Falling Panel Prices Lead To Global Solar Boom, Except For the US 183
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Financial Times: Solar power developers want to cover an area larger than Washington, DC, with silicon panels and batteries, converting sunlight into electricity that will power air conditioners in sweltering Las Vegas along with millions of other homes and businesses. But earlier this month, bureaucrats in charge of federal lands scrapped collective approval for the Esmeralda 7 projects, in what campaigners fear is part of an attack on renewable energy under President Donald Trump. "We will not approve wind or farmer destroying [sic] Solar," he posted on his Truth Social platform in August. Developers will need to reapply individually, slowing progress.
Thousands of miles away on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it is a different story. China has laid solar panels across an area the size of Chicago high up on the Tibetan Plateau, where the thin air helps more sunlight get through. The Talatan Solar Park is part of China's push to double its solar and wind generation capacity over the coming decade. "Green and low-carbon transition is the trend of our time," President Xi Jinping told delegates at a UN summit in New York last month. China's vast production of solar panels and batteries has also pushed down the prices of renewables hardware for everyone else, meaning it has "become very difficult to make any other choice in some places," according to Heymi Bahar, senior analyst at the International Energy Agency. [...]
More broadly, the US's focus on fossil fuels and pullback of support for clean energy further cedes influence over the future global energy system to China. The US is trying to tie its trading partners into fossil fuels, pressing the EU to buy $750 billion of American oil, natural gas, and nuclear technologies during his presidency as part of a trade deal, scuppering an initiative to begin decarbonizing world shipping and pressuring others to reduce their reliance on Chinese technology. But the collapsing cost of solar panels in particular has spoken for itself in many parts of the world. Experts caution that the US's attacks on renewables could cause lasting damage to its competitiveness against China, even if an administration more favorable to renewables were to follow Trump's.
Thousands of miles away on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it is a different story. China has laid solar panels across an area the size of Chicago high up on the Tibetan Plateau, where the thin air helps more sunlight get through. The Talatan Solar Park is part of China's push to double its solar and wind generation capacity over the coming decade. "Green and low-carbon transition is the trend of our time," President Xi Jinping told delegates at a UN summit in New York last month. China's vast production of solar panels and batteries has also pushed down the prices of renewables hardware for everyone else, meaning it has "become very difficult to make any other choice in some places," according to Heymi Bahar, senior analyst at the International Energy Agency. [...]
More broadly, the US's focus on fossil fuels and pullback of support for clean energy further cedes influence over the future global energy system to China. The US is trying to tie its trading partners into fossil fuels, pressing the EU to buy $750 billion of American oil, natural gas, and nuclear technologies during his presidency as part of a trade deal, scuppering an initiative to begin decarbonizing world shipping and pressuring others to reduce their reliance on Chinese technology. But the collapsing cost of solar panels in particular has spoken for itself in many parts of the world. Experts caution that the US's attacks on renewables could cause lasting damage to its competitiveness against China, even if an administration more favorable to renewables were to follow Trump's.
Summon MacMann (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's get this out there before our resident Nuclear wanker turns up. He'll shill for nukes, claim that we "need" them for reasons that make no sense on closer inspection, and not answer any real criticisms. So, before that happens:
1) Renewables (solar and wind) are cheaper than building nuclear plants
2) Renewables do create some emissions in their construction, but not a fraction of that released in making a nuclear plant
3) Renewables spread across wind (on and off-shore) and solar combined are reliable - as evidenced by wind and solar charts taken over decades.
Bonus points for pointing out something about "baseload" without acknowledging that with wind and solar built to capactiy, every day since records began we would have hit total use comfortably.
But hey, have at it, MacMann, shill for those nuclear dollars. Nukes are too expensive, historically unsafe, unwanted by any location they would be put it, but more importantly than all that - they are unnecessary!
Re:Summon MacMann (Score:4, Informative)
The only thing that speaks for a nuclear reactor is the smaller area footprint. On the other hand, I can't put a nuclear reactor on a roof, nor can I farm the land between the nuclear facilities, which makes the area footprint point moot.
Recalculating [Re:Summon MacMann] (Score:5, Informative)
I always like to compare the electricity you could generate from the same piece of land.
Don't forget transmission lines. High voltage transmission lines in the US cover approximately 4,800,000 acres of land, or about 20,000 square kilometers. The area of the generating plants is not the highest land area use in electrical production and distribution.
