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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/8471507
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Don’t forget, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was just in China to protect US interests - this time because China has flooded the market with cheap solar panels.
We can’t have solar power becoming affordable and accessible for most people.
I’ve said it a million times, we had the opportunity to get into the market early under Bush JR, but he shot down investing in the tech. Now who is one of the top exporters?
The manufacturing would still have probably been moved to China at this point, but it’s frustrating that we didn’t even try to support it.
100% true
It’s more complicated than that. Supply shocks cause short term instability in markets that require long term revenue streams to offer service.
Because we privatized our infrastructure, and because private firms divert a bunch of their revenue to profit, we have a bunch of material infrastructure that needs to be maintained by firms more interested in extracting profit than keeping them functional.
That’s the real threat of solar panels. If we cut into private profit margins, they’ll allow the infrastructure to collapse rather than maintain them with declining profit.
Seems like the real problem is corporations and the solution would be to violently nationalize at the slightest hint of bad faith.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to have our infrastructure be used as a hostage.
nationalize at the slightest hint of bad faith.
That’s a smart policy, from the economics perspective. But its pretty disastrous from the politics perspective.
Countries that try to nationalize their major productive assets regularly find themselves destabilized and regime changed in short order.
All I keep reading is the failure of capitalism at the end of the day.
Its failure of regulation. Same shit will happen in any system if its not properly regulated and checked…
It’s nuanced. Domestic solar panel production is lagging and cheaper shit from China is gonna make it worse. It is not necessarily evil to want to have local production, and if we live under capitalism then it has to make money.
I agree though that for the most part even our good politicians do whatever they can to maintain the status quo, and that is generally bad for us and good for corporations and the billionaires
Domestic solar panel production is lagging and cheaper shit from China is gonna make it worse
Isn’t this the point of the free market? Shouldn’t capitalists rejoice when things are working as intended?
Only when they own the means of production.
If they can’t extract profit from Chinese imports, they don’t want anyone else to import them.
Yes but we don’t have a free market.
States don’t serve the majority, per se, but whoever wields the state. Cheap imports are good for consumers, but producers struggle. Capitalists wield the state in America, so this is a bad thing.
I don’t see the problem. Buy the underpriced Chinese Solar. If they raise prices, build a factory. It’s only a few years of overpriced panels, then prices go back down. If they are dumping panels, it’s the Chinese who are handing free money to US consumers.
After the US is 100% solar we can worry about domestic manufacturing for maintaining infrastructure.
except the U.S. needs solar panels for military industrial complex reasons too, and they don’t want to rely on a notoriously hostile power to build the groundwork of that structure. a big part of selling the U.S. on solar is the promise of energy independence, you don’t get independence if your entire foundation is built on another country’s tech.
The US exports oil and gas so we are already energy independent. If China sold Gold to US consumers at $1000 an ounce, should the US step in and stop China from giving Americans cheap gold?
Yes I understand the need for domestic production. Factories take a few years to ramp up. Domestic production can be started after everyone has solar panels and old panels need replacement.
The USA keeps several wartime industries afloat with subsidies in case of war. The big one is steel, but there are others as well.
There has been a recent rethink of what industries are needed during war and solar capacity is part of that.
If it was that important then the US should’ve invested in local manufacturing.
Solar panels degrade over time, I don’t know what the numbers are but they used to be dysmal, like 30% reduction in generation capacity over 5 years. Whatever the actual numbers are, we will constantly be replacing panels. I am sure we can figure out refurbishing too at some point.
Yeah they’re definitely better now, I’m reading anywhere between 1% per year or 12.5% at year 25. There are other things that can pop up though, micro cracks causing localized overheating of the panel - to backing failures and other physical issues. I’m interested in standing some up at some point but the capital eludes me at the moment.
I’m am certainly wrong, that figure was something my dad told me as a kid, we were on solar back then.
No worries at all. Like you said though, with advancements people will likely do upgrades over time anyways. I don’t have numbers off the top of my head, but even just the per panel efficiencies have grown fantastically since your last experience.
Yeah I was totally wrong, that is great though!
but they used to be dysmal, like 30% reduction in generation capacity over 5 years.
??? Monocrystalline silicon losses less than .4% a year. That means after 50 years it’s still producing 82% of when it was new. It takes 90 years to get a 30% reduction rate.
https://www.engineering.com/story/what-is-the-lifespan-of-a-solar-panel
Do you know the type of pv panel that was used 20+ years ago? I lived in an off grid house and my dad mentioned that at one point.
Monocrystalline silicon was used 20 years ago. It’s the oldest solar technology.
