Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system • Hacker News Board

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#451

Post by hoerensagen » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 5:17 PM UTC

passwordoops wrote: post #209

alex_duf wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget I'm not sure I understand. There's no carbon budget, any carbon that we emit is carbon we'll have to re-capture somehow and the longer it stays in the atmosphere the longer it will have a heating effect. I think renewable have accelerated to the point of matching the electricity growth worldwide: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electrici…

Shrinking? China is growing their coal capacity (1). What people mistake is China is not "for renewables". They are for maximizing absolute output. That means they are "for everything" (1) https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-has-more-than-...

China ist still adding coal plants but their capacity factor is falling.

In fact Chinas emissions have probably already peaked.

https://www.economist.com/china/2025/05/29/chinas-carbon-emi...

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-c...

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#452

Post by kjkjadksj » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 5:19 PM UTC

teitoklien wrote: post #350

jjulius wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>... miracles like... youtube... ... miracle ?

lol, you have no idea just how hard it is to make something as mammoth size financially viable or even sustainable as a business, due to sheer technological bottlenecks in video streaming, encoding/decoding videos at that scale, and everything else. It is a technological marvel, similar in comparison to designing and building an F-35 fighter jet or anything else. It requires custom Hardware Accelerators designed at a…

If that is a miracle so is every engineering and scientific effort because most things are hard multifaceted problems. Maybe these aren’t actually miracles but the inevitable products of structured teams of trained people.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#453

Post by Leherenn » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 5:20 PM UTC

davedx wrote: post #278

buckle8017 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better grid connections helps with variable weather but it does nothing for solar biggest down side. Seasonal variation from December to May is enormous. Storing months of power is a problem with no known solution.

“No known solution” is categorically false [1]. Economics is the issue 1. Generate hydrogen or other synthetic hydrocarbon fuels from electricity; flow batteries, saltwater batteries, and a myriad other chemistries; compressed air; hydro, etc etc

They're not really solutions if they're not achievable in practice though. Otherwise why not add nuclear fusion to the mix?

To give some example: Switzerland is roughly electricity neutral over a year, but there's a significant winter/summer imbalance of about 5TWh. To add enough storage to compensate this imbalance, you would need to:

- cover about 2% of the country in batteries

- build about a thousand pump storage stations: despite the Alps covering about 40% of the country, it's not clear if you would have enough valleys to flood

- hydrogen looks a bit more reasonable, if we don't look at the costs, you only need to store a few millions m3 of liquid hydrogen. The gas storage in Germany for instance are quite a bit larger than that, but hydrogen is also significantly harder to store.

And all of this is to use once a year essentially! None of it looks practical or affordable (a pump storage station costs a few billions a piece for instance).

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#454

Post by jcalvinowens » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 5:20 PM UTC

Tade0 wrote: post #305

berkes wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting side effect is that this reliance on cables introduces a dependency on copper which already is in short supply and which can be mined only in specific regions. So it re-introduces some geo-political dependencies. Not in the way fossil fuels or unranium do, because a copper cable won't "burn up" to produce the energy, but they do need some upkeep. Another dependency this introduces is the network itself. A…

It's a non-issue. Copper isn't that short in supply. A typical car uses ~25kg of copper - that's enough for approximately 0.5m of HVDC. The EU currently produces 12mln cars annually, down 3mln from the 2017 peak. In other words there should be no issue with ramping up demand for the equivalent of 1500km of HVDC annually in the EU alone - a rate much higher than the local bureaucracy could manage issuing permits for.

Do any of these HVDC lines really use copper? I think aluminum is much much more common.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#455

Post by glenstein » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 5:21 PM UTC

rel_ic wrote: post #347

Renewable energy is great, but we're not replacing fossil fuels with it, we're just adding more energy usage. And our energy usage is destroying the environment. Don't let these advancements in solar make you think things are getting better. We need to reduce fossil fuel usage, not just increase solar usage. https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/b3b696c0-226d-0137-f265-1d2...

