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.
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.
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.
It's good in its adherence to the budget (almost) and maybe its absolute price: €600M for 700MW is €0.86 per watt. That might sound terrible when compared to current mainstream solar panel wholesale prices of €0.11/Wp, but solar plants in the Netherlands have a capacity factor of only about 10% IIRC, so that is €1.10 per average watt, not counting balance of plant, permitting, etc. The cable may not run at a 100% capacity factor but it'll probably be over 50%.
Still, if module prices continue falling, even at poor capacity factors lime 10%, it'll be increasingly hard to justify paying such high prices to move energy around the continent; local overprovisioning and storage will be cheaper even if Norway is willing to produce the energy for free.
Diesel, iron or aluminum, from your parent post, are difficult to explode… (personally, no clue about magnesium); and the point of the latter two is that you can “store” energy by upstreaming its consumption when power is available, you don’t necessarily need to produce an actual reversible energy store.
> and the point of the latter two is that you can “store” energy by upstreaming its consumption when power is available
Are you sure the parent isn't referring to something like a rust (iron-air) battery? Aluminum, Iron, and Magnesium are all viable battery chemistries.
Side note - I'm pretty certain you don't actually need to make contents of a ship explode to easily sink it with explosives.
I'm actually somewhat concerned that between drones and smart mines - we've never had a better chance of completely ruining our ability to do ocean based shipping during combat.
You may have seen that Colombian drug cartels are already using Starlink-piloted "sea drones" to do ocean-based shipping through blockades. The US Coast Guard estimates that 90% of crewed narcosubs get through: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aPLXdtbLZ0
But still not explosive at scale. It’s a surface area issue, a small strip of magnesium explodes when dropped in water but a 100t cargo of magnesium sinking in a harbor would be a huge fire.
> a small strip of magnesium explodes when dropped in water
No it doesn't.
Magnesium metal burns because the boiling point of magnesium is just 1091 C, so extremely reactive vapor is readily produced. But it would be very hard to heat it that high in water unless it was ignited first. It will then continue to burn under water.
Yes, safety is a significant disadvantage of the use of magnesium as portable stored energy, but if your ship's payload is already on fire, in most cases the shipment will not be very successful anyway, and loss of the ship is a serious possibility.
If a hypothetical ship full of magnesium sinks without catching the magnesium on fire first, the magnesium will probably not catch fire from exposure to water. Perhaps if it's sufficiently finely divided, which seems like a bad idea.
I agree, the point is you’re not risking something like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion “At least 1,782 people, largely in Halifax and Dartmouth, were killed by the blast, debris, fires, or collapsed buildings, and an estimated 9,000 others were injured.”
“Nearly all structures within an 800-metre (half-mile) radius, including the community of Richmond, were obliterated.[3] A pressure wave snapped trees, bent iron rails, demolished buildings, grounded vessels (including Imo, which was washed ashore by the ensuing tsunami), and scattered fragments of Mont-Blanc for kilometres. Across the harbour, in Dartmouth, there was also widespread damage.[4] A tsunami created by the blast wiped out a community of Mi'kmaq who had lived in the Tufts Cove area for generations.”
Not with magnesium ingots or dry magnesium, no; but, because the water–magnesium reaction is exothermic, spontaneous, and gas-producing, I'm pretty sure there's a range of ratios where wet magnesium does constitute an explosive if it's finely divided, at least a low explosive like gunpowder, so such an accident could happen.
It seems unlikely to happen by accident because at stoichiometry you need more water than magnesium, and I don't think spontaneous explosion is a real risk with magnesium. The International Magnesium Association's safe handling guide https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.intlmag.org/resource/resmgr/safety... does mention that magnesium swarf can spontaneously combust in the presence of water, but I think swarf is too coarse to explode. It recommends keeping wet magnesium swarf under water to prevent it from heating up enough to spontaneously ignite.
But presumably you'd be shipping the magnesium in the form of plates, ingots, or rolls rather than powder, swarf, or loose foil.
Even magnesium powder wouldn’t detonate when you’re talking tons of the stuff on a boat for the same reason small hydrogen balloons can go bang, but the Hindenburg just created a huge conflagration. You get limited mixing due to the volumes of material involved. Even burning across several seconds is just vastly less dangerous than an actual detonation.
Same issue with grain silos exploding because of the mixture of fuel with oxygen, but flour just burns etc.
Yes, that's why I said, "dry magnesium, no". A pile of dry magnesium powder only burns at the surface as air diffuses into it. If you have it mixed with the oxidizer so that the flame can propagate through the whole mixture, it will, and the propagation speed is determined by factors like the reaction speed, gas production, and thermal conductivity. The reaction speed in turn is governed by the particle size, since the reaction only takes place at particle surfaces; it goes to completion faster when particle size gets smaller.
Small hydrogen balloons do not in fact go bang; they just create small conflagrations. What goes bang are small balloons filled with a near-stoichiometric mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, such as you get from the simplest forms of water electrolysis.
The stoichiometric mixture of magnesium with water is 1.36 grams of water per gram of magnesium (which is 1.74g/cc, so this 58-wt%-water mixture is 70% water by volume), the enthalpy of formation of H₂O is -285.83kJ/mol, and the enthalpy of formation of MgO is -601.6kJ/mol. So this reaction:
Mg + H₂O → MgO + H₂
yields 315.8kJ/mol, which is to say, 315.8kJ per 24.3 grams of magnesium, or per 58 grams of mixture, about 5.4MJ/kg, about an 18% higher energy density than TNT. And the hot hydrogen gas produced will carry the heat produced by the reaction into nearby areas, igniting them and resulting in a flame propagation velocity that's higher than thermal conduction alone.
For a large enough particle size, you won't get an explosion, and you may even lose most of your water as steam; but for a small enough particle size and an oxidizer concentration close enough to stoichiometric, you will. Some nanothermites consisting of magnesium nanoparticles with an oxidizer such as iron oxide even reliably detonate.
So, it's a potential safety hazard, but it seems like one that should be easy enough to guard against.
It’s not a supersonic detonation but even normal balloons pop with a small bang, pure hydrogen balloons are louder. Though a you mention hydrogen + oxygen is significantly more extreme.
Yes, it's easy to imagine cases where people go around sinking ships; narcosubs, Red Sea oil shipping, and Russian warships in the Black Sea are of course dealing with that threat currently, but as hostilities escalate it's likely to increase. But energy in the form of shipped fuel intrinsically provides some minimal level of such local resilience—for it to work, you need at least a stockpile of fuel big enough to last until the next ship is expected to unload, which is orders of magnitude longer than the milliseconds before a cable cut affects you—and can provide arbitrarily large amounts of it.
The metal fuels in particular have the merit that you can use them in precisely such mass-produced batteries rather than to produce thermal power. As I alluded to in my grandparent comment, aluminum-air batteries were mass-produced in the 01960s.
I think the idea of "peacetime" is probably outdated. Not in the sense that I think people should fight, but in the sense that their fighting will no longer be limited to certain geographic areas, and people will fight, so all of us will be at constant risk of both infrastructural damage and violent death.
I don't think peacetime is outdated, but we do live in a time of increasing tensions and classical and asymetric conflicts, mixed with an increasing amount of people who believe they have nothing left to loose. So yes, I also prefer the concept of local ressilience as opposed to having many critical infrastructure points where everything else will collapse if those are damaged. Solar, Wind and batteries can go a long way here, to keep at least critical systems running.
They might use rotating wings to fly instead of jet turbines, but yes.
EDIT: To make things clearer, the word Missile is quite old, and predates rockets. missile is any object that is propelled somehow to hit a target. So even a stone launched from a sling by a caveman is already a missile. The other guy mentioned precision guided missiles though... and he is still correct in the word usage there.
I don't know, I'd say once you reach a certain amount of control over your flight path you stop being a missile. An aircraft isn't really "projected toward" something.
Cruse missiles have a great deal of control over their flight. “Kamikaze aircraft were pilot-guided explosive missiles, either purpose-built or converted from conventional aircraft.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze
However, the distinction is usually applied where aircraft become missile’s when the attack can no longer be aborted.
The SM-62 Snark had a 10,000km range so presumably thousands of 90 degree turns were possible. What the actual guidance software could do may have limited it.
And software. The Ukrainian drones largely run on the open-source Ardupilot.
GPS is fairly easy to jam, and despite the purported end of Selective Availability, unencrypted GPS can be turned off entirely without affecting US military GPS. Cruise missiles have been using terrain models for decades now, since well before GPS (a major reason high-resolution DTED used to be classified) which just requires a computationally cheap particle filter and appropriate sensors. We can expect belligerents in upcoming conflicts to maintain strategic stockpiles of the relevant electronics, which are more compact than even cocaine or fentanyl and therefore difficult to blockade.
Also depending on how many corners you're willing to cut. Half the cost but a 1% chance that it turns around and targets a friendly? Some countries would take that trade.
"On the landing beach at Baie de Pampelonne, most Apex boats exploded against the obstacles. Nevertheless, one ran aground, and one sank. A third reversed course and turned back out to sea before exploding near Sub-chaser #1029 and severely damaging it."
One could argue all those Mk 14 torpedoes that malfunctioned and went onto circular paths also counted.
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.
Especially at workplaces or shopping malls, where most people park during the day, you can also install lots of EV chargers and use produced power onsite.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
"Full capacity" backup looks different when you have sufficient batteries on the grid. Building enough backup generation to hit peak capacity would entail a lot more gas plants than building enough to hit average capacity and using batteries to supply the peaks.
Most states have sizeable underground gas storages, often reusing old oil and gas fields. The capacity being from weeks to months of normal use, possibly much longer with some rationing. This mostly turned out to be sufficient to enable a quick switch to LNG and other sources.
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:
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.
Recent history is a very, very good reminder that political relationships between countries (or more generally political powers) are extremely fragile and the only reliable constant in these kinds of systems is change and stability isn't permanent, unfortunately.
Even the EU with it's very tight integration between member states is seeing a lot of pressure to tear itself apart again from the inside, despite the very real costs thĺis would bring.
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
And I'd still much rather pay a utility every month for electricity (and have them be responsible for maintaining and upgrading the infrastructure) than install and maintain my own solar plant on my roof, for the same reasons that I'd rather pay utilities to provide me with water and sewer service than have my own well and septic system.
While true, with sufficiently cheap transmission, no storage is needed.
But only the Chinese have either the capability to, or interest in, building a one-square-meter-cross-section aluminium belt around the planet, and that means a geopolitical faff.
The "intercontinental distances" part is simpler, and potentially* cheaper at current aluminium prices, than the domestic grid upgrades and repairs much of the west needs anyway.
* The scale is such that it's more of an opportunity cost than a dollar cost, what else can be done with 5% of Chinese aluminium per year for the next 20-or-so years.
But also, much research needed before a true price tag can be attached, rather than just a bill of materials
The only real downside to batteries is the cost. The upsides are vast. Beyond adding feasibility to solar and wind, batteries stabilize the grid. The ability to instantly absorb and output power in response to demand or a lack of demand is incredibly valuable.
I was somewhat gobsmacked when I learned there are electric stoves with integrated batteries (the batteries serving to reduce the maximum current draw for homes wired for limited current.)
Is this whole "new set of cables" factored into the CO2 emissions equation? We're undoubtedly going to use massive amounts of energy to mine the metal, melt it into wire, transport it to the site, build the towers, etc. Is that energy "green" ?
So why do it at all if there is no accounting to prove it's green? It's almost as if this movement is a scam. No CO2 equivalent publications on solar, or on recycling. It's just "do what we say or the climate will die". I reject that imperative.
Before you've built any green power plants, none of the energy you use to build green power plants can itself be green.
When all the power plants are green, all of the energy you use to build green power plants is necessarily green.
How green a new power plant is, during the process of construction, is a statement of how much progress you've already made before this step, not how much you make in the act of making this step.
They're also not escaping any such accounting, but that wasn't my point.
PV pays its own energy cost in a few months these days. But even then, the very first PV had to be made with mostly fossil fuels and some hydroelectric, now the new ones in China are made with 35% renewables.
Grids have the same question: how green it is to modify today is the current status of the power supply (etc.), not the status it will be when it's been modified.
> if there is no accounting to prove it's green? It's almost as if this movement is a scam. No CO2 equivalent publications on solar, or on recycling
You state this as if that's a fact - just because you haven't looked for them doesn't mean they don't exist. Here's two examples showing that wind [1] and solar [2] have good environmental payback times in my home country due to avoided emissions, a country which already has an ~80% renewable grid. Additionally, [3] is a good resource that puts the potential waste from solar farms into context with other sources (such as coal ash) and shows this is an unfounded fear. Do some research and challenge your biases before you spread misinformation.
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.
The Russian government didn't see it as a Russian dependency on Germany.
As far as the dependency direction goes, Germany didn't start a war with Russia, so the simplistic example isn't enough to disprove anything. If you want to disprove it, do so by explaining how Russia was dependent on Europe.
they were cut off from trade as much as possible (of course there have been rogue nations, but those weren't equivalent in trading/buying power) - and that's one of the reasons, they're not winning the war, even though they were superior in almost all metrics, not at least military and economic power.
if nothing else this will serve as a warning and a cautionary tale for future aspiring conquerors.
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?
“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
They're not really solutions if they're not achievable in practice though. Otherwise why not add nuclear fusion to the mix?
To give some example: Switzerland is roughly electricity neutral over a year, but there's a significant winter/summer imbalance of about 5TWh.
To add enough storage to compensate this imbalance, you would need to:
- cover about 2% of the country in batteries
- build about a thousand pump storage stations: despite the Alps covering about 40% of the country, it's not clear if you would have enough valleys to flood
- hydrogen looks a bit more reasonable, if we don't look at the costs, you only need to store a few millions m3 of liquid hydrogen. The gas storage in Germany for instance are quite a bit larger than that, but hydrogen is also significantly harder to store.
And all of this is to use once a year essentially! None of it looks practical or affordable (a pump storage station costs a few billions a piece for instance).
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.
Solar is always producing, at some percentage (may be very a very low percentage) of full capacity. So, we want it to routinely overproduce. That’ll also cut the days that we need to dip into storage.
> It either requires subsidies or for natural gas to be taxed more.
Subsidies are hard to calculate anyway. For example almost all fossil fuels get a pair of massive subsidies; we let them dump their carbon into the air for free instead of charging for it, and we build and man a bunch of aircraft carriers to go around defending the shipping lanes that it gets sent through.
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.
Ah yes, what Europe needs once more is to become existentially dependent on a region that is both culturally and geographically distant and where Europe has very little ability to enforce and police it's interests.
Have we learned nothing from the 2022 energy crisis? The number of starry eyed suggestions here about distributed worldwide power networks and load balancing is astonishing given the realities that we actually live in.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Thanks for the tip! It seems obvious now, but its been interesting for me to realize how much of human history can be understood as a quest for energy, full stop. Even going back to the invention of farming, which at its core was way to reliably source more calories per person. Fun to think of your examples of sailing, coal, and petroleum empires as further chapters in this ongoing quest.
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.
I think you might be in agreement with me in the main, just quibbling on the timing?
The US's addiction to "fat oil profits" goes back over a hundred years, and that's what the NYTimes author argues is driving the current administration's push to keep those profits going. Whether there actually are such profits is a different question.
This is exactly the behavior of the big companies in "The Innovators Dilemma": continuing to try and squeeze profits out of the dying old paradigm. (IBM clinging to hardware and mainframes, US motorcycle manufacturers not embracing small sport bikes, etc.) That's to say that, yes, countries and governments can indeed behave like companies.
No, that's not the behavior of big companies in "The Innovators Dilemma".
Those companies optimize for corporation profit. If the US was optimizing for societal wealth or government revenue they would be pushing the country into renewables.
On reality many big corporations get corrupt management that destroy corporate profit and optimize for the managers personal wealth. Those ones act like the US is acting. But that's not the behavior that book is about.
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.
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.
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.
lol, you have no idea just how hard it is to make something as mammoth size financially viable or even sustainable as a business, due to sheer technological bottlenecks in video streaming, encoding/decoding videos at that scale, and everything else.
It is a technological marvel, similar in comparison to designing and building an F-35 fighter jet or anything else.
It requires custom Hardware Accelerators designed at a chip level, on top of decades of algorithmic refining of video encoder decoders in stuff like gstreamer or ffmpeg, refining video streaming at inconsistent cellular data networks, various ISPs doing shenanigans with ports, etc. Storing and ingesting that much video data at "Free" initial pricing, streaming that much data to viewers, building analytics algorithms to pair advertisements with watchers, to get a high enough conversion rate to make ads economically viable enough while having minimal number of ads per vids.
Even an infinite money printer like google would struggle were it not for systematically solving technology at all levels from hardware, to chip design, to algorithms, to network level tuning, to frontend device optimizations, etc.
And has been made possible by only the cumulative effort of humankind to build such advanced sophisticated systems in the palm of our devices such that even a normie average iphone 16e has more compute capacity than early 1990s or so, much more.
If that is a miracle so is every engineering and scientific effort because most things are hard multifaceted problems. Maybe these aren’t actually miracles but the inevitable products of structured teams of trained people.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
I have an LG. They look to cost a premium in the US above heated air one. They also seem to be gentler on clothes since they pump in warm dry air vs. super heated air.
I have an LG washer/dryer (not the cool new heat pump dryer, though) and both have "smart" features that are optional and non-intrusive. You don't have to hook up either appliance to the LG app, but if you do you can get push notifications when a cycle is complete or use it to run diagnostics as needed. Honestly one of the few times where I think smart connectivity is a net benefit and not a reason to steer clear.
I used to have a Bloomberg heat pump dryer when I lived in a historical apartment. I was fairly happy with it, only real downsides was that it did take longer to dry compared to my prior electric and gas dryers, it tended to pickup a musty smell, and it was relatively complex and difficult to repair compared to a simpler dryer (had some minor failures over the years). Upside was the efficiency and not needing an exterior exhaust.
Been a number of years since then, so I'm sure they've improved even more and are hopefully somewhat cheaper.
> 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.
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.
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!
The laws of gravity are entirely symmetric, so it doesn't seem fair to attribute it specifically to the sun; also, the energy in this case is coming out of the "v" in earth's good old 0.5mv^2 kinetic energy relative to the sun.
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.
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.
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.
Helium and Lithium were also created in the pre stellar era of the universe, hydrogen was the majority by far but not the only element that wasn't created in stars. I think anything past 3 on the periodic table is exclusively stellar though.
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.
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.
Natural gas and coal are better at throttling up and down than nuclear plants are.
So if they need to run 10% of the time, then you've still reduced your carbon output by 90%. The goal is 100%, but the remaining fossil fuel plants are not the biggest issue.
A nuclear plant would also be carbon-free, but Germany had other reasons not to want it. So it was a reasonable decision to keep the fossil fuel plants around, and shut more and more of them down over time.
No, Germany is shutting down its coal plants and reduced their usage drastically.
Poland is keeping their coal plants open by refusing to invest in quick and cheap renewables. Instead they plan to build nuclear plants for the next 20 years.
> 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.
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.
~25 years ago I could have taken you to multiple entirely dead streams within a 20 minute drive of where I grew up - and you don't get very far in 20 minutes on Appalachian roads. Over large swaths of my home state, in fact, I could have done that from most people's homes. This is no longer the case, and a huge number of streams are now recovered or recovering. The surface water problems are by no means gone, but some of the recoveries that I've witnessed - the North Branch of the Potomac River is a good example - are breathtaking. That river was as dead as a doornail in the 90s and is now a vibrant, healthy wild trout fishery. It is still a post-industrial river, it still has dams, run-off issues, wastewater inputs, etc, but it is a far cry from what it was.
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.
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.)
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.
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).
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
Maybe better disposal practices. Regulations standardizing batteries would also do a lot of good.
But really, we simply need a lot of virgin batteries regardless because we don't have enough. Recycling and disposal will only really take off once the market is mostly saturated (which we don't appear to be anywhere near).
I'd also point out that modern LiPo batteries are 90% recyclable with no special techniques needed. That's because by weight, the batteries are mostly iron and nickel. Recycling them is really as simple as just melting them down. It only gets tricky if you want to collect the lithium, silicon, and other trace materials (and there are already recycling plants that are handling that).
Funny how no one seems to consider the environmental impact of digging up fossil fuels when they discuss solar.
It's similar to how you can identify Real Bird Lovers. They stay silent when they see pictures of oil-covered birds after an Exxon Valdez or a Deepwater Horizon. Show them a windmill and boy do they get passionate about bird safety and welfare.
I think this is the most frustrating part. You wouldn't even need to massively change out neighborhoods to get a huge benefit. If a developer built with district and heating planned, you could have an entire neighborhood heated and cooled without needed AC and heaters in every building. You could still have single family homes that are massively more efficient per unit.
