Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
bbc.comUnregistered solar is huge in the developing world. In the Philippines, basically no one tells the utility they installed solar, because the net metering application is so expensive, comes with tons of red tape (read as opportunities for government officials to extract bribes), and only gives you billing credits anyway. So people just install batteries and automatic transfer switches. Some even disconnect from the grid completely, or never connect in the first place because it was too expensive to get the line installed. Automatic transfer to a generator is now very simple, and with LPG generators, extremely clean and low maintenance.
As I understand it, this is very common across much of the developing world now. So the tracking of how much solar energy there is in the world is almost certainly a lower bound on the reality.
Jenny Chase is a renewable forecaster for BNEF (Bloomber new energy finance), and the way she works around that is by looking at China's solar panel export rather than what's reported in each country.
If you're not following her, she's often sharing really interesting stuff.
She just did her yearly recap of the market:
https://bsky.app/profile/solarchase.bsky.social/post/3mxjkhs...
Her book is excellent, I highly recommend it. I purchased it before I began investing in and contributing time and effort to utility solar projects.
Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon2nd Edition https://doi.org/10.1142/q0437 January 2024, Jenny Chase (BloombergNEF, Switzerland)
(no affiliation, I just like the book)
Even in the developed world, you don't need to register solar instalation as long as you don't plan to plug it into the general network, right?
If you have your own circuit with solar and battery and devices disconnected from the rest of the grid, then there is nothing to register, right?
For germany:
For balcony panels you only have to do a very small registration, but no large bureaucratic process or getting a permit.
For larger ones you still must get a permit for a very simple reason: even if you don't get your power into the general network, you still affect it by using less, which might cause issues with grid stability.
We have so much power on sunny days now that we can barely deal with it. Which in turn occasionally even causes power prices to go negative - you can get paid for drawing power.
Dealing with power from solar panels is easy: you disconnect them (curtailment). So it's not a problem.
Have you ever wondered how is it possible that the price goes negative? Why would someone pay you to use the energy they produce? Logically, the price shouldn't go below 0 (*) . The reason is that the government gives incentives for each kWh produ ed. So if they pay you 0.10€/kWh, you'll be happy to pay people up to 0.09€/kWh as long as you can keep producing, since your marginal cost is 0. Basically government incentives are producing this situation, paying people to produce electricity nobody wants. It's also the reason why production is far from consumption: the incentives never were designed to push to generate useful electrons, just electrons, even if they cannot be moved to where they are useful. We need to rework how incentives are provided, because this is ending up wasting a ton of public money!
(*) except for power stations were they cannot physically turn it off, but generally they wouldn't be able to produce enough energy to define the marginal price
In that case the government should pay incentives when purchasing an electric car. That way the electricity being produced on sunny days can be stored and used when it is cloudy. Electric cars will also be spread out geographically, quite in line with solar panel installations so that solves for regional and network issues too. And as an added benefit we use less oil (less combustion cars) and less gas (we charge when it is sunny and not when we produce electricity with gas generators).
By using less oil and less gas we reduce CO2 emmissions, save money and are less dependent on other regions far away.
I wonder if the excess energy could be used to do things like run carbon capture (although I've read that this is very much a pipe dream, that it'll take several magnitudes more carbon capture facilities to counter what we're currently producing).
In a very tiny Canary Island, their battery is many many tonnes of water pumped uphill when they have windpower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXhAj5BHdfM
Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is done in the alps (at least in Austria as well)
Same in France. You also sign that whatever excess you're producing goes to the grid for free.
This doesn’t make any sense. You also use less electricity if you switch off your devices. I think Germans just have a fetish for permits.
Adherence to regulations is one of the reasons why the German grid is so reliable.
The Germans manage their electric grid very well, the last major electric blackout in Germany was in 2006. (More than 15 million clients of the Union for the Co-ordination of Transmission of Electricity (UCTE) did not have access to electricity for about two hours on this date.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout
On the other hand electric grids in Philippines are quite unreliable and economic losses caused by blackouts are quite high:
" That is a brutal reminder that every blackout doesn’t just kill the lights; it sets the nation’s money, productivity, and economic progress on fire. " https://mb.com.ph/2026/10/26/blackouts-heavy-price-tag-is-ga...
I grew up in Canada and realized I had no memory of a grid blackout (or even brownout for that matter). Google tells me the last time Canada saw a blackout event was in 2003, affecting only one province (not the one I live in), and it lasted for only 7 hours for most people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
I had never really considered how stable our grid is until now. I've experienced blackouts in other countries while traveling/living abroad, but Canada has a remarkably well managed grid.
Regarding reliability: Absolutely. I honestly didn't experience a major blackout in my entire life in germany. I always forget just how big of a problem that still is for many countries and areas.
On grid-scale this very much has an influence. Obviously not on individual scale. Is the influence big enough to warrant needing permits? Not sure, but I certainly see the problem.
In many areas solar panels get turned of by grid operators remotely for many hours on sunny days. In an area in the south I worked in around 50-70% of the produced power of larger installations (>30kwp) is essentially thrown away because the grid simply doesn't have enough capacity.
Every day people go to work and turn off their electrical devices. Switching your home to off-grid solar + batteries is just like going to work and not coming back. The grid can handle it.
If many houses install off-grid solar, it's still not going to have a negative effect on the grid because the change is spread out over time.
It does mean that less generating capacity is needed over the long term, but decision makers can just get that data directly from the grid. I don't see what extra information the permit is adding.
It could be for fire code compliance. Not everyone knows that too much current through a small wire creates heat.
Every wire, small or large, has a maximum current which can safely pass through. Circuit breakers are used prevent overloading of power lines and potential fire.
That's patronizing. My point is that electrical code requires the use of safety devices (breakers are only one). Idiots plugging wires together without oversight cause fires.
Yeah, if you're seen the recent rise in "balcony solar" it's more or less this.
People putting a couple panels up on their patio or whatever and having it charge one of those cooler sized batteries that they then run a few of their devices off of.
I've been thinking about a similar situation for my shed as I'd realized that the entire system would be cheaper than getting a line trenched to it.
Im running such system in sunny Valencia and with just two panels I’ve cut my monthly spend in half.
The system is quite smart, it charges the battery up from the grid when electricity is cheap and discharges during peak hours. Legally it’s limited to 800W, but you can set it up to a much higher output.
May I ask what kind of system you are using? I am also in Valencia and would like to deploy a balcony panel kit but as a solar noob I'm a bit overwhelmed by all the options.
Definitely! I'm using a Zendure SolarFlow 800 Pro [0] and two solar panels. That unit is the battery and micro inverter all in one. It just plugs into one of your home outlets. I also installed a Shelly power meter [1] that the SolarFlow can talk to and learn about your usage trends, and also prevent it from feeding power back to the grid if you want it to.
The SolarFlow 800 Pro goes for around 500 euros, and good quality solar panels for ~120 each. ~100 for the power meter and ~70 for the brackets to install the panels on. Oh and maybe ~40 for cables.
You can also use the battery as a massive power bank with a 240V outlet on camping trips xD
[0] https://zendure.com/products/solarflow-800-pro [1] https://shellyspain.com/shelly-pro-em-50.html
In Italy you don't need to declare to the utility a balcony solar system if you are under 350W, even if you conenct it to your own line.
The inverter is smart enough to disconnect from your line if you are not consuming energy, so there is no risk of sending the power back to the distribution line.
> The inverter is smart enough to disconnect from your line if you are not consuming energy, so there is no risk of sending the power back to the distribution line.
I expect what you're talking about is anti-islanding and so it's not interested in what you're consuming locally.
The anti-islanding works by detecting whether it can make a noticeable change to the constant 50Hz (or 60Hz depending on country) AC waveform, if it can that's an artificial waveform made by itself or similar devices in the neighbourhood and so the anti-islanding protection stops delivering power. But if when you try to change the waveform it won't budge, that's because there's say 10GW of much beefier power sources out there keeping it the same shape it always was, so it's OK to generate electricity.
FWIW: This is NOT what "balcony solar" is. See my top level comment clarifying it.
Well, it's solar and sits in my balcony sooo...
Just kidding, I know what you mean. I actually started with true balcony solar and evolved into the battery+inverter setup and couldn't be happier
In the developed world you need lots of expensive batteries and a massive array to make that work. Unless you are like going without heating and cooling, you are looking at mid five figures to six figures in equipment alone.
You also need to meet NEC for all the wiring and if you put any on your roof, it will have to be approved by the building inspector.
Lastly, for firefighter safety you also need to have functioning and clearly accessible and labeled emergency shutoff inspected and approved.
To be honest upgrading the meter and applying for net metering was maybe 5% of the red tape hassle for my install.
You can get a 32kwh battery for about $3500. 12kw in solar panels is about $2500. And an inverter is a couple thousand. Throw in since mounting equipment and wiring, and a big system that can power a 4000 sqft home can be had for around $10k. If you want it truly off grid, you'll want a bigger battery and more panels to make it through consecutive cloudy days.
You'd have to send me the link but you are possibly comparison shopping scams. Are these alibaba or eBay listings maybe?
To have a battery that truly powers a whole house circuit breaker and not just one flakey ambiguous amperage draw rating collection of power strips you're looking at significantly more. And it's not just for cloudy days. You'd have to size your array for the winter solstice to not be constantly running a deficit out of summer.
Please correct me where I'm wrong with your actual lived experience, but ive yet to encounter much of that, mostly just "I googled this thing and found something claiming to be a thing I think might work"
I don't know what you have to do in terms of letting the grid know. But local authorities have stringent regulations about installation and almost definitely require permits and installation or inspection from vetted electricians.
Some of the local regulation is a good thing - ensure the firefighters don't get hurt if your house starts on fire. They also want to make sure a wind storm won't send panels flying through your neighbors house.
However other regulations are just corruption and increase prices.
You don't need to of course but in many countries there's grants to purchase in the first place and then you can sell excess back to the grid, so it would be rather pointless not to.
My sister got it installed, about €15k worth, of which about a third was covered by grants and she's been selling enough back to the grid that she doesn't pay much bill at all for about 6 months of the year.
Unless she was some kind of off the grid absolutist, why wouldn't she have registered?
Well no, I don’t think you can install anything that generates power without registering.
I remember in past people would make small wind turbines for their own use and would get fined in Europe. Because they expect you to sell the electricity and then buy it back - like you can’t use it directly as far as I remember, without paying taxes and stuff.
The regulations are different from country to country and also have changed a lot in past few years. For example the current situation in Germany is:
"Balcony solar power systems are generally permitted up to a capacity of 800 watts, with this limit referring to the maximum inverter output. Consumers must register their systems in the Federal Network Agency's market master data register. This registration is important to maintain an overview of installed solar energy and to ensure compliance with legal requirements."
" In many EU countries, balcony power plants are already permitted with higher power limits. Countries like the Netherlands , France , and Italy allow balcony power plants with a capacity of up to 2000 watts or even more. These countries have recognized that the integration of mini-PV systems plays a crucial role in achieving their climate goals. The Netherlands, in particular, actively promotes balcony power plants through tax breaks and financial incentives.
Another example is Austria , where the power limits are less strict, and systems with up to 800 watts per module are permitted. Consumers can install multiple modules, each with up to 800 watts. The total output of the solar system is therefore not as strictly limited as in Germany. For example, two 800-watt modules could be used, resulting in a potential total output of 1600 watts . In combination with a suitable inverter, more electricity could be used or fed into the grid. Here, too, simplified registration procedures and regional subsidies support the use of solar power. "
https://www.moe-balkonkraftwerk.de/en/blogs/news/balkonkraft...
You've misremembered/misunderstood this, I think. You can certainly use self-generated electricity directly, pretty much everywhere. In many places you will need some sort of permit/inspection if you're self-generating and connected to the grid, though, because if done incorrectly that's potentially dangerous (in particular, in a power cut either you need to self-isolate or switch off your self-generation, because otherwise lines will unexpectedly have current.)
Wrong. It's pretty much mandatory here and in much of Europe.
I disagree with it and a lot of other stuff but yeah...
An Uncle of mine, who paid to have electric run up to his mountaintop home at the insistence of his wife would have loved that sort of self-sufficient install --- he always complained that after running that wire he suddenly had neighbors, when before, there weren't any.
Even in California it's legal to install non-grid-tied rooftop solar. It requires permitting but does not require an interconnect agreement from the grid electrical utility. We're "remodeling" our house in San Jose currently and the resulting property (includes new ADU) will have 1) old panels (NEM2) grid tied for main house, 2) new panels battery tied for main house & EV charging, 3) new panels (NEM3) grid tied for AGU. PG&E does not care about the second item, provided they are installed per code.
decentralised energy generation is going to be the way developing economies leap over more advanced ones. Same thing happening in South Africa, can't rely on the national grid, so everyone installs solar, batteries and diesel generators for backup. The outcome is a much more resilient grid energy system. Future is literally bright
> decentralised energy generation is going to be the way developing economies leap over more advanced ones.
Good luck with running industries on decentralized energy production. That's how things started during the industrial revolution, and the grid was a net upgrade. Reason for that is building a factory is much cheaper when you don't need to also build the adjoined power plant.
Decentralized production works well with residential or low consumption tertiary sector, but not much else. Even then, a working grid will have better quality of service and economies of scale on equipment. The issue with developing countries is that their grid typically is dysfunctional.
> The outcome is a much more resilient grid energy system.
That claim depends a lot on the threat model you're looking at. If your goal is to still have some energy under coordinated attack, sure. If your goal is to maximmize uptime for critical services, not so much. Backup generators, inverters, etc. typically have a higher rate of failure than a well-performing grid.
I think there's a good chance we will actually see decentralization of industry due to very cheap solar. We may also see a movement of industry to sunny locations. This is bad news for northern Europe, and perhaps for all of Europe.
The scale will be set by how large long term storage has to be, which could be as small as 100s of kW. The future grid might be a constellation of loosely connected microgrids. This will do wonders for resilience.
Yes, all of industry will move to Africa, at great expense, to get the free solar.
Energy input is just one portion of a businesses expenses.. even if this business was fully dark (all robots, since you're not going to get all your HQP to move to Africa), you still would like to have that business somewhat interconnected to the supply chain.
Many businesses won't exist long enough to hit the ROI needed to uproot to move to someplace extra sunny and to pay for the full install of the power required to be fully off grid.
Oh European colonial mindset, don't ever change.
Seems not to be only an issue in the development world though.
At least in Belgium there’s also a lot of unregistered solar panels to the point that the energy regulator is using satellite imagery to catch and find them…
Why?
> Without declaration, there is not only a risk of grid overload and regular shutdowns of inverters, but technicians are also exposed to real danger during their interventions. An undeclared installation can cause serious electrical risks if technicians do not have the necessary information to work safely.
https://www.brussels.be/how-report-solar-panels-brussels
I have no idea how serious these reasons actually are. It seems registration is free, though you do need to have a digital meter, which may incur extra costs. The system is apparently designed to encourage self-usage rather than feeding back to the grid.
I don't really know the benefit of not registering. To register you may need an inspection, which could be a pain and cost some money. But if you've spent a bunch of money on a system... why not do the seemingly small extra steps?
> I have no idea how serious these reasons actually are.
Basically, the grid was built with the assumption that plants produce power, and that households only consume it. That means opening a breaker between the transport grid and the distribution lines should allow to safely work on the consumer-bound side.
That assumption no longer works if consumers energize the network, and while I assume workers have safety guidelines to check the line before starting work, there is still a risk.
Fixing this issue would require new remotely-operated breakers to be installed, which is costly, and it's hard to justify installing them proactively just in case.
Linemen have long be trained that a wire is either live or they have personally shorted it to ground. Even before solar, there are a lot of people with generators who didn't disconnect correctly.
When things like power lines fall down the system will detect and disconnect that portion of the grid, one problem with things like personal solar generation is you can keep feeding power to the fault and melt things down.
While possible, the reality is in almost all cases your home system will shut itself down from overload first.
> Fixing this issue would require new remotely-operated breakers to be installed, which is costly, and it's hard to justify installing them proactively just in case.
No, the fix for this issue is that the inverter of your local solar installation checks if the grid delivers a 50 or 60 Hz waveform, and breaks if it does not. This is pretty much the standard in any installation today, and it's mandatory whether you declare your installation or not.
Side note, there is recently a push to vary the allowed deviation from 50/60 Hz a bit for each installation. The risk is that if all installations stop delivering at, say 50.1 Hz, then if the grid exceeds that value for some reason, there would be a very sudden drop in supply since all solar installations shut off at the same time.
> No, the fix for this issue is that the inverter of your local solar installation checks if the grid delivers a 50 or 60 Hz waveform, and breaks if it does not.
It's hard to apply regulation to people who already decided to skip declaring their setup. If everything was done by the book, the stuff would be declared.
Generally the fix is to either have the inverter shut down if the grid fails, or automatically isolate the premises if the grid fails.
Isolation via a transfer switch or breaker lockouts is the right solution. If the grid fails and your power inverter shuts down, your house is without AC power.
Similarly the UK requires a "g98" notification for all solar installation, including balcony. But it's just a web form and free.
I have been wondering if there is a smart way to make use of "island" solar at home, but not thought of one other than heating assist (pipe tape heater).
I picked up one of these because of how cheap it is; can charge anything with a USB port, laptops, phones, torches, etc.
- https://www.action.com/de-de/p/3222881/re-load-solarmodul/
- https://www.action.com/de-de/p/3222880/re-load-faltbares-sol...
Despite the low capacity, given what can be done with a phone and a laptop, this is still potentially useful.
To fine them and make them pay continuous taxes of course!
I would guess that this is taken into account based on satellite data. Solar must have a direct line of sight to the sun, so it should be fairly easy to detect from the sky.
Kind of. Free satellite data starts at 10m resolution per pixel. You will not get a clear signal on small rooftop solar. Same for balcony solar or other near perpendicular installations.
At 10m the only thing you can reliably detect is large scale deployments. If you want to do better than that you need paid data which is prohibitively expensive at large scales.
Current or most recent data is very expensive, indeed, but researchers as well as governments should have access to data that allows them to measure the rates of change across time and extrapolate them, no?
Not really in developing countries which the OP is talking about.
While most developed countries have aerial imaging campaigns on some recurrent schedule (NAIP in the US is on a rolling 3-year cycle), this is usually not the case in developing countries.
Quite a few never had any large scale aerial imaging campaigns and most do not have them on regular schedules.
Thanks for explaining!
You can do it quite reliably from aerial imagery at ~7cm resolution or so. For urban areas (if you have access to the data) you can pull out the type of panel and its size and get a reasonably good estimate on power output.
Also doable maybe a bit less reliably with high res satellite (30cm res).
Depending on how remote the area the data can be a bit out of date (years even)
can't you just track solar panel sales?
In some countries, but not in others. Also, panels sold ≠ panels installed (as I can confirm by looking into my own garage...)
Pretty much, yes.
e.g. "Across the Caribbean, people have installed roughly twice as many solar panels as official statistics would suggest. ... China ... has exported far more panels to the Caribbean than have officially been installed."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/caribbean-nation...
>> Solar must have a direct line of sight to the sun
A popular misconception. Solar panels can generate significant power during overcast clouds (~15% of rated capacity). I have seen panels generate power in overcast conditions when they would otherwise lack any direct line to the sun (high latitude, winter, forest/mountains).
That is false. Temperature moderation is an important issue and in hot locations solar efficiency may be maximized when trees provide partial shade.
A remarkably individualistic trend. You no longer need to rely on the central authority for your electric utility.
This is precisely the setup I'm planning for my place up north. A few kW of solar, which ought to still kick out useful power even in winter - down south here at 56°N days are pretty short, and I'm about a degree or two further north up there - a couple of kW of wind turbine, and an LPG-powered genny just in case. This latter will be mounted on a trailer with a couple of large automotive tanks so I can just take it to the petrol station and fill it with the same pump as the dual-fuel car, because it's roughly half the price to buy autogas than bottled propane.
Greetings, fellow 56N resident - you may be interested in my seasonality stats from here in Edinburgh: https://flatline.org.uk/daystats.html
I'm a little further north than you, north of the Tay but not so far as Aberdeen. My solar panels down south here are also facing more-or-less southwest and I'm seeing similar figures.
Up north of course I've got the space to put my ground mounts wherever the hell I like, and sufficient power from them to run the welder so they can be any shape I like :-D But the weather in the wet and windy west isn't quite so conducive to solar.
Well, yeah
If the power company is going to annoy me (too much) for that, then tough shyt when they need my battery to compensate for peak hours
>If the power company is going to annoy me (too much) for that, then tough shyt when they need my battery to compensate for peak hours
Ha! They won't even consult you.
What they'll do is they'll fund useful idiot do-gooder advocacy groups and academia and get them to produce a bunch of whining and papers about how the runoff from your panels is bad for some endangered slug or maybe it'll be some supply chain mumbo jumbo about not buying lithium from sources that might fund terrorists or something. In any case, they'll use that as plausible deniability to get some federal rules tweaked and of course your state (because it loves grant money) already has a law saying that municipalities must enforce whatever the fed recommendations are.....blah...blah...blah...several layers of regulatory cause and effect later you will be disallowed from putting up panels without permits which won't be issued unless you bend over and take a bunch of costs that make it a complete non starter.... or unless you connect to the grid.
But don't worry, maybe if your panels and battery are small and useless enough you'll qualify for some tiny homeowner exemption like how you don't need a building permit for a shed so long as it's too small to be useful. Gotta shield the useful idiots from the brunt of the regulatory capture lest they learn how they system works and cease to go to bat for it or starts demanding more than whatever scant shred of a benefit they get out of the whole rotten thing.
Sorry not sorry for being jaded. I work in the sausage factory so I know how it's made.
It's been cheaper than nuclear for a while now, it was only a matter of time.
Personally i'm waiting for the next iterations of Kesterite cells.
If we can get single cells to crack ~20% efficiency. With a tandem cell architecture, it's going to become the new standard overnight.
Durability of silicon cells or better, but orders of magnitude $ cheaper to produce, and without the need to use toxic agents as in perovskite cells.
We're movin' fast.
For over a decade we were stuck at ~12% efficiency. And in the last 4 years (probably with AI help) we've cracked 15% efficiency
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/chinese-researcher...
Few more years, and with a bit of luck, we'll all be around to see solar panels that cost 1/10th of what they do now.
> we'll all be around to see solar panels that cost 1/10th of what they do now
I get the impression they're already really damn cheap, to the point that the issues are more so with grid interconnections, land use, and storage
Installation labour cost and inverter cost are now the largest expenses.
I wonder if as panel costs goes down, will people start to wire their homes again for 48V DC? You could conceivably run your HVAC and fridges at least off of it, this would negate the need for a larger (more costly) inverter.
Unless you build from scratch, and white box stores suddenly start selling a 48v version of every standard household appliance (with industrial supply chain to support that market), inverters are not going anywhere.
The only place it makes sense is personal tech and computing, where USB chargers are cheap and ubiquitous, with technology replacement in 2-5 years instead of 5-10 for standard appliances.
it would probably slowly start coming out as dual ac and dc connections and start with "garage appliances" like your laundry, central ac / vac and car charger since the garage is the cheapest place to wire something into.
I read an article about a house that was converted to use DC instead of AC as a trial. The most surprising part to me was that most household appliances simply kept working because they already contain a AC/DC rectifier anyway which works fine if you connect it to DC.
That depends. Anything with a transformer will not work on DC. Some power supplies don't have a transformer directly connected to mains and they will just work. A large number of appliances use universal motors (anything in your kitchen) and so they will just work. Heaters are typically just resistance and again will just work.
