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Comment by didgetmaster | Hacker News Reader

Why does renewable energy sources have to be so political? Personally, I like the idea of better and more wind and solar generated power, but not because I 'hate fossil fuels'.

If solar panels keep getting cheaper and more efficient, I will eventually get a rooftop solar system. If I can buy a good electric car without breaking the bank then I will.

Renewables seem like a great way to meet the growing demands of an energy hungry society but if they are really good then we shouldn't have to try to scare people away from competing energy sources.

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As usual, follow the money: I suspect this is a wedge issue because it has been manufactured/amplified as one with the encouragement of the fossil fuel lobby.

I agree. More renewables = more natural gas consumed. Case and point: Germany. The proponents of renewables on large scale are usually fossil fuel companies or groups funded by fossil fuel companies [0].

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/3ffe84d3-6b56-4781-a218-a598d43e8...

The only issue with that point is that the share of natural gas in the electricity mix hasn't meaningfully increased in germany over the last decades.

Surely it’s not that simple. In Germany, wasn’t it the abandonment of nuclear that ultimately led to the heavy reliance on fossil fuels? I would think that plays a deeper role.

Germany never went all-in on electricity like e.g. France did, even while building NPPs.

What is now an issue for germany is the move away from domestic or easily replaceable fossil fuels like coal or oil in favour of gas.

These days if you have a natural gas plant that's running most of the time, you can save money by building a solar install of the same capacity and just not burn the fuel for the time when the sun is up. Meaning, that the average new solar power installation now cheaper than the operations and maintenance cost of the average gas generator.

I don't think that the bad behavior of one German green group is representative of all renewables proponents. Nearly everybody in the renewables space is trying to stop gas burning as quickly as possible.

Yes, there is organized social media astroturfing about toxic solar panels and windmill cancer, funded by the usual Koch money.

https://twitter.com/curious_founder/status/15860841319429324...

Some green energy advocates are pushing the narrative of that we can replace fossil fuels with wind/solar. Fossil fuel advocates are trying to push the narrative that green energy is too intermittent to make a reliable grid. Both see it as a zero sum game - the other side loses, they win. In that light, political fights are inevitable.

Reality is that no energy source is replacing any other, we're simply growing the overall pie. All that new wind and solar is merely added on top of natural gas electricity production, which itself is growing. For now.

Renewable energy enjoys broad bi-partisan support amongst voters. It's politicians and fossil fuel lobbyists that are trying to convince Republicans to hate renewable energy.

When I worked in power renewables were a way to add volatility to the grid which you could make a _lot_ of money from. Price swings per MWh are in the tens of thousands. Compared to coal/nuclear/gas you would never see anything like that.

Because if one political party supports something then other can oppose it to get votes.

Because the tech in question has been developed for several decades and you still haven’t been convinced it’s a great investment (waiting for price to get lower). We’d be much further behind without public funds/tax incentives.

Because the government regulates, subsidizes, and mandates these forms of energy. It does all these things because renewable energy is more expensive and so they have not been sustainable, financially, on their own in the free market. Therefore the government, and by extension those who lobby the government for this, are compelling people to spend more for energy. Whether or not this is justified is a different question - but regardless of justification, this is why it's political.

You're >10 years out of date solar and wind have been cost competitive for a long time (wind much longer so). Moreover fossil fuels received (and still are receiving) orders of magnitude more subsidies, same with nuclear which has received significantly more subsidies than solar and wind combined (and that's not even counting the cross subsidies from military use). In many places wind and solar are a factor 3-4 cheaper than other sources.

this is true up to a point: wind and solar require huge overbuilding relative to generation capacity as they make up an increasing fraction of the grid. plus storage which is also expensive.

I would be surprised if what you’re saying is the case. For one, I would expect solar and wind to take off on their own and people falling over each other to replace fossil fuels with them. Especially if what you say has been the case for 10 years. Otherwise, the argument for why that hasn’t happened would have to be some kind of conspiracy theory I would think (like the oil companies have colluded to rig the market).

One thing I do know is that I worked at First Solar from 2008 to 2016 and a couple of things things happened while I was there that don’t fit what you’re saying. First, when the cost of fossil fuels went up, we made bank because that got us closer to “grid parity”. I don’t remember anyone saying that we were in a commanding lead well over grid parity. Just that we were close enough for people to start buying. A year later when the fossil fuel prices would drop, we were back on the ropes. Second, we had a project in west Texas in the mid teens that everyone talked about as being the first, fully financially sustainable implementation of solar. The reason was because it was located in an area of highly dispersed population and very high temp extremes. So the economies of scale that made conventional plants so valuable were not there.

Anyway, I’m not armed with enough details to make a good argument, but I am suspicious of your claim.

> For one, I would expect solar and wind to take off on their own

You may be confusing "solar and wind are cheap enough to win for new construction" vs. "solar and wind are cheap enough to displace existing fossil fuel burning power plants". US electric demand has been flat for more than a decade, so there's no growth to be causing new installations.

All that said, renewables in the US have been dominating the construction of new power plants as old power plants slowly age out and need to be replaced (or need major maintenance). At some point, renewables may get cheap enough (or the fuel expensive enough) that it makes sense to install renewables to just reduce fuel usage in existing plants. We may be near that point in some locations.

>>renewables in the US have been dominating the construction of new power plants>> That may be the case but I think the question here is whether that success is based on the technology's own free market merits.

The statement I was responding to was this: >>You're >10 years out of date solar and wind have been cost competitive for a long time>>

Here, for instance, just two months ago is the CEO of First Solar saying that "solar is going to be investible again [because of the Inflation Reduction Act]". This doesn't strike me as a technology that is exactly flying on its own. And again, to be clear, there is no judgement intended as to whether or not government market manipulation is justified - that's a different question.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/first-solar-to-invest-1-2-billi...

>Why does renewable energy sources have to be so political?

The Republican Party made it political as part of its efforts to establish itself as the pro-business, pro-oil, anti-regulation party[0].

Also, historically environmentalism has had cultural intersections with leftist and feminist movements, which leads in a thumbtacks-and-string way to a suspicion among the American right of a radical socialist agenda behind environmentalism which still persists, as was demonstrated with Trump's infamous tweet about global warming being a Chinese communist plot.

All of this, along with global warming skepticism and a general disdain for "expertise" and "academia" applies via the transitive property of American politics to renewable energy. There is even a dimension of anti-environmentalism/anti-renewable belief among some conservative Christians who believe God gave humanity the world to use as they saw fit, and that God will literally just fix everything.

[0]https://www.vox.com/2017/4/22/15377964/republicans-environme...

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