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Solar is nowhere near to be a dominant source of energy and will never be.
by goneri 2y ago
Solar is nowhere near to be a dominant source of energy and will never be.
- pfdietz 2y agoSolar is looking to be the ultimate winner for powering the world. Your contention seems without sense to me.
- jaggederest 2y ago> and will never be. Why do you think that? Absent some other primary power source like fusion, solar energy is the upstream producer of all the energy we currently use. Using it directly seems like the most obvious answer, especially when replacing e.g. all the earth's energy usage would only take, say, the size of Arizona
- vlovich123 2y agoSaying solar is the upstream of fossil fuels is a technicality. Fossil fuels are more like a battery that’s stored millions of years of solar energy (+ the earth itself contributed a lot of energy). Solar cells are more like plants and cannot be used to replace batteries and our current battery tech can’t improve fast enough to supplant fossil fuels in the time frames needed. Interesting that you mention fusion though considering fission is available today and provides a substantial amount of power (not to mention actually reduces the amount of fossil fuels whereas solar has a negligible impact on fossil fuels and at best is only absorbing energy growth).
- ben_w 2y ago> our current battery tech can’t improve fast enough to supplant fossil fuels in the time frames needed. I disagree. The tech itself already good enough to supplant the majority of cases, which in turn gives us more time for the things that remain (such as long-haul aircraft). That said, I may be a little on the optimistic side about how much warming the ecosphere can take. If it's already too hot, then yes, naturally you are correct. > Interesting that you mention fusion though considering fission is available today and provides a substantial amount of power (not to mention actually reduces the amount of fossil fuels whereas solar has a negligible impact on fossil fuels and at best is only absorbing energy growth). That's not what the graphs show: https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix • Coal: down since 2012 • Gas: close enough to steady since 2012 • Nuclear: down since early 2000s • Wind and solar: up Looks to me like gas mostly replaced oil (since the late 90s); and that wind+solar is displacing nuclear (since the former became big enough to show up on a graph).
- pyrale 2y ago> That's not what the graphs show The graphs you provided show that coal and usage are still growing in absolute numbers. They're only going down in perentages. So, aside from oil (which is mostly still there), nothing was displaced. The only significant thing we learn is that we've doubled our electricity usage since 2000. The share of low carbon electricity generation barely moved since 1985. Renewables just helped avoid it crumble due to hydro not being scalable.
- XorNot 2y agoIf batteries were literally free today, they still wouldn't be good enough due to the cost in support electronics required to put them on the grid (which is currently about price parity with batteries per watt). EDIT: and those electronics also degrade - a lifespan of 20 years would be reasonable at scale.
- svnt 2y agoSo you’re charging twice for the grid tie? Because the reason for installing batteries would be 1) to not grid-tie, or 2) to grid-tie along with a renewable energy source, which if it is a commercial site, is already grid-tied.
- XorNot 2y agoIt's the same thing: the inverters and support electronics needed for batteries currently cost, per watt, about the same as LiFePO4. You can't run "bare" LiFePO4: you're either forming a grid, or you're connecting to one. Both involve BMSes and inverters.
- jaggederest 2y agoBut that's already cheaper than building new coal or natural gas plants. The cost per watt of solar plus battery, right now, is the cheapest available form of power. I don't understand why you don't think that it's going to replace a majority of primary and secondary energy usage on the planet relatively quickly. I'd bet a dollar that, in 50 years time, nearly all energy usage is going to be primitive biofuels or solar-PV-origin.
- lukan 2y agoTo quote Wikipedia for further context: "The total solar energy absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, oceans and land masses is approximately 122 PW·year = 3,850,000 exajoules (EJ) per year. In 2002 (2019), this was more energy in one hour (one hour and 25 minutes) than the world used in one year."
- joak 2y agoSolar is the cheapest and the one that grows the fastest. So eventually it will become dominant.
- yesbut 2y agoEventually is a long time from now.
- pfdietz 2y agoSo is never.
- ben_w 2y agoI estimate that in the early 2030s, PV will pass the TW-year/year mark, or 50% of current demand. I don't trust the exponential trends to not be secret sigmoids past that point.
