Last year PRC brrrted out enough solar panels whose lifetime output is equivalent to annual global oil consumption. AKA world uses about >40billion barrels of oil per year, PRC's annual solar production will sink about 40billion barrels of oil of emissions in their life times. This is at 50% solar manufacturing utilization. Once battery scales, can displace current global oil via solar ~10 years. Less if solar production also globally scales. Looking at 10/15/20 years to displace most global oil, lng, coal. Well the discretionary bits / economic consumption.
Solar and batteries can power the world
271–280 of 473 posts
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#272solar WILL power the world.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article ignores hydropower. The numbers/prices look a lot better with solar + wind + hydro + battery. Norway runs almost entirely on hydropower. Sweden has a lot. Iceland runs on hydropower and geothermal.
I’m happy to be wrong about this globally, but in my neck of the woods the readily exploited hydro resources are already exploited to 90% of their capacity and have been for 100 years. Hydro is in many ways the ultimate renewable energy, but that’s been true since electrification and we’ve been using it as part of the energy mix since then. I’d love to be wrong but my understanding is that there isn’t a huge amount o…
In the last decade or so hydro generation has grown about as much as solar and wind (they all basically grow about the same amount as global nuclear generation, hydro doubling and wind and solar growing exponentially from basically zero).
So it's not going to take off like solar but it's a big chunk of relatively clean electricity production and it's often basically a byproduct of managing water supplies. It also pairs really well with renewables as even without pumps it has a degree of flex and storage.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#274Note that we had the technology to do this affordably as of about 2008, when lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries became widely available for about $10-12 each (I had to look that up). They were definitely available at low cost ($6) by 2018:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180201203013/https://www.18650...
Looks like sodium-ion (Na-ion) 18650 batteries at 1.5 Ah have about 1/2 the capacity of LiFePO4 18650s at 3.5 Ah, and are about twice the price, so lets call them 4x the price per energy stored:
https://www.radicalrc.com/item/Sodium-Na-Ion-Battery-18650-3...
https://ogsolarstore.com/products/sodium-ion-cells-3-1v-batt...
https://coulombsolutions.com/product/12v-sodium-ion-battery/
Battery prices halve about every 4 years:
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/03/06/battery-prices-collap...
So we can project that Na-ion batteries will have the same price per kWh as today's LiFePO4 in perhaps 8 years, or around 2034, if not sooner. That will negate the lithium supply chain bottleneck so that we're limited to ordinary shortages (like copper).
500 W bifacial solar panels are available for $100 each in bulk, so there's no need to analyze them since they're no longer the bottleneck. A typical home uses 24 kWh/day, so 15-20 panels at a typical 4.5 kW/m2 solar insolation provide enough power to charge batteries and still have some energy left over, at a cost of $1500-2000. Installation labor, electricians/licensing, inverters and batteries now dominate cost.
The sodium ion battery market is about $1 billion annually, vs $100 billion for lithium ion. It took lithium about 15-20 years to grow that much. So whoever gets in now could see a 1-2 orders of magnitude return over perhaps 8-15 years. I almost can't think of a better investment outside of AI.
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I've been watching this stuff since the 1980s and I can tell you that every renewable energy breakthrough coincides with a geopolitical instability. For the $8 trillion the US spent on Middle East wars since 9/11, we could have had a moonshot for solar+batteries and be at 90+% coverage today. Not counting the other $12 trillion the US spent on the Cold War. Fully $20 trillion of our ~$40 trillion US national debt went to funding endless war, with the other $20 trillion lost on trickle-down tax cuts for the ultra wealthy.
We can't do anything about that stuff in the short term. But we can move towards off-grid living and a distributed means of production model where AI, 3D printing, permaculture, and other alternative tech negates the need for investment capital.
In the K-shaped economy, the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" phrase might more accurately be stated "if you can't join 'em, beat 'em".
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power That too has pretty recently changed. Even my home state of Idaho is deploying pretty big batteries. It takes almost no time to deploy it's all permitting and public comment at this point that takes the time. Batteries have gotten so cheap that the other electronics and equipement at this point are bigger drivers of the cost of installa…
> Batteries have gotten so cheap Any pointers for a regular Joe Shmoe homeowner looking for a backup battery? The Tesla Power Wall stuff and similar costs are halfway to six figures.
For full house backup, it sort of sucks right now. They are all charging a premium over what you can otherwise get if it's not specifically a whole home product.
What I've done and would suggest is right now looking for battery banks for big ticket important items that you'd want to stay on anyways in terms of an outage. A lot of those can function as a UPS. You can get a 1kWh battery pack for $400 right now. A comparable home battery backup is charging $1300 per kWh of installed storage.
I currently have a 2kWh battery pack for my computer/server/tv and a 500Wh pack for my fridge. Works great and it's pretty reasonably priced. The 500Wh gives my fridge an extra 6 hours of runtime after a power outage.
If I wanted to power shift, I have smart switches setup so I can toggle when I want to.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#276[dead]
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, the technology connections video on this was fantastic. If one was to cover that land in solar, you’d produce far more than the current energy demands of the US. Relying on an energy source which requires constant, continuous resource extraction is fucking stupid when we can spend resources up front and get reliable energy (solar + battery) for decades with minimal operating cost & maintenance. And then we’ll h…
> which requires constant, continuous resource extraction Is there an upper bound on battery limits with regards to resource extraction?
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Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you couldnt. Nuclear power is not dispatchable.
> Nuclear power is not dispatchable. I mean it is, its just slower. but if you have batteries, then you can divert the power to the batteries to keep them topped up.
While technically possible, given that the vast majority of the cost is capex and not fuel and given that it is already five times the cost of solar and wind when producing at 100% 24/7, setting literal piles of cash on fire might be more economic than using it to dispatch electricity.
If you're using it to charge batteries it's just five times more expensive than equivalent solar or wind.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, the technology connections video on this was fantastic. If one was to cover that land in solar, you’d produce far more than the current energy demands of the US. Relying on an energy source which requires constant, continuous resource extraction is fucking stupid when we can spend resources up front and get reliable energy (solar + battery) for decades with minimal operating cost & maintenance. And then we’ll h…
So here I go: if it is so stupid, why it is not done yet? Try not to blame anyone. Do it rationally if you can, from your message I understand your opinion. I say this as a person that has lived in a developing country the last 15 years. It is not that simple IMHO...
Because externalities screw with incentives.
Theft is stupid from a broad view. It causes more harm to the victim than benefit to the perpetrator. Everyone would be better off if we everyone stopped stealing and we provided the same level of benefit to would-be perpetrators in a more efficient form.
Why hasn't theft stopped yet? Because it's extremely difficult to do from a systems level. In principle it's simple: just don't steal. Convincing everyone to do it is hard.
Likewise, fossil fuels have horrible externalities that kill thousands if not millions of people per year. We'd be better off if we greatly cut back our usage and replaced it with cleaner sources of energy. But the people benefitting from any given use of fossil fuels and the people paying the costs tend not to be the same people. This makes it extremely difficult to organize a halt.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, the technology connections video on this was fantastic. If one was to cover that land in solar, you’d produce far more than the current energy demands of the US. Relying on an energy source which requires constant, continuous resource extraction is fucking stupid when we can spend resources up front and get reliable energy (solar + battery) for decades with minimal operating cost & maintenance. And then we’ll h…
> which requires constant, continuous resource extraction Is there an upper bound on battery limits with regards to resource extraction?
Once you have enough to power the world and are able to recycle them, then you're done with extracting resources for them.