Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet

Posted by Matrixik 3 days ago

Comments

Comment by state_less 3 days ago

The scaling up of battery manufacturing for EVs and now solar storage has lead to prices I would have never imagined I'd see in my lifetime. It's one of the success stories that, having lived through it, has been a real joy.

I know that folks might have been able to point to a graph years ago and said we'd be here eventually, but I had my doubts given the scale required and hacking through all the lobbying efforts we saw against solar/battery. Alas, we made it here!

Comment by ak217 3 days ago

Alas is right, China is poised to dominate battery, solar, and EV technology and to translate it to military technology as well. Meanwhile the Republicans are blowing up US alliances and sabotaging the battery/EV industrial development policy that was actually making progress in giving the US hope in catching up.

Comment by api 3 days ago

It’s the innovators dilemma. We have so much not just technical but cultural and political sunk cost in fossil fuels and traditional industrial era infrastructure. The Chinese are just developing now and don’t have so much of that sunk cost. So they can think like it’s the future. We are stuck in the past.

Eventually there may come a day when it’s China that is stuck in the past, looking back to the early 21st century like we look back to the middle twentieth, and someone else will be ascendant.

I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century. It was the moment we chose to exit our position of world leadership both culturally and technologically.

Comment by ksec 3 days ago

May be it is not of an innovators dilemma?

Chinese CCP are willing to scarifies whatever traditional industrial era infrastructure in order for things to move forward and gain a global advantage. Especially when they are not the one paying for the scarifies.

Comment by ndsipa_pomu 2 days ago

Certainly sounds like a sunk cost dilemma.

Just because a country has previously invested in fossil fuels, it doesn't follow that they can't get the benefit of solar with future investment. However, there's a lot of powerful money/people/corporations that depend on fossil fuels for making billions - that's the real problem as that skews the market and politics of energy production/distribution.

Comment by api 2 days ago

That political sunk cost is why the innovators dilemma happens. It happens in companies too where managers, executives, and top employees will have their careers built around a certain way of doing things. Change threatens that so they will resist change and double down.

Basically success creates the preconditions for this failure mode in the future.

It might be thought of as a form of overfitting. Success results in overfitting to a local maximum.

Comment by mcswell 3 days ago

"Make America Little Again" --Donald J. Trump

Comment by jack_tripper 3 days ago

>I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century.

You must have been asleep at the wheel or living under a rock to have mised China's rise over the last decades. They didn't wait for Trump to get elected in 2024 and then flipped a switch from third world country to global superpower.

"Damn, this hot cup of coffee burned my tongue. Why would Trump do this?"

-HN comments

Comment by api 3 days ago

No I saw it. I just felt like that was the moment it tipped.

Comment by epistasis 3 days ago

This is exactly right, IMHO. We were in a course to counter China's momentum, we had handled COVID so much better, our industry had a huuuuuuge investment in it and was poised to take tiff.

And then it was all killed. And we are killing off our other competitive edges over China, the way we attract all the world's best science and tech talent to build here in the US rather than in their own countries. We have sat back scientific research 2-5 years by drastically cutting grants in nonsensical ways and stopping and decimating a class of grad students.

We were the most admired country in the world, and in a short amount of time we have destroyed decades of hard work building a good reputation.

We won't get that back in a year or two, it's going to be decades of work.

Comment by jack_tripper 3 days ago

>our industry had a huuuuuuge investment in it

Which industry? How 'huuuuuge' was the investment?

>We were the most admired country in the world

According to who?

Comment by epistasis 3 days ago

This was reported all over, but certain circles considered it politically incorrect to acknowledge that anything good happened in the years 2020-2024, so perhaps you can be excused for missing it. Some random web hits. Check out the graphs herein the massive investment in factories:

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/the-ira-...

https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/inflation-reduction-a...

Back then when I would inform the politically cloistered about this massive boom in factory construction and the hope for US manufacturing in strategically important energy tech, the most pointed critique was "yeah there's lots of spending but that doesn't mean that the factories are going to make anything." Turns out the skeptics were right. It was a huge mistake that all this stuff went into areas where it is politically incorrect to acknowledge that clean energy is changing the world. Management was not able to trumpet the new investment and the workers dont want to acknowledge what's driving the new higher wages.

As for the US being the most admired country, I work in science and a bit in entrepreneurship. The US was so far and away the leader in these that there's no comparison at all to any other country. Any visitor is completely blown away when they see what's going on, even when they heard ahead of time how much better science and startups are in the US. It's a bit shocking that you think the US was not one of the most admired countries out there, unless you're posting from China or Russia.

Comment by jack_tripper 3 days ago

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Comment by jack_tripper 3 days ago

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Comment by nutjob2 3 days ago

It was that Trump and the MAGA crowd conceded to the Chinese by destroying US goodwill and credibility built up over decades. The US will probably never recover those advantages, just as China is ratcheting up its program of dominance. Trump et al have destroyed many things that made the US great.

It's bewildering why anyone would do such a thing but here we are.

Comment by tim333 2 days ago

I don't think it's unfixable but the behavior is still kind of odd.

Comment by calvinmorrison 3 days ago

good. maybe we can copy some shit for cheap and leap frog a few generations instead of leading the world!

Comment by jfengel 3 days ago

Unlikely, since our labor costs are still considerably higher than elsewhere. For a very long time our economy has rested on developing high margin products and letting others do the low-marginal-overhead of making it. We assumed that they were not going to catch up to us as innovators.

That was a dangerous mistake, and we may be left with nothing.

Comment by dalyons 3 days ago

Chinas labor costs are no longer cheap either. They just have higher tech factories now.

Comment by sdoering 3 days ago

Same here in Germany/Europe. Our conservatives actually destroyed the solar industry for the third time. Our conservative party has actually destroyed significantly more jobs in solar industries over the last 20 years than it keeps alive with subsidies of 70k€ - 100k€ per person working in that industry (direct and indirect subsidies make the 70 - 100k€ range).

But hey, our populist right tell us, that the subsidies for "green technology" are bad and that we need to get rid of them, because they are making energy so expensive in Germany (cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago).

But hey - people vote for those parties. Because they know their economics, not like the leftists, who don't.

Germany (or Europe in general) is fucked. In a few years, we will reap what we now sow. And not because of our social systems or immigration, but because our oh so great political leaders are not willing to invest in the future.

Comment by bootsmann 3 days ago

> cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago

This is not the argument you want to make. Energy prices are a significant component of the basket used to measure inflation. Like yeah, you expect energy prices to sink if you discount for the rise of energy prices. Germany is suffering from high energy prices its the key factor why the country has been stagnating economically for the past 6 years.

Comment by toomuchtodo 3 days ago

Their energy prices are an outcome of incompetence, having tied their energy prices to Russia and a gas supply from them. In hindsight, economic diplomacy is not the path to keeping an authoritarian in check; a strong military and energy independence is.

German energy prices will decline with battery storage and more renewables pushing out the last of their coal and fossil gas generation. Should’ve kept the old nuclear generators running too, as long as possible. Alas, a lesson they’ve learned.

Comment by ViewTrick1002 3 days ago

I think this take is too shallow, and based on hindsight.

Germany has had fossil gas ties to Russia since the Soviet time.

https://dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-50-ye...

When the iron curtain fell pretty much all of Central Europe liberalized and democratized. The sole exceptions being Belarus and Russia.

Thinking they wouldn’t choose the same path is revisionist.

I remember growing up and gaming online thinking of Russians as nothing strange compared to anyone else. This changed with first Georgia and then very much Crimea.

Comment by Gibbon1 3 days ago

> Thinking they wouldn’t choose the same path is revisionist.

Societies tend to not change how things work no matter who is in charge.

Comment by pyrale 3 days ago

That is a myopic view of history.

Just look around yourself. No society is comparable to what it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, etc, in any country. If you think nothing changed in a society, you're just poorly informed.

Comment by toomuchtodo 3 days ago

‘We were all wrong’: how Germany got hooked on Russian energy - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/02/germany-depend... - June 2nd, 2022

> An arrangement that began as a peacetime opening to a former foe has turned into an instrument of aggression. Germany is now funding Russia’s war. In the first two months after the start of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Germany is estimated to have paid nearly €8.3bn for Russian energy – money used by Moscow to prop up the rouble and buy the artillery shells firing at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk. In that time, EU countries are estimated to have paid a total of €39bn for Russian energy, more than double the sum they have given to help Ukraine defend itself. The irony is painful. “For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism,” the historian Timothy Snyder wrote recently. “When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.”

> When Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Germany faced a particular problem. Its rejection of nuclear power and its transition away from coal meant that Germany had very few alternatives to Russian gas. Berlin has been forced to accept that it was a cataclysmic error to have made itself so dependent on Russian energy – whatever the motives behind it. The foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, says Germany failed to listen to the warnings from countries that had once suffered under Russia’s occupation, such as Poland and the Baltic states. For Norbert Röttgen, a former environment minister and member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union (CDU), the German government bowed to industry forces pressing for cheap gas “all too easily”, while “completely ignoring the geopolitical risks”.

> In February this year, German Green economic affairs and climate action minister Robert Habeck said that gas storage facilities owned by Gazprom in Germany had been “systematically emptied” over the winter, to drive up prices and exert political pressure. It was a staggering admission of Russia’s power to disrupt energy supplies.

> “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”

We win or we learn.

Comment by lysace 3 days ago

See also: Gazprom, Gerhard Schröder (”Putin’s man in Germany” according to NYT) and the German nuclear power shutdown.

https://atomicinsights.com/gazprom-profiting-mightily-from-g...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...

Comment by jack_tripper 3 days ago

>> “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”

So when are they retroactively giving back their salaries and pensions for having fucked up the livelihoods of their taxpayers?

Politicians have no incentive to ever make good decisions for the future of their country without any skin in the game from which their personal riches are derived.

>We win or we learn.

Jensen Huang said that failure is learning but sometimes failure is just failure and you should know when to cut your losses before the failure goes from learning to bankruptcy. And Germany did far more failure than actually learning.

Comment by ben_w 2 days ago

> So when are they retroactively giving back their salaries and pensions for having fucked up the livelihoods of their taxpayers?

