It's really just education - as well as industry - is over-regulated so there's no competition, ergo no cheaper higher quality offerings at a higher quantity
I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind
(personally I like both but I can see some shortcomings - for example I have heard that ai datacenters are using gas at times because of its flexibility)
So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?
Or will they just adopt it once it's seen everywhere?
Solar/wind is the cheapest form of power generation by far. You just can't beat it because they don't have any fuel costs. Gas peaker plants will always make sense until we have enough grid scale batteries. They will hold on for now until the price of natural gas hits rock bottom. But with the current advances in low cost battery technology I see them becoming less and less necessary. They would probably already be dead if hydrofracturing hadn't propped up the cost of gas.
Most places have a very different mix of electricity sources, things like hydro and imports from places further to the east (where the sun is still shinning) or wind from west-ward. Nuclear provides the same base power all around the day, etc.
The need for peaker plants to offset the need for batteries is greatly exaggerated. The batteries are mostly required for grid frequency stabilization due to renewal intermittence (clouds passing through, wind slowing down), not so much for overnight storage in most locations.
Of course this varies drastically from place to place, Hawaii for example can't really import energy production from other places.
I think you've missed that all generators have upfront cost. That's why the monetary payoff time for installing solar is non-zero. Versus a backup generator you're paying 2-3x the cost upfront. And yes we know the running cost is almost 0, the maintenance is almost nothing, etc etc, but I could see that argument not holding as much water as we need it to.
The adoption rate in places like Australia and even Texas is what demonstrates that the argument holds water.
People wouldn't be rushing to shift entire markets at the observed rates if the economics were upside down. It is the soundness of the economic model that is driving the adoption even against tariffs and subversion by the current US regime.
How do you explain the fact that the average residential electricity price is higher in Australia than in most of the US?
This is not as simple as people here make it out to be.
Consider also that solar is profitable today because it does not set the price of electricity in most markets. In a world where solar dominates, the prices of electricity could be negative. The economics of negative electricity prices becoming the norm are not yet fully understood.
They paid to decommission fossils early, and amortized it over the future. So it's going to drop like a rock once those debts are paid and the last plants shut down, with fewer remaining customers and lighter load on the grid. But until then, consumers will be paying higher bills.
Perhaps they did not mean point 18, but I found it interesting anyway.
The existing gas infrastructure represents a large amount of taxpayer investment, not due to be paid off until 2070. But it’s estimated that there won’t be any users of that infrastructure beyond 2050.
Are you talking backup generator vs solar for a home?
If so, solar continually supplies power without paying for an input vs a backup generator which is only meant to run infrequently and is costly to run and requires you to pay for inputs and of course maintenance of an ICE.
Typically power is priced by Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) where you amortize the total cost of ownership across the total power generated to get a per kwh cost which is what most grid operators care about. After all, large scale investors and governments don't care if a plant costs a billion dollars if it produces 20 billion in electricity.
What you are talking about is the Payback Period (PP) or Return on Investment (ROI) which is more important to homeowners adding a solar plant to their homes.
Both of these types of measure take into account both capital and operating expenses.
LCOE is a terrible metric for the power grid because it does not capture the cost of balancing the power grid.
Excess renewable power is great but it creates a problem and the cost of that problem is not borne by the generators that created the problem.
What LCOE captures in this context is that solar panels are cheap and that the fuel cost is zero.
The average price of electricity is greatly affected by this, which is why electricity is Europe is generally more expensive than in North America.
Edit - the response below is also incomplete. The trouble with modelling the cost of balancing the power grid is that it depends on many variables, many of which are difficult to forecast. The primary challenge with depending on the weather for power generation is that the climate is changing. What that change looks like in 20 years is impossible to forecast. A great example is from the winter o 2023, during the "dunkelflaute" in europe. Both wind and solar power generation were low for three days.
The estimates for solar plus battery storage typically only account for eight or twelve hours of storage.
Batteries in California have curtailed the need for peaker plants most of the year. Natural gas is starting to become a seasonal supply of electricity. Fall winter spring it's providing a few GW of power. Only in the mid to late summer does it break 10GW. That change happened over just five years.
I keep mentioning this because it's notable. California now needs to increase demand for electricity to move forward on electrification. Things like low cost workplace charging and mass adoption of heat pumps. Unfortunately California is going to elect a governor who thinks it's his job to protect entrenched interests. Fortunately big picture it doesn't matter except to people in California.
Currently renewable manufacturing is doing the the equivalent of adding 10 million barrels/day of oil production per year. Total production is 110 million barrels/day. Demand destruction for oil is coming very soon now.
I appreciate his ability to talk renewables for almost an hour and barely mention climate change. This video has a bit of a twist ending, but he gives you a solid out before he becomes political if you're showing it to someone who won't be receptive to that messaging.
