Discussion

Solar and batteries can power the world

pfdietz: Providing 90% of power is not "powering the world".It really helps to also have a complementary storage technology with low capacity capex, even if the round trip efficiency is lower. This would complement batteries in the same way ordinary RAM complements cache memory in a computer.

teucris: The article specifically notes the following:>We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels.

declan_roberts: The article is just wrong. And only mentions energy used for heating in passing. Heating requires MASSIVE amounts of energy.I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar system (almost 30 kWh battery and 24kW solar). It keeps the lights on, but not heating. I live in a mild climate.The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.

cbdumas: The article is about utility scale solar and storage I believe not home installations. It also mentions towards the end that in cold norther climates adding wind to the mix makes sense

iamjake648: Do you have a high efficiency heat pump, or how are you heating?

ahhhhnoooo: China understands this, parts of the EU understands this. The US is currently dead set on betting on the wrong technology, and it's going to put them so far behind.Imagine a world where people didn't care about labeling new things "woke", and instead could all sit down and say, "we're going to make major investments in next generation infrastructure to ensure our capacity and independence."

declan_roberts: China burns significantly more coal than the USA and Europe combined and has no environmental laws standing in the way of their nuclear power plants.Imagine a world where people don't care about labeling new things as "regressive" or "anti-environmental"

pydry: >We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels.I think a lot of people truly dont get this.Those days when the wind isnt blowing, the sun isnt shining and the batteries and pumped storage are depleted can be easily handled with, e.g. power2gas.It's pretty expensive (per kwh almost as much as nuclear power) but with enough spare solar and wind capacity and a carbon tax on natural gas it becomes a no brainer to swap natural gas for that.Nonetheless this wont stop people saying "but what about that last 5-10%?" as if it's a gotcha for a 100% green grid. It isnt. It never was.

silvestrov: The article ignores hydropower. The numbers/prices look a lot better with solar + wind + hydro + battery.Norway runs almost entirely on hydropower. Sweden has a lot.Iceland runs on hydropower and geothermal.

hnthrow0287345: Apart from the current administration's absolutely hilariously bad governing, the US economy really only cares about profit. The same is going to happen to any country with outsized income inequality.

rafterydj: Unsure why you're getting downvoted. I know politics is generally frowned upon here but this is absolutely relevant to the conversation.

mapmap: This is a large pv system for what I assume is a single family home. Do you have resistive in floor heating or an electric boiler feeding radiators? I imagine you could easily run a half dozen mini-splits drawing 500-1000w each, or a centralized heat pump. Happy to help if you can give more details.

tenthirtyam: This is even more true with international grid connections. Europe in a cold spell? Solar countries import, wind & hydro export. Europe in a heat wave? Flip the switches the opposite direction.

barbazoo: Heat pump is what I would have expected to be suitable for a setup like that. How big is the house I wonder.

declan_roberts: I imagine my system is probably sufficient to keep an 800 sqft house comfortably warm in a climate where it does down to the 20s in the winter.

shipman05: The American shale gas/fracking boom really distorted a lot of things. The strategic energy situations of the United States, the EU, and China were all pretty similar in the late 20th Century: major dependence on OPEC-controlled oil and gas. Post-fracking, the US strategic energy situation has diverged from the others.This difference leads indirectly to things like the current "not war" in Iran. (Iran's geography already gives it strong bargaining power via pressure on energy markets. It would have an even stronger hand if the US was not capable of energy independence).The long term impacts on climate changes are even more negative. It's hard to supplant a cheap, ubiquitous energy source with strong negative externalities when those externalities are subtle, gradual, and strongly denied via propaganda by entrenched interests.

dv_dt: Beyond the other better insulation comments, pairing electric with heat pumps that are SEER 10+ goes a long way to improve heating efficiency. Old resistive heaters are 1:1 on energy to heat, while newer heat pumps operate to much lower temperatures, and give you 1:10 or 1:15 electric:heat energy ratios.

DangitBobby: There are influential people who make lots of money when the US Govt forces the country to rely on fossil fuels.

