[HN Gopher] Solar and batteries can power the world
___________________________________________________________________
Solar and batteries can power the world
Author : edent
Score : 255 points
Date : 2026-04-03 14:29 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nworbmot.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (nworbmot.org)
| ahhhhnoooo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Unsure why you're getting downvoted. I know politics is
| generally frowned upon here but this is absolutely relevant to
| the conversation.
| hnthrow0287345 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| China is doing that because they are profitable, not because
| they care about the environment. Why would they care the coal
| use?
| dmix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| waveforms wrote:
| 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
| shipman05 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There are influential people who make lots of money when the US
| Govt forces the country to rely on fossil fuels.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 [2]
| https://www.semafor.com/article/03/03/2026/us-renewables-hit...
| [3] https://www.integrityenergy.com/blog/the-top-10-states-
| pavin...
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.)
| DangitBobby wrote:
| 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.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| The issue is that to achieve that you can't just build
| 90% solar plus 10% fossil fuels. You would need to build
| 100% solar + 100% fossil fuels for the 10% of the time
| solar doesn't work.
| pingou wrote:
| Good thing it's already built then! Well, of course it
| cost money to maintain though.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Yes, but if you need to have all that infrastructure
| anyway it no longer makes sense to compare the cost of
| solar+batteries with the cost of fossil fuels because you
| actually need to have _both_.
|
| If you compare the _total_ cost of solar with _just_ the
| fuel cost of fossil fuels (ignoring its CapEx and non-
| fuel OpEx) that swings the equation a lot.
| pishpash wrote:
| Infrastructure cost for 100% is the same as
| infrastructure cost for 10%? That's not true. The
| distribution network is the part that can't be scaled,
| but it can also be reused for either source, so it
| doesn't double in cost.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| No, I'm saying infrastructure cost for 100% is the same
| as infrastructure cost for _100%_. You can 't build 10%
| as much fossil fuel infrastructure and expect it to carry
| 100% of the load when solar isn't working. And obviously
| I'm talking about generation here, not distribution.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| If you build batteries on the scale that the article
| suggests (and is probably going to happen in the real
| future) you can use batteries charged from fossil fuels.
|
| It's a few percent dirtier (round trip losses) but in
| return you can use gas plants that are 50% more efficient
| to charge them rather than run peaker plants.
|
| And of course that's ignoring wind which is nearly as
| cheap as solar and anti-correlated with it.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| That's fair, batteries are somewhat useful for peaking
| even in a world powered 100% by fossil fuels so there's
| _some_ infrastructure that can be shared. And even on a
| cloudy day solar output isn 't 0%. But I'm skeptical the
| overlap here is significant enough to invalidate my basic
| point, though I admit it's a big simplification.
|
| Reality is extremely complicated, so realistically the
| exact mix of solar + fossil fuels that makes sense is
| going to depend on a huge number of factors and vary from
| region to region depending on weather, fuel costs,
| construction costs, transmission costs, and probably a
| thousand other things I haven't thought of. The best
| thing to do is stay out of the way of both industries and
| let the market sort all of that complexity out.
|
| I would speculate the result of that is going to be a
| _lot_ more renewables than currently exist, mainly due to
| the drastic reduction in the cost of solar and batteries
| that has been occurring over the last few decades, but I
| don 't think it'll be 100% or even 90% renewables either
| (expect perhaps in the extremely long term). Time will
| tell.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It helps that the cost of a simple cycle gas turbine
| power plant (before the recent data center demand spike)
| is around $600/kW, maybe a factor of 20 cheaper per kW
| than a nuclear power plant. So backing up the whole grid
| with such generators wouldn't be that expensive.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| That's not carbon neutral. You can use synthetic fuels to
| make it fully carbon neutral (way easier to store than
| the often-proposed H2) but that's really just another
| battery.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| You can run anything on 90% renewable and anything else for
| the remaining 10%.
|
| As my house is on hydro-energy and everything is electric,
| I'm currently on 100% renewable and majors factories around
| me are the same.
|
| Yes, hydro isn't available everywhere, just like solar or
| wind isn't, but wherever it's possible, we should have it.
| zekrioca wrote:
| Yes, one can. The issue is that it requires
| synchronization.
| outside1234 wrote:
| The goal of getting to renewables is to not remove every carbon
| source but to slow the rate of change so we can adapt. 90%
| meets that.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The goal ultimately is to get to 100% non-fossil fuel. CO2 is
| removed so slowly from the atmosphere that emissions have to
| go to nearly zero (preferably, to less than zero) or else
| we're just delaying disaster.
|
| The point I was making before, btw, was that renewables _can_
| get to 100%, but doing it with just batteries as storage is
| really stupid in many places. Batteries, while necessary and
| very useful, are not a panacea. In a place like Europe,
| adding the complementary low capex storage could cut the cost
| in _half_ (otherwise, excessive overprovisioning of solar,
| wind, and /or batteries are needed.)
| pydry wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ExpertAdvisor01 wrote:
| Also what is probably used in your country is Pumped-
| storage hydroelectricity . During the day you pump water
| into the reservoir using wind/solar energy and discharge
| e.g at night .
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| In the last decade or so hydro generation has grown about
| as much as solar and wind (they all basically grow about
| the same amount as global nuclear generation, hydro
| doubling and wind and solar growing exponentially from
| basically zero).
|
| So it's not going to take off like solar but it's a big
| chunk of relatively clean electricity production and it's
| often basically a byproduct of managing water supplies. It
| also pairs really well with renewables as even without
| pumps it has a degree of flex and storage.
| tenthirtyam wrote:
| This is even more true with international grid connections.
| Europe in a cold spell? Solar countries import, wind & hydro
| export. Europe in a heat wave? Flip the switches the opposite
| direction.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| And nuclear is already in the 5-10% range in the US, so if we
| just maintained that level, we could get carbon free.
| pydry wrote:
| No, you couldnt. Nuclear power is not dispatchable.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > Nuclear power is not dispatchable.
|
| I mean it is, its just slower.
|
| _but_ if you have batteries, then you can divert the power
| to the batteries to keep them topped up.
| pydry wrote:
| While technically possible, given that the vast majority
| of the cost is capex and not fuel and given that it is
| _already_ five times the cost of solar and wind when
| producing _at 100% 24 /7_, setting literal piles of cash
| on fire might be more economic than using it to dispatch
| electricity.
|
| If you're using it to charge batteries it's just five
| times more expensive than equivalent solar or wind.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| French nuclear stations are roughly as fast as combined
| cycle gas (to turn off at least)
|
| The point is, with enough battery, you don't need fast
| despatch for things like water/gas/nuclear, because the
| battery does that for you. In the UK the 11gwhr we have
| (about 1/2-1/3 of one hours consumption) is more than
| capable to do the balancing.
| pfdietz wrote:
| No, because most of that nuclear generation would be during
| times it wasn't needed. The residual 5-10% in the renewable +
| batteries world is highly nonuniform, utterly unsuited to
| being covered by nuclear.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| 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.
| iamjake648 wrote:
| Do you have a high efficiency heat pump, or how are you
| heating?
| barbazoo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Windchaser wrote:
| > The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular
| among people living in what amounts to subtropics
|
| To be fair, 90% of the population lives within 45 degrees
| of the equator. If we're talking about global energy
| solutions for CO2 reduction, we can go a long way just by
| focusing on what works in these areas of the globe.
|
| The article does also point out that hydro/wind are going
| to be important at higher latitudes in winter, but they
| also acknowledge that they don't account for seasonal
| variation in demand. That's the biggest flaw I can find in
| the analysis.
|
| FWIW: I'm down in a mild arid climate at 35N, and yeah, 90%
| of our winter days are nearly sunny, even when the lows are
| in the teens. It's a different world for sure.
| coryrc wrote:
| Most space heating is in the Northern parts though, so
| those are the ones that need to be addressed. There are
| solutions that are a pareto improvement, but it's a
| coordination problem and the USA is sufficiently broken
| and unable to solve those.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > so those are the ones that need to be addressed.
|
| Make energy so expensive that people have to move away or
| burn their old house.
| coryrc wrote:
| You'd think, but then you get Northeastern states paying
| poor people thousands of dollars a year to keep their oil
| heat going.
| fch42 wrote:
| > "... handwavy crap ..."
|
| handwavy argument. Yes, in the (sub)tropics the argument is
| even stronger pro-PV, not the least because it'll give you
| the opposite of heating - aircon - for free right when you
| need it. And considering summer heatwaves as have been seen
| the last few years "way north", that benefit will extend
| that way even if you wouldn't bother considering letting it
| "assist", if not fully replace, your heating. That said
| though, for 50deg polewards and above, if you wanted to use
| PV in winter orient the panels vertically. If you can clad
| your too floor with shiplap larch so you can with PV
| panels. Given the price of timber ... there's a plan.
|
| (only saying handwaving goes both ways)
| mr_toad wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Most everyone else? Only about two percent of the Earths
| population live above the 55th parallel. There's a big gulf
| between that and the 'subtropics'.
|
| I don't disagree that solar/battery isn't the answer for
| 100% of power needs, let alone 100% of heating needs, but
| if we got to even 50% we'd be in a lot better situation
| than we are now.
| cbdumas wrote:
| The article is about utility scale solar and storage I believe
| not home installations. It also mentions towards the end that
| in cold norther climates adding wind to the mix makes sense
| declan_roberts wrote:
| Like I said he grossly understates the energy demand we use
| in the United States for heating during the winter.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I believe a lot of that demand is due to there being no
| incentive to increase energy efficiency.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| I believe it to be a question of physics and not
| incentives.
| maxerickson wrote:
| A wall is not a wall is not a wall.
|
| A well built home with more insulation will, according to
| physics, lose less heat in any given scenario. So
| policies that push for things that improve buildings can
| reduce energy use.
|
| Do you think we have reached peak building efficiency or
| something?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Kind of silly to think when we've invented materials like
| areogel.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| There are TONS of incentives to increase energy
| efficiency.
|
| Most local electric and gas companies will do free energy
| audits. Many will offer rebates if you install tankless
| water heaters, heat pumps, and insulation. Installers get
| kickbacks from manufacturers and tax credits if you buy
| higher efficiency equipment. Lenders will give you 0%
| loans to fund it all. The Feds and many States offer tax
| credits for all of the above.
|
| I've done every single thing on this list in the last 5
| years, some in Texas, some in Indiana.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| The insulation matters a lot in home heating.
| PyWoody wrote:
| Proper windows make a huge difference, too.
| gib444 wrote:
| And then you need proper ventilation systems once you "fix"
| insulation
| bluGill wrote:
| There isn't a lot you can reasonably do to something that is
| already there. I insulated my attic better, but there wasn't
| enough space to go as high as I wanted (I guess I could in
| the middle, but not around the edges). The thin walls are
| still thin, and not much I can do about it for a reasonable
| price. Likewise the windows are really bad, but the cost of
| good windows is large. By the time I insulated this house to
| modern standards I'm nearly half way to tearing it down and
| building something new (a complete destroy is a lot cheaper
| than trying to take something off without destroying the
| rest) - and a new house would get a lot of other benefits (I
| want a larger kitchen but there is no place to put it)
|
| Which is why a lot of poorly insulated houses still exist -
| people have mostly done what can be done for a reasonable
| price, but anything that will make a difference is also very
| expensive with very long paybacks.
| panstromek wrote:
| As far as I understood it, it only talks about electricity, so
| that doesn't seem like a contradiction to me. I think some
| electrification of heating is expected in 2030, but not that
| much bigger than it is now.
| Epa095 wrote:
| What's the actual effect you get out of that? Even half, 12 kW,
| would be an absolutte beast of heating (for a home), even with
| 'dumb' convection heating. With heat pumps 2-3 kW should really
| be enough.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| There's simply not a lot of sunlight to go around during the
| winter and the battery capacity isn't large enough.
