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Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-years-on-the-sun-is-having-a-moment
280•dmazin•1d ago

Comments

peterpost2•1d ago
Paywall
gjm11•1d ago
For what it's worth, it didn't throw one up for me. Anyway, for anyone wondering what's beyond the slightly clickbaity headline, it isn't about some astronomical phenomenon; the subheading reads "In the past two years, without much notice, solar power has begun to truly transform the world’s energy system." and the article is all about that.
Brajeshwar•1d ago
It do not throw up for me either. I was silently hoping that they excluded IPs from more economically behind countries, so we can read. I was happy.
ljf•1d ago
No paywall for me here in the UK. Maybe they consider us an economically behind country too.
gjm11•1h ago
In case anyone's wondering: the HN title has now been changed to be more informative than the original article title, which was something like "4.6 billion years on, the sun is having a moment".
mikepurvis•1d ago
Reader mode on FF and a reload dismissed it for me.
anomaly_•11h ago
People deserve to be paid for their work.
georgecmu•1d ago
https://archive.is/lv3eU
joshdavham•1d ago
How are people making these?
m348e912•1d ago
>How are people making these?

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.

pcthrowaway•1d ago
Take the paywalled URL: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46...

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If the article has already been archived, you can select one of the snapshots which the archive site will show you.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.

ignoramous•1d ago
> If you get an nginx page (I seem to get one pretty often)

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.

Bender•1d ago
And make sure your DNS is not 1.1.1.1. Archive.is will alter requests coming from their DNS. They do not always detect it.
pcthrowaway•20h ago
I'm pretty sure it's IP-based because I get it on different devices from the same network when it happens.
linusg789•1d ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20250709125256/https://www.newyor...
Aardwolf•1d ago
Given that life on earth in the last multi-billion years wasn't possible without the sun, it's strange to say that it has a moment only today
treve•1d ago
It's a small joke.
arh5451•1d ago
Nice article explaining solar energy policy. I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms. Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.
piva00•1d ago
> Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.

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.

InitialLastName•1d ago
I think they meant critical as in a critique rather than a criticism. They are requesting discussion and exploration of the history and ramifications of China's policy, what the meaningful ROI and costs have been, and what the other (4-ish) countries that had the capacity for that sort of investment got out of non-investment (investment in other things).
destitude•1d ago
I'm fully off grid (even had utility power but had them remove it). Cook on electric, have electric water heater, using AC and have enough panels and batteries to not even need a backup generator.
xnx•22h ago
This is very cool. I'm guessing you must live somewhere with mild winters. Insulation can do wonders, but it can be overcast for weeks in the north.
jdlshore•11h ago
Solar panels are so cheap that it makes sense to overbuild, such that even an overcast winter day meets your electricity needs.
jopsen•11h ago
I think that depends on where you are. I've heard of 20kW installations producing 500W in December.

Granted 500W isn't nothing, but what if it's snows?

belorn•9h ago
That is about the numbers that we get in Sweden. Those months were solar production is lowest is also the months that consumption is highest for the average household, around 400% compared to the warmest summer months. As a result, energy prices are also significant higher during winter compared to summer.
DamonHD•6h ago
My home's PV produces more energy than we use in a year, including heating. But the ~1:10 swing in generation from my roof in London UK between mid-winter and mid-summer is tough, and the storage to cover that interseasonally would currently cost about the same as the house and/or use ~50% of its volume. However, we import minimally in summer and export like crazy with the help of relatively modest storage.

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:

https://www.earth.org.uk/statscast-202012.html

chopin•6h ago
In my experience this requires overbuilding by a factor of 10. That's not a good allocation of money.
LetsGetTechnicl•1d ago
What "critical look" is there to take? How about the way that the US gov't subsidizes the oil and gas industry, and is about to restart the coal industry? For some reason gov't investment in industry is only bad when China does it.
notTooFarGone•1d ago
China bad when it's the only country that actually does something meaningful. Cheap batteries are fueling energy transition and the demand is only met by huge overproduction by china.

China is actually carrying our lazy asses.

MisterTea•1d ago
> 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.

Gigachad•18h ago
It’s a perfect example of overwhelming greed, corruption, and hate collapsing an empire.
m_fayer•6h ago
Seriously, thank you. I’m aware of the complexities and injustices and manipulations and repressions perpetrated by the Chinese state.

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.

JKCalhoun•1d ago
When the U.S. does it we're "picking sides".
mensetmanusman•1d ago
The oil industry pays 10s of billions in taxes.

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.

margalabargala•22h ago
That's a really uncharitable way to read that.

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.

Propelloni•9h ago
Nobody complains about China investing in its private industry, all wealthy nations do that. Everybody complains that China is a dictatorship that a) treats its people like shit, b) exploits these shitty conditions to gain global market advantage with state-owned companies, and c) keeps foreign companies from exploiting it, too.

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.

closewith•8h ago
The Government and actions of the United States also does not mesh well classic liberal ideas of freedom and human dignity, so this seems to be a hypocritical complaint.
Propelloni•4h ago
Sorry, I'm not in the USA. And while the current US government is pretty bad, it is not a dictatorship. Protests like the "No Kings" are unimaginable in China, just consider the Tiananmen Square massacre.
bryanlarsen•1d ago
I saw lots of mentions of batteries in the article.
pydry•1d ago
It'll probably be fulfilled in 3 stages

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.

bryanlarsen•1d ago
My google-fu is failing to resurface the links, but IIRC:

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.

pydry•1d ago
One of the reasons I dont expect the australia storage model I cited to be wildly different to, say, Finland is that areas of the world which dont get a lot of sunlight tend to have a lot more wind and hydro potential per capita.

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.

bryanlarsen•22h ago
Unfortunately, natgas has a large sunk cost advantage. If we were building from scratch in 2025, syngas for the last 2-10% would be competitive. But we have a lot of natgas infrastructure. Syngas's advantage is that it can be locally produced and stored. Natgas has to be shipped large distances, but we already have the infrastructure to do that.
pydry•22h ago
Yeah, if you discount it being zero carbon, syngas is not cost competitive with natgas at all.
bryanlarsen•21h ago
https://terraformindustries.com/ is betting the cost crossover point is soon.
distances•10h ago
Finland does not have any geothermal. The country lies on two billion years old basement rock with approximately zero geothermal activity.

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.

throwaway2037•7h ago

    > second cheapest electricity in Europe
That is incredible. Why don't they have more power intensive industry as a result?
hannob•11h ago
> 3) Syngas fills in that last 2-5%

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.

ajross•1d ago
> I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms.

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.

aaomidi•1d ago
US was giving $7500 for each car sold to Tesla. But sure, CHYNAAA
mensetmanusman•1d ago
Whatever the number is in the west, China has on average ~ 10x the amount of subsidies than the west when it comes to manufacturing.

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.

hearsathought•1d ago
> Whatever the number is in the west

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"?

mensetmanusman•19h ago
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2455
bryanlarsen•1d ago
China obviously does not subsidize $75,000 per car.

European analysis resulted in an 18% offsetting duty, meaning Chinese subsidies are lower than American ones.

mensetmanusman•19h ago
No it’s not focused on vehicles, that’s the average subsidy on manufacturing.

According to the treasury dept (and the EU): https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2455

ferguess_k•3h ago
West simply decided to de-industrialize itself (at least some countries, not all of them) and asked the other countries to do the dirty work for them so they can focus on finance and such, so of course the West has less subsidies -- and no one is forcing the West's hand NOT to give subsidies. Now it takes triple hard to pick it back, if the West really wants.
kjkjadksj•23h ago
Imo that didn’t do much but push people into tesla that were in the market for new cars already. Teslas are cheap enough on a lease as it is.
testing22321•22h ago
They gave that same rebate to all EV manufacturers. It had nothing to do with any one brand.
georgemcbay•1d ago
> Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.

What if... (stick with me here because this is about to get crazy)... free market capitalism isn't the best solution for everything...?

throwaway2037•7h ago
The correct solution is to make China pay tariffs in proportion to their explicit and implicit state support for their "private" industries. It is not too late to push back.
olddustytrail•29m ago
You can't make China pay tariffs because it's not the exporter that pays them, it's the importer.

