Article Image

IPFS News Link • Energy

Future 2040 Solar Will Be Five Times Cheaper Than Fossil Fuel Electricity

• https://www.nextbigfuture.com, by Brian Wang

There have been hundreds of forecasts of the future costs of solar power and the projected share solar power would have in the future. Ramez has been an optimist around solar energy and solar energy development but actual development has even exceeded his previous forecasts in 2011 and 2015.

Energy Storage is Needed to Add to Solar for a Large Scale Energy Transition

This potential low cost of solar energy will need to be marked up to account for the needed large scale battery. Battery prices will also drop a lot. I believe Tesla and CATL and others will be able to drop prices down to $30-50 per kwh 2025-2030. I foresee the Tesla battery day goals to get achieved in 2030. Batteries of some form will get to $10/kwh in 2030-2040.

Previous Nextbigfuture articles covered the future of energy storage. Solar energy at one-fifth the cost would end up around half the price of fossil fuel when very cheap battery storage is included to actually compare more apples to apples with baseload storage.

The actual cost of solar-battery depends upon the percentage of energy that is used in a particular area. MIT has some analysis. It boils down to the higher percentage of renewable and battery usage ends up costing a lot more. This will take longer to go into detail. Getting up to 10% renewables is pretty easy and can be stable. Getting renewables and super-cheap batteries, you can affordably and stably get up around 50% and maybe 60-80%. It would be better to have 20%-40% of reliable baseload with nuclear or hydro.


ppmsilvercosmetics.com/ERNEST/