|
| Keep in mind we WFH and homeschool so our house is used 24/7
| and I think it's a good approximation for OP's goal.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > the battery capacity isn't large enough
|
| This. You have enough generation to keep a mansion toasty,
| but you don't have enough storage to last a long winter
| night.
| fooblaster wrote:
| where are you? that is a massive amount of solar in any place
| at a reasonably low latitude. Is your house enormous or are you
| heating your house with resistive heating?
| mapmap wrote:
| This is a large pv system for what I assume is a single family
| home. Do you have resistive in floor heating or an electric
| boiler feeding radiators? I imagine you could easily run a half
| dozen mini-splits drawing 500-1000w each, or a centralized heat
| pump. Happy to help if you can give more details.
| PyWoody wrote:
| I live in a northern climate and I know multiple people who are
| net zero with solar+basic battery.
|
| Proper insulation and good windows go a very long way. For
| instance, I set my heat to 66F during the day and 60F at night.
| When I wake up in the morning, the register is usually still
| above 60F.
| mtoner23 wrote:
| Net zero. But not effectively zero. They sell energy during
| the day when no one needs it and buy it an night when we all
| need it. If we all switched to solar and heat pumps there
| would be blackouts and an energy crisis
| PyWoody wrote:
| What? They store the surplus in their batteries during the
| day and use it at night.
|
| I genuinely do not understand why people are so afraid of
| solar. It's baffling.
| blackcatsec wrote:
| They've fallen victim to a catastrophically easy scare
| tactic, unfortunately. "The sun only shines during the
| day therefore solar is bad!" Dumb, but easy.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| And in my experience as someone who is actually trying to
| DO something, is exactly right.
|
| But to be clear, it's less about night vs day and more
| about summer vs winter.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| ^ This.
|
| I had a 20kWh array and 18kWh of batteries in Texas and
| it was GREAT in the summer. It'd start charging by 6am
| and be charged by 9am, even with simultaneous usage. Then
| we'd live off solar for the day (even with HVAC), go back
| on batteries around 9pm and they'd be out around 4am. No
| problem.
|
| But during an overcast winter day, the stack wouldn't get
| power until 8/9, not make it to 50%, start discharging by
| 4/5pm, and be out by 10/11pm. It would easily be 8-10
| hours where we were wholly dependent on the grid.
|
| Not a problem, just a constraint to acknowledge and plan
| for.
| applied_heat wrote:
| In Toronto there is only daylight for 9 hours in winter
|
| Yes surely some days are cloudy
|
| So some days you get 5% capacity factor, and need some
| other energy source as well
|
| So it harms the economics of the venture
|
| Look at the profitability of companies building utility
| scale solar farms, they cost 100 million and the company
| hopes to get a 10% return and pay a 3% dividend.
|
| They still have to contend with moving parts for tracking
| the angle of the sun, fans on inverters, contactors,
| clearing snow, mowing grass, site drainage, tornadoes
| etc, so sometimes it is not as easy as it sounds
|
| All for a 7%? Why shouldn't they just buy the s&p 500 and
| call it a day
| juleiie wrote:
| Solar generates like 1/10 in the northern countries for
| half of the year. No batteries currently can solve this.
|
| The problem with global ecological regulations is they
| never differentiate between countries on the equator or
| 30th parallel with countries around 60. They expect
| everyone to only run on sun and wind. It isn't possible.
| There has to be at least nuclear which is ridiculously
| expensive.
|
| It's generally not an easy problem to solve otherwise it
| wouldn't be a problem anymore.
|
| First sensible thing to do is to relax the expectations
| for countries like Poland that have no good way to
| compete with other countries energy wise because of
| geographical location that noone chooses.
|
| It is extremely unfair to treat everyone the same even
| though every country has different energy resources.
| coryrc wrote:
| There's a solution that costs less than fossil fuels, but
| it's a coordination problem and the USA is structurally
| unable to solve those anymore. I guess the Soviet Union
| wins the last laugh?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Communi
| ty
| chongli wrote:
| Because the sun doesn't shine every day. Where I live,
| the sky is overcast 90% of the time in the winter. You
| can't charge the batteries during the summer and run them
| all winter.
| majoe wrote:
| Some thoughts on why I think this is wrong:
|
| If no one needs it during the day, they can't sell it.
| That's not how markets work. Energy that is generated,
| needs to be consumed or else the grid breaks down. These
| two facts together mean, that the energy they sell is
| needed and used. Albeit they could generate and sell even
| more energy, if the energy could be stored or if the load
| could be shaped accordingly. The latter is a great way to
| lower energy costs.
|
| Energy consumption during the night is low. So low, that
| night time electricity prices, which are lower than the
| daytime prices, are still a thing.
|
| Heat pumps are an opportunity for load shaping. Buildings
| can be heated, when electricity is abundant and heated a
| few degree over the target temperature, if needed. The heat
| is stored inside the building and needs less heating during
| the night. That works quite well, especially here in Europe
| were buildings generally have good insulation and are made
| of brick, which can store a lot of heat.
| chongli wrote:
| 66F is ridiculously cold to me, and I live in Canada where it
| can reach -40(F or C) in the winter. I would find that very
| uncomfortable and elderly people would be shivering
| constantly and highly susceptible to respiratory illness.
|
| I have a modern cold climate air source heat pump which
| essentially needs to run 24 hours a day to maintain a stable
| 20C when the outdoor temperatures reach -15C. Below that, the
| heat pump shuts off and the furnace kicks in to provide
| emergency heating. My thermostat is a modern one with full
| time-of-day and day-of-week scheduling for heating and
| cooling, but it doesn't matter because the heat pump by
| itself is not able to swing the temperature up (by even half
| a degree) on its own, so this causes the furnace to kick in
| every time the schedule calls for a higher temperature,
| defeating the entire purpose of time-of-day scheduling.
|
| I will also add that where I live (Southern Ontario) the sky
| is overcast 90% of the time during the winter. Solar panels,
| even somehow free of snow and ice, are going to produce
| almost nothing on those dark days. Add in the need to keep
| the panels free of snow and ice (presumably with heating,
| since nobody is going to be climbing around on their roof in
| the winter), and you'd likely reach energy net-negative
| trying to make use of them.
| PyWoody wrote:
| I actually live on the same latitude as Ontario so -40F/C
| is not unusual. Add in windchill, and it gets even more
| common, given my windy location.
|
| Yeah, I understand I'm probably an outlier at 66F. I was
| using the numbers more to point out how little a house
| temperature will drop with good windows and insulation.
| chongli wrote:
| What year was your house built? Do you have a whole-house
| humidifier?
|
| My house was built in the late 1980s. It has decent
| insulation but not amazing. It still needs a lot of
| heating when temperatures plunge below -15C. I do not
| have a whole-house humidifier. I had one with my previous
| furnace but it had issues with mold in the filter and
| clogging of the condensate pump.
| dnemmers wrote:
| "elderly people would be shivering constantly and highly
| susceptible to respiratory illness."
|
| At 66 degrees F? That sounds like put a sweater on if
| you're chilly, not some near death extreme.
|
| Any evidence that such an 'extreme' would cause issues?
| pishpash wrote:
| It depends on how fat you are. Whales have blubber too.
| sillyfluke wrote:
| >66F is ridiculously cold to me...I would find that very
| uncomfortable and elderly people would be shivering
| constantly and highly susceptible to respiratory illness.
|
| I know people who live in the Mediterranean and get by with
| no heating during the winter with indoor and outdoor
| tempuratures this low or lower, so it seems that one can be
| conditioned into doing so.
|
| Perhaps it's the presence of more sunlight on average
| rather than the temperature that makes the difference.
| chongli wrote:
| You're forgetting about humidity. Mediterranean climate
| has comfortable humidity year-round. Where I live, winter
| relative humidity is 0% because outdoor humidity is
| nonexistent from freezing temperatures.
| asdff wrote:
| Med climate isn't always great year round. They can get
| winds blowing down from the north that freeze the coast:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bora_(wind)
| tstrimple wrote:
| My temperature tolerance has varied quite drastically
| over my lifetime. Born in the south, raised mostly in
| Iowa as one of those kids who was wearing shorts as soon
| as the temp was above 20 degrees. To a pathetic SoCal
| resident who reaches for a jacket or hoodie when it hits
| 65 degrees. You absolutely do adapt and rather quickly.
| chrisBob wrote:
| People acclimatize pretty well if you let them. We keep our
| house at 65F all winter, and set the AC for 85F in the
| summer and everyone is pretty happy. The payback period on
| a good sweater is not very long.
| esseph wrote:
| 85?!?
|
| I've lived in extremely cold and extremely hot/humid
| places.
|
| I cannot imagine setting the temp in the house that high.
| 0wis wrote:
| Setting for command is different from actual temp. Plus,
| humidity is rarely accounted for. A good AC that lowers
| humidity from 90%+ to 30% and this 30degC home becomes
| quite comfortable.
| sumea wrote:
| Modern heat pumps can heat efficiently at -25 degrees
| Celsius or even lower. Not sure if they are available in
| Canada, but in Scandinavia (similar climate) they are
| pretty common.
|
| I also agree that 66F (about 19 degrees Celsius) is not
| comfortable during day time. It is fine for sleeping
| temperature. During winter homes in heating dominated
| climates typically have higher indoor temperatures. One
| advantage of lower inside temperature is that relative
| humidity stays slightly higher when it is very cold
| outside.
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| Those brutally cold temperatures are really not compatible
| with most human beings
| declan_roberts wrote:
| Weird because a significant number of humans beings in the
| USA immigrated at some point from a country in this
| climate.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| At 66F, I struggle to do job because my fingers go numb and I
| can't touch-type well. If others have that problem, a small
| heat-lamp (like for a reptile cage) can locally heat just the
| area above the keyboard cheaply.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| I use a desktop heating pad under my keyboard. It's an
| Apple thin, metal keyboard, which works really well for
| this. It uses about 20w.
| detourdog wrote:
| In the northwest corner of Massachusetts I converted an old
| school into an apartment building. I installed 2" of
| polystyrene on the outside and about a foot of cellulose in
| the ceilings. We relay on heatpumps for HVAC. I also
| installed a 50kW solar array. We don't start paying for
| heating until Nov/Dec and stop paying in Apr/May. Our
| Electric usage goes through the roof in Jan/Feb/Mar. Our weak
| point is that the exterior walls are about 40% windows. I
| hope to install better thermal shades which will cost about
| $80k. We also last fall installed a solar thermal array to
| for hot water and heat the hallway which is radiant floor. I
| would like to think we could achieve net-zero but I will
| likely need to expand the solar array by about 200%.
|
| Thermal curtains are more effective than good windows. Good
| windows are minimally helpful.
| PyWoody wrote:
| Thermal curtains are a godsend. I remember reading about
| your journey and I hope it works out! I think it'd be money
| well spent.
|
| In my last house, I replaced single pane windows with
| properly installed, sealed, and insulated double-hungs and
| it practically cut my heat bill in half. I agree that
| modern window to modern window replacement probably won't
| get you much, though.
| detourdog wrote:
| Thank you for the encouragement. I have all the units
| rented. I'm now trying to balance upgrades to reduce
| energy costs vs. maintaining a cash horde.
| tsoukase wrote:
| These temperatures are non negotiable by my wife. Women will
| burn the planet.
| Rover222 wrote:
| Well obviously lights aren't using up much of that power,
| you're powering everything else too.
| toasty228 wrote:
| People still build houses like energy is cheap and abundant. A
| properly insulated house in any temperate climate require very
| little heating or cooling.
