I believe solar is the future. And hydro where approppriate. China is doing massive things with hydro. The largest hydro power station in the world is the Three Gorges Dam and they've just announced building one three times as large in Tibet for $137 billion [1].
But there's an issue with solar most people don't talk about. Yes it can be variable due to weather and day/night cycles. That's obvious. But a real issue is power lines.
Power lines are built to deliver power to businesses and homes. The cost of that is amortized over the electricity purchased by consumers. If people end up purchasing only half as much power due to more energy-efficient building standards, the use of solar, etc then the cost of the power lines is still the same except now it needs to be amortized over less electricity sold.
This I think is why municipalities tend to limit how much solar power houses are allowed to have. How do you build and maintain a grid when houses are generally self-suficient? Should you? Is it acceptable to not have a grid?
Do you think that will just be moved to the flat connection fee?
I had an apt with a gas stove, and nothing else gas. The $8/m connection fee was pretty much my entire gas bill.
If it’s $50/m per building to be connected to the grid, plus demand charges, then charge that and pass along wholesale energy costs.
A connection fee helps but not as much as you think. You could turn that off but there are still pipes built into your house or apartment down to the street. There's still a pipe that runs down the street. There is distribution infrastructure. You might be paying for your connection separately on your bill but you're still amortizing all that downstream infrastructure. If overall usage drops, that connection fee still has to go up.
The real issue is politics - grids are absolutely going to be required for all the folks who can't generate enough solar on their own roofs, industry, cities, restauraunts, etc. Plus how else are you going to make use of wind, grid scale utility solar installations, etc. I have a feeling many countries in the world (especially china) will not have much trouble forcing the grid to do what's needed and subsidizing shared infrastructure with taxes as a shared societal good. If we insist on not doing that though, the grid system as is is not going to be able to financially and logistically figure out this transition, which is probably a competitive disadvantage for us long term if our own energy grid is stopping us from competing on energy because of the way it's structured.
China has specific needs that almost nobody else does. Most notably, all of China's power generation is in the west of the country (eg Three Gorges, the new Tibet dam) but all the people are in the east. You lose power with long-range transmission and on China's scale that's a real problem.
So China has largely invested in, deployed and perfected Ultra-High Voltage Direct Current ("UHVDC") transmission infrastructure. China has really shown they think 10, 20 and 50 years into the future with their planning.
As for grids, there are a lot of places that could be self-sufficient with solar plus batteries. A lot of remote towns and houses work this way already.
While the cost of power will be reduced, I think that's overly optimistic in the long run. Fixing the lines and power distribution systems when they wear out or get hit by weather is really the cost of your electricity bill. You can have a shared power grid, or not pay for it, but you can't have both. Even areas powered by hydro have to maintain cherry pickers for that.
So you’re saying the equivalent of managing solar panels is the same as what I’d pay monthly?
That’s the first I’ve ever heard this stat.
Right now I pay about $180 a month for electricity. So let’s round it to $2,000 a year.
If I got solar panels, I’d be spending average of $2k a year maintaining them? There are literally no moving parts anywhere. I can imagine having to replace an inverter here and there, or maybe even a panel at some point.
So my guess would be more line $200 a year average, if that.
That’s already happening with EVs. In my state in the US, since they are earning less from the gas taxes (used to pay for roads) from EV owners, they’ve raised the car registration fees for EV owners only.
And at superchargers they’ve raised prices to 45c/KWh.
So eventually I feel it won’t be much of a cost savings to have an EV anymore.
Just the electrician's part would be a good chunk of the $5k, where we live (East coast US) before you even get into placing the panels themselves.
I keep seeing cheap panel costs with a "look, now you can afford it!" thing, but for those of us who may be handy but aren't quite willing to do high-power lines & boxes, or confident bolting steel to a roof without either killing ourselves or ruining the roof, the labor costs continue to be very high, and that part's not going down. From what I'm seeing for online "average costs for 10kw in your area" I'd hesitate to pull the trigger even if it were $5k lower than it is, which would probably be an even bigger discount than if the panels and other hardware were simply free.
