year, they were wrong. And yet they did it again the following year.
Recently the author of "Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon" Jenny Chase was on the Energy Transition Show podcast [0] discussing the growth of solar. The discussion got into some of the technical reasons solar was able to grow as it did; while the analysts were assuming solar was barely affordable with the subsidies, the industry was actually using the subsidies to develop low cost manufacturing processses, springboarding off technology from modern semiconductor manufacturing. A comical moment in that interview, on the same topic as this tweet, was that not only did IEA and other agencies and analyists under-estimate solar, the best estimate (which was still short by half) was from Greenpeace just using a simple compound growth model.
We know for certain is that every exponential progress humans achieves will stop at some point. We saw exponential energy progress in the first half of 20'th century, many assumed that would just continue and everyone would have flying cars today but it stopped dead in its tracks and the energy quantities we have available today is mostly the same that we had 50 years ago.
If it's not off-topic, I'm curious to learn how other HN'ers have approached the planning/viability study of getting solar installed at their home.
I want to see a spreadsheet to help me plan out energy use, peak need, whether batteries are worth buying, amount I could sell back, number of panels needed, amortized cost against savings etc. Extra points for thinking tax benefits and estimating the depreciating cost of panels vs the increasing cost of electricity and where the intersection is (or was, if passed) to pull the trigger on a capital expenditure, etc
My initial foray so far has been vendors see this as a qualitative decision rather than a quantitative decision with little support for this approach. For me it's purely a numbers game.
Anyway, I'm sure HN'ers are most likely to be thinking similarly - any pointers or resources to help others?
The more I think about it, there's probably a startup here...
My parents own an off-grid home with ~12 panels (about 3.3kW installed power I think).
If it didn't cost over 30K to pull power to the house, it'd be impossible to make the math work for solar. If you don't count the climate externalities I doubt there's one city on Earth where the payback period (before incentives) is less than 10 years.
So there's no point in making a spreadsheet at this point, really. You're either buying solar out of need, a desire to "green" your life further, or you're being paid by the government to do it, or buying at a loss.
I've gone through a similar process. The gist of it is that it takes about 6-7 years to recoup the investment, disregarding compound return and opportunity cost. You can think of it as buying a bond that pays back in 6-7 years and then getting 23-24 more years of free return (discounting the teardown cost eventually).
Here's a more detail approach.
1. Compute your electricity usage. Look at 12 months of electric bill. E.g 800kWh per month (9600kWh per year).
2. Get quotes from the solar vendors. They usually quote in term of 5kW system, 6kW system, or 10kW system. The kW number is the instantaneous electricity the panels generated. Multiply that by hours to get the kWh number. The number of panels doesn't matter because some panels generate more some less. You want the total system output number in kW.
3. Figure out how many hours of useful sunlight a day your house can have. Google Sunroof and other calculators on the web would do it for you. E.g. 5 hours of useful sunlight per day.
4. E.g. with a 6kW system, 6kW x 5 hours/day = 30kWh per day = 900kWh per month = 10800kWh per year. Remember you need 9600kWh/year from 1? This just about covers it, accounting for some loss of efficiency.
5. A 6kW system costs about $14,460–$19,260 in CA. See [1]. Let's say it costs $18,000. Let's say your electric bill is $250/month or $3000/year. $18,000/$3,000 = 6 years to recoup (very simplistic view).
Buy simply comparing your bill with how much you generate is not very useful. You have to know when you used that power, and whether or not the sun was shining at that time of the day.
You need to know if your local utility will even pay you for the power you generate that you don't use.
If you are out of the house for most of the day, you probably don't use much power then. When you get home at night you turn all your devices on and start cooking and cleaning.
> The gist of it is that it takes about 6-7 years to recoup the investment
Now I wonder how to compute the best time for investing if you consider both the diminishing rate of panel prices, and the electricity you'll need to pay while you don't have those. Is it always worth it to invest ASAP, or is there a panel improvement rate at which it is worth waiting a bit?
It used to take 6-7 years to recoup... 10 years ago when I was doing the math. I am surprised to hear that it is still the same even though the prices are supposedly going down.
A lot of it comes down to the individual State incentives. My co-worker put in a system on his house and at the time the incentive was that you sold all of your power back to the grid at a fixed rate that was higher than what you would normally pay. He gets a check every month for what he sells to the grid. That rate was locked in for 15 years. It meant that he knew that with average usage he would break even in 6-7 years. Downside is that he is taxed on that income.
The other side of it is how big your roof and if it faces south without much occlusion. If your roof doesn't face south or is occluded but trees then it makes it much less attractive.
As you are a numbers guy, I’m sure you can whip up such a spreadsheet in half an hour. It isn’t that hard. NREL has a calculator you can use to estimate annual production, and it’s up to you to figure out what your utility’s rules on net metering are. South is the best aspect, West is next best, but this can be affected by local climate (e.g. frequent afternoon clouds). I think NREL factors climate.
If the net metering rules are favorable, skip the battery, forget entirely about your own consumption patterns, and just install as much as you can. The job is almost half fixed costs, so a bigger array pays back much faster.
The hard part in out house is estimating how much power we'll use in the middle of the day, and after we return to the office after covid.
The feed-in tariffs here in my state are effectively nothing.
I'd like to wait for battery prices to come down so I can go completely off grid. (though this may not happen with cars gobbling up all the batteries for a long time to come)
I think as electricity gets cheaper and cheaper, connection costs will get more and more expensive, so being able to disconnect will be a significant saving.
Right now we are working to remove all gas appliances here at home so we can disconnect from the Gas entirely.
Basically the numbers come down to a few things. How much energy does your home use in a day (kw/h). How much energy does your installed solar generate; this is genarally kw of solar times average hours of peak sun for your latitude. So if you want to entirely power your home with solar, and you average 1,000 kw/h a month that's about 33 kw/h a day, and your latitude averages 5 hours of direct sun a day, you need about 7 kw of panels to generate that 33 kw/h.
Then you need to store the excess power to use throughout the rest of the day. If you're off grid, this means a lot of battery. If you're on grid (grid tie) you can generally put your excess power on the grid, then draw it back out throughout the day and your utility company will "net meter" periodically so you only pay for the difference you used, or they pay you for the excess you didn't use.
What utility companies pay for excess residential has evolved and is evolving. A few years ago you could get the full domestic rate (~ $.12 per kw/h) and that is a fantastic rate. Now utilities are pushing for a lower rate to take into account for delivery costs solar does not require [1].
