I was one of the early adopters of grid tie solar in our area in 2008. Back then solar panels sold for $7.60 per watt (now they're 1/10 that price) and they paid for themselves a few years back and now I have free electricity for years to come.
Actually less than 1/10th now! Consumers can buy them for about $0.18/W and distributers get them as low as $.10-$0.15/W. As an installer, I'm finding that the mounting hardware is frequently more expensive than the solar module!
@@MrTyrael159 In the U.S. I have not found panels in the price range you indicate online. I recently paid $0.25/watt on a "Black Friday" sale. The week previously I purchased some bifacial panels for $0.48/watt. A far cry from my original installation over 20 years ago @ $5.67/watt. Some of the old panels have water damage at the bottom of the panel & have been replaced but, 2/3 of them are still in operation. I am doubling my array in the coming weeks & installing a stand alone array w/ batteries for charging my electric vehicles separately.
@@MrTyrael159 Crazy, isn't it? I noticed that the mounting kit is indeed not that much cheaper than the panels now. I suspect panels are quite a lot cheaper than tiles now too.
I heard a story of a village near Lahore, where a big joint family house was overcharged like 5-10lac rupees, which they disputed but WAPDA cut their power. They didn't pay it but installed fully offgrid solar. 3 months later employees of WAPDA came to their home to ask, brother you didn't come to our office? Don't you need electricity? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@MrBurairHaider I just recently went fully off grid in Australia. The electricity provider still charged me after I was disconnected. Screw the power companies.
@@jamesrowlands8971 going off grid will become even easier with decreasing cost of batteries. Solar panels are dirt cheap right now. Only 10 cents per watt right now in Pakistan for Tier 1 panels.
In Pakistan the amount of solar installation is crazy. Like a poorman will constuct a mud house in a village, and first thing he does is put 2 solar plates on it, attached to a dc fan and some leds. Any industry which must stay competitive must have rooftop solar, otherwise powerbills make the product non-competitive. a common man earns roughly 30kRs or 100usd per month, and electricity bills for 200kwh can reach half of his salary. So what he does, he puts a solar plate on top to run all fans and maybe the tv on solar, while to grid only runs his fridge, as he can not afford AC. My family got solar last year, which proper backup. we paid 100usd on avg for power, with frequent blackouts, specially during heatwaves. The agricultural farms owned by well off people run the tubewells and other mechanical motors on solar, because the diesel is too expensive. Someone said the solar paid off in a year. The govt is not encouraging the transition but trying to save the powerplants, because it collects taxes through power bills. people who live in appartments are screwed, they have to pay expensive bills more than their rent, for not even turning on their ACs. Everyone wants solar.
Yeah, you're right, the citizens are 'subsidizing' an expensive fossil fuel power source. The electricity company charges high bills to compensate for the loss of customers to rooftop solar. Still, the electricity company's pricing model leads to their eventual demise, in the end, watch the space.
If every country would have had proper nuclear fosil and hydro solar and wind would not be necesary; the need of fosil would be made minimum and nuclear and hydro main power generators. Solar has a high instability in many regions. It fluctuates the grid too much so that fosil and hydro need to adjust too fast for their design.
@ "According to current data, building a nuclear power plant is significantly more expensive than building an equivalent power generation capacity from wind or solar, with the cost of nuclear power often being at least twice as high per megawatt hour of electricity produced; this is due to the high capital costs associated with nuclear plant construction compared to renewable sources like wind and solar. "
@@shanecollie5177 even if that were true, there would be zero need to expand the fossil fuel industry. Current supply will be just fine. The only place where fossil fuels are used in abundance is in the mining of the raw materials and the manufacturing of the silicone wafers. Mining companies the world over are moving to greener production through the use of biofuels or straight up electrification of equipment. As for the production of the silicone wafers, there already exist technologies that can eliminate the gas cookers from the processing
Since about 2023 ago Solar is the cheapest Energy source in most countries.... Shout out to those that invested in the tech before it became really affordable
One of the best decisions that Germany made in the last few decades, spent a lot of money to give solar power a boost to get it into mass production. By being a market that would buy up all the PV panels that could be produced it gave investors the confidence to invest in large-scale PV production, which then brought the price down. I think it would also have happened without Germany, but a couple of years later.
@ You think that China would have invested that heavily into PV that early without the guarantee that they could sell everything that they could manage to produce? (And the ability to buy ready made production equipment from Germany etc.) I didn't say that Germany did it all by themselves, but Germany did play a crucial role.
There is an exciting new breakthrough that allows for twice the energy output from a panel! It is a layer of perovskite. Batteries are having major breakthroughs on a regular basis! It is pretty easy to set up plug and play type solar / battery system (lifepo4 batteries work great).
A lot of effort and money and deception has gone into keeping the alternative technology down over the years. If it could be even 2 decades earlier than now, then we wouldn't be in the climate situation where we are now, and the political landscape would be vastly improved. It's all thanks to greed. Some idiots just don't mind doing harm to everybody around them, if it means they can make a few bucks. And make no mistake - That is very, very, very stupid.
The cost and installation is vastly different everywhere! That's the reason! In the US for some reason its more expensive than everywhere else, especially on installation side of things.
@@ARKY-v3x It's not so difficult to understand. Standard of living and wealth is high in the US. Sadly that means cost of living is also relatively high compared to other places. If an installer in the US needs to make, say $100 per installation, then an installer in a poor 3rd world country might see $10 as a lavish profit. Because $100 is not a lot in the US, but $10 is a lot in the poor country. Now add all the other places in the supply and distribution chain where people need to make profit to make a living. At best you could compare with the EU. Where standards of living and wealth is similar'ish to the US. Also. Even comparing to places like the EU, inequality is higher in the US due to the dogged pursuit of the Neoliberal Capitalist system. Which means that inequality tends to be higher in the US. i.e. More of the wealth is concentrated in the top 10%, and especially the top 1%, or even just the top 100 wealthy individuals. And at the other end of the scale, regular workers have hardly seen their income improve for the last 50 years or so, in real terms, adjusted for inflation. Regardless how much overall extra wealth has been created in the meantime. So even if prices end up being comparable between the US and EU, and average income is higher in the US... Income on the lower end is higher in the EU. So the EU's poorer people are wealthier than in the US, and thus the entire population can much more easily pay those kind of prices.
@@ARKY-v3x DIY installations aren't that expensive. You can do small circuits straight away to run various appliances. Especially now that lifepo4 batteries are so cheap.
Not quite that simple. The sun doesn't shine at night and energy storage is expensive. I am connected to the grid in Canada and have recently had rooftop solar installed on my house. In the 49 days I've had solar so far the panels havs only produced 107.8kWh of power, much less than my home uses. In the summer it will produce more than I need and I will get a credit, from the utility company, for that. I am expecting to have about 80% of my net electricity needs covered by solar over the year.
No... each home would have to duplicate the efforts of maintaining storage, and the smallest scaleable storage is batteries. We need batteries for EVs, etc... A connected grid can diversify across solar/wind/nuclear, minimizing the need for storage, which will still be a huge challenge.
@@Joe-ij6of You might like being tied to the grid and handing ovet your hard earned money to privately owned energy providers to pay their greedy shareholders, I don't I want to break free from their stranglehold.
@GaryV-p3h That's fine, and your choice, but it's stupid to _make_ everyone do that, because it would be very resource-inefficient. Having storage to cover the local area is _much_ more efficient than putting enough in every house to make them entirely independent. Especially in northern climes where the winter/summer solar generation varies by a factor of 9.
Public policy should be a strong, well connected, diverse grid with financial incentives to build it out that way... but also a market structure to make sure there's a link between investment returns and minimizing customer prices, all while keeping costs down. If individuals want to go off-grid prepper-style, that's fine too.
Fossil fuel entities most likely won't just sit idly by. They will mostly likely fight dirty, which is happening today in some countries like the US. We need to be diligent.
@starventure you are extremely naive if you think only price matters. First, you should learn about monopolistic regulated power markets (which covers a significant portion of world energy markets). Second, you should learn about permitting processes and how that can be an easy barrier. I wish price mattered more, but it is only a part of it.
My country (Malaysia) has stopped diesel subsidy which is making EV more attractive. I think we need to do more like cut electricity subsidies to make solar more attractive. Taxing fossil out business.
The overlap between Malaysians who are sensitive to diesel prices and Malaysians who are able to afford an EV is approximately zero. You can't buy an EV in Malaysia for under 100,000 RM and most models cost far more than that. Glad to see that Proton has released the e.MAS 7 though. But as long as Malaysia has oil and gas reserves we're unlikely to see much uptick in EV adoption, or almost any increase in the tiny solar component of its energy mix - this despite Malaysia being the world's third biggest producer of photovoltaic panels.
No matter how hard and experience electricity in Pakistan but the nation has realized that solar is future and we as Pakistani are pioneer in accepting the climate change effects and act proactively to protect precious glaciers and the future nations to come. World must realize that carbon emissions increases high temperatures and unpredicted weather patterns. I live in a region where cold weather circle was about 90 days it has reduced to 70 days it will definitely effect wheet crops and early harvesting. Climate change is real act now
You are completely correct. I live in Southern Spain - a decade or so we'd have a few days each Summer where the temperature rose above 40 degrees, now we seem to be getting more and more such days each year (and they're starting to "leak" into the cooler months). And in Winter we're getting more short, severe storms than we used to. The weather is definitely changing and countries (developed or not) face huge bills adapting to the changes. Spain is gradually getting there but there is still a huge amount to be done.
In the UK when David Cameron was prime minister his vision or the future was “let’s get rid of this green crap” 14years later we had an energy crisis, I wonder why .