AndreyK1984: What about STORING excess power and delivering it during the day at a same level ? That is a critical part! I remember last time it was too expensive.

toasty228: People still build houses like energy is cheap and abundant. A properly insulated house in any temperate climate require very little heating or cooling.Spend 50k on insulation that will last the life of the building instead of 50k on heating and cooling devices which will need constant maintenance and replacement + fuel and end up costing 10x more over the life of the building.A modern house with modern insulation in a mild climate shouldn't even need a central heating system. You can get by with 500w toaster heaters in each room for the coldest time of the year

JKCalhoun: And never mind ground-source heat pumps [1] (although I know the topic was specifically solar).[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump

tonyarkles: I’m happy to be wrong about this globally, but in my neck of the woods the readily exploited hydro resources are already exploited to 90% of their capacity and have been for 100 years. Hydro is in many ways the ultimate renewable energy, but that’s been true since electrification and we’ve been using it as part of the energy mix since then. I’d love to be wrong but my understanding is that there isn’t a huge amount of untapped new hydro capacity available without having severe impacts on ecosystems

silvestrov: Hydro in Norway goes very well with windmills in Denmark.Very simplified:Wind blows mostly in Denmark during the day, so Norway stops hydro during the day and imports electricity from Denmark's windmills.During night the wind is mostly still in Denmark so windmills don't produce much and Denmark imports from Norway's hydro.In this way you can stretch the capacity from hydro using windmills even though Norway isn't a good place for windmills.

PyWoody: I live in a northern climate and I know multiple people who are net zero with solar+basic battery.Proper insulation and good windows go a very long way. For instance, I set my heat to 66F during the day and 60F at night. When I wake up in the morning, the register is usually still above 60F.

mtoner23: Net zero. But not effectively zero. They sell energy during the day when no one needs it and buy it an night when we all need it. If we all switched to solar and heat pumps there would be blackouts and an energy crisis

PyWoody: What? They store the surplus in their batteries during the day and use it at night.I genuinely do not understand why people are so afraid of solar. It's baffling.

jwr: No, they can't, not unless we get rid of the fossil fuel lobby, which pretty much runs the world these days. Which isn't surprising, given that fossil fuels are the largest industry ever created by mankind. If you compare it to anything else which was actively harmful and yet big money tried to convince you it wasn't (like tobacco, alcohol, or really anything else), there is nothing that huge. So it isn't surprising that the industry fights change.EV adoption has been successfully held back mostly by PR, Germany shifted from nuclear to coal and gas, the US president is doing everything to dismantle anything that isn't fossil fuel and promotes fossil fuels, the list goes on.

baking: Probably because energy is cheap and abundant.

jakewins: Respectfully, 30kWh is not much in this context. In 10 years every modern 2-car home will have 200kWh on the driveway just from the EVs; add a 100kWh whole home battery at a price point close to a 10kWh battery today and the calculus changes in most of the world.The cost of materials going into modern batteries easily leaves room for another 10x reduction in price, IMO where this all is heading is obvious. Zero marginal cost will win every day of the week.FWIW we run our cabin on 15kWh battery today year around, though we do run a small wood stove to supplant the heat pump on cold winter days.

mtoner23: So then they are wrong. The last 5-10 percent is the hardest part and it's the one consumers complain the most about! You can't run a factory on 90% power availability

DangitBobby: But you _can_ run it on 90% solar plus 10% fossil fuels to achieve 100% power availability, which is what GP and the article suggest.

amluto: Do check that your heater isn’t doing something ridiculous. A while back I helped someone debug a Mitsubishi Electric system on which the installer had set the fan speed control to high instead of auto (it’s an easily accessible setting on the thermostat). I forget exactly how much power was saved, but IIRC it was well over 30kWh/day.I don’t know where all that energy was going. I expected some improvement but not anywhere near that much.

mbesto: Fun fact, 12 million hectares of land of used to produce corn used for ethanol which is used to produce gas. I'll let you draw the conclusion.https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/04/trading-some-corn-e...

kogasa240p: Damn I didn't know it was that bad. Ideally you'd grow algae from sewer waste and make fuel from that, but this is the US we're talking about.

declan_roberts: Like I said he grossly understates the energy demand we use in the United States for heating during the winter.

