Solar now being the cheapest energy source made its rounds on Lemmy some weeks ago, if I remember correctly. I just found this graphic and felt it was worth sharing independently.
Imagine how steep that line would be if the fossil fuel lobbies hadn’t been fighting it tooth and nail all these years
much more important: we’d be years ahead with storage technology.
I could be wrong but I don’t think there’s any evidence that the fossil fuel industry worked to suppress storage research/funding. Pretty much every IT industry has a huge interest in improving battery tech and energy storage in general, it’s just that we’ve already hit all the low hanging fruit from a chemistry standpoint
Gotta keep prices high yo
It would be less steep because solar costs would have come down earlier.
That would make it steeper, no?
This part of the graph (2009-2019) would be less steep, because this sharp drop would have happened earlier - we’d be further along the curve
And this shows exactly why investing in nuclear is not the answer every tech bro thinks it is. Its far cheaper to built renewable and more importantly far far far quicker.
It is AN answer, but also not the only answer. Generating and moving power around is extremely complex and just seeing “Solar cheaper per Watt” and defining it as the best in all cases is silly. If you changed the axis to be size per MWh, then you would draw a totally different conclusion.
It was the answer. Now solar is so cheap that spamming panels and investing into ways to save the excess energy seems cheaper. By the time nuclear plants are done you’re going to be at least 8 years into the future. Solar panels however are directly implementable. And even cheaper now.
Solar still doesn’t work at all night, no matter how cheap it gets.
It’s not very useful for most of Northern Europe and birth America during the winter months. Even if it was free you’d still need alternatives.
Yup, and you’re not going to be able to make enough batteries, and if you could, it would be prohibitively expensive.
There are other options for energy storage, but they all have massive caveats. We’ll need something reliable as a backbone until we find a good way to store power.
This is the issue: you can use batteries to store energy for the night during the day. Batteries that store over longer periods such as long cloudy spells and large seasonal differences are too expensive. On the other hand, on a global scale this is really mostly a concern in Northern Europe (where I happen to live).
Sweden represent :,(
8 years is a drop in the bucket when it comes to long term production.
It’s really not even AN answer. It’s so expensive to build them, requires hoards of highly specialised people to build and operate, takes decades to build all the while were relying on fossil fuels still until it can generate power, has a bigger carbon impact than renewables due to massive amounts of concrete used in building decommission and waste storage, is more expensive per mw, and while on average safer than most types of power plant, if something unexpected happens shit goes extremely bad.
It just has way way way too many downsides compared to wind or solar or basically any other renewable to the point its just not really worth pursuing.
I’m all for renewables but keep in mind a nuclear plant can produce 24/7 regardless of conditions while many renewables cannot. I don’t see an issue with diversification here rather than pointlessly advocating for a one-size-fits-all solution.
A nuclear plant can’t “produce 24/7 regardless of conditions”. Obviously natural disasters affect them. Nuclear plants need water so any flooding or tsunami can affect them. They also need maintenance because they are very complicated water boilers.
They require a lot of educated people to run them, whereas a wind turbine requires a few guys to check on them sometimes. Solar just requires some dudes to brush off the panels occasionally. That can probably be automated too.
Solar’s lack of moving parts is something people overlook, too. Hail storms supposedly rarely damage them, and if they do, you can just replace individual panels.
Navy has been operating nuclear submarines for 80 years. You don’t have to be that educated
I used to work with a guy who was a nuclear tech before getting out of the military and he legitimately made me concerned about the level of intelligence they require to do the job.
Demand isn’t a 24/7 constant value.
Nuclear doesn’t match demand and supply.
Nobody said it was, and I have no idea what the statement, “Nuclear doesn’t match demand and supply” is supposed to mean.
You said nuclear can produce 24/7. As in thats why its better than renewables. The issue you speak of is supply matching demand right? Renewable don’t match demand. Well neither does nuclear.
Where did I say it was better than renewables? I said we need to diversify, and that means using more than one thing.
Because it doesn’t help. Renewables want to be paired with something that can easily be spun up and down as needed. Nuclear doesn’t fit that model. It tends to make it worse, because cheap energy we could be getting from solar or wind has to give way to the nuclear baseload instead.
