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Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

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Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#301

Post by eldaisfish »

tencentshill wrote: post #296
eldaisfish wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you explain the fact that the average residential electricity price is higher in Australia than in most of the US? This is not as simple as people here make it out to be. Consider also that solar is profitable today because it does not set the price of electricity in most markets. In a world where solar dominates, the prices of electricity could be negative. The economics of negative electricity prices becomin…

They paid to decommission fossils early, and amortized it over the future. So it's going to drop like a rock once those debts are paid and the last plants shut down, with fewer remaining customers and lighter load on the grid. But until then, consumers will be paying higher bills. Similar to the UK - See item 18. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/141240/html...

That is not what your link says?

Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#302

Post by ted_dunning »

fp64 wrote: post #165
ceejayoz wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's for 5000 people. And it's quite compact. > And only covers heat. Is that not useful?

Don't get me wrong, this is cool. We just have some stricter requirements on a country/state/union level that while this might help with parts, I don't see how it can easily scale up and generalize

It scales up just the way that siloes on farms scale up ... you build more of them.

And the Finns put a priority on staying warm. For normal electrical generation, they largely use wind with a growing solar fraction.

Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#303

Post by cmrdporcupine »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #151
cloche wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even so, the article says it grew 8% YOY in the US. The best is to hope that this is an unstoppable trend so that even politicians won't be able to reverse it.

Even so, the article says it grew 8% YOY in the US. Versus 35% YOY in China. China gets it, the USA doesn't. The best is to hope that this is an unstoppable trend The trend is the USA choosing politics over reality as China becomes unstoppable. https://carboncredits.com/china-adds-power-7x-more-than-the-...

The US isn't choosing "politics"

It's "choosing" short term profits because its leadership (and its voters) have given up on long term stable trade and planning, and instead embraced oligarchy and rentier capitalism.

You can't parasitize solar and wind. There's few to no middlemen. No way to monopolize it. So it must be discouraged while you extract the last few years of wealth out of the assets you already control.

Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#304

Post by ted_dunning »

8note wrote: post #134
Aurornis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know how you can be against solar unless you’ve been given some uninformed talking points. Are they against solar subsidies or other policy provisions? It’s hard to understand someone who is against passive energy collection.

solar heating isnt as passive, and requires that the fluid keeps flowing, and all thr plumbing maintenance that goes with that. a lot of opinions were made about solar when solar heating was the primary approach, vs today's chinese PVs

This is an important point. In the 1980's, PV panels extracted 5-10% of the incident solar energy which could be converted to heat at roughly 100% efficiency. Solar thermal collectors collected at 80+% efficiency and could store and return the heat at about that level for a net 70% round trip. That's a lot better than PV, especially if the collector is your entire south-facing facade.

Nowadays, panels are sitting at roughly 20% and heat pumps have a coefficient of performance around 4x. If you need a battery round trip, you are right about the 70% point and you now have electricity which is more generally useful than low grade heat.

Those 40 year old decisions, as you say, have had several decades of ossification, though, so it is hard to uproot them.

Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#305

Post by ted_dunning »

rcxdude wrote: post #162
dimitrios1 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am against it for one reason only, but it's very solvable, IMO, and it's the amount of space they take up. I live next to 200+ acres of solar farms. A part of me cries a little when I see so much beautiful land and trees cut down and these lifeless panels taking up so much space. We have so many buildings, and structures already (think parking decks, tops of apartments, homes, offices, even parking lots) that we co…

I cry more when I think about the amount of farmland being used for bioethanol, something which is barely energy positive. If the US would switch the subsidies and regulations propping that up to propping up solar, it would easily free up a huge amount of land.

and I cry again when I see mountains of fly ash from coal burning.

Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#306

Post by ted_dunning »

ceejayoz wrote: post #288
dimitrios1 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am against it for one reason only, but it's very solvable, IMO, and it's the amount of space they take up. I live next to 200+ acres of solar farms. A part of me cries a little when I see so much beautiful land and trees cut down and these lifeless panels taking up so much space. We have so many buildings, and structures already (think parking decks, tops of apartments, homes, offices, even parking lots) that we co…

> use up perfectly usable farmland It's still farmland! They're just farming energy now.

Cutting out the middlemen. Getting rid of the pesky chlorophyl syndicate.

Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#308

Post by HerbManic »

jrmg wrote: post #254
scope2093 wrote: post #246

We installed roof solar (10kW panels + 8kW hybrid inverter + 32kWh battery + planning/execution) last October for 11k euro. After all the math, our "investment" would pay off in approx 8-10 years (at current electricity prices). That's without an electric car, which we plan to buy sometime in the next two years. All in all, pretty happy. Especially that we have frequent grid faults. Even my ISP has some beefy batteri…

Getting solar installed on our house, providing well over 100% of our energy needs overall (including car), has left me low-key kind of angry that we, as a society, are letting so much energy just uselessly fall onto structures and the ground when we could be harvesting and using it. Especially in the US, and especially in homes, we tend to have dark roofs. Sunlight falls on these, heating the building up, then we bu…

For years, maybe 20 now, I have seen a few people that seem reputable in terms of their positions and data they project that says that we should not have as many solar panels as we do. It is restrictions on rare materials etc. Some of them are probably paid to have this position, others seem genuine.

And yet, look at what is happening. Year after year the exponential growth continues without a blip! It is one of those things that looked impossible initially but obvious in retrospect.

My broader long term fear is that if we essentially get "limitless" energy, we continue to harm the ecosystem in other ways. Like giving a drug addict a limitless bank account. But we are still a long way from that point.

Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#309

Post by belorn »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #217
belorn wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add some numbers here, in Sweden the amount of energy you get from solar during the worst months are a single digit percentage, while consumption of energy during the same period doubles from the average. Consumption during the best solar months drops to about half. Solar works a bit better when consumption patterns is the opposite, and the output is more reliable.

Solar doesn't have to be colocated with consumption. There is a massive amount of available solar in Europe and North Africa, even in the winter, and HVDC (including underwater HVDC lines) makes this available.

Naturally. Build the solar in southern Europe and North Africa, and when enough countries in the route to northern Europe has built up enough transmission with HVDC, then we can start to decommission existing energy infrastructure in favor of importing solar energy from those regions. Such project can happily compete with green hydrogen, and I am sure that Central and Northern Europe are very happy to buy if cheaply offered.

An other similar available strategy would be to turn the Mediterranean Sea into a massive hydro power dam by turning the Strait of Gibraltar into the world largest power plant. Combined with solar and wind, it could act as the storage for the whole of Europe and Africa, and the energy is similar to solar completely free.

Re: Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026

#310

Post by HerbManic »

antonvs wrote: post #249
cryptopian wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who don't have the time to watch, the biggest point he hammers home: fossil fuels are a single use energy source; renewables keep producing energy. So long as you've built the infrastructure and kept it maintained, the energy continues to come. With fossil fuels, you have to build turbines, then you have to remove it from the earth, then you have to ship it to said turbines, then you burn it and it's gone.

> then you burn it and it's gone. It's not just gone. It becomes a debt that everyone has to pay.

Accountants call them 'externalities'. Things they can take off the books if they treat the atmosphere like an open air sewer system.
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