Episode Transcript
This is Tom Rowland's Reese and you're listening to Switched on the podcast brought to you by bn EF.
In recent years, the world has been a wash, with cheap solar hammering the profits of PV manufacturers while at the same time opening up new export markets to developing nations seeking affordable energy sources.
Demand growth for solar is still strong, with our global installation forecast for twenty twenty five set to reach six hundred and ninety five gigawatts, exceeding the five hundred and ninety nine gigawatts seen last year, but headwinds remain in some territories, especially in the US, where the Trump administration's tariffs have taken aim at the entire value chain for key parts originating from China and some Southeast Asian countries.
Speaker 2So just how much.
Speaker 1Longer can module prices continue to decline?
What impact has large scale solar adoption had on energy markets, and could the US government's policy actually support the growth of a domestic PV manufacturing industry or harm it.
Today I'm joined by BNF Solar specialist Jenny Chase as we discuss findings from her most recent PV market outlook, which b and EF clients can find at b and EF go on the Bloomberg terminal or on bnef dot com.
All right, let's get to talking about the out look for SOLA with Jenny.
So it is not very often that we have a bona fide celebrity on the podcast, but I said to my wife this morning that we are having Jenny as a guest on the podcast, and she said, who's Jenny?
And I said, well, imagine if Sola was fashion, then maybe Jenny is Anna Wintle.
And my wife said, well, does that mean she makes interns cry?
And I said no, it's just that, you know, very highly respected opinion, but gives it.
Speaker 2To you straight.
Speaker 1And she said, oh, you mean Jenny Chaser.
So that's why I mean that we have a bona fide celebrity.
So everything there is to know about Sola is contained within the mind of Jenny.
And so, Jenny, welcome to the show.
Really glad to have you on.
Speaker 3Hello Tom.
Speaker 1So we were just talking actually before we started recording that today.
You wanted to talk about, among other things, the global oversupply in solar.
Speaker 2So tell us a little bit more.
And I do have follow on questions around this, but yeah, what is it?
Can you just describe to us the situation as you see it.
Speaker 4So, solar manufacturing is a business in which it is very hard to make in the lock dawn.
It is regularly the case that far more solar modules can be made in a year than are actually bought.
And this is despite the fact that the volumes of solar modules being bought and installed are growing at really quite a rapid clip, and have been for the last twenty years.
The thing is that the solar manufacturing industry consistently expands faster than demand.
So even though demand is growing, you regularly get these periods of oversupply where all the manufacturers suffered negative profitability and quite a lot of them go bust.
We have been in one of those phases for about a year now, and there's no sign of us coming out of it.
Speaker 1I suppose the reason I have follow up questions is I sort of get it where you describe.
I have this picture of, you know, two things that are growing really fast, the demand for solar and the supply of solar.
And maybe if you're in the world of the supply of solar, it's kind of hard to judge the pace and so maybe the industry collectively sometimes overdoes it a little bit and needs to slow down, which is kind of how you're describing it.
Speaker 2I suppose.
Speaker 1The question I have is is I don't remember a time where you have ever said there's undersupply of solar.
I you know, you're saying that the market's going through a really tough time, But I feel like whenever I talked about solo, you're saying them.
Speaker 2Maybe I have a short memory, so it's both.
Speaker 4Now you're pretty much right.
I mean, so in twenty twenty two, demand actually group quite quickly, and prices the solar model actually rose for a little while.
So there are periods where solar manufacturers can make fairly nice profits.
They just tend to be quite short.
And what tends to happen then is that they build new factories using the latest technology, and when they built the factories use the latest technology, the factories that are three years old, and how obsolete.
Speaker 1So a question I have here, I mean, this is kind of almost like everything I've ever wanted to ask Jenny about some of these dynamics.
Speaker 2Is why are people building these factories?
Then?
Speaker 1I mean, given what you're saying, why would anyone in their right mind be investing in solar manufacturing.
