Very cool, if true

5. Good luck getting hold of any solar panels, controllers, storage batteries etc. I work for a big solar installer in Germany and we only have supply because we have had a guy on the ground out in China for the last 2 years working flat out fulltime to build up warehouse stock and accompany deliveries to the port to ensure OUR crates get on the ship. Most of the other cos are struggling and many cannot do installations at all right now. Logically, prices are higher and can only go upwards for the near future.

Edited Date: 2022-08-16 11:54 am (UTC)

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Oh yes, chances of me getting any solar installed in the next while is near zero.

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I really really really want / need solar but it's not happening this year. My neighbours just got the panels ok from their firm but still waiting for the battery.

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bugshaw

Back in July I had the survey person come round, said I'd get the final quote in 2-4 weeks (4 weeks exactly today) and the work could probably start in September. I won't be surprised if suddenly they have no stock.

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rmc28

We signed up with the Solar Together scheme, we've had the survey and agreed to the quote, but no actual install date yet.

A colleague also signed up with Solar Together this year, and has had the panels installed but no battery as yet. They were given the option of panels now, battery later, or wait for battery and have everything in one go. They opted for the former, which seems an obvious choice for us should it arise, but it's a bit tedious.

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bugshaw

Ah yes, I'm on the same scheme, and it looks like you're a bit ahead of me.

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anef

We got panels ages ago, but perhaps should now think about getting a battery...

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movingfinger

[In the US] I got a quote for solar a couple of months ago and it was still coming in as a 20-ish year payback, I guess my usage isn't huge or rates are lower here. I was enthusiastic, but it simply does not pencil out. I also got a bid a battery backup for the whole house, but that was high also, despite press about prices coming down. Total cost for both was about double what I expected to pay, and that would be much more than a generator. The presence of trees shading my house in winter, when power is most needed, means that the system will not perform at top efficiency when new and as the trees grow it will get worse (can't remove them, not my trees and the community has rules against it).

Neighbor across the street is much better placed for it, but that initial cost is so high, I'm sure there won't be a lot of it around here. Twenty year payback is a long long time.

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Depends what you think might happen with prices (and supply security, if such things concern you). 20 yr "payback" - is that allowing for inflation eating at the capital sum if you have it but DON'T spend it now? Also even if that is priced in, it genuinely could make sense if you have the money now but will not later (e.g. retirement or some such quaint notion). Except most systems won't last 20 yrs, and batteries have as max 10yr lifespan. Else I'd be thinking of solar adding to the property value.

As it is, I know in Denmark, most people are actually scrapping their older solar systems. Denmark now forces you to sell to the grid at wholesale price and buy back at consumer price. Needless to say, the differential is huge.bYou are not allowed to directly use the power you generate. So it makes no sense at all any more on a domestic level (esp if there are any maintenance costs at all).

The co. I work for do a "lease to own" 20 yr deal where they sort everything (including if a battery makes sense or not). Basically, you swap your electricity bill for a (almost certainly fixed interest) loan. I guess most people must save. For me right now it'd have to cost less than ... oooh roughly 15k for a loan to be cheaper than my elec bill. I don't think I can get much for that!

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Stopping people from using their own solar panels to power their own needs seems ridiculous. Any idea why Denmark has done that?

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No,I don't know. Big business interests, I assume. I could ask my source.

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I'd love to know!

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"One of the previous right wing government's business friendly policies. Hasn't been changed back however... You can install them any time you like...but you sell the electricity for one quarter what you have to buy it for, and you can't use your own.

It was never advertised. Shocked and upset a lot of folk.

...as they make so little that it doesn't cover the maintenance - so cheaper to take them down."

When asked what a politician would say as to why :

"Probably say something about the fact that power isn't needed in the daytime bla bla bla

...and that they are all for solar power, just in big farms."

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movingfinger

The property will appreciate, but the solar panels won't... if I were thinking of selling in 5 years, it might be an easier call, but, modulo an earthquake, the house will do well with or without them. Hydro dominates our local generation on the grid, as I understand it.

We lose power in storms a couple times a year, so a battery backup would be very nice to have, and quieter than a generator. (I hate the roar of my neighbors' generators and would loath having one going right outside.) The local utility is trying to build more robust system by adding connections between outlying areas.

The Denmark policy is nuts. I assume it's about political donations. Denmark is too urbanized and too far north for people to opt off the grid, I guess...

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I am in N Germany. We get a bit more sun than the Danes typically, but we're still 54N. Long days in the summer though :-). But every commercial farm/ workshop/factory roof has masses of solar. I assume there were grants / loans. None for domestic in my state.

As in Denmark, wind is our bigger asset. But the locals have issues with that (asshole behaviour from landowners hasn't helped). One can have a 10m tower without planning permission. :-). Not that anyone does. But I might. At least to run a fruit/veg dryer.

My dairy farm neighbours across the road are building a Biogas plant! Wonder if they might sell me some :-).

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skington

The answer to "If we have four years of economically crippling energy prices, your solar panels will pay for themselves in four years" is "the energy prices people are talking about (as a result of the war in Ukraine) are clearly unsustainable and something will happen to fix them in some way or another", though, isn't it?

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Yup. Although predictions are that they go up before coming down slightly to still more than the current level.

The long-term answer is to stop burning natural gas because (a) the world is on fire and (b) lots of it is produced by awful regimes. And, hopefully, in a few years we'll be almost entirely using renewables and this will all be a distant memory. But I don't know how long that will take.

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and c) natural gas is more expensive than renewables.

