Most people, and most politicians, don’t realize it yet. But by the 2030s solar will be the largest source of electricity in the world. By the 2040s it will be the largest source of energy in the world. It’s going to change the world in ways we don’t yet understand. And nothing can stop this change. The price of solar and batteries will be lower than every other alternative.
Big fan of Hannah Ritchie's analyses, but I do feel like that PDF is a little over optimistic with both future and allegedly recent peaks for fossil fuel consumption. That said, I retrieved a bunch of a bunch of historical data from OWID, and with some cheap regression analysis in Desmos, I compiled this mindmelting graph
Basically the energy singularity happens in 2034, where wind daily generation + solar daily consumption — which is disturbingly superlinear — eclipses the global energy consumption trend — which is disturbingly linear — and then worldwide storage, which is growing at an even more absurd pace, exceeds solar and wind the following year. And then 4 years after that we have 10 days of worldwide storage. All the while appliances are becoming more efficient. Perhaps AI, VR, and transport electification will soak up the excess, but we've yet to see even crypto make a noticeable bump in global energy consumption above trend, just glancing at the data.
Edit: I couldn't get good data on energy storage, so I used 'added capacity' from here and also a quote from the same site that implies there was 173Gwh capacity in 2021:
> Global installed storage capacity is forecast to expand by 56% in the next five years to reach over 270 GW by 2026.
I really like rooftop solar, as an idea. It might not be the cheapest way to generate electricity, but it's good to know you aren't as dependent on the grid. It's like having your own vegetable garden.
Hopefully, with advances in battery technology, homes can become completely independent of the grid.
Once you add in the costs of additional transmission needed for utility scale solar, rooftop solar is extremely competitive.
Especially as transmission capital costs start to skyrocket, and solar capital costs plummet.
I have yet to see an economic argument in favor of utility scale solar over residential solar that takes into account the T&D upgrades necessary from utility scale solar.
Agreed. I think we will also start to see lots of industrial sites that have their own utility scale installs that don't even feed back into the grid, and are used directly, and coupled with thermal or chemical storage.
It’s interesting seeing the difference in how solar is usually talked about versus backup generators.
Whole-home generators are expensive and get used rarely but are often justified as a “just in case”. Solar doesn’t enjoy this kind of leniency, unfortunately.
Being less dependent on the grid has many benefits that get ignored over a perceived return on value.
An islanding solar system with storage is not useless during storms or the winter, it still generates during the day. Not sure where your "around here" is, though.
Sure, but with a couple inches of snow on them, mine still generate power. And in areas which regularly receive snow, roof pitches are generally steep enough to encourage it to slide off else the building would suffer overloading. Worst case a push broom or squeegee with a very long handle works wonders.
Also fairly trivial to rig up a resistive heating system for melting the snow in cases where the above isn't possible. Even possible to automate it based on time of day and expected power input.
It is possible to back-feed power through a solar cell such that it emits photons (or maybe just heat - I'm not entirely clear on that). But all solar panels include diodes to prevent this and provide protection from hooking them up in reverse.
It does happen occasionally, but it's rare that my panels are covered for more than a day or so. Heavy snows almost always slide off within 36 hours - sometimes a light snow (~3" or so) can cover it for a while because it's not heavy enough to slide off from gravity. The panels are very low friction compared to a normal roof.
Yeah - When covered in even a moderate amount of snow, output drops almost all the way off. I had thought that being black, they would melt off quickly, but that doesn't appear to be the case. As an aside, my daughter's neighbor has solar and after a big snowstorm, a foot of snow slid off his panels, right into the side of her house destroying a basement window and blowing shattered glass 5 foot into the basement.
Whole home generators are miles cheaper than a solar-battery setup. I can get 10kw of backup power tied into my house for 5k with an automatic switch, but that barely covers the labor costs for a solar system, and you still have to buy the rest of it.
Sure you can DIY it and get close, but most people are not going to do that.
You can also DIY a generator. Mine is tied into my 500 gallon propane tank, and would probably run the house for a month or more. And it cost less than $2k. No automatic transfer switch, but I actually prefer that because if the power goes out for a short time I don't start it up, and I turn it off at night as well.
It would have been foolish to have a whole house generator where (and when) I lived before I moved where I am. Where I live now, utility power is less than three nines, and some years doesn't quite make it to two.
Solar without storage usually is grid tied, but even if it runs isolated, it doesn't help overnight. Batteries for a multiday outage are still quite expensive compared to a generator.
A whole house battery would be nice though, at least some of the systems can switch power quick enough that I wouldn't need UPSes at all my computers, and the battery maintenance that requires (of course, the large system would probanly require maintenance)
Sadly at least where I live the backup generators are well-used, winter and summer alike. There was a period of about a year where we went no more than a week or two between power outages. Absolutely a lifesaver, when you have a freezer full of frozen goods.
In this context I'm saving my pennies for a solar and battery set up - it both makes financial sense when connected to the grid, and obviates the annoying side effect and high cost of running the backup generator during outages, unless they're extremely lengthy.
A gallon of gasoline produces about 36 kWh, and costs about $3.6. Assuming that the motor + generator + inverter chain has efficiency is 25%, it's 9 kWh of electricity per gallon, or about 40 ¢ per kWh. Likely twice as expensive as the grid, but fine for a few days.
Well, mine is propane, and propane is substantially less energetic than gasoline, and is also subject to delivery fees.
The issue you really run into is that, even at idle, the generator burns a fixed amount of propane. The minimum is about 2 gallons per hour. Which is roughly $6
So you can imagine that, for 3 days of usage, $500 provides a strong incentive to seek out alternative sources of power.
