Personally i'm waiting for the next iterations of Kesterite cells.
If we can get single cells to crack ~20% efficiency. With a tandem cell architecture, it's going to become the new standard overnight.
Durability of silicon cells or better, but orders of magnitude $ cheaper to produce, and without the need to use toxic agents as in perovskite cells.
We're movin' fast.
For over a decade we were stuck at ~12% efficiency. And in the last 4 years (probably with AI help) we've cracked 15% efficiency
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/chinese-researcher...
Few more years, and with a bit of luck, we'll all be around to see solar panels that cost 1/10th of what they do now.
I get the impression they're already really damn cheap, to the point that the issues are more so with grid interconnections, land use, and storage
I wonder if as panel costs goes down, will people start to wire their homes again for 48V DC? You could conceivably run your HVAC and fridges at least off of it, this would negate the need for a larger (more costly) inverter.
The only place it makes sense is personal tech and computing, where USB chargers are cheap and ubiquitous, with technology replacement in 2-5 years instead of 5-10 for standard appliances.
2. Nearly no equipment uses 120VDC by itself, so you would need specialized DC-DC converters that can deal with the 120VDC input to go down to usual voltages like 48VD, 24VDC or 12VDC
I doubt that. Currently the cells itself makes only <50% (maybe <30% meanwhile) of a PV module. So the limit to the bottom is by the glass and frame and cable, not by the cells.
But $/watts can significantly go down with more efficiency.
Synthetic inertia created by inverters can maintain grid frequency, but they cannot handle fault current. Without the ability to ride through disturbances, downstream protection equipment will fail to work correctly. If you hit a semiconductor with 10x its rated load, it needs to shut down immediately or it will be destroyed. The turbine at a nuclear or coal plant can take a serious beating for several cycles before it would be forced to trip offline. The machine is massive enough to absorb any damage without losing its overall functionality.
We need actual synchronous machines spinning with heavy masses. They don't need a carbon-emitting prime mover on the other side. They just need to be connected to the grid. They also need to be placed relatively close to the inverters (same plant/substation) or they won't provide the desired support.
This was the best bet at the time when it was chosen, but it must be a good case of the sunken cost fallacy by now, given how long it's taken to build, and didn't follow an existing design*
As a risky policy choice, many distributed solar and wind farms with modern sodium-ion batteries would be a safer and more distributed (failure and weather resilient) modern choice.
*If the original design was defective, why are they using it in A and B?
C is not a great idea but like HS2 failing to finish it would also be a disaster.
I can only think that the UK must need the reactor products for something defence related, because little else makes sense.
"Current levelized cost of storage ranges from $150-300 per MWh for established pumped-storage systems, while newer solid-mass gravity systems estimate costs of $200-400 per MWh. These figures are competitive with long-duration storage applications but remain higher than lithium-ion batteries for shorter-duration uses."
https://eureka.patsnap.com/report-gravitational-potential-en...
Batteries are scheduled to become so cheap that these type of physical storage systems just won't be able to keep up in terms of cost.
Most pumped hydro projects are now put on hold as batteries have been coming down.
https://www.elevenenergy.co.uk/#sodium-ion
They are larger than lithium batteries, but potentially cheaper and better performing around temperature extremes.
Solar is cool but solar that can make it through the night and a couple cloudy days is way cooler
The fun part is that we're still well before the point when this even matters.
Almost 60% of the US grid is still fossil fuels, with around half of that still happening during the day. Which means you can get down to ~30% fossil fuels without any storage at all because all you do is go from burning fossil fuels during the day and at night to burning fossil fuels only at night.
only natural gas plants can do this. a coal plant cannot spin up just for the night and turn back off when the sun comes up - it's incredibly inefficient and probably causes more premature wear/tear too.
The big issue is what's called "ramp rate" - how fast can output power be increased or decreased? This tends to be around 1% to 3% of capacity per minute. See Figure B-2 in [1], which is a detailed discussion of how to improve your coal-fired power plant's ramp rate.
Natural gas plants have much higher ramp rates, and for batteries, it's under a second. Nuclear plants can be ramped up and down, slowly, but since it's all capital cost, cutting output raises the price of the power.
"Increased rates of component life consumption due to thermal fatigue, mechanical fatigue and wear caused by differential thermal expansion comprise the bulking of cycling (costs)," according to the International Energy Agency's Coal Industry Advisory Board.
"Every time a power plant is turned on and off, the boiler, steam lines, turbine and auxiliary components go through unavoidably large thermal and pressure stresses," the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) wrote in a report on cycling costs published in April 2012.
"
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/to-survive-c...
Batteries are coming, and will solve it, but it will still take time for them to be come cheap enough.
Only once we have ~7 days of storage (~100 GWh of storage) will we be able to get rid of the last fossil plants.
Other countries are better positioned. e.g. UK has really spiky wind energy. Right this second more than half the grid is wind. Which is both cool and problematic for managing the grid.
Grid scale cheap storage would dramatic help manage that chaos
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956
If you shut down by day, it can take multiple hours for it to be able to provide full load... and multiple hours for it to shut down cleanly. During this time it is producing power at less than optimal rates and/or using the fossil fuels to keep the wheels spinning and in sync with the grid so that they don't have to go through a phase matching period.
(aside for coal - note that it takes more than 12 hours for a coal plant to get running from a cold start)
Wind also helps since wind makes more power at night, as does demand which is dramatically lower at night.
For coal, Great. Making coal economical is excellent. We should have banned it worldwide 20 years ago.
There's a good number of 'em: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pumped-storage_hydroe...
https://www.ferc.gov/media/licensed-pumped-storage-projects-...
You'll see that most of them are in the Appalachian mountains and in the Sierra mountain range.
The one in Missouri is one of the interesting ones that isn't in either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_Hydroelectric_Power_...
> The Taum Sauk pumped storage plant is a power station in the St. Francois mountain region of Missouri, United States about 90 miles (140 km) south of St. Louis near Lesterville, Missouri, in Reynolds County.
It has a hydraulic head of 860 feet and that represents the challenge - you need to find places in the US where you can get several hundred feet of elevation in a short distance.
Hypothetically, lets build one in Minnesota... Taum Sauk Mountain is the highest point in Missouri. The highest point in Minnesota is Eagle Mountain (in the boundary waters - you can't build there, pretend we can) ... the elevation to the top os 550 feet (about half what Taum Sauk provides) over 3.5 miles (Taum Sauk is just over 1 mile). ( https://maps.app.goo.gl/vHfWarwubaLvsf5z7 )
Much of the US is too flat for it to be useful.
