The article seems to leave this important detail out, despite talking a lot about China
0. https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex...
EDIT: it looks like the article does mention it, I just missed it:
> The huge surfeit of production capacity in China, which produced about eight out of 10 of the world’s solar modules in 2024
Meanwhile the US is full of hubris and can't see beyond their own nose.
Soon to be just circuses.
Sigh, without the Brooks Brothers "riot", the guy people insulted for talking about climate change would've been president...
"South Korea files WTO complaint over US solar tariffs"
https://www.pv-tech.org/south-korea-challenging-us-solar-tar...
"US DOC issues steep AD/CVD tariffs on Southeast Asian solar cells"
https://www.pv-tech.org/us-doc-issues-ad-cvd-tariffs-on-sout...
The US Department of Commerce (DOC) has issued anti-dumping and anti-subsidy tariffs against solar cell imports from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia.
"A Casualty of Trump’s Tariffs: India’s Nascent Solar Industry"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/climate/india-solar-panel...
"Solar products from Mexico and Canada slapped with tariffs for first time"
https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2025/02/solar-products...
I don’t doubt that another benefit is the current admin just simply doesn’t like solar of course
Heck, the additonal 25% tariff on India for Russian oil imports only came up after Exxon started lobbying to re-enter the Russian market [0], but the Russians sold Exxon's Russian assets to India's ONGC [1].
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-18/exxon-say...
The full solar supply chain is currently being produced in the US, with low capacity but more planned.
SEIA has a solar and storage supply chain dashboard that they update with operational and planned capacities.
But clearly recent moves by the current admin are undercutting this progress.
Because that (in Rotterdam) is the normal for central Europe these days. Except that they're already in a warehouse/container pile after their ocean voyage.
China shoveled billions into developing solar manufacturing technologies, and as a result they figure out how to cheaply mass-produce solar cells. Solyndra failed because they couldn't compete against the resulting cheap solar cells.
You're measuring success only in with regards to how it might benefit you as a foreigner, but dosen't necessarily mean it was wholly successful for the China.
The treatment of fossil fuels and renewables fits: Block the obviously more economical and better long-term solution in order to shovel money toward the entrenched wealthy. That it sabotages the future due to climate change and economic inefficiency doesn't seem to be a significant factor to them.
I forgot, one of the entrenched corporate wealthy told us that climate change isn't a big deal, and we should send money to his and his friends for solutions.
I'm not anti-business; in fact, quite the opposite: These policies block a free market and the brilliant new businesses that can thrive and deliver solutions to everyone.
The future is pretty much in China now as far as green energy tech and consumption goes. Two bad elections and the US has basically lost world leader status in just over a decade.
Tesla, in particular, boils down to how Americans respond to marketing. We love the idea of buying organic, environmentally-friendly technology that makes us part of the solution. It doesn't matter if Congolese children are dying in the cobalt mines to make EV-grade lithium ion batteries, us Americans need to virtue signal with our wallet. Buy the latest iPhone, save up for a Tesla, it's all part of the new-age jewelry we wear to make ourselves feel worth something.
It was damn good marketing.
To be fair, most CEOs does that, but I think his downfall was really everything that he did besides just over-promising and under-delivering. He could have continued as-is, without all the political stunts and activities, and I'm sure Europeans would still have bought Teslas sometimes. Now the brand is poisoned pretty much world-wide, which wouldn't have happened just because of "over-promise and under-deliver", it takes a lot more for stuff like that to happen.
The equivocation here is quiet something.
> us Americans need to virtue signal how much we love green energy and saving the planet.
Again, more FUD made up by the anti-EV crowd. Most people who buy EVs buy them because they are just better cars. In China, EVs are more of a national security concern: they have to import oil, which exposes them to international conflict. Importing less oil = less exposure, which is a big win for the country. The US has a lot of oil-entrenched interests.
It also goes in lots of other stuff, and is basically a byproduct of Congolese copper production.
The kids are doing artisinal mining because when capitalism doesn't need you to make money, you are pretty fucked. The big mines can make plenty of money with very few workers, leaving no need to build a decent civil society. Something to bear in mind for when our glorious AI future arrives.
Every chance that some countries become the Norway of AI and everyone is rich while others become the resource cursed Congo of AI and a tiny minority become rich and others are left to rot.
Congo is so resource rich, that the state can sustain itself easily with simple, low skilled extraction of resources, without the need to invest in its populace to increase economic output through other, more difficult means.
As for the second paragraph, I mostly agree but nothing you said obviates the virtue signalling that people endlessly associated Tesla with pre-2015. I say this not because I think EVs are bad, but because so much of America's congestive dissonance is rooted in the "Tesla good" aphorism burned into their brain for no reason besides feel-good marketing.
