Solar and batteries can power the world

https://nworbmot.org/blog/solar-battery-world.html

by edent • 4 months ago

292 460 4 months ago

ahhhhnoooo2• 4 months ago

China understands this, parts of the EU understands this. The US is currently dead set on betting on the wrong technology, and it's going to put them so far behind.

Imagine a world where people didn't care about labeling new things "woke", and instead could all sit down and say, "we're going to make major investments in next generation infrastructure to ensure our capacity and independence."

rafterydj• 4 months ago

Unsure why you're getting downvoted. I know politics is generally frowned upon here but this is absolutely relevant to the conversation.

hnthrow0287345• 4 months ago

Apart from the current administration's absolutely hilariously bad governing, the US economy really only cares about profit. The same is going to happen to any country with outsized income inequality.

Octoth0rpe• 4 months ago

the US economy really only cares about profit

Which would be ok if we more effectively were able to include externalities into company's overhead, instead of constantly subsidizing them.

aidenn07• 4 months ago

This argument would make more sense if Chinese companies were all going out of business due to their governments heavy investments in solar and batteries.

alexk3072• 4 months ago

Which is a good thing because solar + batteries is literally the easiest way to make profit currently, and will get more profitable year over year.

declan_roberts20• 4 months ago

China burns significantly more coal than the USA and Europe combined and has no environmental laws standing in the way of their nuclear power plants.

Imagine a world where people don't care about labeling new things as "regressive" or "anti-environmental"

j16sdiz2• 4 months ago

China is doing that because they are profitable, not because they care about the environment. Why would they care the coal use?

budududuroiu• 4 months ago

China burns significantly more coal than the USA and Europe combined

Which is expected when both Europe and the US outsourced most manufacturing to China. It's actually surprising China is so low given they're literally the factory of the world

ahhhhnoooo2• 4 months ago

China's coal use is shrinking recently, and their solar investment is in the hundreds of GW annually.

Don't look at where the ball is, look at where the ball is going.

timbit422• 4 months ago

China doesn't have much oil or natural gas but they have lots of coal so that's their backup until they can get enough renewables built.

tzs3• 4 months ago

China burns significantly more coal than the USA and Europe combined [...]

And the USA burns more natural gas than China, and the USA burns more oil than China.

All this simply reflects both using the fossil fuels they have the most abundant, reliable, and cheap supply of when they need to burn fossil fuels.

waveforms• 4 months ago

I agree and lets not label something as dangerous or expensive if it can be made to be affordable and safe. "As of 2026, 59 nuclear power plants are operational in mainland China, second globally to the United States, which has 94." "There are over 28 further plants under construction with a total power of 32.3 GW, ranked first for the 18th consecutive year"

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

shipman05• 4 months ago

The American shale gas/fracking boom really distorted a lot of things. The strategic energy situations of the United States, the EU, and China were all pretty similar in the late 20th Century: major dependence on OPEC-controlled oil and gas. Post-fracking, the US strategic energy situation has diverged from the others.

This difference leads indirectly to things like the current "not war" in Iran. (Iran's geography already gives it strong bargaining power via pressure on energy markets. It would have an even stronger hand if the US was not capable of energy independence).

The long term impacts on climate changes are even more negative. It's hard to supplant a cheap, ubiquitous energy source with strong negative externalities when those externalities are subtle, gradual, and strongly denied via propaganda by entrenched interests.

DangitBobby2• 4 months ago

There are influential people who make lots of money when the US Govt forces the country to rely on fossil fuels.

0xbadcafebee3• 4 months ago

They're not anti-renewables as a bet, they're anti-renewables strategically. If you like going to war, you can power your warfighting apparatus much easier with a gas tank than a battery. If you want better defense, you don't depend on hostile nations for your energy needs. The US wants to double down on oil because it likes to fight wars and it's paranoid about defense.

alexk3072• 4 months ago

This is just incorrect. The politics in the US say one thing but the market is going in the other direction. 2026 additions to the US grid will be almost entirely renewables - 6.3 GW of natural gas / 86 GW total means ~93% of new additions to grid capacity are renewable [1]. A quarter of the electricity in the US is now generated by renewables [2] and growing rapidly. The states with the largest amount of renewable electricity generation are wildly different politically, but all agree that renewables make the most financial sense [3].

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205 [2] https://www.semafor.com/article/03/03/2026/us-renewables-hit... [3] https://www.integrityenergy.com/blog/the-top-10-states-pavin...

pfdietz9• 4 months ago

Providing 90% of power is not "powering the world".

It really helps to also have a complementary storage technology with low capacity capex, even if the round trip efficiency is lower. This would complement batteries in the same way ordinary RAM complements cache memory in a computer.

teucris• 4 months ago

The article specifically notes the following:

We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels.

mtoner232• 4 months ago

So then they are wrong. The last 5-10 percent is the hardest part and it's the one consumers complain the most about! You can't run a factory on 90% power availability

outside1234• 4 months ago

The goal of getting to renewables is to not remove every carbon source but to slow the rate of change so we can adapt. 90% meets that.

pfdietz9• 4 months ago

The goal ultimately is to get to 100% non-fossil fuel. CO2 is removed so slowly from the atmosphere that emissions have to go to nearly zero (preferably, to less than zero) or else we're just delaying disaster.

The point I was making before, btw, was that renewables can get to 100%, but doing it with just batteries as storage is really stupid in many places. Batteries, while necessary and very useful, are not a panacea. In a place like Europe, adding the complementary low capex storage could cut the cost in half (otherwise, excessive overprovisioning of solar, wind, and/or batteries are needed.)

pydry4• 4 months ago

We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels.

I think a lot of people truly dont get this.

Those days when the wind isnt blowing, the sun isnt shining and the batteries and pumped storage are depleted can be easily handled with, e.g. power2gas.

It's pretty expensive (per kwh almost as much as nuclear power) but with enough spare solar and wind capacity and a carbon tax on natural gas it becomes a no brainer to swap natural gas for that.

Nonetheless this wont stop people saying "but what about that last 5-10%?" as if it's a gotcha for a 100% green grid. It isnt. It never was.

silvestrov2• 4 months ago

The article ignores hydropower. The numbers/prices look a lot better with solar + wind + hydro + battery.

Norway runs almost entirely on hydropower. Sweden has a lot.

Iceland runs on hydropower and geothermal.

maxerickson4• 4 months ago

Hydroelectric capacity is largely built out, so you can look at current generation mix to see how much it is likely to contribute.

In the US capacity is likely to go down (dams are expensive and many time old dams are removed instead of being rebuilt).

tonyarkles2• 4 months ago

I’m happy to be wrong about this globally, but in my neck of the woods the readily exploited hydro resources are already exploited to 90% of their capacity and have been for 100 years. Hydro is in many ways the ultimate renewable energy, but that’s been true since electrification and we’ve been using it as part of the energy mix since then. I’d love to be wrong but my understanding is that there isn’t a huge amount of untapped new hydro capacity available without having severe impacts on ecosystems

tenthirtyam2• 4 months ago

This is even more true with international grid connections. Europe in a cold spell? Solar countries import, wind & hydro export. Europe in a heat wave? Flip the switches the opposite direction.

aidenn07• 4 months ago

And nuclear is already in the 5-10% range in the US, so if we just maintained that level, we could get carbon free.

pydry4• 4 months ago

No, you couldnt. Nuclear power is not dispatchable.

pfdietz9• 4 months ago

No, because most of that nuclear generation would be during times it wasn't needed. The residual 5-10% in the renewable + batteries world is highly nonuniform, utterly unsuited to being covered by nuclear.

declan_roberts20• 4 months ago

The article is just wrong. And only mentions energy used for heating in passing. Heating requires MASSIVE amounts of energy.

I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar system (almost 30 kWh battery and 24kW solar). It keeps the lights on, but not heating. I live in a mild climate.

The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.

iamjake648• 4 months ago

Do you have a high efficiency heat pump, or how are you heating?

barbazoo• 4 months ago

Heat pump is what I would have expected to be suitable for a setup like that. How big is the house I wonder.

lstodd• 4 months ago

First question should be: what latitude?

Because where I live around 55th this winter we had five straight weeks below -15c / 5f daily average plus enough snowfall that it was infeasible to clean anything but the most major roads.

Solar is out of question in these conditions and when thermal pump fails you have to evacuate. When just grid electricity fails you have to either have some sort of stored fuel backup or evacuate.