Tade0: I believe a lot of that demand is due to there being no incentive to increase energy efficiency.

declan_roberts: I believe it to be a question of physics and not incentives.

anon7000: Yeah, the technology connections video on this was fantastic. If one was to cover that land in solar, you’d produce far more than the current energy demands of the US.Relying on an energy source which requires constant, continuous resource extraction is fucking stupid when we can spend resources up front and get reliable energy (solar + battery) for decades with minimal operating cost & maintenance. And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction.If you want to debate that, spend some time with this video first: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM

kingleopold: yes but increasing solar will damage the energy lobby in the congress and other places. It's never about what is best, it's about what's best for lobby and their puppets

LogicFailsMe: If you won't think of the energy corridor, who will?

kogasa240p: Before anyone cries about the environmental cost of lithium, concrete batteries are a thing and are far more ideal for grid storage.

panick21_: Nuclear could have powered the world easily and we could have done it with 1960s technology. And we could easily do electricity and heating with nuclear quite easily. The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis.And we can go to 100% of electricity from nuclear, we don't have to have this dumb argument about 'the last 5-10%'. Because its reliable.And if you actually do the math nuclear would have been cheaper then all this nonsense we have been doing for 30 years with wind, solar and batteries. The cost of the gird updates is like building a whole new infrastructure. With nuclear, the centralized more local networks are perfectly reasonable.I did some scenarios starting in Year 2000 or Germany to all nuclear, vs wind (off-shore, on-shore), and solar (partly local partly brought in) and batteries. The numbers aren't even close, nuclear would have been the much better deal. Even if you are very conservative and don't account for major learning effect that countries like France had when building nuclear.That said, even with nuclear, having a few Lithium batteries that can go all out for 1-2h is actually a good deal. Its really only about peak shaving the absolute daily peaks. What you don't want is having to build batteries that can handle days or weeks.

tenthirtyam: IIRC nuclear doesn't really work well as the last 5-10%. Start-up and shut-down for nuclear reactors is a slow process. When it's generating, it needs to just keep on generating. Not so quick to dial down or up just because the wind is(n't) blowing.

SoftTalker: It's not that slow. They can ramp up and down over hours, and those demand patterns are known in advance. Combine with battery, pumped storage, or synfuel generation to soak up excess power during low demand times, and use that to provide peaker capacity during high demand times.

j16sdiz: China is doing that because they are profitable, not because they care about the environment. Why would they care the coal use?

dmix: Having lots of cheap energy is always boosts industry and reduces cost of living for everyone. The way China accomplished that was by investing heavily in every sort of energy and building large scale infrastructure, instead of adding roadblocks at every stage.

juleiie: Solar generates like 1/10 in the northern countries for half of the year. No batteries currently can solve this.The problem with global ecological regulations is they never differentiate between countries on the equator or 30th parallel with countries around 60. They expect everyone to only run on sun and wind. It isn't possible. There has to be at least nuclear which is ridiculously expensive.It's generally not an easy problem to solve otherwise it wouldn't be a problem anymore.First sensible thing to do is to relax the expectations for countries like Poland that have no good way to compete with other countries energy wise because of geographical location that noone chooses.It is extremely unfair to treat everyone the same even though every country has different energy resources.

dyauspitr: Is a 30 kWh battery considered massive? My F-150 lighting has a 143 kWh battery.

declan_roberts: Yes 30 kWh battery is considered large. It takes up a full 6 slot 2u rack in my garage and cost around $8k. In the context of OP's goals it's larger than what 99% of people in the world will ever have.

skrtskrt: grid-scale batteries are accelerating more rapidly than anyone thought a few years, it’s not really seen as an unsolvable problem anymore

legitster: By 2050 is the important caveat. That's assuming constant production of batteries at the current scale and production.It also assumes we figure out how to economically recycle materials from batteries (and total recovery may never be possible). Grid scale lithium batteries have an effective lifecycle of 15 years. In this potential future, global lithium reserves would actually start getting choked up before the 2050 goal.Nuclear is inevitable and we all need to stop pretending otherwise.

