Notices by Jenny Chase (solar_chase@mastodon.green)

Time to make 2024 updates to my annual “opinions about solar” thread.

If you like these, the second edition of my book, Solar Power Finance Without The Jargon is new this year. A 30% discount code WSQ0437 is valid on publisher website until the end of October.

https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/q0437#t=aboutBook

It's the book I should have read before trying to get a job in renewable energy. Reviewers describe as “to the point, important, and taught me a lot” and “surprisingly entertaining, don’t be put off by the title”.

I have put out this thread once a year on social media since 2017. You can view the 2023 thread below, and from there it links to previous threads. So you can see what I got wrong, or at least changed.

https://mastodon.green/@solar_chase/111313269230960064

1. To opinions! Solar is the cheapest source of bulk electricity in many countries, and the quickest to deploy, and now you couldn't stop it being built if you wanted to. The limits to PV build in most places are grid access, permitting, and sometimes installation labour.

2. Nearly 20 years ago when I got this job, I thought maybe solar would one day be 1% of global electricity supply. Last year it was 6% worldwide, and rising fast.

3. We don’t need a solar technology breakthrough. Today, solar developers just need a grid connection and permission to sell electricity, and then they’ll be off building solar plants whether it’s a good idea or not.

4. Solar will not solve every problem. But the biggest problem is that our civilisation relies on digging up fossil carbon and burning it, which is destabilising the climate, which multiplies a lot of very unpleasant threats. Solar is part of stopping us needing to do that.

5. Solar modules now cost 9.5 US cents per Watt (higher in US, India due to trade barriers). Solar panels are cheaper than ordinary fencing materials. For rooftop installs, non-module cost is still $0.50-3.00 per Watt, so further module price declines make little difference.

6. These prices mean that few makers of solar modules are profitable right now. If manufacturers stop selling at these prices, they will permanently lose customers. They are locked into a game of chicken. There will be bankruptcies and eventual price stabilisation.

7. Solar manufacturing has always been a horrible business, and that’s unlikely to change. It’s very commoditised, and incremental improvements in cell and module tech make factories obsolete in less than four years.

8. India and the US have solar import tariffs, so modules are pricier there (~17 and ~28 cents/W respectively). Both countries are subsidizing local manufacturing capacity. This is a perfectly good strategy as long as it doesn’t slow down their energy transition, but...

9. Thank goodness we’ve stopped the nonsense of boasting about "lowest ever solar auction prices", most of which were Middle East opaque transfer prices or had other features. PV prices below $25/MWh unsubsidized are too low. Solar still costs money.

10. After grid and permitting issues, the next challenge for PV is power price cannibalization. Basically, solar plants in one area all generate at the same time. So they reduce the price of power at that time, “cannibalizing” their own revenues.

11. Solar power price cannibalization also affects other power plants, but not as much as it affects solar, because solar plants generate most at times when solar is pushing the price down most. This will inhibit further solar build.

12. This is already obvious in Spain, California, Australia. Now that the global liquefied natural gas price hike related to Russia invading Ukraine in 2022 has eased, lower power prices drive solar developers to seek long-term contracts again.

13. By 2030 most countries will have spot power prices of zero in sunny hours. This will be passed on to end consumers, to encourage them to shift power demand to sunny periods by electric vehicle and battery charging, preheating, precooling, etc.

14. Low power prices may be great for consumers but they are very bad if you're trying to build more clean power plants. Without demand-side flexibility measures, the energy transition will fail before fully pushing fossil fuel out of the mix.

15. One big difference between edition 1 and 2 of my book is that batteries are now a thing. California has 11GW of batteries in a grid with about 50GW peak power demand, and the reliability of the grid has improved as its carbon emissions went down.

16. Small-scale batteries are a thing too, even though the economics don’t always make sense. 2023 battery attachment rates – proportion of residential PV buyers who get a battery too – are >70% in Germany and Italy, >50% in Switzerland.

17. It may be that "negative power prices for a few hours every sunny day, followed by high evening power prices when the sun goes down" is a problem solved by capitalism and batteries.

18. However, there is no way we can build a big enough battery to shift energy from summer to winter. The economics of battery storage are impossible at one cycle a year.

19. We oughtta be building more wind. Seriously, solar will get built anyway, but wind needs some help, and wind blows in the dark and in the winter. Solar usually hurts wind farm economics even though generation is somewhat anti-correlated.

20. To put it another way: when you tell an energy future model to optimise a power portfolio for clean power adequacy, it will give you more wind and less solar than when you tell it to optimise a least-cost electricity sector development.

21. BNEF’s New Energy Outlook modelling doesn’t want to just solve the intermittency problem with loads of batteries. This is because the batteries get lower utilization rates the more you build. Batteries cannibalize batteries long before you get 100% clean power.

22. Hydrogen made with renewables will be used to make steel and fertiliser. Some may be used to make shipping and aviation fuel. Some may even be burned for power in weeks of low renewables, which is one way to shift energy from summer to winter.

23. ...but sometimes net-zero electricity models want to use hydrogen to cover weeks of low renewables just because the model isn’t given any other option. Deep decarbonization models do weird things. There may be easier pathways in practice.

24. BNEF's mid cumulative solar forecast is 6.7TW by 2030, close to the 7.2TW BNEF models that we need to be on a global net-zero-by-2050 high-renewables path. Wind is 2.1TW forecast and 2.7TW net-zero pathway, a bigger miss.

25. Electrification of transport is far better than biofuels; for example, as the speakers discuss on this podcast, it takes about 300 acres of farmland to run a petrol car on corn ethanol, vs an electric car running on about one acre of PV.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-going-on-with-biofuels#details

We've started handing over the big goslings to Samson the gander overnight, and everyone is happy about this. Especially him; doing childcare is peak goose masculinity.

Female geese can be hostile to goslings they know they didn't hatch, but ganders are always there for single dadhood.

I invariably think "I'm going to let the goslings loose, sit with them to keep them safe from crows, and do some writing" and then I do not do any writing.

(Image shows some goslings exploring a pond).

The thing about goslings is that they are adorable soft warm creatures who want nothing more than to cuddle and fall asleep with you (when they're not grazing), and also extremely inefficient grass processing machines which shit every few minutes.