Their math seems off. I really don't see how you get to 97% renewable when the state was burning natural gas to generate 2.8 GW of non-renewable power and had about 1.1 GW of nuclear at the time. There might be some funny math here where they assign all of the "dirty" power generated in the state to exports and can claim that that California is running on renewable power.
I believe that what is happening is that the rated capacity of a power plant is its maximum output times its capacity factor. Say we have a solar plant that produces a maximum of 1 GW in optimal conditions with a .15 capacity factor. This plant is not a 1GW plant but a 150MW one.
In general fossil fuels have capacity factors around .55, nuclear about .9, hydro about .4, and solar is between .1-.3
So you can imagine a scenario where we have 200MW of natural gas and 200MW of solar, and a grid load of 300MW. The natural gas could produce 400MW, powering the grid alone. Similarly, we could have up to 1 GW of solar, more than enough. But the averages are what is important, and what we use in ratings.
These stories are mostly “feel good” and without meaning imo. We will hit 100% energy from renewables for x minutes, long before we have enough power for the grid. If we were trying to make all the renewables come online at once, you don’t actually need that much capacity to hit 100%. The capacity factor says we only need 1/5 of the grid as solar to hit “100%” renewables. The reason we haven’t is intentional, we want more consistent power from these typically inconsistent renewable sources.
Thus it is clear why nuclear is .9, it doesn’t vary much in its generation. The max is only a bit more than the average. Capacity factor is in some sense, but not exactly, the variability.
The energy is pretty perfectly fungible so it makes about as much sense credited to the state as it does to the wider grid. If you just look at CA it generated 97% of its energy needs in state from renewable energy at that time. That it was connected to a larger grid so it was generating excess power dirtily doesn't really change that math.
Electrical power is fungible, but the time it is available is not. There is usually near-peak power usage just after sun-down. So while a large amount of "clean" power was generated in the middle of the day and sold to other states, after sun-down a significant portion of the power used in the state was "un-clean".
Even if California made it the final 3% to reach 100% renewable energy (by the headline metric), it will still depend on a significant amount of non-renewable energy for significant parts of every single day (or else it will have blackouts).
Even if California made it the final 3% to reach 100% renewable energy (by the headline metric), it will still depend on a significant amount of non-renewable energy for significant parts of every single day (or else it will have blackouts).
It's not like you can ramp a coal-fired or nuclear power station up and down on a whim either though. It takes time and planning to modify the output if you don't have storage capacity. Power companies do a lot of predictive analysis to forecast demand and make sure they're running a little ahead. Here in the UK we even have a term called "TV pickup" where the electricity demand for the country increases significantly immediately after popular TV shows when we all go and put our kettles on for another cup of tea[1].
Power demand varies a lot, and in a reasonably predictable way, so you're fine so long as you have a mix of generation technologies. For most places that'll end up being solar, wind and nuclear, with extensive storage capacity.
> It's not like you can ramp a coal-fired or nuclear power station up and down on a whim either though.
At least nuclear you can relatively fast. In terms of KW/min change rate faster then most gas peaker plants. It is not done much outside of France though as the operating costs of a nuclear power plant are pretty much identical when operating at 5% or 100% output.
edit:
German nuclear power plants also used to do load matching.
TV pick-up used to be a thing when 17 million people watched Corrie in real time.
Those types of real time viewing figures are limited to live England matches in the euros/World Cup, and very unusual events like the PM’s covid broadcast back in 2020
I’m surprised the US doesn’t have the phenomenon during the super bowl. I guess the lack of kettles and the main attraction of the Super Bowl being the adverts dampens it down though.
Coal is also able react relatively quickly to flex up/down within a range once running but has relatively high start costs and minimum run time (startup/shutdown takes longer). In the UK, the remaining coal fired plants still regularly participated in the balancing mechanism over the winter, for example (at sometimes eye-watering prices due to those factors along with high emissions costs).
In that case the metric of how much power the state requires in the context of renewable energy is useless. Instead state the % of overall energy production in the state being renewable.
"97% of some state's energy production was renewable" doesn't tell you much, because they could be a state that hardly burns any fossil fuels.
"California managed to produce enough renewable energy to power 97% of the needs of a state the size of California" actually tells you how much renewable energy it generated, and why that's a big deal.
In that case, you need to provide additional information. Because this coverage is not consistent, since renewables are intermittent and storage appears to be a dream.
The implication here is that you don't need the non-renewable part. That's not true if you have to have it when the renewable part isn't producing power.
Also the article talks about the "grid". California buys most of its renewable power from out of state (mostly hydro from WA). The wording of the article doesn't say that but also doesn't appear to constrain its definition to domestic production.
I don’t know where you live, but the Californian power grid is part of the Western Interconnection that goes from the Mexican-American border to half way through Canada[0]. Are blizzards in the USA ever that big?
As for “at night”, it is possible to get batteries of household scale. Plus insulation is getting better and cheaper, so the power required to maintain any given temperature isn’t as high as it used to be.
At times of the year when there are blizzards, I seriously doubt the rest of solar installations in the US are going to be running anywhere near capacity.
First: So? PV is so cheap overcapacity isn’t unreasonable.
Second: My first visit to the USA, I saw people surfing in Asilomar on Christmas Day/Boxing Day and it remained warm and sunny throughout my stay in California, yet a few days into that trip New York was suffering a blizzard that Trump was trying to argue disproved global warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_2014_North_American_cold...
Law Makers seem off. Why are they not taxing people their life savings yet for all that revenue they're STEALING from the electric companies!? FFS THIS IS MADNES/S
Yeah I’m no expert, but I’m highly skeptical of this claim as well. My intuition is telling me that this is most likely classic Orwellian ‘doublespeak’ from the powers that be.
That being said, it might still be a good signal that investments in renewable electricity infrastructure could be accumulating up to critical mass in some areas. And that is encouraging.
The grid operator cited is the California Independent System Operator. How much of CA's electricity consumption is fed by that operator?
In the article they mention 23GW from wind and solar. A quick search says in 2018 CA's electrical generation capacity was 80GW (which I assume has only gone up). So this 97% is a bit misleading, no? It doesn't represent 97% of total CA electricity usage... it's less than 30%?
The "installed capacity" of 80GW I believe is the number if you add the theoretical max of all hydro, solar, wind, gas peaker plants, etc. But each source will never simultaneously be at max, so we never get close to this 80GW number. https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo....
That is all the capacity added together before de-rating. Capacity is de-rated based on how likely it is to produce during a system load peak. So a nuclear plant might be counted as 75% of nameplate to account for outage risk. Renewables are de-rated a lot and by how much changes over time as they make up a larger share of the connected capacity.