For those who don't have the time to watch, the biggest point he hammers home: fossil fuels are a single use energy source; renewables keep producing energy.
So long as you've built the infrastructure and kept it maintained, the energy continues to come. With fossil fuels, you have to build turbines, then you have to remove it from the earth, then you have to ship it to said turbines, then you burn it and it's gone.
Is this the version he reuploaded? I saw it the day he posted it, and I have never seen that man more passionate and awesome. He mentioned later that he toned it down, which is almost a bummer!
Correct - the version I linked is his more aggressive version, but he does give a soft out with 30 minutes remaining. He mentions that he has also uploaded the alternative version for those who want to share it with someone who wouldn't enjoy the ending of this version.
The argument I have generally heard is consistent power output and grid availability 24x7 with solar is harder. So they augment with gas turbines.
IMO augmenting it with nuclear is better.
Augmenting intermittent renewables with nuclear doesn’t really make sense since nuclear is all fixed costs whereas gas generation is mostly fuel costs which makes it economic to run part of the time.
>I don’t know how you can be against solar unless you’ve been given some uninformed talking points.
One understandable (not saying it's good, just understandable) reason is if your business is selling electricity from a source more expensive than solar. Which is just about every source.
I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc.
> I think power producers will eventually have to combine power generation with activities that generate money separately from selling electricity. Like heavy industry, datacenters etc.
This generally isn't how markets or economics works. If power generation isn't profitable, many companies will just stop doing it. Prices will rise, making it attractive to more companies to do it.
Power generation will still be profitable in my imagined scenario, just not from selling the raw electricity as a product.
Luckily there are several industries that make more money the cheaper electricity is, so there is some market pull in that direction already. Data centers tend to cluster around places with cheap power and/or cold climates, for example.
Consider roads. Having free access to road networks generates enormous value for society, much more than if we had tried to extract tolls on every road.
I think the same should apply for electricity. Free or nearly free access to electricity is likely to create value that far outweighs the value generated by selling electricity.
The existing power-selling industry will of course fight this every chance they get.
I'm not against solar, my primary issue is that in northern Europe there's not much sun at some times. Energy storage and "smart grid" are not there yet, in my view, but maybe should have come first. Hydrogen (electrolysis) sounds a bit wild and impractical to me.
> The net result: Pornainen fulfilled all of its municipal climate targets with a single installation. Oil use dropped 100 percent, emissions fell 70 percent, and woodchip combustion was cut by 60 percent. According to the Mayor of the Municipality of Pornainen, Antti Kuusela, the municipality now heats all its public buildings, including a new sports arena opening in September 2026, entirely through this district heating network.
They are buying electricity and storing it as heat and time-arbitrage it to when the heat is needed, they make no mention of the electric power source. In any case, during the depth of winter, when it's needed most, they're still burning carbon. Previous paragraph to your quote:
>During the coldest, most expensive stretch, the wood chip boiler became the primary unit, and the sand battery supplemented it.
Remarkably: heat is pointed to as "wasted energy" when doing EROEI analysis and discounted, this is done to strengthen the case for Solar vs Gas.
Finland's energy mix is ~6% solar [1]... maybe it's not a larger portion of the grid supply because Finns realize it doesn't work in the winter?
Finland only started building solar recently. Wind is still more cost-effective, if you only consider the cost of generation. But there is almost too much installed wind capacity. If you also consider the value of the generated energy, solar gets ahead, as it correlates less with existing generation.
In any case, Finland does not really use fossil fuels for electricity generation anymore. There is some cogeneration, where heat is the primary output, and reserve power plants that are only used in exceptional situations. Electricity is largely a solved problem, but it's proving harder to get rid of fossil fuels in heating and transportation.
That's for 5000 people. And only covers heat. Happy if it can scale and move from prototype to long-term deployment at a reasonable cost, serving heavy industry in manufacturing.
Don't get me wrong, this is cool. We just have some stricter requirements on a country/state/union level that while this might help with parts, I don't see how it can easily scale up and generalize
That doesn't really make sense, you need the ability for significant overproduction before you start thinking about storage. The other way around is just wasting money. We are just starting to get there, but still have significant fossil fuels that we can replace even by just building out solar more and just having more over production.
Not necessarily. A large component for solar+storage is using the storage to offset the time that the energy is available. It's not just storing for overproduction
For instance, most places will have peak energy usage in the evening, when everyone gets home from work, starts the laundry, turns up the thermostat and makes dinner and such, kind of all at the same time
If you can store the solar energy at noon and use it at 6pm when everyone has come home from work and started making dinner, then you can prevent a demand peak from ramping up fossil fuel plant
So you aren't necessarily just aiming to store the overproduction, you're using the stored solar when it's more useful
Usually there's either sun or wind. Last year 57% of Finland's electricity generation was from renewables, the rest being largely nuclear, and the electricity costs were among lowest in Europe.