The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular among people living in what amounts to subtropics who can't even imagine how crazy they sound to most everyone else.

cbdumas• 4 months ago

The article is about utility scale solar and storage I believe not home installations. It also mentions towards the end that in cold norther climates adding wind to the mix makes sense

declan_roberts20• 4 months ago

Like I said he grossly understates the energy demand we use in the United States for heating during the winter.

j16sdiz2• 4 months ago

The insulation matters a lot in home heating.

PyWoody5• 4 months ago

Proper windows make a huge difference, too.

gib444• 4 months ago

And then you need proper ventilation systems once you "fix" insulation

bluGill2• 4 months ago

There isn't a lot you can reasonably do to something that is already there. I insulated my attic better, but there wasn't enough space to go as high as I wanted (I guess I could in the middle, but not around the edges). The thin walls are still thin, and not much I can do about it for a reasonable price. Likewise the windows are really bad, but the cost of good windows is large. By the time I insulated this house to modern standards I'm nearly half way to tearing it down and building something new (a complete destroy is a lot cheaper than trying to take something off without destroying the rest) - and a new house would get a lot of other benefits (I want a larger kitchen but there is no place to put it)

Which is why a lot of poorly insulated houses still exist - people have mostly done what can be done for a reasonable price, but anything that will make a difference is also very expensive with very long paybacks.

panstromek• 4 months ago

As far as I understood it, it only talks about electricity, so that doesn't seem like a contradiction to me. I think some electrification of heating is expected in 2030, but not that much bigger than it is now.

Epa095• 4 months ago

What's the actual effect you get out of that? Even half, 12 kW, would be an absolutte beast of heating (for a home), even with 'dumb' convection heating. With heat pumps 2-3 kW should really be enough.

declan_roberts20• 4 months ago

There's simply not a lot of sunlight to go around during the winter and the battery capacity isn't large enough.

Keep in mind we WFH and homeschool so our house is used 24/7 and I think it's a good approximation for OP's goal.

fooblaster• 4 months ago

where are you? that is a massive amount of solar in any place at a reasonably low latitude. Is your house enormous or are you heating your house with resistive heating?

mapmap• 4 months ago

This is a large pv system for what I assume is a single family home. Do you have resistive in floor heating or an electric boiler feeding radiators? I imagine you could easily run a half dozen mini-splits drawing 500-1000w each, or a centralized heat pump. Happy to help if you can give more details.

PyWoody5• 4 months ago

I live in a northern climate and I know multiple people who are net zero with solar+basic battery.

Proper insulation and good windows go a very long way. For instance, I set my heat to 66F during the day and 60F at night. When I wake up in the morning, the register is usually still above 60F.

mtoner232• 4 months ago

Net zero. But not effectively zero. They sell energy during the day when no one needs it and buy it an night when we all need it. If we all switched to solar and heat pumps there would be blackouts and an energy crisis

chongli5• 4 months ago

66F is ridiculously cold to me, and I live in Canada where it can reach -40(F or C) in the winter. I would find that very uncomfortable and elderly people would be shivering constantly and highly susceptible to respiratory illness.

I have a modern cold climate air source heat pump which essentially needs to run 24 hours a day to maintain a stable 20C when the outdoor temperatures reach -15C. Below that, the heat pump shuts off and the furnace kicks in to provide emergency heating. My thermostat is a modern one with full time-of-day and day-of-week scheduling for heating and cooling, but it doesn't matter because the heat pump by itself is not able to swing the temperature up (by even half a degree) on its own, so this causes the furnace to kick in every time the schedule calls for a higher temperature, defeating the entire purpose of time-of-day scheduling.

I will also add that where I live (Southern Ontario) the sky is overcast 90% of the time during the winter. Solar panels, even somehow free of snow and ice, are going to produce almost nothing on those dark days. Add in the need to keep the panels free of snow and ice (presumably with heating, since nobody is going to be climbing around on their roof in the winter), and you'd likely reach energy net-negative trying to make use of them.

HoldOnAMinute• 4 months ago

Those brutally cold temperatures are really not compatible with most human beings

aidenn07• 4 months ago

At 66F, I struggle to do job because my fingers go numb and I can't touch-type well. If others have that problem, a small heat-lamp (like for a reptile cage) can locally heat just the area above the keyboard cheaply.

detourdog2• 4 months ago

In the northwest corner of Massachusetts I converted an old school into an apartment building. I installed 2" of polystyrene on the outside and about a foot of cellulose in the ceilings. We relay on heatpumps for HVAC. I also installed a 50kW solar array. We don't start paying for heating until Nov/Dec and stop paying in Apr/May. Our Electric usage goes through the roof in Jan/Feb/Mar. Our weak point is that the exterior walls are about 40% windows. I hope to install better thermal shades which will cost about $80k. We also last fall installed a solar thermal array to for hot water and heat the hallway which is radiant floor. I would like to think we could achieve net-zero but I will likely need to expand the solar array by about 200%.

Thermal curtains are more effective than good windows. Good windows are minimally helpful.

tsoukase• 4 months ago

These temperatures are non negotiable by my wife. Women will burn the planet.

Rover222• 4 months ago

Well obviously lights aren't using up much of that power, you're powering everything else too.

toasty2287• 4 months ago

People still build houses like energy is cheap and abundant. A properly insulated house in any temperate climate require very little heating or cooling.

Spend 50k on insulation that will last the life of the building instead of 50k on heating and cooling devices which will need constant maintenance and replacement + fuel and end up costing 10x more over the life of the building.

A modern house with modern insulation in a mild climate shouldn't even need a central heating system. You can get by with 500w toaster heaters in each room for the coldest time of the year

baking• 4 months ago

Probably because energy is cheap and abundant.

JKCalhoun• 4 months ago

And never mind ground-source heat pumps [1] (although I know the topic was specifically solar).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump

declan_roberts20• 4 months ago

Yes you're right and I don't disagree. But a 500w heater isn't going to cut it when it's 20F outside. You actually have to run the heat as hard as possible when the sun is shining so you have some thermal momentum going into the evening.

The end result is you're going to make big lifestyle changes to accommodate the energy. For example everyone sleeping in 1 bedroom and only cooking with an electric pressure cooker or low and slow with an induction range.

arrowsmith• 4 months ago

Why shouldn't energy be cheap and abundant?

brianwawok• 4 months ago

In the short term the math is usually bad. Can be a 20, 30, 40 year payback on insulation. For the builder? It’s almost for sure a loss unless he can play the green card. For any individual owner? They are likely to leave before they recoup a project like this. Appraisals on houses are price per square foot with a bedroom and bathroom modifier. Until people start pricing in energy efficiency in homes, say a price multiple of 0.8 to 1.2 based on the efficiency of the home? It’s going to be hard to math out. Which yes is sad.

newsclues• 4 months ago

It costs a lot more than 50K to retrofit a house towards passive standards.

Not everyone has the capital (even with gov subsidies) to make those investments, and it's generally the people who need to save a few bucks on bills the most that DONT have the money.

aidenn07• 4 months ago

I could not retrofit my house for efficient heating with $50k. To do so would likely be cheaper to completely tear it down and rebuild.

zrail• 4 months ago

Would you be willing to quantify what "mild" means to you, maybe in terms of a USDA zone? There are maps for both US and Europe:

https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/pages/map-downloads

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USDA_hardiness_zones...

friendzis3• 4 months ago

A properly insulated house in any temperate climate require very little heating or cooling.

A "properly insulated" house still requires something around 0,5 W/m2/K. Modeling a moderate 120 m2 house in the coldest months when the temperatures hit 15-20 negative you still need 2,5 kW of heat with domestic hot water on top. Put in the efficiency of a heat pump and you are still easily looking at half a mega watt-hour per month. ~1MWh for a whole house is very reasonable number during winter months, sans electric mobility.

That's entirely unrealistic to cover with batteries with current battery technologies alone, electricity generation is absolutely REQUIRED. Windmills can help soften the blow and storage needs substantially, but the TFA is about solar, which is effectively absent during the winter.

dyauspitr• 4 months ago

Is a 30 kWh battery considered massive? My F-150 lighting has a 143 kWh battery.

declan_roberts20• 4 months ago

Yes 30 kWh battery is considered large. It takes up a full 6 slot 2u rack in my garage and cost around $8k. In the context of OP's goals it's larger than what 99% of people in the world will ever have.

abenga• 4 months ago

If you need to heat/cool your home, is that really mild?

declan_roberts20• 4 months ago

Isn't it all relative? Cooling actually isn't a problem at all with solar. I can run my AC full blast during the summer and still get the batteries fully charged before evening.

jakewins3• 4 months ago

Respectfully, 30kWh is not much in this context. In 10 years every modern 2-car home will have 200kWh on the driveway just from the EVs; add a 100kWh whole home battery at a price point close to a 10kWh battery today and the calculus changes in most of the world.

