Do you mean how are people making archive links? They go to archive.is and provide a paywalled link and the website archives and displays the content. I can't tell you how they get around paywalls or how archive.is has managed to not get shutdown, but that's how it's done.
Add archive.is in front of it
https://archive.is/https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-...
If you get an nginx page (I seem to get one pretty often), you can try archive.today, archive.li, or any of the alternates in the URL section on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today
If the article has already been archived, you can select one of the snapshots which the archive site will show you.
If it hasn't, click to archive it and wait ~5 minutes for it to finish. You'll get access to the snapshot and a URL you can share.
It appears to be a rate-limit mechanism of some sort specific to a fingerprint. Clearing cookies for archive.[is|vn|fo|md] may (or may not) get you past it.
What would be a critical look though? They thought it would be good to invest in it and so they did, other countries also had that choice if they so wished to sponsor it for strategic purposes but they are ruled by a different ideology which made them decide to not do it.
I don't think there's anything to be critical about, they invested a lot in it and are reaping the benefits.
Should we also be critical about how the Internet started as a state-sponsored project? Many things that aren't commercially viable in its initial state of development need state-sponsorship to get off the ground to be exploited by private companies, the Chinese saw an opportunity for that in solar PV, kudos to them.
Granted 500W isn't nothing, but what if it's snows?
Luckily there is this thing called a grid, and the UK has a lot of anti-correlated wind generation on it, which helps a lot.
All my detailed stats are here:
https://www.earth.org.uk/energy-series-dataset.html
Also see:
China is actually carrying our lazy asses.
Its not laziness, its corruption. The USA has a government that's tainted by moneyed interests who don't want their established gravy train derailed no matter how much it's fucking the entire planets environment. Now add to that, the current administration is too stupid and short sighted to ever incentivize change.
But this isn’t Russia or Iran. They’ve also done so so much good while the west studies its own navel and makes “wealth” out of paper and bits.
I’ve often thought “yes, but where’s the goddamn gratitude”. It’s good to see it.
Any disagreement in how much they should be taxed (e.g. 10,20,30,50,90%) can be considered a subsidy.
What people are mostly concerned with is whether a subsidy is distorting via over production. E.g. when China entered the market in solar, most western solar companies following stricter environmental protection requirements went out of business.
A "critical look" from a US magazine would explore how, with solar power clearly being the future, the US has abdicated its energy dominance to another country. It would discuss the potential ramifications of us not owning our energy infrastructure supply chain the way we do with oil/gas, and what might be done about that.
The New Yorker is a US magazine. From the US perspective, yes, it is "good" when we do it and "bad" when China does it in a way that could negatively impact us.
Obviously it is more complex than that, but in a nutshell it's part butt-hurt and part amalgamation of state and private enterprise that does not mesh well with classic liberal ideas of freedom and human dignity.
1) Gas peakers - where every kilowatt hour delivered by solar or wind is just a kilowatt hour of gas that would otherwise have been burned. We are generally still here - still burning gas while it's sunny and windy.
2) Pumped storage and batteries gets us to 98% carbon free grids with ~5 hours of storage with 90% roundtrip efficiency - https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
(98%/5 hours is for australia and will vary for different countries but probably not wildly).
3) Syngas fills in that last 2-5% with ~50% roundtrip efficiency. Every kilowatt hour used in those 5% times - those dark, windless nights will be quite expensive although, counterintuitively still cheaper than an every kilowatt hour generated by a nuclear power plant - https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
3 and to some extent 2 will require natural gas to be prohibited or taxed heavily.
One study determined the cheapest energy grids for many countries. IOW, if you had to rebuild the energy grid from scratch today, what would be the cheapest way to meet your needs?
And the answer was 90 - 95% renewables, depending on country. Solar + wind + batteries for 90 - 95% of the power, with natgas peakers for the rest. And that 90-95% number increases every year.
Another survey noted that while Australia and many other equatorial countries are optimal for solar, Finland is pessimal. Most countries have already passed the point where solar is best in pure financial terms. Finland hasn't, but it's very close. Which is insane, given that Finland is a poor place for solar, but a great place for wind, nuclear & geothermal.
I doubt there are any places in the world where some carbon free combination of solar, wind, hydro, pumped storage, batteries and syngas isnt economic.
Wind is the dominanting renewable source, with enough of it for Finland to enjoy the second cheapest electricity in Europe last year. And indeed, even solar is profitable, hindered by the winters but helped by the long days during summer.
> second cheapest electricity in Europe
Finland has lofty goals for becoming a hub for new green energy intensive industries, but these require large amounts of capital and it'll remain to be seen if that realizes.
Just one note, I believe what you mean is some form of gas made from renewables, most likely hydrogen.
"Syngas" is a term that has a relatively specific meaning in the chemical industry, notably it is a gas mixture of mostly Carbon Monoxide and Hydrogen. I do not think that this is what you mean.
Or just some old gas plants. No one is demanding a 100% solution. Let's get to 85% or whatever first. Arguments like this (which always appear in these threads) are mostly just noise. Pick the low hanging fruit, then argue about how to cross the finish line.
And the bit about China is an interesting article about trade policy but entirely unrelated to the technology being discussed. "Because it's Chinese" is a dumb reason to reject tech.
Policy makers are trying to decide whether it’s too risky to shut down all manufacturing of heavy machine capable industries and hand it over to China.
So you don't know what the number is?
> China has on average ~ 10x the amount of subsidies than the west when it comes to manufacturing.
And yet you just randomly decide to 10X it for china?
Typical disingenuous anti-china nonsense. What's next? China spends 10X on defense compared to "the west"?
European analysis resulted in an 18% offsetting duty, meaning Chinese subsidies are lower than American ones.
According to the treasury dept (and the EU): https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2455
What if... (stick with me here because this is about to get crazy)... free market capitalism isn't the best solution for everything...?
Tariffs in the USA are basically a tax on Americans. The aim being to make imported goods more expensive for Americans so they're more likely to buy local goods which would otherwise be more expensive than the imported version.
There's going to be a beautiful synergy here between electric vehicles and solar. Because an EV battery is already easily enough to power most houses through 14-16 hours of darkness, so if it can be a sink for solar during the day it can then be a source during the night. The future will have a combo of residential battery storage and V2H/V2G which has an attractive property that it scales naturally with population (every new person that moves to a location brings their EV battery with them).
It may be true for some who WFH often or in some cases, but not enough EVs will be able to discharge overnight for a v2g battery revolution.
BYO house solar is optional when there is grid solar (and home solar exports).
1. You have access to a charger at work 2. You’re retired 3. You take public transportation or bike to work (fairly common scenario in Europe) 4. Work-from-home (got more common after covid, I know many people who do it at least once a week now, and that’s generally enough to charge what you need to drive for a week) 5. You charge only during the day on weekends (should be enough to cover the week for most people, even if you feed say 20% of it back to the grid through the week) 6. Rental fleet operators (booking data can inform charge/discharge policy) 7. Residential batteries, where you charge the EV at night with what you got during the day, every day, but set up a policy where you allow both the home battery and the EV battery to discharge if the electricity is expensive enough. I could see myself making decisions about WFH or biking to work based on electricity pricing.
Remember that even my little town car (Renault Zoe) has a 52kWh battery.... which would run my house for five days. So the energy stored in these systems can be considerable.
The people doing these things have thought a lot about it. Take a look at this video - it's a bit 'puff piece' but shows what one way of doing it looks like:
Would be stella if people could charge during noon. I don't know how feasible that is.
Conversely, if we didn’t drive to work, we probably wouldn’t have a car.
On the other hand, we have a big solar array at work so if we had on-site parking (we don’t) we could drive our power home.
It’s probably impractical in reality though, the tax treatment would be chaos and we use the power we generate at work during the day on-site.
Moreover, even if we take the top 25% percent of commute distances (which is >40km per day), that still leaves you with 10 days until you have to recharge. If you recharge every weekend, you still have plenty of battery capacity for your needs outside of sun hours (you likely will need only 1-2 kWh per day anyway).
Still close to nobody demands it today, and a few people are already successfully selling it. So I don't see where you found a problem here.
People use more energy during the day.
People, globally, use more energy in the summer.
This might not be intuitive if you live nearer the poles, but that's not representative of where the global population live.
And in some of those places, like California people obsesses about the "peak" that is left after you subtract all the solar energy, even if it's lower than the previous real peak.
Luckily that fake peak is immediately after sunset and so easily beaten with a small amount of battery, leaving a much cheaper and easier problem to solve as the peaks are really what drives electricity costs, dictating transmission size and standby capacity.
Peak electrical demand does not coincide with solar generation. Generally, peak demand is either early in the morning or the late afternoon, when solar production tapers. In order to make up the difference, you'd need a couple thousand megawatt-hours of battery capacity for most regions. You'd also need this to happen twice a day - either side of typical working hours.
This is true in Tokyo and Mumbai. Tokyo's data is here https://www.tepco.co.jp/en/forecast/html/calendar-e.html
Mumbai's peak electricity demand is typically in the late afternoon, when solar output starts to dip.
The solution to this is not more battery capacity, but varied power sources. Wind, solar, gas, nuclear, etc.
Spot checking July 2019 the oldest year it had, it's peak day also had the peak at the same time.
Do we have different definitions of "late afternoon"?
I also don't understand the link's differentiation between "demand" and "usage", but "demand" is higher and nearer noon it seems.
It's also not clear if home solar is accounted for and is a factor. You'll see a "demand dip" when behind the meter solar is generating if you're only seeing the grid side of things. Some grids estimate and include it or call it out separately.
A lot of this article was clearly written with rose-colored glasses on, but this might be the silliest line of all. The author just finished talking about how a single country makes up the overwhelming share of solar panel and battery production, but hey, look how much more "diffuse and ubiquitous" it is!
Sun -> plants (corn) -> liquid that goes in (modified) cars
> China is basically a single point of failure for future power expansion
I'm all for solar, generally. Among current renewables, it's the most feasible solution for much of the US. But the idea that they're a "one-time" cost is fantasy.
[1]: https://www.epa.gov/hw/end-life-solar-panels-regulations-and... [2]: https://solar.huawei.com/en/blog/2024/lifespan-of-solar-pane... [3]: https://www.igs.com/energy-resource-center/energy-101/how-lo... [4]: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/09/13/how-long-do-residenti... [5]: https://www.nrel.gov/news/detail/features/2021/scientists-st... [6]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221282712...
I'm not arguing against maintenance items like cleaning, because obviously fossil fuel power plants need maintenance too. I'm directly responding to the perceived geopolitical risk. The question is: is it better for a country to experience a geopolitical risk with a solar-panel-producing nation or with an oil-producing nation? Bringing up items like cleaning is laughably irrelevant because where's the geopolitical risk in cleaning a solar panel?