However there are a lot of things that won't work on DC as well. Since very few people are running mains voltage DC labels often will not tell you if it will work. (I've toured ships with mains voltage DC and those outlets are labeled - I assume the crew is trained - or perhaps was since this is just a museum now and I'm not sure if current ships use DC)
"just work" depends on the DC voltage, right? A heater works just fine on 120V DC but less well on 48 and probably pointless on 5.
I get what you're saying, but there are some hand warmers that just charge off of USB 5V.
Right it works if it's designed for it. But hooking up a 5V source to a stove element isn't going to cause much heat.
V=IR applies. I've seen 900 watt heaters running on just 3 volts. You need big wires and low resistance to pull it off but it works
I run my garden tools and shed on a 1.2kVA 12V inverter, bought for pennies off eBay. It's just about enough to run my little "lunchbox" flux-core welder on a low enough setting to do thin metal and tubing, perfect for sticking exhaust pipes and such together.
Fridges is doubtful. But HVAC... yeah i'd put that at increased possibility because you probably won't have to rewire your house to do it.
> Installation labour cost and inverter cost are now the largest expenses.
That's true for the solar development project, but such a project typically ignores grid costs.
so Edison's dream will finally come to be
Why not 120V DC?
Mainly thinking 48V as that is already a standard in the marine and automotive world. AFAIK 120V DC is not a commonly used standard ? (Maybe in aviation?)
48V DC is also common in the telecommunications world and available in the data center world.
Most modern aircraft have a 400V 360-800Hz three-phase grid, as this allows thinner (read:lighter) conductors. There are some high voltage DC rails on some plains in the range 270VDC or ±270VDC.
On the usage side for instrumentation, avionics etc. it is usually 28 VDC.
50V is the limit for "safe extra low voltage" rules. Considered to be touch safe.
SELV usually is defined to have both a voltage limit and a volt-amp (ie: power) limit. Generally defined somewhere around 60V peak to peak and 250V*A.
48V is under the SELV voltage limit, even with some margins.
But historically, some countries have had lower limits. I recall Japan being one of them for a while. I'm not confident that SELV is a harmonized standard worldwide, or at least it wasn't until recently, if it is now.
It would be great to work on my home's electrical system without the risk of straight-up killing myself. Especially considering most of the things I plug into my wall (lighting, TVs, tablets, phones, etc.) don't need to draw anything like 120/240V. I've debated installing low volt circuits for things like lighting and such, but I think the hassle won't make it worth it.
You can run your lights over ethernet. :)
I don't think it's that dangerous to work with 120v. There's arguably a greater risk with DC starting fires and killing you that way, or burning your house down.
IANAEE, but DC does most of its work with current instead of voltage. So direct shorts are more likely to turn into heating elements (you have to run thicker wire anyway to do the same amount of work). AC can detect and trip faster.
Also, adding/removing loads is more finicky with DC. It affects all the other things on the line much more dramatically than AC.
If I had the time and money to work on this, I would focus on powering heavy appliances with solar and just paying the power co for all the wall wart electronics. Getting a heat pump working with a thermal battery (water tank with heat exchanger), etc. Separate circuit for electric space heaters (with extra consideration for fire safety), and smart thermostat that runs extra heating/cooling beyond what I requested when the sun is shining, to try using the house's thermal storage.
1. It is not considered safe voltage, so you have all the downsides of the current AC grid with the downsides of high DC voltages
2. Nearly no equipment uses 120VDC by itself, so you would need specialized DC-DC converters that can deal with the 120VDC input to go down to usual voltages like 48VD, 24VDC or 12VDC
DC also has issues with arcing, so switches get complicated and expensive.
> Nearly no equipment uses 120VDC by itself, so you would need specialized DC-DC converters that can deal with the 120VDC input to go down to usual voltages like 48VD, 24VDC or 12VDC
Most switched-mode power supplies ought to cope with 120V DC. If you look at a circuit diagram the first thing they go through is a bridge rectifier and smoothing cap to provide a 165V (or 340V outside the US!) DC supply for the chopper.
I have some Thinkpad charging bricks I'm prepared to sacrifice for the cause, if you want me to try it.
Well, one potential issue that springs to mind is that DC 120V might overstress the diodes in the full bridge rectifier. With 120V AC only 2 of the 4 diodes are active at any one time and on average each of them is on only half the time - with DC only 2 of the diodes would be active, but they would be active 100% of time. Say the power supply needs to draw 1A of current, a reasonable good estimate for the voltage drop of a forward biased diode is 0.7V, so each diode that is on will dissipate 1A*0.7V = 0.7W. With AC, each diode would only be on half the time, meaning it would dissipate an average of 0.35W. With DC, 2 of the 4 diodes would be on constantly dissipating the full 0.7W each - this will result in the two diodes getting much hotter. Ask yourself how likely it is that most power supply manufacturers are designing in a safety margin of *2X*...
And that's just dealing with power supplies for electronics (which mostly just want low voltage DC) - if you get into appliances, while almost all will have a power supply that converts to DC, they usually have some circuits that use AC directly (think heating elements, safety critical sensors that use the 60Hz AC waveform as part of their feedback to make sure they haven't locked up, etc). Even appliances that convert the AC input straight to DC (think anything using an inverter to drive a motor or compressor) will often use a voltage doubler circuit to get a DC bus that is ~340V from the 120V AC input (it doubles the peak voltage, which is actually ~170V and not 120V in US) ... The voltage doubler circuit will not infact double a DC input, and the appliance will likely be most unhappy when it's DC bus is a lot lower than it was designed for.
Hopefully we can move to a micro solar system where everyone is responsible for a fraction of the generation and storage
Probably won't happen. Federating the responsibility for overall energy capacity, government ain't gonna do that. You'll be responsible for your own generation / storage.
Tho' something interesting. Those with large enough arrays can use their excess to produce nitrogen fertilizer via cold plasma.
This would either allow them to store value in that (for sale to farmers / national stockpile) which may give better yields then storing via batteries and selling back to the grid. Or they could use it to grow their own produce making them self reliant and less dependent on supermarket chains and by extension their dependency on fossil fuel use in their distribution networks.
>produce nitrogen fertilizer
Oh jesus christ, I don't want the average person doing this, nor any unregulated entities doing so. This is how you end up killing a bunch of people.
Brackets cost more than the panels here.
I've been rednecking up some panels and storage and I'm buying second-hand 250Wish panels about 10p/watt.
It's already getting close to "not really economic" to buy second-hand panels, because people have slightly inflated prices for them, but the way I look at it I get a nice run out to somewhere, have a nice lunch in a cafe, and come back with a couple of kW of panels for about as much as a tank of fuel.
New panels just get cheaper and cheaper and better and better, and you can often find clearance deals on 400W-ish panels for ridiculously low prices.
> we'll all be around to see solar panels that cost 1/10th of what they do now
I doubt that. Currently the cells itself makes only <50% (maybe <30% meanwhile) of a PV module. So the limit to the bottom is by the glass and frame and cable, not by the cells.
But $/watts can significantly go down with more efficiency.
I found most people fixate on the price of the cells/panels, but forget that the rest of the installation required to use said panels easily exceeds the price of the panels by a factor of 3~4. Think mounting hardware, cabling, inverters, batteries, control hardware, labour, etc. It all adds up.
I've been pricing a PV system recently, and I was surprised at how low the price of panels already is. In most estimates I received the panels itself were less than 20% of the total installation costs. Granted, I am looking at a 3-phase system with plenty of battery capacity. For a more typical household setup with 1-phase and moderate battery capacity that percentage will shift a bit.
In my case the quotes are roughly: 40x430Wp panels (~€4000), 3x (3-phase) inverter/chargers (~€5000), batteries (~€5000), auxiliaries (~€1500), cabling (~€2000), mounting hardware (~€2500), labor (~€5000), planning/permissions (~€1000). So total project price is ~25k, of which the panels are only ~€4000. And that doesn't even count the construction of a utility building to house the batteries and inverters, the EV chargers, etc.
On a side note: I found that battery prices have also dropped significantly already. If you're willing to do some assembly yourself you can get ~15kWh of LiFePO4 for just over €1k.
Also, for those wondering: for my situation the ROI of this setup is expected to be about 5 years. This will be quicker if I get an EV, which I am planning on.
ROI on 25000 EUR in 5 years?? How are you spending 5000+ EUR per year on electricity?
Micro plug-in panels address the pricing issues. If every panel has a built-in inverter/controller then everything can be wired at the factory, radically reducing costs. As they are all pushing AC then they can all be plugged in to household outlets without electricians getting involved. Mounting remains an issue but as purchase costs come down the need for a perfect mounting system diminishes.
Solar is getting very cheap, but the land footprint requirement is enormous compared to nuclear.
> It's been cheaper than nuclear for a while now, it was only a matter of time.
AFAIK the latest research contradicts to this [1], can you give some links if you have for this?
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
Why only 20%? Is there a theoretical maximum?
The theoretical maximum for the mentioned cell is around 32-33%, just a touch higher than the theoretical limit for silicon.
Clarifying "Balcony Solar"
I'm seeing a lot of comments mis-representing "balcony solar". This is a phrase that specifically means "small-scale solar panels that directly feed the grid". It is NOT about solar cells feeding a "cooler sized battery+inverter".
This is what makes it so attractive; no battery is required. But this is also why it is waiting in the US on legislation (back-feeding the grid). Germany has already passed this legislation. In particular, the equipment needs to be UL3700 certified.
I've always seen Balcony Solar as a policy failure. It shows that the equivalent amount of grid scale solar is too hard/expensive to make due to permitting and regulation failures.
In an ideal world Balcony Solar shouldn't exist because grid power is cheap and plentiful.
As long as grid operators keep an eye on their inertia figures and fault current handling this is great news.
Synthetic inertia created by inverters can maintain grid frequency, but they cannot handle fault current. Without the ability to ride through disturbances, downstream protection equipment will fail to work correctly. If you hit a semiconductor with 10x its rated load, it needs to shut down immediately or it will be destroyed. The turbine at a nuclear or coal plant can take a serious beating for several cycles before it would be forced to trip offline. The machine is massive enough to absorb any damage without losing its overall functionality.
We need actual synchronous machines spinning with heavy masses. They don't need a carbon-emitting prime mover on the other side. They just need to be connected to the grid. They also need to be placed relatively close to the inverters (same plant/substation) or they won't provide the desired support.
Renewable-heavy grids like Germany use overlapping layers of protection for this sort of thing.
Tier 1 is flywheels because they have the fastest response, and then response isn't regulated by software but instead is purely mechanical
Tier 2 is batteries, they can be made to respond to current or frequency faults in a response time on the order of miliseconds, and the flywheels give you plenty more time than that to make grid-wide orders for the batteries to respond
Tier 3 is gas peaker plants. The batteries are able to buy enough time that if there's a serious fault that could last multiple hours, you're able to spin up (or down) a gas peaker plant to adjust the grid frequency / current.
I can't remember where I read it (I'm sure it was BBC, maybe IEEE?) but it was super interesting to read an article about these giant flywheels that are popping up to combat exactly this - one example https://www.statkraft.co.uk/newsroom/2023/lister-drive/.
"now operational and supplying inertia to the national grid."
I wish someone would pay me to supply inertia. I'm quite good at it too.
Yeah
I'd prefer to think someday supercapacitors before the inverters can take that inertial need, but in the meanwhile the spinning heavy thing solution works
I wouldn't. Spinning things around is a really trivial thing to do and we've perfected it since the invention of the wheel. More relevant to this issue, synchronous machines also interface with three-phase (or any other AC) power systems really well. Supercapacitors may become dramatically more efficient in the future, but they inescapably require more semiconductor technology to get from DC to AC, which reintroduces the semiconductor peak load problem.
More stoked for when the same is said for storage.
Solar is cool but solar that can make it through the night and a couple cloudy days is way cooler
> Solar is cool but solar that can make it through the night and a couple cloudy days is way cooler
The fun part is that we're still well before the point when this even matters.
Almost 60% of the US grid is still fossil fuels, with around half of that still happening during the day. Which means you can get down to ~30% fossil fuels without any storage at all because all you do is go from burning fossil fuels during the day and at night to burning fossil fuels only at night.
> at night to burning fossil fuels only at night
only natural gas plants can do this. a coal plant cannot spin up just for the night and turn back off when the sun comes up - it's incredibly inefficient and probably causes more premature wear/tear too.
Full startup and shutdown of a coal plant can take days, but throttling down to about half power during low-load periods is normal. Power plants do this every day. Late at night, load decreases and plants throttle down. Every morning, between 0600 and 0900 local time, there's "morning load take-up" as load increases.
The big issue is what's called "ramp rate" - how fast can output power be increased or decreased? This tends to be around 1% to 3% of capacity per minute. See Figure B-2 in [1], which is a detailed discussion of how to improve your coal-fired power plant's ramp rate.
Natural gas plants have much higher ramp rates, and for batteries, it's under a second. Nuclear plants can be ramped up and down, slowly, but since it's all capital cost, cutting output raises the price of the power.
Yep, I live in Finland where we are quite far ahead of the curve when it comes to renewables and nuclear. This is one large problem. When it's winter and cold and dark, solar does not help. Wind only helps when its windy.
Batteries are coming, and will solve it, but it will still take time for them to be come cheap enough.
Only once we have ~7 days of storage (~100 GWh of storage) will we be able to get rid of the last fossil plants.
>Batteries are coming, and will solve it, but it will still take time for them to be come cheap enough.
How long is the hope those batteries will last? There's surely no way Finland can run off battery power for even one month, much less a whole winter.
edit: perhaps I misunderstood and your comment on batteries was more related to the reliability of wind?
Yeah, the batteries are for wind. There are some days when the wind barely blows at all. That's when electricity prices really spike.
Finland's power grid stats are open to the public. You can click the month view to see how the different power sources fluctuate.
https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/
Also fun fact: a lot of solar panels in Finland are mounted vertically to walls rather than rooftops. That's because we're so far north that the sun just hangs around the horizon rather than going directly overhead. You end up catching more sunlight pointing directly south.
Budgeting for over a month without power is unheard of. Extreme scenarios ("dunkelflaute") are measured on the order of hours, maybe days, and they get shorter and less frequent the larger the grid is.
"
"Increased rates of component life consumption due to thermal fatigue, mechanical fatigue and wear caused by differential thermal expansion comprise the bulking of cycling (costs)," according to the International Energy Agency's Coal Industry Advisory Board.
"Every time a power plant is turned on and off, the boiler, steam lines, turbine and auxiliary components go through unavoidably large thermal and pressure stresses," the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) wrote in a report on cycling costs published in April 2012.
"
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/to-survive-c...
You don't get thermal and pressure stresses from throttling or even going into hot standby - the pressures and temperatures are the same, just the flow rate of steam changes. You only get thermal and pressure cycles from full shutdowns. As long as you keep the reactor/furnace warm then there's no issue here.
Well Coal is already cooked
Yeah the US will lag behind on this.
Other countries are better positioned. e.g. UK has really spiky wind energy. Right this second more than half the grid is wind. Which is both cool and problematic for managing the grid.
Grid scale cheap storage would dramatic help manage that chaos
Other countries are better positioned already because they don't have an administration funded by the fossil fuel lobby - but even that doesn't explain some of the decisions, like preferring to reimburse $1 billion in already paid leases rather than letting a company build wind farms on the leased area (https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/23/climate/trump-totalenergi...).
Spain suffered a black out partially due to the lack of momentum (spinning generators).
For Europe to get rid of more fossils without putting the grid at risk we will need more storage.
I surprised we can’t, or rather don’t, make more use of tidal energy.
That and low energy density storage located at sea with the turbines.
The issue with this logic is that you build a cliff where, at some point, you need to massively invest in storage, and the storage industry hasn't had time to mature alongside the solar/wind industry.
Yeah it's crazy how many people are in denial of this.
Storage has been making impressive strides, but the cliff here (in storage and transmission, the latter of which we in the US still are sucking at) puts nuclear back in the running.
Hmm, how much of that is base load versus the dramatic rise of natural gas plants that respond to dynamic demands? Even in daytime, I think you need storage to get rid of those, right?
I don't know why this is downvoted. Solar and wind both essentially suck at anything other than baseline throughput. That doesn't mean they're useless, it just means that solar can't be our only solution unless we have, like... 30 breakthroughs tomorrow. We otherwise need something to handle spikes, which are both common and important, as well as periods when there is extended cloud cover even for typically-dark months.
Even if we handwave all the science needed to build batteries big enough to power cities for days, I don't think it's realistic to handwave the science needed to power a city for weeks. We don't even have enough oil for that.
"Power when it is inconvenient" is pretty much the basis for a modern society.
Yeah, thanks for that. I can only imagine someone reacted as if I am arguing against solar, which I'm not. It's just that you really need storage to phase out the natural gas peaker plants, since they need to deliver on-demand rather than as-available.
And, this gets even worse if you are also replacing baseload plants with solar, since the solar output is more variable than those old plants were, so now you need even more storage capacity to offset those dropouts at the same time you are handling demand peaks.
Sometimes, I think there is some magical thinking going on when people see solar panels work at a house without batteries, and they fail to recognize how much they depend on the grid for stability. If they ran in island mode, they'd quickly understand just how important storage is...
Solar panels still work just fine when it is cloudy, just with a lower output. And usually when it is cloudy it also tends to be a bit windy, so solar and wind nicely complement each other.
Heavy clouds and zero wind, for weeks? That's a once-a-century freak event. Just build gas peaker plants if you are worried about it. You could even add carbon capture, but constructing it might emit more than it will ever capture...
> Solar panels still work just fine when it is cloudy, just with a lower output.
I assume you never tried measuring the output of a solar panel when it's cloudy. It's 10-15% of a sunny day. Closer to not working than working.
Depends on the cloud. Where I live I routinely get 50% generation on a "cloudy" day.
On a rainy day that drops closer to 20%.
As an aside - cloudy days avoid a problem I have with shade. In winter, at 3:30pm, the sun goes behind a tree and my production plummets to near zero. If there's cloud cover the sunlight is far more dispersed and there's no "shade".
> On a rainy day that drops closer to 20%
And you’re still able to power your entire home? What if the rain lasts for a few days, which is pretty common in many places.
No, 20% is not sufficient to power the home. I'm still attached to the grid and use grid power even solar is too low.
Worst I've had over a day in the last few months on my home solar is about 25% of my maximum daily generation. It was one day in a very rainy week here in Brisbane Australia.
I did have one rainy day back in the middle of Winter that was 16% but that will end up being literally the worst day of the year.
To be fair Australia is very sunny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance
It also has relatively wealthy people, living in lots of individual housing units. If you wanted to design a country that's perfect for rooftop solar your imagination might come up with Australia.
That said, Australia ought to be able to run almost everything off solar given how sunny it is, and instead solar is a distant second behind coal for electricity production. So there's plenty of work left to do.
That's every single winter where I live in the US. We don't have a word for it like the Germans do, though, we just call it January.
The good news is: you're on a national (or semi-national) grid, and conditions like that are more unusual than they are common across the USA.
You want us to transport energy 1500 miles? Cold, dark winters cover enormous swathes of the US - inconveniently, often at similar times. So what - we're turning Florida into a solar park so the rest of the nation can use that while they're dark?
Our energy grid can't currently handle the ability to charge electric haulers locally at any scale let alone to move an entire city's worth of energy, so the solution is not to 85x the national electric grid all at once.
I used to think the people who took this "America is too incompetent to make the green transition" stance were just downplaying the tech out of some combination of ignorance and weird partisan logic.
But to give them due credit, they believed in this vision and put in the hard work to make sure it became true.
Serious citation needed that there are week-long stretches of continuous wind-free heavy cloud covering thousand mile stretches of the United States.
Also, it’s weird to talk about Florida when, say, Arizona and Utah, etc. are right there. Even Wyoming despite being further north has over half of the month sunny in the winter. One thing to remember is that we could power the entire country using solar with a fraction of the land currently used to produce corn for ethanol so we don’t even need to substantially change land use, just stop subsidizing inefficient fuel generation.
Here's your serious citation - the polar vortex.
These usually drop ambient temperatures across Canada and the northern US to below -20 C, and produce generally high winds. This combination of extreme cold, cloud cover, and high winds last for multiple days, often longer than a week.
The wind plus cold means that many wind turbines cannot operate and the cloud cover and shorter days mean that solar is barely generating any energy.
> You want us to transport energy 1500 miles?
That's literally CCP state controlled communism !! More specifically, that's what the Gansu–Zhejiang UHVDC project has as an overhead transmission line length (2,370 km in international units).
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014206152...
* https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241113-will-chinas-ultr...
The very decidely non-communist SunZia wind project in SE New Mexico (not too from where I live, and the largest wind generation system in the world at this point) came with a 1600km new grid line connecting it to California (though it is a part of the overall western grid too, and electricity is fungible).
Ahhh, I jested - I accept some in the US have no problem getting it together on collective civil infrastructure projects that benefit many.
The GP might be in the group that don't much like that kind of thing.
the US regularly wastes money on its military and fights wars around the world, causing misery for millions.
If the US decided to divert half of the Pentagon's annual budget to electricity, the US could absolutely build the infrastructure to transport electricity thousands of kilometres.
Carbon capture makes little sense until fossil fuels have been replaced. I guess there are some Bio char technologies that might change the equation a bit, but watt for watt, you need to replace your carbon emissions first (generally speaking)
A week of low solar and low wind is a yearly or every-couple of years event that you definitely need to solve for a completely renewable grid.
A completely renewable grid is less important than electrifying the low hanging fruit of heating and transport.
Anything below 800g of CO2 (which means basically every current grid) means electrifying is a net win. Even the famously coal heavy South African grid is already past that barrier and even if it wasn't all grids are getting cleaner over time.
A grid that has maxed out wind and solar and then used only coal for 2 weeks would be one of the cleanest grids in the world right now, on par with France or Sweden.
Chasing 100% on a grid to satisfy the complaints of people who are concern trolling isn't smart nor necessary. What you need is bulk cheap electricity to allow you to reduce your heating and transport costs and clean your air at the same time.
It looks like we’re pretty much in perfect agreement, but I think it doesn’t hurt to already start planning what to do about the last couple of percent. These are all projects with long time horizons
Keeping coal plants around is cheap to cover that. Longer term things like producing ammonia during summer and converting it to electricity in fuel cells will allow to remove needs for fossil fuels completely.
I’d keep gas plants around, but anyway, you need to cover that case and can’t just handwave it away.
The main advantage of gas plants is that they support variability. In a world with enough battery storage to last for days that would be irrelevant. And as an insurance against rare events it is better to keep coal plants as transportation and storage of coal is vastly more resilient to interruptions.
Gas turbines can also run on synthetic methane or hydrogen, which is nice.
Building new gas power plants for backup is currently the plan the Germany is implementing for it's future renewables powered electric grid.
https://biz.liga.net/en/energy/news/germany-to-build-11-gw-i...
In mean time, it looks like coal in Germany will used for longer.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-regulator-says-n...
Germany has not learned anything from the war in Ukraine and still think that dependence on gas imports from other countries is fine even for backup.
Strictly speaking - a battery is stored potential energy
A common battery for grid level storage is pumped hydro - that is, use the peak power during the day(s) to push water from the bottom of an elevation to the top, and hold it there - bonus points if it captures water delivered from other solar processes (evaporation -> rain)
> Strictly speaking - a battery is stored potential energy
That's its function, but that does not make any device that stores energy a 'battery'. An electric battery is specifically a battery of electrochemical cells — Franklin invented the term as analogous to an artillery battery (a collection of guns).