The cost of materials going into modern batteries easily leaves room for another 10x reduction in price, IMO where this all is heading is obvious. Zero marginal cost will win every day of the week.

FWIW we run our cabin on 15kWh battery today year around, though we do run a small wood stove to supplant the heat pump on cold winter days.

coryrc10• 4 months ago

I bet you didn't even see the tragic farce when writing your solution. Land development requiring ”2-car homes" is the driver of the problem! An apartment only has to heat one or two walls facing the outside instead of 4. That's 50-75% right off the top of your energy usage, with the mean closer to 75%.

LogicFailsMe6• 4 months ago

40 kWH of storage and 9 kW of solar panels is all I need personally to live a 1st world lifestyle in the bay area mostly off-grid except for water and internet.

dv_dt• 4 months ago

Beyond the other better insulation comments, pairing electric with heat pumps that are SEER 10+ goes a long way to improve heating efficiency. Old resistive heaters are 1:1 on energy to heat, while newer heat pumps operate to much lower temperatures, and give you 1:10 or 1:15 electric:heat energy ratios.

bluGill2• 4 months ago

My heat pump is SEER 19, and it can't heat my house below 25F. I think this is mostly due to it not being large enough - it was sized to cool my house on the hot summer days, and more energy needs to move on the cold winter days.

coryrc10• 4 months ago

That's not even close to correct. At the design lowest temperature (if <15°C), the very best get 2 COP, but most are 1.5 or lower. The problem is you have to accommodate the worst case.

The average of installed units is closer to 2.0 COP average, unfortunately. Multi-head units really drive down efficiency. A single-head Gree Sapphire can do 4-5 COP on average and that's the best you can get, so still nowhere near your guess.

orthecreedence• 4 months ago

1:10 or 1:15 electric:heat energy ratios

Under what circumstances? I've seen higher-end units that do maybe 1:5 in ideal conditions (heating to 68F when the ambient temp is 55F), but never seen units that do 1:10 or 1:15. This was about 2-3 years ago I did this research. Have things improved that drastically in the last few years?

FEELmyAGI3• 4 months ago

I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar system

This is not really a qualification to speak on how the grid works, at all.

Actually having panels on your roof doesn't give you unique insight into how solar panels operate - there is extensive data out there, any PV installation can become a data source trivially.

The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.

One residence powering itself is not representative of how the grid works, and is not a good way to evaluate any power generation technology whether its PV, coal, nuclear, etc.

declan_roberts20• 4 months ago

I'm actually trying to accomplish what the author is describing, so I have experience to talk about the difficulty of its implementation (unlike the author himself, who has zero experience with its implementation to speak of).

amluto• 4 months ago

Do check that your heater isn’t doing something ridiculous. A while back I helped someone debug a Mitsubishi Electric system on which the installer had set the fan speed control to high instead of auto (it’s an easily accessible setting on the thermostat). I forget exactly how much power was saved, but IIRC it was well over 30kWh/day.

I don’t know where all that energy was going. I expected some improvement but not anywhere near that much.

Faaak• 4 months ago

Heat pumps help quite a lot, thanks to Carnot's law

declan_roberts20• 4 months ago

Heat pump efficiency noticeably drops off after 25°F. Which is when you really start to need it!

DanTheManPR• 4 months ago

This is basically correct in the sense that we cannot simply just force everyone in, say, Minnesota to install electric baseboard heating, rooftop solar, and a battery pack, and then expect them to stay warm. There are periods of extended extreme cold and low solar flux where you would simply not be able to warm everyone's house - that's just physics.

But there are a lot of extra things you can do as an intermediate steps to dramatically close the gap. The main ones are:

1. Homes can be renovated to improve insulation 2. Cold weather heat pumps can handle most mild winter conditions efficiently 3. Electricity doesn't all have to be locally generated - it can be transmitted from other parts of the country. 4. You can keep using fossil fuel peaker plants, and still have incredible reduced overall emissions

jacquesm7• 4 months ago

House heating does not require massive amounts of energy. What it requires is efficiency. I've seen a house in Canada that was heated with a single candle when not occupied. Triple wall, reflective foil in between the wall layers, vertical movement of air in the walls interrupted every 30 cm or so. Absolutely amazing. And it still had sizeable windows. If your house doesn't leak energy like a sieve you don't need to replace as much either. Between passive solar and some augmentation you can do fine on an extremely modest energy budget.

And Canada is not exactly the warmest country on the planet.

minajevs• 4 months ago

24kW solar "to keep lights on" is a funny way to underplay it. My house "summer" electricity usage is 60kWh per month, including water pump, DHW, septic and work from home for 2 adults. So 3h of your PV production would power my house for a month!

Regarding heating - I live in cold climate. We had average daily temperature of -10c this january, with multiple lows at -25c, and most nights at -15c. The house is 116sqm. Our heatpump COP for that month was above 2, and we used 787kWh total to heat the house, which is not a lot, actually. At 15 cents per kWh it is 118 euros for heating, for the coldest month in a decade! Considering also that we do not pay for electricity since april until october (solar panels).

We also paid less than those houses which use natural gas, wood pellets, etc. We also do not need to do anything to keep house warm. Also, during summer months we could "drive for free" in EV due to free solar electricity.

All that just to counter your take on "major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs".

ZeroGravitas6• 4 months ago

Note that the article title has "the world" in it, immediately limits his specific claims to 80% of the world nearer the equatorr as most of the people in the world have more need for cooling than heating.

He even has a map that covers this and multiple paragraphs of discussion about high latitudes and wind in winter.

LogicFailsMe6• 4 months ago

My house in the bay area runs at <1kW per hour most of the time and the sunlight is more than enough to keep it above 65F most of the year. Maybe you need LED lights because when I'm not there, it's ~150W per hour.

Of course actual data like this is downvote heresy! Go for it! Also, bite me.

tzs3• 4 months ago

That power use seems reasonably believable. I'm in the Puget Sound area where we get less sunlight than you and our winters are colder, and I just made a graph of my daily electricity use for 2025 [1]. My house is all electric.

I had 219 days with under 24 kWh use, i.e., drawing an average under 1 kW. I got an EV in mid April that year which I charged with the included level 1 charger until getting a 12 kW EVSE installation in I think May. (2024, the last year with no EV charging, had 240 days under 24 kWh).

Almost every day that was over 30 kWh after that was a day when I charged the car which was typically on a Saturday which is also typically when I do laundry which includes about 5 kWh for the clothes dryer.

I was puzzled by the large number of days near or above 50 kWh in February. The end of 2025 doesn't look like it is setting up 2026 for that high a usage. I just checked the weather records and it doesn't look like that was a particularly cold time.

I just made another graph just showing February 2024, 2025, and 2026, and a third showing January of those 3 years, and both show that in 2026 I'm using quite a lot less power (except for the EV charging) than in the prior years.

I've not changed any habits...but in November 2025 I had my house weatherized. They added a lot more insulation under the house (I already had sufficient attic insulation) and did blower tests and sealed everything that was leaking, and it appears this cut energy use by somewhere in the 10-20% range.

It seems then early 2025 appears so high because the end of 2025 is showing the effects of weatherizing.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/QAnOvm7

ethagnawl2• 4 months ago

The article should have explored that aspect further but it's not all or nothing. For example, a geothermal setup could significantly offset the amount of energy required to heat a home.

FuriouslyAdrift2• 4 months ago

Heating is mostly affected by the roof insulation and really should not be done with electricity alone. It's just not efficient.

Cooling, on the other hand, is brutally expensive without living in basically an air tight Styrofoam box (or underground).

daneel_w• 4 months ago

Gonna go off on a limb and guess that you live in North America where the state of the art in single-family homes is double-pane windows and thin outer walls made of cardboard and pressboard, clad with "luxurious" vinyl siding. I mean no offense to you guys. It is what it is.

declan_roberts20• 4 months ago

My home is less than 5 years old and has the highest R-value fiber insulation I could find before moving to spray foam.