0xbadcafebee: [delayed]

j16sdiz: The insulation matters a lot in home heating.

bluGill: There isn't a lot you can reasonably do to something that is already there. I insulated my attic better, but there wasn't enough space to go as high as I wanted (I guess I could in the middle, but not around the edges). The thin walls are still thin, and not much I can do about it for a reasonable price. Likewise the windows are really bad, but the cost of good windows is large. By the time I insulated this house to modern standards I'm nearly half way to tearing it down and building something new (a complete destroy is a lot cheaper than trying to take something off without destroying the rest) - and a new house would get a lot of other benefits (I want a larger kitchen but there is no place to put it)Which is why a lot of poorly insulated houses still exist - people have mostly done what can be done for a reasonable price, but anything that will make a difference is also very expensive with very long paybacks.

newsclues: It costs a lot more than 50K to retrofit a house towards passive standards.Not everyone has the capital (even with gov subsidies) to make those investments, and it's generally the people who need to save a few bucks on bills the most that DONT have the money.

toasty228: I'm replying to someone who bought a 30kwh battery and 24kwp setup, in my country that's already classified as a "local energy provider" I think they're doing OK financially.People still spend literal millions on poorly built and poorly insulated mcmansions today btw, it's not a money issue.

germandiago: So here I go: if it is so stupid, why it is not done yet?Try not to blame anyone. Do it rationally if you can, from your message I understand your opinion.I say this as a person that has lived in a developing country the last 15 years. It is not that simple IMHO...

idontwantthis: It is happening. It takes time to build and it only became absurdly cheap in the past few years. But it keeps getting cheaper and better (batteries too for anyone who wants to bring that up).

HoldOnAMinute: Those brutally cold temperatures are really not compatible with most human beings

declan_roberts: Weird because a significant number of humans beings in the USA immigrated at some point from a country in this climate.

dylan604: Obviously, money is a factor. But you cannot discount political resistance. If a government in charge is dead set in promoting fossil fuels over renewables, it will never happen. Even if you get a government led by the most gungho green friendly administration, in a democratic government, those opposing can stall any plans to go green. If you live in a less democratic government where leadership decides it's going green, you're going green.

jdc0589: I wish it made sense to do residential solar where I am. It probably does technically, but i hate the idea of spending a ton on a system and then STILL have to pay my power company; if you are connected to the grid at all where I am, you pay the power company $5/kw/month of solar capacity and your excess sell-back rates are insanely bad (0.03/kwh, vs billed usage rate at $0.17/kwh)

chongli: Because solar energy production doesn't just vary by time-of-day, it also varies seasonally. Where I live, winter solar production collapses due to decreased daylight hours and cloud cover. At the same time, energy use skyrockets due to heating demand.We would need a lot of batteries to be able to charge during the summer and drain during the winter!

Retric: The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time. It’s the same reason EV’s make a much larger share of new car sales than a percentage of overall cars, EV’s sucked 20+ years ago.The US stopped building coal power plants over a decade ago but we still have a lot of them. Meanwhile we’ve mostly been building solar, which eventually means we’ll have a mostly solar grid but that’s still decades away.

j23n: I think this sells the German energy mix short - fossil fuel has been on a steady decline in the energy mix for about 2 decades now.Comparing 2020[^2] to 2025[^1]:- renewables (solar+wind) went from 181 TWh to 219 TWh- fossil (coal+gas) stayed constant (177 TWh and 179 TWh)So I'd say we switched from nuclear (60TWh in 2020) to renewables & imported nuclear - but the long-term trend is towards renewables.[1]: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/... [2]: (pdf) https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/N...

toasty228: You don't even need to go that far, put 100m of tubing 2m underground and plug it in your heat recovery ventilation system, bam free winter freeze protection/pre warming and free summer cooling, all you need is a 30w pumps and you will save hundreds of kw per year

a_random_name: uh no... You still need a heat pump. The water coming from that system would be like 50 degrees, far too cold for heating.

arrowsmith: Why shouldn't energy be cheap and abundant?

toasty228: Not saying it shouldn't, I'm just saying it isn't. Housing should be free and taxes illegal but here we are. Some retard decides to go to war with Iran and it costs 30% more to tank your car, I'm not making the rules. Solar panels got 15% more expensive over night in my country too. What happens when they decide to mess around with China? They make 70% of batteries and panels.

detourdog: In the northwest corner of Massachusetts I converted an old school into an apartment building. I installed 2" of polystyrene on the outside and about a foot of cellulose in the ceilings. We relay on heatpumps for HVAC. I also installed a 50kW solar array. We don't start paying for heating until Nov/Dec and stop paying in Apr/May. Our Electric usage goes through the roof in Jan/Feb/Mar. Our weak point is that the exterior walls are about 40% windows. I hope to install better thermal shades which will cost about $80k. We also last fall installed a solar thermal array to for hot water and heat the hallway which is radiant floor. I would like to think we could achieve net-zero but I will like need to expand the solar array by about 200%.Thermal curtains are more effective than good windows. Good windows are minimally helpful.