I have always been asked "how long is the payback period?" I tell the questioner "payback is instant because I am offsetting fossil fuel burning. At 7 years I now have saved (in electricity cost) as much as I spent in the beginning". The payoff is immediate & with battery backup, we never go dark from "blackouts".
Yeah. To start with. There's nothing wrong with making an investment that improves your monthly financials. Right from that moment on you're spending power, saving and investment power, and quality of life are improved. And if you're like me, and I think most are, then you love your installation. Because you can feel the love right from the start. Myself, I've sat down with an expensive whisky and toasted mine at times. Just looking at it with a smile.
Solar can even improve one's retirement prospects. Like... I know I can buy groceries for nearly two weeks with the average money I save on electricity. Each and every month. Since the price of electricity goes up anyway. And the price of groceries, and everything really, is linked to the price of electricity - I know I'll still be able to buy nearly two weeks worth of groceries with the saving each month. That's a big deal for retired people. Who mostly, the longer they live tend to see the cost of living easily outpacing anything they would have previously thought possible before retirement. And before retirement it will allow you to save and invest more. Thus solar is an ideal grade A++ retirement investment, in my opinion.
Solar power is becoming incredibly cheap and prevalent worldwide, displacing fossil fuels in both rich and poor countries. Researcher Jenny Chase explains the rapid growth of solar installations, challenges in tracking data, and how solar is transforming energy markets globally.
Governments have a role here. On the Caribbean islands the rich are autonomous thanks to solar+batteries which drives up energy prices for the regular customers who rely on utilities. Mini grids are often successful in these cases, see the RMI/IREC supported projects in Puerto Rico, but the government needs to allow breaking the utility monopoly.
My small appartment in Austria🇦🇹run`s only on Solar with Battery for 2 Year´s now ..... i don´t have too , but it`s my lovely that this is possible ...... 🥰 best wishes to my brothers and sisters arround the globe
I am getting solar on my house in Las Vegas later this year. It’s still crazy expensive in the US for some reason but it feels so good generating your own power and not having an electric bill.
Austria 🇦🇹, I just installed PV in my home at the balcony which is a thing in the german speaking area (: And I helped install more modules at my brother and all my neighbours (: A 430Wp solar panel costs only €50 incl. shipping
When people talk about return of investment, payback time, they are forgetting one important thing. If you spend say 10,000 € on solar panels, solar hot water, batteries, then the value of your property increases by the same amount. Also the house will sell quicker. Same is true for a car charging point or good energy score. Much better investment than a new bathroom or kitchen, which the new owners will replace anyway.
When I go to sell my house in 20 years, the battery i purchased with my system will be degraded and dangerous, and the panels on my roof will look like giant eyesores compared to the solar tech available in the future. Solar increasing home value is a salesmans tactic.
@@KaiSosceles well my solar panels are 15 years old and still look great and performing well . If car batteries are lasting so long, home batteries will last much longer.
@@KaiSosceles My panels are ground mount so does not make my roof look like an eyesore. Batteries are LiFePo4 which should last me 20+ years and can be replaced easily just like car batteries. And best of all, during a hurricane i still have power here in sunny Jamaica.
i put 200w of solar on my phev, and it paid for itself in like 8 months with gas savings. people dont realize you dont need to put electricity into the main high voltage battery to extend your range, its a lot more efficient to keep everything "low voltage" and just supply the low voltage system directly without going through any inverters. i replaced the 12v battery of my car with a 50$ lifepo4 one i built, and saved almost 200$ over the 50lb heavier lead acid battery. I drive a lot for my work commute, about 160 miles round trip. I was explaining to a curious passer by how my old 2013 volt worked, and mentioned that i get about 50 miles of range now with the ev battery. he said "oh so whats the point?".... like the math was not at all obvious to him. I charge at work and at home, and put 100 miles on the battery every day of the week, which means the gas combustion motor only puts about 60 miles on it per day, and thats all hwy driving. the gas motor will last forever with that type of use, and I save about 3.5 gallons of gas every day for the rest of my life, about 16$ usd per day. in the last 18 months ive put 45k miles on my old ev with the original battery (130k miles on the odom), and saved 6500$ usd, which is more than i paid for my old car. the volt is a rare glimpse into the future of cheap 2nd hand evs/phevs. whats even cooler is that because i designed and installed the system myself, i added a 200w micro inverter which I back feed my home from during the summer months when I get better sun in my parking spot. musks old statement about the futility of putting solar on a car was very misinformed. its the best possible place to put it because it directly offsets the most expensive energy we regularly consume, that being gasoline. you dont need any permits or anything because its a mobile appliaction, and you dont play some futile ev tax credit game, where contractors greatly inflate their labor and cost of goods to make sure they make a healthy profit margin and can pay for any future warranty claims
@@rkan2 if lto costs 10x lifepo4, just make the lifepo4 battery 2-3x as large and put in self heating. doesnt take much to keep a battery above 4C in an insulated box
@ The chemistries are not that expensive. Albeit some manufacturers rely on LiFePo4 for their 12V batteries, I guess they have monitoring for when charging is safe. However for more conventional charging systems, I still wouldn't replace lead acids, which are very reliable with variable temperatures, especially if temperatures go to freezing often. Consider a lead acid should be able to be ready to start a vehicle and accept charge after being in -20C for a few weeks. You cannot rely on LiFePo4 to do that, nevermind building a big enough battery to keep itself heated for such a long period in -20C.
I bought my own solar panels in 2012 ( 4 Kw peak). I have generated almost 49 megawatts since then but I don't have battery storage. If the UK government was realistic about our energy demands it would stop throwing our money away on idiotic and wasteful schemes and subsidise us with batteries.
I am looking into these schemas and not sure if they are reliable but I am kin to install solar panels to my property. Do you have any recommendation or a company you rely on for this work?
@@giovabusi I live near Bristol and used Solarsense. Many firms have come and gone but SS still trades. Everything about them was top notch. Find a good local company and ask for references. The feed in tariff I get is ridiculously high but it isn't now. Panel costs have come down sharply and efficiency has gone up. If you go for it you'll love doing your washing, dishwashing making your tea etc. and it's all for free !
@@AlanJan_UK_49 I am up in Stoke and I have seen plenty of houses with panels installed so I started to get attached by the idea of having it as well. Thank you for the advice, I will look into it and try to contact some local company as well.
Batteries should not be subsidized at the moment. I got solar panels installed last month. I inquired to an instalation company about getting battery storage and was told: it's not worth it. "Just use the grid as your "battery". You get credit when you produce more than you need and will need to buy when the panels don't produce enough." The solar salesman actually told me he'd refer me to another company that could set up a natural gas generator if I wanted full backup, should the electricity grid go down.
Spot the analyst-nerd having to give a presentation :-) Jenny is great, and really knows her stuff (and accidentally fell into a really interesting job answering a fairly random job advert 20 years ago). Panels have indeed got crazy-cheap, and batteries have got _waaay_ cheaper over the last few years, but inverters, scaffolding, electrics, copper and electricians haven't got much cheaper in the last decade so increasingly dominate. I just installed 7kWp of rooftop PV and 16kWh of battery, with off-grid capability and UPS failover in the UK for £4500. I had 2.9kWp installed in 2010 and it was £14000. The new system should pay for itself in under 4 years monetarily. 8yrs in emissions terms (total system embodied emissions 8 tonnes). We can run for about 4-5 days of grey dinge before needing to import from the grid, but there have been two 5-day dinges so far this winter.
@@cad4246 No, a Fogstar 16kWH battery is/was £1700 (Hmm, I see they are back up to £1800, but they were £1700 in December). Panels was £1049+£149 delivery. Inverter+MPPT+GX was £1450. Scaffold was already up for roof repairs (main reason this job got done now), rails were re-used. And about £300 in electrical sundries. Looks like it was more like £4600 all in.
I installed solar 2008, and my small 2kW peak set of panels have been happily generating now for 16 years. Although expensive they have not only paid off the installation cost years ago, they also have paid the fabrication cost (green deficit of construction) years ago.
The Climate Change -causing costs of production cannot be in any way 'paid off', reality doesn't work like that. They can 'save more carbon than it cost to make them', but that's arithmetic sleight of hand, like spending £2 on an illegal product to save £8 on the £10 it would normally cost from another criminal - you've still paid for £2 of illegal product. I have solar PV, but Climate-Change-causing commodities were used to produce and ship them, and probably will be again when they're one day replaced. We can fix that bit too (with renewable synthetic carbon commodities), but 'decarbonisers' won't currently allow us to.
The power pricing situation in Pakistan is interesting because that's what I have long predicted will happen to fossil fuel vehicles. A lot of drivers don't realise how expensive it's going to get in the future, some even think it'll be cheaper
Best thing ng is that prices on solar panels and batteries are coming down fast. More people can then afford it and it makes it more and more viable to install compared to other solutions.
@@HansMilling the panels I'm using on our new setup, Hyundai 410 watt, went from $370 each to $219 each in the last 2 years. And they are bifacial, with a total potential of 575 watts.
Or do both. You can reduce general consumption. But you can also be more efficient to reduce consumption. And often the consumption reduction from more efficient use, also reduces consumption even more. Like how not using fuel means no more shipping fuel, which reduces fuel.
@@5353Jumper Agreed. I renovated a 1903 house including adding 3.9 kWp of solar. But the insulation added really made the difference. I got a check for about $100 for my excess production above consumption last year. That's at the wholesale rate. The house is now all electric: heat pump heat/cool, heat pump water heater, induction cooktop etc.
We are doing both. LED light bulbs have been a massive game changer. EVs, heat pumps, insulating homes,... But we also need to generate a lot of clean energy.
