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Solar and batteries can power the world
71–80 of 473 posts
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#72By 2050 is the important caveat. That's assuming constant production of batteries at the current scale and production.
It also assumes we figure out how to economically recycle materials from batteries (and total recovery may never be possible). Grid scale lithium batteries have an effective lifecycle of 15 years. In this potential future, global lithium reserves would actually start getting choked up before the 2050 goal.
Nuclear is inevitable and we all need to stop pretending otherwise.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#73Fun 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…
yes but increasing solar will damage the energy lobby in the congress and other places. It's never about what is best, it's about what's best for lobby and their puppets
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#74What about STORING excess power and delivering it during the day at a same level ? That is a critical part! I remember last time it was too expensive.
grid-scale batteries are accelerating more rapidly than anyone thought a few years, it’s not really seen as an unsolvable problem anymore
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#75The article is just wrong. And only mentions energy used for heating in passing. Heating requires MASSIVE amounts of energy. I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar system (almost 30 kWh battery and 24kW solar). It keeps the lights on, but not heating. I live in a mild climate. The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.
Is a 30 kWh battery considered massive? My F-150 lighting has a 143 kWh battery.
Yes 30 kWh battery is considered large. It takes up a full 6 slot 2u rack in my garage and cost around $8k. In the context of OP's goals it's larger than what 99% of people in the world will ever have.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Net zero. But not effectively zero. They sell energy during the day when no one needs it and buy it an night when we all need it. If we all switched to solar and heat pumps there would be blackouts and an energy crisis
What? They store the surplus in their batteries during the day and use it at night. I genuinely do not understand why people are so afraid of solar. It's baffling.
Solar generates like 1/10 in the northern countries for half of the year. No batteries currently can solve this.
The problem with global ecological regulations is they never differentiate between countries on the equator or 30th parallel with countries around 60. They expect everyone to only run on sun and wind. It isn't possible. There has to be at least nuclear which is ridiculously expensive.
It's generally not an easy problem to solve otherwise it wouldn't be a problem anymore.
First sensible thing to do is to relax the expectations for countries like Poland that have no good way to compete with other countries energy wise because of geographical location that noone chooses.
It is extremely unfair to treat everyone the same even though every country has different energy resources.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
China burns significantly more coal than the USA and Europe combined and has no environmental laws standing in the way of their nuclear power plants. Imagine a world where people don't care about labeling new things as "regressive" or "anti-environmental"
China is doing that because they are profitable, not because they care about the environment. Why would they care the coal use?
Having lots of cheap energy is always boosts industry and reduces cost of living for everyone. The way China accomplished that was by investing heavily in every sort of energy and building large scale infrastructure, instead of adding roadblocks at every stage.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#78Nuclear 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,…
IIRC nuclear doesn't really work well as the last 5-10%. Start-up and shut-down for nuclear reactors is a slow process. When it's generating, it needs to just keep on generating. Not so quick to dial down or up just because the wind is(n't) blowing.
It's not that slow. They can ramp up and down over hours, and those demand patterns are known in advance. Combine with battery, pumped storage, or synfuel generation to soak up excess power during low demand times, and use that to provide peaker capacity during high demand times.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#79Before anyone cries about the environmental cost of lithium, concrete batteries are a thing and are far more ideal for grid storage.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#80Earlier 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…
yes but increasing solar will damage the energy lobby in the congress and other places. It's never about what is best, it's about what's best for lobby and their puppets
If you won't think of the energy corridor, who will?