> If it's cost effective there's no need to mandate it.
You should see how hard PG&E is working to prevent commercial and multifamily buildings from going solar. If the legislature voted to force PG&E to get out of the way, to allow property owners to do obviously cost-effective upgrades to their own properties, plenty of people would call it a “mandate”
It doesn’t really matter if there’s land that would theoretically be more ideal if the value of the power generated pays for the infrastructure buildout. The best land for solar panels is the land you can build on now.
It’s already possible for consumers to know that, I worked on the software that powers the tools that tell US consumers this at Genability ca 2015.
As far as I know, they never cracked the European market, so if you’re interested in working on that, I’m currently available for hire! Info in profile :)
There will be connected batteries in every home solving this problem faster than the fossil fuel lobby can come up with a new talking point about why it’ll never work.
I'm not convinced we'll ever see mass deployments of batteries to homes, not because of the fossil fuel lobby but because of the economies of scale from installing grid sized batteries at strategic points in the transmission network.
In California grid scale batteries have capital costs of around $125/kWh to $155/kWh while a home battery might be 20x that including installation.
That's because home battery providers aren't competing on price yet. The market is still small, the risks are high and they need to figure things out.
Once the early adopters run out they will have to start competing on price to make sales. There's no justification for a home battery when they charge 10k for 10kwh as they do now - only early adopters and government subsidies getting it over the line.
IMO home batteries should be a relatively easy install in principle, it's just still in that early expensive phase.
It’s already happening as I write this. An enormous amount of capital and labor are already deployed to find ways to get batteries into people’s homes, and growth is accelerating.
It's aluminum, glass, silicon, and some conductive metal. Surely you all have those materials.
And even if you don't make them yourselves, they aren't make and then burn like fossil fuels, they are durable infrastructure, you don't have to replace them often - they have an expected lifespan of >30 years. Buy as many as China will sell you, and once you have more than enough installed, you're good for a long time, regardless of whether they cut you off.
I think being reliant on the fossil fuel supply chain for so long, it's a bit tricky to mindset shift that once these things are installed, you're just good. And they're super fungible, you don't need any precision replacement parts, so you can make your own replacement parts if you want.
Yes, and France currently has a huge problem with keeping their plants online in the summer when it's too warm. And building new plants is outrageously expensive, see Hinkley Point C. Oh, ans you still need to import fission material, so you're dependent again on other countries. Nuclear was good in the 70s, now it's beaten thoroughly by renewables.
The Swedish government is very pro renewables, yet it is initiating large investments in nuclear because they believe it is the only way to ensure enough electricity for the larger and larger need for it in the near future. I’d say they have some good information to base that decision on, since you’re right it’s really expensive, but also it’s the only way to get large amounts of production when the sun ain’t shining (all winter here) and there’s no wind (also happens a lot in the colder months).
Right, a mix of uncorrelated sources is much more resilient than 100% renewables. Of the cleantech industry people I listen to, none of them are advocating for 100% renewables, you need a mix for grid reliability. But renewables can take on much of the load. And overpaneling can help significantly, and makes a lot more sense now that solar is super cheap.
Most panels have a 25 year 80% production warranty. Unless they're planning on being out of business, they're not planning on them lasting <25 years. So their useful life is significantly longer than 30 years, unless we come up with massively more efficient panels and the land opportunity cost is high enough that we should swap them out rather than let them just keep pumping out electricity.
Your comment makes no sense. If the Middle Eat oil gets cut off, you're suffering within days. If China cuts off solar panels, you have many plenty of time to find an alternative source or ramp up your own production.
If you chase down all inputs into everything you need to generate power you will find you're not truly independent from anyone. But solar panels and various other renewables hardware is much easier to stockpile than oil.
> but there is nothing inevitable about it
The Middle East is not going back to normal any time soon. The Israeli/US attack on Iran is a strategic catastrophe, implemented by two felons advised by ideologues and incompetents. The conditions are right to make oil more expensive for a long time, regardless of the outcome of the war. True peace is very unlikely to never be achieved. For instance: Iran now has a massive incentive to build nukes.
Meanwhile solar panel, wind farm, and battery prices are dropping like a rock and they avoid all of the problems of oil. Only the most ideologically fixated wouldn't invest in and install renewables. Anything that makes huge amounts of money is indeed inevitable.
But at the moments they cover only a tiny percentage of our electricity needs, not even talking about storage or the heating needs which usually come from gas.
Huge difference between tranistioning to renewables and going completely de-centralised. Even if we put a limit to the latter at the community level, it's a recipe for de-industrialisation. Centralised power production, even with renewables, has economies of scale, and those economies amplify with volatile demand sources, e.g. residences.
