29 ms·

Solar and batteries can power the world

292 points by edent 6mo ago

turtlebits 6mo ago
I'd like to see some focus on cheap thermal storage as PV is terribly inefficient for heating. Especially in the winter months.
dfilppi 6mo ago
[dead]
ahhhhnoooo 6mo ago
China understands this, parts of the EU understands this. The US is currently dead set on betting on the wrong technology, and it's going to put them so far behind. Imagine a world where people didn't care about labeling new things "woke", and instead could all sit down and say, "we're going to make major investments in next generation infrastructure to ensure our capacity and independence."
- rafterydj 6mo ago
  Unsure why you're getting downvoted. I know politics is generally frowned upon here but this is absolutely relevant to the conversation.
- hnthrow0287345 6mo ago
  Apart from the current administration's absolutely hilariously bad governing, the US economy really only cares about profit. The same is going to happen to any country with outsized income inequality.
  - Octoth0rpe 6mo ago
    > the US economy really only cares about profit Which would be ok if we more effectively were able to include externalities into company's overhead, instead of constantly subsidizing them.
  - aidenn0 6mo ago
    This argument would make more sense if Chinese companies were all going out of business due to their governments heavy investments in solar and batteries.
  - alexk307 6mo ago
    Which is a good thing because solar + batteries is literally the easiest way to make profit currently, and will get more profitable year over year.
- declan_roberts 6mo ago
  China burns significantly more coal than the USA and Europe combined and has no environmental laws standing in the way of their nuclear power plants. Imagine a world where people don't care about labeling new things as "regressive" or "anti-environmental"
  - j16sdiz 6mo ago
    China is doing that because they are profitable, not because they care about the environment. Why would they care the coal use?
    - dmix 6mo ago
      Having lots of cheap energy is always boosts industry and reduces cost of living for everyone. The way China accomplished that was by investing heavily in every sort of energy and building large scale infrastructure, instead of adding roadblocks at every stage.
  - budududuroiu 6mo ago
    > China burns significantly more coal than the USA and Europe combined Which is expected when both Europe and the US outsourced most manufacturing to China. It's actually surprising China is so low given they're literally the factory of the world
  - ahhhhnoooo 6mo ago
    China's coal use is shrinking recently, and their solar investment is in the hundreds of GW annually. Don't look at where the ball is, look at where the ball is going.
  - timbit42 6mo ago
    China doesn't have much oil or natural gas but they have lots of coal so that's their backup until they can get enough renewables built.
  - tzs 6mo ago
    > China burns significantly more coal than the USA and Europe combined [...] And the USA burns more natural gas than China, and the USA burns more oil than China. All this simply reflects both using the fossil fuels they have the most abundant, reliable, and cheap supply of when they need to burn fossil fuels.
- waveforms 6mo ago
  I agree and lets not label something as dangerous or expensive if it can be made to be affordable and safe. "As of 2026, 59 nuclear power plants are operational in mainland China, second globally to the United States, which has 94." "There are over 28 further plants under construction with a total power of 32.3 GW, ranked first for the 18th consecutive year" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
- shipman05 6mo ago
  The American shale gas/fracking boom really distorted a lot of things. The strategic energy situations of the United States, the EU, and China were all pretty similar in the late 20th Century: major dependence on OPEC-controlled oil and gas. Post-fracking, the US strategic energy situation has diverged from the others. This difference leads indirectly to things like the current "not war" in Iran. (Iran's geography already gives it strong bargaining power via pressure on energy markets. It would have an even stronger hand if the US was not capable of energy independence). The long term impacts on climate changes are even more negative. It's hard to supplant a cheap, ubiquitous energy source with strong negative externalities when those externalities are subtle, gradual, and strongly denied via propaganda by entrenched interests.
- DangitBobby 6mo ago
  There are influential people who make lots of money when the US Govt forces the country to rely on fossil fuels.
- 0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
  They're not anti-renewables as a bet, they're anti-renewables strategically. If you like going to war, you can power your warfighting apparatus much easier with a gas tank than a battery. If you want better defense, you don't depend on hostile nations for your energy needs. The US wants to double down on oil because it likes to fight wars and it's paranoid about defense.
- alexk307 6mo ago
  This is just incorrect. The politics in the US say one thing but the market is going in the other direction. 2026 additions to the US grid will be almost entirely renewables - 6.3 GW of natural gas / 86 GW total means ~93% of new additions to grid capacity are renewable [1]. A quarter of the electricity in the US is now generated by renewables [2] and growing rapidly. The states with the largest amount of renewable electricity generation are wildly different politically, but all agree that renewables make the most financial sense [3]. [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205 [2] https://www.semafor.com/article/03/03/2026/us-renewables-hit-record-despite-trump-pushback https://www.semafor.com/article/03/03/2026/us-renewables-hit... [3] https://www.integrityenergy.com/blog/the-top-10-states-paving-the-way-to-a-sustainable-energy-future/ https://www.integrityenergy.com/blog/the-top-10-states-pavin...
pfdietz 6mo ago
Providing 90% of power is not "powering the world". It really helps to also have a complementary storage technology with low capacity capex, even if the round trip efficiency is lower. This would complement batteries in the same way ordinary RAM complements cache memory in a computer.
- teucris 6mo ago
  The article specifically notes the following: >We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels.
  - mtoner23 6mo ago
    So then they are wrong. The last 5-10 percent is the hardest part and it's the one consumers complain the most about! You can't run a factory on 90% power availability
    - IshKebab 6mo ago
      Sure but I think if solar really did provide 90% of the world's electricity it wouldn't be inaccurate to say it powered the world. (Heating and transport are harder to solve of course.)
      - pfdietz 6mo ago
        It would be inaccurate in that it would not, in fact, be powering the world. The bigger deceit in the statement was the implication that only batteries were needed to "power the world". This. Is. Wrong.
    - DangitBobby 6mo ago
      But you _can_ run it on 90% solar plus 10% fossil fuels to achieve 100% power availability, which is what GP and the article suggest.
pydry 6mo ago
>We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels. I think a lot of people truly dont get this. Those days when the wind isnt blowing, the sun isnt shining and the batteries and pumped storage are depleted can be easily handled with, e.g. power2gas. It's pretty expensive (per kwh almost as much as nuclear power) but with enough spare solar and wind capacity and a carbon tax on natural gas it becomes a no brainer to swap natural gas for that. Nonetheless this wont stop people saying "but what about that last 5-10%?" as if it's a gotcha for a 100% green grid. It isnt. It never was.
- silvestrov 6mo ago
  The article ignores hydropower. The numbers/prices look a lot better with solar + wind + hydro + battery. Norway runs almost entirely on hydropower. Sweden has a lot. Iceland runs on hydropower and geothermal.
  - maxerickson 6mo ago
    Hydroelectric capacity is largely built out, so you can look at current generation mix to see how much it is likely to contribute. In the US capacity is likely to go down (dams are expensive and many time old dams are removed instead of being rebuilt).
  - tonyarkles 6mo ago
    I’m happy to be wrong about this globally, but in my neck of the woods the readily exploited hydro resources are already exploited to 90% of their capacity and have been for 100 years. Hydro is in many ways the ultimate renewable energy, but that’s been true since electrification and we’ve been using it as part of the energy mix since then. I’d love to be wrong but my understanding is that there isn’t a huge amount of untapped new hydro capacity available without having severe impacts on ecosystems
    - silvestrov 6mo ago
      Hydro in Norway goes very well with windmills in Denmark. Very simplified: Wind blows mostly in Denmark during the day, so Norway stops hydro during the day and imports electricity from Denmark's windmills. During night the wind is mostly still in Denmark so windmills don't produce much and Denmark imports from Norway's hydro. In this way you can stretch the capacity from hydro using windmills even though Norway isn't a good place for windmills.
declan_roberts 6mo ago
The article is just wrong. And only mentions energy used for heating in passing. Heating requires MASSIVE amounts of energy. I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar system (almost 30 kWh battery and 24kW solar). It keeps the lights on, but not heating. I live in a mild climate. The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.
- abenga 6mo ago
  If you need to heat/cool your home, is that really mild?
  - declan_roberts 6mo ago
    Isn't it all relative? Cooling actually isn't a problem at all with solar. I can run my AC full blast during the summer and still get the batteries fully charged before evening.
- iamjake648 6mo ago
  Do you have a high efficiency heat pump, or how are you heating?
  - barbazoo 6mo ago
    Heat pump is what I would have expected to be suitable for a setup like that. How big is the house I wonder.
    - declan_roberts 6mo ago
      I imagine my system is probably sufficient to keep an 800 sqft house comfortably warm in a climate where it goes down to the 20s in the winter.
  - lstodd 6mo ago
    First question should be: what latitude? Because where I live around 55th this winter we had five straight weeks below -15c / 5f daily average plus enough snowfall that it was infeasible to clean anything but the most major roads. Solar is out of question in these conditions and when thermal pump fails you have to evacuate. When just grid electricity fails you have to either have some sort of stored fuel backup or evacuate. The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular among people living in what amounts to subtropics who can't even imagine how crazy they sound to most everyone else.
panick21_ 6mo ago
Nuclear could have powered the world easily and we could have done it with 1960s technology. And we could easily do electricity and heating with nuclear quite easily. The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis. And we can go to 100% of electricity from nuclear, we don't have to have this dumb argument about 'the last 5-10%'. Because its reliable. And if you actually do the math nuclear would have been cheaper then all this nonsense we have been doing for 30 years with wind, solar and batteries. The cost of the gird updates is like building a whole new infrastructure. With nuclear, the centralized more local networks are perfectly reasonable. I did some scenarios starting in Year 2000 or Germany to all nuclear, vs wind (off-shore, on-shore), and solar (partly local partly brought in) and batteries. The numbers aren't even close, nuclear would have been the much better deal. Even if you are very conservative and don't account for major learning effect that countries like France had when building nuclear. That said, even with nuclear, having a few Lithium batteries that can go all out for 1-2h is actually a good deal. Its really only about peak shaving the absolute daily peaks. What you don't want is having to build batteries that can handle days or weeks.
