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Comment by dzonga | Hacker News Reader

The trump administration by refusing to admit the superior metrics of solar, they're just burying their heads in sand.

As admitting that solar is now a superior and cost effective means of energy means admitting that the US is no longer top dog.

As empires are built on mastering a source of energy.

the Portuguese | Dutch - mastered wind to power their ships.

the British mastered coal to power Industrial Revolution.

America mastered oil

now the Chinese have Solar.

even in places like Africa etc -- places were the grid was never available for $2k -- you can power your whole house with solar and lithium batteries. Panels are getting cheaper, same as batteries. Once the tipping point is reached for electric vehicles both personal and commercial - transition to fully electric mobility happens

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> The trump administration by refusing to admit the superior metrics of solar, they're just burying their heads in sand.

I don't think I agree with this as it suggests they are doing it because they can't be bothered about it. Instead, they are doing it specifically because their (and/or their friend's) pockets are getting filled. To me, the latter is much more sinister.

It such obvious corruption. Trump ordered the pentagon to buy coal power specifically.

The crazy thing is coal mining is 40,000 jobs. I have never seen such a tiny industry given such preferential/oversized treatment.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES1021210001

Lyft is 10% of the size of big coal and Amazon is over 20x larger.

Meanwhile the areas where the coal jobs used to exist (or still do) just had their food stamps removed or reduced. It's such a charade.

There’s such an amount of implied or perceived shame attached to using these government safety nets in America. I’d be surprised if anyone who was benefiting from them worked in coal.

And that is by design. There is a reason why people get food stamps and not just 1000 dollars on their bank account.

I suppose you’re right. Now that you mention it, are food stamps similarly inflationary to having 1000 dollars deposited into their bank account?

I doubt they make any inflation in the sense "more dollars chasing fewer goods"

SNAP etc makes the base-load revenue of many rural grocery stores.

The food is going to be produced, and scale is better.

I work with disabled SNAP recipients and it's never been easy.

$1000 is um, high...

> not just 1000 dollars on their bank account.

Conditional cash transfer programs have been extremely successful in other countries. Brazil’s Bolsa Família is one I am more familiar with and it’s studied as a success reference.

The conditional part relies in part on universal healthcare, which might complicate things a bit in the US.

While they say it’s about the jobs, it is so very clearly about who is making how much money by propping up coal ( and other industries)

The UK fishing industry was cited a lot as a reason for Brexit, despite being just over 10k jobs ( https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-sea-fisheries-an... ) and less economically significant than Warhammer.

(see the "everything is gender now" thesis: fishing and coal mining are "manly" industries, which is why they get this preferential treatment from the right-wing)

I have a theory that corruption+nepotism are unstoppable forces of nature.

Advanced governments only force corruption to distribute and obfuscate.

I think this is why there appears to be some correlation between unpopular behavior and financial success.

Government essentially erects artificial barriers to entry on behalf of the incumbent businesses that fund it.

That's why I see AI (with a clear set of provided objectives and guidelines, i.e., a constitution) as the future of government.

As dystopian as that sounds, it's the only way I see to truly rid ourselves of corruption.

I don't know how any AI system would not eventually determine that humans are the problem. Sci-fi uses this as a plot numerous times for a reason. What humans are doing is not logical, and better choices can be made if it weren't so damn profitable for some to keep going as is.

Why would AI at that scale not have the exact corruptible inclination humans have?

Because unlike natural life, which has evolved to be highly competitive and self-interested, we would explicitly set the AI's objectives to always benefit society.

And why would the people in power be willing to do that?

That will definitely be a problem, but I suspect and hope that there will be governing AI models that can be "prompted" with clear and concise instructions that will be demonstrably free of bias towards any group, either by a direct reading or by evaluation with trusted 3rd party models.

If the public does not trust the fairness of the AI prompt, that will hopefully lead to revolution and replacement of the prompt with something more principled, similar to how rigged elections (sometimes) trigger revolutions.

This is an incomplete thought.

