Comment by rel_ic
2 days ago
Renewable energy is great, but we're not replacing fossil fuels with it, we're just adding more energy usage. And our energy usage is destroying the environment.
Don't let these advancements in solar make you think things are getting better. We need to reduce fossil fuel usage, not just increase solar usage.
https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/b3b696c0-226d-0137-f265-1d2...
The article notes several examples of reduced use of fossil fuels:
> California is so far using forty per cent less natural gas to generate electricity than it did in 2023
> total carbon emissions in China had actually decreased
> kept the country’s coal use flat and also cut the amount of natural gas used during the same period in 2024 by a quarter
Meanwhile Germany shut down its nuclear plants while keeping coal and natural gas around to supplement renewables. One of the biggest unforced errors I've heard of recently.
Natural gas and coal are better at throttling up and down than nuclear plants are.
So if they need to run 10% of the time, then you've still reduced your carbon output by 90%. The goal is 100%, but the remaining fossil fuel plants are not the biggest issue.
A nuclear plant would also be carbon-free, but Germany had other reasons not to want it. So it was a reasonable decision to keep the fossil fuel plants around, and shut more and more of them down over time.
No, Germany is shutting down its coal plants and reduced their usage drastically.
Poland is keeping their coal plants open by refusing to invest in quick and cheap renewables. Instead they plan to build nuclear plants for the next 20 years.
Yes but it's a lie of sorts. It's only reduced at the local level in some specific places on earth. What's more the local reduction has NECESSARILY been linkend to an increase in fossil fuel use to actually build, transport and install the panels. That's not even talking about the energy used for extraction of the primary ressources used to build the stuff.
Until we can figure out how to use solar to actually power the industrial processes necessary to build/recycle/maintain it, it's mostly a lure, a stop gap at best. And to be able to do that you would need to have an industrial policy with strong rules inside the countries using the solar.
But it's all very convenient to lie about it, as if we are doing something meaningful, it's part of the inbuilt duplicity omnipresent in today's society, that derive from female virtuous posturing/behavior.
And as the parent noted, in the case of reduction of fossil fuel use that is necessary at the global level because the effect of climate change is not localized, solar doesn't meaningfully change anything yet. In fact, it allows us to just consume more energy while still putting out as much CO2 as before and actually even more. Global fossil fuel consumption has not reduced one bit; it's extremely hypocritical to have various countries around the world increase their consumption to be able to say that there was a decrease at some specific localisation.
> Don't let these advancements in solar make you think things are getting better. We need to reduce fossil fuel usage, not just increase solar usage.
The advancements in solar and battery storage are accelerating. It's not a linear 1:1 relationship where new solar goes into new usage. As we get better at building and deploying solar, the cost continues to decline. The more the cost declines, the faster the rollout.
So the advancements in solar really are making things better. This is a long-term, cumulative process.
I'm not going to dispute your over-arching point (because I know the data very well), but as a lifelong resident of Appalachia, I can assure you there has been some real and significant reduction in the negative environmental impact of fossil fuels. It's a small comfort and mostly just for those of us who live here, but it's real and visible.
What kind of changes happened there ? just curious
~25 years ago I could have taken you to multiple entirely dead streams within a 20 minute drive of where I grew up - and you don't get very far in 20 minutes on Appalachian roads. Over large swaths of my home state, in fact, I could have done that from most people's homes. This is no longer the case, and a huge number of streams are now recovered or recovering. The surface water problems are by no means gone, but some of the recoveries that I've witnessed - the North Branch of the Potomac River is a good example - are breathtaking. That river was as dead as a doornail in the 90s and is now a vibrant, healthy wild trout fishery. It is still a post-industrial river, it still has dams, run-off issues, wastewater inputs, etc, but it is a far cry from what it was.
Just to hazard a guess, you could start reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_and_environmental_impac...
I grew up in a rural house that is off grid. My parents used to run a gasoline generator whenever they wanted electricity. As kids, to watch movies, this was all the time. As they got older, got phones, satellite internet etc their gasoline use went up a lot.
They had solar since the 90s but it was broken panels (which still work, they basically never die). Finally last year I had the time and money to put in a big new solar setup for them. Now they don't need the generator except during prolonged storms in December (even then I don't think they need it, just like using it).
The main benefits: 1) Pays for itself in 3 years 2) No more gasoline generator (loud, smelly) 3) No more trips to get gasoline. No more parents carrying 5 gallon gas cans around. 4) Allows parents to get A/C for first time.
not to mention, gasoline fumes can cause kidney and liver damage, and hematologic disorders and an increased risk of leukemia and other blood cancers, driven largely by benzene's carcinogenicity
generally not great to be around a lot
Aren't you supposed to cycle through your gasoline every so often anyway?
