Too bad gas and oil didn't have trillions in subsidies over the past 100 years. Maybe had we listened to Jimmy Carter we would have continued to lead the world instead of now being firmly in the back.
Very few people realize that for most of the US, cheaper electricity costs for the utilities means lower profits, because most are regulated utilities that take a fixed profit on costs. Models for this vary greatly, sometimes they only take fixed profit on necessary grid investments (where necessary is determined by the utility, then stamped for approval by a Public Utility Commission, which has a board that might be elected and susceptible to bribing/election malefeasance, such as in Arizona...)
So-called "natural" monopolies are quite difficult to regulate correctly. And the solution we chose as a society a century ago might not be the right one for today.
of course they are. market forces are what you want for everything. granted, you may want to internalize a negative externality like the climate change induced by greenhouse gas emissions, but that's literally correcting market forces.
I kind of agree in the sense that utilities at least need regulation. You can't leave it all up to the market. (I've lived through the winter storm days-long blackout that lies down that path.)
But, I don't think this particular thing proves that point. What we have here is a chaotic shift to a new equilibrium. Technology has changed and needs/priorities have changed.
People wouldn't overbuild solar if they could forecast that it wouldn't be profitable. The issue is they can't forecast.
The reason we aren't allocating resources optimally is not about who is in control or what their motives are. It's that we don't have the information we would need in order to be able to.
Couple of years with occasional negative prices and that market you so detest will cover the place with batteries, solving both the negative prices and reducing load on the grid.
You can view this as a natural or even beneficial feedback mechanism that keeps solar generation and battery storage on par with each other.
Too much solar leads to crashing prices which leads to more battery investment. Once the batteries are built, solar prices recover somewhat and solar investment starts to make sense again.
Ideally you wouldn't overshoot too much on the solar and have big price crashes. But if you do overshoot dramatically, the incentive to build batteries increases, so maybe you recover faster.
This was one of the actual problems highlighted by the people who coined the term "duck curve" over a decade ago.
One of the main ways we've avoided this problem so far is that solar kept getting cheaper.
So it's not really a problem caused by cheap solar, it's just basic market competition, lots of supply with no barrier to entry drives prices down towards the long term marginal cost.
Right, but would not marginal cost approaching zero amplify this problem under the current market system (and without any other mitigations)? So not exactly causal, but making it from a small to a bigger issue.
This is really a non-problem. Curtailment is easy and doesn't cost anything, it just needs a slightly better feedback mechanism than the current grid supplies, but honestly even a 24hr timer and ammeter would do it.
With $40/kWh batteries available soon, i think even having 100 kWh of storage for a house will be rather common. With 14.4kWp solar, 5 MWh of electricity use per year and 100 kWh at 50€/kWh of battery you have 90% autarky and a time-to-value of 8-9 years. Pretty sweet.
My cheat code for 100 kWH is an EV that supports V2H. It's becoming supported in more cars, so I want to buy an EV as my next car. I don't anticipate battery savings and new tech reaching me faster than replacing my aging car with an EV, hence this path.
I'm in South Africa if relevant, and range anxiety is being alleviated by competition in the vehicle charging space, and municipal grid charging still comes to about 70% cheaper than fuel.
Not OP, but a recent auction in China has utility scale at $52/kWh. Given the cost decline curve of storage, I would assume we arrive at $40 within 1-2 years.
Not if you consider that you need to either renew or add battery capacity (and panels and power electronics) after x years? Or did you take that into account?
There is small problem though - all of the people will need the last 10% at the same time. And because you need infrastructure that will work only 10 percent of the time, expect the price of kwh to be 10 times the current to compensate.
The less you need the grid - the more expensive is what you will pull from it because the infrastructure costs will be spread on fewer kwh.
Really, every one interested in renewables and net-zero should listen.
IIRC, my own take aways from this interview:
At the time of this interview, in the USA, because of subsidies and tariffs, only natural gas (IIRC ~$70 gWh) is cheaper than solar + battery for new generation.
Battery storage costs continue to drop faster than any one has anticipated. -40% in 2024 alone. Wow!
Even people savvy about our glorious renewable energy future don't fully appreciate just how quickly how fast both solar and batteries have and will continue to improve.
I don't remember the specifics when where wind is preferable to solar. IIRC, even in Finland solar + battery still pencils out.
Since solar + battery only gets us ~90% (?) to net-zero, we'll still need wind. (Ditto adv geo therm, heat batteries, pumped hydro, etc. Because we'll need A LOT more of everything for net-negative, to restore 360 ppm for CO2 and other GHGs.)
Personal note: Am very eager for Jenny Chase's yearly report on solar. Especially prospects for scaling up wind generation. Chase previously expressed concern about wind lagging behind solar. Which is bad, because we'll still need a lot of wind (at northern latitudes).
