Comment by SoftTalker

A lot of comes from state initiatives too. Texas being conservative also happens to be very pro solar. I’m in the business and we have some great projects there. The US military is also pushing solar at their facilities. Then you have many private-state partnerships like tolls investing a lot in solar. The outlook in general is pretty positive in the US, a lot more than what people would think.

Tariffs on solar panel imports should stimulate domestic solar panel production, but only when they are high enough and applied long enough to justify investments into new solar panel manufacturing facilities.

Like you can't avoid gravity, you can't avoid economic reality. Not in the long term anyway.

It's especially notable because there isn't just the thumb against offshore wind, solar panel tariffs, and even EVs. Chinese EVs can't be imported because of tariffs and many conservative states a pretending that EV drivers "don't pay their fair share because they don't buy gas" - except most gas taxes haven't been adjusted in multiple decades and don't even begin to pay for the cost of maintaining roads. Fuel taxes are a tiny portion of any state revenue.

There has always been a massive thumb on the scale in the form of tax breaks, direct subsidies (billions a year alone on this), land leasing, etc for fossil fuels and their use. Favorable public policy. And what the IMF calls implicit subsidies - the cost of impact on the climate/environment and people's health.

When a refinery is pumping out pollution and everyone in the area is getting sicker than people in similar areas - that costs us as insurance ratepayers and taxpayers.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/5-hidden-ways-the-g...

https://www.imf.org/en/topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...

...to name a few. A simple google search will turn up dozens more.

And yet what is the first critique of solar and wind by right wingers? "It's only cheaper because of all my tax dollars going to subsidizing them."

Federal, state, and local subsidies for green energy and EVs are a drop in the bucket.

Plenty of blame to go around, my understanding of the timeline is:

Trumps first administration put in solar Tariffs with China (25%), Biden administration increased them with China (50%), 2nd Trump administration increased those and applied solar Tariffs to other countries. Though honestly I’ve largely stopped paying attention at this point.

Solar adoption increased through all of that.

A new coal-fired power plant hasn't come online in the US since 2013, IIRC.

Biden also put out a bunch of incentives in the IRA to encourage domestic solar panel production.

It’s true, and the strategy of climate activists in the early 2000s and 2010s was to do everything they could to make coal and other fossil fuels as expensive as possible: by reducing access to capital, increasing the cost of legal and regulatory hurdles, sometime delaying projects through physical blockades, etc etc.

Some utilities didn't have direct market pressures to close coal because they were regulated and the regulator allowed them to recover costs plus a profit on top.

> The Fossil Fuel industry, before it finally dies, will make big Tobacco look downright merciful.

This should not be surprising when one realizes that this industry is the biggest industry that humanity ever created (in terms of monetary value). Nothing ever is or was bigger than energy from fossil fuels. Predictably, those who profit from this, behave like selfish [...] and fight tooth and nail to keep their profits.

Putting the planet aside for a moment, the unnecessary death and illness they've inflicted on the human race will be staggering.

I'm not seeing that in US data either. Here's data from a top web hit:

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

The 10-year change 2015 to 2025 is:

- Gas: +472 TWh, +35%

- Renewables: +525 TWh, +97%

Saying that this is more gas than coal is certainly not the case borne out by the numbers, even in the US, the one place where gas is as cheap as dirt due to it being a by-product of fracking.

LFPs are cheap and safe, with very good cycle counts.

Sodium seems to be actually hitting real commercial production volumes (ex - GM just announced a sodium ramp up days ago, CATL has been producing them for a while). I expect we'll see sodium mature a good bit over the next decade (right now - it's just not quite as good as LFP, but it has a lot of promise in temperature extremes and cheap input materials)

So sure - storage is an issue. But it's not THE issue anymore. It costs surprisingly little to get enough LFP storage to cover an entire house at modest usage for days at a time (ex - under 10k for 42.9KWh of storage, UL approved https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-wallmount-all-weather-lithium...)

So yes - storage remains something to consider. But I think pretending that storage is a constraint that should stop PV rollout is... cough... bullshit cough...

Let industry that needs it pull from existing generation at night, convert residential to solar as fast as possible. Subsidize residential battery rollout the same way we do for insulation and other efficiency improving home improvements (which to be clear - we were doing prior to the current admin).

China isn't fucking around on the solar front, and the continued excuses in US from entrenched interests tangled up in the oil industry are criminal.

Contrary to popular belief, solar panels don't generate zero power on cloudy days.

They typically generate 10-25% of their maximum output on the cloudiest of days. Most cloudy days are not maximally cloudy.

We don't need solar panels everywhere to get even close to ~100% renewables (with nuclear, wind, new geothermal, and hydro). The areas where you put them are distributed enough that it would be exceptionally rare to ever encounter a meaningful need to ration.

So, storage is an issue, but not as big of an issue as most people think, and we do not generate anywhere near enough solar energy for it to be a reasonable concern yet...

There's also more solutions than just conventional batteries. There's pumped hydro, etc...

The main load is during the day when the sun shines anyway, and then the seasonally changing periods before and after, basically ramping when people are getting up, then dropping off while people are going to bed. On the west side of a continent, the power for the ramp can come from the east because the sun shines earlier there; on the west the sun shines later and the east can get power. At night, there are still nuclear and other plants, and it is very foreseeable that installations of ground battery technology will have been in place well before twentieth century plants are retired.

Not quite, current nighttime load is largely a function of cheaper nighttime rates. People don’t set their EV’s to charge from 11-5AM because that’s the only time their cars are plugged in. If rates crater at noon on Sunday, there’s many an EV happy to suck up power then.

So yes batteries are going to continue to grow rapidly, but it’s a smaller role than it might seem.

The whole point about modern gas/coal plants is that it's relatively cheap to shut them down and start them up again. They are backup power, not for providing inflexible base load. Batteries + renewables are taking a lot of market share and flexible backup power is much more important than baseload (inflexible power like nuclear)

These days I think "at night" is mostly covered or at least could be mostly covered both by wind and batteries.

The "base load" question may still be appropriate for deep winter, high (or low) latitudes, etc, but renewables are getting there pretty fast.

The fossil fuel lobbies want us to believe it is a way bigger problem than it is.

The people who echo that sentiment without educating themselves are giving them a helping hand.

True, but battery advancements are ongoing at a rapid pace. Sodium-ion is now viable and will be a mainstay in grid storage. Ignoring ideology, this path is plain cheaper than anything else.

Grid batteries are being deployed everywhere every day and the cost including storage is now lower than fossil fuels.

It's not, grid-scale batteries are being deployed all over the world, and newer batteries keep getting better and cheaper. Storage hasn't been the issue for years.

It turns out battery prices have dropped so much that this isn't difficult anymore either.

Note the use of 'may'; the details of the car-hell vary. Perhaps the I-90 pollution instead spills into the lake and then bioaccumultes into larger organisms, Bon Appétit! My anecdote was a bit southwesterly of the I-5 bridge where there was, besides the horrific noise pollution, definitely a greyish black soot to clean off everything. A fine result of rolling a natural one and automatically failing the skill check for "copy the autobahn", probably.

As to why some beings need to be whisked hither and yon with such haste, and thus spend quite a bit of time (and energy) trying to be somewhere, anywhere else, well, are they hungry ghosts? Or maybe they min/maxed for wizard and ended up with only three points in wisdom?

How are you measuring your AQI, and what particle size? Tire particles aren't PM2.5 AFAIK and are very hazardous to your health.