The problem is that has to be planned almost from the beginning. Which shouldn't be a huge deal. My neighborhood had a water tower built at the same time the neighborhood was built. There's no reason district heating couldn't have occupied the lot right next to it.
If you look at the energy density, cost/kwh, and lifetime maintenance of most of those, you'll find that batteries handily win. Further, batteries have room for innovation and growth in all those categories.
We won't, for example, make a more cost-efficient flywheel or heat storage. They are effectively as efficient as they'll ever be.
IMO, it necessarily has to be batteries. The other alternatives are nowhere near as good.
On the other hand, you need to buy a new set of batteries every 15 or so years. The other things you mentioned generally don't need regular replacement, and when they do, it's not the whole setup.
You don't need to replace the whole setup, just the batteries. All the power electronics and interconnects are already there and will last as long as they last.
You also don't technically need new batteries almost ever. Batteries (typically) don't really die, they just lose capacity. After a 15 year runtime instead of storing 10mWh they now store 7mWh. That's still 7mWh. After another 15 years it'll be down to around 5mWh.
Batteries can be deployed nearly instantly. My power company is planning on building a new battery plant next year, it announced it the year prior.
I know a pumped hydro plan that has literally been in the works for the last 20 years and shows no sign of actually being started (still being planned).
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).
More expensive in what way? "Cost" is what everyone quotes about why nuclear isn't great, but isn't the whole idea behind shelving fossil fuels and switching to alternatives due to downsides that are secondary to cost?
To me, renewables (solar and wind namely) have many more downsides than nuclear. So if we are doing things not because of cost anyway, why not nuclear? What do you fundamentally care about?
The power density of wind and solar is abysmal. You need to cover huge amounts of land with your preferred solution (which doesn't work everywhere) to produce relatively meager amounts of power. You need to have grid-scale storage solutions which are currently not priced in to the costs being quoted. Even if you have that storage solution you need to be significantly over-capacity in terms of production so that storage can actually be filled during peak hours.
Meanwhile, nuclear: requires a fraction of land use (good for ecology), runs continuously (so doesn't need huge storage outlays), can run basically anywhere (reducing transmission costs).
The most important note is that "nuclear" is not entirely encapsulated by existing Gen III reactors. There are many more designs and ideas that are being developed as we speak, whether more interesting (read: safe/efficient) fuel mixes, modular/micro designs, and various other improvements.
"Cost" is a merely a reflection of how much human capital is required to make something happen. I'd much rather spend our human capital on technologies that have the potential to massively increase the energy available to humanity, rather than focusing on tech which we know has strict upper bounds on power output / scalability. Solar and wind is useful in certain areas, but the idea that they can provide the baseload for a decarbonized future is ridiculous to me, unless your starting point is "I don't think humanity needs to consume much more power".
We are in fact doing things soley because of cost, and pretty much only because of cost, because capitalisim. Solar and wind are now cheaper than all alternatives in most situations, so they are rapidly becoming all thats being built. We are doing the cheapest thing, which just so happens to be great for carbon, luckily for us. If we get out of this climate mess it will almost be by accident, because we made solar cheap, not because we chose to do the right thing.
Honestly you need to look into numbers for some of your points, and you'll see the folly. Land usage, its a non issue. For eg, its estimated that if around 1/3rd of the land the US currently uses for corn ethanol was converted to solar, it would power the whole country. And thats existing used land without talking about the insane amount of empty spaces that exist. non issue.
Yes there are new nuke designs that are cool, but they're at least 10-20 years away from deployment at scale, by which time renewables and storage will be much cheaper still, and the transition will be mostly over. Im not anti at all, they're just too late, too slow and too expensive.
I think you need to catch up on developments in the last few years, and re-evaluate what seems ridiculous to you, a lot has changed very quickly. Cheap energy abundance via renewables is now a very likely outcome.
The fundamental disagreement here is (in my opinion) on what needs to be encouraged. If what you say is true and renewables are cheaper anyway, then also as you say capitalism should in out and that's what we will use in the near term anyway. So shouldn't we be investing more now on the things that you think are 10-20 years out, in order to accelerate them?
Becuase I'm interested in the future. The math with wind and solar checks out if all you care about is current energy needs. But we've already achieved most of the efficiency we can with at least PV. Even in a hypothetical future where you have some sort of quantum PV panels using MEG, your best possible hope is only 3x current efficiencies. But again, I'm more interested in our long-term future. Nuclear (fission and fusion) have much more unbounded potential than wind and solar.
Back to cost, the numbers in the article you link are cherry-picked. They rely on deploying solar to "the sunniest regions in the world" to get that performance. Most of the world is not the sunniest, unfortunately. Beyond that, the corn fields and insane amounts of empty space you mention are generally not co-located with areas of high power usage, making transmission another factor (which is doubly a factor since PV is such low-voltage that you require significant transformer infrastructure in order to step things up for transmission). So I strongly disagree, land usage is absolutely still an issue. There are also externalities caused by covering huge swathes of land with PV panels.
And it would need to be huge swathes of land, because in case it wasn't clear I would like to see humanity have huge amounts of power at our disposal – significantly more than we are using today. My back of the napkin map is that it would take 50,000 km2 of solar to accommodate current US energy needs. But I'd like to 100x our energy supply. That would require 5m km2, which is half the entire land area of the USA.
And honestly, I'm still skeptical of the price difference. PV needs lots of things (transformers, transmission, storage, disposal, land use, etc) that are frequently not priced in. Meanwhile the numbers quoted for nuclear fission reactors are frequently absolutely all in, including the cost of decommissioning the reactor at some indeterminate point in the future and pre-allocating funds for disposal.
tl;dr – your right that solar/wind is already quite cost effective and moving rapidly on its own pace just fine. So if anything needs collective support to me it is nuclear which has potential for the future that solar/wind just lacks.
>And honestly, I'm still skeptical of the price difference. PV needs lots of things (transformers, transmission, storage, disposal, land use, etc) that are frequently not priced in.
With a price difference of 5x there is more than a little wiggle room to price in storage and transmission costs and still end up way cheaper.
That is how every kilowatt hour generated with solar and wind and stored with power2gas (the most expensive form of storage) still ends up being cheaper than nuclear power generated on a sunny, windy day.
Nuclear power survives exclusively because it integrates with the military industrial complex. Thats why it gets deluged with lavish subsidies, that's most governments only want a few and that's why the governments who build them either have a bomb or want the ability to build one in a hurry (e.g. Iran who joined this club a long time ago or Poland who joined recently).
This might be the only way I could have any trust in Nuclear. I heard recently from a journalist that the Fukushima plant paid Yakuza owned newspapers to avoid negative press well before the incident. The technology is great, humans are not.
> The rest of the world will keep burning fossil fuel
As the article spends so many paragraphs to explain to us, the rest of the world is increasingly not burning fossil fuel for their new energy needs. Most of the fuel it burns is for the energy it already uses. And solar is starting to take a bite out of that too.
That's great but if we had accelerated our transition, it wouldn't have lead to them accelerating their transition. The things are not linked or correlated.
Solar has gotten cheaper and cheaper largely because as we build more panels and batteries, we find efficiencies. If we had accelerated our transition then the increased demand would have driven even more efficiencies and it would be even cheaper it is now.
If it were cheaper, developing countries would buy even more of it, accelerating their own transition.
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.
The price of LFP batteries in China is $35/kWh for cells, $52/kWh for fully integrated systems [1]. Roughly 1TW of solar is being deployed globally every year. We’re already there, it’s just a matter of pushing the pedal down harder. China destroys half a million barrels a day of global oil demand every year they build EVs at current output levels, which are still increasing.
Fossil fuels are already dead, it’s just time horizon. How fast we want to go is a function of how much fiat we want to shovel into PV solar and battery manufacturing.
But that isn’t the case _today_. Unless you have existing facilities (which we do have and which gives fossils momentum) it’s strictly cheaper to build new renewables! The problem for renewables is that the p99.9 price is much higher than the p95 price. But finance will be solving that part.
you're just wrong. they already are cheap enough, its already happening. PV+battery is now cheaper than new gas & coal. Very soon to come, existing gas.
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.
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?
Some of the graphs have options to switch to multiple comparisons, or to log scale and similar. They often have table formats and allow you to download the data for your own use.
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"
On the other hand the points I listed are sufficiently coarse grained and the cost or expense of most of those can be estimated.
Deaths due to coal mining? Probably in the hundreds of thousands. Animals killed by oil slicks? Millions. Deaths due to fossil fuels via climate change? Millions. Animals (and people) killed by solar? Statistically insignificant in comparison.
The repeated cost of 'trucks driving up a hill', and the cost of fuel for those lorries, and so on, is indeed 'fractal'. However the oil consumed by a power station dwarfs that.
Strip mining thousands of square miles for coal, or steel, or rare-earths, or simply just 'square miles' to bury old wind turbine blades, is very much quantifiable.
And these are all the kinds of points that are used to denigrate one form of power 'I don't like', but aren't talked about for other forms 'I do like'.
Hence my original question, a like-for-like comparison in a reputable scientific journal.
>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
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
It's possible, but you may have noticed that out of the ≈200 countries in the world, over the last 20 years, about 180 of them have completely failed to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers, and about 100 of them have completely failed to develop a native industry of anything, continuing their agrarian and resource-extraction economies more or less as they have been for centuries, just with imported Chinese cellphones. People in those countries often blame the rich countries for keeping them down, for example by selling them goods at lower prices than their domestic production of those goods, and they're not completely wrong, but in many cases the dynamics preventing them from escaping that equilibrium are mostly internal.
Hypothetically, yes, such a blockaded country could develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers in 20 years, and that industry would have an easier time traveling up the learning curve on the domestic market without having to match the prices of the Chinese hyperscalers. But in about 90% of cases they would fail to do so, for the same reasons the US still doesn't have any high-speed trains 60 years after the Shinkansen entered service and still doesn't have a moon base 56 years after Neil Armstrong.
> for the same reasons the US still doesn't have any high-speed trains 60 years after the Shinkansen entered service and still doesn't have a moon base 56 years after Neil Armstrong.
Energy independence and HSR are indeed poor metaphors for each other.
In the U.S. one can travel coast-to-coast faster and cheaper in a car than they can by rail. Then, of course, there is air travel. That is to say, there are alternatives.
A country completely dependent on foreign solar panels could develop non-solar alternatives. Or they could just surrender. So of course they also have alternatives. But this is existential whereas HSR is not. So, yes, it's a pretty poor comparison.
> Energy independence and HSR are indeed poor metaphors for each other.
It's not a metaphor. You're reasoning very sloppily. The absence of high-speed rail in the US is caused by a societal breakdown in technological and economic development. That breakdown also causes other effects. One of those effects is that over the last 20 years the US not only failed to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers; it lost the world-leading native industry of solar panel manufacturers that it already had. There's no strong reason to believe that a blockade would reverse that breakdown rather than accelerating it.
> In the U.S. one can travel coast-to-coast faster and cheaper in a car than they can by rail.
Yes. That's because the US doesn't have high-speed rail, even 60 years after the Shinkansen went into service. If the US did have high-speed rail, one would be able to travel coast-to-coast faster and cheaper by rail than they could in a car. And the difference is not small.
The fastest trains on the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed rail line average 290km/h, about 3–4 times faster than a car in the US and 50% faster than even the fastest Autobahn car speeds. The peak speed is 350km/h, but as in a car, some time is wasted speeding up and slowing down at stops at the beginning and end of the trip, and along the way.
Maybe in China cars are cheaper, in which case driving would only cost 10 times as much, I don't know. But it clearly isn't going to be as cheap as taking the high-speed train.
A consequence of the US's deficits in transportation is that a large fraction of the mental energy of its professional and intellectual classes is devoted to operating cars in traffic rather than to developing vaccines, improving Wikipedia, creating video games, or even selling ads.
60 years is a long time in terms of technological development. 60 years after the Wright Brothers achieve controlled powered flight in 01903 was 01963, when both the US and USSR had orbited cosmonauts, and the Apollo Program was well underway. 60 years after the first stored-program computer was delivered in 01949 (either the EDSAC or the secret Manchester Baby) was 02009, when Intel and AMD were shipping billion-transistor six-core processors. A wealthy country not being able to deploy the already existing technology in that time frame shows that it's experiencing not slow technological and economic development but slow collapse.
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.
Come on, be serious. The IMF doesn't break anyone's legs. The worst they can do is refuse to loan you any more money. Any sovereign state is free to balance their own budget and tell the IMF to GTFO.
This is currently more or less true, but historically speaking, sovereign default has often been used as a casus belli for invasion; that's where the Monroe doctrine comes from, after all. The collapsing Pax Americana is arguably the reason we haven't seen it happen in decades, so it would be unsurprising to see it start to happen again.
And of course financial considerations are often a first-order consideration in military conflict even today.
That most counties need to import oil and gas to keep the lights on and industry functioning means you don't need to send gunboats of yore. See Smedley Butler's rant. Now when they get in a pickle they need foreign currency. And that's how they get ya.
The Sri Lankan politicians like "Mr. 10%" were largely in it for the gift. The debt crisis could have been prevented if they followed IMF recommendations in the first place.
> 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.
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.
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.
As long as China keeps making the panels and selling them for cheap there is no problem at all with that. When they decide to stop doing that other countries can pick up after a short ramp up time, for a little more money.
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.
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.
First 15-20 years old Siemens panels come off the roofs right now in Germany. Still having 2/3 of the rated power generation capability. Absolutely fascinating thing. And since they cost more or less nothing it would make absolutely sense to install them in some lower cost of living area in southern Europe. I can get the panels in Germany, who wants to take over the southern Europe part?
They are also old technology and only about half as efficient as current ones. So even if you restore them to full nameplate capacity for free they are still wasted to put anywhere as long as the installation price is dominated by labor costs. The _only_ scenario in which this might be worth it is if there are no new solar cells available
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.
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)
In 1979 Jimmy Carter installed solar (thermal) panels on the White House roof as part of his fairly progressive environmental and fuel efficiency policies.
Now I feel old :/
And also angry that it's been 40 years and electricity generation is still >50% fossil fuels, never mind world energy use overall.
And Reagan tore them down. If you want to look at why we as a country suck at green energy, you don't have to look further than the Republican party behavior over the decades. The party explicitly responsible for why we can't have any number of Good Things.
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.
Apparently the Chinese solar industry are baffled by the US obsession with Solyndra.
It makes so little objective sense to be that angry about a failed investment in new tech that they thought there was something deeper going on that they didn't understand.
edit: I tried to Google for the source of this, but was stymied by the fact that Solyndra tried to sue Chinese manufacturers.
I did find this time capsule commentary on an NYT piece about how Chinese renewables were about to collapse back in 2012:
The story, the blog take and the unhinged comments do a lot to explain USA losing out.
Not that all of the comments are unhinged, one upvoted to the top actually applies basic economic thinking and suggests this is just counteracting negative externalities and therefore the smart move to anyone with the eyes to see the facts clearly.
Second edit: extra context is that the blogger is funded by Charles Koch:
The sarcasm seems unwarranted. The US has better air quality than any other country with over 50 million people and better air quality than the EU on average. Most of the countries above America on the list are either islands directly in the path of tradewinds, largely unpopulated, or the nordics. Now, a lot of this is simply the fact that Americans haven't embraced diesel and that America is a relatively low density country. But air quality is really quite good in most of the US. The Clean Air Act and other environmental legislation was very successful.
No? I didn't make the parent comment and I was mostly taking issue with the implication in your comment that US air quality was in some way deficient
But since you asked, while manufacturing solar panels does not itself pose a threat to air quality, environmental and air quality regulations obviously raise the cost of doing business in the manufacturing sector broadly, which makes the US less competitive up and down the supply chain than China. That's obviously not the entire story, but it's certainly part of it.
Per-country yes China is #1, but per-capita, oil producing countries are most of the top 10 (with island nation Palau #1, inefficient transport skewed by low population).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.]
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.
>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.
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...
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.)
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"
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).
>I highly doubt that we will have global negative emissions (CO2 capturing) within the next decades
Just to clarify what I wrote, I also highly doubt we'll get it at scale in the near future. We desperately need it though, as well as any other measure that will bend the trends in the right direction.
This may not be the right place for this, but I'm honestly getting very anxious about our climate. Some of the data such as the temperature anomaly is showing an exponential trend. See the scariest graph I've ever seen here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/climate/climate-heat-inte...
The problem with carbon capture is volume. There is about 0.04% CO2 in air. So in order to remove a ton of CO2, you would need to process thousands of tons of air, depending on the efficiency of the extraction process.
It's just kind of infeasible to pull the entire atmosphere through these plants. The largest one we have is called mammoth, claimed to remove 36000 tons of CO2 per year, meanwhile our emissions are measured in billions of tons per year. Like over 30 billion.
We would need about 30 mammoths to get to a million tons per year, and 30,000 mammoths to get to a billion. Then multiply by another 30 and in total we would need almost a million mommoth plants just to undo what we are doing right now at the same rate. Carbon capture is like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket.
How are you so confident that extinction is off the table? I've stopped following this stuff because it's depressing but last time I checked we were in dire straits and I haven't heard any good news on this front. I'm just seeing ice caps disappearing, ocean currents changing, weather changing, pretty much everything that's been predicted is now happening and it's not going to slow down any time soon.
> How are you so confident that extinction is off the table?
Because even the worst-case scenarios (=> think RCP8.5) are just not enough to get rid of us.
I can totally see populous breadbasket states turning into unliveable deserts, billions of deaths from famines and heatwaves, iconic coastal cities being lost to the sea and a giant loss of biodiversity-- but I simply don't see this eradicating our species.
Humans are too adaptable, and warming is invariably gonna leave too many survivable holdout regions.
I think that an all-out global nuclear war would be much more threatening to humanity, and even that I'm very confident we would survive as species.
But what's the probability of those direct climate effects happening without an all out nuclear war on the side, as a second order effect of the climate change? Humans are prone to fall for whatever radical ideology crosses their path when the future looks bleak.
I don't believe in world-war as byproduct of climate change yet.
I think capability to wage war internationally will probably decrease thanks to climate change; it is much easier for a state to prevent the peasants from starving than to feed/equip/fuel an army.
I also don't really see the incentives working: Countries like Bangladesh that are gonna suffer disproportionally are mostly not in a position to wage war offensively, and famines/heatwaves are not gonna make it any easier.
My admittedly cynical outlook is that it will just be business as usual: More affected/poor nations struggling, while wealthier western states moan about refugees, use their wealth as buffer and proceed to not care about people dying elsewhere.
I mostly agree with your assessment, except that "moaning about refugees" and resulting action is going to get a whole lot worse as the numbers increase.
We're already seeing how countries like the UK and US can be manipulated to respond to these situations, even when their effects are mostly imaginary and even net positive. Imagine what will start happening if the bogeyman of migration becomes a real problem.
"Use wealth as a buffer" works in the current scenario to some extent - although the US seems to have a lot of trouble with it. But what will scaling that look like? Trumpian concentration camps throughout the country, ICE budget approaching that of the US military, national curfews, martial law, suspension of habeas corpus...? We've already seen hints of all these things.
Things could get very bad. But I agree, not extinction-level, yet. Give us time though!
Yeah so this is mostly just a difference of definition. When I say extinction I mean what you describe, essentially a total collapse of modern society. I don't care whether/how long a few people survive somewhere, your scenario is apocalyptic enough for me to label it an apocalypse.
I also think this process is likely to trigger a new world war. When nations start collapsing there will be two possible outcomes - other nations take them in or they go to war. They won't just sit down and die. And everyone else won't be able to handle the number of refugees even if they want to.
"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."
Might want to take a look at China, or at least what IEA writes about CCUS and the like there.
Do you have any source for this extraordinary claim? It's practically a claim of perpetual motion.
Carbon dioxide a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, even in concentrations which are immediately harmful to human life.
At the moment it's 400 parts per million. So in order to extract 1kg of Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere you have to pump 2500kg of air through the system. This alone makes it unlikely we can do this profitability.
You then need to extract the carbon dioxide using some technique which will probably involve cooling or pressuring that volume of air. Before finally transforming carbon dioxide, a very stable chemical compound, into a reagent which is actually useful (probably carbon monoxide).
Difficult engineering problem but working from first principles suggests that the energy requirememts are not insurmountable. The roundtrip efficiency is worse than batteries but much better than photosynthesis.
Terraform Industries (and others, like Synhelion) has a plausible if slightly optimistic target to be price competitive with fossil fuels for methane in the early 2030s.
Some places with very cheap to extract hydrocarbons like Saudi Arabia may be able to compete for a very long time, but there are many futures where most of humanity's hydrocarbon consumption (including the ones used for the chemical industry, plastics, etc) derives from atmospheric carbon.
And this can happen fast, the world (mostly China) has developed a truly massive manufacturing capacity for PV.
