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> But at the moment, solar + battery is quick to deploy and about as cheap as you can get. The actual equation is solar + battery + gas fired power plant. Tha

> But at the moment, solar + battery is quick to deploy and about as cheap as you can get. The actual equation is solar + battery + gas fired power plant. That’s the dirty secret behind intermittent power sources and why fossil fuel companies are all investing in solar and wind. Batteries are simply not enough to face the long term intermittence. It’s purely an intra-day solution at the moment and nobody knows how to actually run a large grid on purely intermittent sources. Even China is actually aggressively pursuing nuclear at the same time it builds an insane amount of solar and gas fired power plants.

Workaccount2 11mo ago
The actual actual problem is energy per acre of land per year. Solar is king in places like west Texas and Nevada. Massive sunny flat sprawling landscapes where the land is practically free. It's a different story in places like Massachusetts or New York, where land is expensive and the sun is mildly sunny. Gas becomes much more competitive because you only need 5 acres instead of 500, and the energy is 24/7.
- zekrioca 11mo ago
  Long distant transmission lines would help with that. Also, I want to point out we need to decarbonize, so I don’t think gas considers all externalities that it causes, like air pollution.
  - Workaccount2 11mo ago
    The problem is that people don't really want to pay for it. When you compare the rates at which people recognize the need to decarbonize, to the rates at which people are willing to pay 20-50% more for green energy, an obvious and expected trend arises.... people overwhelming don't want to put their money where there mouth is. Or they want someone elses money to go where there mouth is. It needs to be understood that almost all those "green energy is cheaper than fossil fuels" studies use the best case scenario to calculate those values. To put that another way, gas meets it's ideal pretty much everywhere, whereas green energy meets it's ideal in small, often far from society, spots. Transmission can bridge the gap to a degree, but it's then a cost multiplier. A carbon tax is a good way to balance this, but man, people vote hard to not have to spend more of their own money. (I don't want to pay for it/I only want it if billionaires pay for it)
    - ericd 11mo ago
      If you make the carbon tax revenue neutral, and dividend out the whole take per capita, those below median carbon emissions should end up ahead, and it does end up resting on the wealthy, since carbon emissions generally scale with spending.
- jeffbee 11mo ago
  "how many acres are in the gas field??" I type into the goose meme generator.
- pfdietz 11mo ago
  > It's a different story in places like Massachusetts or New York, where land is expensive and the sun is mildly sunny. Even in those places, the cost of land is a small fraction of the cost of a PV installation.

Workaccount2 11mo ago

The actual actual problem is energy per acre of land per year. Solar is king in places like west Texas and Nevada. Massive sunny flat sprawling landscapes where the land is practically free. It's a different story in places like Massachusetts or New York, where land is expensive and the sun is mildly sunny. Gas becomes much more competitive because you only need 5 acres instead of 500, and the energy is 24/7.

zekrioca 11mo ago
Long distant transmission lines would help with that. Also, I want to point out we need to decarbonize, so I don’t think gas considers all externalities that it causes, like air pollution.
- Workaccount2 11mo ago
  The problem is that people don't really want to pay for it. When you compare the rates at which people recognize the need to decarbonize, to the rates at which people are willing to pay 20-50% more for green energy, an obvious and expected trend arises.... people overwhelming don't want to put their money where there mouth is. Or they want someone elses money to go where there mouth is. It needs to be understood that almost all those "green energy is cheaper than fossil fuels" studies use the best case scenario to calculate those values. To put that another way, gas meets it's ideal pretty much everywhere, whereas green energy meets it's ideal in small, often far from society, spots. Transmission can bridge the gap to a degree, but it's then a cost multiplier. A carbon tax is a good way to balance this, but man, people vote hard to not have to spend more of their own money. (I don't want to pay for it/I only want it if billionaires pay for it)
  - ericd 11mo ago
    If you make the carbon tax revenue neutral, and dividend out the whole take per capita, those below median carbon emissions should end up ahead, and it does end up resting on the wealthy, since carbon emissions generally scale with spending.
jeffbee 11mo ago
"how many acres are in the gas field??" I type into the goose meme generator.
pfdietz 11mo ago
> It's a different story in places like Massachusetts or New York, where land is expensive and the sun is mildly sunny. Even in those places, the cost of land is a small fraction of the cost of a PV installation.