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

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

#581

Post by kragen »

lukan wrote: post #560
kragen wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea of "peacetime" is probably outdated. Not in the sense that I think people should fight, but in the sense that their fighting will no longer be limited to certain geographic areas, and people will fight, so all of us will be at constant risk of both infrastructural damage and violent death.

I don't think peacetime is outdated, but we do live in a time of increasing tensions and classical and asymetric conflicts, mixed with an increasing amount of people who believe they have nothing left to loose. So yes, I also prefer the concept of local ressilience as opposed to having many critical infrastructure points where everything else will collapse if those are damaged. Solar, Wind and batteries can go a long…

I don't think any of tensions, classical conflicts, asymmetric conflicts, the amount of people with nothing left to "loose", or all of these together, are at particularly unusual levels compared to the previous 6000 years, though they're higher than they were 20 years ago. But, for most of that time, warfare was geographically localized; you could avoid directly experiencing warfare by not being a soldier and living inside a country that wasn't being actively invaded, or on the national border between two countries that weren't at war with each other or being actively invaded. Sometimes that was easier said than done, but most people managed it most of the time.

In the Drone Age, though, you can remotely pilot a quadcopter 4300 km away to blow up airplanes on the airstrip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb — or to blow up your political opposition, if you can guess where they are or will be. The US has been doing this for 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq: https://theintercept.com/2015/11/19/former-drone-operators-s... (use Readability mode to bypass "this is not a paywall") but a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper costs on the order of US$100 million, so there are less than 400 of them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper#In... while Ukraine's most popular drones cost on the order of US$300, can be 3-D printed in a basement, already cause 70% of casualties on the battlefield, and are produced in volumes approaching 10 million per year https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/03/world/europe/.... Many experts believe drones have made tanks obsolete on the battlefield https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJRqXBhnvCs.

Even without autonomous weapons, we're rapidly moving toward the future of borderless war without end so vividly envisioned in Slaughterbots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA. Ukraine is already an order of magnitude past the headline number it opens with, "Customer pilots directed almost 3,000 precision strikes last year."

If you want to see what precision strikes on the Ukrainian battlefield look like, plenty of Ukrainian military units have posted fundraising videos, so you can watch terrified conscripts dying all day long if you want to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjIgTJ-73v4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhQBf4VFMwI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A64TmBvbn1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXUqJAnAP9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCoCxARDEio.

Those videos are a preview of what life will be like for you and your family in the years to come as war becomes borderless.

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

#582

Post by Lalo-ATX »

wanderingstan wrote: post #434
zenkat wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" for an interesting take on this dynamic for nation-states and political economies. His core thesis is that dominant powers rise as new players leverage new technologies (especially energy technologies), build complex interdependent economies centered around those technologies, but then wither and fall as they spend increasingly more on military power to…

Thanks for the tip! It seems obvious now, but its been interesting for me to realize how much of human history can be understood as a quest for energy, full stop. Even going back to the invention of farming, which at its core was way to reliably source more calories per person. Fun to think of your examples of sailing, coal, and petroleum empires as further chapters in this ongoing quest.

absolutely.

energy is a time accelerator. You can do more, produce more, using energy.

all of our "wealth" is due to our application of energy. Maintaining and increasing wealth both require energy.

Some people look at the relationship between wealth and energy. And there's more than one way to look at it. I found this interesting for a really big picture perspective.

https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/13/1021/2022/

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

#583

Post by jjulius »

bobdvb wrote: post #564
kjkjadksj wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's like saying "The Great Wall of China is just like any other garden wall."

I don't see that comparison at all. Rather, I see an idea that's more akin to, "This is the sum testament to our overall technological capabilities at that time", for both YT and the Great Wall.

That's why I question whether it's actually a "miracle". I don't mean to suggest that it's not quite the feat to make something like that exist, but I see it as more of a representation of where we're at technologically, rather than some sort of improbable, inexplicable thing that otherwise shouldn't be. The fact that the response to my post seems to clearly understand how it exists kinda-sorta supports that, IMO - you can draw a clear path towards understanding how it came to be.

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

#584

Post by debesyla »

Lalo-ATX wrote: post #582
wanderingstan wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the tip! It seems obvious now, but its been interesting for me to realize how much of human history can be understood as a quest for energy, full stop. Even going back to the invention of farming, which at its core was way to reliably source more calories per person. Fun to think of your examples of sailing, coal, and petroleum empires as further chapters in this ongoing quest.

absolutely. energy is a time accelerator. You can do more, produce more, using energy. all of our "wealth" is due to our application of energy. Maintaining and increasing wealth both require energy. Some people look at the relationship between wealth and energy. And there's more than one way to look at it. I found this interesting for a really big picture perspective. https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/13/1021/2022/

(And to connect this with AI...)

I guess we could count the need for more efficient IT tools/engines too - use less electric and human power to fulfill our knowledge needs using better algorythms.

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

#585

Post by Lalo-ATX »

ddxv wrote: post #384
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...