It’s something of the opposite problem of the sun not shining at the same time the wind doesn’t blow. At times where you have tons of both, you want to store them up for later. Nuclear forces a situation where you have to do that even more.
Except we don’t have a practical way to store any of this energy and there is always a constant baseline demand that can be met in part by techniques that don’t need to be constantly spun up and then back down and work day and night, rain or shine.
Ammonia believe it or not.
Yes diversification is important too. But that still doesn’t mean nuclear is worth it.
I’d be willing to bet that the cost of nuclear energy derived electricity is going up because most countries haven’t been building new plants for the last like 50 years
Average age of a nuclear power plant in the USA: 42 years
Average age of a nuclear power plant in the EU: 31 years
Average original intended operational lifespan: 20-40 years
To put their age into perspective, the average US nuclear plant was built closer in time to the Trinity nuclear test in 1945 than to today (along with any other plant 39 years or older)
This doesn’t prove that nuclear energy is bad, only that slowly degrading nuclear energy technology from decades ago is bad
You can look up the costs of nuclear in a country like France which is easily the most consistent builder of nuclear in the west and its not much better.
The reason we don’t build nuclear power plants anymore (including small modular), is because they’re insanely expensive, produce only a small amount of power compared to you can produce with renewables, and always come with cost overruns. Nuclear power is the techsploitation of of tbe 60’s and 70’s. Most governments look at the economics now and realize they can do solar plus storage for a fraction of the immediate and long term cost.
I wonder if fusion will ever be competitive with photovoltaic at this rate. There will still be decades for solar prices to drop.
At some point decades from now maybe? I still think nuclear and fusion research are important for human civilization, I just think it’s stupid to waste money on building power plants using nuclear technology in its current state.
Diversifying our energy needs in case of a crisis isn’t a bad idea, but we do need to prioritize renewable energy.
No it doesn’t. Cheap solar is great but even if it was $0, you’d still need some other tech to provide electricity when the sun is down. So it’s either gas, batteries, nuclear, etc. but you can’t just use solar alone.
And until batteries get good enough, nuclear is the cleanest option we have.
Bro do you know how power storage works
The problem right now is that we need to find better ways to turn renewable energy into stable, reliable power. The power production problem is highly dependent on balancing power generation and demand, and any excess energy must be stored, used, or wasted.
The main benefit of gas/coal/etc. is that we can (almost) always control the output to a close margin based off of demand projections, which are typically updated every 15 minutes. That being said, the drawbacks of using this form of generation are obvious and need to be addressed.
For renewables like solar and wind, we can’t always predict the output, so in the larger scale of power balance, we need to supplement it with something that can make up for fluctuations in generation. In the current system, this is from conventional sources.
The goal is to implement a robust energy storage system, ideally one that can hold a huge amount of excess renewable power during the day (largely due to solar), and reliable output that power when it is needed (higher demand at night). I would love to see the day where our nation is fully powered by renewables, and I’m super happy to see that there have been pushes to build up renewables, but the target scenario relies on big advancements in storage.
I would suggest anyone who is interested in what I said to look up “california duck curve solar” for some reading on what challenges solar overgen presents in bright and sunny states.
All that being said… we can do it! I sincerely hope we reach a point where we can phase out dirty generation across the globe, but it will take a lot of time and effort.
source: taking several power systems courses as part of my EE degree
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The problem is that all of this requires infrastructure spending.
Agreed. This is spending that our country isn’t willing to do, mostly because of what we already have (both in terms of infrastructure and in political influence). Personally, I hate this.
As for Cali’s duck curve issue, desalination is a great idea, but expansion of renewables and storage should really come first. Keep in mind that the current Cali grid generates much less dirty power during the day, where solar covers a majority of demand. Should we divert that solar power to desalination, we would need to ramp up dirty power generation during the day, and we would continue to generate dirty power at night.
Even if you only get 30% of the power back with green hydrogen it is power you had too much of in the first place.
While I agree with you, we also have to consider what this would do at scale. The 70% of excess power that you lose here translates to wear on the solar panel systems that is never realized into power. That is, the systems will wear at the same rate, but the amount of power you can utilize over the lifespan of the systems is decreased. It’s still a better solution than not implementing these at all, but I’d be wary as to how reluctant our society would be to the spending, especially if the ratio of cost to utilization(?) becomes skewed.
