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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

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
> why it is not done yet? Whoa lots to unpack here. I'll summarize: - It is already happening to some extent (it's cheaper) - Try explaining to farmers to do away with their livelihood and retrain them to running a solar farm - Entrenched bureaucracy and gov subsidies
Retric 6mo ago
The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time. It’s the same reason EV’s make up a far larger share of new car sales than a percentage of overall cars, EV’s sucked 20+ years ago yet there are a lot of 20+ year old cars on the road. The US stopped building coal power plants over a decade ago but we still have a lot of them. Meanwhile we’ve mostly been building solar, which eventually means we’ll have a mostly solar grid but that’s still decades away.
- germandiago 6mo ago
  > The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do. It is reasonable that when someone gives up a couple of things because that person is rich (rich as in a person in the developed world) the sacrifice is more or less acceptable. Now change environment and think that these sacrifices are way worse. Even worse than that: that has more implications in conservative cultures where, whether you like it or not, showing "muscle" (wealth) is socially important for them to reach other soccial layers that will make their lives easier. But giving up those things is probably a very bad choice for their living. America cannot be compared to South East Asia economically speaking, for example. So the comparison of the coal centrals is not even close. A salary in Vietnam is maybe 15 million VND for many people. With that you can hardly live in some areas. It is around 600 usd. Just my two cents.
  - tencentshill 6mo ago
    That's why it will require a functional government who can use taxes responsibly to make the technology affordable to everyone. The US had a pretty good start until one man decided to stop and try to reverse any progress made.
    - mullingitover 6mo ago
      Not one man, he's financially backed by the wealthiest people in the world and politically supported by millions. Acting like this blunder is some random stroke of bad luck isn't telling the whole story.
      - tialaramex 6mo ago
        Trump's animus against wind in particular is definitely specific to the man. He was annoyed by a wind farm in Scotland. Trump of course thinks he's one of those old fashioned kings† (and the US has been annoyingly willing to go along with that, how are those "checks and balances" and your "co-equal branches of government" working out for you?) and so he thought the local government would go along with his whims and prohibit the wind farm but they did not. I'm sure there's some degree of vested interest in protecting fossil energy because it means very concentrated profits in a way that renewables do not. Sunlight isn't owned by anybody (modulo Simpsons references) and nor is the Wind, but I'd expect that, if that was all it was, to manifest as diverting funding to transitional work, stuff that keeps $$$ in the right men's pockets, rather than trying to do a King Canute. Stuff like paying a wind farm not to be constructed feels very Trump-specific. † The British even know what you do with kings who refuse to stop breaking the law. See Charles the First, though that's technically the English I suspect in this respect the Scots can follow along. If the King won't follow the Law, kill the King, problem solved.
        mullingitover 6mo ago
        Trump’s campaign had financial backing from a number of oil and gas industry investors. Following the money in this case is not very difficult. He’s just a useful idiot, the whole industry put him there and are profiting at the expense of the rest of us.
- nradov 6mo ago
  We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power. Perhaps we will eventually, but until that actually happens the base load requirement represents a hard limit on the amount of solar generation capacity that the grid can handle.
  - gpm 6mo ago
    We started scaling batteries after solar (because the technology reached the point where they were profitable after solar)... but they're being installed at scale now, and at a rapdily increasing rate. Batteries provided 42.8% of California's power at 7pm a few days ago (which came across my social media feed as a new record) [1]. And it wasn't a particularly short peak, they stayed above 20% of the power for 3 hours and 40 minutes. It's a non-trivial amount of dispatchable power. [1] https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso&date=2026-03-29 https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso&date=202... Batteries are a form of dispatchable power not "base load". There is no "base load" requirement. Base load is simply a marketing term for power production that cannot (economically) follow the demand curve and therefore must be supplemented by a form of dispatchable power, like gas peaker plants, or batteries. "Base load" power is quite similar to solar in that regard. The term makes sense if you have a cheap high-capitol low running-cost source of power (like nuclear was supposed to be, though it failed on the cheap front) where you install as much of it as you can use constantly and then you follow the demand curve with a different source of more expensive dispatchable power. That's not the reality we find ourselves in unless you happen to live near hydro.
    - tialaramex 6mo ago
      I think the mysterious "Misc" electricity which sometimes appears at dawn and then dusk in the UK is likewise BESS†. The raw data doesn't seem to have labels for BESS, a lot of it was oriented around how electricity works twenty five years ago, there's an 850MW power plant here, and one there and one there, and we measure those. So it can cope with a wind farm - say 500MW or 1GW coming ashore somewhere, but not really with the idea that there's 10GW of solar just scattered all over the place on a bright summer's day and the batteries might similarly be too much? † My thinking is: Dawn because in a few hours the solar comes online, you can refill those batteries at whatever price that is, so sell what you have now for the dawn price, and Dusk because the solar is mostly gone but people are running ovens and so on to make food in the evening, so you can sell into that market. But I might be seeing what I expect not reality.
- wakawaka28 6mo ago
  Becoming completely dependent on imported tech for such basic needs is a BAD idea. The West cannot outcompete China on cost for these products at this time. And before you say subsidies, let me remind you that we are all going broke.
  - defrost 6mo ago
