https://www.aalto.fi/en/news/rapid-growth-of-solar-power-in-...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/plunging-solar-captu...
So-called "natural" monopolies are quite difficult to regulate correctly. And the solution we chose as a society a century ago might not be the right one for today.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Maybe electricity generation shouldn't be a profit seeking enterprise?
Typically, if a person/corporation is clever and figures out a way to reduce costs, they are incentivized heavily to do so because they take the gains, at least for a while until others figure it out too and compete.
With utilities, they are actively incentivized to increase prices as much as possible. This is a crucial distinction for people asking why cheaper electricity generation methods are not resulting in cheaper utility bills: because the regulatory structure is not operating the way it should, and they need to get involved democratically to change the system!
The transmission should of course be state owned due to being a natural monopoly.
(Although, that might not work well in Finland in the summer.)
Too much solar leads to crashing prices which leads to more battery investment. Once the batteries are built, solar prices recover somewhat and solar investment starts to make sense again.
Ideally you wouldn't overshoot too much on the solar and have big price crashes. But if you do overshoot dramatically, the incentive to build batteries increases, so maybe you recover faster.
One of the main ways we've avoided this problem so far is that solar kept getting cheaper.
So it's not really a problem caused by cheap solar, it's just basic market competition, lots of supply with no barrier to entry drives prices down towards the long term marginal cost.
Between batteries, wind, demand response, EVs etc. that slowdown doesn't seem likely to happen.
And the lure of cheaper energy expands solar out horizontally to new markets, speeding up global decarbonisation.
For example a decade ago electricity prices in Nord Pool were relatively stable (and reasonable/lowish). Now it is quite common to either have 0 or even negative prices during summer and artificially set maximums in the autumn/winter. IIRC, the rules were that if the price hit 60% of the maximum, it had to be raised by 1000 €/MWh. It got to 4000 €/MWh (which is 4 € or $4.7/kWh) in 2022 and was supposed to be raised by another 1000, but it was decided not to do it, so I think it stands there right now. But in any case, this is a ridiculous price. As are the negative ones.
It's about nobody making any money, so there will be no incentive to continue building solar.
https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/china-alread...
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-battery-industry-has-en...
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-chinas-bat...
China is leading in both, but I'm more interested in local BESS and other storage deployments locally in northern Europe. I think for example Spain started getting more heavily involved only after their massive blackout. According to those links there is a very large overcapacity in battery production, but I don't see it reflected here. I'm sure it will happen at some point though.
5th October was one such day. From midnight to 17:00 the spot price was negative or zero.
Taxes and distribution costs make the consumer price a lot higher than zero.
I'm in South Africa if relevant, and range anxiety is being alleviated by competition in the vehicle charging space, and municipal grid charging still comes to about 70% cheaper than fuel.
https://aukehoekstra.substack.com/p/batteries-how-cheap-can-...
https://energynews.biz/catls-19-kwh-sodium-ion-claims-face-r...
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/08/catl-sodium-ion-batter...
The discharge curve is also different than lithium ion, so it's easy to see if you actually have a lithium ion battery or a sodium ion.
It's just one metric.
The less you need the grid - the more expensive is what you will pull from it because the infrastructure costs will be spread on fewer kwh.
100 kWh of energy will last the average US house three days. And when you throw in people's EV batteries too...
1) a big part of your energy bill is "connection charge" or similar. Not related to usage but just to be connected at all.
2) they don't allow disconnection
3) most of what you pay in electricity bills is effectively a tax, not for the actual electricity, and isn't really per-kWh. This is masked by the government loading the grid companies up with debt in the past, getting the money and then "making them independent companies", then voting in a levy on tax.
Note I call this masked because the government can't let these companies succeed (it'd be a political disaster if they make real profits, and they can just raise the levy), and they can't let these companies fail (that would mean no more electricity grid for some regions). So it's a matter of time before the government is forced to buy these companies back and all netted out this will just have been a really expensive loan for the government (that past administrations got to spend, and present (it's already begun) and future administrations have to pay)
In some countries there's already talk of giving the grid company the right to charge a connection charge ... when there's no actual grid connection (in Australia), and there isn't even the theoretical option to deliver electricity to an address. Don't worry, they "have plans" to connect everyone (but some of those plans have been there for 80 years and still aren't implemented. But you'll have to pay for just being in the plan)
So the problem is that the government won't let you save money by lowering your usage from normal levels. That would screw up the government budget.
And all they have to do is make connection charge 90%+ of your bill, with some "free" included electricity and your solar installation no longer saves you money.
Now that we have cheaper sources of energy for parts of the day, "base" power is a much less desirable concept. It's gone from a simple and straightforward optimization problem that a middle-schooler could solve to a cost optimization problem that markets and linear solvers can solve.
Now that we have cheap storage, and solar-plus-storage is cheaper than coal in the UK, the cost optimization is getting simpler: get rid of all the base load coal!
Economy 7 off-peak rate was invented to soak up some nuke power unused by industry in the night, IIRC.
