Chasing profit is how we got here. This shouldn’t be the basis of the decision. If it’s the only thing we can use to drag conservatives along though, I guess it’ll have to do.
It’s not about chasing profit though, it’s about getting to net zero as quickly as possible using finite resources. Any money that goes to nuclear could be going to renewables, which would get us there more quickly.
Any money that goes to nuclear could be going to renewables, which would get us there more quickly.
That’s a false dilemma. Nuclear and renewables provide different things, so they shouldn’t be compared directly in an “either or” comparison, and certainly not on cost. Nuclear power provides a stable baseline, so you don’t have to rely on coal/gas/diesel powered generators. Renewables cheaply but opportunistically provide power from natural sources that may not always be available but that can augment the baseline. The share of renewable energy in the mix is something engineers should figure out, not “the market”.
Also, monetary cost shouldn’t be the only concern. Some renewables have a societal cost too, for example in the amount of land that they occupy per kWh generated, or visual polution. I wouldn’t want to live within the shadow flicker of a windmill for example.
Adding 1GW that runs 80% of the time with months long outages to a grid that has 10GW of power available 95% of the time and 3GW 5% of the time doesn’t fix the issue and requires charging $4000/MWh rather than merely $200/MWh to pay back your boondoggle.
All the people chanting “baseload” understand this but pretend not to.
There’s an interesting point buried at the end of that article: electricity quality. With batteries in the loop, supply can scale with demand almost instantly, versus the time it takes for various types of power plant to adjust output.
I wonder if this has any impact on another piece of the puzzle, high voltage direct current (HVDC) which we need to transport electricity over large distances with minimal loss.
There's an equally buried link to a death by powerpoint that made me pray for a blackout before i could get anywhere close to understanding how that bar graph was constructed.
I can't vouch for the following being a necessarily better source, but this one seem a lot more upfront about some of their assumptions and sensitivities. In this adding storage to wind is seems to be +tens of dollars per MWh; a fair amount more than the +1-3 dollars per MWh shown in the cleantech article. https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost-of-energyplus/
So i'd like to know where these cheap battery cost assumption comes from - is it proven tech, available at scale , at that price?
just seems a bit too good to be true.
They don’t provide different things, they both provide electricity. Nuclear is only really suited to base load, whereas renewables can be spun up and down to match varying demand - however renewables are also more than capable of covering base load, because it’s all just electricity.
The only thing nuclear provides that renewables don’t is grid stability. Nuclear turbines have large rotating masses, when loads are switched on and off they keep spinning the same speed, helping to maintain voltage and frequency. Meanwhile renewables are almost all run via inverters, which use feedback loops to chase an ideal voltage and frequency, but that gives them an inherent latency when dealing with changes on the network. However, there are other ways of providing grid stability.
It’s not a windmill. It doesn’t mill anything. The technical term is Wind Turbine Generator (WTG), but usually they’re called wind turbines or just turbines. A group of turbines make up a wind farm.
Land occupied is not much of a concern when most renewables (and nuclear, for that matter) tend to be installed away from population centres. It feels like you’re grasping for reasons now.
Suffice it to say, I work in the electrical industry, and this isn’t the first report that’s come out saying renewables are cheaper, better value and quicker to build and get us to net zero when compared to nuclear. That isn’t to say nuclear isn’t important and shouldn’t be built, just that nuclear shouldn’t be a priority in pursuit of phasing out fossil fuels. At the end of the day, demand will only go up, so building a lot of renewables before building nuclear won’t exactly be going to waste. We’ll need all of it.
Renewables can effectively be spun up or down as long as they have batteries. That way, they can usually be generating as much energy as possible regardless of demand.
Yes. It costs less and requires less mining to use the most expensive and wasteful storage option. The only reason there aren’t more is a lack of sufficient investment in VRE required to make them useful.
In that case it's the batteries being loaded and unloaded, not the renewables.
Storage can be connected to the grid anywhere and charged whenever power is cheap - from whatever sources are generating at that time. It is effectively an independent investment - assuming your on-grid / grid scale.