A nuclear facility usually covers something like 1 square kilometer of land and produces about 1 GW of electricity. The price to build it would be $10 billion. Covering the square kilometer with solar panels will give you about 800 Wp per square meter or 800 MWp,
I think you mistyped a number there? Direct normal solar intensity is nominally 1 kW/m^2. A 20% efficient solar array would produce 200 watts, not 800 watts, at noon on a cloud-free day.
resulting in about 80 MW on average.
Right answer, so I think you just mis-typed. Finishing the calculation: average solar insolation on Earth is 341 W/m^2, but solar arrays are usually at higher insolation sites, so call it 400. At 20% efficiency that's 80 W/m^2 average. (But solar panels don't usually cover 100% of the land area of the array, so the land area use is a little larger than that.)
I can currently buy solar panels for ~$200/sqm. To cover the whole square kilometer would cost me $200 mio. I also could put up 100 wind turbines, giving me about 600 MWp or about 100 MW on average, which would cost me the same $200 mio dollars.
Ignoring storage, which is an equal or greater cost. But also keep in mind that this is very site dependent [nrel.gov]. The cost will be lower in good locations (the Mojave desert, for example), and higher in poor locations (Minnesota, for example.)
The only thing that speaks for a nuclear reactor is the smaller area footprint. On the other hand, I can't put a nuclear reactor on a roof, nor can I farm the land between the nuclear facilities, which makes the area footprint point moot.
Land use is an issue, but not the driving issue. As you point out, you can do other things with the land area of a solar farm, including most notably grazing animals.
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I think the "p" means "peak" and refers to the the rated amount of the panels before you include the capacity factor, etc. That's why the 800 doesn't make sense but the 80 does. This term was new to me as well and I had to look it up.
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I think the "p" means "peak" and refers to the the rated amount of the panels before you include the capacity factor, etc. That's why the 800 doesn't make sense but the 80 does. This term was new to me as well and I had to look it up.
This is correct-- the subscript "p" means peak Watts, which is defined as performance at 1 kW/m^2 input intensity. But the correct number should be 200 W_p, not 800 W_p.
I think it was simply mis-typed.
Re:Summon MacMann (Score:4, Insightful)
Your prices are from 2003.
Besides, when you build that plant, the land is fully booked.
Solar is an addon.
So, no, you're off by a large factor and not in the direction you want.
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The point I was to make was that the only thing that speaks for Nuclear is its compact size, and this is a moot point, because I can use areas of land for Solar, which I would otherwise not being able to use (roofs), or which I can continue to use otherwise (farming around wind turbines).
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What point do I want to make?
1. That nuclear is "compact", which it isn't. Your error is a factor of about 2.5, a nuclear plant requires more land than the equivalent solar farm at most latitudes where solar makes sense. Dunno about wind, I hear it makes the view terrible and kills many orange-feathered birds.
2. That nuclear is (under the current regulatory regimes) cheaper than it is. Your error is a factor of 3 or more. But I guess that can be overcome by cutting regulation.
So, overall, you're close to an error of an order of magnitu
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1. That nuclear is "compact", which it isn't. Your error is a factor of about 2.5, a nuclear plant requires more land than the equivalent solar farm at most latitudes where solar makes sense. Dunno about wind, I hear it makes the view terrible and kills many orange-feathered birds.
I tooked the area of the Flamanville Block 3, France nuclear plant as an example. It's a 1.6 GW plant covering an area of about 1.4 square kilometers. I was rounding it for better calculation.
2. That nuclear is (under the current regulatory regimes) cheaper than it is. Your error is a factor of 3 or more. But I guess that can be overcome by cutting regulation.
Again, I was using the Flamanville nuclear plant as an example. Total construction cost was 13 billion Euros.
Please, tell me again, what you believe to know differently.
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It looks like the actual output of Flamanville is about 1.3 GW, but that might be due to its particularly low average capacity factor of about 70%. As far as a choice for this example though, it seems a bit cherry picket. It has about a 1 square km to 1 GW ratio, but for most plants the land requirement is about three times that. It might help for land usage that this plant is built pretty much directly on the ocean and dumps heated water directly into the ocean. So it is not using an evaporative cooling sy
Re:Summon MacMann (Score:4, Insightful)
And the land required for nuclear does not include the uranium mine either.
