Relying on an energy source which requires constant, continuous resource extraction is fucking stupid when we can spend resources up front and get reliable energy (solar + battery) for decades with minimal operating cost & maintenance. And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction.
If you want to debate that, spend some time with this video first: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM
Try not to blame anyone. Do it rationally if you can, from your message I understand your opinion.
I say this as a person that has lived in a developing country the last 15 years. It is not that simple IMHO...
The US stopped building coal power plants over a decade ago but we still have a lot of them. Meanwhile we’ve mostly been building solar, which eventually means we’ll have a mostly solar grid but that’s still decades away.
This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do. It is reasonable that when someone gives up a couple of things because that person is rich (rich as in a person in the developed world) the sacrifice is more or less acceptable.
Now change environment and think that these sacrifices are way worse. Even worse than that: that has more implications in conservative cultures where, whether you like it or not, showing "muscle" (wealth) is socially important for them to reach other soccial layers that will make their lives easier.
But giving up those things is probably a very bad choice for their living.
America cannot be compared to South East Asia economically speaking, for example. So the comparison of the coal centrals is not even close.
A salary in Vietnam is maybe 15 million VND for many people. With that you can hardly live in some areas. It is around 600 usd.
Just my two cents.
https://statbase.org/data/vnm-coal-imports/
It also started importing liquid natural gas in 2023.
But it has abundant sunlight, access to low cost Chinese solar panels that will produce electricity for decades instead of being burned once, and a substantial domestic photovoltaic manufacturing industry of its own.
"Renewable Energy Investments in Vietnam in 2024 – Asia’s Next Clean Energy Powerhouse" (June 2024)
https://energytracker.asia/renewable-energy-investments-in-v...
In 2014, the share of renewable energy in Vietnam was just 0.32%. In 2015, only 4 megawatts (MW) of installed solar capacity for power generation was available. However, within five years, investment in solar energy, for example, soared.
As of 2020, Vietnam had over 7.4 gigawatts (GW) of rooftop solar power connected to the national grid. These renewable energy numbers surpassed all expectations. It marked a 25-fold increase in installed capacity compared to 2019’s figures.
In 2021, the data showed that Vietnam now has 16.5 GW of solar power. This was accompanied by its green energy counterpart wind at 11.8 GW. A further 6.6 GW is expected in late 2021 or 2022. Ambitiously, the government plans to further bolster this by adding 12 GW of onshore and offshore wind by 2025.
These growth rates are actually much faster than growth rates in the US.
In developed countries 20-50% of the cost of roof top solar is labor.
The general premise of investments is that you end up with fewer resources by not doing them.
It now costs less to install a new solar or wind farm than to continue using an existing coal plant, much less if you were considering building a new coal plant, and that includes the cost of capital, i.e. the interest you have to pay to borrow the money for the up-front investment.
Poorer countries would be at a slight disadvantage if they have to pay higher than average interest rates to borrow money, but they also have the countervailing advantage of having lower labor and real estate costs and the net result is that it still doesn't make sense for anybody to continue to use coal for any longer than it takes to build the replacement.
It just takes more than zero days to replace all existing infrastructure.
Acting like this blunder is some random stroke of bad luck isn't telling the whole story.
I'm sure there's some degree of vested interest in protecting fossil energy because it means very concentrated profits in a way that renewables do not. Sunlight isn't owned by anybody (modulo Simpsons references) and nor is the Wind, but I'd expect that, if that was all it was, to manifest as diverting funding to transitional work, stuff that keeps $$$ in the right men's pockets, rather than trying to do a King Canute. Stuff like paying a wind farm not to be constructed feels very Trump-specific.
† The British even know what you do with kings who refuse to stop breaking the law. See Charles the First, though that's technically the English I suspect in this respect the Scots can follow along. If the King won't follow the Law, kill the King, problem solved.
EDIT: I think people are misunderstanding my response. I fully support local subsidies for solar and renewables. My question is why my tax dollars should go toward making it affordable for everyone, including non-Americans. Either market dynamics will handle that naturally, artificially (i.e., China's manufacturing subsidies), or else it is up to the local government to address the shortfall.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-20247734 (2012)
Or do you think that US federal investment in solar and battery technology would be bad for the American taxpayer?
