U.S. solar will pass wind in 2025 and leave coal in the dust soon after
(pv-magazine-usa.com)
from spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works to technology@lemmy.world on 01 Oct 18:33
https://sh.itjust.works/post/47126729
from spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works to technology@lemmy.world on 01 Oct 18:33
https://sh.itjust.works/post/47126729
Based on current deployment rates, it is likely that solar will surpass wind as the third-largest source of electricity. And solar may soon topple coal in the number two spot.
Looking ahead, through July 2028, FERC expects no new coal capacity to come online based on its “high probability additions” forecast. Meanwhile 63 coal plants are expected to be retired, subtracting 25 GW from the 198 GW total, and landing at about 173 GW of coal capacity by 2028. Meanwhile, FERC forecasts 92.6 GW of “high probability additions” solar will come online through July 2028.
threaded - newest
Gotta love that headline.
Had to read it twice to understand what they WANTED to say
Would have been better as "blow past wind" to match the sentiment of the "coal in the dust" joke.
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.
All we are is dust in the wind…
Even with an admin as renewable-hostile as the current one, you just can’t beat cheap, I guess.
That’s been the joke of Solar for a while. Engineers could have told you all the way back in the 1970s (really, the 1910s) that it costs less money to leave a big plate out in the bright sun than to drill a giant hole and hope there’s enough spicy rocks at the bottom of it to justify the expense.
We should have crested this hill a lot sooner, but the heavy emphasis on subsidized fossil fuels during the 80s, 90s, and 00s kept these fuels artificially cheap. Meanwhile, fossil fuel firms actually did invest in Green Energy R&D but only for the purpose of erecting “patent thickets” that would hinder competitive growth of these alternatives.
This has lead to big surges in the development and deployment of Green Energy grids outside of the countries doing most of the cutting edge research. Americans are only now catching up.
You’re really discounting that fossil fuels have hella bang for the buck, loads of power per gallon. tl;dr: Energy dense
I can run my little generator at camp all night long if there’s as little as 3 gallons in there. Space heater or AC unit, lights, all that. I’d have to have many panels and batteries to compare to that output. My best battery is a huge LIPO4, trolling motor can’t kill it, not even close. But leaving the LED lights on for a little over a day drained it dry.
We need way more solar infrastructure to get where we’re going, and I’m all about it. But since since the GOP has decided to go back in time, China is going to smoke America, both in renewables and the associated economic benefits.
Did not know about the patent thing! Know any examples?
Coal is generally the worst of the lot. Oil and gas burn cleaner and have more combustible by weight. Coal is energy dense but also heavy af and dirty as hell. It’s also very common place and comparably safe to transport. And it is simpler to use.
Fine enough to warm your home or grill some meat. But you’re not putting a rocket into orbit with coal.
Sure. Broadly speaking you want to be hooked up to the grid to benefit from electricity. Anything portable is very ineffective for a litany of reasons.
And you’re definitely not with wind and solar lol.
Coal is cheap, abundant in supply, and easy.
Not anymore. Hasn’t been cheap in decades
Coal cheap? Incorrect.
And it’s only easy if you’re fine burning brown coal and spewing shit everywhere.
This is why I have no problem [REDACTED] members of the ruling class.
It’s [REDACTED] or be [REDACTED] out there
Patents have a short life span. The patent wall keeps expiring and then everyone can use it no cost. the big improvements are long gone and all they can patent is small improvements you can do without (though you may not want to). They also run into those making things do their own r&d and have their own patents.
Years, depending on how it is used and renewed. But the point is that you’ve got a minefield of potential legal liabilities every time you try and launch a business. You don’t know whether what you’re doing is patented until you check. And if enough entrepreneurs have their businesses blown up early on, it delays how quickly alternative energy can be built out and deployed by at least as long as these patents survive.
When the government is in your corner, handing out subsidies, leaving environmental rules unenforced, securing new oil fields overseas through military force, and generally making your life as an energy tycoon easier, you’re at a comparative advantage to the wind farm guy who has to argue with the Kennedys over hurting a bird or obstructing the Massachusetts Bay skyline.
It’s not actually cheap though, that’s the problem. Basically every country that is pushing “renewables” are having their power bills increase over and over and over with no sign of slowing down because it’s not cheap.
No one wants to build them without giant subsidies and guaranteed returns. Why do you think that is?
Solar panels crom China made it a lot cheaper than it used to be. There are also other major advatnages, such as increased independence. You just buy a bunch of solar panels and now you can indenepdently generate energy for the next 30 years.
x.com/jnampijinpa/status/1973660876793368808
cis.org.au/…/the-renewable-energy-honeymoon-start…
This is an important point to consider. However, to me it seems somewhat separate from your previous comment.
