Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Jweb_Guru 1972 days ago
While that's true, it's also true that the total cost of solar (taking storage into account) is far lower now than it was even 10-15 years ago. The logical thing we should be doing now is building massive amounts of storage, rather than complaining about how solar costs don't take it into account. As an added bonus, large pumped storage or fuel cell batteries can be reused for any renewable source (unlike solutions like concentrated solar), so any improvements in one can be mostly decoupled from improvements in the other, which is why I find the insistence that people add the cost of the batteries to the cost of solar to be pretty wearying. And I don't find arguments that pumped storage takes a long time and has high maintenance costs to build very convincing when the alternative, nuclear, has exactly the same requirement.
1 comments

We have lots of solar in Germany (50% renewables in our electricity mix) and we’re paying the highest price per kWh in the whole world.

Let alone that we’re emitting 400 grams of CO2 per kWh on average while it’s just 50 grams on average in France.

Since you seem to be from Germany, you must be fully aware that the emissions problem we have is one caused by our coal power plants and not by renewables (which also means that the emissions stats that you repeatedly posted here no longer feel like an honest mistake but rather disingenuous)

You are also conflating production cost and end user prices.

Germany counts a bunch of incredibly dumb stuff as "renewables," including wood burning, which is just one of the many reasons Germany's emissions are far higher than France's (another is continued support for coal use for political reasons). It gets only about 10% of its energy from solar.
Sadly it's not just Germany, the whole EU is transitioning from coal to wood in poor parts of the countries, and governments are helping in it.
Your cost is due to how the policies are set up, not because the tech is not up to par. Countries that invested in solar early on have a similar problem, where they funded the progress but their own solar installations are now outdated. To get out of solar now would be a mistake since you'd not even reap the benefits of that early investment.
The reason for this is that we bankrolled much of the initial trajectory of cost decline. Unfortunately, we stopped investing heavily when prices dropped due the black/red grand coalition not wanting to risk losing votes over potentially higher power prices. Now we are stuck at high Co2 and high prices.
The price of electricity is not only generation cost, which represent c. 30% of your total energy bill.
Taxes to pay feed in tarif, contract for difference for renewable being another 30%