With subsidies I could make a profit in 15 years. But I don't want to make a plan that stretches that long, and that's a best case scenario (assuming no damages, expensive failures).
So while I can get 100% renewable from the grid, I'll stick with that, at least until an installation can pay for itself in just a few years.
AFAICT, things are already "financialized" so that things like community solar appear to be "cheaper" to a customer. (Nothing wrong with that, BTW.)
I just got my first utility bill with a community solar monetary credit. I wrote the following piece attempting to figure out the energy flows -- as opposed to the dollar flows.
-- cut here --
OK. I have a(n energetic) head scratcher with my latest unbundled
electricity bill. It's the first one that includes a community solar
subscription.
For geeks, this is almost a thermodynamics question about systems and
surroundings -- but it's camouflaged as a monetary problem in
disguise...
1) My utility company (NYSEG) charges me a per kW-hr fee for
"transmitting" electricity and servicing their infrastructure. Fine and
dandy. I understand that perfectly.
2) There is a separate per kW-hr fee from a different supplier of
electricity with whom I have contracted for power. Again, I understand
that perfectly.
3) Now the head scratcher. My "community solar" account just started
contributing PV energy to the grid from a recently completed solar
farm. My fraction of energy generated from their deployment just
showed up as a monetary credit to my total bill. They will invoice
me of 90% of that credit, and claim that I "saved 10%" on my
electricity cost. There is no statement whatsoever of the
amount of electrical energy corresponding to that monetary credit.
That's the monetary accounting. Now let's examine the energy accounting.
Let's call the amount of energy from 2) above "N" for my "normal"
source of electrical power. Similarly, let us call the (unknown) amount of energy
from 3) above "S" for my solar PV power.
(In principle, once I knew the fee per kW-hr I was being charged for
the PV energy, I could convert the monetary charge to the numerical
value for S. Let's leave that as an exercise to be dealt with later
after I receive an invoice from the community solar provider -- which
hopefully will tell me their cost-per-unit of energy.)
Clearly, I paid my normal provider for producing N units of energy. However, I
actually consumed (N-S) units of their energy, because I (notionally)
also received S units of solar energy. I understand perfectly that
electricity on a transmission line is fungible, hence I don't actually
receive "electrons" (so to speak) from either of them.
The community solar project will also get paid (at their claimed
"discounted" rate) for producing S units of energy and delivering it
to me via NYSEG.
My conundrum: It seems to me that (N+S) units of electrical energy
have been produced and paid for, but only N units have been
consumed. Hence there are (N+S) - N = S units of electrical energy
"somewhere" that are generated but not consumed via this accounting
system.
Where are those S units? Who owns them? Are they simply going towards
heating up the transmission lines, or is somebody benefiting from
them?
Is it simply the case that NYSEG no longer has to pay for the energy
consumed in heating up their transmission lines, but are still
charging me the same transmission fees???
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your problem statement. But it seems to me that you are using (and paying for) N units from your regular provider. And then your community solar operation is selling S units to the grid and giving you a monetary credit (the result of the sale) instead. Some customer (due to fungibility, it could be you or anyone else) is getting those S units, and paying the community solar project (indirectly via the grid). And those S units are displacing some other set of S units that were previously generated by fossil fuels, which is (presumably) one of the main goals of this entire exercise. So maybe the answer to your final question is actually "only N units were actually generated, because the fossil fuel plants ran less and produced S fewer units".
> The rise of variable renewable sources means that there is an increasing need for electricity grid flexibility, the IEA notes. “Robust electricity networks, dispatchable power plants, storage technologies and demand response measures all play vital roles in meeting this,” it says.
Which is why it's not really the cheapest. Fossil fuel and nuclear power don't have these associated costs.
It might be the cheapest if you factor in the costs of climate change, as responsible economists have insisted for decades & the fossil fuel industry has spent billions fighting
Except that solar power isn’t an effective measure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector. Nuclear is far more effective as the comparison between France and Germany shows with Germany emitting _seven_ times the emissions as France in their energy sector.
I was just going to say this. This is what many people do not understand, it's "the cheapest" technology but the cost of the necessary ancillary services, balancing mechanism, FFR, inertia, etc., to make this happen is not baked into the LCOE models. That's how shortsighted this sort of messages are.
While that's true, it's also true that the total cost of solar (taking storage into account) is far lower now than it was even 10-15 years ago. The logical thing we should be doing now is building massive amounts of storage, rather than complaining about how solar costs don't take it into account. As an added bonus, large pumped storage or fuel cell batteries can be reused for any renewable source (unlike solutions like concentrated solar), so any improvements in one can be mostly decoupled from improvements in the other, which is why I find the insistence that people add the cost of the batteries to the cost of solar to be pretty wearying. And I don't find arguments that pumped storage takes a long time and has high maintenance costs to build very convincing when the alternative, nuclear, has exactly the same requirement.
Robust electricity networks? The US has spent trillions on transmission networks in the era dominated by coal.
Dispatchable power plants? We’ve had both base-load and peaker plants for decades. Indeed, base load gas is cost-competitive with solar now. But all base-load gen is so slow to start up and shut down that peakers can charge 2-3 orders of magnitude more per MWh.
Storage technologies? Given the exorbitant cost of peaker power, pumped storage has been in use for decades.
Demand response has also made sense for decades, but we’ve lacked the technology and market structures to make it a reality until recently. It was introduced before renewables had real market share.
In short: yes, renewables require these technologies. So does fossil-fuel generation. The IEA’s bias is showing if they’re implying that this is unique to one technology.
Of course, our current system is optimized around the characteristics of huge fossil plants, and a lot of capital will be required to optimize it around a different technology. These investments are worth it if you consider the externalities of carbon emissions. If you do it correctly, and include extreme weather costs, we should try to get to a zero emissions ASAP.
But even if you ignore externalities, as you appear to be doing, renewables are now so much cheaper that there is no economic reason to replace obsolete generation with non renewables. Under this approach, we’ll still get to 100% renewable in 40-50 years.
It's not about being dispatchable or not, it' about the volatility renewable generation and the problem this generates... and how other non-renewables need to be called by the TSO.
Which is actually not true at all. Modern nuclear plants can be operated in load-following mode and reduce and increase their output by 10% and more within minutes.
Right. That makes it ideal for baseload. It can produce more than enough for regular loads. If necessary it can be augmented by solar and other power generation.