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.

zmmmmm•12h ago
> I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms

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).

bot403•12h ago
I can't see how this could be true. Many people will need to drive the ev to work during the day, and if you discharge it at night then when are you really charging?

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.

zmmmmm•11h ago
Yes, it does rely on charging infra rolling out - either at work or with fast DC charging. But that is happening too. Well, in markets where EV adoption is encouraged - for the US, I guess we'll see.
andyferris•11h ago
Ideally in that case you’d charge the car from the grid during the workday, when the grid is powered by solar and power spot prices are low.

BYO house solar is optional when there is grid solar (and home solar exports).

audunw•10h ago
There are several scenarios where it would contribute:

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.

djaychela•10h ago
You're not left with a flat battery at the end of the night. Many vehicles are combined in intelligent systems which work together to ensure that the vehicles have the energy they need (which is easy to set in all the systems I've seen) but provide enough grid support to make this work.

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKItLGPdN0k

Mashimo•9h ago
I think peak energy usage is in the morning and afternoon / early night when people are at home.

Would be stella if people could charge during noon. I don't know how feasible that is.

lawrenceduk•8h ago
We usually drive to work. That means that when the sun’s shining, the car isn’t home.

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.

cycomanic•5h ago
Nobody said that you have to use your home or work solar. If you fill up part of your car using some fast charger network (which would still be solar powered), it would still work.

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).

ErigmolCt•9h ago
Storage is the elephant in the solar-powered room
marcosdumay•17m ago
Storage is something that close to nobody demands today, so up to 3 years ago anybody trying to sell it automatically failed.

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.

ZeroGravitas•8h ago
One of the good things about solar is the lack of a mismatch between solar production curve and human needs.

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.

ryukoposting•1d ago
> offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply.

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!

IsTom•1d ago
With some investment you can make solar panels locally, you can't produce new oil deposits.
fragmede•1d ago
Isn't that what biofuels are?

Sun -> plants (corn) -> liquid that goes in (modified) cars

IsTom•1d ago
EROI for them is really bad.
pfdietz•11h ago
And power/area for biofuels is abysmal. Using PV for BEVs instead of ethanol in ICE vehicles would reduce land requirements by a factor of ~100.
triceratops•22h ago
Sun (+ fertilizers made using petroleum)
bryanlarsen•1d ago
Once you build a solar plant, you no longer have a dependence on the country that made those solar panels. That solar plant will function for 50 years with very little maintenance. China is basically a single point of failure for future power expansion, but they can't take away solar plants already built.
throwaway2037•7h ago

    > China is basically a single point of failure for future power expansion
Not really. There used to be many more competitors, but Chinese govt support for their industry crushed competition elsewhere. It will a little bit more expensive to buy panels made outside China. That's it.
kccqzy•1d ago
The demand for fossil fuel is continuous. The demand for solar panels is one-time: when you first install it.
ryukoposting•23h ago
That's blatantly false. The panels themselves are typically rated for a 25-year service life [1,2]. Inverters are typically rated for about a decade [3,4]. Solar panels also must be cleaned periodically [5], otherwise their output is reduced. It's a power plant. It will need maintenance. As PV technology improves, there's also pressure to buy better solar panels [6] to replace older, lower-performing panels, resulting in disposal problems that hardly need explanation.

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...

kccqzy•21h ago
That's a blatantly disingenuous argument that misses the point. Setting aside the accuracy of the 25-year figure, is it easier to buy solar panels once to use them for 25 years or stockpile 25 years' worth of fossil fuel?

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?

realusername•10h ago
> 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?

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.

actionfromafar•4h ago
Making a solar panel isn't rocket science. China has just cornered the market right now. If supply dries up, you can make your own solar panels. It will take a few years to get the volume up but your current supply of panels will last until you do.
energy123•9h ago
You're right. We should quickly buy millions of solar panels from China and put them in a strategic reserve to future proof our energy needs and secure decades-long energy independence from China. We should also subsidize domestic production ASAP.
Biologist123•1d ago
This was a great positive start to the day. Thanks whoever posted 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.]

alex_duf•1d ago
>whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget

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...

Biologist123•1d ago
My apologies. By available carbon budget, I meant the carbon we can burn before we exceed 1.5 degrees, or 2 degrees etc.
myrmidon•1d ago
I think 1.5°C is already basically impossible; scenarios between 2°C and 4°C by 2100 over pre-industrial levels seem achievable-- that would be a total remaining CO2 budget of ~3 Tera-tons of CO2 within 2100.

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).

cess11•10h ago
1.5 degrees was last year.

https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/en/news-archive/copernic...

kragen•8h ago
Oh, we're definitely going to need direct air capture, which consumes massive amounts of energy. Fortunately, it's only massive compared to things like global shipping, not compared to the sun that hits the Earth.
alex_duf•4h ago
I see, thanks for clarifying I got confused there.
myrmidon•1d ago
I highly doubt that we will have global negative emissions (CO2 capturing) within the next decades-- maybe by the end of the century.

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).

fpoling•11h ago
If electricity is sufficiently cheap it can be cheaper to capture carbon from the atmosphere for chemical industry than to use oil or coal there.
VBprogrammer•10h ago
Do you have any source for this extraordinary claim? It's practically a claim of perpetual motion.

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).

DesertVarnish•9h ago
Difficult engineering problem but working from first principles suggests that the energy requirememts are not insurmountable. The roundtrip efficiency is worse than batteries but much better than photosynthesis.

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.

VBprogrammer•7h ago
Terraform Industries (and others); I'd seriously consider taking a long bet that these companies turn out to be better at converting investor capital into employee salaries, for a finite period of time, than they are at converting atmospheric CO2 into natural gas.

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.

DesertVarnish•6h ago
For hydrocarbon synthesis, hydrogen production from electrolysis dominates the energy usage, along with driving the Sabatier process. DAC might be like 5-10%.

Higher CO2 concentration is better but certainly not needed, it doesn't make or break the economics.

VBprogrammer•6h ago
I'm not going to argue over the numbers but any business which ignores such an obvious upside / upside scenario is not really serious about achieving economic criticality. It would allow a power plant, iron ore plant, cement producer, what have you, to make claims about their environmental credentials while simultaneously improving the efficiency of the process.
ben_w•9h ago
They said "If electricity is sufficiently cheap", which is less a claim and more a tautology.

Will it be that cheap? I think so, given that trees and grass etc. exist and get their carbon from the air.

HPsquared•8h ago
Even with free electricity, the capital (and maintenance, consumables etc) costs of the process could easily be too high.
ben_w•8h ago
I suppose that in principle that is indeed possible; in practice, trees exist and self-seed, so the limit is our own ignorance.
overfeed•7h ago
We are also limited the incentives to that make us cut tree for money, and not develop technologies if they are not profitable within a short time-window. We have the technology to plant more trees right now, but we aren't.
ben_w•7h ago
People plant loads of trees for lumber, but you're right, it's an economics question in the end.

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.

myrmidon•5h ago
> 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?

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).

ben_w•3h ago
> 1) If you actually use the extracted CO2, then it gets re-emitted on use, and the atmospheric concentration is virtually unaffected.

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.

VBprogrammer•7h ago
You could make the same argument about AGI. Just because nature does it doesn't mean it's easy for us to replicate in an industrial setting.
ben_w•7h ago
Sure, but you said "It's practically a claim of perpetual motion." which is overstating the challenge to a much greater degree than this understates it.
fpoling•1h ago
Consider a chemical synthesis that needs carbon. Right now it uses oil. But is has to be extracted and transported. With carbon capture from the air that no longer required. And maintaining the extra facility at the chemical factory can be cheaper than maintaining the extraction and supply chain for oil or coal.
hnaccount_rng•50m ago
It may never be “worth” it in economic sense, but it offers a way to separate the time of “energy is used” and “energy is available”. Assuming sufficient captureable volume you could capture the emissions of a fossil power plant during the ~two weeks per year where weather is sufficiently bad. And then take the other 50 weeks to capture that carbon again. It can be completely inefficient (like sub 5% round trip efficiency) if a) we pay for it via a capacity market and b) have sufficient excess (clean) energy to run it
throwaway2037•8h ago

    > If electricity is sufficiently cheap
It never will be.
myrmidon•8h ago
If you actually use captured carbon for something productive like synthetic fuel (where CO2 gets re-emitted) you are kinda ruining the point though.

