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by smokey42 4635 days ago
Nothing grows as fast and crazy as Photovoltaics right now. It's doubling roughly every 2 years (slightly less than 2 years). I don't know if we can scale up coal/nuclear at the same rate, but I guess that's not even possible.

So when PV prices fall to the bottom (trends indicate they will), electricity prices produced by PV will fall as well. Coal/Nuclear/etc will become unviable. What do we do then? Electricity will be basically free then.
3 comments
tomp 4635 days ago
No. What is missing is batteries. Remember, photovoltaics only work part of the day, and not every day. Same with wind.

In reality, what is happening is that because of "alternative" sources of energy, electricity is plentiful during the day, and scarce during the evening. Also, only turbines (hydro/thermo power plants) can be adjusted to keep current and voltage in the network constant, so we still need them, but because of the "green" sources, they are becoming less profitable for the operators.

TL;DR: alternative energy sources cause us to have too much electricity during the day and too little during the evening, both of which is costing us money.

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mcv 4635 days ago
At some point the turbines may have to be treated as part of the infrastructure, rather than part of the production.

If you produce energy, you get paid for it, but also pay a levy depending on how well your supply fits the demand. The levy goes to whoever fills in the gaps.

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tanzam75 4635 days ago
Some deregulated markets are already paying for the turbines as infrastructure.

For example, the PJM interconnection holds an annual capacity auction. This essentially pays for the capital costs of keeping gas turbines around, at idle. The cost of actually running the turbines is covered by a separate daily auction for actual electricity production.

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rwmj 4635 days ago
PV is a very long way from being free right now. Even with subsidies, it's out of most people's budget to put up solar panels, and then you have to replace them every 20 years, and pay for an inverter to use the power (inverter prices and installation costs are not coming down, rather they are going the other way).
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michaelt 4635 days ago
You realise there's a big difference between 'basically free' and 'actually free' right?
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