Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance
It's the same kind of thing we see with self driving cars. They can navigate sunny California streets so "self driving" must be so close! But put them anywhere with snow, rain, fog, or even just grey skies and they struggle heavily
California represents the easy 80% side of the Pareto curve for a lot of this stuff
Respectfully disagree -- solar isn't the big story here.
One could argue that batteries will have a bigger impact than solar. Batteries obviously let you decouple power generation and consumption, shifting anytime production to peak-time demand.
Less obvious is that local demand can fluctuate 2x. It usually dips mid-day and peaks 5-9pm (see the charts at www.caiso.com) when people come home and turn on their lights, oven, appliances, etc. This pattern happens throughout the year.
So forget solar for a moment; the ability to shift energy that was produced mid-day (even by a natural gas plant) to the evening would allow you to build fewer power plants. Nuclear + batteries might also be a good combination. Batteries get you closer to being able to solve for "average demand" rather than "peak demand."
This has nothing to do w/ California. California is just on the leading edge of battery installation. Solar just exacerbates the issue of the peak-to-trough ratio (evening vs. mid-day demand) due to mid-day solar "overproduction" causing it to be uneconomical to run gas plants mid-day. But solving for "peak demand" is still a problem in the absence of solar.
Still: most of the complaints about solar are answered when paired with large battery systems.
Germany is famous for being cloudy and is much further north, much of it is north of the primary US-Canada border. It is one of the leading solar adopters.
Not being ideal for solar just means you need to install more area, and there's plenty available space. Solar is already the cheapest (if not it's competitive with the cheapest wind power) power source. Also having to, say, double the panel area in lower solar irradiance requires less than double the non-panel costs (you don't need double the inverters or power transmission).
California is leading because the politics/economy/irradiance are the best combination, you would expect a place like that to lead first. It does not follow that other places are unsuitable for solar, it will just cost marginally more.
It's a strange but persistent pattern where success in ideal conditions will draw out a litany of reasons why that success is actually a sign of failure when instead the early success is just a sign of ideal conditions. Why wouldn't something promising succeed first in the place with the best conditions for success?
> Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance
We can also build power lines! Between different places! Such as the places with lots of sun, and the places without lots of sun!!!
The white paper they are discussing [0] includes multiple cities around the world:
> Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply and Muscat in Oman – 99%, using 6 GW solar panels and 17 GWh battery. Even cloudier cities like Birmingham [UK] can get 62% of the way to a constant supply every hour of every day across the year.
> Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance
There are many place that get a lot of sun. As solar panels come down in price, it becomes even easier to compensate for deficits with additional panels.
It’s common practice to install more solar panel capacity than inverter capacity because panels are rarely operating at peak output anyway. If you’re installing 100kW of inverters, you might install 120kW of panels. The panel array wouldn’t exceed 100kW most of the time anyway.
In a location with suboptimal sun, you might install an even higher ratio of panels to inverter and battery capacity.
Some people get bothered by this because they feel like some of the solar power is wasted at peak capacity, but you have to consider that the inverter and battery capacity is also wasted when you’re not sending enough from the panel array. It’s a balancing act.
You also have to consider that the same sunlight that makes California good for solar also creates additional demand for air conditioning. A location with less sun would have less solar heat gain, which is easier to serve for many reasons.
Western Washington is a great contrast. We get a decent amount of sun (despite the reputation), however, our electricity prices are insanely low due to close-proximity hydroelectric power.
As a result, solar is rarely cost effective even with subsidies, and basically never without them.
Doesn't mean people don't install it for various other reasons, but it serves as a good contrast to California despite similar political landscapes.
> But put them anywhere with snow, rain, fog, or even just grey skies and they struggle heavily
I have winter basically 5 months of the year where I am and have no issues being fully off grid with only solar and batteries as energy sources. You do have to compensate for winter by having more panels and more batteries but easily doable.
I think it has been a good benchmark during early development, but you’re right that it becomes less useful now that Solar is further along. Maybe some Midwestern place would be a good benchmark now? Or like England?
