> Solar is cool but solar that can make it through the night and a couple cloudy days is way cooler
The fun part is that we're still well before the point when this even matters.
Almost 60% of the US grid is still fossil fuels, with around half of that still happening during the day. Which means you can get down to ~30% fossil fuels without any storage at all because all you do is go from burning fossil fuels during the day and at night to burning fossil fuels only at night.
Hmm, how much of that is base load versus the dramatic rise of natural gas plants that respond to dynamic demands? Even in daytime, I think you need storage to get rid of those, right?
Usually solar and storage are a package deal these days for grid scale solutions. Mostly, storage is not really about providing long term storage but short term. It used to be that the sweet spot that makes the most economic sense was something like 2 or 4 hours of power (relative to the maximum output of the solar panels) but these days batteries are a lot cheaper and 8 hours or more is becoming fairly common. The point of storage is not really to cover for all the downtime when the sun doesn't shine but to give grid operators enough lead time to bring online extra generation or buy capacity on the open market and adjust their planning. Mostly a few hours is all they need to ensure the grid stays up and running through daily peak usage windows.
In aggregate, grid operators have a lot of other tools at their disposal via flexible pricing, flexible demand, and automated systems that can adapt to this to e.g. charge cars when there is a surplus of energy, turn on/off water boilers, etc. There's a lot of innovation around this topic in this space. This by the way is as much as making sure generated power doesn't go to waste than it is about ensuring there is enough power. They use batteries to time shift excess power to when they can utilize it.
Interconnected grids means that e.g. an operator in Denmark can import/export to and from the UK, Norway, Germany, etc. On a windy day they'll be exporting wind power. On a sunny day, they might add some solar to that mix. When there's no wind or sun in Denmark, they might pull in Scottish/German wind, Norwegian hydro, Swedish nuclear, etc. Batteries are being deployed all over the place at a pace that is only exceeded by the pace at which solar is being deployed. Whenever there's a surplus energy, batteries get charged up. It's very rare for all of the available generation to disappear all at the same time for long enough to drain all the batteries. And for those times of course fossil generation is still a thing as well, and will be for decades to come. There are a lot of gas based plants throughout Europe. As well as some nuclear plants of course. Singling out the EU market here but it's going to be similar elsewhere.
The point here is that there's no need to pair solar setups with days/weeks/months worth of storage. A few hours goes a long way.
Diurnal storage is solved by batteries. Longer term storage will very likely be solved. For several days, cheaper batteries (perhaps with lower specific power). For longer periods, either thermal storage or e-fuels.
Agreed, e-fuels seem to be far and ahead the front-runner.
We can get to 95% using just short term storage. I suspect that most jurisdictions will just say "95% is good enough" rather than paying for ridiculously expensive long term storage.
We've got the nat gas capability already; keeping it around for the 5% is quite inexpensive, making the massive investment in long term storage for marginal benefit hard to justify.
OTOH, while the premium for e-fuels seems excessive, if you're only running that nat gas plant 2 days a year that premium is not so scary.
I'm not talking about district heating. I'm talking about high temperature storage for conversion back to electricity. Round trip efficiency could be around 40%, better than green hydrogen burned in combined cycle plants.
Standard Thermal's website's front page only covers heat delivery; did you mean to link to somewhere else?
Those are 2 very different use cases.
Thermal is low rate extraction. It's 1 cycle per year, but the extraction is performed over months so is low rate.
Electricity long term storage is high rate extraction. It's only used a few times a year, but when it is used it needs to cover roughly 100% of the entire grid's needs. I doubt thermal storage is suitable for high rate extraction, but I'd love to be wrong.
Edit: rereading your parent comment you seem to think thermal is suitable for a different use case? Could you elaborate further? When is "prolonged discharge" useful?
My guess is seasonal will be handled with flow batteries. A big tank and cheap-ish electrolyte, with the expense being in the electrodes sized for whatever max power is required. Tanks good for multiple cubic meters worth of liquid storage aren't exactly difficult to find, nor to place in a garden.
Flow batteries might be ok for a week or so, but their market window has been shrinking as Li-ion has gotten cheaper.
The technology I'm most excited about is ultra low capex thermal, as being done by Standard Thermal. Capital cost per unit of energy storage capacity as low as $0.10/kWh(th), so it can work with seasonal storage and just a few tens of charge/discharge cycles over its lifespan.
Standard Thermal has raised $11M and is building in Germany, where they say they can deliver 365/7/24 solar resistive heat (400 C or perhaps 600 C) for half the cost of heat from burning natural gas there.
Aren’t lead acid batteries great for this purpose? They have advantage over lithium in stationary setups because weight is not an issue and they can be “daisy chained” many many times.
I’m unaware of more cutting edge alternatives and the way the electrical companies handle solar is confusing IME
I dumped my 24V dual LA battery setup for a single 24V LFP battery for my inverter/UPS backup. LFP supposedly has a 10-15y life based on the 4-5000 charge cycles most cells claim. Sodium ion is on the way as well. My setup gives me about 10-12h of backup for critical loads (my PC, lights, fans).
I have a 5 kWp solar plant that produces ~25kWh per day, but it is grid-tied. I considered a hybrid setup with LFP battery back up, but decided to separate the two systems to avoid a single point of failure.
Lead acid batteries don't much like being cycled heavily. Even the ones explicitly designed for it (the average car battery is not) have about a tenth of the lifespan of lithium ion.
LiFePO4 is probably the chemistry best suited to it ATM. Lasts a long time, more stable, pretty cheap, and just a bit less energy density than other lithium ion options. Sodium-ion is looking promising but only just entering the market AFAIK.
Does this mean LA would be a feasible option for longer-cycle storage, IOW keeping a reserve topped up most of the year for those duldrums weeks with little solar or wind?
- Battery energy storage has grown at an exceptional pace, with global installations increasing more than 20-fold in storage capacity over the past five years. This growth has been driven by falling battery prices, abundant supply and relatively short project lead times. As variable renewable generation expands in many markets, battery storage is becoming an important source of flexibility and resilience for power systems, while also representing a growing commercial opportunity for battery manufacturers.
- However, more than 90% of battery storage applications rely on LFP batteries that are almost exclusively supplied from China, which accounts for almost all global manufacturing capacity and the associated technical expertise. Korean producers are investing to scale up LFP battery production that can offer an alternative, but they face intense competition from established, lower-cost Chinese producers in an oversupplied market.
- Battery storage now accounts for around 18% of installed dispatchable capacity in Australia, compared with 7% in China, 5% in the United States and 4% in Europe – underlining how rapidly batteries are becoming an important part of the electricity systems in some regions.
Battery storage is right behind the solar adoption curve. Net zero in five years? Probably not. Ten to fifteen years? Almost assured considering rate of change and the overall economics (assuming ~1TW/year of solar PV deployment and enough battery storage to soak up that low carbon generation while also providing grid services to replace thermal generation grid support [voltage, frequency, etc]).
(China is curtailing renewables equal to the annual combined generation of Spain and the Philippines every six months, and India about ~100-120GW/month due to not enough battery storage, for example)
I am desperate to find a battery inverter that can be used to supplement my existing grid-tied home solar setup. I only need about 5kW and 10kWh of batteries, but everything I can find is geared towards whole-home power at like 12kW. Way way more than I need. I understand I’m in the minority and there’s probably not a market, but I’d love to find something
Unfortunately, the market is somewhat bifurcated between what Anker, Jackery, Ecopower provide and stepping up to Base Power, Powerwalls, and other bigger system components.