A strong checks and balances without influence of bias, relationships, and politics can be implemented using a 2-way blind system where:

1. decision makers (of sound judgement) are not aware of any identifiable information related to any users on whom the decision will be made, nor of each other.

2. Users are not aware of the decision makers who will decide on them, nor of each other.

Possibly AI can play a role here, but a strong system of checks & balances would be a prerequisite for this.

The justice system would definitely benefit from this.

I don’t know if it is “unstoppable” or a “force,” but nepotism is a natural behavior, selected for in humans by kin selection.

Likewise, I think public choice theory would probably argue that corruption is a predictable outcome in politics that has to be constantly guarded against.

> corruption+nepotism are unstoppable forces of nature

History suggests it's the other way round. They're awfully prevalent - what is a hereditary monarchy but nepotism - but the value of meritocracy over nepotism enables such better governance that it tends to win handily in proxy or actual conflicts. Similarly, if your society is too corrupt when you go to war you discover that someone has sold the tyres off all your stored vehicles, or suchlike.

You also can't have a complex society without a complex government. This goes all the way back to Qin dynasty vs. "barbarians".

Chinese also have battery manufacturing, whose rapidly falling cost-curve is what is missing to enable 24/7 solar.

American empire ruled with the petrodollar. Chinese will rule with the solaryuan if we don't get our shit together.

Even if the US gets it's shit together it's already lost the solar and battery fight. It will have to win the next one - which it might do with AI.

What does it mean to lose? Like we can, uh, transfer the technology and build at whatever cost we can build at. Good luck to China charging us more than that cost.

You just slightly missed the crux of the issue here.

The big "problem" with renewables like solar is that once you've installed enough for yourself you are done for like 30 years. There is no monthly sun fee you need to keep paying. There is no solardollar, because there's nothing that needs to be extracted, transported, and sold every single day. A lot of billionaires are in an existential crisis over a world where fossil fuels are no longer the driving force of the economy. That's why we have incessant propaganda against renewable energy.

Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long. The feedback loop of capitalism means we are likely to reach that point sooner than you would expect.

That said, don't think I'm like the nuclear power guys of the 50s who claimed that electricity would be so abundant that we wouldn't even bother to meter it. There are still costs with maintenance, repair, administration, debt servicing, and profits. If you look at your power bill today it will probably list generation, distribution, and taxes. Renewables only eliminate the generation costs, which are usually about half of the bill.

An interesting prospect is the grids getting smaller. Becoming distributed again.

Why pay the enormous maintenance cost for a continental scale grid when you can in your neighborhood have a small local grid with solar, wind and storage followed by a tiny diesel/gas turbine ensuring reliability through firming.

When deemed necessary decarbonize the firming by running it on carbon neutral fuels.

True but there are 2 technology converges that are happening at the same time cheap energy that is getting cheaper. And automation powered by that energy that also gets cheaper as energy gets cheaper as well as efficiency gains. The current world economic systems and most government systems are unlikely to survive the upheaval that this will cause in the next 15-20 years.

> Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long.

It's not going to happen soon - solar is still just 8% of world energy production. Even if solar will cover 100% of consumption on a sunny day it still would make sense to buy more panels to have enough output on a cloudy day or in the morning/evening. It's likely production of solar panels will be a good business till at least 2050 and oil business will start to decline before that unless will be propped by corrupt politicians.

Energy use goes up as civilization advances, and Jevon’s paradox suggests that we’ll use more energy as its cost goes down. Couple that with the need to replace some portion of the installed base of solar capacity over time and I think solar will be a growth industry for the foreseeable future.

I can't believe it's taken this long for someone to mention this. Even just phasing out fossil fuels (if we're still serious about that) plus ordinary growth means today's demand is a fraction of what could potentially be fulfilled by additional solar buildout.

8% of electricity, not total world energy.

But the growth rate has been huge for as long as records have been kept, and was a factor of just over 10x between 2014 and 2024, speeding up more recently.