As far as i know the only major renewable electricity generation that is intrinsically linked to storage is reservoir based hydro with reverse pumping capability though even that increases costs and is a quite situation dependent if you want a lot of peaking power..
Nuclear fanboys could equally argue to add batteries so as to convert baseload into shape, or peaking.
That’s exactly the suggestion, over-build renewables right now to get to net zero, then fill out the generation portfolio with nuclear. The demand will only go up, so that excess renewables will eventually be used to capacity anyway. The study is laying out what the priority should be right now, when climate change has already got its foot well in the door.
If countries want to lower emissions as substantially, rapidly and cost-effectively as possible, they should prioritize support for renewables, rather than nuclear power.
This article is about profitability, not cost to net zero. They are very different things. It also ignores the cost of scale, go all in on say solar today and that doesn’t make more panels available, the increased demand would raise prices and suddenly its not so profitable.
Nothing is as simple and easy as people want it to be.
However, the researchers show that in terms of cost and speed, renewable energy sources have already beaten nuclear and that each investment in new nuclear plants delays decarbonization compared to investments in renewable energies. “In a decarbonizing world, delays increase CO2 emissions,” the researchers pointed out.
They talk about profit to get the attention of money people, but the ultimate goal is decarbonization. Hell, the title of the source article is “Why investing in new nuclear plants is bad for the climate”.
Two of the researchers are economists, and the third is an environmental economist. I’d rather get my opinions on decarbonization and nuclear energy from actual scientists and people who run research reactors.
It’s just money people talking to money people. I don’t trust an economist to make a value judgment on science when all they’re looking at is profit. I actually actively distrust them. They’re interested in investments and profit – nuclear has an undeserved stigma and it makes its profit in the long term, not the short term that they all seem to love.
You seem to be implying that there’s some problem with going to renewables but there isn’t. It’s just quicker and cheaper than nuclear to do so. It’s not like it’s breaking new ground either - plenty of places have already done it.
Nuclear is the hard way of doing this, not renewables.
I’m not implying there is a problem with renewables, I’m actively stating that markets will change if you increase the demand massively and that you can’t just say that a market state today would continue if you change all the driving forces behind it.
What generally is statable is that diversification in markets stays stable. if you buy all the options then you keep the power in the buyer and the costs stay as low as possible.
Demand has never been so high. If we wanted to go all in on solar and get to net zero on it, that demand would be 100x higher.
Right now, the driving reason behind solar prices going down is to encourage more demand. If that demand were to jump suddenly, then that driving reason is gone, and suddenly it makes more sense to charge more as supply can’t keep up.
I was speaking about the market, the solar panel price. Many developing countries now invest in solar power to meet their energy needs with the cost of solar energy technologies decreasing and the availabilities of governments subsidies. The Ukrainian conflict may have an impact on the market but nothing is sure.
Right now, the driving reason behind solar prices going down is to encourage more demand. If that demand were to jump suddenly, then that driving reason is gone, and suddenly it makes more sense to charge more as supply can’t keep up.
Wait, do you really expect us to believe that increasing solar will increase its price? Have you looked at the cost of solar over the past decade? Do you understand the economy of scale as it applies to all 3 (solar, wind, and batteries) because I don’t think you do.
Seriously. By this logic fossil fuels are cheaper, thus better!
This is how we get garbage like carbon credits, trying to capture the cost to the environment in dollar amounts is just more symptoms the fallacy of using economics in lieu of physics.
I don’t think they’re discounting the excitement, but keeping realistic expectations. Don’t hold off on buying an EV or hybrid if you’re in the market right now because headlines say they just discovered this. The path from lab to the dealership is long and sometimes fruitless
A breakthrough often enables more than just a marginal improvement in theory. However building real world, mass produceable products based on the science is not an instant process, and very commonly manifest as a trickle rather than all at once.
LED lighting has changed the world, when they first came out in 1962 as faint ir emitting devices, they were quite useless for most of the purposes we know them for today.
That’s not true, “regular” Li-ion batteries have become tremendously cheaper and have increased their capacity by a lot in the past decade. The next jump in their capacity is about 50% more again, and it’s already being previewed by the big battery manufacturers. They’re not going to be cheap though.
