Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 607 posts

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

#61

Post by alex_duf »

Biologist123 wrote: post #53

This was a great positive start to the day. Thanks whoever posted that. One point curious in its omission is whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget. Presumably that’s the critical metric in all of this. [Edit: I ran this question through ChatGPT and the initial (unvalidated) response wasn’t so exciting. This obviously put a dampener on my mood. And I wondered why people like McKi…

>whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget

I'm not sure I understand. There's no carbon budget, any carbon that we emit is carbon we'll have to re-capture somehow and the longer it stays in the atmosphere the longer it will have a heating effect.

I think renewable have accelerated to the point of matching the electricity growth worldwide: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...

We've also passed the peak of CO2 per capita, but since the population is still growing we are still increasing carbon emitions worldwide. It's going to be a while before we stop emitting anything, and then longer before we start re-absorbing it...

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

#62

Post by IsTom »

fragmede wrote: post #58
IsTom wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Isn't that what biofuels are? Sun -> plants (corn) -> liquid that goes in (modified) cars

EROI for them is really bad.

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

#63

Post by pydry »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #60
pydry wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My google-fu is failing to resurface the links, but IIRC: One study determined the cheapest energy grids for many countries. IOW, if you had to rebuild the energy grid from scratch today, what would be the cheapest way to meet your needs? And the answer was 90 - 95% renewables, depending on country. Solar + wind + batteries for 90 - 95% of the power, with natgas peakers for the rest. And that 90-95% number increases…

One of the reasons I dont expect the australia storage model I cited to be wildly different to, say, Finland is that areas of the world which dont get a lot of sunlight tend to have a lot more wind and hydro potential per capita.

I doubt there are any places in the world where some carbon free combination of solar, wind, hydro, pumped storage, batteries and syngas isnt economic.

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

#64

Post by kccqzy »

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…

The demand for fossil fuel is continuous. The demand for solar panels is one-time: when you first install it.

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

#65

Post by Biologist123 »

alex_duf wrote: post #61
Biologist123 wrote: post #53

This was a great positive start to the day. Thanks whoever posted that. One point curious in its omission is whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget. Presumably that’s the critical metric in all of this. [Edit: I ran this question through ChatGPT and the initial (unvalidated) response wasn’t so exciting. This obviously put a dampener on my mood. And I wondered why people like McKi…

>whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget I'm not sure I understand. There's no carbon budget, any carbon that we emit is carbon we'll have to re-capture somehow and the longer it stays in the atmosphere the longer it will have a heating effect. I think renewable have accelerated to the point of matching the electricity growth worldwide: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electrici…

My apologies. By available carbon budget, I meant the carbon we can burn before we exceed 1.5 degrees, or 2 degrees etc.

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

#66

Post by aaomidi »

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.

US was giving $7500 for each car sold to Tesla. But sure, CHYNAAA

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

#67

Post by mensetmanusman »

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.

The oil industry pays 10s of billions in taxes.

Any disagreement in how much they should be taxed (e.g. 10,20,30,50,90%) can be considered a subsidy.

What people are mostly concerned with is whether a subsidy is distorting via over production. E.g. when China entered the market in solar, most western solar companies following stricter environmental protection requirements went out of business.

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

#68

Post by kccqzy »

coldspoon95 wrote: post #47
dgacmu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 arbitra…

And why is dynamic pricing a bad thing? It aligns the incentives well.

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

#69

Post by mensetmanusman »

aaomidi wrote: post #66
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.

US was giving $7500 for each car sold to Tesla. But sure, CHYNAAA

Whatever the number is in the west, China has on average ~ 10x the amount of subsidies than the west when it comes to manufacturing.

Policy makers are trying to decide whether it’s too risky to shut down all manufacturing of heavy machine capable industries and hand it over to China.

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

#70

Post by Kon5ole »

nemomarx wrote: post #21
coldspoon95 wrote: post #9

[flagged]

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…

>Nuclear seems to only work if nation-states build and operate it directly - no private firm can build them profitably and on time.

Nation states are not able to run the plants profitably either, they just don't run out of money.

Look at France, the US, UK, Germany and Japan for example. They all have immense costs related to nuclear power that is not covered by the sale of nuclear electricity.

Post reply on HN