Yeah, the technology connections video on this was fantastic. If one was to cover that land in solar, you’d produce far more than the current energy demands of the US.
Relying on an energy source which requires constant, continuous resource extraction is fucking stupid when we can spend resources up front and get reliable energy (solar + battery) for decades with minimal operating cost & maintenance. And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction.
The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time. It’s the same reason EV’s make up a far larger share of new car sales than a percentage of overall cars, EV’s sucked 20+ years ago yet there are a lot of 20+ year old cars on the road.
The US stopped building coal power plants over a decade ago but we still have a lot of them. Meanwhile we’ve mostly been building solar, which eventually means we’ll have a mostly solar grid but that’s still decades away.
> The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time
This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do. It is reasonable that when someone gives up a couple of things because that person is rich (rich as in a person in the developed world) the sacrifice is more or less acceptable.
Now change environment and think that these sacrifices are way worse. Even worse than that: that has more implications in conservative cultures where, whether you like it or not, showing "muscle" (wealth) is socially important for them to reach other soccial layers that will make their lives easier.
But giving up those things is probably a very bad choice for their living.
America cannot be compared to South East Asia economically speaking, for example. So the comparison of the coal centrals is not even close.
A salary in Vietnam is maybe 15 million VND for many people. With that you can hardly live in some areas. It is around 600 usd.
It also started importing liquid natural gas in 2023.
But it has abundant sunlight, access to low cost Chinese solar panels that will produce electricity for decades instead of being burned once, and a substantial domestic photovoltaic manufacturing industry of its own.
"Renewable Energy Investments in Vietnam in 2024 – Asia’s Next Clean Energy Powerhouse" (June 2024)
In 2014, the share of renewable energy in Vietnam was just 0.32%. In 2015, only 4 megawatts (MW) of installed solar capacity for power generation was available. However, within five years, investment in solar energy, for example, soared.
As of 2020, Vietnam had over 7.4 gigawatts (GW) of rooftop solar power connected to the national grid. These renewable energy numbers surpassed all expectations. It marked a 25-fold increase in installed capacity compared to 2019’s figures.
In 2021, the data showed that Vietnam now has 16.5 GW of solar power. This was accompanied by its green energy counterpart wind at 11.8 GW. A further 6.6 GW is expected in late 2021 or 2022. Ambitiously, the government plans to further bolster this by adding 12 GW of onshore and offshore wind by 2025.
These growth rates are actually much faster than growth rates in the US.
> This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do.
The general premise of investments is that you end up with fewer resources by not doing them.
It now costs less to install a new solar or wind farm than to continue using an existing coal plant, much less if you were considering building a new coal plant, and that includes the cost of capital, i.e. the interest you have to pay to borrow the money for the up-front investment.
Poorer countries would be at a slight disadvantage if they have to pay higher than average interest rates to borrow money, but they also have the countervailing advantage of having lower labor and real estate costs and the net result is that it still doesn't make sense for anybody to continue to use coal for any longer than it takes to build the replacement.
It just takes more than zero days to replace all existing infrastructure.
That's why it will require a functional government who can use taxes responsibly to make the technology affordable to everyone. The US had a pretty good start until one man decided to stop and try to reverse any progress made.
Trump's animus against wind in particular is definitely specific to the man. He was annoyed by a wind farm in Scotland. Trump of course thinks he's one of those old fashioned kings† (and the US has been annoyingly willing to go along with that, how are those "checks and balances" and your "co-equal branches of government" working out for you?) and so he thought the local government would go along with his whims and prohibit the wind farm but they did not.
I'm sure there's some degree of vested interest in protecting fossil energy because it means very concentrated profits in a way that renewables do not. Sunlight isn't owned by anybody (modulo Simpsons references) and nor is the Wind, but I'd expect that, if that was all it was, to manifest as diverting funding to transitional work, stuff that keeps $$$ in the right men's pockets, rather than trying to do a King Canute. Stuff like paying a wind farm not to be constructed feels very Trump-specific.
† The British even know what you do with kings who refuse to stop breaking the law. See Charles the First, though that's technically the English I suspect in this respect the Scots can follow along. If the King won't follow the Law, kill the King, problem solved.
Trump’s campaign had financial backing from a number of oil and gas industry investors. Following the money in this case is not very difficult. He’s just a useful idiot, the whole industry put him there and are profiting at the expense of the rest of us.
But why should American taxpayers be responsible for making the technology affordable for everyone? Why shouldn't Europe or China be expected to shoulder this financial burden?
EDIT: I think people are misunderstanding my response. I fully support local subsidies for solar and renewables. My question is why my tax dollars should go toward making it affordable for everyone, including non-Americans. Either market dynamics will handle that naturally, artificially (i.e., China's manufacturing subsidies), or else it is up to the local government to address the shortfall.
Isn't the American complaint that China did exactly that by subsidizing its solar industry and flooding the global market with panels cheaper than Americans could make?
China is, it's subsidies have resulted in a glut of cheap solar panel production which the world has benefited from. European counties subsidise their own citizens switch to solar, the US no longer does at the federal level.
Responding to your edit: A wider version of the same argument might apply. The US has (historically) benefited considerably from global stability and this does seem to help with that because if basically everybody has energy independence and the overheating doesn't get much worse they might chill the fuck out?
We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power. Perhaps we will eventually, but until that actually happens the base load requirement represents a hard limit on the amount of solar generation capacity that the grid can handle.
We started scaling batteries after solar (because the technology reached the point where they were profitable after solar)... but they're being installed at scale now, and at a rapdily increasing rate.
Batteries provided 42.8% of California's power at 7pm a few days ago (which came across my social media feed as a new record) [1]. And it wasn't a particularly short peak, they stayed above 20% of the power for 3 hours and 40 minutes. It's a non-trivial amount of dispatchable power.
Batteries are a form of dispatchable power not "base load". There is no "base load" requirement. Base load is simply a marketing term for power production that cannot (economically) follow the demand curve and therefore must be supplemented by a form of dispatchable power, like gas peaker plants, or batteries. "Base load" power is quite similar to solar in that regard. The term makes sense if you have a cheap high-capitol low running-cost source of power (like nuclear was supposed to be, though it failed on the cheap front) where you install as much of it as you can use constantly and then you follow the demand curve with a different source of more expensive dispatchable power. That's not the reality we find ourselves in unless you happen to live near hydro.