(Though you don't have to do it all at once. So you could run it briefly every month, and occasionally put in one gallon, which is a lot easier to lift.)
If by "we" you mean California, then "we" are going to pass the following milestones with solar + batteries fairly soon:
- Solar and storage is cheaper than building a new natural gas peaker plant in most locales (current majority of generation)
- Dispatching battery plants becomes cheaper than turning on existing peaker plants. Fuel is free, dispatch is instant, they can add inertia.
If by "we" you mean the rest of the world, China is manufacturing and installing the most renewable energy of any country in the world by far – and it's not enough to meet their demand. That's why they're also deploying more coal and nuclear than anyone else, too! They're probably building more electric vehicles than any other country, too, which is huge for their air quality.
You are a bit behind on China. This was just published a week ago, showing renewable energy build-out has finally surpassed increased demand for this year, meaning peak coal was probably last year: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-brics-emergin... (at end of the article).
That’s great news! Does that include the coal plants they’re funding in Indonesia and other places?
1 reply →
What replaces fossil fuels is some kind of breakthrough in batteries. At the moment its getting better every year were currently at less than $100 per KWh which is crazy but needs to be improved for allowing more off the grid energy consumption
The lesson from solar is that it won't be "a breakthrough" but the gradual accumulation of a thousand different efforts at cost-shaving across the whole supply chain making batteries gradually but inexorably cheaper.
There won't be fanfare when fixed batteries start using sodium chemistry rather than lithium, for example, but that will start happening across the next few years.
Batteries are just one means to store renewable energy and mechanical storage is another. Re-designing the power grid to transfer peak to areas via HVDC is another, to spread into areas where the weather limits or constricts the renewables for that time of day or day itself.
"Taming the Sun" [0] goes into more details and talks about it better than I can.
People like to over simplifying complexity by reducing arguments to a single reasoning. It helps make everything seem more simple than it really is. It is a way to persuade people that lack understanding "all systems are complex". Even instructions on how to construct a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. How many years does it take of development before a child can actually preform that "simple" task?
[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537070/taming-the-sun/
Better batteries are the road to replacing fossil fuels for transportation, but I feel like abundant nuclear energy is what we need to give a jump start to green steel, hydrogen, ammonia, etc, and electrifying bulk heating industrial processes.
you may feel that, but its not going to happen. nukes are too expensive, and thus the energy they produce is too expensive.
We are also going to need a breakthrough in how batteries are produced and disposed of. Otherwise the environmental impact of the many millions of batteries themselves may prove unsustainable too.
That would be nice indeed, but shouldn't prevent us from prioritizing reducing CO2 emissions first.
Maybe better disposal practices. Regulations standardizing batteries would also do a lot of good.
But really, we simply need a lot of virgin batteries regardless because we don't have enough. Recycling and disposal will only really take off once the market is mostly saturated (which we don't appear to be anywhere near).
I'd also point out that modern LiPo batteries are 90% recyclable with no special techniques needed. That's because by weight, the batteries are mostly iron and nickel. Recycling them is really as simple as just melting them down. It only gets tricky if you want to collect the lithium, silicon, and other trace materials (and there are already recycling plants that are handling that).
Funny how no one seems to consider the environmental impact of digging up fossil fuels when they discuss solar.
It's similar to how you can identify Real Bird Lovers. They stay silent when they see pictures of oil-covered birds after an Exxon Valdez or a Deepwater Horizon. Show them a windmill and boy do they get passionate about bird safety and welfare.
there's also a lot of wastes, with different urban planning and build code a lot of cooling and heating would be avoided
I think this is the most frustrating part. You wouldn't even need to massively change out neighborhoods to get a huge benefit. If a developer built with district and heating planned, you could have an entire neighborhood heated and cooled without needed AC and heaters in every building. You could still have single family homes that are massively more efficient per unit.
The problem is that has to be planned almost from the beginning. Which shouldn't be a huge deal. My neighborhood had a water tower built at the same time the neighborhood was built. There's no reason district heating couldn't have occupied the lot right next to it.
Does not necessarily need to be a battery. Flywheels, heat, and even synthesis of fuels are also solutions to the problem.
If you look at the energy density, cost/kwh, and lifetime maintenance of most of those, you'll find that batteries handily win. Further, batteries have room for innovation and growth in all those categories.
We won't, for example, make a more cost-efficient flywheel or heat storage. They are effectively as efficient as they'll ever be.
IMO, it necessarily has to be batteries. The other alternatives are nowhere near as good.
4 replies →
We can either pray and wait for a technological breakthrough that makes storage tech way cheaper than gas or we can just use taxes and subsidies to make it happen now.
It's not so hard. Lavish subsidies were used to make nuclear power semi-sort-of-competitive even though it's way more expensive.
