Why do I keep getting $20k quotes to install it then in the US. We seem to be doing something incorrectly in the US. The underlying hardware seems cheap (through independent research) but the labor and add in fees seem to be making this expensive. At sub $10k prices for the panels + batteries I would get it yesterday.
From what I understand, the going price is AU$5K in Australia. (USD3500). A small portion of that is scale since solar roof is far more common in Australia, but most of it is "doing something incorrectly", as you suspect.
The regulatory overhead to grid-connect is a _significant_ portion of the price, both for the actual paperwork labor and because of the premium it imposes on the system components (you can't use inexpensive non-UL-listed panels)
This is a good question - there are fairly high imposed tariffs on solar in the US[0] but I think the labor is the big part. Over here in the UK, solar installation would cost about $12k dollars, so quite a bit cheaper, but still not below $10k.
One thing that isn't super obvious from the article is that a lot of it is talking about industry solar panels rather than rooftop. The overheads of installation etc get a lot smaller if you're installing a whole bunch at once.
This isn't to say that installing solar panels on your house is a bad idea - they normally pay for themselves after something like 10 years from memory, so are similar to double glazing.
> they normally pay for themselves after something like 10 years from memory
I would guess this varies by locale, and people usually assume the time value of money to be zero when they make the claim. In much of the US, I think the payback time is more realistically in the 15-20 year range, which means you really only want to install panels when you install a new roof. Otherwise the lifetime of the roof will happen before break even on the panels.
> This isn't to say that installing solar panels on your house is a bad idea - they normally pay for themselves after something like 10 years from memory
I am with you, this would be better on a town or regional basis instead of on everyone’s roof. Our houses already have wires going to them and I can’t imagine my particular roof or garage is the best place to put panels and batteries. But I understand it’s a political / administrative issue which may well be not solvable easily in many places.
Many private utilities in the US have fought against residential solar, and are seemingly motivated to act against it as something against their long term interests. In California the amount of Public Utilities Commisssion retrograde policy is ridiculous.
I diy installed a 13kw ground mount with a 32kwh battery for $18,700 before the tax rebate last december. 6 year payback at my current rate of $0.12 kwh after the rebate. Its a complete no brainer at this point.
6 years to recoup your costs on a depreciating asset is maybe not such a good investment that it becomes a no brainer. It's an OK investment, but the money can probably be invested better.
Distributed solar is cute and it sometimes benefits some people but it is pointless for national policy to pursue it. As you pointed out, the cost structure of small distributed solar is dominated by office overhead, sales, management, insurance, litigation, etc etc.
If you want to look at a place that is comparable to (parts of) the US that manages to do things about 3-4x cheaper, look at Australia. They seem to have stumbled on something that works ridiculously well. You can get a quote and stuff installed in something like a few weeks at most. It's done right and efficiently without a lot of bullshit.
Other places (like the EU and especially the US) have regulatory problems around anything to do with energy. This is mostly about ass coverage resulting in a lot of pressure for certification, related fees, grid operators insisting on a lot of overhead, building codes requiring a lot of faffing about for the business of wiring together what is essentially plug and play stuff, etc.
If you have an off grid shed, providing power to it is cheap and easy because you have none of that. You buy the hardware on amazon or wherever. It arrives, you wire it up. Job done. And if you are smart you might let a qualified electrician do it right for you or at least check your work (so your shed doesn't burn down and nobody dies from electrical shocks). But fundamentally it's not that hard and this stuff is mostly pretty safe and easy to work with. Especially compared to the things people burn down their sheds with traditionally (e.g. generators).
There's a lot of optimization potential here and most of that is completely non technical.
Diurnal storage is solved by batteries. Longer term storage will very likely be solved. For several days, cheaper batteries (perhaps with lower specific power). For longer periods, either thermal storage or e-fuels.
Flow batteries might be ok for a week or so, but their market window has been shrinking as Li-ion has gotten cheaper.
The technology I'm most excited about is ultra low capex thermal, as being done by Standard Thermal. Capital cost per unit of energy storage capacity as low as $0.10/kWh(th), so it can work with seasonal storage and just a few tens of charge/discharge cycles over its lifespan.
Standard Thermal has raised $11M and is building in Germany, where they say they can deliver 365/7/24 solar resistive heat (400 C or perhaps 600 C) for half the cost of heat from burning natural gas there.
Flow batteries keep coming up again and again, but they just don't work well in practice. The power density of electrodes is too low to be practical, and this is a fundamental problem.
A regular 18650 cell has about 0.1 square meters of electrode surface. And you have thousands of these cells in a car battery, resulting in literal football fields of electrode area.
Seasonal will be handled with wind-power (tends to produce more power when solar is producing less), building extra (power being too cheap in the summer is a great problem to have) and long-distance power transmission (plenty of sun in the southern US or southern Spain even in the winter).
Those all help, to be sure. Personally, in my "if I was king of the world" fantasies, I'd make a global power grid. Aluminium production is actually high enough already for genuinely antipodal connectivity at 1 Ω, though it could also be grown fairly easily if this needed to be done faster than a timescale of decades or it turns out 1 Ω isn't low enough resistance. Main limit is global geopolitical issues, hence "if I was king of the world".
Wind certainly helps, but there's a question of what will happen to the relative cost of wind and solar in the future. Solar seems to have a steeper experience curve.
Agreed, e-fuels seem to be far and ahead the front-runner.
We can get to 95% using just short term storage. I suspect that most jurisdictions will just say "95% is good enough" rather than paying for ridiculously expensive long term storage.
We've got the nat gas capability already; keeping it around for the 5% is quite inexpensive, making the massive investment in long term storage for marginal benefit hard to justify.
OTOH, while the premium for e-fuels seems excessive, if you're only running that nat gas plant 2 days a year that premium is not so scary.
I just don't see it with thermal. You have to pay the Carnot tax, and you also need humongous amounts of material.
E.g. 100 GWh (4 days of 1GW thermal power) with a 100C temperature swing (you can't go down all the way to room temperature) will need around 3.6*10^4 tons of sand. That's a lot.
Honestly, power-to-gas sounds like the only reasonable way for now. In theory, with SOFC (Solid Oxide Fuel Cells) for power generation, it can beat the steam cycle.
They also state the cost per kWh(th) of storage capacity is about $0.10, or $100,000/GWh(th). This is thermal energy, which is converted to work at maybe 40% efficiency, mind you. There are costs over and above the dirt (for example, pipes laid through the dirt to carry heat in/out).
The biggest expense will be the pipework inside that pile. That you won't be able to service easily. And you'll also need a LOT of insulation around it to prevent heat from leaking out too quickly.
Homework: compute the heat flux from a 40 meter radius sphere, given the surface temperature 600C and the ambient temperature 0C. Now compute the amount of insulation needed to keep its temperature above 500C for 3 months, given that dry sand has an R value of 0.25 W/mK.
Note that the thermal time constant of a given geometry scales as the square of the radius. This is why subsurface geothermal heat is there even though it was "charged" gradually over millions of years. So it's not hard to achieve very long time constants just by making the pile a bit larger. They've done these computations. The result is the minimum practical size is a pile that provides ~100 kW(th) constant output.
So the idea is not practical for storage for an individual home, but could work on the scale of a village or small industrial enterprise. It would allow a solar microgrid to be completely disconnected from the larger grid, even at high latitude.
If you look at very large piles of dirt, like large earthen dams, if arranged in a suitable geometry they would have thermal time constants (assuming no fluid flow through them) in the thousands of years.
A computation for you: compute the cost of a given R value per m^2 for various materials. Dirt is very cheap, so even if it's not the best insulator it comes out on top. You need the thing being insulated to be large enough that you can fit the thick dirt layer around it, of course.
Even better than that: the thermal time constant is proportional to the square of the radius. There's the square/cube effect that causes a factor of r ratio in the volume to surface area, but there's also a factor of r from the temperature gradient (which, from the center of the pile to the surface, is inversely proportional to r).
The ~grid scale design of this for reference is somewhere around 200mx200mx50m for above ground, or ~100m cube (or bigger) for quarry infill. Such a design is going to get crushed by battery/hydro over the hours/days, but wins on cost for seasonal usage.
The temperature swing can be much greater than 100 C. Heat can be extracted as a wave passing through the store, then heat added back by reversing the flow. It would operate like a counterflow heat exchanger.
View another way: if we hook several piles in series, then lukewarm air from a first mostly discharged pile can be directed into later piles for more heating. In the continuous limit this is the concept I described above.
Realistic designs for this can achieve 450C delta t. Your energy store can store at ~1000C (slightly below rock melting point), and run steam turbines with a hot side of 600C and a cool side of 150C.
Over the season, your sand drops from ~1000 to ~600 (which is fine since your power needs drop in the spring)
Sorry, but 1000C is wildly unrealistic. There are no bulk materials that can be used to construct heat exchangers for this kind of environment. 600C is already a stretch.
At 1000C steel will react with _water_.
To be clear, I'm not talking about cooling a small crucible but a structure that is at least 20 meters in size.
Aren’t lead acid batteries great for this purpose? They have advantage over lithium in stationary setups because weight is not an issue and they can be “daisy chained” many many times.
I’m unaware of more cutting edge alternatives and the way the electrical companies handle solar is confusing IME
I dumped my 24V dual LA battery setup for a single 24V LFP battery for my inverter/UPS backup. LFP supposedly has a 10-15y life based on the 4-5000 charge cycles most cells claim. Sodium ion is on the way as well. My setup gives me about 10-12h of backup for critical loads (my PC, lights, fans).
I have a 5 kWp solar plant that produces ~25kWh per day, but it is grid-tied. I considered a hybrid setup with LFP battery back up, but decided to separate the two systems to avoid a single point of failure.
There's also, like... winter. I'm fairly sure there's a calculation somewhere you could determine the number of deaths this will cause with pretty good accuracy.
Solar is never gonna be a complete solution. At the end of the day, we could do it more efficiently by just building suns here on earth for the panels, but of course then you've achieved fusion and you're already generating more than solar could ever hope to.
Fusion, I hate to say it, is a pipe dream. Why? Because any fusion reactor loses a ton of energy to fast neutrons, which have the added negative of destroying the reactor. So-called aneutronic fusion (eg using He3) isn't zero neutrons. It's just fewer neutrons.
Stars don't have this problem because they're very large so there's only so far neutrons can go.
This is such a weird thing to assume is just impossible in physics, I don't quite know how to respond other than "yes, there are many unsolved problems in every energy sector, which is why it's an open question where we go from here"
I've heard every counterargument a million times at this point. And they fall into one of two buckets:
1. Stars do it. Yes. But stars also have size and gravity, something no nuclear plant will ever have; and
2. "People once said X was impossible" ie the Galileo Gambit. Just because Galileo was mocked for his heliocentric model but was later proven right does not mean everything is possible.
Thing is, I'm not even talking about physics. I'm talking about engineering. Something not only has to be possible but it has to be technically viable and sufficiently cheap. Put it this way: would you pay $60 billion for a 1GW power reactor with a lifespan of 30 years and an annual maintenance cost of $2B? Even if the fuel was completely free the wholesale cost per MWh would be ~$600. Nobody would build that.
Fusion research has been going on for decades and the best we've done thus far is fire a laser for about a second to induce a fusion reaction and also spend billions building magnets to try and contain a turbulent fluid at 100 million degrees, which, again, will do nothing about the neutrons that will destroy that vessel.
The joke is that fusion is always 50 years away and always will be. If you're an optimist it's always 30 years away and always will be.
I’m just glad we finally, today for some reason, have the ability to determine what will and won’t ever be possible with physics. It’s also crazy to me that we know fusion so thoroughly we cannot reliably perform it but we know it’s possible to do but we also know it’s impossible to do for extended periods.
You should inform nuclear physicists and engineers of your new-to-mankind knowledge.
Did you know we once argued over whether or not to close the patent office because “everything had already been invented”? This isn’t the Galileo concept, it’s recognizing we’ve only been doing global hard science as a species for like 50 years.
There's still sun during the winter; you just need more solar panels for the same amount of energy. Also, there tends to be more wind during the winter, so wind power makes a good complement to solar.
So the winter, by definition, will always generate less? or we're just like... covering up a bunch for half the year or something? I don't get your point.
My larger point is that solar is only ever going to be a piece of the puzzle at best. In space it might be quite nice, but otherwise it's kinda goofy to invest too much in.
With the way prices are trending, soon solar power is going to be the cheapest power source even in the winter. No one is going to complain that electricity is too cheap during the summer.
Usually solar and storage are a package deal these days for grid scale solutions. Mostly, storage is not really about providing long term storage but short term. It used to be that the sweet spot that makes the most economic sense was something like 2 or 4 hours of power (relative to the maximum output of the solar panels) but these days batteries are a lot cheaper and 8 hours or more is becoming fairly common. The point of storage is not really to cover for all the downtime when the sun doesn't shine but to give grid operators enough lead time to bring online extra generation or buy capacity on the open market and adjust their planning. Mostly a few hours is all they need to ensure the grid stays up and running through daily peak usage windows.
In aggregate, grid operators have a lot of other tools at their disposal via flexible pricing, flexible demand, and automated systems that can adapt to this to e.g. charge cars when there is a surplus of energy, turn on/off water boilers, etc. There's a lot of innovation around this topic in this space. This by the way is as much as making sure generated power doesn't go to waste than it is about ensuring there is enough power. They use batteries to time shift excess power to when they can utilize it.
Interconnected grids means that e.g. an operator in Denmark can import/export to and from the UK, Norway, Germany, etc. On a windy day they'll be exporting wind power. On a sunny day, they might add some solar to that mix. When there's no wind or sun in Denmark, they might pull in Scottish/German wind, Norwegian hydro, Swedish nuclear, etc. Batteries are being deployed all over the place at a pace that is only exceeded by the pace at which solar is being deployed. Whenever there's a surplus energy, batteries get charged up. It's very rare for all of the available generation to disappear all at the same time for long enough to drain all the batteries. And for those times of course fossil generation is still a thing as well, and will be for decades to come. There are a lot of gas based plants throughout Europe. As well as some nuclear plants of course. Singling out the EU market here but it's going to be similar elsewhere.
The point here is that there's no need to pair solar setups with days/weeks/months worth of storage. A few hours goes a long way.
> Solar is cool but solar that can make it through the night and a couple cloudy days is way cooler
The fun part is that we're still well before the point when this even matters.
Almost 60% of the US grid is still fossil fuels, with around half of that still happening during the day. Which means you can get down to ~30% fossil fuels without any storage at all because all you do is go from burning fossil fuels during the day and at night to burning fossil fuels only at night.
Hmm, how much of that is base load versus the dramatic rise of natural gas plants that respond to dynamic demands? Even in daytime, I think you need storage to get rid of those, right?
I don't know why this is downvoted. Solar and wind both essentially suck at anything other than baseline throughput. That doesn't mean they're useless, it just means that solar can't be our only solution unless we have, like... 30 breakthroughs tomorrow. We otherwise need something to handle spikes, which are both common and important, as well as periods when there is extended cloud cover even for typically-dark months.
Even if we handwave all the science needed to build batteries big enough to power cities for days, I don't think it's realistic to handwave the science needed to power a city for weeks. We don't even have enough oil for that.
"Power when it is inconvenient" is pretty much the basis for a modern society.
Solar panels still work just fine when it is cloudy, just with a lower output. And usually when it is cloudy it also tends to be a bit windy, so solar and wind nicely complement each other.
Heavy clouds and zero wind, for weeks? That's a once-a-century freak event. Just build gas peaker plants if you are worried about it. You could even add carbon capture, but constructing it might emit more than it will ever capture...
You want us to transport energy 1500 miles? Cold, dark winters cover enormous swathes of the US - inconveniently, often at similar times. So what - we're turning Florida into a solar park so the rest of the nation can use that while they're dark?
I used to think the people who took this "America is too incompetent to make the green transition" stance were just downplaying the tech out of some combination of ignorance and weird partisan logic.
But to give them due credit, they believed in this vision and put in the hard work to make sure it became true.
That's literally CCP state controlled communism !! More specifically, that's what the The Gansu–Zhejiang UHVDC project has as an overhead transmission line length (2,370 km in international units).
The very decidely non-communist SunZia wind project in SE New Mexico (not too from where I live, and the largest wind generation system in the world at this point) came with a 1600km new grid line connecting it to California (though it is a part of the overall western grid too, and electricity is fungible).
Serious citation needed that there are week-long stretches of continuous wind-free heavy cloud covering thousand mile stretches of the United States.
Also, it’s weird to talk about Florida when, say, Arizona and Utah, etc. are right there. Even Wyoming despite being further north has over half of the month sunny in the winter. One thing to remember is that we could power the entire country using solar with a fraction of the land currently used to produce corn for ethanol so we don’t even need to substantially change land use, just stop subsidizing inefficient fuel generation.
These usually drop ambient temperatures across Canada and the northern US to below -20 C, and produce generally high winds. This combination of extreme cold, cloud cover, and high winds last for multiple days, often longer than a week.
The wind plus cold means that many wind turbines cannot operate and the cloud cover and shorter days mean that solar is barely generating any energy.
the US regularly wastes money on its military and fights wars around the world, causing misery for millions.
If the US decided to divert half of the Pentagon's annual budget to electricity, the US could absolutely build the infrastructure to transport electricity thousands of kilometres.
Carbon capture makes little sense until fossil fuels have been replaced. I guess there are some Bio char technologies that might change the equation a bit, but watt for watt, you need to replace your carbon emissions first (generally speaking)
Depends on the cloud. Where I live I routinely get 50% generation on a "cloudy" day.
