Yeah, the technology connections video on this was fantastic. If one was to cover that land in solar, you’d produce far more than the current energy demands of the US.
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.
The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time. It’s the same reason EV’s make up a far larger share of new car sales than a percentage of overall cars, EV’s sucked 20+ years ago yet there are a lot of 20+ year old cars on the road.
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.
> The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time
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.
That's why it will require a functional government who can use taxes responsibly to make the technology affordable to everyone. The US had a pretty good start until one man decided to stop and try to reverse any progress made.
We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power. Perhaps we will eventually, but until that actually happens the base load requirement represents a hard limit on the amount of solar generation capacity that the grid can handle.
> We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power
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.
We started scaling batteries after solar (because the technology reached the point where they were profitable after solar)... but they're being installed at scale now, and at a rapdily increasing rate.
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.
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.
Obviously, money is a factor. But you cannot discount political resistance. If a government in charge is dead set in promoting fossil fuels over renewables, it will never happen. Even if you get a government led by the most gungho green friendly administration, in a democratic government, those opposing can stall any plans to go green. If you live in a less democratic government where leadership decides it's going green, you're going green.
1. Solar panels need a huge capital expenditure up front.
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.
Based on your response timestamp I will conclude you didn't watch the video. He "does it rationally" like you requested. You said "try not to blame anyone" so if you'd rather not hear about the people who actually are to blame for this situation, then skip the last 30 minutes of the video.
It is happening. It takes time to build and it only became absurdly cheap in the past few years. But it keeps getting cheaper and better (batteries too for anyone who wants to bring that up).
yes but increasing solar will damage the energy lobby in the congress and other places. It's never about what is best, it's about what's best for lobby and their puppets
What does the 1% of land used to grow corn have to do specifically with solar and batteries? Solar doesn't need to be on the 15% arable land at all.
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.
Then please explain, to me he brought up an unrelated point about ethanol (which is often poorly understood and mischaracterized anyways) consuming a portion of agriculturally productive land. Which BTW this agricultural land that produces ethanol is probably not even close to the best place in the country for industrial scale solar from a LOT of perspectives.
My "try to understand" take: We subsidize corn, then use it yo make a less efficient fuel. The money involved in this process likely takes away from subsidies to other forms of energy. There are a great many activities we do not subsidize, but solar is one that if we did, would produce an outsized benefit to society. And the more we do, the better. Redirecting an ethanol subsidy to solar would be a far more beneficial long term strategy for energy independence and overall standard of living in the US. Going all in on Solar would be a transformative and likely relatively short investment period that would last and benefit a long time. We have done many large scale infrastructure projects in the US, and it is frustrating to see the resistance to this one, being both less disruptive and more "all around win" than any other i can think of.
No no, that argument is pretty old now. The amount of fuel you GROW on your own continent at any single or double digit percentage during wartime-anytime is probably a good long-term research project that shouldn't be interrupted by people online.
The consumer rooftop solar cost is usually one of the most expensive ways you can generate electricity - often several times the cost of utility solar installations. The high rooftop solar price is usually hidden (at least in the USA) because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid. This causes higher electricity bills for those in apartments and those who can't afford to put panels on their roof. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme.
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.
That land is producing food for cars. If we covered half in solar panels we’d have almost enough energy to power the country. Turn the other half over to food production and you’d come out ahead on both energy and food.
It's a common mistake to believe there isn't enough land to grow food, and that is simply false. We throw tons and tons of food away every year due to spoilage and other factors. Even in many parts of Africa scarcity of food is caused by waste and distribution problem than simply lack of arable land.
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.
A roof is quite literally the worst place to put solar panels. Its a load most roofs are not designed for, and the whole point of a roof is to keep water out, which is compromised by attaching stuff to it.
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
Algae needs solar light, so you will have to flood a lot of land to get enough.
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.
Is this grid-scale solar ? It can’t be rooftop - there is nobody in the UK who will install a 5kW rooftop system for £2k. The quotes I’ve had recently have been closer to £10k.
I build off-grid camper vans for a living and install solar + lithium battery systems regularly. The technology has matured a lot in the last few years. What used to take a massive roof array and a bank of heavy lead-acid or AGM batteries to run basic appliances now fits in a fraction of the space with lithium. The limiting factor in real-world installs isn't the panels or the batteries anymore, it's getting customers to right-size the system for their actual usage instead of what they think they'll use. People consistently underestimate idle draws and overestimate how much sun they'll get. Scale that mindset problem up to a national grid and I imagine the challenge is the same.
Very nice. I have my eyes on Lithium-Titanate cells for my house, I can't wait until they go down in price enough. Weight and energy density are not an issue, but safety is and those cells are very good in that sense.
I doubt that issue scales to the national grid at all... national grids tend to dictated in size by more or less market forces not careful pre-planning... and capacity planning for new projects tends to have actual data about energy demand and weather patterns and so on.
> Scale that mindset problem up to a national grid and I imagine the challenge is the same.
Except that we have raw data there? The only question is how fast it grows, but since we're transitioning that's mostly a question of how fast you decommission fossil plants.
Yeah, agreed. It's a lot easier to be empirical when the scale of the requirements is quite literally unimaginable without just dealing with raw numbers.
If you mean what they started in the 90s? That's not what this is about. The conversation was about not being able to rightsize today.
Germany did jumpstart their market successfully but that was in a wildly different time. Want to talk about what a typical KWp of installed solar cost at the time?
there is a youtube video I watched where an RV guy converted as many appliances and gadgets on his vehicle to Direct DC as he could, saved a lot on wastage from DC-AC-DC conversions.
The article is just wrong. And only mentions energy used for heating in passing. Heating requires MASSIVE amounts of energy.
I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar system (almost 30 kWh battery and 24kW solar). It keeps the lights on, but not heating. I live in a mild climate.
The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.
My house in the bay area runs at <1kW per hour most of the time and the sunlight is more than enough to keep it above 65F most of the year. Maybe you need LED lights because when I'm not there, it's ~150W per hour.
People still build houses like energy is cheap and abundant. A properly insulated house in any temperate climate require very little heating or cooling.
Spend 50k on insulation that will last the life of the building instead of 50k on heating and cooling devices which will need constant maintenance and replacement + fuel and end up costing 10x more over the life of the building.
A modern house with modern insulation in a mild climate shouldn't even need a central heating system. You can get by with 500w toaster heaters in each room for the coldest time of the year
> A properly insulated house in any temperate climate require very little heating or cooling.
A "properly insulated" house still requires something around 0,5 W/m2/K. Modeling a moderate 120 m2 house in the coldest months when the temperatures hit 15-20 negative you still need 2,5 kW of heat with domestic hot water on top. Put in the efficiency of a heat pump and you are still easily looking at half a mega watt-hour per month. ~1MWh for a whole house is very reasonable number during winter months, sans electric mobility.
That's entirely unrealistic to cover with batteries with current battery technologies alone, electricity generation is absolutely REQUIRED. Windmills can help soften the blow and storage needs substantially, but the TFA is about solar, which is effectively absent during the winter.
In the short term the math is usually bad. Can be a 20, 30, 40 year payback on insulation. For the builder? It’s almost for sure a loss unless he can play the green card. For any individual owner? They are likely to leave before they recoup a project like this. Appraisals on houses are price per square foot with a bedroom and bathroom modifier. Until people start pricing in energy efficiency in homes, say a price multiple of 0.8 to 1.2 based on the efficiency of the home? It’s going to be hard to math out.
Which yes is sad.
I live in a moderately cold area and pay less than $2000 a year to heat a ~2000 square foot home. So something that improves the efficiency of the building would have to have a pretty low cost to even pay back at all.
There's probably a few lower cost things that I am overlooking, to the tune of netting out a few hundred dollars of savings after however many years they took to pay back.
> Can be a 20, 30, 40 year payback on insulation. For the builder?
In the UK, houses have energy ratings, which are largely not that useful, but they do allow estimated annual running charge.
The house that I live in we moved in and were spending ~1.7k on gas a year.
We needed to re-render the place, because it has a few missing pieces. we spent the extra £4 to put in 90mm of external wall insulation. We also had to replace the glazing. It was cheaper to get triple glazing (for some reason), however the results of that was that it was 6degrees warmer in winter, and 10 degrees (celcius) cooler in summer. Even with gas prices doubling, we spend about £70 on hotwater and heating.
You don't even need to go that far, put 100m of tubing 2m underground and plug it in your heat recovery ventilation system, bam free winter freeze protection/pre warming and free summer cooling, all you need is a 30w pumps and you will save hundreds of kw per year
I think my comment is pretty clear about the use case, this is obviously not water for your floor heating. You shouldn't even have that in a properly insulated house, way too much inertia.
There are electric floor heating graphene foils that put out 20w per sqm, they're more than enough, no moving part, no maintenance, no bs, not even 20% of the price of a hydro floor heating, you can even install them yourself
same here. 1940's house with slate roof and vermiculite "insulation". You can't just use modern insulation techniques or blown-in foam because that would make exterior wood rot. You need to keep the air flowing the right way to dry out the wood.
I have to clean the eaves of my house myself because nobody I hire will believe me that you can't point a pressure washer at the eaves without water getting inside the walls. "I'll just avoid the vents" doesn't work when you can see daylight between the roof and the wall all around the house.
Yes you're right and I don't disagree. But a 500w heater isn't going to cut it when it's 20F outside. You actually have to run the heat as hard as possible when the sun is shining so you have some thermal momentum going into the evening.
The end result is you're going to make big lifestyle changes to accommodate the energy. For example everyone sleeping in 1 bedroom and only cooking with an electric pressure cooker or low and slow with an induction range.
A house built to passive house standards requires less than 10w per sqm of peak heating demand, a 500w toaster will warm 50sqm, which is a decent room already.
There are passive houses built at 2000m altitude in the Alps, some are made of wood and have literal strawbales for insulation, there are no excuses left in 2026 not to build good houses, it's more economical, more practical, more comfortable, more ecological
Take plants that can use enery from the sun 'freely'. Is it cheap for them? Not really when you look at the evolutionary battle between plant species. There is always another plant willing to take your place if you're inefficient, slow growing, not poisoning the ground around you, or some other trick to keep you alive.
Any means to keep energy cheap and abundant must be by force because it is not a natural order.
Not saying it shouldn't, I'm just saying it isn't. Housing should be free and taxes illegal but here we are. Some retard decides to go to war with Iran and it costs 30% more to tank your car, I'm not making the rules. Solar panels got 15% more expensive over night in my country too. What happens when they decide to mess around with China? They make 70% of batteries and panels.
It costs a lot more than 50K to retrofit a house towards passive standards.
Not everyone has the capital (even with gov subsidies) to make those investments, and it's generally the people who need to save a few bucks on bills the most that DONT have the money.
GP's argument is the marginal cost when building new is roughly that amount, not that any house can be retrofitted for that amount.
However, it's not that far off for retrofitting, if you do it when your siding already needs to be replaced. Add 3-5" XPS foam to the exterior of any standard house; if a basement you bring insulation several feet down and out below the ground. If cathedral ceiling, when replacing the roof you put 6-8" polyiso down over the sheathing before the new roofing material. If vented roof, get 1.5x code minimum blown in the attic. Air seal first, of course (1-hour of air sealing is the best ROI of anything you can do in an old house).
I'm replying to someone who bought a 30kwh battery and 24kwp setup, in my country that's already classified as a "local energy provider" I think they're doing OK financially.
People still spend literal millions on poorly built and poorly insulated mcmansions today btw, it's not a money issue.
I live in a northern climate and I know multiple people who are net zero with solar+basic battery.
Proper insulation and good windows go a very long way. For instance, I set my heat to 66F during the day and 60F at night. When I wake up in the morning, the register is usually still above 60F.
66F is ridiculously cold to me, and I live in Canada where it can reach -40(F or C) in the winter. I would find that very uncomfortable and elderly people would be shivering constantly and highly susceptible to respiratory illness.
I have a modern cold climate air source heat pump which essentially needs to run 24 hours a day to maintain a stable 20C when the outdoor temperatures reach -15C. Below that, the heat pump shuts off and the furnace kicks in to provide emergency heating. My thermostat is a modern one with full time-of-day and day-of-week scheduling for heating and cooling, but it doesn't matter because the heat pump by itself is not able to swing the temperature up (by even half a degree) on its own, so this causes the furnace to kick in every time the schedule calls for a higher temperature, defeating the entire purpose of time-of-day scheduling.
I will also add that where I live (Southern Ontario) the sky is overcast 90% of the time during the winter. Solar panels, even somehow free of snow and ice, are going to produce almost nothing on those dark days. Add in the need to keep the panels free of snow and ice (presumably with heating, since nobody is going to be climbing around on their roof in the winter), and you'd likely reach energy net-negative trying to make use of them.