If that's your only question, the answer is straightforward then, there's more oil producing nations than solar panels producing nations making the risk with oil lower.
China is so big in this sector that I don't think that you could even create a real strategy where they get <25% market share in the country solar imports.
You could somewhat mitigate this risk by buying a stock worth 5 years of panel installation of the country but as far as I know, nobody is doing that.
One point curious in its omission is whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget. Presumably that’s the critical metric in all of this.
[Edit: I ran this question through ChatGPT and the initial (unvalidated) response wasn’t so exciting. This obviously put a dampener on my mood. And I wondered why people like McKibben only talk about the upside. It can sometimes feel a bit like Kayfabe, playing with the the reader’s emotions. And like my old man says: if someone tells you about pros and cons, they’re an advisor. If someone tells you only about pros, they’re a salesman.]
I'm not sure I understand. There's no carbon budget, any carbon that we emit is carbon we'll have to re-capture somehow and the longer it stays in the atmosphere the longer it will have a heating effect.
I think renewable have accelerated to the point of matching the electricity growth worldwide: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
We've also passed the peak of CO2 per capita, but since the population is still growing we are still increasing carbon emitions worldwide. It's going to be a while before we stop emitting anything, and then longer before we start re-absorbing it...
That is an average of 4 tons of CO2/person/year for 10 billion people. Americans are at 3x that right now, Europeans/Chinese 2x, and a few wealthy nations are already there (France, Switzerland, Israel). Poorer countries like India are significantly under that value (for now!).
Doubling that CO2 budget to 6000 Gt would make things significantly worse (5° expected temperature increase or more).
https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/en/news-archive/copernic...
Even very rich nations have a handful of prototype plants for CO2 capture right now at best, and the budget for things like this is the first thing that gets slashed by Doge et al.
If we were on track for lots of CO2 capture by 2050, we would see the beginnings already (massive investments, quickly scaling numbers of capture sites, rapid tech iteration).
Fully agree with the rest of your point though. I consider CO2 emissions as basically "raising the difficulty level" for current and future humans (in a very unethical way, disproportionately affecting poor/arid/coastal nations).
I'm also highly confident that human extinction from climate change is completely off the table (and I think a lot of people delude themselves into believing that scenario for no reason).
Carbon dioxide a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, even in concentrations which are immediately harmful to human life.
At the moment it's 400 parts per million. So in order to extract 1kg of Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere you have to pump 2500kg of air through the system. This alone makes it unlikely we can do this profitability.
You then need to extract the carbon dioxide using some technique which will probably involve cooling or pressuring that volume of air. Before finally transforming carbon dioxide, a very stable chemical compound, into a reagent which is actually useful (probably carbon monoxide).
Terraform Industries (and others, like Synhelion) has a plausible if slightly optimistic target to be price competitive with fossil fuels for methane in the early 2030s.
Some places with very cheap to extract hydrocarbons like Saudi Arabia may be able to compete for a very long time, but there are many futures where most of humanity's hydrocarbon consumption (including the ones used for the chemical industry, plastics, etc) derives from atmospheric carbon.
And this can happen fast, the world (mostly China) has developed a truly massive manufacturing capacity for PV.
If such a technology was possible then it would be far better to start with carbon capture from existing emitters. The concentration of CO2 being easily 3 orders of magnitude higher.
Higher CO2 concentration is better but certainly not needed, it doesn't make or break the economics.
Will it be that cheap? I think so, given that trees and grass etc. exist and get their carbon from the air.
This actually means I'm also worried about something currently impossible: that when we do develop the tech sufficiently to be useful, if it's cheap enough to be profitable, nothing would seem to stop extraction. So CO2 goes down to, what, 300ppm? Pre-industrial? Ice age? Same coin, other side. We want to flip a coin and have it land on the edge.
A single world government could organise to fix this either way, but as all leadership roles come with the risk of the leader being fundamentally bad, this isn't something I'd advocate for either.
This is an extremely improbable scenario, for several reasons:
1) If you actually use the extracted CO2, then it gets re-emitted on use, and the atmospheric concentration is virtually unaffected.
2) Concentration difference alone makes it very unlikely that we'll ever extract CO2 as cheaply as O2 from ambient air (or carbon from a mine), and CO2 is not really an appealing ressource compared to its components, either (so demand would presumable be pretty low for centuries, even if the price comes down a lot).
Depends what you use it for, e.g. synthetic diamond windows won't re-emit unless they catch fire.
> 2) Concentration difference alone makes it very unlikely that we'll ever extract CO2 as cheaply as O2 from ambient air (or carbon from a mine), and CO2 is not really an appealing ressource compared to its components, either (so demand would presumable be pretty low for centuries, even if the price comes down a lot).
Underestimating how big an industry would get is the mistake Svante Arrhenius initially made, thinking it would take millennia to emit enough CO2 to cause noticeable global warming.
And remember, with this concern I'm inherently presuming tech (mainly energy) that makes it sufficiently cheap that business and/or governments are willing and able to remove in the order of at least one teratonne of the stuff (but hopefully not two or more teratonnes) — because less than that, it's not solving global warming.
I don't see a future where technologies which are massively inefficient reach their break even cost before other energy intensive activities or more efficient grid scale storage soak up the excess.
And yes “energy” in general won’t be free. We still need to build the generation and distribution systems. But we reached a point where just dumping solar on all _new_ roofs rounds to essentially free (the costs are the labor and the access to qualified personnel). The exact same is currently happening to batteries. Any transformer project will be able to just integrate 4-12 hours of batteries without getting meaningfully more expensive. The same for every domestic or industry service upgrade
We are not there yet. But give it another 5 years and we will. And then we are only talking about financing what little distribution system we will need (basically you only need average-sized cables not peak-sized ones) and a capacity market for backup power systems (also only for average residual demand). And those we simply cannot (efficiently) finance by a per-kWh-used charge
> If electricity is sufficiently cheap
Thats what makes this even less attractive-- those plants are expensive to build and operate and you can't even really use the product in the most obvious ways.
Might want to take a look at China, or at least what IEA writes about CCUS and the like there.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202505/09/WS681d52e5a310a04a...
It's just kind of infeasible to pull the entire atmosphere through these plants. The largest one we have is called mammoth, claimed to remove 36000 tons of CO2 per year, meanwhile our emissions are measured in billions of tons per year. Like over 30 billion.
We would need about 30 mammoths to get to a million tons per year, and 30,000 mammoths to get to a billion. Then multiply by another 30 and in total we would need almost a million mommoth plants just to undo what we are doing right now at the same rate. Carbon capture is like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket.
How are you so confident that extinction is off the table? I've stopped following this stuff because it's depressing but last time I checked we were in dire straits and I haven't heard any good news on this front. I'm just seeing ice caps disappearing, ocean currents changing, weather changing, pretty much everything that's been predicted is now happening and it's not going to slow down any time soon.
Because even the worst-case scenarios (=> think RCP8.5) are just not enough to get rid of us.
I can totally see populous breadbasket states turning into unliveable deserts, billions of deaths from famines and heatwaves, iconic coastal cities being lost to the sea and a giant loss of biodiversity-- but I simply don't see this eradicating our species.
Humans are too adaptable, and warming is invariably gonna leave too many survivable holdout regions.
I think that an all-out global nuclear war would be much more threatening to humanity, and even that I'm very confident we would survive as species.
I also think this process is likely to trigger a new world war. When nations start collapsing there will be two possible outcomes - other nations take them in or they go to war. They won't just sit down and die. And everyone else won't be able to handle the number of refugees even if they want to.
I think capability to wage war internationally will probably decrease thanks to climate change; it is much easier for a state to prevent the peasants from starving than to feed/equip/fuel an army.
I also don't really see the incentives working: Countries like Bangladesh that are gonna suffer disproportionally are mostly not in a position to wage war offensively, and famines/heatwaves are not gonna make it any easier.
My admittedly cynical outlook is that it will just be business as usual: More affected/poor nations struggling, while wealthier western states moan about refugees, use their wealth as buffer and proceed to not care about people dying elsewhere.
We're already seeing how countries like the UK and US can be manipulated to respond to these situations, even when their effects are mostly imaginary and even net positive. Imagine what will start happening if the bogeyman of migration becomes a real problem.
"Use wealth as a buffer" works in the current scenario to some extent - although the US seems to have a lot of trouble with it. But what will scaling that look like? Trumpian concentration camps throughout the country, ICE budget approaching that of the US military, national curfews, martial law, suspension of habeas corpus...? We've already seen hints of all these things.
Things could get very bad. But I agree, not extinction-level, yet. Give us time though!
Just to clarify what I wrote, I also highly doubt we'll get it at scale in the near future. We desperately need it though, as well as any other measure that will bend the trends in the right direction.
This may not be the right place for this, but I'm honestly getting very anxious about our climate. Some of the data such as the temperature anomaly is showing an exponential trend. See the scariest graph I've ever seen here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/climate/climate-heat-inte...
Is that a misunderstanding on my side ?
(1) https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-has-more-than-...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...
This means for any human being we are emitting less carbon than we use to. It's not a big win but I'll take any good trend at the moment.
In fact Chinas emissions have probably already peaked.
https://www.economist.com/china/2025/05/29/chinas-carbon-emi...
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-c...
They're still bad, but better than they would have been with business as usual or if solar, wind and batteries hadn't plummeted in price:
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
I also really liked this passage about the direct on-the-ground effects of being able to install solar panels:
> If you have travelled through rural Asia, you know the sound of diesel generators pumping the millions of deep tube wells that were a chief driver of the agricultural Green Revolution of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Now solar electricity is pumping the water—diesel sales in Pakistan apparently fell thirty per cent in 2024. If you’re a farmer, that’s kind of a miracle; fuel, one of your biggest costs, is simply gone.
Being able to pay a one-time up-front cost and just....never have to worry about paying for fuel for your irrigation system again. Truly remarkable.
It is, if you'll pardon the pun, quite a ray of sunshine in these otherwise dark and uncertain times.
It's hard to see this truth right now, because the demand isn't there for it to happen just yet. At the margin, energy developers will install solar instead of batteries, up until the point that the grid is saturated with solar, at which point they will switch to batteries. But very few energy grids have reached that point of saturation, so demand hasn't sent manufacturers the market signal to begin high-volume production of grid storage. That will change as more grids mature like California/Texas.
> diesel sales in Pakistan apparently fell thirty per cent in 2024
This is amazing! Whether you believe photovoltaics are the most efficient form of green energy production or not, you cannot argue the impressive economics behind them. Successful engineering has to meet the market at the end of the day.
What does this even mean?
It's definitely impressive that the cost per watt of a PV panel is roughly 13% of where it was just 15 years ago.
