We are currently undergoing the greatest transformation in energy infrastructure since the start of the industrial revolution. Solar power and batteries are not only growing, but absolutely exploding.
Solar has become so cheap so fast that it’s going to fundamentally change the very way we use power and energy as a civilization. Seriously, look at new power generation by source. It’s almost all solar and wind, with a bit of nuclear and natural gas as a rounding error. And really, new power generation is majority solar.
The key thing is that solar is a technology that can be mass produced in absurd quantities. And the more we produce, the cheaper we can produce it. It appears now that solar is this epochal leviathan, a glacier sweeping across the energy landscape that will grind everything else to powder before it.
We have a very clear path to a grid that is almost entirely solar and wind. There’s nothing wrong with nuclear, but it cannot even begin to compete economically against the tsunami that is the solar revolution. Hell, I expect the grid to be almost entirely solar in the future.
Obviously the Sun doesn’t shine all the time, but panels have gotten so cheap, so fast, that a lot of these problems are just being carried away by the solar tsunami. For swings over the course of a day, batteries are getting so stupid cheap that we’re going to have no problem making enough power during the day to meet our needs at night. But the bigger concern was always seasonal variation. How can we possibly store enough energy to last through a winter? In years prior, this was seen as the Achilles’ heel of a largely solar grid. To store that much energy in batteries would seem completely impossible.
But it seems the seasonal problem is going to solve itself. You see, if solar power gets cheap enough, you can start doing really wild things with it. Even on a snowy day in winter, solar panels still generate some electricity. They may only generate 10-20% of what they do on a clear summer day, but they still generate power. And if solar is cheap enough, you can simply size your system so stupidly large that you can meet even your winter’s need without any seasonal energy storage. If you spam enough solar panels, you can meet your needs in the winter and then have dirt cheap, essentially free power the rest of the year. And it really looks like this is where we’re headed.
I foresee that many of our most energy-intensive industries will adopt a seasonal or semi-seasonal schedule to take advantage of the dirt cheap power in the warmer months of the year. We have a crop growing season, why not an aluminum smelting season or an AI-model training season? Or that free summertime power could be used to desalinate vast quantities of seawater affordably. Or, such a low-cost energy source is exactly what we need to make bulk atmospheric carbon removal a real possibility.
We used to live in tune with the cycle of the seasons. We lived according to the cycle of the Sun. So important was the Sun to our ancestors that we named our greatest deities after it. Amun. Aten. Ra. Huītzilōpōchtli. Ba’al. Aryaman. Mithra. Apollo. Helios. Sol Invictus. These were but a handful of the thousand names we gave to the mighty Sun upon which we so depended. We rose to its light and slept in its absence. We worked when it shone brightest and in the winter, invented elaborate holidays and rituals to encourage its return. We built our entire calendars and organized our entire civilizations around its cycles.
With the Industrial Revolution, we abandoned this close relationship with the Sun. We learned to draw upon bottled remnants of old rotted sunlight, and for a time learned to live apart from the mighty Sun. And those energies in fossil fuels improved our lives so greatly; they raised us up from the mud. We improved our standard of living so much, that we would rather burn the world to ashes than give up the lifestyle we have grown accustomed to. And so, the great challenge of our age is to find a way to keep our lives and comforts going, without destroying the Earth in the process. Millions of people have dedicated their lives to this one central challenge of our age. All our efforts. All our sciences. All of our industry. Our brightest minds and every tool of finance and government at our disposal. All of it searching, seeking, trying to desperately to find a way out of this horrible trap that we have built for ourselves.
And now, after all this yearning. After all this wondering. After all this wandering. The solution was in front of us this entire time. A ray of Sunlight has been cast down into the cave that we are so lost in. And it is leading us back to the light. We will cast off these shackles and leave the fossil fuels in the dust where we found them. We will once organize our entire civilization around the infinite bounty that the Sun freely gives in such abundance. And we will continue to enjoy the fruits that science has given us, but in a way that not only does not damage the Earth, but allows it to heal. That is the future ahead of us. That is the light in the darkness. As our ancestors did from time immemorial, we will once again live in the endless generosity of the star that birthed us. And we will rejoice. And we will sing.
Sol Invictus. We are coming home.
Whilst it’s true solar is growing, it is not likely to be the silver bullet you make out.
Another way to look at the source you linked is that despite the ongoing climate catastrophe the US is still planning to add 4% more fossil fuel sources to their grid next year.