Calling every form of stored energy a 'battery' is just dumbing things down for the masses.
There are about 90 billion battery solutions - none of them are very efficient, cheap to manufacture, easy to manufacture/acquire materials for, and long-lasting all at the same time.
Grid-scale sodium batteries are already in production, and there isn’t some kind of magic anti-technology shield which keeps the United States in the 1920s.
When talking about cost, it’s important to remember that solar+batteries are already cheaper and, unlike nuclear, happen on much shorter timescales. I’m not opposed to some nuclear plant starts but those guarantee a couple decades of increased pollution before there’s any chance whatsoever for carbon reduction, whereas solar can come online in a year.
Solar panels, of course, are also very dirty to manufacture. Simply bringing something online quickly is not a measure of overall efficiency.
You’re right, though, that nuclear is ALSO only a part of the solution. One day, it will be a major and necessary component of our grid, but we need to start tackling this carbon problem harder, and like… yesterday.
Typical non-informed incorrect opinion.
The overwhelming majority of generation and storage is best deployed at the point of use.
Grid scale anything, is a massive inefficiency.
The only reason grid and city scale is so prevalent in public discourse is because this is the only electricity the utility is paid for, and they are very actively impeding any other solution.
In the US, there is a very large inventory of flat roof industrial buildings, in the industrial parks that are using huge amounts of electricity. Covering all of those roofs with solar (especially here in the west US) would prevent a tremendous amount of grid scale generation, and implementing storage there would eliminate a large part of the transmission line upgrades the utilities are calling for.
The biggest problem in the US isn't technical, it's the governments desire to primarily support the solutions that are best at serving utility shareholder returns, instead of the technically superior solutions.
You're not making any sense. If things worked like you say, the industrial manufacturers would just put solar on their roofs, save a bunch of money, and that'd be the end of the story.
If rooftop solar power were so economically efficient, the manufacturing companies would get far more shareholder money lobbying for rooftop solar than utilities can make lobbying against it. But your conspiracy thinking doesn't account for this.
Heavy machinery uses dramatically more power than the roof space above it can produce. And you can't shut the factory down every time there is a cloud in the sky, so you need a utility hookup that can power the whole factory anyway.
The grid is the technically superior solution. That's why megacorps with capital and lobbying might keep willingly connecting to it.
How common is it that these industrial/commercial buildings have roof-top solar? If not common, what stops it?
It's quite common in Australia for commercial and residential.
> How common is it that these industrial/commercial buildings have roof-top solar? If not common, what stops it?
One factor is weight - a lot of low-cost industrial units may well need modifications to the roof to strengthen them to be able to take the additional weight of solar panels.
Certainly where I work (science research facility in the UK) our business has only been able to install roof-top solar on a comparatively small proportion of our total roof space because a large amount of the seemingly viable space would require substantial works to make the roof strong enough for solar.
It’s becoming common but the current administration has been highly committed to preventing that because it cuts into their fossil fuel donors’ business.
Your first paragraph is nothing but an ad hominem. You lost all credibility there.
It doesnt make economic sense to serve the entirety of daytime electricity demand from solar without batteries. Youd have to tons of fossil fuel plants that turn off during the day and then back on every night. For solar to take the next step batteries are a requirement
It's not quite as bad as that, since you don't consume fossil fuel resources when plants aren't running, but this is mostly a benefit for oil/gas plants, not coal (since the coal is likely useless without the power plant consumer anyway)
Depending on the type of power plant, it can take quite a while to spin up (or down) one of them and get them to optimal power production.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956
If you shut down by day, it can take multiple hours for it to be able to provide full load... and multiple hours for it to shut down cleanly. During this time it is producing power at less than optimal rates and/or using the fossil fuels to keep the wheels spinning and in sync with the grid so that they don't have to go through a phase matching period.
(aside for coal - note that it takes more than 12 hours for a coal plant to get running from a cold start)
That's not really a problem. A spin up over a couple hours matches nicely with the slow sunset over a continent. The sun takes ~4 hours to go from a bit above the horizon in the east coast to a bit below the horizon on the west coast (solar panels make some power in twilight).
Wind also helps since wind makes more power at night, as does demand which is dramatically lower at night.
For coal, Great. Making coal economical is excellent. We should have banned it worldwide 20 years ago.
USA should explore Pumped Storage Hydropower more, it has same or better efficiency than battery storage and can use existing facilities like hydroelectric dams
Part of the pumped storage problem is "where can you do it?"
There's a good number of 'em: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pumped-storage_hydroe...
https://www.ferc.gov/media/licensed-pumped-storage-projects-...
You'll see that most of them are in the Appalachian mountains and in the Sierra mountain range.
The one in Missouri is one of the interesting ones that isn't in either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_...
> The Taum Sauk pumped storage plant is a power station in the St. Francois mountain region of Missouri, United States about 90 miles (140 km) south of St. Louis near Lesterville, Missouri, in Reynolds County.
It has a hydraulic head of 860 feet and that represents the challenge - you need to find places in the US where you can get several hundred feet of elevation in a short distance.
Hypothetically, lets build one in Minnesota... Taum Sauk Mountain is the highest point in Missouri. The highest point in Minnesota is Eagle Mountain (in the boundary waters - you can't build there, pretend we can) ... the elevation to the top os 550 feet (about half what Taum Sauk provides) over 3.5 miles (Taum Sauk is just over 1 mile). ( https://maps.app.goo.gl/vHfWarwubaLvsf5z7 )
Much of the US is too flat for it to be useful.
The largest pumped storage facility in the world is in the us.
It's also pretty old.
"USA should look into thing it practically invented" good meme
Solar+A couple of hours of batteries is already economically viable. The storage problem that is still expensive is bridging days/weeks of insufficient sun and wind.
> The storage problem that is still expensive is bridging days/weeks of insufficient sun and wind.
It might help if the US wasn't so anti off-shore wind at the moment.
I live 900 miles from the coast. While the Great Plains are a good source of wind power ( https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/wind/where-wind-power-is... - Iowa is 43 billion kWh of production - https://iuc.iowa.gov/regulated-industries/electric/iowas-ele... ), I believe it is generally a mistake to assume that power solutions that work for the Atlantic coast can provide power solutions half a continent away.
The US uses around 4TWh of electricity a night. A battery with that capacity, to get through the night with no generation, would cost over a trillion dollars. Of course thered still be some generation at night, but still, using a battery just to get through the night is not even close to viable
You might want to update your numbers, 1 kwh is somewhere between 50€/kwh to 75 including electronics... No economics of scale, shipping included..
That makes 300B
Eu pricing
That sounds like a lot right? But it isn't large compared to US wars to protect energy resources (>$4T just for post-9/11 wars), and the payback it would generate over decades to come. In fact, this level of investment is a total no-brainer, compared to the benefits it will generate (forget about even the climate benefits - just the other economic and defense benefits.)
And we can sure find those trillions when we want to: https://defensecommunities.org/2026/04/trump-requests-1-5-tr.... Or https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/extend.... Or...
Current li-ion pricing is $19 per kwh (BYD's latest cell's pricing), so a single battery that covers all 4TWh would come in at 76 billion dollars. Still a shit ton but reasonable.
> The US uses around 4TWh of electricity a night.
And if we subtract all those datacentres crammed with Nvidia GPUs ? ;)
If we're being honest here, the problem with the US is that it has always treated any sort of energy source as being infinite and has always been quite extravagant in its use of energy.
Whether a preponderance for gas-guzzling SUVs or datacentres the story is always the same. The US mentality is there will always be infinite oil in the pump and infinite electrons in the cable.
Is that actually that much more than building 400GW worth of nuclear generation capacity (assuming 10 hours of nighttime)? I think that, that simple calculation shows that it is viable. Even a trillion is 1/32th of the US GDP. Construction over a decade should not stress the US economy at all.
I also think your trillion number is at least double the raw cell cost today.
A night goes 8 hours or so, so you need 50gw of nuclear
500gw (Terra is 1000 Giga), which would make the nuclear story even worse.
The war in Iraq cost a trillion dollars.
More like $2 T (combined Iraq-Afganistan $4.3T) https://www.warcosts.org/compare/iraq-vs-afghanistan-cost
So far.
That's referring to the Iraq and Afghanistan war with appropriations from 2003 to 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
The Iran war that we're currently in is officially at 43B and estimated at 48B. https://iran-cost-ticker.com
Do you imply that it was really cheap, just like solar+batteries?
You generally get more return on investment if you invest in building infrastructure in your own country rather than investing in blowing up infrastructure in a different country. So I’m implying that solar and batteries are a lot cheaper than the war in Iraq.
1 week national battery storage is totally doable. All we need to do is convince the rest of the planet to stop making GPUs, phones, computers, and EVs for the next decade, and then give us all their rocks. 78.4TWh is about $19T (all in costs) for a national battery grid for 1 week storage, could be built over ten years but would need the US to build and own double the current global output, not even considering where all the raw materials and labor comes from.
Just by scaling up the existing technologies the full cost including installation and maintenance of a grid-scale battery in 5 years will be below 100 usd/kwh. So the price is max 400 billions or 1% of US GDP.
US has ~250 million cars. If they are all EVs (100KWh), it is 25TWh capacity.
Reserving 20% of that capacity to supply power back to the grid is 5TWh.
EVs can be charged for free during the day, ~20% of solar is lost due to curtailment. Even if a significant percentage (10 - 20%) of the people decide they are going on long drives from Florida to Vancouver and turn off supply-power-to-grid-for-money in the app, its fine, there are plenty of cars. It is the cheapest, most resilient, distributed and self-healing energy ecosystem. Only one problem, it won't make the super billionaires money. Unless it can be packaged in a way to make the super billionaires money, its a no go in US.
This infrastructure buildout costs nothing, people buy new cars all the time (~20M/year), just buy EVs instead. Because people are providing the capital and the storage infrastructure, they should be paid for it.
I think this is a pretty decent idea and hopefully within a decade at least california will be doing it. The problem though is that the biggest advantage of an EV is that you charge it overnight and never need to worry about going to the gas station or running low on power. I think a pretty significant number of people would want 100% charge every morning which makes the total addressable battery size a good bit smaller.
Coal is a dead end anyway.
That might work in The SouthWest of the USA, but the Northern bits dont get enough sun to get through the day, so you'll need fossil fuel plants all day night for the Winter. If they're there already its cheaper to use all day in the summer as well.
It’s more expensive to use them all day: that’s the problem facing power plant owners where renewables are so much cheaper that they break the economics for power plants which were designed to run continuously but are more expensive when wind and solar supply is limited.
(That’s the answer for the northeast, too: New England has no shortage of wind all winter long and batteries don’t care where the electricity comes from)
Usually solar and storage are a package deal these days for grid scale solutions. Mostly, storage is not really about providing long term storage but short term. It used to be that the sweet spot that makes the most economic sense was something like 2 or 4 hours of power (relative to the maximum output of the solar panels) but these days batteries are a lot cheaper and 8 hours or more is becoming fairly common. The point of storage is not really to cover for all the downtime when the sun doesn't shine but to give grid operators enough lead time to bring online extra generation or buy capacity on the open market and adjust their planning. Mostly a few hours is all they need to ensure the grid stays up and running through daily peak usage windows.
In aggregate, grid operators have a lot of other tools at their disposal via flexible pricing, flexible demand, and automated systems that can adapt to this to e.g. charge cars when there is a surplus of energy, turn on/off water boilers, etc. There's a lot of innovation around this topic in this space. This by the way is as much as making sure generated power doesn't go to waste than it is about ensuring there is enough power. They use batteries to time shift excess power to when they can utilize it.
Interconnected grids means that e.g. an operator in Denmark can import/export to and from the UK, Norway, Germany, etc. On a windy day they'll be exporting wind power. On a sunny day, they might add some solar to that mix. When there's no wind or sun in Denmark, they might pull in Scottish/German wind, Norwegian hydro, Swedish nuclear, etc. Batteries are being deployed all over the place at a pace that is only exceeded by the pace at which solar is being deployed. Whenever there's a surplus energy, batteries get charged up. It's very rare for all of the available generation to disappear all at the same time for long enough to drain all the batteries. And for those times of course fossil generation is still a thing as well, and will be for decades to come. There are a lot of gas based plants throughout Europe. As well as some nuclear plants of course. Singling out the EU market here but it's going to be similar elsewhere.
The point here is that there's no need to pair solar setups with days/weeks/months worth of storage. A few hours goes a long way.
Ignoring want energy independence, this would be true.
Good news: batteries on are a similar exponential curve. Just a decade or so behind.
Its important to qualify that:
A decade or so behind, in the US.
If the US didn't block import of Chinese tech, we could have electrified a decade ago.
The tech available at the current moment, is even more capable of replacing petroleum based electricity.
But our government is banning Chinese tech to serve our outdated industries instead of importing it to serve the population.
As any wise country would do when faced with superior technology, we should import it with the condition of technology exchange. Chinese manufacturers should be training US workers and industrial ownership how to produce cheap, efficient, sodium batteries.
This benefits the populous immediately, and the industries are able to advance into the current century's tech.
>>> As any wise country would do when faced with superior technology, we should import it with the condition of technology exchange.
If it were a matter of industrial protectionism against a country which was not hostile, not authoritarian, didn't rely on slave labor, etc., then I'd agree with you. Countries have other pressing reasons besides immediate economic advantage to prevent this sort of thing.
To greatly oversimplify: Japan fought against opening their markets, as did China, out of political and social concerns for the stability of their states, far more than economic ones.
The US is far more hostile than China, also relies on slave labor, and is so increasingly authoritarian that our country's domestic & foreign policy now resembles a 3rd world dictatorship.
Doesn't matter though. The big mistake was allowing manufacturing to be exported from the US to begin with. Nearly any advanced technology we use or wish to produce is now dependent on China. They control not only the advanced manufacturing process, but also the refinement of rare earths (we can mine it but not refine it) and have cheaper labor. Not only can't we make tech without them, we can't sell it at competitive prices. Things will soon get worse as robotics and vertical integration makes Chinese products even cheaper and better quality. And we can't compete on robots because China controls that production chain too.
The smart play would be to build up our own green energy sector to gain cost savings, while investing in its manufacturing, so we can eventually compete and support ourselves (which Biden and Obama passed funding for). Trump eliminated all that when he came back, because the oil companies wanted more profits, they literally don't believe climate change is real, and they have no idea how diplomacy works. We could've had cheap battery, wind, and solar manufacturing in the US. Not anymore.
You should visit the Tibet region and ask the locals. But:
1. As a US citizen, you would probably not a get permit necessary for entering the Tibet region.
2. If you could get a permit for Tibet region and go there, you would be followed by police officers dressed in civilian clothing. The locals would be quite hesitant to speak to you.
(Source: been there long ago, seen it). China has many qualities, but freedom is not one of them.
Nor are civil rights, or civil litigation for that matter.
I don't think the poster you're responding to is writing in good faith; they're either an agent of an authoritarian power, or blind to the difference of being one.
People in China can say anything the government approves of, but they can't say "long live freedom and democracy," unless they want to be executed.
Neither, I suspect, will Chinese AI models make any statement in sympathy with personal freedom, democracy, or human rights; it would come at the expense of the people who paid to train those models, and that can't be allowed.
Fun fact: there are huge government-sponsored posters proclaiming Freedom (自由) and Democracy (民主) through China, because they're two of the official twelve Core Socialist Values.
That is a fun fact.
I guess freedom means different things to different people. Do people in China just roll their eyes at that?
And are we perfectly free in America? No. But we can say whatever we want about the government or the corporations, provided we're nonviolent. And we're not commanded how many children we can or can't have, or what religion to practice or not, or forced to show loyalty to a political party.
Plus we can smoke weed, buy guns, vote the bums out every four years, and most importantly make money without having to pay off some party official.
>> The US is far more hostile than China, also relies on slave labor, and is so increasingly authoritarian that our country's domestic & foreign policy now resembles a 3rd world dictatorship.
As a child of immigrants from the Soviet Union, and also as someone who knows people still resident in authoritarian dictatorships: This is patently ridiculous. Everything else in your post is a spray of nonsensical policy points and predictions. You led off with the tell. Frankly, it makes everything you say afterward sound like what an authoritarian enemy government would want people in the US to think about their own country.
What you wrote in your first sentence is either (a) wildly misinformed (like, you have no idea what life is like in an authoritarian country with actual slave labor, which is an insult to the people who do currently live there), or (b) intentionally nefarious (like, you work for such a country, in a capacity to minimize the distinction between their system of autocracy and the United States' democracy). If it's (a), study at least a little bit of the history of mass murder in the 20th Century. If (b), well, we live in a free country so you can spew whatever garbage you want. Interestingly, we have not been overtaken by any of the dictatorships that have sprung up in Eurasia over the past hundred years, and I don't think we will be soon.
I love how nobody asks me to give evidence or examples. You don't want to find out you're wrong.
Sure, give evidence and examples.
>> As any wise country would do when faced with superior technology, we should import it with the condition of technology exchange.
Europe tried doing that. And our green technology sector promptly collapsed, because it couldn't compete with Chinese undercutting our prices. The only thing left now are wind turbines, but Chinese are making inroads there too. In the meantime, the green transition barely moved a needle when energy shock arrived in 2022 or this year. Rendering rest of our industry, especially chemical industry, uncompetitive.
All fine and dandy until your grid goes mysteriously offline the day after China moves on taiwan.
Call me paranoid. I have a couple of inverters here that are grid connected and I made sure everything that allowed outside connectivity in the box mysteriously stopped working. A little bit of RF knowledge goes a long way with stuff like that. It was interesting to see how many ways it tried to do this. Fortunately it kept working even without connectivity. Configuring the things is a pain though, the display and buttons are clearly not meant to be used that way but it does work.
That's not paranoid.
Paranoid is me testing the plates I bought off amazon for lead, and throwing away the bathtub mat which smelled like petroleum waste. I'm fairly convinced that the goal of that ruthless dictatorship is to poison, degrade and infiltrate every single household abroad in every way possible. A fast attack might be to bring as many devices offline as possible, but the slow attack is simply to lower people's intelligence by hardware or software methods (e.g. TikTok, Qwen... or, let's say, not notifying anyone for a few months that a new SARS virus had escaped a lab). Everything that comes out of communist China is warfare, even if it looks like a plush toy.
> But our government is banning Chinese tech to serve our outdated industries instead of importing it to serve the population.
It protects American companies who operate in the green energy generation and storage arena from Chinese competition.
No, it protects fossil fuel energy companies from having to retool and change.
It does that too, but it would be unbalanced to not also recognize it protects green energy companies in America from Chinese competition.
Not only does Chinese competition get blocked, but governments are incentivizing green energy. For instance, just recently it was reported that Tesla’s $10B solar factory could get 35 years of tax breaks in Texas (Oil Capital!!!)
https://electrek.co/2026/10/23/tesla-solar-factory-texas-35-...
Sorry, which country in the world burns the most coal? https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/coal-cons...
China of course. But they are not hobbled by energy ideologies. China is pragmatic and still increasing coal and nuclear power depending on what works.
Honestly, it's not even doing that. Thing that would really push the US ahead would be the tax breaks we had until a couple years ago.
> protects American companies who operate in the green energy generation
Wont someone think of the big beautiful clean coal companies
Yup. Forcing technology exchange is exactly what China demanded of the US to get access to its markets, specifically to gain the advantage it now has.
Access to US markets conditioned on full tech exchange with US battery and automakers would be a fair exchange (and would likely require some temporary support of US automakers so they survive the transition).
13kW on the roof and a 48kW battery. It produces on cloudy days, and battery alone can last 3-4 days with regular unmoderated use with 6 adults at home. That includes split system air-conditioners on eco mode.
It produces enough on cloudy days to still.top the batteries up to full.
I had a day recently where production topped 80kW and was exporting bulk before late afternoon grid production limiting kicked in. That's a lot of juice, and Ive basically not touched the grid in 7 months.
Sounds awesome! How much was your upfront investment if you don't mind me asking?
Where are you located? I hear comments like this and get excited and then find out they're based in, like, Australia. Whenever I look into it here in Chicago, it seems I won't get nearly the same production on cloudy days, and especially in winter.
Diurnal storage is solved by batteries. Longer term storage will very likely be solved. For several days, cheaper batteries (perhaps with lower specific power). For longer periods, either thermal storage or e-fuels.
My guess is seasonal will be handled with flow batteries. A big tank and cheap-ish electrolyte, with the expense being in the electrodes sized for whatever max power is required. Tanks good for multiple cubic meters worth of liquid storage aren't exactly difficult to find, nor to place in a garden.
Then again, I'm basing this opinion on a recent-ish video from NightHawkInLight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7fR9ISuCw
Seasonal will be handled with wind-power (tends to produce more power when solar is producing less), building extra (power being too cheap in the summer is a great problem to have) and long-distance power transmission (plenty of sun in the southern US or southern Spain even in the winter).
Those all help, to be sure. Personally, in my "if I was king of the world" fantasies, I'd make a global power grid. Aluminium production is actually high enough already for genuinely antipodal connectivity at 1 Ω, though it could also be grown fairly easily if this needed to be done faster than a timescale of decades or it turns out 1 Ω isn't low enough resistance. Main limit is global geopolitical issues, hence "if I was king of the world".
Wind certainly helps, but there's a question of what will happen to the relative cost of wind and solar in the future. Solar seems to have a steeper experience curve.
Flow batteries might be ok for a week or so, but their market window has been shrinking as Li-ion has gotten cheaper.
The technology I'm most excited about is ultra low capex thermal, as being done by Standard Thermal. Capital cost per unit of energy storage capacity as low as $0.10/kWh(th), so it can work with seasonal storage and just a few tens of charge/discharge cycles over its lifespan.
Standard Thermal has raised $11M and is building in Germany, where they say they can deliver 365/7/24 solar resistive heat (400 C or perhaps 600 C) for half the cost of heat from burning natural gas there.
Flow batteries keep coming up again and again, but they just don't work well in practice. The power density of electrodes is too low to be practical, and this is a fundamental problem.
A regular 18650 cell has about 0.1 square meters of electrode surface. And you have thousands of these cells in a car battery, resulting in literal football fields of electrode area.
Wood burning heat is perfect compliment to solar in remote areas.
Agreed, e-fuels seem to be far and ahead the front-runner.
We can get to 95% using just short term storage. I suspect that most jurisdictions will just say "95% is good enough" rather than paying for ridiculously expensive long term storage.
We've got the nat gas capability already; keeping it around for the 5% is quite inexpensive, making the massive investment in long term storage for marginal benefit hard to justify.
OTOH, while the premium for e-fuels seems excessive, if you're only running that nat gas plant 2 days a year that premium is not so scary.
> Agreed, e-fuels seem to be far and ahead the front-runner.
For covering Dunkelflauten? Yes.
For seasonal storage with a prolonged discharge (so, low power/storage capacity ratio)? I think thermal storage wins there.
Sure, thermal is great where it's possible. But there aren't that many places where district heating is viable.
I'm not talking about district heating. I'm talking about high temperature storage for conversion back to electricity. Round trip efficiency could be around 40%, better than green hydrogen burned in combined cycle plants.
Standard Thermal's website's front page only covers heat delivery; did you mean to link to somewhere else?
Those are 2 very different use cases.
Thermal is low rate extraction. It's 1 cycle per year, but the extraction is performed over months so is low rate.