Not to mention that combining batteries, i.e., storage, with generation is not exactly accurate or even honest. It is merely an offsetting and also a compensation for the deficiencies of “renewable” energy, which are always mitigated by that type of intentional muddling of classifications.
That is much higher than I would have expected. Good news. What are they using to charge the batteries though? I wonder if it's offpeak renewables or mostly natural gas?
Daytime solar, in the summer especially. Power demand yesterday was negative from 11:30 to 3:30, for instance, meaning batteries can charge for free to absorb excess solar generation during those hours.
RE "...All of the peak demand supplied from batteries...."
This is a very good start.
My question is how do the batteries go , if there is 1 - N days of cloudy weather? Can the batteries supply the peak for more than one day?
Is there ( or where would they go ) transmission lines to bring in the needed peak supply from other storage (battery / pumped hydro ) areas?
Another step would be to include days of peak electricity demand, which in my country occurs in cold weather ( heaters) and very hot weather ( air conditioner's ) OR is there demand limits like in Spain demand limit for some houses is around 3KW (YUKS)
Aww, that old „pick a specific timeframe on a specific day, preferably summer, to get an convenient picture“ trick. incompleteness by design.
Supply itself is an inadequate metric. Yet convenient to obstruct the view upon CA that beacon of the future, suddenly being littered with third world brown and blackouts.
Solar and batteries are still more expensive than gas (as the article admits) but prices are continuing to decrease.
Sadly, the US is hitting a hiccup as the current administration is going out of their way to make solar installs harder and more expensive. Putting tariffs on solar equipment imports is an insane self-defeat. We should be importing as much cheap solar and battery gear as we can get our hands on.
Give it a couple years of price progress and political turnover and I think we’re going to be in a great position.
> Solar and batteries are still more expensive than gas (as the article admits)
On the contrary
> The sunniest US city, Las Vegas [...] It could get to 60% solar+storage at $65/MWh — cheaper than gas.
The article asserts that until you are generating the majority of your power from Solar+Storage, at least in favorable places, solar is cheaper than gas...
And it reached that conclusion under the incredibly unfavourable assumption that all the solar is in the same place, not being distributed around by a grid averaging out the amount of cloud cover over space.
The linked white paper says that the cutover point is at 97% for sunny locations in the US, and more surprisingly, 90% for cloudy mainland US locations.
> Solar and batteries are still more expensive than gas (as the article admits) but prices are continuing to decrease.
Exactly, gas is heavily subsidized and government supported in the US. And even with that support it only barely scrapes ahead. Courtesy of current and future tax payers coughing up the interest payments on the trillions of dollars in debt. That's not going to last indefinitely. The key point here is that the difference is a bit artificial.
In the rest of the world where installing solar is something like a third of the cost (no tariffs, less installation bureaucracy, less crippling rules and legislation, etc.) and where batteries can be imported closer to cost price from China, the picture is very different. If it's importing LNG vs. cheap solar panels + batteries, the latter is already very attractive in many places. Even at higher latitudes than the 49th parallel below which most of the US is.
And it's on track to get a lot better. Production for sodium ion batteries is starting to come online in China. It will be a while before those make it to the US due to the politics. But some are now projecting cost as low as 10$/kwh for those mid term. 1 mwh battery would cost about 10K$ at those prices. And they have quite long lives (thousands of charge cycles). You can run a house on one of those for well over a month in the US. Much longer in places where houses are better insulated and more efficient. It will be a few years before we can get these obviously. But it's a nice mental model for what a reasonably affordable battery will be able to do soon.
> And it's on track to get a lot better. Production for sodium ion batteries is starting to come online in China. It will be a while before those make it to the US due to the politics. But some are now projecting cost as low as 10$/kwh for those mid term.
Is that a typo? Just a year ago ago batteries were expected to drop to $80/kWh around 2026-2027... $10/kWh in the near future is absolutely insane.