Batteries provided 42.8% of California's power at 7pm a few days ago (which came across my social media feed as a new record) [1]. And it wasn't a particularly short peak, they stayed above 20% of the power for 3 hours and 40 minutes. It's a non-trivial amount of dispatchable power.
[1] https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso&date=202...
Batteries are a form of dispatchable power not "base load". There is no "base load" requirement. Base load is simply a marketing term for power production that cannot (economically) follow the demand curve and therefore must be supplemented by a form of dispatchable power, like gas peaker plants, or batteries. "Base load" power is quite similar to solar in that regard. The term makes sense if you have a cheap high-capitol low running-cost source of power (like nuclear was supposed to be, though it failed on the cheap front) where you install as much of it as you can use constantly and then you follow the demand curve with a different source of more expensive dispatchable power. That's not the reality we find ourselves in unless you happen to live near hydro.
† My thinking is: Dawn because in a few hours the solar comes online, you can refill those batteries at whatever price that is, so sell what you have now for the dawn price, and Dusk because the solar is mostly gone but people are running ovens and so on to make food in the evening, so you can sell into that market. But I might be seeing what I expect not reality.
That too has pretty recently changed. Even my home state of Idaho is deploying pretty big batteries. It takes almost no time to deploy it's all permitting and public comment at this point that takes the time.
Batteries have gotten so cheap that the other electronics and equipement at this point are bigger drivers of the cost of installation.
Here's an 800MWh station that's being built in my city [1].
I think people are just generally stuck with the perception of where things are currently at. They are thinking of batteries and solar like it's 2010 or even 2000. But a lot has changed very rapidly even since 2018.
[1] https://www.idahopower.com/energy-environment/energy/energy-...
Any pointers for a regular Joe Shmoe homeowner looking for a backup battery? The Tesla Power Wall stuff and similar costs are halfway to six figures.
What I've done and would suggest is right now looking for battery banks for big ticket important items that you'd want to stay on anyways in terms of an outage. A lot of those can function as a UPS. You can get a 1kWh battery pack for $400 right now. A comparable home battery backup is charging $1300 per kWh of installed storage.
I currently have a 2kWh battery pack for my computer/server/tv and a 500Wh pack for my fridge. Works great and it's pretty reasonably priced. The 500Wh gives my fridge an extra 6 hours of runtime after a power outage.
If I wanted to power shift, I have smart switches setup so I can toggle when I want to.
I hesitate to offer any brand advice, because that is very situational, depends on what you're after, what experience level you have, what trade-offs you want to make, etc.
The cheapest per kwh way I could find to buy a home battery (that didn't involve diy stuff) was to literally buy an EV car with an inverter... by a factor of at least two... I ended up not buying one.
Unfortunately cheap batteries doesn't translate to reputable companies packaging them in cheap high quality packages for consumers instantly.
2. Wind power works better for farmers and provide a smaller footprint. Drive on I-80 in Iowa on a clear night and you'll see the wind farms blink their red lights in the distance. Farmers can lease their land for wind turbines, and the generation companies take on the regulatory / capital / politcal risks, etc.
3. Farming is more or less free market based, and often farmers can let their grain sit in a silo until the price is optimal for them to sell. But for a given location, there's only one power company that you can use, and typically the power companies don't like people putting solar panels on the grid. In many states (like in Idaho) there's regulatory capture or weird politics preventing people putting solar panels up on their own land. (Again Idaho)
As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies.
The problem is that in many of those places where enough water naturally falls from the sky the soil and/or the weather isn't as good for growing food.
It is generally much easier to move water to a low water place that has great soil and/or weather than it is to move soil or weather to a high water place that is missing good soil or weather, and so here we are.
Then economics, lack of infrastructure and incentives buried it in a few years. Farmers were left holding the bag. Many were not happy they had made a huge move into this new "renewable" energy, only to get burned in the end. The same farmers I know have scoffed at windmills and solar farms.
E-85 really lost a lot of farmers willing to use their land for something that won't pan out. The ones I know went back to growing what sells and grows the best in the market. Trying to tell a farmer that solar panels on his land where he grows food to feed his family is going to be a tough sell now.
