8 ms·

'Unstoppable force' of solar power propels world to 40% clean electricity

177 points by belter 2y ago

nitrix 2y ago
Okay, but put the panels on rooftops, not over that nice greenery.
- Filligree 2y ago
  The greenery may be perfectly fine with it. A lot of plants prefer shade, though of course that’s so they can still grow while shaded by trees. You might say “put in a forest”, and I’d agree, but if that’s not going to happen then we might as well have the solar panels.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  Putting solar on rooftops has at least one really unfortunate drawback, at least in Anglosphere nations with the fucked up common law system. Rooftop solar vests the owner with a claim to a right to the sun, and a way to stop people from building anything next to their house.
- atlantic 2y ago
  It's not "over" greenery. Land is entirely cleared of vegetation before panels are installed, including the occasional forest. Thousands of larger birds are killed by wind farms. Offshore wind farms are creating deserts for fish. Understandably, many prefer the good old days before the planet was being saved.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    Why would they prefer the older methods that do more land damage and kill even more animals?
  - recursive 2y ago
    Wait until you find out what fracking and oil drilling do.
  - krn1p4n1c 2y ago
    DWs recent doc showed fish thriving around offshore farms and high success rates of preventing bird strikes by painting the blades. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3395_T1N-fo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3395_T1N-fo
  - mrexroad 2y ago
    Can you cite the offshore wind farm induced fish desert? I’d be interested to understand the dynamics.
  - bmicraft 2y ago
    Have you seen what just mining coal does too a landscape? I don't think so. The only reason for that is that coal isn't new and thus not reported on in the news.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  Putting solar panels over a grassland is a lot better for the environment than using the same area for agriculture. It's not like we have a lot of meadows just lying around unused that are used for solar projects. It's also a lot cheaper than installing panels on roofs. However we should normalize panels over parking lots. Parking lots are just concrete wastelands, and while lifting the panels up over the cars requires a bit more material it is otherwise basically free real estate in areas with high electricity use (great to minimize grid losses)
- acc_297 2y ago
  The greenery in question appears to be a tidal estuary (but I'm not 100% sure) and it also appears to be close to the downtown center of a city of 4 million people who all need some amount of electricity to live their daily lives. The ecosystem of the body of water on which these panels are installed is I would imagine relatively undisturbed by the solar PV - it's a question of aesthetics whether or not this habitat has been degraded. My feeling is that these over-water panels generating a not-insignificant amount of power are an ideal compromise between the sprawl of the built environment of (Taizhou, China) and the natural ecosystem.
melling 2y ago
“ And solar was the fastest-growing electricity source for the 20th year in a row. It now provides 7% of the world's electricity”
- nasmorn 2y ago
  Exponential growth is unintuitive. More than a full percentage point was added last year and that will continue to accelerate. Even the IAE is predicting 14% share by 2030 and they have underestimated solar for the last 10 years now
  - Gibbon1 2y ago
    My comment perceptually, exponential growth looks like bring hit by a wall. It's nothing at all until it is. It'll be 1%. And in a while it double. And double a again. And again. And each doubling is the same amount of time between them. We're close to production of solar and wind exceeding recent growth in energy demand. When that happens it'll start cratering oil and gas demand.
    - pertymcpert 2y ago
      It's like I've always said about self driving cars. Self driving cars always seem around 5 years away, until suddenly they're 6 months away. There's no in between. We're seeing that with Waymo.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    The question is when it starts looking more like an S-curve. That’s hard to predict because it depends on energy storage.
    - piva00 2y ago
      Since there will be so much solar installed it's quite inevitable that energy storage will be also growing on a lagging but similar exponential curve. Solar is becoming big, and if a major impediment is storage which is not a hard problem like fusion to solve, there will be tons done to bring it into reality. Even if the current solutions are inadequate, the same was true for PV 20 years ago, it just needed investment in R&D. Investment in R&D of grid storage is at the highest in history, and growing.
bwb 2y ago
I am excited to see the next 20 years :)
- nxm 2y ago
  China keeps adding coal power plants like no other and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future
  - slaw 2y ago
    In 2024, the world added 553 GW of new solar capacity. China added 277.17 GW.
  - jasonsb 2y ago
    They add coal as peaking power plants. They're not planning to run the grid on coal.
    - timeon 2y ago
      In context of climate change, absolute values of CO2 are still more relevant than proportion in generated energy.
