There's a big issue with this analysis. Namely, it uses levelized cost of electricity, which bakes very aggressive assumptions about time preference into its calculation while glossing over quality issues related to solar power. When this is your standard, solar overperforms its actual performance in reality. After all, you can throw up a solar farm in a relatively short timespan, especially with regulators largely leaving solar projects alone. Compare this to, say, a nuclear plant which will take years to build even if it doesn't get tied up in regulations for decades. By LCOE, the nuclear plant will fare much worse. In some sense, it should. After all, nuclear plants have loans which accumulate interest while the plant is under construction/fighting red tape.
But... look, your background is in architecture, so imagine I started talking about a revolutionary new technology which, under my Levelized Cost Of Shelter framework was vastly cheaper than conventional construction. I take you out to a demonstration site where I... pitch a perfectly normal tent. This is a very tight analogy, you can pitch a tent in a few hours, rarely need to deal with regulation, etc. But anyone who's been on a bad camping trip will tell you that no, tents aren't actually relevantly analogous to houses. In the energy context, nuclear (and coal, and LNG, and...) have properties (constant flows of energy, supply scalability which is responsive to demand, no need for battery-based energy storage infrastructure) which are hidden by a simple LCOE comparison. If you look at another framework, like energy return on energy invested, solar is actually not very cost-competitive with fossil fuels and nuclear. That's why, virtually everywhere they're widely deployed, renewables energy systems need to be supplemented with fossil fuels on pain of brownouts and blackouts.
So, before we ask "how did solar power get so cheap?" we should ask "did solar power get so cheap?" By at least one measurement which is in many ways more reasonable than LCOE, it didn't.
That's not a very good analogy. Electrons from solar behave identical to electrons from nuclear. Yes, you do need some capacity guarantees, but your house/tent analogy draws in all kinds of quality concepts that just aren't true of solar by comparison. Nuclear LCOE is so many times more expensive than solar at this point, that you could take the incredibly simple solution of overbuilding and still come out ahead. There's smarter ways than that, but.. if you have doubts, that simple explanation should be enough to convince.
Yes, but "electrons" aren't actually all that relevant to discussions of "electricity". It's like discussing water molecules in the context of water sanitation or something like that. Grid power is a very specific configuration of electrons relative to the technical details of a grid, demand for power, etc. The fact that solar PV produces electrons and that those electrons aren't distinguishable from the electrons from a fission reactor is concealing vastly more than it reveals. Namely, that the supply for power can be much more cleanly correlated with demand for power with nuclear than with solar PV, which is what ultimately matters.
And I don't deny the difference between LCOE for nuclear versus solar PV. I just deny the relevance of LCOE (or, more specifically, I reject the assumptions of LCOE. Specifically the assumption that there aren't any relevant quality-adjustments to be made for renewables' intermittency and other problems, and the time-preference assumption).
"If you look at another framework, like energy return on energy invested, solar is actually not very cost-competitive with fossil fuels and nuclear." what frameworks show this?
> The calculated value for ERoEI is dimensionless, constituting the energy return (2203 kW he/m2) divided by the energy invested (2664 kW he/m2) – a ratio of 0.82. It is estimated that these numbers could have an error of ±15%, so that, despite a string of optimistic choices resulting in low values of energy investments, the ERoEI is significantly below 1. In other words, an electrical supply system based on today’s PV technologies cannot be termed an energy source, but rather a non-sustainable energy sink or a non-sustainable NET ENERGY LOSS.
The wikipedia article you link cites a 2015 study talking about payback times on energy invested in solar panels on the order of 1 to 4 years, with system lifetimes of 30 years. That's wildly inconsistent with a net energy loss.
ERoEI has it's purpose, but as a comparison for nuclear and solar, it seems irrelevant. "IF" the ERoEI of solar was below 1, then yes, it would be relevant, but there's no credible source of this. Every version of that theory I've seen is either failing to produce it's data or using data from 1970.
When ERoEI is above 1, it's starts to become irrelevant for any renewable energy source. It had it's greatest applicability to fossil sources, because if you used a unit of energy there, it depleted reserves, which lowered your future ERoEI because of the increasing complexity of tapping harder to reach reserves. If you didn't manage to continue to raise efficiency, ERoEI was eventually going to drop below 1 and then it would all stop.