PyWoody: Thermal curtains are a godsend. I remember reading about your journey and I hope it works out! I think it'd be money well spent.In my last house, I replaced single pane windows with properly installed, sealed, and insulated double-hungs and it practically cut my heat bill in half. I agree that modern window to modern window replacement probably won't get you much, though.

ronb1964: I build off-grid camper vans for a living and install solar + lithium battery systems regularly. The technology has matured a lot in the last few years. What used to take a massive roof array and a bank of heavy lead-acid or AGM batteries to run basic appliances now fits in a fraction of the space with lithium. The limiting factor in real-world installs isn't the panels or the batteries anymore, it's getting customers to right-size the system for their actual usage instead of what they think they'll use. People consistently underestimate idle draws and overestimate how much sun they'll get. Scale that mindset problem up to a national grid and I imagine the challenge is the same.

hvb2: > Scale that mindset problem up to a national grid and I imagine the challenge is the same.Except that we have raw data there? The only question is how fast it grows, but since we're transitioning that's mostly a question of how fast you decommission fossil plants.

jacquesm: Very nice. I have my eyes on Lithium-Titanate cells for my house, I can't wait until they go down in price enough. Weight and energy density are not an issue, but safety is and those cells are very good in that sense.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-titanate_battery

aidenn0: This argument would make more sense if Chinese companies were all going out of business due to their governments heavy investments in solar and batteries.

FEELmyAGI: What does the 1% of land used to grow corn have to do specifically with solar and batteries? Solar doesn't need to be on the 15% arable land at all.The corn doesn't just produce ethanol, which just utilizes the starch/sugar. The protein, fat, fiber is eaten by livestock in some form like distillers grains.And governments like to have food security , and having secondary uses for an abundance of food in the good times is more convenient than storing cheese in caves , and in case of an emergency shortage the production is already there without having to rip up solar panels to grow food.My conclusion is you're conflating issues (solar and ethanol) unnecessarily.

gpm: I doubt that issue scales to the national grid at all... national grids tend to dictated in size by more or less market forces not careful pre-planning... and capacity planning for new projects tends to have actual data about energy demand and weather patterns and so on.

balderdash: If you could install solar at ~150% of the cost of utility scale solar it’d make a ton of sense, but at 300%+ it’s hard to make the match work

chongli: 66F is ridiculously cold to me, and I live in Canada where it can reach -40(F or C) in the winter. I would find that very uncomfortable and elderly people would be shivering constantly and highly susceptible to respiratory illness.I have a modern cold climate air source heat pump which essentially needs to run 24 hours a day to maintain a stable 20C when the outdoor temperatures reach -15C. Below that, the heat pump shuts off and the furnace kicks in to provide emergency heating. My thermostat is a modern one with full time-of-day and day-of-week scheduling for heating and cooling, but it doesn't matter because the heat pump by itself is not able to swing the temperature up (by even half a degree) on its own, so this causes the furnace to kick in every time the schedule calls for a higher temperature, defeating the entire purpose of time-of-day scheduling.I will also add that where I live (Southern Ontario) the sky is overcast 90% of the time during the winter. Solar panels, even somehow free of snow and ice, are going to produce almost nothing on those dark days. Add in the need to keep the panels free of snow and ice (presumably with heating, since nobody is going to be climbing around on their roof in the winter), and you'd likely reach energy net-negative trying to make use of them.

sillyfluke: >66F is ridiculously cold to me...I would find that very uncomfortable and elderly people would be shivering constantly and highly susceptible to respiratory illness.I know people who live in the Mediterranean and get by with no heating during the winter with indoor and outdoor tempuratures this low or lower, so it seems that one can be conditioned into doing so.Perhaps it's the presence of more sunlight on average rather than the temperature that makes the difference.

minajevs: 24kW solar "to keep lights on" is a funny way to underplay it. My house "summer" electricity usage is 30kWh per month, including water pump, DHW, septic and work from home for 2 adults. So 1.5h of your PV production would power my house for a month!Regarding heating - I live in cold climate. We had average daily temperature of -10c this january, with multiple lows at -25c, and most nights at -15c. The house is 116sqm. Our heatpump COP for that month was above 2, and we used 787kWh total to heat the house, which is not a lot, actually. At 15 cents per kWh it is 118 euros for heating, for the coldest month in a decade! Considering also that we do not pay for electricity since april until october (solar panels).We also paid less than those houses which use natural gas, wood pellets, etc. We also do not need to do anything to keep house warm. Also, during summer months we could "drive for free" in EV due to free solar electricity.All that just to counter your take on "major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs".

