Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid

Even better imo than all the chemical energy we could store when we have excess solar, think about all the water we could create. Creating fresh water from sea water is extremely energy intensive, but there's nothing easier to store than giant bodies of water. Once the energy term is the reverse osmosis opex equation is erased, large scale water plants wherever it's sunny are going to start looking awfully attractive.

Great post.

There is third option with excess solar energy production - send it elsewhere.

This is partly what China is doing with solar - concurrent with massive solar installation there is also extensive ultra-high-voltage electricity transmission lines being laid out, to load balance excess production in the sunny but sparsely populated N and W, with the excess consumption in the heavily populated S and E.

Australia, Morocco, Spain I think are also getting into this game, though in these cases for energy export

"Fun" fact: the mentioned combination of solar and battery is something many South Africans already have - but more out of necessity to mitigate the frequent brownouts. The more radical ones even use this to go off the grid, and avoid paying anything to their failing power utility.

(see e.g. https://theconversation.com/south-africans-are-opting-to-go-...)

17 hours ago | 129 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41432109

There are two key points of excess that comes from Solar now being the cheapest source of KWH.

1) The duck curve gets flattened to zero during the sunny days and there is excess power at that moment that no one can use. This can go into a variety of uses like hydrolysis or maybe a CO2 capture of the future. At the moment the only thing being deployed for this is storage for later release that day.

2) Solar exceeds what the grid can actually distribute. This can't be utilised as well by big centralised installations and will push towards somewhere to dump the excess power through the summer locally. Some companies are trying to turn the CO2 in the air and power into fuel for home installations and this might make homes quite a lot more independent with their own generators and fuel creation. Not a lot of solutions yet on how to utilise this power.

Other than storage of power for later use that day/week there isn't a whole lot of competition to try and use these periods of excess better. Its an area rife with business opportunities especially ones that can store the energy long term for a home once we hit scenario 2.

Let me calculate:

Australia consumes 5882 PJ of electricity per year [1] = 1.63 PWh/y = 4.46 TWh/day.

A Nickel-Iron battery stores 30 Wh/L [2]. They would need ~150 GL (giga liters) of NiFe batteries to store all the power consumed in a day (they would need much less just for the night) = 150 million m3 (cubic meters). A stack of cells 3m high (+ frames) would occupy 50 million m2 (sq. meters) or a square with ~7 km long sides (without service roads), so let's say battery storage industrial zone 10 km by 20 km in total, split around major cities.

Cost: ~ 1T$ ( tera-dollars :) without the land and the roof )

I hope I didn't miss any 0s.

[1] https://www.energy.gov.au/energy-data/australian-energy-stat...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery

On the east coast of Australia, you are taxed for feeding in solar power between 10am and 3pm. They're trying to get more people to install batteries. But the ROI is 5-7 years (at current rates).

Everyone seems to be saying this but whenever I get quotes they are always the same, for every dollar the hardware goes down the labor seems to go up the exact same amount… strange how that works.

> Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid

this reminds me of "to cheap to meter":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter

When the reporters asked him about the quotation and the viability of "commercial power from atomic piles," Strauss replied that he expected his children and grandchildren would have power "too cheap to be metered, just as we have water today that's too cheap to be metered."

> Most of the world's solar power was installed in the past 30 months

This is pretty impressive.

Fun fact: You can now get a 99kwh ev with bidirectional charging (vehicle to home) for about $50-55K, new.

I can easily imagine buying one of these as an extra “beater” car in a few years, and making sure we’re always charging at least one car at home when it’s sunny.

Seems much more likely that in the US at least, fossil fuel interests will push for taxes on solar installations and usage to bring their costs up to the level of oil and gas.

This is a nice article and everything, but any time I see someone trying to convince me that their magic lines pointing to some point in time that is a decade or more away are definitely going to mean Free Stuff for sure and that it’s a certainty, the signal they’re trying to send gets drowned out by the noise of my bullshit detector screeching.

Would it be possible to create local privately owned or community shared carbon capture devices to "burn off" the solar surplus?

Re: the grid connection backlog - much of the challenge of turning on new generation is simulating the increasingly complex ways the grid can fail due to all the interconnections. It’s a huge computational challenge and there’s really not much incentive to speed it up

What is the basis of the China solar panel install number? Given China lies about their economic data like GDP why do we trust other data?

I've been reading headlines such as these since 2010 during my undergrad. It is 2024 and solar is still an expensive option.

Can someone explain to me why this is a "good" thing?

If solar is too cheap, it won't be overbuilt... or people will lose their return on investment => less solar.

Unless I am missing something major, another way to say this is "solar power during peak solar flux will become so valueless that people will stop building solar".

To the downvoters: Off-grid solar will be unlikely to be dominant energy consumption, and there are other options to build cheap, efficient and clean energy. Solar is an option and I don't "hate" solar.

This is a simple argument of negative prices or low-cheap prices will correct themselves on the market without external forces like subsidies from tax payers... which means it isn't nearly as cheap as everyone is saying.