Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-years-on-the-sun-is-having-a-moment

by dmazin • 1 year ago

353 544 1 year ago

Paywall

gjm112• 1 year ago

For what it's worth, it didn't throw one up for me. Anyway, for anyone wondering what's beyond the slightly clickbaity headline, it isn't about some astronomical phenomenon; the subheading reads "In the past two years, without much notice, solar power has begun to truly transform the world’s energy system." and the article is all about that.

Brajeshwar• 1 year ago

It do not throw up for me either. I was silently hoping that they excluded IPs from more economically behind countries, so we can read. I was happy.

gjm112• 1 year ago

In case anyone's wondering: the HN title has now been changed to be more informative than the original article title, which was something like "4.6 billion years on, the sun is having a moment".

mikepurvis• 1 year ago

Reader mode on FF and a reload dismissed it for me.

anomaly_• 1 year ago

People deserve to be paid for their work.

georgecmu• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/lv3eU

joshdavham• 1 year ago

How are people making these?

m348e912• 1 year ago

How are people making these?

Do you mean how are people making archive links? They go to archive.is and provide a paywalled link and the website archives and displays the content. I can't tell you how they get around paywalls or how archive.is has managed to not get shutdown, but that's how it's done.

pcthrowaway2• 1 year ago

Take the paywalled URL: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46...

Add archive.is in front of it

https://archive.is/https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-...

If you get an nginx page (I seem to get one pretty often), you can try archive.today, archive.li, or any of the alternates in the URL section on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today

If the article has already been archived, you can select one of the snapshots which the archive site will show you.

If it hasn't, click to archive it and wait ~5 minutes for it to finish. You'll get access to the snapshot and a URL you can share.

ignoramous• 1 year ago

If you get an nginx page (I seem to get one pretty often)

It appears to be a rate-limit mechanism of some sort specific to a fingerprint. Clearing cookies for archive.[is|vn|fo|md] may (or may not) get you past it.

linusg789• 1 year ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20250709125256/https://www.newyor...

Aardwolf• 1 year ago

Given that life on earth in the last multi-billion years wasn't possible without the sun, it's strange to say that it has a moment only today

treve• 1 year ago

It's a small joke.

arh5451• 1 year ago

Nice article explaining solar energy policy. I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms. Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.

piva00• 1 year ago

Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.

What would be a critical look though? They thought it would be good to invest in it and so they did, other countries also had that choice if they so wished to sponsor it for strategic purposes but they are ruled by a different ideology which made them decide to not do it.

I don't think there's anything to be critical about, they invested a lot in it and are reaping the benefits.

Should we also be critical about how the Internet started as a state-sponsored project? Many things that aren't commercially viable in its initial state of development need state-sponsorship to get off the ground to be exploited by private companies, the Chinese saw an opportunity for that in solar PV, kudos to them.

InitialLastName• 1 year ago

I think they meant critical as in a critique rather than a criticism. They are requesting discussion and exploration of the history and ramifications of China's policy, what the meaningful ROI and costs have been, and what the other (4-ish) countries that had the capacity for that sort of investment got out of non-investment (investment in other things).

destitude• 1 year ago

I'm fully off grid (even had utility power but had them remove it). Cook on electric, have electric water heater, using AC and have enough panels and batteries to not even need a backup generator.

xnx• 1 year ago

This is very cool. I'm guessing you must live somewhere with mild winters. Insulation can do wonders, but it can be overcast for weeks in the north.

LetsGetTechnicl• 1 year ago

What "critical look" is there to take? How about the way that the US gov't subsidizes the oil and gas industry, and is about to restart the coal industry? For some reason gov't investment in industry is only bad when China does it.

notTooFarGone• 1 year ago

China bad when it's the only country that actually does something meaningful. Cheap batteries are fueling energy transition and the demand is only met by huge overproduction by china.

China is actually carrying our lazy asses.

JKCalhoun• 1 year ago

When the U.S. does it we're "picking sides".

mensetmanusman4• 1 year ago

The oil industry pays 10s of billions in taxes.

Any disagreement in how much they should be taxed (e.g. 10,20,30,50,90%) can be considered a subsidy.

What people are mostly concerned with is whether a subsidy is distorting via over production. E.g. when China entered the market in solar, most western solar companies following stricter environmental protection requirements went out of business.

margalabargala• 1 year ago

That's a really uncharitable way to read that.

A "critical look" from a US magazine would explore how, with solar power clearly being the future, the US has abdicated its energy dominance to another country. It would discuss the potential ramifications of us not owning our energy infrastructure supply chain the way we do with oil/gas, and what might be done about that.

The New Yorker is a US magazine. From the US perspective, yes, it is "good" when we do it and "bad" when China does it in a way that could negatively impact us.

Propelloni2• 1 year ago

Nobody complains about China investing in its private industry, all wealthy nations do that. Everybody complains that China is a dictatorship that a) treats its people like shit, b) exploits these shitty conditions to gain global market advantage with state-owned companies, and c) keeps foreign companies from exploiting it, too.

Obviously it is more complex than that, but in a nutshell it's part butt-hurt and part amalgamation of state and private enterprise that does not mesh well with classic liberal ideas of freedom and human dignity.

bryanlarsen6• 1 year ago

I saw lots of mentions of batteries in the article.

pydry8• 1 year ago

It'll probably be fulfilled in 3 stages

1) Gas peakers - where every kilowatt hour delivered by solar or wind is just a kilowatt hour of gas that would otherwise have been burned. We are generally still here - still burning gas while it's sunny and windy.

2) Pumped storage and batteries gets us to 98% carbon free grids with ~5 hours of storage with 90% roundtrip efficiency - https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

(98%/5 hours is for australia and will vary for different countries but probably not wildly).

3) Syngas fills in that last 2-5% with ~50% roundtrip efficiency. Every kilowatt hour used in those 5% times - those dark, windless nights will be quite expensive although, counterintuitively still cheaper than an every kilowatt hour generated by a nuclear power plant - https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...

3 and to some extent 2 will require natural gas to be prohibited or taxed heavily.

bryanlarsen6• 1 year ago

My google-fu is failing to resurface the links, but IIRC:

One study determined the cheapest energy grids for many countries. IOW, if you had to rebuild the energy grid from scratch today, what would be the cheapest way to meet your needs?

And the answer was 90 - 95% renewables, depending on country. Solar + wind + batteries for 90 - 95% of the power, with natgas peakers for the rest. And that 90-95% number increases every year.

Another survey noted that while Australia and many other equatorial countries are optimal for solar, Finland is pessimal. Most countries have already passed the point where solar is best in pure financial terms. Finland hasn't, but it's very close. Which is insane, given that Finland is a poor place for solar, but a great place for wind, nuclear & geothermal.

hannob• 1 year ago

3) Syngas fills in that last 2-5%

Just one note, I believe what you mean is some form of gas made from renewables, most likely hydrogen.

"Syngas" is a term that has a relatively specific meaning in the chemical industry, notably it is a gas mixture of mostly Carbon Monoxide and Hydrogen. I do not think that this is what you mean.

ajross• 1 year ago

I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms.

Or just some old gas plants. No one is demanding a 100% solution. Let's get to 85% or whatever first. Arguments like this (which always appear in these threads) are mostly just noise. Pick the low hanging fruit, then argue about how to cross the finish line.

And the bit about China is an interesting article about trade policy but entirely unrelated to the technology being discussed. "Because it's Chinese" is a dumb reason to reject tech.

aaomidi• 1 year ago

US was giving $7500 for each car sold to Tesla. But sure, CHYNAAA

mensetmanusman4• 1 year ago

Whatever the number is in the west, China has on average ~ 10x the amount of subsidies than the west when it comes to manufacturing.

Policy makers are trying to decide whether it’s too risky to shut down all manufacturing of heavy machine capable industries and hand it over to China.

kjkjadksj3• 1 year ago

Imo that didn’t do much but push people into tesla that were in the market for new cars already. Teslas are cheap enough on a lease as it is.

testing22321• 1 year ago

They gave that same rebate to all EV manufacturers. It had nothing to do with any one brand.

georgemcbay• 1 year ago

Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.

What if... (stick with me here because this is about to get crazy)... free market capitalism isn't the best solution for everything...?

throwaway20375• 1 year ago

The correct solution is to make China pay tariffs in proportion to their explicit and implicit state support for their "private" industries. It is not too late to push back.

zmmmmm2• 1 year ago

I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms

There's going to be a beautiful synergy here between electric vehicles and solar. Because an EV battery is already easily enough to power most houses through 14-16 hours of darkness, so if it can be a sink for solar during the day it can then be a source during the night. The future will have a combo of residential battery storage and V2H/V2G which has an attractive property that it scales naturally with population (every new person that moves to a location brings their EV battery with them).

bot403• 1 year ago

I can't see how this could be true. Many people will need to drive the ev to work during the day, and if you discharge it at night then when are you really charging?

It may be true for some who WFH often or in some cases, but not enough EVs will be able to discharge overnight for a v2g battery revolution.

lawrenceduk• 1 year ago

We usually drive to work. That means that when the sun’s shining, the car isn’t home.

Conversely, if we didn’t drive to work, we probably wouldn’t have a car.

On the other hand, we have a big solar array at work so if we had on-site parking (we don’t) we could drive our power home.

It’s probably impractical in reality though, the tax treatment would be chaos and we use the power we generate at work during the day on-site.

ErigmolCt3• 1 year ago

Storage is the elephant in the solar-powered room

marcosdumay7• 1 year ago

Storage is something that close to nobody demands today, so up to 3 years ago anybody trying to sell it automatically failed.

Still close to nobody demands it today, and a few people are already successfully selling it. So I don't see where you found a problem here.