€0.11 is 5% of US$2.39 (the Wp price on that graph from 02010), and €0.06 is 2.7% of it. However, my notes from 02016 say that the Solarserver price index for July 02010 was €1.62/Wp; sadly I did not note which module class that was. €0.11 is 6.8% of €1.62, but of course the Euro was worth more at the time...
This three-to-five-fold difference is why you're seeing this article now.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-and-solar-en...
The point is, it depends on how you define it. Engineers may say efficiency is determined by the properties of the photovoltaic cells themselves. Economists may argue it's cost per kilowatt. Politicians may say it's how quickly we can construct solar farms...
That's incorrect. The capacity factor of a coal plant is between 50% and 60%. That's far away from 100% although better than solar (but not that much better) with capacity factors ranging from 15%-30% [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor].
This is called "capacity factor". Other things like maintenance also affect it, no power plant actually generates "24/7". A simple back-of-the-envelope estimate would put solar power's capacity factor at around 25%, so that "gigawatt's worth of solar panels" would generate an average of 250MW. Which is still an impressive number.
[1] - https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-tale-of-two-ene...
There are studies on how much energy is required to decarbonise everything, not just local electricity production. The energy required is far less than what you’d think if you look at the primary energy of all the energy we use today.
One aspect of this is what you see with the transition to EV or from gas to induction cook tops. It comes with a huge reduction in wasted energy.
The other aspect is the transition to heat pumps, which is over 100% efficient, so you need a lot less energy to provide the same amount of heat. There are now commercial industrial heat pumps that has reached 200°C, which enables the use in more industrial applications.
The third is the transition to recycling. At some point we will have enough materials for all that we need to do. The green energy transition requires a big temporary jump in the amount of lithium and copper we need. But once all vehicles have been transitioned to EVs, most of those material will come from recycled materials, cutting the energy required to acquire those materials to a tiny fraction of what we need now.
A base sanity check shows this is a load of BS.
Edit:
I think this paragraph should be enough to show that it is not advisable to trust the author on anything to do with energy:
>Due to the weight of all this stuff, and the relatively mild heat and scattered light coming from the Sun, solar panels produce no more than 20 Watts for each kg of their mass, even on a sunny day. Meanwhile wind turbines, with their massive concrete bases and tall steel towers, generate a mere 6 Watts for every kg of their weight. (Batteries fare slightly better at 240 W/kg.) For comparison diesel fuel produces 13,000 Watts for every kg of fuel burned. A regular diesel engine weighing 150 kg can thus easily produce 110 kW of power, while the same feat would require 5.5 tons of solar panels directly lit by the Sun at noon.
But that line means the exact opposite of what the author claims it means. He claims that renewables are being overinflated, but the reverse is true. Coal and gas get evaluated based on their heat content, not their useful work output. Wind and solar get evaluated on their electrical output.
I think the current US policies are unfortunate (for the US) but ultimately futile. They'll fall behind and will see their exports affected. That will lead to local economic problems that ultimately will lead to economic reform to fix that. It will delay the energy transition in the US for a bit (10-20 years, maybe less). The tariffs will curtail imports. Which, ironically means other countries will be less dependent on exporting to it. And also less motivated to import relatively expensive things from the US. So US exports will decline in lockstep with its imports. And the whole tariff volatility just means that countries will start insulating themselves from being dependent on anything coming from the US. And that will extend to all sectors in the US. Agriculture, gas, cars, software services, etc.
The obvious fix to this in a few years will be a hard break with the (recent) past and ending trade wars and pulling the plug on the fossil fuel industry. Which by then won't be competitive anymore. It actually isn't right now but the US chooses to shove that under the carpet with trillions of dollars of government support. And most of that money is being borrowed. Interest and inflation is going to be a key thing to keep an eye on in the next few years. The US is sitting on a big stinky gas fueled debt bubble currently. What happens when that bursts and the gas becomes worthless?
This needs to be taken into account. I don't know if factories can be made with better insulation so they can "hibernate" somewhat when electricity is expensive.
So they might want to be located in a location with both wind, solar and hydro to ensure a (somewhat) stable price.
Denmark has a lot of wind mills and use hourly pricing for most consumers. This means that the price can vary a lot from hour to hour. 21st of June the price of electricity itself (excl taxes and transmission) was negative 3 cents at 2pm and 18 cents at 8pm. That is a difference of 21 cents over 6 hours.
This isn't true, there are currently facilities doing exactly this. For example, this steel mill in Ohio.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250215223931/https://gridbeyon...
For instance, in New Zealand we have an aluminium smelter (Tiwai point) that constitutes about ~13% of national electricity demand. The smelter recently re-contracted its electricity supply with several of the major power companies (a 20-yr agreement) which includes a component for demand response when required. NZ has a ~80% renewable grid with hydro and wind as major variable sources, which creates both hourly and seasonal variation in the wholesale spot price (dependant on wind and rain resource). In the event of a major drought that pushes up prices due to a lack of hydro (this happened last year), the agreement with the smelter means it will shutdown some of its operating lines in exchange for demand response payments. This is exactly what occurred, whereas other industrial users that did not have such agreements in place or chose to take advantage of previously low spot prices without adequate hedging were then exposed and also shut down, without being paid to so.
Isn't it what the current US administration want? A weak USD to boost export?
EDIT: energy consumption from renewables, not installed capacity
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&hideCo...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-solar?tab=char...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/wind-electricity-per-capi...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-ge...
Do I misunderstand?
On solar - China installed 93 GW in May 2025 alone - this exceeds the US' combined solar additions over the three years from 2022 to 2024.
The US' total solar additions, even over 10 years (92.7 GW), would still be lower than China’s cumulative capacity additions in recent years. China installed 277 GW in 2024 alone.
The US simply does not lead the world in solar and wind per capita, trailing countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, and Australia in both generation (10th at 1,889 kWh) and capacity (~957–1,125 watts).
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&hideCo...
The whole point of the current American efforts about oil seems to be reinvigorating economic growth. Oil supply chains are a lot easier to manipulate into growth strategies than renewables.
Countries that have leapfrogged into energy independence are doing great but thats not hustle. They’re ensuring their isolation for years to come.
And to be clear that may not be a bad thing for them.
But I think even ascribing economic growth as the intent is generous. The economy was already growing vigorously. Most of the policies we're seeing now are performative posturing.
... miracle?
It is a technological marvel, similar in comparison to designing and building an F-35 fighter jet or anything else.
It requires custom Hardware Accelerators designed at a chip level, on top of decades of algorithmic refining of video encoder decoders in stuff like gstreamer or ffmpeg, refining video streaming at inconsistent cellular data networks, various ISPs doing shenanigans with ports, etc. Storing and ingesting that much video data at "Free" initial pricing, streaming that much data to viewers, building analytics algorithms to pair advertisements with watchers, to get a high enough conversion rate to make ads economically viable enough while having minimal number of ads per vids.
Even an infinite money printer like google would struggle were it not for systematically solving technology at all levels from hardware, to chip design, to algorithms, to network level tuning, to frontend device optimizations, etc.
And has been made possible by only the cumulative effort of humankind to build such advanced sophisticated systems in the palm of our devices such that even a normie average iphone 16e has more compute capacity than early 1990s or so, much more.
It is a miracle, in every shape and form.
That's why I question whether it's actually a "miracle". I don't mean to suggest that it's not quite the feat to make something like that exist, but I see it as more of a representation of where we're at technologically, rather than some sort of improbable, inexplicable thing that otherwise shouldn't be. The fact that the response to my post seems to clearly understand how it exists kinda-sorta supports that, IMO - you can draw a clear path towards understanding how it came to be.
It's also a massive attention sink that burns both copious amounts of energy and the world's attention span to earn some clicks and ad dollars.
It's a mixed bag.
Seems the United States is now trapped in the same dilemma. It can’t let go of those fat oil profits to embrace the new —but rapidly improving— renewable tech, even if it’s clear that that’s where the market for energy is heading. I.E., the big company (or nation) must sabotage some of their current profit centers in order to remain long term competitive.
(Reposting a comment I made on nytimes article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/climate/china... )
That's to say that no, countries and governments do not behave like companies.
The US's addiction to "fat oil profits" goes back over a hundred years, and that's what the NYTimes author argues is driving the current administration's push to keep those profits going. Whether there actually are such profits is a different question.
This is exactly the behavior of the big companies in "The Innovators Dilemma": continuing to try and squeeze profits out of the dying old paradigm. (IBM clinging to hardware and mainframes, US motorcycle manufacturers not embracing small sport bikes, etc.) That's to say that, yes, countries and governments can indeed behave like companies.
Those companies optimize for corporation profit. If the US was optimizing for societal wealth or government revenue they would be pushing the country into renewables.
On reality many big corporations get corrupt management that destroy corporate profit and optimize for the managers personal wealth. Those ones act like the US is acting. But that's not the behavior that book is about.
He gives examples of the Dutch and wind power (sailing); Great Britain and coal; and America and petroleum. He also predicted China's ascendency as the next player willing to leverage new technologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great...
energy is a time accelerator. You can do more, produce more, using energy.
all of our "wealth" is due to our application of energy. Maintaining and increasing wealth both require energy.
Some people look at the relationship between wealth and energy. And there's more than one way to look at it. I found this interesting for a really big picture perspective.
I guess we could count the need for more efficient IT tools/engines too - use less electric and human power to fulfill our knowledge needs using better algorythms.
Although, given that the majority of the country is uninhabited. I imagine, it is an ideal place for solar.
Amazing place, highly recommend to visit.
>> of twenty-one thousand respondents in twenty-one countries, found that sixty-eight per cent favored solar energy, “five times more [...]
could be just:
>> of 21,000 responders in 21 countries, found that 68% favored solar energy, "5x more [...]
If I may ask: Do you also find numbers more difficult to parse when doing math pure math operations? Is this:
Two hundred thirty five plus one thousand eight hundred twenty two
Also easier for you to parse than this?
235 + 1822
Or do you have two "parsing modes" ("text" and "math"), and going from one to the other is the difficult part?
Now that's a major development not mentioned much.
Heat pumps have both improved quite a bit, and become cheaper due to sheer volume.
Been a number of years since then, so I'm sure they've improved even more and are hopefully somewhat cheaper.
I’m all for solar - but does it really solve the geographical / geopolitical issues of oil, as it’s currently rolling out?
China produces pretty much all the solar panels - That’s quite a big concentration of power, even more so than oil.
Of course if you don't build up a local solar industry you are still dependent on foreign countries but it's not that China has an unchanging monopoly on the solar industry.
Why didn't other countries build up solar industries? Were busy with fossils? Were too greedy to subsidise?
Now I feel old :/
And also angry that it's been 40 years and electricity generation is still >50% fossil fuels, never mind world energy use overall.
I don't get the two party system where there's such acrimony involved in trashing and undoing anything accomplished by the opposition .
China is by far the world largest producer of green house gases.
