> Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power—which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines.
It's interesting to realize that the vast majority of the energy used by humans comes from the sun (with the exception of nuclear and geothermal energy). Even hydro power comes from the sun, because the sun evaporates the water which then becomes part of rivers or other water reservoirs that power hydroelectric generators.
The unsolved problem with solar power and wind power is how to store it so that it can be used 24/7. Stored at a affordable price that is. Storage so that the supply can be maintained 24/7 across the inevitable renewable ( sola and/'or wind droughts ) that can and do last several days, from time to time.
While the US is busy trying to revive the oil-soaked 20th century, places like Namibia are leapfrogging straight into a distributed, solar-powered future with YouTube tutorials... It's like watching the fossil era get out-hustled in real time.
What is your source for that statement? According to [1], countries like the Netherlands, Germany, Spain and Denmark are way ahead of the US in those respects.
Tony Seba around 10 years ago predicted (among many other things) that ~2024 the cost of generating a unit of electricity onsite with PV will cost less than merely delivering the same unit of electricity over transmission infrastructure, not even considering the cost of generating that unit.
Nowadays he is diving into what he terms the phase change disruptions where he explores and thinks out the ramifications of these disruptions.
The article doesn't mention a technology that deserves some attention because it counters the biggest and most obvious deficiency in solar: the sun doesn't always shine.
That technology is cables. Cables allow us to move energy over long distances. And with HVCD cables that can mean across continents, oceans, time zones, and climate regions. The nice things about cables is that they are currently being underutilized. They are designed to have enough capacity so that the grid continues to function at peak demand. Off peak, there is a lot of under utilized cable capacity. An obvious use for that would be transporting power to wherever batteries need to be re-charged from wherever there is excess solar/wind power. And cables can work both ways. So import when there's a shortage, export when there's a surplus.
And that includes the rapidly growing stock of batteries that are just sitting there with an average charge state close to more or less fully charged most of the time. We're talking terawatt hours of power. All you need to get at that is cables.
Long distance cables will start moving non trivial amounts of renewable power around as we start executing on plans to e.g. connect Moroccan solar with the UK, Australian solar with Singapore, east coast US to Europe, etc. There are lots of cable projects stuck in planning pipelines around the world. Cables can compensate for some of the localized variations in energy productions caused by seasonal effects, weather, or day/night cycles.
For the rest, we have nuclear, geothermal, hydro, and a rapidly growing stock of obsolete gas plants that we might still turn on on a rainy day. I think anyone still investing in gas plants will need a reality check: mothballed gas plant aren't going to be very profitable. But we'll keep some around for decades to come anyway.
Cables can be a great option in certain places but geography and politics limit where they can be used. No one is going to run a cable across the Pacific Ocean so that Russian solar power can supply evening peak demand loads in western North America.
Plausible alternatives to cables include ships full of synthetic diesel, ships full of iron, ships full of aluminum, or ships full of magnesium. Inside China HVDC cables are indeed carrying solar power across the continent, but the Netherlands have not managed to erect any yet. Cables provide efficient JIT power delivery, but they're vulnerable to precision-guided missiles, which Ukrainians are 3-D printing in their basements by the million, so the aluminum-air battery may return to commercial use.
As probably everyone knows, Netherlands is very flat and Norway very mountaneous. Norways is also very rainy. So it's a match made in heaven - Norway's mountain reservoirs can act as balancers for dutch wind power.
There's geopolitical implications. Solar is long stability, short conflict. It's easy to cut undersea cables, it's easy for instability arriving to one the landlocked countries in the middle of transit. This creates systemic risks that are asymmetric with respect to offense and defense.
Many would see this as an invitation to retreat from solar, but I view it as the opposite. Widespread solar will cause peace via the capitalist peace theory, similar to the role that trade plays in staking everyone in mutual stability. Stability will become a public good that everyone will want to preserve. Solar will be another part of the international diplomatic-cultural-economic web that binds countries together in mutual interest.
Resiliency can be figured out with creativity, it's not something to give up on at the first challenge.
To be fair, natural gas and oil shares similar systemic risks, whether it's pipelines open to sabotage or water transits being subject to blockade, such as the Malacca dilemma that China would face if it invades Taiwan. But at least with solar, it won't ruin countries with the resource curse, and in principle it doesn't give a small number of countries leverage since anyone can produce this fairly basic commodity.
Any country relying on international cables for electricity would need to build and maintain full local backup power capacity. The combined cost of cables + backup may be more than storage cost. (Of course there are many factors which affect all these costs)
Norway, Denmark and The Netherlands are all part of the European Union. Would you make the same claim if we were talking about US states? (With Texas being a special exception)
North south connections enable solar power from Africa to be used around the year. And while solar is down in the winter, wind production usually peaks. If you have thousands of km of cable, there is a lot of power that can be moved around.
I recently bought a heat pump dryer and it's pretty cool. No exhaust vent, just water drain. It also doesn't need the heavy duty power plug since it pulls so much less electricity than a typical heated air dryer.
> Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere
I’m all for solar - but does it really solve the geographical / geopolitical issues of oil, as it’s currently rolling out?
China produces pretty much all the solar panels - That’s quite a big concentration of power, even more so than oil.
I’m all for solar - but does it really solve the geographical / geopolitical issues of oil, as it’s currently rolling out?
Yes, because if the US blockades you so you can't import oil, your trucks and power plants stop running in six weeks. If the US blockades you so you can't import Chinese solar panels, your power grid stops running in 20 years. Actually, that's just the end of the warranty period, so more like 30. Or 40. The US is gonna have to keep up that blockade for a long time before it starts causing you any pain. Probably after the President For Life dies.
Not to mention that 20 years is enough time to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers. The issue with oil is it requires a constant flow of resources from specific locations in the world that are blessed by geography. Solar power has much less of that going on.
It's possible, but you may have noticed that out of the ≈200 countries in the world, over the last 20 years, about 180 of them have completely failed to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers, and about 100 of them have completely failed to develop a native industry of anything, continuing their agrarian and resource-extraction economies more or less as they have been for centuries, just with imported Chinese cellphones. People in those countries often blame the rich countries for keeping them down, for example by selling them goods at lower prices than their domestic production of those goods, and they're not completely wrong, but in many cases the dynamics preventing them from escaping that equilibrium are mostly internal.
Hypothetically, yes, such a blockaded country could develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers in 20 years, and that industry would have an easier time traveling up the learning curve on the domestic market without having to match the prices of the Chinese hyperscalers. But in about 90% of cases they would fail to do so, for the same reasons the US still doesn't have any high-speed trains 60 years after the Shinkansen entered service and still doesn't have a moon base 56 years after Neil Armstrong.
It's more banal than that. Oil you have to pay for. Which for most countries you need to constantly come up with foreign currency. If you have a financial crisis like hot money flees you end up at the mercy of the world banking systems mafia enforcers the IMF.
With solar and electrified transport and industry? Can't pay the loans for the solar panels? Sucks for the saps that loaned you the money. Come and take them.
Of course if you don't build up a local solar industry you are still dependent on foreign countries but it's not that China has an unchanging monopoly on the solar industry.
Like everything else in manufacturing, economy of scale wins.
There's been plenty of subsidization efforts, but they made the mistake of subsidizing technologies that were too innovative and too early on in the scaling curve. e.g. Solyndra with CIGS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra
> Between 2009 and mid-2011 the price of polysilicon, the key ingredient for most competing technologies, dropped by about 89% due to Chinese advances in the Siemens process.
"Massive cost reduction in the existing, boring, process" beat "new technology". Possibly for the best in this case, since CIGS and CdTe are poisonous in a way that polysilicon isn't.
Man, Paul Krugman (here's a trigger for people who know they know better than him to respond that he's a hack!) was writing about the US giving up lead of solar tech to China back during the G. W. Bush admin... (which makes me feel old as hell)
In 1979 Jimmy Carter installed solar (thermal) panels on the White House roof as part of his fairly progressive environmental and fuel efficiency policies.
Now I feel old :/
And also angry that it's been 40 years and electricity generation is still >50% fossil fuels, never mind world energy use overall.
The reporting so far is that they did not manage the reactive power correct leading to voltage trip.
But the fossil and nuclear lobbies were straight on blaming renewables when it happened. They are desperate for any handouts they can get their hands on before a select few are preserved as museum pieces.
This was a great positive start to the day. Thanks whoever posted that.
One point curious in its omission is whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget. Presumably that’s the critical metric in all of this.
[Edit: I ran this question through ChatGPT and the initial (unvalidated) response wasn’t so exciting. This obviously put a dampener on my mood. And I wondered why people like McKibben only talk about the upside. It can sometimes feel a bit like Kayfabe, playing with the the reader’s emotions. And like my old man says: if someone tells you about pros and cons, they’re an advisor. If someone tells you only about pros, they’re a salesman.]
Even if, for sake of argument, one outright denies the evident exponential growth in solar, a purely linear extrapolation of 2024's rate from [1] puts solar equal to today's coal output by 2042. Solar is fundamentally a factory product, so this is a wildly pessimistic case, just enough interest in the product to keep the lines running. If you believe solar will grow for even a few more years, but still declare that it should level off, it's the mid 30s. If you're willing to just fit the established trend, even that's a vast underestimate. The difference between which of these to believe is just how brave you are.
There's an article a while ago about the solar boom in a poor country that had unreliable electricity network. The result was, solar wasn't treated as a replacement, but as a new source of energy, which enabled them to do more industrious things. Of course that doesn't help with the carbon budget...
Countries are placing their bets. Fossil fuels will be a massive waste of investment in a decade. Anyone who can extrapolate a graph sees where this is headed.
>whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget
I'm not sure I understand. There's no carbon budget, any carbon that we emit is carbon we'll have to re-capture somehow and the longer it stays in the atmosphere the longer it will have a heating effect.
We've also passed the peak of CO2 per capita, but since the population is still growing we are still increasing carbon emitions worldwide. It's going to be a while before we stop emitting anything, and then longer before we start re-absorbing it...
Shrinking? China is growing their coal capacity (1). What people mistake is China is not "for renewables". They are for maximizing absolute output. That means they are "for everything"
Whenever I hear "carbon budget", I usually understand it as "how much CO2 we can still emit (net of sinks) before the warming passes a certain threshold (for example, some level of the Paris agreement.)
I highly doubt that we will have global negative emissions (CO2 capturing) within the next decades-- maybe by the end of the century.
Even very rich nations have a handful of prototype plants for CO2 capture right now at best, and the budget for things like this is the first thing that gets slashed by Doge et al.
If we were on track for lots of CO2 capture by 2050, we would see the beginnings already (massive investments, quickly scaling numbers of capture sites, rapid tech iteration).
Fully agree with the rest of your point though. I consider CO2 emissions as basically "raising the difficulty level" for current and future humans (in a very unethical way, disproportionately affecting poor/arid/coastal nations).
I'm also highly confident that human extinction from climate change is completely off the table (and I think a lot of people delude themselves into believing that scenario for no reason).
The problem with carbon capture is volume. There is about 0.04% CO2 in air. So in order to remove a ton of CO2, you would need to process thousands of tons of air, depending on the efficiency of the extraction process.
It's just kind of infeasible to pull the entire atmosphere through these plants. The largest one we have is called mammoth, claimed to remove 36000 tons of CO2 per year, meanwhile our emissions are measured in billions of tons per year. Like over 30 billion.
We would need about 30 mammoths to get to a million tons per year, and 30,000 mammoths to get to a billion. Then multiply by another 30 and in total we would need almost a million mommoth plants just to undo what we are doing right now at the same rate. Carbon capture is like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket.
How are you so confident that extinction is off the table? I've stopped following this stuff because it's depressing but last time I checked we were in dire straits and I haven't heard any good news on this front. I'm just seeing ice caps disappearing, ocean currents changing, weather changing, pretty much everything that's been predicted is now happening and it's not going to slow down any time soon.
> How are you so confident that extinction is off the table?
Because even the worst-case scenarios (=> think RCP8.5) are just not enough to get rid of us.
I can totally see populous breadbasket states turning into unliveable deserts, billions of deaths from famines and heatwaves, iconic coastal cities being lost to the sea and a giant loss of biodiversity-- but I simply don't see this eradicating our species.
Humans are too adaptable, and warming is invariably gonna leave too many survivable holdout regions.
I think that an all-out global nuclear war would be much more threatening to humanity, and even that I'm very confident we would survive as species.
Yeah so this is mostly just a difference of definition. When I say extinction I mean what you describe, essentially a total collapse of modern society. I don't care whether/how long a few people survive somewhere, your scenario is apocalyptic enough for me to label it an apocalypse.
I also think this process is likely to trigger a new world war. When nations start collapsing there will be two possible outcomes - other nations take them in or they go to war. They won't just sit down and die. And everyone else won't be able to handle the number of refugees even if they want to.
"Even very rich nations have a handful of prototype plants for CO2 capture right now at best, and the budget for things like this is the first thing that gets slashed by Doge et al."
Might want to take a look at China, or at least what IEA writes about CCUS and the like there.
Do you have any source for this extraordinary claim? It's practically a claim of perpetual motion.
Carbon dioxide a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, even in concentrations which are immediately harmful to human life.
At the moment it's 400 parts per million. So in order to extract 1kg of Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere you have to pump 2500kg of air through the system. This alone makes it unlikely we can do this profitability.
You then need to extract the carbon dioxide using some technique which will probably involve cooling or pressuring that volume of air. Before finally transforming carbon dioxide, a very stable chemical compound, into a reagent which is actually useful (probably carbon monoxide).
Difficult engineering problem but working from first principles suggests that the energy requirememts are not insurmountable. The roundtrip efficiency is worse than batteries but much better than photosynthesis.
Terraform Industries (and others, like Synhelion) has a plausible if slightly optimistic target to be price competitive with fossil fuels for methane in the early 2030s.
Some places with very cheap to extract hydrocarbons like Saudi Arabia may be able to compete for a very long time, but there are many futures where most of humanity's hydrocarbon consumption (including the ones used for the chemical industry, plastics, etc) derives from atmospheric carbon.
And this can happen fast, the world (mostly China) has developed a truly massive manufacturing capacity for PV.