People just really underestimate how much energy it takes to produce heat, and how little energy a solar system produces in the winter. Double whammy!

asdff11• 4 months ago

I'm not sure how sustainable it is at scale but I know someone who winters off a woodburning stove. They basically get their wood for free from trees that come down in their yard or people's yards that they know. They use a hydraulic woodsplitter to manage splitting all the wood.

morphle9• 4 months ago

You should store your solar energy as heat. You move the heat from outside or underground into your house with a heat pump where the heat storage lasts a week or more. You need very little solar to heat your house this way.

So for a mild climate your installer seems to have done you a disservice and probably overcharged you. You can heat an average house with solar for under $14K if properly installed.

panick21_7• 4 months ago

Nuclear could have powered the world easily and we could have done it with 1960s technology. And we could easily do electricity and heating with nuclear quite easily. The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis.

And we can go to 100% of electricity from nuclear, we don't have to have this dumb argument about 'the last 5-10%'. Because its reliable.

And if you actually do the math nuclear would have been cheaper then all this nonsense we have been doing for 30 years with wind, solar and batteries. The cost of the gird updates is like building a whole new infrastructure. With nuclear, the centralized more local networks are perfectly reasonable.

I did some scenarios starting in Year 2000 or Germany to all nuclear, vs wind (off-shore, on-shore), and solar (partly local partly brought in) and batteries. The numbers aren't even close, nuclear would have been the much better deal. Even if you are very conservative and don't account for major learning effect that countries like France had when building nuclear.

That said, even with nuclear, having a few Lithium batteries that can go all out for 1-2h is actually a good deal. Its really only about peak shaving the absolute daily peaks. What you don't want is having to build batteries that can handle days or weeks.

RandomLensman3• 4 months ago

Nuclear reactors make awful targets in a conflict, not sure having many around is generally a good idea if conflict is a risk and there are alternatives.

palata2• 4 months ago

and there are alternatives

That's a big if, though. Solar and batteries require globalisation, based on fossil fuels.

I feel like nuclear reactors are a better choice.

in a conflict, not sure having many around is generally a good idea

On the other hand, blowing nuclear reactors could be considered a big escalation. We see with Iran and Ukraine that it's not exactly the first thing one wants to target.

panick21_7• 4 months ago

For many nations that is really not the primary reason to choose infrastructure. And even if that is your goal. Then building a 500MW reactor you can drop in the ground is likely a pretty decent solution.

baranul2• 4 months ago

Exactly right. Who wants to live any where near a nuclear reactor in a conflict between countries or general war. Despite a country not having nuclear weapons, targeting the nuclear reactors of other countries, is almost as good.

It's very clear now that infrastructure of all kinds are increasingly fair game. Nuclear reactors, data centers, water processing plants, hospitals... Both sad and ridiculous, but that's the level of insanity reached.

tenthirtyam2• 4 months ago

IIRC nuclear doesn't really work well as the last 5-10%. Start-up and shut-down for nuclear reactors is a slow process. When it's generating, it needs to just keep on generating. Not so quick to dial down or up just because the wind is(n't) blowing.

SoftTalker2• 4 months ago

It's not that slow. They can ramp up and down over hours, and those demand patterns are known in advance. Combine with battery, pumped storage, or synfuel generation to soak up excess power during low demand times, and use that to provide peaker capacity during high demand times.

zozbot2342• 4 months ago

It's not a technical limitation, it's economic. The cost of nuclear is almost all in building (and decommissioning) the plant, the fuel is almost free. So you want to produce flat out as long as you can get almost any positive price for the output.

pfdietz9• 4 months ago

The problem isn't technical dispatchability, it's economic dispatchability. A nuclear plant operated at 5-10% capacity factor would be ludicrously uneconomical, even to just operate.

panick21_7• 4 months ago

First of all its not that slow, and when you know when you need it, at what point in the day, so you can ramp up in anticipation.

Also, the claim that nuclear is slow to change is a limitation of current nuclear plants, more modern plants could be far better. Some designs are very much load following.

kogasa240p5• 4 months ago

The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis.

Found this interesting: https://phys.org/news/2026-02-microbial-eco-friendly-butanol.

adrian_b• 4 months ago

Making hydrogen from water and solar light is certainly better than using nuclear energy for that.

There is no reason for consuming valuable nuclear fuel, for which better uses exist, instead of using free solar light.

The efficiency of converting solar energy into hydrogen is already acceptable. The same is true for the efficiency of converting hydrogen and concentrated carbon dioxide into synthetic hydrocarbons, which are the best means for long term energy storage, and also for applications like aircraft and spacecraft.

The least efficient step remains concentrating the diluted carbon dioxide from air.

While the efficiency of converting solar energy and water into hydrogen by artificial means is already better than that of living beings, the living beings are still much more efficient in converting H2 and CO2 from air into organic substances.

Besides improving the efficiency of the existing techniques, an alternative method of CO2 capture would be the genetic engineering of a bacterium that would produce some usable oil from H2 and air, with an improved productivity over the existing bacteria, which use most of the captured energy to make substances useful for them, not for us, so unmodified bacteria would not have a high enough useful output.

panick21_7• 4 months ago

Making hydrogen from water and solar light is certainly better than using nuclear energy for that.

Using heat is the most efficient and if you use nuclear heat directly, and you don't have to go to the step of converting to electricity, you get huge efficiency.

There is no reason for consuming valuable nuclear fuel

Nuclear fuel is not valuable once you have a closed cycle. Fuel cost are already only a few % of total nuclear cost and in a closed cycle would be almost nothing. As soon as you breed fuel from fertile material the cost is basically 0.

The efficiency of converting solar energy into hydrogen is already acceptable.

It requires a very large plant to do in many small batches and cost 20x what hydrogen costs from natural gas. Its not efficient and will not be for the next 20+ years at least.

mbesto6• 4 months ago

Fun fact, 12 million hectares of land of used to produce corn used for ethanol which is used to produce gas. I'll let you draw the conclusion.

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/04/trading-some-corn-e...

anon7000• 4 months ago

Yeah, the technology connections video on this was fantastic. If one was to cover that land in solar, you’d produce far more than the current energy demands of the US.

Relying on an energy source which requires constant, continuous resource extraction is fucking stupid when we can spend resources up front and get reliable energy (solar + battery) for decades with minimal operating cost & maintenance. And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction.

If you want to debate that, spend some time with this video first: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM

kingleopold• 4 months ago

yes but increasing solar will damage the energy lobby in the congress and other places. It's never about what is best, it's about what's best for lobby and their puppets

germandiago2• 4 months ago

So here I go: if it is so stupid, why it is not done yet?

Try not to blame anyone. Do it rationally if you can, from your message I understand your opinion.

I say this as a person that has lived in a developing country the last 15 years. It is not that simple IMHO...

brational• 4 months ago

which requires constant, continuous resource extraction

Is there an upper bound on battery limits with regards to resource extraction?

ethagnawl2• 4 months ago

And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction.

This is something the (willfully?) deluded really don't appreciate. I know people who listened to _that one Joe Rogan podcast_ about precious metal extraction for EVs and are back on the oil bandwagon. The current regime of precious metal extraction is absolutely dirty and dangerous but ... it doesn't have to be and won't be forever -- especially if, as you've said, we actively prioritize a recycling loop for the components.

baranul2• 4 months ago

What is really strange, at this period of history, how anyone would not think that solar makes more sense for focus and investment. Well, unless directly being paid not to use sense or care about the future of humanity, by various oil companies.

kogasa240p5• 4 months ago

Damn I didn't know it was that bad. Ideally you'd grow algae from sewer waste and make fuel from that, but this is the US we're talking about.

gus_massa3• 4 months ago

Algae needs solar light, so you will have to flood a lot of land to get enough.

Also, in case of a war or blockade you can switch the corn use from etanol to food. You will have to eat tortilla and polenta for a year [1] but it's better than algae from seawater or famine.

Here we use sugar cane to produce etanol, it's more efficient because it's a C4 plant. I guess it's possible in the south of the US.

[1] It's not so bad in my opinion if you can mix some meat in the sauce.

balderdash5• 4 months ago

I’d rather people went rooftop solar, and put that land to producing food.

mbesto6• 4 months ago

We already produce enough food. Rooftop solar by definition is an inefficient use of resources.

torpfactory• 4 months ago

That land is producing food for cars. If we covered half in solar panels we’d have almost enough energy to power the country. Turn the other half over to food production and you’d come out ahead on both energy and food.

davyAdewoyin• 4 months ago

It's a common mistake to believe there isn't enough land to grow food, and that is simply false. We throw tons and tons of food away every year due to spoilage and other factors. Even in many parts of Africa scarcity of food is caused by waste and distribution problem than simply lack of arable land.

