this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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Solar modules now selling for less than €0.06/W in Europe (www.pv-magazine.com)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/technology
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[–] [email protected] 116 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (12 children)

Here in Belgium there used to be big government subsidies for solar panels 5-10 ago.

Now the same wattage battery + solar setup without any government subsidies is a good chunk cheaper than that time with the large subsidies.

Pretty cool and shows the power of government renewables subsidies. A huge percentage of houses in Belgium have solar panels now.(and electricity still costs 0.30€/kWh average because of fossil fuel energy lobbies)

Now that there is a local industry around it, most renovations and almost all new builds include them.

[–] sirboozebum 22 points 1 month ago

4 million households in Australia have solar panels.

They are great value.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (2 children)

As your northern neighbors. We did subsidize it too, but now the privatized energy companies started whining that there wasn't enough capacity, so now they charge you for creating free energy

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Yes I'm considering buying a high power laser so I can send the energy back into space instead of paying the power companies for the privilege of giving them electricity.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

Great idea! Some inspiration right here :

https://what-if.xkcd.com/13/

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 month ago (37 children)

$60k per MW or $210M for a nuclear reactors worth (3.5GW). Sure... the reactor will go 24/7 (between maintenance and refuelling down times, and will use less land (1.75km² Vs ~40km²) but at 1% of the cost, why are we still talking about nuclear.

(I'm using the UKs Hinckley Point C power station as reference)

[–] Benaaasaaas 15 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Because there are nights there are winters there are cloudy and rainy days, and there are no batteries capable of balancing all of these issues. Also when you account for those batteries the cost is going to shift a bit. So we need to invest in nuclear and renewables and batteries. So we can start getting rid of coal and gas plants.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago (2 children)

But Germany has no space for nuclear waste. They haven't been able to bury the last batch for over 30 years. And the one that they buried most recently began to leak radioactivity into ground water.

And.. why give Russia more military target opportunities?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I'm not a rabid anti-nuclear, but there are somethings that are often left out of the pricing. One is the exorbitant price of storage of spent fuel although I seem to remember that there is some nuclear tech that can use nuclear waste as at least part of it's fuel (Molten salt? Pebble? maybe an expert can chime in). There is also the human greed factor. Fukushima happened because they built the walls to the highest recorded tsunami in the area, to save on concrete. A lot of civil engineering projects have a 150% overprovision over the worst case calculations. Fukushima? just for the worst case recorded, moronic corporate greed. The human factor tends to be the biggest danger here.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (8 children)

If France can find space, surely Germany can.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

Also when you account for those batteries the cost is going to shift a bit.

You better be bringing units if you're going to be claiming this.

Still less than half of the LCOE of nuclear when storage is added: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1475611/global-levelized-cost-of-energy-components-by-technology/

Given that both solar and storage costs are trending downwards while nuclear is not, this basically kills any argument for nuclear in the future. It's not viable on its face - renewables + storage is the definitive future.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

You're using factors of less than 10 to argue against a factor of 100.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

I think there's a contingent of people who think nuclear is really, really cool. And it is cool. Splitting atoms to make power is undeniably awesome. That doesn't make it sensible, though, and they don't separate those two thoughts in their mind. Their solution is to double down on talking points designed for use against Greenpeace in the 90s rather than absorbing new information that changes the landscape.

And then there's a second group that isn't even trying to argue in good faith. They "support" nuclear knowing it won't go anywhere because it keeps fossil fuels in place.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

What isn't sensible about nuclear? For context, I'm coming from the US in an area with lots of empty space (i.e. tons of place to store radioactive waste) and without much in the way of hydro (I'm in Utah, a mountainous, desert climate). We get plenty of sun as well as plenty of snow. Nuclear should provide power at night and throughout the winter, and since ~89% of homes are heated with natural gas, we only need higher electricity production in the summer when it's hot, which is precisely what solar is great for.

So here's my thought process:

  • nuclear for base load demand to cover nighttime power needs, as well as the small percentage of homes using electricity for heat
  • solar for summer spikes in energy usage for cooling
  • batteries for any excess solar/nuclear generation

If we had a nuclear plant in my area, we could replace our coal plants, as well as some of our natural gas plants. If we go with solar, I don't think we have great options for electricity storage throughout the winter.

