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

Solar is winning the energy race

dw.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 146 posts

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#101

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

thinkcontext wrote: post #45
kwakubiney wrote: post #31

Might be a noob question, but why can't EVs have solar panels on them directly so they can get charged just by moving around? Or why can't we have SVs(Solar Vehicles)? Why do we have to use solar panels on EV stations rather than just having them on the vehicles themselves?

The amount of power that can be generated from the surface area of a car is pretty small compared to how much a car consumes. And the cost hasn't been low enough compared to the value of the electricity it could produce. Maybe someday the price will get so low it will be a no-brainer.

> Maybe someday the price will get so low it will be a no-brainer.

The cost of solar panels is already low, that's why it's booming. This cost isn't the main constraint any more.

Panels on a vehicle have stronger requirements for low weight, and vibration tolerance than those on a fixed structure. They contribute to the complexity of the vehicle's power systems. They have to be designed with vehicle aerodynamics in mind.

And of course the limited surface area means that you do all of that, for a component that's it's barely able to keep the vehicles' aircon running. The physics of that will remain the same. Even of the total costs are low (and factors such as the vehicle weighing more are an unavoidable cost), the benefits are lower.

At any price point, including free solar panels, there are good arguments to put the panels on a fixed structure instead.

So maybe it will happen when we have run out of non-moving surfaces to put the panels on. i.e. don't hold your breath.

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#102

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

GoToRO wrote: post #87
kwakubiney wrote: post #31

Might be a noob question, but why can't EVs have solar panels on them directly so they can get charged just by moving around? Or why can't we have SVs(Solar Vehicles)? Why do we have to use solar panels on EV stations rather than just having them on the vehicles themselves?

My understanding is that when buying a car you are dealing with an oligopoly. You might think that you have a lot of options, but they all come from the same source. Furthermore, big money control not only car production, but oil too. If they allow the ceo of a car company to come with such a car, they loose billions in the oil industry. So they have no incentive to do that. New options do appear on the market like t…

> The problem with green energy is that it is very democratic and hard to control.

It's not that I totally disagree with this - there is some truth to it. But it has no bearing at all on the question "can I put the panels on the car instead?" Which has been debunked in this thread and elsewhere many, many times.

The counterargument to what you say is that Solar is in fact booming. It is coming - oil money can slow it, but not stop it. They have more success in some countries than others. It's not a coincidence that China, which course desires energy independence but doesn't have access to a lot of oil, is leading the way. Sorry USA, you're laggards now.

But solar + battery is on an exponential ramp-up and getting big now. Each shock like the current Hormoz idiocy makes the case for it even more to the rest of the world. It's coming, fast.

Just, it's not useful on car roofs. That's a poor choice of panel location.

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#103

Post by casey2 »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #16
cbmuser wrote: post #7

[flagged]

That’s a lot of text, none of which even attempts to refute the factual claim that solar’s generation share has increased from 1% in 2015 to 10% in 2025. Also, talking of subsidies, the reason renewables like solar need subsidies is because its fossil fuel competitors not only get heavy subsidies, they get massive states to enter trillion dollar wars to secure fossil fuels. They get a tiny fraction of the costs that…

[flagged]

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#104

Post by JKCalhoun »

snowchaser wrote: post #40
kwakubiney wrote: post #31

Might be a noob question, but why can't EVs have solar panels on them directly so they can get charged just by moving around? Or why can't we have SVs(Solar Vehicles)? Why do we have to use solar panels on EV stations rather than just having them on the vehicles themselves?

It’s a good question, but the reality is the energy required to power a car is far larger than what you can collect. The solar energy you can collect is about 750W/sq meter. A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft? Best case if the sun is right over the car you can illuminate about 5 square meters. That’s about 3.75KW. To convert that to a mor…

I would love to see this laid out practically.

For example, if you had an electric golf cart with a solar roof, on a sunny day…

With two adults, a speed of 35 MPH, an LLM suggested a ratio of 10:1—that is, the power demands of the golf cart were 10x what the solar could deliver in real time. (LLM considered also aerodynamic drag, rolling resistance of golf cart tires…). When I suggest a speed of 25 MPH, the ratio came down to 5:1.

Regardless, assuming batteries to store energy on the cart, it suggests a 10 minute drive to your neighborhood grocery store would require the golf cart to sit in the parking lot for close to an hour before it will have caught the batteries back up to their charge before you left home. (And this is at the rather impatient 25 MPH drive.)

To get to a better ratio you would have to engineer like hell to start squeezing the numerator. Make it radically aerodynamic, low-rolling resistance tires (probably the lowest hanging fruit), cut the weight significantly…

I do love the idea of something like an electric rickshaw or tuk-tuk. Maybe not streamlined, but you could get much better rolling resistance with something like bicycle tires—and weight could be kept in check.

