Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system • Hacker News Board

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#31

Post by IsTom » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 1:36 PM UTC

ryukoposting wrote: post #29

> offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. A lot of this article was clearly written with rose-colored glasses on, but this might be the silliest line of all. The auth…

With some investment you can make solar panels locally, you can't produce new oil deposits.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#32

Post by nemomarx » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 1:36 PM UTC

lotharcable wrote: post #27

nemomarx wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear seems to only work if nation-states build and operate it directly - no private firm can build them profitably and on time. If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that, please let people know, but with the current defunding everything mindset and general gridlock and one bill a year passed I think solar will be much cheaper by the time you even start breaking th…

> If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that Impossible. Federal government in US is failing along with the rest of large scale western style governments. They are too big, cost too much, and have too many fundamental structural deficiencies. The model of having professional class of administrators and politicians running the country as part of a massive bureaucracy i…

There are also a lot of people on the ground that don't want it to work, or will protest it, and that's where state power seems to work well to cut through opposition and just build things. Certainly a lot of tradeoffs are made to allow that but the Chinese government seems very good at building.

I'm not sure if it's the model or the particular culture working though - aren't there also a lot of party bureaucrats over there? So the core is authority or agency directed at the center of it, I think.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#33

Post by dgacmu » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 1:37 PM UTC

coldspoon95 wrote: post #9

[flagged]

Return on energy is different from cost, and it's strange that you're ignoring that. When you look at the levelized cost of energy, solar and onshore wind win: On a per-kWh basis, they produce the cheapest energy around. Gas combined cycle plants are close, but they have pollution and CO2 drawbacks.

LCOE doesn't capture everything you want, but when your grid mix is low on solar, it's the most relevant metric. When we get 15x return on energy and the energy we produce is cheap, you can ... use 1/15th of that energy to make more solar panels. And we're getting better at producing them by the year: Energy input is down and efficiency is up.

Nuclear is about 3x as expensive per kWh generated and it's not as dispatchable. Fossil fuels have this annoying problem of emitting co2and contributing a lot to climate change. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying to find ways to drive the cost of nuclear down - we should! - but from the perspective of "What generation should I install tomorrow?", solar and wind, augmented with a bit of storage, are really impressive: They're the fastest to bring online and provide the cheapest energy. The cost to them is you probably have to pay your gas plant operators a higher capacity fee for rare occasions, but that's ok. In a region like mine (PJM - pennsylvania, new jersey, virginia, ohio, etc.), they still make a profit while burning less gas, and consumer energy cost drops.

It seems weird to get all religious about technology choices when they each have advantages and disadvantages and combine pretty well to even out those differences. It would be expensive to be 100% solar+wind+storage because of the overprovisioning needed. But a mix instead of running 100% fossil (or 100% nuclear) would drop your costs considerably and be faster to build out.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#34

Post by destitude » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 1:40 PM UTC

arh5451 wrote: post #24

Nice article explaining solar energy policy. I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms. Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.

I'm fully off grid (even had utility power but had them remove it). Cook on electric, have electric water heater, using AC and have enough panels and batteries to not even need a backup generator.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#35

Post by LetsGetTechnicl » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 1:40 PM UTC

arh5451 wrote: post #24

Nice article explaining solar energy policy. I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms. Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.

What "critical look" is there to take? How about the way that the US gov't subsidizes the oil and gas industry, and is about to restart the coal industry? For some reason gov't investment in industry is only bad when China does it.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#36

Post by InitialLastName » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 1:42 PM UTC

piva00 wrote: post #30

arh5451 wrote: post #24

Nice article explaining solar energy policy. I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms. Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.

> Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means. What would be a critical look though? They thought it would be good to invest in it and so they did, other countries also had that choice if they so wished to sponsor it for strategic purposes but they are ruled by a different ideology which made them decide to not do it. I don't thin…

I think they meant critical as in a critique rather than a criticism. They are requesting discussion and exploration of the history and ramifications of China's policy, what the meaningful ROI and costs have been, and what the other (4-ish) countries that had the capacity for that sort of investment got out of non-investment (investment in other things).

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#37

Post by bryanlarsen » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 1:42 PM UTC

arh5451 wrote: post #24

Nice article explaining solar energy policy. I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms. Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.

I saw lots of mentions of batteries in the article.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#38

Post by dgacmu » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 1:45 PM UTC

lotharcable wrote: post #23

ljf wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that may be true - I can invest in home solar and have zero or near zero electricity costs at reasonable prices with a 5 to 7 year payback period. Near me solar farms run at a profit here in England, and yet I don't believe any nuclear power plant has run at a profit without government assistance, or subsidies, and none are yet expected to fund their own decommissioning and clean up - society will bear these co…

Large scale solar are actually large scale gas plants. Since there is no way to store electricity large scale and solar energy is unreliable then they depend on gas turbines to work.

Not entirely. California now handles its peak using solar+storage quite effectively.

https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-solar-storage-spring-2025/

It's not entirely 1:1. CA has about 20GW of solar production, and the solar+storage together completely replace about 5GW of fossil capacity.

(But don't discount wind. Wind+solar combine pretty well, and if you throw that in, you'll see that CA is actually replacing about 10GW of fossil capacity with solar+storage+wind. That's _capacity_, not production, so that's 8GW of avoided plant construction.)

We still need more progress in storage, for sure, but the trajectory has been good so far. Storage prices have continued to drop and given the lag of construction times, we should expect online storage to continue to improve for at least several years. Another bit of battery coming online should let CA take that from 5 to 7GW of replaced peak capacity from solar+storage.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#39

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 1:45 PM UTC

coldspoon95 wrote: post #9

[flagged]

1. If something's expensive enough, that turns into manpower and then energy use as you look at the whole supply chain.

2. The ratio doesn't really matter once it hits double digits. If something outputs 100 energy units, the difference between it costing 10 energy units to build versus costing .01 energy units to build isn't a game changer. The important number is that almost all the energy it makes is "profit". And if you can make a solar panel output a few percent more energy, that matters more than getting the energy cost to 0 and having an infinite ratio would matter. All else equal, a solar panel that costs 4kWh to make and has a 1000x return is worse than a solar panel that costs 400kWh to make and has a 15x return.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#40

Post by notTooFarGone » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 1:46 PM UTC

LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #35

arh5451 wrote: post #24

Nice article explaining solar energy policy. I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms. Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.

What "critical look" is there to take? How about the way that the US gov't subsidizes the oil and gas industry, and is about to restart the coal industry? For some reason gov't investment in industry is only bad when China does it.

China bad when it's the only country that actually does something meaningful. Cheap batteries are fueling energy transition and the demand is only met by huge overproduction by china.

China is actually carrying our lazy asses.