I don't think the USA is costing in the political risk of not converting to green energy. You do not want to be the only country emitting significant CO2 in a decades time when everyone else has transitioned. Partly it will be more expensive to keep burning fuel especially when the economy of scale decreases but also the political risk of sanctions will be very high.
It's the long term economics that the US should be worried about. Just because the US is sticking its head in the sand doesn't mean the rest of the world is slowing down investments along with it. Other countries are investing heavily in becoming energy independent which means they'll be building the infrastructure to generate lots of cheap energy to power their economies rather than depending on expensive fossil fuel imports. Part of which currently come from the US. The recent tariff madness is actually speeding all this up.
The US as an manufacturing and export country already doesn't make much sense. And that will only get worse. Industry depends on energy and if that energy is locally more expensive than abroad, that puts any energy intensive business at a disadvantage when other countries start running on really cheap renewables and battery.
If you look at this globally, there are a lot of emerging markets that never imported that much oil, coal, and gas to begin with that probably never will. They'll be growing fueled by cheap locally generated renewables. And then there are countries all over Asia and Europe that are mostly importing their fossil fuels that are going to decimate what they import over the next decades. All of that will shift the economic balance in their favor. Any one exporting fossil fuels (including the US) is going to have a rather big problem with shrinking exports.
Places like China are far ahead of everyone else here. And an increasingly large part of their economy is actually selling their tech to other countries to get to a similar level.
It'll be a long tail. The less people rely on fossil fuels, the cheaper it will get (until it gets so underused you start lose economies of scale). But even without any proper political leadership, America will follow the money and pick the most profitable choice.
> Putting tariffs on solar equipment imports is an insane self-defeat. We should be importing as much cheap solar and battery gear as we can get our hands on.
The tariffs are going to impact me heavily because I had planned on buying a shitload of solar in the next 3-5 years. If the price on solar triples in that timeframe (as the price on other things has in the last few years), I will not be "going solar" after all except for a few small hobby projects.
That being said, we should not lose sight of the fact that the REASON solar is cheap right now is because it manufactured almost exclusively in the far east, at cost, subsidized by a communist state, to stifle worldwide competition. I don't think that is good for the world either. There is likely (hopefully) a middle ground here somewhere.
> subsidized by a communist state, to stifle worldwide competition
I don't think "to stifle competition" is right. I suspect China would love it if other countries were investing in solar as much as they are. They just want the tech ASAP.
As someone who greatly supports solar power and the rights of homeowners to install solar, I think your link is total bullshit and calling it a "solar tax" is disingenuous by people that want something for free
The fundamental problem with net metering is that it is obviously unsustainable and unfair. People who are hooked up to the grid benefit from more than just the energy they consume, but the hookup costs and maintenance of the grid is a real cost that power companies need to pay for. Perhaps even more obviously, any company that is in a retail business can only survive if they buy a product at a (cheaper) wholesale rate and sell it at a (more expensive) retail rate. Net metering is exactly the same as forcing power companies to buy energy at a retail rate. Again, this is obviously not sustainable.
As a homeowner, of course I would love net metering, because I'd be getting a sweet deal. But it's not hard for me to see how this can't continue as solar power installations increase. Austin, TX, was one of the first locales to use "value of solar" pricing, and yeah, while it sucks for the homeowner, it is also fairer and more sustainable. I'm also not saying this is the only way to do things (e.g. you could have a monthly connection fee and a separate monthly power charge), but this "solar rights" group is just spinning bullshit because their sweet deal is about to come to an end.
Ah more mental gymnastics in chat. Trying to tax solar and flinging around tariffs backed by extreme climate change denial are not exactly the same thing.
NM-just perused your HN comments and they are littered with dog whistles and talking points. Gymnastics seems too generous.
I haven't heard anyone say it out loud, but I'd wager it's in large part related to things like Chinese solar panels containing remotely triggerable kill-switches and/or having the ability to function as unauthorized mesh relays
You can trace out the circuits on a traditional solar panel. They aren't complex devices. If someone managed to hide some kind of control chip in there and also some sort of connectivity to trigger it then my hat is off to them.
