I saw a tweet the other day that said that solar and batteries are growing so cheap that the combination will shortly be a good way to supply night-time power. I wouldn't have dreamed of it a few years ago.
This [1] recent FT times piece indicates solar PV coming out of China is down to 10 cents/watt. This [2] other piece indicates LFP cells are down to $53/kwh.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/69e4cb33-3615-4424-996d-5aee9d1af... | https://archive.today/11TFI
In my region of the world(Eastern Europe) I've seen monocrystalline solar panels in stores for the equivalent $0.25/W, which is crazy considering that electricity here is around $0.20/kWh.
I could use only a quarter of the generated energy and still break even on the panels in 5 years.
If it's 10 cents per watt why are prices on Amazon still 6 times that? https://www.amazon.in/WAAREE-TOPCON-575-Bifacial-Performance...
I have wondered this for years since the price for 200W panels stayed pretty flat for half a decade or more. Around $1/watt.
It turns out that these calculations are for utility scale purchases. You need to be buying thousands of panels to realize them.
That being said, I have noticed in the last year or so that you can find some pretty good individual panel deals, closer to $0.5/watt.
Interesting, even with the 40% import duties (China to India), local prices still are very high. Im not sure how to explain why no one is using this arbitrage.
Usually the arbitrage is a mirage (though sometimes it's real). Many times there are hidden taxes in the form of government bribery and special red tapes that requires paying the relevant parties. You only find out this stuff when you start doing business as the details are not included in the manual.
Because that's what people are willing to pay.
Yup, I just bought 60 kWh of LFP batteries. Total with shipping was $3100.
Where did you buy from? Also, what is your end application?
I have a theory. China is leading in solar and making it dirt cheap to undermine the USA and any other resource based economies without actually saying they're doing it.
It's a perfect weapon really, make energy so cheap, reliable and efficient that it destroys the petro-dollar.
As someone concerned about climate change, it's a wonderful thing but I think the hegemony should watch it and adapt.
Yours is in the class of theories that presumes that some large group is perfectly organised, communicates perfectly and able to keep that ability secret.
That’s already the case at grid scale in more expensive markets like California. We’ve been supplementing night time power generation with batteries for years now.
Between 5 and 10pm yesterday, batteries supplied more than twice the power that our nuclear reactors did: https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply
The grid has become so expensive due to the cost of fire proofing infrastructure that residential installs are a no-brainer if you can find someone to do the install for a reasonable price. DIY is even cheaper.
Additional context: https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo... ("California Energy Storage System Survey Dashboard")
> twice the power that our nuclear reactors did
Because California forced Nuclear suppliers to throttle down to "make room for renewables", no idea who thought this decision makes any sense.
> The grid has become so expensive due to the cost of fire proofing infrastructure
Power in California was incredibly expensive long before any of the money was going towards fire proofing.
There are some very big outlier exceptions to this however. In a handful of markets (such as the city of Riverside) which are served by a nonprofit municipal power authority with its own generation and distribution, local rates are decoupled from the crises plaguing PGE (and to a lesser extent SDGE, etc).
residential power costs are substantially lower for customers in these areas vs their immediate neighbors - out-of-pocket power bills are as little as half or a third of for-profit statewide utilities for the same sustained consumption during peak usage times.
At 85°C, you can store around 10kWh of solar energy in an average sized water heater. This cut the power bill for my small house about in half.
Fun project, I ended up making a simulator app with fancy graphs and stuff.
Solar has been cheap for a while now. I think what is changed now is that financial markets have become comfortable with financing solar projects. In the beginning it is hard to grade the risk of a project where cloudy weather or unproven degradation estimates can substantially change how much power is being generated and sold. To get a lot of projects financed, you had to come with a 10-year purchase agreement. The are only so many datacenters and industrial customers willing to do that.
More residential HVAC systems should utilize chillers to take advantages of peak solar energy times.
Dynamic rates would be great. This is a real use case for internet-connected appliances and home systems.