- RandomLensman 6mo ago
  Nuclear reactors make awful targets in a conflict, not sure having many around is generally a good idea if conflict is a risk and there are alternatives.
  - palata 6mo ago
    > and there are alternatives That's a big if, though. Solar and batteries require globalisation, based on fossil fuels. I feel like nuclear reactors are a better choice. > in a conflict, not sure having many around is generally a good idea On the other hand, blowing nuclear reactors could be considered a big escalation. We see with Iran and Ukraine that it's not exactly the first thing one wants to target.
    - RandomLensman 6mo ago
mbesto 6mo ago
Fun fact, 12 million hectares of land of used to produce corn used for ethanol which is used to produce gas. I'll let you draw the conclusion. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/04/trading-some-corn-ethanol-land-solar-offers-tremendous-opportunity https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/04/trading-some-corn-e...
- anon7000 6mo ago
  Yeah, the technology connections video on this was fantastic. If one was to cover that land in solar, you’d produce far more than the current energy demands of the US. Relying on an energy source which requires constant, continuous resource extraction is fucking stupid when we can spend resources up front and get reliable energy (solar + battery) for decades with minimal operating cost & maintenance. And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction. If you want to debate that, spend some time with this video first: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM
  - kingleopold 6mo ago
    yes but increasing solar will damage the energy lobby in the congress and other places. It's never about what is best, it's about what's best for lobby and their puppets
    - LogicFailsMe 6mo ago
      If you won't think of the energy corridor, who will?
  - germandiago 6mo ago
    So here I go: if it is so stupid, why it is not done yet? Try not to blame anyone. Do it rationally if you can, from your message I understand your opinion. I say this as a person that has lived in a developing country the last 15 years. It is not that simple IMHO...
    - mbesto 6mo ago
jwr 6mo ago
No, they can't, not unless we get rid of the fossil fuel lobby, which pretty much runs the world these days. Which isn't surprising, given that fossil fuels are the largest industry ever created by mankind. If you compare it to anything else which was actively harmful and yet big money tried to convince you it wasn't (like tobacco, alcohol, or really anything else), there is nothing that huge. So it isn't surprising that the industry fights change. EV adoption has been successfully held back mostly by PR, Germany shifted from nuclear to coal and gas, the US president is doing everything to dismantle anything that isn't fossil fuel and promotes fossil fuels, the list goes on.
- j23n 6mo ago
  I think this sells the German energy mix short - fossil fuel has been on a steady decline in the energy mix for about 2 decades now. Comparing 2020[^2] to 2025[^1]: - renewables (solar+wind) went from 181 TWh to 219 TWh - fossil (coal+gas) stayed constant (177 TWh and 179 TWh) So I'd say we switched from nuclear (60TWh in 2020) to renewables & imported nuclear - but the long-term trend is towards renewables. [1]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/2026/german-public-electricity-generation-in-2025-wind-and-solar-power-take-the-lead.html https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/... [2]: (pdf) https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/News/electricity_production_germany_2020.pdf https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/N...
  - jwr 6mo ago
    I realize there is a lot of verbal gymnastics going on around this issue, and the word "renewables" is being used a lot, but my point still stands. Another way to look at your numbers is that had the nuclear plants not been turned off, fossil (coal+gas) could have been reduced by 60TWh. But they weren't reduced. They remained the same. From the point of view of the fossil fuel industry: WIN!
    - locallost 6mo ago
      Your point does not stand since you are completely wrong. Germany uses less coal and gas for electricity now than at any point in the 21st century. The majority of the nuclear plants were shutdown in 2011. They produced 230TWh from coal in 2011 and less than 100TWh last year. Talk about verbal gymnastics to call that a shift from nuclear to coal and gas! Outrageous.
AndreyK1984 6mo ago
What about STORING excess power and delivering it during the day at a same level ? That is a critical part! I remember last time it was too expensive.
- skrtskrt 6mo ago
  grid-scale batteries are accelerating more rapidly than anyone thought a few years, it’s not really seen as an unsolvable problem anymore
- evilduck 6mo ago
  You can buy a full day's worth of energy storage with an array of LiFePO4 batteries for less than the typical 3% estimate of annual home improvement and maintenance costs you should be budgeting for as a homeowner. The cost problem usually comes from the labor and every solar installation company seemingly being ran by scam artists.
- chongli 6mo ago
  Because solar energy production doesn't just vary by time-of-day, it also varies seasonally. Where I live, winter solar production collapses due to decreased daylight hours and cloud cover. At the same time, energy use skyrockets due to heating demand. We would need a lot of batteries to be able to charge during the summer and drain during the winter!
- aidenn0 6mo ago
  At temperate latitudes, summer/winter is a bigger deal than day/night. To the point where it makes sense to orient fixed panels tilted south and you still get a 2-3x difference in daily capacity between the seasons. Related is the other comments here that mention air-conditioning is largely a non-issue if you spec for year-round solar. If you are generating 3x as much energy in July compared to January, and January can power your house, then the A/C is basically free.
- KaiserPro 6mo ago
  Thats whats driving the buildout in places like spain. Solar power is in curltailment most days, so to make money solar operators need to add batteries to take free energy and shift it to the ultra expensive parts of the day.
dosinga 6mo ago
[dead]
mbgerring 6mo ago
If you’re one of the many companies working on reaching this goal, in defiance of everyone in this thread and elsewhere insisting it will never work, I’d like to work with you. I’ve worked with all of the largest solar, battery and EV companies, as well as America’s largest electric utilities, building complex analytics software to enable the clean energy transition. I’m looking for my next role to continue moving the needle on eliminating fossil fuels. Find me here: https://matthewgerring.com https://matthewgerring.com
- morphle 6mo ago
  I emailed you. You can work with us as it is a booming market in Europe and Ukraine (and probably in China too), you could expand our market into the USA. We build charging stations, big batteries (see my other posts in this thread and in my HN profile), Enernet smart grids and entire solar only neighborhoods (houses, solar, batteries, fast internet, water and sewage infrastructure) remotely, all based on 100% solar. From $40K per tiny house.
EcommerceFlow 6mo ago
Disappointed the article doesn't transmission of electricity and how little the loss is. People are quite surprised that it's like 3.5% per 1000 km. We could just build out huge solar farms in AZ and transmit it accordingly. We did it for railroads, why not here?
- IAmBroom 6mo ago
  That number is improbably low. Transmission losses from local power plants to consumers is on the order of 10%. Cite, please?
  - gpm 6mo ago
    That's the number quoted in wikipedia [1] for HVDC power transmission. I.e. it only applies for long distances, not short distances. China's been building a bunch of these at those kinds of distance . The technology definitely works. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Advantages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...
ill_ion 6mo ago
[dead]
legitster 6mo ago
By 2050 is the important caveat. That's assuming constant production of batteries at the current scale and production. It also assumes we figure out how to economically recycle materials from batteries (and total recovery may never be possible). Grid scale lithium batteries have an effective lifecycle of 15 years. In this potential future, global lithium reserves would actually start getting choked up before the 2050 goal. Nuclear is inevitable and we all need to stop pretending otherwise.
- Retric 6mo ago
  We already have an electric grid we don’t need to build a new one from scratch just replace infrastructure that gets to old and add more for whatever extra demand shows up. Obviously other energy sources are going to exist and non solar power will be produced, but nuclear is getting fucked in a solar + battery heavy future. Nuclear already needs massive subsidies and those subsidies will need to get increasingly large to keep existing nuclear around let alone convince companies to build more.
  - legitster 6mo ago
    Nuclear costs are massively skewed by the compliance costs. Reactors that only took 5 years to build before ALARA are still safely running 80 years later. The 15-20 year build and certification time for new reactors is purely made up. The countries that are building our battery and solar pipeline (China, South Korea, Japan) are all building nuclear domestically at 1/3 of the cost of us. More importantly, for cobalt and lithium - we still exclusively rely on natural raw resources that are still very cheap. Meanwhile we have established reserves of fissile material for thousands of years. Maybe it won't be in the near future, or even in our lifetime, but there is no way the human race does not turn to nuclear eventually.
    - pfdietz 6mo ago
      Compliance costs are there because the government takes up the burden of accident costs. If the government does that, you can expect the government to then have a say in how things are designed and operated.
kogasa240p 6mo ago
Before anyone cries about the environmental cost of lithium, concrete batteries are a thing and are far more ideal for grid storage.
- pfdietz 6mo ago
  You mean gravity batteries using concrete weights? A scam for suckers.
  - kogasa240p 6mo ago
    Nope: https://news.mit.edu/2025/concrete-battery-now-packs-ten-times-power-1001 https://news.mit.edu/2025/concrete-battery-now-packs-ten-tim...
    - pfdietz 6mo ago
      So, about two orders of magnitude lower specific energy than Li-ion batteries. The extra cost per kg had better be damned small or this won't pencil out.
lexcamisa54 6mo ago
The "storeable fuel
jdc0589 6mo ago
I wish it made sense to do residential solar where I am. It probably does technically, but i hate the idea of spending a ton on a system and then STILL have to pay my power company; if you are connected to the grid at all where I am, you pay the power company $5/kw/month of solar capacity and your excess sell-back rates are insanely bad (0.03/kwh, vs billed usage rate at $0.17/kwh)
- jacquesm 6mo ago
  The next generation of home batteries will be a game changer. It will do for home energy storage what Lithium-Ion has done for laptops, phones and vehicles and it will be a lot safer too.
- balderdash 6mo ago
  If you could install solar at ~150% of the cost of utility scale solar it’d make a ton of sense, but at 300%+ it’s hard to make the math work
0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
