alt Hacker News> This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x.
That's a huge "if". The cost of PV panels has come down by a factor of 10 in the last 13 years or so, that's true. I doubt another 10x decrease is possible, because at some point you run into material costs.
But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total installation cost of utility-scale PV. This means that even if the panels were free, it would only reduce the cost by a factor of 1.5.
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> But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total installation cost of utility-scale PV. This means that even if the panels were free, it would only reduce the cost by a factor of 1.5.
1. Do the other costs scale with the number of panels? Because if the sites are 5 times the scale of the current ones I would imagine there are considerable scale based cost efficiencies, both within projects and across projects (through standardization and commoditization).
2. Vertically mounted bifacial PV already greatly smoothes the power production curve throughout the day, improving profitability. Lower cost panels make the downside of requiring more panels in such a setup almost non-existent. Additionally, they reduce maintenance/cleaning costs by being mounted vertically.
3. Battery/energy storage (which further improve profitability) costs are dropping and can drop further.
Also, please address the matter of using the overprovisioned power in summer. Possible projects are underground thermal storage ("Pit Thermal Energy Storage", only works in places where heating is required in winter), desalination, producing ammonia for fertilizer, and producing jet fuel.
> That's a huge "if". The cost of PV panels has come down by a factor of 10 in the last 13 years or so, that's true. I doubt another 10x decrease is possible, because at some point you run into material costs.
A factor of 5 is certainly within the realms of physics, given the numbers I've seen floating around. Note that prices are changing rapidly and any old price may not be current: around these parts, they're already so cheap they're worth it as fencing material even if you don't bother to power anything with them.
> But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total installation cost of utility-scale PV. This means that even if the panels were free, it would only reduce the cost by a factor of 1.5.
This should have changed your opinion, because it shows how the material costs are not the most important factor: we can get up to a 3x cost reduction by improving automation of construction of utility-scale PV plants.
I think I've seen some HN startups with this as their pitch, I've definitely seen some IRL with this pitch.