Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

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> I do not see how the second sentence follows from the first.

Point 1 on the list is "Make Solar Energy Economical".

Solar is economical today - mostly due to China investing (and heavily subsidising) in solar for the past couple of decades; but compare to the US where certain particular big-businesses (oil companies, mostly) were instead cynically funding disinformation efforts and getting into bed with the Republican party (which dovetailed with the GOP's allying with other science-denying movements of the Bush Jr era like creationism and public-health matters with abstinence-only sex-ed and defunding gun safety research efforts) - means we're decades behind where we could have been...

Consider an alternative past, where the GOP had the backbone to resist the oil industry's corruptive influence and instead made a big bet on American Solar; it's entirely possible that instead of MAGA today we'd instead have a right-wing coalition strongly supporting solar and wind energy because they align nicely with American rugged individualism - whereas the current situation on the right is an unprincipled farce with inconsistencies in policy positions at every turn.

This is not a particularly new struggle: Jimmy Carter installed American-made solar water panels on the White House in 1979, then Reagan tore them out.

Solar is not (yet) economical for reliable, year-round electricity because of storage costs. China coal use is growing again this year.

Solar is profitable to install at both industrial and home scale in most areas. You're moving the goalposts.

It would be even better if it had ROI in 2 years instead of 10 for northern installs.

It's a lot more complicated than that -- Solar is great for discretionary, opportunistic, and time-shiftable additive demand, but not for replacing all-day baseline load. Using solar to dip into baseline demand sometimes is catastrophic, because the "profit" is exploiting its failure to provide consistent, reliable power but charging "default" prices that have an implicy assumption that power is consistent and reliable.

Nobody suggests moving to 100% solar. Some off-grid homes do it, but generally there are multiple complementary power sources available. There is no assumption that any single power source always provides consistent output and it wouldn't make sense, because production needs to match consumption, which is variable.

There is also no default price on energy markets, it fluctuates with supply and demand. Dynamic pricing by itself is enough of a reason for industrial users to build up their own power storage, which allows them to time-shift consumption from the grid.

Time-shifting is definitely going to increase, but it's not a bad thing. Look at how battery storage has made electricity cheaper and more reliable in California.

Where do you find the information for 2026?

Improving panels or batteries (e.g. through automated material discovery) would make solar energy economical in a lot more regions.

We do have that, now that Tesla has been abandoned by the Left and pretty much all of the big Oil and Gas companies have heavily invested in solar and wind. Ironically, it's the unions and support of keeping old jobs alive that is hindering the solar in the USA- which in my day used to be leftist type ideals.

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