Pre-2015 the best selling EV in America was the Nissan Leaf. Source: https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10567
The only realistic alternative - not "virtue signalling" and instead buying polluting ICE vehicles - is far worse. I'm ok with virtue signalling. It's not like America is going to get walkable cities and world-class public transit anytime before 2060.
I wouldn't be so pessimistic! The inevitable swing towards authoritarianism in the US happened much sooner than I expected, which also means it'll swing back again much sooner too, likely to be way before 2060. I'll throw out a prediction and say that the soon-to-be-authoritarian state that is under construction right now might fall as soon as 2035-2040, and it'll be a wild swing the other way once it happens.
Because you didn't end your sentence with "Plenty of autocracies last forever" but instead you gave them a duration. Maybe that duration sounds long, but it ends eventually, which is exactly my point.
Think more of the earlier end of medieval era, where the peasant class was mostly incapable against feudal armies, even in many cases with massive numbers on their side.
There’s an entire surveillance state, eyes everywhere, gait recognition, massive intelligence networks all at a scale unimaginable by kings and dictators of the past.
There are decades and centuries where authoritarians and dictators prevail. There is no timeline for guaranteeing democracy and human rights will prevail.
It takes action, diligence, and sacrifice to preserve those things. And even more to regain them once lost.
Of course it eventually falls down, everything does. I'm not saying it won't be difficult, nor many people will ultimately die, and the country will be very different. But it will happen, if not sooner, then later, like in every other place in the world.
By defintion, if it “never fell”, it would be one of the authoritarian states we have today, so the obvious lack of any example fulfilling that criteria doesn't demonstrate anything one way or the other.
Now, if you could say something like “point to any authoritarian regime existing after <year> that had existed for longer than <span in years>”, that might tend to support the claim that, at least after a certain point in time, authoritarian regimes tended to have a particular finite lifespan (of course, you can never prove that currently-existing regimes aren’t exceptions to that withot access to future knowledge.)
At one point I had a hypothesis based on a few notable examples that with certain definitional bounds this might work with some point in the 20th century and about 80 years (even had a bit of process explanation, though not a strong theory on why it didn't apply earlier beyond the general spread of democratic ideals) but I never rigourously checked if there might be exceptions.
(Of course, plenty of authoritarian regimes fall only to be replaced by different authoritarian regimes, too.)
I'm definitely ok with 'virtue signalling' though. It's a lot better than vice signalling.
edit the embarrassing
If joining Montana is "success" you've set your sights too low
/s (no offence to Montanans, it's a beautiful state. I just couldn't resist)
I'm also curious about the 'massive insurrection'. Is that like the guy in the frog costume?
That's the guy.
I assume you’re talking about Portland. Speaking as someone who lives in Portland, you’re grossly misinformed. It’s time to change your filter bubble.
i really wish /s wasn't so damn necessary
Both inflate the ego.
Telsa sells a huge number of vehicles to Americans who couldn't care less about the environment but do care about buying a car that can rip through 0-60 in under 3 seconds.
ICE vehicles are simply inferior for most use cases now. They're only holding on because a huge number of people would be out of work if we abandoned obsolete transportation technology. Continuing ICE mass production is an actual socialist make-work scheme at the end of the day.
However, I won't be buying a Tesla again. I would also not buy another car if I can help it, but I need a car to see family and do relatively long distance tasks.
Love how you were able to take Musk's missteps, layer marketing, and blend in the emotional heart wrenching, think of the (Congolese) children!
Of course, fossil fuels are the ONLY solutions, otherwise you are a victim of marketing or a horrible person for not thinking of (Congolese) children!
If you really care about children at all or any life, first thing would be get off fossil fuels. The right metric is Deaths/TWH: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
This more-or-less summarizes American geopolitical and economic attitudes towards China from 1970 until 2016.
"Sure, they're problematic, but so are we, and their product is cheaper, so..."
All the show-stopping problems you mentioned applied to internal combustion before.
Unless electrical generation gets less efficient somehow, the economics are trending back.
That is misleading. First, China wasn't economically productive in 1970, during the Cultural Revolution. It wasn't until the 1990s that things began to subtantially improve, and then take off in the 2000s.
Also, they weren't so problematic - they were a good trading partner, and they were democratizing slowly: They had with a major setback in 1989, but were improving until Xi took over.
Under Xi, it took a few years to see what would happen, which trends were temporary and which were long-term problems; which could be reversed and which would only get worse. I think the problem calcified, in large part, because the US abandoned universal human rights in large part. If the US doesn't advocate that, who will? How can people in China say that freedom is a right and democracy superior if the US doesn't.
I wouldn't drive a Tesla if it was free, I'd just sell it for whatever - that brand is torched for me.
this was never going to happen. the capitalist class are never going to be the ones to get us out of debt; they cause and benefit from it. it's his entire business model.
Not that his own debt isn't going to cause him problems when the TSLA share price stops defying gravity like Wile E. Coyote, it's just that his problems are shaped more like "being a cult leader".