My recommendation would be to see if Ecopower storage and inverters are a good fit for your use case. If you're feeling adventurous, you could build your own battery pack, but I only recommend if you are knowledgeable and confident. This comes with substantial property and life safety risk, only proceed if you know what you're doing and understand the risk (I'll work on my high voltage EV battery packs, but only with a helper nearby holding a 2x4, for example).
I think we’ll see a pivot from the right on solar soon, once they realize how cheap it is and how much money they can make. They’ll spin it as home-grown local jobs stuff but regardless it’s a win-win.
Why are we waiting on political movements to latch on to a revolutionary technology? If they are against you saving money vote them out, regardless of party, lol
The world has more than one country, and most have basically no access to oil. They will go deep into solar first. See, for instance, how the mix between the Venezuelan takeover early in the year, plus the Hormuz situation, put Cuba's energy access into jeopardy, and how that meant moving heavily into solar, as at least that remains available once purchased.
So even if a place like the US goes lighter on solar that is reasonable, Places like Spain, Italy or Morocco will go all in just to minimize dependence on a resource a third party can control. It's the ultimate counter to the Hormuz situation. Squeeze access to oil for long enough, and you accelerate the move away from it.
The right wing prepers and homesteading communities are already fully on board with it, I think it won't be too long until the rest of the right jumps on board.
The right's opposition to it is mostly rooted in the fact that historically the fossil fuel industry has been a major funding cornerstone of the right.
The pamphlet from which we get the term "fundamentalism" was published by an oil industry tycoon.
So the right is incentivized to protect this industry even if it becomes obsolescent and is no longer the most economical or practical way to generate at least much of our energy needs (electricity).
While the right has often sounded pro-nuclear, in practice they tend not to be that enthusiastic about it when they actually get into office. Obama supported the first new nuclear plant in decades.
Fossil fuel interests seem to support "the enemy of my enemy". 25 years ago the best alternative was nuclear so they supported alternatives to nuclear. Now they support nuclear and hydrogen.
We're barreling toward a point where above a certain wealth level and below a certain population density individuals can get all their energy from the sun, store it with batteries you get in the mail from Temu/Amazon/Alibaba and connect it all together with stuff you can buy from a Home Improvement store. All done unilaterally. Very hard to sink the claws of regulation into that except after the fact (unpopular). That is a future that too many people would be happy to sacrifice a lot of pollution to prevent.
So I think the pivot you're talking about, which I agree with eventually happen, will be offset in at least significant part.
Only Fox News boomers are against solar power. The rest of the right wing just doesn't want government slush fund handouts to vaporware companies like the Obama administration. If it's cheaper, great. Don't drag CO2 into the argument, just win on price and the right wing will happily adopt it.
Im sure theres an element of "private industry should profit off the sun because I'm a temporarily embarrassed millionaire and the government cant be trusted to run efficiently" vs "the government should build and maintain communal infrastructure so everyone can benefit and profit isnt extracted" with both sides thinking their version keeps things cheaper in the end for the customer.
I don't know anything about the polish electricity system but if supply or demand isn't very elastic then excess of either can lead to pretty huge price fluctuations and knock on effects thereafter.
Solar panels cost less than $1/Watt. Then you need some brackets to hold them, some wiring, and likely an MPPT controller. The rest of that price is red tape specific to your locality.
They're so cheap that bars in Colombia had panels as their terasse awnings. Cheaper than cloth and makes power.
Come to Europe. Our discount stores will sell you a kit for €200-€300. Not 20k-30k, 200-300.
That's on the small side of things, of course, but we also have PV-covered carports for about the same as a non-PV-covered carport: https://www.kaufland.de/product/512021383/
The fact that solar panels are getting cheaper on a sqft basis than plywood or sheet metal means we are going to stat to shove them in lots of places we never expected to especially if micro inverters or optimizes become cheap as well. why not use solar panels on your fence if it is cheaper than any other options.
If you have to hire Some Guy to do anything to your entire roof, it'll cost you $30k. The panels are basically free these days, the labor required to install them is not.
Cost per kW/mW is much lower at grid scale than home scale. For a home installation you are also paying for the roof mounting, running cabling through your house, inverter(s), and a transfer switch at minimum.
The cost of the panels themselves is becoming one of the cheaper parts of that project.
Vast majority of costs is in the installation and regulation, Australia home installation costs are a fraction of the cost of the USA and in Europe with plug in solar its a few hundred Euros for a couple panels and small inverter for a small setup
I'm happy if we don't need more nuclear. We're already leaving the place in a sorry state, might as well not litter it with stuff that can kill you if you look at it too long...
The main problem with solar and wind is that they can't be dispatched on demand. The power is incredibly cheap, but you are completely at the mercy of the weather.
What is needed is a source of power which can make up for the freak moments where 1) there isn't any sun, and 2) there isn't any wind, and 3) it lasts long enough that batteries can't cover it, and 4) it has to be widespread enough that you can't make up for it with power from half a continent away.
This power source will only need to be used for a few hundred hours per year but it'll need to carry a significant load, so while its per-MWh running costs are basically irrelevant its one-time per-MW construction costs should be fairly low.
This does not at all describe nuclear power, which has incredibly high construction costs, near-zero running costs, and is expected to run 24/7/365 at 100%.
Money can only be spent once. Similarly, a construction crew can only be at one construction site at a time. Investing in building new nuclear power plants will slow down construction of solar.
Nope. One of the fundamental premises of money is that it circulates. The only way money could not be re-spent is if the money supply were to decrease.
The total volume of new power generation is going to be mostly determined by how much those capital holders value it. If there's more utility in power this year than last, we may see more new starts in generation projects, regardless of which type of generation those projects are doing.
It is amazing that solar, a ridiculous cheap and easy to install solution is winning the energy future. In the past, based mostly on playing SimCity, I would have thought that Nuclear and then Fusion was the future, but solar does seem to be winning and pretty thoroughly.
I guess this is in part because it only needs amazing factories and not complex deployed and maintained infrastructure that is at risk of blowing up.
Solar seems to fix the mould of a disruptive technology to a T.
Games like SimCity just embody the assumptions that are designed into them, and there's no reason to think the designer was any more prescient than anyone else.
After all, if they could predict the future, why did they design a game rather than get rich in the stock market?
The user probably isn't suggesting the designers of SimCity are prescient; it's just that the assumptions that are designed into these games are clear reflections of the social perspective at the time. Assumptions like these tend to have inertia through time, and the user is likely just pointing out their surprise at the change.
I am not saying that SimCity predicts the future, rather I had assumptions growing up in that period, probably similar to everyone else at the time, that Nuclear and Fusion were the future of energy. It is cool to see that shift so soundly to solar in just two decades.
It's useful to go back and figure out why you believed that. Treat it as debugging your thinking. Others were saying, even back then, that nuclear and fusion had predictable economic problems.
SimCity 2000 with Fusion plants was released in 1993. To predict that solar would do this back then is asking a lot - this graph doesn't even start in 1993:
(Needless to say, I don't have a high opinion of current fusion start ups.)
And fission already had the financial fiasco of the first nuclear build out in the US.
Solar could have been predicted to get really cheap, if one had heroically projected its experience curve into the future. A lot of people chickened out doing that, even Greenpeace.
This is a ridiculous demand to make of an early teen in the pre-internet era. You know how hard it was to get information on arbitrary subjects back then like this?
That's fair, but it's also fair to ask the now middle aged person to understand their youthful errors, and to reflect on what other errors they made and might still be making.
Solar only works if you 1) live in a standalone house that 2) don't get tornadoes, typhoons, severe rainstorms or other disasters annually, and 3) they are installed on-prem, for off-grid capacities.