Speaker 4Where you got me there, tom So, I think the dynamic here is that if you're a solar manufacturer, you always have a choice.
You can expand you can build a new factory using the latest technology, so making the latest N type top con cels with the best efficiencies in the market, and you can survive another year.
Or you can not do that.
You can just run your current capacity and you will lose market share and eventually become obsolete.
So you certainly have no choice but to shoot for the stars.
And of course if you shoot for the stars, what happens to a great many of these companies is that they fail, they burn up, they go bankrupt.
But there are always new investors willing to come in because everybody loves sold there so much.
Speaker 1Is there an element because I've also been looking at this from you know, the perspective of some of the US efforts over the years to cultivate its own solar manufacturing business.
And I remember saying on actually the first time I ever was a host on this podcast, we had one of our US solar analysts who was talking about, you know, the use of tariffs and incentives, and this predates Trump to stimulate manufacturing in the US and this kind of trying to fight it out with China, which is I mean, point number one is that seems like a battle that you're unlikely to win.
But point number two I made was is this a battle you even want to win?
Speaker 2It's like this.
Speaker 1War over a little patch of desert where there is the least arable land ever, and so the only conclusion I could kind of come to was that some of this interest was from a more of a national security resilience point of view.
Is that also a fact that it's encouraging or incentivizing some of this investment we see globally, particularly in China, is that it serves a strategic interest and is therefore being encouraged.
Speaker 3Not in China.
Speaker 4So around two thousand and eight, maybe even a bit before twenty and four to twenty ten or so, the Chinese federal government did support solar manufacturer.
It particularly gave the provincial government a remit to give land and permits and suitable infrastructure to solar companies, and the big Chinese state banks were willing to back manufacturers.
So yes, there was a period when for China solar manufacturing was strategically important and the central government was supporting it.
Speaker 3That phase has long long ended.
Speaker 4The Chinese solar industry is viciously capitalist, that is, dog eat dog, and the solar manufacturing industry is principally Chinese companies competing with one another.
In fact, the Chinese PV Industry Association has tried to stop manufacturers selling at vices as low as the vices currently are, and it largely failed because it's very difficult to get five hundred companies to all sell at higher devices that they are naturally inclined to.
Speaker 1So one of part of this cycle you've described is, you know, companies going bust and then also this idea of manufacturing capacity becoming obsolete.
So when companies go bust, to other companies swoop in and buy their factories or is it by that stage those factories are worthless because they're obsolete.
You know what happens there?
Speaker 4They do often get picked up by other players, usually for quite small and absent money.
And in China there is a dynamic where the local government will lost and back another company to take it over because it's a bit let embarrassed than just closing that entirely.
The major Chinese module makers have also cut the number of employees by significant amounts in twenty twenty four, simply because they're reducing production and they're also increasing productivity per employee.
Speaker 1I just find this whole phenomenon so interesting.
It reminds me of that I don't remember the name of the guy that Greek legend about the guy who had to roll a stone up the hill, Cidyphus, Sisyphus.
That's the one that's kind of like what the solar industry seems like to me.
The way you describe it is you're either pushing the stone up the hill, which is hard work, or you're out of the game and back to the bottom.
Speaker 4I think that's what makes that's what trying to make money and solar manufacturing is like.
I mean, Cis of Firs was assigned that job as a punishment, and it wasn't really a job.
There is a good side to this, which is the watch thank you.
There is a good thing, which is is that worldwide, consumers are getting really cheap modules, and we see that even some quite poor countries like Pakistan, South Africa and Nigeria are starting to deploy large about sols now just because they are so cheap.
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean obviously.
Speaker 1I mean I sometimes think when people talk about over suppliers a problem like, well, whose problem is that?
And clearly there is an upside to all of this, which is everywhere else benefits from this suffering that is happening in the Chinese industry.
I still just trying to work out what's in it for Chinese solar manufacturers.
Speaker 2Is there is there an upside for any of them or some of them.