Having quickly scanned prior comments here, my impression is that u/epistatis is spot on.
In other words, most everyone's priors need a major update.
It'll be interesting if the sodium ion battery hype can combine with solar and give real base power alternatives. I think claims of cheapest don't really count unless it's qualified as non base power.
The problem with the idea of "base power" is that in the past, the cheapest electricity was from the big thermal generators that take a day to warm up, and operate most cheaply by pumping out at maximum efficiency 24 hours a day. You could then layer on the more expensive electricity sources that could spin up in 15 minutes or a few hours, and match the demand curve, as long as you matched baseload generators to the minimum of the demand curve, and have a cost-optimal electricity mix.
Now that we have cheaper sources of energy for parts of the day, "base" power is a much less desirable concept. It's gone from a simple and straightforward optimization problem that a middle-schooler could solve to a cost optimization problem that markets and linear solvers can solve.
Now that we have cheap storage, and solar-plus-storage is cheaper than coal in the UK, the cost optimization is getting simpler: get rid of all the base load coal!
As you say, base power is just a concept. It is not a thing that exists in the real world. It's also a bad concept. Electricity demand and supply can be modelled statistically for a significantly better understanding than can be compressed into a single term like "base load". But that doesn't admit for very good rhetoric on internet forums.
Define "real base power"? You think the grid can only operate if every generator is always-on? How do you square that with the fact that the grid is operating just fine with this stuff already?
This is a fallacy, basically. Not least because electricity is by far the most mobile traded commodity in human history. Not enough sun today where you live? Buy your power from across the continent, where they have plenty. Or from your wind generators which are working fine. Or the wind generators across the continent if you have to. Or crank up the hydro dams (most of which rarely run at 100%) a bit to handle the shortfall. Or even fire up an idle gas plant if you absolutely can't get anything else.
The idea that solar and wind aren't (sigh) "real" is a lie that someone sold you. The real world relies on a lot of this stuff already and the promised apocalypse never arrived. Go figure.
> Or the wind generators across the continent if you have to.
Transmission losses are typically very substantial in most grids that are AC based. For example, a cross-country power transmission with the USAs grid would result in ~36% losses (napkin math at about 20% loss per 1000km).
Reality isn't as simple as "ship the electricity" unfortunately; it makes a lot of sense to keep generation near consumption.
One thing that could help would be to see more folks who are bullish on solar actually push the new promise that it gives: not just that we'll have clean energy (yay, but abstract) - we'll have cheap energy, if we do it right. Tons and tons of it for so cheap that you'll almost not even have to think about it, especially in comparison to fossil fuels today. Every aspect of the supply chain is simpler and cleaner.
If people could see that at some point, keeping their house at a perfect temperature with an electric heat pump would lead to them _never thinking about a heating bill again_... that would be far more concrete than promises of staving off climate change.
> How do you square that with the fact that the grid is operating just fine with this stuff already?
Simple every grid in the united states has enough reliable generation capacity to take up the slack when solar fails. But that means the cost of building all those natural gas peaker plants is part of the cost of solar (it's never included in the LCOE).
Not every generator needs to be always on, but the generation needs to be relatively independent of external conditions, especially when there might be correlation between high usage at disadvantageous external conditions (for example it’s colder and less sun in winter).
Recognizing this does not mean one is hostile to renewables, even though some people that are hostile use this talking point dishonestly.
> These hybrid setups, which combine solar panels with batteries, are now standard in many regions and allow solar energy to be stored and released when needed, turning it into a more reliable, dispatchable source of power that helps balance grid demand.
On one hand, I think people underestimate how much energy our grids demand in a 24 hour cycle. The amount of lithium it would take to handle an unusually cloudy week would be astronomical.
On the other hand, one of the ironies of electric cars is that they are one of the least effective uses of battery capacity. A Tesla with a 60kwh battery is probably touching less than 20kwh of capacity every day.
So theoretically if you use the batteries for grid storage and actually cycle them regularly from 80% down to 20%, the battery capacity would be well over 2x - 4x more effective at offsetting carbon sources. (Even more so if you are offsetting worse sources like coal).
> The amount of lithium it would take to handle an unusually cloudy week would be astronomical.
I don't think it's astronomical. At most a few dozen kg per person. Compare that to the amount of steel that we produce per person just to give everybody access to cars!
And it's certainly not more astronomical than the amount of natural gas that we already extract, transport, and burn for electricity.
We have built big things in the past, there's no reason we can't do it again today. In fact, it's going to be far easier today because our tech is better and our factories' productivity is so much higher than in the past.