On a rainy day that drops closer to 20%.
As an aside - cloudy days avoid a problem I have with shade. In winter, at 3:30pm, the sun goes behind a tree and my production plummets to near zero. If there's cloud cover the sunlight is far more dispersed and there's no "shade".
Worst I've had over a day in the last few months on my home solar is about 25% of my maximum daily generation. It was one day in a very rainy week here in Brisbane Australia.
I did have one rainy day back in the middle of Winter that was 16% but that will end up being literally the worst day of the year.
It also has relatively wealthy people, living in lots of individual housing units. If you wanted to design a country that's perfect for rooftop solar your imagination might come up with Australia.
That said, Australia ought to be able to run almost everything off solar given how sunny it is, and instead solar is a distant second behind coal for electricity production. So there's plenty of work left to do.
The overwhelming majority of generation and storage is best deployed at the point of use.
Grid scale anything, is a massive inefficiency.
The only reason grid and city scale is so prevalent in public discourse is because this is the only electricity the utility is paid for, and they are very actively impeding any other solution.
In the US, there is a very large inventory of flat roof industrial buildings, in the industrial parks that are using huge amounts of electricity. Covering all of those roofs with solar (especially here in the west US) would prevent a tremendous amount of grid scale generation, and implementing storage there would eliminate a large part of the transmission line upgrades the utilities are calling for.
The biggest problem in the US isn't technical, it's the governments desire to primarily support the solutions that are best at serving utility shareholder returns, instead of the technically superior solutions.
It’s becoming common but the current administration has been highly committed to preventing that because it cuts into their fossil fuel donors’ business.
> How common is it that these industrial/commercial buildings have roof-top solar? If not common, what stops it?
One factor is weight - a lot of low-cost industrial units may well need modifications to the roof to strengthen them to be able to take the additional weight of solar panels.
Certainly where I work (science research facility in the UK) our business has only been able to install roof-top solar on a comparatively small proportion of our total roof space because a large amount of the seemingly viable space would require substantial works to make the roof strong enough for solar.
In the US, there is a slowly-growing trend of covering parking lots with solar panels, rather than buildings. You can put up very cheap i-beans + corrugated metal structures with the added benefit of shading cars. It doesn't work everywhere, but in sunny - and especially dry - regions, it's great.
You're not making any sense. If things worked like you say, the industrial manufacturers would just put solar on their roofs, save a bunch of money, and that'd be the end of the story.
If rooftop solar power were so economically efficient, the manufacturing companies would get far more shareholder money lobbying for rooftop solar than utilities can make lobbying against it. But your conspiracy thinking doesn't account for this.
Heavy machinery uses dramatically more power than the roof space above it can produce. And you can't shut the factory down every time there is a cloud in the sky, so you need a utility hookup that can power the whole factory anyway.
The grid is the technically superior solution. That's why megacorps with capital and lobbying might keep willingly connecting to it.
Strictly speaking - a battery is stored potential energy
A common battery for grid level storage is pumped hydro - that is, use the peak power during the day(s) to push water from the bottom of an elevation to the top, and hold it there - bonus points if it captures water delivered from other solar processes (evaporation -> rain)
There are about 90 billion battery solutions - none of them are very efficient, cheap to manufacture, easy to manufacture/acquire materials for, and long-lasting all at the same time.
Grid-scale sodium batteries are already in production, and there isn’t some kind of magic anti-technology shield which keeps the United States in the 1920s.
When talking about cost, it’s important to remember that solar+batteries are already cheaper and, unlike nuclear, happen on much shorter timescales. I’m not opposed to some nuclear plant starts but those guarantee a couple decades of increased pollution before there’s any chance whatsoever for carbon reduction, whereas solar can come online in a year.
Solar panels, of course, are also very dirty to manufacture. Simply bringing something online quickly is not a measure of overall efficiency.
You’re right, though, that nuclear is ALSO only a part of the solution. One day, it will be a major and necessary component of our grid, but we need to start tackling this carbon problem harder, and like… yesterday.
> Strictly speaking - a battery is stored potential energy
That's its function, but that does not make any device that stores energy a 'battery'. An electric battery is specifically a battery of electrochemical cells — Franklin invented the term as analogous to an artillery battery (a collection of guns).
Calling every form of stored energy a 'battery' is just dumbing things down for the masses.
Keeping coal plants around is cheap to cover that. Longer term things like producing ammonia during summer and converting it to electricity in fuel cells will allow to remove needs for fossil fuels completely.
The main advantage of gas plants is that they support variability. In a world with enough battery storage to last for days that would be irrelevant. And as an insurance against rare events it is better to keep coal plants as transportation and storage of coal is vastly more resilient to interruptions.
A completely renewable grid is less important than electrifying the low hanging fruit of heating and transport.
Anything below 800g of CO2 (which means basically every current grid) means electrifying is a net win. Even the famously coal heavy South African grid is already past that barrier and even if it wasn't all grids are getting cleaner over time.
A grid that has maxed out wind and solar and then used only coal for 2 weeks would be one of the cleanest grids in the world right now, on par with France or Sweden.
Chasing 100% on a grid to satisfy the complaints of people who are concern trolling isn't smart nor necessary. What you need is bulk cheap electricity to allow you to reduce your heating and transport costs and clean your air at the same time.
It looks like we’re pretty much in perfect agreement, but I think it doesn’t hurt to already start planning what to do about the last couple of percent. These are all projects with long time horizons
Yeah, thanks for that. I can only imagine someone reacted as if I am arguing against solar, which I'm not. It's just that you really need storage to phase out the natural gas peaker plants, since they need to deliver on-demand rather than as-available.
And, this gets even worse if you are also replacing baseload plants with solar, since the solar output is more variable than those old plants were, so now you need even more storage capacity to offset those dropouts at the same time you are handling demand peaks.
Sometimes, I think there is some magical thinking going on when people see solar panels work at a house without batteries, and they fail to recognize how much they depend on the grid for stability. If they ran in island mode, they'd quickly understand just how important storage is...
> Even in daytime, I think you need storage to get rid of those, right?
Suppose that solar generates only during the day and only when it's not cloudy, and it's cloudy e.g. 10% of the time. Then you're using natural gas at night, but those natural gas plants still exist during the day, so you can also use them on the 10% of days that are cloudy and you're still replacing 90% of the daytime demand.
It doesnt make economic sense to serve the entirety of daytime electricity demand from solar without batteries. Youd have to tons of fossil fuel plants that turn off during the day and then back on every night. For solar to take the next step batteries are a requirement
It's not quite as bad as that, since you don't consume fossil fuel resources when plants aren't running, but this is mostly a benefit for oil/gas plants, not coal (since the coal is likely useless without the power plant consumer anyway)
If you shut down by day, it can take multiple hours for it to be able to provide full load... and multiple hours for it to shut down cleanly. During this time it is producing power at less than optimal rates and/or using the fossil fuels to keep the wheels spinning and in sync with the grid so that they don't have to go through a phase matching period.
(aside for coal - note that it takes more than 12 hours for a coal plant to get running from a cold start)
USA should explore Pumped Storage Hydropower more, it has same or better efficiency than battery storage and can use existing facilities like hydroelectric dams
> The Taum Sauk pumped storage plant is a power station in the St. Francois mountain region of Missouri, United States about 90 miles (140 km) south of St. Louis near Lesterville, Missouri, in Reynolds County.
It has a hydraulic head of 860 feet and that represents the challenge - you need to find places in the US where you can get several hundred feet of elevation in a short distance.
Hypothetically, lets build one in Minnesota... Taum Sauk Mountain is the highest point in Missouri. The highest point in Minnesota is Eagle Mountain (in the boundary waters - you can't build there, pretend we can) ... the elevation to the top os 550 feet (about half what Taum Sauk provides) over 3.5 miles (Taum Sauk is just over 1 mile). ( https://maps.app.goo.gl/vHfWarwubaLvsf5z7 )
That's not really a problem. A spin up over a couple hours matches nicely with the slow sunset over a continent. The sun takes ~4 hours to go from a bit above the horizon in the east coast to a bit below the horizon on the west coast (solar panels make some power in twilight).
Wind also helps since wind makes more power at night, as does demand which is dramatically lower at night.
For coal, Great. Making coal economical is excellent. We should have banned it worldwide 20 years ago.
Solar+A couple of hours of batteries is already economically viable. The storage problem that is still expensive is bridging days/weeks of insufficient sun and wind.
The US uses around 4TWh of electricity a night. A battery with that capacity, to get through the night with no generation, would cost over a trillion dollars. Of course thered still be some generation at night, but still, using a battery just to get through the night is not even close to viable
1 week national battery storage is totally doable. All we need to do is convince the rest of the planet to stop making GPUs, phones, computers, and EVs for the next decade, and then give us all their rocks.
78.4TWh is about $19T (all in costs) for a national battery grid for 1 week storage, could be built over ten years but would need the US to build and own double the current global output, not even considering where all the raw materials and labor comes from.
Just by scaling up the existing technologies the full cost including installation and maintenance of a grid-scale battery in 5 years will be below 100 usd/kwh. So the price is max 400 billions or 1% of US GDP.
US has ~250 million cars. If they are all EVs (100KWh), it is 25TWh capacity.
Reserving 20% of that capacity to supply power back to the grid is 5TWh.
EVs can be charged for free during the day, ~20% of solar is lost due to curtailment. Even if a significant percentage (10 - 20%) of the people decide they are going on long drives from Florida to Vancouver and turn off supply-power-to-grid-for-money in the app, its fine, there are plenty of cars. It is the cheapest, most resilient, distributed and self-healing energy ecosystem. Only one problem, it won't make the super billionaires money. Unless it can be packaged in a way to make the super billionaires money, its a no go in US.
This infrastructure buildout costs nothing, people buy new cars all the time (~20M/year), just buy EVs instead. Because people are providing the capital and the storage infrastructure, they should be paid for it.
I think this is a pretty decent idea and hopefully within a decade at least california will be doing it. The problem though is that the biggest advantage of an EV is that you charge it overnight and never need to worry about going to the gas station or running low on power. I think a pretty significant number of people would want 100% charge every morning which makes the total addressable battery size a good bit smaller.
And if we subtract all those datacentres crammed with Nvidia GPUs ? ;)
If we're being honest here, the problem with the US is that it has always treated any sort of energy source as being infinite and has always been quite extravagant in its use of energy.
Whether a preponderance for gas-guzzling SUVs or datacentres the story is always the same. The US mentality is there will always be infinite oil in the pump and infinite electrons in the cable.
Is that actually that much more than building 400GW worth of nuclear generation capacity (assuming 10 hours of nighttime)? I think that, that simple calculation shows that it is viable. Even a trillion is 1/32th of the US GDP. Construction over a decade should not stress the US economy at all.
I also think your trillion number is at least double the raw cell cost today.
That sounds like a lot right? But it isn't large compared to US wars to protect energy resources (>$4T just for post-9/11 wars), and the payback it would generate over decades to come. In fact, this level of investment is a total no-brainer, compared to the benefits it will generate (forget about even the climate benefits - just the other economic and defense benefits.)
Current li-ion pricing is $19 per kwh (BYD's latest cell's pricing), so a single battery that covers all 4TWh would come in at 76 billion dollars. Still a shit ton but reasonable.
That might work in The SouthWest of the USA, but the Northern bits dont get enough sun to get through the day, so you'll need fossil fuel plants all day night for the Winter. If they're there already its cheaper to use all day in the summer as well.
It’s more expensive to use them all day: that’s the problem facing power plant owners where renewables are so much cheaper that they break the economics for power plants which were designed to run continuously but are more expensive when wind and solar supply is limited.
(That’s the answer for the northeast, too: New England has no shortage of wind all winter long and batteries don’t care where the electricity comes from)
Other countries are better positioned. e.g. UK has really spiky wind energy. Right this second more than half the grid is wind. Which is both cool and problematic for managing the grid.
Grid scale cheap storage would dramatic help manage that chaos
Other countries are better positioned already because they don't have an administration funded by the fossil fuel lobby - but even that doesn't explain some of the decisions, like preferring to pay $1 billion in contractual penalties rather than letting a company build an already approved wind farm (https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/23/climate/trump-totalenergi...).
only natural gas plants can do this. a coal plant cannot spin up just for the night and turn back off when the sun comes up - it's incredibly inefficient and probably causes more premature wear/tear too.
"Increased rates of component life consumption due to thermal fatigue, mechanical fatigue and wear caused by differential thermal expansion comprise the bulking of cycling (costs)," according to the International Energy Agency's Coal Industry Advisory Board.
"Every time a power plant is turned on and off, the boiler, steam lines, turbine and auxiliary components go through unavoidably large thermal and pressure stresses," the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) wrote in a report on cycling costs published in April 2012.
You don't get thermal and pressure stresses from throttling or even going into hot standby - the pressures and temperatures are the same, just the flow rate of steam changes. You only get thermal and pressure cycles from full shutdowns. As long as you keep the reactor/furnace warm then there's no issue here.
Yep, I live in Finland where we are quite far ahead of the curve when it comes to renewables and nuclear. This is one large problem. When it's winter and cold and dark, solar does not help. Wind only helps when its windy.
Batteries are coming, and will solve it, but it will still take time for them to be come cheap enough.
Only once we have ~7 days of storage (~100 GWh of storage) will we be able to get rid of the last fossil plants.
Also fun fact: a lot of solar panels in Finland are mounted vertically to walls rather than rooftops. That's because we're so far north that the sun just hangs around the horizon rather than going directly overhead. You end up catching more sunlight pointing directly south.
Budgeting for over a month without power is unheard of. Extreme scenarios ("dunkelflaute") are measured on the order of hours, maybe days, and they get shorter and less frequent the larger the grid is.
Full startup and shutdown of a coal plant can take days, but throttling down to about half power during low-load periods is normal. Power plants do this every day. Late at night, load decreases and plants throttle down. Every morning, between 0600 and 0900 local time, there's "morning load take-up" as load increases.
The big issue is what's called "ramp rate" - how fast can output power be increased or decreased? This tends to be around 1% to 3% of capacity per minute. See Figure B-2 in [1], which is a detailed discussion of how to improve your coal-fired power plant's ramp rate.
Natural gas plants have much higher ramp rates, and for batteries, it's under a second.
Nuclear plants can be ramped up and down, slowly, but since it's all capital cost, cutting output raises the price of the power.
The issue with this logic is that you build a cliff where, at some point, you need to massively invest in storage, and the storage industry hasn't had time to mature alongside the solar/wind industry.
Yeah it's crazy how many people are in denial of this.
Storage has been making impressive strides, but the cliff here (in storage and transmission, the latter of which we in the US still are sucking at) puts nuclear back in the running.
If the US didn't block import of Chinese tech, we could have electrified a decade ago.
The tech available at the current moment, is even more capable of replacing petroleum based electricity.
But our government is banning Chinese tech to serve our outdated industries instead of importing it to serve the population.
As any wise country would do when faced with superior technology, we should import it with the condition of technology exchange. Chinese manufacturers should be training US workers and industrial ownership how to produce cheap, efficient, sodium batteries.
This benefits the populous immediately, and the industries are able to advance into the current century's tech.
Call me paranoid. I have a couple of inverters here that are grid connected and I made sure everything that allowed outside connectivity in the box mysteriously stopped working. A little bit of RF knowledge goes a long way with stuff like that. It was interesting to see how many ways it tried to do this. Fortunately it kept working even without connectivity. Configuring the things is a pain though, the display and buttons are clearly not meant to be used that way but it does work.
Paranoid is me testing the plates I bought off amazon for lead, and throwing away the bathtub mat which smelled like petroleum waste. I'm fairly convinced that the goal of that ruthless dictatorship is to poison, degrade and infiltrate every single household abroad in every way possible. A fast attack might be to bring as many devices offline as possible, but the slow attack is simply to lower people's intelligence by hardware or software methods (e.g. TikTok, Qwen... or, let's say, not notifying anyone for a few months that a new SARS virus had escaped a lab). Everything that comes out of communist China is warfare, even if it looks like a plush toy.
>>> As any wise country would do when faced with superior technology, we should import it with the condition of technology exchange.
If it were a matter of industrial protectionism against a country which was not hostile, not authoritarian, didn't rely on slave labor, etc., then I'd agree with you. Countries have other pressing reasons besides immediate economic advantage to prevent this sort of thing.
To greatly oversimplify: Japan fought against opening their markets, as did China, out of political and social concerns for the stability of their states, far more than economic ones.
>> The US is far more hostile than China, also relies on slave labor, and is so increasingly authoritarian that our country's domestic & foreign policy now resembles a 3rd world dictatorship.
As a child of immigrants from the Soviet Union, and also as someone who knows people still resident in authoritarian dictatorships: This is patently ridiculous. Everything else in your post is a spray of nonsensical policy points and predictions. You led off with the tell. Frankly, it makes everything you say afterward sound like what an authoritarian enemy government would want people in the US to think about their own country.
What you wrote in your first sentence is either (a) wildly misinformed (like, you have no idea what life is like in an authoritarian country with actual slave labor, which is an insult to the people who do currently live there), or (b) intentionally nefarious (like, you work for such a country, in a capacity to minimize the distinction between their system of autocracy and the United States' democracy). If it's (a), study at least a little bit of the history of mass murder in the 20th Century. If (b), well, we live in a free country so you can spew whatever garbage you want. Interestingly, we have not been overtaken by any of the dictatorships that have sprung up in Eurasia over the past hundred years, and I don't think we will be soon.