According to the source data in a link in the page I linked thin film CIGS rollable solar sheets was the least durable. Panels installed before 2000 had a degradation of 3.5% a year. That’s 10 years to lose 30%. But CIGS solar systems installed after the year 2000 show only .02% degradation a year. The document talks about manufacturing defects that were corrected.
Ok, I’m just flat wrong! Til!
Yeah but your point is that solar panels degrade 30% after 5 years, and then you reframe the context for 20 years ago?
Go astrosurf somewhere else.
Any grid has a maintenance cost and degradation. Solar panels isn’t any different.
The fuck are you talking about. I was wrong. Get over it.
That doesn’t sound nuanced. That sounds like the free market, so capitalism, did its thing and the US doesn’t like the outcome. It’s almost like capitalism is a terrible system that the US’s lead economist is trying to subvert.
Agree, but we aren’t in a free market. That is a fantasy the conservatives have been pushing forever to get away from regulation.
Correct.
Id say the bulk of jobs being created in north america wont be in manufacturing the panels, but rather in the installation and upkeep of solar farms and solar panels on houses. If thats the case, then we want the panels themselves to be as low cost as possible to keep the overall cost of projects down.
If politicians had any balls at all (they dont) they’d be proposing publicly funded solar farms outside every major city. But we cant have that because that would be the government directly competing with oil companies, and thats why oil companies have bought one side of our entire political system to keep that from ever happening.
But then you have the issue of being dependent on China for the solar panels, which is why it is crucial to have domestic production. And we have already seen this demonstrated, as China has banned the export of solar panels recently in reaction to us banning electric cars from import (they would probably hurt our domestic car market).
in reaction to us banning electric cars from import (they would probably hurt our domestic car market
Which is an entirely different story that I don’t get. Sure, the protectionism, ok, but there’s no one even attempting to compete with them, and legacy manufacturers have backtracked even more in introducing any. Even Tesla appears to have given up on a reasonably priced EV. What’s the point of protectionism if there’s no equivalent market to protect and no one wants to establish one?
Do subsidies not exist in your reality? Or are they only reserved for corn farmers?
They do, but I was responding to someone that said Yellen went to China to address it, so they aren’t immediately starting with subsidizing production.
Cynicism aside, there are genuine engineering and logistical problems with relying too heavily on solar power. Storage and distribution being chief among them.
A $20k LiPo4 battery in every home can remove almost all base load needs and is available today.
Get to 100% solar, then figure out how much coal/gas/oil can slowly be removed.
Hard sell. Also, say through collective action we actually somehow get governments to pay for a $20,000 battery for every home. How will you make that many, who will install them, who will maintain and replace them? You need a very large number of trained electricians and manufacturing capacity to make that a reality. You also need to plan for and earmark funds for replacements to make it not a complete waste. Just throwing out batteries as a solution is way easier said than done. There are a lot of barriers. That is why things take time.
Nuclear is about $6k per KWatt. Solar with battery is about $5k per KWatt.
If it’s cost effective to build and maintain a nuclear reactor for $6k per KWatt, then it can also be done with the cheaper solar.
Yes it takes lots of money, people and planning. So does operating a coal mine. No one says, “We can’t have coal power, where are all the trained miners going to come from? Someone will need to drive that coal to the powerplant and that power plant will need trained electricians. It’s a huge problem!”
Yes it takes lots of money, people and planning. So does operating a coal mine
I think the problem from the capitalist standpoint is that its not a very profitable business model, well thats fine then the public sector should do it just like we do the roads and other essential services. But no politician in america would even have the balls to propose that.
I hate to tell you, very few places are building new nuclear plants as well.
The Fossil industries have lobbyists and money on their side yes, but their infrastructure also already exists. That’s our biggest challenge. And it takes functional governments looking out for the interests of citizens to build and/or subsidize infrastructure. And functional government takes an educated and engaged electorate.
very few places are building new nuclear plants as well
And because there are few plants being built, the cost is design is massive.
And a government that’s willing to continue funding a growing expense to nuclear reactors such as maintenance or when building one goes over budget.
*Hate to be nitpicky, but a lot of assumptions go into a “$/kW” LCOE. Your effective costs for the solar + battery are going to be very different in different parts of the world depending on factors such as seasons, land value & labour.
Also not a lot of nuclear is being built atm anywhere unfortunately.
Sounds like we got a (green) new deal work program on our hands. Nice.
Yes, that’s what it will take. And we’re going to have to fight like hell for it.