So either that or they'll deploy electric-arc sculptures all over the country for the population to see, listen, and smell.
Source? From everything I can find, at this moment China has around half of the generation coming from clean/renewable sources.
There's a reason Shanghai is known for really bad air quality. There's a reason the rate of GHG emissions are accelerating
Yeah, that's the primary concern for the US, right.
> There's a reason the rate of GHG emissions are accelerating
If you wanted to say that they "produce solar panels with energy from fossils" bring your sources please.
And that remarkable achievement was only possible because the US does not produce evil solar panels on its soil, do I understand you right?
But since you asked, while manufacturing solar panels does not itself pose a threat to air quality, environmental and air quality regulations obviously raise the cost of doing business in the manufacturing sector broadly, which makes the US less competitive up and down the supply chain than China. That's obviously not the entire story, but it's certainly part of it.
There's been plenty of subsidization efforts, but they made the mistake of subsidizing technologies that were too innovative and too early on in the scaling curve. e.g. Solyndra with CIGS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra
> Between 2009 and mid-2011 the price of polysilicon, the key ingredient for most competing technologies, dropped by about 89% due to Chinese advances in the Siemens process.
"Massive cost reduction in the existing, boring, process" beat "new technology". Possibly for the best in this case, since CIGS and CdTe are poisonous in a way that polysilicon isn't.
It makes so little objective sense to be that angry about a failed investment in new tech that they thought there was something deeper going on that they didn't understand.
edit: I tried to Google for the source of this, but was stymied by the fact that Solyndra tried to sue Chinese manufacturers.
I did find this time capsule commentary on an NYT piece about how Chinese renewables were about to collapse back in 2012:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/10/ch...
The story, the blog take and the unhinged comments do a lot to explain USA losing out.
Not that all of the comments are unhinged, one upvoted to the top actually applies basic economic thinking and suggests this is just counteracting negative externalities and therefore the smart move to anyone with the eyes to see the facts clearly.
Second edit: extra context is that the blogger is funded by Charles Koch:
Why would you expect different behavior from others?
Long term thinking in the west is like 5 years. Long term thinking in China is 100+ years.
Yes, because if the US blockades you so you can't import oil, your trucks and power plants stop running in six weeks. If the US blockades you so you can't import Chinese solar panels, your power grid stops running in 20 years. Actually, that's just the end of the warranty period, so more like 30. Or 40. The US is gonna have to keep up that blockade for a long time before it starts causing you any pain. Probably after the President For Life dies.
Hypothetically, yes, such a blockaded country could develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers in 20 years, and that industry would have an easier time traveling up the learning curve on the domestic market without having to match the prices of the Chinese hyperscalers. But in about 90% of cases they would fail to do so, for the same reasons the US still doesn't have any high-speed trains 60 years after the Shinkansen entered service and still doesn't have a moon base 56 years after Neil Armstrong.
So.. lack of demand and ROI?
In the U.S. one can travel coast-to-coast faster and cheaper in a car than they can by rail. Then, of course, there is air travel. That is to say, there are alternatives.
A country completely dependent on foreign solar panels could develop non-solar alternatives. Or they could just surrender. So of course they also have alternatives. But this is existential whereas HSR is not. So, yes, it's a pretty poor comparison.
It's not a metaphor. You're reasoning very sloppily. The absence of high-speed rail in the US is caused by a societal breakdown in technological and economic development. That breakdown also causes other effects. One of those effects is that over the last 20 years the US not only failed to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers; it lost the world-leading native industry of solar panel manufacturers that it already had. There's no strong reason to believe that a blockade would reverse that breakdown rather than accelerating it.
> In the U.S. one can travel coast-to-coast faster and cheaper in a car than they can by rail.
Yes. That's because the US doesn't have high-speed rail, even 60 years after the Shinkansen went into service. If the US did have high-speed rail, one would be able to travel coast-to-coast faster and cheaper by rail than they could in a car. And the difference is not small.
The fastest trains on the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed rail line average 290km/h, about 3–4 times faster than a car in the US and 50% faster than even the fastest Autobahn car speeds. The peak speed is 350km/h, but as in a car, some time is wasted speeding up and slowing down at stops at the beginning and end of the trip, and along the way.
The higher speeds also lower costs; https://www.trip.com/trains/china/route/beijingnan-to-shangh... tells me that the 1300-km trip currently costs US$22 for one person, which works out to about 1.7¢ per km. In the US, driving a car typically costs 70¢ per mile https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/standard-mileage-rates which is 43¢/km. So driving a car the same distance would not only take 3–4 times longer, it would cost 25 times as much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBUYDvu9XgU&t=15m25s reports that a year ago they paid US$92, which would be 7¢/km, so either trip.com is lying, they were taking a higher class of service, or the price has dropped precipitously. It looks to me like coach-class airline seating, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing%E2%80%93Shanghai_high-... tells me that when the service launched there were three classes of service.
Maybe in China cars are cheaper, in which case driving would only cost 10 times as much, I don't know. But it clearly isn't going to be as cheap as taking the high-speed train.
A consequence of the US's deficits in transportation is that a large fraction of the mental energy of its professional and intellectual classes is devoted to operating cars in traffic rather than to developing vaccines, improving Wikipedia, creating video games, or even selling ads.
60 years is a long time in terms of technological development. 60 years after the Wright Brothers achieve controlled powered flight in 01903 was 01963, when both the US and USSR had orbited cosmonauts, and the Apollo Program was well underway. 60 years after the first stored-program computer was delivered in 01949 (either the EDSAC or the secret Manchester Baby) was 02009, when Intel and AMD were shipping billion-transistor six-core processors. A wealthy country not being able to deploy the already existing technology in that time frame shows that it's experiencing not slow technological and economic development but slow collapse.
But markets are far from the only mover here. Regulation, lobbying, habits... Also I guess the US would feel ashamed for not building their trains themselves in the first place, they would probably have to buy them abroad... So "proudness" is probably a factor here too.
High speed trains in the part of Europe I know are very well utilized and even a bit too crowded to my taste (still way better than planes - allow working easily with table, walking, no absurd wait times waiting in line at the airports, arrive much nearer to my actual goals...).
How and from where do you source the necessary primary materials for such an endeavor?
If you try to answer those questions you will see that you are bullshiting yourself.
You do need materials, but you can source the materials anywhere on Earth; it's just a question of how expensive it is to refine them. Every element occurs as an impurity in every rock at some level. When you can import them freely, some deposits are uneconomic.
For building a plant to refine silicon, things like platinum and iridium, which are very scarce in most rocks, are very helpful. But they aren't ingredients in the solar cells themselves. Solar cells themselves are made of silicon, aluminum, silver†, lead, and tin, with trace quantities of phosphorus (or arsenic) and boron. These are mounted to "ultra-white" glass, which is made of silicon again, oxygen, sodium, calcium, and trace amounts of manganese. The mounting is done typically with EVA, which is mostly a hydrocarbon with a little oxygen in it.
The total amount of these materials is surprisingly small. The silicon wafer (2.33g/cc) is about 100μm thick, and the glass (2.5g/cc) is typically 2.5mm thick (3.2mm is "ultra thick"). So a square meter of solar panels, rated at some 200W, contains 6.3kg of glass (mostly oxygen and silicon) and 0.23kg of crystalline silicon, plus much smaller amounts of other materials.
So raw materials aren't a constraining factor unless you're living on a barge or a space station or something. Knowhow, organization, discipline, cooperation, etc., are the constraining factors. Sadly, those are in short supply almost everywhere.
______
† Silver is used for large conductive strips on the surface of the silicon; it can be replaced with copper at a significant loss of efficiency. There is already pressure to do this because the raw-materials cost of silver accounted for about 10% of the wholesale cost of current PV modules last time I checked, and about 10% of global silver production went into PV modules. Since then production has increased and PV prices have dropped.
Silicon production is an energy intensive process; you need 11-13 kWh per kg of silicon produced. Technically it's a process using electrodes and thus raw electricity so you could source it from renewable. But that's in theory you need large amount of predictable power for a long time and on demand, which is not at all what the renewables have been so far.
Then if you look into aluminum production you will see that it requires carbon electrodes, that are made in ovens continuously heated to up to 1300°C for hours on end (about 20h per anode). They do not shut down those ovens since it takes multiple WEEKS to get to temperature, and they use natural gaz as the fuel. It's not clear if we could even make an alternative using purely raw electricity that would have enough power density. The aluminum production process itself requires megawatts levels of energy, usually you need a 500MW substation. Most plants are built next to a power plant, usually coal or nuclear. At the current 200W/m2 efficient level for solar panel, you would need about 2 500 km2 of solar panel to get that much power.
Glass production also requires a lot of dense energy. It typically uses gaz for heating but maybe they can figure out an industrial process to electrify it, currently not the case anyway. We are talking about megawatts level of energy again and a glass furnace cannot ever be shut down during its 15-20 years lifetime, so it's not like intermittent renewable are an option.
And I'm not talking about the various mining operations, necessary to get the raw stuff which is basically running almost exclusively on fossil fuel (but at least some of it can be transitioned to electric).
So now, I have to say 2 things: - firstly, my question was obviously rhetoric, the answer for anyone who has studied the subject is clearly no. But that requires an understanding that isn't surface level. - secondly you are clearly an arrogant asshole who thinks he knows shit when he clearly doesn't. But I'll let you live in your fantasy world where you can have industrial production with just electricity from solar panels.
Your calculation of solar capacity is off by a factor of a million; 500 megawatts at 200W/m² is 2.5 km², not the 2500 km² you say (the size of Yosemite National Park), which would be 500 terawatts, roughly 30 times current world marketed energy consumption. The same magnitude of error in the other direction would have led you to claim that an aluminum smelting plant requires 500 watts, less power than a household blender.
You also forgot to divide by the capacity factor; 200W/m² is the nameplate capacity, what the square meter produces in full sun, not the year-round average, which is closer to 30W/m², depending on factors like latitude, clouds, and tracking. (That increases the estimate from 2.5km² to 17km², 1700 hectares or 7 sections, the area of the city of Los Altos, California, or a quarter the area of the Curonian Spit park in Kaliningrad.)
These basic errors suggest that either you are not fully aware of the extent of your knowledge, or you are knowingly exaggerating it.
It seems like your primary objection is the intermittency of solar energy, which can be straightforwardly solved with BESS; even without lithium resources, either liquid metal batteries or nickel–iron batteries are an adequate resource anywhere in the world. Sodium-ion batteries are another scalable form of BESS that does not depend on scarce elements; a 200MWh utility-scale sodium-ion battery came online a year ago in Qianjiang: https://www.energy-storage.news/first-half-world-largest-200... but plausibly nobody outside of China knows how to do this.
