People seem to have trouble understanding how commodity markets naturally price their goods but the whole point of this website is to show that electricity prices are finally decoupling.
edit: I didn’t watch the videos, I don’t have time first watch a video and then to dissect bullshit from truth.
But the solar electricity is still overpriced and taxed. People pay several times more for solar electricity from the grid than what they get if they sell to the grid.
It's not overpriced. If it was, the grid operator would be raking in massive profits because they're selling way above cost. In reality grid operators have small margins, this indicates there is no overpricing.
Do you get paid less for power fed to the grid than power sold at retail? Yes. Because they're different things. You get say 5 cents for a kWh fed back to the grid, while you pay more like 25c. But guess what? Wholesalers also get 5 cents to sell to the grid. It's just that there's an additional 20 cents in grid operation and taxes for a retail price.
Taxes you can't avoid, it's not a 'scam'. It's money you pay that goes into public funds and returns to the public, and is spent by people you can vote to elect to represent you.
Grid costs also aren't a scam, they're just a cost of doing business. Again, profit margins are small, so they're pricing based on cost, not based on scam.
And it's all entirely optional. You can just install batteries yourself. You can do whatever you want. You don't have to use the grid. But surprise surprise, there's no reason to think that a small network is on average cheaper than a big network. The bigger the network the easier it is to share storage capacity and offload excesses from one place to another. It's the reason most states and countries try to build interconnectors to even build international grids, and why islands like Cyprus that don't interconnect and have small markets have the highest electricity prices. It's why anyone who builds a home and has the choice to connect to an available grid or not, does so. And why land and homes in locations without grid-access are valued less, because they're more expensive to set-up.
The cost of a nationwide grid is significant. Depending on the terrain and population density, it usually nets out at somewhere between 30%-50% the overall cost of electricity. Sure, if you run a microgrid among a few houses, you won't pay those costs, but someone has to pay the cost to maintain the km of lines to reach deep into the mountains of Bavaria.
Microgrids also have some black swan events that can result in outage; if you are reliant on solar and storage but then experience a 7-day long period of stormy weather and no production. As you note, off-grid is always an option, and when you seriously look into it, you quickly find that costs to have that 24/7/365 service are many times more than just paying to connect to the grid.
At least in the us - the only way a utility can really make more money is by spending more money (as they get a return from the utility commission on a vested capital - massive oversimplification) but it means utilities are not incentivized to spend less rather than more…
Same in Australia, after they were corporatised (turned into companies run for profit rather than run as a service by some level of government) it was recognised that as natural monopolies there would need to be some sort of regulation on how much money they could recover, it was decided a method based on their costs was best, so they spent bad money agter good im expanding the network hugely (based on crazy projections of growth in demand to nowhere) rather than building resilience into the network and lowering their costs.
And that’s not even the cost of marketisation, that’s just the regulated network costs.
The government employees who approve or deny the utility’s priced have an incentive to not approve higher prices. Their bosses are usually elected, and higher utility prices are very unpopular.
I was told by a former southern company exec that the McKinsey did a study for them and their largest competitive advantage was regulatory capture in the states in which they operate - unfortunately I think the politicians are more beholden to the utilities than their constituents..
It’s really not - we built a rather large solar plant for one of our facilities offsetting like at most like 15% of demand, but because we were paying high utility rates it was a low double digit ROI project just on the spread between us it commercial rates and our cost of production (even higher when you added in the tax incentives) if you can build solar at utility scale costs and defray commercial or retail rates it’s a pretty good deal the problem is getting those utility scale cost structures when the projects are small…
If you are selling to the grid, there is probably over-supply. Prices are driven by supply and demand. If you want to avoid selling at lower prices and buying at higher, try and get a battery. Check ecoflow to get an idea of the costs.
Ecoflow is a good example of overpriced American tech. I payed $1500 for a 2 kWh battery. Our Fiberhood coop sells a 16kWh battery for $1800. Prices in China are lower still.
Prices have been dropping like crazy as the various battery manufacturers have been competing with each other. They are all pretty similarly priced at this point.
A 2kwh ecoflow now costs $800. Still overpriced, but the gap is steadily narrowing.
Also, $1800 for 16kwh is a great price. That's $112/kWh. That's pretty close to raw cell costs.
Does the battery pack also come with charge circuitry, inverter, bms?
The price for grid power ought to be somewhat higher than the the grid operator(s) pay at the place where the power is delivered into the grid plus their own costs for running the actual grid. So what do you think is a fair price for building/maintaining/running the grid?
The grid is a nationwide electrical circuit with requirements to connect to most buildings, and with demanding uptime and safety requirements. How much ought building and maintaining that to cost?
The value of electricity is extremely time dependent. You can easily overproduce solar power for your house during the day fairly cheaply. However batteries + gas generators for cloudy day quickly make the cost significantly higher.
The grid gives you expensive guarantees about reliability. Just giving power does not do that.
The reason why power prices can still decouple: Because there are more and more quarter-hours where gas plants are NOT setting the price and the marginal cost is set by renewables.