However, it's becoming increasingly apparent that the above paragraph ascribes genius to what is more simply explained by incompetence. It's more likely Musk believed he could make Hyperloop work, but couldn't. Similarly...
- Musk thought he could buy an election and gain the inside track for his companies, but was too witless to maintain good relations with the politician he bought.
- He bought Twitter seemingly on a lark and proceeded to rapidly run it into the ground.
- He put a bunch of script-kiddies in charge of DOGE, which promptly made a mess of an entire government and created a historically massive deficit while gutting government services.
- He alienated the core customer demographics that had formerly been one of Tesla's mains sources of income. (The other being government grants and subsidies which... whoops.)
Now, Tesla's shareholders are weighing whether or not a man with Musk's recent track record is worth a trillion dollar pay package[1]. It's gobsmacking that they even need to think about this.
So, no, Musk is not some evil genius undoing green energy by deliberately creating a false solution that fails to deliver. He's just a garden variety mediocrity who has been promoted far past his capabilities or character and has been utterly undone by the resulting ego trip. He's an object lesson in just how much damage the wrong person in the right place and time can do to the world.
[1]https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/musk-could-leave...
I think you mischaracterize that deal. It's more if he can hype the stock from $1.3t to $8.5t he gets a 15% cut, in stock. It wouldn't be a bad deal for TSLA speculators.
Is that happening though?
Well as we see in the article, this world is very interconnected and you can't hurt your neighbor without hurting yourself.
But let's look at the structure for a bit...
- Citizens United has allowed unfettered amounts of dark money to flow into our elections, disproportionately benefiting the uber wealthy
- The Senate greatly favors rural states, sometimes 60 - 1 by vote weight
- The House is pretty much a race to the bottom in terms of gerrymandering, where many districts are pretty much unloseable
- Many states purge rolls and make it harder to vote by closing polling places, restricting early access, adding id requirements, and restricting mail in voting. Combined with the fact that election day is on a random Tuesday which we don't take off as a nation to go vote
- Education is... not in a great place. Many many people have _no idea_ how the system works at all, or what's happening within it day to day. But they are getting inundated with 7 second flashes of information and misinformation on infinite feeds which bubble their users, lead them to increasingly extreme content, and make it hard to distinguish between fact and fiction
So yea, he's well understood in that half the country has no idea he's all over Epstein's list and think the felonies he's been charged with are bogus while cheering on the prosecution of Letitia James for renting out an apartment that said she could rent it out in the contract she signed
And we voted for him in the sense that only 7 states seem to matter in our presidential elections, and we're constantly inundated with information about how our votes barely matter cause of all the imbalances in elections at every level
I don't disagree but it seems this time the good economy part only exists in their rhetoric.
The fact that the numbers are going up because of a bubble and a lot of questionable deals is not relevant. That's a problem for someone else to handle later.
The people who get burned there are the ones unwilling / unable to track inflation.
Uh, if it deflates, the numbers go down? Isn't that the definition? The same numerical value of currency represents more value as compared to assets etc - hence things get "cheaper", with the side effect of money getting harder to get
I don't know if you noticed, but the discourse in right-wing politics that's absolutely nothing to do with Chicago school anymore. They don't even bring up free markets.
It's an acknowledgment that the entire economy in the US is cartel or Monopoly
I think that's just the Trump version of the GOP, and the Dems followed along, dismissing economics - an attempt at truth - for shallow partisanship. For example, the New York Times fired their economist columnists, such as Paul Krugman.
This is also voter/public appeasement. There are many rural communities that depend on fossil fuel related jobs and will vote to protect them.
"These policies block a free market and the brilliant new businesses that can thrive and deliver solutions to everyone."
I'd be more inclined to share this view if the manufacturing were done in the US. But we can't really compete on manufacturing costs. Remove the policies and the money still goes to the rich and we lose jobs too.
It's true to an extent, but technological transitions happen regularly. Everything we have now is a product of a prior transition.
> Remove the policies and the money still goes to the rich and we lose jobs too.
Prices drop, and also the money goes to those who can innovate in the real economy. Manufacturing isn't the only sector of the economy, and we want to build the new sectors and industries, not the ones that were successful 75 years ago.
Yes, and that doesn't refute that people will vote to protect their jobs. If they were offered alternatives, then maybe it would gain more traction in those areas. Eg you can't mine coal anymore but we'll start up a solar panel plant here.
"and we want to build the new sectors and industries"
And what are those? Most of the economy is shit for job seekers right now. We continue to automate and outsource. Right now it looks like nursing and the trades are some of the few things actually growing.
The challenge of being on the leading edge economically (i.e., not being a middle-income country following the road blazed by others), is you don't always know.
Certainly IT, non-GHG energy, ...
