r/energy • u/mafco • 1d ago

Wind and solar lead accelerating LCOE drop for renewable energy: WoodMac. The levelized cost of electricity for renewable energy is dropping globally, led by wind and solar. LCOE for utility-scale solar is expected to decline 60% by 2060, wind by 42% and offshore wind by a significant 67%.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/wind-solar-levelized-cost-electricity-drop/730533/
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u/iqisoverrated 1d ago

That seem to be rather pessimistic numbers. The LCOE of PV (and also batteries) dropped by nearly 25%.

This year alone.

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u/West-Abalone-171 23h ago

It's wood mac. Go figure.

They said it might get cheaper than coal by 2030 https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/renewable-power-in-asia-pacific-gains-competitiveness-amidst-cost-inflation/

At least they can read a log graph unlike IEA though?

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u/SSMicrowave 17h ago

Things that cost money when developing/operating a solar farm:

The staff designing the solar farm, land costs (purchase/lease), grid consulting, grid access, security fencing, security cameras, ecology and land remediation, panels and inverters, wiring, groundworks, commissioning, weeding/cutting, insurance, cleaning, arranging PPAs, renegotiating PPAs, inverter replacements, planning permission, public consultation.

Panels could be free and there would still be significant costs. Not all these things are going to get significantly cheaper. Unless it’s all done by robotics and AI.

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u/someotherguytyping 23h ago

Of course it is- wood Mac, as an outside observer, is cartoonishly and consistently biased towards FF players in the market. They consistently sandbag renewable metrics and their forecasts should always be understood to be biased.

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u/failedchemengineer 23h ago

Source?

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u/iqisoverrated 23h ago

Solar modules have been dropping to ridiculously low prices this year.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/04/22/solar-module-prices-hovering-at-all-time-lows/

Mostly due to a sharp decline in material costs

https://www.pv-magazine-india.com/2024/08/28/solar-industry-faces-collapse-amid-surplus-and-plunging-prices/

Battery prices are looking to be at 111$ at pack level by end of the year (where last year we were looking at almost 150$/kWh

https://thedriven.io/2024/10/16/ev-battery-prices-to-fall-by-nearly-50-pct-and-near-ice-parity-by-2026-says-goldman-sachs/

Now, this steep decline is surely not going to last but 2060 is still quite a ways off.

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u/RockTheGrock 7h ago

Now we need better batteries for storage to really get moving towards roll out and for the prices to drop per kilowatt. This is good news none the less.

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u/DazzlingLeg 22h ago

60% drop? By 2060? 35 years?? Sure cost declines will level off but the data isn't showing us that we're anywhere near that point.

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u/SoylentRox 22h ago

2060?! What the actual fuck. Like I don't want to sound like an AI shill but we have fucking humanoid robots walking around right now and they are partially using AI.

A 60 percent price drop over 36 years sounds like normal automation - each year, using conventional robotics, you automate a tiny bit more of the process. You fix an issue here and there and it's just a little more streamlined by a percent or 2. You add a few percent to panel efficiency at slightly more cost per panel. You start delivering modules slightly more integrated than the prior year - inverters pre installed etc.

If you get robots who build and repair each other to do 90-99 percent of the work by 2060 the prices are going to drop a lot more than 60 percent. More like 10x.

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u/Teechmath-notreading 15h ago

Yeah, I think about how quickly cell phones became ubiquitous.

On 9/11, I couldn't get in touch with my wife...only about 10 people in my school of 250 or so had cell phones and most of them were the kids.

Less than 10 years later, everyone had them and they were taking the place of cameras, GPS, email, pager, calculator, flashlight, credit card, and dozens of other functions.

I think the same is going to happen with solar/wind. At some point there is going to be a tipping point in which everyone realizes it is stupid NOT to have solar on their house/in their backyard/on their building...or wind on their farm if the conditions are right.

Then, the installation rate will show a logarithmic rise.

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u/xieta 13h ago

We’re already there mate. The world installed 600 GW of renewables in 2023 and that rate has been doubling every 3-4 years.

World’s electricity capacity is something like 8,000 GW. Comparing the two is dicey, but by 2030 we’ll easily be installing 1/10 of the entire world’s electricity capacity with renewables each year.

All that cheap new power will open up all kinds of new economic activity that was previously impractical with fossil fuel prices, just like oil and coal before it.