Terraform Industries (and others); I'd seriously consider taking a long bet that these companies turn out to be better at converting investor capital into employee salaries, for a finite period of time, than they are at converting atmospheric CO2 into natural gas.
If such a technology was possible then it would be far better to start with carbon capture from existing emitters. The concentration of CO2 being easily 3 orders of magnitude higher.
For hydrocarbon synthesis, hydrogen production from electrolysis dominates the energy usage, along with driving the Sabatier process. DAC might be like 5-10%.
Higher CO2 concentration is better but certainly not needed, it doesn't make or break the economics.
I'm not going to argue over the numbers but any business which ignores such an obvious upside / upside scenario is not really serious about achieving economic criticality. It would allow a power plant, iron ore plant, cement producer, what have you, to make claims about their environmental credentials while simultaneously improving the efficiency of the process.
It may never be “worth” it in economic sense, but it offers a way to separate the time of “energy is used” and “energy is available”. Assuming sufficient captureable volume you could capture the emissions of a fossil power plant during the ~two weeks per year where weather is sufficiently bad. And then take the other 50 weeks to capture that carbon again. It can be completely inefficient (like sub 5% round trip efficiency) if a) we pay for it via a capacity market and b) have sufficient excess (clean) energy to run it
The idea that we'll have huge excesses of clean energy seems like wishful thinking. We may have issues with excess energy at certain times of day for sure. But intermittent excesses like that are difficult to make use of economically because of capital costs and low utilisation. A general excess would be countered by falling energy prices to the point that it's difficult to make a business case for new installations.
I don't see a future where technologies which are massively inefficient reach their break even cost before other energy intensive activities or more efficient grid scale storage soak up the excess.
Consider a chemical synthesis that needs carbon. Right now it uses oil. But is has to be extracted and transported. With carbon capture from the air that no longer required. And maintaining the extra facility at the chemical factory can be cheaper than maintaining the extraction and supply chain for oil or coal.
We are also limited the incentives to that make us cut tree for money, and not develop technologies if they are not profitable within a short time-window. We have the technology to plant more trees right now, but we aren't.
People plant loads of trees for lumber, but you're right, it's an economics question in the end.
This actually means I'm also worried about something currently impossible: that when we do develop the tech sufficiently to be useful, if it's cheap enough to be profitable, nothing would seem to stop extraction. So CO2 goes down to, what, 300ppm? Pre-industrial? Ice age? Same coin, other side. We want to flip a coin and have it land on the edge.
A single world government could organise to fix this either way, but as all leadership roles come with the risk of the leader being fundamentally bad, this isn't something I'd advocate for either.
> that when we do develop the tech sufficiently to be useful, if it's cheap enough to be profitable, nothing would seem to stop extraction. So CO2 goes down to, what, 300ppm?
This is an extremely improbable scenario, for several reasons:
1) If you actually use the extracted CO2, then it gets re-emitted on use, and the atmospheric concentration is virtually unaffected.
2) Concentration difference alone makes it very unlikely that we'll ever extract CO2 as cheaply as O2 from ambient air (or carbon from a mine), and CO2 is not really an appealing ressource compared to its components, either (so demand would presumable be pretty low for centuries, even if the price comes down a lot).
> 1) If you actually use the extracted CO2, then it gets re-emitted on use, and the atmospheric concentration is virtually unaffected.
Depends what you use it for, e.g. synthetic diamond windows won't re-emit unless they catch fire.
> 2) Concentration difference alone makes it very unlikely that we'll ever extract CO2 as cheaply as O2 from ambient air (or carbon from a mine), and CO2 is not really an appealing ressource compared to its components, either (so demand would presumable be pretty low for centuries, even if the price comes down a lot).
Underestimating how big an industry would get is the mistake Svante Arrhenius initially made, thinking it would take millennia to emit enough CO2 to cause noticeable global warming.
And remember, with this concern I'm inherently presuming tech (mainly energy) that makes it sufficiently cheap that business and/or governments are willing and able to remove in the order of at least one teratonne of the stuff (but hopefully not two or more teratonnes) — because less than that, it's not solving global warming.
Sure, but you said "It's practically a claim of perpetual motion." which is overstating the challenge to a much greater degree than this understates it.
If you actually use captured carbon for something productive like synthetic fuel (where CO2 gets re-emitted) you are kinda ruining the point though.
Thats what makes this even less attractive-- those plants are expensive to build and operate and you can't even really use the product in the most obvious ways.
I think 1.5°C is already basically impossible; scenarios between 2°C and 4°C by 2100 over pre-industrial levels seem achievable-- that would be a total remaining CO2 budget of ~3 Tera-tons of CO2 within 2100.
That is an average of 4 tons of CO2/person/year for 10 billion people. Americans are at 3x that right now, Europeans/Chinese 2x, and a few wealthy nations are already there (France, Switzerland, Israel). Poorer countries like India are significantly under that value (for now!).
Doubling that CO2 budget to 6000 Gt would make things significantly worse (5° expected temperature increase or more).
Oh, we're definitely going to need direct air capture, which consumes massive amounts of energy. Fortunately, it's only massive compared to things like global shipping, not compared to the sun that hits the Earth.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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…
I'm more thinking about the side of designing and implementing complex engineering systems instead of individual trades, but I'm just an armchair poster so don't know much.
There's a property called "learning rate", which roughly measures the extent to which doing some kind of project more makes it cheaper. Renewables have hugely benefited from this at every level, from manufacture to installation.
From my experience in construction sites as an electrician… It is a race to the bottom. Cheapest subcontractor gets the job. Nobody cares about any training. And there are no engineers at all in construction sites. Overseeing engineer is simply too expensive. Obviously it shouldn’t be that way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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?
Chicago Manual of Style (though it says 1 to 100, er, I mean one to one-hundred).
I try to use a CMOS subset for my professional/technical writing, mostly for consistency, but, partly so that I don't need to argue with people with subjective opinions about how I'm writing it wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Its not laziness, its corruption. The USA has a government that's tainted by moneyed interests who don't want their established gravy train derailed no matter how much it's fucking the entire planets environment. Now add to that, the current administration is too stupid and short sighted to ever incentivize change.
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.
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.
The Government and actions of the United States also does not mesh well classic liberal ideas of freedom and human dignity, so this seems to be a hypocritical complaint.
Sorry, I'm not in the USA. And while the current US government is pretty bad, it is not a dictatorship. Protests like the "No Kings" are unimaginable in China, just consider the Tiananmen Square massacre.
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.
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.
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.
Your link shows that yesterday had the highest peak demand of the month and it was between 1-2pm.
Spot checking July 2019 the oldest year it had, it's peak day also had the peak at the same time.
Do we have different definitions of "late afternoon"?
I also don't understand the link's differentiation between "demand" and "usage", but "demand" is higher and nearer noon it seems.
It's also not clear if home solar is accounted for and is a factor. You'll see a "demand dip" when behind the meter solar is generating if you're only seeing the grid side of things. Some grids estimate and include it or call it out separately.
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.
That is about the numbers that we get in Sweden. Those months were solar production is lowest is also the months that consumption is highest for the average household, around 400% compared to the warmest summer months. As a result, energy prices are also significant higher during winter compared to summer.
My home's PV produces more energy than we use in a year, including heating. But the ~1:10 swing in generation from my roof in London UK between mid-winter and mid-summer is tough, and the storage to cover that interseasonally would currently cost about the same as the house and/or use ~50% of its volume. However, we import minimally in summer and export like crazy with the help of relatively modest storage.
Luckily there is this thing called a grid, and the UK has a lot of anti-correlated wind generation on it, which helps a lot.
> 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).
Nobody said that you have to use your home or work solar. If you fill up part of your car using some fast charger network (which would still be solar powered), it would still work.
Moreover, even if we take the top 25% percent of commute distances (which is >40km per day), that still leaves you with 10 days until you have to recharge. If you recharge every weekend, you still have plenty of battery capacity for your needs outside of sun hours (you likely will need only 1-2 kWh per day anyway).
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.
You're not left with a flat battery at the end of the night. Many vehicles are combined in intelligent systems which work together to ensure that the vehicles have the energy they need (which is easy to set in all the systems I've seen) but provide enough grid support to make this work.
Remember that even my little town car (Renault Zoe) has a 52kWh battery.... which would run my house for five days. So the energy stored in these systems can be considerable.
The people doing these things have thought a lot about it. Take a look at this video - it's a bit 'puff piece' but shows what one way of doing it looks like:
There are several scenarios where it would contribute:
1. You have access to a charger at work
2. You’re retired
3. You take public transportation or bike to work (fairly common scenario in Europe)
4. Work-from-home (got more common after covid, I know many people who do it at least once a week now, and that’s generally enough to charge what you need to drive for a week)
5. You charge only during the day on weekends (should be enough to cover the week for most people, even if you feed say 20% of it back to the grid through the week)
6. Rental fleet operators (booking data can inform charge/discharge policy)
7. Residential batteries, where you charge the EV at night with what you got during the day, every day, but set up a policy where you allow both the home battery and the EV battery to discharge if the electricity is expensive enough. I could see myself making decisions about WFH or biking to work based on electricity pricing.
Yes, it does rely on charging infra rolling out - either at work or with fast DC charging. But that is happening too. Well, in markets where EV adoption is encouraged - for the US, I guess we'll see.
> 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.
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).
> 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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
Finland does not have any geothermal. The country lies on two billion years old basement rock with approximately zero geothermal activity.
Wind is the dominanting renewable source, with enough of it for Finland to enjoy the second cheapest electricity in Europe last year. And indeed, even solar is profitable, hindered by the winters but helped by the long days during summer.
There is a fair amount of industry, but the buildup of wind power is relatively new. Lots of new datacenters are being built as cheap renewables, abundance of water, and a cool climate create a great environment for them.
Finland has lofty goals for becoming a hub for new green energy intensive industries, but these require large amounts of capital and it'll remain to be seen if that realizes.
One of the reasons I dont expect the australia storage model I cited to be wildly different to, say, Finland is that areas of the world which dont get a lot of sunlight tend to have a lot more wind and hydro potential per capita.
I doubt there are any places in the world where some carbon free combination of solar, wind, hydro, pumped storage, batteries and syngas isnt economic.
Unfortunately, natgas has a large sunk cost advantage. If we were building from scratch in 2025, syngas for the last 2-10% would be competitive. But we have a lot of natgas infrastructure. Syngas's advantage is that it can be locally produced and stored. Natgas has to be shipped large distances, but we already have the infrastructure to do that.
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.
You can't make China pay tariffs because it's not the exporter that pays them, it's the importer.
Tariffs in the USA are basically a tax on Americans. The aim being to make imported goods more expensive for Americans so they're more likely to buy local goods which would otherwise be more expensive than the imported version.
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.
West simply decided to de-industrialize itself (at least some countries, not all of them) and asked the other countries to do the dirty work for them so they can focus on finance and such, so of course the West has less subsidies -- and no one is forcing the West's hand NOT to give subsidies. Now it takes triple hard to pick it back, if the West really wants.
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?
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.
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?
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.
This really depends on the pricing mechanisms & contracts that large industrial users have with their energy provider. Many users may contract out of wholesale spot prices in favour for a more predictable contracted price - and demand response could form part of that contract. Depending on the market, financial hedges are also an option.
For instance, in New Zealand we have an aluminium smelter (Tiwai point) that constitutes about ~13% of national electricity demand. The smelter recently re-contracted its electricity supply with several of the major power companies (a 20-yr agreement) which includes a component for demand response when required. NZ has a ~80% renewable grid with hydro and wind as major variable sources, which creates both hourly and seasonal variation in the wholesale spot price (dependant on wind and rain resource). In the event of a major drought that pushes up prices due to a lack of hydro (this happened last year), the agreement with the smelter means it will shutdown some of its operating lines in exchange for demand response payments. This is exactly what occurred, whereas other industrial users that did not have such agreements in place or chose to take advantage of previously low spot prices without adequate hedging were then exposed and also shut down, without being paid to so.
They need some local buffers batteries, and some fallback power generation via the grid. But it benefits them if they can run on cheap renewables most of the time. And of course steel production processes can be adapted to be more flexible as well. Current steel production isn't optimized but when the choice is between shutting down for a few days or falling back to some relatively expensive power source, shutting down might be the more economical option. The idea behind flexible pricing is that large consumers of energy can optimize for that with batteries and storage. Charge when it's cheap, discharge when it isn't. Sell power when it gets really expensive.
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.
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.
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.
> ...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.
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.
You're overstating the current price of PV panels by a factor of three to five; it's closer to 3% of the 15-years-ago price than to 13%. That graph ends in 02023, at US$0.31/Wp, toward the end of the solar-panel bubble set up by the price-fixing cartel at the time. The actual current price is €0.11/Wp, or €0.06/Wp for low-cost (low-efficiency, no-warranty) panels: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...
€0.11 is 5% of US$2.39 (the Wp price on that graph from 02010), and €0.06 is 2.7% of it. However, my notes from 02016 say that the Solarserver price index for July 02010 was €1.62/Wp; sadly I did not note which module class that was. €0.11 is 6.8% of €1.62, but of course the Euro was worth more at the time...
This three-to-five-fold difference is why you're seeing this article now.
So, if I zoom out as you suggest, this means efficient doesn't mean economically efficient. What does it mean here, then? Engineering efficiency? That would make very little sense, since PV and other generating technologies have different inputs. It makes no sense to compare the efficiency of PV modules converting light to electrical energy vs. the efficiency of combustion turbines converting chemical energy to mechanical kinetic energy.
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...
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.
> 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].
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
This year, so far, all of my panels have produced at least 300kwhr of (usable) power. And thats in london, which isn't the sunniest of places.
Is solar the only solution? no. but for places like spain, france and italy, its a very cheap solution to handle peak aircon load. Thats without any kind of battery load shifting.
But!
Solar is not a replacement for nuclear. but currently its so cheap it means that poorer countries are now able to afford stable micro grids, something not possible before.
"This work has shown that the EROI of fossil fuels drops considerably when moving from a final stage (approximately 8.5) to a useful stage analysis (approximately 3.5). The low overall EROI value at the useful stage, however, hides large differences across fossil fuel groups and end uses, with average useful stage energy returns being much higher for heating compared with mechanical end uses. In addition, we find that fossil fuel useful-stage energy returns have remained fairly constant on average over time (except for fossil gas) and may even have slightly increased. Such findings contradict the conventional narrative according to which fossil fuels present very high, although rapidly decreasing, energy returns.
Next, we find that the EROI equivalent value for which electricity-yielding renewable energy systems deliver the same net useful energy as fossil fuels is as low as 4.6, due to the substantially higher final-to-useful efficiency of electricity compared to those of fossil fuel-based energy carriers. This value is, however, highly variable across the fossil fuels and end uses considered. We also find that most literature-sourced EROI values for electricity-yielding renewable energy technologies are higher than the EROI equivalent we have calculated, even when adjusting the values for the implications of intermittency using a wide range of energy transition scenarios. This result suggests that renewable energy may deliver more net useful energy than their fossil fuel counterparts for the same amount of final energy invested."
EROI only has to be greater than one for the number to rapidly lose its meaning relative to every other input (and externality) of a given energy technology. It makes no sense to focus on it.
Return on energy is different from cost, and it's strange that you're ignoring that. When you look at the levelized cost of energy, solar and onshore wind win: On a per-kWh basis, they produce the cheapest energy around. Gas combined cycle plants are close, but they have pollution and CO2 drawbacks.
LCOE doesn't capture everything you want, but when your grid mix is low on solar, it's the most relevant metric. When we get 15x return on energy and the energy we produce is cheap, you can ... use 1/15th of that energy to make more solar panels. And we're getting better at producing them by the year: Energy input is down and efficiency is up.
Nuclear is about 3x as expensive per kWh generated and it's not as dispatchable. Fossil fuels have this annoying problem of emitting co2and contributing a lot to climate change. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying to find ways to drive the cost of nuclear down - we should! - but from the perspective of "What generation should I install tomorrow?", solar and wind, augmented with a bit of storage, are really impressive: They're the fastest to bring online and provide the cheapest energy. The cost to them is you probably have to pay your gas plant operators a higher capacity fee for rare occasions, but that's ok. In a region like mine (PJM - pennsylvania, new jersey, virginia, ohio, etc.), they still make a profit while burning less gas, and consumer energy cost drops.
It seems weird to get all religious about technology choices when they each have advantages and disadvantages and combine pretty well to even out those differences. It would be expensive to be 100% solar+wind+storage because of the overprovisioning needed. But a mix instead of running 100% fossil (or 100% nuclear) would drop your costs considerably and be faster to build out.
From a pure physics and first principles perspective, a higher EROI implies higher scalability and lower costs.
Nuclear today has high costs associated to it due to uncertainty in permitting, high upfront costs due to red-tape, annd archaic regulations that stifle any innovation. These make risk management prohibitively expensive as is the cost of insuring them. If the catastrophic rate of failure and associated deaths are far far smaller than what’s generally accepted in society(think fatalities due to vehicle accidents), then we must work to removing the red-tape to ease construction of these. They’re also far more green to operate.
This way, we can keep solar for residential, and for industries to offset their own use(think data centers investing in their own energy supply instead of paying others. Think on-premise vs off-premise).
Let's start with privatizing the risk of it going kaboom. Why do we need red tape that pushes the cleanup costs onto taxpayer shoulders? It's so safe!
Sophisticated private insurers being willing to shoulder the full financial downside of nuclear power plants going fukushima (not < 1% as it is now!) will give everybody confidence that they're not just pushing propaganda exaggerating how safe they are to an unsophisticated public.
Assuming you are correct, there will be less red tape, the sophisticated insurers will happily take on the additional risks and unsophisticated taxpayers dont have to worry about being on the hook for one of those ~$800 billion Fukushima style cleanup events.
I wont hold my breath though.... after all, they know the nuclear industry would stop existing if insurance were actually priced according to the risk even if the consumers of their expensive public relations campaigns dont.
This is already happening, that and the crypto boom from a few years ago.
> and lift the poor and middle class up
But this is not happening; the ones doing AI stuff, crypto stuff, energy stuff have no interest in lifting any classes up. Energy prices are not going down, because demand is going up alongside supply, to the point where in some places the energy grid can't keep up. At-home solar and EVs are putting strain on the residential grids, even the newly built ones that have been reinforced 4x compared to the power grid of 10, 20 years ago.
Thorium reactors will cost billions and decades to build, even if you can find a location, get past the legal hurdles, the societal outrage, NIMBYism, etc. Meanwhile, you can get solar panels from your local DIY store, or order a pallet of them off the internet for cheap. Anyone with roof or field space can build themselves a solar farm, but nuclear or thorium reactors are huge, nationwide and political investments.
1. If something's expensive enough, that turns into manpower and then energy use as you look at the whole supply chain.
2. The ratio doesn't really matter once it hits double digits. If something outputs 100 energy units, the difference between it costing 10 energy units to build versus costing .01 energy units to build isn't a game changer. The important number is that almost all the energy it makes is "profit". And if you can make a solar panel output a few percent more energy, that matters more than getting the energy cost to 0 and having an infinite ratio would matter. All else equal, a solar panel that costs 4kWh to make and has a 1000x return is worse than a solar panel that costs 400kWh to make and has a 15x return.
While that may be true - I can invest in home solar and have zero or near zero electricity costs at reasonable prices with a 5 to 7 year payback period. Near me solar farms run at a profit here in England, and yet I don't believe any nuclear power plant has run at a profit without government assistance, or subsidies, and none are yet expected to fund their own decommissioning and clean up - society will bear these costs.
It's not entirely 1:1. CA has about 20GW of solar production, and the solar+storage together completely replace about 5GW of fossil capacity.
(But don't discount wind. Wind+solar combine pretty well, and if you throw that in, you'll see that CA is actually replacing about 10GW of fossil capacity with solar+storage+wind. That's _capacity_, not production, so that's 8GW of avoided plant construction.)
We still need more progress in storage, for sure, but the trajectory has been good so far. Storage prices have continued to drop and given the lag of construction times, we should expect online storage to continue to improve for at least several years. Another bit of battery coming online should let CA take that from 5 to 7GW of replaced peak capacity from solar+storage.
Exactly my point. Solar and Wind being intermittent require additional expense of grid storage which other forms of energy do not need.
So to scale, for each GW of solar, you’ll need a GW of storage plus the energy reserve to take through the night. Can’t rely on wind here as that’s also intermittent.
And grid storage is energy intensive and sets up twisted incentives for those playing to get rich with energy arbitrage. Think solar farm generators owning their own grid storage and reducing solar output to sell at higher $ from storage. Because, with intermittent sources pricing has to be more dynamic.
Totally. Our local electric supplier just introduced it as an option and I love it - admitting that none of us here are normal people, I reprogrammed my thermostats to be a degree warmer during peak times, shifted when we run dishes and laundry, and I run some of the compute load off of UPS. (And I have a little solar). I'm saving about $30/month on my power bill with it. It's cool.