Lets hope PG&Es price gouging kicks-off people to look for off-grid solution. EVs have humongous batteries, home batteries are getting pretty cheap. With solar + EV + home battery there is a strong economic case for a large number of people in CA to switch to off grid. Which makes PGE raise rates, driving more people to go off grid. California is a big enough market, which can create this new demand for off grid, new companies and economies of scale.
- Tax imports of panels and batteries
- Tax and oppose new installations.
- Only offer disincetive grid prices to those having panels on their houses. Low pay or negative pay to push to grid, higher cost to consume from the grid.
- Tax installed panels, even off-grid ones.
- Introduce new onerous "safety" requirements.
Imagine you're a US car manufacturer. You see EVs growing around the world, and stagnating in the US. Do you:
(a) Double-down on investments in EVs (billions of USD!), even with a soft US market for EVs, hoping you might compete globally.
(b) Become a parochial, US-only, business hoping to squeeze what you can out of a gradually shrinking industry
When other countries subsidize consumers to buy EVs, and the US does not, it effectively creates a self-own trade barrier for domestic companies.
Examples are the strange Japanese flip phones and the computers with CF card and floppy drives with a 1.5 ghz single core CPU selling for twice the price of a MacBook Pro.
With BYD selling globally now, and Boeing losing its reputation, American vehicles of all sorts are at risk.
The US domestic auto industry was hollowed out decades ago. Germany's domestic auto industry is just starting to be hollowed out, that process is in the early days. China's auto rise will ravage European manufacturing, not US manufacturing. Auto manufacturing is a small share of the US industrial base, it's a large share of the German industrial base for example.
Boeing and Airbus will both lose large chunks of their global airplane business to cheaper Chinese competition over the coming decades. It's definitely not exclusive to Boeing. The US airline market is far more lucrative than the European airline market, US carriers like Delta are very profitable and can more or less be forced to not buy from China.
You can't cut costs infinitely. You still need to pay people, suppliers, and above all, people who had nothing to do with the company but hold a piece of paper saying they're entitled to profits.
It's probably the case that you cannot do that enough to compete with the Chinese if you're in the US, so they won't try.
We're in a post-"what about the long term economic outlook of our country"-era and have been since the 1970s. John Q. Public in the US and Helga Öffentlich in Germany don't care that their purchase of a Chinese EV hollows out their country's industrial base, they just care that they spent less on the EV. And why shouldn't they? The countries themselves are lead by people who do the exact same thing on a massive scale.
American brands were considered prestigious as I understand it.
For automotive, kind of but not really (excluding Tesla).
Volkswagen Group was the primary foreign manufacturer that was also a status symbol in China.
Tesla is a US company?
Keep product lines and factories semi targetted for their individual markets. Ford discontinued the Fiesta in North America but they are still being built in the EU AFAIK. Major car markets product their domestic auto industry anyways so you're probably going to have to setup local production in any case.
The surviving vehicle(s) on the platform are the Ford Puma and Puma Gen-E, which are subcompact crossovers not sold in North America.
I can continue to milk a specific market while my competitors do other things.
Yeah eventually that will be dried up, but by than point enough wealth has been accumulated for generations of me and my family.
Plus if the worst comes too quickly there’s a fair chance I’ll get bailed out by my long time buddies in the government.
And in retrospect subsidizing EV by governments around the world could be a bad decision. If instead fuel taxes were raised or at least the subsidies went to development of more economical cars, then total CO2 emissions could be lower at this point.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...
> (b) Become a parochial, US-only, business hoping to squeeze what you can out of a gradually shrinking industry
It's (c) invest in plug-in hybrids that work everywhere. US customers demand something that can do a road trip without stopping to charge? No problem, and on top of that it will get 40+ MPG. European customers paying high gas prices? No problem, it has a 150 km all-electric range so if you keep it charged you never have to put gas in it.
They don't have to be bad EVs, you could theoretically make one with a good EV powertrain, but then it would likely be more expensive than a pure EV. And battery prices drop substantially every year, and ranges are increasing fast.
They're a dead end.
(1) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...
These are the things they make irrelevant because they're hybrids. It doesn't matter if it has a short range or takes 8 hours to charge because you charge it once a day overnight or while you're at work, which is enough for 98% of the days because the range is still double the average commute, and then the other 2% of the time you put gas in it.
> minimal use of electric engines at higher speeds
There are hybrids that can do 85 MPH before starting the gasoline engine.
> you could theoretically make one with a good EV powertrain, but then it would likely be more expensive than a pure EV
You could make a hybrid that could do 200 MPH in electric mode and the main thing you would have to change is use a bigger electric motor, which isn't the expensive part. But nobody really needs it to do that.
> And battery prices drop substantially every year
Do they get substantially lighter though? Because that's the expensive part. A hybrid can have a battery which is 25% the size and then spend less than half the saved weight on the ICE powertrain. Then it's lighter, which not only increases the number of miles per kWh, it means you don't need such heavy duty propulsion, suspension, brakes, etc., which saves even more weight and cost.
