OK so in the news this week Portugal announced they could build a solar farm for some municipality at a cost of 1.3 cents (USD) per kWh to operate (Reuters). This is a huge nail in the coffin for nuclear and coal and natural gas.
Most of us in the US pay around 5 to 10 cents per kWh depending on the time of day. lot's of moving parts and regulations weigh down most energy companies. But solar is solid state technology (for the most part).
Now there is still the drawback of the land use, but what this suggests here is that as long as the manufacturing process and source materials are abundant and stay at their current cost. solar is beginning to be the lowest costing choice between all of the ways to generate electricity.
This doesn't take into account storage. These panels proposed in Portugal would undoubtedly be part of a larger grid including standard backup generators. However even if the cost of storage was factored it at utility scale it would still come to about 3 or 4 cents per kWh.
Presently I can get a solar array that can produce 4 kWs of electricity for about $5,200. A lithium ion battery pack that is 30 kWhs in capacity will cost about $15000. If I stretch that out across 20 years (life of the battery pack), then it comes to just under 10 cents per kWh. So the benefits of having something grid scale is that everybody shares the cost and the scale is large enough to get the price down to more like 3 cents.
The point is... what are we waiting for? Solar is the easiest way to produce consumer electricity. Now it's also the cheapest. The only think I could think of is the safety of battery storage. but other than that... anybody could run with this business model today.