Of course, no sane government should push for a country to rely solely on wind and solar. Ideally you have a mix of various energy sources, even potentially including some fossil fuels. Hitting that 20-30% sweetspot, as mentioned in the paper, looks to be fairly cheap and beneficial for everyone.
That’s what almost every “net zero” government has been pushing though. They claim it is doable with zero fossil fuel, just 100% “renewables”.
Solar panels are not the expensive part of using solar to power the country - the storage and transmission is.
Although having said that, the cost of regularly cleaning panels, replacing them, throwing them in landfill, and mining materials to make new ones every 15 years or so is also huge - and destructive to the planet. It’s just more of a slow burn cost that snowballs.
True, batteries are quite expensive and very much not environment-friendly when built on such a scale. Though it should be noted good solar panels last longer than 15 years. Even cheap panels can last 20 years.
They need regular cleaning otherwise they can very quickly drop to close to zero output, and storms - especially hail - can destroy entire solar farms at once.
Just no
Some reading for you, which I hope you’ll read:
cis.org.au/…/the-renewable-energy-honeymoon-start…
x.com/jnampijinpa/status/1973660876793368808
Since I doubt you or anyone else will, I’ll take some bits from it:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.net.au/pictrs/image/3c23b2e5-c37d-4532-8d0b-77ed84e00375.png">
As you can see, as wind + solar generation share goes up, retail electricity prices go up. They never go down. They never even stay the same.
…
…
I’m not going to read propaganda from an Australian right wing think tank, you’re right.
I can’t speak for every country, unlike you, but in Southern Europe the trend is exactly the opposite of what you’re saying. bbvaresearch.com/…/spain-more-renewables-to-conti…
“I’m not going to read your link cause it proves my ideology wrong. Here’s a link that proves mine right, and mine is much much much narrower in scope so as to not show the global trend”
lol
No, it’s just that the study you linked is wrong in may aspects. The one I linked comes from a bank not a think tank, but you can find thousands more.
Big surprise, running 50 year old plants lead to lower bills than new infrastructure. Now do new coal plants.
Don’t need new coal plants.
Should be building nuclear anyway.
The current regime could not less about cost. They will probably stamp this out.
I've already passed wind in 2025.
Would that be considered breaking news?
No, but it is breaking wind.
On fox news
Username checks out.
Mmmmmmmmmm beefy!
Did you call me fat?
You’re not fat, you’re just festively plump!
Are you a renewable resource?
He’s here a lot, does that count?
Heh heh. Heh heh.
Phrasing.
It’s perfect
Another example of Big Media always twisting the narrative! They didn’t “pass wind,” they FARTED! Stop diverting the blame!
I lol’d
Well, considering how it’s breaking wind and passing gas, they didn’t really have a collision here.
That’s actually a problem.
All realistic plans for 100% renewable (or even 95% renewable, which is substantially easier) rely on a multipronged approach of wind, water, solar, and grid upgrades. Each one has upsides and downsides, but you can use the upsides of one to cover the downsides of another. Combined, you get a reliable grid based on intermittent but cheap sources.
Capitalism sees this plan and decides to deploy the one with the best immediate ROI. Which happens to be solar. Problem is that you can’t just rely on solar. The grid is hitting limits where electrical production is sending prices to basically zero at certain times, but not able to provide enough the rest of the time. That will shift the economic incentives. Eventually.
It’ll figure out what researchers have already written down, but it’ll take too long to get there.
Is it? Wind is 10% and solar is 4%
www.eia.gov/…/electricity-in-the-us.php
Yes, and we’re already seeing prices go negative with that mix. This shouldn’t happen (at least not very often) if it’s built properly.
Well that’s an average and it will differ greatly with seasons. What percentage is problematic?
SoCal has a huge amount of wind and solar right now. Utility sized battery installations are going in to deal with the times those two aren’t producing.
Even home battery solutions. We have solar panels & a Powerwall. Were part of a Virtual Power Plant along with around 1500 other Powerwall owners in the region. During peak usage in the summer all our PowerWalls feed back to the grid so that our utility provider doesn’t have to spin up expensive (and dirty) peaker plants. We get paid a premium for the power we provide during these events.
I saw articles here on Lemmy just a month or two ago that Tesla successfully tested a VPP in California that consisted of 100,000 PowerWalls.
The ones they’ve installed near us are Siemens and the only reason we even know they exist is we went by often during installation. The cabinets are now hidden behind a high wall. I’m guessing they’re going in all over the place. Strange that I’ve never seen them mentioned in the news anywhere.
While your power company is taking your power from your battery, where does your power to power your house come from? How much do you pay for it, what are your daily charges etc?
Our house is still powered by the panels and/or battery as well. We typically use 1 to 5 kWh, and during these events the batteries are discharging up to 10 kWh. Whatever we don’t use goes to the grid. Last year we received a payout of $1450 for 45 hours worth of energy, probably in the neighborhood of 300-350 kWh.