Terraform Industries (and others); I'd seriously consider taking a long bet that these companies turn out to be better at converting investor capital into employee salaries, for a finite period of time, than they are at converting atmospheric CO2 into natural gas.
If such a technology was possible then it would be far better to start with carbon capture from existing emitters. The concentration of CO2 being easily 3 orders of magnitude higher.
We are also limited the incentives to that make us cut tree for money, and not develop technologies if they are not profitable within a short time-window. We have the technology to plant more trees right now, but we aren't.
People plant loads of trees for lumber, but you're right, it's an economics question in the end.
This actually means I'm also worried about something currently impossible: that when we do develop the tech sufficiently to be useful, if it's cheap enough to be profitable, nothing would seem to stop extraction. So CO2 goes down to, what, 300ppm? Pre-industrial? Ice age? Same coin, other side. We want to flip a coin and have it land on the edge.
A single world government could organise to fix this either way, but as all leadership roles come with the risk of the leader being fundamentally bad, this isn't something I'd advocate for either.
Sure, but you said "It's practically a claim of perpetual motion." which is overstating the challenge to a much greater degree than this understates it.
If you actually use captured carbon for something productive like synthetic fuel (where CO2 gets re-emitted) you are kinda ruining the point though.
Thats what makes this even less attractive-- those plants are expensive to build and operate and you can't even really use the product in the most obvious ways.
I think 1.5°C is already basically impossible; scenarios between 2°C and 4°C by 2100 over pre-industrial levels seem achievable-- that would be a total remaining CO2 budget of ~3 Tera-tons of CO2 within 2100.
That is an average of 4 tons of CO2/person/year for 10 billion people. Americans are at 3x that right now, Europeans/Chinese 2x, and a few wealthy nations are already there (France, Switzerland, Israel). Poorer countries like India are significantly under that value (for now!).
Doubling that CO2 budget to 6000 Gt would make things significantly worse (5° expected temperature increase or more).
Oh, we're definitely going to need direct air capture, which consumes massive amounts of energy. Fortunately, it's only massive compared to things like global shipping, not compared to the sun that hits the Earth.
I would recommend reading or watching what Tony Seba has put out. He has correctly predicted where we ended up with solar, and his predictions for the next stage of the energy transition is very remarkable and uplifting. It seems overly optimistic at first but makes a lot of sense when you look at the trend lines.
I think the raw economics behind the transition are very interesting. People have a hard time imagining transformative changes. They keep trying to project the current state of affairs onto the post transition state. Of course the current state is mostly the result of how things used to work and not really a predictor for the future. When things stop working in the same way, a lot of other things start shifting. For example steel production is happening close to where coal used to be produced. And a lot of other industries depend on steel. What happens if steel production transitions to renewables? It will move to wherever renewables are cheapest. Which typically isn't where it's currently happening. Everything depending on cheap steel might move as well.
I think the current US policies are unfortunate (for the US) but ultimately futile. They'll fall behind and will see their exports affected. That will lead to local economic problems that ultimately will lead to economic reform to fix that. It will delay the energy transition in the US for a bit (10-20 years, maybe less). The tariffs will curtail imports. Which, ironically means other countries will be less dependent on exporting to it. And also less motivated to import relatively expensive things from the US. So US exports will decline in lockstep with its imports. And the whole tariff volatility just means that countries will start insulating themselves from being dependent on anything coming from the US. And that will extend to all sectors in the US. Agriculture, gas, cars, software services, etc.
The obvious fix to this in a few years will be a hard break with the (recent) past and ending trade wars and pulling the plug on the fossil fuel industry. Which by then won't be competitive anymore. It actually isn't right now but the US chooses to shove that under the carpet with trillions of dollars of government support. And most of that money is being borrowed. Interest and inflation is going to be a key thing to keep an eye on in the next few years. The US is sitting on a big stinky gas fueled debt bubble currently. What happens when that bursts and the gas becomes worthless?
> ...people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours.
This is amazing! Whether you believe photovoltaics are the most efficient form of green energy production or not, you cannot argue the impressive economics behind them. Successful engineering has to meet the market at the end of the day.
It is, unfortunately, also an apples to oranges comparison. A coal plant actually generates 1GW, 24/7, while "a gigawatt's worth" of solar panels is theoretical peak capacity at noon on a cloudless day.
You got me. It was a honeypot of a term, "efficiency."
The point is, it depends on how you define it. Engineers may say efficiency is determined by the properties of the photovoltaic cells themselves. Economists may argue it's cost per kilowatt. Politicians may say it's how quickly we can construct solar farms...
being a sentence fragment, not much! It helps to zoom out to the context of the entire sentence, where the GP says: "Whether you believe photovoltaics are the most efficient form of green energy production or not, you cannot argue the impressive economics behind them"
It's definitely impressive that the cost per watt of a PV panel is roughly 13% of where it was just 15 years ago.
You're overstating the current price of PV panels by a factor of three to five; it's closer to 3% of the 15-years-ago price than to 13%. That graph ends in 02023, at US$0.31/Wp, toward the end of the solar-panel bubble set up by the price-fixing cartel at the time. The actual current price is €0.11/Wp, or €0.06/Wp for low-cost (low-efficiency, no-warranty) panels: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...
€0.11 is 5% of US$2.39 (the Wp price on that graph from 02010), and €0.06 is 2.7% of it. However, my notes from 02016 say that the Solarserver price index for July 02010 was €1.62/Wp; sadly I did not note which module class that was. €0.11 is 6.8% of €1.62, but of course the Euro was worth more at the time...
This three-to-five-fold difference is why you're seeing this article now.
I only skimmed the article but there didn’t seem to be much written about how much of that non-electric fossil fuel is waste heat. I know there are versions of the energy source-sink graph which shows wasted energy. Why didn’t the author use it? Weird.
There are studies on how much energy is required to decarbonise everything, not just local electricity production. The energy required is far less than what you’d think if you look at the primary energy of all the energy we use today.
One aspect of this is what you see with the transition to EV or from gas to induction cook tops. It comes with a huge reduction in wasted energy.
The other aspect is the transition to heat pumps, which is over 100% efficient, so you need a lot less energy to provide the same amount of heat. There are now commercial industrial heat pumps that has reached 200°C, which enables the use in more industrial applications.
The third is the transition to recycling. At some point we will have enough materials for all that we need to do. The green energy transition requires a big temporary jump in the amount of lithium and copper we need. But once all vehicles have been transitioned to EVs, most of those material will come from recycled materials, cutting the energy required to acquire those materials to a tiny fraction of what we need now.
Nice article explaining solar energy policy. I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms. Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.
One of the good things about solar is the lack of a mismatch between solar production curve and human needs.
People use more energy during the day.
People, globally, use more energy in the summer.
This might not be intuitive if you live nearer the poles, but that's not representative of where the global population live.
And in some of those places, like California people obsesses about the "peak" that is left after you subtract all the solar energy, even if it's lower than the previous real peak.
Luckily that fake peak is immediately after sunset and so easily beaten with a small amount of battery, leaving a much cheaper and easier problem to solve as the peaks are really what drives electricity costs, dictating transmission size and standby capacity.
What "critical look" is there to take? How about the way that the US gov't subsidizes the oil and gas industry, and is about to restart the coal industry? For some reason gov't investment in industry is only bad when China does it.
China bad when it's the only country that actually does something meaningful.
Cheap batteries are fueling energy transition and the demand is only met by huge overproduction by china.
Its not laziness, its corruption. The USA has a government that's tainted by moneyed interests who don't want their established gravy train derailed no matter how much it's fucking the entire planets environment. Now add to that, the current administration is too stupid and short sighted to ever incentivize change.
A "critical look" from a US magazine would explore how, with solar power clearly being the future, the US has abdicated its energy dominance to another country. It would discuss the potential ramifications of us not owning our energy infrastructure supply chain the way we do with oil/gas, and what might be done about that.
The New Yorker is a US magazine. From the US perspective, yes, it is "good" when we do it and "bad" when China does it in a way that could negatively impact us.
Nobody complains about China investing in its private industry, all wealthy nations do that. Everybody complains that China is a dictatorship that a) treats its people like shit, b) exploits these shitty conditions to gain global market advantage with state-owned companies, and c) keeps foreign companies from exploiting it, too.
Obviously it is more complex than that, but in a nutshell it's part butt-hurt and part amalgamation of state and private enterprise that does not mesh well with classic liberal ideas of freedom and human dignity.
The Government and actions of the United States also does not mesh well classic liberal ideas of freedom and human dignity, so this seems to be a hypocritical complaint.
Any disagreement in how much they should be taxed (e.g. 10,20,30,50,90%) can be considered a subsidy.
What people are mostly concerned with is whether a subsidy is distorting via over production. E.g. when China entered the market in solar, most western solar companies following stricter environmental protection requirements went out of business.
I'm fully off grid (even had utility power but had them remove it). Cook on electric, have electric water heater, using AC and have enough panels and batteries to not even need a backup generator.
That is about the numbers that we get in Sweden. Those months were solar production is lowest is also the months that consumption is highest for the average household, around 400% compared to the warmest summer months. As a result, energy prices are also significant higher during winter compared to summer.
> I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms
There's going to be a beautiful synergy here between electric vehicles and solar. Because an EV battery is already easily enough to power most houses through 14-16 hours of darkness, so if it can be a sink for solar during the day it can then be a source during the night. The future will have a combo of residential battery storage and V2H/V2G which has an attractive property that it scales naturally with population (every new person that moves to a location brings their EV battery with them).
I can't see how this could be true. Many people will need to drive the ev to work during the day, and if you discharge it at night then when are you really charging?
It may be true for some who WFH often or in some cases, but not enough EVs will be able to discharge overnight for a v2g battery revolution.
You're not left with a flat battery at the end of the night. Many vehicles are combined in intelligent systems which work together to ensure that the vehicles have the energy they need (which is easy to set in all the systems I've seen) but provide enough grid support to make this work.
Remember that even my little town car (Renault Zoe) has a 52kWh battery.... which would run my house for five days. So the energy stored in these systems can be considerable.
The people doing these things have thought a lot about it. Take a look at this video - it's a bit 'puff piece' but shows what one way of doing it looks like:
There are several scenarios where it would contribute:
1. You have access to a charger at work
2. You’re retired
3. You take public transportation or bike to work (fairly common scenario in Europe)
4. Work-from-home (got more common after covid, I know many people who do it at least once a week now, and that’s generally enough to charge what you need to drive for a week)
5. You charge only during the day on weekends (should be enough to cover the week for most people, even if you feed say 20% of it back to the grid through the week)
6. Rental fleet operators (booking data can inform charge/discharge policy)
7. Residential batteries, where you charge the EV at night with what you got during the day, every day, but set up a policy where you allow both the home battery and the EV battery to discharge if the electricity is expensive enough. I could see myself making decisions about WFH or biking to work based on electricity pricing.
Yes, it does rely on charging infra rolling out - either at work or with fast DC charging. But that is happening too. Well, in markets where EV adoption is encouraged - for the US, I guess we'll see.
> Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.
What would be a critical look though? They thought it would be good to invest in it and so they did, other countries also had that choice if they so wished to sponsor it for strategic purposes but they are ruled by a different ideology which made them decide to not do it.
I don't think there's anything to be critical about, they invested a lot in it and are reaping the benefits.
Should we also be critical about how the Internet started as a state-sponsored project? Many things that aren't commercially viable in its initial state of development need state-sponsorship to get off the ground to be exploited by private companies, the Chinese saw an opportunity for that in solar PV, kudos to them.
I think they meant critical as in a critique rather than a criticism. They are requesting discussion and exploration of the history and ramifications of China's policy, what the meaningful ROI and costs have been, and what the other (4-ish) countries that had the capacity for that sort of investment got out of non-investment (investment in other things).
> I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms.
Or just some old gas plants. No one is demanding a 100% solution. Let's get to 85% or whatever first. Arguments like this (which always appear in these threads) are mostly just noise. Pick the low hanging fruit, then argue about how to cross the finish line.
And the bit about China is an interesting article about trade policy but entirely unrelated to the technology being discussed. "Because it's Chinese" is a dumb reason to reject tech.
1) Gas peakers - where every kilowatt hour delivered by solar or wind is just a kilowatt hour of gas that would otherwise have been burned. We are generally still here - still burning gas while it's sunny and windy.
(98%/5 hours is for australia and will vary for different countries but probably not wildly).
3) Syngas fills in that last 2-5% with ~50% roundtrip efficiency. Every kilowatt hour used in those 5% times - those dark, windless nights will be quite expensive although, counterintuitively still cheaper than an every kilowatt hour generated by a nuclear power plant - https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
3 and to some extent 2 will require natural gas to be prohibited or taxed heavily.
Just one note, I believe what you mean is some form of gas made from renewables, most likely hydrogen.
"Syngas" is a term that has a relatively specific meaning in the chemical industry, notably it is a gas mixture of mostly Carbon Monoxide and Hydrogen. I do not think that this is what you mean.
My google-fu is failing to resurface the links, but IIRC:
One study determined the cheapest energy grids for many countries. IOW, if you had to rebuild the energy grid from scratch today, what would be the cheapest way to meet your needs?
And the answer was 90 - 95% renewables, depending on country. Solar + wind + batteries for 90 - 95% of the power, with natgas peakers for the rest. And that 90-95% number increases every year.
Another survey noted that while Australia and many other equatorial countries are optimal for solar, Finland is pessimal. Most countries have already passed the point where solar is best in pure financial terms. Finland hasn't, but it's very close. Which is insane, given that Finland is a poor place for solar, but a great place for wind, nuclear & geothermal.
Finland does not have any geothermal. The country lies on two billion years old basement rock with approximately zero geothermal activity.
Wind is the dominanting renewable source, with enough of it for Finland to enjoy the second cheapest electricity in Europe last year. And indeed, even solar is profitable, hindered by the winters but helped by the long days during summer.
One of the reasons I dont expect the australia storage model I cited to be wildly different to, say, Finland is that areas of the world which dont get a lot of sunlight tend to have a lot more wind and hydro potential per capita.
I doubt there are any places in the world where some carbon free combination of solar, wind, hydro, pumped storage, batteries and syngas isnt economic.