I don’t think thats ehat he meant. He meant if renewables wouldn’t be profitable, then in a capitalist system they would rather go for nuclear energy even if renewables are better for our future.
This was my point. I’m glad renewables are getting more funding and becoming the predominant form of energy in the world. I just wish we would do things because it is good for society rather than good for shareholders.
Renewables are incredibly cheaper to build, come online orders of magnitude faster, are completely non-centralized, require massively less infrastructure, have no millennium length waste storage dangers, etc etc etc. The only component still to be built out is energy storage to meet the baseload, and that's well on its way with batteries, water pumping, and other energy storage technologies.
It's just not even a question, renewables are the better choice for new construction.
Renewables are incredibly cheaper to build, come online orders of magnitude faster, are completely non-centralized
All true.
require massively less infrastructure
Not true. In fact, very much the opposite is true, nuclear plants are vastly more compact.
have no millennium length waste storage dangers
Neither does nuclear, really. Waste storage is a non-issue, that has had effectively zero observable impact over the decades we’ve been doing it.
But the bottom line is that this is a distraction. The longer we continue focusing on short term profit, repeating the previous generations’ mistakes, the harder it will be to get to zero emissions. Nuclear and renewables are not mutually exclusive. The more diverse our energy sources, the more robust our fossil-fuel free grid will be.
Not true. In fact, very much the opposite is true, nuclear plants are vastly more compact
Distributed solar and agrivoltaics have 0 or negative land use and require less material than a nuclear reactor. Whereas low-yield uranium resource (like Inkai) has a lower area specific power than a dedicated utility solar install.
Distributed solar + battery also has the effect of massively reducing strain on transmission. A household that previously had a summer peak consumption of 20kW, a summer average of 2kW and a winter max daily average of 1kW can now be fed with 800W of transmission instead of 20kW. Results are less extreme in high latitude but it can still halve.
Along with an enrichment industry (building one rather than paying russia will get your country coup’d, bombed or cyberattacked), and waste processing/permament storage (of which there is one small token facility in finland that might work, and numerous projects that failed to contain their waste and had to be cleaned for hundreds of millions to billions).
Then there is the milling and mining waste which is usually abandoned on indigenous land or in a developing country.
I’m not surprised. Israel loves attacking civilians and their infrastructure. They are no different than Russia, but for some reason the majority of western countries support Israel.
I’m not surprised. Israel loves attacking civilians and their infrastructure. They are no different than Russia, but for some reason the majority of western countries support Israel.
Israel is a modern, western democracy. Russia is an autocratic oligarchy.
Israel is at war for self-defense because of an attack from a hostile nation. Russia started a war to annex land.
Israel's wars are existential. Russia's wars are military adventurism.
Israel is a NATO ally. Opposing Russia is why NATO exists.
Israel is a vital part of the tech and military industrial complexes of many western countries.
...I guess it's a mystery why western countries treat these countries differently.
It is true that both Israel and Russia has attacked infrastructure and killed civilians. But, then again, so does every nation at war when they are valid military targets. Your statement is like saying that Dolly Parton is no different from Adolf Hitler because they were once children, but for some reason one is universally loved and the other is universally hated.
For it to be a war both sides must have a military
Remember that massacre of civilians launched by Gaza's government, that consisted of 5000 simultaneous rockets, a coordinated plan consisting of drones, paragliders, motorcycles, and speedboats by 3,000 armed Hamas militants? That's their military.
I’m not saying it as an insult. I’m using it as a declarative statement. Your inability to understand how the asymmetry creates even more room for literal war crimes, which Israel has done IN GREATER NUMBER, AND IN GREATER NUMBER OF CASUALTIES, you truly are, just purely and simply, pathetic.
Neither side is good, but one side is demonstrably more deadly and commits more war crimes while trying to claim the moral high ground. It is genuinely pathetic to buy that propaganda.
I’m not saying it as an insult. I’m using it as a declarative statement.
A statement can be both, you insufferable twit. <--- See? Both declarative and insulting.