We run about $1200 a year in propane costs for the generator, estimated.
> The issue you really run into is that, even at idle, the generator burns a fixed amount of propane. The minimum is about 2 gallons per hour. Which is roughly $6
All the loads that I might consider a generator for are intermittent (well pump, fridge, microwave, space heater).
I've wondered if it would make sense to get inverters for the fridge, microwave, and heater and get a pool of batteries, and just use the generator for charging batteries and powering the well pump.
With a sufficient number of batteries in the battery pool it should be possible to only need to run the generator when there are sufficient batteries to charge that the generator can run at its most efficient output.
It is probably cheaper or at least equivalent to utility scale, if we consider the cost of transmission and distribution, neither of which are needed with rooftop. Of course, it is grid tied, but it uses existing power lines to the home without requiring any new lines to be installed.
And the indestructible resiliency of distributed power production from tens of millions of rooftops is unparalleled.
Sounds like he is allowed to sell excess back to the grid and payback period would be <20 years. They are warranted for longer. If financing is available it is basically free. ;)
Big if that but more realistically the real kicker here is that all of that is about x3 larger than what most households need.
I get that not everybody has $10k laying around to plop down on panels/batteries all in one go but if you do you can get off the grid now.
Why? Sunlight falls everywhere. It’s not obvious to me that there should be efficiencies in capturing solar power centrally and then moving the energy over transmission lines.
If you want one rooftop’s worth of electricity, you can either pay someone else for a rooftop’s worth of real estate and have them run solar panels on it, and transmit the power to you over wires, or you can put solar panels on the rooftop-sized area you already own at zero marginal land cost, and have the electricity already right where you want it.
That that works out economically doesn’t seem like a surprise.
> It's a testament to how inefficient "the system" is that rooftop solar is economical for a lot of people.
Solar panels are rapidly falling in price, and now I'm generating the power right where I'm using it - so no transmissions losses, no power transmission infrastructure, no transformers, no poles to replace when they get old, no lines to replace when trees fall on them, no trees to trim. No accounts to maintain, no billing, no credit card fees, no taxes.
In fact, to get power to my house for the next ~30+ years requires absolutely zero labor from anybody.
Of course it's economical, it would be baffling if it wasn't.
I'm surprised more conservatives in the West don't like it. It's the ultimate individual independence from the government and corporations. Individual sovereignty over your energy needs. Instead they want to rely on a foreign dictator and government-funded transmission lines. Bizarre.
This isn’t an interesting line of thinking because it depends entirely on your definition of conservative. There’s nothing surprising (or interesting) about a straw man.
There are two attitudes that you skipped over: "dependability" and if it works, then don't fix it.
Between those two and people who have tried an electric or hybrid vehicle and had it turn out poorly (totaled because the battery went bad in the heat and it isn't worth replacing). There is a degree of wisdom to the advice "chemical energy storage is more convenient, dependable, and cheap for intermittent to constant daily use". I look forward to on site residential solar powered propane production and liquification for this reason.
1) it takes co2 from the air and water to produce propane hydrocarbons (mostly theory with some promising lab results)
2) not quite. Well, it is a form of carbon capture, but with the intent of releasing again soon.
3) 4% co2 is everywhere (open a window and turn on a fan and you have almost infinite). Water is everywhere humans are. I think it is a lot more an engineering problem than a feasibility problem
Those supply you with up to 50kg of carbon a month from DAC (direct air capture). If I were to drive a sedan 120 miles (entire day commute) then I would probably burn 250kg of propane and only 80% of the weight of propane is carbon.Therefore, you are exactly correct that it is not feasible. However it may become feasible if I get creative: hybrid work and different fuel sources.
So for me to be perfectly carbon neutral I would need an average total daily commute of 30 miles to be able to have 100% of my fuel usage from solar powered propane.
I think this is some tech in infancy. I think I would be willing to install a o2 tank and a c3h8 tank on my car to have better efficiency if I had to produce all my own fuel.
That link appears to reference industrial carbon capture. I don't see a residential unit there or any claim of 50kg per month. A half acre facility isn't feasible in a residential setting. The site seems to sell carbon offsets (credits) for sequestration, which is nice but isn't residential carbon capture and fuel synthesis.
I just don't see how this is feasible at a residential scale. Certainly not with the convenience of solar plus battery storage.
Carbon capture and fuel synthesis is very exciting technology, especially when combined with solar for load shifting. Generate "clean" fuel from excess sunlight. But even then it doesn't scale as well as direct transmission. Combustion fuels will have to be reserved for those cases that really need the energy density, like aviation. Battery electric is far more practical for self-sufficient personal transportation.
Replace "conservatives" with "libertarians" maybe.
Independence from the government was the revolutionary idea of the American colonies, eventually culminated at founding the USA (with checks and balances to limit the government). Calling this idea "conservative" is weird, but I understand why some may see it like so.
i think - when the grid goes down, your rooftop solar will go down too. Without grid generation there is nothing that can keep your inverters synchronized…
There are inverters with a power outlet that can be used in case of a grid outage. Supplying your whole home with power when the grid goes down is possible too with the right hardware.
This is an old trope that's not longer accurate pretty much across the board for renewables/batteries.
Also.. Mining for solar panels has never been the major energy cost. Solar panels are primarily silicon (re: sand). The actual energy expensive part for them is/was melting the sand into glass. Even the next major element, aluminum for the brackets, accounts for far more energy expenditure than the mining of the doping agents.
Even for windmills, the major energy cost isn't mining, it's the smelting the steel for the tower.