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.

fpoling•1h ago
This about using carbon for chemical industry.
cess11•10h ago
"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."

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...

sfn42•9h ago
The problem with carbon capture is volume. There is about 0.04% CO2 in air. So in order to remove a ton of CO2, you would need to process thousands of tons of air, depending on the efficiency of the extraction process.

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.

myrmidon•8h ago
> How are you so confident that extinction is off the table?

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.

sfn42•8h ago
Yeah so this is mostly just a difference of definition. When I say extinction I mean what you describe, essentially a total collapse of modern society. I don't care whether/how long a few people survive somewhere, your scenario is apocalyptic enough for me to label it an apocalypse.

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.

usrusr•5h ago
But what's the probability of those direct climate effects happening without an all out nuclear war on the side, as a second order effect of the climate change? Humans are prone to fall for whatever radical ideology crosses their path when the future looks bleak.
myrmidon•4h ago
I don't believe in world-war as byproduct of climate change yet.

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.

antonvs•22m ago
I mostly agree with your assessment, except that "moaning about refugees" and resulting action is going to get a whole lot worse as the numbers increase.

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!

alex_duf•4h ago
>I highly doubt that we will have global negative emissions (CO2 capturing) within the next decades

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...

phtrivier•9h ago
Whenever I hear "carbon budget", I usually understand it as "how much CO2 we can still emit (net of sinks) before the warming passes a certain threshold (for example, some level of the Paris agreement.)

Is that a misunderstanding on my side ?

passwordoops•7h ago
Shrinking? China is growing their coal capacity (1). What people mistake is China is not "for renewables". They are for maximizing absolute output. That means they are "for everything"

(1) https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-has-more-than-...

alex_duf•4h ago
I didn't mention any shrinking. I just said we'd passed the CO2 per capita peak.

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.

ErigmolCt•10h ago
Solar and wind are booming, but fossil fuels aren't shrinking nearly as fast in absolute terms
richardw•9h ago
Countries are placing their bets. Fossil fuels will be a massive waste of investment in a decade. Anyone who can extrapolate a graph sees where this is headed.
netsharc•8h ago
There's an article a while ago about the solar boom in a poor country that had unreliable electricity network. The result was, solar wasn't treated as a replacement, but as a new source of energy, which enabled them to do more industrious things. Of course that doesn't help with the carbon budget...
msgodel•7h ago
Usually old energy sources don't go away until there's an economic contraction of some sort.
ZeroGravitas•9h ago
The rollout of renewables is the main factor in climate predictions for 2100 reducing over time.

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:

https://climateactiontracker.org/global/emissions-pathways/

Veedrac•7h ago
Even if, for sake of argument, one outright denies the evident exponential growth in solar, a purely linear extrapolation of 2024's rate from [1] puts solar equal to today's coal output by 2042. Solar is fundamentally a factory product, so this is a wildly pessimistic case, just enough interest in the product to keep the lines running. If you believe solar will grow for even a few more years, but still declare that it should level off, it's the mid 30s. If you're willing to just fit the established trend, even that's a vast underestimate. The difference between which of these to believe is just how brave you are.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...

danaris•1d ago
A remarkably positive and hopeful article. It's really staggering seeing the figures of not just how much solar has grown in recent years, but how massively its growth has outstripped everyone's predictions from essentially any time in the past.

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.

energy123•9h ago
Batteries will soon follow the same trajectory, just lagged. The same economic forces will produce the same outcome. We now have cost-effective stationary storage solution with non-scarce inputs, manufacturers are just waiting for the demand.

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.

throwaway2037•7h ago

    > diesel sales in Pakistan apparently fell thirty per cent in 2024
If true, this is fantastic news for Pakistan. They are in the middle of an awful economic crisis, that includes a balance of payments crisis (central bank has too few dollars to support necessary imports, like oil and gas). Anything they do to reduce trade defects will be very helpful.
thomascountz•12h ago
> ...people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours.

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.

pfdietz•12h ago
> are the most efficient form

What does this even mean?

aaronbrethorst•11h ago
being a sentence fragment, not much! It helps to zoom out to the context of the entire sentence, where the GP says: "Whether you believe photovoltaics are the most efficient form of green energy production or not, you cannot argue the impressive economics behind them"

It's definitely impressive that the cost per watt of a PV panel is roughly 13% of where it was just 15 years ago.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices

kragen•8h ago
You're overstating the current price of PV panels by a factor of three to five; it's closer to 3% of the 15-years-ago price than to 13%. That graph ends in 02023, at US$0.31/Wp, toward the end of the solar-panel bubble set up by the price-fixing cartel at the time. The actual current price is €0.11/Wp, or €0.06/Wp for low-cost (low-efficiency, no-warranty) panels: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...

€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.

thomascountz•9h ago
You got me. It was a honeypot of a term, "efficiency."

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...

decimalenough•7h ago
It is, unfortunately, also an apples to oranges comparison. A coal plant actually generates 1GW, 24/7, while "a gigawatt's worth" of solar panels is theoretical peak capacity at noon on a cloudless day.
cycomanic•5h ago
> It is, unfortunately, also an apples to oranges comparison. A coal plant actually generates 1GW, 24/7, while "a gigawatt's worth" of solar panels is theoretical peak capacity at noon on a cloudless day.

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].

cesarb•5h ago
> A coal plant actually generates 1GW, 24/7, while "a gigawatt's worth" of solar panels is theoretical peak capacity at noon on a cloudless day.

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.

ambientenv•11h ago
I just can't get that exuberant when I also read things like this [1].

[1] - https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-tale-of-two-ene...

audunw•10h ago
I only skimmed the article but there didn’t seem to be much written about how much of that non-electric fossil fuel is waste heat. I know there are versions of the energy source-sink graph which shows wasted energy. Why didn’t the author use it? Weird.

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.

aredox•10h ago
All of OECD countries are lying about their growth numbers, and Russia is "gaining strength".

A base sanity check shows this is a load of BS.

audunw•10h ago
I would recommend reading or watching what Tony Seba has put out. He has correctly predicted where we ended up with solar, and his predictions for the next stage of the energy transition is very remarkable and uplifting. It seems overly optimistic at first but makes a lot of sense when you look at the trend lines.
jillesvangurp•8h ago
I think the raw economics behind the transition are very interesting. People have a hard time imagining transformative changes. They keep trying to project the current state of affairs onto the post transition state. Of course the current state is mostly the result of how things used to work and not really a predictor for the future. When things stop working in the same way, a lot of other things start shifting. For example steel production is happening close to where coal used to be produced. And a lot of other industries depend on steel. What happens if steel production transitions to renewables? It will move to wherever renewables are cheapest. Which typically isn't where it's currently happening. Everything depending on cheap steel might move as well.

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?

silvestrov•5h ago
Steel factories cannot shutdown temporarily due to high electricity prices. They need a steady source of electricity.

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.

tvier•3h ago
> Steel factories cannot shutdown temporarily due to high electricity prices. They need a steady source of electricity.

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...

jillesvangurp•2h ago
They need some local buffers batteries, and some fallback power generation via the grid. But it benefits them if they can run on cheap renewables most of the time. And of course steel production processes can be adapted to be more flexible as well. Current steel production isn't optimized but when the choice is between shutting down for a few days or falling back to some relatively expensive power source, shutting down might be the more economical option. The idea behind flexible pricing is that large consumers of energy can optimize for that with batteries and storage. Charge when it's cheap, discharge when it isn't. Sell power when it gets really expensive.
nmfisher•1h ago
Link?
Loic•10h ago
From a geopolitical point of view, if we increase solar/renewable, we decrease dependencies on fossil fuels. As fossil fuels are traded in USD, we decrease our needs of USD, so we decrease the value of the USD.