The same is happening in the UK.
> , so consumers pay for the highest costing output regardless of how much if any they use.
No, if no Gas is needed (!) for power production in any quarter-hour, the price is not set by gas.
PS: Emphasis on needed. Gas plants may still be running at a loss for whatever reason (heat coupling, special contracts), but if they are not needed to provide the power, they will have to bid at a loss, and then they will not be able to drive the price.
> Gas plants may still be running at a loss for whatever reason
My assumption, given how the UK numbers look when there are negative prices but still a little bit of gas running, is that shut down/ start up for a CCGT is so undesirable (expensive maybe?) that a 100MW plant which can say throttle to 5MW would rather pay to give you 5MW of electricity for the next half hour than switch off the plant and provide nothing then need to start it back up in a few hours.
I don't know what "throttling" looks like for this equipment. It seems implausible that these units have no ability to control their fuel usage/ power output at all, just binary on or off, but on the other hand presumably in practice it's far from infinitely variable.
I imagine it's just be keeping the equipment warm and moving, especially for something like a steam turbine. Partial output sounds like a reasonable guess to me.
The whole point of this website is to show that the price of electricity is year-to-date 22% cheaper than it would be in a gas-dominated grid without renewables.
So I don't know where you're getting the "No" from?
You could argue that maybe investing all those subsidies into nuclear would have been cheaper, but that would have had a lot of path dependencies that simply did not pan out in Europe.
A widening gap between electricity cost and gas cost (and fuel cost) will be THE main driver of electrification! Installing a heat pump will be a no-brainer, driving an electric car will be a no brainer.
This can only happen once electricity decouples from gas prices - but that requires lots of renewables in the mix!
I'm not deep into electricity pricing dynamics, but based on my intuition, shouldn't that rather have a dampening effect on electrification, as the gap widens?
High gas prices + gap is small -> Big opportunity to undercut via cheaper methods like solar -> attractive investment -> more new builds
High gas prices + gap is wide and widening -> Smaller and smaller opportunity to invest in solar, as the market is already dominated by solar prices -> less attractive investment -> less new builds
Heat pump prices + cost of installation was so high the last time I looked 2years ago, that it wasn't worth it even with free electricity (rooftop solar).
Obviously that's impossible to answer without knowing your specific situation, nevermind even knowing which country you are speaking of. Heat pump prices aren't high here, heat pumps are just aircons with some extra cheap parts after all.
I was thinking in general. But specifically: I'm in Croatia (so prices should not be that far off from German ones - equipment perhaps more costly but manual work a bit cheaper) and was quoted (two years ago) for a €15k total installation cost for the size I needed, which would be 15-20 years' worth of my natural gas usage.
Even at zero electricity host (I have rooftop solar), the investment didn't make a lot of sense at the time, assuming the costs would be falling in the next few years.
Quite frankly, Germany already has a lot of renewables in the mix. Why did it take so long for the effect to appear and why is it still so modest? What should be renewables share be (vs ~60% today), for complete decoupling?
You need quarter-hours where renewables set the price for power. That's only happening now that renewables have reached sufficient penetration of the market.
And it will get more as batteries come online.
In a commodity market, the price is always set by the most expensive producer that is still able to sell. That's natural - why would I sell my apples cheaper than the other farmer if you need so many apples that you have to by from both of us?
... because you may have signed a longer term contract that might in turn guarantee offtake from you rather than the other farmer?
This marginal price is only for the spot market right? So the key question is more what % of the mix is spot vs longer term. And thus what the overall impact is on total blended price.
Essentially it's not an isolated market, but part of a bigger whole.
As an example imagine a village that constituted 1% of the population of a country. The village was 100% renewable, and the country was 0% renewable. If the village disconnected its grid, in isolation its prices would be dictated by its renewables. But if its connected, its renewables just get traded on a market with marginal prices. If a person elsewhere in the country has more expensive generation, they'll but your cheap renewables at their price level. Thus the village will experience high prices like everyone else.
Now suppose Germany is that village in an interconnected EU market. Of course the numbers from my example are exaggerated, but the point remains: Germany's renewables aren't enough, if pricing is set at a much larger market, with fewer renewables.
Today about 20% of Germany's electricity was exported. While only about 6% of its demand came from gas. In other words if Germany was disconnected, it'd have needed no gas, and thus prices would've been lower.
Of course disconnecting isn't a good idea for other reasons, as on other days Germany imports. And Germany's ability to export its renewable excess generates significant revenues, creates incentives to build more renewables, and offsets emissions and pollution in other countries, too.
But long story short, it'll take more for one part of the whole to go renewable. As the EU is generally transitioning towards renewables we see a decoupling happen.
It's actually very easy to cool in deserts, because low humidity makes it very easy to move heat into the ambient air. You have to contend against ambient temperatures, but that's what insulation is for. The other big things you need for datacenters are reliable power and a low probability of infrastructure-disrupting natural disasters.
Taking aside you certainly can do radiative cooling in desert at night just fine - you have air, which even if hot to desert standards during the day is still by magnitudes more effective for cooling via direct heat transfer than radiating heat away in vacuum.
