michael_nielsen

Lots of bad policies would (over-subsidizing it, for instance). But among helpful actions, I'd love to see vastly better batteries.

Great chart, BTW, sent me down the Wikipedia rabbithole! I wonder how the actual output scales along the chart?

It would have to match it pretty closely, because it's a logarithmic scale. Early plants get exponentially washed out, so don't matter. And more recent ones have to be used or there would be no follow-on investment. Recent data suggests solar is easier to price than wind.

California's solar is leading to a negative price reasonably often. And it doesn't work at night without large-scale batteries. The Gigafactory is producing tens of GWh of batteries (annualized), which is a rounding error on the scale of the world electricity grid.

TBC: I'm enthusiastic about solar. But the magnitude of the task is orders of magnitude beyond where we're at. Looks like we need battery production at least 100x (actually more) than the Gigafactory to make solar competitive with standard base load.