We’ve been perfectly fine wasting energy for over a century, I don’t see why we should pearl clutch now.
Well, that’s an issue in of itself. It’d be great if we could waste less power in conventional generation, but it’d be even better if we could match or even beat that with renewables. I hope we can reach a point where everyone can agree to implement renewables sooner than later, but I don’t see dirty power’s political influence allowing for changes until renewable is equal to or better than dirty power. Which sucks, but a lot about our political system sucks.
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There was a study done in LA where if you covered just the parking lots with solar you could provide power for the entire city (if storage was available obviously)
That’s really more of an indictment on LA having too much parking than anything else.
Put the solar panels on the roofs. Replace the worthless parking lots with more productive buildings. And, obviously, quit forcing everybody to drive everywhere.
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Yeah, solar + wind + highly connected grids can go a long way to balance loads and make up for the intermittent nature of wind and solar.
Also every bit of atomic energy we use now humans have to pay for for centuries to keep the waste safe
Normally these guys are all about passive income and buying over subscriptions and things like this but if your actions lead to generations having to pay for it suddenly it’s not as bad…
Pay for centuries to keep it safe? We literally just throw it in an old mine shaft and fill it with concrete, it’s really not that monetarily or resource intensive
We have reactor designs that use already spent fuel, we just aren’t building them. We have enough spent fuel for centuries, and afterwards the reprocessed fuel is much less radioactive, and only for a few decades.
The folks that work at the nuke plant around here have this really cute saying. They say working there is like playing “Hide and seek for a grand a week” (it’s an old saying so needs adjusting for inflation) Then they like to say “the cost of labour has no impact on the cost of electricity”
They also like to shit on wind power.
I’m not sure it’s tech bros falling for the nuclear lie, it’s rather the wannabe rich invest boys in my experience.
The same people falling for NFTs
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No it doesn’t.
The price of solar can’t continue on this trend forever. There’s a point of diminishing returns.
I can see that critical thinking isn’t your strong suit, but I’m willing to comment it out with you instead of just down voting.
If the price of solar is already the lowest -and still dropping- then how is the most expensive option that takes about a decade to implement a better option for right now? This apparent point of diminishing returns is only beginning to manifest in even lower prices than this 2019 chart. And this diminishing returns point is only in the cost of the panels dropping; they are still getting better in technology and improving efficiency while maintaining low prices. If your argument is “solar can’t continue on this trend forever” -no one expects anything to consistently drop almost 90% every decade. Of course it will level out. And when it does, it will STILL be the cheapest option.
Yes and no, the progress of solar array technology continues unabated, with multiple areas of research that are beginning to reach commercial applications. Module conversion efficiencies now are in the 20% range, but heterojunction cells, or Gallium Arsenide, or Perovskites, or any number of other possible advancements could easily put efficiencies up into the 30% range.
That being said, the price of the solar modules themselves has already shunk to a small piece of the cost to build a solar array, with the bulk of the costs now being the support structures, wiring, electrical equipment, labor, development, etc. And those costs aren’t going to decline, they’d still be there even if the solar panels themselves were free, so they effectively set a floor to the cost reductions we’re seeing.
Without saying anything about politics, environment, or source:
Why, for the love of Satan, does this graph have only 2 data points per source?
Why use a line chart 📉 for that?
This is clear bar chart territory 📊.
I know it’s not ideal, but a bar chart design could either focus on the difference over time for each source, or the difference between sources at each time. This plot gives a good representation of both the differences between sources and the change in time for each source. It really drives home how far solar prices have fallen relative to other sources and in absolute terms.
It’s called a slope chart and it has several benefits compared to bar charts:
- https://datavizproject.com/data-type/slope-chart/
- https://seeingdata.org/taketime/inside-the-chart-slope-graph/
- https://www.storytellingwithdata.com/blog/2020/7/27/what-is-a-slopegraph
I for one think this is much better than using a bar chart for this use case, as the angled arrows make it immediately obvious the information that matters the most here (the rate of change) while still keeping it contextualized (by relative positions). The bar chart version of this would inevitably look more cluttered and would not be more effective in conveying the incredible progress in solar costs.