But unlike fossil fuels the energy for solar taps is hitting our planet and going somewhere else continuously, you don't "use up" energy in the process of operating a solar farm, you capture it. The real ERoEI is far more than enough above 1 to make comparisons between 4 and 16 and 40 no where near as important as the human processes that go into building and deploying enough generation to replace the coal and natural gas fleets (an area that nuclear does very poorly in)
Yes, but solar panels also require energy investment. They require quite a lot of it, actually. And that's just for the current tech level where the solution to the intermittency and non-dispatchability problems are basically just :shrug emoji:, use Russian LNG to cover the gap, I guess. If you also add in even remotely realistic assumptions about grid-scale batteries, the energy invested for renewables becomes crazy high, and the energy return remains lackluster.
Your point about diminishing returns to fossil fuels is well taken, but uranium is sufficiently energy dense and plentiful that your point doesn't really apply.
My point applies, because it's showing how this doesn't apply to solar... the point about how it does apply to fossil fuel is an explanation for history. I never mentioned anything about diminishing returns on uranium mining, you misread that part.
> As discussed elsewhere, the inclusion of large amounts of energy storage in the analysis of an individual grid-connected electricity production system (in this case, PV) implicitly shifts the goal of the study from the assessment of its intrinsic net energy performance to the assessment of its ability to, by itself, support the entire societal demand for electricity.
I get that the OP wasn't even close to arguing for net-zero or zero-emissions, but the storage costs required to get renewables to the same level of non-intermittency and dispatchability of other energy sources is actually really freaking important. You can't run, e.g. incubators for premature babies or refrigerators to store diabetics' insulin on a grid that doesn't have power more than half the time, so yeah, you do need to take storage costs into account. That's an obvious enough mistake that I don't really feel like doing a deep dive into that rebuttal.
"Many other electricity generation technologies, if deployed on their own, would be equally incapable of continuously meeting society's highly variable demand for electricity without some form of energy storage or large amounts of wasted energy."
The point here is that the study you linked to applies unequal requirements to different energy sources. For solar it analyzes it as if it was the only source and had not a part of many sources which when used together partially cover for each others weakest spots. Existing nuclear an hydro will continue to exist and wind and geothermal will also increase alongside solar. The requirements for storage is much lower than the first analysis implies. If you wanted to analyze how each energy source performed as a singular source, you could. It wouldn't be very relevant, but at least that would be better than an unequal comparison.
So, maybe you should read that rebuttal, you might learn something.
Do you have any thoughts on the claims that LCOE measures substantially undercount the costs of solar (and wind) due to the direct and indirect (ie grid) effects of intermittency?
Just about every source of power has extrinsic costs. Nuclear power has the cost of dealing with waste products and shutting down plants. Hydro power has ecological costs and can harms fisheries. It also has opportunity costs: do you use it now or save it? Fossil fuels have costs in terms of climate impact as carbon dioxide levels rise.
Solar and wind have storage costs, but we've just started moving down the electrical energy storage learning curve. Measuring those costs in terms of current technology would overstate them. Most systems use lithium ion batteries that were originally developed for video cameras and automobiles.
There are actually good arguments for developing grid storage even without solar and wind power. Nuclear power is hard to dispatch, but you could level the load using storage and have to build fewer reactors.
Please, stop repeating the lie that solar is not the least expensive form of electrical energy. See for example "The Unpopular Truth about Electricity and the Future of Energy." The authors point out that LCOE studies omit important costs.
But all one really needs to do is to look at the cost of electricity vs solar penetration. Countries with a lot of solar (and wind) pay much more for electrical energy.
Are you sure that causality isn't flowing the other way? Perhaps countries with a lot of under-served demand for electricity build more supply, whichever type will produce more at the lowest cost (currently mostly renewables), but until demand is saturated still face high prices, while in countries which already built too many fossil-fuel generators - perhaps in anticipation of industrial growth which failed to materialize - marginal prices are so low there's no pressure to modernize.
One query you say of non panel cost '(in residential PV, it’s closer to 80%) - but does that take into account that there is no land cost when its put on a house or garage roof? Its only about installation and the other bits?
The dialog around this is very interesting to me because there seem to be two extremely polarized sides of this topic. There are those who are excited about the current low cost of solar and (especially) exponential curves of improvement. But then there are those (as you see in some of the comments below) who are beyond skeptical because they believe the cost advantages are illusory and/or because they believe that the storage/intermittency problems aren't solved.
