Jenny Chase has led a team analyzing the business of solar power for almost 20 years now; she's also the author of a fantastic introductory book on the subject. I called her to check in on the state of solar power -- whether costs will keep falling, the next big markets, and the most promising technological advances.
I hate to keep harping on this, but if the problem confronting solar growth in the US is grid interconnection capacity, and the solutions to that are stalled by the bureaucratic self interest of big state sanctioned utility monopolies, then why waste time waiting for that to change?
Just accelerate behind the meter solar parking lot canopies +stationary storage batteries +Vehicle-2-Grid charging infrastructure,……right where most US energy is being consumed. No new utility transmission, site acquisition, or other site improvement spending required, with little, if any, NIMBY opposition. And those modular steel canopy structures?…..with minimal maintenance, they’ll last 75 years,…..that’s 3 generations of improving solar panels.
This looks like the most rapidly exploitable strategy to shade big urban heat islands and accelerate widely distributed electric vehicle charging infrastructure & NetZero commercial properties, while simultaneously providing a matrix of reliable neighborhood micro grids. And it can be accomplished by typical leased commercial & large residential property investors using IRA investment incentives, with ordinary local building permits. No complicated permitting or new utility interconnections required.
Solar power from parking lot canopies is very, very expensive due to the heavy structures (longer spans, higher wind loads, resistance to being driven into...), the extra labor of working 15' in the air, bespoke engineering and then insurance...
The cost of solar electricity out of the inverter is a function of cost/kW installed, w/interest rates on that, and output kWh/kW installed, and a little maintenance.
#s:
Average large solar farm now:
$1.05/kW in USA plus grid stuff which is considered a lot if it's over $0.25/kW additional.
Large parking solar now:
$4-5/kW here, or FOUR+ TIMES MORE. I'm sure some are significantly higher, but they are being built for gov't, non-profit and NGO customers so the LCOE is never calculated.
Output in kWh/kW would typically be 0-50% less than solar farms in the same climate; often you can't get due south orientation, and never trackers.
Rooftop solar varies, sadly up to $3/W in the US for residential, but much less elsewhere. And it should be much less on the roofs of large warehouses, etc., so yes to those.
At least some transmission constraints are due to that capacity being hogged by gas and coal plants in places with "capacity markets."
It’s been reported that according to the CEO of PG&E, California’s largest utility, the energy storage in BEVs is an extremely valuable peak demand load-shaving resource when connected to their local distribution grids. And that according to PG&E (not verified), the load-shaving capacity of the existing EVs operating in their California service area alone, is equal to five (5) Diablo Canyon nuclear power plants.
This then, is the most compelling purpose of widely distributed, publicly accessible Level-2 Vehicle-2-Grid charging infrastructure located at large apartments & condos, work-place parking lots, neighborhood shopping centers, & various public facilities like schools, churches, and athletic & entertainment venues, in addition to private dwellings.
To echo the tone of the pod, V2G might end up working but it shouldn't. You'll end up subsidizing an unpredictable grid and an inefficient vehicle. It only becomes a thing if we collectively buy into the delusion. Folks have been trying to make it a thing for decades, thankfully it hasn't caught on.
If the battery in the car is well sized there won't be spare capacity over the expected needs for the vehicle. Any extra capacity is massive waste, because you have to build it and then carry this really heavy thing around with you everywhere you go (increasing your need for more battery capacity and increasing the embodied carbon and overall system cost). That big battery is better suited sitting in your garage permanently affixed to your house (or as a Gogoro expandable battery swap system). Bonus for the static system, it is always plugged in and dispatchable to a location that can accept the juice. Oh, and the big heavy vehicle is bad for roads, and pedestrians.
If the vehicle participates in the V2G it is being drawn down during its duty cycle as a vehicle that stands ready to move you from place to place. In the morning there is a demand spike before solar comes online, so you draw down the vehicle batter right before the morning commute. At the other end of the day you just drove home before the evening spike so your battery should be maximally depleted. It is always cross-pressured. Great for soaking up 0-cost energy midday though.
V2G is non-trivial to participate in. The utilities that are slow-rolling interconnect *also* cannot handle V2G dispatch and management. Even if the utilities could manage the massively distributed peak shaving, you need sufficient last-meter connection capacity to plug all these cars in wherever they happen to be. You are stuck behind the transmission block again, but now an added dimension of distribution line and local panel constraints.
We don't have a gas-pump for every place a car might be in the world, on the off chance we need to siphon some gas back out of the car to dump into a boiler. We won't have level-2 chargers for every place your car might be. That suggests we'll be utilizing a vanishingly small fraction of the potential battery capacity those vehicle batteries represent. Again, we're better off putting the big battery in a static location and ultra-lighting the moving parts of the system.
