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Bear in mind that China has like, no oil[0] or gas[1] at all. Their investments into renewables is kind of a life of death situation, not just for the world, bu

Bear in mind that China has like, no oil[0] or gas[1] at all. Their investments into renewables is kind of a life of death situation, not just for the world, but the PLA specifically, who would likely monopolize domestic oil production in any military engagement. Also worth mentioning that Beijing sits on one side of a mountain range, and the other side is arid desert. It's kind of a no brainer to drop solar panels there and tramsmit power to the nearby megatropolis. > Of course a boom in solar PV installation in the USA would pull the rug out from under natural gas prices Fracking already did this[2]. And solar doesn't make sense in many places in the US. You want somewhere dry and bright, which cuts off the pacific northwest, and most of the north*. You also want to supplement solar with something that will cool off your home in the evening, run your oven, and keep you warm at night. Which natural gas can actually do[3], so even proponents of solar should consider them at least temporary allies. In contrast, wind seems to already be making 10 percent of the US demand[4], versus solars 2 percent. This is where the subsidies are going, and given how much reliable wind there is in tornado alley, will likely continue growing once subsidies expire. In the mean time, we can continue to import subsidized solar from china and focus on higher margin silicon applications. ^_^ [0]: https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/crude-petroleum/reporter/chn [1]: https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/natural-gas-liquefied/reporter/chn [2]: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/rngwhhdm.htm [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States *except for the southern half of Minnesota, apparently