Did you read the link? It absolutely does matter. The pathetic ev system in hybrids mean they save -19% of gas in the real world. Aka, basically nothing. Approximately no-one is doing 98/2 on electric.
Semi-solid states with 500+ mile range are already shipping in china, the remaining niche of hybrids is dying fast.
The other is that it's a plug-in hybrid but that doesn't mean much unless you actually plug it in. A lot of people are presumably buying them without installing a charging port and then just running them on gas all the time. But that's not the car's fault. You make your choices and then the money comes out of your own wallet.
These are the hybrid cars that are getting built, and this is the way people drive them. Yes the cars could theoretically be made different, but they arent today and they wont be in future. Yes people could theoretically use them differently, but they aren’t today and they wont.
The data is in. They are a bad solution for real people in the real world today. Saying “oh if they were just built different and people used them differently “ is … not a good argument. Let’s wait and see whether those two things change before EVs completely obsolete them in few short years.
Both types are being built. You can buy whichever one you want.
> this is the way people drive them
This is the way people from some sample at a particular time and place drive them. If you buy one you can drive it however you want, so what other people do isn't particularly relevant.
Moreover, they're presumably running them on gas because there wasn't convenient charging infrastructure available to them, but that's the same problem EVs have so if you change that then you also change the proportion of the time that plugin-in hybrids run on electricity.
As an obvious example, if a place has high electricity prices, like say central Europe after Germany shut down all their nuclear power plants and stopped being able to buy Russian natural gas, then people with a car that can run on either gasoline or electricity are going to more often choose the former because the latter is more expensive. But "real world data" from the time and place where that's happening is irrelevant to some other place or time where the cost of electricity is lower.
And that's just one factor.
Animal vets, plumbers, HVAC, and other industries too.
How much it costs to sell a house. Then tell him in that in the US it's 6% of the sales price.
How much it costs to install solar and heat pumps.
Domestic sources of cheap, plentiful energy helped the US economy grow beyond expectations over the past decade, but it might prove to be a short-term boon that leads to long-term issues if the rest of the world's economy pivots away from fossil fuels.
City gas was actually the first industry that proved the more you make, the more people demand. If we make more power, we will use it.
Then consider that AI datacenters as big as NYC will need as much power as possible.
A glut in supply drives prices down. Oil extraction and refining doesn't have constant costs, as it is heavily dependent on geography as well as the physical characteristics of oil itself.
This is why there was a 3 way gas price war between the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia in the 2010s.
Not really they can sell gas to anyone else. One cannot simply ship natural gas overseas. LNG is a thing, but export facilities have limited capacity.
PG&E now wants to charge solar panel owners $100+/month just for the privilege of being connected to the grid. This is on top of their $0.41-54/kWh they already charge, the highest in the nation.
PG&E is a government-supported scam that is charging people whatever prices they want with no protection from our politicians because they are all on the take.
I'm not engage in a "conspiracy". She was appointed by Newsom in 2021. This coincides to when the prices started skyrocketing.
I haven't actually looked at the real bills to see if it's happening, but the expectation they're setting up is that 2026 will be lower than 2025. we'll see!
Can you say more about this? I don't live in California, so I'm not familiar with what you mean.
https://www.finegroupre.com/blog/no-more-gas/
This is all the while cost of the alternative -- electric power -- goes up at least 10% YOY
- Electric utility must make up to _forward_maximum_kW of electrical energy available to customer, 24x7, at _rate
- Customer may force electrical utility to accept up to _reverse_maximum_kW - without notice, at his sole discretion, and without regard for electrical utility's needs or wishes, at _rate
If so, just talk to any sane businessman about the viability of being stuck on the utility's end of such a deal.
These implicit subsidies used to mostly benefit lower-income households (though not always: properties like seasonal vacation houses also benefited). Now, higher-income households are more likely to benefit from this structure because they are more likely to install rooftop solar (reducing kWh consumption) but still need the grid to work at night. Crediting solar households for grid exports makes this problem especially acute but it would also exist even if solar households were merely reducing the kWh drawn from the grid during daytime.
One remedy could be to fully separate the costs of fixed infrastructure from per-kWh unit charges and set prices directly proportional to costs. But that is probably politically unfeasible because there will be outcry that prices proportional to costs would hurt low-income, low-consumption households.
Another way to remedy it would use the previous approach but give offsetting vouchers to households that would face financial hardship as a result of the change in pricing structure. I don't know why the underlying issue has remained unaddressed in favor of patchy solar-specific changes to the law.
The things that PG&E has notably been neglecting, resulting in highly destructive wildfires?
The idea that it costs every single ratepayer $100/month to maintain the infrastructure is ludicrous. It's just attempting to deflect blame from PG&E's horrible mismanagement to environmentalists.