Yes, installed with a bit of diy. Licensed solar installer and myself did most of the work. Electrician to actually wire into the house panel was $125 for 1 hour. Permits were $36.
As one who went diy in your region - keep calling electricians, you'll eventually find one who'll do the job at a fair price.
With micro-inverters, there's no power in the lines till you connect into the main panel & you can work that our with a licensed electrician.
I mean, yes, separately that's going to put solar plans on hold for a lot of people in the US. I just meant that labor costs alone already tended to easily exceed $5k for rooftop solar projects in the US, so I was surprised at that price for that much solar.
When we had ours installed on a previous house, the roof installation itself was very fast - couple of hours maybe.
Beyond this, state and council/county authorities often have rebates/incentives to encourage take-up of panels and/or battery systems. Our council (county equivalent, I guess) has had group-buy initiatives, as one example, and a virtual power plant scheme.
Back in the first Trump presidency, there was a 30% tariff on solar panels and equipment, which has significantly increased the price of going solar in the US.
Couple that with the fact that Canada very likely has subsidies for people adopting solar power.
Seems optimistic? With 2 EVs and almost all electric utilities, I'm well past the ~26 KWH a day electricity your system might generate.
I'm also impressed how cheap your costs are. The install cost alone in the Bay Area is going to be past that. Panels getting cheaper just don't matter much.
I spent $60k for panels to support 2 EVs and a heat pump. I live in the Northeastern US. I generate ~80% of my electricity.
Assuming the parent doesn't have EVs and uses gas, oil, or wood for heat, the cost makes sense. "Domestic" electricity usage, when you aren't using it for heat and cars, is quite low.
Those are great prices. In the US we are at least double that for an equivalent system. Many solar installers/sellers here are very predatory and have been for a long time. Prices have dropped, but not by enough for it to be worth it for me.
Meanwhile, new construction in California is required by law to include solar panels, and builders can price them however they want. You will typically see prices of $27,000 for a 5.7 kWh system. You can also choose a lease if you wish, but it's the same as buying the panels, except with a much higher interest rate than including it in your mortgage.
With solar the power per panel speaks a bit to the labor cost of installation. For one you are less likely to have to go to lengths to squeeze the system onto your roof and gang the correct number together.
Where are you, geographically? I'm interested in adding them but I have a large tree on the south side of my house that I really do not want to cut down.
We use the grid like a battery, getting a one for one credit for everything we put in. So during summer/daytime we put in enough to then use up our credit in winter/nighttime.
The power we put in even covers the monthly connection fee.
I’m just about to hit 12 months with mine, 8 Mwh generated, never paid a bill.
In our area the cost of electricity is already Confirmed to increase 5% a year forever, so this will only get better for us.
Subsidies like one for one credit are generally going away since those are prohibitively expensive and not sustainable when the ratio of renewables start to climb. It can be useful to jump start adoption, but having the government pay the true cost of the grid only moves the energy bill to the tax bill.
Compared to what? Yes, batteries have ecological costs, but compared to fossil fuels it's minor. Home storage batteries will likely be LFP which are all abundant and recyclable.
A Tesla Powerwall3 (which apparently uses LFP) has a capacity of 13.5kWh
A household uses up at least around 2MWh per year, most of which during the winter, if you don't use air conditioning in the summer and don't have an electric car to charge.
That means you'd need around 150 (!) Powerwall 3 units. At a price of around 10k GBP each, you'd have to shell out more than 1 million pounds just for the batteries. Not to mention the space that they'd have to take, and the increased risk in having something failing.
In the USA, homes are even less efficient (and depending on locale, people run AC all year round, and drive tens of thousands of kilometers on cars which also need to be powered). 2 years ago MKBHD published a video about his experience with the Tesla roof:
In it, he revealed that his yearly power consumption is 55MWh. His battery was able to tide him over the next cloudy day, and during the winter the solar panel wouldn't ever fully recharge again.
Expecting every household to be energy independent year-round via solar is patently absurd. Renewable energy tided over with massive batteries upstream? Maybe that could work, I haven't run the numbers... But you cannot hope to push that responsibility downstream to every household. Reliable baseline is still going to be necessary for the foreseeable future.