PV and wind together are likely to start breaking the electricity market severely in the first half of the 2030s; I hope, but it's not certain yet, that ongoing battery expansion will allow the demand for electricity to increase and this can continue to the end of the 2030s, because at the current pace of development those scale up to all our energy needs, not merely our present electrical needs, in a bit less than 20 years from now. (PV alone would do all of it in 20 years at present rate of change).

It also assumes that there will never be demand for improved solar generation orthogonal to currently-prioritized metrics. As an example, a nice park near my house was clear-cut to install a solar farm a few years ago. I used to enjoy walks under the trees in that park, and seeing the animals that lived there. Perhaps as solar infrastructure becomes more stable and secure, concerns will turn towards the ecological ramifications of covering so much of the Earth's surface with ecological deserts, and there will be a desire to replace older generations of solar panels with ones that somehow can support or integrate more elegantly with nature. And then the next thing. And then the next thing.

Assuming we consume ~20 TW on average, a metre-squared panel kicks out ~40 W on average, and we halve that to account for batteries and other infra... I reckon we're talking about 1 million square kilometres (people will be along in a sec to check my working, but it's just a Fermi estimate).

Call it 10% of the Sahara.

Bear in mind that if we go all-electric, raw energy consumption falls significantly, many panels will be sited on buildings, solar isn't the only renewable, and solar farms aren't ecological deserts - you can graze animals below them.

Honestly, seems like a good trade to me.

I'm not saying that that magnitude of solar generation isn't a good thing. I'm saying that the solar farms of 2050 don't necessarily need to be arrays of panels on top of clear-cut land.

Grazing land is often essentially an ecological desert when compared to previous uses. Farms in general, honestly. Actually, this is a good forward example as agricultural expansion goes hand-in-hand with the Anthropocene die-off, but late advances in land use efficiency via fertilizer and other technologies means that even though these lands are super dead we also require less of them per person. What I'm proposing is analogous to even further development, where you're still somehow able to produce the same volume of food while reintroducing ecological diversity to the same land; moving away from traditional monoculture farms to ultra-efficient food forests. I don't know how you'd do it in farming, but it energy generation, it would probably involve engineering equipment to some level of symbiosis with the preexisting environment. Could we someday build literal forests of photovoltaics that support energy generation as well as a diverse natural ecosystem? Maybe. I'm sure we'll try. And that's why, ultimately, my point is that the idea that solar is an economic dead end is incorrect. This is just one potential branch on a tech tree (heh) that isn't anywhere near done growing.

Thanks, I completely misunderstood you.

> concerns will turn towards the ecological ramifications of covering so much of the Earth's surface with ecological deserts

About that "solar panels cause ecological deserts" trope:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

https://glassalmanac.com/china-confirms-that-installing-sola...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics

>Traditionally, deserts have been seen as harsh, lifeless landscapes

This is incorrect, depending on the geographic location. Many "deserts" are actually ecologically vibrant, and "greening" them (especially for farming) threatens to destroy a measure of natural diversity.

That said, I think you and the other poster placed emphasis on the wrong part of my post, as my point was less about solar land area coverage as some sort of singular evil, and more about the *opportunity* present in continuing to develop solar technologies so that they impact the environments they're placed in less and less over time. This would mean that efficiency is not the be-all-end-all of development, and that further improvements are possible even after reaching a satisfactory level of efficient generation. The energy economy would not fall off a cliff, as some predict. It would simply shift to solving other problems.

You can see an example of this in computer engineering, with Moore's Law's fall-off and the rise of GPU-based innovation.

Seems like renewable maintenance companies will make a killing.

Solar plants don’t need much maintenance. The lack of moving parts means mostly it is just mowing the grass. The transmission infrastructure does need maintenance. Batteries have pretty low upkeep too.

And if you live in the right place "mowing the grass" can mean you lease the land for somebody to farm goats or sheep on it and so you get a small extra income.

> Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long. The feedback loop of capitalism means we are likely to reach that point sooner than you would expect.