|
| Spend 50k on insulation that will last the life of the building
| instead of 50k on heating and cooling devices which will need
| constant maintenance and replacement + fuel and end up costing
| 10x more over the life of the building.
|
| A modern house with modern insulation in a mild climate
| shouldn't even need a central heating system. You can get by
| with 500w toaster heaters in each room for the coldest time of
| the year
| baking wrote:
| Probably because energy is cheap and abundant.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| And never mind ground-source heat pumps [1] (although I know
| the topic was specifically solar).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump
| toasty228 wrote:
| You don't even need to go that far, put 100m of tubing 2m
| underground and plug it in your heat recovery ventilation
| system, bam free winter freeze protection/pre warming and
| free summer cooling, all you need is a 30w pumps and you
| will save hundreds of kw per year
| a_random_name wrote:
| uh no... You still need a heat pump. The water coming
| from that system would be like 50 degrees, far too cold
| for heating.
| toasty228 wrote:
| I think my comment is pretty clear about the use case,
| this is obviously not water for your floor heating. You
| shouldn't even have that in a properly insulated house,
| way too much inertia.
|
| There are electric floor heating graphene foils that put
| out 20w per sqm, they're more than enough, no moving
| part, no maintenance, no bs, not even 20% of the price of
| a hydro floor heating, you can even install them yourself
| benlivengood wrote:
| Heat recovery ventilation systems exchange inside air for
| outside air through an air to air heat exchanger (modern
| energy-efficient houses are built too tight for natural
| air exchange). If you make the incoming outdoor air an
| even 50degF (except when the outdoor temperature is
| between about 50deg and 70deg) then you spend less on
| heating and cooling.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| Yes you're right and I don't disagree. But a 500w heater
| isn't going to cut it when it's 20F outside. You actually
| have to run the heat as hard as possible when the sun is
| shining so you have some thermal momentum going into the
| evening.
|
| The end result is you're going to make big lifestyle changes
| to accommodate the energy. For example everyone sleeping in 1
| bedroom and only cooking with an electric pressure cooker or
| low and slow with an induction range.
| toasty228 wrote:
| A house built to passive house standards requires less than
| 10w per sqm of peak heating demand, a 500w toaster will
| warm 50sqm, which is a decent room already.
|
| There are passive houses built at 2000m altitude in the
| Alps, some are made of wood and have literal strawbales for
| insulation, there are no excuses left in 2026 not to build
| good houses, it's more economical, more practical, more
| comfortable, more ecological
| jacquesm wrote:
| You could put that 500W into a heatpump.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Why shouldn't energy be cheap and abundant?
| toasty228 wrote:
| Not saying it shouldn't, I'm just saying it isn't. Housing
| should be free and taxes illegal but here we are. Some
| retard decides to go to war with Iran and it costs 30% more
| to tank your car, I'm not making the rules. Solar panels
| got 15% more expensive over night in my country too. What
| happens when they decide to mess around with China? They
| make 70% of batteries and panels.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Take plants that can use enery from the sun 'freely'. Is it
| cheap for them? Not really when you look at the
| evolutionary battle between plant species. There is always
| another plant willing to take your place if you're
| inefficient, slow growing, not poisoning the ground around
| you, or some other trick to keep you alive.
|
| Any means to keep energy cheap and abundant must be by
| force because it is not a natural order.
| brianwawok wrote:
| In the short term the math is usually bad. Can be a 20, 30,
| 40 year payback on insulation. For the builder? It's almost
| for sure a loss unless he can play the green card. For any
| individual owner? They are likely to leave before they recoup
| a project like this. Appraisals on houses are price per
| square foot with a bedroom and bathroom modifier. Until
| people start pricing in energy efficiency in homes, say a
| price multiple of 0.8 to 1.2 based on the efficiency of the
| home? It's going to be hard to math out. Which yes is sad.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Maybe a law forcing disclosure of average heating/cooling
| bills in the listing would do the trick?
| maxerickson wrote:
| I live in a moderately cold area and pay less than $2000 a
| year to heat a ~2000 square foot home. So something that
| improves the efficiency of the building would have to have
| a pretty low cost to even pay back at all.
|
| There's probably a few lower cost things that I am
| overlooking, to the tune of netting out a few hundred
| dollars of savings after however many years they took to
| pay back.
| pishpash wrote:
| That's an appraisal problem. Even cars are valued on more
| things but they do have mpg plastered everywhere.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > Can be a 20, 30, 40 year payback on insulation. For the
| builder?
|
| In the UK, houses have energy ratings, which are largely
| not that useful, but they do allow estimated annual running
| charge.
|
| The house that I live in we moved in and were spending
| ~1.7k on gas a year.
|
| We needed to re-render the place, because it has a few
| missing pieces. we spent the extra PS4 to put in 90mm of
| external wall insulation. We also had to replace the
| glazing. It was cheaper to get triple glazing (for some
| reason), however the results of that was that it was
| 6degrees warmer in winter, and 10 degrees (celcius) cooler
| in summer. Even with gas prices doubling, we spend about
| PS70 on hotwater and heating.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| There's also the simple reality that houses with better
| energy ratings are worth more when they are sold. If you
| own a house, it's a good way to lower your bills and
| increase the value of your house. The only thing you know
| for sure when you pay hundreds per month for gas is that
| it goes out of the chimney. Over ten years, that adds up.
| Most houses you can probably do some sensible things that
| definitely earn themselves back in that kind of period
| while also increasing the value of your property. The
| inconvenience and financing tend to be the big obstacle.
| Add incentives to the mix and it becomes an easy choice
| in a lot of places.
| newsclues wrote:
| It costs a lot more than 50K to retrofit a house towards
| passive standards.
|
| Not everyone has the capital (even with gov subsidies) to
| make those investments, and it's generally the people who
| need to save a few bucks on bills the most that DONT have the
| money.
| toasty228 wrote:
| I'm replying to someone who bought a 30kwh battery and
| 24kwp setup, in my country that's already classified as a
| "local energy provider" I think they're doing OK
| financially.
|
| People still spend literal millions on poorly built and
| poorly insulated mcmansions today btw, it's not a money
| issue.
| coryrc wrote:
| GP's argument is the marginal cost when building new is
| roughly that amount, not that any house can be retrofitted
| for that amount.
|
| However, it's not that far off for retrofitting, if you do
| it when your siding already needs to be replaced. Add 3-5"
| XPS foam to the exterior of any standard house; if a
| basement you bring insulation several feet down and out
| below the ground. If cathedral ceiling, when replacing the
| roof you put 6-8" polyiso down over the sheathing before
| the new roofing material. If vented roof, get 1.5x code
| minimum blown in the attic. Air seal first, of course
| (1-hour of air sealing is the best ROI of anything you can
| do in an old house).
|
| But nobody wants to put that money up.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I could not retrofit my house for efficient heating with
| $50k. To do so would likely be cheaper to completely tear it
| down and rebuild.
| rickydroll wrote:
| same here. 1940's house with slate roof and vermiculite
| "insulation". You can't just use modern insulation
| techniques or blown-in foam because that would make
| exterior wood rot. You need to keep the air flowing the
| right way to dry out the wood.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I have to clean the eaves of my house myself because
| nobody I hire will believe me that you can't point a
| pressure washer at the eaves without water getting inside
| the walls. "I'll just avoid the vents" doesn't work when
| you can see daylight between the roof and the wall all
| around the house.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I'm guessing you don't live in a place with tropical
| storms or really severe weather.
|
| Where I am your house would flood when 80mph+ winds blow
| the rain up your walls.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Indeed, that is the case. However the house is only 55
| years old, so a freak storm destroying it isn't out of
| the question.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Same here... my walls are brick that need to breathe or
| they will crack and crumble within years if sealed up too
| tight.
|
| Same goes with the cinder block foundation. If insulated,
| it moves the freeze/thaw interface inside the block and
| then you end up with a failing foundation.
| zrail wrote:
| Would you be willing to quantify what "mild" means to you,
| maybe in terms of a USDA zone? There are maps for both US and
| Europe:
|
| https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/pages/map-downloads
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USDA_hardiness_zones.
| ..
| laurencerowe wrote:
| Passive house standards first gained popularity in Germany
| and Scandinavia but it seems the principles have been
| adapted to quite a wide range of climate zones now.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
| friendzis wrote:
| > A properly insulated house in any temperate climate require
| very little heating or cooling.
|
| A "properly insulated" house still requires something around
| 0,5 W/m2/K. Modeling a moderate 120 m2 house in the coldest
| months when the temperatures hit 15-20 negative you still
| need 2,5 kW of heat with domestic hot water on top. Put in
| the efficiency of a heat pump and you are still easily
| looking at half a _mega_ watt-hour per month. ~1MWh for a
| whole house is very reasonable number during winter months,
| sans electric mobility.
|
| That's entirely unrealistic to cover with batteries with
| current battery technologies alone, electricity generation is
| absolutely REQUIRED. Windmills can help soften the blow and
| storage needs substantially, but the TFA is about solar,
| which is effectively absent during the winter.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Is a 30 kWh battery considered massive? My F-150 lighting has a
| 143 kWh battery.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| Yes 30 kWh battery is considered large. It takes up a full 6
| slot 2u rack in my garage and cost around $8k. In the context
| of OP's goals it's larger than what 99% of people in the
| world will ever have.
| gpm wrote:
| Approximately 1% of people in the world _currently_ have an
| EV with a more than 30 kWh battery... and we 're very early
| in the adoption curve of EVs and other large batteries.
| abenga wrote:
| If you need to heat/cool your home, is that really mild?
| declan_roberts wrote:
| 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.
| jakewins wrote:
| Respectfully, 30kWh is not much in this context. In 10 years
| every modern 2-car home will have 200kWh on the driveway just
| from the EVs; add a 100kWh whole home battery at a price point
| close to a 10kWh battery today and the calculus changes in most
| of the world.
|
| The cost of materials going into modern batteries easily leaves
| room for another 10x reduction in price, IMO where this all is
| heading is obvious. Zero marginal cost will win every day of
| the week.
|
| FWIW we run our cabin on 15kWh battery today year around,
| though we do run a small wood stove to supplant the heat pump
| on cold winter days.
| coryrc wrote:
| I bet you didn't even see the tragic farce when writing your
| solution. Land development requiring "2-car homes" is the
| driver of the problem! An apartment only has to heat one or
| two walls facing the outside instead of 4. That's 50-75%
| right off the top of your energy usage, with the mean closer
| to 75%.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| There's nothing farcical about wanting one's own space
| where there's space to have one's own space. I'm grateful
| to no longer be sharing walls with a domestic abuse couple
| on one side and a midnight banshee on the other wall when
| she got busy. Energy is cheap, people are exhausting.
| coryrc wrote:
| And that gets into another coordination problem we're
| unable to solve. It's a solved problem to build
| apartments where you can't hear your neighbors, but the
| builders don't have incentive to spend the money upfront
| to do so and we add regulations to make it more expensive
| for them to do so. So people go on thinking "apartments
| suck" and not the correct "we shouldn't let people build
| apartments which suck".
|
| Also, living in SFH isn't avoiding all problems. I'd
| rather live in a properly-built apartment than my old
| house when my neighbor left her dogs outside to bark for
| the entire work day, every single day, and all the city
| would do is fine her a hundred bucks every few months.
| (or if you want to say "rural", that's 1 a small fraction
| of the population and 2 I like hospitals).