"Cannot turn off" power can be as tricky to manage as "cannot turn on", and caused some difficulty for the GB grid operator during covid...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
That study is already old as the prices for batteries have come down a lot more since then.
Getting "18" hours of power, thats actually important (https://timera-energy.com/blog/iberian-price-divergence-on-i...) if you can cover the evening peak, then most of your energy costs disappear.
This is a fallacy, basically. Not least because electricity is by far the most mobile traded commodity in human history. Not enough sun today where you live? Buy your power from across the continent, where they have plenty. Or from your wind generators which are working fine. Or the wind generators across the continent if you have to. Or crank up the hydro dams (most of which rarely run at 100%) a bit to handle the shortfall. Or even fire up an idle gas plant if you absolutely can't get anything else.
The idea that solar and wind aren't (sigh) "real" is a lie that someone sold you. The real world relies on a lot of this stuff already and the promised apocalypse never arrived. Go figure.
Transmission losses are typically very substantial in most grids that are AC based. For example, a cross-country power transmission with the USAs grid would result in ~36% losses (napkin math at about 20% loss per 1000km).
Reality isn't as simple as "ship the electricity" unfortunately; it makes a lot of sense to keep generation near consumption.
Edit: Since people like this comment, take a look at this: https://patternenergy.com/projects/southern-spirit-transmiss...
Here in Norway the limitations of our rather poorly connected energy grid has become very apparent last few years, with 100x price difference between regions that aren't that far apart physically.
While we've been paying "winter prices" during summer, up north they've shut down hydro plants since the prices there are so low it's less than operating costs.
To answer ajross: I'm quite sure that the shutdown of Ringhals and Barsebäck in southern Sweden has had a much greater impact on their and likely southern Norway's prices as well than building for example 10 times the equivalent solar capacity in Spain. It is not even about losses, but just the grid capacity. Theoretically the prices in Nord Pool (from southern France and western Ireland to northern Norway and eastern Baltics) should be equal. As pointed out, in practice they vary wildly. And in principle it can get even worse. It would not be too unrealistic to have negative prices in northern Norway and rolling blackouts in southern Sweden at the same time. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader how the latter can even happen when Sweden has enough capacity to meet its power demand at that time.
That can be helped by reconductoring.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/reconductoring-power-lines-...
> Depending on voltage level and construction details, HVDC transmission losses are quoted at 3.5% per 1,000 km (620 mi), about 50% less than AC (6.7%) lines at the same voltage.
A "full" transition is unlikely in our lifetimes due to the fact that the majority of the benefits can be reaped without needing such an expense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
No reason we cant start expanding things like this to the east and west.
wait, is that it? I can get my electricity from a solar panel in Nevada, middle of winter, far longer than I have local sunlight for,
for about 40 cents a kwh?
And that's treated as an existential problem?
Solar panels are so cheap we should be extremely overprovisioning anyway.
That’s fucking expensive if you don’t live in Germany or California! I pay a little less than a third of that for nuclear power.
> And that's treated as an existential problem?
Yes, tripling one’s electric bill is a problem.
Likely, being able to buy from a generator across the country would REDUCE our prices. Allowing a solar farm in Nevada to compete in markets all over the country would be a large benefit to states like Maine.
Most people are not as far from the western deserts as Maine is, so they would see smaller losses. Add to that, as others have pointed out, a HVDC line is much better than 30% loss to get from Nevada to Maine.
So all this whinging is dumb. Lets build giant solar farms in Nevada deserts and ship it all across the country. Remember, I can't have local solar power past 4pm in January. This capability would replace wind or gas power
The financial fact is that solar is cheap enough that de-rating all panels by 30% to support such a "cross country grid" would be inconsequential. It's the equivalent to buying solar panels from a couple years in the past.
We should be building 2x what we "need" anyway.
If people could see that at some point, keeping their house at a perfect temperature with an electric heat pump would lead to them _never thinking about a heating bill again_... that would be far more concrete than promises of staving off climate change.
They project a further 50% drop by 2030:
https://www.bde.es/wbe/en/publicaciones/analisis-economico-i...
Well by all means, show us how to do it right at scale. The leaders in this area (California, European countries) haven’t exactly done much to deliver on the promise of cheap renewable energy.
That’s how you do it right. You set some basic rules, and then otherwise get out of the way and let economics do its thing, and stop trying to master plan and control everything. So many of the existing regs are built around huge centralized generation sources, requiring extensive planning and approvals, rather than small distributed sources.
Recognizing this does not mean one is hostile to renewables, even though some people that are hostile use this talking point dishonestly.
Simple every grid in the united states has enough reliable generation capacity to take up the slack when solar fails. But that means the cost of building all those natural gas peaker plants is part of the cost of solar (it's never included in the LCOE).
Right, because that would change the definition of LCOE. And you are right that it's important, and there are other terms to look for, as LACE, which EIA has been putting out for a long time. And Lazard's energy reports:
https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-20...
have an entire section on "Cost of firming intermittency" where it estimates costs based on each region of the US.