Speaker 4Will survive and go on to the next phase.
Speaker 3I suppose.
Speaker 4I don't know where the next phase will be, but sometimes they make money sometimes.
I mean, what's the outside of your job, Tom?
I think we just have to say sometimes these firms are doing what they do because it's their job.
Speaker 2Fair enough.
Speaker 1Fair enough, Let's go back to the topic around incredibly cheap solar everywhere in the world and what the knock on effects of that are.
I remember when I joined n EF in two thousand and nine and you were still in London.
I was still in London, and you were describing to me this Moore's law type decline in solar prices, and I remember thinking like, wow, that's going to completely change the world.
It's like, so awesome, I want to be in the solar team.
And I suppose now we're living in that world, that that sort of trend we were seeing promised of incredibly cheap solar everywhere.
Speaker 2So can you.
Speaker 1Describe a little bit about you know, what you're seeing and how that's changing the game generally?
Speaker 4Yeah, So you call it Moore's law.
Then Moore's law is just a special case of what we normally call the experienced curve.
And the basics of the experience curve is every time the human race doubles its cumulative production of something, and it's a manufactured commodity like solar modules, like Brits, like semiconductor chips, we reduce the cost per unit by a fairly fixed amount, and you can calculate what that percentage is.
Then it's usually around twenty percent now for solar modules, calculate We can calculate this back in nineteen seventy six.
The trouble is, it depends wildly on your assumption about inflation over that period.
How you normalize it, And right now the answer makes no sense because the experienced curve says that solar models should be significantly more offensive than they are, and they should be slightly more expensive than they are, but if everyone was making money in the value chain, but probably not that much.
So right now we're kind of looking at the experienced curves suspiciously and saying, we'll see what happens when we get a few more data points.
But yes, right now you can buy a solar module for nine then for what in normal markets?
So normal markets mean not the US and not India either.
This means that solar models are so cheap that they're basically cheaper than fences.
You know, if you want to build a fence around your guards in US up or China or most of the world of that, you can use solar modules as fencing material, and even if you don't bother wiring them up, you'd probably save money versus buying some Liz Wold.
Speaker 1This reminds me of in history, learning about hyperinflation in Viamar, Germany.
I saw this picture that was someone using banknotes as wallpaper because that was cheaper than buying paper.
So maybe people are going to have solar wallpaper inside, you know, completely pointless, but why not?
So what consequences that having on the energy industry?
Speaker 2That you're seeing.
Speaker 3Well.
Speaker 4The other thing is that it's not just cheap, there's also quite a lot of it.
We estimate that five hundred and ninety nine gigawatts of solar modules were installed in twenty twenty four, and about six hundred and ninety five gigawatts would be installed this year in twenty twenty five.
And just for contexts, the entire global power system, all the fossil field and everything, is approximately ten terra watts at the start of this year.
So if we're adding like ero point seven terra watts a year to a ten terra wats system is quite a lot.
And of course it's not evenly distributed.
So what what's happening is that when the sun's out power is very readily available, it's very cheap, and in some cases there's actually more solar power being generated than total demand, which causes problems.
I was just reading on the Solar News this morning that in Cyprus, which is obviously a quite a tiny part of the world and has now had quite a lot of solar, fifty eight percent of the renewables generated in the first five months of this year have been curtailed.
That is thrown away because the grid can't take them.
Speaker 1Wow, that is the highest curtailment numbers I've ever heard, I know, right.
Speaker 4I mean this time of year in northern Northern Hemisphere you always get high solar catailment because it's it's sunny.
Speaker 1Particularly since it's over like you know, you're not just saying, oh and this hour fifty eight percent with ktail, you're talking over a whole month.
It's over five months.
Speaker 4Yeah, so last year in total, twenty nine percent was katail.
But that, I mean that's like economically a disaster.
Speaker 2Well, not if you're an electricity cons well.
Speaker 4I mean, first of all, those results are not being fed directly to electricity consumers.
