
Solar power is now the cheapest form of energy in almost 60 countries - manojr
http://www.sciencealert.com/solar-power-is-now-the-cheapest-energy-in-the-world
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diafygi
I work in solar, and here's my favorite climate change joke:

"They say we won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!"

Solar is no longer an experimental thing, and the industry is now focused on
scaling. How can we deploy more solar faster? It's ridiculous how cheap panels
have gotten, but a significant amount of the cost savings in the past few
years is coming from soft cost (logistics, overhead, engineering, etc.) and
balance of system (wires, fasteners, inverters, etc.) price reduction. And
there's still a ton more to improve, and we really need the help of the tech
community (y'all are good at scaling, after all).

Unfortunately, I always get the sense here on HN that the tech community still
thinks of solar as a novelty or experimental. Why? Is it because you're still
reeling from the 2008 cleantech bust? Is it because the bay area has good
climate and you don't have to pay $400/mo for air conditioning in the summer?

I'd love to hear some feedback on why you're not interested in getting
involved in the solar industry. What would convince you to work as a software
engineer for a cleantech company? What would convince you to start a cleantech
software (i.e. cleanweb) startup?

~~~
jgh
I know next to nothing about Solar so pardon my ignorance, but what do you
suppose the solar industry is looking for from the software industry?

~~~
diafygi
Thanks for the comment! Gotcha, yes, it does take quite a bit of understanding
of the dynamics and incentives of the industry to see how important software
is to the industry. Here's a rundown of the problems that software can solve.

Front End and User Experience: Customer acquisition costs in the U.S. for
distributed solar is extremely high. Think of cleantech sales like the
insurance industry 20 years ago. Most of the sales are human-to-human, and
take a lot of time and legwork. We need to follow the path of the insurance
industry, and start automating the initial quote and feasibility analysis. A
consumer interested in solar or batteries or thermostats or whatever, should
be able to get a savings quote instantly and buy the product online without
having to talk to anyone. It's a complex problem (you have to combine energy
pricing data inputs, easy user experience, complex data science, and dynamic
pricing calculations), but the insurance industry has solved it, so we should,
too. Whenever you go to Home Depot, you should be able to get a free energy
audit with recommendations for what energy products would save you what.
Software like this is how you scale energy efficiency and distributed energy
resources.

Data Science and High Scalability: Intermittent power from solar and wind will
become a huge chunk of the grid's power. What happens when the sun doesn't
shine or the wind doesn't blow? How do we keep the lights on? Storage? Demand
response? It's going to be an extremely complex operation that will require
much more complex software to be able to optimize deploying storage and demand
response. If you want to do software in machine learning and NP optimization,
grid operations is a place that needs it yesterday.

IoT and Security: All of the new distributed energy resources (solar, storage,
demand response, HVAC) are internet connected. The firmware and cloud software
that run these resources are now a critical part of grid operations. If
there's anything we've learned on HN, IoT software is complete shit when it
comes to security. Beefing up the software security of all these resources is
critical to keeping the lights on. That's all software and efficient
protocols.

The next Google will be an energy company.

Edit: Shameless plug. If you're in the bay area and interested in getting
involved in the cleantech software sector, check out the Powerhouse solar
startup incubator ([https://powerhouse.solar/](https://powerhouse.solar/)) and
my energy events calendar
([https://bayareaenergyevents.com/](https://bayareaenergyevents.com/)). Just
start showing up!

~~~
skybrian
What's the selling point for residential rooftop solar versus buying
industrial-scale solar from the power company?

~~~
diafygi
Appetite, mostly.

Utilities want stable production so have been slow to embrace renewables at
high penetration (even though the economics are there). The exception the U.S.
is Texas with over 50% wind at night, because the utilities don't have much
say in the production portfolio (it's heavily deregulated).

For distributed rooftop solar, consumers are much more swayed by the savings,
so many solar companies find it easier to sell hundreds of systems directly to
consumers instead of one system to utilities.