Genuine question out of curiosity, do people think it would be more efficient to have some sort of battery substation for a neighborhood that’s funded publicly? I just think it would be really inefficient to have everyone fund their own private batteries. It’ll be way easier to balance a neighborhood than each individual house.
You start running into major issues with regulation and ownership of equipment that there isn’t a vested interest in solving. If a local battery isn’t owned by the utility company, who owns it? How do you track power input and use? Can one house use another house’s power?
It is a lot less complicated to keep things separated.
Sorry I should have probably worded it better I meant that it would be run by a public utility not by residents.
Run by a public utility, I don’t see any problem.
We own it. It belongs to us. It’s mine, and it’s yours.
It’s public.
And how do you answer the second and third questions?
Things get a lot cleaner when you make the local infrastructure owned by a public utility.
The benefit of everyone having their own batteries is resiliency. If I have batteries I have power in an outage whether the downed wire is in my front yard or miles away.
There’s probably also some free market benefit in purchasing decisions - some people will choose to spend for more capacity while others have an incentive to save money/power usage
Redundancy could be achieved by multiple power stations run municipally, moreover buying in bulk gives the city more leverage to negotiate price than individuals.
Also supposing that the cost of the battery was fielded by individuals it’s just not feasible for the 65% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck to have an additional $20,000 expense and this is something that needs to happen now not down the road.
If the municipal government is going to foot some of that cost it’d be really inefficient to do so in each individual’s home as apposed to a centralized site and project
I’m not qualified to answer but I do know there are losses in transmission and ac/dc conversion for that transmission.
I’m by no means an expert just trying to think things through logically I could absolutely be incorrect in any of my assumptions.
That being said I believe inverters go up in efficiency as their capacity increases, add this the fact that they need to be over provisioned to allow for peak draw times and it makes sense that a substation that averages a neighborhoods demand would be able to cut down on cost by averaging.
In addition to other comments here, I think that there’s added risk to having such a starkly segmented way of running things. Having neighborhood stations (publically owned/owned by the utility service provider) reduces a lot of redundancy and hedges some risk for families. If a battery fails and gets spicy it’s less likely to put a family out of their home, when a substation could be highly specialized for managing that kind of risk so that even if a battery or several batteries fail, it doesn’t impact the whole. There’s also some specialization that goes into handling them at end of life, and trusting normal every day laypeople to both maintain and manage them is a tall ask when most people find themselves in a position to be unable to do larger maintenance on their homes already (it cost me 20k to put in a sump pump and encapsulate my crawl space to treat and protect it from mold and pinhole beetles, which I could only do by taking out a loan that I’m still paying for).
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You are going to grow crops to feed a planet with oil burning power plants? Have you ever even seen a Midwestern farm?
Besides, using solar now saves the oil for future global emergencies. Burning it all now, when it doesn’t need to be burned up is stupid.
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Manufacturing and installation manpower are very real problems that take many years to solve. We needed to start working on them a long time ago. And they should be the first step in moving forward.
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They are both problems. They both can and do exist. Decentralizing like you suggested reduces the problems from my first comment, but it brings a whole new set of problems that are arguably bigger. Either way the capacity needed to attempt it will take huge leaps in manufacturing and installation capacity. And we need to get started on that yesterday if we want this to happen in a decade.
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Problem here is that the engineers are saying “this problem is hard for these reasons” and people like you are screaming that you don’t care, fix it. And when they say it’ll take X years, your scream that it isn’t good enough. Or that the goal posts are moving (problems are complex and involve more than one thing). There standard you’re setting is unreasonable.
Calm down (helpful I know). Stop yelling at people when they are trying to work the problem. It isn’t going to get done the way you like but it can get done if you stop asking for impossible.
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Really? I’m an electrical engineer and your understanding of the problem indicates you aren’t an engineer or you suck at your job (or did you not just positively assert production capacity and storage are minor problems?). Any decent engineer wouldn’t call out moving goal posts on a complex problem. Public awareness of difficulties is a way to get support for decidedly unsexy problems (nothing gets people hard like utilities). And layman screaming about shit they don’t understand is also a problem.
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Opinion time:
Human population will grow to consume all there is, always.
We as a species will ever escape scarcity.
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We were the gray goo the whole time
Until something gooier comes along.
(really I just saw an opportunity to use “gooier” for the first time and I just couldn’t pass it up)
Even if population doesn’t, the constant advancement and use of portable electronics, electric cars, and a warming earth will require more environmental controls for living spaces. These will drive up demand for electricity.
You are right that what you said is an opinion.
