Solar-plus-storage technology is improving quickly

One could argue that batteries will have a bigger impact than solar. Batteries obviously let you decouple power generation and consumption, shifting anytime production to peak-time demand.

Less obvious is that local demand can fluctuate 2x. It usually dips mid-day and peaks 5-9pm (see the charts at www.caiso.com) when people come home and turn on their lights, oven, appliances, etc. This pattern happens throughout the year.

So forget solar for a moment; the ability to shift energy that was produced mid-day (even by a natural gas plant) to the evening would allow you to build fewer power plants. Nuclear + batteries might also be a good combination. Batteries get you closer to being able to solve for "average demand" rather than "peak demand."

This has nothing to do w/ California. California is just on the leading edge of battery installation. Solar just exacerbates the issue of the peak-to-trough ratio (evening vs. mid-day demand) due to mid-day solar "overproduction" causing it to be uneconomical to run gas plants mid-day. But solving for "peak demand" is still a problem in the absence of solar.

Still: most of the complaints about solar are answered when paired with large battery systems.

We can also build power lines! Between different places! Such as the places with lots of sun, and the places without lots of sun!!!

There are many place that get a lot of sun. As solar panels come down in price, it becomes even easier to compensate for deficits with additional panels.

It’s common practice to install more solar panel capacity than inverter capacity because panels are rarely operating at peak output anyway. If you’re installing 100kW of inverters, you might install 120kW of panels. The panel array wouldn’t exceed 100kW most of the time anyway.

In a location with suboptimal sun, you might install an even higher ratio of panels to inverter and battery capacity.

Some people get bothered by this because they feel like some of the solar power is wasted at peak capacity, but you have to consider that the inverter and battery capacity is also wasted when you’re not sending enough from the panel array. It’s a balancing act.

You also have to consider that the same sunlight that makes California good for solar also creates additional demand for air conditioning. A location with less sun would have less solar heat gain, which is easier to serve for many reasons.

> Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply and Muscat in Oman – 99%, using 6 GW solar panels and 17 GWh battery. Even cloudier cities like Birmingham [UK] can get 62% of the way to a constant supply every hour of every day across the year.

[0] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

It also represents 12% of the country's population, which makes it a better benchmark than just being 1 of 50 states.

So San Francisco?

As a result, solar is rarely cost effective even with subsidies, and basically never without them.

Doesn't mean people don't install it for various other reasons, but it serves as a good contrast to California despite similar political landscapes.

Not being ideal for solar just means you need to install more area, and there's plenty available space. Solar is already the cheapest (if not it's competitive with the cheapest wind power) power source. Also having to, say, double the panel area in lower solar irradiance requires less than double the non-panel costs (you don't need double the inverters or power transmission).

California is leading because the politics/economy/irradiance are the best combination, you would expect a place like that to lead first. It does not follow that other places are unsuitable for solar, it will just cost marginally more.

It's a strange but persistent pattern where success in ideal conditions will draw out a litany of reasons why that success is actually a sign of failure when instead the early success is just a sign of ideal conditions. Why wouldn't something promising succeed first in the place with the best conditions for success?

California is representative of more than 25% of the United States in terms of solar intensity.

People really need to get away from the idea that if a solution doesn't work for 100% of use cases then it's nonviable.

It's the renewables during the day while the sun is shining.

Is that a typo? Just a year ago ago batteries were expected to drop to $80/kWh around 2026-2027... $10/kWh in the near future is absolutely insane.

The US as an manufacturing and export country already doesn't make much sense. And that will only get worse. Industry depends on energy and if that energy is locally more expensive than abroad, that puts any energy intensive business at a disadvantage when other countries start running on really cheap renewables and battery.

If you look at this globally, there are a lot of emerging markets that never imported that much oil, coal, and gas to begin with that probably never will. They'll be growing fueled by cheap locally generated renewables. And then there are countries all over Asia and Europe that are mostly importing their fossil fuels that are going to decimate what they import over the next decades. All of that will shift the economic balance in their favor. Any one exporting fossil fuels (including the US) is going to have a rather big problem with shrinking exports.

Places like China are far ahead of everyone else here. And an increasingly large part of their economy is actually selling their tech to other countries to get to a similar level.

I don't think "to stifle competition" is right. I suspect China would love it if other countries were investing in solar as much as they are. They just want the tech ASAP.

China primarily wants to cut oil and gas imports. Exports are a bonus.

The fundamental problem with net metering is that it is obviously unsustainable and unfair. People who are hooked up to the grid benefit from more than just the energy they consume, but the hookup costs and maintenance of the grid is a real cost that power companies need to pay for. Perhaps even more obviously, any company that is in a retail business can only survive if they buy a product at a (cheaper) wholesale rate and sell it at a (more expensive) retail rate. Net metering is exactly the same as forcing power companies to buy energy at a retail rate. Again, this is obviously not sustainable.