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| And the usual engineer mindset to consider the options to
| be 1 or 0, no?
|
| I just live far enough from the center of it all that I
| have a vacant quarter acre and thicker windows that
| happened when the last owner's mistakes caught up with me
| the current owner. For medical, I have UCSF, and for
| major medical, I have medical tourism, something I fully
| endorse from experience. And yes, not everyone can do
| that. And well, I can't touch my toes and they probably
| can. Life's funny that way.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| 40 kWH of storage and 9 kW of solar panels is all I need
| personally to live a 1st world lifestyle in the bay area
| mostly off-grid except for water and internet.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Beyond the other better insulation comments, pairing electric
| with heat pumps that are SEER 10+ goes a long way to improve
| heating efficiency. Old resistive heaters are 1:1 on energy to
| heat, while newer heat pumps operate to much lower
| temperatures, and give you 1:10 or 1:15 electric:heat energy
| ratios.
| bluGill wrote:
| My heat pump is SEER 19, and it can't heat my house below
| 25F. I think this is mostly due to it not being large enough
| - it was sized to cool my house on the hot summer days, and
| more energy needs to move on the cold winter days.
| coryrc wrote:
| SEER, while a useful first-order approximation of
| efficiency, is for cooling and not heating. HSPF-V is for
| cold climates. Likely you just don't have a cold-climate
| heat pump which maintains full capacity down to -10degC
| (and some a little lower still), even before you get into
| appropriate maximum capacity.
| coryrc wrote:
| That's not even close to correct. At the design lowest
| temperature (if <15degC), the very best get 2 COP, but most
| are 1.5 or lower. The problem is you have to accommodate the
| worst case.
|
| The average of installed units is closer to 2.0 COP average,
| unfortunately. Multi-head units really drive down efficiency.
| A single-head Gree Sapphire can do 4-5 COP on average and
| that's the best you can get, so still nowhere near your
| guess.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > 1:10 or 1:15 electric:heat energy ratios
|
| Under what circumstances? I've seen higher-end units that do
| _maybe_ 1:5 in ideal conditions (heating to 68F when the
| ambient temp is 55F), but never seen units that do 1:10 or
| 1:15. This was about 2-3 years ago I did this research. Have
| things improved that drastically in the last few years?
| eldaisfish wrote:
| things have not improved.
|
| Too many folks here do not understand or care to appreciate
| the constraints of the real world. Heat pumps are excellent
| and relatively cheap but have limitations. One of the
| biggest limitations is that a heat pump's efficiency drops
| as ambient temperature drops. This is the worst possible
| situation for heating as the conditions when the risks of
| losing heat are the highest, are precisely the conditions
| when these devices are least efficient.
| timbit42 wrote:
| As long as they remain more efficient than resistive
| heaters down to the lowest temperatures you experience,
| it's a win. Heat pump efficiency is still improving. You
| can get heat pumps that can handle down to -35degC now
| with even better ones in the works.
| FEELmyAGI wrote:
| > I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar
| system
|
| This is not really a qualification to speak on how the grid
| works, at all.
|
| Actually having panels on your roof doesn't give you unique
| insight into how solar panels operate - there is extensive data
| out there, any PV installation can become a data source
| trivially.
|
| > The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of
| life and activity time shifting trade-offs.
|
| One residence powering itself is not representative of how the
| grid works, and is not a good way to evaluate any power
| generation technology whether its PV, coal, nuclear, etc.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| I'm actually trying to accomplish what the author is
| describing, so I have experience to talk about the difficulty
| of its implementation (unlike the author himself, who has
| zero experience with its implementation to speak of).
| amluto wrote:
| Do check that your heater isn't doing something ridiculous. A
| while back I helped someone debug a Mitsubishi Electric system
| on which the installer had set the fan speed control to high
| instead of auto (it's an easily accessible setting on the
| thermostat). I forget exactly how much power was saved, but
| IIRC it was well over 30kWh/day.
|
| I don't know where all that energy was going. I expected some
| improvement but not anywhere near that much.
| Faaak wrote:
| Heat pumps help quite a lot, thanks to Carnot's law
| DanTheManPR wrote:
| This is basically correct in the sense that we cannot simply
| just force everyone in, say, Minnesota to install electric
| baseboard heating, rooftop solar, and a battery pack, and then
| expect them to stay warm. There are periods of extended extreme
| cold and low solar flux where you would simply not be able to
| warm everyone's house - that's just physics.
|
| But there are a _lot_ of extra things you can do as an
| intermediate steps to dramatically close the gap. The main ones
| are:
|
| 1. Homes can be renovated to improve insulation 2. Cold weather
| heat pumps can handle most mild winter conditions efficiently
| 3. Electricity doesn't all have to be locally generated - it
| can be transmitted from other parts of the country. 4. You can
| keep using fossil fuel peaker plants, and still have incredible
| reduced overall emissions
| jacquesm wrote:
| House heating does not require massive amounts of energy. What
| it requires is efficiency. I've seen a house in Canada that was
| heated with a single candle when not occupied. Triple wall,
| reflective foil in between the wall layers, vertical movement
| of air in the walls interrupted every 30 cm or so. Absolutely
| amazing. And it still had sizeable windows. If your house
| doesn't leak energy like a sieve you don't need to replace as
| much either. Between passive solar and some augmentation you
| can do fine on an extremely modest energy budget.
|
| And Canada is not exactly the warmest country on the planet.
| minajevs wrote:
| 24kW solar "to keep lights on" is a funny way to underplay it.
| My house "summer" electricity usage is 60kWh per month,
| including water pump, DHW, septic and work from home for 2
| adults. So 3h of your PV production would power my house for a
| month!
|
| Regarding heating - I live in cold climate. We had average
| daily temperature of -10c this january, with multiple lows at
| -25c, and most nights at -15c. The house is 116sqm. Our
| heatpump COP for that month was above 2, and we used 787kWh
| total to heat the house, which is not a lot, actually. At 15
| cents per kWh it is 118 euros for heating, for the coldest
| month in a decade! Considering also that we do not pay for
| electricity since april until october (solar panels).
|
| We also paid less than those houses which use natural gas, wood
| pellets, etc. We also do not need to do anything to keep house
| warm. Also, during summer months we could "drive for free" in
| EV due to free solar electricity.
|
| All that just to counter your take on "major quality of life
| and activity time shifting trade-offs".
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Note that the article title has "the world" in it, immediately
| limits his specific claims to 80% of the world nearer the
| equatorr as most of the people in the world have more need for
| cooling than heating.
|
| He even has a map that covers this and multiple paragraphs of
| discussion about high latitudes and wind in winter.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| My house in the bay area runs at <1kW per hour most of the time
| and the sunlight is more than enough to keep it above 65F most
| of the year. Maybe you need LED lights because when I'm not
| there, it's ~150W per hour.
|
| Of course actual data like this is downvote heresy! Go for it!
| Also, bite me.
| ethagnawl wrote:
| The article should have explored that aspect further but it's
| not all or nothing. For example, a geothermal setup could
| significantly offset the amount of energy required to heat a
| home.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Heating is mostly affected by the roof insulation and really
| should not be done with electricity alone. It's just not
| efficient.
|
| Cooling, on the other hand, is brutally expensive without
| living in basically an air tight Styrofoam box (or
| underground).
| daneel_w wrote:
| Gonna go off on a limb and guess that you live in North America
| where the state of the art in single-family homes is double-
| pane windows and thin outer walls made of cardboard and
| pressboard, clad with "luxurious" vinyl siding. I mean no
| offense to you guys. It is what it is.
| asdff wrote:
| I'm not sure how sustainable it is at scale but I know someone
| who winters off a woodburning stove. They basically get their
| wood for free from trees that come down in their yard or
| people's yards that they know. They use a hydraulic
| woodsplitter to manage splitting all the wood.
| morphle wrote:
| You should store your solar energy as heat. You move the heat
| from outside or underground into your house with a heat pump
| where the heat storage lasts a week or more. You need very
| little solar to heat your house this way.
|
| So for a mild climate your installer seems to have done you a
| disservice and probably overcharged you. You can heat an
| average house with solar for under $14K if properly installed.
| panick21_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| For shipping?
|
| Wind, Tidal or geothermal are also around, for example.
| palata wrote:
| My point was that photovoltaic is "an alternative" to
| nuclear reactors, but an alternative that relies on
| globalisation. Nuclear reactors... much less.
| panick21_ wrote:
| For many nations that is really not the primary reason to
| choose infrastructure. And even if that is your goal. Then
| building a 500MW reactor you can drop in the ground is likely
| a pretty decent solution.
| tenthirtyam wrote:
| IIRC nuclear doesn't really work well as the last 5-10%. Start-
| up and shut-down for nuclear reactors is a slow process. When
| it's generating, it needs to just keep on generating. Not so
| quick to dial down or up just because the wind is(n't) blowing.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's not that slow. They can ramp up and down over hours, and
| those demand patterns are known in advance. Combine with
| battery, pumped storage, or synfuel generation to soak up
| excess power during low demand times, and use that to provide
| peaker capacity during high demand times.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| The problem is the economics. They're just horrifyingly
| expensive to build. The equivalent to each new large scale
| reactor in GWe requires tens of billions in subsidies.
|
| The next problem comes from incentives. Why should anyone
| with solar or storage buy this expensive grid based nuclear
| electricity?
|
| Why should their neighbors not buy surplus renewables and
| instead pay out of their nose for expensive nuclear powered
| electricity?
|
| EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the
| earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for the
| existing french nuclear fleet. Let alone the horrifyingly
| expensive new builds.
|
| And that is France which has been actively shielding its
| inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition,
| and it still leaks in on pure economics.
| panick21_ wrote:
| The French have used their nuclear system for 20+ years
| as a giving tree.
|
| The forced EDF to sell nuclear at very cheap prices to
| fossil fuel companies and then buy it back at much higher
| price.
|
| The French forced EDF to give subsides to solar even when
| that actually hurts their economics.
|
| The French randomly in the 2010s decided to replace
| nuclear in a short time-frame (completely 100%
| unrealistic) but it sounds good to politicians. And they
| decided to delay all maintenance and didn't do any of the
| upgrades many other nations did.
|
| Once of the secrets of French nuclear is, that their
| grandfather were so good in providing them these nuclear
| plants, the french absolutely suck at running them. Other
| countries like the US and ironically Germany managed to
| run their reactors at higher factors.
|
| The problem is the solar is cheap when its being produced
| and makes the economics of base lose worse, without
| actually solving base load. Solar has been cross
| subsidized this way for a long time. And has been more
| explicitly subsidized. But its a private good, it helps
| only private people, it is negative on a system level.
|
| Once you think on a systemic level, how to provide
| reliable energy for a whole country, nuclear is not more
| expensive and France saved a huge amount of money buy
| doing what they did.
|
| > Why should anyone with solar or storage buy this
| expensive grid based nuclear electricity?
|
| If somebody privately wants to build solar/storage that's
| fine, but they should get no support. Also prices should
| be adjust to actually reflect peak demand. Historically
| the way the system operated is with much simpler pricing
| models because it was understood that everybody shares in
| this infrastructure. In such a situation, the majority of
| people wouldn't build solar and batteries.
|
| But really, the question we should ask, what the best
| thing to run a modern economy on and the German solution
| of 'lets build a massive electricity pipeline to solar
| farms in Greece' isn't a great model.
|
| All this new energy transfer infrastructure is incredibly
| expensive. It cost at least as much as the generation
| itself, and sometimes more.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| People disliking renewables always say this.
|
| Then when asked what method to price in the Swedish
| nuclear fleet having ~50% of capacity offline multiple
| times last year and France famously having 50% of the
| capacity offline during the energy crisis I always get
| crickets for answers.
|
| It's apparently fine when nuclear plants doesn't deliver,
| but not renewables.
|
| The difference with renewables is that it's even easier
| to manage. Their intermittency is entirely expected and
| the law of large numbers ensure we never have half the
| capacity offline due to technical issues at the same
| time.
|
| > Once you think on a systemic level, how to provide
| reliable energy for a whole country, nuclear is not more
| expensive and France saved a huge amount of money buy
| doing what they did.