Renewable energy is a piece of the puzzle and not everything. It's a major and important piece. Switching the grid away from fossil fuels accounts for a huge portion of emissions and renewables are some of the fastest and cheapest to deploy solutions currently.
Sure, it's energy intensive, but if that energy comes from the sun, who cares?
I don't understand we keep using "energy intensive" as a euphemism for "emits carbon". The two aren't synonymous. Energy-intensive processes aren't a problem at all, the problem is dirty energy generation processes. Fix your energy generation, and there's no problem.
The oil companies all rebranded themselves as energy companies over a decade ago, my presumption is it was a convenient part of a long term promotional plan to mix up the definitions to get the environmental movement to fight itself. Same as how the idea of a "carbon footprint" was sponsored out into the world by the same people.
The trick to good propaganda is to create something that makes you say "well I know it's propaganda, but this doesn't seem so wrong..."
There's a (diminishing) correlation that shouldn't be ignored. I'm not saying we should abandon solar because of that correlation but it should at least be factored in.
For example, I think it's a dumb idea to turn every road into a "solar road" just because "who cares".
I was replying to a specific argument: That producing solar panels is energy-intensive, and thus bad (this part was implied). My counterargument is that energy-intensive is irrelevant when you've got basically-free, clean energy.
If your energy is dirty, fix your energy. Don't make downstream consumers feel bad instead.
I don't disagree, just taking the conversation a slightly different direction as I think you'll agree that the "it takes energy to make renewables" argument is generally made in bad faith.
I think there is irresponsible consumption of solar panels, particularly when it's done more as a performative action rather than actually producing power to be used.
Yah. I am glad we are deemphasizing residential solar.
Utility-scale solar has better capacity factors and installation economics.
I think it's going to be barely possible to keep our current quality of life and reach a low-CO2 economy. We have limited resources, and even if a residential solar panel "pays back" its energy in 2.5 years, we are better off putting it in a desert where it will pay back that energy in a year.
I think residential solar was a decent bridge to get things going, and the installed capacity we have is helpful.
Now, though-- at midday we have a glut of power. Residential installations are more expensive per kilowatt hour and don't do as well in reaching into the late afternoon when we need power most. There's no need to add more capacity like this.
Better for those panels to go somewhere else.
There are still times that non-utility scale solar make sense-- it's usually when you get some kind of non-normal-generation related benefit that tips it over into worthwhile, e.g.
- getting a shade structure for a parking lot as part of the rollout
- if you want power backup for your house, adding a bunch of storage and solar
There were some early benefits to grid stability, but not to the extent we've done it, no.
At this point, there are a lot of residential neighborhoods that need more distribution and even transmission capacity (because their peak power movement is now exporting power at mid-day rather than the previous smaller peak loads used). And operating the grid has become a much more complicated task.
Yes, it prevents the house with the battery from being a tax on the grid. However, the capacity factor of both the solar and the battery is less than if they were deployed centrally.
Again: residential solar isn't worthless, but in many places we've reached the point of diminishing returns where any additional capacity is much less useful-- unless there's an ancillary benefit that justifies it (like backup power for your house when deploying storage).
It is that simple. "Energy intensive" is irrelevant. On average, a solar panel will capture more energy in its lifetime than the amount used to create and eventually recycle it.
This is easy to refute. Take the commercial price of power for the location of manufacture and divide your retail price by that amount. The result will be the upper bound in MWh that could have possibly gone into the creation of that panel.
Chinese solar panels cost less than 15 cents a watt. In the NW with residential prices at 10 cents per KWh, it takes 1500 hrs to break even. With 4hrs of "full sun" per day on average at PNW latitudes, about a year. This is just the panel not the system. The BS that panels take more energy to produce than they generate is disproven.
The tariffs on solar are stupider than the Iraq war. If China can produce panels at 10 cents a watt wholesale, we should give them billions of dollars to make as many as they can. Train everyone in the military to install them.
Energy-intensive is fine, as long as the energy is renewable.
Smelting aluminum and silicon or mining aluminum and iron ores with electricity produced by solar and wind is ideal: else that energy of light and air motion would be wasted.
Steel and concrete are harder to produce in an emission-free ways, but steel smelting in arc furnaces is very much a thing, and can be powered by renewables, at least partly.
A lot of misunderstanding about this comment. I think adding solar energy capacity to the energy supply mix is helpful. What I want to clarify is this, adding all energy supply has costs. Rare earth metals and other mining and habitat destruction that goes into increasing renewable supply needs to be considered. Like I said all additional energy supply has a cost.
The real problem is we need to reduce consumption. We also need to rework our energy supply chains with renewables when appropriate as well as nuclear that isn't vulnerable to meltdowns.
That is awesome. I live in the PNW (Oregon,45°N) and the summers here are fantastic for solar power. I have a 20.2kW system on my roof and crank out 100-120 kWh a day in the summer months. I can store 42kWh, and push the rest back to the grid at full cost return.
How expensive is the electricity in your area? I think here it is so cheap that might not be worth the installation cost (though that did drop a whole lot lately).
The ROI calculation can be a little tricky because solar can be a low risk leveraged investment with tax free returns. Remember money you don’t need to spend isn’t taxable.
So for most home owners it’s easily worth it. While from a worker safety, economic, and even environmental standpoint rooftop solar is terrible compared to grid solar as an individual homeowner you can often get subsidies.
Can you elaborate on how you arrived at that conclusion? At least where I live, the math didn’t work out. It seemed like smarter conservation was a much better alternative. A couple portable/window A/C units that pay for themselves within a year or two made a heck of a lot more sense than $30k of solar on a roof already at half it’s life. Maybe when it’s time to replace my roof I’ll reconsider, but the payback didn’t seem there. (FWIW, I probably average < $100/mo in electricity.) I know conservation can go against human nature, but it sure seems like the better option for me.
