Solar and batteries can power the world
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https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/04/trading-some-corn-e...
Relying on an energy source which requires constant, continuous resource extraction is fucking stupid when we can spend resources up front and get reliable energy (solar + battery) for decades with minimal operating cost & maintenance. And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction.
If you want to debate that, spend some time with this video first: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM
Try not to blame anyone. Do it rationally if you can, from your message I understand your opinion.
I say this as a person that has lived in a developing country the last 15 years. It is not that simple IMHO...
The US stopped building coal power plants over a decade ago but we still have a lot of them. Meanwhile we’ve mostly been building solar, which eventually means we’ll have a mostly solar grid but that’s still decades away.
This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do. It is reasonable that when someone gives up a couple of things because that person is rich (rich as in a person in the developed world) the sacrifice is more or less acceptable.
Now change environment and think that these sacrifices are way worse. Even worse than that: that has more implications in conservative cultures where, whether you like it or not, showing "muscle" (wealth) is socially important for them to reach other soccial layers that will make their lives easier.
But giving up those things is probably a very bad choice for their living.
America cannot be compared to South East Asia economically speaking, for example. So the comparison of the coal centrals is not even close.
A salary in Vietnam is maybe 15 million VND for many people. With that you can hardly live in some areas. It is around 600 usd.
Just my two cents.
Acting like this blunder is some random stroke of bad luck isn't telling the whole story.
I'm sure there's some degree of vested interest in protecting fossil energy because it means very concentrated profits in a way that renewables do not. Sunlight isn't owned by anybody (modulo Simpsons references) and nor is the Wind, but I'd expect that, if that was all it was, to manifest as diverting funding to transitional work, stuff that keeps $$$ in the right men's pockets, rather than trying to do a King Canute. Stuff like paying a wind farm not to be constructed feels very Trump-specific.
† The British even know what you do with kings who refuse to stop breaking the law. See Charles the First, though that's technically the English I suspect in this respect the Scots can follow along. If the King won't follow the Law, kill the King, problem solved.
EDIT: I think people are misunderstanding my response. I fully support local subsidies for solar and renewables. My question is why my tax dollars should go toward making it affordable for everyone, including non-Americans. Either market dynamics will handle that naturally, artificially (i.e., China's manufacturing subsidies), or else it is up to the local government to address the shortfall.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-20247734 (2012)
Or do you think that US federal investment in solar and battery technology would be bad for the American taxpayer?
https://statbase.org/data/vnm-coal-imports/
It also started importing liquid natural gas in 2023.
But it has abundant sunlight, access to low cost Chinese solar panels that will produce electricity for decades instead of being burned once, and a substantial domestic photovoltaic manufacturing industry of its own.
"Renewable Energy Investments in Vietnam in 2024 – Asia’s Next Clean Energy Powerhouse" (June 2024)
https://energytracker.asia/renewable-energy-investments-in-v...
In 2014, the share of renewable energy in Vietnam was just 0.32%. In 2015, only 4 megawatts (MW) of installed solar capacity for power generation was available. However, within five years, investment in solar energy, for example, soared.
As of 2020, Vietnam had over 7.4 gigawatts (GW) of rooftop solar power connected to the national grid. These renewable energy numbers surpassed all expectations. It marked a 25-fold increase in installed capacity compared to 2019’s figures.
In 2021, the data showed that Vietnam now has 16.5 GW of solar power. This was accompanied by its green energy counterpart wind at 11.8 GW. A further 6.6 GW is expected in late 2021 or 2022. Ambitiously, the government plans to further bolster this by adding 12 GW of onshore and offshore wind by 2025.
These growth rates are actually much faster than growth rates in the US.
In developed countries 20-50% of the cost of roof top solar is labor.
The general premise of investments is that you end up with fewer resources by not doing them.
It now costs less to install a new solar or wind farm than to continue using an existing coal plant, much less if you were considering building a new coal plant, and that includes the cost of capital, i.e. the interest you have to pay to borrow the money for the up-front investment.
Poorer countries would be at a slight disadvantage if they have to pay higher than average interest rates to borrow money, but they also have the countervailing advantage of having lower labor and real estate costs and the net result is that it still doesn't make sense for anybody to continue to use coal for any longer than it takes to build the replacement.
It just takes more than zero days to replace all existing infrastructure.
Batteries provided 42.8% of California's power at 7pm a few days ago (which came across my social media feed as a new record) [1]. And it wasn't a particularly short peak, they stayed above 20% of the power for 3 hours and 40 minutes. It's a non-trivial amount of dispatchable power.
[1] https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso&date=202...
Batteries are a form of dispatchable power not "base load". There is no "base load" requirement. Base load is simply a marketing term for power production that cannot (economically) follow the demand curve and therefore must be supplemented by a form of dispatchable power, like gas peaker plants, or batteries. "Base load" power is quite similar to solar in that regard. The term makes sense if you have a cheap high-capitol low running-cost source of power (like nuclear was supposed to be, though it failed on the cheap front) where you install as much of it as you can use constantly and then you follow the demand curve with a different source of more expensive dispatchable power. That's not the reality we find ourselves in unless you happen to live near hydro.
† My thinking is: Dawn because in a few hours the solar comes online, you can refill those batteries at whatever price that is, so sell what you have now for the dawn price, and Dusk because the solar is mostly gone but people are running ovens and so on to make food in the evening, so you can sell into that market. But I might be seeing what I expect not reality.
That too has pretty recently changed. Even my home state of Idaho is deploying pretty big batteries. It takes almost no time to deploy it's all permitting and public comment at this point that takes the time.
Batteries have gotten so cheap that the other electronics and equipement at this point are bigger drivers of the cost of installation.
Here's an 800MWh station that's being built in my city [1].
I think people are just generally stuck with the perception of where things are currently at. They are thinking of batteries and solar like it's 2010 or even 2000. But a lot has changed very rapidly even since 2018.
[1] https://www.idahopower.com/energy-environment/energy/energy-...
Any pointers for a regular Joe Shmoe homeowner looking for a backup battery? The Tesla Power Wall stuff and similar costs are halfway to six figures.
The cheapest per kwh way I could find to buy a home battery (that didn't involve diy stuff) was to literally buy an EV car with an inverter... by a factor of at least two... I ended up not buying one.
Unfortunately cheap batteries doesn't translate to reputable companies packaging them in cheap high quality packages for consumers instantly.
What I've done and would suggest is right now looking for battery banks for big ticket important items that you'd want to stay on anyways in terms of an outage. A lot of those can function as a UPS. You can get a 1kWh battery pack for $400 right now. A comparable home battery backup is charging $1300 per kWh of installed storage.
I currently have a 2kWh battery pack for my computer/server/tv and a 500Wh pack for my fridge. Works great and it's pretty reasonably priced. The 500Wh gives my fridge an extra 6 hours of runtime after a power outage.
If I wanted to power shift, I have smart switches setup so I can toggle when I want to.
I hesitate to offer any brand advice, because that is very situational, depends on what you're after, what experience level you have, what trade-offs you want to make, etc.
( They do not use rare earths (inverters use trace amounts) )
China cornering rare earths (for now) is an "own goal" by every country that chose to let China (and to a lesser degree Malaysia) take a hit on the toxic by products of processing concentrates.
The US is easily capable of producing it's own rare earths, it's certainly not been backwards in asking Australia to do that for it.
That's certainly a position.
Replacing the solar panels every 20 years at minimum would mean that the panels would always be getting refreshed. Bro we have roads and bridges 50 years past end of life, in need of rebuilding. We can't afford this fragile power grid rebuild that is completely dependent on foreign suppliers. Sorry. Take your snark and shove it.
Also, PV panels are kinda non uniform in performance, long term studies show that one fifth of them perform 1.5 times worse than the rest.
Either way, 20 year lifetimes where you build once and reap the rewards for 20 years is sufficient to put to rest the kind of argument being made about dependancies.
That's more than enough time for any G20 country to be making it's own PV production chain.
It's not sufficient. We have had plenty of time to start making all of the critical things we import, and that never happened. In most cases, these things used to be made in the West in the first place. Just because you CAN make a thing doesn't mean it makes sense. The economics of solar would be totally different if you had to pay 5x more for solar panels to replace Chinese-subsidized slave-labor-backed imports.
There are other arguments to be made against mega-scale solar. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of solar because it is on a small scale one of the best ways for an individual to get a bit of electricity without reliance on fuel supplies. But it has a lot of disadvantages at scale which make it unsuitable for many regions. Hail, snow, dust, vandals, and strategic vulnerability all make it look precarious. The supply chain concern is that much worse.
In the very long run we need to find alternative sources of energy but I think solar is not going to be that solution. Solar is most likely going to be a fringe backup alternative to nuclear power. Batteries have tremendous disadvantages. In the long run some kind of biofuel or synthetic hydrocarbon might win over batteries.
>Weird that it took way less than 20 years for that to hit.
No, it's not weird. It hit in the 70s and is an actual avoidable problem. Don't kick the hornets nest. The issue of the Strait of Hormuz was known to nearly everyone for decades, and we got a bunch of leaders all over the West who are collectively batshit crazy.
Whoa lots to unpack here. I'll summarize:
- It is already happening to some extent (it's cheaper)
- Try explaining to farmers to do away with their livelihood and retrain them to running a solar farm
- Entrenched bureaucracy and gov subsidies
2. Wind power works better for farmers and provide a smaller footprint. Drive on I-80 in Iowa on a clear night and you'll see the wind farms blink their red lights in the distance. Farmers can lease their land for wind turbines, and the generation companies take on the regulatory / capital / politcal risks, etc.
3. Farming is more or less free market based, and often farmers can let their grain sit in a silo until the price is optimal for them to sell. But for a given location, there's only one power company that you can use, and typically the power companies don't like people putting solar panels on the grid. In many states (like in Idaho) there's regulatory capture or weird politics preventing people putting solar panels up on their own land. (Again Idaho)
As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies.
Then economics, lack of infrastructure and incentives buried it in a few years. Farmers were left holding the bag. Many were not happy they had made a huge move into this new "renewable" energy, only to get burned in the end. The same farmers I know have scoffed at windmills and solar farms.
E-85 really lost a lot of farmers willing to use their land for something that won't pan out. The ones I know went back to growing what sells and grows the best in the market. Trying to tell a farmer that solar panels on his land where he grows food to feed his family is going to be a tough sell now.
The problem is that in many of those places where enough water naturally falls from the sky the soil and/or the weather isn't as good for growing food.
It is generally much easier to move water to a low water place that has great soil and/or weather than it is to move soil or weather to a high water place that is missing good soil or weather, and so here we are.
