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scope2093 2 hours ago [-]
We installed roof solar (10kW panels + 8kW hybrid inverter + 32kWh battery + planning/execution) last October for 11k euro. After all the math, our "investment" would pay off in approx 8-10 years (at current electricity prices). That's without an electric car, which we plan to buy sometime in the next two years.
All in all, pretty happy. Especially that we have frequent grid faults. Even my ISP has some beefy batteries for their equipment, so much so that one 14-hour grid blackout didn't affect us at all and we were able to use the internet since we're working from home (FTTH + ONT, GPON).
Usual disclaimer, sample size of one. We're in Romania.
porphyra 30 minutes ago [-]
Nice. In the US, it cost us $35k to install 7.6 kW panels + 13 kWh battery. But our PG&E electricity prices in the Bay Area are also several times more expensive than in Europe ($0.50 per kWh) so it will also pay off in 8-10 years.
jrmg 2 hours ago [-]
Getting solar installed on our house, providing well over 100% of our energy needs overall (including car), has left me low-key kind of angry that we, as a society, are letting so much energy just uselessly fall onto structures and the ground when we could be harvesting and using it.
Especially in the US, and especially in homes, we tend to have dark roofs. Sunlight falls on these, heating the building up, then we burn fossil fuels to generate more energy to pump the heat outside. It’s absurd.
ragebol 34 minutes ago [-]
On X/Twitter, I'm sometimes seeing graphs comparing energy usage per capita in the US vs the EU and China, with the narrative that the US is 'better' in some way because the higher energy usage.
And then there is stuff like the above indeed, uselessly wasting energy while things could be so much more efficient.
scope2093 2 hours ago [-]
I agree. The momentum seems to be building up though, at least in (east) Europe, so there is a glimpse of hope.
Fun fact: we still don't have AC in our house (it's a new-ish building, built 4 years ago) because it's decently insulated (and we live near the mountains). As in your case, our solar produces way over 100% of what we need, so I'm considering just getting AC to use the sun to cool the house if needed :)
HerbManic 12 minutes ago [-]
For years, maybe 20 now, I have seen a few people that seem reputable in terms of their positions and data they project that says that we should not have as many solar panels as we do. It is restrictions on rare materials etc. Some of them are probably paid to have this position, others seem genuine.
And yet, look at what is happening. Year after year the exponential growth continues without a blip! It is one of those things that looked impossible initially but obvious in retrospect.
My broader long term fear is that if we essentially get "limitless" energy, we continue to harm the ecosystem in other ways. Like giving a drug addict a limitless bank account. But we are still a long way from that point.
pstuart 1 hours ago [-]
Air conditioning is a substantial load on the grid and those that need it most are likely better suited to solar (more sun to heat, more sun to generate electricity). As you noted, it pays for itself and then is "free".
In a different timeline, we'd be investing in the country via zero/low-interest loans to encourage every homeowner to leverage this. It's a win for everybody.
agumonkey 2 hours ago [-]
this is indeed a flaw in modern societies, we get lost in technological "progress" and become blind and dumb
_whiteCaps_ 5 hours ago [-]
I just upgraded the solar system at my family's off-grid cabin. It's incredible how much battery technology has improved over the last 10 years.
Everyone is getting tired of me checking the panel to see how many watts we're bringing in.
Next project, install a shunt and get a Raspberry Pi talking to it over USB. And then I'll be able to build a Grafana dashboard. :)
amluto 1 hours ago [-]
For most purposes, I would avoid the shunt and use a current transformer (for AC) or a DC current sensor (conceptually the same thing but with a Hall effect sensor or other mechanism that works for DC). This way you don’t need anything to touch the potentially rather large voltages on a solar array.
andyferris 56 minutes ago [-]
The OP mentioned modern battery technologies - generally the shunt sits between an LFP battery negative and the main circuit negative/ground, and the solar panels connect to MPPTs. So the voltage at the shunt is a nice consistent nominal 12.8V (~13.3V in practice) or a multiple thereof (for series battery setups).
I just upgraded our hybrid caravan to 24V LFP (2x 300Ah 12V), roof solar + extra MPPT for external solar, shunt, inverter-charger, 24V->12V converter for existing circuity (lights, pump, etc), DCDC charger from car, battery balancer, a little touchscreen interface inside (all victron gear with renogy batteries). It was as a lot of fun and it's amazing how much power we have off grid now! The system would work excellent for a little cabin exactly how it is (minus DCDC).
ravedave5 5 hours ago [-]
I have a similar project, I'm so overpaneled I bought an electric heater so I could actually see how many watts I brought in during a nice summer day. The victron UIs have an excellent graph history.
colechristensen 2 hours ago [-]
The next step for people like you and things like nations: what do we do with this extra electricity we have laying around so often?
What people figure out to do with actually free energy will be exciting. There are a lot of extremely "inefficient" things that might suddenly become commonplace.
Proto-replicator technology where you dump your garbage into a barrel and it gets decomposed and recomposed into something similar to crude oil, blocks of metal, pure gasses, etc? Hydrocarbon fuel from air? Flying cars? You name it.
californical 2 hours ago [-]
Generating hydrocarbons at home from their air with excess electricity is like the ultimate endgame in my opinion. It’d be so sick and enable a million new possibilities, essentially getting us into a net-zero emissions state without needing to use batteries for everything.
I doubt that it ends up being actually better due to efficiency losses but it’d be really cool!!
Kaliboy 2 hours ago [-]
I often daydream about electrolysing water to generate oxygen and hydrogen and store them to use for heating and like welding torches and stuff.
To make electric energy I would have to make a small steam plant to run a turbine.
BobaFloutist 1 hours ago [-]
>To make electric energy I would have to make a small steam plant to run a turbine.
The round-trip efficiency is of course abysmal compared to batteries, but if the input energy is "free", the increased density could pay off.
Neywiny 5 hours ago [-]
Or an esp32 to not run Linux and whatnot off of an sd card. Should be more reliable in the long run
jphil529 4 hours ago [-]
Really curious about the difficulty of doing a self install with Solar. I'm moderately handy (built a Sauna from no plans) and confident with electrical. Any gotchas?
MichaelNolan 4 hours ago [-]
I just did an install to add solar and batteries to my shed to power lights and an AC. It was pretty easy. Hardest part was flattening the ground since I did a ground mount system. 5kw panels and 5kwh of batteries. $1000 for the panels, and $1,400 for the battery and inverter. $250 for the ground mount. Plus a bunch of miscellaneous expenses (tools, wires, permits, etc). It would be cheaper if I did it again since batteries and inverters seem to get cheaper every 6 months.
It's fairly easy and there are a lot of forums around with knowledgeable people.
My main issue was ensuring wire gauges were correct. One's intuition about dealing with house wiring @15A changes when you're dealing with 50A circuits. Also you need to pay attention to things like equal cable lengths between battery banks so you don't overcharge one battery in a series.
However, I'm dealing with an off-grid cabin so I don't need to deal with any grid-tie circuitry, which would make it much more difficult and I'd definitely get an electrician for that.
andyferris 41 minutes ago [-]
Modern off-road/off-grid inverter chargers make wiring to the network pretty easy. I'd still recommend an electrician, but most they'd likely need to do is wire the grid into the inverter-charger input, and your cabin to the output, and check whatever protection (like RCDs) your cabin has is sufficient/up-to-date.
jphil529 1 hours ago [-]
Very cool. Thanks for the tips!
soggybread 4 hours ago [-]
I'm just getting into Solar myself and while it seems like a lot there are some things that you have to do math for. If you've got 10 panels you'll want to find out how to get all that energy to the inverter/mppt without going over the volt/amp limit on the device. This is probably the most difficult part and for everything else there's a huge solar community of people starting exactly where you are. I myself just bought an Anker solar battery and 2 panels that I bring out during the day to charge the battery and it runs my laptop and monitor for the evening after I get home from work. I want to do more but I'm renting so I'm just trying to find ways to do so. When my state legalizes balcony solar you bet I'm going to play with that too.
thrownthatway 3 hours ago [-]
> without going over the volt/amp limit on the device.
It’s not clear what device you’re referring to in this context.
So the most difficult part is using a calculator to determine the charge controller capacity.
cornstalks 2 hours ago [-]
No, you also need to calculate the voltage drop over your distance to show to minimum wire sizing, and the voltage and power levels at the ASHRAE minimum temperature, the current level at 156.25% over the wiring at the ASHRAE max temperature to compute the temperature adjusted resistance and show that your wiring meets minimum spec, etc.
It’s not too hard to actually do the computations. But there is a ton to learn. I installed my own 14.85 kW system last year, with batteries, and I spent hundreds of hours just researching everything. I know I went overkill, but the hardest part of the project was just getting up to speed on all the requirements to meet code.
Someday I’ll write up my entire experience and share my site plan I used for permitting in the hopes it will help someone else. But doing solar right is a nontrivial investment for a newbie (like me).
thrownthatway 54 minutes ago [-]
So the most difficult part is using domain specific online calculators to determine the wiring requirements and charge controller capacity.
nonethewiser 5 hours ago [-]
Where is the cabin? Roughly speaking of course
_whiteCaps_ 5 hours ago [-]
The "Sunshine" Coast of BC.
Right now we're limited by the charging capacity of the inverter/charger. It can only do 50A in from an external solar controller. In hindsight I should have gone with a 48V inverter/charger to get twice the power going in. On a sunny day we're maxing it out at 1200W for several hours at a time.
dghughes 4 hours ago [-]
Hi, from the other coast. I wish I had solar maybe someday. Do you ever watch Artisan Electric from the UK? He tried to run his shop on 100% solar+battery. He ran into a problem where sunny day batteries full shop using power but the panels themselves were throttling. They had no where to send the extra power. He bought a bitcoin floor heater (lol), charged EVs, and some other stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evkdqTcMbWM
jvanderbot 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah that's the point. Most systems are over producing on peak hours of peak days so they can average out to enough power on lower light days. You can buy more batteries, but if you don't have batteries it's waste.
erelong 6 hours ago [-]
I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind
(personally I like both but I can see some shortcomings - for example I have heard that ai datacenters are using gas at times because of its flexibility)
So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?
Or will they just adopt it once it's seen everywhere?
foxyv 5 hours ago [-]
Solar/wind is the cheapest form of power generation by far. You just can't beat it because they don't have any fuel costs. Gas peaker plants will always make sense until we have enough grid scale batteries. They will hold on for now until the price of natural gas hits rock bottom. But with the current advances in low cost battery technology I see them becoming less and less necessary. They would probably already be dead if hydrofracturing hadn't propped up the cost of gas.
I think you've missed that all generators have upfront cost. That's why the monetary payoff time for installing solar is non-zero. Versus a backup generator you're paying 2-3x the cost upfront. And yes we know the running cost is almost 0, the maintenance is almost nothing, etc etc, but I could see that argument not holding as much water as we need it to.
ted_dunning 2 hours ago [-]
The adoption rate in places like Australia and even Texas is what demonstrates that the argument holds water.
People wouldn't be rushing to shift entire markets at the observed rates if the economics were upside down. It is the soundness of the economic model that is driving the adoption even against tariffs and subversion by the current US regime.
eldaisfish 1 hours ago [-]
How do you explain the fact that the average residential electricity price is higher in Australia than in most of the US?
This is not as simple as people here make it out to be.
Consider also that solar is profitable today because it does not set the price of electricity in most markets. In a world where solar dominates, the prices of electricity could be negative. The economics of negative electricity prices becoming the norm are not yet fully understood.
tencentshill 34 minutes ago [-]
They paid to decommission fossils early, and amortized it over the future. So it's going to drop like a rock once those debts are paid and the last plants shut down, with fewer remaining customers and lighter load on the grid. But until then, consumers will be paying higher bills.
Perhaps they did not mean point 18, but I found it interesting anyway.
The existing gas infrastructure represents a large amount of taxpayer investment, not due to be paid off until 2070. But it’s estimated that there won’t be any users of that infrastructure beyond 2050.
BobaFloutist 1 hours ago [-]
> How do you explain the fact that the average residential electricity price is higher in Australia than in most of the US?
Transmission costs.
Retric 4 hours ago [-]
Loans transfer upfront costs into operating costs, thus making upfront costs largely meaningless for anyone with access to cheap credit.
crote 2 hours ago [-]
Solar also has incredibly low upfront costs: 400W panels are available for less than $100 / each these days.
runtime_terror 4 hours ago [-]
Are you talking backup generator vs solar for a home?
If so, solar continually supplies power without paying for an input vs a backup generator which is only meant to run infrequently and is costly to run and requires you to pay for inputs and of course maintenance of an ICE.
It's kinda an apples/oranges comparison
foxyv 3 hours ago [-]
> I think you've missed that all generators have upfront cost.
Why do you say this?
Neywiny 3 hours ago [-]
Because you said it's the cheapest by far but didn't say "after X years". Did I miss where you acknowledged there's a crossover point in cost?
foxyv 2 hours ago [-]
Typically power is priced by Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) where you amortize the total cost of ownership across the total power generated to get a per kwh cost which is what most grid operators care about. After all, large scale investors and governments don't care if a plant costs a billion dollars if it produces 20 billion in electricity.
What you are talking about is the Payback Period (PP) or Return on Investment (ROI) which is more important to homeowners adding a solar plant to their homes.
Both of these types of measure take into account both capital and operating expenses.
eldaisfish 2 hours ago [-]
LCOE is a terrible metric for the power grid because it does not capture the cost of balancing the power grid.
Excess renewable power is great but it creates a problem and the cost of that problem is not borne by the generators that created the problem.
What LCOE captures in this context is that solar panels are cheap and that the fuel cost is zero.
The average price of electricity is greatly affected by this, which is why electricity is Europe is generally more expensive than in North America.
Edit - the response below is also incomplete. The trouble with modelling the cost of balancing the power grid is that it depends on many variables, many of which are difficult to forecast. The primary challenge with depending on the weather for power generation is that the climate is changing. What that change looks like in 20 years is impossible to forecast. A great example is from the winter o 2023, during the "dunkelflaute" in europe. Both wind and solar power generation were low for three days.
The estimates for solar plus battery storage typically only account for eight or twelve hours of storage.
foxyv 1 hours ago [-]
That is not entirely correct. Typically you will see LCOE for Solar grouped with the LCOE of Solar and energy storage.
EG:
> Solar photovoltaic $1,327 $1,333–2,743 $31–146 12–30%
> Solar PV with storage $1,748 $2,044 $53–81 20–31%
I appreciate his ability to talk renewables for almost an hour and barely mention climate change. This video has a bit of a twist ending, but he gives you a solid out before he becomes political if you're showing it to someone who won't be receptive to that messaging.
cryptopian 4 hours ago [-]
For those who don't have the time to watch, the biggest point he hammers home: fossil fuels are a single use energy source; renewables keep producing energy.
So long as you've built the infrastructure and kept it maintained, the energy continues to come. With fossil fuels, you have to build turbines, then you have to remove it from the earth, then you have to ship it to said turbines, then you burn it and it's gone.
antonvs 2 hours ago [-]
> then you burn it and it's gone.
It's not just gone. It becomes a debt that everyone has to pay.
HerbManic 9 minutes ago [-]
Accountants call them 'externalities'. Things they can take off the books if they treat the atmosphere like an open air sewer system.