I got there by just looking at how far north people go before it becomes questionable and then realizing most of the world’s population is closer to the equator. The other approach is to look country by country and solar generally works in China, India, US etc.
For your specific situation, you can reuse panels, inverters, and most wiring etc between roofs or depending on things like a HOA install them elsewhere for less. A solar gazebo or car port for example can directly use the panels as a roofing material. Some people are even using them as fences.
The actual calculations get involved including things like permits and your weather etc. But don’t assume your only option is spending 15+k for some contractor to show up and slap a bunch of panels on your roof.
PS: 30k is overkill for your usage, and you don’t need a battery unless you are particularly worried about power outages.
I am waiting more for the longevity of the roof than the panels. I’m not too keen on putting a lot of penetrations on an aging roof. The $30k number was based on a 10kW system (we’re limited based on a multiple of actual usage). But what you said makes sense and I should ask around for other quotes. But even at half that cost, I’m still looking at a 12-15 year simple payback. On a 20-25 year system, that puts the IRR at ~5%. My thinking is I’d rather have the liquidity of putting that money in the stock market.
Good luck. Also, at least in the US you’re looking at 30% federal and possibly state incentives plus again savings being tax free.
And don’t forget about inflation when doing your ROI and invest returns calculation. US electricity prices averaged 16.04c/kWh March 2023 to March 2024, but 15.50c/kWh March 2022 to March 2023. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
As to liquidity, the stock market may be a better long term investment but it’s quite risky even over surprisingly long periods.
In my place (NZ) finance is only available for 3 years, power is cheap and install is expensive. No subsidies either. I’m looking at anywhere from 15-25 year payback (assuming same power prices and interest rates I pay for house (7.5% atm)).
I’m still keen to at least DIY a shed, but even then it’s like 5 years to pay back.
To compare with my parents place in LT (or even Australia) - power is 3x more, install 2x less and subsidies are available. You are basically looking at 6x quicker payback.
That's the trick. On one of the longest days of the year, OP got ~$5 worth of electricity where I live.
The payoff can be long, and people often forget to account for the added cost to home insurance to cover the panels in that.
OTOH, if where you live electricity is more expensive or labor is cheaper, it can be a really nice addition without too long a wait to make it back. The company I talked to said I get too much shade to be worth installing (150 foot tall trees near my house) so I'll be waiting awhile before I get mine even if electricity prices go up, sadly.
I'll need to see a whole 12 months of output before I can be sure. I suspect winter production will be well down, especially on heavy snow weeks (we get a lot here).
Roughly, it looks like it will make about $1000 worth of power per year, and the price of power here is already locked in to go up between 5% and 12% per year, basically forever.
I'm right on $8k out of pocket, which is on a 10 year interest free loan. So if I just put the savings from my old electricity bill into the loan, in 10 years it will be gone, and I'll just free power for 20 or so years after that.
One day I'll build a garage, cover that in solar too, then get an EV so I don't have to ever buy gas again.
My MSc research at UWaterloo involved mapping photovoltaic viability in Canada. The data was somewhat uninteresting because the conclusion was: pretty much everywhere.
In Australia, I'm very optimistic about Suncable[1], I just wish they were able to move faster (I do get that national coordination is slow, and that it's an enormous project).
Also did a back-of-the-envelope calculation the other day. It would cost roughly $175 billion to add solar panels and a battery to every residential dwelling in Australia (commercially priced and assuming available supply). That's a ton of money, but there are also individual people in the world that could afford that bill and change Australia, and the global power network, forever.
Quite probably, but I only thought to look up the stats for residential dwellings, and price data was easily available.
(I love solar parking lots in particular because it makes double use of the space with zero downside, plus I no longer burn my hands on the steering wheel after going shopping on a 44℃ day.)
Despite the upbeat title, we need to remember that we are well past time to stop emitting large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. And yet, solar, wind, storage discharge, other renewables( and possibly SMR nuclear temporarily) are not even _close_ to replacing fossil fuel energy sources. The charts do not suggest reaching anywhere near zero emissions from electricity generation by 2030, and that's when we ignore the contribution of the production of solar panels and related systems.
So, while the trend is positive - this is still disappointing and worrying news.
IMO it is close. ~40% of the world’s electricity is from low carbon sources like solar, and that number is already increasing by over 1.5% per year and accelerating.
People get concerned about 100% carbon free, but really once you hit 90+% the specific year you hit zero becomes less relevant. Spending 1 more year at 50% is worse than 5 years under 10% or 50 years under 1%.
If anything it’s EV’s we should be worried about not electricity. Cars last a long time so every ICE sold today is ~26 years of pollution locked in.
> IMO it is close. ... ~40%... increasing by over 1.5% per year and accelerating.
That would have been close 15 years ago. We are already way behind, and suffering warming effects with droughts, and fires, and heat waves, and floods etc. :-(
> Cars last a long time so every ICE sold today is ~26 years of pollution locked in.
I would actually guess that 26 years is more of a maximum rather than an average. But regardless - regulatory measures could enforce increasingly more strict pollution limits, which would make it so that the more polluting cars will not be able to be driven legally without some expensive modifications to capture emissions internally. In fact, this already happens in many countries today, forcing decades-old, super-polluting car models off the road. And the availability of gasoline distribution stations could decrease etc.
Global warming has been noticeable and accelerating for 50+ years. Being at the turning point where CO2 emissions are likely lower within 5-10 years despite population and economic growth represents a great deal of progress.
