Could we see U.S. solar electricity for $0 per kWh?

[Caribbeans]

Could we see U.S. solar electricity for $0 per kWh?

A Credit Suisse report suggests that from 2025 through 2032, the United States could see solar and wind PPAs regularly signed for under 1¢/kWh, due to a combination of manufacturing and project tax credits.

PV-Magazine-usa.com | October 14, 2022 | John Fitzgerald Weaver

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) may become a transformative document, enabling a grand experiment in energy generation at a national level. A report from Credit Suisse suggests as much. The organization believes that the United States has an opportunity to become a global leader in clean energy, much like it is already in the fossil industry.

Among the many ideas discussed in the document is a striking prediction – there may be solar power projects whose levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) drops below a penny per kilowatt hour, bottoming around 0.4¢/kWh ($4/MWh) in 2029. We could see these prices as soon as 2025, and they could persist beyond 2030.



If we combine a few data points, we can see how this number is possible – and might even have room to go lower...

...Consider that it has only been a few years since First Solar told Bloomberg that their manufacturing costs were around 20¢/W – with the IRA, they’re on a pathway to a 2¢/W product. Since First Solar has nearly sold out for the upcoming few years, and may not feel enough pressure to reach pricing that low, this author doesn’t expect the most extreme lows to materialize. But according to this report, there are plenty of other solar module manufacturers that could get to an essential cost of 6-10¢/W. more:
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/10/14/could-we-see-u-s-solar-electricity-for-0-per-kwh/

RELATED: This Nation Is Building the World's Cheapest Solar Farm

Popular Mechanics | Caroline Delbert | MAY 1, 2020

A collaboration in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) will help to install the world's cheapest solar farm in 2022. The public electric utility in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the U.A.E., chose a bid that will bring the cost of solar power down to 1.35 cents per kilowatt hour. The U.A.E. is home to many of the world’s biggest solar farms because of its extremely abundant sunshine and wide, flat, empty stretches of land...more
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a30266828/worlds-cheapest-solar-farm/

[bucolic_frolic]

1. CO2 is the most pressing problem

but free energy will spur unlimited growth, or at least growth limited by factors other than energy, such as raw materials, labor, land.

Will we ever find a substitute for old growth timber? Will we mine land fills for metals, energy? Will all the free energy in the world contribute one gallon of clean water?

[FBaggins]

4. That's ok... it isn't free anyway

The author has confused “paid for indirectly through taxes” for an actual cost reduction.

Incentives to jump-start an industry make sense, but if you effectively get to the point (like China did) that the government is just buying up the production… you can’t argue that the product itself is made viable somehow.

Fossil fuels price increases should be making solar dramatically more competitive. Government subsidies can still make sense in certain conditions… but never to the point where they are essentially free.

[Finishline42]

6. Speaking of CO2...

One of the challanges of wind and solar is that there a times when there is an over supply and because we don't have enough storage, it gets wasted (early this year CA utilities were paying Arizona to take excess solar electricity). Batteries are one method but here's another way to store that electricity...

The world’s first CO2 battery for long-duration energy storage is being commercialized

Energy Dome sited the CO2 Battery in Sardinia to favor speed to market and ease of execution, as it’s in an industrial area with an existing electrical connection. Further, Sardinia currently uses coal, but the fossil fuel will be phased out by 2025. The battery can be paired with both wind and solar.

Energy Dome began its operations in February 2020 and has progressed from a concept to full testing at multimegawatt scale in just over two years.

Energy Dome Founder and CEO Claudio Spadacini said:

The CO2 Battery is now commercially available to make cost-effective renewable energy dispatchable on a global scale.

Energy Dome asserted that its CO2 Battery facility in Sardinia uses off-the-shelf equipment available from a globally established supply chain, and said that rapid global deployment of the CO2 Battery is now possible without bottlenecks.

The company has secured multiple commercial agreements, including one with Italian utility A2A for the construction of the first 20 MW-5h facility. Earlier this year, Energy Dome also signed a nonexclusive license agreement with Ansaldo Energia, a power generation plant and component provider, to build long-duration energy storage projects in Italy, Germany, the Middle East, and Africa.

Spadacini explained how it works to Bloomberg in May:

To charge the battery, we take CO2 at near atmospheric temperature and pressure and we compress it. The heat that is generated during compression is stored. When we exchange the thermal energy with the atmosphere, the CO2 gas becomes liquid.

To generate and dispatch electricity, the liquid CO2 is heated up and converted back into a gas that powers a turbine, which generates power. The CO2 gas is always contained and the entire system is sealed.

We don’t use any exotic materials. The technology uses steel, CO2 and water. So there is no dependency on rare earth materials like cobalt or lithium. This makes our technology geopolitically independent. It can be produced everywhere and it can be used everywhere.

https://electrek.co/2022/06/28/worlds-first-co2-battery/

[mahatmakanejeeves]

3. No. NT

[NNadir]

5. This already happens at times, which is a drives climate change and high energy prices.

Only preternaturally delusional people don't realize that the sunlight goes to zero intensity for long periods every day.

Since they don't give a rat's ass about the environment, and care even less about human poverty, they like to pretend that solar energy is reliable, and worse, that it's clean and sustainable.

When electricity prices go to zero, electricity prices go to zero.

This makes all investments in electrical infrastructure worthless, including systems that are reliable. The cost is thus transferred to reliable systems, the redundant systems necessary to keep the lights on when the sun goes down, and when demand peaks are very high, which is in almost every country, the late afternoon and early evening hours. Because these systems are also worthless for the short periods that the sun is shining brightly, when clouds are absent, or the solar cells are covered with ash from burning forests resulting from a century of bullshit about solar and wind, which continue to produce trivial amounts of energy and have done nothing to address climate change.

This is why the highest consumer electricity prices in the world are found in countries with stupid energy policies like Germany and Denmark. Redundancy is not only expensive, it's environmentally disastrous.

It's not bourgeois people who bear this cost, assholes who make their own back up systems by buying expensive batteries because they can afford them. The cost falls on the poor.

Part what is driving the on going disaster of climate change is myopia and selective attention by advocates of tearing the shit out of the planet to put in solar crap and wind crap that will all be landfill in twenty years, while offering thermodynamic and environmentally contemptuous drivel about nonsense like hydrogen and batteries, neither of which are clean nor sustainable.

Have a pleasant Sunday.