davedx 4y ago
"solar doesn't make sense in many places in the US. You want somewhere dry and bright, which cuts off the pacific northwest, and most of the north*" Can you explain with numbers how you arrive at this conclusion? (Solar is extremely popular and viable in Northern Europe, so it surprises me to read it)
- Armisael16 4y ago
  Most of the US is in fact better for solar than most of Europe (Iberia is fairly good). However, energy prices in the US are considerably lower, so the bar for profitability is much higher. The EU also has colossal subsidies for renewables, which obviously skew the market. In a purely market-driven world Europe would not be investing in solar.
  - matmatmatmat 4y ago
    > In a purely market-driven world Europe would not be investing in solar. Well, maybe, but there's more to a market than buy and sell price. There is also the cost of external energy dependency, for example, or environmental degradation.
  - Swenrekcah 4y ago
    In a purely market driven world oil would have been phased out decades ago because of all the negative externalities that the pure and perfect market would have priced in. I understand your point, I just take issue with the phrasing that subsidies for renewables are skewing the market, since in fact they are rather correcting it. Secondly because the oil industry is subsidised as well.
    - akira2501 4y ago
      > In a purely market driven world oil would have been phased out decades ago because of all the negative externalities that the pure and perfect market would have priced in. People who say this don't seem to realize that it was only 70 years ago we were just stopping the use of horses and other beasts of burden to do the majority of farming, and of course, replacing them with tractors... or the impact this had on productivity and availability. Yes.. oil has negative "externalities." It also had massive benefits and created opportunities for expansion that we might not have otherwise had. The purpose of a market isn't to achieve perfect tyranny in the use of all resources, it's to make the best compromise out of the available choices. Finally, it may just be that we haven't exactly factored in all the negative external components of our new energy choices. The market, if anything, has shown that it is willing to brazenly lie to the entire world if it senses that there is massive profit to be made in it. I don't know why people would expect the elites of green energy to operate any differently than the elites of oil energy have in the past, particularly when the market has made no efforts to induce the kind of perfection you have imagined here.
      - DFHippie 4y ago
        You don't need to put "externalities" in quotes as though it's a suspect concept. It's fine to be suspicious of any entity. But it's not easy to hide externalities. Your suspicion should lead pretty directly to evidence. As it does with fossil fuels. Those who profited from fossil fuels brazenly lied about their own knowledge of their externalities, but the rest of the world could see them in real time. They weren't trying to hide the externalities as much as they were mitigating their legal exposure and improving their propaganda.
- jldugger 4y ago
  > Solar is extremely popular and viable in Northern Europe popular? yes. viable? not as much. all of the contiguous US is further south than the UK. That means shorter winter days, but also incident angles are bad year round. But dont take my word for it, check out https://globalsolaratlas.info https://globalsolaratlas.info
- not2b 4y ago
  The Pacific Northwest is near-desert just east of the Cascades, and transmission lines could carry power to Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver BC from the dry sunny parts.
  - jldugger 4y ago
    The cascade rain shadow is helpful but the PNW is far enough north that you're not getting direct sunlight. And unfortunately the Pacific Northwest is also relatively low population. 4 million for the Seattle metro, 2.5 in Portland. Even if you built out enough solar for Washington and Oregon, we're only 3 percent of the US population. Plus these states have pretty good hydro already. While there are arguments about the ecological impacts of hydro, I think reasonable people will agree that those are now sunk costs and there's not much reason to retire them early. There seems to be a better argument in the southwest, where we have less agriculture and the hydro power Lake Mead provides is now questionable. which is why there are already massive farms there. Though, without that water I'm not sure who would want to live in Vegas at all. The best place for solar seems to be California rooftops. Lots of population, far enough south to have closer to optimal solar incidence, and arid climate that wont interfere too much. But all of this means that you shouldn't expect a unified, cohesive federal energy plan. I don't, at least. Instead we should expect different geographies to find different niches, and a much more diversified plan spread across many more forms: wind, solar, hydro, fission, fusion, geothermal, etc. Plus anyone complaining the US underinvests in R&D has to contend with the fact that this publication came from MIT, and was funded in part by the NSF.
kragen 4y ago
investment into renewables is a life or death situation for every country if your energy costs 7¢ per megajoule and you are being invaded by an opponent whose energy costs 0.7¢ per megajoule you are probably going to lose i don't understand why the capacity factor for utility-scale pv in prc is so low but evidently they did not 'drop solar panels [in the desert] and tramsmit power to the nearby megatropolis'
- jldugger 4y ago
  > evidently they did not 'drop solar panels [in the desert] and tramsmit power to the nearby megatropolis' I mean, I browsed the desert northeast of Beijing and found what looks like a solar installation, right next to some wind turbines. No idea how to estimate capacity from that, and without streetview to confirm it, I'm just making guesses based on how the pixels look.
  - kragen 4y ago
    can you estimate what fraction of their power generation does that installation account for like roughly how many square meters is it
    - jldugger 4y ago
      Almost certainly fuckall. I found three of these just by browsing the area but I'm not convinced they're even solar and not just... random arid agriculture I don't understand. More likely these are demonstration installs. The big ones seem to be more in the northwest[0], much further out. The land there is even less productive, but I don't understand how transmission losses don't eat them alive. [0]: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/largest-solar-plants-china/
      - kragen 4y ago
        they've built all of the biggest hvdc systems in the world since 02010 and are building more all the time prc has had 800 kilovolt uhvdc since 02010; 12 years later there still aren't any in europe, north america, africa, or australia, though a european company was the lead contractor on the 02010 project but plausibly the answer is that transmission losses do eat them alive and they have to curtail pv output in the northwest because there isn't enough local demand
tuatoru 4y ago
It's overstating the case to say that China has no oil or fossil gas. Yes, it imports a lot but there are oil fields both on-shore and off-shore. The largest field is Daqing, which, yes, produces less than a million barrels per day. Not nothing, though. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Oil_fields_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Oil_fields_in_China
- marmetio 4y ago
  > China has like, no oil or gas at all The word "like" here indicates hyperbole - an intentional overstatement used as a figure of speech.
gloosx 4y ago
But why couldn't China just keep milking it`s fat cow Russia? AFAIK they are getting mass oil and gas for literally nothing.
- jldugger 4y ago
  Do you know how that supply is making it to china? Almost all of the pipes go from Russian oil fields west to Europe. Even the pipelines that travel east have to contend with a reality that Nobody lives in the Gobi desert. Instead what is happening is oil is being shipped by boat to non-aligned parties like India and China. Supposedly using ship-to-ship transfers[1] to obscure origin, or because Russian ports can't support supertankers. And all of the PLA's ambition is in the South China sea, which means even if you rely on Russia to supply you wartime energy, it has to ship through a battlefield. And anyone opposed to it has a pretty free hand to say "mine now" as the path meanders by Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, India, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka etc. [1]: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/russian-oil-ship-to-ship-transfer-anonymous-chinese-buyer-sanctions-2022-8
  - gloosx 4y ago
    yeah fair point, thanks for clarifying this
todd8 4y ago
> In contrast, wind seems to already be making 10 percent of the US demand[4], versus solars 2 percent. The numbers can be misleading; I'm not suggesting that jldugger doesn't understand this, just that I find the numbers and the way they are quoted a bit confusing. If we look at primary energy consumption by source from the US Energy Information Agency we see [1] that for 2021 the US used 98 quads of energy. The breakdown into primary energy consumption by source for 2021 is 77 quads from fossil fuels 8 quads from nuclear 5 quads from biomass 3.3 quads from wind 2 quads from hydro 1.5 quads from solar =========================== 98 quads total These number are rounded, see original for details (quad == Quadrillion BTU). It appears to me that wind plus solar are providing close to 5% of US consumption of energy. [1] https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T01.03#/?f=A&start=1949&end=2021&charted=13 https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T...
poulsbohemian 4y ago
>which cuts off the pacific northwest, Which is mostly ok, as Eastern Washington and central / eastern Oregon fit the bill both for these state as a whole, plus could be theoretically exporting their hydro / solar / wind generated power to other parts of the country. Problem is, the rural parts of these states feel ignored by the urban (read: politically powerful) parts of the states, leading to all sorts of pettiness around siting of new wind / solar deployments.