> I would actually guess that 26 years is more of a maximum rather than an average.
It’s actually a low estimate. Average car on the road in the US is 12.6 years *2 = 25.2 but that’s biased because there’s a slow increase in the number of cars on the road which underestimates lifespan. Also there is there is a net outflow of cars from American that get sent to other countries.
> Average car on the road in the US is 12.6 years *2 = 25.2
Hmm... I was naturally thinking about the country I live in (Palestine/Israel), but then I remembered I see a lot of old cars in US movies. Guess I'll take your word and assume that's more like the global average.
Israel has younger cars than the US because the total number of cars is increasing rapidly and you don’t manufacture (import) old cars instead mostly buying new ones.
Consider that climate change doesn’t care for percentages, but total CO2equivalents.
Coal is still the third-fastest GROWING energy source in TWh (from the article), so the question is really 90% of what?
Coal bounced back from an economic downturn in 2023. The previous peak was in 2014 at 44,858 TWh which was almost matched in 2022 and then slightly exceeded in 2023. Hardly significant growth.
It’s likely somewhere between 2023 and 2026 will be the all time peak but it’s only really dependent on the economy in the short term. Long term coal is clearly dying and looking at China’s energy policies it’s going to start dying quickly.
One interesting stat I saw recently is that China is electrifying at a much faster rate than any other country.
Which means, even if you ignore the nuclear, hydro, wind and solar that they are building at world leading speeds, the electricity from coal is being used to much more efficiently achieve actual services that in Texas or wherever has slightly less coal in their electricity mix, is being done inefficiently with gas or oil.
The current trend is somewhat exponential, though, and solar is now finally cheap enough to compete even without subsidies. That will hopefully lead to an even stronger boost.
That's the power sector which is less than half of emissions, and it's the most easily addressable part of the problem. We need to be accelerating faster somehow. China has the manufacturing capacity but is struggling to sell panels at the clip it can make them.
I'm not at all across the Nuclear Energy political discourse, though I understand it's a uh... hot topic here. The article you linked is about what I would expect from both sides.
Theoretically I'm not against nuclear power. It's miles better than coal and oil, and Reactor design and safety has come a long way. France is a great example of a country who has made it work.
However. It kind of seems unnecessary at this point. Solar and wind are cheaper, and already have industries in hockey-stick growth - including Lithium which Australia is also getting better at (locally and with Australian-owned companies abroad). Australia's key strength has always[1] been digging stuff out of the ground, and we still get to do that in a renewable future.
Solar and wind also don't have black swan risks like nuclear - regardless of how much safer its become - and they're distributed, with fault tolerance / buffers built in by batteries. I assume the Libs' nuclear plan does not include building a ton of batteries to address those issues.
I feel like we've just leapfrogged Nuclear as a useful solution, similar to the way many developing countries will be able to leapfrog entire industrial revolutions once clean energy is ubiquitous.
Investing in nucalear at this point would literally be going backwards.
> I'm not at all across the Nuclear Energy political discourse ... The article you linked is about what I would expect from both sides.
If you only read (or skim) one technical report on Australia's energy needs and potential solutions:
GenCost: cost of building Australia’s future electricity needs
Each year, CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) collaborate with industry stakeholders to update GenCost. This leading economic report estimates the cost of building new electricity generation, storage, and hydrogen production in Australia out to 2050. Large-scale nuclear technology costs included for the first time.
Renewables remain the lowest cost new build electricity technology.
Nuclear came out as not available for quite some time (in Australia) and even then still the most expensive overall which caused the report to slammed as a product of anti nuclear lefty scientists by the Liberal | Murdoch crowd. (For a year prior to release it was hailed as the report that would prove doing nothing until off the shelf nuclear was a thing was the one true way).
The problem with the Australian Coalition's nuclear plan is it isn't a nuclear plan. It's a coal plan disguised as a nuclear plan. They're a party that's bought and paid for by coal interests who were in power recently for a decade and did nothing to kickstart nuclear. They got voted out partly due to inaction on climate change so they realised they need to propose something. Their half-hearted proposal will deliver less than 15% of the grid to nuclear by 2040, while stopping renewables, and being more expensive.
I don’t have strict view on nuclear but the link I posted goes into detail about why the current proposals are nonsense. There is zero chance that the technology being mooted will be available in the given timeline.
The purpose of nuclear power in the current Australian debate is purely to stall renewables in favour of fossil fuel. That’s it.
Presumably there’s a money trail leading to certain hyper-wealthy, vocal Australians.
We are still seeing the effects of negative sentiment campaigns even today through industry lobbyists and social media campaigns. There is an unusually large number of people and opinions aligned against renewable claiming that they are unreliable, cannot produce, are environmentally worse than their peers, etc. None of which are factually true aside from issues on cloudy windless days.
Suppression is probably the wrong term, but it's naive to believe that there isnt a counter campaign against their uptake being funded by various pure play fossil fuel providers.
I used to work for a company who was one such organisation, we had several PhDs funded through industry bodies we ultimately funded directly and through subsidiaries who had sold their soul to produce material using their "doctor" titles to demonstrate that coal was good for the environment, that wind turbines killed birds in extraordinary numbers and sent people mad, and the solar was poisoning the environment because of a lack of recycling capability. All largely false claims and often based on 30-40 year old early availability chemistry which was no longer in use. It was absolutely disgusting behaviour.
This seems to be overlooking the largest factor, which is that "renewables are cheaper!" has been a claim in the discourse for something like 20+ years and was a lie for most of that time. It is taking people a while to come around to the idea that this time the claim is serious.
