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Comment by mbgerring | Hacker News Reader

The trend lines for this have been obvious for a decade or more for anyone who has paid even cursory attention to the energy industry. The comment section under this post will be full of the same skepticism that always accompanies these announcements, and solar will keep chugging along regardless.

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Every roof in a city, All bus shelters, car parks with shade roofs. Ive often wondered why there's not solar snaking down the highways. There's so much unused land between roads just waiting for panels.

As grids reach higher and higher % of renewables you need more and more storage or more and more peaking plants. You could very easily just crank out solar panels but building the storage gets to be apollo program scale projects as % solar gets very high. Just a few tesla mega packs isn't enough if you are over 50%. You need entire lakes. And we should be doing those programs!

Sure, but the interim solution of "just deploy more panels and turn down/off the existing fossil fuel plants during the day" is working pretty well. I suppose once we start seeing significant periods of negative or zero pricing the storage will start happening.

As noted, that only works in the short term.

Once base load and/or peaker plants become unprofitable, you either lose those or end up paying for them to idle.

Neither outcome is very desirable.

Energy storage is unlikely to come to the rescue in time.

As new safer battery tech like sodium ion gets cheaper. I think we are looking at all homes having batteries that can store and run 24-36 hours rather than large scale batteries. As batteries get cheaper and more solar is added power companies are likely to start offering people better rates for electricity if they are willing to install a grid controlled battery in their garage as the power companies can use the cheaper solar electricity for arbitrage instead of running peaker plants.

Somehow having to thousands or millions of small batteries doesn’t sound like a better idea than having a few large ones.

Re: snaking down the highways—I'm not an electrician, but my understanding is that transporting electricity over distance is costly. First, because you have to run and long-term maintain additional wire, which isn't free, but second because of something called "transmission and distribution losses"—essentially, some fraction of the power you generated gets lost whenever you send it along a wire. That's why the existing grid uses high voltage for transport and transformers to step it back down where it's going to be used.

Solar panels are getting better and better all the time, but for a long time the marginal benefits of running them have been slim (once you offset the power generation by the cost to manufacture, install, and maintain them). And their output is notoriously unpredictable because it's dependent on weather. So, T&D losses alone are enough of a factor to make certain kinds of solar deployment unfeasible. Then consider how much easier maintenance would be if your panels are arranged in a conventional solar farm rather than running for miles down a highway. So, rather than snaking along highways, it's probably better to cluster all the panels close together just outside (or, as you also suggest, integrated into) a major population center.

I don't see the engineering challenges of power distribution for "solar along highways" as any more insurmountable than "wind farms spanning hundreds of square miles," which are already a thing a across much of the Midwest.

It's not an "engineering challenge" in the big sense, it's more a series of small engineering annoyances that make it a bit more expensive and therefore uneconomic. A thin, sloping jobsite where you have to park on the highway to access it is much less convenient than a big flat one.

I am interested to learn more about the subject, even in more technical details. Do you have any source suggestions ?

Read any book by Vaclav Smil if you want to understand the space of energy and not live in fantasy land.

There is no way solar is going to overtake everything by 2027.

I wish that was the case, it would be awesome but that is just not going to happen.

This fantasy land stuff is so counterproductive because when it doesn't happen it causes people to question the entire idea.

How the World Really Works is Smil's book to counter fantasy land stuff like this article but the problem is there is a true believer contingent that that is just not interested in the real world.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply uneducated, ignorant or a true believer themselves.

The fundamental problem is reflected in Smil's writing. The space of energy is incredibly complex and an incredibly dry read. It couldn't lend itself less to news articles and social media posts. So we end up with this ridiculous two sided argument between climate change denial morons and climate fanatics who think solar is going to overtake everything by 2027 and to think otherwise is to be one of the climate change denial morons.

It is fucking pathetic.

Do you have any source suggestions that come without a side order of insults?

First time I’ve heard the 2027 number. Given current fossil reserves 2127 would probably be early enough for civilization to pull through.

Considering the overall tone of your comment 2027 comes across like a favourite straw man.

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