1 TW of solar to be deployed annually by 2030 | Hacker News Reader

1 TW of solar to be deployed annually by 2030

pv-magazine-usa.com

199 pointsGravityloss369 comments

It's been entertaining to watch an industry that is completely unused to technology change start to encounter technologies with exponential change in performance (e.g. cost, for solar).

So much of the industry is caught completely flat-footed, and projections and modeling are tweaked and changed until the projections for solar, wind, and storage, are often out of date and wrong by the time they are published.

Utilities are used to planning with five year time frames, but they will often use estimates from publications that are years old, and the publication may have been under review for a year, in addition to data collection time. So it's not unusual for utilities to do planning with numbers that are 10 years off of where they should be. It takes private citizens to cajole utilities and Public Utilities Commissions to practice basic good decision making.

There are two exceptions to the complete lack of innovation in the industry: Renewable Portfolio Standards that force utilities to change their production by force of law, and open markets in places like Texas where people can see how bad the decision making is from the old school and outcompete with their own generation sources. (and each of these states has had their own planning failures, both connected to improper governance at the PUC level, which is likely due to captured regulators.)

Nothing in life is exponential, but there are a lot of people who confuse the first half of a sigmoid curve for it.

Of course, but we are without a doubt experiencing exponential technology change. All models are approximations, and an exponential approximation is far better than whatever is going into EIA and IEA advice to policy makers.

We have not yet hit the linear part of the sigmoid, and are not close. But the good modes out there take that sigmoid shape into account.

(Also, why don't Singularity advocates know about sigmoids?)

Since the early parts of sigmoid and exponential curves are indistinguishable, the singularity advocates opt for the more interesting of the two. The question people are most interested in "what's the saturation level?" of sigmoids has such a large prediction interval that it's next to useless to estimate from data.

Right, extrapolation from the present and past where the growth has been exponential is not promising. But if somehow know the saturation level, upper asymptote, then what are doing is more like interpolation than extrapolation. Then the sigmoid curve is the solution to the differential equation I posted here a few minutes ago here at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31429475

and there is just the one free parameter k. Sometimes in practice have a shot at estimating k.

> (Also, why don't Singularity advocates know about sigmoids?)

They think the curve goes so far up the y axis before it flattens off that it might as well be exponential to us monkeys stuck at the bottom of the slope.

While I think this, I have definitely seen at least one attempt to argue that progress follows a doubling time itself regularly halves and will actually reach infinite “real soon now”.

I also see, as a common trope, people talking about “the knee of the exponential”; as they clearly don’t know how the exponential function works, I have no idea what they think.

Oh well that's just nuts. Can't help those guys.

Yup: For time t, upper asymptote b, arbitrary constant k, value at time t y(t),

d/dt y(t) = k y(t) (b - y(t))

Solve that and get a sigmoid, lazy S, curve. Yup, the solution, easy closed form, first calculus, is in terms of exponentials.

Could use that to model, say, the growth of immunity to Covid-19. Once it was used to project the growth of FedEx -- pleased the BoD and saved the company.

Addition: Ah, will save you a little first calculus. In TeX,

$$ y(t) = { y(0) b e^{bkt} \over y(0) \big ( e^{bkt} - 1 \big ) + b} $$

How about the expansion of the universe?

Definitely not exponential. Based on available evidence, it was much faster in the inflationary epoch, then slowed down, and is now speeding up again.

This kind of thinking is something I internalised while doing 3D game engine development during the early era of hardware GPU cards. The growth curve was incredible!

I learned quickly that the constants were the slopes of the best fit on a log graph. And that you could never intersect that curve with $today, you had to estimate your delivery date and use the intersection at that point for all planning. E.g.: vram budget for textures, polygon count limits, etc…

I’ve never seen this kind of thinking by management at any level, in any industry outside of computer game development.

I’ve tried explaining it to IT managers to no avail.

E.g.: don’t get a 10% discount now by buying 200 servers up front in a single sale! Buy 100 now at full price and 50 servers that are twice as powerful two years later.

Nope… got to get those sweet volume discounts…

Problem is, this applies "in reverse" to battery technology. Don't buy 1TW of storage today, buy 500MW and wait to see what's coming. Defensible, but possibly not what we actually need.

The jurisdictions buying storage today (California, Australia) are driving down the costs for those who will buy it tomorrow. As costs decline, the market expands, as storage paired with renewables (rapidly approaching $0.01/kWh at utility scale) is cheaper than existing thermal generation.

The problem with battery supply is that it would be better to use that supply on EVs to displace oil rather than on massive stationary grid storage for intermittent sources.

Instead, for the maximum cleaning up of energy, we should build nuclear for the grid and use batteries on transportation.

Diverting money from renewables to nuclear brings climate disaster nearer.

A dollar spent on renewables buys several times what a nuke could produce, and immediately, not ten years from now and buying fuel in the meantime. The money spent just on the fuel over that time would mostly pay for building the renewables.

I'm totally pro-renewables but think that there's enough money out there so that it doesn't have to be an either/or scenario.

Modular thorium reactors would be a huge win if realized.

Money is fungible. Money spent on nukes is unavailable for renewables.

You need to watch some thorium debunking videos. I live near Indian Point, recently shut down. They tried thorium, early on. It cost too much. Every single thing about nukes costs too much.

But that supply of money is not a single pool. I think of it as hedging bets.

I skimmed the Indian Point reactor -- it appears to be a non-LFTR reactor, and that seems to be where the excitement continues.

But yeah, renewables are great and only getting better. If we had taken a trillion dollars out of the fiasco of the Gulf Wars (ostensibly for "energy security") we could have done significant things. For example, I'm enamored with the possibilities of geothermal around the Yellowstone caldera -- if we could figure out how to do that without destroying the local environment.

There is some likelihood that geothermal can be made compatible with any locale, using new drilling tech. But geothermal is likely to remain substantially more expensive than solar and wind, whatever happens: steam turbines are expensive to maintain. It might win at latitudes above 50-60 degrees, if it can compete with ammonia imported from the tropics. But shipping is absurdly cheap.

There's something to be said about having the energy sourced domestically, and it would make a nice baseload service. I believe that dealing with the waste water can be challenging but again, having a spectrum of energy source would be really nice.

Rebuilding The Grid with HVDC would help too, as well as an ammonia economy to utilize excess power from wind. It all seems very technically doable, it's the politics and petrol people that stand between us and a carbon free energy ecosystem (well, with reasonable exceptions for aerospace and other special cases)

Yeah, modular thorium reactors would be awesome. But at the stage of development they're currently at, we'd better be very close to carbon neutral by the time the first one could be connected to the grid.

Thorium has had catchy promotion. The reality is less appealing.

Really, anything that needs a steam turbine is going to cost too much to compete.

There is certainly not enough money invested in solar and storage. It is ironically that Musk rather spends money on buying twitter than investing into more battery production at Tesla.

I see why you're saying that, but I'd love a reference that supports the per-dollar argument.

Is it possible to just spend infinite dollars today and solve the climate crisis by tomorrow?

We are limited by the rate that manufacturing capacity can be scaled up, and then by the rate that product can be built out. I.e., it takes time to build factories. Spending more, you can get more factories, but they are not done sooner. A dollar can be spent on more factory, or on factory output. The factories you have so far can produce at some maximum rate. More factories than you expect to need later are hard to get financing for.

Prices for big solar installations are in the public record. And for nukes. Recently North Carolina and Georgia spent, what, $15B for exactly 0 watts out. They were quoted another $10B to get the 2GW they had signed up for, which they had expected to pay, what, $8B for, total? They won't get any of it back.

The corruption tax on nukes is withering. Nobody involved wants the money to ever stop flowing, as actually delivering would cause.

The best I have seen for nukes is $2B/1GW, but nobody knows how to get that with any reliability; and that is discounted by a huge government disaster-insurance subsidy, and excludes ~$1B end-of-life decommissioning. I see $1B/1GW for recently finished solar projects, but prices are still falling fast.

For the costs of nuclear, they are pretty abysmal, because it's a construction project and Western countries are terrible at construction logistics. One cost estimate:

https://www.lazard.com/media/451905/lazards-levelized-cost-o...

Every year the cost of nuclear increases because we have fewer examples of successful construction and more examples of failed construction. The industry is in shambles, effectively dead. The US attempts at construction of AP1000s resulted in 2/4 failing, and the other two reactors being several multiples behind in schedule and pricing. The latest excuse for the failure is that they began construction before design was complete, so of course they failed. However this was the request of the nuclear industry, in an attempt to bring down prices, and the entire regulatory approval process was changed to accommodate this, which was supposed to bring down prices and prevent the failure of construction. Look at any attempt to build nuclear in a modern economy and you will find failure, not success.

As for spending infinite dollars to solve climate change, no, that is not possible. There are real productive limits to capacity to build things. The solar, wind, and storage industries are growing at massive rates, but still its only barely enough to meet the speed needed for our energy transition.

If we had infinite money to spend on nuclear, we still would not be able to build sufficient new restore by, say 2040. In the US alone we would need to build ~100 reactors simply to replace those reaching their end of life. We do not have the construction capacity for that, much less a design to build, or willing financial backers.

For the foreseeable future, nuclear is a dying industry in the US, not because of regulation or public backlash, but because the industry can't build.

The only hope for nuclear in the US or Europe is for small modular reactors, a design that in the past has been rejected for being too expensive. But since it's closer to manufacturing (like a plane) than like construction, there's hope, even if it's a long shot.

There is too little scope for graft in modular nukes to be feasible in the US.

I.e., if you are trying to scare up money for a big enough nuke plant to be worth installing, the stakeholders you would need on board will see noplace to skim off the money they demand to greenlight the project.

Thus far solar and wind seem thus far resistant to graft, for reasons that are easy to speculate about, but hard to prove.

Honestly I think it's exactly the opposite, there's way too much opportunity for graft, and that's the only reason they ever get pursued.

It's much easier to take some graft off a super size construction project with few bidders and massive transaction costs compared to small repeatable transactions that happen with smaller projects.

Nuclear construction often ends up with people in jail. It's happening in South Carolina, and happened in South Korea too, and up until the corruption was found, SK had been touted as a modern nuclear success story that could maybe be replicated in the US.

So we are left with only China and Russia's Rosatom as the only builders that claim to be able to deliver at a reasonable cost. We just need to trust the builders enough to construct in our countries, with our workforces, and somehow get a hugely complex construction project with lots of high-precision welding and construction pours done on time and accurately.

Point was that modular nukes would have well-known prices: a plant with two dozen modules would be expected to cost 24x the public price of a module. It is hard to bury much graft in the land acquisition, and hard to stretch out the construction time, or pad the cost. So you can't drum up enough support to start it.

Solar projects are useful at smaller sizes, so need fewer stakeholders, making it easier to find honest ones. People choosing to be involved with renewables are more often self-selected for idealism.

>Thus far solar and wind seem thus far resistant to graft,

That's because the graft happens earlier in the process before the actual "build the thing" portion so you don't notice. The developer typically pisses away money directly or indirectly getting on the good side of the local powers that be before actually pulling the trigger on the project.

Contrast with nuclear or any other centralized power generation where the state gets involved. Sure, money gets pissed away in similar ways on those projects (pay off special interest X, promise a favorable rate for Y, etc) but it tends to not technically be graft because it's all done through the official processes.

Anybody can count panels and turbines, look up their prices, and compare them to the project budget. There is just noplace to hide the grift. Undoubtedly that is slowing deployment of really big installations, but economy of scale is much less for renewables, so instead plenty of small installations go up. A single wind turbine or few acres of solar has close to the same value, per unit cost, as a GW-scale installation.

Not infinite, but that doesn't make an argument. We definitely can speed up the transition to renewables by spending more money though, and that is what we should do. Investing more will accelerate the construction of the factories for batteries and solar panels and generate more research into the topic.

> Is it possible to just spend infinite dollars today and solve the climate crisis by tomorrow?

No. Factories need to be build, infrastructure needs to be build with infinite money and an coordinated centrally planned effort it should be possible within 15 years to be net neutral.

This would include: electrifying all of africa, world wide giga grid, replacing all combustion motors, building a new fleet to replace all cargo vessels, build rail to curb all non trans ocean flights, radically cut down militaries all over the world, build a lot of heat pumps, building a lot of buildings in a carbon neutral way, also a lot of other environmental concerns (species protection, eco system protection) would need to be curbed for it to happen in 15 years, more flexibility if you relax that timeframe.

This makes sense for lithium based batteries, but those aren't the only ones around. Iron flow batteries, for example, consist mainly of iron, salt, and water. There's no shortage of ingredients. They're too big and heavy to be practical for most transportation applications, but they have a number of desirable properties for utility-scale energy storage. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1046365/grid-sto... is a pretty good writeup.

Here’s another interesting one, storing energy in heated metal, and later converting the emitted light back to electricity using specialized PV cells: https://youtu.be/Gn7pfYKB7DA

Molten metal batteries have the advantage of not wearing out, and of welcoming heat produced when charging.

Flow batteries are pretty questionable. Moving parts suck. Zinc-bromine in particular was around for a long time as a flow technology but only started to move towards mass production when a non-flow version was developed.

But in particular, the iron-flow battery story going around recently stinks pretty badly. It's being heavily promoted almost entirely by one company, ESS, and their first real client is -- wait for it -- SoftBank [1]. The academic reports on iron-flow batteries [2] make the technology sound a lot less mature than the ESS website [3], which incorrectly refers to vanadium and lithium as "rare-earth metals".

A 2018 publication [4] from Narayan's group at USC boasts that:

>Thus, by operating at 60°C and a pH of 3 with ascorbic acid and ammonium chloride, we achieved a coulombic efficiency of 97.9%. While this value of coulombic efficiency is among the highest values reported for the iron electrode in the context of the all-iron flow battery, further improvement in efficiency is needed for supporting repeated cycling.

However, further work by Narayan's group led them to replace iron chloride by iron sulfate in 2020 [5] which was celebrated by USC in a press release [6].

It was shortly after this that ESS burst onto the scene claiming iron chloride batteries with extremely long cycle life using "carbon composite" electrodes, "porous polyethylene separator" and a "polypropene spacer" [3], which are suspiciously similar to the graphite electrodes, mesoporous hydrocarbon-polymer-not-disclosed (Tokuyama A901 [7]) anion-exchange membrane, and polypropylene housing used in the Narayan group's 2016 paper [8] proposing all-iron-flow batteries for grid storage. It's worth noting that chemically unmodified polyethylene is probably not a suitable material for an ion-selective membrane, but it wouldn't even be the second-worst mistake on the page.

Yet ESS, despite having supposedly solved major problems that are obviously of scientific interest to active researchers, does not appear to have any names on its website, and cites no publications. Frankly, it sounds like another EEStor.

1: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/10/07/first-ess-iron-flow-bat...

2: https://dornsife.usc.edu/labs/narayan/all-iron-redox-flow-ba...

3: https://essinc.com/iron-flow-chemistry/

4: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245191031...

5: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/1945-7111/ab84f8/...

6: https://news.usc.edu/166306/flow-battery-renewable-energy-el...

7: https://watermark.silverchair.com/jeecs_18_2_024001.pdf

8: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/2.0161601jes/pdf

For that matter, it would be good to prioritize EVs to those that drive the most, or have consistent long commutes.

There has been some work on modding how well this could work for changing EV rebate incentives, but getting legislatures to adopt such complicated ideas is nearly impossible.

Another approach would be to add a realistic, risk-adjusted carbon tax to gasoline (probably north of $200/ton co2, or $2/gallon gasoline) and let the market sort it out. Unfortunately when it comes to car purchasing, consumers are less economically rational than even legislators.

If you take a snapshot in time, maybe.