Schiendelman 5 hours ago [-]
Is this the version he reuploaded? I saw it the day he posted it, and I have never seen that man more passionate and awesome. He mentioned later that he toned it down, which is almost a bummer!
terribleperson 5 hours ago [-]
If this is the video I'm thinking of, both versions are up. I think the toned down version is meant to be more palatable to certain people.
gabrielsroka 5 hours ago [-]
The one above is the public long version. it has a link to this unlisted short version
Correct - the version I linked is his more aggressive version, but he does give a soft out with 30 minutes remaining. He mentions that he has also uploaded the alternative version for those who want to share it with someone who wouldn't enjoy the ending of this version.
Aurornis 6 hours ago [-]
I don’t know how you can be against solar unless you’ve been given some uninformed talking points.
Are they against solar subsidies or other policy provisions? It’s hard to understand someone who is against passive energy collection.
ceejayoz 6 hours ago [-]
> Are they against solar subsidies or other policy provisions?
They're mainlining paid propaganda from the fossil fuel industry. Same dynamic that made people defend cigarettes into the late 90s.
anukin 4 hours ago [-]
The argument I have generally heard is consistent power output and grid availability 24x7 with solar is harder. So they augment with gas turbines.
IMO augmenting it with nuclear is better.
ted_dunning 30 minutes ago [-]
And even better is to augment it with large scale batteries.
Nuclear is fine, but very expensive and very slow to deploy.
laurencerowe 51 minutes ago [-]
Augmenting intermittent renewables with nuclear doesn’t really make sense since nuclear is all fixed costs whereas gas generation is mostly fuel costs which makes it economic to run part of the time.
hdgvhicv 1 hours ago [-]
Why not just nuclear?
Because it’s too expensive so needs peaker plants. Or batteries.
Why not just gas?
Because it’s too expensive.
Kon5ole 5 hours ago [-]
>I don’t know how you can be against solar unless you’ve been given some uninformed talking points.
One understandable (not saying it's good, just understandable) reason is if your business is selling electricity from a source more expensive than solar. Which is just about every source.
I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc.
antonvs 2 hours ago [-]
> I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc.
This generally isn't how markets or economics works. If power generation isn't profitable, many companies will just stop doing it. Prices will rise, making it attractive to more companies to do it.
Kon5ole 2 hours ago [-]
>If power generation isn't profitable
Power generation will still be profitable in my imagined scenario, just not from selling the raw electricity as a product.
Luckily there are several industries that make more money the cheaper electricity is, so there is some market pull in that direction already. Data centers tend to cluster around places with cheap power and/or cold climates, for example.
Consider roads. Having free access to road networks generates enormous value for society, much more than if we had tried to extract tolls on every road.
I think the same should apply for electricity. Free or nearly free access to electricity is likely to create value that far outweighs the value generated by selling electricity.
The existing power-selling industry will of course fight this every chance they get.
fp64 6 hours ago [-]
I'm not against solar, my primary issue is that in northern Europe there's not much sun at some times. Energy storage and "smart grid" are not there yet, in my view, but maybe should have come first. Hydrogen (electrolysis) sounds a bit wild and impractical to me.
ceejayoz 5 hours ago [-]
Finland:
> The net result: Pornainen fulfilled all of its municipal climate targets with a single installation. Oil use dropped 100 percent, emissions fell 70 percent, and woodchip combustion was cut by 60 percent. According to the Mayor of the Municipality of Pornainen, Antti Kuusela, the municipality now heats all its public buildings, including a new sports arena opening in September 2026, entirely through this district heating network.
They are buying electricity and storing it as heat and time-arbitrage it to when the heat is needed, they make no mention of the electric power source. In any case, during the depth of winter, when it's needed most, they're still burning carbon. Previous paragraph to your quote:
>During the coldest, most expensive stretch, the wood chip boiler became the primary unit, and the sand battery supplemented it.
Remarkably: heat is pointed to as "wasted energy" when doing EROEI analysis and discounted, this is done to strengthen the case for Solar vs Gas.
Finland's energy mix is ~6% solar [1]... maybe it's not a larger portion of the grid supply because Finns realize it doesn't work in the winter?
Finland only started building solar recently. Wind is still more cost-effective, if you only consider the cost of generation. But there is almost too much installed wind capacity. If you also consider the value of the generated energy, solar gets ahead, as it correlates less with existing generation.
In any case, Finland does not really use fossil fuels for electricity generation anymore. There is some cogeneration, where heat is the primary output, and reserve power plants that are only used in exceptional situations. Electricity is largely a solved problem, but it's proving harder to get rid of fossil fuels in heating and transportation.
adgjlsfhk1 4 hours ago [-]
going from burning fuel 12 months of the year to 3 is still a 75% cut in fuel costs and emissions
fp64 5 hours ago [-]
That's for 5000 people. And only covers heat. Happy if it can scale and move from prototype to long-term deployment at a reasonable cost, serving heavy industry in manufacturing.
ceejayoz 5 hours ago [-]
> That's for 5000 people.
And it's quite compact.
> And only covers heat.
Is that not useful?
fp64 5 hours ago [-]
Don't get me wrong, this is cool. We just have some stricter requirements on a country/state/union level that while this might help with parts, I don't see how it can easily scale up and generalize
ted_dunning 27 minutes ago [-]
It scales up just the way that siloes on farms scale up ... you build more of them.
And the Finns put a priority on staying warm. For normal electrical generation, they largely use wind with a growing solar fraction.
cycomanic 5 hours ago [-]
That doesn't really make sense, you need the ability for significant overproduction before you start thinking about storage. The other way around is just wasting money. We are just starting to get there, but still have significant fossil fuels that we can replace even by just building out solar more and just having more over production.
rwyinuse 2 hours ago [-]
Usually there's either sun or wind. Last year 57% of Finland's electricity generation was from renewables, the rest being largely nuclear, and the electricity costs were among lowest in Europe.
Until battery tech gets (and maybe even after) it's a good idea to build some nuclear too.
Kaliboy 1 hours ago [-]
The main reason I could think of is when you consider the reality of our electric grid and how it remains stable.
Grid inertia is literally maintained by hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal spinning at 50 or 60 hz.
So as the grid moves towards solar and wind, it loses inertia. Solar has no inertia and wind is lightweight compared to baseload plants.
This makes the grid more sensitive to another that can cause the frequency to fall or rise, which will trigger automatic protections.
It takes longer to become an issue in large interconnected grids, but on islands it's like the leading cause of blackouts.
One badly timed cloud means problem, unless you can instantly replace the energy lost through other means.
With thermal power plants the inertia of the generator spinning gave utilities enough time to start up other generators. With solar and wind that's gone, hence the rise of grid batteries.
So then solar/wind costs should include ALL related costs, including grid batteries and such, and often it doesn't. And thus you get people who are against it for honestly a very good reason.
That said I love solar and run fully off grid, but I ain't deluded to think my island can go 100% green. Diesel will stay for now.
I do wonder if using solar to run huge heavy flywheels connected to generators can help with the interia issue.
two_handfuls 1 hours ago [-]
Inertia was an issue, now it's solved with grid-forming batteries that can provide the same inertia a rotating flywheel did.
Most projects today are solar+battery or just battery alone, so inertia is no longer a blocker, it's just part of designing the project right.
solar heating isnt as passive, and requires that the fluid keeps flowing, and all thr plumbing maintenance that goes with that.
a lot of opinions were made about solar when solar heating was the primary approach, vs today's chinese PVs
ted_dunning 21 minutes ago [-]
This is an important point. In the 1980's, PV panels extracted 5-10% of the incident solar energy which could be converted to heat at roughly 100% efficiency. Solar thermal collectors collected at 80+% efficiency and could store and return the heat at about that level for a net 70% round trip. That's a lot better than PV, especially if the collector is your entire south-facing facade.
Nowadays, panels are sitting at roughly 20% and heat pumps have a coefficient of performance around 4x. If you need a battery round trip, you are right about the 70% point and you now have electricity which is more generally useful than low grade heat.
Those 40 year old decisions, as you say, have had several decades of ossification, though, so it is hard to uproot them.
ozim 5 hours ago [-]
You can be when you are living in an apartment building and you hear how people who have a house get 0 electric bill or get negative electric bill.
Some people just want the world to burn…
rgblambda 2 hours ago [-]
It doesn't quite make up for it, but balcony solar is a possibility for apartments (with balconies obviously), provided they're permitted in your jurisdiction.
wat10000 6 hours ago [-]
There's a lot of selective concern. They'll be outraged about the environmental damage from mining and manufacturing needed for panels, but ignore the orders of magnitude worse damage from burning fossil fuels. My favorite is outrage over wind turbines killing birds. Cats kill a thousand times more birds but nobody cares about that.
PyWoody 5 hours ago [-]
> They'll be outraged about the environmental damage from mining and manufacturing needed for panels, but ignore the orders of magnitude worse damage from burning fossil fuels.
I always try to point out that, after all of the "environmental damage" done to create the solar panels, the panels will exist for 30 years before they can be recycled into new panels. Whereas, after all of the environmental damage done to produce gas and coal, it will lead to a one time use only energy output that has to be repeated until the end of time.
It makes zero sense environmentally or cost-wise to prefer fossil fuels.
simbosambo 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
triceratops 4 hours ago [-]
> My favorite is outrage over wind turbines killing birds
I've coined the phrase True Bird Lover. Someone who's never seen a picture of a bird covered in an oil slick from the Exxon Valdez and wants to tell everyone how bad windmills are.
dimitrios1 5 hours ago [-]
I am against it for one reason only, but it's very solvable, IMO, and it's the amount of space they take up.
I live next to 200+ acres of solar farms. A part of me cries a little when I see so much beautiful land and trees cut down and these lifeless panels taking up so much space. We have so many buildings, and structures already (think parking decks, tops of apartments, homes, offices, even parking lots) that we could put these, but instead we cut down acres of trees or use up perfectly usable farmland.
rcxdude 5 hours ago [-]
I cry more when I think about the amount of farmland being used for bioethanol, something which is barely energy positive. If the US would switch the subsidies and regulations propping that up to propping up solar, it would easily free up a huge amount of land.
HerbManic 4 minutes ago [-]
That and the excess amount of farming just to feed cows for beef.
Credit to our current system, if there was a need to cut back, we have a lot of easy cuts to gain some wiggle room.
ted_dunning 20 minutes ago [-]
and I cry again when I see mountains of fly ash from coal burning.
wolrah 46 minutes ago [-]
> A part of me cries a little when I see so much beautiful land and trees cut down and these lifeless panels taking up so much space.
Where are you seeing healthy forests or other "beautiful land" being destroyed for solar farms? There's plenty of low-yield farmland and other similar land that's already been denatured by industry out there, lots of which already has major transmission infrastructure nearby, beautiful land tends to be expensive, and clearing trees costs money. It just doesn't make sense to do something like that outside of isolated areas where there's no other choice.
Here in the midwestern US every single solar or wind farm I've seen has either been on active farmland, former farmland, or a corporate/university campus.
mjamesaustin 4 hours ago [-]
Technology Connections did the math on this and found that if you ONLY replaced fields used for ethanol production with solar panels, the amount of space would be enough solar panels to power the entire power grid in the US.
bryanlarsen 4 hours ago [-]
The standard alternative to a solar farm is a monoculture corn farm producing ethanol. That monoculture corn farm regularly gets sprayed, plowed and harvested, each time decimating its animal population. Your solar farm is probably filled with a diverse selection of grass and weeds, supporting a far higher animal population than that corn farm.
beambot 5 hours ago [-]
You need to read about agrivoltaics. This is being used to huge effect elsewhere in the world to improve farming & soil. Here's an example from China:
It's still farmland! They're just farming energy now.
ted_dunning 20 minutes ago [-]
Cutting out the middlemen. Getting rid of the pesky chlorophyl syndicate.
8note 5 hours ago [-]
on that easy fix - the land under solar panels can still be used for farming or ranching
tootie 5 hours ago [-]
Sure but compare that to the amount of land used for oil and gas extraction. The difference is that mines and drills can only go where there's stuff to extract and solar panels can go anywhere. Including near residential areas. That's also due to the fact that they are so environmentally neutral.
baby_souffle 4 hours ago [-]
And you can do some agriculture near and under the panels. That's not the case with an oil well.
vel0city 6 minutes ago [-]
> And you can do some agriculture near and under the panels. That's not the case with an oil well.
You can absolutely do agriculture near oil and gas wells. I grew up next to land routinely leased to ranchers. That land was spotted with lots of active oil and gas wells. The cows would eat our flowers whenever they got out due to the oil company leaving gates improperly secured. Today I drive past fields of sorghum, corn, and wheat with little spots where active wells operate. Once drilled they usually don't take that much space to operate.
enoint 3 hours ago [-]
Or under the plume of heavy metals from coal. That land, near the transmission infrastructure of a coal plant, is only good for solar farms.
stetrain 5 hours ago [-]
We have already reached the point where solar and wind produce new MW of power cheaper than any other power source you can build.
Of course that energy generation comes with the caveat of being variable with sun and wind. It can still be a net benefit to the grid but the variability means alternative energy sources are still needed.
The cost trend of installing solar/wind plus enough storage capacity to provide steady grid power will eventually cross over to also being cheaper than other sources of energy. At which point the only reason to be against it is if you prefer artificially subsidizing another energy source.
mrhottakes 6 hours ago [-]
If people have strong opinions about renewable energy, just don't waste your breath. You can't reason someone out of an opinion they arrived at unreasonably.
jahnu 6 hours ago [-]
Keep hammering the point that they are cheaper. If they are open to more advanced discussion point to the amazing structural changes that batteries are only starting to bring. Tell them something that sounds mildly like science fiction but is in fact happening already and will be HUGE. E.g. the battery you’ll have in your AC/stove/car will save you money or even make you money when part of a smart mesh of DERs.
Maybe I’m too optimistic :)
WarmWash 6 hours ago [-]
Let me preface this that I am a huge advocate for renewables, and have been spending borderline unreasonable amounts on turning my home green.
The rub with "solar is cheaper" is that those values are almost always calculated using an ideal environment. Solar is cheapest when you are using flat barren land in Arizona where an acre costs $500, the sun shines 330 days a year, you are bulk buying 750 MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is a single rubber stamp. Those are the numbers that ultimately trickle to headlines.
Things get much more complicated (read: expensive), when you are in the North East, an acre costs $12,000, the sun shines 170 days a year, you're bulk buying a few dozen MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is 6 different government bodies full of permits and assessments.
In that situation, a gas plant that produces 10x more power on 10x less land becomes very appealing to people who are already getting crushed by soaring electricity bills. (My take: we're just going to have to deal with higher costs).
So I am all with you on abandoning fossil fuels, but to someone who is firmly in gas camp, they will have legitimate ground to stand on when balking at costs. "It's cheaper" is unfortunately not all encompassing.
volkl48 28 minutes ago [-]
As someone in New England: We don't have enough gas infrastructure up here either, you can't just add more gas plants to our grid and accomplish anything.
As it is, in the coldest periods of winter you will at times see the ISO-NE grid running on 40% oil because we don't have enough natural gas pipeline capacity to run all of the gas plants and meet natural gas heating demands. So many of the gas plants have to kick back over to burning oil.
martijnvds 5 hours ago [-]
Every kWh your panels make from sunlight that you use immediately (or store "behind the meter"), you don't have to buy from the grid.