Yes, you can. Most nuclear power plants are more dispatchable than most gas burners. Countries with lots of nuclear power plants (France) absolutely run them in a load following regime.
[Edit: And, as usual, downvotes rolling in for pointing out a verifiable fact. HN being HN, I guess.]
>Fossil fuel and nuclear power don't have these associated costs.
because those cost have been socialized to the rest of us. We are all paying for higher cancer rates, temps, etc but these companies get to keep the difference as profit.
FWIW, nuclear power does have quite some associated costs (storage, security, etc.) - I'd love to see a sensible estimate. It might still be worth it to cover base loads.
Are you accounting for the refining and transportation costs of fossil fuels and for the fissionable material mining and refining and for the waste storage costs of nuclear?
Nuclear has a lot of hidden costs too such as waste disposal or reprocessing, insurance (whether private or effectively public and socialized), and remediation.
If you look at the whole picture including capacity factor, flexibility, engineering overhead, etc., coal and gas are still very cheap... provided you ignore long term externalities. This is the problem.
Yup. Everyone keeps saying "people ignore the cost of batteries!" but what the thing everyone in all these threads ignores is that fossil fuels have absolutely amazing economics and will for much longer than it will take to inflict catastrophic ecological damage on the world. Waiting for them to become more expensive than renewables just means that by the time you finally panic and start building storage and nuclear infrastructure, fossil fuels will be so expensive that the last thing people are interested in is big public works projects.
Waste disposal or reprocessing are neglectible if you keep in mind that a single nuclear reactor produces electricity worth over one million US Dollars per day.
Why does this non-sense get constantly rehashed all the time?
You cannot compare the cost of an electricity generation system solely based on the cost of the plant technology itself, you always have to take the whole system costs into account.
Solar panels might be cheap, but they are unable to provide a reliable electricity source without backup or storage systems which is what drives the actual costs.
France has 70% nuclear and their kWh costs around 17 Euro cents and causes greenhouse gas emissions of 50 grams of CO2 on average.
Germany has 50% renewables with the kWh at over 31 Euro cents and 400 grams of CO2 on average.
The French energy sector is responsible for 50 million tons of CO2 each year while Germany’s energy sector causes over 350 million tons of CO2 each year.
So, no, large scale solar power is neither cheap nor clean.
I can promise you the energy industry knows about both CapEx and OpEx and has incredibly in depth models on them for all relevant energy technologies.
And on the topic, I can also promise you that they do in fact know about the concept of capacity factor and that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow.
And on the topic of France, their reactors oveheat the river they use for cooling and have to shutdown. And just as you claim you can't soley consider the cost of a plant, you can't solely consider the smokestack emissions of a plant without consider the mining, enrichment, handling, and disposal of nuclear.
Germany has a large CO2 output because they have a large manufacturing industry, and for policy reasons technically decoupled from their investment in solar, they also maintain production capacity of a dirty type of coal as power source because they have it in abundance within their own borders, its a security interest.
If you think your armchair analysis has outsmarted the energy industry then go ahead and invest in fossil and nuclear i guess.
It is likely that politicians know pretty well the difference between what they say to the public and the actually effect their policy have on the market. It is also very important for the public to call them out when reality and truth does not match the promises given in political speech.
When the Swedish government shut down a nuclear reaction the political promise were a greener power grid that polluted less. What we instead got was a oil power plant in the southern part of Sweden that previous only operated as a backup in case of harsh cold winters. Now it is operating all year because it suddenly became commercial viable to do so.
For long I have advocated that the solution to this disconnect between what is being said and what actually happens is laws. No new fossil fueled power plants, and no extended capacity by fossil fueled power plants. One do not need to be pro-nuclear, nor pro-solar or pro-wind. All that is needed is an expanding energy demand, a aging nuclear power plants, and a law that forbid people to use the easy but environmentally damaging alternative. Smart people in the energy industry can figure out what is the cheapest alternative that does not warm up the planet, and politician can stop trying to sell an untruth.
If we don’t switch to wind and solar we’re going to be hearing a lot about heat pollution in the coming decades.
They fought Clinton, Illinois’ nuclear plant for decades. The locals were uneasy because it’s on a recreational lake. The lobby for it dismissed the concerns of the uneducated rabble and built it anyway.
An amoeba that causes encephalitis grew in the heat from the cooling plant. Nobody was allowed to swim there anymore. There’s not a lot to do in the middle of the Plains States if you aren’t in a metropolitan area. Swimming and boating are two of your options.
Fusion, fission, geothermal all dump between one and two units of heat at the source for every two units they push down a power line (which is mostly turned into heat at the destination and a little along the way). In the big picture, all of them are bad pairings with global warming.
> I can also promise you that they do in fact know
Of course they know, but I don't care about what they know, I care about what they say and if it's true or not!
Are the headline figures fudged by neglecting storage or including subsidies? Or is the headline legitimate, and solar can actually stand on its own now?
Curious to hear your take on the Democratic Party's recent reversal on their stance regarding nuclear[1].
It seems to me that if a group of people who were once so vehemently against nuclear for decades (few people were more vocal in opposition to it) finally realized that their fight against climate change simply isn't practical without nuclear, then why are some people still so against it?
You couldn't ask for a more powerful endorsement than the one from nuclear's (former) greatest critic.
>I can promise you the energy industry knows about both CapEx and OpEx and has incredibly in depth models on them for all relevant energy technologies. And on the topic, I can also promise you that they do in fact know about the concept of capacity factor and that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow.
Well, con-men also know that they sell BS, and what exactly is in the snake oil that they sell, but they still push it...
My guess is someone wrote "Solar is now the cheapest marginal source of new power", and someone else that doesn't understand calculus and (non-)fungibility fucked it up.
You’re messing with these stats a lot (I assume this is not malicious). The 50% renewables are not the cause of the extra 350g of CO2 in Germany.
The way you word this it sounds like renewables == bad, when in reality Germany is burning a boat load of coal which is causing the extra emissions, while France’s emissions are offset because they have lots of Nuclear power.
Nuclear power takes 20-50 years to come online- it’s too late to rely on it and burn fossil fuels in the mean time. That ship sailed long ago.
"The way you word this it sounds like renewables == bad"
The point is that unfortunately renewables == good is not often true either despite the common perception. It all depends on how they integrate with the rest of the grid which is something rarely considered when I hear speeches about having more and more renewables in the future
Once you decided to stop nuclear and go wind/solar, what do you do when it's 8pm in winter and there is no wind? => You fire up your coal/gas plants
The answer could be "storage" but right now, as you can see from the stats, this option is not favored and I believe there are good reasons. As you can imagine, if storage was an easy solution today, Germany's emissions would be much smaller.