Dang, it’s almost like it was worth all the research money the government crammed into it in the long run, unlike what my dad said to me a million times.
Pretty clearly shows why there’s no future for nuclear power.
Even for filling gaps in renewables, peaker plants are getting cheaper and don’t take 15 years to build.
This is always a weird take to me because it always ignores the fact that nuclear has been screwed continuously for decades. If any other tecbology, renewable energy or not, had the same public and private blockers did it would also have no future.
it always ignores the fact that nuclear has been screwed continuously for decades
On the contrary: I’d say it implicitly relies on that fact, which is why the argument that it takes 15 years to build is valid. Because nuclear has been screwed, there’s no pipeline of under-construction plants coming online any sooner than that.
It may not be fair that nuclear’s been screwed, but that doesn’t change history. The only thing that matters is what’s better when construction is starting in 2023.
While I don’t think it relies on that fact, you are correct with the rest.
Nuclear has been screwed by its own track record.
Why do you think its had such a wide coalition of public and private opponents?
Well that’s simply false. Its been screwed by ignorance propaganda and fear mongering.
You clearly don’t understand the other side.
Sure buddy. And you clearly do.
Actually I do. I was a nuclear booster in the 1990’s because it means cheap limitless pollution free power.
Except that they don’t actually deliver on that promise. You can have safe nuclear or cheap nuclear, but if it’s safe it’s not cheap, and the public rightfully won’t accept something that can require evacuating hundreds of square miles for decades.
So wise one, where are those cheap safe nuclear power plants we keep hearing about since 1950?
In France. They standardized the designs so each one isn’t a one-off and they trained more people to work in the field.
So the user above me actually gave the the answer so kudos to them but to further answer your question, there are no actually cheap reactors because the fight to actually build one is so insanely expensive. Where I live they’d been trying to build a reactor for over a decade. Constant lawsuits and legal battles after already obtaining permits and everything. Its ballooned the cost by tenfold. Why? Because of constant NGO pressure from the likes of greenpeace. So congrats, you win. They aren’t cheap cause of the hell we’ve made for ourselves.
the other side is big oil
LOL. It’s “big solar” that’s eating their lunch.
yeah but I want the power to work between 4 pm and 8 am
“I’ve ignored and circumvented every known safety measure, and everything went wrong” - Whoever the fuck said that, 2023
Making up straw men to defeat?
We have extensively documented history supporting exactly what you’re trying to argue against
if you cite chernobyl that’s exactly what you’re saying. it’ll never happen again because no one’s that dumb
Fukushima happened in “smart” Japan because it was cheaper to put the backup generators in the basement than to build a concrete podium taller than the tsunamis that previously hit the site.
Capitalism will always choose cost over safety. Even then nuclear ends up going way over budget.
Then we shouldn’t leave energy security and the climate in the hands of capital. Energy should be nationalised.
Has there been a scenario where the technology itself is to blame? The contamination aspect of nuclear waste is well known and preventable, if costs are being cut on radioactive waste disposal (or in the case of a certain Japanese power company, ignoring warnings from the government on how to reduce ocean contamination in the event of an earthquake) a nuclear installation’s fate is sealed…
As far as I can see, the only downsides with nuclear IMO is that it takes multiple decades to decommission a single plant, the environmental impact on that plant’s land in the interim, and the initial cost to build the plant.
In comparison to Solar it sounds awful, but before solar, nuclear honestly would have made a lot of sense. I think it may even still be worth it in places that have a high demand for constant power generation, since Solar only generates while the sun’s about, and then you’re looking at overnight energy storage with lithium-based batteries, which have their own environmental and humanitarian challenges
Uranium powered fission technology, not all nuclear. Look into Thorium
“Today there are about 440 nuclear power reactors operating in 32 countries plus Taiwan, with a combined capacity of about 390 GWe. In 2022 these provided 2545 TWh, about 10% of the world’s electricity.”
There have been two major reactor accidents in the history of civil nuclear power – Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi. Chernobyl involved an intense fire without provision for containment, and Fukushima Daiichi severely tested the containment, allowing some release of radioactivity.
