Solar now being the cheapest energy source made its rounds on Lemmy some weeks ago, if I remember correctly. I just found this graphic and felt it was worth sharing independently.
Imagine how steep that line would be if the fossil fuel lobbies hadn’t been fighting it tooth and nail all these years
much more important: we’d be years ahead with storage technology.
I could be wrong but I don’t think there’s any evidence that the fossil fuel industry worked to suppress storage research/funding. Pretty much every IT industry has a huge interest in improving battery tech and energy storage in general, it’s just that we’ve already hit all the low hanging fruit from a chemistry standpoint
I remember hearing stories about oil companies buying up battery patents. But this may be because they want to collect the royalties, not necessarily to suppress any kind of research. But like you said, I don’t think there is any evidence… But if they were suppressing the technology, we probably would never know about it.
My dad was a VP at an oil major and has a literal story of an LNG tech being bought and shelved. Yet he’s still just like the people he complains about in that story. They’re a strange generation, these boomers.
Gotta keep prices high yo
It would be less steep because solar costs would have come down earlier.
That would make it steeper, no?
This part of the graph (2009-2019) would be less steep, because this sharp drop would have happened earlier - we’d be further along the curve
Without saying anything about politics, environment, or source:
Why, for the love of Satan, does this graph have only 2 data points per source?
Why use a line chart 📉 for that?
This is clear bar chart territory 📊.
I know it’s not ideal, but a bar chart design could either focus on the difference over time for each source, or the difference between sources at each time. This plot gives a good representation of both the differences between sources and the change in time for each source. It really drives home how far solar prices have fallen relative to other sources and in absolute terms.
It’s called a slope chart and it has several benefits compared to bar charts:
- https://datavizproject.com/data-type/slope-chart/
- https://seeingdata.org/taketime/inside-the-chart-slope-graph/
- https://www.storytellingwithdata.com/blog/2020/7/27/what-is-a-slopegraph
I for one think this is much better than using a bar chart for this use case, as the angled arrows make it immediately obvious the information that matters the most here (the rate of change) while still keeping it contextualized (by relative positions). The bar chart version of this would inevitably look more cluttered and would not be more effective in conveying the incredible progress in solar costs.
The cost of the panels themselves doesn’t seem to have gone down nearly that much.
OP’s data is LCOE, which takes into account much more than $/MW. Rather importantly, expected operating liftetime is a major component (and historically THE major economic downside of PV).
IIRC, LCOE is calculated for utility-scale solar, which has seen a 500% decrease according to your chart.
Finally, Neither chart specifies, but if OP’s is in constant dollars and yours isn’t that would explain a lot as well.
And this shows exactly why investing in nuclear is not the answer every tech bro thinks it is. Its far cheaper to built renewable and more importantly far far far quicker.
It is AN answer, but also not the only answer. Generating and moving power around is extremely complex and just seeing “Solar cheaper per Watt” and defining it as the best in all cases is silly. If you changed the axis to be size per MWh, then you would draw a totally different conclusion.
It was the answer. Now solar is so cheap that spamming panels and investing into ways to save the excess energy seems cheaper. By the time nuclear plants are done you’re going to be at least 8 years into the future. Solar panels however are directly implementable. And even cheaper now.
Solar still doesn’t work at all night, no matter how cheap it gets.
It’s not very useful for most of Northern Europe and birth America during the winter months. Even if it was free you’d still need alternatives.
Yup, and you’re not going to be able to make enough batteries, and if you could, it would be prohibitively expensive.
There are other options for energy storage, but they all have massive caveats. We’ll need something reliable as a backbone until we find a good way to store power.
This is the issue: you can use batteries to store energy for the night during the day. Batteries that store over longer periods such as long cloudy spells and large seasonal differences are too expensive. On the other hand, on a global scale this is really mostly a concern in Northern Europe (where I happen to live).
Even overnight storage is expensive.
But yes, it needs to work in both the summer and the winter, so anything not at the equator is going to have seasonal challenges. I’m excited about a lot of innovating battery proposals, such as stacking heavy boxes and hydrogen generation, but none of those are anywhere near capable of production scale. The massive gorilla in the room is using EV batteries during the night and recharging them during the day (the car would reserve enough for your morning commute), but that’s largely theoretical and charging infrastructure is far from sufficient to make that work at scale (not to mention I don’t think there are enough EVs). We have trouble making enough batteries to keep up with EV demand, so there’s no hope of using conventional batteries to actually transition a large countries anytime soon.
So until we solve those problems, we need an energy backbone. Nuclear is a great option, especially if we can destigmatize it so construction can be cheaper. I live in an area that would be perfect for it (Utah USA, just stick it in the desert on the other side of the mountains), yet people keep blocking every proposal out of FUD. So a lot of our energy comes from coal and gas, and we sell a our excess to California, which is utterly stupid since we have geography that collects pollution and makes the air unhealthy to breathe.
Sweden represent :,(
