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posted by martyb on Sunday May 24 2015, @08:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the price-of-sunlight-and-wind-is-pretty-constant dept.

Over the last 5 years, the price of new wind power in the US has dropped 58% and the price of new solar power has dropped 78%. Utility-scale solar in the West and Southwest is now at times cheaper than new natural gas plants. Even after removing the federal solar Investment Tax Credit of 30%, a recent New Mexico solar deal is priced at 6 cents / kwh. By contrast, new natural gas electricity plants have costs between 6.4 to 9 cents per kwh, according to the EIA.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by nitehawk214 on Sunday May 24 2015, @09:44PM

    by nitehawk214 (1304) on Sunday May 24 2015, @09:44PM (#187364)

    Film at 11.

    --
    "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
    • (Score: 3, Funny) by kaszz on Sunday May 24 2015, @10:31PM

      by kaszz (4211) on Sunday May 24 2015, @10:31PM (#187379) Journal

      Solar only gives you power at daytime. For nighttime you need other sources, like gas.

      • (Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday May 24 2015, @10:37PM

        by sjames (2882) on Sunday May 24 2015, @10:37PM (#187383) Journal

        Or wind.

        • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @12:16PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @12:16PM (#187582)

          Yes, my wife complains about it all the time. She won't let me sleep in the same bed as her if I've had beer and curry.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2015, @10:50PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2015, @10:50PM (#187390)

        > Solar only gives you power at daytime. For nighttime you need other sources, like gas.

        RTFA.

        Energy storage is also reaching disruptive prices at utility scale [rameznaam.com]. The Tesla battery is cheap enough to replace natural gas ‘peaker’ plants [rameznaam.com]. And much cheaper energy storage is on the way [rameznaam.com].

        • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 25 2015, @12:30AM

          by kaszz (4211) on Monday May 25 2015, @12:30AM (#187427) Journal

          I re-read it. Sure if they can beat the price point. Finites as fuel will decline. An interesting technology change that will drive economics!
          Seems this technology has changed quickly.

          Then it's th question if the environmental cost is workable. And if there's enough raw material to supply the demand.

        • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Monday May 25 2015, @08:55AM

          by davester666 (155) on Monday May 25 2015, @08:55AM (#187554)

          Tesla batteries are nowhere near "utility scale". They aren't even shipping yet. And yes, other things in the future will be cheaper and better.

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Gravis on Sunday May 24 2015, @10:57PM

        by Gravis (4596) on Sunday May 24 2015, @10:57PM (#187394)

        Solar only gives you power at daytime. For nighttime you need other sources, like gas.

        solar gives you a shitload of power all at once, so what you really need to do is store all the power you aren't using in batteries.

        solar power is completely free, so why wouldn't you store it for use later too?

        • (Score: 5, Informative) by kaszz on Sunday May 24 2015, @11:10PM

          by kaszz (4211) on Sunday May 24 2015, @11:10PM (#187399) Journal

          Because storage also has price tag. Batteries wear out.

          The only solution that seems interesting is the one with molten salt. And of course the classical with water reservoirs. But those need a massive amount of water.

          • (Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Monday May 25 2015, @12:04AM

            by sjames (2882) on Monday May 25 2015, @12:04AM (#187418) Journal

            And according to TFA, that price is reaching parity w/ peaking plants right now.

            • (Score: 2, Interesting) by kaszz on Monday May 25 2015, @12:22AM

              by kaszz (4211) on Monday May 25 2015, @12:22AM (#187424) Journal

              So you still have to buy from what's available at nighttime. Which in most cases is fossiles or nuclear. Wind is kind of unreliable.

              • (Score: 2) by sjames on Monday May 25 2015, @12:32AM

                by sjames (2882) on Monday May 25 2015, @12:32AM (#187428) Journal

                I think you've lost the track here. You claimed storage carries a trice tag and implied it's too high, I pointed out that TFA said it was on parity with peaking plants.

                If you store energy, you don't have to buy it, you already have it.

                • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 25 2015, @01:04AM

                  by kaszz (4211) on Monday May 25 2015, @01:04AM (#187433) Journal

                  Storage has so far been the weak point of renewable power. The article points out a change in that, is to reach break even point soon. The problem with storing energy has been losses and a hefty price tag. Thus reliance on the grid.

                  It might have some implications like independence, tax sources diminishing, standards for electrical distribution may change ie why not 155 VDC, electric cars playing an even more important role etc.

                  • (Score: 5, Informative) by deimtee on Monday May 25 2015, @05:47AM

                    by deimtee (3272) on Monday May 25 2015, @05:47AM (#187527) Journal

                    Just as an aside, there is an important reason why homes are wired with AC instead of DC. To get usable power with reasonable wiring you need minimum 100 volts.
                    If you break a contact on a circuit drawing several amps at >100 volts DC there is a pretty good chance you will get a sustained arc. This is dangerous.
                    AC arcs are self extinguishing as soon as the voltage crosses zero.
                    Yes, you can use anti-arcing switches but that still means that when a wire breaks, instead of a circuit going dead, you burn down the house.

                    --
                    If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
                    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday May 26 2015, @12:43AM

                      by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday May 26 2015, @12:43AM (#187794) Journal

                      Yes, arcing etc is an issue. And low voltage makes it necessary to compensate with current. The issue is that once the hard dependence on the grid is cut. How power is distributed inside households may very well change. The other issue I really had in mind was that it's a lot simpler to design a good DC/DC converter than DC/AC etc. Issues like efficiency, active/reactive/complex/apparent, phase of volt vs current, THD, EMI etc all make generating AC at high power with semiconductors tricky and usually expensive. As for voltage, circa 100 V permits the use of pretty standard power semiconductors.

                      • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday May 26 2015, @04:17AM

                        by deimtee (3272) on Tuesday May 26 2015, @04:17AM (#187866) Journal

                        It's not just the fixed wiring and the pristine new installations with anti-arc switches.
                        Power leads and extension cords are often flexed until they go dead. If they go dead while operating, your house burns down.
                        Radiators and other resistive loads don't care whether it is AC or DC. If you have DC at the same voltage as AC you are going to get semi-knowledgeable idiots converting them over. In most cases it will be as simple as swapping a plug. They will even work for a while until they burn the house down.
                        In theory it could work. In practice high voltage DC in an average home environment is a bad idea. It will burn the house down.

                        --
                        If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
                  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by sjames on Monday May 25 2015, @06:41AM

                    by sjames (2882) on Monday May 25 2015, @06:41AM (#187537) Journal

                    It seems to already be having an effect on some places. In Australia, for example, the power companies tried to put the squeeze on their customers who were depending on net metering. The customers shot back by disconnecting their solar from the grid and using a combination of storage and load shifting . It looks like the power companies there are now in the position of wither returning to the table with a better offer or beginning a death spiral. Several American power companies are starting to make the same bad move and may face the same result.

                    There will definitely need to be new standards and probably mods to the grid. Soon there will be enough solar installations that a power failure could create unsynchronized mini-grids that must somehow be synced back up, for example. DC distribution would fix that, but will require an awful lot of equipment to be switched out.

    • (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday May 26 2015, @02:21AM

      by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Tuesday May 26 2015, @02:21AM (#187831)

      Competition is not considered to be a good thing if established big businesses are taking a beating. Then the laws must be changed to stifle competition.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Gravis on Sunday May 24 2015, @11:08PM

    by Gravis (4596) on Sunday May 24 2015, @11:08PM (#187398)

    this isn't surprising really. mass production is a good way to reduce cost and solar power is just using free power that showers down from the sky every single day without exception. so why are we subsidising oil and coal? seems like we are bending over backwards just to pollute the environment.