Your inability to understand how the asymmetry creates even more room for literal war crimes, which Israel has done IN GREATER NUMBER, AND IN GREATER NUMBER OF CASUALTIES, you truly are, just purely and simply, pathetic.
My inability to understand a point you hadn't yet bothered to make is pathetic, so therefore calling me pathetic is somehow not an insult? Bless your heart, you don't seem to be capable of coherent reasoning.
Israel has attacked it’s own institutions to protect their Prime Minister from prosecution. Including charges of voter suppression and going after political rivals. That’s not a democracy.
Israel was already committing acts of war against Gaza with the blockade and countless military adventures into Gaza for decades. To include preventing the democratically elected party from forming a government in both territories. This war started in 2006.
This not the 1970’s. There is no existential threat to Israel. Hamas and Hezbollah do not have the power to get rid of them. Syria is paralyzed. Jordan and Egypt are trading partners. Iran would get a NATO bombing campaign inside of 24 hours as a prelude to a ground invasion started from Iraq and they know it. This is not the cold war.
The existence of greater war crimes does not make Israel’s any less galling.
And finally, we can develop tech anywhere. Israel getting frozen out would hurt but it’s not anything the west would actually worry about tech wise.
There is still no evidence the hospitals were home to more than a few security guards.
A flawed or imperfect democracy is still a democracy.
Israel was already committing acts of war against Gaza with the blockade and countless military adventures into Gaza for decades.
You're using that term wrong. Military adventurism is the use of military force for matters other than defending one's homeland; Israel's homeland was literally attacked.
While one can certainly cite causes for this ongoing conflict all the way back to the late 1800's, I would argue that Palestine was defeated a long time ago but refuses to pacify and accept terms. An act of war like an embargo isn't uncommon when one is already at war with a government that is still belligerent, launching attacks, and calling for their destruction.
There is no existential threat to Israel. Hamas and Hezbollah do not have the power to get rid of them.
Their calls for genocide should not be overlooked simply because they presently lack the means. If Israel loses this war, (although it is incredibly unlikely,) they have nowhere to retreat to. They will not exist as a country, so existential is the right word. Compare that to Russia, whose people will simply return to Russia should they lose in Ukraine.
The existence of greater war crimes does not make Israel’s any less galling.
Israel claims to have valid military targets and the high civilian death count is due to collateral damage. If true, this makes their military actions legal, not war crimes.
we can develop tech anywhere. Israel getting frozen out would hurt but it’s not anything the west would actually worry about tech wise.
No we cannot simply move tech anywhere, production requires infrastructure, which takes a lot of time and money to build, and development requires an educated population with a culture of technological entrepreneurialism and investors. Israel has all the nessicary components. They are one of the few places outside East Asia that produces advanced chips.
By that definition Russia is still a Democracy. Putin is voted back into office regularly. You cannot have it both ways.
Likewise you cannot justify previous military adventures with an attack that happened after them. But I do get why you would want to do that. Otherwise it gets kind of hard to (checks notes) defend shooting unarmed protestors and their medics.
If you want to talk about homeland I’m sure the Palestinians would love to tell you about how they lived there for thousands of years. Using the word homeland to describe settlers and colonists is just ridiculous. Being there for 500 years didn’t entitle Europeans to Asia, the Americas, or Africa. Why would 50 years entitle them to Israel?
If the hospitals were legitimate targets we’d have seen more than a maintenance tunnel hatch, 5 AKs, and 2 cans of oil spray.
As for how necessary they are, we just built another chip plant in Arizona, with plans for more in the US.
Finally, and in an edit because I fat fingered my phone, private calls for genocide in no way justify an actual ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing campaign. Hamas as an organization has publicly stated many times they will settle for the 1969 borders and/or the destruction of the Israeli state. They very clearly avoid calling for killing all Jews.
Clearly Israel is more democratic than Russia, which is a de facto autocracy. Do I really need to elaborate on this?
Likewise you cannot justify previous military adventures with an attack that happened after them.
As far as I'm aware every war Israel has ever fought has been in defense of its homeland, and therefore by definition not Military Adventurism.