Isn’t this how all species work? Carrying capacity and whatnot
No, but maybe as a first approximation in very small slices of time. It is far more complex than that. Just look at the olive tree. Olive trees detect new olive trees and release poison to kill them off, at the same time they have multi thousand year lifespans. Individuals in that species have “decided” that the only way it can live a long ass time is to have no competition and is willing to kill their own to get it. You can’t apply the carrying capacity model to olive trees.
Energy generation requires intense planning as the amount generated has to be spent immediately.
Reason all countries require some sort of permission before installing solar power to your roof is this; as you can’t just add more power to your grid without addressing proper storage for excess electricity or decreasing certain plant outputs.
I don’t know of a single country that prevents you from adding panels to your roof without permission. The connection to the grid might be regulated, but that’s a totally different claim, my friend. And the difference is important when evaluating the rest of your statement.
decreasing certain plant outputs.
let’s be honest, this is the real threat, oil/coal/natgas based power production would take a hit midday, because at the end of the day, the shareholder is simply more equal than you are, and he is owed the income
no, it’s an engineering reason. The total energy into the grid has to equal the total energy out, and large generation plants can’t just be spun up and down at will. The generation network has to coordinate changes in capacity and synchronize resulting line frequency shifts.
and large generation plants can’t just be spun up and down at will.
actually, they can…
This is true if you want to export the power back to the grid (aka grid tied), however, some solar controller systems can operate without this happening, and do not require any form of permission to operate.
Generally homes are grid tied unless they have batteries, simply for the fact that the solar power is generally available when power isn’t in high demand, and not available when power is in high demand. So the daytime power is pushed to batteries, and the batteries are consumed during usage time (usually near or after sunset).
Systems can be augmented to use grid power when solar/batteries are insufficient, and do so without sending any excess power back to the grid.
These systems are generally more expensive than grid tied systems, but they have obvious upsides to power availability when the grid is not delivering power. Another caveat is that most solar systems are not built to be able to handle the full power load from a household, so some things will be solar while many others will not be.
Unless you’re exporting the power, a permit is not required for generating power with solar. Installing it, however, you may want a permit for that…
I was thinking about something similar recently.
They say we have about 20 years to get to net zero, or face irreversible consequences, increasing exponentially to what is potentially species ending event.
let’s say we achieved nuclear fusion TOMORROW - solving all the planet’s energy need need immediately and forever.
Capitalism means we would be FORCED to drip feed the technology, because plentiful energy cheaper than water would crash the world economy.
Renewable energy is great
Having a power grid is great, needs money to maintain
Having on demand power generation is great, needs money to maintain.
The current model pays for the maintenance and carrying costs of the grid and always available power generation with usage.
The current model doesn’t work when electricity has a negative cost. So we would lose either the on demand power generation or access to the grid.
It’s not capitalism that’s the problem, just the current pricing model.
So in theory a baseline maintenance fee could solve this. You just make it so the metered charge counts against that fee until it’s covered, so the people who don’t have alternate sources of electricity aren’t affected.
I think the “capitalism” part comes around because most electric grids (in the US) are privately owned and actively try to turn a profit. For those companies, the fact that some people use solar panels will just become an excuse to charge everyone a fee.
The current model pays for the maintenance and carrying costs of the grid and always available power generation with usage.
Current model where? My energy bill contains a separate fixed cost for grid access and maintenance. It’s currently €1.16/day.
Curious what the current average cost is for solar on a home? Sadly I haven’t been keeping up with the technology to really have a frame of reference. 🤔
Depends on the region and supplier, but generally speaking the price per kW of solar install has been dropping like 20-50% per year.
Let’s say you spend $5,000 on 5 kW of panels and your monthly energy bill is ~$200. It’ll take 25 months or just over 2 years for the panels to break even.
However, panel substrate materials tend to die after 25 years of service life, so for the remaining 23 years that they exist, they will be making you ~$4,600/year (since you no longer pay for electricity).
The main positive of solar is that the sun will literally outlast human civilization and is about the closest thing to free energy that we have in our fucked up world. No one rushes over with an umbrella in public parks and charges tariffs.
Just food for thought.
of solar install has been dropping like 20-50% per year.
Even half of that is insane. I can’t think of anything in history that has come close to that rate of price fall.
I’m an engineer who designs solar array for a living, here’s how the math breaks down in fairly typical round numbers.
