Discussion
Solar is winning the energy race
mytailorisrich: Thank you, China.One question I have with solar is: what is the reasonable maximum it can produce as a proportion of each country's needs? Solar is the most guaranteed to be intermittent electricity source around, and can have high seasonality, too.
metalman: I live off grid, right on the 45'th parallel, and experience 4 full seasons. The solar array and battery bank I have is built from self sourced miss matched panels, and used batteries, it provides power for my house and a significant portion of my business (welding power is from an engine driven welder). In 10 years it has not just amortised it's costs, it has made me money, and qualifies as a tax right off. My up time is better than the grid. The simple fact is that solar plus batteries is a complete solution for 90% + of the worlds population. One of my side projects was to remove the alternator from the "truckasaurus" and mount solar pv as the only electrical power for starting, lights, etc. It was marginal, but I ran it that way as my only vehicle ,year round, for years. Relevant?, yes! as my experience has shown me where the margin realy is, and there has been a great deal of technological improvements and cost reductions since I built my system.
doener: I think the key is to combine it with a strong, digitalized grid and a lot of BESS—a technology which is now getting progressively cheaper, just like PV.https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/new-record-l...I believe it is realistic to expect that, in combination with other renewable energy sources such as wind (which, for example, generates more energy at night than during the day), biomass, and hydropower—along with the high level of grid integration currently taking place in Europe—the share of renewable energy could reach 100 percent in 10 or 15 years. Provided there is the political will to do so.
defrost: From the article: Researchers at the Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology in Finland have worked out what a globally cost-effective energy supply could look like. Based on their model, 76% of the world's energy would come from solar. Wind power would make up an additional 20%, with the rest coming from hydro, biomass and geothermal energy.
mmooss: Connect enough grids and the sun is always shining.
cbmuser: Yeah, just build a 300 GW transmission line from the US to Europe. It will basically costs nothing.
tiku: Except during the night, or winter.
cbmuser: No, it’s not.We’re still producing 80% of our energy from fossil fuels and that share is basically unchanged for 30 years.The largest renewable share is hydropower, not solar.The hype for volatile renewables on Hackernews is reallt tiresome, but I’m not surprised that the article source posted here is from a German government-funded broadcaster.In Germany, shilling for renewables is basically part of the state propaganda.Btw, Germany has still over 100 active coal-fired power plants according to the official database called Marktstammdatenregister.The energy transition in Germany is not working. Our electricity generation is neither cheap nor clean and national electricity generation has dropped by 20% since 2018.Yet people can’t stop posting this nonsense.
Moldoteck: hydro is mostly tapped, solar on the other hand can grow a lot. And we are talking about electricity, not energy in general. Tackling energy is more about electrification.Germany is against nuclear so the best it can do is expand renewables with fossils firming, gas to be more precise per fraunhofer. It's better than doing nothing bc it's clear nuclear topic will not change anytime soon there.Germany is using in day to day about 20-25gw of coal, the rest is reserve.The price is indeed a challenge - DE spends over 10x more than France on transmission and curtailment and that's on top of EEG fee. Add to that high CO2 tax and you get very high prices
mytailorisrich: Yes, that does not really answer my question, though. A global average is somewhat interesting but with solar the situation is bound to vary widly by location. Also, does 'solar' then include battery storage?
defrost: Australia isn't Norway, there are variations in land area, latitude coverage, existing legacy infrastructure, etc. - I'm not writing a country by country break down for you - the IEA has pages per major countries that show progress and plans.Solar includes energy story - be that thermal, battery, hydro, etc.
mixermachine: The article states the same solar production numbers as your comment. I agree that the headline is overly positive but the ramp up of solar can't really be denied. Change at this scale is sadly slow in this rather conservative sector.The biggest thing is truly that solar has now reached a price tag where it just makes sense to replace other sources. You don't need to think about the environment any more to prefer it.
adjejmxbdjdn: That’s a lot of text, none of which even attempts to refute the factual claim that solar’s generation share has increased from 1% in 2015 to 10% in 2025.Also, talking of subsidies, the reason renewables like solar need subsidies is because its fossil fuel competitors not only get heavy subsidies, they get massive states to enter trillion dollar wars to secure fossil fuels.They get a tiny fraction of the costs that governments all over the world are paying for fossil fuels and solar alone is already grown to double digit market share in about a decade from basically nothing.
micwag: > Germany has still over 100 active coal-fired power plantsNo, Germany has 97 coal BLOCKS in its power plants (down from 150 in 5 years), but those are NOT all active.Also Germany's coal consumption is at an all time low, down a third in only 5 years.
isodev: That's what batteries and wind and hydro are for.