Until battery tech gets (and maybe even after) it's a good idea to build some nuclear too.
It doesn't quite make up for it, but balcony solar is a possibility for apartments (with balconies obviously), provided they're permitted in your jurisdiction.
Better solution would be "not being petty asshole" and keeping in mind that in case of problems with power supply homeowners with solar panels might be useful.
This is an important point. In the 1980's, PV panels extracted 5-10% of the incident solar energy which could be converted to heat at roughly 100% efficiency. Solar thermal collectors collected at 80+% efficiency and could store and return the heat at about that level for a net 70% round trip. That's a lot better than PV, especially if the collector is your entire south-facing facade.
Nowadays, panels are sitting at roughly 20% and heat pumps have a coefficient of performance around 4x. If you need a battery round trip, you are right about the 70% point and you now have electricity which is more generally useful than low grade heat.
Those 40 year old decisions, as you say, have had several decades of ossification, though, so it is hard to uproot them.
The main reason I could think of is when you consider the reality of our electric grid and how it remains stable.
Grid inertia is literally maintained by hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal spinning at 50 or 60 hz.
So as the grid moves towards solar and wind, it loses inertia. Solar has no inertia and wind is lightweight compared to baseload plants.
This makes the grid more sensitive to another that can cause the frequency to fall or rise, which will trigger automatic protections.
It takes longer to become an issue in large interconnected grids, but on islands it's like the leading cause of blackouts.
One badly timed cloud means problem, unless you can instantly replace the energy lost through other means.
With thermal power plants the inertia of the generator spinning gave utilities enough time to start up other generators. With solar and wind that's gone, hence the rise of grid batteries.
So then solar/wind costs should include ALL related costs, including grid batteries and such, and often it doesn't. And thus you get people who are against it for honestly a very good reason.
That said I love solar and run fully off grid, but I ain't deluded to think my island can go 100% green. Diesel will stay for now.
I do wonder if using solar to run huge heavy flywheels connected to generators can help with the interia issue.
The inertia issue is not some fundamental law of physics, it's just how the DC->AC inverters are commonly programmed, to follow the grid, since that is the easiest way to regulate the grid when non-AC generation is a minority.
The inverters can instead be programmed to form the grid frequency - Australia installed its big battery literally as a much faster way to stabilize grid instability events than spinning up gas peaker plants.
Grids with large amounts of renewables like California are moving toward VPPs (Virtual Power Plants) which are distributed collections of renewables and batteries which are programmed to work in unison to help form the grid, as an easier way to regulate the grid frequency than coordinating each tiny plant separately.
There's a lot of selective concern. They'll be outraged about the environmental damage from mining and manufacturing needed for panels, but ignore the orders of magnitude worse damage from burning fossil fuels. My favorite is outrage over wind turbines killing birds. Cats kill a thousand times more birds but nobody cares about that.
> They'll be outraged about the environmental damage from mining and manufacturing needed for panels, but ignore the orders of magnitude worse damage from burning fossil fuels.
I always try to point out that, after all of the "environmental damage" done to create the solar panels, the panels will exist for 30 years before they can be recycled into new panels. Whereas, after all of the environmental damage done to produce gas and coal, it will lead to a one time use only energy output that has to be repeated until the end of time.
It makes zero sense environmentally or cost-wise to prefer fossil fuels.
> My favorite is outrage over wind turbines killing birds
I've coined the phrase True Bird Lover. Someone who's never seen a picture of a bird covered in an oil slick from the Exxon Valdez and wants to tell everyone how bad windmills are.
I am against it for one reason only, but it's very solvable, IMO, and it's the amount of space they take up.
I live next to 200+ acres of solar farms. A part of me cries a little when I see so much beautiful land and trees cut down and these lifeless panels taking up so much space. We have so many buildings, and structures already (think parking decks, tops of apartments, homes, offices, even parking lots) that we could put these, but instead we cut down acres of trees or use up perfectly usable farmland.
I cry more when I think about the amount of farmland being used for bioethanol, something which is barely energy positive. If the US would switch the subsidies and regulations propping that up to propping up solar, it would easily free up a huge amount of land.
The standard alternative to a solar farm is a monoculture corn farm producing ethanol. That monoculture corn farm regularly gets sprayed, plowed and harvested, each time decimating its animal population. Your solar farm is probably filled with a diverse selection of grass and weeds, supporting a far higher animal population than that corn farm.
Technology Connections did the math on this and found that if you ONLY replaced fields used for ethanol production with solar panels, the amount of space would be enough solar panels to power the entire power grid in the US.
This guide to the UK’s Land Use Framework says that the amount of land required for renewables by 2050 is comparable to the amount of land used by golf courses.
> A part of me cries a little when I see so much beautiful land and trees cut down and these lifeless panels taking up so much space.
