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Comment by remarkEon | Hacker News Reader

>but also frees us from dependency on other countries

It does not. It moves the dependency to the manufacturing source of the panels. That is China. No thanks.

Can we please just build more reactors? The insistence on solar is becoming a cargo cult (thanks, Elon Musk).

China can't stop you from using solar panels you've already installed and you could manufacture new ones somewhere else.

Solar actually makes a lot of sense for a significant fraction of the grid. It's specifically excellent for electrifying transportation, because most cars are stationary at an office park during the majority of sunlight hours. Install chargers there and you solve the problem of people in apartments not having them at home and you don't have to worry about the intermittency because you're literally using it to charge batteries. Solar is cheaper at the cost of intermittency, so for the things where intermittency doesn't really matter it makes obvious sense.

When it sucks is when you need reliable power in winter at night. Which is what nuclear is good at. But then... you can use both, each one for the thing it's better at.

This is gas brain thinking.

Solar panels are not gas. You don't burn them to make energy.

There is no dependency on solar panel manufacturers. Once you install a panel it's going to make electricity for the next 25 years. At least. After that you can recycle it and use it another 25 years.

Reactors on the other hand require fuel that is consumed. Unless you can mine it yourself, you're just trading an oil dependency for a uranium dependency.

There is a dependency considering these are evidently valid targets for missiles

I don't know what you're referring to. Do you mind rephrasing?

Energy infrastructure has been targeted in the Iran-Israel-US conflict. Solar is just as liable as petroleum infrastructure has been. People think petroleum has some unique risk here. Really it is energy being targeted by military means. Doesn't matter how a nation or economy sources its energy, it will be a high value target.

Consider if the entire world was solar powered today. Iran targets solar plants in the gulf states instead. Gulf states target iran solar plants. Prices of panel materials surge just like oil prices surge today in response to the demand brought on to the supply chain. Maybe Iran wants to twist the knife, sends submarines to target solar supply chain networks directly either in shipping at sea or to be closer to shelling or missile striking mining or production facilities.

The world is all too easy to disrupt in the very same way it is being disrupted in terms of oil today, thanks to the asymmetries brought on by drone and missile warfare in this new era.

As terrible as the human cost would be if Iran and the other Gulf states were to target each others' solar plants, it would be contained to tha region. India, and China, and America, and Africa, and Europe's PV would continue to generate electricity. Compared to what we have now, where a war in one part of the world makes energy expensive everywhere else.

Not to mention: PV generation is way more distributed than drilling oil and gas. Commercial PV generation facilities are smaller and more spread out. And even if the enemy bombs them all in a war, you can disconnect your rooftop solar panels from the grid and keep your house going. Do you have an oil well and refinery in your backyard?

I'll repeat it again: you don't burn solar panels to make energy. We need growing numbers of panels today because we're going solar. If the world were already at 100% solar then we wouldn't need nearly as much manufacturing or mining. We'd mostly just recycle old panels.

This is unlike fossil fuels. If you burn gas you will always need new gas. Forever.

>Do you have an oil well and refinery in your backyard?

Well, in the context of the US, we certainly do. And yet, our prices go up, because of course they would. In every domestic produced industry prices would go up if global supply were diminished. This is just how a globalized economy works. People assume a degree of economic isolation with solar that just isn't realistic with how the economy is structured today. It might have been realistic 100 years ago but today it is not.

I meant in your literal backyard.

And you bring up an excellent point with the globalized economy. Solar plants being bombed in a faraway country's war won't drive up the cost of your electricity because (most of the time) your electricity can't be exported. But oil can. If oil becomes expensive outside America, it becomes expensive within America. Even if America has its own oil.

What do you think the response will be if the supply chain can't source replacement parts? the grid is damaged every year from storms and wind in addition to routine replacement of parts and end of life replacement. Typically we've seen power companies when they say are handsomely fined for causing a wildfire and having to pay out repair and legal fees that they just raise rates for that behavior, rather than shouldering the consumer from some blow out of the goodness of their heart.

> What do you think the response will be if the supply chain can't source replacement parts?

No idea what we're even talking about now. We went from "solar panels are an intolerable supply chain dependency" to "well the grid needs new transformers and power lines too" as a reason to not switch to solar. Grids will need new transformers and power lines if they're powered by coal too. Do you want to go full dieselpunk or steampunk? Or live in caves wearing animal hides?

> Solar is just as liable as petroleum infrastructure has been.

Oil and gas infrastructure is full of choke points like pipelines, port facilities, storage facilities and large, concentrated refineries that supply entire country's worth of fuel. There is no central choke point in a solar based grid.