Electricity long term storage is high rate extraction. It's only used a few times a year, but when it is used it needs to cover roughly 100% of the entire grid's needs. I doubt thermal storage is suitable for high rate extraction, but I'd love to be wrong.
Edit: rereading your parent comment you seem to think thermal is suitable for a different use case? Could you elaborate further? When is "prolonged discharge" useful?
That's what they're focusing on to start with, but the temperature is high enough to drive heat engines to make power. There's more on the concept at the seed company's (Orca Sciences) web site and at Austin Vernon's blog.
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal
https://austinvernon.substack.com/p/building-ultra-cheap-ene...
They talk about temperature up to ~600 C, which I believe is limited by the desire to use cheap steal (much hotter and creep becomes a problem). This is also perhaps not coincidentally about the temperature of steam from a coal fired boiler, so one of the eventual goals is to repower retired coal fired power plants with this storage providing the heat instead of coal combustion.
You're right this is not good for something needed "a few times a year" for relatively short periods, for example to cover Dunkelflauten. Combustion of an e-fuel is better for that. But it's well suited to seasonal storage of solar energy, as that would be extracted over months, more or less continuously. The resistive heaters should also be much cheaper per W than electrolyzers.
> But it's well suited to seasonal storage of solar energy, as that would be extracted over months, more or less continuously.
But what is that useful for? During almost all of those months it would be a lot cheaper to use renewables & short term storage. And it's not fast enough for the few days it's not beaten by something cheaper.
It's useful for storing cheap solar energy for use in winter. Sizing the solar collectors for winter would require them to be much larger. Basically, this lets 2.5 W of solar in summer deliver 1 W of solar in winter. For a high latitude where the change in insolation is higher than that, this is superior. In Hamburg, for example, insolation varies by more than a factor of 10 from July to December.
Put another way: if you oversize the solar to be adequate in winter, you have enormous amounts of surplus solar in summer. So why not store it?
> So why not store it?
Because 0.10 $/kWh(th) / 0.4 kWh(e)/kWh(th) is expensive.
That's the capex for storage capacity. It's amortized over the number of charge/discharge cycles. Divide by 20 or more. It's amazingly cheap, actually.
I thought that post was interesting when I read it over a year ago, but the startup seems to have gone dark since then.
They appear to be focusing on Europe, and have raised $11M (or maybe 11M euros, I'm not sure which). There is some favorable buzz in Germany, which makes sense because natural gas has become quite expensive there.
https://www.cleanthinking.de/thermischer-erdspeicher-erdhueg...
I just don't see it with thermal. You have to pay the Carnot tax, and you also need humongous amounts of material.
E.g. 100 GWh (4 days of 1GW thermal power) with a 100C temperature swing (you can't go down all the way to room temperature) will need around 3.6*10^4 tons of sand. That's a lot.
Honestly, power-to-gas sounds like the only reasonable way for now. In theory, with SOFC (Solid Oxide Fuel Cells) for power generation, it can beat the steam cycle.
The temperature swing can be much greater than 100 C. Heat can be extracted as a wave passing through the store, then heat added back by reversing the flow. It would operate like a counterflow heat exchanger.
View another way: if we hook several piles in series, then lukewarm air from a first mostly discharged pile can be directed into later piles for more heating. In the continuous limit this is the concept I described above.
> The temperature swing can be much greater than 100 C.
No, because your steam will be at a lower temperature as you draw down the heat, bringing down efficiency.
Realistic designs for this can achieve 450C delta t. Your energy store can store at ~1000C (slightly below rock melting point), and run steam turbines with a hot side of 600C and a cool side of 150C.
Over the season, your sand drops from ~1000 to ~600 (which is fine since your power needs drop in the spring)
Sorry, but 1000C is wildly unrealistic. There are no bulk materials that can be used to construct heat exchangers for this kind of environment. 600C is already a stretch.
At 1000C steel will react with _water_.
To be clear, I'm not talking about cooling a small crucible but a structure that is at least 20 meters in size.
At 600 C one can use stainless steel, but things rapidly become expensive and problematic beyond that. 1000 C would require Inconel or something.
That is wrong, and I already explained why.
36000 tons... doesn't actually sound like that much? That's a ~30x30m cube of dirt.
But I have no reference for the cost of setting up such a storage and how it compares to battery or hydro.
The ~grid scale design of this for reference is somewhere around 200mx200mx50m for above ground, or ~100m cube (or bigger) for quarry infill. Such a design is going to get crushed by battery/hydro over the hours/days, but wins on cost for seasonal usage.
The cost of putting dirt in a pile is $1-2/ton.
so $36-72k for days of 1GW of power? Sounds pretty cheap to me ...
They also state the cost per kWh(th) of storage capacity is about $0.10, or $100,000/GWh(th). This is thermal energy, which is converted to work at maybe 40% efficiency, mind you. There are costs over and above the dirt (for example, pipes laid through the dirt to carry heat in/out).
The biggest expense will be the pipework inside that pile. That you won't be able to service easily. And you'll also need a LOT of insulation around it to prevent heat from leaking out too quickly.
Thermal storage benefits from the square/cube scaling, so the amount of insulation goes down as you scale up the storage.
Even better than that: the thermal time constant is proportional to the square of the radius. There's the square/cube effect that causes a factor of r ratio in the volume to surface area, but there's also a factor of r from the temperature gradient (which, from the center of the pile to the surface, is inversely proportional to r).
The insulation is just more dirt.
Homework: compute the heat flux from a 40 meter radius sphere, given the surface temperature 600C and the ambient temperature 0C. Now compute the amount of insulation needed to keep its temperature above 500C for 3 months, given that dry sand has an R value of 0.25 W/mK.
Note that the thermal time constant of a given geometry scales as the square of the radius. This is why subsurface geothermal heat is there even though it was "charged" gradually over millions of years. So it's not hard to achieve very long time constants just by making the pile a bit larger. They've done these computations. The result is the minimum practical size is a pile that provides ~100 kW(th) constant output.
So the idea is not practical for storage for an individual home, but could work on the scale of a village or small industrial enterprise. It would allow a solar microgrid to be completely disconnected from the larger grid, even at high latitude (assuming one could get a sufficiently good heat engine to work at that scale; it's a bit small for steam turbines.)
If you look at very large piles of dirt, like large earthen dams, if arranged in a suitable geometry they would have thermal time constants (assuming no fluid flow through them) in the thousands of years.
A computation for you: compute the cost of a given R value per m^2 for various materials. Dirt is very cheap, so even if it's not the best insulator it comes out on top. You need the thing being insulated to be large enough that you can fit the thick dirt layer around it, of course.
Aren’t lead acid batteries great for this purpose? They have advantage over lithium in stationary setups because weight is not an issue and they can be “daisy chained” many many times. I’m unaware of more cutting edge alternatives and the way the electrical companies handle solar is confusing IME
Lead acid batteries don't much like being cycled heavily. Even the ones explicitly designed for it (the average car battery is not) have about a tenth of the lifespan of lithium ion.
LiFePO4 is probably the chemistry best suited to it ATM. Lasts a long time, more stable, pretty cheap, and just a bit less energy density than other lithium ion options. Sodium-ion is looking promising but only just entering the market AFAIK.
A tenth is perhaps an exaggeration. It depends on how you count your lifespan.
A lead-acid battery mainly ages by cycle count. If you keep a decent quality battery charged up, and don't regularly discharge it too much, then there are claims they will last ten years. If you discharge them excessively each day, then you'll kill them really quickly.
A LiFePO4 battery has a quoted cycle count. But really what matters is simply elapsed time - the battery will last about ten years if it isn't abused, and you'll be hard-pressed to actually do that many cycles in that ten years. It ages mainly by elapsed time, not cycle count.
I used to argue that for an off-grid solar solution, you should get lead-acid batteries with capacity so that you are normally never discharging below 70%, and that this was still cheaper than getting LiFePO4 batteries with smaller capacity that you would discharge down to 20% each night. The lead-acid would then give you a larger reserve capacity for those instances where the weather is foul for a bit longer than normal and you don't get meaningful charging.
However, since then LiFePO4 batteries have continued to decrease in price, there are new Sodium batteries available now, and I haven't done the calculations again - the best option may have switched over, or it may be so close that it doesn't really matter which one you choose.
It looks like sodium is another step change on top of LiFePO4. I look forward to see it scale
Does this mean LA would be a feasible option for longer-cycle storage, IOW keeping a reserve topped up most of the year for those duldrums weeks with little solar or wind?
I think it still loses out to lithium-ion on cost/kWh, and batteries in general are still a bit expensive for storage on the timescale of months.
For long term storage, the right batteries don't exist yet (commercially). The good options are going to be one of sodium ion, flow batteries, or thermal batteries.
In addition to the fact that it doesn't really work better for that either, it's just not as safe as lithium iron phosphate.
I dumped my 24V dual LA battery setup for a single 24V LFP battery for my inverter/UPS backup. LFP supposedly has a 10-15y life based on the 4-5000 charge cycles most cells claim. Sodium ion is on the way as well. My setup gives me about 10-12h of backup for critical loads (my PC, lights, fans).
I have a 5 kWp solar plant that produces ~25kWh per day, but it is grid-tied. I considered a hybrid setup with LFP battery back up, but decided to separate the two systems to avoid a single point of failure.
They're not great.
LiFePo4 however is excellent and reasonably low cost these days
"PO" not "Po" (I was wondering what Polonium was doing in here lol)
Whatever it is doing, it won't be doing it for very long ;-)
We can simulate storage with overcapacity and broader geographical distribution networks, even if storage doesn’t become as cheap.
Fortunately that doesn’t seem like it will be an issue since battery storage costs are also seeing an exponential reduction.
Electricity is cheaper at night but only 20% of my consumption is at night, so I wouldn't mind if the situation was reversed.
I guess using electricity to heat during the night could be an issue, but we could also accept to let the temperature drop.
Around here late morning to mid afternoon (11 am to 4 pm) is now off-peak, alongside the old 10pm to 6 am.
With enough renewables the cost peaks are in the morning and evening when the sun is rising/setting and people are at home cooking.
There's also, like... winter. I'm fairly sure there's a calculation somewhere you could determine the number of deaths this will cause with pretty good accuracy.
Solar is never gonna be a complete solution. At the end of the day, we could do it more efficiently by just building suns here on earth for the panels, but of course then you've achieved fusion and you're already generating more than solar could ever hope to. We shouldn't hinge our future on half of a technology.
There's still sun during the winter; you just need more solar panels for the same amount of energy. Also, there tends to be more wind during the winter, so wind power makes a good complement to solar.
In lower latitudes, yes. Where I live December has an average of 4 hours of sunlight (yes, the entire month).
So the winter, by definition, will always generate less? or we're just like... covering up a bunch for half the year or something? I don't get your point.
My larger point is that solar is only ever going to be a piece of the puzzle at best. In space it might be quite nice, but otherwise it's kinda goofy to invest too much in.
> My larger point is that solar is only ever going to be a piece of the puzzle at best.
Doesn’t that apply to any power source?
Correct
With the way prices are trending, soon solar power is going to be the cheapest power source even in the winter. No one is going to complain that electricity is too cheap during the summer.
Only if we give up on nuclear and enhanced geothermal and continue subsidizing it massively so we can force it to be cheapest
Nonsense. It's going to be the cheapest no matter what.
Fusion, I hate to say it, is a pipe dream. Why? Because any fusion reactor loses a ton of energy to fast neutrons, which have the added negative of destroying the reactor. So-called aneutronic fusion (eg using He3) isn't zero neutrons. It's just fewer neutrons.
Stars don't have this problem because they're very large so there's only so far neutrons can go.
This is such a weird thing to assume is just impossible in physics, I don't quite know how to respond other than "yes, there are many unsolved problems in every energy sector, which is why it's an open question where we go from here"
Energy storage, on the other hand, has endless solutions which exist right now
I've heard every counterargument a million times at this point. And they fall into one of two buckets:
1. Stars do it. Yes. But stars also have size and gravity, something no nuclear plant will ever have; and
2. "People once said X was impossible" ie the Galileo Gambit. Just because Galileo was mocked for his heliocentric model but was later proven right does not mean everything is possible.
Thing is, I'm not even talking about physics. I'm talking about engineering. Something not only has to be possible but it has to be technically viable and sufficiently cheap. Put it this way: would you pay $60 billion for a 1GW power reactor with a lifespan of 30 years and an annual maintenance cost of $2B? Even if the fuel was completely free the wholesale cost per MWh would be ~$600. Nobody would build that.
Fusion research has been going on for decades and the best we've done thus far is fire a laser for about a second to induce a fusion reaction and also spend billions building magnets to try and contain a turbulent fluid at 100 million degrees, which, again, will do nothing about the neutrons that will destroy that vessel.
The joke is that fusion is always 50 years away and always will be. If you're an optimist it's always 30 years away and always will be.
I’m just glad we finally, today for some reason, have the ability to determine what will and won’t ever be possible with physics. It’s also crazy to me that we know fusion so thoroughly we cannot reliably perform it but we know it’s possible to do but we also know it’s impossible to do for extended periods.
You should inform nuclear physicists and engineers of your new-to-mankind knowledge.
Did you know we once argued over whether or not to close the patent office because “everything had already been invented”? This isn’t the Galileo concept, it’s recognizing we’ve only been doing global hard science as a species for like 50 years.
The cheaper solar gets the more of a gold rush there has been to develop projects/technologies that take advantage.
I don't think the winner takes all mindset can be applied in electricity generation. But I think the clever arrangement between these technologies will work:
- Solar.
- Wind.
- Nuclear.
- Pumped hydro.
- Battery.
Its also tricky to defend in war prone locations.
I think solar is amazing and we need more of it - but I can't stand this solar and storage go at it alone mentality. It's pretty thickheaded to discount the other forms of energy that we can use and will need.
In practice, in Ukraine distributed solar power has been an increasingly important source of resilience in their power supply system.
There are legit reasons to push back against “solar and batteries everywhere” but I find it hard to credit resilience in a conflict situation as one of them.
I probably should have clarified -- I'm not referring to forward bases or front line operations. That location would be fantastic for solar. I'm talking utility scale solar operations deployed in large areas -- quite easy to knock out as it is a huge surface area and not particularly robust.
This isn't a reason not to go with solar+batteries everywhere. This is an observations of the product weak points and why it isn't the only solution in the chain.
I think I'd rather a solar panel array be bombed than a nuclear power plant.
Solar has the advantage that it can be widely distributed on buildings rather than in just a few centralized locations.
A nuclear plant in a war zone is a dirty bomb waiting to be set off, which is incredibly easy to do, technically. Gas and coal plants are also end up being easy targets, as the war in Ukraine has shown. The most reliable one is solar because of how distributed it is. You can knock off one solar field, but then there are rooftops. You really need to destroy a city if you want to get it rid of power completely.
(Diesel power generators also work, but they require constant fuel supply, which can be complicated in a war zone)
I don't see how anything would be more resilient than solar.
Gravity just needs mass not fusion but your point remains.
Won't be long, battery installation is bigger by GW than wing or gas:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
But for the most part it will trail solar, because the first chunk of the solar doesn't really need storage. But once there's a healthy percentage of solar, all new solar will have storage or it won't get paid.
This is solvable, but it will require international cooperation on a scale that is unlikely. But you wouldn't need any storage at all, just a large number of long distance HVDC lines to move the energy from wherever the sun is shining to where it isn't.
It's a nice thought, but the strategic implications make it very hairy, and international trust isn't going in the right direction for that. But within large countries like the US with very varied climates, it seems like we really should.
It solvable but very expensive.
The costs of large number long distance HVDC lines with accompaning invertor stations would be as expensive as a electric generation based on nuclear power.
I don't think that is true. The bigger problem is the international cooperation required, as well as that such a system would be vulnerable to attacks.
" The cost of the electrical equipment that brings the offshore renewable energy from the wind turbines to the shore is in the same range as the cost of the wind turbines themselves. The future offshore grid will need tens of billions of Euros of investments in HVDC transmission infrastructure. For instance, Dutch-German transmission system operator TenneT has contracted 30 G€ for such connections in the North Sea. "
https://blog.sintef.com/energy/future-hvdc-grids-yes-please-...
Yes. Those links will be built anyway. Once you have them it isn't a huge stretch of the imagination that you could cross connect them. Check out a map of how many of those we have now, compare with two years ago or so and see how fast the buildout is. North-South links would take care of the seasonal variation and East-West links would lengthen the day.
> Those links will be built anyway.
Those links and the associated large costs, were not necessary in the past. I would like to note that, the amounts of electricity produced each year in Europe didn't change much for the past 40 years.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&...
I understand the low production costs of solar power, but in many discussions the associated costs of upgrading electric grid and building large scale electric energy storage systems are swept under the rug and not assigned to a electric grid dominated by solar power.
Like this BBC article, which compares costs of solar vs. nuclear, when the comparison should be costs of solar+HVDC+storage vs. nuclear.
They simply weren't possible. HVDC relies on semiconductors that are relatively new.
HVDC is older then semiconductors, but HVDC systems using solid-state devices are much more practical.
Solar that can make it through the seasons is the coolest.
> More stoked for when the same is said for storage
Batteries have use in war and power. It will likely scale faster than PV. What we need is the second derivative, so production of the latter can be turbocharged just before battery production is about to break through.
Batteries already kill peaker plants as a grid-scale battery that lasts 4 hours became cheaper than running natural gas turbine to cover the evening demand peak.
It's encouraging- when one part improves usually the others follow.
Most of our chemistries are targeting things like cars and consumer electronics.
Ideally we see people like Form Energies, using iron-air (rust) batteries, for much easier to scale storage. https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/06/1145020/2026-cli...
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-...
- Battery energy storage has grown at an exceptional pace, with global installations increasing more than 20-fold in storage capacity over the past five years. This growth has been driven by falling battery prices, abundant supply and relatively short project lead times. As variable renewable generation expands in many markets, battery storage is becoming an important source of flexibility and resilience for power systems, while also representing a growing commercial opportunity for battery manufacturers.
- However, more than 90% of battery storage applications rely on LFP batteries that are almost exclusively supplied from China, which accounts for almost all global manufacturing capacity and the associated technical expertise. Korean producers are investing to scale up LFP battery production that can offer an alternative, but they face intense competition from established, lower-cost Chinese producers in an oversupplied market.
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/battery-storage-is-scaling-...
- Battery storage now accounts for around 18% of installed dispatchable capacity in Australia, compared with 7% in China, 5% in the United States and 4% in Europe – underlining how rapidly batteries are becoming an important part of the electricity systems in some regions.
https://www.ess-news.com/2026/06/02/global-battery-additions...
Battery storage is right behind the solar adoption curve. Net zero in five years? Probably not. Ten to fifteen years? Almost assured considering rate of change and the overall economics (assuming ~1TW/year of solar PV deployment and enough battery storage to soak up that low carbon generation while also providing grid services to replace thermal generation grid support [voltage, frequency, etc]).
(China is curtailing renewables equal to the annual combined generation of Spain and the Philippines every six months, and India about ~100-120GW/month due to not enough battery storage, for example)
I am desperate to find a battery inverter that can be used to supplement my existing grid-tied home solar setup. I only need about 5kW and 10kWh of batteries, but everything I can find is geared towards whole-home power at like 12kW. Way way more than I need. I understand I’m in the minority and there’s probably not a market, but I’d love to find something
Transparency: I live in a 240v land, I have a Siggen.[0]
Not sure whether other brands could be better but there seem to be various options that would suit. If you are in 120v land you may need to check if there are models to suit.
Its largely modular, inverter sits on top of modular batteries in 8-9kw chunks.
But they are app-infested. IE wants a wifi connection, app on your phone to their servers... etc etc.
I hate it, but the wife likes it. This is a recent thing so I am still working out if there are possible solutions for privacy and control over my own objects.
[0]https://solarbatterysupermarket.com.au/products/sigenergy-ba...
> IE wants a wifi connection
Their car charger was doing my head in.
I pulled it apart and found an Ethernet plug and it was a complete game changer.
But: the app and their servers remain.
Unfortunately, the market is somewhat bifurcated between what Anker, Jackery, Ecopower provide and stepping up to Base Power, Powerwalls, and other bigger system components.
My recommendation would be to see if Ecopower storage and inverters are a good fit for your use case. If you're feeling adventurous, you could build your own battery pack, but I only recommend if you are knowledgeable and confident. This comes with substantial property and life safety risk, only proceed if you know what you're doing and understand the risk (I'll work on my high voltage EV battery packs, but only with a helper nearby holding a 2x4, for example).
This kind of makes the UK's double budget overrun Hinkley Point C new nuclear powerstation look even worse as a policy choice.
This was the best bet at the time when it was chosen, but it must be a good case of the sunken cost fallacy by now, given how long it's taken to build, and didn't follow an existing design*
As a risky policy choice, many distributed solar and wind farms with modern sodium-ion batteries would be a safer and more distributed (failure and weather resilient) modern choice.
*If the original design was defective, why are they using it in A and B?
Please become political and get party platforms to invest into massive sodium-ion batteries farms for northern Europe like Denmark, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland and so on. There are no political party that has that as a strategy, and those that reject nuclear are instead promoting thermal power plants as the solution to the problem of variability in energy production from renewables. Even the green party, or to be precise the strategy that they pioneered and others on the left adapted, is to build thermal power plants today that burn natural gas and bio fuels, and then wait for green hydrogen. There is no political interests to change that strategy to sodium-ion batteries farms. To make just one such example, south of Sweden strated construction this spring for a fresh new thermal power plant and CCS, owned by local government that is run by a coalition of left and green. Instead of putting millions into emission producing thermal power plants they could build that cheaper and better sodium-ion batteries.
I know multiple people who would have voted for the green party, but decided to not do that because of their investments and political drive towards thermal power plants. The only political alternative to parties pushing for thermal power plants is those that want nuclear power.
We need it all. All the low carbon sources: The cheap intermittent renewables, the expensive and stable nuclear, the biogas from organic waste etc.
Putting one clean tech against the other is a waste of time we don't have right now.
This is falsely assuming that attention is the primary bottleneck. It's not. If you redirected £50B into solar, wind, and battery subsidies, you would end up with straightforwardly more green energy. Solar and wind are not resource-bottlenecked technologies. You can just buy more.
Disappointingly in the West, the primary bottleneck is permitting. Both for sites and grid connections. Not quite the same as "attention", but similar.
The UK is currently building two long offshore DC-DC connections between north Scotland, where all the wind is, and the south of England, where much of the demand is. This is easier than running another line of pylons on land because fewer people will complain.
Misallocation of capital is anti-environmental. If you allocate capital to projects that have decades long delays, you have burned that capital at the start of the project, not at the end of it when you take delivery of a working power plant.
Assuming we have limited time (i.e. that there is a deadline, a “point of no return”) and money to move out of fossil fuels, it makes sense to aim for the cheapest energy source, to optimize the probability of getting there before it’s too late.
So IMO we don’t need all the expensive options, when the cheap ones are already viable.
Nuclear takes far too long (>10 years) to build.
In the same time frame you can build out enough solar, wind and battery storage that you can supply the same amount of continuous power, have money left over and not need worry about nuclear waste and a hefty teardown bill to the tune of billions of dollars.
Nuclear power is on its way out, all you need it for is deep space, marine military applications (i.e. aircraft carriers and submarines that stay submerged for months at a time) and as a byproduct of reactors used for radiotherapy.
