Fun fact, 12 million hectares of land of used to produce corn used for ethanol which is used to produce gas. I'll let you draw the conclusion.
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/04/trading-some-corn-e...
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.
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)
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?
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)
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.