I have been looking for an honest broker analysis of this but haven't been able to find any great ones. If the exponential improvements in both solar and storage continue then the answer becomes obvious but I don't have the ability to figure out if that is likely to continue.
> [2] - This is described as a very generous policy for reasons which are unclear to me.
It short cut difficult negotiations with electricity providers and you got 90% of the end price. Imagine if you would get today in the US 20 Cents per kwh of solar power!
My favorite article on China's contribution to solar power was on Business Insider, "China Laughed When It Saw How Cheap Solar Could Be":
“We have a looming environmental problem due to wanting much more electricity.”
“What are some possible solutions?”
“Solar could one day be cheaper and solve both the cost and pollution problems.”
“How much money do you need to find out?”
“A lot, about $10 billion”
At this point the leadership fall on the floor laughing. China is a country where they build entire ghost cities with nobody in them. They build massive public transportation systems in 15 years because they can. Spending $10bn to find out if they can solve both energy and pollution was completely worth it to them.
China is a country where they build entire ghost cities with nobody in them??
Even the speedy Chinese have not mastered the art of building cities with inhabitants pre-installed. Entire bathrooms, yes, but not residents.
Indeed, the new residents won't even come and visit it, to check it out, until it has...paved roads and wide sidewalks with trees and jobs and buses running and brand new schools with teachers from the big city who volunteered five years to help their kids catch up.
They're cities-in-waiting and anyway, they're all full and bustling now so move along, forget we ever made up that whopper about 'ghost towns,' because we've got one about 'genocide'.
A ghost city doesn't have people living in it. That's why it's called a ghost city. There was a lot of coverage of some of the new urban developments in China in which the physical plant was largely completed - apartment blocks, schools, streets, infrastructure, commercial space - but had no or extremely few residents. I assume that they aren't ghost cities any longer and are probably full of living residents.
There's a big issue with this analysis. Namely, it uses levelized cost of electricity, which bakes very aggressive assumptions about time preference into its calculation while glossing over quality issues related to solar power. When this is your standard, solar overperforms its actual performance in reality. After all, you can throw up a solar farm in a relatively short timespan, especially with regulators largely leaving solar projects alone. Compare this to, say, a nuclear plant which will take years to build even if it doesn't get tied up in regulations for decades. By LCOE, the nuclear plant will fare much worse. In some sense, it should. After all, nuclear plants have loans which accumulate interest while the plant is under construction/fighting red tape.
But... look, your background is in architecture, so imagine I started talking about a revolutionary new technology which, under my Levelized Cost Of Shelter framework was vastly cheaper than conventional construction. I take you out to a demonstration site where I... pitch a perfectly normal tent. This is a very tight analogy, you can pitch a tent in a few hours, rarely need to deal with regulation, etc. But anyone who's been on a bad camping trip will tell you that no, tents aren't actually relevantly analogous to houses. In the energy context, nuclear (and coal, and LNG, and...) have properties (constant flows of energy, supply scalability which is responsive to demand, no need for battery-based energy storage infrastructure) which are hidden by a simple LCOE comparison. If you look at another framework, like energy return on energy invested, solar is actually not very cost-competitive with fossil fuels and nuclear. That's why, virtually everywhere they're widely deployed, renewables energy systems need to be supplemented with fossil fuels on pain of brownouts and blackouts.
So, before we ask "how did solar power get so cheap?" we should ask "did solar power get so cheap?" By at least one measurement which is in many ways more reasonable than LCOE, it didn't.
That's not a very good analogy. Electrons from solar behave identical to electrons from nuclear. Yes, you do need some capacity guarantees, but your house/tent analogy draws in all kinds of quality concepts that just aren't true of solar by comparison. Nuclear LCOE is so many times more expensive than solar at this point, that you could take the incredibly simple solution of overbuilding and still come out ahead. There's smarter ways than that, but.. if you have doubts, that simple explanation should be enough to convince.
Yes, but "electrons" aren't actually all that relevant to discussions of "electricity". It's like discussing water molecules in the context of water sanitation or something like that. Grid power is a very specific configuration of electrons relative to the technical details of a grid, demand for power, etc. The fact that solar PV produces electrons and that those electrons aren't distinguishable from the electrons from a fission reactor is concealing vastly more than it reveals. Namely, that the supply for power can be much more cleanly correlated with demand for power with nuclear than with solar PV, which is what ultimately matters.
