91–100 of 260 posts
don't worry this administration is giving nearly a billion dollar bailout to coal using war powers so congress can't block * https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/04/trump-coal-d...
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>how far are we from a more plug and play home solar system that becomes a primary energy source as opposed to a limited secondary source? We don't need a more plug and play system. A zero agreement interconnection for whatever UL certified 300W-ish scale is fine and should be widely deployed. There needing to be interconnection agreements with your utility and an inspection is not a blocker that needs to be removed.…
Apologies if my reply here is not understanding you, but this is counter to my experience. Plenty of people still want to handle their own energy production even if they have grid access. I've built off-grid houses. Most of the utility production is already renewable. Many people still choose to live off grid even though that's the case. It would be epic if there was a plug and play, house-scale option because the co…
Outside of cities, outside of grid tie, setting up your own micro-grid often can be done without any external intervention. You have to know things to do it though, I don't think it is a desirable state of things for just blind plug and play.
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There’s a legit grid stability issue for solar in general, balcony or no. Usage varies second by second, so the grid relies on physical inertia in the form of rotating turbines. Panels have no inertia; therefore, the more you have the less stable the grid gets. That is however something which can be fixed by grid-scale batteries. Or home systems, for that matter, if they have batteries and some equivalent of Victron’…
Plus /actual/ flywheels to compensate for non-synchronous generation: https://www.esbinternational.ie/case-studies/details/moneypo...
https://torkeldanielsson.se/solar-energy-forecasts/
Solar is already by far our cheapest source of energy. As solar expands, the learning rate means solar will be even cheaper. We should expect solar to be the single largest source of energy on earth by 2035.
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>China is also greatly reducing their emissions Are they? because looking at these charts[0], although fossil fuel use as a percent of total energy may be going down, the absolute values for coal, gas and oil only go up year over year. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#what-sources...
Aye, but that data is up to 2024, here's an update: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
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China’s massive coal footprint is shrinking due to successful, intentional effort under the most recent five year plan, and coal’s presence in China’s power mix will likely continue to shrink, while China ramps up exports of clean energy technology to the rest of the world.
In absolute terms, china's coal footprint is increasing, and will continue to increase in the short term, as of early 2026, they were still opening new coal plants.
People at this point should realise that Trump is lying.
He also does the same with regards to Iran.
It is time to not only look at the Epstein connection, but also the corruption in that whole family dynasty. There has never been as much theft, I claim, as with that dynasty. (And Epstein plays a role because superrich partied with underage girls, and they told Trump to shut down all investigations. This is corruption in its final stage. Same here - Trump babbles about old energy but his superrich friends expand on renewables. And profit. As always.)
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Utah passed a balcony solar bill; I think they're the only ones so far. Oregon tried in the short session last year, but it got shut down by fire marshall type people, sadly.
Interesting on Utah. Re Oregon, was the fire Marshall acting in good faith in that scenario? Recently reading about fire-truck size in the US I start wondering what the motivation is for some views about things around fire safety (amongst a million other things). Maybe good faith is too cynical. Maybe just hard-to-change attitudes.
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i think that is an overly simplistic axiom: the utilities must cover a fixed asset base (poles and wires and transformers), pretty much regardless of how much or whether a household consumes from the grid. the less the utility recoups via billing for energy usage, the bigger the deficit to cover their fixed network costs. they are frequently interested in having you consume energy, to help defray those costs, especia…
that’s true, i was considering only the perspective of the major city i live in rather than networks with lower ratepayer densities where the economics are probably totally different i do think “fully consumed or gated to never backfeed balcony solar at scale” is all i’m referring to, which i naively hope is a smaller regulatory change than backfeeding
This is more from a lot of coal power plants being converted to gas over the past 20 years than solar overtaking the outputs of those power plants. Coal output shrinking, solar output rising, the lines have crossed. Coal is unpopular in all but a few areas where coal mining is still a part of the local econonmy. I used to work near a coal plant and every day I'd go out to my car and it would have little black particl…
Total electricity produced by coal + gas is down over the last 20 years. Total electricity production is up, the difference is from wind and solar. This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc, and yet the trends continued because the underlying economic reality heavily favors battery backed solar.
I doubted what you wrote, but everything you said is correct (for the last 10 years, at least). Over the time period, natural gas increased 740 TWh/year (to 1870) and coal decreased 940 TWh/year (to 650). Electricity production is up ~7%, but that's quite low compared to the growth of everything else.
> This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc
Biden's administration put on solar tariffs, but of course I'll grant the current administration is fucking up everything else possible.