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Looks like 1 GW for a year takes about 165 tons of Uranium ore to produce the required fuel. It is a bit hard to find precise numbers on this, but it looks like the area of mine required to produce enough fuel for the lifetime of a 1 GW reactor is somewhere around the 100 square kilometer range. That could vary depending on various factors. It does seem almost certain though that, if you include the size of the area used for mining, the typical land footprint for a nuclear power plant (usually cited as arou
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I always like to compare the electricity you could generate from the same piece of land. A nuclear facility usually covers something like 1 square kilometer of land and produces about 1 GW of electricity.
Why? You don't live in Japan. Land isn't a scarce resource. Combine that with the ability for solar to help farming, provide shade and improve soil and it really questions whether you care about land at all.
Also there's not a single nuclear power plant in the world that operates covering 1 sq km. Most of them are around 4 sq km in land use. In fact if you build a power plant it almost certainly relies on an additional enrichment facility which itself is likely a couple of 1 sq km, and I'm guessing you'll pr
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Turns out from other comments that the example they were using is Flamanville in France which is ostensibly very compact, but it manages that because its cooling system involves being built right on the English channel, sucking in cold water and pumping the hot water right back into the channel without any system to cool it down first.
Re: Summon MacMann (Score:2)
As it is right now what's needed in many places in Europe is energy storage to accumulate and balance the production v.s. consumption over the 24 hours each day. Batteries and pump dams are two ways to solve that.
At the moment the prices are swinging wildly over the day and year in Europe from negative prices to over an Euro per kwh. The issue is caused by the consumption and production that aren't matching well. With the price is often lowest during the day and highest at night as it is right now. Especial
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...but the problem is that when you need the power in the evening for cooking is also when you want to charge the car so it isn't empty when you want to go to work the next morning.
Good lord, do people leave the oven on while they sleep over there?
There should be plenty of time to charge a car at night even with your concerns.
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Not what I wrote - but when you come home you'll connect your car for charging because it needs to be charged and that can take quite some time and then on top of that when you have connected the car you also start the cooking so in the evening you'll get a peak from two sources at the same time.
Ample time depends on how much energy you'll need and how fast the car can charge. Sometimes you also go for a second trip after dinner and then you want the car to at least be somewhat charged.
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If your car takes all night to charge, then you are using a low amperage circuit and there will not be much of a peak. If not, then you can just set your car to charge after midnight because basically every electric car allows you to do things like select a charging schedule. I can see your concern about power peaks, and I certainly think storage is a good idea, but I think your example can mostly be handled by intelligent charging systems and smart grid features.
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A nuclear facility usually covers something like 1 square kilometer of land and produces about 1 GW of electricity.
Have to add that it is more like 3 square kilometers. I think you're getting confused with square miles. Also, that ignores the requirement for the watershed and river to cool it, or the ocean and the large area of canals required to return it. Or, put in other terms, it ignores the fact that nuclear plants often require premium waterside land. Or, if not, and they are air cooled, that costs a lot more and tends to have even larger land requirements. Overall, it is still a smaller land footprint for the nuc
Re:Summon MacMann (Score:4, Interesting)
Cost of nuclear reactors is mostly in regulation and compliance
Even with the current costs of regulation and compliance, nuclear power plants still regularly cost far more to decommission than was set aside for them, so The People have to make up the difference. Obviously those costs are not high enough.
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What I'm seeing is Google's AI saying literally "Decommissioning a nuclear power plant is a cost, not a profit" and mention that the UK is spending £3 billion annually on the cost of decommissioning old nuclear plants. Yes, that is more than was set aside for the decommissioning.
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Then don't prematurely decommission them because of a bunch of loud activists insisting you do so.
This is one of the more actually valuable comments here. We must not slow the building of renewables by prioritizing nuclear plants which cost so much more and slow down decarbonisation, however if there's a plant already built, then running it as long as it remains safe is the only sensible option.
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however if there's a plant already built, then running it as long as it remains safe is the only sensible option.
Which plants in provably good condition have been shut down because of pressure from activists?
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Which plants in provably good condition have been shut down because of pressure from activists?
And also fuck that cowardly downmod. There is always some cuck out there who can't get me out of their head.
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Which plants in provably good condition have been shut down because of pressure from activists?
German plants in moderate but restoreable condition have been shut down. If I remember correctly they had graphite bricks which needed to be modeled and tested correctly and that modelling wasn't done so we can neither prove 100% that they were okay nor they weren't. Other equivalent plants have had successful lifetime extensions.