I would worry more about the inverters, including microinverters.
Also consider that if someone is doing industrial sabotage on that scale it would be much easier to attack the fossil fuel and nuclear power plants and their enormous computer controlled generators. Even hydroelectric would be susceptible. Or maybe attack the substations. There is nothing unique or special about solar panels that makes them a good target, and their highly distributed and diverse nature actually makes them more difficult.
I could see subterfuge in the inverters, but aren't panels themselves electrically very simple? I would think a rogue device within the panel itself would be apparent.
It's still worth examining the panels in minute detail. I just think it would be a ton more difficult to hide much functionality within a panel.
This isn’t a thing. As in - try sitting in on a power purchase negotiation where the minutiae of every conceivable risk is debated for hours on end and this never even comes up.
If I were a VC or PE firm, this is exactly where I’d be putting a lot of money in the next year or two. Right now there’s a lot of fear given the stance of the current administration, which makes it pretty ripe for smart money willing to play the long game (as Buffett famously noted).
The technology keeps improving, clean energy is increasingly shaping up to be a new arms race with China, and politics these days tend to swing back and forth wildly. By 2028+, it’s very plausible we’ll see things 180 and there'll be plenty of government attention given to clean energy. Even the current administration could change their tune if it's positioned as "beating China" (or even for no reason at all, because who knows with them).
Spending a couple years to prop it up and become a well-established player by then could be a huge advantage.
Do you mean investments in solar panel manufacturing, or something else? From what I understand solar panels are somewhat commoditized, and China has massive subsidies for their manufacturers. I wouldn't want to get in that game. If you mean battery R&D + manufacture, I think that could be promising
I wonder how much is being invested into reducing the costs of inverters and MPPTs and such. ("Balance of system" seems to be the term?)
I'm looking into a DIY install, and it's looking like the microinverters are going to basically be just as expensive as the panels themselves. A quick Google seems to imply this is similar for utility-scale installs: the BoS costs are less than, but still comparable to the costs of the actual panels.
On one hand I get it; panels are very simple, robust devices, while inverters need to interface with the grid and usually have network connectivity and so on. On the other hand, there's a lot less material in an inverter, and they're still relatively simple electronics? Which we're pretty good at mass producing cheaply. You'd think there's a lot of room there to get the cost down.
On solar panel investments, at the time TSMC got into the chip game, I think most people might have said something very similar to a TSMC. Chips are commodotized, and the existing entrants are highly capitalized, and why TSMC do you think you can outdo the likes of 1987 Intel TI, Motorola, NEC et al.
Perkskovites to name one tech, will probably be a generational shift in solar panel technologies, the US would be stupid to miss it if they want to be a future world energy player outside the slow inevitable decline of fossil fuels.
For who has the stomach to fund it, there is available maybe another order of magnitude in cost performance in solar, and say two or three orders of magnitude of cost performance available in batteries?
Solar is a lot easier and faster to deploy - no turbine needed, just convert photons to electrons. The US has sadly decided to shoot itself in the foot by electing an Administration bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry so they're doing everything they can to stymie solar.
There's something that struck me about the recent controversy with the Memphis datacenter. The one rolling out 2 gigawatts of on-site natural gas to power itself. It's this: that the CEO-who-can't-be-named, happens to own one of the largest lithium battery makers in the US; and makes utility-scale grid storage batteries; and also, for completeness, owns a solar photovoltaic plant. If anyone would be using solar+storage for economics, it would that datacenter in sunny, southern USA—but that CEO would rather buy gas than his own product.
It's not a one-off datapoint: none of the other upcoming massive AI datacenters, that I've read about, are built for solar power. Amazon's in rural Illinois (2.2 gigawatts), was also on HN, also going with natural gas.
I'll believe in this when the ruthlessly optimizing FAANG's believe in it, with their own money. Clearly they do not.