I actually live on the same latitude as Ontario so -40F/C is not unusual. Add in windchill, and it gets even more common, given my windy location.
Yeah, I understand I'm probably an outlier at 66F. I was using the numbers more to point out how little a house temperature will drop with good windows and insulation.
People acclimatize pretty well if you let them. We keep our house at 65F all winter, and set the AC for 85F in the summer and everyone is pretty happy. The payback period on a good sweater is not very long.
>66F is ridiculously cold to me...I would find that very uncomfortable and elderly people would be shivering constantly and highly susceptible to respiratory illness.
I know people who live in the Mediterranean and get by with no heating during the winter with indoor and outdoor tempuratures this low or lower, so it seems that one can be conditioned into doing so.
Perhaps it's the presence of more sunlight on average rather than the temperature that makes the difference.
In the northwest corner of Massachusetts I converted an old school into an apartment building. I installed 2" of polystyrene on the outside and about a foot of cellulose in the ceilings. We relay on heatpumps for HVAC. I also installed a 50kW solar array. We don't start paying for heating until Nov/Dec and stop paying in Apr/May. Our Electric usage goes through the roof in Jan/Feb/Mar. Our weak point is that the exterior walls are about 40% windows. I hope to install better thermal shades which will cost about $80k. We also last fall installed a solar thermal array to for hot water and heat the hallway which is radiant floor. I would like to think we could achieve net-zero but I will likely need to expand the solar array by about 200%.
Thermal curtains are more effective than good windows. Good windows are minimally helpful.
Thermal curtains are a godsend. I remember reading about your journey and I hope it works out! I think it'd be money well spent.
In my last house, I replaced single pane windows with properly installed, sealed, and insulated double-hungs and it practically cut my heat bill in half. I agree that modern window to modern window replacement probably won't get you much, though.
Net zero. But not effectively zero. They sell energy during the day when no one needs it and buy it an night when we all need it. If we all switched to solar and heat pumps there would be blackouts and an energy crisis
Solar generates like 1/10 in the northern countries for half of the year. No batteries currently can solve this.
The problem with global ecological regulations is they never differentiate between countries on the equator or 30th parallel with countries around 60. They expect everyone to only run on sun and wind. It isn't possible. There has to be at least nuclear which is ridiculously expensive.
It's generally not an easy problem to solve otherwise it wouldn't be a problem anymore.
First sensible thing to do is to relax the expectations for countries like Poland that have no good way to compete with other countries energy wise because of geographical location that noone chooses.
It is extremely unfair to treat everyone the same even though every country has different energy resources.
There's a solution that costs less than fossil fuels, but it's a coordination problem and the USA is structurally unable to solve those anymore. I guess the Soviet Union wins the last laugh?
Because the sun doesn't shine every day. Where I live, the sky is overcast 90% of the time in the winter. You can't charge the batteries during the summer and run them all winter.
They've fallen victim to a catastrophically easy scare tactic, unfortunately. "The sun only shines during the day therefore solar is bad!" Dumb, but easy.
In Toronto there is only daylight for 9 hours in winter
Yes surely some days are cloudy
So some days you get 5% capacity factor, and need some other energy source as well
So it harms the economics of the venture
Look at the profitability of companies building utility scale solar farms, they cost 100 million and the company hopes to get a 10% return and pay a 3% dividend.
They still have to contend with moving parts for tracking the angle of the sun, fans on inverters, contactors, clearing snow, mowing grass, site drainage, tornadoes etc, so sometimes it is not as easy as it sounds
All for a 7%? Why shouldn’t they just buy the s&p 500 and call it a day
I had a 20kWh array and 18kWh of batteries in Texas and it was GREAT in the summer. It'd start charging by 6am and be charged by 9am, even with simultaneous usage. Then we'd live off solar for the day (even with HVAC), go back on batteries around 9pm and they'd be out around 4am. No problem.
But during an overcast winter day, the stack wouldn't get power until 8/9, not make it to 50%, start discharging by 4/5pm, and be out by 10/11pm. It would easily be 8-10 hours where we were wholly dependent on the grid.
Not a problem, just a constraint to acknowledge and plan for.
At 66F, I struggle to do job because my fingers go numb and I can't touch-type well. If others have that problem, a small heat-lamp (like for a reptile cage) can locally heat just the area above the keyboard cheaply.
Respectfully, 30kWh is not much in this context. In 10 years every modern 2-car home will have 200kWh on the driveway just from the EVs; add a 100kWh whole home battery at a price point close to a 10kWh battery today and the calculus changes in most of the world.
The cost of materials going into modern batteries easily leaves room for another 10x reduction in price, IMO where this all is heading is obvious. Zero marginal cost will win every day of the week.
FWIW we run our cabin on 15kWh battery today year around, though we do run a small wood stove to supplant the heat pump on cold winter days.
40 kWH of storage and 9 kW of solar panels is all I need personally to live a 1st world lifestyle in the bay area mostly off-grid except for water and internet.
I bet you didn't even see the tragic farce when writing your solution. Land development requiring ”2-car homes" is the driver of the problem! An apartment only has to heat one or two walls facing the outside instead of 4. That's 50-75% right off the top of your energy usage, with the mean closer to 75%.
There's nothing farcical about wanting one's own space where there's space to have one's own space. I'm grateful to no longer be sharing walls with a domestic abuse couple on one side and a midnight banshee on the other wall when she got busy. Energy is cheap, people are exhausting.
24kW solar "to keep lights on" is a funny way to underplay it. My house "summer" electricity usage is 60kWh per month, including water pump, DHW, septic and work from home for 2 adults. So 3h of your PV production would power my house for a month!
Regarding heating - I live in cold climate. We had average daily temperature of -10c this january, with multiple lows at -25c, and most nights at -15c. The house is 116sqm. Our heatpump COP for that month was above 2, and we used 787kWh total to heat the house, which is not a lot, actually. At 15 cents per kWh it is 118 euros for heating, for the coldest month in a decade! Considering also that we do not pay for electricity since april until october (solar panels).
We also paid less than those houses which use natural gas, wood pellets, etc. We also do not need to do anything to keep house warm. Also, during summer months we could "drive for free" in EV due to free solar electricity.
All that just to counter your take on "major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs".
> I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar system
This is not really a qualification to speak on how the grid works, at all.
Actually having panels on your roof doesn't give you unique insight into how solar panels operate - there is extensive data out there, any PV installation can become a data source trivially.
> The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.
One residence powering itself is not representative of how the grid works, and is not a good way to evaluate any power generation technology whether its PV, coal, nuclear, etc.
I'm actually trying to accomplish what the author is describing, so I have experience to talk about the difficulty of its implementation (unlike the author himself, who has zero experience with its implementation to speak of).
The article is about utility scale solar and storage I believe not home installations. It also mentions towards the end that in cold norther climates adding wind to the mix makes sense
There are TONS of incentives to increase energy efficiency.
Most local electric and gas companies will do free energy audits. Many will offer rebates if you install tankless water heaters, heat pumps, and insulation. Installers get kickbacks from manufacturers and tax credits if you buy higher efficiency equipment. Lenders will give you 0% loans to fund it all. The Feds and many States offer tax credits for all of the above.
I've done every single thing on this list in the last 5 years, some in Texas, some in Indiana.
A well built home with more insulation will, according to physics, lose less heat in any given scenario. So policies that push for things that improve buildings can reduce energy use.
Do you think we have reached peak building efficiency or something?
This is basically correct in the sense that we cannot simply just force everyone in, say, Minnesota to install electric baseboard heating, rooftop solar, and a battery pack, and then expect them to stay warm. There are periods of extended extreme cold and low solar flux where you would simply not be able to warm everyone's house - that's just physics.
But there are a lot of extra things you can do as an intermediate steps to dramatically close the gap. The main ones are:
1. Homes can be renovated to improve insulation
2. Cold weather heat pumps can handle most mild winter conditions efficiently
3. Electricity doesn't all have to be locally generated - it can be transmitted from other parts of the country.
4. You can keep using fossil fuel peaker plants, and still have incredible reduced overall emissions
House heating does not require massive amounts of energy. What it requires is efficiency. I've seen a house in Canada that was heated with a single candle when not occupied. Triple wall, reflective foil in between the wall layers, vertical movement of air in the walls interrupted every 30 cm or so. Absolutely amazing. And it still had sizeable windows. If your house doesn't leak energy like a sieve you don't need to replace as much either. Between passive solar and some augmentation you can do fine on an extremely modest energy budget.
And Canada is not exactly the warmest country on the planet.
Beyond the other better insulation comments, pairing electric with heat pumps that are SEER 10+ goes a long way to improve heating efficiency. Old resistive heaters are 1:1 on energy to heat, while newer heat pumps operate to much lower temperatures, and give you 1:10 or 1:15 electric:heat energy ratios.
That's not even close to correct. At the design lowest temperature (if <15°C), the very best get 2 COP, but most are 1.5 or lower. The problem is you have to accommodate the worst case.
The average of installed units is closer to 2.0 COP average, unfortunately. Multi-head units really drive down efficiency. A single-head Gree Sapphire can do 4-5 COP on average and that's the best you can get, so still nowhere near your guess.
My heat pump is SEER 19, and it can't heat my house below 25F. I think this is mostly due to it not being large enough - it was sized to cool my house on the hot summer days, and more energy needs to move on the cold winter days.
SEER, while a useful first-order approximation of efficiency, is for cooling and not heating. HSPF-V is for cold climates. Likely you just don't have a cold-climate heat pump which maintains full capacity down to -10°C (and some a little lower still), even before you get into appropriate maximum capacity.
Under what circumstances? I've seen higher-end units that do maybe 1:5 in ideal conditions (heating to 68F when the ambient temp is 55F), but never seen units that do 1:10 or 1:15. This was about 2-3 years ago I did this research. Have things improved that drastically in the last few years?
Note that the article title has "the world" in it, immediately limits his specific claims to 80% of the world nearer the equatorr as most of the people in the world have more need for cooling than heating.
He even has a map that covers this and multiple paragraphs of discussion about high latitudes and wind in winter.
What's the actual effect you get out of that? Even half, 12 kW, would be an absolutte beast of heating (for a home), even with 'dumb' convection heating. With heat pumps 2-3 kW should really be enough.
There isn't a lot you can reasonably do to something that is already there. I insulated my attic better, but there wasn't enough space to go as high as I wanted (I guess I could in the middle, but not around the edges). The thin walls are still thin, and not much I can do about it for a reasonable price. Likewise the windows are really bad, but the cost of good windows is large. By the time I insulated this house to modern standards I'm nearly half way to tearing it down and building something new (a complete destroy is a lot cheaper than trying to take something off without destroying the rest) - and a new house would get a lot of other benefits (I want a larger kitchen but there is no place to put it)
Which is why a lot of poorly insulated houses still exist - people have mostly done what can be done for a reasonable price, but anything that will make a difference is also very expensive with very long paybacks.
Because where I live around 55th this winter we had five straight weeks below -15c / 5f daily average plus enough snowfall that it was infeasible to clean anything but the most major roads.
Solar is out of question in these conditions and when thermal pump fails you have to evacuate. When just grid electricity fails you have to either have some sort of stored fuel backup or evacuate.
The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular among people living in what amounts to subtropics who can't even imagine how crazy they sound to most everyone else.
> The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular among people living in what amounts to subtropics
To be fair, 90% of the population lives within 45 degrees of the equator. If we're talking about global energy solutions for CO2 reduction, we can go a long way just by focusing on what works in these areas of the globe.
The article does also point out that hydro/wind are going to be important at higher latitudes in winter, but they also acknowledge that they don't account for seasonal variation in demand. That's the biggest flaw I can find in the analysis.
FWIW: I'm down in a mild arid climate at 35N, and yeah, 90% of our winter days are nearly sunny, even when the lows are in the teens. It's a different world for sure.
Most space heating is in the Northern parts though, so those are the ones that need to be addressed. There are solutions that are a pareto improvement, but it's a coordination problem and the USA is sufficiently broken and unable to solve those.
handwavy argument. Yes, in the (sub)tropics the argument is even stronger pro-PV, not the least because it'll give you the opposite of heating - aircon - for free right when you need it. And considering summer heatwaves as have been seen the last few years "way north", that benefit will extend that way even if you wouldn't bother considering letting it "assist", if not fully replace, your heating. That said though, for 50° polewards and above, if you wanted to use PV in winter orient the panels vertically. If you can clad your too floor with shiplap larch so you can with PV panels. Given the price of timber ... there's a plan.