This is obviously different in the EU, but surely the nordic countries have similar problems as we do here, so why isn't nuclear more prevalent there?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (10 children)

Because it makes no sense, environmentally or economically speaking. Nuclear is, as you said, base load. It can't adjust for spikes in demand. So if there's more energy in the grid than needed, it's gonna be solar and wind that gets turned off to balance the grid. Investments in nuclear thus slow down the adoption of renewables.

Solar is orders of magnitude cheaper to build, while nuclear is one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity, even discounting the waste storage, which gets delegated the the public.

Battery technology has been making massive gains in scalability and cost in recent years. What we need is battery arrays to cover nighttime demand and spikes in production or demand, combined with a more adaptive industry that performs energy intensive tasks when it's abundant. With countries that have large amounts of solar, it is already happening that during peak production, energy cost goes to zero (or even negative, as traded between utilities companies).

About the heating: gas can not stay the main way to heat homes, it's yet another fossil fuel. What we need is heat pumps, which can have an efficiency of >300% (1kWh electricity gets turned into 3kWh of heat, by taking ambient heat from outside). Combined with large, well-insulated warm-water reservoirs, you can heat up more water than you need to higher temperature during times of electricity oversupply, and have more than enough to last you the night, without even involving batteries. Warm water is an amazing energy storage medium. Batteries cover electricity demand as well as a backup in case you need uncharacteristically much water. This is a system that's slowly getting adopted in Europe, and it's great. Much cheaper, and 100% clean.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

You bring up heated water as a method of storage, and it reminds me of a neighborhood in Alberta, Canada that uses geothermal + solar heated water storage for 52 homes. They've been able to successfully heat the entire neighborhood with only solar over the winter in 2015-2016 and have gotten > 90% solar heating in other years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community

There's a huge number of new storage technologies being developed, and the fact that some even work on a seasonal basis for long term storage is amazing.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

A MW of solar averages out to about .2 MWh per hour. A MW of nuclear averages about .9 MWh per hour.

But even so as the UK does it, nuclear power isn't worth it. France and China are better examples since they both picked a few designs and mass produced them.

China's experience indicates you can mass produce nuclear relatively cheaply and quickly, having built 35 out of 57GW in the last decade, and another 88GW on the way, however it's not nearly as quick to expand as solar, wind, and fossil fuels.

[–] 486 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

MW/h

There is MW which is a unit of power and then there is MWh which is a unit of energy, but what is MW/h supposed to mean?

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[–] Venicon 27 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Good news perhaps but I’m sure I won’t see any benefit in Scotland, still thousands to add solar panels.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 month ago

Scotland has really good wind power, anyway. Between that, nuclear, and a few other renewable sources, you guys are down to 10% fossil fuel energy use. So don't worry about solar.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

You know, if you people wanna ditch the Kingdom and join the club, I don't think it's too late.

[–] Bosht 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yup. Average here in south US is 25k for a home system without battery backup.

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[–] Olap 5 points 1 month ago

Installation the trouble. Roofing is expensive. Next time you have to redo the roof: then it's time

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[–] Shardikprime 24 points 1 month ago

Solar has always an extremely high ratio for megawatt per mass unit.

This price is really good

[–] Valmond 23 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Just have to buy 1100 panels 😋 but then the price is 0.055€/watt ...

I Want one, but only one or a couple, to put on my balcony...

[–] ikidd 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

These are topcon modules only. Considering a 400W panel will have about 72 modules in it, that's only about 15 panels worth. Of course, then you have to actually build the panel and connect the modules, put it behind glass inside a frame, then put in a bypass diode and leads for connection. So an actual panel ends up being about 5-10X the cost of the modules per W.

[–] solrize 5 points 1 month ago (5 children)

You can pay a lot less than 10x for completed panels. https://store.santansolar.com/ amazed me.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

Theyre $1.25 per watt in south America right now (we have an energy crisis due to climate change caused drought)

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