That makes 300B
Eu pricing
Even if we handwave all the science needed to build batteries big enough to power cities for days, I don't think it's realistic to handwave the science needed to power a city for weeks. We don't even have enough oil for that.
"Power when it is inconvenient" is pretty much the basis for a modern society.
Heavy clouds and zero wind, for weeks? That's a once-a-century freak event. Just build gas peaker plants if you are worried about it. You could even add carbon capture, but constructing it might emit more than it will ever capture...
I assume you never tried measuring the output of a solar panel when it's cloudy. It's 10-15% of a sunny day. Closer to not working than working.
On a rainy day that drops closer to 20%.
As an aside - cloudy days avoid a problem I have with shade. In winter, at 3:30pm, the sun goes behind a tree and my production plummets to near zero. If there's cloud cover the sunlight is far more dispersed and there's no "shade".
I did have one rainy day back in the middle of Winter that was 16% but that will end up being literally the worst day of the year.
Our energy grid can't currently handle the ability to charge electric haulers locally at any scale let alone to move an entire city's worth of energy, so the solution is not to 85x the national electric grid all at once.
But to give them due credit, they believed in this vision and put in the hard work to make sure it became true.
That's literally CCP state controlled communism !! More specifically, that's what the The Gansu–Zhejiang UHVDC project has as an overhead transmission line length (2,370 km in international units).
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014206152...
* https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241113-will-chinas-ultr...
A common battery for grid level storage is pumped hydro - that is, use the peak power during the day(s) to push water from the bottom of an elevation to the top, and hold it there - bonus points if it captures water delivered from other solar processes (evaporation -> rain)
The overwhelming majority of generation and storage is best deployed at the point of use.
Grid scale anything, is a massive inefficiency.
The only reason grid and city scale is so prevalent in public discourse is because this is the only electricity the utility is paid for, and they are very actively impeding any other solution.
In the US, there is a very large inventory of flat roof industrial buildings, in the industrial parks that are using huge amounts of electricity. Covering all of those roofs with solar (especially here in the west US) would prevent a tremendous amount of grid scale generation, and implementing storage there would eliminate a large part of the transmission line upgrades the utilities are calling for.
The biggest problem in the US isn't technical, it's the governments desire to primarily support the solutions that are best at serving utility shareholder returns, instead of the technically superior solutions.
It produces enough on cloudy days to still.top the batteries up to full.
I had a day recently where production topped 80kW and was exporting bulk before late afternoon grid production limiting kicked in. That's a lot of juice, and Ive basically not touched the grid in 7 months.
In aggregate, grid operators have a lot of other tools at their disposal via flexible pricing, flexible demand, and automated systems that can adapt to this to e.g. charge cars when there is a surplus of energy, turn on/off water boilers, etc. There's a lot of innovation around this topic in this space. This by the way is as much as making sure generated power doesn't go to waste than it is about ensuring there is enough power. They use batteries to time shift excess power to when they can utilize it.
Interconnected grids means that e.g. an operator in Denmark can import/export to and from the UK, Norway, Germany, etc. On a windy day they'll be exporting wind power. On a sunny day, they might add some solar to that mix. When there's no wind or sun in Denmark, they might pull in Scottish/German wind, Norwegian hydro, Swedish nuclear, etc. Batteries are being deployed all over the place at a pace that is only exceeded by the pace at which solar is being deployed. Whenever there's a surplus energy, batteries get charged up. It's very rare for all of the available generation to disappear all at the same time for long enough to drain all the batteries. And for those times of course fossil generation is still a thing as well, and will be for decades to come. There are a lot of gas based plants throughout Europe. As well as some nuclear plants of course. Singling out the EU market here but it's going to be similar elsewhere.
The point here is that there's no need to pair solar setups with days/weeks/months worth of storage. A few hours goes a long way.
A decade or so behind, in the US.
If the US didn't block import of Chinese tech, we could have electrified a decade ago.
The tech available at the current moment, is even more capable of replacing petroleum based electricity.
But our government is banning Chinese tech to serve our outdated industries instead of importing it to serve the population.
As any wise country would do when faced with superior technology, we should import it with the condition of technology exchange. Chinese manufacturers should be training US workers and industrial ownership how to produce cheap, efficient, sodium batteries.
This benefits the populous immediately, and the industries are able to advance into the current century's tech.
Europe tried doing that. And our green technology sector promptly collapsed, because it couldn't compete with Chinese undercutting our prices. The only thing left now are wind turbines, but Chinese are making inroads there too. In the meantime, the green transition barely moved a needle when energy shock arrived in 2022 or this year. Rendering rest of our industry, especially chemical industry, uncompetitive.
If it were a matter of industrial protectionism against a country which was not hostile, not authoritarian, didn't rely on slave labor, etc., then I'd agree with you. Countries have other pressing reasons besides immediate economic advantage to prevent this sort of thing.
To greatly oversimplify: Japan fought against opening their markets, as did China, out of political and social concerns for the stability of their states, far more than economic ones.
Doesn't matter though. The big mistake was allowing manufacturing to be exported from the US to begin with. Nearly any advanced technology we use or wish to produce is now dependent on China. They control not only the advanced manufacturing process, but also the refinement of rare earths (we can mine it but not refine it) and have cheaper labor. Not only can't we make tech without them, we can't sell it at competitive prices. Things will soon get worse as robotics and vertical integration makes Chinese products even cheaper and better quality. And we can't compete on robots because China controls that production chain too.
The smart play would be to build up our own green energy sector to gain cost savings, while investing in its manufacturing, so we can eventually compete and support ourselves (which Biden and Obama passed funding for). Trump eliminated all that when he came back, because the oil companies wanted more profits, they literally don't believe climate change is real, and they have no idea how diplomacy works. We could've had cheap battery, wind, and solar manufacturing in the US. Not anymore.
1. As a US citizen, you would probably not a get permit necessary for entering the Tibet region.
2. If you could get a permit for Tibet region and go there, you would be followed by police officers dressed in civilian clothing. The locals would be quite hesitant to speak to you.
(Source: been there long ago, seen it). China has many qualities, but freedom is not one of them.
I don't think the poster you're responding to is writing in good faith; they're either an agent of an authoritarian power, or blind to the difference of being one.
People in China can say anything the government approves of, but they can't say "long live freedom and democracy," unless they want to be executed.
Neither, I suspect, will Chinese AI models make any statement in sympathy with personal freedom, democracy, or human rights; it would come at the expense of the people who paid to train those models, and that can't be allowed.
As a child of immigrants from the Soviet Union, and also as someone who knows people still resident in authoritarian dictatorships: This is patently ridiculous. Everything else in your post is a spray of nonsensical policy points and predictions. You led off with the tell. Frankly, it makes everything you say afterward sound like what an authoritarian enemy government would want people in the US to think about their own country.