This would be more believable to skeptics if it wasn't all pro-arguments and theory. If you don't cover the cases in which it doesn't work, or at least mention the arguments against, it reads as propaganda. The thing that reads the most false is the economics. A 480W solar panel is like $90 on sale, they're dirt cheap. A dozen of them is $1,080. But an installed solar+battery system tied to the grid is more like $30,000, and that's not covering the cost of replacing damaged equipment (lightning is a thing). That's just one home, using certified equipment. For nation-states to do solar and battery, they need land, capital, and skilled labor that most nations don't have. Then there's the fact that not all nations get enough sun, or the fact that you must have a stable backup supply (not just for "cloudy days", but also emergencies and national defense), and multiple sources of equipment so your entire nation's energy isn't dependent on one country (China). Only about 10-20 nations on earth could switch to renewables for the majority of their energy in the next 10 years.
- pishpash 6mo ago
  Or you are somewhere in Africa and have no electricity anyway so you start on something renewable.
  - 0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
    African countries are some of the poorest on the planet. It takes a very large capital investment, in addition to skilled labor, to energize a nation. They often have other bigger issues to deal with. It's often way cheaper to pay for humans to mine coal, produce charcoal, extract oil (not uncommonly a private company - or a country like China - extracting the resources and making a big profit, or giving a loan with a huge interest payment). But let's look at a single off-grid DIY example. First you need the expertise to hook it up. If you have the skill, it still isn't cheap if your economy is weak. It requires saving money for a capital purchase, something people all around the world struggle with. And when there are payment programs, they're often exploitative. It's not like people in Africa aren't aware solar power exists. If it was cheap and easy, everyone would have done it already.
jacquesm 6mo ago
They can and they will. In the longer term there simply won't be anything else.
balderdash 6mo ago
Just my 2c but I think the biggest thing we could do is to reduce the regulatory burden, cost, and complexity associated with installing roof mounted solar. This should be something that can be approved and installed in a week, and should be a half the price (put another it should have a double digit roi) . Right now all of the economics of home solar are consumed by regulation/complexity and the contractors / solar installation companies.
- gpm 6mo ago
  At the consumer scale the biggest thing we could do is follow the german model of panels that can be plugged into an outlet and installed in an hour by any homeowner (with the same capacity limits and requirements on the panels electronics to protect the grid/line workers during power outages). That said I'm pretty sure that grid-scale solar is the future of most solar energy, not home solar. It's just cheaper to do things in bigger batches.
  - balderdash 6mo ago
    This statement is 100% correct, but I think is wrong - utility scale solar is 100% more efficient and cheaper to build at scale, the problem is finding large parcels of land to put it on that are close to where the power consumption is, as well as the complexity and cost associated with grid interconnection (and transition if it not close to demand) Edit: though if we ever get to self driving cars there should be a whole lot of parking lots in metro areas that aren’t needed.
  - therealdrag0 6mo ago
    Balcony solar legislation is well underway in dozens of states. But the capacity is still very small. Like 10% of a household.
- hamdingers 6mo ago
  There's been a wave of legislation[1] introduced in the US to legalize so-called "balcony solar," small grid-tied solar systems that plug into a regular household outlet with zero permitting or interconnect requirements. This is already common in Europe, it's mildly complicated by our split-phase system but not much. The reason for the high burden today is people have developed an inflated sense of how much the kWh they generate is worth. They install massive systems on their roofs to try to "cancel out" their power bill by exporting their entire daily power consumption over the course of a few sunny hours, which (when all their neighbors do the same) ends up being a costly burden for grid operators who then pass the costs on to users without panels. Smaller systems focused on immediate, local consumption rather than export are much better for the grid which is why they have support. 1. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/balcony-solar-taking-state-legislatures-by-storm https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/balcony-solar-tak...
ronb1964 6mo ago
I build off-grid camper vans for a living and install solar + lithium battery systems regularly. The technology has matured a lot in the last few years. What used to take a massive roof array and a bank of heavy lead-acid or AGM batteries to run basic appliances now fits in a fraction of the space with lithium. The limiting factor in real-world installs isn't the panels or the batteries anymore, it's getting customers to right-size the system for their actual usage instead of what they think they'll use. People consistently underestimate idle draws and overestimate how much sun they'll get. Scale that mindset problem up to a national grid and I imagine the challenge is the same.
- turtlebits 6mo ago
  While I agree with underestimating capacity, the problem only really applies to off grid. For regular homes, it just means less savings.
  - lazide 6mo ago
    It means some other infrastructure (fossil fuels?) needs to take up the slack, and people underestimate actual costs at larger scales. It’s the big issue in Germany for instance - it’s all fun and games until Winter.
    - pixl97 6mo ago
      And? Any coal not used in summer is coal not dug up.
    - turtlebits 6mo ago
      Which is fine, since you're still reducing your reliance on the grid. However, when you're off grid, underestimating capacity means your SOL and need to buy a generator and burn fuel on-site.
    - uecker 6mo ago
      Germany has more wind in winter, so traditionally has more production of renewables in winter months.
1970-01-01 6mo ago
Elon said the same thing about the US a decade ago. "a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah." https://www.pcmag.com/news/elon-musk-running-us-on-solar-requires-100-miles-square-of-panels https://www.pcmag.com/news/elon-musk-running-us-on-solar-req... See you next decade when we're saying the same thing and not doing it?
- ZeroGravitas 6mo ago
  Musk was proposing about 1.2TW of solar capacity, the US installed about 250GW since then and is currently installing about 50GW a year and is projected to have 770GW by 2036 in a decades time. So the US is probably over-delivering compared with many things Elon has proposed delivering himself.
  - 1970-01-01 6mo ago
    Apples and oranges though. One is a massive public works program and the other is private.
proee 6mo ago
EVs are essentially a giant battery on wheels. Seems there is a good opportunity to configure them as bidirectional power banks for your local grid. You could rewire all parking slots to have a plugin that acts as a bidirectional power station. Imaging how much power could be moved around with such a grid! This would require a major investment in power transmission layouts, but a city full of batteries on wheels. California has registered around 1M Teslas alone. So this is like having a 1Mx80kwh = 80GWh battery at your service. As a reference, the largest solar + storage facility in California is around 3.2 GWh.
- marcosdumay 6mo ago
  It's nice for an emergency, and almost all EVs can do that already. But people pay extra to put the batteries over wheels because they need to haul charged batteries around. It's not normally useful to discharge them locally.
- pingou 6mo ago
  Just charging your car when electricity is cheap and avoiding times when it is scarce would solve most of the issues, provided there is a dynamic pricing system in place.
- DavidPiper 6mo ago
  No idea why this has been downvoted. There is a lot of demand for this, and at least one company actively working on orchestrating home and EV batteries with the grid: https://www.amber.com.au/amber-for-evs https://www.amber.com.au/amber-for-evs
DoneWithAllThat 6mo ago
No, no they can’t. As has been explained over and over again by people who know better. Someday yes when the tech improves (changes) dramatically. But that’s not today.
joeslide 6mo ago
We'll replace the fossil fuel cartel with the wind/solar/battery cartel and everything will be better. Right.
bluegatty 6mo ago
1/2 the 'cost' of electricity is borne by grid operators, which are usually regulated monopolies. They are generally overstaffed, inneficient bureaucracies. I'm not against public service obviously but I don't think that's the issue, rather it's just related to 'monopoly' provider status. Hydro One in Ontario was by far the largest occupant on the Sunshine list (>$100K salaries) and have always been. They pay dramatically above market wages, have more staff than they need. It's the 'old boys clubs of old boys clubs'. If energy prices drop, they will be able to charge more money to justify more 'infra', staff and expanding budgets. The best thing we could ever do is get rid of our dependency on the energy grid. If our homes could be powered like our cars ... that would be amazing and open up a ton of competition in a landscape which now has almost no competition. That said - there are definitely theoretical efficiencies at scale and if we did get rid of the grid, we may never be able to get it back. It's plausible that 'decentralized energy' may be very advantageous in that it puts a lot of competitive pressure on the centralized elements. Then we get the best of both worlds. Edit: value chain and institutional power dynamics is the only real way to look at all of these systems. It's incredibly naive to think that some arbitrary technology is going to change any landscape. Case and point is this issue itself - that we 'grow' fuel instead of doing something arguably more efficient is a function of structural power.
cringleyrobert 6mo ago
Once you take politics out of solar, EVs and batteries we’re all in agreement. Do your part, do your fair share, don’t wait.
danw1979 6mo ago
> solar PV installed cost 384 €/kWp Is this grid-scale solar ? It can’t be rooftop - there is nobody in the UK who will install a 5kW rooftop system for £2k. The quotes I’ve had recently have been closer to £10k.
- edent 6mo ago
  Yes. It literally says: > The cost assumptions assume utility-scale solar panels and batteries in large parks. Smaller-scale rooftop solar and home batteries would cost 2-3 times more. I've installed domestic solar several times. The main cost isn't the panels or the inverters - it's the scaffolding, labour, and wiring improvements in the home. If you have a tall or complicated house, it'll cost more.
jmyeet 6mo ago