You should visit the Tibet region and ask the locals. But:
1. As a US citizen, you would probably not a get permit necessary for entering the Tibet region.
2. If you could get a permit for Tibet region and go there, you would be followed by police officers dressed in civilian clothing. The locals would be quite hesitant to speak to you.
(Source: been there long ago, seen it). China has many qualities, but freedom is not one of them.
Nor are civil rights, or civil litigation for that matter.
I don't think the poster you're responding to is writing in good faith; they're either an agent of an authoritarian power, or blind to the difference of being one.
People in China can say anything the government approves of, but they can't say "long live freedom and democracy," unless they want to be executed.
Neither, I suspect, will Chinese AI models make any statement in sympathy with personal freedom, democracy, or human rights; it would come at the expense of the people who paid to train those models, and that can't be allowed.
Fun fact: there are huge government-sponsored posters proclaiming Freedom (自由) and Democracy (民主) through China, because they're two of the official twelve Core Socialist Values.
I guess freedom means different things to different people. Do people in China just roll their eyes at that?
And are we perfectly free in America? No. But we can say whatever we want about the government or the corporations, provided we're nonviolent. And we're not commanded how many children we can or can't have, or what religion to practice or not, or forced to show loyalty to a political party.
Plus we can smoke weed, buy guns, vote the bums out every four years, and most importantly make money without having to pay off some party official.
>> As any wise country would do when faced with superior technology, we should import it with the condition of technology exchange.
Europe tried doing that. And our green technology sector promptly collapsed, because it couldn't compete with Chinese undercutting our prices. The only thing left now are wind turbines, but Chinese are making inroads there too. In the meantime, the green transition barely moved a needle when energy shock arrived in 2022 or this year. Rendering rest of our industry, especially chemical industry, uncompetitive.
Yup. Forcing technology exchange is exactly what China demanded of the US to get access to its markets, specifically to gain the advantage it now has.
Access to US markets conditioned on full tech exchange with US battery and automakers would be a fair exchange (and would likely require some temporary support of US automakers so they survive the transition).
> More stoked for when the same is said for storage
Batteries have use in war and power. It will likely scale faster than PV. What we need is the second derivative, so production of the latter can be turbocharged just before battery production is about to break through.
I think solar is amazing and we need more of it - but I can't stand this solar and storage go at it alone mentality. It's pretty thickheaded to discount the other forms of energy that we can use and will need.
In practice, in Ukraine distributed solar power has been an increasingly important source of resilience in their power supply system.
There are legit reasons to push back against “solar and batteries everywhere” but I find it hard to credit resilience in a conflict situation as one of them.
I probably should have clarified -- I'm not referring to forward bases or front line operations. That location would be fantastic for solar. I'm talking utility scale solar operations deployed in large areas -- quite easy to knock out as it is a huge surface area and not particularly robust.
This isn't a reason not to go with solar+batteries everywhere. This is an observations of the product weak points and why it isn't the only solution in the chain.
A nuclear plant in a war zone is a dirty bomb waiting to be set off, which is incredibly easy to do, technically. Gas and coal plants are also end up being easy targets, as the war in Ukraine has shown. The most reliable one is solar because of how distributed it is. You can knock off one solar field, but then there are rooftops. You really need to destroy a city if you want to get it rid of power completely.
(Diesel power generators also work, but they require constant fuel supply, which can be complicated in a war zone)
But for the most part it will trail solar, because the first chunk of the solar doesn't really need storage. But once there's a healthy percentage of solar, all new solar will have storage or it won't get paid.
This is solvable, but it will require international cooperation on a scale that is unlikely. But you wouldn't need any storage at all, just a large number of long distance HVDC lines to move the energy from wherever the sun is shining to where it isn't.
The costs of large number long distance HVDC lines with accompaning invertor stations would be as expensive as a electric generation based on nuclear power.
I don't think that is true. The bigger problem is the international cooperation required, as well as that such a system would be vulnerable to attacks.
"
The cost of the electrical equipment that brings the offshore renewable energy from the wind turbines to the shore is in the same range as the cost of the wind turbines themselves. The future offshore grid will need tens of billions of Euros of investments in HVDC transmission infrastructure. For instance, Dutch-German transmission system operator TenneT has contracted 30 G€ for such connections in the North Sea.
"
It's a nice thought, but the strategic implications make it very hairy, and international trust isn't going in the right direction for that. But within large countries like the US with very varied climates, it seems like we really should.
Batteries already kill peaker plants as a grid-scale battery that lasts 4 hours became cheaper than running natural gas turbine to cover the evening demand peak.
13kW on the roof and a 48kW battery. It produces on cloudy days, and battery alone can last 3-4 days with regular unmoderated use with 6 adults at home. That includes split system air-conditioners on eco mode.
It produces enough on cloudy days to still.top the batteries up to full.
I had a day recently where production topped 80kW and was exporting bulk before late afternoon grid production limiting kicked in. That's a lot of juice, and Ive basically not touched the grid in 7 months.
Where are you located? I hear comments like this and get excited and then find out they're based in, like, Australia and well duh. Whenever I look into it here in Chicago, it seems I don't get nearly the same production on cloudy days, and especially in winter.
I don't think the winner takes all mindset can be applied in electricity generation. But I think the clever arrangement between these technologies will work:
Cloudy days don't matter if you over provision. You can add way more panels than your inverter can handle to account for the cloudy days. Night is another story, of course.
Solar can definitely make it through a couple of cloudy days.
This is because people that bring that argument act like every house is it's own electric island. But that's far from the truth. In developed countries the electric grid is HIGHLY interconnected. Look at this beautiful map: https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/
So, how likely is it that it's cloudy in Bulgaria and Spain and Germany and UK and Hungary and and and ...
(It's only the US that decided to mis-design their grid. Instead of one united, where each one can help the others, they have 4 different grid. That is also one of the reason why the SAIDI --- duration of power interruptions per customer and year --- is so terribly bad).
Also, if you buy your solar cells to work with ambient light, put them into east-west (instead of south) and use an inverter that doesn't use 50W just for itself --- then you can also get power WHEN it it cloudy. Enough to sustain e.g. your router, fridge etc. Not enough to charge an EV.
But... for a day-night-cycle we have local batteries. They got cheap in the last 5 years. I mean, the cheaper ones arrive at 100 €/ kWh.
And finally: no one every proposed that "a single solution is all we need". We don't need just Ford passenger cars. We also need vans. And trucks. And buses.
By limiting your thinking artificially to "How can I oppose a situation where ONLY solar panels provide power" you're doing your own reasoning power no favor. The starting premises is already faulty, almost like a strawman attack (invent some bogus scenario, attack that scenario, hope that others that can't think sharp fail for this bad reasoning).
The fun thing is that people like you post this again and again, in every discussion. Since years. As if you're unable to learn that the world isn't only "one solar island next to another solar island". Why is it so hard to understand that a grid is inherently connected? And that we have a multitude of ways to generate electric power?
It is amazing that solar, a ridiculous cheap and easy to install solution is winning the energy future. In the past, based mostly on playing SimCity, I would have thought that Nuclear and then Fusion was the future, but solar does seem to be winning and pretty thoroughly.
I guess this is in part because it only needs amazing factories and not complex deployed and maintained infrastructure that is at risk of blowing up.
Solar seems to fix the mould of a disruptive technology to a T.
Solar only works if you 1) live in a standalone house that 2) don't get tornadoes, typhoons, severe rainstorms or other disasters annually, and 3) they are installed on-prem, for off-grid capacities.
Games like SimCity often only supports ultradense Manhattan style cities and centralized solar plants through distribution networks. That combination doesn't work with solar technology. It should be like "Set up offgrid solar incentives program($1.5B)" buttons that reduces power draw proportionate to numbers of standalone houses that resets when disaster hits the parts of the map it was used on.
Interesting perspective. As someone who didn't even grow up in the US, I saw Sim City as a builder of relatively low density, hard zoning cities that had little to do with the high density I grew up in. The idea of commercial zones didn't even make sense to me, as in Spain, such thing doesn't exist. Need for traffic to get to the commercial zones made little sense.
Solar seems to be working just fine in Spain, a place where almost nobody lives in a stand alone house, or even a row house. You still put solar in the building, but then you have industrial solar in places wi5 little agricultural value, and wind turbines installed on top of hills. All of this could work just fine in any sim city I remember, as you are just dedicating space to power, which is fine.
Solar is “working just fine” as a way to help contribute daytime generation. It’s only 20% and the storage bit hasn’t been worked out so it’s going to continue to require something to cover the gaps at night. So the gas/coal/nuclear needs to backstop unless the population is good with nighttime blackouts when the wind stops. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Spain
I've seen plenty of solar in areas that get hit by hurricanes or tropical cyclones. If your panels get blown to bits, you just put up new panels once the storm is over (or you know, take them down the storm is forecasted)
On our boat[1] we have deployable solar that we need to take down every time it gets windy so I'm quite familiar with the process.
Plan it and it won't be a huge deal.
That said, I'm sure there are spots on this planet where solar isn't the best renewable option. Maybe small-scale wind power would be better where you are? On our boat we have both (and hydro for when we're sailing). Sadly these mechanical generators haven't yet received similar scale effects to their price as solar has.
I live in a place that gets typhoons, but there's probably only one big enough to rip my panels off every once in 5 years. Still, you never know which one it will be and I don't look forward to having to taken mine inside for false alarms.
That's a very narrow view of solar. Solar, like any other form of electricity, can be transmitted, even very large distances. There's no reason that places like the US Southwest can't generate a whole bunch of solar and export it to the national grid.
Plus below a certain cost threshold, the risk of damage still means the overall cost is lower.
Funny that you mention SimCity ... I used to play it (mostly the Nintendo SuperNES/SuperFamicom versions) and nuclear power plants would invariably explode at some point. I guess few people talked about climate change back then because the only drawback to the other power plant types was space usage ... reflecting on it, interesting how the assumptions formed the game ...
Do you remember the microwave antenna power stations that power from solar satellites? The Moore-like drop of solar prices killed solar satellites, solar greenhouses with turbine chimneys, TW superconductor submarine cables circling the world etc.
Theoretically fusion can/would be an absurd winner but the $$ needed to get it there vs "good enough" solar will likely prevent that from happening at a global scale IMO.
it's a great source of energy mind you, but I kind of wince everytime people are trying to say it's better than nuclear (if you put the dangerosity of the raw material aside of course)
there are excellent storage capacities now, which helps a lot, but nuclear stays unmatched in producing vast amounts of electricity on demand (as long as we're not in a brutal heat wave to be fair)
Fission is unmatched in its ability to abandon projects after spending tens of billions of dollars. I don't see how any rational person can look at the history of nuclear and say "damn, this thing can drop electrons on short notice." That's just a ridiculous take.
" but I kind of wince everytime people are trying to say it's better than nuclear"
Solar is the superior form of nuclear energy. You're using a big ass nuclear fusion reactor in the center of our solar system to generate energy, and you harvest that energy by capturing its photonic output.
As far as storing the energy for peak demand/nighttime usage, we've got literally hundreds of methods to do it, from pure mechanical to electrochemical.
Isn't targeting their nuclear plants the first thing that Russia did when they invaded Ukraine? And there are all of these refineries and pipelines being bombed around Iran. And sometimes an oil tanker or several gets stolen...
Centralized energy infra just isn't resilient enough against geopolitical problems to be worth investing in.
By contrast, ain't nobody wasting a $50k missile on a $5k battery just so they can cut power to one building.
Exaggeration: everything on the grid has a "trip" for instant disconnect, and there's usually a steam bypass for ramping down fairly quickly.
Ramping up takes longer, yes, especially from maintenance. But the real factor is that operating cost is constant, almost independent from output, so they want to run the plant at operational 100% as much as possible.
I think we’ll see a pivot from the right on solar soon, once they realize how cheap it is and how much money they can make. They’ll spin it as home-grown local jobs stuff but regardless it’s a win-win.
The right's opposition to it is mostly rooted in the fact that historically the fossil fuel industry has been a major funding cornerstone of the right.
The pamphlet from which we get the term "fundamentalism" was published by an oil industry tycoon.
So the right is incentivized to protect this industry even if it becomes obsolescent and is no longer the most economical or practical way to generate at least much of our energy needs (electricity).
While the right has often sounded pro-nuclear, in practice they tend not to be that enthusiastic about it when they actually get into office. Obama supported the first new nuclear plant in decades.
I'm not convinced. If the fossil fuel industry has such a grip on the right, how did these things make it into the 2008 Republican Party Platform [1]?
Climate change:
> By increasing our American energy supply and decreasing the long term demand for oil, we will be well positioned to address the challenge of climate change and continue our longstanding responsibility for stewardship over the environment.
...
> As part of a global climate change strategy, Republicans support technology-driven, market-based solutions that will decrease emissions, reduce excess greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, increase energy efficiency, mitigate the impact of climate change where it occurs, and maximize any ancillary benefits climate change might offer for the economy.
...
> Because Republicans believe that solutions to the risk of global climate change will be found in the ingenuity of the American people, we propose a Climate Prize for scientists who solve the challenges of climate change. Honoraria of many millions of dollars would be a small price for technological developments that eliminate our need for gas-powered cars or abate atmospheric carbon.
Clean energy:
> Alternate power sources must enter the mainstream. The technology behind solar energy has improved significantly in recent years, and the commercial development of wind power promises major benefits both in costs and in environmental protection. Republicans support these and other alternative energy sources, including geothermal and hydropower, and anticipate technological developments that will increase their economic viability. We therefore advocate a long-term energy tax credit equally applicable to all renewable power sources.
Reducing demand for fossil fuels:
> Conservation does not mean deprivation; it means efficiency and achieving more with less. Most Americans today endeavor to conserve fossil fuels, whether in their cars or in their home heating, but we can do better. We can construct better and smarter buildings, use smarter thermostats and transmission grids, increase recycling, and make energy-efficient consumer purchases. Wireless communications, for example, can increase telecommuting options and cut back on business travel. The Republican goal is to ensure that Americans have more conservation options that will enable them to make the best choices for their families.
...
> We must also produce more vehicles that operate on electricity and natural gas, both to reduce demand for oil and to cut CO2 emissions.
> Given that fully 97 percent of our current transportation vehicles rely on oil, we will aggressively support technological advances to reduce our petroleum dependence. For example, lightweight composites could halve the weight and double the gas mileage of cars and trucks, and together with flex-fuel and electric vehicles, could usher in a renaissance in the American auto industry.
They no longer say anything like that, which supports my point.
The argument that the fossil fuel industry historically being a major source of their funding is why they currently oppose renewables is weak because that has been a major continuing source of their funding for many decades.
Hence to explain why the renewable support in the 2008 party platform went away we need to look for an explanation other than simply the fossil fuel industry wanted it.
It still may be due to the fossil fuel industry, but to make that argument one needs to explain why they didn't have enough power before to stop it from going into the platform in 2008 but they did have enough later to get rid of it.
The oil and gas industry loves solar and wind. You need baseload generation capacity in those outlier days where there is cloud cover and the wind doesn’t blow.
That baseload capacity comes from natural gas power plants. By building solar and wind you are guaranteeing a market for their products in the future.
Not sure what religious fundamentalism has to do with any of this.
"historically the fossil fuel industry has been a major funding cornerstone of the right."
The Eastern Bloc in the Cold War was extremely keen on fossil fuels (and nuclear power) and very poor at dealing with pollution. As is the PRC.
In Western Europe, coal miners were the backbone of the far left in places like Germany and the UK including Communist parties. The British Labour Party's vote was traditionally strongest in coal mining areas.
I don't know so much about the US situation, but I am aware that some American coal miners were involved in socialist movements there many decades ago.
> So the right is incentivized to protect this industry even if it becomes obsolescent and is no longer the most economical or practical way to generate at least much of our energy needs (electricity).
I think in that case industries that will became most economical or practical way to generate electricity simply will start funding the right.
Only Fox News boomers are against solar power. The rest of the right wing just doesn't want government slush fund handouts to vaporware companies like the Obama administration. If it's cheaper, great. Don't drag CO2 into the argument, just win on price and the right wing will happily adopt it.
If you can solve the problem in a way that doesn't give government and NGO's more power over private industry, nobody will push back. If the solution is invasive government regulation, the answer will always be no. Also, can't involve the tax payers funding any of it.
Good news, we can! Solar and battery technology will reduce our reliance on oil, which will reduce the need for our expensive overseas misadventures and crimes.
Im sure theres an element of "private industry should profit off the sun because I'm a temporarily embarrassed millionaire and the government cant be trusted to run efficiently" vs "the government should build and maintain communal infrastructure so everyone can benefit and profit isnt extracted" with both sides thinking their version keeps things cheaper in the end for the customer.
Private industry should be able to profit off the sun and it's disturbing that you think asserting this is a dunk. Steinbeck's temporarily embarrassed capitalists quote (not "millionaires", that is a misquote of what he actually wrote in 'A Primer on the 30s' for Esquire magazine in 1960) was referring to well-off liberals involved in socialist activism in the 30s and having a naive, self-interested understanding of what policies would actually help the proletariat. The government often can't be trusted to run efficiently because the government is insulated from having to actually make a profit delivering services people want to pay for, and is often being used for other poltical ends by people who do not care about wasting taxpayer money. Communal infrastructure is often not something everyone benefits from because infrastructure that is legally required to serve everyone by law often has a bunch of compromises that make it practically unusuable for some group of people who can't do anything to change it because they are a numerical minority.
