At Bestway Cement’s plant in Chakwal, Pakistan, solar already supplies more than a quarter of the electricity used to make cement. The company has 26MW installed and expects to add another 6.34MW by the end of the year.
That’s pretty amazing. Building construction make up a huge part of our carbon footprint.
If we could get 100% green cement (and steel), it would significantly decrease our emissions.
Steel is a lot more tricky as generally fossil fuels are burnt directly inside the blast furnace. There are a few alternative “green steel” processing routes that avoid this but iirc none of them are hugely competitive at the moment.
There’s some sort of electrolytic process similar to aluminium available, but yes the reaction that turns iron ore into iron is:
Iron oxide + carbon monoxide + heat ->
A redox reaction where oxygen atoms are transferred from iron oxide to carbon monoxide ->
Iron + CO2.
Heat and CO is conveniently provided by burning coal/coke in a blast furnace in the presence of a lot of oxygen.
You can pretty much just chuck layers of coke and iron ore in the top of your blast furnace, pump high pressure oxygen into the centre, and get molten iron straight out the bottom.
There’s definitely some in Germany. Iirc they use hydrogen generated from electrolysis
Still too high
I bought 3.5kw and a 10kwh battery in June and it’s amazing. Bills are 90% cheaper and it’ll pay for itself in 5 years with underwritten warranties for 25 years on the panels and 15 on the battery
I’m an electrician and would do it myself if I wasn’t covered by trees with a house facing north in one of the least sunny parts of the country lol
How much did you pay for it all and did you use an electrician, solar company, or DIY?
I been saving up to by outright at 30-40k though with energy rises not sure if it’s better of to start earlier maybe even do less capacity with room to upgrade later.
£9k through my energy supplier Octopus
living in capitalistic country with a super idiotic “leader” isn’t helping me here lol. I hope one day to have the clean energy like you and a battery backup. We have had storms that caused a 6 day outage in the past…
It’s great. I have an EV and fill it up when the price goes negative when there is loads of wind and solar.
Yeah I have an EV already which in 3 years still with grid I’m sure saved a lot. I was doing $160 / month on gas with my normal commute.
What battery is that? Most I’ve seen have a 7-10yr warranty
FOXESS EVO10
From octopus
Where the fuck are you getting panels for $0.12/watt!?
Most likely: alibaba
My roommate is rebuilding his Volkswagen 2012 Golf R’s engine right now. We were watching on YouTube, you can get a whole engine on Alibaba for like $500. Seems like it’s 50/50 of it working and being like a brand new car, or just a huge clusterfuck that won’t run and turns into a shitshow disaster
Sourcing parts from China requires skill. Look for reviews, get samples, and don’t go cheap. You can get great quality stuff there. They will build to spec. So if you know the exact geometry and thickness and grade of material, you can be very specific and get something great.
But if you just buy something cheap without discussing it with their engineers and confirming specs and tolerances, you’ll get something cheap.
Skimming the article I couldn’t find any definition of terms, but I assume this is production cost, not cost to the end user after markups from the manufacturer, distributor, and retailer.
€0.13/watt* here, random store I found online in my country, but it is a legitimate business, I checked that much. Not quite $0.12, but close enough and I didn’t spend much time looking for it.
Though I feel like just a few months ago I couldn’t find anything this cheap.
Either way, for me personally, my geographical location makes it kinda useless in the winter and for some months I’d have nothing to do with the excess I would produce from just a few panels - in the summer, there’s no point selling to the grid during daytime and the nights are too short to make proper use of any stored energy, you’d have fully charged batteries all the time.
Couple of months in spring and fall where things would run into a nice equilibrium though. Unfortunately not enough savings to pay for a battery. Think sodium batteries will change that over the coming years though, so I might go for it eventually.
* just noticed this is excluding VAT, so add 24% on top - but then price comparisons make sense without VAT anyway, since that varies by country. I think most US states have much lower sales tax than our VAT.
I checked around in Alibaba and for bulk orders directly from a big manufacturer (with EXW terms, meaning pick-up at the factory, so no shipping and no taxes included) it was actually less that $0.12/watt, quite a bit less if enough units were ordered.
Such consumer price in Estonia kinda dovetails with the indicative prices per watt that I’ve seen in Alibaba being less than $0.12/watt, as even though Estonia has 0% VAT on solar panels and the EU has no Duty Tax on them so there’s no tax paid, what’s left that’s on top of the factory price (so the shipping costs + a little margin for the seller) still requires the panels to be less than $0.12 at the factory to end up sold to consumers in Estonia for €0.13
For reference, 100W panels were running 66 cents/W when I did my build in 2023. Larger panels have always been cheaper per watt, but it means prices have dropped by up to 80% in just three years.
Given the tarrifs and price flow in the BBB, panel prices will never be lower than .35 a watt (imported panels must cost that much or a dirty will be applied for the difference). Two Bit DaVinci covers it at 3:00 in this video: https://youtu.be/1nvhe2h82hY?is=5ivY0bV9cxC9T1h5
That very much depends on the country you’re in: @boonhet@sopuli.xyz found them at €0.13/watt sold to consumers in Estonia, which is an EU country which has 0% VAT on solar panels whilst the EU itself has 0% Duty Tax (aka tariffs) so there is no tax at all on them and their price is just factory price in China + shipping costs (probably by ship, which isn’t actually that much when shipping full container loads of them) + profit margin for importers and sellers.
Even in the US, given that Duty Tax if applied to Purchase Price + Shipping Costs To US Border, if the purchase price of the panels goes down, the price in the US after Duty Tax will go down, though it’s ultimatelly bound by Shipping Costs To US Border (which aren’t actually all that much if shipping full container loads of them from Shenzheng by boat). The point being that the Duty Tax for solar panels would have to be many 100s or percent for them to never be lower than $0.35/watt when factory prices in China are already below $0.12/watt.
I think that the reason for US prices is all the intermediaries adding their margins on top of the base product price.
Yes, the US has a floor on panel prices coming that will fix the retail price at .35 per watt, if imported. It’s possible for a US manufacturer to sell for less, like .34.
I wasn’t aware the US had a Duty Tax for some things that was a fixed minimum price.
Until now, all I had ever seen and learned about Duty Tax and Tariffs is that they’re a percentage on top of total price of a product delivered at the border (so basically factory price + shipping to border costs).
Then again I’m in Europe and only ever imported consumer electronics in bulk here for a small business I had years ago.