They also have goals other than generating energy effectively
Theft is stupid from a broad view. It causes more harm to the victim than benefit to the perpetrator. Everyone would be better off if we everyone stopped stealing and we provided the same level of benefit to would-be perpetrators in a more efficient form.
Why hasn't theft stopped yet? Because it's extremely difficult to do from a systems level. In principle it's simple: just don't steal. Convincing everyone to do it is hard.
Likewise, fossil fuels have horrible externalities that kill thousands if not millions of people per year. We'd be better off if we greatly cut back our usage and replaced it with cleaner sources of energy. But the people benefitting from any given use of fossil fuels and the people paying the costs tend not to be the same people. This makes it extremely difficult to organize a halt.
Existing plans are built to run 40-60 years.. retiring creates "stranded assets". pension funds fight hard to avoid that. The renewable projects that wait for permits exceed total existing capacity.. the bottleneck is not tech, but locality.
I found this visual schematic helpful - https://vectree.io/c/why-energy-transitions-are-slow-grid-in...
Is there an upper bound on battery limits with regards to resource extraction?
Hopefully we are able to reach a point of effectively unlimited cheap energy and storage but it's that if overnight we suddenly had enough solar+batteries to power today's usage, we'd suddenly need way more as demand rises
This is something the (willfully?) deluded really don't appreciate. I know people who listened to _that one Joe Rogan podcast_ about precious metal extraction for EVs and are back on the oil bandwagon. The current regime of precious metal extraction is absolutely dirty and dangerous but ... it doesn't have to be and won't be forever -- especially if, as you've said, we actively prioritize a recycling loop for the components.
Also, in case of a war or blockade you can switch the corn use from etanol to food. You will have to eat tortilla and polenta for a year [1] but it's better than algae from seawater or famine.
Here we use sugar cane to produce etanol, it's more efficient because it's a C4 plant. I guess it's possible in the south of the US.
[1] It's not so bad in my opinion if you can mix some meat in the sauce.
Not that easily. Yellow dent corn is not edible without processing. So to switch that to food use you have to have factories to deal with it.
You'd be far better off taking the energy from panels and using it greenhouses to get human feed.
* Home made popcorn: made from whole yellow corn grains.
* Corn on the cob: Sweet yellow corn. We just learned that you can microwave them for 6 minutes instead of boiling.
* Polenta: Grinded yellow corn. Add milk, butter and as much cheese as possible. You can buy the precooked grinded corn, and it takes less than 5 minutes. Bonus points for a sauce with tomato, onion, peppers, and red chorizo. [1]
* Humita/Tamales: Put some grinded corn wrapped inside the corn husk and boil it. I had not eat them since a long time ago, but they use also yellow corn here. I like it, but it requires a lot of preparation.
We use white corn only for food related to our two independence day:
* Locro: Mix split white hard corn, beans, pumpkin pieces, potatoes, pieces of meat with bone and whatever you can find. Boil it for hours and hours and hours. I probably eat it once or twice a year. [2]
* Mazamorra (porridge?): Mix split white hard corn with sugar and probably milk. Boil it until it's soft, that may take a very long time. I think I eat it once or twice in my life, for some patriotic celebration.
[1] https://www.paulinacocina.net/como-hacer-polenta-con-tuco/25...
[2] https://www.paulinacocina.net/receta-de-locro-argentino/9829
PS: As a rule of thumb, if you want to cook Argentinean food, just look at the site of "Paulina Cocina". She has simple but tasty recipes.
> Dent corn is the variety used in food manufacturing as the base ingredient for cornmeal flour (used in the baking of cornbread), corn chips, tortillas, and taco shells. It is also used to make corn syrup.
After a quick search, you need "flint" corn instead of "dent" corn for polenta (it appears to be similar to grits). I guess in case of an emergency anyone is better than nothing.
Also, it would be much easier to switch if the people has the know-how. (I'm worried about the availability of enough seeds of the other corn.)
Algae is farmed at industrial scales in the ocean, today. Mostly in asia. US is very behind on this industry.
Same with corn
> so you will have to flood a lot of land to get enough. Not necessarily, just use pre-existing water treatment plants to grow algae, and vertical photobioreactors exist. Algae also has a much higher harvest rate versus corn, and if you only wanted to ferment the algal biomass into corn you'd have much higher yields than corn.
> Also, in case of a war or blockade you can switch the corn use from ethanol to food. You will have to eat tortilla and polenta for a year [1] but it's better than algae from seawater or famine.
True
> Here we use sugar cane to produce etanol, it's more efficient because it's a C4 plant. I guess it's possible in the south of the US. Agreed.
And when you think about the millions of lands used to grow bioethanol I think we can safely convert that for solar installation without worries.Agrovoltaic is also a practical approach for a lot of crops and farmers so that we can grow and produce electricity side by side.
There are deserts everywhere.
The most efficient way to do large scale solar is with semi-local utility scale arrays with ultra efficient inverters and enormous chemical or hydro storage. We have a lot of unused land, that's not a problem
Rooftop solar is good but it shouldn't be a gift to the wealthier residents paid for by those less wealthy. Any subsidies for solar power should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further than a dollar spent subsidizing wealthy homeowners who install panels on their roof.
My understanding is that the (unsubsidised) price of rooftop solar is only high in the USA. Because the cost is almost entirely labor (high in the US) and issues around permitting (more restrictive in the US). Pretty much everywhere else in the world you'll now save money with rooftop solar + batteries even if you can't sell back to the grid at all. Even places that aren't that sunny like the UK where I live.
It is still more expensive than "grid scale" deployments. But there are positive externalities that make up for that: uses otherwise unused space, less grid capacity needed, adds resiliency to the grid (if implemented well with storage).
I don't think you thought this up yourself, so I won't blame you for it, as this exact, word for word swill is mindlessly repeated by a lot of people, so thats ample evidence of brainwashing going on.
The subsidies and retail rate (both of which have been murdered by now thanks to swill like this) incentives were not a sneaky reverse welfare program snuck in by the wealthy.
They were infrastructure incentives for people who could afford to make those infrastructure investments.
Investments have always required incentives and a positive ROI. You don't put money into your 401k, Roth or HSA because you expect to lose money in 20 years.
The goal of solar subsidies was never some sneaky wealth redistribution with unforseen sideeffects but rather to rally support from the private industry and wealthy homes to spearhead rapid decarbonization, energy independence, and grid decentralization.
A single mother treading water, barely being able to afford groceries isn't your persona for actually making rapid decarbonization, energy independence, and grid decentralization happen - however, the wealthy that you so despise of, certainly put a 10kWh (sometimes more) PV array on their 3000 sqft rooftop and actually feed power to the grid that was reeling under tremendous growing strain.
People hanging portable solar panels from the balconies of their apartments barely make power to run their kitchen fridge so that's out as well.
Mom and pop landlords and corporate run apartments aren't going to put solar for their tenants because they are not legally allowed to sell power above utility rates while they don't enjoy the 10% guaranteed ROI that utilities get (which is where utilities actually make their money), so that's out too.
This makes me sad - We could have had a future where the grid was fully decentralized, where our single mother neighbor would never had to worry about the lights getting turned off even when there was a downed power line or wildfire or a snowstorm turning down power lines half a mile away, where she could plug in her EV into my shed instead of having to drive miles away to a crowded charging station.
We are numbers people here - so here's a numbers perspective:
If I had taken the same money I had to spend on a "grid compliant" installation (so I could connect all of this to the grid) and put it into the SNP500 instead, I would never have had to worry just about a power bill (as bad it is - $0.60/kWh) but also my inflation adjusted grocery bills for the rest of my life.
It turns out that a big problem is that whenever we install local generation it costs utilities a ton of money. They bundle the cost of grid maintenance into their per kWh charges. These costs, which include debt service, maintenance, upgrades etc amount to 5-7 cents/kWh. Whenever you generate your own energy you cost the utility 5-7cents/kWh that they have to pay regardless of your usage.
This business model, which has bundled grid maintenance into usage costs means that utilities put up huge roadblocks for distributed generation. They say they love it, but they actually hate it. Utility executives have looked me in the eye and said as much.
It gets worse though, because energy infrastructure is backed by trillions in utility bonds. These "low risk" debt instruments are owned by national and private pension funds of mind boggling size. In order to bring about a distributed energy future the grid (and low pressure nat gas infrastructure) must be reorganized in a manner that is likely to make those bonds worthless. These background factors are definitely in play when you see these bait and switch enthusiastic green energy programs that turn out to be a regulatory quagmire when you dig into them. Public utilities and pension funds hate green energy, they are a major factor in west's pathetic performance when it comes to solar adoption vs China.
So a question:
- Lets hypothesize that distributed, decentralized systems cost way more than centralized systems
- If you agree with that hypothesis, can we next hypothesize that building a distributed, decentralized system that can support power on one block and can allow it to continue to stay on while the "central feeder line" (please tell me the proper word for this made up word is) to all the blocks is down, because that one block has a local distributed, decentralized power source, is of value to the community?
In the past, commercial factories were the only places that could afford this kind of redundancy but it feels to me, thanks to crashing prices of solar and batteries (I could never have imagined 12kWh brand new LFP could be purchased for $2k), this level of redundancy is now very much realistic at the consumer, residential level. It just doesn't work locally today because the utility poles lack the smarts to do the isolated switching and safe islanding. For example: one unsettled question today is if a lot of customers on one such island are on solar and the grid is down, how do we safely supply power within nominal specs to the whole of the island - but this isn't a physical unknown, we know how to solve it. It just is lacking implementation.
> These costs, which include debt service, maintenance, upgrades etc amount to 5-7 cents/kWh. Whenever you generate your own energy you cost the utility 5-7cents/kWh that they have to pay regardless of your usage
Capitalism has repeatedly proven its ability to cut costs down while improving QoS. I realize you really believe in the numbers you have been provided - that it costs a utility 5-7cents/kWh that they have to pay regardless of my usage, but before SpaceX, it used to cost multiple millions of dollars and years of planning and design to launch one rocket.
It is already cheaper to build the distributed energy solution you describe but making that change would require a massive restructuring of electricity and natural gas utilities. Such a restructuring would revalue the debt that backs the existing infrastructure. This would be a great thing for the average person but not for the people currently in charge of regulating what types of systems are allowed.
Costs of distributed energy may drop so low in the next 5-10 years that it will no longer be possible to keep things from moving to a micro grid network.
fair. I appreciated the insight in your original message - datapoints from industry insiders like yourself do help people like I gain some understanding of why we have to go in alone on this and not wait
No this statement is absolutely wrong. Here's why:
> west's pathetic performance when it comes to solar adoption vs China
China is dominating energy because the CCP doesn't care what their citizens think. They need energy and they are doing everything they can do to get it. They will put you behind bars at best or kill your family and demolish your house if it gets in the middle of a power line trench. For China, energy isn't a "nice to have" - they realize it's essential and they won't stop until they get there.
