“Suddenly”? This has been an obvious trend for many years. Anyone paying even cursory attention to the cost curve of renewable energy could see this was coming.
Basically my conclusion (in amidst a lot of embarrassingly arrogant stuff) was that maybe silicon PV was going to get a lot cheaper, because I looked long and hard for any fundamental cost floor within an order of magnitude or so of where we were, and I couldn't find one. But even if silicon PV didn't, there were several plausible alternative technologies that could move in to fill the gap.
As it turned out, silicon PV is now about 20 times cheaper than it was then.
Sorry, this is off-topic, but: it looks like you wrote on average a page or more of personal notes every day for 10 years, and then... put it all up on github?
This is extremely fascinating to me. Why? Was it worth the effort?
Something tells me that if solar continues this decline (which is obviously much more difficult now) and achieves another 80% drop in price, it is possibly the biggest solution to most of the world's major problems impacting most of the world population (which lives in tropics).
The oligopoly of energy industry by OPEC, Russia and few other countries has possibly impacted geopolitics more than anything else. The fights of today and future might all be about intellectual property on everything new and shiny that is discovered.
Meta (since it’s your site): 26px is waaaaay too large a font size for body text; I zoomed out to ⅔ before it was comfortable. Even with a comparatively small font like you’re using, I’d say never go past 20px, and I’d suggest 18px as a better upper limit (only to be applied on larger-than-mobile devices, too). Also since I’m writing, I strongly recommend against adjusting letter-spacing except for in all-caps text. (You’ve spaced headings out.) It just makes text uglier and harder to read; the designer did it the way they did for a good reason in almost all cases.
Nuclear provides 20% of our power today and would have provided 100% of our power today if we hadn't stopped building in the 80s and had merely kept up the pace.
Congrats to solar on reaching 3% of our energy mix. I'm genuinely glad that science and industry finally figured out clean energy that met the approval of environmentalists. I don't think the billion or so tons of extra CO2 spent waiting for cheap solar were worth it, but what's done is done and we just have to live with the consequences.
I couldn't read the article, it said I'd reached my free limit.
But the reason I remember people saying the trend would plateau is because while the solar cells themselves can get cheaper, they questioned if the installation could.
Kind of reminiscent of Amdahl's law.
So I'm wondering if that proved not to be the barrier people thought.
What I've heard from some friends in the installation industry is that their work is dominated by large installation projects that will become huge money-makers for the owners in a reasonably short time frame, so it's worth the big up-front cost.
The panels are quite expensive and the labour is not cheap, but when you're installing 50-100+ panels on a big box store roof, it seems the economics far more than works out, at current energy price and subsidy levels.
This has been clear for a while. The real challenge for grid operators at the moment is system security - we need sufficient storage to ensure that supply and demand are consistently balanced.
I think what people fail to see is that renewable is not just solar or just wind or just hydro. It is a mix of these that will get us there. Each has pros and cons and we need prices for the whole group to come down. And they are, at a very sharp rate. Just that it may not be visible in every part of the world.
I am very hopeful that our grids will be powered by a mix of renewables that cover most hours in a 24 hour cycle with some mix of energy storage.
Also, as individuals, we are buying more of our own generation and storage needs, which I feel is great for reaching to places that the grid has not be able to.
I just signed up for amberelectric.com.au (no connection other than satisfied customer). Where I live we have a wholesale market that bids every 30m and a retail market that basically provides a fixed kWh price to consumers, with a maximum rate set by the government.
Amber provides consumption (and feed-in) at the wholesale rates, with a fixed $15/month fee.
The price is mostly at the AUD 0.10 - 0.20 / kWh during the day currently (its winter here) and as of right now (16:00 AEST), it's showing that 40% of the source is renewables (on a cloudy day)
The price has peaks at 07:00-09:00 and 17:00-19:00 and the renewables drop when the sun goes down, but on average wind days, it drops to ~20% from 40%.
Household solar is booming in Australia, to the point where governments are now rebating battery storage instead of solar panels, because the grid can't handle the inflow during solar peak. It's almost at the point where it would be worthwhile to have a household battery that uses grid energy during the day to charge.
In the meantime, our federal government wants to spend AUD660m on an unneeded gas peaker plant that is estimated to only be needed 2% of the time.
I work at a power company and while it can be cheap, in places like the Midwest, it's very unreliable. Solar? On average were budget for getting 10% max power generation out of single sided panels and about 25% for double sided. Wind? Prone to malfunctions and can get wrecked during tornados. But on good days they do well. Aside from that, still very unreliable when you have 5mph winds on a Friday night when energy need is at its highest.
Renewables got a long way to go. Storage is barely feasible right now and is the largest reason why it just can't work. This isn't a "Debbie downer" speaking here, these are facts. Green energy cannot support the infrastructure we've created right now. We could revert society to adapt to needing less power, but you're more likely capable of overthrowing the US government than have people be okay with using 30% if their max power usage nowadays.
You can generate at least 50% of the electricity with hardly any storage at all, more if you integrate heat and transportation in the network. The world is very far from the levels of renewables were storage is strictly necessary, which is why there is not very much storage being built right now.