Over the long term, any batteries sold are good batteries, because batteries exhibit large economies of scale. Profit on existing sales can fund new production facilities; incremental improvements in battery technology; R&D into capacity increases; improved distribution networks; R&D into new sources of lithium; and so on. The way you get dirt-cheap storage is to build lots of it.

> The problem with battery supply is that it would be better to use that supply on EVs to displace oil rather than on massive stationary grid storage for intermittent sources.

If your electricity generation is fossil moving to EVs is of questionable benefit.

> Instead, for the maximum cleaning up of energy, we should build nuclear for the grid and use batteries on transportation.

We are talking about solar power costs exponentially dropping and your suggestion is to build nuclear, the slowest to build and already much less economical than solar. By the time your nuclear power plants are build you could buy ~10 times the capacity in solar and likely would not need any battery storage.

Once the energy storage demand follows the PV exponential curve a little longer, it will be obvious to everyone that batteries won't cut it, and you will see people starting to deploy stuff like hydrogen electrolysis and liquefaction for storage combined with hydrogen fired gas turbine powerplants.

Several of the established players are close to achieving dry-low-NOx 100% hydrogen gas turbines. Then you are talking about >500 MW power per unit and a thermodynamic efficiency of >65%. If you are in the "extremely abundant but too variable renewable power" scenario, these things will be the major stabilisers. You can easily imagine smoothing out even seasonal fluctuations with them.

Even if electricity generation is from coal, EVs produce less CO2 than ICEs, because big power plants are much more efficient than small engines. Plus all the other benefits they have, especially in cities.

This is quite disputed still, mainly because of the high weight of the batteries and the large energy cost of manufacturing these batteries. The studies I'm aware of, pretty much agree on that for 100% coal based electricity, ICEs are better, and for 100% renewables EVs are better. The dispute is at what percentage EVs become better.

You are pricing battery storage in kWh but storage is measured in kW. $50-100 kW is "normal" for installed grid scale battery.

There is no realistic way to GENERALLY determine the price of the kWh coming out of a grid scale battery due to the large number of variables, such as battery lifepan, wholesale production rates, land and permitting cost, etc.

Not true. A battery stores kWh. kW is practically unlimited for utility-scale batteries. By contrast, many other storage methods have limits on kW, but may offer practically unlimited kWh. Some limit charging kW, but may be discharged at a higher rate.

Short-term storage wants high charge and discharge rate, efficiency and durability. Longer-term storage mainly favors cheap capacity, and tolerates low charging rate and low efficiency.

kWh is a unit of energy measurement kW is a unit of power measurement

Capacitors are capable of delivering high levels of power but have relatively small energy storage capacity compared to batteries.

Grid scale batteries need to be sized in terms of both charge/discharge rates (kW/MW) and energy storage (kWh/MWh)

Storage is measured in units of energy, i.e. something akin to Joules. Watts (and thus kW) are a measure of power, i.e. energy rate: 1 W is 1 Joule per second. kWh is a measure of energy (a kW for an hour) and is directly convertible to Joules. You could of course price based on energy discharge rate in kW, but not that alone...

That's right. Although (source: built Si battery company) the more powerful commercial trend is customers with arcane needs paving the way for architectures and chemistries that later can serve more general needs. Expensive NMC did make for cheaper NMC, but of course what actually happened is that Tesla and the automaker followed the lead of Enphase in switching over to LFP.

In the more exotic architectures and chemistries, what's moving the needle is the exotic military or medical need, where the battery can be 10x more expensive on the OEM BOM and barely move the actual end unit price to the final user.

What you really need is the government to be able to set a moving sliding window on battery performance, and then update tax regulation to allow companies to quickly depreciate an battery that gets outpaced fast and move onto the better tech. You'd ideally want to incentivise upgrades and updates for better tech in this space because of the positive externalities that come with it.

Generally, storage just gets cheaper, not better. Storage bought early is just as good as something cheaper bought later. Its resale value has fallen, but not its usefulness. You will always be best off buying storage as late as you can get away with.

Battery tech improves rapidly in terms of energy stored per $, but much more slowly in terms of energy stored per m^3 of volume ("energy density", relevant for cars) and energy stored per kg of mass ("specific energy", relevant for planes).

Until averaged renewable generating capacity entirely matches averaged demand, money spent on storage is mostly wasted, because to charge it up you would need to burn fossil fuels. It will be radically cheaper, soon enough.

That is why so little storage is being built, thus far. Costs for storage are falling even faster than wind or solar ever did, because there is nothing to be overcome except limits on scaling manufacturing. The physics of energy storage, chemical schemes excepted, are a matter of freshman physics, so the drive is only how to apply the same principles more cheaply.

Simplicity is the greatest virtue: if you can make a storage system with just one moving part, you have the makings of a winner. Many involve anchoring something to the sea floor: an air bladder with a hose to an air pump and turbine onshore, charged by pumping in air; a float with a cable down to a pulley, thence to a winch and motor/generator onshore, charged by dragging the float down to the bottom; an air tank with an electric pump/turbine just wired to shore, charged by evacuating the tank.

The overwhelming majority of storage will not be batteries, ever. But molten metal batteries have massive advantages over lithium, longevity and heat tolerance probably most important. Iron-air batteries are much cheaper.

Hydrogen and ammonia synthesis will not be as cheap as the others, but have the massive advantage that, because tankage is cheap and transportable, storage capacity is unlimited; and when as much tankage as you care to keep is full, any extra generating capacity yields a high-demand product, thus extra revenue. Furthermore, if your local storage gets looking likely to run dry, you just buy more.

Compatibility with existing natural gas generators is a plus; thus, compressed air, liquified nitrogen, hydrogen and ammonia. Burning something with compressed air increases efficiency.

Energy Vault is bald grift, the Theranos of storage.

'money spent on storage is mostly wasted, because to charge it up you would need to burn fossil fuels'

Huh? Why would you not charge your utility battery bank with surplus solar or wind power?

Bonus: at the point when solar or wind power would be curtailed (when it is generating more supply than the grid demands), is also when the wholesale price per MWh is zero or negative, making it free or profitable to charge your batteries.

The point is that until all fossil fuel plants are shut down, when you have “excess power” that means you could either shut down FF plant or charge some batteries. If you choose the latter then the FF plant is effectively charging the battery.

That is better though for when the renewable plant isn’t running.

Also most utilities will not let you charge from grid. Its very hard to get interconnect agreement if a battery is involved

A distributed approach may solve many problems, enabling charging with surplus produced by renewables, and discharge when people are at work/home (<=> most of them not driving their electric cars): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid

Yeah, I dont know if its pointless to get in early (as if now is really early) given the subsidies in some areas. And it does seem realistic to become an energy independent home for not that much investment which 10 year old me still cant believe is actually a reality.

But I do like the idea that these industries might actually be motivated to progress faster now if people hold off on getting on board. Seems like its enough of a reality that they can justify r&d to make the last push toward real competitiveness.

Then again my brains fried from work and I don't know what I'm talking about.

All I know is I want me some solar panels and an electric F150.

Domestic is a whole different domain from utility-scale.

The best thing for a house power bank is a used-up electric car.

> Why would you not charge your utility battery bank with surplus solar or wind power?

Because you spent the money on more generating capacity, instead, and displaced exactly that much more carbon emission.

You put any excess power on a transmission line to someplace else that would otherwise be burning fossil fuel, and collect revenue. Maybe spend that on more generation.

If you are maxing out your transmission lines, spend money building those out. The more of those you have, the more places you can get revenue from.

When it starts to look like there will be nobody left to sell your excess to, then build storage.

This is already a reality on several grids across the world though. On weekend days with lots of sun and wind (ie low demand and high supply), prices dip below zero.

Just from an economic standpoint it can also be a valid choice to build storage next to unpredictable generating capacity, for example if you build a wind farm and want to sell during daytime (when prices are highest) as much as possible.

Those negative price stories have been around for years but the last time I checked, they still weren't because we had 100% renewables, which people assume to be the case. There's someone paying that negative price and it's generally fossil producers.

(Technically, a 100% renewable grid could go negative I'd there were separate subsidies, but as soon as renewable goes below that level it would just be shut off rather than pay money to generate.)

At least here in Germany, at the grid scale, there isn't a real surplus of renewable energy most of the time, especially if you subtract all coal and gas power going into the grid. Of course on smaller scales, batteries make much more sense. For example, it is profitable to combine your private solar generation with a battery, as you don't get much by feeding your surplus generated power to the grid.

Suppose for the sake of the argument that renewables only produced power around noon. If you build more renewables until they produce more power than you need before you invest in storage you run your fossil fuel plants a lot more than if you invest a little in storage to be able to shift massive overproduction around noon to other times of the day.

It's probably best if we increase the carbon price until the market figures out how much storage is economical.

The overwhelming majority of storage will not be batteries, ever.

Why not? Lithium iron phosphate batteries work fine, don't cost too much, don't have a thermal runaway problem, are good for 10,000 cycles, require little maintenance, have good energy density per unit volume, and you can buy them right now. They're heavier than lithium ion batteries, but in stationary installations, that doesn't matter. Something better may come along, but they're good enough to deploy now.

We need the lithium for cars. There is literally not enough lithium known of to build enough utility storage. And, they cost way more than alternatives.

Utility batteries, where used, will be iron-air or molten metal. Light weight is no virtue in that use.

This seemed surprising, so I looked up the estimate of the available lithium reserves (20 million tons, seems low) and lithium needed per kWh (160g), which means we can make up to 113 TWh of batteries.

If those numbers are correct and we want cars that each have 50 kWh batteries, we can have up to about 2.2 billion cars, so we either get more lithium (seawater is 1000x more in quantity but IIRC not economical at this time), or we don’t all get to have electric cars.

This is making me go back to an older preference of mine, which is to have a really fat wire (order of 1m^2 cross section) going around the planet. Take years (literally) to mine and process that quantity, but in principle you can get winter solstice pre-dawn energy from your antipode. The losses, while large, are not catastrophic.

China has announced an intention to build a cable from China to Chile to pick up Chilean solar power in the austral summer daytime. (Chile is very nearly antipodal to China.) Surprisingly, transmission loss is calculated to be only around 50%, which is completely tolerable. I doubt they will build it, in the end, but they really, usefully could.

Long distance transmission has become very practical as the top-line cost of generation has fallen far below historic lows.

You don't need a square meter in cross section. There will be a hell of a lot of long distance transmission lines. Singapore is all in on one to northern Australia. UK has signed a deal for one to Africa.

Ooh, neat, I missed that news. 50% losses is basically what I was expecting, it’s what you get from just using state-of-the-art HVDC cables.

If there’s any single entity I expect to have both the economic power and originational capacity to do that, it’s the Chinese government.

The main reason is that the cables are much cheaper than the storage (so a massive incentive if you can do it), but 15000 km * 1m^2 * density of copper is 1.3e8 tons, and current global annual production is 2e7 tons, and a similar problem for aluminium. Need a lot of organisation of the wider economy to pull that off.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/11/15/chile-wants-to-export...

The usual definition of stated "reserves" is the amount of natural resource known to exist in explored, proven deposits. As the demand for a resource increases, more exploration is done and reserves increase. It is wildly incorrect to use reserves as an estimate of the total amount of the resource available.

It's the total amount available in the next few years.

Pumping water uphill requires no lithium.

Requires some pretty specific geography, though. You're not going to see one in Florida.

There are other methods practical in Florida. You could read up on them.

> The overwhelming majority of storage will not be batteries, ever

Pretty big categorical statement.

The problem with the "one moving part" storage systems is that their energy density is surprisingly bad. Gravitational potential energy in particular is terrible. Compressed air systems can be OK, especially the ones using underground reservoirs, but have an efficiency limited by the physics of gas expansion.

It's pretty hard to beat redox reactions for energy density. As you say, tankage is cheap, so can this be done with "flow batteries"?

But the real reason lithium is winning is the incredible power of path dependence and manufacturing efficiency. Is it the optimal chemists's whiteboard solution to churn out a billion 18650 cells? No. Is it the one that's easier to actually do in the world as it exists today? Possibly.

What matters is not joules per unit mass or unit volume, but per dollar, and also watts charging or discharging per dollar. Gravity and compressed air systems excel on that axis (Energy Vault excepted, of course).

Chemical synthesis systems suffer on cost per watt to charge, but hit it out of the park on joules stored per dollar. Further pluses are bulk-shippable storage media that may be bought and sold, and can be discharged using existing gas turbines, even in places where you have not installed any synthesis apparatus.

> I’ve tried explaining it to IT managers to no avail.

I've had this experience myself. I usually find that I was overlooking important inputs to, constraints on or goals behind the decision.

> Buy 100 now at full price and 50 servers that are twice as powerful two years later

As someone who buys a lot of hardware for my employer, I can tell you that performance is only one of several interrelated considerations that goes in to purchasing decisions, and is far from the most important.

For that matter, exactly the same thing can be said about the price.

If not performance and not price, what considerations are close to the most important for your employer?

Reliability, compatibility, political considerations (eg we partner with this brand)

Reliability hasn't changed significantly for server-grade kit for decades.

All Intel-compatible servers have been essentially perfectly compatible with each other for decades.

All major brands will keep selling server kit. It's not like you have to throw away your IBM brand Intel-based servers and replace them with ARM chips from some no-name vendor!

My point is that in next year and the year after, and the year after that IBM will sell you faster and faster servers. Also... bigger and bigger. At roughly the same price point. With largely (if not entirely) compatible management systems, drivers, etc...

Speaking of drivers: VMware and similar hypervisors have almost completely eliminated driver compatibility as a concern. Clusters can contain wildly different gear without issues.

There's a lack of understanding in the industry by older managers that gained their experience in the "before times" when even the firmware had to be consistent for a cluster of servers.

For example, the local budget airline Jetstar would buy used servers from Ebay.

Why?

Why not!

Why would you need "support" if a server dies? It is stateless (diskless!) and just 1% of your capacity! Just throw it out.

Why would you care about driver updates if all of your VMs are using emulated hypervisor drivers only?

Why would you care if a server is "used" if chips don't "wear out"?

Etc...

Sounds like your Compute-By-Ebay solution should be able to undercut all those other idiots who buy new.

Where can we sign up?

It's not arbitrage because of the labor spent looking through ebay listings and dealing with surprises (broken hardware, incorrect listings etc.)

Also the machines have to go somewhere and that costs a lot because if someone can do it cheaper they'll just sell VPSs for cheaper than you can host them. Doing it cheaper means more compute per rack/watt which means newer hardware.

Managing, securing and auditing them. The cost of those activities easily exceeds the purchase price over a 3 year lifetime.

There are also sometimes nontechnical business considerations that matter enough that you make tradeoffs around them.

> ... inputs to, constraints on or goals behind the decision.

Of course! Unfortunately and somewhat sadly, later on I discovered that these constraints and goals boiled down to one of a few categories:

1) Got to spend the budget this FY, otherwise we get our budget cut.

2) A big enough sale at once means the sales person is more likely to give me a kick-back.

3) The overhead of the procurement process is so obscenely enormous that it swamps any potential cost saving. A single procurement cycle instead of two is literally cheaper overall than, say, a $500K saving on the hardware.

4) The procurement process is not that expensive, but I am that lazy. It's not my money, so why bother optimising it? It is my time and effort to do the procurement twice however...

5) I can't count, and that 10% discount looked really sweet. There is some techo telling me to buy most of this stuff later, but what does he know? I studied finance! I'm an MBA! I'm a business person now!

In most businesses that kickback is decisive. But most commonly in HR and facilities.

"And that you could never intersect that curve with $today, you had to estimate your delivery date and use the intersection at that point for all planning."

Otherwise known as "Skate to where the puck will be, not where it has been. -- Wayne Gretzky."

