I learned a lot from this BlueSky thread about renewable energy by Jenny Chase, solar analyst for BloombergNEF.
Solar panels, she reports, are now cheaper than regular fencing material. That blew my mind.
When the sun is out, the price of energy from solar PV falls so far, it becomes free, which may sound great, but is actually a problem from a market standpoint:
By 2030 most countries will have spot power prices of zero in sunny hours. This will be passed on to end consumers, to encourage them to shift power demand to sunny periods by electric vehicle and battery charging, preheating, precooling, etc.
Low power prices may be great for consumers but they are very bad if you're trying to build more clean power plants. Without demand-side flexibility measures, the energy transition will fail before fully pushing fossil fuel out of the mix. Which is what we must do.
And then there are batteries, of course, store that power for use at other times. And wind, which works in winter and in the dark. So more wind!
As far as biofuels go, she says:
Electrification of transport is far better than biofuels; for example, ...it takes about 300 acres of farmland to run a petrol car on corn ethanol, vs an electric car running on about one acre of PV.
She sums up:
Ordinary people have no idea how much progress we’ve made. Tell people at parties that UK carbon emissions in 2023 were at their lowest level since 1879, for example. Most developed economies are now reducing carbon emissions without lowering quality of life.
It would still really help if rich people would stop pissing carbon into the atmosphere for no reason.
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