What people keep underestimating are several things:
- learning effects keep making existing battery chemistries and panels cheaper. This shouldn't come as a surprise if you know anything about manufacturing. But essentially any study, report, etc. that assumes cost to be a constant is 100% certified bullshit. And there have been some notable reports that should have anticipated that that didn't. E.g. most of what is published by the IEA.
- there is still a lot of potential coming out research into new technology. And contrary to the popular belief, a lot of that makes it to market and then starts making an impact. Energy density is improving. What's currently on the road is nowhere near the theoretical maximum. Technology is hard to predict but a very safe prediction is that stagnation is not happening any time soon. So, anything that assumes energy densities, efficiencies, etc. will freeze at their 2024 levels is going to be wrong as well.
- Dropping cost opens up new use cases and increased demand. Elon Musk going to Australia and putting some megapacks down to save the day is only seven years ago. Very few people predicted that. That's now a multi billion dollar business that is disrupting grids all over the world. E.g. gas plants are being reduced to expensive peaker plants because of this unexpected use case. Including some recently opened ones.
My bold prediction is that we are living through an energy revolution that will completely change everything over the next few decades. We've seen nothing yet. Just extrapolating current trends, an order of magnitude improvement along several dimensions seems likely. And why stop there? Solar panel cost (especially including installation), battery cost, battery energy density, battery longevity, battery charging speeds, etc. Those are just some of the more obvious ones.
Well... I own a small, self-made (legally here, France) domestic p.v. with small storage (5kWp/8kWh LFP). The storage is just a very expensive backup able to keep the home when I do not need heating from one sunny day to another, able just to keep few hours with minimum heating.
I regret I've not chosen back than a 10kWp/24kWh to being able to go from a day to another with heating, reaching hours where eventually I can power up an ICE generator to recharge because well... It's exactly in winter that I need heating, where there is the littlest Sun and when grid-disruptive storms likely happen (NOT happened so far for more than little time, but still...). At current Chinese prices it's sensible. At current local price it's not even for self-made solutions, it's totally fool for ready-made solutions by a local pro. To give some numbers my system was 11.500€ 4 years ago. The cheapest professionally made one similar but INFERIOR to mine was ~30.000€, the most expensive ~50k.
Long story short, I do not know in the US, but a current southern/center EU prices p.v. is not an economically sound choice if not self made, there is simply way too much speculation, like on EVs, where the same Chinese imported EV in Thailand costs less than 9k€ while the same vehicle cost a bit less than 40k here (eg. https://asia.nikkei.com/content/1f9ed40b4b44745e1a39fafaf94b... to have the Thailand price in BTH and USD).
At this rates there is no new deal.
About underestimating... Well... We have no seasonal storage. So we can't run a grid with p.v. apart of anything else. We can't even run a home with p.v. only, simply because OR we use something else to heat and recharge EVs or we need the size of the home itself of panels and storage, witch could last theoretically 10 years. So personally in a new home with an EV I produce around 50% of my energy needs and I'm in the southern Alps at 1030 so a very good place for p.v.
We should do much more, of course, but the dream of a renewable only grid is still a dream, possible in some areas of the world, like Norway with mountain hydro, nearly possible in some others, like Swiss but definitively not possible on scale. Beside that remember a thing: a modern home consume 1/7-1/10 of a "classic" one, thanks to mere design and insulation. We could converge to electricity with new homes ONLY on scale, we cannot with classic ones. We could converge to electricity on scale for cars if we mandate WFH for all eligible jobs, not without that.
That's to say is a MUST understanding what we need to implement the new deal, because what we need it the opposite of what big corps want.
But all those huge tariffs are about to kick in though and skyrocket prices so that adoption curve is going to be slowing down, a lot, at least in the US
And those are not tariffs from the previous administration, that's the current one, under the guise that it will increase American production/sales, which it won't because the US can't compete with nearly free slave labor and the manufacturing barely even exists here.