I'm not even sure if it is worth it to keep chasing the fusion dream. Sure, as a foundation research into nuclear physics and chemistry (i.e. creating new elements), or for powering interplanetary space travel, it still makes sense, but by the time nuclear fusion can generate power... renewables will have long since taken over.
Essentially, its a game of capital and solar is accessible to (almost) every human household on the planet.
Additionally, zeroish fuel costs/operational costs, grid connection is optional, capacity to build panels is not controlled technology, raw materials are relatively cheap. So scaling production further or bringing it online is not otherwise constrained.
Nuclear can still can be strategically important as rock solid base load and for grid stability.
In the future, with better understanding and control over nuclear physics, nuclear one day might be as cheap and plentiful as batteries, but for this cycle , solar has essentially ‘won’
> Nuclear takes far too long (>10 years) to build.
Latency and throughput are not the same thing. 10 years to the first result, and less once the planning and construction process is streamlined.
The two most recent reactors built in the US used a modern modular design that was supposed to reduce the chances of construction delays. They weren't late because of planning or permitting.
The modularity was supposed to enable offsite construction of modules in a controlled environment and make it more reliable. What happened in real life is that some modules needed rework and that was only discovered after delivery. That massively fucked the schedule.
The AP1000 was an incomplete design, plus the aircraft impact assessment change happened. Even the Chinese had trouble constructing it.
But now there is a design, and the Chinese construct CAP1000/CAP1400 on a regular basis.
> But now there is a design, and the Chinese construct CAP1000/CAP1400 on a regular basis.
Yeah. The Chinese. A country well known for cutting corners ("chinesium steel" has its name for a reason).
I wouldn't trust a Chinese made design. If they do, it's their choice.
That’s a pretty massive assumption at the end: you really don’t want to cut corners with safety and unless the government can simply ignore residents, very few people are willing to live near a nuclear plant so you have to anticipate delays or higher transmission costs.
While all of that’s happening, you’re guaranteed to be producing more carbon emissions before anything can be displaced.
> 10 years to the first result, and less once the planning and construction process is streamlined.
You can't streamline your way out of the need to have to build containments capable of surviving a fully laden Airbus A380 crashing into it from 43.000 ft.
I live near a NPP, these buildings are insanely tough and you need a lot of time, a lot of resources and a lot of people to build them - especially the people part is a huge constraint, construction already isn't an attractive career and the demographic bomb is hitting the trades hard.
> You can't streamline your way out of the need to have to build containments capable of surviving a fully laden Airbus A380 crashing into it from 43.000 ft.
Most of the plane is not a problem for 6ft of concrete and a steel liner. Planes are built to just about hold together. The main thing to worry about are the jet engine cores.
> Most of the plane is not a problem for 6ft of concrete and a steel liner. Planes are built to just about hold together.
It's still 575 tons of material crashing into the containment at a speed near at or even over the speed of sound. That is a lot of energy to dissipate, on top of that 250 tons of burning jet fuel is a lot of thermal energy that can quickly eat away at steel.
> but it must be a good case of the sunken cost fallacy by now, given how long it's taken to build
No, for nuclear plants generally sunk cost is not a fallacy :) Most of the cost for a nuclear plant is upfront, so once you've spent that you may as well use it.
A was Magnox and B was AGR. A collectible set of British dead end nuclear technologies.
C is not a great idea but like HS2 failing to finish it would also be a disaster.
Thanks for the correction, what specifically makes them dead end that we can't re-use the designs - e.g. use modern parts?
Long discussion: https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/why-british-nuclear-flopp...
Magnox: un-enriched fuel, designed for weapons, low operating temperature.
AGR: too complicated, can't be refuelled without complete shutdown.
PWR has emerged as the only viable design, and even that is too complicated compared to solar+batteries.
Basically, plumbing is the enemy. Every joint is a potential failure. If what's in the pipe is radioactive or corrosive or explosive (in the case of molten sodium, all three), that's extra bad. So there's tremendous cost of inspections.
Molten sodium as a cooling liquid always struck me as a "courageous decision" (to quote Yes Minister). Is there really nothing else that can do the job?
It's an annoying tradeoff: if you want something that's liquid at 600C, it pretty much either has to be a metal, or heavily pressurized (i.e. the PWR, the pressurized water reactor everyone has converged on).
Or you go for a gas. But then you're not able to use water as a moderator, so it either has to be a "fast neutron" design (which the few liquid sodium reactors are) or use a graphite moderator (flammable, lifespan issues with neutron cracking).
The unexplored corner is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-cooled_fast_reactor : plumbing is "safe" apart from being incredibly hot, but you still have to deal with fast neutrons smashing up the reactor from the inside on an atomic level.
Radiation damage is no joke!
> PWR
CANDU works fine too.
Something about AGR in this great Stross piece https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/nothing-l...
> didn't follow an existing design
https://www.onr.org.uk/publications/regulatory-reports/other... is an interesting read; the ONR claims it was not them, and EDF/Framatome claim it was not them either.
The Fingleton Review goes into this and other design changes required by other agencies. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/taskforce-calls-for-radic... .
Sizewell C has an approved design, so the risks are much reduced, and the political/regulatory environment is behind simplification.
If we save money by cutting every single project and never delivering anything then we’ll save a fortune sure, except we won’t have anything.
And then you’ll have us buy Russian gas and Iranian oil to save money… and oopsie woopsie looks like we’re dependent on the evil countries again.
I've converged on "it's a bad idea to _start_ a nuclear project in 2026, but the sunk cost fallacy doesn't quite apply, so once significantly invested it should be finished and run to its operational lifetime".
That is not how it works.
First, you for decades pay 5-10 times more for energy to subsidize every single green energy project... and then oopsie woopsie you still buy Russian gas and dependent on the evil coutries.
While I don't disagree, Britain is hardly in the sweet spot for efficient, year-round solar production.
Surely the real sweet spot is diversity? Solar for when it's sunny (which is more often than many think in lots of parts of the UK, especially SE England), wind (reliable most of the year in other parts of the UK), tidal/wave/hydro, etc.
At least for nuclear, no. The cost is overwhelmingly in the construction rather than the operation so it makes sense to run it all the time. With diverse green sources while their fluctuations are less correlated than just adding more solar you still have the potential for all of them to have a lull at the same time.
It was the third of its type in Europe built by roughly the same people, fifth if you include Chinese models built separately, so not a totally new design.
Not really. Solar is improving, but in terms of area required it's not even close to comparable to nuclear. You'd need 668 sq kilometres of solar panel (67k hectares) to match the same generation capability as Hinkley C (175 hectares).
I’m not convinced that solar’s land requirements matter. Almost no country is small enough that the land usage is a serious constraint. The UK is 244,376 km2.
In 2010 Hinkley C was the right choice. But if starting today, that £48 billion could buy you a whole lot of wind, solar, and batteries.
You are still going to need an energy source that you can “switch on” and balance the grid at times of low wind/solar.
You know it’s not sunny all the time, you don’t need me to tell you that, but it’s not windy all the time either. Batteries are a good investment but they can only hold hours worth of capacity right now not days.
So you have 2 options. Either invest in long term storage, or have enough nuclear around that can kick in when other generators don’t have much, or ideally both, which the UK is doing.
Both Hinkley and Sizewell are the right choice. They’re an upfront cost but once running are cheap.
I guess people can have different views. I'd rather have power generation concentrated in a few spots and have more fields and forests.
For reference, the Birmingham/West Midlands conurbation is 671 sq km.
It was an obsolete design before they even started.
A modern nuclear power plant using a pebble bed reactor could be the size of a couple of Portakabins, with a third Portakabin to contain the wellies and gardening gloves you'd need to handle the fuel.
When I was in South Africa their pebble bed reactor was the thing. They were working on it from 1993 until 2009 then gave up. Not totally sure why. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_Bed_Modular_Reactor
There was a German one too:
>constructed in 1960, grid connected in 1967 and shut down in 1988. It was a 15 MWe, 46 MWt test reactor used to develop and test a variety of fuels and machinery. ... Over its lifetime the reactor had many accidents, earning it the name "Shipwreck".
Not quite sure what goes wrong but they seem problematic.
This is clearly not true because nobody is building one of those? Not just in the West. The one that's actually getting built is PWR.
There are startups. See Standard Nuclear making TRISO or X-Energy
The last chance to stop that particular albatross was lost under Theresa May, who was advised that it was already over-budget and wouldn't deliver value for money, and had to guarantee a pretty eye-watering price per kWh at the taxpayer's expense.
I can only think that the UK must need the reactor products for something defence related, because little else makes sense.
> I can only think that the UK must need the reactor products for something defence related, because little else makes sense.
Obviously as a country with nuclear weapons that's an ingredient.
However Hinkley C's strike price £2012 92.50 is lower than was renegotiated for Drax £2012 109.90. Those are £2012 which means they're inflation adjusted as if you were being paid in the year 2012 not in current pounds. For a real world comparison, AR6 Solar got a strike price of about £2012 50 and that translates into about £75 right now today. Inflation is a hell of a thing.
Drax burns imported trees ("waste wood") so it requires some creative Green accounting to come up with the idea that this is carbon neutral so even if it's not quite as trivially friendly as a solar panel Hinkley is obviously less stupid. Both Hinkley and Drax run happily in the still dark, so to compare solar or wind you need to factor in a lot of storage. Today the government does not fund storage, that's a free market opportunity, so we can interpret the significant discount from Hinkley or Drax to a solar farm as a sign that the market thinks storing enough power is quite expensive actually.
They worked around the CfD and shifted nearly 2 billion of the costs to the next nuclear build by paying the first project out of the new budget for "lessons learned"!
Apparently the main lesson learned was, don't use a CfD because you'll be contractually bound to your initial bid and be responsible for cost overruns. Instead consumers are paying upfront for construction, with no cap on costs for the next one.
Though of course that's not really a lesson learned. Their CFO knew enough at the time the deal was originally signed to resign over it.
One crucial point is that military nuclear know-how (engines and weapons) needs a civilian industry for continuity of knowledge and betterment of practices and procedures.
I'm not sure how essential Hinckley Point C would be in this regard (probably not really), but I don't think this is about nuclear fuel.
Solar is great, but we still need a rotating chunk of steel to stabilise the grid. In my country (Poland) on a good sunny day half of the grid is powered by renewables (in reality almost all is solar).
But the beauty of solar is that it makes you independent from the grid. China makes the whole system. Cheap, but good quality solar panels. Cheap inverters - these are actually pretty good for the price. And finally cheap LFP batteries.
When amount of solar capacity exceeded half of entire grid, my country has established few silly rules to stop the growth.
For example let's say your house's grid connection is 24kW 3phase. If you want to connect your solar to the grid and feed in power you are limited to 24kW peak solar panels, and.... 24kWh of battery.
This is beyond stupid, but there is more... If your inverter is 10kW or more you have to give the grid operator full control over your system. They then decide when you are sending power to the grid, when you use your battery and when you use the grid. Of course they will make you push to the grid when prices are the lowest and you'll consume from the grid when they are highest.
So many people do what I did. Build off grid systems with ability to swap between the grid and the system.
Such systems do not have to be registered anywhere and I bet they are responsible for huge amount of power use.
For example before I installed solar I wouldn't even think about installing a heat pump for both air con and heating. But having extra power allows me to do it economically.
> we still need a rotating chunk of steel to stabilise the grid
No we don't. Battery systems can stabilize the grid. You need inverters that are designed for this, but it isn't hard to make an inverter that will set then grid frequency and force it correct. You want most inverters to follow the source, but something needs to set it.
Most rotating steel isn't setting grid frequency either, an induction motor follows the frequency of the grid, and generates power if it is rotating faster than the grid frequency. (this is much more complex, but close enough for a quick comment).
>> we still need a rotating chunk of steel to stabilise the grid
>No we don't. Battery systems can stabilize the grid. You need inverters that are designed for this, but it isn't hard to make an inverter that will set then grid frequency and force it correct.
I know in theory we don't, but in practice there is no such real grid anywhere in the world that would run on large percentage of solar. So it seems we do.
I'm talking about real grid as something that powers at least thousands of households. Not a compound with a dozen buildings.
Take Canary Islands for example. They are an ideal environment to setup a 90% solar and battery grid. They have a great climate and size well suited to this. But they still run thermal plants.
Why? Because no one has successfully showed a largish scale frequency regulation/stabilisation with inverters.
See a writeup about the Texas outage a year or two ago to understand how fragile grids with too large percentage of semiconductor sources are compared with rotating masses.
The Canary islands do not have space for a lot solar. There is some empty desert on Fuerteventura, but the other islands all flat ground is already used.
Trump administration banned import of Chinese inverters unfortunately.
I think we’ll see a pivot from the right on solar soon, once they realize how cheap it is and how much money they can make. They’ll spin it as home-grown local jobs stuff but regardless it’s a win-win.
The ironical thing is nothing screams independent, rugged like having your own large single family home with your own power source which is even powering your EV. The US suburbia will become net positive if more people figure out wasting roof space does not make sense
I'm not rly convinced that roofs are the best places for solar.
1. Then you need small scale transformers 2. Lots of roofs have shadows on them a lot of the time, like from trees or other nearby buildings 3. Most roofs have to get replaced every 15 years 4. Roof installed solar is fixed in place
I think parking lots, rural empty land and the like are a better starting point that avoids all 4 of these issues.
I have solar on my roof btw.
Rooftops, residential or commercial, have the benefit of being "free" land for installation. It isn't used for anything else, typically.
Right, that's the only benefit. But while the real estate is "free", the cost to install there compared to somewhere else has to include all costs, not just real estate.
> 3. Most roofs have to get replaced every 15 years
What in the world?? What are your roofs made out of?
Asphalt shingles. As usual the US is building cheap and light and these things don't last.
Rooftop solar has the benefit that you distribute the investment cost over a large number of people, even if the costs are a lot higher than grid-scale installations on the ground.
I'm surprised to hear that you need to replace roofs every fifteen years. What are they made of? The roofs I know last decades longer than that.
Grid scale installations are also amortized over many people (?!?!). This is literally why governments and corporations exist.
And rooftop solar had to be subsidized in the US, so apparently it wasn't attractive enough as an investment on its own. Even now, solar without batteries isn't economically beneficial to individuals, and batteries are ludicrously expensive and require a lot of space.
> I'm surprised to hear that you need to replace roofs every fifteen years.
Asphalt shingles. Of course you can use something else like a metal roof. But the solar panel itself doesn't last that long since efficiency drops and new technology gets so much better. So you're still gonna have a new part of your house that can break whenever it feels like it and needs maintenance every so often. Something I want the government or a utility company to deal with, please.
I've now seen farmers replacing diesel trucks with Rivian trucks. A lot of them are starting to get it, and the Republicans are losing them as a result.
I had a staunchly Republican environmental science professor in college say that environmentalism IS conservatism and Republicans shot themselves in the foot by making it political. He gave example after example and I'm not sure I've ever heard a more convincing argument before.
Are you sure he didn’t use the word conservation?
In red state language, conservation is being in tune with nature and environmentalism is regulatory capture.
Why are we waiting on political movements to latch on to a revolutionary technology? If they are against you saving money vote them out, regardless of party, lol
Parties are in power, not voters. Or rather, the parties hold the votes that count: those in the assembly.
Political movements are the crests of the waves that are voter opinion. When they move, it means the underlying beliefs move.
It’s also much more effective to grow support across the spectrum then to have an extremely polarised issue where one side gets power and just overpowers the other. Then you get the insane back and forth tug of war when they get in power and just undo everything you did. It’s pointless.
You only vote once every couple years. Political movements mean less waiting.
There is a school of thought (ie ecomodernism [1]) that believes that all big problems will be solved when the economics change. I used to believe that.
Instead we have a captured system where it's cheaper to buy the politics of wealth extraction. Historically speaking this has always led to increasing wealth inequality that is ultimately resolved by war or revolution.
If the ultra-wealthy were smart, they'd declare victory because they've never had it so good and they'd seek to give back a little to placate the populace and stave off that war and revolution. But they don't. Greed has no bounds. So at some points, the guillotines are probably making a comeback. And a lot of people are going to die as climate refugees in the coming decades.
You underestimate how much money oil groups are pouring in lobbying. Energy could fall from the sky, it wouldn't change their mind... oh wait
The world has more than one country, and most have basically no access to oil. They will go deep into solar first. See, for instance, how the mix between the Venezuelan takeover early in the year, plus the Hormuz situation, put Cuba's energy access into jeopardy, and how that meant moving heavily into solar, as at least that remains available once purchased.
So even if a place like the US goes lighter on solar that is reasonable, Places like Spain, Italy or Morocco will go all in just to minimize dependence on a resource a third party can control. It's the ultimate counter to the Hormuz situation. Squeeze access to oil for long enough, and you accelerate the move away from it.
I don't see this happening for a very long time. Mines and oil and gas wells are huge wealth concentrators.
Oil wells decrease in production over time. It's called the decline rate. For wells in the Permian basin, the average decline rate is about 15%. So a 1000 barrel per day ("bpd") well produces ~850bpd in year 2, ~700bpd in year 3 and ~550bpd in year 4. That means you need to be constantly drilling wells. That's more wealth concentration opportunity.
1MW of solar produces 1MW in years 1 through 20.
Additionally, the fight for control over resources induces demand for weapons. Solar doesn't do that. This is summed up as No one goes to war over a solar panel [1].
Efficiency isn't the goal. Wealth extraction is.
[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
>> 1MW of solar produces 1MW in years 1 through 20.
I agree with your post, but the above statement is not technically accurate.
Panels do drop in production over time; A very rough rule-of-thumb is around 1% loss per year.
So after 20 years production is at like 80%. (Ymmv)
Of course this isn't really a big deal. The panels themselves are cheap and can be replaced very easily. Equally there is a market for 2nd hand panels as they still produce, and are ideal for places that are not space constrained.
> Mines and oil and gas wells are huge wealth concentrators.
Only if the oil price remains high. If the world, um, situation stabilizes we will go back to having a glut of oil and hence low prices. Lower than ever I would guess because of the current massive transition to EVs.
The right wing prepers and homesteading communities are already fully on board with it, I think it won't be too long until the rest of the right jumps on board.
Just slap an American flag on it and call it "Patriot Solar."
Go religious. "Energy from heaven." or "The devil lives underground."
Bathe your home in God's holy light vs. the toxic foul black liquid that burns with hellfire
That works!
Associating religion with the right is such a shallow, annoying stereotype.
but it works so well!
After all, it comes from the Star of America.
Nope. Big oil has spent big money on propaganda for a VERY long time. Something that almost all right wing pundits and podcasters are funded by.
For the right to actually embrace solar, you need either big money in solar to start it's own propaganda campaigns or you need big oil to collapse to the point where they can't afford paying propagandists. Right now, they are making record profits so don't count on that anytime soon.
Actually, Texas is leading the way on Solar and it has been exploding under the Trump administration too. California has too much regulations and grifting to scale solar compared to Texas, so hopefully we see a pivot from the left soon.
We're barreling toward a point where above a certain wealth level and below a certain population density individuals can get all their energy from the sun, store it with batteries you get in the mail from Temu/Amazon/Alibaba and connect it all together with stuff you can buy from a Home Improvement store. All done unilaterally. Very hard to sink the claws of regulation into that except after the fact (unpopular). That is a future that too many people would be happy to sacrifice a lot of pollution to prevent.
So I think the pivot you're talking about, which I agree with eventually happen, will be offset in at least significant part.
> individuals can get all their energy from the sun, store it with batteries
Good luck storing that energy in batteries through the winter. Having a portion of $50/kWh batteries that cycle once a year results in pretty high energy costs. At some point non-battery storage (e.g. generators running on diesel) take over.
Of course, if people are willing to go totally off-grid then good luck to them.
You can still backup to a large propane or natgas tank which many rural homes already have.
>Good luck storing that energy in batteries through the winter.
I think solar will be cheap enough it'll be more like you need to over-provision the panels and just have storage for a week of cloudy days.
The right's opposition to it is mostly rooted in the fact that historically the fossil fuel industry has been a major funding cornerstone of the right.
It goes all the way back to this kind of thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fundamentals
The pamphlet from which we get the term "fundamentalism" was published by an oil industry tycoon.
So the right is incentivized to protect this industry even if it becomes obsolescent and is no longer the most economical or practical way to generate at least much of our energy needs (electricity).
While the right has often sounded pro-nuclear, in practice they tend not to be that enthusiastic about it when they actually get into office. Obama supported the first new nuclear plant in decades.
https://politifact.com/factchecks/2012/mar/02/barack-obama/o...
Fossil fuel interests seem to support "the enemy of my enemy". 25 years ago the best alternative was nuclear so they supported alternatives to nuclear. Now they support nuclear and hydrogen.
> So the right is incentivized to protect this industry even if it becomes obsolescent and is no longer the most economical or practical way to generate at least much of our energy needs (electricity).
I think in that case industries that will became most economical or practical way to generate electricity simply will start funding the right.
"historically the fossil fuel industry has been a major funding cornerstone of the right."
The Eastern Bloc in the Cold War was extremely keen on fossil fuels (and nuclear power) and very poor at dealing with pollution. As is the PRC.
In Western Europe, coal miners were the backbone of the far left in places like Germany and the UK including Communist parties. The British Labour Party's vote was traditionally strongest in coal mining areas.
I don't know so much about the US situation, but I am aware that some American coal miners were involved in socialist movements there many decades ago.
My comment was US-centric, though I have gotten the sense that now trad rebranded Russia has helped push fossil fuels in Europe.
I'm not convinced. If the fossil fuel industry has such a grip on the right, how did these things make it into the 2008 Republican Party Platform [1]?
Climate change:
> By increasing our American energy supply and decreasing the long term demand for oil, we will be well positioned to address the challenge of climate change and continue our longstanding responsibility for stewardship over the environment.
...
> As part of a global climate change strategy, Republicans support technology-driven, market-based solutions that will decrease emissions, reduce excess greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, increase energy efficiency, mitigate the impact of climate change where it occurs, and maximize any ancillary benefits climate change might offer for the economy.
...
> Because Republicans believe that solutions to the risk of global climate change will be found in the ingenuity of the American people, we propose a Climate Prize for scientists who solve the challenges of climate change. Honoraria of many millions of dollars would be a small price for technological developments that eliminate our need for gas-powered cars or abate atmospheric carbon.
Clean energy:
> Alternate power sources must enter the mainstream. The technology behind solar energy has improved significantly in recent years, and the commercial development of wind power promises major benefits both in costs and in environmental protection. Republicans support these and other alternative energy sources, including geothermal and hydropower, and anticipate technological developments that will increase their economic viability. We therefore advocate a long-term energy tax credit equally applicable to all renewable power sources.
Reducing demand for fossil fuels:
> Conservation does not mean deprivation; it means efficiency and achieving more with less. Most Americans today endeavor to conserve fossil fuels, whether in their cars or in their home heating, but we can do better. We can construct better and smarter buildings, use smarter thermostats and transmission grids, increase recycling, and make energy-efficient consumer purchases. Wireless communications, for example, can increase telecommuting options and cut back on business travel. The Republican goal is to ensure that Americans have more conservation options that will enable them to make the best choices for their families.
...
> We must also produce more vehicles that operate on electricity and natural gas, both to reduce demand for oil and to cut CO2 emissions.
> Given that fully 97 percent of our current transportation vehicles rely on oil, we will aggressively support technological advances to reduce our petroleum dependence. For example, lightweight composites could halve the weight and double the gas mileage of cars and trucks, and together with flex-fuel and electric vehicles, could usher in a renaissance in the American auto industry.
