0 sats \ 11 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 22 Oct 2023 \ parent \ on: Meta Econ Takeover Day 6 meta
It's not the cheapest electricity source though.
Why do you say so? 🤷
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Because, oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, geothermal, and hydro are all cheaper sources of electricity than solar.
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I can't tell if you are serious or just trolling
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Keep in mind that selection bias heavily favors solar, since it's only installed in the most suitable locations. That means expanding it is going to lead to worse cost profiles (more in line with the upper end of the box-and-whisker plots).
Also, petro fuel costs have to incorporate many arbitrary costs associated with government efforts to reduce its use.
However, I might have been wrong about geothermal.
Consider in the future, 1) you might be wrong and 2) someone might disagree with you in good faith, so you don't have to assume bad intentions on their part.
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That report is from 2020
a quick web search about the topic gives results everywhere about how solar and wind are cheapest sources of energy.
Even if it is not the cheapest right now in 2023, the cost will keep going down, and fossil fuels will keep going up.
Also, there are other costs associated to fossil fuels, like destruction of the environment, so if there is no habitable planet to live, I would say the cost is pretty high.
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Talk about saving the environment with solar panels and windmills... It is as if solar panel and windmill raw materials grew on trees and their manufacturing process powered by pixie dust and unicorn poop.
Also, being cheap has nothing to do with being reliable. I don't know about you, but I want my electricity when I want it, aka on demand. I'm willing to pay extra for that.
In case you have not noticed, I would like to point out that humanity had improved their quality of life through history by using more energy and by moving to denser forms of energy. To me, the next logical step from here is nuclear energy. Spending resources on solar and wind is just going backwards. Solar and wind can ever only be, in the best case, a supplementary form of energy generation due to their unreliable generation; and in the worst case, a waste of resources and a huge misallocation of capital due to government subsidies.
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This is the point I was raising about selection bias. The measurements for cost of solar (and wind) are under near optimal conditions, because they are only installed in places that are best suited for them.
Even then, they don't provide baseload power (intermittency) and they aren't clearly cheaper than conventional energy sources.
Also, the point about environmental impact of producing wind and solar is spot on, especially if you bring EV's into the discussion.
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I agree on nuclear. It is very good, but also expensive. We were speaking about costs.
And it can take up to a decade to build a new nuclear plant.
New nuclear technologies of small reactors are being done and it is promising.
And fusion investigation keeps advancing too but it is still many years away.
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If it's so easy to back up your claim, why not provide a link?
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some examples
a good report on renewables:
https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Aug/Renewable-Power-Generation-Costs-in-2022
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The original question I was asking was about residential solar. If you look at the tables in that wikipedia article, you'll see that residential solar costs are much higher than utility scale.
The other point I would make is that IRENA is an activist organization, so it's hard to trust their conclusions without knowing more about how they drew them. There are many ways to do these comparisons and the deck can easily be stacked in favor of renewables for political/ideological reasons.