This is the first time I've seen serious discussion about "firming intermittent" power sources.
I'm not sure I agree with the numbers from the various ISOs but it's still an excellent starting point.
This can be seen from the fact that while lifted weight storage is ridiculously easy to build with existing technology - it's a train or a crane, after all! - it has never caught on as an economically fieldable system, whereas pumped-storage hydro has wide adoption.
However pumped hydro is shall we say extremely environmentally bad.
Like casually remove a mountain bad
At least in western countries. There's lots of potential in developing countries.
Think artificial volcano shape with a tube in the middle.
Think 100 million times the size of that project.
24/8 * 100days * 330000Mw
It also is a counter to anyone still proposing primary baseload plant construction. Why fission atoms when you can just get cheap heat from huge piles of slightly red hot dirt?
That's why we still burn natural gas all winter instead of storing solar.
If you put your H2 hydrolysers and turbines or fuel cells near the H2 store then handlng and distribution becomes easier. Move the electricity not the H2.
In general though low grade heat is almost entirely worthless, all the Bitcoin miners and data centers that regularly just blow low grade heat into the air.
This is a weird position to take. How would you price out nuclear then? As that cannot respond to changes in demand quickly either? Should every power source's cost have some gas tacked on to it? Or can we just assume that for now we have a mix of sources where different sources have different pros and cons.
And as said in many other places here, fossils don't have their externalities priced in either. I wouldn't be surprised if future generations scold us for burning so much natural gas that can also be used for many other things than burning
Ultimately, what we care about, from a grid policy perspective, is the cost to provide 99% (or whatever) guaranteed 24/7/365 power. Each energy source will have its own challenges in order to do that, and for solar availablity it clearly one of them. And yes, externalities should be factored in.
> Or can we just assume that for now we have a mix of sources where different sources have different pros and cons.
Of course, but the question is: what is the right mix for the right place. And saying "solar + storage" is cheaper than gas means very different things if it can only guarantee 60% availability like in England, or 95+% in the sunniest regions of the world.
The figures reported here come from (among others) Lazard' LCOE analysis. (https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...) If you have a look at how it's calculated, "solar + storage" only has enough storage for 4h for instance. You cannot really meaningfully compare it directly with nuclear which is much more reliable in itself.
What LCOE says is that the system will produce X amount of energy at cost of Y. It says nothing about when that energy will be produced. An energy source that produces 365 MWh on January 1st only, and another that produces 1 MWh every day, for the same cost, will have the same LCOE. The latter is, provided you can scale it, much more useful in practice.
Look, I'm not saying that solar is bad or we shouldn't do it. It's just that the "solar is cheap" thing which is regularly reported is a bit misleading. We've heard it for years now, and yet electricity prices around the world are mostly increasing. Clearly there's a mismatch, but where does it come from? And I think part of the reason is that the "ancillary" costs of solar have been underestimated. Sure, the energy straight out of the panel is very cheap, but if you need 10s of billions in grid upgrades and storage/backup to make it work in practice, then it should definitely be included in the comparison! Just like the externalities of fossil fuels should be.
Part of that is a result of not pricing in externalities so we've never paid the actual cost. On the other hand, demand is going up a lot which means a lot more investment on the grid side as well.
If you have a level 2 charger for your ev for example, that can draw 20kW... If you asked an electrician in the 80s what the peak power a residential home could consume is, you would probably get 1 maybe 2kW at best. So all of that infra is very undersized if we stop burning stuff.
And finally, recently there's been a few disruptions in main sources of fossil fuels (looking at you, Russia)
On one hand, I think people underestimate how much energy our grids demand in a 24 hour cycle. The amount of lithium it would take to handle an unusually cloudy week would be astronomical.
On the other hand, one of the ironies of electric cars is that they are one of the least effective uses of battery capacity. A Tesla with a 60kwh battery is probably touching less than 20kwh of capacity every day.
So theoretically if you use the batteries for grid storage and actually cycle them regularly from 80% down to 20%, the battery capacity would be well over 2x - 4x more effective at offsetting carbon sources. (Even more so if you are offsetting worse sources like coal).
I don't think it's astronomical. At most a few dozen kg per person. Compare that to the amount of steel that we produce per person just to give everybody access to cars!
And it's certainly not more astronomical than the amount of natural gas that we already extract, transport, and burn for electricity.
We have built big things in the past, there's no reason we can't do it again today. In fact, it's going to be far easier today because our tech is better and our factories' productivity is so much higher than in the past.
Even so, if you do the math about how much lithium we need to get to a few dozen kg per person given that rate of growth, we're still looking at 20-30 years. (There are also a lot of elemental and labor bottlenecks).
So you're right that it's not astronomical! We just might have speedier expectations for when it's achievable.
[0] battery c rating is what fraction of the battery can discharge in 1 hour https://wikibattery.org/en/wiki-us/battery/charging-rate-cha...
