Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time

There has always been a massive thumb on the scale in the form of tax breaks, direct subsidies (billions a year alone on this), land leasing, etc for fossil fuels and their use. Favorable public policy. And what the IMF calls implicit subsidies - the cost of impact on the climate/environment and people's health.

When a refinery is pumping out pollution and everyone in the area is getting sicker than people in similar areas - that costs us as insurance ratepayers and taxpayers.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/5-hidden-ways-the-g...

https://www.imf.org/en/topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...

...to name a few. A simple google search will turn up dozens more.

And yet what is the first critique of solar and wind by right wingers? "It's only cheaper because of all my tax dollars going to subsidizing them."

Federal, state, and local subsidies for green energy and EVs are a drop in the bucket.

Trumps first administration put in solar Tariffs with China (25%), Biden administration increased them with China (50%), 2nd Trump administration increased those and applied solar Tariffs to other countries. Though honestly I’ve largely stopped paying attention at this point.

Solar adoption increased through all of that.

This should not be surprising when one realizes that this industry is the biggest industry that humanity ever created (in terms of monetary value). Nothing ever is or was bigger than energy from fossil fuels. Predictably, those who profit from this, behave like selfish [...] and fight tooth and nail to keep their profits.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

The 10-year change 2015 to 2025 is:

- Gas: +472 TWh, +35%

- Renewables: +525 TWh, +97%

Saying that this is more gas than coal is certainly not the case borne out by the numbers, even in the US, the one place where gas is as cheap as dirt due to it being a by-product of fracking.

Sodium seems to be actually hitting real commercial production volumes (ex - GM just announced a sodium ramp up days ago, CATL has been producing them for a while). I expect we'll see sodium mature a good bit over the next decade (right now - it's just not quite as good as LFP, but it has a lot of promise in temperature extremes and cheap input materials)

So sure - storage is an issue. But it's not THE issue anymore. It costs surprisingly little to get enough LFP storage to cover an entire house at modest usage for days at a time (ex - under 10k for 42.9KWh of storage, UL approved https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-wallmount-all-weather-lithium...)

So yes - storage remains something to consider. But I think pretending that storage is a constraint that should stop PV rollout is... cough... bullshit cough...

Let industry that needs it pull from existing generation at night, convert residential to solar as fast as possible. Subsidize residential battery rollout the same way we do for insulation and other efficiency improving home improvements (which to be clear - we were doing prior to the current admin).

China isn't fucking around on the solar front, and the continued excuses in US from entrenched interests tangled up in the oil industry are criminal.

They typically generate 10-25% of their maximum output on the cloudiest of days. Most cloudy days are not maximally cloudy.

We don't need solar panels everywhere to get even close to ~100% renewables (with nuclear, wind, new geothermal, and hydro). The areas where you put them are distributed enough that it would be exceptionally rare to ever encounter a meaningful need to ration.

So, storage is an issue, but not as big of an issue as most people think, and we do not generate anywhere near enough solar energy for it to be a reasonable concern yet...

There's also more solutions than just conventional batteries. There's pumped hydro, etc...

So yes batteries are going to continue to grow rapidly, but it’s a smaller role than it might seem.

The "base load" question may still be appropriate for deep winter, high (or low) latitudes, etc, but renewables are getting there pretty fast.

The people who echo that sentiment without educating themselves are giving them a helping hand.

As to why some beings need to be whisked hither and yon with such haste, and thus spend quite a bit of time (and energy) trying to be somewhere, anywhere else, well, are they hungry ghosts? Or maybe they min/maxed for wizard and ended up with only three points in wisdom?

There's 3 ways to run solar.

Grid tied, grid backed and off grid.

I live on a farm and am off grid. The solar inverter is my "utility". After the inverter I have my main breaker. The inverter makes 5 kW max at 230 volts, so my fuse is 5000/230 = 20 amps.

I'm outside the US, regulation is a suggestion here everyone ignores. So many many houses have solar panels here to offset grid costs ($0.60 per kWh).

The main way we do it is make it grid backed. This means the inverter creates power that is in no way mixed with grid power. It forms a microgrid within the home. All ac's are connected to this. This can be done in the electrical panel as its just rerouting wires to fuses.

So then you have your 20A fuse behind the inverter, and smaller fuses (which you should already have) to your house loads. Btw you guys run 110v so your fuses are probably double the rating of ours.

When you do grid backed a battery is nice, since it helps prevent using the grid when a cloud passes by, it forms a bit of buffer. A 5kWh battery already helps. At night the grid powers the loads.

Grid-tied is the one nobody here uses, so you can feed back to the grid. This involves complicated electrical stuff so you don't electrocute the line workers. Plus it gets complicated with split phases and such.

Not to mention utilities pay less than what they ask you for the same kWh.

In the case of balcony solar you can feed the inverter utility power and connect your AC to the inverter. It uses solar power first and takes the needed diff from utility.

Traditional residential electric utility billing puts a lot of emphasis on usage, but when there's a lot more residential solar, that ends up not reflecting the costs very well. I think, over time, you'll see things where you pay a distribution fee per kWh in either direction, and then also pay for energy input and get paid for energy output. You might also see a demand charge that scales with your connection size or your maximum load/generation. If you don't have local generation with export, everything kind of mushes into the usage charge, especially if it's tiered... but when you exporting with net metering, you pay the same bill for exporting 950kWh and importing 1000kWh as someone who imports 100kWh and exports 50kWh, but one customer is using the grid a lot more than the other.

You see something like that with California's NEM 3.0 tarrif setting export price to the 'avoided cost' instead of offsetting import one for one. Under NEM 3.0, the utility is disincentivizing using production credits as long term storage. They prefer you use or store your energy onsite; if you can export while costs are high, that's nice too.

Here in California, PG&E has a "base service fee" of $24/month. That you owe even if they sell you no (as in ZERO) electricity:

https://www.pge.com/en/account/billing-and-assistance/base-s...

We don't need to solve that problem in advance.

i do think “fully consumed or gated to never backfeed balcony solar at scale” is all i’m referring to, which i naively hope is a smaller regulatory change than backfeeding

Outside of cities, outside of grid tie, setting up your own micro-grid often can be done without any external intervention. You have to know things to do it though, I don't think it is a desirable state of things for just blind plug and play.

Are they? because looking at these charts[0], although fossil fuel use as a percent of total energy may be going down, the absolute values for coal, gas and oil only go up year over year.

[0]https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#what-sources...

"Asia" is a Greek name, fully Eurocentric.

The entire continent doesn't even make sense. Geographically, sure, culturally, absolutely not. It should either be Eurasia or probably about 5 different continents (South of Himalaya aka Indian subcontinent, North of Himalaya aka Siberia + Central Asia + China + South East Asia, South of Caucasus + Kopet Dag aka Middle East, etc).

So a centi-millionaire would have only 10 thousand :-)

You mean a hecto-millionaire.

The only problem with this comparison is the cost of the grid, which at least in the US will dwarf the savings from doing utility scale installs.

One nice thing about residential solar is that it greatly reduces the need for transmission, while perhaps requiring some short-term enhancement on distribution. And ideally dumping a bunch of storage at grid distribution nodes in the form of a container of batteries would solve a ton of problems and reduce costs a lot. This is of course heavily resisted by utilities because in most places in the US they make their money on T&D costs, so cutting those is a threat to their existence.