Hopefully it becomes a more viable solution in the near future but at the moment we're still far from it
Wait, how are these numbers for Germany and France relevant? Germany's renewable energy was built in recent years, much of it during a time when it was significantly more expensive than now. Frances price is from mostly very old nuclear reactors, many of which are close to end-of-life.
And you seem to be attributing the CO2 emissions to the renewables, but that's in no way fair. Even if we had the solution to energy storage, you'd expect a country switching from coal to renewables to have high emissions even at the half-way point.
> So, no, large scale solar power is neither cheap nor clean.
It's more complex than headlines would lead you to believe. But that's ALWAYS the case. This conclusion is just as dumb as the headlines, if not even dumber.
You're right that storage and backup is a big factor, but it's a problem that's rapidly being solved.
Can you please expand on what makes you say that "storage (...) is a problem that's rapidly being solved" ?
Have you read articles with scenarios about % electricity stored compared to daily consumption for instance? Are we going to reach any significant number in the next decade?
From this IEA article [1] it is not clear that we're getting close to it fast enough
Except Germany is doing all sorts of accounting maneuvers to hide the high cost of renewables. They say they have a low wholesale price and the final price is high just because of taxes, but in the end you pay so many taxes that end up in the renewable subsidies in different forms.
A fair comparison would take a per population approach and compare similar environmental regions, and calculate the cost of supplying that region and population with the energy demand over the span of years.
It is however not that hard to do since the energy market basically operate already on this principle. Energy companies bid on supplying a specific demand in the future, and the bid that is lowest win. That bid also include if I understand it right the cost of transmission. The practical end result is that different companies win the bid depending on all the variations that makes energy production commercial viable. A solar plant that is not producing enough energy because of weather conditions is not going to put in a bid, and thus the fossil fueled power plant wins the bid and the outcome is pollution. The more times fossil fueled power plants win, the more economical incentives there are to build more fossil fueled power plants, and the more pollution we get in the air.
The only way to have a non-polluting power grid is to either outlaw fossil fueled plants from bidding, or make sure that there is always an pollution free alternative that has an economical reason to make a lower bid. Nuclear, renewables, batteries, solar, wind, carbon taxes or what have you, as long as fossil fueled power plants can manage to make the lowest bid we have a problem.
That's an odd bit if logic to get to your conclusion. You haven't demonstrated that renewables aren't clean, you've demonstrated that the non-renewable portion for Germany generates more C02 than the non-renewable (nuclear) portion for France.
It's also strange to talk about energy cleanliness in the context of nuclear energy yet only bring in C02 when the environmental factors with nuclear extend much beyond C02
IMO Germany is more set up to benefit from future developments than France and the numbers you cite may very well look a lot different in 10 years. What you are giving is a static snapshot in time where France has a mature technology that is declining and Germany is rapidly moving to the future.
Nuclear certainly has a place in baseload generation but new greenfield development is rare and costs skyrocket upon decommissioning. On the other hand Germany is well positioned to take advantage of cost declines in battery storage to solve the intermittency problem. It’s not clear what France does when all of their reactors age out.
> IMO Germany is more set up to benefit from future developments than France and the numbers you cite may very well look a lot different in 10 years
Within 10 years, Germany will already have to replace a good half of their renewable capacity so I doubt that assessment will change. That's the next issue which is not often taken into account, those renewables have a very low lifespan.
Do these numbers factor in pollution from uranium and coal mining and enrichment? For uranium there is also the burden of storing it for a few ten thousand years.
You also need to factor in that Germany is exporting more power than it imports within a year, primarily to Austria and Switzerland but also a bit to France.
In order to be pro-nuclear power on a large scale, you pretty much have to not care about nuclear waste storage, as we don't have any good long term solutions for it. The favored argument nowadays seems to be that it's not that dangerous and what danger there is is easily outweighed by the climate benefits.
Solar energy will not run out in the near future (at least 5 billion years, even earth will be destroyed way before the sun run out of fuel), fossil fuels will run out, it does not matter if it's 50, 100 or 1000 years from now, but it will run out. Period. (that's the same problem with current nuclear power technology beside other factors)
Nobody takes into consideration the cost of managing nuclear waste either. I understand there is not much anymore, but I believe its still dangerous and requires armed security effectively forever. (making the cost effectively infinite).
I guess those costs are for future generations and not our problem. (Kind of like CO2)
Wow, what an argument. Solar panels don’t last forever and have to be maintained and replace effectively forever making the cost infinite too by that argument.
Excellent point. It also assumes that society will be sufficiently organized to provide the security and maintenance for the entire half life of the waste. That seems like a fairly unrealistic assumption. And so we are basically guaranteed to ruin the area where waste is stored at some point in the future and easily explains why congress has been unable to designate a permanent storage location.
That logic makes a lot of cheap things cost an effectively infinite amount, like shopping centre security.
A waste storage facility doesn't need armed guards if it isn't being used any more than a shopping centre would. If the facility isn't being used then it can be sealed with a big plug of concrete or something else that has a cost that is small vs. infinity.
Plus there is a decent chance that the dangerous stuff will be a valuable fuel source in 100 years.
Just on a technical note: With interest rate r, an infinite stream of annual payments P (aka a perpetuity) is worth P/r. So, with rates around 2%, the cost of security forever is the annual cost times 50.
(I guess what you're saying is that rates are effectively zero, and they are, and then the cost is infinite indeed...)
That is a good point in favor of batteries over nuclear. If we made fossil fueled power plants illegal, the external costs of nuclear waste should be considered.
As long as fossil fuels are used however the risk of runaway climate change is a much bigger issue than nuclear waste. The risk of runaway nuclear waste is unlikely.
Why do we price a barrel of oil without the military costs to protect the shipping channels. Or the short term and long term storage. While you have a point. It’s hard to deny the extreme drop in cost of solar over time. And that drop runs counter to a lot of predictions from people that said moving away from fossil fuel is impossible.
Barrels of oil are a very poor comparison, as the price is based on limited supply (which is even artificially controlled by the OPEC), where with solar and nuclear the price is much closer (and based) on manufacturing costs.
Uh, what about the yearly production of nuclear waste by the French energy sector? Do they have a long term solution for that? And what about decommissioning old power plants? They’re currently deciding whether to run them another 10 years beyond their 40 years design lifetime. (Great way to postpone a problem, by the way)
For the record, the whole of France’s nuclear fuel waste since the 50’s is a 15mx15mx15m cube.