You can decentralize residential power without doing the same for industrial loads. Doing so is a mixed bag. It's somewhat more expensive however it's less prone to failures during natural disasters, failures aren't outside of your ability to fix, and it isn't subject to politics to nearly the same degree.
When you consider the logistics of strengthening the last mile of residential to accommodate EVs in a sparsely populated place like the US (or rather the apparent lack of political will to do so) it starts to look extremely attractive.
A good friend of mine is a solar installer in rural California, and he is booked solid building battery and solar systems sized to charge cars, because depending on PG&E is worse than spending the money to go off-grid.
Yepp. Grid defection is a trend all across the world right now in sunny climates. I live in Germany and can unfortunately not do this, but if I had thr sun hours of California, you can bet I'd build 300kWh of LiFePO4 and as much solar as my roof allows, and cancel all my expensive contracts.
> You can decentralize residential power without doing the same for industrial loads. Doing so is a mixed bag
There is a middle ground: decentralize enough to run essential services. Run the rest through the grid. The big downside to decentralising residential power is that's variable demand–precisely the sort of demand you can net out against other parts of the grid. The sort of variance that makes grids more economic than everyone powering themselves.
> The big downside to decentralising residential power is that's variable demand–precisely the sort of demand you can net out against other parts of the grid.
Residential is variable but for the most part not all that amenable to time shifting, at least at present. Isn't a grid most efficient with a constant load, with the next best being something that varies only slowly over time and is highly predictable?
Then there's EVs. I'm under the impression that replacing a notable fraction of the ICE cars on the road with EVs would at present place the grid over capacity most places in the US.
When it comes to unit cost doesn't the ultimate benefit here lie with the consumer's pocketbook? I don't see why residential considerations should make much (or even any) difference to dense commercial or extremely high capacity industrial users. Given that solar plus battery is reasonably affordable for a large chunk of the US population it doesn't really seem like much of a downside when framed as a voluntary expense. I still see people building it out where I'm at (suburbs) despite (AFAIK) the subsidies ending.
That’s fine. A solar system specced to a house has to meet its max drawdown. A house connected to a grid can effectively pawn off its unused power to another user. That’s the efficiency of a grid.
> doesn't the ultimate benefit here lie with the consumer's pocketbook?
Yes. The NPV of a blended system (solar, maybe battery and grid) almost always beats going all in on one or the other. You spec to your base load and put the uncertainty on the grid. That way you don’t have to overprovision solar and battery. (And you’re good with your essentials if the power goes out.)
This is almost universally true unless you have super-subsidized solar (bonus points for an expensive grid, e.g. California) or stupidly-cheap and reliable grid power (until recently, the Gulf).
Wholesale power market prices are responding to shocks in the natural gas market from two wars that disrupted those supply chains. Solar and batteries have been and will continue to he the cheapest source of power, and globally, deployment is accelerating.
Not so much in the US, where our braindead political culture is intent on ignoring the obvious economic advantage of renewables, but definitely everywhere else in the world.
> Solar and batteries have been and will continue to he the cheapest source of power, and globally, deployment is accelerating.
I think storage is great and solar has a place, but this is not true unless you discard reliability and other features, which should be in the price. Solar plus storage for baseload power matching requires huge overbuilds. Even in the last few years, before the AI hype, installed utility scale renewables costs went up in the US. It's not just the hardware or national politics.
And if you can't get renewables interconnected in a couple years, then the install rate won't lower the carbon of the existing grid mix charging your car.
Why would you need to “discard reliability”? What do you think storage is for?
People have been saying that solar will never work for my entire life, and my entire career in clean energy, as I have watched it grow and grow and grow and grow.
You’re right that the interconnect queue is broken. Many, many people are working on this problem. Believing that an extremely tractable bureaucratic hurdle means that solar can’t work is madness.
No, solar reliability requires overbuild and storage to compare accurately on LCOE. Hybrid and overbuild = expensive, so not "cheap/er", which you said.
A lot of people have this misconception about solar even with awareness of the duck curve.
I don’t think this is correct. You’re arguing that the industry analyses on this subject are wrong because they’re underestimating how much solar + batteries need to be deployed to be as reliable as a gas power plant. So you’re arguing that initial capex (which everyone acknowledges is higher than natural gas) is somewhat higher than existing analyses think it is.
The lifetime of solar panels is also higher than most of these analyses say it is, because both solar and batteries are frequently found to last well beyond their factory-rated lifetimes. So I think you’re wrong without any additional considerations here, so let’s leave that aside.
