It’s kinda good but it completely destroyed the European manufacturing for solar
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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Yep the EU will be beholden to a dictatorial regime again. Instead of placating Putin for gas it will be Xi for solar panels and batteries.
Theyre $1.25 per watt in south America right now (we have an energy crisis due to climate change caused drought)
Solar has always an extremely high ratio for megawatt per mass unit.
This price is really good
Here in Belgium there used to be big government subsidies for solar panels 5-10 ago.
Now the same wattage battery + solar setup without any government subsidies is a good chunk cheaper than that time with the large subsidies.
Pretty cool and shows the power of government renewables subsidies. A huge percentage of houses in Belgium have solar panels now.(and electricity still costs 0.30€/kWh average because of fossil fuel energy lobbies)
Now that there is a local industry around it, most renovations and almost all new builds include them.
As your northern neighbors. We did subsidize it too, but now the privatized energy companies started whining that there wasn't enough capacity, so now they charge you for creating free energy
Yes I'm considering buying a high power laser so I can send the energy back into space instead of paying the power companies for the privilege of giving them electricity.
I'm fairly sure that all newly built houses in the UK require solar by law.
All the new houses around here with no solar would indicate that is not true. They're not even required to have a south facing roof.
Same here in California
4 million households in Australia have solar panels.
They are great value.
Just have to buy 1100 panels 😋 but then the price is 0.055€/watt ...
I Want one, but only one or a couple, to put on my balcony...
These are topcon modules only. Considering a 400W panel will have about 72 modules in it, that's only about 15 panels worth. Of course, then you have to actually build the panel and connect the modules, put it behind glass inside a frame, then put in a bypass diode and leads for connection. So an actual panel ends up being about 5-10X the cost of the modules per W.
You can pay a lot less than 10x for completed panels. https://store.santansolar.com/ amazed me.
does the link not work in 'murica?
The link doesn't work at all.
If they simply didn't want to sell to a certain demographic it would still load the website but would just say they don't operate in your region. The error you get back is once you get back if the domain doesn't exist.
Would not want to infect patriots with Communism
$60k per MW or $210M for a nuclear reactors worth (3.5GW). Sure... the reactor will go 24/7 (between maintenance and refuelling down times, and will use less land (1.75km² Vs ~40km²) but at 1% of the cost, why are we still talking about nuclear.
(I'm using the UKs Hinckley Point C power station as reference)
but at 1% of the cost, why are we still talking about nuclear
Sure... the reactor will go 24/7 (between maintenance and refuelling down times, and will use less land
Because grid level power delivery is about FAR more than just raw wattage numbers. Momentum of spinning turbines is extremely important to the grid. The grid relies on generation equipment maintaing an AC frequency of 60 hz or 50hz or whatever a country decides on. Changing loads throughout the day literally add an amount of drag to the entire grid and it can drag the frequency down. The inverse can also happen. If you have fluctuating wind or cloud cover you can bring the whole grid down if you can't instantly spin up other methods to pick up the slack.
reliable consistent power delivery is absolutely critical when it comes to running the grid effectively and that is something that solar and wind are bad at
Ideally we will be able to use those technologies to fill grid level storage (batteries, pumped hydro) to supply 100% of our energy needs in the not too distant future but until then we desperately need large, consistent, clean power generation.
Because there are nights there are winters there are cloudy and rainy days, and there are no batteries capable of balancing all of these issues. Also when you account for those batteries the cost is going to shift a bit. So we need to invest in nuclear and renewables and batteries. So we can start getting rid of coal and gas plants.
Also when you account for those batteries the cost is going to shift a bit.
You better be bringing units if you're going to be claiming this.
Still less than half of the LCOE of nuclear when storage is added: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1475611/global-levelized-cost-of-energy-components-by-technology/
Given that both solar and storage costs are trending downwards while nuclear is not, this basically kills any argument for nuclear in the future. It's not viable on its face - renewables + storage is the definitive future.
You're using factors of less than 10 to argue against a factor of 100.
But Germany has no space for nuclear waste. They haven't been able to bury the last batch for over 30 years. And the one that they buried most recently began to leak radioactivity into ground water.
And.. why give Russia more military target opportunities?
I'm not a rabid anti-nuclear, but there are somethings that are often left out of the pricing. One is the exorbitant price of storage of spent fuel although I seem to remember that there is some nuclear tech that can use nuclear waste as at least part of it's fuel (Molten salt? Pebble? maybe an expert can chime in). There is also the human greed factor. Fukushima happened because they built the walls to the highest recorded tsunami in the area, to save on concrete. A lot of civil engineering projects have a 150% overprovision over the worst case calculations. Fukushima? just for the worst case recorded, moronic corporate greed. The human factor tends to be the biggest danger here.
Not an expert, but molten salt reactors are correct. MSRs are especially useful as breeder reactors, since they can actually reinvigorate older, spent fuel using more common isotopes. Thorium in particular is useful here. Waste has also been largely reduced with the better efficiency of modern reactors.
