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. https://chargerobotics.com/ (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've always thought that it would be cool to run a robot arm museum, showcasing industrial robot arms from different periods - 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, etc. As far as I can tell the first one was Unimate in 1961: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unimate
But... I don't have a feel for how many of these things actually exist out there. Do collections already exist? What happens to a robot arm once it becomes obsolete?
"Charge Robotics (YC S21) is hiring meches to build robots that build solar farms"
Mechanical engineers would be better shortened to MechEs instead of meches, IMO.
We tend to think of the desert as a lifeless wasteland, but that's far from the truth. Visit Death Valley National Park for example and see the marvelous diversity and beauty of life there, especially during a superbloom.
Solar power plants in the Mojave desert threaten wildlife like the Desert Tortoise by reducing their natural range and plowing over the desert habitat.
Rooftop, parking lot, etc. solar makes much better sense by utilizing already disturbed land nearer to where the power will be used thereby reducing transmission costs and the treat to biodiversity. A major downside (from one perspective) would be that rooftop solar installers out-compete the developers of desert power plants.
There is actually less and less reason to site solar in deserts.
As solar has dropped in price, lots of things we used to do to optimise the expensive solar no longer make sense.
We used to build trackers that would point the cells directly at the sun all day, now that extra complexity can be replaced with just buying more panels.
Similarly, long transmission lines out to deserts can be replaced by more solar spread everywhere that we need it.
But to close, I want to reiterate that if you're reading some article about solar panels destroying the desert it's almost certainly bad-faith bullshit, so don't worry too much about it.
Citizens For Responsible Solar is a front used by fossil fuel companies to block solar farms and they object to every single solar farm claiming it should be on the roof. They object to rooftop solar and claim it should be on another roof, etc.
Land use by solar is not a primary concern, there is more land wasted on gold courses than would be required to power the country.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/chart-whos-the-le...
As toomuchtodo mentioned in another comment [1], the cost of solar declined 89% in the past decade. California's installed base is weighted toward older, more expensive solar power installations because it started installing solar power sooner and more rapidly than other states. That's compounded by California's slowdown in utility scale solar farms added in recent years. Texas is about to surpass California on installed solar farm capacity and Texas's solar generation will be cheaper because those farms have been built more recently with lower cost solar hardware.
2. It doesn't necessarily follow that free fuel == cheaper power. I'm not at all familiar, but I imagine building, operating, and maintaining a solar plant could be expensive, perhaps even more expensive than a coal plant, for all I know.
In the spring and summer seasons California routinely hits over 100% of demand generated from renewables at some point in a given month. CAISO, which does not cover the entire state, says that in June about 47% came from renewables. Last June it was only 37%.
1: http://www.caiso.com/Documents/GreenhouseGasEmissions-Tracki...
In WA we pay more for "fish mitigation" than all other hydro-related costs. I expect CA has similar money pits.
Now, nuclear is not fossil fuel, but Lazard measures LCOE of nuclear as 6x more expensive than solar and wind. So that might be part of it.
I use solar at home and the battery is actually the most expensive and least durable component of the system.
Also the battery disposal story is not great (at least at the moment).
This is in line with why are we replacing fossil fuels with solar.
It was never a quality of life play, it's some sort of altruistic effort / dumbness deciding to be the suckers kind of thing.
California for sure cares about them Californians who'd be alive 150 years from now more than those who are alive right now. Actually not even that, given that the atmosphere is one for everybody, they care more about Indians and Chinese who'd be alive 150 years from now than Californians who struggle and are 'alive' right now.
Given that the atmosphere is one for everybody, comparing by country does not make sense because some countries have more people than other countries.
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.
A typical grid-tied home solar system has 3 big areas of component costs:
1. The actual solar panels.
2. The thing that mounts the solar panels in place (called racking)
3. The things that turn the solar panel's electricity into electricity that can be used in your home and by the grid. Typically inverters and wiring.
