Solar is now 41% cheaper than fossil fuels, UN report shows

Comments

• BombOmOm@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I wish these reports would include required other costs, as solar needs to be paired with grid-scale storage or, more often, peaker natural gas plants. Both of witch are pretty expensive.

  It may still be cheaper, I honestly don’t know, because all the reports leave such necessary, and expensive, things out.

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  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    So check this out:

    Lazard - Levelized Cost of Energy

    This is an industry study that gets published every year by Lazard, for the past 18 years. It is focused on the US market. They put in a lot of effort to assess the whole cost of various forms of energy generation, including government subsidies.

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    • Rakonat@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Worth noting lot of industry experts in renewables and outside of it criticize LCOE for not properly taking inflation and total life cycle costs into account. It’s still a useful number but never let it be more than a single data point in determining which form of energy is cost effective balanced against environmental impact.

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    • BombOmOm@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Thank you for the link, that is exactly what I was looking for.

      For the chat, going to link the main graph with that info (page 8):

      Image

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• AlternatePersonMan@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Quick, subsidize coal! Jobs and the black lung depend on it!

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• WoodScientist@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Unfortunately this isn’t saving us from climate-induced civilizational suicide. We are not capable of saving ourselves. Conservative governments are science-denying fascists, and liberal governments can’t see any solution that doesn’t involve the free market. They’re both slaves to capitalism, and capitalism is destroying our world. Every societal collapse is driven primarily by a delusional elite powered by high levels of wealth inequality, and our story will be no different than countless societies that have collapsed before us, crushed under the weight of their own dysfunctional political systems.

  Renewables are not replacing fossil fuels. Fossil fuel use hasn’t declined at all. Emissions have never been higher. Rather, what should have been obvious is happening. Capitalism is very good at exploiting any available and useful resource, and there is no more useful resource than energy. The market is more than happy to gobble up the output of any number of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. A use for all that energy can be found. No matter how many solar panels we produce, their output is used to increase the total amount of energy consumed, rather than using them to replace fossil fuels. Meanwhile, fossil fuels are still very useful energy, and the market continues to find a use for them as well. To a capitalist system, the answer to the question “how much energy should we produce?” Is always “yes.”

  Solving this problem will require actions that no liberal government is capable of. If you worship the free market as a religion, then you won’t be capable of making the changes that are needed to save our species from extinction. Conservatives know only delusions, and liberals know only subsidies. Both are equally useless at solving the problems we face.

  What do we need to do? We need to be using non-market solutions. We need to be phasing out fossil fuels entirely. We need to be limiting the total amount extracted, and we need to lower that cap rapidly over time. Then we need to make it illegal to extract fossil fuels. We need to make it a capital offense to dig an oil well. Anyone caught drilling a well should be buried alive inside that well. Then we need to go to war against any nation that refuses to do the same. Eventually we need to waging outright military campaigns against fossil fuel infrastructure, regardless of what country the infrastructure belongs to. We need to be willing to risk nuclear war, as that is the level of crisis we are facing.

  Note, your skin probably crawled when you read those last few sentences. If it did, you’re likely not psychologically capable of truly addressing the crisis we find ourselves in. You’re so conditioned to capitalist realism that those actions seem violent and absurd, rather than acts of rational self-defense of a species against its own annihilation.

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