California de-rates solar by less than, say, the UK since Cali has a lot of air conditioning load which is coincident with insolation whereas summer days are the low-load periods in the UK.
The capacity before de-rating > capacity after de-rating > highest anticipated load > actual load on a normal day.
> A quick search says in 2018 CA's electrical generation capacity was 80GW (which I assume has only gone up). So this 97% is a bit misleading, no? It doesn't represent 97% of total CA electricity usage... it's less than 30%?
Their full installed generation capacity is 80GW, but there's huge variability in actual load. As I write this, current load is around 21GW, on a range of between 18.7GW and 27GW over the day. It gets into the 40's in the summer.
> How much of CA's electricity consumption is fed by that operator?
80% of California and part of Nevada also. Don't confuse the grid operator with the utility. Those are separate entities.
The ISO is the market maker for electricity - ultimately responsible for keeping supply and demand on the grid in balance. They contract with numerous entities to achieve that.
The utility is responsible for some combination of generation, transmission, distribution, and billing, depending on where you are located.
There are many other players in the markets, including spinning reserves, independent generators, demand aggregators, community-choice-aggregators, and some that play multiple roles.
> “If California is to have any hope of getting to 100% renewable energy on an August day in the future ... it will take 100 GW more energy produced by solar. Halting the progress of rooftop solar makes that goal impossible"
I'm also confused by the scales here. How are they praising the use of 15,000 MW (15GW) and 8,000 MW (8 GW) in one sentence, in an article about 97% of California's energy being used, and saying they need 100 GW in the next sentence and being sad they can't put it on rooftops. In an article showing a photo of a solar cell field in a vast, desolate, arid region of central valley.
In California August requires a lot more electricity due to AC than April. Seasonal demand differences can be huge, and why a lot of maintenance for nuclear reactors etc take place in the spring and fall.
Space is of no concern. You would not install solar in the Central Valley generally because it is the most productive irrigated farmland on the planet. You would however put it right on top of Edwards Air Force Base, which is large enough to supply the energy needs of the entire United States, if paved over completely with solar panels.
In theory moving electricity 1,000 miles can have minimal transmission losses. Unfortunately California’s grid lacks the infrastructure to support significant long distance transmission.
Sort-of. Transmission for HTHV lines (745kV single circuit cost $2.5-4M/mile with ~1% line loss; 345kV single circuit will cost ~$1.5-2M/mile with 5% line loss). For 1MW solar capacity you typically need about 4 acres. 100GW of solar would require 400k acres of land - and come at a cost of about $3 billion for the panels, not to mention the price of land or entitlements. Add in cost of substations and transmission you’re realistically looking at a $10+ Billion project. Which while doable would not profitability compete with other grid solutions. If panels drop by another 30% and power densities improve the grid will naturally tend towards that direction.
The US already has 121GW of solar installed the majority of that being large scale Grid solar. Which shows the transition is already happening at current prices.
A major part of that equation is there is a lot of land in the US available for under 2,000$/acre, however spending more is a tradeoff to reduce the need for longer distance power transmission etc.
PS: 10B for 100GW at 30% capacity factor for 20 years is 10,000,000,000$ / (100,000,000kW * 0.3 * 24h * 365 * 20) or 0.2c/kWh ignoring interest. So, I think you messed up your estimate somewhere if you think that’s uncompetitive.
One sounds like an expense, the other sounds like a transfer from one pocket to the other while allowing for shifting the public perception any way desired while retaining unparalleled access to capital.
Yes, but not of the places you listed are where you would put solar to supply California. If anything they will likely be used to move excess solar power out of California.
not all california energy is produce in california california fo example pays to nevada if don't remember wrong to, shut down their panels to make their output higher than it is for example, or like this articule say pay other state to buy their electric excess output meaning the technically could be true
My interpretation is that this was a low demand moment where that 27gw was more or less equal to the demand (e.g. a demand trough not a renewable output spike).
Capacity is the ability to produce energy and with renewables that number is very different than with fossil fuels or nukes.
Renewables never reach capacity, well your solar might for a peak moment, but then it will drop as the sun drops.
For example - you have a 200 MW wind farm, you might only be able to produce 10MW at that moment. The capacity is 200MW, the generation is 10.
Also the 3rd was a Sunday in spring - no office workers, less demand, not a heating or cooling day in a lot of California, ie a lower energy day than say a week day in summer where the temp is 105 in the Central Valley.
> Rooftop solar advocacy group Save California Solar said although this milestone should be celebrated, California’s renewable energy progress is better measured by conditions on a hot August summer day than a cool April spring day. Renewable peaks typically occur in the spring, due to mild temperatures and the sun angle allowing for an extended window of strong solar production.
You need forms of storage for that. The conundrum can be turned on its head - "What do you do when you have nuclear and the businesses and factories are closed ?" You either simply waste nuclear capacity that you've paid and waited years for to be built - or you need forms of storage to make use of it. Both Nuclear and Renewables really want storage, they will compete for it.
If you can only make use of 60% of a nuclear plants capacity, you're price per unit is 100/60 more than the 'base-load' ideal that it was sold for. And another thing future nuclear plants will have to run alongside - is more and more renewable supply since renewables are cheaper and faster to build. We will have a situation where almost all demand is met by renewable supply eventually, and before that situation the demand left nuclear will decrease from 70,60,50,40,30...% - that's even without storage. How many decades do you expect it will take before those plants built with contracts to run for half a century or more, become pointlessly uneconomic ?
If there's too much power, it will be dirt cheap, and you'll charge your electric car then, which will maybe become affordable by then. Also with smart grid you'll regulate water heaters, ACs etc.
Still better to have too much power than not enough... Especially if eg. Russia decides to close the gas pipe, or if americans decide to "bring democracy" to another middle eastern state and that disrupta oil delivery.
We've sidetracked nuclear for decades now... The best time was decades ago, and the second vest time to build some new ones is now.
Electric cars are affordable now, assuming electricity is dirt cheap.
Nissan Leaf: $17K after tax incentives, $27K before.
Gas is $5/gallon. You can buy 5400/gallons for the price of an unsubsidized leaf.
Assume a leaf-alike ICE car gets 40 miles per gallon. It will go 216K miles for the unsubsidized retail price of the leaf.
Leaf batteries last at least 100K miles, and cost about $6K.
The purchase cost of the ICE car, and 216K miles of motor oil, engine and exhaust work have to be under $6K ($12K if the leaf batteries need to be swapped twice) or the leaf is cheaper.