This comment section is so weird. This seems like a decent analysis to me. It also backs up what's been pretty obvious for some time: solar is the future. Yet we have: - Pointing out the corn ethanol scam. Ok, that's fair. We would be better of spending money on renewables. No argument there; - Multiple people arguing that solar hasn't goten more mature, more effective and that battery technology really hasn't gotten better. No sources mind you, just opinion; - Another busy thread based on an uncited claim that this doesn't account for US heating costs. And tthere are a lot of people who seem to think not having efficient insulation in houses is an expression of freedom in some way; - There's the naive idea that the profit motive will somehow solve all this. Bless your heart; - Probably the least surprising thing is that the pro-nuclear people piped up and tried to make this about nuclear and failed. Sorry but nuclear is one of the most expensive forms of electricity and there's no real way to get around that. I normally don't expect such anti-solar sentiment here. Here's the real problem with renewables politically: if you produce 1GW of solar and it produces 2TWh of electricity in year 1, it'll probably 2TWh in years 2-30 with very little maintenance. That's bad in our system because some private company doesn't get to keep profiting. Let's compare that to an oil well. If you drill wells and make them produce 100kbpd (barrels pe day) of crude and some quantity of natural gas in year 1 then in year 2 it produces 80-85kbpd. In year 3 it's ~70kbpd. In year 4 it's 55kbpd. By year 5 it's less than half what it was originally. This is for the Permian basin and it's called "decline rate". So to maintain the amount of oil and gas you need, you need to be constantly drilling new wells and bringing them online to replace the lost capacity. That's good for business because all that exploration and digging is more profit opportunity. Evenw ith coal, you need people and machiens to keep digging up the coal. Our entire electricity sector is sold a lie that the private sector is somehow better at providing electricity and then everything is built around a massive wealth transfer from consumers and the government to the already wealthy. That's really why renewables aren't popular in the modern political climate.
- locallost 6mo ago
  I am big fan of renewables, but I disagree on your conclusion. The main reason is purely financial, the incumbenta do not want to lose their investment so they spend a lot of money on manipulation and lobbying. Another big reason is that politicians simply can't know everything, so they rely on advisors whose opinions are influenced by lobbyists. There is a clear lack of vision in the western hemisphere on how to move forward and see the transformation not as a cost but as an advantage. So they let their opinions and decisions be massaged by people whose intentions are to protect the status quo.
ZeroGravitas 6mo ago
Bit of a cop out headline, should have said "will power the world". Even boring staid organisations are predicting solar will be more than half the planet's electricity supply by 2050 which is I think enough to say it powers the world.
maxglute 6mo ago
Last year PRC brrrted out enough solar panels whose lifetime output is equivalent to annual global oil consumption. AKA world uses about >40billion barrels of oil per year, PRC's annual solar production will sink about 40billion barrels of oil of emissions in their life times. This is at 50% solar manufacturing utilization. Once battery scales, can displace current global oil via solar ~10 years. Less if solar production also globally scales. Looking at 10/15/20 years to displace most global oil, lng, coal. Well the discretionary bits / economic consumption.
segmondy 6mo ago
solar WILL power the world.
zackmorris 6mo ago
Note that we had the technology to do this affordably as of about 2008, when lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries became widely available for about $10-12 each (I had to look that up). They were definitely available at low cost ($6) by 2018: https://web.archive.org/web/20180201203013/https://www.18650batterystore.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180201203013/https://www.18650... Looks like sodium-ion (Na-ion) 18650 batteries at 1.5 Ah have about 1/2 the capacity of LiFePO4 18650s at 3.5 Ah, and are about twice the price, so lets call them 4x the price per energy stored: https://www.radicalrc.com/item/Sodium-Na-Ion-Battery-18650-3.1V-1500mAh-Single-Cell-108393 https://www.radicalrc.com/item/Sodium-Na-Ion-Battery-18650-3... https://ogsolarstore.com/products/sodium-ion-cells-3-1v-battery-cell https://ogsolarstore.com/products/sodium-ion-cells-3-1v-batt... https://coulombsolutions.com/product/12v-sodium-ion-battery/ https://coulombsolutions.com/product/12v-sodium-ion-battery/ Battery prices halve about every 4 years: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/03/06/battery-prices-collapsing-grid-tied-energy-storage-expanding/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/03/06/battery-prices-collap... So we can project that Na-ion batteries will have the same price per kWh as today's LiFePO4 in perhaps 8 years, or around 2034, if not sooner. That will negate the lithium supply chain bottleneck so that we're limited to ordinary shortages (like copper). 500 W bifacial solar panels are available for $100 each in bulk, so there's no need to analyze them since they're no longer the bottleneck. A typical home uses 24 kWh/day, so 15-20 panels at a typical 4.5 kW/m2 solar insolation provide enough power to charge batteries and still have some energy left over, at a cost of $1500-2000. Installation labor, electricians/licensing, inverters and batteries now dominate cost. The sodium ion battery market is about $1 billion annually, vs $100 billion for lithium ion. It took lithium about 15-20 years to grow that much. So whoever gets in now could see a 1-2 orders of magnitude return over perhaps 8-15 years. I almost can't think of a better investment outside of AI. - I've been watching this stuff since the 1980s and I can tell you that every renewable energy breakthrough coincides with a geopolitical instability. For the $8 trillion the US spent on Middle East wars since 9/11, we could have had a moonshot for solar+batteries and be at 90+% coverage today. Not counting the other $12 trillion the US spent on the Cold War. Fully $20 trillion of our ~$40 trillion US national debt went to funding endless war, with the other $20 trillion lost on trickle-down tax cuts for the ultra wealthy. We can't do anything about that stuff in the short term. But we can move towards off-grid living and a distributed means of production model where AI, 3D printing, permaculture, and other alternative tech negates the need for investment capital. In the K-shaped economy, the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" phrase might more accurately be stated "if you can't join 'em, beat 'em".
jillesvangurp 6mo ago
While I'm pro renewables and the article is technically correct (it could work), I don't think this is optimal. What's optimal is using a mix of mostly (>90-95%) renewable technologies for generating power supplemented by gas (short term) and nuclear (long term). Additionally, there's a lot of stuff that can be done with cables and batteries that we aren't currently doing to over come daily, seasonal, and weather related variation in power output of wind and solar. Put cables north-south to compensate for seasonal drops in solar output. Put them east-west to have solar power in the evenings/early mornings. Off shore and on shore wind can produce a lot of power and the way high pressure and low pressure systems (aka. weather) work, if the wind is not blowing locally that just means it is blowing elsewhere. Having a lot of solar and wind all over the place and cables to move the power around evens out all the peaks and dips. The rest is just using batteries, pumped hydro, and other storage to add enough buffers. That gets you quite far. Another point here is that people think in rigid "must cover everything 100% of the time", which is valuable but we actually do have a lot of flexibility. You can choose when to charge your car (at night, or at noon), when to run your dishwasher, etc. And does a data center need to be at 100% capacity 100% of the time no matter the cost? Flexible load is a thing. And we can use automation to control it, flexible pricing to incentivize when there are surpluses or shortages, etc. This btw. also neuters the whole "baseload" argument. Baseload power is non flexible power that becomes a problem when we have too much of it. Flexible power is power you can turn off when there's too much of it. The reason energy prices are high in a lot of places is that we have too much of really expensive base load that drives the pricing even if the wind and sun shines for free and gets curtailed. That lack of flexibility is a problem. That's how we could get to 90% over the next few decades. The remaining 10% is harder / more expensive. Gas peaker plants make a lot of sense to fill that gap. Replaced by nuclear long term. Nothing against that but it's just stupidly expensive and slow to realize. There's no need to build new gas plants for that; we have plenty already.
mikewarot 6mo ago
It's important to note that electricity is 21% of the World's energy demand, according to the IEA[1]. This implies that if we could 10x solar, and figure out how to convert some of that to liquid fuels with decent efficiency, we could become sustainable for all energy. [1] https://www.iea.org/world/energy-mix https://www.iea.org/world/energy-mix
- eigenspace 6mo ago
  That's a very silly way to compare energy usage. For example, you're counting all the energy in the gasoline that gets loaded into a car, not the useful work that the gasoline actually produces. Gasoline gars typically are only able to convert 20-30% of their fuel into propulsion. Counting the energy in the fuel loaded into engines is like counting the amount of energy in the sunlight hitting a solar panel. Similar things go for heating by the way. A modern heat pump often has a coefficient of performance of around 3x, meaning that for every joule of electricity you put into the pump, you can heat up a house with 3 joules of heat, so 3x as efficient as heating the house with combustion.
  - mikewarot 6mo ago
    I don't see why anyone would balk at the idea of using backwards compatible fuel sources, synthesized using a sustainable process powered by solar energy. Replacing ALL of the liquid fueled devices in the world impractical, to the point of absurdity, to do. Where would we get electric versions of the Emma Mærsk[1] and her sister ships in a reasonable timeframe? Where would all the infrastructure come from to build out the grid to handle the charging load? Where are the ports with that kind of power capability coming from? What about the world's aviation? There are no viable ways to do air transport on a large scale using battery power. The world is optimized for liquid fuels, it would make far more sense to synthesize them from low cost solar power during the day, and accumulate the quantities required, rather than rip and replace every single industrial engine on the planet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_M%C3%A6rsk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_M%C3%A6rsk
- ZeroGravitas 6mo ago
  2/3rds of that other 79% is wasted as unwanted heat, so we only need to replace 1/3rd of 79% (~26 percent points) so slightly more than double the current clean energy supply. An extensive explanation of this "primary energy fallacy": https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/reframing-energy-for-the-age-of-electricity/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/reframing-energy-fo...
erelong 6mo ago
Nice, we can get rid of nuclear dangers entirely
djoldman 6mo ago
Fuel price varies dramatically with respect to geographic area. It seems reasonable to factor that in especially if geographic area is factored in to solar capacity.
Havoc 6mo ago
As enthusiastic as I am about that I'd love to see grid scale storage move more towards something like sand batteries. Stuff you can buy for dollars per ton and move with an excavator seems like a better bet than lithium batteries. If we want flakey renewables to be the backbone (which we should)...then we needs serious scale on storage side. Batteries for voltage regulation and quick response is good though
numitus 6mo ago
[dead]
ozgurds 6mo ago
World's economy and based on oil and gas and It is not easy to switch to an alternative. Because it will also mean to change all the geopolitical relations around the globe