jacquesm: The fossil fuel industry is fighting a rearguard action at this point.

aidenn0: And nuclear is already in the 5-10% range in the US, so if we just maintained that level, we could get carbon free.

jacquesm: The next generation of home batteries will be a game changer. It will do for home energy storage what Lithium-Ion has done for laptops, phones and vehicles and it will be a lot safer too.

dehrmann: The fossil fuel lobby can only do so much. Solar has gotten so cheap it's taking over on its own. Companies are doing it for no reason other than the math makes sense. EV batteries are nearing that point too. You can only keep BYD out of the US for so long.

1970-01-01: Elon said the same thing about the US a decade ago."a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah."https://www.pcmag.com/news/elon-musk-running-us-on-solar-req...See you next decade when we're saying the same thing and not doing it?

jacquesm: My conclusion is that you didn't even try to understand the GP.

FEELmyAGI: Then please explain, to me he brought up an unrelated point about ethanol (which is often poorly understood and mischaracterized anyways) consuming a portion of agriculturally productive land. Which BTW this agricultural land that produces ethanol is probably not even close to the best place in the country for industrial scale solar from a LOT of perspectives.

budududuroiu: > China burns significantly more coal than the USA and Europe combinedWhich is expected when both Europe and the US outsourced most manufacturing to China. It's actually surprising China is so low given they're literally the factory of the world

brianwawok: In the short term the math is usually bad. Can be a 20, 30, 40 year payback on insulation. For the builder? It’s almost for sure a loss unless he can play the green card. For any individual owner? They are likely to leave before they recoup a project like this. Appraisals on houses are price per square foot with a bedroom and bathroom modifier. Until people start pricing in energy efficiency in homes, say a price multiple of 0.8 to 1.2 based on the efficiency of the home? It’s going to be hard to math out. Which yes is sad.

maxerickson: I live in a moderately cold area and pay less than $2000 a year to heat a ~2000 square foot home. So something that improves the efficiency of the building would have to have a pretty low cost to even pay back at all.There's probably a few lower cost things that I am overlooking, to the tune of netting out a few hundred dollars of savings after however many years they took to pay back.

entropicdrifter: Yeah, agreed. It's a lot easier to be empirical when the scale of the requirements is quite literally unimaginable without just dealing with raw numbers.

lazide: Germany’s renewables rollout would like a word….

germandiago: > The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long timeThis needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do. It is reasonable that when someone gives up a couple of things because that person is rich (rich as in a person in the developed world) the sacrifice is more or less acceptable.Now change environment and think that these sacrifices are way worse. Even worse than that: that has more implications in conservative cultures where, whether you like it or not, showing "muscle" (wealth) is socially important for them to reach other soccial layers that will make their lives easier.But giving up those things is probably a very bad choice for their living.America cannot be compared to South East Asia economically speaking, for example. So the comparison of the coal centrals is not even close.A salary in Vietnam is maybe 15 million VND for many people. With that you can hardly live in some areas. It is around 600 usd.Just my two cents.

zozbot234: That's not carbon neutral. You can use synthetic fuels to make it fully carbon neutral (way easier to store than the often-proposed H2) but that's really just another battery.

proee: EVs are essentially a giant battery on wheels. Seems there is a good opportunity to configure them as bidirectional power banks for your local grid. You could rewire all parking slots to have a plugin that acts as a bidirectional power station. Imaging how much power could be moved around with such a grid! This would require a major investment in power transmission layouts, but a city full of batteries on wheels.California has registered around 1M Teslas alone. So this is like having a 1Mx80kwh = 80GWh battery at your service. As a reference, the largest solar + storage facility in California is around 3.2 GWh.

pingou: Charging your car when electricity is cheap and avoiding times when it is scarce would solve most of the issues, provided there is a dynamic pricing system in place.

coryrc: There's a solution that costs less than fossil fuels, but it's a coordination problem and the USA is structurally unable to solve those anymore. I guess the Soviet Union wins the last laugh?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community

tencentshill: That's why it will require a functional government who can use taxes responsibly to make the technology affordable to everyone. The US had a pretty good start until one man decided to stop and try to reverse any progress made.