This is fairly common in other software-related industries, eg. mobile. Uber was not physically possible when the company was founded in 2008 - most phones didn't have GPS, and when they did, it drained the battery too quickly for the phone to charge from a car. Same with Whatsapp's founding in 2009 - the push notifications that let it catch on weren't actually available until a year after the product first came out. I know a number of Silicon Valley drone transportation companies that know their product isn't feasible today, but are betting on improvements in battery technology.

Oftentimes the market (and underlying technology) pivots into the startup, the startup doesn't pivot into the market. Many of the big pandemic successes like Zoom, Toast, Marco Polo, Peloton, etc. already existed before the pandemic, they just happened to luck out when everybody got shut up at home.

This is obviously very common for logic design and silicon manufacturing. They frequently design for technology that does not exist yet.

I don't quite understand what you think is missing though, every industry and company I've had experience with has forecast things and planned based on some estimated intersection of many moving parts.

The thermal coal industry has to forecast electricity demand, competition, coal demand, coal prices, building and mining prices, regulatory environment, etc. to build and operate mines and power plants., out to about 50 years.

I don't know how much renewables have really caught the industry off guard, but rapid advancements in technology has caused many to come unstuck, especially those in the technology industry (Nvidia et al killed SGI, Intel killed DEC and Sun, and so on).

It's not that it's just renewables catching the old dinosaurs off guard here, it's going both ways because energy is obviously very volatile and highly complex. The Moore's law era gains in transistor performance and density were obviously vastly larger changes but they were actually very consistent and easy to predict by comparison, some guy can't remember his name now even made up a trivial formula for it that held up extremely well for 50 years! With a few relatively minor tweaks. In contrast there have been proclamations for many years now that wind and solar have killed coal. That the price points have crossed over, that coal is dead and coal infrastructure is a worthless asset. Today, thermal coal prices are at historic record highs. Someone is buying it and someone is making a killing digging it up. And a lot of executives are kicking themselves for divesting at the bottom of the market thinking it was worthless except for the free kudos they thought it would get them boasting about something they were going to do for financial reasons anyway.

It's hardly anything to boast about predicting silicon device improvements when others struggle to predict energy markets.

Competition in the energy market is key to bringing more renewables online. With Texas style retail choice we’ve seen 10% of their power come from wind, and that’s not for environmental reasons. It’s just pure market dynamics at play. But we’ve also seen blackouts ~$10,000 residential power bills come out of Texas, so that’s what utilities focus on when there’s talk of competition in other markets.

There are other forms of competition that work better. The form used in CA, OH, and MA is community choice aggregation, which lets municipalities buy electricity for their residents. Newton MA procures 80% of its electricity as renewable. Marin County CA is at 100%. CCAs reduce residential electric bills by 2-9% vs monopoly utilities. With CCA you get the price reductions of the free market, combined with the protections of regulation. The only opposition comes from utilities.

> There are other forms of competition that work better.

There certainly are. The one that works best is the free market.

There is no such thing as a free market.

You're right, perfection is never possible. Free markets, however, have the wonderful property that the closer one gets to them, the better they work!

On the other hand, the closer one gets to socialism, the worse it works :-(

It just means markets have to be managed. Better management makes better markets, but politics only tolerates so much management merit.

Socialism is politics.

The issue is free markets require more than just open competition, they need zero market coercions such as monopolies or misinformation, while also being free from governmental interference.

That’s clearly a direct contradiction. So basically nobody is actually promoting free markets, they all have their own spin to get past these contradictions.

Free markets do not require perfect information. Every transaction made has an element of risk in it - the risk is factored into the price. Buying a used car is a perfect example. They cost more at a dealer than from a private party - because people will pay more for lower risk. Another example is name brands costing more than generic items. Another is less risky investments come with lower returns.

I don't know where the idea that free markets require perfect information comes from.

As for monopolies, the historical ones are ones set up and enforced by the government.

Free markets need management to continue existing at all. When one gets to a monopoly or oligopoly, it's not a market anymore, so isn't counted. Monopoly is the natural end state of an unregulated market.

Name a monopoly in the US not put in place by the government. Historical or contemporary.

Standard Oil, plenty of others like Microsoft are more arguable but standard oil simply out competed and then bought up the competition.

Standard Oil never was a monopoly, and never was convicted of being a monopoly. It was convicted of restraint of trade.

SO never had a market share that exceeded 90%. Throughout the years-long anti-trust trial, SO's market share declined, as competitors had learned how to compete with SO.

During the height of SO, the consumer price of kerosene dropped 70%. There is no evidence SO harmed consumers or charged monopoly prices.

As for Microsoft, they never had more than 90% share, there were always alternatives consumers could buy (Linux and Apple), and their market share has slipped quite a bit since the Justice Dept took no action against them. There's no evidence Microsoft charged monopoly prices - they charged with giving away free copies of their browser! They still give it away for free.

Nobody ever demonstrated any harm to consumers from Microsoft.

Monopoly isn’t defined as having a market share over 90%, or any specific percentage.

Standard oil was the massively dominant player which controlled enough of the oil supply to be able to set the market price because the competition had insufficient capacity to make up the difference and there was a lack of an equivalent substitute good(s). That’s the economic definition of a monopoly.

As to being convinced, it isn’t illegal to become a monopoly.

Again, SO was never convicted of having a monopoly. SO's market share declined before the anti-trust trial got underway, and steadily declined throughout the trial.

> set the market price

Again, the "market price" declined by 70% under SO's alleged monopoly.

The case wasn’t about having monopoly power, the laws states:

“Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.”

Don’t constrain trade and it’s perfectly legal to become a monopoly. Not being a monopoly is a defense but so is not constraining commerce.

Having a monopoly is not a crime, so nothing you can be convicted of. It was broken up because it was a monopoly.

It’s not perfect information, it’s a lack of misinformation. Indistinguishable fake products remove the possibility of name brands.

You run into situations where people can’t trust a gas station is actually selling gas when anyone can slap an Exxon sign up. Reputation networks fill some of these roles, but gatekeepers aren’t free markets.

A free market comes with it government protections against use of fraud and force. Fraudulently misrepresenting your product is a crime and is actionable in a free market.

That’s exactly the kind of contradiction I am talking about. Some people view such government intervention as part of free markets, others feel free markets only exist without any government involvement.

There is a certain kind of religious nut that exists in the US, and no other place as far as I can tell, that believes that the invisible hand of the market is the benevolent hand of God, and that leaving it to its own devices is best. This is dogma, which needs no proof, and any market failures we mortals point out are simply failures to understand the Divine Plan.

That's a pretty bold claim not backed up by any evidence and I can think of numerous counter examples. So if you make such a claim I you really make a bit of an effort to support it.

Name a couple counter examples.

No evidence? It's all around you. The US for mostly free market. It's done spectacularly well. For communism, how about the USSR, N. Korea, etc. They're not hard to find. Do you think they did well? I read somewhere that N. Koreans were 4 inches shorter than their southern neighbors. Does that sound like hard over socialism is a success?

Why is it that every country and society that tried collective farms starved, and sometimes resorted to cannibalism?

The Pilgrims tried collective farming for their first year. They starved. Jamestown tried collective farms. They starved. The Israeli Kibbutzen are propped up by the government, as they cannot produce enough food. Kansas was called the "Breadbasket of the Soviet Union." And on and on.

I saw on the news the other day an interview with a fellow trying to get in the US via the southern border. He has nothing. He spent 4 months getting from Cuba to that border. What would motivate someone to do that? Triumphant socialism in Cuba?

Your statement was: "Free markets, however, have the wonderful property that the closer one gets to them, the better they work!" and you bring up the US compared to North Korea. That doesn't support your point. You simply showed that a market that is freer than NK works better, that doesn't mean that a market that is freer than the US would also work better than the US, or that the US is the global maximum.

Europe is arguably a less free market than the US but it's by no means clear which one is working better. Somalia ruled by the warlords was a freer market but nobody was emigrating from the US to Somalia.

> Somalia ruled by the warlords was a freer market

That kinda sank your argument, as Somalia is anarchy, not a free market.

> it's by no means clear which one is working better

The US economy does much better than the European one. Look at investment returns, for example. Look at which country all the FAANG companies are in.

> > Somalia ruled by the warlords was a freer market

> That kinda sank your argument, as Somalia is anarchy, not a free market.

A free market is an economical system, anarchy is a political one. They are orthogonal to each other. In fact there are anarcho capitalists (the most extreme liberterians) and anarchistic socialists.

> > it's by no means clear which one is working better

> The US economy does much better than the European one. Look at investment returns, for example.

Investment returns? There are many developing nations that have higher than both. They are significantly based on risk of the investment.

> Look at which country all the FAANG companies are in.

So? They are also in the most regulated (least free market) state in the US, that really doesn't prove anything.

Somalia is the freest market possible, excepting only what the warlords confiscate.

I suggest looking up what a free market is, as evidently you don't believe me.

How about what happened to China when they switched from a centrally planned socialist economy to a free market based economy? Or look at the divergence of the fortunes of North & South Korea after the Korean War?

The evidence is everywhere, and very strong.

That strongly depends on your definition of "better".

How about average height? Check out the US figures for the 19th century. Height turns out to be a very good proxy of prosperity.

The Netherlands have better height. It is not genetic: they didn't, historically. In the US it is decreasing.

And, shall we compare infant mortality figures? How about life expectancy? Europe does better than the US on all but mean income, which is skewed by billionaires. Having more billionaires does not favor your argument.

Infant mortality measurement varies because different countries have different measures of what constitutes a baby. The US tries very hard to save preemies, and those failures are considered infant mortality. Other countries don't, calling them miscarriages. It's a moot point anyway, as infant mortality has declined to statistical noise level in all the first world countries.

Life expectancy: America has a big problem with obesity, which is a side effect of prosperity. Obesity negatively influences life expectancy.

Income: income needs to be expressed in terms of Purchasing Power Parity. Besides, what evidence do you have that this is skewed by billionaires?

I'll stick with average height. It's a pretty good indicator of a prosperous country, up until the genetic potential is reached.

As for the Dutch, having traveled in Holland, they appear to have a culture of more healthy food. It's their choice, and this choice is available to Americans, too. Nobody makes Americans drink soda pop all day.

Move goalposts, much? Declining average height indicates something real.

And, American obesity, and (more to the point) prevalence of metabolic disorder causing it, is not a product of prosperity. It is, ultimately, a product of dysfunctional government, with a consequence of falling prosperity.

As far as I know obesity declines with wealth. I'm not sure you should classify it as a side effect of prosperity. Most countries are able to provide more than enough calories for their populace, that's a fairly out-of-date measure of prosperity.

This is a "content free dismissal" that gets re-litigated on HN every week. If you don't have something new or interesting to say about it, just don't.

Not always. Markets are a poor choice when the barriers to entry are high or when the product is mandatory for life so people can't reasonably elect to not buy it or cut back significantly on their use. This is why we don't put municipal water on the free market, and why Texas can't keep the lights on. This is why no sane country would try to distribute healthcare on a free market.

> when the product is mandatory for life

Would you say food is in that category? The free market is the only system that has ever provided a consistent food surplus. The US, with its free market, became the first country with food security and you can see it in the statistics - the average height of Americans increased throughout the 19th century, peaking out around WW2.

> why we don't put municipal water on the free market

Instead we have water intensive almonds being grown in an arid area undergoing a record drought, alongside the government blocking desalination plants (California)

> why Texas can't keep the lights on

Texas is undergoing a record heat wave. Rolling blackouts are predicted this summer for California.

> no sane country would try to distribute healthcare on a free market

Health care in the US was cheap before the government got involved in it.

> Health care in the US was cheap before the government got involved in it.

Only for those who were healthy and had employer provided insurance. Everyone else either went without or paid through the nose or was dropped as soon as they actually needed services. Healthcare premiums are more expensive now because the insurance is a much better product for many people.

You don't know the history of health care in the United States. Before the government got involved by instituting wage limits during WWII, there was no such thing as "employer provided insurance".

You couldn't have picked a worse example. Food market in the US is incredibly distorted by corn subsidies. There are also strategic stockpiles and regulations around commodity prices to stop periodic free market booms and busts from causing famines. Free market speculators have once fucked up so hard that there's Onion Futures Act.

Modern food surplus is mainly thanks to the Green Revolution, thanks to advancements in fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery. A lot of that was government-lead.

On top of the heavily-controlled agriculture there is mostly a free market for consumer products (just needs to be regulated not to save costs by causing cancers), but that has innovated into making junk food cheaper than a healthy diet.

There are indeed government distortions in the market, you mentioned corn subsidies. There are also government payments to farmers to not grow food.

These are not failures of the free market. The growth of junk food can be attributed in large part to corn subsidies.

Now, if you attribute the success of agriculture to the government, why have all the collective farming systems failed completely? Why did the USSR have to import wheat from Kansas?

Modern wheat came from Norman Borlaug's research, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation - not a government project. He received a well-earned Nobel Peace Prize for it.

The Haber-Bosch process was developed at BASF, a private company, and was the first industrialized production of fertilizer.

> heavily-controlled agriculture

That's simply not true. A subsidy is not "control". The government does not direct what gets produced, who produces it, how it is produced, nor does it take the profits.

Health care in the US was cheap only if you never got sick. It was a false promise.

Look deeper into that. For example, health care price increases paralleled inflation until 1968, when they started on a steep upward trajectory, which has never eased. 1968 was when Medicare/Medicaid appeared.

Sounds like classic problems with socialism and central economic planning.

I would say decision making in general.

Don't forget that all those optimization methods developed by Soviet mathematicians found great adoption by corporate planners in capitalist societies!

The book Red Plenty is a great book about both these ideas and the history of the USSR. I can't recommend it enough for technical folks, it's a book that made me interested in economics like never before.

With companies like Amazon taking over large sections of retail consumption and allocation in our economy, the ideas are extremely relevant today. What could Amazon do with a massive AI that the USSR could not do? Definitely more, but they probably can not solve the computation problem of an entire economy.

Lenin copied his government from Ford Motor Company. He was a huge admirer of Henry Ford. A corporation is a command economy.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos differ from Lenin and Mao mainly in firing people instead of executing them.

Marx viewed capitalism as an essential step towards communism, and that we needed the abundance that capitalism provided in order to transition to the next stage.

The biggest refutation of historial materialism is that it was Russia and China, nearly feudal societies, that tried to adopt his ideas and skip the capitalist stage, or at least have the capitalist stage be managed by committed Marxists that would shepherd the transformation. Of course the USSR faltered, and China has adopted more and more capitalism as of late, and it's hard to classify as Marxist other than it is authoritarian and oppressive, a natural consequence of any society build on Marxist ideals.

And perhaps all these capitalist societies in the West will eventually become what Marx envisioned, once there is adequate abundance, but I personally doubt it heavily. Marx's conception of the labor theory of value, in addition to historical Materialism, are pretty well shot down as terrible theory, IMHO. And I say that as someone who aspires to a socialist society. Marx had some good ideas and some really terrible ones, but I think Marxists of today are some of the biggest obstacles towards advancing to more socialism, just as much an obstacle as Libertarians or all stripes of conservatives.

I would also note that opposition to Marx has been a consistent thread throughout socialist history, so I'm not alone on this.

A corporation does not apply force. Socialism requires force.

Overwhelmingly the most coercion applied in the world in any moment is economic. Corporations are created specifically to apply that.

And police. If I want to live in my own, outside of current society, I still need land. Yet the system for allocating land allows individuals to own and control far more than they need personally, which means that there's little chance for me to get a chunk unless I enter fully into exchange with society and garner enough social power (money) to buy my own land.

What has Bill Gates forced you to do?

I was never employed at Microsoft.

So Bill Gates never forced you to work at Microsoft? Did he force anyone to work there? Did he forcibly prevent any employee from quitting? Did he chop anyone's foot off who tried to run away? Did he ever threaten anyone's family to garner compliance?

I know I do not really need to explain economic coercion to you. Disingenuous absurdities are out of place here.