292 points by edent 6mo ago

I'd like to see some focus on cheap thermal storage as PV is terribly inefficient for heating. Especially in the winter months.

dfilppi 6mo ago

[dead]

ahhhhnoooo 6mo ago

China understands this, parts of the EU understands this. The US is currently dead set on betting on the wrong technology, and it's going to put them so far behind. Imagine a world where people didn't care about labeling new things "woke", and instead could all sit down and say, "we're going to make major investments in next generation infrastructure to ensure our capacity and independence."

rafterydj 6mo ago
Unsure why you're getting downvoted. I know politics is generally frowned upon here but this is absolutely relevant to the conversation.
hnthrow0287345 6mo ago
Apart from the current administration's absolutely hilariously bad governing, the US economy really only cares about profit. The same is going to happen to any country with outsized income inequality.
- Octoth0rpe 6mo ago
  > the US economy really only cares about profit Which would be ok if we more effectively were able to include externalities into company's overhead, instead of constantly subsidizing them.
- aidenn0 6mo ago
  This argument would make more sense if Chinese companies were all going out of business due to their governments heavy investments in solar and batteries.
- alexk307 6mo ago
  Which is a good thing because solar + batteries is literally the easiest way to make profit currently, and will get more profitable year over year.
declan_roberts 6mo ago
China burns significantly more coal than the USA and Europe combined and has no environmental laws standing in the way of their nuclear power plants. Imagine a world where people don't care about labeling new things as "regressive" or "anti-environmental"
- j16sdiz 6mo ago
  China is doing that because they are profitable, not because they care about the environment. Why would they care the coal use?
  - dmix 6mo ago
    Having lots of cheap energy is always boosts industry and reduces cost of living for everyone. The way China accomplished that was by investing heavily in every sort of energy and building large scale infrastructure, instead of adding roadblocks at every stage.
- budududuroiu 6mo ago
  > China burns significantly more coal than the USA and Europe combined Which is expected when both Europe and the US outsourced most manufacturing to China. It's actually surprising China is so low given they're literally the factory of the world
- ahhhhnoooo 6mo ago
  China's coal use is shrinking recently, and their solar investment is in the hundreds of GW annually. Don't look at where the ball is, look at where the ball is going.
- timbit42 6mo ago
  China doesn't have much oil or natural gas but they have lots of coal so that's their backup until they can get enough renewables built.
- tzs 6mo ago
  > China burns significantly more coal than the USA and Europe combined [...] And the USA burns more natural gas than China, and the USA burns more oil than China. All this simply reflects both using the fossil fuels they have the most abundant, reliable, and cheap supply of when they need to burn fossil fuels.
waveforms 6mo ago
I agree and lets not label something as dangerous or expensive if it can be made to be affordable and safe. "As of 2026, 59 nuclear power plants are operational in mainland China, second globally to the United States, which has 94." "There are over 28 further plants under construction with a total power of 32.3 GW, ranked first for the 18th consecutive year" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
shipman05 6mo ago
The American shale gas/fracking boom really distorted a lot of things. The strategic energy situations of the United States, the EU, and China were all pretty similar in the late 20th Century: major dependence on OPEC-controlled oil and gas. Post-fracking, the US strategic energy situation has diverged from the others. This difference leads indirectly to things like the current "not war" in Iran. (Iran's geography already gives it strong bargaining power via pressure on energy markets. It would have an even stronger hand if the US was not capable of energy independence). The long term impacts on climate changes are even more negative. It's hard to supplant a cheap, ubiquitous energy source with strong negative externalities when those externalities are subtle, gradual, and strongly denied via propaganda by entrenched interests.
DangitBobby 6mo ago
There are influential people who make lots of money when the US Govt forces the country to rely on fossil fuels.
0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
They're not anti-renewables as a bet, they're anti-renewables strategically. If you like going to war, you can power your warfighting apparatus much easier with a gas tank than a battery. If you want better defense, you don't depend on hostile nations for your energy needs. The US wants to double down on oil because it likes to fight wars and it's paranoid about defense.
alexk307 6mo ago
This is just incorrect. The politics in the US say one thing but the market is going in the other direction. 2026 additions to the US grid will be almost entirely renewables - 6.3 GW of natural gas / 86 GW total means ~93% of new additions to grid capacity are renewable [1]. A quarter of the electricity in the US is now generated by renewables [2] and growing rapidly. The states with the largest amount of renewable electricity generation are wildly different politically, but all agree that renewables make the most financial sense [3]. [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205 [2] https://www.semafor.com/article/03/03/2026/us-renewables-hit-record-despite-trump-pushback https://www.semafor.com/article/03/03/2026/us-renewables-hit... [3] https://www.integrityenergy.com/blog/the-top-10-states-paving-the-way-to-a-sustainable-energy-future/ https://www.integrityenergy.com/blog/the-top-10-states-pavin...

pfdietz 6mo ago

Providing 90% of power is not "powering the world". It really helps to also have a complementary storage technology with low capacity capex, even if the round trip efficiency is lower. This would complement batteries in the same way ordinary RAM complements cache memory in a computer.

teucris 6mo ago
The article specifically notes the following: >We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels.
- mtoner23 6mo ago
  So then they are wrong. The last 5-10 percent is the hardest part and it's the one consumers complain the most about! You can't run a factory on 90% power availability
  - IshKebab 6mo ago
    Sure but I think if solar really did provide 90% of the world's electricity it wouldn't be inaccurate to say it powered the world. (Heating and transport are harder to solve of course.)
    - pfdietz 6mo ago
      It would be inaccurate in that it would not, in fact, be powering the world. The bigger deceit in the statement was the implication that only batteries were needed to "power the world". This. Is. Wrong.
  - DangitBobby 6mo ago
    But you _can_ run it on 90% solar plus 10% fossil fuels to achieve 100% power availability, which is what GP and the article suggest.

pydry 6mo ago

>We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels. I think a lot of people truly dont get this. Those days when the wind isnt blowing, the sun isnt shining and the batteries and pumped storage are depleted can be easily handled with, e.g. power2gas. It's pretty expensive (per kwh almost as much as nuclear power) but with enough spare solar and wind capacity and a carbon tax on natural gas it becomes a no brainer to swap natural gas for that. Nonetheless this wont stop people saying "but what about that last 5-10%?" as if it's a gotcha for a 100% green grid. It isnt. It never was.

silvestrov 6mo ago
The article ignores hydropower. The numbers/prices look a lot better with solar + wind + hydro + battery. Norway runs almost entirely on hydropower. Sweden has a lot. Iceland runs on hydropower and geothermal.
- maxerickson 6mo ago
  Hydroelectric capacity is largely built out, so you can look at current generation mix to see how much it is likely to contribute. In the US capacity is likely to go down (dams are expensive and many time old dams are removed instead of being rebuilt).
- tonyarkles 6mo ago
  I’m happy to be wrong about this globally, but in my neck of the woods the readily exploited hydro resources are already exploited to 90% of their capacity and have been for 100 years. Hydro is in many ways the ultimate renewable energy, but that’s been true since electrification and we’ve been using it as part of the energy mix since then. I’d love to be wrong but my understanding is that there isn’t a huge amount of untapped new hydro capacity available without having severe impacts on ecosystems
  - silvestrov 6mo ago
    Hydro in Norway goes very well with windmills in Denmark. Very simplified: Wind blows mostly in Denmark during the day, so Norway stops hydro during the day and imports electricity from Denmark's windmills. During night the wind is mostly still in Denmark so windmills don't produce much and Denmark imports from Norway's hydro. In this way you can stretch the capacity from hydro using windmills even though Norway isn't a good place for windmills.

declan_roberts 6mo ago

The article is just wrong. And only mentions energy used for heating in passing. Heating requires MASSIVE amounts of energy. I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar system (almost 30 kWh battery and 24kW solar). It keeps the lights on, but not heating. I live in a mild climate. The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.

abenga 6mo ago
If you need to heat/cool your home, is that really mild?
- declan_roberts 6mo ago
  Isn't it all relative? Cooling actually isn't a problem at all with solar. I can run my AC full blast during the summer and still get the batteries fully charged before evening.
iamjake648 6mo ago
Do you have a high efficiency heat pump, or how are you heating?
- barbazoo 6mo ago
  Heat pump is what I would have expected to be suitable for a setup like that. How big is the house I wonder.
  - declan_roberts 6mo ago
    I imagine my system is probably sufficient to keep an 800 sqft house comfortably warm in a climate where it goes down to the 20s in the winter.
- lstodd 6mo ago
  First question should be: what latitude? Because where I live around 55th this winter we had five straight weeks below -15c / 5f daily average plus enough snowfall that it was infeasible to clean anything but the most major roads. Solar is out of question in these conditions and when thermal pump fails you have to evacuate. When just grid electricity fails you have to either have some sort of stored fuel backup or evacuate. The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular among people living in what amounts to subtropics who can't even imagine how crazy they sound to most everyone else.

panick21_ 6mo ago

Nuclear could have powered the world easily and we could have done it with 1960s technology. And we could easily do electricity and heating with nuclear quite easily. The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis. And we can go to 100% of electricity from nuclear, we don't have to have this dumb argument about 'the last 5-10%'. Because its reliable. And if you actually do the math nuclear would have been cheaper then all this nonsense we have been doing for 30 years with wind, solar and batteries. The cost of the gird updates is like building a whole new infrastructure. With nuclear, the centralized more local networks are perfectly reasonable. I did some scenarios starting in Year 2000 or Germany to all nuclear, vs wind (off-shore, on-shore), and solar (partly local partly brought in) and batteries. The numbers aren't even close, nuclear would have been the much better deal. Even if you are very conservative and don't account for major learning effect that countries like France had when building nuclear. That said, even with nuclear, having a few Lithium batteries that can go all out for 1-2h is actually a good deal. Its really only about peak shaving the absolute daily peaks. What you don't want is having to build batteries that can handle days or weeks.