> twisted incentives for those playing to get rich with energy arbitrage
You're saying energy arbitrage doesn't happen right now?
> Think solar farm generators owning their own grid storage and reducing solar output to sell at higher $ from storage
If enough generators do that they'll drive down the price of power at night and increase the price of power in the daytime. This will incentivize the opposite behavior.
Nuclear seems to only work if nation-states build and operate it directly - no private firm can build them profitably and on time.
If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that, please let people know, but with the current defunding everything mindset and general gridlock and one bill a year passed I think solar will be much cheaper by the time you even start breaking the ground on a thorium reactor.
>Nuclear seems to only work if nation-states build and operate it directly - no private firm can build them profitably and on time.
Nation states are not able to run the plants profitably either, they just don't run out of money.
Look at France, the US, UK, Germany and Japan for example. They all have immense costs related to nuclear power that is not covered by the sale of nuclear electricity.
Yeah, but if your intent is to support industry by having cheap energy costs that works out for you. Same reason public transit and police run at a loss, in theory.
>Yeah, but if your intent is to support industry by having cheap energy costs that works out for you
Short-term perhaps, but pretending that something expensive is cheap doesn't really work in the long run.
Investments are supposed to be an initial cost upfront that pays off later. Like building roads, bridges and such. For energy, an investment would be to take the cost of a renewable infrastructure, energy storage, solar roofs and such. Once they are in place they have minimal costs and give extremely cheap and reliable energy (reliable because of the distribution and redundancy).
Nuclear is kind of the opposite, you get the payoff upfront but have to pay an unknown amount basically forever afterwards. This cost eventually catches up to you.
France today is in a manner of speaking still paying for electricity they consumed in the 80s and 90s by bailing out EDF. Yet the common opinion still seems to be that they have "cheap electricity".
I think France has the most expensive energy infrastructure in Europe, and it will sooner or later become impossible to pretend otherwise.
I’m honestly not sure I understand. All electricity export charts I see show France as a net exporter of electricity and by a huge margin. What am I missing?
Nuclear works, it's just more expensive. We can quibble over other things (land use, nuclear waste, nuclear proliferation, embedded carbon, energy independence, social licensing, construction time, local insolation levels and seasonality), but 90% of the equation is just cost. Nuclear is damn expensive compared to wind and solar.
When France and Germany built their nuclear, solar and wind was too expensive. But it's changed now. Nobody should decomission nuclear plants that already exist, because the fixed costs are already paid for, but building new ones doesn't make economic sense.
> If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that
Impossible.
Federal government in US is failing along with the rest of large scale western style governments. They are too big, cost too much, and have too many fundamental structural deficiencies.
The model of having professional class of administrators and politicians running the country as part of a massive bureaucracy is one that can't work as it is unmanageable and full of conflicts of interests, moral hazards, political market failures and so on and so forth.
They carry on just through inertia at this point. Their one talent is creating a image of control and stability without actually providing any.
If you ever worked in a large publicly traded corporation and realized just how dysfunctional they are as a organization, multiply that a thousandfold and you have modern western governments.
Nuclear is expensive and doesn't work because there are a lot of people in power and next to power that don't want it to work.
> Federal government in US is failing along with the rest of large scale western style governments. They are too big, cost too much, and have too many fundamental structural deficiencies.
How do you see those governments failing, and when?
When sorting countries by tax burden (as a percentage of GDP), then you will find that there are tons of extremely livable countries at the top (wealthy European nations), while basically everything under ~10% GDP taxation is a 3rd world disaster.
How big of a GDP percentage would you propose can a government take at most and not "invariably fall apart"?
There are also a lot of people on the ground that don't want it to work, or will protest it, and that's where state power seems to work well to cut through opposition and just build things. Certainly a lot of tradeoffs are made to allow that but the Chinese government seems very good at building.
I'm not sure if it's the model or the particular culture working though - aren't there also a lot of party bureaucrats over there? So the core is authority or agency directed at the center of it, I think.
So get government out of the space here. Keep essential regulations for ensuring safety and so that insurance companies can cover liabilities. Let the free market play it out.
If the profit incentives are there(which there are as higher EROI = lowest cost per kWh), then it is a race to who can provide the product(energy) at the lowest cost more reliably.
Government unfortunately has a monopoly here as traditional reactors had proliferations concerns, needed much large capital, and political will. But if reactors can be modular and costs low that a city could afford it, then you can also have decentralized reactors just like you have with solar.
Like I said, if you have some pathway to a functional government (either to cut regulations sufficiently or to build it, I don't think either is much simpler) then you should get on that part first. But I'm not holding out much hope. We can barely reduce regulations to build houses, and voters like houses. You'll have environmental protests a plenty for city scale small reactors if they're in anyone's "backyard" at all
China seems to be taking the joke rather seriously [1]
> The 277 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in China in 2024 alone is more than twice as much as the 121 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2024.
So they took all the solar installed in the USA since forever, and build it in a year. Twice.
That being said, they're _also_ building everything else:
* PWR nuclear [2] (sadly, they managed to make EPR work faster than the E in EPR, but we're getting there.) Here market and investment and regulation are the hitters. "Fusion nuclear" will always be 50 years away ; until we get SMRs, "Fission nuclear" will always be a couple of years late and a few millions over budget.
* indeed, Thorium nuclear [3] (although it's far from powering any air-conditionner in any pig shed any time soon)
* and looooooots of coal [4]
So basically, China has understood that the answer to "what kind of electricity source should we build ?" is "YES".
The faster they replace "new coal" by "new anything else", the better we are as as species, since they're the world factory - so the lifecycle of _everything_ improve when they improve their grid.
Of course, here's to hoping they're not lying they way off...
I’d also point out that China is teetering on the edge of a financial meltdown, having also built complete ghost cities, so some of these investments may not look very smart in just a few years. Don’t confuse investment with malinvestment, in other words. Throwing money at everything, much in direct opposition to market forces, has never really been shown to be a winning strategy.
Most of those "ghost cities" got populated in "just a few years", so much so that wiki had to change Chinese Ghost City entry into "Underoccupied Developements". And what is the scale of PRC "malinvestment", quantify or approximate it. Here's a hint, PRC RE+construction as % of GDP = ~15%, about OECD average. PRC just very good at building and gets much more from it, even if some sits idle first or ultimately gets wasted. AKA PRC barely throws more money that OECD in RE sector, they certainly have the option of throwing less money, but that only makes them more efficient relative to rest.
Entire construction + downstream industries is 30%, most of 15% redirected to renewable row out where solar already has better ROI than importing oil, aka, until PRC displaces another 10m barrels per day via renewables, or hits US per capita energy use (double current), any domestic power investment is positive. Throwing money at increasing cheaper power that makes manipulating atoms in every down stream sector is directly what market forces is ALWAYS driving towards. Increasing energy per capita is the only proven winning civilzational development strategy.
Don't confuse some malinvestments for retarded existential PRC collapse narrative. For reference US spending 18% GDP on health care, i.e. 2x OECD average of 9% is single handly more inefficient than likely ALL Chinese policies can misallocate, i.e. that 9% of excess US health spending that gets wasted by scribes can build entire PRC HSR network in like 5 months.
It's not "wasted by scribes" in the US - it very much goes into the pockets of the "pharaohs" (aka "corporate boards"), and, through campaigns donations, to the "high and low priests" (aka "politicians").
The fact that it was supposed to be used to cure peasants from malaria or ensure next year's yield of grain is just a detail.
Don't bother questioning the pharaohs ! Instead, attend the ceremony for when we turn them into gods (aka "IPOs").
Just riffing on [1], no intention of being serious, sorry.
Of course it's more complex than that.
I just needed to make the "cat" joke. Sorry again.
(That being said, I'm scared that learning more about the Egyptian scribe system would make me find even more similarities with our civilisation, and it would just be depressing. I get that any time I read about Rome.)
"Those who don't know history are bound to repeat it - but at least no one spoils the ending for them."
Housing projects are handled by local governments in China, not the central government. What you're saying is as absurd as saying Detroit going bankrupt is hurting the credibility of Uncle Sam.
I really don't know how to assess China's economic or financial state.
I vividly remember hearing about how the housing bubble was going to break any time soon... a decade ago ?
And then how they would never survive Covid-19. Or the Trump tarrifs, etc...
To be clear, I'm not saying they're invincible or anything - maybe the economy _did_ collapse, but not uniformly, and maybe the central government is able to bail out the economy more efficiently than western economies, and maybe they're just lying their way off, etc...
But so far I have the same feelings about rumors on china's economical death as on Russian ones - metaphorically, I'll believe it when I see the corpse, and when its head has been chopped off for safety ;)
I think you have misunderstood energy yield expressed as a multiple of energy input as a fundamental measurement of the viability of any energy technology.
If you run scenarios, you’ll find that this number is entirely irrelevant. Instead, try considering the availability and required quantities of raw materials and inputs like silver, indium, land, and of course money which is the best proxy for measuring how much of the world economy would be required for building out any technology.
China is literally making energy that cheap using solar. They add about an entire United Kingdom's worth of solar energy every year (about 270 TWh), that's 100x(!) of what they add in nuclear capacity (which is almost nothing). Even in China solar and renewables are rendering the nuclear sector obsolete. (afaik they're canceling about a third or half of running projects)
And paraphrasing Bruno Maçães from his latest book, far from a caveman technology one of the most transformative aspects of solar energy is that it will move the world from a logic of energy stocks to a logic of energy flows. Decentralized, dynamic, expandable and moveable, a solar network is to the legacy energy grid what the internet is to the TV broadcasting center. It's to move from a society of matter to a society of energy.
To make that philosophical point practical, Pakistan last year added a third of its entire consumption in solar energy. Significant parts of the population are now grid independent. In a country where natural disasters and central mismanagement produced a fragile system, you might soon have one of the most robust, distributed and deterritorialized energy systems.
China is a beast in solar. Truly amazing work. That being said not only are they not canceling any nuclear projects, they announced close to 10 more just in 2025. They are building both and with a great pace.
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.
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".
> 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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
That's a blatantly disingenuous argument that misses the point. Setting aside the accuracy of the 25-year figure, is it easier to buy solar panels once to use them for 25 years or stockpile 25 years' worth of fossil fuel?
I'm not arguing against maintenance items like cleaning, because obviously fossil fuel power plants need maintenance too. I'm directly responding to the perceived geopolitical risk. The question is: is it better for a country to experience a geopolitical risk with a solar-panel-producing nation or with an oil-producing nation? Bringing up items like cleaning is laughably irrelevant because where's the geopolitical risk in cleaning a solar panel?
Making a solar panel isn't rocket science. China has just cornered the market right now. If supply dries up, you can make your own solar panels. It will take a few years to get the volume up but your current supply of panels will last until you do.
> The question is: is it better for a country to experience a geopolitical risk with a solar-panel-producing nation or with an oil-producing nation?
If that's your only question, the answer is straightforward then, there's more oil producing nations than solar panels producing nations making the risk with oil lower.
China is so big in this sector that I don't think that you could even create a real strategy where they get <25% market share in the country solar imports.
You could somewhat mitigate this risk by buying a stock worth 5 years of panel installation of the country but as far as I know, nobody is doing that.
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.
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?
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...
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.
https://archive.is/lv3eU
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.
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.
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.
>Budgeted at €550 million, and completed at a cost of €600m
Amazing.
That's pretty good! Just a 10% overrun. By comparison, Hinkley Point C is now at "up to" £46bn from an initial £18bn. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68073279
It's good in its adherence to the budget (almost) and maybe its absolute price: €600M for 700MW is €0.86 per watt. That might sound terrible when compared to current mainstream solar panel wholesale prices of €0.11/Wp, but solar plants in the Netherlands have a capacity factor of only about 10% IIRC, so that is €1.10 per average watt, not counting balance of plant, permitting, etc. The cable may not run at a 100% capacity factor but it'll probably be over 50%.
Still, if module prices continue falling, even at poor capacity factors lime 10%, it'll be increasingly hard to justify paying such high prices to move energy around the continent; local overprovisioning and storage will be cheaper even if Norway is willing to produce the energy for free.
Which is a fair comparison because 700MW is a smallish nuclear reactor and that cable should last a long time.
And to Denmark:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBRAcable
While Denmark in term essentially is a trading hub for electricity between Scandinavia, the UK and continental Europe.
Thank you for the correction! That one is immune to quadcopters too.
Thank you for the correction! It's also immune to quadcopters.
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.
Yes, ammonia is another candidate.
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.
Diesel, iron or aluminum, from your parent post, are difficult to explode… (personally, no clue about magnesium); and the point of the latter two is that you can “store” energy by upstreaming its consumption when power is available, you don’t necessarily need to produce an actual reversible energy store.
> and the point of the latter two is that you can “store” energy by upstreaming its consumption when power is available
Are you sure the parent isn't referring to something like a rust (iron-air) battery? Aluminum, Iron, and Magnesium are all viable battery chemistries.
Side note - I'm pretty certain you don't actually need to make contents of a ship explode to easily sink it with explosives.
I'm actually somewhat concerned that between drones and smart mines - we've never had a better chance of completely ruining our ability to do ocean based shipping during combat.
You may have seen that Colombian drug cartels are already using Starlink-piloted "sea drones" to do ocean-based shipping through blockades. The US Coast Guard estimates that 90% of crewed narcosubs get through: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aPLXdtbLZ0
magnesium is the most explody of all those
But still not explosive at scale. It’s a surface area issue, a small strip of magnesium explodes when dropped in water but a 100t cargo of magnesium sinking in a harbor would be a huge fire.
> a small strip of magnesium explodes when dropped in water
No it doesn't.
Magnesium metal burns because the boiling point of magnesium is just 1091 C, so extremely reactive vapor is readily produced. But it would be very hard to heat it that high in water unless it was ignited first. It will then continue to burn under water.
Maybe I should have clarified burning, as in “Why does burning magnesium explode when sprinkled with water?”
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/33167/why-does-b...
Yes, safety is a significant disadvantage of the use of magnesium as portable stored energy, but if your ship's payload is already on fire, in most cases the shipment will not be very successful anyway, and loss of the ship is a serious possibility.
If a hypothetical ship full of magnesium sinks without catching the magnesium on fire first, the magnesium will probably not catch fire from exposure to water. Perhaps if it's sufficiently finely divided, which seems like a bad idea.
I agree, the point is you’re not risking something like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion “At least 1,782 people, largely in Halifax and Dartmouth, were killed by the blast, debris, fires, or collapsed buildings, and an estimated 9,000 others were injured.”
“Nearly all structures within an 800-metre (half-mile) radius, including the community of Richmond, were obliterated.[3] A pressure wave snapped trees, bent iron rails, demolished buildings, grounded vessels (including Imo, which was washed ashore by the ensuing tsunami), and scattered fragments of Mont-Blanc for kilometres. Across the harbour, in Dartmouth, there was also widespread damage.[4] A tsunami created by the blast wiped out a community of Mi'kmaq who had lived in the Tufts Cove area for generations.”
Not with magnesium ingots or dry magnesium, no; but, because the water–magnesium reaction is exothermic, spontaneous, and gas-producing, I'm pretty sure there's a range of ratios where wet magnesium does constitute an explosive if it's finely divided, at least a low explosive like gunpowder, so such an accident could happen.
It seems unlikely to happen by accident because at stoichiometry you need more water than magnesium, and I don't think spontaneous explosion is a real risk with magnesium. The International Magnesium Association's safe handling guide https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.intlmag.org/resource/resmgr/safety... does mention that magnesium swarf can spontaneously combust in the presence of water, but I think swarf is too coarse to explode. It recommends keeping wet magnesium swarf under water to prevent it from heating up enough to spontaneously ignite.
But presumably you'd be shipping the magnesium in the form of plates, ingots, or rolls rather than powder, swarf, or loose foil.
Even magnesium powder wouldn’t detonate when you’re talking tons of the stuff on a boat for the same reason small hydrogen balloons can go bang, but the Hindenburg just created a huge conflagration. You get limited mixing due to the volumes of material involved. Even burning across several seconds is just vastly less dangerous than an actual detonation.
Same issue with grain silos exploding because of the mixture of fuel with oxygen, but flour just burns etc.
Yes, that's why I said, "dry magnesium, no". A pile of dry magnesium powder only burns at the surface as air diffuses into it. If you have it mixed with the oxidizer so that the flame can propagate through the whole mixture, it will, and the propagation speed is determined by factors like the reaction speed, gas production, and thermal conductivity. The reaction speed in turn is governed by the particle size, since the reaction only takes place at particle surfaces; it goes to completion faster when particle size gets smaller.
Small hydrogen balloons do not in fact go bang; they just create small conflagrations. What goes bang are small balloons filled with a near-stoichiometric mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, such as you get from the simplest forms of water electrolysis.
The stoichiometric mixture of magnesium with water is 1.36 grams of water per gram of magnesium (which is 1.74g/cc, so this 58-wt%-water mixture is 70% water by volume), the enthalpy of formation of H₂O is -285.83kJ/mol, and the enthalpy of formation of MgO is -601.6kJ/mol. So this reaction:
yields 315.8kJ/mol, which is to say, 315.8kJ per 24.3 grams of magnesium, or per 58 grams of mixture, about 5.4MJ/kg, about an 18% higher energy density than TNT. And the hot hydrogen gas produced will carry the heat produced by the reaction into nearby areas, igniting them and resulting in a flame propagation velocity that's higher than thermal conduction alone.For a large enough particle size, you won't get an explosion, and you may even lose most of your water as steam; but for a small enough particle size and an oxidizer concentration close enough to stoichiometric, you will. Some nanothermites consisting of magnesium nanoparticles with an oxidizer such as iron oxide even reliably detonate.
So, it's a potential safety hazard, but it seems like one that should be easy enough to guard against.
> for a small enough particle size and an oxidizer concentration close enough to stoichiometric, you will.
Sure but nobody is going to ship large quantities of magnesium like that: “Use proper packaging: Ensure the magnesium is sealed in moisture-proof, airtight containers.” https://www.freightamigo.com/blog/hs-code-for-containing-at-...
> Small hydrogen balloons do not in fact go bang
It’s not a supersonic detonation but even normal balloons pop with a small bang, pure hydrogen balloons are louder. Though a you mention hydrogen + oxygen is significantly more extreme.
Yes, it's easy to imagine cases where people go around sinking ships; narcosubs, Red Sea oil shipping, and Russian warships in the Black Sea are of course dealing with that threat currently, but as hostilities escalate it's likely to increase. But energy in the form of shipped fuel intrinsically provides some minimal level of such local resilience—for it to work, you need at least a stockpile of fuel big enough to last until the next ship is expected to unload, which is orders of magnitude longer than the milliseconds before a cable cut affects you—and can provide arbitrarily large amounts of it.
The metal fuels in particular have the merit that you can use them in precisely such mass-produced batteries rather than to produce thermal power. As I alluded to in my grandparent comment, aluminum-air batteries were mass-produced in the 01960s.
We have quite a bit of experience transporting hydrocarbons . . . .
We do, but even in peacetimes not without issues.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills
But the problem mentioned above was about war.
I think the idea of "peacetime" is probably outdated. Not in the sense that I think people should fight, but in the sense that their fighting will no longer be limited to certain geographic areas, and people will fight, so all of us will be at constant risk of both infrastructural damage and violent death.
I don't think peacetime is outdated, but we do live in a time of increasing tensions and classical and asymetric conflicts, mixed with an increasing amount of people who believe they have nothing left to loose. So yes, I also prefer the concept of local ressilience as opposed to having many critical infrastructure points where everything else will collapse if those are damaged. Solar, Wind and batteries can go a long way here, to keep at least critical systems running.
The Netherlands has “erected” multiple HVDC links
Ukranians are 3d printing millions of missiles in their basements?
They might use rotating wings to fly instead of jet turbines, but yes.
EDIT: To make things clearer, the word Missile is quite old, and predates rockets. missile is any object that is propelled somehow to hit a target. So even a stone launched from a sling by a caveman is already a missile. The other guy mentioned precision guided missiles though... and he is still correct in the word usage there.
I don't know, I'd say once you reach a certain amount of control over your flight path you stop being a missile. An aircraft isn't really "projected toward" something.
Cruse missiles have a great deal of control over their flight. “Kamikaze aircraft were pilot-guided explosive missiles, either purpose-built or converted from conventional aircraft.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze
However, the distinction is usually applied where aircraft become missile’s when the attack can no longer be aborted.
If I look at the number of 90 degree turns a cruise missile can make and compare it to an airplane I wouldn't rate it very highly.
> However, the distinction is usually applied where aircraft become missile’s when the attack can no longer be aborted.
So for a quadcopter that's a pretty negligible amount of time. And not all that much for tiny planes either.
The SM-62 Snark had a 10,000km range so presumably thousands of 90 degree turns were possible. What the actual guidance software could do may have limited it.
