I dug down trying to get the actual paper and it appears it's a pre-print with only the abstract available (but maybe I wasn't looking in the right spot).

That being said, the quotes from the author were more to the point of it being a milestone that in the UK that Solar+Battery systems were now less expensive than gas/coal.

To my understanding, this is a milestone vs "raw" production numbers, which you're correct in saying have had solar as the cheapest option for years.

Wouldn't it depend a lot on where you live in terms of weather and/or required pollution controls?

Do you think those are significantly different for solar versus other technologies? Seems they would be right in line with anything else...

Is there a form of power that doesn't have these? A coal plant has all these plus fuel costs, workers to run the plant, parts for the turbines, and ash disposal to deal with.

Transmission is more of a problem with the centralized forms of power generation? So transmission should be a net positive for solar?

Construction and disposal I'm not sure to be honest, intuitively I don't think those are much more expensive.

It doesn't exclude construction. The abstract says they analyzed levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). LCOE includes investments, operations, and fuel, so it includes construction.

Land is also spoiled and occupied for fossil fuel extraction, refinement, and distribution. And at least you can be within the near vicinity of solar panels without experiencing significant health issues, so we need to tabulate the very real public health costs too when comparing. I highly doubt there is a solar equivalent of “Cancer Alley” in the US. Another consideration is that we can slap solar panels on top of existing structures, which you cannot do with fossil fuel at any stage.

I don’t doubt that the costs are considerable but if we’re going to go down that path we need to make sure it’s applied across the board here and I imagine the gap is not as bad as you’re implying. I’m going off my gut though so I could be entirely wrong.

Because solar (for example) can often go on rooftops so not needing new land. And solar and wind are often good in remote areas where population is low and land is cheap.

Because land doesn't need to be vacant to develop solar?

Residential or industrial rooftops are perfect examples. Heck, sound barriers along freeways etc are now even profitable

Because the land cost and amount needed is immaterial. Solar and wind actually contribute to the tax base where it is colocated, tax revenue that would otherwise not be provided (depending on jurisdiction). People overvalue land for some reason, most of the world is not Manhattan or Hong Kong. The US farms 60 million acres for corn and soybean for biofuels alone, for example, and of course that land is much more efficiently used if solar PV is installed for energy.

https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/10/solar-panels-half-th...

https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/california-first-...

Edit: your comment has changed a bit, so let me address the new sentence here:

> I don't understand. Why is it that in every single discussion about power- and in particular, solar power- is the cost of land omitted ?

You are incorrect that land costs are omitted; in fact I don't recall any sort of cost comparison that has ever omitted land costs, whether it's from Lazard or NREL or anywhere else. It's part of the CapEx, or as rent, or however it's modeled. NREL in particular looks at overall costs on completed and built systems. Further, the developers building these things know the land costs very well.

Can you point to a discussion or paper where land cost was not included? If it's still an open discussion I'd love to add the high quality solar-is-cheapest studies that all include land costs.

And as for this particular study:

First, doesn't omit the cost of land. Secondly land is only the most important resource in very very few markets. Razing skyscrapers in Manhattan would be a bad idea. Instead of farming crops or the sun in Manhattan, it's done elsewhere and shipped in.

PV is fairly unique in that land is not required. It can be installed over existing land uses such as rooftops, canals, parking.

It's also not clear if they factored in battery costs. They mention lithium battery costs have also decreased in cost but not clear if its included. Batteries are a requirement for consistently delivering solar power. You cant just flip the sun on and off.

It's been included in every one I've read. You're not going to find it in broad surveys like this one, because it's a survey. They'll average together the cost of hundreds of projects. But when you look at the projects individually that were the sources, land acquisition is part of the capital costs or land lease is part of the operating costs.

What's the cite for solar requiring "massive amounts of land and taxes"? That doesn't square with the back of my envelope but I'd be willing to look at numbers.

Because the land is already owned for the most part?

Why are we assuming that the cost of land isn't included in their LCoE calculation?

Why are you saying land is not included in the cost calculations? I've not read this particular study, but every study looking at the cost of electricity generation I have seen in recent years, essentially looked at investment/returns which obviously includes land use cost. The reason why it's not a big topic, is because it's generally not a big contributor to overall cost, the main drivers being panels and construction. Incidentally, the main power sources where things are not included in the cost are nuclear (typically risk for major accidents is taken on by the government, as no insurance will do it, waste storage cost is often capped as well incalculations) and fossils (health effects of pollution, CO2...).

I'm not sure how practical that would be. Transmitting power over distances incurs losses.

