Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

People use way too much power for battery storage to be viable. The average household consumes 28.9kwh in a day (in 2017), which is way more than rooftop solar can provide.

Maybe when we have smaller houses and don't have a bajillion devices plugged in all the time.

It's amazing how much less of something you use when you don't have basically an endless, cheap supply of it. You tend to conserve a lot more because you know it's finite and will run out if you use too much.

The majority of solar comes from Utility scale about 60/40 vs. rooftop solar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Stat...

> The average household consumes 28.9kwh in a day

Maybe in the USA.

> which is way more than rooftop solar can provide.

Maybe in your part of the world this is true, but it is not unrealistic in many places.

Also, why are you limiting your thinking to rooftop solar?

> The average household consumes 28.9kwh in a day, which is way more than rooftop solar can provide.

The average house doesn't need to source 100% of their electricity from rooftop solar. Electric utilities are how most people will still get a significant portion of their electricity, even those with rooftops solar.

Also, the average household's electricity needs could be reduced significantly while increasing comfort via better insulation, air sealing, and higher efficiency appliances.

Most people will have a big battery in their garage capable of powering their house for days pretty soon.

Once solar generating costs are further reduced, there needs to be improved effort on improving local infrastructure (within a single residence). Getting rid of DC-AC-DC conversion would be a huge improvement. If we standardize on a DC system (48v?) then household devices can be more efficient without the conversions.

The article is referring to the prices in the US.

When land is at a premium, most people aren't going to cover their yard with solar panels. . Rooftop is already generally accepted.

Unless battery prices drastically drop, 2 days of power is 60kwh (quoting earlier figure), even if batteries were $100/kwh, that's $6000 in batteries (or ~$9 if you're on grid)

edit: bad math, had $60k

Probably in a lot of countries in the future. One common reason countries have lower average household electricity consumption is the widespread use of non-electric heating, and there's been a huge push to switch to electric heating for environmental reasons.

In a northern latitude, it looks like I could (more than) meet my electric use with ~1/2 of the southern face of my roof (so like 25% of the roof area).

It wouldn't be enough for winter heating though.

I think you're off by an order of magnitude there? $100/kwh * 60kwh is $6000, not 60 grand.

What makes you think they won't drop significantly? PV panel costs have dropped by dramtically due to efficiencies of scale, and batteries are only just seeing production begin to ramp up.

Not in Australia, where we have much more roof-top solar (and which is less than half-the-price installed of roof-top in the US)

Interesting! Do you have any idea why it's so much cheaper?

Shipping costs from China, who is the source of key materials?

You might think so, but no. It's the wrong order of magnitude.

That could add maybe US$2000 per TEU, which is 21 tonnes of cargo such as solar panels. You can ship a TEU anywhere in the world for US$3000 or less. A 1m² solar panel might weigh 20 kg, so that's roughly 1000 solar pannels, or US$2 per solar panel. That solar panel is about 200 Wp, so this works out to US$0.01 of shipping cost per peak watt. Or less.

The solar module itself costs some US$0.18/Wp wholesale (the article cites higher prices, but see http://pvinsights.com/ https://www.solarserver.de/pv-modulpreise/ https://www.energytrend.com/solar-price.html for more detailed and reliable pricing info), and the whole installation including the panels maybe US$0.50/Wp. So there's no way that an extra US$0.01/Wp could double the cost of the installation. Bump it by 2% maybe.

China isn't the source of key materials. There aren't any key materials; the ingredients in PV cells, except for silver, are abundant everywhere. It's the source of the fully manufactured photovoltaic modules, a finished product that you can prop up in the sun and connect to a battery through a diode. If shipping costs were so high relative to the value of the finished product, every country would have its own solar-cell manufacturing plants, the way every country has its own liquid-oxygen plants, and there wouldn't be such a thing as a worldwide concentration of PV manufacturing in China.

I don't get it, are these built on people's yards?

https://constructionreviewonline.com/biggest-projects/top-5-...

how long before I can buy a Tesla for 50% of what one costs now? If the batteries are going to get so cheap we should be seeing some great price drops in electric cars. If not ... why not? And that reason will probably apply to battery energy storage too.

American houses tend to be bigger than those in other countries, and built with poor insulation than say those of europe.

Hyper-competitive low-margin market, many very efficient vertically-integrated solar sales businesses (sales, installation, logistics), lower selling costs (very engaged consumers), most homes single story so lower installation costs, and lower permitting and connection costs.

Thank you very much! Do you have any idea how the costs of a typical Australian rooftop system break down? I'm curious about the relative importance of these factors.

I should have been more explicit in my post. I was talking about car batteries. Tesla cars have batteries in the 60-100 kWh range, and Vehicle-To-Home (V2H) power is becoming a real thing, and I predict over the next few years it could have a large impact on the ability of the grid to use that energy storage to help even out renewable power variability.

See https://electrek.co/2020/05/19/tesla-bidirectional-charging-...

*panels