ZeroGravitas10• 1 year ago

One of the good things about solar is the lack of a mismatch between solar production curve and human needs.

People use more energy during the day.

People, globally, use more energy in the summer.

This might not be intuitive if you live nearer the poles, but that's not representative of where the global population live.

And in some of those places, like California people obsesses about the "peak" that is left after you subtract all the solar energy, even if it's lower than the previous real peak.

Luckily that fake peak is immediately after sunset and so easily beaten with a small amount of battery, leaving a much cheaper and easier problem to solve as the peaks are really what drives electricity costs, dictating transmission size and standby capacity.

eldaisfish2• 1 year ago

this is often repeated, but is not entirely true.

Peak electrical demand does not coincide with solar generation. Generally, peak demand is either early in the morning or the late afternoon, when solar production tapers. In order to make up the difference, you'd need a couple thousand megawatt-hours of battery capacity for most regions. You'd also need this to happen twice a day - either side of typical working hours.

This is true in Tokyo and Mumbai. Tokyo's data is here https://www.tepco.co.jp/en/forecast/html/calendar-e.html

Mumbai's peak electricity demand is typically in the late afternoon, when solar output starts to dip.

The solution to this is not more battery capacity, but varied power sources. Wind, solar, gas, nuclear, etc.

ryukoposting2• 1 year ago

offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply.

A lot of this article was clearly written with rose-colored glasses on, but this might be the silliest line of all. The author just finished talking about how a single country makes up the overwhelming share of solar panel and battery production, but hey, look how much more "diffuse and ubiquitous" it is!

IsTom2• 1 year ago

With some investment you can make solar panels locally, you can't produce new oil deposits.

fragmede• 1 year ago

Isn't that what biofuels are?

Sun -> plants (corn) -> liquid that goes in (modified) cars

bryanlarsen6• 1 year ago

Once you build a solar plant, you no longer have a dependence on the country that made those solar panels. That solar plant will function for 50 years with very little maintenance. China is basically a single point of failure for future power expansion, but they can't take away solar plants already built.

throwaway20375• 1 year ago

    > China is basically a single point of failure for future power expansion

Not really. There used to be many more competitors, but Chinese govt support for their industry crushed competition elsewhere. It will a little bit more expensive to buy panels made outside China. That's it.

kccqzy2• 1 year ago

The demand for fossil fuel is continuous. The demand for solar panels is one-time: when you first install it.

ryukoposting2• 1 year ago

That's blatantly false. The panels themselves are typically rated for a 25-year service life [1,2]. Inverters are typically rated for about a decade [3,4]. Solar panels also must be cleaned periodically [5], otherwise their output is reduced. It's a power plant. It will need maintenance. As PV technology improves, there's also pressure to buy better solar panels [6] to replace older, lower-performing panels, resulting in disposal problems that hardly need explanation.

I'm all for solar, generally. Among current renewables, it's the most feasible solution for much of the US. But the idea that they're a "one-time" cost is fantasy.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/hw/end-life-solar-panels-regulations-and... [2]: https://solar.huawei.com/en/blog/2024/lifespan-of-solar-pane... [3]: https://www.igs.com/energy-resource-center/energy-101/how-lo... [4]: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/09/13/how-long-do-residenti... [5]: https://www.nrel.gov/news/detail/features/2021/scientists-st... [6]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221282712...

energy1233• 1 year ago

You're right. We should quickly buy millions of solar panels from China and put them in a strategic reserve to future proof our energy needs and secure decades-long energy independence from China. We should also subsidize domestic production ASAP.

Biologist1232• 1 year ago

This was a great positive start to the day. Thanks whoever posted that.

One point curious in its omission is whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget. Presumably that’s the critical metric in all of this.

[Edit: I ran this question through ChatGPT and the initial (unvalidated) response wasn’t so exciting. This obviously put a dampener on my mood. And I wondered why people like McKibben only talk about the upside. It can sometimes feel a bit like Kayfabe, playing with the the reader’s emotions. And like my old man says: if someone tells you about pros and cons, they’re an advisor. If someone tells you only about pros, they’re a salesman.]

alex_duf4• 1 year ago

whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget

I'm not sure I understand. There's no carbon budget, any carbon that we emit is carbon we'll have to re-capture somehow and the longer it stays in the atmosphere the longer it will have a heating effect.

I think renewable have accelerated to the point of matching the electricity growth worldwide: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...

We've also passed the peak of CO2 per capita, but since the population is still growing we are still increasing carbon emitions worldwide. It's going to be a while before we stop emitting anything, and then longer before we start re-absorbing it...

Biologist1232• 1 year ago

My apologies. By available carbon budget, I meant the carbon we can burn before we exceed 1.5 degrees, or 2 degrees etc.

myrmidon6• 1 year ago

I highly doubt that we will have global negative emissions (CO2 capturing) within the next decades-- maybe by the end of the century.

Even very rich nations have a handful of prototype plants for CO2 capture right now at best, and the budget for things like this is the first thing that gets slashed by Doge et al.

If we were on track for lots of CO2 capture by 2050, we would see the beginnings already (massive investments, quickly scaling numbers of capture sites, rapid tech iteration).

Fully agree with the rest of your point though. I consider CO2 emissions as basically "raising the difficulty level" for current and future humans (in a very unethical way, disproportionately affecting poor/arid/coastal nations).

I'm also highly confident that human extinction from climate change is completely off the table (and I think a lot of people delude themselves into believing that scenario for no reason).

phtrivier• 1 year ago

Whenever I hear "carbon budget", I usually understand it as "how much CO2 we can still emit (net of sinks) before the warming passes a certain threshold (for example, some level of the Paris agreement.)

Is that a misunderstanding on my side ?

passwordoops2• 1 year ago

Shrinking? China is growing their coal capacity (1). What people mistake is China is not "for renewables". They are for maximizing absolute output. That means they are "for everything"

(1) https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-has-more-than-...

ErigmolCt3• 1 year ago

Solar and wind are booming, but fossil fuels aren't shrinking nearly as fast in absolute terms

richardw• 1 year ago

Countries are placing their bets. Fossil fuels will be a massive waste of investment in a decade. Anyone who can extrapolate a graph sees where this is headed.

netsharc2• 1 year ago

There's an article a while ago about the solar boom in a poor country that had unreliable electricity network. The result was, solar wasn't treated as a replacement, but as a new source of energy, which enabled them to do more industrious things. Of course that doesn't help with the carbon budget...

msgodel• 1 year ago

Usually old energy sources don't go away until there's an economic contraction of some sort.

ZeroGravitas10• 1 year ago

The rollout of renewables is the main factor in climate predictions for 2100 reducing over time.

They're still bad, but better than they would have been with business as usual or if solar, wind and batteries hadn't plummeted in price:

https://climateactiontracker.org/global/emissions-pathways/

Veedrac2• 1 year ago

Even if, for sake of argument, one outright denies the evident exponential growth in solar, a purely linear extrapolation of 2024's rate from [1] puts solar equal to today's coal output by 2042. Solar is fundamentally a factory product, so this is a wildly pessimistic case, just enough interest in the product to keep the lines running. If you believe solar will grow for even a few more years, but still declare that it should level off, it's the mid 30s. If you're willing to just fit the established trend, even that's a vast underestimate. The difference between which of these to believe is just how brave you are.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...

danaris• 1 year ago

A remarkably positive and hopeful article. It's really staggering seeing the figures of not just how much solar has grown in recent years, but how massively its growth has outstripped everyone's predictions from essentially any time in the past.

I also really liked this passage about the direct on-the-ground effects of being able to install solar panels:

If you have travelled through rural Asia, you know the sound of diesel generators pumping the millions of deep tube wells that were a chief driver of the agricultural Green Revolution of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Now solar electricity is pumping the water—diesel sales in Pakistan apparently fell thirty per cent in 2024. If you’re a farmer, that’s kind of a miracle; fuel, one of your biggest costs, is simply gone.

Being able to pay a one-time up-front cost and just....never have to worry about paying for fuel for your irrigation system again. Truly remarkable.

It is, if you'll pardon the pun, quite a ray of sunshine in these otherwise dark and uncertain times.

energy1233• 1 year ago

Batteries will soon follow the same trajectory, just lagged. The same economic forces will produce the same outcome. We now have cost-effective stationary storage solution with non-scarce inputs, manufacturers are just waiting for the demand.

It's hard to see this truth right now, because the demand isn't there for it to happen just yet. At the margin, energy developers will install solar instead of batteries, up until the point that the grid is saturated with solar, at which point they will switch to batteries. But very few energy grids have reached that point of saturation, so demand hasn't sent manufacturers the market signal to begin high-volume production of grid storage. That will change as more grids mature like California/Texas.

throwaway20375• 1 year ago

    > diesel sales in Pakistan apparently fell thirty per cent in 2024

If true, this is fantastic news for Pakistan. They are in the middle of an awful economic crisis, that includes a balance of payments crisis (central bank has too few dollars to support necessary imports, like oil and gas). Anything they do to reduce trade defects will be very helpful.

thomascountz2• 1 year ago

...people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours.

This is amazing! Whether you believe photovoltaics are the most efficient form of green energy production or not, you cannot argue the impressive economics behind them. Successful engineering has to meet the market at the end of the day.

pfdietz9• 1 year ago

are the most efficient form

What does this even mean?

aaronbrethorst2• 1 year ago

being a sentence fragment, not much! It helps to zoom out to the context of the entire sentence, where the GP says: "Whether you believe photovoltaics are the most efficient form of green energy production or not, you cannot argue the impressive economics behind them"

It's definitely impressive that the cost per watt of a PV panel is roughly 13% of where it was just 15 years ago.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices

thomascountz2• 1 year ago

You got me. It was a honeypot of a term, "efficiency."