You can buy all the parts for a grid tie solar system in the USA for about 50 cents per watt. Yet companies routinely charge $3-$5 per watt installed, so most Americans don't see any value in solar. If the price came down to about $1 per watt we would see a lot more Americans adopting aolar
"What does 50 degrees Celsius feel like? Extreme Heat: At 50 degrees Celsius, you would experience intense heat. The air would feel scorching, and any physical contact with surfaces exposed to direct sunlight could burn your skin. Difficulty Breathing: In such extreme heat, the air can become dry and stifling, making it difficult to breathe comfortably. " May 28, 2015
It fully depends on humidity. If the air is extremely dry, like in a desert, 50°C is bearable... some people live their life with such daytime temperatures... and without A/C. If it is humid, then a human can die in minutes! The experience can be done in a sauna... and I have done it. Heat the sauna to 50°C, and it feels almost cold, because the air is very dry! Heat then the sauna to 130°C, and it is hard for a non-Finn to stay more than 5 mn. But then, add a single ladle of water on the hot stones, and you are a hero if you stay a single minute!
@@st-ex8506 ether way 50 celsius is 120 F and that's serious hot. i've lived in the mojave desert and yes dry heat isn't as bad a humid. but it's not healthy.
@ I am not saying it is. But there are people living in places as hot if not hotter than the Mojave desert that you know, with no access to air conditioning, like the Bedouin tribes of the Sahara region, the Afar and Issa tribes of Djibouti, etc.
@@jensonee Well, actually, the hottest places on Earth are NOT the ones getting hotter the fastest. Their average temperature have gone up by only 0-1°C. It is in the Arctic and Antarctic that you find record increase of temperature of 4°C or even more, and in Western Europe and North-West Africa (ca. 2°C). They are also not, at least not all, getting dryer. Some deserts are getting rainier! For example, the Western Sahara has seen last year its highest rainfall in human memory. So, yeah, the problem is indeed global, but not evenly spread!
Watching this in a home in southern EU that's 98% powered by solar + LFP batteries both summer and winter. Air conditioned, heat pump water boiler, heat pump dryer etc.. It's great! And a DIY system with DIY batteries isn't that expensive.
It's all about economics. As the price comes down, it will meet the needs of more people, utilities and countries on a greater and greater basis. Batteries will further extend this.
It's all about economics, but you have to admit that powerful entities exist (e.g. the Saudi royal family) whose interests are best served by slowing this transition as much as they can. Given that oil and gas companies globally have a lot of free cash at any given time, they're quite likely to divert some from exploration and development to slowing the adoption of competing technologies. I mean, that's what I would do if I were them. Let's not assume everyone is a boy scout! :)
I'am currently in the process of installing 20 kWp + 21 kWh LiFePo batteries in my home. It's a DIY-project and already over 10 person days of work. But once completed (in 2 days or so) the amortization period will only be around 6 years. So yeah, solar realy has gotten cheap.
It is impossible to know how much solar electricity is REALLY produced. The grid authority keeps statistics on only the power that transit through the grid. All auto-consumption is ignored, be it a single solar panel on a garden shed, or a few thousands on a factory's roof. I leave in France, and I do not sell any power to the grid...my production is hence statistically ignored! Installed capacity can be approximately known from the sales of panels in a country. And the generated energy calculated by multiplying the installed base by the average panel efficiency in said country.
No, produced energy is still useless. Unfortunately solar electricity is produced mainly at times of low demand, and unavailable at times of high demand. The amount of demand covered is what matters.
@ Solar energy IS produced at time of high demand… just when the industries and businesses are working. And some 4 hours of storage allows to cover the evening time peak also. The problem of solar energy is NOT that the sun does not shine at night, but rather that it shines significantly less, at northern latitudes, during the winter time. But there are several ways to solve that problem!
@@st-ex8506fully agreed, batteries are now economical in Germany, so the sun DOES shine at night. Seasonal fluctuation is best countered by building wind power, as pv & wind have complementary seasonality in the northern hemisphere. Combine that with batteries for short term, and hydro, biogas and hydrogen long-term storage and you get fully renewable power supply year-round, even during prolonged doldrums during winter, for 7 Cent/kWh total cost. That is the only number that matters when comparing to alternatives like nuclear.
@ We are in almost complete agreement. Only hydrogen storage is way too inefficient technically complex, dangerous and hence expensive, that won't happen. As a matter of fact, there is no need for long-term/seasonal storage (with some exceptions like isolated grids or north of 60°of latitude). All the storage Germany needs is 4-5 days worth of average consumption. When you say batteries are now economical in Germany, I am glad to hear that, but do you mean at grid-level, or at household level? or both? If we agree that NEW nuclear is simply way too expensive, existing nuclear is not... and is going to ease and hasten the transition a lot. Germany made a monumental blunder in closing its perfectly good nuclear plants. The whole German people... and industry... is now paying for it... and paying dearly... more than double the price of the kWh than I pay!
Def agree with that final line in regards to batteries. They will be a fundamental game changer. I myself have a battery ready system and as soon as I’m done paying off my solar system. I’ll be getting a battery installed. I’ll be looking at a 15kw battery so that I can participate in a virtual power plant scheme. For 90% of the year, a 10kw would suit me fine, but the 15kw will give me more peace of mind and allow me to monetize my investment.
dietary choices are also important (or even essential) in the fight against climate change. which of the following levels can you do for the planet? - level 1: avoid red meat, as it is by far the worst food for the planet. this is the least we should all do. - level 2: be vegetarian, thus avoiding all meat and fish. - level 3: be vegan, thus avoiding all animal products. + warning: if you decide to try a vegan diet, i would recommend the following supplements: a multivitamin, a choline supplement, calcium from tofu and fortified plant milks (or a calcium supplement), vitamin D if you don't spend enough time in the sun (this varies based on your latitude), 1 or 2 algae oil capsules for the long chain omega3s (which is where fish get their omega3s from), and finally a weekly b12 supplement (2000 mcg of cyanocobalamin taken once a week on an empty stomach).
ah, the cult is here. the healthiest level of vegetarian is octo-lavo pescatarian. Vegetables, fruits, grains, legumes, fish, eggs, and milk. Any less and you are missing nutrients.
The panels are cheap, the inverters and installation cost are now a significant part of the total cost. Adding batteries is still expensive, but battery prices are falling. I intend to buy my solar installation in the Philippines in a few weeks time. There is plenty of potential for roof top solar in the Philippines. Sadly the energy companies are not stimulating it. I see a lot of Pakistani posting about solar on social media. There is a lot of interest there. What is needed in poorer countries right now are hybrid inverters that do not require batteries, so an inverter that can take the panel DC power and convert it directly to AC power and has a switch so it can be used on-grid and can also operate when the grid goes down while the panels generate enough power.
The problem in some nations is that regulations restrict the use of solar panels and there is also geographical, some areas simply do not get enough sunlight.
I hope there is some discussions on why solar panel prices are getting so low, and if the companies making solar panels are very profitable because of the tremendous volume growth.
@@bernhardschmalhofer855 It seems using more and more solar panels that are so cheap is no brainer. So I want to know more about why it's so cheap and if those that produce them actually make a profit doing so. Also, are the panel produced by dirty coal power? If so, do we have a situation where more solar panel production require more coal power? I wish I knew.
@@wmchan3364 Let's just talk about Chinese production of solar panels. Yes, there's a lot of existing coal-fired generation on the Chinese electrical grid. But at the same time, they're building more solar, more wind, and more nuclear and adding it to the grid faster than the rest of the world put together. Burning coal, if you need to, to build solar panels is the only way you get away from having to burn coal (or import natural gas) forever. Trust me, those factories and those workers were going to be doing *something* anyway. Best for all of us if they are building batteries and solar hardware. By building at such scale, and in competition with others in China and elsewhere, the efficiency of production goes up, and the panels get cheaper. At some scale, new solar panel + battery power gets to be cheaper than existing coal-burning power in China (especially considering that the state carries the cost of health care including everyone made sick by local and regional air pollution) and the state steps in and starts switching off coal plants. This will happen late, when costs are very low, but also quickly.
Need to add the cost of batteries and thermo gas plants to the mix if for grid. For something like pumping water very good. Though problem now is draining aquaphor.
Solar panels are getting cheaper, but this trend is not the same for electricity storage(still expensive and does not last long give or take around 7 years) and you really need both. Especially if you want to drive electric
Home storage batteries have gotten much cheaper and there are many more options out there. 15kwh battery from fogstar is £2500 in the UK. You couldn't have done that DIY two years ago. Likewise EVs. Kia/Hyundai have been selling good value 64kwh EVs since 2020 and more recently MG have joined the fray. There is now a rich second hand market of cars with practical range. I've been watching the UK EV market since 2016 finally buying second hand in 2023 and there is no question prices have plummeted.
A 7 year battery life is really out of date information. My 11 year old EV is still working, and modern ones have batteries 2-4 times bigger, so they will take a lot longer to do the same number of cycles. Most now come with an 8 year battery warrantee.
My wife and I were quoted on installing solar on the top of our modest sized house. It was $20k and would pay for itself after 20 years. Safe to say we decided against it.
Solar is useful as a part of the grid, but the reliability problems when the sun is down or there is lots of cloud/fog cover (which can last for days) are very real.
Economics for consumers is dependent on your local price for electricity. Given the commercial wind and solar in Texas, the wholesale price is typically around $0.03/kWh during daytime. So grid-tied is not that great as the buy back price from Entergy is low and the base rate for consumption is around $0.12/kWh. Prices for solar, inverters and batteries are coming down but it’s still a long payout even for DIY installations.
I'm not as hopeful and I'm surprised the talk didn't have more data on how cheap it actually is, because the comparisons at scale, especially combined with battery trends would have been great. She is an analyst who didn't gave us as much data as expected.
