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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

#441

Post by xhkkffbf »

parineum wrote: post #397
xhkkffbf wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capital was actually a big part of it. The plantation owner didn't just need to capitalize the cost of the land, but the labor as well. When someone purchased a slave, they were paying up front for the remaining labor that could come from that body. This was often pretty expensive when the body was young. Before the Civil War, New Orleans was one of the biggest banking centers of the US because of all of the borrowin…

Reading this post made me wonder if there were "temp agency" type businesses for slaves. Having to own the labor would make your it very difficult to expand and contract your workforce. Morality aside, it really doesn't seem like a great system.

Yup. This is why it failed.

I think it was fairly common for plantations to loan, rent, or trade slaves just as they treated any other asset.

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

#443

Post by ProllyInfamous »

iknowstuff wrote: post #258
ProllyInfamous wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely: ERCOT's battery storage is worldbest. As a fifth-generation former Texan, I understand "separatist mentality." ERCOT's buy/sell market is perhaps also the most purely capitalistic marketplace in existance (and among least-regulated, in first-world); for these reasons, winter-proofing funding is terrible and outages likely when the system is stressed (e.g. approximately every decade Texas loses power durin…

they also pay like 1/5th of pg&e rates plus it seems ERCOT has learned and the grid seems fine now

>the grid seems fine now

Time tells all.

One benefit of the previous Texas winter disaster is that the highest MWH fee was reduced from $9000/per to $3k/p [normal would be ~$30/p].

In my personal opinion the winterization of LNG lines is still not enough for the next major storm (the cause of previous two decade storms was lack of adequate heat-tracing along pipelines — not windmills [Hotwheels' deception]). This has been discussed in every post-disaster report, since the 1980s. Private grid operators see little incentive to prepare for these storms, particularly since they make so much money when the grid is stressed (just how it's set up).

Instead of the stupidity of isolation, Texas could easily amalgamate its resources with the entire rest of Lower 48 USA, and not have to spend nearly as much prepping for emergency gas lines (instead: buy power from somewhere else).

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

#444

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

ericd wrote: post #403
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first set of PV panels I put on our van didn't even make their 10 year warranty @ 80%. Anecdata, sure, but still data.

Interesting, most of the anecdata I've heard elsewhere (for residential solar) goes the other direction - that they degrade slower than expected. You're sure there are no dead microinverters involved, right? I guess that'd be more than 20% on a van.

No microinverters involved.

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

#445

Post by bryanlarsen »

tialaramex wrote: post #436
jandrese wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just slightly missed the crux of the issue here. The big "problem" with renewables like solar is that once you've installed enough for yourself you are done for like 30 years. There is no monthly sun fee you need to keep paying. There is no solardollar , because there's nothing that needs to be extracted, transported, and sold every single day. A lot of billionaires are in an existential crisis over a world where…

I think one place this could go, a decade or more in our future is that the electricity isn't worth metering but the fact you can have electricity is billed. Think of a typical phone service today. You don't pay to send a text or read Hacker News on your phone, but you do pay for the privilege to be able to do either of those whenever you want. So I'm imagining instead of spending 40p per day plus 24p per kWh maybe i…

In the 50's "too cheap to meter" was a saying that made sense because metering was expensive. Computers have made metering cheap.

Your internet/phone analogy is relevant. They are metered, but you aren't billed on usage. Metering is used to monitor for abuse.

Australia is already moving towards the system you envisage. They're going to give you free power between 10AM and 3PM. I bet there's fine print in it similar to internet/TV, some sort of abuse limit.

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

#446

Post by toss1 »

dzonga wrote: post #126

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. A…

And for a regime claiming to support jobs, sustainable energy provides/requires orders of magnitude more workers than the obsolete, expensive, and dirty coal they are pushing again for no reason.

Moreover, no semi-smart coal miner would wish a coal mining career on their sons. They'd want them to have honest work that is clean and won't likely kill them either quickly in a disaster or slowly by breathing in coal and rock dust all day.

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

#447

Post by bryanlarsen »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #330
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the opponents of it have the deepest pockets of literally anybody in the world. A whole class of parasites who have made their lives as highwaymen on the densest energy source (outside of uranium) -- that literally comes out of the ground -- have spent at least the last 20 years actively suppressing alternatives. In some places (see Alberta, Canada), they have literally outlawed renewable developments. In thi…

> Because the opponents of it have the deepest pockets of literally anybody in the world Yet somehow these opponents have been ham fisted when it comes to opposing the projects which make commercial sense? > In this context political advocacy, education, and subsidy remain absolutely imperative Agree. But the bans were counterproductive. > There is no "free market" You're the only one in this thread who's brought up…

> the breathless activism did approximately nothing

The subsidies for solar in places like Germany in the 2000's were crucial for the insane solar cost curve we have today. Those subsidies primarily came from "breathless activism" IMO.

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

#448

Post by ElevenLathe »

thrance wrote: post #232
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry Taking Europe versus China, California versus Texas, it seems like social pressure is less effective than markets. Let markets build the power source they want to build and lo and behold you get lots of solar and wind and batteries.

If we let the markets have their way, Earth becomes unhabitable. Coal and oil plants aren't being shut down. In fact, we have more than ever with additional ones on the way.

Markets are constructed. It's possible to engineer toward the outcome you want by designing the market in a way that brings it about. Unfortunately, this is considered a socialist (which, in the US, is largely synonymous with "demonic") idea unless you want to change a market in ways that benefit entrenched elites.

Making it illegal (or expensive, via outsized taxes) to burn fossil fuels would ultimately just be another change in the rules of the market -- players will optimize within that space and find the best way to deliver energy and other services within those constraints (assuming enforcement is such that they can't just skirt the laws -- enforcement is also part of the market design).

One can frame this as "incorporating externalities" in order to help marketist ideologues swallow it, but the audience for that is almost entirely composed of people with second homes on islands with tax-cheating-based economies. Normal people are fine with the explanation of "this would have horrible and unpredictable consequences for the world your children are inheriting, so we're making it illegal".

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

#449

Post by philipkglass »

jiggawatts wrote: post #386
WarmWash wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone desperately needs to build the largest solar farm on earth, nakedly as a direct affront to China, and call it the "The Grand Trump Sun Energy Complex", with a large statue of him standing at the center of the massive radial field of panels. The dude would have no choice but to approve it and provide funding for it.

With what panels? The vast majority are made in China.

The US manufactures more solar panels now than it ever has before. It just looks small because Chinese solar manufacturing has grown enormously.

First Solar makes panels in the US and is the single largest supplier for utility scale solar farms in the US. If someone wanted to build the world's largest solar farm in the US as a stunt, domestic First Solar capacity alone could do it:

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/11/03/first-solar-to-open-i...

The current single largest solar farm is 15.6 gigawatts of nameplate capacity. It would take a bit more than a year of First Solar domestic manufacturing to surpass that.

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

#450

Post by Zigurd »

defrost wrote: post #348
shwaj wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide examples that support your assertion, that the US system was already generally seen as obsolete in 1926? Smells like BS.

"Obsolete" is pretty strong, clearly it's still limping along and hasn't quite yet succumbed to Benjamin's Franklin's expectation that it would fall to Despots if not vigoriously maintained. But it was absolutely seen as "a good first effort" that could be improved upon in the 1890s. Evidence of that is the new Australian Federation used the UK Westminster system and the system straight of Washington as inspiration t…

Seems like an easier problem to attack than, say, slavery, women's suffrage, the draft, etc. Once you look just a bit deeper, the US system hasn't been stagnant monotonically over the long-term. Not that originalists would ever admit it.
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