      - itishappy 2y ago
        Somewhat, but proportional/per-capita becomes more relevant when you allow for changing standards of living. Put differently: Unless you have a plan to change the number of people on Earth (please don't) or the amount of power required per person (potentially viable), then proportional and absolute are essentially equivalent.
  - throwawaymaths 2y ago
    > will continue to do so for the foreseeable future Not really, there is going to be about a 40-year trough in the Chinese economy due to demographics. At some point soon, manufacturing in China won't make sense anymore, (and world wide demand will also decrease due to demographics) so presumably China will be able to decommission a lot of their power generation instead of adding to it. Will they axe their coal? Time will tell, but adding capacity will end, and not too far in the future, either.
botanical 2y ago
[flagged]
- blackhawkC17 2y ago
  This is a silly rant. Politicians were also responsible for initially subsidizing solar to usher in the current boom. Corporations invested heavily in solar production to create the cheap panels that are being installed rapidly. Just because some politicians and corporations do things we don’t like doesn’t make them in general “the biggest enemy of humanity.”
  - thelastgallon 2y ago
    They didn't need to subsidize solar. Just stop fossil fuel subsidies, which are $7 trillion/year and level the playing field.
    - bpodgursky 2y ago
      That number is fake. There's no way to add up to anything within two orders of magnitude without adding extremely specious externalities and permitting rights.
      - ElevenLathe 2y ago
        Even better news! If the subsidies are actually really small or nonexistent, it should be much easier to get rid of them, right?
        bpodgursky 2y ago
        Uh... sure? Can you point to the actual subsidies you want to remove? I feel like you think you're making some clever gotcha, but what you're saying is, let's continue doing what we're doing right now.
        2y ago
exabrial 2y ago
Yeah, no. That picture is disgusting. Look at all of that natural habitat plowed through will diesel bulldozers, hauled off with giant diesel trucks, displacing animals and plants and insects. The habitat is permanently ruined. This is dumb and shouldn't be celebrated. Solar is fine in already disturbed areas. Stop clearing more land for "green" projects.
- acc_297 2y ago
  I believe that the installation in that picture and a number of other installations in the Taizhou region are built over a river system or some kind of tidal water reservoir I was unable to find the exact area but [1] is a nearby installation. Land use is a large contributing factor to climate change but this particular image seems to be the best case scenario for large solar installation the ecosystem (marshland?) appears to be relatively undisturbed (also considering it is centrally located in a city of 4 million people solar panels or not it seems pretty lush). And I'll parrot an often cited statistic: "the entire U.S. could be powered by utility-scale solar occupying just 0.6% of the nation’s land mass" this (imo) makes a good case for solar PV as a relatively large chunk of installed grid capacity it just seems like a better compromise than the alternatives. If utility scale battery storage ever pans out (that or UHV transmission or both) then we could see renewable sources like solar+wind actually work as base-load capacity. Others also comment on this thread that converted agricultural land (i.e. field to pasture) meshes well with solar PV installation the plants typically do not need full sun. I would guess that a small percentage of installed solar required any kind of land shaping or clearing although it does happen [2]. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-invests-546-billion-in-clean-energy-far-surpassing-the-u-s/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-invests-546... [2] https://www.cmigroupinc.ca/solar-farm-environmental-impact-biodiversity-and-land-use/ https://www.cmigroupinc.ca/solar-farm-environmental-impact-b...
lm28469 2y ago
Daily reminder that fossils aren't decreasing and renewables are just added on top. The only recent time fossil decreased was during covid, and even then it barely was a dent. To meet our climate goals we'd need something in the same vein as covid... constantly https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country.png?stackMode=absolute https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
- sightbroke 2y ago
  Article is limited on numbers perhaps but does state: > Phil MacDonald, Ember's managing director, said: "Paired with battery storage, solar is set to be an unstoppable force. "As the fastest-growing and largest source of new electricity, it is critical in meeting the world's ever-increasing demand for electricity." > Despite the rise in renewable power, electricity from more polluting fossil fuels crept up by 1.4% last year due to surging demand, meaning emissions from the sector rose too to an all-time high. > Ember forecasts the growth in clean power will soon outpace the growth in demand, helping to displace fossil fuels from the system. Is fossil fuel use growing at an increasing rate or decreasing rate? Is non-carbon emitting energy supplies growing at an increasing rate or decreasing?