No we won't. Even if we waved a magic wand and converted the entire planet to solar today, there would still be new installations tomorrow because energy demand is infinite. There's never enough, we've always used more energy as more energy sources were available.

That hasn’t really been true in the US in recent decades - efficiency improvements and deindustrialization were balancing increasing population. It’s recently started growing again because EVs, heat pumps, and DCs, but even a 3% increase in demand has caused a lot of growing pains.

We have a finite demand at a certain price point before running out of productive use cases.

Renewables lower the price, enabling use cases which fossil fuels were too expensive to support.

We are in for an incredibly interesting ride as we for the first time in generations lower the price floor for energy globally.

> Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long.

If the average panel lifetime is 25 years, and it takes > 25 years to reach "full capacity" (whatever that might mean or whatever level that is at), then by definition there will be a continuous cycle of panel replacement taking place.

It's not as if we get all the PV installed in 12 months and then it lasts for 25 years ...

The 25 year thing comes from the 25 year warranties - they’re generally warrantied to be at 80% power capability at 25 years. I don’t know the real lifetime, but presumably it’s a lot longer than 25 years. And by that point, maybe we’ll have the deuteriumdollar…

The first set of PV panels I put on our van didn't even make their 10 year warranty @ 80%. Anecdata, sure, but still data.

Being mounted on a moving vehicle subjects them to a much more dynamic and hostile environment than having arguably better quality, fixed panels sitting in a dry desert for 25 years. I’m actually impressed that yours lasted 10 years.

Open for debate. They are mounted horizontally on the van, which makes them subject to almost no face-on wind forces at all. The aluminum frames are bolted to the van, but the van structure is metal and likely doesn't move much in terms of distances between bolts other than due to thermal expansion, which is also true of my ground-mount array (in the dry desert :)

There's more vibration on the van, but how the impacts their life compared to the months of daily 30mph+ winds hit the faces/rear of the ground mount array seems hard to tell without a lot of research (which someone may have done).

Interesting, most of the anecdata I've heard elsewhere (for residential solar) goes the other direction - that they degrade slower than expected.

You're sure there are no dead microinverters involved, right? I guess that'd be more than 20% on a van.

No microinverters involved.

> That said, don't think I'm like the nuclear power guys of the 50s who claimed that electricity would be so abundant that we wouldn't even bother to meter it

Funny you would say that, Australia is about to have free power for all for a few hours each day. Yep, there really is that much

https://www.energy.gov.au/news/solar-sharer-offer-cut-electr...

It probably could have been true if regulations were not written that said if your nuclear power is going to be cheaper than other sources you have to spend on safety features until it's not cheaper.

Like the internet today, electricity could have been a flat monthly fee determined by your service line limit (similar to bandwidth) with limits in place for excess use.

Get solar on your roof and then just ignore their stupid rules and monopolies and corruption.

Working great for me. Friends down the road had a 16% increase in price per kWh, already locked in another 8% increase next year.

Old panels are continuously being replaced with new panels. This is happening now with a few year old panels. So many free old panels available, because new ones are producing 590W/panel. Over 25 years, there will be a lot more advances, panels that will be printed by textiles, or painted on surfaces, or grown by bacteria.

How big is a panel?

Very much depends on the rating. A residential panel is something like 65”x40”. A commercial sized panel is something like 80”x40”. The cell size is relatively constant, but the bigger panels are 6x12 cells instead of 6x10. Newer panels have more efficient cells, and so higher power.

Panel manufacturers can also do odder sizes as required. Example: q-cell does a 94x51” panel. This is 6x22 cells, but different sized cells as well.

Most panels are 6x, because that results in an open circuit voltage of just shy of 50V, which is convenient for code compliance.

Wait, where are these free old panels and how do I get some?

if you are in EU: https://www.secondsol.com/en/index.htm

That may not be a problem for a while as we're going to have to do desalination and CCS at a scale that's quite incomprehensible at the moment.

> A lot of billionaires

But if you are already a billionaire, then you could stay calm? Transform your business or sell it now?