- yesbut 2y agoHow much coal will we need to burn in order to make all of those PV cells? How many mountain tops removed to get the raw materials? Nobody ever provides an honest answer to those questions. This isn't a binary versus issue. If you have to ramp up coal burning and natural habitat destruction to produce the needed PV cells then you also need to stop endless-growth profit seeking manufacturing wholesale.
- bastawhiz 2y agoVersus burning fossil fuels that need to be mined, refined, and shipped for nonrenewables? You think the materials needed to build turbines for a fossil fuel plant just magically appear? How much coal do you think is burned to facilitate a kWh of solar production versus a kWh of coal power generation?
- elliotto 2y agoyou're moving goalpoasts.
- dymk 2y agoThat's not what I said, try reading my comment again. Also, based on the current rate of solar adoption, you're likely wrong about it never being the dominant form of energy generation.
- jjtheblunt 2y agoIs solar the only source of power on long spacecraft journeys, like that of Voyager and so on?
- lukan 2y agoNo, Voyager uses a radioactive battery. The sun is already way too far away for Voyager, to provide enough energy.
- thinkcontext 2y agoVoyager doesn't use solar power since its incredibly faint as you get further from the Sun. It uses the heat from the decay of radioactive plutonium to generate electricity.
- andybak 2y agoWell on a certain level, all energy sources are "solar but with extra steps" so make of that what you will. If you think I'm being silly, well... I'm not the one using the word "never"
- dymk 2y agoIt's all fusion with extra steps, but your point stands.
- pfdietz 2y agoUranium's energy derives from gravitational collapse, not fusion. The neutron stars whose collision produces uranium have undergone endothermic nuclear reactions; their nuclear matter (aside from its gravitational binding energy) is at a higher energy state than the initial protons and electrons. Geothermal is most either primordial gravitational energy from the Earth's formation or energy from decay of uranium and thorium. Only decay of K-40 might be ascribed to fusion. Tidal is derived from gravitational energy.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoFusion also comes from gravity so we could say gravity is the source of all energy.
- Dylan16807 2y agoGravity is just the catalyst for solar fusion. The energy comes from moving the atoms closer to iron in size.
- pfdietz 2y agoWe can compare the fraction of the Sun's energy that has come from fusion vs. coming from gravitational collapse (that is, the release of energy as the material becomes more tightly gravitationally bound, starting from the diffuse gas cloud that formed the Sun). It's about two orders of magnitude in favor of fusion. This is related to the historical question of the age of the Earth. Before the discovery of fusion, it was thought the Sun was powered by gravity, which put an upper limit on the age of the Sun of some tens of millions of years. This was close to Lord Kelvin's limit on the age of the Earth as modeled as a solid sphere cooling by conduction, which led him to believe both estimates were correct. As it turns out, both estimates were flawed, but for different reasons, and it was only coincidence they were similar.
- bastawhiz 2y agoUnfortunately there's zero metrics from any reputable sources that would agree with you. Solar deployment is accelerating massively (0-8% of utility scale production in just a couple decades) while all nonrenewables are decelerating.
- pyrale 2y ago> while all nonrenewables are decelerating. 2023 is the year we burned the most coal, the most gas, the most oil, etc... So far.
- bastawhiz 2y agoI said decelerating, not shrinking
- dalyons 2y agoMight be the most ever , at least for power generation https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/global-electricity-review-2024/the-big-picture/#past-the-peak-a-new-era-of-falling-power-emissions https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/global-electrici... Here’s hoping!
- goneri 2y agoYou ignore the short daylight period during the winter, when the electricity consumption is the most important. There is no practical why to store the energy for the nights. At the end we end up with a cheap source of energy that covers only a fraction of our needs, and we have to maintain a second source of production for the rest of the time. We pay two times to keep the two system operational. Nuclear is also cheap and doesn't have this limitation.
- ben_w 2y agoNuclear is, last I checked, the same cost as the combination of PV with a sufficient number of batteries to be the backup. And for transport we need some kind of storage system regardless (doesn't have to be batteries, but does have to exist), the scale of which is larger than needed to do anything we want with night/clouds/etc. issues with PV. The factories to make those batteries are being built very quickly.
- icehawk 2y agoDefine dominant.