Antinuclear

Forget nuclear: 5B says plunging price of PV means giga-scale solar farms the future for old coal plants

Sophie Vorrath, Jul 26, 2024, RenewEconomy,

Australian solar innovator 5B says the plunging price of photovoltaic technology has made the company’s prefabricated Maverick arrays cost-competitive with single axis tracking solar plants – and in some cases cheaper, depending on the quality of the solar resource.

In a presentation to the Large-scale Renewable Generation & Storage Summit in Sydney on Thursday, 5B deputy CEO Nicole Kuepper-Russell said the company’s value proposition was “really singing” since module prices fell to just over 10 cents per watt in China in March.

The low cost of solar was a hot topic at the conference, as was the falling cost of storage.

In a presentation by former Clean Energy Finance Corporation chief Oliver Yates, the renewables investment guru argued cheaper batteries mean most existing government and industry plans should be “shredded and start again” to account for the “new solar/battery economic frontier.”

Representing Valent Energy – the energy storage focused joint venture between Gaw Capital and BW ESS – Yates said the cost of dispatchable renewables was now around $200/MWh – $65/MWh for solar production and $135/MWh for battery storage – and “anything producing power higher than that is ridiculous.”

For 5B – as Kuepper-Russell’s presentation illustrated, below [on original]– the levelised cost of energy for a solar project using its Maverick arrays hit price parity with the LCOE of single axis tracker solar towards the end of last year, and has steadily become cheaper as panel prices continue to fall……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… more https://reneweconomy.com.au/forget-nuclear-5b-says-plunging-price-of-pv-means-giga-scale-solar-farms-the-future-for-old-coal-plants/

July 28, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | energy