Also, that 40 years numbers is a financial one, not a technical or design one. Some reactors based on the same designs have been validated for 60 years in the US.
Look at my comment history for a previous discussion but these studies also include theoretical costs for non-renewable energy called 'carbon pricing'. It's flat-out dishonest.
If solar power were the cheapest energy source, it would be unilaterally adopted until it's no longer the cheapest option--it's trivial to hook up to the grid, private individuals do it today. Unless of course there is a global conspiracy with the entire energy utility, semiconductor, and financial industry; private individuals; and municipalities to avoid profit seeking behavior.
I think it is slowly adopted everywhere, and we are facing resistance from the traditional energy industry as they try to protect their current investments.
Profit seeking behavior from the fossil fuel industry is to resist change at all costs. Profit seeking behavior from our politicians here in Australia is to not upset the fossil fuel industry as they are a large source of donations.
Not to mention the large amount of real-estate that a solar farm requires. Which isn't always convenient either given that it only works in sunny places.
Solar will only ever be a part of the picture, not the whole thing.
> Not to mention the large amount of real-estate that a solar farm requires.
In a recent 400 MW solar farm installed in Texas, I looked at the cost of land in that area, vs. the cost of the solar field. Land was about 1% of the cost. Land is cheap. We have lots of land. We have so much land, we use it for low value things like farming. And land that isn't suitable for farming is even cheaper than that.
Of all the things people complain about with solar, this is by far the strangest. Perform any calculations you like and you'll find that the area required to power the entire world with solar would be quite small; the only issue it has (but don't get me wrong, it is a big one) is the need for storage.
The costs of disposing of nuclear waste don't come out of the energy bill, they come directly out of taxes. This needs to be factored in, because this cost continues long after the plant is decommissioned.
How is this nonsense the top comment? Who upvotes this tripe?
To counter the calculations of the IEA (who are a world more informed than cbmuser, I'm fairly sure), this guy conflates the entire historic mix of two very different countries, one with a long history of coal, natural gas and lignite (those decreasing as renewables enter the mix).
The author of the linked piece has the following background:
“He holds a PhD in biochemistry from Bristol University and previously studied chemistry at Oxford University.”
From the Carbon Brief “about” page. (Click his byline on the linked article and you’ll see he works for Carbon Brief.) https://www.carbonbrief.org/about-us
So he’s a scientist.
Given that you disagree strongly with a well credentialed chemist, are you sure the profession of journalism or the credentials of its practitioners are the issue here?
Also, it’s interesting you linked an article that leans heavily on the authority of Michael Crichton, himself a noted climate change denialist — and a former physician.
It would seem to me poor information and sloppy work crosses many fields. I think anyone who has, say, used very much software in their life would probably agree.
Because one cannot compute that in a generally applicable way. It depends on details of ststems that vary from place to place. Levelized cost of energy is more constant, although not entirely so.
The WEF 'weforum' website is often laughably weak. McKinsey & the WEF are endlessly trying to portray what their ideal future will look like and will cherry pick statements that back up their goals.
Here is the IEA web page for their 120 euro 'World Energy Outlook 2020' publication.
I couldn't find the assertion about 'cheapest electricity in history' has anyone else seen the actual report?
The International Energy Agency is a Paris-based autonomous intergovernmental organisation established in the framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1974 in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. ~ Wikipedia
The numbers take into account the lower capacity factor of solar. So yes, they do take into account that the sun is not always shining. Judged just on a peak kW basis, solar's advantage would be even larger.
Well yes if we put grossly misleading numbers it would be even worse of a sin. What I mean is that it is not a system cost. This assumes the existence of dispatchable low carbon energy at large scale without acknowledging this cost. You can't meaningfully talk about $/kWh with solar in the context of deep decarbonization without talking about the cost of dispatchable duplicate backup capacity. Costs and success today are riding on the back of a huge and high carbon dispatchable grid.
In large parts of the world (e.g. where I live, in Texas, USA) this is by far when the largest electricity usage is (because it's when the air conditioners are working hardest). So, yes we will have to have some non-solar energy, we could get to much larger than we already are (and it's growing fast) because that is when the peak usage is.
This is a common oversight in much of the public discussion about renewables that is inexcusable. Public policy is being devised from a very deep misunderstanding of the physics of a power grid.
All the nuclear waste in the world can fit in one are the size of a soccer field. The only real issue are catastrophic failures - and those are usually prevented by improvements in technology and safety protocols.
>I don't think its fair to draw a line in the sand and declare that those costs are for future generations and don't need to be considered now.
I agree, but we should balance those costs with the costs of our current actions and the costs of other possible options. Future generations will have to live with the costs of our action or inaction, whichever forms they take.
I wonder what the world would look like if the Chernobyl disaster and the Challenger disaster didn't happen. I think both of those events, combined with years of rhetoric, were a turning point in 1986 which really damaged the idea that governments were capable of solving problems and pushing society forward. We didn't give up after the Apollo 1 fire. We did give up after the Challenger disaster and Chernobyl.
On a large time scale solar seems like the right call, even over fusion. I keep hearing about storage issues, but that seems trivial given the complexity of our current energy landscape.
Humanity is hopefully progressing toward a Dyson sphere... which is just maxed out solar.
Readit News
https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/866313289306963969
In short, solar production had increased steeply between 2000 and 2015, but each and every year, the IEA predicted that production would plateau. Each and every year, they were wrong. And yet they did it again the following year.
[0]https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-132-the-future-of...
I want to see a spreadsheet to help me plan out energy use, peak need, whether batteries are worth buying, amount I could sell back, number of panels needed, amortized cost against savings etc. Extra points for thinking tax benefits and estimating the depreciating cost of panels vs the increasing cost of electricity and where the intersection is (or was, if passed) to pull the trigger on a capital expenditure, etc
My initial foray so far has been vendors see this as a qualitative decision rather than a quantitative decision with little support for this approach. For me it's purely a numbers game.
Anyway, I'm sure HN'ers are most likely to be thinking similarly - any pointers or resources to help others?
The more I think about it, there's probably a startup here...
If it didn't cost over 30K to pull power to the house, it'd be impossible to make the math work for solar. If you don't count the climate externalities I doubt there's one city on Earth where the payback period (before incentives) is less than 10 years.