What you wrote in your first sentence is either (a) wildly misinformed (like, you have no idea what life is like in an authoritarian country with actual slave labor, which is an insult to the people who do currently live there), or (b) intentionally nefarious (like, you work for such a country, in a capacity to minimize the distinction between their system of autocracy and the United States' democracy). If it's (a), study at least a little bit of the history of mass murder in the 20th Century. If (b), well, we live in a free country so you can spew whatever garbage you want. Interestingly, we have not been overtaken by any of the dictatorships that have sprung up in Eurasia over the past hundred years, and I don't think we will be soon.
Paranoid is me testing the plates I bought off amazon for lead, and throwing away the bathtub mat which smelled like petroleum waste. I'm fairly convinced that the goal of that ruthless dictatorship is to poison, degrade and infiltrate every single household abroad in every way possible. A fast attack might be to bring as many devices offline as possible, but the slow attack is simply to lower people's intelligence by hardware or software methods (e.g. TikTok, Qwen... or, let's say, not notifying anyone for a few months that a new SARS virus had escaped a lab). Everything that comes out of communist China is warfare, even if it looks like a plush toy.
It protects American companies who operate in the green energy generation and storage arena from Chinese competition.
Not only does Chinese competition get blocked, but governments are incentivizing green energy. For instance, just recently it was reported that Tesla’s $10B solar factory could get 35 years of tax breaks in Texas (Oil Capital!!!)
https://electrek.co/2026/10/23/tesla-solar-factory-texas-35-...
Then again, I'm basing this opinion on a recent-ish video from NightHawkInLight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7fR9ISuCw
The technology I'm most excited about is ultra low capex thermal, as being done by Standard Thermal. Capital cost per unit of energy storage capacity as low as $0.10/kWh(th), so it can work with seasonal storage and just a few tens of charge/discharge cycles over its lifespan.
Standard Thermal has raised $11M and is building in Germany, where they say they can deliver 365/7/24 solar resistive heat (400 C or perhaps 600 C) for half the cost of heat from burning natural gas there.
A regular 18650 cell has about 0.1 square meters of electrode surface. And you have thousands of these cells in a car battery, resulting in literal football fields of electrode area.
We can get to 95% using just short term storage. I suspect that most jurisdictions will just say "95% is good enough" rather than paying for ridiculously expensive long term storage.
We've got the nat gas capability already; keeping it around for the 5% is quite inexpensive, making the massive investment in long term storage for marginal benefit hard to justify.
OTOH, while the premium for e-fuels seems excessive, if you're only running that nat gas plant 2 days a year that premium is not so scary.
For covering Dunkelflauten? Yes.
For seasonal storage with a prolonged discharge (so, low power/storage capacity ratio)? I think thermal storage wins there.
Those are 2 very different use cases.
Thermal is low rate extraction. It's 1 cycle per year, but the extraction is performed over months so is low rate.
Electricity long term storage is high rate extraction. It's only used a few times a year, but when it is used it needs to cover roughly 100% of the entire grid's needs. I doubt thermal storage is suitable for high rate extraction, but I'd love to be wrong.
Edit: rereading your parent comment you seem to think thermal is suitable for a different use case? Could you elaborate further? When is "prolonged discharge" useful?
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal
https://austinvernon.substack.com/p/building-ultra-cheap-ene...
They talk about temperature up to ~600 C, which I believe is limited by the desire to use cheap steal (much hotter and creep becomes a problem). This is also perhaps not coincidentally about the temperature of steam from a coal fired boiler, so one of the eventual goals is to repower retired coal fired power plants with this storage providing the heat instead of coal combustion.
You're right this is not good for something needed "a few times a year" for relatively short periods, for example to cover Dunkelflauten. Combustion of an e-fuel is better for that. But it's well suited to seasonal storage of solar energy, as that would be extracted over months, more or less continuously. The resistive heaters should also be much cheaper per W than electrolyzers.
But what is that useful for? During almost all of those months it would be a lot cheaper to use renewables & short term storage. And it's not fast enough for the few days it's not beaten by something cheaper.
Put another way: if you oversize the solar to be adequate in winter, you have enormous amounts of surplus solar in summer. So why not store it?
Because 0.10 $/kWh(th) / 0.4 kWh(e)/kWh(th) is expensive.
https://www.cleanthinking.de/thermischer-erdspeicher-erdhueg...
E.g. 100 GWh (4 days of 1GW thermal power) with a 100C temperature swing (you can't go down all the way to room temperature) will need around 3.6*10^4 tons of sand. That's a lot.
Honestly, power-to-gas sounds like the only reasonable way for now. In theory, with SOFC (Solid Oxide Fuel Cells) for power generation, it can beat the steam cycle.
View another way: if we hook several piles in series, then lukewarm air from a first mostly discharged pile can be directed into later piles for more heating. In the continuous limit this is the concept I described above.
No, because your steam will be at a lower temperature as you draw down the heat, bringing down efficiency.
Over the season, your sand drops from ~1000 to ~600 (which is fine since your power needs drop in the spring)
At 1000C steel will react with _water_.
To be clear, I'm not talking about cooling a small crucible but a structure that is at least 20 meters in size.
But I have no reference for the cost of setting up such a storage and how it compares to battery or hydro.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
But for the most part it will trail solar, because the first chunk of the solar doesn't really need storage. But once there's a healthy percentage of solar, all new solar will have storage or it won't get paid.
The costs of large number long distance HVDC lines with accompaning invertor stations would be as expensive as a electric generation based on nuclear power.
https://blog.sintef.com/energy/future-hvdc-grids-yes-please-...
LiFePO4 is probably the chemistry best suited to it ATM. Lasts a long time, more stable, pretty cheap, and just a bit less energy density than other lithium ion options. Sodium-ion is looking promising but only just entering the market AFAIK.
I have a 5 kWp solar plant that produces ~25kWh per day, but it is grid-tied. I considered a hybrid setup with LFP battery back up, but decided to separate the two systems to avoid a single point of failure.
Fortunately that doesn’t seem like it will be an issue since battery storage costs are also seeing an exponential reduction.
I guess using electricity to heat during the night could be an issue, but we could also accept to let the temperature drop.
Solar is never gonna be a complete solution. At the end of the day, we could do it more efficiently by just building suns here on earth for the panels, but of course then you've achieved fusion and you're already generating more than solar could ever hope to. We shouldn't hinge our future on half of a technology.
My larger point is that solar is only ever going to be a piece of the puzzle at best. In space it might be quite nice, but otherwise it's kinda goofy to invest too much in.