Isn't it what the current US administration want? A weak USD to boost export?

DamonHD•4h ago
From outside at least, the US administration seems very like a bunch of cruel angry teens lashing out against reality, so various others (eg the bond markets) seem not sure that even if the US administration wants something that it would know why it does or that what is wanted would be a sensible thing or that it could be executed on...
ErigmolCt•10h ago
While the US is busy trying to revive the oil-soaked 20th century, places like Namibia are leapfrogging straight into a distributed, solar-powered future with YouTube tutorials... It's like watching the fossil era get out-hustled in real time.
seydor•7h ago
To be fair the US is leading the world in solar and wind per capita

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...

svantana•6h ago
What is your source for that statement? According to [1], countries like the Netherlands, Germany, Spain and Denmark are way ahead of the US in those respects.

[1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/

ludwigschubert•6h ago
The US is at half the per capital levels of Sweden, and seems to lag behind most of Europe:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-ge...

Do I misunderstand?

aa-jv•6h ago
This is false.

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).

lentil_soup•2h ago
those are interesting links, but it doesn't account for the amount of energy each person consumes in each region. Probably this one is better? it's the share of the electricity from renewables

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&hideCo...

cheschire•6h ago
Those are vastly different scales you’re comparing. I doubt Namibia vs America will be another Tesla vs Ford.

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.

loudmax•5h ago
Reinvigorating economic growth is the stated intent. The effectiveness of these policies will take longer to sort out, and will probably be argued over for decades.

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.

philipallstar•5h ago
The oil-soaked 20th century created all the millions of necessary precursors to miracles like phones and youtube and people in Namibia being able to get them. It's not out-hustled; it's just a miniscle increment. But it's good to see.
jjulius•4h ago
>... miracles like... youtube...

... miracle?

teitoklien•3h ago
lol, you have no idea just how hard it is to make something as mammoth size financially viable or even sustainable as a business, due to sheer technological bottlenecks in video streaming, encoding/decoding videos at that scale, and everything else.

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.

the_sleaze_•1h ago
Beautifully put
wffurr•3h ago
It's an amazing repository of how-to videos on every subject imaginable.

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.

wanderingstan•4h ago
“The Innovator's Dilemma” by Clayton M. Christensen described how big companies fail when against new startups because they can’t let go of their fat margins for a new technology that (at first) appears to be inferior, even a toy. (His examples are Japanese motorbikes and hard disks)

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... )

marcosdumay•53m ago
Hum... The profits from oil aren't as fat as they used to be. In fact, if you subtract the giant amount of subsides, there may be almost to nothing there.

That's to say that no, countries and governments do not behave like companies.

wanderingstan•41m ago
I think you might be in agreement with me in the main, just quibbling on the timing?

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.

zenkat•51m ago
Check out Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" for an interesting take on this dynamic for nation-states and political economies. His core thesis is that dominant powers rise as new players leverage new technologies (especially energy technologies), build complex interdependent economies centered around those technologies, but then wither and fall as they spend increasingly more on military power to monopolize and defend the chokepoints of those technologies. When a new more efficient technology comes along, they are doomed to irrelevance as they fail to capitalize on those technologies, and new players swoop in for dominance.

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...

wanderingstan•37m ago
Thanks for the tip! It seems obvious now, but its been interesting for me to realize how much of human history can be understood as a quest for energy, full stop. Even going back to the invention of farming, which at its core was way to reliably source more calories per person. Fun to think of your examples of sailing, coal, and petroleum empires as further chapters in this ongoing quest.
jer2209•4h ago
Its interesting you give Namibia as an example. Every major oil company has exploration projects there today. It is clearly part of the future strategy for the country. When I visited for vacation not too long ago, I remember the O&G industry being very much visible from the shore in Walvis Bay.

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.

pzo•9h ago
good article I just don't know why author prefer to spell all numbers using words rather than digits. It's very mentally taxing for me to read, e.g:

>> 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 [...]

ZeroGravitas•9h ago
I believe this is a New Yorker magazine house style thing. I'd assume the author uses numerals in the book this article is based on.
HPsquared•8h ago
If there are two options, you can trust they'll go for the more verbose one.
shmeeed•3h ago
Autors are often paid by word count. Note that I'm not saying that's the reason here, but it could be.
bokkies•8h ago
Also Cape Town is a city in South Africa..no idea where Capetown is
antonvs•40m ago
It's near Stellen Bosch
happyraul•8h ago
That's simply good writing practice. I find it more taxing to read digits than prose.
sojournerc•4h ago
I was taught numbers up to ten should be spelled, the rest use digits
mrspuratic•2h ago
Chicago Manual of Style (though it says 1 to 100, er, I mean one to one-hundred). I try to use a CMOS subset for my professional/technical writing, mostly for consistency, but, partly so that I don't need to argue with people with subjective opinions about how I'm writing it wrong.
otikik•4h ago
Thank you. To me after reading the parent comment the numbers option was so evidently better that I didn't even consider that someone like you could exist. My conception of humanity has been slightly enlarged.

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?

Animats•9h ago
"Last year, for the third year straight, heat pumps outsold furnaces in the U.S."

Now that's a major development not mentioned much.

Heat pumps have both improved quite a bit, and become cheaper due to sheer volume.

matwood•7h ago
I recently bought a heat pump dryer and it's pretty cool. No exhaust vent, just water drain. It also doesn't need the heavy duty power plug since it pulls so much less electricity than a typical heated air dryer.
pjc50•7h ago
Ah of course - it can recycle the heat. Hot air going out a vent is wasted energy that you've paid for.
markus_zhang•6h ago
I don’t know this thing exists. I need to take a look and maybe buy one when the current one breaks down. What brand did you purchase? Thanks.
matwood•3h ago
I have an LG. They look to cost a premium in the US above heated air one. They also seem to be gentler on clothes since they pump in warm dry air vs. super heated air.
zitsarethecure•6m ago
Out of curiosity, is it a "smart" appliance that requires an app to function?
jpk2f2•40m ago
I used to have a Bloomberg heat pump dryer when I lived in a historical apartment. I was fairly happy with it, only real downsides was that it did take longer to dry compared to my prior electric and gas dryers, it tended to pickup a musty smell, and it was relatively complex and difficult to repair compared to a simpler dryer (had some minor failures over the years). Upside was the efficiency and not needing an exterior exhaust.

Been a number of years since then, so I'm sure they've improved even more and are hopefully somewhat cheaper.

jonplackett•8h ago
> Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere

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.

bhaak•8h ago
Solar panels can be locally recycled. Oil cannot.

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.

nradov•6h ago
Solar panel recycling has never really been done at scale. And a country would need fairly advanced manufacturing capabilities first before they could conduct that recycling.
adrianN•5h ago
Are old solar panels available at scale? They last for decades.
lnsru•4h ago
First 15-20 years old Siemens panels come off the roofs right now in Germany. Still having 2/3 of the rated power generation capability. Absolutely fascinating thing. And since they cost more or less nothing it would make absolutely sense to install them in some lower cost of living area in southern Europe. I can get the panels in Germany, who wants to take over the southern Europe part?
hnaccount_rng•1h ago
They are also old technology and only about half as efficient as current ones. So even if you restore them to full nameplate capacity for free they are still wasted to put anywhere as long as the installation price is dominated by labor costs. The _only_ scenario in which this might be worth it is if there are no new solar cells available
marcosdumay•48m ago
Yep. Those will still not be available for recycling.
pshirshov•8h ago
> China produces pretty much all the solar panels

Why didn't other countries build up solar industries? Were busy with fossils? Were too greedy to subsidise?

netsharc•8h ago
Man, Paul Krugman (here's a trigger for people who know they know better than him to respond that he's a hack!) was writing about the US giving up lead of solar tech to China back during the G. W. Bush admin... (which makes me feel old as hell)
mrspuratic•6h ago
In 1979 Jimmy Carter installed solar (thermal) panels on the White House roof as part of his fairly progressive environmental and fuel efficiency policies.