In Pakistan,not only solar installation is in demand but also almost every building getting higher and higher which means no value for money for their solar panels
If solar panels produced energy at one cent per kilowatt hour, and batteries were in place that could store it for three cents per kilowatt hour, and you could distribute the energy over a large area to the user at five cents per kilowatt hour, The world would beat a path to your door. But without usable batteries at scale, and without a decent distribution system, solar power will only be an increment addition to the grid. Though I think we desperately need it, I think we need to be very realistic. There is a lot of work to still be done.
Not every place has enough sun and wind all of the time, to cover for the electricity needs. In Europe we do have periods of weeks with hardly any wind and little sunshine. The grid has too be able to cope with that, by basically have another electricity generator on standby. Nobody seems to be working on filling that gap, since most electricity generating companies are now controlled by commercial companies trying to make profit. I hope this won't backfire on us and fuel the naysayers who claim renewables don't work since they are intermittent.
In the United States, every utility that has led an aggressive switch to solar and wind has seen an increase in utility prices. In Europe, Germany has led the way to switching to renewables and now pay twice as much for electricity than nuclear heavy France. Renewables must be cheaper or no one will switch.
In Finland, the electricity grid has to be built with the once-in-a-decade peak in electricity consumption in mind. If, for example, it is -30°C for a week in the winter, electricity consumption will peak, but there is hardly any power from the sun or wind, so peak power has to be covered by other forms of production, and in addition, Putler or someone else may cut off the electricity transmission lines between the countries. EVs could be a partial solution for storing energy from the sun during the summer, but even now, electric car drivers usually charge their cars at night, so the electricity comes from somewhere other than the sun, and separate batteries are still too expensive. Currently, the price of electricity in Finland is €0.0028/kWh because it is windy and so much wind power has been built in Finland that when it is windy the price drops to almost zero and apparently no electricity producer earn anything then?
Finland has one of the best electrical grids in the world for production and consumption. There is no excuse to install more solar/wind production. Obviously there will be an effect in electricity price, that is the market at work.
Exactly! Solar already rises exponentially from the systems that are connected to the grid. It does not include systems like yours. So the increase in implemented solar is even better than the reports make it out to be.
We must be about to pass 'capacity' in the UK for installed solar. When wind passed capacity (slightly more complex in UK than that due to bottlenecks) we started to 'curtail' it - dump the energy and pay to do it. Not sure what will happen when solar does it, unless there's a similar scheme for grid-tied inverters/batteries? Batteries can shift a little bit of generation to later in the day, but they're too expensive for much more than that, prospects are that we will exceed capacity by many times over, and this far north we need energy from summer sun / episodic wind in the winter. The only current tech that offers that much long-term storage cheaply is e-fuels (inc hydrogen - Royal Soc's pick). If we don't make that tech mainstream, all the new RE being added will be increasingly marginally utilised (as more and more 'excess' is dumped), which will put up its apparent cost per energy unit. We need to pull our communal finger out.
Got my panels for 2.5 years now, produced 12.6GW so far. Enough for my consumption. I can even fully charge my EV 50x a year just from what the panels produce. Every house should have solar panels
they are not cheap where I live, country gives money to cover part of the costs of setting up PV but the companies decided to ramp up their prices to make money off of that, people don't want to buy PV because even with country's help it's still expensive,
I hear people talk about how cheap it is getting but have yet to see United States sellers/installers relaying that cheapness. The initial cost is so high that it negates the reason to switch. Maybe someone who lives in the United States, particularly the southern states, can share a company that uses quality products and offers everything at a reasonable rate?
Will prowes of RUclips teaches everything you need to know about solar. And he was living in a van for nearly a decade so he knows how to build cheap DIY.. i learned to build my 10kw hybrid set up thanks to him and some others like off-grid garage
Solar contributes 1-2% of total energy usage. It's not the answer to future energy needs. It's like building a castle in a swamp. You can't put solar in areas like New England.
Total energy consumption (more accurately: primary energy consumption) does also include tons of inefficiencies. And we just don’t have to keep them going. For example, a modern efficient fossil power plant does only turn about 40-60% of the burnt stuff (coal, gas) into electricity, the rest is wasted as excess heat. In some places, some of that waste heat is also used for district heating, but that’s about it. Oh, and traditional power plants also spend about 5-10% or so from the produced electricity for their own consumption - to keep the plant running. With renewables, those losses are way lower. With fossil fuels in cars, the stats are even worse: a combustion car does only use about 20% of the fuel to propel the car, the rest is wasted heat. Essentially, your car is a furnace able to propel itself 😁 Electric motors in electric cars routinely use about 80% of the energy they get for propulsion and overall have an efficiency of about 64% (including any losses for storage and inverters). That’s not breaking news: heavy machinery such as ships or trains have been using “diesel-electric” drive trains for decades. The diesel engine is running at optimum efficiency to generate electricity, which in turn charges a small battery and powers the actual electric motor. This is just way more efficient, reliable and flexible than a pure combustion system. Why am I writing this up? What you’re usually being told about “total energy consumption” does include alle the net losses. But we don’t have to stick to those old, inefficient dinosaurs of technology, when the newer ones are way more efficient and can easily save more than half of that amount by switching to a different type of technology. And in the realm of electricity generation, renewables such as wind and solar power contributed 26% to the globally generated electricity in 2023 (source: Global Energy Outlook 2024 from IEA).
A nice chart for California electricity, but what it doesn't show is COST. California has some of the most expensive electricity in the US due to "cheaper" solar. Yes, solar IS cheaper WHEN it is available. But people and industry need electricity 24/7/365, not just when the sun shines. Imagine you need a ride to work 5 days a week. You ca buy a weekly bus pass from the Fossil Bus Company for $10 per week ($2/day). Your friend Solar says he can give you a ride for an average random 2 days per week for only $1/day to save you money. Your initial thought is "great". But then you remember you need a ride 5 days per week, and the daily bus pass is $3/day, because the bus company has to provide service all 5 weekdays, not just random days dictated by Solar. There is no combination of fares that will result in less cost to you from the "cheaper" ride from Solar.
Developing nations have a huge opportunity to leapfrog the stage where a massive, interconnected grid fed by huge powerplants fed by imported fossil fuels.
Solar panels are only that cheap in places where they don't tariff Chinese panels. The solar panel she showed is more than 3x more expensive where I live than what she stated.
I recently read that Eskom is now seeking to penalise rooftop solar installers with increasingly higher connection or line charge fees in order to recover some of the lost revenue from solar and curb solar demand to protect its business. Can anyone from SA confirm?
We in nepal are using pure green energy,no fossil fuel,never,100% of our energy is either sun,wind or hydro powered.we export some remaing energy to china,India and some to US aswell.we are engery dependent and energy exporting nation,now we are planning to extract energy from moon aswell as solar energy is insufficient for us,and climate change is very much real.thank you🙏
I was one of the early adopters of grid tie solar in our area in 2008. Back then solar panels sold for $7.60 per watt (now they're 1/10 that price) and they paid for themselves a few years back and now I have free electricity for years to come.
Actually less than 1/10th now! Consumers can buy them for about $0.18/W and distributers get them as low as $.10-$0.15/W. As an installer, I'm finding that the mounting hardware is frequently more expensive than the solar module!
@@MrTyrael159 In the U.S. I have not found panels in the price range you indicate online. I recently paid $0.25/watt on a "Black Friday" sale. The week previously I purchased some bifacial panels for $0.48/watt. A far cry from my original installation over 20 years ago @ $5.67/watt. Some of the old panels have water damage at the bottom of the panel & have been replaced but, 2/3 of them are still in operation. I am doubling my array in the coming weeks & installing a stand alone array w/ batteries for charging my electric vehicles separately.
@@MrTyrael159 Crazy, isn't it? I noticed that the mounting kit is indeed not that much cheaper than the panels now. I suspect panels are quite a lot cheaper than tiles now too.
@@MrTyrael159 If you look in the right places (e.g. Ali) you can see them being sold for 7¢/W. Very exciting times.
I just paid 53 cents per watt in Hawaii..and there are cheaper, I just wanted my panels to all match.
We live in Lahore and got solar panels installed last summer. Initial cost was mad but best decision ever.
I heard a story of a village near Lahore, where a big joint family house was overcharged like 5-10lac rupees, which they disputed but WAPDA cut their power. They didn't pay it but installed fully offgrid solar. 3 months later employees of WAPDA came to their home to ask, brother you didn't come to our office? Don't you need electricity? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@MrBurairHaider I just recently went fully off grid in Australia. The electricity provider still charged me after I was disconnected. Screw the power companies.
@@jamesrowlands8971 going off grid will become even easier with decreasing cost of batteries. Solar panels are dirt cheap right now. Only 10 cents per watt right now in Pakistan for Tier 1 panels.
In Pakistan the amount of solar installation is crazy. Like a poorman will constuct a mud house in a village, and first thing he does is put 2 solar plates on it, attached to a dc fan and some leds. Any industry which must stay competitive must have rooftop solar, otherwise powerbills make the product non-competitive. a common man earns roughly 30kRs or 100usd per month, and electricity bills for 200kwh can reach half of his salary. So what he does, he puts a solar plate on top to run all fans and maybe the tv on solar, while to grid only runs his fridge, as he can not afford AC. My family got solar last year, which proper backup. we paid 100usd on avg for power, with frequent blackouts, specially during heatwaves. The agricultural farms owned by well off people run the tubewells and other mechanical motors on solar, because the diesel is too expensive. Someone said the solar paid off in a year. The govt is not encouraging the transition but trying to save the powerplants, because it collects taxes through power bills. people who live in appartments are screwed, they have to pay expensive bills more than their rent, for not even turning on their ACs. Everyone wants solar.