We're barreling toward a point where above a certain wealth level and below a certain population density individuals can get all their energy from the sun, store it with batteries you get in the mail from Temu/Amazon/Alibaba and connect it all together with stuff you can buy from a Home Improvement store. All done unilaterally. Very hard to sink the claws of regulation into that except after the fact (unpopular). That is a future that too many people would be happy to sacrifice a lot of pollution to prevent.
So I think the pivot you're talking about, which I agree with eventually happen, will be offset in at least significant part.
> individuals can get all their energy from the sun, store it with batteries
Good luck storing that energy in batteries through the winter. Having a portion of $50/kWh batteries that cycle once a year results in pretty high energy costs. At some point non-battery storage (e.g. generators running on diesel) take over.
Of course, if people are willing to go totally off-grid then good luck to them.
1 week of storage that is cycled perhaps once or twice a year. 30 year lifetime, say, so 60 cycles in its lifetime. $50/kWh so perhaps $1/kWh for two (presumably cold and dark) weeks a year.
Of the top 10 states in solar generation in July 2026, 7/10 of them voted for Trump in 2024 [1].
The U.S. solar industry installed 43 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in 2025, remaining the dominant source of new capacity added to the grid for the fifth consecutive year. Solar and energy storage represent 79% of new capacity installed in the first year of the Trump Administration [2].
You would think the administration would champion these efforts, even continue or expand subsidies for it and other things like EVs. Instead they seem to be doing most of what they can in their power to quash green energy.
Because they very transparently are personally getting paid by fossil interests. It’s a naked grift, just like everything else this administration does.
I don't see this happening for a very long time. Mines and oil and gas wells are huge wealth concentrators.
Oil wells decrease in production over time. It's called the decline rate. For wells in the Permian basin, the average decline rate is about 15%. So a 1000 barrel per day ("bpd") well produces ~850bpd in year 2, ~700bpd in year 3 and ~550bpd in year 4. That means you need to be constantly drilling wells. That's more wealth concentration opportunity.
1MW of solar produces 1MW in years 1 through 20.
Additionally, the fight for control over resources induces demand for weapons. Solar doesn't do that. This is summed up as No one goes to war over a solar panel [1].
>> 1MW of solar produces 1MW in years 1 through 20.
I agree with your post, but the above statement is not technically accurate.
Panels do drop in production over time; A very rough rule-of-thumb is around 1% loss per year.
So after 20 years production is at like 80%. (Ymmv)
Of course this isn't really a big deal. The panels themselves are cheap and can be replaced very easily. Equally there is a market for 2nd hand panels as they still produce, and are ideal for places that are not space constrained.
> Mines and oil and gas wells are huge wealth concentrators.
Only if the oil price remains high. If the world, um, situation stabilizes we will go back to having a glut of oil and hence low prices. Lower than ever I would guess because of the current massive transition to EVs.
Nope. Big oil has spent big money on propaganda for a VERY long time. Something that almost all right wing pundits and podcasters are funded by.
For the right to actually embrace solar, you need either big money in solar to start it's own propaganda campaigns or you need big oil to collapse to the point where they can't afford paying propagandists. Right now, they are making record profits so don't count on that anytime soon.
I don't think many people on the right have ever been against solar power. It's rather being pro all power and not wanting to remove a source to replace it. The demands to remove power sources come from the left. Build as much solar as you want, but don't shut down the nuclear plants.
The problem is left and right are too broad. There are some one each side in every different option. There are oil barrons in the right and those who like solar because it is economical. Likewise the left has those who hate all electric and want to go back to the pre electric era, and those who want solar.
The current US administration has forcibly shutdown solar, onshore and offshore wind projects. Explicitly, intentionally.
A bit of realism would help here. Yes, there's a left/NIMBY overlap to some degree, but the forces from the non-right camp seeking to limit power development comes from the NIMBY elements, not the left elements.
A bit of realism is that there's a very well established anti-nuclear popular movement on the left, which has existed for decades. As long as we have access to history books and photos from the past, there is no use denying this.
Germany recently finished their complete dismantlement of the nations nuclear power. Another nuclear country Sweden, has shut down seven of their reactors, but are at least rhetorically changing back to supporting nuclear.
Go and talk in real life with people on the left and you'll find many of them are against nuclear power. Go and talk in real life with people on the right and it will be hard for you to find anybody who is against solar power. Because why would you be against solar?
You were using the example of "left" opposition to nuclear power as a complete or partial refutation to my point that there really is no or very little "left" opposition to power technology.
Maybe I write too much like a journalist, but you've misunderstood that sentence. It would read "remove all power sources" if I wanted to say that.
I also wouldn't have written "remove a power source", since there are movements on the left against several different power sources, including nuclear and coal and maybe more. In the context of this discussion we might however stick to just talking about nuclear and solar.
People who have no other arguments than Reddit down votes: Try to get out of your bubble and sit down and talk with somebody on the right IRL and see if they have anything against solar power. I've never heard anybody in my life be against it, so maybe you are just swallowing untruths because they align with your taste.
The ironical thing is nothing screams independent, rugged like having your own large single family home with your own power source which is even powering your EV. The US suburbia will become net positive if more people figure out wasting roof space does not make sense
I've now seen farmers replacing diesel trucks with Rivian trucks. A lot of them are starting to get it, and the Republicans are losing them as a result.
I had a staunchly Republican environmental science professor in college say that environmentalism IS conservatism and Republicans shot themselves in the foot by making it political. He gave example after example and I'm not sure I've ever heard a more convincing argument before.
I'm not rly convinced that roofs are the best places for solar.
1. Then you need small scale transformers
2. Lots of roofs have shadows on them a lot of the time, like from trees or other nearby buildings
3. Most roofs have to get replaced every 15 years
4. Roof installed solar is fixed in place
I think parking lots, rural empty land and the like are a better starting point that avoids all 4 of these issues.
Rooftop solar has the benefit that you distribute the investment cost over a large number of people, even if the costs are a lot higher than grid-scale installations on the ground.
I'm surprised to hear that you need to replace roofs every fifteen years. What are they made of? The roofs I know last decades longer than that.
Grid scale installations are also amortized over many people (?!?!). This is literally why governments and corporations exist.
And rooftop solar had to be subsidized in the US, so apparently it wasn't attractive enough as an investment on its own. Even now, solar without batteries isn't economically beneficial to individuals, and batteries are ludicrously expensive and require a lot of space.
> I'm surprised to hear that you need to replace roofs every fifteen years.
Asphalt shingles. Of course you can use something else like a metal roof. But the solar panel itself doesn't last that long since efficiency drops and new technology gets so much better. So you're still gonna have a new part of your house that can break whenever it feels like it and needs maintenance every so often. Something I want the government or a utility company to deal with, please.
Right, that's the only benefit. But while the real estate is "free", the cost to install there compared to somewhere else has to include all costs, not just real estate.
Actually, Texas is leading the way on Solar and it has been exploding under the Trump administration too. California has too much regulations and grifting to scale solar compared to Texas, so hopefully we see a pivot from the left soon.
I'm happy if we don't need more nuclear. We're already leaving the place in a sorry state, might as well not litter it with stuff that can kill you if you look at it too long...
The price coming down is great, more accessibility to more people. Have there been any significant breakthroughs in overall average efficiency/conversion? e.g. 30%+ Asking for my own selfish needs as I am in a place with reduce sunlight availability.
You can get around it with multi-layer, but each layer adds diminishing returns on improvements, while the cost keeps increasing.
The best way to handle places with less solar irradiance is to have more panels. The cost per panel keeps dropping, so the economics keep improving in that way.
Agreed adding more panels would work around the limitation. The reason I ask is that in theory there is room to reach upwards of 48%, the max being reached right now is around 32% and all the panels I can find that are mass produced are between 20% and 22% assuming one can even find the numbers, some companies are making the numbers hard to find. Anything above 22% appear to climb in cost exponentially.
With more panels my setup will be more of an eye-sore, require more and longer cables, combiner boxes and the setup becomes a bigger project. So I am just being a selfish ass but I had to ask where we are.
Multijunction solar cells (the ones that can get over 30% efficiency in theory or 25% in practice) are a completely different market. They generally go into satellites and research labs, not rooftops and power plants. That's why the numbers are hard to find.
It's just clickbait headline speak. Predates LLMs by a little bit. I think it's meant to make it sound like you're being let in on a secret or sometime to cast whatever is being reported on in a negative light by implying it's sneaky somehow.
Cost per kW/mW is much lower at grid scale than home scale. For a home installation you are also paying for the roof mounting, running cabling through your house, inverter(s), and a transfer switch at minimum.
The cost of the panels themselves is becoming one of the cheaper parts of that project.
Vast majority of costs is in the installation and regulation, Australia home installation costs are a fraction of the cost of the USA and in Europe with plug in solar its a few hundred Euros for a couple panels and small inverter for a small setup
Come to Europe. Our discount stores will sell you a kit for €200-€300. Not 20k-30k, 200-300.
That's on the small side of things, of course, but we also have PV-covered carports for about the same as a non-PV-covered carport: https://www.kaufland.de/product/512021383/
The fact that solar panels are getting cheaper on a sqft basis than plywood or sheet metal means we are going to stat to shove them in lots of places we never expected to especially if micro inverters or optimizes become cheap as well. why not use solar panels on your fence if it is cheaper than any other options.
If you have to hire Some Guy to do anything to your entire roof, it'll cost you $30k. The panels are basically free these days, the labor required to install them is not.
Solar panels cost less than $1/Watt. Then you need some brackets to hold them, some wiring, and likely an MPPT controller. The rest of that price is red tape specific to your locality.
They're so cheap that bars in Colombia had panels as their terasse awnings. Cheaper than cloth and makes power.
The city grew around my house and now I have access to city water if I want. I stick with my well because it is cheaper. Even if I had to drill a new well, over 20 years it is cheaper than city water. Pipes and city scale treatments that I don't need are expensive.
Rooftop solar and grid scale solar farms are two completely different things. Rooftop solar requires a custom install for every home. Solar farms can leverage economies of scale to drive costs lower and lower.
$30k for what? Your house? Prices vary massively depending on needs, and whether or not you want to reduce grid usage, time shift grid usage, or replace it entirely and go off-grid.
This article isn't about personal solar installations, in any event.
Does anyone understand why you can't generally use solar when the power goes out? Is it just risk to line workers? (Couldn't you just auto-disconnect from the mains?) Is it just too variable to be useful enough on its own? Is my premise just wrong?
You can, especially when you also have an energy storage rack. The inverter has to support going into "island mode".
Where I live, on sunny days, the grid goes over 253V (230V nominal +10%), so in order for me to generate anything, my inverter disconnects itself from the grid.
The risk to line workers is overstated, they ground the lines before working on them. The reason solar doesn't work without the grid is because most solar installs don't [0] have batteries. And you can't practically power your house directly off panels if you don't have a battery to act as a buffer.
So - short answer, it costs more and it doesn't happen that often. So contractors don't sell/install it.
Most solar installs work by tying into the existing main breaker of the home.
The cheapest way to do this is to leave the line feeding from the power meter to the main panel untouched. Instead you do anti-islanding detection at the inverters, and when they detect that mains is "down" they automatically cut off to prevent trying to backfeed power to your whole neighborhood during an outage (dangerous, not a good idea).
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Second issue - there are many appliances that are NOT happy about being turned on and off at random times, and it can significantly impact their lifespan (ex - refrigerators, acs, computers, washers & dryers, etc).
So given the variability of direct solar, you don't want to accidentally destroy your ac unit by having it turn on and off 100 times as random clouds float by.
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But! If you're willing to install even moderate battery capacity (and LFP is getting quite cheap as well). Then you can absolutely do this. It's just more complicated and more expensive.
You need to wire in a mains relay (~$1,000 depending on the unit) and install some battery capacity to prevent very frequent startup/shutdown, then go through some painful additional signage and labeling requirements (at least in most of the US) and also install some additional shut-down switches on the exterior of the home (ex - to automatically turn the inverters off, and to shutdown the battery system).
Then, yes, you can absolutely stay on solar power while the grid is down. In the same way that people are allowed to run whole-home generators to stay online when the grid is down.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. Can we connect? Email on my profile. I run a non-profit, I teach middle/high-school and college kids about building codes and the first thing I have them do is find out the county building code engineers[1] and ask them to update the code: require 240V outlets in the garage for EV charging. After they know how to do this, the next steps are to require 240V outlet for heat pump water heater, induction stove (solves indoor air pollution), heat pump HVAC. Everything can be electric. Finally, build the house with solar panels on the roof.
Home circuitry, load center need to be redesigned for V2X (vehicle to grid, home, load, etc), plug-in solar and batteries, solar/batteries replacing generators, etc. You seem to have thoughtful ideas about these and it would help to have someone knowledgable articulate how it should be done.
[1]The idea is that they can change the world right now by understanding what they want in their world (clean and free energy) and that they need to ask for those changes because buildings last ~100 years. The lowest hanging fruit is future-proof all construction and have it be ready for incremental changes without needing any labor or permitting work.
This isn't [pro|anti] [biden|trump|abortion|guns|vaccines|facemasks|etc].
Its kids deciding for themselves about the world they want to live in and what features they want in it. Buildings last ~100 years and most likely they are going to live in a home that was built in the past. If they want modern features or amenities without spending a fortune rebuilding the house, its best to future proof.
Building codes are how people went from defecating outside (not the best idea) to thinking about public health and spread of infectious diseases to building indoor bathrooms and plumbing. Once people figured out this is a slightly better way of living, it made into building code.
There are apartments being built today in major metro areas of Asia, they look very fancy, but they don't have a carve-out for a fridge, washer/dryer or a dishwasher. These are concrete homes that people will live in for a long long time. Everyone will eventually need these appliances, but your trade-offs are a significantly worse aesthetic home with all these appliances plugged in your living area or do without them. There was a recent post about white women being racist and not adopting washers immediately, because they have maids. But there is another explanation, old homes are not built with a place for water and electric hookups and a designated space where it goes in. We can see the same phenomenon in Asia now, almost all households in India have a maid to do the clothes, dishes, etc. A machine is far more reliable, higher quality, and cheaper. But there is no designated space, hookups or outlets.
The next generation of kids are going to deal with different challenges. They can't rely on the demographic ponzi scheme, the growth will stop. Building anything new will stop and rentier capitalism will extract the rents from very very old homes for a very long time. See the housing stock in London, (half of it Victorian, 25% from 1900 - 1929, 34% 1930 - 1949). London, the HQ of British Empire, the seat of capitalism for centuries has expensive and old homes. You can also see multi-million dollar very very old homes in bay area and almost any metro. If you are pro defecating outside, anti-electricity, and pro-pollution (air pollution kills 10M/year - nytimes), I don't know what to tell you. These are things that all humans everywhere have to deal with, not political positions.
Read your comment again: you are going straight to the political activism before even explaining the difference between 120V and 240V:
> the first thing I have them do is find out the county building code engineers[1] and ask them to update the code
Based on your other comments, it doesn't appear you're qualified to be teaching kids about this stuff in the first place, given the lack of understanding about basic electrical code.
The real world is full of tradeoffs. If you also told the kids that mandating 240V outlets in garages would increase the cost of new homes by $1,000 they may have a different opinion on the matter, given that those college kids you're teaching probably imagine themselves trying to buy a home in a few years.
Years ago I owned a home built in the 1980's that had a central vacuum system. It was a cool concept but utterly useless. No new homes that I know of have these systems anymore.
Imagine you were born in the 1960's and thought that these things were the future. Think of all the vacuum bags we'll save from the landfill with this technology! Think of all the money people will save on vacuum cleaners!
> If they want modern features or amenities without spending a fortune rebuilding the house, its best to future proof.
The future is uncertain. Ten years from now people may not even want to own cars if autonomous taxis take off. The whole concept of a garage may morph into something unrecognizable to us today. But if you get your way, we'll waste tons of money putting 240V outlets that never get used as intended.
What is the environmental cost of mining and producing literal tons of copper wire and installing it in new homes for outlets that never get used? What is the cost of using skilled electrician labor to install useless outlets instead of having those same electricians working on building a new solar plant?
I encourage you to discuss these tradeoffs. Don't just ride the good vibes of teaching kids how to use political activism to "make the world a better place", without ever actually teaching them how to evaluate if a certain choice actually makes the world a better place.
If people want a 240V outlet in their garage, they are welcome to pay for it. It doesn't need to be mandated. Home builders aren't stupid: they know what their customers want. If they think they can sell that amenity, they'll install it. If they suspect their customers won't use it, they'll omit it and offer them a lower price. That is the most environmentally optimum solution in the first place. Only those homes that intend to use these outlets should get them.
Imagine I was running a non-profit that teaches middle and high school kids about the human body and the first thing I have them do is to look up their legislator and ask them to pass anti-abortion legislation.
In both situations, kids are being used to promote a political agenda.
It's no different than the parents who bring their kids to protests and make signs for them to hold. Except parents likely explain why they're bringing their kid to a protest. This guy just straight up uses them for his own political goals before even explaining why their doing it.
The very simple answer is you must have a battery system to complement the solar system or you're just losing power again when a cloud comes and decimates your household production. The electrical inertia must be held at a nice constant.
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense too. I didn't have a sense for how much power would fluctuate, but it makes sense that it would almost _need_ to fluctuate well below capacity. If it didn't, it would mean that in full sun you'd have built your solar array well _over_ capacity, which would be inefficient in a different direction.