  - lm28469 2y ago
    None of them are decreasing globally, that's the point
    - sightbroke 2y ago
      If fossil fuels are growing at a decreasing rate that means that eventually they will stop growing. That's the point.
      - lm28469 2y ago
        Does this look like it's coming to a plateau of even a slowdown to you ? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuel-consumption-by-fuel-type.png https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuel-consumption-b... > To keep global warming to no more than 1.5°C – as called for in the Paris Agreement – emissions need to be reduced by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. Even if we stopped right now we'd need to be back to ~2000 co2 emissions by 2030, that's in 5 years. Even if we had 5 years of covid with the same restrictions as we had in peak 2020 we wouldn't reach that point...
jeffbee 2y ago
When do the fission cheerleaders capitulate?
- zozbot234 2y ago
  The point of fission is that it still yields power even when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. The alternative is to run gas peaker plants, or even dirtier sources like coal. Storage is a non-starter, even the best form of energy storage (pumped hydro) cannot cope with a dip lasting more than a few days or weeks.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    So, never, for your part, is what you are saying? Have you updated this copypasta at any time over the last 15 years?
  - myrmidon 2y ago
    Gas peaker plants are not "the alternative" to nuclear power, they are exactly what nuclear power needs, too, because regulating nuclear plants down is not what you wanna do after investing billions into it-- you need those plants running on full tilt for like 90% of the time, and even then its gonna take decades to pay back the investment. Meanwhile, 1kW of solar with 1kWh of storage can be had for $1k on Amazon, yields 1-2MWh per year and pays for itself within the decade, with costs still trending down. Yes, fully getting rid of fossil gas is an ongoing challenge, but a much easier one than ramping up nuclear reactor build rates by a factor of 1000 or so...
  - itishappy 2y ago
    Fission plants are way too expensive to let idle. They make ideal baseload plants, but they suck as peaking plants.
- 1970-01-01 2y ago
  When volcanic eruptions are 100% predictable 3 years in advance.
- tick_tock_tick 2y ago
mentalgear 2y ago
I, for one, welcome the solar age. Truly clean power that can be generated decentralised, on a regional, even local commune level. It's wild how big companies, certain countries and billionaires are still holding on to nuclear fission (not fusion). Nuclear reactors: - take decades to build - go massively over budget, at least 2x if not more [0] - are inherently uneconomically: energy companies would never invest/build them on their own, only by lobbying governments for HUGE subsides (in various forms) do they get build - inherently uninsurable: no private insurance company would insure a plant, again if private companies would need to build/run them on their own, every insurance company would deny them - deconstructing them takes again billions and decades - there's still no real-world solution (or even long-term secure storage) for nuclear waste in the world --- Solar / Wind / Storage Compare the 60 Billions for 1 single nuclear plant (UK) to what you would get from the same investment in solar (plus battery tech getting cheaper and better for storage). We are talking about differences in the magnitudes. About the only value nuclear fission has is that's a central power source which gives the entities owning it huge power over the consumers. [0] https://apnews.com/article/uk-nuclear-plant-hinkley-point-costs-67adc627f0acf130d3ea6c2423e98c4e https://apnews.com/article/uk-nuclear-plant-hinkley-point-co...
- wortelefant 2y ago
  This is not an adequate way to look at nuclear. If you check the stats of established constructions and not first of a kind prototypes (check Barakah instead Hinkley), the construction time is closer to 10 years, often less. With transmutation and the option for recycling it altogether, waste is not an issue. Only the low fission parts of the spent fuel is low-grade active for longer than 1000 years, but this is such a low level of radiation, it is comparable to natural uranium formations and not an issue. The high radiation part of the fuel has lost the dangerous level of radiation in less than 1000 years and can be recycled before. The arenic compounds and other substances as byproduct of copper etc production for the mass of renewables have a much longer shelf life of toxitity. Also, you need more of them.
  - mentalgear 2y ago
    - Even if 'only' 10 years construction time: How much solar energy can be build in that time at a fraction of the cost? - So we need to find secure expensive, leak-free storage only for 1000 years? Most countries cant even plan 5 years ahead. - No words on generated Energy produced per Dollar. Your rebuttal is not as significant as you might think.
gandalfian 2y ago
And yet sometimes I wonder. In the Uk you need most of your energy in the cold dark winter. So if you require enough non solar renewables to get you through the winter with net zero and those renewables are still available in the summer time are large scale solar not a bit redundant? Sunnier countries that have high electricity demand for air conditioning during the sunny periods would seem to have a better match mind.