Yeah, you're right, the citizens are 'subsidizing' an expensive fossil fuel power source. The electricity company charges high bills to compensate for the loss of customers to rooftop solar. Still, the electricity company's pricing model leads to their eventual demise, in the end, watch the space.
great comment.
are their people in apartments with balconies hanging solar panels on them?
If every country would have had proper nuclear fosil and hydro solar and wind would not be necesary; the need of fosil would be made minimum and nuclear and hydro main power generators. Solar has a high instability in many regions. It fluctuates the grid too much so that fosil and hydro need to adjust too fast for their design.
@ "According to current data, building a nuclear power plant is significantly more expensive than building an equivalent power generation capacity from wind or solar, with the cost of nuclear power often being at least twice as high per megawatt hour of electricity produced; this is due to the high capital costs associated with nuclear plant construction compared to renewable sources like wind and solar. "
Trump: “Drill, baby, Drill!”
Solar Market: “Fine, I’ll do it myself.”
As it should be.
You realise that you cant manufacture solar panels without hydrocarbons?
@@shanecollie5177 Much less than burning regular Fossil Fuels and those panels pay off their carbon debt within months.
@@shanecollie5177 even if that were true, there would be zero need to expand the fossil fuel industry. Current supply will be just fine. The only place where fossil fuels are used in abundance is in the mining of the raw materials and the manufacturing of the silicone wafers. Mining companies the world over are moving to greener production through the use of biofuels or straight up electrification of equipment. As for the production of the silicone wafers, there already exist technologies that can eliminate the gas cookers from the processing
@@shanecollie5177so much in love with hydrocarbons? 😂
Since about 2023 ago Solar is the cheapest Energy source in most countries.... Shout out to those that invested in the tech before it became really affordable
One of the best decisions that Germany made in the last few decades, spent a lot of money to give solar power a boost to get it into mass production. By being a market that would buy up all the PV panels that could be produced it gave investors the confidence to invest in large-scale PV production, which then brought the price down. I think it would also have happened without Germany, but a couple of years later.
You mean thank China
@ You think that China would have invested that heavily into PV that early without the guarantee that they could sell everything that they could manage to produce? (And the ability to buy ready made production equipment from Germany etc.)
I didn't say that Germany did it all by themselves, but Germany did play a crucial role.
There is an exciting new breakthrough that allows for twice the energy output from a panel! It is a layer of perovskite.
Batteries are having major breakthroughs on a regular basis!
It is pretty easy to set up plug and play type solar / battery system (lifepo4 batteries work great).
Almost every house has solar in Lagos, Nigeria
I wish your country prosperity!
Which of the lagos?
Island or mainland?
You are lying!
Im in boston usa
Are they Chinese solar panels that are now wayyy cheaper than in the USA.
my dad put solar on our house in Perth in 1982. Just can't believe how slow the global up take has been. we should be where we are today in 1985!
A lot of effort and money and deception has gone into keeping the alternative technology down over the years. If it could be even 2 decades earlier than now, then we wouldn't be in the climate situation where we are now, and the political landscape would be vastly improved. It's all thanks to greed. Some idiots just don't mind doing harm to everybody around them, if it means they can make a few bucks.
And make no mistake - That is very, very, very stupid.
Absolutely. The foot dragging has been staggering.
The cost and installation is vastly different everywhere! That's the reason!
In the US for some reason its more expensive than everywhere else, especially on installation side of things.
@@ARKY-v3x It's not so difficult to understand.
Standard of living and wealth is high in the US. Sadly that means cost of living is also relatively high compared to other places. If an installer in the US needs to make, say $100 per installation, then an installer in a poor 3rd world country might see $10 as a lavish profit. Because $100 is not a lot in the US, but $10 is a lot in the poor country. Now add all the other places in the supply and distribution chain where people need to make profit to make a living.
At best you could compare with the EU. Where standards of living and wealth is similar'ish to the US.
Also. Even comparing to places like the EU, inequality is higher in the US due to the dogged pursuit of the Neoliberal Capitalist system. Which means that inequality tends to be higher in the US. i.e. More of the wealth is concentrated in the top 10%, and especially the top 1%, or even just the top 100 wealthy individuals. And at the other end of the scale, regular workers have hardly seen their income improve for the last 50 years or so, in real terms, adjusted for inflation. Regardless how much overall extra wealth has been created in the meantime. So even if prices end up being comparable between the US and EU, and average income is higher in the US... Income on the lower end is higher in the EU. So the EU's poorer people are wealthier than in the US, and thus the entire population can much more easily pay those kind of prices.
@@ARKY-v3x DIY installations aren't that expensive. You can do small circuits straight away to run various appliances. Especially now that lifepo4 batteries are so cheap.
Thank You for the great TED talk...
It really is yes. Definitively great.
Every home and business could and should be made to be enery self-sufficient.
Not quite that simple. The sun doesn't shine at night and energy storage is expensive. I am connected to the grid in Canada and have recently had rooftop solar installed on my house. In the 49 days I've had solar so far the panels havs only produced 107.8kWh of power, much less than my home uses. In the summer it will produce more than I need and I will get a credit, from the utility company, for that. I am expecting to have about 80% of my net electricity needs covered by solar over the year.
No... each home would have to duplicate the efforts of maintaining storage, and the smallest scaleable storage is batteries. We need batteries for EVs, etc... A connected grid can diversify across solar/wind/nuclear, minimizing the need for storage, which will still be a huge challenge.
@@Joe-ij6of You might like being tied to the grid and handing ovet your hard earned money to privately owned energy providers to pay their greedy shareholders, I don't I want to break free from their stranglehold.
@GaryV-p3h That's fine, and your choice, but it's stupid to _make_ everyone do that, because it would be very resource-inefficient. Having storage to cover the local area is _much_ more efficient than putting enough in every house to make them entirely independent. Especially in northern climes where the winter/summer solar generation varies by a factor of 9.
Public policy should be a strong, well connected, diverse grid with financial incentives to build it out that way... but also a market structure to make sure there's a link between investment returns and minimizing customer prices, all while keeping costs down. If individuals want to go off-grid prepper-style, that's fine too.
Fossil fuel entities most likely won't just sit idly by. They will mostly likely fight dirty, which is happening today in some countries like the US. We need to be diligent.
BS, price is king everywhere. Whatever is cheapest will win, no matter how much hand wringing and "wind and solar, bad" chanting is going on.
@starventure you are extremely naive if you think only price matters.
First, you should learn about monopolistic regulated power markets (which covers a significant portion of world energy markets).
Second, you should learn about permitting processes and how that can be an easy barrier.
I wish price mattered more, but it is only a part of it.
My country (Malaysia) has stopped diesel subsidy which is making EV more attractive. I think we need to do more like cut electricity subsidies to make solar more attractive.
Taxing fossil out business.
But your country does are allowed to install solar panels yourself. If they did it would be at least 30%cheaper
The overlap between Malaysians who are sensitive to diesel prices and Malaysians who are able to afford an EV is approximately zero. You can't buy an EV in Malaysia for under 100,000 RM and most models cost far more than that. Glad to see that Proton has released the e.MAS 7 though. But as long as Malaysia has oil and gas reserves we're unlikely to see much uptick in EV adoption, or almost any increase in the tiny solar component of its energy mix - this despite Malaysia being the world's third biggest producer of photovoltaic panels.
No matter how hard and experience electricity in Pakistan but the nation has realized that solar is future and we as Pakistani are pioneer in accepting the climate change effects and act proactively to protect precious glaciers and the future nations to come. World must realize that carbon emissions increases high temperatures and unpredicted weather patterns.
I live in a region where cold weather circle was about 90 days it has reduced to 70 days it will definitely effect wheet crops and early harvesting.
Climate change is real act now
You are completely correct. I live in Southern Spain - a decade or so we'd have a few days each Summer where the temperature rose above 40 degrees, now we seem to be getting more and more such days each year (and they're starting to "leak" into the cooler months). And in Winter we're getting more short, severe storms than we used to. The weather is definitely changing and countries (developed or not) face huge bills adapting to the changes. Spain is gradually getting there but there is still a huge amount to be done.
Nice to see my solar fence 😄
In the UK when David Cameron was prime minister his vision or the future was “let’s get rid of this green crap” 14years later we had an energy crisis, I wonder why .
I have always been asked "how long is the payback period?" I tell the questioner "payback is instant because I am offsetting fossil fuel burning. At 7 years I now have saved (in electricity cost) as much as I spent in the beginning". The payoff is immediate & with battery backup, we never go dark from "blackouts".
@@dennislyons3095 the independance is life changing...
Payback is immediate for me because as soon as power goes like during a hurricane i still have most of my stuff running. Greetings from Jamaica.
Yeah. To start with. There's nothing wrong with making an investment that improves your monthly financials. Right from that moment on you're spending power, saving and investment power, and quality of life are improved. And if you're like me, and I think most are, then you love your installation. Because you can feel the love right from the start.
Myself, I've sat down with an expensive whisky and toasted mine at times. Just looking at it with a smile.
@ takes booze to kill all that guilt from siphoning off resources without working for it.
Solar can even improve one's retirement prospects. Like... I know I can buy groceries for nearly two weeks with the average money I save on electricity. Each and every month. Since the price of electricity goes up anyway. And the price of groceries, and everything really, is linked to the price of electricity - I know I'll still be able to buy nearly two weeks worth of groceries with the saving each month.
That's a big deal for retired people. Who mostly, the longer they live tend to see the cost of living easily outpacing anything they would have previously thought possible before retirement. And before retirement it will allow you to save and invest more. Thus solar is an ideal grade A++ retirement investment, in my opinion.
Solar power is becoming incredibly cheap and prevalent worldwide, displacing fossil fuels in both rich and poor countries. Researcher Jenny Chase explains the rapid growth of solar installations, challenges in tracking data, and how solar is transforming energy markets globally.