Moldoteck: it's winning regardless - every kwh of solar is a kwh less of fossils. You can achieve even deeper decarbonization with nuclear but the perfect shouldnt be the enemy of good. There are countries where nuclear is politically hard and changing ppl's opinions is hard too. So it's either ren+ some fossil firming or just fossils
cbmuser: »In 10 years it has not just amortised it's costs, it has made me money, and qualifies as a tax right off.«Great, so basically the tax payer is subsidizing your energy consumption.Sounds like a fair system.
foragerdev: Solar is not less than revolution in Pakistan. Almost every home and factory has solar installed on their roofs. More affluent houses have almost gone off grid; others are selling back to grid and others who can't afford has their own small scale 12V solar panels to run fans in the scorching summer of Pakistan to save electricity bills. It is all done by people independently without much support from the government as ROI (if you are using full potential of your installed capacity, it can be as low as 1 year and afterwords it will be free) is much better on solar than paying the grid.I myself has got one my roof, 6KW with 5Kwh battery backup costing me 700K roughly 2500$. Now, I can use AC without thinking of electricity bills and the most importantly I do not have to face inconvenience of grid being not available in some cases for 24 hours.Now Pakistan is facing energy crises not because it does not have enough, because it has too much as people are generating their own and due to nature of the contracts with electricity producing companies' government has to pay them according to their installed capacity not by generated.According to a government report in 2021, 116,816Gwh was consumed commercially and in 2024 it stands at 111,110Gwh and in 25 and 26 in would be even lower.Isn't it insane?
kwakubiney: Might be a noob question, but why can't EVs have solar panels on them directly so they can get charged just by moving around? Or why can't we have SVs(Solar Vehicles)? Why do we have to use solar panels on EV stations rather than just having them on the vehicles themselves?
snowchaser: It’s a good question, but the reality is the energy required to power a car is far larger than what you can collect.The solar energy you can collect is about 750W/sq meter.A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft?Best case if the sun is right over the car you can illuminate about 5 square meters. That’s about 3.75KW.To convert that to a more familiar car power measurement that’s about 5 horsepower.Hopefully it’s clear why a realtime solar car is hard.This is not to say it’s impossible, they have been built. They’re just not super practical for everyday use.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_car
nutjob2: Your comment is typical of the tortured efforts of skeptics to discredit renewables, also usually applied to electric cars and other climate friendly measures.You ignore the points made to argue a bunch on non-sequiturs that you think serve your purposes. Plus you throw in various ad-hominem attacks.The article points out the experiential growth of renewables and logarithmic reductions in price. You don't take issue with that, maybe because you don't understand the consequences of exponential growth?You mention that largest renewable share is hydro, but the number of locations suitable for hydro is very limited, and the attendant cost is very high.What you focus on in existing installed capacity. But so what? Yes sources of power that have been installed over hundreds of years are indeed outnumbering renewables. Somehow you don't get that the rapid increase of renewables will wipe out existing forms of power generation in a fraction of the time it took for those to appear.Renewables are much, much cheaper than other forms, and more scalable (up and down). That is undeniable buy you or anyone else. That will drive installations even in the face of issues such as intermittency because the force of money, along with convenience and flexibility, beats everything.
jstummbillig: And battery prices and buildout are looking really promising.https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/electric-...
aurareturn: The US can have this too if it stops demonizing China.
defrost: You absolutely can .. but in order to be self sustaining vehicles need to look somewhat like the builds that appear in Australian multi day solar races - ultra lightweight, extreme streamlining, zero driver comfort, no extras like cargo space and automatic rear doors, etc.Maybe in time efficiencies will get there.* https://worldsolarchallenge.org/* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K0FD9Hh6XY* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_lVdrHnbYo
arjonagelhout: There was a production car planned called the Lightyear One [0], originating from a Dutch student team, but if I recall correctly it was quite difficult and expensive to manufacture.[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightyear_0
wartywhoa23: > Every home and factory has solar installed on their roofs.Looking at Karachi's 2025 satellite imagery in Google Earth, I find this utterly overstated. Maybe 5% of houses have them on their rooves at best.And that is in the largest city in Pakistan, where people ostensibly have much more money to throw at solar panels than in rural areas.
foragerdev: Sorry, I fixed it to "Almost every". I agree, "Every" is overstated.I have never been to Karachi, what I know about Karachi, Karachi weather is not as harsh as Punjab or away from coastline so, you might survive (If you are used to living without AC) there without AC. And further, its hugely densely populate area so a lot of people might not have roof to install it. And Karachi gets people from the whole country and most of the people are living there temporarily, they might not want to commit on installing solar system on a rented house.That might be reason, but numbers speak themselves. Source: [https://www.ceicdata.com/en/pakistan/electricity-generation-...]