China is the person out in the mountains being chased by a hungry bear while we in the west is the person sitting in their air conditioned room debating whether to drive or take an Uber to have a drink with buddies.
News came out last week that you can buy a Chinese hypersonic missle for $100k - you can't even build a little two car garage where I am for double that price.
> Public utilities and pension funds hate green energy
Pension funds don't care whether energy is green or orange. What they hate are the horrible returns affected by all the stealing and grifting that happens in the name of "green energy".
Public utilities (atleast in the jurisdictions that I am aware of) love any infrastructure work - they are guaranteed a 10% ROI by the government on any approved infrastructure work they do. If you could work with them to build infrastructure to cremate just newborn kids and get it approved by the CPUC, they will happily start work on it tomorrow. The reason why they hate green energy is because after they've made their 10% ROI, they are now stuck with a power source that costs them more than their non-green sources and that hurts their razor thin margins.
However, as the customer - I don't care either about what public utilities and pension funds hate or don't.
What I do care about is having affordable and reliable power and I absolutely can get that with my own solar panels and batteries. The fact that it's green is a happy sideffect for most.
The reason why every home in the U.S. isn't overflowing with solar panels and batteries is because of regulation and government shenanigans making retail costs really high. Average people in Pakistan, South Africa and Lebanon certainly power their whole homes with solar panels and batteries but their governments don't have nonsense taffifs and fees on Chinese solar equipment.
Those regulations and that interference result from the fact that in a distributed world the current utility bond value drops to zero. Utilities will not build infrastructure that makes their existing infrastructure lose value.
I recently negotiated with a government owned utility on a large solar project. They were 100% against it until I demonstrated that the project would never feed back to the grid and wouldn't reduce the amount of power we currently buy from them. Zero interest in distributed solutions on their side. They are focused on giant transmission line projects and hydro.
Is that because of the scale they need to achieve to support the investment?
> until I demonstrated that the project would never feed back to the grid
Financial greed aside, and I mentioned this previously, feedback at a large scale isn't free especially if the impedance of the grid cannot be predicted - the frequency or voltage or both would spike. Monitoring for these conditions are expensive and addressing them is even more expensive - the cheapest solution is you do a shutdown until things stabilize but this is kinda catch-22 because that itself might have its own cascading effects.
Let me ask you this - if you were to update a local neighborhood (like a block or two of 1000 homes) distribution station, that all have their own solar and battery, where the homes could independently power themselves for a day - what changes or upgrades would you make to ensure they can share load for that one day when the larger grid is suffering an outage?
Now would that cost and complexity be lower or higher if instead, nothing was changed at grid scale at all but each of the individual 1000 homes doubled their own capacity (let's say 30kWh a day if you're OK with that)?
> a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further to decarbonizing the grid than a dollar spent subsidizing rooftop residential solar
That's completely, trivially provably wrong.
For one, rooftop residential allows decentralization and redundancy. Customers can have their house continue to run while the grid as a whole is down.
Utility solar absolutely does not - solar here is just another source of energy into the centralized grid. From a physics and math perspective, that source of energy could very well have been a coal plant. It doesn't have the same decentralized and redundancy benefit as a 10kWh PV array and a 30kWh battery on a home where the home no longer even needs the grid anymore.
Any rational consumer would appreciate having power than not - We cannot argue physics and math or consumer demands - that's just insanity.
A person who repeatedly argues against this basic math doesn't have the best interest of the consumer in mind. Further, when there's a group of people who repeatedly argues the same illogical swill using the same phrasing as the others, it's a cult.
I could go on and on but I have learned that arguing with brainwashed people takes a lot of time and effort and most of the time, in the end, it ends in a stalemate. Most of the time, it reenforces them they are right and the other side is ignorant and "doesnt get it". No thank you.
On this very thread a person who actually designs and implements grid projects agreed that the only objective utility solar serves are those of the utilities themselves.
The reason why this person is provably correct is because you could come to the same conclusion from first principles as well. To most people, the above statement is a "duh!" moment.
They gave solid, clear, objective examples of how utilities have other much higher priorities than ensuring consumers have access to the most affordable, reliable, resilient power.
They further gave evidence and insight into how the way utilities fund their infrastructure projects actively make them opposed to what's good for the consumer, because decentralization and redundancy would collapse the value of existing collateral.
Now that's a high quality, high value, high merit discussion.
When someone comes and lectures me about how my dollars should go towards initiatives that absolutely do not help me, rather makes me even more dependent on a 3rd party that doesn't have me as their first priority, I dont care about what they have to say especially when I have options available where my dollars directly go towards initiatives that absolutely do help me.
The most generous interpretation I have of their motives is that they are brainwashed.
I would encourage beginning from first principles, gaining clarity into what the final objective is - to provide affordable, redundant, reliable, resilient power to the consumer or to ensure the utility has smoother operations and a tighter grip over the consumer and ensure the consumer is completely dependent on the utility?
If the brainwashing isn't complete and there's a tiny chance of a breakthrough, maybe changing domains would help?
What's better for a local economy that has willing, capable backyard farmers:
- allow them to sell their product that meets all regulatory requirements, to other willing consumers at the same market clearing price or
- destroy them completely and remove any incentives for them to grow, in favor of having a massive, centralized farm?
The corn doesn't just produce ethanol, which just utilizes the starch/sugar. The protein, fat, fiber is eaten by livestock in some form like distillers grains.
And governments like to have food security , and having secondary uses for an abundance of food in the good times is more convenient than storing cheese in caves , and in case of an emergency shortage the production is already there without having to rip up solar panels to grow food.
My conclusion is you're conflating issues (solar and ethanol) unnecessarily.
Ethanol from sugarcane makes a lot more sense. Corn ethanol is just a wasteful subsidy for farmers paid for by drivers.
What is the problem, that sounds great? 30% free output out of your input is staggering honestly. Thank you sunshine and atmospheric CO2. You don't have to use fossil fuel for this. You can potentially run the farm equipment off ethanol if it were designed as such.
You can also only grow sugarcane well up to usda zone 8. Some people can do it as an annual but I guess it is tricky. Corn you can grow all the way into Canada.
No, that's the entire point. As mentioned above, for ethanol you input the equivalent of 300 ethanol gallons worth of energy (which could also be ethanol) to get 100 net gallons out you can do whatever you want with. If you instead used that 300 gallons worth of input to produce solar panels, they'd produce 3,600 net gallons worth of equivalent energy over their lifetime. You get 36x more net energy building solar panels than growing corn for ethanol. Sure, you could spend 600 gallons worth of energy and do both, but then you'd still be better off switching the entire 600 gallons of input to solar panels until you run out of solar panel generation capacity or demand. That's the opportunity cost.
Also a minor point worth making is that ethanol is in no way a "waste product" from the corn growing industry that would otherwise go to, well, waste. Farmers aren't just growing a bunch of extra corn for no reason that we can conveniently use for ethanol. If demand for ethanol stopped, they'd stop growing all that extra corn.
It's really not when you compare it to the energy return you get from energy invested in other forms of energy generation. Solar power, for example, is typically estimated to produce 13x as much energy as it takes to make the panel. This is obviously a considerable improvement over 1.3x.
So why does it matter as long as the net energy output is positive? Because the whole point of the energy generating exercise is to do something with the output energy other than just make more energy and there isn't unlimited capacity on the input side of the equation. The 100 "free" gallons you get in the example sounds great, but sustaining that requires inputting (i.e. growing) 300 gallons worth, so you need to produce 400 gallons total to get 100 useful gallons. Looking at the math another way, an ethanol powered civilization would spend 75% of the energy it produces simply producing more energy, leaving only 25% to actually do anything useful with. This is bad, because said civilization will run out land to grow corn for ethanol well before it's generating enough useful energy.
It's sort of like the energy equivalent of the food explanation for why it took human civilization so long to advance out of the agrarian stage. Up until relatively recently, most humans spent most of their time and effort simply growing enough food to live. This left very little excess capacity for humans to do anything to move humanity forward. In the modern day, very little of our time and energy goes into growing food, leaving all sorts of extra capacity to build spaceships and AI and the Internet and whatever else. But only because we got really efficient at growing food.
There's lot of factors at play here:
- Location for generating PV
- Redistribution of food (both for livestock and human) production
- Environmental impacts of PV vs livestock vs depletion of native prairies
Point still stands...if you replaced all of the land used to produce ethanol with PV, you would create a surplus of energy that is higher than anything we could imaginably consume today (hint - China is essentially already doing this)
How much energy in terms of calories does one get per acre?
What is the equivalent energy input in terms of diesel and so forth?
The blunt question is:
>How many calories of energy to grow 1 calorie of corn (using modern industrial farming practices)
I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar system (almost 30 kWh battery and 24kW solar). It keeps the lights on, but not heating. I live in a mild climate.
The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.
Because where I live around 55th this winter we had five straight weeks below -15c / 5f daily average plus enough snowfall that it was infeasible to clean anything but the most major roads.
Solar is out of question in these conditions and when thermal pump fails you have to evacuate. When just grid electricity fails you have to either have some sort of stored fuel backup or evacuate.
The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular among people living in what amounts to subtropics who can't even imagine how crazy they sound to most everyone else.
To be fair, 90% of the population lives within 45 degrees of the equator. If we're talking about global energy solutions for CO2 reduction, we can go a long way just by focusing on what works in these areas of the globe.
The article does also point out that hydro/wind are going to be important at higher latitudes in winter, but they also acknowledge that they don't account for seasonal variation in demand. That's the biggest flaw I can find in the analysis.
FWIW: I'm down in a mild arid climate at 35N, and yeah, 90% of our winter days are nearly sunny, even when the lows are in the teens. It's a different world for sure.
Make energy so expensive that people have to move away or burn their old house.
handwavy argument. Yes, in the (sub)tropics the argument is even stronger pro-PV, not the least because it'll give you the opposite of heating - aircon - for free right when you need it. And considering summer heatwaves as have been seen the last few years "way north", that benefit will extend that way even if you wouldn't bother considering letting it "assist", if not fully replace, your heating. That said though, for 50° polewards and above, if you wanted to use PV in winter orient the panels vertically. If you can clad your too floor with shiplap larch so you can with PV panels. Given the price of timber ... there's a plan.
(only saying handwaving goes both ways)
Most everyone else? Only about two percent of the Earths population live above the 55th parallel. There’s a big gulf between that and the ‘subtropics’.
I don’t disagree that solar/battery isn’t the answer for 100% of power needs, let alone 100% of heating needs, but if we got to even 50% we’d be in a lot better situation than we are now.
