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.
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
> ...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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I think this would work for the summer months. Overnight storage is manageble/cost-effective by load shifting/battery storage/etc. This is now estimated at about $100/MWh ($0.10/Kwh).
Seasonal storage is a completely different story. For my own panels, production in Nov/Dec/Jan is about 20% of that in Apr/May/Jun, and this is typical. That means that you either need 15x solar capacity of what you need on a sunny day, or enough storage to bridge those 3 months, two orders of magnitude storage more than we would need to store electricity overnight.
Or some combination of the two. Obviously sounds expensive but 20 years ago this would have been fiction. I think it’s entirely likely that energy storage and production will continue to fall enough in price to make this realistic.
In the USA, eg California, the cost of building out the grid we need (to achieve netzero) is mostly borne by retail consumers. Versus industry and data centers. (IIRC)
Obviously, this creates huge push back, threatening the transition to renewables.
The Correct Answer remains federal policy and support. Just like the New Deal Era's electrification of our country.
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.
Thank you for your promotion of HVDC! Especially given the context of its weak electrical reacts new compared to HVAC which mutates cellular DNA much much more! (Strong hypothesis: positive correlation of cancer rates with electrical power transmission in the 20th century…please research the epidemiology for yourselves)
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 93.1 ms ] threadIs 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.
What if... (stick with me here because this is about to get crazy)... free market capitalism isn't the best solution for everything...?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.]
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/
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
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.
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.
[1] - https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-tale-of-two-ene...
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.
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.
Isn't it what the current US administration want? A weak USD to boost export?
>> 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 [...]
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’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.
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.
I /think/ formulating the problem this way means that 12h=power is always relevant. So: where are we?
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.
Seasonal storage is a completely different story. For my own panels, production in Nov/Dec/Jan is about 20% of that in Apr/May/Jun, and this is typical. That means that you either need 15x solar capacity of what you need on a sunny day, or enough storage to bridge those 3 months, two orders of magnitude storage more than we would need to store electricity overnight.
Obviously, this creates huge push back, threatening the transition to renewables.
The Correct Answer remains federal policy and support. Just like the New Deal Era's electrification of our country.
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.
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.
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.
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
his predictions have gotten a LOT more dramatic lately, I can't wait to see if he's still nailing it