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Comment by coredog64 | Hacker News Reader

There's another large effect that is left out of this story. As solar gets cheaper, and as we get more of it, it reduces the marginal pressure on fossil fuel production. That, in turn, makes fossil fuels cheaper and forces solar to get cheaper still to compete.

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Solar doesn't much compete with petroleum. Its main effect is to reduce prices for coal. You'd expect that this might start to affect the profitability of coal companies eventualy....

For solar to affect petroleum, whose primary use is transport, we'll need to solve the storage problem. Tesla notwithstanding that has not happened. Electric vehicle sales were 0.66% of unit auto sales in 2015, and actually represented a sharp numeric decrease from 2014.

(The dollar volume is higher given the higher price of electrics, but it's unit sales you want to watch.)

> For solar to affect petroleum, whose primary use is transport, we'll need to solve the storage problem.

The obvious solution here is solar-generated biofuel, such as the algae projects now being investigated.

HANNP is still your limiting factor. Algae offers at best about 1,000 gallons/acre/yr. That's good, but small relative to utilisation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_int...

That's not necessarily the correct solution - there's competing chemical processes like Fischer-Tropsch.

Once you've got electricity, FT appears to win. Though again, there's the ages of investigation without large-scale application, on a power-to-fuels basis.

Sasol, the South African energy company, did run commercial coal-to-liquids via Fischer-Tropsch, since the 1950s, and I believe may still do so. The US tried but ran into technical issues.

>electric vehicle sales were 0.66% of unit auto sales in 2015, and actually represented a sharp numeric decrease from 2014

Can you site this source please? I am very curious to see the data! thanks

US auto sales in 2015 were 17,470,000.

US EV sales in 2015 were 116,000.

That's 0.66% of total unit auto sales.

EV sales compares with 122,000 units in 2014, or negative growth in 2015 by 6,000 units, or about 5%.

http://www.autonews.com/article/20160105/RETAIL01/160109995/...

http://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/

(I'd happened to have looked this up a day or so back in another discussion.)

As less oil is produced though it will also likely decrease the returns to scale that I assume exist.

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