A well built home with more insulation will, according to physics, lose less heat in any given scenario. So policies that push for things that improve buildings can reduce energy use.
Do you think we have reached peak building efficiency or something?
Most local electric and gas companies will do free energy audits. Many will offer rebates if you install tankless water heaters, heat pumps, and insulation. Installers get kickbacks from manufacturers and tax credits if you buy higher efficiency equipment. Lenders will give you 0% loans to fund it all. The Feds and many States offer tax credits for all of the above.
I've done every single thing on this list in the last 5 years, some in Texas, some in Indiana.
Which is why a lot of poorly insulated houses still exist - people have mostly done what can be done for a reasonable price, but anything that will make a difference is also very expensive with very long paybacks.
Keep in mind we WFH and homeschool so our house is used 24/7 and I think it's a good approximation for OP's goal.
This. You have enough generation to keep a mansion toasty, but you don’t have enough storage to last a long winter night.
Proper insulation and good windows go a very long way. For instance, I set my heat to 66F during the day and 60F at night. When I wake up in the morning, the register is usually still above 60F.
I genuinely do not understand why people are so afraid of solar. It's baffling.
But to be clear, it's less about night vs day and more about summer vs winter.
I had a 20kWh array and 18kWh of batteries in Texas and it was GREAT in the summer. It'd start charging by 6am and be charged by 9am, even with simultaneous usage. Then we'd live off solar for the day (even with HVAC), go back on batteries around 9pm and they'd be out around 4am. No problem.
But during an overcast winter day, the stack wouldn't get power until 8/9, not make it to 50%, start discharging by 4/5pm, and be out by 10/11pm. It would easily be 8-10 hours where we were wholly dependent on the grid.
Not a problem, just a constraint to acknowledge and plan for.
Yes surely some days are cloudy
So some days you get 5% capacity factor, and need some other energy source as well
So it harms the economics of the venture
Look at the profitability of companies building utility scale solar farms, they cost 100 million and the company hopes to get a 10% return and pay a 3% dividend.
They still have to contend with moving parts for tracking the angle of the sun, fans on inverters, contactors, clearing snow, mowing grass, site drainage, tornadoes etc, so sometimes it is not as easy as it sounds
All for a 7%? Why shouldn’t they just buy the s&p 500 and call it a day
The problem with global ecological regulations is they never differentiate between countries on the equator or 30th parallel with countries around 60. They expect everyone to only run on sun and wind. It isn't possible. There has to be at least nuclear which is ridiculously expensive.
It's generally not an easy problem to solve otherwise it wouldn't be a problem anymore.
First sensible thing to do is to relax the expectations for countries like Poland that have no good way to compete with other countries energy wise because of geographical location that noone chooses.
It is extremely unfair to treat everyone the same even though every country has different energy resources.
If no one needs it during the day, they can't sell it. That's not how markets work. Energy that is generated, needs to be consumed or else the grid breaks down. These two facts together mean, that the energy they sell is needed and used. Albeit they could generate and sell even more energy, if the energy could be stored or if the load could be shaped accordingly. The latter is a great way to lower energy costs.
Energy consumption during the night is low. So low, that night time electricity prices, which are lower than the daytime prices, are still a thing.
Heat pumps are an opportunity for load shaping. Buildings can be heated, when electricity is abundant and heated a few degree over the target temperature, if needed. The heat is stored inside the building and needs less heating during the night. That works quite well, especially here in Europe were buildings generally have good insulation and are made of brick, which can store a lot of heat.
I have a modern cold climate air source heat pump which essentially needs to run 24 hours a day to maintain a stable 20C when the outdoor temperatures reach -15C. Below that, the heat pump shuts off and the furnace kicks in to provide emergency heating. My thermostat is a modern one with full time-of-day and day-of-week scheduling for heating and cooling, but it doesn't matter because the heat pump by itself is not able to swing the temperature up (by even half a degree) on its own, so this causes the furnace to kick in every time the schedule calls for a higher temperature, defeating the entire purpose of time-of-day scheduling.
I will also add that where I live (Southern Ontario) the sky is overcast 90% of the time during the winter. Solar panels, even somehow free of snow and ice, are going to produce almost nothing on those dark days. Add in the need to keep the panels free of snow and ice (presumably with heating, since nobody is going to be climbing around on their roof in the winter), and you'd likely reach energy net-negative trying to make use of them.
Yeah, I understand I'm probably an outlier at 66F. I was using the numbers more to point out how little a house temperature will drop with good windows and insulation.
My house was built in the late 1980s. It has decent insulation but not amazing. It still needs a lot of heating when temperatures plunge below -15C. I do not have a whole-house humidifier. I had one with my previous furnace but it had issues with mold in the filter and clogging of the condensate pump.
At 66 degrees F? That sounds like put a sweater on if you’re chilly, not some near death extreme.
Any evidence that such an ‘extreme’ would cause issues?
I know people who live in the Mediterranean and get by with no heating during the winter with indoor and outdoor tempuratures this low or lower, so it seems that one can be conditioned into doing so.
Perhaps it's the presence of more sunlight on average rather than the temperature that makes the difference.
I've lived in extremely cold and extremely hot/humid places.
I cannot imagine setting the temp in the house that high.
I also agree that 66F (about 19 degrees Celsius) is not comfortable during day time. It is fine for sleeping temperature. During winter homes in heating dominated climates typically have higher indoor temperatures. One advantage of lower inside temperature is that relative humidity stays slightly higher when it is very cold outside.
Thermal curtains are more effective than good windows. Good windows are minimally helpful.
In my last house, I replaced single pane windows with properly installed, sealed, and insulated double-hungs and it practically cut my heat bill in half. I agree that modern window to modern window replacement probably won't get you much, though.
Spend 50k on insulation that will last the life of the building instead of 50k on heating and cooling devices which will need constant maintenance and replacement + fuel and end up costing 10x more over the life of the building.
A modern house with modern insulation in a mild climate shouldn't even need a central heating system. You can get by with 500w toaster heaters in each room for the coldest time of the year
There are electric floor heating graphene foils that put out 20w per sqm, they're more than enough, no moving part, no maintenance, no bs, not even 20% of the price of a hydro floor heating, you can even install them yourself
The end result is you're going to make big lifestyle changes to accommodate the energy. For example everyone sleeping in 1 bedroom and only cooking with an electric pressure cooker or low and slow with an induction range.
There are passive houses built at 2000m altitude in the Alps, some are made of wood and have literal strawbales for insulation, there are no excuses left in 2026 not to build good houses, it's more economical, more practical, more comfortable, more ecological
Any means to keep energy cheap and abundant must be by force because it is not a natural order.
There's probably a few lower cost things that I am overlooking, to the tune of netting out a few hundred dollars of savings after however many years they took to pay back.
In the UK, houses have energy ratings, which are largely not that useful, but they do allow estimated annual running charge.
The house that I live in we moved in and were spending ~1.7k on gas a year.
We needed to re-render the place, because it has a few missing pieces. we spent the extra £4 to put in 90mm of external wall insulation. We also had to replace the glazing. It was cheaper to get triple glazing (for some reason), however the results of that was that it was 6degrees warmer in winter, and 10 degrees (celcius) cooler in summer. Even with gas prices doubling, we spend about £70 on hotwater and heating.
How do you draw this conclusion? Like any other expensive, long-lasting part of the house, this should be seen as an asset which is “priced-in“ to the value of the building.
Not everyone has the capital (even with gov subsidies) to make those investments, and it's generally the people who need to save a few bucks on bills the most that DONT have the money.
People still spend literal millions on poorly built and poorly insulated mcmansions today btw, it's not a money issue.
However, it's not that far off for retrofitting, if you do it when your siding already needs to be replaced. Add 3-5" XPS foam to the exterior of any standard house; if a basement you bring insulation several feet down and out below the ground. If cathedral ceiling, when replacing the roof you put 6-8" polyiso down over the sheathing before the new roofing material. If vented roof, get 1.5x code minimum blown in the attic. Air seal first, of course (1-hour of air sealing is the best ROI of anything you can do in an old house).
But nobody wants to put that money up.
Where I am your house would flood when 80mph+ winds blow the rain up your walls.
Same goes with the cinder block foundation. If insulated, it moves the freeze/thaw interface inside the block and then you end up with a failing foundation.
https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/pages/map-downloads
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USDA_hardiness_zones...
A "properly insulated" house still requires something around 0,5 W/m2/K. Modeling a moderate 120 m2 house in the coldest months when the temperatures hit 15-20 negative you still need 2,5 kW of heat with domestic hot water on top. Put in the efficiency of a heat pump and you are still easily looking at half a mega watt-hour per month. ~1MWh for a whole house is very reasonable number during winter months, sans electric mobility.
That's entirely unrealistic to cover with batteries with current battery technologies alone, electricity generation is absolutely REQUIRED. Windmills can help soften the blow and storage needs substantially, but the TFA is about solar, which is effectively absent during the winter.
That was a good number in 1980 lmao (or in the US maybe), passive houses are often 1/5th of that. I'm talking 25cm+ of rockwool in the walls, 40cm on the roof and triple pane windows, mostly facing south, reasonably shaped house that conserve heat by design, etc.
0.5 W/m²/K is a good value.... for a window, certainly not for the overall house, for a wall it wouldn't even pass code in most of Europe
> That's entirely unrealistic to cover with batteries with current battery technologies alone
It already is a reality for many people.
There's a mix of miscommunication and wat. I'm using approximate floor area values here, not perimeter walls. 0.1 W/m2/K for a WALL is definitely not a "passive" house, that's barely A++.
> I'm talking 25cm+ of rockwool in the walls, 40cm on the roof and triple pane windows,
Yep, this gets you something like 0.5 realistic, maaaaybe up to 0.3 in the models.
> It already is a reality for many people.
Megawatt-hour level home-battery installs? Show us a picture. That's literally a room full of batteries. The actual reality is having ten or so kilowatt-hours to balance rooftop solar.
The cost of materials going into modern batteries easily leaves room for another 10x reduction in price, IMO where this all is heading is obvious. Zero marginal cost will win every day of the week.
FWIW we run our cabin on 15kWh battery today year around, though we do run a small wood stove to supplant the heat pump on cold winter days.
Also, living in SFH isn't avoiding all problems. I'd rather live in a properly-built apartment than my old house when my neighbor left her dogs outside to bark for the entire work day, every single day, and all the city would do is fine her a hundred bucks every few months. (or if you want to say "rural", that's 1 a small fraction of the population and 2 I like hospitals).
