They mention California. https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply is a dashboard showing electricity demand and supply, real-time and historical.
Yesterday evening's peak demand was between 7-8pm at 30.7 gigawatts. Supply breakdown around 8pm:
Batteries: 8.4 GW
Natural gas: 6.0 GW
Renewables: 5.4 GW
Large hydro: 4.4 GW
Imports: 4.1 GW
Nuclear: 2.3 GW
Yeah
Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance
It's the same kind of thing we see with self driving cars. They can navigate sunny California streets so "self driving" must be so close! But put them anywhere with snow, rain, fog, or even just grey skies and they struggle heavily
California represents the easy 80% side of the Pareto curve for a lot of this stuff
Respectfully disagree -- solar isn't the big story here.
One could argue that batteries will have a bigger impact than solar. Batteries obviously let you decouple power generation and consumption, shifting anytime production to peak-time demand.
Less obvious is that local demand can fluctuate 2x. It usually dips mid-day and peaks 5-9pm (see the charts at www.caiso.com) when people come home and turn on their lights, oven, appliances, etc. This pattern happens throughout the year.
So forget solar for a moment; the ability to shift energy that was produced mid-day (even by a natural gas plant) to the evening would allow you to build fewer power plants. Nuclear + batteries might also be a good combination. Batteries get you closer to being able to solve for "average demand" rather than "peak demand."
This has nothing to do w/ California. California is just on the leading edge of battery installation. Solar just exacerbates the issue of the peak-to-trough ratio (evening vs. mid-day demand) due to mid-day solar "overproduction" causing it to be uneconomical to run gas plants mid-day. But solving for "peak demand" is still a problem in the absence of solar.
Still: most of the complaints about solar are answered when paired with large battery systems.
Yup by far batteries are the bigger deal. If battery prices were minimal then it makes household solar far more feasible to begin with.
The OP numbers are fascinating. I wonder how the equivalent to the "station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" looks for batteries.
> I wonder how the equivalent to the "station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" looks for batteries.
Looks terrible.
I think the best are only about 500Wh/kg, so a shipping container* full of them would be 28870kg * 500Wh/kg = 14.44 MWh, so if it takes an hour to the destination it's about the capacity of one not particularly thick cable.
Cables are great for electricity. If the (aluminium) cable had a cross section of one square meter, you could get all the way around the planet and back to where you started with just 1Ω of DC electrical resistance.
I seem to recall that one of the main reasons to doubt batteries was that they relied on minerals that are just too rare on Earth to consider scaling them up to the entire grid.
Was my understanding incorrect? Or perhaps have new technologies emerged that work around this limitation?
The linked article addresses that. Modern batteries are lithium-iron, without the rare cobalt and nickel. Sodium batteries are also in development, but lithium is turning out to be so cheap and abundant that investment in the sodium batteries isn’t economical.
Sodium-ion batteries have extreme good performance in low-temperature environments. CATL is working on sodium-LFP dual-power batteries to get the best of both worlds:
https://www.catl.com/en/news/6401.html
That's mainly for EVs though.
Grid storage batteries don't have the same weight constraint as vehicle batteries which opens the door to many other combinations that have a lower energy density but are cheaper per GW despite weighing more per GW.
> Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance
We can also build power lines! Between different places! Such as the places with lots of sun, and the places without lots of sun!!!
Solar has gotten so cheap that it's cheaper to just overbuild solar in cloudy places than to build long distance HVDC lines between sunny and cloudy locations.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
The great thing about solar is that you can put it nearly everywhere. Avoid the transmission losses and put the panels close to the load, even if it’s not as ideal as one state over.
It’s easy to put extra solar panels into a system to make up for reduced average sunlight. It’s standard practice to have a ratio of PV capacity to inverter capacity of something like 1.2:1. In a low sun location you could bump that up to 1.5:1 or higher.
It consumes a lot of power to transmit over long distances. From what I understand it's basically always preferable to generate power as close to where you are using it as possible.
> It consumes a lot of power to transmit over long distances.
No, it doesn't. This is plain wrong. Power loss for a 1000 km HVDC line is 3.5% [0], which is the same order of magnitude as battery losses.
If you had of said it cost a lot of money to transmit over long distances, then fine.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#:~...
Absolutely, but besides rooftop solar we don't have a single power source currently that does that.
Traditional power generation was always centralized big plants. Most people wouldn't want to live next to them and from a health perspective you probably shouldn't.
So "close" has always been within air quotes.
Also small-scale fossil fuel, hydropower, wind, geothermal, etc. What solar does differently than those is be directly usable and not have significant negatives which made it undesirable to have near non-industrial users because it doesn’t make noise, air, or water pollution.
Batteries are significant amounts of "nearby risk" that is being handwaved away imo
They are fire/explosion hazards, heavy metals, etc.
They’re a fire risk but have you tried fossil fuels and power lines? The newer battery technologies have significantly minimized the heavy metal needs and especially the sodium-ion batteries really reduce the fire and explosion risk.
Genuine question, what do you mean by small-scale fossil fuel
What power output in megawatt are we talking about here? I'm struggling to think of a fossil power source efficient at small scale
Well, if you go back far enough there were a ton of factories and other buildings which had their own small plants but the main thing I was thinking of was stuff like that xAI data center in Memphis with the methane-powered turbines where they’re avoiding grid limits and transmission losses at the expense of pollution.
Well, nearby is relative.
My point is that a nuclear power station near a city is probably better than a wind farm offshore 1000km away even if the wind farm and the nuclear generate the same
It's hard to define 'better'
Nuclear has significant downsides besides the waste and proliferation risks.
You wouldn't want to build a grid on just nuclear.
Let's assume that city takes 1.2MWh at its peak every day. That would mean you need to be able to supply that. So you build a nuclear plant producing 1.2MWh of energy.
Now you have the argument against renewables (the sun doesn't always shine) in reverse. The city doesn't always need that peak power. And nuclear is the slowest of all power sources to tune up and down in terms of output.
Nuclear for base load makes a lot of sense as it'll always be fully utilized. But nuclear to power a grid 100% doesn't exist anywhere for a reason either.
That wind farm needs to be like 4% bigger to cancel out transmission losses so the question has to involve the relative costs.
The EIA has it at $81 for advanced nuclear, which is competitive with offshore wind ($88) but not hydro ($58), PV+battery ($53), PV ($31), or onshore wind ($29). Now, both of those could see big improvements with scale but I think the uncertainty of the markets and our political climate are going to complicate that a lot. A big nuclear push needs a lot of upfront funding and while Trump has boosted it a bit and hates wind, I’m not sure how much that counts on a loan that big since right now that plant is guaranteed to lose money most of the time unless it’s near a big industrial user with high baseline demand.
RE ".....We can also build power lines! Between different places! ...."
We certainly can. However it is expensive. In my country (Australia) is is estimated to be cira $20 Billion
20 billion for infrastructure that lasts 50 years is 400 million per year hardly a major issue for a 1.6 Trillion dollar economy.
The US recently spent more than that on a single nuclear power plant.
> 20 billion for infrastructure that lasts 50 years
Average solar panels last 20-30 at most right now just fyi
50 years is practically right out of the question
There are several 50 year old solar installations that are still working fine. They've only degraded 10%-20% or so. The reason that they are typically replaced after ~20 years is that the technology has gotten so much better that you can replace the old panels with new ones and get 4X the power in the same space. The wires and the mounts are worth more than the panels, so reuse those with modern panels.
“We can also build power lines! Between different places!”
The actual panels themselves are a different kind of infrastructure.
But if you're from Australia you should know that your country isnt exactly typical?
There's a few big metros the rest of it is sparse, where sparse is a stretch? Isn't Perth like the most isolated city in the world?
That's a steal compared to racing toward extinction.
You need to persuade the median voter about this, and looking at the state of Western politics right now, it seems to me that peak willingness to spend huge money on environmental projects is behind us.
I agree with you, but surviving is worth more than almost any amount of money and that fact doesn't depend on the median voter's opinion.
You say that, but recent regulatory history suggests that building power lines in the USA isn't necessarily something which can be done.
one state supplying the rest is not what you want, especially if there are chances that something will disturb that states grid.
I remember the uni day discussions about Africa supplying the rest of the world with solar energy and that the material requirements for such an infrastructure should become a thing around 2025 - 2035 ... then someone explained climate change and hinted at the exponential function ...
back to topic: you'd have to maintain an "inert" backup, which isn't portfolio-communist-economically "viable". or you share the load "as much as necessary", which would still become an issue if any of the suppliers have a fallout ...
That was a real plan
The white paper they are discussing [0] includes multiple cities around the world:
> Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply and Muscat in Oman – 99%, using 6 GW solar panels and 17 GWh battery. Even cloudier cities like Birmingham [UK] can get 62% of the way to a constant supply every hour of every day across the year.
[0] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
62% is a long way from 97%
I'm all for not letting perfect being the enemy of good, and I used to work in solar. I'm very in favor of it. I just really think people need to be realistic about this stuff
I think the real way to read it is: Renewables are at a point where, combined with battery storage, they can supply 100% if we chose to while being competitive on cost.