RandomLensman 6mo ago
Nuclear reactors make awful targets in a conflict, not sure having many around is generally a good idea if conflict is a risk and there are alternatives.
- palata 6mo ago
  > and there are alternatives That's a big if, though. Solar and batteries require globalisation, based on fossil fuels. I feel like nuclear reactors are a better choice. > in a conflict, not sure having many around is generally a good idea On the other hand, blowing nuclear reactors could be considered a big escalation. We see with Iran and Ukraine that it's not exactly the first thing one wants to target.
  - RandomLensman 6mo ago

mbesto 6mo ago

Fun fact, 12 million hectares of land of used to produce corn used for ethanol which is used to produce gas. I'll let you draw the conclusion. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/04/trading-some-corn-ethanol-land-solar-offers-tremendous-opportunity https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/04/trading-some-corn-e...

anon7000 6mo ago
Yeah, the technology connections video on this was fantastic. If one was to cover that land in solar, you’d produce far more than the current energy demands of the US. Relying on an energy source which requires constant, continuous resource extraction is fucking stupid when we can spend resources up front and get reliable energy (solar + battery) for decades with minimal operating cost & maintenance. And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction. If you want to debate that, spend some time with this video first: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM
- kingleopold 6mo ago
  yes but increasing solar will damage the energy lobby in the congress and other places. It's never about what is best, it's about what's best for lobby and their puppets
  - LogicFailsMe 6mo ago
    If you won't think of the energy corridor, who will?
- germandiago 6mo ago
  So here I go: if it is so stupid, why it is not done yet? Try not to blame anyone. Do it rationally if you can, from your message I understand your opinion. I say this as a person that has lived in a developing country the last 15 years. It is not that simple IMHO...
  - mbesto 6mo ago

jwr 6mo ago

No, they can't, not unless we get rid of the fossil fuel lobby, which pretty much runs the world these days. Which isn't surprising, given that fossil fuels are the largest industry ever created by mankind. If you compare it to anything else which was actively harmful and yet big money tried to convince you it wasn't (like tobacco, alcohol, or really anything else), there is nothing that huge. So it isn't surprising that the industry fights change. EV adoption has been successfully held back mostly by PR, Germany shifted from nuclear to coal and gas, the US president is doing everything to dismantle anything that isn't fossil fuel and promotes fossil fuels, the list goes on.

j23n 6mo ago
I think this sells the German energy mix short - fossil fuel has been on a steady decline in the energy mix for about 2 decades now. Comparing 2020[^2] to 2025[^1]: - renewables (solar+wind) went from 181 TWh to 219 TWh - fossil (coal+gas) stayed constant (177 TWh and 179 TWh) So I'd say we switched from nuclear (60TWh in 2020) to renewables & imported nuclear - but the long-term trend is towards renewables. [1]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/2026/german-public-electricity-generation-in-2025-wind-and-solar-power-take-the-lead.html https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/... [2]: (pdf) https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/News/electricity_production_germany_2020.pdf https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/N...
- jwr 6mo ago
  I realize there is a lot of verbal gymnastics going on around this issue, and the word "renewables" is being used a lot, but my point still stands. Another way to look at your numbers is that had the nuclear plants not been turned off, fossil (coal+gas) could have been reduced by 60TWh. But they weren't reduced. They remained the same. From the point of view of the fossil fuel industry: WIN!
  - locallost 6mo ago
    Your point does not stand since you are completely wrong. Germany uses less coal and gas for electricity now than at any point in the 21st century. The majority of the nuclear plants were shutdown in 2011. They produced 230TWh from coal in 2011 and less than 100TWh last year. Talk about verbal gymnastics to call that a shift from nuclear to coal and gas! Outrageous.

AndreyK1984 6mo ago

What about STORING excess power and delivering it during the day at a same level ? That is a critical part! I remember last time it was too expensive.

skrtskrt 6mo ago
grid-scale batteries are accelerating more rapidly than anyone thought a few years, it’s not really seen as an unsolvable problem anymore
evilduck 6mo ago
You can buy a full day's worth of energy storage with an array of LiFePO4 batteries for less than the typical 3% estimate of annual home improvement and maintenance costs you should be budgeting for as a homeowner. The cost problem usually comes from the labor and every solar installation company seemingly being ran by scam artists.
chongli 6mo ago
Because solar energy production doesn't just vary by time-of-day, it also varies seasonally. Where I live, winter solar production collapses due to decreased daylight hours and cloud cover. At the same time, energy use skyrockets due to heating demand. We would need a lot of batteries to be able to charge during the summer and drain during the winter!
aidenn0 6mo ago
At temperate latitudes, summer/winter is a bigger deal than day/night. To the point where it makes sense to orient fixed panels tilted south and you still get a 2-3x difference in daily capacity between the seasons. Related is the other comments here that mention air-conditioning is largely a non-issue if you spec for year-round solar. If you are generating 3x as much energy in July compared to January, and January can power your house, then the A/C is basically free.
KaiserPro 6mo ago
Thats whats driving the buildout in places like spain. Solar power is in curltailment most days, so to make money solar operators need to add batteries to take free energy and shift it to the ultra expensive parts of the day.

dosinga 6mo ago

[dead]

mbgerring 6mo ago

If you’re one of the many companies working on reaching this goal, in defiance of everyone in this thread and elsewhere insisting it will never work, I’d like to work with you. I’ve worked with all of the largest solar, battery and EV companies, as well as America’s largest electric utilities, building complex analytics software to enable the clean energy transition. I’m looking for my next role to continue moving the needle on eliminating fossil fuels. Find me here: https://matthewgerring.com https://matthewgerring.com

morphle 6mo ago
I emailed you. You can work with us as it is a booming market in Europe and Ukraine (and probably in China too), you could expand our market into the USA. We build charging stations, big batteries (see my other posts in this thread and in my HN profile), Enernet smart grids and entire solar only neighborhoods (houses, solar, batteries, fast internet, water and sewage infrastructure) remotely, all based on 100% solar. From $40K per tiny house.

EcommerceFlow 6mo ago

Disappointed the article doesn't transmission of electricity and how little the loss is. People are quite surprised that it's like 3.5% per 1000 km. We could just build out huge solar farms in AZ and transmit it accordingly. We did it for railroads, why not here?

IAmBroom 6mo ago
That number is improbably low. Transmission losses from local power plants to consumers is on the order of 10%. Cite, please?
- gpm 6mo ago
  That's the number quoted in wikipedia [1] for HVDC power transmission. I.e. it only applies for long distances, not short distances. China's been building a bunch of these at those kinds of distance . The technology definitely works. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Advantages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...

ill_ion 6mo ago

[dead]

legitster 6mo ago

By 2050 is the important caveat. That's assuming constant production of batteries at the current scale and production. It also assumes we figure out how to economically recycle materials from batteries (and total recovery may never be possible). Grid scale lithium batteries have an effective lifecycle of 15 years. In this potential future, global lithium reserves would actually start getting choked up before the 2050 goal. Nuclear is inevitable and we all need to stop pretending otherwise.

Retric 6mo ago
We already have an electric grid we don’t need to build a new one from scratch just replace infrastructure that gets to old and add more for whatever extra demand shows up. Obviously other energy sources are going to exist and non solar power will be produced, but nuclear is getting fucked in a solar + battery heavy future. Nuclear already needs massive subsidies and those subsidies will need to get increasingly large to keep existing nuclear around let alone convince companies to build more.
- legitster 6mo ago
  Nuclear costs are massively skewed by the compliance costs. Reactors that only took 5 years to build before ALARA are still safely running 80 years later. The 15-20 year build and certification time for new reactors is purely made up. The countries that are building our battery and solar pipeline (China, South Korea, Japan) are all building nuclear domestically at 1/3 of the cost of us. More importantly, for cobalt and lithium - we still exclusively rely on natural raw resources that are still very cheap. Meanwhile we have established reserves of fissile material for thousands of years. Maybe it won't be in the near future, or even in our lifetime, but there is no way the human race does not turn to nuclear eventually.
  - pfdietz 6mo ago
    Compliance costs are there because the government takes up the burden of accident costs. If the government does that, you can expect the government to then have a say in how things are designed and operated.

kogasa240p 6mo ago

Before anyone cries about the environmental cost of lithium, concrete batteries are a thing and are far more ideal for grid storage.

pfdietz 6mo ago
You mean gravity batteries using concrete weights? A scam for suckers.
- kogasa240p 6mo ago
  Nope: https://news.mit.edu/2025/concrete-battery-now-packs-ten-times-power-1001 https://news.mit.edu/2025/concrete-battery-now-packs-ten-tim...
  - pfdietz 6mo ago
    So, about two orders of magnitude lower specific energy than Li-ion batteries. The extra cost per kg had better be damned small or this won't pencil out.

lexcamisa54 6mo ago

The "storeable fuel

jdc0589 6mo ago

I wish it made sense to do residential solar where I am. It probably does technically, but i hate the idea of spending a ton on a system and then STILL have to pay my power company; if you are connected to the grid at all where I am, you pay the power company $5/kw/month of solar capacity and your excess sell-back rates are insanely bad (0.03/kwh, vs billed usage rate at $0.17/kwh)

jacquesm 6mo ago
The next generation of home batteries will be a game changer. It will do for home energy storage what Lithium-Ion has done for laptops, phones and vehicles and it will be a lot safer too.
balderdash 6mo ago
If you could install solar at ~150% of the cost of utility scale solar it’d make a ton of sense, but at 300%+ it’s hard to make the math work