The three top countries by electrical generation emissions are currently the US, China, and India. While the tariffs are inefficient from a decarbonization perspective, China and India have enough energy demand that they should be able to sink most of the solar and battery production coming out of China. The US, in due time, will catch up.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/grid-interconnection-queue-...
https://cgs.umd.edu/sites/default/files/2022-07/US%20Coal%20...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-17/generatio... | https://archive.today/HvPlb (Control -f "Solar, Wind and Battery Storage Projects Dominate Grid Queues in US and Europe"; draw attention to the graphic)
https://coal.sierraclub.org/coal-plant-map
(lets not get into the per capita argument in this thread; I'm not saying it isn't valid, I am simply focused on physical systems vs accounting)
More detailed/sourced recent HN comment on these tariffs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41394506
I don't know anything myself but thought it interesting. I guess it's the sort of news neither political side sees an advantage in propagating.
With the demand from server farms and new EV devices, grid prices are not coming down any time soon or at all. The hikes in the Bay Area alone have been 20% per year lately. Solar has become enough of a commodity that PGE pays atrocious rates for daytime energy, but battery power is golden after 6pm. Solar with batteries or just batteries for personal use can pay back for itself fast. With the money you might be able to buy the next generation solid state batteries when they come out.
I don’t think most people deny that solar is a good idea. Although isn’t it a statistic that all batteries we’ve ever manufactured would power the world for what, 15 minutes?
> Although isn’t it a statistic that all batteries we’ve ever manufactured would power the world for what, 15 minutes
Is it really that much? That's incredible!
You have to realize that battery manufacturing capacity has been growing at an exponential rate. 15 minutes of global power capacity will quickly turn into 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, etc. 8 hours of global storage is enough to survive the night with just solar alone.
15 minutes is already a huge win. The more lead time we have for production ramping, the cheaper and more efficient we can make the plants that provide backup power.
So, think in systems; humans are building a machine (the entire supply chain for solar and batteries) that builds a machine (the global energy grid). By the end of this year, the world will be deploying ~660GW of solar capacity per year. Within 18 months, trajectories of manufacturing capacity bring that to 1TW per year. It is unlikely that number goes anywhere but up.
Now on to batteries. Again, let us assume this is a manufacturing floor, and battery manufacturing continues to scale up globally.
> BNEF is tracking 7.9 TWh of annual battery manufacturing capacity announced for the end of 2025. That’s compared to demand projections of 1.6 TWh, and even that assumes steady EV demand growth and very rapid growth in batteries for storage applications. Even half that total announced capacity would be enough to equip almost every car sold in the world next year with a 50 kWh battery pack. [My note: Global light vehicle auto sales are ~90M units per year]
We are, trying to be as rational and with as little hyperbole as possible, at the hockey stick inflection point looking almost straight up.
Edit: It also appears the US is throwing another $3B into battery projects.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41603409 ("HN: US announces $3B in funding for new battery projects")
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.today/DklaA ("Bloomberg: China’s Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts")
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... | https://archive.is/8Dy4D ("Bloomberg: China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants")
(i track and provide reporting on global energy electrification velocity and clean energy policy on a volunteer basis for a cleantech startup)
What’s insane is that battery grid storage has already overtaken pumped hydro storage, and practically all of that is in just the last few years.
We haven’t really even ramped up production of battery chemistries that are tailor made for grid storage yet. Batteries like sodium-ion, molten metal or various flow batteries have basically no limits to how much we can scale them, and a really low potential price floor.
Let's counter that with some real statistics:
Batteries are being produced at TWH/year scale now. Probably crossing into 1.5-2 TWH/year this year. That's new batteries added every year. This is projected to grow over the next few years. Most of those batteries have thousands of cycles of lifetime. Tens of thousands for some of the newer chemistries (e.g. sodium ion).
Overall electricity production is 25-30 TWH per year; for the entire planet. So 25000 TWH. That's going to go up of course but it's a nice number to work with.
Those batteries can cycle multiple times per day. Lets assume once a day (they'd be able to do multiple of course). So you get about 365 TWH of power cycled per day out of 1 TWH of batteries (discharged and charged again). You'd charge them with cheap solar, wind, geothermal, and whatever else you have available; whenever you have that available.
About 70 TWH of battery would be enough to get to 25000 TWH per year. We'll have that probably in the early 2040s. Once we hit tens of TWH of battery produced per year that won't take long. Of course electricity production and demand will increase as well.