ZeroGravitas: Musk was proposing about 1.2TW of solar capacity, the US installed about 250GW since then and is currently installing about 50GW a year and is projected to have 770GW by 2036 in a decades time.So the US is probably over-delivering compared with many things Elon has proposed delivering himself.

1970-01-01: Apples and oranges though. One is a massive public works program and the other is private.

RandomLensman: Nuclear reactors make awful targets in a conflict, not sure having many around is generally a good idea if conflict is a risk and there are alternatives.

palata: > and there are alternativesThat's a big if, though. Solar and batteries require globalisation, based on fossil fuels.I feel like nuclear reactors are a better choice.> in a conflict, not sure having many around is generally a good ideaOn the other hand, blowing nuclear reactors could be considered a big escalation. We see with Iran and Ukraine that it's not exactly the first thing one wants to target.

RandomLensman: For shipping?Wind, Tidal or geothermal are also around, for example.

lstodd: First question should be: what latitude?Because where I live around 55th this winter we had five straight weeks below -15c / 5f daily average plus enough snowfall that it was infeasible to clean anything but the most major roads.Solar is out of question in these conditions and when thermal pump fails you have to evacuate. When just grid electricity fails you have to either have some sort of stored fuel backup or evacuate.The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular among people living in what amounts to subtropics who can't even imagine how crazy they sound to most everyone else.

fch42: > "... handwavy crap ..."handwavy argument. Yes, in the (sub)tropics the argument is even stronger pro-PV, not the least because it'll give you the opposite of heating - aircon - for free right when you need it. And considering summer heatwaves as have been seen the last few years "way north", that benefit will extend that way even if you wouldn't bother considering letting it "assist", if not fully replace, your heating. That said though, for 50° polewards and above, if you wanted to use PV in winter orient the panels vertically. If you can clad your too floor with shiplap larch so you can with PV panels. Given the price of timber ... there's a plan.(only saying handwaving goes both ways)

balderdash: I’d rather people went rooftop solar, and put that land to producing food.

idiotsecant: A roof is quite literally the worst place to put solar panels. Its a load most roofs are not designed for, and the whole point of a roof is to keep water out, which is compromised by attaching stuff to it.The most efficient way to do large scale solar is with semi-local utility scale arrays with ultra efficient inverters and enormous chemical or hydro storage. We have a lot of unused land, that's not a problem

KaiserPro: I mean yeah, but $100 a barrel makes it difficult to argue.

Ajedi32: The issue is that to achieve that you can't just build 90% solar plus 10% fossil fuels. You would need to build 100% solar + 100% fossil fuels for the 10% of the time solar doesn't work.

pingou: Good thing it's already built then! Well, of course it cost money to maintain though.

Ajedi32: Yes, but if you need to have all that infrastructure anyway it no longer makes sense to compare the cost of solar+batteries with the cost of fossil fuels because you actually need to have both.Perhaps you could compare the capex+opex of solar with just the fuel cost of fossil fuels (ignoring all other capex and opex) but that swings the calculus a lot.

gus_massa: Algae needs solar light, so you will have to flood a lot of land to get enough.Also, in case of a war or blockade you can switch the corn use from etanol to food. You will have to eat tortilla and polenta for a year [1] but it's better than algae from seawater or famine.Here we use sugar cane to produce etanol, it's more efficient because it's a C4 plant. I guess it's possible in the south of the US.[1] It's not so bad in my opinion if you can mix some meat in the sauce.

pixl97: >you can switch the corn use from etanol to foodNot that easily. Yellow dent corn is not edible without processing. So to switch that to food use you have to have factories to deal with it.You'd be far better off taking the energy from panels and using it greenhouses to get human feed.