Speaker 3But yes, in sery, you're if you could use that.
Speaker 4Electricity that would otherwise be wasted, it would not be a problem.
That is not easy to do though, because it's all being generated at the same time.
Speaker 1I mean, I look at power markets, So this is something I also think about a lot, is the disruptive effect of solar and how batteries can manage that.
But I just want to step back to look at the big picture.
It seems like there's this wave starting, you know, with upstream solar and those cost declines, and you know, the solar industry being a hard place to make money, and it then feeds into every subsequent step in the value chain and is now impacting power markets and power prices.
And is this going to one day lead to a point in time where just how you're saying it's incredibly hard to make money manufacturing solar because it's just getting cheaper all the time, that we're also going to say it's incredibly hard to make money selling electricity because it essentially has no value because of all of this solar Do you.
Speaker 2Think that that's where we're trending towards.
Speaker 4Well, it's incredibly difficult to make money selling power in sunny hours already, that doesn't mean that there's no money in selling electricity.
The obvious solution is batteries, but it's not actually trivial to solve all your solar time shifting problems with batteries.
Speaker 2Why not in your opinion.
Speaker 4So basically it's about utilization.
If you're in a place where all the days are the same length and it's sunny every day, then you can charge your battery every day and discharge it every day, and you run that battery three hundred and sixty five times in a year, right, Yeah, However, most places are not like that.
Most places have seasonality, they have variation in demand, and I mean, if it's northern Europe, we have winter, it is quite a long period where your solar panels don't generate much, and so your battery doesn't run every day.
Your batteries it's empty all winter basically, and then it sits full all summer.
Speaker 2I hear what you're saying.
Speaker 1Are we setting an unrealistic bar here?
It's a little bit where like when people who are skeptical about renewables say, oh, wind and solar aren't the solution, because you know, the sun isn't always shining, the wind isn't always blowing, and they're setting this bar of this thing is useless because you can't depend on it one hundred percent of the time, Whereas the reality is is, yes, it can get you, I don't know, depending on where you are, fifty to eighty percent of the I just pulled these numbers out out of thin air.
Speaker 4Oh yeah, so it's not it's definitely not useless.
I mean, it's already not useless, right.
Twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three Europe was pretty glad of its solar because it meant we burnt less Russian gas.
Speaker 1Yeah, and I guess I'm you know, I mean, I think I'm preaching to the choir here.
I know that you don't think that solar is useless.
I guess what I'm saying is, are we setting a like for anyone to expect that batteries would completely solve the problem of solar being at the wrong time that even in those northern climates you described, surely, up to a point, they're still very.
Speaker 4Useful up to a point, yes, but bear by that the economics of those batteries gets very bad when you stop running them three hundred and sixty five times a year and you start running them past that.
For example, I mean that instantly means that the costs can make what hour you're shifting doubles if you have the number of times it runs.
And so that's why our new Energy Outlook modeling, which among the other scenarios we run, we have something called the net ero scenario, which is about how we totally get to net ero by twenty fifty.
One of the things that that model doesn't actually rely that heavily on solar and store it.
I think it ends up with about fifty percent solar in a literacy mix.
That model really wants to build wind and the reason is that wind blows in the winter, which means that you can also charge your batteries in the winter.
Speaker 1So kind of going back then to the fundamental question around, you know, we've got solar over capacity globally, and then it almost sounds like solar overbuild happening in certain places that you know you can't one hundred percent solved with batteries, and you know you need to bring in another time.
Speaker 4I mean, at the moment, the levels we're at, we can solve that with batteries, and of course that's what people are doing.
They're building lots of batteries.
In fact, a quick calculation suggests that twenty percent of the utility scale PV built last year had a battery attached.
Speaker 1I suppose I'm talking about like the example in Cypress.
Is Cypress now at a stage where I suppose the question I was going to ask is why is anyone still building solar in Cypress?
Speaker 3So I'm kind of I kind of hope they're not.