The Birmingham case is a perfect example where solar might not be the source, wind is
Yeah
I do think that the batteries side of the equation is handwaved away too much though
Batteries at this scale are going to be awful for the environment once we start to have to decommission and dispose of them
There are no perfect solutions unfortunately
Batteries can be recycled though as the degradation is mostly on the kathode anode pair AFAIK
> Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance
There are many place that get a lot of sun. As solar panels come down in price, it becomes even easier to compensate for deficits with additional panels.
It’s common practice to install more solar panel capacity than inverter capacity because panels are rarely operating at peak output anyway. If you’re installing 100kW of inverters, you might install 120kW of panels. The panel array wouldn’t exceed 100kW most of the time anyway.
In a location with suboptimal sun, you might install an even higher ratio of panels to inverter and battery capacity.
Some people get bothered by this because they feel like some of the solar power is wasted at peak capacity, but you have to consider that the inverter and battery capacity is also wasted when you’re not sending enough from the panel array. It’s a balancing act.
You also have to consider that the same sunlight that makes California good for solar also creates additional demand for air conditioning. A location with less sun would have less solar heat gain, which is easier to serve for many reasons.
==California represents the easy 80% side of the Pareto curve for a lot of this stuff==
It also represents 12% of the country's population, which makes it a better benchmark than just being 1 of 50 states.
It's also not too dissimilar from Texas, Arizona, Oregon, Nevada, and Utah - which together are a much larger part of the US - and not too far from being able to ship power not too expensively to even more areas.
Florida and Colorado are not much farther below California in total solar radiation per year per sq meter, either.
Ditto for even Idaho and Oklahoma.
For reference, those states cover 4.5x more land but only 20% more population (50M vs 40M) compared to California.
Texas consumes almost 2x as much electricity as California [1], and is almost 1/8th the entire US consumption, so population is not the most important factor.
More land with fewer people makes them even better for solar, though.
> fog, or even just grey skies
So San Francisco?
Electricity can be moved long distances over wires.
For some definition of "long distances" sure. At a certain point it basically becomes more economical to charge batteries and ship them by truck than to build wires :/
HVDC losses are roughly 3.5% per 1000 km.
I think referring to the costs of 1 - 3 million per GW-mile.
Easy to say, hard to do. The cost per mile rises non-linearly.
No it doesn't.
True, but the quote was actually in a paragraph about self-driving cars.
Western Washington is a great contrast. We get a decent amount of sun (despite the reputation), however, our electricity prices are insanely low due to close-proximity hydroelectric power.
As a result, solar is rarely cost effective even with subsidies, and basically never without them.
Doesn't mean people don't install it for various other reasons, but it serves as a good contrast to California despite similar political landscapes.
Which is perfectly fine? You're just using what's abundant to you? And even better, hydro has the ability to control how much it generates. You have a surplus? Let less water flow through the turbines. So it can regulate, something solar can't do, it needs batteries to do that.
The one big upside that I haven't seen mentioned is that rooftop solar is local. So what I overproduce doesn't go on the big grid, it's probably consumed by my neighbor or someone in my street.
All those big power plants, and big consumers of electricity (because they're switching from their current source), will lead to net congestion where you need to decide if you want to increase net capacity... Which is slow and $$$
> But put them anywhere with snow, rain, fog, or even just grey skies and they struggle heavily I have winter basically 5 months of the year where I am and have no issues being fully off grid with only solar and batteries as energy sources. You do have to compensate for winter by having more panels and more batteries but easily doable.
"You have to compensate for winter by having more panels and more batteries" is exactly the point I was making
:/
Germany is famous for being cloudy and is much further north, much of it is north of the primary US-Canada border. It is one of the leading solar adopters.
Not being ideal for solar just means you need to install more area, and there's plenty available space. Solar is already the cheapest (if not it's competitive with the cheapest wind power) power source. Also having to, say, double the panel area in lower solar irradiance requires less than double the non-panel costs (you don't need double the inverters or power transmission).
California is leading because the politics/economy/irradiance are the best combination, you would expect a place like that to lead first. It does not follow that other places are unsuitable for solar, it will just cost marginally more.
It's a strange but persistent pattern where success in ideal conditions will draw out a litany of reasons why that success is actually a sign of failure when instead the early success is just a sign of ideal conditions. Why wouldn't something promising succeed first in the place with the best conditions for success?
> Germany is famous for being cloudy and is much further north, much of it is north of the primary US-Canada border. It is one of the leading solar adopters
Looks like it's about 12 cents (in USD) more expensive on average per kwh in Germany than Cali
So maybe Germany isn't exactly a great example of energy production if it's that much more expensive
>Looks like it's about 12 cents (in USD) more expensive on average per kwh in Germany than Cali
What is? Consumer energy prices?
Apples-to-apples consumer energy prices are difficult between the US and EU, Germany has historically had particularly high energy prices for various reasons, taxation is significantly different. Also they were a heavy importer of Russian gas and foolishly dismantled their entire nuclear generation capacity, so there are other reasons why their energy prices are high. The peaking energy costs caused by the Ukraine/Russia war have gone down.
That’s both moving the goalposts and also leaving out the true cost comparison. Solving climate change should be worth a lot more than $0.12/kWh and viability in countries like Germany suggests that fossil fuel advocates saying that it would be economically ruinous are not making a good-faith argument.
For what it's worth I'm a nuclear advocate not a fossil fuel advocate
I think it has a place in the portfolio but one of the reasons why fossil fuel-backed think tanks like to push nuclear or hydrogen as the green option is that it means years of continued growth in oil consumption before anything competing comes online, whereas solar cuts into their profits within weeks. Deploying solar as much as possible buys the decades we need to get much new nuclear power online and in many cases it doesn’t require much more than buying commodity products.
Solar is still cheaper than anything else is in Germany. Deutsche Bank thinks so [1]
There's no "moving goalposts" possible. Without any morality, preventing future costs, or any such way of adjusting the "real" costs... solar is just cheaper, and by a large margin which is only expected to grow. Yes you need storage and methods to move power east and west, solar is still cheaper. The greediest, most short sighted, heartless monster would still invest in solar before anything else because it makes them the most money.
https://www.dbresearch.de/PROD/RPS_DE-PROD/PROD0000000000528...
Good point. I’m not familiar with the German power market but the amount in question is small enough that I suspect our descendants will consider it trivial compared to the cost of dealing with a broken climate.
I think it has been a good benchmark during early development, but you’re right that it becomes less useful now that Solar is further along. Maybe some Midwestern place would be a good benchmark now? Or like England?
The Midwestern places probably lack the demand.
Because solar isn't energy dense, you will probably be told that you picked an area with low land cost to make it look better.
For England you can replace the word solar with wind and the same would probably apply
The white paper being discussed includes Birmingham, UK and several other cities around the world.
I have negative energy bills and high net export with my moderate system in Ireland which is definitely not considered a good solar country.
Most power generation is not used for peoples homes, though
What exactly changes at larger scale?
It's a completely different ballgame
Houses don't tend to have consistent electricity usage. Think of the electricity usage for a suburb. Chances are it's almost 0 most days. People get home and turn on the stove, the washer, the TV, etc. Big demand spikes at certain times of day, low demand for the rest
Commercial usage goes the opposite direction. Higher during the day when stores and offices are open, lower overnight
Industrial usages tend to be more consistent, but constant. Factories don't shut down overnight, but they have high constant requirements
But as a power company you are supplying all of this. You have to supply a consistent load that satisfies all of these usecases. It's all one grid after all, outside of some very unusual cases
And if you oversupply too much you break the grid. If you undersupply then stuff that relies on you shuts down and breaks
It's very much a goldilocks problem, which is non-trivial to optimize or automate
These are questions of getting the storage capacity to a certain level.
> Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark.
California is representative of more than 25% of the United States in terms of solar intensity.
People really need to get away from the idea that if a solution doesn't work for 100% of use cases then it's nonviable.
Solar, self-driving, tax policy, software engineering, cryptocurrency, the list goes on and on. You can have 100,000 successes and 1 failure and someone will say "It just doesn't work!".
This is not what I'm saying at all
What I am saying is "it works in California, it must be ready to roll out globally immediately" is silly
It works in California means "it is ready to roll out in areas with very optimal conditions but long-term it still likely has a lot of speedbumps so temper your timelines accordingly"
That's all. I'm just tired of people thinking timelines are short when stuff performs under super ideal conditions
How about “it works in California, it’s ready to roll out in most places between, say, 45° north or south where most of the human population lives”? It’s not universally solving every problem but pulling the gigawatts of power demand it _can_ solve out of the mix buys time for us to decarbonize harder problems.
The whitepaper says that the optimal power generation for Birmingham is 62% solar. That's about as far from ideal as you can get bar locations north of the Arctic circle, and it still says that solar should supply a small majority of the power to Birmingham UK.
==I'm just tired of people thinking timelines are short when stuff performs under super ideal conditions==
This feels like a strawman. We just started doing this in one place with ideal conditions. The next step could be other places with even more ideal conditions New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada (all have more sunshine than "ideal" California). [0]
We need to start investing immediately to begin overcoming the speed-bumps you mention. California has gotten to this point in about 5 years. Spend the next 5 years on the states I mentioned above. Then move on to Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Utah, South Carolina, and Kansas.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/sunniest-st...
"It works in California" means that it is potentially viable elsewhere. As others have pointed out: California is not the sunniest, not the simplest roads, most consistent weather, or the most favorable regulatory environment.