Solar's global peak month in (northern hemisphere) summer 2024 nearly equaled nuclear and now it's possible that the next yearly minimum month coming up this december will match nuclear just 2.5 years later.
Put alternatively, better rates for consumers. How should one portion the cost of the electrical system as a whole to different groups of people? If someone seldom draws electricity from the grid, and only when it is likely more expensive how much should they pay? What about the limit where everyone is a prosumer and has this usage pattern?
I don't know anything about the polish electricity system but if supply or demand isn't very elastic then excess of either can lead to pretty huge price fluctuations and knock on effects thereafter.
Look at it the other way around, there are 8 months in the year where you can turn off or reduce fossil fuel consumption.
It creates financing challenges (keep generation around for a few months in the year means more expensive power), but it also provides independence against foreign fossil fuel imports.
<subsidised, officially sanctioned by nearly every government, regulated to be easily deployed> technology overtaking <banned by several governments, mired in red tape, with a huge opposing lobby with deep pockets that's part of every group that should be supporting it> technology who would have thunk it.
Installation labour cost and inverter cost are now the largest expenses.
I wonder if as panel costs goes down, will people start to wire their homes again for 48V DC? You could conceivably run your HVAC and fridges at least off of it, this would negate the need for a larger (more costly) inverter.
Mainly thinking 48V as that is already a standard in the marine and automotive world. AFAIK 120V DC is not a commonly used standard ? (Maybe in aviation?)
Most modern aircraft have a 400V 360-800Hz three-phase grid, as this allows thinner (read:lighter) conductors. There are some high voltage DC rails on some plains in the range 270VDC or ±270VDC.
On the usage side for instrumentation, avionics etc. it is usually 28 VDC.
It would be great to work on my home's electrical system without the risk of straight-up killing myself. Especially considering most of the things I plug into my wall (lighting, TVs, tablets, phones, etc.) don't need to draw anything like 120/240V. I've debated installing low volt circuits for things like lighting and such, but I think the hassle won't make it worth it.
I don't think it's that dangerous to work with 120v. There's arguably a greater risk with DC starting fires and killing you that way, or burning your house down.
IANAEE, but DC does most of its work with current instead of voltage. So direct shorts are more likely to turn into heating elements (you have to run thicker wire anyway to do the same amount of work). AC can detect and trip faster.
Also, adding/removing loads is more finicky with DC. It affects all the other things on the line much more dramatically than AC.
SELV usually is defined to have both a voltage limit and a volt-amp (ie: power) limit. Generally defined somewhere around 60V peak to peak and 250V*A.
48V is under the SELV voltage limit, even with some margins.
But historically, some countries have had lower limits. I recall Japan being one of them for a while. I'm not confident that SELV is a harmonized standard worldwide, or at least it wasn't until recently, if it is now.
> Nearly no equipment uses 120VDC by itself, so you would need specialized DC-DC converters that can deal with the 120VDC input to go down to usual voltages like 48VD, 24VDC or 12VDC
Most switched-mode power supplies ought to cope with 120V DC. If you look at a circuit diagram the first thing they go through is a bridge rectifier and smoothing cap to provide a 165V (or 340V outside the US!) DC supply for the chopper.
I have some Thinkpad charging bricks I'm prepared to sacrifice for the cause, if you want me to try it.
Well, one potential issue that springs to mind is that DC 120V might overstress the diodes in the full bridge rectifier. With 120V AC only 2 of the 4 diodes are active at any one time and on average each of them is on only half the time - with DC only 2 of the diodes would be active, but they would be active 100% of time. Say the power supply needs to draw 1A of current, a reasonable good estimate for the voltage drop of a forward biased diode is 0.7V, so each diode that is on will dissipate 1A*0.7V = 0.7W. With AC, each diode would only be on half the time, meaning it would dissipate an average of 0.35W. With DC, 2 of the 4 diodes would be on constantly dissipating the full 0.7W each - this will result in the two diodes getting much hotter. Ask yourself how likely it is that most power supply manufacturers are designing in a safety margin of *2X*...
And that's just dealing with power supplies for electronics (which mostly just want low voltage DC) - if you get into appliances, while almost all will have a power supply that converts to DC, they usually have some circuits that use AC directly (think heating elements, safety critical sensors that use the 60Hz AC waveform as part of their feedback to make sure they haven't locked up, etc). Even appliances that convert the AC input straight to DC (think anything using an inverter to drive a motor or compressor) will often use a voltage doubler circuit to get a DC bus that is ~340V from the 120V AC input (it doubles the peak voltage, which is actually ~170V and not 120V in US) ... The voltage doubler circuit will not infact double a DC input, and the appliance will likely be most unhappy when it's DC bus is a lot lower than it was designed for.*
> Well, one potential issue that springs to mind is that DC 120V might overstress the diodes in the full bridge rectifier.
I see what you're saying but it's a bit theoretical. Nothing in a switcher is run at that tight a tolerance, because in normal operation the load will be highly variable. One of the el-cheapo switching PSUs I have on my bench right now is rated for 90V to 270V, for example, and will run quite happily fully loaded across that full range (and considerably beyond - my variac goes from 0 to about 300V output).
> they usually have some circuits that use AC directly
AC motors won't enjoy it, but heating elements won't be affected.
If you look at the switching power supplies used for network equipment that often actually *does* have ratings for DC operation.
Unless you build from scratch, and white box stores suddenly start selling a 48v version of every standard household appliance (with industrial supply chain to support that market), inverters are not going anywhere.
The only place it makes sense is personal tech and computing, where USB chargers are cheap and ubiquitous, with technology replacement in 2-5 years instead of 5-10 for standard appliances.
it would probably slowly start coming out as dual ac and dc connections and start with "garage appliances" like your laundry, central ac / vac and car charger since the garage is the cheapest place to wire something into.
I run my garden tools and shed on a 1.2kVA 12V inverter, bought for pennies off eBay. It's just about enough to run my little "lunchbox" flux-core welder on a low enough setting to do thin metal and tubing, perfect for sticking exhaust pipes and such together.
I read an article about a house that was converted to use DC instead of AC as a trial. The most surprising part to me was that most household appliances simply kept working because they already contain a AC/DC rectifier anyway which works fine if you connect it to DC.
That depends. Anything with a transformer will not work on DC. Some power supplies don't have a transformer directly connected to mains and they will just work. A large number of appliances use universal motors (anything in your kitchen) and so they will just work. Heaters are typically just resistance and again will just work.
However there are a lot of things that won't work on DC as well. Since very few people are running mains voltage DC labels often will not tell you if it will work. (I've toured ships with mains voltage DC and those outlets are labeled - I assume the crew is trained - or perhaps was since this is just a museum now and I'm not sure if current ships use DC)
I've been rednecking up some panels and storage and I'm buying second-hand 250Wish panels about 10p/watt.
It's already getting close to "not really economic" to buy second-hand panels, because people have slightly inflated prices for them, but the way I look at it I get a nice run out to somewhere, have a nice lunch in a cafe, and come back with a couple of kW of panels for about as much as a tank of fuel.
New panels just get cheaper and cheaper and better and better, and you can often find clearance deals on 400W-ish panels for ridiculously low prices.
> we'll all be around to see solar panels that cost 1/10th of what they do now
I doubt that. Currently the cells itself makes only <50% (maybe <30% meanwhile) of a PV module. So the limit to the bottom is by the glass and frame and cable, not by the cells.
But $/watts can significantly go down with more efficiency.
I found most people fixate on the price of the cells/panels, but forget that the rest of the installation required to use said panels easily exceeds the price of the panels by a factor of 3~4. Think mounting hardware, cabling, inverters, batteries, control hardware, labour, etc. It all adds up.
I've been pricing a PV system recently, and I was surprised at how low the price of panels already is. In most estimates I received the panels itself were less than 20% of the total installation costs.
Granted, I am looking at a 3-phase system with plenty of battery capacity. For a more typical household setup with 1-phase and moderate battery capacity that percentage will shift a bit.
In my case the quotes are roughly: 40x430Wp panels (~€4000), 3x (3-phase) inverter/chargers (~€5000), batteries (~€5000), auxiliaries (~€1500), cabling (~€2000), mounting hardware (~€2500), labor (~€5000), planning/permissions (~€1000). So total project price is ~25k, of which the panels are only ~€4000.
And that doesn't even count the construction of a utility building to house the batteries and inverters, the EV chargers, etc.
On a side note: I found that battery prices have also dropped significantly already. If you're willing to do some assembly yourself you can get ~15kWh of LiFePO4 for just over €1k.
Also, for those wondering: for my situation the ROI of this setup is expected to be about 5 years. This will be quicker if I get an EV, which I am planning on.
> How are you spending 5000+ EUR per year on electricity?
Energy prices are high in my country, and price spikes have become more frequent.
My house is currently heated by natural gas, which costs about €200/month avg plus another €550/year in standing charges. Prices for natural gas is expected to rise. By switching to heat pumps and induction cooktop I can disconnect from the gas distribution grid completely. This will safe about €3k in gas costs annually (against current rates) but obviously increase my electricity usage significantly. So in my country €5k/year in electricity isn't as ridiculous as it sounds.
I'm projecting my electricity consumption to be ~€3.5k a year once I have fully switched to electric heating, so this is where generating my own electricity starts to make sense.
The PV array I'm planning is very much over dimensioned for my use. To make financial sense my PV installation must produce more than I consume over the year. Not only will my electricity bill be effectively €0, I will also be able sell overproduction back to the grid during summer. By using variable rate discharging I can optimize the return. I am projecting that selling overproduction will net about €1k annually.
If I add an EV my electricity use obviously goes up again. I won't have as much overproduction then, but I'll safe about 3k/year in fuel.
The rest comes from from dynamic energy tariff trading. The battery will be used as a grid stabiliser, so it'll charge (from the grid) when electricity is cheap/negative and discharge back to the grid when return rate is high. This is projected to net another €500~€1000 annually.
PV only really makes sense when it's combined with batteries and connected to the grid with a variable rate contract. The more battery capacity you have the more value/income it can create stabilising the grid. So really the price per kWh of battery capacity is the driving force in the ROI of a PV setup.
Micro plug-in panels address the pricing issues. If every panel has a built-in inverter/controller then everything can be wired at the factory, radically reducing costs. As they are all pushing AC then they can all be plugged in to household outlets without electricians getting involved. Mounting remains an issue but as purchase costs come down the need for a perfect mounting system diminishes.
Well, no. This one is one thousands of studies on it. And they narrowed things down (e.g. only looking at Denmark) and setting their projected numbers exactly so that the desired outcome arrived.
And usually (I did not read into detail here) the total cost of energy is never calculated.
In Europe, nuclear power plants usually don't have an insurance. It's the state that pays of the cleanup after an aftermath. So total cost is socialized.
Few countries have final deposits. With current technology, you need to operate them for thousands of years (e.g. guard them, so that no terrorists can get the material for "dirty bombs"). None of these total-cost studies calculates this in.
Many countries don't have their own source of uranium or the fabs to bring it up for usage in power plants. So it happens that by betting on solar, you bet on the goodwill of some external country. Did you know that most nuclear related companies worldwide used to be owned by the russian RosAtom? I have no idea if that is still true now after 5 years of war against Ukraine, so maybe the odd country seized mines or enrichment plants. But RosAtom owned stuff abroad, like Canada or Australia. Finding new ways if some terrorist country like russia suddenly ceases to supply you (like they did with gas) has a very high oppertunity cost. These studies usually don't plan in "second source" economic calculations.
In Germany, the four big electric power companies (e.g. Vattenfall, EON etc) say since decades that they don't want to open new nuclear power plants. Since it is not economically feasible. If the TCO would really be spectacular, then they would say differently. In those places, where they still open nuclear plants, like France, even a single block costs billions. I mean, one block estimated to cost 3 billion euro was costing 27 billion. Do these fabricated studies calculate in this grave error of factor 12? In France, EDF only works because it is state backed. If the TCO would be any good, they would swim in money like the senior Uncle Duck.
Is there any practical way for US individuals to invest in solar? With the anti-solar attitude from the government, is now a good time given that's where the world is obviously headed?
I understand the sentiment but I also think the modern electrical grid is one of the most impressive and valuable things man has created and I'd hate to see us give up on it.
Surely economic forces will overcome political ones eventually, right?
Buy some solar panels yourself and use them to generate electricity in your own home? Write to your local legislators expressing support for utility scale solar panel arrays?
If you're talking about investment in the usual sense, can't you just buy stocks of solar/clean energy companies?
Otherwise, if you just mean financially supporting solar technology, one good way is donating to political action/lobbying groups like Greenlight America or CATF (though that supports clean energy as a whole, not just solar)
It was bound to happen sooner or later. People tend to forgot nuclear is old technology. We went so hard on nuclear in 1960s because there was no alternative, nobody knew semiconductors would be so disruptive. Nuclear reactors are huge (to be efficient), still not completely solved (we are finding new methods of cooling every year) and require extensive regulations to save ourselves from human errors. Solar is the opposite. Build it, use it, throw it away etc. And your biggest problem is the environmental pollution and energy storage. Much better problems than trying to make nuclear safe. And even the energy storage problem is getting solved slowly by pumped hydro.
“Getting solved” isn’t solved though. Abandoning nuclear for an inadequate replacement led to massive global expansion of natural gas and coal generation from the 80s onward. While solar and wind exploded in deployments, it didn’t keep up and shuttering nuclear is likely the largest mistake societies made as far as global warming goes. It was the only non-austerity option with the capacity capability.
I'd like to see more examples of (non-hydro) Gravitational Potential Energy Storage tried out. Very large containers full of sand, for example. If you have no mountains, a deep hole will do.
"Current levelized cost of storage ranges from $150-300 per MWh for established pumped-storage systems, while newer solid-mass gravity systems estimate costs of $200-400 per MWh. These figures are competitive with long-duration storage applications but remain higher than lithium-ion batteries for shorter-duration uses."
It looks like Energy Vault, the people with the tower crane and big stack of concrete blocks scheme, gave up on that. Energy Vault is now selling large battery systems that actually work.
Also what about the systems to turn the batteries into something useable? It is telling how cheap lead-acid batteries looked on the first paper's Figure 2, yet overall system costs were vastly higher.
> Like CATL announced a cost of $19 per kwh
> I think the actual cost to buy one now it more $40-60.
Plus battery assembly and installation costs (inverter, grid connection).
> If you spread $60 over 15000 cycles
A 30 year lifetime (11k cycles if charged/discharged once a day). Using a 5% discount rate the cost goes up to 0.78c/kWh for the cells. The cost goes up if it can not cycle once a day, for instance intermittent source of energy or excess capacity. And the cost goes up with all the rest of the equipment involved, and round trip efficiency.
The amount of space needed is just massive. Hydro only works because you can declare that an entire valley is now energy storage, in one fell swoop. As soon as you have to construct each unit of storage instead of letting nature do it for you, it becomes completely impractical.
But battery storage is a proven technology now and the cost trends with such bespoke megaprojects are not looking promising, so I'm not holding my breath.
Burning (regenerable) metal fuel in old coal power plants is also an interesting approach:
If you’ve got very large containers of sand you can just store energy as heat instead, especially if you’re planning to use the energy for heating eventually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage
Thing is that you need incredible large masses in incredible heights.
Example: Lifting a 10-metric-ton stone by 36 meters stores just about 1 kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy. This is roughly equivalent to the capacity of a small power station used for a camping trip.
To get a sense of scale, when accounting for round trip efficiency of li-ion batteries and gravity batteries, a single 18650 battery has about the same energy as lifting 100kg by 50 meters.
A single cell is about $5 in volume, while 100kg of fill dirt and rock is about $2. At this point new pumped hydro or gravity batteries don’t scale like li-ion does. This tips even more towards normal batteries when you look at sodium or other cheaper but less energy dense batteries.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 40.0 ms ] threadhttps://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
The World Crossed a Major Solar Milestone [3TW] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151977 - August 2026
One thing that isn't super obvious from the article is that a lot of it is talking about industry solar panels rather than rooftop. The overheads of installation etc get a lot smaller if you're installing a whole bunch at once.
This isn't to say that installing solar panels on your house is a bad idea - they normally pay for themselves after something like 10 years from memory, so are similar to double glazing.
[0] https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/overview-trade-and-polic...
I would guess this varies by locale, and people usually assume the time value of money to be zero when they make the claim. In much of the US, I think the payback time is more realistically in the 15-20 year range, which means you really only want to install panels when you install a new roof. Otherwise the lifetime of the roof will happen before break even on the panels.
I am with you, this would be better on a town or regional basis instead of on everyone’s roof. Our houses already have wires going to them and I can’t imagine my particular roof or garage is the best place to put panels and batteries. But I understand it’s a political / administrative issue which may well be not solvable easily in many places.
On-prem has a problem of distributed labour costs.
On-prem might eventually become cheaper, but my guess is that won't happen any time soon.
For the time being, centralized and at-scale installation is where you can get much, much lower labour per watt costs.
Other places (like the EU and especially the US) have regulatory problems around anything to do with energy. This is mostly about ass coverage resulting in a lot of pressure for certification, related fees, grid operators insisting on a lot of overhead, building codes requiring a lot of faffing about for the business of wiring together what is essentially plug and play stuff, etc.
If you have an off grid shed, providing power to it is cheap and easy because you have none of that. You buy the hardware on amazon or wherever. It arrives, you wire it up. Job done. And if you are smart you might let a qualified electrician do it right for you or at least check your work (so your shed doesn't burn down and nobody dies from electrical shocks). But fundamentally it's not that hard and this stuff is mostly pretty safe and easy to work with. Especially compared to the things people burn down their sheds with traditionally (e.g. generators).