I think the mysterious "Misc" electricity which sometimes appears at dawn and then dusk in the UK is likewise BESS†. The raw data doesn't seem to have labels for BESS, a lot of it was oriented around how electricity works twenty five years ago, there's an 850MW power plant here, and one there and one there, and we measure those. So it can cope with a wind farm - say 500MW or 1GW coming ashore somewhere, but not really with the idea that there's 10GW of solar just scattered all over the place on a bright summer's day and the batteries might similarly be too much?
† My thinking is: Dawn because in a few hours the solar comes online, you can refill those batteries at whatever price that is, so sell what you have now for the dawn price, and Dusk because the solar is mostly gone but people are running ovens and so on to make food in the evening, so you can sell into that market. But I might be seeing what I expect not reality.
> We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power
That too has pretty recently changed. Even my home state of Idaho is deploying pretty big batteries. It takes almost no time to deploy it's all permitting and public comment at this point that takes the time.
Batteries have gotten so cheap that the other electronics and equipement at this point are bigger drivers of the cost of installation.
Here's an 800MWh station that's being built in my city [1].
I think people are just generally stuck with the perception of where things are currently at. They are thinking of batteries and solar like it's 2010 or even 2000. But a lot has changed very rapidly even since 2018.
Becoming completely dependent on imported tech for such basic needs is a BAD idea. The West cannot outcompete China on cost for these products at this time. And before you say subsidies, let me remind you that we are all going broke.
Obviously, money is a factor. But you cannot discount political resistance. If a government in charge is dead set in promoting fossil fuels over renewables, it will never happen. Even if you get a government led by the most gungho green friendly administration, in a democratic government, those opposing can stall any plans to go green. If you live in a less democratic government where leadership decides it's going green, you're going green.
1. Solar panels need a huge capital expenditure up front.
2. Wind power works better for farmers and provide a smaller footprint. Drive on I-80 in Iowa on a clear night and you'll see the wind farms blink their red lights in the distance. Farmers can lease their land for wind turbines, and the generation companies take on the regulatory / capital / politcal risks, etc.
3. Farming is more or less free market based, and often farmers can let their grain sit in a silo until the price is optimal for them to sell. But for a given location, there's only one power company that you can use, and typically the power companies don't like people putting solar panels on the grid. In many states (like in Idaho) there's regulatory capture or weird politics preventing people putting solar panels up on their own land. (Again Idaho)
As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies.
Theft is stupid from a broad view. It causes more harm to the victim than benefit to the perpetrator. Everyone would be better off if we everyone stopped stealing and we provided the same level of benefit to would-be perpetrators in a more efficient form.
Why hasn't theft stopped yet? Because it's extremely difficult to do from a systems level. In principle it's simple: just don't steal. Convincing everyone to do it is hard.
Likewise, fossil fuels have horrible externalities that kill thousands if not millions of people per year. We'd be better off if we greatly cut back our usage and replaced it with cleaner sources of energy. But the people benefitting from any given use of fossil fuels and the people paying the costs tend not to be the same people. This makes it extremely difficult to organize a halt.
It is happening. It takes time to build and it only became absurdly cheap in the past few years. But it keeps getting cheaper and better (batteries too for anyone who wants to bring that up).
Based on your response timestamp I will conclude you didn't watch the video. He "does it rationally" like you requested. You said "try not to blame anyone" so if you'd rather not hear about the people who actually are to blame for this situation, then skip the last 30 minutes of the video.
had the same question and after reading about it, I found there are multiple layers on each other.
Existing plans are built to run 40-60 years.. retiring creates "stranded assets". pension funds fight hard to avoid that.
The renewable projects that wait for permits exceed total existing capacity.. the bottleneck is not tech, but locality.
yes but increasing solar will damage the energy lobby in the congress and other places. It's never about what is best, it's about what's best for lobby and their puppets
What is really strange, at this period of history, how anyone would not think that solar makes more sense for focus and investment. Well, unless directly being paid not to use sense or care about the future of humanity, by various oil companies.
> And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction.
This is something the (willfully?) deluded really don't appreciate. I know people who listened to _that one Joe Rogan podcast_ about precious metal extraction for EVs and are back on the oil bandwagon. The current regime of precious metal extraction is absolutely dirty and dangerous but ... it doesn't have to be and won't be forever -- especially if, as you've said, we actively prioritize a recycling loop for the components.
What does the 1% of land used to grow corn have to do specifically with solar and batteries? Solar doesn't need to be on the 15% arable land at all.
The corn doesn't just produce ethanol, which just utilizes the starch/sugar. The protein, fat, fiber is eaten by livestock in some form like distillers grains.
And governments like to have food security , and having secondary uses for an abundance of food in the good times is more convenient than storing cheese in caves , and in case of an emergency shortage the production is already there without having to rip up solar panels to grow food.
My conclusion is you're conflating issues (solar and ethanol) unnecessarily.
The consumer rooftop solar cost is usually one of the most expensive ways you can generate electricity - often several times the cost of utility solar installations. The high rooftop solar price is usually hidden (at least in the USA) because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid. This causes higher electricity bills for those in apartments and those who can't afford to put panels on their roof. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme.
Rooftop solar is good but it shouldn't be a gift to the wealthier residents paid for by those less wealthy. Any subsidies for solar power should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further than a dollar spent subsidizing wealthy homeowners who install panels on their roof.
That land is producing food for cars. If we covered half in solar panels we’d have almost enough energy to power the country. Turn the other half over to food production and you’d come out ahead on both energy and food.
It's a common mistake to believe there isn't enough land to grow food, and that is simply false. We throw tons and tons of food away every year due to spoilage and other factors. Even in many parts of Africa scarcity of food is caused by waste and distribution problem than simply lack of arable land.
And when you think about the millions of lands used to grow bioethanol I think we can safely convert that for solar installation without worries.Agrovoltaic is also a practical approach for a lot of crops and farmers so that we can grow and produce electricity side by side.
Kinda funny how we invented a carbon neutral fuel system but we are like "lets only use it as a 15% mix" vs trying to design new engines for pure ethanol. You could fuel your car with hooch you made from yard waste.
Correct me if I’m wrong but my understanding was that ethanol in gasoline was a result laws enacted due to corn farmers (or their state reps) lobbying for subsidies, not any intrinsic part of gasoline production
The article is just wrong. And only mentions energy used for heating in passing. Heating requires MASSIVE amounts of energy.
I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar system (almost 30 kWh battery and 24kW solar). It keeps the lights on, but not heating. I live in a mild climate.
The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.
People still build houses like energy is cheap and abundant. A properly insulated house in any temperate climate require very little heating or cooling.