I grew up in a rural house that is off grid. My parents used to run a gasoline generator whenever they wanted electricity. As kids, to watch movies, this was all the time. As they got older, got phones, satellite internet etc their gasoline use went up a lot. They had solar since the 90s but it was broken panels (which still work, they basically never die). Finally last year I had the time and money to put in a big n…

not to mention, gasoline fumes can cause kidney and liver damage, and hematologic disorders and an increased risk of leukemia and other blood cancers, driven largely by benzene's carcinogenicity

generally not great to be around a lot

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

#586

Post by fastball »

pydry wrote: post #575
fastball wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you getting a LCOE diff of 5x? The latest Lazard's is 2x. Transmission costs will require more than "wiggle room" if you are sending power from some cornfield in middle America to Seattle. Also a big question in my mind is "where can the price go from here". I don't imagine there is a huge amount of room left for optimization of solar, where as with nuclear I think almost everyone agrees that it is about as…

Lazard says utility solar and onshore wind is ~$40 per MWh while nuclear power is ~$200. Offshore wind is more like $70, but also has double the capacity factor, so requires less matching storage. We've been told for about 3 decades that any day soon microreactors/thorium/fusion will lead to cheaper, safer nuclear power and no doubt for the next 3 decades some people will continue to believe.

I'm seeing those numbers, but as the low end (without storage) for solar and at the high end for nuclear... so not a reasonable comparison. Not sure where you're looking, but from here your numbers are way off base.

To be more concrete: the first chart from this report[1] is showing "Solar PV + Storage—Utility" at $50-130 (mid-range: $90) and "U.S. Nuclear" at $141-220 (mid-range: $180).

I don't think we've had serious capitalized work on micro-reactors for 3 decades, it's a much more recent phenomenon. And China (who is massively outperforming the US in solar deployment) is also deploying Thorium reactors. Kinda strange for them to do that since they're so good at solar and nuclear is such a lost cause, esp since Thorium reactors are generally worse for the military/weapons case (which you claim is the only reason nuclear energy programs exist).

[1] https://www.lazard.com/media/uounhon4/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...

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

#587

Post by aaronbrethorst »

pfdietz wrote: post #460
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mecha…

I'm not sure how you're extrapolating your argument from anything that you or I said before. Solar is generally cheaper than fossil fuels for new power generation.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-and-solar-en...

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

#588

Post by hnaccount_rng »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #562
hnaccount_rng wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may never be “worth” it in economic sense, but it offers a way to separate the time of “energy is used” and “energy is available”. Assuming sufficient captureable volume you could capture the emissions of a fossil power plant during the ~two weeks per year where weather is sufficiently bad. And then take the other 50 weeks to capture that carbon again. It can be completely inefficient (like sub 5% round trip effic…

The idea that we'll have huge excesses of clean energy seems like wishful thinking. We may have issues with excess energy at certain times of day for sure. But intermittent excesses like that are difficult to make use of economically because of capital costs and low utilisation. A general excess would be countered by falling energy prices to the point that it's difficult to make a business case for new installations.…

Of course it seems like wishful thinking! Because that’s the historic norm. Energy was (in some way) always the limiting factor. And every time energy access got meaningfully cheaper society massively reorganised around it.

And yes “energy” in general won’t be free. We still need to build the generation and distribution systems. But we reached a point where just dumping solar on all _new_ roofs rounds to essentially free (the costs are the labor and the access to qualified personnel). The exact same is currently happening to batteries. Any transformer project will be able to just integrate 4-12 hours of batteries without getting meaningfully more expensive. The same for every domestic or industry service upgrade

We are not there yet. But give it another 5 years and we will. And then we are only talking about financing what little distribution system we will need (basically you only need average-sized cables not peak-sized ones) and a capacity market for backup power systems (also only for average residual demand). And those we simply cannot (efficiently) finance by a per-kWh-used charge

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

#589

Post by idiotsecant »

pfdietz wrote: post #472
idiotsecant wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally the problem. Transmission is desperately needed, much more than generation right now. The issue is that it's hard to explain to people why this is, and even when they understand they react like you do. RENEWABLES NEED TRANSMISSION!!! We need to be building unprecedented Manhattan project levels of transmission, yesterday! But instead we will put some solar panels on a car park and feel like we did o…

With sufficiently cheap storage, no transmission is needed. There's a tradeoff, and batteries are rapidly improving.

>With sufficiently cheap storage, no transmission is needed.

This logic eats its own tail. Yes, if battery storage was cheap a lot of things would be monumentally better. It isn't. We need today solutions, not hypothetical ones.

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

#590

Post by defrost »

idiotsecant wrote: post #589
pfdietz wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With sufficiently cheap storage, no transmission is needed. There's a tradeoff, and batteries are rapidly improving.

>With sufficiently cheap storage, no transmission is needed. This logic eats its own tail. Yes, if battery storage was cheap a lot of things would be monumentally better. It isn't. We need today solutions, not hypothetical ones.

Progress marches on: Chemical Process Produces Critical Battery Metals With No Waste https://spectrum.ieee.org/nmc-battery-aspiring-materials

Energy storage technology is on a roll, and grid storage isn't limited by weight energy density in the same manner as vehicle batteries are.

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