A few dozen kg is quite generous. There's 160 g of lithium in a kWh of lithium batteries. A typical household uses less than 30kWh per day. At 2.6 people per household, let's round to 10 kWh per person per day. So 1.6kg of lithium per day, 11kg for a week. But you don't need that much battery -- solar produces power even on cloudy days.
During the height of the industrial revolution, humans were able to double steel production roughly every 6 years. We've doubled global lithium production in the last 3!
Even so, if you do the math about how much lithium we need to get to a few dozen kg per person given that rate of growth, we're still looking at 20-30 years. (There are also a lot of elemental and labor bottlenecks).
So you're right that it's not astronomical! We just might have speedier expectations for when it's achievable.
Fortunately other chemistries are making their way down the learning curve lithium's been on, and after a few moment reflection it would be astounding if the same types of storage that are optimal for mobile consumers also happen to be optimal for grid balancing, as daily grid balancing can be done pretty reasonably with a c rating[0] of about .2 or even .1, and as long they aren't so heavy they need to be placed on massive foundation piles, weight is not really a factor. Just need to make it as cheap as possible.
Also, sodium batteries are now coming online. Slightly lower energy density, but potentially vastly lower cost. From looking at cost trends and increased production, it also seems pretty obvious at this point that we probably are going to get those vast quantities of battery storage everyone is so surprised about.
I'm still a little bit skeptical because chemical energy storage is inherently corrosive and unstable and so maintaining installed capacity is more expensive.
Unlike power generation, where you can build a facility and it can more or less run for decades with basic maintenance, batteries effectively have a limited number of cycles they can be relied on for. So you would effectively have to remanufacture your entire storage capacity every 10-15 years. So scaling up on storage would theoretically get exponentially more expensive the more of the grid you take over.
Obviously battery technology is improving and each 1% gain in improvement represents drastic savings. But I think there is still lots of reason to diversify technologically and continue to look into complementary sources of base power like nuclear.
> The amount of lithium it would take to handle an unusually cloudy week would be astronomical.
Unusual events shouldn't be handled by high capex, high efficiency storage. They should be handled by lower capex, lower round trip efficiency storage (as should long term/seasonal storage).
Grids don't need "batteries" as consumers think about them. They can store energy using gravity, for example pumping water up into a reservoir (to store) and letting it drain through a turbine using gravity (to convert back into electricity).
At grid scale, all sorts of different batteries become feasible. My favorite is the one that uses solar during the day to lift heavy objects, which then turn a generator at night when they come back down.
Smart water heaters are interesting, too (though not grid scale). They can use a power surplus during the day to overheat water, reducing the power demand at night. I assume they're smart enough to keep delivering water at a safe temperature.
> On one hand, I think people underestimate how much energy our grids demand in a 24 hour cycle. The amount of lithium it would take to handle an unusually cloudy week would be astronomical.
but thats why you have more than one energy source right?
Even on a cloudy week, I still generate power, just not enough. Thats why I'm not truely off grid, otherwise I'd need to move from 5kwp(3 electrical) to 15kwp.
Mind you, the most expensive thing for doing that is either the inverters, or the mounts. Its got to the point that solar panels are cheaper than 18mm plywood.
I don't think it's a fair argument to say that EVs are an ineffective use of battery capacity. They are certainly more affordable and accessible than home batteries.
Have you seen the cost of home batteries? Napkin math shows their installed-cost in my region of the US is the same as the fractional cost of an EV. But the EV comes with a free drivetrain, seats, and airbags!
It should be noted that those low costs for solar installations are not including consumer rooftop solar. The consumer rooftop solar cost is usually one of the most expensive ways you can generate electricity - often several times the cost of utility solar installations:
The high 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. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme.
Any subsidies for solar power should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further than a dollar spent subsidizing wealthy homeowners who install panels on their roof.
> Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather
That's true today, but I bet it won't be in 5 years time. Around this year or last year batteries have hit a price point where they make financial sense for ordinary people, and in a couple of years you'd be mad not to have them if you have rooftop (and somewhere to put the batteries of course).
> Any subsidies for solar power should go to utility grade solar.
At this point, it should probably go towards storage, grid capacity, or things like EV charging infrastructure. Solar generation doesn't need it.
> The consumer rooftop solar cost is usually one of the most expensive ways you can generate electricity
This may well be true, but there are positive externalities:
- It has reduced land use compared to other energy generation methods
- Power is produced near the point of use, reducing transmission requirements
- Most of the cost is labour for installation which creates jobs
Given that rooftop solar usually pays for itself despite being less cost-efficient that other forms of solar, I see no reason to discourage it.
All new construction should have it, at least. The cost differential for building a new home's roof and outfitting that roof with solar just isn't high enough to justify doing it differently. Plus it improves cooling/heating costs and protects the roofing materials from direct sunlight.