No, having too much power without storage is exactly as bad as not enough. That's how the physics works. It's a zero sum game or it's lights out for the grid. It takes a lot of smart people and simulations to do a semi decent job of walking that tightrope day after day after day. Overproduction is a huge problem, as evidenced by the frequent negative power pricing of CA solar
If you have the infrastructure to produce hydrogen at scale you pretty much automatically have the infrastructure to store excess renewable production. That makes the "baseload!!" argument for nuclear moot.
It may be still better to run nuclear plants then. We'll need data from modern nuclear designs, (especially the small ones) but renewables are not exactly free to run. Storage degrades, solar degrades, lithium needs to be mined, turbines mean lots of mechanical parts, etc. We may learn that running just the renewables common today is even more uneconomic.
The maintenance burden you suggest for wind turbines is exaggerated. Compared to a gas car there are way fewer moving parts in common wind turbines, and some designs with no moving parts are being tested: https://www.windpowerengineering.com/dutch-wind-wheel-genera...
Additionally, battery degradation appears to be primarily related to high speed charging. In decade old battery packs that were not charged at extreme rates like 2C or above, you rarely see significant degredation. Grid scale operators will almost certainly manage their battery farms to limit the C rate to optimize battery life and long term profits.
Compared to a gas car a wind turbine is a completely different mechanism with a completely different scale, material requirements, elements exposure, and pretty much everything apart from "it has spinning things".
I can't exaggerate the maintenance burden for the turbines, because I didn't claim what it is, beyond that it exists. We'll have to compare it to new nuclear plants before stating which becomes uneconomical.
Solar degradation is commonly estimated at 20% in 25y, but then we get inverter failures on top of that which account for ~80% of issues in home installations. Batteries are commonly estimated to lose 20% capacity in 10y. All of those stack up too. Again - we'll have to compare the actual numbers which we don't have yet.
We talk about nuclear more than we talk about solar on HN. Probably because it’s controversial we get more atomic writes, while solar is presumed to exist.
To summarize, CA has to burn a lot of natural gas and import a lot of (mostly non-renewable) electricity from other states at night, and even more in the shoulder periods at morning and evening. Only untold billions in new batteries at the expense of ratepayers, and (barring storage breakthroughs) new nuclear or geothermal generation will fundamentally change this situation.
A cool thing is that you can see grid demand drop hard during the days when behind-the-meter rooftop solar is on.
This is inevitably the case with renewable options that don't offer on-demand capacity (i.e. not hydro). The success metric for renewable adoption must take into account the need for on-demand generation, at present the most viable and cleanest option being natural gas.
The condition that renewables success currently require fossil fuel is the point of contention between those who advocate for renewables vs those that advocate in favor of nuclear.
Take away natural gas and the success metric for renewable goes away.
The interesting thing to know is what amount of the base load is used for which purposes. A tax on all non-renewable power could be used to incentivize a reduction of carbon-emitting base load on the grid - either by shutting down stuff like street lights, advertising and other wasteful usage, or by providing on-site battery storage. In any case, reducing light pollution would be a worthy goal on its own.
The income from said tax could then be used to build out the transnational capacity of the grid, to subsidize transformations that save energy or to build out grid-scale battery storage.
Then why is it so damn expensive. Honestly one of the reasons I can’t wait to own a house is to purchase enough solar panels and batteries to give a huge middle finger to PG&E and go off-grid
Texas does allow consumers to pay market rate for electricity, you may have heard about last winter people getting bills in the several thousands of dollars when prices spiked.
CAISO was 97% renewable for only a moment, not the entire day.
The 3rd was a Sunday, not a peak day.
And the average price for energy for the day was $30.77 (day head) $27.1 (real time) for TH_SP15_GEN-APND (per MWh)
My understanding, to put it in AWS EC2 pricing terms, is that we do not pay the market "spot" rate for electricity (variable, often less than what you might pay elsewhere, but could spike up) - which is what Texas allowed. Typically we pay the "on demand" rate which is fixed. Large energy users probably negotiate "reserved" pricing.
My point being, we pay the market rate, those massive hikes are just built-in over a long period of time.
That only works if the demand curve (the price the market will bear at given levels of shortage) and the cost curve (the actual price to produce the energy) match up.
In fact they never do, especially in this market. Texas producers weren't spending 100x (or whatever) more to produce that electricity, that spike just reflected the amount that customers who "had to keep the lights on" were willing to bear. In fact total utility costs are basically flat. They didn't hire 100x more employees or work 100x more hours to get things running again. They didn't have to build 100x more substations, etc...
And that's why spot pricing is a disaster for consumers. It creates a perverse incentive for producers to reduce supply.
Generally agree although there is something a bit sinister about a market where you don't really know the price until after you've bought the product. IMO giving a utility provider blank check is like raw-dogging cheap hookers every night and then being surprised when your luck runs out.
If people WANT this kind of contract I hope that their consent is an informed one. I'm not one to stop people from engaging in their own reckless behavior.
The Texas spike was not what customers were willing to bear, the Texas spike was set to the max price by the regulator because they thought the pricing system wasn't working.
> Texas spike was set to the max price by the regulator...
IIRC, a member of ERCOT who resigned claimed high-ranked state politician(s) pressured the regulator to do set the max price - so it wasn't the independent judgment of the regulator that the system was working; or that this was the solution.
When you have an outage, it's possible the instantaneous cost of electricity is in fact 10x/100x/infinitely more than baseline cost. Looking at it as 100x more employees is the wrong direction. If you're producing 1/100th the electricity for 5 minutes due to power outtages but you still have to pay all your employees during that time, your instantaneous cost (per unit energy) actually are proportionally higher.
Total Texas energy production during the worst part of the crisis last winter was like 60% of maximum though. Most generators were running. If consumer had to pay a 2x premium then no one would have even complained; we'd have all said the system was working.
But that's not how it works, because as I mentioned the demand curve is non-linear. When you have 60% power, yet 60.1% of your capacity needs to go to "must keep the lights on" customers, then prices go to infinity (or in practice to the credit/spending limits of those customers making bids).
You don't 'need the lights on.' I have lived in multiple third world countries where outages happen regularly if you have electricity at all. This is a failure of customers to adequately prepare and instead playing the victim because of their failures. People knew for years Texas grid was vulnerable, and it's an exquisite display of Darwin Award for those who didn't prepare for it.
Only a moron doesn't keep some sort of off-grid combustibles and cold weather gear on hand, even if you live in the most southern edge of our nation. The customer is to blame for paying, not capitalism.
Hospitals do. Street lights do. Network operators do. Just think back to the beginning of the pandemic and how many industries were suddenly discovered to be "essential". You're thinking from the perspective of "can I, personally, suffer a power outage in my own home[1]" and imaginging that "running a civilization" works like that. There are many entities who simply can't stop buying power.