Whoa lots to unpack here. I'll summarize:
- It is already happening to some extent (it's cheaper)
- Try explaining to farmers to do away with their livelihood and retrain them to running a solar farm
- Entrenched bureaucracy and gov subsidies
They also have goals other than generating energy effectively
Theft is stupid from a broad view. It causes more harm to the victim than benefit to the perpetrator. Everyone would be better off if we everyone stopped stealing and we provided the same level of benefit to would-be perpetrators in a more efficient form.
Why hasn't theft stopped yet? Because it's extremely difficult to do from a systems level. In principle it's simple: just don't steal. Convincing everyone to do it is hard.
Likewise, fossil fuels have horrible externalities that kill thousands if not millions of people per year. We'd be better off if we greatly cut back our usage and replaced it with cleaner sources of energy. But the people benefitting from any given use of fossil fuels and the people paying the costs tend not to be the same people. This makes it extremely difficult to organize a halt.
Is there an upper bound on battery limits with regards to resource extraction?
Hopefully we are able to reach a point of effectively unlimited cheap energy and storage but it's that if overnight we suddenly had enough solar+batteries to power today's usage, we'd suddenly need way more as demand rises
This is something the (willfully?) deluded really don't appreciate. I know people who listened to _that one Joe Rogan podcast_ about precious metal extraction for EVs and are back on the oil bandwagon. The current regime of precious metal extraction is absolutely dirty and dangerous but ... it doesn't have to be and won't be forever -- especially if, as you've said, we actively prioritize a recycling loop for the components.
The corn doesn't just produce ethanol, which just utilizes the starch/sugar. The protein, fat, fiber is eaten by livestock in some form like distillers grains.
And governments like to have food security , and having secondary uses for an abundance of food in the good times is more convenient than storing cheese in caves , and in case of an emergency shortage the production is already there without having to rip up solar panels to grow food.
My conclusion is you're conflating issues (solar and ethanol) unnecessarily.
There's lot of factors at play here:
- Location for generating PV
- Redistribution of food (both for livestock and human) production
- Environmental impacts of PV vs livestock vs depletion of native prairies
Point still stands...if you replaced all of the land used to produce ethanol with PV, you would create a surplus of energy that is higher than anything we could imaginably consume today (hint - China is essentially already doing this)
Ethanol from sugarcane makes a lot more sense. Corn ethanol is just a wasteful subsidy for farmers paid for by drivers.
What is the problem, that sounds great? 30% free output out of your input is staggering honestly. Thank you sunshine and atmospheric CO2. You don't have to use fossil fuel for this. You can potentially run the farm equipment off ethanol if it were designed as such.
You can also only grow sugarcane well up to usda zone 8. Some people can do it as an annual but I guess it is tricky. Corn you can grow all the way into Canada.
Rooftop solar is good but it shouldn't be a gift to the wealthier residents paid for by those less wealthy. Any subsidies for solar power should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further than a dollar spent subsidizing wealthy homeowners who install panels on their roof.
My understanding is that the (unsubsidised) price of rooftop solar is only high in the USA. Because the cost is almost entirely labor (high in the US) and issues around permitting (more restrictive in the US). Pretty much everywhere else in the world you'll now save money with rooftop solar + batteries even if you can't sell back to the grid at all. Even places that aren't that sunny like the UK where I live.
It is still more expensive than "grid scale" deployments. But there are positive externalities that make up for that: uses otherwise unused space, less grid capacity needed, adds resiliency to the grid (if implemented well with storage).
I don't think you thought this up yourself, so I won't blame you for it, as this exact, word for word swill is mindlessly repeated by a lot of people, so thats ample evidence of brainwashing going on.
The subsidies and retail rate (both of which have been murdered by now thanks to swill like this) incentives were not a sneaky reverse welfare program snuck in by the wealthy.
They were infrastructure incentives for people who could afford to make those infrastructure investments.
Investments have always required incentives and a positive ROI. You don't put money into your 401k, Roth or HSA because you expect to lose money in 20 years.
The goal of solar subsidies was never some sneaky wealth redistribution with unforseen sideeffects but rather to rally support from the private industry and wealthy homes to spearhead rapid decarbonization, energy independence, and grid decentralization.
A single mother treading water, barely being able to afford groceries isn't your persona for actually making rapid decarbonization, energy independence, and grid decentralization happen - however, the wealthy that you so despise of, certainly put a 10kWh (sometimes more) PV array on their 3000 sqft rooftop and actually feed power to the grid that was reeling under tremendous growing strain.