It also leaves out the fact that 84% of the current US power is generated by fossil fuels and that figure is not being reduced.
The source is also very US-centric. If we take the IEA’s projections, only 25% of the world’s new energy will be from renewable sources in 2024.
Then there’s the weird choice of counting battery storage as energy generation. At the end of 2022 half of the battery storage was being powered by fossil fuels so should probably be left out of any statistics.
We need people to understand the true scale of the problem rather than generating more hopium. The energy companies have teams of people for that.
Check out how much solar china’s put up this year.
Solar is absolutely the future
As of 2023, solar energy accounted for about 4.5% of China’s total energy consumption.
In 2024 solar energy could account for around 5-6% of China’s total energy consumption.
If they add another 170GW in 2025, the percentage could rise to approximately 6-7%.
They hope by 2026 solar will make up 8-9% of the total energy consumption.
If solar is the future then we are screwed because that isn’t fast enough growth… and that is without factoring in the rest of the world who will hit nowhere near those numbers.
And they are adding, fast. Far faster than we are. That goal of nearly ten percent solar in less than two years?
That’s not only fucking amazing, that’s achievable, and they’re on target for it.
As cheap as panels and controllers and batteries have gotten? It’s only getting better.
Free electricity. From the fucking sky. Magic is real. You can play xbox with it
Yes they are the leaders in solar which is they are a good example… If the rest of the world was going at thier pace (it’s not) it still wouldn’t be fast enough.
Then we’ve got the degradation to worry about so the panels will all need regularly replacing whilst silver, gold and rare earth metals run out.
Rolling out that infrastructure is not likely to be smooth whilst most countries will be busy footing bills for the ongoing extreme weather. Not to mention the other potential blockers like wars, pandemics and lack of political will.
That last line sounds boundlessly optimistic and condescending in equal measures. Magic is real lol please. Of course I know sunlight comes from the sky and electricity can be used to play games consoles.
Ah, typical human problems that disrupt regular power generation is somehow specific to solar?
Nah, wars and climate change fuck with the grid already, just ask texas. Or north carolina. Or palestine.
And panel degradation is wildly over exaggerated.
My old as fuck mono crystalline panels (I have owned for ten years, and they were outdated when I got them) still kick literally 99% of their sticker rated juice. Even when dirty. They’re dirty right now. I’m not bothering to clean them, cuz they still kick every volt they say they will.
They also literally produce all of the electricity my entire household needs.
SOLAR IS BETTER THAN YOU ARE WILLING TO ADMIT
And yeah, I probably pwned your ass at fortnite or rocket league or something
On solar power
Bitch
My battery powered router is smarter than your bullshit
Oh dear someone has had a tantrum and resorted to shouting and ad hominiums.
I know solar is good and sounds like it works well for you in your part of the world. My only point is that it’s not going to solve climate change like you make out.
I don’t play Fortnite or Rocket League lmao.
So is this how the Sundom in Horizon starts?
Sundom in Horizon
I mean, I’m not expecting anyone to actually start rebuilding temples to Helios any time soon. But if you want to, I’m not going to stop you. Live your dreams!
Don’t forget that solar power is exploding thanks to China
Sure. It’s very welcome. I guess the west will find it hard to say that solar cells are spying on us but we will see :)
I’ll be dead before I let the god damn reds take my American Sun and turn it into godless commie electricity.
That’s right, Virtuous American Sun Energy before Dirty Commy solar beams. :p
I’ve actually been shocked by how little production drops during winter. For example, we Feb & March, our coldest months this year, we produced 1.75 MWh/month, which actually beats every summer month before it, and is only beaten by this August, which was our highest producing month ever at 2.04MWh. Most summer months before that were closer to 1.5. Only thing I need to do is clear the panels after it snows.
What is likely the cause of this is one thing that people miss about solar panels. Their efficiency is a function of temperature. In the summer, you get more sunlight, but the panels themselves are hotter and thus lose efficiency. In the winter there is less light, but the panels make the most of every photon.
Well sonofabitch.
That explains why my setup starts cranking early in the morning, but is kinda piddly in the afternoon, when, by my eyes, there’s even more direct light on them.
Had honestly never heard temp mattered at all
It’s true today that you can easily drive your entire home on solar power, but only if you live in a sunny country. If I was, I would install them immediately. They will pay back in like 5 years and after that, energy costs are zero.