[1] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2008-republican-pa...
And what do the Republican party platforms from within the last decade have to say?
They no longer say anything like that, which supports my point.
The argument that the fossil fuel industry historically being a major source of their funding is why they currently oppose renewables is weak because that has been a major continuing source of their funding for many decades.
Hence to explain why the renewable support in the 2008 party platform went away we need to look for an explanation other than simply the fossil fuel industry wanted it.
It still may be due to the fossil fuel industry, but to make that argument one needs to explain why they didn't have enough power before to stop it from going into the platform in 2008 but they did have enough later to get rid of it.
The oil and gas industry loves solar and wind. You need baseload generation capacity in those outlier days where there is cloud cover and the wind doesn’t blow.
That baseload capacity comes from natural gas power plants. By building solar and wind you are guaranteeing a market for their products in the future.
Not sure what religious fundamentalism has to do with any of this.
Already happened, more or less - c.f. Texas
https://texas2036.org/news-analysis/growth-of-utility-scale-...
tl;dr: https://mlu3fafnp1cd.i.optimole.com/w:778/h:495/q:mauto/f:be...
freedom energy
Of the top 10 states in solar generation in July 2026, 7/10 of them voted for Trump in 2024 [1].
The U.S. solar industry installed 43 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in 2025, remaining the dominant source of new capacity added to the grid for the fifth consecutive year. Solar and energy storage represent 79% of new capacity installed in the first year of the Trump Administration [2].
[1] https://www.chooseenergy.com/solar-energy/solar-energy-produ...
[2] https://tedmag.com/report-u-s-added-43-gw-of-new-solar-capac...
You would think the administration would champion these efforts, even continue or expand subsidies for it and other things like EVs. Instead they seem to be doing most of what they can in their power to quash green energy.
Because they very transparently are personally getting paid by fossil interests. It’s a naked grift, just like everything else this administration does.
Only Fox News boomers are against solar power. The rest of the right wing just doesn't want government slush fund handouts to vaporware companies like the Obama administration. If it's cheaper, great. Don't drag CO2 into the argument, just win on price and the right wing will happily adopt it.
> The rest of the right wing just doesn't want government slush fund handouts to vaporware companies
Maybe the voters don't, but the businessmen and politicians definitely do, maybe more so than democrats. Just in different sectors (military).
> just win on price and the right wing will happily adopt it
Obvious counterpoints: Trump's $700m "clean, beautiful coal" handouts, or Trump's $2B buyback of wind farm leases.
I'm talking about the voter base, not the crooks in Washington.
The voter base keeps voting for the crooks though.
Nobody likes everything any politician does. The question is who is least evil.
The less evil one, in this case, is the one that is not afraid to admit excess CO2 (emitted by human activity) is a problem.
There are thousands of different issues though.
And the current US administration is on the wrong side of almost all of them.
If you can solve the problem in a way that doesn't give government and NGO's more power over private industry, nobody will push back. If the solution is invasive government regulation, the answer will always be no. Also, can't involve the tax payers funding any of it.
Good news, we can! Solar and battery technology will reduce our reliance on oil, which will reduce the need for our expensive overseas misadventures and crimes.
> If the solution is invasive government regulation, the answer will always be no
The answer is already "no" without regulation. Might as well regulate.
What other options are there? Mind-control?
Im sure theres an element of "private industry should profit off the sun because I'm a temporarily embarrassed millionaire and the government cant be trusted to run efficiently" vs "the government should build and maintain communal infrastructure so everyone can benefit and profit isnt extracted" with both sides thinking their version keeps things cheaper in the end for the customer.
Private industry should be able to profit off the sun and it's disturbing that you think asserting this is a dunk. Steinbeck's temporarily embarrassed capitalists quote (not "millionaires", that is a misquote of what he actually wrote in 'A Primer on the 30s' for Esquire magazine in 1960) was referring to well-off liberals involved in socialist activism in the 30s and having a naive, self-interested understanding of what policies would actually help the proletariat. The government often can't be trusted to run efficiently because the government is insulated from having to actually make a profit delivering services people want to pay for, and is often being used for other poltical ends by people who do not care about wasting taxpayer money. Communal infrastructure is often not something everyone benefits from because infrastructure that is legally required to serve everyone by law often has a bunch of compromises that make it practically unusuable for some group of people who can't do anything to change it because they are a numerical minority.
It's interesting that you took my ambiguity and lack of conviction regarding a right and wrong side as me picking one.
>Private industry should be able to profit off the sun and it's disturbing that you think asserting this is a dunk.
It wasn't a "dunk", you added that interpretation yourself.
I don't think many people on the right have ever been against solar power. It's rather being pro all power and not wanting to remove a source to replace it. The demands to remove power sources come from the left. Build as much solar as you want, but don't shut down the nuclear plants.
The current US administration has forcibly shutdown solar, onshore and offshore wind projects. Explicitly, intentionally.
A bit of realism would help here. Yes, there's a left/NIMBY overlap to some degree, but the forces from the non-right camp seeking to limit power development comes from the NIMBY elements, not the left elements.
A bit of realism is that there's a very well established anti-nuclear popular movement on the left, which has existed for decades. As long as we have access to history books and photos from the past, there is no use denying this.
Germany recently finished their complete dismantlement of the nations nuclear power. Another nuclear country Sweden, has shut down seven of their reactors, but are at least rhetorically changing back to supporting nuclear.
Go and talk in real life with people on the left and you'll find many of them are against nuclear power. Go and talk in real life with people on the right and it will be hard for you to find anybody who is against solar power. Because why would you be against solar?
Opposition to specific power technologies is not opposition to power technologies. How difficult is this to grasp?
Nobody said that. You're frustrating yourself against an imaginary argument.
You were using the example of "left" opposition to nuclear power as a complete or partial refutation to my point that there really is no or very little "left" opposition to power technology.
The problem is left and right are too broad. There are some one each side in every different option. There are oil barrons in the right and those who like solar because it is economical. Likewise the left has those who hate all electric and want to go back to the pre electric era, and those who want solar.
People who have no other arguments than Reddit down votes: Try to get out of your bubble and sit down and talk with somebody on the right IRL and see if they have anything against solar power. I've never heard anybody in my life be against it, so maybe you are just swallowing untruths because they align with your taste.
I always got a kick out of those graphs of projected solar power capacity that showed the line leveling off if not actually shrinking, with successive year's predictions doing the same thing again and again, but the actual numbers continuing to shoot way up.
Like the itanium sales forecast chart, except in reverse.
I'd like to see more examples of (non-hydro) Gravitational Potential Energy Storage tried out. Very large containers full of sand, for example. If you have no mountains, a deep hole will do.
"Current levelized cost of storage ranges from $150-300 per MWh for established pumped-storage systems, while newer solid-mass gravity systems estimate costs of $200-400 per MWh. These figures are competitive with long-duration storage applications but remain higher than lithium-ion batteries for shorter-duration uses."
https://eureka.patsnap.com/report-gravitational-potential-en...
The amount of space needed is just gargantuan. Hydro only works because you can declare that an entire valley is now energy storage, in one fell swoop. As soon as you have to construct each unit of storage instead of letting nature do it for you, it becomes completely impractical. Yes you can store energy in a tower of concrete blocks... if you can make enough concrete blocks to fill a lake.
There's some plausible concepts:
https://gravity-storage.com/technical-concept/
But battery storage is a proven technology now and the cost trends with such bespoke megaprojects are not looking promising, so I'm not holding my breath.
Burning (regenerable) metal fuel in old coal power plants is also an interesting approach:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666352X2...
AFAIK problem with all physical energy storage solutions is just one of cost.
Batteries are scheduled to become so cheap that these type of physical storage systems just won't be able to keep up in terms of cost.
Most pumped hydro projects are now put on hold as batteries have been coming down.
> Batteries are scheduled to become so cheap
Wait, you can schedule price drops?
https://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy2017110 / https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(18)30583-X make the battery takeover look like a foregone conclusion, but past performance is no indication of future performance.
Also what about the systems to turn the batteries into something useable? It is telling how cheap lead-acid batteries looked on the first paper's Figure 2, yet overall system costs were vastly higher.
You can get a reasonable idea in the near term from the announcements of CATL and BYD who are building the things.
Like CATL announced a cost of $19 per kwh. https://electrek.co/2026/07/16/catl-sodium-ion-15000-cycle-g...
which I think is far cheaper than the prices in your links. I think they'll have a job going lower for a while as the raw materials are ~$10.
I think the actual cost to buy one now it more $40-60. The $19 is probably their target in a while.
If you spread $60 over 15000 cycles that's 0.4c per kwh stored and returned which is pretty cheap compared to what I pay for electicity (~$35c).
I've recently learnt about sodium ion batteries, such as this uk company:
https://www.elevenenergy.co.uk/#sodium-ion
They are larger than lithium batteries, but potentially cheaper and better performing around temperature extremes.
To get a sense of scale, when accounting for round trip efficiency of li-ion batteries and gravity batteries, a single 18650 battery has about the same energy as lifting 100kg by 50 meters.
A single cell is about $5 in volume, while 100kg of fill dirt and rock is about $2. At this point new pumped hydro or gravity batteries don’t scale like li-ion does. This tips even more towards normal batteries when you look at sodium or other cheaper but less energy dense batteries.
It looks like Energy Vault, the people with the tower crane and big stack of concrete blocks scheme, gave up on that. Energy Vault is now selling large battery systems that actually work.
Thing is that you need incredible large masses in incredible heights.
Example: Lifting a 10-metric-ton stone by 36 meters stores just about 1 kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy. This is roughly equivalent to the capacity of a small power station used for a camping trip.
This is the reason whey pumped hydroelectric energy storage (PHES) systems are so large. Gravity is quite a weak force.
If you’ve got very large containers of sand you can just store energy as heat instead, especially if you’re planning to use the energy for heating eventually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage
Judging by the source data:
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?tem...
Solar's global peak month in (northern hemisphere) summer 2024 nearly equaled nuclear, the full calendar year 2025 slightly beat nuclear and now it's possible that the next yearly minimum month coming up this december will match nuclear. That's a lot of change in just 2.5 years.
Also, the graph shows the world needs more wind power as it counter cycles both solar and hydro supply.
Two observation:
1. This must be a nightmare to plan the maintenance of a nuclear-heavy grid (as we have in France.) Any nuclear project must be planned 20 years, including just "keeping" what you built 50 years ago. So, assuming they're not stupid and are reading the changes in batteries and PV, anyone working on that knows that, potentially, during the 8th year of a 10-year construction plan, your all plan will have become obsolete.
But, if, for some reason, the evolution is not skyrocketing, and if you _don't_ plan on maintaining / replacing your plans (assuming that "batteries and EV will just solve it"), then you take the risk of, well... not having enough electricity.
So I suppose it's a trade-off between "the risk of have too expensive nuclear capacity", "the risk of loosing face and shutting down a plant construction because it's useless", and "the risk of not having electricity".
I suppose the calculation is that, if you do the first one (as we're doing, as far as I can tell), you end up with sunk cost, but your reactors are there, and you can always find something to do with it...
2. Is there an "Ormouz of solar" scenario ? What would be a SPOF in the solar + battery rollout that could bring the solarpunk world to a halt ? Obviously it's less at risk because, once the PVs and batteries are out of chinese factories, they will produce electricity no matter who rules in Beijing ; but, appart from Xi (who already controls pretty much everything we consume, at this point), is any particular country / corporation gaining leverage if the whole world goes full PV+B ?
> Is there an "Ormouz of solar" scenario?
Yes. At some point somebody will weaponize smart inverters.
It's avoidable if people suddenly decide to not act stupidly. I classify that as unlikely. It's also fixable, just like the oil Hormuz.
Is there a single company that "owns" that ?
> Any nuclear project must be planned 20 years
Is it true? France built more the 40 nuclear reactors in the 80s. I doubt it started “planning” for those in late 50s.
Ain’t designs standardized? Russian Rosatom builds a nuclear plant in 5-7 years
Obligatory "WiP" article : https://worksinprogress.co/issue/liberte-egalite-radioactivi...
In short, yes, France was able to build a lot of nuclear in the 80s, but the plans were made in the 70s and, to some extend, reused design and research from the 60s.
Mostly, they benefited from pre-Tchernobyl regulations, and a standardized design that would not be accepted anywhere in the world today if you started from scratch.
After a long hiatus, we sort of managed to build an over engineered post-Fukushima reactor (EPR) in about 20 years, and hopefully learnt lessons so that the next version of the new thing (EPR2) is less of a disaster - but still, you're talking about a decade and a half from presidential ink on paper to electron in the grid if everything goes well - and nuclear is one of those industries where things never go well. Mesmer plan is the exception, not the rule (except if you're Chinese, of course...)
For more, see “Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time” with 464 comments from 9 days ago.
Poland is going all on solar. People are enthusiastic about generating their own power, government had to step in and curb the enthusiasm.
I don't know anything about the polish electricity system but if supply or demand isn't very elastic then excess of either can lead to pretty huge price fluctuations and knock on effects thereafter.
Poland has massive issues with curtailment due to grid overload at peak hours
Currently Solar PV output is incredibly unbalancing but hopefully batteries will offset that in the coming years
Did they add a solar tax?
No: regulatory burden and worse rates for prosumers.
> worse rates for prosumers
Put alternatively, better rates for consumers. How should one portion the cost of the electrical system as a whole to different groups of people? If someone seldom draws electricity from the grid, and only when it is likely more expensive how much should they pay? What about the limit where everyone is a prosumer and has this usage pattern?
I would encourage people to buy batteries. But many small producers have less lobbing money than huge corporations.
bro the sun hardly rises above the horizon for 4 months of the year when power is needed the most.
Look at it the other way around, there are 8 months in the year where you can turn off or reduce fossil fuel consumption. It creates financing challenges (keep generation around for a few months in the year means more expensive power), but it also provides independence against foreign fossil fuel imports.
It is amazing that solar, a ridiculous cheap and easy to install solution is winning the energy future. In the past, based mostly on playing SimCity, I would have thought that Nuclear and then Fusion was the future, but solar does seem to be winning and pretty thoroughly.
I guess this is in part because it only needs amazing factories and not complex deployed and maintained infrastructure that is at risk of blowing up.
Solar seems to fix the mould of a disruptive technology to a T.
Games like SimCity just embody the assumptions that are designed into them, and there's no reason to think the designer was any more prescient than anyone else.
After all, if they could predict the future, why did they design a game rather than get rich in the stock market?
The user probably isn't suggesting the designers of SimCity are prescient; it's just that the assumptions that are designed into these games are clear reflections of the social perspective at the time. Assumptions like these tend to have inertia through time, and the user is likely just pointing out their surprise at the change.
I am not saying that SimCity predicts the future, rather I had assumptions growing up in that period, probably similar to everyone else at the time, that Nuclear and Fusion were the future of energy. It is cool to see that shift so soundly to solar in just two decades.
It's useful to go back and figure out why you believed that. Treat it as debugging your thinking. Others were saying, even back then, that nuclear and fusion had predictable economic problems.
SimCity 2000 with Fusion plants was released in 1993. To predict that solar would do this back then is asking a lot - this graph doesn't even start in 1993:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
People were predicting that solar would eventually take over everything in the 19th century.
It got out of the spot for a few decades when everybody started to be on nuclear power, but by the 1980s it was obvious nuclear wouldn't get there.
Fusion was predicted to be an economic nonstarter at least a decade before that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20782346
(Needless to say, I don't have a high opinion of current fusion start ups.)
And fission already had the financial fiasco of the first nuclear build out in the US.
Solar could have been predicted to get really cheap, if one had heroically projected its experience curve into the future. A lot of people chickened out doing that, even Greenpeace.
This is a ridiculous demand to make of an early teen in the pre-internet era. You know how hard it was to get information on arbitrary subjects back then like this?
That's fair, but it's also fair to ask the now middle aged person to understand their youthful errors, and to reflect on what other errors they made and might still be making.
They predicted they had a better chance of getting rich off the game as opposed to the stock market
Nuclear /could/ have solved this years ago but the spectacular and scary nature of failures like TMI or Chernobyl [0] really sunk any chance of that happening. Plus you had all the traditional nonrenewable energy providers intensely interested in stoking fears of that and the question of nuclear fuel storage.
[0] Yes pollution from normal everyday fossil fuel power generation causes more damage and deaths in the aggregate but it's a diffuse hard to attribute kind of damage which makes it far less, for lack of a better way to say it, real to people. eg: Did living downwind of that unupgraded coal plant really kill them or is their death because of something else.
Price probably played a pretty big role, too. The up front cost of a new nuclear plant is eye watering. Hard to compete against solar & battery these days which can be spun up in months and cost comparatively pennies.
That's also true, partially driven by a lot of hurdles and time spent fighting for approval due to the anti-nuclear push due to the things I mentioned, but it is also just expensive to build in the US because our labor and land is pretty expensive too.
Nukes are ruinously expensive all over the world. This isn’t a US thing, or a “darn regulations slowing us down” thing. Nukes are just too expensive, regardless of regulatory regime.
Is there a study that pinpoints which nuclear regulations are unnecessary and how much they add to the LCoE of a nuke plant?
I'm thinking more of the cycles of community approval that can drag on and delay the project rather than individual ongoing regulations.
Why are these rounds of community consultation allowed? Surely legislatures ought to be able to pre-empt them.
Disallow community input just for building nuclear in a community, or also disallow community input for all public and private zoning, and infrastructure proposals, transit proposals, etc?
Disallow community input for anything not meeting some emissions (noise, smell, light, whatever) at the property line criteria.
For industrial sites (including nuclear) there should have to be some sort of containment requirements or insurance/bonds for cleanup but if those can be met I don't see why it should matter any more than a soda bottling plant.
I mean concrete is also just really expensive. A lot of the cost is labor, yes, but still.
And the price was escalating even before TMI and Chernobyl.
Nuclear has to be the most cultish topic on HN, I swear. Anything less than full-throated support for nuclear gets downvoted into oblivion and it simply doesn't matter how well-reasoned those views are.
To borrow the meme about LISP [1], if nuclear was so good, it would've caught on at any point in the last 80 years. And it hasn't for some good reasons:
- It's too expensive. As an example, Hinkley Point-C in the UK has a super high negotiated rate that only lasts 35 years for a plant that still needs a lifetime of 60 to justify the investment so who knows how expensive the power will be for those last 25 years;
- It takes too long to build, typically ~20 years;
- Fuel processing (to create the fuel rods) creates a lot of harmful waste (eg UF6) and it is not a solved problem;
- Processing of spent fuel is not a solved problem. There's this idea that you just stick it in a barrel and leave it for a thousand years doesn't match the reality. It typically needs active cooling for possibly decades, for a start;
- Failure modes for a single plant dwarf any other alternative. The standard counterpoint is global warming from fossil fuels but that's for the entire fossil fuel ecosystem. The clean up for Fukushima, for example, will likely take over a century and cost over $1 trillion;
- The taxpayer bears the burden for these failures because, in the US for example, the industry self-insurance fund is a couple of orders magnitude too small to cover it;
- Nuclear requires liability limits well below any such failure mode to make it remotely economical (eg the Price-Anderson Act liability limits);
- The ecosystem of building, maintaining, repairing, servicing, monitoring and regulating nuclear power plants as well as all the supply chains (eg transporting and storing fuel) takes a long time to scale up.
I really wish I understood why nuclear has this cult-like following. It's completely irrational.
> I really wish I understood why nuclear has this cult-like following. It's completely irrational.
I believe it is largely because it is so unviable. If you can shut down any power supply argument with "but muh nuclear" then you can ensure that we keep burning coal and gas forever. And as a bonus, you get to pretend you're the smartest person in the room for having come up with the only good solution.
It did catch on, and then it was regulated beyond the point of profitability, and nuclear plants stopped being built. The points you make are only true because of the unique regulatory regime that nuclear plants exist under.
We tolerate all kinds of externalities from fossil fuel energy production and environmental degradation due to rare earth mining required to produce solar panels and wind turbines.
Nuclear energy is the only industry required to mitigate all possible externalities, and for that reason it is very expensive.
It’s disingenuous to claim nuclear power is a failure because it’s expensive to build without examining the reasons why that might be.
For proof it can work and is both safe and economical, witness the Chinese currently building 40 new nuclear plants. We could do that here, but choose not to. The only missing ingredient is political will, and resistance from ill-informed people such as yourself.
> Nuclear energy is the only industry required to mitigate all possible externalities, and for that reason it is very expensive.
Is there a plant where the enviromental costs of building and decomissioning a plant and of extracting and enriching the fuel are completely mitigated?
> ... regulated beyond the point of profitability
I love this argument because it's never qualified. What regulations exactly make nuclear unaffordable? How many of them are safety related? Is safety not necessary?
It's just a hand-wavy argument for nebulous deregulation when all the evidence suggests that no industry is capable of self-regulation.
> ... rare earth mining required to produce solar panels ...
Solar panels don't require rare earths.
> Nuclear energy is the only industry required to mitigate all possible externalities
This is just objectively false. Fuel processing, spent fuel processing and storage and failure modes are absolutely not completely mitigated or even solved problems.
> For proof it can work and is both safe and economical, witness the Chinese currently building 40 new nuclear plants.
Well if 40 power plants are being built, you can't really say that their operational record is that they're "safe and economical" because they have no operational record, right? Now China has other nuclear power plants but you're not arguing with those.
China has several advantages no Western country has:
1. A standardized design so economies of scales with components;
2. State subsidies such as ultra-cheap finance; and
3. If people who manage and oversee such plants skimp on such maintenance they'll likely be executed.
> China has several advantages no Western country has:
Plus, 4. The ability to do long-term planning.
5. An engineering culture instead of a lawfare culture.
There's upsides and downsides to both of these facts, of course.
> I really wish I understood why nuclear has this cult-like following. It's completely irrational.
Because “cost” is not an argument against something that hasn’t been scaled. Nuclear was snuffed in the crib before any repeatable plants could be brought online.
If you looked at the cost of solar in 1995, using it to power anything like a house was a complete joke. It had to fall over an order of magnitude and leave behind a trail of solar company corpses to get to a point where you can break even after 10 years putting them on a house.
Solar and wind need storage to make a complete solution, so when it comes to climate change discussions, you just end up with two “irrational” groups arguing about the optimistic potential things that don’t actually exist at an affordable cost.
Do you remember the microwave antenna power stations that power from solar satellites? The Moore-like drop of solar prices killed solar satellites, solar greenhouses with turbine chimneys, TW superconductor submarine cables circling the world etc.
Solar only works if you 1) live in a standalone house that 2) don't get tornadoes, typhoons, severe rainstorms or other disasters annually, and 3) they are installed on-prem, for off-grid capacities.
Games like SimCity often only supports ultradense Manhattan style cities and centralized solar plants through distribution networks. That combination doesn't work with solar technology. It should be like "Set up offgrid solar incentives program($1.5B)" buttons that reduces power draw proportionate to numbers of standalone houses that resets when disaster hits the parts of the map it was used on.
Interesting perspective. As someone who didn't even grow up in the US, I saw Sim City as a builder of relatively low density, hard zoning cities that had little to do with the high density I grew up in. The idea of commercial zones didn't even make sense to me, as in Spain, such thing doesn't exist. Need for traffic to get to the commercial zones made little sense.
Solar seems to be working just fine in Spain, a place where almost nobody lives in a stand alone house, or even a row house. You still put solar in the building, but then you have industrial solar in places wi5 little agricultural value, and wind turbines installed on top of hills. All of this could work just fine in any sim city I remember, as you are just dedicating space to power, which is fine.