If it works in California then it will probably work elsewhere. AND more importantly, if it doesn't work in California then it's probably not going to work anywhere else.
Not to mention that combining batteries, i.e., storage, with generation is not exactly accurate or even honest. It is merely an offsetting and also a compensation for the deficiencies of “renewable” energy, which are always mitigated by that type of intentional muddling of classifications.
[flagged]
RE "...All of the peak demand supplied from batteries...." This is a very good start.
My question is how do the batteries go , if there is 1 - N days of cloudy weather? Can the batteries supply the peak for more than one day? Is there ( or where would they go ) transmission lines to bring in the needed peak supply from other storage (battery / pumped hydro ) areas?
Another step would be to include days of peak electricity demand, which in my country occurs in cold weather ( heaters) and very hot weather ( air conditioner's ) OR is there demand limits like in Spain demand limit for some houses is around 3KW (YUKS)
That is much higher than I would have expected. Good news. What are they using to charge the batteries though? I wonder if it's offpeak renewables or mostly natural gas?
Daytime solar, in the summer especially. Power demand yesterday was negative from 11:30 to 3:30, for instance, meaning batteries can charge for free to absorb excess solar generation during those hours.
If you scroll to the "Supply trend" graph you can see when the batteries were charging and how electricity was being generated at that time.
It's the renewables during the day while the sun is shining.
It's the imports that get you. The energy marketplace is all over the place in regards to price because of the demand for energy.
That is impressive but California electricity is pretty expensive compared to most of the rest of the US.
Aww, that old „pick a specific timeframe on a specific day, preferably summer, to get an convenient picture“ trick. incompleteness by design.
Supply itself is an inadequate metric. Yet convenient to obstruct the view upon CA that beacon of the future, suddenly being littered with third world brown and blackouts.
Solar and batteries are still more expensive than gas (as the article admits) but prices are continuing to decrease.
Sadly, the US is hitting a hiccup as the current administration is going out of their way to make solar installs harder and more expensive. Putting tariffs on solar equipment imports is an insane self-defeat. We should be importing as much cheap solar and battery gear as we can get our hands on.
Give it a couple years of price progress and political turnover and I think we’re going to be in a great position.
> Solar and batteries are still more expensive than gas (as the article admits)
On the contrary
> The sunniest US city, Las Vegas [...] It could get to 60% solar+storage at $65/MWh — cheaper than gas.
The article asserts that until you are generating the majority of your power from Solar+Storage, at least in favorable places, solar is cheaper than gas...
And it reached that conclusion under the incredibly unfavourable assumption that all the solar is in the same place, not being distributed around by a grid averaging out the amount of cloud cover over space.
also waaaaaaay cheaper than nuclear power.
In a thread decrying policy choices that are artificially making one particular kind of power generation more expensive than they have to be, this seems like a weird comment to make.
Is nuclear power only expensive because of policy choices? I know it's cheaper in, say, China where the policy is different, but it still isn't anywhere as cheap as solar.
Yes on both halves of that.
Expensive in that the policy choice is "we want the worst-case to be affordable", and that this includes not only explosive meltdowns but also international treaties to make sure nobody steals radioisotopes.
More than it needs to be, because anecdotes I've heard about radiation spills include "some liquid was spilled on the tarmac so we had to dig up a long deep trench; the replacement had some granite in and was more radioactive than the stuff it replaced".
I’m going to push back on this and point out that the major difference between expensive and inexpensive power isn’t really safety choices, it’s the ability to mass-produce power generation components. Solar PV is at the far end of the spectrum, since panels are essentially printed in a factory. Late 20th century French nuclear is in the middle, because many nuclear power plants were constructed at the same time using nearly identical specs. Today’s nuclear power is at the opposite end, where virtually every plant is bespoke. Even China hasn’t fully standardized on a single plant that they’re building in huge numbers without customization.
> Solar and batteries are still more expensive than gas (as the article admits) but prices are continuing to decrease.
Exactly, gas is heavily subsidized and government supported in the US. And even with that support it only barely scrapes ahead. Courtesy of current and future tax payers coughing up the interest payments on the trillions of dollars in debt. That's not going to last indefinitely. The key point here is that the difference is a bit artificial.
In the rest of the world where installing solar is something like a third of the cost (no tariffs, less installation bureaucracy, less crippling rules and legislation, etc.) and where batteries can be imported closer to cost price from China, the picture is very different. If it's importing LNG vs. cheap solar panels + batteries, the latter is already very attractive in many places. Even at higher latitudes than the 49th parallel below which most of the US is.
And it's on track to get a lot better. Production for sodium ion batteries is starting to come online in China. It will be a while before those make it to the US due to the politics. But some are now projecting cost as low as 10$/kwh for those mid term. 1 mwh battery would cost about 10K$ at those prices. And they have quite long lives (thousands of charge cycles). You can run a house on one of those for well over a month in the US. Much longer in places where houses are better insulated and more efficient. It will be a few years before we can get these obviously. But it's a nice mental model for what a reasonably affordable battery will be able to do soon.
> And it's on track to get a lot better. Production for sodium ion batteries is starting to come online in China. It will be a while before those make it to the US due to the politics. But some are now projecting cost as low as 10$/kwh for those mid term.
Is that a typo? Just a year ago ago batteries were expected to drop to $80/kWh around 2026-2027... $10/kWh in the near future is absolutely insane.
What counts as "soon" is pretty subjective of course, but $10/kWh is only 3 halving's from $80/kWh. So it wouldn't be too surprising if $80/kWh in 2026 corresponded to $10/kWh in 2030.
More expensive than gas, if you power 98% of the grid with it. But if you power 60% of the grid, it's cheaper than gas. Useful distinction imo.
The linked white paper says that the cutover point is at 97% for sunny locations in the US, and more surprisingly, 90% for cloudy mainland US locations.
The great part is... we already have more than enough Nuclear, Hydro, Wind, and Geothermal power for that other 10% - so going 100% solar would be asinine.
It's not quite that simple. You need to be able to supply 100% of demand 10% of the time, and we don't have enough nuclear, hydro and wind to do that. 100% of demand 10% of the time is an oversimplification, but a reasonable one.
I don't think the USA is costing in the political risk of not converting to green energy. You do not want to be the only country emitting significant CO2 in a decades time when everyone else has transitioned. Partly it will be more expensive to keep burning fuel especially when the economy of scale decreases but also the political risk of sanctions will be very high.
It'll be a long tail. The less people rely on fossil fuels, the cheaper it will get (until it gets so underused you start lose economies of scale). But even without any proper political leadership, America will follow the money and pick the most profitable choice.
It's the long term economics that the US should be worried about. Just because the US is sticking its head in the sand doesn't mean the rest of the world is slowing down investments along with it. Other countries are investing heavily in becoming energy independent which means they'll be building the infrastructure to generate lots of cheap energy to power their economies rather than depending on expensive fossil fuel imports. Part of which currently come from the US. The recent tariff madness is actually speeding all this up.
The US as an manufacturing and export country already doesn't make much sense. And that will only get worse. Industry depends on energy and if that energy is locally more expensive than abroad, that puts any energy intensive business at a disadvantage when other countries start running on really cheap renewables and battery.
If you look at this globally, there are a lot of emerging markets that never imported that much oil, coal, and gas to begin with that probably never will. They'll be growing fueled by cheap locally generated renewables. And then there are countries all over Asia and Europe that are mostly importing their fossil fuels that are going to decimate what they import over the next decades. All of that will shift the economic balance in their favor. Any one exporting fossil fuels (including the US) is going to have a rather big problem with shrinking exports.
Places like China are far ahead of everyone else here. And an increasingly large part of their economy is actually selling their tech to other countries to get to a similar level.
> Putting tariffs on solar equipment imports is an insane self-defeat. We should be importing as much cheap solar and battery gear as we can get our hands on.
The tariffs are going to impact me heavily because I had planned on buying a shitload of solar in the next 3-5 years. If the price on solar triples in that timeframe (as the price on other things has in the last few years), I will not be "going solar" after all except for a few small hobby projects.
That being said, we should not lose sight of the fact that the REASON solar is cheap right now is because it manufactured almost exclusively in the far east, at cost, subsidized by a communist state, to stifle worldwide competition. I don't think that is good for the world either. There is likely (hopefully) a middle ground here somewhere.
> subsidized by a communist state, to stifle worldwide competition
I don't think "to stifle competition" is right. I suspect China would love it if other countries were investing in solar as much as they are. They just want the tech ASAP.
> subsidized by a communist state, to stifle worldwide competition
China primarily wants to cut oil and gas imports. Exports are a bonus.
China was a big solar exporter before it was a big solar installer. China had a small solar manufacturing capacity in 2003. By 2008 it was number one in the world for solar manufacturing and it has remained there since:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China#/media/Fi...
But it didn't start installing large quantities of solar power domestically until 2013:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China#Solar_PV_...
Before that, solar power was too expensive for large scale use inside China. Chinese renewable energy growth was mostly hydropower and wind before 2013. Now of course China is by far #1 in yearly solar power installations as well as solar manufacturing, and that in combination with electric vehicle adoption is helping to curb oil demand:
"China’s electric car revolution hammers demand for oil"
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-electric-car-revolution...