The good news is that you can price this all out yourself, to get an idea of what your system SHOULD actually cost. Then you could theoretically do it yourself, or be a more informed consumer when shopping around to have someone do it for you.
I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but I've been planning, revising and tracking prices on a DIY install for the past couple years.
Here are some of the resources I like:
1: Unbound Solar is a good resource for ready-to-install DIY kits. Their kits are a good resource for "this just works" - and you can then price out individual components as-needed. - https://unboundsolar.com/shop/solar-kits?product-category=gr...
2: For buying actual panels, I like A1 solar. They seem to have the best selection/pricing I've found: https://a1solarstore.com/
3: OpenSolar is a free tool designed for solar installers, but available to DIY'ers. It lets you specify your panels, racking, inverters etc., and then lay them out no your roof or the ground. https://www.opensolar.com/ - It's very likely the tool that the contractors you're getting bids from are using.
The last bit of info I'll share is that in general, microinverters don't make sense from a cost/benefit standpoint. Panels have gotten really cheap, microinverters haven't. You're probably better off adding more panels with a traditional inverter system vs. paying for microinverters to get marginal efficiency gains from a smaller number of panels.
There seems to be some DIY advertised costs that might be better. Really, this is mounting stuff on a roof and wiring it to your garage. While there is code and best practices, this is not disassembly of your car's transmission.
I'm hoping DIY practices and experience disseminates over the next decade, as well as cheap-good perovskite+silicon panels and sodium ion/sulfur/solid state battery storage.
I also think there is a place for solar company that ignores the hard sale and leases. Even better if they focus on efficiency and getting the installation price down. Franchised or training companies would also work.
As prices drop, it becomes possible to pay immediately. Or get a small loan. I wish they would ban solar leases.
I am not affiliated with the below, but saw DIY kits - your comment reminded me others might have experience. One quote that is interesting "With the current tax incentives to go solar, our DIY solar customer’s average ROI is less than 5 years."
It's not obvious to me that rooftop solar panels will still pay for themselves (in the past there were subsidized rates that made the math work better) but being able to run off batteries+solar "microgrid" in a power outage for a few hours is a quality-of-life improvement that I'd consider for the right price. (There's some of this in corporate offices, luxury apartments, etc.)
The jackery is roughly 30% more expensive but feels a lot less fragile than my homemade stuff, and I've moved all my device charging (tablet/phone/power tool battery) charging over to these systems.
It was a fun project! Cabling is always the part that sneaks up on you so make sure to plan out the cabling / what plug types you want / crimp or buy / etc. ahead of time.
Also Panels, inverters and batteries are all quite different and have varied pros and cons and installers are typically getting kick backs from specific suppliers so their advice is not impartial
The only thing the installers have to figure out is how to wire up the panels with your inverter in the right ratio, and if your roof can hold the panels you want. The rest you pick and they do.
Don't get an offgrid inverter, hybrid grid-tied inverter all the way. Even if you live in the sticks with no grid, just get a hybrid one.
Also, don't worry if your batteries will last the night or cloudy days or whatever. Just make sure you have enough to handle your load if it goes down, the rest works on its own and the inverter just blends your solar with whatever it needs from the grid.
Would you please expand on why a hybrid inverter is better even if you're not going to grid-tie it?
My quick take is that there is enough competition to ensure reasonable prices for solar equipment (panels, racking, electronics, etc.). However, a lot of manual labor goes into a rooftop installation that's comparable to other trades like plumbing, electric, roofing, construction, etc., which means that if your local cost of living is high, then the labor cost will be high as well. Until we have robot labor, I accept that other people need to put food on their tables as well, so I don't think that a lot of overhead in a solar project's cost beyond the materials is necessarily evidence of exploitation.