    Once you have PV panels, they (on average) last 20+ years - that's not being dependant, particularly when PV panels can be mass produced anywhere. ( They do not use rare earths (inverters use trace amounts) ) China cornering rare earths (for now) is an "own goal" by every country that chose to let China (and to a lesser degree Malaysia) take a hit on the toxic by products of processing concentrates. The US is easily capable of producing it's own rare earths, it's certainly not been backwards in asking Australia to do that for it.
    - wakawaka28 6mo ago
      20 years is not great for those. Extreme weather can also shred them. It's fine to have some, but I sure as hell don't want to be dependent on that.
      - defrost 6mo ago
        Gotcha, you prefer to be daily dependent on fossil fuel delivery rather than get new panels every 20 years, particularly given you're in a country seemingly incapable of manufacture and minerals processing. That's certainly a position.
        wakawaka28 6mo ago
        The US and the rest of the West are capable of manufacturing. You just said yourself they can be made "anywhere" so make up your mind. What I think is that manufacturing is not competitive in the US or the West as a whole because of wage requirements and monetary exchange rates, and additionally because we operate a mostly free market and don't penalize foreign state-subsidized products hard enough to make domestic manufacture make sense. Replacing the solar panels every 20 years at minimum would mean that the panels would always be getting refreshed. Bro we have roads and bridges 50 years past end of life, in need of rebuilding. We can't afford this fragile power grid rebuild that is completely dependent on foreign suppliers. Sorry. Take your snark and shove it.
dylan604 6mo ago
Obviously, money is a factor. But you cannot discount political resistance. If a government in charge is dead set in promoting fossil fuels over renewables, it will never happen. Even if you get a government led by the most gungho green friendly administration, in a democratic government, those opposing can stall any plans to go green. If you live in a less democratic government where leadership decides it's going green, you're going green.
idontwantthis 6mo ago
It is happening. It takes time to build and it only became absurdly cheap in the past few years. But it keeps getting cheaper and better (batteries too for anyone who wants to bring that up).
micromacrofoot 6mo ago
Time, infrastructure changes take decades
doctoboggan 6mo ago
Based on your response timestamp I will conclude you didn't watch the video. He "does it rationally" like you requested. You said "try not to blame anyone" so if you'd rather not hear about the people who actually are to blame for this situation, then skip the last 30 minutes of the video.
bb88 6mo ago
1. Solar panels need a huge capital expenditure up front. 2. Wind power works better for farmers and provide a smaller footprint. Drive on I-80 in Iowa on a clear night and you'll see the wind farms blink their red lights in the distance. Farmers can lease their land for wind turbines, and the generation companies take on the regulatory / capital / politcal risks, etc. 3. Farming is more or less free market based, and often farmers can let their grain sit in a silo until the price is optimal for them to sell. But for a given location, there's only one power company that you can use, and typically the power companies don't like people putting solar panels on the grid. In many states (like in Idaho) there's regulatory capture or weird politics preventing people putting solar panels up on their own land. (Again Idaho) As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies.
- burningChrome 6mo ago
  There was also a huge move by farmers towards growing corn and selling for ethanol because E-85 was seen as some future fuel. Many farmers I know went all in and switched from regional crops (this was in ND), such as sugar beets, soybeans, and spring wheat to corn to fuel this thinking this some kind of energy gold rush. Then economics, lack of infrastructure and incentives buried it in a few years. Farmers were left holding the bag. Many were not happy they had made a huge move into this new "renewable" energy, only to get burned in the end. The same farmers I know have scoffed at windmills and solar farms. E-85 really lost a lot of farmers willing to use their land for something that won't pan out. The ones I know went back to growing what sells and grows the best in the market. Trying to tell a farmer that solar panels on his land where he grows food to feed his family is going to be a tough sell now.
- fhn 6mo ago
  In California, PG&E charges you for putting solar on their grid and they'll pay you a penny for your extra electricity.
- tzs 6mo ago
  > As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies. The problem is that in many of those places where enough water naturally falls from the sky the soil and/or the weather isn't as good for growing food. It is generally much easier to move water to a low water place that has great soil and/or weather than it is to move soil or weather to a high water place that is missing good soil or weather, and so here we are.
Aperocky 6mo ago
It is being done, just not here.
shepherdjerred 6mo ago
People, especially recent American leaders, do not make rational decisions. They also have goals other than generating energy effectively
wat10000 6mo ago
Because externalities screw with incentives. Theft is stupid from a broad view. It causes more harm to the victim than benefit to the perpetrator. Everyone would be better off if we everyone stopped stealing and we provided the same level of benefit to would-be perpetrators in a more efficient form. Why hasn't theft stopped yet? Because it's extremely difficult to do from a systems level. In principle it's simple: just don't steal. Convincing everyone to do it is hard. Likewise, fossil fuels have horrible externalities that kill thousands if not millions of people per year. We'd be better off if we greatly cut back our usage and replaced it with cleaner sources of energy. But the people benefitting from any given use of fossil fuels and the people paying the costs tend not to be the same people. This makes it extremely difficult to organize a halt.
functional_dev 6mo ago
had the same question and after reading about it, I found there are multiple layers on each other. Existing plans are built to run 40-60 years.. retiring creates "stranded assets". pension funds fight hard to avoid that. The renewable projects that wait for permits exceed total existing capacity.. the bottleneck is not tech, but locality. I found this visual schematic helpful - https://vectree.io/c/why-energy-transitions-are-slow-grid-infrastructure-incumbents-inertia https://vectree.io/c/why-energy-transitions-are-slow-grid-in...