Speaker 4I had a quick poke around on their Electricity operate a website and it looks like they still are, so.
Speaker 2That rock up the hill as well via the sounds of things.
Speaker 4Cyprus has something called a net billing where you can export power into the grid and be paid for it for your solar panels, and of course you're being paid for it, but that money has to come from somewhere and the money is not actually worse it's also not safe in so this is this is probably not a good policy.
It's not sustainable and I don't think the Cypress Coop has removed it yet.
Speaker 1So a lot of farmers in Cypress, I'm presuming, will have solar fencing at this point in time.
Speaker 3Yeah, or solar roofs.
Speaker 4And what they'll do next hopefully has put some batteries in and this will almost certainly alleviate a big part of the problem.
But push into one hundred percent might be a bit difficult.
I don't know the climate of Cyprus for some.
Speaker 1No, but you would expect that you know ultimately that the market pull of batteries because it this represents a huge opportunity for batteries.
I mean, my team looks at power market dynamics and one of the things I realized as we've modeled batteries and prices together, is the biggest opportunity for batteries is not the high prices in the summer when the sun goes down.
It's the cheap prices when they can charge you know.
I mean, obviously if you look at their daily revenues from the wholesale market, and obviously batteries make money in other ways.
The most profitable seasons are not when power prices are highest.
It's when power price is the lowest.
So we're looking at Cyprus.
That's a huge opportunity that will presumably rebalance itself at some point.
And this is maybe a question, and you know, I just say this more speculatively because this goes beyond both of our own teams.
I always wonder why we're not seeing more industries popping up that make use of insanely cheap or even negatively priced electricity that is available some of the time.
You know, I don't know what this creative application is, but there has to be something someone can do with free energy.
Speaker 4I presume, well, it's a capex pub isn't it, Because it is if.
Speaker 1We're thinking in terms of all of the industrial applications we can think of.
I'm just saying there must be some use for free energy that is only available some of the time.
Speaker 2I'm just I'm not asking expect.
Speaker 4This question to be very low capex, because yes, you can run a data center or something, but data centers don't run for three or four hours a.
Speaker 1Day, right, So data centers aren't the answer.
I guess what I'm saying is we have kind of scoped out what this has to look like.
Has to be a low capex industry that can benefit from free energy.
Maybe this industry doesn't yet exist.
So listeners, especially those of you at the start of your careers, you can come up with something you can might get super rich.
Speaker 4I mean, to make this electricity into heat, all you need is a big one with some resistance.
Right, So if hardware is actually negative, you could probably make money out of just having a really big wire and forcing it down it.
But you could also, for example, eat up a big pile of salt or a pile of water and store it for winter to run your district heat it.
That's being tried in some of the Scandinavian countries.
Speaker 2That makes sense.
Speaker 4There's also power to gas, but that is also quite high topics for the futical companies.
Speaker 1Yeah, and I also wonder if power to gas, from my understanding, does it have the flexibility to be ramping up and down all the time, which is a key parameter here, I mean.
Speaker 4Potentially, Yes, A hydrogen team seems to think that you could have electoralizers that run for sort of four hours day, so you could make hard I mean, you can make hydrogen, but electoralizers are really expensive.
Speaker 1Yeah, that it violates the capex parameter that you put in place exactly.
Speaker 4But if you if you could make a really cheap, even quite low efficiency electoralizer and trickle generate hydrogen, that might be something work all right.
Speaker 1Well, anyway, putting it out there for everyone who's again, particularly those of you who are entering into this space, very cheap electricity some of the time represents a huge opportunity for someone, so get creative.
So I'm in the US right now, and the US has a relatively new government that has lots of ideas about the energy industry and global trade, and this is manifesting itself in potentially the rescinding of tax credits for various technologies, including solar.
Also in tariffs on imports, particularly anything that has been touched by China.
So, from your point of view of someone looking at solar globally, how much of a big deal is this?
You know, seeing here it feels like the deglobalization of solar is that to.
