
Solar Power Is Now the World's Cheapest Energy - ph0rque
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a24357/solar-power-cheapest-energy/
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teilo
In addition to being a dupe, the Popular Mechanics title is false. Natural Gas
is still the cheapest form of energy production for large scale production.
The cheapest overall is Geothermal. The only thing that makes wind and solar
cheaper in certain scenarios is the heavy government subsidies.
[http://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.p...](http://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf)

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bmh_ca
I think the important element is the inflection. Resources go up in price as
they are used. Manufacturing goes down in price as capital is recouped.

The article you link shows wind and solar being cheaper than natural gas in
several scenarios, unless I misread it. However over time natural gas - as a
resource - will get more expensive as it becomes more scarce and harder to
extract and demand goes up. In contrast, solar will get cheaper over time as
capital expenditure is recouped, economies of scale kick in, and technological
improvements are discovered and implemented.

Solar may not have crossed the cost of natural gas yet, but it is all but
inevitable now, with eg China having a very mature manufacturing industry for
solar and the Middle East expressing ever growing demand for it.

The writing is on the panel.

Edit: it's worth noting that at least in the US it looks like natural gas has
been heavily subsidized by naive investors and ultra low interest rates since
2009 - see eg [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-18/us-shale-gas-
indust...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-18/us-shale-gas-industry-
countdown-disaster) \-- but that's probably coming to a head soon.

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dang
This is blogspam of a Bloomberg article that was extensively discussed here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13189743](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13189743).

The HN guidelines ask you not to submit articles like this, but instead, to
submit the original source. In this case, of course, it turned out to be a
dupe.

