Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet • Hacker News Board

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#131

Post by dalyons » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 9:42 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #112

antonvs wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alas is right, China is poised to dominate … Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”? Seems like a win for everyone else, no? What happened to “competition”, or is that something that’s only supposed to be beneficial within the US?

> Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”? He’s saying it as a realist. China is building the equivalent to America’s sanctions power in their battery dominance. In an electrified economy, shutting off battery and rare earths access isn’t as acutely calamitous as an oil embargo, but it’s similarly shocking as sanctions and tariffs.

Yes and no - yes it’s dumb to give up and let china have a defacto monopoly on the future of energy production. But no insofar as sanctions on battery and solar don’t hit the same as oil and other things. Because once you have them, they keep producing for you.

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#132

Post by nutjob2 » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

apexalpha wrote: post #105

It’s somewhat humbling that this is essentially entirely done by one country. For all their faults, I am in awe of the scale and success of their industrial policy.

It's amazing what you can achieve when you control everything in a nation and can execute anyone who disagrees.

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#133

Post by antonvs » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

nutjob2 wrote: post #123

antonvs wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alas is right, China is poised to dominate … Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”? Seems like a win for everyone else, no? What happened to “competition”, or is that something that’s only supposed to be beneficial within the US?

It's alas for everyone but China. Who wants to be dependent on an aggressive totalitarian state? You can't compete fairly with China because the government applies massive subsidies and is coercive with both imports and exports. Right behind Russia, China is the biggest threat to global order and peace. It's no accident they are in cahoots.

Where do you place the United States under the Trump administration in that list?

I’m getting a strong sense of denial in this thread.

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#134

Post by dalyons » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #115

calvinmorrison wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good. maybe we can copy some shit for cheap and leap frog a few generations instead of leading the world!

Unlikely, since our labor costs are still considerably higher than elsewhere. For a very long time our economy has rested on developing high margin products and letting others do the low-marginal-overhead of making it. We assumed that they were not going to catch up to us as innovators. That was a dangerous mistake, and we may be left with nothing.

Chinas labor costs are no longer cheap either. They just have higher tech factories now.

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#135

Post by coryrc » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 9:45 PM UTC

morsch wrote: post #75

jansan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This probably depends a lot on how close you are to the equator. Here in Germany output of solar in winter is negligible, and if there is no wind, which can happen for several consecutive weeks, we need a backup. No utilities company will build a fossil power plant that will be used only a few weeks per year, so our government will have to step in to make sure this happens. On top of this you have very high costs for…

Here are some numbers: January 2025, the output of solar was ~1500 GWh, it peaked in June at 10500 GWh. So the lowest output was about 15% of the maximum, this year. https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&... https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&... Looking at wind, the ratio between min and max per week is about 1:5 (~1200 vs ~6000 GWh). Just as there is always some solar…

And this also leaves out all the heating power still consumed directly from fossil fuels. The gap is much larger.

This doesn't have have to be by switching consumption; using less is possible: Passivhaus is from Germany, after all. However, you can't do that and keep all your historical protections on buildings and layers-upon-layers of red tape on renovations.

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#136

Post by tootie » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 9:46 PM UTC

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #64

empiricus wrote: post #48

All nice and beautiful, but I don't understand how will this work in the winter in the temperate areas. You maintain parallel natural gas installations and ramp them up in the winter? Does this doubles the cost?

Wind power. Mix with emergency reserves running on open cycle gas turbines, if deemed necessary, preferably running on with carbon neutral fuel. Optimize for lowest possible CAPEX. That is contingent on that we’re not wasting money and opportunity cost that could have larger impact decarbonizing agriculture, construction, aviation, maritime shipping etc.

The next hot thing (pun intended) is geothermal. The tech to drill deep enough opens up the possibility of extracting geothermal energy in most of the world. The tech exists and is deployed. Scaling is not yet proven but is very plausible. Geothermal runs 24/7 and can be clean base load power.

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#137

Post by gpm » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 9:46 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #125

gpm wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think long range transmission remains a thing anywhere having a local grid remains a thing (which will be most places for other reasons). Load-balancing the area having a cloudy few days and the area having a sunny days and the area having a windy few days and so on will remain extremely valuable. It lets you install a lot less batteries and isn't that much infrastructure given that the last mile problems are dealt…

The point being made is that if smoothing over time becomes sufficiently cheap then smoothing over space is supplanted. It would be nice if this happened before the next Carrington Event (or the next nuclear war with orbital EMP weapons.)

I get that, I'm just disagreeing that we should be looking forwards to storage becoming that cheap. Particularly when our cheap energy sources (solar, wind) have a lot of location specific variability over time.

With some exceptions for sufficiently remote (or sufficiently always-sunny and not too dense) places that local grids themselves are no longer worth it

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#138

Post by Zigurd » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 9:47 PM UTC

antonvs wrote: post #130

ak217 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is governed by the CCP, which holds the world record for the number of people murdered by the state, feeds its citizens militaristic propaganda at scale, is currently controlled by a guy who fancies himself a dictator, and is politically stable only as long as it continues to suppress free speech and free trade. It takes a dangerous kind of willful naivete to just ignore that fact.

What kind of willful naïveté does it take to ignore the nature of the current government of the United States?

He's not ignoring it.

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#139

Post by coryrc » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 9:48 PM UTC

estimator7292 wrote: post #29

codersfocus wrote: post #21

Does anyone know whether it makes sense to setup solar arrays closer to users or to concentrate them in sunny places and send them throughout the country? e.g. an analysis of whether we should setup all the solar farms in Nevada for the whole country... set them up in the general south and transmit north... or will each state have their own farms?

We don't put all our coal and gas plants out in the desert, they're next to and within our cities. Physically transporting electricity across distance is very expensive and a not-insignificant amount of power is simply lost on the way. These problems only get worse as the amount of power goes up, and the danger grows very quickly as power goes up. Plus the strategic and logistical benefits of distributed generation.…

> Simply put you can't centralize generation for the entire country.

Depends on the country.

In Washington state, our power sources are not next to our population centers; in fact many are in the center of our state! And our state would be the 87th-biggest-country out of 197 in the world.

USA averages 6% transmission loss. New long-distance transmission lines are HVDC and have far less loss over distance. But people oppose them for dumb and good reasons; why would I in Washington state want to have good connections to California so the local producers can reduce supply and drive up prices?

Re: Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

#140

Post by Zigurd » Sat, Dec 13, 2025, 9:55 PM UTC

Carlseymanh wrote: post #54

empiricus wrote: post #48

All nice and beautiful, but I don't understand how will this work in the winter in the temperate areas. You maintain parallel natural gas installations and ramp them up in the winter? Does this doubles the cost?

One of the few problem of nuclear is summer time water use. Combining solar with nuclear would be the best option in my opinion.

Historically the biggest impediment to nuclear power has been incompetent construction management and project management. Incompetent is a strong word for it but nuclear power plants are the largest capital equipment purchases on the planet. Even modern so-called modular designs can't save poor project management, and learn as you go engineering.

That so mundane and should be easy to fix, right? That's why I bring up scale. Nobody has experience running projects that big. Some things are just too big to manage.