If you want to talk about homeland I’m sure the Palestinians would love to tell you about how they lived there for thousands of years. Using the word homeland to describe settlers and colonists is just ridiculous.
It's not really their homeland? Well, Israel disagrees and there's been a lot of people living and dying there who now have a legitimate claim that it is, especially since they are currently in possession of said land and Palestine has no way of contesting their territorial claims. Regardless of how you feel about the term, "homeland," it applies here:
an autonomous or semiautonomous state occupied by a particular people.
Yes you do since Netanyahu is doing the same political stuff Putin is doing. He’s literally passed a law preventing the courts from holding him accountable for anything he does to maintain power. Which absolutely includes using the police to intimidate voters.
So please, elaborate.
Israel has been in a state of war continuously since the mid 2000’s. The election of Hamas was not a declaration of war against Israel. No matter how much you want to pretend. You don’t even need to go into cold war era to disprove the myth of them only defending themselves. To boot, many of their military adventures are justified by having settler militias attack Palestinians so the IDF can look clean when it clears the Palestinians out of a village. It’s a pattern repeated over and over again in Colonial history.
“We conquered this so it’s ours” went away at the end of World War 2. Not even the Soviet Union could make it stick anymore. The Israelis do not get some special dispensation to kill the locals and take their land. They can take the same deal settlers got in Africa. Become citizens of the unified successor state with democracy everyone gets to participate in
Netanyahu is doing the same political stuff Putin is doing.
He's simply not. Russia fakes elections in a way that lets us know they are faking elections and don't give a shit:
Our new research using election forensics techniques suggests that the 2016 Duma (legislative) election had the largest magnitude of fraud under Putin’s presidencies since 2000. What’s more, we suspect that the Russian government may have deliberately manipulated some results — in ways that show they’ve been reading papers on detecting election frauds!
Metaphorically, we suspect the Russians may be giving us the statistical finger. They appear to be sending signals that they are on to election forensics researchers — while continuing to cheat, obviously, right in front of us. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/01/11/when-the-russians-fake-their-election-results-they-may-be-giving-us-the-statistical-finger/
Bibi is trying to neuter the Justice system, which would be a power grab, and he is trying to intimidate voters, but he doesn't outright fake elections. He's not an autocrat, (not yet anyway.) He is still beholden to popular vote in a way that Putin never will be. And because of this democracy he's likely to be removed from power soon.
Putin just straight up murders and throws his political opponents in prison, en masse. He will be removed from power when he dies, and any claims of Russian democracy by the Federation are made in bad faith, to support comparisons like this one.
“We conquered this so it’s ours” went away at the end of World War 2. The Israelis do not get some special dispensation to kill the locals and take their land. They can take the same deal settlers got in Africa. Become citizens of the unified successor state with democracy everyone gets to participate in
That would have been nice. Jews started out by legally buying the land until a xenophobic Arab nationalist movement was whipped up and started a cycle of massacres, making a 1-state solution impossible, and the hostilities never stopped. Most of that land was taken as a result of failed wars waged against Israel.
One doesn't need a special dispensation for self-defense. Letting an enemy who outnumbers them and wants to drive them into the sea elect their leadership sounds like a terrible idea, that isn't remotely viable today.
Right. I’m guessing you haven’t cracked a history book in the last decade or so.
Israeli settlers were the ones who pushed the British out and then started burning out Palestinians. We have the British Army reports on it. At the end of the day Israel is nothing but a modern colonialist state. Winning the war doesn’t give you moral authority.
And Bibi has already neutered the justice system. That law got passed.
Edit - and repeating myself. Hamas doesn’t want to kill all Jews. That’s Israeli propaganda. Their charter lays out their specific demands. A return to the 1969 borders or the dissolution of the state of Israel. So a two state solution or a one state solution. Not a permanent occupation and Apartheid.
guess allowing hezbollah to take over the lebanese government on behalf of iran, and use that country as a staging ground for advanced weaponry to attack israel and kill jews was a poor choice after all
Is that the same Hezbollah that only exists thanks to Israeli invasion? Kinda like Americans whining about Al-Qeada when their own government made them.