And not buying something tends to be cheaper than buying :)
marcianx 5 hours ago [-]
Building it out and maintaining it isn't free. And per a friend who's been selling consumer solar installations for years in the North East and gotten disillusioned: the equipment maintenance, repairability, and replacement story isn't great at the company they last worked at and results in a lot of environmental waste. One of the reasons they left. Of course, this is just second-hand information - I don't personally have much intuition for how widespread the issue is.
blackjack_ 5 hours ago [-]
Every gallon of gas you use was produced far away, shipped halfway around the world for processing, and shipped back to you. Even if you are in the US, we basically don’t have the equipment to process our own gasoline from the crude we produce.
This means that millions and millions of machines have to be maintained, shipping lanes have to stay open, infrastructure has to stay profitable, distribution has to stay easy and cheap. The web is invisible to the end user, but it is massively complicated and expensive to upkeep.
Solar, once you have the panels you have to clean them every once in a while, and replace a failing panel every once in a while. But they produce for ~30 years after being made once.
So it’s funny to argue about environmental waste in this way. It’s an issue, but everything in a solar panel can basically be recycled and we are seeing the facilities start to come online as the first wave of PV panels starts dying off.
jimbokun 4 hours ago [-]
All of that is still much better than for fossil fuels.
rcxdude 5 hours ago [-]
Residential solar doesn't make that much sense from a system point of view - it's a lot more expensive than utility grade solar for the same amount of energy, but with the way the energy market works retail electricity prices are much higher than wholesale prices and that makes the upside of rooftop solar a lot bigger for consumers.
mrhottakes 6 hours ago [-]
"It's cheaper" is a good route, but a lot of these people have decided they don't care about objective facts in favor of what their favorite media personality says.
cryptopian 5 hours ago [-]
It's a challenge, but remember that there is a lot of money in trying to convince people about the status quo. I'd keep in mind the kind of tactics that fossil fuel companies will be using to convince people otherwise:
- Using old data - the price of renewables and storage technology have fallen through the floor but bad actors are quite happy to use outdated numbers to convince you that they're not cheap
- Ignoring existing downsides - renewables have issues and we shouldn't forget that, but it's easy to forget what we're replacing. e.g. Lithium mines are environmentally unfriendly, but you dig it out of the ground and turn it into a battery once (and bonus - it's recyclable). Oil and gas must be continually dug out of the ground and burned
- But China... - I don't think most people realise quite how quickly the rest of the world is pushing on with renewables
Ray20 5 hours ago [-]
In fact, it's very easy to reason them to change their minds:
1. Take statistics from any of these excellent solar power plants for, say, five years time span
2. Find the worst week in terms of energy production in these statistics
3. Explain to the renewable energy skeptic how this 20+ times drop in productivity will be compensated for users
4. The skeptic is successfully convinced and becomes a renewable energy proponent
davedx 6 hours ago [-]
- cheaper - much less upfront capex, lower operating costs
- removes nasty geopolitical dependencies on eg gulf state oil and gas; costs are more predictable
- easier to plan and build because the base units are much smaller
Variability remains a valid objection, to which the main answer today is "batteries. Lots of batteries. And other cheaper longer duration storage, like sand heat storage, vanadium flow, and good old pumped hydro."
snehk 5 hours ago [-]
> So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?
Ensure that the prices decrease for people with existing contracts. The hatred comes from people being told that it's better and cheaper now while the price is significantly higher than before.
If I didn't have solar panels on my roof that basically cover all my energy needs, I'd be absolutely furious seeing politicians pat themselves on the back for shutting down nuclear power plants and talking about how energy is now cheaper at some foreign exchange where I can not buy while I pay more and more every month.
rsync 3 hours ago [-]
"I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind ..."
Ignore them because it doesn't matter.
Physics causes finance, which causes politics ... and their politics will immediately change when the finance crosses whatever threshold they happen to be anchored to.
That's different for different people and different situations but you can be sure it will happen. Those people will not pay markedly higher electrical bills or have a (relative) doubling of their cars TCO for their politics.
Just be patient.
ufmace 3 hours ago [-]
I think there are 2 good and important points that make me re-think things some:
First is technological advancement. It seems solar and wind and the supporting technologies, including battery storage and grid firming, are advancing very fast to become cheaper, more powerful, and more reliable. What was a reasonable argument ~15 years ago might actually be out of date today. To form a reasonable argument for today, you need to know the types of hardware, costs, and specs for what's on the market today.
Second is that the recent improvements are all independent capitalistic companies building things for their own profit. They're not going to do things that are unprofitable, and if they did, they'd go out of business pretty fast. It is fair to criticize pushes by Government and activists to build this stuff, since both of them have advocated for unprofitable things plenty of times and suffer no consequences if the things they push are a terrible or unworkable idea. When it's an independent company, though, it's none of our business. I'm for success and functional systems, not ideology; if you want to build this stuff, believe you can make a profit doing so, and take ownership of the consequences if you are wrong or fail, then by all means go to it, and I'll cheer if you succeed.
graemep 6 hours ago [-]
I do not think the two should be lumped together. They do both need storage but solar is more predictable. Winds can be low for extended periods.
ceejayoz 6 hours ago [-]
> Winds can be low for extended periods.
So can sun, but that's why we build both where that's unusual. We've got plenty of stats and data gathering on where it's reliably sunny/windy enough.
lstodd 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
fredophile 6 hours ago [-]
Can you point to large scale solar or wind projects that were shoved into places that have extended periods of low sunlight or wind?
lstodd 5 hours ago [-]
The entire Energiewende for example.
fredophile 4 hours ago [-]
Are you saying that they chose bad locations inside of Germany for wind and solar or that Germany doesn't have any viable locations and they shouldn't build wind and solar in Germany at all?
8note 5 hours ago [-]
germany is producing tons of solar energy though?
can you be more specific and give 10 examples of german solar plants that produce ~0W electricity in a year?
they might be a lot more productive than you think
lstodd 4 hours ago [-]
Germany is producing some solar energy. This is of course indisputable.
They paid for that by selling most of their industry to China because energy costs became unbearable.
Was this the right tradeoff?
bryanlarsen 4 hours ago [-]
Without that solar / wind, Europe would be paying 100 million euros per day more for LNG. Electricity in Europe is expensive enough already, making it even more expensive by shunning the cheapest available form would be even harder on industry.
lstodd 3 hours ago [-]
And if Germany did not phase out nuclear, EU would not have relied on russian LNG for so long.
But we live in an imperfect world.
bryanlarsen 2 hours ago [-]
Prematurely phasing out 10GW of nuclear electricity is a drop in the bucket compared to LNG usage. A mistake, but a minor one.
lstodd 2 hours ago [-]
Axing the whole nuclear generation was a disaster.How many GW were not even planned, not to mention built in all those years? And don't try to slide out on "nuclear build-out takes too much time". It does not if there is a will.
macintux 3 hours ago [-]
> Winds can be low for extended periods.
I'm curious how true this is anymore. It sure feels like as the globe heats up we're getting windier and windier.
kstenerud 5 hours ago [-]
You can't "sell" the opposite to someone who is expressing a loyalty belief. If their tribe believes in the opposite, then no amount of logic will change their minds - only a change of their or their group's allegiance will change their minds.
newyankee 6 hours ago [-]
LCOE is the talking point that should shut down all others along with LCOS of LFP batteries
davedx 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah the relatively recent paper that takes LCOE and adds back a bunch of cherry picked system costs is a PITA to refute because it's inherently complicated and actually has some good points.
The problem is every good argument for renewables will always inevitably have someone come up with some kind of counterpoint that on the surface may seem reasonable to those without the time or inclination to deeply research it all.
Energy is complicated.
FWIW I agree with a sibling poster who said to just say "its cheaper".
DonsDiscountGas 5 hours ago [-]
My understanding is the AI data centers use LNG just because it's the fastest way to spin up a lot of power without using much land/permits. Solar panels would be cheaper but it still requires a lot of land and permits, plus batteries for smoothing.
I don't know why people would be "against" solar and wind. Even if they think global warning is a hoax, at a certain point (which was like 10 years ago) they're the cheapest option. So why not use them?
dmd 5 hours ago [-]
Simply because the “other team” likes them. That’s it.
_ZeD_ 6 hours ago [-]
> I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind
let me guess... they sell oil?
tialaramex 5 hours ago [-]
Nah, it definitely comes along for the ride. Maybe watch Folding Idea's (lengthy, sorry, he does that) documentary "In Search Of A Flat Earth".
That documentary is about QAnon (not about the "Flat Earth" per se) but it helps you understand that "But that's nonsense" is the point. I call this "Facts Aren't True" because that's the core of the idea. They don't like facts, the facts are uncomfortable, they can make up a better truth which does make them comfortable.
no, sadly its somehow become part of the global culture war. Fossil is right wing manly dominant power, renewables are woke and womanly and left.
Its all electrons how did we get here jesus.
toast0 6 hours ago [-]
> So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?
Increasing utility energy prices worked for me. I wasn't anti-solar, but it didn't seem worthwhile for me. When the utility price doubled over three years (or just about), the math makes sense now. I'm not looking for solar to acheive grid independence though, I already have a whole house generator for that, because utility power is two nines reliable around here.
black_puppydog 5 hours ago [-]
check volts.wtf and notably these recent podcast episodes:
I almost feel like it doesn't matter if Joe-public is on board or not at this stage. For as much as capitalism kinda got us into this mess, at this point the flywheel is going in the other direction and it's a natural market consequence that renewables will win. Lack of priced in externalities created the problem but the same economics will now save us.*
The money men have no moral attachment to any source so given how cheap this mix has gotten it basically wins.
* I'd point out without China and its Leninist command economy (as well as publicly funded research) getting the price of these technologies down to where it is now we'd still be doomed, but we are where we are so now the system necessarily will act in its own self interest to use the basically free energy. Is it going to be enough at this stage? Who knows, but I see reasons to be optimistic.
1970-01-01 3 hours ago [-]
>they just adopt it once it's seen everywhere?
Maybe not even then. Some still refuse to believe the Earth is round. They can die before they admit they were wrong.
wayeq 2 hours ago [-]
> I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind
Yes, down with Big Sun
singpolyma3 5 hours ago [-]
Put it on your roof. Never pay for power again.
Pretty easy sell for me.
cloche 5 hours ago [-]
The sun will last forever (at least from our point of view).
root-parent 5 hours ago [-]
>> I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind
Sounds like they have more serious issues going on there... :-)
belorn 5 hours ago [-]
A few different things would help.
First would be to be clear and unambiguous when it comes to building gas/oil thermal power plants in order to deal with the intermittence problem of solar and wind. Political strategies in wind and solar is built on trust, and people will quickly become unconvinced when politicians are dishonest/ambiguous about the requirements that is needed to support a grid with a high ratio of wind and solar.
Using fossil fuels as the reserve energy for when the weather is bad allows the producers of reserve energy to demand high market prices, to the point where a whole month in EU can cost as much as a full year. Even if solar and wind would put the grid costs to zero for 90% of the time, it doesn't make the cost for the consumer any lower if the fossil fueled "reserve energy" can increase their price by 10x. Selling solar and wind require some kind of solution here.
Reserve energy also want to be paid if they are expected to stand-by 365 days a week, which is a big reason why EU subsidizes to fossil fueled thermal power plants are not decreasing when the ratio of wind and solar goes up. That costs is then added as a grid fee/taxes, hiding the true cost. Paying first to keep the fossil fueled power plants warm and ready when solar and wind is producing, and then pay them a second time for whatever the market price is when they are producing is a very costly way to operate a grid.
And last is the transmission costs. Switching between multiple different energy sources depending on the weather has a high demand for a very flexible infrastructure in terms of transmitting energy from where it is being produced to where it is being consumed. In south of Sweden as an example, the cost of transmission infrastructure and the cost of reserve energy is now the majority of consumers electricity bill, with cost associated with production of energy being a small minority.
Solving those issues is what will convince people of the viability of wind and solar.
tejohnso 6 hours ago [-]
Why would you be adamantly against solar? That sounds like someone who is of the opinion that solar is NEVER a good idea. Nonsense.
hstaab 5 hours ago [-]
I’ve talked to some local people who are convinced that panels slowly leach heavy metals into the surrounding ground.
They mainly argue against it on residential & farm land (Midwest USA) for this reason.
tialaramex 5 hours ago [-]
The argument I've seen against it for prime farm land in the UK is "Well we could use it to farm things" but that maybe lands less well in the US because of the enormous scales involved. "¿Por qué no los dos?" is the obvious retort in a huge region like that.
I've never seen "heavy metals" conspiracies, though I'm sure if I just wait I'll run into some because people sure do like making up reasons good things are bad...
outside1234 6 hours ago [-]
Fox News is funded by fossil. They literally ship a 24x7 feed of why fossil is good and renewables are bad. It is their business model: money for placed content to shape opinions.
So someone watching that has strong opinions about renewables that is hard to overcome.
dnautics 6 hours ago [-]
it depends. some places it makes sense, some places it doesn't.
it will be adopted when the money speaks. the good news is that money is a reasonably close proxy to "environmental benefit" (balancing the environmental costs of green infra production versus dirtiness of gas generation)
tialaramex 6 hours ago [-]
> some places it doesn't
I can see this for wind, but not solar. PV turns sunlight into electrical energy. The whole damp rock gets sunlight on the outside, why not build panels anywhere?
For wind yeah, if you live one of those boring flat places which gets tornadoes a wind turbine is definitely a bad idea, it won't make much energy and then a tornado turns it into scrap and possibly destroys nearby things with chunks of debris.
pbmonster 5 hours ago [-]
> why not build panels anywhere?
Because there's better alternatives same places. Norway has legendary well-suited topography for hydro power (>90% of electricity), and it's reliably windy (>8% of electricity). It's also so far north that the sun doesn't shine very much for half the year, and it's notoriously cloudy.
So yes, it will probably never make much sense to build a lot of solar panels in Norway. Same for Greenland, Iceland (substitute geothermal), and probably some parts of Canada, Alaska and Southern Argentina.
But also, yes, there's almost nobody living in those places. They're not terribly relevant in the grand scheme of things. Probably significantly less than 50M people in total.
matthewdgreen 4 hours ago [-]
I'm confused. Those boring flat places that get tornadoes have massive wind farms, because that's where wind blows. Tornadoes are not a major economic threat to wind farms. Have you been to the midwest? There's at least 40GW of wind capacity out there, and the wind farms are really something.
belorn 5 hours ago [-]
Just to add some numbers here, in Sweden the amount of energy you get from solar during the worst months are a single digit percentage, while consumption of energy during the same period doubles from the average. Consumption during the best solar months drops to about half.
Solar works a bit better when consumption patterns is the opposite, and the output is more reliable.
matthewdgreen 4 hours ago [-]
Solar doesn't have to be colocated with consumption. There is a massive amount of available solar in Europe and North Africa, even in the winter, and HVDC (including underwater HVDC lines) makes this available.
belorn 12 minutes ago [-]
Naturally. Build the solar in southern Europe and North Africa, and when enough countries in the route to northern Europe has built up enough transmission with HVDC, then we can start to decommission existing energy infrastructure in favor of importing solar energy from those regions. Such project can happily compete with green hydrogen, and I am sure that Central and Northern Europe are very happy to buy if cheaply offered.