Marxist socialism may require force, but most others define socialism as having democratic or anarchic systems of control.

All societies force their members to do something to be part of them, and some societies do not allow people to leave, even if they disagree with core parts of that social contract.

I disagree with large chunks of the US social contract, but find it a good balance overall. Yet I am still forced to take part in many systems that I would rather not take part in.

You're free to leave the US. The border fence is to keep people out, not in.

Leave the US for where? Who will let me in and under what societal forces?

It's inescapable.

And even if I were to find my spot, generate massive wealth, and I'm outside any society forcing me to do anything, I will now find that other societies I'm not part of, that have lots of weapons, might want to come and take whatever wealth I have generated, by force. And who will stop them unless I use force back?

If you don't feel that society in the US forces you to beg Ave in certain ways, then either you have somehow licked intro eh one society that perfectly matches your views on every single matter, or you are not aware of how our society is forcing you to do things that you would rather now do.

There are many expatriates from the US living abroad. My previous neighbor decided to leave the US and became a citizen of Canada. Nobody tried to stop him.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Homestead-Strike

Even the libertarians will acknowledge that the rights of money and property are protected by force.

Yes, the role of government in a free market is to prevent the use of force or fraud.

Note that this does not involve forcing anyone to do anything. It just says what people cannot do.

And attacking them with truncheons and rubber bullets if they do anyway?

A market of any kind also requires force. Otherwise anyone can simply take your goods without paying for them.

For anyone else seeing this comment, I recommend the following blog post:

http://bactra.org/weblog/918.html

"Attention conservation notice: Over 7800 words about optimal planning for a socialist economy and its intersection with computational complexity theory. This is about as relevant to the world around us as debating whether a devotee of the Olympian gods should approve of transgenic organisms. (Or: centaurs, yes or no?) Contains mathematical symbols but no actual math, and uses Red Plenty mostly as a launching point for a tangent."

I made it about a quarter of the way through before I had to return my copy to the library - not because it wasn't well written, but my attention span has been shot by the internet and smart phones.

I guess that's why almost every successful corporation (some of them larger than small cities by population and larger than small nations by GDP) does central economic planning.

There is actually some interesting literature on this subject - start with Coase's Theory of the Firm. But you won't get there by HN playing "capitalism vs socialism" like 12-year-olds.

Note that large corporations in capitalist economies (and to a lesser extent extremely wealthy individuals) face exactly the same problems with central planning as socialist economies do. It's slightly different: on the one hand power is less concentrated (but still highly concentrated), but on the other hand private actors have less incentive to act in the public interest.

If we wish to reap the "wisdom of the crowd" benefits of "free market" ideals then we need to make sure that wealth remains relatively well distributed.

why does solar produce an exponential decrease in cost over time? I understand how cmos lithography reduces costs. over time smaller and smaller features drives chips smaller which increases yields. I don't understand how that is true for solar - I don't see panel efficiency increasing dramatically. why are the cost curves different for solar than any mass manufacturing, like stamping steel chassis for cars?

It's just a traditional learning curve. More similar to panel than cmos.

The reason we are getting steady cost reduction is steady volume increase in production.

For decades we have been massively under-served in PV production volume. Even now, we are still somewhere in the middle of that S-curve.

I haven't seen such data, but panel in the early C20th probably followed a similar learning curve to PV now.

Car production costs did fall dramatically in their first decades. Production learning curves tend to be log log over cumulative volume. So the early gains are gone. It’s easy to forget that mass production of automobiles has gone on for a century.

Mass manufacturing of solar panels is a lot more complex than stamping steel parts.

For example, one of the big wins was diamond (I think?) cutters for crystalline silicon, which allowed panels to be made rig far less inputs. A big competitor before that was thin film, and maybe you have heard of Solyndra, who had a heat tech that was made obsolete because this advancement in cutting silicon.

Any improvement along the chain of silicon production to siping to assembly has a chance to reduce costs, and it's usually small incremental bits of 1% here or 2% there.

That is quite remarkable (if true), given that total world electricity consumption is around 3 TW on average.

(ETA: one commenter adds that solar has an "average capacity factor" of around 20%, so that 1 TW deployed will provide about 0.2 TW on average. Still, very impressive.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption

i’ve been reading on this lately and it’s incredibly hard to find up to date numbers on solar capacity, deployed or projected, in terms that make sense. some places report draw rates. some GHw. some daily numbers some yearly. politicians like to report places are 100% running off renewables when that means current draw rate matches solar productivity rate. yet solar production is always a small fraction of overall usage. it’s all very confusing

Also keep in mind that this will coincide massive electrification of historically non-electric energy consumption (eg. transportation and heating).

You'll be even more impressed after trying to match this in Factorio...

Elon musk made a point in a recent talk, the entire demand of the USA could be satisfied with a 100x100 square miles of solar panels. Thinking in those terms, you realize it's quite achievable.

Edit - 100x100

There is a video debunking that: 10,000 square miles, to start with. But really, a fair bit more than that. Or would be, except we have wind and hydro. And even nukes and geothermal.

It will honestly take one hell of a lot of panels, any way you count them. But that just hammers home how much we are still spending every day on coal, oil, and gas. We will spend less when most of our power comes from the panels, even with the capital cost of the panels figured in.

Elon Musk lies a lot, not sure why you didn't validate that before parroting it because it's definitely false.

Not sure (it's been a long time) but I think that a figure like that (a square 200 miles on a side) arose long ago based on a constant insolation (so, spread around the world, not one location) and 100% capture(??). (For world electricity use only, based on usage at that time.)

Even if 100 by 100 is correct and it isn’t more that is an insane engineering project, and a lot of land. More than Lebanon, for example.

Alternatively, covering less than half the car parks in the US with solar roofs.

"A 2011 study by the University of California, estimated there are upwards of 800m parking spaces in the US, covering about 25,000 square miles of land."

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/sep/27/cities-elimin...

It’s still remarkable to me none of the big oil companies are going hard into renewables.

It’s like they are either accepting their decline or are in denial.

What decline? Hydrocarbon demand is going up over time while the supply is going down due to underinvestment.

> none of the big oil companies are going hard into renewables

Citation, please.

Because afaik it's the other way around.

They're not 'oil' companies, they're energy companies. As long as something other than 'oil' gets more interesting they'll do it.

They're company companies, meaning that their goal is to make profit, not do something that's "interesting." You can't take Apple seriously when its spokespeople explain the logic that drives its production. It's a load of horseshit. You can't take BP seriously when they says that it's an "energy company" and you can't take Apple seriously when they says that it's a "tech company."

European oil majors invest in "renewables," American oil majors basically do not at all (unless you count carbon sequestration for the purpose of further oil extraction as "renewable"). Here's a source:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daneberhart/2021/03/09/oil-gian...

This difference in strategy stems from the difference in economic opportunity between the two imperialist spheres.

If the oil companies were acting in the best interests of the shareholders, they would be all-in on renewables. But US oil companies act in the interest of corporate officers, who are all close to retirement.

For me its more like old 'dinosaur' cooperate mentality slows down r&d on alternatives, maybe its more of a fear taking a major step, while other startups with main focus on green energy taking the field and attention. Yet still countries like Norway recognized this years ago and started investing on green.

Or they're still making ludicrous amount of money in the current scheme of things, and shareholders prefer hedging their bet and investing into clean energy through different companies to not put their eggs all in one basket.

Owning renewables doesn't sound like a fantastic business to be in, except maybe for hydropower plants. Massive amounts of CapEx, a commodity product that you're locked by contract into limiting any possibility of upside...

Renewables developers are actually raking it in, if they are good at what they do. Due to the tax incentives, it requires very particular types of backing.

Up until recently there were very lucrative power purchase agreements that would offtake your solar generation st great rates for decades.

The problem is one of scale and expertise. These projects are smaller than the many billion dollar capital projects that fossil fuel companies usually embark upon. Those large fossil fuel projects also have super long payback periods, not too dissimilar from renewables.

However we don't see a ton of fossil fuel expansion even with the current price spike, because there's a huge huge huge risk that any new projects started will never pay themselves back. ESG efforts have reduced appetite for capital expenditures, and other shareholders are demanding strict capital discipline. Which is for the best for all involved. We can't afford, environmentally, to star any new big fossil fuel extraction projects. The big question is who will be left holding the bag as we phase fossil fuels out.

Eventually, the extremely generous tax benefits for building a solar field will no longer exist and when you're spending hundreds of millions to make $0.03/kwh for 20 years... I'd rather go buy bonds at that point.

I would argue that the market will price in the risk, and that there will be successful developers who generate alpha, and some number of failed solar projects developers.

This is why we need a carbon price

You know what else requires lots of capex and produces a commodity product? Oil.

But oil goes to $110/barrel sometimes (like it is now), and Exxon gets to make a ton of money.

With renewables, you're locked in for decades when you sign the contract. There's no upside swings.

And oil isn't a great business to be in either. Return on Equity for the whole US industry since 2010 or so has been ~0%

They will have countries that 'voluntarily' tether themselves to "beautiful clean coal" to keep them going.

Some are catching up:

https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/new-energies/win...

https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/new-energies/sol...

https://www.bp.com/en_us/united-states/home/what-we-do/gas-a...

https://totalenergies.com/infographics/totalenergies-offshor...

https://totalenergies.com/energy-expertise/exploration-produ...

These probably have 100GW in total

No more remarkable than typewriter companies not going hard into computers.

Or kodak not going hard into digital cameras.

Some of them did go big on solar. BP Solar was a major solar manufacturer and subsidiary of British Petroleum (now just "BP"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BP_Solar

ARCO Solar was another significant solar player in the 1980s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARCO#ARCO_Solar

The first American solar company to target terrestrial applications, Solarex, was acquired by Amoco in 1983:

https://cleantechnica.com/2014/10/24/sun-horizon-history-sol...

France's major oil company Total acquired a majority share of SunPower in 2011:

https://store.globaldata.com/report/total-to-acquire-60-stak...

There are a few reasons I can see why the oil companies never became "energy companies" with an equal emphasis on renewables:

- The required competencies for success in manufacturing renewable energy equipment are very different from those required for discovering/extracting/refining oil. The production side of renewables is high volume manufacturing. The oil companies aren't going to do any better than existing big manufacturers like Siemens, Panasonic, or General Electric (to say nothing of more specialized manufacturers focusing only on renewable energy components).

- The competition is fierce. Most of the world's top solar manufacturers from 15 years ago are now shut down, acquired, or have a tiny market share compared to the past. It would have taken a very lucky guess or the fortitude to endure years of losses for an oil company to keep an acquired solar company running consistently.

- Renewable energy costs are falling every decade, and fierce competition (see previous point) means that prices have to fall also. This is very different from oil where global prices go up as often as they go down. Going all-in on renewable energy means betting on a future of high volumes and lower margins. That may look lucrative for a company starting from nothing, but for an oil company it's a very Kodak film-versus-digital kind of institutional shift.

Back-of-the-envelope calculation regarding the market size: World primary energy consumption is well below (and will remain below for a while) 200PWh, if I am not mistaken.

Assuming a lifespan of 30 years, this quantity would allow for 30TW of world-wide installed peak power. Assuming further an average utilization of 1000h/a, we end up with about 15% of the world energy needs, assuming a 1:1 electrification with solar power.

So by this calculation, there's maybe room for 3-4TW, which this growth curve would reach around 2036. By 2040 solar energy would be abundant world-wide. Of course there will be other limits much earlier and the growth might flatten much earlier, but I think I wouldn't hold stock of solar panel manufacturers after 2028 or so.

Sufficiently cheap solar could replace all primary energy sources (e.g. through storage and fuel synthesis), and total global energy consumption may also increase dramatically if the price is right. So a solar manufacturer that continues to find ways to cut costs could remain a good investment for a long time to come.

Industrial-level deployments have dropped precipitously in price but personal-scale ones have not. It still takes two decades for home solar to pay for itself. Portable panels for camping are about the same price they were five years ago.

If you buy from Home Depot or any of the hawkers putting flyers in your mail, payback time is long. But they charge 4x the FOB price for a pallet-load.

Taking two decades to pay for itself depends entirely on the rate structure of the utility and the prices of the installer.

Prices in the US are heavily inflated because rate regulations change dramatízale year to year, which means that the only installers that survive tend to be the ones that can dynamically expand into a market before the utility closes the market again. Which means that a huge fraction of US solar costs are actually customer acquisition costs, marketing and advertising and boots on the ground doing the hard sell to consumers.

Where I live, even with super expensive installation, solar pays for itself in five years.

When you say "pays for itself" does that include the cost of interest and the time value of money? If so, then you can finance the installation and still come out ahead.

Even with the high price of residential solar, it's still pretty cheap compared to the cost of new transmission and distribution infrastructure, which is what utility-scale solar also requires. And utility scale solar is the cheapest energy out there.

So we should find ways to make the US solar industry more efficient and cost effective for consumers, because pairing residential solar with batteries (for example in an EV) is a very cost effective future.

It actually costs double to install a solar roof in the US than in the EU. It takes about 5-8 years for the roof to pay for itself over here (of course depending on your location).

Depends where you are. In Australia it's pretty cheap - I had 6.6kW installed for about US$4000 and it should pay off in about seven years. Would have been five or six but the feed in tariff went down - although with the massive increase in the price of coal and gas, the tariff should increase again, given the wholesale electricity cost is jumping up.

If we will have this much spare solar, can’t we just convert it to methane and reuse most of the current infrastructure for heating homes etc? The CO2 can be taken from the air…

I highly doubt that we'll have significant spare solar. Energy is just way too useful and valuable. Once we get close to a situation where the price goes negative, somebody will figure out a way to turn the spare solar into dollars.

https://terraformindustries.com/ and SpaceX are planning on turning solar and atmospheric CO2 into methane. Not spare solar, but dedicated solar. It'd be silly to use it to heat your house. If electricity is cheap enough to make the process viable, then a heat pump will save you a huge amount of money.

That spare solar power will be used for hydrogen production most of the time.

And where is it?

I mean, CA duck is already there, but not a single cf of hydrogen produced

Factories to make hydrogen electrolysers need to be built first.

China got a jump on us and is selling electrolysers pretty cheap. Somebody is buying those.

To be cheap, they need to operate at multi-GW scale, have a long operating life, and good reliability.

You say so, but hydrogen production capacity is additive. More electrolysers, more hydrogen, up to the power available.

But, as with solar, wind, and storage, prices will fall fast as production ramps up.

Which costs more to install, run and maintain: 100,000 10kW grid-connected PV installations, or one 1GW installation? I think it's the single installation.

Likewise with hydrogen. Unless it is all used at the point of generation, and near enough at the time of generation (storing and transporting it is expensive energetically and in terms of capital assets, and risky), economies of scale apply. And domestic use isn't a good fit for "use it all now while the sun is shining".

Yes, advocates for hydrogen need to explain this.

My guess: there are major engineering challenges that drive up the cost. Storing and transporting hydrogen (compressed, adsorbed/absorbed or liquid) are difficult.

The major use for hydrogen initially will be to push into underground reservoirs. It takes a long time to build out hydrogen handling infrastructure. After we are awash in cheap spare hydrogen, the handling infrastructure will grow by natural market forces. First things happen first.

https://www.airproducts.com/news-center/2022/04/0422-air-pro...

A lot of facilities are coming online.

On very sunny days in Australia the price frequently goes negative already.

That won't last.

Generating synthetic hydrocarbon fuels from oversupply of renewables only makes sense for use cases that can't be easily electrified like aviation. The conversion process is very inefficient. Others here have pointed out that hydrogen could eventually be used directly in aviation, at which point hydrocarbon energy storage is even less relevant.

Regarding home heating in the future, firstly the infrastructure we have is rapidly depreciating to the point of needing replacement: The gas distribution infrastructure in many areas is old and very expensive to maintain and operate, and furnaces only last a few decades at best.