Stars don't have this problem because they're very large so there's only so far neutrons can go.
1. Stars do it. Yes. But stars also have size and gravity, something no nuclear plant will ever have; and
2. "People once said X was impossible" ie the Galileo Gambit. Just because Galileo was mocked for his heliocentric model but was later proven right does not mean everything is possible.
Thing is, I'm not even talking about physics. I'm talking about engineering. Something not only has to be possible but it has to be technically viable and sufficiently cheap. Put it this way: would you pay $60 billion for a 1GW power reactor with a lifespan of 30 years and an annual maintenance cost of $2B? Even if the fuel was completely free the wholesale cost per MWh would be ~$600. Nobody would build that.
Fusion research has been going on for decades and the best we've done thus far is fire a laser for about a second to induce a fusion reaction and also spend billions building magnets to try and contain a turbulent fluid at 100 million degrees, which, again, will do nothing about the neutrons that will destroy that vessel.
The joke is that fusion is always 50 years away and always will be. If you're an optimist it's always 30 years away and always will be.
I think solar is amazing and we need more of it - but I can't stand this solar and storage go at it alone mentality. It's pretty thickheaded to discount the other forms of energy that we can use and will need.
There are legit reasons to push back against “solar and batteries everywhere” but I find it hard to credit resilience in a conflict situation as one of them.
Batteries have use in war and power. It will likely scale faster than PV. What we need is the second derivative, so production of the latter can be turbocharged just before battery production is about to break through.
Ideally we see people like Form Energies, using iron-air (rust) batteries, for much easier to scale storage. https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/06/1145020/2026-cli...
- Battery energy storage has grown at an exceptional pace, with global installations increasing more than 20-fold in storage capacity over the past five years. This growth has been driven by falling battery prices, abundant supply and relatively short project lead times. As variable renewable generation expands in many markets, battery storage is becoming an important source of flexibility and resilience for power systems, while also representing a growing commercial opportunity for battery manufacturers.
- However, more than 90% of battery storage applications rely on LFP batteries that are almost exclusively supplied from China, which accounts for almost all global manufacturing capacity and the associated technical expertise. Korean producers are investing to scale up LFP battery production that can offer an alternative, but they face intense competition from established, lower-cost Chinese producers in an oversupplied market.
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/battery-storage-is-scaling-...
- Battery storage now accounts for around 18% of installed dispatchable capacity in Australia, compared with 7% in China, 5% in the United States and 4% in Europe – underlining how rapidly batteries are becoming an important part of the electricity systems in some regions.
https://www.ess-news.com/2026/06/02/global-battery-additions...
Battery storage is right behind the solar adoption curve. Net zero in five years? Probably not. Ten to fifteen years? Almost assured considering rate of change and the overall economics (assuming ~1TW/year of solar PV deployment and enough battery storage to soak up that low carbon generation while also providing grid services to replace thermal generation grid support [voltage, frequency, etc]).
(China is curtailing renewables equal to the annual combined generation of Spain and the Philippines every six months, and India about ~100-120GW/month due to not enough battery storage, for example)
Not sure whether other brands could be better but there seem to be various options that would suit. If you are in 120v land you may need to check if there are models to suit.
Its largely modular, inverter sits on top of modular batteries in 8-9kw chunks.
But they are app-infested. IE wants a wifi connection, app on your phone to their servers... etc etc.
I hate it, but the wife likes it. This is a recent thing so I am still working out if there are possible solutions for privacy and control over my own objects.
[0]https://solarbatterysupermarket.com.au/products/sigenergy-ba...
My recommendation would be to see if Ecopower storage and inverters are a good fit for your use case. If you're feeling adventurous, you could build your own battery pack, but I only recommend if you are knowledgeable and confident. This comes with substantial property and life safety risk, only proceed if you know what you're doing and understand the risk (I'll work on my high voltage EV battery packs, but only with a helper nearby holding a 2x4, for example).
1. Then you need small scale transformers 2. Lots of roofs have shadows on them a lot of the time, like from trees or other nearby buildings 3. Most roofs have to get replaced every 15 years 4. Roof installed solar is fixed in place
I think parking lots, rural empty land and the like are a better starting point that avoids all 4 of these issues.
I have solar on my roof btw.
I'm surprised to hear that you need to replace roofs every fifteen years. What are they made of? The roofs I know last decades longer than that.
Instead we have a captured system where it's cheaper to buy the politics of wealth extraction. Historically speaking this has always led to increasing wealth inequality that is ultimately resolved by war or revolution.
If the ultra-wealthy were smart, they'd declare victory because they've never had it so good and they'd seek to give back a little to placate the populace and stave off that war and revolution. But they don't. Greed has no bounds. So at some points, the guillotines are probably making a comeback. And a lot of people are going to die as climate refugees in the coming decades.
So even if a place like the US goes lighter on solar that is reasonable, Places like Spain, Italy or Morocco will go all in just to minimize dependence on a resource a third party can control. It's the ultimate counter to the Hormuz situation. Squeeze access to oil for long enough, and you accelerate the move away from it.
It goes all the way back to this kind of thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fundamentals
The pamphlet from which we get the term "fundamentalism" was published by an oil industry tycoon.
So the right is incentivized to protect this industry even if it becomes obsolescent and is no longer the most economical or practical way to generate at least much of our energy needs (electricity).
While the right has often sounded pro-nuclear, in practice they tend not to be that enthusiastic about it when they actually get into office. Obama supported the first new nuclear plant in decades.
https://politifact.com/factchecks/2012/mar/02/barack-obama/o...
Climate change:
> By increasing our American energy supply and decreasing the long term demand for oil, we will be well positioned to address the challenge of climate change and continue our longstanding responsibility for stewardship over the environment.
...
> As part of a global climate change strategy, Republicans support technology-driven, market-based solutions that will decrease emissions, reduce excess greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, increase energy efficiency, mitigate the impact of climate change where it occurs, and maximize any ancillary benefits climate change might offer for the economy.
...
> Because Republicans believe that solutions to the risk of global climate change will be found in the ingenuity of the American people, we propose a Climate Prize for scientists who solve the challenges of climate change. Honoraria of many millions of dollars would be a small price for technological developments that eliminate our need for gas-powered cars or abate atmospheric carbon.
Clean energy:
> Alternate power sources must enter the mainstream. The technology behind solar energy has improved significantly in recent years, and the commercial development of wind power promises major benefits both in costs and in environmental protection. Republicans support these and other alternative energy sources, including geothermal and hydropower, and anticipate technological developments that will increase their economic viability. We therefore advocate a long-term energy tax credit equally applicable to all renewable power sources.