And when you think about the millions of lands used to grow bioethanol I think we can safely convert that for solar installation without worries.Agrovoltaic is also a practical approach for a lot of crops and farmers so that we can grow and produce electricity side by side.

notTooFarGone• 4 months ago

Do you know how much land there is that is simply not worth farming on?

There are deserts everywhere.

idiotsecant• 4 months ago

A roof is quite literally the worst place to put solar panels. Its a load most roofs are not designed for, and the whole point of a roof is to keep water out, which is compromised by attaching stuff to it.

The most efficient way to do large scale solar is with semi-local utility scale arrays with ultra efficient inverters and enormous chemical or hydro storage. We have a lot of unused land, that's not a problem

opo2• 4 months ago

The consumer rooftop solar cost is usually one of the most expensive ways you can generate electricity - often several times the cost of utility solar installations. The high rooftop solar price is usually hidden (at least in the USA) because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid. This causes higher electricity bills for those in apartments and those who can't afford to put panels on their roof. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme.

Rooftop solar is good but it shouldn't be a gift to the wealthier residents paid for by those less wealthy. Any subsidies for solar power should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further than a dollar spent subsidizing wealthy homeowners who install panels on their roof.

audunw• 4 months ago

Why do you assume that solar and production of food is mutually exclusive on that land? Agrovoltaics is a thing and can often have benefits to the growing of crops.

FEELmyAGI3• 4 months ago

What does the 1% of land used to grow corn have to do specifically with solar and batteries? Solar doesn't need to be on the 15% arable land at all.

The corn doesn't just produce ethanol, which just utilizes the starch/sugar. The protein, fat, fiber is eaten by livestock in some form like distillers grains.

And governments like to have food security , and having secondary uses for an abundance of food in the good times is more convenient than storing cheese in caves , and in case of an emergency shortage the production is already there without having to rip up solar panels to grow food.

My conclusion is you're conflating issues (solar and ethanol) unnecessarily.

jacquesm7• 4 months ago

My conclusion is that you didn't even try to understand the GP.

amusingimpala75• 4 months ago

Correct me if I’m wrong but my understanding was that ethanol in gasoline was a result laws enacted due to corn farmers (or their state reps) lobbying for subsidies, not any intrinsic part of gasoline production

asdff11• 4 months ago

Kinda funny how we invented a carbon neutral fuel system but we are like "lets only use it as a 15% mix" vs trying to design new engines for pure ethanol. You could fuel your car with hooch you made from yard waste.

WillAdams4• 4 months ago

But is it carbon neutral?

How much energy in terms of calories does one get per acre?

What is the equivalent energy input in terms of diesel and so forth?

rainsford3• 4 months ago

Not unless your yard was ~5 acres and you did nothing with that land but grew corn for ethanol. And even if you could do that, there's nowhere near enough "yard' for every car out there. The math just doesn't math.

wakawaka288• 4 months ago

The corn is good for multiple purposes. In a pinch, you can eat it. Can't eat electrons. The panels are not recyclable either.

jwr4• 4 months ago

No, they can't, not unless we get rid of the fossil fuel lobby, which pretty much runs the world these days. Which isn't surprising, given that fossil fuels are the largest industry ever created by mankind. If you compare it to anything else which was actively harmful and yet big money tried to convince you it wasn't (like tobacco, alcohol, or really anything else), there is nothing that huge. So it isn't surprising that the industry fights change.

EV adoption has been successfully held back mostly by PR, Germany shifted from nuclear to coal and gas, the US president is doing everything to dismantle anything that isn't fossil fuel and promotes fossil fuels, the list goes on.

j23n• 4 months ago

I think this sells the German energy mix short - fossil fuel has been on a steady decline in the energy mix for about 2 decades now.

Comparing 2020[^2] to 2025[^1]:

- renewables (solar+wind) went from 181 TWh to 219 TWh

- fossil (coal+gas) stayed constant (177 TWh and 179 TWh)

So I'd say we switched from nuclear (60TWh in 2020) to renewables & imported nuclear - but the long-term trend is towards renewables.

[1] https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/... [2]: (pdf) https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/N...

jwr4• 4 months ago

I realize there is a lot of verbal gymnastics going on around this issue, and the word "renewables" is being used a lot, but my point still stands.

Another way to look at your numbers is that had the nuclear plants not been turned off, fossil (coal+gas) could have been reduced by 60TWh.

But they weren't reduced. They remained the same.

From the point of view of the fossil fuel industry: WIN!

dehrmann• 4 months ago

The fossil fuel lobby can only do so much. Solar has gotten so cheap it's taking over on its own. Companies are doing it for no reason other than the math makes sense. EV batteries are nearing that point too. You can only keep BYD out of the US for so long.

jacquesm7• 4 months ago

The fossil fuel industry is fighting a rearguard action at this point.

mft_2• 4 months ago

Germany shifted from nuclear to coal and gas

Sure, but you're attributing this, deliberately or not, to the wrong cause. It wasn't that the fossil fuel industry somehow won - it was range of factors possibly including geopolitics, some existing plants aging, an emotional response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the Green lobby.

Basically, they voted to kill nuclear without a solid plan for an alternative, and coal/gas is the default option for filling the gaps left in the absence of timely and sufficiently rapid investment in other technologies.

jwr4• 4 months ago

Hmm. After former chancellor (Schroeder) heavily pushed Russian gas pipelines (Nord Stream 1 and 2) and then swiftly moved to working for Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom, I have a different outlook on things.

KaiserPro5• 4 months ago

I mean yeah, but $100 a barrel makes it difficult to argue.

AndreyK1984• 4 months ago

What about STORING excess power and delivering it during the day at a same level ? That is a critical part! I remember last time it was too expensive.

skrtskrt• 4 months ago

grid-scale batteries are accelerating more rapidly than anyone thought a few years, it’s not really seen as an unsolvable problem anymore

evilduck• 4 months ago

You can buy a full day's worth of energy storage with an array of LiFePO4 batteries for less than the typical 3% estimate of annual home improvement and maintenance costs you should be budgeting for as a homeowner. The cost problem usually comes from the labor and every solar installation company seemingly being ran by scam artists.

chongli5• 4 months ago

Because solar energy production doesn't just vary by time-of-day, it also varies seasonally. Where I live, winter solar production collapses due to decreased daylight hours and cloud cover. At the same time, energy use skyrockets due to heating demand.

We would need a lot of batteries to be able to charge during the summer and drain during the winter!

aidenn07• 4 months ago

At temperate latitudes, summer/winter is a bigger deal than day/night. To the point where it makes sense to orient fixed panels tilted south and you still get a 2-3x difference in daily capacity between the seasons.

Related is the other comments here that mention air-conditioning is largely a non-issue if you spec for year-round solar. If you are generating 3x as much energy in July compared to January, and January can power your house, then the A/C is basically free.

KaiserPro5• 4 months ago

Thats whats driving the buildout in places like spain.

Solar power is in curltailment most days, so to make money solar operators need to add batteries to take free energy and shift it to the ultra expensive parts of the day.

pydry4• 4 months ago

Tell me you didnt read the article without telling me.

mbgerring• 4 months ago

If you’re one of the many companies working on reaching this goal, in defiance of everyone in this thread and elsewhere insisting it will never work, I’d like to work with you.

I’ve worked with all of the largest solar, battery and EV companies, as well as America’s largest electric utilities, building complex analytics software to enable the clean energy transition. I’m looking for my next role to continue moving the needle on eliminating fossil fuels. Find me here: https://matthewgerring.com

morphle9• 4 months ago

I emailed you. You can work with us as it is a booming market in Europe and Ukraine (and probably in China too), you could expand our market into the USA. We build charging stations, big batteries (see my other posts in this thread and in my HN profile), Enernet smart grids and entire solar only neighborhoods (houses, solar, batteries, fast internet, water and sewage infrastructure) remotely, all based on 100% solar. From $40K per tiny house.

EcommerceFlow• 4 months ago

Disappointed the article doesn't transmission of electricity and how little the loss is. People are quite surprised that it's like 3.5% per 1000 km.

We could just build out huge solar farms in AZ and transmit it accordingly. We did it for railroads, why not here?