There's a lot of optimization potential here and most of that is completely non technical.
Solar is cool but solar that can make it through the night and a could cloudy days is way cooler
Then again, I'm basing this opinion on a recent-ish video from NightHawkInLight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7fR9ISuCw
The technology I'm most excited about is ultra low capex thermal, as being done by Standard Thermal. Capital cost per unit of energy storage capacity as low as $0.10/kWh(th), so it can work with seasonal storage and just a few tens of charge/discharge cycles over its lifespan.
Standard Thermal has raised $11M and is building in Germany, where they say they can deliver 365/7/24 solar resistive heat (400 C or perhaps 600 C) for half the cost of heat from burning natural gas there.
A regular 18650 cell has about 0.1 square meters of electrode surface. And you have thousands of these cells in a car battery, resulting in literal football fields of electrode area.
We can get to 95% using just short term storage. I suspect that most jurisdictions will just say "95% is good enough" rather than paying for ridiculously expensive long term storage.
We've got the nat gas capability already; keeping it around for the 5% is quite inexpensive, making the massive investment in long term storage for marginal benefit hard to justify.
OTOH, while the premium for e-fuels seems excessive, if you're only running that nat gas plant 2 days a year that premium is not so scary.
For covering Dunkelflauten? Yes.
For seasonal storage with a prolonged discharge (so, low power/storage capacity ratio)? I think thermal storage wins there.
E.g. 100 GWh (4 days of 1GW thermal power) with a 100C temperature swing (you can't go down all the way to room temperature) will need around 3.6*10^4 tons of sand. That's a lot.
Honestly, power-to-gas sounds like the only reasonable way for now. In theory, with SOFC (Solid Oxide Fuel Cells) for power generation, it can beat the steam cycle.
But I have no reference for the cost of setting up such a storage and how it compares to battery or hydro.
So the idea is not practical for storage for an individual home, but could work on the scale of a village or small industrial enterprise. It would allow a solar microgrid to be completely disconnected from the larger grid, even at high latitude.
If you look at very large piles of dirt, like large earthen dams, if arranged in a suitable geometry they would have thermal time constants (assuming no fluid flow through them) in the thousands of years.
A computation for you: compute the cost of a given R value per m^2 for various materials. Dirt is very cheap, so even if it's not the best insulator it comes out on top. You need the thing being insulated to be large enough that you can fit the thick dirt layer around it, of course.
View another way: if we hook several piles in series, then lukewarm air from a first mostly discharged pile can be directed into later piles for more heating. In the continuous limit this is the concept I described above.
No, because your steam will be at a lower temperature as you draw down the heat, bringing down efficiency.
Over the season, your sand drops from ~1000 to ~600 (which is fine since your power needs drop in the spring)
At 1000C steel will react with _water_.
To be clear, I'm not talking about cooling a small crucible but a structure that is at least 20 meters in size.
I have a 5 kWp solar plant that produces ~25kWh per day, but it is grid-tied. I considered a hybrid setup with LFP battery back up, but decided to separate the two systems to avoid a single point of failure.
I guess using electricity to heat during the night could be an issue, but we could also accept to let the temperature drop.
Solar is never gonna be a complete solution. At the end of the day, we could do it more efficiently by just building suns here on earth for the panels, but of course then you've achieved fusion and you're already generating more than solar could ever hope to.
Stars don't have this problem because they're very large so there's only so far neutrons can go.
1. Stars do it. Yes. But stars also have size and gravity, something no nuclear plant will ever have; and
2. "People once said X was impossible" ie the Galileo Gambit. Just because Galileo was mocked for his heliocentric model but was later proven right does not mean everything is possible.
Thing is, I'm not even talking about physics. I'm talking about engineering. Something not only has to be possible but it has to be technically viable and sufficiently cheap. Put it this way: would you pay $60 billion for a 1GW power reactor with a lifespan of 30 years and an annual maintenance cost of $2B? Even if the fuel was completely free the wholesale cost per MWh would be ~$600. Nobody would build that.
Fusion research has been going on for decades and the best we've done thus far is fire a laser for about a second to induce a fusion reaction and also spend billions building magnets to try and contain a turbulent fluid at 100 million degrees, which, again, will do nothing about the neutrons that will destroy that vessel.
The joke is that fusion is always 50 years away and always will be. If you're an optimist it's always 30 years away and always will be.
You should inform nuclear physicists and engineers of your new-to-mankind knowledge.
Did you know we once argued over whether or not to close the patent office because “everything had already been invented”? This isn’t the Galileo concept, it’s recognizing we’ve only been doing global hard science as a species for like 50 years.
My larger point is that solar is only ever going to be a piece of the puzzle at best. In space it might be quite nice, but otherwise it's kinda goofy to invest too much in.
Doesn’t that apply to any power source?
Ideally we see people like Form Energies, using iron-air (rust) batteries, for much easier to scale storage. https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/06/1145020/2026-cli...
In aggregate, grid operators have a lot of other tools at their disposal via flexible pricing, flexible demand, and automated systems that can adapt to this to e.g. charge cars when there is a surplus of energy, turn on/off water boilers, etc. There's a lot of innovation around this topic in this space. This by the way is as much as making sure generated power doesn't go to waste than it is about ensuring there is enough power. They use batteries to time shift excess power to when they can utilize it.
Interconnected grids means that e.g. an operator in Denmark can import/export to and from the UK, Norway, Germany, etc. On a windy day they'll be exporting wind power. On a sunny day, they might add some solar to that mix. When there's no wind or sun in Denmark, they might pull in Scottish/German wind, Norwegian hydro, Swedish nuclear, etc. Batteries are being deployed all over the place at a pace that is only exceeded by the pace at which solar is being deployed. Whenever there's a surplus energy, batteries get charged up. It's very rare for all of the available generation to disappear all at the same time for long enough to drain all the batteries. And for those times of course fossil generation is still a thing as well, and will be for decades to come. There are a lot of gas based plants throughout Europe. As well as some nuclear plants of course. Singling out the EU market here but it's going to be similar elsewhere.
The point here is that there's no need to pair solar setups with days/weeks/months worth of storage. A few hours goes a long way.
The fun part is that we're still well before the point when this even matters.
Almost 60% of the US grid is still fossil fuels, with around half of that still happening during the day. Which means you can get down to ~30% fossil fuels without any storage at all because all you do is go from burning fossil fuels during the day and at night to burning fossil fuels only at night.
Even if we handwave all the science needed to build batteries big enough to power cities for days, I don't think it's realistic to handwave the science needed to power a city for weeks. We don't even have enough oil for that.
"Power when it is inconvenient" is pretty much the basis for a modern society.
Heavy clouds and zero wind, for weeks? That's a once-a-century freak event. Just build gas peaker plants if you are worried about it. You could even add carbon capture, but constructing it might emit more than it will ever capture...
But to give them due credit, they believed in this vision and put in the hard work to make sure it became true.
That's literally CCP state controlled communism !! More specifically, that's what the The Gansu–Zhejiang UHVDC project has as an overhead transmission line length (2,370 km in international units).
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014206152...
* https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241113-will-chinas-ultr...
The GP might be in the group that don't much like that kind of thing.
Also, it’s weird to talk about Florida when, say, Arizona and Utah, etc. are right there. Even Wyoming despite being further north has over half of the month sunny in the winter. One thing to remember is that we could power the entire country using solar with a fraction of the land currently used to produce corn for ethanol so we don’t even need to substantially change land use, just stop subsidizing inefficient fuel generation.
These usually drop ambient temperatures across Canada and the northern US to below -20 C, and produce generally high winds. This combination of extreme cold, cloud cover, and high winds last for multiple days, often longer than a week.
The wind plus cold means that many wind turbines cannot operate and the cloud cover and shorter days mean that solar is barely generating any energy.
If the US decided to divert half of the Pentagon's annual budget to electricity, the US could absolutely build the infrastructure to transport electricity thousands of kilometres.
I assume you never tried measuring the output of a solar panel when it's cloudy. It's 10-15% of a sunny day. Closer to not working than working.
On a rainy day that drops closer to 20%.
As an aside - cloudy days avoid a problem I have with shade. In winter, at 3:30pm, the sun goes behind a tree and my production plummets to near zero. If there's cloud cover the sunlight is far more dispersed and there's no "shade".
And you’re still able to power your entire home? What if the rain lasts for a few days, which is pretty common in many places.
I did have one rainy day back in the middle of Winter that was 16% but that will end up being literally the worst day of the year.
It also has relatively wealthy people, living in lots of individual housing units. If you wanted to design a country that's perfect for rooftop solar your imagination might come up with Australia.
That said, Australia ought to be able to run almost everything off solar given how sunny it is, and instead solar is a distant second behind coal for electricity production. So there's plenty of work left to do.
The overwhelming majority of generation and storage is best deployed at the point of use.
Grid scale anything, is a massive inefficiency.
The only reason grid and city scale is so prevalent in public discourse is because this is the only electricity the utility is paid for, and they are very actively impeding any other solution.
In the US, there is a very large inventory of flat roof industrial buildings, in the industrial parks that are using huge amounts of electricity. Covering all of those roofs with solar (especially here in the west US) would prevent a tremendous amount of grid scale generation, and implementing storage there would eliminate a large part of the transmission line upgrades the utilities are calling for.
The biggest problem in the US isn't technical, it's the governments desire to primarily support the solutions that are best at serving utility shareholder returns, instead of the technically superior solutions.
It's quite common in Australia for commercial and residential.
One factor is weight - a lot of low-cost industrial units may well need modifications to the roof to strengthen them to be able to take the additional weight of solar panels.
Certainly where I work (science research facility in the UK) our business has only been able to install roof-top solar on a comparatively small proportion of our total roof space because a large amount of the seemingly viable space would require substantial works to make the roof strong enough for solar.
If rooftop solar power were so economically efficient, the manufacturing companies would get far more shareholder money lobbying for rooftop solar than utilities can make lobbying against it. But your conspiracy thinking doesn't account for this.
Heavy machinery uses dramatically more power than the roof space above it can produce. And you can't shut the factory down every time there is a cloud in the sky, so you need a utility hookup that can power the whole factory anyway.
The grid is the technically superior solution. That's why megacorps with capital and lobbying might keep willingly connecting to it.
A common battery for grid level storage is pumped hydro - that is, use the peak power during the day(s) to push water from the bottom of an elevation to the top, and hold it there - bonus points if it captures water delivered from other solar processes (evaporation -> rain)
When talking about cost, it’s important to remember that solar+batteries are already cheaper and, unlike nuclear, happen on much shorter timescales. I’m not opposed to some nuclear plant starts but those guarantee a couple decades of increased pollution before there’s any chance whatsoever for carbon reduction, whereas solar can come online in a year.
You’re right, though, that nuclear is ALSO only a part of the solution. One day, it will be a major and necessary component of our grid, but we need to start tackling this carbon problem harder, and like… yesterday.
That's its function, but that does not make any device that stores energy a 'battery'. An electric battery is specifically a battery of electrochemical cells — Franklin invented the term as analogous to an artillery battery (a collection of guns).
Calling every form of stored energy a 'battery' is just dumbing things down for the masses.
https://biz.liga.net/en/energy/news/germany-to-build-11-gw-i...
In mean time, it looks like coal in Germany will used for longer.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-regulator-says-n...
Anything below 800g of CO2 (which means basically every current grid) means electrifying is a net win. Even the famously coal heavy South African grid is already past that barrier and even if it wasn't all grids are getting cleaner over time.
A grid that has maxed out wind and solar and then used only coal for 2 weeks would be one of the cleanest grids in the world right now, on par with France or Sweden.
Chasing 100% on a grid to satisfy the complaints of people who are concern trolling isn't smart nor necessary. What you need is bulk cheap electricity to allow you to reduce your heating and transport costs and clean your air at the same time.
And, this gets even worse if you are also replacing baseload plants with solar, since the solar output is more variable than those old plants were, so now you need even more storage capacity to offset those dropouts at the same time you are handling demand peaks.
Sometimes, I think there is some magical thinking going on when people see solar panels work at a house without batteries, and they fail to recognize how much they depend on the grid for stability. If they ran in island mode, they'd quickly understand just how important storage is...
Suppose that solar generates only during the day and only when it's not cloudy, and it's cloudy e.g. 10% of the time. Then you're using natural gas at night, but those natural gas plants still exist during the day, so you can also use them on the 10% of days that are cloudy and you're still replacing 90% of the daytime demand.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956
If you shut down by day, it can take multiple hours for it to be able to provide full load... and multiple hours for it to shut down cleanly. During this time it is producing power at less than optimal rates and/or using the fossil fuels to keep the wheels spinning and in sync with the grid so that they don't have to go through a phase matching period.
(aside for coal - note that it takes more than 12 hours for a coal plant to get running from a cold start)
There's a good number of 'em: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pumped-storage_hydroe...
https://www.ferc.gov/media/licensed-pumped-storage-projects-...
You'll see that most of them are in the Appalachian mountains and in the Sierra mountain range.
The one in Missouri is one of the interesting ones that isn't in either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_...
> The Taum Sauk pumped storage plant is a power station in the St. Francois mountain region of Missouri, United States about 90 miles (140 km) south of St. Louis near Lesterville, Missouri, in Reynolds County.
It has a hydraulic head of 860 feet and that represents the challenge - you need to find places in the US where you can get several hundred feet of elevation in a short distance.
Hypothetically, lets build one in Minnesota... Taum Sauk Mountain is the highest point in Missouri. The highest point in Minnesota is Eagle Mountain (in the boundary waters - you can't build there, pretend we can) ... the elevation to the top os 550 feet (about half what Taum Sauk provides) over 3.5 miles (Taum Sauk is just over 1 mile). ( https://maps.app.goo.gl/vHfWarwubaLvsf5z7 )
Much of the US is too flat for it to be useful.
It's also pretty old.
"USA should look into thing it practically invented" good meme
Wind also helps since wind makes more power at night, as does demand which is dramatically lower at night.
For coal, Great. Making coal economical is excellent. We should have banned it worldwide 20 years ago.
The Iran war that we're currently in is officially at 43B and estimated at 48B. https://iran-cost-ticker.com
That makes 300B
Eu pricing
Reserving 20% of that capacity to supply power back to the grid is 5TWh.
EVs can be charged for free during the day, ~20% of solar is lost due to curtailment. Even if a significant percentage (10 - 20%) of the people decide they are going on long drives from Florida to Vancouver and turn off supply-power-to-grid-for-money in the app, its fine, there are plenty of cars. It is the cheapest, most resilient, distributed and self-healing energy ecosystem. Only one problem, it won't make the super billionaires money. Unless it can be packaged in a way to make the super billionaires money, its a no go in US.
This infrastructure buildout costs nothing, people buy new cars all the time (~20M/year), just buy EVs instead. Because people are providing the capital and the storage infrastructure, they should be paid for it.
And if we subtract all those datacentres crammed with Nvidia GPUs ? ;)
If we're being honest here, the problem with the US is that it has always treated any sort of energy source as being infinite and has always been quite extravagant in its use of energy.
Whether a preponderance for gas-guzzling SUVs or datacentres the story is always the same. The US mentality is there will always be infinite oil in the pump and infinite electrons in the cable.
I also think your trillion number is at least double the raw cell cost today.
And we can sure find those trillions when we want to: https://defensecommunities.org/2026/04/trump-requests-1-5-tr.... Or https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/extend.... Or...
It might help if the US wasn't so anti off-shore wind at the moment.
(That’s the answer for the northeast, too: New England has no shortage of wind all winter long and batteries don’t care where the electricity comes from)
Other countries are better positioned. e.g. UK has really spiky wind energy. Right this second more than half the grid is wind. Which is both cool and problematic for managing the grid.
Grid scale cheap storage would dramatic help manage that chaos
For Europe to get rid of more fossils without putting the grid at risk we will need more storage.
That and low density storage located at sea with the turbines.
only natural gas plants can do this. a coal plant cannot spin up just for the night and turn back off when the sun comes up - it's incredibly inefficient and probably causes more premature wear/tear too.
"Increased rates of component life consumption due to thermal fatigue, mechanical fatigue and wear caused by differential thermal expansion comprise the bulking of cycling (costs)," according to the International Energy Agency's Coal Industry Advisory Board.
"Every time a power plant is turned on and off, the boiler, steam lines, turbine and auxiliary components go through unavoidably large thermal and pressure stresses," the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) wrote in a report on cycling costs published in April 2012.
"
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/to-survive-c...
Batteries are coming, and will solve it, but it will still take time for them to be come cheap enough.
Only once we have ~7 days of storage (~100 GWh of storage) will we be able to get rid of the last fossil plants.
How long is the hope those batteries will last? There's surely no way Finland can run off battery power for even one month, much less a whole winter.
edit: perhaps I misunderstood and your comment on batteries was more related to the reliability of wind?
Finland's power grid stats are open to the public. You can click the month view to see how the different power sources fluctuate.
https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/
Also fun fact: a lot of solar panels in Finland are mounted vertically to walls rather than rooftops. That's because we're so far north that the sun just hangs around the horizon rather than going directly overhead. You end up catching more sunlight pointing directly south.
The big issue is what's called "ramp rate" - how fast can output power be increased or decreased? This tends to be around 1% to 3% of capacity per minute. See Figure B-2 in [1], which is a detailed discussion of how to improve your coal-fired power plant's ramp rate.