I look forward to them becoming smaller and more efficient. In the future, we may be able to have glass that is made of solar panels, which means entire skyscraper buildings can charge their power continuously from the sun.
Americans in Massachusetts are able to install solar panels and run their house.
It’s not like a cloudy day means 0% generation
Shit, my panels were still kicking at 95% when covered in a layer of dirt so thick I had to hose them, and wash em twice.
Now they’re back up to 99%, and they’re about ten years old
Yeah, I am lucky to live in such a country and it’s amazing. The state and municipality each subsidised part of the purchase, so I ended up paying 300 something euros to install 3.5 kW of panels. My electricity bills are almost non existant during summer and also cheaper during winter. To make it even better, anytime I’m not using the produced electricity, it gets sold to the grid, even if pretty cheap, rebating on my next billing cycle.
@1984@lemmy.today: It’s true today that you can easily drive your entire home on solar power, but only if you live in a sunny country.
The truth of that statement is entirely a function of the price of solar panels. Again, if they are cheap enough, even on a cloudy winter day, you can power a city with them. My point is that solar is becoming so stupidly cheap that “spam solar panels” is becoming a viable option for our power production needs. Unless you live in such a high latitude that you’re near the Arctic circle, you will be able to power things off solar. Solar panels will produce power literally in the middle of a snow storm. It may only be 10% or their peak output. But if you have enough of the damn things, it doesn’t matter. And solar is getting cheap enough that this is a viable path forward. And that’s before we even talk about other energy storage methods like green hydrogen production or long distance power transport.
Violence has been going down for centuries. We’re hearing about it more, but it’s declining. It peaked around 1993, and it’s been trending downward ever since.
If you zoom out and look at super long term trends, it’s been declining for centuries.
that sure doesn’t look like it’s been going down for centuries. What about per capita?
Here’s homicides per capita in Western Europe. I highly recommend reading The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. It goes into this in depth.
Per capita, IIRC it peaks in the 70’s. I’ve heard it proposed that it was down to leaded gasoline causing brain damage, and it’s such a weird blip I have to consider that. Obviously, from WWII backwards through depression and prohibition it was plenty nasty.
Russian invasion is largest scale conflict since korean war.
Israel is conducting a genocide in Palestine.
WW3 is on the menu…
Turn the news off and look at the data. It’s important to end these conflicts, but in terms of scale, these are far smaller than the past.
Ukraine was literally largest scale military conflict since Korean war. What are you talking about.
Look at the sentence you wrote. Since the Korean War. And the Korean War was the biggest since the one before that.
We are going on thrid year of the Russian savagery with no end in sight with brutal trench war fare with casualties to show for it.
We don’t know geopolitical consequences of this and US disregard for “rules based international order” vis-a-vis israeli savagery but I trust you bro, we are living through the good times.
COVID research made generic sequencing for viruses and bacteria incredibly cheap. You can run a PCR test for most things now for $10 (USD) or less. This opens a whole world of highly specific diagnostics and cheap, hyper-personalized treatments.
Also, MRNA vaccines are being tested for several other diseases and it seems very promising.
Decentralized networks seem to be getting stronger. The number of options you have is crazy. I’m hoping for the day that decentralized networks overcome centralized ones. It’ll probably still be a while (years at least, probably), but given time, I bet it’ll happen.
I also had an idea for a wifi network where a router talks to other routers in range to setup networks independent of the internet. The idea being that, if widely enough adopted, you could potentially cut out ISPs except in situations where the signal needs to travel long distances (like rural areas). The router would have an antenna for long-range communication, and then a second antenna to actually talk to devices in a smaller range. Kinda like meshtastic, but significantly faster (with the trade-off being distance and penetration).
I also had an idea for a wifi network where a router talks to other routers in range to setup networks independent of the internet. The idea being that, if widely enough adopted, you could potentially cut out ISPs except in situations where the signal needs to travel long distances (like rural areas). The router would have an antenna for long-range communication, and then a second antenna to actually talk to devices in a smaller range. Kinda like meshtastic, but significantly faster (with the trade-off being distance and penetration).
There are open source projects in the works for just such a thing, I forget the details at the moment but I heard about them from the Meshtastic Discord funny enough.