Utilities can pass on CapEx projects to rate payers and a level-2 charger build out is a great big CapEx that a utility knows what to do with. That a utility finds a massive CapEx pathway important and viable (by doing a naive estimation based on total battery capacity rather than addressable battery capacity at any point in time) should be the least surprising thing in the world. They aren't talking about the operational limits of that network because they aren't interested in it, they can't make money in OpEx.
V2G is basically the most American approach to the problem possible - an attempt to do everything else with the hope that the problem gets resolved somewhere along the way.
Hot (sub)urban environments & exponentially growing demand for accessible BEV charging, especially for commercial fleet vehicles, places of employment, & large residential apartments & condos is likely to drive more widely distributed parking lot canopies +storage batteries +V2G chargers, in spite of lower LCOE of remote solar farms.
Hey I was looking back at the transcript, and it didn't seem to mention one seemingly big advance in PV panels in the last decade. That is "bi-facial" panels, those with glass on the back and cells which can utilize reflected light. Depending on mounting and climate, I understand this increases the output per area over the year by another 10-25% beyond the gains from efficiency discussed. As would be expected, maximum gains are where the panels are mounted on racks above a white roof, sand or snow. There are a few drawbacks; the glass backsheet increases weight, and there are some new fault conditions and a little less front side efficiency. Not something to do for a typical residential flush mount.
In the beginning of this podcast it was mentioned that China installed 240GW of solar in their country this year, more than half of the world production. It amazed me that the entire U.S. power capacity is only 1,300GW. This indicates that it may take only 5 years to completely power the U.S. with solar if we install solar at the rate that China does. We can forget about 2035, we could do this by 2029!
Sorry it doesn't work like that. US power capacity is probably assuming mostly regular power plants that operate 80% of the time. Because the sun doesn't shine all the time and is only overhead for a short period, average solar power production is much lower than the rated capacity (at peak sun). Overall, it is probably 20-30% (I don't know the actual figures).
Still, it is true that if we were installing solar at the same rate as China, we could probably provide as much power in 2035 from solar as we are now producing. There is a lot more potential there than we are actually doing and largely because the fossil fuel lobbyists have a lot of power.
When you say, "we could probably provide as much power in 2035 from solar as we are now producing", I disagree, we would be providing all the power that the U.S needs, 1,300GW, with solar and storage. The storage at peak sun is the way one gets the stated solar power capacity.
I hate to keep harping on this, but if the problem confronting solar growth in the US is grid interconnection capacity, and the solutions to that are stalled by the bureaucratic self interest of big state sanctioned utility monopolies, then why waste time waiting for that to change?
Just accelerate behind the meter solar parking lot canopies +stationary storage batteries +Vehicle-2-Grid charging infrastructure,……right where most US energy is being consumed. No new utility transmission, site acquisition, or other site improvement spending required, with little, if any, NIMBY opposition. And those modular steel canopy structures?…..with minimal maintenance, they’ll last 75 years,…..that’s 3 generations of improving solar panels.
This looks like the most rapidly exploitable strategy to shade big urban heat islands and accelerate widely distributed electric vehicle charging infrastructure & NetZero commercial properties, while simultaneously providing a matrix of reliable neighborhood micro grids. And it can be accomplished by typical leased commercial & large residential property investors using IRA investment incentives, with ordinary local building permits. No complicated permitting or new utility interconnections required.
Solar power from parking lot canopies is very, very expensive due to the heavy structures (longer spans, higher wind loads, resistance to being driven into...), the extra labor of working 15' in the air, bespoke engineering and then insurance...
The cost of solar electricity out of the inverter is a function of cost/kW installed, w/interest rates on that, and output kWh/kW installed, and a little maintenance.
#s:
Average large solar farm now:
$1.05/kW in USA plus grid stuff which is considered a lot if it's over $0.25/kW additional.
Large parking solar now:
$4-5/kW here, or FOUR+ TIMES MORE. I'm sure some are significantly higher, but they are being built for gov't, non-profit and NGO customers so the LCOE is never calculated.
Output in kWh/kW would typically be 0-50% less than solar farms in the same climate; often you can't get due south orientation, and never trackers.
Rooftop solar varies, sadly up to $3/W in the US for residential, but much less elsewhere. And it should be much less on the roofs of large warehouses, etc., so yes to those.
At least some transmission constraints are due to that capacity being hogged by gas and coal plants in places with "capacity markets."
It’s been reported that according to the CEO of PG&E, California’s largest utility, the energy storage in BEVs is an extremely valuable peak demand load-shaving resource when connected to their local distribution grids. And that according to PG&E (not verified), the load-shaving capacity of the existing EVs operating in their California service area alone, is equal to five (5) Diablo Canyon nuclear power plants.