> Only a moron [...]
Please think harder here. It's not remotely as simple as you think it is.
[1] Knowing that you can use your phone to reach effective emergency services in the event of need, of course.
Hospitals are 60.1% of capacity? Hospitals have generators, also. Lets not make hypocritical statements about think harder.
>imaginging that "running a civilization" works like tha
And yet many rich civilizations do run just fine 'like that' and many may consider those civilizations just as good as yours. Your statement is simply ethnocentric arrogant elitism.
>Just think back to the beginning of the pandemic and how many industries were suddenly discovered to be "essential".
You're describing tyrants trying to shut down business. Being 'essential' was simply a chosen word of propaganda as part of a tyrannical process to destroy some people's line of work while favoring others. We are discussing free-market pricing and their interconnection with power disruptions and acts of god.
You should keep in mind that only one provider allowed end users to pay spot rate and ERCOT revoked their license to operate after the freeze where power rates went to $4000/MWh. The average Texan (excluding people in East Texas who are on the Eastern power grid, and people in Austin) buy their energy on a 12 month contract from an intermediary who THEN negotiates a flat rate or gambles on beating the sold contracts on spot.
What was Griddy telling gullible people that wasn't the truth? As far as I've seen, they've been completely honest about their pricing.
> [Griddy] does warn customers, however, that the wholesale price is capped by state regulators at $9 a kilowatt-hour. [1]
It's not Griddys fault that Texas doesn't prepare for winter storms that hit the state once per decade. Griddy doesn't produce electricity. Griddy doesn't build power lines. Griddy did however get customers power and thats why many of them were upset about how much the state set the wholesale price at.
> Their page downplayed the risks of variable pricing and their process during the ordeal was unprofessional.
That's rather unspecific. As far as I've seen the risk of 9k/MW always comes up in articles about Griddy (even pre-2021) and even happened to customers prior to 2021. And before the storm they notified customers that they should "switch providers" due to expected high prices.
The 2021 storm could be a 1/100 year but a non-trival winter storm hits Texas every 10 years. Letting pipes burst due to an extreme event can be a valid strategy but just be honest that the plan is that.
Every time I do the math, any money I would spend on a solar system, would be better invested in an energy utility and just collect the dividend to pay my electric bill.
If you want to do solar for the environment, fine - I won't fault you - but if you are doing it to save/make money, there are better places to invest.
That's a super interesting angle I had never considered!
Part of my reason for thinking about solar is that if I'm going to spend 10k on a backup generator it might be far smarter to spend that on solar. For me the invest and pay cycle doesn't address the problem I'm solving. But I absolutely learned something today.
Just did that. PG&E's not quite bad enough to justify going off grid with current NEM 2 rates. (Trust me, I checked.) NEM 3 would have been bad enough for the middle finger treatment, but they're reworking and delaying it.
Anyway, if you want to use it as a backup, you'll need to oversize the solar so the battery can get you through power outages on cloudy days.
At that point PG&E will pay you 10-20% market rate for the excess energy you produce on most days. It's much better to dump those electrons into an EV battery than into the grid. My commute costs $4/week in electricity I don't send to PG&E, vs 20x that for the gas for the same commute.
(The EV gets 4.5 miles/kWh, and PG&E pays $0.04 / kWh, or $.008/mile. The old car gets 30mpg. At $5/gallon, that's $0.16/mile)
The punchline: Budget money for an EV for each of your household's commutes when you purchase the solar panels. Regardless if whether you buy panels, consider charging at work, assuming your employer subsidizes it and/or has solar panels.
(Also, check the milage on the EV you want. 3-5 mi/kWh is typical, but they can vary from 1 to 7.)
Who is your utility and what part of the country? My panels are earning me about 12% per annum post tax, low risk, with insurance against capital loss (home insurance in event of hailstorm, hurricane.) I don’t see stock market investment opportunities competing.
I am in new england, electric rates are a lot less here (for now anyway) than CA (if that is where you are), and thus the calculations for you may be better than they are for me.
Its been a few years since I did the math, but last time I was quoted about 60K for a complete system - 60K at 5% dividend (NGG at the time), would give me $3K per year, enough to cover my bill.
AT the end of 20-30 years, a solar system will be worth nothing, or almost nothing, whereas I will still own the same stock in the same company hopefully the stock will have appreciated as well), and will still be covering my electric bill.
This of course makes lots of assumptions: I need to invest in company that will still be around for decades, that electric costs don't go thru the roof during that time, and the dividend doesn't go away etc. - but also would have to make assumptions about how long a solar system would last - its impossible for any of us to see out 30 years, but for the time being, I feel like on a purely financial basis, it didn't make sense for me today.
But trust me, I would love to pay one sunk cost today and not have to pay an electric bill for the next 30+ years, if only I could see that far in the future with some certainty.
I’m in Illinois. $60k definitely ruins it. I wonder if you could find a more pragmatic vendor. I got a $55k quote but ended up finding 10.5kw for $22k and was happy with the work, financial health of vendor and warranties. After federal and state credits I’m paying back in several years and making money on the next 14-20. I may also need an inverter replacement between years 10-15 for a few thousand.
We have some of the cheapest rates in the US, due to our nuclear, so our state incentives are fairly good to compensate. Nuclear may be discontinued, but given recent events I’m less sure. Either way I think we only have upside on the ROI due to rate changes.
I’ve been trying to do the math for my own home, are solar panels actually cash flow positive, once you account for efficiency decrease overtime etc.? It always seemed like one barely breaks even in 2 decades
It depends on a whole lot of factors. In a sunny place like CA with good solar incentive programs, assuming good southern to southwestern exposure, they are cash positive after about 6 years [1]. In Wisconsin, 11 years [2]. In Washington State, 15 years [3]
Wow is electricity really that expensive in CA? Our total expenditure on electricity over 20 years is around 20k.
But in CA that site says that their net 20 year savings using solar is 44k-60k. That's insane. Their savings alone is 3 times the cost of our entire electric bill...
> Wow is electricity really that expensive in CA? Our total expenditure on electricity over 20 years is around 20k.
Electricity in CA currently averages around 28c/kWh. Your total expenditure depends on a lot of things, including the size of your home and your loads. The average CA home probably spends around $2000/year on electricity, but that varies a lot based on location and lifestyle.
> But in CA that site says that their net 20 year savings using solar is 44k-60k. That's insane. Their savings alone is 3 times the cost of our entire electric bill...
That figure probably assumes increasing electricity prices over the 20 years, which by and large has held true due to both inflation and increasing wildfire liability.