Yes- a track record of one plant failing due to Soviet incompetence and political blunders; and the second failing due to checks notes a 9.0 magnitude almost direct earthquake and ensuing 133 ft tsunami.
This.
And it is always a question how they calculated handling of nuclear waste.
There are options, we can use coal and natural gas for on demand power to fill the gaps in renewables, we don’t have to quit all at once. New ideas for energy storage and comming around, some of them might be useful for small towns, others for remote places.
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there is very very very little nuclear waste.this is complete handwringing. it can be buried and forgotten.
Bigger issue is the carbon costs and pay back periods. Nuclear (unless you’ve got sources otherwise stating) is green in it’s planning phase but not as often in execution. A shit ton of concrete is used, and the plants rarely operate at the capacity they are expected to (or have in the past). Open to revision but that’s my current understanding.
They are a massive upfront carbon cost and only become carbon neutral or negative relative to fossil fuels 20+ years down the line.
Do you have data on that? A modern nuclear power plant is going to be in the 500-1000+ MW range. I have a hard time imagining that even operating at half capacity that they do not offset the carbon used for concrete within a relatively short order. But if that is in fact the case I’d love to see data saying so, so that I can correct my thinking.
Kyle Hill has a nice video about power plants waste disposal, one of cleanest methods there is.
edit: he actually went to the plant and showed how it’s done
He literally hugged and kissed a canister of nuclear waste to show how safe it is. Kyle Hill is my hero
nuclear waste, by definition of being radioactive, is the only wast that goes away on it’s own if you leave it sit for long enough
I was considering whether this is just a shitpost, but your other comments suggest that you’re completely serious. It does not go away. Radioactive decay causes multiple transitions between radioactive elements until it ends up as lead, which does not decay further.
Of course, it should also be said that it’s better to have no waste than waste that eventually turns into lead.
And that it’s still better to have waste than waste which also happens to be toxic.
I think that’s too simplistic of a view. Part of the high cost of nuclear is because of the somewhat niche use. As with everything, economies of scale makes things cheaper. Supporting one nuclear plant with specialized labor, parts, fuel, etc is much more expensive then supporting 100 plants, per Watt.
I can’t say more plants would drastically reduce costs. But it would definitely help.
Of course It is, the incompetent and ignorant people that try to hinder it’s use is the problem
The nuclear industry is 100% responsible for the operational record of the nuclear industry.
Cool, so you’re either going to have to completely get rid of all the nimbys and people that don’t understand nuclear, then build a massive population of qualified workers to build them and staff them and then fund them in the hundreds of billions for at least 2 decades to build up the knowledge base required to be able to build them quickly and efficiently.
Or accept the reality that nuclear is dead in the water.
So the people who built that reactor were incompetent and ignorant?
Reading comprehension isn’t really your strong suit, eh? “The incompetent and ignorant people that try to hinder it’s use is the problem”
If you are hired to do a task and then overrun the budget by 14B$ I wouldn’t exactly call it furthering the cause. More like incompetence and/or trying to detail the project.
the most dangerous part of nuclear power is not using enough
The source article actually talks about this and measured data suggests nuclear cost actually went up, despite more capacity being built.
This is the first time, I’ve read this anywhere. More sources/studies would be really important. And there is lots of interpretations to be had on the why, but assuming the article isn’t completely off the mark, that’s cold, hard data suggesting that your (perfectly reasonable) assumption is actually wrong, after all.
They’ve had 75 years to get the cost down. It’s still going up.
because of oil funded fear pushing pseudoscience based restrictions
Congratulate yourself then. The propaganda you and your ilk continue to spew is the reason for this.
Oh it’s just the meanies keeping the poor nuclear industry down! 😆
I just installed a 9.3 kW system with individual microinverters under each panel for grid stability and it is absolutely amazing how much you can power all day without threatening a massive bill at the end of the month. I still import power at night, but the power companies usually have agreements where you get credits for all wattage exported to the grid to cover your imported power at night, because both parties win in that contract.
Do you mind sharing what price one can expect for an install that size (or similar)? I’ve been wanting to install a system like that on my house for a couple years. Now that prices on hardware are more affordable it’s becoming very tempting. I’d love to do it myself.