Does anyone, ever, in any role, do this?

Do CEOs return their bonuses and pay and pensions when they close a business, let alone when they cut the workforce, let alone when they miss the growth of a competitor that is currently still not a direct threat and is instead fighting a battle of attrition with friend of the CEO and would only become a threat if they can take that friend's resources without the attrition destroying everything of value?

> Politicians have no incentive to ever make good decisions for the future of their country without any skin in the game from which their personal riches are derived.

The penalty for most errors in politics is the same as the penalty in any other job: you lose the job.

Most errors, because the really bad errors get you killed, either by an angry mob or by an invading army or by special forces (who may be from the latter while pretending to be the former).

Comment by braincat31415 3 days ago

A self inflicted wound. Europe keeps entering into spot gas supply contracts and paying through the nose instead of signing longer-term contracts for lower prices. The Russians have always been reliable suppliers even after sanctions took place, and calls from some hotheads to use gas as leverage was never seriously followed through by the real decision makers. And Habeck is an idiot. Lately Germany has not been buying enough summer gas to keep the storage full, and of course the storage gets emptied during the winter - people need to keep warm. To imply that Gazprom is somehow stealing gas from these facilities to exert political pressure is ludicrous, expecially since Gazprom has not even owned these facilities since 2022.

Comment by toomuchtodo 3 days ago

Europe Locks In Endgame for Russian Gas And Oil - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/europe-locks-endgame-russian-... - December 9th, 2025

Comment by braincat31415 3 days ago

Thanks for the link. I think the facts are correct but the conclusions are wrong. Yamal gas will be redirected to Asian markets by 2030, and Europe will keep losing its manufacturing base to locations with cheaper energy (e.g. the US). But something tells me von der Leyen will not have trouble heating her own home.

Comment by toomuchtodo 3 days ago

Take a look at US manufacturing activity over the last 12 months. The industry is contracting due to federal policy. US fossil gas prices are rising due to LNG exports, so it is not a sure bet cheap energy is available in the US for manufacturing.

https://www.themanufacturer.com/articles/u-s-manufacturing-c...

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64344

CATL is building one of the largest battery manufacturing facilities in Europe in Spain. I think Europe will adapt without issue to manufacturing without the inexpensive fossil fuels it previously relied on Russia for.

https://www.catl.com/en/news/6614.html

Comment by braincat31415 3 days ago

I am not sure how US manufacturing activity contracting implies that Europe is not losing its manufacturing to the US. There are lots of news of European companies expanding in the US (one example would be Airbus in Alabama, lots of others). You are absolutely right about LNG exports, and it's unfortunate because it also pushed residential gas prices up, but just look at the benchmark prices in the US vs. Europe (TTF vs Henry), they are different by a whopping factor of 2 at the moment, and it has been worse in the previous years. Notice that the US manufacturing that tends to concentrate next the the source will get its gas even cheaper. Volkswagen CEO recently stated that manufacturing in Germany no longer makes sense. I believe Europe will adapt eventually, but the cost in terms of lost manufacturing and quality of life will be high.

Comment by aktuel 3 days ago

> cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago

Dude, soaring energy prices are driving inflation. That's like saying the prices are lower if you just keep ignoring everything that actually makes them more expensive. Duh.

Comment by tirant 3 days ago

I don’t care if German prices for electricity are below inflation. They’re just still expensive. As an EV owner is difficult to find an electricity provider with costs below 0,25€/kWh, and most of them go beyond 0,30€. While I had prices in other European countries for around 0,05€/kWh at night for example.

Not only that, Conservatives, Socialists and the Green all managed to increase our electricity CO2 footprint by moving from nuclear to coal/lng.

Comment by junto 3 days ago

That’s mainly because German has fucked up the smart meter rollout. In their wisdom they separated the meter and the gateway when other countries just combined it. They also made it super secure (good), but then didn’t look at the fact that lots of people live in rented apartments and their meters in the cellars have really poor or no cellular connectivity. When Germany can finally do steerable dynamic loads properly at 95% of the market rather than under 10%, it will finally make a difference on steering pricing for such consumers as yourself.

Germany is investing in massive battery parks dotted around the grid. This will make a difference to supporting base load and offsetting coal, but it will take time.

If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly.

Comment by ben_w 2 days ago

> If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly.

Too slowly, if I'm following local news correctly (I might well not be, my German is enough to listen to podcasts but it's still not good).

e.g. this train station upgrade is currently about 20 years behind the original schedule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Köpenick_station#Presen...

Comment by jack_tripper 3 days ago

>but then didn’t look at the fact that lots of people live in rented apartments

How would the political class know this obvious fact from the top of their ivory McMansions?

Comment by lukan 3 days ago

"If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly."

What happened to Blitzkrieg?

Comment by ohdeardear 2 days ago

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Comment by antonvs 3 days ago

> Alas is right, China is poised to dominate …

Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”?

Seems like a win for everyone else, no? What happened to “competition”, or is that something that’s only supposed to be beneficial within the US?

Comment by ak217 3 days ago

China is governed by the CCP, which holds the world record for the number of people murdered by the state, feeds its citizens militaristic propaganda at scale, is currently controlled by a guy who fancies himself a dictator, and is politically stable only as long as it continues to suppress free speech and free trade. It takes a dangerous kind of willful naivete to just ignore that fact.

Comment by lossolo 3 days ago

This is oversimplified view of the world and China.

China being powerful is not something new, it was the world's largest economy for 18 of the past 20 centuries (with exceptions being parts of the 19th and 20th centuries, when Western Europe and then the US surged ahead after the industrial revolution).

> is politically stable only as long as it continues to suppress free speech and free trade.

Your analysis is through the lens of Western culture. The definition and understanding of freedom and harmony are entirely different in China. I was in China and experienced this myself, so this is firsthand experience, not something I picked up from blogs or news.

In the Chinese context, freedom is defined collectively so freedom from chaos, poverty, foreign domination etc, whereas here in the West it's individual liberty. Harmony and social stability are seen as more valuable than political pluralism, so authoritarian governance is culturally framed as legitimate. You know that 100 million Chinese travel abroad every year and all of them come back to China? Chinese leaders and citizens still remember periods of fragmentation and civil war.

There is a widespread belief that adopting a Western adversarial political model could reintroduce instability and weaken national unity so something China cannot risk given its size and diversity (you know how many ethnicities there are in China?)

This is their natural state. China has a long history of centralized, bureaucratic governance (over 2k years since the Qin Dynasty), where stability and order are prioritized.

Comment by adwn 3 days ago

This and your other comment in this thread reads exactly like propaganda paid for by the CCP.

Comment by lossolo 3 days ago

That's a funny meta comment, where are you from? Are you consuming a lot of US based content? I ask because I mainly see Americans here writing about the "CCP" based on what they regularly hear from government officials and certain news outlets. It's rarely framed as "China" it's usually "the Chinese Communist Party" emphasizing "Communist" because that word carries negative connotations in the US given its history and in the EU. But maybe framing is similar in your country.

So just to clarify, I'm from the EU, and I'm not paid for anything I write here. Maybe your world model is influenced by propaganda? The world isn't black and white.

I also encourage people to read more about the history and culture of other countries, especially the ones they have strong opinions about, which they often haven't formed themselves (In my experience, this is often lacking in US education, people learn a lot about US history, but not as much about the rest of the world).

Reading more philosophy can also broaden your perspective. In particular, I recommend learning about Singapore, its history, Lee Kuan Yew, and why many highly educated people there willingly accept restrictions on individual freedom. If you understand that, you can then start reading about China, its culture, and its history.

Comment by ak217 3 days ago

Yeah. I have also been to China myself, and have first hand experience walking around Hong Kong with people who later found themselves in jail, or riding the subway getting bombarded with saturation level jingoistic propaganda urging attack against the capitalist aggressors, or getting a tour of Beijing from a friend who worked as a photojournalist and found himself followed by the security services and had to leave and seek asylum with his family.

The silent majority is silent, yes. Those who try to do something get pushed out, or worse. It's the double-edged sword of immigration. But the Chinese people love freedom like the rest of us - you don't need to go far to disprove your entire narrative, Taiwan and Singapore are right there.

Comment by lossolo 3 days ago

Then you've had a very different experience than I have. If you don't mind me asking, where exactly were you in mainland China, and for how long?

Hong Kong isn't representative of China. I've been there and honestly, it felt like a post colonial UK dump. Going directly from Shenzhen to Hong Kong felt like going from a first world country to a third world one, but I digress.

I also talked with Hong Kongers (this year), and they told me a different story, one that isn't so black and white as the worldview you're projecting onto others.

> or getting a tour of Beijing from a friend who worked as a photojournalist and found himself followed by the security services and had to leave and seek asylum with his family.

That's another interesting anecdote. I actually know a photo blogger and a local journalist from China, neither of them is being followed by the security services, and neither has sought asylum anywhere. What was so unique about your friend?

> But the Chinese people love freedom like the rest of us - you don't need to go far to disprove your entire narrative, Taiwan and Singapore are right there.

You know Singapore isn't exactly a "free" country either, right? And Singaporeans are generally fine with that and accept the trade off. So who's disproving whose narrative here?

Different cultures have different systems and trade offs, different value systems and philosophies of life. But some people seem not to understand that and view everything through the lens of their own values, convincing themselves there's only one "right" way to live and that everything else is evil. The Holy Crusades had similar vibes.

Comment by antonvs 3 days ago

What kind of willful naïveté does it take to ignore the nature of the current government of the United States?

Comment by Zigurd 3 days ago

He's not ignoring it.

Comment by ak217 3 days ago

Yours?

I'm sick and tired of whataboutism from people who are somehow motivated to carry water for aggressive dictatorships that threaten the rest of us. I've already lost my birth country to zombies like that (they call them z-patriots, or turbopatriots, the supporters of Russia's invasion of Ukraine). In case you missed it, my original comment was intended as a criticism of the current government of the United States.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 3 days ago

> Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”?

He’s saying it as a realist.

China is building the equivalent to America’s sanctions power in their battery dominance. In an electrified economy, shutting off battery and rare earths access isn’t as acutely calamitous as an oil embargo, but it’s similarly shocking as sanctions and tariffs.