As long as we all realize you can’t 3D print precision-guided missiles without, well, the guidance bit.
The guidance bit should be quite cheap now though, compared to decades ago. Some combination of MEMS backed up with GPS.
And software. The Ukrainian drones largely run on the open-source Ardupilot.
GPS is fairly easy to jam, and despite the purported end of Selective Availability, unencrypted GPS can be turned off entirely without affecting US military GPS. Cruise missiles have been using terrain models for decades now, since well before GPS (a major reason high-resolution DTED used to be classified) which just requires a computationally cheap particle filter and appropriate sensors. We can expect belligerents in upcoming conflicts to maintain strategic stockpiles of the relevant electronics, which are more compact than even cocaine or fentanyl and therefore difficult to blockade.
Also depending on how many corners you're willing to cut. Half the cost but a 1% chance that it turns around and targets a friendly? Some countries would take that trade.
Like the Apex boats in Operation Dragoon.
https://www.oldsaltblog.com/2024/08/apex-boats-the-unlikely-...
"On the landing beach at Baie de Pampelonne, most Apex boats exploded against the obstacles. Nevertheless, one ran aground, and one sank. A third reversed course and turned back out to sea before exploding near Sub-chaser #1029 and severely damaging it."
One could argue all those Mk 14 torpedoes that malfunctioned and went onto circular paths also counted.
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.
Solar over parking lots is so good. it creates power, shade, and reduces reflected heat.
And you can't make a parking lot any uglier.
Especially at workplaces or shopping malls, where most people park during the day, you can also install lots of EV chargers and use produced power onsite.
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.
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.
As in, "an electric vehicle fleet that charges during the day and powers the grid at night if the owner opts in"?
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.
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.
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?
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...
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)
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.
"Full capacity" backup looks different when you have sufficient batteries on the grid. Building enough backup generation to hit peak capacity would entail a lot more gas plants than building enough to hit average capacity and using batteries to supply the peaks.
To be fair, many countries have several months worth of gas reserves.
==the Russia/Ukraine war causing all sorts of problems.==
Problems, yes. Catastrophes, no. It's not clear that they "needed" full backup capacity.
Most states have sizeable underground gas storages, often reusing old oil and gas fields. The capacity being from weeks to months of normal use, possibly much longer with some rationing. This mostly turned out to be sufficient to enable a quick switch to LNG and other sources.
> 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:
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.
Recent history is a very, very good reminder that political relationships between countries (or more generally political powers) are extremely fragile and the only reliable constant in these kinds of systems is change and stability isn't permanent, unfortunately.
Even the EU with it's very tight integration between member states is seeing a lot of pressure to tear itself apart again from the inside, despite the very real costs thĺis would bring.
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)
Norway is member of the European Economic Area, not of the European Union, together with Iceland and Liechtenstein.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Area
It's a risk management thing. "Can a trade dispute or undersea 'accident' lead to mass blackouts?"
There is one error there, Norway is not in the EU
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.
No, but it might make sense to run them from the east coast to the west in America.
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
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...
Right, they are blaming the "thermal powersources"(non-renewable) for the waveform of the grid collapsing.
They also initially said that there was "high ion flux" from the sun too.
I am not EE or in power gen but it smacks a bit more of politics than analysis.
https://www.eng-tips.com/threads/spain-and-portugal-power-gr...
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.
Do any of these HVDC lines really use copper? I think aluminum is much much more common.
I'm no expert but it appears both materials are used - there must be a trade-off of some sort.
Cables can be made out of aluminium, so that's not really an issue
Not just "can be". For transmission lines (which is what we're talking about here) aluminum is used exclusively.
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.
A lot of the wind projects could be classified as "giant, long-term punts".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsea_Wind_Farm
What exactly does that mean?
The project you linked to was completed pretty quickly and is supplying 2.5GW to the UK grid
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.
And I'd still much rather pay a utility every month for electricity (and have them be responsible for maintaining and upgrading the infrastructure) than install and maintain my own solar plant on my roof, for the same reasons that I'd rather pay utilities to provide me with water and sewer service than have my own well and septic system.
With sufficiently cheap storage, no transmission is needed. There's a tradeoff, and batteries are rapidly improving.
While true, with sufficiently cheap transmission, no storage is needed.
But only the Chinese have either the capability to, or interest in, building a one-square-meter-cross-section aluminium belt around the planet, and that means a geopolitical faff.
> While true, with sufficiently cheap transmission, no storage is needed.
Where "sufficiently cheap" here means "affordable over intercontinental distances".
I believe storage costs are falling faster than transmission costs.
The "intercontinental distances" part is simpler, and potentially* cheaper at current aluminium prices, than the domestic grid upgrades and repairs much of the west needs anyway.
* The scale is such that it's more of an opportunity cost than a dollar cost, what else can be done with 5% of Chinese aluminium per year for the next 20-or-so years.
But also, much research needed before a true price tag can be attached, rather than just a bill of materials
The only real downside to batteries is the cost. The upsides are vast. Beyond adding feasibility to solar and wind, batteries stabilize the grid. The ability to instantly absorb and output power in response to demand or a lack of demand is incredibly valuable.
I was somewhat gobsmacked when I learned there are electric stoves with integrated batteries (the batteries serving to reduce the maximum current draw for homes wired for limited current.)
And, when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Stoves spend 90% of their time drawing 0 power.
A fridge would also do well to have a backup battery.
Is this whole "new set of cables" factored into the CO2 emissions equation? We're undoubtedly going to use massive amounts of energy to mine the metal, melt it into wire, transport it to the site, build the towers, etc. Is that energy "green" ?
> Is that energy "green" ?
Not very, but neither is continuing to use fossil fuels on a huge scale.
So why do it at all if there is no accounting to prove it's green? It's almost as if this movement is a scam. No CO2 equivalent publications on solar, or on recycling. It's just "do what we say or the climate will die". I reject that imperative.
Before you've built any green power plants, none of the energy you use to build green power plants can itself be green.
When all the power plants are green, all of the energy you use to build green power plants is necessarily green.
How green a new power plant is, during the process of construction, is a statement of how much progress you've already made before this step, not how much you make in the act of making this step.
its not a green plant if they conveniently escape all accounting. its a scam.
They're also not escaping any such accounting, but that wasn't my point.
PV pays its own energy cost in a few months these days. But even then, the very first PV had to be made with mostly fossil fuels and some hydroelectric, now the new ones in China are made with 35% renewables.
Grids have the same question: how green it is to modify today is the current status of the power supply (etc.), not the status it will be when it's been modified.
I remember seeing such a paper linked by a nuclear bro.
Going on and on about how important the LCA was and how nuclear should be the choice.
After pages and pages of ”sciency” equations it ends with the Chinese average grid mix in terms of gCO2/kWh.
> if there is no accounting to prove it's green? It's almost as if this movement is a scam. No CO2 equivalent publications on solar, or on recycling
You state this as if that's a fact - just because you haven't looked for them doesn't mean they don't exist. Here's two examples showing that wind [1] and solar [2] have good environmental payback times in my home country due to avoided emissions, a country which already has an ~80% renewable grid. Additionally, [3] is a good resource that puts the potential waste from solar farms into context with other sources (such as coal ash) and shows this is an unfounded fear. Do some research and challenge your biases before you spread misinformation.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03036758.2024.2...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038092X2...
[3] https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-023-02230-0
[3 - sharing link] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-023-02230-0.epdf?shar...
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.
That was the idea behind Germany’s energy dependence on Russia. Let’s call that experiment not successful, shall we?
The Russian government didn't see it as a Russian dependency on Germany.
As far as the dependency direction goes, Germany didn't start a war with Russia, so the simplistic example isn't enough to disprove anything. If you want to disprove it, do so by explaining how Russia was dependent on Europe.
Then go back to the beginning of WW2 and look up the biggest trading partners for both Germany and France
> 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.
they were cut off from trade as much as possible (of course there have been rogue nations, but those weren't equivalent in trading/buying power) - and that's one of the reasons, they're not winning the war, even though they were superior in almost all metrics, not at least military and economic power.
if nothing else this will serve as a warning and a cautionary tale for future aspiring conquerors.
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?
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?
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.
“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
They're not really solutions if they're not achievable in practice though. Otherwise why not add nuclear fusion to the mix?
To give some example: Switzerland is roughly electricity neutral over a year, but there's a significant winter/summer imbalance of about 5TWh. To add enough storage to compensate this imbalance, you would need to:
- cover about 2% of the country in batteries
- build about a thousand pump storage stations: despite the Alps covering about 40% of the country, it's not clear if you would have enough valleys to flood
- hydrogen looks a bit more reasonable, if we don't look at the costs, you only need to store a few millions m3 of liquid hydrogen. The gas storage in Germany for instance are quite a bit larger than that, but hydrogen is also significantly harder to store.
And all of this is to use once a year essentially! None of it looks practical or affordable (a pump storage station costs a few billions a piece for instance).
Just to add: overbuilding and using the excess in low capital-intensive applications.
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.
Methane storage is only like a few weeks at most.
Storing months worth of power is not something we do with natural gas or even oil today.
Germany has like three months worth of nat gas reserves. See for example https://www.intellinews.com/how-many-days-of-gas-consumption.... Building bigger gas tanks is not rocket science either.
Power2gas+solar/wind produced energy is a lot more expensive than natural gas and requires solar/wind to routinely overproduce.
...hence why there isnt much of it. It either requires subsidies or for natural gas to be taxed more.
Windless night produced electricity from stored solar energy via windgas is still cheaper than nuclear power produced on sunny, windy days though: https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
Solar is always producing, at some percentage (may be very a very low percentage) of full capacity. So, we want it to routinely overproduce. That’ll also cut the days that we need to dip into storage.
> It either requires subsidies or for natural gas to be taxed more.
Subsidies are hard to calculate anyway. For example almost all fossil fuels get a pair of massive subsidies; we let them dump their carbon into the air for free instead of charging for it, and we build and man a bunch of aircraft carriers to go around defending the shipping lanes that it gets sent through.
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.
buckle may be referring at least partly to the north-south landmass imbalance.
inb4 someone tries to invent floating solar farms to try to fill the Pacific with, lol.
China already has more than 1GW of floating solar PV in the Pacific.
Ah yes, what Europe needs once more is to become existentially dependent on a region that is both culturally and geographically distant and where Europe has very little ability to enforce and police it's interests.
Have we learned nothing from the 2022 energy crisis? The number of starry eyed suggestions here about distributed worldwide power networks and load balancing is astonishing given the realities that we actually live in.
The "realities" are a direct result of a fossil economy which is still stuck in the 19th century.
Oil and gas have caused far more wars than electricity has.
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
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.
Despite all the great technology and improvements over the years, consumer energy in Europe has never been so expensive.
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.
> 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.
Dude, the sun always shines.
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.
“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... )
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...
Thanks for the tip! It seems obvious now, but its been interesting for me to realize how much of human history can be understood as a quest for energy, full stop. Even going back to the invention of farming, which at its core was way to reliably source more calories per person. Fun to think of your examples of sailing, coal, and petroleum empires as further chapters in this ongoing quest.
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.
I think you might be in agreement with me in the main, just quibbling on the timing?
The US's addiction to "fat oil profits" goes back over a hundred years, and that's what the NYTimes author argues is driving the current administration's push to keep those profits going. Whether there actually are such profits is a different question.
This is exactly the behavior of the big companies in "The Innovators Dilemma": continuing to try and squeeze profits out of the dying old paradigm. (IBM clinging to hardware and mainframes, US motorcycle manufacturers not embracing small sport bikes, etc.) That's to say that, yes, countries and governments can indeed behave like companies.
No, that's not the behavior of big companies in "The Innovators Dilemma".
Those companies optimize for corporation profit. If the US was optimizing for societal wealth or government revenue they would be pushing the country into renewables.
On reality many big corporations get corrupt management that destroy corporate profit and optimize for the managers personal wealth. Those ones act like the US is acting. But that's not the behavior that book is about.
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.
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.
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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.
>... miracles like... youtube...
... miracle?
lol, you have no idea just how hard it is to make something as mammoth size financially viable or even sustainable as a business, due to sheer technological bottlenecks in video streaming, encoding/decoding videos at that scale, and everything else.
It is a technological marvel, similar in comparison to designing and building an F-35 fighter jet or anything else.
It requires custom Hardware Accelerators designed at a chip level, on top of decades of algorithmic refining of video encoder decoders in stuff like gstreamer or ffmpeg, refining video streaming at inconsistent cellular data networks, various ISPs doing shenanigans with ports, etc. Storing and ingesting that much video data at "Free" initial pricing, streaming that much data to viewers, building analytics algorithms to pair advertisements with watchers, to get a high enough conversion rate to make ads economically viable enough while having minimal number of ads per vids.
Even an infinite money printer like google would struggle were it not for systematically solving technology at all levels from hardware, to chip design, to algorithms, to network level tuning, to frontend device optimizations, etc.
And has been made possible by only the cumulative effort of humankind to build such advanced sophisticated systems in the palm of our devices such that even a normie average iphone 16e has more compute capacity than early 1990s or so, much more.
It is a miracle, in every shape and form.
If that is a miracle so is every engineering and scientific effort because most things are hard multifaceted problems. Maybe these aren’t actually miracles but the inevitable products of structured teams of trained people.
Beautifully put
It's an amazing repository of how-to videos on every subject imaginable.
It's also a massive attention sink that burns both copious amounts of energy and the world's attention span to earn some clicks and ad dollars.
It's a mixed bag.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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/
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...
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).
"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.
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.
Ah of course - it can recycle the heat. Hot air going out a vent is wasted energy that you've paid for.
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.
I have an LG. They look to cost a premium in the US above heated air one. They also seem to be gentler on clothes since they pump in warm dry air vs. super heated air.
Out of curiosity, is it a "smart" appliance that requires an app to function?
I have an LG washer/dryer (not the cool new heat pump dryer, though) and both have "smart" features that are optional and non-intrusive. You don't have to hook up either appliance to the LG app, but if you do you can get push notifications when a cycle is complete or use it to run diagnostics as needed. Honestly one of the few times where I think smart connectivity is a net benefit and not a reason to steer clear.
I have an LG heat pump dryer as well, it doesn't require the app to function as far as I understand.
I think there’s an app to do app things but I’ve never used it.
I used to have a Bloomberg heat pump dryer when I lived in a historical apartment. I was fairly happy with it, only real downsides was that it did take longer to dry compared to my prior electric and gas dryers, it tended to pickup a musty smell, and it was relatively complex and difficult to repair compared to a simpler dryer (had some minor failures over the years). Upside was the efficiency and not needing an exterior exhaust.
Been a number of years since then, so I'm sure they've improved even more and are hopefully somewhat cheaper.
Technology Connections did a video on heat pump dryers.
https://youtu.be/zheQKmAT_a0?t=930
> 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.
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.
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!
> I refer to my solar panels as nuclear power, just to mess with people
Solar is actually fusion power, which is way cooler than any fission plant that puny humans have ever constructed.
Tidal power doesn't come from the sun either. It slows the earth's rotation by a tiny amount.
Is the origin of that rotation not also the gravitational wells created by the Sun?
IIUC it's only half from the Sun's gravity well, the other half of that energy gradient is from the Moon's gravity well.
Also IIUC "energy from the sun" is really shorthand for "Energy emitted by solar fusion", which tidal would not involve.
The laws of gravity are entirely symmetric, so it doesn't seem fair to attribute it specifically to the sun; also, the energy in this case is coming out of the "v" in earth's good old 0.5mv^2 kinetic energy relative to the sun.
Good pedantry, but then we can argue that the origin of fossil fuels is geothermal (if we ascribe the origin of life to hydrothermal vents).
All fossil fuels also come from the sun!
I wonder if there are some minimal fossil hydrocarbon deposits somewhere that originate from chemosynthesis-only microbe populations.
The nuclear fuels are also probably from the Sun. Pretty much everything is the Sun.
Hm, no, don't the heavy elements used for nuclear fission come from a previous generation of stars?
They came from some other suns, technically.
No wonder people worshipped the Sun in ancient times!
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.
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.
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.
Helium and Lithium were also created in the pre stellar era of the universe, hydrogen was the majority by far but not the only element that wasn't created in stars. I think anything past 3 on the periodic table is exclusively stellar though.
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...
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
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.
Natural gas and coal are better at throttling up and down than nuclear plants are.
So if they need to run 10% of the time, then you've still reduced your carbon output by 90%. The goal is 100%, but the remaining fossil fuel plants are not the biggest issue.
A nuclear plant would also be carbon-free, but Germany had other reasons not to want it. So it was a reasonable decision to keep the fossil fuel plants around, and shut more and more of them down over time.
No, Germany is shutting down its coal plants and reduced their usage drastically.
Poland is keeping their coal plants open by refusing to invest in quick and cheap renewables. Instead they plan to build nuclear plants for the next 20 years.
> 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.
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.
What kind of changes happened there ? just curious
~25 years ago I could have taken you to multiple entirely dead streams within a 20 minute drive of where I grew up - and you don't get very far in 20 minutes on Appalachian roads. Over large swaths of my home state, in fact, I could have done that from most people's homes. This is no longer the case, and a huge number of streams are now recovered or recovering. The surface water problems are by no means gone, but some of the recoveries that I've witnessed - the North Branch of the Potomac River is a good example - are breathtaking. That river was as dead as a doornail in the 90s and is now a vibrant, healthy wild trout fishery. It is still a post-industrial river, it still has dams, run-off issues, wastewater inputs, etc, but it is a far cry from what it was.
Just to hazard a guess, you could start reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_and_environmental_impac...
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.
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.)
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.
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).
That’s great news! Does that include the coal plants they’re funding in Indonesia and other places?
The Chinese funded coal plants in Pakistan are being priced out by Chinese solar panels imported by end users.
Will be an interesting one to watch as to how China responds.
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
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.
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/
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.
you may feel that, but its not going to happen. nukes are too expensive, and thus the energy they produce is too expensive.
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.
That would be nice indeed, but shouldn't prevent us from prioritizing reducing CO2 emissions first.
Maybe better disposal practices. Regulations standardizing batteries would also do a lot of good.
But really, we simply need a lot of virgin batteries regardless because we don't have enough. Recycling and disposal will only really take off once the market is mostly saturated (which we don't appear to be anywhere near).
I'd also point out that modern LiPo batteries are 90% recyclable with no special techniques needed. That's because by weight, the batteries are mostly iron and nickel. Recycling them is really as simple as just melting them down. It only gets tricky if you want to collect the lithium, silicon, and other trace materials (and there are already recycling plants that are handling that).
Funny how no one seems to consider the environmental impact of digging up fossil fuels when they discuss solar.
It's similar to how you can identify Real Bird Lovers. They stay silent when they see pictures of oil-covered birds after an Exxon Valdez or a Deepwater Horizon. Show them a windmill and boy do they get passionate about bird safety and welfare.
there's also a lot of wastes, with different urban planning and build code a lot of cooling and heating would be avoided
I think this is the most frustrating part. You wouldn't even need to massively change out neighborhoods to get a huge benefit. If a developer built with district and heating planned, you could have an entire neighborhood heated and cooled without needed AC and heaters in every building. You could still have single family homes that are massively more efficient per unit.
The problem is that has to be planned almost from the beginning. Which shouldn't be a huge deal. My neighborhood had a water tower built at the same time the neighborhood was built. There's no reason district heating couldn't have occupied the lot right next to it.
Does not necessarily need to be a battery. Flywheels, heat, and even synthesis of fuels are also solutions to the problem.
If you look at the energy density, cost/kwh, and lifetime maintenance of most of those, you'll find that batteries handily win. Further, batteries have room for innovation and growth in all those categories.
We won't, for example, make a more cost-efficient flywheel or heat storage. They are effectively as efficient as they'll ever be.
IMO, it necessarily has to be batteries. The other alternatives are nowhere near as good.
On the other hand, you need to buy a new set of batteries every 15 or so years. The other things you mentioned generally don't need regular replacement, and when they do, it's not the whole setup.
You don't need to replace the whole setup, just the batteries. All the power electronics and interconnects are already there and will last as long as they last.
You also don't technically need new batteries almost ever. Batteries (typically) don't really die, they just lose capacity. After a 15 year runtime instead of storing 10mWh they now store 7mWh. That's still 7mWh. After another 15 years it'll be down to around 5mWh.
At grid scale I'd imagine that pumped hydroelectric storage would beat batteries for TCO, but there are significant geographic constraints.
I mean, it is a literal pipe dream :)
Batteries can be deployed nearly instantly. My power company is planning on building a new battery plant next year, it announced it the year prior.
I know a pumped hydro plan that has literally been in the works for the last 20 years and shows no sign of actually being started (still being planned).
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).
Or we can go full nuclear.
why? much more expensive, much slower. This reflexive "nukes are the only way" meme amongst technical folk really has gotta die.
