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In addition to being cheaper, you never hear about a massive sun or wind spill and the prices never change due to events thousands of miles away.
by acdha 2mo ago
In addition to being cheaper, you never hear about a massive sun or wind spill and the prices never change due to events thousands of miles away.
- epolanski 2mo agoElectricity cost is pegged to energy cost and wars happening on the other end of the planet influence it directly. That includes renewables.
- nisegami 2mo agoMaybe to the end consumer after being integrated into a grid, but the cost to the owner of installed solar/wind energy infrastructure should not change.
- acdha 2mo agoCan you show your math explaining how my solar panels change production or retroactively cost more after a war on the other side of the planet? Short of nuclear winter, you can reliably predict what they’ll generate years out with far less volatility.
- indiantrains 2mo ago[dead]
- ekianjo 2mo agogood luck building solar without having any petrol or plastics derived from petrol in the supply chain
- savolai 2mo agoAlso see: black and white or false dilemma fallacy
- ThrowawayTestr 2mo agoIt's a good thing we burn all these precious hydrocarbons, less microplastics in the environment.
- ben_w 2mo agoOh no, turns out that even if we stop burning oil we still need 6% of it for plastics, clearly this means there's no environmental benefit to reducing how much we ship by 94%, and we can't possibly for example move the plastic production to where the oil comes from so what we ship isn't crude and oh look people are already genetically modifying bacteria to produce oils suitable for various of the huge range of things in the category "plastic", which is such a broad range of things that saying anything about the whole lot in one go is a bit like saying "eat more fruit" when you mean "you are short of vitamin C specifically", oh wait hang on a minute…
- hdgvhicv 2mo agoAbout 5kG of polymers per kw. That’s about a gallon of oil if it all came from oil. Where I live a 1kW solar panel offsets 100 litres of oil in a car every year. Oil from a single full tank of petrol could produce enough energy to drive a car about 1 million miles over its lifetime.
- ben_w 2mo agoOnion headlines aside*, we kinda do? This summer's European heatwave is due to emissions worldwide**; while the historical record has the early emissions from Europe, all the other inhabited continents have also contributed to it since then. * https://theonion.com/solar-power-investment-skyrockets-upon-discovery-of-mas-1849458050/ https://theonion.com/solar-power-investment-skyrockets-upon-... ** There's also a big El Niño event, the Wikipedia page on the heatwave currently expressly denies that this contributed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_European_heatwaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_European_heatwaves
- dyzone 2mo ago> Onion headlines aside Well technically speaking crude oil is a form of solar energy. (Sun -> plants -> animals -> crude oil)
- MikeNotThePope 2mo agoWhat energy sources do we have that don't ultimately derive from either solar of radioactive decay? Residual heat from object formation perhaps.
- ben_w 2mo ago> solar of radioactive decay We can do fusion, but given the only large sources of that are fusion bombs and nobody wants a bomb-based power plant… :P
- anabab 2mo ago> nobody [citation needed]. Project Pacer might be controversial and uneconomical, but still interesting.
- ben_w 2mo agoOK, not *literally* nobody at the human level, just *metaphorically* nobody at the human level (or literally at the level of nations) given that even normal boring fission plants make voters stick their tongues out and complain.
- andsoitis 2mo agoOil is used for a lot more than power generation.
- mhh__ 2mo agoThe prices do change because (many, at least) renewable projects are subsidised via CFD schemes and so on and atop of that are selling into a spot market that may (it varies) pay them more than what they offer into the market. It's wonderful technology, the sun is god and so on, but we can't run everything on bursty renewables.
- acdha 2mo agoThat’s not external, though: what we’re seeing now are a ton of people struggling because two countries they have no control over are at war. If they used solar and their local government changed the pricing, they’d have some outlet for relief in a way they don’t now. Also, we have battery technology. Bursty doesn’t mean real engineers can’t build reliable systems, and the economic factors can spur a lot of efficiency improvements.
- mhh__ 2mo agoWhen these batteries actually exist then sure...
- acdha 2mo agoSo several years ago. There’s grid scale storage in use around the world. This is not alien tech, just a matter of engineering.
- mhh__ 2mo agoYes but it doesn't actually exist yet so anyone saying "just use batteries" is basically either a bit naive or a journalist.