Governments have a role here. On the Caribbean islands the rich are autonomous thanks to solar+batteries which drives up energy prices for the regular customers who rely on utilities. Mini grids are often successful in these cases, see the RMI/IREC supported projects in Puerto Rico, but the government needs to allow breaking the utility monopoly.
My small appartment in Austria🇦🇹run`s only on Solar with Battery for 2 Year´s now ..... i don´t have too , but it`s my lovely that this is possible ...... 🥰 best wishes to my brothers and sisters arround the globe
Excellent presentation!!!
I am getting solar on my house in Las Vegas later this year. It’s still crazy expensive in the US for some reason but it feels so good generating your own power and not having an electric bill.
how much is it per watt for solar panels? In Pakistan its only 10 cents per watt for Tier 1 panels like Jinko, JA, Trina, Longi, Canadian.
@ I think it’s like $2-3 now
@@mikeshafer 600 watt panel would cost 1200 to 1800 dollars?
Austria 🇦🇹, I just installed PV in my home at the balcony which is a thing in the german speaking area (:
And I helped install more modules at my brother and all my neighbours (:
A 430Wp solar panel costs only €50 incl. shipping
Every country should try to use solar energy in all things and try to minimise carbon fuels.
Thank you
An Informative speech❤❤
Great talk!!!!
When people talk about return of investment, payback time, they are forgetting one important thing. If you spend say 10,000 € on solar panels, solar hot water, batteries, then the value of your property increases by the same amount. Also the house will sell quicker. Same is true for a car charging point or good energy score. Much better investment than a new bathroom or kitchen, which the new owners will replace anyway.
When I go to sell my house in 20 years, the battery i purchased with my system will be degraded and dangerous, and the panels on my roof will look like giant eyesores compared to the solar tech available in the future. Solar increasing home value is a salesmans tactic.
@@KaiSosceles well my solar panels are 15 years old and still look great and performing well . If car batteries are lasting so long, home batteries will last much longer.
@@KaiSosceles it's similar to a new roof, new siding, or new windows except that you get paid back for installing solar.
@@KaiSosceles My panels are ground mount so does not make my roof look like an eyesore. Batteries are LiFePo4 which should last me 20+ years and can be replaced easily just like car batteries. And best of all, during a hurricane i still have power here in sunny Jamaica.
i put 200w of solar on my phev, and it paid for itself in like 8 months with gas savings. people dont realize you dont need to put electricity into the main high voltage battery to extend your range, its a lot more efficient to keep everything "low voltage" and just supply the low voltage system directly without going through any inverters. i replaced the 12v battery of my car with a 50$ lifepo4 one i built, and saved almost 200$ over the 50lb heavier lead acid battery. I drive a lot for my work commute, about 160 miles round trip. I was explaining to a curious passer by how my old 2013 volt worked, and mentioned that i get about 50 miles of range now with the ev battery. he said "oh so whats the point?".... like the math was not at all obvious to him. I charge at work and at home, and put 100 miles on the battery every day of the week, which means the gas combustion motor only puts about 60 miles on it per day, and thats all hwy driving. the gas motor will last forever with that type of use, and I save about 3.5 gallons of gas every day for the rest of my life, about 16$ usd per day. in the last 18 months ive put 45k miles on my old ev with the original battery (130k miles on the odom), and saved 6500$ usd, which is more than i paid for my old car. the volt is a rare glimpse into the future of cheap 2nd hand evs/phevs. whats even cooler is that because i designed and installed the system myself, i added a 200w micro inverter which I back feed my home from during the summer months when I get better sun in my parking spot. musks old statement about the futility of putting solar on a car was very misinformed. its the best possible place to put it because it directly offsets the most expensive energy we regularly consume, that being gasoline.
you dont need any permits or anything because its a mobile appliaction, and you dont play some futile ev tax credit game, where contractors greatly inflate their labor and cost of goods to make sure they make a healthy profit margin and can pay for any future warranty claims
Lifepo4 is nice in a car everywhere where it isn't regularly freezing. LTO or Na-Ion should be the standard in car batteries since last year.
@@rkan2 if lto costs 10x lifepo4, just make the lifepo4 battery 2-3x as large and put in self heating. doesnt take much to keep a battery above 4C in an insulated box
@ The chemistries are not that expensive. Albeit some manufacturers rely on LiFePo4 for their 12V batteries, I guess they have monitoring for when charging is safe.
However for more conventional charging systems, I still wouldn't replace lead acids, which are very reliable with variable temperatures, especially if temperatures go to freezing often.
Consider a lead acid should be able to be ready to start a vehicle and accept charge after being in -20C for a few weeks. You cannot rely on LiFePo4 to do that, nevermind building a big enough battery to keep itself heated for such a long period in -20C.
Eight months or like eight months 😁
@ 18* mo ;)
More solar is good. Any encouragement is helpful.
I bought my own solar panels in 2012 ( 4 Kw peak). I have generated almost 49 megawatts since then but I don't have battery storage. If the UK government was realistic about our energy demands it would stop throwing our money away on idiotic and wasteful schemes and subsidise us with batteries.
I am looking into these schemas and not sure if they are reliable but I am kin to install solar panels to my property. Do you have any recommendation or a company you rely on for this work?
@@giovabusi I live near Bristol and used Solarsense. Many firms have come and gone but SS still trades. Everything about them was top notch. Find a good local company and ask for references. The feed in tariff I get is ridiculously high but it isn't now. Panel costs have come down sharply and efficiency has gone up. If you go for it you'll love doing your washing, dishwashing making your tea etc. and it's all for free !
@@AlanJan_UK_49 I am up in Stoke and I have seen plenty of houses with panels installed so I started to get attached by the idea of having it as well. Thank you for the advice, I will look into it and try to contact some local company as well.
@@giovabusi If you own your own property whatever you do DON'T fall for the free solar panels ads. Keep your roof yours.
Batteries should not be subsidized at the moment. I got solar panels installed last month. I inquired to an instalation company about getting battery storage and was told: it's not worth it. "Just use the grid as your "battery". You get credit when you produce more than you need and will need to buy when the panels don't produce enough."
The solar salesman actually told me he'd refer me to another company that could set up a natural gas generator if I wanted full backup, should the electricity grid go down.
Adaxum’s focus on real-world applications makes it a standout project. Joined the presale today!
Excellent news. It's great to see the impact of batteries
Spot the analyst-nerd having to give a presentation :-) Jenny is great, and really knows her stuff (and accidentally fell into a really interesting job answering a fairly random job advert 20 years ago). Panels have indeed got crazy-cheap, and batteries have got _waaay_ cheaper over the last few years, but inverters, scaffolding, electrics, copper and electricians haven't got much cheaper in the last decade so increasingly dominate. I just installed 7kWp of rooftop PV and 16kWh of battery, with off-grid capability and UPS failover in the UK for £4500. I had 2.9kWp installed in 2010 and it was £14000. The new system should pay for itself in under 4 years monetarily. 8yrs in emissions terms (total system embodied emissions 8 tonnes). We can run for about 4-5 days of grey dinge before needing to import from the grid, but there have been two 5-day dinges so far this winter.
The dress with pockets gave her away. She knows her stuff :)
How did you do that for £4500? A fogstar 15kwh battery is £2500 alone.
@@cad4246 No, a Fogstar 16kWH battery is/was £1700 (Hmm, I see they are back up to £1800, but they were £1700 in December). Panels was £1049+£149 delivery. Inverter+MPPT+GX was £1450. Scaffold was already up for roof repairs (main reason this job got done now), rails were re-used. And about £300 in electrical sundries. Looks like it was more like £4600 all in.
Motivation is so inspiring and it challenged
I installed solar 2008, and my small 2kW peak set of panels have been happily generating now for 16 years. Although expensive they have not only paid off the installation cost years ago, they also have paid the fabrication cost (green deficit of construction) years ago.
The Climate Change -causing costs of production cannot be in any way 'paid off', reality doesn't work like that. They can 'save more carbon than it cost to make them', but that's arithmetic sleight of hand, like spending £2 on an illegal product to save £8 on the £10 it would normally cost from another criminal - you've still paid for £2 of illegal product. I have solar PV, but Climate-Change-causing commodities were used to produce and ship them, and probably will be again when they're one day replaced. We can fix that bit too (with renewable synthetic carbon commodities), but 'decarbonisers' won't currently allow us to.
The power pricing situation in Pakistan is interesting because that's what I have long predicted will happen to fossil fuel vehicles. A lot of drivers don't realise how expensive it's going to get in the future, some even think it'll be cheaper
Solar energy = green planet = better life
I don't know how I ended up here, but I'm not leaving
Thank you so much for spreading awareness about solar energy and trying to reduce dependence on fossil fuels
Powered my home with solar for 7 years - Solar is Great
5 for me next month.
Solar power is absolutely great, inexpensive and will change the world to the better.
Best thing ng is that prices on solar panels and batteries are coming down fast. More people can then afford it and it makes it more and more viable to install compared to other solutions.
@@HansMilling the panels I'm using on our new setup, Hyundai 410 watt, went from $370 each to $219 each in the last 2 years. And they are bifacial, with a total potential of 575 watts.
This is so true.
Best way to save energy is to save on energy usage.
How about rationing energy to the super rich? Short of that, charge them 500 times the cost to ordinary users because they earn 500 times more?
Insulation and air sealing And is about 1/4 the price of solar.
Or do both.
You can reduce general consumption.
But you can also be more efficient to reduce consumption.
And often the consumption reduction from more efficient use, also reduces consumption even more.
Like how not using fuel means no more shipping fuel, which reduces fuel.
