401–410 of 473 posts
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Rooftop solar in Australia is ~60cents per Watt installed.
in the US - admittedly 4 years old info, the cost of utility scale solar was like ~$1/watt - rooftop solar was like $2.5-$3/watt
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So then they are wrong. The last 5-10 percent is the hardest part and it's the one consumers complain the most about! You can't run a factory on 90% power availability
Sure but I think if solar really did provide 90% of the world's electricity it wouldn't be inaccurate to say it powered the world. (Heating and transport are harder to solve of course.)
The bigger deceit in the statement was the implication that only batteries were needed to "power the world". This. Is. Wrong.
Fun fact, 12 million hectares of land of used to produce corn used for ethanol which is used to produce gas. I'll let you draw the conclusion. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/04/trading-some-corn-e...
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…
Nuclear could have powered the world easily and we could have done it with 1960s technology. And we could easily do electricity and heating with nuclear quite easily. The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis. And we can go to 100% of electricity from nuclear,…
Nuclear reactors make awful targets in a conflict, not sure having many around is generally a good idea if conflict is a risk and there are alternatives.
It's very clear now that infrastructure of all kinds are increasingly fair game. Nuclear reactors, data centers, water processing plants, hospitals... Both sad and ridiculous, but that's the level of insanity reached.
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Not sure. But not everyone uses fertilizer. No till is being more widely appreciated, getting nitrogen in the soil using cover crops that fix it from the atmosphere. Probably everything uses oil for lube including any alternative energy. Teslas still need greasing after all. They still have bearings and other moving parts.
Some crops can require as much as 10 calories of petrochemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy when one takes such things into account --- corn (well, maize) is quite calorie dense/efficient in terms of land and other usages --- I'd be curious to see a full, comprehensive crunching of the values involved.
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I have some experience with distributed energy generation and have met with senior utility executives many times while trying to implement some grant supported projects through my work. It turns out that a big problem is that whenever we install local generation it costs utilities a ton of money. They bundle the cost of grid maintenance into their per kWh charges. These costs, which include debt service, maintenance,…
> Public utilities and pension funds hate green energy, they are a major factor in west's pathetic performance when it comes to solar adoption vs China No this statement is absolutely wrong. Here's why: > west's pathetic performance when it comes to solar adoption vs China China is dominating energy because the CCP doesn't care what their citizens think. They need energy and they are doing everything they can do to g…
Those regulations and that interference result from the fact that in a distributed world the current utility bond value drops to zero. Utilities will not build infrastructure that makes their existing infrastructure lose value.
I recently negotiated with a government owned utility on a large solar project. They were 100% against it until I demonstrated that the project would never feed back to the grid and wouldn't reduce the amount of power we currently buy from them. Zero interest in distributed solutions on their side. They are focused on giant transmission line projects and hydro.
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I have some experience with distributed energy generation and have met with senior utility executives many times while trying to implement some grant supported projects through my work. It turns out that a big problem is that whenever we install local generation it costs utilities a ton of money. They bundle the cost of grid maintenance into their per kWh charges. These costs, which include debt service, maintenance,…
> It turns out that a big problem is that whenever we install local generation it costs utilities a ton of money So a question: - Lets hypothesize that distributed, decentralized systems cost way more than centralized systems - If you agree with that hypothesis, can we next hypothesize that building a distributed, decentralized system that can support power on one block and can allow it to continue to stay on while t…
It is already cheaper to build the distributed energy solution you describe but making that change would require a massive restructuring of electricity and natural gas utilities. Such a restructuring would revalue the debt that backs the existing infrastructure. This would be a great thing for the average person but not for the people currently in charge of regulating what types of systems are allowed.
Costs of distributed energy may drop so low in the next 5-10 years that it will no longer be possible to keep things from moving to a micro grid network.
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> It turns out that a big problem is that whenever we install local generation it costs utilities a ton of money So a question: - Lets hypothesize that distributed, decentralized systems cost way more than centralized systems - If you agree with that hypothesis, can we next hypothesize that building a distributed, decentralized system that can support power on one block and can allow it to continue to stay on while t…
In this case the utility executives work for public utilities. So capitalism isn't to blame. It's about the incentives of the incumbent energy providers. It is already cheaper to build the distributed energy solution you describe but making that change would require a massive restructuring of electricity and natural gas utilities. Such a restructuring would revalue the debt that backs the existing infrastructure. Thi…
fair. I appreciated the insight in your original message - datapoints from industry insiders like yourself do help people like I gain some understanding of why we have to go in alone on this and not wait
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We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power. Perhaps we will eventually, but until that actually happens the base load requirement represents a hard limit on the amount of solar generation capacity that the grid can handle.
We started scaling batteries after solar (because the technology reached the point where they were profitable after solar)... but they're being installed at scale now, and at a rapdily increasing rate. Batteries provided 42.8% of California's power at 7pm a few days ago (which came across my social media feed as a new record) [1]. And it wasn't a particularly short peak, they stayed above 20% of the power for 3 hours…
Fun fact, 12 million hectares of land of used to produce corn used for ethanol which is used to produce gas. I'll let you draw the conclusion. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/04/trading-some-corn-e...