mbesto 6mo ago

> why it is not done yet? Whoa lots to unpack here. I'll summarize: - It is already happening to some extent (it's cheaper) - Try explaining to farmers to do away with their livelihood and retrain them to running a solar farm - Entrenched bureaucracy and gov subsidies

Retric 6mo ago

The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time. It’s the same reason EV’s make up a far larger share of new car sales than a percentage of overall cars, EV’s sucked 20+ years ago yet there are a lot of 20+ year old cars on the road. The US stopped building coal power plants over a decade ago but we still have a lot of them. Meanwhile we’ve mostly been building solar, which eventually means we’ll have a mostly solar grid but that’s still decades away.

germandiago 6mo ago
> The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do. It is reasonable that when someone gives up a couple of things because that person is rich (rich as in a person in the developed world) the sacrifice is more or less acceptable. Now change environment and think that these sacrifices are way worse. Even worse than that: that has more implications in conservative cultures where, whether you like it or not, showing "muscle" (wealth) is socially important for them to reach other soccial layers that will make their lives easier. But giving up those things is probably a very bad choice for their living. America cannot be compared to South East Asia economically speaking, for example. So the comparison of the coal centrals is not even close. A salary in Vietnam is maybe 15 million VND for many people. With that you can hardly live in some areas. It is around 600 usd. Just my two cents.
- tencentshill 6mo ago
  That's why it will require a functional government who can use taxes responsibly to make the technology affordable to everyone. The US had a pretty good start until one man decided to stop and try to reverse any progress made.
  - mullingitover 6mo ago
    Not one man, he's financially backed by the wealthiest people in the world and politically supported by millions. Acting like this blunder is some random stroke of bad luck isn't telling the whole story.
    - tialaramex 6mo ago
      Trump's animus against wind in particular is definitely specific to the man. He was annoyed by a wind farm in Scotland. Trump of course thinks he's one of those old fashioned kings† (and the US has been annoyingly willing to go along with that, how are those "checks and balances" and your "co-equal branches of government" working out for you?) and so he thought the local government would go along with his whims and prohibit the wind farm but they did not. I'm sure there's some degree of vested interest in protecting fossil energy because it means very concentrated profits in a way that renewables do not. Sunlight isn't owned by anybody (modulo Simpsons references) and nor is the Wind, but I'd expect that, if that was all it was, to manifest as diverting funding to transitional work, stuff that keeps $$$ in the right men's pockets, rather than trying to do a King Canute. Stuff like paying a wind farm not to be constructed feels very Trump-specific. † The British even know what you do with kings who refuse to stop breaking the law. See Charles the First, though that's technically the English I suspect in this respect the Scots can follow along. If the King won't follow the Law, kill the King, problem solved.
      - mullingitover 6mo ago
        Trump’s campaign had financial backing from a number of oil and gas industry investors. Following the money in this case is not very difficult. He’s just a useful idiot, the whole industry put him there and are profiting at the expense of the rest of us.
nradov 6mo ago
We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power. Perhaps we will eventually, but until that actually happens the base load requirement represents a hard limit on the amount of solar generation capacity that the grid can handle.
- gpm 6mo ago