Unlike power generation, where you can build a facility and it can more or less run for decades with basic maintenance, batteries effectively have a limited number of cycles they can be relied on for. So you would effectively have to remanufacture your entire storage capacity every 10-15 years. So scaling up on storage would theoretically get exponentially more expensive the more of the grid you take over.
Obviously battery technology is improving and each 1% gain in improvement represents drastic savings. But I think there is still lots of reason to diversify technologically and continue to look into complementary sources of base power like nuclear.
but thats why you have more than one energy source right?
Even on a cloudy week, I still generate power, just not enough. Thats why I'm not truely off grid, otherwise I'd need to move from 5kwp(3 electrical) to 15kwp.
Mind you, the most expensive thing for doing that is either the inverters, or the mounts. Its got to the point that solar panels are cheaper than 18mm plywood.
Have you seen the cost of home batteries? Napkin math shows their installed-cost in my region of the US is the same as the fractional cost of an EV. But the EV comes with a free drivetrain, seats, and airbags!
Unusual events shouldn't be handled by high capex, high efficiency storage. They should be handled by lower capex, lower round trip efficiency storage (as should long term/seasonal storage).
I will once again point to Standard Thermal.
https://www.standardthermal.com/
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal-copy
https://austinvernon.site/blog/standardthermal.html
Ten cents per kWh of storage capacity!
https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
The high rooftop solar price is usually hidden because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme.
Any subsidies for solar power should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further than a dollar spent subsidizing wealthy homeowners who install panels on their roof.
That's true today, but I bet it won't be in 5 years time. Around this year or last year batteries have hit a price point where they make financial sense for ordinary people, and in a couple of years you'd be mad not to have them if you have rooftop (and somewhere to put the batteries of course).
> Any subsidies for solar power should go to utility grade solar.
At this point, it should probably go towards storage, grid capacity, or things like EV charging infrastructure. Solar generation doesn't need it.
> The consumer rooftop solar cost is usually one of the most expensive ways you can generate electricity
This may well be true, but there are positive externalities:
- It has reduced land use compared to other energy generation methods
- Power is produced near the point of use, reducing transmission requirements
- Most of the cost is labour for installation which creates jobs
Given that rooftop solar usually pays for itself despite being less cost-efficient that other forms of solar, I see no reason to discourage it.
Yea, I have never actually seen any estimates of the cost when adding panels to new construction, but it sure seems like a reasonable idea.
The LCOE of battery systems for residential systems is still incredibly high according to the Lazard report - an unsubsidized cost maybe 3 - 10 times more expensive than grid batteries.
>...Given that rooftop solar usually pays for itself despite being less cost-efficient that other forms of solar,
If that is the case, then less well off rate payers shouldn't have to subsidize their wealthier neighbors. If it does require subsidies, then that money should go to where it will do the most good in decarbonizing the grid - not as a giveaway to wealthier home owners.
>I see no reason to discourage it.
Who said anything about discouraging it? I certainly wouldn't want to discourage it.
Solar "subsidies" are almost universally tax credits, meaning the only money involved is the money paid by the homeowners. So, for society, rooftop solar is by far the cheapest option. It costs the rest of us nothing, the homeowners pay for it.
Money is also not limited, it is in fact created by the banks when someone takes a loan, for example to put solar on their roofs.
Meaning there is no money lost from society that could instead be used to build utility solar, just because someone puts solar on their roofs. If your county borrows money to make utility solar, that money is also created by the bank then and there.
Also note that you are quoting last years Lazard report. Solar is way cheaper in this year's report. It will probably be even cheaper in the next one.
If the tax credit results in an increase of solar panel installations it’s still a net gain for society, even just financially.
That's an unreasonable assumption IMO. Solar is not food, homeowners can choose to skip it.
Well, it means that the government will have less available money to spend on other priorities. Often there are also state and utility subsidies, but those subsidies are often not the largest subsidy. Besides the direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof. As I said before, the whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme.
>...Solar is way cheaper in this year's report.
No it is not. I used last year's numbers since the 2025 report for reasons, does not include consumer rooftop solar. The closest comparison would likely be the category of Solar PV—Community & C&I. In 2024, the cost estimate was $54 - $191 in 2025, the price range was $81 - $217.
That assumes people have to buy solar at any price, but they don't. The money the gov gets from people choosing solar because of the tax credit is extra money that they wouldn't have gotten otherwise. So it's likely they get more money, not less money.
If everyone scrambled to buy all available solar at full price already, then yes, of course nobody should give tax credits. But that's not where we are, tax credits cause an increase in installations.
I am convinced everyone benefits from wealthy homeowners installing solar, not just the homeowners.
Solar panels make electricity cheaper from base principles, despite any political schemes that are employed right now. Once installed, the panels generate electricity for free.
I think that's often overlooked - all talk about subsidies for solar is just for the installations. Once they are done, solar electricity costs nothing.