0xbadcafebee 6mo ago

This would be more believable to skeptics if it wasn't all pro-arguments and theory. If you don't cover the cases in which it doesn't work, or at least mention the arguments against, it reads as propaganda. The thing that reads the most false is the economics. A 480W solar panel is like $90 on sale, they're dirt cheap. A dozen of them is $1,080. But an installed solar+battery system tied to the grid is more like $30,000, and that's not covering the cost of replacing damaged equipment (lightning is a thing). That's just one home, using certified equipment. For nation-states to do solar and battery, they need land, capital, and skilled labor that most nations don't have. Then there's the fact that not all nations get enough sun, or the fact that you must have a stable backup supply (not just for "cloudy days", but also emergencies and national defense), and multiple sources of equipment so your entire nation's energy isn't dependent on one country (China). Only about 10-20 nations on earth could switch to renewables for the majority of their energy in the next 10 years.

pishpash 6mo ago
Or you are somewhere in Africa and have no electricity anyway so you start on something renewable.
- 0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
  African countries are some of the poorest on the planet. It takes a very large capital investment, in addition to skilled labor, to energize a nation. They often have other bigger issues to deal with. It's often way cheaper to pay for humans to mine coal, produce charcoal, extract oil (not uncommonly a private company - or a country like China - extracting the resources and making a big profit, or giving a loan with a huge interest payment). But let's look at a single off-grid DIY example. First you need the expertise to hook it up. If you have the skill, it still isn't cheap if your economy is weak. It requires saving money for a capital purchase, something people all around the world struggle with. And when there are payment programs, they're often exploitative. It's not like people in Africa aren't aware solar power exists. If it was cheap and easy, everyone would have done it already.

jacquesm 6mo ago

They can and they will. In the longer term there simply won't be anything else.

balderdash 6mo ago

Just my 2c but I think the biggest thing we could do is to reduce the regulatory burden, cost, and complexity associated with installing roof mounted solar. This should be something that can be approved and installed in a week, and should be a half the price (put another it should have a double digit roi) . Right now all of the economics of home solar are consumed by regulation/complexity and the contractors / solar installation companies.

gpm 6mo ago
At the consumer scale the biggest thing we could do is follow the german model of panels that can be plugged into an outlet and installed in an hour by any homeowner (with the same capacity limits and requirements on the panels electronics to protect the grid/line workers during power outages). That said I'm pretty sure that grid-scale solar is the future of most solar energy, not home solar. It's just cheaper to do things in bigger batches.
- balderdash 6mo ago
  This statement is 100% correct, but I think is wrong - utility scale solar is 100% more efficient and cheaper to build at scale, the problem is finding large parcels of land to put it on that are close to where the power consumption is, as well as the complexity and cost associated with grid interconnection (and transition if it not close to demand) Edit: though if we ever get to self driving cars there should be a whole lot of parking lots in metro areas that aren’t needed.
- therealdrag0 6mo ago
  Balcony solar legislation is well underway in dozens of states. But the capacity is still very small. Like 10% of a household.
hamdingers 6mo ago
There's been a wave of legislation[1] introduced in the US to legalize so-called "balcony solar," small grid-tied solar systems that plug into a regular household outlet with zero permitting or interconnect requirements. This is already common in Europe, it's mildly complicated by our split-phase system but not much. The reason for the high burden today is people have developed an inflated sense of how much the kWh they generate is worth. They install massive systems on their roofs to try to "cancel out" their power bill by exporting their entire daily power consumption over the course of a few sunny hours, which (when all their neighbors do the same) ends up being a costly burden for grid operators who then pass the costs on to users without panels. Smaller systems focused on immediate, local consumption rather than export are much better for the grid which is why they have support. 1. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/balcony-solar-taking-state-legislatures-by-storm https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/balcony-solar-tak...

ronb1964 6mo ago

I build off-grid camper vans for a living and install solar + lithium battery systems regularly. The technology has matured a lot in the last few years. What used to take a massive roof array and a bank of heavy lead-acid or AGM batteries to run basic appliances now fits in a fraction of the space with lithium. The limiting factor in real-world installs isn't the panels or the batteries anymore, it's getting customers to right-size the system for their actual usage instead of what they think they'll use. People consistently underestimate idle draws and overestimate how much sun they'll get. Scale that mindset problem up to a national grid and I imagine the challenge is the same.

turtlebits 6mo ago
While I agree with underestimating capacity, the problem only really applies to off grid. For regular homes, it just means less savings.
- lazide 6mo ago
  It means some other infrastructure (fossil fuels?) needs to take up the slack, and people underestimate actual costs at larger scales. It’s the big issue in Germany for instance - it’s all fun and games until Winter.
  - pixl97 6mo ago
    And? Any coal not used in summer is coal not dug up.
  - turtlebits 6mo ago
    Which is fine, since you're still reducing your reliance on the grid. However, when you're off grid, underestimating capacity means your SOL and need to buy a generator and burn fuel on-site.
  - uecker 6mo ago
    Germany has more wind in winter, so traditionally has more production of renewables in winter months.

1970-01-01 6mo ago

Elon said the same thing about the US a decade ago. "a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah." https://www.pcmag.com/news/elon-musk-running-us-on-solar-requires-100-miles-square-of-panels https://www.pcmag.com/news/elon-musk-running-us-on-solar-req... See you next decade when we're saying the same thing and not doing it?

ZeroGravitas 6mo ago
Musk was proposing about 1.2TW of solar capacity, the US installed about 250GW since then and is currently installing about 50GW a year and is projected to have 770GW by 2036 in a decades time. So the US is probably over-delivering compared with many things Elon has proposed delivering himself.
- 1970-01-01 6mo ago
  Apples and oranges though. One is a massive public works program and the other is private.

proee 6mo ago

EVs are essentially a giant battery on wheels. Seems there is a good opportunity to configure them as bidirectional power banks for your local grid. You could rewire all parking slots to have a plugin that acts as a bidirectional power station. Imaging how much power could be moved around with such a grid! This would require a major investment in power transmission layouts, but a city full of batteries on wheels. California has registered around 1M Teslas alone. So this is like having a 1Mx80kwh = 80GWh battery at your service. As a reference, the largest solar + storage facility in California is around 3.2 GWh.

marcosdumay 6mo ago
It's nice for an emergency, and almost all EVs can do that already. But people pay extra to put the batteries over wheels because they need to haul charged batteries around. It's not normally useful to discharge them locally.
pingou 6mo ago
Just charging your car when electricity is cheap and avoiding times when it is scarce would solve most of the issues, provided there is a dynamic pricing system in place.
DavidPiper 6mo ago
No idea why this has been downvoted. There is a lot of demand for this, and at least one company actively working on orchestrating home and EV batteries with the grid: https://www.amber.com.au/amber-for-evs https://www.amber.com.au/amber-for-evs

DoneWithAllThat 6mo ago

No, no they can’t. As has been explained over and over again by people who know better. Someday yes when the tech improves (changes) dramatically. But that’s not today.

joeslide 6mo ago

We'll replace the fossil fuel cartel with the wind/solar/battery cartel and everything will be better. Right.

bluegatty 6mo ago

1/2 the 'cost' of electricity is borne by grid operators, which are usually regulated monopolies. They are generally overstaffed, inneficient bureaucracies. I'm not against public service obviously but I don't think that's the issue, rather it's just related to 'monopoly' provider status. Hydro One in Ontario was by far the largest occupant on the Sunshine list (>$100K salaries) and have always been. They pay dramatically above market wages, have more staff than they need. It's the 'old boys clubs of old boys clubs'. If energy prices drop, they will be able to charge more money to justify more 'infra', staff and expanding budgets. The best thing we could ever do is get rid of our dependency on the energy grid. If our homes could be powered like our cars ... that would be amazing and open up a ton of competition in a landscape which now has almost no competition. That said - there are definitely theoretical efficiencies at scale and if we did get rid of the grid, we may never be able to get it back. It's plausible that 'decentralized energy' may be very advantageous in that it puts a lot of competitive pressure on the centralized elements. Then we get the best of both worlds. Edit: value chain and institutional power dynamics is the only real way to look at all of these systems. It's incredibly naive to think that some arbitrary technology is going to change any landscape. Case and point is this issue itself - that we 'grow' fuel instead of doing something arguably more efficient is a function of structural power.

cringleyrobert 6mo ago

Once you take politics out of solar, EVs and batteries we’re all in agreement. Do your part, do your fair share, don’t wait.

danw1979 6mo ago

> solar PV installed cost 384 €/kWp Is this grid-scale solar ? It can’t be rooftop - there is nobody in the UK who will install a 5kW rooftop system for £2k. The quotes I’ve had recently have been closer to £10k.

edent 6mo ago
Yes. It literally says: > The cost assumptions assume utility-scale solar panels and batteries in large parks. Smaller-scale rooftop solar and home batteries would cost 2-3 times more. I've installed domestic solar several times. The main cost isn't the panels or the inverters - it's the scaffolding, labour, and wiring improvements in the home. If you have a tall or complicated house, it'll cost more.