There are obvious failures from pushing renewables - Germany springing to mind, or any number of solar subsidies that proved uneconomic - and it was completely reasonable to wait for some demonstrated successes.
This is a great example of how point data has been used to reinforce that negative sentiment, and how we need to readdress that sentiment given that over the past decade to 15 years the benefit has swung strongly in favour of renewables as a way to bolster the grid and improve energy security. The rejections ignored the incoming economy of scale and ramping of manufacturing, instead focusing on an immediate cost comparisson instead of a reformed market and lifetime project benefit cost scale. When you plan out the lifetime finances for a fossil fuel project, you use the latter. The arguments were perverted to ignore benefits in order to ensure current fossil fuel projects were able to remain generating a profit for as long as possible, minimising their debt and heading towards profitability. As stated, I've been behind that curtain first hand, and my engineering background is in planning out the lifetime of a resource and how to best exploit it.
IRENA, 2022: "For the last 13 to 15 years, renewable power generation costs from solar and wind power have been falling. Between 2010 and 2022, solar and wind power became cost-competitive with fossil fuels even without financial support. The global weighted average cost of electricity from solar PV fell by 89 per cent to USD 0.049/kWh, almost one-third less than the cheapest fossil fuel globally. For onshore wind the fall was 69 per cent to USD 0.033/kWh in 2022, slightly less than half that of the cheapest fossil fuel-fired option in 2022."
Germany, suffered from early mover issues in ~2015 combined with poor winter planning, however is now reaping the benefits of cheaper generation cost to offset gas supply shortages for baseload due to European supply restrictions, 2021: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/...
Even the UK prime minister Boris Johnson, a conservative pundit, went on record as stating that renewables were the quickest, cheapest, and easiest way to shore up the energy grid and remove dependence upon Russian oil and gas. This is a nice nod to the fact that the UK has been bulk importing Scottish renewable energy to ward against the massive price increases caused in Europe by the gas supply restriction: http://scotsman.com/news/environment/sustainable-scotland-wi...
Failing any rational risk taking due to the above illustrations, it's also critical that we reduce our greenhouse emissions. Another topic that is hotly debated when it really is straight forward. Even if renewables were to cost more, the educated policy makers would still steer toward either making them cheaper or installing them if the difference was marginal simply to ensure long term stability, maximising distributed generation and attempting to minimise the effects of a changing climate.
> Even the UK prime minister Boris Johnson, a conservative pundit, went on record as stating that renewables were the quickest, cheapest, and easiest way to shore up the energy grid and remove dependence upon Russian oil and gas.
He is not particularly known for the virtue of truthfulness.
Turning the UK into “the Saudi Arabia of wind” has not gone the way he planned. Offshore wind costs have been rising, and the narrative of industrial growth has ceased to hold water.
Also why is onshore wind still so hard to construct in England? The PM had a large majority and yet failed to enact legislation to permit such development. I guess he could have been arguing to place all bets on offshore, which seems foolhardy given how often ocean cables seem to break/be broken.
> The rejections ignored the incoming economy of scale and ramping of manufacturing, instead focusing on an immediate cost comparisson
One might say the same of other energy sources… a consistent campaign of construction brings costs down.
There is a lot there and I agree with most of it. But lets just go through the countries you are picking out as examples:
1) Australia's energy situation is humiliating. We've been gifted what might be the most unreasonably energy-rich land in the world and have managed to build this 2nd-rate grid that is not operating anywhere close to the efficiency we could manage. It is so bad that people would often rather go almost off-grid with solar than deal with the costs we manage to impose on ourselves for no obvious reason. We're also technophobes over here, being the only advanced economy that didn't even have the expertise to build a commercial nuclear reactor and having succeeded to an impressive extent in driving any local solar panel expertise off shore to China.
2) Germany's per-capita (and total; their population isn't shrinking) electricity generation has rolled back 50 years of progress into the modern era [0]. I want to reap the opposite of whatever benefits they are reaping, I like to look at their energy stats because it makes Australia look well managed, by comparison. Last time I checked they had the most expensive power in Europe.
3) The UK is also obviously being squeezed for energy availability [1] and appears to be worse off than Germany (!). In line with a lot of other European countries that are struggling.
The problem renewables have with this history isn't some sort of "negative sentiment campaigns". The problem appears to be that their track record is appalling and was pushed by a bunch of people who are now in the history books for woefully mismanaging the key input for modern comfort and prosperity. It looks like the future is going to be different because a rational person would choose to be involved now; but the outcomes so far are eye-wateringly bad. The image commercial renewables have is both unreasonably good and improving remarkably quickly given the circumstances we came from; fortunately capitalists are very forgiving to things that start making money.
Over the last year the UK has generated more electricity from renewable resources than it has from fossil fuels — https://grid.iamkate.com/
The energy from the wind farms built over the last few years are priced of a Contracts for Difference basis i.e. if energy price is under a set price we pay the operator, if it’s over the operator pays us
The largest impact on electricity prices has been the war in Ukraine, and as electricity prices are set by the highest cost generator then domestic prices have risen (and fallen) in line with oil / gas prices
What’s clear though is the renewables are cheaper than oil and gas for electricity generation and are largely stable enough to meet demand (we also have the option of importing from France or Scandinavia for non-fossil fuel produced electricity)
I'm assuming you're talking about the UK all the way through that post.
In this post you've identified that the UK had given marginal pricing power of already costly energy to Ukraine (a highly corrupt country 3 borders away, poor and as it turns out in a geopolitical hotspot). The UK has not only no ability to keep the region stable. In fact it's foreign policy has been assisting the US in escalating the conflict by pouring in weapons and military aid in to the region.