Solar is “working just fine” as a way to help contribute daytime generation. It’s only 20% and the storage bit hasn’t been worked out so it’s going to continue to require something to cover the gaps at night. So the gas/coal/nuclear needs to backstop unless the population is good with nighttime blackouts when the wind stops. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Spain
I live in a place that gets typhoons, but there's probably only one big enough to rip my panels off every once in 5 years. Still, you never know which one it will be and I don't look forward to having to taken mine inside for false alarms.
I've seen plenty of solar in areas that get hit by hurricanes or tropical cyclones. If your panels get blown to bits, you just put up new panels once the storm is over (or you know, take them down when the storm is forecasted)
These[1] just keeps happening where I live. This year it was some flooded field ~40mi away from Tokyo station. You can't "just" pick them up as they continue to generate potential as broken panels continue to charge up potentials as long as there's light. IIUC you first carefully put tarps over them.
The situation is slightly different for rooftop solar installations, which are equally prone to flying debris as concentrated farms but somewhat less likely to be affected by disasters that the house it is on can withstand. But that would be for off-grid purposes and not for the grid, and my original comment that solar generation only works for on-prem off-grid applies.
On our boat[1] we have deployable solar that we need to take down every time it gets windy so I'm quite familiar with the process.
Plan it and it won't be a huge deal.
That said, I'm sure there are spots on this planet where solar isn't the best renewable option. Maybe small-scale wind power would be better where you are? On our boat we have both (and hydro for when we're sailing). Sadly these mechanical generators haven't yet received similar scale effects to their price as solar has.
That's a very narrow view of solar. Solar, like any other form of electricity, can be transmitted, even very large distances. There's no reason that places like the US Southwest can't generate a whole bunch of solar and export it to the national grid.
Plus below a certain cost threshold, the risk of damage still means the overall cost is lower.
Funny that you mention SimCity ... I used to play it (mostly the Nintendo SuperNES/SuperFamicom versions) and nuclear power plants would invariably explode at some point. I guess few people talked about climate change back then because the only drawback to the other power plant types was space usage ... reflecting on it, interesting how the assumptions formed the game ...
Well, it is where all energy on Earth originated/originates from :)
Geothermal is a thing :)
If I wanted to be pedantic (and I do), I could say that came from the proto-sun ;)
Another huge reason, I bet is that it's possible for me to have my own solar system, but not really possible to have my own little reactor.
> it's possible for me to have my own solar system
Finally, some much needed progress towards Sagan's apple pie.
If its any consolation, with your solar system you have a shared massive fusion reactor
I you only need heating, something like this might work
The simplest form of a nuclear reactor is some small sphere of purified heavy metal put onto a cavity on a thick Be sphere and covered by another piece of the same metal. The reactor can be started up and shut down by lowering or lifting the top piece using a flathead screwdriver shoved between two pieces, which can kill anybody nearby if dropped and the pieces go ultra super critical. That has to be a lot simpler than even a basic solar cell by itself.
Surely this is satire. The reference to the screwdriver is what convinced me it is.
I believe it refers to the death of the Los Alamos scientist Louis Slotin in 1946 when his own sloppiness around a plutionium core lead to a chain reaction and a dose of radiation that killed him within days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#Criticality_accid...
The nature of disruptive solutions is that they can be adopted easily at the bottom of the market - which means in this case people like you rather than at the centrally planned utility.
Theoretically fusion can/would be an absurd winner but the $$ needed to get it there vs "good enough" solar will likely prevent that from happening at a global scale IMO.
Solar is fusion. It is optically coupled to a free resource that was on the map from the beginning of the first turn.
It needs mines, but those are easily forgotten about once the blood money is washed through a few hands.
Nuclear's problem, despite it's Champions assertion that it's now safe and properly engineered, is it's still inherently dirty and that dirt follows it through out it's life. It also probably has bloody mines, but every step on the path of using nuclear requires security and safety, and even when it's disposed, it still requires safety and security. It loses because no one trusts anyone along the entire value chain to not cut corners that leads to unsafe practices.
Nuclear waste materials aren't hard to dispose of, they just have extremely high abuse potential. That's why they have to be safely stored for million years away from civilization, so that they cannot be dug up by current and future terrorists.
I think there was some ex-French colony government that demanded France disclose details of nuclear waste burial sites for "safety" reasons, which France rejected. Which means it happens. That kind of thing is why nuclear wastes are supposedly and actually so "dangerous" and small private owned generators get "complicated".
Yeah, Nuclear is one of those solutions where in an ideal world it makes sense, but in the real world it is just too complex all around make it work.
It's not like solar panels don't use raw materials.
It's from 2022, so probably outdated.
> According to the US Department of Energy (DOE), about 12% of all silicon metal produced worldwide (also known as “metallurgical-grade silicon” or MGS) is turned into polysilicon for solar panel production. China produces about 70% of the world’s MGS and 77% of the world’s polysilicon. Converting silicon to polysilicon requires very high temperatures, and in China it’s coal that largely fuels these plants. Xinjiang—a region in China of abundant coal and low electricity prices—produces 45% of the world’s polysilicon.
> Reports indicate that some Xinjiang polysilicon plants have employed forced labor of Uyghurs, an intensely persecuted Muslim ethnic minority.
[0] https://blog.ucs.org/charlie-hoffs/mining-raw-materials-for-...
the opening sentence already set the stage my man. you misread it some how.
I guess since we know about the problem and someone wrote an article saying we should fix it, it's taken care of?
That doesn't change that you've made a total apples to oranges comparison by using the environmental cost of nuclear fuel to the cost of having a solar panel.
Both produce a finite amount of MWh for their lifetime. Both require mining. How much mining and human rights violations exist per unit of energy produced is the metric you're looking for.
That's complicated though. Easier to pretend like it's zero for one and non-zero for the other.
You misread their original post.
> It needs mines, but those are easily forgotten about once the blood money is washed through a few hands.
This sentence was commenting on solar panels.
something about solar I don't understand is even if you crack energy storage for nighttime, what do you do about the tail risks? There are overcast days, sometimes it lasts for multiple days. you can have a volcano eruption or wild fires that have the same effect on solar cells.
would it really be acceptable to have power outages during such events? is it reasonable to have gas plants on standby for just this? if so, you must add them to the cost of solar.
Every time I see something about solar's expanding capacity, I imagine a Yeoman farmer in a cowboy hat with straw in his mouth talkin' about farming yer energy.
Is it? I keep hearing something like $30k. That might pay for itself over time, but it's hardly cheap.
Rooftop solar and grid scale solar farms are two completely different things. Rooftop solar requires a custom install for every home. Solar farms can leverage economies of scale to drive costs lower and lower.
If you have to hire Some Guy to do anything to your entire roof, it'll cost you $30k. The panels are basically free these days, the labor required to install them is not.
Come to Europe. Our discount stores will sell you a kit for €200-€300. Not 20k-30k, 200-300.
That's on the small side of things, of course, but we also have PV-covered carports for about the same as a non-PV-covered carport: https://www.kaufland.de/product/512021383/
The fact that solar panels are getting cheaper on a sqft basis than plywood or sheet metal means we are going to stat to shove them in lots of places we never expected to especially if micro inverters or optimizes become cheap as well. why not use solar panels on your fence if it is cheaper than any other options.
> why not use solar panels on your fence if it is cheaper than any other options.
I was considering this earlier in the year, as it happens.
The biggest issue I can see is that you would want a micro inverter or solar optimizer on every panel or every other panel to get decent output which would add a lot to the cost.
Don't take my word for it because I still feel like I don't fully understand the situation, but are you aware of the current state of bypass diodes and shadow scanning in mppts? The situation seems to have changed a lot in recent years.
Just checked my local online store - non-structural plywood is still about 5-10x cheaper.
I don't think you realize how little power does apartment needs. Your average American/AU/NZ home is using 10x more energy.
I know exactly how little power an apartment needs, that's why I had the entire second paragraph.
Solar panels cost less than $1/Watt. Then you need some brackets to hold them, some wiring, and likely an MPPT controller. The rest of that price is red tape specific to your locality.
They're so cheap that bars in Colombia had panels as their terasse awnings. Cheaper than cloth and makes power.
Vast majority of costs is in the installation and regulation, Australia home installation costs are a fraction of the cost of the USA and in Europe with plug in solar its a few hundred Euros for a couple panels and small inverter for a small setup
Cost per kW/mW is much lower at grid scale than home scale. For a home installation you are also paying for the roof mounting, running cabling through your house, inverter(s), and a transfer switch at minimum.
The cost of the panels themselves is becoming one of the cheaper parts of that project.
$30k for what? Your house? Prices vary massively depending on needs, and whether or not you want to reduce grid usage, time shift grid usage, or replace it entirely and go off-grid.
This article isn't about personal solar installations, in any event.
They're talking about grid scale solar, not home installations.
Home solar makes sense for the same type of homes that need to drill their own well. For everyone else, grid solar makes most economic sense.
The city grew around my house and now I have access to city water if I want. I stick with my well because it is cheaper. Even if I had to drill a new well, over 20 years it is cheaper than city water. Pipes and city scale treatments that I don't need are expensive.
Solar power is nuclear!
Before you get angry, remember what the sun is....
You could equally well say that nuclear is the only non-solar energy (coming from other stars instead).
Every power is nuclear, with a few extra steps. Oil/coal is also nuclear, with a few extra steps.
most people in the west ie US and western europe if they haven't travelled to africa etc and other '3rd world countries' miss the solar revolution.
what china has done is massive - cheap solar panels & batteries - means a lot of places that never had grid connections suddenly have power 24/7 for cheap. with electric cars / hybrid cars from china - means even transportation is now cheap too. some places even have those electric mopeds too.
nothing beats free energy from the sun.
They aren't mutually exclusive - we should have more of both.
Nuclear is bad capital allocation. The reasons nuclear is expensive are very very difficult to overcome, whereas if you can make a solar cell cheaper, solar gets cheaper. Nuclear operating expenses, nuclear safety and security expenses, and decommissioning expenses constitute multiple difficult problems none with straightforward solutions.
It reduces risk though - solar power will be much less useful if battery tech doesn't continue to improve, and we can't be certain that it will.
That's the thing about capital allocation: you can reduce risk as much or more by buying batteries and more solar panels, and you can get it next week at a reliable price.
Nuclear is expensive because of risk, and a lot of that risk is just project risk. Nuclear doesn't get built on time or on budget because project management so often goes sideways. It's not the permits or the protesters.]
Is there any practical way for US individuals to invest in solar? With the anti-solar attitude from the government, is now a good time given that's where the world is obviously headed?
If you're talking about investment in the usual sense, can't you just buy stocks of solar/clean energy companies?
Otherwise, if you just mean financially supporting solar technology, one good way is donating to political action/lobbying groups like Greenlight America or CATF (though that supports clean energy as a whole, not just solar)
Buy some solar panels yourself and use them to generate electricity in your own home? Write to your local legislators expressing support for utility scale solar panel arrays?
I'm sure there are lots of ways. For example you could give people money to buy panels via https://ecoligo.com or similar services.
I understand the sentiment but I also think the modern electrical grid is one of the most impressive and valuable things man has created and I'd hate to see us give up on it.
Surely economic forces will overcome political ones eventually, right?
Does anyone understand why you can't generally use solar when the power goes out? Is it just risk to line workers? (Couldn't you just auto-disconnect from the mains?) Is it just too variable to be useful enough on its own? Is my premise just wrong?
[edit]
According to HN you can totally do this and I'm just wrong.
So - short answer, it costs more and it doesn't happen that often. So contractors don't sell/install it.
Most solar installs work by tying into the existing main breaker of the home.
The cheapest way to do this is to leave the line feeding from the power meter to the main panel untouched. Instead you do anti-islanding detection at the inverters, and when they detect that mains is "down" they automatically cut off to prevent trying to backfeed power to your whole neighborhood during an outage (dangerous, not a good idea).
---
Second issue - there are many appliances that are NOT happy about being turned on and off at random times, and it can significantly impact their lifespan (ex - refrigerators, acs, computers, washers & dryers, etc).
So given the variability of direct solar, you don't want to accidentally destroy your ac unit by having it turn on and off 100 times as random clouds float by.
---
But! If you're willing to install even moderate battery capacity (and LFP is getting quite cheap as well). Then you can absolutely do this. It's just more complicated and more expensive.
You need to wire in a mains relay (~$1,000 depending on the unit) and install some battery capacity to prevent very frequent startup/shutdown, then go through some painful additional signage and labeling requirements (at least in most of the US) and also install some additional shut-down switches on the exterior of the home (ex - to automatically turn the inverters off, and to shutdown the battery system).
Then, yes, you can absolutely stay on solar power while the grid is down. In the same way that people are allowed to run whole-home generators to stay online when the grid is down.
Thanks, that's a really useful explanation. It sounds like if you forgo using a battery, then you have to be comfortable scurrying around and unplugging some of your devices. (and as silly as that is, you might aggressively power-cycle a device into oblivion before you manage to get everything unplugged. (most people would probably just not settle that sort of plugging / unplugging.)
> It sounds like if you forgo using a battery, then you have to be comfortable scurrying around and unplugging some of your devices.
Pretty much. I vaguely remember a couple of "off-grid" devices that try to automate this for you (ex - you can set a priority on each breaker, and as supply dips, they get dropped in order of priority).
But functionally speaking, you just need to install a battery. Frankly - Batteries aren't discussed as much as solar, but the big breaking point we're hitting right now isn't just that solar has gotten incredibly, unimaginably cheap.
It's that BOTH batteries AND solar are getting very, very cheap. And the new generation of batteries are also considerably safer than the original lithium batteries.
Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries (LFP) are ~$60/kWh right now. I can buy them commercially in bulk in the US around ~$80 (pretty much all china production - full stop. Historically, I've bought EVE cells, but I'm now seeing direct BYD branded cells as well).
If sodium-ion can hit the same price points (and odds are looking better and better they'll both hit and then plow past as they bulk up production) then my read is that modern power plants are going to be very, very different.
They'll look a lot more like the connection structures we see for trees - a bunch of connected independent installs that can optionally cooperate as needed. Ex https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260928-a-virtual-power-...
Thanks for the detailed explanation. Can we connect? Email on my profile. I run a non-profit, I teach middle/high-school and college kids about building codes and the first thing I have them do is find out the county building code engineers[1] and ask them to update the code: require 240V outlets in the garage for EV charging. After they know how to do this, the next steps are to require 240V outlet for heat pump water heater, induction stove (solves indoor air pollution), heat pump HVAC. Everything can be electric. Finally, build the house with solar panels on the roof.
Home circuitry, load center need to be redesigned for V2X (vehicle to grid, home, load, etc), plug-in solar and batteries, solar/batteries replacing generators, etc. You seem to have thoughtful ideas about these and it would help to have someone knowledgable articulate how it should be done.
[1]The idea is that they can change the world right now by understanding what they want in their world (clean and free energy) and that they need to ask for those changes because buildings last ~100 years. The lowest hanging fruit is future-proof all construction and have it be ready for incremental changes without needing any labor or permitting work.
Asking kids to push your political goals under the guise of “education” feels pretty icky.
how is grid electrification and evs political?
This isn't [pro|anti] [biden|trump|abortion|guns|vaccines|facemasks|etc].
Its kids deciding for themselves about the world they want to live in and what features they want in it. Buildings last ~100 years and most likely they are going to live in a home that was built in the past. If they want modern features or amenities without spending a fortune rebuilding the house, its best to future proof.
You can, especially when you also have an energy storage rack. The inverter has to support going into "island mode".
Where I live, on sunny days, the grid goes over 253V (230V nominal +10%), so in order for me to generate anything, my inverter disconnects itself from the grid.
The risk to line workers is overstated, they ground the lines before working on them. The reason solar doesn't work without the grid is because most solar installs don't [0] have batteries. And you can't practically power your house directly off panels if you don't have a battery to act as a buffer.
[0] It is becoming way more common now, though.
The very simple answer is you must have a battery system to complement the solar system or you're just losing power again when a cloud comes and decimates your household production. The electrical inertia must be held at a nice constant.
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense too. I didn't have a sense for how much power would fluctuate, but it makes sense that it would almost _need_ to fluctuate well below capacity. If it didn't, it would mean that in full sun you'd have built your solar array well _over_ capacity, which would be inefficient in a different direction.
you can. there are auto-switches, these are used by diesel generators. The better question, is what happens when the power goes out at night.
When the power goes out at night I typically go to bed.
Do people commonly do this for regularly residential setups? I wonder if I've just been talking to the wrong people.
I think some inverters have a special island mode for off-grid operation, but it's not standard.
The price coming down is great, more accessibility to more people. Have there been any significant breakthroughs in overall average efficiency/conversion? e.g. 30%+ Asking for my own selfish needs as I am in a place with reduce sunlight availability.
It really comes down to overcoming the Shockley-Queisser limit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi...
You can get around it with multi-layer, but each layer adds diminishing returns on improvements, while the cost keeps increasing.
The best way to handle places with less solar irradiance is to have more panels. The cost per panel keeps dropping, so the economics keep improving in that way.
Agreed adding more panels would work around the limitation. The reason I ask is that in theory there is room to reach upwards of 48%, the max being reached right now is around 32% and all the panels I can find that are mass produced are between 20% and 22% assuming one can even find the numbers, some companies are making the numbers hard to find. Anything above 22% appear to climb in cost exponentially.
With more panels my setup will be more of an eye-sore, require more and longer cables, combiner boxes and the setup becomes a bigger project. So I am just being a selfish ass but I had to ask where we are.
Multijunction solar cells (the ones that can get over 30% efficiency in theory or 25% in practice) are a completely different market. They generally go into satellites and research labs, not rooftops and power plants. That's why the numbers are hard to find.
That's how you do an energy transition! In Germany, the energy transition is based on legal and regulatory schemes, whereas the rest of the world transitions because it makes economic sense.
I may be wrong, but my impression is that the "legal and regulatory schemes" the red-green government placed in the early 2000s kicked off a lot of the solar economy we see now. Then the "legal and regulatory schemes" of the conservatives killed the solar economy in Germany <https://www.heise.de/en/opinion/Katherina-Reiche-s-Solar-Tra...>.
I wish I could have solar, every time I run the numbers it doesn't make sense since our power is so cheap
How cheap? Where you based? Here in New England, counting fees etc, we're about $.30 per kWh, or around .27 Eur per kWh.
Nuclear power plants are only useful if you want nuclear bombs. For power production they have been much to expensive for decades.
Looking at power output, or worse, power capacity, is not a good way to compare solar to nuclear.
While solar is definitely useful, nuclear is available at all time, during the night, winter, and bad weather. Solar as it is right now (even with a lot of batteries) is not a direct replacement for nuclear energy.
> For power production they have been much to expensive for decades.
Sizewell B signed a contract for difference at £70.50/MWh for the next 20 years, which is cheaper than UK offshore and onshore wind in CfD AR7.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/sizewell-b-power-plant-gi... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/contracts-for-dif...
Better in many ways: true clean energy like solar and wind are the only sources of power that truly allow individuals, communities and regions to be self-sufficient. That would flatten the distribution of power currently held by a few national or international power/energy providers - that's why it has been so ferociously fought by them via propaganda, lobbying, sabotage the past few decades.
It may sound absurd, but of all movies the 1990s Naked Gun 2 plot was already about fossil/nuclear conspiracy to withhold liberating, independent clean power from the people. Now we are just add an affordance infliction point that it doesn't make any more sense to not deploy it privately.
(and before the nitpickers nudge in, yes of course ideally it would run on open-source free software. But it's a reach goal, one that you never have with nuclear/fossil)
I hope we see solar in all roofs. It will have a big impact to overall power need.
Great to read some good news for once. Solar in Aus is gong gang busters, as are home batteries. Awesome combo.
I'm happy if we don't need more nuclear. We're already leaving the place in a sorry state, might as well not litter it with stuff that can kill you if you look at it too long...
If it displaces fossil generation, it's still a big win.
It won't.
The main problem with solar and wind is that they can't be dispatched on demand. The power is incredibly cheap, but you are completely at the mercy of the weather.
What is needed is a source of power which can make up for the freak moments where 1) there isn't any sun, and 2) there isn't any wind, and 3) it lasts long enough that batteries can't cover it, and 4) it has to be widespread enough that you can't make up for it with power from half a continent away.
This power source will only need to be used for a few hundred hours per year but it'll need to carry a significant load, so while its per-MWh running costs are basically irrelevant its one-time per-MW construction costs should be fairly low.
This does not at all describe nuclear power, which has incredibly high construction costs, near-zero running costs, and is expected to run 24/7/365 at 100%.
I'm optimistic about synthetic hydrocarbons for that use case. The infra is already in place for storage, delivery, consumption. You gotta waste some energy to get it, but if sun and wind is cheap most of the time, who cares?
> synthetic hydrocarbons
I don't follow. Why would they be any less polluting than natural ones?
Because we'd be making them out of CO2 pulled from the atmosphere in the first place. We wouldn't be putting any new carbon into the atmosphere, just recycling carbon that's already there. And the larger our fuel stockpiles get, the more carbon we've sequestered. I think it has better economic incentives than pumping CO2 down into the earth or something like that.
In and of themselves the hydrocarbons are molecules with only Carbon and Hydrogen atoms. So, they're polluting only in the sense that we should not release more Carbon Dioxide into our atmosphere because due to the Greenhouse Effect that causes Climate Disaster.
In terms of regular old "Oh, no, it's toxic" pollution this part was fine, and the problem in the "natural" hydrocarbons is that they were not actually pure hydrogen and carbon - especially coal. So you just wouldn't do that in the synthetics. It's likely easier to make "pure" synthetics.
In terms of climate, the synthetics would be cycling carbon that already exists. So they'd be neutral. Neutral isn't a solution, but it's at least not making the problem even worse which we are aggressively continuing to do as a species.
Because they would be generated with CO2 by industrial processes or carbon capture. I don't see the process becoming economically viable, and hydrocarbon combustion create other toxic byproducts, compared to hydrogen. It will still make sense for usages that require a high J/kg fuel ratio.
Do you see any other carbon capture scheme becoming economically viable? I mean, if we must put atmospheric carbon in tanks anyhow, why not package it as fuel so that we can burn it later if we need to?
Spring and fall are peak solar collection times, summer and winter are peak energy use times. So collect the carbon in fall, burn it in winter, re-collect it in spring, burn it in summer...
New projects are decades from completion given the size of the any reactor, modular is unproven. We need clean power right now, actually 20 years ago
A single solar installation on the scale required to replace the output of one nuclear plant also takes many years to come online. You're not wrong that new nuclear projects take a long time to start producing, longer than any other power solution, but new solar projects of that magnitude don't pop up overnight. There's still bureaucracy, funding, land acquisition (and boy do you need a lot of land for enough solar to offset even one nuclear plant), construction, power grid connections, and sourcing/manufacturing the actual panels.
The median reactor in the US produces 1-2GW. Most nuclear installations have multiple reactors, so capacity is a multiple of that. 1GW of solar generation requires literally millions of solar panels and thousands of acres of land, and still needs the transformers and distribution infrastructure. And that doesn't include any storage capability.
This is a contrived example. You're making it sound like solar is power available now. It simply isn't, on any scale like that. If it takes a decade to bring 1GW of solar online and two decades to bring 1GW of nuclear online, it's not as clear-cut.
Nuclear could be done a lot more quickly than it is and still be safe. Not as fast as solar, but it's not like it's an order of magnitude.