This means that you can online-shop and build a cheap system (I'm sure under $2 per watt is easy). But it needs to be shipped to you, lifted onto the roof, mounted, and finally wired to your grid. All that is pure labor. I did everything except the high-voltage wiring and the conduit runs, and I bet a competent version of me could have done everything I did in three 10-hour days (it actually took me twice that). Where I live, California Bay Area, you can't get any tradesperson out of bed for less than $100/hour, so that's at least $3,000 in labor. The electrician, permitting, and re-patching the roof around the new mounts added another $4,500 -- again, mostly labor and/or bureaucracy.
That makes about $7,500 to install maybe $10,000 of equipment. I avoided about $3,000 in labor costs by spending at least 60 hours of my own amateur time, including mistakes, worrying, second-guessing myself, and other activities that a professional wouldn't have done.
I learned a lot. I understand the difference between microinverters and regular ones; I know more about split-phase residential electricity in the US; I appreciate how a system design trades off cost and efficiency for issues like "clipping" when an inverter can't handle the full output of a PV panel; and I know way more than I ever wanted to know about the foam, insulation, tar, gravel, and wood that make up my roof.
In retrospect, I'm glad I did the project because of the knowledge gained, and because I now have even more respect for the skills and effort that are needed to put solar on a home's roof. But would I do it again? Probably not; I'd rather have paid the extra few grand to have someone do it for me while I stayed cocooned in my office, writing code.
TL;DR: profit is being made in residential solar, but I believe most of it goes to honest labor.
Here in the Netherlands, the norm is that it's a single day of work by a crew of two. That includes everything you described: rails, installation, repatching, wiring, inverter, basically the entire package.
- Batteries are not cheap, nor renewable. Just because there may 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.
- 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)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Forget batteries for now. How about replacing half of the US that is using coal in the middle of the day?
> - A society based on only solar
Said no one
> - Solar only works under ideal conditions, which is to say, in daylight, without clouds, smoke, ash, snow, etc.
Ok, use them for those ideal conditions then, not coal or nat. gas.
> - 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.
You must be joking. Take a look at all the land in the US. Especially in places that are >50% coal in the day, like Wyoming, Montana, and most of the Midwest.
The faster we build solar, the better. We can sort out lots of things along the way.
[1] https://twitter.com/JigarShahDC/status/1701228390735602048?t...
It is not enough to merely fill bids for new generation contracts. There's this assumption that just because you build it, everything else will come. This is a dangerously shortsighted view of the world that only people hoping to win a quick buck on a stock price increase will sell you on. Anybody pushing this idea is vested in a green energy company.
A nation isn't a start-up. There are real-world consequences to running before you can walk. People need to come to grips with this or we're all gonna suffer the consequences.
His comment points out valid concerns for a future that appears to be trending in the direction of relying more and more on solar power - these are real concerns even if solar accounts for ~20% of all power generation, not some 100% solar-only future. It's a reminder that solar power is not some silver bullet solution to energy generation.
Solar's experience rate is greater than any other energy source. In the long term, can even wind keep up?
Batteries are MUCH cheaper and their prices are declining. Especially at grid scale. There are MANY ways to store energy surplus, we're not at that stage yet but we will get there.
Batteries can be recycled. Again, especially at grid scale. Since they contain renewable energy for later use I'll call them WAY more renewable than gas/oil/coal.
> A society based on only solar
No one said that.
> Solar only works under ideal conditions
This is untrue. There are two types of solar, photovoltaic which is what most of us talk about works even under cloud coverage. No, it won't get 100% efficiency but it will give you energy during the day.
Couple that with the fact that wind is stronger during those seasons and that there are other sources of renewables and you will get a more even picture across seasons.
> At some point, people run out of land to put panels on
Right now most deployments are conventional and we still have plenty of land. Unlike regular energy factories we can place panels above every single interstate. Many crop fields and keep the crops which actually grow better and improve electric generation... Every building, every parking lot and right in the middle of the city.
Unlike other means of electric generation this can be deployed everywhere. The main things stopping us from doing it are time, costs and incentives.
