Arnt
5 hours ago
I saw a tweet the other day that said that solar and batteries are growing so cheap that the combination will shortly be a good way to supply night-time power. I wouldn't have dreamed of it a few years ago.
toomuchtodo
5 hours ago
This [1] recent FT times piece indicates solar PV coming out of China is down to 10 cents/watt. This [2] other piece indicates LFP cells are down to $53/kwh.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/69e4cb33-3615-4424-996d-5aee9d1af... | https://archive.today/11TFI
aero-glide2
5 hours ago
If it's 10 cents per watt why are prices on Amazon still 6 times that? https://www.amazon.in/WAAREE-TOPCON-575-Bifacial-Performance...
pjc50
5 hours ago
user
5 hours ago
Workaccount2
5 hours ago
I have wondered this for years since the price for 200W panels stayed pretty flat for half a decade or more. Around $1/watt.
It turns out that these calculations are for utility scale purchases. You need to be buying thousands of panels to realize them.
That being said, I have noticed in the last year or so that you can find some pretty good individual panel deals, closer to $0.5/watt.
martinald
an hour ago
Just having a look in the UK and you can get 430W panels for £59.95 (excluding VAT, similar to sales tax) in bulk, marginally higher for smaller quantities. At current exchange rates that's $80, so 18c/watt?
https://www.solartradesales.co.uk/8-33-solar-430w-full-black...
toomuchtodo
5 hours ago
aero-glide2
5 hours ago
Interesting, even with the 40% import duties (China to India), local prices still are very high. Im not sure how to explain why no one is using this arbitrage.
csomar
5 hours ago
Usually the arbitrage is a mirage (though sometimes it's real). Many times there are hidden taxes in the form of government bribery and special red tapes that requires paying the relevant parties. You only find out this stuff when you start doing business as the details are not included in the manual.
criddell
5 hours ago
Because that's what people are willing to pay.
Tade0
5 hours ago
In my region of the world(Eastern Europe) I've seen monocrystalline solar panels in stores for the equivalent $0.25/W, which is crazy considering that electricity here is around $0.20/kWh.
I could use only a quarter of the generated energy and still break even on the panels in 5 years.
conk
5 hours ago
Yup, I just bought 60 kWh of LFP batteries. Total with shipping was $3100.
thebruce87m
2 hours ago
That’s insane. That’s the size of a decent EV battery.
proee
5 hours ago
Where did you buy from? Also, what is your end application?
bamboozled
5 hours ago
I have a theory. China is leading in solar and making it dirt cheap to undermine the USA and any other resource based economies without actually saying they're doing it.
It's a perfect weapon really, make energy so cheap, reliable and efficient that it destroys the petro-dollar.
As someone concerned about climate change, it's a wonderful thing but I think the hegemony should watch it and adapt.
Arnt
4 hours ago
Yours is in the class of theories that presumes that some large group is perfectly organised, communicates perfectly and able to keep that ability secret.
dopidopHN
19 minutes ago
Like a single autocratic government.
innagadadavida
3 hours ago
The only hole in this theory is that solar currently doesn’t help with car and automobile usage.
fragmede
3 hours ago
If I drive to my office and use their solar charger to charge my EV (which conveniently comes from China) while it's there, or if I'm lucky enough to have a wfh job and then charge it during the day while I'm working, why wouldn't it?
Though the other thing to note is that Texas and thus the US is now a net exporter of oil, the opposite of the 70' oil crisis.
Regardless of their intentions, energy independence is a huge thing for a country's sovereignty.
throwup238
5 hours ago
That’s already the case at grid scale in more expensive markets like California. We’ve been supplementing night time power generation with batteries for years now.
Between 5 and 10pm yesterday, batteries supplied more than twice the power that our nuclear reactors did: https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply
The grid has become so expensive due to the cost of fire proofing infrastructure that residential installs are a no-brainer if you can find someone to do the install for a reasonable price. DIY is even cheaper.
toomuchtodo
5 hours ago
Additional context: https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo... ("California Energy Storage System Survey Dashboard")
pstrateman
5 hours ago
> The grid has become so expensive due to the cost of fire proofing infrastructure
Power in California was incredibly expensive long before any of the money was going towards fire proofing.
ChainOfFools
4 hours ago
There are some very big outlier exceptions to this however. In a handful of markets (such as the city of Riverside) which are served by a nonprofit municipal power authority with its own generation and distribution, local rates are decoupled from the crises plaguing PGE (and to a lesser extent SDGE, etc).
residential power costs are substantially lower for customers in these areas vs their immediate neighbors - out-of-pocket power bills are as little as half or a third of for-profit statewide utilities for the same sustained consumption during peak usage times.
rasz
3 hours ago
> twice the power that our nuclear reactors did
Because California forced Nuclear suppliers to throttle down to "make room for renewables", no idea who thought this decision makes any sense.
opwieurposiu
5 hours ago
At 85°C, you can store around 10kWh of solar energy in an average sized water heater. This cut the power bill for my small house about in half.
Fun project, I ended up making a simulator app with fancy graphs and stuff.