Solar has supply bottlenecks at the moment that are stopping further price declines- hopefully they will get solved.
But there’s a lithium shortage that is already showing up in the price of lithium going up 5x. Analysts predict that by around 2025 lithium will limit the battery market that is trying to grow 40x to meet electrification demands [1]. Note that opening a new lithium mine takes a minimum of 7 years. sodium based batteries are coming to help this situation, but they are a new technology that will take time to productionize and ramp up.
Even the video you link claims to be 'bullish' on production. I didn't see any claims about price in the future, just production, though I might have missed it.
In my opinion, we're seeing a lot of 'whiplash' effects from the supply chain issues but, as the pandemic recedes, these should resolve in the next couple of years.
[0] https://www.thesolarnerd.com/blog/will-solar-get-cheaper/
I like that solar analysis, but I also think it is possible that the high demand for solar and high commodity (energy, etc) costs could continue to stop solar prices from dropping for much of this decade just as we have seen recently.
The temporary whiplash concept for inflation hasn't panned out yet. I follow Lyn Alden's economic analysis closely and she has been predicting this decade to be inflationary. These predictions started over a year ago when the Fed kept saying that inflation was temporary.
That is what is called inflation. If people have an extra 7500 to buy solar, then solar becomes up to 7500 more expensive.
There's also a risk that supply chain bottlenecks/cold war with china will drive up the cost & your electric bill is only gonna go up.
It badly needs to be standardized in a consumer-friendly way...like power-over-ethernet in reverse. Field-installable, hot-pluggable, fool proof connectors. You can get 90W over some variations of network cabling...bump that up a couple sizes so you can handle 400W.
So you buy a bunch of solar panels and some patch cables, and plug those in to a one or more "power switches" on the roof top. Then run a QSFP+ equivalent "power backhaul" down into utility room where you have your "power aggregation switch" which has a bunch of (power)QSFP+ ports and plug batteries in to a few of those. And of course a couple big QSFP28 ports to an inverter to power legacy 120V loads, which maybe someday you don't need any more as household things move to using PoLE (power over large ethernet).
The dropping price puts the rollout/adoption within the next 10-15 years.
So it's not just a matter of 'if' but we have a guess as to when as well.
There are other gotchas like PACE loans being senior to your mortgage. So if you get a PACE loan, the loan is transferred to the person buying the home and is senior to your mortgage.
I'm also suspicious around the maintenance and longevity claims. For instance, from my experience, the energy efficient light bulbs do not live up to to their claims. I changed about half of my lightbulbs within three years and they supposedly have a 20+ year lifespan. It's fine that they don't have a crazy lifespan, but it just shows the industry is okay with outright false claims.
Overall I think the industry is so juiced by incentives and manipulated by regulations that it attracts shady players.
You can run a fridge, lights and a laptop 24.7 on about $300 of solar. You can add panels as your needs and budget increases. The biggest cost is the battery.
Besides the money issue, the biggest concern I have are balancing the batteries, getting the right inverters, keeping the panels clear and figuring out what inefficiencies are during the non-summer seasons.
My batteries have always been lead-acid, simply because L.A. is still much cheaper than Lithium and alternatives.
I've recently taken my first set of Lead-Acid batteries out of service. They powered a small fridge, etc, via 200W of solar panels for over 20 years with essentially zero maintenance, except for occasional top-up of distilled water.
Inverters were a problem at first. I had a series of Inverters die over the years, until I started buying Victron products. Have had zero problems since. Rule one, is "don't buy cheap inverters".
The best part is that secondhand solar panels are now very cheap. The reason is that Gov regulations for grid-tie prohibits the use of second-hand panels, so people doing upgrades will basically throw away their old panels.
My setup runs a conventional fridge/freezer, and a large computer which is on-line for most of the day, as well as my workshop full of electrical tools. I do have a large generator, but the only time it gets run is when I have some welding to do. I don't even gave a battery charger hooked to it.
There are so many myths about solar: Lead-Acid batteries don't last as they are destroyed by deep-cycles. Yes, but when you size the system, you should aim for a deep discharge maybe once a month. This still should result in twenty years life or so. I live in a wet and cloudy part of Australia, and this winter my batteries have never been as low as 80% capacity, and it is rare if the batteries haven't returned to 100% charge by 10:00am each day.