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Excellent point. Although I'm not 100% that renewables, if used for the entirety of our supply, are cheaper than keeping a small amount of gas for unusual circumstances.

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Probably true over the next 20 years.

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How much oversupply and storage do we need on top of generation to guarantee absolutely no blackouts? I know we can do it, but my memory was that guaranteeing it was remarkably expensive. Although storage may have gotten significantly cheaper than then.

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Nobody guarantees absolutely no blackouts but taking your point as an acceptable level of blackout risk I think a lot of the prohibitive cost comes if you are determined to minimise generation capacity and the dumping of surplus generation.

I think the key commercial break-through is someone finding something that uses a lot of electricity to do something useful and which doesn't mind much being switched on and off somewhat unpredictably.

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Although clearly some people think it's doable much cheaper than I thought
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180208141214.htm

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Ooh - this is quite a good one

https://www.reddie.co.uk/2022/08/03/renewable-energy-oversupply-and-storage/

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That links to this

https://www.ldescouncil.com/assets/pdf/LDES-brochure-F3-HighRes.pdf

which is chock full of interesting chat on alternative technologies for longer-duration storage including some heartening numbers on the projected pipeline.

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Oh yes. If someone like these people can get it off the ground then that'll make a massive difference on that front:
https://prometheusfuels.com/news/dude-wheres-my-fuel

We just oversupply greatly and store fuel for the down periods.

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I'm quite excited about those people - I look forward to seeing them go live with some production this time next year.

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As a somewhat aside, I always find gravity storage numbers a bit silly.

The figures on page 11 have it as 20-1000MW for up to 15 hours. That's 300-15,000 MWH. 10,000MWH is a nice middle ground.

To lift 1 ton 1m takes 9,800 joules. Which is about 2.7WH. Not very much. Your phone battery could list about 6 tons by 1m.

10GWH would take 3.7 million tons up 100m. That's 10 Empire State Buildings, lifted a quarter of their own height. Managing all of that seems like a titanic task. I can certainly understand why water is so much easier to manage.

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On reflection I don't see gravity storage being much use when pumped hydro exists. I was enthused for a bit a few years ago but it just doesn't work as well as PHES for some applications and batteries for other.

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Yeah, gravity storage sounds awesome when you think "Big block of concrete = big amount of energy!" When you discover that 50 tons of concrete 20m in the air is enough to boil 3 liters of water, it makes the scale of the problem rather more apparent.

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Looking at this for 2020

https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy

and this

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

and this

https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2020

Wind provided 1,862 terawatthours

Solar provided 1,033 terawatthours

hydro provided 4,346 terawatthours

out of about 170,000 terawatthours of total energy demand (the figures are a bit fudged but good enough for this)

So solar is producing about 0.6% of total energy, wind about 1.1% and hydro 2.5%. Total about 4.2%

Hydro is unlikely to increase much over the next two decades so, if we move to 100% energy from renewables the growth pretty much all has to come from solar and wind. (I'm bullish on geothermal but no one else seems to be)

Ten years ago wind was 440 TWH and Solar 65 TWH so over the last ten years wind production has increased by 1,422 or 142TWH per year and solar 965 or 96 TWH - so about 230TWH. Assume the next few years will be better for renewables and or add in a bit of biomass and geothermal and we're looking at about 0.15% of global energy demand moving to renewables a year.

The picture is slightly better for renewables because the fudging I mentioned is to adjust for renewables better efficiency at turning energy inputs in to usable energy.

So we need about a 100-fold increase in the deployment of renewables to get from annualised increases of 0.15% to 15.0% per year shift in energy source.(Renewables provide all energy by about 2035 - allowing for increases in total energy demand) A 20-fold increase gets us from 0.15% per year to 3% per year. (Renewables provide all energy by about 2075. )

That's not great news I think.

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Your first link has renewables as a percentage of world energy use at 13.5% - I wonder where the difference is.

As you say, solar has gone from 65TWh to 1,032TWh in the last 10 years. That's an increase of 15x. The same increase again would be to 15,000TWh, and again would be 225,000TWh. So if we keep increasing at the same rate we have been over the last ten years then in 20 years' time we'll get there with solar alone.

Wind, going from 440TWh to 1,861TWh, is an increase of about 4x. So another 2 decades would increase that by only about 16x. Which is only about 30TWh in total.

Of course, scaling is very rarely as simple as that, and solar might hit an inflection point in its growth, while wind might take off at a higher rate. But even so that looks pretty hopeful to me.

(Over the last 5 years solar has trebled. Which would still mean about 10,000TWh by 2031, and around 100,000TWh by 2041. Those sound like good figures to me. All figures from here.)

Edited Date: 2022-08-17 10:07 am (UTC)

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I think the difference is that one of the data sets adjusts renewable energy upwards to take account of the fact that renewables deliver a greater proportion of directly useable energy - but I didn't follow the explaination any further than noting it.

I think it is probably true that both solar PV and wind have reached a cost inflection point where they are the cheapest avaible option and the previous 10 years are not a super-reliable guide to the next ten years. I'm just looking at the increases in deployment required and wondering where the factories to make the kit are being built today in order to expand production that much in the near future.

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qilora

"1. Under Marxism, which will be the correct way to eat?"

"I am not a Marxist" – Karl Marx.

(i just read that quote today! your post made it pop up in my head) ;D

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simont

If I remember, Thomas Kuhn denied being a Kuhnian, for similar reasons. I wonder what proportion of people who have had an ideology named after them have ended up saying something similar.

(Unrelatedly,

andrewducker, is your link poster broken, or has there just not been anything interesting for the last 2 middays?)

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