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Comment by thelastgallon | Hacker News Reader

I support solar. Democratize energy, everyone should have the right to produce and store energy.

1) Plug-in solar and batteries are plug-n-play. This is the first step to teach everyone energy literacy and numeracy.

2) Vertical panels immediately add 3 - 4 hours. Vertical panels have zero real estate cost and no need to build costly and slow transmission infrastructure. Every building in a city can produce energy.

3) EVs to store excess energy during the day and supply power back to the grid later.

1.8 billion vehicles connect 4 billion buildings. Buildings can produce clean energy and EVs can store energy. The lowest hanging fruit is to make sure all new buildings are built to produce, and all new vehicles are EVs. New buildings can be built with vertical panels and rooftop. The easiest thing to do is change building code, thats it. Then, we can deal with the built environment.

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Expecting everyone to have a car cannot remotely be considered a serious solution

Centralized production and storage will always be more efficient

What source of energy will provide energy at night or bad weather?

I would like to note that batteries at end of life are chemical waste and have to be disposed properly.

"End of life electric vehicle batteries in China to 2060 and related resource management implications"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-026-03555-3

"The EOL batteries contain a wide range of toxic and hazardous materials that can leach into the soil and water, threatening human health and the environment. For example, lithium hexafluorophosphate (LiPF₆), a component in power batteries, hydrolyzes on contact with water to produce highly toxic hydrofluoric acid (HF). Additionally, cobalt, nickel, and organic solvents in the batteries can contaminate water and soil, leading to long-term ecological damage"

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30072026/china-ev-battery...

There are startups like Redwood Materials. I'm sure China will figure it out. They are willing to put in the right policies, incentives and research dollars.

Redwood recycles end-of-life batteries to recover lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper — creating one of the largest domestic sources of these critical materials: https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/

The question of how to supply daily and seasonal storage requirements demanded by intermittent sources remains unanswered, even if we assume battery recycling is performed. The US alone uses 12,000 Gwh of electricity daily and about 30,000 GWh of energy daily (transportation, burning gas for smelters, heating, etc).

Even just a day's worth of energy is decades worth of global lithium ion battery output. For just one country. People rarely appreciate the scale demanded to make grid storage feasible.

Solar plus batteries is the cheapest way to build a power plant in 2026. Nowhere gets so little sun that this can't be made to work.

Again, this glosses over the scale of grid storage. If the US decides to provision a day's worth of electricity storage then, that amounts to 12 years worth of global battery production.

>I would like to note that batteries at end of life are chemical waste and have to be disposed properly.

As far as countries like the US is concerned we need to mirror our policies with lead acid batteries. Recycling chains need to be setup and monetary penalties for not recycling a battery when buying a new battery. Ideally I think this should be for lithium batteries from BEV & Home Storage, all the way down to disposable vapes.

"As the United States tightened regulations on lead processing to protect Americans over the past three decades, finding domestic lead became a challenge. So the auto industry looked overseas to supplement its supply. In doing so, car and battery manufacturers pushed the health consequences of lead recycling onto countries where enforcement is lax, testing is rare and workers are desperate for jobs."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/18/world/africa/...

This already happens. There are many companies recycling batteries. The batteries of tomorrow are the batteries of today. They are permanent infrastructure.

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