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posted by martyb on Wednesday February 21 2018, @04:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the power-to-the-people['s-homes] dept.

Residential solar is cheap, but can it get cheaper? Paths to $0.05 per kWh

The price of solar panels has fallen far and fast. But the Energy Department (DOE) wants to bring those costs down even further, especially for residential homes. After all, studies have shown that if every inch of useable rooftop in the US had solar panels on it, the panels could provide about 40 percent of the nation's power demand. Right now, the DOE's goal is residential solar that costs 5¢ per kilowatt-hour by 2030.

In a new report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), researchers mapped out some possible pathways to that goal. Notably, the biggest barriers to cost reduction appear to be the stubborn "soft costs" of solar installation. Those soft costs include supply chain costs, labor costs, and sales and marketing costs that aren't related to the physical production of solar cells at a factory.

NREL wrote: "Because the 2030 target likely will not be achieved under business-as-usual trends, we examine two key market segments that demonstrate significant opportunities for cost savings and market growth: installing PV at the time of roof replacement and installing PV as part of the new home construction process."

The report mapped out two "visionary" pathways (as well as two "less-aggressive' pathways) to achieving those cost reductions within the roof replacement and new home construction markets. The result? The only way NREL found it could achieve the "visionary" cost reductions was by assuming that solar installers would start selling low-cost solar-integrated roof tiles before 2030, "which could significantly reduce supply chain, installation labor, and permitting costs."

[...] [It's] not just Tesla working on this: the Colorado-based lab cites CertainTeed's solar shingle product and GAF's solar panels as examples of products breaking the divide between roof and solar panel installation.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by requerdanos on Wednesday February 21 2018, @08:12PM (9 children)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 21 2018, @08:12PM (#641376) Journal

    Why does solar power need to be so much cheaper?

    The thinking goes something like this.

    Eventually nonrenewable fuels will price themselves out of the market due to scarcity. They have not, won't do so very soon, but will eventually.

    Long before that happens, it would be good to have some sort of "plan b" in place that does not involve slave labor and draft animals.

    Developing solar (or wind, or geo-something, or harvesting ions out of the upper atmosphere, or thorium, or room-temperature nuclear event harvesting, or zero point energy or whatever) to be a replacement for the nonrenewable fuels would be easier and easier if it costs less and less.

    This works in a way that it doesn't for fossil-hydrocarbons, which perversely are depleted more quickly with lower prices.

    Does this make sense?

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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday February 21 2018, @10:39PM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday February 21 2018, @10:39PM (#641457) Homepage Journal

    +1, Informative

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
  • (Score: 3, Touché) by stretch611 on Thursday February 22 2018, @12:57AM (6 children)

    by stretch611 (6199) on Thursday February 22 2018, @12:57AM (#641536)

    Zero point Energy?

    Well if we have that tech, its safe to assume we have the stargate tech as well...

    Then we can just go and get fossil fuels from other planets when we need... or move to the next planet when this one becomes a barren husk. ;)

    --
    Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
    • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday February 22 2018, @01:45AM (2 children)

      by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 22 2018, @01:45AM (#641563) Journal

      Yeah, "harvesting ions out of the upper atmosphere" is out of the science fiction of Murray Leinster, "room-temperature nuclear event harvesting" because it's impolite to say "cold fusion", and "zero point energy" now made with 25% more unobtainium.

      Well if we have that tech, its safe to assume we have the stargate tech as well...

      Stargate tech was researched at Montauk, NY [rationalwiki.nom.pw] by the US Government (presumably without, or separately from, zero point energy, which a scary number of people believe in (search YouTube)), but the results have unfortunately not been made public.

      move to the next planet when this one becomes a barren husk. ;)

      I think most earth natives would rather, if we had the option, refurbish this planet than move to a new one. I am not sure which I would choose, to be honest, but I bet most would choose "let the scientists refurbish my home planet while I go about my daily affairs."

      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:33PM

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:33PM (#641831)

        I think most earth natives would rather, if we had the option, refurbish this planet than move to a new one. I am not sure which I would choose, to be honest, but I bet most would choose "let the scientists refurbish my home planet while I go about my daily affairs."

        Not in America. There, they believe "the scientists" are all part of an elaborate conspiracy to keep them from driving gigantic, smoke-spewing pickup trucks which God intended for them to drive in.

        Anyway, if we could get to another somewhat-habitable planet feasibly, terraforming that is far easier than refurbishing this one. Doing the former is merely a technical challenge once you have the resources from somewhere (e.g., a cabal of billionaires?), while doing the latter is nearly impossible because of politics. It's the same reason you see small teams or companies out-innovating huge companies, and small countries able to make large social or infrastructural improvements internally on a short timescale while the US is completely crippled.

      • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday February 24 2018, @11:23AM

        by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Saturday February 24 2018, @11:23AM (#642991) Homepage Journal

        It's not just Star Trek - if we are to get to the stars, our ship will be powered by antimatter.

        Last I read, CERN made some antiprotons slow down enough that they could be trapped in a magnetic bottle - but not for very long.

        --
        Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:36PM (1 child)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:36PM (#641834)

      Zero point Energy?
      Well if we have that tech, its safe to assume we have the stargate tech as well...

      No, not necessarily. Finding a new energy source (that requires new physics maybe) is somewhat different than finding a way of moving matter instantly between different star systems in the galaxy. We could very well figure out how to harness quantum fluctuation energy long before we figure out how to open stable wormholes.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @04:15PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @04:15PM (#641849)

        Using an energy source that by its very definition cannot be used is definitely less likely than a star gate (that at least doesn't violate the laws of logic).

    • (Score: 2) by fritsd on Thursday February 22 2018, @05:17PM

      by fritsd (4586) on Thursday February 22 2018, @05:17PM (#641872) Journal

      Hey don't knock professor Casimir [wikipedia.org]!

      He never managed to find any practical applications for his theories during his lifetime, but I wouldn't rule out that we can harvest microscopic amounts of energy from sufficient amounts of nothing somehow.

      Maybe one day some clever person can combine the zero-point energy [wikipedia.org] idea with that new theory from last year that gravity doesn't really exist, but is an extrinsic property of the system of our universe, a bit like centrifugal force can be measured but is just an improper viewing of centripetal force.

  • (Score: 2) by Spamalope on Thursday February 22 2018, @04:29PM

    by Spamalope (5233) on Thursday February 22 2018, @04:29PM (#641852) Homepage

    Also, many of those petrochemicals would be put to better use making plastics, tires and such instead of burning them. So if you can undercut the cost of burned petroleum electricity you reduce pollution (solar isn't perfect), free up the petroleum for it's other uses and reduce the economic burden of producing power which frees that wealth up for some other purpose.