I just live far enough from the center of it all that I have a vacant quarter acre and thicker windows that happened when the last owner's mistakes caught up with me the current owner. For medical, I have UCSF, and for major medical, I have medical tourism, something I fully endorse from experience. And yes, not everyone can do that. And well, I can't touch my toes and they probably can. Life's funny that way.
For solar powered homes specifically though, multi-story buildings are much harder to run solar powered from the simple ratios - even if you reduce energy use 75%, at 4 stories you are break-even in roof-ratio-to-energy-need. I’ve worked in this space a while, and it’s now pretty straight forward to run single-family homes 24/7/367 on solar in most of the world, but multi story buildings are much harder.
Nothing is ever simple or one-dimensional :)
You don't need to colocate solar at the point it's used. Utility solar is cheaper than rooftop, by multiple.
The last part isn't true. There's no way you're running a home, including heat, entirely of solar in the winter in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
As for the last part not being true, can you clarify? The majority of the earths population lives between the 20th and 40th latitude, the band around the earth approximately between Madrid and the Sahara desert. Sure you can’t run a poorly insulated home in northern Michigan on solar year around without considerable expense, but that’s nowhere near where the majority of humanity lives.
From the Bay area or so and down across the country is ideal for solar, passing through a lot of red states that ought to know better. Fun fact though: Texas has the most windmills of any state by a huge margin.
The average of installed units is closer to 2.0 COP average, unfortunately. Multi-head units really drive down efficiency. A single-head Gree Sapphire can do 4-5 COP on average and that's the best you can get, so still nowhere near your guess.
Under what circumstances? I've seen higher-end units that do maybe 1:5 in ideal conditions (heating to 68F when the ambient temp is 55F), but never seen units that do 1:10 or 1:15. This was about 2-3 years ago I did this research. Have things improved that drastically in the last few years?
Too many folks here do not understand or care to appreciate the constraints of the real world. Heat pumps are excellent and relatively cheap but have limitations. One of the biggest limitations is that a heat pump's efficiency drops as ambient temperature drops. This is the worst possible situation for heating as the conditions when the risks of losing heat are the highest, are precisely the conditions when these devices are least efficient.
What i remain opposed to is this persistent idea that heat pumps work in all situations, for all people and for all time. They do not, and heat pumps create a unique set of problems that we might not be fully prepared for.
This is not really a qualification to speak on how the grid works, at all.
Actually having panels on your roof doesn't give you unique insight into how solar panels operate - there is extensive data out there, any PV installation can become a data source trivially.
> The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.
One residence powering itself is not representative of how the grid works, and is not a good way to evaluate any power generation technology whether its PV, coal, nuclear, etc.
I don’t know where all that energy was going. I expected some improvement but not anywhere near that much.
But there are a lot of extra things you can do as an intermediate steps to dramatically close the gap. The main ones are:
1. Homes can be renovated to improve insulation 2. Cold weather heat pumps can handle most mild winter conditions efficiently 3. Electricity doesn't all have to be locally generated - it can be transmitted from other parts of the country. 4. You can keep using fossil fuel peaker plants, and still have incredible reduced overall emissions
And Canada is not exactly the warmest country on the planet.
Regarding heating - I live in cold climate. We had average daily temperature of -10c this january, with multiple lows at -25c, and most nights at -15c. The house is 116sqm. Our heatpump COP for that month was above 2, and we used 787kWh total to heat the house, which is not a lot, actually. At 15 cents per kWh it is 118 euros for heating, for the coldest month in a decade! Considering also that we do not pay for electricity since april until october (solar panels).
We also paid less than those houses which use natural gas, wood pellets, etc. We also do not need to do anything to keep house warm. Also, during summer months we could "drive for free" in EV due to free solar electricity.
All that just to counter your take on "major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs".
He even has a map that covers this and multiple paragraphs of discussion about high latitudes and wind in winter.
Of course actual data like this is downvote heresy! Go for it! Also, bite me.
I had 219 days with under 24 kWh use, i.e., drawing an average under 1 kW. I got an EV in mid April that year which I charged with the included level 1 charger until getting a 12 kW EVSE installation in I think May. (2024, the last year with no EV charging, had 240 days under 24 kWh).
Almost every day that was over 30 kWh after that was a day when I charged the car which was typically on a Saturday which is also typically when I do laundry which includes about 5 kWh for the clothes dryer.
I was puzzled by the large number of days near or above 50 kWh in February. The end of 2025 doesn't look like it is setting up 2026 for that high a usage. I just checked the weather records and it doesn't look like that was a particularly cold time.
I just made another graph just showing February 2024, 2025, and 2026, and a third showing January of those 3 years, and both show that in 2026 I'm using quite a lot less power (except for the EV charging) than in the prior years.
I've not changed any habits...but in November 2025 I had my house weatherized. They added a lot more insulation under the house (I already had sufficient attic insulation) and did blower tests and sealed everything that was leaking, and it appears this cut energy use by somewhere in the 10-20% range.
It seems then early 2025 appears so high because the end of 2025 is showing the effects of weatherizing.
Cooling, on the other hand, is brutally expensive without living in basically an air tight Styrofoam box (or underground).
People just really underestimate how much energy it takes to produce heat, and how little energy a solar system produces in the winter. Double whammy!
So for a mild climate your installer seems to have done you a disservice and probably overcharged you. You can heat an average house with solar for under $14K if properly installed.
Except that we have raw data there? The only question is how fast it grows, but since we're transitioning that's mostly a question of how fast you decommission fossil plants.
Germany did jumpstart their market successfully but that was in a wildly different time. Want to talk about what a typical KWp of installed solar cost at the time?
Hindsight....
Like in the camper van scenario, if we include winter heating and transportation? Oh boy.
It’s getting better, but if we’re really honest very far from the truth
For regular homes, it just means less savings.
It’s the big issue in Germany for instance - it’s all fun and games until Winter.
However, when you're off grid, underestimating capacity means your SOL and need to buy a generator and burn fuel on-site.
We need mundane home DC solutions.
The crucial point though is the charging/discharging inverter (converter) that I purpose built (printed circuits boards) and a change to the car firmware. Without it the car will reject the battery, your acceleration would be less and it also would not last the same amount of discharge cycles. My battery electronics works fine for cars, trucks, boats, house and neighborhood batteries (up to 6mW per shipping container).
We build entire smart grids around the batteries, solar panels and tiny houses. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...
It is the same with the article we are commenting on here: if people just listen to the statistics, the simulations and the actual market developments they would see that 100% solar+battery is the cheapest energy.
The simple message is Solar is by far the cheapest energy: below 1 dollar cent per kWh and that will fall a lot more in the next decade until we get to 'a squanderable abundance of free and clean energy' as Bob Metcalf puts it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axfsqdpHVFU Batteries still double the cost of that solar but these prices are falling rapidly too. It is already cheaper to have solar nearby than transmit it over a distance of a few miles.
More in my earlier comments weeks and months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=morphle
Also: when we last spoke you were talking about energy storage solutions. How has that progressed recently?
1 kWh Wind, or Hydro, Thermal and other renewables do not go down as much in cost price because they have mechanical or chemical components that do not last as long as solar cells and need maintenance and repair.
We keep the cost low by group buying in bulk at wholesale prices (a shipping container with 770 panels for 20-30 houses) with our coop instead of premium installer prices by the electrotechnical or building companies. If you let our Fiberhood coöperative in the US install your solar, batteries, tiny house or eCamper you do not pay these high tariffs, we have enough panels pre-tariff. So you still can hit 1 cent per kWh but only if you get the decent installers and sellers.
My message is that to reach 1 cent per kWh we need to solar electrify all our infrastructure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEOPx2X-EtE
Also Trump doubling solar panel prices with tarifs and shutting down subsidies is wrong, it makes it much more expensive. Add an oil third world war however does help, we sold double solar, batteries and evs in the last month.
Also the larger battery means the individual cells can be pulse charged much slower and each cell individually at the rate where it doesn't damage that much. I measure the temperature, voltage and current of each cell so they never overheat. This is how I get many more cycles out of each cell so they last 50 years. It is also safer, with thousands of temperature measurements several times per second not a single sell gets warm, and if they ever do it is because it is damaged and we can immediately disconnect it and tell the driver where to locate it and remove it.
For a truck these thousands of battery cells discharging slowly in parallel becomes the reason all trucking companies will be forced to switch from diesel to electric, it is several times cheaper per mile or km. Lower energy cost, lower maintainace, lower downtime, longer life. The only thing you would want is that the maximum weight limit per truck goes up so you can ship more per trip. Right now you ship little kilo's if you carry a heavy battery. But charging with your own solar at home base is so much cheaper that it is worth to do two trips versus 1 trip with diesel.
The reason electric trucks are not yet everywhere is that the truck makers ask ridiculous amounts for battery cells that are still wired in series and discharged too fast to last long. Simply bad design. We need a disruptive electric truck startup and we need a disruptive battery startup. Investors welcome...
No, my eSprinter camper is a small room with kitchen, bed and shower. The trailer ways 3500 kg, the eSprinter 2670. I could haul at least 889 kilo more. If I had the bigger motor I could haul twice as much.
That said I'm pretty sure that grid-scale solar is the future of most solar energy, not home solar. It's just cheaper to do things in bigger batches.
Edit: though if we ever get to self driving cars there should be a whole lot of parking lots in metro areas that aren’t needed.
The reason for the high burden today is people have developed an inflated sense of how much the kWh they generate is worth. They install massive systems on their roofs to try to "cancel out" their power bill by exporting their entire daily power consumption over the course of a few sunny hours, which (when all their neighbors do the same) ends up being a costly burden for grid operators who then pass the costs on to users without panels. Smaller systems focused on immediate, local consumption rather than export are much better for the grid which is why they have support.
1. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/balcony-solar-tak...
They love to market a "green energy" plan where they pay you 3c for your exported power and charge somebody miles away 25c for it!
The power has to go somewhere, SoCal grid operators have to pay real money to neighboring grids to accept the energy being generated while also paying the homeowner who generated it. No grid connection fee comes close to covering this, it's paid for by increasing rates for everyone else. Net metering was a stupid deal cooked up by politicians who are incapable of systems thinking, or simply decided appealing to suburban voters was more important than grid stability.
It's getting better[1] but still a problem, and the solutions being pursued are: discourage export in favor of onsite storage (done by NEM 3.0) and encourage smaller solar installs (balcony solar).
1. https://www.caiso.com/content/monthly-market-performance/jan...
They're soaking out of both sides of their mouth.
I have leftover panels from an off grid install, and its extremely hard to get an approved permit for a small roof solar array + off the shelf AIO (Ecoflow/Anker)
The thing that reads the most false is the economics. A 480W solar panel is like $90 on sale, they're dirt cheap. A dozen of them is $1,080. But an installed solar+battery system tied to the grid is more like $30,000, and that's not covering the cost of replacing damaged equipment (lightning is a thing). That's just one home, using certified equipment.
