It’s economically feasible to go all solar without firm generation, at least in places at the latitude of the US (further north it becomes impossible, you’d need to import power).
How much does this depend on the costs of solar+storage continuing to fall? (In one of your FB posts you wrote “Given 10-20 years and moderate progress on solar+storage I think it probably makes sense to use solar power for everything other than space heating”) Because I believe since you wrote the FB posts, these prices have been going up instead. See this or this.
Covering 8% of the US or 30% of Japan (eventually 8-30% of all land on Earth?) with solar panels would take a huge amount of raw materials, and mining has obvious diseconomies at this kind of scale (costs increase as the lowest cost mineral deposits are used up), so it seems premature to conclude “economically feasible” without some investigation into this aspect of the problem.
This does require prices going down. I think prices in many domains have gone up (a lot) over the last few years, so it doesn’t seem like a lot of evidence about technological progress for solar panels. (Though some people might take it as a warning shot for long-running decay that would interfere with a wide variety of optimistic projections from the past.)
I think it’s not clear whether non-technological factors get cheaper or more expensive at larger scales. Seems to me like “expected cost is below current electricity costs” is a reasonable guess, but “>75% chance of being economically feasible” is not.
My current understanding is that there are plenty of the relevant minerals (and in many cases there is a lot of flexibility about exactly what to use), and so this seems unlikely to be a major driver of cost over the very long term even if short-term supply is relatively inelastic. (Wasn’t this the conclusion last time we had a thread on this?)
How much does this depend on the costs of solar+storage continuing to fall? (In one of your FB posts you wrote “Given 10-20 years and moderate progress on solar+storage I think it probably makes sense to use solar power for everything other than space heating”) Because I believe since you wrote the FB posts, these prices have been going up instead. See this or this.
Covering 8% of the US or 30% of Japan (eventually 8-30% of all land on Earth?) with solar panels would take a huge amount of raw materials, and mining has obvious diseconomies at this kind of scale (costs increase as the lowest cost mineral deposits are used up), so it seems premature to conclude “economically feasible” without some investigation into this aspect of the problem.
This does require prices going down. I think prices in many domains have gone up (a lot) over the last few years, so it doesn’t seem like a lot of evidence about technological progress for solar panels. (Though some people might take it as a warning shot for long-running decay that would interfere with a wide variety of optimistic projections from the past.)
I think it’s not clear whether non-technological factors get cheaper or more expensive at larger scales. Seems to me like “expected cost is below current electricity costs” is a reasonable guess, but “>75% chance of being economically feasible” is not.
My current understanding is that there are plenty of the relevant minerals (and in many cases there is a lot of flexibility about exactly what to use), and so this seems unlikely to be a major driver of cost over the very long term even if short-term supply is relatively inelastic. (Wasn’t this the conclusion last time we had a thread on this?)