Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by typon 1243 days ago
Maintenance of the power inverter, batteries, wiring, and the panels themselves means that marginal cost is not zero, and as long as we don't know the solution to entropy, will never be "essentially" zero.
2 comments

All of those things happen the same, and cost the same amount, whether 10 kWh are produced or 11 kWh. The marginal cost of the last kWh is zero for these items.

There is thermal wear on the power management and voltage step-up electronics, but it is small unless design parameters are exceeded in going to 11. So maybe those components would have to be replaced ten milliseconds earlier than otherwise.

Those things need to be maintained so seldom that they won't be far from 0 though. Systems without moving parts are nice like that.