It depends, $180/mo for 25 years is the agreement and it’s directly connected to the grid both ways which required additional work from the power company to inspect and approve. I think given the projections it was rated for about 25,000 kWh per year * 25 years (approaching 85% efficiency after 30 years), which is a good amount of total production for my needs. Edit: it’s worth considering what $180/mo will look like in 5 to 20 years… it will probably be significantly cheaper compared to other power sources because it’s generated locally.
Yes the time value of money can work heavily in your favor when projecting that far out. The way the housing market is right now, I might be here for a while 🤣 Thanks for the response!
Get 800kwh to 1mwh a month depending on sun coverage. Cost me 23k paid in full.
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Where are you located and what was the total cost? When I last got quotes 12 years ago, it was insanely expensive ($ 70k ) .
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I hate that PGE got rid of the export.
It’s frustrating seeing a graph showing the price of electricity going down while my utility prices go up. Does this take into account infrastructure cost?
The reason utilities are going up in actual costs to the consumer (apart from inflation, which is another kettle of fish) is greed and crappy inadequate government oversight tho
All the major electricity providers in my country have dramatically increased their prices in the last few years, stating how hard done by they are and how difficult it is, increased costs, inflation, covid, other bullshit excuses.
And they have all also made record profits year-on-year, while spinning this bullshit lines to us.
And their executives have continued to receive massive pay packets each year.
Yeah energy prices have gone through the roof but apparently it’s cheaper in every way except nuclear - and we don’t even have nuclear around here
The data stops in 2019. It’s completely outdated. The world is in chaos since covid. But anti nuke propagandists don’t care much about these “details”.
Hi, I’m a human being, not an “anti nuke propagandist”. I just checked, if there’s newer data, and well, there is, but no one seems to have formatted that in a way yet, which you or me would be willing to digest.
Personally, my impression has been that the solar industry was one of the industries that was pretty much completely unaffected by COVID, so I felt this graph was still perfectly relevant.
But even if it were strongly affected, I do not see why our technological progress in manufacturing, that we had in 2019, should evaporate with COVID.
There is inflation and a rise in natural catastrophes, but I feel like those would affect nuclear and others roughly proportional.Well, if you omit batteries then you are mostly true, although with covid there was a huge shortage of electronic components that would affect solar a lot, at least depending on where you live. Batteries is a big unknown now, because with all the demand for it, we simply can’t build enough batteries to feed all the grids with it.
https://www.powerengineeringint.com/renewables/lcoe-for-offshore-wind-now-on-par-with-coal-bnef/amp/
Covid actually had almost no impact on the prices and they continued to level off a little lower. The surprising one is the onshore wind remaining on par with solar and continues to drop (albeit slowely).
Gas skyrocketed in Europe. Oil is going yo-yo. How does this have no impact on the price?
Sweet, now get the panels and installation cheaper so I can afford to put it on my house
We had a solar salesman come by once and told us he could lower our electricity bill the same amount as it would cost us to install the solar panels.
I knew there was something up with this but I decided to let him continue to talk anyways. He does this whole presentation with solar panels and how great they are for a good 30 minutes.
Finally we get to the money part and he keeps emphasizing that they will lower my electricity bill so the cost of them will be made up there. I push him for the total cost of them plus installation and I about died.
$30,000??? They literally wanted me to pay for these for 30 years. As long as my mortgage! Aaaaah!!!
I had a few come over and I was already in the market for solar so I entertained them for a minute. I told them “OK, give me some invoices for your other customers so I know what you charge. Black out the names, I dont care - I just want the prices of your services and materials”. These idiots would not stop calling me or coming over to my house for months. I kept telling them “Unless you give me actual, real world dollar amounts, I won’t consider it”.
Those solar sales guys are worse than used car salesmen.
Just to save $100 a month.
100x12x30
Government subsidies work for getting new technologies out of the prototype stage and into practical deployment. Solar and wind are both good demonstrations.
my bill has gone up 89%
Well the electric exec’s kid needs a third Ferrari to go with the third Lamborghini they got last year! You’re not gonna be so heartless as to deprive a 32 year old child of their birthday wish are you?