I did see a proposal to build out solar in Africa and pipe it undersea to Europe. That seemed wild, and, predictably, it got canned for its impracticality.

Edit - it looks like there are several such proposals, and that they're not all cancelled:

Several travel across the Mediterranean:

https://gregy-interconnector.gr/index_en.html

https://www.ecofinagency.com/news-industry/0210-49221-egypt-...

Here's the one I thought was cancelled, which travels along the western coast of Africa to the UK:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe...

https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/

https://thenational-the-national-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/...

Why transmit it rather than just storing the unused power for later near the source?

To transmit power you will need battery storage on both sides of long distance power lines. We never build enough of them, but if you can peak shave and trough fill with stored power, you increase the MWH per day available on the far end.

Solar tends to come with battery storage. But you could also just build the battery storage.

The Pan-European grid is already reality. The fluctuating generation costs between e.g. the Nordics and mainland Europe are already driving investment into undersea HVDC cables.

Define "real base power"? You think the grid can only operate if every generator is always-on? How do you square that with the fact that the grid is operating just fine with this stuff already?

This is a fallacy, basically. Not least because electricity is by far the most mobile traded commodity in human history. Not enough sun today where you live? Buy your power from across the continent, where they have plenty. Or from your wind generators which are working fine. Or the wind generators across the continent if you have to. Or crank up the hydro dams (most of which rarely run at 100%) a bit to handle the shortfall. Or even fire up an idle gas plant if you absolutely can't get anything else.

The idea that solar and wind aren't (sigh) "real" is a lie that someone sold you. The real world relies on a lot of this stuff already and the promised apocalypse never arrived. Go figure.

The problem with the idea of "base power" is that in the past, the cheapest electricity was from the big thermal generators that take a day to warm up, and operate most cheaply by pumping out at maximum efficiency 24 hours a day. You could then layer on the more expensive electricity sources that could spin up in 15 minutes or a few hours, and match the demand curve, as long as you matched baseload generators to the minimum of the demand curve, and have a cost-optimal electricity mix.

Now that we have cheaper sources of energy for parts of the day, "base" power is a much less desirable concept. It's gone from a simple and straightforward optimization problem that a middle-schooler could solve to a cost optimization problem that markets and linear solvers can solve.

Now that we have cheap storage, and solar-plus-storage is cheaper than coal in the UK, the cost optimization is getting simpler: get rid of all the base load coal!

24hrs solar is already a thing that is possible for large parts of the world with lithium batteries.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

That study is already old as the prices for batteries have come down a lot more since then.

But California has this: https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook

New energy generation from solar is cheaper. New energy generation from solar plus storage is cost competitive with natural gas peaker plants. By how much depends on the region.

There's also the problem of rural opposition to solar farms. Not unusual to see a "no solar farms" sign every few hundred feet in some parts of Indiana where I wander (often in the same areas where the cars have bumper stickers celebrating coal).

I assume astroturfing is at play.

Not if you consider that you need to either renew or add battery capacity (and panels and power electronics) after x years? Or did you take that into account?

There is small problem though - all of the people will need the last 10% at the same time. And because you need infrastructure that will work only 10 percent of the time, expect the price of kwh to be 10 times the current to compensate.

The less you need the grid - the more expensive is what you will pull from it because the infrastructure costs will be spread on fewer kwh.

$40/kWh sounds so fantastic, I can't believe it. Could you please provide a source for that price? Where will I get such cheap batteries?

It’s almost like market forces aren’t what you want for a utility.

This seems good for investors in utility-scale batteries, since they can charge them very cheaply and sell at night.

(Although, that might not work well in Finland in the summer.)

This was one of the actual problems highlighted by the people who coined the term "duck curve" over a decade ago.

One of the main ways we've avoided this problem so far is that solar kept getting cheaper.

Where are your calculations? It's hard for anyone to comment without seeing your cost/benefit analysis.

Totally. Grid solar and grid battery installations are gonna rock the world but rooftop solar is too bespoke and labor intensive. It goes directly against the benefit of solar’s mass manufacturing

This is true. A lot of the older panels are also rather inefficient and come with a rather poor lifespan. It's part of the reason I don't personally have any form of solar despite working in the industry.

Technology is catching up on the solar panel front though. French Heliup are producing panels which are only 5kg per square meter. Which makes them significantly easier to install on roof-tops. I imagine I'll eventually have solar panels on my roof, but I'll likely wait another decade for battery tech to also be more viable.

Australian rooftop solar is the cheapest consumer energy in history. This is despite the hardware and salaries being roughly equal to the US where the cost is about 3 times more.

You should check your electricity to bill to see how much is actually for generation.