Comment by xbmcuser
6 hours ago
Cost is no longer the barrier as today even the upfront cost of solar is competitive against upfront cost for building coal or gas power plant. While there is no cost of fuel for solar. In China and India even solar + battery is cheaper than new coal power plants.
New electricity generation has been 90% clean for a few years now and solar the biggest part of it for 3 or 4 years. This new landmark is about energy.
That's good progress but it does raise some new cost barriers to get over for each new thing we electrify.
EVs are over this hump, heat pumps replacing boilers are just about there. Some industrial uses are getting there.
Notably, in electricity renewables went through being cheaper than new build and reduced further in cost to being cheaper than running existing plants.
We're not quite at that stage for many electrification use cases, though for growing nations without lots of existing assets that's not as relevant.
A recent Danish research[1] found that the cheapest energy mix (that includes system costs like energy storage) right now for them is offshore wind power (66%), natural gas CCGT (26%), and solar PV (8%). Solar panels are cheap, but their system cost is the highest.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
I presume that this paper assumes some form of stable costs for natural gas... what happens when that stability is soundly invalidated?