Comment by dalyons 3 days ago

Yes and no - yes it’s dumb to give up and let china have a defacto monopoly on the future of energy production. But no insofar as sanctions on battery and solar don’t hit the same as oil and other things. Because once you have them, they keep producing for you.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 3 days ago

> sanctions on battery and solar don’t hit the same as oil and other things

Oil hits hardest. I’m comparing financial sanctions to a battery embargo. Both are slow. Both are powerful.

Comment by matheusmoreira 3 days ago

> shutting off battery and rare earths access

Trump just leveraged Magnitsky sanctions against brazilian authorities to obtain access to brazilian rare earths until 2030.

Comment by ben_w 2 days ago

Brazil?

https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-rare-earth...

Output in 2024 was 20 tons.

The change in Chinese output between 2023 and 2024 was an additional 15,000 tons, going from 255,000 to 270,000 tons. The USA's own increased by 3400, from 41,600 to 45,000 tons.

I'm happy to assume Brazilian output will grow, especially if the USA invests a lot in it, but is it going to even be close to enough to make up for where China's already at? China was about 70% of the global output.

Comment by matheusmoreira 2 days ago

Honestly, I don't know. I just know this rare earths business, among other things, was somehow enough for Trump to drop the very deserved Magnitsky sanctions against a brazilian judge.

I hope it was worth it. I have to believe it was. Because otherwise he delegitimized the Magnitsky Act and fucked us in exchange for nothing.

Comment by nutjob2 3 days ago

It's alas for everyone but China. Who wants to be dependent on an aggressive totalitarian state?

You can't compete fairly with China because the government applies massive subsidies and is coercive with both imports and exports.

Right behind Russia, China is the biggest threat to global order and peace. It's no accident they are in cahoots.

Comment by antonvs 3 days ago

Where do you place the United States under the Trump administration in that list?

I’m getting a strong sense of denial in this thread.

Comment by throwaway-11-1 3 days ago

For real. I think there's a type of American that would rather hype up the evils of china than admit the distance the US has fallen from its purported ideals. This year I've seen students deported for criticizing Israel, mobs of poorly trained militarized federal police roaming neighborhoods violently disappearing people without trial, the number of homeless grow to 700,000, food kitchens with lines around the block and a president straight up selling pardons to drug dealers.

Chinese totalitarianism just doesn't seem like such a huge contrast as it once did. At least they get an increase in quality of life for the tradeoff. Also a lot of this reeks of Sinophobia tbh

Comment by andrekandre 3 days ago

  > Also a lot of this reeks of Sinophobia tbh

the grass is always browner on the other side...

Comment by ben_w 2 days ago

IMO, depends where you are in the world.

I'm in Berlin, I have more to fear from Trump's administration than from Xi Jinping's.

If I was in the Philippines, I think it would be the other way around. Initially I also had Japan and Taiwan in that comparison, but thinking a bit harder, there's also a risk that Trump is isolationist, that means the risk from each is more like a multiplier than a simple comparison.

Comment by epistasis 3 days ago

You are certainly not alone in your beliefs, but it always amazes me which technologies get the benefit of doubt and which are severely penalized by unfounded doubt. Solar and especially batteries are completely penalized and doubted in a way that defies any honest assessment of reality. The EIA and IEA forecasts are as terrible as they are because the reflect this unrealistic doubt (random blog spam link, but this observation is so old that it's hard to find the higher quality initial graphs)

https://optimisticstorm.com/iea-forecasts-wrong-again/

Similarly, nuclear power gets way too much benefit of the doubt, which should simply vanish after a small amount of due diligence on construction costs over its history. It's very complex, expensive, high labor, and has none of the traits that let it get cheaper as it scales.

Comment by solarengineer 3 days ago

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

10 new plants at USD 2.7 Billion each. They take six years to build. USD 2/Watt. They have standardised designs, have invested in grownig their manpower and know-how.

Comment by epistasis 3 days ago

If you believe China's internal pricing numbers, sure....

But their actual investments in billions of dollars and in GW show that nuclear is not competing with solar, and is sticking around for hedging bets. They the are deploying far far far more solar and storage than nuclear. And if those nuclear costs were accurate, then nuclear would be far preferable. $2/W is incredible, as in perhaps not credible, but it would also be far cheaper than solar.

And even if China figured out how to build that cheaply, it doesn't mean that highly developed countries will be able to replicate that. Nuclear requires a huge amount of high skill, specialized labor, and doing that cheaply is only possible at certain levels of economic development. As economies develop to ever higher productivity, the cost of labor goes up, and it's likely that nuclear only ever makes sense at a very narrow band of economic development.

Comment by ZeroGravitas 2 days ago

Original source of that observation was Auke Hoekstra nearly a decade ago:

https://x.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1730992987021226002

Comment by alexose 3 days ago

In addition to coming so far down in price, it's amazing to me how good the technology has gotten. Batteries that can easily discharge 5C in cold weather, cycle 10000 times, survive harsh conditions with zero maintenance. Panels that last for decades.

Which is why it makes me especially angry that the current US government is throwing away this gift in order to appease a bunch of aging leaders of petro-states. Literally poisoning the world for a 10-15 year giveaway to the richest of the rich.

I take some solace knowing that fossil fuels are now a dead end. And even though certain people are trying to keep the industry going, that end is sooner than ever.

Comment by venturecruelty 3 days ago

We are the petro-state, and they're our aging leaders.

Comment by pfdietz 3 days ago

> cycle 10000 times

This is truly important, allowing the plummeting cost of the batteries to be amortized over so many cycles.

Comment by jasondigitized 2 days ago

I take solace in the invisible hand which, in the longer term, ultimately directs greedy capitalists. Water finds its level, etc. etc.

Comment by chrisweekly 3 days ago

Yes! It's awesome!

(Also, "alas" is a lament, expressing sadness, which is clearly not your intent.)

Comment by jauntywundrkind 3 days ago

In general it's obvious this is the trend & amazing.

It is a little surprising to me that some markets don't see the benefit. I was pretty delighted ~8 years ago to get some 4500mah 6s batteries RC (under 100Wh) for ~$65 but the price doesn't feel like it's changed much since, based on some light shopping around. Just wanted to note what I perceived as an unevenness. https://rcbattery.com/liperior-4500mah-6s-40c-22-2v-lipo-bat...

Comment by apexalpha 3 days ago

It’s somewhat humbling that this is essentially entirely done by one country.

For all their faults, I am in awe of the scale and success of their industrial policy.

Comment by rstuart4133 1 day ago

Yes. It's amazing, isn't it.

Too put the facts crudely, the world would be fucked climate change wise without China. The oft heard "why do anything while China is the problem" would be hilarious, if people repeating bald-faced bullshit didn't grate so much.

Comment by pfdietz 3 days ago

They have a new kind of R&D organization that may be worth emulating.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/china-has-invented-a-whole-new...

(partially behind paywall, sorry)

Comment by nutjob2 3 days ago

It's amazing what you can achieve when you control everything in a nation and can execute anyone who disagrees.

Comment by ponector 3 days ago

If it was a real reason of their success we would see amazing results in russia and their friends: Iran, Korea and other countries.

Comment by alsetmusic 4 hours ago

Name checks out.

Comment by ben_w 2 days ago

Of "control everything" and "execute anyone who disagrees", only the former is useful; the latter is kinda why Russia (and the USSR before it) are failing despite also having a government that could control everything.

You only achieve greatness when your control gets you to do the correct thing. Strong governments make decisions faster, not better. Freedom to debate, to speak out against bad governance, to speak truth to power, democracy, all that's a system to keep a government pointing in the right direction, it slows down decision making but (generally) also increases the accuracy of that decision making.

Same deal with free markets in capitalism: its a feedback mechanism, Tim Cook can announce the Vision Pro and Zuckerberg the Metaverse, direct their teams to spend whatever number of billions was necessary to develop them, market says no.

Comment by jmward01 3 days ago

Batteries are probably going to kill long-range transmission lines and open up remote generation at a scale never thought possible. Desert solar, remote hydro, etc etc. As the price continues to fall and the density continues to rise the economics of transmission completely change and will decouple the location of power generation from the use of that power dramatically. This decoupling of location and use will drastically reshape energy production. Right now is likely the time to buy sunny land in the middle of nowhere but near train tracks.

Comment by gpm 3 days ago

I think long range transmission remains a thing anywhere having a local grid remains a thing (which will be most places for other reasons).

Load-balancing the area having a cloudy few days and the area having a sunny days and the area having a windy few days and so on will remain extremely valuable. It lets you install a lot less batteries and isn't that much infrastructure given that the last mile problems are dealt with already.

Comment by pfdietz 3 days ago

The point being made is that if smoothing over time becomes sufficiently cheap then smoothing over space is supplanted.

It would be nice if this happened before the next Carrington Event (or the next nuclear war with orbital EMP weapons.)

Comment by gpm 3 days ago

I get that, I'm just disagreeing that we should be looking forwards to storage becoming that cheap. Particularly when our cheap energy sources (solar, wind) have a lot of location specific variability over time.

With some exceptions for sufficiently remote (or sufficiently always-sunny and not too dense) places that local grids themselves are no longer worth it

Comment by algo_trader 3 days ago

The original report by Ember [1] is decent but clearly biased.

They assume each battery cycles entirely EVERY day - even in winter. They also assume PV is never curtailed - not even in summer. They of course ignore multi-day weather anomalies. Like wise for weekend/holiday demand variations. etc.

The best part of the report are real world bids of 2025 ESS projects.

[1] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...

Comment by pfdietz 2 days ago

I do look forward to local storage getting that cheap. If Standard Thermal (here I am hawking them again) succeeds, we could see local PV-generated seasonally stored 600 C heat at as little as $3/GJ -- competitive with Henry Hub natural gas.