- mr_toad 2y ago
  The UK might to think nuclear, if only so that it isn’t totally reliant on a foreign power for its nuclear deterrent.
  - tim333 2y ago
    We have a few reactors and used to make bombs, the first tested in 1952. It's been a bit outsourced to the US these days though which might end up changing.
- pydry 2y ago
  It's usually windy when it's dark and cold and vice versa. You should be wondering about the combination of solar + wind energy + short term storage + long term storage.
  - zozbot234 2y ago
    > It's usually windy when it's dark and cold and vice versa. Usually, but not always. You can have many days or weeks, e.g. in mid-winter of overcast weather and very little wind. This is a real problem for renewable energy sources, they're not comprehensively viable unless supplemented by alternatives like gas peakers or perhaps nuclear.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      Or geographic interconnection. There hasn't been an hour in the past 30 years where there was no wind or sun somewhere in Europe.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bluescrn 2y ago
Unstoppable force meets 104% tariff...
- api 2y ago
  First they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Part of this extreme reckless tariff push is definitely protectionism for the fossil fuel industry.
  - tim333 2y ago
    I hope they are enjoying the drop in the oil price from $71 when trump did his Apr 2nd announcement to $57 now.
  - bitethecutebait 2y ago
    two more parts: - a call to action - dump and pump stock market scheme how many HN users, say top 5000 commenters and people with craziest CVs and or income will profit of that? it would be stupid not to, right?
  - WillPostForFood 2y ago
    Do you think that was Biden's motivation when he put a 50% tariff on solar panels? https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ustr-biden-tariff-increase-wafers-polysilicon-tungsten/735300/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ustr-biden-tariff-increase-...
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      > The move builds on tariff hikes finalized by the Biden administration in September that target strategic product categories from China You can argue about whether tariffs are good or bad, but in any case there's a vast difference between "target[ing] strategic product categories" and bluntly hitting entire ccTLDs.
      - bryanlarsen 2y ago
        The Biden tariffs were balanced by substantial incentives to build solar manufacturing capacity. edit to respond to dead comment: The Chinese wasted way more money on Solyndra's than the US did. Most of their solar power startups were failures too. Yet now they dominate because they subsidized more than one and didn't give up after one failed.
thundervelvet 2y ago
Neat, solar power growing this fast is really good news!
1970-01-01 2y ago
Moore's law for solar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law
ck2 2y ago
Meanwhile in the USA the whitehouse just bailed out the coal industry.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  Actually no, coal is still going to die in the US unless China sells us their coal for dirt cheap. You get more watts per human labor hour with our abundant natural gas reserves. No matter how cheap you drive labor, it will still be more economical to use that labor to drill wells. Coal was always dying, especially in the US, because of economic concerns. It's a stupid source of energy. The fact that anyone in the US even thinks of coal is absurd. There are maybe 60k coal miners in the US. It hasn't mattered in decades.
seeg 2y ago
What about https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/19/1032215/solar-panels-recycling/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/19/1032215/solar-pa...
- alright2565 2y ago
  Through incredible human ingenuity, we have convinced the two most abundant elements in the earth's crust to give us free energy. Once they are no longer effective, after several decades of service, we put them back in the earth where we got them. Is this a problem worth solving? Is it a problem worth giving any amount of thought to at all, when the alternative is killing people both directly through pollution and indirectly through climate change?
know-how 2y ago
[dead]
Fruitmaniac 2y ago
America is so fucking backwards it makes me cry
phendrenad2 2y ago
Is there a source for the claim that solar provides 7% of the world's power? I'm trying to track down the source of this figure. I see that the global "photovoltaic (PV) capacity" is at 6.6% (according to a trade organization that represents manufacturers of solar panels). I don't see a definition for "PV capacity", but I assume it means the total theoretical output of all installed solar panels, even if the output is much lower (due to panels being sub-optimally located, aligned, or having degraded over time). I'd love to be proven wrong, but I'm just not buying the 7% figure as the evidence stands.
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  The news story is reporting on the new report from Ember think tank, which has interactive data charts on their site. It shows solar PV as 6.91% of global electricity generation last year: https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/ https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/