GaggiX: I'm not from Pakistan but Karachi is the only vertical city in Pakistan, most people lives in apartment buildings, I would suggest looking at other cities like Lahore.
belorn: It is absolutely sane and perfectly reasonable. The climate highly support it, you are already used to a grid that in some cases are not available 24/7, and the major energy consumptions are AC and fans which correlate with production.
red75prime: The heat and electricity energy storage need to grow to 46000 TWh [1]. The current value is about 10 TWh.[1] https://uk.eragroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Global_sy...
defrost: That's in line with estimates being bandied about in the Finnish dissertations.
energy123: The energy transition in Germany sucks because they are replacing nuclear with solar when they should have been replacing coal with solar.That doesn't mean renewables are bad, it just means that turning off already built nuclear plants is bad... Which is an entirely different matter.If you look at China, they are building so much more solar than they are building nuclear, and they have no anti-nuclear sentiment. Their technocrats have decided, correctly, that solar is cheaper and better at current market prices.
actionfromafar: Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070915
jorisboris: Hydro has its own problems, it traps fish and it significantly changes ecosystems. It might be renewable but not necessary ecological
SideburnsOfDoom: [delayed]
awongh: There must be some kind of calculation generally based on latitude?A sub-question that I would be curious about is how much climate in that region then affects the total possible solar energy. How much is the variance from a naive calculation just based on latitude?One other second-order effect is: developed economies are heavily weighted towards places that are cold / farther north than less developed places (as a very general rule). And, a lot of people don't realize how much less energy efficient it is per-capita to make a space human comfortable year round in a "cold" climate vs a warm one.-That's a new way of comparing economies where the price and stability of energy is better in a warm, more equator proximate location.
didgetmaster: I am confused. The article claims that solar is the best, cheapest source of power. It also claims that the Trump administration is undermining it in the US by cutting federal subsidies.If solar truly is the cheapest, why does it need any help from any government? It would seem to me that it should flourish in any capitalist society where money naturally flows towards the cheapest solution that actually works.
broken-kebab: I have my quite positive experience with solar too. But "90% population" claim is unrealistic.For starters, solar needs batteries to be truly effective. Batteries need rare-earth metals which is a narrow bottleneck. It's fine to buy 4 batteris for yourself but procuring a million will raise prices and probably break backs of many projects. A trillion, and you probably igniting wars for resources.Also we can't multiply a homesteader's optimum a million times and expect it to be close to what a million people industrial city really needs.At a large enough scale everything gets different.
nmehner: It is working perfectly fine: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...Heat pumps and electric cars are so much more efficient than ICE engines or gas heating. This is why the share doesn't change a lot. Even looking at consumption in Norway: https://robbieandrew.github.io/EV/img/NORenergy_road.svg You don't see the electric share going up a lot. Still oil consumption is collapsing-
belorn: The extensive EV car subsidies has been really got people to buy EV. With 98.3% of all new cars sold, it is amazing what subsidies that accounts for more than 25% of the value of a new car does to encourage people to buy electric. In Sweden, it is a well know concept that when Norway do subsidies, they don't do it ungenerously.Norway has however started to cut down on those subsidies, with one cut 2023 and now a second cut next year, and then a third one in 2027. They are combining that with extra fees for ICE, and time will tell what that will do to voters.
torginus: It is genuninely insane (in a good way!) I've encountered some degree of apprehension and disbelief from people in Western countries when I told them, that countries considered poor and backwards often are further along in the transition to renewables, and even for the everyman, installing solar and having (a usually Chinese) EV just makes sense - economically, and not only in terms of saving the planet.The markup on solar in Europe is insane, and it usually comes down to shitty government regulations - we were forced to upgrade to a 3 phase system (even though our net drain from the grid was looking to decrease), install a government monitoring and control system (and were locked out of some inverter settings), and install a lot of questionable 'safety' equipment (like a DC fire safety cutout, which some argue is even a bigger fire hazard than not having it), and basically all but being forced to install a grid-tie system, as isolated systems (that can take but not feed back to the grid) are a legal gray area.Not to mention, all the red tape.But in exchange we get to feed back to the power grid for like 5% of the original price. To be fair, we got a substantial subsidy and in the end, jumping through these hoops was only a bit more expensive that going at it by myself and installing the hardware we actually needed and paying for it out of pocket.sOcIaLiSM!!!
adrianN: Heat storage is quite cheap per kWh and has excellent economy of scale.
