> At peak, renewables provide up to ~90% of California's electricity<p>In fact, renewable generation regularly hit more than 100% of load in California during April and June of this year. The peak was 132% of load [0]!<p>How can generation be more than 100% of load? California was exporting power to other regions.<p>We track all this data and more across the United States at Grid Status: <a href="https://www.gridstatus.io/home" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.gridstatus.io/home</a><p>[0] <a href="https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso?record=Maximum%20Renewables%20To%20Load%20Ratio" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso?record=Maximum%20Ren...</a>
Hope it's cool for me to plug this here -- I'm one of the cofounders of a YC-backed startup working on robots that build large-scale solar farms!<p>We basically stick a bunch of industrial robot arms in a shipping container and use them to build solar fields out in the middle of the desert. <a href="https://chargerobotics.com/">https://chargerobotics.com/</a> (we have an open software engineer role for the factory, email in my profile if you want to chat! team is currently 7 people)
I wish home solar was more ... trustworthy?<p>I've looked into having rooftop solar installed a number of times, and every time I've walked away with the feeling that I don't know enough to know what to watch out for, and that there was a high probability that any company I dealt with would be trying to take advantage of my ignorance.
> Solar deployment is now running at about $500 billion per year, which means that about 0.5% of global GDP is being spent on solar deployment. This figure is up an improbable 43% Y/Y<p>What a mind boggling relative and absolute increase.
If Solar provides up to 90% of CA’s peak capacity, why is electricity here so monstrously expensive? Shouldn’t it be nearly the lowest cost because there is no need to pay for fuel?
It's almost as if everything on this earth is a reflection of Sun. We finally figured out how to harvest it at scale without depending on nature in the middle.
Can an American explain to me why there are so many solar scams in the USA?<p>I'm about to bring my 20,000W rooftop array online. In my country I simply got quotes from local professionals and it was painless. I picked the best system that met my needs and they installed within weeks.
Module prices are now $0.130/W - $0.151/W: <a href="https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/09/08/china-solar-module-prices-dive-to-record-low/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/09/08/china-solar-module-pr...</a><p>This is less than the 2030 projections of $0.17/W for modules: <a href="https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/2030-solar-cost-targets" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/2030-solar-cost-t...</a><p>Related, China adds enough new solar and wind every year to cover the total electricity use of many major economies such as Australia and the UK: <a href="https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-renewables-2023" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-renewables-2...</a>
The data is whatever the data is, but measuring in nominal dollars sure seems like the wrong way to approach this. Did 40% more gigawatts get deployed or did the cost of installation labor account for some/most/all of that increase?
> If one takes at face value the estimate that the world will deploy 300–400 GW of solar in 2023 (IEA), and that 1 MW of solar =~ 5 acres, we're deploying roughly 3–4 acres of solar per minute.<p>The thing about solar is location, location, and location. The annual average GHI in the Mojave is over 6 kWh/m2/day while in Alaska it's under 3. Interestingly, Germany, who funded a big push into Solar, has the solar resource of Alaska.<p>So you can't derive the area or cost from a unidimensional installation chart.
Youtube's premier economist/deadpan comedian, Patrick Boyle had an interesting video on 'Electrify Everything' a few weeks ago. It could be seen as pessimistic but I think its a fairly realistic view of the costs involved in moving away from gas and oil for transportation and household & industrial energy demand. In particular, grid capacity is going to have to at least double, if not triple. Perhaps he underestimates a push towards more efficiency (i.e. a one-to-one replacement of relatively inefficient fossil fuel-powered devices in terms of energy usage is an overestimate of demand, I think), but there's little doubt that the price of grid improvements and battery storage is going to at least match the costs of the primary wind/solar energy generation systems:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/w4WfbqE5elk" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/w4WfbqE5elk</a><p>Technologically a complete transition to renewables is entirely plausible, but it's a mistake to try to play down the scale of effort needed - but this doesn't mean it's not possible. Look at the > $10 trillion in global oil infrastructure for comparison - offshore oil rigs, continent-spanning pipelines, gargantuan refinery complexes, a huge fleet of ocean-travelling oil & LNG tankers, etc. Of course replacing all that is going to be a major effort, requiring a significant diversion of civilizational resources to the task.
Despite these very exciting data points you can watch California systematically push against these trends:<p><a href="https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/new-california-rules-would-crush-rooftop-solar-for-renters" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/new-california-ru...</a>
It seems like the neighborhood is the sweet spot for battery deployments - Easier to spread capital allocation, Lower stress on transmission lines.<p>Are any organizations working on neighborhood storage in a big way?
> In Spain, electricity provided by solar increased 8 percentage points Y/Y, from 16% to 24%.<p>This increase is only for the month of July, not Y/Y.
Lots of people on HN only talking about solar recently. Solar will not solve all our energy needs.<p>- Batteries are not cheap, nor renewable. Just because there <i>may</i> be advances in the future does not mean batteries are going to always be cheap and freely available. They are also currently quite dangerous to deal with.<p>- A society based on only solar would have to reduce its power needs in winter, or increase its solar generation capacity to account for winter losses. (Winter losses is largely the shorter daylight hours, but also snow in northern climates)<p>- Solar only works under ideal conditions, which is to say, in daylight, without clouds, smoke, ash, snow, etc. Even if you have batteries to account for occasional environmental losses, those batteries probably won't last for weeks on end in the event of the more bizarre weather that climate change is bringing.<p>- At some point, people run out of land to put panels on. Geography and legal/political boundaries around the world vary. Sometimes there just won't be enough land.<p>- A lot of the cheap manufacturing is centered in one or two countries, which creates a political and economic disadvantage to the rest, if they become over-dependent on this energy generation method. Look at what's happened recently from a loss of access to cheap natural gas.<p>- Transmission/distribution/management is still a significant challenge which is not solved; you can have all the solar generation you'll ever need and still have power shortages.