177 points by belter 2y ago

nitrix 2y ago

Okay, but put the panels on rooftops, not over that nice greenery.

Filligree 2y ago
The greenery may be perfectly fine with it. A lot of plants prefer shade, though of course that’s so they can still grow while shaded by trees. You might say “put in a forest”, and I’d agree, but if that’s not going to happen then we might as well have the solar panels.
jeffbee 2y ago
Putting solar on rooftops has at least one really unfortunate drawback, at least in Anglosphere nations with the fucked up common law system. Rooftop solar vests the owner with a claim to a right to the sun, and a way to stop people from building anything next to their house.
atlantic 2y ago
It's not "over" greenery. Land is entirely cleared of vegetation before panels are installed, including the occasional forest. Thousands of larger birds are killed by wind farms. Offshore wind farms are creating deserts for fish. Understandably, many prefer the good old days before the planet was being saved.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  Why would they prefer the older methods that do more land damage and kill even more animals?
- recursive 2y ago
  Wait until you find out what fracking and oil drilling do.
- krn1p4n1c 2y ago
  DWs recent doc showed fish thriving around offshore farms and high success rates of preventing bird strikes by painting the blades. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3395_T1N-fo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3395_T1N-fo
- mrexroad 2y ago
  Can you cite the offshore wind farm induced fish desert? I’d be interested to understand the dynamics.
- bmicraft 2y ago
  Have you seen what just mining coal does too a landscape? I don't think so. The only reason for that is that coal isn't new and thus not reported on in the news.
wongarsu 2y ago
Putting solar panels over a grassland is a lot better for the environment than using the same area for agriculture. It's not like we have a lot of meadows just lying around unused that are used for solar projects. It's also a lot cheaper than installing panels on roofs. However we should normalize panels over parking lots. Parking lots are just concrete wastelands, and while lifting the panels up over the cars requires a bit more material it is otherwise basically free real estate in areas with high electricity use (great to minimize grid losses)
acc_297 2y ago
The greenery in question appears to be a tidal estuary (but I'm not 100% sure) and it also appears to be close to the downtown center of a city of 4 million people who all need some amount of electricity to live their daily lives. The ecosystem of the body of water on which these panels are installed is I would imagine relatively undisturbed by the solar PV - it's a question of aesthetics whether or not this habitat has been degraded. My feeling is that these over-water panels generating a not-insignificant amount of power are an ideal compromise between the sprawl of the built environment of (Taizhou, China) and the natural ecosystem.

melling 2y ago

“ And solar was the fastest-growing electricity source for the 20th year in a row. It now provides 7% of the world's electricity”

nasmorn 2y ago
Exponential growth is unintuitive. More than a full percentage point was added last year and that will continue to accelerate. Even the IAE is predicting 14% share by 2030 and they have underestimated solar for the last 10 years now
- Gibbon1 2y ago
  My comment perceptually, exponential growth looks like bring hit by a wall. It's nothing at all until it is. It'll be 1%. And in a while it double. And double a again. And again. And each doubling is the same amount of time between them. We're close to production of solar and wind exceeding recent growth in energy demand. When that happens it'll start cratering oil and gas demand.
  - pertymcpert 2y ago
    It's like I've always said about self driving cars. Self driving cars always seem around 5 years away, until suddenly they're 6 months away. There's no in between. We're seeing that with Waymo.
- skybrian 2y ago
  The question is when it starts looking more like an S-curve. That’s hard to predict because it depends on energy storage.
  - piva00 2y ago
    Since there will be so much solar installed it's quite inevitable that energy storage will be also growing on a lagging but similar exponential curve. Solar is becoming big, and if a major impediment is storage which is not a hard problem like fusion to solve, there will be tons done to bring it into reality. Even if the current solutions are inadequate, the same was true for PV 20 years ago, it just needed investment in R&D. Investment in R&D of grid storage is at the highest in history, and growing.