Games like SimCity often only supports ultradense Manhattan style cities and centralized solar plants through distribution networks. That combination doesn't work with solar technology. It should be like "Set up offgrid solar incentives program($1.5B)" buttons that reduces power draw proportionate to numbers of standalone houses that resets when disaster hits the parts of the map it was used on.
I've seen plenty of solar in areas that get hit by hurricanes or tropical cyclones. If your panels get blown to bits, you just put up new panels once the storm is over (or you know, take them down the storm is forecasted)
Interesting perspective. As someone who didn't even grow up in the US, I saw Sim City as a builder of relatively low density, hard zoning cities that had little to do with the high density I grew up in. The idea of commercial zones didn't even make sense to me, as in Spain, such thing doesn't exist. Need for traffic to get to the commercial zones made little sense.
Solar seems to be working just fine in Spain, a place where almost nobody lives in a stand alone house, or even a row house. You still put solar in the building, but then you have industrial solar in places wi5 little agricultural value, and wind turbines installed on top of hills. All of this could work just fine in any sim city I remember, as you are just dedicating space to power, which is fine.
Nuclear /could/ have solved this years ago but the spectacular and scary nature of failures like TMI or Chernobyl [0] really sunk any chance of that happening. Plus you had all the traditional nonrenewable energy providers intensely interested in stoking fears of that and the question of nuclear fuel storage.
[0] Yes pollution from normal everyday fossil fuel power generation causes more damage and deaths in the aggregate but it's a diffuse hard to attribute kind of damage which makes it far less, for lack of a better way to say it, real to people. eg: Did living downwind of that unupgraded coal plant really kill them or is their death because of something else.
Price probably played a pretty big role, too. The up front cost of a new nuclear plant is eye watering. Hard to compete against solar & battery these days which can be spun up in months and cost comparatively pennies.
That's also true, partially driven by a lot of hurdles and time spent fighting for approval due to the anti-nuclear push due to the things I mentioned, but it is also just expensive to build in the US because our labor and land is pretty expensive too.
Do you remember the microwave antenna power stations that power from solar satellites? The Moore-like drop of solar prices killed solar satellites, solar greenhouses with turbine chimneys, TW superconductor submarine cables circling the world etc.
Funny that you mention SimCity ... I used to play it (mostly the Nintendo SuperNES/SuperFamicom versions) and nuclear power plants would invariably explode at some point. I guess few people talked about climate change back then because the only drawback to the other power plant types was space usage ... reflecting on it, interesting how the assumptions formed the game ...
It needs mines, but those are easily forgotten about once the blood money is washed through a few hands.
Nuclear's problem, despite it's Champions assertion that it's now safe and properly engineered, is it's still inherently dirty and that dirt follows it through out it's life. It also probably has bloody mines, but every step on the path of using nuclear requires security and safety, and even when it's disposed, it still requires safety and security. It loses because no one trusts anyone along the entire value chain to not cut corners that leads to unsafe practices.
Nuclear waste materials aren't hard to dispose of, they just have extremely high abuse potential. That's why they have to be safely stored for million years away from civilization, so that they cannot be dug up by current and future terrorists.
I think there was some ex-French colony government that demanded France disclose details of nuclear waste burial sites for "safety" reasons, which France rejected. Which means it happens. That kind of thing is why nuclear wastes are supposedly and actually so "dangerous" and small private owned generators get "complicated".
It's not like solar panels don't use raw materials.
It's from 2022, so probably outdated.
> According to the US Department of Energy (DOE), about 12% of all silicon metal produced worldwide (also known as “metallurgical-grade silicon” or MGS) is turned into polysilicon for solar panel production. China produces about 70% of the world’s MGS and 77% of the world’s polysilicon. Converting silicon to polysilicon requires very high temperatures, and in China it’s coal that largely fuels these plants. Xinjiang—a region in China of abundant coal and low electricity prices—produces 45% of the world’s polysilicon.
> Reports indicate that some Xinjiang polysilicon plants have employed forced labor of Uyghurs, an intensely persecuted Muslim ethnic minority.
The simplest form of a nuclear reactor is some small sphere of purified heavy metal put onto a cavity on a thick Be sphere and covered by another piece of the same metal. The reactor can be started up and shut down by lowering or lifting the top piece using a flathead screwdriver shoved between two pieces, which can kill anybody nearby if dropped and the pieces go ultra super critical. That has to be a lot simpler than even a basic solar cell by itself.
The nature of disruptive solutions is that they can be adopted easily at the bottom of the market - which means in this case people like you rather than at the centrally planned utility.
Solar's global peak month in (northern hemisphere) summer 2024 nearly equaled nuclear, the full calendar year 2025 slightly beat nuclear and now it's possible that the next yearly minimum month coming up this december will match nuclear. That's a lot of change in just 2.5 years.
Also, the graph shows the world needs more wind power as it counter cycles both solar and hydro supply.
The price coming down is great, more accessibility to more people. Have there been any significant breakthroughs in overall average efficiency/conversion? e.g. 30%+ Asking for my own selfish needs as I am in a place with reduce sunlight availability.
You can get around it with multi-layer, but each layer adds diminishing returns on improvements, while the cost keeps increasing.
The best way to handle places with less solar irradiance is to have more panels. The cost per panel keeps dropping, so the economics keep improving in that way.
Agreed adding more panels would work around the limitation. The reason I ask is that in theory there is room to reach upwards of 48%, the max being reached right now is around 32% and all the panels I can find that are mass produced are between 20% and 22% assuming one can even find the numbers, some companies are making the numbers hard to find. Anything above 22% appear to climb in cost exponentially.
With more panels my setup will be more of an eye-sore, require more and longer cables, combiner boxes and the setup becomes a bigger project. So I am just being a selfish ass but I had to ask where we are.
Does anyone understand why you can't generally use solar when the power goes out? Is it just risk to line workers? (Couldn't you just auto-disconnect from the mains?) Is it just too variable to be useful enough on its own? Is my premise just wrong?
[edit]
According to HN you can totally do this and I'm just wrong.
So - short answer, it costs more and it doesn't happen that often. So contractors don't sell/install it.
Most solar installs work by tying into the existing main breaker of the home.
The cheapest way to do this is to leave the line feeding from the power meter to the main panel untouched. Instead you do anti-islanding detection at the inverters, and when they detect that mains is "down" they automatically cut off to prevent trying to backfeed power to your whole neighborhood during an outage (dangerous, not a good idea).
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Second issue - there are many appliances that are NOT happy about being turned on and off at random times, and it can significantly impact their lifespan (ex - refrigerators, acs, computers, washers & dryers, etc).
So given the variability of direct solar, you don't want to accidentally destroy your ac unit by having it turn on and off 100 times as random clouds float by.
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But! If you're willing to install even moderate battery capacity (and LFP is getting quite cheap as well). Then you can absolutely do this. It's just more complicated and more expensive.
You need to wire in a mains relay (~$1,000 depending on the unit) and install some battery capacity to prevent very frequent startup/shutdown, then go through some painful additional signage and labeling requirements (at least in most of the US) and also install some additional shut-down switches on the exterior of the home (ex - to automatically turn the inverters off, and to shutdown the battery system).
Then, yes, you can absolutely stay on solar power while the grid is down. In the same way that people are allowed to run whole-home generators to stay online when the grid is down.
Thanks, that's a really useful explanation. It sounds like if you forgo using a battery, then you have to be comfortable scurrying around and unplugging some of your devices. (and as silly as that is, you might aggressively power-cycle a device into oblivion before you manage to get everything unplugged. (most people would probably just not settle that sort of plugging / unplugging.)