Currently, Canada's investing in a number of small modular reactors to improve power generation capacity without the need to establish entire new nuclear zones and helps take some of the stress off the aging CANDU reactors. These in particular take advantage of the spent fuel and thorium rather than the very expensive and hard to find Uranium more typically used. There's been interest in these elsewhere too, but considering how little waste is produced by modern reactors, and the capacity for re-use, it feels pike a very good way to supplement additional wind and solar energy sources.
If France can find space, surely Germany can.
If Finland could find space, Germany definitely can.
Finland with it's vast swathes of frozen tundra.
We don't have vast swaths of Frozen Tundras. This isn't Alaska.
And it's actually stored south not north.
Idk, Finland has a much lower population density vs Germany. France is something like 1/2 the population density, but they also have >50 reactors, so surely Germany can find room for a few...
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I think there's a contingent of people who think nuclear is really, really cool. And it is cool. Splitting atoms to make power is undeniably awesome. That doesn't make it sensible, though, and they don't separate those two thoughts in their mind. Their solution is to double down on talking points designed for use against Greenpeace in the 90s rather than absorbing new information that changes the landscape.
And then there's a second group that isn't even trying to argue in good faith. They "support" nuclear knowing it won't go anywhere because it keeps fossil fuels in place.
What isn't sensible about nuclear? For context, I'm coming from the US in an area with lots of empty space (i.e. tons of place to store radioactive waste) and without much in the way of hydro (I'm in Utah, a mountainous, desert climate). We get plenty of sun as well as plenty of snow. Nuclear should provide power at night and throughout the winter, and since ~89% of homes are heated with natural gas, we only need higher electricity production in the summer when it's hot, which is precisely what solar is great for.
So here's my thought process:
- nuclear for base load demand to cover nighttime power needs, as well as the small percentage of homes using electricity for heat
- solar for summer spikes in energy usage for cooling
- batteries for any excess solar/nuclear generation
If we had a nuclear plant in my area, we could replace our coal plants, as well as some of our natural gas plants. If we go with solar, I don't think we have great options for electricity storage throughout the winter.
This is obviously different in the EU, but surely the nordic countries have similar problems as we do here, so why isn't nuclear more prevalent there?
Because it makes no sense, environmentally or economically speaking. Nuclear is, as you said, base load. It can't adjust for spikes in demand. So if there's more energy in the grid than needed, it's gonna be solar and wind that gets turned off to balance the grid. Investments in nuclear thus slow down the adoption of renewables.
Solar is orders of magnitude cheaper to build, while nuclear is one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity, even discounting the waste storage, which gets delegated the the public.
Battery technology has been making massive gains in scalability and cost in recent years. What we need is battery arrays to cover nighttime demand and spikes in production or demand, combined with a more adaptive industry that performs energy intensive tasks when it's abundant. With countries that have large amounts of solar, it is already happening that during peak production, energy cost goes to zero (or even negative, as traded between utilities companies).
About the heating: gas can not stay the main way to heat homes, it's yet another fossil fuel. What we need is heat pumps, which can have an efficiency of >300% (1kWh electricity gets turned into 3kWh of heat, by taking ambient heat from outside). Combined with large, well-insulated warm-water reservoirs, you can heat up more water than you need to higher temperature during times of electricity oversupply, and have more than enough to last you the night, without even involving batteries. Warm water is an amazing energy storage medium. Batteries cover electricity demand as well as a backup in case you need uncharacteristically much water. This is a system that's slowly getting adopted in Europe, and it's great. Much cheaper, and 100% clean.
You bring up heated water as a method of storage, and it reminds me of a neighborhood in Alberta, Canada that uses geothermal + solar heated water storage for 52 homes. They've been able to successfully heat the entire neighborhood with only solar over the winter in 2015-2016 and have gotten > 90% solar heating in other years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community
There's a huge number of new storage technologies being developed, and the fact that some even work on a seasonal basis for long term storage is amazing.
That's pretty cool! Still seems to have some issues, but as the technology matures, that seems like a promising technology. I didn't know seasonal warm water storage was a thing
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You have to have some base load it can't be all renewable because renewables just aren't reliable enough. The only way to get 100% reliability from solar for example would be to build a ring of panels around the equator (type 1 civilization stuff).
Of all the options for base load, nuclear is the least worst, at least until we can get Fusion online, but you know that's always 20 years away.
That's why we have hydro. Its a giant battery. We can also make synthetic methane.
We absolutely can do 100% renewable.
Hydro is great but it's not clean it requires you to flood vast areas of land, it's quite damaging to wildlife.
It is also highly situation dependent, you be quiet exactly the right kind of geography in order to be able to build hydro and then you require that there is no one living in the affected area otherwise it gets very expensive very quickly assuming you're allowed to do it at all.
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Good news perhaps but I’m sure I won’t see any benefit in Scotland, still thousands to add solar panels.
Scotland has really good wind power, anyway. Between that, nuclear, and a few other renewable sources, you guys are down to 10% fossil fuel energy use. So don't worry about solar.
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Assuming these prices are ideal for a solar grid, which EU country(s) would have the highest chance of shifting towards solar; I wonder
Probably all of them. Germany is really not ideal for solar in terms of weather, yet they are installed by many people all over the place, even today. With the cheaper prices things will get even better.
Germany is already over 50% renewable. :)
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