Is that the same Hezbollah that only exists thanks to Israeli invasion?
Yes and no. Hezbollah is a result of militant Nakba Palestinians destabilizing Lebanon.
Hezbollah emerged during Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war, which broke out in 1975 when long-simmering discontent over the large, armed Palestinian presence in the country reached a boiling point. Various Lebanese sectarian communities held different positions on the nature of the Palestinian challenge. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-hezbollah
Israel was attacked and invaded first, successfully repelled the invaders, then occupied and annexed land from the belligerent forces. Some Palestinians left for Lebanon from within Israeli territory, (not invasion, as one cannot invade their own lands,) and some refugees left from invaded/annexed lands, (could accurately be called invasion.)
I have some limited electrical engineering experience and don’t like paying other people to do things that I think I can do myself. How likely do you guys think it would be that I’ll end up burning my house down if I try to DIY a small solar installation?
It’s actually not that hard. Microinverters have taken a lot of the danger out of it. Every one or two panels has an inverter, they can be individually controlled and tie together with 120 volt AC wiring, so you avoid the issue of 100+ volt DC strings that can’t be turned off. And on the physical side, there are now rack systems that install very easily and look good. Designing and installing the system isn’t hard. Just look up the documentation from Enphase or someone similar, you just need panels, micro inverters, a combiner panel, and maybe one of their computer management units. There’s other manufacturers too but the concept is the same. Installing the solar is the easy part. Getting permits is the hard part. Municipalities throw up a ton of red tape and utilities throw up even more for any sort of grid connected system. So what would be a basic concept that a technician level person could design, ends up being this complicated thing that needs engineering sign-offs and stamped plans that have to be approved by the town and the power company and inspected 18 different ways. This leads a lot of people to do off-grid systems, that is, set up your own solar panels and batteries, and run some portion of your house off at using extension cords rather than hardwired. If you’re just putting panels on the ground or on your deck and running extension cords, no need for permits.
That’s pretty ridiculous imo. My system in total was around $45k including parts and installation. I got it Feb 2022. It’s 17kW system with microinverters for every panel (42 panels). No battery though.
I don’t know how anyone affords home solar. We got 2 quotes last year to put solar on our 1000sqft roof from solar installers in our area. The first was just over $100k, the second $160k! The second quote was for more than we have remaining on our mortgage - how is anybody doing this?
I would recommend most people at least have professionals install the hardware going directly into and through the roof to avoid leaks. Unless there’s nobody reputable you can hire and you are sure what you’re doing.
Home repair is often fairly simple and can be done easily with some basic online tutorials, but there’s so many people that don’t do that and think up terrible solutions off the cuff.
Metal roofs are also an option that go great with solar. There is a style of metal roof panels where you dont drill at all, you just clamp the panels on the ridges.
Roofing is its own ball of wax, but if youre handy or need a new one anyway they are a fine pair.
Keep mind that the prices in the article are FOB China (i.e. cover deliver to a ship in a port in China).
Shipping for Shenzhen (most likely port) will be between $1000 and $2000.
Duty tax for photovoltaic panels from China is 0% (I was curious so checked the TARIC database) but VAT gets added on top of it all (both the panels and the shipping) which depends on the country but will be around 20 - 25%
What I’ve seen generally (not solar panels but years ago I did look into importing LED lamps) is that doing it directly tends to result in it costing as little as 1/4 of the price but, on the other hand as a small purchaser you run certain risks in terms of quality and the manufacturer guarantees actually being possible to uphold (I’ve imported stuff were the failure rate was 10% and if you have to send stuff back, it’s going to cost you).
It’s worth considering for a big enough installation.
That said if one goes DYI, looking around in the EU for better prices is well worth it and does not carry anywhere the same risks (but also won’t save you as much) as a retail buyer for something that’s 7000€ - this kind of stuff is were the single market really makes a difference and might save you a few thousands of euros.
That’s seems ridiculous: where are you? Are you sure that’s just solar, or would it also include batteries, maybe a “solar roof”, instead of solar on the roof? As far as I know, most of the systems (in us at least) are designed for shingled roofs: do you have tiles or slate, or something?