There are straightforward solutions to the problems you're describing, even without BESS; many haven't been developed beyond the lab scale because they aren't economically competitive with the established approaches you're describing. In a hypothetical blockaded country, those alternatives wouldn't be competing with cheap fossil fuels. In practice, though, BESS is plenty.
Silicon purification to solar grade is not simply an electrolytic process, as you incorrectly imply; it requires a series of refinement steps to become PV-grade silicon.
In the case of glassmaking, the necessary technology is already well developed. An all-electric glassblowing pilot plant entered production last year in Cognac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuK8f4cB7Ps. And you can buy off-the-shelf glassmaking furnaces for mass production: https://www.hornglass.com/products/melting-furnaces-and-equi...
Electrically heated furnaces are more controllable and versatile, which is why they are universally used in laboratory glassmaking. Unlike the case with aluminum, fossil fuels are nothing but trouble for glassmaking; limited adiabatic flame temperatures, glass-batch contamination from fuel impurities, and the unfortunate necessity to vent flame-fired furnace to the atmosphere are problems glassmakers have had to overcome in order to use cheap energy from fossil fuels, not benefits.
Carbon is probably the only possible electrode material for aluminum production, although zirconia has been suggested. The net reaction is Al₂O₃ + 3C → 2Al + 3CO, consuming about 700kg of carbon per tonne of aluminum produced. Fortunately such small quantities of carbon are not difficult to obtain, and in extremis it would even be bearable to obtain them via direct air capture; we're talking about hundreds of grams of carbon per 300-watt solar panel, so a single tree contains enough carbon to smelt the aluminum for a megawatt or so of panels.
Mining is almost entirely electrified already; attempting to run fossil-fuel machinery in an underground mine shaft, or even an indoor warehouse, poses the kind of risk of asphyxiating workers that is normally considered unacceptable except in, for example, Russia. Gargantuan strip mining machinery like the Marion 8750 is largely electric for the same reasons that diesel locomotives are electric.
Thank you for a productive, if gratuitously insulting, exchange of views!
With solar and electrified transport and industry? Can't pay the loans for the solar panels? Sucks for the saps that loaned you the money. Come and take them.
And of course financial considerations are often a first-order consideration in military conflict even today.
Renewables however flips things back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Sri_Lankan_protests
Debt crisis and sharp spikes in fuel and oil costs resulted in shortages of both. Also shortages of fertilizer. Which resulted in shortages of food.
If I was a Sri Lankan politician I wouldn't want a repeat of that.
Whether that makes a global conflict more or less likely is an interesting question.
But that very much isn't a consequence of geology. Ramping up panel production is much easier than discovering oil deposits when there aren't any to discover.
It’s hard in a capitalist country to do things that don’t make business sense - eg long term thinking. So I don’t see any reasonable route where China isn’t still making all the panels any time soon.
There are still a few solar panel plants in the US, but nothing like we had.
That technology is cables. Cables allow us to move energy over long distances. And with HVCD cables that can mean across continents, oceans, time zones, and climate regions. The nice things about cables is that they are currently being underutilized. They are designed to have enough capacity so that the grid continues to function at peak demand. Off peak, there is a lot of under utilized cable capacity. An obvious use for that would be transporting power to wherever batteries need to be re-charged from wherever there is excess solar/wind power. And cables can work both ways. So import when there's a shortage, export when there's a surplus.
And that includes the rapidly growing stock of batteries that are just sitting there with an average charge state close to more or less fully charged most of the time. We're talking terawatt hours of power. All you need to get at that is cables.
Long distance cables will start moving non trivial amounts of renewable power around as we start executing on plans to e.g. connect Moroccan solar with the UK, Australian solar with Singapore, east coast US to Europe, etc. There are lots of cable projects stuck in planning pipelines around the world. Cables can compensate for some of the localized variations in energy productions caused by seasonal effects, weather, or day/night cycles.
For the rest, we have nuclear, geothermal, hydro, and a rapidly growing stock of obsolete gas plants that we might still turn on on a rainy day. I think anyone still investing in gas plants will need a reality check: mothballed gas plant aren't going to be very profitable. But we'll keep some around for decades to come anyway.
Problems, yes. Catastrophes, no. It's not clear that they "needed" full backup capacity.
Not necessarily. If connectivity is broad and the network graph is decentralized, rerouting should cover some of the backup.
For example, if Luxembourg goes to war with Belgium, and Belgium shuts down the lines to Luxembourg, then they can reroute via Germany or France (provided they have lines there, obv). But if Spain gets beef with France, and France cuts the lines, they cannot easily reroute. So Spain would need more backup and more independence (and prolly cables to Italy and Africa?). Point being:
Most renewable energy investments have decent, easy to calculate returns on investment. That's why this stuff is so popular with investors. And that's also why I don't think current policy changes in the US matter long term. It just slightly increases the time to a return on investment. But you still get a return. So, companies will continue to look at batteries, solar, and indeed cables with or without government support. And even a little bit of tariffs (aka. taxes) won't stop that.
Even the EU with it's very tight integration between member states is seeing a lot of pressure to tear itself apart again from the inside, despite the very real costs thĺis would bring.
Seasonal variation from December to May is enormous.
Storing months of power is a problem with no known solution.
inb4 someone tries to invent floating solar farms to try to fill the Pacific with, lol.
Have we learned nothing from the 2022 energy crisis? The number of starry eyed suggestions here about distributed worldwide power networks and load balancing is astonishing given the realities that we actually live in.
Oil and gas have caused far more wars than electricity has.
The best interpretation you can give is that they are naive idealists, stuck in the mental state of a kid (even though their intelligence is fully developed).
But as I'm getting older, I'm more inclined to say that they are clearly stupid, some form of "intellectual yet idiot".
I always roll my eyes when I read that ultra optimistic report about renewables because it doesn't really match reality. Not only do they always grossly exaggerate the benefits but they also systematically bury the problems that have to be solved for it to be a long-term solution (manufacturing in a sovereign way, recycling and grid balancing are largely unsolved problems).
And then you have idiots who come in and propose some grandiose "solution" that would require multiple countries/culture to not only collaborate economically but also accept de facto power imbalance and stuff like that. It's almost like believing in Santa; but it's cute up to a 10-year-old, after that it's more hopeless than anything else.
...hence why there isnt much of it. It either requires subsidies or for natural gas to be taxed more.
Windless night produced electricity from stored solar energy via windgas is still cheaper than nuclear power produced on sunny, windy days though: https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
> It either requires subsidies or for natural gas to be taxed more.
Subsidies are hard to calculate anyway. For example almost all fossil fuels get a pair of massive subsidies; we let them dump their carbon into the air for free instead of charging for it, and we build and man a bunch of aircraft carriers to go around defending the shipping lanes that it gets sent through.
Storing months worth of power is not something we do with natural gas or even oil today.
1. Generate hydrogen or other synthetic hydrocarbon fuels from electricity; flow batteries, saltwater batteries, and a myriad other chemistries; compressed air; hydro, etc etc
To give some example: Switzerland is roughly electricity neutral over a year, but there's a significant winter/summer imbalance of about 5TWh. To add enough storage to compensate this imbalance, you would need to:
- cover about 2% of the country in batteries
- build about a thousand pump storage stations: despite the Alps covering about 40% of the country, it's not clear if you would have enough valleys to flood
- hydrogen looks a bit more reasonable, if we don't look at the costs, you only need to store a few millions m3 of liquid hydrogen. The gas storage in Germany for instance are quite a bit larger than that, but hydrogen is also significantly harder to store.
And all of this is to use once a year essentially! None of it looks practical or affordable (a pump storage station costs a few billions a piece for instance).
As probably everyone knows, Netherlands is very flat and Norway very mountaneous. Norways is also very rainy. So it's a match made in heaven - Norway's mountain reservoirs can act as balancers for dutch wind power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBRAcable
While Denmark in term essentially is a trading hub for electricity between Scandinavia, the UK and continental Europe.
Amazing.
Still, if module prices continue falling, even at poor capacity factors lime 10%, it'll be increasingly hard to justify paying such high prices to move energy around the continent; local overprovisioning and storage will be cheaper even if Norway is willing to produce the energy for free.
Local ressilence is needed in any case and mass produced batteries can provide that safety.
No it doesn't.
Magnesium metal burns because the boiling point of magnesium is just 1091 C, so extremely reactive vapor is readily produced. But it would be very hard to heat it that high in water unless it was ignited first. It will then continue to burn under water.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/33167/why-does-b...
If a hypothetical ship full of magnesium sinks without catching the magnesium on fire first, the magnesium will probably not catch fire from exposure to water. Perhaps if it's sufficiently finely divided, which seems like a bad idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion “At least 1,782 people, largely in Halifax and Dartmouth, were killed by the blast, debris, fires, or collapsed buildings, and an estimated 9,000 others were injured.”
“Nearly all structures within an 800-metre (half-mile) radius, including the community of Richmond, were obliterated.[3] A pressure wave snapped trees, bent iron rails, demolished buildings, grounded vessels (including Imo, which was washed ashore by the ensuing tsunami), and scattered fragments of Mont-Blanc for kilometres. Across the harbour, in Dartmouth, there was also widespread damage.[4] A tsunami created by the blast wiped out a community of Mi'kmaq who had lived in the Tufts Cove area for generations.”
It seems unlikely to happen by accident because at stoichiometry you need more water than magnesium, and I don't think spontaneous explosion is a real risk with magnesium. The International Magnesium Association's safe handling guide https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.intlmag.org/resource/resmgr/safety... does mention that magnesium swarf can spontaneously combust in the presence of water, but I think swarf is too coarse to explode. It recommends keeping wet magnesium swarf under water to prevent it from heating up enough to spontaneously ignite.
But presumably you'd be shipping the magnesium in the form of plates, ingots, or rolls rather than powder, swarf, or loose foil.
Same issue with grain silos exploding because of the mixture of fuel with oxygen, but flour just burns etc.
Small hydrogen balloons do not in fact go bang; they just create small conflagrations. What goes bang are small balloons filled with a near-stoichiometric mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, such as you get from the simplest forms of water electrolysis.
The stoichiometric mixture of magnesium with water is 1.36 grams of water per gram of magnesium (which is 1.74g/cc, so this 58-wt%-water mixture is 70% water by volume), the enthalpy of formation of H₂O is -285.83kJ/mol, and the enthalpy of formation of MgO is -601.6kJ/mol. So this reaction:
Mg + H₂O → MgO + H₂
For a large enough particle size, you won't get an explosion, and you may even lose most of your water as steam; but for a small enough particle size and an oxidizer concentration close enough to stoichiometric, you will. Some nanothermites consisting of magnesium nanoparticles with an oxidizer such as iron oxide even reliably detonate.
So, it's a potential safety hazard, but it seems like one that should be easy enough to guard against.
Sure but nobody is going to ship large quantities of magnesium like that: “Use proper packaging: Ensure the magnesium is sealed in moisture-proof, airtight containers.” https://www.freightamigo.com/blog/hs-code-for-containing-at-...