In places with honestly run utilities that cost is closer to $5-$10/month per household.
I moved across the road from this government owned power company so i was just out of Palo Alto municipality and suddenly had to pay 4x the price. Sigh.
It's a weird thing moving to the USA. Everyone's been brainwashed "anything government run is more expensive" yet every example I've ever looked into proved the opposite to a dramatic extent. Government run institutions lead to lower overall costs.
It's unsurprising that companies want to make money, it is, however, shocking how corrupt the CA government is when it comes to the issue.
The government is the cause of the problem.
I live 20 minutes north of you. My power is in fact 4 times expensive in the winter.
BRB, Shopping on amazon for a 20-mile long extension cord
You have wildfires caused by, basically, climate change causing there to be an abundance of fuel (dead wood) waiting for any spark, exacerbated by decades of the government putting out every wildfire when in the natural environment the last fire would have cleared out the dead wood before the next one, causing fuel to accumulate even more.
At that point it doesn't matter what the ignition source is, that much fuel is going to burn, soon. If it isn't some piece of PG&E equipment it will be a lightning strike or something else. But if you can pin it on the power company because a tree caught fire from falling on a power line then the fire insurance companies can sue the power company instead of filing for bankruptcy, and then all you have to do is pass on the cost to ordinary people as $500/month electric bills.
One of the many questionable political situations in California.
Another intermediate possibility in California is distributed generation and storage to both reduce load on transmission and to allow transmission and distribution to be deenergized during times when fire risk is high. This could then gradually transition over into an entirely distributed system without transmission to some locations.
They took a risk by underspending on upgrading, and we as Californians are paying for them paying out their shareholders.
No one is blaming PG&E for all wildfires. We are blaming PG&E for the wildfires THAT THEY CAUSED. These fires could have been prevented if THEY BURIED THEIR POWERLINES back in the early 2000s when it was far cheaper and like they promised. They instead decided to ditch that and instead buyback stock and pay lucrative dividends.
Burying powerlines would 100% prevent wildfires which were caused by sparking or broken power equipment, which has been the documented reason why several extremely large and fatal wild fires were caused by.
To have a fire you need a spark, air and fuel. The air is there all the time. The fuel is there whenever there hasn't been a spark recently. And power lines aren't the only source of sparks.
Once the fuel is there and accumulating, you're playing roulette to see if you're going to have a smaller fire now or a bigger fire later. There is no option for "never have a fire again" in those areas, and the second option isn't inherently better than the first one.
As you stated, PG&E was held liable for billions of dollars of compensation for the impacted people. This led to negative earnings zeroing out the profits of the previous decade [2]. Furthermore, the stock's price is far lower than it was during the hayday of deferred maintenance.
Since the involvement of California state government in PG&E operations, maintenance has improved dramatically. Furthermore, PG&E again has positive earnings, demonstrating that the long-term viability of the company is improved with adequate maintenance budgeting.
Now to address the counterfactual, "the fires would have happened anyway": no. The leading cause of wildfires in California in general, and impacting people and infrastructure in particular, is electrical equipment. This is empirical; after PG&E began cutting power during high-fire danger days, the number and severity of wildfires dropped dramatically [3].
1. How PG&E missed its chance to prevent the Camp Fire: Damning report on utility’s negligence, https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article24357122...
2. Pacific Gas & Electric EPS - Earnings per Share 2011-2025 | PCG, https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PCG/pacific-gas-el...
3. Human-caused ignitions spark California’s worst wildfires but get little state focus: In 2019, utilities turned off electricity during high-wind events, and California had its mildest fire season in eight years. Was that a coincidence?, https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2020/01/05/human-caused...
That sounds like something lawyers say when they want to sue somebody.
Who determines the "service life" of a conductive piece of metal with no moving parts?
> Now to address the counterfactual, "the fires would have happened anyway": no. The leading cause of wildfires in California in general, and impacting people and infrastructure in particular, is electrical equipment. This is empirical; after PG&E began cutting power during high-fire danger days, the number and severity of wildfires dropped dramatically
Nobody disputes that power lines can be an ignition source. The issue is that there are also other ignition sources and dead trees will eventually burn. Causing the fires to be less frequent actually makes the problem worse, because then when it does happen there is even more fuel, which makes the next fire bigger and harder to contain. It's the same failure mode as putting out natural wildfires and leaving all that fuel to accumulate for next time.
Removing some of the ignition sources means you're going to have fewer small fires this year, but at the cost of having bigger ones later. That's not a win.
Perhaps you might start by explaining how that question is in any way relevant to the current discussion.
The part that was found to have failed was a wire hanger that wore through as it swung in the wind (hint: a moving part) and allowed the power line to fall on the ground.
Somehow (magic or the occult probably) SC Edison and LADWP have not had failures of their physical plant which bankrupted the company. They also had higher maintenance budgets. Hmmm… nope, can’t see how these things are connected.
