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“the problem with solar is we can’t monopolize the sun or make it scarcer than it is”
Oh contraire. Have you seen the cloud seeding chemtrails?
the best solar and wind ad you can imagine is russian energy grid attacks and how communities had built diverse workarounds to mitigate the grid going down here and there. it also spawned local businesses to maintain these stations which greatly helps local economies.
Screen caps need dates. These tweets are pretty old from memory. It feels like making a joke about rotary phones not fitting in your pocket, it’s out of date.
Your mom needs dates, like even if she’s happily married to your father, great lady.
I dated his mom for a while
I don’t know nearly enough about electrical engineering to consider what precautions must be taken when there is too much power flowing through the grid. I’ve seen enough fried motherboards that I can take a wild guess, but those were edge cases.
I’d think that in the event of a day being especially clear, cold, and sunny, there’d be a ground-fault circuit that would take the surge instead of the house.
that’s not what this means. Surge protection in a solar setup is more about protecting you from the grid, which generally is far more susceptible to surges and issues with inclement weather.
What they’re describing is excess capacity is being generated, eg a sunny day can fill a battery bank enough to not just power your home (making energy costs 0) but send excess capacity to power other people (making costs negative, eg you are now paid by the utility).
It can be an issue in a country like America because if solar occurs at enough scale it could seriously disrupt utilities from a financial standpoint. Then you’ll have people who are affluent and can afford to convert their home to a $20-70,000 solar setup draining funds from the utility. Then the lower SES people that rely on it would be more likely to have disruptions as companies lower budgets and potentially go out of business. This also means those low SES people have a portion of their energy costs funneled into far more wealthy landowners.
This is easily mitigated of course either through government subsidies of the utility or (ideally) having the utility convert to far cheaper green energy so they then maintain the role of the main supply. But the latter requires significant investment - a solar setup for a house as mentioned is tens of thousands and a solar farm is far more. And Americans are historically terrible at subsidies to benefit the lower class as well as green energy initiatives; we’d much rather go “the cost!!” As the world boils
They’ve found the same is true for the wind, that the oil robbers can’t own that either… I think Maria may own the wind… I’m not sure. They call it that… the wind, that is.
Rules are made up, as are property rights. Any idea that you have a right to, or that nobody can, own the sunshine, is you being foolish. There was once a sunshine tax on windows. If they want your money, or someone wants ownership, they’ll just write the rules that way and enforce it through violence, as usual. Never underestimate how truly cruel and greedy the wealthy and powerful are.
There is literally limitless energy available to us. But as long as the people in charge benefit from people believing the supply is limited, people will be made to believe the supply is limited.
There literally was limitless energy available to the literal ancient Egyptians, as well as literally 19th century literal London.
Why did it take fossil energy to literally reach our present state?
That limitless energy is presumably also literally available to you, why aren’t you literally using it now and why are you limited?
Well, not “literally”, since the sun will one day stop working (it will take a while, though) plus even it is not a limitless source of energy.
But yeah, in practice at the moment given the amount of energy our society consumes is there is limitless energy available to us.
Just not “literally” 🤪
When an infinite growth mindset meets nearly infinite growth potential, capitalists complains about sustainability.
I mean yes, but what’s genuinely problematic is the variability of the sun. Since it doesn’t shine at night, you have to store the energy generated during the day somehow. What about winter, especially in parts of the world where it lasts a very long time? How can we transfer the energy generated in, say, the Sahara desert to Svalbard? Solar is great for generating electricity, but storage and transport of said energy is not completely resolved, yet.
There are many ways to store the energy without chemical batteries.
We can use thermal batteries by heating water or other liquids and then release it at night. We can use kinetic batteries like compressing springs and then releasing them at night to turn a generator. Water batteries like hydro dams where you pump the water into a reservoir during the day and then release at night to again power a generator.
Giant. Freaking. Lasers.
Hey, I never claimed it was efficient.
Mirrors in space
Musk is this you?
For most parts of the world, the only reason why the problem with the variability isn’t solved yet, is because governments don’t want to invest in the electricity grid. We have the storage technologies, the only thing missing is money. And it’s unrealistic to say that energy needs to be trabsported from the Sahara to nordic countries. Finland already needs to cut its nuclear reactors, because the renewables in Finland produce so much energy. Only the furthest regions north can’t use solar.
We have the storage technologies, the only thing missing is money.
When discussing large public projects whose scale is larger than anything before seen, the money is mainly an accounting placeholder for the real resources that need to be expended.
Grid scale storage has been expanding at an exponential pace, but the sheer magnitude of the materials and engineering work that needs to be done to make a dent is pretty huge.
Bloomberg projects that total cumulative installed capacity should hit 2 Terawatt hours by 2035, noting that would represent 8x the number for 2025. But when you compare those numbers to just how much electricity is produced or consumed, with 22,000 TWh per year, we’re talking about demand periods measured in minutes, not even hours, much less days.
