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Comment by CptJamesCook | Hacker News Reader

Solar doesn't really compete with oil. It competes with coal, natural gas, and nuclear power to power homes.

I would say it does. According to [1] 5% of electricity is generated from oil. Also I would guess that this capacity is mostly located in places where other generation types are not available (islands, remote locations etc) and will be overtaken by solar before coal.

Then also there is EV+solar combo (solar owners are more inclined to get ev and vice versa).

[1] http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Breakdown-of-Electricity-Gene...

What happens when transportation starts to shift over to electricity?

Why can't solar be used to capture CO2 and produce fuel?

It not so much that it isn't possible, just that it's significantly more efficient, by a large margin, to use solar to displace more dirty energy sources (and of those, coal is by far the highest priority).

If you want to create fuel from sun and CO2 it's cheaper to farm some oil-heavy plants and produce biofuel from them. They grow solar cells from sun and air by itself :) It's magic-level nanotech :)

http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/prices.html

https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/01/uic-solar-co2-fuel/

Last time I saw a electricity to fuel system with a price attached, it was the US Navy's one which could produce gasoline at $6/USgal. Not competitive unless you're in the middle of the sea, which is their intended use case.

Natural gas comes from oil presumably?

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