Do check that your heater isn’t doing something ridiculous. A while back I helped someone debug a Mitsubishi Electric system on which the installer had set the fan speed control to high instead of auto (it’s an easily accessible setting on the thermostat). I forget exactly how much power was saved, but IIRC it was well over 30kWh/day.
I don’t know where all that energy was going. I expected some improvement but not anywhere near that much.
As far as I understood it, it only talks about electricity, so that doesn't seem like a contradiction to me. I think some electrification of heating is expected in 2030, but not that much bigger than it is now.
This is a large pv system for what I assume is a single family home. Do you have resistive in floor heating or an electric boiler feeding radiators? I imagine you could easily run a half dozen mini-splits drawing 500-1000w each, or a centralized heat pump. Happy to help if you can give more details.
Yes 30 kWh battery is considered large. It takes up a full 6 slot 2u rack in my garage and cost around $8k. In the context of OP's goals it's larger than what 99% of people in the world will ever have.
Approximately 1% of people in the world currently have an EV with a more than 30 kWh battery... and we're very early in the adoption curve of EVs and other large batteries.
Isn't it all relative? Cooling actually isn't a problem at all with solar. I can run my AC full blast during the summer and still get the batteries fully charged before evening.
where are you? that is a massive amount of solar in any place at a reasonably low latitude. Is your house enormous or are you heating your house with resistive heating?
If you’re one of the many companies working on reaching this goal, in defiance of everyone in this thread and elsewhere insisting it will never work, I’d like to work with you.
I’ve worked with all of the largest solar, battery and EV companies, as well as America’s largest electric utilities, building complex analytics software to enable the clean energy transition. I’m looking for my next role to continue moving the needle on eliminating fossil fuels. Find me here: https://matthewgerring.com
Just my 2c but I think the biggest thing we could do is to reduce the regulatory burden, cost, and complexity associated with installing roof mounted solar. This should be something that can be approved and installed in a week, and should be a half the price (put another it should have a double digit roi) . Right now all of the economics of home solar are consumed by regulation/complexity and the contractors / solar installation companies.
At the consumer scale the biggest thing we could do is follow the german model of panels that can be plugged into an outlet and installed in an hour by any homeowner (with the same capacity limits and requirements on the panels electronics to protect the grid/line workers during power outages).
That said I'm pretty sure that grid-scale solar is the future of most solar energy, not home solar. It's just cheaper to do things in bigger batches.
This statement is 100% correct, but I think is wrong - utility scale solar is 100% more efficient and cheaper to build at scale, the problem is finding large parcels of land to put it on that are close to where the power consumption is, as well as the complexity and cost associated with grid interconnection (and transition if it not close to demand)
Edit: though if we ever get to self driving cars there should be a whole lot of parking lots in metro areas that aren’t needed.
There's been a wave of legislation[1] introduced in the US to legalize so-called "balcony solar," small grid-tied solar systems that plug into a regular household outlet with zero permitting or interconnect requirements. This is already common in Europe, it's mildly complicated by our split-phase system but not much.
The reason for the high burden today is people have developed an inflated sense of how much the kWh they generate is worth. They install massive systems on their roofs to try to "cancel out" their power bill by exporting their entire daily power consumption over the course of a few sunny hours, which (when all their neighbors do the same) ends up being a costly burden for grid operators who then pass the costs on to users without panels. Smaller systems focused on immediate, local consumption rather than export are much better for the grid which is why they have support.
100% this. If it was DIYable, its an order of magnitude cheaper.
I have leftover panels from an off grid install, and its extremely hard to get an approved permit for a small roof solar array + off the shelf AIO (Ecoflow/Anker)
1/2 the 'cost' of electricity is borne by grid operators, which are usually regulated monopolies. They are generally overstaffed, inneficient bureaucracies. I'm not against public service but I don't think that's. related issue.
If energy prices drop, they will be able to charge more money to justify more 'infra' etc..
The best thing we could ever do is get rid of our dependency on the energy grid.
If our homes could be powered like our cars ... that would be amazing.
That said - there are definitely theoretical efficiencies at scale and if we did get rid of the grid, we may never be able to get it back!
It's plausible that 'decentralized energy' may be very advantageous in that it puts a lot of competitive pressure on the centralized elements. Then we get the best of both worlds.
This would be more believable to skeptics if it wasn't all pro-arguments and theory. If you don't cover the cases in which it doesn't work, or at least mention the arguments against, it reads as propaganda.
The thing that reads the most false is the economics. A 480W solar panel is like $90 on sale, they're dirt cheap. A dozen of them is $1,080. But an installed solar+battery system tied to the grid is more like $30,000, and that's not covering the cost of replacing damaged equipment (lightning is a thing). That's just one home, using certified equipment.
For nation-states to do solar and battery, they need land, capital, and skilled labor that most nations don't have. Then there's the fact that not all nations get enough sun, or the fact that you must have a stable backup supply (not just for "cloudy days", but also emergencies and national defense), and multiple sources of equipment so your entire nation's energy isn't dependent on one country (China). Only about 10-20 nations on earth could switch to renewables for the majority of their energy in the next 10 years.
I wish it made sense to do residential solar where I am. It probably does technically, but i hate the idea of spending a ton on a system and then STILL have to pay my power company; if you are connected to the grid at all where I am, you pay the power company $5/kw/month of solar capacity and your excess sell-back rates are insanely bad (0.03/kwh, vs billed usage rate at $0.17/kwh)
The next generation of home batteries will be a game changer. It will do for home energy storage what Lithium-Ion has done for laptops, phones and vehicles and it will be a lot safer too.
Providing 90% of power is not "powering the world".
It really helps to also have a complementary storage technology with low capacity capex, even if the round trip efficiency is lower. This would complement batteries in the same way ordinary RAM complements cache memory in a computer.
>We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels.
So then they are wrong. The last 5-10 percent is the hardest part and it's the one consumers complain the most about! You can't run a factory on 90% power availability
That's not carbon neutral. You can use synthetic fuels to make it fully carbon neutral (way easier to store than the often-proposed H2) but that's really just another battery.
The issue is that to achieve that you can't just build 90% solar plus 10% fossil fuels. You would need to build 100% solar + 100% fossil fuels for the 10% of the time solar doesn't work.
If you build batteries on the scale that the article suggests (and is probably going to happen in the real future) you can use batteries charged from fossil fuels.
It's a few percent dirtier (round trip losses) but in return you can use gas plants that are 50% more efficient to charge them rather than run peaker plants.
And of course that's ignoring wind which is nearly as cheap as solar and anti-correlated with it.
Yes, but if you need to have all that infrastructure anyway it no longer makes sense to compare the cost of solar+batteries with the cost of fossil fuels because you actually need to have both.
If you compare the total cost of solar with just the fuel cost of fossil fuels (ignoring its CapEx and non-fuel OpEx) that swings the equation a lot.
Infrastructure cost for 100% is the same as infrastructure cost for 10%? That's not true. The distribution network is the part that can't be scaled, but it can also be reused for either source, so it doesn't double in cost.
No, I'm saying infrastructure cost for 100% is the same as infrastructure cost for 100%. You can't build 10% as much fossil fuel infrastructure and expect it to carry 100% of the load when solar isn't working.
No, they can't, not unless we get rid of the fossil fuel lobby, which pretty much runs the world these days. Which isn't surprising, given that fossil fuels are the largest industry ever created by mankind. If you compare it to anything else which was actively harmful and yet big money tried to convince you it wasn't (like tobacco, alcohol, or really anything else), there is nothing that huge. So it isn't surprising that the industry fights change.
EV adoption has been successfully held back mostly by PR, Germany shifted from nuclear to coal and gas, the US president is doing everything to dismantle anything that isn't fossil fuel and promotes fossil fuels, the list goes on.
The fossil fuel lobby can only do so much. Solar has gotten so cheap it's taking over on its own. Companies are doing it for no reason other than the math makes sense. EV batteries are nearing that point too. You can only keep BYD out of the US for so long.
Sure, but you're attributing this, deliberately or not, to the wrong cause. It wasn't that the fossil fuel industry somehow won - it was range of factors possibly including geopolitics, some existing plants aging, an emotional response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the Green lobby.
Basically, they voted to kill nuclear without a solid plan for an alternative, and coal/gas is the default option for filling the gaps left in the absence of timely and sufficiently rapid investment in other technologies.
Hmm. After former chancellor (Schroeder) heavily pushed Russian gas pipelines (Nord Stream 1 and 2) and then swiftly moved to working for Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom, I have a different outlook on things.
Musk was proposing about 1.2TW of solar capacity, the US installed about 250GW since then and is currently installing about 50GW a year and is projected to have 770GW by 2036 in a decades time.
So the US is probably over-delivering compared with many things Elon has proposed delivering himself.
At temperate latitudes, summer/winter is a bigger deal than day/night. To the point where it makes sense to orient fixed panels tilted south and you still get a 2-3x difference in daily capacity between the seasons.
Related is the other comments here that mention air-conditioning is largely a non-issue if you spec for year-round solar. If you are generating 3x as much energy in July compared to January, and January can power your house, then the A/C is basically free.
Thats whats driving the buildout in places like spain.
Solar power is in curltailment most days, so to make money solar operators need to add batteries to take free energy and shift it to the ultra expensive parts of the day.
You can buy a full day's worth of energy storage with an array of LiFePO4 batteries for less than the typical 3% estimate of annual home improvement and maintenance costs you should be budgeting for as a homeowner. The cost problem usually comes from the labor and every solar installation company seemingly being ran by scam artists.
Because solar energy production doesn't just vary by time-of-day, it also varies seasonally. Where I live, winter solar production collapses due to decreased daylight hours and cloud cover. At the same time, energy use skyrockets due to heating demand.
We would need a lot of batteries to be able to charge during the summer and drain during the winter!
China understands this, parts of the EU understands this. The US is currently dead set on betting on the wrong technology, and it's going to put them so far behind.
Imagine a world where people didn't care about labeling new things "woke", and instead could all sit down and say, "we're going to make major investments in next generation infrastructure to ensure our capacity and independence."
The American shale gas/fracking boom really distorted a lot of things. The strategic energy situations of the United States, the EU, and China were all pretty similar in the late 20th Century: major dependence on OPEC-controlled oil and gas. Post-fracking, the US strategic energy situation has diverged from the others.
This difference leads indirectly to things like the current "not war" in Iran. (Iran's geography already gives it strong bargaining power via pressure on energy markets. It would have an even stronger hand if the US was not capable of energy independence).
The long term impacts on climate changes are even more negative. It's hard to supplant a cheap, ubiquitous energy source with strong negative externalities when those externalities are subtle, gradual, and strongly denied via propaganda by entrenched interests.
I agree and lets not label something as dangerous or expensive if it can be made to be affordable and safe. "As of 2026, 59 nuclear power plants are operational in mainland China, second globally to the United States, which has 94." "There are over 28 further plants under construction with a total power of 32.3 GW, ranked first for the 18th consecutive year"
Having lots of cheap energy is always boosts industry and reduces cost of living for everyone. The way China accomplished that was by investing heavily in every sort of energy and building large scale infrastructure, instead of adding roadblocks at every stage.
> China burns significantly more coal than the USA and Europe combined
Which is expected when both Europe and the US outsourced most manufacturing to China. It's actually surprising China is so low given they're literally the factory of the world
Apart from the current administration's absolutely hilariously bad governing, the US economy really only cares about profit. The same is going to happen to any country with outsized income inequality.
This argument would make more sense if Chinese companies were all going out of business due to their governments heavy investments in solar and batteries.
They're not anti-renewables as a bet, they're anti-renewables strategically. If you like going to war, you can power your warfighting apparatus much easier with a gas tank than a battery. If you want better defense, you don't depend on hostile nations for your energy needs. The US wants to double down on oil because it likes to fight wars and it's paranoid about defense.
>We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels.
I think a lot of people truly dont get this.
Those days when the wind isnt blowing, the sun isnt shining and the batteries and pumped storage are depleted can be easily handled with, e.g. power2gas.
It's pretty expensive (per kwh almost as much as nuclear power) but with enough spare solar and wind capacity and a carbon tax on natural gas it becomes a no brainer to swap natural gas for that.
Nonetheless this wont stop people saying "but what about that last 5-10%?" as if it's a gotcha for a 100% green grid. It isnt. It never was.
I’m happy to be wrong about this globally, but in my neck of the woods the readily exploited hydro resources are already exploited to 90% of their capacity and have been for 100 years. Hydro is in many ways the ultimate renewable energy, but that’s been true since electrification and we’ve been using it as part of the energy mix since then. I’d love to be wrong but my understanding is that there isn’t a huge amount of untapped new hydro capacity available without having severe impacts on ecosystems
Also what is probably used in your country is Pumped-storage hydroelectricity .