|
| Given that new built nuclear power costs 18-24 cents per
| kWh and won't come online until the 2040s what you're
| trying to tell me is that multiplying the current
| electricity cost 3-4x and creating a self made energy
| crisis isn't so bad.
|
| The French made a good choice half a century ago. The
| equivalent choice in 2026 are renewables and storage.
|
| Just look at the proposed EPR2 fleet. A 11 cent per kWh
| CFD and interest free loans. Summing up to over 20 cents
| per kWh for the electricity. With the first reactor
| coming online at the earliest in 2038.
|
| It's just complete insanity at this point.
|
| > All this new energy transfer infrastructure is
| incredibly expensive. It cost at least as much as the
| generation itself, and sometimes more.
|
| The 10 GW HVDC links being built costs EUR20B. That's
| equivalent to the subsidies needed for one new large
| scale reactor. Then you have the market price of
| electricity on top of that.
|
| Are you starting to realize the conundrum?
| cauch wrote:
| Demand following for nuclear is possible (after all, if you
| produce 10X but the demand suddenly drops to 7X, what you
| can always do is to "dump" 3X worth of steam instead of
| injecting it in the turbine), but because the cost of
| nuclear is mainly upfront, it is not cost efficient at all.
|
| If it costs 10X dollars upfront to build a nuclear central
| that can produce 10X energy, then if you run it at 100%, it
| will cost 1 dollar per 1 unit of energy. If you follow the
| demand, you will not produce 10X, but let's say to
| illustrate maybe 5X, and it will cost 2 dollars per 1 unit
| of energy.
|
| You are right about storage as a way to help with demand
| following, but if you build enough storage capacity, then
| you basically have solved "for free" a big part of the
| problem linked to the intermittence of renewables. In this
| case, you have the choice between building an expensive
| nuclear central and a distributed cheaper renewable
| generation.
|
| I'm not saying it demonstrate renewables are better, but
| that it is true that nuclear is not the obvious winner it
| looks like before we look into the practical details.
| panick21_ wrote:
| No, nuclear storage needs to be optimized for 1-2h peaks,
| if you build a renewable system you need, much, much
| more. And you have much more localized peaks and valleys
| depending on weather and such.
|
| So basically, you can put some battery next to every
| nuclear plant and otherwise use the same grid.
|
| For renewable you need a much more complex grid with much
| more battery.
| cauch wrote:
| Why do you say "optimized for 1-2h peaks"? The typical
| electricity demand has a trough during the night for few
| hours, then a first peak in the morning, than a second
| less-deep trough in the middle of the day (sometimes with
| a bump around lunchtime), than a second bigger peak in
| the afternoon for 3-4 hours. And of course this varies
| with season, day of week, regions, ...
|
| Not sure why you are saying that renewable you need "much
| more battery": the overlap of generation means that you
| already have a "baseline" of generation even with
| renewables (sure, I know about dunkelflaute, but they are
| as frequent as unexpected shutdown of nuclear site), and
| therefore in both case, the game is mainly to "move the
| peaks around" which requires about the same capacity.
|
| Not sure why you are saying the renewable led to a much
| more complex grid either. Sure, with a naive simplified
| grid, nuclear works well. But in practice, the modern
| grid is complex, and adding more nuclear does not really
| reduce the complexity.
|
| Also, nuclear or not, having EV or heat-pump will be
| needed for decarbonisation, and therefore the demand
| becomes even more complex. With EV and heat-pump, local
| solar+battery is also a smarter choice. So it means that
| some storage will need to be built on the consumer site
| directly, even with nuclear.
|
| I'm not saying that in some situation at the end of the
| computation, nuclear is not the best option, but it is
| not at all as simple as having a clear winner. Also, the
| reality is that you need to work with the uncertainties,
| so it is not like one solution has a score of 75 and the
| other has a score of 70, so the first is the obvious
| choice, it is more like one solution has a score of 75 +-
| 15 and the other 70 +- 5 (or even asymmetric errors), so
| you cannot directly conclude the first solution is the
| best. I think the conversation would be way more healthy
| if we could just avoid over-simplify into a pro-nuclear
| vs. pro-renewable partisan battle.
|
| (also not sure about "you can put some battery next to
| every nuclear plant and otherwise use the same grid", why
| is this not true for renewable too? Just compute the
| average production of the site, and put storage that will
| charge when the site produces more than the average and
| discharge when the site produces less, and you get the
| same situation as the nuclear site (they may still have
| period of no generation, the same way nuclear sites have
| unexpected shutdown). Especially that with a renewable
| site, the cost is lower so the site owner can invest more
| in storage and manage it themselves: storage is part of
| the black box, the grid does not need to know, stay the
| same and no complexity is added)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It's not a technical limitation, it's economic. The cost of
| nuclear is almost all in building (and decommissioning) the
| plant, the fuel is almost free. So you want to produce flat
| out as long as you can get almost any positive price for the
| output.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The problem isn't technical dispatchability, it's economic
| dispatchability. A nuclear plant operated at 5-10% capacity
| factor would be ludicrously uneconomical, even to just
| operate.
| panick21_ wrote:
| First of all its not that slow, and when you know when you
| need it, at what point in the day, so you can ramp up in
| anticipation.
|
| Also, the claim that nuclear is slow to change is a
| limitation of current nuclear plants, more modern plants
| could be far better. Some designs are very much load
| following.
| kogasa240p wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Found this interesting:
| https://phys.org/news/2026-02-microbial-eco-friendly-butanol.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Making hydrogen from water and solar light is certainly better
| than using nuclear energy for that.
|
| There is no reason for consuming valuable nuclear fuel, for
| which better uses exist, instead of using free solar light.
|
| The efficiency of converting solar energy into hydrogen is
| already acceptable. The same is true for the efficiency of
| converting hydrogen and concentrated carbon dioxide into
| synthetic hydrocarbons, which are the best means for long term
| energy storage, and also for applications like aircraft and
| spacecraft.
|
| The least efficient step remains concentrating the diluted
| carbon dioxide from air.
|
| While the efficiency of converting solar energy and water into
| hydrogen by artificial means is already better than that of
| living beings, the living beings are still much more efficient
| in converting H2 and CO2 from air into organic substances.
|
| Besides improving the efficiency of the existing techniques, an
| alternative method of CO2 capture would be the genetic
| engineering of a bacterium that would produce some usable oil
| from H2 and air, with an improved productivity over the
| existing bacteria, which use most of the captured energy to
| make substances useful for them, not for us, so unmodified
| bacteria would not have a high enough useful output.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > Making hydrogen from water and solar light is certainly
| better than using nuclear energy for that.
|
| Using heat is the most efficient and if you use nuclear heat
| directly, and you don't have to go to the step of converting
| to electricity, you get huge efficiency.
|
| > There is no reason for consuming valuable nuclear fuel
|
| Nuclear fuel is not valuable once you have a closed cycle.
| Fuel cost are already only a few % of total nuclear cost and
| in a closed cycle would be almost nothing. As soon as you
| breed fuel from fertile material the cost is basically 0.
|
| > The efficiency of converting solar energy into hydrogen is
| already acceptable.
|
| It requires a very large plant to do in many small batches
| and cost 20x what hydrogen costs from natural gas. Its not
| efficient and will not be for the next 20+ years at least.
| mbesto wrote:
| 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-e...
| anon7000 wrote:
| 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
| kingleopold wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If you won't think of the energy corridor, who will?
| germandiago wrote:
| 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...
| Retric wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 (2012)
| a_paddy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
|
| 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-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 wrote:
| Add cheap labor to the equation.
|
| In developed countries 20-50% of the cost of roof top
| solar is labor.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The transition is happening rapidly in Pakistan: https://
| www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/17/pakistan...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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=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 wrote:
| 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.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > We haven't been building much battery storage to go
| along with that solar power
|
| That too has pretty recently changed. Even my home state
| of Idaho is deploying pretty big batteries. It takes
| almost no time to deploy it's all permitting and public
| comment at this point that takes the time.
|
| Batteries have gotten so cheap that the other electronics
| and equipement at this point are bigger drivers of the
| cost of installation.
|
| Here's an 800MWh station that's being built in my city
| [1].
|
| I think people are just generally stuck with the
| perception of where things are currently at. They are
| thinking of batteries and solar like it's 2010 or even
| 2000. But a lot has changed very rapidly even since 2018.
|
| [1] https://www.idahopower.com/energy-
| environment/energy/energy-...
| foobarian wrote:
| > Batteries have gotten so cheap
|
| Any pointers for a regular Joe Shmoe homeowner looking
| for a backup battery? The Tesla Power Wall stuff and
| similar costs are halfway to six figures.
| gpm wrote:
| I don't know if the market has improved but when I looked
| at this a year or two ago I concluded that the consumer
| market here was utter crap with hugely inflated prices.
|
| The cheapest per kwh way I could find to buy a home
| battery (that didn't involve diy stuff) was to literally
| buy an EV car with an inverter... by a factor of at least
| two... I ended up not buying one.
|
| Unfortunately cheap batteries doesn't translate to
| reputable companies packaging them in cheap high quality
| packages for consumers instantly.
| cogman10 wrote:
| For full house backup, it sort of sucks right now. They
| are all charging a premium over what you can otherwise
| get if it's not specifically a whole home product.
|
| What I've done and would suggest is right now looking for
| battery banks for big ticket important items that you'd
| want to stay on anyways in terms of an outage. A lot of
| those can function as a UPS. You can get a 1kWh battery
| pack for $400 right now. A comparable home battery backup
| is charging $1300 per kWh of installed storage.
|
| I currently have a 2kWh battery pack for my
| computer/server/tv and a 500Wh pack for my fridge. Works
| great and it's pretty reasonably priced. The 500Wh gives
| my fridge an extra 6 hours of runtime after a power
| outage.
|
| If I wanted to power shift, I have smart switches setup
| so I can toggle when I want to.
| a_paddy wrote:
| In the EU EUR1800 gets you a 10kWh battery (ex install)
| rootusrootus wrote:
| That's on the high side, I would guess. Depending on what
| brand you want, you can get 10kWh of LFP for under a
| grand right now in the US.
| gpm wrote:
| With a BMS and inverter? What brand should I be looking
| at?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| You will get a battery and BMS for that price. Decent
| inverters are expensive, however, so you won't get a
| whole 10kWh setup with appropriately sized inverter for
| under US$2K. Probably twice that.
|
| I hesitate to offer any brand advice, because that is
| very situational, depends on what you're after, what
| experience level you have, what trade-offs you want to
| make, etc.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| mbesto wrote:
| > 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
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Time, infrastructure changes take decades
| doctoboggan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| In California, PG&E charges you for putting solar on
| their grid and they'll pay you a penny for your extra
| electricity.
| tzs wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| It is being done, just not here.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| People, especially recent American leaders, do not make
| rational decisions.
|
| They also have goals other than generating energy
| effectively
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| brational wrote:
| > which requires constant, continuous resource extraction
|
| Is there an upper bound on battery limits with regards to
| resource extraction?
| scythe wrote:
| It's probably fairly high, considering the existence of the
| sodium-sulfur battery. It's not economically competitive
| since it operates at high temperature, but it's based on
| very abundant materials.
| ghighi7878 wrote:
| What about salt water batteries? Seem almost commodity
| wat10000 wrote:
| Once you have enough to power the world and are able to
| recycle them, then you're done with extracting resources
| for them.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| Unfortunately human energy use appears to be proportional
| to the amount of energy available
|
| Hopefully we are able to reach a point of effectively
| unlimited cheap energy and storage but it's that if
| overnight we suddenly had enough solar+batteries to power
| today's usage, we'd suddenly need way more as demand
| rises
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's based on cost, like anything else. If running
| everything on solar and batteries makes it cheaper then
| we'll use more. But the same is true regardless of the
| technology. What's not true regardless is whether a given
| amount of energy usage requires continual resource
| extraction just to sustain it, or whether it's only
| needed for new capacity.