Where are you seeing healthy forests or other "beautiful land" being destroyed for solar farms? There's plenty of low-yield farmland and other similar land that's already been denatured by industry out there, lots of which already has major transmission infrastructure nearby, beautiful land tends to be expensive, and clearing trees costs money. It just doesn't make sense to do something like that outside of isolated areas where there's no other choice.
Here in the midwestern US every single solar or wind farm I've seen has either been on active farmland, former farmland, or a corporate/university campus.
Sure but compare that to the amount of land used for oil and gas extraction. The difference is that mines and drills can only go where there's stuff to extract and solar panels can go anywhere. Including near residential areas. That's also due to the fact that they are so environmentally neutral.
> And you can do some agriculture near and under the panels. That's not the case with an oil well.
You can absolutely do agriculture near oil and gas wells. I grew up next to land routinely leased to ranchers. That land was spotted with lots of active oil and gas wells. The cows would eat our flowers whenever they got out due to the oil company leaving gates improperly secured. Today I drive past fields of sorghum, corn, and wheat with little spots where active wells operate. Once drilled they usually don't take that much space to operate.
Also, when you’re done with the solar farm you simply take the panels off, disassemble the aluminium frame, then you have your field back. Unlike a coal mine.
If people have strong opinions about renewable energy, just don't waste your breath. You can't reason someone out of an opinion they arrived at unreasonably.
Keep hammering the point that they are cheaper. If they are open to more advanced discussion point to the amazing structural changes that batteries are only starting to bring. Tell them something that sounds mildly like science fiction but is in fact happening already and will be HUGE. E.g. the battery you’ll have in your AC/stove/car will save you money or even make you money when part of a smart mesh of DERs.
Let me preface this that I am a huge advocate for renewables, and have been spending borderline unreasonable amounts on turning my home green.
The rub with "solar is cheaper" is that those values are almost always calculated using an ideal environment. Solar is cheapest when you are using flat barren land in Arizona where an acre costs $500, the sun shines 330 days a year, you are bulk buying 750 MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is a single rubber stamp. Those are the numbers that ultimately trickle to headlines.
Things get much more complicated (read: expensive), when you are in the North East, an acre costs $12,000, the sun shines 170 days a year, you're bulk buying a few dozen MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is 6 different government bodies full of permits and assessments.
In that situation, a gas plant that produces 10x more power on 10x less land becomes very appealing to people who are already getting crushed by soaring electricity bills. (My take: we're just going to have to deal with higher costs).
So I am all with you on abandoning fossil fuels, but to someone who is firmly in gas camp, they will have legitimate ground to stand on when balking at costs. "It's cheaper" is unfortunately not all encompassing.
As someone in New England: We don't have enough gas infrastructure up here either, you can't just add more gas plants to our grid and accomplish anything.
As it is, in the coldest periods of winter you will at times see the ISO-NE grid running on 40% oil because we don't have enough natural gas pipeline capacity to run all of the gas plants and meet natural gas heating demands. So many of the gas plants have to kick back over to burning oil.
Building it out and maintaining it isn't free. And per a friend who's been selling consumer solar installations for years in the North East and gotten disillusioned: the equipment maintenance, repairability, and replacement story isn't great at the company they last worked at and results in a lot of environmental waste. One of the reasons they left. Of course, this is just second-hand information - I don't personally have much intuition for how widespread the issue is.
Every gallon of gas you use was produced far away, shipped halfway around the world for processing, and shipped back to you. Even if you are in the US, we basically don’t have the equipment to process our own gasoline from the crude we produce.
This means that millions and millions of machines have to be maintained, shipping lanes have to stay open, infrastructure has to stay profitable, distribution has to stay easy and cheap. The web is invisible to the end user, but it is massively complicated and expensive to upkeep.
Solar, once you have the panels you have to clean them every once in a while, and replace a failing panel every once in a while. But they produce for ~30 years after being made once.
So it’s funny to argue about environmental waste in this way. It’s an issue, but everything in a solar panel can basically be recycled and we are seeing the facilities start to come online as the first wave of PV panels starts dying off.
Residential solar doesn't make that much sense from a system point of view - it's a lot more expensive than utility grade solar for the same amount of energy, but with the way the energy market works retail electricity prices are much higher than wholesale prices and that makes the upside of rooftop solar a lot bigger for consumers.
"It's cheaper" is a good route, but a lot of these people have decided they don't care about objective facts in favor of what their favorite media personality says.
It's a challenge, but remember that there is a lot of money in trying to convince people about the status quo. I'd keep in mind the kind of tactics that fossil fuel companies will be using to convince people otherwise:
- Using old data - the price of renewables and storage technology have fallen through the floor but bad actors are quite happy to use outdated numbers to convince you that they're not cheap
- Ignoring existing downsides - renewables have issues and we shouldn't forget that, but it's easy to forget what we're replacing. e.g. Lithium mines are environmentally unfriendly, but you dig it out of the ground and turn it into a battery once (and bonus - it's recyclable). Oil and gas must be continually dug out of the ground and burned
- But China... - I don't think most people realise quite how quickly the rest of the world is pushing on with renewables
We have already reached the point where solar and wind produce new MW of power cheaper than any other power source you can build.