And I don't deny the difference between LCOE for nuclear versus solar PV. I just deny the relevance of LCOE (or, more specifically, I reject the assumptions of LCOE. Specifically the assumption that there aren't any relevant quality-adjustments to be made for renewables' intermittency and other problems, and the time-preference assumption).
"If you look at another framework, like energy return on energy invested, solar is actually not very cost-competitive with fossil fuels and nuclear." what frameworks show this?
Been looking and can't find it. Thanks!
Energy returned on energy invested, a description of the framework is available here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment and an analysis of solar PV using it can be found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516301379
Headline quote:
> The calculated value for ERoEI is dimensionless, constituting the energy return (2203 kW he/m2) divided by the energy invested (2664 kW he/m2) – a ratio of 0.82. It is estimated that these numbers could have an error of ±15%, so that, despite a string of optimistic choices resulting in low values of energy investments, the ERoEI is significantly below 1. In other words, an electrical supply system based on today’s PV technologies cannot be termed an energy source, but rather a non-sustainable energy sink or a non-sustainable NET ENERGY LOSS.
The wikipedia article you link cites a 2015 study talking about payback times on energy invested in solar panels on the order of 1 to 4 years, with system lifetimes of 30 years. That's wildly inconsistent with a net energy loss.
ERoEI has it's purpose, but as a comparison for nuclear and solar, it seems irrelevant. "IF" the ERoEI of solar was below 1, then yes, it would be relevant, but there's no credible source of this. Every version of that theory I've seen is either failing to produce it's data or using data from 1970.
When ERoEI is above 1, it's starts to become irrelevant for any renewable energy source. It had it's greatest applicability to fossil sources, because if you used a unit of energy there, it depleted reserves, which lowered your future ERoEI because of the increasing complexity of tapping harder to reach reserves. If you didn't manage to continue to raise efficiency, ERoEI was eventually going to drop below 1 and then it would all stop.
But unlike fossil fuels the energy for solar taps is hitting our planet and going somewhere else continuously, you don't "use up" energy in the process of operating a solar farm, you capture it. The real ERoEI is far more than enough above 1 to make comparisons between 4 and 16 and 40 no where near as important as the human processes that go into building and deploying enough generation to replace the coal and natural gas fleets (an area that nuclear does very poorly in)
Yes, but solar panels also require energy investment. They require quite a lot of it, actually. And that's just for the current tech level where the solution to the intermittency and non-dispatchability problems are basically just :shrug emoji:, use Russian LNG to cover the gap, I guess. If you also add in even remotely realistic assumptions about grid-scale batteries, the energy invested for renewables becomes crazy high, and the energy return remains lackluster.
Your point about diminishing returns to fossil fuels is well taken, but uranium is sufficiently energy dense and plentiful that your point doesn't really apply.
My point applies, because it's showing how this doesn't apply to solar... the point about how it does apply to fossil fuel is an explanation for history. I never mentioned anything about diminishing returns on uranium mining, you misread that part.
That paper is from 2016 and may be out of date. I couldn't easily find a more recent one or a meta-analysis, so take that for what it's worth.
Essentially, yes, that report used data from 1980 (production numbers): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516307066
> Based on old and/or unreliable studies (seven references, of which two are >10 year-old, and two are ‘grey literature’)
Just skimming that rebuttal and:
> As discussed elsewhere, the inclusion of large amounts of energy storage in the analysis of an individual grid-connected electricity production system (in this case, PV) implicitly shifts the goal of the study from the assessment of its intrinsic net energy performance to the assessment of its ability to, by itself, support the entire societal demand for electricity.
I get that the OP wasn't even close to arguing for net-zero or zero-emissions, but the storage costs required to get renewables to the same level of non-intermittency and dispatchability of other energy sources is actually really freaking important. You can't run, e.g. incubators for premature babies or refrigerators to store diabetics' insulin on a grid that doesn't have power more than half the time, so yeah, you do need to take storage costs into account. That's an obvious enough mistake that I don't really feel like doing a deep dive into that rebuttal.
You've misunderstood those comments:
"Many other electricity generation technologies, if deployed on their own, would be equally incapable of continuously meeting society's highly variable demand for electricity without some form of energy storage or large amounts of wasted energy."
The point here is that the study you linked to applies unequal requirements to different energy sources. For solar it analyzes it as if it was the only source and had not a part of many sources which when used together partially cover for each others weakest spots. Existing nuclear an hydro will continue to exist and wind and geothermal will also increase alongside solar. The requirements for storage is much lower than the first analysis implies. If you wanted to analyze how each energy source performed as a singular source, you could. It wouldn't be very relevant, but at least that would be better than an unequal comparison.