The point is, it depends on how you define it. Engineers may say efficiency is determined by the properties of the photovoltaic cells themselves. Economists may argue it's cost per kilowatt. Politicians may say it's how quickly we can construct solar farms...

decimalenough• 1 year ago

It is, unfortunately, also an apples to oranges comparison. A coal plant actually generates 1GW, 24/7, while "a gigawatt's worth" of solar panels is theoretical peak capacity at noon on a cloudless day.

cycomanic2• 1 year ago

It is, unfortunately, also an apples to oranges comparison. A coal plant actually generates 1GW, 24/7, while "a gigawatt's worth" of solar panels is theoretical peak capacity at noon on a cloudless day.

That's incorrect. The capacity factor of a coal plant is between 50% and 60%. That's far away from 100% although better than solar (but not that much better) with capacity factors ranging from 15%-30% [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor].

cesarb• 1 year ago

A coal plant actually generates 1GW, 24/7, while "a gigawatt's worth" of solar panels is theoretical peak capacity at noon on a cloudless day.

This is called "capacity factor". Other things like maintenance also affect it, no power plant actually generates "24/7". A simple back-of-the-envelope estimate would put solar power's capacity factor at around 25%, so that "gigawatt's worth of solar panels" would generate an average of 250MW. Which is still an impressive number.

ambientenv• 1 year ago

I just can't get that exuberant when I also read things like this [1].

[1] https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-tale-of-two-ene...

audunw3• 1 year ago

I only skimmed the article but there didn’t seem to be much written about how much of that non-electric fossil fuel is waste heat. I know there are versions of the energy source-sink graph which shows wasted energy. Why didn’t the author use it? Weird.

There are studies on how much energy is required to decarbonise everything, not just local electricity production. The energy required is far less than what you’d think if you look at the primary energy of all the energy we use today.

One aspect of this is what you see with the transition to EV or from gas to induction cook tops. It comes with a huge reduction in wasted energy.

The other aspect is the transition to heat pumps, which is over 100% efficient, so you need a lot less energy to provide the same amount of heat. There are now commercial industrial heat pumps that has reached 200°C, which enables the use in more industrial applications.

The third is the transition to recycling. At some point we will have enough materials for all that we need to do. The green energy transition requires a big temporary jump in the amount of lithium and copper we need. But once all vehicles have been transitioned to EVs, most of those material will come from recycled materials, cutting the energy required to acquire those materials to a tiny fraction of what we need now.

aredox• 1 year ago

All of OECD countries are lying about their growth numbers, and Russia is "gaining strength".

A base sanity check shows this is a load of BS.

hoerensagen2• 1 year ago

Maybe I'm misunderstanding but the Author seems to think that the main conversion losses in electricity generation come from renewables

Edit:

I think this paragraph should be enough to show that it is not advisable to trust the author on anything to do with energy:

Due to the weight of all this stuff, and the relatively mild heat and scattered light coming from the Sun, solar panels produce no more than 20 Watts for each kg of their mass, even on a sunny day. Meanwhile wind turbines, with their massive concrete bases and tall steel towers, generate a mere 6 Watts for every kg of their weight. (Batteries fare slightly better at 240 W/kg.) For comparison diesel fuel produces 13,000 Watts for every kg of fuel burned. A regular diesel engine weighing 150 kg can thus easily produce 110 kW of power, while the same feat would require 5.5 tons of solar panels directly lit by the Sun at noon.

MichaelNolan• 1 year ago

That article's whole premises seems to hinge on the quote: "Energy from non-fossil fuel combustible electricity generation is accounted for on their input heat requirements and non-combustible renewables on the energy content of their gross electrical output."

But that line means the exact opposite of what the author claims it means. He claims that renewables are being overinflated, but the reverse is true. Coal and gas get evaluated based on their heat content, not their useful work output. Wind and solar get evaluated on their electrical output.

audunw3• 1 year ago

I would recommend reading or watching what Tony Seba has put out. He has correctly predicted where we ended up with solar, and his predictions for the next stage of the energy transition is very remarkable and uplifting. It seems overly optimistic at first but makes a lot of sense when you look at the trend lines.

jillesvangurp7• 1 year ago

I think the raw economics behind the transition are very interesting. People have a hard time imagining transformative changes. They keep trying to project the current state of affairs onto the post transition state. Of course the current state is mostly the result of how things used to work and not really a predictor for the future. When things stop working in the same way, a lot of other things start shifting. For example steel production is happening close to where coal used to be produced. And a lot of other industries depend on steel. What happens if steel production transitions to renewables? It will move to wherever renewables are cheapest. Which typically isn't where it's currently happening. Everything depending on cheap steel might move as well.

I think the current US policies are unfortunate (for the US) but ultimately futile. They'll fall behind and will see their exports affected. That will lead to local economic problems that ultimately will lead to economic reform to fix that. It will delay the energy transition in the US for a bit (10-20 years, maybe less). The tariffs will curtail imports. Which, ironically means other countries will be less dependent on exporting to it. And also less motivated to import relatively expensive things from the US. So US exports will decline in lockstep with its imports. And the whole tariff volatility just means that countries will start insulating themselves from being dependent on anything coming from the US. And that will extend to all sectors in the US. Agriculture, gas, cars, software services, etc.

The obvious fix to this in a few years will be a hard break with the (recent) past and ending trade wars and pulling the plug on the fossil fuel industry. Which by then won't be competitive anymore. It actually isn't right now but the US chooses to shove that under the carpet with trillions of dollars of government support. And most of that money is being borrowed. Interest and inflation is going to be a key thing to keep an eye on in the next few years. The US is sitting on a big stinky gas fueled debt bubble currently. What happens when that bursts and the gas becomes worthless?

silvestrov• 1 year ago

Steel factories cannot shutdown temporarily due to high electricity prices. They need a steady source of electricity.

This needs to be taken into account. I don't know if factories can be made with better insulation so they can "hibernate" somewhat when electricity is expensive.

So they might want to be located in a location with both wind, solar and hydro to ensure a (somewhat) stable price.

Denmark has a lot of wind mills and use hourly pricing for most consumers. This means that the price can vary a lot from hour to hour. 21st of June the price of electricity itself (excl taxes and transmission) was negative 3 cents at 2pm and 18 cents at 8pm. That is a difference of 21 cents over 6 hours.

nmfisher• 1 year ago

Link?

Loic• 1 year ago

From a geopolitical point of view, if we increase solar/renewable, we decrease dependencies on fossil fuels. As fossil fuels are traded in USD, we decrease our needs of USD, so we decrease the value of the USD.

Isn't it what the current US administration want? A weak USD to boost export?

DamonHD2• 1 year ago

From outside at least, the US administration seems very like a bunch of cruel angry teens lashing out against reality, so various others (eg the bond markets) seem not sure that even if the US administration wants something that it would know why it does or that what is wanted would be a sensible thing or that it could be executed on...

ErigmolCt3• 1 year ago

While the US is busy trying to revive the oil-soaked 20th century, places like Namibia are leapfrogging straight into a distributed, solar-powered future with YouTube tutorials... It's like watching the fossil era get out-hustled in real time.

seydor• 1 year ago

To be fair the US is leading the world in solar and wind per capita

EDIT: energy consumption from renewables, not installed capacity

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&hideCo...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-solar?tab=char...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/wind-electricity-per-capi...

svantana• 1 year ago

What is your source for that statement? According to [1], countries like the Netherlands, Germany, Spain and Denmark are way ahead of the US in those respects.

[1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/

ludwigschubert• 1 year ago

The US is at half the per capital levels of Sweden, and seems to lag behind most of Europe:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-ge...

Do I misunderstand?

aa-jv• 1 year ago

This is false.

On solar - China installed 93 GW in May 2025 alone - this exceeds the US' combined solar additions over the three years from 2022 to 2024.

The US' total solar additions, even over 10 years (92.7 GW), would still be lower than China’s cumulative capacity additions in recent years. China installed 277 GW in 2024 alone.

The US simply does not lead the world in solar and wind per capita, trailing countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, and Australia in both generation (10th at 1,889 kWh) and capacity (~957–1,125 watts).

lentil_soup• 1 year ago

those are interesting links, but it doesn't account for the amount of energy each person consumes in each region. Probably this one is better? it's the share of the electricity from renewables

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&hideCo...

cheschire• 1 year ago

Those are vastly different scales you’re comparing. I doubt Namibia vs America will be another Tesla vs Ford.

The whole point of the current American efforts about oil seems to be reinvigorating economic growth. Oil supply chains are a lot easier to manipulate into growth strategies than renewables.

Countries that have leapfrogged into energy independence are doing great but thats not hustle. They’re ensuring their isolation for years to come.

And to be clear that may not be a bad thing for them.

loudmax2• 1 year ago

Reinvigorating economic growth is the stated intent. The effectiveness of these policies will take longer to sort out, and will probably be argued over for decades.

But I think even ascribing economic growth as the intent is generous. The economy was already growing vigorously. Most of the policies we're seeing now are performative posturing.

philipallstar• 1 year ago

The oil-soaked 20th century created all the millions of necessary precursors to miracles like phones and youtube and people in Namibia being able to get them. It's not out-hustled; it's just a miniscle increment. But it's good to see.

jjulius2• 1 year ago

... miracles like... youtube...

... miracle?

wanderingstan3• 1 year ago

“The Innovator's Dilemma” by Clayton M. Christensen described how big companies fail when against new startups because they can’t let go of their fat margins for a new technology that (at first) appears to be inferior, even a toy. (His examples are Japanese motorbikes and hard disks)

Seems the United States is now trapped in the same dilemma. It can’t let go of those fat oil profits to embrace the new —but rapidly improving— renewable tech, even if it’s clear that that’s where the market for energy is heading. I.E., the big company (or nation) must sabotage some of their current profit centers in order to remain long term competitive.