If they were ruthlessly optimizing they wouldn't be jumping on the AI train at the scale they do, and then they wouldn't need those DC's in the first place.
The xAI datacenters do use batteries though. The batteries have advantages for providing a clean power supply and not tripping the grid when large workloads start or finish.
According to the article, 2 GW would require 8-10 Solar GW and 35-40 GWh of batteries to achieve high 90's availability. I would guess finding enough land close by might be a challenge.
Just imagine if we install 300GW of solar panels in a dark warehouse and connect it to 3000 GWh of battery capacity, then we can magically dance around with fairies in our CO2 free Utopia?
You got downvoted, I upvoted because I share the sentiment very strongly.
I keep getting downvoted for much less sarcastic comments that are actually providing actual information on reality.
In this case, I find it baffling that they see nothing wrong in needing 22km2 just for a solar panel installation, before even talking about the cost of batteries.
Like there is no way that this has no environmental impact and plenty of unsuspected side effects.
And that's before talking about the fact that it would be an installation for just one usage, in very good conditions.
Solar is getting installed because it makes a lot of money for already rich people, there is not really any other good explanation but they'll ask the public to fund the "bad" CO2 producing installation necessary to make the whole thing viable...
This is a lot of words to say “solar + battery lcoe is $70/MWH and gas is $40/MWH, but most places outside the U.S. don’t have access to tons of cheap gas so it’s more expensive there”
And no, they are wrong, gas is still currently cheaper ($40 is less than $70)
In other places outside US, cost of gas electricity is not 40/MWh. In Germany for example, the cost of natural gas power plants is 110 to 170 Euros/MWh.
For solar in Germany, it is 37 Euro/MWh to 80 Euros/MWh not including storage.
Yeah ok but without storage you are comparing apples to oranges. Even with storage it is barely comparable. Since even with batteries you can't provide power 24/7.
Combined cycle can be as low as $37 during low price periods of natural gas; combustion cycle is around or higher than the $70 in the podcast. Dedicated peaker plants can be much more expensive depending on the design.
> This is a lot of words to say “solar + battery lcoe is $70/MWH and gas is $40/MWH,
No, that isn't what the article says. I'll quote it for you:
I think it was around $70 for new gas. It was a weighted US average — from memory, but I might be wrong on that.
I suspect your $40/MWH isn't LCOE, it's the marginal cost of producing an extra MWH from an existing plant. A second problem they don't mention for gas is the demand is so high, the wait time for a new turbine is around 4 years. Batteries on the other hand can be bought with very short lead times.
A crucial factor is also availability. You can basically buy square kilometers of solar today, but if you want a gas turbine for your plant, you are on a +5yr waiting list.
Readit News
Yesterday evening's peak demand was between 7-8pm at 30.7 gigawatts. Supply breakdown around 8pm:
This is a remarkable development. All of the peak demand supplied from batteries used to be supplied by natural gas just a couple years ago.Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance
It's the same kind of thing we see with self driving cars. They can navigate sunny California streets so "self driving" must be so close! But put them anywhere with snow, rain, fog, or even just grey skies and they struggle heavily
California represents the easy 80% side of the Pareto curve for a lot of this stuff
One could argue that batteries will have a bigger impact than solar. Batteries obviously let you decouple power generation and consumption, shifting anytime production to peak-time demand.
Less obvious is that local demand can fluctuate 2x. It usually dips mid-day and peaks 5-9pm (see the charts at www.caiso.com) when people come home and turn on their lights, oven, appliances, etc. This pattern happens throughout the year.
So forget solar for a moment; the ability to shift energy that was produced mid-day (even by a natural gas plant) to the evening would allow you to build fewer power plants. Nuclear + batteries might also be a good combination. Batteries get you closer to being able to solve for "average demand" rather than "peak demand."
This has nothing to do w/ California. California is just on the leading edge of battery installation. Solar just exacerbates the issue of the peak-to-trough ratio (evening vs. mid-day demand) due to mid-day solar "overproduction" causing it to be uneconomical to run gas plants mid-day. But solving for "peak demand" is still a problem in the absence of solar.
