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.
American empire ruled with the petrodollar. Chinese will rule with the solaryuan if we don't get our shit together.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 ...
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).
You're sure there are no dead microinverters involved, right? I guess that'd be more than 20% on a van.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Working great for me. Friends down the road had a 16% increase in price per kWh, already locked in another 8% increase next year.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.)