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One thing that could help would be to see more folks who are bullish on solar actually push the new promise that it gives: not just that we'll have clean energy
by mikestorrent 1y ago
One thing that could help would be to see more folks who are bullish on solar actually push the new promise that it gives: not just that we'll have clean energy (yay, but abstract) - we'll have cheap energy, if we do it right. Tons and tons of it for so cheap that you'll almost not even have to think about it, especially in comparison to fossil fuels today. Every aspect of the supply chain is simpler and cleaner.
If people could see that at some point, keeping their house at a perfect temperature with an electric heat pump would lead to them _never thinking about a heating bill again_... that would be far more concrete than promises of staving off climate change.
- hwc 1y agoProbably not orders of magnitude cheaper than today. But energy prices will become very stable.
- ZeroGravitas 1y agoA Spanish bank has calculated that the solar and wind built there between 2019 and 2024 reduced wholesale electricity prices by 40% compared with if they'd stuck at 2019 levels. They project a further 50% drop by 2030: https://www.bde.es/wbe/en/publicaciones/analisis-economico-investigacion/boletin-economico/2024t3-articulo-09-el-impacto-de-las-energias-renovables-sobre-el-precio-mayorista-de-la-electricidad.html https://www.bde.es/wbe/en/publicaciones/analisis-economico-i...
- xienze 1y ago> we'll have cheap energy, if we do it right. Well by all means, show us how to do it right at scale. The leaders in this area (California, European countries) haven’t exactly done much to deliver on the promise of cheap renewable energy.
- ericd 1y agoIirc, Texas has deployed more clean energy generation in the last few years than the entire CA fleet, despite CA subsidizing heavily, and retail energy rates >2x in CA. TX is at something like 3x the generation from wind/solar in CA. My understanding is that this is largely because of how much easier it is to deploy in Texas than in almost any other part of the country. That’s how you do it right. You set some basic rules, and then otherwise get out of the way and let economics do its thing, and stop trying to master plan and control everything. So many of the existing regs are built around huge centralized generation sources, requiring extensive planning and approvals, rather than small distributed sources.
- pixl97 1y agoI'm guessing most of this is in the form of wind energy. The number of large wind farms that have popped up across the state is pretty crazy.
- ericd 1y agoYep, that's the majority, and western TX is supposedly super windy, so not replicable everywhere. But they're deploying lots of solar, too.