Look up the IEEE 802.11ah standard (or Wi-Fi HaLow) for example, it’s a standard that can achieve pretty good WiFi data rates for quite a distance (enough that a neighborhood mesh would work well), whilst running on low power, sub-GHz hardware (like the Meshtastic hardware).
https://www.quectel.com/blog/what-is-wi-fi-halow-iot/
There are mesh internet projects using this, I just don’t remember their names right now haha.
Sadly while it uses more or less the same frequency band as LoRa in the USA (around 900MHz), I’m not sure how useable it is here in Europe given the band licensing restrictions. I’d like to think they’ve thought of that! But I dunno? I’ve seen HaLow hardware that only used the US band, but maybe other companies price EU equivalent hardware.
Wouldnt that meshed network be just a sort of torrent-like network?
How would that anarchistic type of network even work without some authoritive entity deciding the public IP? Auto configured IP based on a MAC? Maybe a MACv8 (because we already use a hex based adress. Maybe increase the MAC adress to allow for longer adresses?)
Such a network exists here in Germany, called Freifunk.
They provide firmware for routers. I have a node at home, but no other nodes in range right now.
Regarding decentralized internet, your idea is being enacted! I posted a couple short docs about that over on !breadtube@slrpnk.net
Here’s the first one, I’ll go hunt down the second.
Edit: found it!
Negativity bias is real! I was reminding myself just today that for every act of hatred, there are ten thousand acts of love or kindness happening unreported all over the world. In homes, on the streets at the store…
Don’t let the news get you down. Things aren’t as bad as all that.
Kids are so much nicer than when I was in school. Not perfect, obviously, but really just so much nicer to each other.
I’ve noticed this with my kids’ schools. Many kids are open about who they are - LGBT+, neurodivergent, mental illnesses, etc. - and people are generally accepting of that. When I was a kid, people were bullied relentlessly for showing any form of difference from “normal”. It makes me happy to hear them talk about things like that like its no big deal…because it shouldn’t be.
My niece attends school in a town with a population of less than 5k and even there she learned all about various different forms of sexuality and romantic interest just through conversations on the bus and was not only accepted but able to explore herself
Back when I was using reddit, I found Uplifting News to be a helpful source of positive information. Some of it can be reminders of our boring dystopia, like students helping another by starting a laundry program at the school, but it’s something. Here is the lemmy version.
I’m a masochist, do you have a c/downliftingnews?
Yes, it’s !news@lemmy.world
We know that decoupling growth and fossil fuel is possible. The US and EU has had declining fossil emissions since the 2000s yet still achieved growth, also if you include outsourced emission.
It can be done.
Whether it’s done in time, or without large scale impact, is another question. But it’s possible.
Medical advancements. It’s one of two topics that consistently delivers exciting news. The other is historical research and discovery.
Fwiw, this title would apply to any point in time in human history. We just have the internet now to exchange information about it with higher bandwidth and lower latency than ever. Just think about the cost of exchanging information with random individuals around the world even 30 years ago.
100 years ago you just said “Yeah, I’m sure all that’s happening. So what? The world is big, I just stick to my little corner.” Today we have an interconnected population of people who now recognize these things not only as problems, but as things that could/should be resolved.
This site usually has some good stories worth checking out.
The USA is collapsing
Great, but the fictitious financial system is based on the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If you want to see the US collapsing, then I guess it’s true that
Some men just want to watch the world burn
The world is already burning and the USA are the flames
I don’t want it to collapse. Just stop being an arsehole.
Thats what everyone hoped for. For a long time. Wont happen
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Is this sarcasm?
China’s economic boom
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Elaborate on some examples of the YIMBYs?
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millions of people in the third world are growing out of poverty thanks to the advance of technology.
Can you be a bit more specific? Which technologies defeat poverty where?
everything. There isn’t one particular technology driving this. My hometown of İstanbul has been transformed. Modern buildings are replacing horrible slums, there are new subway lines opening every year and almost everything is improving over time.
Turkey is fact actually building infrastructure like china.
People in the US hard time understanding thatnthe world moving forward while we are wasting our lives at the airports and hihhway traffic without proper national infrastructure plan to fix any of this shit.
And before any of you bootlickers start yupping about biden state aid for parasites… Let’s be real it is too late, too small, mainly focuses on corrupt highway construction, not enough maintenance, airlines bailouts and only then few bucks for rail to pacify “educated” crowd.
There is no plan, another generation of public investment looted. Hope y’all love that traffic and being treated like cattle at the airport.
Cheers!