(Reposting a comment I made on nytimes article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/climate/china... )

marcosdumay7• 1 year ago

Hum... The profits from oil aren't as fat as they used to be. In fact, if you subtract the giant amount of subsides, there may be almost to nothing there.

That's to say that no, countries and governments do not behave like companies.

zenkat• 1 year ago

Check out Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" for an interesting take on this dynamic for nation-states and political economies. His core thesis is that dominant powers rise as new players leverage new technologies (especially energy technologies), build complex interdependent economies centered around those technologies, but then wither and fall as they spend increasingly more on military power to monopolize and defend the chokepoints of those technologies. When a new more efficient technology comes along, they are doomed to irrelevance as they fail to capitalize on those technologies, and new players swoop in for dominance.

He gives examples of the Dutch and wind power (sailing); Great Britain and coal; and America and petroleum. He also predicted China's ascendency as the next player willing to leverage new technologies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great...

jer2209• 1 year ago

Its interesting you give Namibia as an example. Every major oil company has exploration projects there today. It is clearly part of the future strategy for the country. When I visited for vacation not too long ago, I remember the O&G industry being very much visible from the shore in Walvis Bay.

Although, given that the majority of the country is uninhabited. I imagine, it is an ideal place for solar.

Amazing place, highly recommend to visit.

analyte123• 1 year ago

I sincerely doubt the Namibian government is giving out thousands of dollars per household in solar subsidies, like the US does up until the end of this year. I doubt Pakistan does either, another country noted in the article where solar usage is expanding. If solar is a mature technology and an economic inevitability as contended in the article (I agree), there is a much weaker case for subsidizing it. In any case, most solar installation costs in the US seem to go to permits and expensive, inefficient contractors - endemic problems which affect all types of development and are probably only made worse by throwing free money at them.

pzo• 1 year ago

good article I just don't know why author prefer to spell all numbers using words rather than digits. It's very mentally taxing for me to read, e.g:

> of twenty-one thousand respondents in twenty-one countries, found that sixty-eight per cent favored solar energy, “five times more [...]

could be just:

> of 21,000 responders in 21 countries, found that 68% favored solar energy, "5x more [...]

ZeroGravitas10• 1 year ago

I believe this is a New Yorker magazine house style thing. I'd assume the author uses numerals in the book this article is based on.

HPsquared5• 1 year ago

If there are two options, you can trust they'll go for the more verbose one.

bokkies• 1 year ago

Also Cape Town is a city in South Africa..no idea where Capetown is

antonvs2• 1 year ago

It's near Stellen Bosch

happyraul• 1 year ago

That's simply good writing practice. I find it more taxing to read digits than prose.

sojournerc• 1 year ago

I was taught numbers up to ten should be spelled, the rest use digits

otikik• 1 year ago

Thank you. To me after reading the parent comment the numbers option was so evidently better that I didn't even consider that someone like you could exist. My conception of humanity has been slightly enlarged.

If I may ask: Do you also find numbers more difficult to parse when doing math pure math operations? Is this:

Two hundred thirty five plus one thousand eight hundred twenty two

Also easier for you to parse than this?

235 + 1822

Or do you have two "parsing modes" ("text" and "math"), and going from one to the other is the difficult part?

Animats• 1 year ago

"Last year, for the third year straight, heat pumps outsold furnaces in the U.S."

Now that's a major development not mentioned much.

Heat pumps have both improved quite a bit, and become cheaper due to sheer volume.

matwood3• 1 year ago

I recently bought a heat pump dryer and it's pretty cool. No exhaust vent, just water drain. It also doesn't need the heavy duty power plug since it pulls so much less electricity than a typical heated air dryer.

pjc5010• 1 year ago

Ah of course - it can recycle the heat. Hot air going out a vent is wasted energy that you've paid for.

markus_zhang5• 1 year ago

I don’t know this thing exists. I need to take a look and maybe buy one when the current one breaks down. What brand did you purchase? Thanks.

fhdkweig• 1 year ago

Technology Connections did a video on heat pump dryers.

https://youtu.be/zheQKmAT_a0?t=930

jonplackett3• 1 year ago

Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere

I’m all for solar - but does it really solve the geographical / geopolitical issues of oil, as it’s currently rolling out?

China produces pretty much all the solar panels - That’s quite a big concentration of power, even more so than oil.

bhaak• 1 year ago

Solar panels can be locally recycled. Oil cannot.

Of course if you don't build up a local solar industry you are still dependent on foreign countries but it's not that China has an unchanging monopoly on the solar industry.

nradov4• 1 year ago

Solar panel recycling has never really been done at scale. And a country would need fairly advanced manufacturing capabilities first before they could conduct that recycling.

pshirshov5• 1 year ago

China produces pretty much all the solar panels

Why didn't other countries build up solar industries? Were busy with fossils? Were too greedy to subsidise?

netsharc2• 1 year ago

Man, Paul Krugman (here's a trigger for people who know they know better than him to respond that he's a hack!) was writing about the US giving up lead of solar tech to China back during the G. W. Bush admin... (which makes me feel old as hell)

buckle80173• 1 year ago

China builds solar panels using electricity produced by burning coal.

China is by far the world largest producer of green house gases.

passwordoops2• 1 year ago

You forgot being too concerned with maintaining environmental and air quality regulations.

There's a reason Shanghai is known for really bad air quality. There's a reason the rate of GHG emissions are accelerating

pjc5010• 1 year ago

Like everything else in manufacturing, economy of scale wins.

There's been plenty of subsidization efforts, but they made the mistake of subsidizing technologies that were too innovative and too early on in the scaling curve. e.g. Solyndra with CIGS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra

Between 2009 and mid-2011 the price of polysilicon, the key ingredient for most competing technologies, dropped by about 89% due to Chinese advances in the Siemens process.

"Massive cost reduction in the existing, boring, process" beat "new technology". Possibly for the best in this case, since CIGS and CdTe are poisonous in a way that polysilicon isn't.

freeopinion3• 1 year ago

Point the finger at yourself. Why didn't you personally build and operate a plant?

Why would you expect different behavior from others?

jonplackett3• 1 year ago

We let big corporations run things and they just do what’s best for short term profit.

Long term thinking in the west is like 5 years. Long term thinking in China is 100+ years.

kragen26• 1 year ago

I’m all for solar - but does it really solve the geographical / geopolitical issues of oil, as it’s currently rolling out?

Yes, because if the US blockades you so you can't import oil, your trucks and power plants stop running in six weeks. If the US blockades you so you can't import Chinese solar panels, your power grid stops running in 20 years. Actually, that's just the end of the warranty period, so more like 30. Or 40. The US is gonna have to keep up that blockade for a long time before it starts causing you any pain. Probably after the President For Life dies.

roenxi• 1 year ago

Not to mention that 20 years is enough time to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers. The issue with oil is it requires a constant flow of resources from specific locations in the world that are blessed by geography. Solar power has much less of that going on.

Gibbon13• 1 year ago

It's more banal than that. Oil you have to pay for. Which for most countries you need to constantly come up with foreign currency. If you have a financial crisis like hot money flees you end up at the mercy of the world banking systems mafia enforcers the IMF.

With solar and electrified transport and industry? Can't pay the loans for the solar panels? Sucks for the saps that loaned you the money. Come and take them.

ZeroGravitas10• 1 year ago

At the very least it has solved it for China, and that is one key driving force of their moves in this area.

Whether that makes a global conflict more or less likely is an interesting question.

usrusr2• 1 year ago

China produces pretty much all the solar panels - That’s quite a big concentration of power, even more so than oil.

But that very much isn't a consequence of geology. Ramping up panel production is much easier than discovering oil deposits when there aren't any to discover.

adrianN6• 1 year ago

Solar panels are not that hard to produce. China just does it cheaper than other countries. Any industrialized country can easily set up the necessary infrastructure if they choose to do so for strategic reasons.

jonplackett3• 1 year ago

They’re not hard to produce but they are hard to produce really cheap as in as cheap as China. For lots of reasons (state aid being one, extreme competition being another).

It’s hard in a capitalist country to do things that don’t make business sense - eg long term thinking. So I don’t see any reasonable route where China isn’t still making all the panels any time soon.

myself2482• 1 year ago

The US used to produce tons of solar panels, and LiFePO4 batteries too, but we let those industries fail. (I've been to quite a few plant auctions. It's sad, picking through the bones of random tools and support equipment, but nobody's bidding on the big crown-jewel machines because they had one purpose and that simply doesn't work in our market anymore.)

There are still a few solar panel plants in the US, but nothing like we had.

jillesvangurp7• 1 year ago

The article doesn't mention a technology that deserves some attention because it counters the biggest and most obvious deficiency in solar: the sun doesn't always shine.

That technology is cables. Cables allow us to move energy over long distances. And with HVCD cables that can mean across continents, oceans, time zones, and climate regions. The nice things about cables is that they are currently being underutilized. They are designed to have enough capacity so that the grid continues to function at peak demand. Off peak, there is a lot of under utilized cable capacity. An obvious use for that would be transporting power to wherever batteries need to be re-charged from wherever there is excess solar/wind power. And cables can work both ways. So import when there's a shortage, export when there's a surplus.

And that includes the rapidly growing stock of batteries that are just sitting there with an average charge state close to more or less fully charged most of the time. We're talking terawatt hours of power. All you need to get at that is cables.