Unfortunately, natgas has a large sunk cost advantage. If we were building from scratch in 2025, syngas for the last 2-10% would be competitive. But we have a lot of natgas infrastructure. Syngas's advantage is that it can be locally produced and stored. Natgas has to be shipped large distances, but we already have the infrastructure to do that.
The correct solution is to make China pay tariffs in proportion to their explicit and implicit state support for their "private" industries. It is not too late to push back.
Whatever the number is in the west, China has on average ~ 10x the amount of subsidies than the west when it comes to manufacturing.
Policy makers are trying to decide whether it’s too risky to shut down all manufacturing of heavy machine capable industries and hand it over to China.
A remarkably positive and hopeful article. It's really staggering seeing the figures of not just how much solar has grown in recent years, but how massively its growth has outstripped everyone's predictions from essentially any time in the past.
I also really liked this passage about the direct on-the-ground effects of being able to install solar panels:
> If you have travelled through rural Asia, you know the sound of diesel generators pumping the millions of deep tube wells that were a chief driver of the agricultural Green Revolution of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Now solar electricity is pumping the water—diesel sales in Pakistan apparently fell thirty per cent in 2024. If you’re a farmer, that’s kind of a miracle; fuel, one of your biggest costs, is simply gone.
Being able to pay a one-time up-front cost and just....never have to worry about paying for fuel for your irrigation system again. Truly remarkable.
It is, if you'll pardon the pun, quite a ray of sunshine in these otherwise dark and uncertain times.
> diesel sales in Pakistan apparently fell thirty per cent in 2024
If true, this is fantastic news for Pakistan. They are in the middle of an awful economic crisis, that includes a balance of payments crisis (central bank has too few dollars to support necessary imports, like oil and gas). Anything they do to reduce trade defects will be very helpful.
Batteries will soon follow the same trajectory, just lagged. The same economic forces will produce the same outcome. We now have cost-effective stationary storage solution with non-scarce inputs, manufacturers are just waiting for the demand.
It's hard to see this truth right now, because the demand isn't there for it to happen just yet. At the margin, energy developers will install solar instead of batteries, up until the point that the grid is saturated with solar, at which point they will switch to batteries. But very few energy grids have reached that point of saturation, so demand hasn't sent manufacturers the market signal to begin high-volume production of grid storage. That will change as more grids mature like California/Texas.
In Star Trek The Next Generation, energy is a 'solved problem'. Material needs are also a 'solved problem'.
Money doesn't exist anymore.
I think at least 70% of the Hacker News crowd would hate this world because they would have no idea what to do with their life under these circumstances.
What is life about except turning a profit? How can you have power over other people? Feel important with all your money? Look at Elon, he's happy.
(They probably would become Ferengi).
Maybe people can learn something from the anarchist David Graeber.
If you get an nginx page (I seem to get one pretty often), you can try archive.today, archive.li, or any of the alternates in the URL section on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today
If the article has already been archived, you can select one of the snapshots which the archive site will show you.
If it hasn't, click to archive it and wait ~5 minutes for it to finish. You'll get access to the snapshot and a URL you can share.
> If you get an nginx page (I seem to get one pretty often)
It appears to be a rate-limit mechanism of some sort specific to a fingerprint. Clearing cookies for archive.[is|vn|fo|md] may (or may not) get you past it.
Do you mean how are people making archive links? They go to archive.is and provide a paywalled link and the website archives and displays the content. I can't tell you how they get around paywalls or how archive.is has managed to not get shutdown, but that's how it's done.
This year, so far, all of my panels have produced at least 300kwhr of (usable) power. And thats in london, which isn't the sunniest of places.
Is solar the only solution? no. but for places like spain, france and italy, its a very cheap solution to handle peak aircon load. Thats without any kind of battery load shifting.
But!
Solar is not a replacement for nuclear. but currently its so cheap it means that poorer countries are now able to afford stable micro grids, something not possible before.
"This work has shown that the EROI of fossil fuels drops considerably when moving from a final stage (approximately 8.5) to a useful stage analysis (approximately 3.5). The low overall EROI value at the useful stage, however, hides large differences across fossil fuel groups and end uses, with average useful stage energy returns being much higher for heating compared with mechanical end uses. In addition, we find that fossil fuel useful-stage energy returns have remained fairly constant on average over time (except for fossil gas) and may even have slightly increased. Such findings contradict the conventional narrative according to which fossil fuels present very high, although rapidly decreasing, energy returns.
Next, we find that the EROI equivalent value for which electricity-yielding renewable energy systems deliver the same net useful energy as fossil fuels is as low as 4.6, due to the substantially higher final-to-useful efficiency of electricity compared to those of fossil fuel-based energy carriers. This value is, however, highly variable across the fossil fuels and end uses considered. We also find that most literature-sourced EROI values for electricity-yielding renewable energy technologies are higher than the EROI equivalent we have calculated, even when adjusting the values for the implications of intermittency using a wide range of energy transition scenarios. This result suggests that renewable energy may deliver more net useful energy than their fossil fuel counterparts for the same amount of final energy invested."
EROI only has to be greater than one for the number to rapidly lose its meaning relative to every other input (and externality) of a given energy technology. It makes no sense to focus on it.
Return on energy is different from cost, and it's strange that you're ignoring that. When you look at the levelized cost of energy, solar and onshore wind win: On a per-kWh basis, they produce the cheapest energy around. Gas combined cycle plants are close, but they have pollution and CO2 drawbacks.
LCOE doesn't capture everything you want, but when your grid mix is low on solar, it's the most relevant metric. When we get 15x return on energy and the energy we produce is cheap, you can ... use 1/15th of that energy to make more solar panels. And we're getting better at producing them by the year: Energy input is down and efficiency is up.
Nuclear is about 3x as expensive per kWh generated and it's not as dispatchable. Fossil fuels have this annoying problem of emitting co2and contributing a lot to climate change. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying to find ways to drive the cost of nuclear down - we should! - but from the perspective of "What generation should I install tomorrow?", solar and wind, augmented with a bit of storage, are really impressive: They're the fastest to bring online and provide the cheapest energy. The cost to them is you probably have to pay your gas plant operators a higher capacity fee for rare occasions, but that's ok. In a region like mine (PJM - pennsylvania, new jersey, virginia, ohio, etc.), they still make a profit while burning less gas, and consumer energy cost drops.
It seems weird to get all religious about technology choices when they each have advantages and disadvantages and combine pretty well to even out those differences. It would be expensive to be 100% solar+wind+storage because of the overprovisioning needed. But a mix instead of running 100% fossil (or 100% nuclear) would drop your costs considerably and be faster to build out.
From a pure physics and first principles perspective, a higher EROI implies higher scalability and lower costs.
Nuclear today has high costs associated to it due to uncertainty in permitting, high upfront costs due to red-tape, annd archaic regulations that stifle any innovation. These make risk management prohibitively expensive as is the cost of insuring them. If the catastrophic rate of failure and associated deaths are far far smaller than what’s generally accepted in society(think fatalities due to vehicle accidents), then we must work to removing the red-tape to ease construction of these. They’re also far more green to operate.
This way, we can keep solar for residential, and for industries to offset their own use(think data centers investing in their own energy supply instead of paying others. Think on-premise vs off-premise).
Let's start with privatizing the risk of it going kaboom. Why do we need red tape that pushes the cleanup costs onto taxpayer shoulders? It's so safe!
Sophisticated private insurers being willing to shoulder the full financial downside of nuclear power plants going fukushima (not < 1% as it is now!) will give everybody confidence that they're not just pushing propaganda exaggerating how safe they are to an unsophisticated public.
Assuming you are correct, there will be less red tape, the sophisticated insurers will happily take on the additional risks and unsophisticated taxpayers dont have to worry about being on the hook for one of those ~$800 billion Fukushima style cleanup events.
I wont hold my breath though.... after all, they know the nuclear industry would stop existing if insurance were actually priced according to the risk even if the consumers of their expensive public relations campaigns dont.
This is already happening, that and the crypto boom from a few years ago.
> and lift the poor and middle class up
But this is not happening; the ones doing AI stuff, crypto stuff, energy stuff have no interest in lifting any classes up. Energy prices are not going down, because demand is going up alongside supply, to the point where in some places the energy grid can't keep up. At-home solar and EVs are putting strain on the residential grids, even the newly built ones that have been reinforced 4x compared to the power grid of 10, 20 years ago.
Thorium reactors will cost billions and decades to build, even if you can find a location, get past the legal hurdles, the societal outrage, NIMBYism, etc. Meanwhile, you can get solar panels from your local DIY store, or order a pallet of them off the internet for cheap. Anyone with roof or field space can build themselves a solar farm, but nuclear or thorium reactors are huge, nationwide and political investments.
1. If something's expensive enough, that turns into manpower and then energy use as you look at the whole supply chain.
2. The ratio doesn't really matter once it hits double digits. If something outputs 100 energy units, the difference between it costing 10 energy units to build versus costing .01 energy units to build isn't a game changer. The important number is that almost all the energy it makes is "profit". And if you can make a solar panel output a few percent more energy, that matters more than getting the energy cost to 0 and having an infinite ratio would matter. All else equal, a solar panel that costs 4kWh to make and has a 1000x return is worse than a solar panel that costs 400kWh to make and has a 15x return.
While that may be true - I can invest in home solar and have zero or near zero electricity costs at reasonable prices with a 5 to 7 year payback period. Near me solar farms run at a profit here in England, and yet I don't believe any nuclear power plant has run at a profit without government assistance, or subsidies, and none are yet expected to fund their own decommissioning and clean up - society will bear these costs.
It's not entirely 1:1. CA has about 20GW of solar production, and the solar+storage together completely replace about 5GW of fossil capacity.
(But don't discount wind. Wind+solar combine pretty well, and if you throw that in, you'll see that CA is actually replacing about 10GW of fossil capacity with solar+storage+wind. That's _capacity_, not production, so that's 8GW of avoided plant construction.)
We still need more progress in storage, for sure, but the trajectory has been good so far. Storage prices have continued to drop and given the lag of construction times, we should expect online storage to continue to improve for at least several years. Another bit of battery coming online should let CA take that from 5 to 7GW of replaced peak capacity from solar+storage.
Exactly my point. Solar and Wind being intermittent require additional expense of grid storage which other forms of energy do not need.
So to scale, for each GW of solar, you’ll need a GW of storage plus the energy reserve to take through the night. Can’t rely on wind here as that’s also intermittent.
And grid storage is energy intensive and sets up twisted incentives for those playing to get rich with energy arbitrage. Think solar farm generators owning their own grid storage and reducing solar output to sell at higher $ from storage. Because, with intermittent sources pricing has to be more dynamic.
Totally. Our local electric supplier just introduced it as an option and I love it - admitting that none of us here are normal people, I reprogrammed my thermostats to be a degree warmer during peak times, shifted when we run dishes and laundry, and I run some of the compute load off of UPS. (And I have a little solar). I'm saving about $30/month on my power bill with it. It's cool.
> twisted incentives for those playing to get rich with energy arbitrage
You're saying energy arbitrage doesn't happen right now?
> Think solar farm generators owning their own grid storage and reducing solar output to sell at higher $ from storage
If enough generators do that they'll drive down the price of power at night and increase the price of power in the daytime. This will incentivize the opposite behavior.
Nuclear seems to only work if nation-states build and operate it directly - no private firm can build them profitably and on time.
If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that, please let people know, but with the current defunding everything mindset and general gridlock and one bill a year passed I think solar will be much cheaper by the time you even start breaking the ground on a thorium reactor.
>Nuclear seems to only work if nation-states build and operate it directly - no private firm can build them profitably and on time.
Nation states are not able to run the plants profitably either, they just don't run out of money.
Look at France, the US, UK, Germany and Japan for example. They all have immense costs related to nuclear power that is not covered by the sale of nuclear electricity.
Yeah, but if your intent is to support industry by having cheap energy costs that works out for you. Same reason public transit and police run at a loss, in theory.
>Yeah, but if your intent is to support industry by having cheap energy costs that works out for you
Short-term perhaps, but pretending that something expensive is cheap doesn't really work in the long run.
Investments are supposed to be an initial cost upfront that pays off later. Like building roads, bridges and such. For energy, an investment would be to take the cost of a renewable infrastructure, energy storage, solar roofs and such. Once they are in place they have minimal costs and give extremely cheap and reliable energy (reliable because of the distribution and redundancy).
Nuclear is kind of the opposite, you get the payoff upfront but have to pay an unknown amount basically forever afterwards. This cost eventually catches up to you.
France today is in a manner of speaking still paying for electricity they consumed in the 80s and 90s by bailing out EDF. Yet the common opinion still seems to be that they have "cheap electricity".
I think France has the most expensive energy infrastructure in Europe, and it will sooner or later become impossible to pretend otherwise.
I’m honestly not sure I understand. All electricity export charts I see show France as a net exporter of electricity and by a huge margin. What am I missing?
Nuclear works, it's just more expensive. We can quibble over other things (land use, nuclear waste, nuclear proliferation, embedded carbon, energy independence, social licensing, construction time, local insolation levels and seasonality), but 90% of the equation is just cost. Nuclear is damn expensive compared to wind and solar.
When France and Germany built their nuclear, solar and wind was too expensive. But it's changed now. Nobody should decomission nuclear plants that already exist, because the fixed costs are already paid for, but building new ones doesn't make economic sense.
> If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that
Impossible.
Federal government in US is failing along with the rest of large scale western style governments. They are too big, cost too much, and have too many fundamental structural deficiencies.
The model of having professional class of administrators and politicians running the country as part of a massive bureaucracy is one that can't work as it is unmanageable and full of conflicts of interests, moral hazards, political market failures and so on and so forth.
They carry on just through inertia at this point. Their one talent is creating a image of control and stability without actually providing any.
If you ever worked in a large publicly traded corporation and realized just how dysfunctional they are as a organization, multiply that a thousandfold and you have modern western governments.
Nuclear is expensive and doesn't work because there are a lot of people in power and next to power that don't want it to work.
> Federal government in US is failing along with the rest of large scale western style governments. They are too big, cost too much, and have too many fundamental structural deficiencies.