Comment by jmward01 3 days ago

I think there is a calculation that makes the point a little clearer. There is some distance, x, where it is cheaper to transport the electrons mechanically than it is to push them over a wire. Every month that distance gets shorter as battery prices drop. This gets even more advantageous for batteries when you start talking about variable use and generation since it is easier to change the destination or source of a battery container than it is to change the destination or source of transmission lines. My main point is that that distance x is going to rapidly get towards just a few miles away from point of use very shortly. Imagine a small city getting a local electricity provider. I actually think the way it is likely to go is that energy consumers (cities, factories, etc) will start installing backup power via battery shipment and then slowly start disconnecting from the larger grid as the cost of the battery container delivered power dips below the cost for transmission line delivered. The infrastructure is just so much more efficient for most use cases because we already have that infrastructure for shipping other goods.

Comment by dinfinity 2 days ago

> My main point is that that distance x is going to rapidly get towards just a few miles away from point of use very shortly.

That seems physically unlikely to me. Sure, burying and maintaining cables costs money, but other than that transferring energy in a very fundamental and solid state way is going to be much easier than packaging it up and transporting it with heavy machinery.

This is definitely a case where your argument only works if it is supported by the actual calculation.

Comment by laurencerowe 3 days ago

I don't think this makes sense. Rail freight is about 20x more expensive than transmission at current battery densities.

Transmission: $41.50 per MWh per 1,000 miles. https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81662.pdf

Rail freight: $160 / ton per 1,000 miles. At 220 Wh/kg a ton of batteries is 200kWh. So rail costs $800 per MWh per 1,000 miles without considering the cost of the batteries themselves.

Comment by adrianN 1 day ago

You probably don’t want to use regular batteries for that. I’d go with shipping energy as aluminum or something like that and use aluminum-air batteries. But regular hvdc seems really hard to beat with shipping of any kind.

Comment by ben_w 2 days ago

> Batteries are probably going to kill long-range transmission lines and open up remote generation at a scale never thought possible.

Not at current power densities.

The bandwidth of a station wagon filled with hard drives is quite high; the power delivery of station wagon filled with batteries is on the low side compared to a wire made from the same material as that station wagon and buried under the road the wagon would have been driving along.

Even for liquid and gas fuels, people make dedicated pipelines rather than doing it all by truck and train.

Now, if someone figures out how to get something like metastable pumped hafnium isomers working… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium_controversy

Comment by ndsipa_pomu 2 days ago

Surely batteries will be used in conjunction with solar, and as solar is already distributed (except for high latitudes), the need for power distribution will diminish as once you're setup with solar and batteries, you only really need the transmission lines to sell any excess power. Presumably, once solar is rolled out at scale, there will be little demand for purchasing excess power.

Comment by ben_w 2 days ago

Heavily depends on the details.

Extreme case sometimes used to argue against PV is the Arctic circle. Anywhere in the Artctic circle has to choose between enough batteries to cope with entire days when the sun's below the horizon *or* a transmission line further south where the sun's still up.

Or a different renewable, or nuclear, my point here isn't any particular answer just that there's cases where you might go for something other than PV+battery, and my point before is just about yeeting batteries around.

That said, re-reading the comment I was originally responding too, I may have inferred too much from:

> Right now is likely the time to buy sunny land in the middle of nowhere but near train tracks.

And the previously quoted words "remote generation".

Comment by ndsipa_pomu 1 day ago

> Extreme case sometimes used to argue against PV is the Arctic circle. Anywhere in the Artctic circle has to choose between enough batteries to cope with entire days when the sun's below the horizon or a transmission line further south where the sun's still up.

I can imagine that they might go several months without usable sunlight, so yes, they'll likely need some form of energy distribution unless they plan on burning blubber for their energy needs.

Comment by 3 days ago

Comment by empiricus 3 days ago

All nice and beautiful, but I don't understand how will this work in the winter in the temperate areas. You maintain parallel natural gas installations and ramp them up in the winter? Does this doubles the cost?

Comment by epistasis 3 days ago

Not having to burn gas is cheaper than burning gas. There will be a decade or two of transition with rarely used gas turbines getting their yearly packet in a short amount of time. Eventually other tech will take over, or the gas infrastructure will pare down and be cost optimized for its new role or rare usage.

Europe, and Germany and the UK in particular, are really poorly suited to take advantage of this new cheap technology. If these countries don't figure out alternatives, the countries with better and cheaper energy resources will take over energy intensive industries.

This is not a problem for solar and storage to solve, it's a problem that countries with poor resources need to solve if they want to compete in global industry.

Comment by ViewTrick1002 3 days ago

Wind power. Mix with emergency reserves running on open cycle gas turbines, if deemed necessary, preferably running on with carbon neutral fuel. Optimize for lowest possible CAPEX.

That is contingent on that we’re not wasting money and opportunity cost that could have larger impact decarbonizing agriculture, construction, aviation, maritime shipping etc.

Comment by tootie 3 days ago

The next hot thing (pun intended) is geothermal. The tech to drill deep enough opens up the possibility of extracting geothermal energy in most of the world. The tech exists and is deployed. Scaling is not yet proven but is very plausible. Geothermal runs 24/7 and can be clean base load power.

Comment by rgmerk 3 days ago

It’s not just drilling deep enough, it’s whether they can keep the wells open and flowing long enough to make the whole thing economic.

Some deep geothermal projects have failed because the wells wouldn’t stay open. Maybe this generation of companies have solved this problem; let’s wait and see.

Comment by rgmerk 3 days ago

From a global perspective, people living in temperate areas are actually the exception, not the rule (if a disproportionately economically successful exception).

The likely implication of this is that, long term, unless wind power starts going back down the cost curve, or you're fortunate enough to have lots of hydro power, Northern Europe, Canada, northern China and so on are going to have much more expensive energy than more equatorial places.

Comment by jansan 3 days ago

This probably depends a lot on how close you are to the equator. Here in Germany output of solar in winter is negligible, and if there is no wind, which can happen for several consecutive weeks, we need a backup. No utilities company will build a fossil power plant that will be used only a few weeks per year, so our government will have to step in to make sure this happens.

On top of this you have very high costs for an increasingly complex grid, which needs to be built and then maintained. Prices will never again be as low as in the fossil/nuclear era.

Comment by morsch 3 days ago

Here are some numbers: January 2025, the output of solar was ~1500 GWh, it peaked in June at 10500 GWh. So the lowest output was about 15% of the maximum, this year.

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...

Looking at wind, the ratio between min and max per week is about 1:5 (~1200 vs ~6000 GWh). Just as there is always some solar power generation, there is never no wind, though looking at those charts there were 4 weeks in the late summer of 2023 when production was low consecutively, between 700 and 1000 GWh.

Comment by adwn 3 days ago

How do you interpret these numbers? If your point is that we can simply overprovision photovoltaik arrays by a factor of 6.67, then that would make solar the most expensive power generation method by far.

And it only gets worse the more households transition to heatpumps, because the consumption in winter is so lopsided. For example, I heat my home with a heatpump, and I have 10 kWp of solar arrays on my roof. In the last week of July, we consumed 84 kWh and generated 230 kWh (273 %). In the last week of November, we consumed 341 khW and generated 40 kWh (11 %). This means we'd need roughly 10 times as much PV area to match demand (10 roofs?), and huge batteries because most of that consumption is in the evening, at night, and in the morning.

Of course, utility-scale and residential solar behave a bit differently, and it becomes more complicated if wind is factored in. But it shows that you can't just overprovision PV a little to fix the main problem of solar power: that it is most abundant in summer, and most in demand in winter.

Comment by morsch 2 days ago

My point was really only that neither is solar what I'd consider negligible in winter, nor are there really weeks with no wind. Other than that, my interpretation is pretty much the same as yours.

Above, I looked at the weekly min/max ratio. Of course the daily ratios are much higher, 1:60 for solar, and about 1:30 for wind. But wind and solar do have a useful anti-correlation: the ratio is "only" about 1:15 for combined solar+wind. Still high, but a huge improvement on both wind and solar individually.

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...

In reality, the ratio is even higher since we routinely have to drop solar and turn off wind turbines when there is more production than demand (and I don't think that generation is reflected in the graph).

Ie. the max is already a representation more of grid and demand than of production, and it'd make more sense to use the ratio of min:mean, so comparing what we expect PV+wind to produce on average with what they give on the worst day. That gets us a different, more favorable ratio: 195 TWh produced in 2025 so far, let's call it 550 GWh/day, giving a ratio of about 1:6.

Comment by adwn 2 days ago

Thank you for actually running the numbers. I think the data is quite convincing that overprovisioning won't be the solution to the seasonal storage problem, or at least not the major factor in it.

Personally, I have high hopes for flow batteries. Increasing storage capacity is so easy with them, liquids can easily be stored for a long time, and it would even make long-distance transport by ship feasible. If only we can find a cheap, suitable electrolyte.

Comment by ZeroGravitas 2 days ago

This is just a slighty more sophisticated version of the "solar doesn't work at night" trope.

The implications of bringing it up is that these silly hippies haven't even thought of this basic fact so how can we trust them with our energy system.

Meanwhile, actual energy experts have been aware of the concept of winter for at least a few years now.

If you want to critique their plans for dealing with it, you'd need to do more than point out the existence of winter as a gotcha.

Comment by adwn 2 days ago

I don't see you countering my argument, only attempting to ridicule it ("slighty more sophisticated", "trope", "these silly hippies", "been aware of the concept of winter", "existence of winter as a gotcha"). That sucks, man :-(

> If you want to critique their plans for dealing with it […]

There are many ideas for seasonal storage of PV-generated electricity, but so far there is no concrete plan that's both scalable to TWh levels and economically feasible. Here on HN, there's always someone who'll post the knee-jerk response of "just build more panels", without doing the simple and very obvious calculation that 5x to 10x overprovisioning would turn solar from one of the cheaper into the by far most expensive power generation method out there [1].

[1] Except for paying people to crank a generator by hand, although that might at least help with obesity rates.

Comment by dinfinity 2 days ago

> 5x to 10x overprovisioning would turn solar from one of the cheaper into the by far most expensive power generation method out there.

This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x.

Additionally that implies the overprovisioned power is worthless in the summer, which does not have to be the case. It might make certain processes viable due to very low cost of energy during those months. Not trivial as those industries would have to leave the equipment using the power unused during winter months, but the economics could still work for certain cases.

Some of the cases might even specifically be those that store energy for use in winter (although then we're not looking at the 'pure' overprovisioning solution anymore).