The all-in cost is around $2-3k per kilowatt (thats equipment, installation, permitting, utility approvals, etc), so a 5kW system (pretty typical residential size) would cost $10-15k. Each kilowatt produces about 1000-1500 kWh every year (depending on your latitude and how much sun your roof gets), so if your electric company charges you $0.10 per kWh, that 5kW system will generate $500-750 worth of energy annually. Without incentives it would pay itself off in 20 or 30 years, but if your state has good solar incentives that can be much shorter, if you pay a lot more for electricity it pays itself off sooner as well.
Is there anywhere that the price is 0.10$ per kW? We have a pretty good pricing here and it’s not even that low.
I live in WA state, land of hydro electric dams. Our rates are about .09/kw.
I paid 53k USD for sixty 405w panels installed.
Well the point is the powerplant, if not currently a municipal service, has to pay for itself, make capital improvements, pay wages, etc.
If the powerplant doesn’t have “regular” income they are in a tougher spot and “may” go out of business.
Solar and green energy is wonderful and we need more and more. But we should agree we want power at any time, in any condition, so the powerplant currently still needs to exist.
This problem is not wholly removed if the powerplant is a municipal service either.
Edit Not sure what the downvotes are for, nothing I said is wrong. I even praised green energy.
As a Canadian, if you taxed us for electricity the way we’re taxed to provide universal healthcare, we’re all for it. It would be cheaper then what we have now too
That’s great. As an Americans I agree.
My point is we don’t have a green grid at full readiness. I hope we do soon via distributed storage .
But for now, municipal or not, the power station has bills and operational standards. Big swings in revenue, as well as the operational challenge of starting and stopping every day is a challenge that we currently are experiencing.
We need those plants (currently!) To provide the backbone, so unfortunately have to suffer their habits and needs
Negative prices are good for BESS. It also has no bearing on the consumption market, which is detached from the generation market (so they can charge consumers more).
This.
For those not in the industry, the drivers for this are green tags and production tax credits (more common in wind).
Green tags are basically attaboys for funding the generation of renewable electricity, and are tradable.
Production tax credits are a $/MWH tax incentive for generating renewable power, and are, again, tradable.
In both cases, then, there are incentives for renewable projects to keep producing power even when the wholesale power price at the point of interconnection is negative, as there are generation incentives that still make it better than idling.
From an environmentalist perspective, this is fantastic, as virtually all of this renewable generation represents offset coal and gas peaker plant generation.
From an environmentalist perspective, this is fantastic, as virtually all of this renewable generation represents offset coal and gas peaker plant generation.
Aren’t prices swinging rapidly between negatives and high peaks a sign of volatility, where specifically fossil gas peaker plants flourish? (Since we have a notable absence of proper grid-level storage)
Yes, but if baseline generation goes up there are fewer peak demand events that exceed available baseline capacity so fewer revenue generating opportunities for peaker plants. But I agree the real answer is less overbuild and more storage- unfortunate given today’s Tesla news.
For now, BESS is a hugely growing industry and many countries’ planning authorities are speed lining them.
Ahem. Please don’t use Twitter
I am pretty sure this is terribly taken out of context. The issue is solar is unreliable. By being cheap, it is pushing reliable sources out of business. And if you want to know how bad the consequences can be, just look at how many people died due to the relatively small blackout in Texas.
So the issue is not capitalism disliking solar. The issue is capitalism liking solar too much. Endangering people by choosing cheap over reliable.
The 2020 incident? Texas failed because they didn’t properly winterize their infrastructure. Not because they were using green energy. It was almost entirely gas that failed.
Also there are a number of ways to store and transfer energy.
The real issue in Texas was unregulated capitalism. Energy prices skyrocketed like 6000% at the time, because they could get away with it.
I live in Minnesota and those idiots are charging me for their lack of preparation.
Yes, I did not mean to imply it was due to green energy. I just wanted to point out how important reliability is.
It doesn’t have to be that way. With volatility comes high peak prices, so speaker plants should be doing ok. We should be approaching a stage where fossil fuel plants are evolving into peaker plants, and peaked plants will still have decades of use to generate a profit, as we continue to build out renewables and try to get a handle on storage
The issue is the storage costs. We can’t generate excess electricity from solar and then ‘bank’ it somewhere. It needs to be used within a relatively short amount of time.
If we could figure out a way to store it for longer or allow the grid to deal with more volatile fluctuations then there would not be an issue with it.
Well, yes. But I don’t think wishing for what we don’t have is productive. That is why I am still convinced nuclear is the best source of green energy we currently have.
Agree that nuclear should be the focus if we are serious about clean energy. The main problem with it is that the plants take so long to setup that we need to start them now to see benefits which could help the planet in the medium term.
Why would you just spend so much time to lie?