>No it is not. I used last year's numbers since the 2025 report for reasons, does not include consumer rooftop solar.
You're right, I made a mistake and didn't notice the rooftop category was gone. My bad.
That combination of factors is fairly rare in most of Europe & North America - especially when you’re looking for multiple contiguous kilometres of land for utility scale solar. There’s a lot of that type of land out in Texas and Australia, but there’s much less of it in the Scottish Highlands.
My friend has a 10kW setup combined with a 10kWh battery. Main adjustment he made was prevent the heat pump from keeping the water hot during the night, as that was just wasting energy.
After this adjustment his electricity bills halved despite only really selling energy in the peak of the summer season. The savings translate to a 10-year return on investment before subsidies.
Technology is catching up on the solar panel front though. French Heliup are producing panels which are only 5kg per square meter. Which makes them significantly easier to install on roof-tops. I imagine I'll eventually have solar panels on my roof, but I'll likely wait another decade for battery tech to also be more viable.
I just like paying the utility every month and not having to worry about owning, maintaining, and repairing my own infrastructure though. As it is now, if anything goes wrong upstream of the meter, that's not my responsibility.
If I had a good area for them which wasn't some form of rooftop I might have. Rooftop installations are very expensive in Denmark because they are too heavy to be installed without building a lot of support. Even my carport would basically need to be an entirely different structure with a custom foundation to support a roof of solar panels. Which you can absolutely do, but it would be decades before it was worth it.
If the way things are structured in your country let you draw the same amount of kWh that you’ve put into the network, that works. Where I live they recently changed to buying the solar at market prices. When the sun is up during sunny months that’s zero or close to that. So you pretty much need the battery installation too.
My neighbour got a solar + battery installation, and it works well enough!
>a small installation where your generation does not exceed your usage
I meant explicitly a small system where the moment to moment generation generally did not exceed moment to moment usage.
>the way things are structured in your country
In the US things are structured per utility which varies widely by state, city, or even neighborhood and they have many different kinds of rules.
So we pay something like 3x-5x for residential solar in the US versus Australia. Because we choose to as a society.
Also, I heartily disagree that utility scale solar is obviously cheaper. Transmission and distribution costs are the biggest cost on the grid, and utility scale solar needs to pay for that whereas residential solar drives down T&D costs.
We definitely need a lot of utility scale solar, but if we want cheaper electricity we need to incentivize tons of residential solar so that we can keep our grid costs lower.
But yeah, would be great if we could do something about it.
There are some baby steps - Maryland passed a law last year to force adoption of uniform permitting process via NREL’s SolarApp+, hopefully that’ll make a dent.
If we are really at the point where distribution costs for utility solar make it cost anywhere near the cost of consumer rooftop solar, we have a real problem. If that is true, we probably need a different approach to decarbonize the grid. I don't think you are right.
Average US consumer costs are $70/MWh for transmission [1], out of $130/MWh total averaged across all consumer types [2].
However, those are average prices, residential consumers pay far higher prices, especially for the T&D side.
New utility scale solar is $38-$78/MWh unsubsidized [3, page 8], at $1.15-$1.6/W. [3, page 34].
Meanwhile, residential solar is $2.5/W to $3.5/W [4], meaning it's only twice as expensive as utility scale solar. All told, that means that residential solar cost is roughly equal to the cost of utility scale + T&D. (While searching the web, several results claimed that residential solar typically costs $0.06-$0.10/kWh, or $60-$100/MWh, but that seems too low, and I'm guessing is from old data when it was cheaper to residential builds...)
All this ignores storage, etc. But residential solar shaves off the highest peak of demand from air conditioning on the hottest days, so every time I see a neighbor install solar I cheer because I know that it's less justification for the utility to build out more T&D for the rest of the power needs.
[1] https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/us-electric-utilitie...
[2] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
[3] Main report PDF at https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-20...
[4] many sources, this hasn't changed much in years, one random top web hit is here: https://www.ecoflow.com/us/blog/california-solar-panel-costs...
And in general, you should check your electricity bill to see how much is actually for generation vs transmission.
- 10 years: $265/mo
- 15 years: $197/mo
- 20 years: $164/mo
What are your current monthly electricity costs, and what time horizon gets you a good break-even?
Also consider what electricity costs are gonna do. The loan locks in a monthly cost, but electricity rates have lately been increasing around 3% per year. Say you currently have a $150 monthly electricity bill... in 10, 15, and 20 years that will be $202, $233, and $270/mo.
There's other ways to finance it (PPA's, leases, maybe incentives if we get serious about our energy again someday, etc.) that have their own advantages/disadvantages, but even this simple approach shows there's some wins depending on your exact consumption, time horizon, time-value of money, and what you expect your electric load to do (will you get an EV? will you adopt heat pumps? will you need to start using way more AC in the summers? etc)
YMMV. As with most things in life, there is no one-size-fits-all. Do what's right for you.
I installed 7.8kw of rooftop solar for $8k out of pocket, all of which is on a ten year interest free loan.