Still: most of the complaints about solar are answered when paired with large battery systems.
Not being ideal for solar just means you need to install more area, and there's plenty available space. Solar is already the cheapest (if not it's competitive with the cheapest wind power) power source. Also having to, say, double the panel area in lower solar irradiance requires less than double the non-panel costs (you don't need double the inverters or power transmission).
California is leading because the politics/economy/irradiance are the best combination, you would expect a place like that to lead first. It does not follow that other places are unsuitable for solar, it will just cost marginally more.
It's a strange but persistent pattern where success in ideal conditions will draw out a litany of reasons why that success is actually a sign of failure when instead the early success is just a sign of ideal conditions. Why wouldn't something promising succeed first in the place with the best conditions for success?
We can also build power lines! Between different places! Such as the places with lots of sun, and the places without lots of sun!!!
> Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply and Muscat in Oman – 99%, using 6 GW solar panels and 17 GWh battery. Even cloudier cities like Birmingham [UK] can get 62% of the way to a constant supply every hour of every day across the year.
[0] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
There are many place that get a lot of sun. As solar panels come down in price, it becomes even easier to compensate for deficits with additional panels.
It’s common practice to install more solar panel capacity than inverter capacity because panels are rarely operating at peak output anyway. If you’re installing 100kW of inverters, you might install 120kW of panels. The panel array wouldn’t exceed 100kW most of the time anyway.
In a location with suboptimal sun, you might install an even higher ratio of panels to inverter and battery capacity.
Some people get bothered by this because they feel like some of the solar power is wasted at peak capacity, but you have to consider that the inverter and battery capacity is also wasted when you’re not sending enough from the panel array. It’s a balancing act.
You also have to consider that the same sunlight that makes California good for solar also creates additional demand for air conditioning. A location with less sun would have less solar heat gain, which is easier to serve for many reasons.
It also represents 12% of the country's population, which makes it a better benchmark than just being 1 of 50 states.
California is representative of more than 25% of the United States in terms of solar intensity.
People really need to get away from the idea that if a solution doesn't work for 100% of use cases then it's nonviable.
So San Francisco?
As a result, solar is rarely cost effective even with subsidies, and basically never without them.
Doesn't mean people don't install it for various other reasons, but it serves as a good contrast to California despite similar political landscapes.
It's the renewables during the day while the sun is shining.
My question is how do the batteries go , if there is 1 - N days of cloudy weather? Can the batteries supply the peak for more than one day? Is there ( or where would they go ) transmission lines to bring in the needed peak supply from other storage (battery / pumped hydro ) areas?
Another step would be to include days of peak electricity demand, which in my country occurs in cold weather ( heaters) and very hot weather ( air conditioner's ) OR is there demand limits like in Spain demand limit for some houses is around 3KW (YUKS)
Supply itself is an inadequate metric. Yet convenient to obstruct the view upon CA that beacon of the future, suddenly being littered with third world brown and blackouts.
Sadly, the US is hitting a hiccup as the current administration is going out of their way to make solar installs harder and more expensive. Putting tariffs on solar equipment imports is an insane self-defeat. We should be importing as much cheap solar and battery gear as we can get our hands on.
Give it a couple years of price progress and political turnover and I think we’re going to be in a great position.
On the contrary
> The sunniest US city, Las Vegas [...] It could get to 60% solar+storage at $65/MWh — cheaper than gas.
The article asserts that until you are generating the majority of your power from Solar+Storage, at least in favorable places, solar is cheaper than gas...
And it reached that conclusion under the incredibly unfavourable assumption that all the solar is in the same place, not being distributed around by a grid averaging out the amount of cloud cover over space.
Deleted Comment
Exactly, gas is heavily subsidized and government supported in the US. And even with that support it only barely scrapes ahead. Courtesy of current and future tax payers coughing up the interest payments on the trillions of dollars in debt. That's not going to last indefinitely. The key point here is that the difference is a bit artificial.
