Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

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motohagiography

Is the precise reason there are not solar canopies everywhre because the cost of panels is not competitive with the value of the power they yield?

Something seems economically broken in the solar business. It should be an arbitrage that so many people pile into that panel prices plummet as fast as compute processing and RAM has. Economically, Moore's law should also apply to solar panels, but the R&D isn't economical either.

Sure, the hard problem isn't collection but transmission and storage, but again, what is the R&D bottleneck? We could say the subsidies on fossil fuels means the competitiveness of solar is suppressed, but maybe we need some breakaway regions that make it viable, like a hundred solar Las Vegas'es that run on cryptocurrency chips signed by solar power producers, and govts can tolerate our autonomy in exchange for taking the risk on tech to create newly sustainable economies.

If you really want solar power, legalize gambling with a provably solar powered cryptocurrency. I could build the first low powered rig in an afternoon, as it would be a panel hookup, a raspi, and the secret sauce would be the HSM that signed the tokens it produced. If someone stole the keys, you just fork and grandfather tokens produced before the compromise. If someone swapped their panel for grid power instead of solar to produce them, the sun is the ultimate open random number generator and by encoding bursts from it into the token, you could see whether a miner was producing consistently based on volume relative to the random stream from the sun.

I don't think it's the tech that is the problem, there's something fishy about the economics, as these are solvable problems.

For one, very sunny places like California are getting very close to the "too much solar" on their energy production. Until microgrids take off, this is going to be a very serious problem in the next 12-24 months. California will probably have one of the lowest kWh/$ rates in the country during summer daylight hours. But off-peak hours will be much more expensive. Adding more solar would not help in these places because it would interfere with the economics of mass power production. The investment to build power plants (nuclear or gas-fired) is too high when you can only run that plant during night-time hours but sit idle during the day. Texas has been in a similar situation, before the Feb 2021 disaster, they were giving away free power at night because of too much wind production. All of that energy production has to go somewhere and grid-scale energy storage isn't feasible just yet. If it's not consumed, then it's just wasted.

Two, the tech is just forming to help solve some things, such as "floatovoltaics". Covering Lake Mead will help, or the Great Salt Lake in Utah. But water is very corrosive. Engineers have also stayed away from putting power lines in water for good reason. The tech for floatovoltaics is just now emerging, and even the national electric code has just put something in it for 2023.

Three, raw materials shortages. Solar requires a lot of silicon, aluminum, glass, and steel. Batteries require a lot of rare earth metals from harmful mining practices. You need billions of tons of copper just to handle the wiring and distribution side of things. Almost all lithium battery and solar manufacturing is overseas in China. There are some in the U.S., but not enough to make a serious dent in solving the overall problem. EV batteries have secured over 140% of the available lithium mines in the world. Alternative batteries like sodium-ion are exclusively produced at scale in China, but startups like Natron Energy are trying to change that (again, not enough to make a dent). But the main point is that there isn't enough lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, silicon in the world to go around without having some serious inflation and supply chain issues along the way. The tech doesn't yet exist for grid-scale energy storage that doesn't rely on lithium and its closest cousin sodium-ion doesn't have the manufacturing scale to produce the billions of cells annually needed to tackle this problem.

Four, the U.S. lacks political will. Republican states are actively damaging companies who are reducing their carbon emissions. Fox News labels climate change as "woke politics". Thus, you have 40-50% of Americans believing solar panels and EVs as "bad" things. It then trickles down to local politics like where the article shows that Southern states should be accounting for 33% of solar production, but due to poor politics/laws they only account for 7%.

> All of that energy production has to go somewhere and grid-scale energy storage isn't feasible just yet. If it's not consumed, then it's just wasted.

Imo, this is the economic case for proof-of-work in cryptocurrencies as instead of shedding load into the ground or burning off gas, it gets refined into tokens that both store and transmit value. It's the missing feedback cycle in the economy. I'm suggesting a verifiably solar currency used for gambling will drive innovation in areas like graphene solar panels and other new techs. We can convert an energy storage and transmission problem into a financial securitization and risk problem that feeds back into driving optimization of the energy production problem. The sun is a verifiable random number generator that with a clock signal, the whole network can use it for consensus.

We may be talking past one another, but if macro grid economics and the politics around them are standing in the way of sustainable tech, we may need to route around them.

That already exists. It's called SREC credits. Large corporations pay SREC credits to homeowners and others to reduce carbon. Those credits can be cashed out, and many just use the money to buy more solar panels and batteries.

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