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0 pointsadwn3mo ago0 comments

I don't see you countering my argument, only attempting to ridicule it ("slighty more sophisticated", "trope", "these silly hippies", "been aware of the concept of winter", "existence of winter as a gotcha"). That sucks, man :-(

> If you want to critique their plans for dealing with it […]

There are many ideas for seasonal storage of PV-generated electricity, but so far there is no concrete plan that's both scalable to TWh levels and economically feasible. Here on HN, there's always someone who'll post the knee-jerk response of "just build more panels", without doing the simple and very obvious calculation that 5x to 10x overprovisioning would turn solar from one of the cheaper into the by far most expensive power generation method out there [1].

[1] Except for paying people to crank a generator by hand, although that might at least help with obesity rates.

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dinfinity3mo ago

> 5x to 10x overprovisioning would turn solar from one of the cheaper into the by far most expensive power generation method out there.

This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x.

Additionally that implies the overprovisioned power is worthless in the summer, which does not have to be the case. It might make certain processes viable due to very low cost of energy during those months. Not trivial as those industries would have to leave the equipment using the power unused during winter months, but the economics could still work for certain cases.

Some of the cases might even specifically be those that store energy for use in winter (although then we're not looking at the 'pure' overprovisioning solution anymore).

adwnOP3mo ago

> This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x.

That's a huge "if". The cost of PV panels has come down by a factor of 10 in the last 13 years or so, that's true. I doubt another 10x decrease is possible, because at some point you run into material costs.

But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total installation cost of utility-scale PV. This means that even if the panels were free, it would only reduce the cost by a factor of 1.5.

dinfinity3mo ago

> But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total installation cost of utility-scale PV. This means that even if the panels were free, it would only reduce the cost by a factor of 1.5.

1. Do the other costs scale with the number of panels? Because if the sites are 5 times the scale of the current ones I would imagine there are considerable scale based cost efficiencies, both within projects and across projects (through standardization and commoditization).

2. Vertically mounted bifacial PV already greatly smoothes the power production curve throughout the day, improving profitability. Lower cost panels make the downside of requiring more panels in such a setup almost non-existent. Additionally, they reduce maintenance/cleaning costs by being mounted vertically.

3. Battery/energy storage (which further improve profitability) costs are dropping and can drop further.

Also, please address the matter of using the overprovisioned power in summer. Possible projects are underground thermal storage ("Pit Thermal Energy Storage", only works in places where heating is required in winter), desalination, producing ammonia for fertilizer, and producing jet fuel.

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ben_w3mo ago

> That's a huge "if". The cost of PV panels has come down by a factor of 10 in the last 13 years or so, that's true. I doubt another 10x decrease is possible, because at some point you run into material costs.

A factor of 5 is certainly within the realms of physics, given the numbers I've seen floating around. Note that prices are changing rapidly and any old price may not be current: around these parts, they're already so cheap they're worth it as fencing material even if you don't bother to power anything with them.

This should have changed your opinion, because it shows how the material costs are not the most important factor: we can get up to a 3x cost reduction by improving automation of construction of utility-scale PV plants.

I think I've seen some HN startups with this as their pitch, I've definitely seen some IRL with this pitch.

adrianN3mo ago

What amounts to „concrete plan“? Right now we’re still in the state where building more generation is the best use of our money with batteries for load shifting a few hours ramping up. So it’s entirely expected that there is no infrastructure for seasonal storage yet. However the maths for storing energy as hydrogen and heat looks quite favorable and the necessary technology exists already.

adwnOP3mo ago

"Concrete plan" means a technology which satisfies all of these requirements:

1) demonstrated ability in a utility-scale plant

2) already economically viable, or projected to be economically viable within 2 years by actual process engineers with experience in scaling up chemical/electrical plants to industrial size

Yes, that's hard to meet. But the thing is, we've seemingly heard of hundreds of revolutionary storage methods over the last decade, and so far nothing has come to fruition. That's because they were promised by researchers making breakthroughs in the lab, and forecasting orders of magnitude of cost reductions. They're doing great experimental work, but they lack the knowledge and experience to judge what it takes to go from lab result to utility-scale application.

ben_w3mo ago

> 2) already economically viable, or projected to be economically viable within 2 years by actual process engineers with experience in scaling up chemical/electrical plants to industrial size

Why 2 years?

Even though I'm expecting the current approximately-exponential growths of both PV and wind to continue until they supply at least 50% of global electrical demand between them, I expect that to happen in the early 2030s, not by the end of 2027.

(I expect global battery capacity to be between a day and a week at that point, still not "seasonal" for sure).

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adrianN3mo ago

Electrolysis hydrogen is only a little bit more expensive than hydrogen derived from methane and electrolyzers with dozens of megawatt are available. That seems pretty solid to me at this point in the energy transition.

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dinfinity3mo ago

> 5x to 10x overprovisioning would turn solar from one of the cheaper into the by far most expensive power generation method out there.

This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x.

Some of the cases might even specifically be those that store energy for use in winter (although then we're not looking at the 'pure' overprovisioning solution anymore).

adwnOP3mo ago

> This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x.

dinfinity3mo ago

3. Battery/energy storage (which further improve profitability) costs are dropping and can drop further.

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ben_w3mo ago

I think I've seen some HN startups with this as their pitch, I've definitely seen some IRL with this pitch.

adrianN3mo ago

adwnOP3mo ago

"Concrete plan" means a technology which satisfies all of these requirements:

1) demonstrated ability in a utility-scale plant

2) already economically viable, or projected to be economically viable within 2 years by actual process engineers with experience in scaling up chemical/electrical plants to industrial size

ben_w3mo ago

> 2) already economically viable, or projected to be economically viable within 2 years by actual process engineers with experience in scaling up chemical/electrical plants to industrial size

Why 2 years?

(I expect global battery capacity to be between a day and a week at that point, still not "seasonal" for sure).

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adrianN3mo ago

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