I work in solar, and here's my favorite climate change joke:<p>"They say we won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!"<p>Solar is no longer an experimental thing, and the industry is now focused on scaling. How can we deploy more solar faster? It's ridiculous how cheap panels have gotten, but a significant amount of the cost savings in the past few years is coming from soft cost (logistics, overhead, engineering, etc.) and balance of system (wires, fasteners, inverters, etc.) price reduction. And there's still a ton more to improve, and we really need the help of the tech community (y'all are good at scaling, after all).<p>Unfortunately, I always get the sense here on HN that the tech community still thinks of solar as a novelty or experimental. Why? Is it because you're still reeling from the 2008 cleantech bust? Is it because the bay area has good climate and you don't have to pay $400/mo for air conditioning in the summer?<p>I'd love to hear some feedback on why you're not interested in getting involved in the solar industry. What would convince you to work as a software engineer for a cleantech company? What would convince you to start a cleantech software (i.e. cleanweb) startup?
$27.4 per mwh is as cheap as buring raw crude in Saudi Arabia.<p>Math:
1 BOE is 1.7 MW/h<p>Cost of getting 1 barrel out from the oilfield with all infrastructure costs amortized: $6<p>Accrued logistics costs to get the oil from the oilfield to the power station + powerplant operation cost/per unit of power: $8<p>Per BOE cost: $14<p>Cost per MW/h of generated electricity assuming 30% conversion efficiency (SA is a hot place): $14/1.7/.30 = $27.5
More evidence (as if we needed it) of just how ridiculous Trump's promise to revive the US coal industry is.<p><a href="http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/22/trumps-big-plan-for-the-coal-industry-just-got-even-harder-than-it-was-yesterday.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/22/trumps-big-plan-for-the-coal-...</a>
Original source: <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/world-energy-hits-a-turning-point-solar-that-s-cheaper-than-wind" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/world-ene...</a>
These numbers don't take the cost of storage into account. It doesn't matter how many kilowatts you can produce at noon when you need them at midnight. Simply taking kilowatt hours produced and multiplying by the average market price is not a good estimate of the value produced by solar. Sure those numbers work now while solar is only providing a fraction of the total energy being consumed but if solar were to become the dominate energy source we would have to solve the storage problem and this will greatly increase production costs. Solar is still more expensive than the alternatives when considered at realistic scales.
Related discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217320" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217320</a>