@@5353Jumper Agreed. I renovated a 1903 house including adding 3.9 kWp of solar. But the insulation added really made the difference. I got a check for about $100 for my excess production above consumption last year. That's at the wholesale rate. The house is now all electric: heat pump heat/cool, heat pump water heater, induction cooktop etc.
We are doing both. LED light bulbs have been a massive game changer. EVs, heat pumps, insulating homes,... But we also need to generate a lot of clean energy.
Adaxum’s innovative approach to E-commerce integration is a game-changer. Joined the presale today!
Great job Jenny!
Got some solar panels on my roof. One of the best decision of my life
You can buy all the parts for a grid tie solar system in the USA for about 50 cents per watt. Yet companies routinely charge $3-$5 per watt installed, so most Americans don't see any value in solar. If the price came down to about $1 per watt we would see a lot more Americans adopting aolar
Wow. Impressive analysis
You know, she does have a couple of points. I think I'll invest in solar energy!
"What does 50 degrees Celsius feel like?
Extreme Heat: At 50 degrees Celsius, you would experience intense heat. The air would feel scorching, and any physical contact with surfaces exposed to direct sunlight could burn your skin. Difficulty Breathing: In such extreme heat, the air can become dry and stifling, making it difficult to breathe comfortably. " May 28, 2015
It fully depends on humidity. If the air is extremely dry, like in a desert, 50°C is bearable... some people live their life with such daytime temperatures... and without A/C.
If it is humid, then a human can die in minutes!
The experience can be done in a sauna... and I have done it. Heat the sauna to 50°C, and it feels almost cold, because the air is very dry! Heat then the sauna to 130°C, and it is hard for a non-Finn to stay more than 5 mn. But then, add a single ladle of water on the hot stones, and you are a hero if you stay a single minute!
@@st-ex8506 ether way 50 celsius is 120 F and that's serious hot. i've lived in the mojave desert and yes dry heat isn't as bad a humid. but it's not healthy.
@ I am not saying it is. But there are people living in places as hot if not hotter than the Mojave desert that you know, with no access to air conditioning, like the Bedouin tribes of the Sahara region, the Afar and Issa tribes of Djibouti, etc.
@@st-ex8506 and it's getting way hotter and dryer in those places than ever before. this is a global problem.
@@jensonee Well, actually, the hottest places on Earth are NOT the ones getting hotter the fastest. Their average temperature have gone up by only 0-1°C. It is in the Arctic and Antarctic that you find record increase of temperature of 4°C or even more, and in Western Europe and North-West Africa (ca. 2°C).
They are also not, at least not all, getting dryer. Some deserts are getting rainier! For example, the Western Sahara has seen last year its highest rainfall in human memory.
So, yeah, the problem is indeed global, but not evenly spread!
I live in Nigeria and it is cheaper to use solar power than use fossil fuels on the longer run
Thanks to china for affordable solar panels.
I have solar panels on my house
So cheap that electricity prices go through the roof everywhere govts promote it...
I think i don't need to these information i just watch this video to improve my English
😊
Watching this in a home in southern EU that's 98% powered by solar + LFP batteries both summer and winter. Air conditioned, heat pump water boiler, heat pump dryer etc.. It's great! And a DIY system with DIY batteries isn't that expensive.
It's all about economics. As the price comes down, it will meet the needs of more people, utilities and countries on a greater and greater basis. Batteries will further extend this.
More cost effective cold weather sodium batteries will even extend it more.
It's all about economics, but you have to admit that powerful entities exist (e.g. the Saudi royal family) whose interests are best served by slowing this transition as much as they can. Given that oil and gas companies globally have a lot of free cash at any given time, they're quite likely to divert some from exploration and development to slowing the adoption of competing technologies. I mean, that's what I would do if I were them. Let's not assume everyone is a boy scout! :)
thanks for this great talk. from pakistan
Nice for barath south.
I'am currently in the process of installing 20 kWp + 21 kWh LiFePo batteries in my home. It's a DIY-project and already over 10 person days of work. But once completed (in 2 days or so) the amortization period will only be around 6 years. So yeah, solar realy has gotten cheap.
6years is nuts. Faster than I imagined. 😮
Installed capacity is really a useless term. Produced energy is really what matters and compare it to all other energy sources.
It is impossible to know how much solar electricity is REALLY produced. The grid authority keeps statistics on only the power that transit through the grid. All auto-consumption is ignored, be it a single solar panel on a garden shed, or a few thousands on a factory's roof. I leave in France, and I do not sell any power to the grid...my production is hence statistically ignored!
Installed capacity can be approximately known from the sales of panels in a country. And the generated energy calculated by multiplying the installed base by the average panel efficiency in said country.
No, produced energy is still useless. Unfortunately solar electricity is produced mainly at times of low demand, and unavailable at times of high demand. The amount of demand covered is what matters.
@ Solar energy IS produced at time of high demand… just when the industries and businesses are working. And some 4 hours of storage allows to cover the evening time peak also. The problem of solar energy is NOT that the sun does not shine at night, but rather that it shines significantly less, at northern latitudes, during the winter time.
But there are several ways to solve that problem!
@@st-ex8506fully agreed, batteries are now economical in Germany, so the sun DOES shine at night.
Seasonal fluctuation is best countered by building wind power, as pv & wind have complementary seasonality in the northern hemisphere. Combine that with batteries for short term, and hydro, biogas and hydrogen long-term storage and you get fully renewable power supply year-round, even during prolonged doldrums during winter, for 7 Cent/kWh total cost. That is the only number that matters when comparing to alternatives like nuclear.
@ We are in almost complete agreement.
Only hydrogen storage is way too inefficient technically complex, dangerous and hence expensive, that won't happen. As a matter of fact, there is no need for long-term/seasonal storage (with some exceptions like isolated grids or north of 60°of latitude). All the storage Germany needs is 4-5 days worth of average consumption.
When you say batteries are now economical in Germany, I am glad to hear that, but do you mean at grid-level, or at household level? or both?
If we agree that NEW nuclear is simply way too expensive, existing nuclear is not... and is going to ease and hasten the transition a lot. Germany made a monumental blunder in closing its perfectly good nuclear plants. The whole German people... and industry... is now paying for it... and paying dearly... more than double the price of the kWh than I pay!
Def agree with that final line in regards to batteries. They will be a fundamental game changer. I myself have a battery ready system and as soon as I’m done paying off my solar system. I’ll be getting a battery installed. I’ll be looking at a 15kw battery so that I can participate in a virtual power plant scheme. For 90% of the year, a 10kw would suit me fine, but the 15kw will give me more peace of mind and allow me to monetize my investment.
dietary choices are also important (or even essential) in the fight against climate change. which of the following levels can you do for the planet?
- level 1: avoid red meat, as it is by far the worst food for the planet. this is the least we should all do.
- level 2: be vegetarian, thus avoiding all meat and fish.
- level 3: be vegan, thus avoiding all animal products.
+ warning: if you decide to try a vegan diet, i would recommend the following supplements: a multivitamin, a choline supplement, calcium from tofu and fortified plant milks (or a calcium supplement), vitamin D if you don't spend enough time in the sun (this varies based on your latitude), 1 or 2 algae oil capsules for the long chain omega3s (which is where fish get their omega3s from), and finally a weekly b12 supplement (2000 mcg of cyanocobalamin taken once a week on an empty stomach).
No thanks
ah, the cult is here. the healthiest level of vegetarian is octo-lavo pescatarian. Vegetables, fruits, grains, legumes, fish, eggs, and milk. Any less and you are missing nutrients.
You make me to want to eat more meat!
@ i guess you don't wanna help the climate?
@HakuCell well, I guess you don't want to be healthy and help in other ways.
The panels are cheap, the inverters and installation cost are now a significant part of the total cost. Adding batteries is still expensive, but battery prices are falling.
I intend to buy my solar installation in the Philippines in a few weeks time. There is plenty of potential for roof top solar in the Philippines. Sadly the energy companies are not stimulating it.
I see a lot of Pakistani posting about solar on social media. There is a lot of interest there. What is needed in poorer countries right now are hybrid inverters that do not require batteries, so an inverter that can take the panel DC power and convert it directly to AC power and has a switch so it can be used on-grid and can also operate when the grid goes down while the panels generate enough power.
My DIY solar system of 2000 watts of panels are supplying 60-90% of my power needs at home here in Jamaica.
The problem in some nations is that regulations restrict the use of solar panels and there is also geographical, some areas simply do not get enough sunlight.
I hope there is some discussions on why solar panel prices are getting so low, and if the companies making solar panels are very profitable because of the tremendous volume growth.
Why do you hope that?
@@bernhardschmalhofer855 It seems using more and more solar panels that are so cheap is no brainer. So I want to know more about why it's so cheap and if those that produce them actually make a profit doing so. Also, are the panel produced by dirty coal power? If so, do we have a situation where more solar panel production require more coal power? I wish I knew.
@wmchan3364 Yes, these are interesting questions. Keep on digging. I'm of no use for that, as I'm more of a physics guy than an economics guy.
@@wmchan3364 Let's just talk about Chinese production of solar panels. Yes, there's a lot of existing coal-fired generation on the Chinese electrical grid. But at the same time, they're building more solar, more wind, and more nuclear and adding it to the grid faster than the rest of the world put together. Burning coal, if you need to, to build solar panels is the only way you get away from having to burn coal (or import natural gas) forever. Trust me, those factories and those workers were going to be doing *something* anyway. Best for all of us if they are building batteries and solar hardware. By building at such scale, and in competition with others in China and elsewhere, the efficiency of production goes up, and the panels get cheaper. At some scale, new solar panel + battery power gets to be cheaper than existing coal-burning power in China (especially considering that the state carries the cost of health care including everyone made sick by local and regional air pollution) and the state steps in and starts switching off coal plants. This will happen late, when costs are very low, but also quickly.