It makes more sense to electrolyse water to H2 and then convert to NH3 for long term storage, then convert that to electricity at a central plant in the heating season, and use the electricity to run heat pumps which can be 300+% efficient.

Heat pumps even make sense (from a climate/CO2 perspective, not necessarily a household finance perspective) with the fossil natural gas derived electricity we still use today.

This is a thing I'm wondering. In Europe houses are old (i.e. not well insulated) and electricity is expensive. A heat pump to go through the winter would be insanely expensive for most households. Is there any solution that could fix this issue?

Insulation!

Northern/Western Europe has a whole bunch of Ukrainian refugees. Why not solve two problems at once by putting them to work doing insulation retrofits?

Insulation isn't that challenging. Houses eventually need to be upgraded and remodeled. That's usually a good time to insulate them better.

In Northern Europe the way new houses are built today is a masonry structure and then that's wrapped with rigid foam insulation on the outside (also under the floor and roof, but wrapping the walls is the bulk of it). My city is in the process of retrofitting 50yo Soviet apartment blocks with the same technique, and it works well.

The hard part is not technical or financial, it is convincing someone to change the look of their 250yo stone house.

> The hard part is not technical or financial, it is convincing someone to change the look of their 250yo stone house.

If one is willing to give up a bit of interior space in order to keep the charming stone exterior, they can also insulate on the interior of the wall, probably with some kind of vapor barrier between the stone wall and the insulation to keep condensation on the cold stone wall away from the interior.

The tricky part is these houses are probably already small to begin with. In the village I grew up in, there were old houses with ceilings where I (1.80m) couldn't stand up straight.

If the house is old enough that a 1.8m person can't stand up in it, unless it has tremendous cultural/historical value, it should probably be torn down and replaced with a newer building.

I am extremely sceptical of this claim. I have had a heat pump installed in November (UK), and my estimates from over the winter is that it cost me less to run than my (admittedly old and inefficient) gas boiler. As it was probably past time to replace the boiler, it would not have been a bad move even without government incentives. The incentives made it a no-brainer. My house is reasonably well insulated as the previous owner did do that upgrade, and that might be a necessary first step before switching to a heat pump. Even on gas, though, you will save a lot by upgrading the insulation.

How do you handle ventilation? Do you need to trap warm air in the house by keeping doors and windows closed as much as possible to avoid defeating insulation?

I am not sure I understand the question. Yes, I keep the doors and windows closed in the winter; it is cold outside. Do you normally leave them open? Ultimately, I am getting the same total heat from the heat pump as I was from the boiler (kind of by definition).

I often open windows even in winter to get fresh air circulating through the house. Not all day, but not just for a few minutes either. It gets stuffy otherwise. I am also motivated by these types of concerns:

https://www.lung.org/clean-air/at-home/ventilation-buildings...

You should consider adding an active ventilation system, which turns on periodically. This can be as simple as a bath fan on a timer with a make-up air opening elsewhere in the house.

If you are concerned about the inherent heat loss that comes with ventilation, consider installing a heat (or energy) recovery ventilator, which uses a heat exchanger to recycle a large portion of the heat while also introducing fresh air into the house.

If you are in the UK or the US Northeast you probably experience worse stuffiness because the dominant method of heating is hydronic which doesn't circulate or filter air.

At least in the UK, electricity prices are (very roughly) 4x that of gas, but heat pumps are about 4x as efficient, so the two roughly balance out and you end up with similar heating costs. At least this is how it's worked out in practice for my air-to-air installation.

If you improve the building envelope with air sealing and insulation (assuming that wasn't already done) you can get even lower operational costs. But the even bigger value is in the increased comfort.

At least in Western europe there's big governmental pressure (by means of laws and incentives) to insulate old houses.

Synthesising fuel could become very interesting, as the entire infrastructure is there already. Might also be interesting for aviation, as batteries are not really practical for a few more decades, it seems to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-neutral_fuel

Once LH2-fueled aircraft enter a market, kerosene-fueled craft will be wholly unable to compete. The rate will be limited by how fast retrofits or new airframes can be made, and secondarily by growth of LH2 synthesis infrastructure at major airports. Kerosene craft will be relegated to increasingly marginal routes.

Amusingly, Russia could find itself fielding LH2 birds first just because they will need all new aircraft sooner than everybody else.

Average aircraft age in the USA is 14+ years. A new passenger jet costs some $100+ million. We cannot even approve unleaded aviation gas, I am unsure a transition to LH2 will be speedy.

"General aviation" below turboprop-scale has been too small to command the attention needed for change.

When you need an LH2 airframe to be able to stay in the market at all, that will accelerate conversion.

The next step is to use excess renewable energy to electrolyze water and make hydrogen. To get to the next step requires direct air capture of CO₂. We haven't solved that last problem yet.

Also, it is not really necessary to go to that step in many cases. Steel can directly use hydrogen in production. Natural gas turbines can switch to hydrogen instead. So any kind of hydrocarbon quickly becomes a value-added cost that may only make sense if you need that particular hydrocarbon.

> Steel can directly use hydrogen in production.

Well, yes, you can use hydrogen. But you will always have to use some carbon too.

In other words, steel is a long-term sink for carbon.

Only if the infrastructure for producing the synthetic fuel is cheap enough to leave idle part of the time.

Fuel synthesis equipment will never be idle except when long-term storage is actually being drawn down. The output is too valuable for too many things. Everyone will massively overbuild generating capacity in order to keep their electrolysers busy at all times.

Heat pumps are so much more efficient in many climates (and the tech is improving quickly for cold temperature air-source - newer model are reportedly much better than was available even five years ago) that it's better to go for electrification. That's even before the massive efficiency loss of producing gas from electricity.

Burning gas also produces NOx emissions, which is something that would be much better to avoid, especially in and around houses. The air quality improvements to electrification are potentially massive for public health.

For solar and other intermittent sources to be viable at scale, a continental long haul grid is needed, as well as a way to store power. Generally, you need 2x intermittent capacity to replace non-intermittent, as you need to be able to provide power, and store power at the same time.

AC is a huge load for much of the US. Covering that with solar is a huge win even if you need something else for 10pm. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

And not just AC, but the service economy runs during daytime for the most part.

AC is a huge load now, with electrification heating will eclipse it. I can confirm this via my electric bill with a heat pump.

New AC designs seem to get about 1-2% more efficient every year, so we're making progress on both ends.

It's funny people always forget this. There is a much bigger temperature differential to overcome to provide heating compared to cooling in most of the US. Burning natural gas for various forms of heat is probably the most energy intensive thing most houses do. Electricity is more efficient, but once heating is electrified, most residential electricity will be used to heat homes and water.

With a modern heat pump, it is more efficient (most of the time) to burn natural gas at the power plant and then use the generated electricity to heat the home (after accounting for generation and line losses, and other efficiency drains) than it is to burn the gas in a modern, super-efficient gas furnace in the home.

So whether we fully renewablize™ the grid or not, we still should encourage (read: subsidize) the replacement of gas and heating oil furnaces with heat pumps.

The grid doesn't rely on a single source of generation at scale today, I don't see why doing solar at scale is any different. A big chunk of power usage follows the sun; you don't need to store anything until solar is more than that portion.

There's this little thing called the sun, and it doesn't shine a big chunk of the day. Right about when you need the most energy for heating and lighting.

Electricity usage generally peaks during daylight hours, and other sources of generation can be throttled to account for solar's lack of generation at night.

Other sources being natural gas plants? Great plan.

Yes, it does make more sense to use natural gas between 6-10pm than it does it use it 24/7, like we do now.

And/or use hydro, which can also be throttled.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-view/el...

Until renewables are fully built out, storage is useless. So we burn natural gas at night for a while. When there is enough generating capacity to supply demand and charge storage at the same time, then we install the storage and charge it. Storage will be radically cheaper at that time than now.

In the meantime, every spare dollar should go to building out renewables. At some point spending on mined gas declines naturally because it is the most expensive energy.

But why do you want us to move to 100% solar and nothing else? No power system in the world depends on only one type of power.

You're just making things up to prove your conclusion.

In most of the US, electricity usage in afternoons in July is 50-100% higher than during the middle of the night in January[1]. Your intuition about when the most electricity is used is dead wrong.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915

Does this hold true when controlled for heat source? If we are pushing to be off fossil fuels, it'd be worth knowing how much we will need in order to convert all existing methane/propane/oil furnaces over to heat pumps, and what that looks like during cold winter nights.

The sun definitely shines all day. If it stopped shining at night, you wouldn't see a full moon

I don't think that's relevant to his point

A 10MV DC national transmission system would make a lot of sense.

This intuition can be kind of wrong - Long haul grid power isn't cheap, and it may turn out that large batteries on location will be more effective in many cases.

Everybody will have everything. You draw down local batteries first, pull from transmission lines, convert from your long-term tankage, according to what your AI decides. Transmission line power costs money, drawing down your batteries causes wear, long-term storage has lower round-trip efficiency, yada yada.

Maybe this is a stupid question but I wonder if there are any ecological concerns about redirecting terawatts of power from the photons hitting Earth into electricity. Of course, it's bound to be a big net win over burning hydrocarbons. But is there any drawback?

Yes, whatever is under the solar panels gets less sunlight. There are even some companies starting to lay solar panels directly on the ground, which means it gets none at all.

I don't think it's all that hard to take that into account, though; it's a land use concern. What was the land being used for before?

Also, the terawatts of power generated will get converted to heat in developed areas where it's used, but that's true of any electricity use.

But if the sunlight that produced that power had hit something else instead, it also would have been turned into heat. There's no net heating of the planet from solar power. (Of course, the distribution of heating can change.)

Recall that PV panels are black. They get quite hot, almost certainly hotter than plain dirt would if uncovered. Plenty hot enough that you can't touch them for more than a moment.

For reference, that's somewhere just above 50°C

I am not sure that is correct. It is possible that solar panels absorb more total energy and keep it locally than would otherwise be reflected back into space via radiative cooling.

Possibly, although it would behoove solar panels to have a high albedo along the non-electrically producing wavelengths. Lower panel temperatures mean higher efficiency, but the effort might not be worth the marginal improvement.

Yes, and when electricity is used to do work, the vast, overwhelming majority of the energy used is turned into heat.

So solar panels are moving heat, not sending it into a black hole somewhere.

That was my point.

At 100TW, solar power would use a whooping 0.06% of total solar radiation the Earth receives. The Sun is truly immense.

The biggest environmental concern is the disposing of the batteries when they die, and that should seen solutions soon as solar gets more and more popular.

The overwhelming majority of solar energy storage will likely be in batteries with little need for disposal: giant spinning flywheels, pumping water up high, storing energy in millions of smart thermostat homes by overheating/cooling them during peak hours to reduce demand at other hours, etc.

Finally, I see mention of the HVAC "battery" idea I've been flogging for years. Progress!

I hope this progresses to using the pile-of-rocks "battery" to store heat/cold in cheap hours and draw on it in expensive hours.

You might be interested to read about a seasonal thermal storage project in Vojens, Denmark:

https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2020/12/16/district-heati...

Looks like the Danes are very smart!

It was popular in the 1950s. Deployed near where you live, even.

I know Seattle has an old steam plant to supply the downtown with heat. Never heard of rock storage in the US. I'm interested in a reference.

If so, Americans have forgotten all about it, replaced with a desire to do it all with electric batteries.

"storing energy in millions of smart thermostat homes by overheating/cooling them during peak hours to reduce demand at other hours"

Who's going to go along with this? I suspect millions in the US alone would flip their lids if such an idea were even considered and rightfully so. IMO this would be a great idea if your ultimate goal was to cause smart thermostats to be banished from the home.

I think GP meant overheating/overcooling during off-peak hours? In which case plenty of people in well-insulated buildings go along with this, motivated by lower electricity prices during off-peak hours.

I took it as over-heating/cooling during peak electric production time (daylight probably) when power is more available in order to reduce usage during off-peak times. I think it would require compulsion or a large amount of voluntary adoption on the part of the customers to really make much of a difference though, and I doubt that the latter is likely on a meaningful scale (though I could be wrong of course).

It already happens today with little complaint.. many utilities are offering discounted rates if you agree to let them reduce your consumption on a handful of days per year. One such example;

https://consumersenergy-faqs.tendrilinc.com/faqs/what-is-the...

Everything's fine as long as it's voluntary. And by voluntary I mean both not compulsory (mandated by some level of government) as well as not normalized to such a degree that virtually every electric provider independently offers no other option. These types of things have a way of worming their way into our everyday lives; I imagine I'm not the only one who is wary of loss of agency from this as well as other similar things as the Overton window is dragged farther and farther away over time.

The fraction of storage in the form of batteries will diminish to near zero, except in cars and garages. That will be a large absolute amount of batteries, but will not grow at anything like the rate generating capacity will.

Consider that 40% of American corn crop (created, as you say, by redirecting the suns energy) is turned into Ethanol, to be burned for energy.

Solar panels are "roughly 200 times more energy per acre than corn" according to https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/03/10/solarfood-in-ethanol-...

There are ecological concerns but the alternatives have them too.

There's an albedo change where previously the light would have reflected back out.

The melting ice is likely a bigger change, considering some of the solar is going on dark rooftops that already bake in the sun

It would be wonderful if it came to be but I find that hard to believe. The UK peak electricity consumption is around 40GW, so that would be enough to supply 1.2B people at UK standards of living. In just 6 years the entire world’s electricity needs would be met. Unless they count hydrogen and synthetic fuel generation.

Solar is meant to handle peak loads, but spread out over the full day and night. Its worst case peak winter output will need to exceed usage.

The future will mean energy abundance during most of the year. An S-curve of cost decline and deployments means even 1TW could be a low estimate

Solar is certainly not a silver bullet. Putting the same panel in Arizona or Norway will yield a wildly different RoI

However, electricity is easily transmitted, especially compared to oil pipelines.

Northern Africa is having a massive solar boon right now, with lines delivering across Europe.

Not so much as you would expect. Solar panels have got cheap enough that buying more of them to use locally is cheaper than buying the transmission line.

The smart money would be buying ammonia synthesis equipment to site in Africa, instead, to sell to Finland and wherever the wind has let up.

Dependence on foreign nations for your energy needs is currently not very in vogue.

Like this proposed project?

https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/

It blew my mind you can transmit power for 3000km/2000mi with only about 10% loss using high voltage DC power lines.

Well hearing and transportation are in the process of becoming electrified, electricity usage will skyrocket as fossil fuel usage declines.

It'd be ideal to also electrify cement production, iron smelting, and fertilizer production. And other big industrial heat and power uses, and commercial and domestic heat. Then we'll have converted most uses of fossil fuels.

That 1TW is nameplate peak production. New solar installed in good sites has a budgeted capacity factor of 0.2, declining gradually as the panels and associated equipment age.

If loads (demand, storage) are not well matched to solar production, realised capacity factor could well be 25% lower.

We'll want more of everything as the developing world develops and wants stuff and as demand for air conditioning grows. Vaclav Smil estimated world primary energy supply as 10 TW continuous as at 2000. since then it has near doubled with China's sudden rise. We'll probably want 50% - 100% more by 2050 as India and Nigeria develop.

0.2 TW continuous per year (the optimistic figure) growth in solar is not fast enough, IMHO.

1. Energy in Nature and Society, Smil V.

Loads will come to match solar production exactly as storage is built out, and electrolysis.

Of course solar is not the only renewable benefitting from production learning curve.

Engineering considerations will trump enthusiasm.

Taking into account engineering considerations like reliability, operating life, material properties in various environments, product quality, safety, known materials performance, operating life, and especially costs, capital and operating -- taking all those into account, the best uses for any electrolysed* hydrogen, made as a use of otherwise unused electricity, seem to be making fertilizer and hydrocarbons.