I'd have to check details.
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So, that depends then on what the cost of the testing was and the estimated odds on how those tests would come out. A perfectly reasonable gamble might have been made on what the results would be. It is worth noting that the average age of Germany's nuclear plants when they were shut down was in the 40's.
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however if there's a plant already built, then running it as long as it remains safe is the only sensible option.
I will agree with that as an example of a sunk cost argument that is not a fallacy. Except though that I will add that "remains safe and does not become too expensive" should be the requirement. Extending the life of a nuclear plant, like many things, comes with diminishing returns. You have to spend more and more money over time to prevent failure and keep it safe, etc. Eventually you do reach a point where keeping it running hits the sunk cost fallacy. This principle applies to many things. The best examp
Re:Summon MacMann (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. Barakah was projected to cost $20 billion that ballooned to $32 billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I can’t imagine the UAE being full of liberal environmentalists protesting.
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So, about $32 billion for 5.6 GWe nameplate (but that's nameplate capacity, so the actual uptime can be assumed to be about 93%), so about 5.2 GW. That works out to about $6.2 Billion in upfront costs per GW. Then there's about $1.6 billion per year in operating costs for the whole plant. Then at least $4.2 billion for decomissioning. It doesn't really seem to be all that cheap. In any case, estimates that I can find put the power from the plant at around $110 per MWh, which seems like pretty clearly more t
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Cost of nuclear reactors is mostly in regulation and compliance.
When you nuclear fans say this stuff, you never seem to explain exactly how those things are 90% of the cost. Does it really cost all that much to file the paperwork, or are you talking about something else? Do you mean that building a nuclear plant with all the things required by the regulation, like all the basic safety stuff, costs a lot more than just building an open, uncontained reactor maybe? If you could maybe give some sort of actual rundown of these costs, it could help your case a lot. I mean, if
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Please, describe farming the land between solar panels? How many multiples of a typical combine width are you going to put between solar panel clusters? In other words, how much will you reduce the density of solar panels to exploit this so-called advantage of solar?
"Agrivoltaics" is the buzzword you could search on to see what's meant here. Turns out, for example, that many crops that like shade grow better in between rows of panels than they would on their own. Plan the rows of panels appropriately (with enough room between them, but not too much) and it's a win-win for the voltage and the vegetables.
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If the answer is "batteries", those need land too, and money, and the resources to make them. And of course, you have to hope you don't have too many cloudy days, or there goes your batteries.
"There goes your batteries."? I mean, I know it's not what you mean, but I'm getting flashbacks of Trump explaining how it's the end of magnets if you put them in a glass of water.
Seriously though, there's still power from wind when the sun is not shining and periods that long without sunshine are rare, especially if the solar plants are well sited and you have a well spread out power grid.
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We do need fusion though. We need to figure out how to make that work.
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Actually, solar, wind and nuclear are the same but opposite. They're both non-dispatchable sources of power - that is, they cannot adapt to changes in the grid. Solar and wind is obvious - they're erratic, but if you have an excess, you can always curtail production. Nuclear is the opposite - you cannot have an excess as reactors take many hours to change output so you have to run them short of what the grid needs.
This non-dispatchability is fixed with dispatchable power - things like grid scale batteries,
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Flawed conclusion (Score:3, Informative)
Nobody's ceding the "global energy future" to China. China is already the global leader in production of state-subsidized solar panels and polycrystalline silicon. If you buy their panels, you're further cementing their position of dominance (and guaranteeing that you will need to go back to them 15-25 years later whenever you need replacement panels).
Re: Flawed conclusion (Score:5, Informative)
You don't need replacement panels at 25 years, much less 15. They will just produce a little less than they originally did. I have 28 15 year old panels that are still fine. Admittedly, these were supposedly US made, by Sharp. The additional 42 panels are Jinko and were more recently installed. I actually bought them used. No issues at all so far.
Re: Flawed conclusion (Score:2)
Government regulations require 25 year warranty on panels, including performance. Those don't apply to any of the other goods you listed. While many panel companies haven't existed that long, or survived that long they still need to engineer them not to fail short term while they are still in business and on the hook for warranty.
A high quality panel can produce about 88% of original nameplate at 25 years. It's still got plenty of useful life. Short of physical damage, such as hail or lightning strikes, pan
Re:Flawed conclusion (Score:5, Informative)
"state-subsidized solar panels"
Same old douches with the same old, tired message. China evil.