jmyeet 6mo ago

This comment section is so weird. This seems like a decent analysis to me. It also backs up what's been pretty obvious for some time: solar is the future. Yet we have: - Pointing out the corn ethanol scam. Ok, that's fair. We would be better of spending money on renewables. No argument there; - Multiple people arguing that solar hasn't goten more mature, more effective and that battery technology really hasn't gotten better. No sources mind you, just opinion; - Another busy thread based on an uncited claim that this doesn't account for US heating costs. And tthere are a lot of people who seem to think not having efficient insulation in houses is an expression of freedom in some way; - There's the naive idea that the profit motive will somehow solve all this. Bless your heart; - Probably the least surprising thing is that the pro-nuclear people piped up and tried to make this about nuclear and failed. Sorry but nuclear is one of the most expensive forms of electricity and there's no real way to get around that. I normally don't expect such anti-solar sentiment here. Here's the real problem with renewables politically: if you produce 1GW of solar and it produces 2TWh of electricity in year 1, it'll probably 2TWh in years 2-30 with very little maintenance. That's bad in our system because some private company doesn't get to keep profiting. Let's compare that to an oil well. If you drill wells and make them produce 100kbpd (barrels pe day) of crude and some quantity of natural gas in year 1 then in year 2 it produces 80-85kbpd. In year 3 it's ~70kbpd. In year 4 it's 55kbpd. By year 5 it's less than half what it was originally. This is for the Permian basin and it's called "decline rate". So to maintain the amount of oil and gas you need, you need to be constantly drilling new wells and bringing them online to replace the lost capacity. That's good for business because all that exploration and digging is more profit opportunity. Evenw ith coal, you need people and machiens to keep digging up the coal. Our entire electricity sector is sold a lie that the private sector is somehow better at providing electricity and then everything is built around a massive wealth transfer from consumers and the government to the already wealthy. That's really why renewables aren't popular in the modern political climate.

locallost 6mo ago
I am big fan of renewables, but I disagree on your conclusion. The main reason is purely financial, the incumbenta do not want to lose their investment so they spend a lot of money on manipulation and lobbying. Another big reason is that politicians simply can't know everything, so they rely on advisors whose opinions are influenced by lobbyists. There is a clear lack of vision in the western hemisphere on how to move forward and see the transformation not as a cost but as an advantage. So they let their opinions and decisions be massaged by people whose intentions are to protect the status quo.

ZeroGravitas 6mo ago

Bit of a cop out headline, should have said "will power the world". Even boring staid organisations are predicting solar will be more than half the planet's electricity supply by 2050 which is I think enough to say it powers the world.

maxglute 6mo ago

Last year PRC brrrted out enough solar panels whose lifetime output is equivalent to annual global oil consumption. AKA world uses about >40billion barrels of oil per year, PRC's annual solar production will sink about 40billion barrels of oil of emissions in their life times. This is at 50% solar manufacturing utilization. Once battery scales, can displace current global oil via solar ~10 years. Less if solar production also globally scales. Looking at 10/15/20 years to displace most global oil, lng, coal. Well the discretionary bits / economic consumption.

segmondy 6mo ago

solar WILL power the world.

zackmorris 6mo ago

Note that we had the technology to do this affordably as of about 2008, when lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries became widely available for about $10-12 each (I had to look that up). They were definitely available at low cost ($6) by 2018: https://web.archive.org/web/20180201203013/https://www.18650batterystore.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180201203013/https://www.18650... Looks like sodium-ion (Na-ion) 18650 batteries at 1.5 Ah have about 1/2 the capacity of LiFePO4 18650s at 3.5 Ah, and are about twice the price, so lets call them 4x the price per energy stored: https://www.radicalrc.com/item/Sodium-Na-Ion-Battery-18650-3.1V-1500mAh-Single-Cell-108393 https://www.radicalrc.com/item/Sodium-Na-Ion-Battery-18650-3... https://ogsolarstore.com/products/sodium-ion-cells-3-1v-battery-cell https://ogsolarstore.com/products/sodium-ion-cells-3-1v-batt... https://coulombsolutions.com/product/12v-sodium-ion-battery/ https://coulombsolutions.com/product/12v-sodium-ion-battery/ Battery prices halve about every 4 years: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/03/06/battery-prices-collapsing-grid-tied-energy-storage-expanding/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/03/06/battery-prices-collap... So we can project that Na-ion batteries will have the same price per kWh as today's LiFePO4 in perhaps 8 years, or around 2034, if not sooner. That will negate the lithium supply chain bottleneck so that we're limited to ordinary shortages (like copper). 500 W bifacial solar panels are available for $100 each in bulk, so there's no need to analyze them since they're no longer the bottleneck. A typical home uses 24 kWh/day, so 15-20 panels at a typical 4.5 kW/m2 solar insolation provide enough power to charge batteries and still have some energy left over, at a cost of $1500-2000. Installation labor, electricians/licensing, inverters and batteries now dominate cost. The sodium ion battery market is about $1 billion annually, vs $100 billion for lithium ion. It took lithium about 15-20 years to grow that much. So whoever gets in now could see a 1-2 orders of magnitude return over perhaps 8-15 years. I almost can't think of a better investment outside of AI. - I've been watching this stuff since the 1980s and I can tell you that every renewable energy breakthrough coincides with a geopolitical instability. For the $8 trillion the US spent on Middle East wars since 9/11, we could have had a moonshot for solar+batteries and be at 90+% coverage today. Not counting the other $12 trillion the US spent on the Cold War. Fully $20 trillion of our ~$40 trillion US national debt went to funding endless war, with the other $20 trillion lost on trickle-down tax cuts for the ultra wealthy. We can't do anything about that stuff in the short term. But we can move towards off-grid living and a distributed means of production model where AI, 3D printing, permaculture, and other alternative tech negates the need for investment capital. In the K-shaped economy, the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" phrase might more accurately be stated "if you can't join 'em, beat 'em".

jillesvangurp 6mo ago

While I'm pro renewables and the article is technically correct (it could work), I don't think this is optimal. What's optimal is using a mix of mostly (>90-95%) renewable technologies for generating power supplemented by gas (short term) and nuclear (long term). Additionally, there's a lot of stuff that can be done with cables and batteries that we aren't currently doing to over come daily, seasonal, and weather related variation in power output of wind and solar. Put cables north-south to compensate for seasonal drops in solar output. Put them east-west to have solar power in the evenings/early mornings. Off shore and on shore wind can produce a lot of power and the way high pressure and low pressure systems (aka. weather) work, if the wind is not blowing locally that just means it is blowing elsewhere. Having a lot of solar and wind all over the place and cables to move the power around evens out all the peaks and dips. The rest is just using batteries, pumped hydro, and other storage to add enough buffers. That gets you quite far. Another point here is that people think in rigid "must cover everything 100% of the time", which is valuable but we actually do have a lot of flexibility. You can choose when to charge your car (at night, or at noon), when to run your dishwasher, etc. And does a data center need to be at 100% capacity 100% of the time no matter the cost? Flexible load is a thing. And we can use automation to control it, flexible pricing to incentivize when there are surpluses or shortages, etc. This btw. also neuters the whole "baseload" argument. Baseload power is non flexible power that becomes a problem when we have too much of it. Flexible power is power you can turn off when there's too much of it. The reason energy prices are high in a lot of places is that we have too much of really expensive base load that drives the pricing even if the wind and sun shines for free and gets curtailed. That lack of flexibility is a problem. That's how we could get to 90% over the next few decades. The remaining 10% is harder / more expensive. Gas peaker plants make a lot of sense to fill that gap. Replaced by nuclear long term. Nothing against that but it's just stupidly expensive and slow to realize. There's no need to build new gas plants for that; we have plenty already.

mikewarot 6mo ago

It's important to note that electricity is 21% of the World's energy demand, according to the IEA[1]. This implies that if we could 10x solar, and figure out how to convert some of that to liquid fuels with decent efficiency, we could become sustainable for all energy. [1] https://www.iea.org/world/energy-mix https://www.iea.org/world/energy-mix

eigenspace 6mo ago
That's a very silly way to compare energy usage. For example, you're counting all the energy in the gasoline that gets loaded into a car, not the useful work that the gasoline actually produces. Gasoline gars typically are only able to convert 20-30% of their fuel into propulsion. Counting the energy in the fuel loaded into engines is like counting the amount of energy in the sunlight hitting a solar panel. Similar things go for heating by the way. A modern heat pump often has a coefficient of performance of around 3x, meaning that for every joule of electricity you put into the pump, you can heat up a house with 3 joules of heat, so 3x as efficient as heating the house with combustion.
- mikewarot 6mo ago
  I don't see why anyone would balk at the idea of using backwards compatible fuel sources, synthesized using a sustainable process powered by solar energy. Replacing ALL of the liquid fueled devices in the world impractical, to the point of absurdity, to do. Where would we get electric versions of the Emma Mærsk[1] and her sister ships in a reasonable timeframe? Where would all the infrastructure come from to build out the grid to handle the charging load? Where are the ports with that kind of power capability coming from? What about the world's aviation? There are no viable ways to do air transport on a large scale using battery power. The world is optimized for liquid fuels, it would make far more sense to synthesize them from low cost solar power during the day, and accumulate the quantities required, rather than rip and replace every single industrial engine on the planet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_M%C3%A6rsk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_M%C3%A6rsk
ZeroGravitas 6mo ago
2/3rds of that other 79% is wasted as unwanted heat, so we only need to replace 1/3rd of 79% (~26 percent points) so slightly more than double the current clean energy supply. An extensive explanation of this "primary energy fallacy": https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/reframing-energy-for-the-age-of-electricity/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/reframing-energy-fo...

erelong 6mo ago

Nice, we can get rid of nuclear dangers entirely

djoldman 6mo ago

Fuel price varies dramatically with respect to geographic area. It seems reasonable to factor that in especially if geographic area is factored in to solar capacity.

Havoc 6mo ago

As enthusiastic as I am about that I'd love to see grid scale storage move more towards something like sand batteries. Stuff you can buy for dollars per ton and move with an excavator seems like a better bet than lithium batteries. If we want flakey renewables to be the backbone (which we should)...then we needs serious scale on storage side. Batteries for voltage regulation and quick response is good though

numitus 6mo ago

[dead]

ozgurds 6mo ago

World's economy and based on oil and gas and It is not easy to switch to an alternative. Because it will also mean to change all the geopolitical relations around the globe