Long distance cables will start moving non trivial amounts of renewable power around as we start executing on plans to e.g. connect Moroccan solar with the UK, Australian solar with Singapore, east coast US to Europe, etc. There are lots of cable projects stuck in planning pipelines around the world. Cables can compensate for some of the localized variations in energy productions caused by seasonal effects, weather, or day/night cycles.

For the rest, we have nuclear, geothermal, hydro, and a rapidly growing stock of obsolete gas plants that we might still turn on on a rainy day. I think anyone still investing in gas plants will need a reality check: mothballed gas plant aren't going to be very profitable. But we'll keep some around for decades to come anyway.

HPsquared5• 1 year ago

Any country relying on international cables for electricity would need to build and maintain full local backup power capacity. The combined cost of cables + backup may be more than storage cost. (Of course there are many factors which affect all these costs)

CrossVR• 1 year ago

Norway, Denmark and The Netherlands are all part of the European Union. Would you make the same claim if we were talking about US states? (With Texas being a special exception)

pjc5010• 1 year ago

You might say "any country relying on international pipelines for gas would need to build and maintain full local backup capacity", except they didn't. Hence the Russia/Ukraine war causing all sorts of problems.

berkes2• 1 year ago

maintain full local backup power capacity.

Not necessarily. If connectivity is broad and the network graph is decentralized, rerouting should cover some of the backup.

For example, if Luxembourg goes to war with Belgium, and Belgium shuts down the lines to Luxembourg, then they can reroute via Germany or France (provided they have lines there, obv). But if Spain gets beef with France, and France cuts the lines, they cannot easily reroute. So Spain would need more backup and more independence (and prolly cables to Italy and Africa?). Point being:

jillesvangurp7• 1 year ago

It helps to have stable bi-lateral relationships between countries that choose to connect their grids and economies. This kind of stability is a good thing. The current instability with long relationships being questioned and falling apart is a bad thing. And where you say cost, I say investment. Because energy is a valuable commodity and being able to buy/sell energy via cables has value.

Most renewable energy investments have decent, easy to calculate returns on investment. That's why this stuff is so popular with investors. And that's also why I don't think current policy changes in the US matter long term. It just slightly increases the time to a return on investment. But you still get a return. So, companies will continue to look at batteries, solar, and indeed cables with or without government support. And even a little bit of tariffs (aka. taxes) won't stop that.

buckle80173• 1 year ago

Better grid connections helps with variable weather but it does nothing for solar biggest down side.

Seasonal variation from December to May is enormous.

Storing months of power is a problem with no known solution.

jillesvangurp7• 1 year ago

North south connections enable solar power from Africa to be used around the year. And while solar is down in the winter, wind production usually peaks. If you have thousands of km of cable, there is a lot of power that can be moved around.

adrianN6• 1 year ago

Power2Gas and using the existing infrastructure for gas storage is a known solution for storing months of power. It might not be the cheapest solution though.

davedx2• 1 year ago

“No known solution” is categorically false [1]. Economics is the issue

1. Generate hydrogen or other synthetic hydrocarbon fuels from electricity; flow batteries, saltwater batteries, and a myriad other chemistries; compressed air; hydro, etc etc

kragen26• 1 year ago

Plausible alternatives to cables include ships full of synthetic diesel, ships full of iron, ships full of aluminum, or ships full of magnesium. Inside China HVDC cables are indeed carrying solar power across the continent, but the Netherlands have not managed to erect any yet. Cables provide efficient JIT power delivery, but they're vulnerable to precision-guided missiles, which Ukrainians are 3-D printing in their basements by the million, so the aluminum-air battery may return to commercial use.

Gravityloss• 1 year ago

There's at least one HVDC cable connected to Netherlands, Norned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NorNed .

As probably everyone knows, Netherlands is very flat and Norway very mountaneous. Norways is also very rainy. So it's a match made in heaven - Norway's mountain reservoirs can act as balancers for dutch wind power.

lukan3• 1 year ago

Ships carrying energy are a pretty easy explosive target as well.

Local ressilence is needed in any case and mass produced batteries can provide that safety.

davedx2• 1 year ago

The Netherlands has “erected” multiple HVDC links

dgfitz• 1 year ago

As long as we all realize you can’t 3D print precision-guided missiles without, well, the guidance bit.

globalnode• 1 year ago

As well as electricity to ammonia, ship it around the world by boat and then crack or burn it at the destination. or just use it as-is.

fred_is_fred2• 1 year ago

Ukranians are 3d printing millions of missiles in their basements?

specialist2• 1 year ago

ships full of iron

At first I thought you meant "embodied energy" or some such.

Iceland "exports" geothermal energy by converting bauxite ore into aluminum.

Australian could "export" renewable energy by domestically converting iron ore into steel.

nradov4• 1 year ago

Cables can be a great option in certain places but geography and politics limit where they can be used. No one is going to run a cable across the Pacific Ocean so that Russian solar power can supply evening peak demand loads in western North America.

tonyedgecombe2• 1 year ago

No, but it might make sense to run them from the east coast to the west in America.

energy1233• 1 year ago

There's geopolitical implications. Solar is long stability, short conflict. It's easy to cut undersea cables, it's easy for instability arriving to one the landlocked countries in the middle of transit. This creates systemic risks that are asymmetric with respect to offense and defense.

Many would see this as an invitation to retreat from solar, but I view it as the opposite. Widespread solar will cause peace via the capitalist peace theory, similar to the role that trade plays in staking everyone in mutual stability. Stability will become a public good that everyone will want to preserve. Solar will be another part of the international diplomatic-cultural-economic web that binds countries together in mutual interest.

Resiliency can be figured out with creativity, it's not something to give up on at the first challenge.

To be fair, natural gas and oil shares similar systemic risks, whether it's pipelines open to sabotage or water transits being subject to blockade, such as the Malacca dilemma that China would face if it invades Taiwan. But at least with solar, it won't ruin countries with the resource curse, and in principle it doesn't give a small number of countries leverage since anyone can produce this fairly basic commodity.

flohofwoe• 1 year ago

similar to the role that trade plays in staking everyone in mutual stability

That's a nice idea in theory but isn't worth much in practice if one of the trade partners has 19th century style imperial ambitions.

hnaccount_rng7• 1 year ago

That was the idea behind Germany’s energy dependence on Russia. Let’s call that experiment not successful, shall we?

Mengkudulangsat• 1 year ago

I do not feel as optimistic about any uptick in cables as I do about solar and wind. Solar and wind can grow through a multitude of small, plug-and-play projects. Cable projects like HDVC are still giant, long-term punts.

tonyedgecombe2• 1 year ago

A lot of the wind projects could be classified as "giant, long-term punts".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsea_Wind_Farm

idiotsecant3• 1 year ago

This is literally the problem. Transmission is desperately needed, much more than generation right now. The issue is that it's hard to explain to people why this is, and even when they understand they react like you do.

RENEWABLES NEED TRANSMISSION!!! We need to be building unprecedented Manhattan project levels of transmission, yesterday! But instead we will put some solar panels on a car park and feel like we did our part. Solar is the easy part. Storage and/or transmission is the hard part.

froh• 1 year ago

for the rest (as the sun shines again after some time) storage sounds like a viable alternative to the list in your comments...

other than that I agree

berkes2• 1 year ago

Interesting side effect is that this reliance on cables introduces a dependency on copper which already is in short supply and which can be mined only in specific regions.

So it re-introduces some geo-political dependencies. Not in the way fossil fuels or unranium do, because a copper cable won't "burn up" to produce the energy, but they do need some upkeep.

Another dependency this introduces is the network itself. A failure in specific regions could lead to massive blackouts (Like recently in spain/portugal) or could even become political pressure instruments like currently the russian-natural-gas-pipelines in Europe are

CorrectHorseBat• 1 year ago

Cables can be made out of aluminium, so that's not really an issue

TheOtherHobbes2• 1 year ago

The Spain/Portugal blackout happened when network management failed to predict a workable source mix. Basically human error.

Political pressure is hardly a renewables problem, and is more likely to mitigate it than make it worse.

Currently we get a lot of energy by shipping it as physical cargo around the world through various unstable regions after it's produced by hostile regimes - which is not exactly a recipe for reliability.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/investigation-into-s...

Tade02• 1 year ago

It's a non-issue. Copper isn't that short in supply.

A typical car uses ~25kg of copper - that's enough for approximately 0.5m of HVDC.

The EU currently produces 12mln cars annually, down 3mln from the 2017 peak.

In other words there should be no issue with ramping up demand for the equivalent of 1500km of HVDC annually in the EU alone - a rate much higher than the local bureaucracy could manage issuing permits for.

dzhiurgis• 1 year ago

Few years ago I was super hyped about HVDC across the ocean too. LCOE over batteries seemed no brainer.

Now I am not so sure anymore, especially most of the power is going to be powering AI datacenters and it's far easier to locate datacenter near cheap solar than put tons of cables around the world.

naikrovek• 1 year ago

All you need to get at that is cables

I don't understand your point. Power grids are a thing, and these enormous battery banks are attached to them.

It's true that power grids are independent from each other, but it's not a simple matter to just connect them all and observe a huge benefit as solar farms in Africa power the US or something. When everything is working that is certainly a possible outcome, but when things break, the operators of these grids need to know what the other grid operators are doing, and supply must be routed to demand correctly or you'll just create more outages. power grids aren't a simple mesh where any substation can power any home.

mcbrit• 1 year ago

How far do cables generally move power now in terms of hours, meaning time zone offset? This might seem like an odd formulation, but.

I /think/ formulating the problem this way means that 12h=power is always relevant. So: where are we?

hollerith• 1 year ago

Aside from your question (which I would rephrase as, How expensive is it to send electricity to a different time zone), another important question is, How expensive is it to ensure that the electricity continues to flow if our country's government angers some other country's government and that country has an effective military?