This then, is the most compelling purpose of widely distributed, publicly accessible Level-2 Vehicle-2-Grid charging infrastructure located at large apartments & condos, work-place parking lots, neighborhood shopping centers, & various public facilities like schools, churches, and athletic & entertainment venues, in addition to private dwellings.
To echo the tone of the pod, V2G might end up working but it shouldn't. You'll end up subsidizing an unpredictable grid and an inefficient vehicle. It only becomes a thing if we collectively buy into the delusion. Folks have been trying to make it a thing for decades, thankfully it hasn't caught on.
If the battery in the car is well sized there won't be spare capacity over the expected needs for the vehicle. Any extra capacity is massive waste, because you have to build it and then carry this really heavy thing around with you everywhere you go (increasing your need for more battery capacity and increasing the embodied carbon and overall system cost). That big battery is better suited sitting in your garage permanently affixed to your house (or as a Gogoro expandable battery swap system). Bonus for the static system, it is always plugged in and dispatchable to a location that can accept the juice. Oh, and the big heavy vehicle is bad for roads, and pedestrians.
If the vehicle participates in the V2G it is being drawn down during its duty cycle as a vehicle that stands ready to move you from place to place. In the morning there is a demand spike before solar comes online, so you draw down the vehicle batter right before the morning commute. At the other end of the day you just drove home before the evening spike so your battery should be maximally depleted. It is always cross-pressured. Great for soaking up 0-cost energy midday though.
V2G is non-trivial to participate in. The utilities that are slow-rolling interconnect *also* cannot handle V2G dispatch and management. Even if the utilities could manage the massively distributed peak shaving, you need sufficient last-meter connection capacity to plug all these cars in wherever they happen to be. You are stuck behind the transmission block again, but now an added dimension of distribution line and local panel constraints.
We don't have a gas-pump for every place a car might be in the world, on the off chance we need to siphon some gas back out of the car to dump into a boiler. We won't have level-2 chargers for every place your car might be. That suggests we'll be utilizing a vanishingly small fraction of the potential battery capacity those vehicle batteries represent. Again, we're better off putting the big battery in a static location and ultra-lighting the moving parts of the system.
Utilities can pass on CapEx projects to rate payers and a level-2 charger build out is a great big CapEx that a utility knows what to do with. That a utility finds a massive CapEx pathway important and viable (by doing a naive estimation based on total battery capacity rather than addressable battery capacity at any point in time) should be the least surprising thing in the world. They aren't talking about the operational limits of that network because they aren't interested in it, they can't make money in OpEx.
V2G is basically the most American approach to the problem possible - an attempt to do everything else with the hope that the problem gets resolved somewhere along the way.
Hot (sub)urban environments & exponentially growing demand for accessible BEV charging, especially for commercial fleet vehicles, places of employment, & large residential apartments & condos is likely to drive more widely distributed parking lot canopies +storage batteries +V2G chargers, in spite of lower LCOE of remote solar farms.
Hey I was looking back at the transcript, and it didn't seem to mention one seemingly big advance in PV panels in the last decade. That is "bi-facial" panels, those with glass on the back and cells which can utilize reflected light. Depending on mounting and climate, I understand this increases the output per area over the year by another 10-25% beyond the gains from efficiency discussed. As would be expected, maximum gains are where the panels are mounted on racks above a white roof, sand or snow. There are a few drawbacks; the glass backsheet increases weight, and there are some new fault conditions and a little less front side efficiency. Not something to do for a typical residential flush mount.
In the beginning of this podcast it was mentioned that China installed 240GW of solar in their country this year, more than half of the world production. It amazed me that the entire U.S. power capacity is only 1,300GW. This indicates that it may take only 5 years to completely power the U.S. with solar if we install solar at the rate that China does. We can forget about 2035, we could do this by 2029!
Sorry it doesn't work like that. US power capacity is probably assuming mostly regular power plants that operate 80% of the time. Because the sun doesn't shine all the time and is only overhead for a short period, average solar power production is much lower than the rated capacity (at peak sun). Overall, it is probably 20-30% (I don't know the actual figures).
Still, it is true that if we were installing solar at the same rate as China, we could probably provide as much power in 2035 from solar as we are now producing. There is a lot more potential there than we are actually doing and largely because the fossil fuel lobbyists have a lot of power.
When you say, "we could probably provide as much power in 2035 from solar as we are now producing", I disagree, we would be providing all the power that the U.S needs, 1,300GW, with solar and storage. The storage at peak sun is the way one gets the stated solar power capacity.
Great pod. I wish we had a pod like this about wind.
Stay tuned!