> It sounds like if you forgo using a battery, then you have to be comfortable scurrying around and unplugging some of your devices.
Pretty much. I vaguely remember a couple of "off-grid" devices that try to automate this for you (ex - you can set a priority on each breaker, and as supply dips, they get dropped in order of priority).
But functionally speaking, you just need to install a battery. Frankly - Batteries aren't discussed as much as solar, but the big breaking point we're hitting right now isn't just that solar has gotten incredibly, unimaginably cheap.
It's that BOTH batteries AND solar are getting very, very cheap. And the new generation of batteries are also considerably safer than the original lithium batteries.
Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries (LFP) are ~$60/kWh right now. I can buy them commercially in bulk in the US around ~$80 (pretty much all china production - full stop. Historically, I've bought EVE cells, but I'm now seeing direct BYD branded cells as well).
If sodium-ion can hit the same price points (and odds are looking better and better they'll both hit and then plow past as they bulk up production) then my read is that modern power plants are going to be very, very different.
You can, especially when you also have an energy storage rack. The inverter has to support going into "island mode".
Where I live, on sunny days, the grid goes over 253V (230V nominal +10%), so in order for me to generate anything, my inverter disconnects itself from the grid.
The risk to line workers is overstated, they ground the lines before working on them. The reason solar doesn't work without the grid is because most solar installs don't [0] have batteries. And you can't practically power your house directly off panels if you don't have a battery to act as a buffer.
Why do I keep getting $20k quotes to install it then in the US. We seem to be doing something incorrectly here. The underlying hardware seems cheap (through independent research) but the labor and add in fees seem to be making this expensive. At sub $10k prices for the panels + batteries I would get it yesterday.
From what I've heard from people who've done deep dives, most solar installers in the US are essentially financing scams. The component costs have come way down, it's still essentially screwing things into the roof + a few hours from an electrician.
The real money is convincing marks to take the financing for 20+ years.
If that were the only reason, you’d surely be able to find someone who undercut the bloated financed costs and do a straightforward labor and materials install. But no such cheaper options exist
Depends on many factors. If installers are able to fully fill their available time and crews with jobs at the current price and expanding is limited by the availability of new crews high prices could be a stable equilibrium until a) more crews become available/techniques improve to speed up install times or b) demand relaxes and they need to drop their price to find sufficient customers.
There's also other factors like the overall cost being beyond people's willingness to save for when financing is available or the extra value that financed installs can provide the underwriters when they're bundled and sold as a stable income stream like houses were in the mid 00s.
"If it can be done cheaper someone will" is based on a lot of simplifications and assumptions about the market in question.
To my understanding regulation explains most of the difference. And it will vary a lot from place to place -- your experience will depend largely on local government policy and what your grid provider requires in order to establish the connection. E.g. locally I'm kinda forced to go with one of the power company's blessed installers. Cha-ching! If I understand Australian regulations, they tend to be more uniform nationally, there is less bureaucracy to drive up costs.
Not necessarily. There are little-known monopolies like the eyewear, travel agencies, and cargo fuel (there are many more!) where price fixing like this happens.
Untrue, at Sunspark we sold to both individuals and companies. If you can install the stuff yourself, buying it direct from the manufacturer is ungodly cheap (~330w panels at $80 a piece when I worked there almost decade ago.)
yeah, ive looked into DIY. As you say, even with tarrifs its pretty cheap to buy the panels and inverters. Which makes the installed cost even sillier, > $15k markup for a 2 day job.
I call this "the capitalism fallacy": it doesn't exist in the (my) market, therefore it's not possible.
The fallacy is that there are infinite market opportunities but a finite supply of entrepeneurs/business/money to exploit them. Therefore, there are an infinite number of market opportunities that will get passed up for one reason or another.
This is a good question - there are fairly high imposed tariffs on solar in the US[0] but I think the labor is the big part. Over here in the UK, solar installation would cost about $12k dollars, so quite a bit cheaper, but still not below $10k.
One thing that isn't super obvious from the article is that a lot of it is talking about industry solar panels rather than rooftop. The overheads of installation etc get a lot smaller if you're installing a whole bunch at once.
This isn't to say that installing solar panels on your house is a bad idea - they normally pay for themselves after something like 10 years from memory, so are similar to double glazing.
> they normally pay for themselves after something like 10 years from memory
I would guess this varies by locale, and people usually assume the time value of money to be zero when they make the claim. In much of the US, I think the payback time is more realistically in the 15-20 year range, which means you really only want to install panels when you install a new roof. Otherwise the lifetime of the roof will happen before break even on the panels.
> This isn't to say that installing solar panels on your house is a bad idea - they normally pay for themselves after something like 10 years from memory
I am with you, this would be better on a town or regional basis instead of on everyone’s roof. Our houses already have wires going to them and I can’t imagine my particular roof or garage is the best place to put panels and batteries. But I understand it’s a political / administrative issue which may well be not solvable easily in many places.
Rooftop solar costs 3x more per watt than utility scale. The only reason it would pay off is that you're able to avoid grid maintenance costs built into per-kwh pricing.
Rooftop solar (ideally with battery backup) allows you to be independent of the grid (yes, even if you're interconnected, if you do it properly), which means PG&E's garbage infrastructure can largely become irrelevant if your system is properly sized.
The regulatory overhead to grid-connect is a _significant_ portion of the price, both for the actual paperwork labor and because of the premium it imposes on the system components (you can't use inexpensive non-UL-listed panels)
Only some states allow simple plug in roof top or balcony solar I believe. So depending on your area you might be required to do a grid hookup and lose access to it during outages.
From what I understand, the going price is AU$5K in Australia. (USD3500). A small portion of that is scale since solar roof is far more common in Australia, but most of it is "doing something incorrectly", as you suspect.
Many private utilities in the US have fought against residential solar, and are seemingly motivated to act against it as something against their long term interests. In California the amount of Public Utilities Commisssion retrograde policy is ridiculous.
This makes me think of the Franklin Pot Belly stove we had in the middle of the living room growing up and the coal bin in my back yard having to go out there on cold winter mornings to bring a bucket in.
I diy installed a 13kw ground mount with a 32kwh battery for $18,700 before the tax rebate last december. 6 year payback at my current rate of $0.12 kwh after the rebate. Its a complete no brainer at this point.
If you want to look at a place that is comparable to (parts of) the US that manages to do things about 3-4x cheaper, look at Australia. They seem to have stumbled on something that works ridiculously well. You can get a quote and stuff installed in something like a few weeks at most. It's done right and efficiently without a lot of bullshit.
Other places (like the EU and especially the US) have regulatory problems around anything to do with energy. This is mostly about ass coverage resulting in a lot of pressure for certification, related fees, grid operators insisting on a lot of overhead, building codes requiring a lot of faffing about for the business of wiring together what is essentially plug and play stuff, etc.
If you have an off grid shed, providing power to it is cheap and easy because you have none of that. You buy the hardware on amazon or wherever. It arrives, you wire it up. Job done. And if you are smart you might let a qualified electrician do it right for you or at least check your work (so your shed doesn't burn down and nobody dies from electrical shocks). But fundamentally it's not that hard and this stuff is mostly pretty safe and easy to work with. Especially compared to the things people burn down their sheds with traditionally (e.g. generators).
There's a lot of optimization potential here and most of that is completely non technical.
Distributed solar is cute and it sometimes benefits some people but it is pointless for national policy to pursue it. As you pointed out, the cost structure of small distributed solar is dominated by office overhead, sales, management, insurance, litigation, etc etc.