An other similar available strategy would be to turn the Mediterranean Sea into a massive hydro power dam by turning the Strait of Gibraltar into the world largest power plant. Combined with solar and wind, it could act as the storage for the whole of Europe and Africa, and the energy is similar to solar completely free.
fredophile 5 hours ago [-]
I spent a good chunk of my life in the Pacific Northwest. You get very long stretches of cloudy skies through most of the winter that are poor for solar. However, there are alternatives in that region like hydro that may be more suitable choices.
wat10000 5 hours ago [-]
Tornadoes are not actually very common in terms of how often you'd expect a structure to be hit by one. You're looking at hundreds or thousands of years between tornado hits even in the most tornado-prone areas. They're numerous, but small.
customguy 5 hours ago [-]
So what I'm hearing is very sturdy, christmas tree shaped turbines (long blades at the bottom, getting shorter as you go up), on a very heavy central shaft ending in a spike that gets driven deep into the ground by dropping them from great height with planes (there probably needs to be a thruster stage on top that accelerates them beyond mere free fall) into the path of tornadoes. No clue what to do with the energy, but that seems like a minor detail.
wat10000 3 hours ago [-]
Excellent idea. You don't even have to worry about hitting people's houses and such, since they'll be destroyed by the tornado anyway.
vincnetas 6 hours ago [-]
If we can build skyscrapers that can survive tornadoes, can wind turbines be made tornado proof?
bob1029 5 hours ago [-]
I believe this is one of those having your cake & eating your cake scenarios.
Wind turbines are designed to be aerodynamically loaded on purpose. The blades can pitch arbitrarily to compensate for unwanted loads in the axial flow direction, but beyond a certain point it doesn't matter anymore because wind can do a lot of other things.
> Before March 28, 2000, a tornado had never collided with a skyscraper.
> Bank One Tower sat, rotting. The Fort Worth Fire Department declared the building a fire hazard, forcing the Bass family to replace the plywood planks with fireproof metal.
dfee 5 hours ago [-]
if you require a stable energy source, neither wind nor solar (nor both) provide a complete strategy. they can be a part of a composite strategy, though.
for both wind and solar, they're also quite taxing on the environment during manufacturing. the "true cost" is rarely reported.
PV is getting on the range where it pays for itself in 3 or 4 years. If somebody is just "against it", well, I have to agree with the sibling that said you can't reason with that person.
gaiagraphia 5 hours ago [-]
Imagine being opposed to solar and wind....
Do people people really hate sun and clouds and stuff?
Or are they against the physical capture of geographical processes? ...
I've heard "muh birds" a few times. Ironically, it seems only those who eat chicken who seem to be worried about it :/
thrance 4 hours ago [-]
Most likely their opposition to renewables is ideological and can't be cured by reason.
ZeroGravitas 5 hours ago [-]
In Australia conservatives with solar on their own roof continue to complain about renewables generally. It's just a weird cultural thing for some people.
4 hours ago [-]
anovikov 5 hours ago [-]
Why doing so? When there are so many people irrationally against something, there's always some upside in being closer to truth than the crowd. It's arbitrage.
outside1234 6 hours ago [-]
You need to include batteries in the equation: solar, wind, water and batteries.
What California and others have shown is that you can replace natural gas peaker plants (literally - tear out natural gas turbines) with batteries and get both superior cost dynamics and "dispatchability" (aka turning them on and off). Batteries have millisecond level dispatch, peaker plants have hours level dispatch.
0cf8612b2e1e 3 hours ago [-]
Gas peaker plants can be turned on in minutes. Coal takes hours.
pstuart 6 hours ago [-]
I'm going to guess they are against it because it's "woke".
A question might be "why is it woke?"
And if it's because libtards like it, then you can point out that libtards like coffee, beer, sports, etc -- so when will they boycott those?
zahlman 4 hours ago [-]
Rather than guessing, have you considered asking?
Sure, sometimes people haven't reasoned themselves into positions, and won't simply be reasoned out of them. But understanding others' epistemology is still the first step to changing minds.
pstuart 4 hours ago [-]
>> I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind
I'm guessing about those people. It's very clear that renewable energy is considered to be a liberal ideology by those that oppose renewable energy.
> Sure, sometimes people haven't reasoned themselves into positions, and won't simply be reasoned out of them. But understanding others' epistemology is still the first step to changing minds.
Both of your points are true but in effect are a contradiction to the original discussion. The moment somebody uses the word woke non-ironically as a reasoning point they are beyond reasoned discussion (at least from my experience). It's beyond vexing because there's no room for real dialog, just talking past each other.
philipallstar 6 hours ago [-]
Woke is cultural Marxism, deconstructing competence hierarchies, identity politics, quotas, oppression olympics, that sort of thing.
This isn't those things at all.
mrhottakes 6 hours ago [-]
Plenty of people call renewable energy woke
pstuart 3 hours ago [-]
Could you explain cultural marxism to me in your own words?
More so, could you hazard a guess why those friends would be categorically against renewables?
dudefeliciano 6 hours ago [-]
> Woke is cultural Marxism
> Woke is an adjective derived from African-American English used since the 1930s or earlier to refer to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction stay woke. [1]
> Cultural Marxism is a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory that misrepresents Western Marxism (especially the Frankfurt School) as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness. [2]
Yes, the first one was the original meaning of the word.
The second one is... I don't know how to debate someone who quotes Wikipedia like this. It's not what I said. That article looks incredibly one-sided, and uses fallacies of the "You think snow is white? Did you know Adolph Hitler thought snow was white?" persuasion.
pstuart 5 hours ago [-]
What is "cultural Marxism"? I genuinely do not understand.
4 hours ago [-]
okr 6 hours ago [-]
I find no arguments against solar. I can put it everywhere and has no moving parts. Once storing is solved, perfect.
But wind?? Huge nature areas are destroyed by beton fundaments, rotors break, and just in germany was a scandal lately about recycling, as the first structures need to be renewed.
fredophile 5 hours ago [-]
It's not like other forms of power generation don't have similar problems. Solar PV cells lose efficiency and need to be replaced. Nuclear has very long term storage concerns. Coal and natural gas plants have finite expected lifetimes before the whole plant needs to shut down.
6 hours ago [-]
mtmickush 5 hours ago [-]
This is exciting news but the term power here should really be replaced with electricity which is clarified early on in the article.
Electricity only accounts for roughly 20-25% of all power / energy used and the vast majority of the remaining 75% is fueled by gas (cars, ships, heating, construction, ect.)
tialaramex 5 hours ago [-]
This is true but also distorting because it's not an Apples-to-Apples comparison. Electricity is not only much more flexible it's also much more efficient when it's an option.
The internal combustion engine is not a very efficient way to convert fuel into movement, its key benefit was that it is compact enough to put inside the vehicle itself. A steam train was more efficient, and steam boats were more efficient still, but those are both enormous so it was seen as a more reasonable option for these vehicles. So an EV transition actually doesn't mean that much more electrical generation compared to much less fossil fuel production.
jl6 5 hours ago [-]
All true, but also remember that in a zero-fossil world the supply chain for solar/wind also needs to be decarbonized, which involves things like making green steel, which is not such a favorable efficiency story (the way to overcome it is simply to generate massive amounts of electricity cheap enough that you can eat the inefficiency).
tialaramex 4 hours ago [-]
I expect that a zero-fossil world does a lot more steel recycling. Today steel is insanely cheap. Not so very long ago steel was this wonder metal, too expensive to mass produce, and today the pennies most people don't want as change when buying things here have steel inside because no other metal would be cheap enough given the value of the coins. They're jacketed because people expect them to look like tarnished copper (they were once bronze coins), but copper is expensive compared to steel now so it's just a jacket around a steel core.
If steel went back to say, twice the price of bronze, I think recycling makes a lot more sense and that means far less need for new steel production.
jl6 4 hours ago [-]
Steel is cheap for two reasons: unaccounted externalities of the use of coal in the process, and massive scale. Coal-free steel is possible, but we don’t currently do it at scale, so there is work to do.
Recycling will make sense if steel becomes much more expensive, but a future with really expensive steel is not what we should be aiming for.
tialaramex 3 hours ago [-]
The externalities for burning coal to make steel aren't acceptable though, we would need the mythical high performance carbon capture solutions and those aren't materialising, everybody who promised more efficient solar did what they promised, bigger wind turbines, as promised, more compact storage, as promised - but the carbon capture is MIA.
zahlman 4 hours ago [-]
...Do we really need steel just to mount solar panels?
jl6 4 hours ago [-]
We need steel for a million and one things that make modernity possible, but in the context of renewable energy, we particularly need it to build the towers that the largest and most efficient wind turbines sit on.
Tade0 5 hours ago [-]
That is true, but a lot of that, if replaced by electricity, would use considerably less energy overall, so it's not a 1:1 comparison.
Residential heating in particular would use anywhere between a third to half the energy, if we only transitioned to heat pumps.
nielsole 5 hours ago [-]
Important to consider that your stat is likely comparing primary energy, not secondary energy. E.g. an electric car or a heat pump use less primary energy than the fossil equivalent.
toomuchtodo 5 hours ago [-]
Global solar PV deployment is approaching 1TW/year. All energy will be clean energy in the next 1-2 decades. Vehicles will electrify, as will heating. Roughly half of marine traffic disappears if you're not shipping fossil fuels around.
> Investors have piled into climate-friendly assets this year despite policy and regulatory rollbacks in the US and Europe, as artificial intelligence drives a boom in energy infrastructure demand. Global green bond and loan issuance has reached a record $947 billion so far this year, with Asia-Pacific companies and government-linked issuers raising $261 billion from green debt. Green investments are increasingly becoming viewed as core infrastructure and industrial plays, with clearer policy signals and an expected increase in global electricity demand lifting investor optimism. Global green bond and loan issuance has reached a record $947 billion so far this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence. That’s as stock market gauges for renewables are set for their first annual gains since 2020, outperforming the S&P 500 by a wide margin, while shares of power-grid technology companies remain in favor.
> Annual energy transition investment surpassed $2 trillion for the first time in 2024, more than double the rate in 2020, according to research by BloombergNEF examining the deployment of net zero-aligned technologies and infrastructure.
macintux 3 hours ago [-]
And yet, people in my home state are passionate about coal, as is the current clown-in-chief.
I do not believe that economics will win in 10-20 years if the U.S. government continues its current path, at least not to the "100% clean energy" level.
toomuchtodo 3 hours ago [-]
No new coal plants will be built in the US, it is only how long the existing ones will run for. The longer they run, the more expensive it costs to maintain them, continually tilting the economics against them. As more coal generators go offline, coal demand declines, and as that happens, mines will go offline as the demand drops below thresholds that will support the economics of continued operations. This is a form of "death spiral."
"This too shall pass." Existing coal will retire eventually. Let them be passionate if they wish, as comfort, but the outcome will not change. This administration has an expiration date.
> In response, the Trump administration has recently invoked legislation designed for wartime emergencies to force a number of uneconomic coal plants to remain open.
> Despite Trump’s efforts, clean energy made up 96% of the new electricity generation capacity added to the US grid in 2025. None of the new capacity came from coal power.
Wacari 5 hours ago [-]
no. if you work in the industry you'll know power/electricity are used interchangeably, and energy is treated as the superset. in the physics sense, you're right.
ZeroGravitas 5 hours ago [-]
And roughly 2/3rds of that is lost as waste heat, so really only another 25% is actually useful.
marcosdumay 5 hours ago [-]
If you don't look at electricity generation, yes. If you look at grid generators, that fraction can get as low as 1/3. (But then, it can get higher than 3/4 on transportation.)
So it really depends on who is counting and how. I do think transportation and heating use more energy than the grid, but I was never able to get a definitive number. (My best guess is it's close to 2 times larger.)
Also, electricity to transportation conversion is usually only around 80% efficient. Making electricity portable has a cost.
jrmg 13 minutes ago [-]
Meanwhile, just hours ago:
Trump Offers Funds for First New U.S. Coal Plants in 13 Years
On the graph, you can clearly see the seasonal demand for power during the summer months as air conditioning kicks in. The electricity production for gas mimics this as well each year. But the solar output does not seem to have a spike each summer. Why is that? You would think that solar output would be significantly higher when the summer months are here.
miahi 2 hours ago [-]
It's global data, "here" is not US, and it's solar+wind, not only solar. Summer months have a different definition depending on hemisphere and solar production maximums depend heavily on latitude.
nonethewiser 5 hours ago [-]
Is it possible to increase the grid by add solar and wind and NOT adding an on-demand backup source (gas, etc.) WITHOUT ADDING RISK?
What I mean is say the grid demands 100. The grid is powered entirely by coal. You give it 120 for 20% redundancy. This is extremely reliable.
The grid demand is now 120. You now need 144 for 20% redundancy. You dont want to use coal. So you add solar and batteries.
Batteries are great because they normalize the volatility of solar generation over time, but they do not make solar truly on demand. So if you add 24 solar to the 120 coal you are increasing the risk on the grid. What often happens is you add 24 solar but you have 24 coal as a backup. Ideally the real-world use will be solar but in case of downtime your grid will not fail.
bryanlarsen 2 hours ago [-]
Just ask California. They've basically conducted the experiment you asked for by adding substantial solar & battery. They haven't had a blackout since 2020 and are the most stable grid in the entire US.
Your existing demand is not flat. Not flat over a single day, nor a single week nor a single year.
So you already have some spare capacity on the system.
If your demand peak was summer air con, then adding the solar makes the system more stable. This can be seen in a few grids that issue less grid warnings in summer now.
thewhitetulip 4 hours ago [-]
In the Indian state of Bihar in the current summer season, the grid met the extra demand purely due to smart grid installed on rooftops. That state used to have shortage of electricity during peak summer until 2yrs ago
Not to mention solar contributed to more than 15 % of Indian summer demand which is crazily high due to 40+ degree temperature during the heat wave
Solar that too decentralised is a massive boon
DonsDiscountGas 5 hours ago [-]
You add 100x1day worth of battery capacity. Which is fairly economical even today (though not economical enough to actually shut down coal). Wouldn't work everywhere (winter in New England needs more than 1 day of backup) but works in some places.
megaman821 4 hours ago [-]
Trivially yes, for any locations with summer energy use peaks. The solar output will be the greatest when the demand for cooling is at its greatest.
Yes, for places with sizeable hydropower. You simply hold the water for longer.
Probably yes, for places where the need for redundancy is rare. Natural gas peaker plants are cheaper to build and simpler to operate with the tradeoff of being less efficient than combined cycle plants.
toomuchtodo 5 hours ago [-]
Take a look at California. Their grid is routinely, daily, generating ~84% of its power from renewables [1] (with ~25GW of existing solar PV capacity, ~6GW of wind, and ~6GW of hydro). They are adding batteries rapidly [2] (with a goal of 52GW by 2045; they are 33% of the way there). They still have ~32GW of fossil gas generation capacity, but it is rarely used constantly at full capacity. They have plans for another ~21GW of solar PV on land that can no longer be farmed due to water shortages [3] [4] (enabling families to keep their land with long term lease payments).
Not everywhere is California, but solar and batteries are the cheapest form of generation in 90%+ of the world [5]. You simply keep building more solar collection, storage, transmission, etc. to orchestrate collecting this "fusion at a distance" and distributing it to loads. The sun rises every day, and will for our lifetimes. We continue to deploy batteries and solar at manufacturing capacity, while continuing to increase manufacturing capacity year over year. You fill any gaps with fossil generation until there are no longer any gaps to fill [6].