More expensive in what way? "Cost" is what everyone quotes about why nuclear isn't great, but isn't the whole idea behind shelving fossil fuels and switching to alternatives due to downsides that are secondary to cost?
To me, renewables (solar and wind namely) have many more downsides than nuclear. So if we are doing things not because of cost anyway, why not nuclear? What do you fundamentally care about?
The power density of wind and solar is abysmal. You need to cover huge amounts of land with your preferred solution (which doesn't work everywhere) to produce relatively meager amounts of power. You need to have grid-scale storage solutions which are currently not priced in to the costs being quoted. Even if you have that storage solution you need to be significantly over-capacity in terms of production so that storage can actually be filled during peak hours.
Meanwhile, nuclear: requires a fraction of land use (good for ecology), runs continuously (so doesn't need huge storage outlays), can run basically anywhere (reducing transmission costs).
The most important note is that "nuclear" is not entirely encapsulated by existing Gen III reactors. There are many more designs and ideas that are being developed as we speak, whether more interesting (read: safe/efficient) fuel mixes, modular/micro designs, and various other improvements.
"Cost" is a merely a reflection of how much human capital is required to make something happen. I'd much rather spend our human capital on technologies that have the potential to massively increase the energy available to humanity, rather than focusing on tech which we know has strict upper bounds on power output / scalability. Solar and wind is useful in certain areas, but the idea that they can provide the baseload for a decarbonized future is ridiculous to me, unless your starting point is "I don't think humanity needs to consume much more power".
in $/kwh.
We are in fact doing things soley because of cost, and pretty much only because of cost, because capitalisim. Solar and wind are now cheaper than all alternatives in most situations, so they are rapidly becoming all thats being built. We are doing the cheapest thing, which just so happens to be great for carbon, luckily for us. If we get out of this climate mess it will almost be by accident, because we made solar cheap, not because we chose to do the right thing.
Honestly you need to look into numbers for some of your points, and you'll see the folly. Land usage, its a non issue. For eg, its estimated that if around 1/3rd of the land the US currently uses for corn ethanol was converted to solar, it would power the whole country. And thats existing used land without talking about the insane amount of empty spaces that exist. non issue.
For storage, solar+24hr storage is now cheaper than new gas, and dropping fast (https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...).
Yes there are new nuke designs that are cool, but they're at least 10-20 years away from deployment at scale, by which time renewables and storage will be much cheaper still, and the transition will be mostly over. Im not anti at all, they're just too late, too slow and too expensive.
I think you need to catch up on developments in the last few years, and re-evaluate what seems ridiculous to you, a lot has changed very quickly. Cheap energy abundance via renewables is now a very likely outcome.
The fundamental disagreement here is (in my opinion) on what needs to be encouraged. If what you say is true and renewables are cheaper anyway, then also as you say capitalism should in out and that's what we will use in the near term anyway. So shouldn't we be investing more now on the things that you think are 10-20 years out, in order to accelerate them?
Becuase I'm interested in the future. The math with wind and solar checks out if all you care about is current energy needs. But we've already achieved most of the efficiency we can with at least PV. Even in a hypothetical future where you have some sort of quantum PV panels using MEG, your best possible hope is only 3x current efficiencies. But again, I'm more interested in our long-term future. Nuclear (fission and fusion) have much more unbounded potential than wind and solar.
Back to cost, the numbers in the article you link are cherry-picked. They rely on deploying solar to "the sunniest regions in the world" to get that performance. Most of the world is not the sunniest, unfortunately. Beyond that, the corn fields and insane amounts of empty space you mention are generally not co-located with areas of high power usage, making transmission another factor (which is doubly a factor since PV is such low-voltage that you require significant transformer infrastructure in order to step things up for transmission). So I strongly disagree, land usage is absolutely still an issue. There are also externalities caused by covering huge swathes of land with PV panels.
And it would need to be huge swathes of land, because in case it wasn't clear I would like to see humanity have huge amounts of power at our disposal – significantly more than we are using today. My back of the napkin map is that it would take 50,000 km2 of solar to accommodate current US energy needs. But I'd like to 100x our energy supply. That would require 5m km2, which is half the entire land area of the USA.
And honestly, I'm still skeptical of the price difference. PV needs lots of things (transformers, transmission, storage, disposal, land use, etc) that are frequently not priced in. Meanwhile the numbers quoted for nuclear fission reactors are frequently absolutely all in, including the cost of decommissioning the reactor at some indeterminate point in the future and pre-allocating funds for disposal.
tl;dr – your right that solar/wind is already quite cost effective and moving rapidly on its own pace just fine. So if anything needs collective support to me it is nuclear which has potential for the future that solar/wind just lacks.
>And honestly, I'm still skeptical of the price difference. PV needs lots of things (transformers, transmission, storage, disposal, land use, etc) that are frequently not priced in.
With a price difference of 5x there is more than a little wiggle room to price in storage and transmission costs and still end up way cheaper.
That is how every kilowatt hour generated with solar and wind and stored with power2gas (the most expensive form of storage) still ends up being cheaper than nuclear power generated on a sunny, windy day.
Nuclear power survives exclusively because it integrates with the military industrial complex. Thats why it gets deluged with lavish subsidies, that's most governments only want a few and that's why the governments who build them either have a bomb or want the ability to build one in a hurry (e.g. Iran who joined this club a long time ago or Poland who joined recently).
Get private insurance to fully cover nuclear and I'm onboard.
This might be the only way I could have any trust in Nuclear. I heard recently from a journalist that the Fukushima plant paid Yakuza owned newspapers to avoid negative press well before the incident. The technology is great, humans are not.
could do but im not sure what there is to be gained from unnecessarily spending trillions more to decarbonize.
“We” are only in control of “us”. The rest of the world will keep burning fossil fuel
> The rest of the world will keep burning fossil fuel
As the article spends so many paragraphs to explain to us, the rest of the world is increasingly not burning fossil fuel for their new energy needs. Most of the fuel it burns is for the energy it already uses. And solar is starting to take a bite out of that too.
That's great but if we had accelerated our transition, it wouldn't have lead to them accelerating their transition. The things are not linked or correlated.
Solar has gotten cheaper and cheaper largely because as we build more panels and batteries, we find efficiencies. If we had accelerated our transition then the increased demand would have driven even more efficiencies and it would be even cheaper it is now.
If it were cheaper, developing countries would buy even more of it, accelerating their own transition.
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.
The price of LFP batteries in China is $35/kWh for cells, $52/kWh for fully integrated systems [1]. Roughly 1TW of solar is being deployed globally every year. We’re already there, it’s just a matter of pushing the pedal down harder. China destroys half a million barrels a day of global oil demand every year they build EVs at current output levels, which are still increasing.
Fossil fuels are already dead, it’s just time horizon. How fast we want to go is a function of how much fiat we want to shovel into PV solar and battery manufacturing.
[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/watershed-moment-big-battery-sto...
But that isn’t the case _today_. Unless you have existing facilities (which we do have and which gives fossils momentum) it’s strictly cheaper to build new renewables! The problem for renewables is that the p99.9 price is much higher than the p95 price. But finance will be solving that part.
Citation:
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/01/solar-cost-of-electri...
you're just wrong. they already are cheap enough, its already happening. PV+battery is now cheaper than new gas & coal. Very soon to come, existing gas.
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.
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???
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
I've looked at these before, and the charts are nice, but I feel like there's a better way of displaying the data in some sort of matrix.
Some of the graphs have options to switch to multiple comparisons, or to log scale and similar. They often have table formats and allow you to download the data for your own use.
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"
On the other hand the points I listed are sufficiently coarse grained and the cost or expense of most of those can be estimated.
Deaths due to coal mining? Probably in the hundreds of thousands. Animals killed by oil slicks? Millions. Deaths due to fossil fuels via climate change? Millions. Animals (and people) killed by solar? Statistically insignificant in comparison.
The repeated cost of 'trucks driving up a hill', and the cost of fuel for those lorries, and so on, is indeed 'fractal'. However the oil consumed by a power station dwarfs that.
Strip mining thousands of square miles for coal, or steel, or rare-earths, or simply just 'square miles' to bury old wind turbine blades, is very much quantifiable.
And these are all the kinds of points that are used to denigrate one form of power 'I don't like', but aren't talked about for other forms 'I do like'.
Hence my original question, a like-for-like comparison in a reputable scientific journal.
>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
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
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
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
where do you follow him? i just poked around in X & youtube but all his stuff there seems ~a year old.
> 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.
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.
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.
It's possible, but you may have noticed that out of the ≈200 countries in the world, over the last 20 years, about 180 of them have completely failed to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers, and about 100 of them have completely failed to develop a native industry of anything, continuing their agrarian and resource-extraction economies more or less as they have been for centuries, just with imported Chinese cellphones. People in those countries often blame the rich countries for keeping them down, for example by selling them goods at lower prices than their domestic production of those goods, and they're not completely wrong, but in many cases the dynamics preventing them from escaping that equilibrium are mostly internal.
Hypothetically, yes, such a blockaded country could develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers in 20 years, and that industry would have an easier time traveling up the learning curve on the domestic market without having to match the prices of the Chinese hyperscalers. But in about 90% of cases they would fail to do so, for the same reasons the US still doesn't have any high-speed trains 60 years after the Shinkansen entered service and still doesn't have a moon base 56 years after Neil Armstrong.
> for the same reasons the US still doesn't have any high-speed trains 60 years after the Shinkansen entered service and still doesn't have a moon base 56 years after Neil Armstrong.
So.. lack of demand and ROI?
Energy independence and HSR are indeed poor metaphors for each other.
In the U.S. one can travel coast-to-coast faster and cheaper in a car than they can by rail. Then, of course, there is air travel. That is to say, there are alternatives.
A country completely dependent on foreign solar panels could develop non-solar alternatives. Or they could just surrender. So of course they also have alternatives. But this is existential whereas HSR is not. So, yes, it's a pretty poor comparison.
> Energy independence and HSR are indeed poor metaphors for each other.
It's not a metaphor. You're reasoning very sloppily. The absence of high-speed rail in the US is caused by a societal breakdown in technological and economic development. That breakdown also causes other effects. One of those effects is that over the last 20 years the US not only failed to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers; it lost the world-leading native industry of solar panel manufacturers that it already had. There's no strong reason to believe that a blockade would reverse that breakdown rather than accelerating it.
> In the U.S. one can travel coast-to-coast faster and cheaper in a car than they can by rail.
Yes. That's because the US doesn't have high-speed rail, even 60 years after the Shinkansen went into service. If the US did have high-speed rail, one would be able to travel coast-to-coast faster and cheaper by rail than they could in a car. And the difference is not small.
The fastest trains on the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed rail line average 290km/h, about 3–4 times faster than a car in the US and 50% faster than even the fastest Autobahn car speeds. The peak speed is 350km/h, but as in a car, some time is wasted speeding up and slowing down at stops at the beginning and end of the trip, and along the way.
The higher speeds also lower costs; https://www.trip.com/trains/china/route/beijingnan-to-shangh... tells me that the 1300-km trip currently costs US$22 for one person, which works out to about 1.7¢ per km. In the US, driving a car typically costs 70¢ per mile https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/standard-mileage-rates which is 43¢/km. So driving a car the same distance would not only take 3–4 times longer, it would cost 25 times as much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBUYDvu9XgU&t=15m25s reports that a year ago they paid US$92, which would be 7¢/km, so either trip.com is lying, they were taking a higher class of service, or the price has dropped precipitously. It looks to me like coach-class airline seating, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing%E2%80%93Shanghai_high-... tells me that when the service launched there were three classes of service.
Maybe in China cars are cheaper, in which case driving would only cost 10 times as much, I don't know. But it clearly isn't going to be as cheap as taking the high-speed train.
A consequence of the US's deficits in transportation is that a large fraction of the mental energy of its professional and intellectual classes is devoted to operating cars in traffic rather than to developing vaccines, improving Wikipedia, creating video games, or even selling ads.
60 years is a long time in terms of technological development. 60 years after the Wright Brothers achieve controlled powered flight in 01903 was 01963, when both the US and USSR had orbited cosmonauts, and the Apollo Program was well underway. 60 years after the first stored-program computer was delivered in 01949 (either the EDSAC or the secret Manchester Baby) was 02009, when Intel and AMD were shipping billion-transistor six-core processors. A wealthy country not being able to deploy the already existing technology in that time frame shows that it's experiencing not slow technological and economic development but slow collapse.
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.
Come on, be serious. The IMF doesn't break anyone's legs. The worst they can do is refuse to loan you any more money. Any sovereign state is free to balance their own budget and tell the IMF to GTFO.
This is currently more or less true, but historically speaking, sovereign default has often been used as a casus belli for invasion; that's where the Monroe doctrine comes from, after all. The collapsing Pax Americana is arguably the reason we haven't seen it happen in decades, so it would be unsurprising to see it start to happen again.
And of course financial considerations are often a first-order consideration in military conflict even today.
That most counties need to import oil and gas to keep the lights on and industry functioning means you don't need to send gunboats of yore. See Smedley Butler's rant. Now when they get in a pickle they need foreign currency. And that's how they get ya.
Renewables however flips things back.
That's an excellent point, and one I hadn't really internalized. Thank you.
Instructive to read up on the 2022 Sri Lanka protests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Sri_Lankan_protests
Debt crisis and sharp spikes in fuel and oil costs resulted in shortages of both. Also shortages of fertilizer. Which resulted in shortages of food.
If I was a Sri Lankan politician I wouldn't want a repeat of that.
The Sri Lankan politicians like "Mr. 10%" were largely in it for the gift. The debt crisis could have been prevented if they followed IMF recommendations in the first place.
> 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.
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.
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.
As long as China keeps making the panels and selling them for cheap there is no problem at all with that. When they decide to stop doing that other countries can pick up after a short ramp up time, for a little more money.
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.
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.
Are old solar panels available at scale? They last for decades.
First 15-20 years old Siemens panels come off the roofs right now in Germany. Still having 2/3 of the rated power generation capability. Absolutely fascinating thing. And since they cost more or less nothing it would make absolutely sense to install them in some lower cost of living area in southern Europe. I can get the panels in Germany, who wants to take over the southern Europe part?
They are also old technology and only about half as efficient as current ones. So even if you restore them to full nameplate capacity for free they are still wasted to put anywhere as long as the installation price is dominated by labor costs. The _only_ scenario in which this might be worth it is if there are no new solar cells available
Yep. Those will still not be available for recycling.
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.
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.
> 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?
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)
In 1979 Jimmy Carter installed solar (thermal) panels on the White House roof as part of his fairly progressive environmental and fuel efficiency policies.
Now I feel old :/
And also angry that it's been 40 years and electricity generation is still >50% fossil fuels, never mind world energy use overall.
And Reagan tore them down. If you want to look at why we as a country suck at green energy, you don't have to look further than the Republican party behavior over the decades. The party explicitly responsible for why we can't have any number of Good Things.
Yes, but maybe not "tore" since they got reused elsewhere. Solar was (quietly) reinstated by GW, but not on the Whitehouse itself until Obama, I think. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_13562...
I don't get the two party system where there's such acrimony involved in trashing and undoing anything accomplished by the opposition .
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.
Apparently the Chinese solar industry are baffled by the US obsession with Solyndra.
It makes so little objective sense to be that angry about a failed investment in new tech that they thought there was something deeper going on that they didn't understand.
edit: I tried to Google for the source of this, but was stymied by the fact that Solyndra tried to sue Chinese manufacturers.
I did find this time capsule commentary on an NYT piece about how Chinese renewables were about to collapse back in 2012:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/10/ch...
The story, the blog take and the unhinged comments do a lot to explain USA losing out.
Not that all of the comments are unhinged, one upvoted to the top actually applies basic economic thinking and suggests this is just counteracting negative externalities and therefore the smart move to anyone with the eyes to see the facts clearly.
Second edit: extra context is that the blogger is funded by Charles Koch:
https://www.desmog.com/mercatus-center/
The US has a lot of obsessions foreigners make little objective sense of.
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
> maintaining environmental and air quality regulations
Yeah, that's the primary concern for the US, right.
> There's a reason the rate of GHG emissions are accelerating
If you wanted to say that they "produce solar panels with energy from fossils" bring your sources please.
The sarcasm seems unwarranted. The US has better air quality than any other country with over 50 million people and better air quality than the EU on average. Most of the countries above America on the list are either islands directly in the path of tradewinds, largely unpopulated, or the nordics. Now, a lot of this is simply the fact that Americans haven't embraced diesel and that America is a relatively low density country. But air quality is really quite good in most of the US. The Clean Air Act and other environmental legislation was very successful.
> The US has better air quality than any other country with over 50 million people and better air quality than the EU on average
And that remarkable achievement was only possible because the US does not produce evil solar panels on its soil, do I understand you right?
No? I didn't make the parent comment and I was mostly taking issue with the implication in your comment that US air quality was in some way deficient
But since you asked, while manufacturing solar panels does not itself pose a threat to air quality, environmental and air quality regulations obviously raise the cost of doing business in the manufacturing sector broadly, which makes the US less competitive up and down the supply chain than China. That's obviously not the entire story, but it's certainly part of it.
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.
Point the finger at yourself. Why didn't you personally build and operate a plant?
Why would you expect different behavior from others?
I did personally build and operate a plant. Literally.
China builds solar panels using electricity produced by burning coal.
China is by far the world largest producer of green house gases.
> China builds solar panels using electricity produced by burning coal.
Source? From everything I can find, at this moment China has around half of the generation coming from clean/renewable sources.
Per-country yes China is #1, but per-capita, oil producing countries are most of the top 10 (with island nation Palau #1, inefficient transport skewed by low population).
Surely, at some point in the near future, they'll be producing solar panels using solar energy?
Well, in some 2 years their solar production trend will reach their electricity consumption trend...
So either that or they'll deploy electric-arc sculptures all over the country for the population to see, listen, and smell.
China is also one of the top two countries by population. The other is India, at almost exactly the same number of 1.4bn.
For goods we consume, though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.]
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...
>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...
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 ?
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-...
China ist still adding coal plants but their capacity factor is falling.
In fact Chinas emissions have probably already peaked.
https://www.economist.com/china/2025/05/29/chinas-carbon-emi...
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-c...
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants
I didn't mention any shrinking. I just said we'd passed the CO2 per capita peak.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...
This means for any human being we are emitting less carbon than we use to. It's not a big win but I'll take any good trend at the moment.
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).
>I highly doubt that we will have global negative emissions (CO2 capturing) within the next decades
Just to clarify what I wrote, I also highly doubt we'll get it at scale in the near future. We desperately need it though, as well as any other measure that will bend the trends in the right direction.
This may not be the right place for this, but I'm honestly getting very anxious about our climate. Some of the data such as the temperature anomaly is showing an exponential trend. See the scariest graph I've ever seen here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/climate/climate-heat-inte...
The problem with carbon capture is volume. There is about 0.04% CO2 in air. So in order to remove a ton of CO2, you would need to process thousands of tons of air, depending on the efficiency of the extraction process.
It's just kind of infeasible to pull the entire atmosphere through these plants. The largest one we have is called mammoth, claimed to remove 36000 tons of CO2 per year, meanwhile our emissions are measured in billions of tons per year. Like over 30 billion.
We would need about 30 mammoths to get to a million tons per year, and 30,000 mammoths to get to a billion. Then multiply by another 30 and in total we would need almost a million mommoth plants just to undo what we are doing right now at the same rate. Carbon capture is like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket.
How are you so confident that extinction is off the table? I've stopped following this stuff because it's depressing but last time I checked we were in dire straits and I haven't heard any good news on this front. I'm just seeing ice caps disappearing, ocean currents changing, weather changing, pretty much everything that's been predicted is now happening and it's not going to slow down any time soon.
> How are you so confident that extinction is off the table?
Because even the worst-case scenarios (=> think RCP8.5) are just not enough to get rid of us.
I can totally see populous breadbasket states turning into unliveable deserts, billions of deaths from famines and heatwaves, iconic coastal cities being lost to the sea and a giant loss of biodiversity-- but I simply don't see this eradicating our species.
Humans are too adaptable, and warming is invariably gonna leave too many survivable holdout regions.
I think that an all-out global nuclear war would be much more threatening to humanity, and even that I'm very confident we would survive as species.
But what's the probability of those direct climate effects happening without an all out nuclear war on the side, as a second order effect of the climate change? Humans are prone to fall for whatever radical ideology crosses their path when the future looks bleak.
I don't believe in world-war as byproduct of climate change yet.
I think capability to wage war internationally will probably decrease thanks to climate change; it is much easier for a state to prevent the peasants from starving than to feed/equip/fuel an army.
I also don't really see the incentives working: Countries like Bangladesh that are gonna suffer disproportionally are mostly not in a position to wage war offensively, and famines/heatwaves are not gonna make it any easier.