Residential solar in the US is very expensive, $3-4/watt versus utility scale closer to $1/watt. The cheapest residential solar options are community solar if your state and utility supports it, or a ground mount system.
The biggest cost components are sales and marketing expenses and similar soft costs. Some of this can be driven down if you collectively buy through something like https://solarunitedneighbors.org/
"Residential solar in the US is very expensive, $3-4/watt versus utility scale closer to $1/watt."
Yea, if you go to an installer instead of buying from the OEM and installing yourself. I likely made your panels at SunSpark (We made panels for everyone, Renogy, Juinko Solar, Samsung, etc.) They were sold for $80 at 330w - 4.125 watts per dollar, or a quarter per watt.
I am not a commercial system installer, I am a hobbyist enthusiast who helps others install to avoid commercial installers and their costs. Volunteer labor for everything (racking, panels, electrical), volunteer electrician signs off for any AHJ (authority having jurisdiction) requirements.
Most people cannot install the equipment themselves, which leads to the residential costs I mention. Is it expensive? Price is what you pay, value is what you get. If you cannot find someone to install for free, and cannot do it yourself, the price is the price. You can either choose to pay market rate after getting multiple bids, or choose to go without.
(i am also a community outreach volunteer for https://www.gosolarapp.org for automating permitting and remote inspections across the US, which was incubated at NREL prior to being spun out as an independent non profit; this drives down permitting soft costs)
"Most people cannot install the equipment themselves"
This is highly untrue, until you get to the task mounting on a roof. Barring that, making a solar array system is dead simple. Most anyone can turn a screwdriver or build a frame or connect very distinct connectors together (they just snap together for daisy-chaining solar panels) or insert a power plug into a NEMA receptacle (for balcony solar installs.)
It is the install on the roof itself which most people cannot do (because they lack roofing knowledge.) Every other thing is absolutely DIY by pretty much anyone with hands and eyes.
> It is the install on the roof itself which most people cannot do (because they lack roofing knowledge.) Every other thing is absolutely DIY by pretty much anyone with hands and eyes.
Literally the most important part is what most people cannot do. If you have the space, sure, ground mount. Most people do not have the space, nor are they going to be confident in putting penetrations in their roof deck to mount racking to hold the panels.
How can the numbers ever work? $15k pays my electric bill for a decade. I get that it amortizes beyond that, but it's a heck of a sunk cost that just doesn't make sense IMO.
I have a cabin in the woods, an hour from my house, my choices are either install a couple of solar panels on the roof, or have no electricity.
I'm looking forward to installing a couple of panels on the roof next year. Having power to charge my phone, or laptop, won't take much capacity, I'm not going to use much power other than that, maybe some music but nothing like cooking/heating, or similar heavyweight usage. (I have a wood stove for heating, and gas/alcohol stoves for cooking, along with on-site water.)
Solar panels are rated to handle 1 inch hail at 52mph (IEC 61215). Damaged panels can be easily replaced, and are typically covered by your homeowner's insurance.
- Every panel sold in the U.S. has to pass an industry-standard hail test, which fires ice balls at multiple points on the panel and requires no visible cracking, delamination, or more than a 5% drop in power output afterward. Companies like UL Solutions, an applied safety science company, test solar panels by dropping a two-inch solid steel sphere from 51 inches onto panels, simulating the impact energy of serious hail. Panels that survive without electrical hazards earn certification for real-world deployment.
- The proof is in the pudding—or in this case, the parking lot. When a severe hailstorm hammered the National Laboratory of the Rockies' (NLR) (formerly National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)) Colorado campus in 2017, just one single panel out of more than 3,000 suffered damage. That's a 99.97% survival rate against Mother Nature.
Because your electric bill goes up every year as the utility keeps asking for return on equity (assuming investor owned utility, math might be different if you're in an electric coop). A solar PV system will produce power for 25 years at a minimum at a fixed cost. Like a mortgage that is fixed versus rent that is not.
It's the equivalent of a bond investment with potential subsidies at the utility, state, and federal level (solar is no longer subsidized, but batteries still are).
So long as the roof itself lasts that long. People who are mid-cycle on their existing roof should not install solar until they get to the next replacement. This is where I am, and why I do not have rooftop solar. I expect to get 15 additional years from my roof, and there's no guarantee I will have hit the break even point by then. Plus, solar installers will not warranty a mid-cycle roof against leaks, so if something goes wrong that quickly eats into your cost savings.
It is also cheaper to get it installed if you're already doing a roof replacement. Especially if you're getting built-in modules instead of retrofit, since they replace some of the roof surface instead of going over it.
Indeed, the best time to install is during a roof replacement. If one can afford it, standing seam metal roof, racking mounted with friction mounts (deck penetrations are the enemy and to be avoided whenever possible, to prevent future water intrusion), and the entire system (roof deck and panels) should last 40+ years. Last roof and solar you put on for your life for many of us.
It's just clickbait headline speak. Predates LLMs by a little bit. I think it's meant to make it sound like you're being let in on a secret or sometime to cast whatever is being reported on in a negative light by implying it's sneaky somehow.
it's a great source of energy mind you, but I kind of wince everytime people are trying to say it's better than nuclear (if you put the dangerosity of the raw material aside of course)
there are excellent storage capacities now, which helps a lot, but nuclear stays unmatched in producing vast amounts of electricity on demand (as long as we're not in a brutal heat wave to be fair)
I don't believe the parent commenter was setting aside the waste and potential impact of radioactivity as the risks associated with those are very very low. I think they were setting aside the literal mining and handling of the raw material before it even enters a reactor which is fair IMO. Also uranium mining is more often happening with in situ leach mining which removes a lot of the risk and environmental impact [1] - especially compared to lithium extraction!
Also to clarify, modern Gen III+ reactors have passive safety systems that make leaks/meltdowns virtually impossible [2], and the total volume of high-level waste is tiny, solid, and completely contained in dry casks with little chance of escape - however there are some concerns on the 100+ year timescale, I'll admit.
Also a fun fact, deaths per unit of energy of nuclear compared to solar are nearly identical.[3]
> If it were 10x cheaper but still had the waste and radioactivity it would be going like gangbusters.
Perhaps. While the amortisation of the costs of Chernobyl etc. over the global nuclear fleet are surprisingly low, the local economic impact was high enough that even governments are cautious about the risks.
e.g. the Chernobyl exclusion zone is about the size of Luxembourg, so I'd expect their government to have had… discussions… with the French government about the safety of the nearby reactor in Cattenom: were it to détoner while the wind was blowing the wrong way, Luxembourg may cease to exist.
(Low risk, but existential if it happens. Not everyone's as enthusiastic as powerful people seem to be today about AI).
To be fair nuclear is as expensive as it is mostly because of radioactivity. There'd be no need for all the heavy concrete, armed guards, and spent fuel disposal if the materials were innocuous.
" but I kind of wince everytime people are trying to say it's better than nuclear"
Solar is the superior form of nuclear energy. You're using a big ass nuclear fusion reactor in the center of our solar system to generate energy, and you harvest that energy by capturing its photonic output.
As far as storing the energy for peak demand/nighttime usage, we've got literally hundreds of methods to do it, from pure mechanical to electrochemical.
Fission is unmatched in its ability to abandon projects after spending tens of billions of dollars. I don't see how any rational person can look at the history of nuclear and say "damn, this thing can drop electrons on short notice." That's just a ridiculous take.
Sadly nuclear also stays unmatched in cost. It was already way too expensive, and now it has even worse economics on modern grids full of cheap variable sources. It is terribly uncompetitive and that’s why you see roughly none getting built anymore
Solar is cool but solar that can make it through the night and a couple cloudy days is way cooler
The fun part is that we're still well before the point when this even matters.