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.

buckle8017•8h ago
China builds solar panels using electricity produced by burning coal.

China is by far the world largest producer of green house gases.

chopin•7h ago
For goods we consume, though.
kukkukb•6h ago
Surely, at some point in the near future, they'll be producing solar panels using solar energy?
marcosdumay•37m ago
Well, in some 2 years their solar production trend will reach their electricity consumption trend...

So either that or they'll deploy electric-arc sculptures all over the country for the population to see, listen, and smell.

mrspuratic•6h ago
Per-country yes China is #1, but per-capita, oil producing countries are most of the top 10 (with island nation Palau #1, inefficient transport skewed by low population).
pjc50•6h ago
China is also one of the top two countries by population. The other is India, at almost exactly the same number of 1.4bn.
pshirshov•4h ago
> China builds solar panels using electricity produced by burning coal.

Source? From everything I can find, at this moment China has around half of the generation coming from clean/renewable sources.

passwordoops•7h ago
You forgot being too concerned with maintaining environmental and air quality regulations.

There's a reason Shanghai is known for really bad air quality. There's a reason the rate of GHG emissions are accelerating

pshirshov•4h ago
> maintaining environmental and air quality regulations

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.

derektank•2h ago
The sarcasm seems unwarranted. The US has better air quality than any other country with over 50 million people and better air quality than the EU on average. Most of the countries above America on the list are either islands directly in the path of tradewinds, largely unpopulated, or the nordics. Now, a lot of this is simply the fact that Americans haven't embraced diesel and that America is a relatively low density country. But air quality is really quite good in most of the US. The Clean Air Act and other environmental legislation was very successful.
pshirshov•15m ago
> The US has better air quality than any other country with over 50 million people and better air quality than the EU on average

And that remarkable achievement was only possible because the US does not produce evil solar panels on its soil, do I understand you right?

pjc50•6h ago
Like everything else in manufacturing, economy of scale wins.

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.

ZeroGravitas•6h ago
Apparently the Chinese solar industry are baffled by the US obsession with Solyndra.

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:

https://www.desmog.com/mercatus-center/

actionfromafar•4h ago
The US has a lot of obsessions foreigners make little objective sense of.
freeopinion•4h ago
Point the finger at yourself. Why didn't you personally build and operate a plant?

Why would you expect different behavior from others?

pshirshov•11m ago
I did personally build and operate a plant. Literally.
kragen•8h ago
I’m all for solar - but does it really solve the geographical / geopolitical issues of oil, as it’s currently rolling out?

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.

roenxi•8h ago
Not to mention that 20 years is enough time to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers. The issue with oil is it requires a constant flow of resources from specific locations in the world that are blessed by geography. Solar power has much less of that going on.
kragen•7h ago
It's possible, but you may have noticed that out of the ≈200 countries in the world, over the last 20 years, about 180 of them have completely failed to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers, and about 100 of them have completely failed to develop a native industry of anything, continuing their agrarian and resource-extraction economies more or less as they have been for centuries, just with imported Chinese cellphones. People in those countries often blame the rich countries for keeping them down, for example by selling them goods at lower prices than their domestic production of those goods, and they're not completely wrong, but in many cases the dynamics preventing them from escaping that equilibrium are mostly internal.

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.

HappMacDonald•6h ago
> 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?

freeopinion•4h ago
Energy independence and HSR are indeed poor metaphors for each other.

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.

Gibbon1•7h ago
It's more banal than that. Oil you have to pay for. Which for most countries you need to constantly come up with foreign currency. If you have a financial crisis like hot money flees you end up at the mercy of the world banking systems mafia enforcers the IMF.

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.

nradov•6h ago
Come on, be serious. The IMF doesn't break anyone's legs. The worst they can do is refuse to loan you any more money. Any sovereign state is free to balance their own budget and tell the IMF to GTFO.
ZeroGravitas•6h ago
At the very least it has solved it for China, and that is one key driving force of their moves in this area.

Whether that makes a global conflict more or less likely is an interesting question.

usrusr•5h ago
> China produces pretty much all the solar panels - That’s quite a big concentration of power, even more so than oil.

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.

adrianN•5h ago
Solar panels are not that hard to produce. China just does it cheaper than other countries. Any industrialized country can easily set up the necessary infrastructure if they choose to do so for strategic reasons.
myself248•4h ago
The US used to produce tons of solar panels, and LiFePO4 batteries too, but we let those industries fail. (I've been to quite a few plant auctions. It's sad, picking through the bones of random tools and support equipment, but nobody's bidding on the big crown-jewel machines because they had one purpose and that simply doesn't work in our market anymore.)

There are still a few solar panel plants in the US, but nothing like we had.

jillesvangurp•8h ago
The article doesn't mention a technology that deserves some attention because it counters the biggest and most obvious deficiency in solar: the sun doesn't always shine.

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.

HPsquared•8h ago
Any country relying on international cables for electricity would need to build and maintain full local backup power capacity. The combined cost of cables + backup may be more than storage cost. (Of course there are many factors which affect all these costs)
CrossVR•7h ago
Norway, Denmark and The Netherlands are all part of the European Union. Would you make the same claim if we were talking about US states? (With Texas being a special exception)
HPsquared•6h ago
It's a risk management thing. "Can a trade dispute or undersea 'accident' lead to mass blackouts?"
kzrdude•5h ago
There is one error there, Norway is not in the EU
ColonelBlimp•2h ago
Norway is member of the European Economic Area, not of the European Union, together with Iceland and Liechtenstein.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Area

pjc50•6h ago
You might say "any country relying on international pipelines for gas would need to build and maintain full local backup capacity", except they didn't. Hence the Russia/Ukraine war causing all sorts of problems.
adrianN•5h ago
To be fair, many countries have several months worth of gas reserves.
supplied_demand•4h ago
==the Russia/Ukraine war causing all sorts of problems.==

Problems, yes. Catastrophes, no. It's not clear that they "needed" full backup capacity.

m4rtink•3h ago
Most states have sizeable underground gas storages, often reusing old oil and gas fields. The capacity being from weeks to months of normal use, possibly much longer with some rationing. This mostly turned out to be sufficient to enable a quick switch to LNG and other sources.
berkes•5h ago
> maintain full local backup power 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:

jillesvangurp•1h ago
It helps to have stable bi-lateral relationships between countries that choose to connect their grids and economies. This kind of stability is a good thing. The current instability with long relationships being questioned and falling apart is a bad thing. And where you say cost, I say investment. Because energy is a valuable commodity and being able to buy/sell energy via cables has value.

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.

gmueckl•40m ago
Recent history is a very, very good reminder that political relationships between countries (or more generally political powers) are extremely fragile and the only reliable constant in these kinds of systems is change and stability isn't permanent, unfortunately.

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.

buckle8017•8h ago
Better grid connections helps with variable weather but it does nothing for solar biggest down side.

Seasonal variation from December to May is enormous.

Storing months of power is a problem with no known solution.

jillesvangurp•7h ago
North south connections enable solar power from Africa to be used around the year. And while solar is down in the winter, wind production usually peaks. If you have thousands of km of cable, there is a lot of power that can be moved around.
HappMacDonald•6h ago
buckle may be referring at least partly to the north-south landmass imbalance.

inb4 someone tries to invent floating solar farms to try to fill the Pacific with, lol.

ZeroGravitas•39m ago
China already has more than 1GW of floating solar PV in the Pacific.
short_sells_poo•6h ago
Ah yes, what Europe needs once more is to become existentially dependent on a region that is both culturally and geographically distant and where Europe has very little ability to enforce and police it's interests.

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.

TheOtherHobbes•5h ago
The "realities" are a direct result of a fossil economy which is still stuck in the 19th century.