"Sadly, the US is hitting a hiccup as the current administration is going out of their way to make solar installs harder and more expensive"
The other group has been trying to tax solar for years: https://solarrights.org/blog/2025/05/06/solartax2024/
Why no outcry on HN?
As someone who greatly supports solar power and the rights of homeowners to install solar, I think your link is total bullshit and calling it a "solar tax" is disingenuous by people that want something for free
The fundamental problem with net metering is that it is obviously unsustainable and unfair. People who are hooked up to the grid benefit from more than just the energy they consume, but the hookup costs and maintenance of the grid is a real cost that power companies need to pay for. Perhaps even more obviously, any company that is in a retail business can only survive if they buy a product at a (cheaper) wholesale rate and sell it at a (more expensive) retail rate. Net metering is exactly the same as forcing power companies to buy energy at a retail rate. Again, this is obviously not sustainable.
As a homeowner, of course I would love net metering, because I'd be getting a sweet deal. But it's not hard for me to see how this can't continue as solar power installations increase. Austin, TX, was one of the first locales to use "value of solar" pricing, and yeah, while it sucks for the homeowner, it is also fairer and more sustainable. I'm also not saying this is the only way to do things (e.g. you could have a monthly connection fee and a separate monthly power charge), but this "solar rights" group is just spinning bullshit because their sweet deal is about to come to an end.
The electric company isn't "entitled" to their subscribers either.
My city recently enacted a tax on solar called a generation fee or something like that. That is, if you put up solar panels, generate all your own power, and export ZERO back to the grid you need to pay them "fee" for every kWh generated because they are making less back in distribution costs to their subscribers since you stopped buying their power.
Sounds to me like their broken business model is their problem. After doing the math in some places it make sense to disconnect completely, avoid the interconnect fees, and run a standby generator for the edge cases where solar doesn't work. I've heard this is becoming popular in places like Australia and California more recently (Of course, then the government tries to make living off grid illegal to protect electric company profits)
Someone needs to pay to maintain the connection to your house, even if you don't draw any electricity from it.
"As a homeowner, of course I would love net metering, because I'd be getting a sweet deal. But it's not hard for me to see how this can't continue as solar power installations increase. Austin, TX, was one of the first locales to use "value of solar" pricing, and yeah, while it sucks for the homeowner, it is also fairer and more sustainable. "
Solar should be saving the homeowner money and not risking increased taxes in the future, especially if the homeowner has to foot the bill for thousands of dollars it takes to install the panels/system.
"Net metering is exactly the same as forcing power companies to buy energy at a retail rate. Again, this is obviously not sustainable."
Why prop up power companies if the business model is unsustainable? Especially if you want to convert to something like solar? Why should I, as a homeowner, be forced to pay the power companies just because they can't change with the times?
You don't. Disconnect from the grid completely. If you don't need the power company then disconnect from them.
The problem lies when you need the power company 'some of the time'.
The costs of the power company are in 2 parts. Generation and Distribution. Traditionally those costs were bundled together, those who used more paid more (for both generation and Distribution. )
If I generate my own solar, say 65% of the time, then I'm paying 65% less for generation (which is fair, I'm using 65% less) but I'm also paying 65% less for distribution (which is unfair because the cost of distribution is fixed, not variable. )
The power company can solve this by billing the two parts separately. Indeed in some places in the world utilities are formally splitting the two parts into different companies. Generation has variable cost depending on consumption- Distribution has fixed cost if you are connected at all.
Of course people without solar want this split (it fairly distributes Distribution), folks with solar want the old way to continue (less for me to pay, cost to everyone else goes up.)
Power companies are trying to change with the times, by separately billing. Some homeowners are the ones trying to straddle the best of both words, and effectively get "100% availability" for no cost.
> You don't. Disconnect from the grid completely. If you don't need the power company then disconnect from them.
That's not a fair argument.
> The costs of the power company are in 2 parts. Generation and Distribution
That's the real issue. How, in most places in the us that I know of, these 2 are combined. Which leads to this problem becoming a thing.
We all pay taxes for roads. Whether we use them or not. Being connected to the grid should make everyone pay an equal share based on their connection size. Who delivers power over that connection? Pick your provider, make it a free market where power is a true commodity. Generation prices will drop significantly, distribution prices will probably go up.
You can apply the above reasoning to the ISPs of the world too. Like roads, and electric connections, I think we can all consider an internet connection as vital to our daily lives as roads are
My bill is currently split between generation and distribution, and the two halves are roughly equal. (I don't have any solar at the moment.)
The interesting bit is that the distribution charge is a mix of fixed-fees and per-kWh fees. Obviously the fixed fees will remain if I added solar, but I'm not certain what would happen to the per-kWh fees if I started exporting power to the grid.
My electric bill already shows a fixed "facility" charge and a variable "energy" charge. If I didn't use any electricity one month, I would still owe the facility charge. I thought they all did it that way.
> Why should I, as a homeowner, be forced to pay the power companies...?
You keep making this disingenuous argument all over this thread.
If you have solar and use their grid to distribute it you pay to use their grid. If you want solar off the grid and want no distribution you pay nothing to them.
It's really that simple. There is production and distribution. If you are using their distribution you pay them for it. Not to mention for the stability of still getting power when your solar is insufficient...
Most of the cost of power is not the cost of the electrons. You have to account for the transmission and distribution infrastructure, the operation of the grid, the safety programs, customer service, etc. Retail rates bake that all in. When you run local solar, they are still providing all of that for you when you need it, plus the distribution of the power you sell back to them. What would be "fair" would be to net meter at the value of the power, minus the cost of the grid and backup generation. The cold truth is that this would still be a negative number, i.e. what would truly be fair is for the homeowner to pay a fee to the power company even when they are running off of their own solar 24/7.
If you don't want to pay the power company, drop their service and go it alone. If you want them as a backup for when your solar rig isn't producing what you need, then you should expect to pay the higher costs that more reliable power production demands.
"In California, a "Solar Tax" has been proposed in recent years, which would impose fees or charges on households with rooftop solar panels based on the energy they produce.
Proposals have included fees as high as $700 per year for the average solar consumer. These efforts, backed by Governor Newsom’s Public Utilities Commission, were defeated in 2021, 2022, and 2024 due to public outcry but remain under consideration."
Just admit that the the Democrats in charge of California don't care about the environmental benefits of solar.
I don't live in California and don't pay attention to what the Democrats there do. My response was about "net metering." Having to sell your solar power to the utility at the wholesale rate, not the retail rate, would seem fair to me, since you're only selling them power and not any of the other stuff that is necessary to deliver that power to anywhere else. If you don't like the price, don't sell the power, find something else to do with it or some other way to store it.
Austin's "value of solar" is the opposite of net metering. 100% of the solar you produce goes back into the grid, which is bought at some cheap rate, and then you buy back your own electricity at retail rates. You litterally lose more money at tier 3 rates than you get paid.
> The other group has been trying to tax solar for years: https://solarrights.org/blog/2025/05/06/solartax2024/
Sorry, what other group. Power companies?
HEH
"They unsuccessfully tried again in 2024, working with Governor Newsom to try and slip a Solar Tax in his proposed budget."
Remind me again who is in charge of the California state legislature, and who voted against this 'tax'.
So you aren't going to blame the governor, but some how will blame the Republicans for all of these issues and more? If you were at least a little more honest, I might be able to have a discussion with you.
Ah more mental gymnastics in chat. Trying to tax solar and flinging around tariffs backed by extreme climate change denial are not exactly the same thing.
NM-just perused your HN comments and they are littered with dog whistles and talking points. Gymnastics seems too generous.
"Trying to tax solar"
We are specifically talking about the increase costs in solar. Taxing is definitely one of them.
"dog whistles and talking point"
You have 3 comments. You also keep using that phrase 'gymnastics'. Do you even know what it means? It doesn't appear so.
I use it only for folks like you and other proxy red hats. I know what it means. Sorry I haven’t dedicated my days to pumping internet points on hn. I mostly lurk. I also know what that means. You and your ilk turn yourselves inside out to prove to ONLY YOU that you are righteous in your dogma. Always with the most vague and suspect “sources”. Your fear driven ethos and enlarged frontal lobe will hopefully be the end of you and yours eventually in public discourse. Until then, good luck.
I haven't heard anyone say it out loud, but I'd wager it's in large part related to things like Chinese solar panels containing remotely triggerable kill-switches and/or having the ability to function as unauthorized mesh relays
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-...
You can trace out the circuits on a traditional solar panel. They aren't complex devices. If someone managed to hide some kind of control chip in there and also some sort of connectivity to trigger it then my hat is off to them.
I would worry more about the inverters, including microinverters.
Also consider that if someone is doing industrial sabotage on that scale it would be much easier to attack the fossil fuel and nuclear power plants and their enormous computer controlled generators. Even hydroelectric would be susceptible. Or maybe attack the substations. There is nothing unique or special about solar panels that makes them a good target, and their highly distributed and diverse nature actually makes them more difficult.
Other targets may be more appropriate, but:
> and their highly distributed and diverse nature actually makes them more difficult
Distributed doesn't make it harder, if/when there's a common failure mode. See e.g. this with the power grid which is obviously as distributed as any PV connected to it: https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/01/could-hackers-use-n...