  We started scaling batteries after solar (because the technology reached the point where they were profitable after solar)... but they're being installed at scale now, and at a rapdily increasing rate. Batteries provided 42.8% of California's power at 7pm a few days ago (which came across my social media feed as a new record) [1]. And it wasn't a particularly short peak, they stayed above 20% of the power for 3 hours and 40 minutes. It's a non-trivial amount of dispatchable power. [1] https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso&date=2026-03-29 https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso&date=202... Batteries are a form of dispatchable power not "base load". There is no "base load" requirement. Base load is simply a marketing term for power production that cannot (economically) follow the demand curve and therefore must be supplemented by a form of dispatchable power, like gas peaker plants, or batteries. "Base load" power is quite similar to solar in that regard. The term makes sense if you have a cheap high-capitol low running-cost source of power (like nuclear was supposed to be, though it failed on the cheap front) where you install as much of it as you can use constantly and then you follow the demand curve with a different source of more expensive dispatchable power. That's not the reality we find ourselves in unless you happen to live near hydro.
  - tialaramex 6mo ago
    I think the mysterious "Misc" electricity which sometimes appears at dawn and then dusk in the UK is likewise BESS†. The raw data doesn't seem to have labels for BESS, a lot of it was oriented around how electricity works twenty five years ago, there's an 850MW power plant here, and one there and one there, and we measure those. So it can cope with a wind farm - say 500MW or 1GW coming ashore somewhere, but not really with the idea that there's 10GW of solar just scattered all over the place on a bright summer's day and the batteries might similarly be too much? † My thinking is: Dawn because in a few hours the solar comes online, you can refill those batteries at whatever price that is, so sell what you have now for the dawn price, and Dusk because the solar is mostly gone but people are running ovens and so on to make food in the evening, so you can sell into that market. But I might be seeing what I expect not reality.
wakawaka28 6mo ago
Becoming completely dependent on imported tech for such basic needs is a BAD idea. The West cannot outcompete China on cost for these products at this time. And before you say subsidies, let me remind you that we are all going broke.
- defrost 6mo ago
  Once you have PV panels, they (on average) last 20+ years - that's not being dependant, particularly when PV panels can be mass produced anywhere. ( They do not use rare earths (inverters use trace amounts) ) China cornering rare earths (for now) is an "own goal" by every country that chose to let China (and to a lesser degree Malaysia) take a hit on the toxic by products of processing concentrates. The US is easily capable of producing it's own rare earths, it's certainly not been backwards in asking Australia to do that for it.
  - wakawaka28 6mo ago
    20 years is not great for those. Extreme weather can also shred them. It's fine to have some, but I sure as hell don't want to be dependent on that.
    - defrost 6mo ago
      Gotcha, you prefer to be daily dependent on fossil fuel delivery rather than get new panels every 20 years, particularly given you're in a country seemingly incapable of manufacture and minerals processing. That's certainly a position.
      - wakawaka28 6mo ago
        The US and the rest of the West are capable of manufacturing. You just said yourself they can be made "anywhere" so make up your mind. What I think is that manufacturing is not competitive in the US or the West as a whole because of wage requirements and monetary exchange rates, and additionally because we operate a mostly free market and don't penalize foreign state-subsidized products hard enough to make domestic manufacture make sense. Replacing the solar panels every 20 years at minimum would mean that the panels would always be getting refreshed. Bro we have roads and bridges 50 years past end of life, in need of rebuilding. We can't afford this fragile power grid rebuild that is completely dependent on foreign suppliers. Sorry. Take your snark and shove it.