davedx 4y ago

"solar doesn't make sense in many places in the US. You want somewhere dry and bright, which cuts off the pacific northwest, and most of the north*" Can you explain with numbers how you arrive at this conclusion? (Solar is extremely popular and viable in Northern Europe, so it surprises me to read it)

Armisael16 4y ago
Most of the US is in fact better for solar than most of Europe (Iberia is fairly good). However, energy prices in the US are considerably lower, so the bar for profitability is much higher. The EU also has colossal subsidies for renewables, which obviously skew the market. In a purely market-driven world Europe would not be investing in solar.
- matmatmatmat 4y ago
  > In a purely market-driven world Europe would not be investing in solar. Well, maybe, but there's more to a market than buy and sell price. There is also the cost of external energy dependency, for example, or environmental degradation.
- Swenrekcah 4y ago
  In a purely market driven world oil would have been phased out decades ago because of all the negative externalities that the pure and perfect market would have priced in. I understand your point, I just take issue with the phrasing that subsidies for renewables are skewing the market, since in fact they are rather correcting it. Secondly because the oil industry is subsidised as well.
  - akira2501 4y ago
    > In a purely market driven world oil would have been phased out decades ago because of all the negative externalities that the pure and perfect market would have priced in. People who say this don't seem to realize that it was only 70 years ago we were just stopping the use of horses and other beasts of burden to do the majority of farming, and of course, replacing them with tractors... or the impact this had on productivity and availability. Yes.. oil has negative "externalities." It also had massive benefits and created opportunities for expansion that we might not have otherwise had. The purpose of a market isn't to achieve perfect tyranny in the use of all resources, it's to make the best compromise out of the available choices. Finally, it may just be that we haven't exactly factored in all the negative external components of our new energy choices. The market, if anything, has shown that it is willing to brazenly lie to the entire world if it senses that there is massive profit to be made in it. I don't know why people would expect the elites of green energy to operate any differently than the elites of oil energy have in the past, particularly when the market has made no efforts to induce the kind of perfection you have imagined here.
    - DFHippie 4y ago
      You don't need to put "externalities" in quotes as though it's a suspect concept. It's fine to be suspicious of any entity. But it's not easy to hide externalities. Your suspicion should lead pretty directly to evidence. As it does with fossil fuels. Those who profited from fossil fuels brazenly lied about their own knowledge of their externalities, but the rest of the world could see them in real time. They weren't trying to hide the externalities as much as they were mitigating their legal exposure and improving their propaganda.
jldugger 4y ago
> Solar is extremely popular and viable in Northern Europe popular? yes. viable? not as much. all of the contiguous US is further south than the UK. That means shorter winter days, but also incident angles are bad year round. But dont take my word for it, check out https://globalsolaratlas.info https://globalsolaratlas.info
not2b 4y ago
The Pacific Northwest is near-desert just east of the Cascades, and transmission lines could carry power to Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver BC from the dry sunny parts.
- jldugger 4y ago
  The cascade rain shadow is helpful but the PNW is far enough north that you're not getting direct sunlight. And unfortunately the Pacific Northwest is also relatively low population. 4 million for the Seattle metro, 2.5 in Portland. Even if you built out enough solar for Washington and Oregon, we're only 3 percent of the US population. Plus these states have pretty good hydro already. While there are arguments about the ecological impacts of hydro, I think reasonable people will agree that those are now sunk costs and there's not much reason to retire them early. There seems to be a better argument in the southwest, where we have less agriculture and the hydro power Lake Mead provides is now questionable. which is why there are already massive farms there. Though, without that water I'm not sure who would want to live in Vegas at all. The best place for solar seems to be California rooftops. Lots of population, far enough south to have closer to optimal solar incidence, and arid climate that wont interfere too much. But all of this means that you shouldn't expect a unified, cohesive federal energy plan. I don't, at least. Instead we should expect different geographies to find different niches, and a much more diversified plan spread across many more forms: wind, solar, hydro, fission, fusion, geothermal, etc. Plus anyone complaining the US underinvests in R&D has to contend with the fact that this publication came from MIT, and was funded in part by the NSF.