Spend 50k on insulation that will last the life of the building instead of 50k on heating and cooling devices which will need constant maintenance and replacement + fuel and end up costing 10x more over the life of the building.
A modern house with modern insulation in a mild climate shouldn't even need a central heating system. You can get by with 500w toaster heaters in each room for the coldest time of the year
24kW solar "to keep lights on" is a funny way to underplay it. My house "summer" electricity usage is 60kWh per month, including water pump, DHW, septic and work from home for 2 adults. So 3h of your PV production would power my house for a month!
Regarding heating - I live in cold climate. We had average daily temperature of -10c this january, with multiple lows at -25c, and most nights at -15c. The house is 116sqm. Our heatpump COP for that month was above 2, and we used 787kWh total to heat the house, which is not a lot, actually. At 15 cents per kWh it is 118 euros for heating, for the coldest month in a decade! Considering also that we do not pay for electricity since april until october (solar panels).
We also paid less than those houses which use natural gas, wood pellets, etc. We also do not need to do anything to keep house warm. Also, during summer months we could "drive for free" in EV due to free solar electricity.
All that just to counter your take on "major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs".
I live in a northern climate and I know multiple people who are net zero with solar+basic battery.
Proper insulation and good windows go a very long way. For instance, I set my heat to 66F during the day and 60F at night. When I wake up in the morning, the register is usually still above 60F.
Respectfully, 30kWh is not much in this context. In 10 years every modern 2-car home will have 200kWh on the driveway just from the EVs; add a 100kWh whole home battery at a price point close to a 10kWh battery today and the calculus changes in most of the world.
The cost of materials going into modern batteries easily leaves room for another 10x reduction in price, IMO where this all is heading is obvious. Zero marginal cost will win every day of the week.
FWIW we run our cabin on 15kWh battery today year around, though we do run a small wood stove to supplant the heat pump on cold winter days.
> I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar system
This is not really a qualification to speak on how the grid works, at all.
Actually having panels on your roof doesn't give you unique insight into how solar panels operate - there is extensive data out there, any PV installation can become a data source trivially.
> The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.
One residence powering itself is not representative of how the grid works, and is not a good way to evaluate any power generation technology whether its PV, coal, nuclear, etc.
This is basically correct in the sense that we cannot simply just force everyone in, say, Minnesota to install electric baseboard heating, rooftop solar, and a battery pack, and then expect them to stay warm. There are periods of extended extreme cold and low solar flux where you would simply not be able to warm everyone's house - that's just physics.
But there are a lot of extra things you can do as an intermediate steps to dramatically close the gap. The main ones are:
1. Homes can be renovated to improve insulation
2. Cold weather heat pumps can handle most mild winter conditions efficiently
3. Electricity doesn't all have to be locally generated - it can be transmitted from other parts of the country.
4. You can keep using fossil fuel peaker plants, and still have incredible reduced overall emissions
The article is about utility scale solar and storage I believe not home installations. It also mentions towards the end that in cold norther climates adding wind to the mix makes sense
I build off-grid camper vans for a living and install solar + lithium battery systems regularly. The technology has matured a lot in the last few years. What used to take a massive roof array and a bank of heavy lead-acid or AGM batteries to run basic appliances now fits in a fraction of the space with lithium. The limiting factor in real-world installs isn't the panels or the batteries anymore, it's getting customers to right-size the system for their actual usage instead of what they think they'll use. People consistently underestimate idle draws and overestimate how much sun they'll get. Scale that mindset problem up to a national grid and I imagine the challenge is the same.
Just my 2c but I think the biggest thing we could do is to reduce the regulatory burden, cost, and complexity associated with installing roof mounted solar. This should be something that can be approved and installed in a week, and should be a half the price (put another it should have a double digit roi) . Right now all of the economics of home solar are consumed by regulation/complexity and the contractors / solar installation companies.
This would be more believable to skeptics if it wasn't all pro-arguments and theory. If you don't cover the cases in which it doesn't work, or at least mention the arguments against, it reads as propaganda.
The thing that reads the most false is the economics. A 480W solar panel is like $90 on sale, they're dirt cheap. A dozen of them is $1,080. But an installed solar+battery system tied to the grid is more like $30,000, and that's not covering the cost of replacing damaged equipment (lightning is a thing). That's just one home, using certified equipment.
For nation-states to do solar and battery, they need land, capital, and skilled labor that most nations don't have. Then there's the fact that not all nations get enough sun, or the fact that you must have a stable backup supply (not just for "cloudy days", but also emergencies and national defense), and multiple sources of equipment so your entire nation's energy isn't dependent on one country (China). Only about 10-20 nations on earth could switch to renewables for the majority of their energy in the next 10 years.
If you’re one of the many companies working on reaching this goal, in defiance of everyone in this thread and elsewhere insisting it will never work, I’d like to work with you.
I’ve worked with all of the largest solar, battery and EV companies, as well as America’s largest electric utilities, building complex analytics software to enable the clean energy transition. I’m looking for my next role to continue moving the needle on eliminating fossil fuels. Find me here: https://matthewgerring.com
While I'm pro renewables and the article is technically correct (it could work), I don't think this is optimal. What's optimal is using a mix of mostly (>90-95%) renewable technologies for generating power supplemented by gas (short term) and nuclear (long term).
Additionally, there's a lot of stuff that can be done with cables and batteries that we aren't currently doing to over come daily, seasonal, and weather related variation in power output of wind and solar. Put cables north-south to compensate for seasonal drops in solar output. Put them east-west to have solar power in the evenings/early mornings. Off shore and on shore wind can produce a lot of power and the way high pressure and low pressure systems (aka. weather) work, if the wind is not blowing locally that just means it is blowing elsewhere. Having a lot of solar and wind all over the place and cables to move the power around evens out all the peaks and dips. The rest is just using batteries, pumped hydro, and other storage to add enough buffers.
That gets you quite far. Another point here is that people think in rigid "must cover everything 100% of the time", which is valuable but we actually do have a lot of flexibility. You can choose when to charge your car (at night, or at noon), when to run your dishwasher, etc. And does a data center need to be at 100% capacity 100% of the time no matter the cost? Flexible load is a thing. And we can use automation to control it, flexible pricing to incentivize when there are surpluses or shortages, etc. This btw. also neuters the whole "baseload" argument. Baseload power is non flexible power that becomes a problem when we have too much of it. Flexible power is power you can turn off when there's too much of it. The reason energy prices are high in a lot of places is that we have too much of really expensive base load that drives the pricing even if the wind and sun shines for free and gets curtailed. That lack of flexibility is a problem.