- acdha 2mo ago2023: https://www.energy-storage.news/australias-first-grid-scale-battery-storage-system-at-decommissioned-coal-plant-goes-online/ https://www.energy-storage.news/australias-first-grid-scale-... 2024: https://www.indexbox.io/blog/australias-battery-storage-fleet-sets-new-records-on-august-11/ https://www.indexbox.io/blog/australias-battery-storage-flee... https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2025-11/californias-battery-storage-fleet-continues-record-growth-strengthening-grid https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2025-11/californias-battery-s... https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10022025/solar-battery-storage-texas-grid/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10022025/solar-battery-st... Note how massive home battery deployment drove all of Australia’s wholesale power price down by half: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/australia-home-batteries https://e360.yale.edu/digest/australia-home-batteries
- binyu 2mo agoYep, that's one of the reasons it is called "green" energy. On top of renewability, the environmental impact of production is radically different from fossil fuels.
- gertrunde 2mo agoWind spill? Like... A hurricane? Sun spill? Like... A coronal mass ejection?
- roenxi 2mo agoThe price of solar power is governed by the events happening in China. It just happens that the situation in China is pretty good because their military are the most competent in practice out of all the major players. At least so far. > In addition to being cheaper... It might even be cheaper, we're looking for the tipping point. But if it is actually cheaper to get power from solar energy, people will just switch to it at high speed. The reason the world runs on something like 80% fossil fuel is because solar has, so far, manifestly not been a cheaper source of energy than fossil fuels. If you ignore the fact that people would have to go without energy then sure, it'd be great. But the practical reality is the downsides of oil are much smaller than the downsides of not having cheap, accessible energy. Which is why the world persists in using coal and oil.
- ZeroGravitas 2mo agoRenewbles have been more than half of all added generation over the last decade, slowly rising to near 100% of the increase from 2024 to 2025. This tracks with it being cheaper which it basically has been for that decade. The market has spoken but some people who claim to like markets aren't listening.
- acdha 2mo ago> The price of solar power is governed by the events happening in China. Events in China do not retroactively change your solar panels or wind farm. You might choose to buy from a different supplier but there’s no equivalent of all of the people who are now struggling with food and housing insecurity because of two other countries fighting thousands of miles away. > But if it is actually cheaper to get power from solar energy, people will just switch to it at high speed. This is in process now, but there are efforts by the fossil fuel industry to prevent that. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the United States where laws are being broken at the federal level to prevent cheaper renewable projects from going online, but it’s common to other corrupt petro-states as well.
- roenxi 2mo ago> Events in China do not retroactively change your solar panels or wind farm. It can, capital depreciated continuously and there'd be an annual budget for replacing panels. If the new panels are much more expensive, we'd expect the cost to start rising. Obviously everyone would rather be using solar rather than oil if there is going to be a war because the feedback loop is slower, but it is still affected by foreign events. > This is in process now, but there are efforts by the fossil fuel industry to prevent that. Maybe, but the environmentalists have been flailing and failing to stop the fossil fuel industry for decades, because people want cheap energy. If renewables actually work the fossil fuel industry will have about as much success stopping them, ie, none whatever. There wasn't ever strong enough political support for renewables to escape economics, but there is even less for fossil fuels. Nobody is in favour of them on an ideological basis.
- Markoff 2mo agonuclear is safer (per deaths per TWh installed) and more reliable than solar or wind energy though "The data available on fatal falls from height would indicate that rooftop solar power is several times more dangerous than wind power or nuclear power (0.44 deaths per terawatt hour each year compared with 0.15 and 0.04 deaths respectively)" https://osha.europa.eu/sites/default/files/E-fact68.pdf https://osha.europa.eu/sites/default/files/E-fact68.pdf "Government (South Korea) data reported 28 worker deaths during solar installation projects from 2020 through the first half of 2025 (about 5–6 deaths per year on average)." https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20251015163100530 https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20251015163100530
- acdha 2mo agoMaybe, although nuclear construction and mining aren’t safer and there’s a probability issue over time but more importantly, nuclear is too slow to be what we bank on. Solar and wind can produce in months as opposed to decades and we should treat nuclear as the long term option for that last bit of heavy production, not the primary. It guaranteed pollution until some point two decades from now when it finally displaces fossil fuels.