This is changing slowly, because the economics are getting too much for
utilities to ignore, but unfortunately federal rules like the clean power plan
will likely be made toothless soon, so many utilities will continue to be
stuck in the mud.

------
baybal2
$27.4 per mwh is as cheap as buring raw crude in Saudi Arabia.

Math: 1 BOE is 1.7 MW/h

Cost of getting 1 barrel out from the oilfield with all infrastructure costs
amortized: $6

Accrued logistics costs to get the oil from the oilfield to the power station
+ powerplant operation cost/per unit of power: $8

Per BOE cost: $14

Cost per MW/h of generated electricity assuming 30% conversion efficiency (SA
is a hot place): $14/1.7/.30 = $27.5

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cpncrunch
More evidence (as if we needed it) of just how ridiculous Trump's promise to
revive the US coal industry is.

[http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/22/trumps-big-plan-for-the-
coal-...](http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/22/trumps-big-plan-for-the-coal-
industry-just-got-even-harder-than-it-was-yesterday.html)

~~~
blargles
I wouldn't count on Canadian ramp down, most of the coal power stations are in
Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Alberta's current government has been
going on a green binge that most of the residents despise (approval rating for
the government are quite low). As for the other provinces, the federal
government unilaterally imposed those decisions without consulting the
provinces which has caused issues.

~~~
cpncrunch
Well, if you look at the bar graph, exports of coal from the USA to all the
main users has dropped precipitously in 2016, so Alberta isn't going to make a
huge difference.

Also, there are a lot of factors behind the decline in coal (particulate
pollution, CO2, lowering cost of renewables, etc), so it seems highly unlikely
that the downward trend is going to reverse itself.

------
qz_
Original source: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/world-
ene...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/world-energy-hits-
a-turning-point-solar-that-s-cheaper-than-wind)

------
jcoffland
These numbers don't take the cost of storage into account. It doesn't matter
how many kilowatts you can produce at noon when you need them at midnight.
Simply taking kilowatt hours produced and multiplying by the average market
price is not a good estimate of the value produced by solar. Sure those
numbers work now while solar is only providing a fraction of the total energy
being consumed but if solar were to become the dominate energy source we would
have to solve the storage problem and this will greatly increase production
costs. Solar is still more expensive than the alternatives when considered at
realistic scales.

------
iamgopal
Kudos to China!! We should give credit when it's due.

------
waynenilsen
* after subsidies

~~~
jaclaz
... and without taking into account that after 15 or 20 - maybe 25 - years the
panels will need to be replaced.

How "clean" is disposing of these depleted slabs of glass and silicon (or
whatever other elements)?

How much will it cost?

~~~
_red
A bigger environmental problem is that many solar use mandates having
batteries.

The average armchair environmentalist loves to ignore the thousands of tons of
earth that must be mined to get enough rare earth minerals for a single
battery to be constructed.

~~~
greglindahl
Lithium isn't a rare earth element. Batteries don't use rare earth elements.
Some electric motors do, but that's a choice; Tesla's doesn't.

If you mean to say that lithium mining is a bad thing, then you might want to
try to come up with a better measure of environmental impact than the number
of tons of earth moved.

------
amelius
Question: how many solar panels would you need to power a large steel
producing company?

~~~
floatrock
This is a distracting red herring argument and you know it.

Solar makes up less than 1% of the US energy supply. No one is saying we power
our high-energy industrial consumers until we get up to say 50% renewable with
all existing the low-hanging fruit out there.

Energy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. You can still use the energy-
dense sources where they're the best tool for the job while still decreasing
our existential risk elsewhere.

~~~
amelius
You are looking for an argument that isn't there. I was asking because someone
else brought up the question, and I still think it is interesting to know the
answer.

~~~
floatrock
Apologies if it was genuine curiosity, tone doesn't get across on the
internet. Interpreted it as another leading question. Point is, the shift to
renewables is an incremental process where industries with high/dense energy
requirements will likely not be the first applications.

------
sctb
Related discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217320](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217320)