Probably the main problem with solar is that people are stupid. One of my neighbours installed a modest solar system, only to have it regularly fail due to low battery voltage. Long story short: The supplier fitted a Watt meter which tracked the consumption at each outlet. It showed that that the problem was in his daughter's bedroom. A quick search revealed a huge radiator under her bed that she was running each night. Problem solved.
Panel costs are accurate and the additional electronic expense is not super high. $1000 should be enough for most setups.
For most people the issue is space. This is going to be another thing where the poor are taxed. A significant amount of single family residences dropping off the grid will cause prices to go up for the people that don't have the luxury of 4000 sq ft to fill with solar panels.
Just a cursory look on Aliexpress gives $0.12wh for LiFePo4 batteries [0] [1].
Looking on Alibaba, I see some potential sellers that might get below that $0.12 but it takes looking around and potentially talking with sellers. I do think it's possible but it requires some hunting, especially in the 'consumer' quantities we're talking about (sub qty 100).
[0] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3256803821576908.html?spm=a2...
[1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3256803518663847.html?spm=a2...
Not for nothing but there are solar bitcoin farms that are popping up for precisely this reason.
In the region where I live (upstate New York, USA), there are solar panel fields where just five years ago there was nothing.
Because this is not going to make all energy cheaper. It's going to massively increase the cost of "legacy" energy while making some types of energy free.
Perhaps they will use a "social" cost-sharing, or ... well I don't know, but essentially the time will come when living in the countryside will come with "free" energy (not unlimited though), and cities will come with punitively expensive energy.
As for costs, there's been concern for more than a decade about the "utility death spiral" scenario: some users disconnecting from a grid would spread the fixed costs of things like transmission and black start over a smaller number of remaining users, leading more of them to disconnect, and so on. So far it hasn't materialized anywhere, but as far as I know it could. I don't think the same scenario is likely with "legacy energy" like gasoline and natural gas, because the fixed costs are so low.
Taxation of energy is a big revenue stream for the governments. What happens when people start putting independent energy sources to power themselves and it causes significant revenue drop ? Would the government tax them for putting up solar on their property ? Couple this with electrification of transportation and you have another taxation source (fossil fuels) losing revenue. This would lead to a disruption in the social power dynamics in a country.
Yes, energy companies can invest in these too, but why would I buy from them if I have my own generation ?
But I don't quite see how free countryside electricity would mean expensive electricity in cities? Large scale wind and solar will decrease grid prices too, and most people live in cities anyway so the people dropping off grid doesn't seem like an issue for electricity transfer costs. Plus off-grid won't happen anywhere with a real winter, so most of Europe is excluded already.
It would be a change in the dynamics of economies of scale vs small and nimble, greater lobbying power is one thing economies of scale still have a big advantage in so GP's comment seems plausible.
The calculations I did for it in 2020 were that the payback period would be 7 years, or 6 with government incentives. That was when electricity was 15c/kWh though... if energy prices stay at the current level I will break even in less than 4 years. I generate around 8000kWh a year, which at current prices is €3200.
The panels should last forever (assuming no physical damage from hail storms etc), they just decrease in efficiency. The inverter should last at least 10 years, but that's easy to replace as it's not on the roof.
The (relatively) high cost is most likely because of labor and (in my opinion) inflated hardware costs of battery and solar panels.
Labor is a massive expense and can't be discounted but one could imagine a solar panel "kit" that just includes the hardware that you can install yourself.
One could also imagine that the costs of labor being subsumed by a larger entity that can take advantage of economies of scale and provide solar energy like a "classic" energy company. I believe something like that is already happening in the region where I live (upstate New York, USA).
For places where labor might be cheaper, then total costs would also come closer to raw hardware costs.
Installing high-wattage DC lines without any training at all is a great way to get house fires.
Also, I haven't got whole lot of un-shaded roof space.
I don't understand why commercial solar isn't even bigger than it is - are they waiting for prices to come down, or what?
> I don't understand why commercial solar isn't even bigger than it is - are they waiting for prices to come down, or what?
I think this is a really good question and I don't know the answer to it.
My not-very-well-informed opinion is that there are a confluence of factors involved:
* Infrastructure buildout, especially in the USA where the infrastructure projects take massive amounts of effort and the population is spread out over a large area of land, takes a lot of time, effort and money.
* The prices involved aren't as lucrative yet as they could be. When the price per MWh is 1/10 that of coal, then we'll see huge rollout (in my opinion).
* Adoption/rollout is happening but, in some places at least, there's government capture preventing widespread rollout/adoption (Pennsylvania?)
* Aging infrastructure prevents large scale energy injection at random points.