The latter are very energy dense, super cheap, and safe to store for long periods and to transport long distances to where the stored energy is needed.

Those two products are best made at isolated large scale dedicated plants operating continuous processes. It's not clear to me that hydrogen as hydrogen has any role as an energy storage or transport medium, nor is it clear that PV alone is a good fit as the energy source for the likely uses.

* I'm guessing by hydrolysis you meant electrolysis to produce hydrogen? "Hydrolysis" means "chemical reaction occurring with the addition of water", e.g sucrose -> glucose and fructose.

(s/hydro/electro/, thanks.)

Handling of LNG and LH2 are not very different, a matter of volume and temperature. Where we handle millions of tons of LNG today, we can handle LH2 in its place with some adjustment. The people doing the adjustment will see a big job, but we won't notice.

The UK peak demand is surprisingly low. Maybe because most people don't need air conditioning and the primary heating source is natural gas.

Finland needs ~15 GW in cold winter evenings, and that's for a population 12x smaller than in the UK. I've seen numbers like 720 GW for the US peak demand, which is comparable to Finland.

And what to do at night? Fornicate?

Fortunately there are a lot of options for grid storage and most of them don't need lithium which will be in short supply for the next few years.

Such as? Gravity is a terrible way to store energy, and everything else seems to be 20 years out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_to_gas for example. Iron-air batteries or redox-flow batteries also look very promising.

This is the “20 years out” that I mentioned.

In the meantime, it’s lithium.

Power to gas is available today, we just need to build the electrolyzers. Several MW worth are already operating in Germany for R&D purposes.

i mean CA duck is already there, but no serious storage/conversion problem.

Maybe in 20-30 years it will be solved, but what is the point adding CA solar NOW?

Still burn some gas? That's still a big reduction in gas burnt

Well, 1 out of 22,300 TWh is a start! Menlo park didn't light the world in a day.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/280704/world-power-consu...

EDIT: Misread power as energy.

You can't compare TW and TWh in that way (one is power, the other energy). With solar the way that TW translates to TWh is a little complicated, but it sure isn't 1:1 (probably closer to 1:2000).

Just curious, did you get 2000 as in eight hours a day, five days a week? It just reminds me of the rough estimate of the number of hours worked in a year which I find funny to think about the sun going to work in an office for five days a week, eight hours a day.

8 * 5 * 50 = 2000

so the sun gets two weeks vacation a year :)

Just on this, depending on location there are "rules of thumb" based on hours of sunlight, cloud cover etc.

Where I live the rule of thumb is 4. So 1 KW of panels will make around 4kWh a day, averaged over the year or about 1460 a year.

I think more accurately the sun puts in incredibly long hours, but isn't working at full productivity for a lot of it (maybe if it cut back to a normal 40 hour work week it would get more done).

A single TW of solar would produce a TW for every hour that the sun is shining, so it could be 3,000 TWh for every TW installed. Obviously the exact value depends on the insolation.

nit: watts are measured per second, not per hour

You're confusing TW with TWh. If running at full capacity that would be an additional 8760 TWh generated every year. Of course it won't be 100% utilised but it takes more of a chunk out of it then you suggest.

Solar has an average capacity factor of roughly 20%, meaning over the course of a year 1W generates an average of 0.2W.

You are using a metric of TWh/year, so multiply 1 TW * .2 * 24 hour/day * 365 day/year and that 1TW of solar generates 1700TWh/year.

Given an average lifespan of 25 years, a 1TW/year productive capacity supports 44,000TWh/year production.

Given that solar will be so cheap, I expect us to be throwing away 20%-50% of solar electricity (curtailment, in current jargon). For example, production may be sized to produce enough at the seasonal minimum (winter in Northern countries), and summer time might have ridiculous abundance.

this is why I think hydrogen will be a huge part of the system.

even if the round-trip efficiency is 20% and all you do is mix it into the gas turbines, eventually the numbers are going to work out to "why would you not, why would you leave the money on the table"

even if the tanks leak like sieves a 10 - 100Hr buffer will go a huge way toward smoothing out winter lulls.

Leaked hydrogen, all told, traps 200x as much heat as CO2. We really should not leak any more than we must.

By itself, it is just 6x. But it has lots of other interactions, such as increasing lifetime of methane.

But round-trip efficiency of hydrogen will be rising fast. Electrolysis by itself, which used to be 60%, will go well over 90%, maybe over 95%, in short order.

Liquid hydrocarbons can be stored safely and at virtually no cost for years in all sorts of climates in cheap, lightweight containers. Transport is likewise cheap, simple, and safe. Dealing with leaks is relatively safe too.

We have a hundred years of experience dealing with them with all the deep knowledge and huge mass of deeply embedded systems that that implies.

And they are nearly as energy dense as liquid hydrogen.* There doesn't seem to be much "there" there with hydrogen, except generation efficiency if it is generated at the point and time of use.

Reliability, safety, operational life, risk management, availability of expertise, and cost will probably trump technical efficiency, just as when buying servers. I expect to see synthetic hydrocarbons being made with green hydrogen (and green carbon) before I see the hydrogen itself being transported around in any significant way or stored for any significant time.

* Fun semi-related fact: there's more hydrogen in a liter of gasoline than in a liter of liquid hydrogen.

We store and transport millions of tons of LNG -- liquified natural gas, dirty methane -- in the same way as liquid hydrogen would be handled. LH2 is colder, but not so you would notice.

LNG goes point-to-point from liquefaction plant to regasification plant. There's no reticulation to city neighbourhoods.

Gaseous hydrogen is much more dangerous than natural gas (flame speed, range of air fraction for combustion, ability to escape seals, etc., etc.) and you need three times the volume to deliver the same energy.[1] I doubt there will be much reticulated use.

1. https://www.powereng.com/library/6-things-to-remember-about-...

H2 will be mixed into the natural gas, short term. Longer term, plumbed gas will be phased out, as is happening already in New York.

I'm hoping we can convince gas companies to convert into district heating companies. It's still the heating business, and uses pipes and liquids. They could make heat pumps far more efficient by using ground sources of heating and cooling, and maybe even shipping process heat from one building to another.

It would be a it of a shift, but it uses the same core competencies and would allow them to survive.

However I don't think there's a single gas company with management with the vision, innovation, and smarts to make the switch. It would take a new generation of management, that's smarter and more forward looking.

Maybe a shareholder revolt at one could cause a change in management that would pioneer this change... how much does a gas company cost?

I like how you are thinking.

Trick is to force them all to make the change.

District heating is hell.

Most ex-Soviet/Warsaw pact countries tried to move from district to direct gas, or small CCGT plants (as in one for about 10000 people) exactly for this reason: maintenance is hell and losses are enormous. And that's in high-density urban. In low-density suburbs it won't ever fly.

I agree about not being transported or stored "significantly" but thats the beauty of it. The very places that would consume it (gas gen stations) would also be the ones who could produce it when they're not running because solar is overproducing. produced and stored on site, never transported, pre-exising grid connectivity. and again i'm only talking about the 10 - 100 hour market. the <10hr market is already solved by li-ion, and the >100hr market is an unsolved problem, we're just gonna have to burn gas for 4 - 6 weeks in the winter.

Hydrogen storage is such a pain that I don't think we will be keeping hydrogen around except for chemical feedstocks.

We will need to convert hydrogen into something else to make it easier to handle. Perhaps ammonia, which is useful both for fertilizer and perhaps as a liquid fuel.

There will be a hell of a lot of synthetic ammonia. The shipbuilders and ship fuel suppliers are already tooling up for ammonia-powered shipping. It will take a long time to get electrically synthesized ammonia production up. GW-scale plants under construction now won't start delivering until 2026.

There will be a lot of hydrogen banked in underground caverns and tapped-out fracking wells. But industrial users who have been buying it, or LNG, will take to electrolysing locally instead. Airports will electrolyse and liquify locally, international hubs first.

Desalination will be the new pumped hydro.

I kid but I don't.

(I don't actually know much about desal - there's details, but is it power in = water out, plus a bunch of facility maintenance and operations?)

Yeah we need good things to do with cheap power that don't always have to run and aren't too capital intensive (Making them need to use more expensive power). I'm not sure what is best between Desalination, Aluminum smelting, Crypto mining, or what other good alternatives are.

You are putting crypto mining on the same level to humankind as making drinking water?

Desalination is higher priority overall then crypto mining. There are several factors which make something a good candidate to use excess solar power. Maybe it makes sense for desal to always be running? Crypto can more quickly be spun up or down to respond to the energy market. Crypto mining can be done anywhere with cheap power but desalination needs to be near salt water and where water is needed. We will probably need a mix of several industries to effectively use the cheap power.

Indeed, we're seeing this happening. Bitcoin mining will pay $$$ for your waste power, and an increase in waste power is the problem with wind and solar.

We need a shitload of green generation infrastructure, and Bitcoin is going to pay for it. Sometimes the world is weird, sorry.

> but is it power in = water out, plus a bunch of facility maintenance and operations?

Basically yes. I'm mostly familiar with Reverse Osmosis, where electricity to drive the pumps is about 40% of the TCO. There's another big chunk for consumables - chemicals, failed membranes, etc. Then the rest is capital costs to build the thing.

It's not "free power == free water", but the power is a significant factor.

> Desalination will be the new pumped hydro.

Eh, no. Desal is a great place to dump surplus energy, but you can't get the energy back out. It pairs well with nuclear power, so you can use extra nighttime capacity. It's less useful with solar, unless you've severely overbuilt panels and can't find anything else to do with them on sunny days. It's a better tradeoff to buy fewer panels and use that money to pay for storage (pumped hydro, batteries, whatever).

Fun fact: the Mangyshlak atomic energy complex used low temperature steam from the first stage turbines for thermal desalination: https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...

Nothing pairs well with nuclear.

A key fact about desalination is that it is totally OK for it to happen only when the sun shines or the wind blows.

Neat, thanks for the additional details!

My mind went "you can't do pumped hydro if you don't have enough water!"

Although I guess you could just pump salt water, and we're not gonna run out of that.

It's power in, water + brine out. You have to do something with the brine- dribble it into the ocean over a large area, pump it into old salt mines or below freshwater aquifers.

It's too concentrated to just put back into the ocean in one spot without killing everything around it, and you don't want it contaminating what little fresh water you have under ground. Not an insurmountable problem, but it does add another cost in addition to maintenance and power

The dilution can be done in holding tanks. Fill a tank a tenth of the way with the hyper-saline brine (or whatever the right ratio is), flood the rest of it with sea water, stir it around for a while then dump it into the ocean. If the holding tanks are built in the tidal zone and are sized appropriate relative to the brine output of the desalination plant, then you wouldn't even need to do much pumping. The salinity of the tank could be tested before dumping it, an extra layer of safety in the system.

What holding tanks? They would have to be by the volume about the equal of where you'd discharge them.

This is just sad.

I don't see the problem. The holding tanks would be concrete lined basins amounting to relatively small reservoirs. Not exactly unprecedented.

A long, leaky pipe achieves the same thing without the tanks.

There is public opposition to building desalination plants in part because a lot of people don't like that solution. For starters, it just sounds bad; it sounds like a company brushing aside pollution concerns by saying they'll spread it out where you can't see it. That characterization isn't fair; but fair or not, poor public perception still stalls land development.

More significantly, it requires more infrastructure under the water where it will be difficult to inspect and repair. Furthermore there is a financial incentive for plants to neglect these pipes. Suppose there is a break in the pipe that discharges concentrated brine straight into the ocean. Slowing or ceasing production until the pipe could be repaired would be very expensive to the plant operator. On the other hand if they ignore the problem, they wouldn't have to slow production and it would cost them nothing (unless they got caught.)

This stupidity is causing our civilization to collapse. Don't ignore what works now such as natural gas, nuclear, clean coal. It's still 8 years till 2030. Investment in these have collapsed, and now we are short on resources. https://www.wsj.com/articles/electricity-shortage-warnings-g...

Clean coal? Never worked. Nuclear is a failure as an entire industry, just nowhere near enough competence to even build anymore. Gas still emits carbon, even if you ignore the leaked methane.

These approaches have all proven themselves to be dead tech. There is no smart money in them, only saps.

Having done the numbers to understand solar (and having designed and built a 13 kW array myself) the hubris exhibited in these conversations about solar continues to perplex me.

There simply isn't a comparison between nuclear and solar. Nuclear is a far better solution on all fronts. The reality of solar is very different from the dream of solar.

The simplest calculations clearly show this. In order to match the power output of a nuclear power plant you need to build a photovoltaic solar installation of at least seven times the peak power output. In other words, if you want the equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant, the minimum size of your solar array is at least 7 GW peak. And it gets worse, much worse, from there.

Why doesn't anyone ever bother to do the math before they become blind champions of technologies they clearly do not understand at a technological level?

I understand the emotional connection with wanting to be "clean". Yet, at some point, you have to connect the dream with reality through numbers. Numbers of this type do not lie. The comparison is brutally tilted in favor of nuclear.

If you do the math without your thumb on the scale you get a different answer. Everybody knows rooftop solar costs several times utility-scale solar. If you get only 14% duty cycle, you are doing worse than most.

Ask the people in Georgia and South Carolina how much value they got for the $15B they were made to spend on their 0W nuke plant.

> Everybody knows rooftop solar costs several times utility-scale solar

Nope. Not true. The fact that contractors are raping people doesn't mean that's the cost. The system I installed for about $30K was quoted at $100K. If people pay stupid money for solar that's their problem.

> If you get only 14% duty cycle, you are doing worse than most.

Not sure where that number comes from.

Oh, wait, that's 1/7 th. Ah, you are using my 7x figure to attack my argument? Show me the math that compares any solar system to a nuclear power generator. See, the fact that you used this 14% figure confirmed my suspicion. You really don't know what you are talking about. For all I know you have the mathematical skills to do the numbers, you just haven't taken the time to do it and, as a result, are operating under ideas that can only be described as part of a cult rather than science and engineering.

> Ask the people in Georgia and South Carolina how much value they got for the $15B they spend on their 0W nuke plant.

By that logic aircraft should not have been developed, ever. If a few failures means a technology is to be avoided most of what we enjoy today would not exist.

You are intentionally avoiding the mathematical realities of solar by using a project that was grotesquely mismanaged to sidestep reality.

Google says there are 440 nuclear reactors in the world. One or two failed projects due to abject incompetence clearly isn't an argument at all in support of anything other than, don't hire idiots.

Do you even know the answer?

If I asked you to describe top level requirements for a photovoltaic array that would be the equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant. What would you say? Do you have any idea at all? Can you describe the calculations?

Probably not. Most people don't. They like to argue, sometimes passionately, and yet few actually know what they are talking about.

So what's your answer?

The photovoltaic equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant is calculated as follows:

...

I'll wait.

I am interested in the 7 factor. (I have no agenda in this argument). I assume it is because you need to store most of the energy for times when it is not generated, and that storage is not 100% efficient, plus cloudy days and suchlike.

You are aiming to not just merely generate the same energy per year as the nuke, but guarantee 1GW at all times. To be a base load?

Now, this is how a good discussion can be had. Not diverting into irrelevant crap but actually asking the commenter to justify the claim --something I will gladly do here.

NOTE: Breaking this into parts because of post limits.

---------------- Power and Energy ----------------

First things first, we have to be careful not to mix energy with power. We all do it out of convenience, yet they are very different things. The differences also affect system-wide technology and economics.

Since I can't assume the audience is entirely technical, here's a reasonable analogy for power and energy:

Your garden hose is a low power source of water when compared to a firehose. Anyone understands that a firehose can deliver a lot more water per second than a garden hose.

Energy is like the amount of water you need to fill-up a swimming pool. You can fill it up with a garden hose, but it could take days. If you use a high power fire hose you might be able to fill up the same swimming pool in seconds.