If I would be majority shareholder of lets say Exxon, even with upcoming solar I would be more relaxed than in any other job?

I think one place this could go, a decade or more in our future is that the electricity isn't worth metering but the fact you can have electricity is billed. Think of a typical phone service today. You don't pay to send a text or read Hacker News on your phone, but you do pay for the privilege to be able to do either of those whenever you want.

So I'm imagining instead of spending 40p per day plus 24p per kWh maybe it's £1 per day and usage isn't really metered. A few people would abuse this, but if energy is cheap enough it's barely worth caring.

In the 50's "too cheap to meter" was a saying that made sense because metering was expensive. Computers have made metering cheap.

Your internet/phone analogy is relevant. They are metered, but you aren't billed on usage. Metering is used to monitor for abuse.

Australia is already moving towards the system you envisage. They're going to give you free power between 10AM and 3PM. I bet there's fine print in it similar to internet/TV, some sort of abuse limit.

I think you've misunderstood the term 'petrodollar'. Petrodollars are the American currency in circulation abroad because we bought other people's oil (principally Saudi), not exported our own.

The 'export' that made the US powerful was finance and political manipulation - toppling socialist / populist leaders to install puppets and controlling economies by manipulating trade.

I think your original point kind of stands, though - we are seeing a decline and independence from our supply chain is going to be a deciding factor in 'who's the next top dog', but I think the decline is going to be a lot uglier than a simple "they have it now and we don't" - it's going to be all the thrashing about that an aggressive international power does when the grift no longer works.

No, it's the US dollars circulating globally because all transactions for oil anywhere in the world are dollar-denominated, giving the US control over the entire global financial system.

> because all transactions for oil anywhere in the world are dollar-denominated

This was sort of true in the 1970s only because we ignored the Soviet Union and its allies, which included a lot of petroleum production. It's totally untrue now, in a world where America exports oil. (I traded contracts in Connecticut in the early 2010s. Oil was priced in all sorts of currencies. British and Norwegian oil, for example, is sold for local currency.)

What about iranian or russian oil? Can british and norweigian buy iranian oil in currency other than dollars?

> Can british and norweigian buy iranian oil in currency other than dollars?

Both Russia and Iran are heavily sanctioned by the U.S. Neither sells its oil for dollars by default, though either will accept them, of course.

Note, too, that pricing and settlement are different. If I’m Russia selling oil to India, I can “sell” at $50/barrel and accept payment in rupees or rubles. (Indian refineries were not paying Russia dollars for oil.)

Thankyou for pointing this out. People get very weird about how the petrodollar works, it's more about convenience than force. Like the "eurodollar" of financial clearing. In general people overlook how much America (and to a lesser extent the UK) export "stability as a service". Which becomes jeopardized if the leader is unstable.

Solaryuan? How does that work? You dont need to buy sun. Just the initial infrastructure. Even if, in a post oil world, china refuses to let you buy the latest panels down the line, a country could just coast on its existing solar infra. Theres no need to use the yuan to sell of buy the energy

OH wow. American Petrodollar and Chinese SolarYuan are great terms.

Panels prices bottomed about a year ago below many manufacturer's cash cost, and have gone mostly sideways since. https://www.pvxchange.com/Price-Index

If silver stays above $70/oz, prices will likely go up by 5-10%.

Until Perovskite tandem technology matures, there's unlikely to be any significant reduction in PV module prices.

Manufacturers already reacted and intensified efforts to replace silver in panels with copper:

https://finance-commerce.com/2026/02/solar-panels-silver-to-...

I know. AIKO has been using copper in their BC cells, and LONGi is making the transition. Many TOPCon cell manufacturers are using silver-coated copper pastes, but full copper metallization is unlikely to happen in the next year or two.

Even if they got stuck at that price point and never went down again it's already over. 30 years of buying natural gas can't compete with that.

I got panels last year because I’m pretty confident that the majority of the cost of putting panels on my roof is the stuff besides the actual panels. So pricing won’t go down much for getting an actual installer to do it.