During the day you pump water into the reservoir using wind/solar energy and discharge e.g at night .
This is even more true with international grid connections. Europe in a cold spell? Solar countries import, wind & hydro export. Europe in a heat wave? Flip the switches the opposite direction.
No, no they can’t. As has been explained over and over again by people who know better. Someday yes when the tech improves (changes) dramatically. But that’s not today.
Nuclear could have powered the world easily and we could have done it with 1960s technology. And we could easily do electricity and heating with nuclear quite easily. The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis.
And we can go to 100% of electricity from nuclear, we don't have to have this dumb argument about 'the last 5-10%'. Because its reliable.
And if you actually do the math nuclear would have been cheaper then all this nonsense we have been doing for 30 years with wind, solar and batteries. The cost of the gird updates is like building a whole new infrastructure. With nuclear, the centralized more local networks are perfectly reasonable.
I did some scenarios starting in Year 2000 or Germany to all nuclear, vs wind (off-shore, on-shore), and solar (partly local partly brought in) and batteries. The numbers aren't even close, nuclear would have been the much better deal. Even if you are very conservative and don't account for major learning effect that countries like France had when building nuclear.
That said, even with nuclear, having a few Lithium batteries that can go all out for 1-2h is actually a good deal. Its really only about peak shaving the absolute daily peaks. What you don't want is having to build batteries that can handle days or weeks.
Making hydrogen from water and solar light is certainly better than using nuclear energy for that.
There is no reason for consuming valuable nuclear fuel, for which better uses exist, instead of using free solar light.
The efficiency of converting solar energy into hydrogen is already acceptable. The same is true for the efficiency of converting hydrogen and concentrated carbon dioxide into synthetic hydrocarbons, which are the best means for long term energy storage, and also for applications like aircraft and spacecraft.
The least efficient step remains concentrating the diluted carbon dioxide from air.
While the efficiency of converting solar energy and water into hydrogen by artificial means is already better than that of living beings, the living beings are still much more efficient in converting H2 and CO2 from air into organic substances.
Besides improving the efficiency of the existing techniques, an alternative method of CO2 capture would be the genetic engineering of a bacterium that would produce some usable oil from H2 and air, with an improved productivity over the existing bacteria, which use most of the captured energy to make substances useful for them, not for us, so unmodified bacteria would not have a high enough useful output.
Nuclear reactors make awful targets in a conflict, not sure having many around is generally a good idea if conflict is a risk and there are alternatives.
That's a big if, though. Solar and batteries require globalisation, based on fossil fuels.
I feel like nuclear reactors are a better choice.
> in a conflict, not sure having many around is generally a good idea
On the other hand, blowing nuclear reactors could be considered a big escalation. We see with Iran and Ukraine that it's not exactly the first thing one wants to target.
My point was that photovoltaic is "an alternative" to nuclear reactors, but an alternative that relies on globalisation. Nuclear reactors... much less.
IIRC nuclear doesn't really work well as the last 5-10%. Start-up and shut-down for nuclear reactors is a slow process. When it's generating, it needs to just keep on generating. Not so quick to dial down or up just because the wind is(n't) blowing.
It's not that slow. They can ramp up and down over hours, and those demand patterns are known in advance. Combine with battery, pumped storage, or synfuel generation to soak up excess power during low demand times, and use that to provide peaker capacity during high demand times.
Demand following for nuclear is possible (after all, if you produce 10X but the demand suddenly drops to 7X, what you can always do is to "dump" 3X worth of steam instead of injecting it in the turbine), but because the cost of nuclear is mainly upfront, it is not cost efficient at all.
If it costs 10X dollars upfront to build a nuclear central that can produce 10X energy, then if you run it at 100%, it will cost 1 dollar per 1 unit of energy. If you follow the demand, you will not produce 10X, but let's say to illustrate maybe 5X, and it will cost 2 dollars per 1 unit of energy.
You are right about storage as a way to help with demand following, but if you build enough storage capacity, then you basically have solved "for free" a big part of the problem linked to the intermittence of renewables. In this case, you have the choice between building an expensive nuclear central and a distributed cheaper renewable generation.
I'm not saying it demonstrate renewables are better, but that it is true that nuclear is not the obvious winner it looks like before we look into the practical details.
The problem is the economics. They’re just horrifyingly expensive to build. The equivalent to each new large scale reactor in GWe requires tens of billions in subsidies.
The next problem comes from incentives. Why should anyone with solar or storage buy this expensive grid based nuclear electricity?
Why should their neighbors not buy surplus renewables and instead pay out of their nose for expensive nuclear powered electricity?
EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for the existing french nuclear fleet. Let alone the horrifyingly expensive new builds.
And that is France which has been actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and it still leaks in on pure economics.
It's not a technical limitation, it's economic. The cost of nuclear is almost all in building (and decommissioning) the plant, the fuel is almost free. So you want to produce flat out as long as you can get almost any positive price for the output.
> The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis.
By 2050 is the important caveat. That's assuming constant production of batteries at the current scale and production.
It also assumes we figure out how to economically recycle materials from batteries (and total recovery may never be possible). Grid scale lithium batteries have an effective lifecycle of 15 years. In this potential future, global lithium reserves would actually start getting choked up before the 2050 goal.
Nuclear is inevitable and we all need to stop pretending otherwise.
> Grid scale lithium batteries have an effective lifecycle of 15 years. In this potential future, global lithium reserves would actually start getting choked up before the 2050 goal.
I think the long-term solutions here are not grid-scale lithium batteries, but pumped hydro, flow batteries, or compressed air. Lithium batteries have just gotten a bit ahead on the technological growth curve because of the recent boom in production from phones and EVs, but liquid flow batteries can be made using common elements, and are likely to be cost-effective once the tech gets worked out better.
So: I don't think we can say "lithium energy storage is unfeasible large-scale and long-term" and thus conclude that nuclear is inevitable, unless we also look at all the other storage alternatives.
We already have an electric grid we don’t need to build a new one from scratch just replace infrastructure that gets to old and add more for whatever extra demand shows up.
Obviously other energy sources are going to exist and non solar power will be produced, but nuclear is getting fucked in a solar + battery heavy future. Nuclear already needs massive subsidies and those subsidies will need to get increasingly large to keep existing nuclear around let alone convince companies to build more.
Nuclear costs are massively skewed by the compliance costs.
Reactors that only took 5 years to build before ALARA are still safely running 80 years later. The 15-20 year build and certification time for new reactors is purely made up. The countries that are building our battery and solar pipeline (China, South Korea, Japan) are all building nuclear domestically at 1/3 of the cost of us.
More importantly, for cobalt and lithium - we still exclusively rely on natural raw resources that are still very cheap. Meanwhile we have established reserves of fissile material for thousands of years.
Maybe it won't be in the near future, or even in our lifetime, but there is no way the human race does not turn to nuclear eventually.
EVs are essentially a giant battery on wheels. Seems there is a good opportunity to configure them as bidirectional power banks for your local grid. You could rewire all parking slots to have a plugin that acts as a bidirectional power station. Imaging how much power could be moved around with such a grid! This would require a major investment in power transmission layouts, but a city full of batteries on wheels.
California has registered around 1M Teslas alone. So this is like having a 1Mx80kwh = 80GWh battery at your service. As a reference, the largest solar + storage facility in California is around 3.2 GWh.
Just charging your car when electricity is cheap and avoiding times when it is scarce would solve most of the issues, provided there is a dynamic pricing system in place.
It's nice for an emergency, and almost all EVs can do that already.
But people pay extra to put the batteries over wheels because they need to haul charged batteries around. It's not normally useful to discharge them locally.
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...
Yeah, the technology connections video on this was fantastic. If one was to cover that land in solar, you’d produce far more than the current energy demands of the US.
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
So here I go: if it is so stupid, why it is not done yet?
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...
People, especially recent American leaders, do not make rational decisions.
They also have goals other than generating energy effectively
The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time. It’s the same reason EV’s make up a far larger share of new car sales than a percentage of overall cars, EV’s sucked 20+ years ago yet there are a lot of 20+ year old cars on the road.
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.
> The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time
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.
That's why it will require a functional government who can use taxes responsibly to make the technology affordable to everyone. The US had a pretty good start until one man decided to stop and try to reverse any progress made.
Not one man, he's financially backed by the wealthiest people in the world and politically supported by millions.
Acting like this blunder is some random stroke of bad luck isn't telling the whole story.
We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power. Perhaps we will eventually, but until that actually happens the base load requirement represents a hard limit on the amount of solar generation capacity that the grid can handle.
> We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power
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-...
We started scaling batteries after solar (because the technology reached the point where they were profitable after solar)... but they're being installed at scale now, and at a rapdily increasing rate.
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.
Obviously, money is a factor. But you cannot discount political resistance. If a government in charge is dead set in promoting fossil fuels over renewables, it will never happen. Even if you get a government led by the most gungho green friendly administration, in a democratic government, those opposing can stall any plans to go green. If you live in a less democratic government where leadership decides it's going green, you're going green.
1. Solar panels need a huge capital expenditure up front.
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.
> why it is not done yet?
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
Based on your response timestamp I will conclude you didn't watch the video. He "does it rationally" like you requested. You said "try not to blame anyone" so if you'd rather not hear about the people who actually are to blame for this situation, then skip the last 30 minutes of the video.
It is being done, just not here.
It is happening. It takes time to build and it only became absurdly cheap in the past few years. But it keeps getting cheaper and better (batteries too for anyone who wants to bring that up).
Time, infrastructure changes take decades
yes but increasing solar will damage the energy lobby in the congress and other places. It's never about what is best, it's about what's best for lobby and their puppets
If you won't think of the energy corridor, who will?
What does the 1% of land used to grow corn have to do specifically with solar and batteries? Solar doesn't need to be on the 15% arable land at all.
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.
My conclusion is that you didn't even try to understand the GP.
Then please explain, to me he brought up an unrelated point about ethanol (which is often poorly understood and mischaracterized anyways) consuming a portion of agriculturally productive land. Which BTW this agricultural land that produces ethanol is probably not even close to the best place in the country for industrial scale solar from a LOT of perspectives.
My "try to understand" take: We subsidize corn, then use it yo make a less efficient fuel. The money involved in this process likely takes away from subsidies to other forms of energy. There are a great many activities we do not subsidize, but solar is one that if we did, would produce an outsized benefit to society. And the more we do, the better. Redirecting an ethanol subsidy to solar would be a far more beneficial long term strategy for energy independence and overall standard of living in the US. Going all in on Solar would be a transformative and likely relatively short investment period that would last and benefit a long time. We have done many large scale infrastructure projects in the US, and it is frustrating to see the resistance to this one, being both less disruptive and more "all around win" than any other i can think of.
No no, that argument is pretty old now. The amount of fuel you GROW on your own continent at any single or double digit percentage during wartime-anytime is probably a good long-term research project that shouldn't be interrupted by people online.
I’d rather people went rooftop solar, and put that land to producing food.
The consumer rooftop solar cost is usually one of the most expensive ways you can generate electricity - often several times the cost of utility solar installations. The high rooftop solar price is usually hidden (at least in the USA) because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid. This causes higher electricity bills for those in apartments and those who can't afford to put panels on their roof. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme.
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.
That land is producing food for cars. If we covered half in solar panels we’d have almost enough energy to power the country. Turn the other half over to food production and you’d come out ahead on both energy and food.
It's a common mistake to believe there isn't enough land to grow food, and that is simply false. We throw tons and tons of food away every year due to spoilage and other factors. Even in many parts of Africa scarcity of food is caused by waste and distribution problem than simply lack of arable land.
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.
We already produce enough food. Rooftop solar by definition is an efficient use of resources.
Do you know how much land there is that is simply not worth farming on?
There are deserts everywhere.
A roof is quite literally the worst place to put solar panels. Its a load most roofs are not designed for, and the whole point of a roof is to keep water out, which is compromised by attaching stuff to it.
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
Damn I didn't know it was that bad. Ideally you'd grow algae from sewer waste and make fuel from that, but this is the US we're talking about.
Algae needs solar light, so you will have to flood a lot of land to get enough.
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.
>you can switch the corn use from etanol to food
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.
> solar PV installed cost 384 €/kWp
Is this grid-scale solar ? It can’t be rooftop - there is nobody in the UK who will install a 5kW rooftop system for £2k. The quotes I’ve had recently have been closer to £10k.
