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.
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.
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?
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.
For what it's worth there are battery chemistries now that don't require cobalt - LiFePO4 for example, which are already being used in vehicles. And sodium based batteries suitable for vehicles are around the corner as well, these don't even require lithium, all you need for these is table salt or desalination brine.
Anyway, the alternative to batteries is combustion, and that's just as nasty - we're paying the people that attacked the US (9/11), Israel (Oct 7th) and a sovereign European nation (Ukraine) billions upon billions of dollars each year for their oil and gas. Thanks but no thanks, we got to get rid of fossil fuels because with the exception of Norway and the US, almost all major relevant suppliers of them are religious autocracies and/or kleptocracies.
By bulk they use sodium, aluminium and iron - all of which are very abundant.
China is dominating that field as well.
What does anyone care about the people who attacked Israel? The Arab Gulf has rivers of oil required for driving human economic progress forward. they have been consistent about suppressing Islamists within their borders. The Saudi security infrastructure had voided Bin Laden's citizenship since the 1990s and notified the US & their Western partners.
Pinning Hamas on the Arab Gulf might advance your narrative, but it's provably false for anyone willing to actually probe that claim.
>we got to get rid of fossil fuels because with the exception of Norway and the US, almost all major relevant suppliers of them are religious autocracies and/or kleptocracies.
LMAO. Imagine a (likely) Western European preaching about morals after ethnically cleansing three entire continents? If morals ever mattered to anyone, we'd have known before now.
I want to see theocracies gone.
> The Arab Gulf has rivers of oil required for driving human economic progress forward.
Solar energy is cheaper and it doesn't need to be trucked around on ships, threatening insanely expensive disasters.
> they have been consistent about suppressing Islamists within their borders.
... and instead funding them in Western countries, yeah. Saudi funded madrasa schools or imams funded by oilsheik countries are a massive problem, although I admit a part of that is our fault as well for not running theology studies in our universities for Islam (unlike for Christian denominations).
> Pinning Hamas on the Arab Gulf might advance your narrative, but it's provably false for anyone willing to actually probe that claim.
Well, Hamas is strongly supported by Qatar and Iran.
> LMAO. Imagine a (likely) Western European preaching about morals after ethnically cleansing three entire continents?
Just because we did massive mistakes in the past, there's no reason we have to continue doing them now.
How they choose to organize their society is none of your business. Whenever any Arab society becomes democratic, it's almost guaranteed they'll vote in Muslim Brotherhood types that'll be joined at the hip with Islamist movements. So, you don't want rapidly liberalizing benevolent monarchies, but rather democratic Islamists? Wasn't it the Americans who nudged the Egyptian military to topple Morsi after the Arab Spring brough an Islamist to power? Democracy until whoever we dislike is elected by the people.
It was the Western powers messing around with Mossadegh's democratically-elected regime in Iran that led to its fall and later down the line, the rise of the Shia-extremist Iran.
You westerners are so full of hubris. You don't know how to leave well-enough alone.
>Solar energy is cheaper and it doesn't need to be trucked around on ships, threatening insanely expensive disasters.
That's none of your business either. No western country is accelerating the renewable transition. Stay out of the way of those doing it, and don't pontificate to those providing energy for civilization now.
>... and instead funding them in Western countries, yeah. Saudi funded madrasa schools or imams funded by oilsheik countries are a massive problem, although I admit a part of that is our fault as well for not running theology studies in our universities for Islam (unlike for Christian denominations).
That's a YOU problem! Western governments hold a monopoly of violence within their own borders. You can simply shut down Islamist mosques. If you refuse, you implicitly permit their activities. There's a reason why extreme preachers are imprisoned/executed in the Arab Gulf, but they find an audience in the West. You allowed it; it's a you problem.
>Well, Hamas is strongly supported by Qatar and Iran.
And Israel too, right? Are we going to gloss over that? That these fighters are mostly orphans, whose parents and grandparents where marched out of their homes at gunpoint and had their homes stolen?
>Well, Hamas is strongly supported by Qatar and Iran.
You're still making these mistakes now, like the ongoing genocide in Gaza. You don't get to pontificate or preach. You don't have the moral capital. No one takes the West's moral posturing serious. The only people who do are developing countries paying lip service so they can get aid handouts. No one cares. Pack it up.
Israel has a long list of their own theocratic traits, fwiw. Unless you just don’t allow religious people to vote you’re never going to get a perfect secular government anywhere.
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.
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..."
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...
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.
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.
> (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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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•4h 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•4h 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•4h 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•3h 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•3h ago
Retric•4h 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•4h ago
seanmcdirmid•4h ago
wood_spirit•3h ago
Retric•3h 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•1h ago
evan_•3h ago
Filligree•3h ago
daveguy•4h ago
seanmcdirmid•4h ago
AnimalMuppet•4h ago
seanmcdirmid•3h 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•3h ago
somanyphotons•3h ago
zparky•3h ago
Retric•3h 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•7m ago
For seasonal storage, round trip efficiency is mostly irrelevant; the relevant metric is capex per unit of stored energy.
downrightmike•3h ago
pfdietz•2h ago
pfdietz•2h ago
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal-copy
namibj•2h 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•1h 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...
namibj•3h ago
Half of Germany is north of the straight part of the US/Canada border...
seanmcdirmid•1h ago
reducesuffering•4h 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•4h ago
more_corn•3h ago
marcosdumay•3h 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•3h 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•3h ago
Like solar panels, also tariffed.
WaxProlix•3h 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•3h ago
GloriousKoji•3h 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•3h 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•1h ago
The way you worded this implies that you disagree. Are you aware of why wholesale prices aren't constant?