>Renewable energy is great, but we're not replacing fossil fuels with it, we're just adding more energy usage.

My understanding is that Solar does offset fossil fuel usage, in large part because solar power generation throughout the day is conveniently aligned with energy usage throughout the day. With the exception of the evening, which some people refer to as a "duck curve" left behind to be picked up by other generation sources. But it's most definitely stepping in to fill demand that would otherwise be filled by fossil fuels

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#456

Post by neon_electro » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 5:26 PM UTC

zitsarethecure wrote: post #444

matwood wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an LG. They look to cost a premium in the US above heated air one. They also seem to be gentler on clothes since they pump in warm dry air vs. super heated air.

Out of curiosity, is it a "smart" appliance that requires an app to function?

I have an LG heat pump dryer as well, it doesn't require the app to function as far as I understand.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#457

Post by toomuchtodo » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 5:26 PM UTC

hnaccount_rng wrote: post #361

bena wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the overall point is that we will never get there. Renewables will never be cheap enough to fully replace fossil fuels, batteries will never be good enough. No matter what, as long as the cost of extracting and burning fossil fuels is less than the result of what gets produced by the consumption, someone will be doing it. It’s why crypto will never solve the energy issue. Why AI/GPT/LLM won’t either. Especial…

But that isn’t the case _today_. Unless you have existing facilities (which we do have and which gives fossils momentum) it’s strictly cheaper to build new renewables! The problem for renewables is that the p99.9 price is much higher than the p95 price. But finance will be solving that part.

Citation:

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/01/solar-cost-of-electri...

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#458

Post by ViewTrick1002 » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 5:26 PM UTC

logic_node wrote: post #420

It’s crazy that most emergency plans ignore geomagnetic threats—did you know a Carrington‑level flare today could knock out transformers worth hundreds of billions? What low‑cost steps could cities take now?

This seems to be more doomerism than reality.

What you are saying is that the induced current will be strong enough to cause damage even after all breakers trip.

Having to black start a bunch of grids world wide? Yes. Widespread damage? No.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#459

Post by eldaisfish » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 5:30 PM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #156

arh5451 wrote: post #24

Nice article explaining solar energy policy. I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms. Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.

One of the good things about solar is the lack of a mismatch between solar production curve and human needs. People use more energy during the day. People, globally, use more energy in the summer. This might not be intuitive if you live nearer the poles, but that's not representative of where the global population live. And in some of those places, like California people obsesses about the "peak" that is left after y…

this is often repeated, but is not entirely true.

Peak electrical demand does not coincide with solar generation. Generally, peak demand is either early in the morning or the late afternoon, when solar production tapers. In order to make up the difference, you'd need a couple thousand megawatt-hours of battery capacity for most regions. You'd also need this to happen twice a day - either side of typical working hours.

This is true in Tokyo and Mumbai. Tokyo's data is here https://www.tepco.co.jp/en/forecast/html/calendar-e.html

Mumbai's peak electricity demand is typically in the late afternoon, when solar output starts to dip.

The solution to this is not more battery capacity, but varied power sources. Wind, solar, gas, nuclear, etc.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#460

Post by pfdietz » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 5:31 PM UTC

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #115

pfdietz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are the most efficient form What does this even mean?

being a sentence fragment, not much! It helps to zoom out to the context of the entire sentence, where the GP says: "Whether you believe photovoltaics are the most efficient form of green energy production or not, you cannot argue the impressive economics behind them" It's definitely impressive that the cost per watt of a PV panel is roughly 13% of where it was just 15 years ago. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/so…

So, if I zoom out as you suggest, this means efficient doesn't mean economically efficient. What does it mean here, then? Engineering efficiency? That would make very little sense, since PV and other generating technologies have different inputs. It makes no sense to compare the efficiency of PV modules converting light to electrical energy vs. the efficiency of combustion turbines converting chemical energy to mechanical kinetic energy.