You get $4/kWh?! We get 2c here in Australia lol
Batteries
What batteries exactly? The capacity required is huge.
Also not renewable, are incredibly environmentally destructive, and have short lifetimes - kinda the opposite of what the push for “renewables” is supposed to be about lol.
Are you talking about batteries?
Yes.
I think you are wrong then. First, even Li-ion batteries are recyclable to a huge amount, usually the problem is that different manufacturers pack them differently without any blueprint and then it’s much harder to recycle them. Then there are a ton of different chemistries with ones really harmless (i.e. using sodium instead of lithium) but they come with less energy density. Which isn’t that important when it comes to energy storage for the network purpose but it’s important when it comes to cars and portable electronic devices. Also different chemistries have different lifetime, i.e. LFP batteries have better durability and are less fire prone than the standard li-ion.
Being “recyclable” doesn’t mean that they get recycled, because it’s often not economically feasible - like with solar panels. Are there lots and lots of recyclable materials in them? Absolutely. Does it cost more to extract them out than it does to buy a new one? Absolutely.
Most batteries, especially those used for home batteries, will never be recycled. They’ll end up in landfill, leaching toxic chemicals into the earth.
Also the materials used to make new batteries are not renewable. There are finite resources of them. They require mining. Mining equipment and trucks aren’t running on solar or batteries. As more and more are needed, more and more mining is needed.
The entire “renewables” push is based around endlessly manufacturing non recyclable things that end in landfill, using non-renewable materials, creating large amounts of toxic emissions - but the ones pushing it don’t care because the emissions happen somewhere else by someone else so they can claim to be carbon neutral.
You have some valid points. Yes, economical aspect is crap, countries should push laws demanding that producers guarantee recycling and/or state clear lifecycle of the battery (actually it should be applied to all products). Even still, there are companies that do recycle batteries for profit, so it’s not that absurd. But you miss the whole other aspect with different chemistries, many even harmless to the environment. You are focused only on current li-ion it seems which are not very network storage friendly anyway.
I’m focused on current battery tech because that’s what we have. There is no grid storage level battery tech yet - entire countries are basing their economic livelihood on the promise that there will be soon. It’s looking like a bad bet. We still can’t make phones that last a week.
They can be distributed though. I Install solar, most of the systems we install with batteries end up selling back a significant portion of their charge to the grid (iirc our system wide average is 40% nightly resale)
So not only is each house with a battery not using grid power at night, its powering almost half of an equivalently sized house.
Granted, batteries are still on the expensive side, so these systems aren’t coming enough ( I think we’re at ~10% of our systems have a battery)
Yeah, that’s a step in correct direction, but can you guarantee that everybody can be powered 24/7 through renewables/batteries, specially during winter? Unless that’s the case you still need a shit-ton of non-renewable energy that’s coming either from fossil fuels or nuclear. And if you want to avoid (co2) emissions, then you need nuclear to cover everybody, and if you have nuclear then it has to run 100% 24/7. OTOH if you don’t have nuclear, you’ll emit all sort or crap during those periods. And so on. Also, it’s not just that batteries are sort of expensive, they are big. Also you are talking houses, but masses live in apartments where placing solar panels or batteries isn’t possible (at least in quantity).
A competent government that believes in basic science, would give tax breaks to encourage this.
Sure, but even then we don’t have a solution today. It’s all in the fuzzy future.
No one will ever have the idea of simply having more batteries right? It’s all in capacity not quantity, because quantity would be to easy right? Got it.
Where do you have TWhs of batteries? As you said, both quantity and capacity matters, when lower capacity you need bigger battery which is harder to put somewhere.
Batteries are nice, but they’re insanely expensive at this scale and ruin the entire point of helping the environment. Carbon emissions from huge batteries are unbelievable.
It’s not really a ‘problem.’
If push came to shove, we could just wait before putting the panels online.
Well despite Trump wanting to reverse it coal has been being phased out for decades. I’d look at how it does vs natural gas.
Aren’t wind turbines mostly diesel generators in disguise?
-edited due to my ignorance: No in fact what they are is in the name “WIND” turbines…
What?
Wind turbines have to be constantly spinning due to inertia to get them started due to that they have big diesel engines that keep them going the minimum speed. I’m not trying to be inflammatory and am welcome to a fact check.
This is complete BS, I could find zero sources for that claim, and several debunking it.
The only tangentially related thing I could find was that in colder climates, they need heat to de-ice the wings, and at one point, the power supply to a Scottish wind farm was cut off, so they put in some temporary diesel generators on-site to power the de-icing system to get the turbines going again.
So, I do not believe that is a thing. Apparently there are some wind turbines with diesel generators attached somewhere, but it’s not for that reason. Offshore wind seems to have them in case they get disconnected from the grid because they rely on some power to protect themselves from ocean air, and apparently a wind array in Scottland had some to keep the turbines from freezing over. Frankly though there just isn’t room in the turbine’s housing to keep a whole diesel engine, at least most of the time.