>...Around this year or last year batteries have hit a price point where they make financial sense for ordinary people,
The LCOE of battery systems for residential systems is still incredibly high according to the Lazard report - an unsubsidized cost maybe 3 - 10 times more expensive than grid batteries.
>...Given that rooftop solar usually pays for itself despite being less cost-efficient that other forms of solar,
If that is the case, then less well off rate payers shouldn't have to subsidize their wealthier neighbors. If it does require subsidies, then that money should go to where it will do the most good in decarbonizing the grid - not as a giveaway to wealthier home owners.
>I see no reason to discourage it.
Who said anything about discouraging it? I certainly wouldn't want to discourage it.
Solar "subsidies" are almost universally tax credits, meaning the only money involved is the money paid by the homeowners. So, for society, rooftop solar is by far the cheapest option. It costs the rest of us nothing, the homeowners pay for it.
Money is also not limited, it is in fact created by the banks when someone takes a loan, for example to put solar on their roofs.
Meaning there is no money lost from society that could instead be used to build utility solar, just because someone puts solar on their roofs. If your county borrows money to make utility solar, that money is also created by the bank then and there.
Also note that you are quoting last years Lazard report. Solar is way cheaper in this year's report. It will probably be even cheaper in the next one.
>Solar "subsidies" are almost universally tax credits, meaning the only money involved is the money paid by the homeowners.
Well, it means that the government will have less available money to spend on other priorities. Often there are also state and utility subsidies, but those subsidies are often not the largest subsidy. Besides the 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. As I said before, the whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme.
>...Solar is way cheaper in this year's report.
No it is not. I used last year's numbers since the 2025 report for reasons, does not include consumer rooftop solar. The closest comparison would likely be the category of Solar PV—Community & C&I. In 2024, the cost estimate was $54 - $191 in 2025, the price range was $81 - $217.
I think you’re missing the real-politik of rooftop installations. The person installing the panel has a few square meters of empty and unproductive space, over which they have exclusive construction rights. And which is already connected to a grid, with capacity to absorb its production, physically close to the consumers of its output.
That combination of factors is fairly rare in most of Europe & North America - especially when you’re looking for multiple contiguous kilometres of land for utility scale solar. There’s a lot of that type of land out in Texas and Australia, but there’s much less of it in the Scottish Highlands.
Yep, and electrical distribution is frequently a bottleneck, and electrification initiatives (EVs, heat pumps) and data center buildouts are causing that to a larger and larger issue - colocating generation and usage seems very helpful for this.
That hugely depends on the region. In my corner of the world the scheme is net-billing, so homeowners are selling energy at wholesale prices.
My friend has a 10kW setup combined with a 10kWh battery. Main adjustment he made was prevent the heat pump from keeping the water hot during the night, as that was just wasting energy.
After this adjustment his electricity bills halved despite only really selling energy in the peak of the summer season. The savings translate to a 10-year return on investment before subsidies.
Even this is a subsidy. Your friend was benefiting from the presence of the grid even when they weren't pulling energy from it. They still had the ability to pull energy from it when they did need. If enough people go that route then the grid will start selling this right and charge you even if you don't use it.
This is true. A lot of the older panels are also rather inefficient and come with a rather poor lifespan. It's part of the reason I don't personally have any form of solar despite working in the industry.
Technology is catching up on the solar panel front though. French Heliup are producing panels which are only 5kg per square meter. Which makes them significantly easier to install on roof-tops. I imagine I'll eventually have solar panels on my roof, but I'll likely wait another decade for battery tech to also be more viable.
I would have to cut down so many trees around my house to get effective sunlight on the roof more than a few hours a day. Plus my roof is pitched east/west so at best I have half the roof in sunlight for half the day. I do have quite a bit of clear space behind the house, so I could consider a system that sits on the ground.
I just like paying the utility every month and not having to worry about owning, maintaining, and repairing my own infrastructure though. As it is now, if anything goes wrong upstream of the meter, that's not my responsibility.
The high cost of rooftop solar in the US is mostly a regulatory choice. From tariffs driving up prices significantly, to completely scattered permitting processes city-to-city, to wild swings in utility policies that make solar a good-to-bad decision overnight, it all drives costs up. So the only solar installers who survive are those who are able to swoop in when the utility policies change and can drive customer acquisition super quickly ($$$), and have massive permitting office experience that lets them deploy. That all costs a lot of money and drives out competition from the space.
So we pay something like 3x-5x for residential solar in the US versus Australia. Because we choose to as a society.
Also, I heartily disagree that utility scale solar is obviously cheaper. Transmission and distribution costs are the biggest cost on the grid, and utility scale solar needs to pay for that whereas residential solar drives down T&D costs.
We definitely need a lot of utility scale solar, but if we want cheaper electricity we need to incentivize tons of residential solar so that we can keep our grid costs lower.