People hanging portable solar panels from the balconies of their apartments barely make power to run their kitchen fridge so that's out as well.
Mom and pop landlords and corporate run apartments aren't going to put solar for their tenants because they are not legally allowed to sell power above utility rates while they don't enjoy the 10% guaranteed ROI that utilities get (which is where utilities actually make their money), so that's out too.
This makes me sad - We could have had a future where the grid was fully decentralized, where our single mother neighbor would never had to worry about the lights getting turned off even when there was a downed power line or wildfire or a snowstorm turning down power lines half a mile away, where she could plug in her EV into my shed instead of having to drive miles away to a crowded charging station.
We are numbers people here - so here's a numbers perspective:
If I had taken the same money I had to spend on a "grid compliant" installation (so I could connect all of this to the grid) and put it into the SNP500 instead, I would never have had to worry just about a power bill (as bad it is - $0.60/kWh) but also my inflation adjusted grocery bills for the rest of my life.
It turns out that a big problem is that whenever we install local generation it costs utilities a ton of money. They bundle the cost of grid maintenance into their per kWh charges. These costs, which include debt service, maintenance, upgrades etc amount to 5-7 cents/kWh. Whenever you generate your own energy you cost the utility 5-7cents/kWh that they have to pay regardless of your usage.
This business model, which has bundled grid maintenance into usage costs means that utilities put up huge roadblocks for distributed generation. They say they love it, but they actually hate it. Utility executives have looked me in the eye and said as much.
It gets worse though, because energy infrastructure is backed by trillions in utility bonds. These "low risk" debt instruments are owned by national and private pension funds of mind boggling size. In order to bring about a distributed energy future the grid (and low pressure nat gas infrastructure) must be reorganized in a manner that is likely to make those bonds worthless. These background factors are definitely in play when you see these bait and switch enthusiastic green energy programs that turn out to be a regulatory quagmire when you dig into them. Public utilities and pension funds hate green energy, they are a major factor in west's pathetic performance when it comes to solar adoption vs China.
So a question:
- Lets hypothesize that distributed, decentralized systems cost way more than centralized systems
- If you agree with that hypothesis, can we next hypothesize that building a distributed, decentralized system that can support power on one block and can allow it to continue to stay on while the "central feeder line" (please tell me the proper word for this made up word is) to all the blocks is down, because that one block has a local distributed, decentralized power source, is of value to the community?
In the past, commercial factories were the only places that could afford this kind of redundancy but it feels to me, thanks to crashing prices of solar and batteries (I could never have imagined 12kWh brand new LFP could be purchased for $2k), this level of redundancy is now very much realistic at the consumer, residential level. It just doesn't work locally today because the utility poles lack the smarts to do the isolated switching and safe islanding. For example: one unsettled question today is if a lot of customers on one such island are on solar and the grid is down, how do we safely supply power within nominal specs to the whole of the island - but this isn't a physical unknown, we know how to solve it. It just is lacking implementation.
> These costs, which include debt service, maintenance, upgrades etc amount to 5-7 cents/kWh. Whenever you generate your own energy you cost the utility 5-7cents/kWh that they have to pay regardless of your usage
Capitalism has repeatedly proven its ability to cut costs down while improving QoS. I realize you really believe in the numbers you have been provided - that it costs a utility 5-7cents/kWh that they have to pay regardless of my usage, but before SpaceX, it used to cost multiple millions of dollars and years of planning and design to launch one rocket.
No this statement is absolutely wrong. Here's why:
> west's pathetic performance when it comes to solar adoption vs China
China is dominating energy because the CCP doesn't care what their citizens think. They need energy and they are doing everything they can do to get it. They will put you behind bars at best or kill your family and demolish your house if it gets in the middle of a power line trench. For China, energy isn't a "nice to have" - they realize it's essential and they won't stop until they get there.
China is the person out in the mountains being chased by a hungry bear while we in the west is the person sitting in their air conditioned room debating whether to drive or take an Uber to have a drink with buddies.
News came out last week that you can buy a Chinese hypersonic missle for $100k - you can't even build a little two car garage where I am for double that price.