bwb 2y ago

I am excited to see the next 20 years :)

nxm 2y ago
China keeps adding coal power plants like no other and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future
- slaw 2y ago
  In 2024, the world added 553 GW of new solar capacity. China added 277.17 GW.
- jasonsb 2y ago
  They add coal as peaking power plants. They're not planning to run the grid on coal.
  - timeon 2y ago
    In context of climate change, absolute values of CO2 are still more relevant than proportion in generated energy.
    - itishappy 2y ago
      Somewhat, but proportional/per-capita becomes more relevant when you allow for changing standards of living. Put differently: Unless you have a plan to change the number of people on Earth (please don't) or the amount of power required per person (potentially viable), then proportional and absolute are essentially equivalent.
- throwawaymaths 2y ago
  > will continue to do so for the foreseeable future Not really, there is going to be about a 40-year trough in the Chinese economy due to demographics. At some point soon, manufacturing in China won't make sense anymore, (and world wide demand will also decrease due to demographics) so presumably China will be able to decommission a lot of their power generation instead of adding to it. Will they axe their coal? Time will tell, but adding capacity will end, and not too far in the future, either.

botanical 2y ago

[flagged]

blackhawkC17 2y ago
This is a silly rant. Politicians were also responsible for initially subsidizing solar to usher in the current boom. Corporations invested heavily in solar production to create the cheap panels that are being installed rapidly. Just because some politicians and corporations do things we don’t like doesn’t make them in general “the biggest enemy of humanity.”
- thelastgallon 2y ago
  They didn't need to subsidize solar. Just stop fossil fuel subsidies, which are $7 trillion/year and level the playing field.
  - bpodgursky 2y ago
    That number is fake. There's no way to add up to anything within two orders of magnitude without adding extremely specious externalities and permitting rights.
    - ElevenLathe 2y ago
      Even better news! If the subsidies are actually really small or nonexistent, it should be much easier to get rid of them, right?
      - bpodgursky 2y ago
        Uh... sure? Can you point to the actual subsidies you want to remove? I feel like you think you're making some clever gotcha, but what you're saying is, let's continue doing what we're doing right now.
        2y ago

exabrial 2y ago

Yeah, no. That picture is disgusting. Look at all of that natural habitat plowed through will diesel bulldozers, hauled off with giant diesel trucks, displacing animals and plants and insects. The habitat is permanently ruined. This is dumb and shouldn't be celebrated. Solar is fine in already disturbed areas. Stop clearing more land for "green" projects.

acc_297 2y ago
I believe that the installation in that picture and a number of other installations in the Taizhou region are built over a river system or some kind of tidal water reservoir I was unable to find the exact area but [1] is a nearby installation. Land use is a large contributing factor to climate change but this particular image seems to be the best case scenario for large solar installation the ecosystem (marshland?) appears to be relatively undisturbed (also considering it is centrally located in a city of 4 million people solar panels or not it seems pretty lush). And I'll parrot an often cited statistic: "the entire U.S. could be powered by utility-scale solar occupying just 0.6% of the nation’s land mass" this (imo) makes a good case for solar PV as a relatively large chunk of installed grid capacity it just seems like a better compromise than the alternatives. If utility scale battery storage ever pans out (that or UHV transmission or both) then we could see renewable sources like solar+wind actually work as base-load capacity. Others also comment on this thread that converted agricultural land (i.e. field to pasture) meshes well with solar PV installation the plants typically do not need full sun. I would guess that a small percentage of installed solar required any kind of land shaping or clearing although it does happen [2]. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-invests-546-billion-in-clean-energy-far-surpassing-the-u-s/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-invests-546... [2] https://www.cmigroupinc.ca/solar-farm-environmental-impact-biodiversity-and-land-use/ https://www.cmigroupinc.ca/solar-farm-environmental-impact-b...

lm28469 2y ago

Daily reminder that fossils aren't decreasing and renewables are just added on top. The only recent time fossil decreased was during covid, and even then it barely was a dent. To meet our climate goals we'd need something in the same vein as covid... constantly https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country.png?stackMode=absolute https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