That explains it then, looking at our past few bills it comes out to ~$0.13/kWh. So yeah, we are less than half the average price in CA. Crazy. That would really change the dynamics of how profitable solar is. I've been wanting to get solar myself.
In reality our rate is Basic - $23.15 + All kWh @ $.089. So it would be even cheaper if we used more on a per kWh basis.
I got a quote last fall in the SF Bay Area for a system:
- 6.4 kW (16x400W panels), microinverter-based (little to no maintenance expected in 25 years)
- estimated to produce 8,500 kWh in year 1
- the panels are warrantied to produce 86% in year 25. Let's use 80% as a more conservative estimate.
- up front cost: $16,500 after the federal tax incentive
- alternative: paying PG&E $.25/kWh on average (conservative estimate)
To a first approximation, the system would save $2,125 in the first year, or almost 13% of the initial investment. In year 25, we'd expect 6,800 kWh. At the same energy price, it'd be saving 10% of the initial investment. (This doesn't take into account inflation, changes in energy prices, and I'm sure other things. This is all very different if your local utility doesn't offer net metering, too.)
The system breaks even in year 8, similar to what others in this thread have reported. But you can also look at it as a pretty low-risk investment returning 10-13% per year for 25 years. That sounds pretty good to me.
You are ignoring investing the savings which if the stock market returns 8% vs the panels at 13%, you would get a 50% higher return with the panels + investing the savings in the stock market vs just the stock market after 30 years. Albeit, it does take 13 years to come out ahead.
You're not adjusting for inflation (cash + increases in electricity costs), ambitiously assuming an equivalent 10% return on other investments, or re-investing the amount saved per year in your calculations (that $1650 you save in the first year also compounds to ~$16.25k).
Solar in California is often breakeven after 4 to 7 years. Enphase enables microgrid systems, and the IQ8 can keep your house powered even when the grid is down, and even without batteries –– something never before possible.
Worth nothing that PG&E is working with CA Democrats to try to kill rooftop solar. They want renewables, but only if distributed using their (badly operated and overpriced) grid. [1]
While I can't say anything useful about PG&E, net metering is problematic though. As used right now in many regions of the world, it is a large and inefficient subsidy to relatively affluent solar roof owners like you and me.
Where I live, a different regime is being introduced:
- a capacity tariff: a base grid charge, calculated based upon quarterly average peak consumption
- a feed-in rate: a wholesale rate compensation for injecting self-produced green electricity into the grid (my current rate: 0.064€/kWh)
- a retail rate by one's electricity provider (my current rate: .02869€/kWh)
- subsidies for installation of solar (up to 300€/kW peak) and storage (up to 30%)
This at least conceptually incentivises both of solar installation and peak shaving. Solar is less ridiculously profitable for me, but still a no-brainer in terms of profitability.
Depends on how much power you need and your access to sun. I'm in the Bay Area, installed solar panels about 18 months ago. Break even for the panels is estimated to be about 6 years at current market rates. Now I also had to do a new roof, which roughly doubles the break even time, ignoring the fact that I'd have needed a new roof anyways.
Currently I'm not taking into consideration decreased efficiency because the panels are warrantied for 90.08%+ at 25 years. Also something not taken into account on breakeven/cash positive is the fact that PG&E rates are always on the rise. As of March of this year rates went up 9%. The more rates go up, the faster I break even.
I got solar in northern California with new roof that needed to be replaced. I got 30 percent tax credit on the roof as well. Paid for the roof in cash but took 10 year loan out for the solar panels at 3.0 percent. Break even at this rate is about 4 years already a few year in. With inflation right now I feel like I got good deal borrowing the money. Right now my loan payment plus then 10.00 monthly connection fee is less than my average monthly bill before 2019. Not sure I would do it with needing a new roof though. But everybody experience will be different.
Sounds about right for the power only, but you also probably get a battery with it to deal with power outages… I don’t know how to price the utility of that, but it’s why I bought solar.
35k for a 8kwh, 24kwh battery storage system.
~15k in credits?
Solar loan ends up at 175 a month. I got in before the recent ridiculousness around fuel prices. I'm sure I'm net positive at this point but haven't done the precise math.
One addition I'm considering, is some bitcoin/ crypto rigs to take care of excess power during the peaks. Even with my batteries, I produce a lot of extra power and don't get paid spit from the power company, and what I do get I can only use as credit.
How long have you been able to stretch that battery out when your power is out? Don’t have a point to make or anything, I’m just curious. I hadn’t really considered that.
I only have 10kw but most days that is enough to get through the night. Air conditioning will go through it, but I don’t typically need it, especially after the sun sets.
> PG&E Corp. put a cost estimate of more than $25 billion Thursday on its effort to plant thousands of miles of power lines underground in an effort to tamp down wildfire risks.
Shame that they're not getting better publicity as a result of this. Our main complaint about the internet companies is that they pocket the money meant to speed up networks for their subscribers. This is exactly what utility companies ought to do to prepare for the future.
> PG&E sought bankruptcy protection in January 2019 after accumulating an estimated $30 billion in liability for fires started by its poorly maintained equipment. One of the blazes, the 2018 Camp Fire, killed scores of people and destroyed the town of Paradise.
A large part of why they're doing it because they're guaranteed a certain percentage return on investments. There's ways to fix this problem without a $25bil investment, but you won't make nearly as much profit on that.
Around 90% of wild fires are caused by humans. A few of the recent major fires (the Camp Fire being one of them) were caused by power lines. So there is definitely a major human-cause component here that can be addressed.
I am all for more prescribed burns, but the people in opposition to those burns aren't the people living in the most at-risk areas.
Fires were intentionally set by humans for thousands of years. The forests evolved with them. There needs to be fire. The causes don't need to be "addressed".
Wildfires in California not only affect California itself, but neighboring states as well. Last year I drove from CA to CO. The wildfire smoke from California covered all of Nevada and Utah.
I don't know where you live, but if you are in CA, there is a very high chance that you live in a wildland-urban interface zone. About 45% of housing in CA would fall under this category.
These risks aren't limited to people living up in the mountains. A large chunk of the Bay Area is a wildland-urban interface.
All of this to say, preventing wild fires is in everybody's best interest and trying to pass the costs to one group or another will only delay our timeline to address these issues.
Burying power lines is just one part of the solution.
Bury power lines. Address liability, insurance, and red tape around prescribed burns so that we can actually meet our goals. Better enforcement (and more government funding) of creating defensible space around homes.
Presumably the Sacramento utility district doesn't serve high risk fire areas, so their customers don't have to subsidize people that choose to live on the wildlands-urban interface.