DamonHD: https://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-EU-US-supergrid-interconnec...
mixermachine: Especially for hot and sunny areas solar is insane. At mid day, max heat, you get the peak production and can run your AC at full throttle. That enables you to efficiently work at nice temperatures.
healthy_throw: Heat reduces solar production, ideally you have very sunny environment with about 25C / 77F.
adrianN: Panels are cheap, efficiency is not that important.
pydry: Areas where solar is much less productive (e.g. Norway, Canada) tend to have lower populations, more abundant hydropower (which also means storage capacity) and wind potential and often grid interconnects to areas where solar does produce a lot.
Moldoteck: you get too little energy vs the cost of integrating it. It gets worse considering as a driver you want to park your car in shade/garage/multistory parkings
thinkcontext: The amount of power that can be generated from the surface area of a car is pretty small compared to how much a car consumes. And the cost hasn't been low enough compared to the value of the electricity it could produce.Maybe someday the price will get so low it will be a no-brainer.
b00ty4breakfast: We've already got pumped-hydro storage infrastructure and battery tech, while certainly not as far along as the boosters circa the middle of the last decade promised us, is at a point where it's viable as one part of the puzzle.Speaking of the larger picture, this is to say nothing of all the other renewable options out there that continue to work when the sun goes down.EDIT: And it doesn't speak at all to the other "alternative" energy storage options like thermal storage
don_esteban: Another advantage of solar that it is decentralized and difficult/too costly to shut off by a country bombing you (Ukraine benefits from this) (unlike a big centralized power plant).I think the biggest potential is in the 3rd world countries for which hydrocarbon import is a big drain on their convertible monetary reserves (especially now with the rising oil prices).A farmer with enough free land and significant diesel bills for his farm machinery would also benefit from having his own solar farm and electric machinery.Two future developments might be especially useful: 1) extremely cheap (sodium?) batteries (not necessarily ultra compact/light per kwh, just cheap). Moving in that direction but significant price reduction is still needed.2) an ultra-cheap PV foil you can just roll out and not care too much about the longevity (not sure how feasible, but would be awesome and really handy in many situations)
hnmullany: Just a note that 46,000 is a 2050 target - which covers current demand AND all the growth in electricity and heat demand over the next 25 years.
Jedd: > The solar energy you can collect is about 750W/sq meter.> A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft?We must think metric, every inch of the way!Anyway, PVCs currently max out at about 300W / square metre - and that's in ideal conditions.I believe theoretical maximum energy per square metre (when light actually arrives at the planet surface) is conveniently pretty close to 1000W, assuming you're in the right place, but maximum efficiency of contemporary panels is only about 30%.
kaibee: > Great, so basically the tax payer is subsidizing your energy consumption.> Sounds like a fair system.Yes, people voted for tax credits for solar/renewables. It is a fair system. You know what isn't a fair system? Fossil fuel externalities causing childhood asthma and rising sea levels requiring rebuilding coastal infrastructure globally.
defrost: The USofA is a broligarchy not a capitalist society, so there's that.Trump has his thumb on the scales, cancelling wind farms in progress via executive order, not cancelling the federal subsidies for fossil fuels, etc.There are always transition overheads to breach - in China the government there subsidised the non existant EV industry into being, now that's going gang busters the government support has dropped back to near zero.
embedding-shape: > but if I recall correctly it was quite difficult and expensive to manufactureMore importantly, seems they stopped manufacture it because they made a new version, that was supposed to be available in 2025, but I don't think I've seen it anywhere.> However, in January 2023 Lightyear announced that it was halting production of the 0 model, redirecting their efforts towards production of Lightyear 2; Atlas Technologies B.V., the subsidiary responsible for the manufacture of the Lightyear 0, would be allowed to go bankrupt. As of 2023, the replacement, Lightyear 2, is slated to be US$40,000 and available in both Europe and North America, and to start production in 2025.
hnmullany: Solar still makes sense economically in the US without explicit subsidies - that's why it is still getting built.But the Trump admin is also with-holding permits and cancelling long distance transmission that would allow it to reach non-local markets. The fossil fuel industry is also sponsoring astro-turf campaigns on the local level to ban new deployments.