Tangentially, Australia is currently testing a battery with a 8 hour discharge capability [7] ("Long-Duration Energy Storage (LDES)"), as they are rapidly preparing for a network/team of battery storage facilities to assume grid health responsibility from their retiring thermal coal generators [8]. Certainly there is much work ahead in understanding and developing longer duration energy storage systems.
> Take a look at California. Their grid is routinely, daily, generating ~84% of its power from renewables [1] (with ~25GW of existing solar PV capacity, ~6GW of wind, and ~6GW of hydro).
> ... Not everywhere is California, but solar and batteries are the cheapest form of generation in 90%+ of the world [5].
... Then why is electricity so expensive there compared to the US average?
bryanlarsen 4 hours ago [-]
It's not. California has the cheapest wholesale electricity prices in the country. It's the only place in the country with a wholesale rate below $100 / MWh, and California is way below $100.
Retail prices are of course super high in California, but that has nothing to do with generation.
verdverm 3 hours ago [-]
Why is there such a disconnect?
epistasis 1 hours ago [-]
Transmission and distribution costs: i.e. the grid.
California is a massive state, has very rugged terrain, and there's a ton of deferred maintenance on transmission lines that are more than 50 years old, that are at huge risk of causing massive wildfires that destroy entire towns.
This has been terribly mismanaged, because like most places with regulated monopoly utilities, the regulatory body is opaque and not very responsive to the needs of the public.
The utility doesn't make money on electricity generation costs, but it does get to take a fixed rate of profit from grid infrastructure costs. So the obvious game for a for-profit regulated monopoly utility is to jack up the grid costs as high as possible, try to snow the regulators to possible cheaper alternatives, and rake in more money.
I remember one case where PG&E got approval to charge for grid maintenance, spent hundreds of millions, had ~$100M leftover, then declared "oh we did it cheaper than we expected, executive bonuses all around the C-suite with the extra!" And then we had multi-billion dollar wildfires the following year.
Utilities are not normal businesses, they make more money by increasing their input costs. (See also the US healthcare system where incentives are similarly perverse... Insurance company profits are capped at a fixe percentage of health care expenditures, so the route to more profit is to increase health care expenditures.)
Of my decades in California, there's been a single gubernatorial candidate with deep knowledge of the grid and how to fix the regulatory structure, and it's the governor who actually appoints people to the regulatory board of the utilities, so the governor and their appointees have the power to fix this. That gubernatorial candidate was Tom Steyer, and he had/has fantastic plans, but I fear he just lost the primary:
politics. Supply is cheap, but California has a corrupt relationship with the monopoly provider, and lets them get away with bundling all kinds of costs into the distribution charge. fire rebuilding, social projects, decades of infrastructure neglect from previous corruption.
Go and compare the rates from a non-pg&e distributor (eg SMUD in sac) and you'll see, supply is cheap enough and it doesnt have to be this way.
toomuchtodo 4 hours ago [-]
A distribution grid for 40 million people in a high fire risk geography [1]. Renewables drive down supply costs, but not distribution costs (unless you can go off grid, etc). They could also improve costs by nationalizing PG&E (I argue, cutting out shareholder returns and excessive management comp), but that is an argument for another thread [2].
It's a good news but I didn't expect that coal is still on the 1st place and not really trending down. I though coal was largely replaced by gas years ago...
DonsDiscountGas 5 hours ago [-]
Nobody, anywhere, is building new coal power plants. Approximately all new power is wind and solar. Which is good. But there is still a lot of installed capacity. And until new solar is cheaper than existing coal (which will be awhile, maybe never) then coal only decreases as plants shut down.
zahlman 4 hours ago [-]
> And until new solar is cheaper than existing coal (which will be awhile, maybe never) then coal only decreases as plants shut down.
Why wouldn't "existing solar is cheaper than existing coal, and existing coal is not required to meet demand" result in coal plants shutting down?
miahi 1 hours ago [-]
You need a lot of batteries to store the energy needed overnight and you have to plan for (lots of) days without sun. At my latitude (45N) the difference in solar production between summer and winter is 5x. Even with batteries, you still need a backup for a week of bad weather; so you have to choose between increasing the solar production 20x to have enough power generated in cloudy days or have a backup coal/gas/something else plant.
ApolloFortyNine 4 hours ago [-]
China is. [1]
I don't get why people feel the need to just start lying when talking about renewables. It's probably a large reason why people are always skeptical of 'rewnewables are cheaper than x' claims.
and yet their coal usage has declined in the last two years, and is projected to continue declining.
4 hours ago [-]
0cf8612b2e1e 3 hours ago [-]
In 2025, renewables generated more energy globally than coal (neck and neck tie, but renewables just edged out coal). This trend is likely to continue.
Wacari 5 hours ago [-]
in large parts of the west! still good news
bocytron 5 hours ago [-]
And gas is not going down either.
fsh 5 hours ago [-]
Coal is much cheaper than gas.
usefulcat 5 hours ago [-]
Is it cheaper per MW of generated power? I thought that the main reason use of gas has increased so much (for power generation) over the past 20-30 years is that gas became cheaper.
citrin_ru 5 hours ago [-]
Gas allows to use combined cycle gas turbines (CCGT) which is more efficient and it makes gas cheaper for electricity generation.
enoint 4 hours ago [-]
Not per-MWh in North America.
sleight42 51 minutes ago [-]
Waiting for this to get flagged because, once again, the US sucks.
A lot of us know why the US is behind in wind and solar. It's because of a five letter word that starts with "T".
Do better, America.
iQoxi 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting how sustainability is shifting from a regulatory topic to a competitive advantage for businesses.
singingtoday 4 hours ago [-]
Progress! Build more, we need it..
philipkglass 6 hours ago [-]
More good news from Ember, according to their Global Electricity
Review 2026 [1]:
Solar power increased by a record 636 TWh to reach 2,778 TWh in 2025, a 30% increase from 2024.
Wind saw the second-largest increase, growing 205 TWh (+8.2%)
Driven by record solar growth, low-carbon power generation increased by 887 TWh in 2025, outpacing electricity demand growth of 849 TWh. Solar power alone met 75% of the net increase in electricity demand. Together with wind, the two sources met almost all (99%) demand growth.
For the first time in 100 years, renewables (33.8%, 10,730 TWh) overtook coal power (33.0%, 10,476 TWh) in the global electricity mix as continued rapid growth in solar and wind pushed the share of renewables above a third of global generation. Coal power dropped 63 TWh (-0.6%) in 2025, marking the first fall since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Combined with continued electricity demand growth, this meant coal fell below a third of global generation for the first time in history.
For comparison, I have collated information from the International Atomic Energy Agency's Power Reactor Information System. The fastest that nuclear power generation ever grew was 213 TWh added in 1985. Since the year 2000, the fastest growth year was 2004, with 111 TWh added.
Solar and progress on better batteries is a more consequential and useful technological revolution than AI. Should be a huge story, but there's not enough money to be made via speculation so it's not.
jampa 6 hours ago [-]
> there's not enough money to be made via speculation
I mean, there is money to be made. CATL stock (the major producer of EV batteries with 50% market share, with billions of contracts for stationary batteries) rose 48.81% over the last 6 months, for example.
But I agree that news about renewables goes unnoticed. I only see news about renewables because I actively seek out channels and websites that cover it. I wonder if it is because most companies in the industry are Chinese and don't focus on PR in the West as AI companies do.
feelamee 6 hours ago [-]
why is it?
of course now this is true. But people investing money in the future of AI, a future where AI can produce an enormous amount of goods.
mrhottakes 6 hours ago [-]
When will AI start producing goods?
onionisafruit 6 hours ago [-]
Claude, Gemini and Grok are all doing shifts at Little Debbie’s making Swiss Rolls
mrhottakes 6 hours ago [-]
Finally, AI has become useful!
tootie 5 hours ago [-]
AI is enough of an issue. As fast as we are adding renewable capacity, demand is also growing extremely fast. We're chasing a rapidly moving target. And we're stuck in an adverse political climate for the time being as well.
toomuchtodo 6 hours ago [-]
Nailed it. Solar, wind, and batteries are going to be the predominant form of generation in a decade, but there is no speculative benefit, so it’ll happen silently.
ajross 6 hours ago [-]
To be fair (and, somewhat ironically, rationally detached libertarian) that's the way it's supposed to be. We don't develop and deploy technology to make a bunch of too-online nerds rich. We develop and deploy technology to make everyone's lives better by providing goods at lower expense and lower externalized cost.
toomuchtodo 6 hours ago [-]
Indeed, but wouldn't it be great if all of this capital pouring into the AI bubble went into global electrification and clean energy instead?
The percentage increases here don't really tell the full picture. Look at it in terms of pure TWh [1]. China just dwarfs any other country in terms of wind and solar deployment. I guess that's the difference between putting engineers in charge instead of those who believe in the magical powers of red heifers [2].
One of the short-term issues in the US is going to be that a lot of utilities depend on natural gas and natural gas prices are going to keep rising beyond whatever happens in the Persian Gulf because of increased LNG exports (that directly raises domestic prices) and the increased use of gas turbines for AI data centers. Plus all the consumers are going to pay for the infrastructure buildout for electricity for those data centers.
So, despite a large Y/Y solar increase in the US, electricity prices are only going up.
I feel the energy conversation is dominated by people that don't realize how far Solar tech has come recently arguing with other people that don't realize short nuclear half lives have gotten recently.
chris_money202 6 hours ago [-]
Finally some good news!
tonymet 6 hours ago [-]
*electricity . Gas is heavily used for heating , cooking & industrial uses (e.g. drying agriculture like hops, boilers etc).
I raise this point since policymakers get confused and try to ban gas, only to realize how critical gas is for food & industrial applications that consumers enjoy after the fact.
PaulDavisThe1st 5 hours ago [-]
You're correct that this ought to say "electricity" and not "power".
But I think you're wrong to think that gas is "critical" to any of the things you've listed. "Currently used" ... yes. "Not replaceable by electricity" ... no (unlike, e.g. air travel).
tonymet 5 hours ago [-]
explain the cost to replace a hop drying kiln with an electrical one, including the grid load.
PaulDavisThe1st 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not going to do that.
Electrical heat using heat pumps is cheaper than in-situ heating with any fossil fuel because (a) the base price per unit of energy is (or certainly can be) lower (b) the coefficient of performance is higher.
There are obviously costs to changing heating systems. But that doesn't mean that a gas heating system cannot be replaced by an electrical one.
tonymet 55 minutes ago [-]
to me, it sounds unreasonable. Let’s say this project was your responsibility, would this argument be enough for your supervisor to approve it?
tootie 5 hours ago [-]
Most of it can be electrified. NYC has banned gas hookups in new residential buildings (I live in one and it's great). Industrial electrification will never be 100% but I've seen estimates as high as 90%. It will take time and money but it will happen.
tonymet 3 hours ago [-]
how much time and money, and whether it’s worth the opportunity cost, is the entire question.
tootie 1 hours ago [-]
If you're considering the total cost then you have to factor in the entire reason to electrify which is the environmental cost of continuing to burn dead organic matter. In that case, electrification is absolute bargain.
tonymet 57 minutes ago [-]
to what end?
yogthos 6 hours ago [-]
China having managed to position itself as the main driver of the green transition by investing into key industries illustrates the power of state planning. The markets simply can't operate on horizons of decades because there is no immediate profit to be had. You need long term planning and sustained investment that only a state is able to provide.
6 hours ago [-]
jqpabc123 6 hours ago [-]
Renewable energy offers a competitive advantage for any energy intensive activity --- like manufacturing or AI.
China gets it, the USA doesn't.
cloche 6 hours ago [-]
Even so, the article says it grew 8% YOY in the US. The best is to hope that this is an unstoppable trend so that even politicians won't be able to reverse it.
adjejmxbdjdn 6 hours ago [-]
Imagine how much faster it would be growing if the U.S. government wasn’t paying companies billions to not produce wind energy
It’s already irreversible, but it’s just disappointing to see how the U.S. administration has chosen to actively fight against it, while other countries like China are embracing reality.
It’s actually funny if you don’t think about it too hard. The U.S. president is trying to make us more reliant on fossil fuels, while starting a war in Iran that’s led to the global fossil fuel market to be negatively impacted, forcing most Americans to pay more for fossil fuels. Who could have seen that coming? We’re doing great!
dnautics 6 hours ago [-]
> the U.S. administration has chosen to actively fight against it
the biggest producer of renewables is Texas, by a longshot. and the state of california just created insane NEM laws that favor the pockets of pg&e (and are shit for the environment) and as a result solar home installations have cratered.
ceejayoz 6 hours ago [-]
> the biggest producer of renewables is Texas
That doesn't refute the point at all.
dnautics 6 hours ago [-]
no, but renewables do speak for themselves in dollars and cents, even if they dont have subsidy. now should petrochem subsidies end too? probably yes.
ceejayoz 6 hours ago [-]
> renewables do speak for themselves in dollars and cents
Yes. But administration opposition can change that math, as they have with the tariffs.
toast0 5 hours ago [-]
From the CalISO graphs, there doesn't seem to be a shortage of solar power for most of the day. It doesn't seem reasonable to incentivise production in the same way as it was when that wasn't the case.
I think NEM 3.0 incentivises storage now? Which seems to be what the (California) grid is looking for.
some-guy 6 hours ago [-]
Both NEM 2.0 and 3.0 have serious issues, but for different reasons. NEM 2.0 was basically a early adopter's rich person's subsidy that heavily distorted the market, and NEM 3.0 does not have nearly enough subsidies to justify the cost unless you pay cash up front for a large system. (For the record, I am on NEM 3.0 and got such a system).
At the end of the day, the best case scenario is large scale renewable / battery storage to bring costs down as much as possible, and for those of us who want battery backup / solar can choose to invest in it, but it shouldn't be "the" solution.
ZeroGravitas 5 hours ago [-]
Texas barely scrapes into the top ten red states by percentage of wind and solar, despite its ideal geography.
5 hours ago [-]
mrhottakes 6 hours ago [-]
"No One Could Have Predicted This!" - Nation where this happens all the time
jqpabc123 5 hours ago [-]
Even so, the article says it grew 8% YOY in the US.
Versus 35% YOY in China.
China gets it, the USA doesn't.
The best is to hope that this is an unstoppable trend
The trend is the USA choosing politics over reality as China becomes unstoppable.
It's "choosing" short term profits because its leadership (and its voters) have given up on long term stable trade and planning, and instead embraced oligarchy and rentier capitalism.
You can't parasitize solar and wind. There's few to no middlemen. No way to monopolize it. So it must be discouraged while you extract the last few years of wealth out of the assets you already control.
ceejayoz 6 hours ago [-]
Never underestimate the capacity of shitty people to shoot themselves and others in the foot.
wolfhumble 5 hours ago [-]
Good China numbers, but I’d still keep two things in mind.
China is moving very fast on clean power. But total energy is still very fossil-heavy, about 78%: 51.4% coal, about 26.9% other fossil fuels, calculated as the remaining share after coal and non-fossil, and 21.7% non-fossil in 2025, based on official Chinese figures.
The U.S. is about 82% fossil overall, so roughly comparable to China’s ~78%, just in a different way. Much less coal now, around 8%, but a lot of oil and gas: petroleum about 38%, natural gas about 36%, according to EIA’s 2024 summary.
