5 ms·

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 percenta

by Retric 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.
  - gamblor956 7mo ago
    But why should American taxpayers be responsible for making the technology affordable for everyone? Why shouldn't Europe or China be expected to shoulder this financial burden? EDIT: I think people are misunderstanding my response. I fully support local subsidies for solar and renewables. My question is why my tax dollars should go toward making it affordable for everyone, including non-Americans. Either market dynamics will handle that naturally, artificially (i.e., China's manufacturing subsidies), or else it is up to the local government to address the shortfall.
    - Brybry 7mo ago
      Isn't the American complaint that China did exactly that by subsidizing its solar industry and flooding the global market with panels cheaper than Americans could make? [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-20247734 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-20247734 (2012)
    - a_paddy 7mo ago
      China is, it's subsidies have resulted in a glut of cheap solar panel production which the world has benefited from. European counties subsidise their own citizens switch to solar, the US no longer does at the federal level.
    - maxerickson 7mo ago
      Look at it this way: Benefiting everyone is a side effect of benefiting American taxpayers. Or do you think that US federal investment in solar and battery technology would be bad for the American taxpayer?
    - tialaramex 7mo ago
      Responding to your edit: A wider version of the same argument might apply. The US has (historically) benefited considerably from global stability and this does seem to help with that because if basically everybody has energy independence and the overheating doesn't get much worse they might chill the fuck out?
- philipkglass 7mo ago
  Unlike the US, Vietnam is a net importer of fuel. It imports over 40 million tons of coal per year: https://statbase.org/data/vnm-coal-imports/ https://statbase.org/data/vnm-coal-imports/ It also started importing liquid natural gas in 2023. But it has abundant sunlight, access to low cost Chinese solar panels that will produce electricity for decades instead of being burned once, and a substantial domestic photovoltaic manufacturing industry of its own. "Renewable Energy Investments in Vietnam in 2024 – Asia’s Next Clean Energy Powerhouse" (June 2024) https://energytracker.asia/renewable-energy-investments-in-vietnam-asias-next-clean-energy-powerhouse/ https://energytracker.asia/renewable-energy-investments-in-v... In 2014, the share of renewable energy in Vietnam was just 0.32%. In 2015, only 4 megawatts (MW) of installed solar capacity for power generation was available. However, within five years, investment in solar energy, for example, soared. As of 2020, Vietnam had over 7.4 gigawatts (GW) of rooftop solar power connected to the national grid. These renewable energy numbers surpassed all expectations. It marked a 25-fold increase in installed capacity compared to 2019’s figures. In 2021, the data showed that Vietnam now has 16.5 GW of solar power. This was accompanied by its green energy counterpart wind at 11.8 GW. A further 6.6 GW is expected in late 2021 or 2022. Ambitiously, the government plans to further bolster this by adding 12 GW of onshore and offshore wind by 2025. These growth rates are actually much faster than growth rates in the US.
  - jopsen 7mo ago
    Add cheap labor to the equation. In developed countries 20-50% of the cost of roof top solar is labor.
- pjc50 7mo ago
  The transition is happening rapidly in Pakistan: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/17/pakistan-people-led-solar-boom-middle-east-energy-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/17/pakistan...
- AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
  > This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do. The general premise of investments is that you end up with fewer resources by not doing them. It now costs less to install a new solar or wind farm than to continue using an existing coal plant, much less if you were considering building a new coal plant, and that includes the cost of capital, i.e. the interest you have to pay to borrow the money for the up-front investment. Poorer countries would be at a slight disadvantage if they have to pay higher than average interest rates to borrow money, but they also have the countervailing advantage of having lower labor and real estate costs and the net result is that it still doesn't make sense for anybody to continue to use coal for any longer than it takes to build the replacement. It just takes more than zero days to replace all existing infrastructure.
nradov 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.

by Retric 7mo ago

germandiago 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.
- gamblor956 7mo ago
  But why should American taxpayers be responsible for making the technology affordable for everyone? Why shouldn't Europe or China be expected to shoulder this financial burden? EDIT: I think people are misunderstanding my response. I fully support local subsidies for solar and renewables. My question is why my tax dollars should go toward making it affordable for everyone, including non-Americans. Either market dynamics will handle that naturally, artificially (i.e., China's manufacturing subsidies), or else it is up to the local government to address the shortfall.
  - Brybry 7mo ago
    Isn't the American complaint that China did exactly that by subsidizing its solar industry and flooding the global market with panels cheaper than Americans could make? [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-20247734 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-20247734 (2012)
  - a_paddy 7mo ago
    China is, it's subsidies have resulted in a glut of cheap solar panel production which the world has benefited from. European counties subsidise their own citizens switch to solar, the US no longer does at the federal level.
  - maxerickson 7mo ago
    Look at it this way: Benefiting everyone is a side effect of benefiting American taxpayers. Or do you think that US federal investment in solar and battery technology would be bad for the American taxpayer?
  - tialaramex 7mo ago
    Responding to your edit: A wider version of the same argument might apply. The US has (historically) benefited considerably from global stability and this does seem to help with that because if basically everybody has energy independence and the overheating doesn't get much worse they might chill the fuck out?
philipkglass 7mo ago
Unlike the US, Vietnam is a net importer of fuel. It imports over 40 million tons of coal per year: https://statbase.org/data/vnm-coal-imports/ https://statbase.org/data/vnm-coal-imports/ It also started importing liquid natural gas in 2023. But it has abundant sunlight, access to low cost Chinese solar panels that will produce electricity for decades instead of being burned once, and a substantial domestic photovoltaic manufacturing industry of its own. "Renewable Energy Investments in Vietnam in 2024 – Asia’s Next Clean Energy Powerhouse" (June 2024) https://energytracker.asia/renewable-energy-investments-in-vietnam-asias-next-clean-energy-powerhouse/ https://energytracker.asia/renewable-energy-investments-in-v... In 2014, the share of renewable energy in Vietnam was just 0.32%. In 2015, only 4 megawatts (MW) of installed solar capacity for power generation was available. However, within five years, investment in solar energy, for example, soared. As of 2020, Vietnam had over 7.4 gigawatts (GW) of rooftop solar power connected to the national grid. These renewable energy numbers surpassed all expectations. It marked a 25-fold increase in installed capacity compared to 2019’s figures. In 2021, the data showed that Vietnam now has 16.5 GW of solar power. This was accompanied by its green energy counterpart wind at 11.8 GW. A further 6.6 GW is expected in late 2021 or 2022. Ambitiously, the government plans to further bolster this by adding 12 GW of onshore and offshore wind by 2025. These growth rates are actually much faster than growth rates in the US.
- jopsen 7mo ago
  Add cheap labor to the equation. In developed countries 20-50% of the cost of roof top solar is labor.
pjc50 7mo ago
The transition is happening rapidly in Pakistan: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/17/pakistan-people-led-solar-boom-middle-east-energy-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/17/pakistan...
AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
> This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do. The general premise of investments is that you end up with fewer resources by not doing them. It now costs less to install a new solar or wind farm than to continue using an existing coal plant, much less if you were considering building a new coal plant, and that includes the cost of capital, i.e. the interest you have to pay to borrow the money for the up-front investment. Poorer countries would be at a slight disadvantage if they have to pay higher than average interest rates to borrow money, but they also have the countervailing advantage of having lower labor and real estate costs and the net result is that it still doesn't make sense for anybody to continue to use coal for any longer than it takes to build the replacement. It just takes more than zero days to replace all existing infrastructure.

nradov 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.