Well, very few in the US realize that residential solar in the US is 3x the price it is in Australia, let alone that a lot of it caused by regulatory structures, so it’s hard to say it’s a conscious choice we’ve made…
But yeah, would be great if we could do something about it.
There are some baby steps - Maryland passed a law last year to force adoption of uniform permitting process via NREL’s SolarApp+, hopefully that’ll make a dent.
>...Also, I heartily disagree that utility scale solar is obviously cheaper. Transmission and distribution costs are the biggest cost on the grid, and utility scale solar needs to pay for that whereas residential solar drives down T&D costs.
If we are really at the point where distribution costs for utility solar make it cost anywhere near the cost of consumer rooftop solar, we have a real problem. If that is true, we probably need a different approach to decarbonize the grid. I don't think you are right.
Australian rooftop solar is the cheapest consumer energy in history. This is despite the hardware and salaries being roughly equal to the US where the cost is about 3 times more. So it's not wise to extrapolate from US prices.
And in general, you should check your electricity bill to see how much is actually for generation vs transmission.
> Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather
I've posted this several times here, but I think it's worth responding to claims like this, as they are plain wrong.
I had a house with a 4.8kWh battery, and 6.6kW of panels. Just our overnight consumption was over 4.8kWh, so I purchased a generator "in case". Later during a period of high rainfall, we got flooded in for a week. The authorities cut off the power because of risks, so no power for a week. It was a once in a decade rain event, so "inclement weather" understates it.
In that week I learnt what a little adaption can do to your electricity consumption. We never used the generator. We did stopped bulk heating water, and of course all house heating / cooling was turned off. That was about the only life style changes from memory - well perhaps no 2 hour roasts in the oven.
Turns out even in inclement weather the sun does peek through occasionally, and when it does you can do high power consuming activities like wash clothes. It also turns out solar panels don't shut off under overcast conditions, they just drop to about 20% capacity - which means for us they output 1kW most of the day. And that turns out to be more than enough to charge the 4.8kWh battery, and that battery more than enough to power the refrigerators, lights, computers, TV's, fans, and microwave overnight.
4.8kWh is stuff all of course. Yet it suffices to get you through during a once in a decade event.
We've built a new house now, and have 40kWh battery (oddly cost us the same as the 4.8kWh). We also have 32kW panels. They will generate 6.4kW during inclement weather. Do you see the implications of this?
If the electricity bill doesn't remain in credit, we will just disconnect. Why wouldn't it remain in credit you ask? It's because you can't sell power when the sun is shining where I live, as the solar duck curve forces the price to go negative. There is a $2/day flat cost for being connected to the grid, even if you draw nothing. So we have to sell $2 of electricity every day for being connected to remain viable.
I think perhaps we will, but only because of the battery. When the grid suffers some outage the price spikes by a factor of around 100. That almost never happens when the sun is shining of course, because the solar over capacity just shoulders the load. But when those coal fired generators trip during the night (which they regularly do), you get to make some real money from the battery capacity.
Totally. Grid solar and grid battery installations are gonna rock the world but rooftop solar is too bespoke and labor intensive. It goes directly against the benefit of solar’s mass manufacturing
This isn't surprising. Or new. I've been saying for years solar is the future. Solar has so many advantages over every other form of power generation. It's flexible, scalable (meaning you can have an installation any size from a solar farm to a calculator) and robust because it has no moving parts. It has no pollution (noise or chemical) and can be dual-use on many structures, everything from rooftops to adding solar to highways.
The big problem with solar? Regulation around installing it that is entirely designed to protect the profits of utility companies.
We have predatory financing around solar where companies are allowed to put a lien on your house and then essentially extort the homeowner if they ever choose to sell such that solar can reduce the value of your house significantly.
We limit the amount of solar basically so the utility can keep selling you electricity.
One might say it's to cover the bullding and maintenance of the transmission infrastructure. There's some truth to that. But at the same time utilities are generating massive profits, doing share buybacks and giving massive concessions to data centers that everyone else is paying for.
Basically we would all be better off if every electricity provider wasn't a private company but instead what a municipal operation like municipal broadband.
There's also the problem of rural opposition to solar farms. Not unusual to see a "no solar farms" sign every few hundred feet in some parts of Indiana where I wander (often in the same areas where the cars have bumper stickers celebrating coal).
As a steady income stream, solar is a huge help to smaller farmers that might otherwise go bankrupt from a few bad years' of harvests. Larger growers hate that they no longer get to gobble up the land of the smaller growers, so there's a strong political incentive to block solar from their side.
Readit News
https://www.aalto.fi/en/news/rapid-growth-of-solar-power-in-...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/plunging-solar-captu...