Almost 60% of the US grid is still fossil fuels, with around half of that still happening during the day. Which means you can get down to ~30% fossil fuels without any storage at all because all you do is go from burning fossil fuels during the day and at night to burning fossil fuels only at night.
In aggregate, grid operators have a lot of other tools at their disposal via flexible pricing, flexible demand, and automated systems that can adapt to this to e.g. charge cars when there is a surplus of energy, turn on/off water boilers, etc. There's a lot of innovation around this topic in this space. This by the way is as much as making sure generated power doesn't go to waste than it is about ensuring there is enough power. They use batteries to time shift excess power to when they can utilize it.
Interconnected grids means that e.g. an operator in Denmark can import/export to and from the UK, Norway, Germany, etc. On a windy day they'll be exporting wind power. On a sunny day, they might add some solar to that mix. When there's no wind or sun in Denmark, they might pull in Scottish/German wind, Norwegian hydro, Swedish nuclear, etc. Batteries are being deployed all over the place at a pace that is only exceeded by the pace at which solar is being deployed. Whenever there's a surplus energy, batteries get charged up. It's very rare for all of the available generation to disappear all at the same time for long enough to drain all the batteries. And for those times of course fossil generation is still a thing as well, and will be for decades to come. There are a lot of gas based plants throughout Europe. As well as some nuclear plants of course. Singling out the EU market here but it's going to be similar elsewhere.
The point here is that there's no need to pair solar setups with days/weeks/months worth of storage. A few hours goes a long way.
We can get to 95% using just short term storage. I suspect that most jurisdictions will just say "95% is good enough" rather than paying for ridiculously expensive long term storage.
We've got the nat gas capability already; keeping it around for the 5% is quite inexpensive, making the massive investment in long term storage for marginal benefit hard to justify.
OTOH, while the premium for e-fuels seems excessive, if you're only running that nat gas plant 2 days a year that premium is not so scary.
For covering Dunkelflauten? Yes.
For seasonal storage with a prolonged discharge (so, low power/storage capacity ratio)? I think thermal storage wins there.
Those are 2 very different use cases.
Thermal is low rate extraction. It's 1 cycle per year, but the extraction is performed over months so is low rate.
Electricity long term storage is high rate extraction. It's only used a few times a year, but when it is used it needs to cover roughly 100% of the entire grid's needs. I doubt thermal storage is suitable for high rate extraction, but I'd love to be wrong.
Edit: rereading your parent comment you seem to think thermal is suitable for a different use case? Could you elaborate further? When is "prolonged discharge" useful?
Then again, I'm basing this opinion on a recent-ish video from NightHawkInLight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7fR9ISuCw
The technology I'm most excited about is ultra low capex thermal, as being done by Standard Thermal. Capital cost per unit of energy storage capacity as low as $0.10/kWh(th), so it can work with seasonal storage and just a few tens of charge/discharge cycles over its lifespan.
Standard Thermal has raised $11M and is building in Germany, where they say they can deliver 365/7/24 solar resistive heat (400 C or perhaps 600 C) for half the cost of heat from burning natural gas there.
I guess using electricity to heat during the night could be an issue, but we could also accept to let the temperature drop.
I have a 5 kWp solar plant that produces ~25kWh per day, but it is grid-tied. I considered a hybrid setup with LFP battery back up, but decided to separate the two systems to avoid a single point of failure.
LiFePO4 is probably the chemistry best suited to it ATM. Lasts a long time, more stable, pretty cheap, and just a bit less energy density than other lithium ion options. Sodium-ion is looking promising but only just entering the market AFAIK.
LiFePo4 however is excellent and reasonably low cost these days
Fortunately that doesn’t seem like it will be an issue since battery storage costs are also seeing an exponential reduction.
Ideally we see people like Form Energies, using iron-air (rust) batteries, for much easier to scale storage. https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/06/1145020/2026-cli...
- Battery energy storage has grown at an exceptional pace, with global installations increasing more than 20-fold in storage capacity over the past five years. This growth has been driven by falling battery prices, abundant supply and relatively short project lead times. As variable renewable generation expands in many markets, battery storage is becoming an important source of flexibility and resilience for power systems, while also representing a growing commercial opportunity for battery manufacturers.
- However, more than 90% of battery storage applications rely on LFP batteries that are almost exclusively supplied from China, which accounts for almost all global manufacturing capacity and the associated technical expertise. Korean producers are investing to scale up LFP battery production that can offer an alternative, but they face intense competition from established, lower-cost Chinese producers in an oversupplied market.
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/battery-storage-is-scaling-...
- Battery storage now accounts for around 18% of installed dispatchable capacity in Australia, compared with 7% in China, 5% in the United States and 4% in Europe – underlining how rapidly batteries are becoming an important part of the electricity systems in some regions.
https://www.ess-news.com/2026/06/02/global-battery-additions...
Battery storage is right behind the solar adoption curve. Net zero in five years? Probably not. Ten to fifteen years? Almost assured considering rate of change and the overall economics (assuming ~1TW/year of solar PV deployment and enough battery storage to soak up that low carbon generation while also providing grid services to replace thermal generation grid support [voltage, frequency, etc]).
(China is curtailing renewables equal to the annual combined generation of Spain and the Philippines every six months, and India about ~100-120GW/month due to not enough battery storage, for example)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50132343
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50198882
My recommendation would be to see if Ecopower storage and inverters are a good fit for your use case. If you're feeling adventurous, you could build your own battery pack, but I only recommend if you are knowledgeable and confident. This comes with substantial property and life safety risk, only proceed if you know what you're doing and understand the risk (I'll work on my high voltage EV battery packs, but only with a helper nearby holding a 2x4, for example).
https://hackaday.com/tag/battery-pack/
So even if a place like the US goes lighter on solar that is reasonable, Places like Spain, Italy or Morocco will go all in just to minimize dependence on a resource a third party can control. It's the ultimate counter to the Hormuz situation. Squeeze access to oil for long enough, and you accelerate the move away from it.
It goes all the way back to this kind of thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fundamentals
The pamphlet from which we get the term "fundamentalism" was published by an oil industry tycoon.
So the right is incentivized to protect this industry even if it becomes obsolescent and is no longer the most economical or practical way to generate at least much of our energy needs (electricity).
While the right has often sounded pro-nuclear, in practice they tend not to be that enthusiastic about it when they actually get into office. Obama supported the first new nuclear plant in decades.
https://politifact.com/factchecks/2012/mar/02/barack-obama/o...
So I think the pivot you're talking about, which I agree with eventually happen, will be offset in at least significant part.
https://texas2036.org/news-analysis/growth-of-utility-scale-...
tl;dr: https://mlu3fafnp1cd.i.optimole.com/w:778/h:495/q:mauto/f:be...
Obvious counterpoints: Trump's $700m "clean, beautiful coal" handouts, or Trump's $2B buyback of wind farm leases.
They're so cheap that bars in Colombia had panels as their terasse awnings. Cheaper than cloth and makes power.
That's on the small side of things, of course, but we also have PV-covered carports for about the same as a non-PV-covered carport: https://www.kaufland.de/product/512021383/
I was considering this earlier in the year, as it happens.
The cost of the panels themselves is becoming one of the cheaper parts of that project.
The main problem with solar and wind is that they can't be dispatched on demand. The power is incredibly cheap, but you are completely at the mercy of the weather.
What is needed is a source of power which can make up for the freak moments where 1) there isn't any sun, and 2) there isn't any wind, and 3) it lasts long enough that batteries can't cover it, and 4) it has to be widespread enough that you can't make up for it with power from half a continent away.