To the last point, here in New York state, I've heard one has to pay to first do a survey if the site where you want to build a solar array can actually inject that much more energy into the grid (at a cost of $10k+ or more) and even then, you're limited by what the aging energy infrastructure can support, capping the amount of energy available.
First off you need roofing skills, which 99% of homeowners have no idea how to do safely, often needs specialized equipment, and you run the risk of falling off and basically paralyzing yourself for life. Then you have the issue of having run conduit correctly, grounding everything to code, having disconnects installed in the right places, which is going to vary from state to state and even city to city based on what the laws are.
If you don't electrocute yourself, and manage to not fall off the roof and die, and somehow connect everything correctly, there is approximately 0% chance the local utility agrees to connect your system without a licensed electrician who is willing to vouch for the work you did.
I wouldn't do it. I don't need yet another interested party when trying to sell my house eventually, and I don't want to scare off would-be buyers with potentially complicated contract terms.
A cursory look on YouTube gives many results [0] [1] [2].
There are fields of ground mounted solar panels in the country side where I live.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t4hGBWLtxM
I haven’t researched it but I feel like I’d have pay 20-40K for such a system. What gives?
Is it all just labor and regulations? Why can’t we solve that?
I'm also not sure what you mean by "just" labor. You're talking about a critical system, that has the possibility of seriously injuring someone (including folks outside your house) or causing extensive property damage if not installed correctly. That seems like a thing where skilled (and fairly compensated) installers and some degree of regulation is very appropriate.
Maybe this is the next big thing.
More energy sources means more power lines all over the place.
Few things get NIMBYs worked up like power lines.
The social aspect will be harder to solve than the engineering.
Certainly cross country electric lines aren't going to needed as much because the energy can be produced by a relatively clean factory. With coal, we want it very far away enough away from consumers so as not to cause health concerns. Decentralized energy, at the very least, means we can create solar power plants next to larger cities and towns.
In terms of the wires in urban centers, I don't have a good sense. I can see where you might be right but at the same time, that infrastructure is already there and there are efficiencies to be gained by not transporting electricity over many miles of copper.
I also agree that the social aspect but there's a large pressure to find solutions because energy costs are going to be dropping by an order of magnitude or more.
Your going to need very long electric lines, to send clean energy from places where its sunny to places where it cloudy, or from places where its windy, to places where its currently calm.
There are places that have so much cloud cover year round that it makes solar adoption there effectively impossible? The frequency of these places is such that their energy needs requires the infrastructure remain in place?
Not all of them... but "off grid" no longer means living like Ted Kaczynski. The popular understanding has yet to catch up.
You can have artificial lighting all night long (thanks to LEDs and batteries), computers (ideally you want to avoid the DC -> AC -> DC conversion), Internet access (although most satellite systems aren't really optimized for low power yet), running water (solar-powered pumps, cheap large-capacity plastic storage totes), etc.
The items that are still hard to get, because of their inherently energy-intensive nature, are hot water out of the tap on demand, and interior climate control (space heating especially). You need a pretty big solar array and battery system to run even a fairly efficient (AC or heat pump) climate control system. Lots of people get around this by siting their off-grid cabins in places that don't require AC, and making the interior volume small enough to heat with a small biofuel furnace (like a modern, efficient wood stove) that can burn locally-obtained fuel.
One interesting documentary on this topic is Adam Curtis' All Watched Over by Machines of Every Loving Grace.
Fyi, that's time to break even. ROI is measured in % (annualized, usually).
Solar panels are dropping in cost at an exponential rate [0]. As of this writing, consumer "new" panels are $0.75/W and used are at around $0.30/W right now (I won't give a link as a Google search will do).
Battery technology is also dropping at an exponential rate. I believe, with a little effort, one can purchase batteries at about $0.08/Wh.
Taken together, one can purchase a 30KWh (daily) solar panel and battery storage system for about $4,200 (not including labor and extra hardware/electronics), which puts the return on investment (ROI) at about 3.5 years if we consider the average house spends around $1200 (in the USA).
Dropping costs will quickly put that in the 2 year ROI range which, in my opinion, is the inflection point where it effectively becomes too good to pass up for the average consumer.
The dropping price of energy comes with all sorts of side effects, like a potentially decentralized energy grid, use cases for excess energy (eg bitcoin mining, carbon capture, hydrogen production, etc.), novel power storage systems etc., which is maybe the "novel" part that I haven't heard too much talk about.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law