My admittedly cynical outlook is that it will just be business as usual: More affected/poor nations struggling, while wealthier western states moan about refugees, use their wealth as buffer and proceed to not care about people dying elsewhere.
I mostly agree with your assessment, except that "moaning about refugees" and resulting action is going to get a whole lot worse as the numbers increase.
We're already seeing how countries like the UK and US can be manipulated to respond to these situations, even when their effects are mostly imaginary and even net positive. Imagine what will start happening if the bogeyman of migration becomes a real problem.
"Use wealth as a buffer" works in the current scenario to some extent - although the US seems to have a lot of trouble with it. But what will scaling that look like? Trumpian concentration camps throughout the country, ICE budget approaching that of the US military, national curfews, martial law, suspension of habeas corpus...? We've already seen hints of all these things.
Things could get very bad. But I agree, not extinction-level, yet. Give us time though!
Yeah so this is mostly just a difference of definition. When I say extinction I mean what you describe, essentially a total collapse of modern society. I don't care whether/how long a few people survive somewhere, your scenario is apocalyptic enough for me to label it an apocalypse.
I also think this process is likely to trigger a new world war. When nations start collapsing there will be two possible outcomes - other nations take them in or they go to war. They won't just sit down and die. And everyone else won't be able to handle the number of refugees even if they want to.
"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."
Might want to take a look at China, or at least what IEA writes about CCUS and the like there.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202505/09/WS681d52e5a310a04a...
If electricity is sufficiently cheap it can be cheaper to capture carbon from the atmosphere for chemical industry than to use oil or coal there.
Do you have any source for this extraordinary claim? It's practically a claim of perpetual motion.
Carbon dioxide a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, even in concentrations which are immediately harmful to human life.
At the moment it's 400 parts per million. So in order to extract 1kg of Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere you have to pump 2500kg of air through the system. This alone makes it unlikely we can do this profitability.
You then need to extract the carbon dioxide using some technique which will probably involve cooling or pressuring that volume of air. Before finally transforming carbon dioxide, a very stable chemical compound, into a reagent which is actually useful (probably carbon monoxide).
Difficult engineering problem but working from first principles suggests that the energy requirememts are not insurmountable. The roundtrip efficiency is worse than batteries but much better than photosynthesis.
Terraform Industries (and others, like Synhelion) has a plausible if slightly optimistic target to be price competitive with fossil fuels for methane in the early 2030s.
Some places with very cheap to extract hydrocarbons like Saudi Arabia may be able to compete for a very long time, but there are many futures where most of humanity's hydrocarbon consumption (including the ones used for the chemical industry, plastics, etc) derives from atmospheric carbon.
And this can happen fast, the world (mostly China) has developed a truly massive manufacturing capacity for PV.
Terraform Industries (and others); I'd seriously consider taking a long bet that these companies turn out to be better at converting investor capital into employee salaries, for a finite period of time, than they are at converting atmospheric CO2 into natural gas.
If such a technology was possible then it would be far better to start with carbon capture from existing emitters. The concentration of CO2 being easily 3 orders of magnitude higher.
For hydrocarbon synthesis, hydrogen production from electrolysis dominates the energy usage, along with driving the Sabatier process. DAC might be like 5-10%.
Higher CO2 concentration is better but certainly not needed, it doesn't make or break the economics.
I'm not going to argue over the numbers but any business which ignores such an obvious upside / upside scenario is not really serious about achieving economic criticality. It would allow a power plant, iron ore plant, cement producer, what have you, to make claims about their environmental credentials while simultaneously improving the efficiency of the process.
It may never be “worth” it in economic sense, but it offers a way to separate the time of “energy is used” and “energy is available”. Assuming sufficient captureable volume you could capture the emissions of a fossil power plant during the ~two weeks per year where weather is sufficiently bad. And then take the other 50 weeks to capture that carbon again. It can be completely inefficient (like sub 5% round trip efficiency) if a) we pay for it via a capacity market and b) have sufficient excess (clean) energy to run it
The idea that we'll have huge excesses of clean energy seems like wishful thinking. We may have issues with excess energy at certain times of day for sure. But intermittent excesses like that are difficult to make use of economically because of capital costs and low utilisation. A general excess would be countered by falling energy prices to the point that it's difficult to make a business case for new installations.
I don't see a future where technologies which are massively inefficient reach their break even cost before other energy intensive activities or more efficient grid scale storage soak up the excess.
They said "If electricity is sufficiently cheap", which is less a claim and more a tautology.
Will it be that cheap? I think so, given that trees and grass etc. exist and get their carbon from the air.
Even with free electricity, the capital (and maintenance, consumables etc) costs of the process could easily be too high.
Consider a chemical synthesis that needs carbon. Right now it uses oil. But is has to be extracted and transported. With carbon capture from the air that no longer required. And maintaining the extra facility at the chemical factory can be cheaper than maintaining the extraction and supply chain for oil or coal.
Yes. But it still has to compete with all the various types of biomass, for example.
I suppose that in principle that is indeed possible; in practice, trees exist and self-seed, so the limit is our own ignorance.
We are also limited the incentives to that make us cut tree for money, and not develop technologies if they are not profitable within a short time-window. We have the technology to plant more trees right now, but we aren't.
People plant loads of trees for lumber, but you're right, it's an economics question in the end.
This actually means I'm also worried about something currently impossible: that when we do develop the tech sufficiently to be useful, if it's cheap enough to be profitable, nothing would seem to stop extraction. So CO2 goes down to, what, 300ppm? Pre-industrial? Ice age? Same coin, other side. We want to flip a coin and have it land on the edge.
A single world government could organise to fix this either way, but as all leadership roles come with the risk of the leader being fundamentally bad, this isn't something I'd advocate for either.
> that when we do develop the tech sufficiently to be useful, if it's cheap enough to be profitable, nothing would seem to stop extraction. So CO2 goes down to, what, 300ppm?
This is an extremely improbable scenario, for several reasons:
1) If you actually use the extracted CO2, then it gets re-emitted on use, and the atmospheric concentration is virtually unaffected.
2) Concentration difference alone makes it very unlikely that we'll ever extract CO2 as cheaply as O2 from ambient air (or carbon from a mine), and CO2 is not really an appealing ressource compared to its components, either (so demand would presumable be pretty low for centuries, even if the price comes down a lot).
> 1) If you actually use the extracted CO2, then it gets re-emitted on use, and the atmospheric concentration is virtually unaffected.
Depends what you use it for, e.g. synthetic diamond windows won't re-emit unless they catch fire.
> 2) Concentration difference alone makes it very unlikely that we'll ever extract CO2 as cheaply as O2 from ambient air (or carbon from a mine), and CO2 is not really an appealing ressource compared to its components, either (so demand would presumable be pretty low for centuries, even if the price comes down a lot).
Underestimating how big an industry would get is the mistake Svante Arrhenius initially made, thinking it would take millennia to emit enough CO2 to cause noticeable global warming.
And remember, with this concern I'm inherently presuming tech (mainly energy) that makes it sufficiently cheap that business and/or governments are willing and able to remove in the order of at least one teratonne of the stuff (but hopefully not two or more teratonnes) — because less than that, it's not solving global warming.
You could make the same argument about AGI. Just because nature does it doesn't mean it's easy for us to replicate in an industrial setting.
Sure, but you said "It's practically a claim of perpetual motion." which is overstating the challenge to a much greater degree than this understates it.
If you actually use captured carbon for something productive like synthetic fuel (where CO2 gets re-emitted) you are kinda ruining the point though.
Thats what makes this even less attractive-- those plants are expensive to build and operate and you can't even really use the product in the most obvious ways.
This about using carbon for chemical industry.
My apologies. By available carbon budget, I meant the carbon we can burn before we exceed 1.5 degrees, or 2 degrees etc.
I think 1.5°C is already basically impossible; scenarios between 2°C and 4°C by 2100 over pre-industrial levels seem achievable-- that would be a total remaining CO2 budget of ~3 Tera-tons of CO2 within 2100.
That is an average of 4 tons of CO2/person/year for 10 billion people. Americans are at 3x that right now, Europeans/Chinese 2x, and a few wealthy nations are already there (France, Switzerland, Israel). Poorer countries like India are significantly under that value (for now!).
Doubling that CO2 budget to 6000 Gt would make things significantly worse (5° expected temperature increase or more).
Oh, we're definitely going to need direct air capture, which consumes massive amounts of energy. Fortunately, it's only massive compared to things like global shipping, not compared to the sun that hits the Earth.
I see, thanks for clarifying I got confused there.
1.5 degrees was last year.
https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/en/news-archive/copernic...
Solar and wind are booming, but fossil fuels aren't shrinking nearly as fast in absolute terms
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...
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.
Usually old energy sources don't go away until there's an economic contraction of some sort.
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/
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?
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.
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…
Is that a benefit or a cost? People these days have to train at their own expense, and construction trades are in something of a short supply.
I'm more thinking about the side of designing and implementing complex engineering systems instead of individual trades, but I'm just an armchair poster so don't know much.
There's a property called "learning rate", which roughly measures the extent to which doing some kind of project more makes it cheaper. Renewables have hugely benefited from this at every level, from manufacture to installation.
Nuclear, somehow, exhibits a negative learning rate: the more nuclear projects you do, the more expensive it gets. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
From my experience in construction sites as an electrician… It is a race to the bottom. Cheapest subcontractor gets the job. Nobody cares about any training. And there are no engineers at all in construction sites. Overseeing engineer is simply too expensive. Obviously it shouldn’t be that way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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 [...]
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.
If there are two options, you can trust they'll go for the more verbose one.
Autors are often paid by word count. Note that I'm not saying that's the reason here, but it could be.
Also Cape Town is a city in South Africa..no idea where Capetown is
It's near Stellen Bosch
That's simply good writing practice. I find it more taxing to read digits than prose.
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?
I was taught numbers up to ten should be spelled, the rest use digits
Chicago Manual of Style (though it says 1 to 100, er, I mean one to one-hundred). I try to use a CMOS subset for my professional/technical writing, mostly for consistency, but, partly so that I don't need to argue with people with subjective opinions about how I'm writing it wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> China is actually carrying our lazy asses.
Its not laziness, its corruption. The USA has a government that's tainted by moneyed interests who don't want their established gravy train derailed no matter how much it's fucking the entire planets environment. Now add to that, the current administration is too stupid and short sighted to ever incentivize change.
It’s a perfect example of overwhelming greed, corruption, and hate collapsing an empire.
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Seriously, thank you. I’m aware of the complexities and injustices and manipulations and repressions perpetrated by the Chinese state.
But this isn’t Russia or Iran. They’ve also done so so much good while the west studies its own navel and makes “wealth” out of paper and bits.
I’ve often thought “yes, but where’s the goddamn gratitude”. It’s good to see it.
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.
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.
The Government and actions of the United States also does not mesh well classic liberal ideas of freedom and human dignity, so this seems to be a hypocritical complaint.
Sorry, I'm not in the USA. And while the current US government is pretty bad, it is not a dictatorship. Protests like the "No Kings" are unimaginable in China, just consider the Tiananmen Square massacre.
When the U.S. does it we're "picking sides".
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.
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.
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.
Your link shows that yesterday had the highest peak demand of the month and it was between 1-2pm.
Spot checking July 2019 the oldest year it had, it's peak day also had the peak at the same time.
Do we have different definitions of "late afternoon"?
I also don't understand the link's differentiation between "demand" and "usage", but "demand" is higher and nearer noon it seems.
It's also not clear if home solar is accounted for and is a factor. You'll see a "demand dip" when behind the meter solar is generating if you're only seeing the grid side of things. Some grids estimate and include it or call it out separately.
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.
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.
Solar panels are so cheap that it makes sense to overbuild, such that even an overcast winter day meets your electricity needs.
I think that depends on where you are. I've heard of 20kW installations producing 500W in December.
Granted 500W isn't nothing, but what if it's snows?
That is about the numbers that we get in Sweden. Those months were solar production is lowest is also the months that consumption is highest for the average household, around 400% compared to the warmest summer months. As a result, energy prices are also significant higher during winter compared to summer.
My home's PV produces more energy than we use in a year, including heating. But the ~1:10 swing in generation from my roof in London UK between mid-winter and mid-summer is tough, and the storage to cover that interseasonally would currently cost about the same as the house and/or use ~50% of its volume. However, we import minimally in summer and export like crazy with the help of relatively modest storage.
Luckily there is this thing called a grid, and the UK has a lot of anti-correlated wind generation on it, which helps a lot.
All my detailed stats are here:
https://www.earth.org.uk/energy-series-dataset.html
Also see:
https://www.earth.org.uk/statscast-202012.html
In my experience this requires overbuilding by a factor of 10. That's not a good allocation of money.
Storage is the elephant in the solar-powered room
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.
> 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).
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.
Nobody said that you have to use your home or work solar. If you fill up part of your car using some fast charger network (which would still be solar powered), it would still work.
Moreover, even if we take the top 25% percent of commute distances (which is >40km per day), that still leaves you with 10 days until you have to recharge. If you recharge every weekend, you still have plenty of battery capacity for your needs outside of sun hours (you likely will need only 1-2 kWh per day anyway).
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.
You're not left with a flat battery at the end of the night. Many vehicles are combined in intelligent systems which work together to ensure that the vehicles have the energy they need (which is easy to set in all the systems I've seen) but provide enough grid support to make this work.
Remember that even my little town car (Renault Zoe) has a 52kWh battery.... which would run my house for five days. So the energy stored in these systems can be considerable.
The people doing these things have thought a lot about it. Take a look at this video - it's a bit 'puff piece' but shows what one way of doing it looks like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKItLGPdN0k
There are several scenarios where it would contribute:
1. You have access to a charger at work 2. You’re retired 3. You take public transportation or bike to work (fairly common scenario in Europe) 4. Work-from-home (got more common after covid, I know many people who do it at least once a week now, and that’s generally enough to charge what you need to drive for a week) 5. You charge only during the day on weekends (should be enough to cover the week for most people, even if you feed say 20% of it back to the grid through the week) 6. Rental fleet operators (booking data can inform charge/discharge policy) 7. Residential batteries, where you charge the EV at night with what you got during the day, every day, but set up a policy where you allow both the home battery and the EV battery to discharge if the electricity is expensive enough. I could see myself making decisions about WFH or biking to work based on electricity pricing.
Ideally in that case you’d charge the car from the grid during the workday, when the grid is powered by solar and power spot prices are low.
BYO house solar is optional when there is grid solar (and home solar exports).
Yes, it does rely on charging infra rolling out - either at work or with fast DC charging. But that is happening too. Well, in markets where EV adoption is encouraged - for the US, I guess we'll see.
I think peak energy usage is in the morning and afternoon / early night when people are at home.
Would be stella if people could charge during noon. I don't know how feasible that is.
> 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.
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).
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Finland does not have any geothermal. The country lies on two billion years old basement rock with approximately zero geothermal activity.
Wind is the dominanting renewable source, with enough of it for Finland to enjoy the second cheapest electricity in Europe last year. And indeed, even solar is profitable, hindered by the winters but helped by the long days during summer.
There is a fair amount of industry, but the buildup of wind power is relatively new. Lots of new datacenters are being built as cheap renewables, abundance of water, and a cool climate create a great environment for them.
Finland has lofty goals for becoming a hub for new green energy intensive industries, but these require large amounts of capital and it'll remain to be seen if that realizes.
One of the reasons I dont expect the australia storage model I cited to be wildly different to, say, Finland is that areas of the world which dont get a lot of sunlight tend to have a lot more wind and hydro potential per capita.
I doubt there are any places in the world where some carbon free combination of solar, wind, hydro, pumped storage, batteries and syngas isnt economic.
Unfortunately, natgas has a large sunk cost advantage. If we were building from scratch in 2025, syngas for the last 2-10% would be competitive. But we have a lot of natgas infrastructure. Syngas's advantage is that it can be locally produced and stored. Natgas has to be shipped large distances, but we already have the infrastructure to do that.
Yeah, if you discount it being zero carbon, syngas is not cost competitive with natgas at all.
https://terraformindustries.com/ is betting the cost crossover point is soon.
I saw lots of mentions of batteries in the article.
> 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...?
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.
You can't make China pay tariffs because it's not the exporter that pays them, it's the importer.
Tariffs in the USA are basically a tax on Americans. The aim being to make imported goods more expensive for Americans so they're more likely to buy local goods which would otherwise be more expensive than the imported version.
US was giving $7500 for each car sold to Tesla. But sure, CHYNAAA
They gave that same rebate to all EV manufacturers. It had nothing to do with any one brand.
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.
West simply decided to de-industrialize itself (at least some countries, not all of them) and asked the other countries to do the dirty work for them so they can focus on finance and such, so of course the West has less subsidies -- and no one is forcing the West's hand NOT to give subsidies. Now it takes triple hard to pick it back, if the West really wants.
China obviously does not subsidize $75,000 per car.
European analysis resulted in an 18% offsetting duty, meaning Chinese subsidies are lower than American ones.
No it’s not focused on vehicles, that’s the average subsidy on manufacturing.
According to the treasury dept (and the EU): https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2455
> Whatever the number is in the west
So you don't know what the number is?
> China has on average ~ 10x the amount of subsidies than the west when it comes to manufacturing.
And yet you just randomly decide to 10X it for china?
Typical disingenuous anti-china nonsense. What's next? China spends 10X on defense compared to "the west"?
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2455
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.
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?
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.
Also, having a bunch of batteries on the grid would make a black start much easier.
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.
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?
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.
This really depends on the pricing mechanisms & contracts that large industrial users have with their energy provider. Many users may contract out of wholesale spot prices in favour for a more predictable contracted price - and demand response could form part of that contract. Depending on the market, financial hedges are also an option.
For instance, in New Zealand we have an aluminium smelter (Tiwai point) that constitutes about ~13% of national electricity demand. The smelter recently re-contracted its electricity supply with several of the major power companies (a 20-yr agreement) which includes a component for demand response when required. NZ has a ~80% renewable grid with hydro and wind as major variable sources, which creates both hourly and seasonal variation in the wholesale spot price (dependant on wind and rain resource). In the event of a major drought that pushes up prices due to a lack of hydro (this happened last year), the agreement with the smelter means it will shutdown some of its operating lines in exchange for demand response payments. This is exactly what occurred, whereas other industrial users that did not have such agreements in place or chose to take advantage of previously low spot prices without adequate hedging were then exposed and also shut down, without being paid to so.
They need some local buffers batteries, and some fallback power generation via the grid. But it benefits them if they can run on cheap renewables most of the time. And of course steel production processes can be adapted to be more flexible as well. Current steel production isn't optimized but when the choice is between shutting down for a few days or falling back to some relatively expensive power source, shutting down might be the more economical option. The idea behind flexible pricing is that large consumers of energy can optimize for that with batteries and storage. Charge when it's cheap, discharge when it isn't. Sell power when it gets really expensive.
> Steel factories cannot shutdown temporarily due to high electricity prices. They need a steady source of electricity.
This isn't true, there are currently facilities doing exactly this. For example, this steel mill in Ohio.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250215223931/https://gridbeyon...
Link?
"...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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> ...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.
> are the most efficient form
What does this even mean?
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
You're overstating the current price of PV panels by a factor of three to five; it's closer to 3% of the 15-years-ago price than to 13%. That graph ends in 02023, at US$0.31/Wp, toward the end of the solar-panel bubble set up by the price-fixing cartel at the time. The actual current price is €0.11/Wp, or €0.06/Wp for low-cost (low-efficiency, no-warranty) panels: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...
€0.11 is 5% of US$2.39 (the Wp price on that graph from 02010), and €0.06 is 2.7% of it. However, my notes from 02016 say that the Solarserver price index for July 02010 was €1.62/Wp; sadly I did not note which module class that was. €0.11 is 6.8% of €1.62, but of course the Euro was worth more at the time...
This three-to-five-fold difference is why you're seeing this article now.
So, if I zoom out as you suggest, this means efficient doesn't mean economically efficient. What does it mean here, then? Engineering efficiency? That would make very little sense, since PV and other generating technologies have different inputs. It makes no sense to compare the efficiency of PV modules converting light to electrical energy vs. the efficiency of combustion turbines converting chemical energy to mechanical kinetic energy.
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...
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.
> 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].
> 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.
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
It's a small joke.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Okay hear me out - Uber for holodecks.
> 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.
Thank you
http://web.archive.org/web/20250709125256/https://www.newyor...
How are people making these?
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.
> 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.
I'm pretty sure it's IP-based because I get it on different devices from the same network when it happens.
And make sure your DNS is not 1.1.1.1. Archive.is will alter requests coming from their DNS. They do not always detect it.
>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.
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This year, so far, all of my panels have produced at least 300kwhr of (usable) power. And thats in london, which isn't the sunniest of places.
Is solar the only solution? no. but for places like spain, france and italy, its a very cheap solution to handle peak aircon load. Thats without any kind of battery load shifting.