For electricity, China was around 11% solar and 11% wind in 2025, according to China’s 2025 Statistical Communiqué. The U.S. was around 9% solar, including rooftop and other small-scale solar, and around 10% wind in 2025, according to EIA.
Nuclear is a major difference in the electricity mix: about 18% of U.S. electricity generation versus roughly 5% in China, based on EIA and China’s 2025 Statistical Communiqué.
And yes, EIA is not a typo for IEA
EIA is the U.S. Energy Information Administration, whereas IEA is the International Energy Agency.
kieranmaine 6 hours ago [-]
The USA get's it. Trump doesn't. Texas is a the leader in wind and solar in the US.
Compare generation stats for yesterday between 2021 and 2026 on the Texas grid (ERCOT)
All of that combined is peanuts compared to what's happening in China. Not to mention that all the panels and most of the wind turbines are produced in China. It's not just a question of installing them, it's having the industry and technical know how to make them that really matters.
Does the USA really get it? I'd like to believe that, but honestly, I hear a lot of hatin' on anything related to renewable or 'green' energy, not just from Trump.
kieranmaine 2 hours ago [-]
My earlier comment was too ambiguous. Those that spend money on generating capacity in the US get it.
> As of April 1, 2026, renewable energy’s share of total US utility-scale (>1 MW) generating capacity was 33.6%. EIA projects this to grow to 36.6% by March 31, 2027. Utility-scale solar will add 42,626.1 MW, expanding its share from 12.8% to 15.7%, while wind will grow by 14,157.4 MW (including 4,155.0 MW of offshore wind), increasing from 13.0% to 13.6%. The mix of other renewables (hydropower, biomass, and geothermal) will add 297.1 MW.
> The capacity of battery storage was 42 GW at the end of 2025 and is expected to double and reach 85 GW by the end of 2027.
In terms of the general population or politicians, some more than others. This is also with an administration that is irrationally hostile to renewables.
Indeed. Steel mills, aluminum smelters and glass factories really adore the intermittent nature of renewables.
ZeroGravitas 6 hours ago [-]
Smelters in Australia are leaning on the fossil-friendly politicians to stop getting in the way of renewables because they can't compete with global prices unless they use renewables.
jqpabc123 5 hours ago [-]
Unlike in the USA --- they obviously look beyond the rhetoric to grasp the fact that renewables help lower energy costs even if their industry doesn't fully depend on them.
Danox 6 hours ago [-]
Germany screwed themselves.
uecker 5 hours ago [-]
The world screwed itself by not investing in renewables earlier. Germany paid a high price for being early, but we all should be thankful for Germany creating an economy of scale and bringing cost down.
And while the extreme right wing propaganda claims that Germany is doomed because of the Energiewende for the last 20 years or so, it is somehow still the third largest economy.
jqpabc123 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, that probably explains why US imports of steel and aluminum continue to grow, even with a 25% tariff.
US manufacturers and consumers just love the added cost --- aka, inflation.
How is that working for German industry where you need dense energy if you are going to continue build anything big..
iSnow 1 minutes ago [-]
Germany IS suffering from high energy prices, but renewables are only a small part of the problem.
It was a mistake to shut down the working nuclear power plants, and that also coincided with the abrupt loss of all (cheap) gas from Russia. Now, the country imports expensive LNG and renewables generate something like 80% on a good day - but thanks to merit order, the most expensive form of power generation sets the price and that is gas.
It doesn't help that thanks to shifts in industry, the grid has to be re-developed north->south instead of west->east and south-north. NIMBYism is rampant in Germany, so new high-voltage lines can take decades. Meanwhile, renewable capacity has to be shutdown if the transmission capacity of the grid cannot keep up during windy, sunny days.
Things are slowly improving what with grid-scale batteries coming online, and one major north-south connection being done. But yeah, it's going to take years still, and if our current governing coalition have their say, it's going to take even longer.
blackjack_ 6 hours ago [-]
Multiple ways. One interesting one is huge sand batteries that are being heated up to massive temps, then having pipes run through there to collect the heat energy as hot water and doing the industrial processes that way.
Another way is using excess green energy to produce green hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel source in very high energy scenarios.
Past that, we recently have made electric arc furnaces and electric smelting furnaces for steel and aluminum, and several of these are fully solar powered.
It’s a shift to change the energy source for industrial production, but we have the technology and the ability. And the sun is free!
ceejayoz 6 hours ago [-]
Believe it or not, a large solar field (or several!) can readily densify its energy into a nice small power transmission line.
unglaublich 5 hours ago [-]
You turn the machines on when electricity is cheap, and turn em off when it's not?
Folks operating businesses that depend on oil prices would know these tricks?
gaiagraphia 5 hours ago [-]
Surely households using more wind and solar frees up capacity for 'dense energy' though?
micromacrofoot 5 hours ago [-]
when energy is abundant, you use it to hoist a large rock very high up above your head
when energy is scarce, you drop the rock on your head
dudefeliciano 6 hours ago [-]
pretty well? and it can only get better if we continue rolling out renewables?
All in all, pretty happy. Especially that we have frequent grid faults. Even my ISP has some beefy batteries for their equipment, so much so that one 14-hour grid blackout didn't affect us at all and we were able to use the internet since we're working from home (FTTH + ONT, GPON).
Usual disclaimer, sample size of one. We're in Romania.
Especially in the US, and especially in homes, we tend to have dark roofs. Sunlight falls on these, heating the building up, then we burn fossil fuels to generate more energy to pump the heat outside. It’s absurd.
And then there is stuff like the above indeed, uselessly wasting energy while things could be so much more efficient.
Fun fact: we still don't have AC in our house (it's a new-ish building, built 4 years ago) because it's decently insulated (and we live near the mountains). As in your case, our solar produces way over 100% of what we need, so I'm considering just getting AC to use the sun to cool the house if needed :)
And yet, look at what is happening. Year after year the exponential growth continues without a blip! It is one of those things that looked impossible initially but obvious in retrospect.
My broader long term fear is that if we essentially get "limitless" energy, we continue to harm the ecosystem in other ways. Like giving a drug addict a limitless bank account. But we are still a long way from that point.
In a different timeline, we'd be investing in the country via zero/low-interest loans to encourage every homeowner to leverage this. It's a win for everybody.
Everyone is getting tired of me checking the panel to see how many watts we're bringing in.
Next project, install a shunt and get a Raspberry Pi talking to it over USB. And then I'll be able to build a Grafana dashboard. :)
I just upgraded our hybrid caravan to 24V LFP (2x 300Ah 12V), roof solar + extra MPPT for external solar, shunt, inverter-charger, 24V->12V converter for existing circuity (lights, pump, etc), DCDC charger from car, battery balancer, a little touchscreen interface inside (all victron gear with renogy batteries). It was as a lot of fun and it's amazing how much power we have off grid now! The system would work excellent for a little cabin exactly how it is (minus DCDC).
What people figure out to do with actually free energy will be exciting. There are a lot of extremely "inefficient" things that might suddenly become commonplace.
Proto-replicator technology where you dump your garbage into a barrel and it gets decomposed and recomposed into something similar to crude oil, blocks of metal, pure gasses, etc? Hydrocarbon fuel from air? Flying cars? You name it.
I doubt that it ends up being actually better due to efficiency losses but it’d be really cool!!
To make electric energy I would have to make a small steam plant to run a turbine.
Or a hydrogen fuel cell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell
The round-trip efficiency is of course abysmal compared to batteries, but if the input energy is "free", the increased density could pay off.
Check out https://m.youtube.com/c/WillProwse and https://diysolarforum.com/
My main issue was ensuring wire gauges were correct. One's intuition about dealing with house wiring @15A changes when you're dealing with 50A circuits. Also you need to pay attention to things like equal cable lengths between battery banks so you don't overcharge one battery in a series.
However, I'm dealing with an off-grid cabin so I don't need to deal with any grid-tie circuitry, which would make it much more difficult and I'd definitely get an electrician for that.
It’s not clear what device you’re referring to in this context.
MidNite has a sizing tool for this: https://www.midnitesolar.com/sizingTool/
It’s not too hard to actually do the computations. But there is a ton to learn. I installed my own 14.85 kW system last year, with batteries, and I spent hundreds of hours just researching everything. I know I went overkill, but the hardest part of the project was just getting up to speed on all the requirements to meet code.
Someday I’ll write up my entire experience and share my site plan I used for permitting in the hopes it will help someone else. But doing solar right is a nontrivial investment for a newbie (like me).
Right now we're limited by the charging capacity of the inverter/charger. It can only do 50A in from an external solar controller. In hindsight I should have gone with a 48V inverter/charger to get twice the power going in. On a sunny day we're maxing it out at 1200W for several hours at a time.
(personally I like both but I can see some shortcomings - for example I have heard that ai datacenters are using gas at times because of its flexibility)
So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?
Or will they just adopt it once it's seen everywhere?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
People wouldn't be rushing to shift entire markets at the observed rates if the economics were upside down. It is the soundness of the economic model that is driving the adoption even against tariffs and subversion by the current US regime.
This is not as simple as people here make it out to be.
Consider also that solar is profitable today because it does not set the price of electricity in most markets. In a world where solar dominates, the prices of electricity could be negative. The economics of negative electricity prices becoming the norm are not yet fully understood.
Similar to the UK - See item 18. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/141240/html...
The existing gas infrastructure represents a large amount of taxpayer investment, not due to be paid off until 2070. But it’s estimated that there won’t be any users of that infrastructure beyond 2050.
Transmission costs.
If so, solar continually supplies power without paying for an input vs a backup generator which is only meant to run infrequently and is costly to run and requires you to pay for inputs and of course maintenance of an ICE.
It's kinda an apples/oranges comparison
Why do you say this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
What you are talking about is the Payback Period (PP) or Return on Investment (ROI) which is more important to homeowners adding a solar plant to their homes.
Both of these types of measure take into account both capital and operating expenses.
Excess renewable power is great but it creates a problem and the cost of that problem is not borne by the generators that created the problem.
What LCOE captures in this context is that solar panels are cheap and that the fuel cost is zero.
The average price of electricity is greatly affected by this, which is why electricity is Europe is generally more expensive than in North America.
Edit - the response below is also incomplete. The trouble with modelling the cost of balancing the power grid is that it depends on many variables, many of which are difficult to forecast. The primary challenge with depending on the weather for power generation is that the climate is changing. What that change looks like in 20 years is impossible to forecast. A great example is from the winter o 2023, during the "dunkelflaute" in europe. Both wind and solar power generation were low for three days.
The estimates for solar plus battery storage typically only account for eight or twelve hours of storage.
EG: > Solar photovoltaic $1,327 $1,333–2,743 $31–146 12–30% > Solar PV with storage $1,748 $2,044 $53–81 20–31%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
What do you think this means? It doesn't mean what you think it means.
Quoting LCOE and ignoring system costs disqualifies you for any discussion on this topic, sorry.
I appreciate his ability to talk renewables for almost an hour and barely mention climate change. This video has a bit of a twist ending, but he gives you a solid out before he becomes political if you're showing it to someone who won't be receptive to that messaging.
So long as you've built the infrastructure and kept it maintained, the energy continues to come. With fossil fuels, you have to build turbines, then you have to remove it from the earth, then you have to ship it to said turbines, then you burn it and it's gone.
It's not just gone. It becomes a debt that everyone has to pay.
https://youtu.be/Zgxb8I1nk2I
Are they against solar subsidies or other policy provisions? It’s hard to understand someone who is against passive energy collection.
They're mainlining paid propaganda from the fossil fuel industry. Same dynamic that made people defend cigarettes into the late 90s.
Nuclear is fine, but very expensive and very slow to deploy.
Because it’s too expensive so needs peaker plants. Or batteries.
Why not just gas?
Because it’s too expensive.
One understandable (not saying it's good, just understandable) reason is if your business is selling electricity from a source more expensive than solar. Which is just about every source.
I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc.
This generally isn't how markets or economics works. If power generation isn't profitable, many companies will just stop doing it. Prices will rise, making it attractive to more companies to do it.
Power generation will still be profitable in my imagined scenario, just not from selling the raw electricity as a product.
Luckily there are several industries that make more money the cheaper electricity is, so there is some market pull in that direction already. Data centers tend to cluster around places with cheap power and/or cold climates, for example.
Consider roads. Having free access to road networks generates enormous value for society, much more than if we had tried to extract tolls on every road.
I think the same should apply for electricity. Free or nearly free access to electricity is likely to create value that far outweighs the value generated by selling electricity.
The existing power-selling industry will of course fight this every chance they get.
> The net result: Pornainen fulfilled all of its municipal climate targets with a single installation. Oil use dropped 100 percent, emissions fell 70 percent, and woodchip combustion was cut by 60 percent. According to the Mayor of the Municipality of Pornainen, Antti Kuusela, the municipality now heats all its public buildings, including a new sports arena opening in September 2026, entirely through this district heating network.
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/sand-battery-polar...
>During the coldest, most expensive stretch, the wood chip boiler became the primary unit, and the sand battery supplemented it.
Remarkably: heat is pointed to as "wasted energy" when doing EROEI analysis and discounted, this is done to strengthen the case for Solar vs Gas.
Finland's energy mix is ~6% solar [1]... maybe it's not a larger portion of the grid supply because Finns realize it doesn't work in the winter?
[1] https://www.iea.org/countries/finland/energy-mix
In any case, Finland does not really use fossil fuels for electricity generation anymore. There is some cogeneration, where heat is the primary output, and reserve power plants that are only used in exceptional situations. Electricity is largely a solved problem, but it's proving harder to get rid of fossil fuels in heating and transportation.
And it's quite compact.
> And only covers heat.
Is that not useful?
And the Finns put a priority on staying warm. For normal electrical generation, they largely use wind with a growing solar fraction.
Until battery tech gets (and maybe even after) it's a good idea to build some nuclear too.
Grid inertia is literally maintained by hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal spinning at 50 or 60 hz.
So as the grid moves towards solar and wind, it loses inertia. Solar has no inertia and wind is lightweight compared to baseload plants.
This makes the grid more sensitive to another that can cause the frequency to fall or rise, which will trigger automatic protections.
It takes longer to become an issue in large interconnected grids, but on islands it's like the leading cause of blackouts.
One badly timed cloud means problem, unless you can instantly replace the energy lost through other means.
With thermal power plants the inertia of the generator spinning gave utilities enough time to start up other generators. With solar and wind that's gone, hence the rise of grid batteries.
So then solar/wind costs should include ALL related costs, including grid batteries and such, and often it doesn't. And thus you get people who are against it for honestly a very good reason.
That said I love solar and run fully off grid, but I ain't deluded to think my island can go 100% green. Diesel will stay for now.
I do wonder if using solar to run huge heavy flywheels connected to generators can help with the interia issue.
Most projects today are solar+battery or just battery alone, so inertia is no longer a blocker, it's just part of designing the project right.
Here is a "Practical Engineering" video on the topic, mentioning that your concern is real: https://youtu.be/7G4ipM2qjfw?si=qfVymRpKFpuexQF_
And here is a more recent video about how Australia runs on a ton of solar with no issues thanks to grid-forming inverters: https://youtu.be/qavFbOpt4jA?si=dlkEEN4sZLCv2os5
a lot of opinions were made about solar when solar heating was the primary approach, vs today's chinese PVs
Nowadays, panels are sitting at roughly 20% and heat pumps have a coefficient of performance around 4x. If you need a battery round trip, you are right about the 70% point and you now have electricity which is more generally useful than low grade heat.