Of course that energy generation comes with the caveat of being variable with sun and wind. It can still be a net benefit to the grid but the variability means alternative energy sources are still needed.
The cost trend of installing solar/wind plus enough storage capacity to provide steady grid power will eventually cross over to also being cheaper than other sources of energy. At which point the only reason to be against it is if you prefer artificially subsidizing another energy source.
> So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?
Ensure that the prices decrease for people with existing contracts. The hatred comes from people being told that it's better and cheaper now while the price is significantly higher than before.
If I didn't have solar panels on my roof that basically cover all my energy needs, I'd be absolutely furious seeing politicians pat themselves on the back for shutting down nuclear power plants and talking about how energy is now cheaper at some foreign exchange where I can not buy while I pay more and more every month.
- cheaper - much less upfront capex, lower operating costs
- removes nasty geopolitical dependencies on eg gulf state oil and gas; costs are more predictable
- easier to plan and build because the base units are much smaller
Variability remains a valid objection, to which the main answer today is "batteries. Lots of batteries. And other cheaper longer duration storage, like sand heat storage, vanadium flow, and good old pumped hydro."
We can analyze this issue with historical weather data, and it turns out it's tractable. Using solar + wind + batteries + non-fossil fuel turbines enables 365/24/7 "synthetic baseload", 100% renewable.
See https://model.energy/ for a web site that will solve this optimization problem for you in various places.
Are you saying that they chose bad locations inside of Germany for wind and solar or that Germany doesn't have any viable locations and they shouldn't build wind and solar in Germany at all?
Without that solar / wind, Europe would be paying 100 million euros per day more for LNG. Electricity in Europe is expensive enough already, making it even more expensive by shunning the cheapest available form would be even harder on industry.
Axing the whole nuclear generation was a disaster.How many GW were not even planned, not to mention built in all those years? And don't try to slide out on "nuclear build-out takes too much time". It does not if there is a will.
You can't "sell" the opposite to someone who is expressing a loyalty belief. If their tribe believes in the opposite, then no amount of logic will change their minds - only a change of their or their group's allegiance will change their minds.
I think there are 2 good and important points that make me re-think things some:
First is technological advancement. It seems solar and wind and the supporting technologies, including battery storage and grid firming, are advancing very fast to become cheaper, more powerful, and more reliable. What was a reasonable argument ~15 years ago might actually be out of date today. To form a reasonable argument for today, you need to know the types of hardware, costs, and specs for what's on the market today.
Second is that the recent improvements are all independent capitalistic companies building things for their own profit. They're not going to do things that are unprofitable, and if they did, they'd go out of business pretty fast. It is fair to criticize pushes by Government and activists to build this stuff, since both of them have advocated for unprofitable things plenty of times and suffer no consequences if the things they push are a terrible or unworkable idea. When it's an independent company, though, it's none of our business. I'm for success and functional systems, not ideology; if you want to build this stuff, believe you can make a profit doing so, and take ownership of the consequences if you are wrong or fail, then by all means go to it, and I'll cheer if you succeed.
"I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind ..."
Ignore them because it doesn't matter.
Physics causes finance, which causes politics ... and their politics will immediately change when the finance crosses whatever threshold they happen to be anchored to.
That's different for different people and different situations but you can be sure it will happen. Those people will not pay markedly higher electrical bills or have a (relative) doubling of their cars TCO for their politics.
Yeah the relatively recent paper that takes LCOE and adds back a bunch of cherry picked system costs is a PITA to refute because it's inherently complicated and actually has some good points.
The problem is every good argument for renewables will always inevitably have someone come up with some kind of counterpoint that on the surface may seem reasonable to those without the time or inclination to deeply research it all.
Energy is complicated.
FWIW I agree with a sibling poster who said to just say "its cheaper".
Nah, it definitely comes along for the ride. Maybe watch Folding Idea's (lengthy, sorry, he does that) documentary "In Search Of A Flat Earth".
That documentary is about QAnon (not about the "Flat Earth" per se) but it helps you understand that "But that's nonsense" is the point. I call this "Facts Aren't True" because that's the core of the idea. They don't like facts, the facts are uncomfortable, they can make up a better truth which does make them comfortable.
Your comment, as appropriate for a culture war is both subtly misleading and also just flat out wrong.
Quote from your own article:
> And if we look at the sum of utility-scale and small-scale solar, California remains ahead.
The more subtle misdirection is obvious from the first sentence:
> Texas, which already leads the country in electricity generation from natural gas, coal and wind, has passed California to become the leader in utility-scale solar.
