Probably true in every market that is not the US, with extreme tariffs and EOs banning solar technology.
This is true when comparing to peaker gas/coal plants which are less efficient than more expensive Combine Cycle plants, though both can still run 24/7. The myth of baseload as a requirement ignores that “outside of heating or extreme summer night heat” night demand is half of day/evening demand.
Batteries are now extremely cheap as well, and certainly the combo compared to Combined Cycle is cheaper for better baseload coverage because combined cycle/baseload must overprovide daily needs by meeting peak demand, while solar+batteries can better cover full day needs.
The absolute clincher though is price certainty for 30 years. Free from extortion or geopolitical oppression/chaos of fuel supply chains. Global warming has direct costs to property values, insurance costs, and food scarcity. US policy has moved to create global fuel scarcity for increased dependence on US, as well.
Yes, but have you considered that using renewables means you’re gay? Checkmate liberals.
We could use the excess power to bank carbon, then if we need more power we can burn that same carbon.
Seems super complicated when you could just pump water up a hill, then open a dam when we need more power.
What about the absurd amount of land it takes?
can be leased, and at end of lease, land is free for any use. ie. it is not polluted. Fossil plants need exclusion zones for air pollution and noise, and still depress neighbour property values.
How much energy can be produced on global land used for liquid biofuels: 31000 TWh for PV vs 1400 TWh biofuels for transport:
Remember that you can still use the land for a more useful agricultural crop with higher¹ or similar² yield³ with agrivoltaics
You can also put panels over parking lots. USA alone has more parking lot land area than some countries:
Get ready for “Economic rationalists” having a meltdown in 5… 4… 3…
BuT wHaTaBoUt WhEn ItS cLoUdY!!
What about just night?
At night I run off my battery. I can’t go completely off-grid, the days are simply too short in winter, but for like 70% of the year I get free electricity.
In the winter months it still gives me an advantage because I can buy energy at the lowest price point of the day (i.e. when demand is lowest relative to production).
It also allows me to sell the over-production of my solar panels at the most expensive part of the day. And it’s all handled automatically by the software in my solar system. It takes into account the prices over the day, the predicted energy usage during the night, the weather prediction for the next day and uses that to determine when and how much to sell back to the grid and/or when to buy electricity from the grid.
Yeah but you have to pay for the sunshine every year that you use to power the panels. And you have to build pipelines to transport that sunshine from the faraway places where it’s developed, and sometimes you have to liquefy it a load it onto gigantic tanker ships and carry it overseas, and there’s always a risk of it exploding and…oh, wait. I’m thinking of the gas. Never mind.
Think of all the sunshine jobs.
But what happens after that up front cost?? With the current price of a barrel of sun, can we really afford to limit fossil fuels?
I bought a 1 kg rest mass barrel of sunshine, and… boy howdy, for the price I might as well have purchased 1.8 times 10^15 joules from the energy grid.
You don’t measure sun in barrels. It comes in bars.
So do I.
How many?
All of them.
The propagandized will continue parroting their fossil fuel talking points and will continue to vote for the politicians that collect fossil fuel money.
They already moved on to different tactics like restricting the ability to connect solar to the grid or simply burying all applications in red tape for years.
Idk, it’s working pretty great for me.
My experience: https://lemmy.world/post/32326227
But you are not scalable.
The companies that in my country have already applied for grid connections of more solar and battery capacity than would be needed in the next few years yet waiting and waiting and at some point just giving up would be.
Oh, and now law changes will also kill all future plans as no one will build any more solar with their own money (or get loans from banks) after the decision if they can actually feed in their produced electricity is shifted to the control of grid providers all-well connected or subsidiaries with fossil-fuel focused energy companies.
Economic viability means shit if it gets fought actively on the government level.
they are going pretty hard in maintaining gas and oil production
Why do you say it like it’s an eternal inevitability? Propagandists spend so much time and money on propaganda because it has to be maintained at a certain pressure to effectively change someone’s behavior. The solution to the propaganda problem, then, is to combat propaganda, not wring our hands in despair. We’ve been busting up propaganda rings since the dawn of the written word, it can be done. Just needs people to do it.
Propagandists spend so much time and money on propaganda
Your mistake is believing that they are spending much money. It’s actually a small fraction of the money they make from burning the planet, miniscule if compared to the amounts accumulated over decades, and it’s also the easiest option. They could also just buy politicians who are incredible cheap but still more expensive than the ongoing media desinformation campaign that mostly runs on its own because the clickbait industry journalism has become runs on stories the propaganda victims want to hear.
I guess it depends on what you call much. influence campaigns are clearly profitable, at least some of the time, but just because the profits are greater doesn’t mean the costs aren’t still significant.
And, I think the more active people are in countering propaganda, the more expensive it becomes to achieve the same effect. I think just believing the effects of propaganda are inevitable (and acting on that belief) has the effect of making deception that much more economical and effective for those who wish to deceive for their own selfish ends.
I think the more active people are in countering propaganda
Oh, so you never actually tried to talk to those lost propaganda victims conditioned to reject facts (because otherwise they wouldn’t fall obvious bullshit anyway) and can’t be convinced of reality anymore?
If you have the space. Solar needs a lot more space for the same power output.
Sticking coal power generation on your roof, are ye?
From a power-generated-per-area perspective, PV is about 500x less dense than a modern gas-fired combined cycle.
Why does that matter? Solar can go where coal can’t.
Put PV above a parking lot, you’re not using that land for anything else useful anyway.
Lotta places it can go. Doesn’t matter if it takes up more space.
Coal and gas plants can only go in specific spots. Need a water supply, needs logistics, needs a clear zone to vent. So it needs more space than a trivial accounting would indicate.
Solar can go in more diverse locations, absolutely. Especially advantageous because solar can be installed right on top of the buildings that need electricity. Lowers dependence on already-overloaded transmission lines.
Just from a utility perspective, it’s a lot simpler, easier to buy a plot of industrial zoned land, and stick a combined cycle on it. This is enough to power an entire medium city, 24/7.
Compared to logistically working with a massive number of private property owners to install solar on their property. And the result of all that work is enough to power the same city from 7 in the morning to 7 at night.
We have space on our houses, to protect us from rain and sun.
Btw, why are never company buildings solar required? They have vastly more space.
Completely ignoring the mining part
It’s not the same, since it’s not dispatchable. So you need gas turbines or very large battery systems for backup, which isn’t exactly helping with that upfront capital.
The backup for turbines and coal plants failing is more turbines / older, less efficient turbines though, right? If our existing power infrastructure is spun up overnight only, that’s a huge improvement. Turbines for flexible capacity will always be a thing, but solar to provide baseline capacity is just good business.
There’s another strategic benefit: batteries have a fixed cost that doesn’t rely on a variable input cost. With current events in the strait, countries without abundant natural gas are advantaged because they’re less reliant on geopolitical conditions. This is why we’ve seen such growth of solar in china, which is not oil-rich, and was already importing a lot of coal.