How do you see those governments failing, and when?
When sorting countries by tax burden (as a percentage of GDP), then you will find that there are tons of extremely livable countries at the top (wealthy European nations), while basically everything under ~10% GDP taxation is a 3rd world disaster.
How big of a GDP percentage would you propose can a government take at most and not "invariably fall apart"?
There are also a lot of people on the ground that don't want it to work, or will protest it, and that's where state power seems to work well to cut through opposition and just build things. Certainly a lot of tradeoffs are made to allow that but the Chinese government seems very good at building.
I'm not sure if it's the model or the particular culture working though - aren't there also a lot of party bureaucrats over there? So the core is authority or agency directed at the center of it, I think.
So get government out of the space here. Keep essential regulations for ensuring safety and so that insurance companies can cover liabilities. Let the free market play it out.
If the profit incentives are there(which there are as higher EROI = lowest cost per kWh), then it is a race to who can provide the product(energy) at the lowest cost more reliably.
Government unfortunately has a monopoly here as traditional reactors had proliferations concerns, needed much large capital, and political will. But if reactors can be modular and costs low that a city could afford it, then you can also have decentralized reactors just like you have with solar.
Like I said, if you have some pathway to a functional government (either to cut regulations sufficiently or to build it, I don't think either is much simpler) then you should get on that part first. But I'm not holding out much hope. We can barely reduce regulations to build houses, and voters like houses. You'll have environmental protests a plenty for city scale small reactors if they're in anyone's "backyard" at all
China seems to be taking the joke rather seriously [1]
> The 277 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in China in 2024 alone is more than twice as much as the 121 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2024.
So they took all the solar installed in the USA since forever, and build it in a year. Twice.
That being said, they're _also_ building everything else:
* PWR nuclear [2] (sadly, they managed to make EPR work faster than the E in EPR, but we're getting there.) Here market and investment and regulation are the hitters. "Fusion nuclear" will always be 50 years away ; until we get SMRs, "Fission nuclear" will always be a couple of years late and a few millions over budget.
* indeed, Thorium nuclear [3] (although it's far from powering any air-conditionner in any pig shed any time soon)
* and looooooots of coal [4]
So basically, China has understood that the answer to "what kind of electricity source should we build ?" is "YES".
The faster they replace "new coal" by "new anything else", the better we are as as species, since they're the world factory - so the lifecycle of _everything_ improve when they improve their grid.
Of course, here's to hoping they're not lying they way off...
I’d also point out that China is teetering on the edge of a financial meltdown, having also built complete ghost cities, so some of these investments may not look very smart in just a few years. Don’t confuse investment with malinvestment, in other words. Throwing money at everything, much in direct opposition to market forces, has never really been shown to be a winning strategy.
Most of those "ghost cities" got populated in "just a few years", so much so that wiki had to change Chinese Ghost City entry into "Underoccupied Developements". And what is the scale of PRC "malinvestment", quantify or approximate it. Here's a hint, PRC RE+construction as % of GDP = ~15%, about OECD average. PRC just very good at building and gets much more from it, even if some sits idle first or ultimately gets wasted. AKA PRC barely throws more money that OECD in RE sector, they certainly have the option of throwing less money, but that only makes them more efficient relative to rest.
Entire construction + downstream industries is 30%, most of 15% redirected to renewable row out where solar already has better ROI than importing oil, aka, until PRC displaces another 10m barrels per day via renewables, or hits US per capita energy use (double current), any domestic power investment is positive. Throwing money at increasing cheaper power that makes manipulating atoms in every down stream sector is directly what market forces is ALWAYS driving towards. Increasing energy per capita is the only proven winning civilzational development strategy.
Don't confuse some malinvestments for retarded existential PRC collapse narrative. For reference US spending 18% GDP on health care, i.e. 2x OECD average of 9% is single handly more inefficient than likely ALL Chinese policies can misallocate, i.e. that 9% of excess US health spending that gets wasted by scribes can build entire PRC HSR network in like 5 months.
It's not "wasted by scribes" in the US - it very much goes into the pockets of the "pharaohs" (aka "corporate boards"), and, through campaigns donations, to the "high and low priests" (aka "politicians").
The fact that it was supposed to be used to cure peasants from malaria or ensure next year's yield of grain is just a detail.
Don't bother questioning the pharaohs ! Instead, attend the ceremony for when we turn them into gods (aka "IPOs").
Housing projects are handled by local governments in China, not the central government. What you're saying is as absurd as saying Detroit going bankrupt is hurting the credibility of Uncle Sam.
I really don't know how to assess China's economic or financial state.
I vividly remember hearing about how the housing bubble was going to break any time soon... a decade ago ?
And then how they would never survive Covid-19. Or the Trump tarrifs, etc...
To be clear, I'm not saying they're invincible or anything - maybe the economy _did_ collapse, but not uniformly, and maybe the central government is able to bail out the economy more efficiently than western economies, and maybe they're just lying their way off, etc...
But so far I have the same feelings about rumors on china's economical death as on Russian ones - metaphorically, I'll believe it when I see the corpse, and when its head has been chopped off for safety ;)
I think you have misunderstood energy yield expressed as a multiple of energy input as a fundamental measurement of the viability of any energy technology.
If you run scenarios, you’ll find that this number is entirely irrelevant. Instead, try considering the availability and required quantities of raw materials and inputs like silver, indium, land, and of course money which is the best proxy for measuring how much of the world economy would be required for building out any technology.
China is literally making energy that cheap using solar. They add about an entire United Kingdom's worth of solar energy every year (about 270 TWh), that's 100x(!) of what they add in nuclear capacity (which is almost nothing). Even in China solar and renewables are rendering the nuclear sector obsolete. (afaik they're canceling about a third or half of running projects)
And paraphrasing Bruno Maçães from his latest book, far from a caveman technology one of the most transformative aspects of solar energy is that it will move the world from a logic of energy stocks to a logic of energy flows. Decentralized, dynamic, expandable and moveable, a solar network is to the legacy energy grid what the internet is to the TV broadcasting center. It's to move from a society of matter to a society of energy.
To make that philosophical point practical, Pakistan last year added a third of its entire consumption in solar energy. Significant parts of the population are now grid independent. In a country where natural disasters and central mismanagement produced a fragile system, you might soon have one of the most robust, distributed and deterritorialized energy systems.
China is a beast in solar. Truly amazing work. That being said not only are they not canceling any nuclear projects, they announced close to 10 more just in 2025. They are building both and with a great pace.
For what it's worth, it didn't throw one up for me. Anyway, for anyone wondering what's beyond the slightly clickbaity headline, it isn't about some astronomical phenomenon; the subheading reads "In the past two years, without much notice, solar power has begun to truly transform the world’s energy system." and the article is all about that.
> offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply.
A lot of this article was clearly written with rose-colored glasses on, but this might be the silliest line of all. The author just finished talking about how a single country makes up the overwhelming share of solar panel and battery production, but hey, look how much more "diffuse and ubiquitous" it is!
You're right. We should quickly buy millions of solar panels from China and put them in a strategic reserve to future proof our energy needs and secure decades-long energy independence from China. We should also subsidize domestic production ASAP.
Once you build a solar plant, you no longer have a dependence on the country that made those solar panels. That solar plant will function for 50 years with very little maintenance. China is basically a single point of failure for future power expansion, but they can't take away solar plants already built.
> China is basically a single point of failure for future power expansion
Not really. There used to be many more competitors, but Chinese govt support for their industry crushed competition elsewhere. It will a little bit more expensive to buy panels made outside China. That's it.
That's blatantly false. The panels themselves are typically rated for a 25-year service life [1,2]. Inverters are typically rated for about a decade [3,4]. Solar panels also must be cleaned periodically [5], otherwise their output is reduced. It's a power plant. It will need maintenance. As PV technology improves, there's also pressure to buy better solar panels [6] to replace older, lower-performing panels, resulting in disposal problems that hardly need explanation.
I'm all for solar, generally. Among current renewables, it's the most feasible solution for much of the US. But the idea that they're a "one-time" cost is fantasy.
That's a blatantly disingenuous argument that misses the point. Setting aside the accuracy of the 25-year figure, is it easier to buy solar panels once to use them for 25 years or stockpile 25 years' worth of fossil fuel?
I'm not arguing against maintenance items like cleaning, because obviously fossil fuel power plants need maintenance too. I'm directly responding to the perceived geopolitical risk. The question is: is it better for a country to experience a geopolitical risk with a solar-panel-producing nation or with an oil-producing nation? Bringing up items like cleaning is laughably irrelevant because where's the geopolitical risk in cleaning a solar panel?
> The question is: is it better for a country to experience a geopolitical risk with a solar-panel-producing nation or with an oil-producing nation?
If that's your only question, the answer is straightforward then, there's more oil producing nations than solar panels producing nations making the risk with oil lower.
China is so big in this sector that I don't think that you could even create a real strategy where they get <25% market share in the country solar imports.
You could somewhat mitigate this risk by buying a stock worth 5 years of panel installation of the country but as far as I know, nobody is doing that.
From a geopolitical point of view, if we increase solar/renewable, we decrease dependencies on fossil fuels. As fossil fuels are traded in USD, we decrease our needs of USD, so we decrease the value of the USD.
Isn't it what the current US administration want? A weak USD to boost export?
https://archive.is/lv3eU
> Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power—which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines.
It's interesting to realize that the vast majority of the energy used by humans comes from the sun (with the exception of nuclear and geothermal energy). Even hydro power comes from the sun, because the sun evaporates the water which then becomes part of rivers or other water reservoirs that power hydroelectric generators.
All fossil fuels also come from the sun!
The nuclear fuels are also probably from the Sun. Pretty much everything is the Sun.
Hm, no, don't the heavy elements used for nuclear fission come from a previous generation of stars?
They came from some other suns, technically.
Tidal power doesn't come from the sun either. It slows the earth's rotation by a tiny amount.
Is the origin of that rotation not also the gravitational wells created by the Sun?
No wonder people worshipped the Sun in ancient times!
The unsolved problem with solar power and wind power is how to store it so that it can be used 24/7. Stored at a affordable price that is. Storage so that the supply can be maintained 24/7 across the inevitable renewable ( sola and/'or wind droughts ) that can and do last several days, from time to time.
While the US is busy trying to revive the oil-soaked 20th century, places like Namibia are leapfrogging straight into a distributed, solar-powered future with YouTube tutorials... It's like watching the fossil era get out-hustled in real time.
To be fair the US is leading the world in solar and wind per capita
The US is at half the per capital levels of Sweden, and seems to lag behind most of Europe:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-ge...
Do I misunderstand?
What is your source for that statement? According to [1], countries like the Netherlands, Germany, Spain and Denmark are way ahead of the US in those respects.
[1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/
Tony Seba around 10 years ago predicted (among many other things) that ~2024 the cost of generating a unit of electricity onsite with PV will cost less than merely delivering the same unit of electricity over transmission infrastructure, not even considering the cost of generating that unit.
Nowadays he is diving into what he terms the phase change disruptions where he explores and thinks out the ramifications of these disruptions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9McWXZA5wc
The article doesn't mention a technology that deserves some attention because it counters the biggest and most obvious deficiency in solar: the sun doesn't always shine.
That technology is cables. Cables allow us to move energy over long distances. And with HVCD cables that can mean across continents, oceans, time zones, and climate regions. The nice things about cables is that they are currently being underutilized. They are designed to have enough capacity so that the grid continues to function at peak demand. Off peak, there is a lot of under utilized cable capacity. An obvious use for that would be transporting power to wherever batteries need to be re-charged from wherever there is excess solar/wind power. And cables can work both ways. So import when there's a shortage, export when there's a surplus.
And that includes the rapidly growing stock of batteries that are just sitting there with an average charge state close to more or less fully charged most of the time. We're talking terawatt hours of power. All you need to get at that is cables.
Long distance cables will start moving non trivial amounts of renewable power around as we start executing on plans to e.g. connect Moroccan solar with the UK, Australian solar with Singapore, east coast US to Europe, etc. There are lots of cable projects stuck in planning pipelines around the world. Cables can compensate for some of the localized variations in energy productions caused by seasonal effects, weather, or day/night cycles.
For the rest, we have nuclear, geothermal, hydro, and a rapidly growing stock of obsolete gas plants that we might still turn on on a rainy day. I think anyone still investing in gas plants will need a reality check: mothballed gas plant aren't going to be very profitable. But we'll keep some around for decades to come anyway.
Cables can be a great option in certain places but geography and politics limit where they can be used. No one is going to run a cable across the Pacific Ocean so that Russian solar power can supply evening peak demand loads in western North America.
Plausible alternatives to cables include ships full of synthetic diesel, ships full of iron, ships full of aluminum, or ships full of magnesium. Inside China HVDC cables are indeed carrying solar power across the continent, but the Netherlands have not managed to erect any yet. Cables provide efficient JIT power delivery, but they're vulnerable to precision-guided missiles, which Ukrainians are 3-D printing in their basements by the million, so the aluminum-air battery may return to commercial use.
There's at least one HVDC cable connected to Netherlands, Norned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NorNed .
As probably everyone knows, Netherlands is very flat and Norway very mountaneous. Norways is also very rainy. So it's a match made in heaven - Norway's mountain reservoirs can act as balancers for dutch wind power.
And to Denmark:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBRAcable
While Denmark in term essentially is a trading hub for electricity between Scandinavia, the UK and continental Europe.
Ships carrying energy are a pretty easy explosive target as well.
Local ressilence is needed in any case and mass produced batteries can provide that safety.
There's geopolitical implications. Solar is long stability, short conflict. It's easy to cut undersea cables, it's easy for instability arriving to one the landlocked countries in the middle of transit. This creates systemic risks that are asymmetric with respect to offense and defense.
Many would see this as an invitation to retreat from solar, but I view it as the opposite. Widespread solar will cause peace via the capitalist peace theory, similar to the role that trade plays in staking everyone in mutual stability. Stability will become a public good that everyone will want to preserve. Solar will be another part of the international diplomatic-cultural-economic web that binds countries together in mutual interest.
Resiliency can be figured out with creativity, it's not something to give up on at the first challenge.