Natural gas plants have much higher ramp rates, and for batteries, it's under a second. Nuclear plants can be ramped up and down, slowly, but since it's all capital cost, cutting output raises the price of the power.
[1] https://www.epri.com/research/products/3002012979
Storage has been making impressive strides, but the cliff here (in storage and transmission, the latter of which we in the US still are sucking at) puts nuclear back in the running.
Fortunately that doesn’t seem like it will be an issue since battery storage costs are also seeing an exponential reduction.
A decade or so behind, in the US.
If the US didn't block import of Chinese tech, we could have electrified a decade ago.
The tech available at the current moment, is even more capable of replacing petroleum based electricity.
But our government is banning Chinese tech to serve our outdated industries instead of importing it to serve the population.
As any wise country would do when faced with superior technology, we should import it with the condition of technology exchange. Chinese manufacturers should be training US workers and industrial ownership how to produce cheap, efficient, sodium batteries.
This benefits the populous immediately, and the industries are able to advance into the current century's tech.
It protects American companies who operate in the green energy generation and storage arena from Chinese competition.
Wont someone think of the big beautiful clean coal companies
Paranoid is me testing the plates I bought off amazon for lead, and throwing away the bathtub mat which smelled like petroleum waste. I'm fairly convinced that the goal of that ruthless dictatorship is to poison, degrade and infiltrate every single household abroad in every way possible. A fast attack might be to bring as many devices offline as possible, but the slow attack is simply to lower people's intelligence by hardware or software methods (e.g. TikTok, Qwen... or, let's say, not notifying anyone for a few months that a new SARS virus had escaped a lab). Everything that comes out of communist China is warfare, even if it looks like a plush toy.
If it were a matter of industrial protectionism against a country which was not hostile, not authoritarian, didn't rely on slave labor, etc., then I'd agree with you. Countries have other pressing reasons besides immediate economic advantage to prevent this sort of thing.
To greatly oversimplify: Japan fought against opening their markets, as did China, out of political and social concerns for the stability of their states, far more than economic ones.
As a child of immigrants from the Soviet Union, and also as someone who knows people still resident in authoritarian dictatorships: This is patently ridiculous. Everything else in your post is a spray of nonsensical policy points and predictions. You led off with the tell. Frankly, it makes everything you say afterward sound like what an authoritarian enemy government would want people in the US to think about their own country.
What you wrote in your first sentence is either (a) wildly misinformed (like, you have no idea what life is like in an authoritarian country with actual slave labor, which is an insult to the people who do currently live there), or (b) intentionally nefarious (like, you work for such a country, in a capacity to minimize the distinction between their system of autocracy and the United States' democracy). If it's (a), study at least a little bit of the history of mass murder in the 20th Century. If (b), well, we live in a free country so you can spew whatever garbage you want. Interestingly, we have not been overtaken by any of the dictatorships that have sprung up in Eurasia over the past hundred years, and I don't think we will be soon.
1. As a US citizen, you would probably not a get permit necessary for entering the Tibet region.
2. If you could get a permit for Tibet region and go there, you would be followed by police officers dressed in civilian clothing. The locals would be quite hesitant to speak to you.
(Source: been there long ago, seen it). China has many qualities, but freedom is not one of them.
I don't think the poster you're responding to is writing in good faith; they're either an agent of an authoritarian power, or blind to the difference of being one.
People in China can say anything the government approves of, but they can't say "long live freedom and democracy," unless they want to be executed.
Neither, I suspect, will Chinese AI models make any statement in sympathy with personal freedom, democracy, or human rights; it would come at the expense of the people who paid to train those models, and that can't be allowed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Socialist_Values
I guess freedom means different things to different people. Do people in China just roll their eyes at that?
And are we perfectly free in America? No. But we can say whatever we want about the government or the corporations, provided we're nonviolent. And we're not commanded how many children we can or can't have, or what religion to practice or not, or forced to show loyalty to a political party.
Plus we can smoke weed, buy guns, vote the bums out every four years, and most importantly make money without having to pay off some party official.
Europe tried doing that. And our green technology sector promptly collapsed, because it couldn't compete with Chinese undercutting our prices. The only thing left now are wind turbines, but Chinese are making inroads there too. In the meantime, the green transition barely moved a needle when energy shock arrived in 2022 or this year. Rendering rest of our industry, especially chemical industry, uncompetitive.
Access to US markets conditioned on full tech exchange with US battery and automakers would be a fair exchange (and would likely require some temporary support of US automakers so they survive the transition).
Batteries have use in war and power. It will likely scale faster than PV. What we need is the second derivative, so production of the latter can be turbocharged just before battery production is about to break through.
I think solar is amazing and we need more of it - but I can't stand this solar and storage go at it alone mentality. It's pretty thickheaded to discount the other forms of energy that we can use and will need.
Solar has the advantage that it can be widely distributed on buildings rather than in just a few centralized locations.
There are legit reasons to push back against “solar and batteries everywhere” but I find it hard to credit resilience in a conflict situation as one of them.
This isn't a reason not to go with solar+batteries everywhere. This is an observations of the product weak points and why it isn't the only solution in the chain.
(Diesel power generators also work, but they require constant fuel supply, which can be complicated in a war zone)
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
But for the most part it will trail solar, because the first chunk of the solar doesn't really need storage. But once there's a healthy percentage of solar, all new solar will have storage or it won't get paid.
The costs of large number long distance HVDC lines with accompaning invertor stations would be as expensive as a electric generation based on nuclear power.
https://blog.sintef.com/energy/future-hvdc-grids-yes-please-...
It produces enough on cloudy days to still.top the batteries up to full.
I had a day recently where production topped 80kW and was exporting bulk before late afternoon grid production limiting kicked in. That's a lot of juice, and Ive basically not touched the grid in 7 months.
- Solar.
- Wind.
- Nuclear.
- Pumped hydro.
- Battery.
This is because people that bring that argument act like every house is it's own electric island. But that's far from the truth. In developed countries the electric grid is HIGHLY interconnected. Look at this beautiful map: https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/
So, how likely is it that it's cloudy in Bulgaria and Spain and Germany and UK and Hungary and and and ...
(It's only the US that decided to mis-design their grid. Instead of one united, where each one can help the others, they have 4 different grid. That is also one of the reason why the SAIDI --- duration of power interruptions per customer and year --- is so terribly bad).
Also, if you buy your solar cells to work with ambient light, put them into east-west (instead of south) and use an inverter that doesn't use 50W just for itself --- then you can also get power WHEN it it cloudy. Enough to sustain e.g. your router, fridge etc. Not enough to charge an EV.
But... for a day-night-cycle we have local batteries. They got cheap in the last 5 years. I mean, the cheaper ones arrive at 100 €/ kWh.
And finally: no one every proposed that "a single solution is all we need". We don't need just Ford passenger cars. We also need vans. And trucks. And buses.
By limiting your thinking artificially to "How can I oppose a situation where ONLY solar panels provide power" you're doing your own reasoning power no favor. The starting premises is already faulty, almost like a strawman attack (invent some bogus scenario, attack that scenario, hope that others that can't think sharp fail for this bad reasoning).
The fun thing is that people like you post this again and again, in every discussion. Since years. As if you're unable to learn that the world isn't only "one solar island next to another solar island". Why is it so hard to understand that a grid is inherently connected? And that we have a multitude of ways to generate electric power?
I guess this is in part because it only needs amazing factories and not complex deployed and maintained infrastructure that is at risk of blowing up.
Solar seems to fix the mould of a disruptive technology to a T.
Games like SimCity often only supports ultradense Manhattan style cities and centralized solar plants through distribution networks. That combination doesn't work with solar technology. It should be like "Set up offgrid solar incentives program($1.5B)" buttons that reduces power draw proportionate to numbers of standalone houses that resets when disaster hits the parts of the map it was used on.
Solar seems to be working just fine in Spain, a place where almost nobody lives in a stand alone house, or even a row house. You still put solar in the building, but then you have industrial solar in places wi5 little agricultural value, and wind turbines installed on top of hills. All of this could work just fine in any sim city I remember, as you are just dedicating space to power, which is fine.
Plan it and it won't be a huge deal.
That said, I'm sure there are spots on this planet where solar isn't the best renewable option. Maybe small-scale wind power would be better where you are? On our boat we have both (and hydro for when we're sailing). Sadly these mechanical generators haven't yet received similar scale effects to their price as solar has.
1: https://lille-oe.de/
Plus below a certain cost threshold, the risk of damage still means the overall cost is lower.
it's a great source of energy mind you, but I kind of wince everytime people are trying to say it's better than nuclear (if you put the dangerosity of the raw material aside of course)
there are excellent storage capacities now, which helps a lot, but nuclear stays unmatched in producing vast amounts of electricity on demand (as long as we're not in a brutal heat wave to be fair)
Solar is the superior form of nuclear energy. You're using a big ass nuclear fusion reactor in the center of our solar system to generate energy, and you harvest that energy by capturing its photonic output.
As far as storing the energy for peak demand/nighttime usage, we've got literally hundreds of methods to do it, from pure mechanical to electrochemical.
Centralized energy infra just isn't resilient enough against geopolitical problems to be worth investing in.
By contrast, ain't nobody wasting a $50k missile on a $5k battery just so they can cut power to one building.
You cannot switch off a nuclear plant in an instant, that process takes weeks.
Ramping up takes longer, yes, especially from maintenance. But the real factor is that operating cost is constant, almost independent from output, so they want to run the plant at operational 100% as much as possible.
(handy UK status page: https://www.ukgridlive.co.uk/nuclear )
It goes all the way back to this kind of thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fundamentals
The pamphlet from which we get the term "fundamentalism" was published by an oil industry tycoon.
So the right is incentivized to protect this industry even if it becomes obsolescent and is no longer the most economical or practical way to generate at least much of our energy needs (electricity).
While the right has often sounded pro-nuclear, in practice they tend not to be that enthusiastic about it when they actually get into office. Obama supported the first new nuclear plant in decades.
https://politifact.com/factchecks/2012/mar/02/barack-obama/o...
Climate change:
> By increasing our American energy supply and decreasing the long term demand for oil, we will be well positioned to address the challenge of climate change and continue our longstanding responsibility for stewardship over the environment.
...
> As part of a global climate change strategy, Republicans support technology-driven, market-based solutions that will decrease emissions, reduce excess greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, increase energy efficiency, mitigate the impact of climate change where it occurs, and maximize any ancillary benefits climate change might offer for the economy.
...
> Because Republicans believe that solutions to the risk of global climate change will be found in the ingenuity of the American people, we propose a Climate Prize for scientists who solve the challenges of climate change. Honoraria of many millions of dollars would be a small price for technological developments that eliminate our need for gas-powered cars or abate atmospheric carbon.
Clean energy:
> Alternate power sources must enter the mainstream. The technology behind solar energy has improved significantly in recent years, and the commercial development of wind power promises major benefits both in costs and in environmental protection. Republicans support these and other alternative energy sources, including geothermal and hydropower, and anticipate technological developments that will increase their economic viability. We therefore advocate a long-term energy tax credit equally applicable to all renewable power sources.
Reducing demand for fossil fuels:
> Conservation does not mean deprivation; it means efficiency and achieving more with less. Most Americans today endeavor to conserve fossil fuels, whether in their cars or in their home heating, but we can do better. We can construct better and smarter buildings, use smarter thermostats and transmission grids, increase recycling, and make energy-efficient consumer purchases. Wireless communications, for example, can increase telecommuting options and cut back on business travel. The Republican goal is to ensure that Americans have more conservation options that will enable them to make the best choices for their families.
...
> We must also produce more vehicles that operate on electricity and natural gas, both to reduce demand for oil and to cut CO2 emissions.
> Given that fully 97 percent of our current transportation vehicles rely on oil, we will aggressively support technological advances to reduce our petroleum dependence. For example, lightweight composites could halve the weight and double the gas mileage of cars and trucks, and together with flex-fuel and electric vehicles, could usher in a renaissance in the American auto industry.
[1] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2008-republican-pa...
The argument that the fossil fuel industry historically being a major source of their funding is why they currently oppose renewables is weak because that has been a major continuing source of their funding for many decades.
Hence to explain why the renewable support in the 2008 party platform went away we need to look for an explanation other than simply the fossil fuel industry wanted it.
It still may be due to the fossil fuel industry, but to make that argument one needs to explain why they didn't have enough power before to stop it from going into the platform in 2008 but they did have enough later to get rid of it.
That baseload capacity comes from natural gas power plants. By building solar and wind you are guaranteeing a market for their products in the future.
Not sure what religious fundamentalism has to do with any of this.
The Eastern Bloc in the Cold War was extremely keen on fossil fuels (and nuclear power) and very poor at dealing with pollution. As is the PRC.
In Western Europe, coal miners were the backbone of the far left in places like Germany and the UK including Communist parties. The British Labour Party's vote was traditionally strongest in coal mining areas.
I don't know so much about the US situation, but I am aware that some American coal miners were involved in socialist movements there many decades ago.
I think in that case industries that will became most economical or practical way to generate electricity simply will start funding the right.
Obvious counterpoints: Trump's $700m "clean, beautiful coal" handouts, or Trump's $2B buyback of wind farm leases.
The answer is already "no" without regulation. Might as well regulate.
What other options are there? Mind-control?
>Private industry should be able to profit off the sun and it's disturbing that you think asserting this is a dunk.
It wasn't a "dunk", you added that interpretation yourself.
Maybe the voters don't, but the businessmen and politicians definitely do, maybe more so than democrats. Just in different sectors (military).
So I think the pivot you're talking about, which I agree with eventually happen, will be offset in at least significant part.
Good luck storing that energy in batteries through the winter. Having a portion of $50/kWh batteries that cycle once a year results in pretty high energy costs. At some point non-battery storage (e.g. generators running on diesel) take over.
Of course, if people are willing to go totally off-grid then good luck to them.
I think solar will be cheap enough it'll be more like you need to over-provision the panels and just have storage for a week of cloudy days.
1 week of storage that is cycled perhaps once or twice a year. 30 year lifetime, say, so 60 cycles in its lifetime. $50/kWh so perhaps $1/kWh for two (presumably cold and dark) weeks a year.
The U.S. solar industry installed 43 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in 2025, remaining the dominant source of new capacity added to the grid for the fifth consecutive year. Solar and energy storage represent 79% of new capacity installed in the first year of the Trump Administration [2].
[1] https://www.chooseenergy.com/solar-energy/solar-energy-produ...
[2] https://tedmag.com/report-u-s-added-43-gw-of-new-solar-capac...
Oil wells decrease in production over time. It's called the decline rate. For wells in the Permian basin, the average decline rate is about 15%. So a 1000 barrel per day ("bpd") well produces ~850bpd in year 2, ~700bpd in year 3 and ~550bpd in year 4. That means you need to be constantly drilling wells. That's more wealth concentration opportunity.
1MW of solar produces 1MW in years 1 through 20.
Additionally, the fight for control over resources induces demand for weapons. Solar doesn't do that. This is summed up as No one goes to war over a solar panel [1].
Efficiency isn't the goal. Wealth extraction is.
[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
I agree with your post, but the above statement is not technically accurate.
Panels do drop in production over time; A very rough rule-of-thumb is around 1% loss per year.
So after 20 years production is at like 80%. (Ymmv)
Of course this isn't really a big deal. The panels themselves are cheap and can be replaced very easily. Equally there is a market for 2nd hand panels as they still produce, and are ideal for places that are not space constrained.
Only if the oil price remains high. If the world, um, situation stabilizes we will go back to having a glut of oil and hence low prices. Lower than ever I would guess because of the current massive transition to EVs.
For the right to actually embrace solar, you need either big money in solar to start it's own propaganda campaigns or you need big oil to collapse to the point where they can't afford paying propagandists. Right now, they are making record profits so don't count on that anytime soon.
A bit of realism would help here. Yes, there's a left/NIMBY overlap to some degree, but the forces from the non-right camp seeking to limit power development comes from the NIMBY elements, not the left elements.
Germany recently finished their complete dismantlement of the nations nuclear power. Another nuclear country Sweden, has shut down seven of their reactors, but are at least rhetorically changing back to supporting nuclear.
Go and talk in real life with people on the left and you'll find many of them are against nuclear power. Go and talk in real life with people on the right and it will be hard for you to find anybody who is against solar power. Because why would you be against solar?
> The demands to remove power sources come from the left.
I also wouldn't have written "remove a power source", since there are movements on the left against several different power sources, including nuclear and coal and maybe more. In the context of this discussion we might however stick to just talking about nuclear and solar.
In red state language, conservation is being in tune with nature and environmentalism is regulatory capture.
1. Then you need small scale transformers 2. Lots of roofs have shadows on them a lot of the time, like from trees or other nearby buildings 3. Most roofs have to get replaced every 15 years 4. Roof installed solar is fixed in place
I think parking lots, rural empty land and the like are a better starting point that avoids all 4 of these issues.
I have solar on my roof btw.
I'm surprised to hear that you need to replace roofs every fifteen years. What are they made of? The roofs I know last decades longer than that.
And rooftop solar had to be subsidized in the US, so apparently it wasn't attractive enough as an investment on its own. Even now, solar without batteries isn't economically beneficial to individuals, and batteries are ludicrously expensive and require a lot of space.
> I'm surprised to hear that you need to replace roofs every fifteen years.
Asphalt shingles. Of course you can use something else like a metal roof. But the solar panel itself doesn't last that long since efficiency drops and new technology gets so much better. So you're still gonna have a new part of your house that can break whenever it feels like it and needs maintenance every so often. Something I want the government or a utility company to deal with, please.