SMUD does operate HV lines into the Sierras as part of the Upper American River Project consisting of 11 dams and eight power generating facilities. It’s capable of powering most of Sacramento in a pinch but is typically used only when they need more capacity. Throughout the course of a year, it ends up providing about 20% of Sacramento’s power.
SMUD has very strict preventative maintenance procedures for their HV transmission lines, clearing all underbrush from below the 15KV lines almost yearly. We have not had any major incidents involving electrical fires in my lifetime that I am aware of.
Seems unfair to compare a utility covering 18 square miles to one covering 160k+ square miles across some of the harshest terrain in the country. But I agree that PG&E charges way too much.
Going off-grid is really expensive unless you're willing to make significant quality of life cuts when you go outside your system capacity. A string of overcast days that only produce 50% of normal, or a series of hot or cold days that drive large A/C or Heat Pump usage can put you in a situation where you are shedding load during the day so you can bridge across the overnight period.
I expect it's just probably doable in a really temperate climate like SF, where you can live without running heating or cooling year-round and try to get your other electric usage way down, but anywhere with hot summers or cold winters is going to risk battery depletion.
If electricity is cheaper to generate when the sun is shining, the retail price of electricity should reflect that. In fact, the retail price should fluctuate minute by minute, so that demand can be shaped to match supply.
Trying to match variable supply to a fixed retail electric rate is certain to cause energy gluts and shortages.
For example, I'd be happy to charge my electric car during price minima, heat the electric water heater to the max when power is cheap, and run the A/C to the cold end of comfort when electrons are plentiful.
The wholesale price does fluctuate minute by minute. The grid and the average consumer/retail user is not yet sophisticated to take advantage of what you propose.
We know this because until recently, this ‘ideal situation’ that you propose was available by a company called Griddy, that went balls up when their consumers got absolutely slammed during the Texas snowstorms, and the idea of having the wholesale price if you’re a retail consumer became a very very silly idea
Oh, I know about the Texas example. It wasn't the concept that was bad, it was the implementation. The implementation needs to be coupled with meters where you can set a max price you'll accept.
Any system where you sign a contract that says you'll pay any price to turn on a lamp is idiotic, and so are the people who sign such contracts.
(The wholesale prices fluctuation does little to affect demand, because the demand is on the retail price, which is fixed.)
When it’s dark people turn on the lights. When it’s cold they turn on the heating. Those are the drivers of demand.
Industrial demand (aluminium smelters etc) are more price sensitive, but they tend to be billed by the minute anyway. some “residential” people will be happy to turn off their Bitcoin or weed growing equipment when the price rises but that shouldnt be residential.
The wealthy will have their own storage systems to smooth out the bumps and thus spend less than those who are poorer. You may like that idea, but for most people this would be devestating and less to more deaths.
> People adjust their use of gasoline based on the constantly shifting prices. This is how demand is shaped to match supply.
Yeah, but unlike electricity gas can be stored efficiently and long term - your typical 5-series BMW has ~60l of tank volume, a Ford F150 has ~90-100l, not to mention jerry cans. That means when gas is expensive, a consumer usually can choose to simply fill up the tank at another date.
Electricity can be "stored" in hot water in the hot water tank, the thermal mass of the house, and in the battery in the electric car. This can greatly mitigate the demand for electricity at night, for example.
If electricity is scarce during a blizzard, many people's houses are going to be dark and cold anyway. Variable pricing means people can decide how valuable not being dark and cold is to them.
> If electricity is cheaper to generate when the sun is shining, the retail price of electricity should reflect that.
This would be amazing. It would quickly turn the population off further investment in solar and other unreliable, unpredictable sources of energy and prove that nuclear is the only viable green power.
The French "gilets jaune" riots demanded, among other things, reductions in the prices of diesel. Plenty of countries subsidise fuel or electricity in order to maintain society. While the US tolerates small price fluctuations, I guarantee you that if people in the US woke up to $10/USgal gasoline there would be armed mobs heading to the statehouse.
Isn't the price of diesel in France higher now than at the time of the protests in late 2018? At one point this year it even passed 2 euros per liter. How come they aren't rioting now?
Rioting is tiring and there's an election happening right now through which they can express their preferences? Also these things tend to be "edge triggered rather than level triggered" - by a rise, rather than any absolute level.
There's a good chance France will reelect the president that was vilified during the riots.
I guess four years ago the cause of the price hike was different. But overall the situation seems worse to me now. I don't think the yellow vests accomplished much in the long term.
You'd be happy, but that happiness would fade after not too long. It was tried in the US in the 1970s, and produced long gas lines, shortages, and gluts.
It's what always happens when the government engages in price fixing and supply fixing.
Also, I did not even mention price or supply fixing: prices can be stable for reasons outside governmental and/or monopolistic-evildoer's direct control.
I meant Nixon's price and allocation controls he imposed on gas. The proof that the lines were not OPEC's doing is the moment Reagan repealed those controls, the gas lines disappeared and never came back.
And I mean the moment. Gas lines one day, gone the next.
We can predict the weather reasonably well. As the penetration of renewables increases, eventually storage will start to make more economic sense. It is likely that renewables with storage will be cheaper than nuclear. It is virtually certain that we can build renewables and storage much faster than nuclear.
The light part of the graph is transport costs and taxes.
I think the price moves within a range -- I'm protected from enormous spikes, but I also won't see the price go negative.
This is a standard tariff, there are other options for people owning electric cars. There's also an app to show this information, and (I assume) a way to tell the car to charge at the cheapest time in next few hours.
It's a good start, but still an approximation. I bet it makes a significant difference, and that difference will increase over time as people adapt to it, and buy electrical appliances that automatically adapt to it.
This would definitely work, but would require a big infra adjustment.
I don’t know but I wonder if (and it seems likely that) the time arbitrage of electrons is better/simpler (and cheaper?) solved by batteries now or in a few years time.
What batteries ain't is cheap. Grid scale batteries so you can have a fixed price 24/7 will more than double your electricity bills. If they can be built at all, with their massive need for rare metals.
I mean gird scale batteries at production sites to smooth fluctuations in supply, and virtual producers like Tesla in Texas that store power when its cheap and sell when it's expensive to smooth out fluctuations in demand.
This makes prices unpredictable, and I think it's a bad thing. You cannot plan when you can charge your car. Why not have just two prices which are predictable (one day and one night for example) ?
The price of pump gas changes every day. Is that a bad thing?
I'm old enough to remember when pump gas was regulated. Two things happened - gluts and shortages, at the same time! This all ended abruptly when Reagan signed his first Executive Order to repeal all that nonsense.
