Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid.
Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid.
The cost of solar panels is plummeting, and this will flood the power grid with cheap electricity. But that’s just Act 1. We won’t stop building solar at the limits of the grid - we’ll build a lot more. This post explains why we'll keep building more,
All I’m hearing is excuses not to invest in battery storage at the grid level.
113Grid scale storage will be built en masse the moment it becomes economical, or when governments decide to use tax payer money to do it or subsidize it.
14Is your area not undergoing a massive expansion? I'm in NW Florida, hardly a hotbed of environmentalism, and brother, business is booming.
I fully expect the 20-miles between the edge of town and my camp to be covered in the next decade. Any non-residential and non-commercial land is getting bought up and covered. I expect to see solar panels all they way in the space between the interstate and the state highway, already a few spots where you can see clear from one road to the other over the panels. Very exciting!
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I wish we could. That capacity is already booked. The batteries we are deploying needs to be used as local storage. And this is before the EU mandate on solarpanels on all roof tops has taken effect. The grid can't expand at that rate, unfortunately.
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It's almost as if a proper energy grid isn't compatible with private equity.
73We had a nice setup, quasi public/private power company. Prices were low and we voted on the governing board. Cool.
The the county sold us out to a strictly private firm and most people's prices spiked 40%, literally overnight.
I'm not much of a socialist, government solutions carry their own issues and inefficiencies, but a service as vital as power (and water and sewage) should be public works.
6You've got to at least have a seat at the table as a community, for it not to be an entirely predatory relationship.
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There is a lot of operations that aren't timing-critical (their work is cumulative) and can be made cheaper by only using excess energy in daytime.
- Pumped hydro
- Charging grid-tied batteries and EVs
- Air heating/conditioning (especially when used with physical heat storage)
- Water heating/cooling for residential use
- Water heating for pools
- Reverse osmosis
- Furnaces in glass/metal/aluminum factories, crematoriums etc.
- Computation-heavy tasks (AI training, simulations, rendering, crypto mining...)
Solar can be built wherever there's demand for any of these, right? Also, more customers should adopt a real-time energy pricing model.
30I will say, from my time being a process engineer in metals:
-Everything runs 24/7 cuz the equipment is so expensive and there's always too much demand
-furnaces are gas, probably too hot to reach in a reasonable space with electricity
Totally agree with storing temperature/water locally as a battery, especially at home levels
18I believe the electric funaces are called "Arc furnaces" and you heat by making electricy jump between conductors.
One of the advantages over blust furnaces is that production can be varied more easily as there isn't a whole lot of ancillary parts of the furnance which all need to get up to temperature. So only running them on excess energy might be more practical.
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Yeah, this should really be the future. There's a lot of unnecessary materials used/energy wasted to give us our current "all power costs the same all the time" system.
According to this, about 70% of US household energy use is heating/cooling the space, or water. Much of that can be time shifted. What can't be time shifted can be stored in cheaper ways than battery storage.
1 tonne of rock heated (or cooled) 20° C above ambient is a store of about 4.7 kWh. According to that same site, the average yearly energy use in the US is 10500 kWh. If 70% is heating/cooling, that's about 20 kWh per day, so you'd need about 5 tonnes of rock to hold that enough energy. That seems like a lot, but it's just about 2 cubic meters of rock.
If you use water, it has 5 times the specific heat (but less density), so you only need 1 cubic meter. Probably easier to heat/cool/use, too. Water can also be heated more than 20 degrees above ambient, too.
Really, we should create incentives for homes to be built with high thermal mass. Even without any sort of fancy direct heating or cooling of a thermal mass, it will store significant heat.
10Really, we should create incentives for homes to be built with high thermal mass. Even without any sort of fancy direct heating or cooling of a thermal mass, it will store significant heat.
Welcome to traditional housing in Italy and probably elsewhere in the Mediterranean region. Thick stone walls even out the temperature swings through the day. Throw open the windows when the temperature is comfortable and close up when it gets too hot or cold depending on the season. This gets you quite far without any air-conditioning or heating.
8If you use water, it has 5 times the specific heat (but less density), so you only need 1 cubic meter. Probably easier to heat/cool/use, too. Water can also be heated more than 20 degrees above ambient, too.
My old house had an electric boiler that would automatically heat up at night when electricity was cheap. They have fallen out of fashion in the past two decades or so around here, but I can see them making a come back.
Of course that was direct resistive heating. Stick a heat pump in there and you got something.
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That's true. If there's lots of flexibility in the energy consumption, then it would be easy to keep adding lots of renewable. And there's lot of potential for demand flexibility.
In reality there's limited flexibility, in part due to laziness and inertia. So adding more solar is giving diminishing returns. Which means adding solar gets harder to do economically as the share of renewable increase.
There need to be better incentives for flexibility in demand (ie push consumer to shift energy usage) and for storage (ie give energy producers bonuses depending on the amount of energy storage they have available).
6Factories often kinda have to run 24/7 so only firing up the furnaces/other electricity intensive machines when electricity is cheap isn't feasible in most cases
4I'm not saying factories should be forced to switch machinery like with ripple control systems in Soviet countries (contactors in households and industry switching based on signals superimposed on the 50Hz grid), there should just be an appropriate economic incentive in doing so. If it's not enough to offset equipment cost, the factories can ignore it.
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Just export the power to the next timezone over.
25Fpl artificially stifles solar panels on private homes by demanding a 1 million dollar policy be taken out payed by the homeowner in case solar damages something.
They also lobbied to get a law approved that says Insurance companies can refuse to insure houses with panels. Mine dropped me for my solar
23What's FPL?
5Florida Power & Light
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Duke energy in NC has basically already made it to expensive or at least not worth it to install solar. They reset the power credits to generate and you basically still are stuck paying a power bill regardless of what you generate.
19Get batteries; fuck em.
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I fear for induced demand. If electricity is cheap, why build more efficiently? Why not do bitcoin mining or AI training?
It wouldn't be so bad if there weren't plenty of places around the world that could desperately use solar panels, that are building fossil fuel infrastructure instead. Climate change is a global problem, so the obsession with getting your individual emissions down to zero is selfish and sometimes even detrimental to the climate if "your emissions" don't include the cost of manufacturing and limited availability.
We should be sending solar panels to the developing world as fast as humanly possible, not making electricity so cheap in California that multinationals can open up a couple more data centers.
17We should be sending solar panels to the developing world as fast as humanly possible
More of addendum than criticism - sending random stuff to developing countries is one of the problems. Solar panels need proper infrastructure and maintenance. Instead of sending them for the west to feel good, we should rather empower governments of those countries to take their own initiative, build infrastructure, train people and make the panels very affordable for them.
10sending random stuff to developing countries is one of the problems.
Relevant Video.
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Already happening in Northern California. PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric), which is a FOR-PROFIT utility, reduced the price it pays individuals for selling extra power to the grid. The reason cited was there is too much power being sold at the wrong time of day.
Take a look at California ISO to see real-time graphs of electricity generation and usage.
Solar is currently generating about 50% of total electricity. A percentage of that is going to batteries.
12Pretty exciting!
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