The transmission should of course be state owned due to being a natural monopoly.
So-called "natural" monopolies are quite difficult to regulate correctly. And the solution we chose as a society a century ago might not be the right one for today.
But, I don't think this particular thing proves that point. What we have here is a chaotic shift to a new equilibrium. Technology has changed and needs/priorities have changed.
People wouldn't overbuild solar if they could forecast that it wouldn't be profitable. The issue is they can't forecast.
The reason we aren't allocating resources optimally is not about who is in control or what their motives are. It's that we don't have the information we would need in order to be able to.
TLDR: growing pains, not misaligned incentives.
(Although, that might not work well in Finland in the summer.)
Too much solar leads to crashing prices which leads to more battery investment. Once the batteries are built, solar prices recover somewhat and solar investment starts to make sense again.
Ideally you wouldn't overshoot too much on the solar and have big price crashes. But if you do overshoot dramatically, the incentive to build batteries increases, so maybe you recover faster.
One of the main ways we've avoided this problem so far is that solar kept getting cheaper.
So it's not really a problem caused by cheap solar, it's just basic market competition, lots of supply with no barrier to entry drives prices down towards the long term marginal cost.
It's about nobody making any money, so there will be no incentive to continue building solar.
5th October was one such day. From midnight to 17:00 the spot price was negative or zero.
Taxes and distribution costs make the consumer price a lot higher than zero.
I'm in South Africa if relevant, and range anxiety is being alleviated by competition in the vehicle charging space, and municipal grid charging still comes to about 70% cheaper than fuel.
Dead Comment
https://aukehoekstra.substack.com/p/batteries-how-cheap-can-...
https://energynews.biz/catls-19-kwh-sodium-ion-claims-face-r...
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/08/catl-sodium-ion-batter...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44513185
It's just one metric.
The less you need the grid - the more expensive is what you will pull from it because the infrastructure costs will be spread on fewer kwh.
100 kWh of energy will last the average US house three days. And when you throw in people's EV batteries too...
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Solar+storage is so much farther along than you think / A conversation with Kostantsa Rangelova and Dave Jones of Ember. [2025/07/16]
https://www.volts.wtf/p/solarstorage-is-so-much-farther-alon...
Really, every one interested in renewables and net-zero should listen.
IIRC, my own take aways from this interview:
Having quickly scanned prior comments here, my impression is that u/epistatis is spot on.In other words, most everyone's priors need a major update.
I've converted it to pdf.
https://files.catbox.moe/tfoim0.pdf
Now that we have cheaper sources of energy for parts of the day, "base" power is a much less desirable concept. It's gone from a simple and straightforward optimization problem that a middle-schooler could solve to a cost optimization problem that markets and linear solvers can solve.
Now that we have cheap storage, and solar-plus-storage is cheaper than coal in the UK, the cost optimization is getting simpler: get rid of all the base load coal!
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
That study is already old as the prices for batteries have come down a lot more since then.
Getting "18" hours of power, thats actually important (https://timera-energy.com/blog/iberian-price-divergence-on-i...) if you can cover the evening peak, then most of your energy costs disappear.
This is a fallacy, basically. Not least because electricity is by far the most mobile traded commodity in human history. Not enough sun today where you live? Buy your power from across the continent, where they have plenty. Or from your wind generators which are working fine. Or the wind generators across the continent if you have to. Or crank up the hydro dams (most of which rarely run at 100%) a bit to handle the shortfall. Or even fire up an idle gas plant if you absolutely can't get anything else.
The idea that solar and wind aren't (sigh) "real" is a lie that someone sold you. The real world relies on a lot of this stuff already and the promised apocalypse never arrived. Go figure.
Transmission losses are typically very substantial in most grids that are AC based. For example, a cross-country power transmission with the USAs grid would result in ~36% losses (napkin math at about 20% loss per 1000km).
Reality isn't as simple as "ship the electricity" unfortunately; it makes a lot of sense to keep generation near consumption.
Edit: Since people like this comment, take a look at this: https://patternenergy.com/projects/southern-spirit-transmiss...
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If people could see that at some point, keeping their house at a perfect temperature with an electric heat pump would lead to them _never thinking about a heating bill again_... that would be far more concrete than promises of staving off climate change.
Simple every grid in the united states has enough reliable generation capacity to take up the slack when solar fails. But that means the cost of building all those natural gas peaker plants is part of the cost of solar (it's never included in the LCOE).
Recognizing this does not mean one is hostile to renewables, even though some people that are hostile use this talking point dishonestly.
On one hand, I think people underestimate how much energy our grids demand in a 24 hour cycle. The amount of lithium it would take to handle an unusually cloudy week would be astronomical.