| ethagnawl wrote:
| > And then we'll have a recycling loop to minimize future
| resource extraction.
|
| This is something the (willfully?) deluded really don't
| appreciate. I know people who listened to _that one Joe Rogan
| podcast_ about precious metal extraction for EVs and are back
| on the oil bandwagon. The current regime of precious metal
| extraction is absolutely dirty and dangerous but ... it
| doesn't have to be and won't be forever -- especially if, as
| you've said, we actively prioritize a recycling loop for the
| components.
| kogasa240p wrote:
| Damn I didn't know it was that bad. Ideally you'd grow algae
| from sewer waste and make fuel from that, but this is the US
| we're talking about.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Algae needs solar light, so you will have to flood a lot of
| land to get enough.
|
| Also, in case of a war or blockade you can switch the corn
| use from etanol to food. You will have to eat tortilla and
| polenta for a year [1] but it's better than algae from
| seawater or famine.
|
| Here we use sugar cane to produce etanol, it's more efficient
| because it's a C4 plant. I guess it's possible in the south
| of the US.
|
| [1] It's not so bad in my opinion if you can mix some meat in
| the sauce.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >you can switch the corn use from etanol to food
|
| Not that easily. Yellow dent corn is not edible without
| processing. So to switch that to food use you have to have
| factories to deal with it.
|
| You'd be far better off taking the energy from panels and
| using it greenhouses to get human feed.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Yellow corn is very popular here in Argentina. Things I
| ate this or last week:
|
| * Home made popcorn: made from whole yellow corn grains.
|
| * Corn on the cob: Sweet yellow corn. We just learned
| that you can microwave them for 6 minutes instead of
| boiling.
|
| * Polenta: Grinded yellow corn. Add milk, butter and as
| much cheese as possible. You can buy the precooked
| grinded corn, and it takes less than 5 minutes. Bonus
| points for a sauce with tomato, onion, peppers, and red
| chorizo. [1]
|
| * Humita/Tamales: Put some grinded corn wrapped inside
| the corn husk and boil it. I had not eat them since a
| long time ago, but they use also yellow corn here. I like
| it, but it requires a lot of preparation.
|
| We use white corn only for food related to our two
| independence day:
|
| * Locro: Mix split white hard corn, beans, pumpkin
| pieces, potatoes, pieces of meat with bone and whatever
| you can find. Boil it for hours and hours and hours. I
| probably eat it once or twice a year. [2]
|
| * Mazamorra (porridge?): Mix split white hard corn with
| sugar and probably milk. Boil it until it's soft, that
| may take a very long time. I think I eat it once or twice
| in my life, for some patriotic celebration.
|
| [1] https://www.paulinacocina.net/como-hacer-polenta-con-
| tuco/25...
|
| [2] https://www.paulinacocina.net/receta-de-locro-
| argentino/9829
|
| PS: As a rule of thumb, if you want to cook Argentinean
| food, just look at the site of " _Paulina Cocina_ ". She
| has simple but tasty recipes.
| asdff wrote:
| >Algae needs solar light, so you will have to flood a lot
| of land to get enough.
|
| Algae is farmed at industrial scales in the ocean, today.
| Mostly in asia. US is very behind on this industry.
| kogasa240p wrote:
| > Algae needs solar light
|
| Same with corn
|
| > so you will have to flood a lot of land to get enough.
| Not necessarily, just use pre-existing water treatment
| plants to grow algae, and vertical photobioreactors exist.
| Algae also has a much higher harvest rate versus corn, and
| if you only wanted to ferment the algal biomass into corn
| you'd have much higher yields than corn.
|
| > Also, in case of a war or blockade you can switch the
| corn use from ethanol to food. You will have to eat
| tortilla and polenta for a year [1] but it's better than
| algae from seawater or famine.
|
| True
|
| > Here we use sugar cane to produce etanol, it's more
| efficient because it's a C4 plant. I guess it's possible in
| the south of the US. Agreed.
| balderdash wrote:
| I'd rather people went rooftop solar, and put that land to
| producing food.
| mbesto wrote:
| We already produce enough food. Rooftop solar by definition
| is an inefficient use of resources.
| torpfactory wrote:
| That land is producing food for cars. If we covered half in
| solar panels we'd have almost enough energy to power the
| country. Turn the other half over to food production and
| you'd come out ahead on both energy and food.
| davyAdewoyin wrote:
| It's a common mistake to believe there isn't enough land to
| grow food, and that is simply false. We throw tons and tons
| of food away every year due to spoilage and other factors.
| Even in many parts of Africa scarcity of food is caused by
| waste and distribution problem than simply lack of arable
| land.
|
| And when you think about the millions of lands used to grow
| bioethanol I think we can safely convert that for solar
| installation without worries.Agrovoltaic is also a practical
| approach for a lot of crops and farmers so that we can grow
| and produce electricity side by side.
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| Do you know how much land there is that is simply not worth
| farming on?
|
| There are deserts everywhere.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| A roof is quite literally the worst place to put solar
| panels. Its a load most roofs are not designed for, and the
| whole point of a roof is to keep water out, which is
| compromised by attaching stuff to it.
|
| The most efficient way to do large scale solar is with semi-
| local utility scale arrays with ultra efficient inverters and
| enormous chemical or hydro storage. We have a _lot_ of unused
| land, that 's not a problem
| opo wrote:
| The consumer rooftop solar cost is usually one of the most
| expensive ways you can generate electricity - often several
| times the cost of utility solar installations. The high
| rooftop solar price is usually hidden (at least in the USA)
| because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop
| solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have
| often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell
| to the grid. This causes higher electricity bills for those
| in apartments and those who can't afford to put panels on
| their roof. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation
| doesn't have enough battery power to actually last through
| inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability
| provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well
| off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme.
|
| Rooftop solar is good but it shouldn't be a gift to the
| wealthier residents paid for by those less wealthy. Any
| subsidies for solar power should go to utility grade solar.
| Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing
| utility solar will go much, much, further than a dollar spent
| subsidizing wealthy homeowners who install panels on their
| roof.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > The high rooftop solar price is usually hidden (at least
| in the USA)
|
| My understanding is that the (unsubsidised) price of
| rooftop solar is only high in the USA. Because the cost is
| almost entirely labor (high in the US) and issues around
| permitting (more restrictive in the US). Pretty much
| everywhere else in the world you'll now save money with
| rooftop solar + batteries even if you can't sell back to
| the grid at all. Even places that aren't that sunny like
| the UK where I live.
|
| It is still more expensive than "grid scale" deployments.
| But there are positive externalities that make up for that:
| uses otherwise unused space, less grid capacity needed,
| adds resiliency to the grid (if implemented well with
| storage).
| subhobroto wrote:
| > Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have
| often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they
| sell to the grid. This causes higher electricity bills for
| those in apartments and those who can't afford to put
| panels on their roof
|
| I don't think you thought this up yourself, so I won't
| blame you for it, as this exact, word for word swill is
| mindlessly repeated by a lot of people, so thats ample
| evidence of brainwashing going on.
|
| The subsidies and retail rate (both of which have been
| murdered by now thanks to swill like this) incentives _were
| not_ a sneaky reverse welfare program snuck in by the
| wealthy.
|
| They were infrastructure incentives for people who could
| _afford_ to make those infrastructure _investments_.
|
| Investments have always required incentives and a positive
| ROI. You don't put money into your 401k, Roth or HSA
| because you expect to lose money in 20 years.
|
| The goal of solar subsidies was _never_ some sneaky wealth
| redistribution with unforseen sideeffects but rather to
| rally support from the private industry and wealthy homes
| to _spearhead rapid_ decarbonization, energy independence,
| and grid decentralization.
|
| A single mother treading water, barely being able to afford
| groceries isn't your persona for actually making rapid
| decarbonization, energy independence, and grid
| decentralization happen - _however_ , the wealthy that you
| so despise of, certainly put a 10kWh (sometimes more) PV
| array on their 3000 sqft rooftop and actually feed power to
| the grid that was reeling under tremendous growing strain.
|
| People hanging portable solar panels from the balconies of
| their apartments barely make power to run their kitchen
| fridge so that's out as well.
|
| Mom and pop landlords and corporate run apartments aren't
| going to put solar for their tenants because they are not
| legally allowed to sell power above utility rates while
| they don't enjoy the 10% guaranteed ROI that utilities get
| (which is where utilities actually make their money), so
| that's out too.
|
| This makes me sad - We _could_ have had a future where the
| grid was fully decentralized, where our single mother
| neighbor would _never_ had to worry about the lights
| getting turned off even when there was a downed power line
| or wildfire or a snowstorm turning down power lines half a
| mile away, where she could plug in her EV into my shed
| instead of having to drive miles away to a crowded charging
| station.
|
| We are numbers people here - so here's a numbers
| perspective:
|
| If I had taken the _same_ money I had to spend on a "grid
| compliant" installation (so I could connect all of this to
| the grid) and put it into the SNP500 instead, I would never
| have had to worry just about a power bill (as bad it is -
| $0.60/kWh) but also my inflation adjusted grocery bills
| _for the rest of my life_.
| enslavedrobot wrote:
| I have some experience with distributed energy generation
| and have met with senior utility executives many times
| while trying to implement some grant supported projects
| through my work.
|
| It turns out that a big problem is that whenever we
| install local generation it costs utilities a ton of
| money. They bundle the cost of grid maintenance into
| their per kWh charges. These costs, which include debt
| service, maintenance, upgrades etc amount to 5-7
| cents/kWh. Whenever you generate your own energy you cost
| the utility 5-7cents/kWh that they have to pay regardless
| of your usage.
|
| This business model, which has bundled grid maintenance
| into usage costs means that utilities put up huge
| roadblocks for distributed generation. They say they love
| it, but they actually hate it. Utility executives have
| looked me in the eye and said as much.
|
| It gets worse though, because energy infrastructure is
| backed by trillions in utility bonds. These "low risk"
| debt instruments are owned by national and private
| pension funds of mind boggling size. In order to bring
| about a distributed energy future the grid (and low
| pressure nat gas infrastructure) must be reorganized in a
| manner that is likely to make those bonds worthless.
| These background factors are definitely in play when you
| see these bait and switch enthusiastic green energy
| programs that turn out to be a regulatory quagmire when
| you dig into them. Public utilities and pension funds
| hate green energy, they are a major factor in west's
| pathetic performance when it comes to solar adoption vs
| China.
| subhobroto wrote:
| > It turns out that a big problem is that whenever we
| install local generation it costs utilities a ton of
| money
|
| So a question:
|
| - Lets hypothesize that distributed, decentralized
| systems cost way more than centralized systems
|
| - If you agree with that hypothesis, can we next
| hypothesize that building a distributed, decentralized
| system that can support power on one block and can allow
| it to continue to stay on while the "central feeder line"
| (please tell me the proper word for this made up word is)
| to all the blocks is down, because that one block has a
| local distributed, decentralized power source, is of
| value to the community?
|
| In the past, commercial factories were the only places
| that could afford this kind of redundancy but it feels to
| me, thanks to crashing prices of solar and batteries (I
| could never have imagined 12kWh brand new LFP could be
| purchased for $2k), this level of redundancy is now very
| much realistic at the consumer, residential level. It
| just doesn't work locally today because the utility poles
| lack the smarts to do the isolated switching and safe
| islanding. For example: one unsettled question today is
| if a lot of customers on one such island are on solar and
| the grid is down, how do we safely supply power within
| nominal specs to the whole of the island - but this isn't
| a physical unknown, we know how to solve it. It just is
| lacking implementation.