> Public utilities and pension funds hate green energy
Pension funds don't care whether energy is green or orange. What they hate are the horrible returns affected by all the stealing and grifting that happens in the name of "green energy".
Public utilities (atleast in the jurisdictions that I am aware of) love any infrastructure work - they are guaranteed a 10% ROI by the government on any approved infrastructure work they do. If you could work with them to build infrastructure to cremate just newborn kids and get it approved by the CPUC, they will happily start work on it tomorrow. The reason why they hate green energy is because after they've made their 10% ROI, they are now stuck with a power source that costs them more than their non-green sources and that hurts their razor thin margins.
However, as the customer - I don't care either about what public utilities and pension funds hate or don't.
What I do care about is having affordable and reliable power and I absolutely can get that with my own solar panels and batteries. The fact that it's green is a happy sideffect for most.
The reason why every home in the U.S. isn't overflowing with solar panels and batteries is because of regulation and government shenanigans making retail costs really high. Average people in Pakistan, South Africa and Lebanon certainly power their whole homes with solar panels and batteries but their governments don't have nonsense taffifs and fees on Chinese solar equipment.
And when you think about the millions of lands used to grow bioethanol I think we can safely convert that for solar installation without worries.Agrovoltaic is also a practical approach for a lot of crops and farmers so that we can grow and produce electricity side by side.
There are deserts everywhere.
The most efficient way to do large scale solar is with semi-local utility scale arrays with ultra efficient inverters and enormous chemical or hydro storage. We have a lot of unused land, that's not a problem
How much energy in terms of calories does one get per acre?
What is the equivalent energy input in terms of diesel and so forth?
The blunt question is:
>How many calories of energy to grow 1 calorie of corn (using modern industrial farming practices)
Also, in case of a war or blockade you can switch the corn use from etanol to food. You will have to eat tortilla and polenta for a year [1] but it's better than algae from seawater or famine.
Here we use sugar cane to produce etanol, it's more efficient because it's a C4 plant. I guess it's possible in the south of the US.
[1] It's not so bad in my opinion if you can mix some meat in the sauce.
Not that easily. Yellow dent corn is not edible without processing. So to switch that to food use you have to have factories to deal with it.
You'd be far better off taking the energy from panels and using it greenhouses to get human feed.
* Home made popcorn: made from whole yellow corn grains.
* Corn on the cob: Sweet yellow corn. We just learned that you can microwave them for 6 minutes instead of boiling.
* Polenta: Grinded yellow corn. Add milk, butter and as much cheese as possible. You can buy the precooked grinded corn, and it takes less than 5 minutes. Bonus points for a sauce with tomato, onion, peppers, and red chorizo. [1]
* Humita/Tamales: Put some grinded corn wrapped inside the corn husk and boil it. I had not eat them since a long time ago, but they use also yellow corn here. I like it, but it requires a lot of preparation.
We use white corn only for food related to our two independence day:
* Locro: Mix split white hard corn, beans, pumpkin pieces, potatoes, pieces of meat with bone and whatever you can find. Boil it for hours and hours and hours. I probably eat it once or twice a year. [2]
* Mazamorra (porridge?): Mix split white hard corn with sugar and probably milk. Boil it until it's soft, that may take a very long time. I think I eat it once or twice in my life, for some patriotic celebration.
[1] https://www.paulinacocina.net/como-hacer-polenta-con-tuco/25...
[2] https://www.paulinacocina.net/receta-de-locro-argentino/9829
PS: As a rule of thumb, if you want to cook Argentinean food, just look at the site of "Paulina Cocina". She has simple but tasty recipes.
Algae is farmed at industrial scales in the ocean, today. Mostly in asia. US is very behind on this industry.
Same with corn
> so you will have to flood a lot of land to get enough. Not necessarily, just use pre-existing water treatment plants to grow algae, and vertical photobioreactors exist. Algae also has a much higher harvest rate versus corn, and if you only wanted to ferment the algal biomass into corn you'd have much higher yields than corn.
> Also, in case of a war or blockade you can switch the corn use from ethanol to food. You will have to eat tortilla and polenta for a year [1] but it's better than algae from seawater or famine.
True
> Here we use sugar cane to produce etanol, it's more efficient because it's a C4 plant. I guess it's possible in the south of the US. Agreed.