Comment by adwn 1 day ago

> This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x.

That's a huge "if". The cost of PV panels has come down by a factor of 10 in the last 13 years or so, that's true. I doubt another 10x decrease is possible, because at some point you run into material costs.

But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total installation cost of utility-scale PV. This means that even if the panels were free, it would only reduce the cost by a factor of 1.5.

Comment by ben_w 16 hours ago

> That's a huge "if". The cost of PV panels has come down by a factor of 10 in the last 13 years or so, that's true. I doubt another 10x decrease is possible, because at some point you run into material costs.

A factor of 5 is certainly within the realms of physics, given the numbers I've seen floating around. Note that prices are changing rapidly and any old price may not be current: around these parts, they're already so cheap they're worth it as fencing material even if you don't bother to power anything with them.

> But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total installation cost of utility-scale PV. This means that even if the panels were free, it would only reduce the cost by a factor of 1.5.

This should have changed your opinion, because it shows how the material costs are not the most important factor: we can get up to a 3x cost reduction by improving automation of construction of utility-scale PV plants.

I think I've seen some HN startups with this as their pitch, I've definitely seen some IRL with this pitch.

Comment by dinfinity 1 day ago

1. Do the other costs scale with the number of panels? Because if the sites are 5 times the scale of the current ones I would imagine there are considerable scale based cost efficiencies, both within projects and across projects (through standardization and commoditization).

2. Vertically mounted bifacial PV already greatly smoothes the power production curve throughout the day, improving profitability. Lower cost panels make the downside of requiring more panels in such a setup almost non-existent. Additionally, they reduce maintenance/cleaning costs by being mounted vertically.

3. Battery/energy storage (which further improve profitability) costs are dropping and can drop further.

Also, please address the matter of using the overprovisioned power in summer. Possible projects are underground thermal storage ("Pit Thermal Energy Storage", only works in places where heating is required in winter), desalination, producing ammonia for fertilizer, and producing jet fuel.

Comment by adwn 21 hours ago

> 1. Do the other costs scale with the number of panels?

Mostly yes. Once you're at utility-scale, installation and maintainance should scale 1:1 with number of panels. Inverters and balancing systems should also scale 1:1, although you might be able to save a bit here if you're willing to "waste" power during peak insolation.

But think about it this way: If it was possible to reduce non-panel costs by a factor of 5 simply by building 5x larger solar plants, the operating companies would already be doing this. With non-panel costs around 65%, this would result in 65% * (1 - 1/5) = 52% savings and give them a huge advantage over the competition.

> 2. Vertically mounted bifacial PV […] 3. Battery […] costs are dropping

I agree that intra-day fluctuations will be solved by cheaper panels and cheaper batteries, especially once sodium-ion battery costs fall significantly. But I'm specifically talking about seasonal storage here.

> Also, please address the matter of using the overprovisioned power in summer.

I'm quite pessimistic about that. Chemical plants tend to be extremely capital-intensive and quickly become non-profitable if they're effectively idle during half of the year. Underground thermal storage would require huge infrastructure investments into distribution, since most places don't already have district heating.

Sorry, very busy today so I can't go into all details, but I still wanted to give you an answer.

Comment by adrianN 1 day ago

What amounts to „concrete plan“? Right now we’re still in the state where building more generation is the best use of our money with batteries for load shifting a few hours ramping up. So it’s entirely expected that there is no infrastructure for seasonal storage yet. However the maths for storing energy as hydrogen and heat looks quite favorable and the necessary technology exists already.

Comment by adwn 1 day ago

"Concrete plan" means a technology which satisfies all of these requirements:

1) demonstrated ability in a utility-scale plant

2) already economically viable, or projected to be economically viable within 2 years by actual process engineers with experience in scaling up chemical/electrical plants to industrial size

Yes, that's hard to meet. But the thing is, we've seemingly heard of hundreds of revolutionary storage methods over the last decade, and so far nothing has come to fruition. That's because they were promised by researchers making breakthroughs in the lab, and forecasting orders of magnitude of cost reductions. They're doing great experimental work, but they lack the knowledge and experience to judge what it takes to go from lab result to utility-scale application.

Comment by ben_w 16 hours ago

> 2) already economically viable, or projected to be economically viable within 2 years by actual process engineers with experience in scaling up chemical/electrical plants to industrial size

Why 2 years?

Even though I'm expecting the current approximately-exponential growths of both PV and wind to continue until they supply at least 50% of global electrical demand between them, I expect that to happen in the early 2030s, not by the end of 2027.

(I expect global battery capacity to be between a day and a week at that point, still not "seasonal" for sure).

Comment by adwn 12 hours ago

> Why 2 years?

Significantly longer than that and you go from prediction to speculation, and it is unwise to base a country's energy policy on speculation.

Comment by adrianN 1 day ago

Electrolysis hydrogen is only a little bit more expensive than hydrogen derived from methane and electrolyzers with dozens of megawatt are available. That seems pretty solid to me at this point in the energy transition.

Comment by adwn 1 day ago

Hydrogen generation isn't the problem, storing it over several months is. Economical, safe, and reliable storage of hydrogen is very much an unsolved engineering challenge. If it weren't, hydrogen storage plants would shoot out of the ground left and right: Even here in Germany, we have such an abundance of solar electricity during the summer months that wind generators have to be turned off and the spot price of electricity still falls to negative values(!) over noon, almost every day.

Comment by defrost 1 day ago

Why stop at hydrogen for storage and transport;

there's ammonia, methanol, and other derivatives that are easier to store and transport.

eg: * https://www.methanex.com/our-products/about-methanol/marine-...

Comment by adwn 1 day ago

Yes, those are easier to store, but more expensive and less efficient to generate.

The question is the same as for hydrogen: If it's easy, cheap, and safe to generate, store, and convert back into electricity, why isn't it already being done on a large, commercial scale? The answer is invariably that it's either not easy to scale, too expensive (in terms of upfront costs, maintainance costs, or inefficiencies), or too unsafe, at least today.

Comment by defrost 1 day ago

With rapidly dropping PV prices it just gets cheaper - this is only a relatively recent thing; the projects that exist to exand production are barely complete yet .. capital plant takes time to build.

Fortescue only piloted athe the world's first ammonia dual-fuel vessel late last year, give them time to bed that in and advance.

Comment by adrianN 1 day ago

You can store it in salt caverns

Comment by adwn 1 day ago

If that's so easy, cheap, and safe, why aren't there companies doing it on a large scale already? We're talking about billions of Euros of market volume.

Comment by adrianN 1 day ago

Right now it’s cheaper to make hydrogen from methane and methane is easier to store and process so no large scale storage of hydrogen is in demand. Nevertheless storage in salt caverns is a proven process that is in use right now eg. Linde does it.

Comment by coryrc 3 days ago

And this also leaves out all the heating power still consumed directly from fossil fuels. The gap is much larger.

This doesn't have have to be by switching consumption; using less is possible: Passivhaus is from Germany, after all. However, you can't do that and keep all your historical protections on buildings and layers-upon-layers of red tape on renovations.

Comment by gpm 3 days ago

> it peaked in June at 10500 GWh

And 8280 GWh the previous June for those wondering roughly how much of this was due to more solar panels being deployed.

Comment by toomuchtodo 3 days ago

For reference, Germany has ~101GW of solar capacity installed as of this comment (and is deploying ~2GW/month). 59% of Germany's electricity in 2024 came from renewable sources, up from 56% in 2023. I am curious to see how 2025 turns out, and therefore predict 2026 from planned renewables and battery storage projects.

Comment by tim333 2 days ago

Possible things are to over provision solar, and set it up further south with a high voltage dc cable. We almost had a Morocco - UK power setup but the current government said no to it.

Comment by Carlseymanh 3 days ago

One of the few problem of nuclear is summer time water use. Combining solar with nuclear would be the best option in my opinion.

Comment by datadrivenangel 3 days ago

Nuclear plants, like most large thermal plants, are almost always located near large bodies of water and return that water downstream so it doesn't really matter?

Comment by lukan 3 days ago

It matters if people don't want to see the rivers full of dead fish, so last year there were already shutdowns because of heatwaves.

https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...

Comment by moooo99 3 days ago

It does when you care about the environmental impact of your cooling (and also consider the fact that droughts are an increasingly severe problem).

Comment by pbmonster 3 days ago

It matters when the level of that body of water drops by a lot in summer and the water temperature rises at the same time. Add environmental laws (cooking the fish is discouraged), and your nuke plant needs to go into safety shutdown pretty reliably every summer.

Comment by Zigurd 3 days ago

Historically the biggest impediment to nuclear power has been incompetent construction management and project management. Incompetent is a strong word for it but nuclear power plants are the largest capital equipment purchases on the planet. Even modern so-called modular designs can't save poor project management, and learn as you go engineering.

That so mundane and should be easy to fix, right? That's why I bring up scale. Nobody has experience running projects that big. Some things are just too big to manage.

Comment by codersfocus 3 days ago

Does anyone know whether it makes sense to setup solar arrays closer to users or to concentrate them in sunny places and send them throughout the country?

e.g. an analysis of whether we should setup all the solar farms in Nevada for the whole country... set them up in the general south and transmit north... or will each state have their own farms?

Comment by ericd 3 days ago

Distributed. New transmission lines have big nimby issues, and many existing corridors are already getting overloaded. There are recurring attempts to reform the permitting process (in the last Congress it was called EPRA/energy permitting reform act), but… we’ll see.

Bureaucracy is the main thing holding back clean energy right now, rather than economics. You can see this in how Texas, which has lax grid regulation but isn’t biased towards clean energy has far surpassed CA, which subsidizes and got a big head start, in wind/solar generation in a few years.

Comment by estimator7292 3 days ago

We don't put all our coal and gas plants out in the desert, they're next to and within our cities.

Physically transporting electricity across distance is very expensive and a not-insignificant amount of power is simply lost on the way. These problems only get worse as the amount of power goes up, and the danger grows very quickly as power goes up. Plus the strategic and logistical benefits of distributed generation.

Simply put you can't centralize generation for the entire country. There's no practical way to actually transport that much power. Not with the technology we have today. If we had high-temperature superconductors then it would make more sense. But with standard metal wires, it's not happening.

