Thread by @solar_chase

1. Time to make 2021 minor updates to my annual “opinions on #solar” thread.
If you like these, you’ll like my 2019 book, Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, a little old but still valid, five stars on Amazon.
tinyurl.com/y6lc3ohl

2. Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon is the book I should have read before seeking a job in renewables 16 years ago.
Link to 2020 thread. 2019, 2018 and 2017 are linked from there so you can see what I got wrong or changed. tinyurl.com/yr2memtx

3. To the opinions! Solar manufacturing is still a terrible business to be in, though 2020 and 2021 were less harsh than most years. Competition is vicious, the newest factories have the best tech. Older manufacturers carry heavy debt for factories rapidly becoming obsolete.

4. Yes, countries can implement policies to build a domestic manufacturing industry. A success story is India, which has had strong domestic manufacturing support since 2013 and developed such internationally recognised brands as… Vikram, Waaree and Mundra.

5. Crystalline silicon technology is good enough, though First Solar is holding on well, partly due to trade wars. Bifacial monocrystalline silicon based on 166mm cells is today’s standard and bigger cells will soon take over.

6. Solar is now the cheapest source of bulk electricity in most sunny countries, and that’s starting to sink in. Photovoltaics doesn’t need a breakthrough. Mostly, solar developers just need a grid connection and/or permission to sell electricity.

7. …but we are in an age of dramatic cost rises, unprecedented in my time. Metal silicon has cost <$2.5/kg since before 2003, but in Sep 2021 broke $10/kg. Cost of a container of freight Shanghai-Rotterdam was <$3,000 since before 2011, but has risen to $14,800 since Oct 2020.

8. These costs hit sectors other than solar, and I expect the spike in the price of energy and other commodities will in the long term be positive for solar demand. It’s still a shock to a sector (and analysts) accustomed to lower prices for better tech every year.

9. Standard mono module prices spiked to 27.3 cents per W, the highest since early 2019, last week. All time low was 19 cents in July 2020.

This tweet might age like milk, but I think prices will come back down over 1-2 years and resume a slow decline driven by better tech.

10. Solar’s still reasonably cheap, but it costs money and some auction projects bid too low will not be built, or will lose money. Most being paid below $25/MWh (unsubsidised) fall into this category. Middle East headlines are opaque internal transfer prices and don’t count.

11. We’ll probably see a few years of PPA price adjustment as solar developers push power buyers for higher prices on new projects. After the energy crisis some of them will get higher prices, though Spain’s recent windfall tax on merchant renewable projects is a red flag.

12. Grid connections are the gold dust for the solar (and wind) project development business. To optimize use, we now see solar & wind farms with capacity much larger than the grid connection, some with batteries.

13. For this reason, solar curtailment is a feature not a bug.

Solar’s also probably the easiest source of generation to curtail quickly, so can really contribute to grid stability. And sometimes curtailment is a price worth paying for using a grid connection more fully.

14. There’s never been a better time to plan a lot of solar. And many organisations are. ‘Somewhat credible’ (BNEF) net-zero government targets currently cover about 42% of global CO2 emissions, and the easiest first step to net zero is often to build massive amounts of solar.

15. You can be cynical about net zero emissions targets if you like, but they're a hell of a lot better than no net zero emissions targets.

16. Nonetheless, our PV forecast – the highest I could get regional analysts to agree to, while allocating most solar to actual countries, not buffer – is only 3.3TW by 2030, rather below the 5.3TW BNEF models that we need to be on a global net-zero-by-2050 high-renewables path.

17. Forecasting is hard when people actually pay for the results and therefore want them country by country. It’s easy when you just extrapolate a global line, but that is not terribly useful for setting corporate strategy, and makes your clients yell at you.

18. In 2017, my analysis team covered 42 countries which were significant solar markets doing more than 50MW/year. Now we attempt to cover 138, which is a pain, and we keep finding ones we have missed.

19. In countries which have lots of solar, the market flattens off. Here’s Germany and Japan. This makes it hard to convincingly forecast strong growth by country; you end up having to pitch for, eg, Indonesia being a big market and then Indonesians laugh at you.

20. That said I do believe Indonesia will be a big solar market (more than the 8.7GW cumulative we have by 2030), and so will lots of countries that aren’t on our radar yet. That’s why our global forecast contains a significant buffer.

21. Good solar companies don’t need to pitch the enviro-social of solar in general. They have a few meaningful differentiators (above-average recycling efforts, renewable energy purchase plans) but mostly they differentiate on executing solar well, ie profitably.

22. The supply chain for solar manufacturing should probably be more transparent. This sentence is also true without the word “solar”.

23. While moving to a circular economy with 100% recycling rates is essential in the long run, it’s not a challenge for PV in particular; few PV panels have been recycled to date only because the vast majority are still in use. It can be done.

24. I refuse to get excited about perovskites until a perovskite company can disclose a partnership with a named major module manufacturer.

(This was my opinion in 2018, 2019 and 2020. It is my opinion still).

25. Floating solar is a thing, but it’s not a new tech. It’s solar onna boat.

It’s mostly about having a place to put the modules and, when it’s on a hydro dam reservoir, a grid connection right there.

26. Agrivoltaics, likewise, is solar onna field.

PV only has synergies with *some* agriculture. Competition for light and restricted mechanical access to crops are often problems. Existing Chinese agrivoltaics are largely PV subsidizing bad farming.