kragen 4y ago

investment into renewables is a life or death situation for every country if your energy costs 7¢ per megajoule and you are being invaded by an opponent whose energy costs 0.7¢ per megajoule you are probably going to lose i don't understand why the capacity factor for utility-scale pv in prc is so low but evidently they did not 'drop solar panels [in the desert] and tramsmit power to the nearby megatropolis'

jldugger 4y ago
> evidently they did not 'drop solar panels [in the desert] and tramsmit power to the nearby megatropolis' I mean, I browsed the desert northeast of Beijing and found what looks like a solar installation, right next to some wind turbines. No idea how to estimate capacity from that, and without streetview to confirm it, I'm just making guesses based on how the pixels look.
- kragen 4y ago
  can you estimate what fraction of their power generation does that installation account for like roughly how many square meters is it
  - jldugger 4y ago
    Almost certainly fuckall. I found three of these just by browsing the area but I'm not convinced they're even solar and not just... random arid agriculture I don't understand. More likely these are demonstration installs. The big ones seem to be more in the northwest[0], much further out. The land there is even less productive, but I don't understand how transmission losses don't eat them alive. [0]: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/largest-solar-plants-china/
    - kragen 4y ago
      they've built all of the biggest hvdc systems in the world since 02010 and are building more all the time prc has had 800 kilovolt uhvdc since 02010; 12 years later there still aren't any in europe, north america, africa, or australia, though a european company was the lead contractor on the 02010 project but plausibly the answer is that transmission losses do eat them alive and they have to curtail pv output in the northwest because there isn't enough local demand

tuatoru 4y ago

It's overstating the case to say that China has no oil or fossil gas. Yes, it imports a lot but there are oil fields both on-shore and off-shore. The largest field is Daqing, which, yes, produces less than a million barrels per day. Not nothing, though. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Oil_fields_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Oil_fields_in_China

marmetio 4y ago
> China has like, no oil or gas at all The word "like" here indicates hyperbole - an intentional overstatement used as a figure of speech.

gloosx 4y ago

But why couldn't China just keep milking it`s fat cow Russia? AFAIK they are getting mass oil and gas for literally nothing.

jldugger 4y ago
Do you know how that supply is making it to china? Almost all of the pipes go from Russian oil fields west to Europe. Even the pipelines that travel east have to contend with a reality that Nobody lives in the Gobi desert. Instead what is happening is oil is being shipped by boat to non-aligned parties like India and China. Supposedly using ship-to-ship transfers[1] to obscure origin, or because Russian ports can't support supertankers. And all of the PLA's ambition is in the South China sea, which means even if you rely on Russia to supply you wartime energy, it has to ship through a battlefield. And anyone opposed to it has a pretty free hand to say "mine now" as the path meanders by Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, India, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka etc. [1]: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/russian-oil-ship-to-ship-transfer-anonymous-chinese-buyer-sanctions-2022-8
- gloosx 4y ago
  yeah fair point, thanks for clarifying this

todd8 4y ago

> In contrast, wind seems to already be making 10 percent of the US demand[4], versus solars 2 percent. The numbers can be misleading; I'm not suggesting that jldugger doesn't understand this, just that I find the numbers and the way they are quoted a bit confusing. If we look at primary energy consumption by source from the US Energy Information Agency we see [1] that for 2021 the US used 98 quads of energy. The breakdown into primary energy consumption by source for 2021 is 77 quads from fossil fuels 8 quads from nuclear 5 quads from biomass 3.3 quads from wind 2 quads from hydro 1.5 quads from solar =========================== 98 quads total These number are rounded, see original for details (quad == Quadrillion BTU). It appears to me that wind plus solar are providing close to 5% of US consumption of energy. [1] https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T01.03#/?f=A&start=1949&end=2021&charted=13 https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T...

poulsbohemian 4y ago

>which cuts off the pacific northwest, Which is mostly ok, as Eastern Washington and central / eastern Oregon fit the bill both for these state as a whole, plus could be theoretically exporting their hydro / solar / wind generated power to other parts of the country. Problem is, the rural parts of these states feel ignored by the urban (read: politically powerful) parts of the states, leading to all sorts of pettiness around siting of new wind / solar deployments.