In the rest of the world where installing solar is something like a third of the cost (no tariffs, less installation bureaucracy, less crippling rules and legislation, etc.) and where batteries can be imported closer to cost price from China, the picture is very different. If it's importing LNG vs. cheap solar panels + batteries, the latter is already very attractive in many places. Even at higher latitudes than the 49th parallel below which most of the US is.
And it's on track to get a lot better. Production for sodium ion batteries is starting to come online in China. It will be a while before those make it to the US due to the politics. But some are now projecting cost as low as 10$/kwh for those mid term. 1 mwh battery would cost about 10K$ at those prices. And they have quite long lives (thousands of charge cycles). You can run a house on one of those for well over a month in the US. Much longer in places where houses are better insulated and more efficient. It will be a few years before we can get these obviously. But it's a nice mental model for what a reasonably affordable battery will be able to do soon.
Is that a typo? Just a year ago ago batteries were expected to drop to $80/kWh around 2026-2027... $10/kWh in the near future is absolutely insane.
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The US as an manufacturing and export country already doesn't make much sense. And that will only get worse. Industry depends on energy and if that energy is locally more expensive than abroad, that puts any energy intensive business at a disadvantage when other countries start running on really cheap renewables and battery.
If you look at this globally, there are a lot of emerging markets that never imported that much oil, coal, and gas to begin with that probably never will. They'll be growing fueled by cheap locally generated renewables. And then there are countries all over Asia and Europe that are mostly importing their fossil fuels that are going to decimate what they import over the next decades. All of that will shift the economic balance in their favor. Any one exporting fossil fuels (including the US) is going to have a rather big problem with shrinking exports.
Places like China are far ahead of everyone else here. And an increasingly large part of their economy is actually selling their tech to other countries to get to a similar level.
The tariffs are going to impact me heavily because I had planned on buying a shitload of solar in the next 3-5 years. If the price on solar triples in that timeframe (as the price on other things has in the last few years), I will not be "going solar" after all except for a few small hobby projects.
That being said, we should not lose sight of the fact that the REASON solar is cheap right now is because it manufactured almost exclusively in the far east, at cost, subsidized by a communist state, to stifle worldwide competition. I don't think that is good for the world either. There is likely (hopefully) a middle ground here somewhere.
China primarily wants to cut oil and gas imports. Exports are a bonus.
I don't think "to stifle competition" is right. I suspect China would love it if other countries were investing in solar as much as they are. They just want the tech ASAP.
The other group has been trying to tax solar for years: https://solarrights.org/blog/2025/05/06/solartax2024/
Why no outcry on HN?
The fundamental problem with net metering is that it is obviously unsustainable and unfair. People who are hooked up to the grid benefit from more than just the energy they consume, but the hookup costs and maintenance of the grid is a real cost that power companies need to pay for. Perhaps even more obviously, any company that is in a retail business can only survive if they buy a product at a (cheaper) wholesale rate and sell it at a (more expensive) retail rate. Net metering is exactly the same as forcing power companies to buy energy at a retail rate. Again, this is obviously not sustainable.
As a homeowner, of course I would love net metering, because I'd be getting a sweet deal. But it's not hard for me to see how this can't continue as solar power installations increase. Austin, TX, was one of the first locales to use "value of solar" pricing, and yeah, while it sucks for the homeowner, it is also fairer and more sustainable. I'm also not saying this is the only way to do things (e.g. you could have a monthly connection fee and a separate monthly power charge), but this "solar rights" group is just spinning bullshit because their sweet deal is about to come to an end.
Sorry, what other group. Power companies?
NM-just perused your HN comments and they are littered with dog whistles and talking points. Gymnastics seems too generous.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-...
I would worry more about the inverters, including microinverters.
