Yeah but you have to pay for the sunshine every year that you use to power the panels. And you have to build pipelines to transport that sunshine from the faraway places where it’s developed, and sometimes you have to liquefy it a load it onto gigantic tanker ships and carry it overseas, and there’s always a risk of it exploding and…oh, wait. I’m thinking of the gas. Never mind.
Solar Has Crossed a Critical Economic Tipping Point | Solar now requires no more upfront capital than coal or gas to produce the same annual electricity
Submitted 2 weeks ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to energy@slrpnk.net
Comments
Octavio@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
paraphrand@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Think of all the sunshine jobs.
ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
To be fair, NG was sunshine at one point.
Leviathan@fedinsfw.app 2 weeks ago
Yes, but have you considered that using renewables means you’re gay? Checkmate liberals.
rafoix@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
The propagandized will continue parroting their fossil fuel talking points and will continue to vote for the politicians that collect fossil fuel money.
queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Why do you say it like it’s an eternal inevitability? Propagandists spend so much time and money on propaganda because it has to be maintained at a certain pressure to effectively change someone’s behavior. The solution to the propaganda problem, then, is to combat propaganda, not wring our hands in despair. We’ve been busting up propaganda rings since the dawn of the written word, it can be done. Just needs people to do it.
Ooops@feddit.org 2 weeks ago Propagandists spend so much time and money on propaganda
Your mistake is believing that they are spending much money. It’s actually a small fraction of the money they makew from burning the planet, miniscule if compared to the amounts accumulated over decades, and i’s also the easiest option. They could also just buy politicians who are incredible cheap but still more expensive than the ongoing media desinformation campaign.
- Ooops@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
They already moved on to different tactics like restricting the ability to connect solar to the grid or simply burying all applications in red tape for years.
Serinus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Idk, it’s working pretty great for me.
My experience: lemmy.world/post/32326227
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
they are going pretty hard in maintaining gas and oil production
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Probably true in every market that is not the US, with extreme tariffs and EOs banning solar technology.
This is true when comparing to peaker gas/coal plants which are less efficient than more expensive Combine Cycle plants, though both can still run 24/7. The myth of baseload as a requirement ignores that “outside of heating or extreme summer night heat” night demand is half of day/evening demand.
Batteries are now extremely cheap as well, and certainly the combo compared to Combined Cycle is cheaper for better baseload coverage because combined cycle/baseload must overprovide daily needs by meeting peak demand, while solar+batteries can better cover full day needs.
The absolute clincher though is price certainty for 30 years. Free from extortion or geopolitical oppression/chaos of fuel supply chains. Global warming has direct costs to property values, insurance costs, and food scarcity. US policy has moved to create global fuel scarcity for increased dependence on US, as well.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
BuT wHaTaBoUt WhEn ItS cLoUdY!!
eleitl@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
What about just night?
BorgDrone@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
At night I run off my battery. I can’t go completely off-grid, the days are simply too short in winter, but for like 70% of the year I get free electricity.
kablez@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Get ready for “Economic rationalists” having a meltdown in 5… 4… 3…
Lumpenmole@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
We could use the excess power to bank carbon, then if we need more power we can burn that same carbon.
ExperiencedWinter@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Seems super complicated when you could just pump water up a hill, then open a dam when we need more power.
Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Have you tried boiling water?
Lumpenmole@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
My bad, the carbon banking would be to clean the atmosphere, being able to burn it is just a side effect.
sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Pumped hydroelectric storage is really hard to do at scale, because gravitational potential energy requires a gargantuan amount of mass raised a very tall height.
A containerized battery storage system can fit up to 5 MWh of storage in a single 40-ft shipping container. 5MWh is 18 gigajoules, or 18,000,000,000 joules.
Raising 1 kg (or 1 liter of water) by 1 meter stores 9.8 joules of gravitational potential energy. So you need to scale this upwards and find 1.8 billion to fit into mass or height in order to match the storage of one measly shipping container battery system. So basically any gravity storage system needs very favorable geography, and can’t really scale the way that battery storage systems can.
kbobabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
If you have the space. Solar needs a lot more space for the same power output.
rbos@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago Sticking coal power generation on your roof, are ye?
antimongo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
From a power-generated-per-area perspective, PV is about 500x less dense than a modern gas-fired combined cycle.
monkdervierte@lemmy.zip@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
We have space on our houses, to protect us from rain and sun.
potpotato@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Completely ignoring the mining part
eleitl@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
It’s not the same, since it’s not dispatchable. So you need gas turbines or very large battery systems, which isn’t exactly helping with that upfront capital.
bitwize01@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
The backup for turbines and coal plants failing is more turbines / older, less efficient turbines though, right? If our existing power infrastructure is spun up overnight only, that’s a huge improvement. Turbines for flexible capacity will always be a thing, but solar to provide baseline capacity is just good business.