What in the world?? What are your roofs made out of?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi...
You can get around it with multi-layer, but each layer adds diminishing returns on improvements, while the cost keeps increasing.
The best way to handle places with less solar irradiance is to have more panels. The cost per panel keeps dropping, so the economics keep improving in that way.
With more panels my setup will be more of an eye-sore, require more and longer cables, combiner boxes and the setup becomes a bigger project. So I am just being a selfish ass but I had to ask where we are.
The cost of the panels themselves is becoming one of the cheaper parts of that project.
That's on the small side of things, of course, but we also have PV-covered carports for about the same as a non-PV-covered carport: https://www.kaufland.de/product/512021383/
They're so cheap that bars in Colombia had panels as their terasse awnings. Cheaper than cloth and makes power.
This article isn't about personal solar installations, in any event.
Where I live, on sunny days, the grid goes over 253V (230V nominal +10%), so in order for me to generate anything, my inverter disconnects itself from the grid.
[0] It is becoming way more common now, though.
Most solar installs work by tying into the existing main breaker of the home.
The cheapest way to do this is to leave the line feeding from the power meter to the main panel untouched. Instead you do anti-islanding detection at the inverters, and when they detect that mains is "down" they automatically cut off to prevent trying to backfeed power to your whole neighborhood during an outage (dangerous, not a good idea).
---
Second issue - there are many appliances that are NOT happy about being turned on and off at random times, and it can significantly impact their lifespan (ex - refrigerators, acs, computers, washers & dryers, etc).
So given the variability of direct solar, you don't want to accidentally destroy your ac unit by having it turn on and off 100 times as random clouds float by.
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But! If you're willing to install even moderate battery capacity (and LFP is getting quite cheap as well). Then you can absolutely do this. It's just more complicated and more expensive.
You need to wire in a mains relay (~$1,000 depending on the unit) and install some battery capacity to prevent very frequent startup/shutdown, then go through some painful additional signage and labeling requirements (at least in most of the US) and also install some additional shut-down switches on the exterior of the home (ex - to automatically turn the inverters off, and to shutdown the battery system).
Then, yes, you can absolutely stay on solar power while the grid is down. In the same way that people are allowed to run whole-home generators to stay online when the grid is down.
Home circuitry, load center need to be redesigned for V2X (vehicle to grid, home, load, etc), plug-in solar and batteries, solar/batteries replacing generators, etc. You seem to have thoughtful ideas about these and it would help to have someone knowledgable articulate how it should be done.
[1]The idea is that they can change the world right now by understanding what they want in their world (clean and free energy) and that they need to ask for those changes because buildings last ~100 years. The lowest hanging fruit is future-proof all construction and have it be ready for incremental changes without needing any labor or permitting work.
Its kids deciding for themselves about the world they want to live in and what features they want in it. Buildings last ~100 years and most likely they are going to live in a home that was built in the past. If they want modern features or amenities without spending a fortune rebuilding the house, its best to future proof.
Building codes are how people went from defecating outside (not the best idea) to thinking about public health and spread of infectious diseases to building indoor bathrooms and plumbing. Once people figured out this is a slightly better way of living, it made into building code.
There are apartments being built today in major metro areas of Asia, they look very fancy, but they don't have a carve-out for a fridge, washer/dryer or a dishwasher. These are concrete homes that people will live in for a long long time. Everyone will eventually need these appliances, but your trade-offs are a significantly worse aesthetic home with all these appliances plugged in your living area or do without them. There was a recent post about white women being racist and not adopting washers immediately, because they have maids. But there is another explanation, old homes are not built with a place for water and electric hookups and a designated space where it goes in. We can see the same phenomenon in Asia now, almost all households in India have a maid to do the clothes, dishes, etc. A machine is far more reliable, higher quality, and cheaper. But there is no designated space, hookups or outlets.
The next generation of kids are going to deal with different challenges. They can't rely on the demographic ponzi scheme, the growth will stop. Building anything new will stop and rentier capitalism will extract the rents from very very old homes for a very long time. See the housing stock in London, (half of it Victorian, 25% from 1900 - 1929, 34% 1930 - 1949). London, the HQ of British Empire, the seat of capitalism for centuries has expensive and old homes. You can also see multi-million dollar very very old homes in bay area and almost any metro. If you are pro defecating outside, anti-electricity, and pro-pollution (air pollution kills 10M/year - nytimes), I don't know what to tell you. These are things that all humans everywhere have to deal with, not political positions.
> the first thing I have them do is find out the county building code engineers[1] and ask them to update the code
Based on your other comments, it doesn't appear you're qualified to be teaching kids about this stuff in the first place, given the lack of understanding about basic electrical code.
The real world is full of tradeoffs. If you also told the kids that mandating 240V outlets in garages would increase the cost of new homes by $1,000 they may have a different opinion on the matter, given that those college kids you're teaching probably imagine themselves trying to buy a home in a few years.
Years ago I owned a home built in the 1980's that had a central vacuum system. It was a cool concept but utterly useless. No new homes that I know of have these systems anymore.
Imagine you were born in the 1960's and thought that these things were the future. Think of all the vacuum bags we'll save from the landfill with this technology! Think of all the money people will save on vacuum cleaners!
> If they want modern features or amenities without spending a fortune rebuilding the house, its best to future proof.
The future is uncertain. Ten years from now people may not even want to own cars if autonomous taxis take off. The whole concept of a garage may morph into something unrecognizable to us today. But if you get your way, we'll waste tons of money putting 240V outlets that never get used as intended.
What is the environmental cost of mining and producing literal tons of copper wire and installing it in new homes for outlets that never get used? What is the cost of using skilled electrician labor to install useless outlets instead of having those same electricians working on building a new solar plant?
I encourage you to discuss these tradeoffs. Don't just ride the good vibes of teaching kids how to use political activism to "make the world a better place", without ever actually teaching them how to evaluate if a certain choice actually makes the world a better place.
If people want a 240V outlet in their garage, they are welcome to pay for it. It doesn't need to be mandated. Home builders aren't stupid: they know what their customers want. If they think they can sell that amenity, they'll install it. If they suspect their customers won't use it, they'll omit it and offer them a lower price. That is the most environmentally optimum solution in the first place. Only those homes that intend to use these outlets should get them.
Imagine I was running a non-profit that teaches middle and high school kids about the human body and the first thing I have them do is to look up their legislator and ask them to pass anti-abortion legislation.
In both situations, kids are being used to promote a political agenda.
It's no different than the parents who bring their kids to protests and make signs for them to hold. Except parents likely explain why they're bringing their kid to a protest. This guy just straight up uses them for his own political goals before even explaining why their doing it.
You should find that icky.
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?tem...
Solar's global peak month in (northern hemisphere) summer 2024 nearly equaled nuclear and now it's possible that the next yearly minimum month coming up this december will match nuclear just 2.5 years later.
Put alternatively, better rates for consumers. How should one portion the cost of the electrical system as a whole to different groups of people? If someone seldom draws electricity from the grid, and only when it is likely more expensive how much should they pay? What about the limit where everyone is a prosumer and has this usage pattern?
Currently Solar PV output is incredibly unbalancing but hopefully batteries will offset that in the coming years
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50131256
Before you get angry, remember what the sun is....
I get the impression they're already really damn cheap, to the point that the issues are more so with grid interconnections, land use, and storage
Oh jesus christ, I don't want the average person doing this, nor any unregulated entities doing so. This is how you end up killing a bunch of people.
I wonder if as panel costs goes down, will people start to wire their homes again for 48V DC? You could conceivably run your HVAC and fridges at least off of it, this would negate the need for a larger (more costly) inverter.
On the usage side for instrumentation, avionics etc. it is usually 28 VDC.
IANAEE, but DC does most of its work with current instead of voltage. So direct shorts are more likely to turn into heating elements (you have to run thicker wire anyway to do the same amount of work). AC can detect and trip faster.
Also, adding/removing loads is more finicky with DC. It affects all the other things on the line much more dramatically than AC.
48V is under the SELV voltage limit, even with some margins.
But historically, some countries have had lower limits. I recall Japan being one of them for a while. I'm not confident that SELV is a harmonized standard worldwide, or at least it wasn't until recently, if it is now.
Most switched-mode power supplies ought to cope with 120V DC. If you look at a circuit diagram the first thing they go through is a bridge rectifier and smoothing cap to provide a 165V (or 340V outside the US!) DC supply for the chopper.
I have some Thinkpad charging bricks I'm prepared to sacrifice for the cause, if you want me to try it.
And that's just dealing with power supplies for electronics (which mostly just want low voltage DC) - if you get into appliances, while almost all will have a power supply that converts to DC, they usually have some circuits that use AC directly (think heating elements, safety critical sensors that use the 60Hz AC waveform as part of their feedback to make sure they haven't locked up, etc). Even appliances that convert the AC input straight to DC (think anything using an inverter to drive a motor or compressor) will often use a voltage doubler circuit to get a DC bus that is ~340V from the 120V AC input (it doubles the peak voltage, which is actually ~170V and not 120V in US) ... The voltage doubler circuit will not infact double a DC input, and the appliance will likely be most unhappy when it's DC bus is a lot lower than it was designed for.*
I see what you're saying but it's a bit theoretical. Nothing in a switcher is run at that tight a tolerance, because in normal operation the load will be highly variable. One of the el-cheapo switching PSUs I have on my bench right now is rated for 90V to 270V, for example, and will run quite happily fully loaded across that full range (and considerably beyond - my variac goes from 0 to about 300V output).
> they usually have some circuits that use AC directly
AC motors won't enjoy it, but heating elements won't be affected.
If you look at the switching power supplies used for network equipment that often actually *does* have ratings for DC operation.
Look at any power supply where you don't want a downstream regulator's decoupling capacitors to have an effect on other regulators.
The only place it makes sense is personal tech and computing, where USB chargers are cheap and ubiquitous, with technology replacement in 2-5 years instead of 5-10 for standard appliances.
However there are a lot of things that won't work on DC as well. Since very few people are running mains voltage DC labels often will not tell you if it will work. (I've toured ships with mains voltage DC and those outlets are labeled - I assume the crew is trained - or perhaps was since this is just a museum now and I'm not sure if current ships use DC)
That's true for the solar development project, but such a project typically ignores grid costs.
It's already getting close to "not really economic" to buy second-hand panels, because people have slightly inflated prices for them, but the way I look at it I get a nice run out to somewhere, have a nice lunch in a cafe, and come back with a couple of kW of panels for about as much as a tank of fuel.
New panels just get cheaper and cheaper and better and better, and you can often find clearance deals on 400W-ish panels for ridiculously low prices.
I doubt that. Currently the cells itself makes only <50% (maybe <30% meanwhile) of a PV module. So the limit to the bottom is by the glass and frame and cable, not by the cells.
But $/watts can significantly go down with more efficiency.
I've been pricing a PV system recently, and I was surprised at how low the price of panels already is. In most estimates I received the panels itself were less than 20% of the total installation costs. Granted, I am looking at a 3-phase system with plenty of battery capacity. For a more typical household setup with 1-phase and moderate battery capacity that percentage will shift a bit.
In my case the quotes are roughly: 40x430Wp panels (~€4000), 3x (3-phase) inverter/chargers (~€5000), batteries (~€5000), auxiliaries (~€1500), cabling (~€2000), mounting hardware (~€2500), labor (~€5000), planning/permissions (~€1000). So total project price is ~25k, of which the panels are only ~€4000. And that doesn't even count the construction of a utility building to house the batteries and inverters, the EV chargers, etc.
On a side note: I found that battery prices have also dropped significantly already. If you're willing to do some assembly yourself you can get ~15kWh of LiFePO4 for just over €1k.
Also, for those wondering: for my situation the ROI of this setup is expected to be about 5 years. This will be quicker if I get an EV, which I am planning on.
Energy prices are high in my country, and price spikes have become more frequent.
My house is currently heated by natural gas, which costs about €200/month avg plus another €550/year in standing charges. Prices for natural gas is expected to rise. By switching to heat pumps and induction cooktop I can disconnect from the gas distribution grid completely. This will safe about €3k in gas costs annually (against current rates) but obviously increase my electricity usage significantly. So in my country €5k/year in electricity isn't as ridiculous as it sounds.
I'm projecting my electricity consumption to be ~€3.5k a year once I have fully switched to electric heating, so this is where generating my own electricity starts to make sense.
The PV array I'm planning is very much over dimensioned for my use. To make financial sense my PV installation must produce more than I consume over the year. Not only will my electricity bill be effectively €0, I will also be able sell overproduction back to the grid during summer. By using variable rate discharging I can optimize the return. I am projecting that selling overproduction will net about €1k annually.
If I add an EV my electricity use obviously goes up again. I won't have as much overproduction then, but I'll safe about 3k/year in fuel.
The rest comes from from dynamic energy tariff trading. The battery will be used as a grid stabiliser, so it'll charge (from the grid) when electricity is cheap/negative and discharge back to the grid when return rate is high. This is projected to net another €500~€1000 annually.
PV only really makes sense when it's combined with batteries and connected to the grid with a variable rate contract. The more battery capacity you have the more value/income it can create stabilising the grid. So really the price per kWh of battery capacity is the driving force in the ROI of a PV setup.
I said ~20% because that's the minimum required to bring it to commercial market while being competitive. If they go more, great, bonus.
AFAIK the latest research contradicts to this [1], can you give some links if you have for this?
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
And usually (I did not read into detail here) the total cost of energy is never calculated.
In Europe, nuclear power plants usually don't have an insurance. It's the state that pays of the cleanup after an aftermath. So total cost is socialized.
Few countries have final deposits. With current technology, you need to operate them for thousands of years (e.g. guard them, so that no terrorists can get the material for "dirty bombs"). None of these total-cost studies calculates this in.
Many countries don't have their own source of uranium or the fabs to bring it up for usage in power plants. So it happens that by betting on solar, you bet on the goodwill of some external country. Did you know that most nuclear related companies worldwide used to be owned by the russian RosAtom? I have no idea if that is still true now after 5 years of war against Ukraine, so maybe the odd country seized mines or enrichment plants. But RosAtom owned stuff abroad, like Canada or Australia. Finding new ways if some terrorist country like russia suddenly ceases to supply you (like they did with gas) has a very high oppertunity cost. These studies usually don't plan in "second source" economic calculations.
In Germany, the four big electric power companies (e.g. Vattenfall, EON etc) say since decades that they don't want to open new nuclear power plants. Since it is not economically feasible. If the TCO would really be spectacular, then they would say differently. In those places, where they still open nuclear plants, like France, even a single block costs billions. I mean, one block estimated to cost 3 billion euro was costing 27 billion. Do these fabricated studies calculate in this grave error of factor 12? In France, EDF only works because it is state backed. If the TCO would be any good, they would swim in money like the senior Uncle Duck.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o
Surely economic forces will overcome political ones eventually, right?
Otherwise, if you just mean financially supporting solar technology, one good way is donating to political action/lobbying groups like Greenlight America or CATF (though that supports clean energy as a whole, not just solar)
"Current levelized cost of storage ranges from $150-300 per MWh for established pumped-storage systems, while newer solid-mass gravity systems estimate costs of $200-400 per MWh. These figures are competitive with long-duration storage applications but remain higher than lithium-ion batteries for shorter-duration uses."
https://eureka.patsnap.com/report-gravitational-potential-en...
Batteries are scheduled to become so cheap that these type of physical storage systems just won't be able to keep up in terms of cost.
Most pumped hydro projects are now put on hold as batteries have been coming down.
https://www.elevenenergy.co.uk/#sodium-ion
They are larger than lithium batteries, but potentially cheaper and better performing around temperature extremes.
Wait, you can schedule price drops?
https://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy2017110 / https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(18)30583-X make the battery takeover look like a foregone conclusion, but past performance is no indication of future performance.
Also what about the systems to turn the batteries into something useable? It is telling how cheap lead-acid batteries looked on the first paper's Figure 2, yet overall system costs were vastly higher.
Like CATL announced a cost of $19 per kwh. https://electrek.co/2026/07/16/catl-sodium-ion-15000-cycle-g...
which I think is far cheaper than the prices in your links. I think they'll have a job going lower for a while as the raw materials are ~$10.
I think the actual cost to buy one now it more $40-60. The $19 is probably their target in a while.
If you spread $60 over 15000 cycles that's 0.4c per kwh stored and returned which is pretty cheap compared to what I pay for electicity (~$35c).
Plus battery assembly and installation costs (inverter, grid connection).
> If you spread $60 over 15000 cycles
A 30 year lifetime (11k cycles if charged/discharged once a day). Using a 5% discount rate the cost goes up to 0.78c/kWh for the cells. The cost goes up if it can not cycle once a day, for instance intermittent source of energy or excess capacity. And the cost goes up with all the rest of the equipment involved, and round trip efficiency.
https://gravity-storage.com/technical-concept/
But battery storage is a proven technology now and the cost trends with such bespoke megaprojects are not looking promising, so I'm not holding my breath.
Burning (regenerable) metal fuel in old coal power plants is also an interesting approach:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666352X2...
Example: Lifting a 10-metric-ton stone by 36 meters stores just about 1 kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy. This is roughly equivalent to the capacity of a small power station used for a camping trip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped_hydro
A single cell is about $5 in volume, while 100kg of fill dirt and rock is about $2. At this point new pumped hydro or gravity batteries don’t scale like li-ion does. This tips even more towards normal batteries when you look at sodium or other cheaper but less energy dense batteries.