I think they move from the wind and eventually wear through.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/new-images-of-pge-...
Please read citation number three from the parent post. This is not a certainty. Calfire and local agencies do a substantial amount of brush clearing, tree cutting, and when conditions are right, controlled burns. Anything that reduces the frequency of ignition events buys more time for fire control agencies to do this work.
The link is essentially arguing that there are some areas with very few natural ignition sources, so most of the fires are caused by people. But that doesn't get you out of the accumulation of fuel. Even if zero of the fires were caused by power lines or nature, there would still be car fires and campfires etc., and longer durations between them causes larger accumulations of fuel.
> Calfire and local agencies do a substantial amount of brush clearing, tree cutting, and when conditions are right, controlled burns. Anything that reduces the frequency of ignition events buys more time for fire control agencies to do this work.
This isn't a case of there being a fixed amount of brush that only has to be cleared out this once and we need to buy some time to allow the work to be completed. It's a continuous process and they don't have the resources to do it everywhere. If you then prevent more of the "unscheduled" fires in the places where they can't and then more fuel accumulates there, what happens?
Furthermore, risk to people and property is not uniformly distributed. Fire mitigation efforts are performed disproportionately near population centers. When man-made, preventable ignition causes are concentrated near towns like Paradise, responsible entities have a duty to reduce those risks.
It is not necessary to allow fires to burn houses down to fulfill a concept of accumulated fire risk. Marin County has published a series of videos showing homeowners how to landscape their properties to reduce the spread of fire.
There was a quite convincing article claiming the abundance of dead wood was due to bureaucracy more than anything else - two years of paperwork to remove a tree etc.
It really does feel like the US is completely hosed when it comes to energy (and thus, industrial relevance broadly). Every 4 years we make a bigger bet in the opposite direction of the last, and meanwhile the entire world moves on without us. At least now it feels like no matter what the US does we'll make progress on climate goals as a species, even if in 50 years the US is still building coal plants and criminalizing home solar.
umvi•3mo ago
Personally I like the idea of an electric car doubling as a house battery but so far I think only the F-150 lightning is capable of doing that.
xnx•3mo ago
No, but it's cheaper than it ever was and panels are so cheap that they can have ROI even without storage. That said, grid solar makes the most financial sense if you're not in an off-grid location.
Retric•3mo ago
The economics on storage only kicks in after scaling the grid with a lot of solar, but adding solar to that point is itself profitable almost anywhere.
jaggederest•3mo ago
Once you're curtailing a bunch of power during the daytime, then you can add storage as a no brainer bonus and stop curtailing.
xnx•3mo ago
Retric•3mo ago
It’s clearly a net win environmentally and economically, but for anyone who sees nuclear as part of a green future storage in some form is a massive requirement.
rsynnott•3mo ago
If you exclude China, effectively no nuclear plants have been built in the last decade, and the existing fleet is aging out. "We shouldn't do this thing, because it might threaten that other thing that we don't do anymore" is a weird argument.
Retric•3mo ago
But yea building nuclear is all about forecasting the future so most of the damage has already occurred here, still advocates are going to advocate even if what they say doesn’t make sense.
Retric•3mo ago
In general yes, grid solar + grid batteries are cheaper than any peaking power plants. So now 24/7 batteries + wind + solar generally outcompetes nuclear, coal, or natural gas on price as long as there’s no tariffs involved.
This isn’t enough to make batteries + solar viable in Alaska but long distance transmission lines could solve that issue cost effectively.
candiddevmike•3mo ago
seanmcdirmid•3mo ago
wood_spirit•3mo ago
Retric•3mo ago
I’ve got an usually good location for small scale hydro, there was even a mill on the property, but it just doesn’t seem worth it to me.
wood_spirit•3mo ago
evan_•3mo ago
Filligree•3mo ago
daveguy•3mo ago
seanmcdirmid•3mo ago
AnimalMuppet•3mo ago
seanmcdirmid•3mo ago
Communities in the north will use diesel generators in the winter (nothing else is viable). Again, I assume you are talking about off grid communities, which is basically all of them except a few cities (and most cities have their own grids disconnected from the rest, especially Southeast Alaska).
cachius•3mo ago
somanyphotons•3mo ago
zparky•3mo ago
Retric•3mo ago
Rather than building 10x as much solar in the north + battery systems + winter hydrogen storage etc long distance HVDC to cities and the surrounding grid just makes so much more sense. Even better because the state is huge and the population is tiny they can go nearly 100% hydro.
Where batteries could be useful is operating those long distance power lines at nearly 100% 24/7 then load shifting via batteries to match local demand.
pfdietz•3mo ago
For seasonal storage, round trip efficiency is mostly irrelevant; the relevant metric is capex per unit of stored energy.