IAmBroom• 4 months ago

That number is improbably low. Transmission losses from local power plants to consumers is on the order of 10%.

Cite, please?

gpm8• 4 months ago

That's the number quoted in wikipedia [1] for HVDC power transmission. I.e. it only applies for long distances, not short distances.

China's been building a bunch of these at those kinds of distance . The technology definitely works.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...

legitster2• 4 months ago

By 2050 is the important caveat. That's assuming constant production of batteries at the current scale and production.

It also assumes we figure out how to economically recycle materials from batteries (and total recovery may never be possible). Grid scale lithium batteries have an effective lifecycle of 15 years. In this potential future, global lithium reserves would actually start getting choked up before the 2050 goal.

Nuclear is inevitable and we all need to stop pretending otherwise.

Retric3• 4 months ago

We already have an electric grid we don’t need to build a new one from scratch just replace infrastructure that gets to old and add more for whatever extra demand shows up.

Obviously other energy sources are going to exist and non solar power will be produced, but nuclear is getting fucked in a solar + battery heavy future. Nuclear already needs massive subsidies and those subsidies will need to get increasingly large to keep existing nuclear around let alone convince companies to build more.

legitster2• 4 months ago

Nuclear costs are massively skewed by the compliance costs.

Reactors that only took 5 years to build before ALARA are still safely running 80 years later. The 15-20 year build and certification time for new reactors is purely made up. The countries that are building our battery and solar pipeline (China, South Korea, Japan) are all building nuclear domestically at 1/3 of the cost of us.

More importantly, for cobalt and lithium - we still exclusively rely on natural raw resources that are still very cheap. Meanwhile we have established reserves of fissile material for thousands of years.

Maybe it won't be in the near future, or even in our lifetime, but there is no way the human race does not turn to nuclear eventually.

gpm8• 4 months ago

That's assuming constant production of batteries at the current scale and production.

That's a terribly pessimistic assumption when production has been scaling exponentially, and cost per kWh dropping exponentially.

Windchaser2• 4 months ago

Grid scale lithium batteries have an effective lifecycle of 15 years. In this potential future, global lithium reserves would actually start getting choked up before the 2050 goal.

I think the long-term solutions here are not grid-scale lithium batteries, but pumped hydro, flow batteries, or compressed air. Lithium batteries have just gotten a bit ahead on the technological growth curve because of the recent boom in production from phones and EVs, but liquid flow batteries can be made using common elements, and are likely to be cost-effective once the tech gets worked out better.

So: I don't think we can say "lithium energy storage is unfeasible large-scale and long-term" and thus conclude that nuclear is inevitable, unless we also look at all the other storage alternatives.

ARandumGuy• 4 months ago

The main reason lithium batteries are used in cars and electronics is because they offer some of the best energy storage per kilogram. That's really important for something meant to be portable, but it's completely irrelevant for a large permanent installation.

kogasa240p5• 4 months ago

Before anyone cries about the environmental cost of lithium, concrete batteries are a thing and are far more ideal for grid storage.

pfdietz9• 4 months ago

You mean gravity batteries using concrete weights? A scam for suckers.

kogasa240p5• 4 months ago

Nope: https://news.mit.edu/2025/concrete-battery-now-packs-ten-tim...

lexcamisa54• 4 months ago

The "storeable fuel

jdc0589• 4 months ago

I wish it made sense to do residential solar where I am. It probably does technically, but i hate the idea of spending a ton on a system and then STILL have to pay my power company; if you are connected to the grid at all where I am, you pay the power company $5/kw/month of solar capacity and your excess sell-back rates are insanely bad (0.03/kwh, vs billed usage rate at $0.17/kwh)

jacquesm7• 4 months ago

The next generation of home batteries will be a game changer. It will do for home energy storage what Lithium-Ion has done for laptops, phones and vehicles and it will be a lot safer too.

balderdash5• 4 months ago

If you could install solar at ~150% of the cost of utility scale solar it’d make a ton of sense, but at 300%+ it’s hard to make the math work

0xbadcafebee3• 4 months ago

This would be more believable to skeptics if it wasn't all pro-arguments and theory. If you don't cover the cases in which it doesn't work, or at least mention the arguments against, it reads as propaganda.

The thing that reads the most false is the economics. A 480W solar panel is like $90 on sale, they're dirt cheap. A dozen of them is $1,080. But an installed solar+battery system tied to the grid is more like $30,000, and that's not covering the cost of replacing damaged equipment (lightning is a thing). That's just one home, using certified equipment.

For nation-states to do solar and battery, they need land, capital, and skilled labor that most nations don't have. Then there's the fact that not all nations get enough sun, or the fact that you must have a stable backup supply (not just for "cloudy days", but also emergencies and national defense), and multiple sources of equipment so your entire nation's energy isn't dependent on one country (China). Only about 10-20 nations on earth could switch to renewables for the majority of their energy in the next 10 years.

pishpash4• 4 months ago

Or you are somewhere in Africa and have no electricity anyway so you start on something renewable.

0xbadcafebee3• 4 months ago

African countries are some of the poorest on the planet. It takes a very large capital investment, in addition to skilled labor, to energize a nation. They often have other bigger issues to deal with. It's often way cheaper to pay for humans to mine coal, produce charcoal, extract oil (not uncommonly a private company - or a country like China - extracting the resources and making a big profit, or giving a loan with a huge interest payment).

But let's look at a single off-grid DIY example. First you need the expertise to hook it up. If you have the skill, it still isn't cheap if your economy is weak. It requires saving money for a capital purchase, something people all around the world struggle with. And when there are payment programs, they're often exploitative.

It's not like people in Africa aren't aware solar power exists. If it was cheap and easy, everyone would have done it already.

jacquesm7• 4 months ago

They can and they will. In the longer term there simply won't be anything else.

balderdash5• 4 months ago

Just my 2c but I think the biggest thing we could do is to reduce the regulatory burden, cost, and complexity associated with installing roof mounted solar. This should be something that can be approved and installed in a week, and should be a half the price (put another it should have a double digit roi) . Right now all of the economics of home solar are consumed by regulation/complexity and the contractors / solar installation companies.

gpm8• 4 months ago

At the consumer scale the biggest thing we could do is follow the german model of panels that can be plugged into an outlet and installed in an hour by any homeowner (with the same capacity limits and requirements on the panels electronics to protect the grid/line workers during power outages).

That said I'm pretty sure that grid-scale solar is the future of most solar energy, not home solar. It's just cheaper to do things in bigger batches.

balderdash5• 4 months ago

This statement is 100% correct, but I think is wrong - utility scale solar is 100% more efficient and cheaper to build at scale, the problem is finding large parcels of land to put it on that are close to where the power consumption is, as well as the complexity and cost associated with grid interconnection (and transition if it not close to demand)

Edit: though if we ever get to self driving cars there should be a whole lot of parking lots in metro areas that aren’t needed.

therealdrag0• 4 months ago

Balcony solar legislation is well underway in dozens of states. But the capacity is still very small. Like 10% of a household.

hamdingers3• 4 months ago

There's been a wave of legislation[1] introduced in the US to legalize so-called "balcony solar," small grid-tied solar systems that plug into a regular household outlet with zero permitting or interconnect requirements. This is already common in Europe, it's mildly complicated by our split-phase system but not much.

The reason for the high burden today is people have developed an inflated sense of how much the kWh they generate is worth. They install massive systems on their roofs to try to "cancel out" their power bill by exporting their entire daily power consumption over the course of a few sunny hours, which (when all their neighbors do the same) ends up being a costly burden for grid operators who then pass the costs on to users without panels. Smaller systems focused on immediate, local consumption rather than export are much better for the grid which is why they have support.

1. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/balcony-solar-tak...

declan_roberts20• 4 months ago

"Costly burden" is an incredible statement. The utilities get what is effectively free electricity generation. Remember every solar customer still pays the grid connection fee, which goes to maintain the grid.

They love to market a "green energy" plan where they pay you 3c for your exported power and charge somebody miles away 25c for it!

turtlebits5• 4 months ago

100% this. If it was DIYable, its an order of magnitude cheaper.

