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  • One of the important questions to always ask about solar is the energy inputs required to make a solar panel, and the time required to "earn it back" with solar electricity. This is different than "cheap price" because the energy consumed in manufacturing usually happens on a different continent, in a different currency, different regulatory regime and is thus easily obscured.
    by stmw
  • Interesting solar PV facts (as of this comment):

    - Wood Mackenzie estimates Chinese solar manufacturing capacity at roughly 1.36TW.

    - By the end of 2025, installed small-scale solar capacity worldwide had reached ~1.2TW.

    - While solar does not generate at full capacity around the clock, the installed total is about three times the size of the global nuclear fleet.

    - Ember Energy expects Africa to add about 17GW of solar this year.

    - In the Philippines, rooftop solar capacity may have nearly doubled in the 12 months through April, rooftop systems generated 372 gigawatt hours in the first six months of the year and residential systems can now pay for themselves there in a little more than three years.

    - India is scaling rooftop systems through a national subsidy program launched in February 2024. The program has installed panels on more than 5 million homes and is adding about 500,000 homes a month.

    https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

    by toomuchtodo
  • Hopefully at some point the price of tokens will collapse, forcing data centers onto cheaper renewable energy in order to stay profitable.
    by bryanlarsen
  • The problem with Solar is once someone buys it they can continuously use it for a long time with out participating in the economy. That is unacceptable especially from local grid providers and many in the energy sector and since China makes the best solar panels in quality and quantity that will take us maybe more than 3 years to catch up just in quality, it makes them even more bold in not allowing or making it hard for solar to proliferate. The risk is that the cost of energy will be high enough not to make manufacturing and other sector competitive enough but that does not matter as long as energy sector makes money the US can decline the number one goal is each individuals own goal there is no collective goal unless it just happens to be sadly a goal that is shared and individually beneficial.
    by mainecoder
  • forever link https://ghostarchive.org/archive/Nkrxp
    by asmodeuslucifer
  • The solution is to charge for power, not for energy.

    Utilities are reacting to this problem by separating connection fees from energy fees. The big problem is this is highly regressive. Rich and poor people pay the same connection fee.

    The solution is to also charge by peak power use. Rich people use more power on cloudy days than poor people do.

    This has the great advantage of aligning with utility costs. Utilities pay a great amount of money to be able to handle peak loads, not so much for normal loads.

    by bryanlarsen
  • At least in America the greatest hurdle imo is both the cost of labor and the local/state red tape that has been pushed from local grid operators. Balcony solar should be available in all states across the country. I know on my state they require all this additional steps to get solar (including a bs solar study for your home) which just amounts to a significant permit fee which makes the investment less economical.
    by infecto
  • An underappreciated fact is that the Japanese/German renewable push starting in the early 2000s contributed a lot toward the global state of solar power now.

    Solar programs/subsidies there is how a lot of local (and later Chinese) industry was bootstrapped despite being far from competitive with fossil energy back then.

    Those initiatives might have accelerated the whole solar power industry by half a decade or more. We are now reaping even (indirect) benefit from industrializing countries (Pakistan, India, etc) that go straight to solar instead of conventional plants.

    People often insist that western climate initiatives are "meaningless", "wasteful" and "ineffective", but examples like this prove that global effects are absolutely realistic.

    If those two countries had fully invested into nuclear power back then, we might be significantly worse off right now as far as global CO2 emissions are concerned.

    by myrmidon

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