Comment by DamonHD 3 days ago

In the GB (UK mainland) grid only ~2% of energy is lost in transmission; distribution is more typically ~5%. And we did put most of our big thermal power generation in the middle of the country, which is now causing difficulties as we need to re-jig transmission to accept offshore wind and interconnectors.

Solar PV on rooftops is great, injecting power directly at the load, eliminating transmission and distribution losses until there is excess to spill back to grid. It would be helpful if we stopped running an entirely artificial timetable in winter that demands heavy activity well outside daylight hours, so that demand better matched availability.

Comment by coryrc 3 days ago

> Simply put you can't centralize generation for the entire country.

Depends on the country.

In Washington state, our power sources are not next to our population centers; in fact many are in the center of our state! And our state would be the 87th-biggest-country out of 197 in the world.

USA averages 6% transmission loss. New long-distance transmission lines are HVDC and have far less loss over distance. But people oppose them for dumb and good reasons; why would I in Washington state want to have good connections to California so the local producers can reduce supply and drive up prices?

Comment by wrsh07 3 days ago

Casey Handmer is a huge solar bull and his estimate is that solar becomes cheaper than any other form of electricity even when generated from northern states by 2030 (likely sooner)

Iirc solar is meaningfully more efficient (30-50%) in southern states, so it will likely make sense to place energy intensive workloads in locations with more direct sun.

However, the cost of transmitting additional power is interesting and complex. Building out the grid (which runs close to capacity by some metric^) is expensive: transmission lines, transformers or substations, and acquiring land is obvious stuff. Plus the overhead of administration which is significant.

So there's a lot of new behind-the-meter generation (ie electricity that never touches the grid)^^

With all that in mind, I expect energy intensive things will move south (if they have no other constraints. Eg cooling for data centers might be cheaper in northern climes. Some processing will make sense close to where materials are available) But a significant amount of new solar will still be used in northern states because it's going to be extremely cheap to build additional capacity. Especially capacity that is behind-the-meter.

^ but not others! Eg if you're willing to discuss tradeoffs you might find dozens of gw available most of the time https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/out-of-thin-air

^^ patio11 has a good podcast about this https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/the-ai-energy... Disclaimer: my employer apparently sponsored that episode

Comment by DamonHD 3 days ago

IMHO "efficient" isn't really the right term in your second para. The PV generation per W incoming is actually a little lower at higher ambient temperatures, but is otherwise fairly constant.

I assume that you mean higher kWh/y/kWp, ie you get more generation out of a given solar panel in the south each year.

Comment by pfdietz 3 days ago

"Effective" might be the better word.

It's unfortunate that "efficiency" has both engineering and economic definitions.

Comment by wrsh07 3 days ago

I meant kw h/m^2/d I think, but I'm not sure what the simplest way to say that is

I think you and I are saying the same thing though!

Comment by grensley 3 days ago

The transmission network is underbuilt, so it's mostly best to generate closer to where it's consumed (especially for data centers).

We'll continue to see a mix though of Residential / Commercial & Industrial / Utility Scale

There are about 7,000 Utility scale sites in the US right now, so even the big boys there are fairly distributed.

Comment by lukan 3 days ago

If you would have a high voltage DC transmission line already, linking the dessert and the clouded cities far away, then it makes sense. I think it is worth building them, but it is a big investment. Many lines are proposed, some already build, but with the current US administration I don't think it is a priority.

So decentral is the current way to go.

That is the current state in the US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects#/map/3

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 3 days ago

High voltage transmission lines are really quite efficient, and concentrating generation is usually the right choice.

That said, it doesn't make sense to have just a single place for the entire country, as there are multiple grids in the US (primarily East, West, and Texas), and with very long transmission you can get into phase issues.

Comment by epistasis 3 days ago

Concentrating generation made sense when transmission was cheap in comparison.

But one effect of ever cheaper solar is that transmission costs start to dominate generation costs, because transmission is not getting cheaper.

Cheap solar and storage requires rethinking every aspect and all conventional wisdom about the grid. Storage in particular is a massive game changer on a scale that few in the industry understand.

Comment by aaronblohowiak 3 days ago

technically or politically?

Comment by bilbo0s 3 days ago

Don't know about either of those? But militarily, it's suicide to set up all your generation in one area.

Always overwhelm the enemy when possible. Even when he's planning.

Comment by neuroelectron 3 days ago

For about $100 the black friday, i got a ridiculous overkill LFP battery for my router and fiber modem. Would last about a week with no power.

Comment by ramshanker 3 days ago

Has any production battery become cheaper than LEAC ACID for computer UPS ? I have not seen new cheaper UPS getting launched.

Comment by fyrn_ 3 days ago

Many "solar power stations" can be used as a UPS, with competitive switching speed. Just not sold under that label. You can even get one made entirely in the US, but it will cost you: https://enphase.com/store/portable-energy/iq-powerpack-1500-...

But yeah, the cheap chinese "power stations" run circles around most UPS capacity wise. UPS market is very complacent.

Comment by jcheng 3 days ago

Seems like an opportunity for someone

Comment by nomel 3 days ago

No, it's a bad fit. it would be pure marketing. Lipo slowly destroy themselves when charged. Lead acid slowly destroy themselves when not charged.

Comment by cogman10 3 days ago

There are different LIPO chemistries. LFP in particular has little problem with being fully charged. You'll see it get swapped in for lead acid chemistries even in places like car/motorcycle batteries.

If you want an Lithium power supply then the keyword to look for is "LFP".

Comment by gpm 3 days ago

And LFP is also cheaper per unit energy and less of a fire hazard. Hard to imagine why you would use a different lithium-chemistry in a UPS.

Comment by lesuorac 3 days ago

Can't we just not push the lipos to 100% and have the UPS maintain a ~60% charge instead and get a long life span?

Comment by fyrn_ 3 days ago

Many of these power stations (including the one I linked) are LFP chemistry

Comment by PaulKeeble 3 days ago

Lead Acid as far as I know is about $500 per KWh of usable space due to their depth of discharge being limited to about 50% and then they last about 3 to 5 years if they kept within their 500 cycles at most. Whereas a LiPho battery will last 10-15 years, 6000 cycles and costs about £120 a KWh. So I have no idea how UPS based on lead acid is ending up cheaper, its not based on the battery tech cheapness.

Comment by literalAardvark 3 days ago

UPS aren't really cheaper.

Sure, up front you're paying very little for that box that can run your PC for an hour.

But over 2-4 years you'll have to replace that UPS after it fails catastrophically in really dumb ways, and that's if you're lucky and it doesn't also burn your house down, whereas a proper storage system will last for a long, long time with more capability.

In my business I've never had a deskside UPS live longer than that.

And yes, we don't buy the ultra expensive ones. That's true.

Comment by rssoconnor 3 days ago

Do not try this at home, but I replaced the lead acid battery in my UPS with a LFP battery. From what I read online, the charging curves for lead acid batteries and LFP batteries are very similar. The LFP batteries have a slightly higher charging voltage, so I expect my LFP battery to only charge upto about 80% capacity or so due to the charging voltage being slightly too low. I'm hoping the battery will last 10 years instead of 2 or 3 years.

Do not try this at home, as changing battery chemistry is quite ill advised.

Comment by Rebelgecko 3 days ago

Some of the power stations from Ecoflow/Anker/Bluetti are competitive in terms of price and capacity while still having a fast enough switchover for UPS purposes.

They tend to have features that may not be necessary for a UPS (eg solar or DC input), while lacking some features that are more common on UPS (eg companion app to turn your computer off when UPS gets low, although you might be able to rig your own solution)

Comment by ulnarkressty 3 days ago

Eaton and APC at least have models with LFP chemistry, with comparable prices across power ratings. The LFP will be more expensive though due to the increased longevity, at least until lead-acid ones stops being produced.

Comment by rightbyte 3 days ago

UPS is kinda different since they are hardly used. I haven't done the calculation but it would guess lead acid is still cheaper?

Comment by Nextgrid 3 days ago

Problem with Lithium ones is that they tend to be quite flammable. Lead acid is mostly inert I believe?

Comment by andruby 3 days ago

LFP is a lot safer than NMC. I think it's almost on par with Lead-Acid.

Comment by SigmundA 3 days ago

The acid in lead acid is sulfuric acid and if overcharged vents hydrogen gas, thats why they need a ventilated space typically. Sealed lead acid have safety vents that might pop if enough pressure builds.

They are most certainly not inert, they just have well established safety and charging protocols and are not used in very high quantities together because of their low energy density and cycle life.

LFP batteries which have iron phosphate cathodes are very stable compared to colbalt based batteries that tend to have catastrophic failures due to overcharge causing cathode failure. LFP have higher cycle life and are cheaper and typically whats used for storage and application where the loss in erergy density is not a big deal.

Comment by onraglanroad 3 days ago

Weirdly, none of the many phones, tablets and laptops I've owned have ever caught on fire.

I guess I've just been lucky.

Comment by bingo-bongo 3 days ago

It’s not as much about the risk of failure, as both are safe when the correct safety measures are in place.

But what might happen when they fail - thermal runaway is no joke with lithium-ion, ask any firefighter.

Comment by pfdietz 3 days ago

I've had laptop batteries swell up, which is disconcerting to say the least.

Comment by buckle8017 3 days ago

Ok now shift summer sun into winter.

Comment by apexalpha 3 days ago

A very large part of the people on this planet have (almost) no winters.

We could start with those ~3 billion people.

Also wind has proven to be a very good supplement to pv.

Comment by buckle8017 3 days ago

Those people already use almost no energy compared to everybody else.

Comment by apexalpha 1 day ago

Great we should be done relatively quickly then. ;)

Comment by buckle8017 1 day ago

Done with what, they don't matter here.

Comment by gpm 3 days ago

Just build more solar. You generate excess electricity in summer and enough in winter. This isn't a problem.

Comment by Youden 3 days ago

I live in Switzerland and my house currently consumes 35-40kWh of electricity each day. I'm in the process of installing as many panels as possible on my roof and right now in winter, they're forecasted to produce ~18kWh on a good day.