The same thing could have been done with solar and wind but apparently we thought the best course of action was just to wait until they became cheaper than coal without subsidies (& then Obama and Trump slammed solar with tariffs).
Or we can go full nuclear.
11 replies →
“We” are only in control of “us”. The rest of the world will keep burning fossil fuel
3 replies →
I think the overall point is that we will never get there.
Renewables will never be cheap enough to fully replace fossil fuels, batteries will never be good enough.
No matter what, as long as the cost of extracting and burning fossil fuels is less than the result of what gets produced by the consumption, someone will be doing it.
It’s why crypto will never solve the energy issue. Why AI/GPT/LLM won’t either. Especially when the cost of that output is pegged to the cost of generating the above.
The price of LFP batteries in China is $35/kWh for cells, $52/kWh for fully integrated systems [1]. Roughly 1TW of solar is being deployed globally every year. We’re already there, it’s just a matter of pushing the pedal down harder. China destroys half a million barrels a day of global oil demand every year they build EVs at current output levels, which are still increasing.
Fossil fuels are already dead, it’s just time horizon. How fast we want to go is a function of how much fiat we want to shovel into PV solar and battery manufacturing.
[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/watershed-moment-big-battery-sto...
But that isn’t the case _today_. Unless you have existing facilities (which we do have and which gives fossils momentum) it’s strictly cheaper to build new renewables! The problem for renewables is that the p99.9 price is much higher than the p95 price. But finance will be solving that part.
1 reply →
you're just wrong. they already are cheap enough, its already happening. PV+battery is now cheaper than new gas & coal. Very soon to come, existing gas.
This is basically just not true. Energy is fungible and the grid is demand driven. Every watt of solar displaces a watt of something else. In many places like the US we've basically stopped building nonrenewable energy generation as it's no longer economically competitive. China has to date still built a lot of coal powered generation even as most of the richer world shut theirs for greener sources, since China rightly and justly prioritized bringing a billion people out of severe poverty, but even in China the tides are turning, and we're seeing indications that 2025 could be their peak coal.
Things are getting better.
Can anyone point me a genuinely unbiased comparison of solar, wind, coal, oil, nuclear and hydro, in a reputable scientific journal that covers all of the 'criticisms' that are raised for some but not others?
There's at least:
- creation of infrastructure
- maintenance of infrastructure
- mining/acquiring fuel
- waste fuel
- retirement of infrastructure
and then for each point:
- something like cost per MWh,
- human deaths,
- animal deaths,
- CO2 emissions
- land area usage (or land area damage)
- others???
Oxford University's Our World in Data collates this kind of thing from reputable sources.
What are the safest and cleanest sources of energy?
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Low-carbon technologies need far less mining than fossil fuels
https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-...
Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?
https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
I've looked at these before, and the charts are nice, but I feel like there's a better way of displaying the data in some sort of matrix.
1 reply →
This is an active area that is exceedingly difficult if not outright impossible to do.
The nature of any project is inherently fractal, and trying to assign a impact to each part is all over the map, and anyone with any agenda or bias can move the 1000 little sliders enough that it adds up to what they ultimately want to see.
You get stuff like:
"Lets assume all the trucks are old and need to drive up hill to deliver the panels"
"Lets assume that the solar panels are installed in a place where it never is cloudy"
"Lets assume the coal plant only burns coal from this one deposit on earth that has the lowest NOx emissions"
"Lets assume the solar panel factory never bother putting panels on their roof, and instead run on coal"
On the other hand the points I listed are sufficiently coarse grained and the cost or expense of most of those can be estimated.
Deaths due to coal mining? Probably in the hundreds of thousands. Animals killed by oil slicks? Millions. Deaths due to fossil fuels via climate change? Millions. Animals (and people) killed by solar? Statistically insignificant in comparison.
The repeated cost of 'trucks driving up a hill', and the cost of fuel for those lorries, and so on, is indeed 'fractal'. However the oil consumed by a power station dwarfs that.
Strip mining thousands of square miles for coal, or steel, or rare-earths, or simply just 'square miles' to bury old wind turbine blades, is very much quantifiable.
And these are all the kinds of points that are used to denigrate one form of power 'I don't like', but aren't talked about for other forms 'I do like'.
Hence my original question, a like-for-like comparison in a reputable scientific journal.
>Renewable energy is great, but we're not replacing fossil fuels with it, we're just adding more energy usage.
My understanding is that Solar does offset fossil fuel usage, in large part because solar power generation throughout the day is conveniently aligned with energy usage throughout the day. With the exception of the evening, which some people refer to as a "duck curve" left behind to be picked up by other generation sources. But it's most definitely stepping in to fill demand that would otherwise be filled by fossil fuels