This power source will only need to be used for a few hundred hours per year but it'll need to carry a significant load, so while its per-MWh running costs are basically irrelevant its one-time per-MW construction costs should be fairly low.
This does not at all describe nuclear power, which has incredibly high construction costs, near-zero running costs, and is expected to run 24/7/365 at 100%.
Nope. One of the fundamental premises of money is that it circulates. The only way money could not be re-spent is if the money supply were to decrease.
The total volume of new power generation is going to be mostly determined by how much those capital holders value it. If there's more utility in power this year than last, we may see more new starts in generation projects, regardless of which type of generation those projects are doing.
I guess this is in part because it only needs amazing factories and not complex deployed and maintained infrastructure that is at risk of blowing up.
Solar seems to fix the mould of a disruptive technology to a T.
After all, if they could predict the future, why did they design a game rather than get rich in the stock market?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20782346
(Needless to say, I don't have a high opinion of current fusion start ups.)
And fission already had the financial fiasco of the first nuclear build out in the US.
Solar could have been predicted to get really cheap, if one had heroically projected its experience curve into the future. A lot of people chickened out doing that, even Greenpeace.
Games like SimCity often only supports ultradense Manhattan style cities and centralized solar plants through distribution networks. That combination doesn't work with solar technology. It should be like "Set up offgrid solar incentives program($1.5B)" buttons that reduces power draw proportionate to numbers of standalone houses that resets when disaster hits the parts of the map it was used on.
Solar seems to be working just fine in Spain, a place where almost nobody lives in a stand alone house, or even a row house. You still put solar in the building, but then you have industrial solar in places wi5 little agricultural value, and wind turbines installed on top of hills. All of this could work just fine in any sim city I remember, as you are just dedicating space to power, which is fine.
[0] Yes pollution from normal everyday fossil fuel power generation causes more damage and deaths in the aggregate but it's a diffuse hard to attribute kind of damage which makes it far less, for lack of a better way to say it, real to people. eg: Did living downwind of that unupgraded coal plant really kill them or is their death because of something else.
Nuclear's problem, despite it's Champions assertion that it's now safe and properly engineered, is it's still inherently dirty and that dirt follows it through out it's life. It also probably has bloody mines, but every step on the path of using nuclear requires security and safety, and even when it's disposed, it still requires safety and security. It loses because no one trusts anyone along the entire value chain to not cut corners that leads to unsafe practices.
I think there was some ex-French colony government that demanded France disclose details of nuclear waste burial sites for "safety" reasons, which France rejected. Which means it happens. That kind of thing is why nuclear wastes are supposedly and actually so "dangerous" and small private owned generators get "complicated".
It's from 2022, so probably outdated.
> According to the US Department of Energy (DOE), about 12% of all silicon metal produced worldwide (also known as “metallurgical-grade silicon” or MGS) is turned into polysilicon for solar panel production. China produces about 70% of the world’s MGS and 77% of the world’s polysilicon. Converting silicon to polysilicon requires very high temperatures, and in China it’s coal that largely fuels these plants. Xinjiang—a region in China of abundant coal and low electricity prices—produces 45% of the world’s polysilicon.
> Reports indicate that some Xinjiang polysilicon plants have employed forced labor of Uyghurs, an intensely persecuted Muslim ethnic minority.
[0] https://blog.ucs.org/charlie-hoffs/mining-raw-materials-for-...
Finally, some much needed progress towards Sagan's apple pie.
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?tem...
Solar's global peak month in (northern hemisphere) summer 2024 nearly equaled nuclear, the full calendar year 2025 slightly beat nuclear and now it's possible that the next yearly minimum month coming up this december will match nuclear. That's a lot of change in just 2.5 years.
Also, the graph shows the world needs more wind power as it counter cycles both solar and hydro supply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi...
You can get around it with multi-layer, but each layer adds diminishing returns on improvements, while the cost keeps increasing.
The best way to handle places with less solar irradiance is to have more panels. The cost per panel keeps dropping, so the economics keep improving in that way.
With more panels my setup will be more of an eye-sore, require more and longer cables, combiner boxes and the setup becomes a bigger project. So I am just being a selfish ass but I had to ask where we are.
[edit]
According to HN you can totally do this and I'm just wrong.
Most solar installs work by tying into the existing main breaker of the home.
The cheapest way to do this is to leave the line feeding from the power meter to the main panel untouched. Instead you do anti-islanding detection at the inverters, and when they detect that mains is "down" they automatically cut off to prevent trying to backfeed power to your whole neighborhood during an outage (dangerous, not a good idea).
---
Second issue - there are many appliances that are NOT happy about being turned on and off at random times, and it can significantly impact their lifespan (ex - refrigerators, acs, computers, washers & dryers, etc).
So given the variability of direct solar, you don't want to accidentally destroy your ac unit by having it turn on and off 100 times as random clouds float by.
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But! If you're willing to install even moderate battery capacity (and LFP is getting quite cheap as well). Then you can absolutely do this. It's just more complicated and more expensive.
You need to wire in a mains relay (~$1,000 depending on the unit) and install some battery capacity to prevent very frequent startup/shutdown, then go through some painful additional signage and labeling requirements (at least in most of the US) and also install some additional shut-down switches on the exterior of the home (ex - to automatically turn the inverters off, and to shutdown the battery system).
Then, yes, you can absolutely stay on solar power while the grid is down. In the same way that people are allowed to run whole-home generators to stay online when the grid is down.
Pretty much. I vaguely remember a couple of "off-grid" devices that try to automate this for you (ex - you can set a priority on each breaker, and as supply dips, they get dropped in order of priority).
But functionally speaking, you just need to install a battery. Frankly - Batteries aren't discussed as much as solar, but the big breaking point we're hitting right now isn't just that solar has gotten incredibly, unimaginably cheap.
It's that BOTH batteries AND solar are getting very, very cheap. And the new generation of batteries are also considerably safer than the original lithium batteries.
Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries (LFP) are ~$60/kWh right now. I can buy them commercially in bulk in the US around ~$80 (pretty much all china production - full stop. Historically, I've bought EVE cells, but I'm now seeing direct BYD branded cells as well).
If sodium-ion can hit the same price points (and odds are looking better and better they'll both hit and then plow past as they bulk up production) then my read is that modern power plants are going to be very, very different.
They'll look a lot more like the connection structures we see for trees - a bunch of connected independent installs that can optionally cooperate as needed. Ex https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260928-a-virtual-power-...
Where I live, on sunny days, the grid goes over 253V (230V nominal +10%), so in order for me to generate anything, my inverter disconnects itself from the grid.
[0] It is becoming way more common now, though.
The real money is convincing marks to take the financing for 20+ years.
There's also other factors like the overall cost being beyond people's willingness to save for when financing is available or the extra value that financed installs can provide the underwriters when they're bundled and sold as a stable income stream like houses were in the mid 00s.
"If it can be done cheaper someone will" is based on a lot of simplifications and assumptions about the market in question.
None? Project Solar? The last time I seriously looked at doing rooftop panels, they were significantly cheaper than the door-to-door jerks.
AI can't take my job then.
One indicator is that third world countries can seem to afford it.
Untrue, at Sunspark we sold to both individuals and companies. If you can install the stuff yourself, buying it direct from the manufacturer is ungodly cheap (~330w panels at $80 a piece when I worked there almost decade ago.)
The fallacy is that there are infinite market opportunities but a finite supply of entrepeneurs/business/money to exploit them. Therefore, there are an infinite number of market opportunities that will get passed up for one reason or another.