To be fair, natural gas and oil shares similar systemic risks, whether it's pipelines open to sabotage or water transits being subject to blockade, such as the Malacca dilemma that China would face if it invades Taiwan. But at least with solar, it won't ruin countries with the resource curse, and in principle it doesn't give a small number of countries leverage since anyone can produce this fairly basic commodity.
Any country relying on international cables for electricity would need to build and maintain full local backup power capacity. The combined cost of cables + backup may be more than storage cost. (Of course there are many factors which affect all these costs)
Norway, Denmark and The Netherlands are all part of the European Union. Would you make the same claim if we were talking about US states? (With Texas being a special exception)
Better grid connections helps with variable weather but it does nothing for solar biggest down side.
Seasonal variation from December to May is enormous.
Storing months of power is a problem with no known solution.
North south connections enable solar power from Africa to be used around the year. And while solar is down in the winter, wind production usually peaks. If you have thousands of km of cable, there is a lot of power that can be moved around.
"Last year, for the third year straight, heat pumps outsold furnaces in the U.S."
Now that's a major development not mentioned much.
Heat pumps have both improved quite a bit, and become cheaper due to sheer volume.
I recently bought a heat pump dryer and it's pretty cool. No exhaust vent, just water drain. It also doesn't need the heavy duty power plug since it pulls so much less electricity than a typical heated air dryer.
Ah of course - it can recycle the heat. Hot air going out a vent is wasted energy that you've paid for.
> Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere
I’m all for solar - but does it really solve the geographical / geopolitical issues of oil, as it’s currently rolling out?
China produces pretty much all the solar panels - That’s quite a big concentration of power, even more so than oil.
I’m all for solar - but does it really solve the geographical / geopolitical issues of oil, as it’s currently rolling out?
Yes, because if the US blockades you so you can't import oil, your trucks and power plants stop running in six weeks. If the US blockades you so you can't import Chinese solar panels, your power grid stops running in 20 years. Actually, that's just the end of the warranty period, so more like 30. Or 40. The US is gonna have to keep up that blockade for a long time before it starts causing you any pain. Probably after the President For Life dies.
Not to mention that 20 years is enough time to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers. The issue with oil is it requires a constant flow of resources from specific locations in the world that are blessed by geography. Solar power has much less of that going on.
It's possible, but you may have noticed that out of the ≈200 countries in the world, over the last 20 years, about 180 of them have completely failed to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers, and about 100 of them have completely failed to develop a native industry of anything, continuing their agrarian and resource-extraction economies more or less as they have been for centuries, just with imported Chinese cellphones. People in those countries often blame the rich countries for keeping them down, for example by selling them goods at lower prices than their domestic production of those goods, and they're not completely wrong, but in many cases the dynamics preventing them from escaping that equilibrium are mostly internal.
Hypothetically, yes, such a blockaded country could develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers in 20 years, and that industry would have an easier time traveling up the learning curve on the domestic market without having to match the prices of the Chinese hyperscalers. But in about 90% of cases they would fail to do so, for the same reasons the US still doesn't have any high-speed trains 60 years after the Shinkansen entered service and still doesn't have a moon base 56 years after Neil Armstrong.
It's more banal than that. Oil you have to pay for. Which for most countries you need to constantly come up with foreign currency. If you have a financial crisis like hot money flees you end up at the mercy of the world banking systems mafia enforcers the IMF.
With solar and electrified transport and industry? Can't pay the loans for the solar panels? Sucks for the saps that loaned you the money. Come and take them.
Solar panels can be locally recycled. Oil cannot.
Of course if you don't build up a local solar industry you are still dependent on foreign countries but it's not that China has an unchanging monopoly on the solar industry.
> China produces pretty much all the solar panels
Why didn't other countries build up solar industries? Were busy with fossils? Were too greedy to subsidise?
Like everything else in manufacturing, economy of scale wins.
There's been plenty of subsidization efforts, but they made the mistake of subsidizing technologies that were too innovative and too early on in the scaling curve. e.g. Solyndra with CIGS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra
> Between 2009 and mid-2011 the price of polysilicon, the key ingredient for most competing technologies, dropped by about 89% due to Chinese advances in the Siemens process.
"Massive cost reduction in the existing, boring, process" beat "new technology". Possibly for the best in this case, since CIGS and CdTe are poisonous in a way that polysilicon isn't.
Man, Paul Krugman (here's a trigger for people who know they know better than him to respond that he's a hack!) was writing about the US giving up lead of solar tech to China back during the G. W. Bush admin... (which makes me feel old as hell)
In 1979 Jimmy Carter installed solar (thermal) panels on the White House roof as part of his fairly progressive environmental and fuel efficiency policies.
Now I feel old :/
And also angry that it's been 40 years and electricity generation is still >50% fossil fuels, never mind world energy use overall.
You forgot being too concerned with maintaining environmental and air quality regulations.
There's a reason Shanghai is known for really bad air quality. There's a reason the rate of GHG emissions are accelerating
China builds solar panels using electricity produced by burning coal.
China is by far the world largest producer of green house gases.
For goods we consume, though.
The piece doesn't mention the recent blackout in Spain. Wasn't it caused by the lack of energy sources with rotational inertia?
The reporting so far is that they did not manage the reactive power correct leading to voltage trip.
But the fossil and nuclear lobbies were straight on blaming renewables when it happened. They are desperate for any handouts they can get their hands on before a select few are preserved as museum pieces.
It was a design/dimensioning error, something was expected to absorb reactive power and it added it instead.
good article I just don't know why author prefer to spell all numbers using words rather than digits. It's very mentally taxing for me to read, e.g:
>> of twenty-one thousand respondents in twenty-one countries, found that sixty-eight per cent favored solar energy, “five times more [...]
could be just:
>> of 21,000 responders in 21 countries, found that 68% favored solar energy, "5x more [...]
I believe this is a New Yorker magazine house style thing. I'd assume the author uses numerals in the book this article is based on.
If there are two options, you can trust they'll go for the more verbose one.
Also Cape Town is a city in South Africa..no idea where Capetown is
That's simply good writing practice. I find it more taxing to read digits than prose.
This was a great positive start to the day. Thanks whoever posted that.
One point curious in its omission is whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget. Presumably that’s the critical metric in all of this.
[Edit: I ran this question through ChatGPT and the initial (unvalidated) response wasn’t so exciting. This obviously put a dampener on my mood. And I wondered why people like McKibben only talk about the upside. It can sometimes feel a bit like Kayfabe, playing with the the reader’s emotions. And like my old man says: if someone tells you about pros and cons, they’re an advisor. If someone tells you only about pros, they’re a salesman.]
Even if, for sake of argument, one outright denies the evident exponential growth in solar, a purely linear extrapolation of 2024's rate from [1] puts solar equal to today's coal output by 2042. Solar is fundamentally a factory product, so this is a wildly pessimistic case, just enough interest in the product to keep the lines running. If you believe solar will grow for even a few more years, but still declare that it should level off, it's the mid 30s. If you're willing to just fit the established trend, even that's a vast underestimate. The difference between which of these to believe is just how brave you are.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
Solar and wind are booming, but fossil fuels aren't shrinking nearly as fast in absolute terms
There's an article a while ago about the solar boom in a poor country that had unreliable electricity network. The result was, solar wasn't treated as a replacement, but as a new source of energy, which enabled them to do more industrious things. Of course that doesn't help with the carbon budget...
Countries are placing their bets. Fossil fuels will be a massive waste of investment in a decade. Anyone who can extrapolate a graph sees where this is headed.
Usually old energy sources don't go away until there's an economic contraction of some sort.
>whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget
I'm not sure I understand. There's no carbon budget, any carbon that we emit is carbon we'll have to re-capture somehow and the longer it stays in the atmosphere the longer it will have a heating effect.
I think renewable have accelerated to the point of matching the electricity growth worldwide: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
We've also passed the peak of CO2 per capita, but since the population is still growing we are still increasing carbon emitions worldwide. It's going to be a while before we stop emitting anything, and then longer before we start re-absorbing it...
Shrinking? China is growing their coal capacity (1). What people mistake is China is not "for renewables". They are for maximizing absolute output. That means they are "for everything"
(1) https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-has-more-than-...
Whenever I hear "carbon budget", I usually understand it as "how much CO2 we can still emit (net of sinks) before the warming passes a certain threshold (for example, some level of the Paris agreement.)
Is that a misunderstanding on my side ?
I highly doubt that we will have global negative emissions (CO2 capturing) within the next decades-- maybe by the end of the century.
Even very rich nations have a handful of prototype plants for CO2 capture right now at best, and the budget for things like this is the first thing that gets slashed by Doge et al.
If we were on track for lots of CO2 capture by 2050, we would see the beginnings already (massive investments, quickly scaling numbers of capture sites, rapid tech iteration).
Fully agree with the rest of your point though. I consider CO2 emissions as basically "raising the difficulty level" for current and future humans (in a very unethical way, disproportionately affecting poor/arid/coastal nations).
I'm also highly confident that human extinction from climate change is completely off the table (and I think a lot of people delude themselves into believing that scenario for no reason).
The problem with carbon capture is volume. There is about 0.04% CO2 in air. So in order to remove a ton of CO2, you would need to process thousands of tons of air, depending on the efficiency of the extraction process.
It's just kind of infeasible to pull the entire atmosphere through these plants. The largest one we have is called mammoth, claimed to remove 36000 tons of CO2 per year, meanwhile our emissions are measured in billions of tons per year. Like over 30 billion.
We would need about 30 mammoths to get to a million tons per year, and 30,000 mammoths to get to a billion. Then multiply by another 30 and in total we would need almost a million mommoth plants just to undo what we are doing right now at the same rate. Carbon capture is like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket.
How are you so confident that extinction is off the table? I've stopped following this stuff because it's depressing but last time I checked we were in dire straits and I haven't heard any good news on this front. I'm just seeing ice caps disappearing, ocean currents changing, weather changing, pretty much everything that's been predicted is now happening and it's not going to slow down any time soon.
> How are you so confident that extinction is off the table?
Because even the worst-case scenarios (=> think RCP8.5) are just not enough to get rid of us.
I can totally see populous breadbasket states turning into unliveable deserts, billions of deaths from famines and heatwaves, iconic coastal cities being lost to the sea and a giant loss of biodiversity-- but I simply don't see this eradicating our species.
Humans are too adaptable, and warming is invariably gonna leave too many survivable holdout regions.
I think that an all-out global nuclear war would be much more threatening to humanity, and even that I'm very confident we would survive as species.
Yeah so this is mostly just a difference of definition. When I say extinction I mean what you describe, essentially a total collapse of modern society. I don't care whether/how long a few people survive somewhere, your scenario is apocalyptic enough for me to label it an apocalypse.
I also think this process is likely to trigger a new world war. When nations start collapsing there will be two possible outcomes - other nations take them in or they go to war. They won't just sit down and die. And everyone else won't be able to handle the number of refugees even if they want to.
"Even very rich nations have a handful of prototype plants for CO2 capture right now at best, and the budget for things like this is the first thing that gets slashed by Doge et al."
Might want to take a look at China, or at least what IEA writes about CCUS and the like there.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202505/09/WS681d52e5a310a04a...
If electricity is sufficiently cheap it can be cheaper to capture carbon from the atmosphere for chemical industry than to use oil or coal there.
Do you have any source for this extraordinary claim? It's practically a claim of perpetual motion.
Carbon dioxide a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, even in concentrations which are immediately harmful to human life.
At the moment it's 400 parts per million. So in order to extract 1kg of Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere you have to pump 2500kg of air through the system. This alone makes it unlikely we can do this profitability.
You then need to extract the carbon dioxide using some technique which will probably involve cooling or pressuring that volume of air. Before finally transforming carbon dioxide, a very stable chemical compound, into a reagent which is actually useful (probably carbon monoxide).
Difficult engineering problem but working from first principles suggests that the energy requirememts are not insurmountable. The roundtrip efficiency is worse than batteries but much better than photosynthesis.
Terraform Industries (and others, like Synhelion) has a plausible if slightly optimistic target to be price competitive with fossil fuels for methane in the early 2030s.
Some places with very cheap to extract hydrocarbons like Saudi Arabia may be able to compete for a very long time, but there are many futures where most of humanity's hydrocarbon consumption (including the ones used for the chemical industry, plastics, etc) derives from atmospheric carbon.
And this can happen fast, the world (mostly China) has developed a truly massive manufacturing capacity for PV.
Terraform Industries (and others); I'd seriously consider taking a long bet that these companies turn out to be better at converting investor capital into employee salaries, for a finite period of time, than they are at converting atmospheric CO2 into natural gas.
If such a technology was possible then it would be far better to start with carbon capture from existing emitters. The concentration of CO2 being easily 3 orders of magnitude higher.
They said "If electricity is sufficiently cheap", which is less a claim and more a tautology.
Will it be that cheap? I think so, given that trees and grass etc. exist and get their carbon from the air.
Even with free electricity, the capital (and maintenance, consumables etc) costs of the process could easily be too high.
I suppose that in principle that is indeed possible; in practice, trees exist and self-seed, so the limit is our own ignorance.
We are also limited the incentives to that make us cut tree for money, and not develop technologies if they are not profitable within a short time-window. We have the technology to plant more trees right now, but we aren't.
People plant loads of trees for lumber, but you're right, it's an economics question in the end.
This actually means I'm also worried about something currently impossible: that when we do develop the tech sufficiently to be useful, if it's cheap enough to be profitable, nothing would seem to stop extraction. So CO2 goes down to, what, 300ppm? Pre-industrial? Ice age? Same coin, other side. We want to flip a coin and have it land on the edge.
A single world government could organise to fix this either way, but as all leadership roles come with the risk of the leader being fundamentally bad, this isn't something I'd advocate for either.
You could make the same argument about AGI. Just because nature does it doesn't mean it's easy for us to replicate in an industrial setting.
Sure, but you said "It's practically a claim of perpetual motion." which is overstating the challenge to a much greater degree than this understates it.
If you actually use captured carbon for something productive like synthetic fuel (where CO2 gets re-emitted) you are kinda ruining the point though.
