Call me naive, but I went into it knowing solar power is _cheaper_, and the inability to measure how much solar energy was in an electricity network, and uncertainty about the generation were the main problems the startup was aiming to solve. The finance made it attractive to capital, I got that, partly why I was convinced it would succeed, but I underestimated how laser focused these groups are to "line go up". They would outsource everything because they were there as the money people, and have people in the meeting knowing just enough to gauge if project was on track for expectations of "line go up".
Problem being is that the margins aren't there. Everytime a solar panel is added to an electricity network, the life time ROI for ALL panels in the network goes down. This is due to pushing down the price of electricity during the day. Eg, when oversupply occurs in the middle of the day (and they don't store it cause X is cheaper), it causes electricity markets to drive prices down and even negative, meaning the return of possible life time generated power for each panel also gets reduced.
Saying all that, the adoption of renewables is growing at a rapid pace due to it being cheaper, but also slowed down by constant value extraction shenanigans.
Capital is never going away I don’t think, but that doesn’t mean you have to be resigned to its inexorable subsumption of all productive potentials for value extractions… just means you need to keep finding ways to leverage your own knowledge of its behavior and response modes to make positive change (eg start working on demand forecasting in p2p battery storage networks, or utility scale deployment controls, etc etc).
I humbly suggest we start to think about how we all can get back to that time. It’s come to rule the roost over all other concerns and we are not seeing the bright future we deserve as humanity in part but not solely, due to this fact.
We can change that, but it means drawing the line. And I mean all of us
Ideally, everyone is sustainable. 'equal' is neither possible nor desirable, and naively trying to reward the 'superior' is a path to Hapsburg-ville.
It has always been the same. Knowledgeable citizens who can push back are the only defence.
There was a time - however brief - that it wasn’t line it is now. Where shareholders and investors didn’t have primacy
By definition, if a large enough group wields the majority of political power then they will always have “primacy”.
It’s like complaining about rivers flowing downhill instead of uphill.
The real issue is that there is legal doctrine that makes it hard for businesses to not be dominated by their largest investors / shareholders in such a way that extracting short term profits every quarter has taken precedence over building healthy sustainable businesses. Everyone is chasing the absolute most % of profit to the detriment to even the business
Some mysterious beings outside of society?
There's been a huge cultural shift over the past several decades, which I would broadly describe as moving from a philosophy of "companies are here to provide a good or service, and make money by doing that" to "companies are here to make as much money as possible, and most of them have to provide a good or service in order to do so."
Naturally, there were people and companies with the latter philosophy before, just as there are with the former now, but the overall attitude of our corporate world has moved more to the latter.
I think that to a large extent, this has correlated with the dismantling of regulations, the gutting of unions, the relaxation of antitrust enforcement, and the rise of the unchallengeable power of wealthy corporations. (Causality is definitely murkier, and probably goes both ways to some extent.)
[1] shademap.app
Caltopo has a similar feature including an 'average' for, say, the month of January, which gives more of a sense of where it's darker.
I'll start by noting that in my region variable pricing does not exist, so that effect is not in play.
I'll also note that we use a lot more energy during the day than at night. They are very much not equal. (Residentially, WFH, about 75% of my daily energy is I the daytime, and hence "free".)
Lastly I point out that storage is the next silver bullet. I generate excess during the day (10 months of the year) and I have a small battery attached to the home. Potentially a larger battery in an electric car. Grid-level storage solutions (perhaps sodium-ion, perhaps something else) will radically move the needle.
Maybe one day we'll have so many panels installed that energy is "too cheap to measure", but its not today. Water is still measured, and that's already 100% renewable.
I agree, was trying to convey the purely economical point of view that owner operators of large utility scale solar likely have.
> I'll start by noting that in my region variable pricing does not exist, so that effect is not in play.
Where abouts are you located? Most electricity networks have market mechanisms, even if the end consumer of the electricity only pays flat usage rate. Although it is a supply and demand problem to balance an electricity network, regulation needs to be carefully controlled and enforced since generators will actively seek out exploits to save/make money that goes against stability of the network.
> I'll also note that we use a lot more energy during the day than at night. They are very much not equal. (Residentially, WFH, about 75% of my daily energy is I the daytime, and hence "free".)
Yup, that is pretty normal in my neck of the woods as well.
