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In the end, all energy, save for nuclear, comes from the sun anyway.
Solar and nuclear will be the dominant sources.of energy going into the 22nd century.
No, nuclear will.
Intermittent energy always sucks. Spain and Portugal learned that recently.
This is physics too
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Tom Hess 
@TomHess_
Replying to @xiaowang1984
It is hard to pin down what really happened with incomplete and/or low resolution data but I will give you my opinion on what I see at this time. It will likely be incomplete or incorrect later as more info is then available.
This will take 7 posts.
So… you’re *not* going to be addressing how the (solar-dependent) power grid of Spain and Portugal went down for over a day, and had to be black-started with natural gas plants after battery storage ran out?
Physics favors the prepared, not the assumed.
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Jesse Peltan
![](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="73" height="73"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
@JessePeltan
How many more years of this is it going to take?
The Sun REALLY IS a giant nuclear fusion reactor.
Physicists are not kidding. x.com/AukeHoekstra/s…
![Solar panels are arrayed on Earth Day in Northfield, Massachusetts, U.S., April 22, 2022. Picture taken with a drone. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="1200" height="628"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
I did some math on my 35,000 population city the other night...
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Taylor Thompson
@TJThomps
Gillette Wyoming's houses (~14,000 houses). Running on solar alone. During peak summer days.
Cost: ~$50 million per year. Or $300 per month in utilities.
Upfront Cost: ~$800,000,000 would last for at least 15 years. A ~$200,000,000 upgrade would be required at year 15 years.
Show more
Solar is AMAZING. But you don't just buy an engine, you buy a whole car, and the other required technologies in the package (storing, smoothing, and moving electrons) are not going anywhere near as fast. So we will end up with a lot of solar and a system otherwise the same.
This isn't about efficiency or quality but simply what was built
Physics uh?
The amount of energy spent (and pollution produced in the process) to make a photovoltaic generator is bigger than the total amount of energy the device will produce throughout its lifetime...We're converting fossil into solar at a huge loss, so much so that it is
*Space based solar.
Terrestrial applications have serious reliability issues.
It’s true.
All energy in earth comes from the sun (geo-thermal is an option too, but much harder and less efficient than solar)
Nuclear. Solar will never be able to carry the base load needed for massive industrial or AI. It will be ubiquitous and distributed for residential and perhaps light commercial though.
"What a dumb take" I thought. I didn't recognize you by your pfp, and kept scrolling. ""it's physics" to refer to solar as better than nuclear? lmao" so I got back and oh, it's Noah with a new pfp, same retardation. It's truly remarkable how bad your takes are. One in a million.
Not without adequate storage. This issue actually must be number one in any transitional discussion.
California went big on rooftop solar. It created an environmental danger in the process
“People just don’t realize that there are toxic materials in those electronics...a lot of those toxic chemicals and materials are going to leak into your groundwater.”
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Solar panels are threatening China's food security.
China lacks farmland to grow food, and China is the largest food importer.
Yet authorities take farmland from farmers to install solar panels.
During Covid, many countries banned food export.
——you can't eat solar panels!!
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Jon Jeffrey Man
@JonJeffreyMan
solar cat laser (with batteries) 
Sadly, “the physics” makes it 4 things that a reliable energy source can never be:
(1) horribly inefficient on several levels (eg space usage, usable energy produced relative to energy input)
(2) expensive
(3) intermittent and highly location-dependent
(4) not very scalable
It's all about subsidies to cronies.
Wind & Solar by far receive the most subsidies per MWh produced, that's what counts. They are not cheap by any means.
Study: U.S. Federal Energy Subsidies and Support from 2010-19
texaspolicy.com/wp-content/upl
Physics (unless you want to get way out afield to things like zero point energy) suggests nuclear. Solar is long-distance nuclear.
If I were Minster of R&D, I'd be putting some money into solar panels, more into next gen fission reactors (5th gen, thorium) and a lot into fusion.
Solar sucks at physics. It doesn't have the energy density, the equipment doesn't last long enough to generate optimal RoI, and energy storage is too expensive to scale.
Maybe, but after a week of trying to make it make sense financially for our house's rooftop we gave up.
The hard thing that fossil fuels have to compete with is the fact that every day the sun just absolutely DUMPS energy on earth. We just have to build the panels to harness it. Then every day, free energy.
Depends on energy consumption. More production drives down energy prices. New investments are only made if estimated profits recoup the costs in a few years. There's always a point where building more is not profitable. Exponential increases always become S curves eventually.