So, maybe you should read that rebuttal, you might learn something.
Do you have any thoughts on the claims that LCOE measures substantially undercount the costs of solar (and wind) due to the direct and indirect (ie grid) effects of intermittency?
Just about every source of power has extrinsic costs. Nuclear power has the cost of dealing with waste products and shutting down plants. Hydro power has ecological costs and can harms fisheries. It also has opportunity costs: do you use it now or save it? Fossil fuels have costs in terms of climate impact as carbon dioxide levels rise.
Solar and wind have storage costs, but we've just started moving down the electrical energy storage learning curve. Measuring those costs in terms of current technology would overstate them. Most systems use lithium ion batteries that were originally developed for video cameras and automobiles.
There are actually good arguments for developing grid storage even without solar and wind power. Nuclear power is hard to dispatch, but you could level the load using storage and have to build fewer reactors.
Please, stop repeating the lie that solar is not the least expensive form of electrical energy. See for example "The Unpopular Truth about Electricity and the Future of Energy." The authors point out that LCOE studies omit important costs.
But all one really needs to do is to look at the cost of electricity vs solar penetration. Countries with a lot of solar (and wind) pay much more for electrical energy.
Are you sure that causality isn't flowing the other way? Perhaps countries with a lot of under-served demand for electricity build more supply, whichever type will produce more at the lowest cost (currently mostly renewables), but until demand is saturated still face high prices, while in countries which already built too many fossil-fuel generators - perhaps in anticipation of industrial growth which failed to materialize - marginal prices are so low there's no pressure to modernize.
Great, thanks.
One query you say of non panel cost '(in residential PV, it’s closer to 80%) - but does that take into account that there is no land cost when its put on a house or garage roof? Its only about installation and the other bits?
The dialog around this is very interesting to me because there seem to be two extremely polarized sides of this topic. There are those who are excited about the current low cost of solar and (especially) exponential curves of improvement. But then there are those (as you see in some of the comments below) who are beyond skeptical because they believe the cost advantages are illusory and/or because they believe that the storage/intermittency problems aren't solved.
I have been looking for an honest broker analysis of this but haven't been able to find any great ones. If the exponential improvements in both solar and storage continue then the answer becomes obvious but I don't have the ability to figure out if that is likely to continue.
> [2] - This is described as a very generous policy for reasons which are unclear to me.
It short cut difficult negotiations with electricity providers and you got 90% of the end price. Imagine if you would get today in the US 20 Cents per kwh of solar power!
How much of the cost of a PV panel lies in the cost of the energy used to manufacture it?
My favorite article on China's contribution to solar power was on Business Insider, "China Laughed When It Saw How Cheap Solar Could Be":
“We have a looming environmental problem due to wanting much more electricity.”
“What are some possible solutions?”
“Solar could one day be cheaper and solve both the cost and pollution problems.”
“How much money do you need to find out?”
“A lot, about $10 billion”
At this point the leadership fall on the floor laughing. China is a country where they build entire ghost cities with nobody in them. They build massive public transportation systems in 15 years because they can. Spending $10bn to find out if they can solve both energy and pollution was completely worth it to them.
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-laughed-when-it-saw-how-cheap-solar-could-be-2014-6?op=1
P.S. What, no mention of Swanson's Law?
China is a country where they build entire ghost cities with nobody in them??
Even the speedy Chinese have not mastered the art of building cities with inhabitants pre-installed. Entire bathrooms, yes, but not residents.
Indeed, the new residents won't even come and visit it, to check it out, until it has...paved roads and wide sidewalks with trees and jobs and buses running and brand new schools with teachers from the big city who volunteered five years to help their kids catch up.
They're cities-in-waiting and anyway, they're all full and bustling now so move along, forget we ever made up that whopper about 'ghost towns,' because we've got one about 'genocide'.
A ghost city doesn't have people living in it. That's why it's called a ghost city. There was a lot of coverage of some of the new urban developments in China in which the physical plant was largely completed - apartment blocks, schools, streets, infrastructure, commercial space - but had no or extremely few residents. I assume that they aren't ghost cities any longer and are probably full of living residents.
Nicely done, Brian! Only quibble is that the proper term is solar modules, not panels, but that’s a tiny nit to pick.