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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

The price of solar power is governed by the events happening in China. It just happens that the situation in China is pretty good because their military are the most competent in practice out of all the major players. At least so far.

> In addition to being cheaper...

It might even be cheaper, we're looking for the tipping point. But if it is actually cheaper to get power from solar energy, people will just switch to it at high speed. The reason the world runs on something like 80% fossil fuel is because solar has, so far, manifestly not been a cheaper source of energy than fossil fuels.

If you ignore the fact that people would have to go without energy then sure, it'd be great. But the practical reality is the downsides of oil are much smaller than the downsides of not having cheap, accessible energy. Which is why the world persists in using coal and oil.

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> The price of solar power is governed by the events happening in China.

Events in China do not retroactively change your solar panels or wind farm. You might choose to buy from a different supplier but there’s no equivalent of all of the people who are now struggling with food and housing insecurity because of two other countries fighting thousands of miles away.

> But if it is actually cheaper to get power from solar energy, people will just switch to it at high speed.

This is in process now, but there are efforts by the fossil fuel industry to prevent that. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the United States where laws are being broken at the federal level to prevent cheaper renewable projects from going online, but it’s common to other corrupt petro-states as well.

> Events in China do not retroactively change your solar panels or wind farm.

It can, capital depreciated continuously and there'd be an annual budget for replacing panels. If the new panels are much more expensive, we'd expect the cost to start rising.

Obviously everyone would rather be using solar rather than oil if there is going to be a war because the feedback loop is slower, but it is still affected by foreign events.

> This is in process now, but there are efforts by the fossil fuel industry to prevent that.

Maybe, but the environmentalists have been flailing and failing to stop the fossil fuel industry for decades, because people want cheap energy. If renewables actually work the fossil fuel industry will have about as much success stopping them, ie, none whatever. There wasn't ever strong enough political support for renewables to escape economics, but there is even less for fossil fuels. Nobody is in favour of them on an ideological basis.

Renewbles have been more than half of all added generation over the last decade, slowly rising to near 100% of the increase from 2024 to 2025.

This tracks with it being cheaper which it basically has been for that decade.

The market has spoken but some people who claim to like markets aren't listening.

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