|
| > These costs, which include debt service, maintenance,
| upgrades etc amount to 5-7 cents/kWh. Whenever you
| generate your own energy you cost the utility
| 5-7cents/kWh that they have to pay regardless of your
| usage
|
| Capitalism has repeatedly proven its ability to cut costs
| down while improving QoS. I realize you really believe in
| the numbers you have been provided - that it costs a
| utility 5-7cents/kWh that they have to pay regardless of
| my usage, but before SpaceX, it used to cost multiple
| millions of dollars and years of planning and design to
| launch one rocket.
| subhobroto wrote:
| > Public utilities and pension funds hate green energy,
| they are a major factor in west's pathetic performance
| when it comes to solar adoption vs China
|
| No this statement is absolutely wrong. Here's why:
|
| > west's pathetic performance when it comes to solar
| adoption vs China
|
| China is dominating energy because the CCP doesn't _care_
| what their citizens think. They need energy and they are
| doing everything they can do to get it. They will put you
| behind bars at best or kill your family and demolish your
| house if it gets in the middle of a power line trench.
| For China, energy isn 't a "nice to have" - they realize
| it's essential and they won't stop until they get there.
|
| China is the person out in the mountains being chased by
| a hungry bear while we in the west is the person sitting
| in their air conditioned room debating whether to drive
| or take an Uber to have a drink with buddies.
|
| News came out last week that you can buy a Chinese
| hypersonic missle for $100k - you can't even build a
| little two car garage where I am for _double_ that price.
|
| > Public utilities and pension funds hate green energy
|
| Pension funds don't care whether energy is green or
| orange. What they hate are the horrible returns affected
| by all the stealing and grifting that happens in the name
| of "green energy".
|
| Public utilities (atleast in the jurisdictions that I am
| aware of) love _any_ infrastructure work - they are
| _guaranteed_ a 10% ROI by the government on _any_
| approved infrastructure work they do. If you could work
| with them to build infrastructure to cremate just newborn
| kids and get it approved by the CPUC, they will happily
| start work on it _tomorrow_. The reason why _they_ hate
| green energy is because _after_ they 've made their 10%
| ROI, they are now stuck with a power source that costs
| them more than their non-green sources and that hurts
| their razor thin margins.
|
| However, as the customer - I don't care either about what
| public utilities and pension funds hate or don't.
|
| What I _do_ care about is having affordable and reliable
| power and I absolutely can get that with my own solar
| panels and batteries. The fact that it 's green is a
| happy sideffect for most.
|
| The reason why every home in the U.S. isn't overflowing
| with solar panels and batteries is because of regulation
| and government shenanigans making retail costs really
| high. Average people in Pakistan, South Africa and
| Lebanon certainly power their whole homes with solar
| panels and batteries but their governments don't have
| nonsense taffifs and fees on Chinese solar equipment.
| enslavedrobot wrote:
| Rooftop solar in Australia is ~60cents per Watt installed.
| balderdash wrote:
| in the US - admittedly 4 years old info, the cost of
| utility scale solar was like ~$1/watt - rooftop solar was
| like $2.5-$3/watt
| audunw wrote:
| Why do you assume that solar and production of food is
| mutually exclusive on that land? Agrovoltaics is a thing and
| can often have benefits to the growing of crops.
| FEELmyAGI wrote:
| What does the 1% of land used to grow corn have to do
| specifically with solar and batteries? Solar doesn't need to be
| on the 15% arable land at all.
|
| The corn doesn't just produce ethanol, which just utilizes the
| starch/sugar. The protein, fat, fiber is eaten by livestock in
| some form like distillers grains.
|
| And governments like to have food security , and having
| secondary uses for an abundance of food in the good times is
| more convenient than storing cheese in caves , and in case of
| an emergency shortage the production is already there without
| having to rip up solar panels to grow food.
|
| My conclusion is you're conflating issues (solar and ethanol)
| unnecessarily.
| jacquesm wrote:
| My conclusion is that you didn't even try to understand the
| GP.
| conorcleary wrote:
| No no, that argument is pretty old now. The amount of fuel
| you GROW on your own continent at any single or double
| digit percentage during wartime-anytime is probably a good
| long-term research project that shouldn't be interrupted by
| people online.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| The problem is corn requires a lot of fossil fuel energy
| input, mostly in the form of fertiliser. The net energy
| output is only around 1.3 so an acre of corn produces
| maybe 400 gallons of gasoline equivalent output requires
| 300 gallons of gasoline equivalent in energy inputs.
|
| Ethanol from sugarcane makes a lot more sense. Corn
| ethanol is just a wasteful subsidy for farmers paid for
| by drivers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance
| asdff wrote:
| >The net energy output is only around 1.3 so an acre of
| corn produces maybe 400 gallons of gasoline equivalent
| output requires 300 gallons of gasoline equivalent in
| energy inputs.
|
| What is the problem, that sounds great? 30% free output
| out of your input is staggering honestly. Thank you
| sunshine and atmospheric CO2. You don't have to use
| fossil fuel for this. You can potentially run the farm
| equipment off ethanol if it were designed as such.
|
| You can also only grow sugarcane well up to usda zone 8.
| Some people can do it as an annual but I guess it is
| tricky. Corn you can grow all the way into Canada.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| Opportunity costs essentially. The effort that goes into
| growing and refining corn ethanol could be better spent
| on reducing fuel consumption instead of dedicating five
| acres of land to provide the equivalent net yearly fossil
| fuel consumption of a single average car using 500
| gallons of gasoline to drive about 15000 miles.
| asdff wrote:
| Why not do both, reduce fuel consumption while shifting
| to a carbon neutral fuel source that is fully onshored?
| laurencerowe wrote:
| Again opportunity costs. It almost always makes sense to
| spend the money on the most efficient means to achieve
| the goal. Money spent paying farmers and ethanol refiners
| to inefficiently produce 25% lower carbon fuel could
| instead be directed at other endeavours that for the same
| cost reduce carbon emissions more.
| asdff wrote:
| The difference is we already grow corn at scale beyond
| market need. Probably less has to be paid in that effort
| than starting up some other industry. Which still can be
| done along side the corn shouldering the load until that
| industry reaches the scale of the corn industry's waste
| product.
| FEELmyAGI wrote:
| Then please explain, to me he brought up an unrelated point
| about ethanol (which is often poorly understood and
| mischaracterized anyways) consuming a portion of
| agriculturally productive land. Which BTW this agricultural
| land that produces ethanol is probably not even close to
| the best place in the country for industrial scale solar
| from a LOT of perspectives.
| cloverich wrote:
| My "try to understand" take: We subsidize corn, then use
| it yo make a less efficient fuel. The money involved in
| this process likely takes away from subsidies to other
| forms of energy. There are a great many activities we do
| not subsidize, but solar is one that if we did, would
| produce an outsized benefit to society. And the more we
| do, the better. Redirecting an ethanol subsidy to solar
| would be a far more beneficial long term strategy for
| energy independence and overall standard of living in the
| US. Going all in on Solar would be a transformative and
| likely relatively short investment period that would last
| and benefit a long time. We have done many large scale
| infrastructure projects in the US, and it is frustrating
| to see the resistance to this one, being both less
| disruptive and more "all around win" than any other i can
| think of.
| mbesto wrote:
| This is a fair point as it's not just simply using
| ethanol for gasoline. This article goes into more depth
| about it:
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2501605122
|
| There's lot of factors at play here:
|
| - Location for generating PV
|
| - Redistribution of food (both for livestock and human)
| production
|
| - Environmental impacts of PV vs livestock vs depletion
| of native prairies
|
| Point still stands...if you replaced all of the land used
| to produce ethanol with PV, you would create a surplus of
| energy that is higher than anything we could imaginably
| consume today (hint - China is essentially already doing
| this)
| amusingimpala75 wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding was that ethanol
| in gasoline was a result laws enacted due to corn farmers (or
| their state reps) lobbying for subsidies, not any intrinsic
| part of gasoline production
| asdff wrote:
| Kinda funny how we invented a carbon neutral fuel system but we
| are like "lets only use it as a 15% mix" vs trying to design
| new engines for pure ethanol. You could fuel your car with
| hooch you made from yard waste.
| WillAdams wrote:
| But is it carbon neutral?
|
| How much energy in terms of calories does one get per acre?
|
| What is the equivalent energy input in terms of diesel and so
| forth?
| asdff wrote:
| Why would you use diesel as input when you are making fuel?
| Just use part of the fuel you are making as input for the
| next crop.
| WillAdams wrote:
| We will have to see if Deere's new tractor which runs on
| E98 actually makes it to market.
|
| The blunt question is:
|
| >How many calories of energy to grow 1 calorie of corn
| (using modern industrial farming practices)
| asdff wrote:
| Another commenter said this ratio is 1.3 in favor of
| output.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Interesting --- does that also include considerations
| such as oil for lubrication and fertilizer sourcing?
| asdff wrote:
| Not sure. But not everyone uses fertilizer. No till is
| being more widely appreciated, getting nitrogen in the
| soil using cover crops that fix it from the atmosphere.
| Probably everything uses oil for lube including any
| alternative energy. Teslas still need greasing after all.
| They still have bearings and other moving parts.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Some crops can require as much as 10 calories of
| petrochemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy when
| one takes such things into account --- corn (well, maize)
| is quite calorie dense/efficient in terms of land and
| other usages --- I'd be curious to see a full,
| comprehensive crunching of the values involved.
| jwr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/... [2]: (pdf)
| https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/N...
| jwr wrote:
| 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!
| dehrmann wrote:
| The fossil fuel lobby can only do so much. Solar has gotten so
| cheap it's taking over on its own. Companies are doing it for
| no reason other than the math makes sense. EV batteries are
| nearing that point too. You can only keep BYD out of the US for
| so long.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The fossil fuel industry is fighting a rearguard action at this
| point.
| mft_ wrote:
| > Germany shifted from nuclear to coal and gas
|
| Sure, but you're attributing this, deliberately or not, to the
| wrong cause. It wasn't that the fossil fuel industry somehow
| won - it was range of factors possibly including geopolitics,
| some existing plants aging, an emotional response to the
| Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the Green lobby.
|
| Basically, they voted to kill nuclear without a solid plan for
| an alternative, and coal/gas is the default option for filling
| the gaps left in the absence of timely and sufficiently rapid
| investment in other technologies.
| jwr wrote:
| Hmm. After former chancellor (Schroeder) heavily pushed
| Russian gas pipelines (Nord Stream 1 and 2) and then swiftly
| moved to working for Russian state-owned energy companies,
| including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom, I have a
| different outlook on things.
| mft_ wrote:
| One can never discount lobbying and influence behind the
| scenes, but Schroeder finished being Chancellor in 2005,
| which was six years before the initial post-Fukushima vote
| in question, and even longer since various aspects of the
| plan continued to be supported by various politicians.
|
| He'd be a spectacularly successful lobbyist if your
| suspicion is correct.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I mean yeah, but $100 a barrel makes it difficult to argue.
| AndreyK1984 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| grid-scale batteries are accelerating more rapidly than anyone
| thought a few years, it's not really seen as an unsolvable
| problem anymore
| evilduck wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pydry wrote:
| Tell me you didnt read the article without telling me.
| mbgerring wrote:
| 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
| morphle wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That number is improbably low. Transmission losses from local
| power plants to consumers is on the order of 10%.
|
| Cite, please?
| gpm wrote:
| 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#Ad...
| legitster wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| > 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.
|
| We already use nuclear, if you mean fission as a primary
| energy source...
|
| Batteries don't consume lithium, battery recycling doesn't
| consume lithium, we a literally use the same lithium for
| hundreds of billions of years. So the only way humans are
| going to be forced to use nuclear is when the stars die.
|
| I don't think humans will last that long, but if they do
| I'm unsure what technology they'll be using. Theoretically
| dumping matter into black holes beats nuclear, but who
| knows.
| gpm wrote:
| > That's assuming constant production of batteries at the
| current scale and production.
|
| That's a terribly pessimistic assumption when production has
| been scaling exponentially, and cost per kWh dropping
| exponentially.
| Windchaser wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I think the long-term solutions here are not grid-scale lithium
| batteries, but pumped hydro, flow batteries, or compressed air.
| Lithium batteries have just gotten a bit ahead on the
| technological growth curve because of the recent boom in
| production from phones and EVs, but liquid flow batteries can
| be made using common elements, and are likely to be cost-
| effective once the tech gets worked out better.
|
| So: I don't think we can say "lithium energy storage is
| unfeasible large-scale and long-term" and thus conclude that
| nuclear is inevitable, unless we also look at all the other
| storage alternatives.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| The main reason lithium batteries are used in cars and
| electronics is because they offer some of the best energy
| storage per kilogram. That's really important for something
| meant to be portable, but it's completely irrelevant for a
| large permanent installation.
| kogasa240p wrote:
| Before anyone cries about the environmental cost of lithium,
| concrete batteries are a thing and are far more ideal for grid
| storage.
| pfdietz wrote:
| You mean gravity batteries using concrete weights? A scam for
| suckers.
| kogasa240p wrote:
| Nope: https://news.mit.edu/2025/concrete-battery-now-packs-
| ten-tim...