With today's very high orbital launch costs, it's trivially true that the desert is cheaper.
With very low orbital launch costs, it's trivially true that space would become cheaper. Solar panels have no atmosphere/night/seasons and are always pointed at the Sun, no cover glass for hail, no 24h battery either. Radiators are 1/10th the area of PV which is very doable.
The question is, where exactly is the tipping point between those two extremes, and will Starship reach that? Opinions on this naturally bifurcate depending on one's feelings about Elon Musk.
I wouldn't be too worried because SpaceX engineers put a great deal of effort into reflection mitigation, including developing a space-rated mirror able to have an RF signal fire transparently through it.[1] The strategy is to bounce all the sunlight away from Earth, which makes satellites darker than even (hypothetically) covering a satellite in Vantablack.
I don’t want to be foolishly dismissive, but I just don’t see how launch costs could be small enough to compensate for the huge overhead of putting things into space and maintaining things in space as opposed to literally any other place on earth.
I think the burden of proof is on the people who want to tell us that this is economical to show the numbers
Starship becomes “fully and rapidly reusable”, needing little to no refurbishment between launches. Then the lower bound of launch costs is just the expendables (methane, oxygen, nitrogen) which could cost as little as $1M per launch.
SpaceX uses custom silicon (produced by “TeraFab”) that can run at higher temperatures then the radiative cooling requirements goes down significantly and a 100 kW satellite might weight around 1 ton.
Starship should be able to launch at least 100T payload. Assuming they could fit that many, that puts the launch cost per 100 kW at $10,000, which is a rounding error compared to the cost of the chips alone, even if it’s off by a factor of 10.
Obviously a lot needs to go right for this to happen, but it’s not impossible.
Before the cost of flying very heavy shit and dealing with all the problems of operating that shit in space goes to zero, the cost of doing it terrestrially will go to zero. The idea that shooting any amount of payload into space could some how be more economical than just not doing that is completely bonkers and laughable.
It's like people completely forgot that there was 15+ years of connectivity infrastructure build out on earth before Musk did his shittier space version, not the other way around.
Transport doesn't "go to zero." Terrestrial transportation is already fully reusable, so it doesn't have the same cost headroom for improvement vs orbital launch.
Thanks, I really needed this post. I'm saving this for when people inevitably try to re-write history by saying "we didn't need Elon, because did anyone really doubted space-based AI would be the winner?? It was obvious all along because blah blah... <insert 20/20 hindsight>"
The world seems to have become an abstract plaything for these billionaires why would they give a damn about practicality. This idiot shot a car into space for no good reason.
Not completely 'no good reason'—they needed to test the ability to send heavy payloads, it's great marketing for SpaceX (who intend to make money by having people pay them to put things in space for them) and brand awareness for Tesla.
> He can blow his money on 1 million satellites that will all decay back into the atmosphere within a few years
He can also 'blow' his money on helping people by giving them opportunities:
> In 1993, Harris Rosen “adopted” a run-down, drug-infested section of Orlando called Tangelo Park. Rosen offers free preschool for all children prior to kindergarten and a free college education for high school graduates. Today, the high school graduation rate for Tangelo Park is 100 percent. And no, that is not a typo.
Is throwing up "1 million satellites" going to do those things?
How about running DOGE and gutting USAID?
Or helping Trump get elected? Was that a worthy endeavour? How's that working out for the average American (or anyone else on the planet) with four dollar gas and five dollar diesel?
> The only 'key times' were Ukrainian military usage of Starlink inside Russia. Ukraine was given Starlink to use to defend Ukraine, not attack Russia.
Fighting without hurting the enemy? What’s the point? The approach of the Trump administration is just letting Ukraine bleed out.
Russian starlink usage has only just been cut off, how many years did that take?
> Russian starlink usage has only just been cut off
No. Russians have tried to use Starlink in late 2023 early 2024, there were no direct or indirect sales and terminals were disabled on a blacklist basis. They moved from a blacklist to a whitelist in February this year.
> This administration is anti-fraud and anti-abuse
In some ways, yes. I won't defend "Trump coin" but it's pretty clear with things like USAID, Minnesota child care center scams, and the California hospice scam the democrats were in favour of and participated in fraud and abuse.
> There are more things to life than the price of gas.
That is a very privileged view. In the US specifically, with its abysmal public transportation due to car-centric {ex,sub}urban design, a lot of people will need to pay more for getting to work and will have to cut back on (e.g.) groceries.
Globally, oil prices are wreaking havoc in all sorts of ways on daily life:
> Worsening fuel shortages resulting from the war in the Middle East are threatening sacred funeral ceremonies in Thailand, where Buddhist temples are scrambling to obtain diesel for cremations.
> The abbot of Wat Saman Rattanaram in Chachoengsao province, about 80km (50 miles) east of Bangkok, warned that a suspension of cremation services was a real possibility. Some petrol stations have run out of fuel, while others allow sales only to vehicle operators.
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