> the majority of the cost of putting panels on my roof is the stuff besides the actual panels

and installation / wages dont seem like they are going down anytime in the foreseable future

California power generation profile yesterday showing solar and battery proportion.

https://engaging-data.com/california-electricity-generation/...

Is California enough to drag the rest of the country with them, though?

Texas, technically, generates more TWh than California. I think a data center boom followed by a bust would help a lot more than what California can do. Unlike in cars, CAs market size or regulations can’t help/hinder other fuel sources as much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_renewab...

Interesting this doesn't get passed around as much, not only does Texas generate more than California, it's twice as much.

The % is lower, but still higher than the countries average.

Good point.

Are Texas and California enough to drag the rest of the US with them?

Grid-connected PV in Texas has grown between 33% and over 100% every year since 2008, which outpaces the growth of solar in the US in the same timeframe.

California's percentage of solar generation as a share of the entire solar generation in the USA has shrunk every year since 2016.

It's not been accurate to say that California is dragging the rest of the country with them for a long time when it comes to energy generation.

It doesn't need to. The reality is companies are going to go for whatever the cheapest cost for electricity is, and solar w/ batteries has taken that lead. Capitalism happens to align with a renewable energy green transition, regardless of whatever the US political engine wants. At the end of the day most companies are going to choose profit over political ideology.

You're right but the problem is subsidies change that math. If the US gov subsidizes oil, then the economics of that work out even if solar wins in a free market.

That's true, but also requires that companies believe those subsidies will remain in place over ~20-30 years. Assuming US elections remain fair, that's not going to be the case. By contrast solar / wind subsidies are effective since the bulk of their cost is up-front, so you can generally rely on getting full value out of those subsidies.

Subsidies can certainly delay things at this point, but it's hard to see how it'd stop it.

I agree. Subsidies will delay, but they will not change the outcome.

Considering we are racing against CO2 release and the warming planet, I worry that the delay makes a large difference in outcome, not for energy breakdown, but in quality of life for humanity.

Sadly they might not be allowed to choose profit. ~25% of US counties have adopted regulation effectively blocking new solar and wind (1). Up from 15% a year ago!

Peoples stupidity and self sabotage truly knows no bounds.

1 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2026/02/2...

Other comments mentioned Texas, but check out the Ercot dashboard: https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards

Not only did solar and wind provide the vast majority of power during the day today, as I write this comment coal is neck-and-neck with storage as an energy resource - i.e. power that was saved during the day because it was so sunny.

Coal simply makes no economic sense as a power source for electricity generation anymore. Natural gas is still needed as base load for when renewables are insufficient, but in perhaps the "free market ideological capital" of Texas, the trend towards renewables + storage is simply the economic choice.

Today Texas kissed 50% generation from solar around 11:30AM and was generating 63% from wind last night.

What are your thoughts on oil?

What does it mean to do battery-based power generation?

It means you charge the batteries when you have extra power (like a sunny day), and you use that charge to handle the times you don't.

Hm, so that seems to kind of obscure how that power actually got generated. Maybe it was all coal, although that seems unlikely. It seems like battery usage is important to measure. But calling it generation seems to obscure something, unless they're double-counting the generation. That's misleading in another way though.

It's not coal.

Here's the chart with everything but battery+solar turned off.

https://imgur.com/a/5HfjAdI

Makes the scenario quite clear. No double counting.

Someone desperately needs to build the largest solar farm on earth, nakedly as a direct affront to China, and call it the "The Grand Trump Sun Energy Complex", with a large statue of him standing at the center of the massive radial field of panels.

The dude would have no choice but to approve it and provide funding for it.

You’re joking but that would probably actually work

With what panels? The vast majority are made in China.

So are MAGA hats.

The irony of proudly wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat made overseas to support a renowned grifter… I have no words.

The US manufactures more solar panels now than it ever has before. It just looks small because Chinese solar manufacturing has grown enormously.