> Iran targets solar plants in the gulf states instead.

A drone exploding in a solar plant will take out what, a couple hundred solar panels? The rest will keep working once you blow the dust off.

You set one oil storage tank on fire and it takes care of everything else in its vicinity.

Not to mention solar can be truly decentralized. You can just buy a solar panel, plug it in your outlet and start generating electricity. You can turn every house into a solar power plant if you want and an enemy will have to bomb every house to get them offline.

> Maybe Iran wants to twist the knife, sends submarines to target solar supply chain networks directly either in shipping at sea or to be closer to shelling or missile striking mining or production facilities.

Iran will totally just go to war against china to prevent more solar panels from being made, yeah.

>There is no central choke point in a solar based grid.

The distribution becomes the target, not the generation. I agree with most of the other things you're saying, about how I can generate a small amount of electricity on my own if I buy a PV system. That's irrelevant, however.

Destroy oil supply and there is a crisis in 12h. Destroy solar supply and there's a crisis in... 20 years? It'd actually be much sooner but the point is that it's much less urgent that oil.

Destroy solar supply chain and then your main solar generating plants and there is a crisis that day as well.

Sure but certainly you understand that's far more complex to do than taking out a single oil refinery next to your country that affects the whole work and is the only reason a country like Iran has any power at all?

They can just target the Suez Canal and wreak similar economic havoc. They can target the Temple Mount if they wanted to really see the world rise up and burn. It isn't the only accessible linchpin even in the region. It is just perhaps the closest one to hit when throwing a stone.

And this is two dimensional thinking.

PRC has spent the better part of the last two decades gobbling up the supply chains that feed into solar panel manufacturing. Suppose you and I, being experienced technologists and enterprising individuals, decided tomorrow that we were going to start a solar panel manufacturing company. Surely this will be a growing, potentially high margin business because demand will be high if we're electrifying everything because of the aforementioned energy crisis. We are going to run head first into a wall of raw materials supply that is controlled by ... China.

So my point is that if you want to flip the energy generation to "green" and solar on some aggressive timeline, you are going to be dependent on China to do so. There are very obvious geopolitical reasons for why this is a very dumb idea. One of the ways I gauge how serious someone is about moving energy generation in the United States to solar is if they are okay with opening up closed mines so we can produce the rare earths, here, that are needed to manufacture the panels themselves. If they're cool with that, great, let's get stared. If they aren't, then they're not serious and are bandwagoning.

And I'm saying the US doesn't need to bother with rare earth mining as long as China is happy to export their panels. Buy as many as they sell. Build up a strategic panel reserve.

If they ever stop, use the reserve and gas plants to backstop. Spend the next 20 years developing domestic PV manufacturing capability, safe in the knowledge that your current panels are good for at least that long.

Today's mainstream solar panels use abundant, widely available materials.

Feels like PV boosters these days are just completely and totally unaware of where these things actually come from and who controls the material supply chain.

Your feelings are likely off - most people know that the materials used in solar panels are widely available across the globe and that China dominates the manufacturing process due to the US abdicating interest in manufacturing and renewables.

You get why this is bad, right.

.. and you get why this is less bad than Middle East fossil fuel dependancies right?

Rare earths are not used to make solar panels.

Solid comment - although rare earths are used in a minor way in the full Solar PV solution via inverters and other components.

Straight up Solar Panel grid arrays sans that stuff, it's 2,800 kg copper and 3,900 kg Silicon per MW and not much else directly (aluminium for framing, glass protection, can be added).

( Although lots of new copper (oxide ore, the most common) requires lots of new sulphur and the world has just lost 3.8 million tonnes of annual sulphur production by product from Qatar refineries )

No. Solar bought mostly from a foreign power only gives you a dependence for continuing to expand solar or (much less so) maintaining the solar already in your country over the 15-30 years it gradually breaks down / gets less efficient. Once you're at peak solar youre not that bad off even if embargoed. Meanwhile since oil highly inelastic, even relatively small portions of your supply being disrupted at any point means an almost instaneous increase in the price to do almost anything industrial or commercial in your country, as is shown by the current Hormuz crisis

It seems to me what you're arguing is that the government should incentivize the industry to produce solar panels domestically - as a strategic resource. Then you are both free from China and oil producing nations; and you get to create some domestic jobs in manufacturing.

> But China also owns the supply.

Well then, damn, we better get started making deals today?

Your plan to do absolutely nothing and continue losing forever with increasingly no way out seems utterly rediculous.

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