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

newyorker.com

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

#41

Post by bryanlarsen »

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…

Once you build a solar plant, you no longer have a dependence on the country that made those solar panels. That solar plant will function for 50 years with very little maintenance. China is basically a single point of failure for future power expansion, but they can't take away solar plants already built.

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

#42

Post by pydry »

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.

It'll probably be fulfilled in 3 stages

1) Gas peakers - where every kilowatt hour delivered by solar or wind is just a kilowatt hour of gas that would otherwise have been burned. We are generally still here - still burning gas while it's sunny and windy.

2) Pumped storage and batteries gets us to 98% carbon free grids with ~5 hours of storage with 90% roundtrip efficiency - https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

(98%/5 hours is for australia and will vary for different countries but probably not wildly).

3) Syngas fills in that last 2-5% with ~50% roundtrip efficiency. Every kilowatt hour used in those 5% times - those dark, windless nights will be quite expensive although, counterintuitively still cheaper than an every kilowatt hour generated by a nuclear power plant - https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...

3 and to some extent 2 will require natural gas to be prohibited or taxed heavily.

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

#43

Post by coldspoon95 »

dgacmu wrote: post #33
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 w…

From a pure physics and first principles perspective, a higher EROI implies higher scalability and lower costs.

Nuclear today has high costs associated to it due to uncertainty in permitting, high upfront costs due to red-tape, annd archaic regulations that stifle any innovation. These make risk management prohibitively expensive as is the cost of insuring them. If the catastrophic rate of failure and associated deaths are far far smaller than what’s generally accepted in society(think fatalities due to vehicle accidents), then we must work to removing the red-tape to ease construction of these. They’re also far more green to operate.

This way, we can keep solar for residential, and for industries to offset their own use(think data centers investing in their own energy supply instead of paying others. Think on-premise vs off-premise).

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

#44

Post by ignoramous »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #15
joshdavham wrote: post #5

How are people making these?

Take the paywalled URL: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46... Add archive.is in front of it https://archive.is/https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-... If you get an nginx page (I seem to get one pretty often), you can try archive.today, archive.li, or any of the alternates in the URL section on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today If the article has already been archived, you can…

> If you get an nginx page (I seem to get one pretty often)

It appears to be a rate-limit mechanism of some sort specific to a fingerprint. Clearing cookies for archive.[is|vn|fo|md] may (or may not) get you past it.

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

#45

Post by coldspoon95 »

nashashmi wrote: post #28
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cheap energy is will power the next AI boom This is already happening, that and the crypto boom from a few years ago. > and lift the poor and middle class up But this is not happening; the ones doing AI stuff, crypto stuff, energy stuff have no interest in lifting any classes up. Energy prices are not going down, because demand is going up alongside supply, to the point where in some places the energy grid can't ke…

In capitalism, we innovate for more profit. We don’t innovate to get random people wealthy.

High EROI = high profit for investors

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

#46

Post by rz2k »

coldspoon95 wrote: post #9

[flagged]

I think you have misunderstood energy yield expressed as a multiple of energy input as a fundamental measurement of the viability of any energy technology.

If you run scenarios, you’ll find that this number is entirely irrelevant. Instead, try considering the availability and required quantities of raw materials and inputs like silver, indium, land, and of course money which is the best proxy for measuring how much of the world economy would be required for building out any technology.

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

#47

Post by coldspoon95 »

dgacmu wrote: post #38
lotharcable wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 10…

Exactly my point. Solar and Wind being intermittent require additional expense of grid storage which other forms of energy do not need.

So to scale, for each GW of solar, you’ll need a GW of storage plus the energy reserve to take through the night. Can’t rely on wind here as that’s also intermittent.

And grid storage is energy intensive and sets up twisted incentives for those playing to get rich with energy arbitrage. Think solar farm generators owning their own grid storage and reducing solar output to sell at higher $ from storage. Because, with intermittent sources pricing has to be more dynamic.

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

#48

Post by coldspoon95 »

nemomarx wrote: post #32
lotharcable wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ove…

So get government out of the space here. Keep essential regulations for ensuring safety and so that insurance companies can cover liabilities. Let the free market play it out.

If the profit incentives are there(which there are as higher EROI = lowest cost per kWh), then it is a race to who can provide the product(energy) at the lowest cost more reliably.

Government unfortunately has a monopoly here as traditional reactors had proliferations concerns, needed much large capital, and political will. But if reactors can be modular and costs low that a city could afford it, then you can also have decentralized reactors just like you have with solar.

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

#49

Post by drob518 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #12
coldspoon95 wrote: post #9

[flagged]

> cheap energy is will power the next AI boom This is already happening, that and the crypto boom from a few years ago. > and lift the poor and middle class up But this is not happening; the ones doing AI stuff, crypto stuff, energy stuff have no interest in lifting any classes up. Energy prices are not going down, because demand is going up alongside supply, to the point where in some places the energy grid can't ke…

Modern nuclear reactors used to be huge, but that’s outdated now. The revolution in small modular reactors promises to change all that.

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

#50

Post by rz2k »

calibas wrote: post #20
coldspoon95 wrote: post #9

[flagged]

Not sure where you're getting "at best 15x", the best panels from 2013 were found to have a 30x EROI: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640... And from a more recent study: "This work has shown that the EROI of fossil fuels drops considerably when moving from a final stage (approximately 8.5) to a useful stage analysis (approximately 3.5). The low overall EROI value at the useful stage, however…

EROI only has to be greater than one for the number to rapidly lose its meaning relative to every other input (and externality) of a given energy technology. It makes no sense to focus on it.
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