First Solar makes panels in the US and is the single largest supplier for utility scale solar farms in the US. If someone wanted to build the world's largest solar farm in the US as a stunt, domestic First Solar capacity alone could do it:

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/11/03/first-solar-to-open-i...

The current single largest solar farm is 15.6 gigawatts of nameplate capacity. It would take a bit more than a year of First Solar domestic manufacturing to surpass that.

China will replace Oil (+Fossil fuel) based ecosystems and applications of energy. Think about all the Oil wealth, but add on energy storage, an unsolved problem of mankind, and all the applications of energy production+storage. We already see this dominance in EVs. Soon, everything else will be replaced. We live in interesting times!

The worlds militaries will always require oil.

Also, the US has a lot of influence over the flow of oil in the world. A world of cheap solar energy removes that influence.

True, but until we reach a global state, everyone’s militaries require much oil.

And for a regime claiming to support jobs, sustainable energy provides/requires orders of magnitude more workers than the obsolete, expensive, and dirty coal they are pushing again for no reason.

Moreover, no semi-smart coal miner would wish a coal mining career on their sons. They'd want them to have honest work that is clean and won't likely kill them either quickly in a disaster or slowly by breathing in coal and rock dust all day.

>the Portuguese | Dutch - mastered wind to power their ships. the British mastered coal to power Industrial Revolution

the British were world-beating masters of sailing technology before they were masters of anything else, and that enabled them to leverage their advances in other areas (including mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun) to become a mercantile behemoth.

They cut down their forests to build ships; they needed coal to keep the lights on.

Some comment I read I keep coming back to. They (elites) will risk everything to give up nothing.

The same elites that were telling us we can't have electric cars because the power grid can't support them are now building massive data centers for AI which they think will allow them to completely ignore the working class.

It's just so breathtakingly OBVIOUS. And it has been for a decade. Yet we have done nearly nothing.

I mean it doesn't really matter, does it? Even with 200% tariffs solar panels will still be cheapest. The entire global supply chain will move towards electrification.

The only question is whether we will be left behind or not.

"Drill baby drill" as he said this week.

The Trump administration is intentionally trying to kill solar so that their oil buddies can make money for another 5-10 years.

It’s insane to think that close to 80% of cars in shenzen are electric. I don’t even understand how that works. These EV cars have been around for about a decade. How has the entire population of the city purchased a new vehicle in that short span of time.

I guess most just did not have a car before...

It's quadrupled in population in the last two decades and gone from a manufacturing hub to China's Silicon Valley, so it's probably the least surprising place to be full of EVs.

> These EV cars have been around for about a decade. How has the entire population of the city purchased a new vehicle in that short span of time.

As one comment says, many of those are going from 0 cars to 1 car. But also the average age of cars in China is less: https://min.news/en/auto/6ebd7edbc7df2c10102b857be9c06a47.ht...

It's also worth questioning what wealth and poverty look like in China; the changes in family structure; savings, investment, and credit; and so on. Shenzen is a rich city.

He doesn't care about solar because it does nothing to boost his narcissism. Simple as that. He can't take credit for it. It doesn't boost his image. It's just a simple quiet thing sitting there working.

You refuse to understand the difference between capacity and utilization. That mass of solar still only makes about 1/6th the actual number of watts of power delivered to the grid. Anyone who shows you capacity numbers about energy generation is intentionally lying to you. Capacity factor matters. The capacity factor of nuclear is .9. For Hydro and FF, its .6. For solar its .1. That means 9 watts of solar capacity generates the same amount of power as 1 watt of nuclear capacity or 1.5 watts of Hydro capacity. That's why you keep getting shown capacity instead of utilization (the number that matters).

Capacity factor solar is highly variable. AFAIK in Arizona it's something like 0.3.

Parent didn't mention either capacity or utilization? The article itself is mentioning generation. Not sure where you're getting what you're responding to?

The article reports capacity (which doesn't matter) not utilization (which does). Not sure why you are responding about a topic about which you literally don't know the first thing.

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