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Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

arstechnica.com

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Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#121

Post by _whiteCaps_ »

elliotbnvl wrote: post #90

I have a goal of setting up solar on my property in the woods that goes directly to a wall of batteries, maybe Tesla, maybe something else. But definitely not going back into the grid. Does anybody have suggestions or advice on how to do this? Who are the best companies doing this right now in New England? What products are folks using to store electricity? Are there any good resources for this kind of thing?

A few things that I've needed to deal with in my off grid setup:

I like the MidNite solar controllers.

LiFePO4 batteries are great, with a few caveats:

  - you must use batteries from the same batch, ie you can't upgrade capacity piecemeal, to avoid degrading the new ones  
  - cable lengths are important because even small differences in resistive losses between batteries can mean that one battery is doing more charging / discharging  
  - you can't charge below 0\*C, which I'm assuming could be a problem in New England

Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#123

Post by hnuser847 »

loeg wrote: post #119
ertgbnm wrote: post #22

I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.) I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively un…

My impression is that slavery was economically disadvantageous the whole time, but persisted in the South because of the relative power of the slaveholders.

Exactly. As distasteful as it is to put it in these terms, some slaveholders had massive "balance sheets" consisting of thousands of human "assets". Outlawing slavery meant reducing the value of these assets to zero.

Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#124

Post by [deleted] »

jmyeet wrote: post #106
margalabargala wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north. That doesn't tell the whole story though. If you own 100 slaves, you need to spend nonzero resources maintaining them, or else they will starve and then you have zero slaves. So the owner has less wealth than the equivalent person in the North that has the same income but zero slaves. You can't directly compare GDP per capita excludi…

Except that slaves also make new slaves that can be sold. I really dislike this idea that slavery was just a cultural aberration and not economic. For one thing, that lightens the moral stain of slavery adjacent activity, most notably colonialism and the exploitation of the colonies. This never went away. Economic colonialism exists to this day. We just call it “outsourcing”, “offshoring” and “subcontracting”.

[deleted]

Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#125

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

whatever1 wrote: post #30
toomuchtodo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is global oil oversupply of ~2M-3.7M barrels/day. China destroys ~1M barrels/day of global oil demand for every 24 months of EV production. Iran needs $164/barrel to break even on their budget, $86/barrel for Saudi Arabia, ~$60 for US shale (per Bloomberg). China has already potentially hit peak oil and ~>50% of new vehicle sales are battery electric or plug in hybrids. Oil is over, regardless of this admin's p…

Gasoline might be on decline (but the gas car fleet will take decades to turn over), but for literally everything else there is no viable alternative. Trucks, ships, airplanes, freight trains, even heating for older buildings. So no, we need our refineries for a good part of this century. Likely we will keep just the integrated ones (chemical + fuels).

Maritime shipping is targeting synfuels or ammonia. Hydrogen is not dense enough for ocean crossing voyages, too much cargo space is lost. They see the writing on the wall.

Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#126

Post by dzonga »

The trump administration by refusing to admit the superior metrics of solar, they're just burying their heads in sand.

As admitting that solar is now a superior and cost effective means of energy means admitting that the US is no longer top dog.

As empires are built on mastering a source of energy.

the Portuguese | Dutch - mastered wind to power their ships.

the British mastered coal to power Industrial Revolution.

America mastered oil

now the Chinese have Solar.

even in places like Africa etc -- places were the grid was never available for $2k -- you can power your whole house with solar and lithium batteries. Panels are getting cheaper, same as batteries. Once the tipping point is reached for electric vehicles both personal and commercial - transition to fully electric mobility happens

Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#127

Post by watwut »

hippo22 wrote: post #62
legitster wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.) More or less. Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years…

[flagged]

> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita

Yeah because your "capita" is severely undercounted.

If I exclude every who dont live in New York, USA has astonishing GDP per capita ... because I am assigning each person production of many. Same thing.

Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#128

Post by toomuchtodo »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #125
whatever1 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gasoline might be on decline (but the gas car fleet will take decades to turn over), but for literally everything else there is no viable alternative. Trucks, ships, airplanes, freight trains, even heating for older buildings. So no, we need our refineries for a good part of this century. Likely we will keep just the integrated ones (chemical + fuels).

Maritime shipping is targeting synfuels or ammonia. Hydrogen is not dense enough for ocean crossing voyages, too much cargo space is lost. They see the writing on the wall.

Approximately 40% of global maritime trade by volume consists of transporting fossil fuels [1] [2], which will be less necessary as renewables and storage scale globally, replacing this consumption and the transportation needed.

[1] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2022/01/12/almost-40-...

[2] https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2019_en...

Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#129

Post by Rexxar »

miltonlost wrote: post #96
ertgbnm wrote: post #22

I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.) I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively un…

> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.) I also never found the economic argument entirely convincing. If slavery were so economically disadvantageous in an industrialized…

Which countries do you think of when discussing industrialised countries that use slave labour?

Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#130

Post by irishcoffee »

ceejayoz wrote: post #42
crystal_revenge wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That entire talk didn't once mention the phrase "energy density" which is the real reason we rely so heavily on hydrocarbons. Additionally this talk makes the usual mistake of conflating "electricity" with "energy". While the US does have fairly high percentage of energy in the form of electricity it's still only around 33% of the US energy needs. And still we see that "green energy" only supplements not replaces our…

> It's wild that there are multiple, very serious global conflicts heating up over control of oil… That's what happens when the "Leader of the Free World" is 79 with dementia with memories of the 1970s oil crisis. We're not likely to get useful oil out of Venezuela, and any we do get isn't gonna be cost-competitive against solar.

Military vehicles that take oil-derived fuel take diesel, not hydrocarbons. The oil in Venezuela serves that purpose nicely.

No, I am not condoning anything here, just pointing something out.

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