Edited my OG comment for future people. Thank you for correcting this Franky inexcusably ignorant miss comprehension. I appreciate your civilness in correct me.
No?
Assuming Dear Leader Trump (and I hate calling him that even as a joke) don’t stamp it out, of course.
I also always call him Dear Leader. We can’t normalize these behaviors from a president, and using the “Dear Leader” title makes it unambiguously clear that his selfish actions are not presidential.
I call him Literal Sentient Piece of Shit. For real. Have done frequently. I’ve successfully turned it into a habit lol
“dumpy” says the same and takes less breath.
It’s the dumbest possible reaction to this news, so he probably will
Preznit Numbnuts will be sure to start closing wind farms then, forcing us all back into using coal so he can slurp up lobby $$
Lol they’ve already announced funding (or intent to fund?) for reviving coal mining
The Republicans. They yearn for the mines.
You guys still burning coal? We dumped that ages ago.
still passing wind though…
I can ride a bike to a coal plant from my house. Thing’s almost as ugly as the five-over-one across the street from my house.
See, you can build coal plants in poor/black areas, so you don’t have to see the pollution, nor your kids have to get cancer like those silly poors. And then you don’t have to put up with woke shit like windmills. Sigh.
We built wind turbines in view of trumps golf course and it makes him furious. We will build 500 wind turbines and then build 500 more.
Hell. In Florida, FPL is the electric provider, and they are fighting tooth and nail to keep people from installing solar on houses… In Florida, we would have almost free electric for everyone if all houses could install panels…
But FPL lobbied our GOP legislature and force anyone with solar to have a million dollar insurance policy payable to FPL in case something happens. Also got regulations passed to bar home windstorm insurance if any panels are bolted to the roof. So if you have panels, no hurricane insurance for you…and the mortgage holder gets to put their expensive policy on your home.
Fuck FPL
You couldn’t just have “free electricity for everyone” by having solar panels on your houses lol. Where’s the power being stored?
Bad phrasing. There are power walls for home use and FPL is still available.
My point is that Florida could use solar as 1 prong on the challenge to provide clean, green energy but FPL must deliver profit to it’s shareholders and will fight that effort
As soon as solar panels and batteries are involved it’s not “clean, green energy” though. I have no idea how people ate that lie.
Solar panels don’t grow on trees. They’re not made from renewable sources. They require mass amounts of mining and coal/gas created energy to make, and they last 10-20 years max. They’re not recyclable either because it costs more to recycle them than it does to make a new one.
Batteries are even worse.
Still less than the competitors
Widely distributed solar + nuclear produces a generation curve that matches demand better than any other combination, minimizing battery or dirty on-demand generation needs.
💯
Nuclear + solar is the only way to truly make it work. Unfortunately the “nuclear bad” message that’s spread by the “renewables” people are going to put us trillions of dollars and decades behind in getting there.
There are many orders in NA for SMR reactors. A fraction of China, but they are happening.
only because we choose to use coal and gas. This circular argument is old.
No, because we have no alternative. Mining equipment and machines can’t run on wind and solar.
To be fair, Florida building codes are pretty much static electricity holding cardboard together.
Florida has some of the strictest building codes in the United States due to the hurricane and flooding risks.
May I ask the source of your comment?
My father ran a small construction company in Ontario, he was asked to manage building a few house for a client in Florida and at the time, the codes were a complete joke compared to Canada, closer to what we grade as seasonal cottages. This likely had recently changed, only because people can’t even get storm insurance any more. Then there’s the 5,400 trailer parks in Florida. Ontario has 14, seasonal use only.
Yes, FPL has done a lot to prevent rooftop solar, but calling it “almost free” is not correct. Rooftop solar still comes with significant upfront costs. The weather of Florida degrades panels quicker with non-trivial odds of hurricane damage. Finally, Southwestern states receive much more solar irradiance.
If you are willing to be pragmatic and want solar in Florida, FPL’s solar together program is your best option. Like it or not, utility grade solar is 1/3 the LCOE.
“Will pass wind”
Haha
Cool
Yeah haha I came here to laugh too. And leave coal sounds funny too
my dylexic brain read it as “US soldier will pass wind in 2025 and leaves coal dust soon after…”
holycrap wtf did they feed them as part of military experiment or wtf is going on???
A recent article about the state of the coal industry in the usa…
Fossil Fuels and Fossilized Minds - Paul Krugman share.google/9gGFCB2MFShNzGJrp
Sodium-ion batteries are becoming more viable, which will be necessary to buffer the solar energy surge during the day and lack of energy production at night.
Solar may pass wind, but gas and burning gas are actual stinking farts.
They knew what they were doing with that title.