I have leftover panels from an off grid install, and its extremely hard to get an approved permit for a small roof solar array + off the shelf AIO (Ecoflow/Anker)

declan_roberts20• 4 months ago

What's the challenge you're seeing?

ronb1964• 4 months ago

I build off-grid camper vans for a living and install solar + lithium battery systems regularly. The technology has matured a lot in the last few years. What used to take a massive roof array and a bank of heavy lead-acid or AGM batteries to run basic appliances now fits in a fraction of the space with lithium. The limiting factor in real-world installs isn't the panels or the batteries anymore, it's getting customers to right-size the system for their actual usage instead of what they think they'll use. People consistently underestimate idle draws and overestimate how much sun they'll get. Scale that mindset problem up to a national grid and I imagine the challenge is the same.

gpm8• 4 months ago

I doubt that issue scales to the national grid at all... national grids tend to dictated in size by more or less market forces not careful pre-planning... and capacity planning for new projects tends to have actual data about energy demand and weather patterns and so on.

ViewTrick10023• 4 months ago

And what the market doesn’t solve the grid operator solves using ancillary markets.

jacquesm7• 4 months ago

Very nice. I have my eyes on Lithium-Titanate cells for my house, I can't wait until they go down in price enough. Weight and energy density are not an issue, but safety is and those cells are very good in that sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-titanate_battery

turtlebits5• 4 months ago

LFP is safe and is under $100/kwH.

hvb22• 4 months ago

Scale that mindset problem up to a national grid and I imagine the challenge is the same.

Except that we have raw data there? The only question is how fast it grows, but since we're transitioning that's mostly a question of how fast you decommission fossil plants.

entropicdrifter• 4 months ago

Yeah, agreed. It's a lot easier to be empirical when the scale of the requirements is quite literally unimaginable without just dealing with raw numbers.

turtlebits5• 4 months ago

While I agree with underestimating capacity, the problem only really applies to off grid.

For regular homes, it just means less savings.

lazide5• 4 months ago

It means some other infrastructure (fossil fuels?) needs to take up the slack, and people underestimate actual costs at larger scales.

It’s the big issue in Germany for instance - it’s all fun and games until Winter.

ryzvonusef2• 4 months ago

there is a youtube video I watched where an RV guy converted as many appliances and gadgets on his vehicle to Direct DC as he could, saved a lot on wastage from DC-AC-DC conversions.

We need mundane home DC solutions.

jabl• 4 months ago

There's https://currentos.org/ working on it.

morphle9• 4 months ago

I build off-grid electrical campers (Mercedes eSprinter) with extended 600kWh batteries (11 times more battery capacity than the default model) and charge them from solar panels at home. I disagree with your negative mindset, people who ride in my eCamper quickly learn you can go 100% solar and use you camper at home to store all neighborhood solar and even charge other EVs from our eCamper battery. We make our own parallel battery cell dis/charger to extent the LFP battery life to 20000 charges (one a day for 50 years).

RobinL2• 4 months ago

Wow, that's big! I'm curious, how much does the 600kWh battery cost nowadays? Amazing that the tech has got to a point this is even possible

1970-01-012• 4 months ago

Elon said the same thing about the US a decade ago.

"a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah."

https://www.pcmag.com/news/elon-musk-running-us-on-solar-req...

See you next decade when we're saying the same thing and not doing it?

ZeroGravitas6• 4 months ago

Musk was proposing about 1.2TW of solar capacity, the US installed about 250GW since then and is currently installing about 50GW a year and is projected to have 770GW by 2036 in a decades time.

So the US is probably over-delivering compared with many things Elon has proposed delivering himself.

1970-01-012• 4 months ago

Apples and oranges though. One is a massive public works program and the other is private.

proee• 4 months ago

EVs are essentially a giant battery on wheels. Seems there is a good opportunity to configure them as bidirectional power banks for your local grid. You could rewire all parking slots to have a plugin that acts as a bidirectional power station. Imaging how much power could be moved around with such a grid! This would require a major investment in power transmission layouts, but a city full of batteries on wheels.

California has registered around 1M Teslas alone. So this is like having a 1Mx80kwh = 80GWh battery at your service. As a reference, the largest solar + storage facility in California is around 3.2 GWh.

marcosdumay• 4 months ago

It's nice for an emergency, and almost all EVs can do that already.

But people pay extra to put the batteries over wheels because they need to haul charged batteries around. It's not normally useful to discharge them locally.

pingou2• 4 months ago

Just charging your car when electricity is cheap and avoiding times when it is scarce would solve most of the issues, provided there is a dynamic pricing system in place.

DavidPiper• 4 months ago

No idea why this has been downvoted. There is a lot of demand for this, and at least one company actively working on orchestrating home and EV batteries with the grid: https://www.amber.com.au/amber-for-evs

DoneWithAllThat• 4 months ago

No, no they can’t. As has been explained over and over again by people who know better. Someday yes when the tech improves (changes) dramatically. But that’s not today.

joeslide• 4 months ago

We'll replace the fossil fuel cartel with the wind/solar/battery cartel and everything will be better. Right.

bluegatty• 4 months ago

1/2 the 'cost' of electricity is borne by grid operators, which are usually regulated monopolies. They are generally overstaffed, inneficient bureaucracies. I'm not against public service obviously but I don't think that's the issue, rather it's just related to 'monopoly' provider status.

Hydro One in Ontario was by far the largest occupant on the Sunshine list (>$100K salaries) and have always been. They pay dramatically above market wages, have more staff than they need. It's the 'old boys clubs of old boys clubs'.

If energy prices drop, they will be able to charge more money to justify more 'infra', staff and expanding budgets.

The best thing we could ever do is get rid of our dependency on the energy grid.

If our homes could be powered like our cars ... that would be amazing and open up a ton of competition in a landscape which now has almost no competition.

That said - there are definitely theoretical efficiencies at scale and if we did get rid of the grid, we may never be able to get it back.

It's plausible that 'decentralized energy' may be very advantageous in that it puts a lot of competitive pressure on the centralized elements. Then we get the best of both worlds.

Edit: value chain and institutional power dynamics is the only real way to look at all of these systems. It's incredibly naive to think that some arbitrary technology is going to change any landscape. Case and point is this issue itself - that we 'grow' fuel instead of doing something arguably more efficient is a function of structural power.

cringleyrobert• 4 months ago

Once you take politics out of solar, EVs and batteries we’re all in agreement. Do your part, do your fair share, don’t wait.

danw1979• 4 months ago

solar PV installed cost 384 €/kWp

Is this grid-scale solar ? It can’t be rooftop - there is nobody in the UK who will install a 5kW rooftop system for £2k. The quotes I’ve had recently have been closer to £10k.

edent• 4 months ago

Yes. It literally says:

The cost assumptions assume utility-scale solar panels and batteries in large parks. Smaller-scale rooftop solar and home batteries would cost 2-3 times more.

I've installed domestic solar several times. The main cost isn't the panels or the inverters - it's the scaffolding, labour, and wiring improvements in the home. If you have a tall or complicated house, it'll cost more.

jmyeet• 4 months ago

This comment section is so weird. This seems like a decent analysis to me. It also backs up what's been pretty obvious for some time: solar is the future. Yet we have:

- Pointing out the corn ethanol scam. Ok, that's fair. We would be better of spending money on renewables. No argument there;

- Multiple people arguing that solar hasn't goten more mature, more effective and that battery technology really hasn't gotten better. No sources mind you, just opinion;

- Another busy thread based on an uncited claim that this doesn't account for US heating costs. And tthere are a lot of people who seem to think not having efficient insulation in houses is an expression of freedom in some way;

- There's the naive idea that the profit motive will somehow solve all this. Bless your heart;

- Probably the least surprising thing is that the pro-nuclear people piped up and tried to make this about nuclear and failed. Sorry but nuclear is one of the most expensive forms of electricity and there's no real way to get around that.

I normally don't expect such anti-solar sentiment here.

Here's the real problem with renewables politically: if you produce 1GW of solar and it produces 2TWh of electricity in year 1, it'll probably 2TWh in years 2-30 with very little maintenance. That's bad in our system because some private company doesn't get to keep profiting.

Let's compare that to an oil well. If you drill wells and make them produce 100kbpd (barrels pe day) of crude and some quantity of natural gas in year 1 then in year 2 it produces 80-85kbpd. In year 3 it's ~70kbpd. In year 4 it's 55kbpd. By year 5 it's less than half what it was originally. This is for the Permian basin and it's called "decline rate".

So to maintain the amount of oil and gas you need, you need to be constantly drilling new wells and bringing them online to replace the lost capacity. That's good for business because all that exploration and digging is more profit opportunity.

Evenw ith coal, you need people and machiens to keep digging up the coal.