Thats what makes this even less attractive-- those plants are expensive to build and operate and you can't even really use the product in the most obvious ways.
My apologies. By available carbon budget, I meant the carbon we can burn before we exceed 1.5 degrees, or 2 degrees etc.
I think 1.5°C is already basically impossible; scenarios between 2°C and 4°C by 2100 over pre-industrial levels seem achievable-- that would be a total remaining CO2 budget of ~3 Tera-tons of CO2 within 2100.
That is an average of 4 tons of CO2/person/year for 10 billion people. Americans are at 3x that right now, Europeans/Chinese 2x, and a few wealthy nations are already there (France, Switzerland, Israel). Poorer countries like India are significantly under that value (for now!).
Doubling that CO2 budget to 6000 Gt would make things significantly worse (5° expected temperature increase or more).
Oh, we're definitely going to need direct air capture, which consumes massive amounts of energy. Fortunately, it's only massive compared to things like global shipping, not compared to the sun that hits the Earth.
1.5 degrees was last year.
https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/en/news-archive/copernic...
The rollout of renewables is the main factor in climate predictions for 2100 reducing over time.
They're still bad, but better than they would have been with business as usual or if solar, wind and batteries hadn't plummeted in price:
https://climateactiontracker.org/global/emissions-pathways/
I would recommend reading or watching what Tony Seba has put out. He has correctly predicted where we ended up with solar, and his predictions for the next stage of the energy transition is very remarkable and uplifting. It seems overly optimistic at first but makes a lot of sense when you look at the trend lines.
I think the raw economics behind the transition are very interesting. People have a hard time imagining transformative changes. They keep trying to project the current state of affairs onto the post transition state. Of course the current state is mostly the result of how things used to work and not really a predictor for the future. When things stop working in the same way, a lot of other things start shifting. For example steel production is happening close to where coal used to be produced. And a lot of other industries depend on steel. What happens if steel production transitions to renewables? It will move to wherever renewables are cheapest. Which typically isn't where it's currently happening. Everything depending on cheap steel might move as well.
I think the current US policies are unfortunate (for the US) but ultimately futile. They'll fall behind and will see their exports affected. That will lead to local economic problems that ultimately will lead to economic reform to fix that. It will delay the energy transition in the US for a bit (10-20 years, maybe less). The tariffs will curtail imports. Which, ironically means other countries will be less dependent on exporting to it. And also less motivated to import relatively expensive things from the US. So US exports will decline in lockstep with its imports. And the whole tariff volatility just means that countries will start insulating themselves from being dependent on anything coming from the US. And that will extend to all sectors in the US. Agriculture, gas, cars, software services, etc.
The obvious fix to this in a few years will be a hard break with the (recent) past and ending trade wars and pulling the plug on the fossil fuel industry. Which by then won't be competitive anymore. It actually isn't right now but the US chooses to shove that under the carpet with trillions of dollars of government support. And most of that money is being borrowed. Interest and inflation is going to be a key thing to keep an eye on in the next few years. The US is sitting on a big stinky gas fueled debt bubble currently. What happens when that bursts and the gas becomes worthless?
> ...people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours.
This is amazing! Whether you believe photovoltaics are the most efficient form of green energy production or not, you cannot argue the impressive economics behind them. Successful engineering has to meet the market at the end of the day.
It is, unfortunately, also an apples to oranges comparison. A coal plant actually generates 1GW, 24/7, while "a gigawatt's worth" of solar panels is theoretical peak capacity at noon on a cloudless day.
> are the most efficient form
What does this even mean?
You got me. It was a honeypot of a term, "efficiency."
The point is, it depends on how you define it. Engineers may say efficiency is determined by the properties of the photovoltaic cells themselves. Economists may argue it's cost per kilowatt. Politicians may say it's how quickly we can construct solar farms...
being a sentence fragment, not much! It helps to zoom out to the context of the entire sentence, where the GP says: "Whether you believe photovoltaics are the most efficient form of green energy production or not, you cannot argue the impressive economics behind them"
It's definitely impressive that the cost per watt of a PV panel is roughly 13% of where it was just 15 years ago.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
You're overstating the current price of PV panels by a factor of three to five; it's closer to 3% of the 15-years-ago price than to 13%. That graph ends in 02023, at US$0.31/Wp, toward the end of the solar-panel bubble set up by the price-fixing cartel at the time. The actual current price is €0.11/Wp, or €0.06/Wp for low-cost (low-efficiency, no-warranty) panels: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...
€0.11 is 5% of US$2.39 (the Wp price on that graph from 02010), and €0.06 is 2.7% of it. However, my notes from 02016 say that the Solarserver price index for July 02010 was €1.62/Wp; sadly I did not note which module class that was. €0.11 is 6.8% of €1.62, but of course the Euro was worth more at the time...
This three-to-five-fold difference is why you're seeing this article now.
I just can't get that exuberant when I also read things like this [1].
[1] - https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-tale-of-two-ene...
I only skimmed the article but there didn’t seem to be much written about how much of that non-electric fossil fuel is waste heat. I know there are versions of the energy source-sink graph which shows wasted energy. Why didn’t the author use it? Weird.
There are studies on how much energy is required to decarbonise everything, not just local electricity production. The energy required is far less than what you’d think if you look at the primary energy of all the energy we use today.
One aspect of this is what you see with the transition to EV or from gas to induction cook tops. It comes with a huge reduction in wasted energy.
The other aspect is the transition to heat pumps, which is over 100% efficient, so you need a lot less energy to provide the same amount of heat. There are now commercial industrial heat pumps that has reached 200°C, which enables the use in more industrial applications.
The third is the transition to recycling. At some point we will have enough materials for all that we need to do. The green energy transition requires a big temporary jump in the amount of lithium and copper we need. But once all vehicles have been transitioned to EVs, most of those material will come from recycled materials, cutting the energy required to acquire those materials to a tiny fraction of what we need now.
All of OECD countries are lying about their growth numbers, and Russia is "gaining strength".
A base sanity check shows this is a load of BS.
Nice article explaining solar energy policy. I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms. Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.
One of the good things about solar is the lack of a mismatch between solar production curve and human needs.
People use more energy during the day.
People, globally, use more energy in the summer.
This might not be intuitive if you live nearer the poles, but that's not representative of where the global population live.
And in some of those places, like California people obsesses about the "peak" that is left after you subtract all the solar energy, even if it's lower than the previous real peak.
Luckily that fake peak is immediately after sunset and so easily beaten with a small amount of battery, leaving a much cheaper and easier problem to solve as the peaks are really what drives electricity costs, dictating transmission size and standby capacity.
What "critical look" is there to take? How about the way that the US gov't subsidizes the oil and gas industry, and is about to restart the coal industry? For some reason gov't investment in industry is only bad when China does it.
China bad when it's the only country that actually does something meaningful. Cheap batteries are fueling energy transition and the demand is only met by huge overproduction by china.
China is actually carrying our lazy asses.
> China is actually carrying our lazy asses.
Its not laziness, its corruption. The USA has a government that's tainted by moneyed interests who don't want their established gravy train derailed no matter how much it's fucking the entire planets environment. Now add to that, the current administration is too stupid and short sighted to ever incentivize change.
It’s a perfect example of overwhelming greed, corruption, and hate collapsing an empire.
[dead]
That's a really uncharitable way to read that.
A "critical look" from a US magazine would explore how, with solar power clearly being the future, the US has abdicated its energy dominance to another country. It would discuss the potential ramifications of us not owning our energy infrastructure supply chain the way we do with oil/gas, and what might be done about that.
The New Yorker is a US magazine. From the US perspective, yes, it is "good" when we do it and "bad" when China does it in a way that could negatively impact us.
Nobody complains about China investing in its private industry, all wealthy nations do that. Everybody complains that China is a dictatorship that a) treats its people like shit, b) exploits these shitty conditions to gain global market advantage with state-owned companies, and c) keeps foreign companies from exploiting it, too.
Obviously it is more complex than that, but in a nutshell it's part butt-hurt and part amalgamation of state and private enterprise that does not mesh well with classic liberal ideas of freedom and human dignity.
The Government and actions of the United States also does not mesh well classic liberal ideas of freedom and human dignity, so this seems to be a hypocritical complaint.
When the U.S. does it we're "picking sides".
The oil industry pays 10s of billions in taxes.
Any disagreement in how much they should be taxed (e.g. 10,20,30,50,90%) can be considered a subsidy.
What people are mostly concerned with is whether a subsidy is distorting via over production. E.g. when China entered the market in solar, most western solar companies following stricter environmental protection requirements went out of business.
I'm fully off grid (even had utility power but had them remove it). Cook on electric, have electric water heater, using AC and have enough panels and batteries to not even need a backup generator.
This is very cool. I'm guessing you must live somewhere with mild winters. Insulation can do wonders, but it can be overcast for weeks in the north.
Solar panels are so cheap that it makes sense to overbuild, such that even an overcast winter day meets your electricity needs.
I think that depends on where you are. I've heard of 20kW installations producing 500W in December.
Granted 500W isn't nothing, but what if it's snows?
That is about the numbers that we get in Sweden. Those months were solar production is lowest is also the months that consumption is highest for the average household, around 400% compared to the warmest summer months. As a result, energy prices are also significant higher during winter compared to summer.
Storage is the elephant in the solar-powered room
> I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms
There's going to be a beautiful synergy here between electric vehicles and solar. Because an EV battery is already easily enough to power most houses through 14-16 hours of darkness, so if it can be a sink for solar during the day it can then be a source during the night. The future will have a combo of residential battery storage and V2H/V2G which has an attractive property that it scales naturally with population (every new person that moves to a location brings their EV battery with them).
We usually drive to work. That means that when the sun’s shining, the car isn’t home.
Conversely, if we didn’t drive to work, we probably wouldn’t have a car.
On the other hand, we have a big solar array at work so if we had on-site parking (we don’t) we could drive our power home.
It’s probably impractical in reality though, the tax treatment would be chaos and we use the power we generate at work during the day on-site.
I can't see how this could be true. Many people will need to drive the ev to work during the day, and if you discharge it at night then when are you really charging?
It may be true for some who WFH often or in some cases, but not enough EVs will be able to discharge overnight for a v2g battery revolution.
You're not left with a flat battery at the end of the night. Many vehicles are combined in intelligent systems which work together to ensure that the vehicles have the energy they need (which is easy to set in all the systems I've seen) but provide enough grid support to make this work.
Remember that even my little town car (Renault Zoe) has a 52kWh battery.... which would run my house for five days. So the energy stored in these systems can be considerable.
The people doing these things have thought a lot about it. Take a look at this video - it's a bit 'puff piece' but shows what one way of doing it looks like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKItLGPdN0k
There are several scenarios where it would contribute:
1. You have access to a charger at work 2. You’re retired 3. You take public transportation or bike to work (fairly common scenario in Europe) 4. Work-from-home (got more common after covid, I know many people who do it at least once a week now, and that’s generally enough to charge what you need to drive for a week) 5. You charge only during the day on weekends (should be enough to cover the week for most people, even if you feed say 20% of it back to the grid through the week) 6. Rental fleet operators (booking data can inform charge/discharge policy) 7. Residential batteries, where you charge the EV at night with what you got during the day, every day, but set up a policy where you allow both the home battery and the EV battery to discharge if the electricity is expensive enough. I could see myself making decisions about WFH or biking to work based on electricity pricing.
Ideally in that case you’d charge the car from the grid during the workday, when the grid is powered by solar and power spot prices are low.
BYO house solar is optional when there is grid solar (and home solar exports).
I think peak energy usage is in the morning and afternoon / early night when people are at home.
Would be stella if people could charge during noon. I don't know how feasible that is.
Yes, it does rely on charging infra rolling out - either at work or with fast DC charging. But that is happening too. Well, in markets where EV adoption is encouraged - for the US, I guess we'll see.
> Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.
What would be a critical look though? They thought it would be good to invest in it and so they did, other countries also had that choice if they so wished to sponsor it for strategic purposes but they are ruled by a different ideology which made them decide to not do it.
I don't think there's anything to be critical about, they invested a lot in it and are reaping the benefits.
Should we also be critical about how the Internet started as a state-sponsored project? Many things that aren't commercially viable in its initial state of development need state-sponsorship to get off the ground to be exploited by private companies, the Chinese saw an opportunity for that in solar PV, kudos to them.
I think they meant critical as in a critique rather than a criticism. They are requesting discussion and exploration of the history and ramifications of China's policy, what the meaningful ROI and costs have been, and what the other (4-ish) countries that had the capacity for that sort of investment got out of non-investment (investment in other things).
> I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms.
Or just some old gas plants. No one is demanding a 100% solution. Let's get to 85% or whatever first. Arguments like this (which always appear in these threads) are mostly just noise. Pick the low hanging fruit, then argue about how to cross the finish line.
And the bit about China is an interesting article about trade policy but entirely unrelated to the technology being discussed. "Because it's Chinese" is a dumb reason to reject tech.
It'll probably be fulfilled in 3 stages
1) Gas peakers - where every kilowatt hour delivered by solar or wind is just a kilowatt hour of gas that would otherwise have been burned. We are generally still here - still burning gas while it's sunny and windy.
2) Pumped storage and batteries gets us to 98% carbon free grids with ~5 hours of storage with 90% roundtrip efficiency - https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
(98%/5 hours is for australia and will vary for different countries but probably not wildly).
3) Syngas fills in that last 2-5% with ~50% roundtrip efficiency. Every kilowatt hour used in those 5% times - those dark, windless nights will be quite expensive although, counterintuitively still cheaper than an every kilowatt hour generated by a nuclear power plant - https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
3 and to some extent 2 will require natural gas to be prohibited or taxed heavily.
> 3) Syngas fills in that last 2-5%
Just one note, I believe what you mean is some form of gas made from renewables, most likely hydrogen.
"Syngas" is a term that has a relatively specific meaning in the chemical industry, notably it is a gas mixture of mostly Carbon Monoxide and Hydrogen. I do not think that this is what you mean.
My google-fu is failing to resurface the links, but IIRC:
One study determined the cheapest energy grids for many countries. IOW, if you had to rebuild the energy grid from scratch today, what would be the cheapest way to meet your needs?