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#105

Post by patall »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #2

Thank you, China. One question I have with solar is: what is the reasonable maximum it can produce as a proportion of each country's needs? Solar is the most guaranteed to be intermittent electricity source around, and can have high seasonality, too.

It depends on how much generation you expect to 'waste'. Many plans are targetting a lot more generation than demand, with numbers sometimes stated as 300% generation potential for solar plus wind.

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#106

Post by belorn »

hnmullany wrote: post #61
didgetmaster wrote: post #54

I am confused. The article claims that solar is the best, cheapest source of power. It also claims that the Trump administration is undermining it in the US by cutting federal subsidies. If solar truly is the cheapest, why does it need any help from any government? It would seem to me that it should flourish in any capitalist society where money naturally flows towards the cheapest solution that actually works.

Solar still makes sense economically in the US without explicit subsidies - that's why it is still getting built. But the Trump admin is also with-holding permits and cancelling long distance transmission that would allow it to reach non-local markets. The fossil fuel industry is also sponsoring astro-turf campaigns on the local level to ban new deployments.

Long distance transmission is part of the cost of production when the location of the production is non-local to the consumption.

With-holding permits is stupid, as are bans on new deployments, but neither are subsidies. You can cut subsidies to zero and at the same time give out all the permits people requests.

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#107

Post by ordu »

defrost wrote: post #63
didgetmaster wrote: post #54

I am confused. The article claims that solar is the best, cheapest source of power. It also claims that the Trump administration is undermining it in the US by cutting federal subsidies. If solar truly is the cheapest, why does it need any help from any government? It would seem to me that it should flourish in any capitalist society where money naturally flows towards the cheapest solution that actually works.

The USofA is a broligarchy not a capitalist society, so there's that. Trump has his thumb on the scales, cancelling wind farms in progress via executive order, not cancelling the federal subsidies for fossil fuels, etc. There are always transition overheads to breach - in China the government there subsidised the non existant EV industry into being, now that's going gang busters the government support has dropped bac…

> cancelling wind farms in progress via executive order

He is going to pay them $1B to drop their plans: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/23/g-s1-114868/trump-totalenergi...

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#108

Post by thinkcontext »

cbmuser wrote: post #7

[flagged]

I won't disagree that Germany's energy transition has been badly managed. However, after many years of needing subsidies in the last few years the economic case for solar + storage has changed. The most vivid example I've seen if that is Pakistan. They are a poor country with no subsidies and had a huge explosion of solar without the government even being aware at first. It's been so dramatic that they've had to cancel scheduled tanker deliveries of LNG because they had no place to put it.

The energy transition is a decades long project. Germany started early in order to bring costs down which took time. You should consider reexamining the economics

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#109

Post by Moldoteck »

don_esteban wrote: post #76
Moldoteck wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

full decentralization is not a feature but a bug imo - you spend a lot on transmission. Germany now spends 10x more than france on transmission and curtailment and has highest prices in EU. It's the best to have a hybrid - centralized pp and centralized solar/wind parks but distributed evenly across country. Ukraine had also massive loss of ren power because most solar+wind was in south (because of better weather) an…

You are looking at it from the point of view of 1st world country that has a functioning highly centralized generation and distribution system. My view is more from the 3rd world country where the generation and distribution is insufficient and unreliable. To goal is to have local generation closely tied to local production, greatly alleviating the need for global long-distance transmission. Yes, it does not work as…

"greatly alleviating the need for global long-distance transmission" - the need isnt gone. You still need transmission, especially with VRE where you want to distribute generation to capture higher variety of weather.

Getting electricity for some unreliable home usage is one thing and should be pursued if there's no viable alternative, but the moment you want to go the next step, transmission is a must.

Re: Solar is winning the energy race

#110

Post by don_esteban »

Moldoteck wrote: post #109
don_esteban wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are looking at it from the point of view of 1st world country that has a functioning highly centralized generation and distribution system. My view is more from the 3rd world country where the generation and distribution is insufficient and unreliable. To goal is to have local generation closely tied to local production, greatly alleviating the need for global long-distance transmission. Yes, it does not work as…

"greatly alleviating the need for global long-distance transmission" - the need isnt gone. You still need transmission, especially with VRE where you want to distribute generation to capture higher variety of weather. Getting electricity for some unreliable home usage is one thing and should be pursued if there's no viable alternative, but the moment you want to go the next step, transmission is a must.

I am thinking Africa, not Northern Europe with winter, snow and weeks of overcast.

In tropics/subtropics, even during monsoon season, you have plenty of sunlight, the needs for storage and long distance transmission capacities are much lower than in more solar-hostile environments.

Post reply on HN