Where I live in the northeast us, it’s typically $20-30k for solar panels on my roof, only. I don’t need batteries because I’d stay grid-tied and my roof is pretty new. That’s still ridiculously expensive and beyond any reasonable payback but state incentives make it much more reasonable. They claim 4-7 years payback but since I can’t follow their math, it goes into the bin with the rest of advertising hogwash
That’s a sneaky-ass edit just to rant at someone on the internet. They didn’t say “only 20-30k” they said it’s 20-30k for just the solar panels on the roof. They even go on to say that 20-30k is really expensive.
lol i didn’t edit my comment. If by edit you mean i “misquoted” the parent comment then i suppose you’re technically right. Let me fix it, “it’s typically $20-30k for solar panels on my roof, only.” i really don’t think it’s very different than “20-30k only”. I understand it’s still expensive… that’s kinda exactly my point. But saying something is “only” $20-30k is just pretty funny to me cause i’m a poor lol.
It’s not about having the money laying around. It’s about seeing if the cost over 25 years of electric bills is higher or lower than financing $20-30k.
If it’s more expensive to pay for 25 years of electric bills, buy the solar. If it’s more expensive to finance solar and maintain, keep paying your electric bill.
In some places and buildings, it’s cheaper to use solar. In some it’s not.
Also if you happen to be on undeveloped land with no power, the electric company often charges $1200 or more per pole to get to you, so it very quickly becomes worth it to just do off grid solar.
There was one guy I saw who was 400ft from power but thepower company wanted so much that for a tiny fraction of that he was able to put in a really nice off-grid solar setup. Plus then you don't need to deal with connecting to the grid or any sort of permitting depending on where you are or how little you care about permits.
you still need the spare income to buy new land while continuing to pay mortgage/rent at your current home, and the spare time to do all the actual development
Yeah, for us the solar installation (5kw of panels) was around US$14k. Since electricity is quite expensive and we live in a sunny country the installation paid for itself in 4 years.
Yeah I get that. The problem is (at least around where I live) is they don’t give you 25 years to pay it off. I need to take out a loan to pay it back pretty quickly and I’m paying with interest so it changes things a little. I also can’t find any one that can do it for under like 50k which sucks. At least not yet.
I’m hoping that prices drop and the subsidies get a little more helpful or something. But right now I just can’t figure out a way to afford it. It’s just too expensive. Do you have them by any chance?
Even in that case, you are overpaying in the early years and getting free electricity for the rest of the life of the system. If you can only get a 7 year loan, you may have a higher bill for 7 years, but no bill for 18 years while electricity prices continue rising is a pretty awesome benefit.
You still weigh the balance to figure out what is economically the best option.
I don’t have them on my home because my HOA disallows them. I did, however, initiate and helped manage installation of systems on 3 separate family members’ homes and since I had already done the research and the financial benefit worked out for each of them. One was 6 years ago, one was 3 years ago, and one was 2 years ago and none of them have any complaints.
The 6 yr old system is almost paid off and has already reached its pay-off value since electricity prices keep rising… meaning, they haven’t paid off the system, but would have spent more in electricity in the 6 years they have had it if they would not have installed it.
I am currently in the process of moving out of a neighborhood with an HOA and plan on installing a system as soon as I get into my new home.
Not only is home installation expensive AF but solar panels themselves on a house continue to look ugly AF. Uptake is going to remain slow amid these 2 factors.
Yeah. People hate hearing that it’s ugly. But it’s ugly. Some people have houses that have the backside facing the right way. But when the panels are all upfront it looks bad imo.
Yeah. People hate hearing that it’s ugly. But it’s ugly
Very ugly, and worse than that they can only be used on a house that is not surrounded by trees. I found out that the hard way too, the solar company said they can put them up, but with all the old trees around my house I would likely only see 50% of the power of an install where there are no trees. So I was like ya no.
I could have either switched to propane heating or oil heating for around $10,000 or switch to solar electric heating for around $12,000.
Not only was it fairly cheap, it also included a receptacle that sends extra energy back to the grid and I get paid for it.