But!
Solar is not a replacement for nuclear. but currently its so cheap it means that poorer countries are now able to afford stable micro grids, something not possible before.
Not sure where you're getting "at best 15x", the best panels from 2013 were found to have a 30x EROI: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
And from a more recent study:
"This work has shown that the EROI of fossil fuels drops considerably when moving from a final stage (approximately 8.5) to a useful stage analysis (approximately 3.5). The low overall EROI value at the useful stage, however, hides large differences across fossil fuel groups and end uses, with average useful stage energy returns being much higher for heating compared with mechanical end uses. In addition, we find that fossil fuel useful-stage energy returns have remained fairly constant on average over time (except for fossil gas) and may even have slightly increased. Such findings contradict the conventional narrative according to which fossil fuels present very high, although rapidly decreasing, energy returns.
Next, we find that the EROI equivalent value for which electricity-yielding renewable energy systems deliver the same net useful energy as fossil fuels is as low as 4.6, due to the substantially higher final-to-useful efficiency of electricity compared to those of fossil fuel-based energy carriers. This value is, however, highly variable across the fossil fuels and end uses considered. We also find that most literature-sourced EROI values for electricity-yielding renewable energy technologies are higher than the EROI equivalent we have calculated, even when adjusting the values for the implications of intermittency using a wide range of energy transition scenarios. This result suggests that renewable energy may deliver more net useful energy than their fossil fuel counterparts for the same amount of final energy invested."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
EROI only has to be greater than one for the number to rapidly lose its meaning relative to every other input (and externality) of a given energy technology. It makes no sense to focus on it.
Return on energy is different from cost, and it's strange that you're ignoring that. When you look at the levelized cost of energy, solar and onshore wind win: On a per-kWh basis, they produce the cheapest energy around. Gas combined cycle plants are close, but they have pollution and CO2 drawbacks.
LCOE doesn't capture everything you want, but when your grid mix is low on solar, it's the most relevant metric. When we get 15x return on energy and the energy we produce is cheap, you can ... use 1/15th of that energy to make more solar panels. And we're getting better at producing them by the year: Energy input is down and efficiency is up.
Nuclear is about 3x as expensive per kWh generated and it's not as dispatchable. Fossil fuels have this annoying problem of emitting co2and contributing a lot to climate change. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying to find ways to drive the cost of nuclear down - we should! - but from the perspective of "What generation should I install tomorrow?", solar and wind, augmented with a bit of storage, are really impressive: They're the fastest to bring online and provide the cheapest energy. The cost to them is you probably have to pay your gas plant operators a higher capacity fee for rare occasions, but that's ok. In a region like mine (PJM - pennsylvania, new jersey, virginia, ohio, etc.), they still make a profit while burning less gas, and consumer energy cost drops.
It seems weird to get all religious about technology choices when they each have advantages and disadvantages and combine pretty well to even out those differences. It would be expensive to be 100% solar+wind+storage because of the overprovisioning needed. But a mix instead of running 100% fossil (or 100% nuclear) would drop your costs considerably and be faster to build out.
From a pure physics and first principles perspective, a higher EROI implies higher scalability and lower costs.
Nuclear today has high costs associated to it due to uncertainty in permitting, high upfront costs due to red-tape, annd archaic regulations that stifle any innovation. These make risk management prohibitively expensive as is the cost of insuring them. If the catastrophic rate of failure and associated deaths are far far smaller than what’s generally accepted in society(think fatalities due to vehicle accidents), then we must work to removing the red-tape to ease construction of these. They’re also far more green to operate.
This way, we can keep solar for residential, and for industries to offset their own use(think data centers investing in their own energy supply instead of paying others. Think on-premise vs off-premise).
Let's start with privatizing the risk of it going kaboom. Why do we need red tape that pushes the cleanup costs onto taxpayer shoulders? It's so safe!
Sophisticated private insurers being willing to shoulder the full financial downside of nuclear power plants going fukushima (not < 1% as it is now!) will give everybody confidence that they're not just pushing propaganda exaggerating how safe they are to an unsophisticated public.
Assuming you are correct, there will be less red tape, the sophisticated insurers will happily take on the additional risks and unsophisticated taxpayers dont have to worry about being on the hook for one of those ~$800 billion Fukushima style cleanup events.
I wont hold my breath though.... after all, they know the nuclear industry would stop existing if insurance were actually priced according to the risk even if the consumers of their expensive public relations campaigns dont.
> cheap energy is will power the next AI boom
This is already happening, that and the crypto boom from a few years ago.
> and lift the poor and middle class up
But this is not happening; the ones doing AI stuff, crypto stuff, energy stuff have no interest in lifting any classes up. Energy prices are not going down, because demand is going up alongside supply, to the point where in some places the energy grid can't keep up. At-home solar and EVs are putting strain on the residential grids, even the newly built ones that have been reinforced 4x compared to the power grid of 10, 20 years ago.
Thorium reactors will cost billions and decades to build, even if you can find a location, get past the legal hurdles, the societal outrage, NIMBYism, etc. Meanwhile, you can get solar panels from your local DIY store, or order a pallet of them off the internet for cheap. Anyone with roof or field space can build themselves a solar farm, but nuclear or thorium reactors are huge, nationwide and political investments.
Modern nuclear reactors used to be huge, but that’s outdated now. The revolution in small modular reactors promises to change all that.
Current modern nuclear reactors getting built are huge.
Maybe, perhaps, in the next decade or two we'll see small(er) reactors, but this isn't a new idea and hasn't worked out it practice before.
in what, another decade or more before they actually get made at scale? they'll be irrelevant by then outside of niche applications.
In capitalism, we innovate for more profit. We don’t innovate to get random people wealthy.
High EROI = high profit for investors
1. If something's expensive enough, that turns into manpower and then energy use as you look at the whole supply chain.
2. The ratio doesn't really matter once it hits double digits. If something outputs 100 energy units, the difference between it costing 10 energy units to build versus costing .01 energy units to build isn't a game changer. The important number is that almost all the energy it makes is "profit". And if you can make a solar panel output a few percent more energy, that matters more than getting the energy cost to 0 and having an infinite ratio would matter. All else equal, a solar panel that costs 4kWh to make and has a 1000x return is worse than a solar panel that costs 400kWh to make and has a 15x return.
While that may be true - I can invest in home solar and have zero or near zero electricity costs at reasonable prices with a 5 to 7 year payback period. Near me solar farms run at a profit here in England, and yet I don't believe any nuclear power plant has run at a profit without government assistance, or subsidies, and none are yet expected to fund their own decommissioning and clean up - society will bear these costs.
Large scale solar are actually large scale gas plants.
Since there is no way to store electricity large scale and solar energy is unreliable then they depend on gas turbines to work.
Not entirely. California now handles its peak using solar+storage quite effectively.
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-solar-storage-spring-2025/
It's not entirely 1:1. CA has about 20GW of solar production, and the solar+storage together completely replace about 5GW of fossil capacity.
(But don't discount wind. Wind+solar combine pretty well, and if you throw that in, you'll see that CA is actually replacing about 10GW of fossil capacity with solar+storage+wind. That's _capacity_, not production, so that's 8GW of avoided plant construction.)
We still need more progress in storage, for sure, but the trajectory has been good so far. Storage prices have continued to drop and given the lag of construction times, we should expect online storage to continue to improve for at least several years. Another bit of battery coming online should let CA take that from 5 to 7GW of replaced peak capacity from solar+storage.
Exactly my point. Solar and Wind being intermittent require additional expense of grid storage which other forms of energy do not need.
So to scale, for each GW of solar, you’ll need a GW of storage plus the energy reserve to take through the night. Can’t rely on wind here as that’s also intermittent.
And grid storage is energy intensive and sets up twisted incentives for those playing to get rich with energy arbitrage. Think solar farm generators owning their own grid storage and reducing solar output to sell at higher $ from storage. Because, with intermittent sources pricing has to be more dynamic.
solar + storage for a full day cycle is now cheaper than new gas. And way cheaper than nuclear. Keep up!
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
And why is dynamic pricing a bad thing? It aligns the incentives well.
Totally. Our local electric supplier just introduced it as an option and I love it - admitting that none of us here are normal people, I reprogrammed my thermostats to be a degree warmer during peak times, shifted when we run dishes and laundry, and I run some of the compute load off of UPS. (And I have a little solar). I'm saving about $30/month on my power bill with it. It's cool.
> twisted incentives for those playing to get rich with energy arbitrage
You're saying energy arbitrage doesn't happen right now?
> Think solar farm generators owning their own grid storage and reducing solar output to sell at higher $ from storage
If enough generators do that they'll drive down the price of power at night and increase the price of power in the daytime. This will incentivize the opposite behavior.
untrue. Solar + 24hr storage is now (just) cheaper than new gas.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
Nuclear seems to only work if nation-states build and operate it directly - no private firm can build them profitably and on time.
If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that, please let people know, but with the current defunding everything mindset and general gridlock and one bill a year passed I think solar will be much cheaper by the time you even start breaking the ground on a thorium reactor.
>Nuclear seems to only work if nation-states build and operate it directly - no private firm can build them profitably and on time.
Nation states are not able to run the plants profitably either, they just don't run out of money.
Look at France, the US, UK, Germany and Japan for example. They all have immense costs related to nuclear power that is not covered by the sale of nuclear electricity.
Yeah, but if your intent is to support industry by having cheap energy costs that works out for you. Same reason public transit and police run at a loss, in theory.
>Yeah, but if your intent is to support industry by having cheap energy costs that works out for you
Short-term perhaps, but pretending that something expensive is cheap doesn't really work in the long run.
Investments are supposed to be an initial cost upfront that pays off later. Like building roads, bridges and such. For energy, an investment would be to take the cost of a renewable infrastructure, energy storage, solar roofs and such. Once they are in place they have minimal costs and give extremely cheap and reliable energy (reliable because of the distribution and redundancy).
Nuclear is kind of the opposite, you get the payoff upfront but have to pay an unknown amount basically forever afterwards. This cost eventually catches up to you.
France today is in a manner of speaking still paying for electricity they consumed in the 80s and 90s by bailing out EDF. Yet the common opinion still seems to be that they have "cheap electricity".
I think France has the most expensive energy infrastructure in Europe, and it will sooner or later become impossible to pretend otherwise.
I’m honestly not sure I understand. All electricity export charts I see show France as a net exporter of electricity and by a huge margin. What am I missing?
Nuclear works, it's just more expensive. We can quibble over other things (land use, nuclear waste, nuclear proliferation, embedded carbon, energy independence, social licensing, construction time, local insolation levels and seasonality), but 90% of the equation is just cost. Nuclear is damn expensive compared to wind and solar.
When France and Germany built their nuclear, solar and wind was too expensive. But it's changed now. Nobody should decomission nuclear plants that already exist, because the fixed costs are already paid for, but building new ones doesn't make economic sense.
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> If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that
Impossible.
Federal government in US is failing along with the rest of large scale western style governments. They are too big, cost too much, and have too many fundamental structural deficiencies.
The model of having professional class of administrators and politicians running the country as part of a massive bureaucracy is one that can't work as it is unmanageable and full of conflicts of interests, moral hazards, political market failures and so on and so forth.
They carry on just through inertia at this point. Their one talent is creating a image of control and stability without actually providing any.
If you ever worked in a large publicly traded corporation and realized just how dysfunctional they are as a organization, multiply that a thousandfold and you have modern western governments.
Nuclear is expensive and doesn't work because there are a lot of people in power and next to power that don't want it to work.
> Federal government in US is failing along with the rest of large scale western style governments. They are too big, cost too much, and have too many fundamental structural deficiencies.
How do you see those governments failing, and when?
When sorting countries by tax burden (as a percentage of GDP), then you will find that there are tons of extremely livable countries at the top (wealthy European nations), while basically everything under ~10% GDP taxation is a 3rd world disaster.
How big of a GDP percentage would you propose can a government take at most and not "invariably fall apart"?
There are also a lot of people on the ground that don't want it to work, or will protest it, and that's where state power seems to work well to cut through opposition and just build things. Certainly a lot of tradeoffs are made to allow that but the Chinese government seems very good at building.
I'm not sure if it's the model or the particular culture working though - aren't there also a lot of party bureaucrats over there? So the core is authority or agency directed at the center of it, I think.
So get government out of the space here. Keep essential regulations for ensuring safety and so that insurance companies can cover liabilities. Let the free market play it out.
If the profit incentives are there(which there are as higher EROI = lowest cost per kWh), then it is a race to who can provide the product(energy) at the lowest cost more reliably.
Government unfortunately has a monopoly here as traditional reactors had proliferations concerns, needed much large capital, and political will. But if reactors can be modular and costs low that a city could afford it, then you can also have decentralized reactors just like you have with solar.
Like I said, if you have some pathway to a functional government (either to cut regulations sufficiently or to build it, I don't think either is much simpler) then you should get on that part first. But I'm not holding out much hope. We can barely reduce regulations to build houses, and voters like houses. You'll have environmental protests a plenty for city scale small reactors if they're in anyone's "backyard" at all
China seems to be taking the joke rather seriously [1]
> The 277 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in China in 2024 alone is more than twice as much as the 121 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2024.
So they took all the solar installed in the USA since forever, and build it in a year. Twice.
That being said, they're _also_ building everything else:
* PWR nuclear [2] (sadly, they managed to make EPR work faster than the E in EPR, but we're getting there.) Here market and investment and regulation are the hitters. "Fusion nuclear" will always be 50 years away ; until we get SMRs, "Fission nuclear" will always be a couple of years late and a few millions over budget.
* indeed, Thorium nuclear [3] (although it's far from powering any air-conditionner in any pig shed any time soon)
* and looooooots of coal [4]
So basically, China has understood that the answer to "what kind of electricity source should we build ?" is "YES".
The faster they replace "new coal" by "new anything else", the better we are as as species, since they're the world factory - so the lifecycle of _everything_ improve when they improve their grid.
Of course, here's to hoping they're not lying they way off...
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65064
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishan_Nuclear_Power_Plant
[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/01/1115957/old-new-...
[4] https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...
I’d also point out that China is teetering on the edge of a financial meltdown, having also built complete ghost cities, so some of these investments may not look very smart in just a few years. Don’t confuse investment with malinvestment, in other words. Throwing money at everything, much in direct opposition to market forces, has never really been shown to be a winning strategy.
Most of those "ghost cities" got populated in "just a few years", so much so that wiki had to change Chinese Ghost City entry into "Underoccupied Developements". And what is the scale of PRC "malinvestment", quantify or approximate it. Here's a hint, PRC RE+construction as % of GDP = ~15%, about OECD average. PRC just very good at building and gets much more from it, even if some sits idle first or ultimately gets wasted. AKA PRC barely throws more money that OECD in RE sector, they certainly have the option of throwing less money, but that only makes them more efficient relative to rest.
Entire construction + downstream industries is 30%, most of 15% redirected to renewable row out where solar already has better ROI than importing oil, aka, until PRC displaces another 10m barrels per day via renewables, or hits US per capita energy use (double current), any domestic power investment is positive. Throwing money at increasing cheaper power that makes manipulating atoms in every down stream sector is directly what market forces is ALWAYS driving towards. Increasing energy per capita is the only proven winning civilzational development strategy.
Don't confuse some malinvestments for retarded existential PRC collapse narrative. For reference US spending 18% GDP on health care, i.e. 2x OECD average of 9% is single handly more inefficient than likely ALL Chinese policies can misallocate, i.e. that 9% of excess US health spending that gets wasted by scribes can build entire PRC HSR network in like 5 months.
It's not "wasted by scribes" in the US - it very much goes into the pockets of the "pharaohs" (aka "corporate boards"), and, through campaigns donations, to the "high and low priests" (aka "politicians").
The fact that it was supposed to be used to cure peasants from malaria or ensure next year's yield of grain is just a detail.
Don't bother questioning the pharaohs ! Instead, attend the ceremony for when we turn them into gods (aka "IPOs").
And, also, venerate your cats (aka "cats").
please write a book. such a simple explanation.
Just riffing on [1], no intention of being serious, sorry.
Of course it's more complex than that.
I just needed to make the "cat" joke. Sorry again.
(That being said, I'm scared that learning more about the Egyptian scribe system would make me find even more similarities with our civilisation, and it would just be depressing. I get that any time I read about Rome.)
"Those who don't know history are bound to repeat it - but at least no one spoils the ending for them."
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
Housing projects are handled by local governments in China, not the central government. What you're saying is as absurd as saying Detroit going bankrupt is hurting the credibility of Uncle Sam.
> I’d also point out that China is teetering on the edge of a financial meltdown
This and the "OMG demographic collapse" sound like serious copium to me at this point.
I really don't know how to assess China's economic or financial state.
I vividly remember hearing about how the housing bubble was going to break any time soon... a decade ago ?
And then how they would never survive Covid-19. Or the Trump tarrifs, etc...
To be clear, I'm not saying they're invincible or anything - maybe the economy _did_ collapse, but not uniformly, and maybe the central government is able to bail out the economy more efficiently than western economies, and maybe they're just lying their way off, etc...
But so far I have the same feelings about rumors on china's economical death as on Russian ones - metaphorically, I'll believe it when I see the corpse, and when its head has been chopped off for safety ;)
I think you have misunderstood energy yield expressed as a multiple of energy input as a fundamental measurement of the viability of any energy technology.
If you run scenarios, you’ll find that this number is entirely irrelevant. Instead, try considering the availability and required quantities of raw materials and inputs like silver, indium, land, and of course money which is the best proxy for measuring how much of the world economy would be required for building out any technology.
You seem to be ignoring the most important factor, which is cost.
You also only need to buy the panel once. Fuel is free
China is literally making energy that cheap using solar. They add about an entire United Kingdom's worth of solar energy every year (about 270 TWh), that's 100x(!) of what they add in nuclear capacity (which is almost nothing). Even in China solar and renewables are rendering the nuclear sector obsolete. (afaik they're canceling about a third or half of running projects)
And paraphrasing Bruno Maçães from his latest book, far from a caveman technology one of the most transformative aspects of solar energy is that it will move the world from a logic of energy stocks to a logic of energy flows. Decentralized, dynamic, expandable and moveable, a solar network is to the legacy energy grid what the internet is to the TV broadcasting center. It's to move from a society of matter to a society of energy.
To make that philosophical point practical, Pakistan last year added a third of its entire consumption in solar energy. Significant parts of the population are now grid independent. In a country where natural disasters and central mismanagement produced a fragile system, you might soon have one of the most robust, distributed and deterritorialized energy systems.
China is a beast in solar. Truly amazing work. That being said not only are they not canceling any nuclear projects, they announced close to 10 more just in 2025. They are building both and with a great pace.
Paywall
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.
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".
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.
No paywall for me here in the UK. Maybe they consider us an economically behind country too.
People deserve to be paid for their work.
Reader mode on FF and a reload dismissed it for me.
> 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!
With some investment you can make solar panels locally, you can't produce new oil deposits.
Isn't that what biofuels are?
Sun -> plants (corn) -> liquid that goes in (modified) cars
EROI for them is really bad.
And power/area for biofuels is abysmal. Using PV for BEVs instead of ethanol in ICE vehicles would reduce land requirements by a factor of ~100.
Sun (+ fertilizers made using petroleum)
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.
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.
The demand for fossil fuel is continuous. The demand for solar panels is one-time: when you first install it.
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...
That's a blatantly disingenuous argument that misses the point. Setting aside the accuracy of the 25-year figure, is it easier to buy solar panels once to use them for 25 years or stockpile 25 years' worth of fossil fuel?
I'm not arguing against maintenance items like cleaning, because obviously fossil fuel power plants need maintenance too. I'm directly responding to the perceived geopolitical risk. The question is: is it better for a country to experience a geopolitical risk with a solar-panel-producing nation or with an oil-producing nation? Bringing up items like cleaning is laughably irrelevant because where's the geopolitical risk in cleaning a solar panel?
Making a solar panel isn't rocket science. China has just cornered the market right now. If supply dries up, you can make your own solar panels. It will take a few years to get the volume up but your current supply of panels will last until you do.
> The question is: is it better for a country to experience a geopolitical risk with a solar-panel-producing nation or with an oil-producing nation?
If that's your only question, the answer is straightforward then, there's more oil producing nations than solar panels producing nations making the risk with oil lower.
China is so big in this sector that I don't think that you could even create a real strategy where they get <25% market share in the country solar imports.
You could somewhat mitigate this risk by buying a stock worth 5 years of panel installation of the country but as far as I know, nobody is doing that.
The piece doesn't mention the recent blackout in Spain. Wasn't it caused by the lack of energy sources with rotational inertia?
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.
It was a design/dimensioning error, something was expected to absorb reactive power and it added it instead.
No, that was some of the initial speculation, but turned out to be wrong.
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?
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...
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.