So they lead on gas, coal, wind and (utility) solar in absolute terms. Which points to them being big and/or power hungry rather than particularly green.
Important to call this out as fans of hands off government highlight Texas as their champion for renewables rollout when they are solidly mid-ranking by percentage. And they had government support for wind under previous Republican governers and all but one federal governments.
My understanding is the AI data centers use LNG just because it's the fastest way to spin up a lot of power without using much land/permits. Solar panels would be cheaper but it still requires a lot of land and permits, plus batteries for smoothing.
I don't know why people would be "against" solar and wind. Even if they think global warning is a hoax, at a certain point (which was like 10 years ago) they're the cheapest option. So why not use them?
> So what are some of the best talking points to "sell" solar and wind to the unconvinced?
Increasing utility energy prices worked for me. I wasn't anti-solar, but it didn't seem worthwhile for me. When the utility price doubled over three years (or just about), the math makes sense now. I'm not looking for solar to acheive grid independence though, I already have a whole house generator for that, because utility power is two nines reliable around here.
I almost feel like it doesn't matter if Joe-public is on board or not at this stage. For as much as capitalism kinda got us into this mess, at this point the flywheel is going in the other direction and it's a natural market consequence that renewables will win. Lack of priced in externalities created the problem but the same economics will now save us.*
The money men have no moral attachment to any source so given how cheap this mix has gotten it basically wins.
* I'd point out without China and its Leninist command economy (as well as publicly funded research) getting the price of these technologies down to where it is now we'd still be doomed, but we are where we are so now the system necessarily will act in its own self interest to use the basically free energy. Is it going to be enough at this stage? Who knows, but I see reasons to be optimistic.
China's Leninist command economy also burned (and still does burn) tremendous amounts of fossil fuels to generate energy, just as the command economy of the Soviet Union did, and just as the more-or-less free markets of the western world did and still do. People burn fossil fuels because the energy that they generate is incredibly useful for everything in the modern world, regardless of the economic system governing any particular jurisdiction.
The argument I've seen against it for prime farm land in the UK is "Well we could use it to farm things" but that maybe lands less well in the US because of the enormous scales involved. "¿Por qué no los dos?" is the obvious retort in a huge region like that.
I've never seen "heavy metals" conspiracies, though I'm sure if I just wait I'll run into some because people sure do like making up reasons good things are bad...
Fox News is funded by fossil. They literally ship a 24x7 feed of why fossil is good and renewables are bad. It is their business model: money for placed content to shape opinions.
So someone watching that has strong opinions about renewables that is hard to overcome.
First would be to be clear and unambiguous when it comes to building gas/oil thermal power plants in order to deal with the intermittence problem of solar and wind. Political strategies in wind and solar is built on trust, and people will quickly become unconvinced when politicians are dishonest/ambiguous about the requirements that is needed to support a grid with a high ratio of wind and solar.
Using fossil fuels as the reserve energy for when the weather is bad allows the producers of reserve energy to demand high market prices, to the point where a whole month in EU can cost as much as a full year. Even if solar and wind would put the grid costs to zero for 90% of the time, it doesn't make the cost for the consumer any lower if the fossil fueled "reserve energy" can increase their price by 10x. Selling solar and wind require some kind of solution here.
Reserve energy also want to be paid if they are expected to stand-by 365 days a week, which is a big reason why EU subsidizes to fossil fueled thermal power plants are not decreasing when the ratio of wind and solar goes up. That costs is then added as a grid fee/taxes, hiding the true cost. Paying first to keep the fossil fueled power plants warm and ready when solar and wind is producing, and then pay them a second time for whatever the market price is when they are producing is a very costly way to operate a grid.
And last is the transmission costs. Switching between multiple different energy sources depending on the weather has a high demand for a very flexible infrastructure in terms of transmitting energy from where it is being produced to where it is being consumed. In south of Sweden as an example, the cost of transmission infrastructure and the cost of reserve energy is now the majority of consumers electricity bill, with cost associated with production of energy being a small minority.
Solving those issues is what will convince people of the viability of wind and solar.
Both users and companies could be incentivized to lower their consumption of electricity by increasing the price astronomical during periods of scarcity. A minimum of 1 Ampere per household without surcharge and beyond that enough to pay off the infrastructure. Taking a sauna or charging your car during peak times would costs, let’s say, €500. Assuming that in the north of Sweden there is ample Hydro energy, in the north the surcharge would be lower than in the south.
I strongly believe people and organizations would accommodate, just like during winter times in the north of Sweden one wears a different coat than in the south. But with the current system one isn’t incentivized to adapt power consumption to cost and hence more & more costs are made to build power lines from the north to feed the south of Sweden. And the same for standby fossil fuel plants.