For nation-states to do solar and battery, they need land, capital, and skilled labor that most nations don't have. Then there's the fact that not all nations get enough sun, or the fact that you must have a stable backup supply (not just for "cloudy days", but also emergencies and national defense), and multiple sources of equipment so your entire nation's energy isn't dependent on one country (China). Only about 10-20 nations on earth could switch to renewables for the majority of their energy in the next 10 years.
But let's look at a single off-grid DIY example. First you need the expertise to hook it up. If you have the skill, it still isn't cheap if your economy is weak. It requires saving money for a capital purchase, something people all around the world struggle with. And when there are payment programs, they're often exploitative.
It's not like people in Africa aren't aware solar power exists. If it was cheap and easy, everyone would have done it already.
I’ve worked with all of the largest solar, battery and EV companies, as well as America’s largest electric utilities, building complex analytics software to enable the clean energy transition. I’m looking for my next role to continue moving the needle on eliminating fossil fuels. Find me here: https://matthewgerring.com
Additionally, there's a lot of stuff that can be done with cables and batteries that we aren't currently doing to over come daily, seasonal, and weather related variation in power output of wind and solar. Put cables north-south to compensate for seasonal drops in solar output. Put them east-west to have solar power in the evenings/early mornings. Off shore and on shore wind can produce a lot of power and the way high pressure and low pressure systems (aka. weather) work, if the wind is not blowing locally that just means it is blowing elsewhere. Having a lot of solar and wind all over the place and cables to move the power around evens out all the peaks and dips. The rest is just using batteries, pumped hydro, and other storage to add enough buffers.
That gets you quite far. Another point here is that people think in rigid "must cover everything 100% of the time", which is valuable but we actually do have a lot of flexibility. You can choose when to charge your car (at night, or at noon), when to run your dishwasher, etc. And does a data center need to be at 100% capacity 100% of the time no matter the cost? Flexible load is a thing. And we can use automation to control it, flexible pricing to incentivize when there are surpluses or shortages, etc. This btw. also neuters the whole "baseload" argument. Baseload power is non flexible power that becomes a problem when we have too much of it. Flexible power is power you can turn off when there's too much of it. The reason energy prices are high in a lot of places is that we have too much of really expensive base load that drives the pricing even if the wind and sun shines for free and gets curtailed. That lack of flexibility is a problem.
That's how we could get to 90% over the next few decades. The remaining 10% is harder / more expensive. Gas peaker plants make a lot of sense to fill that gap. Replaced by nuclear long term. Nothing against that but it's just stupidly expensive and slow to realize. There's no need to build new gas plants for that; we have plenty already.
It really helps to also have a complementary storage technology with low capacity capex, even if the round trip efficiency is lower. This would complement batteries in the same way ordinary RAM complements cache memory in a computer.
>We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels.
(Heating and transport are harder to solve of course.)
The bigger deceit in the statement was the implication that only batteries were needed to "power the world". This. Is. Wrong.
If you compare the total cost of solar with just the fuel cost of fossil fuels (ignoring its CapEx and non-fuel OpEx) that swings the equation a lot.
It's a few percent dirtier (round trip losses) but in return you can use gas plants that are 50% more efficient to charge them rather than run peaker plants.
And of course that's ignoring wind which is nearly as cheap as solar and anti-correlated with it.
Reality is extremely complicated, so realistically the exact mix of solar + fossil fuels that makes sense is going to depend on a huge number of factors and vary from region to region depending on weather, fuel costs, construction costs, transmission costs, and probably a thousand other things I haven't thought of. The best thing to do is stay out of the way of both industries and let the market sort all of that complexity out.
I would speculate the result of that is going to be a lot more renewables than currently exist, mainly due to the drastic reduction in the cost of solar and batteries that has been occurring over the last few decades, but I don't think it'll be 100% or even 90% renewables either (expect perhaps in the extremely long term). Time will tell.
As my house is on hydro-energy and everything is electric, I'm currently on 100% renewable and majors factories around me are the same.
Yes, hydro isn't available everywhere, just like solar or wind isn't, but wherever it's possible, we should have it.
The point I was making before, btw, was that renewables can get to 100%, but doing it with just batteries as storage is really stupid in many places. Batteries, while necessary and very useful, are not a panacea. In a place like Europe, adding the complementary low capex storage could cut the cost in half (otherwise, excessive overprovisioning of solar, wind, and/or batteries are needed.)
I think a lot of people truly dont get this.
Those days when the wind isnt blowing, the sun isnt shining and the batteries and pumped storage are depleted can be easily handled with, e.g. power2gas.
It's pretty expensive (per kwh almost as much as nuclear power) but with enough spare solar and wind capacity and a carbon tax on natural gas it becomes a no brainer to swap natural gas for that.
Nonetheless this wont stop people saying "but what about that last 5-10%?" as if it's a gotcha for a 100% green grid. It isnt. It never was.
Norway runs almost entirely on hydropower. Sweden has a lot.
Iceland runs on hydropower and geothermal.
In the US capacity is likely to go down (dams are expensive and many time old dams are removed instead of being rebuilt).
Very simplified:
Wind blows mostly in Denmark during the day, so Norway stops hydro during the day and imports electricity from Denmark's windmills.
During night the wind is mostly still in Denmark so windmills don't produce much and Denmark imports from Norway's hydro.
In this way you can stretch the capacity from hydro using windmills even though Norway isn't a good place for windmills.
So it's not going to take off like solar but it's a big chunk of relatively clean electricity production and it's often basically a byproduct of managing water supplies. It also pairs really well with renewables as even without pumps it has a degree of flex and storage.
I mean it is, its just slower.
but if you have batteries, then you can divert the power to the batteries to keep them topped up.
If you're using it to charge batteries it's just five times more expensive than equivalent solar or wind.
The point is, with enough battery, you don't need fast despatch for things like water/gas/nuclear, because the battery does that for you. In the UK the 11gwhr we have (about 1/2-1/3 of one hours consumption) is more than capable to do the balancing.
EV adoption has been successfully held back mostly by PR, Germany shifted from nuclear to coal and gas, the US president is doing everything to dismantle anything that isn't fossil fuel and promotes fossil fuels, the list goes on.
Comparing 2020[^2] to 2025[^1]:
- renewables (solar+wind) went from 181 TWh to 219 TWh
- fossil (coal+gas) stayed constant (177 TWh and 179 TWh)
So I'd say we switched from nuclear (60TWh in 2020) to renewables & imported nuclear - but the long-term trend is towards renewables.
[1]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/... [2]: (pdf) https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/N...
Another way to look at your numbers is that had the nuclear plants not been turned off, fossil (coal+gas) could have been reduced by 60TWh.
But they weren't reduced. They remained the same.
From the point of view of the fossil fuel industry: WIN!
Sure, but you're attributing this, deliberately or not, to the wrong cause. It wasn't that the fossil fuel industry somehow won - it was range of factors possibly including geopolitics, some existing plants aging, an emotional response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the Green lobby.
Basically, they voted to kill nuclear without a solid plan for an alternative, and coal/gas is the default option for filling the gaps left in the absence of timely and sufficiently rapid investment in other technologies.
He'd be a spectacularly successful lobbyist if your suspicion is correct.
Even boring staid organisations are predicting solar will be more than half the planet's electricity supply by 2050 which is I think enough to say it powers the world.
California has registered around 1M Teslas alone. So this is like having a 1Mx80kwh = 80GWh battery at your service. As a reference, the largest solar + storage facility in California is around 3.2 GWh.
But people pay extra to put the batteries over wheels because they need to haul charged batteries around. It's not normally useful to discharge them locally.
For example, you're counting all the energy in the gasoline that gets loaded into a car, not the useful work that the gasoline actually produces. Gasoline gars typically are only able to convert 20-30% of their fuel into propulsion.
Counting the energy in the fuel loaded into engines is like counting the amount of energy in the sunlight hitting a solar panel.
Similar things go for heating by the way. A modern heat pump often has a coefficient of performance of around 3x, meaning that for every joule of electricity you put into the pump, you can heat up a house with 3 joules of heat, so 3x as efficient as heating the house with combustion.
Replacing ALL of the liquid fueled devices in the world impractical, to the point of absurdity, to do. Where would we get electric versions of the Emma Mærsk[1] and her sister ships in a reasonable timeframe? Where would all the infrastructure come from to build out the grid to handle the charging load? Where are the ports with that kind of power capability coming from?
What about the world's aviation? There are no viable ways to do air transport on a large scale using battery power.
The world is optimized for liquid fuels, it would make far more sense to synthesize them from low cost solar power during the day, and accumulate the quantities required, rather than rip and replace every single industrial engine on the planet.
An extensive explanation of this "primary energy fallacy":
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/reframing-energy-fo...
We would need a lot of batteries to be able to charge during the summer and drain during the winter!
Related is the other comments here that mention air-conditioning is largely a non-issue if you spec for year-round solar. If you are generating 3x as much energy in July compared to January, and January can power your house, then the A/C is basically free.
Solar power is in curltailment most days, so to make money solar operators need to add batteries to take free energy and shift it to the ultra expensive parts of the day.
If we want flakey renewables to be the backbone (which we should)...then we needs serious scale on storage side.
Batteries for voltage regulation and quick response is good though
"a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah."
https://www.pcmag.com/news/elon-musk-running-us-on-solar-req...
See you next decade when we're saying the same thing and not doing it?
So the US is probably over-delivering compared with many things Elon has proposed delivering himself.
Hydro One in Ontario was by far the largest occupant on the Sunshine list (>$100K salaries) and have always been. They pay dramatically above market wages, have more staff than they need. It's the 'old boys clubs of old boys clubs'.
If energy prices drop, they will be able to charge more money to justify more 'infra', staff and expanding budgets.
The best thing we could ever do is get rid of our dependency on the energy grid.
If our homes could be powered like our cars ... that would be amazing and open up a ton of competition in a landscape which now has almost no competition.
That said - there are definitely theoretical efficiencies at scale and if we did get rid of the grid, we may never be able to get it back.
It's plausible that 'decentralized energy' may be very advantageous in that it puts a lot of competitive pressure on the centralized elements. Then we get the best of both worlds.
Edit: value chain and institutional power dynamics is the only real way to look at all of these systems. It's incredibly naive to think that some arbitrary technology is going to change any landscape. Case and point is this issue itself - that we 'grow' fuel instead of doing something arguably more efficient is a function of structural power.
Is this grid-scale solar ? It can’t be rooftop - there is nobody in the UK who will install a 5kW rooftop system for £2k. The quotes I’ve had recently have been closer to £10k.