Depends if you can exploit the system directly from the Internet or if you need to break into hundreds of thousands of individual networks before you can trigger the attack.
I could see subterfuge in the inverters, but aren't panels themselves electrically very simple? I would think a rogue device within the panel itself would be apparent.
It's still worth examining the panels in minute detail. I just think it would be a ton more difficult to hide much functionality within a panel.
Reds under beds, again?
The S in IoT stands for security
This isn’t a thing. As in - try sitting in on a power purchase negotiation where the minutiae of every conceivable risk is debated for hours on end and this never even comes up.
If I were a VC or PE firm, this is exactly where I’d be putting a lot of money in the next year or two. Right now there’s a lot of fear given the stance of the current administration, which makes it pretty ripe for smart money willing to play the long game (as Buffett famously noted).
The technology keeps improving, clean energy is increasingly shaping up to be a new arms race with China, and politics these days tend to swing back and forth wildly. By 2028+, it’s very plausible we’ll see things 180 and there'll be plenty of government attention given to clean energy. Even the current administration could change their tune if it's positioned as "beating China" (or even for no reason at all, because who knows with them).
Spending a couple years to prop it up and become a well-established player by then could be a huge advantage.
Do you mean investments in solar panel manufacturing, or something else? From what I understand solar panels are somewhat commoditized, and China has massive subsidies for their manufacturers. I wouldn't want to get in that game. If you mean battery R&D + manufacture, I think that could be promising
On solar panel investments, at the time TSMC got into the chip game, I think most people might have said something very similar to a TSMC. Chips are commodotized, and the existing entrants are highly capitalized, and why TSMC do you think you can outdo the likes of 1987 Intel TI, Motorola, NEC et al.
Perkskovites to name one tech, will probably be a generational shift in solar panel technologies, the US would be stupid to miss it if they want to be a future world energy player outside the slow inevitable decline of fossil fuels.
For who has the stomach to fund it, there is available maybe another order of magnitude in cost performance in solar, and say two or three orders of magnitude of cost performance available in batteries?
Brookfield is investing in it:
There's something that struck me about the recent controversy with the Memphis datacenter. The one rolling out 2 gigawatts of on-site natural gas to power itself. It's this: that the CEO-who-can't-be-named, happens to own one of the largest lithium battery makers in the US; and makes utility-scale grid storage batteries; and also, for completeness, owns a solar photovoltaic plant. If anyone would be using solar+storage for economics, it would that datacenter in sunny, southern USA—but that CEO would rather buy gas than his own product.
It's not a one-off datapoint: none of the other upcoming massive AI datacenters, that I've read about, are built for solar power. Amazon's in rural Illinois (2.2 gigawatts), was also on HN, also going with natural gas.
I'll believe in this when the ruthlessly optimizing FAANG's believe in it, with their own money. Clearly they do not.
2 gigawatts of output would require about 8,000 acres of solar panels. The energy density just isn't there compared to gas.
It requires some square kilometers of panels yes, but it’s definitely possible to do solar farms at that scale.
E.g. the Al Dhafra Solar PV project in the UAE has a capacity of 2 GW and covers over 20 square kilometers, using ~4 million panels.
Of course, but not in the footprint available at the data center
No cheap land for sale in Califonia City that this DC and corresponding PV array could've used?
I mean, sure, Musk clearly doesn't like CA these days, but the point is there's a lot of cheap land out there.
How big is the gas field which supplies the gas turbine?
If they were ruthlessly optimizing they wouldn't be jumping on the AI train at the scale they do, and then they wouldn't need those DC's in the first place.
The xAI datacenters do use batteries though. The batteries have advantages for providing a clean power supply and not tripping the grid when large workloads start or finish.
According to the article, 2 GW would require 8-10 Solar GW and 35-40 GWh of batteries to achieve high 90's availability. I would guess finding enough land close by might be a challenge.
Louisiana also has industry who would love more solar deployment but is getting kneecapped by Entergy who will ask how high when Meta says jump.
Solar is a lot easier and faster to deploy - no turbine needed, just convert photons to electrons. The US has sadly decided to shoot itself in the foot by electing an Administration bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry so they're doing everything they can to stymie solar.
If you're interested in this, I recommend reading Casey Handmer's blog. Here is one of several pieces about cost curves and learning rate for solar and batteries: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/11/09/solar-and-batt...
This is a lot of words to say “solar + battery lcoe is $70/MWH and gas is $40/MWH, but most places outside the U.S. don’t have access to tons of cheap gas so it’s more expensive there”
And no, they are wrong, gas is still currently cheaper ($40 is less than $70)
In other places outside US, cost of gas electricity is not 40/MWh. In Germany for example, the cost of natural gas power plants is 110 to 170 Euros/MWh.
For solar in Germany, it is 37 Euro/MWh to 80 Euros/MWh not including storage.
Where did you get the 110 - 170 figure from?
According to [1] (figure 5, 6) its at the maximum, around 80€ MWh. Am I looking at the wrong stats?
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Not the parent, but I believe they were talking about LCOE, or total cost including building the plant and operating it. So that will be the cost of natural gas plus the rest amortized.
Yes. It would be LCOE for both solar and gas.
Yeah ok but without storage you are comparing apples to oranges. Even with storage it is barely comparable. Since even with batteries you can't provide power 24/7.
This is factually inaccurate. At solar and storage costs today, they are cheaper than existing fossil generation in all of Europe. In the US, even at today's low fossil gas prices, they are competitive. They will become even more competitive over the next several years as the price of solar and batteries continues to decline, and the US fossil gas market is exposed to global demand via LNG exports. Renewables prices will keep going down, fossil costs will keep going up, very broadly speaking.
Base load is a myth; as long as you can orchestrate low carbon energy (nuclear + renewables + hydro), storage (hydro and batteries), transmission, and load shifting and shedding, the grid will continue to operate at expected service levels. Europe demonstrates this today with high renewables penetration in Portugal, Spain, the UK, and Germany, and nuclear in France (with robust exports to adjacent grids). "Excess" renewables that are curtailed during low demand seasons solve for near term storage as the storage manufacturing/deployment ramp curves upward and the price decline curves downward.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/01/solar-cost-of-electri...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/european-unio...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-is-eus-bigges...
RE ".....At solar and storage costs today, they are cheaper than existing fossil generation in all of Europe....." If so, are power prices decreasing in Europe?
If not, there must be other costs not included, in the above statement?Europe isn't optimizing for lower prices. It's trying to phase out coal, which might lead to higher prices if gas is used more often:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/20/why-the-uks...
Lots of nuance, citations below, TLDR is fossil gas and hydro volatility from Russia and climate change has caused price levels seen. Europe avoided €59B in fossil fuel import costs due to new wind and solar in the EU since 2019. The evidence shows renewables have been restraining electrical cost increases, and as more renewables and storage is deployed, costs should remain flat (if not decline).
https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-j...
https://ember-energy.org/data/european-electricity-prices-an...
https://gmk.center/en/infographic/electricity-prices-in-euro...
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/electricity-prices-acros...
> Base load is a myth; as long as you can orchestrate low carbon energy (nuclear + renewables + hydro), storage (hydro and batteries), transmission, and load shifting and shedding, the grid will continue to operate at expected service levels. Europe demonstrates this today with high renewables penetration in Portugal, Spain, the UK, and Germany, and nuclear in France (with robust exports to adjacent grids).
As long as you keep the gas peaker plants operating for those few months every couple of years with overcast, low wind weather (e.g. in 2021: https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w... ) which severely limits a lot of the renewable output.
Or you don't have an unpredicted peak/drop and the whole grid fails over (cf. Iberia a few months back).
Handwaving very complex problems as "it's a myth" won't make it go away.
> Handwaving very complex problems as "it's a myth" won't make it go away.
Having evidence that the problem is tractable, while observing the continued rate of deployment of generation and storage, as well as their cost decline rates, is arguably not handwaving anything away. Simply follow along observing China as they continue to prove out the thesis ahead of developed countries.
Enough sunlight falls on Earth in ~30 minutes to power humanity for a year. Everything else is capture, transmission, and storage.
China launches world’s first grid-forming sodium-ion battery storage plant - https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/03/china-launches-worlds-fi... - June 3rd, 2025 ("With a total investment of over CNY 460 million ($63.8 million) and occupying 34,000 square metres, the Baochi plant is designed for an installed capacity of 200MW/400MWh. Based on a dual daily charge-discharge cycle, it can regulate up to 580 GWh annually — enough to power 270,000 households, with 98 per cent of its energy sourced from renewables. The facility supports more than 30 local wind and solar power stations, alleviating the impact of intermittent supply and facilitating the integration of high shares of renewables into the grid.")
How we made it: will China be the first electrostate? - https://www.ft.com/content/e1a232c7-52a0-44dd-a13b-c4af54e74... | https://archive.today/OSFYo - May 20th, 2025
If we use power-to-gas for the gas peaker plants, gas peaker plants can be just as renewable. We can use excess Summer electricity to generate it, We've already got the powerplants and storage anyway.
Not sure why you say this. I'm on solar + batteries 24/7 365 days a year. Use no fossil fuels. Even had utility company remove power poles from my place.
Yeah for some parts of the world that is possible. Not for most of europe.