Also consider that if someone is doing industrial sabotage on that scale it would be much easier to attack the fossil fuel and nuclear power plants and their enormous computer controlled generators. Even hydroelectric would be susceptible. Or maybe attack the substations. There is nothing unique or special about solar panels that makes them a good target, and their highly distributed and diverse nature actually makes them more difficult.
It's still worth examining the panels in minute detail. I just think it would be a ton more difficult to hide much functionality within a panel.
The technology keeps improving, clean energy is increasingly shaping up to be a new arms race with China, and politics these days tend to swing back and forth wildly. By 2028+, it’s very plausible we’ll see things 180 and there'll be plenty of government attention given to clean energy. Even the current administration could change their tune if it's positioned as "beating China" (or even for no reason at all, because who knows with them).
Spending a couple years to prop it up and become a well-established player by then could be a huge advantage.
I'm looking into a DIY install, and it's looking like the microinverters are going to basically be just as expensive as the panels themselves. A quick Google seems to imply this is similar for utility-scale installs: the BoS costs are less than, but still comparable to the costs of the actual panels.
On one hand I get it; panels are very simple, robust devices, while inverters need to interface with the grid and usually have network connectivity and so on. On the other hand, there's a lot less material in an inverter, and they're still relatively simple electronics? Which we're pretty good at mass producing cheaply. You'd think there's a lot of room there to get the cost down.
Perkskovites to name one tech, will probably be a generational shift in solar panel technologies, the US would be stupid to miss it if they want to be a future world energy player outside the slow inevitable decline of fossil fuels.
For who has the stomach to fund it, there is available maybe another order of magnitude in cost performance in solar, and say two or three orders of magnitude of cost performance available in batteries?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTd02-0BiOM
It's not a one-off datapoint: none of the other upcoming massive AI datacenters, that I've read about, are built for solar power. Amazon's in rural Illinois (2.2 gigawatts), was also on HN, also going with natural gas.
I'll believe in this when the ruthlessly optimizing FAANG's believe in it, with their own money. Clearly they do not.
https://www.energea.com/understanding-scale-solar-projects/
E.g. the Al Dhafra Solar PV project in the UAE has a capacity of 2 GW and covers over 20 square kilometers, using ~4 million panels.
Much of Tennessee is deeply forested. 8000 acres is a square 3.5 miles or 5.7 km on a side.
Knocking down that much forest hits different than planting poles in dry grassland or desert that prevails in much of the western US.
According to the article, 2 GW would require 8-10 Solar GW and 35-40 GWh of batteries to achieve high 90's availability. I would guess finding enough land close by might be a challenge.
Just imagine if we install 300GW of solar panels in a dark warehouse and connect it to 3000 GWh of battery capacity, then we can magically dance around with fairies in our CO2 free Utopia?
Don't believe it? What are you a nazi bigot?
I keep getting downvoted for much less sarcastic comments that are actually providing actual information on reality.
In this case, I find it baffling that they see nothing wrong in needing 22km2 just for a solar panel installation, before even talking about the cost of batteries.
Like there is no way that this has no environmental impact and plenty of unsuspected side effects. And that's before talking about the fact that it would be an installation for just one usage, in very good conditions.
Solar is getting installed because it makes a lot of money for already rich people, there is not really any other good explanation but they'll ask the public to fund the "bad" CO2 producing installation necessary to make the whole thing viable...
And no, they are wrong, gas is still currently cheaper ($40 is less than $70)
For solar in Germany, it is 37 Euro/MWh to 80 Euros/MWh not including storage.
According to [1] (figure 5, 6) its at the maximum, around 80€ MWh. Am I looking at the wrong stats?
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
No, that isn't what the article says. I'll quote it for you:
I suspect your $40/MWH isn't LCOE, it's the marginal cost of producing an extra MWH from an existing plant. A second problem they don't mention for gas is the demand is so high, the wait time for a new turbine is around 4 years. Batteries on the other hand can be bought with very short lead times.Marginal costs of $108 for gas peaking and $31 for combined cycle. $48-$107 actual LCOE ($77.5 average).