The water distribution infrastructure currently installed in any city is designes such that every home (or a reasonable number of homes) can use their garden hoses and they will all have acceptable flow rates.

If every home in a city was specified to have a fire hose, the size and scale of the water distribution systems would be absolutely massive when compared to what we have today.

One way to think of this is that power determines how quickly you can deliver energy. Water flow rate determines how quickly you can fill-up your swimming pool.

---------------- The Solar Panel ----------------

What are the realities of a solar panel? Sure, you buy a 325 W panel. Great. How does that behave in the real world, in the context of a system?

There are several variables that affect the output of a solar panel:

- Mounting angle - Variation of solar radiation based on time of day - Weather (clouds, rain, etc.) - Dirt - Negative temperature coefficient - Wiring losses - Energy conversion losses - Degradation over time

I could write pages on the above. I'll limit myself to a couple of elements that have the most impact on power production.

---------------- The Solar Parabola ----------------

If you look at the output of a fixed solar array, regardless of scale, rooftop or megawatt, it will look like an inverted parabola. Here's a picture of that from my 13 kW array:

https://i.imgur.com/Fl8ARJd.png

This is from March of this year. It should be noted that it never reached 13 kW, it peaked at about 10 kW. This is important, but I'll skip over it for now.

A nuclear power plant, over the same period of time, would produce constant power for 24 hours. If we are going to scale it down to this graph, we would get 10 kW every second of the day for the full 24 hours.

The first thing we need to calculate, then, is the ratio between full power for the solar period vs. what the equivalent nuclear source would deliver.

The way you calculate this is to integrate the curves over the period of interest, say from 8 AM to 8 PM. You are comparing the area of a rectangle to that of the parabola that fits within it.

The answer to this is surprisingly simple: The ratio is 2/3. In other words, a solar system --of any scale-- rated at the same peak power as a nuclear power plant, will, at best, produce 2/3 (66%) the energy over the same period of time under --and this is important-- ideal conditions.

Just using this number, we can calculate that we need to build a 1.5 GW solar array in order to match the daylight energy output of a 1 GW nuclear power plant.

---------------- Power at Night ----------------

That covers you for 12 hours. What do we do for the other half of the day? Batteries, of course.

Well, we need extra energy to pump into the batteries so we can use it at night. The 1.5 GW is used-up. If we keep that math simple, that means we need to double our power production capacity.

Now we are up to a 3 GW peak power solar system in order to be able to match the energy output of a 1 GW nuclear power plant.

I won't cover the cost, scale and realities of such a massive energy storage installation at this time, just remember this is very much a part of the reality of solar --and a very significant one at that.

---------------- Conversion Efficiency ----------------

What I will talk about is the fact that solar arrays require the power conversion systems in order to move energy in and out of batteries and even out to the grid. Current battery charging technologies are nearly 100% efficient, so I'll ignore the small losses incurred going in and out of a battery and over time (self discharge).

In order to get in and out of the buildings full of battery packs you will need to use conversion equipment. This will cost about 20% of the energy you produce. Yes, 20% of what you produce will be converted into heat. At the peak of 3 GW, we would be producing 0.6 GW in heat. That's no joke. That's nearly the peak output of a nuclear facility being used to create heat. I won't get into what this might mean in terms of having to provide for cooling. I don't know how this is handled at such massive scales. I just know that 0.6 GW of heat producing power is a very serious number.

OK, this means that our system now needs to be upsized yet again in order to compensate for the 20% conversion loss.

3 GW * (1/0.8) = 3.75 GW

That's where we are: Without considering other factors, the solar equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant requires 3.75 GW peak power and a train-load of batteries.

Are we done? No, not even close.

Part 2:

---------------- Unreliable Solar Production ----------------

https://i.imgur.com/SOr30bX.png

Take a look at that image. That, again, is from my solar array in March of this year. What happened to the nice smooth parabola? Well, the weather happened, that's what you are looking at. Each one of those horrific dips is a cloud or set of clouds calmly flying by. Yup. Here's the graph for another day around the same time period:

https://i.imgur.com/yvTdNX0.png

You can see just how dramatic the power loss can be just because of a few clouds flying by. In one case there's a drop from 7.5 kW to about 2.5 kW. In another a drop from 8 kW to 4 kW. And these drops last HOURS.

The net effect is that the peak rating of your solar array is a distant image in the context of real-world solar. My 13 kW array gets taken down to 2.5 kW by a CLOUD.

What this means, at a practical level, is that, in order to have the ability to deliver constant power --like a nuclear power plant-- 24/7 your solar system will have to be overbuilt to a larger scale yet. More batteries, lots more, and lots more solar panels.

Imagine a city or small town suffering such deep power losses as weather rolls over the one-and-only solar facility. Rain would do the same thing, even worse.

How do we even begin to calculate something like this?

Well, let's look at an example of day to day energy generation for my system.

This is January of this year:

https://i.imgur.com/bGuCH2F.png

Here's last month:

https://i.imgur.com/8lYKImD.png

We have days with less than half the energy output, yes, here in sunny California. I don't even want to imagine what this might look like in other parts of the country/world where they have real weather. Imagine this happening at the scale of a city.

In checking the daily output of this system over the last 24 months, I estimate that 7 out of 31 days we are producing at half the rated peak power, if not less. This represents an 11.3% loss of capacity, which we have to compensate for by building a larger system yet.

Now we need a 4.2 GW system to match the output of a 1 GW nuclear power plant.

Does it end there?

Nope.

---------------- Negative Temperature Coefficient and The Seasons ----------------

https://i.imgur.com/EF2L3Hk.png

That's month-to-month generation for all of last year. You can see that the peak was reached in May, not in the middle of summer as most would think.

Why?

Solar panels have a characteristic called "Negative Temperature Coefficient". In plain language, it means that they produce less power when they get hot. In the summer, for example. Couple that to variations of solar radiation based on the season and you get the above graph.

The difference between the May peak and December low is about a 50% reduction in energy production yet again. This seems to be a common theme, doesn't it?

If the design was based on May peak power generation as a constant throughout the year, we now need to compensate for the 22% loss suffered due to seasons and the negative temperature coefficient of the panels.

This brings our 4.2 GW array up to 5.5 GW. Again, to match the output of a 1 GW nuclear power plant.

It should not be lost in this discussion that this also represents a massive increase in the number of batteries you'll need, heat management as well as the massive amounts of construction materials, labor and land such a system would require.

I'll stop here because the rest of the analysis starts to get into deeper technical details an modeling that is hard to convey in this medium. Things like the loss of energy in the very wires used to connect everything together and the statistical failures of a system in the with somewhere in the order of 16 million solar panels (that's roughly what you need for a 5+ GW system.

The final number quickly approaches 7 GW as the solar equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant. You also need somewhere over 20,000 or 30,000 acres of land for this installation. No telling what the ecological effect of such a monster might be. The US Department of Energy says that the solar equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant needs 75 times more land. Quoting:

“A typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear facility in the United States needs a little more than 1 square mile to operate. NEI says wind farms require 360 times more land area to produce the same amount of electricity and solar photovoltaic plants require 75 times more space.”

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/01/f58/Ultimate...

1 square mile would be covered with roughly 1.3 million solar panels (each being two square meters).

A solar farm requires access isles for installation, cleaning and maintenance of rows of panels. So, out of the 75 square miles the DoE provides as an equivalent, we would have to assume a percentage would have no panels. Here are the results:

  33% covered with panels = 30.9375 million panels
  50% covered with panels = 46.875 million panels
  75% covered with panels = 70.3125 million panels

Assuming 325 W panels:

  33% case: 10.1 GW
  50% case: 15.2 GW
  75% case: 22.9 GW

And so, the best case presented by the US Department of Energy as the solar equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear facility requires 10.1 GW of peak power generation capacity. This aligns very well with my "at least 7x" calculation.

That's my point.

It's math and physics. Very basic math and physics at that. And yet most people are living in a delusional cult that looks at solar as this bubble gum and pink unicorns technology that will save the world. Well, based on the science, I beg to differ. Time to actually discuss facts rather than fantasy.

You can go down any rabbit hole you like, calculating like mad. But if what you are calculating does not match what people have built, are building, or would build, it amounts to preening.

Thanks for the insult. Typical.

Since you can't discuss the physics-driven models you have to resort to diverting the conversation or attacking the messenger.

Good luck buddy. Live long and prosper.

Look, I happily concede that, if we take all your assumptions as given, and all your value judgments as to what is important, the numbers come out just as you say. But checking the map just seems like an essential step before we plunge headlong into the jungle.

I am saying:

"It will take twice as much to fill up the gas tank because I know how to calculate the volume of a container. Here's the math."

You are waving your hands around and saying:

"No we can fill it up with half the gasoline you just don't believe. And, no, I can't be bothered to do any math or talk about the science of how one calculates the volume of a container. And, BTW, here's a downvote for you!"

So, yeah, there really isn't much I can talk about with you. My life is math, science and engineering. I don't do hand-waving. Sorry.

Calculating the wrong thing can lead you equally as far astray as doing your calculations wrong.

I, also, am an engineer. I take care to set up the right problem.

How about listing off all the US nuke plants completed on time and within budget? And all the ones paying for their own disaster insurance? And the ones who have put their dismantling cost in escrow?

If you paid $30k for 13kW peak, you paid several times what utilities pay. Or what I will.

> If you paid $30k for 13kW peak, you paid several times what utilities pay.

So...you must think that the ground mount structure is free then?

Where were you when I had to buy 64,000 lbs of concrete for the footing?

Everyone is an expert, until a google search no longer aligns with reality.

> How about listing off all the US nuke plants completed on time and within budget?

That is a different problem and one that plagues all types of projects in the US. Look at what happened with the ten billion dollar high speed train promised to us in California. A hundred billion dollars later and we have nothing. If I remember correctly they only built ten miles, it doesn't even run and, if it did, it would be limited to something like 50 mph in that segment.

Until we hold people severely accountable for these issues things will not get better. So, yes, you are correct in highlighting that we can't build shit in this country any more. If we had to build our road system today we could never do it. That is a very different issue through and one that would definitely apply to building solar at the scale we need for the clean future most envision.

We need to DOUBLE our power generation capacity in order to support a full transition to electric vehicles. This is like taking the entire power generation system currently installed in the US and making a full copy of it. We wouldn't do it that way, of course, the point is to provide a sense of proportion. We need to double not just our power generation system but retrofit our entire grid to be able to carry this power. This isn't a joke of a project.

And yet, my comment had nothing to do with costs or the ability to build anything on time and on budget. What I said, quite clearly, was:

"if you want the equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant, the minimum size of your solar array is at least 7 GW peak."

You come aggressively attacking me with things I did not say or even mention laterally. If you have a problem with my claim, tell me how it is I am wrong. Don't divert the conversation into failed projects and cost. I can discuss those topics just as well, but you are confusing and sidestepping the conversation here. This is a technique commonly used by politicians when the answer to a question is inconvenient. They are asked about "A" and their answer is about "B".

Still waiting for your answer:

How does one calculate the photovoltaic equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant?

...

Fill in the blank.

One doesn't. One doesn't need to. Nobody is siting an isolated photovoltaic farm (presumably charging only local storage?) in place of a nuke.

For an off-grid house, the criteria differ. But you won't find a nuke for your house.

I'm certainly not an expert on nuclear vs solar energy, although I do have some background knowledge. As with many things, I make up for my lack of expertise by seeking the analyses and opinions of real experts. No offense, but I trust them over a rando on HN who built a solar array in his backyard :) . A simple google search of "nuclear vs solar cost" strongly suggests that you are very wrong - nuclear is far more expensive than solar, and the gap is growing as solar gets cheaper. Of the first four results[1][2][3][4], only one argued that nuclear was even remotely competitive[3], and it's 6 years out of date and the most convincing data it cites is from 2005.

I found [4] to be the most straightforward and pithy explanation. Basically, nuclear wins on capacity factor, but solar makes up for it by a) still being cheaper even when you have to build 4-6 times more capacity, and b) it takes 10 years to build a nuclear plant vs 1 for solar, so you get to start using your electricity and paying off capex (and reducing CO2 emissions) much sooner.

Now it's possible all these sources are so deeply flawed that they came to the completely wrong conclusion, but the onus is on you to present evidence of your assertion and provide a convincing argument. Saying (and I'm obviously paraphrasing here), "the calculations are simple and you all are idiot sheep" doesn't cut it.

1. https://www.literoflightusa.org/solar-vs-nuclear/

2. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...

3. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-problem-wit...

4. https://earth911.com/business-policy/solar-vs-nuclear-best-c...

> No offense, but I trust them over a rando on HN who built a solar array in his backyard :) .

That same rando built one in his backyard isn't nothing burger.

Agreed, it's actually fairly impressive. Beware the false equivalence fallacy however - there's little overlap in the expertise needed to design and install a home solar array, and that needed to analyze the economics of complex industrial technologies. Based on my links above, I think op is a far better electrician than economist.

Also, I doubt op ever built a nuclear reactor in his backyard :D

> analyze the economics of complex industrial technologies.

Except I have been responsible for the design, construction, installation and operation of large complex industrial installations. That is what I did 40 years ago. Not solar, of course, but beyond a certain scale a project is a project, whether you are building a bridge, road or chemical processing installation. Of course, the private sector has different dynamics when compared to government projects.

Also, as I mentioned in my other reply to you, I never made financial claims about solar. This is a branch introduced by someone who could not argue against what I was saying and chose to divert the conversation. My claim was simple:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31430747

"if you want the equivalent of a 1 GW nuclear power plant, the minimum size of your solar array is at least 7 GW peak"

So, please, don't charge me with something I did not enter into the argument.

> A simple google search of "nuclear vs solar cost" strongly suggests that you are very wrong

Kindly show me where I was making a cost comparison between nuclear and solar in my original comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31430747

You see, what happened here is that @ncmncm masterfully diverted the conversation into cost and project failures. A typical political argument form when you can't discuss the actual subject.

You spent a lot of time researching and composing an argument against something I didn't even touch in my comment, at all.

I can definitely get into relative cost discussions. I am not in the habit of making comments unless I devote a serious amount of time to understanding what I am talking about. In this case my research into this was triggered by trying to understand the realities of converting our entire ground transportation fleet (US, 300 million vehicles) to electrics.

That led to creating a series of mid-sophistication models to try to arrive at parameters, from technical to financial. For example, my power requirement model, done about five years ago, predicted we would need between 900 GW and 1400 GW of new, additional power generation. I other words, we would have to double what we have now. That's what led me to try to understand how we could go about doing something like that. Solar isn't going to do it. It can be a part of it, but solar and wind are not what people seem to think these technologies are in real life.

So, my claim was simple: In order to build a solar system that delivers power equivalent to that of a nuclear power plant you need a system with at least 7 times the peak generation rating. This is a matter of physics and it requires understanding how real-world solar systems work, not imaginary pink unicorn systems.

My favorite saying, by Mark Twain:

"A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way".

A corollary to this is to listen to someone who has before believing it's easy.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

> Kindly show me where I was making a cost comparison between nuclear and solar in my original comment

Ok. "There simply isn't a comparison between nuclear and solar. Nuclear is a far better solution on all fronts... The comparison is brutally tilted in favor of nuclear." Two of the most important factors in choosing a grid-scale energy solution are cost and time to deployment, so they're included in your statement. Perhaps you intended to convey a different assertion, but based on any reasonable interpretation of what you actually wrote, @ncmncm didn't divert the conversation, he focused it on a subset of your claim.

> The simplest calculations clearly show this...

> That led to creating a series of mid-sophistication models to try to arrive at parameters, from technical to financial.

Ah, so we've gone from the "simplest calculations" to "a series of mid-sophistication models" :)

> [I] predicted we would need between 900 GW and 1400 GW of new, additional power generation. I[n] other words, we would have to double what we have now.