> Small hydrogen balloons do not in fact go bang
It’s not a supersonic detonation but even normal balloons pop with a small bang, pure hydrogen balloons are louder. Though a you mention hydrogen + oxygen is significantly more extreme.
Are you sure the parent isn't referring to something like a rust (iron-air) battery? Aluminum, Iron, and Magnesium are all viable battery chemistries.
Side note - I'm pretty certain you don't actually need to make contents of a ship explode to easily sink it with explosives.
I'm actually somewhat concerned that between drones and smart mines - we've never had a better chance of completely ruining our ability to do ocean based shipping during combat.
The metal fuels in particular have the merit that you can use them in precisely such mass-produced batteries rather than to produce thermal power. As I alluded to in my grandparent comment, aluminum-air batteries were mass-produced in the 01960s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills
But the problem mentioned above was about war.
In the Drone Age, though, you can remotely pilot a quadcopter 4300 km away to blow up airplanes on the airstrip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb — or to blow up your political opposition, if you can guess where they are or will be. The US has been doing this for 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq: https://theintercept.com/2015/11/19/former-drone-operators-s... (use Readability mode to bypass "this is not a paywall") but a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper costs on the order of US$100 million, so there are less than 400 of them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper#In... while Ukraine's most popular drones cost on the order of US$300, can be 3-D printed in a basement, already cause 70% of casualties on the battlefield, and are produced in volumes approaching 10 million per year https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/03/world/europe/.... Many experts believe drones have made tanks obsolete on the battlefield https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJRqXBhnvCs.
Even without autonomous weapons, we're rapidly moving toward the future of borderless war without end so vividly envisioned in Slaughterbots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA. Ukraine is already an order of magnitude past the headline number it opens with, "Customer pilots directed almost 3,000 precision strikes last year."
If you want to see what precision strikes on the Ukrainian battlefield look like, plenty of Ukrainian military units have posted fundraising videos, so you can watch terrified conscripts dying all day long if you want to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjIgTJ-73v4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhQBf4VFMwI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A64TmBvbn1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXUqJAnAP9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCoCxARDEio.
Those videos are a preview of what life will be like for you and your family in the years to come as war becomes borderless.
This consequently scales down the scale of any spill or security issue.
Like the difference between nicking a capillary and nicking an aorta.
GPS is fairly easy to jam, and despite the purported end of Selective Availability, unencrypted GPS can be turned off entirely without affecting US military GPS. Cruise missiles have been using terrain models for decades now, since well before GPS (a major reason high-resolution DTED used to be classified) which just requires a computationally cheap particle filter and appropriate sensors. We can expect belligerents in upcoming conflicts to maintain strategic stockpiles of the relevant electronics, which are more compact than even cocaine or fentanyl and therefore difficult to blockade.
https://www.oldsaltblog.com/2024/08/apex-boats-the-unlikely-...
"On the landing beach at Baie de Pampelonne, most Apex boats exploded against the obstacles. Nevertheless, one ran aground, and one sank. A third reversed course and turned back out to sea before exploding near Sub-chaser #1029 and severely damaging it."
One could argue all those Mk 14 torpedoes that malfunctioned and went onto circular paths also counted.
EDIT: To make things clearer, the word Missile is quite old, and predates rockets. missile is any object that is propelled somehow to hit a target. So even a stone launched from a sling by a caveman is already a missile. The other guy mentioned precision guided missiles though... and he is still correct in the word usage there.
However, the distinction is usually applied where aircraft become missile’s when the attack can no longer be aborted.
> However, the distinction is usually applied where aircraft become missile’s when the attack can no longer be aborted.
So for a quadcopter that's a pretty negligible amount of time. And not all that much for tiny planes either.
At first I thought you meant "embodied energy" or some such.
Iceland "exports" geothermal energy by converting bauxite ore into aluminum.
Australian could "export" renewable energy by domestically converting iron ore into steel.
Many would see this as an invitation to retreat from solar, but I view it as the opposite. Widespread solar will cause peace via the capitalist peace theory, similar to the role that trade plays in staking everyone in mutual stability. Stability will become a public good that everyone will want to preserve. Solar will be another part of the international diplomatic-cultural-economic web that binds countries together in mutual interest.
Resiliency can be figured out with creativity, it's not something to give up on at the first challenge.
To be fair, natural gas and oil shares similar systemic risks, whether it's pipelines open to sabotage or water transits being subject to blockade, such as the Malacca dilemma that China would face if it invades Taiwan. But at least with solar, it won't ruin countries with the resource curse, and in principle it doesn't give a small number of countries leverage since anyone can produce this fairly basic commodity.
That's a nice idea in theory but isn't worth much in practice if one of the trade partners has 19th century style imperial ambitions.
if nothing else this will serve as a warning and a cautionary tale for future aspiring conquerors.
As far as the dependency direction goes, Germany didn't start a war with Russia, so the simplistic example isn't enough to disprove anything. If you want to disprove it, do so by explaining how Russia was dependent on Europe.
The project you linked to was completed pretty quickly and is supplying 2.5GW to the UK grid
RENEWABLES NEED TRANSMISSION!!! We need to be building unprecedented Manhattan project levels of transmission, yesterday! But instead we will put some solar panels on a car park and feel like we did our part. Solar is the easy part. Storage and/or transmission is the hard part.
Not very, but neither is continuing to use fossil fuels on a huge scale.
When all the power plants are green, all of the energy you use to build green power plants is necessarily green.
How green a new power plant is, during the process of construction, is a statement of how much progress you've already made before this step, not how much you make in the act of making this step.
PV pays its own energy cost in a few months these days. But even then, the very first PV had to be made with mostly fossil fuels and some hydroelectric, now the new ones in China are made with 35% renewables.
Grids have the same question: how green it is to modify today is the current status of the power supply (etc.), not the status it will be when it's been modified.
Going on and on about how important the LCA was and how nuclear should be the choice.
After pages and pages of ”sciency” equations it ends with the Chinese average grid mix in terms of gCO2/kWh.
Another dimension is time. They can be considered "green" once they have produced more energy than was used for construction from non-green sources.
You state this as if that's a fact - just because you haven't looked for them doesn't mean they don't exist. Here's two examples showing that wind [1] and solar [2] have good environmental payback times in my home country due to avoided emissions, a country which already has an ~80% renewable grid. Additionally, [3] is a good resource that puts the potential waste from solar farms into context with other sources (such as coal ash) and shows this is an unfounded fear. Do some research and challenge your biases before you spread misinformation.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03036758.2024.2...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038092X2...
[3] https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-023-02230-0
[3 - sharing link] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-023-02230-0.epdf?shar...
A fridge would also do well to have a backup battery.
But only the Chinese have either the capability to, or interest in, building a one-square-meter-cross-section aluminium belt around the planet, and that means a geopolitical faff.
Where "sufficiently cheap" here means "affordable over intercontinental distances".
I believe storage costs are falling faster than transmission costs.
* The scale is such that it's more of an opportunity cost than a dollar cost, what else can be done with 5% of Chinese aluminium per year for the next 20-or-so years.
But also, much research needed before a true price tag can be attached, rather than just a bill of materials
This logic eats its own tail. Yes, if battery storage was cheap a lot of things would be monumentally better. It isn't. We need today solutions, not hypothetical ones.
Energy storage technology is on a roll, and grid storage isn't limited by weight energy density in the same manner as vehicle batteries are.
The current limiting factor is the number of factories making batteries, not the cost per deferred kWh of the batteries they do make.
other than that I agree
So it re-introduces some geo-political dependencies. Not in the way fossil fuels or unranium do, because a copper cable won't "burn up" to produce the energy, but they do need some upkeep.
Another dependency this introduces is the network itself. A failure in specific regions could lead to massive blackouts (Like recently in spain/portugal) or could even become political pressure instruments like currently the russian-natural-gas-pipelines in Europe are
Political pressure is hardly a renewables problem, and is more likely to mitigate it than make it worse.
Currently we get a lot of energy by shipping it as physical cargo around the world through various unstable regions after it's produced by hostile regimes - which is not exactly a recipe for reliability.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/investigation-into-s...
They also initially said that there was "high ion flux" from the sun too.
I am not EE or in power gen but it smacks a bit more of politics than analysis.
https://www.eng-tips.com/threads/spain-and-portugal-power-gr...
A typical car uses ~25kg of copper - that's enough for approximately 0.5m of HVDC.
The EU currently produces 12mln cars annually, down 3mln from the 2017 peak.
In other words there should be no issue with ramping up demand for the equivalent of 1500km of HVDC annually in the EU alone - a rate much higher than the local bureaucracy could manage issuing permits for.
Now I am not so sure anymore, especially most of the power is going to be powering AI datacenters and it's far easier to locate datacenter near cheap solar than put tons of cables around the world.
I don't understand your point. Power grids are a thing, and these enormous battery banks are attached to them.
It's true that power grids are independent from each other, but it's not a simple matter to just connect them all and observe a huge benefit as solar farms in Africa power the US or something. When everything is working that is certainly a possible outcome, but when things break, the operators of these grids need to know what the other grid operators are doing, and supply must be routed to demand correctly or you'll just create more outages. power grids aren't a simple mesh where any substation can power any home.
I /think/ formulating the problem this way means that 12h=power is always relevant. So: where are we?
Once solar is cheap (like now, as it already is), you can put in 3x what is needed on a sunny day, and power everything on cloudy days. Solar runs on cloudy days. Night obviously requires a different solution. Start by installing solar over all parking lots.
To think that you won't be able to run a 100% solar/wind grid is a bet against human ingenuity. If generation in excess of peak demand was installed of solar/wind, there are many promising approaches to deal with generation shortfalls. Batteries, load shifting, an electric vehicle fleet that charges during the day and powers the grid at night if the owner opts in, precooling a home with AC during the day to a low set point so AC isn't needed at night, H2 storage in salt caverns, pumped hydro, aluminum smelters that operate during excess power periods, the possibilities are infinite.
It won't be hard. Don't bet against human ingenuity.
It's not an either or thing. And this will be a self optimizing system as well. It won't be up to grid operators anymore. If people need more power, they'll get some even if the grids won't provide it. And if they need it to be more reliable, they'll fix it anyway they can. Which includes using batteries, generators, and whatever else works.
Hydrogen for energy production is a bit of a fantasy IMHO. Awful battery. Expensive to create. And there are plenty more profitable uses for it than sacrificing it as a simple methane alternative. Honestly, burning it is a bit desperate. If you have all this valuable hydrogen and burning it is the most valuable thing you can imagine doing, you're doing it wrong and missing out on some big dollar amount of more sane shit you should be doing.