There is no real need to reduce energy consumption. We have plenty of space to build solar panels and wind turbines. But primary energy consumption will naturally go down a bit when you replace ICEs (30% efficient or so?) with EVs (80% efficient or so?) and oil and gas heaters with heat pumps (2
4 times as efficient). Of course electricity consumption will be way larger.
I think this is why some countries (China, Russia, and some EU countries) continue to invest in nuclear power for base load. Solar/wind power are great where they are viable, but that’s not everywhere (yet)
Edit: to be fair, the US is still investing in nuclear just not at the “expansion” scale for the most part. Only one new reactor in construction rn.
>On average were budget for getting 10% max power generation out of single sided panels and about 25% for double sided.
Well, yes. It's a panel that only generates power when sunlight is shining on it. When the sun goes down, solar stops producing power.
Switching all power generation to PV solar is going to require massive overprovisioning. This has been obvious, and widely known, for decades. Cost-per-KWh is going to be widely variable during the day. This has also been known. Running an aluminum smelter at midnight is going to stop being economical.
We can either do this, or pay to raise every building and road in Miami by 6 feet. One or the other.
The mechanism we use is markets: the energy is put for sale, and bought by those who have some use for it.
High-carbon energy comes with an externality, CO2 emission, which doesn't depend on the use to which this energy is put.
There is an obvious solution to this: make high-carbon energy expensive, and use the Pigovian tax to subsidize installation of more renewable energy. The coal plants can pay for their own obsolescence, win-win.
Bitcoin is a complete distraction from this goal. If the price of energy doubled everywhere, overnight, and the market price of Bitcoin stayed perfectly level, Bitcoin's energy use would halve also.
So if you make high-carbon energy expensive, and renewable energy cheap, Bitcoin miners will use the renewable stuff instead. Indeed, to a significant degree this is already what happens.
What worries me is if crypto miners and crypto buyers, whose belief in cryptocurrencies is closer to a religion, would progressively lock more and more of these renewables for mining.
Now it's still 0.5% of the world's electricity production. What would prevent it for jumping to 30% in a few years?
In your assumption, the bitcoin market price stays level. But it can double or triple quickly, and peak for short intervals of time, or stay high. All because of the belief of bitcoiners. That's all just a huge socio-psychological problem.
Your comment let's suggest that you think that the price of bitcoin depends on the cost of energy used, while it it the opposite: the amount of energy used depends on the price of bitcoin.
So with cheaper renewable, all other things staying equal, the price of bitcoin will not change, but the energy use will increase.
It doesn’t matter whether the production of renewable energy is cheap as long as it cannot be produced on demand.
A lot of people seem to think that market prices are determined by production costs but that isn’t the case.
Market prices are determined by supply and demand and that’s where renewables (except for hydro power) are very bad at.
This is why Germany has the highest electricity prices worldwide. Because it has a large share of wind and solar meaning that a large portion of the electricity is not supplied on demand:
I agree with pricing being dependent on supply and demand. But I do not think Germany is a good example.
I love Germany for many reasons and have lived there but pricing is not one of these reasons. Cellular, home Broadband, 4G LTE, Bank fees, that weird radio tax, and just about everything that is run by corporations is expensive compared to many other nations.
Are energy prices higher in every country that has more renewable sources than not?
Pretty obvious that if you have a very low variable cost to produce a product (electricity), then you can bid the lowest price to the market (so long as the fixed costs are reasonably similar in the long run).
If this is due to solar, though, this is some kind of perverse market malfunction—somebody's getting paid to keep their solar farms turned on and pumping power into the grid even when the grid operator is having to pay someone else to burn it up. Negative LMPs can be real with coal or nuclear generation, because their ramp times are measured in hours or even days, so you can't just turn them off at night when you don't need them. But the ramp time of a PV panel is about 100 nanoseconds. Short the panel out with a MOSFET (or, more dangerously, open-circuit it) and it stops producing power in under a microsecond. There's no fundamental reason for PV to drive prices negative.
As battery/storage deployment improves, this will balance out. Imagine a bunch of plugged-in EVs and home batteries ready to charge on demand in the middle of the day, etc...
Readit News
Basically my conclusion (in amidst a lot of embarrassingly arrogant stuff) was that maybe silicon PV was going to get a lot cheaper, because I looked long and hard for any fundamental cost floor within an order of magnitude or so of where we were, and I couldn't find one. But even if silicon PV didn't, there were several plausible alternative technologies that could move in to fill the gap.
As it turned out, silicon PV is now about 20 times cheaper than it was then.
This is extremely fascinating to me. Why? Was it worth the effort?
The oligopoly of energy industry by OPEC, Russia and few other countries has possibly impacted geopolitics more than anything else. The fights of today and future might all be about intellectual property on everything new and shiny that is discovered.
But the content I am enjoying!
Deleted Comment
Congrats to solar on reaching 3% of our energy mix. I'm genuinely glad that science and industry finally figured out clean energy that met the approval of environmentalists. I don't think the billion or so tons of extra CO2 spent waiting for cheap solar were worth it, but what's done is done and we just have to live with the consequences.