Those 40 year old decisions, as you say, have had several decades of ossification, though, so it is hard to uproot them.
Some people just want the world to burn…
I always try to point out that, after all of the "environmental damage" done to create the solar panels, the panels will exist for 30 years before they can be recycled into new panels. Whereas, after all of the environmental damage done to produce gas and coal, it will lead to a one time use only energy output that has to be repeated until the end of time.
It makes zero sense environmentally or cost-wise to prefer fossil fuels.
I've coined the phrase True Bird Lover. Someone who's never seen a picture of a bird covered in an oil slick from the Exxon Valdez and wants to tell everyone how bad windmills are.
I live next to 200+ acres of solar farms. A part of me cries a little when I see so much beautiful land and trees cut down and these lifeless panels taking up so much space. We have so many buildings, and structures already (think parking decks, tops of apartments, homes, offices, even parking lots) that we could put these, but instead we cut down acres of trees or use up perfectly usable farmland.
Credit to our current system, if there was a need to cut back, we have a lot of easy cuts to gain some wiggle room.
Where are you seeing healthy forests or other "beautiful land" being destroyed for solar farms? There's plenty of low-yield farmland and other similar land that's already been denatured by industry out there, lots of which already has major transmission infrastructure nearby, beautiful land tends to be expensive, and clearing trees costs money. It just doesn't make sense to do something like that outside of isolated areas where there's no other choice.
Here in the midwestern US every single solar or wind farm I've seen has either been on active farmland, former farmland, or a corporate/university campus.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
It's still farmland! They're just farming energy now.
You can absolutely do agriculture near oil and gas wells. I grew up next to land routinely leased to ranchers. That land was spotted with lots of active oil and gas wells. The cows would eat our flowers whenever they got out due to the oil company leaving gates improperly secured. Today I drive past fields of sorghum, corn, and wheat with little spots where active wells operate. Once drilled they usually don't take that much space to operate.
Of course that energy generation comes with the caveat of being variable with sun and wind. It can still be a net benefit to the grid but the variability means alternative energy sources are still needed.
The cost trend of installing solar/wind plus enough storage capacity to provide steady grid power will eventually cross over to also being cheaper than other sources of energy. At which point the only reason to be against it is if you prefer artificially subsidizing another energy source.
Maybe I’m too optimistic :)
The rub with "solar is cheaper" is that those values are almost always calculated using an ideal environment. Solar is cheapest when you are using flat barren land in Arizona where an acre costs $500, the sun shines 330 days a year, you are bulk buying 750 MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is a single rubber stamp. Those are the numbers that ultimately trickle to headlines.
Things get much more complicated (read: expensive), when you are in the North East, an acre costs $12,000, the sun shines 170 days a year, you're bulk buying a few dozen MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is 6 different government bodies full of permits and assessments.
In that situation, a gas plant that produces 10x more power on 10x less land becomes very appealing to people who are already getting crushed by soaring electricity bills. (My take: we're just going to have to deal with higher costs).
So I am all with you on abandoning fossil fuels, but to someone who is firmly in gas camp, they will have legitimate ground to stand on when balking at costs. "It's cheaper" is unfortunately not all encompassing.
As it is, in the coldest periods of winter you will at times see the ISO-NE grid running on 40% oil because we don't have enough natural gas pipeline capacity to run all of the gas plants and meet natural gas heating demands. So many of the gas plants have to kick back over to burning oil.
And not buying something tends to be cheaper than buying :)
This means that millions and millions of machines have to be maintained, shipping lanes have to stay open, infrastructure has to stay profitable, distribution has to stay easy and cheap. The web is invisible to the end user, but it is massively complicated and expensive to upkeep.
Solar, once you have the panels you have to clean them every once in a while, and replace a failing panel every once in a while. But they produce for ~30 years after being made once.
So it’s funny to argue about environmental waste in this way. It’s an issue, but everything in a solar panel can basically be recycled and we are seeing the facilities start to come online as the first wave of PV panels starts dying off.
- Using old data - the price of renewables and storage technology have fallen through the floor but bad actors are quite happy to use outdated numbers to convince you that they're not cheap
- Ignoring existing downsides - renewables have issues and we shouldn't forget that, but it's easy to forget what we're replacing. e.g. Lithium mines are environmentally unfriendly, but you dig it out of the ground and turn it into a battery once (and bonus - it's recyclable). Oil and gas must be continually dug out of the ground and burned
- But China... - I don't think most people realise quite how quickly the rest of the world is pushing on with renewables
1. Take statistics from any of these excellent solar power plants for, say, five years time span
2. Find the worst week in terms of energy production in these statistics
3. Explain to the renewable energy skeptic how this 20+ times drop in productivity will be compensated for users
4. The skeptic is successfully convinced and becomes a renewable energy proponent
- removes nasty geopolitical dependencies on eg gulf state oil and gas; costs are more predictable
- easier to plan and build because the base units are much smaller
Variability remains a valid objection, to which the main answer today is "batteries. Lots of batteries. And other cheaper longer duration storage, like sand heat storage, vanadium flow, and good old pumped hydro."
Ensure that the prices decrease for people with existing contracts. The hatred comes from people being told that it's better and cheaper now while the price is significantly higher than before.
If I didn't have solar panels on my roof that basically cover all my energy needs, I'd be absolutely furious seeing politicians pat themselves on the back for shutting down nuclear power plants and talking about how energy is now cheaper at some foreign exchange where I can not buy while I pay more and more every month.
Ignore them because it doesn't matter.
Physics causes finance, which causes politics ... and their politics will immediately change when the finance crosses whatever threshold they happen to be anchored to.
That's different for different people and different situations but you can be sure it will happen. Those people will not pay markedly higher electrical bills or have a (relative) doubling of their cars TCO for their politics.
Just be patient.
First is technological advancement. It seems solar and wind and the supporting technologies, including battery storage and grid firming, are advancing very fast to become cheaper, more powerful, and more reliable. What was a reasonable argument ~15 years ago might actually be out of date today. To form a reasonable argument for today, you need to know the types of hardware, costs, and specs for what's on the market today.
Second is that the recent improvements are all independent capitalistic companies building things for their own profit. They're not going to do things that are unprofitable, and if they did, they'd go out of business pretty fast. It is fair to criticize pushes by Government and activists to build this stuff, since both of them have advocated for unprofitable things plenty of times and suffer no consequences if the things they push are a terrible or unworkable idea. When it's an independent company, though, it's none of our business. I'm for success and functional systems, not ideology; if you want to build this stuff, believe you can make a profit doing so, and take ownership of the consequences if you are wrong or fail, then by all means go to it, and I'll cheer if you succeed.
So can sun, but that's why we build both where that's unusual. We've got plenty of stats and data gathering on where it's reliably sunny/windy enough.
can you be more specific and give 10 examples of german solar plants that produce ~0W electricity in a year?
they might be a lot more productive than you think
They paid for that by selling most of their industry to China because energy costs became unbearable.
Was this the right tradeoff?
But we live in an imperfect world.
I'm curious how true this is anymore. It sure feels like as the globe heats up we're getting windier and windier.
The problem is every good argument for renewables will always inevitably have someone come up with some kind of counterpoint that on the surface may seem reasonable to those without the time or inclination to deeply research it all.
Energy is complicated.
FWIW I agree with a sibling poster who said to just say "its cheaper".
I don't know why people would be "against" solar and wind. Even if they think global warning is a hoax, at a certain point (which was like 10 years ago) they're the cheapest option. So why not use them?
let me guess... they sell oil?
That documentary is about QAnon (not about the "Flat Earth" per se) but it helps you understand that "But that's nonsense" is the point. I call this "Facts Aren't True" because that's the core of the idea. They don't like facts, the facts are uncomfortable, they can make up a better truth which does make them comfortable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
Its all electrons how did we get here jesus.
Increasing utility energy prices worked for me. I wasn't anti-solar, but it didn't seem worthwhile for me. When the utility price doubled over three years (or just about), the math makes sense now. I'm not looking for solar to acheive grid independence though, I already have a whole house generator for that, because utility power is two nines reliable around here.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/sooner-than-you-think-electricity
https://www.volts.wtf/p/giving-clean-electricity-a-political
The money men have no moral attachment to any source so given how cheap this mix has gotten it basically wins.
* I'd point out without China and its Leninist command economy (as well as publicly funded research) getting the price of these technologies down to where it is now we'd still be doomed, but we are where we are so now the system necessarily will act in its own self interest to use the basically free energy. Is it going to be enough at this stage? Who knows, but I see reasons to be optimistic.
Maybe not even then. Some still refuse to believe the Earth is round. They can die before they admit they were wrong.
Yes, down with Big Sun
Pretty easy sell for me.
Sounds like they have more serious issues going on there... :-)
First would be to be clear and unambiguous when it comes to building gas/oil thermal power plants in order to deal with the intermittence problem of solar and wind. Political strategies in wind and solar is built on trust, and people will quickly become unconvinced when politicians are dishonest/ambiguous about the requirements that is needed to support a grid with a high ratio of wind and solar.
Using fossil fuels as the reserve energy for when the weather is bad allows the producers of reserve energy to demand high market prices, to the point where a whole month in EU can cost as much as a full year. Even if solar and wind would put the grid costs to zero for 90% of the time, it doesn't make the cost for the consumer any lower if the fossil fueled "reserve energy" can increase their price by 10x. Selling solar and wind require some kind of solution here.
Reserve energy also want to be paid if they are expected to stand-by 365 days a week, which is a big reason why EU subsidizes to fossil fueled thermal power plants are not decreasing when the ratio of wind and solar goes up. That costs is then added as a grid fee/taxes, hiding the true cost. Paying first to keep the fossil fueled power plants warm and ready when solar and wind is producing, and then pay them a second time for whatever the market price is when they are producing is a very costly way to operate a grid.
And last is the transmission costs. Switching between multiple different energy sources depending on the weather has a high demand for a very flexible infrastructure in terms of transmitting energy from where it is being produced to where it is being consumed. In south of Sweden as an example, the cost of transmission infrastructure and the cost of reserve energy is now the majority of consumers electricity bill, with cost associated with production of energy being a small minority.
Solving those issues is what will convince people of the viability of wind and solar.
They mainly argue against it on residential & farm land (Midwest USA) for this reason.
I've never seen "heavy metals" conspiracies, though I'm sure if I just wait I'll run into some because people sure do like making up reasons good things are bad...
So someone watching that has strong opinions about renewables that is hard to overcome.
it will be adopted when the money speaks. the good news is that money is a reasonably close proxy to "environmental benefit" (balancing the environmental costs of green infra production versus dirtiness of gas generation)
I can see this for wind, but not solar. PV turns sunlight into electrical energy. The whole damp rock gets sunlight on the outside, why not build panels anywhere?
For wind yeah, if you live one of those boring flat places which gets tornadoes a wind turbine is definitely a bad idea, it won't make much energy and then a tornado turns it into scrap and possibly destroys nearby things with chunks of debris.
Because there's better alternatives same places. Norway has legendary well-suited topography for hydro power (>90% of electricity), and it's reliably windy (>8% of electricity). It's also so far north that the sun doesn't shine very much for half the year, and it's notoriously cloudy.
So yes, it will probably never make much sense to build a lot of solar panels in Norway. Same for Greenland, Iceland (substitute geothermal), and probably some parts of Canada, Alaska and Southern Argentina.
But also, yes, there's almost nobody living in those places. They're not terribly relevant in the grand scheme of things. Probably significantly less than 50M people in total.
Solar works a bit better when consumption patterns is the opposite, and the output is more reliable.
An other similar available strategy would be to turn the Mediterranean Sea into a massive hydro power dam by turning the Strait of Gibraltar into the world largest power plant. Combined with solar and wind, it could act as the storage for the whole of Europe and Africa, and the energy is similar to solar completely free.
Wind turbines are designed to be aerodynamically loaded on purpose. The blades can pitch arbitrarily to compensate for unwanted loads in the axial flow direction, but beyond a certain point it doesn't matter anymore because wind can do a lot of other things.
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/tarrant-county/the-t...
> Before March 28, 2000, a tornado had never collided with a skyscraper.
> Bank One Tower sat, rotting. The Fort Worth Fire Department declared the building a fire hazard, forcing the Bass family to replace the plywood planks with fireproof metal.
for both wind and solar, they're also quite taxing on the environment during manufacturing. the "true cost" is rarely reported.
nuclear energy has a different set of problems (including social / political ones). here's that industry's take on the economics of wind energy: https://www.ans.org/news/article-638/the-economics-of-wind-p...
Wind power had dropped in price about 70% since then. Notably going from being more expensive than fossil fuels to substantially cheaper.
What power source isn't?
Compared to what? Are these people in the oil industry, by any chance?
PV is getting on the range where it pays for itself in 3 or 4 years. If somebody is just "against it", well, I have to agree with the sibling that said you can't reason with that person.
Do people people really hate sun and clouds and stuff?
Or are they against the physical capture of geographical processes? ...
I've heard "muh birds" a few times. Ironically, it seems only those who eat chicken who seem to be worried about it :/
What California and others have shown is that you can replace natural gas peaker plants (literally - tear out natural gas turbines) with batteries and get both superior cost dynamics and "dispatchability" (aka turning them on and off). Batteries have millisecond level dispatch, peaker plants have hours level dispatch.
A question might be "why is it woke?"
And if it's because libtards like it, then you can point out that libtards like coffee, beer, sports, etc -- so when will they boycott those?
Sure, sometimes people haven't reasoned themselves into positions, and won't simply be reasoned out of them. But understanding others' epistemology is still the first step to changing minds.
I'm guessing about those people. It's very clear that renewable energy is considered to be a liberal ideology by those that oppose renewable energy.
> Sure, sometimes people haven't reasoned themselves into positions, and won't simply be reasoned out of them. But understanding others' epistemology is still the first step to changing minds.
Both of your points are true but in effect are a contradiction to the original discussion. The moment somebody uses the word woke non-ironically as a reasoning point they are beyond reasoned discussion (at least from my experience). It's beyond vexing because there's no room for real dialog, just talking past each other.
This isn't those things at all.
More so, could you hazard a guess why those friends would be categorically against renewables?
> Woke is an adjective derived from African-American English used since the 1930s or earlier to refer to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction stay woke. [1]
> Cultural Marxism is a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory that misrepresents Western Marxism (especially the Frankfurt School) as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness. [2]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
The second one is... I don't know how to debate someone who quotes Wikipedia like this. It's not what I said. That article looks incredibly one-sided, and uses fallacies of the "You think snow is white? Did you know Adolph Hitler thought snow was white?" persuasion.
But wind?? Huge nature areas are destroyed by beton fundaments, rotors break, and just in germany was a scandal lately about recycling, as the first structures need to be renewed.
Electricity only accounts for roughly 20-25% of all power / energy used and the vast majority of the remaining 75% is fueled by gas (cars, ships, heating, construction, ect.)
The internal combustion engine is not a very efficient way to convert fuel into movement, its key benefit was that it is compact enough to put inside the vehicle itself. A steam train was more efficient, and steam boats were more efficient still, but those are both enormous so it was seen as a more reasonable option for these vehicles. So an EV transition actually doesn't mean that much more electrical generation compared to much less fossil fuel production.