Cables are expensive mainly because of policy. They are mainly made using commodity materials (copper, aluminium, etc.). Cable manufacturing isn't expensive. Installing them isn't rocket science. Land disputes on the other hand are cripplingly expensive. Solve that and cables become cheap. Geothermal works the same way; not that hard. Drill some holes (oil companies are really good at this) and that's most of the work. Getting permission to do that is the hard and expensive part.
I suspect we'll see the grid get very close to 100% being the "base" load, and the complexities of having power flow in so many directions will cause the largest blackout to date.
Seasonal storage is a completely different story. For my own panels, production in Nov/Dec/Jan is about 20% of that in Apr/May/Jun, and this is typical. That means that you either need 15x solar capacity of what you need on a sunny day, or enough storage to bridge those 3 months, two orders of magnitude storage more than we would need to store electricity overnight.
Meaning - the interconnection queue for storage and new renewables is absolutely enormous but getting enough online to meaningfully alter the electricity bills will take years.
Obviously, this creates huge push back, threatening the transition to renewables.
The Correct Answer remains federal policy and support. Just like the New Deal Era's electrification of our country.
They don’t invest in gas much because they have to import it all, though it will be a long time before they use electricity for cooking as opposed to natural gas or propane.
It seems premature to write that all off given it's ongoing.
Nuclear is also expanding as planned, as a small percentage of renewable power, and China's coal use is peaking and starting to level and planned to fall in the short term future.
The interesting nuclear project to watch in china is their third generation salt reactors .. their small pilot has been running for a whilke, their second gen is completed (?) and starting to return data at the next scale up, and the third generation plant is in the initial construction phase (to be modified on the fly as results come back from the pilot and second gen plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...
Nuclear power is a minuscule part of the Chinese grid. 4.4% and shrinking and with their recent number of construction starts will likely land on ~2% of the grid mix.
Their coal usage has started to shrink.
How can they lean on technologies they have started to replace with renewables and storage?
It's interesting to realize that the vast majority of the energy used by humans comes from the sun (with the exception of nuclear and geothermal energy). Even hydro power comes from the sun, because the sun evaporates the water which then becomes part of rivers or other water reservoirs that power hydroelectric generators.
Also IIUC "energy from the sun" is really shorthand for "Energy emitted by solar fusion", which tidal would not involve.
Take it a step further and nearly all our energy comes from nuclear fusion, with the exceptions you noted.
I use a gravitationally-confined fusion reactor, and pull power out of it by allowing the radiation to excite unbound electron-hole pairs in a semiconductor substrate. It's dangerous; even miles away from the reactor itself I can't expose myself to the radiation for too long or I get a painful skin reaction, and that might lead to cancer someday, but hey, it's cheap and quiet and I don't pay for the nuclear fuel!
Solar is actually fusion power, which is way cooler than any fission plant that puny humans have ever constructed.
Money doesn't exist anymore.
I think at least 70% of the Hacker News crowd would hate this world because they would have no idea what to do with their life under these circumstances.
What is life about except turning a profit? How can you have power over other people? Feel important with all your money? Look at Elon, he's happy.
(They probably would become Ferengi).
Maybe people can learn something from the anarchist David Graeber.
In later Star Trek shows of the same era they show that it isn't really. A major plot point of voyager is them having to save power because they can't get the resources to keep the ship running. It kinda forgotten about later, but it shows that whatever power sources they are using isn't infinite and is still finite.
> Material needs are also a 'solved problem'.
Did you forget the episode where Troi literally has a breakdown in one episode because she knows the desert she is eating isn't real? She won't be the only person.
They end up bartering BTW in one episode to get real eggs in so they can make real "authentic" scrambled eggs.
Throughout the show they have to barter (which is less efficient form of transaction) to get things the replica can't produce or that are hand produced.
Which echoes more wealthy people in reality buying hand produced items at a greater cost, over cheap mass produced items.
> Money doesn't exist anymore.
Money certainly exists in some sort of context as Federation has to trade and everyone else use Gold Pressed Latinum. It may not be used on Earth, but it is used elsewhere extensively and the Federation must also have some of that currency to be able to trade with those outside of it.
People who rave about the vision that TNG put forward. They seem to forget that in Star Trek: Deep Space 9 they show the other side of the Federation.
In the first episode they show the other side of the federation. Q introduced the federation to the Borg early and set off the chain of events which leads to the death of thousands of Starfleet personnel including Sisko's wife which he is haunted by throughout the entire series. This was a direct consequence of Picard's poor choices when dealing with two
There are disaffected federation citizens that have started a terrorist / militia force called the marquis as a direct consequence of the colonisation of their homes by foreign invaders when the Federation sold them out.
> What is life about except turning a profit? How can you have power over other people? Feel important with all your money?
Man, I feel you. HN as this small window into the soul of the silicon valley is best consumed only in very small doses.
Thank you for your work and stay how and who you are.
But the fossil and nuclear lobbies were straight on blaming renewables when it happened. They are desperate for any handouts they can get their hands on before a select few are preserved as museum pieces.
Nowadays he is diving into what he terms the phase change disruptions where he explores and thinks out the ramifications of these disruptions.
his predictions have gotten a LOT more dramatic lately, I can't wait to see if he's still nailing it
I don’t really understand inertia in power plants but I wonder if it helps to push nuclear as primary and solar as secondary?
Conversely, the Spain problem appears to have been a classic control systems problem of a slow undamped oscillation that gradually got out of hand.
(I believe the preliminary incident reports got published and discussed on HN, if someone would like to link that here?)
Nuclear may or may not have a role, but it's much slower to build than solar, so starting a plant now is going to face a very different landscape with a lot more solar in by the time it completes.
Nuclear, somehow, exhibits a negative learning rate: the more nuclear projects you do, the more expensive it gets. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
At the moment it showed nothing, because it's still under investigation. You might be referring to the FUD campaign that started the same day of the blackout.
But it is true that inertia is provided mainly by conventional power plants, and they are being removed from the grid. It is also true that, if finally the lack of inertia is confirmed as the cause of the blackouts, there are alternative ways to provide inertia in the system: synchronous condensers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_condenser) like the one in Moneypoint (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneypoint_power_station).
there'll probably be an increase of solar and wind for many more years, as they're a safe bet - cheap, low maintenance and you don't need much skilled human labor to operate it.
additionally, battery storage will be become ever cheaper and more ubiquitous. together with traditional storage options, like water. we'll see how far that gets us.
A lot of people are in denial and like this is all hype it'll never happen followed by wow how did that happen.
Their push for renewables and energy independence is very deliberate. When they reach the goal, it's not "oh noes, our precious coal jobs, how are we going to placate rural voters and coal lobbyists", it's cheaper energy, and workers freed to be moved to more productive things.
Don't let these advancements in solar make you think things are getting better. We need to reduce fossil fuel usage, not just increase solar usage.
https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/b3b696c0-226d-0137-f265-1d2...
There won't be fanfare when fixed batteries start using sodium chemistry rather than lithium, for example, but that will start happening across the next few years.
It's not so hard. Lavish subsidies were used to make nuclear power semi-sort-of-competitive even though it's way more expensive.
The same thing could have been done with solar and wind but apparently we thought the best course of action was just to wait until they became cheaper than coal without subsidies (& then Obama and Trump slammed solar with tariffs).
As the article spends so many paragraphs to explain to us, the rest of the world is increasingly not burning fossil fuel for their new energy needs. Most of the fuel it burns is for the energy it already uses. And solar is starting to take a bite out of that too.
If it were cheaper, developing countries would buy even more of it, accelerating their own transition.
To me, renewables (solar and wind namely) have many more downsides than nuclear. So if we are doing things not because of cost anyway, why not nuclear? What do you fundamentally care about?
The power density of wind and solar is abysmal. You need to cover huge amounts of land with your preferred solution (which doesn't work everywhere) to produce relatively meager amounts of power. You need to have grid-scale storage solutions which are currently not priced in to the costs being quoted. Even if you have that storage solution you need to be significantly over-capacity in terms of production so that storage can actually be filled during peak hours.
Meanwhile, nuclear: requires a fraction of land use (good for ecology), runs continuously (so doesn't need huge storage outlays), can run basically anywhere (reducing transmission costs).
The most important note is that "nuclear" is not entirely encapsulated by existing Gen III reactors. There are many more designs and ideas that are being developed as we speak, whether more interesting (read: safe/efficient) fuel mixes, modular/micro designs, and various other improvements.
"Cost" is a merely a reflection of how much human capital is required to make something happen. I'd much rather spend our human capital on technologies that have the potential to massively increase the energy available to humanity, rather than focusing on tech which we know has strict upper bounds on power output / scalability. Solar and wind is useful in certain areas, but the idea that they can provide the baseload for a decarbonized future is ridiculous to me, unless your starting point is "I don't think humanity needs to consume much more power".
We are in fact doing things soley because of cost, and pretty much only because of cost, because capitalisim. Solar and wind are now cheaper than all alternatives in most situations, so they are rapidly becoming all thats being built. We are doing the cheapest thing, which just so happens to be great for carbon, luckily for us. If we get out of this climate mess it will almost be by accident, because we made solar cheap, not because we chose to do the right thing.
Honestly you need to look into numbers for some of your points, and you'll see the folly. Land usage, its a non issue. For eg, its estimated that if around 1/3rd of the land the US currently uses for corn ethanol was converted to solar, it would power the whole country. And thats existing used land without talking about the insane amount of empty spaces that exist. non issue.
For storage, solar+24hr storage is now cheaper than new gas, and dropping fast (https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...).
Yes there are new nuke designs that are cool, but they're at least 10-20 years away from deployment at scale, by which time renewables and storage will be much cheaper still, and the transition will be mostly over. Im not anti at all, they're just too late, too slow and too expensive.
I think you need to catch up on developments in the last few years, and re-evaluate what seems ridiculous to you, a lot has changed very quickly. Cheap energy abundance via renewables is now a very likely outcome.
Becuase I'm interested in the future. The math with wind and solar checks out if all you care about is current energy needs. But we've already achieved most of the efficiency we can with at least PV. Even in a hypothetical future where you have some sort of quantum PV panels using MEG, your best possible hope is only 3x current efficiencies. But again, I'm more interested in our long-term future. Nuclear (fission and fusion) have much more unbounded potential than wind and solar.
Back to cost, the numbers in the article you link are cherry-picked. They rely on deploying solar to "the sunniest regions in the world" to get that performance. Most of the world is not the sunniest, unfortunately. Beyond that, the corn fields and insane amounts of empty space you mention are generally not co-located with areas of high power usage, making transmission another factor (which is doubly a factor since PV is such low-voltage that you require significant transformer infrastructure in order to step things up for transmission). So I strongly disagree, land usage is absolutely still an issue. There are also externalities caused by covering huge swathes of land with PV panels.