Pricing for the next day is decided on the spot market, around 2-3 PM. All large consumers and producers place bids on one-hour slots until the market clears. Prices do not fluctuate minute-to-minute, but hour-to-hour. Consumers might opt in to electricity resellers selling spot prices, or get a fixed but usually higher guaranteed price per kWh. All that changes for the end consumer is that your electricity meter readings will be forwarded to a different company
As an European with a fixed-Euros-per-kWh-contract (with two prices, one for daytime, one for nighttime, the latter being a bit cheaper), I'm curious - which countries allow you to get a contract in which your electricity costs get updated daily?
Apparently, Nord Pool just is an electricity exchange market - I was aware those existed. I was more asking for a local electric company which changes prices daily (and allows me to know that before so I can adapt). At least in Germany, I am not aware of anyone offering that kind of contract, and I would love to see how that is implemented elsewhere.
At least in Finland pretty much every electric company offers "pörssisähkö" contracts using either hourly or daily prices. Afaik they all provide an app to see the prices, or you can get them directly from Nord Pool.
Since German prices are on that map, I assume there are at least some companies doing that in Germany too.
Renewables do make electricity cheaper. Here is a highly simplified version of how rates are set:
Fixed price = (unit cost + a profit margin) * number of units
The fixed price is set for a period of time based on historical and forecasted costs. Which costs are allowed and the profit margin for regulated utilities serving fixed price load is determined by the public service commissions.
When their costs go down the regulators will say you can’t charge as much during the next period.
Utilities are a natural monopoly and their prices are controlled.
That formula denies how markets work, and gets us high priced electricity and rolling blackouts.
Like it or not, supply of electricity with renewables is highly variable. Fixed price electric rates are simply incompatible with that.
P.S. Back in the 70's when the DOE allocated gas and set prices, it was simply unable to react to varying gas supplies and demand. The result was gas lines for years until Reagan repealed all that nonsense.
This is in fact how regulated utilities work for fixed rate customers (simplified). The utility charges a customer a rate of x for some period. If the cost during that period is below x the utility may have to lower the price in the next period. If the cost is greater than x they may be able to raise the price in the next period. The exact mechanism for cost-recovery is state-specific and subject to a lot of considerations [0]. Utilities act as wholesale price buffers for retail customers (not commercial users) but the costs are eventually paid.
None of this denies how economics works or that solar and wind are variable.
Most goods and services don’t fluctuate minute to minute despite input prices varying minute to minute. If I go to a car dealer the price of the car doesn’t change while I am there even when the real time price of commodity inputs are moving that quickly. Is that denying economics?
Here in Belgium this type of tariff is marketed under the name "dynamic tariff". (It's only offered by the biggest player Engie, but other companies are working on it.) The price varies hourly, but it is determined by the day-ahead electricity market so the price schedule for the day is known the evening before.
It's a good approximation. But renewable power generation is affected by the weather, and the weather is not predictable.
The price should change minute by minute. Of course, this implies people having internet-connected hot water heaters, car chargers, etc., which are hardly expensive.
I didn't think of that (not much solar power in Denmark...) but my feeling is that it isn't really relevant on the scale of a country -- clouds move across many PV sites, covering one panel as they uncover the adjacent one.
The graphs at the start of this paper show fluctuations on 9 PV power plans in a 50km square, 49 plants in a 250km square, and 225 plants in a 500km square.
Would you prefer rolling blackouts like California has? Would you prefer paying much higher electricity rates for all those peaker plants and grid storage batteries?
I'd prefer the cheap LNG and nuclear power where I live now. Power cost fluctuating over the course of the day would mean cutting back on critical stuff since I already optimize my power consumption pretty well. Maybe I could cut power to my refrigerator/freezer at night but I prefer having it cold on the small chance that there is a blackout the next day.
I have a conventional water heater, and when a tree falls on the power lines I discovered that the water will remain hot enough for a shower for 3 days.
I don't see any problem with heating the water to the max during the day, and you'll be able to enjoy the hot water at night.
> More than 15,000 MW of grid-connected solar power capacity and almost 8,000 MW of wind are now online.
> The system currently has more than 2,700 MW of storage, most of it in lithium-ion batteries, and that number is projected to grow to about 4,000 MW by June 1.
Storage should be in MWh I assume? Anyways, those batteries can hold 11 minutes of peak solar power production.
But by June 1st, battery capacity is set to go up by 50% while new solar production will only go up about by 5%.
No, it's common to measure storage with MW when you're talking about dispatchable power.
For example, a 10 MW battery can replace a 10 MW gas generator (assuming it has enough capacity to cover the relevant peak, which is usually a fair assumption because that's what they're designed for). If you only know a battery has 20 MWh, that's not enough information to know what equivalent amount of generation or ramp it can replace.
Solar?
Hydro electric?
(I wonder if roof top solar is included here).
Also, note this was over a very short period of time. And there's still night time, when solar doesn't operate, except for whatever got stored into batteries.
> In another sign of progress toward a carbon-free power grid.
This is clearly not the case, this is a sign of progress of carbon free production capacity but not the grid. It doesn't mean we should not be happy about it. But we need to stop mixing everything
FYI, in the year 2020 renewables produced 33% and fossil fuels fulfilled 40% of California's total energy budget in 2020, and this 97% figure – while impressive – is not representative of typical energy production [0].
Article doesn't get into this level of detail, but I'd be interested in how they define "renewable". Does it include hydropower, which is renewable but has strong non-carbon-related undesirable environmental consequences? Is burned trash "renewable"?
Depending on location, hydroelectric power can have (mostly because of decomposing vegetation) carbon-equivalent emissions ranging from several grams of CO₂ per kWh, all the way up to around two thousand grams (!) per kWh. This greatly depends on location, with shallow, large-area tropical dams being the worst offenders, and cold, high altitude Nordic dams being the most environmentally friendly.
Hydropower actually has strong carbon-related undesirable environmental consequences, but probably not to such an extent in California as it does in Africa and South America. You'd have to find dam-specific data to verify that for Californian dams, though. It's not like with coal where burning 1 kg releases 3.6 kg of CO₂ no matter where you burn it. Emissions of a dam per kWh produced depend at the very least on its surface area, depth, water temperature, biomass inflow etc., all of which are dam-specific.
Looks like California should start building one of these 3.6GW 40GWh batteries since at this rate routine 120-150% renewable power days dont look so far off and it'll take about 6 years to build.
Sounds big but California built over 2GW/8GW-h of battery capacity last year, so I think we're on pace. Nothing fancy, just a lot of batteries in cabinets.