I build off-grid camper vans for a living and install solar + lithium battery systems regularly. The technology has matured a lot in the last few years. What used to take a massive roof array and a bank of heavy lead-acid or AGM batteries to run basic appliances now fits in a fraction of the space with lithium. The limiting factor in real-world installs isn't the panels or the batteries anymore, it's getting customers to right-size the system for their actual usage instead of what they think they'll use. People consistently underestimate idle draws and overestimate how much sun they'll get. Scale that mindset problem up to a national grid and I imagine the challenge is the same.
Very nice. I have my eyes on Lithium-Titanate cells for my house, I can't wait until they go down in price enough. Weight and energy density are not an issue, but safety is and those cells are very good in that sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-titanate_battery
LFP is safe and is under $100/kwH.
I doubt that issue scales to the national grid at all... national grids tend to dictated in size by more or less market forces not careful pre-planning... and capacity planning for new projects tends to have actual data about energy demand and weather patterns and so on.
And what the market doesn’t solve the grid operator solves using ancillary markets.
> Scale that mindset problem up to a national grid and I imagine the challenge is the same.
Except that we have raw data there? The only question is how fast it grows, but since we're transitioning that's mostly a question of how fast you decommission fossil plants.
Yeah, agreed. It's a lot easier to be empirical when the scale of the requirements is quite literally unimaginable without just dealing with raw numbers.
Germany’s renewables rollout would like a word….
If you mean what they started in the 90s? That's not what this is about. The conversation was about not being able to rightsize today.
Germany did jumpstart their market successfully but that was in a wildly different time. Want to talk about what a typical KWp of installed solar cost at the time?
Hindsight....
there is a youtube video I watched where an RV guy converted as many appliances and gadgets on his vehicle to Direct DC as he could, saved a lot on wastage from DC-AC-DC conversions.
We need mundane home DC solutions.
While I agree with underestimating capacity, the problem only really applies to off grid.
For regular homes, it just means less savings.
It means some other infrastructure (fossil fuels?) needs to take up the slack, and people underestimate actual costs at larger scales.
It’s the big issue in Germany for instance - it’s all fun and games until Winter.
Which is fine, since you're still reducing your reliance on the grid.
However, when you're off grid, underestimating capacity means your SOL and need to buy a generator and burn fuel on-site.
And? Any coal not used in summer is coal not dug up.
The article is just wrong. And only mentions energy used for heating in passing. Heating requires MASSIVE amounts of energy.
I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar system (almost 30 kWh battery and 24kW solar). It keeps the lights on, but not heating. I live in a mild climate.
The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.
My house in the bay area runs at <1kW per hour most of the time and the sunlight is more than enough to keep it above 65F most of the year. Maybe you need LED lights because when I'm not there, it's ~150W per hour.
People still build houses like energy is cheap and abundant. A properly insulated house in any temperate climate require very little heating or cooling.
Spend 50k on insulation that will last the life of the building instead of 50k on heating and cooling devices which will need constant maintenance and replacement + fuel and end up costing 10x more over the life of the building.
A modern house with modern insulation in a mild climate shouldn't even need a central heating system. You can get by with 500w toaster heaters in each room for the coldest time of the year
> A properly insulated house in any temperate climate require very little heating or cooling.
A "properly insulated" house still requires something around 0,5 W/m2/K. Modeling a moderate 120 m2 house in the coldest months when the temperatures hit 15-20 negative you still need 2,5 kW of heat with domestic hot water on top. Put in the efficiency of a heat pump and you are still easily looking at half a mega watt-hour per month. ~1MWh for a whole house is very reasonable number during winter months, sans electric mobility.
That's entirely unrealistic to cover with batteries with current battery technologies alone, electricity generation is absolutely REQUIRED. Windmills can help soften the blow and storage needs substantially, but the TFA is about solar, which is effectively absent during the winter.
In the short term the math is usually bad. Can be a 20, 30, 40 year payback on insulation. For the builder? It’s almost for sure a loss unless he can play the green card. For any individual owner? They are likely to leave before they recoup a project like this. Appraisals on houses are price per square foot with a bedroom and bathroom modifier. Until people start pricing in energy efficiency in homes, say a price multiple of 0.8 to 1.2 based on the efficiency of the home? It’s going to be hard to math out. Which yes is sad.
I live in a moderately cold area and pay less than $2000 a year to heat a ~2000 square foot home. So something that improves the efficiency of the building would have to have a pretty low cost to even pay back at all.
There's probably a few lower cost things that I am overlooking, to the tune of netting out a few hundred dollars of savings after however many years they took to pay back.
> Can be a 20, 30, 40 year payback on insulation. For the builder?
In the UK, houses have energy ratings, which are largely not that useful, but they do allow estimated annual running charge.
The house that I live in we moved in and were spending ~1.7k on gas a year.
We needed to re-render the place, because it has a few missing pieces. we spent the extra £4 to put in 90mm of external wall insulation. We also had to replace the glazing. It was cheaper to get triple glazing (for some reason), however the results of that was that it was 6degrees warmer in winter, and 10 degrees (celcius) cooler in summer. Even with gas prices doubling, we spend about £70 on hotwater and heating.
Maybe a law forcing disclosure of average heating/cooling bills in the listing would do the trick?
That's an appraisal problem. Even cars are valued on more things but they do have mpg plastered everywhere.
Would you be willing to quantify what "mild" means to you, maybe in terms of a USDA zone? There are maps for both US and Europe:
https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/pages/map-downloads
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USDA_hardiness_zones...
And never mind ground-source heat pumps [1] (although I know the topic was specifically solar).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump
You don't even need to go that far, put 100m of tubing 2m underground and plug it in your heat recovery ventilation system, bam free winter freeze protection/pre warming and free summer cooling, all you need is a 30w pumps and you will save hundreds of kw per year
uh no... You still need a heat pump. The water coming from that system would be like 50 degrees, far too cold for heating.
I think my comment is pretty clear about the use case, this is obviously not water for your floor heating. You shouldn't even have that in a properly insulated house, way too much inertia.
There are electric floor heating graphene foils that put out 20w per sqm, they're more than enough, no moving part, no maintenance, no bs, not even 20% of the price of a hydro floor heating, you can even install them yourself
I could not retrofit my house for efficient heating with $50k. To do so would likely be cheaper to completely tear it down and rebuild.
same here. 1940's house with slate roof and vermiculite "insulation". You can't just use modern insulation techniques or blown-in foam because that would make exterior wood rot. You need to keep the air flowing the right way to dry out the wood.
I have to clean the eaves of my house myself because nobody I hire will believe me that you can't point a pressure washer at the eaves without water getting inside the walls. "I'll just avoid the vents" doesn't work when you can see daylight between the roof and the wall all around the house.
I'm guessing you don't live in a place with tropical storms or really severe weather.
Where I am your house would flood when 80mph+ winds blow the rain up your walls.
Indeed, that is the case. However the house is only 55 years old, so a freak storm destroying it isn't out of the question.
Yes you're right and I don't disagree. But a 500w heater isn't going to cut it when it's 20F outside. You actually have to run the heat as hard as possible when the sun is shining so you have some thermal momentum going into the evening.
The end result is you're going to make big lifestyle changes to accommodate the energy. For example everyone sleeping in 1 bedroom and only cooking with an electric pressure cooker or low and slow with an induction range.
A house built to passive house standards requires less than 10w per sqm of peak heating demand, a 500w toaster will warm 50sqm, which is a decent room already.
There are passive houses built at 2000m altitude in the Alps, some are made of wood and have literal strawbales for insulation, there are no excuses left in 2026 not to build good houses, it's more economical, more practical, more comfortable, more ecological
You could put that 500W into a heatpump.
Probably because energy is cheap and abundant.
Why shouldn't energy be cheap and abundant?
Take plants that can use enery from the sun 'freely'. Is it cheap for them? Not really when you look at the evolutionary battle between plant species. There is always another plant willing to take your place if you're inefficient, slow growing, not poisoning the ground around you, or some other trick to keep you alive.
Any means to keep energy cheap and abundant must be by force because it is not a natural order.
Not saying it shouldn't, I'm just saying it isn't. Housing should be free and taxes illegal but here we are. Some retard decides to go to war with Iran and it costs 30% more to tank your car, I'm not making the rules. Solar panels got 15% more expensive over night in my country too. What happens when they decide to mess around with China? They make 70% of batteries and panels.
It costs a lot more than 50K to retrofit a house towards passive standards.
Not everyone has the capital (even with gov subsidies) to make those investments, and it's generally the people who need to save a few bucks on bills the most that DONT have the money.
GP's argument is the marginal cost when building new is roughly that amount, not that any house can be retrofitted for that amount.
However, it's not that far off for retrofitting, if you do it when your siding already needs to be replaced. Add 3-5" XPS foam to the exterior of any standard house; if a basement you bring insulation several feet down and out below the ground. If cathedral ceiling, when replacing the roof you put 6-8" polyiso down over the sheathing before the new roofing material. If vented roof, get 1.5x code minimum blown in the attic. Air seal first, of course (1-hour of air sealing is the best ROI of anything you can do in an old house).
But nobody wants to put that money up.
I'm replying to someone who bought a 30kwh battery and 24kwp setup, in my country that's already classified as a "local energy provider" I think they're doing OK financially.
People still spend literal millions on poorly built and poorly insulated mcmansions today btw, it's not a money issue.
I live in a northern climate and I know multiple people who are net zero with solar+basic battery.
Proper insulation and good windows go a very long way. For instance, I set my heat to 66F during the day and 60F at night. When I wake up in the morning, the register is usually still above 60F.
66F is ridiculously cold to me, and I live in Canada where it can reach -40(F or C) in the winter. I would find that very uncomfortable and elderly people would be shivering constantly and highly susceptible to respiratory illness.
I have a modern cold climate air source heat pump which essentially needs to run 24 hours a day to maintain a stable 20C when the outdoor temperatures reach -15C. Below that, the heat pump shuts off and the furnace kicks in to provide emergency heating. My thermostat is a modern one with full time-of-day and day-of-week scheduling for heating and cooling, but it doesn't matter because the heat pump by itself is not able to swing the temperature up (by even half a degree) on its own, so this causes the furnace to kick in every time the schedule calls for a higher temperature, defeating the entire purpose of time-of-day scheduling.
I will also add that where I live (Southern Ontario) the sky is overcast 90% of the time during the winter. Solar panels, even somehow free of snow and ice, are going to produce almost nothing on those dark days. Add in the need to keep the panels free of snow and ice (presumably with heating, since nobody is going to be climbing around on their roof in the winter), and you'd likely reach energy net-negative trying to make use of them.
“elderly people would be shivering constantly and highly susceptible to respiratory illness.”
At 66 degrees F? That sounds like put a sweater on if you’re chilly, not some near death extreme.
Any evidence that such an ‘extreme’ would cause issues?
It depends on how fat you are. Whales have blubber too.
I actually live on the same latitude as Ontario so -40F/C is not unusual. Add in windchill, and it gets even more common, given my windy location.
Yeah, I understand I'm probably an outlier at 66F. I was using the numbers more to point out how little a house temperature will drop with good windows and insulation.
People acclimatize pretty well if you let them. We keep our house at 65F all winter, and set the AC for 85F in the summer and everyone is pretty happy. The payback period on a good sweater is not very long.
85?!?
I've lived in extremely cold and extremely hot/humid places.
I cannot imagine setting the temp in the house that high.
>66F is ridiculously cold to me...I would find that very uncomfortable and elderly people would be shivering constantly and highly susceptible to respiratory illness.
I know people who live in the Mediterranean and get by with no heating during the winter with indoor and outdoor tempuratures this low or lower, so it seems that one can be conditioned into doing so.
Perhaps it's the presence of more sunlight on average rather than the temperature that makes the difference.
In the northwest corner of Massachusetts I converted an old school into an apartment building. I installed 2" of polystyrene on the outside and about a foot of cellulose in the ceilings. We relay on heatpumps for HVAC. I also installed a 50kW solar array. We don't start paying for heating until Nov/Dec and stop paying in Apr/May. Our Electric usage goes through the roof in Jan/Feb/Mar. Our weak point is that the exterior walls are about 40% windows. I hope to install better thermal shades which will cost about $80k. We also last fall installed a solar thermal array to for hot water and heat the hallway which is radiant floor. I would like to think we could achieve net-zero but I will likely need to expand the solar array by about 200%.
Thermal curtains are more effective than good windows. Good windows are minimally helpful.
Thermal curtains are a godsend. I remember reading about your journey and I hope it works out! I think it'd be money well spent.
In my last house, I replaced single pane windows with properly installed, sealed, and insulated double-hungs and it practically cut my heat bill in half. I agree that modern window to modern window replacement probably won't get you much, though.
Net zero. But not effectively zero. They sell energy during the day when no one needs it and buy it an night when we all need it. If we all switched to solar and heat pumps there would be blackouts and an energy crisis
What? They store the surplus in their batteries during the day and use it at night.