So there's no point in making a spreadsheet at this point, really. You're either buying solar out of need, a desire to "green" your life further, or you're being paid by the government to do it, or buying at a loss.
There is a massive assumption in there that you can have a non-risky investment with a 10% rate of return idefinately.
Given that we can barely go 10 years from crisis to crisis (2008 and covid) this assumption cannot possibly be justified.
Here's a more detail approach.
1. Compute your electricity usage. Look at 12 months of electric bill. E.g 800kWh per month (9600kWh per year).
2. Get quotes from the solar vendors. They usually quote in term of 5kW system, 6kW system, or 10kW system. The kW number is the instantaneous electricity the panels generated. Multiply that by hours to get the kWh number. The number of panels doesn't matter because some panels generate more some less. You want the total system output number in kW.
3. Figure out how many hours of useful sunlight a day your house can have. Google Sunroof and other calculators on the web would do it for you. E.g. 5 hours of useful sunlight per day.
4. E.g. with a 6kW system, 6kW x 5 hours/day = 30kWh per day = 900kWh per month = 10800kWh per year. Remember you need 9600kWh/year from 1? This just about covers it, accounting for some loss of efficiency.
5. A 6kW system costs about $14,460–$19,260 in CA. See [1]. Let's say it costs $18,000. Let's say your electric bill is $250/month or $3000/year. $18,000/$3,000 = 6 years to recoup (very simplistic view).
Battery is an additional cost, $6000~$10000.
[1] https://news.energysage.com/6kw-solar-system-compare-prices-...
You need to know if your local utility will even pay you for the power you generate that you don't use.
If you are out of the house for most of the day, you probably don't use much power then. When you get home at night you turn all your devices on and start cooking and cleaning.
Now I wonder how to compute the best time for investing if you consider both the diminishing rate of panel prices, and the electricity you'll need to pay while you don't have those. Is it always worth it to invest ASAP, or is there a panel improvement rate at which it is worth waiting a bit?
The other side of it is how big your roof and if it faces south without much occlusion. If your roof doesn't face south or is occluded but trees then it makes it much less attractive.
If the net metering rules are favorable, skip the battery, forget entirely about your own consumption patterns, and just install as much as you can. The job is almost half fixed costs, so a bigger array pays back much faster.
The feed-in tariffs here in my state are effectively nothing.
I'd like to wait for battery prices to come down so I can go completely off grid. (though this may not happen with cars gobbling up all the batteries for a long time to come)
I think as electricity gets cheaper and cheaper, connection costs will get more and more expensive, so being able to disconnect will be a significant saving.
Right now we are working to remove all gas appliances here at home so we can disconnect from the Gas entirely.
Then you need to store the excess power to use throughout the rest of the day. If you're off grid, this means a lot of battery. If you're on grid (grid tie) you can generally put your excess power on the grid, then draw it back out throughout the day and your utility company will "net meter" periodically so you only pay for the difference you used, or they pay you for the excess you didn't use.
What utility companies pay for excess residential has evolved and is evolving. A few years ago you could get the full domestic rate (~ $.12 per kw/h) and that is a fantastic rate. Now utilities are pushing for a lower rate to take into account for delivery costs solar does not require [1].
[1] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11062019/rooftop-solar-ne...
So while I can get 100% renewable from the grid, I'll stick with that, at least until an installation can pay for itself in just a few years.
There is nothing wrong with it, but i dont see how your expectation of a 98%?safe investment paying for itself in 5 years is justified.
I just got my first utility bill with a community solar monetary credit. I wrote the following piece attempting to figure out the energy flows -- as opposed to the dollar flows.
-- cut here --
OK. I have a(n energetic) head scratcher with my latest unbundled electricity bill. It's the first one that includes a community solar subscription. For geeks, this is almost a thermodynamics question about systems and surroundings -- but it's camouflaged as a monetary problem in disguise...
1) My utility company (NYSEG) charges me a per kW-hr fee for "transmitting" electricity and servicing their infrastructure. Fine and dandy. I understand that perfectly.
2) There is a separate per kW-hr fee from a different supplier of electricity with whom I have contracted for power. Again, I understand that perfectly.
3) Now the head scratcher. My "community solar" account just started contributing PV energy to the grid from a recently completed solar farm. My fraction of energy generated from their deployment just showed up as a monetary credit to my total bill. They will invoice me of 90% of that credit, and claim that I "saved 10%" on my electricity cost. There is no statement whatsoever of the amount of electrical energy corresponding to that monetary credit.
That's the monetary accounting. Now let's examine the energy accounting.
Let's call the amount of energy from 2) above "N" for my "normal" source of electrical power. Similarly, let us call the (unknown) amount of energy from 3) above "S" for my solar PV power. (In principle, once I knew the fee per kW-hr I was being charged for the PV energy, I could convert the monetary charge to the numerical value for S. Let's leave that as an exercise to be dealt with later after I receive an invoice from the community solar provider -- which hopefully will tell me their cost-per-unit of energy.)
Clearly, I paid my normal provider for producing N units of energy. However, I actually consumed (N-S) units of their energy, because I (notionally) also received S units of solar energy. I understand perfectly that electricity on a transmission line is fungible, hence I don't actually receive "electrons" (so to speak) from either of them. The community solar project will also get paid (at their claimed "discounted" rate) for producing S units of energy and delivering it to me via NYSEG.
My conundrum: It seems to me that (N+S) units of electrical energy have been produced and paid for, but only N units have been consumed. Hence there are (N+S) - N = S units of electrical energy "somewhere" that are generated but not consumed via this accounting system.
Where are those S units? Who owns them? Are they simply going towards heating up the transmission lines, or is somebody benefiting from them?
Is it simply the case that NYSEG no longer has to pay for the energy consumed in heating up their transmission lines, but are still charging me the same transmission fees???
I don't know the answer to this problem.
Discuss.
Which is why it's not really the cheapest. Fossil fuel and nuclear power don't have these associated costs.
Robust electricity networks? The US has spent trillions on transmission networks in the era dominated by coal.
Dispatchable power plants? We’ve had both base-load and peaker plants for decades. Indeed, base load gas is cost-competitive with solar now. But all base-load gen is so slow to start up and shut down that peakers can charge 2-3 orders of magnitude more per MWh.
Storage technologies? Given the exorbitant cost of peaker power, pumped storage has been in use for decades.
Demand response has also made sense for decades, but we’ve lacked the technology and market structures to make it a reality until recently. It was introduced before renewables had real market share.