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 25 2015, @12:01AM

      by kaszz (4211) on Monday May 25 2015, @12:01AM (#187416) Journal

      Renewable only need to get an economical and sustainable solution to storage. And then it will really make serious dent in competing finite or polluting sources of energy.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Frosty Piss on Monday May 25 2015, @02:10AM

    by Frosty Piss (4971) on Monday May 25 2015, @02:10AM (#187465)

    How does the cost work out over the long run in terms of maintenance and technology upgrades to these solar plants?

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @04:05AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @04:05AM (#187511)

      Dunno, but maintenance on a solid-state device like a solar panel has got to be near zero. Probably just wiping the dust off.
      I'd bet maintenance costs on anything using fossil fuels is at least an order of magnitude higher.

      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday May 25 2015, @07:15PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 25 2015, @07:15PM (#187698) Journal

        FWIW, solar cells *do* wear out. I'm not sure how long it takes, and I'm rather sure it's different for different technologies. (I suspect that any that use dyes will wear out more quickly...but does that mean 10 years or 30?)

        OTOH, you don't need to replace the whole installation just because a few cells wear out. You replace one panel, take it to the shop to fix it (replace the failing cells), and then use it to replace another.

        Storage is more critical. At this point there doesn't seem to *be* a really good solution, and many acceptable solutions are site-specific. The article claims that there are good choices, but....well, I'm not sure I believe it. I think it may be overselling.

        --
        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @09:21PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @09:21PM (#187737)

          > FWIW, solar cells *do* wear out. I'm not sure how long it takes,

          All modern solar panels are guaranteed to produce at least 80% of their rated capacity at 25 years of age. [energyinformative.org]
          Actual in the field results [nrel.gov] seem to be better than that.

          • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday May 26 2015, @07:59AM

            by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday May 26 2015, @07:59AM (#187908) Journal

            According to a quick look in the above document the solar cells degrade with approximately 0.5% per year. The time in years it takes to degrade to 80% compared to when new is:
            years = log(0.80) / log(1-.005) = 44 years

            The amount of degradation at a specific year is:
            Lost capacity in part of full (1) is: 1-(1-.005)^year

            Ie after 44 years 1-pow(1-.005,44) = 0.20 of full capacity has been lost.

            And these calculations is a rule of thumb, statistics.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Monday May 25 2015, @11:42AM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 25 2015, @11:42AM (#187575)

      http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_04.html [eia.gov]

      A mill is a tenth of a cent. So figure half a cent per KWh to maintain a coal plant. That high pressure steam boiler ain't gonna inspect itself, ya know. The wear and tear on those things is incredible.

      yeah yeah geologically speaking, natgas is a fossil fuel but when energy dorks write "fossil steam" they mean coal. Natgas used to (on a decades scale) be a rounding error and nobody runs primary base load on natgas (if they can avoid it) so it gets categorized into the ghetto of "small scale" which is usually where renewables get categorized too.

      The best number I have for solar maint is take the capital cost and divide by 100 and thats a realistic maint figure and take the capital cost and divide by 30 and thats a realistic depreciation figure. Its an open argument if the panels will outlast the expensive mountings and expensive wiring and expensive inverter. I've been verbally told the biggest problem varies by region/climate and often is vegetation growth related. Vines block the sun, kudzu, whatever. Obviously mounted on house roofs results in different problems such as idiot roofers and the like.

      The nuke operation figure is high because they quite reasonably insist on including armed plant guards and training and emergency testing in the figure. Its interesting that all that BS is still only about a fifth to a tenth of the cost of fuel for a coal plant. Security guards are expensive, but so is trainloads of coal!

      I've been investing in energy companies for a long time. Its interesting that "in the old days" the cheapest way to pay your electric bill was about $20K worth of electric company stock, for some values of electric bill and company stock LOL, but its rapidly getting to the point where the overall cheapest way to pay your electric bill is $10K of solar panels. Looking at long term graphs of technological trends etc I'm probably going to sell my electric company stock in the next decade and buy panels. This financial issue has certain implications for legacy plant operators aka todays electric companies. You don't just need breakeven, you need enough free profit to buy another system every 25 years or so, because my electric company stock doesn't depreciate over time but a solar plant will.