Reducing demand for fossil fuels:
> Conservation does not mean deprivation; it means efficiency and achieving more with less. Most Americans today endeavor to conserve fossil fuels, whether in their cars or in their home heating, but we can do better. We can construct better and smarter buildings, use smarter thermostats and transmission grids, increase recycling, and make energy-efficient consumer purchases. Wireless communications, for example, can increase telecommuting options and cut back on business travel. The Republican goal is to ensure that Americans have more conservation options that will enable them to make the best choices for their families.
...
> We must also produce more vehicles that operate on electricity and natural gas, both to reduce demand for oil and to cut CO2 emissions.
> Given that fully 97 percent of our current transportation vehicles rely on oil, we will aggressively support technological advances to reduce our petroleum dependence. For example, lightweight composites could halve the weight and double the gas mileage of cars and trucks, and together with flex-fuel and electric vehicles, could usher in a renaissance in the American auto industry.
[1] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2008-republican-pa...
The argument that the fossil fuel industry historically being a major source of their funding is why they currently oppose renewables is weak because that has been a major continuing source of their funding for many decades.
Hence to explain why the renewable support in the 2008 party platform went away we need to look for an explanation other than simply the fossil fuel industry wanted it.
It still may be due to the fossil fuel industry, but to make that argument one needs to explain why they didn't have enough power before to stop it from going into the platform in 2008 but they did have enough later to get rid of it.
That baseload capacity comes from natural gas power plants. By building solar and wind you are guaranteeing a market for their products in the future.
Not sure what religious fundamentalism has to do with any of this.
Oil wells decrease in production over time. It's called the decline rate. For wells in the Permian basin, the average decline rate is about 15%. So a 1000 barrel per day ("bpd") well produces ~850bpd in year 2, ~700bpd in year 3 and ~550bpd in year 4. That means you need to be constantly drilling wells. That's more wealth concentration opportunity.
1MW of solar produces 1MW in years 1 through 20.
Additionally, the fight for control over resources induces demand for weapons. Solar doesn't do that. This is summed up as No one goes to war over a solar panel [1].
Efficiency isn't the goal. Wealth extraction is.
[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
I agree with your post, but the above statement is not technically accurate.
Panels do drop in production over time; A very rough rule-of-thumb is around 1% loss per year.
So after 20 years production is at like 80%. (Ymmv)
Of course this isn't really a big deal. The panels themselves are cheap and can be replaced very easily. Equally there is a market for 2nd hand panels as they still produce, and are ideal for places that are not space constrained.
So I think the pivot you're talking about, which I agree with eventually happen, will be offset in at least significant part.
For the right to actually embrace solar, you need either big money in solar to start it's own propaganda campaigns or you need big oil to collapse to the point where they can't afford paying propagandists. Right now, they are making record profits so don't count on that anytime soon.
https://texas2036.org/news-analysis/growth-of-utility-scale-...
tl;dr: https://mlu3fafnp1cd.i.optimole.com/w:778/h:495/q:mauto/f:be...
The U.S. solar industry installed 43 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in 2025, remaining the dominant source of new capacity added to the grid for the fifth consecutive year. Solar and energy storage represent 79% of new capacity installed in the first year of the Trump Administration [2].
[1] https://www.chooseenergy.com/solar-energy/solar-energy-produ...
[2] https://tedmag.com/report-u-s-added-43-gw-of-new-solar-capac...
Maybe the voters don't, but the businessmen and politicians definitely do, maybe more so than democrats. Just in different sectors (military).
Obvious counterpoints: Trump's $700m "clean, beautiful coal" handouts, or Trump's $2B buyback of wind farm leases.
>Private industry should be able to profit off the sun and it's disturbing that you think asserting this is a dunk.
It wasn't a "dunk", you added that interpretation yourself.
A bit of realism would help here. Yes, there's a left/NIMBY overlap to some degree, but the forces from the non-right camp seeking to limit power development comes from the NIMBY elements, not the left elements.
I guess this is in part because it only needs amazing factories and not complex deployed and maintained infrastructure that is at risk of blowing up.
Solar seems to fix the mould of a disruptive technology to a T.
After all, if they could predict the future, why did they design a game rather than get rich in the stock market?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20782346
(Needless to say, I don't have a high opinion of current fusion start ups.)
And fission already had the financial fiasco of the first nuclear build out in the US.
Solar could have been predicted to get really cheap, if one had heroically projected its experience curve into the future. A lot of people chickened out doing that, even Greenpeace.
[0] Yes pollution from normal everyday fossil fuel power generation causes more damage and deaths in the aggregate but it's a diffuse hard to attribute kind of damage which makes it far less, for lack of a better way to say it, real to people. eg: Did living downwind of that unupgraded coal plant really kill them or is their death because of something else.
To borrow the meme about LISP [1], if nuclear was so good, it would've caught on at any point in the last 80 years. And it hasn't for some good reasons:
- It's too expensive. As an example, Hinkley Point-C in the UK has a super high negotiated rate that only lasts 35 years for a plant that still needs a lifetime of 60 to justify the investment so who knows how expensive the power will be for those last 25 years;
- It takes too long to build, typically ~20 years;
- Fuel processing (to create the fuel rods) creates a lot of harmful waste (eg UF6) and it is not a solved problem;
- Processing of spent fuel is not a solved problem. There's this idea that you just stick it in a barrel and leave it for a thousand years doesn't match the reality. It typically needs active cooling for possibly decades, for a start;
- Failure modes for a single plant dwarf any other alternative. The standard counterpoint is global warming from fossil fuels but that's for the entire fossil fuel ecosystem. The clean up for Fukushima, for example, will likely take over a century and cost over $1 trillion;
- The taxpayer bears the burden for these failures because, in the US for example, the industry self-insurance fund is a couple of orders magnitude too small to cover it;
- Nuclear requires liability limits well below any such failure mode to make it remotely economical (eg the Price-Anderson Act liability limits);
- The ecosystem of building, maintaining, repairing, servicing, monitoring and regulating nuclear power plants as well as all the supply chains (eg transporting and storing fuel) takes a long time to scale up.
I really wish I understood why nuclear has this cult-like following. It's completely irrational.
I believe it is largely because it is so unviable. If you can shut down any power supply argument with "but muh nuclear" then you can ensure that we keep burning coal and gas forever. And as a bonus, you get to pretend you're the smartest person in the room for having come up with the only good solution.
Because “cost” is not an argument against something that hasn’t been scaled. Nuclear was snuffed in the crib before any repeatable plants could be brought online.
