I don’t know how you can be against solar unless you’ve been given some uninformed talking points.
Are they against solar subsidies or other policy provisions? It’s hard to understand someone who is against passive energy collection.
Are they against solar subsidies or other policy provisions? It’s hard to understand someone who is against passive energy collection.
They're mainlining paid propaganda from the fossil fuel industry. Same dynamic that made people defend cigarettes into the late 90s.
> The net result: Pornainen fulfilled all of its municipal climate targets with a single installation. Oil use dropped 100 percent, emissions fell 70 percent, and woodchip combustion was cut by 60 percent. According to the Mayor of the Municipality of Pornainen, Antti Kuusela, the municipality now heats all its public buildings, including a new sports arena opening in September 2026, entirely through this district heating network.
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/sand-battery-polar...
And it's quite compact.
> And only covers heat.
Is that not useful?
And the Finns put a priority on staying warm. For normal electrical generation, they largely use wind with a growing solar fraction.
>During the coldest, most expensive stretch, the wood chip boiler became the primary unit, and the sand battery supplemented it.
Remarkably: heat is pointed to as "wasted energy" when doing EROEI analysis and discounted, this is done to strengthen the case for Solar vs Gas.
Finland's energy mix is ~6% solar [1]... maybe it's not a larger portion of the grid supply because Finns realize it doesn't work in the winter?
In any case, Finland does not really use fossil fuels for electricity generation anymore. There is some cogeneration, where heat is the primary output, and reserve power plants that are only used in exceptional situations. Electricity is largely a solved problem, but it's proving harder to get rid of fossil fuels in heating and transportation.
For instance, most places will have peak energy usage in the evening, when everyone gets home from work, starts the laundry, turns up the thermostat and makes dinner and such, kind of all at the same time
If you can store the solar energy at noon and use it at 6pm when everyone has come home from work and started making dinner, then you can prevent a demand peak from ramping up fossil fuel plant
So you aren't necessarily just aiming to store the overproduction, you're using the stored solar when it's more useful
Until battery tech gets (and maybe even after) it's a good idea to build some nuclear too.
Because it’s too expensive so needs peaker plants. Or batteries.
Why not just gas?
Because it’s too expensive.
Nuclear is fine, but very expensive and very slow to deploy.
One understandable (not saying it's good, just understandable) reason is if your business is selling electricity from a source more expensive than solar. Which is just about every source.
I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc.
This generally isn't how markets or economics works. If power generation isn't profitable, many companies will just stop doing it. Prices will rise, making it attractive to more companies to do it.
Power generation will still be profitable in my imagined scenario, just not from selling the raw electricity as a product.
Luckily there are several industries that make more money the cheaper electricity is, so there is some market pull in that direction already. Data centers tend to cluster around places with cheap power and/or cold climates, for example.
Consider roads. Having free access to road networks generates enormous value for society, much more than if we had tried to extract tolls on every road.
I think the same should apply for electricity. Free or nearly free access to electricity is likely to create value that far outweighs the value generated by selling electricity.
The existing power-selling industry will of course fight this every chance they get.
Some people just want the world to burn…
I always try to point out that, after all of the "environmental damage" done to create the solar panels, the panels will exist for 30 years before they can be recycled into new panels. Whereas, after all of the environmental damage done to produce gas and coal, it will lead to a one time use only energy output that has to be repeated until the end of time.
It makes zero sense environmentally or cost-wise to prefer fossil fuels.
I've coined the phrase True Bird Lover. Someone who's never seen a picture of a bird covered in an oil slick from the Exxon Valdez and wants to tell everyone how bad windmills are.
a lot of opinions were made about solar when solar heating was the primary approach, vs today's chinese PVs
Nowadays, panels are sitting at roughly 20% and heat pumps have a coefficient of performance around 4x. If you need a battery round trip, you are right about the 70% point and you now have electricity which is more generally useful than low grade heat.
Those 40 year old decisions, as you say, have had several decades of ossification, though, so it is hard to uproot them.
Grid inertia is literally maintained by hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal spinning at 50 or 60 hz.
So as the grid moves towards solar and wind, it loses inertia. Solar has no inertia and wind is lightweight compared to baseload plants.
This makes the grid more sensitive to another that can cause the frequency to fall or rise, which will trigger automatic protections.
It takes longer to become an issue in large interconnected grids, but on islands it's like the leading cause of blackouts.
One badly timed cloud means problem, unless you can instantly replace the energy lost through other means.
With thermal power plants the inertia of the generator spinning gave utilities enough time to start up other generators. With solar and wind that's gone, hence the rise of grid batteries.
So then solar/wind costs should include ALL related costs, including grid batteries and such, and often it doesn't. And thus you get people who are against it for honestly a very good reason.
That said I love solar and run fully off grid, but I ain't deluded to think my island can go 100% green. Diesel will stay for now.
I do wonder if using solar to run huge heavy flywheels connected to generators can help with the interia issue.
Most projects today are solar+battery or just battery alone, so inertia is no longer a blocker, it's just part of designing the project right.
Here is a "Practical Engineering" video on the topic, mentioning that your concern is real: https://youtu.be/7G4ipM2qjfw?si=qfVymRpKFpuexQF_
And here is a more recent video about how Australia runs on a ton of solar with no issues thanks to grid-forming inverters: https://youtu.be/qavFbOpt4jA?si=dlkEEN4sZLCv2os5
The inverters can instead be programmed to form the grid frequency - Australia installed its big battery literally as a much faster way to stabilize grid instability events than spinning up gas peaker plants.
Grids with large amounts of renewables like California are moving toward VPPs (Virtual Power Plants) which are distributed collections of renewables and batteries which are programmed to work in unison to help form the grid, as an easier way to regulate the grid frequency than coordinating each tiny plant separately.
I live next to 200+ acres of solar farms. A part of me cries a little when I see so much beautiful land and trees cut down and these lifeless panels taking up so much space. We have so many buildings, and structures already (think parking decks, tops of apartments, homes, offices, even parking lots) that we could put these, but instead we cut down acres of trees or use up perfectly usable farmland.
You can absolutely do agriculture near oil and gas wells. I grew up next to land routinely leased to ranchers. That land was spotted with lots of active oil and gas wells. The cows would eat our flowers whenever they got out due to the oil company leaving gates improperly secured. Today I drive past fields of sorghum, corn, and wheat with little spots where active wells operate. Once drilled they usually don't take that much space to operate.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
Credit to our current system, if there was a need to cut back, we have a lot of easy cuts to gain some wiggle room.
It's still farmland! They're just farming energy now.
Where are you seeing healthy forests or other "beautiful land" being destroyed for solar farms? There's plenty of low-yield farmland and other similar land that's already been denatured by industry out there, lots of which already has major transmission infrastructure nearby, beautiful land tends to be expensive, and clearing trees costs money. It just doesn't make sense to do something like that outside of isolated areas where there's no other choice.
Here in the midwestern US every single solar or wind farm I've seen has either been on active farmland, former farmland, or a corporate/university campus.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-what-englands-new-land-use-fr...
Also see the amount of land used for beef and dairy. Before industrial farming, Britain was a rainforest.