Suppose there is a law passed that makes solar power provide guaranteed capacity - as a precondition for joining the grid. At what percent of the average solar farm's maximum output would such capacity guarantees make it impossible to run a solar farm at a profit?
I just came from an energy conference and I wonder how many people are missing that all this is capex. Once the build out is done, solar is just gonna keep pumping out electrons for free. Not like Oil and Gas.
I assume their last prediction was in 2016 as afterwords they committed seppuku?
If you have the original data: can you separate the amount dependent on China? If possible (a) by use and then (b) by production of solar panels?
Thanks
* batteries not included
hey what just happened in Spain?
which state has highest rates?
Why does France have lower rates n much lower CO2 than Germany?
Economics is a truly wild force. Solar crossed the "economically viable" threshold, and now humans will move heaven and Earth to install as much of it as possible. Those road blocks the other models foresaw are now just speed bumps.
The simplest proof that this is nonsense is how far we are from it making financial sense to install unsubsidized solar plus batteries instead of connecting to the grid and paying for all the existing generation plus distribution infrastructure.
Nuclear is the only option.
Australia requires at peak 835GWhr of electricity on a given 24hr period of high demand. Typically during peak winter or summer where air con and heating is required.
Winter is the limiting case with only 6full hours of sunlight in the southern capital cities. (Syd, per, melb,
2 gw solar vs nuclear
Some day we'll figure out that chopping down forests to replace them with panels that effectively turn visible light into infrared that's more susceptible to greenhouse effect isn't a great improvement over fossil fuels...
“Won” but for widespread Luddite refusal - climate-denial-inspired on the MAGA right, anti-abundance-fueled on the left - to pick up the $1,000,000 bill on the sidewalk.
They underestimated China. The story of the early 21st century, before the transition
Solar plus a 100% gas generator back up.
Meaning that at any moment in time solar could produce 0% electricity, so a 100% back up system has to agilely fire up to supply that missing electricity.
another entry to add to your collection of bitemporal charts (a.k.a. medusa plots)
Solar won’t win because it’s a part-time technology. Even the wealthiest areas of the US can’t battery backup their entire grids. Spain has shown us the folly of a majority if renewables grid. Nuclear will win whenever people actually get serious about moving away from fossils.
Largely in agreement, yet hardly everything about solar energy is "simply physics", unfortunately. Until that changes, the issue is far more muddled.
I don’t think these are measuring the same thing. The IEA forecast, while ultimately wrong, is showing installed and actively generating solar assets. The black line seems to be the amount of panels produced.
As a consequence gas will win together with solar, covering energy demand at night and in winter
$SPX is down ~2% again 
Our analyst purchased puts on $SPX live yesterday. SPX rapidly dropped to the area of the largest negative gamma exposure (-50M) at the $5,300 strike.
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What's your view of what US should do with installed base and future production in response to this?
And geography. 80% of the world population live in the Global sunbelt and solar power is by far the least expensive source for new electricity there. Add the fact that batteries for storage are getting better and less expensive rapidly and it is now unstoppable.
Physics of no solar for 12 hours per day, or no solar electricity for half of the year. If it is not cloudy. you probably counted solar capacity, not production. Like assuming a empty battery is fully charged. Summary, solar works 25% of the time, which is terribly inefficient.
I need to see charts of storage (in kWh stock, not kW flow) to take it seriously. Intermittent power will never win.
Between solar, wind, and fission, we have all the energy we need. And fusion will be a great add on when it is ready. Not leveraging all the tech we have today is the unintelligent part.
Yes. I have been saying this for many years. It is exponential, and has no reason to plateau :
Your understanding of physics/electricity seems to be roughly on par with the German Greens. The electricity grid is a bit more complicated than just "more energy in moar better". Especially if that energy comes in huge spikes at unpredictable times, and then completely vanishes.
the thing with energy is that it can’t be enough of it, there is a huge backlog of technological things that are expensive only due to expensiveness or in other words just lack of energy, so talking about a winner has no point as all the sources will still stay as energy sources
Kardashev scale ain't about burning fossil fuels. They're a bootloader for fusion.
Win what? Producing power for half the day requiring a parallel power system that can back it up.
Solar already provides all our energy. Always has. Including the carbon stored in the earth.
Win, as in be where most energy comes from, probably even a majority. We need other renewables, too, of course, and maybe some baseload nuke
Nonsense. Adding more solar panels doesn’t produce more electricity at night.
The difference between GWh & GW is the same as the difference between the truth and a lie. And leaving out the necessary non renewable ancillary services is a bigger lie.