That's how we could get to 90% over the next few decades. The remaining 10% is harder / more expensive. Gas peaker plants make a lot of sense to fill that gap. Replaced by nuclear long term. Nothing against that but it's just stupidly expensive and slow to realize. There's no need to build new gas plants for that; we have plenty already.
Last year PRC brrrted out enough solar panels whose lifetime output is equivalent to annual global oil consumption. AKA world uses about >40billion barrels of oil per year, PRC's annual solar production will sink about 40billion barrels of oil of emissions in their life times. This is at 50% solar manufacturing utilization. Once battery scales, can displace current global oil via solar ~10 years. Less if solar production also globally scales. Looking at 10/15/20 years to displace most global oil, lng, coal. Well the discretionary bits / economic consumption.
Providing 90% of power is not "powering the world".
It really helps to also have a complementary storage technology with low capacity capex, even if the round trip efficiency is lower. This would complement batteries in the same way ordinary RAM complements cache memory in a computer.
>We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels.
I think a lot of people truly dont get this.
Those days when the wind isnt blowing, the sun isnt shining and the batteries and pumped storage are depleted can be easily handled with, e.g. power2gas.
It's pretty expensive (per kwh almost as much as nuclear power) but with enough spare solar and wind capacity and a carbon tax on natural gas it becomes a no brainer to swap natural gas for that.
Nonetheless this wont stop people saying "but what about that last 5-10%?" as if it's a gotcha for a 100% green grid. It isnt. It never was.
No, they can't, not unless we get rid of the fossil fuel lobby, which pretty much runs the world these days. Which isn't surprising, given that fossil fuels are the largest industry ever created by mankind. If you compare it to anything else which was actively harmful and yet big money tried to convince you it wasn't (like tobacco, alcohol, or really anything else), there is nothing that huge. So it isn't surprising that the industry fights change.
EV adoption has been successfully held back mostly by PR, Germany shifted from nuclear to coal and gas, the US president is doing everything to dismantle anything that isn't fossil fuel and promotes fossil fuels, the list goes on.
Bit of a cop out headline, should have said "will power the world".
Even boring staid organisations are predicting solar will be more than half the planet's electricity supply by 2050 which is I think enough to say it powers the world.
EVs are essentially a giant battery on wheels. Seems there is a good opportunity to configure them as bidirectional power banks for your local grid. You could rewire all parking slots to have a plugin that acts as a bidirectional power station. Imaging how much power could be moved around with such a grid! This would require a major investment in power transmission layouts, but a city full of batteries on wheels.
California has registered around 1M Teslas alone. So this is like having a 1Mx80kwh = 80GWh battery at your service. As a reference, the largest solar + storage facility in California is around 3.2 GWh.
It's important to note that electricity is 21% of the World's energy demand, according to the IEA[1]. This implies that if we could 10x solar, and figure out how to convert some of that to liquid fuels with decent efficiency, we could become sustainable for all energy.
As enthusiastic as I am about that I'd love to see grid scale storage move more towards something like sand batteries. Stuff you can buy for dollars per ton and move with an excavator seems like a better bet than lithium batteries.
If we want flakey renewables to be the backbone (which we should)...then we needs serious scale on storage side.
Batteries for voltage regulation and quick response is good though
1/2 the 'cost' of electricity is borne by grid operators, which are usually regulated monopolies. They are generally overstaffed, inneficient bureaucracies. I'm not against public service obviously but I don't think that's the issue, rather it's just related to 'monopoly' provider status.
Hydro One in Ontario was by far the largest occupant on the Sunshine list (>$100K salaries) and have always been. They pay dramatically above market wages, have more staff than they need. It's the 'old boys clubs of old boys clubs'.
If energy prices drop, they will be able to charge more money to justify more 'infra', staff and expanding budgets.
The best thing we could ever do is get rid of our dependency on the energy grid.
If our homes could be powered like our cars ... that would be amazing and open up a ton of competition in a landscape which now has almost no competition.
That said - there are definitely theoretical efficiencies at scale and if we did get rid of the grid, we may never be able to get it back.
It's plausible that 'decentralized energy' may be very advantageous in that it puts a lot of competitive pressure on the centralized elements. Then we get the best of both worlds.
Edit: value chain and institutional power dynamics is the only real way to look at all of these systems. It's incredibly naive to think that some arbitrary technology is going to change any landscape. Case and point is this issue itself - that we 'grow' fuel instead of doing something arguably more efficient is a function of structural power.
Is this grid-scale solar ? It can’t be rooftop - there is nobody in the UK who will install a 5kW rooftop system for £2k. The quotes I’ve had recently have been closer to £10k.
World's economy and based on oil and gas and It is not easy to switch to an alternative. Because it will also mean to change all the geopolitical relations around the globe
Fuel price varies dramatically with respect to geographic area. It seems reasonable to factor that in especially if geographic area is factored in to solar capacity.
I wish it made sense to do residential solar where I am. It probably does technically, but i hate the idea of spending a ton on a system and then STILL have to pay my power company; if you are connected to the grid at all where I am, you pay the power company $5/kw/month of solar capacity and your excess sell-back rates are insanely bad (0.03/kwh, vs billed usage rate at $0.17/kwh)
Nuclear could have powered the world easily and we could have done it with 1960s technology. And we could easily do electricity and heating with nuclear quite easily. The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis.
And we can go to 100% of electricity from nuclear, we don't have to have this dumb argument about 'the last 5-10%'. Because its reliable.
And if you actually do the math nuclear would have been cheaper then all this nonsense we have been doing for 30 years with wind, solar and batteries. The cost of the gird updates is like building a whole new infrastructure. With nuclear, the centralized more local networks are perfectly reasonable.
I did some scenarios starting in Year 2000 or Germany to all nuclear, vs wind (off-shore, on-shore), and solar (partly local partly brought in) and batteries. The numbers aren't even close, nuclear would have been the much better deal. Even if you are very conservative and don't account for major learning effect that countries like France had when building nuclear.
That said, even with nuclear, having a few Lithium batteries that can go all out for 1-2h is actually a good deal. Its really only about peak shaving the absolute daily peaks. What you don't want is having to build batteries that can handle days or weeks.
China understands this, parts of the EU understands this. The US is currently dead set on betting on the wrong technology, and it's going to put them so far behind.
Imagine a world where people didn't care about labeling new things "woke", and instead could all sit down and say, "we're going to make major investments in next generation infrastructure to ensure our capacity and independence."