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The "storeable fuel
| jdc0589 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Or you are somewhere in Africa and have no electricity anyway
| so you start on something renewable.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They can and they _will_. In the longer term there simply won 't
| be anything else.
| balderdash wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hamdingers wrote:
| 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-
| tak...
| turtlebits wrote:
| 100% this. If it was DIYable, its an order of magnitude
| cheaper.
|
| I have leftover panels from an off grid install, and its
| extremely hard to get an approved permit for a small roof solar
| array + off the shelf AIO (Ecoflow/Anker)
| ronb1964 wrote:
| 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.
| gpm wrote:
| I doubt that issue scales to the national grid at all...
| national grids tend to dictated in size by more or less market
| forces not careful pre-planning... and capacity planning for
| new projects tends to have actual data about energy demand and
| weather patterns and so on.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| And what the market doesn't solve the grid operator solves
| using ancillary markets.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Very nice. I have my eyes on Lithium-Titanate cells for my
| house, I can't wait until they go down in price enough. Weight
| and energy density are not an issue, but safety is and those
| cells are very good in that sense.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-titanate_battery
| turtlebits wrote:
| LFP is safe and is under $100/kwH.
| hvb2 wrote:
| > Scale that mindset problem up to a national grid and I
| imagine the challenge is the same.
|
| Except that we have raw data there? The only question is how
| fast it grows, but since we're transitioning that's mostly a
| question of how fast you decommission fossil plants.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Yeah, agreed. It's a lot easier to be empirical when the
| scale of the requirements is quite literally unimaginable
| without just dealing with raw numbers.
| lazide wrote:
| Germany's renewables rollout would like a word....
| hvb2 wrote:
| If you mean what they started in the 90s? That's not what
| this is about. The conversation was about not being able
| to rightsize today.
|
| Germany did jumpstart their market successfully but that
| was in a wildly different time. Want to talk about what a
| typical KWp of installed solar cost at the time?
|
| Hindsight....
| lazide wrote:
| Germany has only a tiny portion of their total energy
| needs on renewables - if we're being honest about the
| definition of 'total energy needs'.
|
| Like in the camper van scenario, if we include winter
| heating and transportation? Oh boy.
|
| It's getting better, but if we're really honest very far
| from the truth
| turtlebits wrote:
| While I agree with underestimating capacity, the problem only
| really applies to off grid.
|
| For regular homes, it just means less savings.
| lazide wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And? Any coal not used in summer is coal not dug up.
| turtlebits wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Germany has more wind in winter, so traditionally has more
| production of renewables in winter months.
| lazide wrote:
| It has dramatically higher thermal heat demands in winter
| - far higher than is compensated for by that. Even if
| everyone switched to heat pumps.
| uecker wrote:
| True, but higher demand for heating in winter is not
| specific to Germany. In the end, Germany will likely need
| to import energy anyway - just as it does today. But this
| means this question may not be the most relevant.
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| there is a youtube video I watched where an RV guy converted as
| many appliances and gadgets on his vehicle to Direct DC as he
| could, saved a lot on wastage from DC-AC-DC conversions.
|
| We need mundane home DC solutions.
| jabl wrote:
| There's https://currentos.org/ working on it.
| morphle wrote:
| I build off-grid electrical campers (Mercedes eSprinter) with
| extended 600kWh batteries (11 times more battery capacity than
| the default model) and charge them from solar panels at home. I
| disagree with your negative mindset, people who ride in my
| eCamper quickly learn you can go 100% solar and use you camper
| at home to store all neighborhood solar and even charge other
| EVs from our eCamper battery. We make our own parallel battery
| cell dis/charger to extent the LFP battery life to 20000
| charges (one a day for 50 years).
| RobinL wrote:
| Wow, that's big! I'm curious, how much does the 600kWh
| battery cost nowadays? Amazing that the tech has got to a
| point this is even possible
| morphle wrote:
| 15kWh 48V LFP battery around $1800 with low quality battery
| management system in metal box on wheels. Car batteries
| need more expensive inverters if you want to fast charge
| them (150kW-950kW) and super fast discharge them while
| driving fast (>100 kW). Thus my 600kW extender comes to
| almost $62000 for vans and small trucks. Cheaper if
| installed as house battery. The Mercedes eSprinter 56kW van
| costs around $80000 new but we sell 3 year old vans like
| this for $4000 without battery. So refurbished and
| converted to eCamper with 1800 mile range you pay $6700.
| You can drive 3000 km (almost 1860 miles) with this battery
| in the eSprinter and eCamper. A normal size car would go
| twice as far with this battery but it's big and heavy
| enough that you need to tow it in a trailer.
|
| The crucial point though is the charging/discharging
| inverter (converter) that I purpose built (printed circuits
| boards) and a change to the car firmware. Without it the
| car will reject the battery, your acceleration would be
| less and it also would not last the same amount of
| discharge cycles. My battery electronics works fine for
| cars, trucks, boats, house and neighborhood batteries (up
| to 6mW per shipping container).
|
| We build entire smart grids around the batteries, solar
| panels and tiny houses.
| https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-
| Voswinkel/publica...
| RobinL wrote:
| I love this! Thanks for the detailed response, super
| interesting
| morphle wrote:
| Thank you. I hardly get to explain the techology I
| 'invent' (power chips, power router, parallel battery
| charger, car firmware, charging (station) software,
| simulation software) because the investors customers only
| want to hear that its cheaper or sells better (then
| Tesla). Or that besides going from 4000 to 20000
| dis/charge cycles you also prevent any li-ion fires and
| have fire alarm sensors on every battery cell. The main
| thing I would like to shout from the rooftops is: Not a
| single battery on the planet charges their battery cells
| in parallel as we do, they all shorten their cell
| lifetime by charging/discharging them to fast in series,
| what will damage all battery cell types but especially
| the li-ion.
|
| It is the same with the article we are commenting on
| here: if people just listen to the statistics, the
| simulations and the actual market developments they would
| see that 100% solar+battery is the cheapest energy.
|
| The simple message is Solar is by far the cheapest
| energy: below 1 dollar cent per kWh and that will fall a
| lot more in the next decade until we get to 'a
| squanderable abundance of free and clean energy' as Bob
| Metcalf puts it
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axfsqdpHVFU Batteries
| still double the cost of that solar but these prices are
| falling rapidly too. It is already cheaper to have solar
| nearby than transmit it over a distance of a few miles.
|
| More in my earlier comments weeks and months ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=morphle
| saijanai wrote:
| Why are the prices in the USA so much higher?
|
| Also: when we last spoke you were talking about energy
| storage solutions. How has that progressed recently?
| morphle wrote:
| $0,01 per kWh from solar, that is the price worldwide on
| the condition that they sell you the panels at a
| reasonable price and don't overcharge you on all the
| other parts like micro-inverters, field or rooftop
| installation, permitting and labour. That adds up to
| around 5 cent for rooftop solar in Australia for example
| (including everything). 1 cent is for solar panels
| lasting 50 years (with 20% degradation over decades), we
| refer to such prices as Levelised Cost Of Energy (LCOE)
| over lifetime. It halved in the last 10 years for solar
| and it will halve again (20% cost reduction on each
| doubling of manufactured capacity). Similar for
| batteries, they also go down around 20% each year.
|
| 1 kWh Wind, or Hydro, Thermal and other renewables do not
| go down as much in cost price because they have
| mechanical or chemical components that do not last as
| long as solar cells and need maintenance and repair.
|
| We keep the cost low by group buying in bulk at wholesale
| prices (a shipping container with 770 panels for 20-30
| houses) with our coop instead of premium installer prices
| by the electrotechnical or building companies. If you let
| our Fiberhood cooperative in the US install your solar,
| batteries, tiny house or eCamper you do not pay these
| high tariffs, we have enough panels pre-tariff. So you
| still can hit 1 cent per kWh but only if you get the
| decent installers and sellers.
| morphle wrote:
| Our energy storage solutions have widened. First you
| timeshift all electricity use of the car, house or
| neighborhood into daylight hours when the sun shines.
| This means a bunch of electronics and software changes.
| Next we build termal storage solutions, you can store
| heat much cheaper than electricity. You move heat around
| with a heat pump. Or you heat your water tank with a
| datacenter computer in your water tank (for free). In
| summer you store solar electricity in ice. Or you store
| it in iron, aluminum, glass or silicon by melting ore and
| purifying, You embodied the solar electricity into the
| purified ore. In northern and southern latitudes you need
| 10 to 50 times more solar panels to heat houses during
| cold winters. This means you have large overcapacity in
| summer that you can sell as embodied iron, etc. Batteries
| are only needed to store for the hours there is no
| sunlight during 24 hours, no need to store longer. The
| cheapest place is to store it in the electrical cars in
| your neighborhood. That is why we install our own brand
| ev car chargers in the neighborhood of the panels. In
| contrast, Tesla chargers overcharge you a factor of 34 to
| 76 and that's partially because its fossil energy and
| transmitted over hundreds of miles.
|
| My message is that to reach 1 cent per kWh we need to
| solar electrify all our infrastructure
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEOPx2X-EtE
|
| Also Trump doubling solar panel prices with tarifs and
| shutting down subsidies is wrong, it makes it much more
| expensive. Add an oil third world war however does help,
| we sold double solar, batteries and evs in the last
| month.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 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-req...
|
| See you next decade when we're saying the same thing and not
| doing it?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Apples and oranges though. One is a massive public works
| program and the other is private.
| proee wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| We'll replace the fossil fuel cartel with the wind/solar/battery
| cartel and everything will be better. Right.
| bluegatty wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > solar PV installed cost 384 EUR/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 PS2k. The
| quotes I've had recently have been closer to PS10k.
| edent wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| solar WILL power the world.
| zackmorris wrote:
| 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.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...
|
| https://ogsolarstore.com/products/sodium-ion-cells-3-1v-batt...
|
| 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-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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| eigenspace wrote:
| 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.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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-fo...
| erelong wrote:
| Nice, we can get rid of nuclear dangers entirely
| djoldman wrote:
| 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.
| turtlebits wrote:
| I'd like to see some focus on cheap thermal storage as PV is
| terribly inefficient for heating. Especially in the winter
| months.
| Havoc wrote:
| 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
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