"If you buy their panels, you're further cementing their position of dominance..."
That's not a proposal, that's a scare tactic. Either we find better alternatives to solar, we compete in solar, or we cement their position of dominance. With MAGA, we most definitely are not doing the first two.
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Same old douches with the same old, tired message. China evil.
They are. That is, CCP is clearly evil. (The Chinese people are the same as people everywhere, varied).
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Scare tactic or not, nobody's building solar panels or producing polysilicon in the US anymore, so it's not like anyone's losing ground to China by not buying their shit.
And it's VERY VERY VERY much subsidized with the intention of destroying foreign competition. Now they have overcapacity in the sector (and in others):
https://oilprice.com/Latest-En... [oilprice.com]
Dunno how you got modded +5 Informative with this reactionary schlock.
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At this point we are so screwed with climate change that even if it was "cementing their position of dominance" we should do it anyway. No point cutting your nose off to spite your face.
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Re:Flawed conclusion (Score:4, Informative)
(and guaranteeing that you will need to go back to them 15-25 years later whenever you need replacement panels).
My Singaporean solar panels have 20 year rated output warranties. They will most likely still be producing 90% of their rated output in 40 years, when I will most likely be dead. You're not very good at this FUD thing.
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Do you really think utilities want "90% of their rated output" at any point of deployment? Seriously? No.
https://coldwellsolar.com/what... [coldwellsolar.com]
Expect replacements at the 25-year mark, possibly less for panels incidentally damaged (hail storms, tornadoes, other problems).
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Do you really think utilities want "90% of their rated output" at any point of deployment? Seriously? No.
Nobody is replacing solar panels because they are only delivering 90% output. They are replacing them because there are newer panels which deliver 150% of the original panel's output.
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China is already the global leader in production of state-subsidized solar panels and polycrystalline silicon. If you buy their panels, you're further cementing their position of dominance (and guaranteeing that you will need to go back to them 15-25 years later whenever you need replacement panels).
On the other hand: If you buy their subsidized solar panels you get them to partly pay for your panels. So: Chinese tax payers subsidizing American solar installations. Isn't that a big win for 'murica?
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No because you're still beholden to a hostile foreign power for all your electrical generation. Once they cut you off, you can't deploy anything further or maintain your existing deployments.
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What fundamentally defective economic principles have you used there? "FUD"?
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My statement is plain and easy-to-understand. The summary is fear-mongering, making it look like we're going to somehow fall behind China because we aren't buying enough of their stuff (since obviously we aren't building solar panels for ourselves anymore).
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Your statement is confused.
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We can't maintain replacement capacity. We discarded it earlier, so now we'd need to build it from scratch. That will take awhile and be expensive.
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Who's going to pay for the development? Yeah, it's been done before, and a lot of the info is public, so it would be cheaper to do again, but while you're doing it you're competing against a already build, working, and relatively efficient existing system. You won't make any profit during development. So it's not like doing it in a clean field.
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Not if they cut you off, you can't.
Regarding falling solar panel prices (Score:5, Interesting)
Prices of solar panels has fallen orders of magnitude since the 80s and 90s to the point that now solar is now in some cases the cheapest energy source. In a recent podcast episode (2025-08-26) of Why is this happening? [msnbc.com] the guest (an author of a book related to solar panels) mentioned that in Pakistan the official electricity production had dropped like 10-15% over a year, not because of lesser energy consumption but because people rather had bought and installed their own, independent solar panels.
Re:Regarding falling solar panel prices (Score:4, Informative)
The story of solar in Pakistan is very very interesting
https://www.wri.org/insights/p... [wri.org]
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The used panel market is an interesting story in Afghanistan.
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So basically the opposite of USA. I had so many hoops to jump through to get solar put on my condo it was insane. I had this done before the rules change, so the payback was reasonable. Now, at least in California, NEM 3.0 is such a rotten deal. It doubles the pay back for your system with horrible resale prices. It's almost as if private utilities profit margins are more important, even under solid Democrat rule.
To make matters worse, a large portion of the state is literally banned from going off grid. Yo
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My pleasure. A very similar story is unfolding right across sub-Saharan Africa, and I believe it may also be happening in many other SE Asian countries too. EV adoption is also dramatically increasing in SE Asia, where people do not have cultural boogeymen in the form of either EVs or China.
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It's got to the point where solar panels are one of the cheapest roofing products. Protect your roof from damage, and generate your own electricity.