This comment section is so weird. This seems like a decent analysis to me. It also backs up what's been pretty obvious for some time: solar is the future. Yet we have:
- Pointing out the corn ethanol scam. Ok, that's fair. We would be better of spending money on renewables. No argument there;
- Multiple people arguing that solar hasn't goten more mature, more effective and that battery technology really hasn't gotten better. No sources mind you, just opinion;
- Another busy thread based on an uncited claim that this doesn't account for US heating costs. And tthere are a lot of people who seem to think not having efficient insulation in houses is an expression of freedom in some way;
- There's the naive idea that the profit motive will somehow solve all this. Bless your heart;
- Probably the least surprising thing is that the pro-nuclear people piped up and tried to make this about nuclear and failed. Sorry but nuclear is one of the most expensive forms of electricity and there's no real way to get around that.
I normally don't expect such anti-solar sentiment here.
Here's the real problem with renewables politically: if you produce 1GW of solar and it produces 2TWh of electricity in year 1, it'll probably 2TWh in years 2-30 with very little maintenance. That's bad in our system because some private company doesn't get to keep profiting.
Let's compare that to an oil well. If you drill wells and make them produce 100kbpd (barrels pe day) of crude and some quantity of natural gas in year 1 then in year 2 it produces 80-85kbpd. In year 3 it's ~70kbpd. In year 4 it's 55kbpd. By year 5 it's less than half what it was originally. This is for the Permian basin and it's called "decline rate".
So to maintain the amount of oil and gas you need, you need to be constantly drilling new wells and bringing them online to replace the lost capacity. That's good for business because all that exploration and digging is more profit opportunity.
Evenw ith coal, you need people and machiens to keep digging up the coal.
Our entire electricity sector is sold a lie that the private sector is somehow better at providing electricity and then everything is built around a massive wealth transfer from consumers and the government to the already wealthy.
That's really why renewables aren't popular in the modern political climate.
No, no they can’t. As has been explained over and over again by people who know better. Someday yes when the tech improves (changes) dramatically. But that’s not today.
Note that we had the technology to do this affordably as of about 2008, when lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries became widely available for about $10-12 each (I had to look that up). They were definitely available at low cost ($6) by 2018:
Looks like sodium-ion (Na-ion) 18650 batteries at 1.5 Ah have about 1/2 the capacity of LiFePO4 18650s at 3.5 Ah, and are about twice the price, so lets call them 4x the price per energy stored:
So we can project that Na-ion batteries will have the same price per kWh as today's LiFePO4 in perhaps 8 years, or around 2034, if not sooner. That will negate the lithium supply chain bottleneck so that we're limited to ordinary shortages (like copper).
500 W bifacial solar panels are available for $100 each in bulk, so there's no need to analyze them since they're no longer the bottleneck. A typical home uses 24 kWh/day, so 15-20 panels at a typical 4.5 kW/m2 solar insolation provide enough power to charge batteries and still have some energy left over, at a cost of $1500-2000. Installation labor, electricians/licensing, inverters and batteries now dominate cost.
The sodium ion battery market is about $1 billion annually, vs $100 billion for lithium ion. It took lithium about 15-20 years to grow that much. So whoever gets in now could see a 1-2 orders of magnitude return over perhaps 8-15 years. I almost can't think of a better investment outside of AI.
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I've been watching this stuff since the 1980s and I can tell you that every renewable energy breakthrough coincides with a geopolitical instability. For the $8 trillion the US spent on Middle East wars since 9/11, we could have had a moonshot for solar+batteries and be at 90+% coverage today. Not counting the other $12 trillion the US spent on the Cold War. Fully $20 trillion of our ~$40 trillion US national debt went to funding endless war, with the other $20 trillion lost on trickle-down tax cuts for the ultra wealthy.
We can't do anything about that stuff in the short term. But we can move towards off-grid living and a distributed means of production model where AI, 3D printing, permaculture, and other alternative tech negates the need for investment capital.
In the K-shaped economy, the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" phrase might more accurately be stated "if you can't join 'em, beat 'em".
By 2050 is the important caveat. That's assuming constant production of batteries at the current scale and production.
It also assumes we figure out how to economically recycle materials from batteries (and total recovery may never be possible). Grid scale lithium batteries have an effective lifecycle of 15 years. In this potential future, global lithium reserves would actually start getting choked up before the 2050 goal.
Nuclear is inevitable and we all need to stop pretending otherwise.
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https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/04/trading-some-corn-e...
Relying on an energy source which requires constant, continuous resource extraction is fucking stupid when we can spend resources up front and get reliable energy (solar + battery) for decades with minimal operating cost & maintenance. And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction.
If you want to debate that, spend some time with this video first: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM
Try not to blame anyone. Do it rationally if you can, from your message I understand your opinion.
I say this as a person that has lived in a developing country the last 15 years. It is not that simple IMHO...
The US stopped building coal power plants over a decade ago but we still have a lot of them. Meanwhile we’ve mostly been building solar, which eventually means we’ll have a mostly solar grid but that’s still decades away.
> The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time
This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do. It is reasonable that when someone gives up a couple of things because that person is rich (rich as in a person in the developed world) the sacrifice is more or less acceptable.
Now change environment and think that these sacrifices are way worse. Even worse than that: that has more implications in conservative cultures where, whether you like it or not, showing "muscle" (wealth) is socially important for them to reach other soccial layers that will make their lives easier.
But giving up those things is probably a very bad choice for their living.
America cannot be compared to South East Asia economically speaking, for example. So the comparison of the coal centrals is not even close.
A salary in Vietnam is maybe 15 million VND for many people. With that you can hardly live in some areas. It is around 600 usd.
Just my two cents.
https://statbase.org/data/vnm-coal-imports/
It also started importing liquid natural gas in 2023.
But it has abundant sunlight, access to low cost Chinese solar panels that will produce electricity for decades instead of being burned once, and a substantial domestic photovoltaic manufacturing industry of its own.
"Renewable Energy Investments in Vietnam in 2024 – Asia’s Next Clean Energy Powerhouse" (June 2024)
https://energytracker.asia/renewable-energy-investments-in-v...
In 2014, the share of renewable energy in Vietnam was just 0.32%. In 2015, only 4 megawatts (MW) of installed solar capacity for power generation was available. However, within five years, investment in solar energy, for example, soared.
As of 2020, Vietnam had over 7.4 gigawatts (GW) of rooftop solar power connected to the national grid. These renewable energy numbers surpassed all expectations. It marked a 25-fold increase in installed capacity compared to 2019’s figures.