In 12 months it makes smack on $1000 worth of electricity. So my payback is 8 years ( less, actually. The price of electricity here is already pre approved to increase no less than 5% a year) After that I get $1000 of power per year for twenty or so years.
The term no brainer doesn’t seem enough.
But the variance is huge.
So it's cheapest in sun peak, when it's sunny
I've converted it to pdf.
Does this cost include needed storage( up to several days ) and often new transmission lines? Is any country running only on solar? if it is the cheapest? The actual all up costs to actually allow 100% solar actually make it very expensive
When the sun goes down, you have saved tons of oil, gas and goal that didn't have to burn during the day. Which is very very good. You don't have to "solve nighttime" before solar makes sense, it makes sense immediately.
Edit: And of course, nighttime is also being solved, in many ways, already.
Solar+storage is so much farther along than you think / A conversation with Kostantsa Rangelova and Dave Jones of Ember. [2025/07/16]
https://www.volts.wtf/p/solarstorage-is-so-much-farther-alon...
Really, every one interested in renewables and net-zero should listen.
IIRC, my own take aways from this interview:
At the time of this interview, in the USA, because of subsidies and tariffs, only natural gas (IIRC ~$70 gWh) is cheaper than solar + battery for new generation.
Battery storage costs continue to drop faster than any one has anticipated. -40% in 2024 alone. Wow!
Even people savvy about our glorious renewable energy future don't fully appreciate just how quickly how fast both solar and batteries have and will continue to improve.
I don't remember the specifics when where wind is preferable to solar. IIRC, even in Finland solar + battery still pencils out.
Since solar + battery only gets us ~90% (?) to net-zero, we'll still need wind. (Ditto adv geo therm, heat batteries, pumped hydro, etc. Because we'll need A LOT more of everything for net-negative, to restore 360 ppm for CO2 and other GHGs.)
Personal note: Am very eager for Jenny Chase's yearly report on solar. Especially prospects for scaling up wind generation. Chase previously expressed concern about wind lagging behind solar. Which is bad, because we'll still need a lot of wind (at northern latitudes).
In other words, most everyone's priors need a major update.
That being said, the quotes from the author were more to the point of it being a milestone that in the UK that Solar+Battery systems were now less expensive than gas/coal.
To my understanding, this is a milestone vs "raw" production numbers, which you're correct in saying have had solar as the cheapest option for years.
[1] https://www.authorea.com/users/960972/articles/1329770/maste...
Ultra cheap thermal storage promises cost at least an order of magnitude below that.
Abstract here: https://www.authorea.com/users/960972/articles/1329770-solar...
Which links to this .docx: https://www.authorea.com/users/960972/articles/1329770/maste...
Germany also has absolutely terrible solar resources, worse than any continental US state, and is also deploying tons and tons of solar.
Solar really is one of the more amazing technologies of our time, especially when combined with batteries, which advance almost as fast.
We will have such greater reliability, cost, and air quality as coal is completely replaced by modern clean energy systems.
Self-cannibalization is infinitely preferable to the regular sort of cannibalization.
It made it that you were guaranteed a certain rate for x amount of years. As a result people were driving to farmers to rent their roof to install solar on it.
What the UK cannot do is concentrating solar. The efficiency absolutely crashes in diffuse light.
Regarding concentrating solar: are people still trying to make that work for commercial generation? I thought this had generally failed to pan out for electricity generation.
There are still plants out there, but I don’t know how many are still operating versus being decommissioned.
None of them work on overcast days because they rely on parallel rays of light.
(BTW, this is my crowd at Surrey, and Ravi is my (IfS) director!)
Cheap clean elec and comments is all about finding issues
"Recycle" -- 0 results
"Maintenance" -- 0 results
"Insurance" -- 0 results
Okay?
The big problem with solar? Regulation around installing it that is entirely designed to protect the profits of utility companies.
We have predatory financing around solar where companies are allowed to put a lien on your house and then essentially extort the homeowner if they ever choose to sell such that solar can reduce the value of your house significantly.
We limit the amount of solar basically so the utility can keep selling you electricity.
One might say it's to cover the bullding and maintenance of the transmission infrastructure. There's some truth to that. But at the same time utilities are generating massive profits, doing share buybacks and giving massive concessions to data centers that everyone else is paying for.
Basically we would all be better off if every electricity provider wasn't a private company but instead what a municipal operation like municipal broadband.
I assume astroturfing is at play.
Well, which one is it? Is it cheaper or the same price as a gas plant?
It talks about the California grid. Except there is no such thing, California is on the Western grid which is operated by WECC.
The actual mix of energy on the western grid is here.[1]
[1] https://feature.wecc.org/soti2025/soti2025/resources/index.h...
However it's not actually a separate grid. So when analyzing stability issues from inverter based sources of power (solar/wind/batteries) we can't use CalISO numbers since they can (and do) actually draw power from outside the CalISO grid area.
It would also make the world more interdependent and thus hopefully more peaceful.