> Lastly I point out that storage is the next silver bullet. I generate excess during the day (10 months of the year) and I have a small battery attached to the home. Potentially a larger battery in an electric car. Grid-level storage solutions (perhaps sodium-ion, perhaps something else) will radically move the needle.
It will likely move the needle yes, and for countries with publicly owned networks, they can do this now just at a larger upfront cost. As much as I like home solar panels for generation, but I'm actually not a fan of home batteries. They have a non zero fire risk (unless chemistries like LTO are used, again deemed too expensive) and require more equipment that can fail and then has to be maintained for such a small installation (less than 50kwh for example). When multiplied out, you have a much higher frequency of issues that can take out home power. Distributed solar generation has several weather based advantages as you spread out the generation, cloud disruptions get smoothed out for example. I get that home batteries make the system more resilient in ways, I still just don't think it should be in/around homes. Neighborhood batteries make a lot of sense, especially since networks commonly have zone substations distributed around.
That's a feature from an overall perspective. Not for the seller. Additionally when those panels then don't or barely produce electricity such as at night or in most of europe during much of winter it mandates a costly variable additional source that can output for days on end so many battery solutions end up out of the question at grid scale. Often when pumped hydro isn't an option only co2 emitting gas remains.
To the individual. What i'm referring to is when you want to be climate "neutral" and collectively use that solar whilst your peak is not just at a recurring 10pm or so but also across many days/weeks/months and it's not just for you as an individual but for your wider region or country. After all there will be long periods where my panels will produce not even a 10th of what they might produce on average in summer.
If we as a species, were truly committed to clean energy on a civilization scale, we would go all in on nuclear, and have renewables be produced at dedicated sites, built and maintained by professionals.
Which goes against the DIY 'punk' idea of it, but I think 'punk' itself is a contradiction - the ability to live free from the constraints of society means you are using much more resources than someone who makes use of communal resources - flats, public transport, etc. The lifestyle of living in a detached house (or even a row house) is not available to everyone, on account of there not being enough resources to go around.
Have you tried it?
Those tomatoes taste like real tomatoes, unlike those things, you can usually buy in a supermarket.
And nuclear as the only sane choice is just your personal opinion, not a fact.
What is the worst outcome, with too many solar panels vs too many nuclear reactors?
Only in your nuclear Utopia all those reactors will be maintained to the highest standards. In reality humans cut corners, are still lazy, don't give shit and who cares, "it will be allright". Until it isn't when multiplied with lots of reactors and time.
Yeah, it's a niche hobby. Nobody is relying on their backyard tomato harvest without a lot of work. Just like your backyard solar array.
(Also my backyard will be automated one day)
Switching to solar requires a nation-wide initiative (or something close to that scale).
> The lifestyle of living in a detached house (or even a row house) is not available to everyone, on account of there not being enough resources to go around.
This is true, but you don't need a detached house. A row of houses can also have solar on top. A building with a couple of floors and a few apartments can have a shared roof and garden.
Sure, none of this works in a large metropolitan city, but living in a metropolis is kind of the antithesis of solarpunk.
It might be, but I'd wager it's a pretty efficient way for humans to live, in terms of carbon footprint.
Really? Do you have any examples of these communities?
and would rather like some cheap solar panels and insulation to help get away from our impressively high energy costs. Sadly I live in a flat so it's not really a goer.
My dad had a 160 acre farm outside London on which you could have had loads of solarpunk type dwelling at zero cost to the government but instead it's impossible to build anything due to regulations plus they spend the billions on overpriced Sizewells.
I daresay the reason you can't build anything is people want green countryside rather than packed in unsightly housing estates but maybe something like the art in the Wikipedia could satisfy both? Functional while not hideous?
Meanwhile It's ridiculously bad for traffic and getting every other kind of utility available everywhere.
It’s as relevant now as it was when it was written.
There will always be those who seek more, who admire those towers reaching into the sky, even as others admonish it as tyranny. And they are right, ambition will result in tyranny, in oppression and conflict, but even so, I would still believe in a future over an eternal present.
What you’re describing is the perennially utopian pitch of Marxist societies — a century of failure, not withstanding.
I don't get it. What do you prefer? The inverse?
You are right, and the US won that battle. But let’s wait a few years as that winning looking quite so solid today.