Retric•3mo ago
A panel in Alaska only collects so much sunlight over the summer before considering efficiency losses from Hydrogen. It would require buying panels that effectively get ~1 month of use over the entire year due to efficiency losses + limited gathering period, and solar isn’t that cheap.
So in Alaska you’re just better off only using panels directly in the summer which at least provide several months of electricity per year. In say Texas on the other hand you get energy from a panel year round so a marginal panel purchased to generate hydrogen at say 20% round trip efficiency gets 30% * 9 months + say 70% of average production for the 3 winter months = 4.8 months of winter electricity per year. Of course you also need to pay for the hydrogen generating machine and the hydrogen burning device, but that’s not necessarily problematic.
pfdietz•3mo ago
It is certainly the case that hydrogen would be better than batteries for this storage use case in Alaska.
Retric•3mo ago
In 20 years it might make sense but today green hydrogen is several times more expensive than gas even when you can use cheaper electricity, can make use of the equipment year round, and have the benefit of larger economies of scale. Even if the goal is completely about climate change locating that same equipment in the lower 48 states is just a much better idea.
downrightmike•3mo ago
pfdietz•3mo ago
downrightmike•3mo ago
pfdietz•3mo ago
If the basement rock is close to the surface and is crystalline, it probably involves deep mining to form cavities, which would raise the capex by maybe an order of magnitude. Other options could become cheaper then, say storing ammonia.
This is for large scale storage, of course, not for individual residences.
pfdietz•3mo ago
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal-copy
namibj•3mo ago
Having energy cost related scheduled (winter) downtime gives the plants proper maintenance windows.
With free power but only during surplus peaks in summer when the grid can't transmit a large utility solar farm's entire production, and the day/night/weekday time shifting batteries are also already fully active, you could (looks like the math checks out) electrolytically refine iron ore into iron metal (for later smelting in an arc furnace) just about cost-competitively with (coal-fired) blast furnace operation. The key is to skip most overhead by operating them only to eat otherwise-curtailed production and connecting them to the DC bus between the MPPT and the grid inverter (same as the day/night shifting battery).
skrause•3mo ago
For example, last Sunday Germany covered more than 100% of its own power load with renewables even though winter is approaching. Only a small part of that was solar power, most electricity was generated by wind turbines: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...
pfdietz•3mo ago
As I said elsewhere I'm thinking ultra low capex thermal storage will edge out hydrogen here, though.
namibj•3mo ago
Half of Germany is north of the straight part of the US/Canada border...
seanmcdirmid•3mo ago
reducesuffering•3mo ago
I'm pretty sure PG&E pays back something like only 5% of the generation of my solar panels. I'll end the year with $400 more generated than used, and I'll get a check for $20...
mannanj•3mo ago
more_corn•3mo ago
marcosdumay•3mo ago
We will run with 100% renewables for years, and there will still be people asking if storage has been solved already. We will just solve every large issue, and suffer lots of small issues.
Also, if you are using your car as a battery, you can't use it as a car. It's more likely that you will have extra batteries at home so that you can charge your car when you want.
darth_avocado•3mo ago
If it wasn’t, parts of the country wouldn’t be invested in adding it.
Recent discussion on HN on a similar topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45706527
triceratops•3mo ago
Like solar panels, also tariffed.
WaxProlix•3mo ago
Thinking of national policy from a home owner perspective is expected, but it isn't always instructive.
For the latter item, my Rivian has a relatively paltry 1500W inverter with standard 110W plugs in the back seat, truck bed, and gear tunnel, but I can use a rectifier/power supply to pull a constant 1kW, step that back to DC and feed it into my home's battery backup system. My whole house tends to use ~2kW at peak, and obviously can conserve in outages. So I get my normal 4kWh battery bank with solar hookups, but can splice the 141kWh Rivian battery in, too, for a good chunk of off-grid power.
gertlex•3mo ago
GloriousKoji•3mo ago
Getting solar panels forces you onto a plan in which they charge more per kwh pulled from the grid. The surplus electricity is only credited at the generation cost which is only 1/4 the total cost per kwh. (Delivery costs is 3x the price of electricity).
So if you want to go solar to save money you need both batteries and solar panels which is not an insignificant amount of money.
namibj•3mo ago
Maybe just force grid-connected solar installations that want credit (any size) and even those that just want to be grid-tied (beyond some small size like maybe 5 panels/2kW worth of MPPT) to use a registering meter that meters net energy for each like 15 min interval (that's the granularity we use in central Europe; I assume the US would have come to a similar choice of granularity), and bills energy according to market rate and appropriately handles connection capacity/transformer capex by like taking a histogram of those individual measurements or otherwise letting a few isolated bursts through while ensuring transformer capacity is paid for by those responsible for the (hypothetical, until it's not) transformer upgrade.
tbrownaw•3mo ago
The way you worded this implies that you disagree. Are you aware of why wholesale prices aren't constant?