> The cost assumptions assume utility-scale solar panels and batteries in large parks. Smaller-scale rooftop solar and home batteries would cost 2-3 times more.
I've installed domestic solar several times. The main cost isn't the panels or the inverters - it's the scaffolding, labour, and wiring improvements in the home. If you have a tall or complicated house, it'll cost more.
And we can go to 100% of electricity from nuclear, we don't have to have this dumb argument about 'the last 5-10%'. Because its reliable.
And if you actually do the math nuclear would have been cheaper then all this nonsense we have been doing for 30 years with wind, solar and batteries. The cost of the gird updates is like building a whole new infrastructure. With nuclear, the centralized more local networks are perfectly reasonable.
I did some scenarios starting in Year 2000 or Germany to all nuclear, vs wind (off-shore, on-shore), and solar (partly local partly brought in) and batteries. The numbers aren't even close, nuclear would have been the much better deal. Even if you are very conservative and don't account for major learning effect that countries like France had when building nuclear.
That said, even with nuclear, having a few Lithium batteries that can go all out for 1-2h is actually a good deal. Its really only about peak shaving the absolute daily peaks. What you don't want is having to build batteries that can handle days or weeks.
That's a big if, though. Solar and batteries require globalisation, based on fossil fuels.
I feel like nuclear reactors are a better choice.
> in a conflict, not sure having many around is generally a good idea
On the other hand, blowing nuclear reactors could be considered a big escalation. We see with Iran and Ukraine that it's not exactly the first thing one wants to target.
Wind, Tidal or geothermal are also around, for example.
It's very clear now that infrastructure of all kinds are increasingly fair game. Nuclear reactors, data centers, water processing plants, hospitals... Both sad and ridiculous, but that's the level of insanity reached.
The next problem comes from incentives. Why should anyone with solar or storage buy this expensive grid based nuclear electricity?
Why should their neighbors not buy surplus renewables and instead pay out of their nose for expensive nuclear powered electricity?
EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for the existing french nuclear fleet. Let alone the horrifyingly expensive new builds.
And that is France which has been actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and it still leaks in on pure economics.
The forced EDF to sell nuclear at very cheap prices to fossil fuel companies and then buy it back at much higher price.
The French forced EDF to give subsides to solar even when that actually hurts their economics.
The French randomly in the 2010s decided to replace nuclear in a short time-frame (completely 100% unrealistic) but it sounds good to politicians. And they decided to delay all maintenance and didn't do any of the upgrades many other nations did.
Once of the secrets of French nuclear is, that their grandfather were so good in providing them these nuclear plants, the french absolutely suck at running them. Other countries like the US and ironically Germany managed to run their reactors at higher factors.
The problem is the solar is cheap when its being produced and makes the economics of base lose worse, without actually solving base load. Solar has been cross subsidized this way for a long time. And has been more explicitly subsidized. But its a private good, it helps only private people, it is negative on a system level.
Once you think on a systemic level, how to provide reliable energy for a whole country, nuclear is not more expensive and France saved a huge amount of money buy doing what they did.
> Why should anyone with solar or storage buy this expensive grid based nuclear electricity?
If somebody privately wants to build solar/storage that's fine, but they should get no support. Also prices should be adjust to actually reflect peak demand. Historically the way the system operated is with much simpler pricing models because it was understood that everybody shares in this infrastructure. In such a situation, the majority of people wouldn't build solar and batteries.
But really, the question we should ask, what the best thing to run a modern economy on and the German solution of 'lets build a massive electricity pipeline to solar farms in Greece' isn't a great model.
All this new energy transfer infrastructure is incredibly expensive. It cost at least as much as the generation itself, and sometimes more.
Then when asked what method to price in the Swedish nuclear fleet having ~50% of capacity offline multiple times last year and France famously having 50% of the capacity offline during the energy crisis I always get crickets for answers.
It’s apparently fine when nuclear plants doesn’t deliver, but not renewables.
The difference with renewables is that it’s even easier to manage. Their intermittency is entirely expected and the law of large numbers ensure we never have half the capacity offline due to technical issues at the same time.
> Once you think on a systemic level, how to provide reliable energy for a whole country, nuclear is not more expensive and France saved a huge amount of money buy doing what they did.
Given that new built nuclear power costs 18-24 cents per kWh and won’t come online until the 2040s what you’re trying to tell me is that multiplying the current electricity cost 3-4x and creating a self made energy crisis isn’t so bad.
The French made a good choice half a century ago. The equivalent choice in 2026 are renewables and storage.
Just look at the proposed EPR2 fleet. A 11 cent per kWh CFD and interest free loans. Summing up to over 20 cents per kWh for the electricity. With the first reactor coming online at the earliest in 2038.
It’s just complete insanity at this point.
> All this new energy transfer infrastructure is incredibly expensive. It cost at least as much as the generation itself, and sometimes more.
The 10 GW HVDC links being built costs €20B. That’s equivalent to the subsidies needed for one new large scale reactor. Then you have the market price of electricity on top of that.
Are you starting to realize the conundrum?
The reality is that in most western countries even 50+ year old nuclear plants often have an 80% uptime and usually are down at times when the capacity is not needed. If a government properly cares for their reactors, up-times of 90-95% are very possible.
Switzerland has a capacity factor of 90% with some of the oldest reactors in the world.
> The difference with renewables is that it’s even easier to manage. Their intermittency is entirely expected and the law of large numbers ensure we never have half the capacity offline due to technical issues at the same time.
The fact is that is overall much less available and much less flexible on when you do the generation and when you want more or less energy.
> Given that new built nuclear power costs 18-24 cents per kWh and won’t come online until the 2040s what you’re trying to tell me is that multiplying the current electricity cost 3-4x and creating a self made energy crisis isn’t so bad.
Nuclear is to slow is something renewable fans have been arguing since the 1970s.
The fact about cost is that on a system level its cheaper and France has been able to have cheaper energy then Germany for the last 50+ years.
Once you don't just look at generation but total cost, including all the cost of building out the grid, the cost is much higher. And if you ever want to be 100% renewable you better have weeks of battery at least, and that is a thing people barley calculate. Gas peakers plants will remain the solution for a very long time and when gas prices go up, it will cause an energy crisis.
In addition you will need to replace the wind energy far sooner.
In addition, with nuclear, a huge part of the cost is going to salaries of local highly educated people and technicians. You capture much more of the value in your own economy for the next 60+ years.
> Given that new built nuclear power costs 18-24 cents per kWh and won’t come online until the 2040s what you’re trying to tell me is that multiplying the current electricity cost 3-4x and creating a self made energy crisis isn’t so bad.
> Just look at the proposed EPR2 fleet. A 11 cent per kWh CFD and interest free loans. Summing up to over 20 cents per kWh for the electricity. With the first reactor coming online at the earliest in 2038.
The West has so totally and completely fucked the industry and did every possible thing wrong for the last 30 years. And now we are paying for it. This is what 30+ years of renewable orthodox has brought us, high energy prices and a complete collapse of the nuclear industry. France has dropped all its advanced reactor as well now we are building EPRs again. Its beyond sad.
What we could build are APR1400 units like in the UAE. If you do a proper build, yes it takes 10 year for the first to finish but after you start a new years 3 years later, and then another every year and then 2 each after that and later 3 each year. In 20 you can build pretty much as much capacity as you need and your learning curve is going to be amazing, likely you will finish a new build in less then 5 years at much lower cost. The problem is if you only look at 'when will the first reactor finish' instead of 'how fast can we build 20 reactors'.
Capital-recovery component for APR1400 alone works out to about 3.2–4.3 US¢/kWh at 5–7% financing, but this is for only 4 reactors built in with no background. But we should finance this with government bonds directly, so really capital alone is only 2 USc/kWh and less as build cost go down the learning curve. The fuel cost is also only 3-4 USc/kWh (hopefully we again have reliable European fuel and reduce the price further, another thing destroyed by the last 30 years). And operation and maintenance around 10USc/kWh isn't crazy for a proper fleet with centralized staff training and local industry.
As with everything in nuclear, one nation building 1 plant is going to be expensive and makes the numbers look worse then they are. And remember this was build in a country with no experience and no train workforce and only 4 reactors built, not the 10s of reactors people should build. A country like Poland could easily do a 20 year flash build program, and that would be much faster for them then Poland.
> The 10 GW HVDC links being built costs €20B. That’s equivalent to the subsidies needed for one new large scale reactor. Then you have the market price of electricity on top of that.
> Are you starting to realize the conundrum?
Try looking up total grid upgrade cost if you want to achieve 100% renewables. We are literally talking the same amount of money as all the generation combined. I heard interviews with people responsible for even only part of Germany where they admitted they will have to go to private markets to fund 100+ billion $ in investments. And these investors will want their money back. Total grid cost will be higher then to total cost of renewable installs. And of course wind turbines need to be rebuilt.
But I guess Germany is making it easier on itself by losing so much industry that they have fewer problems in the future for renewables to solve. Germany by the way since 2018 is spending 50 billion $ per year on direct energy subsidies. Yes that is partly heating but France because of its cheap electricity has far more heating converted to electric. So it is related to electricity policy.
What I want is rock solid energy that is reliable and served from a simple centralized grid, nuclear + 1-2h battery peak shaving with lithium or sodium batteries. Anything longer then that isn't great. Not some scheme where we somehow hope that the combination of Greek solar and Danish wind produce enough, and then trying produce hydrogen in Canada and ship it to Germany, or whatever other nonsense people want to come up with.
The current proto-market system has all the wrong intensives built in and we were much better of in a system where there was simply one centralized utility that made rational engineering choices about how to get cheap energy to everybody.
Not to mention that having a well functioning nuclear industry has lots of other advantages that 'buy solar panels from China' doesn't bring.
If it costs 10X dollars upfront to build a nuclear central that can produce 10X energy, then if you run it at 100%, it will cost 1 dollar per 1 unit of energy. If you follow the demand, you will not produce 10X, but let's say to illustrate maybe 5X, and it will cost 2 dollars per 1 unit of energy.
You are right about storage as a way to help with demand following, but if you build enough storage capacity, then you basically have solved "for free" a big part of the problem linked to the intermittence of renewables. In this case, you have the choice between building an expensive nuclear central and a distributed cheaper renewable generation.
I'm not saying it demonstrate renewables are better, but that it is true that nuclear is not the obvious winner it looks like before we look into the practical details.
So basically, you can put some battery next to every nuclear plant and otherwise use the same grid.
For renewable you need a much more complex grid with much more battery.
Not sure why you are saying that renewable you need "much more battery": the overlap of generation means that you already have a "baseline" of generation even with renewables (sure, I know about dunkelflaute, but they are as frequent as unexpected shutdown of nuclear site), and therefore in both case, the game is mainly to "move the peaks around" which requires about the same capacity.
