Solar module prices reached a new low this week, says Leen van Bellen, business development manager Europe for Search4Solar, a European purchasing and selling platform for solar products. He tells pv magazine that prices will remain low in the short term.
This is interesting. Why do you think that?
I would disagree, because is see investment capital as finite. There are only so many investors able to operate at infrastructure scales. And therefore I see nuclear’s true cost as opportunity cost.
From an investor perspective, solar farm projects are a slam dunk once they reach the point of being ready to purchase panels.
There are a lot of things to line up to build a grid-scale solar farm before you get to that point. You need to acquire (the rights to) the land, get permits to connect to the grid, which usually includes construction of the new transmission line to the grid. You need to line up panels from a manufacturer (who in turn has supply chains to manage), and labor to install it. And 100 other things. It typically takes a few years of planning, but get all that in order and it’s a small percentage of the total expense of the project.
At the point you need to do the larger capital raise needed to buy the panels and hire the labour it’s a slam dunk. The project can be completed typically within 12-24 months so there’s a quick process to get to generating revenue for investors, and because solar has gotten so cheap it doesn’t take long to see positive ROI. It’s not like electricity demand is going away either. It’s a very safe bet, once all the pieces are lined up, and not difficult to raise funds once you get to the point of needing the big money.
People on Lemmy/Reddit have this mental model that there’s a fixed budget for investment in the energy transition. If that was the case, then yes it would make sense to go all in on the cheapest technology option.
But that’s how it works. Energy projects are competing with the global market for investment capital with non-energy related investments and there’s no shortage of wealth wanting to throw money at a solar project because they’re low risk/high ROI.
Nuclear projects are a different story, long timelines from construction to revenue generation and high upfront capital costs make them unfavourable investments, they generally need government support to derisk the investment before investors jump on board. Which the governments are reluctant to do because they lack a mandate to do so from the populace. In part because of this mindset that nuclear investment impedes solar or wind investments.