RHSman2• 1 year ago

Dude, the sun always shines.

marze3• 1 year ago

Transmission lines are a interesting idea, but expensive.

Once solar is cheap (like now, as it already is), you can put in 3x what is needed on a sunny day, and power everything on cloudy days. Solar runs on cloudy days. Night obviously requires a different solution. Start by installing solar over all parking lots.

To think that you won't be able to run a 100% solar/wind grid is a bet against human ingenuity. If generation in excess of peak demand was installed of solar/wind, there are many promising approaches to deal with generation shortfalls. Batteries, load shifting, an electric vehicle fleet that charges during the day and powers the grid at night if the owner opts in, precooling a home with AC during the day to a low set point so AC isn't needed at night, H2 storage in salt caverns, pumped hydro, aluminum smelters that operate during excess power periods, the possibilities are infinite.

It won't be hard. Don't bet against human ingenuity.

abakker• 1 year ago

Solar over parking lots is so good. it creates power, shade, and reduces reflected heat.

jillesvangurp7• 1 year ago

You are right. A different way of thinking of this is that we'll be able to saturate whatever cable capacity there is with excess solar and wind in order to charge whatever battery capacity needs charging. It's a careful balance between time shifting solar and wind with batteries or shifting it in space with cables. They complement each other. The natural consequence of people installing more solar, wind, and batteries than they need is running surpluses most of the time. Which means that whenever there's a local shortage, cables are a way out because there's plenty of energy in the system. The more excess energy there is, the more attractive cables get.

It's not an either or thing. And this will be a self optimizing system as well. It won't be up to grid operators anymore. If people need more power, they'll get some even if the grids won't provide it. And if they need it to be more reliable, they'll fix it anyway they can. Which includes using batteries, generators, and whatever else works.

Hydrogen for energy production is a bit of a fantasy IMHO. Awful battery. Expensive to create. And there are plenty more profitable uses for it than sacrificing it as a simple methane alternative. Honestly, burning it is a bit desperate. If you have all this valuable hydrogen and burning it is the most valuable thing you can imagine doing, you're doing it wrong and missing out on some big dollar amount of more sane shit you should be doing.

Cables are expensive mainly because of policy. They are mainly made using commodity materials (copper, aluminium, etc.). Cable manufacturing isn't expensive. Installing them isn't rocket science. Land disputes on the other hand are cripplingly expensive. Solve that and cables become cheap. Geothermal works the same way; not that hard. Drill some holes (oil companies are really good at this) and that's most of the work. Getting permission to do that is the hard and expensive part.

privatelypublic2• 1 year ago

You missed a huge upcoming one: EV's. I firmly believe that paying EV owners with vehicle-to-load capability will soon be used to smooth out peaks and troughs in the grid. Maybe in the future even systems that use DC fast charging contacts to get the huge DC voltages needed for an external inverter capable of powering several houses.

evandijk70• 1 year ago

I think this would work for the summer months. Overnight storage is manageble/cost-effective by load shifting/battery storage/etc. This is now estimated at about $100/MWh ($0.10/Kwh).

Seasonal storage is a completely different story. For my own panels, production in Nov/Dec/Jan is about 20% of that in Apr/May/Jun, and this is typical. That means that you either need 15x solar capacity of what you need on a sunny day, or enough storage to bridge those 3 months, two orders of magnitude storage more than we would need to store electricity overnight.

GrumpyNl• 1 year ago

Despite all the great technology and improvements over the years, consumer energy in Europe has never been so expensive.

ViewTrick10026• 1 year ago

We have started to tax carbon in form the of the ETS system while now LNG keeps being the marginal producer in the grid.

Meaning - the interconnection queue for storage and new renewables is absolutely enormous but getting enough online to meaningfully alter the electricity bills will take years.

specialist2• 1 year ago

In the USA, eg California, the cost of building out the grid we need (to achieve netzero) is mostly borne by retail consumers. Versus industry and data centers. (IIRC)

Obviously, this creates huge push back, threatening the transition to renewables.

The Correct Answer remains federal policy and support. Just like the New Deal Era's electrification of our country.

seanmcdirmid• 1 year ago

HVCD Was supposed to be the answer for china’s big renewable energy surplus out west while most of its energy needs are in the east, but for some reason it hasn’t worked out so they are leaning on nuclear and coal more for eastern power needs. I guess when the imbalance is huge, it’s not that easy. They could move more manufacturing out west, and I think they are doing that to a point, but water supply becomes an issue at that point (and it will always be easier to move energy than water!). Still, I wonder if we will see the rise of cities like Lanzhou that have cheap electricity, the same thing happened for Seattle and aluminum smelting via cheap hydro power (also why boeing started there)

They don’t invest in gas much because they have to import it all, though it will be a long time before they use electricity for cooking as opposed to natural gas or propane.

defrost2• 1 year ago

UHV (both AC and DC) has worked out as planned in China, so much so that there's still more under construction today and scheduled for the future.

It seems premature to write that all off given it's ongoing.

Nuclear is also expanding as planned, as a small percentage of renewable power, and China's coal use is peaking and starting to level and planned to fall in the short term future.

The interesting nuclear project to watch in china is their third generation salt reactors .. their small pilot has been running for a whilke, their second gen is completed (?) and starting to return data at the next scale up, and the third generation plant is in the initial construction phase (to be modified on the fly as results come back from the pilot and second gen plant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...

ViewTrick10026• 1 year ago

This seems to be quite far from reality?

Nuclear power is a minuscule part of the Chinese grid. 4.4% and shrinking and with their recent number of construction starts will likely land on ~2% of the grid mix.

Their coal usage has started to shrink.

How can they lean on technologies they have started to replace with renewables and storage?

maxglute• 1 year ago

UHVDC is progress is "fine", I think utilization is 60-70%, ideally it would be 80-90% but hurdles now mostly political, many central govs still want to prop up local coal, so new policies on national unified electric / spot market by 2026. Current UHVDC capacity is ~150GW, utilization around ~100GW, PRC peak demand ~1000GW, i.e. UHVDC transmitting like 10% national power, could be 15%. Rollout for next 10 years is to hit ~25%, something like 300GW (70-80% from western renewables), assuming peak power demand grows to peak 1200-1500GW. But this is based on outdated 14th 5-year plan projections (~2021), PRC currently on trend to 1800-2000GW peak. Don't know if there's new policies to scale UHVCD accordingly.

achillesheels• 1 year ago

Thank you for your promotion of HVDC! Especially given the context of its weak electrical reacts new compared to HVAC which mutates cellular DNA much much more! (Strong hypothesis: positive correlation of cancer rates with electrical power transmission in the 20th century…please research the epidemiology for yourselves)

rpozarickij• 1 year ago

Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power—which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines.

It's interesting to realize that the vast majority of the energy used by humans comes from the sun (with the exception of nuclear and geothermal energy). Even hydro power comes from the sun, because the sun evaporates the water which then becomes part of rivers or other water reservoirs that power hydroelectric generators.

lordofgibbons• 1 year ago

All fossil fuels also come from the sun!

vrx-meta• 1 year ago

The nuclear fuels are also probably from the Sun. Pretty much everything is the Sun.

Sharlin• 1 year ago

I wonder if there are some minimal fossil hydrocarbon deposits somewhere that originate from chemosynthesis-only microbe populations.

card_zero2• 1 year ago

Tidal power doesn't come from the sun either. It slows the earth's rotation by a tiny amount.

OtherShrezzing• 1 year ago

Is the origin of that rotation not also the gravitational wells created by the Sun?

baxtr• 1 year ago

No wonder people worshipped the Sun in ancient times!

loudmax2• 1 year ago

At some level all fossil fuels come from the sun. Fossil fuels come from biomass accumulated over millions of years. The energy that went into gathering all that carbon and hydrocarbons came from the sun.

Take it a step further and nearly all our energy comes from nuclear fusion, with the exceptions you noted.

myself2482• 1 year ago

I refer to my solar panels as nuclear power, just to mess with people:

I use a gravitationally-confined fusion reactor, and pull power out of it by allowing the radiation to excite unbound electron-hole pairs in a semiconductor substrate. It's dangerous; even miles away from the reactor itself I can't expose myself to the radiation for too long or I get a painful skin reaction, and that might lead to cancer someday, but hey, it's cheap and quiet and I don't pay for the nuclear fuel!

thijson• 1 year ago

Nuclear comes from the supernova that created all the heavy elements in our solar system. Fission is releasing energy trapped during that event. So from that standpoint, even Nuclear is solar in origin.

ertgbnm• 1 year ago

Well the sun didn't make those elements. Some other star did so they aren't solar. Also by that logic everything that is not a hydrogen atom would be "solar" so I don't think we can stretch the analogy.

babymetal• 1 year ago

I clicked to the comments to see how far down this observation would appear. It was my first thought, although I can understand why the more energetic discussion is around human-centered energy collection and management.

louwrentius3• 1 year ago

In Star Trek The Next Generation, energy is a 'solved problem'. Material needs are also a 'solved problem'.

Money doesn't exist anymore.

I think at least 70% of the Hacker News crowd would hate this world because they would have no idea what to do with their life under these circumstances.

What is life about except turning a profit? How can you have power over other people? Feel important with all your money? Look at Elon, he's happy.

(They probably would become Ferengi).

Maybe people can learn something from the anarchist David Graeber.

CoolChum• 1 year ago

In Star Trek The Next Generation, energy is a 'solved problem'.

In later Star Trek shows of the same era they show that it isn't really. A major plot point of voyager is them having to save power because they can't get the resources to keep the ship running. It kinda forgotten about later, but it shows that whatever power sources they are using isn't infinite and is still finite.

Material needs are also a 'solved problem'.