But the reason I remember people saying the trend would plateau is because while the solar cells themselves can get cheaper, they questioned if the installation could.
Kind of reminiscent of Amdahl's law.
So I'm wondering if that proved not to be the barrier people thought.
The panels are quite expensive and the labour is not cheap, but when you're installing 50-100+ panels on a big box store roof, it seems the economics far more than works out, at current energy price and subsidy levels.
I am very hopeful that our grids will be powered by a mix of renewables that cover most hours in a 24 hour cycle with some mix of energy storage.
Also, as individuals, we are buying more of our own generation and storage needs, which I feel is great for reaching to places that the grid has not be able to.
Australia has the highest penetration of household solar (20%) and that is unlikely to slow.
Coal generators are already almost a stranded asset and gas plants for FCAS are obsolete.
Amber provides consumption (and feed-in) at the wholesale rates, with a fixed $15/month fee.
The price is mostly at the AUD 0.10 - 0.20 / kWh during the day currently (its winter here) and as of right now (16:00 AEST), it's showing that 40% of the source is renewables (on a cloudy day)
The price has peaks at 07:00-09:00 and 17:00-19:00 and the renewables drop when the sun goes down, but on average wind days, it drops to ~20% from 40%.
Household solar is booming in Australia, to the point where governments are now rebating battery storage instead of solar panels, because the grid can't handle the inflow during solar peak. It's almost at the point where it would be worthwhile to have a household battery that uses grid energy during the day to charge.
In the meantime, our federal government wants to spend AUD660m on an unneeded gas peaker plant that is estimated to only be needed 2% of the time.
Renewables got a long way to go. Storage is barely feasible right now and is the largest reason why it just can't work. This isn't a "Debbie downer" speaking here, these are facts. Green energy cannot support the infrastructure we've created right now. We could revert society to adapt to needing less power, but you're more likely capable of overthrowing the US government than have people be okay with using 30% if their max power usage nowadays.
There is no real need to reduce energy consumption. We have plenty of space to build solar panels and wind turbines. But primary energy consumption will naturally go down a bit when you replace ICEs (30% efficient or so?) with EVs (80% efficient or so?) and oil and gas heaters with heat pumps (2 4 times as efficient). Of course electricity consumption will be way larger.
I was under the impression that storage is the crucial missing piece?
Edit: to be fair, the US is still investing in nuclear just not at the “expansion” scale for the most part. Only one new reactor in construction rn.
Well, yes. It's a panel that only generates power when sunlight is shining on it. When the sun goes down, solar stops producing power.
Switching all power generation to PV solar is going to require massive overprovisioning. This has been obvious, and widely known, for decades. Cost-per-KWh is going to be widely variable during the day. This has also been known. Running an aluminum smelter at midnight is going to stop being economical.
We can either do this, or pay to raise every building and road in Miami by 6 feet. One or the other.
Or will we be smart enough to chose to what use we put our energy?
The mechanism we use is markets: the energy is put for sale, and bought by those who have some use for it.
High-carbon energy comes with an externality, CO2 emission, which doesn't depend on the use to which this energy is put.
There is an obvious solution to this: make high-carbon energy expensive, and use the Pigovian tax to subsidize installation of more renewable energy. The coal plants can pay for their own obsolescence, win-win.
Bitcoin is a complete distraction from this goal. If the price of energy doubled everywhere, overnight, and the market price of Bitcoin stayed perfectly level, Bitcoin's energy use would halve also.
So if you make high-carbon energy expensive, and renewable energy cheap, Bitcoin miners will use the renewable stuff instead. Indeed, to a significant degree this is already what happens.
Now it's still 0.5% of the world's electricity production. What would prevent it for jumping to 30% in a few years?
In your assumption, the bitcoin market price stays level. But it can double or triple quickly, and peak for short intervals of time, or stay high. All because of the belief of bitcoiners. That's all just a huge socio-psychological problem.
Dead Comment
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/ammonia-renewable-fu...
The emissions add up: Ammonia production consumes about 2% of the world's energy and generates 1% of its CO2.
2% not 20%
Source: https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...
You point out other ways to improve our energy consumption to avoid touching to your beloved crypto mining. While it could be both.
A lot of people seem to think that market prices are determined by production costs but that isn’t the case.
Market prices are determined by supply and demand and that’s where renewables (except for hydro power) are very bad at.
This is why Germany has the highest electricity prices worldwide. Because it has a large share of wind and solar meaning that a large portion of the electricity is not supplied on demand:
> https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
So stating that producing renewable electricity is cheap is rather irrelevant as long as the electricity cannot be produced on demand.
I love Germany for many reasons and have lived there but pricing is not one of these reasons. Cellular, home Broadband, 4G LTE, Bank fees, that weird radio tax, and just about everything that is run by corporations is expensive compared to many other nations.
Are energy prices higher in every country that has more renewable sources than not?
https://euanmearns.com/the-causes-of-the-differences-between...