On the other hand, one of the ironies of electric cars is that they are one of the least effective uses of battery capacity. A Tesla with a 60kwh battery is probably touching less than 20kwh of capacity every day.
So theoretically if you use the batteries for grid storage and actually cycle them regularly from 80% down to 20%, the battery capacity would be well over 2x - 4x more effective at offsetting carbon sources. (Even more so if you are offsetting worse sources like coal).
I don't think it's astronomical. At most a few dozen kg per person. Compare that to the amount of steel that we produce per person just to give everybody access to cars!
And it's certainly not more astronomical than the amount of natural gas that we already extract, transport, and burn for electricity.
We have built big things in the past, there's no reason we can't do it again today. In fact, it's going to be far easier today because our tech is better and our factories' productivity is so much higher than in the past.
Even so, if you do the math about how much lithium we need to get to a few dozen kg per person given that rate of growth, we're still looking at 20-30 years. (There are also a lot of elemental and labor bottlenecks).
So you're right that it's not astronomical! We just might have speedier expectations for when it's achievable.
[0] battery c rating is what fraction of the battery can discharge in 1 hour https://wikibattery.org/en/wiki-us/battery/charging-rate-cha...
Unlike power generation, where you can build a facility and it can more or less run for decades with basic maintenance, batteries effectively have a limited number of cycles they can be relied on for. So you would effectively have to remanufacture your entire storage capacity every 10-15 years. So scaling up on storage would theoretically get exponentially more expensive the more of the grid you take over.
Obviously battery technology is improving and each 1% gain in improvement represents drastic savings. But I think there is still lots of reason to diversify technologically and continue to look into complementary sources of base power like nuclear.
Unusual events shouldn't be handled by high capex, high efficiency storage. They should be handled by lower capex, lower round trip efficiency storage (as should long term/seasonal storage).
I will once again point to Standard Thermal.
https://www.standardthermal.com/
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal-copy
https://austinvernon.site/blog/standardthermal.html
Ten cents per kWh of storage capacity!
but thats why you have more than one energy source right?
Even on a cloudy week, I still generate power, just not enough. Thats why I'm not truely off grid, otherwise I'd need to move from 5kwp(3 electrical) to 15kwp.
Mind you, the most expensive thing for doing that is either the inverters, or the mounts. Its got to the point that solar panels are cheaper than 18mm plywood.
Have you seen the cost of home batteries? Napkin math shows their installed-cost in my region of the US is the same as the fractional cost of an EV. But the EV comes with a free drivetrain, seats, and airbags!
https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
The high 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. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme.
Any subsidies for solar power should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further than a dollar spent subsidizing wealthy homeowners who install panels on their roof.
That's true today, but I bet it won't be in 5 years time. Around this year or last year batteries have hit a price point where they make financial sense for ordinary people, and in a couple of years you'd be mad not to have them if you have rooftop (and somewhere to put the batteries of course).
> Any subsidies for solar power should go to utility grade solar.
At this point, it should probably go towards storage, grid capacity, or things like EV charging infrastructure. Solar generation doesn't need it.
> The consumer rooftop solar cost is usually one of the most expensive ways you can generate electricity
This may well be true, but there are positive externalities:
- It has reduced land use compared to other energy generation methods
- Power is produced near the point of use, reducing transmission requirements
- Most of the cost is labour for installation which creates jobs
Given that rooftop solar usually pays for itself despite being less cost-efficient that other forms of solar, I see no reason to discourage it.
The LCOE of battery systems for residential systems is still incredibly high according to the Lazard report - an unsubsidized cost maybe 3 - 10 times more expensive than grid batteries.
>...Given that rooftop solar usually pays for itself despite being less cost-efficient that other forms of solar,
If that is the case, then less well off rate payers shouldn't have to subsidize their wealthier neighbors. If it does require subsidies, then that money should go to where it will do the most good in decarbonizing the grid - not as a giveaway to wealthier home owners.
>I see no reason to discourage it.
Who said anything about discouraging it? I certainly wouldn't want to discourage it.
Solar "subsidies" are almost universally tax credits, meaning the only money involved is the money paid by the homeowners. So, for society, rooftop solar is by far the cheapest option. It costs the rest of us nothing, the homeowners pay for it.
Money is also not limited, it is in fact created by the banks when someone takes a loan, for example to put solar on their roofs.
Meaning there is no money lost from society that could instead be used to build utility solar, just because someone puts solar on their roofs. If your county borrows money to make utility solar, that money is also created by the bank then and there.
Also note that you are quoting last years Lazard report. Solar is way cheaper in this year's report. It will probably be even cheaper in the next one.
Well, it means that the government will have less available money to spend on other priorities. Often there are also state and utility subsidies, but those subsidies are often not the largest subsidy. Besides the 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. As I said before, the whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme.