      Its also interesting to watch other trends. Coal used to be the cheapest source of energy, but the lines on the graph are crossing and its rapidly becoming the most expensive form of energy out there. Natgas fluctuates in price too quickly to be trusted, its a PITA. A plant could almost justify a huge battery bank to only burn natgas when the price is low, or a combined solar/natgas plant so you only have to burn expensive natgas at night and never pay daytime spot prices for natgas.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday May 25 2015, @02:33AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 25 2015, @02:33AM (#187474) Journal
    I noticed a peculiar lack of actual costs mentioned. For example:

    We see the latest proposed PPA price for Xcel’s SPS subsidiary by NextEra (NEE) as in NM as setting a new record low for utility-scale solar. [..] The 25-year contracts for the New Mexico projects have levelized costs of $41.55/MWh and $42.08/MWh. Levelized costs which are a) prices not costs, b) factoring in a substantial federal subsidy, and c) bids placed by a party that has an interest in understating what costs they'll encounter (keep in mind that there just isn't many buyers of power purchasing agreements (PPA) out there and plenty of sellers). There's more conflating of PPA bid prices with actual costs being done in the article.

    Still it's nice to see that solar power might be competitive with fossil fuels in a few years.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @12:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @12:41PM (#187585)

    goal, oil, gas are limited (unless there's a huge teleporter hidden somewhere in the earth and friendly aliens replenishing it).
    they can be polluting.
    you can oxidize the stuff day and night.
    the sun shines for free ... every DAY. sometimes more, sometimes less.
    nevertheless the same sun gave dinosaurs sunburn a million years ago.

    storage is a "problem" if you want it to be a problem.
    electricity is consumed all the time.
    you cannot turn it off (like a water tank) and "store" it in the wire.
    it has to be produced continuously.

    we have to change our perspective. a solar "installation" needs to be viewed like a appliance. like a tv and like fridge. it has to become as simple to use and install as all our other house appliances.

    FiT is "good" ... for a time. it brought down the prices of solarpanels and inverters etc. but let's be honest: who pays for the FiT? the people who don't (yet?) have solar grid-tie or cannot afford it.

    we have to stop trying to profit from solar, methinks and just use what we produce. and this should become super simple. like plugging in a new fridge or tv or whatnot.

    farms should be banned! why are you solar farmers trying to sell me (non solar-user) something that is basically free and if i wish i can do it too? afterall the sun shines for me too!

    maybe in 20 years if new houses come with sticker:"produces 1 kw" per default and we decide to go all-out solar we can start thinking about throwing all "green" anti-dam protestors in prison and build more reservoirs for fishes and save the "sweet" water from becoming salty and ... waaaah! hydrogen etc. etc.

    Anyways: everybody should have a 2 (?) kilo watt allowance from birth to produce electricity. set it up someplace and if you go to the mall (which uses electricity) it will come from your birthright 2 kW at home (nobody is using it at home now), or if you step into a lift or escalator (which uses electricity) it will be powered also from your birthright as a human in an enlightend society.
    see how you can check your email from everywhere? see how you can use YOUR generated electricity everywhere too? same same!
    [end rant]
    [not really]

    • (Score: 1) by KGIII on Monday May 25 2015, @04:42PM

      by KGIII (5261) on Monday May 25 2015, @04:42PM (#187641) Journal

      If you wed and/or have offspring does the head of household control the KW? What about the mentally ill, who controls their allotment? And the homeless? The poor? And many more... How can you say how much of the Sun's energy I can have? Taking more does not deplete it. IOW I think your idea is bad and you should feel bad for suggesting it. Utopia will never happen. Enlightenment can not be had by the entire populace - I cite Buddha and the TeaParty as my evidence. You can not force enlightenment without a police state and a surveillance state - I will not accept either and am willing to fight against it as are many others. One authoritarian regime is not better than another regardless of what you think are my best interests.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."