What you’re saying here is that the lower ongoing opex of solar and batteries is eaten up by the higher initial capex of gas, but you’re saying the prive of natural gas has no impact on this calculation.
I don’t think this makes any sense. Can you explain your thinking here? Can you cite any data on this?
> You’re arguing that the industry analyses on this subject are wrong because they’re underestimating how much solar + batteries need to be deployed to be as reliable as a gas power plant.
No, the industry knows this. Talk to any investor or developer. See the capacity market blowout in PJM because they don't have enough firm power supply to offset the flood of renewables (sans storage). Or just look at the announcements for natural gas turbine demand by datacenters, which need 24/7 power. The overbuild for renewables and storage is insane to hit the same reliability and safety margins.
> So you’re arguing that initial capex (which everyone acknowledges is higher than natural gas) is somewhat higher than existing analyses think it is
It's not just CAPEX. It's also OPEX. LCOE is a normalized ($/MWh) metric that allows for comparison. See Lazard [0] or NREL's analysis [1] on LCOE costs. Note how expensive solar plus storage becomes on an LCOE basis and realistically, you might need way more than 4h batteries to hit reliability targets.
> because both solar and batteries are frequently found to last well beyond their factory-rated lifetimes.
BTW, this is like saying you can still use laptops past their 5 year warranty. Yes, but that's not how depreciation, financing, and service levels work. These assets are getting pushed to their limits and not everyone's buying tier 1 suppliers.
That little (sans storage) is some load-bearing sleight of hand. Yes, solar is intermittent, and needs to be paired with storage.
You’re saying the overbuild is “insane”. Do you have an actual cite for this? I’m assuming there’s some percent over capacity you need to build that would allow people to reason about this.
I’m still not seeing an answer here re: the cost of natural gas, it seems like that has a huge impact on all of these assumptions.
I can't take your comments seriously, though, I don't think you're trying act in bad faith.
> You’re saying the overbuild is “insane”. Do you have an actual cite for this? I’m assuming there’s some percent over capacity you need to build that would allow people to reason about this.
If you have zero intuition about storage overbuild or underbuild to firm up intermittent capacity or why PJM has an undersupply of storage, then on what basis are you calling my comments on storage "sleight of hand"? My assumption, though, and seriously not trying to be mean, but based on your bio and paradoxical comments, you don't really know how to defend your argument or read these primary sources you requested.
> I’m still not seeing an answer here re: the cost of natural gas, it seems like that has a huge impact on all of these assumptions.
Taking one step at a time, you still haven't acknowledged you were incorrect about LCOE comparisons to date. These are provided in the sources that you asked for.
As for the future, you can run sensitivities. My primary sources included price shock sensitivities. You probably overlooked or can't process them as it appears.
If your time horizon is long enough, the best possible investment thesis is to assume that climate change is real and the energy transition is inevitable.
I’ve worked in clean energy software and hardware since 2014. I’m currently looking for a new position, and recently some research firms came out of the woodwork offering to pay me a high consulting rate just to better understand the market. I wasn’t even looking for this, they just came to me. All they said was “interest in this area is increasing.”
P.S., if you’re looking for someone with deep domain knowledge and senior-level engineering skills for your clean energy project, I’m available. https://matthewgerring.com
He’s right. I built a hackintosh from a PowerMac G4 motherboard I bought off of eBay with my saved-up babysitting money when I was 12 or 13 because I was absolutely desperate to have a machine I could edit movies with, I couldn’t afford a real Mac, and I read on the internet somewhere that this was the cheapest way to get one. I knew lots of older brothers who were “into” computers (all of them for gaming) that thought I was an idiot, because building my own mac made everything ten times harder. I didn’t care. I was obsessed.
This is a $599 computer with purpose-built architecture for (barely) running (small, underpowered, near-useless) LLMs. There are children saving pennies for this machine that will do great, horrifying, dangerous things with these computers. I can’t wait to see the results.
Actually I think the last 20 years of the Internet demonstrates that copyright is more important than ever, because unless it's enforced, people with more capital than the copyright owner will simply steal creative works and profit from them.
The idea that "information wants to be free" was always a lie, meant to transfer value from creators to platform owners. The result of that has been disastrous, and it's long past time to push the pendulum in the other direction.
See also "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence), and what a goofy, naive, misguided disaster that early internet optimism turned into.
No, AI does not mean the end of either copyright or copyleft, it means that the laws need to catch up. And they should, and they will.
You should see how hard PG&E is working to prevent commercial and multifamily buildings from going solar. If the legislature voted to force PG&E to get out of the way, to allow property owners to do obviously cost-effective upgrades to their own properties, plenty of people would call it a “mandate”
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