In 2021, the data showed that Vietnam now has 16.5 GW of solar power. This was accompanied by its green energy counterpart wind at 11.8 GW. A further 6.6 GW is expected in late 2021 or 2022. Ambitiously, the government plans to further bolster this by adding 12 GW of onshore and offshore wind by 2025.
These growth rates are actually much faster than growth rates in the US.
In developed countries 20-50% of the cost of roof top solar is labor.
> This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do.
The general premise of investments is that you end up with fewer resources by not doing them.
It now costs less to install a new solar or wind farm than to continue using an existing coal plant, much less if you were considering building a new coal plant, and that includes the cost of capital, i.e. the interest you have to pay to borrow the money for the up-front investment.
Poorer countries would be at a slight disadvantage if they have to pay higher than average interest rates to borrow money, but they also have the countervailing advantage of having lower labor and real estate costs and the net result is that it still doesn't make sense for anybody to continue to use coal for any longer than it takes to build the replacement.
It just takes more than zero days to replace all existing infrastructure.
Acting like this blunder is some random stroke of bad luck isn't telling the whole story.
I'm sure there's some degree of vested interest in protecting fossil energy because it means very concentrated profits in a way that renewables do not. Sunlight isn't owned by anybody (modulo Simpsons references) and nor is the Wind, but I'd expect that, if that was all it was, to manifest as diverting funding to transitional work, stuff that keeps $$$ in the right men's pockets, rather than trying to do a King Canute. Stuff like paying a wind farm not to be constructed feels very Trump-specific.
† The British even know what you do with kings who refuse to stop breaking the law. See Charles the First, though that's technically the English I suspect in this respect the Scots can follow along. If the King won't follow the Law, kill the King, problem solved.
EDIT: I think people are misunderstanding my response. I fully support local subsidies for solar and renewables. My question is why my tax dollars should go toward making it affordable for everyone, including non-Americans. Either market dynamics will handle that naturally, artificially (i.e., China's manufacturing subsidies), or else it is up to the local government to address the shortfall.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-20247734 (2012)
Or do you think that US federal investment in solar and battery technology would be bad for the American taxpayer?
Batteries provided 42.8% of California's power at 7pm a few days ago (which came across my social media feed as a new record) [1]. And it wasn't a particularly short peak, they stayed above 20% of the power for 3 hours and 40 minutes. It's a non-trivial amount of dispatchable power.
[1] https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso&date=202...
Batteries are a form of dispatchable power not "base load". There is no "base load" requirement. Base load is simply a marketing term for power production that cannot (economically) follow the demand curve and therefore must be supplemented by a form of dispatchable power, like gas peaker plants, or batteries. "Base load" power is quite similar to solar in that regard. The term makes sense if you have a cheap high-capitol low running-cost source of power (like nuclear was supposed to be, though it failed on the cheap front) where you install as much of it as you can use constantly and then you follow the demand curve with a different source of more expensive dispatchable power. That's not the reality we find ourselves in unless you happen to live near hydro.
† My thinking is: Dawn because in a few hours the solar comes online, you can refill those batteries at whatever price that is, so sell what you have now for the dawn price, and Dusk because the solar is mostly gone but people are running ovens and so on to make food in the evening, so you can sell into that market. But I might be seeing what I expect not reality.
> We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power
That too has pretty recently changed. Even my home state of Idaho is deploying pretty big batteries. It takes almost no time to deploy it's all permitting and public comment at this point that takes the time.
Batteries have gotten so cheap that the other electronics and equipement at this point are bigger drivers of the cost of installation.
Here's an 800MWh station that's being built in my city [1].
I think people are just generally stuck with the perception of where things are currently at. They are thinking of batteries and solar like it's 2010 or even 2000. But a lot has changed very rapidly even since 2018.
[1] https://www.idahopower.com/energy-environment/energy/energy-...
2. Wind power works better for farmers and provide a smaller footprint. Drive on I-80 in Iowa on a clear night and you'll see the wind farms blink their red lights in the distance. Farmers can lease their land for wind turbines, and the generation companies take on the regulatory / capital / politcal risks, etc.
3. Farming is more or less free market based, and often farmers can let their grain sit in a silo until the price is optimal for them to sell. But for a given location, there's only one power company that you can use, and typically the power companies don't like people putting solar panels on the grid. In many states (like in Idaho) there's regulatory capture or weird politics preventing people putting solar panels up on their own land. (Again Idaho)
As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies.
> why it is not done yet?
Whoa lots to unpack here. I'll summarize:
- It is already happening to some extent (it's cheaper)
- Try explaining to farmers to do away with their livelihood and retrain them to running a solar farm
- Entrenched bureaucracy and gov subsidies
They also have goals other than generating energy effectively
Theft is stupid from a broad view. It causes more harm to the victim than benefit to the perpetrator. Everyone would be better off if we everyone stopped stealing and we provided the same level of benefit to would-be perpetrators in a more efficient form.
Why hasn't theft stopped yet? Because it's extremely difficult to do from a systems level. In principle it's simple: just don't steal. Convincing everyone to do it is hard.
Likewise, fossil fuels have horrible externalities that kill thousands if not millions of people per year. We'd be better off if we greatly cut back our usage and replaced it with cleaner sources of energy. But the people benefitting from any given use of fossil fuels and the people paying the costs tend not to be the same people. This makes it extremely difficult to organize a halt.
Existing plans are built to run 40-60 years.. retiring creates "stranded assets". pension funds fight hard to avoid that. The renewable projects that wait for permits exceed total existing capacity.. the bottleneck is not tech, but locality.
I found this visual schematic helpful - https://vectree.io/c/why-energy-transitions-are-slow-grid-in...
> which requires constant, continuous resource extraction
Is there an upper bound on battery limits with regards to resource extraction?
> And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction.
This is something the (willfully?) deluded really don't appreciate. I know people who listened to _that one Joe Rogan podcast_ about precious metal extraction for EVs and are back on the oil bandwagon. The current regime of precious metal extraction is absolutely dirty and dangerous but ... it doesn't have to be and won't be forever -- especially if, as you've said, we actively prioritize a recycling loop for the components.
The corn doesn't just produce ethanol, which just utilizes the starch/sugar. The protein, fat, fiber is eaten by livestock in some form like distillers grains.
And governments like to have food security , and having secondary uses for an abundance of food in the good times is more convenient than storing cheese in caves , and in case of an emergency shortage the production is already there without having to rip up solar panels to grow food.