If you looked at the cost of solar in 1995, using it to power anything like a house was a complete joke. It had to fall over an order of magnitude and leave behind a trail of solar company corpses to get to a point where you can break even after 10 years putting them on a house.
Solar and wind need storage to make a complete solution, so when it comes to climate change discussions, you just end up with two “irrational” groups arguing about the optimistic potential things that don’t actually exist at an affordable cost.
We tolerate all kinds of externalities from fossil fuel energy production and environmental degradation due to rare earth mining required to produce solar panels and wind turbines.
Nuclear energy is the only industry required to mitigate all possible externalities, and for that reason it is very expensive.
It’s disingenuous to claim nuclear power is a failure because it’s expensive to build without examining the reasons why that might be.
For proof it can work and is both safe and economical, witness the Chinese currently building 40 new nuclear plants. We could do that here, but choose not to. The only missing ingredient is political will, and resistance from ill-informed people such as yourself.
I love this argument because it's never qualified. What regulations exactly make nuclear unaffordable? How many of them are safety related? Is safety not necessary?
It's just a hand-wavy argument for nebulous deregulation when all the evidence suggests that no industry is capable of self-regulation.
> ... rare earth mining required to produce solar panels ...
Solar panels don't require rare earths.
> Nuclear energy is the only industry required to mitigate all possible externalities
This is just objectively false. Fuel processing, spent fuel processing and storage and failure modes are absolutely not completely mitigated or even solved problems.
> For proof it can work and is both safe and economical, witness the Chinese currently building 40 new nuclear plants.
Well if 40 power plants are being built, you can't really say that their operational record is that they're "safe and economical" because they have no operational record, right? Now China has other nuclear power plants but you're not arguing with those.
China has several advantages no Western country has:
1. A standardized design so economies of scales with components;
2. State subsidies such as ultra-cheap finance; and
3. If people who manage and oversee such plants skimp on such maintenance they'll likely be executed.
Games like SimCity often only supports ultradense Manhattan style cities and centralized solar plants through distribution networks. That combination doesn't work with solar technology. It should be like "Set up offgrid solar incentives program($1.5B)" buttons that reduces power draw proportionate to numbers of standalone houses that resets when disaster hits the parts of the map it was used on.
Solar seems to be working just fine in Spain, a place where almost nobody lives in a stand alone house, or even a row house. You still put solar in the building, but then you have industrial solar in places wi5 little agricultural value, and wind turbines installed on top of hills. All of this could work just fine in any sim city I remember, as you are just dedicating space to power, which is fine.
The situation is slightly different for rooftop solar installations, which are equally prone to flying debris as concentrated farms but somewhat less likely to be affected by disasters that the house it is on can withstand. But that would be for off-grid purposes and not for the grid, and my original comment that solar generation only works for on-prem off-grid applies.
Plan it and it won't be a huge deal.
That said, I'm sure there are spots on this planet where solar isn't the best renewable option. Maybe small-scale wind power would be better where you are? On our boat we have both (and hydro for when we're sailing). Sadly these mechanical generators haven't yet received similar scale effects to their price as solar has.
Plus below a certain cost threshold, the risk of damage still means the overall cost is lower.
Finally, some much needed progress towards Sagan's apple pie.
Nuclear's problem, despite it's Champions assertion that it's now safe and properly engineered, is it's still inherently dirty and that dirt follows it through out it's life. It also probably has bloody mines, but every step on the path of using nuclear requires security and safety, and even when it's disposed, it still requires safety and security. It loses because no one trusts anyone along the entire value chain to not cut corners that leads to unsafe practices.
I think there was some ex-French colony government that demanded France disclose details of nuclear waste burial sites for "safety" reasons, which France rejected. Which means it happens. That kind of thing is why nuclear wastes are supposedly and actually so "dangerous" and small private owned generators get "complicated".
It's from 2022, so probably outdated.
> According to the US Department of Energy (DOE), about 12% of all silicon metal produced worldwide (also known as “metallurgical-grade silicon” or MGS) is turned into polysilicon for solar panel production. China produces about 70% of the world’s MGS and 77% of the world’s polysilicon. Converting silicon to polysilicon requires very high temperatures, and in China it’s coal that largely fuels these plants. Xinjiang—a region in China of abundant coal and low electricity prices—produces 45% of the world’s polysilicon.
> Reports indicate that some Xinjiang polysilicon plants have employed forced labor of Uyghurs, an intensely persecuted Muslim ethnic minority.
[0] https://blog.ucs.org/charlie-hoffs/mining-raw-materials-for-...
That doesn't change that you've made a total apples to oranges comparison by using the environmental cost of nuclear fuel to the cost of having a solar panel.
Both produce a finite amount of MWh for their lifetime. Both require mining. How much mining and human rights violations exist per unit of energy produced is the metric you're looking for.
That's complicated though. Easier to pretend like it's zero for one and non-zero for the other.
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?tem...
Solar's global peak month in (northern hemisphere) summer 2024 nearly equaled nuclear, the full calendar year 2025 slightly beat nuclear and now it's possible that the next yearly minimum month coming up this december will match nuclear. That's a lot of change in just 2.5 years.
Also, the graph shows the world needs more wind power as it counter cycles both solar and hydro supply.
That's on the small side of things, of course, but we also have PV-covered carports for about the same as a non-PV-covered carport: https://www.kaufland.de/product/512021383/
I was considering this earlier in the year, as it happens.
This article isn't about personal solar installations, in any event.
They're so cheap that bars in Colombia had panels as their terasse awnings. Cheaper than cloth and makes power.
The cost of the panels themselves is becoming one of the cheaper parts of that project.
[edit]
According to HN you can totally do this and I'm just wrong.
Most solar installs work by tying into the existing main breaker of the home.
The cheapest way to do this is to leave the line feeding from the power meter to the main panel untouched. Instead you do anti-islanding detection at the inverters, and when they detect that mains is "down" they automatically cut off to prevent trying to backfeed power to your whole neighborhood during an outage (dangerous, not a good idea).
---
Second issue - there are many appliances that are NOT happy about being turned on and off at random times, and it can significantly impact their lifespan (ex - refrigerators, acs, computers, washers & dryers, etc).
So given the variability of direct solar, you don't want to accidentally destroy your ac unit by having it turn on and off 100 times as random clouds float by.
---
But! If you're willing to install even moderate battery capacity (and LFP is getting quite cheap as well). Then you can absolutely do this. It's just more complicated and more expensive.
You need to wire in a mains relay (~$1,000 depending on the unit) and install some battery capacity to prevent very frequent startup/shutdown, then go through some painful additional signage and labeling requirements (at least in most of the US) and also install some additional shut-down switches on the exterior of the home (ex - to automatically turn the inverters off, and to shutdown the battery system).
