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On Tuesday, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced that utility-grade solar panels have hit cost targets set for 2020, three years ahead of schedule. Those targets reflect around $1 per watt and 6¢ per kilowatt-hour in Kansas City, the department's mid-range yardstick for solar panel cost per unit of energy produced (New York is considered the high-cost end, and Phoenix, Arizona, which has much more sunlight than most other major cities in the country, reflects the low-cost end).
Those prices don't include an Investment Tax Credit (ITC), which makes solar panels even cheaper. The Energy Department said that the cost per watt was assessed in terms of total installed system costs for developers. That means the number is based on "the sales price paid to the installer; therefore, it includes profit in the cost of the hardware," according to a department presentation (PDF).
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a DOE-funded lab that assesses solar panel cost, wrote that, compared to the first quarter in 2016, the first quarter in 2017 saw a 29-percent decline in installed cost for utility-scale solar, which was attributed to lower photovoltaic module and inverter prices, better panel efficiency, and reduced labor costs. Despite the plummeting costs for utility-scale solar, costs for commercial and residential solar panels have not fallen quite as quickly—just 15 percent and 6 percent, respectively.
It seems there are still big gains to be made in the installed costs of residential panels.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday September 16 2017, @10:14AM
>To really take this into account we would need to estimate how many miles (or km) each would be expected to go before being scrapped. More on this later.
electric cars have batteries that wear out (meaning lower capacity, and more energy loss when charging them) that need to be replaced relatively often
> I want a reference on this one. I heard this when the Prius first came out. "It's gonna need a $10K battery pack every five years!" I see taxi services operating Prius cabs, which proves to me that they aren't crazy expensive to run. And according to this [cleanfleetreport.com], car makers are warrantying the battery packs for 80K miles.
Well, read up on lithium ion battery technology, or look at how other devices with smaller batteries fare after a couple of years of charge/discharge cycles. I mean, surely you have used battery tech in other places except cars? Look at your smartphone, that has the same battery tech (and charging tech) as electric cars, and they still can't make the batteries last more than a couple of years of use.
As for Priuses, all I have is anecdotal evidence, as where I live there are 3 minicab drivers who are my neighbours, and they all have Priuses. Basically the fleet is scrapped and replaced every 3 years, because the batteries wear out to the point of being near useless. True that minicab drivers really drive a lot. and the car for them is a tool to make money, so they don't really have an easy life, but the car is a cost of business to them, so they just replace when they are worn out and their clients bare the cost.
My area is full of Priuses that basically use the ICE all the time, and lug around a weight of dead batteries, because the battery packs are too expensive to replace vs the cost of the car. Many of them are around 5-10 years old now.
And 80k is around 2 years worth of casual driving, so fits in with what I said for battery wear. 80k isn't even that much. One of my cars has 132000 miles on the clock, another 202441 miles on the clock. All with the original engine and fuel system, and all still getting pretty much the same mileage they did when new. I highly doubt any electric car will manage that on its original batteries.
> And for battery electric vehicles in particular, I have only researched Teslas, but Teslas have had very little battery degredation [greencarreports.com]. Teslas with over 220K kilometres (or about 136K miles) still had over 90% battery life.
That is because they lie. Tesla understates the actual battery capacity, this means that the battery can degrade by X% before anyone even notices, so you can claim "after $x miles/years, still have 90% capacity". You don't, if the battery has a capacity of 100kwh, but they sell you it as a 60kwh battery, the battery can lose 40% of its capacity and you would be none the wiser. It is a marketing gimmick, or a psychological trick, take your pick.
> Next, incidental pollution again favors EVs. EVs tend to be heavy so they probably make more rubber dust by grinding away the tires during driving. Other than that they are totally clean. ICE cars can emit noxious smoke when badly tuned or burning oil or the emissions control system has problems; also, they can drip oil or transmission fluid on the road.
Well, sounds like you have bad environmental standards. Of course ICE cars that are poorly kept will leak and spew all sorts of crap, that is why round here (in Europe) such cars are not road legal, and you cannot drive them until they are fixed and operating within environmental regs.
Not sure what a poorly kept electric car would do though. They also have oil, which can leak, the batteries can leak I guess, ignoring shorts or fires that can happen when water gets into the pack (or sometimes, just when charging, like what happened with the Teslas)
> Now consider this. An EV has very few moving parts; there's just less there to fail. I invested in an EV because I was tired of expensive repairs on my ICE car. In the space of about a year, I had to have a transmission rebuild, an emission control system repair which also fixed an oil leak, and some other repairs (long story).
Seriously? that sounds nuts. I've never had to do any of that. I mean, the Saab did 202000 miles without anything (the clutch has started squeaking a bit, but it still works fine) short of oil changes. Not to judge, but maybe it was just a crap car?
> An EV doesn't have a transmission, doesn't have an emission control system, and the other repairs are also mostly not relevant.
They do have transmissions. Electric motors torque curve peaks at 0rpm and goes down from there, so to keep it in its efficiency band, you need to keep the rpm's low. Hence Teslas have 4 gearboxes, one in each wheel, with two gears each. Also why electric trains and trams have gearboxes as well (2 speed normally, some have 3 or 4 gears).
True they don't have an emissions system, but you do have the cost of the battery packs, and dealing with all the toxic metals in that. That might be handled now by the manufacturer in order to encourage adoption, but don't count on it in future.
> If you assume that money spent on repairs is a reflection of resources used (those mechanics I was paying were fixing my car instead of doing something else) then the complexity of an ICE car has long-term economic costs that reflect (at the very minimum) an opportunity cost for society.
>the environmental cost of running an electric car is worse than a fossil fueled running one.
So we're back to this. If the EVs are about twice as efficient (using well-to-wheel estimates), and last longer, and might be powered at least partly by renewable energy, this conclusion is not correct.
Assuming EVs are about twice as efficient over the entire life of the car, which just doesn't seem to be the case for me. I've give some points to consider above about it. Not to mention they are a lot more complicated, need a lot more infrastructure to run, and actually end up worse in range and convenience than what they are replacing, means that they seem a really bad deal, which is probably why (apart from EV enthusiasts) everyone else doesn't seem interested unless bribed into buying them, or forced into it against their will.