One thing that isn't super obvious from the article is that a lot of it is talking about industry solar panels rather than rooftop. The overheads of installation etc get a lot smaller if you're installing a whole bunch at once.
This isn't to say that installing solar panels on your house is a bad idea - they normally pay for themselves after something like 10 years from memory, so are similar to double glazing.
[0] https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/overview-trade-and-polic...
I would guess this varies by locale, and people usually assume the time value of money to be zero when they make the claim. In much of the US, I think the payback time is more realistically in the 15-20 year range, which means you really only want to install panels when you install a new roof. Otherwise the lifetime of the roof will happen before break even on the panels.
I am with you, this would be better on a town or regional basis instead of on everyone’s roof. Our houses already have wires going to them and I can’t imagine my particular roof or garage is the best place to put panels and batteries. But I understand it’s a political / administrative issue which may well be not solvable easily in many places.
This is really surprising to hear. Are you sure about that?
On-prem has a problem of distributed labour costs.
On-prem might eventually become cheaper, but my guess is that won't happen any time soon.
For the time being, centralized and at-scale installation is where you can get much, much lower labour per watt costs.
Other places (like the EU and especially the US) have regulatory problems around anything to do with energy. This is mostly about ass coverage resulting in a lot of pressure for certification, related fees, grid operators insisting on a lot of overhead, building codes requiring a lot of faffing about for the business of wiring together what is essentially plug and play stuff, etc.
If you have an off grid shed, providing power to it is cheap and easy because you have none of that. You buy the hardware on amazon or wherever. It arrives, you wire it up. Job done. And if you are smart you might let a qualified electrician do it right for you or at least check your work (so your shed doesn't burn down and nobody dies from electrical shocks). But fundamentally it's not that hard and this stuff is mostly pretty safe and easy to work with. Especially compared to the things people burn down their sheds with traditionally (e.g. generators).
There's a lot of optimization potential here and most of that is completely non technical.
The biggest cost components are sales and marketing expenses and similar soft costs. Some of this can be driven down if you collectively buy through something like https://solarunitedneighbors.org/
(have installed 100kw+ of residential solar, ama)
Yea, if you go to an installer instead of buying from the OEM and installing yourself. I likely made your panels at SunSpark (We made panels for everyone, Renogy, Juinko Solar, Samsung, etc.) They were sold for $80 at 330w - 4.125 watts per dollar, or a quarter per watt.
Solar isn't expensive - you are.
I am not a commercial system installer, I am a hobbyist enthusiast who helps others install to avoid commercial installers and their costs. Volunteer labor for everything (racking, panels, electrical), volunteer electrician signs off for any AHJ (authority having jurisdiction) requirements.
Most people cannot install the equipment themselves, which leads to the residential costs I mention. Is it expensive? Price is what you pay, value is what you get. If you cannot find someone to install for free, and cannot do it yourself, the price is the price. You can either choose to pay market rate after getting multiple bids, or choose to go without.
US Dept of Energy: Solar Photovoltaic System Cost Benchmarks - https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/solar-photovoltaic-syste...
Energy Sage: Solar panel cost in 2026 - https://www.energysage.com/local-data/solar-panel-cost/
(i am also a community outreach volunteer for https://www.gosolarapp.org for automating permitting and remote inspections across the US, which was incubated at NREL prior to being spun out as an independent non profit; this drives down permitting soft costs)
This is highly untrue, until you get to the task mounting on a roof. Barring that, making a solar array system is dead simple. Most anyone can turn a screwdriver or build a frame or connect very distinct connectors together (they just snap together for daisy-chaining solar panels) or insert a power plug into a NEMA receptacle (for balcony solar installs.)
It is the install on the roof itself which most people cannot do (because they lack roofing knowledge.) Every other thing is absolutely DIY by pretty much anyone with hands and eyes.
Literally the most important part is what most people cannot do. If you have the space, sure, ground mount. Most people do not have the space, nor are they going to be confident in putting penetrations in their roof deck to mount racking to hold the panels.
I'm looking forward to installing a couple of panels on the roof next year. Having power to charge my phone, or laptop, won't take much capacity, I'm not going to use much power other than that, maybe some music but nothing like cooking/heating, or similar heavyweight usage. (I have a wood stove for heating, and gas/alcohol stoves for cooking, along with on-site water.)
https://www.energysage.com/news/solar-panels-withstand-hail/
- Every panel sold in the U.S. has to pass an industry-standard hail test, which fires ice balls at multiple points on the panel and requires no visible cracking, delamination, or more than a 5% drop in power output afterward. Companies like UL Solutions, an applied safety science company, test solar panels by dropping a two-inch solid steel sphere from 51 inches onto panels, simulating the impact energy of serious hail. Panels that survive without electrical hazards earn certification for real-world deployment.
- The proof is in the pudding—or in this case, the parking lot. When a severe hailstorm hammered the National Laboratory of the Rockies' (NLR) (formerly National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)) Colorado campus in 2017, just one single panel out of more than 3,000 suffered damage. That's a 99.97% survival rate against Mother Nature.
It's the equivalent of a bond investment with potential subsidies at the utility, state, and federal level (solar is no longer subsidized, but batteries still are).
https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=411421
https://magnifina.com/articles/rooftop-solar-yield/
So long as the roof itself lasts that long. People who are mid-cycle on their existing roof should not install solar until they get to the next replacement. This is where I am, and why I do not have rooftop solar. I expect to get 15 additional years from my roof, and there's no guarantee I will have hit the break even point by then. Plus, solar installers will not warranty a mid-cycle roof against leaks, so if something goes wrong that quickly eats into your cost savings.
it's a great source of energy mind you, but I kind of wince everytime people are trying to say it's better than nuclear (if you put the dangerosity of the raw material aside of course)
there are excellent storage capacities now, which helps a lot, but nuclear stays unmatched in producing vast amounts of electricity on demand (as long as we're not in a brutal heat wave to be fair)
I could also say: Solar is the best energy source (if you put night aside of course).
I mean obviously the main drawback of nuclear fission is the waste and the potential impact of radioactivity.
Also to clarify, modern Gen III+ reactors have passive safety systems that make leaks/meltdowns virtually impossible [2], and the total volume of high-level waste is tiny, solid, and completely contained in dry casks with little chance of escape - however there are some concerns on the 100+ year timescale, I'll admit.
Also a fun fact, deaths per unit of energy of nuclear compared to solar are nearly identical.[3]
[1]https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... [2]https://www.amacad.org/publication/nuclear-reactors-generati... [3]https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy?hl=en-US
If nuclear were just as expensive as it is now but had no waste or radioactivity it would still be struggling.
If it were 10x cheaper but still had the waste and radioactivity it would be going like gangbusters.
Perhaps. While the amortisation of the costs of Chernobyl etc. over the global nuclear fleet are surprisingly low, the local economic impact was high enough that even governments are cautious about the risks.
e.g. the Chernobyl exclusion zone is about the size of Luxembourg, so I'd expect their government to have had… discussions… with the French government about the safety of the nearby reactor in Cattenom: were it to détoner while the wind was blowing the wrong way, Luxembourg may cease to exist.
(Low risk, but existential if it happens. Not everyone's as enthusiastic as powerful people seem to be today about AI).
Solar is the superior form of nuclear energy. You're using a big ass nuclear fusion reactor in the center of our solar system to generate energy, and you harvest that energy by capturing its photonic output.
As far as storing the energy for peak demand/nighttime usage, we've got literally hundreds of methods to do it, from pure mechanical to electrochemical.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
The World Crossed a Major Solar Milestone [3TW] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151977 - August 2026