That suggests indefensibly stupid energy policy. It is hard to fail worse than that without week-long blackouts. This is something that India and China have managed not to suffer from and they're managing energy for a population of >2 billion people. China is also doing better than the UK on a per capita basis just to really rub salt in to the wounded pride, using a mix of technologies that the UK couldn't hope to match.
Whilst I'd like to see us get nuclear power up and running, I also do not want to see it happen under Voldemort. I'm in his electorate, and the only reason he's in is because we have a number of conservative hicks and nut jobs.
While the Coalition's policy is likely to be a disaster and they've had too many energy failures to be respectable, as far as nuclear goes the major problem is that the Labor party has been explicitly, 100%, against nuclear power for the last ... 30, 50 years? I dunno, it was policy for a long time.
The issue Australia has is it was illegal to build a nuclear plant for far too long, and even now I would be suspicious of what the balance of opinion is for the topic on the left flank of politics. It doesn't matter what the coalition thinks when there is that level of political risk, nuclear may well be uninvestible in Australia until Labor (and the Greens) commit to it with some level of enthusiasm. I have a vague memory of Labor removing the "No Nuclear" line from their policy documents a few years ago, but that is hardly the endorsement we need for people to start risking capital.
Things like that is why I would term our energy policy an international embarrassment. Our high-tech play is "no". Our solar tech play is "people got so sick of the grid they bought panels from China and installed them themselves". Which is better than it could be, but crikey it is not good policy on the energy regulation front. I'm still horrified that this seems to be doing well compared to the Europeans.
I find myself wondering something along the lines of: if it's 10-15 years to build a nuclear power plant, that's potentially 3, possibly 4 governments. How will a single power plant project make it through, let alone e 2, 3, 4.
Additionally, at that time will we see breakthroughs in fusion technology that means we are building into old tech? Not that this point can be helped without a crystal ball, bit it certainly wouldn't surprise me. Penance for 60 years of inaction and lack of commitment to nuclear technology?
> How will a single power plant project make it through, let alone e 2, 3, 4
I really don't see it myself. Particularly when we look at the Gillard government which had to rely on the Greens to get legislation through and that ended up with them negotiating a carbon tax. That sort of action against the nuclear industry can completely scupper a plant. There is huge sovereign risk in these things that we've seen materialise in Ukraine/the USSR, Germany and Japan. Even to a lesser extent in the UK and US with their approval processes. With a global record like that, I really don't see how the coalition's opinion matters in Australia; they've always been lightly pro-nuclear. Labor's opinions matters, and the Greens to an uncomfortable extent for an investor.
Here in rural America, farmers putting signs in their fields stating “stop solar”, and “stop wind energy” are common. What is the source of the propaganda convincing them to do this?
Critics of solar (ie pro-nuclear people) like to point out that solar paower is variable and can't be used for base load. The truth seems to be more complicated [1] eg:
> Interestingly, as it looks to the future, NextEra seems not to be particularly interested in thermal power plants, the type that includes base load plants. It is planning to close its last coal-burning plant in 2028. And it expects electricity generated by natural gas to decline to 18% overall for all US producers by 2035. A look at a graphic on page 122 shows us why.
Another factor here is that solar power generation (ie when the Sun is up) largely aligns with peak power usage [2] so you're actually reducing the base load required because the maximum power usage has decreased with a significant solar power deployment.
Lastly, we don't tend to build power plants next to people. People don't want to live next to power plants. The further users are away from a power plant the more power required because you lose power in transmission. Solar (with or without batteries) can be deployed on residential housing so a wide solar deployment has power generation closer to the user (and is thus more efficient) but also reduces the need for heavy transmission lines.
That's important because if and when we have wider EV usage, there's going to be an issue in having sufficient power generation and transmission capacity so you really need solar to offset that.
Please don't assume that everyone who is pro-nuclear is anti-solar. Let's have nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tide-based, and anything else that works as a viable power source with no pollution. Let's have all of those technologies compete fairly over what is the most efficient and most capable of handling the load.
> Please don't assume that everyone who is pro-nuclear is anti-solar
It's more that there is a rabid pro-nuclear segment who will try and silence anything less than unfettered praise for nuclear. Anecdotally, I can simply mention the bojective fact that the clean up for Fukushima will likely approach or even exceed $1 trillion [1] and I know what reaction I'll get.
The same goes for pointing out the very real problem of neutron energy loss from fusion (let alone the resulting destruction of the containment vessel) to the point where I'm not convinced fusion will ever be commercially viable and you get the same reaction.
So I can't speak to you personally but as a whole the nuclear fanboys, even on HN, absolutely do not tolerate even mild factual criticism or objective facts that paint nuclear in anything less than a glowing light (pun intended).
I’ve generally just asked someone to show me an analysis where wind/solar can handle something like a cold snap or time when wind basically doesn’t happen for days on end? Just go without power?There are currently so grid scale batteries that can go days without “good” conditions where your solar/wind are only performing at 20% rather than 60-70% ? If wind/solar is 80% of your mix you’re gonna have a bad time. Do you keep the old fossil fuel plants around “just in case”?who is going to pay for that?
Totally agree. The solution is “yes and”. It’ always a bit sad to see people with good intensions arguing over whose intentions are more pure. I appreciate the frustration of pro nuclear people, because for so long they were see as even worse than fossil fuels, but we’ve gotta move past that and work together to get the most effective set of things built asap.
To add some numbers to that: peak winter heating load in my house is about double the peak summer cooling load. And I'm in Maryland--not a cold climate at all.
