[xbmcuser]

You are missing that cost of electricity is also going to keep falling because of solar and batteries. This year in China my table cloth math says it is $0.05 pkwh and following the cost decline trajectory be under $0.01 in 10 years

[patrickhogan1]

Bingo! Solar energy moves us toward a future where a household's energy needs become nearly cost-free.

Energy Need: The average home uses 30 kWh/day, requiring 6 kW/hour over 5 peak sunlight hours.

Multijunction Panels: Lab efficiencies are already at 47% (2023), and with multiple years of progress, 60% efficiency is probable.

Efficiency Impact: At 60% efficiency, panels generate 600 W/m², requiring 10 m² (e.g., 2 m × 5 m) to meet energy needs.

This size can fit on most home roofs, be mounted on a pole with stacked layers, or even be hung through an apartment window.

[arcticbull]

Everyone always forgets that they only perform at less than half of their rated capacity and require significant battery installations. Rooftop solar plus storage is actually more expensive than nuclear on a comparable system LCOE due to their lack of efficiency of scale. Rooftop solar plus storage is about the most expensive form of electricity on earth, maybe excluding gas peaker plants.

[xbmcuser]

Everyone also forgets the speed of price decline for solar and battery your statement is completely false propaganda made up by power companies. Today rooftop solar and battery is cost competitive to nuclear already in many countries like India

[arcticbull]

Do you have some citations?

[patrickhogan1]

You’re right that rooftop solar and storage have costs and efficiency limits, but those are improving quickly.

Rooftop solar harnesses energy from the sun, which is powered by nuclear fusion—arguably the most effective nuclear reactor in our solar system.

[nateglims]

It varies by a lot of factors but it’s way less than half. Photovoltaic panels have around 10% capacity utilization vs 50-70% for a gas or nuke plant.

[theendisney]

The thing everyone forgets is that all good energy technology is seized by governments for military purposes and to preserve the status quo. God knows how far it progressed.

What a joke

[jdhwosnhw]

While I agree with your general assessment, I think your conclusion is a bit off. You’re assuming 1kw/m^2, which is only true with the sun directly overhead. A real-world solar setup gets hit with several factors of cosine (related to roof pitch, time of day, day of year, and latitude) that conspire to reduce the total output.

For example, my 50 sq m set up, at -29 deg latitude, generated your estimated 30 kwh/day output. I have panels with ~20% efficiency, suggesting that at 60% efficiency, the average household would only get to around half their energy needs with 10 sq m.

Yes, solar has the potential to drastically reduce energy costs, but even with free energy storage, individual households aren’t likely to achieve self sustainability.

[sahmeepee]

Average US home.

In Europe it is around 6-7 kWh/day. This might increase with electrification of heating and transport, but probably nothing like as much as the energy consumption they are replacing (due to greater efficiency of the devices consuming the energy and other factors like the quality of home insulation.)

In the rest of the world the average home uses significantly less.

[barney54]

But the cost of electricity is not falling—it’s increasing. Wholesale prices have decreased, but retail rates are up. In the U.S. rates are up 27% over the past 4 years. In Europe prices are up too.

[NoLinkToMe]

That's a bit of a non-statement. Virtually all prices increase because of money supply, but we consider things to get cheaper if their prices grow less fast than inflation / income.

General inflation has outpaced the inflation of electricity prices by about 3x in the past 100 years. In other words, electricity has gotten cheaper over time in purchasing power terms.

And that's whilst our electricity usage has gone up by 10x in the last 100 years.

And this concerns retail prices, which includes distribution/transmission fees. These have gone up a lot as you get complications on the grid, some of which is built on a century old design. But wholesale prices (the cost of generating electricity without transmission/distribution) are getting dirt cheap, and for big AI datacentres I'm pretty sure they'll hook up to their own dedicated electricity generation at wholesale prices, off the grid, in the coming decades.

[xbmcuser]

Most large compute clusters would be buying electricity at wholesale price not at retail price. But anyway solar and battery prices have just reached the tipping point this year only now the longer power companies keep retail prices high the more people will defect from the grid and install their own solar + batteries.

[lucubratory]

I am not certain because I've been very focused on the o3 news, but at least yesterday neither the US nor Europe were part of China.

[lxgr]

But data centers pay wholesale prices or even less (given that especially AI training and, to a lesser extend, inference clusters can load shed like few other consumers of electricity).

[fulafel]

And this is great news as long as marginal production (the most expensive to produce, first to turn on/off according to demand) of electricity is fossils.

[necovek]

If climate change ends up changing weather profiles and we start seeing many more cloudy days or dust/mist in the air, we'll need to push those solar panel above (all the way to space?) or have many more of them, figure out transmission to the ground and costs will very much balloon.

Not saying this will happen, but it's risky to rely on solar as the only long-term solution.

[nateglims]

Is it going to fall significantly for data centers? Industrial policy for consumer power is different from subsidizing it for data centers and if you own grid infrastructure why would you tank the price by putting up massive amounts of capital?

[xbmcuser]

It's the same about using the cloud or using your own infrastructure there will be a point where building your own solar and battery plant is cheaper than what they are charging they will need to follow the price decline if they want to keep the customers if not there will be mass scale grid defections.

[nateglims]

I don’t think this reflects the reality of the power industry. Data centers are the only significant growth in actual generated power in decades and hyperscalers are already looking at very bespoke solutions.

The heavy commodification of networking and compute brought about by the internet and cloud aligned with tech company interests in delivering services or content to consumers. There does not seem to be an emerging consensus that data center operators also need to provide consumer power.

[xbmcuser]

It was not the reality of the power industry but will be soon as we have not had a source of electricity that is the cheapest and is getting cheaper and easy to install this is something unique.

I don't see Google, Amazon, Microsoft or any company pay $10 for something if building it themselves will cost them $5. Either the price difference will reach a point where investing into power production themselves makes sense or the power companies decrease prices. Looking at how all 3 have already been investing in power production over the last decade themselves either to get better prices or for PR.

[lyu07282]

But didn't we liberalized energy markets for that reason, if anyone could undercut the market like that wouldn't that happen automatically and the prices go down anyway? /s