Oil and gas have caused far more wars than electricity has.

adrianN•5h ago
Power2Gas and using the existing infrastructure for gas storage is a known solution for storing months of power. It might not be the cheapest solution though.
pydry•5h ago
Power2gas+solar/wind produced energy is a lot more expensive than natural gas and requires solar/wind to routinely overproduce.

...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...

bee_rider•3h ago
Solar is always producing, at some percentage (may be very a very low percentage) of full capacity. So, we want it to routinely overproduce. That’ll also cut the days that we need to dip into storage.

> 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.

davedx•5h ago
“No known solution” is categorically false [1]. Economics is the issue

1. Generate hydrogen or other synthetic hydrocarbon fuels from electricity; flow batteries, saltwater batteries, and a myriad other chemistries; compressed air; hydro, etc etc

marcosdumay•59m ago
Just to add: overbuilding and using the excess in low capital-intensive applications.
kragen•8h ago
Plausible alternatives to cables include ships full of synthetic diesel, ships full of iron, ships full of aluminum, or ships full of magnesium. Inside China HVDC cables are indeed carrying solar power across the continent, but the Netherlands have not managed to erect any yet. Cables provide efficient JIT power delivery, but they're vulnerable to precision-guided missiles, which Ukrainians are 3-D printing in their basements by the million, so the aluminum-air battery may return to commercial use.
Gravityloss•7h ago
There's at least one HVDC cable connected to Netherlands, Norned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NorNed .

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.

ViewTrick1002•7h ago
And to Denmark:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBRAcable

While Denmark in term essentially is a trading hub for electricity between Scandinavia, the UK and continental Europe.

hydrogen7800•4h ago
>Budgeted at €550 million, and completed at a cost of €600m

Amazing.

pjc50•4h ago
That's pretty good! Just a 10% overrun. By comparison, Hinkley Point C is now at "up to" £46bn from an initial £18bn. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68073279
jillesvangurp•2h ago
Which is a fair comparison because 700MW is a smallish nuclear reactor and that cable should last a long time.
lukan•7h ago
Ships carrying energy are a pretty easy explosive target as well.

Local ressilence is needed in any case and mass produced batteries can provide that safety.

harperlee•3h ago
Diesel, iron or aluminum, from your parent post, are difficult to explode… (personally, no clue about magnesium); and the point of the latter two is that you can “store” energy by upstreaming its consumption when power is available, you don’t necessarily need to produce an actual reversible energy store.
trillic•3h ago
magnesium is the most explody of all those
Retric•24m ago
But still not explosive at scale. It’s a surface area issue, a small strip of magnesium explodes when dropped in water but a 100t cargo of magnesium sinking in a harbor would be a huge fire.
horsawlarway•3h ago
> and the point of the latter two is that you can “store” energy by upstreaming its consumption when power is available

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.

davedx•5h ago
The Netherlands has “erected” multiple HVDC links
dgfitz•5h ago
As long as we all realize you can’t 3D print precision-guided missiles without, well, the guidance bit.
globalnode•4h ago
As well as electricity to ammonia, ship it around the world by boat and then crack or burn it at the destination. or just use it as-is.
fred_is_fred•2h ago
Ukranians are 3d printing millions of missiles in their basements?
speeder•2h ago
They might use rotating wings to fly instead of jet turbines, but yes.

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.

Dylan16807•1h ago
I don't know, I'd say once you reach a certain amount of control over your flight path you stop being a missile. An aircraft isn't really "projected toward" something.
Retric•17m ago
Cruse missiles have a great deal of control over their flight. “Kamikaze aircraft were pilot-guided explosive missiles, either purpose-built or converted from conventional aircraft.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze

However, the distinction is usually applied where aircraft become missile’s when the attack can no longer be aborted.

nradov•6h ago
Cables can be a great option in certain places but geography and politics limit where they can be used. No one is going to run a cable across the Pacific Ocean so that Russian solar power can supply evening peak demand loads in western North America.
tonyedgecombe•6h ago
No, but it might make sense to run them from the east coast to the west in America.
energy123•6h ago
There's geopolitical implications. Solar is long stability, short conflict. It's easy to cut undersea cables, it's easy for instability arriving to one the landlocked countries in the middle of transit. This creates systemic risks that are asymmetric with respect to offense and defense.

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.

flohofwoe•6h ago
> similar to the role that trade plays in staking everyone in mutual stability

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.

stefs•5h ago
they were cut off from trade as much as possible (of course there have been rogue nations, but those weren't equivalent in trading/buying power) - and that's one of the reasons, they're not winning the war, even though they were superior in almost all metrics, not at least military and economic power.

if nothing else this will serve as a warning and a cautionary tale for future aspiring conquerors.

hnaccount_rng•2h ago
That was the idea behind Germany’s energy dependence on Russia. Let’s call that experiment not successful, shall we?
marcosdumay•1h ago
The Russian government didn't see it as a Russian dependency on Germany.

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.

hnaccount_rng•6m ago
Then go back to the beginning of WW2 and look up the biggest trading partners for both Germany and France
Mengkudulangsat•6h ago
I do not feel as optimistic about any uptick in cables as I do about solar and wind. Solar and wind can grow through a multitude of small, plug-and-play projects. Cable projects like HDVC are still giant, long-term punts.
tonyedgecombe•6h ago
A lot of the wind projects could be classified as "giant, long-term punts".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsea_Wind_Farm

idiotsecant•3h ago
This is literally the problem. Transmission is desperately needed, much more than generation right now. The issue is that it's hard to explain to people why this is, and even when they understand they react like you do.

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.

gosub100•3h ago
Is this whole "new set of cables" factored into the CO2 emissions equation? We're undoubtedly going to use massive amounts of energy to mine the metal, melt it into wire, transport it to the site, build the towers, etc. Is that energy "green" ?
pjc50•3h ago
> Is that energy "green" ?

Not very, but neither is continuing to use fossil fuels on a huge scale.

froh•6h ago
for the rest (as the sun shines again after some time) storage sounds like a viable alternative to the list in your comments...

other than that I agree

berkes•5h ago
Interesting side effect is that this reliance on cables introduces a dependency on copper which already is in short supply and which can be mined only in specific regions.

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

CorrectHorseBat•5h ago
Cables can be made out of aluminium, so that's not really an issue
0xffff2•40m ago
Not just "can be". For transmission lines (which is what we're talking about here) aluminum is used exclusively.
TheOtherHobbes•5h ago
The Spain/Portugal blackout happened when network management failed to predict a workable source mix. Basically human error.

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...

themaninthedark•3h ago
Right, they are blaming the "thermal powersources"(non-renewable) for the waveform of the grid collapsing.

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...

Tade0•4h ago
It's a non-issue. Copper isn't that short in supply.

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.

dzhiurgis•5h ago
Few years ago I was super hyped about HVDC across the ocean too. LCOE over batteries seemed no brainer.

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.

naikrovek•4h ago
> All you need to get at that is cables

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.

mcbrit•1h ago
How far do cables generally move power now in terms of hours, meaning time zone offset? This might seem like an odd formulation, but.

I /think/ formulating the problem this way means that 12h=power is always relevant. So: where are we?

hollerith•1h ago
Aside from your question (which I would rephrase as, How expensive is it to send electricity to a different time zone), another important question is, How expensive is it to ensure that the electricity continues to flow if our country's government angers some other country's government and that country has an effective military?
rpozarickij•8h ago
> Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power—which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines.

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.

lordofgibbons•7h ago
All fossil fuels also come from the sun!
vrx-meta•7h ago
The nuclear fuels are also probably from the Sun. Pretty much everything is the Sun.
ses1984•7h ago
They came from some other suns, technically.
isolli•7h ago
Hm, no, don't the heavy elements used for nuclear fission come from a previous generation of stars?
Sharlin•5h ago
I wonder if there are some minimal fossil hydrocarbon deposits somewhere that originate from chemosynthesis-only microbe populations.
card_zero•7h ago
Tidal power doesn't come from the sun either. It slows the earth's rotation by a tiny amount.
OtherShrezzing•7h ago
Is the origin of that rotation not also the gravitational wells created by the Sun?
HappMacDonald•6h ago
IIUC it's only half from the Sun's gravity well, the other half of that energy gradient is from the Moon's gravity well.

