| It will be interesting to see how solar evolves in the coming decade in US, maybe it could reach the current share of gas produced electricity, 40% . The country with the highest share of solar electricity is Hungary 27%, but they are part of the European electricity grid with lot of export and import. https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/hungary Gas turbine manufacturing factories are very expensive and gas turbine manufacturers have already experienced turbine market crashed in 2018. Nobody wants to sit on loans for expensive idle factories in 5 years when the AI hype stops. https://www.primary.vc/articles/the-gas-turbine-bottleneck-r... Per MWh costs of residential solar are usually 2x per MWh costs of utility scale solar. Utility scale solar power plants buy and install solar panels at larger scale and cheaper. Most places can't run on residential solar + battery 365 days in year and need grid connectivity. As more homes install residential solar + battery the grid costs, which are independent of the number of hours when the grid is used, will stay the same. The amount of consumed gas will be lower. The costs of building gas power plants will stay the same (they are the backup), the costs of maintaining gas power plants will increase (more frequent ramping up and down). "Ramping damage in gas turbines refers to the wear and tear or stress that occurs as a result of frequent changes in the operating load, also known as load cycling. Gas turbines are designed to operate efficiently at steady-state conditions, and deviations from these conditions can lead to various issues" https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeff-shan-a8962b36_ramping-da... |
The only problem with this comparison is the cost of the grid, which at least in the US will dwarf the savings from doing utility scale installs.
One nice thing about residential solar is that it greatly reduces the need for transmission, while perhaps requiring some short-term enhancement on distribution. And ideally dumping a bunch of storage at grid distribution nodes in the form of a container of batteries would solve a ton of problems and reduce costs a lot. This is of course heavily resisted by utilities because in most places in the US they make their money on T&D costs, so cutting those is a threat to their existence.