sightbroke 2y ago
Article is limited on numbers perhaps but does state: > Phil MacDonald, Ember's managing director, said: "Paired with battery storage, solar is set to be an unstoppable force. "As the fastest-growing and largest source of new electricity, it is critical in meeting the world's ever-increasing demand for electricity." > Despite the rise in renewable power, electricity from more polluting fossil fuels crept up by 1.4% last year due to surging demand, meaning emissions from the sector rose too to an all-time high. > Ember forecasts the growth in clean power will soon outpace the growth in demand, helping to displace fossil fuels from the system. Is fossil fuel use growing at an increasing rate or decreasing rate? Is non-carbon emitting energy supplies growing at an increasing rate or decreasing?
- lm28469 2y ago
  None of them are decreasing globally, that's the point
  - sightbroke 2y ago
    If fossil fuels are growing at a decreasing rate that means that eventually they will stop growing. That's the point.
    - lm28469 2y ago
      Does this look like it's coming to a plateau of even a slowdown to you ? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuel-consumption-by-fuel-type.png https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuel-consumption-b... > To keep global warming to no more than 1.5°C – as called for in the Paris Agreement – emissions need to be reduced by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. Even if we stopped right now we'd need to be back to ~2000 co2 emissions by 2030, that's in 5 years. Even if we had 5 years of covid with the same restrictions as we had in peak 2020 we wouldn't reach that point...

jeffbee 2y ago

When do the fission cheerleaders capitulate?

zozbot234 2y ago
The point of fission is that it still yields power even when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. The alternative is to run gas peaker plants, or even dirtier sources like coal. Storage is a non-starter, even the best form of energy storage (pumped hydro) cannot cope with a dip lasting more than a few days or weeks.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  So, never, for your part, is what you are saying? Have you updated this copypasta at any time over the last 15 years?
- myrmidon 2y ago
  Gas peaker plants are not "the alternative" to nuclear power, they are exactly what nuclear power needs, too, because regulating nuclear plants down is not what you wanna do after investing billions into it-- you need those plants running on full tilt for like 90% of the time, and even then its gonna take decades to pay back the investment. Meanwhile, 1kW of solar with 1kWh of storage can be had for $1k on Amazon, yields 1-2MWh per year and pays for itself within the decade, with costs still trending down. Yes, fully getting rid of fossil gas is an ongoing challenge, but a much easier one than ramping up nuclear reactor build rates by a factor of 1000 or so...
- itishappy 2y ago
  Fission plants are way too expensive to let idle. They make ideal baseload plants, but they suck as peaking plants.
1970-01-01 2y ago
When volcanic eruptions are 100% predictable 3 years in advance.
tick_tock_tick 2y ago

mentalgear 2y ago

I, for one, welcome the solar age. Truly clean power that can be generated decentralised, on a regional, even local commune level. It's wild how big companies, certain countries and billionaires are still holding on to nuclear fission (not fusion). Nuclear reactors: - take decades to build - go massively over budget, at least 2x if not more [0] - are inherently uneconomically: energy companies would never invest/build them on their own, only by lobbying governments for HUGE subsides (in various forms) do they get build - inherently uninsurable: no private insurance company would insure a plant, again if private companies would need to build/run them on their own, every insurance company would deny them - deconstructing them takes again billions and decades - there's still no real-world solution (or even long-term secure storage) for nuclear waste in the world --- Solar / Wind / Storage Compare the 60 Billions for 1 single nuclear plant (UK) to what you would get from the same investment in solar (plus battery tech getting cheaper and better for storage). We are talking about differences in the magnitudes. About the only value nuclear fission has is that's a central power source which gives the entities owning it huge power over the consumers. [0] https://apnews.com/article/uk-nuclear-plant-hinkley-point-costs-67adc627f0acf130d3ea6c2423e98c4e https://apnews.com/article/uk-nuclear-plant-hinkley-point-co...

wortelefant 2y ago
This is not an adequate way to look at nuclear. If you check the stats of established constructions and not first of a kind prototypes (check Barakah instead Hinkley), the construction time is closer to 10 years, often less. With transmutation and the option for recycling it altogether, waste is not an issue. Only the low fission parts of the spent fuel is low-grade active for longer than 1000 years, but this is such a low level of radiation, it is comparable to natural uranium formations and not an issue. The high radiation part of the fuel has lost the dangerous level of radiation in less than 1000 years and can be recycled before. The arenic compounds and other substances as byproduct of copper etc production for the mass of renewables have a much longer shelf life of toxitity. Also, you need more of them.
- mentalgear 2y ago
  - Even if 'only' 10 years construction time: How much solar energy can be build in that time at a fraction of the cost? - So we need to find secure expensive, leak-free storage only for 1000 years? Most countries cant even plan 5 years ahead. - No words on generated Energy produced per Dollar. Your rebuttal is not as significant as you might think.