Also IIUC "energy from the sun" is really shorthand for "Energy emitted by solar fusion", which tidal would not involve.

Smithalicious•5h ago
The laws of gravity are entirely symmetric, so it doesn't seem fair to attribute it specifically to the sun; also, the energy in this case is coming out of the "v" in earth's good old 0.5mv^2 kinetic energy relative to the sun.
baxtr•7h ago
No wonder people worshipped the Sun in ancient times!
loudmax•5h ago
At some level all fossil fuels come from the sun. Fossil fuels come from biomass accumulated over millions of years. The energy that went into gathering all that carbon and hydrocarbons came from the sun.

Take it a step further and nearly all our energy comes from nuclear fusion, with the exceptions you noted.

myself248•4h ago
I refer to my solar panels as nuclear power, just to mess with people:

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!

kibwen•1h ago
> I refer to my solar panels as nuclear power, just to mess with people

Solar is actually fusion power, which is way cooler than any fission plant that puny humans have ever constructed.

thijson•4h ago
Nuclear comes from the supernova that created all the heavy elements in our solar system. Fission is releasing energy trapped during that event. So from that standpoint, even Nuclear is solar in origin.
ertgbnm•3h ago
Well the sun didn't make those elements. Some other star did so they aren't solar. Also by that logic everything that is not a hydrogen atom would be "solar" so I don't think we can stretch the analogy.
pikminguy•3h ago
Helium and Lithium were also created in the pre stellar era of the universe, hydrogen was the majority by far but not the only element that wasn't created in stars. I think anything past 3 on the periodic table is exclusively stellar though.
babymetal•1h ago
I clicked to the comments to see how far down this observation would appear. It was my first thought, although I can understand why the more energetic discussion is around human-centered energy collection and management.
louwrentius•7h ago
In Star Trek The Next Generation, energy is a 'solved problem'. Material needs are also a 'solved problem'.

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.

CoolChum•6h ago
> In Star Trek The Next Generation, energy is a 'solved problem'.

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.

louwrentius•1h ago
All I read is that you are part of the 70% that has no idea what to do in life when money and power doesn't matter anymore.
hypfer•5h ago
> 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?

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.

louwrentius•1h ago
Thank you
isolli•7h ago
The piece doesn't mention the recent blackout in Spain. Wasn't it caused by the lack of energy sources with rotational inertia?
vasco•7h ago
It was a design/dimensioning error, something was expected to absorb reactive power and it added it instead.
ViewTrick1002•7h ago
The reporting so far is that they did not manage the reactive power correct leading to a voltage trip.

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.

diffeomorphism•5h ago
No, that was some of the initial speculation, but turned out to be wrong.
papaver-somnamb•7h ago
Tony Seba around 10 years ago predicted (among many other things) that ~2024 the cost of generating a unit of electricity onsite with PV will cost less than merely delivering the same unit of electricity over transmission infrastructure, not even considering the cost of generating that unit.

Nowadays he is diving into what he terms the phase change disruptions where he explores and thinks out the ramifications of these disruptions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9McWXZA5wc

GratiaTerra•1h ago
I agree, personal energy abundance is disruptive: * Utility decentralization, economic liberation from near zero marginal cost of energy after initial investment. * Geo political: reduced dependence on hydrocarbon fuels, energy sovereignty * Transportation: every home is becomes a 'gas station' to recharge EVs, or for the EVs to charge the house in case of low house batteries (as opposed to ICE generator) * Climate: no hydrocarbons burned => no pollution * Technological civilization: abundant clean energy creates a feedback loop of innovation in energy production, storage, AI and networking * new business models from energy as a service
asdefghyk•6h ago
The unsolved problem with solar power and wind power is how to store it so that it can be used 24/7. Stored at a affordable price that is. Storage so that the supply can be maintained 24/7 across the inevitable renewable ( sola and/'or wind droughts ) that can and do last several days, from time to time.
markus_zhang•6h ago
I recall that other power plants such as thermal power is still required to provide “inertia” for the whole system, as solar fluctuates a lot. The recent Spain-Portugal outage showed that there is not enough inertia in the system.

I don’t really understand inertia in power plants but I wonder if it helps to push nuclear as primary and solar as secondary?

cinntaile•6h ago
The more likely future imo is different forms of dedicated inertia rather than inertia that you used to automatically get from old school power plants with big turbines. Both will coexist of course. Financial incentives for different support systems for electrical grids will continue to evolve in the foreseeable future.
pjc50•6h ago
This is mostly a matter of control systems engineering: inverters tend to be perfectly grid-following, but there's no reason why the phase angle can't be adjusted to provide "virtual inertia". Same for battery systems - an early market for these in the UK is getting paid for "fast frequency response". Every battery can be a virtual flywheel. https://www.modernpowersystems.com/analysis/batteries-for-fa...

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.

markus_zhang•5h ago
Thanks. One benefit about nuclear, maybe I’m overstretching a bit, is that it is a large system engineering project so hopefully it trains and retains many engineers and technicians. Maybe solar farm serves that purpose too? But somehow “nuclear” sounds more cool…
lnsru•4h ago
From my experience in construction sites as an electrician… It is a race to the bottom. Cheapest subcontractor gets the job. Nobody cares about any training. And there are no engineers at all in construction sites. Overseeing engineer is simply too expensive. Obviously it shouldn’t be that way.
pjc50•3h ago
Is that a benefit or a cost? People these days have to train at their own expense, and construction trades are in something of a short supply.
markus_zhang•3h ago
I'm more thinking about the side of designing and implementing complex engineering systems instead of individual trades, but I'm just an armchair poster so don't know much.
pjc50•3h ago
There's a property called "learning rate", which roughly measures the extent to which doing some kind of project more makes it cheaper. Renewables have hugely benefited from this at every level, from manufacture to installation.

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...

tim333•6h ago
The best way of doing things changes as market prices for the various options change. At the moment we mostly have renewables, wind and solar backed up by natural gas powered plants that can increase and decrease power rapidly. As time goes on and batteries and solar get cheaper things will probably move more to those. Nuclear is good for constant power but expensive.
otherme123•5h ago
> The recent Spain-Portugal outage showed that there is not enough inertia in the system.

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).

stefs•3h ago
a nuclear power plant is very expensive and takes a long time to build. they're also designed to deliver constant output (i don't know how fast they can de-/increase output), so if power prices get into negative territory due to overwhelming solar output, nuclear power plants might have to operate at a loss, making its product comparably expensive. there are environmental factors (need for water sources for cooling), political/nimbyism and fuel dependency from foreign powers. so nowadays you have trouble finding willing investors. also, due to low demand there are few nuclear plant building companies left.
markus_zhang•3h ago
I so much hope that we (the world) replace thermal plants (except geothermal) with nuclear ones. But yeah there is a lot of resistance and it is very expensive.
tim333•5h ago
Exponential growth gonna exponential in both solar and AI.

A lot of people are in denial and like this is all hype it'll never happen followed by wow how did that happen.

xbmcuser•5h ago
China is also now facing an interesting problem as solar + batteries are cheaper than coal today. But coal currently is around 60% of its electricity supply it uses around 10 trillion kwh. So 6 trillion kwh * $0.08c is $600 billion ie it will have to destroy a $5-600 billion industry that employees millions of people. But at the same time it will be getting cheaper energy and the cost of producing energy will keep getting cheaper each year that would be another deflationary pressure on its economy.
pornel•4h ago
Of all the places I think China has the least sentiment for protecting business of industries it doesn't want, to keep a line going up on paper.