Does solar power generation really align with peak power usage... ? For most of Europe and the US, peak usage is during winter, and this is the time where the days are shorter, and the sun is lower in the sky.
Here's a nice chart for the US [1]. You are correct that because of colder climates European power demand tends to peak more in winter. I can't find a similar chart to this (ideally broken down by country) but I did find this [2]
> Even though it may seem counterintuitive due to their climate, Nordic countries are remarkably well-suited for PV installations. Solar irradiation levels during the long summer days, when the sun barely sets, make these regions perfectly viable for solar power generation. In fact, it’s a burgeoning industry that’s increasingly turning heads towards the north.
> Solar PV cells operate more optimally at lower temperatures. Cold environments help maintain the cells’ operational temperature, allowing them to work at peak efficiency. The Nordic regions often enjoy strong sunshine, and when this is coupled with the reflective properties of snow, solar irradiance is significantly increased. A good example of this was during the first COVID lockdown when Western Europe saw record irradiance levels.
My buddy, 59 deg N, has solar panels on his roof. During winter the sun is so low in the sky that a treeline quite away shadows most of the panels. He doesn't run microinverters so often zero output for an entire day.
During summer through he's often self-reliant, including charging his EV. If he had a power-wall type battery he'd be fully self-reliant most of the summer.
Peak demand in the US is in the summer, specifically July/August, due to air conditioning. [1]
Most of the cold climate areas in the US use non-electric heating like gas furnaces (and the non-cold climate areas don't really need a lot of heating). [2]
> Another factor here is that solar power generation (ie when the Sun is up) largely aligns with peak power usage [2]
Right now, you have an asymmetry in electric use between heating and cooling, because electricity is used for cooling (peak during the day), while gas and oil are typically used for heating (peak at night). That's going to change when we move everyone to heat pumps for heating, and to EVs that will charge at home overnight.
My question though is what happens when there are -days- of bad weather for solar or wind and most of a state (Texas during the 2021 cold snap where 500+people died). No grid batteries that we currently have can handle that. Do we just let 5000 people die and say “those are the breaks”? The grid was already bad with 80% ish fossil + 20% wind/solar mix. I’ll admit it was because the old fossil fuel plants weren’t properly winterized, but the net effect is the same, when the role is flipped and it 80%/20% green/fossil what happens?
This is a nice marketing article, and while I completely support the transition off fossil fuels and onto renewables, I don't think it's the right approach - it's better to be upfront about the challenges involved in feeding intermittent energy streams into an electricity grid where demand is not aligned closely with primary production, neither on a daily nor a seasonal basis.
The authors of this kind of thing should take a cue from the financial reporting on the 2008 economic crash and films like the Big Short - people can handle complexity, they're interested in hearing about default credit swaps and CDOs and the internal mechanisms of complex financial instruments - so they can certainly handle somewhat difficult energy concepts.
Thus, you can tell people that if you want to run 24/7 on solar inputs alone, then at peak noon you might need your solar system to be producing twice as much power as demand is drawing from the grid, so that the rest can be diverted to storage for use in the evening and morning. If you want to get through a cold wet northern hemisphere December, then you'll need even more solar to divert to chemical fuel storage of some kind for that time period.
I sort of get the complaint about matching production and usage, but it seems worth pointing out that in climates that encourage air conditioning, peak solar output and peak air conditioning usage are reasonably well matched. That's not a 24/7 solution of course, but it's substantial progress all the same.
It's not a complaint, just a suggestion that articles like this include a paragraph explaining the 24-7 power generation issue, instead of just the optimal output under ideal conditions. In terms of the organization behind it (ember-climate) it leads one to suspect they have more marketers than engineers on staff, which (depending on audience, I suppose) is somewhat poor marketing.
And then, the Netherlands just killed off an ecosystem of installation and service of solar, crafted by 2 decades of subsidies. In just 2 months. Such a waste.
Net metering is great for the customers, but then your electricity provider becomes an equivalent of a giant battery. A batteries are very expensive still.
We have solar on our house, and we enjoy net metering, but I understand the arguments against it.
Yes it has been amazing seeing the economics change in real time. And I also love the fact that photosynthesizing ecosystems are going full circle now. Earth has evolved sun eating lifeforms and now these lifeforms are at last developing a sun eating civilization. All debate is mooted, the momentum is there and the economics work. We will all be energy rich in a couple of decades! It will surely help mitigate the impacts from all the carbon we've emitted so far.
Even better our solar panels actually beat photosynthesis for conversion efficiency by at least 2X or sometimes more (depending on the plant you are comparing against).
This is also a big reason that biofuels are a bad idea, other than that they compete with farmland and natural land.
Good point. Biofuels were clearly a bad idea from any angle other than political virtual signaling. Rudimentary energy accounting was sufficient to show it's basically greenwashing the oil sunk into the process rather than harnessing the sun.
Solar without batteries should be illegal; we are just creating a massive problem and doubling down on non-renewables. (Coal, gas, and nuclear plants can't shut down and start up that quickly.) Of course, batteries have their own massive ecological issues to worry about.
Please explain how you just "make" loads run only when solar is present? A quick look at California's "Duck Curve" shows that isn't likely, and reinforces my original point. AC during the day is a major draw, but the second major draw is in the evenings when people get home from work and start doing things. Solar is okay during the summer when the sun is still out (albeit low on the horizon so many arrays have reduced output) but during the winter it's dark before you even get home.
Aluminum smelting, data processing, water treatment and pumping, mining... A lot of industries don't need a 100% duty cycle and would be hally to switch to scheduling if cost incentives are here (and some already do like aluminum smelting in some areas).