Need to add the cost of batteries and thermo gas plants to the mix if for grid. For something like pumping water very good. Though problem now is draining aquaphor.
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Solar panels are getting cheaper, but this trend is not the same for electricity storage(still expensive and does not last long give or take around 7 years) and you really need both. Especially if you want to drive electric
Home storage batteries have gotten much cheaper and there are many more options out there.
15kwh battery from fogstar is £2500 in the UK. You couldn't have done that DIY two years ago.
Likewise EVs. Kia/Hyundai have been selling good value 64kwh EVs since 2020 and more recently MG have joined the fray. There is now a rich second hand market of cars with practical range.
I've been watching the UK EV market since 2016 finally buying second hand in 2023 and there is no question prices have plummeted.
A 7 year battery life is really out of date information. My 11 year old EV is still working, and modern ones have batteries 2-4 times bigger, so they will take a lot longer to do the same number of cycles. Most now come with an 8 year battery warrantee.
My wife and I were quoted on installing solar on the top of our modest sized house. It was $20k and would pay for itself after 20 years. Safe to say we decided against it.
Solar is useful as a part of the grid, but the reliability problems when the sun is down or there is lots of cloud/fog cover (which can last for days) are very real.
Solar is 10 cent a Wp. Production garantee 30 years. That is very Cheap. Solar is for Free. 👍👍👍
Economics for consumers is dependent on your local price for electricity. Given the commercial wind and solar in Texas, the wholesale price is typically around $0.03/kWh during daytime. So grid-tied is not that great as the buy back price from Entergy is low and the base rate for consumption is around $0.12/kWh. Prices for solar, inverters and batteries are coming down but it’s still a long payout even for DIY installations.
All good while the sun shines. Here in continental Europe for the last three months I had like maybe 7 sunny days. Waiting for spring
Solar still produces energy on cloudy days. Production diminishes, but doesn't go to 0
The next step is cheaper storage
I'm not as hopeful and I'm surprised the talk didn't have more data on how cheap it actually is, because the comparisons at scale, especially combined with battery trends would have been great.
She is an analyst who didn't gave us as much data as expected.
Great to hear Machine Learning described correctly; so often the term, ‘AI’, is misused…
In Pakistan,not only solar installation is in demand but also almost every building getting higher and higher which means no value for money for their solar panels
If solar panels produced energy at one cent per kilowatt hour, and batteries were in place that could store it for three cents per kilowatt hour, and you could distribute the energy over a large area to the user at five cents per kilowatt hour, The world would beat a path to your door. But without usable batteries at scale, and without a decent distribution system, solar power will only be an increment addition to the grid. Though I think we desperately need it, I think we need to be very realistic. There is a lot of work to still be done.
In a couple years the battery production will outpace installation capacity. It already is in some small areas.
It's too expensive and they want to put high tax on every kilo wat
Seeing the increase in demand i wonder, how well can old solar modules be recycled or have they any problematic components?
India being a tropical country, must come up
Not every place has enough sun and wind all of the time, to cover for the electricity needs. In Europe we do have periods of weeks with hardly any wind and little sunshine. The grid has too be able to cope with that, by basically have another electricity generator on standby. Nobody seems to be working on filling that gap, since most electricity generating companies are now controlled by commercial companies trying to make profit. I hope this won't backfire on us and fuel the naysayers who claim renewables don't work since they are intermittent.
Overcharging utilities are screwed!
In the United States, every utility that has led an aggressive switch to solar and wind has seen an increase in utility prices. In Europe, Germany has led the way to switching to renewables and now pay twice as much for electricity than nuclear heavy France. Renewables must be cheaper or no one will switch.
In Finland, the electricity grid has to be built with the once-in-a-decade peak in electricity consumption in mind. If, for example, it is -30°C for a week in the winter, electricity consumption will peak, but there is hardly any power from the sun or wind, so peak power has to be covered by other forms of production, and in addition, Putler or someone else may cut off the electricity transmission lines between the countries. EVs could be a partial solution for storing energy from the sun during the summer, but even now, electric car drivers usually charge their cars at night, so the electricity comes from somewhere other than the sun, and separate batteries are still too expensive. Currently, the price of electricity in Finland is €0.0028/kWh because it is windy and so much wind power has been built in Finland that when it is windy the price drops to almost zero and apparently no electricity producer earn anything then?
Finland has one of the best electrical grids in the world for production and consumption. There is no excuse to install more solar/wind production. Obviously there will be an effect in electricity price, that is the market at work.
And it does not count self made unofficial installations, like my 17kWp home system🤭
Exactly! Solar already rises exponentially from the systems that are connected to the grid. It does not include systems like yours. So the increase in implemented solar is even better than the reports make it out to be.
We must be about to pass 'capacity' in the UK for installed solar. When wind passed capacity (slightly more complex in UK than that due to bottlenecks) we started to 'curtail' it - dump the energy and pay to do it. Not sure what will happen when solar does it, unless there's a similar scheme for grid-tied inverters/batteries? Batteries can shift a little bit of generation to later in the day, but they're too expensive for much more than that, prospects are that we will exceed capacity by many times over, and this far north we need energy from summer sun / episodic wind in the winter. The only current tech that offers that much long-term storage cheaply is e-fuels (inc hydrogen - Royal Soc's pick). If we don't make that tech mainstream, all the new RE being added will be increasingly marginally utilised (as more and more 'excess' is dumped), which will put up its apparent cost per energy unit. We need to pull our communal finger out.
Got my panels for 2.5 years now, produced 12.6GW so far. Enough for my consumption. I can even fully charge my EV 50x a year just from what the panels produce. Every house should have solar panels
Quite a big solar farm you have there and must be the biggest EV battery in the world too! 😂
@@rkan2 average yearly consumption per household in this country is 3500kw. Did i ever mention a battery? It's dangerous to jump to conclusions 😉
they are not cheap where I live, country gives money to cover part of the costs of setting up PV but the companies decided to ramp up their prices to make money off of that, people don't want to buy PV because even with country's help it's still expensive,
I hear people talk about how cheap it is getting but have yet to see United States sellers/installers relaying that cheapness. The initial cost is so high that it negates the reason to switch. Maybe someone who lives in the United States, particularly the southern states, can share a company that uses quality products and offers everything at a reasonable rate?
Will prowes of RUclips teaches everything you need to know about solar. And he was living in a van for nearly a decade so he knows how to build cheap DIY.. i learned to build my 10kw hybrid set up thanks to him and some others like off-grid garage
Well done thank you
Solar contributes 1-2% of total energy usage. It's not the answer to future energy needs. It's like building a castle in a swamp. You can't put solar in areas like New England.
Total energy consumption (more accurately: primary energy consumption) does also include tons of inefficiencies. And we just don’t have to keep them going.
For example, a modern efficient fossil power plant does only turn about 40-60% of the burnt stuff (coal, gas) into electricity, the rest is wasted as excess heat. In some places, some of that waste heat is also used for district heating, but that’s about it. Oh, and traditional power plants also spend about 5-10% or so from the produced electricity for their own consumption - to keep the plant running. With renewables, those losses are way lower.
With fossil fuels in cars, the stats are even worse: a combustion car does only use about 20% of the fuel to propel the car, the rest is wasted heat. Essentially, your car is a furnace able to propel itself 😁
Electric motors in electric cars routinely use about 80% of the energy they get for propulsion and overall have an efficiency of about 64% (including any losses for storage and inverters). That’s not breaking news: heavy machinery such as ships or trains have been using “diesel-electric” drive trains for decades. The diesel engine is running at optimum efficiency to generate electricity, which in turn charges a small battery and powers the actual electric motor. This is just way more efficient, reliable and flexible than a pure combustion system.
Why am I writing this up? What you’re usually being told about “total energy consumption” does include alle the net losses. But we don’t have to stick to those old, inefficient dinosaurs of technology, when the newer ones are way more efficient and can easily save more than half of that amount by switching to a different type of technology.
And in the realm of electricity generation, renewables such as wind and solar power contributed 26% to the globally generated electricity in 2023 (source: Global Energy Outlook 2024 from IEA).
A nice chart for California electricity, but what it doesn't show is COST. California has some of the most expensive electricity in the US due to "cheaper" solar. Yes, solar IS cheaper WHEN it is available. But people and industry need electricity 24/7/365, not just when the sun shines.
Imagine you need a ride to work 5 days a week. You ca buy a weekly bus pass from the Fossil Bus Company for $10 per week ($2/day). Your friend Solar says he can give you a ride for an average random 2 days per week for only $1/day to save you money. Your initial thought is "great". But then you remember you need a ride 5 days per week, and the daily bus pass is $3/day, because the bus company has to provide service all 5 weekdays, not just random days dictated by Solar. There is no combination of fares that will result in less cost to you from the "cheaper" ride from Solar.
While this is technically true I think we need to consider the humanitarian issues of providing these panels as well.
Just Stop Oil should become Just Stop Fossil to become more impactful & expansive.
Developing nations have a huge opportunity to leapfrog the stage where a massive, interconnected grid fed by huge powerplants fed by imported fossil fuels.
Solar panels are only that cheap in places where they don't tariff Chinese panels. The solar panel she showed is more than 3x more expensive where I live than what she stated.
I recently read that Eskom is now seeking to penalise rooftop solar installers with increasingly higher connection or line charge fees in order to recover some of the lost revenue from solar and curb solar demand to protect its business. Can anyone from SA confirm?
We in nepal are using pure green energy,no fossil fuel,never,100% of our energy is either sun,wind or hydro powered.we export some remaing energy to china,India and some to US aswell.we are engery dependent and energy exporting nation,now we are planning to extract energy from moon aswell as solar energy is insufficient for us,and climate change is very much real.thank you🙏