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.

xbmcuser•4h ago
Oh I know I am just saying China currently needs to stimulate it internal consumption to maintain its economic growth targets. But cheaper energy that keeps getting cheaper each year is a wierd problem to have and it will be interesting to see how it plays out in the next 5-10 year.
getnormality•4h ago
It's funny that our hope for the future now seems to stand upon the Chinese Communist Party being the paragons of enlightened, unsentimental capitalism that we never were.
hnaccount_rng•1h ago
That’s only a problem if you care about the stranded investment side. The energy industry isn’t that personel intensive (plus you could just continue to employ the people). But they absolutely will deprecate the power plants and stop buying the coal. The former will bankrupt some of the projects which planned with much longer repayment periods. The latter will immediately safe money
rel_ic•3h ago
Renewable energy is great, but we're not replacing fossil fuels with it, we're just adding more energy usage. And our energy usage is destroying the environment.

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...

amarait•3h ago
What replaces fossil fuels is some kind of breakthrough in batteries. At the moment its getting better every year were currently at less than $100 per KWh which is crazy but needs to be improved for allowing more off the grid energy consumption
pjc50•2h ago
The lesson from solar is that it won't be "a breakthrough" but the gradual accumulation of a thousand different efforts at cost-shaving across the whole supply chain making batteries gradually but inexorably cheaper.

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.

pydry•2h ago
We can either pray and wait for a technological breakthrough that makes storage tech way cheaper than gas or we can just use taxes and subsidies to make it happen now.

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).

conductr•2h ago
“We” are only in control of “us”. The rest of the world will keep burning fossil fuel
fastball•2h ago
Or we can go full nuclear.
pydry•1h ago
could do but im not sure what there is to be gained from unnecessarily spending trillions more to decarbonize.
triceratops•1h ago
Get private insurance to fully cover nuclear and I'm onboard.
heisgone•1h ago
This might be the only way I could have any trust in Nuclear. I heard recently from a journalist that the Fukushima plant paid Yakuza owned newspapers to avoid negative press well before the incident. The technology is great, humans are not.
bena•2h ago
I think the overall point is that we will never get there.

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.

hnaccount_rng•2h ago
But that isn’t the case _today_. Unless you have existing facilities (which we do have and which gives fossils momentum) it’s strictly cheaper to build new renewables! The problem for renewables is that the p99.9 price is much higher than the p95 price. But finance will be solving that part.
toomuchtodo•2h ago
The price of LFP batteries in China is $35/kWh for cells, $52/kWh for fully integrated systems [1]. Roughly 1TW of solar is being deployed globally every year. We’re already there, it’s just a matter of pushing the pedal down harder. China destroys half a million barrels a day of global oil demand every year they build EVs at current output levels, which are still increasing.

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...

goda90•2h ago
Better batteries are the road to replacing fossil fuels for transportation, but I feel like abundant nuclear energy is what we need to give a jump start to green steel, hydrogen, ammonia, etc, and electrifying bulk heating industrial processes.
carra•2h ago
We are also going to need a breakthrough in how batteries are produced and disposed of. Otherwise the environmental impact of the many millions of batteries themselves may prove unsustainable too.
tonfa•1h ago
That would be nice indeed, but shouldn't prevent us from prioritizing reducing CO2 emissions first.
triceratops•1h ago
Funny how no one seems to consider the environmental impact of digging up fossil fuels when they discuss solar.

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.

cogman10•1h ago
Maybe better disposal practices. Regulations standardizing batteries would also do a lot of good.

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).

agumonkey•1h ago
there's also a lot of wastes, with different urban planning and build code a lot of cooling and heating would be avoided
cogman10•1h ago
I think this is the most frustrating part. You wouldn't even need to massively change out neighborhoods to get a huge benefit. If a developer built with district and heating planned, you could have an entire neighborhood heated and cooled without needed AC and heaters in every building. You could still have single family homes that are massively more efficient per unit.

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.

1970-01-01•1h ago
Does not necessarily need to be a battery. Flywheels, heat, and even synthesis of fuels are also solutions to the problem.
cogman10•1h ago
If you look at the energy density, cost/kwh, and lifetime maintenance of most of those, you'll find that batteries handily win. Further, batteries have room for innovation and growth in all those categories.

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.

qiqitori•1h ago
On the other hand, you need to buy a new set of batteries every 15 or so years. The other things you mentioned generally don't need regular replacement, and when they do, it's not the whole setup.
cogman10•1h ago
You don't need to replace the whole setup, just the batteries. All the power electronics and interconnects are already there and will last as long as they last.

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.

EvanAnderson•1h ago
At grid scale I'd imagine that pumped hydroelectric storage would beat batteries for TCO, but there are significant geographic constraints.
cogman10•1h ago
I mean, it is a literal pipe dream :)

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).

yndoendo•1h ago
Batteries are just one means to store renewable energy and mechanical storage is another. Re-designing the power grid to transfer peak to areas via HVDC is another, to spread into areas where the weather limits or constricts the renewables for that time of day or day itself.

"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?

[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537070/taming-the-sun/

erghjunk•2h ago
I'm not going to dispute your over-arching point (because I know the data very well), but as a lifelong resident of Appalachia, I can assure you there has been some real and significant reduction in the negative environmental impact of fossil fuels. It's a small comfort and mostly just for those of us who live here, but it's real and visible.
agumonkey•1h ago
What kind of changes happened there ? just curious
dublinben•52m ago
Just to hazard a guess, you could start reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_and_environmental_impac...
unbalancedevh•2h ago
The article notes several examples of reduced use of fossil fuels:

> 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

DrBazza•2h ago
Can anyone point me a genuinely unbiased comparison of solar, wind, coal, oil, nuclear and hydro, in a reputable scientific journal that covers all of the 'criticisms' that are raised for some but not others?

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???

Workaccount2•1h ago
This is an active area that is exceedingly difficult if not outright impossible to do.

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"

DrBazza•1h ago
On the other hand the points I listed are sufficiently coarse grained and the cost or expense of most of those can be estimated.

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.

ZeroGravitas•1h ago
Oxford University's Our World in Data collates this kind of thing from reputable sources.

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?

https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

DrBazza•1h ago
I've looked at these before, and the charts are nice, but I feel like there's a better way of displaying the data in some sort of matrix.
ZeroGravitas•1h ago
Some of the graphs have options to switch to multiple comparisons, or to log scale and similar. They often have table formats and allow you to download the data for your own use.
ddxv•1h ago
I grew up in a rural house that is off grid. My parents used to run a gasoline generator whenever they wanted electricity. As kids, to watch movies, this was all the time. As they got older, got phones, satellite internet etc their gasoline use went up a lot.

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.

Aurornis•1h ago
> 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.

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.

conradev•1h ago
If by "we" you mean California, then "we" are going to pass the following milestones with solar + batteries fairly soon:

- 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.

Lightkey•54m ago
You are a bit behind on China. This was just published a week ago, showing renewable energy build-out has finally surpassed increased demand for this year, meaning peak coal was probably last year: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-brics-emergin... (at end of the article).
conradev•51m ago
That’s great news! Does that include the coal plants they’re funding in Indonesia and other places?
ZeroGravitas•35m ago
The Chinese funded coal plants in Pakistan are being priced out by Chinese solar panels imported by end users.

Will be an interesting one to watch as to how China responds.

logic_node•57m ago
It’s crazy that most emergency plans ignore geomagnetic threats—did you know a Carrington‑level flare today could knock out transformers worth hundreds of billions? What low‑cost steps could cities take now?

Is Gemini 2.5 good at bounding boxes?

https://simedw.com/2025/07/10/gemini-bounding-boxes/
173•simedw•4h ago•36 comments

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165•nsoonhui•7h ago•128 comments

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22•Bogdanp•2d ago•0 comments

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121•preetsuthar17•7h ago•70 comments

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61•Bluestein•2d ago•42 comments

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13•gniting•1d ago•2 comments

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39•zeristor•3d ago•5 comments

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229•gnabgib•19h ago•259 comments

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298•bustodisgusto•18h ago•155 comments

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249•TangerineDream•2d ago•170 comments

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330•iraton•23h ago•72 comments

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3•zigrazor•3d ago•2 comments

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280•dmazin•1d ago•432 comments

The jank programming language

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385•akkad33•3d ago•104 comments

The death of partying in the USA

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203•tysone•20h ago•365 comments

The Origin of the Research University

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