My conclusion is you're conflating issues (solar and ethanol) unnecessarily.
Rooftop solar is good but it shouldn't be a gift to the wealthier residents paid for by those less wealthy. Any subsidies for solar power should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further than a dollar spent subsidizing wealthy homeowners who install panels on their roof.
And when you think about the millions of lands used to grow bioethanol I think we can safely convert that for solar installation without worries.Agrovoltaic is also a practical approach for a lot of crops and farmers so that we can grow and produce electricity side by side.
I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar system (almost 30 kWh battery and 24kW solar). It keeps the lights on, but not heating. I live in a mild climate.
The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.
Spend 50k on insulation that will last the life of the building instead of 50k on heating and cooling devices which will need constant maintenance and replacement + fuel and end up costing 10x more over the life of the building.
A modern house with modern insulation in a mild climate shouldn't even need a central heating system. You can get by with 500w toaster heaters in each room for the coldest time of the year
Regarding heating - I live in cold climate. We had average daily temperature of -10c this january, with multiple lows at -25c, and most nights at -15c. The house is 116sqm. Our heatpump COP for that month was above 2, and we used 787kWh total to heat the house, which is not a lot, actually. At 15 cents per kWh it is 118 euros for heating, for the coldest month in a decade! Considering also that we do not pay for electricity since april until october (solar panels).
We also paid less than those houses which use natural gas, wood pellets, etc. We also do not need to do anything to keep house warm. Also, during summer months we could "drive for free" in EV due to free solar electricity.
All that just to counter your take on "major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs".
Proper insulation and good windows go a very long way. For instance, I set my heat to 66F during the day and 60F at night. When I wake up in the morning, the register is usually still above 60F.
The cost of materials going into modern batteries easily leaves room for another 10x reduction in price, IMO where this all is heading is obvious. Zero marginal cost will win every day of the week.
FWIW we run our cabin on 15kWh battery today year around, though we do run a small wood stove to supplant the heat pump on cold winter days.
> I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar system
This is not really a qualification to speak on how the grid works, at all.
Actually having panels on your roof doesn't give you unique insight into how solar panels operate - there is extensive data out there, any PV installation can become a data source trivially.
> The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.
One residence powering itself is not representative of how the grid works, and is not a good way to evaluate any power generation technology whether its PV, coal, nuclear, etc.
But there are a lot of extra things you can do as an intermediate steps to dramatically close the gap. The main ones are:
1. Homes can be renovated to improve insulation 2. Cold weather heat pumps can handle most mild winter conditions efficiently 3. Electricity doesn't all have to be locally generated - it can be transmitted from other parts of the country. 4. You can keep using fossil fuel peaker plants, and still have incredible reduced overall emissions
The thing that reads the most false is the economics. A 480W solar panel is like $90 on sale, they're dirt cheap. A dozen of them is $1,080. But an installed solar+battery system tied to the grid is more like $30,000, and that's not covering the cost of replacing damaged equipment (lightning is a thing). That's just one home, using certified equipment.
For nation-states to do solar and battery, they need land, capital, and skilled labor that most nations don't have. Then there's the fact that not all nations get enough sun, or the fact that you must have a stable backup supply (not just for "cloudy days", but also emergencies and national defense), and multiple sources of equipment so your entire nation's energy isn't dependent on one country (China). Only about 10-20 nations on earth could switch to renewables for the majority of their energy in the next 10 years.
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Additionally, there's a lot of stuff that can be done with cables and batteries that we aren't currently doing to over come daily, seasonal, and weather related variation in power output of wind and solar. Put cables north-south to compensate for seasonal drops in solar output. Put them east-west to have solar power in the evenings/early mornings. Off shore and on shore wind can produce a lot of power and the way high pressure and low pressure systems (aka. weather) work, if the wind is not blowing locally that just means it is blowing elsewhere. Having a lot of solar and wind all over the place and cables to move the power around evens out all the peaks and dips. The rest is just using batteries, pumped hydro, and other storage to add enough buffers.
That gets you quite far. Another point here is that people think in rigid "must cover everything 100% of the time", which is valuable but we actually do have a lot of flexibility. You can choose when to charge your car (at night, or at noon), when to run your dishwasher, etc. And does a data center need to be at 100% capacity 100% of the time no matter the cost? Flexible load is a thing. And we can use automation to control it, flexible pricing to incentivize when there are surpluses or shortages, etc. This btw. also neuters the whole "baseload" argument. Baseload power is non flexible power that becomes a problem when we have too much of it. Flexible power is power you can turn off when there's too much of it. The reason energy prices are high in a lot of places is that we have too much of really expensive base load that drives the pricing even if the wind and sun shines for free and gets curtailed. That lack of flexibility is a problem.
That's how we could get to 90% over the next few decades. The remaining 10% is harder / more expensive. Gas peaker plants make a lot of sense to fill that gap. Replaced by nuclear long term. Nothing against that but it's just stupidly expensive and slow to realize. There's no need to build new gas plants for that; we have plenty already.
It really helps to also have a complementary storage technology with low capacity capex, even if the round trip efficiency is lower. This would complement batteries in the same way ordinary RAM complements cache memory in a computer.
>We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels.
I think a lot of people truly dont get this.
Those days when the wind isnt blowing, the sun isnt shining and the batteries and pumped storage are depleted can be easily handled with, e.g. power2gas.
It's pretty expensive (per kwh almost as much as nuclear power) but with enough spare solar and wind capacity and a carbon tax on natural gas it becomes a no brainer to swap natural gas for that.
Nonetheless this wont stop people saying "but what about that last 5-10%?" as if it's a gotcha for a 100% green grid. It isnt. It never was.
EV adoption has been successfully held back mostly by PR, Germany shifted from nuclear to coal and gas, the US president is doing everything to dismantle anything that isn't fossil fuel and promotes fossil fuels, the list goes on.
Even boring staid organisations are predicting solar will be more than half the planet's electricity supply by 2050 which is I think enough to say it powers the world.
California has registered around 1M Teslas alone. So this is like having a 1Mx80kwh = 80GWh battery at your service. As a reference, the largest solar + storage facility in California is around 3.2 GWh.
[1] https://www.iea.org/world/energy-mix
If we want flakey renewables to be the backbone (which we should)...then we needs serious scale on storage side.
Batteries for voltage regulation and quick response is good though
"a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah."
https://www.pcmag.com/news/elon-musk-running-us-on-solar-req...
See you next decade when we're saying the same thing and not doing it?