Also prepaid electricity bills with automatic cutoff when exceeding, remaining 1 Ampere. Similar to the days when homes/tents would be heated by burning wood, during summertime one needs to collect enough firewood for the whole winter. Different times but in concept nothing new.
Market prices in the electricity grid do not work to incentivized lower consumption, and the latest few energy crisis in EU has demonstrated that clearly. You can't expect workers to go to work based on when the weather is optimal, and to stay at home (unpaid) when it is not. Rent do not go down according to weather, nor do food prices. Workers do not like to go to work at 3am in the night if that happens to be the time when the wind is blowing. Bakeries can't just choose to produce bread when its good weather and not delivery anything during other periods. Contracts in production chains are not written to consider weather patterns.
A bakery for example will produce bread at a loss if they have a contract and the value of the contract is higher than a temporary increase in electricity. If you allow market prices to rise unlimited, the price will increase to the point where breaking a contract is cheaper than not producing. Some companies in the last crisis did invoke force majeure when prices got too high, which as a society is a very poor way to incentivize behavior.
The result is that voters will elect a government that solves the problem, rather than change behavior. We have also seen that in eu for the last few elections. The Swedish elections in particular has been dominated around the topic of energy.
Hydro energy would help to keep the market stable in Sweden if the value of the natural resource would also stay in Sweden. Right now that resource is being primarily sold off by private actors through exports to countries like Germany and Denmark, thus doing little to keep the market stable for Swedish consumers. The government could nationalize that resource, deeming it as a natural resource owned by the Swedish citizens and thus any revenue gained from selling electricity would automatically go to Swedish citizens to pay their energy bills.
it depends. some places it makes sense, some places it doesn't.
it will be adopted when the money speaks. the good news is that money is a reasonably close proxy to "environmental benefit" (balancing the environmental costs of green infra production versus dirtiness of gas generation)
I can see this for wind, but not solar. PV turns sunlight into electrical energy. The whole damp rock gets sunlight on the outside, why not build panels anywhere?
For wind yeah, if you live one of those boring flat places which gets tornadoes a wind turbine is definitely a bad idea, it won't make much energy and then a tornado turns it into scrap and possibly destroys nearby things with chunks of debris.
Because there's better alternatives same places. Norway has legendary well-suited topography for hydro power (>90% of electricity), and it's reliably windy (>8% of electricity). It's also so far north that the sun doesn't shine very much for half the year, and it's notoriously cloudy.
So yes, it will probably never make much sense to build a lot of solar panels in Norway. Same for Greenland, Iceland (substitute geothermal), and probably some parts of Canada, Alaska and Southern Argentina.
But also, yes, there's almost nobody living in those places. They're not terribly relevant in the grand scheme of things. Probably significantly less than 50M people in total.
Just to add some numbers here, in Sweden the amount of energy you get from solar during the worst months are a single digit percentage, while consumption of energy during the same period doubles from the average. Consumption during the best solar months drops to about half.
Solar works a bit better when consumption patterns is the opposite, and the output is more reliable.
Solar doesn't have to be colocated with consumption. There is a massive amount of available solar in Europe and North Africa, even in the winter, and HVDC (including underwater HVDC lines) makes this available.
Naturally. Build the solar in southern Europe and North Africa, and when enough countries in the route to northern Europe has built up enough transmission with HVDC, then we can start to decommission existing energy infrastructure in favor of importing solar energy from those regions. Such project can happily compete with green hydrogen, and I am sure that Central and Northern Europe are very happy to buy if cheaply offered.
An other similar available strategy would be to turn the Mediterranean Sea into a massive hydro power dam by turning the Strait of Gibraltar into the world largest power plant. Combined with solar and wind, it could act as the storage for the whole of Europe and Africa, and the energy is similar to solar completely free.
I'm confused. Those boring flat places that get tornadoes have massive wind farms, because that's where wind blows. Tornadoes are not a major economic threat to wind farms. Have you been to the midwest? There's at least 40GW of wind capacity out there, and the wind farms are really something.
I spent a good chunk of my life in the Pacific Northwest. You get very long stretches of cloudy skies through most of the winter that are poor for solar. However, there are alternatives in that region like hydro that may be more suitable choices.
Tornadoes are not actually very common in terms of how often you'd expect a structure to be hit by one. You're looking at hundreds or thousands of years between tornado hits even in the most tornado-prone areas. They're numerous, but small.
So what I'm hearing is very sturdy, christmas tree shaped turbines (long blades at the bottom, getting shorter as you go up), on a very heavy central shaft ending in a spike that gets driven deep into the ground by dropping them from great height with planes (there probably needs to be a thruster stage on top that accelerates them beyond mere free fall) into the path of tornadoes. No clue what to do with the energy, but that seems like a minor detail.
I believe this is one of those having your cake & eating your cake scenarios.