Our entire electricity sector is sold a lie that the private sector is somehow better at providing electricity and then everything is built around a massive wealth transfer from consumers and the government to the already wealthy.

That's really why renewables aren't popular in the modern political climate.

locallost2• 3 months ago

I am big fan of renewables, but I disagree on your conclusion. The main reason is purely financial, the incumbenta do not want to lose their investment so they spend a lot of money on manipulation and lobbying. Another big reason is that politicians simply can't know everything, so they rely on advisors whose opinions are influenced by lobbyists. There is a clear lack of vision in the western hemisphere on how to move forward and see the transformation not as a cost but as an advantage. So they let their opinions and decisions be massaged by people whose intentions are to protect the status quo.

ZeroGravitas6• 4 months ago

Bit of a cop out headline, should have said "will power the world".

Even boring staid organisations are predicting solar will be more than half the planet's electricity supply by 2050 which is I think enough to say it powers the world.

maxglute• 4 months ago

Last year PRC brrrted out enough solar panels whose lifetime output is equivalent to annual global oil consumption. AKA world uses about >40billion barrels of oil per year, PRC's annual solar production will sink about 40billion barrels of oil of emissions in their life times. This is at 50% solar manufacturing utilization. Once battery scales, can displace current global oil via solar ~10 years. Less if solar production also globally scales. Looking at 10/15/20 years to displace most global oil, lng, coal. Well the discretionary bits / economic consumption.

segmondy• 4 months ago

solar WILL power the world.

zackmorris• 4 months ago

Note that we had the technology to do this affordably as of about 2008, when lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries became widely available for about $10-12 each (I had to look that up). They were definitely available at low cost ($6) by 2018:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180201203013/https://www.18650...

Looks like sodium-ion (Na-ion) 18650 batteries at 1.5 Ah have about 1/2 the capacity of LiFePO4 18650s at 3.5 Ah, and are about twice the price, so lets call them 4x the price per energy stored:

https://www.radicalrc.com/item/Sodium-Na-Ion-Battery-18650-3...

https://ogsolarstore.com/products/sodium-ion-cells-3-1v-batt...

https://coulombsolutions.com/product/12v-sodium-ion-battery/

Battery prices halve about every 4 years:

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/03/06/battery-prices-collap...

So we can project that Na-ion batteries will have the same price per kWh as today's LiFePO4 in perhaps 8 years, or around 2034, if not sooner. That will negate the lithium supply chain bottleneck so that we're limited to ordinary shortages (like copper).

500 W bifacial solar panels are available for $100 each in bulk, so there's no need to analyze them since they're no longer the bottleneck. A typical home uses 24 kWh/day, so 15-20 panels at a typical 4.5 kW/m2 solar insolation provide enough power to charge batteries and still have some energy left over, at a cost of $1500-2000. Installation labor, electricians/licensing, inverters and batteries now dominate cost.

The sodium ion battery market is about $1 billion annually, vs $100 billion for lithium ion. It took lithium about 15-20 years to grow that much. So whoever gets in now could see a 1-2 orders of magnitude return over perhaps 8-15 years. I almost can't think of a better investment outside of AI.

I've been watching this stuff since the 1980s and I can tell you that every renewable energy breakthrough coincides with a geopolitical instability. For the $8 trillion the US spent on Middle East wars since 9/11, we could have had a moonshot for solar+batteries and be at 90+% coverage today. Not counting the other $12 trillion the US spent on the Cold War. Fully $20 trillion of our ~$40 trillion US national debt went to funding endless war, with the other $20 trillion lost on trickle-down tax cuts for the ultra wealthy.

We can't do anything about that stuff in the short term. But we can move towards off-grid living and a distributed means of production model where AI, 3D printing, permaculture, and other alternative tech negates the need for investment capital.

In the K-shaped economy, the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" phrase might more accurately be stated "if you can't join 'em, beat 'em".

jillesvangurp2• 4 months ago

While I'm pro renewables and the article is technically correct (it could work), I don't think this is optimal. What's optimal is using a mix of mostly (>90-95%) renewable technologies for generating power supplemented by gas (short term) and nuclear (long term).

Additionally, there's a lot of stuff that can be done with cables and batteries that we aren't currently doing to over come daily, seasonal, and weather related variation in power output of wind and solar. Put cables north-south to compensate for seasonal drops in solar output. Put them east-west to have solar power in the evenings/early mornings. Off shore and on shore wind can produce a lot of power and the way high pressure and low pressure systems (aka. weather) work, if the wind is not blowing locally that just means it is blowing elsewhere. Having a lot of solar and wind all over the place and cables to move the power around evens out all the peaks and dips. The rest is just using batteries, pumped hydro, and other storage to add enough buffers.

That gets you quite far. Another point here is that people think in rigid "must cover everything 100% of the time", which is valuable but we actually do have a lot of flexibility. You can choose when to charge your car (at night, or at noon), when to run your dishwasher, etc. And does a data center need to be at 100% capacity 100% of the time no matter the cost? Flexible load is a thing. And we can use automation to control it, flexible pricing to incentivize when there are surpluses or shortages, etc. This btw. also neuters the whole "baseload" argument. Baseload power is non flexible power that becomes a problem when we have too much of it. Flexible power is power you can turn off when there's too much of it. The reason energy prices are high in a lot of places is that we have too much of really expensive base load that drives the pricing even if the wind and sun shines for free and gets curtailed. That lack of flexibility is a problem.

That's how we could get to 90% over the next few decades. The remaining 10% is harder / more expensive. Gas peaker plants make a lot of sense to fill that gap. Replaced by nuclear long term. Nothing against that but it's just stupidly expensive and slow to realize. There's no need to build new gas plants for that; we have plenty already.

mikewarot2• 4 months ago

It's important to note that electricity is 21% of the World's energy demand, according to the IEA[1]. This implies that if we could 10x solar, and figure out how to convert some of that to liquid fuels with decent efficiency, we could become sustainable for all energy.

[1] https://www.iea.org/world/energy-mix

eigenspace• 4 months ago

That's a very silly way to compare energy usage.

For example, you're counting all the energy in the gasoline that gets loaded into a car, not the useful work that the gasoline actually produces. Gasoline gars typically are only able to convert 20-30% of their fuel into propulsion.

Counting the energy in the fuel loaded into engines is like counting the amount of energy in the sunlight hitting a solar panel.

Similar things go for heating by the way. A modern heat pump often has a coefficient of performance of around 3x, meaning that for every joule of electricity you put into the pump, you can heat up a house with 3 joules of heat, so 3x as efficient as heating the house with combustion.

mikewarot2• 4 months ago

I don't see why anyone would balk at the idea of using backwards compatible fuel sources, synthesized using a sustainable process powered by solar energy.

Replacing ALL of the liquid fueled devices in the world impractical, to the point of absurdity, to do. Where would we get electric versions of the Emma Mærsk[1] and her sister ships in a reasonable timeframe? Where would all the infrastructure come from to build out the grid to handle the charging load? Where are the ports with that kind of power capability coming from?

What about the world's aviation? There are no viable ways to do air transport on a large scale using battery power.

The world is optimized for liquid fuels, it would make far more sense to synthesize them from low cost solar power during the day, and accumulate the quantities required, rather than rip and replace every single industrial engine on the planet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_M%C3%A6rsk

ZeroGravitas6• 4 months ago

2/3rds of that other 79% is wasted as unwanted heat, so we only need to replace 1/3rd of 79% (~26 percent points) so slightly more than double the current clean energy supply.

An extensive explanation of this "primary energy fallacy":

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/reframing-energy-fo...

erelong• 4 months ago

Nice, we can get rid of nuclear dangers entirely

djoldman• 4 months ago

Fuel price varies dramatically with respect to geographic area. It seems reasonable to factor that in especially if geographic area is factored in to solar capacity.

turtlebits5• 4 months ago

I'd like to see some focus on cheap thermal storage as PV is terribly inefficient for heating. Especially in the winter months.

Havoc• 4 months ago

As enthusiastic as I am about that I'd love to see grid scale storage move more towards something like sand batteries. Stuff you can buy for dollars per ton and move with an excavator seems like a better bet than lithium batteries.

If we want flakey renewables to be the backbone (which we should)...then we needs serious scale on storage side.

Batteries for voltage regulation and quick response is good though

ozgurds• 4 months ago

World's economy and based on oil and gas and It is not easy to switch to an alternative. Because it will also mean to change all the geopolitical relations around the globe

Solar and batteries can power the world

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