I haven't done any research to verify this, but based on your reasonable assumption of transport fleet electrification, these numbers seem reasonable. So we agree we'll need more electricity generation in the future. I don't see how that's evidence that nuclear is a better source for it than solar.

> ...done about five years ago...

You may want to update your models, the cost of utility-scale solar has roughly halved in the last five years worth of data points: https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2021/documenting-a-decade-...

> Solar isn't going to do it.

Why not? None of the evidence you've provided supports this assertion.

> [Solar] can be a part of it...

Your original assertion was that, "The comparison is brutally tilted in favor of nuclear." An obvious corollary is that we should invest all our resources into nuclear deployment instead of solar. By saying solar can be a part of it, you're implicitly changing your original position.

> So, my claim was simple: In order to build a solar system that delivers power equivalent to that of a nuclear power plant you need a system with at least 7 times the peak generation rating.

The sources I cited above say a factor of 4 - 6, but it obviously varies a lot depending on climate and latitude. So sure, let's say 7 conservatively. So what? Even taking that into account, solar is still a fraction the cost of nuclear. It has myriad other advantages such as being faster to deploy, safer, has unlimited fuel, doesn't have any significant waste products, has much more predictable costs, etc. So why should we bother investing in new nuclear deployments?

I realize you're saying you're not making an economic argument, but you haven't made any other kind of argument either. The biggest thing nuclear wins on is steady output - as everyone knows, we can't rely on solar generation 24/7. So perhaps that's what you're trying to get at? As sister threads have discussed, however, a) we have a lot of solar to install before we have to worry about excess peak capacity, and b) there's been great progress in utility-scale energy storage systems which mitigate this problem.

Nice try. I'll give you that.

The mid-sophistication models, as I clearly stated, were intended to try and understand what it would take to convert our entire ground transportation fleet to electric. This required a medium level of sophistication as I had to code models to simulate average behaviors across six time zones, different driving habits, slow and rapid charging, business and personal use, etc. Tons of variables to play with. The model predicted the need for additional power generation in a range between 900 GW and 1400 GW, doubling what we have today. I did this about five years ago.

This has since been confirmed by other sources.

That led to trying to understand how we might be able to do it. Hence looking at the various technologies and focusing on solar --something I had devoted a considerable time and investment into just the year before-- and a comparison to nuclear. Solar lost.

> I don't see how that's evidence that nuclear is a better source for it than solar.

You have to do the math. If you are not willing to do that there's nothing I can say here that will convince you of it. In order to do the math you do have to have a good level of experience in construction. I have, so I understand how things are built. Most people don't. I understand this, of course. This makes it very difficult to have a conversation because people don't have a sense of proportion to what it might cost to, for example, prepare a ten square mile site for the construction of ground mount structures and the installation, operation and maintenance of a solar array. Simple example: If you just leave untreated dirt on the ground in some places you are going to lose half of your generation capacity inside of a week or a few weeks as winds cover your panels with dirt.

This isn't as simple as magical solar panels making magical energy. Not even close.

> solar is still a fraction the cost of nuclear.

Have you actually done the numbers?

I'll take the Department of Energy's baseline number that indicates you need 10 GW in solar panels in order to match a 1 GW nuclear power plant.

And, BTW, that also means you need at least the ability to store 12 GWh of energy in batteries in order for this to actually replace a nuclear facility. That scale is massive.

Let's just look at the panels. How many do you need for 10 GW?

Assuming 325 W panels, which is a reasonable assumption today:

10 GW = 31 million panels

Let's say you can buy the panels at $300 for easy math:

That's $9.3 billion just in the panels.

Now you have to add the land, preparing the land (bulldozing, grading, leveling, etc.), the concrete, mount structures, wiring, inverters, installation labor, vehicles, transportation costs (what does it cost to move 31 million panels, wires, steel, concrete, etc.). The list goes on and on.

Too much to throw into a text comment. This is spreadsheet territory. If you understand construction and do the math, the numbers quickly click up into the billions and the total cost of the installation is easily in the tens of billions of dollars.

And that does not include the batteries and related technology.

Even worse. You just installed 31 million solar panels that will suffer that will degrade at a rate of 0.5% per year. Your 10 GW facility becomes a 9 GW facility in twenty years.

Either you overbuild it to an 11.1 GW facility so you have 10 GW by year twenty (at the cost of another 3+ million panels and all else that goes with it) or you have to replace millions of panels, likely starting somewhere around year ten and on a constant basis for the next ten years. You'll probably have to replace the entire array somewhere between year 20 and 30.

Same for the batteries. What does it cost to replace 12 or 20 GWh of batteries? Where do they go after 20 or 30 years of service?

And we haven't even accounted for the oil, gasoline and diesel you'll need to burn to build and maintain this monster. How much fuel are you going to use to dispose of panels and batteries gone bad?

And here's the kicker: In order to be able to switch our ground transport fleet to 100% electric we would need 1200 of these facilities. My not-so-humble opinion is that this is both crazy and impossible.

Nuclear isn't without issues, of course. However, if you build a 1 GW reactor it will produce 1 GW 24/7 for at least the next 50 years. Last I checked that only requires somewhere around 1 square mile (vs. at least 75 square miles for the same output with solar, according to the US Department of Energy).

That is a no-brainer. We just need to get good at building them and build next generation clean and safe reactors. If it becomes a national mission to do this with no political bullshit in the middle, we can do it. Otherwise, forget about it.

This is what will happen. As electric cars start to become more common our grid will be taxed to the breaking point. At that point the cost of upgrading our infrastructure will be even worse than it is today and we might not be able to afford it (the US is already broke). This will mean that economies who made heavy investments in nuclear will have huge advantages while we keep talking about pink unicorns in the form of solar, wind and whatever else.

I obviously like solar, I invested a non-trivial amount on it (my entire project cost over $100K). However, I choose to be a realist about what this technology is and is not. I only learned these things after owning such a system for a few years and looking at it as an engineer devoid of any cult-like attachment to the technology. Math, physics, engineering. The numbers don't lie.

> The biggest thing nuclear wins on is steady output

It's a lot more than that. It's nearly 100% output capacity, 24/7 for at least 50 years with no serious degradation and not having to replace half the reactor every 15 to 20 years.

The weather is a huge factor. The nuclear reactor keeps going, rain, windy or calm. A solar array can get ripped to shreds by a strong wind event and cut down to 25% energy output by rain or clouds. It can be damaged to the tune of billions by hail. It can literally produce half the energy output for days or a whole month. Which requires heavy over-building of the storage portion in order to effectively survive a one week brown-out due to weather, etc.

Solar can be great at home to run your air conditioner and lower your bill. At a massive scale, to supply 1200 GW over and above what we have today. I am not sure. Right now, I don't think so.

> So perhaps that's what you're trying to get at?

Well, cities don't work with intermittent unreliable energy. So, what I am trying to get at is what you actually need for society, industry, life to function.

Either we are talking about things that have to be equivalent or we are changing the rules. A factory needs consistent and reliable power. So does a hospital, school, office and home. So, yeah, 24/7 performance isn't just important, it's a requirement.

> we have a lot of solar to install before we have to worry about excess peak capacity

No. If we are going to make the claim that solar is the path to our energy future, we have to answer the question. We need at least 1200 GW of additional capacity. What is the best way to achieve this? Solar or nuclear? My argument is that nuclear is likely the bulk of it and solar will play a lesser --yet important-- role.

It's a mathematical reality, not my opinion. If you have enough command of the basic science you can verify this yourself, this does not require a wall of links to studies, its super-simple math and physics. Most people can't do it or don't care to do it, because it is always easier to just believe what you are told.

Your whole argument will fall down because of this weird mistake:

> Let's say you can buy the panels at $300 for easy math

You'er assuming ~1$/1W for solar not installed, you're off by almost 5 order. I bought 330w panels ~2 years ago for 165$ each, which is exactly 0.5$/W and currently I can find 0.38-0.45$ / W for more modern panels (> 400w, Mono Perc... where 0.38 or less for price per pallet not containers even) and this is for home usage without subsidies and in the middle of the price hikes we're facing. For utility scale you can expect it to be 0.18-0.3$ / Watt (0.18 is a real price offered from some Chinese companies for wholesale without shipping prices), so all in all 10GW of solar panels will cost $1.8-3 Billion give or take, so your $9 Billion figure could make ~ 30-40 GW or even more given the expected price reduction and/or efficiency increase of the solar panels.

If you do not compare cost, you promote irrelevancies. If you do not take into account real-world circumstances, your conclusions are meaningless.

In this case, we need not rely on a single solar farm of a size to match your nuke plant, sited where the nuke plant would be. Instead, we have many solar farms scattered widely, thus not all affected by the same weather, connected by long-distance transmission lines and augmented by similarly widely distributed wind farms, and hydro power. In the near future, we will be able to import synthetic ammonia from tropical solar farms to fill in shortfalls. So, whether your straw-man installation would need 7x peak capacity is irrelevant; nobody deploys that way. You don't need all the sources to add up to 7x equivalent; the industry figure is closer to 2x, although there will be good economic and practical reasons not to stop building at that level.

Nice attempt, but you provide no calculations and conveniently ignore the fact that my multiplier isn't based on some seat of the pants hand-wavy idea but rather the most fundamental physics and math related to making solar energy. At the start of that chain of calculations is the fact that a fixed solar array will, at best, only deliver 66% of the energy of a nuclear power plant during a 12 hour solar period. That alone requires one to overbuild the array by a factor of 1.5 in order to get the same energy output. And the analysis continues from there. You double yet again to account for night time generation. You add another 25% to account for energy conversion losses. And so on.

My estimate was "over 7x". The US Department of Energy's own estimate sets it at a minimum of 10x and up to 20x.

So, no, you are wrong. And, yes, costs will sky-rocket if you have to overbuild at these scales. Even worse if we need to to double our power generation capabilities --which is what we need in order to be able to transition to electric cars. That would require 1200 nuclear power plants in the 1 GW range. If this was done with solar (using DoE numbers, not mine) you would need a minimum of 12 Tera Watts. Not sure we have the land and resources to do that in, say, 25 to 30 years.

Again, you are wrong. Do the math.

Again, what matters is cost. Do you need to spend 7x as much on renewables as you would have on your (to date massively subsidized) nukes? No. How much does a GW of nuke really cost, all told, in the US? Current numbers look bad. Disaster insurance alone would price them out of the market. Decommissioning cost is never included in the ticket price. Nobody can quote a reliable price for a nuke in the US. Then, we have operating cost.

The more total power you need, the worse the nukes look. Renewable costs are still in free fall, so setting out, 10 years hence, to double total capacity costs much less than it cost to get to that point. Nukes you started on today, meanwhile, would be just beginning to come online, after ten years shelling out for mined carbon they have not displaced yet. Does it seem unfair to charge that to your nukes?

Calculations divorced from real-world conditions do not enlighten. We are nowhere near short of land to site panels on -- they coexist, synergistically, with crops and pasture, and industrial rooftops, parking lots, reservoirs and canals -- or of silicon to make them out of. We need not discuss the amount of concrete that would be needed to build out your nukes.

I used to hold the same opinion that reducing carbon without going nuclear wasn't possible. But, with increasing cost of nuclear power US, EU not categorising nuclear as green and not funding it, India seeing huge delay in their construction of nuclear plants in fleet mode, I came to conclusion that nuclear is not going to be built at scale needed at least in this decade. China is having success in their build out, but China's approach without huge bureaucracy/political overhead is not possible elsewhere. The time for nuclear was 2 decades ago, missing that a decade ago, if there was huge govt investments into it in US or EU. I am hopeful energy storage prices would come down similar to solar in coming years with multiple pilot projects of sodium, flow, thermal batteries expected to come up in few years. Energy storage with offshore wind, solar and solar CSP might be the only option at least for a decade.

> I came to conclusion that nuclear is not going to be built at scale needed at least in this decade. China is having success in their build out, but China's approach without huge bureaucracy/political overhead is not possible elsewhere.

You are not wrong here. Nuclear is clearly a better solution. However, if the political forces and dominant ideological framework/cult opposes it, there is no way to make it happen.

What we need is a Kennedy-style movement with a goal to "go to the moon" in nuclear power plant terms, in ten years. If everyone is aligned behind a common goal there is absolutely no question that a nation like the US can do it. So can Europe. We are not unique in that sense. It requires clear goals and no-bullshit unity of vision and purpose.

To the extent that this is impossible to achieve, yes, we can probably say that nuclear is but a dream.

Sadly, almost any construction at scale is impossible in the US these days. In California we have already spent over 100 billion dollars on a high speed train that was supposed to cost 10 billion. They only built about ten miles of low speed track and it doesn't even run. So, yes, again, you are right. So long as incompetence reigns high we can't get out of our own way, nuclear or otherwise.

Sure, but technology doesn't exist in a vacuum. You need the political will, finance, a skilled workforce, industrial capacity etc. Solar just wins in those areas.

And the maths works fine if you can build that capacity fast and cheap enough.

Thank you. It's getting very tiring to debunk this every time.

Well, yeah, you are right. Sometimes I wonder why I bother at all. There's a sea of ignorance out there, deeply driven by ideological effects rather than science.

They are passionate about their beliefs while being almost 100% ignorant about the realities of what they choose to be so passionate and argumentative about. It's a really odd thing. A frustrating thing, for sure.

Science is about challenging every single assumption, not being cult members. And yet, these days, if you dare question the beliefs of the mob you are punished/cancelled for it and, at the extremes, suffer potentially serious real-life consequences (anything from losing your job to physical harm). This isn't a society in search of enlightenment and progress. Quite to the contrary.

Frankly, if I were a researcher in this field I would probably end-up having to say what they want me to say. Ethics aside, when your entire career, your wellbeing and that of your family depend on the crazies not destroying your life the choices are very limited indeed. I am always surprised that the cult members do not realize that this behavior is, ultimately, self-defeating.

History is marked by shifts in beliefs and centers of power. Which means that what someone is aligned with might not be the majority or "power" position in the future. At that moment in time you are going to wish you had extended the courtesy of promoting a civilized and open society to those who you chose to attack at the time simply because you could, because you were a part of a mob. As they say, what goes around, comes around. People tend to forget such simple ideas.

The current ideology surrounding climate change, saving the planet, renewable energy, etc. is putrid at best. It's as complete to a full-on delusion as one can get. And yet, the forces at play are so powerful that you'd lose your head if you stick out too far in opposition.

Simple example: In order to be able to afford building terawatts of solar and wind generation facilites we need oil, fuel, to be as cheap as dirt. Why? Because construction costs are influenced by the cost of oil and oil derivatives in a non trivial way. The more expensive oil becomes the less affordable it is to build the massive infrastructure improvements we are going to need in order to make any of this a reality. And yet, the ideological hatred for oil is causing all of our costs to double or triple, almost guaranteeing that we will not be able to make advancements at scale in these domains. Crazy. That's ideology for you.

This might be only tangentially related, but every time someone darkens my doorstep selling solar, they fail to explain to me how I'm even going to break even with solar. I'm sure some of that might be Oncor, but I'm not interested in covering my roof with ugly panels AND paying more money in the long run.

I look at it the other way - I like having the panels on my roof. When I later add battery storage, I'll be able to keep the lights on during power outages. And maybe my purchasing them helps finance the industry a little bit so further improvements can be made.

I don't rely on door-to-door salesmen to give me detailed information about my energy consumption. There are plenty of calculator online, and reputable solar companies ( who do not sell door-to-door in my experience ) will be happy to help you understand.

Your door-to-door salesman is charging 4x what you could pay somebody not on the take. Home Depot, likewise.

Unfortunately the people going door to door aren't likely to be competent enough to do that. If its a good company, these are just qualifying leads and passing them back to sales staff. Hopefully those are better, and that's really your best option if you want to get deep into the details.

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