While it'll be possible for me to be more than fully self-sufficient in summer, I'd need roughly 3x more panels to come close to having a chance in winter, plus far more battery storage than is reasonable.

I suspect it might be more doable somewhere with milder winters, like Italy but especially as you go further north and the days get shorter, there's just no chance.

For it to work in places with large seasonal differences, we need something else (e.g. nuclear) and/or storage.

Comment by buckle8017 3 days ago

The over build causes these rosey projections about power prices from solar to turn on their heads.

6.5 cents/kWh is pretty good, 65 cents though is terrible.

Actually difference is more than 10:1 too

Comment by aswegs8 3 days ago

Am I dumb or does that sentence "Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet" make no sense grammatically?

Comment by FfejL 3 days ago

The actual headline is:

Analysis finds "anytime electricity" from solar available as battery costs plummet.

Those missing quotes go a long way to making the headline make sense.

Comment by malfist 3 days ago

Its still really confusing. A better title would be "When solar power from batteries are available, costs plummet"

Or since power has no provenience, "When batteries are available, electricity prices fall"

Comment by bee_rider 3 days ago

This doesn’t really capture their meaning though. They are describing a change in how the solar generated electricity can be treated due to the changing battery prices.

Arguably your edit is more factual. But part of the job of the title in an editorial like this is to tell you what their perspective is.

Comment by fweimer 3 days ago

I assume the intended meaning is “reduced battery costs make around-the-clock solar-generated electricity possible”. I don't think it's possible to predict how technical changes in electricity production and storage impact prices.

Comment by Angostura 3 days ago

"Falling battery costs make electricity from solar viable day and night"

Comment by k1t 3 days ago

I think they meant "viable" instead of "available"

Comment by hammock 3 days ago

Just read the subhead. It explains everything.

Ember’s report outlines how falling battery capital expenditures and improved performance metrics have lowered the levelized cost of storage, making dispatchable solar a competitive, anytime electricity option globally.

Comment by kgwgk 3 days ago

I.e. making it a viable option.

Comment by hammock 3 days ago

Well they are two different words with two different meanings. Both are true in this case. “Available” in the sense “obtainable,” “ready for use,” “suitable for a purpose” or perhaps “available to investors”

Comment by evrimoztamur 3 days ago

Baseload, ideally.

Comment by ttul 3 days ago

If they were going for maximum confusion, why not write, “Solar battery costs plummet analysis findings back anytime electricity availability”?

Subject (((((Solar battery) costs) plummet) analysis) findings)

Verb [back]

Object (anytime (electricity availability))

Garden path sentence structure trap creation relies on initial word parse error encouragement. Brain pattern recognition system default subject-verb-object order preference exploitation causes early stop interpretation failure.

Solar battery costs plummet phrase acting as complex noun modifier group creates false sentence finish illusion. Real subject findings arrival delay forces mental backtrack restart necessity.

Noun adjunct modifier stack length excess impacts processing speed negatively. Back word function switch from direction noun to support verb finalizes reader confusion state.

We write to be understood. Short sentences and simple words make the truth easy to see.

Comment by robwwilliams 3 days ago

Brilliant <ttul>! I would have needed help from Claude to tangle it up so well and on topic. But that last lucid sentence is rubbish.

Comment by pqdbr 3 days ago

Came in the comment section looking to see if it was just me. Had to read it 4 times

Comment by jt2190 3 days ago

The source report

“How cheap is battery storage?“ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...

In short: Cheaper batteries plus already cheap solar means that solar is now a cheap source of “anytime electricity”.

Comment by Etheryte 3 days ago

Falling battery prices make storing solar electricity for later use economically viable. This means we can use electricity from solar anytime around the clock. Even accounting for the cost of batteries, it's still competitive with other sources of electricity.

Comment by neom 3 days ago

To me the context string is just a bit...lumpy or something, I don't think it's directly about the grammar. I would have written something more like: a battery costs plummet, analasis finds "anytime electricity" is now available from solar.

Comment by fweimer 3 days ago

I think “anytime electricity” is a noun phrase, and the rest is just the usual headline shortening. So something like this:

(Analysis finds ((anytime electricity) from solar) available) (as (battery costs) plummet)

In the unsuccessful parse, “anytime“ introduces a relative clause.

(Analysis finds [that] (anytime ((electricity from solar) [is] available))) ???

Comment by JoeAltmaier 3 days ago

$33 per MWh for solar. What is it for coal or natural gas? Maybe half that?

Comment by fyrn_ 3 days ago

In the US as of June 2024: Gas peaker plants are: $110-228 And Gas combined cycle: $45-108

PV in the US is also more expensive than globally however: $38-171 for Utility scale with storage, when including subsidies, $60-210 when not.

Coal is so much worse in every cost metric than gas combined cycle it's not worth considering, even leaving the pollution aside.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/34-%20Exh...

Comment by mullingitover 3 days ago

It's already cheaper to demolish an existing coal plant that's already paid for and replace it with solar + battery. Solar and battery brand new buildout, plus their maintenance overhead, dominates coal even when you only count coal's maintenance cost.

People have it in their heads that this is some bleeding heart, don't ruin the planet thing, but it's plain economics. Non-renewable energy is simply inferior, and will only become more so.

Comment by luqtas 3 days ago

> Non-renewable energy is simply inferior, and will only become more so.

you simply can't say this. despite the lobby against it, solar and wind energy have lifespans of around 20 years and afterwards, it's a freaking mess to deal with recycling and often times, garbage we don't know what to do. not even counting the amount of NASTY chemicals going into the production of solar panels. these are sometimes permanent and will have a great long term impact on ecology if we just start destroying plants to substitute with "green" alternatives mindlessly

one can also make a point that despite wind generators metals and batteries being almost to 100% recyclable, it's heck expensive to do and we don't have infrastructure. a comparison cosidering everything involved may show that hydroelectrics, nuclear, geo-thermal and heck even gas may have a similar or better impact depending on location

Comment by thinkcontext 3 days ago

Its fair to do an accounting of externalities. However, I generally find those raising externality issues with solar and wind wildly overestimate their impact and wildly underestimate the externalities of fossil fuels. You mention the 20 year lifespan, this is a huge benefit compared to fossil fuels. The externalities of oil and gas add up for every second they are used.

Comment by toss1 3 days ago

Sure, and none of that amounts to even close to the damage from stripping vast areas of the earth to dig up coal, grinding and transporting it to power plants, then setting it on fire, and releasing tons of CO2, and then disposing of tons of unburnt waste full of NASTY chemicals.

And having to do all that continuously, every day, for the life of the plant.

In every single solution you can point out problems. Complaining that "X isn't perfect" is the easiest and laziest thing in the world to do. Assessing the ACTUAL costs and damages IN PROPORTION is more difficult, but actually yields good results.

Comment by JoeAltmaier 3 days ago

It can be viewed as stripping vast areas of the earth, to put them in the shadow of a solar farm. That utterly disrupts the ecosystem underneath, though in a different way. That's usually hand-waved away.

Comment by 26 minutes ago

Comment by toss1 2 days ago

If you actually read any of the reports of current research, you would find that combining solar with agriculture improves both the health of the flock and/or crops being produced, and increases output. More shade for the fauna, and better moisture profile for the flora, for starters.

Similar effects can also be created in currently wild areas that does NOT disrupt the ecosystem, but augments it. For starters, in very dry areas which are ideal for solar deployment, the typical constraint on the ecosystem is lack of shade and moisture preservation, which is mitigated by solar deployment

There are also VAST areas of already populated or in-use areas that are ripe for deployment of solar panels, rooftops, parking areas, canals, reservoirs, and more, and ALL of them are a net improvement with solar panels

So, nobody is stripping anything from the earth, and there is no continuous transportation of materials to set them on fire. The fact that it is already CHEAPER to produce electricity by tearing down a coal plant and installing the same solar capacity shows how crazy it is.

Just because something was the best way we had to do something three technology generations ago does not mean it is still best, or even viable or recommended. Stunning to see such unscientific backwards attitudes on a site focused on science and technology.

Comment by ceejayoz 3 days ago

Turns out you can basically hand-wave it away.

https://apnews.com/article/sheep-solar-texas-climate-333e721...

https://www.nrel.gov/news/detail/features/2025/solar-panels-...

Certainly more so than, say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine.

Comment by luqtas 2 days ago

> Complaining that "X isn't perfect" is the easiest and laziest thing in the world to do. Assessing the ACTUAL costs and damages IN PROPORTION is more difficult, but actually yields good results.

no one here typed that photovoltaics shouldn't be on play. but the way it's being paraphrase, feels like a panacea. the OP telling other skeptical opinions against mass substitution to photovoltaics is 'a shame on a tech oriented forum' probably don't even know that regulations and deals of these ballparks have a bunch of regulamentations and considerations that even needs to look for the security/reliability of the grid agaisnt (cyber)terrorism and war...

they then bring a cute little article of people producing tomatoes under laboratory settings being shaded by solar panels. we are chatting about mass production and distribution of energy. if you think it's economically viable to dismantle coal stations and substitute them for solar only shows ignorancy from a multitude of fields... as if energy was easy as comparing output of CO2/$ per watt produced! they even were ironic agaisnt (underdeveloped yet more sane than photovoltaics in the long-term for a vast majority of cases) nuclear technology :D we may shall dismiss the discussion of hooking up batteries on wind/solar, as current prices don't make recycling (batteries) any sense in a large scale that will be decentralized due the geo-location of wind/solar requirements. or do you think transporting these batteries to be recycled in specific areas is just a matter of building cargo-drones powered by solar energy and AI vision? we may also dismiss ecology on the amount of area and damaged species by exchanging any power plant to wind/solar because it's cheap. even group of populations agaisnt visual pollution coming from wind turbines, for example. we also should dismiss the amount of thrash burried by thousands and thousands of multi kilo tons wind turbines after 25 years etc. /s

Comment by toss1 1 day ago

Nice, a lovely screed using exactly the same Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt techniques used by tobacco companies to promote cigarettes for decades after they were proven to be the source of mass fatal diseases costing people and society, and again reused by the fossil energy companies.

Every single claim above is at best massively outdated and/or outright wrong and disproved (and no, I won't go do your research for you and find cites for everything).