In short: yes, renewables require these technologies. So does fossil-fuel generation. The IEA’s bias is showing if they’re implying that this is unique to one technology.
Of course, our current system is optimized around the characteristics of huge fossil plants, and a lot of capital will be required to optimize it around a different technology. These investments are worth it if you consider the externalities of carbon emissions. If you do it correctly, and include extreme weather costs, we should try to get to a zero emissions ASAP.
But even if you ignore externalities, as you appear to be doing, renewables are now so much cheaper that there is no economic reason to replace obsolete generation with non renewables. Under this approach, we’ll still get to 100% renewable in 40-50 years.
[Edit: And, as usual, downvotes rolling in for pointing out a verifiable fact. HN being HN, I guess.]
because those cost have been socialized to the rest of us. We are all paying for higher cancer rates, temps, etc but these companies get to keep the difference as profit.
Google for “GHG emissions life cycle IPCC”. I’m currently on mobile so I don’t have the sources at hand.
If you look at the whole picture including capacity factor, flexibility, engineering overhead, etc., coal and gas are still very cheap... provided you ignore long term externalities. This is the problem.
See: https://youtu.be/cbeJIwF1pVY
They do, but with coal, it's the pile out back, I assume natural gas networks have tanks. Nuclear is interesting because it's almost control rods.
But your point stands; storage is a lot simpler for conventional fuels.
Germany has 50% renewables, yet their kWh causes 400 grams of CO2 on average while France with 70% nuclear causes 50 grams of CO2 per kWh on average.
You cannot compare the cost of an electricity generation system solely based on the cost of the plant technology itself, you always have to take the whole system costs into account.
Solar panels might be cheap, but they are unable to provide a reliable electricity source without backup or storage systems which is what drives the actual costs.
France has 70% nuclear and their kWh costs around 17 Euro cents and causes greenhouse gas emissions of 50 grams of CO2 on average.
Germany has 50% renewables with the kWh at over 31 Euro cents and 400 grams of CO2 on average.
The French energy sector is responsible for 50 million tons of CO2 each year while Germany’s energy sector causes over 350 million tons of CO2 each year.
So, no, large scale solar power is neither cheap nor clean.
And on the topic, I can also promise you that they do in fact know about the concept of capacity factor and that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow.
And on the topic of France, their reactors oveheat the river they use for cooling and have to shutdown. And just as you claim you can't soley consider the cost of a plant, you can't solely consider the smokestack emissions of a plant without consider the mining, enrichment, handling, and disposal of nuclear.
Germany has a large CO2 output because they have a large manufacturing industry, and for policy reasons technically decoupled from their investment in solar, they also maintain production capacity of a dirty type of coal as power source because they have it in abundance within their own borders, its a security interest.
If you think your armchair analysis has outsmarted the energy industry then go ahead and invest in fossil and nuclear i guess.
When the Swedish government shut down a nuclear reaction the political promise were a greener power grid that polluted less. What we instead got was a oil power plant in the southern part of Sweden that previous only operated as a backup in case of harsh cold winters. Now it is operating all year because it suddenly became commercial viable to do so.
For long I have advocated that the solution to this disconnect between what is being said and what actually happens is laws. No new fossil fueled power plants, and no extended capacity by fossil fueled power plants. One do not need to be pro-nuclear, nor pro-solar or pro-wind. All that is needed is an expanding energy demand, a aging nuclear power plants, and a law that forbid people to use the easy but environmentally damaging alternative. Smart people in the energy industry can figure out what is the cheapest alternative that does not warm up the planet, and politician can stop trying to sell an untruth.
They fought Clinton, Illinois’ nuclear plant for decades. The locals were uneasy because it’s on a recreational lake. The lobby for it dismissed the concerns of the uneducated rabble and built it anyway.
An amoeba that causes encephalitis grew in the heat from the cooling plant. Nobody was allowed to swim there anymore. There’s not a lot to do in the middle of the Plains States if you aren’t in a metropolitan area. Swimming and boating are two of your options.
Fusion, fission, geothermal all dump between one and two units of heat at the source for every two units they push down a power line (which is mostly turned into heat at the destination and a little along the way). In the big picture, all of them are bad pairings with global warming.
And hydro reservoirs boost methane emissions.
Of course they know, but I don't care about what they know, I care about what they say and if it's true or not!
Are the headline figures fudged by neglecting storage or including subsidies? Or is the headline legitimate, and solar can actually stand on its own now?
It seems to me that if a group of people who were once so vehemently against nuclear for decades (few people were more vocal in opposition to it) finally realized that their fight against climate change simply isn't practical without nuclear, then why are some people still so against it?
You couldn't ask for a more powerful endorsement than the one from nuclear's (former) greatest critic.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2020/08/23/after-48...
Well, con-men also know that they sell BS, and what exactly is in the snake oil that they sell, but they still push it...
Some nuclear reactor were shutdown to protect fish in the river in a summer during a heatwave because they had no cooling tower.
Nuclear reactor with cooling tower were fine. And current solar panels are less efficient when it's hot.
You dismiss CO2 per kWh because you say the whole lifecycle of the nuclear plant and it's fuel should be taken in account. Well it is already.
The way you word this it sounds like renewables == bad, when in reality Germany is burning a boat load of coal which is causing the extra emissions, while France’s emissions are offset because they have lots of Nuclear power.
Nuclear power takes 20-50 years to come online- it’s too late to rely on it and burn fossil fuels in the mean time. That ship sailed long ago.
That ship was sunk.
Germany had a lot of nuclear power, and decided shut it down. That is why Germany is producing so much CO₂.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#German...
South Korea builds nuclear plants in less than 5 years on average.
https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-korea-s...
The point is that unfortunately renewables == good is not often true either despite the common perception. It all depends on how they integrate with the rest of the grid which is something rarely considered when I hear speeches about having more and more renewables in the future
Once you decided to stop nuclear and go wind/solar, what do you do when it's 8pm in winter and there is no wind? => You fire up your coal/gas plants
The answer could be "storage" but right now, as you can see from the stats, this option is not favored and I believe there are good reasons. As you can imagine, if storage was an easy solution today, Germany's emissions would be much smaller.
Hopefully it becomes a more viable solution in the near future but at the moment we're still far from it
And you seem to be attributing the CO2 emissions to the renewables, but that's in no way fair. Even if we had the solution to energy storage, you'd expect a country switching from coal to renewables to have high emissions even at the half-way point.
> So, no, large scale solar power is neither cheap nor clean.