If steel went back to say, twice the price of bronze, I think recycling makes a lot more sense and that means far less need for new steel production.
Recycling will make sense if steel becomes much more expensive, but a future with really expensive steel is not what we should be aiming for.
Residential heating in particular would use anywhere between a third to half the energy, if we only transitioned to heat pumps.
The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential... | https://archive.today/lp9pZ - June 20th, 2024
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-export-data/
You're disregarding the culture wars for which science, and even economics, seem to offer no respite.
Green Debt Sales Hit Record Levels Despite Climate Backlash - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-25/green-deb... | https://archive.today/BrLlK - December 25th, 2025
> Investors have piled into climate-friendly assets this year despite policy and regulatory rollbacks in the US and Europe, as artificial intelligence drives a boom in energy infrastructure demand. Global green bond and loan issuance has reached a record $947 billion so far this year, with Asia-Pacific companies and government-linked issuers raising $261 billion from green debt. Green investments are increasingly becoming viewed as core infrastructure and industrial plays, with clearer policy signals and an expected increase in global electricity demand lifting investor optimism. Global green bond and loan issuance has reached a record $947 billion so far this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence. That’s as stock market gauges for renewables are set for their first annual gains since 2020, outperforming the S&P 500 by a wide margin, while shares of power-grid technology companies remain in favor.
There’s a $10 Trillion Antidote to Trump’s Climate Backlash - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-climate-tech-investm... | https://archive.today/m0xg1 - November 4th, 2025
> Annual energy transition investment surpassed $2 trillion for the first time in 2024, more than double the rate in 2020, according to research by BloombergNEF examining the deployment of net zero-aligned technologies and infrastructure.
I do not believe that economics will win in 10-20 years if the U.S. government continues its current path, at least not to the "100% clean energy" level.
"This too shall pass." Existing coal will retire eventually. Let them be passionate if they wish, as comfort, but the outcome will not change. This administration has an expiration date.
https://www.sierraclub.org/coal/coal-plant-map
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67427
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/591b44aa8dd144719e059...
https://www.wsaz.com/2026/02/13/7-mines-idle-resulting-loss-...
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-trump-has-overseen-more...
> In response, the Trump administration has recently invoked legislation designed for wartime emergencies to force a number of uneconomic coal plants to remain open.
> Despite Trump’s efforts, clean energy made up 96% of the new electricity generation capacity added to the US grid in 2025. None of the new capacity came from coal power.
So it really depends on who is counting and how. I do think transportation and heating use more energy than the grid, but I was never able to get a definitive number. (My best guess is it's close to 2 times larger.)
Also, electricity to transportation conversion is usually only around 80% efficient. Making electricity portable has a cost.
Trump Offers Funds for First New U.S. Coal Plants in 13 Years
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/climate/trump-coal-plants...
What I mean is say the grid demands 100. The grid is powered entirely by coal. You give it 120 for 20% redundancy. This is extremely reliable.
The grid demand is now 120. You now need 144 for 20% redundancy. You dont want to use coal. So you add solar and batteries.
Batteries are great because they normalize the volatility of solar generation over time, but they do not make solar truly on demand. So if you add 24 solar to the 120 coal you are increasing the risk on the grid. What often happens is you add 24 solar but you have 24 coal as a backup. Ideally the real-world use will be solar but in case of downtime your grid will not fail.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/30/california-lowest-whole...
So you already have some spare capacity on the system.
If your demand peak was summer air con, then adding the solar makes the system more stable. This can be seen in a few grids that issue less grid warnings in summer now.
Not to mention solar contributed to more than 15 % of Indian summer demand which is crazily high due to 40+ degree temperature during the heat wave Solar that too decentralised is a massive boon
Yes, for places with sizeable hydropower. You simply hold the water for longer.
Probably yes, for places where the need for redundancy is rare. Natural gas peaker plants are cheaper to build and simpler to operate with the tradeoff of being less efficient than combined cycle plants.
Not everywhere is California, but solar and batteries are the cheapest form of generation in 90%+ of the world [5]. You simply keep building more solar collection, storage, transmission, etc. to orchestrate collecting this "fusion at a distance" and distributing it to loads. The sun rises every day, and will for our lifetimes. We continue to deploy batteries and solar at manufacturing capacity, while continuing to increase manufacturing capacity year over year. You fill any gaps with fossil generation until there are no longer any gaps to fill [6].
Tangentially, Australia is currently testing a battery with a 8 hour discharge capability [7] ("Long-Duration Energy Storage (LDES)"), as they are rapidly preparing for a network/team of battery storage facilities to assume grid health responsibility from their retiring thermal coal generators [8]. Certainly there is much work ahead in understanding and developing longer duration energy storage systems.
[1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/live/fi...
[2] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
[3] 21GW of Solar for California Land That Can No Longer Be Used for Agriculture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488648 - January 2026
[4] https://valleycleaninfrastructureplan.com/
[5] Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... - June 21st, 2025
[6] Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47615756 - April 2026 (149 comments)
[7] https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/australias-first...
[8] https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineerin...
(think in systems)
> ... Not everywhere is California, but solar and batteries are the cheapest form of generation in 90%+ of the world [5].
... Then why is electricity so expensive there compared to the US average?
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/30/california-lowest-whole...
Retail prices are of course super high in California, but that has nothing to do with generation.
California is a massive state, has very rugged terrain, and there's a ton of deferred maintenance on transmission lines that are more than 50 years old, that are at huge risk of causing massive wildfires that destroy entire towns.
This has been terribly mismanaged, because like most places with regulated monopoly utilities, the regulatory body is opaque and not very responsive to the needs of the public.
The utility doesn't make money on electricity generation costs, but it does get to take a fixed rate of profit from grid infrastructure costs. So the obvious game for a for-profit regulated monopoly utility is to jack up the grid costs as high as possible, try to snow the regulators to possible cheaper alternatives, and rake in more money.
I remember one case where PG&E got approval to charge for grid maintenance, spent hundreds of millions, had ~$100M leftover, then declared "oh we did it cheaper than we expected, executive bonuses all around the C-suite with the extra!" And then we had multi-billion dollar wildfires the following year.
Utilities are not normal businesses, they make more money by increasing their input costs. (See also the US healthcare system where incentives are similarly perverse... Insurance company profits are capped at a fixe percentage of health care expenditures, so the route to more profit is to increase health care expenditures.)
Of my decades in California, there's been a single gubernatorial candidate with deep knowledge of the grid and how to fix the regulatory structure, and it's the governor who actually appoints people to the regulatory board of the utilities, so the governor and their appointees have the power to fix this. That gubernatorial candidate was Tom Steyer, and he had/has fantastic plans, but I fear he just lost the primary:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/tom-steyer-wants-to-be-californias
Go and compare the rates from a non-pg&e distributor (eg SMUD in sac) and you'll see, supply is cheap enough and it doesnt have to be this way.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[2] "Where’s all the f&$#ing money going?" The Waste and Costs of American Utilities - https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/wheres-all-the-f-and-ing-... - May 22nd, 2026
Why wouldn't "existing solar is cheaper than existing coal, and existing coal is not required to meet demand" result in coal plants shutting down?
I don't get why people feel the need to just start lying when talking about renewables. It's probably a large reason why people are always skeptical of 'rewnewables are cheaper than x' claims.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2026/02/27/ch...
A lot of us know why the US is behind in wind and solar. It's because of a five letter word that starts with "T".
Do better, America.
Solar power increased by a record 636 TWh to reach 2,778 TWh in 2025, a 30% increase from 2024.
Wind saw the second-largest increase, growing 205 TWh (+8.2%)
Driven by record solar growth, low-carbon power generation increased by 887 TWh in 2025, outpacing electricity demand growth of 849 TWh. Solar power alone met 75% of the net increase in electricity demand. Together with wind, the two sources met almost all (99%) demand growth.
For the first time in 100 years, renewables (33.8%, 10,730 TWh) overtook coal power (33.0%, 10,476 TWh) in the global electricity mix as continued rapid growth in solar and wind pushed the share of renewables above a third of global generation. Coal power dropped 63 TWh (-0.6%) in 2025, marking the first fall since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Combined with continued electricity demand growth, this meant coal fell below a third of global generation for the first time in history.
For comparison, I have collated information from the International Atomic Energy Agency's Power Reactor Information System. The fastest that nuclear power generation ever grew was 213 TWh added in 1985. Since the year 2000, the fastest growth year was 2004, with 111 TWh added.
[1] https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electric...
I mean, there is money to be made. CATL stock (the major producer of EV batteries with 50% market share, with billions of contracts for stationary batteries) rose 48.81% over the last 6 months, for example.
But I agree that news about renewables goes unnoticed. I only see news about renewables because I actively seek out channels and websites that cover it. I wonder if it is because most companies in the industry are Chinese and don't focus on PR in the West as AI companies do.
Ah well, we'll get there eventually.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/wind-generation
https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
https://electrek.co/2026/02/23/texas-is-about-to-overtake-ca...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/battery-storage-is-...
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-solar-installa...
One of the short-term issues in the US is going to be that a lot of utilities depend on natural gas and natural gas prices are going to keep rising beyond whatever happens in the Persian Gulf because of increased LNG exports (that directly raises domestic prices) and the increased use of gas turbines for AI data centers. Plus all the consumers are going to pay for the infrastructure buildout for electricity for those data centers.
So, despite a large Y/Y solar increase in the US, electricity prices are only going up.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/chart/36117/electricity-generated-b...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48393661
Incredible gobsmacking amount of stored energy on display here. Great to see. https://bsky.app/profile/neilgrant.bsky.social/post/3mneo3to...
I raise this point since policymakers get confused and try to ban gas, only to realize how critical gas is for food & industrial applications that consumers enjoy after the fact.
But I think you're wrong to think that gas is "critical" to any of the things you've listed. "Currently used" ... yes. "Not replaceable by electricity" ... no (unlike, e.g. air travel).
Electrical heat using heat pumps is cheaper than in-situ heating with any fossil fuel because (a) the base price per unit of energy is (or certainly can be) lower (b) the coefficient of performance is higher.
There are obviously costs to changing heating systems. But that doesn't mean that a gas heating system cannot be replaced by an electrical one.
China gets it, the USA doesn't.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/climate/offshore-wind-gas...
or delaying standard approvals
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/climate/wind-solar-projec...
It’s actually funny if you don’t think about it too hard. The U.S. president is trying to make us more reliant on fossil fuels, while starting a war in Iran that’s led to the global fossil fuel market to be negatively impacted, forcing most Americans to pay more for fossil fuels. Who could have seen that coming? We’re doing great!
the biggest producer of renewables is Texas, by a longshot. and the state of california just created insane NEM laws that favor the pockets of pg&e (and are shit for the environment) and as a result solar home installations have cratered.
That doesn't refute the point at all.
Yes. But administration opposition can change that math, as they have with the tariffs.
I think NEM 3.0 incentivises storage now? Which seems to be what the (California) grid is looking for.
At the end of the day, the best case scenario is large scale renewable / battery storage to bring costs down as much as possible, and for those of us who want battery backup / solar can choose to invest in it, but it shouldn't be "the" solution.
Versus 35% YOY in China.
China gets it, the USA doesn't.
The best is to hope that this is an unstoppable trend
The trend is the USA choosing politics over reality as China becomes unstoppable.
https://carboncredits.com/china-adds-power-7x-more-than-the-...
It's "choosing" short term profits because its leadership (and its voters) have given up on long term stable trade and planning, and instead embraced oligarchy and rentier capitalism.
You can't parasitize solar and wind. There's few to no middlemen. No way to monopolize it. So it must be discouraged while you extract the last few years of wealth out of the assets you already control.
China is moving very fast on clean power. But total energy is still very fossil-heavy, about 78%: 51.4% coal, about 26.9% other fossil fuels, calculated as the remaining share after coal and non-fossil, and 21.7% non-fossil in 2025, based on official Chinese figures.
The U.S. is about 82% fossil overall, so roughly comparable to China’s ~78%, just in a different way. Much less coal now, around 8%, but a lot of oil and gas: petroleum about 38%, natural gas about 36%, according to EIA’s 2024 summary.
For electricity, China was around 11% solar and 11% wind in 2025, according to China’s 2025 Statistical Communiqué. The U.S. was around 9% solar, including rooftop and other small-scale solar, and around 10% wind in 2025, according to EIA.
Nuclear is a major difference in the electricity mix: about 18% of U.S. electricity generation versus roughly 5% in China, based on EIA and China’s 2025 Statistical Communiqué.
And yes, EIA is not a typo for IEA EIA is the U.S. Energy Information Administration, whereas IEA is the International Energy Agency.
Compare generation stats for yesterday between 2021 and 2026 on the Texas grid (ERCOT)
* 2021 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/ercot?date=2021-06-03
* 2026 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/ercot?date=2026-06-03
Also, the Californian grid (CAISO) shows where everyone is headed with a huge deployment of batteries:
* 2021 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso?date=2021-06-03
* 2026 - https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso?date=2026-06-03
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...
> As of April 1, 2026, renewable energy’s share of total US utility-scale (>1 MW) generating capacity was 33.6%. EIA projects this to grow to 36.6% by March 31, 2027. Utility-scale solar will add 42,626.1 MW, expanding its share from 12.8% to 15.7%, while wind will grow by 14,157.4 MW (including 4,155.0 MW of offshore wind), increasing from 13.0% to 13.6%. The mix of other renewables (hydropower, biomass, and geothermal) will add 297.1 MW.
> The capacity of battery storage was 42 GW at the end of 2025 and is expected to double and reach 85 GW by the end of 2027.
In terms of the general population or politicians, some more than others. This is also with an administration that is irrationally hostile to renewables.
1. https://electrek.co/2026/05/26/renewables-installed-capacity...
And while the extreme right wing propaganda claims that Germany is doomed because of the Energiewende for the last 20 years or so, it is somehow still the third largest economy.
US manufacturers and consumers just love the added cost --- aka, inflation.
https://www.steel.org/2026/03/steel-imports-up-4-6-in-januar...
I want to feed the balcony solar o/p back to the grid and not have a off grid system
Meanwhile I bought a 25W solar panel and a controller and am going to make a solar charger to charge my powerbanks
the spite is the point
(do we survive past 2029? are you sure? I'm not)
https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/trump-to-invoke-...
It was a mistake to shut down the working nuclear power plants, and that also coincided with the abrupt loss of all (cheap) gas from Russia. Now, the country imports expensive LNG and renewables generate something like 80% on a good day - but thanks to merit order, the most expensive form of power generation sets the price and that is gas.
It doesn't help that thanks to shifts in industry, the grid has to be re-developed north->south instead of west->east and south-north. NIMBYism is rampant in Germany, so new high-voltage lines can take decades. Meanwhile, renewable capacity has to be shutdown if the transmission capacity of the grid cannot keep up during windy, sunny days.
Things are slowly improving what with grid-scale batteries coming online, and one major north-south connection being done. But yeah, it's going to take years still, and if our current governing coalition have their say, it's going to take even longer.
Another way is using excess green energy to produce green hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel source in very high energy scenarios.
Past that, we recently have made electric arc furnaces and electric smelting furnaces for steel and aluminum, and several of these are fully solar powered.
It’s a shift to change the energy source for industrial production, but we have the technology and the ability. And the sun is free!
Folks operating businesses that depend on oil prices would know these tricks?
when energy is scarce, you drop the rock on your head