And the answer was 90 - 95% renewables, depending on country. Solar + wind + batteries for 90 - 95% of the power, with natgas peakers for the rest. And that 90-95% number increases every year.
Another survey noted that while Australia and many other equatorial countries are optimal for solar, Finland is pessimal. Most countries have already passed the point where solar is best in pure financial terms. Finland hasn't, but it's very close. Which is insane, given that Finland is a poor place for solar, but a great place for wind, nuclear & geothermal.
Finland does not have any geothermal. The country lies on two billion years old basement rock with approximately zero geothermal activity.
Wind is the dominanting renewable source, with enough of it for Finland to enjoy the second cheapest electricity in Europe last year. And indeed, even solar is profitable, hindered by the winters but helped by the long days during summer.
One of the reasons I dont expect the australia storage model I cited to be wildly different to, say, Finland is that areas of the world which dont get a lot of sunlight tend to have a lot more wind and hydro potential per capita.
I doubt there are any places in the world where some carbon free combination of solar, wind, hydro, pumped storage, batteries and syngas isnt economic.
Unfortunately, natgas has a large sunk cost advantage. If we were building from scratch in 2025, syngas for the last 2-10% would be competitive. But we have a lot of natgas infrastructure. Syngas's advantage is that it can be locally produced and stored. Natgas has to be shipped large distances, but we already have the infrastructure to do that.
Yeah, if you discount it being zero carbon, syngas is not cost competitive with natgas at all.
https://terraformindustries.com/ is betting the cost crossover point is soon.
I saw lots of mentions of batteries in the article.
> Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.
What if... (stick with me here because this is about to get crazy)... free market capitalism isn't the best solution for everything...?
The correct solution is to make China pay tariffs in proportion to their explicit and implicit state support for their "private" industries. It is not too late to push back.
US was giving $7500 for each car sold to Tesla. But sure, CHYNAAA
They gave that same rebate to all EV manufacturers. It had nothing to do with any one brand.
Whatever the number is in the west, China has on average ~ 10x the amount of subsidies than the west when it comes to manufacturing.
Policy makers are trying to decide whether it’s too risky to shut down all manufacturing of heavy machine capable industries and hand it over to China.
China obviously does not subsidize $75,000 per car.
European analysis resulted in an 18% offsetting duty, meaning Chinese subsidies are lower than American ones.
No it’s not focused on vehicles, that’s the average subsidy on manufacturing.
According to the treasury dept (and the EU): https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2455
> Whatever the number is in the west
So you don't know what the number is?
> China has on average ~ 10x the amount of subsidies than the west when it comes to manufacturing.
And yet you just randomly decide to 10X it for china?
Typical disingenuous anti-china nonsense. What's next? China spends 10X on defense compared to "the west"?
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2455
Imo that didn’t do much but push people into tesla that were in the market for new cars already. Teslas are cheap enough on a lease as it is.
Given that life on earth in the last multi-billion years wasn't possible without the sun, it's strange to say that it has a moment only today
It's a small joke.
A remarkably positive and hopeful article. It's really staggering seeing the figures of not just how much solar has grown in recent years, but how massively its growth has outstripped everyone's predictions from essentially any time in the past.
I also really liked this passage about the direct on-the-ground effects of being able to install solar panels:
> If you have travelled through rural Asia, you know the sound of diesel generators pumping the millions of deep tube wells that were a chief driver of the agricultural Green Revolution of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Now solar electricity is pumping the water—diesel sales in Pakistan apparently fell thirty per cent in 2024. If you’re a farmer, that’s kind of a miracle; fuel, one of your biggest costs, is simply gone.
Being able to pay a one-time up-front cost and just....never have to worry about paying for fuel for your irrigation system again. Truly remarkable.
It is, if you'll pardon the pun, quite a ray of sunshine in these otherwise dark and uncertain times.
Batteries will soon follow the same trajectory, just lagged. The same economic forces will produce the same outcome. We now have cost-effective stationary storage solution with non-scarce inputs, manufacturers are just waiting for the demand.
It's hard to see this truth right now, because the demand isn't there for it to happen just yet. At the margin, energy developers will install solar instead of batteries, up until the point that the grid is saturated with solar, at which point they will switch to batteries. But very few energy grids have reached that point of saturation, so demand hasn't sent manufacturers the market signal to begin high-volume production of grid storage. That will change as more grids mature like California/Texas.
In Star Trek The Next Generation, energy is a 'solved problem'. Material needs are also a 'solved problem'.
Money doesn't exist anymore.
I think at least 70% of the Hacker News crowd would hate this world because they would have no idea what to do with their life under these circumstances.
What is life about except turning a profit? How can you have power over other people? Feel important with all your money? Look at Elon, he's happy.
(They probably would become Ferengi).
Maybe people can learn something from the anarchist David Graeber.
http://web.archive.org/web/20250709125256/https://www.newyor...
How are people making these?
Take the paywalled URL: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46...
Add archive.is in front of it
https://archive.is/https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-...
If you get an nginx page (I seem to get one pretty often), you can try archive.today, archive.li, or any of the alternates in the URL section on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today
If the article has already been archived, you can select one of the snapshots which the archive site will show you.
If it hasn't, click to archive it and wait ~5 minutes for it to finish. You'll get access to the snapshot and a URL you can share.
> If you get an nginx page (I seem to get one pretty often)
It appears to be a rate-limit mechanism of some sort specific to a fingerprint. Clearing cookies for archive.[is|vn|fo|md] may (or may not) get you past it.
I'm pretty sure it's IP-based because I get it on different devices from the same network when it happens.
And make sure your DNS is not 1.1.1.1. Archive.is will alter requests coming from their DNS. They do not always detect it.
>How are people making these?
Do you mean how are people making archive links? They go to archive.is and provide a paywalled link and the website archives and displays the content. I can't tell you how they get around paywalls or how archive.is has managed to not get shutdown, but that's how it's done.
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This year, so far, all of my panels have produced at least 300kwhr of (usable) power. And thats in london, which isn't the sunniest of places.
Is solar the only solution? no. but for places like spain, france and italy, its a very cheap solution to handle peak aircon load. Thats without any kind of battery load shifting.
But!
Solar is not a replacement for nuclear. but currently its so cheap it means that poorer countries are now able to afford stable micro grids, something not possible before.
Not sure where you're getting "at best 15x", the best panels from 2013 were found to have a 30x EROI: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
And from a more recent study:
"This work has shown that the EROI of fossil fuels drops considerably when moving from a final stage (approximately 8.5) to a useful stage analysis (approximately 3.5). The low overall EROI value at the useful stage, however, hides large differences across fossil fuel groups and end uses, with average useful stage energy returns being much higher for heating compared with mechanical end uses. In addition, we find that fossil fuel useful-stage energy returns have remained fairly constant on average over time (except for fossil gas) and may even have slightly increased. Such findings contradict the conventional narrative according to which fossil fuels present very high, although rapidly decreasing, energy returns.
Next, we find that the EROI equivalent value for which electricity-yielding renewable energy systems deliver the same net useful energy as fossil fuels is as low as 4.6, due to the substantially higher final-to-useful efficiency of electricity compared to those of fossil fuel-based energy carriers. This value is, however, highly variable across the fossil fuels and end uses considered. We also find that most literature-sourced EROI values for electricity-yielding renewable energy technologies are higher than the EROI equivalent we have calculated, even when adjusting the values for the implications of intermittency using a wide range of energy transition scenarios. This result suggests that renewable energy may deliver more net useful energy than their fossil fuel counterparts for the same amount of final energy invested."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
EROI only has to be greater than one for the number to rapidly lose its meaning relative to every other input (and externality) of a given energy technology. It makes no sense to focus on it.
Return on energy is different from cost, and it's strange that you're ignoring that. When you look at the levelized cost of energy, solar and onshore wind win: On a per-kWh basis, they produce the cheapest energy around. Gas combined cycle plants are close, but they have pollution and CO2 drawbacks.
LCOE doesn't capture everything you want, but when your grid mix is low on solar, it's the most relevant metric. When we get 15x return on energy and the energy we produce is cheap, you can ... use 1/15th of that energy to make more solar panels. And we're getting better at producing them by the year: Energy input is down and efficiency is up.
Nuclear is about 3x as expensive per kWh generated and it's not as dispatchable. Fossil fuels have this annoying problem of emitting co2and contributing a lot to climate change. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying to find ways to drive the cost of nuclear down - we should! - but from the perspective of "What generation should I install tomorrow?", solar and wind, augmented with a bit of storage, are really impressive: They're the fastest to bring online and provide the cheapest energy. The cost to them is you probably have to pay your gas plant operators a higher capacity fee for rare occasions, but that's ok. In a region like mine (PJM - pennsylvania, new jersey, virginia, ohio, etc.), they still make a profit while burning less gas, and consumer energy cost drops.
It seems weird to get all religious about technology choices when they each have advantages and disadvantages and combine pretty well to even out those differences. It would be expensive to be 100% solar+wind+storage because of the overprovisioning needed. But a mix instead of running 100% fossil (or 100% nuclear) would drop your costs considerably and be faster to build out.
From a pure physics and first principles perspective, a higher EROI implies higher scalability and lower costs.
Nuclear today has high costs associated to it due to uncertainty in permitting, high upfront costs due to red-tape, annd archaic regulations that stifle any innovation. These make risk management prohibitively expensive as is the cost of insuring them. If the catastrophic rate of failure and associated deaths are far far smaller than what’s generally accepted in society(think fatalities due to vehicle accidents), then we must work to removing the red-tape to ease construction of these. They’re also far more green to operate.
This way, we can keep solar for residential, and for industries to offset their own use(think data centers investing in their own energy supply instead of paying others. Think on-premise vs off-premise).
Let's start with privatizing the risk of it going kaboom. Why do we need red tape that pushes the cleanup costs onto taxpayer shoulders? It's so safe!
Sophisticated private insurers being willing to shoulder the full financial downside of nuclear power plants going fukushima (not < 1% as it is now!) will give everybody confidence that they're not just pushing propaganda exaggerating how safe they are to an unsophisticated public.
Assuming you are correct, there will be less red tape, the sophisticated insurers will happily take on the additional risks and unsophisticated taxpayers dont have to worry about being on the hook for one of those ~$800 billion Fukushima style cleanup events.
I wont hold my breath though.... after all, they know the nuclear industry would stop existing if insurance were actually priced according to the risk even if the consumers of their expensive public relations campaigns dont.
> cheap energy is will power the next AI boom
This is already happening, that and the crypto boom from a few years ago.
> and lift the poor and middle class up
But this is not happening; the ones doing AI stuff, crypto stuff, energy stuff have no interest in lifting any classes up. Energy prices are not going down, because demand is going up alongside supply, to the point where in some places the energy grid can't keep up. At-home solar and EVs are putting strain on the residential grids, even the newly built ones that have been reinforced 4x compared to the power grid of 10, 20 years ago.
Thorium reactors will cost billions and decades to build, even if you can find a location, get past the legal hurdles, the societal outrage, NIMBYism, etc. Meanwhile, you can get solar panels from your local DIY store, or order a pallet of them off the internet for cheap. Anyone with roof or field space can build themselves a solar farm, but nuclear or thorium reactors are huge, nationwide and political investments.
Modern nuclear reactors used to be huge, but that’s outdated now. The revolution in small modular reactors promises to change all that.
Current modern nuclear reactors getting built are huge.
Maybe, perhaps, in the next decade or two we'll see small(er) reactors, but this isn't a new idea and hasn't worked out it practice before.
in what, another decade or more before they actually get made at scale? they'll be irrelevant by then outside of niche applications.
In capitalism, we innovate for more profit. We don’t innovate to get random people wealthy.
High EROI = high profit for investors
1. If something's expensive enough, that turns into manpower and then energy use as you look at the whole supply chain.
2. The ratio doesn't really matter once it hits double digits. If something outputs 100 energy units, the difference between it costing 10 energy units to build versus costing .01 energy units to build isn't a game changer. The important number is that almost all the energy it makes is "profit". And if you can make a solar panel output a few percent more energy, that matters more than getting the energy cost to 0 and having an infinite ratio would matter. All else equal, a solar panel that costs 4kWh to make and has a 1000x return is worse than a solar panel that costs 400kWh to make and has a 15x return.
While that may be true - I can invest in home solar and have zero or near zero electricity costs at reasonable prices with a 5 to 7 year payback period. Near me solar farms run at a profit here in England, and yet I don't believe any nuclear power plant has run at a profit without government assistance, or subsidies, and none are yet expected to fund their own decommissioning and clean up - society will bear these costs.
Large scale solar are actually large scale gas plants.
Since there is no way to store electricity large scale and solar energy is unreliable then they depend on gas turbines to work.
Not entirely. California now handles its peak using solar+storage quite effectively.
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-solar-storage-spring-2025/
It's not entirely 1:1. CA has about 20GW of solar production, and the solar+storage together completely replace about 5GW of fossil capacity.
(But don't discount wind. Wind+solar combine pretty well, and if you throw that in, you'll see that CA is actually replacing about 10GW of fossil capacity with solar+storage+wind. That's _capacity_, not production, so that's 8GW of avoided plant construction.)
We still need more progress in storage, for sure, but the trajectory has been good so far. Storage prices have continued to drop and given the lag of construction times, we should expect online storage to continue to improve for at least several years. Another bit of battery coming online should let CA take that from 5 to 7GW of replaced peak capacity from solar+storage.
Exactly my point. Solar and Wind being intermittent require additional expense of grid storage which other forms of energy do not need.
So to scale, for each GW of solar, you’ll need a GW of storage plus the energy reserve to take through the night. Can’t rely on wind here as that’s also intermittent.
And grid storage is energy intensive and sets up twisted incentives for those playing to get rich with energy arbitrage. Think solar farm generators owning their own grid storage and reducing solar output to sell at higher $ from storage. Because, with intermittent sources pricing has to be more dynamic.
solar + storage for a full day cycle is now cheaper than new gas. And way cheaper than nuclear. Keep up!
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
And why is dynamic pricing a bad thing? It aligns the incentives well.