Governments regulate roads and can provide financial incentives, they stopped so the costs aren't as great. But with the continued drop in price of panels I'm sure we'll see a lot more of that.
> A lot of the cheap manufacturing is centered in one or two countries
This is just weird. I have no idea what you're claiming here. That if China decides to stop selling or raise the price of panels it will be a problem? Do you know who controls Uranium? Oil?
Nice thing is that these are "renewable. Once installed we don't need to worry about China for 25+ years...
> Transmission/distribution/management
This is the one correct point here... But not really.
Right now coal/gas plants need to be far from the city center so transmission is expensive. You don't want to breath that in. So should nuclear, you REALLY don't want that near your building.
You can have a solar roof right above your head. The road leading into your city can be solar. Batteries can be stored right outside the city and save the cost of transmitting... They can be underground which further saves on real-estate. A smart grid can take advantage of all of that.
The problem is that the grid is also very out of date and not interconnected enough to trade surplus. This is something that governments need to fix. Even between countries e.g. northern states should sell surplus to Canada and vice versa.
I'm for the free market here. The free market needs an infrastructure to work on. Since solar and wind are some of the cheapest options around, once the grid is properly open and modern, the market will take care of everything. Obviously, that's a huge investment but it will make energy cheaper and cleaner for everyone.
What a mind boggling relative and absolute increase.
For reference about 2% of global GDP is spent on new fossil fuel mining and drilling investment, and another 2-4% on the fuels (including refining).
It can also be not enough. They're not mutually exclusive.
We already pretty much passed 1.5C anyway, right?
(obvs we have a long way to go, just need to push the pedal to the floor; enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 2 minutes to power humanity for a year [6], and space is not a concern [7] [8])
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37435387 ("Solar and batteries are going to win, and our thinking needs to adjust")
[4] https://www.pv-tech.org/nearly-1tw-of-renewables-in-us-inter... ("Nearly 1TW of renewables in US interconnection queues as wait times continue to grow)
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/29/china-wind-sol... ("China is set to double its capacity and produce 1,200 gigawatts of energy through wind and solar power by 2025, reaching its 2030 goal five years ahead of time; ...as of the first quarter of the year, China’s utility-scale solar capacity has reached 228GW, more than that of the rest of the world combined.")
[6] https://www.ku.ac.ae/two-minutes-of-sun-enough-to-power-a-ye...
[7] https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/77565 ("Land and Ocean Areas to Support a 100% Renewable Energy, Zero-Emissions, Regenerative Global Economy")
[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37492062 ("Declining populations free up ag land for solar in densely populated countries")
Importantly, though, only a small percentage of that capacity "in queue" will actually get built. From your link:
> Much of this proposed capacity will ultimately not be built, however, with only 23% of projects seeking connection from 2000 to 2016 having subsequently been built based on a LBNL analysis of a subset of queues. Only ISO-NE and ERCOT exceeded 30% completion rates, with CAISO performing the worst at 13%.
What you are seeing is basically the consequence of solar changing from not the cheapest power source available into the cheapest power source available. Immediately, everybody that would invest into something else changed into solar.
Yet so many people only fixate on the "solution" of "you must use less and have a shittier, less-comfortable life, there is no other way!".
We are a civilization that fundamentally requires energy for all our wants and needs. People need to get over that and focus on gathering energy cleanly.
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]!
How can generation be more than 100% of load? California was exporting power to other regions.
We track all this data and more across the United States at Grid Status: https://www.gridstatus.io/home
[0] https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso?record=Maximum%20Ren...
I noticed that you have a page on records that have been set. It looks like Ercot released this data today that might be of interest: https://www.ercot.com/news/release/2023-09-14-ercot-provides...
I’m curious why there appears to be a pretty significant delta between their data and yours.