Not sure why you are saying the renewable led to a much more complex grid either. Sure, with a naive simplified grid, nuclear works well. But in practice, the modern grid is complex, and adding more nuclear does not really reduce the complexity.
Also, nuclear or not, having EV or heat-pump will be needed for decarbonisation, and therefore the demand becomes even more complex. With EV and heat-pump, local solar+battery is also a smarter choice. So it means that some storage will need to be built on the consumer site directly, even with nuclear.
I'm not saying that in some situation at the end of the computation, nuclear is not the best option, but it is not at all as simple as having a clear winner. Also, the reality is that you need to work with the uncertainties, so it is not like one solution has a score of 75 and the other has a score of 70, so the first is the obvious choice, it is more like one solution has a score of 75 +- 15 and the other 70 +- 5 (or even asymmetric errors), so you cannot directly conclude the first solution is the best. I think the conversation would be way more healthy if we could just avoid over-simplify into a pro-nuclear vs. pro-renewable partisan battle.
(also not sure about "you can put some battery next to every nuclear plant and otherwise use the same grid", why is this not true for renewable too? Just compute the average production of the site, and put storage that will charge when the site produces more than the average and discharge when the site produces less, and you get the same situation as the nuclear site (they may still have period of no generation, the same way nuclear sites have unexpected shutdown). Especially that with a renewable site, the cost is lower so the site owner can invest more in storage and manage it themselves: storage is part of the black box, the grid does not need to know, stay the same and no complexity is added)
Not sure about your 12-18 hours, it looks like you want to use the energy during the night, while it is the trough and does not require energy.
Also, the claim that nuclear is slow to change is a limitation of current nuclear plants, more modern plants could be far better. Some designs are very much load following.
Found this interesting: https://phys.org/news/2026-02-microbial-eco-friendly-butanol.
There is no reason for consuming valuable nuclear fuel, for which better uses exist, instead of using free solar light.
The efficiency of converting solar energy into hydrogen is already acceptable. The same is true for the efficiency of converting hydrogen and concentrated carbon dioxide into synthetic hydrocarbons, which are the best means for long term energy storage, and also for applications like aircraft and spacecraft.
The least efficient step remains concentrating the diluted carbon dioxide from air.
While the efficiency of converting solar energy and water into hydrogen by artificial means is already better than that of living beings, the living beings are still much more efficient in converting H2 and CO2 from air into organic substances.
Besides improving the efficiency of the existing techniques, an alternative method of CO2 capture would be the genetic engineering of a bacterium that would produce some usable oil from H2 and air, with an improved productivity over the existing bacteria, which use most of the captured energy to make substances useful for them, not for us, so unmodified bacteria would not have a high enough useful output.
Using heat is the most efficient and if you use nuclear heat directly, and you don't have to go to the step of converting to electricity, you get huge efficiency.
> There is no reason for consuming valuable nuclear fuel
Nuclear fuel is not valuable once you have a closed cycle. Fuel cost are already only a few % of total nuclear cost and in a closed cycle would be almost nothing. As soon as you breed fuel from fertile material the cost is basically 0.
> The efficiency of converting solar energy into hydrogen is already acceptable.
It requires a very large plant to do in many small batches and cost 20x what hydrogen costs from natural gas. Its not efficient and will not be for the next 20+ years at least.
Imagine a world where people didn't care about labeling new things "woke", and instead could all sit down and say, "we're going to make major investments in next generation infrastructure to ensure our capacity and independence."
Which would be ok if we more effectively were able to include externalities into company's overhead, instead of constantly subsidizing them.
Imagine a world where people don't care about labeling new things as "regressive" or "anti-environmental"
Which is expected when both Europe and the US outsourced most manufacturing to China. It's actually surprising China is so low given they're literally the factory of the world
Don't look at where the ball is, look at where the ball is going.
And the USA burns more natural gas than China, and the USA burns more oil than China.
All this simply reflects both using the fossil fuels they have the most abundant, reliable, and cheap supply of when they need to burn fossil fuels.
This difference leads indirectly to things like the current "not war" in Iran. (Iran's geography already gives it strong bargaining power via pressure on energy markets. It would have an even stronger hand if the US was not capable of energy independence).
The long term impacts on climate changes are even more negative. It's hard to supplant a cheap, ubiquitous energy source with strong negative externalities when those externalities are subtle, gradual, and strongly denied via propaganda by entrenched interests.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205 [2] https://www.semafor.com/article/03/03/2026/us-renewables-hit... [3] https://www.integrityenergy.com/blog/the-top-10-states-pavin...
- Pointing out the corn ethanol scam. Ok, that's fair. We would be better of spending money on renewables. No argument there;
- Multiple people arguing that solar hasn't goten more mature, more effective and that battery technology really hasn't gotten better. No sources mind you, just opinion;
- Another busy thread based on an uncited claim that this doesn't account for US heating costs. And tthere are a lot of people who seem to think not having efficient insulation in houses is an expression of freedom in some way;
- There's the naive idea that the profit motive will somehow solve all this. Bless your heart;
- Probably the least surprising thing is that the pro-nuclear people piped up and tried to make this about nuclear and failed. Sorry but nuclear is one of the most expensive forms of electricity and there's no real way to get around that.
I normally don't expect such anti-solar sentiment here.
Here's the real problem with renewables politically: if you produce 1GW of solar and it produces 2TWh of electricity in year 1, it'll probably 2TWh in years 2-30 with very little maintenance. That's bad in our system because some private company doesn't get to keep profiting.
Let's compare that to an oil well. If you drill wells and make them produce 100kbpd (barrels pe day) of crude and some quantity of natural gas in year 1 then in year 2 it produces 80-85kbpd. In year 3 it's ~70kbpd. In year 4 it's 55kbpd. By year 5 it's less than half what it was originally. This is for the Permian basin and it's called "decline rate".
So to maintain the amount of oil and gas you need, you need to be constantly drilling new wells and bringing them online to replace the lost capacity. That's good for business because all that exploration and digging is more profit opportunity.
Evenw ith coal, you need people and machiens to keep digging up the coal.
Our entire electricity sector is sold a lie that the private sector is somehow better at providing electricity and then everything is built around a massive wealth transfer from consumers and the government to the already wealthy.
That's really why renewables aren't popular in the modern political climate.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180201203013/https://www.18650...
Looks like sodium-ion (Na-ion) 18650 batteries at 1.5 Ah have about 1/2 the capacity of LiFePO4 18650s at 3.5 Ah, and are about twice the price, so lets call them 4x the price per energy stored:
https://www.radicalrc.com/item/Sodium-Na-Ion-Battery-18650-3...
https://ogsolarstore.com/products/sodium-ion-cells-3-1v-batt...
https://coulombsolutions.com/product/12v-sodium-ion-battery/
Battery prices halve about every 4 years:
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/03/06/battery-prices-collap...
So we can project that Na-ion batteries will have the same price per kWh as today's LiFePO4 in perhaps 8 years, or around 2034, if not sooner. That will negate the lithium supply chain bottleneck so that we're limited to ordinary shortages (like copper).
500 W bifacial solar panels are available for $100 each in bulk, so there's no need to analyze them since they're no longer the bottleneck. A typical home uses 24 kWh/day, so 15-20 panels at a typical 4.5 kW/m2 solar insolation provide enough power to charge batteries and still have some energy left over, at a cost of $1500-2000. Installation labor, electricians/licensing, inverters and batteries now dominate cost.
The sodium ion battery market is about $1 billion annually, vs $100 billion for lithium ion. It took lithium about 15-20 years to grow that much. So whoever gets in now could see a 1-2 orders of magnitude return over perhaps 8-15 years. I almost can't think of a better investment outside of AI.
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I've been watching this stuff since the 1980s and I can tell you that every renewable energy breakthrough coincides with a geopolitical instability. For the $8 trillion the US spent on Middle East wars since 9/11, we could have had a moonshot for solar+batteries and be at 90+% coverage today. Not counting the other $12 trillion the US spent on the Cold War. Fully $20 trillion of our ~$40 trillion US national debt went to funding endless war, with the other $20 trillion lost on trickle-down tax cuts for the ultra wealthy.
We can't do anything about that stuff in the short term. But we can move towards off-grid living and a distributed means of production model where AI, 3D printing, permaculture, and other alternative tech negates the need for investment capital.
In the K-shaped economy, the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" phrase might more accurately be stated "if you can't join 'em, beat 'em".
We could just build out huge solar farms in AZ and transmit it accordingly. We did it for railroads, why not here?
Cite, please?
China's been building a bunch of these at those kinds of distance . The technology definitely works.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...
It also assumes we figure out how to economically recycle materials from batteries (and total recovery may never be possible). Grid scale lithium batteries have an effective lifecycle of 15 years. In this potential future, global lithium reserves would actually start getting choked up before the 2050 goal.
Nuclear is inevitable and we all need to stop pretending otherwise.
Obviously other energy sources are going to exist and non solar power will be produced, but nuclear is getting fucked in a solar + battery heavy future. Nuclear already needs massive subsidies and those subsidies will need to get increasingly large to keep existing nuclear around let alone convince companies to build more.
Reactors that only took 5 years to build before ALARA are still safely running 80 years later. The 15-20 year build and certification time for new reactors is purely made up. The countries that are building our battery and solar pipeline (China, South Korea, Japan) are all building nuclear domestically at 1/3 of the cost of us.
More importantly, for cobalt and lithium - we still exclusively rely on natural raw resources that are still very cheap. Meanwhile we have established reserves of fissile material for thousands of years.
Maybe it won't be in the near future, or even in our lifetime, but there is no way the human race does not turn to nuclear eventually.
We already use nuclear, if you mean fission as a primary energy source…
Batteries don’t consume lithium, battery recycling doesn’t consume lithium, we a literally use the same lithium for hundreds of billions of years. So the only way humans are going to be forced to use nuclear is when the stars die.
I don’t think humans will last that long, but if they do I’m unsure what technology they’ll be using. Theoretically dumping matter into black holes beats nuclear, but who knows.
That's a terribly pessimistic assumption when production has been scaling exponentially, and cost per kWh dropping exponentially.
I think the long-term solutions here are not grid-scale lithium batteries, but pumped hydro, flow batteries, or compressed air. Lithium batteries have just gotten a bit ahead on the technological growth curve because of the recent boom in production from phones and EVs, but liquid flow batteries can be made using common elements, and are likely to be cost-effective once the tech gets worked out better.
So: I don't think we can say "lithium energy storage is unfeasible large-scale and long-term" and thus conclude that nuclear is inevitable, unless we also look at all the other storage alternatives.