Wind turbines are designed to be aerodynamically loaded on purpose. The blades can pitch arbitrarily to compensate for unwanted loads in the axial flow direction, but beyond a certain point it doesn't matter anymore because wind can do a lot of other things.
> Before March 28, 2000, a tornado had never collided with a skyscraper.
> Bank One Tower sat, rotting. The Fort Worth Fire Department declared the building a fire hazard, forcing the Bass family to replace the plywood planks with fireproof metal.
PV is getting on the range where it pays for itself in 3 or 4 years. If somebody is just "against it", well, I have to agree with the sibling that said you can't reason with that person.
In Australia conservatives with solar on their own roof continue to complain about renewables generally. It's just a weird cultural thing for some people.
In Poland main opposition candidate for the next prime minister Przemysław Czarnek declared he has solar panels, but he will be removing it because solar is bad (1). He also announced new election slogan "Renewables, shite-wables" (loosly translated oze sroze).
1 Solar was pretty good until PIS party lost elections and became Trump bitch, now they toe the coal/oil good solar/wind bad line.
PIS already has one of their men poorly performing function of Poland president. His main election slogan was lowering energy prices, you can guess how that went :-) His latest trick was vetoing super cheap EU military loan because it was conditioned on buying European/Polish equipment meaning none of the money could be funneled to USA.
Why doing so? When there are so many people irrationally against something, there's always some upside in being closer to truth than the crowd. It's arbitrage.
You need to include batteries in the equation: solar, wind, water and batteries.
What California and others have shown is that you can replace natural gas peaker plants (literally - tear out natural gas turbines) with batteries and get both superior cost dynamics and "dispatchability" (aka turning them on and off). Batteries have millisecond level dispatch, peaker plants have hours level dispatch.
California has very expensive residential electricity. This isn't solely due to the amount of solar and natural gas in the electricity generation mix, but it does mean that what California is doing is not a great guide to what other jurisdictions ought to be doing.
Sure, sometimes people haven't reasoned themselves into positions, and won't simply be reasoned out of them. But understanding others' epistemology is still the first step to changing minds.
>> I know some people who are adamantly against solar and wind
I'm guessing about those people. It's very clear that renewable energy is considered to be a liberal ideology by those that oppose renewable energy.
> Sure, sometimes people haven't reasoned themselves into positions, and won't simply be reasoned out of them. But understanding others' epistemology is still the first step to changing minds.
Both of your points are true but in effect are a contradiction to the original discussion. The moment somebody uses the word woke non-ironically as a reasoning point they are beyond reasoned discussion (at least from my experience). It's beyond vexing because there's no room for real dialog, just talking past each other.
Apparently these days people in US consider a lot of seemingly neutral issues from a political perspective. One of the funniest things I read about recently is that some right-leaning individuals prefer dark-roasted coffee because apparently light-roasted coffee is considered soy-boy-liberal-city thing.
> Woke is an adjective derived from African-American English used since the 1930s or earlier to refer to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction stay woke. [1]
> Cultural Marxism is a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory that misrepresents Western Marxism (especially the Frankfurt School) as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness. [2]
Yes, the first one was the original meaning of the word.
The second one is... I don't know how to debate someone who quotes Wikipedia like this. It's not what I said. That article looks incredibly one-sided, and uses fallacies of the "You think snow is white? Did you know Adolph Hitler thought snow was white?" persuasion.
that's the only thing that comes up on google when searching "cultural marxism wiki". I was making a point with those links, specifically that cultural marxism is a bullshit term that doesn't mean anything. I'm not looking for a debate, just using a term like cultural marxism shows the intellectual level of whoever is using it.
I find no arguments against solar. I can put it everywhere and has no moving parts. Once storing is solved, perfect.
But wind?? Huge nature areas are destroyed by beton fundaments, rotors break, and just in germany was a scandal lately about recycling, as the first structures need to be renewed.
Wind power does seem to be generally not quite as good as photovoltaic solar power. But yeah every source of electricity has some downside. I don't have any good reason to care more about the possibility of rotors breaking or how to recycle the turbines, than I do about the possibility that a natural gas peaker plant might suffer a mechanical failure.
It's not like other forms of power generation don't have similar problems. Solar PV cells lose efficiency and need to be replaced. Nuclear has very long term storage concerns. Coal and natural gas plants have finite expected lifetimes before the whole plant needs to shut down.
if you require a stable energy source, neither wind nor solar (nor both) provide a complete strategy. they can be a part of a composite strategy, though.
for both wind and solar, they're also quite taxing on the environment during manufacturing. the "true cost" is rarely reported.
Probably not a bad thing, the coursework is antiquated and meeting students with new advanced tools and the awareness of AI's impact on things in the coming future
I imagine there is some apathy and laziness here but idk how unjustified it is
"Noooooo you need to manually code on paper in assembly"
Alright, well maybe the CS grads need to, but why expect that of everyone else
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