And it would need to be huge swathes of land, because in case it wasn't clear I would like to see humanity have huge amounts of power at our disposal – significantly more than we are using today. My back of the napkin map is that it would take 50,000 km2 of solar to accommodate current US energy needs. But I'd like to 100x our energy supply. That would require 5m km2, which is half the entire land area of the USA.
And honestly, I'm still skeptical of the price difference. PV needs lots of things (transformers, transmission, storage, disposal, land use, etc) that are frequently not priced in. Meanwhile the numbers quoted for nuclear fission reactors are frequently absolutely all in, including the cost of decommissioning the reactor at some indeterminate point in the future and pre-allocating funds for disposal.
tl;dr – your right that solar/wind is already quite cost effective and moving rapidly on its own pace just fine. So if anything needs collective support to me it is nuclear which has potential for the future that solar/wind just lacks.
You should be less skeptical.
With a LCOE difference of 5x there is more than a little wiggle room to price in extra storage and transmission costs and still end up way cheaper.
That is how every kilowatt hour generated with solar and wind, stored with power2gas (the most expensive form of storage) and used on a cold, windless night still ends up being cheaper than nuclear power generated on a sunny, windy day.
Nuclear power survives exclusively because of its relationship with the military industrial complex. Thats why it gets deluged with lavish subsidies, that's most governments only want a few and that's why the governments who build them either have a bomb or want the ability to build one in a hurry (e.g. Iran who joined this club a long time ago or Poland who joined recently).
Transmission costs will require more than "wiggle room" if you are sending power from some cornfield in middle America to Seattle.
Also a big question in my mind is "where can the price go from here". I don't imagine there is a huge amount of room left for optimization of solar, where as with nuclear I think almost everyone agrees that it is about as expensive as it could be. There is infinite room to improve the economies of scale and unit economics of nuclear; not so much for solar.
Offshore wind is more like $70, but also has double the capacity factor, so requires less matching storage.
We've been told for about 3 decades that any day soon microreactors/thorium/fusion will lead to cheaper, safer nuclear power and no doubt for the next 3 decades some people will continue to believe.
To be more concrete: the first chart from this report[1] is showing "Solar PV + Storage—Utility" at $50-130 (mid-range: $90) and "U.S. Nuclear" at $141-220 (mid-range: $180).
I don't think we've had serious capitalized work on micro-reactors for 3 decades, it's a much more recent phenomenon. And China (who is massively outperforming the US in solar deployment) is also deploying Thorium reactors. Kinda strange for them to do that since they're so good at solar and nuclear is such a lost cause, esp since Thorium reactors are generally worse for the military/weapons case (which you claim is the only reason nuclear energy programs exist).
[1] https://www.lazard.com/media/uounhon4/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
I kind of see where you're coming from now. However, I don't particularly care about 100x'ing our future at the moment. For right now, I care about solving the existential risk of climate change - lets get to 1x as carbon free as possible, as quickly as possible. And at present the quickest and cheapest way to do that is solar/wind + battery. Any dollar diverted from solar/etc right now to "go full nuclear" delays our progress against decarbonization.
Once we are out of the danger zone we can talk about our 100x future, and sure build nukes for that if you want, sounds great. Perhaps given 20 years of investment we can make them competitive, like we did for solar.
Renewables will never be cheap enough to fully replace fossil fuels, batteries will never be good enough.
No matter what, as long as the cost of extracting and burning fossil fuels is less than the result of what gets produced by the consumption, someone will be doing it.
It’s why crypto will never solve the energy issue. Why AI/GPT/LLM won’t either. Especially when the cost of that output is pegged to the cost of generating the above.
Fossil fuels are already dead, it’s just time horizon. How fast we want to go is a function of how much fiat we want to shovel into PV solar and battery manufacturing.
[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/watershed-moment-big-battery-sto...
It's similar to how you can identify Real Bird Lovers. They stay silent when they see pictures of oil-covered birds after an Exxon Valdez or a Deepwater Horizon. Show them a windmill and boy do they get passionate about bird safety and welfare.
But really, we simply need a lot of virgin batteries regardless because we don't have enough. Recycling and disposal will only really take off once the market is mostly saturated (which we don't appear to be anywhere near).
I'd also point out that modern LiPo batteries are 90% recyclable with no special techniques needed. That's because by weight, the batteries are mostly iron and nickel. Recycling them is really as simple as just melting them down. It only gets tricky if you want to collect the lithium, silicon, and other trace materials (and there are already recycling plants that are handling that).
The problem is that has to be planned almost from the beginning. Which shouldn't be a huge deal. My neighborhood had a water tower built at the same time the neighborhood was built. There's no reason district heating couldn't have occupied the lot right next to it.
We won't, for example, make a more cost-efficient flywheel or heat storage. They are effectively as efficient as they'll ever be.
IMO, it necessarily has to be batteries. The other alternatives are nowhere near as good.
You also don't technically need new batteries almost ever. Batteries (typically) don't really die, they just lose capacity. After a 15 year runtime instead of storing 10mWh they now store 7mWh. That's still 7mWh. After another 15 years it'll be down to around 5mWh.
Batteries can be deployed nearly instantly. My power company is planning on building a new battery plant next year, it announced it the year prior.
I know a pumped hydro plan that has literally been in the works for the last 20 years and shows no sign of actually being started (still being planned).
"Taming the Sun" [0] goes into more details and talks about it better than I can.
People like to over simplifying complexity by reducing arguments to a single reasoning. It helps make everything seem more simple than it really is. It is a way to persuade people that lack understanding "all systems are complex". Even instructions on how to construct a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. How many years does it take of development before a child can actually preform that "simple" task?
> California is so far using forty per cent less natural gas to generate electricity than it did in 2023
> total carbon emissions in China had actually decreased
> kept the country’s coal use flat and also cut the amount of natural gas used during the same period in 2024 by a quarter
So if they need to run 10% of the time, then you've still reduced your carbon output by 90%. The goal is 100%, but the remaining fossil fuel plants are not the biggest issue.
A nuclear plant would also be carbon-free, but Germany had other reasons not to want it. So it was a reasonable decision to keep the fossil fuel plants around, and shut more and more of them down over time.
Poland is keeping their coal plants open by refusing to invest in quick and cheap renewables. Instead they plan to build nuclear plants for the next 20 years.
> Poland—long a leading coal-mining nation—saw renewable power outstrip coal for electric generation in May, thanks to a remarkable surge in solar construction. In 2021, the country set a goal for photovoltaic power usage by 2030; it has already tripled that goal.
Is this inaccurate / missing something?
Until we can figure out how to use solar to actually power the industrial processes necessary to build/recycle/maintain it, it's mostly a lure, a stop gap at best. And to be able to do that you would need to have an industrial policy with strong rules inside the countries using the solar.
But it's all very convenient to lie about it, as if we are doing something meaningful, it's part of the inbuilt duplicity omnipresent in today's society, that derive from female virtuous posturing/behavior.
And as the parent noted, in the case of reduction of fossil fuel use that is necessary at the global level because the effect of climate change is not localized, solar doesn't meaningfully change anything yet. In fact, it allows us to just consume more energy while still putting out as much CO2 as before and actually even more. Global fossil fuel consumption has not reduced one bit; it's extremely hypocritical to have various countries around the world increase their consumption to be able to say that there was a decrease at some specific localisation.
There's at least:
- creation of infrastructure
- maintenance of infrastructure
- mining/acquiring fuel
- waste fuel
- retirement of infrastructure
and then for each point:
- something like cost per MWh,
- human deaths,
- animal deaths,
- CO2 emissions
- land area usage (or land area damage)
- others???
The nature of any project is inherently fractal, and trying to assign a impact to each part is all over the map, and anyone with any agenda or bias can move the 1000 little sliders enough that it adds up to what they ultimately want to see.
You get stuff like:
"Lets assume all the trucks are old and need to drive up hill to deliver the panels"
"Lets assume that the solar panels are installed in a place where it never is cloudy"
"Lets assume the coal plant only burns coal from this one deposit on earth that has the lowest NOx emissions"
"Lets assume the solar panel factory never bother putting panels on their roof, and instead run on coal"
Deaths due to coal mining? Probably in the hundreds of thousands. Animals killed by oil slicks? Millions. Deaths due to fossil fuels via climate change? Millions. Animals (and people) killed by solar? Statistically insignificant in comparison.
The repeated cost of 'trucks driving up a hill', and the cost of fuel for those lorries, and so on, is indeed 'fractal'. However the oil consumed by a power station dwarfs that.
Strip mining thousands of square miles for coal, or steel, or rare-earths, or simply just 'square miles' to bury old wind turbine blades, is very much quantifiable.
And these are all the kinds of points that are used to denigrate one form of power 'I don't like', but aren't talked about for other forms 'I do like'.
Hence my original question, a like-for-like comparison in a reputable scientific journal.
What are the safest and cleanest sources of energy?
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Low-carbon technologies need far less mining than fossil fuels
https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-...
Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?
They had solar since the 90s but it was broken panels (which still work, they basically never die). Finally last year I had the time and money to put in a big new solar setup for them. Now they don't need the generator except during prolonged storms in December (even then I don't think they need it, just like using it).
The main benefits: 1) Pays for itself in 3 years 2) No more gasoline generator (loud, smelly) 3) No more trips to get gasoline. No more parents carrying 5 gallon gas cans around. 4) Allows parents to get A/C for first time.
(Though you don't have to do it all at once. So you could run it briefly every month, and occasionally put in one gallon, which is a lot easier to lift.)
generally not great to be around a lot
The advancements in solar and battery storage are accelerating. It's not a linear 1:1 relationship where new solar goes into new usage. As we get better at building and deploying solar, the cost continues to decline. The more the cost declines, the faster the rollout.
So the advancements in solar really are making things better. This is a long-term, cumulative process.
- Solar and storage is cheaper than building a new natural gas peaker plant in most locales (current majority of generation)
- Dispatching battery plants becomes cheaper than turning on existing peaker plants. Fuel is free, dispatch is instant, they can add inertia.
If by "we" you mean the rest of the world, China is manufacturing and installing the most renewable energy of any country in the world by far – and it's not enough to meet their demand. That's why they're also deploying more coal and nuclear than anyone else, too! They're probably building more electric vehicles than any other country, too, which is huge for their air quality.
Will be an interesting one to watch as to how China responds.
My understanding is that Solar does offset fossil fuel usage, in large part because solar power generation throughout the day is conveniently aligned with energy usage throughout the day. With the exception of the evening, which some people refer to as a "duck curve" left behind to be picked up by other generation sources. But it's most definitely stepping in to fill demand that would otherwise be filled by fossil fuels
Things are getting better.
What you are saying is that the induced current will be strong enough to cause damage even after all breakers trip.
Having to black start a bunch of grids world wide? Yes. Widespread damage? No.
By that logic, fossil fuels are also a form of solar power.
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