What percentage of industries and cars are electric currently? Is 100% also continuous during winter? There's a long way to go after "100%" unfortunately :/
No, because California isn't constantly having blackouts. There was one really infamous (among habitual Fox News viewers) capacity-related blackout in late 2020, in which fewer than 1% of customers were disconnected for less than 1 hour. That was precipitated by the sudden shutdown of Diablo Canyon, a nuclear power station. California hasn't had a capacity-related intentional disconnect since then.
There have also been the intentional blackouts of a sort, if I recall correctly, but those were to mitigate fire risk, not because of capacity, and aren't particularly related to electricity generation.
Yup, thanks to poor power line maintenance burning down big swathes of the state, we established the totally modern, first world solution of shutting off the power when it's hot and windy.
But massive unintentional blackouts like say, Texas, nope not here.
Thanks for the extra context - went back and refreshed my memory and you are both correct. These are the articles I remember reading about CA blackouts from:
Viewers of a certain cable channel seem to have a uniquely long memory about this. But the last time there was widespread problems with the electric grid in California was a generation ago.
> What is the minimum capacity that renewables are guaranteed to provide?
Zero... same as any other technology. ie: Texas lost around 25GW of needed NatGas capacity in Feb 2021, not to mention the failed coal, wind, and nuclear that also occurred during that event. (Texas had similar shortages in 2011 and 1989.)
> That's the number that matters.
You need to take a portfolio view when thinking about energy supply issues... reality is both your number and their number matter.
What 97% does mean, is less consumption of two finite resources, namely the ability of the atmosphere to absorb carbon and the amount of carbon we have available to us to burn.
Of course, it also means there's a need to either scale the rest of the generation in the ISO down to 3% or export the excess to a neighboring market. Larger base load plants, particularly nuclear, are very bad at lowering their output (Which is why sometimes wholesale electricity prices are negative. These are generators willing to pay people to take their power so they don't have to shut down or otherwise reduce output.)
So we can't make engineering calculations because black swan events throw all that out the window? That doesn't seem like a winning strategy.
Power grids require serious engineering, not magical thinking, if they are to be economical and reliable.
If windmills do not provide base load power, then what will? Something will, and that something will need to be built, and that something will cost money, and that something will have a level of reliability.
It is not peak capacity that is important in engineering these things, and it isn't average capacity either. Engineering based on those will give you a very unreliable power grid, kind of like what California has now.
If renewables (and batteries) are deployed at a scale where they produce enough electricity except during black swan events, then we can just keep the gas power stations around and use them a couple of days a year.
The rest of the year we can run atmospheric carbon capture facilities (or just try to capture the CO2 from the gas power stations).
> It is not peak capacity that is important in engineering these things, and it isn't average capacity either. Engineering based on those will give you a very unreliable power grid, kind of like what California has now.
Not all of California is served by PG&E. My power is cheap, reliable, and carbon free.
No, we can make engineering calculations, however those calculations don't support the strawman you're promoting.
What happened in Texas was a direct and utterly predictable result of market policy that did not value resiliency vs spot price. Let's just pause to take into full scale the failure of the TX energy market during that emergency: gas turbine producers, facing the highest spot rates they will likely ever see, couldn't produce into the grid because the grid was designed &()*(&)BN dumb. End of story from the technology side for all this sophomoric lazy lassie faire libertarian blather.
California has its issues, but compared to the scale of demand is a very effective power grid. I grew up in KS. If the institutions there had even 1% of the exogenous problems faced by CA providers they'd turn into a clown circus on fire real fast.
> What happened in Texas was a direct and utterly predictable result of market policy that did not value resiliency vs spot price.
There's a lot to this notion that the state deliberately traded off reliability for lower wholesale prices attractive to large scale industrial consumers. It's not like it's unknown how to make a power system reliable in cold weather, but when it happens every ten or twenty years (1989, 2011, 2021), it can be difficult to justify the expense of that sort of preparation. Of course, the costs of this choice are dramatically socialized across the entire state in these extreme weather events. The refinery might get cheaper power, but part of the cost of that cheapness is borne by the homeowner who loses power due to a lack cold weather capacity in the grid, can't heat their home, and their pipes burst or worse.
But the issues in TX were not confined to just the electric part of the energy infrastructure - natgas supply failed also. Some of this was due to things like wellheads freezing (wells very often produce water in addition to hydrocarbons). Some of it was due to bureaucratic snafus. For environmental reasons, many of the natgas pipeline pumping stations have been switched from running on their own gas supply to electrical power. These pumping stations have the ability to request treatment as critical infrastructure for which the power should never be deliberately cut. To do this requires filing paperwork with the state that many or most did not. The consequence of this is that as the electric utilities shed load to keep the grid up, they often cut off their own fuel supply and made the problem worse.
Disclaimer: this comment is not about environmentalism or even the environmental impact. I’m not wading in those waters with HN.
It’s difficult to see this as a net positive given the financial hardship brought about to even make this headline a reality (note that even the headline is misleading and requires context).
It’s a bit like the person who goes out and purchases a vehicle, spends countless hours away from his family working on it, takes out additional loans to modify it, crashes it, repairs it and then wins 2nd place at the local meetup. You have to ask yourself, at what point was this worth it?
Yes, it is. Solar pays for itself in raw kWh over ~8 years, probably even better at utility scale which negotiates huge panel purchases. Batteries cost more, but can apply stored power when they can earn the most (during peak), reducing viability of polluting alternatives.
The cherry on top is that all future energy uses no more material and creates no more pollution, with materials mostly all recyclable at end of life. Over a 30 year horizon, fossil fuel infra cannot compete.
AFAIK in this thread the calculation that gave the answer of 8 years also included the bonus that comes from the government subsidies. What is the number if we excluded that subsidy?
That is part of the cost analysis. Costs continue to fall, only rising recently due to macro materials costs. In a few years when the subsidy vanishes, the difference should be nearly made up for by reduced cost.
And this subsidy only applies to residential AFAICT, not grid-scale which is the main discussion. Grid scale tends to come in far cheaper
I'm having trouble understanding how you can separate the cost/benefit analysis of renewable energy from environmentalism. The entire point is that the reasons for hitting these goals are not purely economic (in the short term - long term, running out of fossil fuels in a fossil fuel economy does not tend to be good for the economy.) The sentiment that aiming for full renewable supply is too expensive to be worth it feels like it misses the mark on why we're doing it.
What financial hardship? Pretty much all the other pathways are even more expensive, either in externalities or in internalized costs. There really are not that many realistic options that remain open (at least in the US).
The only reason we are where we are is because people are choosing the cheapest path rather than going through financial hardship and working on it countless hours. (Which I wouldn't recommend, either, of course; there is also a middle way.)
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Source: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html