So, start from the bottom:

>> thrash burried .. multi kilo tons wind turbines

not sure if you mean buried or burned, but wind turbines are already being recycled and reused in bulk, and that is ramping up (and also offtopic from solar)

>> visual pollution coming from wind turbines

Again offtopic, and also purely a matter of taste; it doesn't affect anything

>> transporting these batteries to be recycled in specific areas is just a matter of building cargo-drones powered by solar energy and AI vision

Nice strawman argument from something I never said, and no, there are plenty of other perfectly good transport methods. And yes, recycling batteries is already becoming good business and a great feedstock for 'mining' the materials, and no it does not need to be a big deal, and siting the 'mining' facilities for recycling/recovery is vastly more flexible than siting mining for coal which is obviously necessary wherever the coal happened to form 100 million years ago.

>> they even were ironic agaisnt nuclear technology

Again, a strawman argument, as I never said I was against nuclear tech, and I am in fact for the new forms of nuclear tech, particularly the smaller even portable reactors ('tho the promise of Thorium reactors seems to have faded, but I'm not sure why).

>> if you think it's economically viable to dismantle coal stations and substitute them for solar

Again, only citing multiple studies showing that, and again, you entirely miss the point, which is not that you'd necessarily do it in every case, but that the point of coal being even the economical option has long passed, nevermind the environmental catastrophe it creates.

>> cute little article of people producing tomatoes under laboratory settings

tomatoes aren't the only thing being produced in conjunction with solar panels, and there are so many projects and studies showing its effectiveness in both improving results for farmers and improving their financial stability that it has a name: "agrivoltaics". Instead of spending your energy scoffing at things you obviously know nothing about, perhaps go read up on it and learn something.

>> security/reliability of the grid agaisnt (cyber)terrorism and war

If you want security and reliability, the best thing is widely dispersed power generation as close as possible to the use location. I have advocated for decades that a DOD project like the US Interstate Highway System should be done to ensure every household had a minimum amount of solar self-generation capacity, and stockpile transformers which have a manufacturing lead time of years. A nationwide grid outage without this is a potentially civilization-collapsing event, whereas if every household had some baseline capacity, they can still refrigerate food and communicate. Obviously just a cutout example, but the principle of diversity of power sources and locations makes a more robust system. Only bad grid planning makes solar or wind anything other than an improvement in grid reliability.

Moreover, battery tech is now sufficiently cheap that even the net cost of installing solar+batteries is lower than fossil plants, and that combination has better stability and millisecond-response rates that massively stabilize the grid (vs. ramp-up times measured in minutes-hours for gas plants and days for coal/nuclear).

>>a shame on a tech oriented forum

It is not the discussion of other options, but the disproportionate dismissal and spurious arguments that is a shame here. I'm sure there might be some exceptional situation where a new coal plant might actually be better all things considered, and if you have an actual example to discuss then bring some fats, but overall, that ship has sailed.

with agrivoataiagain, there are hundreds of article

Comment by luqtas 1 day ago

> not sure if you mean buried or burned, but wind turbines are already being recycled and reused in bulk, and that is ramping up (and also offtopic from solar)

it seems i'm an outdated dreamer here or do you think "two million metric tons of wind turbine blades will reach the end of their operational lifetime in the United States by 2050" is a low-number? something being recyclable doesn't mean it will be, not that's economical feasible to do it. that's like saying we should produce PET plastic mindlessly just because we can recycle it 100%. ¶ https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssusresmgt.4c00256

> Again offtopic, and also purely a matter of taste; it doesn't affect anything

so clearly you don't have idea about authorizations to build them nor what's actually going on ¶ https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/01/the... ¶ https://www.nature.com/articles/s44358-025-00078-1

> Nice strawman argument from something I never said, and no, there are plenty of other perfectly good transport methods. And yes, recycling batteries is already becoming good business and a great feedstock for 'mining' the materials, and no it does not need to be a big deal, and siting the 'mining' facilities for recycling/recovery is vastly more flexible than siting mining for coal which is obviously necessary wherever the coal happened to form 100 million years ago.

... please, just do a quick research on the amount of batteries that actually are recycled, not if they can be recycled. do you think building biometallurgical or pyrometallurgy/hydrometallurgy facilities is cheap and easy to build a bunch of them so we compass the decentralized nature of wind and solar generation? there's a high cost of transporting dead batteries, which requires fossil fuel and if done through roads, will contribute much more to their actual state of the worst offender of micro-plastic producers/polluters worldwide. i will just point some papers on the problem of recycling vehicle batteries (which is so small on scale compared to what we are discussing); https://www.mdpi.com/2313-0105/11/3/94 ¶ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134492... ¶ https://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/21_ma...

> Again, only citing multiple studies showing that, and again, you entirely miss the point, which is not that you'd necessarily do it in every case, but that the point of coal being even the economical option has long passed, nevermind the environmental catastrophe it creates.

seriously. am i arguing with ChatGPT? one thing is to re-purpose unused coal facilities, the other is to claim is economically feasible to substitute them with solar. we aren't living in a happy place where we just substitute stuff arbitrarily based on emergent tech ¶ https://www.sunhub.com/blog/repurposing-coal-mines-solar-ene... ¶ https://www.renewableinstitute.org/abandoned-coal-mines-coul... ¶ https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/PNNL-SA-...

> Instead of spending your energy scoffing at things you obviously know nothing about, perhaps go read up on it and learn something.

i remember once doing volunteer for a farm based on the system of a Swiss guy who came to Brazil to execute his hypothesis. really neat. a pioneer on "regenerative agriculture". but if i actually had to became his proletariat for the rest of my life and know i would retire with a low salary and the consequences of intensive physical labor those organic places required, i wouldn't think it's revolutionary. people on GMO farms have a greater prognosis. rural exodus is an ongoing social phenomena because a thing... with that said i was quite happy to know someone i worked with invested millions USD on solar technology on their farm. really neat move. but would much better a local generator for the whole region... but our global situation doesn't seem to care much about long-term solutions, that are expensive and slower to build. every average enthusiast seems more worried about short term gains and trusting "green technology news headlines" than actually evaluating everything with skepticism

i'm all for development and implementation of greener solutions. that's why i don't even have a driver license. i don't like coal (my country doesn't even use it) but i'm not a blind upper class north American that thinks buying high-tech photovoltaics or wind turbines is the panacea nor these don't leak lead on China or India

Comment by luqtas 1 day ago

late edit: oh by the way, you also don't see to understand what are the key topics of cyber-security on energy... this is a great start: https://www.csis.org/podcasts/power-map

although de-centralization is always good!

Comment by dalyons 3 days ago

Who cares if we never figure out how to recycle them? bury them in a landfill, and we’ll still be so far ahead on the pollution front than any other alternative. This is such a non issue

Comment by RealityVoid 3 days ago

As opposed to coal that pump out NASTY chemicals right now?

Comment by luqtas 3 days ago

i'm not defending coal. i'm just saying that solution to energy is much more broad than the OP seems to pass on "being cheaper to destroy a coal plant and substitute with batteries and solar". i wouldn't be surprised trey sightread titles and didn't realized that it may be economical to re-use an OLD coal plant to produce solar energy but well... my last comment on this thread has it all, great book

Comment by ceejayoz 3 days ago

> it's a freaking mess to deal with recycling and often times, garbage we don't know what to do

I love that this is followed by “so go nuclear!”

Comment by luqtas 3 days ago

i recommend you starting with something easy to digest like this: https://www.amazon.com/Energy-Society-David-Pimentel-Ph-D/dp...

then you can move on and judge what't the panorama of closed/paywalled science found out there (Nature) that evaluates impacts of solar panel not even considering numbers of last batches of thrash from ~ 2010 (which still have 10-15 years till they start filling the world with chemicals like lead)... then may dive into electricity security and distribution and recycling technology to bring up a single ignorant phrase comment downsizing nuclear generation, despite it being safer and ecological on the long-term compared to photovoltaics in LOTS of places, for example

Comment by 3 days ago

Comment by Panino 3 days ago

Why would you think that? Solar and wind are both far cheaper than fossil fuels even ignoring the problems caused by coal and methane.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

Comment by mikeyouse 3 days ago

Fuel cost for gas/coal can be rounded to $2/MWH - so then you need to amortize the cost of the plant over all the energy produced and you get to roughly 2x fuel cost for nat gas plants and 3x - 5x for coal ones. See page 10 here for sensitivity to fuel costs though;

https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-20...

Comment by mlwiese 3 days ago

No, Lazard estimates the fuel cost is $22-$23/MWh for Gas Combined Cycle, and $13-$18/MWh for Coal. See pages 39-40 of https://www.lazard.com/media/0sopmth5/lazard-releases-2025-l...

Comment by toomuchtodo 3 days ago

Solar and storage is the cheapest form of power now. Prices for both will continue to decline.

Battery storage hits $65/MWh – a tipping point for solar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46251705 - December 2025

Comment by xbmcuser 3 days ago

$100+ meh for natural gas. Solar and battery is so cheap that arab countries are now building large solar and battery systems to save money instead of burning oil and gas. Where as in the US the other big oil and gas producer wholesale electricity prices for Natural Gas is around $100-150 mwh which is cheaper than coal and the major reason coal got pushed out. Then we have China and India where coal is around $40-50 mwh.

So solar and batteries are now cheaper than all other forms of energy/electricity the only problem is finance for poor countries as you need to spend for all the 15-20 years of electricity in one go where as for coal and gas you will spend the same amount over 10-15 years. For rich countries the problem is mostly protectionism as cheap energy would destroy a lot of wealth of people in power.

Comment by pfdietz 3 days ago

When we get to the point where resistive heat from PV is cheaper than burning fossil fuels, the revolution will truly shift into high gear.

Comment by aoeusnth1 3 days ago

Curious, where do you get your news? What gives you the impression that coal or gas would possibly be cheaper than solar?

Comment by ceejayoz 2 days ago

Doesn't matter; they'll keep up with the same talking points.

They're still flogging the "vast areas of the earth" one nearly two years after someone debunked it and they said "very encouraging!" to that info.

Now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259179

Early 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39415988