You would think that the rugged independent manly men would be all over solar, keeping the lights on when the apocalypse comes, not relying on the electricity company.
I would not mind Trump's attack on renewables ... (Score:3)
and his push for coal quite so much if the pollution so caused would stay within the borders of the USA so that only Americans suffer climate and health problems caused by the orange idiot's stupidity. Unfortunately this is fantasy: we all share this planet and it's atmosphere so we all suffer pollution elsewhere.
Energy Costs Are Confusing (Score:2)
You'd think solar panels would cost MORE if they are falling. Who wants a broken solar panel?
Post-reality politics (Score:2)
Keeping technological advances out of your country does only one thing: It makes you obsolete. Yes, it can work for a time. But that is it. And then the cost will be huge.
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So you think we should all, globally, buy from China? What happens when they are the only game in town and they alter the deal? Hmm. It means you have no choice and will pay whatever they ask because they are the only game in town.
It's like, monopolies bad unless China is the monopoly. Last I checked, China was still run by humans and humans are still greedy fucking assholes. I'd rather have a lot more vendor diversity then just "China".
I don't ever want to hear anymore bullshit out of the Slashdot crowd re
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The stupid is strong with you if that is the only way you see to react. Well, your whole posting drips MAGA, so "stupid" is the default.
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Is calling someone MAGA just the new shorthand for saying you disagree with someone?
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Obviously not. What a stupid question.
Uh, Russia? (Score:2)
The US is trying to tie its trading partners into fossil fuels, pressing the EU to buy $750 billion of American oil, natural gas, and nuclear technologies during his presidency as part of a trade deal
Trump is trying to get our "allies" to stop buying Russian oil & natural gas because, you know, doing that has our "allies" funding Russia's military adventures into Ukraine.
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Shame! (Score:2)
Re:Oh good (Score:4, Insightful)
LOL MAGA shit-brain championing Tibet.
"I can see how the world's self-proclaimed morally superior folks might want to trumpet that ..."
I can see how being a member of the klan makes you sensitive to that.
Geography [Re:Oh good] (Score:2)
on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it is a different story. China has laid solar panels across an area the size of Chicago high up on the Tibetan Plateau,
Oh good. Well, as long as China gets to use Tibet however it wants to ...
Just a quick note, "The Tibetan Plateau [wikipedia.org]" is not a synonym for Tibet. The plateau is a region much much larger than Tibet itself.
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You trumptards would rather burn in Hell than share Heaven with a liberal.
Trump literally said he's not going to heaven (Score:2)
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You seem to be obsessed with fucking kids.
Why is that?
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Humanity has worshiped over 18,000 deities during its time on Earth.
Which one are you referring to in your statement?
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Solar panels require an accompanying energy storage system, hydro or gas turbines. Therefore looking at the cost of the solar installation only, is misleading. Looking at the complete system cost, solar and wind gennies will always be more expensive than a primary generation system.
The word 'always' is inaccurate here. The system cost is very dependent on the case, including both the site (how sunny is it?), the usage profile (how much power do users need when?), and the fraction of energy produced by each provider (is solar producing 10%, 50%, of 90% of the total power?).
Armchair engineers like we have on /. tend to dislike problems where the devil is in the details, but the real answer is "it depends."
Overall, I would advocate for a mix of power sources.
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Solar panels require an accompanying energy storage system, hydro or gas turbines. Therefore looking at the cost of the solar installation only, is misleading. Looking at the complete system cost, solar and wind gennies will always be more expensive than a primary generation system.
That's obviously, stupidly false, and you should feel obviously stupid for saying it.
Every watt solar panels produce is a watt that doesn't have to be produced with some more expensive source. Therefore even if literally the only thing you do is supplement other plants with solar arrays and shut or ramp them down when the sun is shining, you're still going to improve cost and efficiency. This is true even if you use no storage at all because solar panels and inverters are so cheap now. You think solar panel
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Every watt solar panels produce is a watt that doesn't have to be produced with some more expensive source.
Not really. If your solar panels produce a watt when nobody needs a watt, it's useless.
You have to either store it to use later, or else you have to turn down a watt from some other power plant. Storage costs money. You have to incorporate that into the economics. And, if you have to turn down a watt from some other source, if that source is not easily ramped up or down, you end up wasting that watt.
