[caminante]

> Solar and batteries have been and will continue to he the cheapest source of power, and globally, deployment is accelerating.

I think storage is great and solar has a place, but this is not true unless you discard reliability and other features, which should be in the price. Solar plus storage for baseload power matching requires huge overbuilds. Even in the last few years, before the AI hype, installed utility scale renewables costs went up in the US. It's not just the hardware or national politics.

And if you can't get renewables interconnected in a couple years, then the install rate won't lower the carbon of the existing grid mix charging your car.

[mbgerring]

Why would you need to “discard reliability”? What do you think storage is for?

People have been saying that solar will never work for my entire life, and my entire career in clean energy, as I have watched it grow and grow and grow and grow.

You’re right that the interconnect queue is broken. Many, many people are working on this problem. Believing that an extremely tractable bureaucratic hurdle means that solar can’t work is madness.

[caminante]

No, solar reliability requires overbuild and storage to compare accurately on LCOE. Hybrid and overbuild = expensive, so not "cheap/er", which you said.

A lot of people have this misconception about solar even with awareness of the duck curve.

[mbgerring]

Is this still true after a bunch of natural gas infrastructure got blown up this week?

[caminante]

> Solar and batteries have been and will continue...

Yes, your statement is still false. Opposite is true.

[mbgerring]

I don’t think this is correct. You’re arguing that the industry analyses on this subject are wrong because they’re underestimating how much solar + batteries need to be deployed to be as reliable as a gas power plant. So you’re arguing that initial capex (which everyone acknowledges is higher than natural gas) is somewhat higher than existing analyses think it is.

The lifetime of solar panels is also higher than most of these analyses say it is, because both solar and batteries are frequently found to last well beyond their factory-rated lifetimes. So I think you’re wrong without any additional considerations here, so let’s leave that aside.

What you’re saying here is that the lower ongoing opex of solar and batteries is eaten up by the higher initial capex of gas, but you’re saying the prive of natural gas has no impact on this calculation.

I don’t think this makes any sense. Can you explain your thinking here? Can you cite any data on this?

[caminante]

> You’re arguing that the industry analyses on this subject are wrong because they’re underestimating how much solar + batteries need to be deployed to be as reliable as a gas power plant.

No, the industry knows this. Talk to any investor or developer. See the capacity market blowout in PJM because they don't have enough firm power supply to offset the flood of renewables (sans storage). Or just look at the announcements for natural gas turbine demand by datacenters, which need 24/7 power. The overbuild for renewables and storage is insane to hit the same reliability and safety margins.

> So you’re arguing that initial capex (which everyone acknowledges is higher than natural gas) is somewhat higher than existing analyses think it is

It's not just CAPEX. It's also OPEX. LCOE is a normalized ($/MWh) metric that allows for comparison. See Lazard [0] or NREL's analysis [1] on LCOE costs. Note how expensive solar plus storage becomes on an LCOE basis and realistically, you might need way more than 4h batteries to hit reliability targets.

[0] https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...

[1] https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2024/index

> because both solar and batteries are frequently found to last well beyond their factory-rated lifetimes.

BTW, this is like saying you can still use laptops past their 5 year warranty. Yes, but that's not how depreciation, financing, and service levels work. These assets are getting pushed to their limits and not everyone's buying tier 1 suppliers.