But you don't need "a single solar installation on the scale required to replace the output of one nuclear plant". This is electricity, it's fungible, ten tiny projects produces the same power as one large project.
The UK's biggest solar farm, Cleve Hill has 373 MW nameplate capacity but over the last two years the UK brought 10x that much total subsidised grid solar online - not to mention the unsubsidised which is likely many times more because if you're a gambler the subsidy is mitigating a risk you wanted† I don't have blow-by-blow data for unsubsidised schemes because only the subsidy needs to track that.
† The UK uses Contracts for Difference to subsidise these energy projects. In effect these contracts guarantee you a price, your "strike price" when you sign the contract, plus automatic inflation tracking. But for Solar PV that price can be (and for years now has been) lower than wholesale electricity prices you'd keep outright if you were willing to gamble and risk the wholesale price collapsing. Cleve Hill paid about £3.5M to us because their guaranteed price was lower than the wholesale price they received most of the time.
Or the Pakistani solution: over 3 years, import 55GW of panels and distribute them across roofs. https://janrosenow.substack.com/p/pakistan-the-solar-revolut...
By comparison, the country's nuclear programme is targeting 2050, and I suspect that may get overtaken by events. Although it's still required for nuclear weapons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Pakistan
> You're making it sound like solar is power available now
It is. It's a thing you can buy from Aliexpress.
Thanks very interesting perspective
Build nuke and solar then. The more the merrier.
Nuke, storage, solar and wind. They all work together. You need redundancy, resiliency and dedicate quality power.
No reason for people to splinter the effort on clean reliable power.
If we only go after solar, wind and storage -- how are we ever going to get to long form space travel and continue to level up our technology for energy? How will we get to fusion?
They don't really work together, actually. Nuclear is the opposite of solar, it has a consistent output at all times that makes no sense to stop or curtail. It doesn't play particularly well with renewables, unlike gas, which is expensive to run and polluting, but is already built and can be run when renewables are not producing.
If you add enough batteries, nuclear comes back the original economics.
I'm not sure the "enough batteries" part is a good investment, and the original economics is already not competitive with renewables. But maybe after you add in long term storage and the possibility of black swan risks it can make sense to subsidize a bit of other kinds of power on some regions.
If you know the energy system it absolutely does. Theres a large portion of power that is always in demand. Industrial power needs high quality power and constant on.
If you know the energy system and are not operating off out of date thinking, it absolutely does not. Wind and solar shifted with batteries is munching its way through this night time supply window . On a timeframe of 20 years this obsolete “baseload supply” economic niche will absolutely no longer exist.
> How will we get to fusion?
By researching fusion? Imagine how much research you could do with all the money that you didn't waste on building uneconomical nuclear power plants
Or subsidizing oil and gas... It's such a shame that a certain political ideology which strongly believes in the free market (or so they claim) made energy a political issue...
A bit of a waste if the nuclear is obsolete by the time it comes online and we could have spent the money on renewables instead.
Money can only be spent once. Similarly, a construction crew can only be at one construction site at a time. Investing in building new nuclear power plants will slow down construction of solar.
> Money can only be spent once
Nope. One of the fundamental premises of money is that it circulates. The only way money could not be re-spent is if the money supply were to decrease.
The total volume of new power generation is going to be mostly determined by how much those capital holders value it. If there's more utility in power this year than last, we may see more new starts in generation projects, regardless of which type of generation those projects are doing.
What? Construction crews are completely different - different tranches of money. Couldn't be more wrong about this.
Technically solar is fusion.
my money is still on nuclear but i would be happy to be wrong
> Solar, a mature technology for some 15 years now, became the cheapest electricity in history in 2020.
I mean, the article kind of self-contradicts the idea that it's mature technology. A mature technology would not be halving in cost every couple of years. 15 years ago solar cells cost about $2.50/watt; in 2024 it was about $0.27/watt.
All hail Chinese overcapacity?
arghhh ‘quietly becoming’ I smell AI
It's just clickbait headline speak. Predates LLMs by a little bit. I think it's meant to make it sound like you're being let in on a secret or sometime to cast whatever is being reported on in a negative light by implying it's sneaky somehow.
Then theres something wrong with your nose.
I suppose now it is possible to install a mirror in space, creating shade over countries that receive energy from the sun, and charge a commission for the use of the sun.
Why do I keep getting $20k quotes to install it then in the US. We seem to be doing something incorrectly here. The underlying hardware seems cheap (through independent research) but the labor and add in fees seem to be making this expensive. At sub $10k prices for the panels + batteries I would get it yesterday.
From what I've heard from people who've done deep dives, most solar installers in the US are essentially financing scams. The component costs have come way down, it's still essentially screwing things into the roof + a few hours from an electrician.
The real money is convincing marks to take the financing for 20+ years.
If that were the only reason, you’d surely be able to find someone who undercut the bloated financed costs and do a straightforward labor and materials install. But no such cheaper options exist
> But no such cheaper options exist
None? Project Solar? The last time I seriously looked at doing rooftop panels, they were significantly cheaper than the door-to-door jerks.
i did get a quote with them. Its still 3 times (!) the price my parents paid in australia. not exactly apples to apples, but whats going on?
To my understanding regulation explains most of the difference. And it will vary a lot from place to place -- your experience will depend largely on local government policy and what your grid provider requires in order to establish the connection. E.g. locally I'm kinda forced to go with one of the power company's blessed installers. Cha-ching! If I understand Australian regulations, they tend to be more uniform nationally, there is less bureaucracy to drive up costs.
california adopted part of australia's regulatory framework - required all counties to adopt an instant online permitting for solar, through a unified portal (SB 379). Didnt seem to help costs much.
There's probably more to the regulatory problem than just the permits i guess.
Depends on many factors. If installers are able to fully fill their available time and crews with jobs at the current price and expanding is limited by the availability of new crews high prices could be a stable equilibrium until a) more crews become available/techniques improve to speed up install times or b) demand relaxes and they need to drop their price to find sufficient customers.
There's also other factors like the overall cost being beyond people's willingness to save for when financing is available or the extra value that financed installs can provide the underwriters when they're bundled and sold as a stable income stream like houses were in the mid 00s.
"If it can be done cheaper someone will" is based on a lot of simplifications and assumptions about the market in question.
Unless there are enough marks for everyone to scam. Then the focus is to extract the money instead of investing in crushing the competition.
Not necessarily. There are little-known monopolies like the eyewear, travel agencies, and cargo fuel (there are many more!) where price fixing like this happens.
This makes me want to start a solar company.
AI can't take my job then.
One indicator is that third world countries can seem to afford it.
"But no such cheaper options exist"
Untrue, at Sunspark we sold to both individuals and companies. If you can install the stuff yourself, buying it direct from the manufacturer is ungodly cheap (~330w panels at $80 a piece when I worked there almost decade ago.)
yeah, ive looked into DIY. As you say, even with tarrifs its pretty cheap to buy the panels and inverters. Which makes the installed cost even sillier, > $15k markup for a 2 day job.
I call this "the capitalism fallacy": it doesn't exist in the (my) market, therefore it's not possible.
The fallacy is that there are infinite market opportunities but a finite supply of entrepeneurs/business/money to exploit them. Therefore, there are an infinite number of market opportunities that will get passed up for one reason or another.
No, the cash prices are insane too. I paid cash for my system.
This is a good question - there are fairly high imposed tariffs on solar in the US[0] but I think the labor is the big part. Over here in the UK, solar installation would cost about $12k dollars, so quite a bit cheaper, but still not below $10k.
One thing that isn't super obvious from the article is that a lot of it is talking about industry solar panels rather than rooftop. The overheads of installation etc get a lot smaller if you're installing a whole bunch at once.
This isn't to say that installing solar panels on your house is a bad idea - they normally pay for themselves after something like 10 years from memory, so are similar to double glazing.
[0] https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/overview-trade-and-polic...
> they normally pay for themselves after something like 10 years from memory
I would guess this varies by locale, and people usually assume the time value of money to be zero when they make the claim. In much of the US, I think the payback time is more realistically in the 15-20 year range, which means you really only want to install panels when you install a new roof. Otherwise the lifetime of the roof will happen before break even on the panels.
> This isn't to say that installing solar panels on your house is a bad idea - they normally pay for themselves after something like 10 years from memory
I am with you, this would be better on a town or regional basis instead of on everyone’s roof. Our houses already have wires going to them and I can’t imagine my particular roof or garage is the best place to put panels and batteries. But I understand it’s a political / administrative issue which may well be not solvable easily in many places.
Rooftop solar costs 3x more per watt than utility scale. The only reason it would pay off is that you're able to avoid grid maintenance costs built into per-kwh pricing.
Residential electricity pricing is 3x-4x wholesale pricing.
Which is gaming a particular kind of rate structure. They would not do nearly as well if grid maintenance charges were decoupled from consumption.
Rooftop solar (ideally with battery backup) allows you to be independent of the grid (yes, even if you're interconnected, if you do it properly), which means PG&E's garbage infrastructure can largely become irrelevant if your system is properly sized.
The regulatory overhead to grid-connect is a _significant_ portion of the price, both for the actual paperwork labor and because of the premium it imposes on the system components (you can't use inexpensive non-UL-listed panels)
Is this really a thing in the US? At least in Europe, rooftop solar like OP mentioned doesn't require grid-connection?
Only some states allow simple plug in roof top or balcony solar I believe. So depending on your area you might be required to do a grid hookup and lose access to it during outages.
Nevada has started allowing it, and other states are starting to allow it in Jan 2027. However, these all rely on equipment that meets standards that equipment is not yet certified for (UL 3700). It's a bit of a waiting game in the US right now.
Net metering hasn’t been allowed in my county in more than two years so that can’t be it.
I suspect a huge chunk of that is labor costs rather than materials.
Labor costs even more in Australia, yet total systems are installed for about 1/3rd - 1/4th the cost of the US. It’s not labor.
It is labor. It's code. The amount of labor required to do an installation to code in the US is easily 50% more, if not more than that. Australia also has standardized streamlined racking that works on much higher percentage of roofs, the US has a lot more custom construction.
>Labor costs even more in Australia
This is really surprising to hear. Are you sure about that?
Australia's minimum wage is significantly higher than in the US. An adult working as a burger flipper at McDonalds can expect a minimum of $27.81 / hour.
yup. not just the minimum - skilled labor costs are very high too.
For the same reason you don't have a small coal power plant in your backyard - scale matters.
This makes me think of the Franklin Pot Belly stove we had in the middle of the living room growing up and the coal bin in my back yard having to go out there on cold winter mornings to bring a bucket in.
Many private utilities in the US have fought against residential solar, and are seemingly motivated to act against it as something against their long term interests. In California the amount of Public Utilities Commisssion retrograde policy is ridiculous.
Just dont expect net metering and get yourself some batteries. They are cheap now.
Don't confuse grid solar with on-prem
On-prem has a problem of distributed labour costs.
On-prem might eventually become cheaper, but my guess is that won't happen any time soon.
For the time being, centralized and at-scale installation is where you can get much, much lower labour per watt costs.
If you want to look at a place that is comparable to (parts of) the US that manages to do things about 3-4x cheaper, look at Australia. They seem to have stumbled on something that works ridiculously well. You can get a quote and stuff installed in something like a few weeks at most. It's done right and efficiently without a lot of bullshit.
Other places (like the EU and especially the US) have regulatory problems around anything to do with energy. This is mostly about ass coverage resulting in a lot of pressure for certification, related fees, grid operators insisting on a lot of overhead, building codes requiring a lot of faffing about for the business of wiring together what is essentially plug and play stuff, etc.
If you have an off grid shed, providing power to it is cheap and easy because you have none of that. You buy the hardware on amazon or wherever. It arrives, you wire it up. Job done. And if you are smart you might let a qualified electrician do it right for you or at least check your work (so your shed doesn't burn down and nobody dies from electrical shocks). But fundamentally it's not that hard and this stuff is mostly pretty safe and easy to work with. Especially compared to the things people burn down their sheds with traditionally (e.g. generators).
There's a lot of optimization potential here and most of that is completely non technical.
I diy installed a 13kw ground mount with a 32kwh battery for $18,700 before the tax rebate last december. 6 year payback at my current rate of $0.12 kwh after the rebate. Its a complete no brainer at this point.
6 years to recoup your costs on a depreciating asset is maybe not such a good investment that it becomes a no brainer. It's an OK investment, but the money can probably be invested better.
Self-installable plug-in solar is coming: https://www.energysage.com/news/plug-in-balcony-solar-panels...
Residential solar in the US is very expensive, $3-4/watt versus utility scale closer to $1/watt. The cheapest residential solar options are community solar if your state and utility supports it, or a ground mount system.
The biggest cost components are sales and marketing expenses and similar soft costs. Some of this can be driven down if you collectively buy through something like https://solarunitedneighbors.org/
(have installed 100kw+ of residential solar, ama)
"Residential solar in the US is very expensive, $3-4/watt versus utility scale closer to $1/watt."
Yea, if you go to an installer instead of buying from the OEM and installing yourself. I likely made your panels at SunSpark (We made panels for everyone, Renogy, Juinko Solar, Samsung, etc.) They were sold for $80 at 330w - 4.125 watts per dollar, or a quarter per watt.
Solar isn't expensive - you are.
> Solar isn't expensive - you are.
I am not a commercial system installer, I am a hobbyist enthusiast who helps others install to avoid commercial installers and their costs. Volunteer labor for everything (racking, panels, electrical), volunteer electrician signs off for any AHJ (authority having jurisdiction) requirements.
Most people cannot install the equipment themselves, which leads to the residential costs I mention. Is it expensive? Price is what you pay, value is what you get. If you cannot find someone to install for free, and cannot do it yourself, the price is the price. You can either choose to pay market rate after getting multiple bids, or choose to go without.
US Dept of Energy: Solar Photovoltaic System Cost Benchmarks - https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/solar-photovoltaic-syste...
Energy Sage: Solar panel cost in 2026 - https://www.energysage.com/local-data/solar-panel-cost/
(i am also a community outreach volunteer for https://www.gosolarapp.org for automating permitting and remote inspections across the US, which was incubated at NREL prior to being spun out as an independent non profit; this drives down permitting soft costs)
"Most people cannot install the equipment themselves"
This is highly untrue, until you get to the task mounting on a roof. Barring that, making a solar array system is dead simple. Most anyone can turn a screwdriver or build a frame or connect very distinct connectors together (they just snap together for daisy-chaining solar panels) or insert a power plug into a NEMA receptacle (for balcony solar installs.)
It is the install on the roof itself which most people cannot do (because they lack roofing knowledge.) Every other thing is absolutely DIY by pretty much anyone with hands and eyes.
> It is the install on the roof itself which most people cannot do (because they lack roofing knowledge.) Every other thing is absolutely DIY by pretty much anyone with hands and eyes.
Literally the most important part is what most people cannot do. If you have the space, sure, ground mount. Most people do not have the space, nor are they going to be confident in putting penetrations in their roof deck to mount racking to hold the panels.
How can the numbers ever work? $15k pays my electric bill for a decade. I get that it amortizes beyond that, but it's a heck of a sunk cost that just doesn't make sense IMO.
I have a cabin in the woods, an hour from my house, my choices are either install a couple of solar panels on the roof, or have no electricity.
I'm looking forward to installing a couple of panels on the roof next year. Having power to charge my phone, or laptop, won't take much capacity, I'm not going to use much power other than that, maybe some music but nothing like cooking/heating, or similar heavyweight usage. (I have a wood stove for heating, and gas/alcohol stoves for cooking, along with on-site water.)
Especially if a once-in-a-decade freak hailstorm can take it out…
Solar panels are rated to handle 1 inch hail at 52mph (IEC 61215). Damaged panels can be easily replaced, and are typically covered by your homeowner's insurance.
https://www.energysage.com/news/solar-panels-withstand-hail/
- Every panel sold in the U.S. has to pass an industry-standard hail test, which fires ice balls at multiple points on the panel and requires no visible cracking, delamination, or more than a 5% drop in power output afterward. Companies like UL Solutions, an applied safety science company, test solar panels by dropping a two-inch solid steel sphere from 51 inches onto panels, simulating the impact energy of serious hail. Panels that survive without electrical hazards earn certification for real-world deployment.
- The proof is in the pudding—or in this case, the parking lot. When a severe hailstorm hammered the National Laboratory of the Rockies' (NLR) (formerly National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)) Colorado campus in 2017, just one single panel out of more than 3,000 suffered damage. That's a 99.97% survival rate against Mother Nature.
Because your electric bill goes up every year as the utility keeps asking for return on equity (assuming investor owned utility, math might be different if you're in an electric coop). A solar PV system will produce power for 25 years at a minimum at a fixed cost. Like a mortgage that is fixed versus rent that is not.
It's the equivalent of a bond investment with potential subsidies at the utility, state, and federal level (solar is no longer subsidized, but batteries still are).
> 25 years at a minimum
So long as the roof itself lasts that long. People who are mid-cycle on their existing roof should not install solar until they get to the next replacement. This is where I am, and why I do not have rooftop solar. I expect to get 15 additional years from my roof, and there's no guarantee I will have hit the break even point by then. Plus, solar installers will not warranty a mid-cycle roof against leaks, so if something goes wrong that quickly eats into your cost savings.
It is also cheaper to get it installed if you're already doing a roof replacement. Especially if you're getting built-in modules instead of retrofit, since they replace some of the roof surface instead of going over it.
Indeed, the best time to install is during a roof replacement. If one can afford it, standing seam metal roof, racking mounted with friction mounts (deck penetrations are the enemy and to be avoided whenever possible, to prevent future water intrusion), and the entire system (roof deck and panels) should last 40+ years. Last roof and solar you put on for your life for many of us.
From what I understand, the going price is AU$5K in Australia. (USD3500). A small portion of that is scale since solar roof is far more common in Australia, but most of it is "doing something incorrectly", as you suspect.
If you had this option in the United States, you would have people fighting in line to be first
Distributed solar is cute and it sometimes benefits some people but it is pointless for national policy to pursue it. As you pointed out, the cost structure of small distributed solar is dominated by office overhead, sales, management, insurance, litigation, etc etc.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci... (already out of date due to solar PV deployment velocity, the world crossed 3TW of cumulative deployed capacity earlier this year)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
The World Crossed a Major Solar Milestone [3TW] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151977 - August 2026
It was bound to happen sooner or later. People tend to forgot nuclear is old technology. We went so hard on nuclear in 1960s because there was no alternative, nobody knew semiconductors would be so disruptive. Nuclear reactors are huge (to be efficient), still not completely solved (we are finding new methods of cooling every year) and require extensive regulations to save ourselves from human errors. Solar is the opposite. Build it, use it, throw it away etc. And your biggest problem is the environmental pollution and energy storage. Much better problems than trying to make nuclear safe. And even the energy storage problem is getting solved slowly by pumped hydro.
“Getting solved” isn’t solved though. Abandoning nuclear for an inadequate replacement led to massive global expansion of natural gas and coal generation from the 80s onward. While solar and wind exploded in deployments, it didn’t keep up and shuttering nuclear is likely the largest mistake societies made as far as global warming goes. It was the only non-austerity option with the capacity capability.
LOL. Simply not true. With the advent of small salt reactors it's getting less true by the second.
I'd rather focus on the fact that neither coal or gas seems to go own.
You can use your focus to verify it.
solar is not pilotable like nuclear though
it's a great source of energy mind you, but I kind of wince everytime people are trying to say it's better than nuclear (if you put the dangerosity of the raw material aside of course)
there are excellent storage capacities now, which helps a lot, but nuclear stays unmatched in producing vast amounts of electricity on demand (as long as we're not in a brutal heat wave to be fair)
Isn't targeting their nuclear plants the first thing that Russia did when they invaded Ukraine? And there are all of these refineries and pipelines being bombed around Iran. And sometimes an oil tanker or several gets stolen...
Centralized energy infra just isn't resilient enough against geopolitical problems to be worth investing in. Something about too much dependency on a thing attracts bad behavior to that thing.
By contrast, ain't nobody wasting a $50k missile on a $5k battery just so they can cut power to one building.
> not pilotable like nuclear
You cannot switch off a nuclear plant in an instant, that process takes weeks.
Exaggeration: everything on the grid has a "trip" for instant disconnect, and there's usually a steam bypass for ramping down fairly quickly.
Ramping up takes longer, yes, especially from maintenance. But the real factor is that operating cost is constant, almost independent from output, so they want to run the plant at operational 100% as much as possible.
(handy UK status page: https://www.ukgridlive.co.uk/nuclear )
" but I kind of wince everytime people are trying to say it's better than nuclear"
Solar is the superior form of nuclear energy. You're using a big ass nuclear fusion reactor in the center of our solar system to generate energy, and you harvest that energy by capturing its photonic output.
As far as storing the energy for peak demand/nighttime usage, we've got literally hundreds of methods to do it, from pure mechanical to electrochemical.
I am not sure if I understand your comment lol
I could also say: Solar is the best energy source (if you put night aside of course).
I mean obviously the main drawback of nuclear fission is the waste and the potential impact of radioactivity.
No, the main drawback of nuclear is it costs too much.
If nuclear were just as expensive as it is now but had no waste or radioactivity it would still be struggling.
If it were 10x cheaper but still had the waste and radioactivity it would be going like gangbusters.
> If it were 10x cheaper but still had the waste and radioactivity it would be going like gangbusters.
Perhaps. While the amortisation of the costs of Chernobyl etc. over the global nuclear fleet are surprisingly low, the local economic impact was high enough that even governments are cautious about the risks.
e.g. the Chernobyl exclusion zone is about the size of Luxembourg, so I'd expect their government to have had… discussions… with the French government about the safety of the nearby reactor in Cattenom: were it to détoner while the wind was blowing the wrong way, Luxembourg may cease to exist.
(Low risk, but existential if it happens. Not everyone's as enthusiastic as powerful people seem to be today about AI).
To be fair nuclear is as expensive as it is mostly because of radioactivity. There'd be no need for all the heavy concrete, armed guards, and spent fuel disposal if the materials were innocuous.
I don't believe the parent commenter was setting aside the waste and potential impact of radioactivity as the risks associated with those are very very low. I think they were setting aside the literal mining and handling of the raw material before it even enters a reactor which is fair IMO. Also uranium mining is more often happening with in situ leach mining which removes a lot of the risk and environmental impact [1] - especially compared to lithium extraction!
Also to clarify, modern Gen III+ reactors have passive safety systems that make leaks/meltdowns virtually impossible [2], and the total volume of high-level waste is tiny, solid, and completely contained in dry casks with little chance of escape - however there are some concerns on the 100+ year timescale, I'll admit.
Also a fun fact, deaths per unit of energy of nuclear compared to solar are nearly identical.[3]
[1]https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... [2]https://www.amacad.org/publication/nuclear-reactors-generati... [3]https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy?hl=en-US
Fission is unmatched in its ability to abandon projects after spending tens of billions of dollars. I don't see how any rational person can look at the history of nuclear and say "damn, this thing can drop electrons on short notice." That's just a ridiculous take.
Sadly nuclear also stays unmatched in cost. It was already way too expensive, and now it has even worse economics on modern grids full of cheap variable sources. It is terribly uncompetitive and that’s why you see roughly none getting built anymore
<subsidised, officially sanctioned by nearly every government, regulated to be easily deployed> technology overtaking <banned by several governments, mired in red tape, with a huge opposing lobby with deep pockets that's part of every group that should be supporting it> technology who would have thunk it.