As a homeowner, of course I would love net metering, because I'd be getting a sweet deal. But it's not hard for me to see how this can't continue as solar power installations increase. Austin, TX, was one of the first locales to use "value of solar" pricing, and yeah, while it sucks for the homeowner, it is also fairer and more sustainable. I'm also not saying this is the only way to do things (e.g. you could have a monthly connection fee and a separate monthly power charge), but this "solar rights" group is just spinning bullshit because their sweet deal is about to come to an end.

Sorry, what other group. Power companies?

NM-just perused your HN comments and they are littered with dog whistles and talking points. Gymnastics seems too generous.

I would worry more about the inverters, including microinverters.

Also consider that if someone is doing industrial sabotage on that scale it would be much easier to attack the fossil fuel and nuclear power plants and their enormous computer controlled generators. Even hydroelectric would be susceptible. Or maybe attack the substations. There is nothing unique or special about solar panels that makes them a good target, and their highly distributed and diverse nature actually makes them more difficult.

It's still worth examining the panels in minute detail. I just think it would be a ton more difficult to hide much functionality within a panel.

Perkskovites to name one tech, will probably be a generational shift in solar panel technologies, the US would be stupid to miss it if they want to be a future world energy player outside the slow inevitable decline of fossil fuels.

For who has the stomach to fund it, there is available maybe another order of magnitude in cost performance in solar, and say two or three orders of magnitude of cost performance available in batteries?

E.g. the Al Dhafra Solar PV project in the UAE has a capacity of 2 GW and covers over 20 square kilometers, using ~4 million panels.

According to [1] (figure 5, 6) its at the maximum, around 80€ MWh. Am I looking at the wrong stats?

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Good to hear!

Reason why I thought there was a shortage was because there was a major push to recover Li from old phones a few years back. I have 4-5 old unused phones lying around my house. (Mostly because there's old text messages in them that I'm hoarding.) I presume it's the same for others. And I was wondering whether there's enough Li for new phones.

"Henry Hub Natural Gas Spot Price is at a current level of 3.21, down from 3.22 the previous market day and up from 2.17 one year ago." That's in $/MMBTU, divide by 1.038 to get $/MCF.

7kw of panels? Nothing under a full-sized RV (45') can touch that. Those are the tour-bus style RVs.

The problem is that at that length, they're impractical for boondocking because that often involves some pretty rough terrain. You'll be limited to RV parts and those have power hookup anyways.

Boondocking is far easier/less dangerous with your Class B/Cs which are well under 30' in length. You have far less room for panels at that length.

For sure solar isn't as effective in the UK but we're lucky to have shallow sea nearby for offshore wind (onshore wind being opposed by the same kind of NIMBY clowns that are a true biblical plague in every country). But if solar is cheap enough you may as well deploy it even where it's not especially efficient. Then you can start to look at things like transmission lines or whatever energy source works best for your area.

Edit: it's a reasonable point that dollars spent in the 2nd cloudiest state on solar aren't particularly well spent, but that leaves you with 48(?) less cloudy states. While CA is pretty south there are 10 more states to the south of it, one of them is even called the sunshine state and is effectively an uninhabitable sinking swamp, ideal for solar!

And then if you have the bad luck to be stuck in Birmingham, in the UK.

That's a cloudy place. And you barely have, like, two very, very sunny months, like in the middle of the year in summer when it's actually, it is actually sunny. Most of the time it's various degrees of cloudy. So even there you have more than 60% of the way to 24/365"

So it's not as big as a drop-off as you might think with solar+battery. And that's not accounting for wind being a much better performer in the UK.

While the point that the benchmark favours CA is reasonable what about the other 10+ states on California's latitude? Even as far North as New York is equivalent latitude to Madrid. I just struggle to believe the desert of Nevada for instance or Texas isn't also viable for solar. Plus those states have the advantage of not having California's crumbling transmission infrastructure (though even worse for Texas from what I understand) or anti-building regulatory regime.

This strand of American pessimism seems to only ever lean one way, to ignore lessons from other countries and to oppose new tech.

What would be favourable for that cost curve is not putting tarrifs on Chinese subsidised panels and this fatalism leeches energy from that consensus. When the tech is cheap enough to slap anywhere the optimal deployment is less important and why not make the most of China's 'blunder' with these below cost panels.

But from a brief Google California isn't even in the 10 most southerly states in the US. While I have broader problems with the political direction of travel of this site in general my main concern is trying to shake Americans out of this fatalism where nothing ever works, nothing is possible and the country has to be left to decay.

You guys landed on the moon for goodness sake, where's that America gone?

In the meantime, here in France, we've had the lowest power supply cost for decades

I am glad politics have fixed that, so that we can be miserable like everyone else