The only time I have to pay for electricity is in the Winter months and that’s because the heat is on the go constantly and we don’t line dry in the winter.
That’s interesting! In 2017 it was still 0.50$/w and solar pretty much was the cheapest form of electricity. With huge demand I thought maybe prices would stabilize, but it’s awesome that they’re still falling. We might literally see solar panels everywhere in the future and near free electricity, at least during sun hours. Imagine installing an AC along with a couple of these and setting the AC to run when they are providing power. Free cool air when it’s needed.
The sun is always up somewhere. I haven’t seen any numbers on the cost to implement compared to alternatives like battery or pumped hydro storage, but in theory, a global power grid with enough transmission capacity could run entirely on solar.
Well a superconducting loop (even with liquid nitrogen costs/inefficiencies) would enable a global grid with quite minimal energy loses and reduce the amount of energy storage needed to sustain a stable grid even in the face of failures and disruptions.
The big problem tends to do with harmonization of energy grid standards.
My understanding was that most long distance transmission is high voltage DC anyway, so the frequency of interconnected grids should be irrelevant in that case
harmonization of grid standards is more than just frequency (it is mostly policy paperwork and the replacement of non-compliant equipment or the installation of conversion equipment) but you are correct high voltage DC is used for long distance power transmission. There are also details such as who is responsible for paying for what, where things are to be connected and various other bureaucratic details.
It would take 460 Tesla Megapack 2 XLs to be the same capacity as this. The biggest deployment so far of those is about 200 Megapacks 1 giving 450MWh capacity vs 1,800MWh for this.
The lithium batteries can supply the same power (300MW) and cost $160M. This cost $207M, so quite a lot cheaper given 4x the capacity.
Well, no. The round trip efficiency of pumped hydro is terrible. And flywheels aren’t scalable. 72% is pretty decent and I’m sure that can still be improved.
Round trip efficiency of modern pumped storage hydro is about 80%. How is that horrible if 72% is decent?
Pumped hydro obviously does have drawbacks in that it requires you to have the water and suitable landscape available to dedicate to it, but efficiency doesn't seem to be one of them
Energy density is terrible of pumped hydro, plus you have the environmental impact; tunnel out the inside of a mountain, place a generator hall in there, and then flood a valley. Sure it look ok at the end of it, but huge damage has to be done each time. All of that coats large sums of money too, and it can only be done in a relatively small number of locations. Step 1. You need a mountain to pump the water up.
Compressed air batteries are a lot more energy dense, so smaller footprint, so much lower environmental Impact / cheaper and they don’t rely on particular geographic features to work. They might be a bit less efficient, but that seems like a good trade to me.
What does “a good heat exchanger” look like in this case? You compress air, the pump heats up, so you ventilate it to keep it cool. The air in the tank is hot, and starts to cool as it sits in the tank, and this causes a decrease in pressure, which is why even with no leaks a shop air compressor will run for awhile, stop, then after awhile cut back on again.
I get that I’m applying a shop tech’s “machines that I can move with a hand truck” understanding to factory-size operations here but…
The tldr says 72% efficient. If it can store excess solar or wind from times they are not in use and release at times of higher demand, it should be great.
In all of this, we need diversity. Diversity of generation sources (solar, wind, tidal, etc). Diversity of storage (Chemical batteries, compressed air batteries, pumped hydro, etc). Each will have different sweet spots; cost vs reaction time vs capacity vs efficiency.
Try not to dismiss a technology just because it’s not the whole solution. Nothing ever is. They all contribute a part to the big picture.
So most hydrogen is produced using fossil fuels, or via electrolysis, which just uses the very power this aims to produce. I like how they put “clean” in quotes, indicating that’s more of a bullshit name than the reality, and then they fail to mention how it would be “clean”. It seems like this is just an intermediate step to cover up fossil fuel bullshit.
Electrolysis will eventually be "clean" as it comes from electricity and water, neither of which require fossil fuels...
The majority of our electricity comes from fossil fuels at the moment, which everyone is working on phasing out in favour of solar/wind/tidal/geo/etc.
The hydrogen then gives you a high energy density solution for things like aeroplanes.
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