Of course, we'll have plenty of other power sources. So, most of those batteries will just be sitting there fully charged most of the time and we won't actually be cycling most of them all that much. That's a lot of potential energy. Combine that with cables, dynamic pricing, demand shaping, and a few other things and the implied need for long term storage melts away.
Basically all the batteries that have ever been built (by volume), have been built in the last 3 years. The party is just getting started. So while it might only be 15 minutes today, it's going to 1000x in just a few years.
https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-...
That chart makes me annoyed that all UPSs under $1000 use SLA batteries. Where's my compact LiFePO UPS or same-sized UPS that lasts for an hour?
How many kwh do you need? These are just over $1000 - https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-lifepower4-v2-lithium-battery...
Holy cow! 5kwh for $1k is amazing!
That is not a UPS.
What’s the difference between a regular battery with a smart inverter and a UPS? It’s just that the UPS is an all in 1 box right? Or is there something else that a ups has?
Something like this?
https://www.amazon.com/GOLDENMATE-600W-Battery-Protector-Lif...
That's more like it. However, if I can be picky, sketchy company that advertises it as being suitable for medical equipment when it's almost certainly not certified for such a use is a bit of a red flag for me (company contact info is "dobest021@sina.com").
What's messing with people's heads when it comes to predicting solar is the perfectly rational tendency to base projections on past and current data. I think it qualifies as a black swan event for this reason.
Ditto with batteries. I very frequently see people talk about batteries with notions from the 2000s about expense and manufacturing capability.
Batteries have become dirt cheap to make and we are very quickly getting to the point where the power electronics are actually the more expensive part of a battery deployment rather than the battery capacity itself.
And you see people who confidently spout conclusions that have long been rendered obsolete. It's not just that they don't understand growth, it's that their conclusions ossified a decade or two ago. They're basing them on far past data, not recent past data.
That's only because we haven't made a lot of batteries, historically speaking. Their price per kWh was too high with the technology of the time. With modern battery technology there is nothing stopping us from building dramatically more capacity.
"Every day, the sun’s rays send 173,000 terawatts of energy to Earth, 10,000 times the amount used by all of humanity." ???
They speak in term of raw energy, carried by the photons the sun sends us. If we had 100% efficient solar panels and covered the entire earth with them we'd get 173,000 terrawatts of electrical power.
> They speak in term of raw energy, carried by the photons the sun sends us.
Or is it saying that you would get 173,000 terrawatt-hours of electrical energy? It refers to energy then gives a number in units of power.
Why every day, not every some other time unit? The unit "terawatts" is a rate, not a quantity of energy.
What's ??? about it. That actually sounds much less than expected. It's not saying we can or should capture it all, just the possibilities if we can harness even 0.1% of it.
That's rather meaningless number intending maybe to shock some folks who don't understand math/physics etc for many reasons, just randomly: atmosphere takes a bit out; we will never be 100% effective (but 50% is not unreasonable); we can't cover even 1% of earth surface with solar panels even when ignoring most are oceans, that would be absolutely massive use producing staggering waste and due to curvature of Earth only a fraction of them would be useful at a given time.
So what you are basically saying we have to support solar with other sources, always, by principle. Still good supplementary stuff unless you are too north/south from cca equator, there it will never be a major thing.
I wonder how long it will be before the enviro types will be angered by those yuge fields of solar cells like the one in the cover image of the story. Coal mines and oil fields don't look great, but the solar fields are starting to look pretty industrial too. Maybe not as sooty or as smelly, but they're only possible when we clear cut the trees and steal all of the sunlight from the plants that feed the animals.
The article was clearly written by some fanboi. I suppose when oil was first discovered, there were fanbois for oil too. But maybe it would be better if the fanbois started to get ahead of the criticism.
>angered by those yuge fields of solar cells like the one in the cover image of the story
You are correct. If the world were perfect in every way, some people will come up with ways to find faults the scheme of things. This is because various causes give meaning to people's lives. Without a cause they would feel life is meaningless.
Note: I am not saying that most causes do not have legitimacy, what I'm claiming is they have tones of religion.
There are still millions of oil fanbois…