Did you forget the episode where Troi literally has a breakdown in one episode because she knows the desert she is eating isn't real? She won't be the only person.

They end up bartering BTW in one episode to get real eggs in so they can make real "authentic" scrambled eggs.

Throughout the show they have to barter (which is less efficient form of transaction) to get things the replica can't produce or that are hand produced.

Which echoes more wealthy people in reality buying hand produced items at a greater cost, over cheap mass produced items.

Money doesn't exist anymore.

Money certainly exists in some sort of context as Federation has to trade and everyone else use Gold Pressed Latinum. It may not be used on Earth, but it is used elsewhere extensively and the Federation must also have some of that currency to be able to trade with those outside of it.

People who rave about the vision that TNG put forward. They seem to forget that in Star Trek: Deep Space 9 they show the other side of the Federation.

In the first episode they show the other side of the federation. Q introduced the federation to the Borg early and set off the chain of events which leads to the death of thousands of Starfleet personnel including Sisko's wife which he is haunted by throughout the entire series. This was a direct consequence of Picard's poor choices when dealing with two

There are disaffected federation citizens that have started a terrorist / militia force called the marquis as a direct consequence of the colonisation of their homes by foreign invaders when the Federation sold them out.

louwrentius3• 1 year ago

All I read is that you are part of the 70% that has no idea what to do in life when money and power doesn't matter anymore.

hypfer• 1 year ago

I think at least 70% of the Hacker News crowd would hate this world because they would have no idea what to do with their life under these circumstances.
What is life about except turning a profit? How can you have power over other people? Feel important with all your money?

Man, I feel you. HN as this small window into the soul of the silicon valley is best consumed only in very small doses.

Thank you for your work and stay how and who you are.

louwrentius3• 1 year ago

Thank you

fred_is_fred2• 1 year ago

Okay hear me out - Uber for holodecks.

isolli2• 1 year ago

The piece doesn't mention the recent blackout in Spain. Wasn't it caused by the lack of energy sources with rotational inertia?

vasco• 1 year ago

It was a design/dimensioning error, something was expected to absorb reactive power and it added it instead.

ViewTrick10026• 1 year ago

The reporting so far is that they did not manage the reactive power correct leading to a voltage trip.

But the fossil and nuclear lobbies were straight on blaming renewables when it happened. They are desperate for any handouts they can get their hands on before a select few are preserved as museum pieces.

diffeomorphism• 1 year ago

No, that was some of the initial speculation, but turned out to be wrong.

papaver-somnamb• 1 year ago

Tony Seba around 10 years ago predicted (among many other things) that ~2024 the cost of generating a unit of electricity onsite with PV will cost less than merely delivering the same unit of electricity over transmission infrastructure, not even considering the cost of generating that unit.

Nowadays he is diving into what he terms the phase change disruptions where he explores and thinks out the ramifications of these disruptions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9McWXZA5wc

GratiaTerra• 1 year ago

I agree, personal energy abundance is disruptive: * Utility decentralization, economic liberation from near zero marginal cost of energy after initial investment. * Geo political: reduced dependence on hydrocarbon fuels, energy sovereignty * Transportation: every home is becomes a 'gas station' to recharge EVs, or for the EVs to charge the house in case of low house batteries (as opposed to ICE generator) * Climate: no hydrocarbons burned => no pollution * Technological civilization: abundant clean energy creates a feedback loop of innovation in energy production, storage, AI and networking * new business models from energy as a service

jes51992• 1 year ago

I've been following Seba since around 2020, and it's wild how: 1) he continues to be correct 2) people are still very slow to believe him

his predictions have gotten a LOT more dramatic lately, I can't wait to see if he's still nailing it

dalyons6• 1 year ago

where do you follow him? i just poked around in X & youtube but all his stuff there seems ~a year old.

asdefghyk• 1 year ago

The unsolved problem with solar power and wind power is how to store it so that it can be used 24/7. Stored at a affordable price that is. Storage so that the supply can be maintained 24/7 across the inevitable renewable ( sola and/'or wind droughts ) that can and do last several days, from time to time.

markus_zhang5• 1 year ago

I recall that other power plants such as thermal power is still required to provide “inertia” for the whole system, as solar fluctuates a lot. The recent Spain-Portugal outage showed that there is not enough inertia in the system.

I don’t really understand inertia in power plants but I wonder if it helps to push nuclear as primary and solar as secondary?

cinntaile• 1 year ago

The more likely future imo is different forms of dedicated inertia rather than inertia that you used to automatically get from old school power plants with big turbines. Both will coexist of course. Financial incentives for different support systems for electrical grids will continue to evolve in the foreseeable future.

pjc5010• 1 year ago

This is mostly a matter of control systems engineering: inverters tend to be perfectly grid-following, but there's no reason why the phase angle can't be adjusted to provide "virtual inertia". Same for battery systems - an early market for these in the UK is getting paid for "fast frequency response". Every battery can be a virtual flywheel. https://www.modernpowersystems.com/analysis/batteries-for-fa...

Conversely, the Spain problem appears to have been a classic control systems problem of a slow undamped oscillation that gradually got out of hand.

(I believe the preliminary incident reports got published and discussed on HN, if someone would like to link that here?)

Nuclear may or may not have a role, but it's much slower to build than solar, so starting a plant now is going to face a very different landscape with a lot more solar in by the time it completes.

markus_zhang5• 1 year ago

Thanks. One benefit about nuclear, maybe I’m overstretching a bit, is that it is a large system engineering project so hopefully it trains and retains many engineers and technicians. Maybe solar farm serves that purpose too? But somehow “nuclear” sounds more cool…

tim3332• 1 year ago

The best way of doing things changes as market prices for the various options change. At the moment we mostly have renewables, wind and solar backed up by natural gas powered plants that can increase and decrease power rapidly. As time goes on and batteries and solar get cheaper things will probably move more to those. Nuclear is good for constant power but expensive.

otherme123• 1 year ago

The recent Spain-Portugal outage showed that there is not enough inertia in the system.

At the moment it showed nothing, because it's still under investigation. You might be referring to the FUD campaign that started the same day of the blackout.

But it is true that inertia is provided mainly by conventional power plants, and they are being removed from the grid. It is also true that, if finally the lack of inertia is confirmed as the cause of the blackouts, there are alternative ways to provide inertia in the system: synchronous condensers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_condenser) like the one in Moneypoint (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneypoint_power_station).

stefs3• 1 year ago

a nuclear power plant is very expensive and takes a long time to build. they're also designed to deliver constant output (i don't know how fast they can de-/increase output), so if power prices get into negative territory due to overwhelming solar output, nuclear power plants might have to operate at a loss, making its product comparably expensive. there are environmental factors (need for water sources for cooling), political/nimbyism and fuel dependency from foreign powers. so nowadays you have trouble finding willing investors. also, due to low demand there are few nuclear plant building companies left.

markus_zhang5• 1 year ago

I so much hope that we (the world) replace thermal plants (except geothermal) with nuclear ones. But yeah there is a lot of resistance and it is very expensive.

ethan_smith• 1 year ago

Grid inertia is the rotational kinetic energy in synchronous generators that stabilizes frequency during sudden load changes - modern solutions include grid-forming inverters, synchronous condensers, and virtual inertia systems that can provide this stability without requiring traditional thermal plants.

tim3332• 1 year ago

Exponential growth gonna exponential in both solar and AI.

A lot of people are in denial and like this is all hype it'll never happen followed by wow how did that happen.

xbmcuser2• 1 year ago

China is also now facing an interesting problem as solar + batteries are cheaper than coal today. But coal currently is around 60% of its electricity supply it uses around 10 trillion kwh. So 6 trillion kwh * $0.08c is $600 billion ie it will have to destroy a $5-600 billion industry that employees millions of people. But at the same time it will be getting cheaper energy and the cost of producing energy will keep getting cheaper each year that would be another deflationary pressure on its economy.

pornel• 1 year ago

Of all the places I think China has the least sentiment for protecting business of industries it doesn't want, to keep a line going up on paper.

Their push for renewables and energy independence is very deliberate. When they reach the goal, it's not "oh noes, our precious coal jobs, how are we going to placate rural voters and coal lobbyists", it's cheaper energy, and workers freed to be moved to more productive things.

xbmcuser2• 1 year ago

Oh I know I am just saying China currently needs to stimulate it internal consumption to maintain its economic growth targets. But cheaper energy that keeps getting cheaper each year is a wierd problem to have and it will be interesting to see how it plays out in the next 5-10 year.

getnormality• 1 year ago

It's funny that our hope for the future now seems to stand upon the Chinese Communist Party being the paragons of enlightened, unsentimental capitalism that we never were.

hnaccount_rng7• 1 year ago

That’s only a problem if you care about the stranded investment side. The energy industry isn’t that personel intensive (plus you could just continue to employ the people). But they absolutely will deprecate the power plants and stop buying the coal. The former will bankrupt some of the projects which planned with much longer repayment periods. The latter will immediately safe money

rel_ic• 1 year ago

Renewable energy is great, but we're not replacing fossil fuels with it, we're just adding more energy usage. And our energy usage is destroying the environment.

Don't let these advancements in solar make you think things are getting better. We need to reduce fossil fuel usage, not just increase solar usage.

https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/b3b696c0-226d-0137-f265-1d2...

amarait• 1 year ago

What replaces fossil fuels is some kind of breakthrough in batteries. At the moment its getting better every year were currently at less than $100 per KWh which is crazy but needs to be improved for allowing more off the grid energy consumption

pjc5010• 1 year ago

The lesson from solar is that it won't be "a breakthrough" but the gradual accumulation of a thousand different efforts at cost-shaving across the whole supply chain making batteries gradually but inexorably cheaper.