I genuinely do not understand why people are so afraid of solar. It's baffling.
Solar generates like 1/10 in the northern countries for half of the year. No batteries currently can solve this.
The problem with global ecological regulations is they never differentiate between countries on the equator or 30th parallel with countries around 60. They expect everyone to only run on sun and wind. It isn't possible. There has to be at least nuclear which is ridiculously expensive.
It's generally not an easy problem to solve otherwise it wouldn't be a problem anymore.
First sensible thing to do is to relax the expectations for countries like Poland that have no good way to compete with other countries energy wise because of geographical location that noone chooses.
It is extremely unfair to treat everyone the same even though every country has different energy resources.
There's a solution that costs less than fossil fuels, but it's a coordination problem and the USA is structurally unable to solve those anymore. I guess the Soviet Union wins the last laugh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community
Because the sun doesn't shine every day. Where I live, the sky is overcast 90% of the time in the winter. You can't charge the batteries during the summer and run them all winter.
They've fallen victim to a catastrophically easy scare tactic, unfortunately. "The sun only shines during the day therefore solar is bad!" Dumb, but easy.
In Toronto there is only daylight for 9 hours in winter
Yes surely some days are cloudy
So some days you get 5% capacity factor, and need some other energy source as well
So it harms the economics of the venture
Look at the profitability of companies building utility scale solar farms, they cost 100 million and the company hopes to get a 10% return and pay a 3% dividend.
They still have to contend with moving parts for tracking the angle of the sun, fans on inverters, contactors, clearing snow, mowing grass, site drainage, tornadoes etc, so sometimes it is not as easy as it sounds
All for a 7%? Why shouldn’t they just buy the s&p 500 and call it a day
And in my experience as someone who is actually trying to DO something, is exactly right.
But to be clear, it's less about night vs day and more about summer vs winter.
^ This.
I had a 20kWh array and 18kWh of batteries in Texas and it was GREAT in the summer. It'd start charging by 6am and be charged by 9am, even with simultaneous usage. Then we'd live off solar for the day (even with HVAC), go back on batteries around 9pm and they'd be out around 4am. No problem.
But during an overcast winter day, the stack wouldn't get power until 8/9, not make it to 50%, start discharging by 4/5pm, and be out by 10/11pm. It would easily be 8-10 hours where we were wholly dependent on the grid.
Not a problem, just a constraint to acknowledge and plan for.
At 66F, I struggle to do job because my fingers go numb and I can't touch-type well. If others have that problem, a small heat-lamp (like for a reptile cage) can locally heat just the area above the keyboard cheaply.
I use a desktop heating pad under my keyboard. It's an Apple thin, metal keyboard, which works really well for this. It uses about 20w.
Those brutally cold temperatures are really not compatible with most human beings
Weird because a significant number of humans beings in the USA immigrated at some point from a country in this climate.
Respectfully, 30kWh is not much in this context. In 10 years every modern 2-car home will have 200kWh on the driveway just from the EVs; add a 100kWh whole home battery at a price point close to a 10kWh battery today and the calculus changes in most of the world.
The cost of materials going into modern batteries easily leaves room for another 10x reduction in price, IMO where this all is heading is obvious. Zero marginal cost will win every day of the week.
FWIW we run our cabin on 15kWh battery today year around, though we do run a small wood stove to supplant the heat pump on cold winter days.
40 kWH of storage and 9 kW of solar panels is all I need personally to live a 1st world lifestyle in the bay area mostly off-grid except for water and internet.
I bet you didn't even see the tragic farce when writing your solution. Land development requiring ”2-car homes" is the driver of the problem! An apartment only has to heat one or two walls facing the outside instead of 4. That's 50-75% right off the top of your energy usage, with the mean closer to 75%.
There's nothing farcical about wanting one's own space where there's space to have one's own space. I'm grateful to no longer be sharing walls with a domestic abuse couple on one side and a midnight banshee on the other wall when she got busy. Energy is cheap, people are exhausting.
24kW solar "to keep lights on" is a funny way to underplay it. My house "summer" electricity usage is 60kWh per month, including water pump, DHW, septic and work from home for 2 adults. So 3h of your PV production would power my house for a month!
Regarding heating - I live in cold climate. We had average daily temperature of -10c this january, with multiple lows at -25c, and most nights at -15c. The house is 116sqm. Our heatpump COP for that month was above 2, and we used 787kWh total to heat the house, which is not a lot, actually. At 15 cents per kWh it is 118 euros for heating, for the coldest month in a decade! Considering also that we do not pay for electricity since april until october (solar panels).
We also paid less than those houses which use natural gas, wood pellets, etc. We also do not need to do anything to keep house warm. Also, during summer months we could "drive for free" in EV due to free solar electricity.
All that just to counter your take on "major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs".
> I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar system
This is not really a qualification to speak on how the grid works, at all.
Actually having panels on your roof doesn't give you unique insight into how solar panels operate - there is extensive data out there, any PV installation can become a data source trivially.
> The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.
One residence powering itself is not representative of how the grid works, and is not a good way to evaluate any power generation technology whether its PV, coal, nuclear, etc.
I'm actually trying to accomplish what the author is describing, so I have experience to talk about the difficulty of its implementation (unlike the author himself, who has zero experience with its implementation to speak of).
The article is about utility scale solar and storage I believe not home installations. It also mentions towards the end that in cold norther climates adding wind to the mix makes sense
Like I said he grossly understates the energy demand we use in the United States for heating during the winter.
I believe a lot of that demand is due to there being no incentive to increase energy efficiency.
There are TONS of incentives to increase energy efficiency.
Most local electric and gas companies will do free energy audits. Many will offer rebates if you install tankless water heaters, heat pumps, and insulation. Installers get kickbacks from manufacturers and tax credits if you buy higher efficiency equipment. Lenders will give you 0% loans to fund it all. The Feds and many States offer tax credits for all of the above.
I've done every single thing on this list in the last 5 years, some in Texas, some in Indiana.
I believe it to be a question of physics and not incentives.
Kind of silly to think when we've invented materials like areogel.
A wall is not a wall is not a wall.
A well built home with more insulation will, according to physics, lose less heat in any given scenario. So policies that push for things that improve buildings can reduce energy use.
Do you think we have reached peak building efficiency or something?
This is basically correct in the sense that we cannot simply just force everyone in, say, Minnesota to install electric baseboard heating, rooftop solar, and a battery pack, and then expect them to stay warm. There are periods of extended extreme cold and low solar flux where you would simply not be able to warm everyone's house - that's just physics.
But there are a lot of extra things you can do as an intermediate steps to dramatically close the gap. The main ones are:
1. Homes can be renovated to improve insulation 2. Cold weather heat pumps can handle most mild winter conditions efficiently 3. Electricity doesn't all have to be locally generated - it can be transmitted from other parts of the country. 4. You can keep using fossil fuel peaker plants, and still have incredible reduced overall emissions
House heating does not require massive amounts of energy. What it requires is efficiency. I've seen a house in Canada that was heated with a single candle when not occupied. Triple wall, reflective foil in between the wall layers, vertical movement of air in the walls interrupted every 30 cm or so. Absolutely amazing. And it still had sizeable windows. If your house doesn't leak energy like a sieve you don't need to replace as much either. Between passive solar and some augmentation you can do fine on an extremely modest energy budget.
And Canada is not exactly the warmest country on the planet.
Beyond the other better insulation comments, pairing electric with heat pumps that are SEER 10+ goes a long way to improve heating efficiency. Old resistive heaters are 1:1 on energy to heat, while newer heat pumps operate to much lower temperatures, and give you 1:10 or 1:15 electric:heat energy ratios.
That's not even close to correct. At the design lowest temperature (if <15°C), the very best get 2 COP, but most are 1.5 or lower. The problem is you have to accommodate the worst case.
The average of installed units is closer to 2.0 COP average, unfortunately. Multi-head units really drive down efficiency. A single-head Gree Sapphire can do 4-5 COP on average and that's the best you can get, so still nowhere near your guess.
My heat pump is SEER 19, and it can't heat my house below 25F. I think this is mostly due to it not being large enough - it was sized to cool my house on the hot summer days, and more energy needs to move on the cold winter days.
SEER, while a useful first-order approximation of efficiency, is for cooling and not heating. HSPF-V is for cold climates. Likely you just don't have a cold-climate heat pump which maintains full capacity down to -10°C (and some a little lower still), even before you get into appropriate maximum capacity.
> 1:10 or 1:15 electric:heat energy ratios
Under what circumstances? I've seen higher-end units that do maybe 1:5 in ideal conditions (heating to 68F when the ambient temp is 55F), but never seen units that do 1:10 or 1:15. This was about 2-3 years ago I did this research. Have things improved that drastically in the last few years?
Note that the article title has "the world" in it, immediately limits his specific claims to 80% of the world nearer the equatorr as most of the people in the world have more need for cooling than heating.
He even has a map that covers this and multiple paragraphs of discussion about high latitudes and wind in winter.
What's the actual effect you get out of that? Even half, 12 kW, would be an absolutte beast of heating (for a home), even with 'dumb' convection heating. With heat pumps 2-3 kW should really be enough.
There's simply not a lot of sunlight to go around during the winter and the battery capacity isn't large enough.
Keep in mind we WFH and homeschool so our house is used 24/7 and I think it's a good approximation for OP's goal.
The insulation matters a lot in home heating.
There isn't a lot you can reasonably do to something that is already there. I insulated my attic better, but there wasn't enough space to go as high as I wanted (I guess I could in the middle, but not around the edges). The thin walls are still thin, and not much I can do about it for a reasonable price. Likewise the windows are really bad, but the cost of good windows is large. By the time I insulated this house to modern standards I'm nearly half way to tearing it down and building something new (a complete destroy is a lot cheaper than trying to take something off without destroying the rest) - and a new house would get a lot of other benefits (I want a larger kitchen but there is no place to put it)
Which is why a lot of poorly insulated houses still exist - people have mostly done what can be done for a reasonable price, but anything that will make a difference is also very expensive with very long paybacks.
Proper windows make a huge difference, too.
And then you need proper ventilation systems once you "fix" insulation
Do you have a high efficiency heat pump, or how are you heating?
Heat pump is what I would have expected to be suitable for a setup like that. How big is the house I wonder.
I imagine my system is probably sufficient to keep an 800 sqft house comfortably warm in a climate where it goes down to the 20s in the winter.
First question should be: what latitude?
Because where I live around 55th this winter we had five straight weeks below -15c / 5f daily average plus enough snowfall that it was infeasible to clean anything but the most major roads.
Solar is out of question in these conditions and when thermal pump fails you have to evacuate. When just grid electricity fails you have to either have some sort of stored fuel backup or evacuate.
The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular among people living in what amounts to subtropics who can't even imagine how crazy they sound to most everyone else.
> The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular among people living in what amounts to subtropics
To be fair, 90% of the population lives within 45 degrees of the equator. If we're talking about global energy solutions for CO2 reduction, we can go a long way just by focusing on what works in these areas of the globe.
The article does also point out that hydro/wind are going to be important at higher latitudes in winter, but they also acknowledge that they don't account for seasonal variation in demand. That's the biggest flaw I can find in the analysis.
FWIW: I'm down in a mild arid climate at 35N, and yeah, 90% of our winter days are nearly sunny, even when the lows are in the teens. It's a different world for sure.
Most space heating is in the Northern parts though, so those are the ones that need to be addressed. There are solutions that are a pareto improvement, but it's a coordination problem and the USA is sufficiently broken and unable to solve those.
> so those are the ones that need to be addressed.
Make energy so expensive that people have to move away or burn their old house.
> "... handwavy crap ..."
handwavy argument. Yes, in the (sub)tropics the argument is even stronger pro-PV, not the least because it'll give you the opposite of heating - aircon - for free right when you need it. And considering summer heatwaves as have been seen the last few years "way north", that benefit will extend that way even if you wouldn't bother considering letting it "assist", if not fully replace, your heating. That said though, for 50° polewards and above, if you wanted to use PV in winter orient the panels vertically. If you can clad your too floor with shiplap larch so you can with PV panels. Given the price of timber ... there's a plan.
(only saying handwaving goes both ways)
Do check that your heater isn’t doing something ridiculous. A while back I helped someone debug a Mitsubishi Electric system on which the installer had set the fan speed control to high instead of auto (it’s an easily accessible setting on the thermostat). I forget exactly how much power was saved, but IIRC it was well over 30kWh/day.
I don’t know where all that energy was going. I expected some improvement but not anywhere near that much.