gandalfian 2y ago

And yet sometimes I wonder. In the Uk you need most of your energy in the cold dark winter. So if you require enough non solar renewables to get you through the winter with net zero and those renewables are still available in the summer time are large scale solar not a bit redundant? Sunnier countries that have high electricity demand for air conditioning during the sunny periods would seem to have a better match mind.

mr_toad 2y ago
The UK might to think nuclear, if only so that it isn’t totally reliant on a foreign power for its nuclear deterrent.
- tim333 2y ago
  We have a few reactors and used to make bombs, the first tested in 1952. It's been a bit outsourced to the US these days though which might end up changing.
pydry 2y ago
It's usually windy when it's dark and cold and vice versa. You should be wondering about the combination of solar + wind energy + short term storage + long term storage.
- zozbot234 2y ago
  > It's usually windy when it's dark and cold and vice versa. Usually, but not always. You can have many days or weeks, e.g. in mid-winter of overcast weather and very little wind. This is a real problem for renewable energy sources, they're not comprehensively viable unless supplemented by alternatives like gas peakers or perhaps nuclear.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    Or geographic interconnection. There hasn't been an hour in the past 30 years where there was no wind or sun somewhere in Europe.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bluescrn 2y ago

Unstoppable force meets 104% tariff...

api 2y ago
First they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Part of this extreme reckless tariff push is definitely protectionism for the fossil fuel industry.
- tim333 2y ago
  I hope they are enjoying the drop in the oil price from $71 when trump did his Apr 2nd announcement to $57 now.
- bitethecutebait 2y ago
  two more parts: - a call to action - dump and pump stock market scheme how many HN users, say top 5000 commenters and people with craziest CVs and or income will profit of that? it would be stupid not to, right?
- WillPostForFood 2y ago
  Do you think that was Biden's motivation when he put a 50% tariff on solar panels? https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ustr-biden-tariff-increase-wafers-polysilicon-tungsten/735300/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ustr-biden-tariff-increase-...
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    > The move builds on tariff hikes finalized by the Biden administration in September that target strategic product categories from China You can argue about whether tariffs are good or bad, but in any case there's a vast difference between "target[ing] strategic product categories" and bluntly hitting entire ccTLDs.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      The Biden tariffs were balanced by substantial incentives to build solar manufacturing capacity. edit to respond to dead comment: The Chinese wasted way more money on Solyndra's than the US did. Most of their solar power startups were failures too. Yet now they dominate because they subsidized more than one and didn't give up after one failed.

thundervelvet 2y ago

Neat, solar power growing this fast is really good news!

1970-01-01 2y ago

Moore's law for solar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law

ck2 2y ago

Meanwhile in the USA the whitehouse just bailed out the coal industry.

mrguyorama 2y ago
Actually no, coal is still going to die in the US unless China sells us their coal for dirt cheap. You get more watts per human labor hour with our abundant natural gas reserves. No matter how cheap you drive labor, it will still be more economical to use that labor to drill wells. Coal was always dying, especially in the US, because of economic concerns. It's a stupid source of energy. The fact that anyone in the US even thinks of coal is absurd. There are maybe 60k coal miners in the US. It hasn't mattered in decades.

seeg 2y ago

What about https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/19/1032215/solar-panels-recycling/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/19/1032215/solar-pa...

alright2565 2y ago
Through incredible human ingenuity, we have convinced the two most abundant elements in the earth's crust to give us free energy. Once they are no longer effective, after several decades of service, we put them back in the earth where we got them. Is this a problem worth solving? Is it a problem worth giving any amount of thought to at all, when the alternative is killing people both directly through pollution and indirectly through climate change?

know-how 2y ago

[dead]

Fruitmaniac 2y ago

America is so fucking backwards it makes me cry

phendrenad2 2y ago

Is there a source for the claim that solar provides 7% of the world's power? I'm trying to track down the source of this figure. I see that the global "photovoltaic (PV) capacity" is at 6.6% (according to a trade organization that represents manufacturers of solar panels). I don't see a definition for "PV capacity", but I assume it means the total theoretical output of all installed solar panels, even if the output is much lower (due to panels being sub-optimally located, aligned, or having degraded over time). I'd love to be proven wrong, but I'm just not buying the 7% figure as the evidence stands.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago
The news story is reporting on the new report from Ember think tank, which has interactive data charts on their site. It shows solar PV as 6.91% of global electricity generation last year: https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/ https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/