A big part of it is the industry standard for using the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCoE) as the benchmark metric. By that metric, solar IS the lowest cost power source.
But that definition doesn't take into account availability. This wasn't a problem when all electricity sources were highly available by default. You can burn coal or run the hydro turbines any minute of the year. With the rise of often-unavailable renewable sources like solar and wind that definition is now insufficient and under counts the true like-for-like cost of solar.
By any metric which takes into account minor availability requirements (eg. supplies electricity at night) solar badly loses its cost advantage. It gets even worse if the metric is the still important "deepest winter night" scenario.
> By any metric which takes into account minor availability requirements (eg. supplies electricity at night) solar badly loses its cost advantage. It gets even worse if the metric is the still important "deepest winter night" scenario.
This is wildly incorrect. Batteries have gotten cheaper, solar has gotten cheaper, and even accounting for storage solar now wins by a wide margin even in "wintery" climates.[0]
Ten years ago you were right, but the cost has been falling by a huge percentage every year for about 15 years straight now. There will never be another time when it makes sense to dig up fossil fuels, ship them all over the world, process them, and then set them on fire when we can just slap up a solar panel and store the power for something approximating free on a 20+ year timeline.
Even if we discount the tax breaks (which we should since Trump is a doofus) both the LCOE and LCOS (levelized cost of storage) of PV + battery are lower than for natural gas, coal, nuclear, etc. Wind beats it by a small amount but less of our land is suitable for wind.
That presentation doesn't support your claim. The closest it gets is that solar attached to 4 hours of batteries is, ignoring tax credits, about (it's hard to read accurately from the graph) ~8% more expensive than combined-cycle plants.
But 4 hours isn't near a full night. At least 12 hours of battery storage would be necessary for that, possibly more depending on light angles and the relative supply-versus-demand loading at different times of day.
Roughly from the graph on page 8, that 4 hours of battery costs $22/MWh over solar alone. Presuming no further solar panels were needed, extending that 4 hours to 12 to cover the night would cost around $44/MWh more, bringing the total cost of 24h-reliable solar+battery to around $97/MWh -- WITH tax credits. Without tax credits it would be $20-$30 higher, but the graph is too low resolution to be precise. That compares poorly to the $65/MWh for combined-cycle for one single night -- which gets no tax credits accounted for in that graph.
Using mandated breaks for recharging heavy trucks isn't actually helpful in much of the world. Maybe it is in parts of Western Europe.
The problem is that those mandated breaks are mandated and happen (with a small amount of wiggle room) wherever the truck happens to be at that moment. Rolling out enough charging infrastructure to make that work is an even more immense challenge than the already massive challenge of adding sufficient charging infrastructure to places like existing truck stops.
Imagine the cost of installing 1MW chargers on, say, half the wide spots on every highway.
Imagine the cost of installing massive diesel depots at half the wide spots on every highway. And yet, there they are. And we already have car chargers every few dozen miles on the highways. A larger number of smaller chargers adding up to likely a larger wattage than what the trucks need.
> Imagine the cost of installing 1MW chargers on, say, half the wide spots on every highway.
Do those spots have lighting? If so, a significant portion of the work has already been done. Even if the electrical wiring must be supplemented or replaced, just having already the subinfrastructure to snake high voltage wiring up there is the major hurdle.
I think both Slate and Telos will be failures. They will be too expensive to make economic sense for people, as opposed to businesses, to buy over a more conventional full-size half ton pickup.
In some ways the massive online interest is proof, because most people outside of pickup truck forums who would talk it up have neither experience nor use for pickups. They are simply never going to buy any pickup truck-shaped vehicle and so are irrelevant to commercial success.
All the participants in those pilot programs *know* they are in a time-limited pilot programs and that in a handful of years the money will dry up. This is a major flaw in all UBI studies which make them all but useless.
It will take 15 or 20 years before any UBI could be considered permanent enough for a majority of people to change their work habits.
People’s habits are not usually driven by such long term thinking, but I think there’s a more fundamental thing you’re missing: People will continue to work as long as there is an advantage to working. In any well designed UBI system, those who are on UBI and continue to work will make more money than those on UBI alone, so most people will continue to work.
Not to mention that most people enjoy working as it gives them a sense of purpose.
I agree and disagree with you. These studies should be done with guaranteed payments for life. Otherwise it is just not representative.
I do believe that people would still work though. Personally I would like to do a useful job with real benefit to society, but the low pay makes it not feasible. I would still want to work part time at least instead of not at all.
In most cases every residential system is getting payment rates at least that good.
The problem is that wH-for-wH doesn't take into account distribution costs, which is most of the residential cost of electricity, and that a wH at noon in July doesn't cost the same to generate as a wH at 2am in February.
For most jurisdictions you can look up the large industrial rates to find the wholesale energy rates. Residential solar is worth about half of that 'reliable' electricity rate.
Even beyond mutual exhaustion is housework. When both partners works outside the home, they still have to do the housework when they get home or on the weekend. Previously that would have been the job of the one staying at home.
The 20-ish hours a week needed for domestic chores has to come from somewhere.
Linux kernel drivers often end up being GPL'd, but out of tree. This is because Linux releases many very useful (and sometimes critical to the use-case!) functions behind a GPL-license API restriction. This is EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL.
Are you sure this is exactly what it means? You're basically saying that if I start hacking on a driver that consumes such an API tonight, I must release it as GPL somewhere publicly the moment I start consuming the API? I can't even work on it for a bit privately?
I'm surprised if so, because usually these sorts of licenses only apply if you're redistributing the code, not if you're just using it privately.
In my experience in corporate environments, that ability to forward to new participants with most of the context is really useful. If few people are going to read the history anyways, then in my opinion this edge case is valuable enough to tip in the scales.
I agree the difficulty quoting sucks, but that's mostly because of the switch from top posting to bottom posting. When people copy-and-paste the bit they are replying to and stay in the top posting paradigm things aren't so bad.
According to this article, a rather weak argument about people not liking to wake up before sunrise based on questionable correlation of commute times to sunrise times, ignoring factors such as average commute lengths, dominant (historical) industries, effective natural light at different times in modern housing.
From that it makes an (incorrect) assumption about the value of AM sunlight over PM sunlight and declares that all-year DST is pointless.
In my opinion the only argument against all-year DST which holds any water at all, and even then not much, is the concern about kids going to school in the dark. However, since many places don't have enough winter daylight to go around, trade-offs need to be made and kids are probably better off on-net having daylight time during their free time instead of while eating their toast inside and commuting to school.
Kids being forced to start school in basically the middle of the night is another especially American phenomenon that requires a separate solution, I feel.
I think the hypothesis was more true in the past, but mostly because both the necessary dependencies it is based on are less true today than in the past, and the products and services are more complex today.
Back when anybody could start building furniture the cost of entry was low and competition high. Switching costs were also low.
The cost of entry for a smartphone which is truly different are astronomical, many previously unregulated products are now strictly regulated, so costs of entry is no longer low and therefore competition is also low. For many services like software switching costs are very high. Firms need to be large to produce the complex products which introduces internal inefficiencies which are hard to avoid.
But that definition doesn't take into account availability. This wasn't a problem when all electricity sources were highly available by default. You can burn coal or run the hydro turbines any minute of the year. With the rise of often-unavailable renewable sources like solar and wind that definition is now insufficient and under counts the true like-for-like cost of solar.
By any metric which takes into account minor availability requirements (eg. supplies electricity at night) solar badly loses its cost advantage. It gets even worse if the metric is the still important "deepest winter night" scenario.