I remember reading about this in IEEE. If you google "hypergrid IEEE" you can find papers in IEEE explore, but there was also a perspective that was more readable that I read a few years ago...
Solar tends to come with battery storage. But you could also just build the battery storage.
I did see a proposal to build out solar in Africa and pipe it undersea to Europe. That seemed wild, and, predictably, it got canned for its impracticality.
Edit - it looks like there are several such proposals, and that they're not all cancelled:
Several travel across the Mediterranean:
https://gregy-interconnector.gr/index_en.html
https://www.ecofinagency.com/news-industry/0210-49221-egypt-...
Here's the one I thought was cancelled, which travels along the western coast of Africa to the UK:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe...
https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
https://thenational-the-national-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/...
That doesn't seem _that_ wild? The Strait of Gibraltar is only about 15km wide. There are far longer HVDC undersea lines than that in Europe (longest is nearly 800km), and in China there's a 3,000km land-based HVDC line.
The real challenge here (besides the "it will be cheaper if you wait another year" problem that kinda haunts big solar/battery/HVDC projects at the moment; costs are falling fast enough that sometimes the economics are to wait) is political. Do we want to be in a situation where the European grid is dependent on, say, Algeria? Probably not; been there, done that with Russia.
For those interested
Last I've seen, it would cost (roughly) $5k per kilogram that you deliver to space. Local costs for rooftop solar that I've seen are around $3k per kilowatt - and that's after the cost of installation, including power hookups, etc.
Once you factor in the efficiency loss from beaming down the power (plus the cost of building the base stations, and the cost of manufacturing these awesome solar panels), I'm not sure that it makes economic sense.
This is literally the most important factor to consider as it is a very scare resource in some markets - nevermind that this would be a significant driver of cost for solar, as it requires massive amounts of land (and taxes). This is true for solar, wind, etc be built.
> I don't understand. Why is it that in every single discussion about power- and in particular, solar power- is the cost of land omitted ?
You are incorrect that land costs are omitted; in fact I don't recall any sort of cost comparison that has ever omitted land costs, whether it's from Lazard or NREL or anywhere else. It's part of the CapEx, or as rent, or however it's modeled. NREL in particular looks at overall costs on completed and built systems. Further, the developers building these things know the land costs very well.
Can you point to a discussion or paper where land cost was not included? If it's still an open discussion I'd love to add the high quality solar-is-cheapest studies that all include land costs.
And as for this particular study:
First, doesn't omit the cost of land. Secondly land is only the most important resource in very very few markets. Razing skyscrapers in Manhattan would be a bad idea. Instead of farming crops or the sun in Manhattan, it's done elsewhere and shipped in.
Residential or industrial rooftops are perfect examples. Heck, sound barriers along freeways etc are now even profitable
[1] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/10/03/rooftop-solar-could-g...
[2] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/rooftop-solar-housing-b...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
The UK also has a huge amount of roof-top PV potential, outside the very dense city cores, plus enough golf course space to cover all our PV needs and some I think.
Spain and France and Italy are also doing well with PV and are nowhere near done.
Land on Earth is in fact not a scarce resource.
This is even more important for solar eclipses: unlike normal sunrise and sunset which are gradual, the ramp in a solar eclipse is very steep, so the grid operator has to have enough reserve prepared in advance and ready to absorb the sudden decrease (and increase) in solar generation.
I would regard that as a huge improvement in use from areas that are otherwise often fairly sterile from a biodiversity point of view, and only get used by a fraction of the population.
What is the 'cost' of those courses, vs PV, vs horrible climate change?
But the point remains that very significant PV can be provided on already-in-use land from homes and warehouses to reservoirs and farm land agrivoltaics.
The solar discussed is massive investments into solar farm production.
To your point, sure you can do "remote" - you still have to get a lot of power transmission lines to remote locations, and yes you still have to buy the land. Its not a 0 cost investment. But that's what the accounting looks like when discussing this topic.
Its sloppy
Separate reports in the last couple of days suggest that both Norway and Germany could get ~25% of their total solar power from viable rooftop spaces, IIRC.
And indeed one very positive feature of solar is that it IS safe to deploy AT load/demand centres, very much reducing costs and losses in the last 'distribution' mile.
Solar also works when there is no grid locally, which is useful from rural UK to Africa.
[1] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/10/03/rooftop-solar-could-g...
[2] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/rooftop-solar-housing-b...
However, not every single discussion does omit it. For example, we were discussing this yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487268 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487197, where my calculation was that even in solar-unfavorable places like the northern extreme of Germany, the cost of land barely reaches the same order of magnitude as the cost of the solar modules, even at today's record-low module prices. US$72 million of the US$200 million of the estimate mentioned above was the modules themselves, but today that would be closer to US$15 million.
The atom of truth in your confused assertion is that solar farms do take up enormous amounts of land compared to other kinds of power plants. But, at current human energy consumption levels, it's still only a tiny amount of overall land.