At scales large enough to make enough of a dent to show up in global energy stats, we need to recognize that even infinite money would run into the real resource constraints of how much capacity we as a species have for pulling minerals out of the ground, processing them into useful materials, and engineering them to be useful energy storage solutions (whether pumped hydro or other gravitational systems, compressed air, flywheels, or whatever battery or fuel cell chemistries can store energy in an efficient way).
We have some technologies, but need things to improve significantly before storage can actually meet the needs for power that meets demand at any given moment in time. In the meantime, matching supply and demand in real time is a true engineering challenge, not just a monetary challenge.
we need to recognize that even infinite money would run into the real resource constraints of how much capacity we as a species have for pulling minerals out of the ground
You can store electricity by stacking rocks. You can store it by moving large volumes of liquid. You can store it with sand. If we are in danger of exhausting these resources I think problems have gotten bad enough that energy storage is no longer a going concern.
A gravity storage system that stores about 100 MWh and outputs about 25 MW is much, much larger than the 65 battery containers they’d replace. It stores basically 4 hours worth of energy in what appears to be a large steel and concrete structure 150 m tall (the equivalent height as a 30-40 story building) on a 100m x 100m footprint.
If we’re talking about storing a terawatt hour, then we’d be talking about about 10,000 of these gravity storage systems needing to be built. That’s what I mean by existing technology not really meeting the scale requirements of the problem.
Gravity storage systems all basically suffer from this problem. Water-based solutions need to be sited on favorable geography to have large scale (otherwise water itself isn’t dense enough to compete with concrete and stone and sand).
Meanwhile, storing the same 100 MWh of energy in containerized lithium batteries would basically require a 4x6 stack of 40-foot shipping containers that each can store 4MWh.
We can get there on storage, but we’re talking about decades of planning and implementation, across all technologies, before we can even credibly reach storage representing one whole day’s electricity usage. How many man hours of labor does that engineering and planning and building represent? How much steel, energy, and machinery would these projects use up?
Anyone who talks about this stuff without recognizing the scale involved is basically not serious about solving it. It’s an engineering problem that exists independently of money (and it’s also a money problem, but that part will probably pay for itself because of how valuable a solution to this problem would be).
Also the other problem is political, without borders we could be transmitting power from places in daytime to places in nighttime. We already have grids that span across different timezones.
That isn’t really a problem for where many people live though, nor for very long, so some modest storage medium and transmission lines (which likely already exist to many places dark in the winter) coupled with wind or whatever else makes sense locally would be just fine for those locations where it is a problem. There’s no need to transmit from the Sahara to islands at the poles either, there’s so much sun to go around, and so many places to gather it.
That’s why we need a way to store the power overnight, this is a well known and obvious problem, and there are solutions. Batteries, flywheels, sand bins, etc. Solutions which should also raise the price of the electrons produced, just to make the fuckers happier.
Not everyone who writes under the banner of MIT is sincere.
It’s kind of a ridiculous “problem” with easy fixes, that are long known.
There’s high demand on Hydrogen. It’s fairly easy to produce Hydrogen via electrolysis (storage/logistics is another issue, but that is also true for blue hydrogen…). It could also be processed further to Methane or even Gas for cars…
If there’s a will…
This is actually a solid use case for crypto mining. When supply outstrips demand, turn your excess solar power wattage into crypto instead of feeding it into the grid. 100% green, and helps stabilize the power grid to boot if you do it right.
yeah the only downside with crypto is that it has absolutely 0 meaningful use cases AFAIK and also it does not only consume energy but also requires computer chips which are also expensive to produce. (wait, that was two downsides)
There are two parts of this problem:
- If you are connected to the grid and using it you need to pay for it somehow. This is not a capitalisim thing this is a maintenance issue. Deploying lots of rooftop solar reduces the amount people are paying the grid operators for the same infrastructure as before while they are still using it. This could be solved by making the grid operators public utilities again and charging taxes instead of billing electric rates. Either way rooftop solar owners are going to need to pay grid fees unless they are entirely disconnected from the grid (this is rarely ever the case).
- It creates issues where generation may outstrip load as well as transmission and storage capacity. A lot of this can be solved with more investment but if you are earning less of power sales and still need to maintain everthing this can be financially challenging.
There is also a third problem where home solar isn’t centrally planned resulting in cases where utilities need to delay homeowners’ solar installations while they figure out grid capacity.
Uh, most countries have a base utility fee that’s charged, and then usage on top of that.
Tried that one?
Most of summer our bills are negative use because we have a fuckoff huge solar array, but we still pay “property charges”
How about just decoupling grid fees from electricity costs? As in a base fee and in turn a cheaper price on electricity used
That seems to be what is happening in some states. They have a minimum price which is effectively the cost of hooking up to the grid.
Won’t someone PLEASE think of the prices?!