There won't be fanfare when fixed batteries start using sodium chemistry rather than lithium, for example, but that will start happening across the next few years.

pydry8• 1 year ago

We can either pray and wait for a technological breakthrough that makes storage tech way cheaper than gas or we can just use taxes and subsidies to make it happen now.

It's not so hard. Lavish subsidies were used to make nuclear power semi-sort-of-competitive even though it's way more expensive.

The same thing could have been done with solar and wind but apparently we thought the best course of action was just to wait until they became cheaper than coal without subsidies (& then Obama and Trump slammed solar with tariffs).

bena• 1 year ago

I think the overall point is that we will never get there.

Renewables will never be cheap enough to fully replace fossil fuels, batteries will never be good enough.

No matter what, as long as the cost of extracting and burning fossil fuels is less than the result of what gets produced by the consumption, someone will be doing it.

It’s why crypto will never solve the energy issue. Why AI/GPT/LLM won’t either. Especially when the cost of that output is pegged to the cost of generating the above.

goda90• 1 year ago

Better batteries are the road to replacing fossil fuels for transportation, but I feel like abundant nuclear energy is what we need to give a jump start to green steel, hydrogen, ammonia, etc, and electrifying bulk heating industrial processes.

carra• 1 year ago

We are also going to need a breakthrough in how batteries are produced and disposed of. Otherwise the environmental impact of the many millions of batteries themselves may prove unsustainable too.

agumonkey2• 1 year ago

there's also a lot of wastes, with different urban planning and build code a lot of cooling and heating would be avoided

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

Does not necessarily need to be a battery. Flywheels, heat, and even synthesis of fuels are also solutions to the problem.

yndoendo• 1 year ago

Batteries are just one means to store renewable energy and mechanical storage is another. Re-designing the power grid to transfer peak to areas via HVDC is another, to spread into areas where the weather limits or constricts the renewables for that time of day or day itself.

"Taming the Sun" [0] goes into more details and talks about it better than I can.

People like to over simplifying complexity by reducing arguments to a single reasoning. It helps make everything seem more simple than it really is. It is a way to persuade people that lack understanding "all systems are complex". Even instructions on how to construct a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. How many years does it take of development before a child can actually preform that "simple" task?

[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537070/taming-the-sun/

erghjunk2• 1 year ago

I'm not going to dispute your over-arching point (because I know the data very well), but as a lifelong resident of Appalachia, I can assure you there has been some real and significant reduction in the negative environmental impact of fossil fuels. It's a small comfort and mostly just for those of us who live here, but it's real and visible.

agumonkey2• 1 year ago

What kind of changes happened there ? just curious

unbalancedevh• 1 year ago

The article notes several examples of reduced use of fossil fuels:

California is so far using forty per cent less natural gas to generate electricity than it did in 2023
total carbon emissions in China had actually decreased
kept the country’s coal use flat and also cut the amount of natural gas used during the same period in 2024 by a quarter

AlexandrB• 1 year ago

Meanwhile Germany shut down its nuclear plants while keeping coal and natural gas around to supplement renewables. One of the biggest unforced errors I've heard of recently.

seec4• 1 year ago

Yes but it's a lie of sorts. It's only reduced at the local level in some specific places on earth. What's more the local reduction has NECESSARILY been linkend to an increase in fossil fuel use to actually build, transport and install the panels. That's not even talking about the energy used for extraction of the primary ressources used to build the stuff.

Until we can figure out how to use solar to actually power the industrial processes necessary to build/recycle/maintain it, it's mostly a lure, a stop gap at best. And to be able to do that you would need to have an industrial policy with strong rules inside the countries using the solar.

But it's all very convenient to lie about it, as if we are doing something meaningful, it's part of the inbuilt duplicity omnipresent in today's society, that derive from female virtuous posturing/behavior.

And as the parent noted, in the case of reduction of fossil fuel use that is necessary at the global level because the effect of climate change is not localized, solar doesn't meaningfully change anything yet. In fact, it allows us to just consume more energy while still putting out as much CO2 as before and actually even more. Global fossil fuel consumption has not reduced one bit; it's extremely hypocritical to have various countries around the world increase their consumption to be able to say that there was a decrease at some specific localisation.

DrBazza3• 1 year ago

Can anyone point me a genuinely unbiased comparison of solar, wind, coal, oil, nuclear and hydro, in a reputable scientific journal that covers all of the 'criticisms' that are raised for some but not others?

There's at least:

- creation of infrastructure

- maintenance of infrastructure

- mining/acquiring fuel

- waste fuel

- retirement of infrastructure

and then for each point:

- something like cost per MWh,

- human deaths,

- animal deaths,

- CO2 emissions

- land area usage (or land area damage)

- others???

Workaccount2• 1 year ago

This is an active area that is exceedingly difficult if not outright impossible to do.

The nature of any project is inherently fractal, and trying to assign a impact to each part is all over the map, and anyone with any agenda or bias can move the 1000 little sliders enough that it adds up to what they ultimately want to see.

You get stuff like:

"Lets assume all the trucks are old and need to drive up hill to deliver the panels"

"Lets assume that the solar panels are installed in a place where it never is cloudy"

"Lets assume the coal plant only burns coal from this one deposit on earth that has the lowest NOx emissions"

"Lets assume the solar panel factory never bother putting panels on their roof, and instead run on coal"

ZeroGravitas10• 1 year ago

Oxford University's Our World in Data collates this kind of thing from reputable sources.

What are the safest and cleanest sources of energy?

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Low-carbon technologies need far less mining than fossil fuels

https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-...

Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

ddxv• 1 year ago

I grew up in a rural house that is off grid. My parents used to run a gasoline generator whenever they wanted electricity. As kids, to watch movies, this was all the time. As they got older, got phones, satellite internet etc their gasoline use went up a lot.

They had solar since the 90s but it was broken panels (which still work, they basically never die). Finally last year I had the time and money to put in a big new solar setup for them. Now they don't need the generator except during prolonged storms in December (even then I don't think they need it, just like using it).

The main benefits: 1) Pays for itself in 3 years 2) No more gasoline generator (loud, smelly) 3) No more trips to get gasoline. No more parents carrying 5 gallon gas cans around. 4) Allows parents to get A/C for first time.

jfengel2• 1 year ago

Aren't you supposed to cycle through your gasoline every so often anyway?

(Though you don't have to do it all at once. So you could run it briefly every month, and occasionally put in one gallon, which is a lot easier to lift.)

Lalo-ATX2• 1 year ago

not to mention, gasoline fumes can cause kidney and liver damage, and hematologic disorders and an increased risk of leukemia and other blood cancers, driven largely by benzene's carcinogenicity

generally not great to be around a lot

Aurornis• 1 year ago

Don't let these advancements in solar make you think things are getting better. We need to reduce fossil fuel usage, not just increase solar usage.

The advancements in solar and battery storage are accelerating. It's not a linear 1:1 relationship where new solar goes into new usage. As we get better at building and deploying solar, the cost continues to decline. The more the cost declines, the faster the rollout.

So the advancements in solar really are making things better. This is a long-term, cumulative process.

conradev2• 1 year ago

If by "we" you mean California, then "we" are going to pass the following milestones with solar + batteries fairly soon:

- Solar and storage is cheaper than building a new natural gas peaker plant in most locales (current majority of generation)

- Dispatching battery plants becomes cheaper than turning on existing peaker plants. Fuel is free, dispatch is instant, they can add inertia.

If by "we" you mean the rest of the world, China is manufacturing and installing the most renewable energy of any country in the world by far – and it's not enough to meet their demand. That's why they're also deploying more coal and nuclear than anyone else, too! They're probably building more electric vehicles than any other country, too, which is huge for their air quality.

Lightkey• 1 year ago

You are a bit behind on China. This was just published a week ago, showing renewable energy build-out has finally surpassed increased demand for this year, meaning peak coal was probably last year: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-brics-emergin... (at end of the article).

glenstein• 1 year ago

Renewable energy is great, but we're not replacing fossil fuels with it, we're just adding more energy usage.

My understanding is that Solar does offset fossil fuel usage, in large part because solar power generation throughout the day is conveniently aligned with energy usage throughout the day. With the exception of the evening, which some people refer to as a "duck curve" left behind to be picked up by other generation sources. But it's most definitely stepping in to fill demand that would otherwise be filled by fossil fuels

Veedrac2• 1 year ago

This is basically just not true. Energy is fungible and the grid is demand driven. Every watt of solar displaces a watt of something else. In many places like the US we've basically stopped building nonrenewable energy generation as it's no longer economically competitive. China has to date still built a lot of coal powered generation even as most of the richer world shut theirs for greener sources, since China rightly and justly prioritized bringing a billion people out of severe poverty, but even in China the tides are turning, and we're seeing indications that 2025 could be their peak coal.

Things are getting better.

logic_node• 1 year ago

It’s crazy that most emergency plans ignore geomagnetic threats—did you know a Carrington‑level flare today could knock out transformers worth hundreds of billions? What low‑cost steps could cities take now?

ViewTrick10026• 1 year ago

This seems to be more doomerism than reality.

What you are saying is that the induced current will be strong enough to cause damage even after all breakers trip.

Having to black start a bunch of grids world wide? Yes. Widespread damage? No.

megaman8212• 1 year ago

Also, having a bunch of batteries on the grid would make a black start much easier.

perfectritone• 1 year ago

"...it is closely followed by wind power—which is really another form of energy from the sun..."

By that logic, fossil fuels are also a form of solar power.

Amaury-El• 1 year ago

Solar used to feel pretty distant from everyday life. But now more and more rooftops are generating power, and even rural areas can run on their own. People who aren’t into tech can still feel the shift. It really is like getting electricity straight from the sky.

Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

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