I want a battery in my house big enough for me to lose power for 2 days and still cook with electric stove and have hot water from water heater.
That is my dream for every house. To be able to have a stable power well from some kind of battery fed by a solar + grid sharing. To be able to offer extra power to a neighbor if they need it for a project or a party or help however.
I don’t want to be energy isolated from the grid. I want to be energy insulated and be of the grid.
There is this vision for the future, where people can use the battery in their electric car (or a separately bought battery) to store power, either produced by their own cheap solar or from the grid during over-production. And then some software could sell that energy back into the grid at night or during high demand.
If that becomes a reality, we might have it at least so that if a chunk of the grid gets cut off for a bit, it can actually tide that over.
This isn’t so much a vision for the future, as it’s an option right now.
I can’t wait until work puts in car chargers- Top off the battery for free during the day, come home and sell that juice back to the grid, baby!
Just pointing out that the grid is paid for by your electric bill, roughly half of what you pay is for delivery (paying to maintain the equipment needed to deliver you that energy), the other half is for supply (paying the power plant that generated the energy). So even if you and all your neighbors are energy independent you’ll still be on the hook for at least half your bill, or they’ll have to recoup it in taxes or something.
Not saying that’s a bad thing, just clarifying a common misconception that going solar should not mean you eliminate your electric bill. In fact many places where solar does offset 100% of your electric bill are ending up with the rich owning solar and the poor paying to maintain the grid for them.
Hydrogen is the answer for that, cost about 100k today hopefully those cost will decline fast
The problem with Hydrogen, is that its not efficient (fuel cells apparently are only 40-60% efficient). In contrast, batteries are 90% or more efficient (and improving)
So, you’d be wasting 50% of the power generated, and wasting fresh water too… Thats all assuming too that the additional minerals in the water won’t cause extra issues either.
Battery costs keep dropping, and the technology keeps improving rapidly.
If they can get the efficiency much higher, maybe… It also might make sense for long range cars (at the moment) due to energy density
But, in practice, companies like BP and traditional gas companies are the main ones who benefit from a hydrogen economy. Because they can use non-renewable to undercut everyone
What surprises me, in a way, is that photovoltaics are literally 3,5 times cheaper than just mirrors reflecting light onto a tower. It got REAL cheap. Wish it’d go further!
I know it’s basically a physical impossibility but here hoping to another 89% in the next 10 years (compared to today)
What happened to Nuclear option?
The Cold War is over, man.
This guy gets it.
Costs are increasing.
Why?
Huge up front costs.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx
“On a levelized (i.e. lifetime) basis, nuclear power is an economic source of electricity generation, combining the advantages of security, reliability and very low greenhouse gas emissions. Existing plants function well with a high degree of predictability. The operating cost of these plants is lower than almost all fossil fuel competitors, with a very low risk of operating cost inflation. Plants are now expected to operate for 60 years and even longer in the future…”
“World Nuclear Association published Nuclear Power Economics and Project Structuring in early 2017. The report notes that the economics of new nuclear plants are heavily influenced by their capital cost, which accounts for at least 60% of their LCOE. Interest charges and the construction period are important variables for determining the overall cost of capital. The escalation of nuclear capital costs in some countries, more apparent than real given the paucity of new reactor construction in OECD countries and the introduction of new designs, has peaked in the opinion of the International Energy Agency (IEA). In countries where continuous development programmes have been maintained, capital costs have been contained and, in the case of South Korea, even reduced. Over the last 15 years global median construction periods have fallen. Once a nuclear plant has been constructed, the production cost of electricity is low and predictably stable.”
TLDR: If you weren’t already on the nuke train when it was going, the upfront costs are too much to make it worth it this late in the game. You are better off just getting solar/wind + battery. If you already invested in nuke, then you are good to keep updating them.
The installation just keeps getting higher. Now to add onto mine I need a load of additional equipment that was not required when my first lot of enphase inverters was installed. Also what was quoted for the labour and materials that are not the panels and inverters has almost tripled in 4 years. Have to get the roof sorted before I go ahead with it and the higher output panels and inverters mean that I would get about another 1.5kw in the same space compared to my first installation.
