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What's the explanation? That's a pretty divergent trend.
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Solar panels became much cheaper than people expected. In fairness, part of why they're so cheap is China makes them with dirt cheap reliable coal electricity, and probably unenforced environmental regulators. But still, it's pretty impressive.
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Thanks, that makes sense. I was wondering if US subsidies ended up being larger than expected or something.
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Probably the opposite actually, as lots of places are scaling back subsidy programs.
OTOH a hidden subsidy that many people forget about is that in most places solar generators aren't getting charged during negative electricity prices. They should be paying to put their electricity on the grid, which of course would result in everyone adding additional hardware to disconnect during negative prices. But AFAIK that's pretty much not happening yet.
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Are negative prices caused by the grid being overcapacity?
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Yes. The key reason negative prices happen is because many large electricity generators would rather temporarily pay you to dispose of their power rather than shutdown, because ramping power up and down is hard on their machinery. Of course, there's always some emergency system that allows them to disconnect from the grid pretty much instantly. But those systems are often expensive to operate due to them creating more maintenance, as well as sometimes putting the plant offline for a few hours (or more!) to reset certain systems.
A good example of such a generator is a big coal or biofuel plant. During operation the boilers will have a lot of energy in the form of steam. The energy in that steam has to go somewhere. If there isn't enough electrical load on the steam turbines they'll over speed, and the steam will have to be dumped into the atmosphere. That annoys the neighbors and is hard on the equipment. So they'd rather just pay someone else to use the power for few minutes/hours so they can continue operating normally without any disruptions.
What's ridiculous is that solar panels can be shut off essentially instantly, and most wind turbines shut off nearly instantly. There's no reason why your solar panel should be feeding more power into the grid during a negative pricing event. Yet because of bad contracts, lacking hardware, etc. lots of them do. And even worse, they don't pay for it.
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Thanks for the explanation. That's something I recall reading about a while ago and wanted to make sure I had it right in my head.
If ever there were a great use case for bitcoin mining, negative electricity prices would have to be it.
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Came here to say the exact same thing.
It's because being a pessimist gets attention and headlines.
Being an optimists and continuing to draw exponential growth as exponential growth gets you called "naive" - even though that's the natural observable trend in technological innovation
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Who's predictions are being used for comparison?
Industry analysts are usually trying to get trends right so they can make money.
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The potential of solar energy to provide the electrical power we need in the future is undeniable. As we harness the sun's clean and free energy, we will greatly reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.
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solar punks
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It is a very true fact, solar energy being one of the cleanest energies in the world, human beings have taken it for their benefit.
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"Swings and slides."
Saifedean Ammous
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Nothing wrong with solar, hence the results. The drawback is in storing and transporting that energy, we can't do that efficiently yet. Once that hurdle is gone, that graph will be rocket ship :-) We can't make a battery that lasts 5 years. Coal is old but that's what we do well, so until the new king comes in we still be doing silly things we do. Solar, wind, hydro and nukes are the future of the energy work and it should be distributed, except "nukelar" :-) That's my personal opinion.
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For storing energy, one of the best solutions IMHO is pumped-storage hydroelectricity.
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It's a great solution if you happen to have the right geography for it. Not everyone does. And many countries have built out most of the suitable hydro sites already.
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Agree 100% check this baby out :-) https://www.verbund.com/en-at/about-verbund/visitors-centres/kaprun This should be a template. Every lake or river can do something similar (at scale) In Kaprun they used nature to help them out, it's brilliant.
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I'm a big fan of nuclear as well. But the nice thing about solar is how it perfectly correlates with human electricity usage (ACs suck a lot of energy compared to all things light, computing, rotation motors)
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Yes, solar is great for certain loads. Unfortunately there isn't infinite demand for those loads. So as the % of solar goes up, the cost to supply the remaining needs with solar goes up too.
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