That doesn't mean that solar is not an economical energy source. It does mean that when you do the economic
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Both arguments are spreading FUD, both "solar is perfect already, you don't need storage" and also "solar doesn't work right now because you need storage."
If you want to use all solar, you need storage. If you don't, then you don't. Most power is consumed while the sun is shining, or would be if there weren't clouds. As I said in my prior comment here, if you are expecting to use both legacy and solar power then you do not need storage. I expect slashdotters to be able to process if..then statements.
The argument over whether you can use all solar is a different argument than I was addressing, so I'm not going have it in this thread now.
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Most power is consumed while the sun is shining, or would be if there weren't clouds.
Depends on where you are. The further north, the more you need power when the sun is not shining. Peak power usage here in my part of Canada is evenings in the winter when a cold spell is happening. Luckily we have hydro so solar/wind means simply turning a tap down and saving the water for evening.
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There's also a whole bunch of work going into thinking about energy abundance -- figuring out cool ways to make use of a bunch of "excess" power that we are likely to have if we do a 4x or 8x overbuild of renewables because they're so damn cheap to deploy and becaue it reduces the volume of storage we need.
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Indeed. Some power grid redesign is needed, but most of that simply has to be done.
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Forget it. That person you answer to is just an idiot with a big ego and zero understanding of how a grid works.
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Therefore looking at the cost of the solar installation only, is misleading. Looking at the complete system cost, solar and wind gennies will always be more expensive than a primary generation system.
Only if you cherry pick what is considered as "cost" like excluding cost of fuel.
Re:Total System Cost (Score:4, Informative)
Looking at the complete system cost, solar and wind gennies will always be more expensive than a primary generation system.
Sure. If it were 1990. But in 2025 solar + storage is cheaper than coal, far cheaper than gas, and an order of magnitude cheaper than CCS / nuclear.You really need to update your FUD, you can't rest on your laurels with outdated shit like that.
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> Solar panels require an accompanying energy storage system, hydro or gas turbines.
That is not exactly true. For example Europen super grid is an alternative solution. The idea is that you generate electricity in one country and then transfer it to another. For example "midday" lasts about 7 hours in Europe, so at least one country. You will have pretty good generation between 8:00 - 16:00, so that is 15 hours of good electricity generation. During night time the demand is lower. When you combine this w
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War is a problem with traditional energy too. Dams, pipelines, power plants including nukes are likely targets. The nukes and dams can also become major disasters if targeted.
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> Solar panels require an accompanying energy storage system
So put a small battery module under each panel. It's not like much can grow there besides grass, and there's plenty of that between rows of panels.
You've got what, a 2x1 meter plot of land for each panel? If you allow for a 1 meter panel height, that's slightly less than 2 cubic meters of volume you could fill with batteries (allowing for some loss of volume for the module's outer casing). That is a LOT of space, even if what you fill it with
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I wonder which is the most expensive in the long run?
Re:Total System Cost (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, many studies that I looked at several decades ago only counted the cost of the solar installation. They assumed that the electric network would act as the storage. And they were correct.
Now the fraction that's based around intermittent power sources is large enough that that needs to be taken into consideration. I assume it is, but I haven't checked.
But if you're looking at old studies, they generally don't list the complete cost.
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Any study that you looked at several decades ago is not worth the paper it is written on as the economics of solar, wind, and indeed storage solutions have changed in ways that would make a homeless GenZer in Sydney stop complaining about the housing crisis. Heck any study you read about from a half a decade ago is off by an order of magnitude.
No one cares what the old studies list.
Also they weren't even that wrong. There's a whole separate market for storage and frequency stabilisation that has cropped up
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And, funnily, these old studies also do not account for the present-day cost and possibilities.
Morale: Do not use old studies except when they have been updated.
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Batteries are very cheap now. You can get a 15kWh pack for about 1,400 Euro/USD, plus tax. Average US consumption is about 10.5kWh/day of electricity, by the way.
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Just about nobody looks at the cost of decommissioning, and when they do they lie. E.g. "How do you reprocess discarded wind turbine blades?", "Who pays to decommission a nuclear reactor?", "How do you recover the carbon from burned coal?", et multitudinous cetera. (In at least one case the company that promised to clean up after decommissioning it's nuclear reactor used the money for other purposes and then went bankrupt.)
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used the money for other purposes and then went bankrupt
That was probably the actual unspoken business plan from the beginning.
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I want it measured in Librarys of Congress or Olympic swimming pools!