Technology

When panels were 30c/watt, projects at $1/watt in EU and US happened. 70c/watt was spent on labour, copper, support structures, and grid connection equipment. All of those can be locally produced, with possible exception of last item.

At 6c/watt, that is over 90% of power projects are local economy boosting instead of 70%. It provides cheaper energy that is useful for industrialization and cost of living benefits too. US tariffs on solar are entirely about protecting oil/gas extortion power instead of a $10B solar production industry that needs fairly expensive support.

Solar imports does not cause energy dependence. You have power for 30+ years with no reliance on continuous fuel supplies. Shoes and apparel is a $450B industry in US. You need new supplies every year, and it makes much more sense to secure supply in that industry for war on the world purposes.

By providing big subsidies to green energy developement. Something the EU could also have done but refused to. And so they lost their entire lead.

Yep the EU will be beholden to a dictatorial regime again. Instead of placating Putin for gas it will be Xi for solar panels and batteries.

It is good, period.

Local manufacturing is politically advantageous and may employ some people at the same time, but that's where benefits end.

Europe didn't reject Chinese face masks during COVID-19, and Europe shouldn't reject Chinese solar during a climate emergency.

Solve that first, and political struggles later.

electricity still costs 0.30€/kWh average because of fossil fuel energy lobbies.

This is the price of guaranteed electricity delivered to your doorstep. We can't get rid of gas fired power stations and kms of electricity grid network yet.

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

I'm fairly sure that all newly built houses in the UK require solar by law.

4 million households in Australia have solar panels.

They are great value.

Thousands of people buying rooftop panels was never going to be the best way towards a Water/Wind/Solar (WWS) future. Fitting panels to the roof has to work around the roof geometry and obstructions like vents. That makes every job a custom job. It also means thousands of small inverters rather than a few big ones.

Compare that to setting up thousands of panels on racks in a field. As long as it's relatively open and flat, you just slap those babies down. You haul in a few big inverters which are often built right into shipping containers that can just be placed on site, hooked up, and left there. Batteries need inverters, too, so if your project includes some storage, then you only need one set of inverters.

I get the feeling of independence from the system that solar panels on the roof gives people, but it's just not economically the best way to go. The insanely cheap dollars per MWh of solar is only seen when deploying them on a mass scale. That means roofs of commercial/industrial buildings or bigger.

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

but at 1% of the cost, why are we still talking about nuclear

Sure... the reactor will go 24/7 (between maintenance and refuelling down times, and will use less land

Because grid level power delivery is about FAR more than just raw wattage numbers. Momentum of spinning turbines is extremely important to the grid. The grid relies on generation equipment maintaing an AC frequency of 60 hz or 50hz or whatever a country decides on. Changing loads throughout the day literally add an amount of drag to the entire grid and it can drag the frequency down. The inverse can also happen. If you have fluctuating wind or cloud cover you can bring the whole grid down if you can't instantly spin up other methods to pick up the slack.

reliable consistent power delivery is absolutely critical when it comes to running the grid effectively and that is something that solar and wind are bad at

Ideally we will be able to use those technologies to fill grid level storage (batteries, pumped hydro) to supply 100% of our energy needs in the not too distant future but until then we desperately need large, consistent, clean power generation.