27. People get far too excited about putting solar on things you technically can put solar on but maybe shouldn’t bother. Car roofs, roadways, etc. If you walk on it, drive on it or park it in a garage then put the solar somewhere else.

28. Residential and commercial solar policy worldwide are moving to paying a much lower rate for instantaneous exports than users pay for grid power, and that’s fine. The pro-solar alternatives, full net metering or even a higher feed-in tariff, are excessively generous.

29. Selfconsumption ratio – how much of your power you use instantaneously – is a key financial metric for a household or commercial system in most of the world now, so get data before you design your system, and find ways to usefully increase the selfconsumption ratio.

30. Also get your rooftop solar system built when you have scaffolding up for something else, 'cos scaffolding is expensive. Ideally build it when you’re building the roof, there will never be a better time.

Rooftop solar mandates are good and should be more common.

31. There’s more innovation now in system design than in module tech (though some there, eg multi busbars, bigger wafers). East-west orientations use less land and give flatter output profiles, costing ~1 percentage point of capacity factor, than equator-facing systems.

32. Although batteries are going to be more a thing than I previously expected, when and where a power plant generates will probably be more important in future than exactly how much it costs. The age of LCOE as a relevant metric is nearly over.

33. Very few people who are not solar project financiers understand tax treatment for solar projects (I don’t) and it’s important enough to make most calculated LCOEs irrelevant to auction prices.

34. Solar thermal tower and heliostat designs are still not working well, although we’ll see how smoothly Cerro Dominador ramps up.

We might even end up using molten salt for multi-day and seasonal storage... but heat it with PV.

35. Utility-scale batteries are going to be a massive thing everywhere, both co-located with solar and wind to use a grid connection, and just embedded in the grid. However they’re not going to solve seasonal demand-supply mismatches as the utilization rate would be very low.

36. Hydrogen is going to be a thing, especially for wider industrial decarbonisation outside the power sector (steel, fertiliser etc).

It also is what gets built by deep-decarbonisation-path models when they can’t find any other options….

37. Nuclear is safer than coal and climate change, and better than gas unless the gas plants are running very rarely. Batteries should help with the unfavourable ramping economics of nuclear (you *can* turn nuclear plants up and down, but you really don’t want to).

38. We’re finally getting serious about net zero carbon, since 2020. Whew. Getting that last 10-30% of carbon out will be hard, and require some expensive solutions. The first 70-90% is easy-ish so let’s get on with it.

39. “We” who are finally getting serious about net zero carbon mainly means governments and large companies. I’m pretty sure the general public has little idea how much progress has been made. Tell people at parties that Germany’s at 43% renewable electricity.

40. …It would still really help if rich people would stop pissing away carbon for no reason.

41. Solar is a major part of decarbonizing electricity, but probably not more than 50% worldwide, so we need something else too. Transport will go electric but also we really need to sort out industry, agriculture, shipping and aviation for a sustainably habitable planet.

42. Solar plant operation and maintenance in desert environments will prove more challenging than PV project stakeholders currently expect.

Climate risk from hurricanes, hailstorms, fire and floods is on the rise for solar as for everything else.

43. Traded electricity wholesale markets are the worst way of deciding how to dispatch energy resources, except for all the others that have been tried.

44. Many solar project developers complaining their problem is 'finance' are being disingenuous. Their problem is, their project is rubbish and they cannot convince anyone otherwise.

This is not just a solar thing.

45. Building-integrated PV products are usually attempts to sell bad solar products for premium prices to gullible aesthetes and architects.

46. Job creation from solar will be less than solar advocates forecast. Relatedly, solar cost will be lower than solar advocates currently forecast.

Being a lot of work is not intrinsically a good thing for a source of power.

47. The whole “only an overall growing economy can support a growing renewables industry” idea needs to die. Renewables growth *is* economic growth, and jobs, and nobody said economic growth needed to be homogenous.

Renewables growth continued (overall) right through Covid-19.

48. Offgrid solar is driven more by people wanting TVs than by people wanting their kids to have light to do homework. And that’s absolutely fine.

Minigrids, microgrids, and solar home systems with batteries are bringing reliable electricity to the whole world. It's happening.

49. Commercial and residential power pricing structures are going to get more complicated to reflect cheap midday solar. The main role of smart home technology is to take advantage of this. It's not currently doing it very well.

50. There is enough land for lots of solar. There are enough golf courses in the U.S. for about 370GW, ffs.

There’s also loads and loads of roofs, so let’s see those who oppose ground-mounted solar support higher-cost roof-mounted solar.

51. If you’re recording PV capacity and only have room for one figure, record MW(DC). It will tell you more about what the project will produce and what it will cost than MW(AC), which is just the size of the wire.

I will die on this hill.

52. Anyone buying a new internal combustion car now is pretty silly. EVs aren’t the answer to everything – especially congestion of cities – but they do use much less energy and, with flexibility, can support the grid.

53. Heatpumps rock, but in highly seasonal climates like most of northern Europe, they’re going to exacerbate solar’s seasonal mismatch problem. We are going to need a *lot* of wind power for deep renewables-driven decarbonisation.

...how on earth did I end up having 53 solar opinions, I'm stopping now.