dylan604 6mo ago

Obviously, money is a factor. But you cannot discount political resistance. If a government in charge is dead set in promoting fossil fuels over renewables, it will never happen. Even if you get a government led by the most gungho green friendly administration, in a democratic government, those opposing can stall any plans to go green. If you live in a less democratic government where leadership decides it's going green, you're going green.

idontwantthis 6mo ago

It is happening. It takes time to build and it only became absurdly cheap in the past few years. But it keeps getting cheaper and better (batteries too for anyone who wants to bring that up).

micromacrofoot 6mo ago

Time, infrastructure changes take decades

doctoboggan 6mo ago

Based on your response timestamp I will conclude you didn't watch the video. He "does it rationally" like you requested. You said "try not to blame anyone" so if you'd rather not hear about the people who actually are to blame for this situation, then skip the last 30 minutes of the video.

bb88 6mo ago

1. Solar panels need a huge capital expenditure up front. 2. Wind power works better for farmers and provide a smaller footprint. Drive on I-80 in Iowa on a clear night and you'll see the wind farms blink their red lights in the distance. Farmers can lease their land for wind turbines, and the generation companies take on the regulatory / capital / politcal risks, etc. 3. Farming is more or less free market based, and often farmers can let their grain sit in a silo until the price is optimal for them to sell. But for a given location, there's only one power company that you can use, and typically the power companies don't like people putting solar panels on the grid. In many states (like in Idaho) there's regulatory capture or weird politics preventing people putting solar panels up on their own land. (Again Idaho) As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies.

burningChrome 6mo ago
There was also a huge move by farmers towards growing corn and selling for ethanol because E-85 was seen as some future fuel. Many farmers I know went all in and switched from regional crops (this was in ND), such as sugar beets, soybeans, and spring wheat to corn to fuel this thinking this some kind of energy gold rush. Then economics, lack of infrastructure and incentives buried it in a few years. Farmers were left holding the bag. Many were not happy they had made a huge move into this new "renewable" energy, only to get burned in the end. The same farmers I know have scoffed at windmills and solar farms. E-85 really lost a lot of farmers willing to use their land for something that won't pan out. The ones I know went back to growing what sells and grows the best in the market. Trying to tell a farmer that solar panels on his land where he grows food to feed his family is going to be a tough sell now.
fhn 6mo ago
In California, PG&E charges you for putting solar on their grid and they'll pay you a penny for your extra electricity.
tzs 6mo ago
> As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies. The problem is that in many of those places where enough water naturally falls from the sky the soil and/or the weather isn't as good for growing food. It is generally much easier to move water to a low water place that has great soil and/or weather than it is to move soil or weather to a high water place that is missing good soil or weather, and so here we are.

Aperocky 6mo ago

It is being done, just not here.

shepherdjerred 6mo ago

People, especially recent American leaders, do not make rational decisions. They also have goals other than generating energy effectively

wat10000 6mo ago

Because externalities screw with incentives. Theft is stupid from a broad view. It causes more harm to the victim than benefit to the perpetrator. Everyone would be better off if we everyone stopped stealing and we provided the same level of benefit to would-be perpetrators in a more efficient form. Why hasn't theft stopped yet? Because it's extremely difficult to do from a systems level. In principle it's simple: just don't steal. Convincing everyone to do it is hard. Likewise, fossil fuels have horrible externalities that kill thousands if not millions of people per year. We'd be better off if we greatly cut back our usage and replaced it with cleaner sources of energy. But the people benefitting from any given use of fossil fuels and the people paying the costs tend not to be the same people. This makes it extremely difficult to organize a halt.

functional_dev 6mo ago

had the same question and after reading about it, I found there are multiple layers on each other. Existing plans are built to run 40-60 years.. retiring creates "stranded assets". pension funds fight hard to avoid that. The renewable projects that wait for permits exceed total existing capacity.. the bottleneck is not tech, but locality. I found this visual schematic helpful - https://vectree.io/c/why-energy-transitions-are-slow-grid-infrastructure-incumbents-inertia https://vectree.io/c/why-energy-transitions-are-slow-grid-in...