Probably pretty doable in Europe. For one most people don't have air conditioning and that's a big suck of electricity. And if you aren't using electric for heat then realistically your electric draw is not going to be that high
Heating generally uses much more energy than cooling, and even more so if something is burned.
However, it's true that places with low heat pump adoption tend to have few ACs. For example, ACs are rarer in Germany than in Norway, despite Germany being warmer.
More like comparing fresh apples to preserved dried apples, in that PV is still useful even without storage until it exceeds ~100% of daytime demand; and even then pumped hydro is like a fridge or something similar to put the fresh apples in, because you got it anyway for unrealated reasons.
Where is your $40/mwh figure from? The claim in the podcast is that average LCOE for new gas in the US is "around $76, $78" or "around $70".
Combined cycle can be as low as $37 during low price periods of natural gas; combustion cycle is around or higher than the $70 in the podcast. Dedicated peaker plants can be much more expensive depending on the design.
Where are your numbers from? "during low price periods" doesn't really make sense here, we're talking about LCOE which is the average cost over the lifetime of a plant.
> This is a lot of words to say “solar + battery lcoe is $70/MWH and gas is $40/MWH,
No, that isn't what the article says. I'll quote it for you:
I think it was around $70 for new gas. It was a weighted US average — from memory, but I might be wrong on that.
Lazard agrees with you: https://www.lazard.com/media/uounhon4/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
Marginal costs of $108 for gas peaking and $31 for combined cycle. $48-$107 actual LCOE ($77.5 average).
I want a solar powered greenhouse in AZ, where the solar panels are used solely to run an AC unit, keeping temps down during the day - without using inverters or batteries. With some large water barrels in the greenhouse, it should maintain temps down during the night. Is this practical? The solar panels don’t necessarily need to be on the greenhouse itself, as I have plenty of land. Trying to do this as cheap as possible. Any ideas?
Meanwhile in the WSJ opinion section there is a hit-piece warning of power shortages because of wind and solar subsidies. We should be subsidizing gas turbines, if only the market would listen!
"The Real Risk to the Electric Grid" https://archive.ph/avp9N
Ooga-Booga!!!
Off-topic, but why is these no scrollbar on the transcript in firefox? I smacked my keyboard and now I've lost my position and it's going to be a pain to find it again.
Besides that, I was going to note: Yes, solar isn't necessarily great in northern Germany and further north. But us and the Scots and the Brits have one super-power up our sleeve: Shitty weather made of rain, wind and misery. Meaning, we put up wind turbines up here. We got like 33% of our power from these turbines over 2024 and apparently, expansion of wind capacity in 2025 is happening very quickly.
It's somewhat amusing, because the amount of wind power and planned offshore wind capacities are currently forcing rather large infrastructure projects to move all of this power south. My parents are living right next to where Nordtrasse A-Nord is going past. That is a _huge_ construction site.
> Off-topic, but why is these no scrollbar on the transcript in firefox? I smacked my keyboard and now I've lost my position and it's going to be a pain to find it again.
I see a scrollbar in Firefox on Windows but it's quite small due to the article length + comments at the bottom. Maybe 5% of the height of the whole scroll bar.
This article fails to mention that a lot of current commercial scale battery co-locations' purpose is to capitalize on rare but highly profitable periods where demand spikes and spot prices go up by, sometimes, multiple orders of magnitude.
The idea is to store the power until these events. A lot of money is made from these.
Where are they getting all the lithium from, anyone know? I thought we would have a major shortage by now.
The top lithium mining country is currently Australia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_lithium_p...
Here's a USGS report on global lithium from 1996:
https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/...
And the same report from 2025:
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-lithium.pd...
Over those 29 years world production shot up from 6,300 tons in 1995 to 240,000 tons in 2024. At the same time reserves grew from 2.2 million tons to 30 million tons.
How can reserves go up even as we're mining lithium faster? It's because reserves are defined by a combination of economics and technology. The Earth's crust contains 20 ppm of lithium now and in 1996 (or a million years ago, for that matter). The geology doesn't change but the effort put into identifying potential sources of lithium and means of extracting and purifying lithium does change. Geologically speaking, the Earth has a lot of lithium. World lithium reserves have been increasing faster than they have been depleted, because the industrial demand that causes reserve depletion also spurs additional research to identify potential lithium sources and extraction processes.
Capitalism doing its (positive) thing. Awesome to hear, thank you!
Mostly Australian mines. There's no projected shortage that I have ever heard of. There's plenty of Lithium in them there hills.
> There's plenty of Lithium in them there hills.
Good to hear!
Reason why I thought there was a shortage was because there was a major push to recover Li from old phones a few years back. I have 4-5 old unused phones lying around my house. (Mostly because there's old text messages in them that I'm hoarding.) I presume it's the same for others. And I was wondering whether there's enough Li for new phones.
The nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper in old batteries is valuable, not the lithium.
You thought wrong. There's plenty of lithium on this planet. And we keep discovering more convenient sources and ways to extract it. We have a surplus. That's why kg prices have come down.
Good to hear!
Seems like renewable fuels of some type could make it much more realistic to move away from fossil fuels. Even hydrogen could work if people really wanted to make it work. But surely there is a way to make ammonia, ethanol, biodiesel, or something viable for long term renewable energy storage.
That's the business model of Terraform Industries[1]. They're betting on solar getting cheap enough to make synthesis of hydrocarbons economically competitive. It looks like they're selling synthesized natural gas for $35/MCF, which is 2.5x the national average. As panels get cheaper and they optimize their processes, it seems likely that they'll be able to make natural gas for cheaper than uhh... natural natural gas.
I'm rooting for them but $35/MCF is more like 10x current market price.
"Henry Hub Natural Gas Spot Price is at a current level of 3.21, down from 3.22 the previous market day and up from 2.17 one year ago." That's in $/MMBTU, divide by 1.038 to get $/MCF.
That's the price at a hub before distribution & transport. For comparison, the cost in Hawaii is $23/MCF. Terraform's plan is to make synthesis plants closer to where the natural gas would be used, reducing distribution & transport costs.
I have done a fair amount of noodling around with the numbers and have come to the conclusion that within a decade, maybe two, we'll start to see rural homes disconnecting from the grid in significant numbers.
Or for new homes, not connecting to the grid in the first place. Around here, the cost of getting a new house on the grid is $50,000 - $100,000. This is often more than the cost of the land itself. That will buy a serious amount of panels and storage, AND you won't have to send a $100 - $200 check to the utility every month. (They will need replacing in a few decades, of course, but being energy-independent can still work out.)
I live in Michigan which is one of the worst states for solar. Full sun only half the time and fairly brutal winters, depending on the year. Yet I know people who get almost all of their electricity from solar. They treat the grid as a big backup generator. Some are just getting into it now and others have been doing it for years as a hobby. Of course there's more to it than just switching power sources. You need to think about insulating your home better, alternative sources of heat, timing when you run certain appliances, running some stuff directly off DC to reduce conversion losses, etc. But it's eminently doable. Which means it's a complete no-brainer for the southwestern states with plenty of sun and very little demand for winter heat.
My main concern at this point is that solar and batteries are cheap NOW, will they be in the future? It's hard to say. But my guess is that we might be at peak "cheapness" for solar, for a bunch of reasons. The federal subsidy is going away. Right now, solar panels and batteries come from almost exclusively from China, whose government has subsidized their low cost to prevent foreign competition. Even if they decide to keep producing them cheaply (they may not, their economy is not doing any better than ours lately), the new tariffs are designed explicitly to make them NOT cheap in order to favor US manufacturers (the few such that there are, one of which is Tesla) and indirectly, oil companies.
In urban/suburban environments, solar can make sense to offset SOME electricity usage in order to lower the light bill, but that's about as far as you can get for most homes. What little land is available is shaded by trees or large buildings. Roof panels work, but are a huge pain for panel and roof maintenance, and the roof should face south, and only so many can fit on the roof, etc. A rack of lithium batteries bolted to the outside of a house looks like a liability to insurance companies and may lower resale value. I still think the best strategy for urban environments is to force utilities (via regulation) to build out more solar farms to move the risks out of the neighborhoods, let the utilities handle all the maintenance and pain points, and take advantage of the economies of scale.
> I have done a fair amount of noodling
I did the same noodling years ago, when battery prices were "only" dropping at 8% per year. My conclusion was in your decade or two, it's possible energy production and storage will be driven by solar and EV's in the suburbs respectively.
I don't see how that won't happen, to be honest. The costs they talk about in the article, like $70/MWH, is the wholesale price. The customer pays about 3 times that. If batteries and solar look good at $70/MWH, they look like gold raining from the sky when you are paying $240/MWH.
Right now where I live, you can buy a dedicated house batteries. They cost as little under $1000/kWh installed. Or you can buy an EV which works out at $600/kWh for the battery, and you get the rest of the car for free :D.
If the current trajectory of battery prices continues, the fate of the car industry is sealed. It's all over bar the shouting. When means everyone is going to have a positively gigantic parked in the garage regardless of what the insurance companies you are wringing your hands over think of it. And yes solar panels on the roof are a hassle, but you can justify a lot of hassles when your power costs 300% more if you don't have them on the roof.
A crucial factor is also availability. You can basically buy square kilometers of solar today, but if you want a gas turbine for your plant, you are on a +5yr waiting list.
