Economics

FSLR is the country’s only major U.S. solar manufacturer. The Inflation Reduction Act has begun to change the industry’s fortunes. The 2022 law added tax credits for domestic manufacturing, compelling several companies to announce plans to build factories. Still, it has been slow-going.

Chinese companies have ramped up production and driven prices relentlessly lower, making it difficult for American firms to catch up. FREYR will get its polysilicon from both the U.S. and Asia, and its solar cells from Asia. It’s exploring whether to build another factory for cells in the U.S.

So far, the U.S. has tried to keep Chinese panels out by ramping up tariffs or outright banning panels. Chinese companies still want access to the U.S. market, so they have begun to build factories in the U.S. The Inflation Reduction Act allows companies based in foreign countries to qualify for tax credits as long as they set up shop in the U.S.

McKinsey studied the growth of an earlier generation of climate technologies to divine a roadmap for more nascent tech to become cost competitive with fossil-fuel. McKinsey found that every 100% increase in deployment can yield at least 70% of cost reductions. Patel said this relationship is predictable and should give investors confidence that rapid scaling will lead to disproportionate cost cuts and unlock faster adoption.

“It’s intuitive that the more scale, the lower the unit cost should become, but in climate tech we have the challenge of promising technologies that didn’t get beyond first-of-a-kind operations and didn’t reach a unit cost near parity with the fossil alternative,” Patel said.

by Dana Nuccitelli, 9/3/24

I just came across this interesting paper, although it was published last October. The authors performed model projections of the cheapest source of electricity in every country over the coming years, including ‘system storage cost (SSC)’, which is basically battery storage, if needed. Right now it’s mostly a mix of wind and solar (although interestingly, in Russia it’s nuclear power), but by 2027 the falling costs of solar + battery storage are expected to become the cheapest source almost everywhere.

The blades on the newest wind turbines sweep an area longer than a football field and are nearly impossible to recycle.

At the end of their life span of around 20 years, they are chopped into pieces and buried in a handful of landfills across the Great Plains. But this waste problem from a growing source of low carbon energy could become a headache of the past.

Rising electricity costs are putting American households under increasing financial stress. But clean energy isn’t to blame — even if Republican lawmakers and pro-fossil fuel advocates say otherwise.  :See example.

The real drivers of climbing electricity rates are spikes in fossil gas prices, rising costs to maintain and rebuild aging and stressed grid infrastructure, and a utility business model that incentivizes big capital investments that customers have to pay off over decades.

That’s the conclusion of a new report from think tank Energy Innovation, which takes on one of the favorite talking points of those striving to reverse renewable energy mandates and climate change policies across the country.