Speaker 4A beretrant tom or people who are in America.
So the US market is about fifty two gigawats, the global market is six hundred and ninety five gigawats this year.
China of that is three hund and sixty eighty.
What's so whether the US buys or not is not of primary importance to people outside.
Speaker 2The US, does it?
Speaker 1Because my understanding of the situation prior to some of these tariff changes is that, I mean, there were already tariffs on Chinese solar.
Speaker 4There were, So the US has had tariffs on Chinese solar imports since twenty twelve, and in consequence, most of the direct imports of solar components to the US don't come from China at all.
They came from South Southeast Asia, four countries specifically, and recent rounds of tariffs, which were actually proposed under the previous US government, put tariffs on those four countries.
So they're Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam, and that does push up probably the price of supply to the US market, but there are also more sweeping import tariffs on everything.
Speaker 1I suppose this whole Southeast Asia as being a channel for solar to come into the US from China via Southeast Asia effectively, and these are Chinese companies operating in Southeast Asia.
My understand was that this little kind of anomaly in the global industry was one of the few areas where there was actually a healthy profit margin for the solar manufacturers involved.
So I suppose a question I have is if that sort of loophole is now being closed, does that have a significant impact on the solar industry.
Speaker 4Well, a lot of these factory eat in Southeast Asia will disclose on the companies that will take lots on them, because it is true the US people love to pay for things, and so solar modules in the US cost about twenty seven US sense per what versus nine cents outside the US.
So yes, even though the costs slightly higher to manufacturer in South East Asia, these were some of the more profitable businesses.
Speaker 1So stepping back, so I hear your message, This doesn't really affect the global industry for solar that much.
Speaker 2How do you see it affecting solar in the US.
Speaker 4Well, I think it's going to hurt because, first of all, there were a bunch of manufacturers who were setting up sell factory EAT in the US because the Inflation and Reduction app had some very specific, quite generous incentives for manufacturing the US, which first of all could go away, and secondly could be affected by one possible provision in the latest One Big Beautiful Bill if it goes forward as currently anticipated, in that it looks as if components and materials from China might not be allowed for important into the USS.
And depending on how extensively that is prosecuted, it may be quite difficult to make a solar module using nothing contract.
Speaker 1Right, So, if the goal is to and I'm not saying that this is a realistic goal before you shoot it down, but let's just say, if the goal is to cultivate a US solar manufacturing industry, there is maybe a goldilocks one of just the right amount of tariffing where you create a dependence on stuff manufactured in the US, but you still don't completely shut off that manufacturing having what it needs, and what you're saying is it looks like we might be going beyond that Goldilock one at the moment.
Speaker 4Absolutely, it's also so unpredictable.
You know, if you're a company who's trying to decide whether to proceed with building a high tapics factory in the US, you want to be able to predict what the environment it's going to be like in two to three years time.
And the country that's done that much better is India.
India is much more successful, it's establishing a domestic manufacturing industry US just through being much more predictable.
Speaker 2Got it.
Speaker 1That's such an important point.
And I think something that you know at bn EF, I know, since I joined, we've been saying policy consistency is key.
Policy inconsistency just renders all policy ineffective unless the policy is to kill something off.
And I suppose that's maybe a real danger for the US is the potential flip flopping means it's impossible to incentivize anything exactly.
Speaker 4I mean, in some respects, the US has quite a predictable business environment, as the Investment Tax Credit was guaranteed for periods that frankly European product developers.
Speaker 3Would love to have.
Speaker 4But it well, the latest government has just thrown everything into the air, and who knows where the cars will come down.
Speaker 2Well, we shall surely see.
Speaker 4So Tom, I have a question for you.
Since you've been tracking US power markets, we see California as world leading in terms of adoption.
California has got what eleven gigawatsa batteries, and a grid with peak demand it's about fifty gigwatts that's got to be helping to integrate all this.
Solda, right, what's going on in California?
