alt Hacker News> 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.
> 1. Do the other costs scale with the number of panels?
Mostly yes. Once you're at utility-scale, installation and maintainance should scale 1:1 with number of panels. Inverters and balancing systems should also scale 1:1, although you might be able to save a bit here if you're willing to "waste" power during peak insolation.
But think about it this way: If it was possible to reduce non-panel costs by a factor of 5 simply by building 5x larger solar plants, the operating companies would already be doing this. With non-panel costs around 65%, this would result in 65% * (1 - 1/5) = 52% savings and give them a huge advantage over the competition.
> 2. Vertically mounted bifacial PV […] 3. Battery […] costs are dropping
I agree that intra-day fluctuations will be solved by cheaper panels and cheaper batteries, especially once sodium-ion battery costs fall significantly. But I'm specifically talking about seasonal storage here.
> Also, please address the matter of using the overprovisioned power in summer.
I'm quite pessimistic about that. Chemical plants tend to be extremely capital-intensive and quickly become non-profitable if they're effectively idle during half of the year. Underground thermal storage would require huge infrastructure investments into distribution, since most places don't already have district heating.
Sorry, very busy today so I can't go into all details, but I still wanted to give you an answer.