> We use the grid like a battery, getting a one for one credit for everything we put in. So during summer/daytime we put in enough to then use up our credit in winter/nighttime.
> The power we put in even covers the monthly connection fee.
> I’m just about to hit 12 months with mine, 8 Mwh generated, never paid a bill.
If I have to get batteries one day, I sure as heck won’t get a whole years worth of energy. In summer I’ll only need enough to get through the night ( very little ).
In winter I’ll obviously need more, and I would have to carefully look at how much the house is using and how much solar I’m generating, but something like one or two power walls would do it. In five or ten years that’s going to be cheap.
That make perfectly sense if the climate is right. Energy discussions often get messy when people from different climates are talking about utilizing the same strategy, since different climate has different requirements.
Solar and batteries works great in climates with highly predictable weather and where demand only exceeds supply during very short burst. Europe, especially the northern part, are prime example where this is not the case and where supply shortages can occur for months. This is the reason why a single month of energy can cost more than the collective sum of all the other 11 months, since market prices follows supply and demand. This is where government subsidies will hide things with government funded fossil fueled power plants (under the euphemism of reserve energy and grid stability), and they can also just straight pay citizens energy bill when the price hit certain levels. When the government is responsible for energy storage, the cost is placed through taxes or tax-related fees. A common red flag here is when grid connection fees start to become bigger than actually consumption cost.
That is very surprising. Looking at the statistics collected from the Swedish grid (https://svensksolenergi.se/statistik/elproduktion-fran-solen... ,first graph), the winter months are close to zero in output. December 2024 were 35 GWH, while May 2024 were 765 GWH. In 2023, December were 14 GWH, while May were 579 GWH
It is not absolute zero, but it kind of close, and there is a large period that storage would need to fill. For Sweden it is also the inverse for the demand spike, with winter demanding more energy than during the summer.
Looking again at Swedish number, the average house need around 200kwh per month for the period of December to April, and about half that for the rest of the year (https://hemsol.se/wp-content/uploads/Elforbrukning-villa-02....). If your maximum is 1000kwh your battery need for the winter will be around 125-150 kwh, not counting capacity for harsher winters or degrading panels.
Using the power walls examples above, you then need around 10 units.
This is unsustainable: you deliver power when its real market value is close to zero, and you want to take power out of the grid when its real market value is large.
At current rates, 5k USD is enough to cover my electricity costs for the next 87 years. Your quoted prices still make them a non-starter in (probably) most of the world.
A 10kW system produces somewhere between 11,000kWh - 17,000kWh / year give or take. Qatar has one of lowest electricity prices in the world at $0.03/kW
$0.03 * 11,000kWh/year * 87 years = $28,710.
So either you're vastly underestimating the amount you pay in electricity, or you're using vastly less electricity in which case you obviously wouldn't get a 10kW system.
Many parts of the US have staggeringly cheap power compared to the rest of the world.
Before all this our power bills were smack on $100 per month, so I’ve got about a 6.5 year pay off. Electricity here is 13 cents per kWh, but is confirmed to increase 5% per year basically forever. So my pay off is less than that.
I live in a locale that has cheap energy, in fact one that makes solar a pretty bad deal. Depending on the real generation numbers of the panels it would take about 20 years for me to payback that level of generation.
So saying most people have an 80 year payback period just feels wildly off (depending on the assumptions in the calculation I think that implies less than a penny per kWh generated).
The more usage of intermittent renewables increases the more your electricity bill is dominated by fixed costs. You still need the grid, which is only growing more expensive.
For places not already on the grid, using batteries instead of paying for a new grid connection is close enough to be a question worth asking, though from what I've seen not a definite "yes" or "no" in general.
Well how much electricity are you using? If you use much less electricity, then you would need less solar panels which means the system would be cheaper.
I highly doubt there is anywhere in the world where you can buy the amount of energy specified by the parent as cheaply as you said. Like i think it would work out to less then a penny per kwh
If you are not accounting for amount of generation than this is an apples and oranges comparison.
A year ago I paid $8k for 7.8kw on my roof. My Dad just paid $5k for 10kw.
Neither of us will ever pay for power again.
Edit: Western, southern Canada for those asking.