There’s another strategic benefit: batteries have a fixed cost that doesn’t rely on a variable input cost. With current events in the strait, countries without abundant natural gas are advantaged because they’re less reliant on geopolitical conditions. This is why we’ve seen such growth of solar in china, which is not oil-rich, and was already importing a lot of coal.
antimongo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Major issue with spinning up turbines over night is the actual gas turbine unit ramp rates. Meaning how quickly they can go from cold and offline to hot and full output. Some units take upwards of 8 hours to get to their full output.
And the peak load of an average grid is right when the sun is setting and everyone is getting home from work, around 5 in the afternoon.
At that time, solar is dropping fast, and you don’t have time to start up your slow units, they’d have to already be online.
So utilities are often forced to leave their gas units online, even when solar is pumping out power, just to have them ready for the peak demand (and also have them for night).
oyo@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Solar was the cheapest source of power YEARS ago. Solar plus storage was also the cheapest form of dispatchable power years ago, but for some reason these idiots are just reporting it now.
sj_zero 2 weeks ago federation: confirmed
That's always dangerous to say, because it misses a bunch of the equation.
You can run your lights during the day and your heat when there's lots of sun.
Green washed technology would cause ecological Armageddon if adopted at proper scale because the energy needs to go somewhere for when you need it, and that scale of energy storage isn't cheap or clean.
silence7@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
California at the point where utility-scale batteries can power the state overnight a few days a year. If we are actually able to build offshore wind, and proceed with the planned battery build-out, it’s going to be most of the year. And the ecological armageddon isn’t happening.
I'm going to say two things that can be extrapolated wrong:
- I can run an LLM on a 10 Watt thin client system.
- A modern laptop can run under some circumstances all night on batteries.
So the first thing is a very specific claim I could not then extrapolated to say that llms do not burn electricity because they clearly burn and gigawatts of electricity.
The second one is a very specific claim that a certain device can run for a certain period of time it does not mean that I can run my house off of a laptop battery overnight.
This is where scale really matters because specific claims end up being replaced with broad claims intentionally by authors who are hunting for clicks and are really hoping to get the eyeballs of people who are interested in green energy. They will phrase the fact that certain battery Banks were able to run all night to misleadingly lead people to believe that those battery Banks were running the entire State all night when in fact they were just a small portion of the electricity being generated. That matters a lot. Running a frontier model of an LLM versus running a little 1b parameter model are not the same thing. Being able to run specific batteries over the course of a specific night in a state which is world famous for being temperate, that is different than rolling out a certain renewable energy Nationwide to 300 million people who don't live in places that are famously temperate.
These stories are intended to make environmentalism a consumer problem, in the sense that you just aren't consuming enough product and if you consumed the correct product and paid enough money for the environmentalism boxes, then we could solve the problem.
That's applying a very industrial revolution mindset to a problem caused by the excesses of the industrial revolution.
The ecological Armageddon is when you scale up. Scale to the United States, and try to build 3 days of storage so we can fully migrate to green energy, and you'd require more lithium ion batteries than have been manufactured by mankind, or if you use lead acid batteries you'd require more lead than we have known reserves of lead on Earth. Recycling appears at first like it's a solution, but lithium ion batteries are barely economically recyclable as it is at the moment, and lead acid batteries would require massive transportation networks to be continually moving around massive amounts of lead.
You can say "We don't need 3 days of storage", but even if you cut it by 3/4, you're still talking about one of the largest endeavors in human history, and you haven't even built the solar and wind farms yet.
The real solution is to reduce our need for energy by dramatically changing the way we look at how we use energy. Everything from cars to homes is built around a post-war energy economy that isn't sustainable. We can't just drop the exact same things in "but green". You can't consume your way out of this, but a lot of these articles would have you believe just that.
Sour_Kabos@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
What about the absurd amount of land it takes?
livligkinkajou@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Remember that you can still use the land for a more useful agricultural crop with higher¹ or similar² yield³ with agrivoltaics
You can also put panels over parking lots. USA alone has more parking lot land area than some countries:
ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Biofuels: the least efficient form of solar power one could possibly invent.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
can be leased, and at end of lease, land is free for any use. ie. it is not polluted. Fossil plants need exclusion zones for air pollution and noise, and still depress neighbour property values.
LastWish@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
But what happens after that up front cost?? With the current price of a barrel of sun, can we really afford to limit fossil fuels?
applebusch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
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prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I bought a 1 kg rest mass barrel of sunshine, and… boy howdy, for the price I might as well have purchased 1.8 times 10^15 joules from the energy grid.
Gust@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
1kg rest mass of sunlight in a barrel is objectively horrifying lol. Napkin math says thats ~9e19J. For reference, Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated on earth, produced ~2.1e17J. You’ve got a barrel containing ~440 Tsar bomba detonations
qyron@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
You don’t measure sun in barrels. It comes in bars.
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
So do I.