Then, yes, you can absolutely stay on solar power while the grid is down. In the same way that people are allowed to run whole-home generators to stay online when the grid is down.
Home circuitry, load center need to be redesigned for V2X (vehicle to grid, home, load, etc), plug-in solar and batteries, solar/batteries replacing generators, etc. You seem to have thoughtful ideas about these and it would help to have someone knowledgable articulate how it should be done.
[1]The idea is that they can change the world right now by understanding what they want in their world (clean and free energy) and that they need to ask for those changes because buildings last ~100 years. The lowest hanging fruit is future-proof all construction and have it be ready for incremental changes without needing any labor or permitting work.
Pretty much. I vaguely remember a couple of "off-grid" devices that try to automate this for you (ex - you can set a priority on each breaker, and as supply dips, they get dropped in order of priority).
But functionally speaking, you just need to install a battery. Frankly - Batteries aren't discussed as much as solar, but the big breaking point we're hitting right now isn't just that solar has gotten incredibly, unimaginably cheap.
It's that BOTH batteries AND solar are getting very, very cheap. And the new generation of batteries are also considerably safer than the original lithium batteries.
Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries (LFP) are ~$60/kWh right now. I can buy them commercially in bulk in the US around ~$80 (pretty much all china production - full stop. Historically, I've bought EVE cells, but I'm now seeing direct BYD branded cells as well).
If sodium-ion can hit the same price points (and odds are looking better and better they'll both hit and then plow past as they bulk up production) then my read is that modern power plants are going to be very, very different.
They'll look a lot more like the connection structures we see for trees - a bunch of connected independent installs that can optionally cooperate as needed. Ex https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260928-a-virtual-power-...
Where I live, on sunny days, the grid goes over 253V (230V nominal +10%), so in order for me to generate anything, my inverter disconnects itself from the grid.
[0] It is becoming way more common now, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi...
You can get around it with multi-layer, but each layer adds diminishing returns on improvements, while the cost keeps increasing.
The best way to handle places with less solar irradiance is to have more panels. The cost per panel keeps dropping, so the economics keep improving in that way.
With more panels my setup will be more of an eye-sore, require more and longer cables, combiner boxes and the setup becomes a bigger project. So I am just being a selfish ass but I had to ask where we are.
Before you get angry, remember what the sun is....
The main problem with solar and wind is that they can't be dispatched on demand. The power is incredibly cheap, but you are completely at the mercy of the weather.
What is needed is a source of power which can make up for the freak moments where 1) there isn't any sun, and 2) there isn't any wind, and 3) it lasts long enough that batteries can't cover it, and 4) it has to be widespread enough that you can't make up for it with power from half a continent away.
This power source will only need to be used for a few hundred hours per year but it'll need to carry a significant load, so while its per-MWh running costs are basically irrelevant its one-time per-MW construction costs should be fairly low.
This does not at all describe nuclear power, which has incredibly high construction costs, near-zero running costs, and is expected to run 24/7/365 at 100%.
The median reactor in the US produces 1-2GW. Most nuclear installations have multiple reactors, so capacity is a multiple of that. 1GW of solar generation requires literally millions of solar panels and thousands of acres of land, and still needs the transformers and distribution infrastructure. And that doesn't include any storage capability.
This is a contrived example. You're making it sound like solar is power available now. It simply isn't, on any scale like that. If it takes a decade to bring 1GW of solar online and two decades to bring 1GW of nuclear online, it's not as clear-cut.
Nuclear could be done a lot more quickly than it is and still be safe. Not as fast as solar, but it's not like it's an order of magnitude.
No reason for people to splinter the effort on clean reliable power.
If we only go after solar, wind and storage -- how are we ever going to get to long form space travel and continue to level up our technology for energy? How will we get to fusion?
By researching fusion? Imagine how much research you could do with all the money that you didn't waste on building uneconomical nuclear power plants
Nope. One of the fundamental premises of money is that it circulates. The only way money could not be re-spent is if the money supply were to decrease.
The total volume of new power generation is going to be mostly determined by how much those capital holders value it. If there's more utility in power this year than last, we may see more new starts in generation projects, regardless of which type of generation those projects are doing.
The real money is convincing marks to take the financing for 20+ years.
None? Project Solar? The last time I seriously looked at doing rooftop panels, they were significantly cheaper than the door-to-door jerks.
There's probably more to the regulatory problem than just the permits i guess.
There's also other factors like the overall cost being beyond people's willingness to save for when financing is available or the extra value that financed installs can provide the underwriters when they're bundled and sold as a stable income stream like houses were in the mid 00s.
"If it can be done cheaper someone will" is based on a lot of simplifications and assumptions about the market in question.
AI can't take my job then.
One indicator is that third world countries can seem to afford it.
Untrue, at Sunspark we sold to both individuals and companies. If you can install the stuff yourself, buying it direct from the manufacturer is ungodly cheap (~330w panels at $80 a piece when I worked there almost decade ago.)
The fallacy is that there are infinite market opportunities but a finite supply of entrepeneurs/business/money to exploit them. Therefore, there are an infinite number of market opportunities that will get passed up for one reason or another.
One thing that isn't super obvious from the article is that a lot of it is talking about industry solar panels rather than rooftop. The overheads of installation etc get a lot smaller if you're installing a whole bunch at once.
This isn't to say that installing solar panels on your house is a bad idea - they normally pay for themselves after something like 10 years from memory, so are similar to double glazing.
[0] https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/overview-trade-and-polic...
I would guess this varies by locale, and people usually assume the time value of money to be zero when they make the claim. In much of the US, I think the payback time is more realistically in the 15-20 year range, which means you really only want to install panels when you install a new roof. Otherwise the lifetime of the roof will happen before break even on the panels.
I am with you, this would be better on a town or regional basis instead of on everyone’s roof. Our houses already have wires going to them and I can’t imagine my particular roof or garage is the best place to put panels and batteries. But I understand it’s a political / administrative issue which may well be not solvable easily in many places.
This is really surprising to hear. Are you sure about that?
On-prem has a problem of distributed labour costs.
On-prem might eventually become cheaper, but my guess is that won't happen any time soon.
For the time being, centralized and at-scale installation is where you can get much, much lower labour per watt costs.
Other places (like the EU and especially the US) have regulatory problems around anything to do with energy. This is mostly about ass coverage resulting in a lot of pressure for certification, related fees, grid operators insisting on a lot of overhead, building codes requiring a lot of faffing about for the business of wiring together what is essentially plug and play stuff, etc.