KaiserPro: > Can be a 20, 30, 40 year payback on insulation. For the builder?In the UK, houses have energy ratings, which are largely not that useful, but they do allow estimated annual running charge.The house that I live in we moved in and were spending ~1.7k on gas a year.We needed to re-render the place, because it has a few missing pieces. we spent the extra £4 to put in 90mm of external wall insulation. We also had to replace the glazing. It was cheaper to get triple glazing (for some reason), however the results of that was that it was 6degrees warmer in winter, and 10 degrees (celcius) cooler in summer. Even with gas prices doubling, we spend about £70 on hotwater and heating.

palata: My point was that photovoltaic is "an alternative" to nuclear reactors, but an alternative that relies on globalisation. Nuclear reactors... much less.

nradov: We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power. Perhaps we will eventually, but until that actually happens the base load requirement represents a hard limit on the amount of solar generation capacity that the grid can handle.

aidenn0: At 66F, I struggle to do job because my fingers go numb and I can't touch-type well. If others have that problem, a small heat-lamp (like for a reptile cage) can locally heat just the area above the keyboard cheaply.

declan_roberts: I use a desktop heating pad under my keyboard. It's an Apple thin, metal keyboard, which works really well for this. It uses about 20w.

zozbot234: It's not a technical limitation, it's economic. The cost of nuclear is almost all in building (and decommissioning) the plant, the fuel is almost free. So you want to produce flat out as long as you can get almost any positive price for the output.

Windchaser: > The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular among people living in what amounts to subtropicsTo be fair, 90% of the population lives within 45 degrees of the equator. If we're talking about global energy solutions for CO2 reduction, we can go a long way just by focusing on what works in these areas of the globe.The article does also point out that hydro/wind are going to be important at higher latitudes in winter, but they also acknowledge that they don't account for seasonal variation in demand. That's the biggest flaw I can find in the analysis.FWIW: I'm down in a mild arid climate at 35N, and yeah, 90% of our winter days are nearly sunny, even when the lows are in the teens. It's a different world for sure.

coryrc: Most space heating is in the Northern parts though, so those are the ones that need to be addressed. There are solutions that are a pareto improvement, but it's a coordination problem and the USA is sufficiently broken and unable to solve those.

adrian_b: Making hydrogen from water and solar light is certainly better than using nuclear energy for that.There is no reason for consuming valuable nuclear fuel, for which better uses exist, instead of using free solar light.The efficiency of converting solar energy into hydrogen is already acceptable. The same is true for the efficiency of converting hydrogen and concentrated carbon dioxide into synthetic hydrocarbons.The least efficient step remains concentrating the diluted carbon dioxide from air.While the efficiency of converting solar energy and water into hydrogen by artificial means is already better than that of living beings, the living beings are still much more efficient in converting H2 and CO2 from air into organic substances.Besides improving the efficiency of the existing techniques, an alternative method of CO2 capture would be the genetic engineering of a bacterium that would produce some usable oil from H2 and air, with an improved productivity over the existing bacteria.

aidenn0: I could not retrofit my house for efficient heating with $50k. To do so would likely be cheaper to completely tear it down and rebuild.

rickydroll: same here. 1940's house with slate roof and vermiculite "insulation". You can't just use modern insulation techniques or blown-in foam because that would make exterior wood rot. You need to keep the air flowing the right way to dry out the wood.

aidenn0: I have to clean the eaves of my house myself because nobody I hire will believe me that you can't point a pressure washer at the eaves without water getting inside the walls. "I'll just avoid the vents" doesn't work when you can see daylight between the roof and the wall all around the house.

pixl97: I'm guessing you don't live in a place with tropical storms or really severe weather.Where I am your house would flood when 80mph+ winds blow the rain up your walls.

aidenn0: Indeed, that is the case. However the house is only 55 years old, so a freak storm destroying it isn't out of the question.

ZeroGravitas: If you build batteries on the scale that the article suggests (and is probably going to happen in the real future) you can use batteries charged from fossil fuels.It's a few percent dirtier (round trip losses) but in return you can use gas plants that are 50% more efficient to charge them rather than run peaker plants.And of course that's ignoring wind which is nearly as cheap as solar and anti-correlated with it.

pixl97: Take plants that can use enery from the sun 'freely'. Is it cheap for them? Not really when you look at the evolutionary battle between plant species. There is always another plant willing to take your place if you're inefficient, slow growing, not poisoning the ground around you, or some other trick to keep you alive.Any means to keep energy cheap and abundant must be by force because it is not a natural order.

ryzvonusef: there is a youtube video I watched where an RV guy converted as many appliances and gadgets on his vehicle to Direct DC as he could, saved a lot on wastage from DC-AC-DC conversions.We need mundane home DC solutions.

Aperocky: It is being done, just not here.