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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

#71

Post by myrmidon »

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…

I highly doubt that we will have global negative emissions (CO2 capturing) within the next decades-- maybe by the end of the century.

Even very rich nations have a handful of prototype plants for CO2 capture right now at best, and the budget for things like this is the first thing that gets slashed by Doge et al.

If we were on track for lots of CO2 capture by 2050, we would see the beginnings already (massive investments, quickly scaling numbers of capture sites, rapid tech iteration).

Fully agree with the rest of your point though. I consider CO2 emissions as basically "raising the difficulty level" for current and future humans (in a very unethical way, disproportionately affecting poor/arid/coastal nations).

I'm also highly confident that human extinction from climate change is completely off the table (and I think a lot of people delude themselves into believing that scenario for no reason).

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

#72

Post by phtrivier »

drob518 wrote: post #55
phtrivier wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China seems to be taking the joke rather seriously [1] > The 277 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in China in 2024 alone is more than twice as much as the 121 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2024. So they took all the solar installed in the USA since forever, and build it in a year. Twice. That being said, they're _also_ building everything else: * PWR nucle…

I’d also point out that China is teetering on the edge of a financial meltdown, having also built complete ghost cities, so some of these investments may not look very smart in just a few years. Don’t confuse investment with malinvestment, in other words. Throwing money at everything, much in direct opposition to market forces, has never really been shown to be a winning strategy.

I really don't know how to assess China's economic or financial state.

I vividly remember hearing about how the housing bubble was going to break any time soon... a decade ago ?

And then how they would never survive Covid-19. Or the Trump tarrifs, etc...

To be clear, I'm not saying they're invincible or anything - maybe the economy _did_ collapse, but not uniformly, and maybe the central government is able to bail out the economy more efficiently than western economies, and maybe they're just lying their way off, etc...

But so far I have the same feelings about rumors on china's economical death as on Russian ones - metaphorically, I'll believe it when I see the corpse, and when its head has been chopped off for safety ;)

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

#73

Post by dgacmu »

kccqzy wrote: post #68
coldspoon95 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Totally. Our local electric supplier just introduced it as an option and I love it - admitting that none of us here are normal people, I reprogrammed my thermostats to be a degree warmer during peak times, shifted when we run dishes and laundry, and I run some of the compute load off of UPS. (And I have a little solar). I'm saving about $30/month on my power bill with it. It's cool.

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

#74

Post by myrmidon »

Biologist123 wrote: post #65
alex_duf wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I think 1.5°C is already basically impossible; scenarios between 2°C and 4°C by 2100 over pre-industrial levels seem achievable-- that would be a total remaining CO2 budget of ~3 Tera-tons of CO2 within 2100.

That is an average of 4 tons of CO2/person/year for 10 billion people. Americans are at 3x that right now, Europeans/Chinese 2x, and a few wealthy nations are already there (France, Switzerland, Israel). Poorer countries like India are significantly under that value (for now!).

Doubling that CO2 budget to 6000 Gt would make things significantly worse (5° expected temperature increase or more).

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

#75

Post by hearsathought »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #69
aaomidi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Whatever the number is in the west

So you don't know what the number is?

> China has on average ~ 10x the amount of subsidies than the west when it comes to manufacturing.

And yet you just randomly decide to 10X it for china?

Typical disingenuous anti-china nonsense. What's next? China spends 10X on defense compared to "the west"?

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

#76

Post by nemomarx »

Kon5ole wrote: post #70
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…

>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.

Yeah, but if your intent is to support industry by having cheap energy costs that works out for you. Same reason public transit and police run at a loss, in theory.

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

#77

Post by danaris »

A remarkably positive and hopeful article. It's really staggering seeing the figures of not just how much solar has grown in recent years, but how massively its growth has outstripped everyone's predictions from essentially any time in the past.

I also really liked this passage about the direct on-the-ground effects of being able to install solar panels:

> If you have travelled through rural Asia, you know the sound of diesel generators pumping the millions of deep tube wells that were a chief driver of the agricultural Green Revolution of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Now solar electricity is pumping the water—diesel sales in Pakistan apparently fell thirty per cent in 2024. If you’re a farmer, that’s kind of a miracle; fuel, one of your biggest costs, is simply gone.

Being able to pay a one-time up-front cost and just....never have to worry about paying for fuel for your irrigation system again. Truly remarkable.

It is, if you'll pardon the pun, quite a ray of sunshine in these otherwise dark and uncertain times.

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

#78

Post by Bender »

ignoramous wrote: post #44
pcthrowaway wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And make sure your DNS is not 1.1.1.1. Archive.is will alter requests coming from their DNS. They do not always detect it.

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

#79

Post by bryanlarsen »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #69
aaomidi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

China obviously does not subsidize $75,000 per car.

European analysis resulted in an 18% offsetting duty, meaning Chinese subsidies are lower than American ones.

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

#80

Post by Kon5ole »

nemomarx wrote: post #76
Kon5ole wrote: post #70

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. 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.

Yeah, but if your intent is to support industry by having cheap energy costs that works out for you. Same reason public transit and police run at a loss, in theory.

>Yeah, but if your intent is to support industry by having cheap energy costs that works out for you

Short-term perhaps, but pretending that something expensive is cheap doesn't really work in the long run.

Investments are supposed to be an initial cost upfront that pays off later. Like building roads, bridges and such. For energy, an investment would be to take the cost of a renewable infrastructure, energy storage, solar roofs and such. Once they are in place they have minimal costs and give extremely cheap and reliable energy (reliable because of the distribution and redundancy).

Nuclear is kind of the opposite, you get the payoff upfront but have to pay an unknown amount basically forever afterwards. This cost eventually catches up to you.

France today is in a manner of speaking still paying for electricity they consumed in the 80s and 90s by bailing out EDF. Yet the common opinion still seems to be that they have "cheap electricity".

I think France has the most expensive energy infrastructure in Europe, and it will sooner or later become impossible to pretend otherwise.

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