If you have an off grid shed, providing power to it is cheap and easy because you have none of that. You buy the hardware on amazon or wherever. It arrives, you wire it up. Job done. And if you are smart you might let a qualified electrician do it right for you or at least check your work (so your shed doesn't burn down and nobody dies from electrical shocks). But fundamentally it's not that hard and this stuff is mostly pretty safe and easy to work with. Especially compared to the things people burn down their sheds with traditionally (e.g. generators).
There's a lot of optimization potential here and most of that is completely non technical.
The biggest cost components are sales and marketing expenses and similar soft costs. Some of this can be driven down if you collectively buy through something like https://solarunitedneighbors.org/
(have installed 100kw+ of residential solar, ama)
Yea, if you go to an installer instead of buying from the OEM and installing yourself. I likely made your panels at SunSpark (We made panels for everyone, Renogy, Juinko Solar, Samsung, etc.) They were sold for $80 at 330w - 4.125 watts per dollar, or a quarter per watt.
Solar isn't expensive - you are.
I am not a commercial system installer, I am a hobbyist enthusiast who helps others install to avoid commercial installers and their costs. Volunteer labor for everything (racking, panels, electrical), volunteer electrician signs off for any AHJ (authority having jurisdiction) requirements.
Most people cannot install the equipment themselves, which leads to the residential costs I mention. Is it expensive? Price is what you pay, value is what you get. If you cannot find someone to install for free, and cannot do it yourself, the price is the price. You can either choose to pay market rate after getting multiple bids, or choose to go without.
US Dept of Energy: Solar Photovoltaic System Cost Benchmarks - https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/solar-photovoltaic-syste...
Energy Sage: Solar panel cost in 2026 - https://www.energysage.com/local-data/solar-panel-cost/
(i am also a community outreach volunteer for https://www.gosolarapp.org for automating permitting and remote inspections across the US, which was incubated at NREL prior to being spun out as an independent non profit; this drives down permitting soft costs)
This is highly untrue, until you get to the task mounting on a roof. Barring that, making a solar array system is dead simple. Most anyone can turn a screwdriver or build a frame or connect very distinct connectors together (they just snap together for daisy-chaining solar panels) or insert a power plug into a NEMA receptacle (for balcony solar installs.)
It is the install on the roof itself which most people cannot do (because they lack roofing knowledge.) Every other thing is absolutely DIY by pretty much anyone with hands and eyes.
Literally the most important part is what most people cannot do. If you have the space, sure, ground mount. Most people do not have the space, nor are they going to be confident in putting penetrations in their roof deck to mount racking to hold the panels.
I'm looking forward to installing a couple of panels on the roof next year. Having power to charge my phone, or laptop, won't take much capacity, I'm not going to use much power other than that, maybe some music but nothing like cooking/heating, or similar heavyweight usage. (I have a wood stove for heating, and gas/alcohol stoves for cooking, along with on-site water.)
https://www.energysage.com/news/solar-panels-withstand-hail/
- Every panel sold in the U.S. has to pass an industry-standard hail test, which fires ice balls at multiple points on the panel and requires no visible cracking, delamination, or more than a 5% drop in power output afterward. Companies like UL Solutions, an applied safety science company, test solar panels by dropping a two-inch solid steel sphere from 51 inches onto panels, simulating the impact energy of serious hail. Panels that survive without electrical hazards earn certification for real-world deployment.
- The proof is in the pudding—or in this case, the parking lot. When a severe hailstorm hammered the National Laboratory of the Rockies' (NLR) (formerly National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)) Colorado campus in 2017, just one single panel out of more than 3,000 suffered damage. That's a 99.97% survival rate against Mother Nature.
It's the equivalent of a bond investment with potential subsidies at the utility, state, and federal level (solar is no longer subsidized, but batteries still are).
So long as the roof itself lasts that long. People who are mid-cycle on their existing roof should not install solar until they get to the next replacement. This is where I am, and why I do not have rooftop solar. I expect to get 15 additional years from my roof, and there's no guarantee I will have hit the break even point by then. Plus, solar installers will not warranty a mid-cycle roof against leaks, so if something goes wrong that quickly eats into your cost savings.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
The World Crossed a Major Solar Milestone [3TW] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151977 - August 2026
it's a great source of energy mind you, but I kind of wince everytime people are trying to say it's better than nuclear (if you put the dangerosity of the raw material aside of course)
there are excellent storage capacities now, which helps a lot, but nuclear stays unmatched in producing vast amounts of electricity on demand (as long as we're not in a brutal heat wave to be fair)
Centralized energy infra just isn't resilient enough against geopolitical problems to be worth investing in. Something about too much dependency on a thing attracts bad behavior to that thing.
By contrast, ain't nobody wasting a $50k missile on a $5k battery just so they can cut power to one building.
Solar is the superior form of nuclear energy. You're using a big ass nuclear fusion reactor in the center of our solar system to generate energy, and you harvest that energy by capturing its photonic output.
As far as storing the energy for peak demand/nighttime usage, we've got literally hundreds of methods to do it, from pure mechanical to electrochemical.
I could also say: Solar is the best energy source (if you put night aside of course).
I mean obviously the main drawback of nuclear fission is the waste and the potential impact of radioactivity.
If nuclear were just as expensive as it is now but had no waste or radioactivity it would still be struggling.
If it were 10x cheaper but still had the waste and radioactivity it would be going like gangbusters.
Perhaps. While the amortisation of the costs of Chernobyl etc. over the global nuclear fleet are surprisingly low, the local economic impact was high enough that even governments are cautious about the risks.
e.g. the Chernobyl exclusion zone is about the size of Luxembourg, so I'd expect their government to have had… discussions… with the French government about the safety of the nearby reactor in Cattenom: were it to détoner while the wind was blowing the wrong way, Luxembourg may cease to exist.
(Low risk, but existential if it happens. Not everyone's as enthusiastic as powerful people seem to be today about AI).
Also to clarify, modern Gen III+ reactors have passive safety systems that make leaks/meltdowns virtually impossible [2], and the total volume of high-level waste is tiny, solid, and completely contained in dry casks with little chance of escape - however there are some concerns on the 100+ year timescale, I'll admit.
Also a fun fact, deaths per unit of energy of nuclear compared to solar are nearly identical.[3]
[1]https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... [2]https://www.amacad.org/publication/nuclear-reactors-generati... [3]https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy?hl=en-US
As I understand it, this is very common across much of the developing world now. So the tracking of how much solar energy there is in the world is almost certainly a lower bound on the reality.
At least in Belgium there’s also a lot of unregistered solar panels to the point that the energy regulator is using satellite imagery to catch and find them…