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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

A neat trend. But still renewables are a small fraction of electrical generation capacity in the US. Dominated by gas, even the renewable slice (< 20%) is dominated by hydroelectric. Which hasn't changed in 50 years, even gone down a bit. Second is wind. Solar is a scrap of a scrap.

A long, long way to go to complete renewable energy.

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https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights... ("US Interconnection Queues Analysis 2023")

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55960 ("Renewable generation surpassed coal and nuclear in the U.S. electric power sector in 2022")

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/11/02/u-s-to-deploy-550-gw-... ("U.S. to deploy 550 GW of new renewables by 2030")

China deployed more solar last year than total US solar generation capacity, so while work, it can be done.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-installed-sol... ("The country built in excess of 216 gigawatts (GW) of solar power this year, the data indicated, underscoring the scale and pace of China's solar build out.")

Currently, the U.S. PV manufacturing industry has the capacity to produce PV modules to meet nearly a third of US domestic demand.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-manufacturing

The second link is interesting since it covers actual generated energy. The others are kind of convoluted and need to be more clear on what the capacity measurement is since most renewables have significantly lower capacity factors than nuke, gas and coal.

Which is why the battery uptake mentioned in this piece is of note. It firms renewables and steals grid service revenue from thermal generators. Pulls the uptake trajectory of renewables closer to vertical.

Only one coal fired generator in the US is currently economical to run vs new renewables. You don’t have to match capacity factor, it’s about economics; if renewables can run often enough cheap enough, it makes other generators uneconomical even if they have superior capacity factors. It’s why nuclear is on life support in the US.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-07/end-of-co... | https://archive.today/2owbd

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/30/us-coal-more...

https://cleantechnica.com/2024/02/14/texas-shatters-own-sola... ("Texas Shatters Own Solar Power Record, Weird Political Situation Or Not")

I think wind dominates hydropower now

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

Say you don't understand exponential growth without saying you don't understand exponential growth.

There's no way solar can grow geometrically for long. It consumes real estate like there's no tomorrow. Land is limited; sunlight is limited. It has a hard, hard limit.

Unlike many other kinds of power generation, which are land-frugal and work 24 hours a day.

So, let's rethink who doesn't understand growth.

> It consumes real estate like there's no tomorrow.

Now you're really showing you haven't bothered to do basic arithmetic. Land use is not any sort of real limit to PV solar, especially in the US.

I suggest you check your assertions for validity before you commit them to writing.

Looking it up solar/renewables take up surprisingly less space than expected

Area required for all renewables: https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/77565

Area required for just solar: https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127

Luckily we'll have more than enough energy long, long before we run out of land or sunlight. We could satisfy a large part of our energy demand just by replacing energy crops by solar panels, with the added benefit of not needing fertilizer and pesticides.

California has a lot of desert. A lot a lot.

The single most fragile ecosystem in the world is a desert. The casual way folks here throw that line out, again and again - shows a profound lack of understanding about what an ecosystem is.

If you are concerned about solar's use of land then you must be positively apoplectic about using corn for ethanol. That uses more than 40% of US corn production, an amount of acreage so vast it's difficult to comprehend.

Using PV with BEVs instead of ethanol in ICEs would be something like 200x more land efficient.

~40 million acres.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/03/10/solarfood-in-ethanol-...

Isn't exponential growth where the growth rate becomes more rapid as the stock of the thing gets larger (and, more precisely, the growth rate is a function of the stock)? How is growth in solar capacity exponential? Wouldn't it actually be logarithmic, all other things equal?

The graph looks rather exponential (and decidedly _not_ logarithmic) to me.[0]

The story is actually "the growth rate becomes more rapid as you accumulate experience manufacturing, which also grows as a function of the stock." AKA Wright's Law.[1]

You may notice this is faster than your definition of exponential growth, because Wright's Law also counts the decommissioned panels too. The industry still got that manufacturing experience, even if the panels don't count as 'stock' today. So technically the growth rate scales with total all-time production, not current stockpile size.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

PV has been growing with a time constant short compared to the lifespan of PV modules, so most of the cumulative production is still in operation today.

This is also why PV recycling hasn't had a chance to really get going -- very limited potential input to the process yet.

Yes that's true. My point is simply that solar (in this early phase) does show exponential growth.

Spangry's "the growth rate becomes more rapid as the stock of the thing gets larger" was confused enough to made exponential growth sound vaguely absurd, but in fact it's perfectly expected (and indeed observed).

Because the more solar gets deployed, the less the costs are. So each increase in growth triggers a reduction in costs which then enables larger growth and so on.

The key point here is that the potential market has been increasing exponentially with reduction in price.

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