As far as I understood it, it only talks about electricity, so that doesn't seem like a contradiction to me. I think some electrification of heating is expected in 2030, but not that much bigger than it is now.
This is a large pv system for what I assume is a single family home. Do you have resistive in floor heating or an electric boiler feeding radiators? I imagine you could easily run a half dozen mini-splits drawing 500-1000w each, or a centralized heat pump. Happy to help if you can give more details.
Heat pumps help quite a lot, thanks to Carnot's law
Is a 30 kWh battery considered massive? My F-150 lighting has a 143 kWh battery.
Yes 30 kWh battery is considered large. It takes up a full 6 slot 2u rack in my garage and cost around $8k. In the context of OP's goals it's larger than what 99% of people in the world will ever have.
Approximately 1% of people in the world currently have an EV with a more than 30 kWh battery... and we're very early in the adoption curve of EVs and other large batteries.
If you need to heat/cool your home, is that really mild?
Isn't it all relative? Cooling actually isn't a problem at all with solar. I can run my AC full blast during the summer and still get the batteries fully charged before evening.
where are you? that is a massive amount of solar in any place at a reasonably low latitude. Is your house enormous or are you heating your house with resistive heating?
Well obviously lights aren't using up much of that power, you're powering everything else too.
If you’re one of the many companies working on reaching this goal, in defiance of everyone in this thread and elsewhere insisting it will never work, I’d like to work with you.
I’ve worked with all of the largest solar, battery and EV companies, as well as America’s largest electric utilities, building complex analytics software to enable the clean energy transition. I’m looking for my next role to continue moving the needle on eliminating fossil fuels. Find me here: https://matthewgerring.com
Just my 2c but I think the biggest thing we could do is to reduce the regulatory burden, cost, and complexity associated with installing roof mounted solar. This should be something that can be approved and installed in a week, and should be a half the price (put another it should have a double digit roi) . Right now all of the economics of home solar are consumed by regulation/complexity and the contractors / solar installation companies.
At the consumer scale the biggest thing we could do is follow the german model of panels that can be plugged into an outlet and installed in an hour by any homeowner (with the same capacity limits and requirements on the panels electronics to protect the grid/line workers during power outages).
That said I'm pretty sure that grid-scale solar is the future of most solar energy, not home solar. It's just cheaper to do things in bigger batches.
This statement is 100% correct, but I think is wrong - utility scale solar is 100% more efficient and cheaper to build at scale, the problem is finding large parcels of land to put it on that are close to where the power consumption is, as well as the complexity and cost associated with grid interconnection (and transition if it not close to demand)
Edit: though if we ever get to self driving cars there should be a whole lot of parking lots in metro areas that aren’t needed.
There's been a wave of legislation[1] introduced in the US to legalize so-called "balcony solar," small grid-tied solar systems that plug into a regular household outlet with zero permitting or interconnect requirements. This is already common in Europe, it's mildly complicated by our split-phase system but not much.
The reason for the high burden today is people have developed an inflated sense of how much the kWh they generate is worth. They install massive systems on their roofs to try to "cancel out" their power bill by exporting their entire daily power consumption over the course of a few sunny hours, which (when all their neighbors do the same) ends up being a costly burden for grid operators who then pass the costs on to users without panels. Smaller systems focused on immediate, local consumption rather than export are much better for the grid which is why they have support.
1. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/balcony-solar-tak...
100% this. If it was DIYable, its an order of magnitude cheaper.
I have leftover panels from an off grid install, and its extremely hard to get an approved permit for a small roof solar array + off the shelf AIO (Ecoflow/Anker)
1/2 the 'cost' of electricity is borne by grid operators, which are usually regulated monopolies. They are generally overstaffed, inneficient bureaucracies. I'm not against public service but I don't think that's. related issue.
If energy prices drop, they will be able to charge more money to justify more 'infra' etc..
The best thing we could ever do is get rid of our dependency on the energy grid.
If our homes could be powered like our cars ... that would be amazing.
That said - there are definitely theoretical efficiencies at scale and if we did get rid of the grid, we may never be able to get it back!
It's plausible that 'decentralized energy' may be very advantageous in that it puts a lot of competitive pressure on the centralized elements. Then we get the best of both worlds.
This would be more believable to skeptics if it wasn't all pro-arguments and theory. If you don't cover the cases in which it doesn't work, or at least mention the arguments against, it reads as propaganda.
The thing that reads the most false is the economics. A 480W solar panel is like $90 on sale, they're dirt cheap. A dozen of them is $1,080. But an installed solar+battery system tied to the grid is more like $30,000, and that's not covering the cost of replacing damaged equipment (lightning is a thing). That's just one home, using certified equipment.
For nation-states to do solar and battery, they need land, capital, and skilled labor that most nations don't have. Then there's the fact that not all nations get enough sun, or the fact that you must have a stable backup supply (not just for "cloudy days", but also emergencies and national defense), and multiple sources of equipment so your entire nation's energy isn't dependent on one country (China). Only about 10-20 nations on earth could switch to renewables for the majority of their energy in the next 10 years.
Or you are somewhere in Africa and have no electricity anyway so you start on something renewable.
I wish it made sense to do residential solar where I am. It probably does technically, but i hate the idea of spending a ton on a system and then STILL have to pay my power company; if you are connected to the grid at all where I am, you pay the power company $5/kw/month of solar capacity and your excess sell-back rates are insanely bad (0.03/kwh, vs billed usage rate at $0.17/kwh)
If you could install solar at ~150% of the cost of utility scale solar it’d make a ton of sense, but at 300%+ it’s hard to make the math work
The next generation of home batteries will be a game changer. It will do for home energy storage what Lithium-Ion has done for laptops, phones and vehicles and it will be a lot safer too.
Providing 90% of power is not "powering the world".
It really helps to also have a complementary storage technology with low capacity capex, even if the round trip efficiency is lower. This would complement batteries in the same way ordinary RAM complements cache memory in a computer.
The article specifically notes the following:
>We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels.
So then they are wrong. The last 5-10 percent is the hardest part and it's the one consumers complain the most about! You can't run a factory on 90% power availability
But you _can_ run it on 90% solar plus 10% fossil fuels to achieve 100% power availability, which is what GP and the article suggest.
That's not carbon neutral. You can use synthetic fuels to make it fully carbon neutral (way easier to store than the often-proposed H2) but that's really just another battery.
The issue is that to achieve that you can't just build 90% solar plus 10% fossil fuels. You would need to build 100% solar + 100% fossil fuels for the 10% of the time solar doesn't work.
If you build batteries on the scale that the article suggests (and is probably going to happen in the real future) you can use batteries charged from fossil fuels.
It's a few percent dirtier (round trip losses) but in return you can use gas plants that are 50% more efficient to charge them rather than run peaker plants.
And of course that's ignoring wind which is nearly as cheap as solar and anti-correlated with it.
Good thing it's already built then! Well, of course it cost money to maintain though.
Yes, but if you need to have all that infrastructure anyway it no longer makes sense to compare the cost of solar+batteries with the cost of fossil fuels because you actually need to have both.
If you compare the total cost of solar with just the fuel cost of fossil fuels (ignoring its CapEx and non-fuel OpEx) that swings the equation a lot.
Infrastructure cost for 100% is the same as infrastructure cost for 10%? That's not true. The distribution network is the part that can't be scaled, but it can also be reused for either source, so it doesn't double in cost.
No, I'm saying infrastructure cost for 100% is the same as infrastructure cost for 100%. You can't build 10% as much fossil fuel infrastructure and expect it to carry 100% of the load when solar isn't working.
You can run anything on 90% renewable and anything else for the remaining 10%.
As my house is on hydro-energy and everything is electric, I'm currently on 100% renewable and majors factories around me are the same.
Yes, hydro isn't available everywhere, just like solar or wind isn't, but wherever it's possible, we should have it.
Sure but I think if solar really did provide 90% of the world's electricity it wouldn't be inaccurate to say it powered the world.
(Heating and transport are harder to solve of course.)
Yes, one can. The issue is that it requires synchronization.
The goal of getting to renewables is to not remove every carbon source but to slow the rate of change so we can adapt. 90% meets that.
Once you take politics out of solar, EVs and batteries we’re all in agreement. Do your part, do your fair share, don’t wait.
No, they can't, not unless we get rid of the fossil fuel lobby, which pretty much runs the world these days. Which isn't surprising, given that fossil fuels are the largest industry ever created by mankind. If you compare it to anything else which was actively harmful and yet big money tried to convince you it wasn't (like tobacco, alcohol, or really anything else), there is nothing that huge. So it isn't surprising that the industry fights change.
EV adoption has been successfully held back mostly by PR, Germany shifted from nuclear to coal and gas, the US president is doing everything to dismantle anything that isn't fossil fuel and promotes fossil fuels, the list goes on.
I think this sells the German energy mix short - fossil fuel has been on a steady decline in the energy mix for about 2 decades now.
Comparing 2020[^2] to 2025[^1]:
- renewables (solar+wind) went from 181 TWh to 219 TWh
- fossil (coal+gas) stayed constant (177 TWh and 179 TWh)
So I'd say we switched from nuclear (60TWh in 2020) to renewables & imported nuclear - but the long-term trend is towards renewables.
[1]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/... [2]: (pdf) https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/N...
I realize there is a lot of verbal gymnastics going on around this issue, and the word "renewables" is being used a lot, but my point still stands.
Another way to look at your numbers is that had the nuclear plants not been turned off, fossil (coal+gas) could have been reduced by 60TWh.
But they weren't reduced. They remained the same.
From the point of view of the fossil fuel industry: WIN!
The fossil fuel lobby can only do so much. Solar has gotten so cheap it's taking over on its own. Companies are doing it for no reason other than the math makes sense. EV batteries are nearing that point too. You can only keep BYD out of the US for so long.
The fossil fuel industry is fighting a rearguard action at this point.
> Germany shifted from nuclear to coal and gas
Sure, but you're attributing this, deliberately or not, to the wrong cause. It wasn't that the fossil fuel industry somehow won - it was range of factors possibly including geopolitics, some existing plants aging, an emotional response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the Green lobby.
Basically, they voted to kill nuclear without a solid plan for an alternative, and coal/gas is the default option for filling the gaps left in the absence of timely and sufficiently rapid investment in other technologies.
Hmm. After former chancellor (Schroeder) heavily pushed Russian gas pipelines (Nord Stream 1 and 2) and then swiftly moved to working for Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom, I have a different outlook on things.
I mean yeah, but $100 a barrel makes it difficult to argue.
Elon said the same thing about the US a decade ago.
"a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah."
https://www.pcmag.com/news/elon-musk-running-us-on-solar-req...
See you next decade when we're saying the same thing and not doing it?
Musk was proposing about 1.2TW of solar capacity, the US installed about 250GW since then and is currently installing about 50GW a year and is projected to have 770GW by 2036 in a decades time.
So the US is probably over-delivering compared with many things Elon has proposed delivering himself.
Apples and oranges though. One is a massive public works program and the other is private.
We'll replace the fossil fuel cartel with the wind/solar/battery cartel and everything will be better. Right.
What about STORING excess power and delivering it during the day at a same level ? That is a critical part! I remember last time it was too expensive.
At temperate latitudes, summer/winter is a bigger deal than day/night. To the point where it makes sense to orient fixed panels tilted south and you still get a 2-3x difference in daily capacity between the seasons.
Related is the other comments here that mention air-conditioning is largely a non-issue if you spec for year-round solar. If you are generating 3x as much energy in July compared to January, and January can power your house, then the A/C is basically free.
Thats whats driving the buildout in places like spain.
Solar power is in curltailment most days, so to make money solar operators need to add batteries to take free energy and shift it to the ultra expensive parts of the day.
You can buy a full day's worth of energy storage with an array of LiFePO4 batteries for less than the typical 3% estimate of annual home improvement and maintenance costs you should be budgeting for as a homeowner. The cost problem usually comes from the labor and every solar installation company seemingly being ran by scam artists.
grid-scale batteries are accelerating more rapidly than anyone thought a few years, it’s not really seen as an unsolvable problem anymore
Because solar energy production doesn't just vary by time-of-day, it also varies seasonally. Where I live, winter solar production collapses due to decreased daylight hours and cloud cover. At the same time, energy use skyrockets due to heating demand.
We would need a lot of batteries to be able to charge during the summer and drain during the winter!
They can and they will. In the longer term there simply won't be anything else.
China understands this, parts of the EU understands this. The US is currently dead set on betting on the wrong technology, and it's going to put them so far behind.
Imagine a world where people didn't care about labeling new things "woke", and instead could all sit down and say, "we're going to make major investments in next generation infrastructure to ensure our capacity and independence."