Totally. Our local electric supplier just introduced it as an option and I love it - admitting that none of us here are normal people, I reprogrammed my thermostats to be a degree warmer during peak times, shifted when we run dishes and laundry, and I run some of the compute load off of UPS. (And I have a little solar). I'm saving about $30/month on my power bill with it. It's cool.
> twisted incentives for those playing to get rich with energy arbitrage
You're saying energy arbitrage doesn't happen right now?
> Think solar farm generators owning their own grid storage and reducing solar output to sell at higher $ from storage
If enough generators do that they'll drive down the price of power at night and increase the price of power in the daytime. This will incentivize the opposite behavior.
untrue. Solar + 24hr storage is now (just) cheaper than new gas.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
Nuclear seems to only work if nation-states build and operate it directly - no private firm can build them profitably and on time.
If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that, please let people know, but with the current defunding everything mindset and general gridlock and one bill a year passed I think solar will be much cheaper by the time you even start breaking the ground on a thorium reactor.
>Nuclear seems to only work if nation-states build and operate it directly - no private firm can build them profitably and on time.
Nation states are not able to run the plants profitably either, they just don't run out of money.
Look at France, the US, UK, Germany and Japan for example. They all have immense costs related to nuclear power that is not covered by the sale of nuclear electricity.
Yeah, but if your intent is to support industry by having cheap energy costs that works out for you. Same reason public transit and police run at a loss, in theory.
>Yeah, but if your intent is to support industry by having cheap energy costs that works out for you
Short-term perhaps, but pretending that something expensive is cheap doesn't really work in the long run.
Investments are supposed to be an initial cost upfront that pays off later. Like building roads, bridges and such. For energy, an investment would be to take the cost of a renewable infrastructure, energy storage, solar roofs and such. Once they are in place they have minimal costs and give extremely cheap and reliable energy (reliable because of the distribution and redundancy).
Nuclear is kind of the opposite, you get the payoff upfront but have to pay an unknown amount basically forever afterwards. This cost eventually catches up to you.
France today is in a manner of speaking still paying for electricity they consumed in the 80s and 90s by bailing out EDF. Yet the common opinion still seems to be that they have "cheap electricity".
I think France has the most expensive energy infrastructure in Europe, and it will sooner or later become impossible to pretend otherwise.
Didn’t you get owned by arguing with someone with these same exact talking points the other day?
I’m honestly not sure I understand. All electricity export charts I see show France as a net exporter of electricity and by a huge margin. What am I missing?
Nuclear works, it's just more expensive. We can quibble over other things (land use, nuclear waste, nuclear proliferation, embedded carbon, energy independence, social licensing, construction time, local insolation levels and seasonality), but 90% of the equation is just cost. Nuclear is damn expensive compared to wind and solar.
When France and Germany built their nuclear, solar and wind was too expensive. But it's changed now. Nobody should decomission nuclear plants that already exist, because the fixed costs are already paid for, but building new ones doesn't make economic sense.
> If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that
Impossible.
Federal government in US is failing along with the rest of large scale western style governments. They are too big, cost too much, and have too many fundamental structural deficiencies.
The model of having professional class of administrators and politicians running the country as part of a massive bureaucracy is one that can't work as it is unmanageable and full of conflicts of interests, moral hazards, political market failures and so on and so forth.
They carry on just through inertia at this point. Their one talent is creating a image of control and stability without actually providing any.
If you ever worked in a large publicly traded corporation and realized just how dysfunctional they are as a organization, multiply that a thousandfold and you have modern western governments.
Nuclear is expensive and doesn't work because there are a lot of people in power and next to power that don't want it to work.
> Federal government in US is failing along with the rest of large scale western style governments. They are too big, cost too much, and have too many fundamental structural deficiencies.
How do you see those governments failing, and when?
When sorting countries by tax burden (as a percentage of GDP), then you will find that there are tons of extremely livable countries at the top (wealthy European nations), while basically everything under ~10% GDP taxation is a 3rd world disaster.
How big of a GDP percentage would you propose can a government take at most and not "invariably fall apart"?
There are also a lot of people on the ground that don't want it to work, or will protest it, and that's where state power seems to work well to cut through opposition and just build things. Certainly a lot of tradeoffs are made to allow that but the Chinese government seems very good at building.
I'm not sure if it's the model or the particular culture working though - aren't there also a lot of party bureaucrats over there? So the core is authority or agency directed at the center of it, I think.
So get government out of the space here. Keep essential regulations for ensuring safety and so that insurance companies can cover liabilities. Let the free market play it out.
If the profit incentives are there(which there are as higher EROI = lowest cost per kWh), then it is a race to who can provide the product(energy) at the lowest cost more reliably.
Government unfortunately has a monopoly here as traditional reactors had proliferations concerns, needed much large capital, and political will. But if reactors can be modular and costs low that a city could afford it, then you can also have decentralized reactors just like you have with solar.
Like I said, if you have some pathway to a functional government (either to cut regulations sufficiently or to build it, I don't think either is much simpler) then you should get on that part first. But I'm not holding out much hope. We can barely reduce regulations to build houses, and voters like houses. You'll have environmental protests a plenty for city scale small reactors if they're in anyone's "backyard" at all
China seems to be taking the joke rather seriously [1]
> The 277 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in China in 2024 alone is more than twice as much as the 121 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2024.
So they took all the solar installed in the USA since forever, and build it in a year. Twice.
That being said, they're _also_ building everything else:
* PWR nuclear [2] (sadly, they managed to make EPR work faster than the E in EPR, but we're getting there.) Here market and investment and regulation are the hitters. "Fusion nuclear" will always be 50 years away ; until we get SMRs, "Fission nuclear" will always be a couple of years late and a few millions over budget.
* indeed, Thorium nuclear [3] (although it's far from powering any air-conditionner in any pig shed any time soon)
* and looooooots of coal [4]
So basically, China has understood that the answer to "what kind of electricity source should we build ?" is "YES".
The faster they replace "new coal" by "new anything else", the better we are as as species, since they're the world factory - so the lifecycle of _everything_ improve when they improve their grid.
Of course, here's to hoping they're not lying they way off...
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65064
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishan_Nuclear_Power_Plant
[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/01/1115957/old-new-...
[4] https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...
I’d also point out that China is teetering on the edge of a financial meltdown, having also built complete ghost cities, so some of these investments may not look very smart in just a few years. Don’t confuse investment with malinvestment, in other words. Throwing money at everything, much in direct opposition to market forces, has never really been shown to be a winning strategy.
Most of those "ghost cities" got populated in "just a few years", so much so that wiki had to change Chinese Ghost City entry into "Underoccupied Developements". And what is the scale of PRC "malinvestment", quantify or approximate it. Here's a hint, PRC RE+construction as % of GDP = ~15%, about OECD average. PRC just very good at building and gets much more from it, even if some sits idle first or ultimately gets wasted. AKA PRC barely throws more money that OECD in RE sector, they certainly have the option of throwing less money, but that only makes them more efficient relative to rest.
Entire construction + downstream industries is 30%, most of 15% redirected to renewable row out where solar already has better ROI than importing oil, aka, until PRC displaces another 10m barrels per day via renewables, or hits US per capita energy use (double current), any domestic power investment is positive. Throwing money at increasing cheaper power that makes manipulating atoms in every down stream sector is directly what market forces is ALWAYS driving towards. Increasing energy per capita is the only proven winning civilzational development strategy.
Don't confuse some malinvestments for retarded existential PRC collapse narrative. For reference US spending 18% GDP on health care, i.e. 2x OECD average of 9% is single handly more inefficient than likely ALL Chinese policies can misallocate, i.e. that 9% of excess US health spending that gets wasted by scribes can build entire PRC HSR network in like 5 months.
It's not "wasted by scribes" in the US - it very much goes into the pockets of the "pharaohs" (aka "corporate boards"), and, through campaigns donations, to the "high and low priests" (aka "politicians").
The fact that it was supposed to be used to cure peasants from malaria or ensure next year's yield of grain is just a detail.
Don't bother questioning the pharaohs ! Instead, attend the ceremony for when we turn them into gods (aka "IPOs").
And, also, venerate your cats (aka "cats").
please write a book. such a simple explanation.
Housing projects are handled by local governments in China, not the central government. What you're saying is as absurd as saying Detroit going bankrupt is hurting the credibility of Uncle Sam.
> I’d also point out that China is teetering on the edge of a financial meltdown
This and the "OMG demographic collapse" sound like serious copium to me at this point.
I really don't know how to assess China's economic or financial state.
I vividly remember hearing about how the housing bubble was going to break any time soon... a decade ago ?
And then how they would never survive Covid-19. Or the Trump tarrifs, etc...
To be clear, I'm not saying they're invincible or anything - maybe the economy _did_ collapse, but not uniformly, and maybe the central government is able to bail out the economy more efficiently than western economies, and maybe they're just lying their way off, etc...
But so far I have the same feelings about rumors on china's economical death as on Russian ones - metaphorically, I'll believe it when I see the corpse, and when its head has been chopped off for safety ;)
I think you have misunderstood energy yield expressed as a multiple of energy input as a fundamental measurement of the viability of any energy technology.
If you run scenarios, you’ll find that this number is entirely irrelevant. Instead, try considering the availability and required quantities of raw materials and inputs like silver, indium, land, and of course money which is the best proxy for measuring how much of the world economy would be required for building out any technology.
You seem to be ignoring the most important factor, which is cost.
You also only need to buy the panel once. Fuel is free
China is literally making energy that cheap using solar. They add about an entire United Kingdom's worth of solar energy every year (about 270 TWh), that's 100x(!) of what they add in nuclear capacity (which is almost nothing). Even in China solar and renewables are rendering the nuclear sector obsolete. (afaik they're canceling about a third or half of running projects)
And paraphrasing Bruno Maçães from his latest book, far from a caveman technology one of the most transformative aspects of solar energy is that it will move the world from a logic of energy stocks to a logic of energy flows. Decentralized, dynamic, expandable and moveable, a solar network is to the legacy energy grid what the internet is to the TV broadcasting center. It's to move from a society of matter to a society of energy.
To make that philosophical point practical, Pakistan last year added a third of its entire consumption in solar energy. Significant parts of the population are now grid independent. In a country where natural disasters and central mismanagement produced a fragile system, you might soon have one of the most robust, distributed and deterritorialized energy systems.
China is a beast in solar. Truly amazing work. That being said not only are they not canceling any nuclear projects, they announced close to 10 more just in 2025. They are building both and with a great pace.
Paywall
For what it's worth, it didn't throw one up for me. Anyway, for anyone wondering what's beyond the slightly clickbaity headline, it isn't about some astronomical phenomenon; the subheading reads "In the past two years, without much notice, solar power has begun to truly transform the world’s energy system." and the article is all about that.
It do not throw up for me either. I was silently hoping that they excluded IPs from more economically behind countries, so we can read. I was happy.
No paywall for me here in the UK. Maybe they consider us an economically behind country too.
People deserve to be paid for their work.
Reader mode on FF and a reload dismissed it for me.
> offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply.
A lot of this article was clearly written with rose-colored glasses on, but this might be the silliest line of all. The author just finished talking about how a single country makes up the overwhelming share of solar panel and battery production, but hey, look how much more "diffuse and ubiquitous" it is!
With some investment you can make solar panels locally, you can't produce new oil deposits.
Isn't that what biofuels are?
Sun -> plants (corn) -> liquid that goes in (modified) cars
EROI for them is really bad.
And power/area for biofuels is abysmal. Using PV for BEVs instead of ethanol in ICE vehicles would reduce land requirements by a factor of ~100.
Sun (+ fertilizers made using petroleum)
You're right. We should quickly buy millions of solar panels from China and put them in a strategic reserve to future proof our energy needs and secure decades-long energy independence from China. We should also subsidize domestic production ASAP.
Once you build a solar plant, you no longer have a dependence on the country that made those solar panels. That solar plant will function for 50 years with very little maintenance. China is basically a single point of failure for future power expansion, but they can't take away solar plants already built.
The demand for fossil fuel is continuous. The demand for solar panels is one-time: when you first install it.
That's blatantly false. The panels themselves are typically rated for a 25-year service life [1,2]. Inverters are typically rated for about a decade [3,4]. Solar panels also must be cleaned periodically [5], otherwise their output is reduced. It's a power plant. It will need maintenance. As PV technology improves, there's also pressure to buy better solar panels [6] to replace older, lower-performing panels, resulting in disposal problems that hardly need explanation.
I'm all for solar, generally. Among current renewables, it's the most feasible solution for much of the US. But the idea that they're a "one-time" cost is fantasy.
[1]: https://www.epa.gov/hw/end-life-solar-panels-regulations-and... [2]: https://solar.huawei.com/en/blog/2024/lifespan-of-solar-pane... [3]: https://www.igs.com/energy-resource-center/energy-101/how-lo... [4]: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/09/13/how-long-do-residenti... [5]: https://www.nrel.gov/news/detail/features/2021/scientists-st... [6]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221282712...
That's a blatantly disingenuous argument that misses the point. Setting aside the accuracy of the 25-year figure, is it easier to buy solar panels once to use them for 25 years or stockpile 25 years' worth of fossil fuel?
I'm not arguing against maintenance items like cleaning, because obviously fossil fuel power plants need maintenance too. I'm directly responding to the perceived geopolitical risk. The question is: is it better for a country to experience a geopolitical risk with a solar-panel-producing nation or with an oil-producing nation? Bringing up items like cleaning is laughably irrelevant because where's the geopolitical risk in cleaning a solar panel?
> The question is: is it better for a country to experience a geopolitical risk with a solar-panel-producing nation or with an oil-producing nation?
If that's your only question, the answer is straightforward then, there's more oil producing nations than solar panels producing nations making the risk with oil lower.
China is so big in this sector that I don't think that you could even create a real strategy where they get <25% market share in the country solar imports.
You could somewhat mitigate this risk by buying a stock worth 5 years of panel installation of the country but as far as I know, nobody is doing that.
From a geopolitical point of view, if we increase solar/renewable, we decrease dependencies on fossil fuels. As fossil fuels are traded in USD, we decrease our needs of USD, so we decrease the value of the USD.
Isn't it what the current US administration want? A weak USD to boost export?