Comment by tialaramex

2 days ago

There's a situation like with Amdahl's law here, which I'm guessing you're familiar with since this is HN but if not then I'm sure you can read about it. Consumer prices - the thing you're experiencing - have multiple inputs, and wholesale price is the only one that's subject to this change by generation technology so that dilutes the consequence of any such change for consumers.

If you're paying 25 cents per kWh and and the wholesale price was $100 per MWh then 10 of those 25 cents were for wholesale electricity, but you're paying 15 cents per kWh for "other things". Maybe a huge improvement to generation technology reduces that wholesale price to $90 per MWh, amazing, but alas general inflation increases your suppliers other costs to 16 cents per kWh and so you pay... 25 cents still.

If that wholesale price somehow halved and it was all passed on (good luck with that) your 25 cents per kWh goes to 20 cents, only a 20% drop.

The learning curve for solar is shallowing, and while it's steeper for offshore wind and especially floating offshore wind, those are both way more expensive than solar, so you'd need much more price decrease for them to be cheaper than say, coal.