The American shale gas/fracking boom really distorted a lot of things. The strategic energy situations of the United States, the EU, and China were all pretty similar in the late 20th Century: major dependence on OPEC-controlled oil and gas. Post-fracking, the US strategic energy situation has diverged from the others.
This difference leads indirectly to things like the current "not war" in Iran. (Iran's geography already gives it strong bargaining power via pressure on energy markets. It would have an even stronger hand if the US was not capable of energy independence).
The long term impacts on climate changes are even more negative. It's hard to supplant a cheap, ubiquitous energy source with strong negative externalities when those externalities are subtle, gradual, and strongly denied via propaganda by entrenched interests.
I agree and lets not label something as dangerous or expensive if it can be made to be affordable and safe. "As of 2026, 59 nuclear power plants are operational in mainland China, second globally to the United States, which has 94." "There are over 28 further plants under construction with a total power of 32.3 GW, ranked first for the 18th consecutive year"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
China burns significantly more coal than the USA and Europe combined and has no environmental laws standing in the way of their nuclear power plants.
Imagine a world where people don't care about labeling new things as "regressive" or "anti-environmental"
China is doing that because they are profitable, not because they care about the environment. Why would they care the coal use?
Having lots of cheap energy is always boosts industry and reduces cost of living for everyone. The way China accomplished that was by investing heavily in every sort of energy and building large scale infrastructure, instead of adding roadblocks at every stage.
> China burns significantly more coal than the USA and Europe combined
Which is expected when both Europe and the US outsourced most manufacturing to China. It's actually surprising China is so low given they're literally the factory of the world
Apart from the current administration's absolutely hilariously bad governing, the US economy really only cares about profit. The same is going to happen to any country with outsized income inequality.
> the US economy really only cares about profit
Which would be ok if we more effectively were able to include externalities into company's overhead, instead of constantly subsidizing them.
This argument would make more sense if Chinese companies were all going out of business due to their governments heavy investments in solar and batteries.
They're not anti-renewables as a bet, they're anti-renewables strategically. If you like going to war, you can power your warfighting apparatus much easier with a gas tank than a battery. If you want better defense, you don't depend on hostile nations for your energy needs. The US wants to double down on oil because it likes to fight wars and it's paranoid about defense.
There are influential people who make lots of money when the US Govt forces the country to rely on fossil fuels.
Unsure why you're getting downvoted. I know politics is generally frowned upon here but this is absolutely relevant to the conversation.
>We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels.
I think a lot of people truly dont get this.
Those days when the wind isnt blowing, the sun isnt shining and the batteries and pumped storage are depleted can be easily handled with, e.g. power2gas.
It's pretty expensive (per kwh almost as much as nuclear power) but with enough spare solar and wind capacity and a carbon tax on natural gas it becomes a no brainer to swap natural gas for that.
Nonetheless this wont stop people saying "but what about that last 5-10%?" as if it's a gotcha for a 100% green grid. It isnt. It never was.
And nuclear is already in the 5-10% range in the US, so if we just maintained that level, we could get carbon free.
No, you couldnt. Nuclear power is not dispatchable.
> Nuclear power is not dispatchable.
I mean it is, its just slower.
but if you have batteries, then you can divert the power to the batteries to keep them topped up.
The article ignores hydropower. The numbers/prices look a lot better with solar + wind + hydro + battery.
Norway runs almost entirely on hydropower. Sweden has a lot.
Iceland runs on hydropower and geothermal.
I’m happy to be wrong about this globally, but in my neck of the woods the readily exploited hydro resources are already exploited to 90% of their capacity and have been for 100 years. Hydro is in many ways the ultimate renewable energy, but that’s been true since electrification and we’ve been using it as part of the energy mix since then. I’d love to be wrong but my understanding is that there isn’t a huge amount of untapped new hydro capacity available without having severe impacts on ecosystems
Hydro in Norway goes very well with windmills in Denmark.
Very simplified:
Wind blows mostly in Denmark during the day, so Norway stops hydro during the day and imports electricity from Denmark's windmills.
During night the wind is mostly still in Denmark so windmills don't produce much and Denmark imports from Norway's hydro.
In this way you can stretch the capacity from hydro using windmills even though Norway isn't a good place for windmills.
Also what is probably used in your country is Pumped-storage hydroelectricity . During the day you pump water into the reservoir using wind/solar energy and discharge e.g at night .
This is even more true with international grid connections. Europe in a cold spell? Solar countries import, wind & hydro export. Europe in a heat wave? Flip the switches the opposite direction.
Hydroelectric capacity is largely built out, so you can look at current generation mix to see how much it is likely to contribute.
In the US capacity is likely to go down (dams are expensive and many time old dams are removed instead of being rebuilt).
Before anyone cries about the environmental cost of lithium, concrete batteries are a thing and are far more ideal for grid storage.
The "storeable fuel
No, no they can’t. As has been explained over and over again by people who know better. Someday yes when the tech improves (changes) dramatically. But that’s not today.
Nuclear could have powered the world easily and we could have done it with 1960s technology. And we could easily do electricity and heating with nuclear quite easily. The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis.
And we can go to 100% of electricity from nuclear, we don't have to have this dumb argument about 'the last 5-10%'. Because its reliable.
And if you actually do the math nuclear would have been cheaper then all this nonsense we have been doing for 30 years with wind, solar and batteries. The cost of the gird updates is like building a whole new infrastructure. With nuclear, the centralized more local networks are perfectly reasonable.
I did some scenarios starting in Year 2000 or Germany to all nuclear, vs wind (off-shore, on-shore), and solar (partly local partly brought in) and batteries. The numbers aren't even close, nuclear would have been the much better deal. Even if you are very conservative and don't account for major learning effect that countries like France had when building nuclear.
That said, even with nuclear, having a few Lithium batteries that can go all out for 1-2h is actually a good deal. Its really only about peak shaving the absolute daily peaks. What you don't want is having to build batteries that can handle days or weeks.
Making hydrogen from water and solar light is certainly better than using nuclear energy for that.
There is no reason for consuming valuable nuclear fuel, for which better uses exist, instead of using free solar light.
The efficiency of converting solar energy into hydrogen is already acceptable. The same is true for the efficiency of converting hydrogen and concentrated carbon dioxide into synthetic hydrocarbons, which are the best means for long term energy storage, and also for applications like aircraft and spacecraft.
The least efficient step remains concentrating the diluted carbon dioxide from air.
While the efficiency of converting solar energy and water into hydrogen by artificial means is already better than that of living beings, the living beings are still much more efficient in converting H2 and CO2 from air into organic substances.
Besides improving the efficiency of the existing techniques, an alternative method of CO2 capture would be the genetic engineering of a bacterium that would produce some usable oil from H2 and air, with an improved productivity over the existing bacteria, which use most of the captured energy to make substances useful for them, not for us, so unmodified bacteria would not have a high enough useful output.
Nuclear reactors make awful targets in a conflict, not sure having many around is generally a good idea if conflict is a risk and there are alternatives.
> and there are alternatives
That's a big if, though. Solar and batteries require globalisation, based on fossil fuels.
I feel like nuclear reactors are a better choice.
> in a conflict, not sure having many around is generally a good idea
On the other hand, blowing nuclear reactors could be considered a big escalation. We see with Iran and Ukraine that it's not exactly the first thing one wants to target.
For shipping?
Wind, Tidal or geothermal are also around, for example.
My point was that photovoltaic is "an alternative" to nuclear reactors, but an alternative that relies on globalisation. Nuclear reactors... much less.
IIRC nuclear doesn't really work well as the last 5-10%. Start-up and shut-down for nuclear reactors is a slow process. When it's generating, it needs to just keep on generating. Not so quick to dial down or up just because the wind is(n't) blowing.
It's not that slow. They can ramp up and down over hours, and those demand patterns are known in advance. Combine with battery, pumped storage, or synfuel generation to soak up excess power during low demand times, and use that to provide peaker capacity during high demand times.
Demand following for nuclear is possible (after all, if you produce 10X but the demand suddenly drops to 7X, what you can always do is to "dump" 3X worth of steam instead of injecting it in the turbine), but because the cost of nuclear is mainly upfront, it is not cost efficient at all.
If it costs 10X dollars upfront to build a nuclear central that can produce 10X energy, then if you run it at 100%, it will cost 1 dollar per 1 unit of energy. If you follow the demand, you will not produce 10X, but let's say to illustrate maybe 5X, and it will cost 2 dollars per 1 unit of energy.
You are right about storage as a way to help with demand following, but if you build enough storage capacity, then you basically have solved "for free" a big part of the problem linked to the intermittence of renewables. In this case, you have the choice between building an expensive nuclear central and a distributed cheaper renewable generation.
I'm not saying it demonstrate renewables are better, but that it is true that nuclear is not the obvious winner it looks like before we look into the practical details.
The problem is the economics. They’re just horrifyingly expensive to build. The equivalent to each new large scale reactor in GWe requires tens of billions in subsidies.
The next problem comes from incentives. Why should anyone with solar or storage buy this expensive grid based nuclear electricity?
Why should their neighbors not buy surplus renewables and instead pay out of their nose for expensive nuclear powered electricity?
EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for the existing french nuclear fleet. Let alone the horrifyingly expensive new builds.
And that is France which has been actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and it still leaks in on pure economics.
It's not a technical limitation, it's economic. The cost of nuclear is almost all in building (and decommissioning) the plant, the fuel is almost free. So you want to produce flat out as long as you can get almost any positive price for the output.
> The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis.
Found this interesting: https://phys.org/news/2026-02-microbial-eco-friendly-butanol.
Disappointed the article doesn't transmission of electricity and how little the loss is. People are quite surprised that it's like 3.5% per 1000 km.
We could just build out huge solar farms in AZ and transmit it accordingly. We did it for railroads, why not here?
That number is improbably low. Transmission losses from local power plants to consumers is on the order of 10%.
Cite, please?
By 2050 is the important caveat. That's assuming constant production of batteries at the current scale and production.
It also assumes we figure out how to economically recycle materials from batteries (and total recovery may never be possible). Grid scale lithium batteries have an effective lifecycle of 15 years. In this potential future, global lithium reserves would actually start getting choked up before the 2050 goal.
Nuclear is inevitable and we all need to stop pretending otherwise.
> Grid scale lithium batteries have an effective lifecycle of 15 years. In this potential future, global lithium reserves would actually start getting choked up before the 2050 goal.
I think the long-term solutions here are not grid-scale lithium batteries, but pumped hydro, flow batteries, or compressed air. Lithium batteries have just gotten a bit ahead on the technological growth curve because of the recent boom in production from phones and EVs, but liquid flow batteries can be made using common elements, and are likely to be cost-effective once the tech gets worked out better.
So: I don't think we can say "lithium energy storage is unfeasible large-scale and long-term" and thus conclude that nuclear is inevitable, unless we also look at all the other storage alternatives.
We already have an electric grid we don’t need to build a new one from scratch just replace infrastructure that gets to old and add more for whatever extra demand shows up.
Obviously other energy sources are going to exist and non solar power will be produced, but nuclear is getting fucked in a solar + battery heavy future. Nuclear already needs massive subsidies and those subsidies will need to get increasingly large to keep existing nuclear around let alone convince companies to build more.
Nuclear costs are massively skewed by the compliance costs.
Reactors that only took 5 years to build before ALARA are still safely running 80 years later. The 15-20 year build and certification time for new reactors is purely made up. The countries that are building our battery and solar pipeline (China, South Korea, Japan) are all building nuclear domestically at 1/3 of the cost of us.
More importantly, for cobalt and lithium - we still exclusively rely on natural raw resources that are still very cheap. Meanwhile we have established reserves of fissile material for thousands of years.
Maybe it won't be in the near future, or even in our lifetime, but there is no way the human race does not turn to nuclear eventually.
> That's assuming constant production of batteries at the current scale and production.
That's a terribly pessimistic assumption when production has been scaling exponentially, and cost per kWh dropping exponentially.
EVs are essentially a giant battery on wheels. Seems there is a good opportunity to configure them as bidirectional power banks for your local grid. You could rewire all parking slots to have a plugin that acts as a bidirectional power station. Imaging how much power could be moved around with such a grid! This would require a major investment in power transmission layouts, but a city full of batteries on wheels.
California has registered around 1M Teslas alone. So this is like having a 1Mx80kwh = 80GWh battery at your service. As a reference, the largest solar + storage facility in California is around 3.2 GWh.
Just charging your car when electricity is cheap and avoiding times when it is scarce would solve most of the issues, provided there is a dynamic pricing system in place.
It's nice for an emergency, and almost all EVs can do that already.
But people pay extra to put the batteries over wheels because they need to haul charged batteries around. It's not normally useful to discharge them locally.