I'm assuming from your past submission history that you're in the US, because you mostly only post US politics stuff. The US generates about 4200 TWh electric per year, which is 480 gigawatts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...). Under the 2000kWh/year/kWp conditions prevailing in the Californian Mojave Desert, parts of Arizona, and parts of New Mexico, according to https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali..., this would require about 2.1 terawatts (peak) of solar panels. A square meter of 22%-efficient solar panel produces 220 watts, peak, so this is about 9600 square kilometers, a 110-kilometer-diameter circle. (Although, if you don't leave spaces between the panels, you have to make them horizontal so they don't shade each other; in practice people set them further apart to use more land but less panels.)
How big is that?
It's almost 0.1% of the US, not counting the space between the panels. It's a little over twice the diameter of the VLA radio telescope in western New Mexico, a facility you might remember from the movie Contact. It's slightly larger than White Sands Missile Range (8300km²). It's 15 times the size of Lake Mead, which was created by Hoover Dam to generate electricity. It's about two thirds the size of California's Death Valley National Park (13'793km²). It would take up one eighth of the Navajo Reservation.
Almost everywhere in the US has at least half that much sunlight. Suppose you wanted to site the panels near Springport, Michigan, for some reason. You only have 1200 kWh/year/kWp there, so you need 16000km². The panels would cover a ten-county area centered on Jackson County; they would reach Lansing, and might reach from Ann Arbor to Kalamazoo.
In real life, it wouldn't be a good idea to put it all in one place like that, both because it's fragile and because it creates higher transmission-line losses; it's better to put the panels closer to where they're used, which implies spreading them apart. So probably 0.2% of every state. In an average-sized state like Iowa (145'746km²) it might be 300km², 20% of the size of an average-sized county like Hamilton County. To power the whole state.
But try to keep perspective on the total amount of land we're talking about here: White Sands Missile Range, two thirds of Death Valley, or a small part of the Navajo Reservation to power the whole country.
I don’t doubt that the costs are considerable but if we’re going to go down that path we need to make sure it’s applied across the board here and I imagine the gap is not as bad as you’re implying. I’m going off my gut though so I could be entirely wrong.
I think most major solar projects include land and infrastructure so only comparing the costs of the panels is like comparing hydro only based on operating the dam, not building it.
Fossil the way we're running it now is only priced out based on burning it not dealing with its externalities either.
Comparing solar cells without other direct costs is not sufficient for decision making.
The answer to this problem is more precise and complete comparisons, not fewer.
Take all that land that's currently used for fossil fuels, and replace its use with solar, and you're replacing pretty much 100% of the world's total energy demand, not just fossil fuel demand. (I need to find that citation again...)
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/10/solar-panels-half-th...
https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/california-first-...
its simple
*Why is the cost of land ommitted ? *
A link to "rooftops" is not an answer when its primary use case is a ROI that doesn't work out unless its measured in decades.
Sloppy accounting.
My initial answer was literally going to be a Billy Madison quote. Specifically, the reply to Principal Max Anderson to Billy's rambling answer. But that's offensive, so i will just state:
you can do better!
https://www.agweb.com/news/business/4-500-acre-plus-signing-...
Intraday anti-correlation is there, but it's more complicated:
https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/generation-forecast-for-wind-and-s...
The US picture varies a lot over the contiguous states, I think, but often, again, there is anti-correlation in general.
So transmission of solar should be less, as the sun shines everywhere, and people like to build houses where it shines the most.
But no, neither coal nor nukes would be welcome in cities just to reduce transmission costs!
When a site is repowered with new panels, the old panels are often reused, as well, and there's a robust secondary market for panels.
In short: disposal costs are well in line with other technologies, at least according to this consultant (top hit on a web search):
https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/solar-power-decommis...
In, Ga, As, P, Si, Zn, Se, Ge, Cd, Te, Pb, etc. The duh materials. Sometimes the whole panel is thin crystals of GaAs. You have to melt that down to recycle.
GaAs photovoltaic cells, InGaAs photovoltaic cells, etc., do exist, but aren't used in utility-scale solar power, because their cost doesn't compensate for their performance. Some of the other elements you list are never used at all for photovoltaic cells to my knowledge.
Wherever you got this information from, you should killfile it and make sure you don't trust any more information from that source.
Most solar is monocrystalline Si with tiny amounts of dopants such as P and B, not especially difficult to deal with. Ag contacts, Al frames, more Si for the glass, and maybe most troublesome the plastic backing sheets and insulants.
We just are not spreading heavy metals on our fields.
Usually lead used the solder, if there is lead, is the biggest risk!
Even nukes are more eco friendly, even if you include things Fukushima, maybe Chernobyl too. The elephant foot is going to passivate itself before the collapse of human civilization could occur. I don't know same can be said about panels blown away in rainstorms.
Construction and disposal I'm not sure to be honest, intuitively I don't think those are much more expensive.
Note: I am pro nukes in the mix, but nukes have difficult points too.