>...Solar is way cheaper in this year's report.
No it is not. I used last year's numbers since the 2025 report for reasons, does not include consumer rooftop solar. The closest comparison would likely be the category of Solar PV—Community & C&I. In 2024, the cost estimate was $54 - $191 in 2025, the price range was $81 - $217.
That combination of factors is fairly rare in most of Europe & North America - especially when you’re looking for multiple contiguous kilometres of land for utility scale solar. There’s a lot of that type of land out in Texas and Australia, but there’s much less of it in the Scottish Highlands.
My friend has a 10kW setup combined with a 10kWh battery. Main adjustment he made was prevent the heat pump from keeping the water hot during the night, as that was just wasting energy.
After this adjustment his electricity bills halved despite only really selling energy in the peak of the summer season. The savings translate to a 10-year return on investment before subsidies.
Technology is catching up on the solar panel front though. French Heliup are producing panels which are only 5kg per square meter. Which makes them significantly easier to install on roof-tops. I imagine I'll eventually have solar panels on my roof, but I'll likely wait another decade for battery tech to also be more viable.
I just like paying the utility every month and not having to worry about owning, maintaining, and repairing my own infrastructure though. As it is now, if anything goes wrong upstream of the meter, that's not my responsibility.
So we pay something like 3x-5x for residential solar in the US versus Australia. Because we choose to as a society.
Also, I heartily disagree that utility scale solar is obviously cheaper. Transmission and distribution costs are the biggest cost on the grid, and utility scale solar needs to pay for that whereas residential solar drives down T&D costs.
We definitely need a lot of utility scale solar, but if we want cheaper electricity we need to incentivize tons of residential solar so that we can keep our grid costs lower.
But yeah, would be great if we could do something about it.
There are some baby steps - Maryland passed a law last year to force adoption of uniform permitting process via NREL’s SolarApp+, hopefully that’ll make a dent.
If we are really at the point where distribution costs for utility solar make it cost anywhere near the cost of consumer rooftop solar, we have a real problem. If that is true, we probably need a different approach to decarbonize the grid. I don't think you are right.
And in general, you should check your electricity bill to see how much is actually for generation vs transmission.
I've posted this several times here, but I think it's worth responding to claims like this, as they are plain wrong.
I had a house with a 4.8kWh battery, and 6.6kW of panels. Just our overnight consumption was over 4.8kWh, so I purchased a generator "in case". Later during a period of high rainfall, we got flooded in for a week. The authorities cut off the power because of risks, so no power for a week. It was a once in a decade rain event, so "inclement weather" understates it.
In that week I learnt what a little adaption can do to your electricity consumption. We never used the generator. We did stopped bulk heating water, and of course all house heating / cooling was turned off. That was about the only life style changes from memory - well perhaps no 2 hour roasts in the oven.
Turns out even in inclement weather the sun does peek through occasionally, and when it does you can do high power consuming activities like wash clothes. It also turns out solar panels don't shut off under overcast conditions, they just drop to about 20% capacity - which means for us they output 1kW most of the day. And that turns out to be more than enough to charge the 4.8kWh battery, and that battery more than enough to power the refrigerators, lights, computers, TV's, fans, and microwave overnight.
4.8kWh is stuff all of course. Yet it suffices to get you through during a once in a decade event.
We've built a new house now, and have 40kWh battery (oddly cost us the same as the 4.8kWh). We also have 32kW panels. They will generate 6.4kW during inclement weather. Do you see the implications of this?
If the electricity bill doesn't remain in credit, we will just disconnect. Why wouldn't it remain in credit you ask? It's because you can't sell power when the sun is shining where I live, as the solar duck curve forces the price to go negative. There is a $2/day flat cost for being connected to the grid, even if you draw nothing. So we have to sell $2 of electricity every day for being connected to remain viable.
I think perhaps we will, but only because of the battery. When the grid suffers some outage the price spikes by a factor of around 100. That almost never happens when the sun is shining of course, because the solar over capacity just shoulders the load. But when those coal fired generators trip during the night (which they regularly do), you get to make some real money from the battery capacity.
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The big problem with solar? Regulation around installing it that is entirely designed to protect the profits of utility companies.
We have predatory financing around solar where companies are allowed to put a lien on your house and then essentially extort the homeowner if they ever choose to sell such that solar can reduce the value of your house significantly.
We limit the amount of solar basically so the utility can keep selling you electricity.
One might say it's to cover the bullding and maintenance of the transmission infrastructure. There's some truth to that. But at the same time utilities are generating massive profits, doing share buybacks and giving massive concessions to data centers that everyone else is paying for.
Basically we would all be better off if every electricity provider wasn't a private company but instead what a municipal operation like municipal broadband.
I assume astroturfing is at play.