Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid

Long-Distance Transmission & Grids

• One path for excess solar is exporting power via long-distance high-voltage transmission, as with China’s ultra-high-voltage lines and proposed Australia–Singapore cables.
• HVDC is argued to be sufficient (≈3.5% loss per 1,000 km, less than AC); superconductors seen as unnecessary and currently impractical (brittle, expensive).
• Continental grids could smooth solar across time zones (e.g., US east–west), but large grid expansions are seen as slow, expensive, politically fraught, and security-sensitive.

Desalination and Water from Excess Solar

• Many see solar-powered desalination as a prime “dump load”: deserts near coasts could gain water and new arable/usable land.
• Counterpoints: brine discharge can damage near-shore ecosystems; evidence of concentrated high-salinity plumes and long outflow pipes is cited.
• Others argue global impact is tiny versus natural evaporation, with effects mostly local and mitigable via dilution, mixing with treated sewage, or further processing.
• Capital cost, not energy, dominates desal economics; plants must run near-continuously. Using only midday surplus demands much cheaper plant construction.

Economics of Solar, Storage, and Incentives

• Debate over whether “too cheap” solar leads to underinvestment: some say negative or low midday prices will self-correct and curb new builds; others say once cheap enough, people buy for direct usefulness, not ROI.
• Excess solar can be monetized via arbitrage and flexible loads (batteries, fertilizer production, CO₂ capture, overcooling buildings, water).
• Battery round-trip efficiency is quoted around 80+%; there is confusion and dispute over how capacity factor and efficiency interact at grid scale.

Rooftop vs Utility-Scale Solar

• Utility-scale solar is broadly seen as much cheaper per MWh than rooftop.
• Rooftop is criticized as heavily subsidized via net metering, shifting costs to non-solar customers.
• Others counter that rooftop only needs to beat retail (not wholesale) prices and can already be rational, especially in high-tariff regions; soft costs and policy design (connection fees, export tariffs) are key.

Batteries, EVs, and Off-Grid Trends

• Home batteries are getting cheaper; some expect them to become widely affordable within 5–10 years.
• EVs with large batteries and vehicle-to-home/grid are viewed as emerging storage assets, especially as used EV prices fall.
• In places with unreliable grids (e.g., South Africa), solar + batteries are already widely used to reduce or eliminate grid dependence.

Environmental & Scale Concerns; Skepticism

• Some worry cheap solar will boost total energy use with unclear long-term effects, though others note solar’s lower climate impact vs fossil fuels despite lower albedo.
• There is skepticism about long-range projections that promise “effectively free” energy, likened to past “too cheap to meter” claims, and about the reliability of some official solar deployment statistics.