Sound to me like it's a feature not a bug.
OT, how much more (or less) efficient is solar out in space? I am guessing radiant energy is much higher.
Location and use are big factors, I am sure.
I am writing from an off-grid shack in rural CO where I have installed a fairly nice panel, storage, and inverter system (4kw panels, 15kwh batteries, 6kw inverter).
I'm about $10k into that project (though I did all the labor, and didn't count that), but the easement and company equipment would have been $25k-$35k... much more effecient from a money perspective to go with solar out here in the sticks.
I am sure that in places like space, where there are no gas stations (or much solid matter at all), solar is going to be an easier deal than petrochemicals.
Very cool! What's winter like for you and this setup?
Last winter (my first) was cold, but I still hadn't built the little solar setup and was living in a 9x9 shack with a diesel heater.
By the end of the winter I had renovated a 24x24 room into my music studio, which is mostly heated with firewood that I collect as part of my wildfire mitigation or (kind of expensive) an externally vented propane all heater.
By the end of the winter it was much easier to stay warm. Hopefully I'll have a septic, cistern, and tiny house setup by the time it geet cold again.
The solar equipment was super easy to install and I think it will be cheaper than grid power in the 10-year time frame.
Solar flux above the atmosphere is around 1300 watts per square meter. At the ground in say Las Vegas it's around 1000 watts. Cloud cover or similar can cut that in half or worse.
Sinking heat is an issue in space. The thermal radiator panels on the ISS are bigger than the solar panels.
I never understood why heat exchange is so hard in space. I suppose it’s hard to keep things in orbit while also keeping hot and cold sides stationary?
It just boils down to radiation being a lot less effective way to shed heat than conduction/convection to a surrounding medium.
If you can get there cheaply (you can't right now), getting rid of heat becomes an issue rapidly. ISS has large banks of radiators to shed heat.
Not THAT Dave Jones, unfortunately.
That's just about how far I thought
> who find that solar-plus-storage costs have declined so much that it can now provide baseload-level power in sunny cities for less than the cost of new nuclear or even new gas.
What about cities that only get enough sun from about April to late September? If your battery is doing almost nothing during the other half of the year, it becomes way less cost effective. Still good, but takes twice as long to be really profitable.
Until you're really close to the arctic circle, it's really cheap to just buy e.g 4x the amount of PV and then keep charging in winter anyway.
Beyond a certain point, it makes more sense to use transmission lines connecting you to somewhere sunnier.
The western American grid connects bits of Canada to bits of Mexico.
Isn't one problem with solar+storage that the battery cannot store the energy accumulated in the summer until the winter?
I mean, there are countries with seasons (at least for a few more years, until we're done screwing up the climate).
Solar and wind are good complements. Solar is strong at day in the summer, and wind is strong at night in the winter. Most Northern european countries would need 2-10 days of storage with 2-5x required capacity of solar+wind installed. Noone wants to store a full season’s energy.
Tony Seba talks a lot about this stuff if you’re interested.
> Noone wants to store a full season’s energy.
Dams do that...
Generating enough power even in winter is feasible in most countries. The very northerly ones may need other solutions (but luckily tend to be sparsely populated and thus need less power).
Interesting to see that solar panels seem to keep their Moor‘s Law intact. This is indeed a fundamental lever to lift solar over the threshold to make it viable for many.
However in terms energy security: Are these efficient panels (and future ones) produced at all outside of China?
I looked at solar and battery set up for an off-grid RV system about 3 years ago and revisited again just a few weeks ago. There's been some impressive strides in terms of wattage produced and battery AH.
It's still a long, long way from where it needs to be to live fully off solar, though. Want solar powered AC and a fridge? One or the other. You can't have both. It still needs help from the consumption end and energy production end. For example, mini-split AC systems these past few years have at least made solar-powered ACs in RVs possible.
Sure you can. You can get a 5kva inverter/charger from victron for about €800, and pylontech lifepo4 batteries will set you back about €200/kWh with 5kwh units. Panels are now so cheap as to be negligible in price.
15kWh of storage, which is plenty to run AC, a fridge, and plenty else overnight, would be €3000. Call it €1200 for 7kw of panels and mounting gear, which you could just about cram on your roof assuming a full sized RV, and you’re looking at €5000 all in.
I live totally off grid, and admittedly have 30kW of panels and 75kWh of storage, but we also charge the car, cook, heat, cool, and all the rest off of it. Battery prices have dropped precipitously over the last five years - our original OPzS lead bank is a joke compared to the lithiums I can now just chuck in on pretty much a whim.
> full sized RV,
7kw of panels? Nothing under a full-sized RV (45') can touch that. Those are the tour-bus style RVs.
The problem is that at that length, they're impractical for boondocking because that often involves some pretty rough terrain. You'll be limited to RV parts and those have power hookup anyways.
Boondocking is far easier/less dangerous with your Class B/Cs which are well under 30' in length. You have far less room for panels at that length.
With a shorter rig you could use slide-out armatures - double or triple your area when you’re parked up, plus get a nice awning to chill out under. Victron stuff if you’re talking about the electronics is all marine rated and commonly used in vehicles.
This sort of thing:
Honest question, maybe I am being stupid here, but why do people insist on counting solar+storage costs per MWh, when LCOE already takes into account that the sun does not shine at night. So when you pay for electricity from solar and the price is 40 per MWh, the fact you will not get anything at night is already baked into the price. If you could get solar at night, the price would be half of what it is now. So it should be either solar or storage costs because you only pay for one of those, and the price in case you use each for half the time is basically the average of the two.
Yet I keep seeing people argue against solar by simply stacking those two costs on top of each other.
Solar and batteries have made a lot of strides. At the technology level, it looks great.
The problem is that energy is a concerted industry that requires all of the parts to work together. That requires institutions that are ready and willing to play ball. Otherwise you look like Brazil, which until this year had a really impressive trend of solar adoption which just... suddenly... stopped:
https://www.absolar.org.br/mercado/infografico/
You can see it clearly in the graph: solar adoption grows rapidly every year until 2024, going from under 5% to over 20% of Brazil's electricity matrix in a decade, and then we get to 2025. Solar farm expansions drop almost to zero, and rooftop adoption significantly slows. Why did this happen? Well, the grid wasn't ready:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/brazils-grid-caps-po...
It's not like nobody could have seen this coming. The trend is smoothly exponential every year until 2025. They just didn't care. There simply was not enough pressure or attention from the government or the public to prevent a grid crunch.
These problems are not unavoidable. They are mostly political failures. In general, electricity markets do not exist without state support. China does not have this problem. In the West, our politicians seem to be too fond of the legacy energy industry and too timid about building infrastructure to address the issue, not to mention the popular tendency to think that the government should — or even can — just "get out of the way", or the ever-present NIMBY lawsuits.
It's not only Brazil, either; the UK has the same problem with wind:
https://archy.deberker.com/the-uk-is-wasting-a-lot-of-wind-p...
...which has been outstanding since 2023. There is not even enough grid capacity planned to address the problem, to say nothing of how little they've actually built. I believe there is currently a political controversy about the appearance of pylons.
> Well, the grid wasn't ready:
You are being sold a pup. The grid was fine. Places like South Australia (a state) have 70% renewables without big changes to the grid.
I don't know what the real reason was, but it's more likely to do renewables undercutting the price the existing coal plants could sell electricity during the day, to the point the were no longer profitable. So to keep them profitable they curtailed the much cheaper solar and wind, rather than the coal fired generation. Maybe those plants are state owned, or perhaps they have good political connections, or perhaps they own the generation, distribution and retail networks making them very difficult for a politician to take on.
The approach taken in other countries is to let the market sort it out, with a guiding hand. If coal plants can only generate at night because they are out-competed during the day by solar, then let them raise their prices at night and when the sun don't shine. That will cause price spikes. Don't like the political problems price spikes cause? Force the retailers to sell at a base price fixed for must they advertise in advance. The retailers won't do that because they are owned by the generators - it's time to split the two functions and create an electricity market. Intermittent renewables and slow ramping coal companies are causing spikes? Create a market for storage, and ensure the retails have no choice but to purchase enough storage guarantee the continuous supply they promised to the customers.
Or you can just sit on your hands, let the existing coal generators continue doing what they have always done, and justify it by saying "the grid" can't handle change. Reuters will happily repeat that excuse for you, without asking too many questions. Politically, that works too. But only in the short term. In the longer term, particularly as those coal fired plants reach end of life, you are up for a really painful time because the gradual change you could have had had now has to happen all at once.
batteries should help with this. They can be cited in points with existing grid connections, and used to lower overall demands on the grid by smoothing out production & demand spikes.
A funny thing that I notice on this site, as a foreign, is apparently everywhere in the US that isn't the place in whichever article is under discussion has weather such as to be effectively uninhabitable.
I realise there is extreme weather in the US but every discussion on renewables, cars, trains, cycling, construction standards or whatever else has comments along the lines of "good for Utah (or wherever) but this couldn't possibly work in the 95% of the US that is constantly inundated by biblical plagues".
Sure the performance of whatever technology might be suboptimal but I struggle to believe vast swathes of the US experience weather so extreme as to be uninhabitable. If I'm wrong y'all really need to leave that country for your own safety.