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I used to genuinely be against solar because the carbon costs barely break even,
Carbon costs are not break even. The monetary costs include all economic inputs including the dirty energy used to produce the panels. So even if 100% of the $1000 cost to create a panel was from burning coal, that means once the panel has generated $1k in electricity, it has recouped all the carbon output. Because the alternative to $1k in burning coal to make a solar panel is $1k in burning coal for electricity.
Solar takes 10 years to break even and lasts a minimum of 20 years. And 20 years it hasn’t stopped working but is only outputting at worst 80% less power. There are 40 year old panels outputting 80% of what they did when new.
Can you point me to a study saying carbon cost barely breaks even? Compared to what?
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The owners of my family’s last house left us with solar panels, and as a struggling barely middle class family, it helped my parents afford all our expenses; from groceries to rent and even a vacation. It makes me so happy to see solarpunk become so popular, the good it can do is nothing short of awesome.
Just FYI: The claim that solar panels barely break even in regards of carbon is misinformation:
Indeed, the solar panels exported from China in 2024 will have paid off their “carbon debt” within an average of just four months, according to detailed recent analysis for Carbon Brief. Manufacturing the solar panels will have added some 72m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) to China’s emissions in 2024, but will cut them overseas by 203MtCO2 per year, the analysis found. In total, these solar panels will save some 4.1GtCO2 over their lifetimes, paying off the upfront “carbon debt” some 57 times over. Looked at another way, the lifecycle emissions of solar power are far lower than those of fossil fuels, as shown in the chart below, which is based on UN data published in 2021.
And since most solar panels are produced in China and China is rapidly building clean energy, that will also go down further in the future. Solar is great.
Can you clarify how the recycling works? We had BP solar panels and after 6-7 years they all cracked (the crystalline silicon couldn’t handle the sun or heat) and stopped working
If they cracked, your installer may have fucked up. You need to leave a gap between panels because they expand with humidity and heat, kinda like flooring.
They were installed correctly and BP said they were faulty. They offered to replace them if an NDA was signed
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I addition to what others noted, this can also create an equality issue. Say you are a working class renter in a town of well-off home owners who have solar panels on their houses. They are likely as dependent as you on the grid when the sun isnt shining, but because they can sell back to the grid. They contribute much less to paying for the grid.
The grid that everyone relies on is therefore disproportionately funded by poorer individuals. Its the same problem with all the subsidies on electric cars and solar installations; you have to be decently wealthy to be able to take advantage.
Transitioning to EVs is better for everyone in the long term. Improved technology and greater marketshare among new EVs today means more and better used EV options in the future, with the effect increasing as the economics of scale make budget models more viable.
It’s not that we shouldn’t subsidize solar and EV, it’s that we should also use incentives and regulations to make these options work for renters. We should be requiring rental properties to add outlets to parking spaces. We should be pushing policies aimed at getting solar on apartment buildings for the benefit of the tenants.
Honestly, we should be working towards getting every building to have solar and battery and reducing our dependence on the grid.
Transitioning to EVs is better for everyone in the long term.
I dont believe this (but I’m open to being wrong). I think giving the same amount of money invested into EVs to public transit and ebikes instead, we’d be better off.
incentives and regulations to make these options work for renters
Yeah, strongly agreed there. I basically just want my tax dollars to go towards equality and resilience. Instead, it seems that the best the party not 100% controlled by fossil fuels can do is enact policies that still disproportionately benefit the wealthy. I’ve heard a lot of well-off people talking about getting a $7500 dollar rebate on an EV, which seems silly when there’s a lot of people who have never even owned a car worth that much.
At least in my area, solar roofs still have to pay the usual service fee, an extra fee for grid-tie, taxes and fees on all the power they consume, without deduction for power they deliver. I know many utilities buy power at the same rate they sell it, but mine only pays 85% (before taxes). Solar people pay just fine for grid maintenance.
Is that 85% based on the flat rate, or an actively changing rate? If it’s the flat rate, thats a super good deal. The cost of generation can easily vary by 10x throughout the day, so if the average price is $0.15/kWh, they might be paying you 13 during the times it only costs 1.
I know in some places the meters are smart enough to track when the usage is occurring, though.
85% of the flat retail rate. AFAIK, no company with a rooftop solar program puts them through spot wholesale market prices. I don’t think my provider even participates in the spot market - they own all their own generation with plenty of excess capacity and essentially no net interchange. They also cap participation in net metering at 0.2% of system-wide peak demand, so there’s very little chance they’ll take much of a loss, regardless.
There are balcony solar panels that renters can just plug into a socket
Not in America, yet, but we are getting there. Unfortunately, that still has the issue of needing to be able to afford it to be able to take advantage. Plus those have a max wattage thats way lower than what a homeowner can do.
I dont think any of these are insurmountable issues, but I also don’t want to just ignore them.