Speaker 1I mean, it's really interesting what you see, and some of this is more what we've seen in our modeling, and we gradually see it taking shape in the market.
But you know, California is famous for its duck curve, the shape of the power price throughout the day.
And I'm not going to be able to describe a duck over the you know, let's just say that the power price goes down, and then it goes up, and then it goes down again.
Speaker 2It kind of peaks in the.
Speaker 1Late afternoon, and that apparently looks like the head of a duck when you put it.
Speaker 2On a truck.
Speaker 3Because everyone's using air and after the sun goes down.
Speaker 2Yeah, absolutely, so, yeah, that's the typical profile.
Speaker 1And the other country in my world, because I also have the now the European Power Team reports to me, it's very similar in Spain, which is the one country in Europe where there's a decent amount of air conditioning.
Speaker 2They have their own version of this.
Speaker 1And the thing you see in markets like this as you add in more storage to go with your solar is the price throughout the day.
It just becomes like binary.
There's a high price period and a low price period.
It's kind of flat because batteries like balance everything out even within those places if you're assuming they're cycling once a day, so you get a cheap period of the day which is when solar is generating, and then a more expensive period of the day when it's not.
And that's because if you were to add more batteries to make it just an even price throughout the whole day, then batteries wouldn't make any money, so no one would add those batteries, So you're never going to have this situation where it's just a consistent price throughout the day.
But it becomes just much more a two tone situation.
Speaker 2The thing that's.
Speaker 1Interesting, though, is even in our forecast, we still see days where there's not enough batteries to lap up all the solar, and so I mean, I suppose what you'll see is curtailment.
So even with a lot of batteries, you still have and this this goes back to what I'm saying, You're still going to have those times where electricity is insane nee che.
Speaker 4But also times when it's the same expensive simply not really.
Speaker 1I suppose this is the point is that I mean, because let's say you've got enough batteries to soak up the majority of an entire day's worth of solar, and then you might have a period of a few hours where prices would be really high.
Well, then that's going to be the hours where the majority of batteries is going to be discharging to push that price down to the level because they're always going to prioritize concentrating their discharge in those hours.
So I suppose what I'm saying is batteries will make price dynamics a little bit less explosive.
They'll be a bit more boring, but it's going to go from being all over the place and then maybe a really high peak in the afternoon, which is what you see in the sort of duck curve scenario to just like on time and off time.
Speaker 3That also been the batteries cannibalized there.
Speaker 1Great point, and yeah, and that's exactly right.
It's like the total demand in a market sets a in a way, a ceiling on how much solar you can take before price cannibalization takes over.
And then the total amount of solar in the market creates a ceiling for how much batteries the market can take.
And so you know, this is what you know batteries when you see them build anywhere.
It's like it follows on from solar.
Solar creates the opportunity for those batteries, and ultimately the amount of solar you have in the market is the amount of opportunity there is for batteries.
You now, what the ideal ratio between the two is is kind of depends on your assumptions.
But that's kind of how I see it from what I'm seeing in markets.
But yeah, the cannibalization of batteries is a thing as well.
Speaker 2I suppose what you could say with.
Speaker 1Batteries and that the price dynamics you see there is it almost traces all the way back to where we started the conversation.
Solar is getting insanely cheap as manufacturers are cannibalizing their own revenues, and the knock on effect is that solar then is really cheap and getting built in a lot of markets and therefore cannibalizing its own revenues, which creates an opportunity for storage, which can pile in and in turn cannibalize its own revenues, which means that it's good in any of these spaces to either be early or to have been early, because it might be too late in some instances.
Speaker 2And ultimately, I.
Speaker 1Would say all of this is, if this gets passed down to consumer, a good thing, because more electricity will cost less.
Jenny, thank you very much for joining us.
Today's has been a really fascinating discussion.
Speaker 3Thank you very much.
Tom.
Speaker 1Today's episode of Switched On was produced by Cam Gray with production assistance from Kamala Shelling.
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