There is a mental block around "efficiency". Because what most people have in mind is some sort of technical performance efficiency of the solar + battery system. And if it's not higher than some number - then it's unworkable in region X.
Technical performance is an input in the efficiency that actually matters, but definitely not the sole determinant. Ultimately the cost efficiency that delivers the needed power at the some time. If you can capitalize more panels at the right cost, it overcomes an "uunworkable" technical performance efficiency.
Five years ago, solar + batts were getting dismissed as being able to offset natural gas. Now its offseting that tradoff in new energy builds for California. What we're seeing is renewables advancing on multiple efficiency fronts - both technical performance efficiencies, and subsystem costs, to deliver more competitive system cost efficiency. More and more traditional energy and more regions will be displaced because these technologies are still in the rapid cost drop phase of their manufacturing S curves.
It's really a matter of who has the focus and financial strength to continue to invest in the manufacturing and tech to keep up the improvements - a lot like the solar+batt version of Moores law in chips and the race surrounding it.
It's not just "uninhabitable weather". I live in Michigan. It's the second-cloudiest state in the nation, just barely behind Oregon (but they get way more rain than we do), but in terms of "plague"-type weather it's not bad. We do get some thunderstorms, and nominally, we're the northeastern end of "Tornado Alley", and we do have the occasional tornado, but it's not that common. On the net I think Michigan is rather less prone to natural disasters than most places.
But it's cloudy. A lot. It literally does not raise to my conscious awareness if the sun does not shine in December. And I mean literally in its original sense. It takes over 30 days in the winter for me to notice that I haven't seen the sun in a while and another couple of weeks before I'm really bothered by it. We're already far enough north that winter days are noticeably shorter and less bright as it is, and then the sun doesn't even shine. In the summer 50% cloudy is a fairly normal day. Bright blue sky from horizon to horizon is uncommon enough to be worth noting.
Solar advocates may relax as I'm not going to claim that solar is "useless" in Michigan. However, it is undeniably a lot more useful in deserts that are much closer to the equator. And big government solar projects really do pencil out much worse in Michigan than they do in California or Arizona, even though I'm not constantly dodging death around here. I like the diversity in power sources on general principles but we do take an efficiency hit to get it.
I'm originally from the UK so I know cloudy. Not sure if we're better or worse than Michigan but the weather is one of the main reasons I left.
For sure solar isn't as effective in the UK but we're lucky to have shallow sea nearby for offshore wind (onshore wind being opposed by the same kind of NIMBY clowns that are a true biblical plague in every country). But if solar is cheap enough you may as well deploy it even where it's not especially efficient. Then you can start to look at things like transmission lines or whatever energy source works best for your area.
Edit: it's a reasonable point that dollars spent in the 2nd cloudiest state on solar aren't particularly well spent, but that leaves you with 48(?) less cloudy states. While CA is pretty south there are 10 more states to the south of it, one of them is even called the sunshine state and is effectively an uninhabitable sinking swamp, ideal for solar!
There's a good article here showing how solar, gas, and battery storage work together in the UK:
https://electrotechrevolution.substack.com/p/renewables-allo...
The whole thing is worth reading, but this is the most interesting result:
Let's push the boundaries further and see how much solar we can get in the system without exceeding the 100% gas case’s £76/MWh. Playing with the numbers we find that installing 6.5 GW of solar and 12 GWh of battery storage alongside our 1 GW gas plant, we can get to the result plotted below...
Solar now accounts for over 70% of total generation. During the summer basically all electricity now comes from solar. This system costs the same £76/MWh as the 100% gas case. Remarkably, a combination of 1 GW of gas, 6.5 GW of solar, and 12 GWh of battery storage can achieve the same overall system cost as installing just 1 GW of gas.
The lowest-cost scenario has much less solar, but not 100% gas either:
Solar energy now accounts for over a quarter of total generation, while the total system costs £9/MWh less than just using gas.
You can modestly decarbonize a gas-driven electricity system with solar and save a modest amount of money, or keep costs constant and deeply (though not completely) decarbonize the same system with solar and batteries, even in the relatively sunlight-poor UK.
How is the wind in Michigan?
Mixed. There are some substantial wind farms in the middle of the state and on the lakes, especially on the northern part of the thumb. I'm not sure how they compare in general but they're pretty big when you're driving through them. Here's some info on that: https://thumbwind.com/michigan-wind-farm-map/#h-the-great-la...
And since their google maps embed seems to be broken, a direct link to that: https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=11HL-d8V1MCxM01uEwpn...
Where I live isn't that great though.
Yeah, there’s a lot of exaggeration, but the kernel of truth is that margins in energy generation are thin and it only takes a small shift away from ideal conditions to make gas the cheaper option. Renewables+storage has to work in the bad times as well as the good.
Read the transcript. "...the sunny places, think about Muscat in Oman, or Las Vegas in the US or Johannesburg in South Africa. So places like that get more than 90% of the way to 1 GW constant electricity with those cloudy days. In a place like Washington or Madrid, you're in the high 80s. So 88% in Madrid, if I remember correctly. And then for Washington, it would be somewhere there as well.
And then if you have the bad luck to be stuck in Birmingham, in the UK.
That's a cloudy place. And you barely have, like, two very, very sunny months, like in the middle of the year in summer when it's actually, it is actually sunny. Most of the time it's various degrees of cloudy. So even there you have more than 60% of the way to 24/365"
So it's not as big as a drop-off as you might think with solar+battery. And that's not accounting for wind being a much better performer in the UK.
That's fair and it was less a dig at the specific comment than the overall trend of American fatalism that can be summed up as "a new thing can't possibly work because we live in a weather torment nexus".
While the point that the benchmark favours CA is reasonable what about the other 10+ states on California's latitude? Even as far North as New York is equivalent latitude to Madrid. I just struggle to believe the desert of Nevada for instance or Texas isn't also viable for solar. Plus those states have the advantage of not having California's crumbling transmission infrastructure (though even worse for Texas from what I understand) or anti-building regulatory regime.
This strand of American pessimism seems to only ever lean one way, to ignore lessons from other countries and to oppose new tech.
What would be favourable for that cost curve is not putting tarrifs on Chinese subsidised panels and this fatalism leeches energy from that consensus. When the tech is cheap enough to slap anywhere the optimal deployment is less important and why not make the most of China's 'blunder' with these below cost panels.
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44637724.)
No one said uninhabitable except you.
OP said that in terms of weather, California is almost ideal for renewables and self-driving cars. California is very, very, very sunny and mild.
Many places in the United States are not that for a good portion of the year. That was the point. Not that it's uninhabitable, but that these results may not translate to other areas.
You're correct that uninhabitable was my exaggeration and the OP's reasonable point was that some parts of the US would see less impressive outcomes.
But from a brief Google California isn't even in the 10 most southerly states in the US. While I have broader problems with the political direction of travel of this site in general my main concern is trying to shake Americans out of this fatalism where nothing ever works, nothing is possible and the country has to be left to decay.
You guys landed on the moon for goodness sake, where's that America gone?
> where's that America gone
It basically died when we became divided into two camps, neither of which can support any proposal if the other side supports it too. People are more concerned with feeling they've won an argument than actually achieving anything.
It's interesting because I'm very ideological about politics in the UK. I have a burning hatred for the party that just left power after 14 years to the point that would make most zealots look positively tame. However I will concede that the UK has made pretty good progress on energy transition with a fairly broad base of support from most major parties and a lot of that transition happened under the party I detest.
While the UK faces some ongoing challenges:
- Transmission bottlenecks in Scotland
- Dwindling opportunities for offshore wind construction
- Natural gas for heating in an old and poorly insulated housing stock
- Electricity prices tied to gas prices
- A generation of NIMBYs who don't want wind turbines ruining their view of transmission pylons and ecologically dead sheep pastures
- Lack of zonal pricing to incentivize more on-shore renewables
And needs to go further and faster I don't think energy generation falls into the same ideological divide there (though this may change with Reform UK and their questionable funding/astroturfing). Certainly net zero and 'green crap' remains contentious but from an actual building-the-thing perspective we're just quietly getting on with it.
The cost of solar panels and batteries has tumbled over the last decade, but it would still take an enormous amount of battery storage to cover weeks/months of cloud, which is common in many parts of the world.
To describe solar+batteries as "baseload" is like calling the Martingale Strategy an infinite money machine. It works brilliantly until it doesn't.
"Really cloudy" still has a lot of sun; e.g. dunkelflaute is often defined as when both solar and wind are simultaneously below 20% peak output, which just means "let's have five of this absurdly cheap thing".
Nothing interesting about the cleanest energy (which is, as everybody knows, nuclear) ? That's desapointing.
I'm glad that some countries have built and are still betting on the half-century years-old tech: fast neutrons reactors, those outputs are equivalent to our regular light-water reactors and which generates no waste (to be precise, most of that waste have a ~30yo half-life, not a big deal)
Volts covers nuclear fairly often. Check the transcript history if you're genuinely interested. It's not a compelling story; solar and wind are _really_ cheap now, and our modeling and software is getting way better at accommodating them. Nuclear just isn't economical at all in comparison.
Not that cheap though. Cheap nuclear seems to be a bit of a fantasy.
Yeah
In the meantime, here in France, we've had the lowest power supply cost for decades
I am glad politics have fixed that, so that we can be miserable like everyone else