Moldoteck: for them prices are kinda similar. Their npp is 2.5bn/unit. But inland construction is banned.
embedding-shape: Ok, so lets say we didn't want 100% of the energy to come from those "self-sustainable panels on the car", but rather N%, so we keep most everything as-is, except switching all the outside body/chassi panels for solar panels, how much N% could we recover from that? Could it change so someone goes from needing to charge once every 3 days to once every 2 weeks lets say? Together with re-generative breaking, maybe it could at least have some impact.
Moldoteck: full decentralization is not a feature but a bug imo - you spend a lot on transmission. Germany now spends 10x more than france on transmission and curtailment and has highest prices in EU. It's the best to have a hybrid - centralized pp and centralized solar/wind parks but distributed evenly across country. Ukraine had also massive loss of ren power because most solar+wind was in south (because of better weather) and destroyed by russia or captured.Electric machinery is good but crazy expensive, esp in farming sector. Eastern EU still buys bellorusian tractors because of their price...PV is already sufficiently cheap, the problem is new units start competing with existing units so gains are getting smaller unless you have lots of hydro or bessAgree about huge sums being spent on fossils, it's a strong grip and getting off isnt cheap either becaus of necessary grid upgrades
don_esteban: You are looking at it from the point of view of 1st world country that has a functioning highly centralized generation and distribution system.My view is more from the 3rd world country where the generation and distribution is insufficient and unreliable.To goal is to have local generation closely tied to local production, greatly alleviating the need for global long-distance transmission. Yes, it does not work as well as well functioning global system, but that is not the reality of the 3rd world. And can be achieved much cheaper/simpler than a well-working global system.Sort of like Africa leapfrogging land lines and going directly to cell phones.Electric machinary does not have to be crazy expensive. As electric cars do not need to be crazy expensive, that is the market the west is willingly leaving to China/rest of the world. (Just go to China/Asia and see cheap electric cars. For locals, the electric is the cheapest option.)Re: PV is already sufficiently cheap: For 1st world, and for the current applications. Bringing the battery costs down would enable much wider use of solar.Last year I have been to remote parts of Indonesia. Almost all local transport was by small boats, with japanese ICE engines. The availability (logistics of getting the fuel to small remote islands) and cost of fuel were quite limiting. If each village/homestead had their PV farm for charging their boats, their life would be transformed.
izacus: And it absolutely won't be used by MAGA and Putinist crazies as a tool of extortion.
patall: Why is that always posted without stating the magnitude of the effect? The numbers that you find online are around 15% relative loss at 60°C vs. 25°C panel temperatur (I remember a HN comment reporting 12% comparing peak April to peak July). That is significant, but not world changing, especially for AC.
torlok: "Building and recycling windmills has a carbon footprint"-ass argument.
thechao: You're off by an order of magnitude. It's a few hundred watts; an EV is consuming 10s of kilowatts. (Ignore the watt-watt/hour sloppiness, pls.) To charge my car 60% would take about 2 months. Ambient needs (battery cooling) would eat up more than I'd get back. At best it extends idle sit time.
snowchaser: Totally agree, SI units for the win!I was just trying to use “familiar” units. I could have led with 1 HP per square yard, and then you’d totally have license to call me out!And yeah, I was just talking about solar flux, there’s a whole lot of real world losses to consider but my point was that none of this matters, it’s orders of magnitude away from ICE engine output.
foragerdev: Yes, that's drive me insane, west which is biggest advocator of climate change and preaches renewable energy has not done as much as a poor country like Pakistan has done.And Pakistan is the one who is affected the most by the climate change. From September to February Pakistan AQI is basically unbreathable. Rain pattern is disturbed, winter has become shorter and summer has become longer, basically there is no spring or autumn, either it's summer or winter.EU has to do more and make it easier for them to install solar panels.
bmitch3020: I really appreciate the Technology Connections take on renewable energy from solar and batteries including a recyclable component. With fossil fuels, the power plant has to be built, and then the fuel is constantly shipped in, which requires constant extraction. While solar panels and batteries can not only consume their fuel for effectively free, but at the end of their life, the materials in them can be recycled without needing massive mines for fresh glass, aluminum, lithium, silicon, etc.
hnmullany: Battery chemistries for grid storage are moving toward commodity elements and rapidly reducing reliance on rare earths. Sodium and Iron/Air batteries can take over fairly easily.