Hydro One in Ontario was by far the largest occupant on the Sunshine list (>$100K salaries) and have always been. They pay dramatically above market wages, have more staff than they need. It's the 'old boys clubs of old boys clubs'.
If energy prices drop, they will be able to charge more money to justify more 'infra', staff and expanding budgets.
The best thing we could ever do is get rid of our dependency on the energy grid.
If our homes could be powered like our cars ... that would be amazing and open up a ton of competition in a landscape which now has almost no competition.
That said - there are definitely theoretical efficiencies at scale and if we did get rid of the grid, we may never be able to get it back.
It's plausible that 'decentralized energy' may be very advantageous in that it puts a lot of competitive pressure on the centralized elements. Then we get the best of both worlds.
Edit: value chain and institutional power dynamics is the only real way to look at all of these systems. It's incredibly naive to think that some arbitrary technology is going to change any landscape. Case and point is this issue itself - that we 'grow' fuel instead of doing something arguably more efficient is a function of structural power.
> solar PV installed cost 384 €/kWp
Is this grid-scale solar ? It can’t be rooftop - there is nobody in the UK who will install a 5kW rooftop system for £2k. The quotes I’ve had recently have been closer to £10k.
And we can go to 100% of electricity from nuclear, we don't have to have this dumb argument about 'the last 5-10%'. Because its reliable.
And if you actually do the math nuclear would have been cheaper then all this nonsense we have been doing for 30 years with wind, solar and batteries. The cost of the gird updates is like building a whole new infrastructure. With nuclear, the centralized more local networks are perfectly reasonable.
I did some scenarios starting in Year 2000 or Germany to all nuclear, vs wind (off-shore, on-shore), and solar (partly local partly brought in) and batteries. The numbers aren't even close, nuclear would have been the much better deal. Even if you are very conservative and don't account for major learning effect that countries like France had when building nuclear.
That said, even with nuclear, having a few Lithium batteries that can go all out for 1-2h is actually a good deal. Its really only about peak shaving the absolute daily peaks. What you don't want is having to build batteries that can handle days or weeks.
Imagine a world where people didn't care about labeling new things "woke", and instead could all sit down and say, "we're going to make major investments in next generation infrastructure to ensure our capacity and independence."
- Pointing out the corn ethanol scam. Ok, that's fair. We would be better of spending money on renewables. No argument there;
- Multiple people arguing that solar hasn't goten more mature, more effective and that battery technology really hasn't gotten better. No sources mind you, just opinion;
- Another busy thread based on an uncited claim that this doesn't account for US heating costs. And tthere are a lot of people who seem to think not having efficient insulation in houses is an expression of freedom in some way;
- There's the naive idea that the profit motive will somehow solve all this. Bless your heart;
- Probably the least surprising thing is that the pro-nuclear people piped up and tried to make this about nuclear and failed. Sorry but nuclear is one of the most expensive forms of electricity and there's no real way to get around that.
I normally don't expect such anti-solar sentiment here.
Here's the real problem with renewables politically: if you produce 1GW of solar and it produces 2TWh of electricity in year 1, it'll probably 2TWh in years 2-30 with very little maintenance. That's bad in our system because some private company doesn't get to keep profiting.
Let's compare that to an oil well. If you drill wells and make them produce 100kbpd (barrels pe day) of crude and some quantity of natural gas in year 1 then in year 2 it produces 80-85kbpd. In year 3 it's ~70kbpd. In year 4 it's 55kbpd. By year 5 it's less than half what it was originally. This is for the Permian basin and it's called "decline rate".
So to maintain the amount of oil and gas you need, you need to be constantly drilling new wells and bringing them online to replace the lost capacity. That's good for business because all that exploration and digging is more profit opportunity.
Evenw ith coal, you need people and machiens to keep digging up the coal.
Our entire electricity sector is sold a lie that the private sector is somehow better at providing electricity and then everything is built around a massive wealth transfer from consumers and the government to the already wealthy.
That's really why renewables aren't popular in the modern political climate.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180201203013/https://www.18650...
Looks like sodium-ion (Na-ion) 18650 batteries at 1.5 Ah have about 1/2 the capacity of LiFePO4 18650s at 3.5 Ah, and are about twice the price, so lets call them 4x the price per energy stored:
https://www.radicalrc.com/item/Sodium-Na-Ion-Battery-18650-3...
https://ogsolarstore.com/products/sodium-ion-cells-3-1v-batt...
https://coulombsolutions.com/product/12v-sodium-ion-battery/
Battery prices halve about every 4 years:
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/03/06/battery-prices-collap...
So we can project that Na-ion batteries will have the same price per kWh as today's LiFePO4 in perhaps 8 years, or around 2034, if not sooner. That will negate the lithium supply chain bottleneck so that we're limited to ordinary shortages (like copper).
500 W bifacial solar panels are available for $100 each in bulk, so there's no need to analyze them since they're no longer the bottleneck. A typical home uses 24 kWh/day, so 15-20 panels at a typical 4.5 kW/m2 solar insolation provide enough power to charge batteries and still have some energy left over, at a cost of $1500-2000. Installation labor, electricians/licensing, inverters and batteries now dominate cost.
The sodium ion battery market is about $1 billion annually, vs $100 billion for lithium ion. It took lithium about 15-20 years to grow that much. So whoever gets in now could see a 1-2 orders of magnitude return over perhaps 8-15 years. I almost can't think of a better investment outside of AI.
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I've been watching this stuff since the 1980s and I can tell you that every renewable energy breakthrough coincides with a geopolitical instability. For the $8 trillion the US spent on Middle East wars since 9/11, we could have had a moonshot for solar+batteries and be at 90+% coverage today. Not counting the other $12 trillion the US spent on the Cold War. Fully $20 trillion of our ~$40 trillion US national debt went to funding endless war, with the other $20 trillion lost on trickle-down tax cuts for the ultra wealthy.
We can't do anything about that stuff in the short term. But we can move towards off-grid living and a distributed means of production model where AI, 3D printing, permaculture, and other alternative tech negates the need for investment capital.
In the K-shaped economy, the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" phrase might more accurately be stated "if you can't join 'em, beat 'em".
We could just build out huge solar farms in AZ and transmit it accordingly. We did it for railroads, why not here?
It also assumes we figure out how to economically recycle materials from batteries (and total recovery may never be possible). Grid scale lithium batteries have an effective lifecycle of 15 years. In this potential future, global lithium reserves would actually start getting choked up before the 2050 goal.
Nuclear is inevitable and we all need to stop pretending otherwise.