It's more complex than headlines would lead you to believe. But that's ALWAYS the case. This conclusion is just as dumb as the headlines, if not even dumber.
You're right that storage and backup is a big factor, but it's a problem that's rapidly being solved.
Have you read articles with scenarios about % electricity stored compared to daily consumption for instance? Are we going to reach any significant number in the next decade?
From this IEA article [1] it is not clear that we're getting close to it fast enough
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-storage
These are not the same !
The cost you're comparing (0.17€/kWh) includes transmission costs (Enedis + EDF), taxes (CSPE, ...) AND the energy cost (~0.06€/kwh, market rate).
You cannot compare costs between countries like that, because taxes are different and transmission costs too.
You must compare market rate costs (from eex for example).
It is however not that hard to do since the energy market basically operate already on this principle. Energy companies bid on supplying a specific demand in the future, and the bid that is lowest win. That bid also include if I understand it right the cost of transmission. The practical end result is that different companies win the bid depending on all the variations that makes energy production commercial viable. A solar plant that is not producing enough energy because of weather conditions is not going to put in a bid, and thus the fossil fueled power plant wins the bid and the outcome is pollution. The more times fossil fueled power plants win, the more economical incentives there are to build more fossil fueled power plants, and the more pollution we get in the air.
The only way to have a non-polluting power grid is to either outlaw fossil fueled plants from bidding, or make sure that there is always an pollution free alternative that has an economical reason to make a lower bid. Nuclear, renewables, batteries, solar, wind, carbon taxes or what have you, as long as fossil fueled power plants can manage to make the lowest bid we have a problem.
It's also strange to talk about energy cleanliness in the context of nuclear energy yet only bring in C02 when the environmental factors with nuclear extend much beyond C02
Nuclear certainly has a place in baseload generation but new greenfield development is rare and costs skyrocket upon decommissioning. On the other hand Germany is well positioned to take advantage of cost declines in battery storage to solve the intermittency problem. It’s not clear what France does when all of their reactors age out.
Within 10 years, Germany will already have to replace a good half of their renewable capacity so I doubt that assessment will change. That's the next issue which is not often taken into account, those renewables have a very low lifespan.
You also need to factor in that Germany is exporting more power than it imports within a year, primarily to Austria and Switzerland but also a bit to France.
(For the record I am very pro-nuclear, but it feels disingenuous to mention solar requires storage but totally ignore nuclear disposal)
And the BN-800 reactor that’s online and in commercial service.
Also, SuperPhénix.
I guess those costs are for future generations and not our problem. (Kind of like CO2)
That logic makes a lot of cheap things cost an effectively infinite amount, like shopping centre security.
A waste storage facility doesn't need armed guards if it isn't being used any more than a shopping centre would. If the facility isn't being used then it can be sealed with a big plug of concrete or something else that has a cost that is small vs. infinity.
Plus there is a decent chance that the dangerous stuff will be a valuable fuel source in 100 years.
(I guess what you're saying is that rates are effectively zero, and they are, and then the cost is infinite indeed...)
As long as fossil fuels are used however the risk of runaway climate change is a much bigger issue than nuclear waste. The risk of runaway nuclear waste is unlikely.
For the record, the whole of France’s nuclear fuel waste since the 50’s is a 15mx15mx15m cube.
Also, that 40 years numbers is a financial one, not a technical or design one. Some reactors based on the same designs have been validated for 60 years in the US.
Not for long sadly :( Government policy is to reduce this to 50% by 2035.
If solar power were the cheapest energy source, it would be unilaterally adopted until it's no longer the cheapest option--it's trivial to hook up to the grid, private individuals do it today. Unless of course there is a global conspiracy with the entire energy utility, semiconductor, and financial industry; private individuals; and municipalities to avoid profit seeking behavior.
Profit seeking behavior from the fossil fuel industry is to resist change at all costs. Profit seeking behavior from our politicians here in Australia is to not upset the fossil fuel industry as they are a large source of donations.
Solar will only ever be a part of the picture, not the whole thing.
In a recent 400 MW solar farm installed in Texas, I looked at the cost of land in that area, vs. the cost of the solar field. Land was about 1% of the cost. Land is cheap. We have lots of land. We have so much land, we use it for low value things like farming. And land that isn't suitable for farming is even cheaper than that.
To counter the calculations of the IEA (who are a world more informed than cbmuser, I'm fairly sure), this guy conflates the entire historic mix of two very different countries, one with a long history of coal, natural gas and lignite (those decreasing as renewables enter the mix).
Can you point me to a grid that runs mainly on solar and wind that’s les than 150gCO2eq/kWh?
France is around 50-60.
Because journalists are not engineers: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
“He holds a PhD in biochemistry from Bristol University and previously studied chemistry at Oxford University.”
From the Carbon Brief “about” page. (Click his byline on the linked article and you’ll see he works for Carbon Brief.) https://www.carbonbrief.org/about-us
So he’s a scientist.
Given that you disagree strongly with a well credentialed chemist, are you sure the profession of journalism or the credentials of its practitioners are the issue here?
Also, it’s interesting you linked an article that leans heavily on the authority of Michael Crichton, himself a noted climate change denialist — and a former physician.
It would seem to me poor information and sloppy work crosses many fields. I think anyone who has, say, used very much software in their life would probably agree.
Nuclear is the only way fwd, sooner we come to realization better it will be for us.
Solar and wind do lot of eco damage due to low density output.
Yea I don't understand these non-sense which doesn't includes whole system costs.
As cool as PV is, there is a big difference between always-on, modular power source and one that has a variable and intermittent production.
It would be like saying one doesn't need heating in the winter since heat is cheap in the summer.
Here is the IEA web page for their 120 euro 'World Energy Outlook 2020' publication.
https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2020 Solar https://www.iea.org/fuels-and-technologies/solar
I couldn't find the assertion about 'cheapest electricity in history' has anyone else seen the actual report?
The International Energy Agency is a Paris-based autonomous intergovernmental organisation established in the framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1974 in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. ~ Wikipedia
It must be stated that these numbers imply 'when the sun is shining'. The cost of the systems producing nighttime power is not accounted for in these.
I don't think its fair to draw a line in the sand and declare that those costs are for future generations and don't need to be considered now.
I agree, but we should balance those costs with the costs of our current actions and the costs of other possible options. Future generations will have to live with the costs of our action or inaction, whichever forms they take.
Humanity is hopefully progressing toward a Dyson sphere... which is just maxed out solar.