Also, if you’re open to suggestions, I had trouble finding the pricing for gridstatus. Entirely possible I was missing something obvious, but I wanted to see how much it might cost to get the long term Ercot generation-by-source dataset and couldn’t seem to get a clear answer.
Regardless, building things like this takes a ton of effort, and I appreciate all you’re doing. Keep up the great work!
My focus right now is to make this data more available and easier to use. Haven’t done much to monetize yet. If you just want that data source, happy to get it to you for free. Shoot me an email at max@gridstatus.io or sign up for a free api key and grab it from the site
We still want to do lots of distribution, but it'll be for reliability reasons rather than cost.
1: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/new-california-ru...
Because it's unsustainable and every rooftop solar installation that has net metering causes electricity to be more expensive for everyone. The same time your rooftop system is producing its peak capacity is likely to be the same time the nearby grid-scale solar plants are producing at peak capacity, but the utility is forced to pay you retail price for the power you're producing when they'd rather get it at wholesale price from the larger facilities.
The new NEM (the Net Billing Tariff) shifts the incentives away from solar generation (which the utilities have a lot of) and towards energy storage. I am in the market for solar right now, and I’ve been running the numbers. Whereas I would have had the greatest ROI with a large solar panel array under the last NEM, I now get the largest ROI with a small solar array + a battery.
I can’t say that my ROI will be the same under NEM 3.0 as it was in the old NEM, but solar is not suddenly a bad investment, as some might claim. A small solar + battery setup will pay for itself in 5 years in my situation. A battery alone (no solar panels) pays for itself within a decade, since you can buy energy for “cheap” during super off peak and store it for use during peak hours, pinning your electricity costs to the lowest of the day.
This is all with existing rates. The upcoming shift to an Income Graduated Fixed Fee will likely come with reduced per-kilowatt-hour rates, which will reduce the ROI for home solar and batteries.
The International Renewable Energy Agency says that 191 GW of solar capacity were installed in 2022:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/03/22/new-global-solar-capa...
Wood Mackenzie estimates that 270 GW of solar will be installed this year:
https://electrek.co/2023/08/03/a-record-270-gw-of-solar-is-p...
270/191 = 1.41, or a 41% increase in installed capacity this year.
I prefer the meteorological seasons:
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/why-meteorologic...
The world consists of two hemispheres with opposite seasons.
Let's cancel out that possibility first.
Growing at night outdoors seems like the kind of light pollution that would harm something and anger someone, but not unlikely anyway...
Do we really need more yields? I thought we made enough food for everyone already and it's just distribution at this point?
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.
Companies minimize their sales cost by using the lowest cost, most effective salesmen that they can find and don't monitor them very much.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ones that you hear from the most are the ones that you almost certainly shouldn't do business with.
I feel like there should be some term for this kind of market, where the worst of the worst natural rise to the top for periods of time.
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.
Are any organizations working on neighborhood storage in a big way?
https://babcockranch.com/our-vision/core-initiatives/
"In partnership with Florida Power & Light, Babcock Ranch houses the FPL Babcock Ranch Solar Energy Center and FPL Babcock Preserve Solar Energy Center on 870 acres of land. Each one is capable of generating 75 MW of clean energy, for a combined total of 150 MW capacity and 680,000 solar panels. The FPL Babcock Ranch Solar Energy Center ensures that the net production of clean, renewable energy at Babcock Ranch exceeds the total amount the town consumes.
Another exciting part Babcock Ranch’s clean energy program? We house the largest solar-plus-storage system operating in the U.S. today. Created by FPL, these ten large gray steel battery storage units can store 1 megawatt of power and discharge for 4 hours. The new battery storage system ensures a steady supply of power on partly cloudy days and at night."
Small Florida community aims for energy independence by harnessing the power of the sun
This is less than the 2030 projections of $0.17/W for modules: https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/2030-solar-cost-t...
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: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-renewables-2...
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.
So you can't derive the area or cost from a unidimensional installation chart.
This increase is only for the month of July, not Y/Y.
